Dreadful Summit Read Free

of his head. And instead of real teeth, he had a set of false ones, top and bottom, and when he got excited and started talking too fast they would come loose and start rattling around his mouth and he would have to shove them back with his finger.
    On account of that, all the steadies liked to get him riled up so that his teeth would start slipping loose and then they would have a good laugh. He was easy to get riled up too, about almost everything. Especially women. He would start yelling about how women made all the trouble in the world, with his teeth hopping around in his mouth until he nearly swallowed them and all the customers would die laughing. Then he would shove the teeth back in place and take a True Story magazine into the toilet and sit there until he cooled off.
    He always meant to write the story of his life for True Story magazine, because he said people would really learn something if they read it, but he never got around to it. Sometimes he got around to taking a pencil and starting off on a piece of paper, but he never got past writing ‘The Story of My Life’, and then somebody would come in for a beer or a rye or something and he would have to go back to work. I guess he never did get around to it.
    Nobody ever called him anything except Flanagan. He worked for my father from as far back as I can remember, but he wouldn’t ever tell his first name. Even to my father. When my father made out government papers for Flanagan, like taxes or something, he just put down X. Flanagan. It never bothered my father any. He said every man is entitled to one secret anyhow.
    Flanagan used to worry about me an awful lot when I was a kid, and it was his idea I ought to go down and join the C.Y.O. because all I did was hang around the back of the bar after school and read books. I read almost everything by Rudyard Kipling and Alexandre Dumas and good books like that, and I read all the comic books I could get and picture magazines. After a while I had to wear glasses from reading so much.
    Flanagan worried about this and he took me to the C.Y.O. which is the Catholic Youth Organization on Seventeenth Street because they had sports and fresh air. But I couldn’t see too good, and the kids didn’t like me. I was always last pick on the teams, and I made believe I didn’t care but finally I quit going.
    Then Flanagan saw a sign in the subway that said how good the Boy Scouts were, and he took me down to the public-school basement and I joined the Boy Scouts. But the same thing happened at the Boy Scouts that happened at the C.Y.O., and besides I felt funny in the uniform because I was way taller than the other kids. The best thing they had was the Boy Scout Handbook which has plenty to read in it and a lot of pictures. I read it all through, and when I quit the Boy Scouts I kept the Handbook . I still like to read it.
    After I quit the Boy Scouts, Flanagan got all steamed up about it and yelled at my father for an hour. My father just said sitting and reading was as good a way of staying out of trouble as he knew, so after that Flanagan never bothered me again.
    Once he saw me just sitting and watching him set up beers, and he got annoyed and said, ‘What are you looking at?’
    I said, ‘I’m just looking at the beers when you set them up. I like the way they look.’
    Maybe he thought I was kidding him or something, because he looked at the beers and then he looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘What’s there to like about the way they look!’
    I said, ‘The way the head comes up from the bottom of the glass right after you fill it. It comes up so slow and easy and it rocks up and down until it comes all the way to the top.’
    So all he said was, ‘You got stones in the head,’ and he didn’t bother about it any more. But I think he got to like it too, because now and then I would see him watching the glasses right after he filled them, and shaking his