You & Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

around uncomplaining and content with powder for brains, can we?
    From an ethical point of view, or from perhaps a social point of view, you are right, we do not want to be perceived as having been content to having had bullets for brains. But from let us say a naturalistic point of view, is one really capable of repudiating his own brain? Has this been done too often in the animal kingdom?
    So you maintain we just sit around like the howitzer heads we are until we go off?
    Yes, we just calmly take aim at an enemy downrange, which is anyone who happens to be downrange, and sooner or later, according to high principles of military art or acknowledging the low principles of happy circumstance putting a victim in our crosshairs, we kill. We use our heads and annihilate. It’s easy. It’s what we are designed to do. We are bullet heads. You need to relax.
    That much is true. I do. Need to relax.
    We all do.
    All us bullet heads need to chill.
    Right on. We could hurt our selves if we don’t.
    Bullets don’t just go off by themselves.
    No, they don’t.
    Exhale.
    Okay.
    They’ve started letting us take the yoga classes if we wrap our heads in towels.
    That is good news.
    Yes it is.

&
    That is a man with fifty functional rain hats.
    What do he paw fink?
    What?
    A man with fifty hats makes me think of a joke about a bear. A country boy is told that a bear hibernates all winter. What do he do? the boy asks. He sucks his paw, the teacher says. What do he paw fink? the boy asks. You needed to have been there.
    Where?
    I will estimate that I heard my aunt tell this about 1962 in a rented cabin on the Crooked River in Georgia. Boozists and card players.
    Big hit, was it?
    Medium hit. They lost a large quantity of beer leaving it in a chest freezer too long, looked like ropes of intestines and brown glass in there. Good snake count outside. Rough river with some salt water in it. Nice place. These places are all gone now. At least I fink they are.
    I fink so too. My paw is dead.
    Mine too. This is one reason why I do not discredit totally a man with fifty rain hats.
    I am not following you, but I dig where you comin’ from.
    My paw could wear one of those hats were he here. I did not really know him. That is a shame. Had I to do it over again, and if he himself had fifty rain hats, I would not laugh at him for that, is all I am—
    â€”Yes yes, perfectly clear.
    You going to pay me, or whut?
    How much you worth?
    Four grand.
    Four grand.
    Yes.
    Okay.
    You don’t think I am worth four grand?
    I said I’d pay.
    You said, Okay. You have doubts.
    Okay, I doubt that you are worth four grand.
    Okay. Pay me.
    That is what I said I would do. No one who argues to effect the initial status quo is worth four grand.
    I made an error. I have mental problems.
    I would say that you do. It may take your four grand to begin to address them.
    That would be a waste of money. My first purchase will be a deep-fried hamburger, followed by a nice leather bag for some new toiletries. I lost all my toiletries in the misplaced-car incident, or series of misadventures related to losing the car, I should say.
    Your toiletries.
    My toothbrush and chiefly my Eveready badger-bristle shaving brush, which I had had over twenty-five years. It’s like losing a child, or a parent. When I get a good new ditty bag and a shaving brush in it I can begin to reassimilate into normal living. Hat, boots, beer come next. Redhead on my arm. Hot-air-balloon vacation, that kind of thing, snap me back into my BVDs just fine.
    Four grand will get you there?
    I should think so. Yes.
    You’ll stop this trebly warbling and trembly walking around and all the goddamn moping and incoherent expressions of your pain as if only you have any, and the incessant holding of your large face in your tiny hands?
    Yes, I shall stop all that.
    Four grand is cheap if it will stop the lugubrious flood of you.
    Well, pay up, and I’m a new me, that’s