Jolly Read Free Page A

directed. “You got three dollars?”
    “No, and neither do you and if you did you wouldn’t have the nerve to spend it up there. Me neither.”
    Luke kept the motor running in front of Jolly’s house. “See you tomorrow,” he said, “and no kiddin’, Joll, take it easy with Gusperson. Some day he’s gonna chew you up.”
    “Will he eat me whole?”
    Luke grinned. “Naw. He’ll spit that part out.”
    Jolly stopped between the pines edging the path and viewed the little shingled house folded in among the trellised dead vines like an old barn owl impassively scanning the moonlight for prey, its glass eyes dimly reflecting the night. He walked to the back door and cautiously entered the kitchen as he always did, although knowing well his mother would be lying awake waiting for sound of him. He groped above his head for the string and pulled. Unshaded light sprang against the four walls as if it were desperate to escape the confinements of a room too small for a hundred watts.
    “Is that you, Jolly?”
    “Yes, Mom. It’s me.”
    “What time is it?”
    He knew she had already picked up, shook, and viewed her phosphorescent-faced clock. “It’s late,” he answered.
    “Hum.”
    From her tight-lipped response Jolly knew she would have a word or two to say at breakfast in the morning, and she would roust him out of bed at least an hour early without having started the fire. Well, he could use the hour to study for the Great Hoary Father.
    He rummaged in the refrigerator through habit more than hunger. He set out one of the quarts of milk and reached down a glass from an open shelf.
    “They’s cake,” called his mother from her bed.
    He smiled and rattled the cake cover so it would be known he appreciated the clue.
    After he had placed the glass and plate in the sink, he entered the bathroom, which opened in an afterthought off the kitchen. He sat on the toilet and smoked a last cigarette after first opening a window. The room became cold immediately. He stretched over the tub to reach a towel, which he tucked around his bare thighs. But each time he lifted one hip to flick ashes into the toilet, the towel slipped away, exposing his flesh to the cold. Finally, he abandoned his legs to goose bumps and let the towel slide to the floor where it remained. Later, he examined his face in the mirror, memorizing the best way to hold a smile or the exact level at which his lids should rest in order to create the most awesome effect. The effect was short-lived, shattered by a frown at the sight of another new pimple. He searched a shelf above the basin until he found a small jar of medicated brown ointment, which he daubed over blemishes, real and imaginary.
    Finding nothing else to do, Jolly faced the prospect of bed and the hour or more of sweet-sour restlessness he dreaded and looked forward to each night. He stepped from his clothes beside his cot (the same one he had slept in since he was eight) in the bedroom shared by his mother, only now the room was divided somewhat by a large pasteboard closet from Sears that housed his things, and he let himself noiselessly and naked into the bed, while from the other side of the partition his mother mentally shook her head, and she closed her ears against the sounds of this boy’s night terror and ecstasy.
    This boy—Jolly—wasn’t like the other one. For that matter, as far as she could tell, he wasn’t like anybody either on her side or his father’s, not that she knew much about the man she had married late and lived with for a quarter of a century when he was home, and home had been a dozen places where he left her until he sent her money to move to another tiny, barren town where, he believed, his luck would turn. After twelve years of teaching in the same country school she and her six brothers and sisters had attended, passing twice each day over the same hickory-shaded foot bridge that led everywhere from her own father’s farm, she had resigned herself to what