Tithe Read Free Page A

say that would explain what had happened.
    She could hear Janet shouting. “What did you do to her? What the fuck did you do?”
    Kaye ran across the carousel hall and swung her leg over the sill. The glass she had carefully avoided earlier slashed a thin line on the outside of her thigh as she dropped among the sandy soil and weeds.
    The cold wind felt good against her hot face.
    Cornelius Stone picked up the new box of computer crap and hauled it into his bedroom to drop next to the others. Each time his mother came home from the flea market with a cracked monitor, sticky keyboard, or just loads of wires, she had that hopeful look that made Corny want to hit her. She just couldn’t comprehend the difference between a 286 and a quantum computer. She couldn’t understand that the age of guerilla engineering was at a close, that being a motherfucking genius wasn’t enough. You needed to be a rich motherfucking genius.
    He dropped the box, kicked it hard three times, picked up his denim jacket with the devil’s head on the back, and made for the door.
    “Can you use that stuff, honey?” His mother was in Janet’s room, folding a new pair of secondhand jeans. She held up a T-shirt with rhinestone cats on it. “Think your sister will like it?”
    “Thanks, Ma,” he said through gritted teeth. “I got to get to work.” He walked past The Husband, who was stooped over, getting a beer from the case under the kitchen table. The white cat was waddling along the countertop, its belly dragging with another pregnancy, screaming for canned food or pickles and ice cream or something. He petted its head grudgingly, but before it began rubbing against his hand in earnest, he opened the screen door and went out into the lot.
    The cool October air was a relief from the recirculated cigarette smoke.
    Corny loved his car. It was a primer-colored Chevy blooming with rust spots and an inner lining that hung like baggy skin from the roof. He knew what he looked like. Beaky. Skinny and tall with bad hair and worse skin. He lived up to his name. Cornelius. Corny. Corn-dog. But not in his car. Inside, he was anonymous.
    Every day for the last three weeks he had left a little earlier for work. He would go to theconvenience store and buy some food. Then he would drive around, cruise past all the local rutting joints, imagining he had a semiautomatic rifle in the car and counting how many he could have gotten. “Pow,” he’d say, softly, to rolled-up windows as a brown-haired boy with broad shoulders and a backwards baseball cap ran up to the giggling girls behind the window of a red truck. “Pow. Pow.”
    Tonight, he bought a cup of coffee and a package of black licorice. He lingered over a paperback with an embossed metallic dragon on the cover, reading the first few sentences, hoping something would interest him. The game was becoming boring. Worse than boring, it made him feel more pathetic than before. Nearly a week before Halloween and all, this was the point when a real maniac would go and get a gun. He sipped at the coffee and almost spat it out. Too sweet. He sipped at it some more, steeling himself to the taste. Disgusting.
    Corny got out of his car and chucked the full coffee into the parking lot. It splashed satisfactorily on the asphalt. He went inside and poured himself another cup. From behind the counter, a matronly woman with frizzy red hair looked him over and pointed to his jacket. “Who are you supposed to be, the devil?”
    “I wish,” Corny said, dropping a dollar twenty-five on the counter. “I wish.”

2
    “The stones were sharp,
The wind came at my back;
Walking along the highway,
Mincing like a cat.”
    —THEODORE ROETHKE, “Praise to the End!”
    The wind whipped tiny pebbles of rain across Kaye’s face. The droplets froze her hands, making her shiver as they slid down her wet hair and under the collar of her coat. She walked, head down, kicking the scattered trash that had eddied up on the grassy