Pipsqueak Read Online Free PDF

ulterior motives, a secret agenda that made him feel smarter than everybody else. It also made him a charming son of a gun, replete with a dash of freckles and farm-boy features. But now he looked a little too smooth for his own good, perhaps betrayed by the short, slick, dark hair with a little widow’s peak “flip” or the bags that had started to form under his eyes.
    I’d not seen this incarnation of Nicholas. The tweed seemed out of character, but maybe that was the idea. I hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years, and the last time I saw him was before he entered the Peace Corps, of all things. That had been just after our father’s funeral. Dad was a professional butterfly collector and finally succumbed to emphysema and congestive heart failure while chasing down spangled fritillaries in a field of marigolds. My father and I were kindred spirits, both possessed by a passion for collecting and identifying. As a kid I collected bugs by the thousands, and now I collect taxidermy, which is sort of the same thing, except on a much larger scale. And we shared a fondness for big convertibles, like the Lincoln he left me in his will.
    Anyway, Nicholas was often as not the object of Dad’s disapproval. He was not born with the scientific ethos that Dad and I shared: Rather, he seemed hatched from the egg of avarice. Even as a fledgling, Nicholas took a shine to the persuasive, psychological ploys of commerce. He couldn’t have been more than five before he started setting up all manner of stands out in front of the house, from which he proffered whatever he thought he could sell. We’re not talking about lemonade and cookies. Stock in trade was more like gold (rocks painted that way), the neighbors’ cats, dead batteries, worthless stock certificates, etc.
    I most vividly remember an early venture in which he made shoes out of cardboard. They were painted with watercolors, garden twine for laces. Some male teens came by his shop and laughed themselves sick, ridiculing him. Assuming he’d been humiliated, I went to console Nick after they left. He turned on a big sly grin and held up a crumpled dollar bill in his little fist. He didn’t care what they thought of his shoes or that the reason they bought a couple of pairs was to parade around in front of his stand. “Chumps!” was his reply to my compassion. Nicholas couldn’t have been more than seven then, and I’ll admit to being a little bit frightened of him ever since.
    So it had been plain to see that Nicholas was destined for Vegas, Wall Street, Sing Sing, or worse. He had his share of high-school troubles, pummelings, and suspensions: a pyramid scheme here, an applejack racket there. Rather than college, Nicholas used the bankroll he’d accumulated (which some of his varsity henchmen hinted was in excess of twenty-five grand) to buy into real estate. Using a shoebox full of Visa cards, he financed New York property deals that he turned to profit rapidly enough to pay off the creditors before incurring massive financing charges. Yeah, that gimmick they once advertised on TV. Well, it worked for him, and he became an overtipping hotshot and a club-scene fixture. Then he developed an obsession with penny stocks, around 1987, just before the market crashed. The brokers went to jail with all Nicholas’s pennies. And just after that, the New York real estate market slumped, and Nicholas found himself with creditors he couldn’t pay. A judge made him hand over the shoebox.
    This would have been all well and good had Nicholas not convinced Dad to invest with him, to allow Nicholas to make good on all the trouble he’d been. I was out of town while much of this happened, and if I’d got wind of this I would have tried to talk some sense back into Dad and some shame into Nicholas.
    “It’s not just for me, or for yourself,” Nicholas told Dad, “but for Mom. You guys aren’t getting any younger, and what if something happens and you or Mom needs a long