Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man Read Online Free PDF

squinting in at them. “You might be the daughters of Lancaster.”
    “Burt Lancaster? Hey, is Burt Lancaster anybody’s father?”
    “If we were wise children,” another one said, “I suppose we would know.”
    “Are you a wise child?” another one asked me.
    “No, I’m a mad drunken poet.”
    “Oh, everybody’s a mad poet. Are you at least Welsh?”
    “My mother came from Ireland,” I said. “ ’Did your mother come from Ireland?’ ” I sang.
    The light had turned green in the course of all this, but the car stayed where it was. Now it turned red again.
    “And where did your father come from, mad drunken poet?”
    “How would I know? I’m an unwise child.”
    “Have you a name, mad poet?”
    “Mad with a U,” I said, “and poet with an E.”
    “I think I missed that one,” somebody said.
    “Laurence with a U,” I said, making another stab at it. “Clarke with an E.”
    “Laurence Clarke?”
    “Yes, Laurence Clarke the mad poet.”
    “What do you do when you don’t write poems?”
    “Everything,” I said. “I never write poems. I haven’t written a poem for a year and a half.”
    “Then what do you do?”
    I considered this. “I don’t edit Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls ,”I said.
    “Neither do I, mad poet.”
    “Ah, but I did,” I said. “Or at least I was presumed to do so, but Ronald Rabbit’s doesn’t exist. I was stowing away on a corporation, and today they fired me.”
    “Poor mad poet.”
    The light had turned green again, and the car behind us was using his horn to bring this fact to our attention. “We can’t just stand here,” one of the girls said.
    “We can’t drive away,” another one said. “We can’t leave Mad Poet here. How would we find him again?”
    “You mean Laurence Clarke. You shouldn’t call him Mad Poet.”
    “You can call me Mad Poet if you want to.”
    More honking behind me. The tailgate dropped and the girls in the luggage compartment moved to make room for me. “We’ll give Mad Poet a ride,” one of them said. “Hop in, Mad Poet. Hop in, M.P.”
    “Military Police,” said a voice from the front.
    “No, Member of Parliament. Laurence Clarke, Member of Parliament. Where are you going, Laurence Clarke?”
    “To hell in a handcar.”
    I got inside, and got the tailgate shut behind me. The station wagon lurched forward just as the light turned red. The honker behind us didn’t make the signal and went on honking his distress at us as we sped away.
    “Where are you going, Mad Poet?”
    “Call him Larry. Can we call you Larry? Where are you going, Larry?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Don’t you have a home?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “So we’ll take him home with us.”
    “Oh, wouldn’t that be brittle!”
    “Utterly peanut. Should we kidnap you, Larry?”
    “No one would ransom me.”
    “Then we could keep you forever, and feed you peanut brittle and marmalade.”
    “And treacle, and weak tea with cream in it.”
    “How super if we could kidnap him.”
    “Go ahead,” I put in. “Kidnap me. But treacle makes me ill and weak tea with cream in it is very hard to find. I’ll have jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, if that’s all the same to you.”
    “Mad Poet knows Alice.”
    “Mad Poet knew Alice long before you ever fell down any rabbit holes,” said Mad Poet. “And Mad Poet feels the same way about little girls that Lewis Carroll did.”
    “Oh, super! Mad Poet’s a dirty old man.”
    “But not that old.”
    “How old are you, Mad Poet?”
    “Thirty-two.”
    “We’re sixteen. Except Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is fifteen.”
    “A mere child,” murmured Naughty Nasty Nancy. She was one of the two in the back seat, and wore a peaked witch’s cap and granny glasses.
    “Hey, Mad Poet! Where do you want to go?”
    “Wherever you’re going,” I said.
    A forest of giggles. “But we’re going to Darien!”
    “Excellent.”
    “That’s Darien, Connecticut!”
    “Only Darien I know,” I