Tucker's Last Stand Read Online Free PDF

might be sold to a customer. Tucker liked especially Life magazine, whose pictures he would stare at with hungry curiosity, and Popular Mechanics , and National Geographic . There was only one copy of the National Geographic , to which the store subscribed, and it was earmarked for a professor at St. Mary’s University, but the professor never got around to picking it up until after a week or so, giving Tucker time to come in, even during weekdays, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
    Tucker attended the parochial school at St. Eustace’s and during the afternoons stayed on after classes to help Fr. Enrique. By the time he was thirteen, Fr. Enrique would discreetly confide to anyone conceivably interested in the point, Tucker Montana could perform any job his father had been able to perform. “I don’t know where he picked up the knowledge,” he told Tucker’s mother one Sunday after Mass on Tucker’s eleventh birthday, “but he did.” He pointed to the cathedral-shaped wooden Victor radio. “That stopped working on Friday. I thought it needed a new tube and I told Tucker to take it to a radio shop. He said he would have a look. He took it apart. I mean, all apart. In a half hour he had it working. Wasn’t a tube, your boy said. Some kind of short circuit. He is some kind of a kid!”
    By the time Tucker was fourteen, Fr. Enrique knew that he had to do something about him. So one afternoon, after making an appointment over the phone, he went over to St. Mary’s, the Marianist men’s university at San Antonio, and was told where he could find Mr. Galen, the professor of physics. He explained the problem and Mr. Galen agreed to see the boy, and the following afternoon, at the designated hour, Tucker arrived in Mr. Galen’s study, which was also his classroom.
    Tucker was tall for his age. His hair was cropped close but not mercilessly short. A “bean shave” meant fewer quarters spent at the barber. (Tucker had begun, at age seven, restricting himself to four haircuts every year, explaining to his mother that hair grew at the rate of a half inch per month, and that if cropped close enough, once every three months was all he really needed to spend at the barber’s—exactly one dollar per year.) He had lately taken to asking Antonio if there was anything in the barber shop that needed to be fixed—one day he said, to his own and the barber’s astonishment, “malfunctioning”—and as often as not there was: a chipped mirror, dull shaving blade, whatever. Tucker would fix it, sharpen it, clean it, paint it, and Antonio would remit the price of the haircut. Antonio took to cutting Tucker’s hair less drastically than directed because Antonio didn’t want to go a full three months without seeing him. So that although Tucker, entering the physics professor’s domain, had had his hair cut the day before, he didn’t look as spare as he would have a year earlier.
    He was tall, but somehow not ungainly. His arms and legs seemed fully developed, and Mr. Galen found himself wondering whether the boy was full-grown at fourteen. At five feet six or seven inches his body seemed mature, though his face was that of a prepubescent boy. His brown eyes were oddly adult, penetrating but not obtrusive, and his ears lifted slightly when he was spoken to (though perhaps this would not have been noticeable if his hair had been a little longer). Tucker’s chin was slightly pointed, and since he did not smile, one saw only a trace of his white, regular teeth. He was beardless of course but there was the peach fuzz, lighter in color than the light-brown hair on his head. His manner was direct—polite, obliging, but not in the least intimidated or obsequious.
    Mr. Galen told him to sit down. He turned then, and pointed to the blackboard. He asked Tucker whether what was written there meant anything to him. Tucker looked up and said