The Amazing Absorbing Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

he would sit before the television and suck his teeth as three young men, who called themselves mythbusters, cooked up all kinds of contraptions to challenge why this or that couldn’t ever happen. I believe
Mythbusters
was his favourite television programme, even though he sometimes switched to
MacGyver
. One night while he was watching
Mythbusters
, he asked me, “So what you intend to do?”
    It was the first time he had spoken directly to me in days. “About what?”
    “About what.” He imitated my accent and it felt like he was mocking me. “That is the way you Trinidadians does operate? Answering one question with another.”
    As he grumbled, I remembered Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was designed for young, hard-working boys like me. He had rattled off a list of jobs he had heard about in the rumshops: delivering pizza, watchmanning, mowing lawns, picking apples, pumping gas, packing goods, cleaning rubbish, waitering. He made it seem as if these jobs were just lying on the sides of the road waiting for me. “I don’t know anybody here.”
    “Then why exactly you here?”
    “You invited me to come.” How could he forget this?
    “You think I had any choice in the matter?” He did not explain and because of his nasty mood, I kept quiet. “But the point is you here now and I can’t do anything about that.”
    He went to the balcony for one of his smokes and when he returned, I told him, “Maybe I could get a work with you.”
    “I see. You mean in one of my big factories that I making millions from? Maybe I could hire you as an overseer to manage one of them. Oompa loompa. You will like that?” This way he was talking got me real angry and I had to remind myself once more that I knew nobody else in this place. “You have any money?”
    “Uncle Boysie gave me five hundred.”
    “And I sure he sell the property in Mayaro for a hundred times that amount. The damn chiseller. Who living there now?”
    I guessed he was talking about my mother’s board house that she always kept nice and neat with curtains and flowers like zinnias and daisies and ginger lilies. Before she got sick, she was always watering the flowers. “Nobody, as far as I know.”
    I saw him digging his teeth with his little finger. “He send anything for me? Your Uncle Boysie?” I remembered Uncle Boysie’s threatening message but I shook my head. “The damn scamp and chiseller.” He got up and put on his green coat. At the door he hesitated and told me, “You better give me forty from that five hundred. To buy some foodstuff.”
    I got out the money from my suitcase and handed it to him. He returned late in the night and from the foam I saw him placing two loaves of bread in the fridge and a little while later, sitting before the kitchen table, trying to make out the numbers from what looked like a lottery ticket. Every now and again he would glance in my direction and even though in the dark he could not see me awake, I still shut my eyes tightly. About two hours later, I fell asleep and finally had that conversation with my father where he chatted about
The Wonder Book of Wonders
and said he was pleased that my mother had not thrown it away. And then he apologized for not sending any money to us after his first year in Canada.
    In the morning, with the dream still fresh in my mind, I remembered how I used to sit on the balcony railing in Mayaro and listen to my mother telling some of the other village women that my father always posted letters with Canadian money; and the women, as if they knew that my mother was lying, just rubbing their hands and saying, “So it is, Sylvie. So it is.” After these conversations I would catch her gazing at the framed photograph on top of the old safe that was set close to the window, alongside the sewing machine. The picture was of a couple. The man had longish hair and ascrawny patch of beard on his chin that made him look like a Mayaro pimp. The woman didn’t look special in any way