Roscoe Read Online Free PDF Page A

holy hiccups.”
    “You underrate your achievement. My blood cells turned red, white, and blue.”
    “Don’t hold it against me. Remember that the kamikazes are still out there, and the war criminals will cut themselves in two rather than face the music.”
    “Kamikazes? War criminals?”
    “Don’t forget I said this.”
    They walked to the Albany Garage, where Roscoe housed his two-door 1941 Plymouth, and they headed for Tivoli to rendezvous with Veronica, an upgrading of life for Roscoe just
to see her. But as he drove, distracted, perhaps, by the gin, or by seeing Trish as a soldier-and-sailor sandwich, or relief at being rid of her, or by going public with his plan to quit politics,
he began playing eye games with moving vehicles, blanking them out with his right eye, then his left, eliminating them entirely by closing both eyes.
    “Why are you closing your eyes while you drive?” Elisha asked.
    “I’m playing Albany roulette.”
    “Let me out.”
    “You’ll be home in ten minutes.”
    “Playing games with death. You really are in trouble.”
    “I’m all right.” But he kept closing one eye, then the other.
    “This is a form of suicide,” Elisha said. “Is that your plan?”
    “No. Not my style.”
    “It’s everybody’s style at some point. And if you kill me while you’re at it, that’s murder.”
    “Not at all my style,” Roscoe said.
    “Open your eyes and listen to me. I’m the one who’s quitting, not you.”
    Roscoe braked instantly and swerved to avoid sideswiping an oncoming trolley car, then climbed a curb and struck a small tree. The impact was light, but it drove the steering wheel into the deep
folds of Roscoe’s abdomen and threw Elisha into the windshield. Blood instantly gushed, and Elisha pressed his pocket handkerchief onto his forehead.
    “Let me see that,” Roscoe said, and when he saw the wound he said, “Stitches.”
    He backed the car onto the street and drove to Albany Hospital. They both could walk to the emergency room, which was accumulating assorted brawling louts and burn victims and skewed drivers
like Roscoe, all celebrating peace with blood and fire and pain. As a nurse started to take Elisha off to stanch his bleeding, Roscoe asked, “What’s this quitting stuff?”
    “Believe me, it’s real,” Elisha said. “Unless you want to give Patsy a heart attack, don’t you run off just yet.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “I’m doing a fadeaway,” Elisha said. “Time’s up.”
    “Suddenly there’s a retirement epidemic,” Roscoe said. “Do you suppose the Japs put something in our drinking water?”
    He felt new pain in his stomach, and his head ached from the resurrection of old doubt. You think you’ve done something radical and it turns out you’ve done nothing at all.
    Roscoe recognized a nun sitting in the next bay of the emergency room, Arlene Flinn from Arbor Hill, a Sister of the Sacred Heart, hundred and one pounds, tiny, dark-haired,
sharp-nosed beauty in adolescence, when Roscoe had a crush on her. Those once-spunky eyes were now reshaped behind spectacles, her hair hidden under her starched wimple.
    “Arlene?” he said. “Is that you?”
    “Oh, Roscoe,” she said. “Roscoe Conway.”
    Her tone of voice suggested to Roscoe that she remembered the day he caught her in his arms and kissed her by the holy-water fountain in St. Joseph’s Church. Two days later she went off to
the nunnery—the beginning of your control over women, Ros.
    “Are you ill, Arlene?” he asked her.
    “A toothache,” she said. “The pain is horrible.” She was humming something that sounded like a Benediction—hymn—“O Salutaris,” was it?
    “How’s your father?” he asked.
    “Oh dear, my father,” Arlene said. “He died six months ago.”
    “I didn’t know. I never saw it in the paper.”
    “He died in Poughkeepsie. My brother didn’t want it publicized.”
    “I knew he was down there. I’m sorry,