The Hair of Harold Roux Read Online Free PDF Page A

with some game or other of man’s. Barrage, etc.
    “Wouldn’t it be nice to be scared of thunder again!” Helga says.
    “Yes,” Aaron says. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be scared of God.”
    “Instead of some nasty little men,” Helga says.
    “Christ, yes,” George says. He gets up; in the lightning flashes each movement is frozen, framed like a still camera shot. Soon he comes back from the kitchen carrying a lighted oil lamp and puts it on the table. Its truly yellow light brings out their faces, seems to hang them like glowing portraits against the darkness. Warm, ice-blue, warm, ice, as the lightning arcs across its polarities. When the wind and rain begin, the old house creaks and releases its secret mustiness into the air, cool breath from ancient interior spaces.
    “So nice to be under this old roof,” George says dreamily.
    George’s dreamy impracticality exasperates Aaron. He knows better than to grab George by the arm and talk straight to him. For one thing, he’s done just that before, and he knows his words will be greeted with hysteria in one form or another—sullenness, partial deafness, a counter-lecture about the evils of The System. But here is George Buck, after having spent ten years of his life preparing himself for one profession, and he still won’t let himself believe in its simplest technicality: that the advanced degree is necessary for promotion. And the plain simple hardfast rule, printed clearly in the Staff Handbook—surely the language is clear enough for a teacher of English to decipher—states that without promotion no contract will be renewed after the fifth year. Aaron wants to shout,
Look, George! This is incredible! You’ve been told over and over again! Believe it
! But what good will that do? Aaron does have some understanding of George’s beautiful baroque set of rationalizations. George works so hard, he teaches so hard, he is so close to his students and so necessary to them that he has to believe that somehow he is above such crassly technical considerations.
    As the intensity of the storm grows, George’s dreamy mood changes into excitement. He goes from window to window to stare at the wildness outside. “Beautiful! God
damn
, look at that!” Beside the house their four-foot avocado tree, set out for the summer, writhes frantically in the rain and wind, flashes rich green, bows nearly flat, then comes partially back upright, its leaves like hands in religious ecstasy. “Shee-it, man! There goes a limb off that white pine!” He turns joyfully, his hand strongly caressing the thick boards of the window frame. “This old house knows how to roll with it, by God! Strong! I know how bloody strong!”
    A bolt hits so near it really scares them all—its tearing
crack
felt in the fingertips, and then the slightly delayed knowledge that they are still alive.
    “Wow!” George yells gleefully. “That one hit the transformer on the pole! I saw it!”
    The faint smell of ozone breathes through the house.
    “I must admit I’ve had just about enough of this storm,” Helga says, a little shakily. The oil lamp flickers, though there is no obvious draft
    Aaron is slightly nervous, too, so his tone becomes as nearly pedantic as it ever does. “But you love this power, Helga. This primeval energy that belittles nasty man.”
    “Well, I don’t like it when it belittles us
too
much,” she says.
    “Oh, come on,” Aaron says. “We need something we’re too scared to enjoy. Anyway, something up there that isn’t controlled from Houston. The Furies—that’s what we need, or we can’t even enjoy a good old roof.”
    CRACK! BLAM! says the storm.
    “
Jesus
!” George answers.
    After a time of slightly less apocalyptic explosions and gusts, they realize that the storm’s salvos are just perceptibly diminishing.
    “I wonder if it’s safe to go into the kitchen yet,” George says. “Sometimes we get these little fireballs zapping around between the stove and the