Twenty-Six Read Online Free PDF

so popular in the seventies. The windows downstairs had all been replaced, those upstairs had been sealed over with aluminum storm windows. When they’d moved in, they’d barely had a stick of furniture, but over the years they had accumulated so much stuff (couches, chairs, bookshelves, china cabinets, lamps, and magazine racks) that you had to turn sideways to enter every room, the doorways were all blocked by furniture.
    Ennis entered the back porch silently, and silently slipped off his boots and parka. Arvel was sitting at the kitchen table. His wife had kicked him out again. He’d been back in his parents’ house for several days, living out of the blue overnight bag that he always brought with him when his wife sent him packing. He was working the back shift, which started at midnight, so at eleven o’clock on Friday night he was chewing on toast and jam, washing it down with tea.
    “You look like shit,” Ennis said to his son.
    “You’re drunk, old man,” Arvel said. He had both elbows on the table and stared blankly into his teacup.
    “I’ll old man you,” Ennis said. “How would you like to be called old man?” He took the Pepsi from his pocket and set it on the counter by the sink.
    “How would you like to be called
shit
?” Arvel said.
    “Jesus Christ. You’re the touchiest guy I know.”
    Arvel shook his head and stared back into his tea.
    “What the hell’s the matter, now?” Ennis said.
    Arvel bit a corner off his toast and put the remainder of the slice back on the plate.
    “For God’s sake,” Dunya called from the living room. “Leave the boy alone.” The voices from her TV show rose up again behind her, and it was as though she’d never said a thing.
    Ennis opened the Pepsi and half-filled a glass. He took a forty of black rum down from the cupboard, topped up the glass, and sat across the table from his son.
    Arvel looked up at his father and shook his head. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said.
    Ennis smiled and took a big drink of his rum. “What are you talking about?” he said.
    “Your bad heart is saving you from getting your arse kicked.”
    Ennis stood up, arms out at his sides, at the ready.
    “Sit down,” Arvel said calmly.
    Ennis knew the score. Arvel had inherited his size, his strength, and his temper. At twenty-six, the age Arvel was now, Ennis could have pounded him. Ennis had grown up in the old Red Row. The mean one. He had shovelled coal, picked peas, driven rivets, loaded wood. And he’d learned how to take a punch and give back two for every one he took. Arvel had grown up soft in comparison. All the same, Ennis’s aging, overweight body was no match for his son’s. He could not sit down on the command ofthis snot-nosed kid, so he grabbed his drink from the table and backed away to the counter, leaned against it, trying to look unaffected after such a loss of face.
    Arvel showed no pleasure in the power he’d just exercised over his father. “Look at you,” he said. “You lousy drunk.”
    “I’ll kick you out of my damned house.”
    “Go ahead,” Arvel said.
    “I raised you, you …”
    “Raised me? Raised me?” Arvel’s voice was loud now. “You lowered me, old man. You lowered the bunch of us. You and your drinking and screaming and pushing us around. You spent your whole life looking after workers’ rights. Those people were strangers to you. What about your own sons?”
    “Again and again, you screw up your own life and every time you come crawling back to me to save you. Don’t blame me if you can’t convince your wife to let you live in your own house. You’re not man enough to face yourself. Christ!” he said. He held the drink up to the light to examine its appearance.
    “Did you poison this goddamned rum, woman!” he called into the living room. He sniffed at the glass and dumped the contents into the sink.
    “Rum
is
poison,” Arvel said, then in response to seeing his father dump out the rum: “It’s like