Spit Delaney's Island Read Free Page A

about the heat, and the taste of dry sand in the air.
    â€œIt’s supposed to be hot, stupid,” Jon said. “This is Egypt.” He spent most
of the trip reading books about the countries they were passing through,
and rarely had time for the real thing. It was obvious to Spit that his son
was cut out for a university professor.
    And Cora, who hated everything, would get married. “I can’t see why
they don’t just tear it down. A lot of hot stone.”
    Jon sniffed his contempt. “It’s a monument. It’s something they can
look at to remind them of their past.”
    â€œThen they ought to drag it into a museum somewhere under a roof.
With air conditioning.”
    Stella said, “Where’s Daddy?”
    He wasn’t anywhere amongst the tourists. No one in the family had
seen him leave.
    â€œMaybe he got caught short,” Jon said, and sniggered.
    Cora stretched her fat neck, to peer. “And he’s not in the bus.”
    The other tourists, too, appeared uneasy. Clearly something was sensed,
something was wrong. They shifted, frowned, looked out where there
was nothing to see. Stella was the first to identify it: somewhere out there,
somewhere out on that flat hot sand, that desert, a train was chugging, my
God, a steam engine was chugging and hissing. People frowned at one
another, craned to see. Uneasy feet shifted. Where in all that desert was
there a train?
    But invisible or not it got closer, louder. Slowing. Hunph hunph hunph
hunph. Then speeding up, clattering, hissing. When it could have been on
top of them all, cutting their limbs off on invisible tracks, the whistle blew
like a long clarion howl summoning them to death.
    Stella screamed. “Spit! Spit!” She ran across sand into the noise, forgetting to keep her arms clamped down against the circles of sweat.
    She found him where in the shrill moment of the whistle she’d realized
he would be, at the far side of the pyramid, leaning back against its dusty
base with his eyes closed. The tape recorder was clutched with both hands
against his chest. Old Number One rattled through him like a fever.
    When it was over, when he’d turned the machine off, he raised his eyes
to her angry face.
    â€œWhere is the line?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
    â€œYou’re crazy,” she said. “Get a hold of yourself.” Her eyes banged
around in her bony head as if they’d gone out of control. There were witnesses all over this desert, she appeared to be saying, who knew what kind
of a fool she had to put up with. He expected her to kick at him, like someone trying to rout a dog. Her mouth gulped at the hot air; her throat
pumped like desperate gills. Lord, you’re an ugly woman, he thought.
    The children, of course, refused to speak to him through Israel, Turkey,
and France. They passed messages through their mother—“We’re starved,
let’s eat” or “I’m sick of this place”—but they kept their faces turned from
him and pretended, in crowds, that they had come alone, without parents.
Cora cried a great deal, out of shame. And Jon read a complete six-volume
history of Europe. Stella could not waste her anxiety on grudges, for while
the others brooded over the memory of his foolishness she saw the same
symptoms building up again in his face. She only hoped that this time he
would choose some place private.
    He chose Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford. They wouldn’t have
gone there at all if it hadn’t been for Jon, who’d read a book on Shakespeare and insisted on seeing the place. “You’ve dragged me from one
rotten dump to another,” he said, “now let me see one thing I want to see.
She was twenty-six and Shakespeare was only my age when he got her
pregnant. That’s probably the only reason he married her. Why else would
a genius marry an old woman?” Spit bumped his head on the low doorway and