Jog On Fat Barry Read Free Page A

of a box for us. Fuck no. We had five hundred bucks. The sky was the limit and we were bouncing off it. There were a million things we wanted to do: I’d set my heart on Coney Island and The Cyclone; Danny wanted to walk to the top of the Empire State building, and set a Lincoln Continental on fire, and the black kid said The Jackson 5 would be appearing at The Apollo but the tickets were $100.
    “We’ll do it all when Uncle Frank shows,” I told them, “because we’re fuckin’ rich, man! We’re fuckin’ rich!”
    Danny and me and the black kid waited all day for Uncle Frank to show. We counted away the minutes, and then the hours on the black kid’s watch waiting for Frank to show with the $500. But Frank never did show, because he ran into Aileen on his way back, and gave her the money. And Aileen did the same thing she always did with money: drank it all up with whichever uncle Frank happened to be screwing her at the time.
    When we found out what they’d done with the money Danny had won, I wanted to kill them, but Danny was more philosophical.
    “We still got the wallpaper,” he said.
    His idea was that we could bankroll ourselves again: save up all our nickels and dimes, pool our resources, if you like, and then, when the time was right, and we had another big chunk of change, Danny could sing to the angels again. He’d get the name of a new horse and we’d be rich all over again. So all that summer Danny and me washed cars, and took out people’s trash, and dropped nickels, dimes and quarters into the glass jar Danny kept under his bed, and watched our chunk of change grow. Then summer ended and I went back to school. But Danny had no school to go to. Aileen said it was pointless for fools like him to go to school because he couldn’t keep anything in his head anyway, so Danny kept washing cars, and kept dropping coins into that big old glass jar.
    Pretty soon the glass jar was almost full. Danny said a few more coins would fill it to the top, and then he was going to sing to the angels. On Monday he took out the trash for the Italian lady on the fifth floor and she gave him a quarter. On Tuesday someone broke a bottle outside the grocery store on the corner, and Danny cleaned it up for fifty cents. On Wednesday he didn’t make zip, but Thursday the black kid swiped a pack of smokes from his mom and sold them for forty cents. He kept the dime and nickel but gave Danny the quarter. The jar was full. Danny said he’d sing that Friday and I raced home from school because I didn’t want to miss it. But when I got home, Danny was in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, and hugging himself the way he did when something had upset him. He was growling and dribbling and wouldn’t say what was wrong. I heard noises down the hall. It sounded something like a dog scratching at a door. It was coming from our room. I ran down the hall and threw open the door. Aileen and Uncle Frank were standing in the middle of the room. They were drunk. Frank had a scraper in his hands; Aileen had a chisel in hers. The beds and the floor and everything else were covered with shredded pieces of furry paper. The walls had been stripped bare. I dropped my schoolbag and stepped into the room. Aileen had this huge grin on her face. She was beaming. I don’t think I’d ever seen her looking so happy. She started to stomp around the room and kick pieces of shredded wallpaper up into the air.
    “Danny and his fucking wallpaper!” she cried.
    She slipped on something; took a tumble. I saw the glass jar. It was on the floor beside her feet. The lid was off; the jar was empty. Aileen tried to stand but fell over again. I got down beside her. Her face was all ugly and bent out of shape.
    “Where’s our money?” I asked.
    “Danny and his fucking wallpaper,” she hissed as globules of spit went flying out of her mouth.
    I glanced at the chisel in her hand. I felt my fingers tighten around its wooden handle. My