The Stranger Read Online Free PDF

face, just gazing out the window not really knowing how to begin. Across the lake squatted the remains of Lewis. They say when you’re writing a book you shouldn’t use flashbacks. But what the hell? Here’s a flashback for you, because I can’t get it out of my head. I remember the first time I walked into Lewis. I saw burnt buildings; wrecked cars littering the streets; a dog starved down to its ribs turning over a human skull with its paw, searching for a mouthful of brain fresh enough to keep body and soul together. Like some ghost, I saw myself gliding through the shattered window of a KFC, where I found a box of ketchup packets. Was I hungry? Jesus Christ, I’d run out of belt holes. I had the waist of a starved wasp. That’s how hungry I was. Sitting there on a fallen cash register, I oooohhh ed and aaaaaah ed as I tore away the foil corner and squirted blob after blob of spicy red ketchup into my mouth. Shit. In my mind’s eye I can travel in time, too. I can see myself roaming the town, breaking into any garage that was still in one piece. At last I’d found a car with air in its tires and enough gas in the tank to drive back the fifty miles or so to pick up my mom and sister where they’d hidden in a church. Both were sick then, only I didn’t know how sick.
    With my forehead buzzing, the grazes stiffening my face into a mask, I pictured myself gliding back across the water to Lewis again. Past the cinema with its heap of human bones in the foyer. With spiders in the popcorn maker. Bats have colonized the projection room. Woolworth’s is burnt to the foundations. Wal-Mart survived as a structure, but it’s been cleaned of everything. Not a single can of beans, not a bottle of beer remains.
    I can glide through the deserted houses. There’s a mess of something in the bathtub where Grandma fell and broke her hip when the rumpus began. And no one came to pull her out. Some dogs ate babies before they starved. Swimming pools are slick with pond slime. And as for the local high school? Boy, oh, boy, there are tombs noisier than those classrooms now.
    I reeled my mind’s eye back in. I saw myself gliding past the ruined stores, across the road, through the ruined ferry station, down along the quay . . . faster, faster, faster . . . then I’m flying out across the water to Sullivan. It’s evening; townspeople quietly going about their business like they’ve always done. Mrs. Hatchard is giving a piano recital at Brown’s Hotel in the square. A bunch of kids are hurrying down Central Way to where the Millennium cinema sits in the center of town.
    Whoa! And there I am sitting in the cabin (well out of town, I should stress. Welluvva way from the good people of Sullivan). Still sitting there with a pencil in your hand, Valdiva? Still figuring out how to say it? Where to begin?
    Well . . . where do you begin, Valdiva?
    At the beginning , chirps the clever tyke that lives in the back of your head. The one always ready with the smart cracks that never help you one little bit. OK, wise guy. I’ll try at the beginning. Right at the beginning of what I remember. So, what is my earliest memory? Well, that one’s easy.
    My mom driving me to get my hair cut. I must have been three years old. And the last place I wanted to go was the barbershop. I hated it so much I’d scream the place down. I hated the way the barber would push my head forward, then backward, then sideways as he cut my hair. I hated the way he’d stare at my hair like there was a circus show taking place among the follicles More than anything, I hated the hair clippings that would creep down inside my shirt and prickle my skin, making me itch like crazy.
    “You’re going to get your hair cut whether you like it or not, young man.” That’s what my mother said for the tenth time. Normally, she was relaxed and fairly cheerful. Now her lips had pressed together into a hard line. She tugged the steering wheel hard. I was being a brat. Believe me,