The Hair of Harold Roux Read Online Free PDF

water heater.” As the storm subsides into rain and mist, he grows quiet and sad. “Well, it looks like it’s over. As dear old Henry Troy once sang,
     
    ‘The Furious Surge hath sped away
;
    Soft smiles now galeth all the pretty day
…’
     
    or some such immortal couplet.”
    “So how is it coming?” Aaron rather carefully asks.
    “Okay. It’s shaping up, little by little.” And George jumps up to get some more beer.
    Aaron looks at Helga in the lamplight. She seems to have lost her vernal green, and stares, loyally, away from his eyes. “I’ve told him,” she says in her whispery voice. “I’ve done all I can. Aaron, he just can’t believe it. He prepares harder and harder for his classes… .”
    “Christ,” Aaron says, keeping his voice low, “I don’t even think he knows I’m a senior member and have to voteon his case—because you know there were a couple of exceptions, a long time ago, and even if it’s only theoretical we’re still supposed to have the power to break the rules—only we don’t in this case because it’s really up to the dean, and we know what he’ll say, and the president and the trustees. But mainly I don’t think George
knows
what sort of machinery gets set in motion. What do you think?”
    “I don’t think he thinks about it at all, Aaron. I mean, he knows but he won’t consider it for a minute. He’d rather think pleasanter thoughts, like about pollution, the military-industrial complex, racism, overpopulation and the cobalt bomb.”
    Usually Helga does not mix irony with her worries, and Aaron looks at her carefully. She becomes unbearably important to him because he is devastated by this change in her that sounds like despair. For the moment she is the only other person in the world and he becomes her, feels his nerves leading to all her muscles and glands and tendons; even her small bones seem to shiver with a kind of ticklish pain beside his own, inside his flesh. He is a man with a woman inside him, and he seems to feel and understand her womanness, the vulnerability of something like incompleteness, of empty womb, empty everything—though here he begins to doubt his evaluation of female helplessness and tries to shiver off this excruciating union.
    George comes back with the beer, a flashlight held in his armpit. For a while they talk, deliberately, about storms, those great natural explosions, their mostly benevolent power of sustenance and change.
    This storm, sending its farewell rumbles back from the east, moves on, and the narrow windows lighten again toward day. “It’s clearing,” George says.
    The sun comes out for a moment, printing a window upon the varnished pine floor. “I wonder if there’s a rainbow,” Helga says.
    They go out onto the front lawn, where the evenly trimmed wet grass seems to grow greener by the second. Partof a rainbow in the northeast, pale pastels, can be seen against a black bank of cloud. The sun comes across the house again, just as a gleaming yellow school bus, tires dripping, red lights flashing, stops at the mailbox. Its front door opens to the cries of children, and out comes Edward Buck, a second-grader, with his tin lunch box and green book bag. He looks like his mother—a little green man from Mongo. The children on the bus wave their arms behind the glass, but Edward pays no attention to them, or to their now muted screams. With dignity he comes up the front walk, book bag over his shoulder, lunch box in his hand.
    “I didn’t eat my pickle,” he tells his mother. “It was a dill pickle.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” Helga says. “I thought I put in a sweet pickle. I must have got the jars mixed up.”
    The bus departs with its lively cargo. “I don’t like that driver,” Edward says. “He won’t make them shut up. It’s enough to break your eardrums. Mrs. Bailey is better because she lets them talk in a normal voice, but they can’t yell all the time.”
    Edward is bright. Soon he will be skipping