Jog On Fat Barry Read Free

enforced. Aileen and me left Brooklyn State the following morning. The rain had stopped. The forecast predicted it was going to be overcast with intermittent showers, but it didn’t rain again until the following Tuesday, which was just as well, since Aileen never owned an umbrella in her life.
    Sometime in the summer of 1967, Aileen stumbled across the living room to answer a knock at the door. Danny was standing out in the hall: a beat-up suitcase on the ground by his feet. He didn’t say what he was doing, or why he was there. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, waiting to be let in. Aileen stared at her firstborn for a long time: her eyes swimming in Jack Daniel’s. Eight years had passed since she’d last seen him. She reached out and mumbled something. Her fingers tightened around the door handle. She tried to close it but lost her balance and banged her head.
    “Fuck.”
    Aileen stumbled backwards. She reached up and touched her forehead. Her fingers came back bloodied.
    “Fuck.”
    She staggered back across the living room and disappeared into the kitchen. Danny didn’t move. I stepped up to door and showed him the G.I. Joe I had stolen off the black kid on the third floor.
    “Look. It ain’t got no head.”
    Danny stared at the headless doll.
    “You wanna come in?”
    Danny picked up his suitcase and walked into the apartment. And I guess blood being thicker than water is why Aileen never sent Danny back to wherever it was he came from. She made threats, but nothing ever came of it. And whenever Brenda Lee, or someone else from the Agency paid us an unexpected visit, Danny and me just hid.
    Danny loved fire and was always setting stuff ablaze. The thing he liked doing most was torching newspapers and then shoving them under parked cars. We crucified that headless G.I. Joe on a telegraph pole and set it on fire; burned all kinds of flies and bees and spiders; even tried to set a cat on fire but gave up when the little fucker scratched us. The other thing about Danny was he didn’t like being touched. Didn’t like making eye contact either. He never did much talking, and when he did, it was usually to me and me only. Danny would say a word or two and then wouldn’t speak again for a month. I counted up all the words he said that first year he came back, and they added up to seventeen: “I ran away cause the man did things to me and the lady pretended it wasn’t happening.”
    Danny wouldn’t talk, but he liked to sing. He wasn’t any good at it but it never stopped him. We had this old furry wallpaper in our bedroom that smelled like a wet dog, and Danny would stand with his face pressed up against the paper and sing for hours. I asked him a million times who he was singing to, but he wouldn’t say. And then, one day, when he was humming the theme tune of The Virginian , he just came out with it: “Angels.”
    Danny said the angels spoke to him: told him stuff. Crazy shit most of the time, but one time they gave him the name of a horse that was going to win at Flushing Meadows the next day. Danny got out this old shoebox where he kept his money and counted up. There was $35.71 in it, which was a shit-load of money for an eleven-year-old who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer to have saved. Danny gave me the thirty-five and change, and I gave it to Uncle Frank, and Uncle Frank placed it on the horse that the angels had tipped because Danny and me were too young to do it ourselves. Then we crowded around the little transistor radio the black kid up on the third floor had and listened to that race at Flushing Meadows. And we practically shit our pants when the horse came home to win at 12-1. I fucking kid you not…12-1! Those angels were right on the money; Danny was $500 richer, and we were like three jumping fools. We hopped around like crazy, waiting for Frank to show with the money. We were these three big shots, ready to turn the world on its head. No more macaroni and cheese out