Sleepers Read Online Free PDF

do you want?” Klondike Bill asked. His hair and beard were darker and thicker than Calhoun’s and he was half his weight, which made him the second biggest man I’d ever seen.
    “I’ve watched you guys wrestle a lot,” I said. I pointed a finger to the three behind me. “We all have.”
    “You root for us to win?” Bo Bo Brazil asked. He was more muscular than his cohorts, and looked like sculpted stone leaning against the window, his shaved black head gleaming, his eyes clear and bright. Bo Bo’s one noted move, the head-crushing co-co-butt, was said to be a weapon harsh enough to leave an opponent paralyzed.
    “No,” I said.
    “Why not?” Calhoun demanded.
    “You usually fight the good guys,” I said, my palms starting to sweat.
    Haystack Calhoun lifted one large hand from the table and placed it on my shoulder and around my neck. Its weight alone made my legs quiver. He was breathing through his mouth, air coming out in thick gulps. “Your friends feel the same way?”
    “Yes,” I said, not giving them a chance to respond. “We all root against you.”
    Haystack Calhoun let out a loud laugh, the fat of his body shaking in spasms, his free hand slapping at the tabletop. Klondike Bill and Bo Bo Brazil were quick to join in.
    “Get some chairs, boys,” Calhoun said, grabbing a glass of water to wash down his laugh. “Sit with us.”
    We spent more than an hour in their company, crowded around the booth, treated to four pieces of cherry pie, four chocolate shakes, and tales of the wrestling world. We didn’t get the impression that they made a lot of money and, judging by their scarred faces and cauliflower ears, we knew it wasn’t an easy life. But the stories they told were filled with exuberance and the thrill of working the circuit in arenas around the country, where people paid money to jeer and cheer every night. To our young ears, being a wrestler sounded far better than running away to join the circus.
    “You boys got tickets for tonight?” Haystack asked, signaling to a waitress.
    “No, sir,” John said, scraping up the last crumbs of his pie.
    “Get yourself over to the box office at seven,” Calhoun said, slowly squeezing out of his side of the booth. “You’ll be sittin’ ringside by seven-thirty.”
    We shook hands, each of ours disappearing into the expanse of theirs and thanked them, looking up in awe as they smiled and rubbed the top of our heads.
    “Don’t disappoint us now,” Klondike Bill warned on his way out. “We wanna hear you boo loud and clear tonight.”
    “We won’t let you down,” Tommy said.
    “We’ll throw things if you want,” John said.
    We stood by the booth and watched as they walked out of the inn and onto Tenth Avenue, three large mentaking small steps, heading toward Madison Square Garden and the white lights of a packed arena.

    I WAS THE youngest of my friends by three years, and yet they treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. A sure sign of their acceptance was when, less than a week after we met, they gave me a nickname. They called me Shakespeare, because I was never without a book.
    We were each the only child of a troubled marriage.
    My father, Mario, worked as a butcher, a trade he learned in prison while serving six years of a five-to-fifteen-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter. The victim was his first wife. The battles my father fought with my mother, Raffaela, a silent, angry woman who hid herself in prayer, were neighborhood legend. My father was a con man who gambled what little he earned and managed to spend what he never had. Yet he always had time and money to buy me and my Mends ice cream cones or sodas whenever he saw us on the street. He was a man who seemed more comfortable in the company of children than in a world of adults. Growing up, for reasons I could never put into words, I was always afraid my father would disappear. That one day he would