Seeing Off the Johns Read Online Free PDF Page A

they just kept putting them in front of other houses. They almost reach to your house. Anyway, everyone left. No one said where they were going, but half ended up at Flojo’s and the other half at the church.”
    Chon waited for Henry to tell him more. But Henry was done. He just sat there, his hands over his eyes, breath coming heavily out of his nostrils. Chon turned the car on and drove him home.
    He took Mesquite from Henry’s house, a street that, along with Sigrid, served as the east end of Greenton’s east-west bookends. A few blocks from Viggie, Chon could see the town’s church strangely active. Half of Greenton must have been there, looking up at the cross with their hands clasped in prayer (like a button that has to be held down on a walkie-talkie for any correspondence to be transmitted), asking God, asking the beaten-bloody Jew on the cross—asking them both at the same time—why?
    He went back over to Main Street. There was a truck pulled onto the sidewalk—like its driver had tried to park perpendicular to it and then drove right on ahead. Chon might have assumed this was one of the Flojo’s loaded congregants if he hadn’t seen someone, presumably the truck’s owner, standing on the roof of the cab. Chon slammed the brakes, backed into a two-point turn, and drove toward whoever was caving in the roof of his truck.
    He put the Dodge-nasty in park, rolled down his window, and was about to shout the man down when he saw it was Goyo Mejia, indeed drunk, clinging to the telephone pole he was parked next to, tiptoeing up, just inches below the bottom right quadrant of the banner that had been hung for his little brother and his little brother’s best friend.
    â€œHey,” was all Chon managed to say. The first half of the H was loud enough to be heard, but he let the e and the y die in a downward glissandoing diminuendo, like a trombonist running out of breath and letting his instrument’s slide slip from his hand down to the ground.
    Goyo was trying to stretch himself up the pole. Chon got out of his car to make his presence known, hoping that might make a difference. The danger of the situation had Chon standing on his toes, every muscle in his legs tense. When Goyo’s balance would tip this way or that Chon would give a start in that direction, like he did at so many routine grounders in his Little League days, with about the same, if not less, efficacy.
    Suddenly Goyo gave a shout of frustration and punched at the telephone pole, which had years of nails and staples in it announcing so many yard sales and church Jamaicas and lost pets. Then he gave another shout, this one out of pain. He fell to his knee, still on the truck’s roof, and clutched at his bloody fist. Chon watched Goyo shift his focus from fist to banner, back to fist, then back again. Then he let go of his hand,laid both hands palm-side down on the roof of the truck, righted his stance, touched down and gave a leap.
    Chon watched in awe. It was far more graceful a leap than Chon could have ever executed, drunk or otherwise. Goyo seemed to float in air, ascending inch by inch toward the night sky. He caught onto the banner, but it was secured to the poles so well that when the right side came down, the left still held. That changed what would have been an up/down trajectory for Goyo to an outward pull like Tarzan swinging on a vine and bought him in a belly flop onto the bed of his truck. A less determined, less inebriated man would have let go of the banner. But Goyo Mejia, clinging to a relic of his brother’s life that might otherwise have been taken by another person, held on with his bloody hand.
    Half of the banner ended up in the bed of the truck with Goyo. The other half was splayed across Main Street. Chon heard a madman’s laughter, replaced quickly by the loud sobs of a person who had either broken his ribs or lost his brother. Probably both. But Goyo couldn’t