Torch Read Free Page B

and then roared with laughter.
    Vern had shown Joshua his anchor tattoo and asked him if he’d ever heard of the cartoon
Popeye the Sailor Man
.
    “Yes,” Joshua said solemnly, holding out the money his mother had given him.
    “That’s me. That’s who I am,” Vern said, his eyes wild and mystical, as if he’d been transported into a memory of a time when he’d been secretly heroic. “Only I’m the original one, not a cartoon.” And then he laughed monstrously again while Joshua faked a smile.
    It had taken Joshua several years to fully shake the sense that Vern
was
Popeye, despite the fact that Vern’s real life was on obvious display. He had a son named Andrew, who was older than Joshua by twenty years. At work, when Vern was in a good mood, he would tell Joshua stories about Andrew when he was young. Andrew shooting his first deer, Andrew and his legendary basketball abilities, Andrew getting his arm broken by Vern when he’d caught him smoking pot in eighth grade. “I just took the little bugger and twisted it till it snapped,” Vern said. “I woulda pulled it clean off if I could. That’s how he learned. I don’t mess around. Messing around’s not how you raise a kid. You mess around and then they never get toughened up.”
    Joshua hardly knew his own father. He lived in Texas now. Joshua and Claire had gone to visit him there once when Joshua was ten, but they hadn’t lived with him since Joshua was four. They didn’t live in Midden then. They lived in Pennsylvania, where their father was a coal miner. They moved to Midden without ever having known about its existence until shortly before they’d arrived on a series of Greyhound buses, their mother having secured a job in housekeeping at the Rest-A-While Villa through the cousin of a friend.
    Marcy came back into the kitchen and sat on an upturned bucketthat they used as a chair. “I’ll have the pork tenderloin tonight, Vern. With a baked potato. You can keep the peas. You got a baked potato for me?”
    Vern nodded and closed the door he’d opened again.
    “Is it thinking about snowing out there?” she asked, looking at her nails.
    “Too cold to snow,” he said.
    All three of them listened to Teresa ask Patty Peterson what she thought the future of dowsing held and Patty told her it was a dying art. The radio show wasn’t Teresa’s real job; she was a volunteer, like almost everyone who worked at the station. Her real job was waiting tables at Len’s Lookout out on Highway 32. She’d started there after the Rest-A-While Villa closed down ten years before.
    Marcy grabbed the baseball cap off of Joshua’s head and then put it back on crooked. “Tell Vern what you want for dinner so we can get the hell out of Dodge when it’s time. I’m gonna go sweep.”
    “Onion rings, please,” he said, and loaded up another tray of dirty dishes. On the radio, his mother asked what year the showy lady’s slipper was made the Minnesota state flower.
    “1892,” said Vern. He opened the oven drawer and took out a potato wrapped in foil with his bare hands and dropped it onto a plate.
    At the end of each show, his mother would ask a question and then would tell the listeners what next week’s show would be while she waited for them to call in and guess the answer. She practiced these questions on Joshua and Claire and Bruce. She had them name all seven of the dwarfs, or define
pulchritudinous
, or tell her which is the most populous city in India. The people who called in to the show were triumphant if they got the answer right, as if they’d won something, though there was no prize at all. What they got was Teresa asking where they were calling from, and she’d repeat the place name back to them, delighted and surprised. The names of cold, country places with Indian names or the names of animals or rivers or lakes: Keewatin, Atumba, Beaver, Deer Lake.
    “1910?” a voice on the radio asked uncertainly.
    “Nooo,” Teresa cooed. “Good guess,