Trace Read Free Page A

bead of saliva drips from his lower lip and slides down his chin.
         You won't amount to anything, Edgar Allan. Failure, failure, failure. He talks around the pencil, mimicking his mother's mean-spirited, slurred, drunken voice. You're a thin soup, Edgar Allan, that's what you are. Loser, loser, loser.
         His lawn chair is exactly in the middle of the airless, stinking living room, and his one-bedroom apartment is not quite exactly in the middle of the second level of units that face Garfield Street, named after the U.S. president and running east-west between Hollywood Boulevard and Sheridan. The pale yellow stucco two-level complex is called Garfield Court for reasons unknown, beyond the obvious one of false advertising. There is no courtyard, not even a blade of grass, just a parking lot and three spindly palm trees with ragged fronds that remind Pogue of the tattered wings of the butterflies he pinned to cardboard as a boy.
         Not enough sap in the tree. That's your problem.
         "Stop it, Mother. Stop it right now. It's unkind to talk like that."
         When he rented his second home two weeks ago, Pogue didn't argue about the price, although nine hundred and fifty dollars a month is outrageous compared to what that amount of money would get him in Richmond, assuming he paid rent in Richmond. But proper accommodations aren't easy to find around here, and he didn't know where to start when he finally arrived in Broward County after a sixteen-hour drive, and in an exhausted but exhilarated mood began cruising, getting himself oriented, looking for a place and unwilling to rest in a motel room, not even for one night. His old white Buick was packed with his belongings, and he didn't want to take the chance that some juvenile delinquent might smash out the car windows and steal his VCR and TV, not to mention his clothing, toiletries, laptop computer and wig, the lawn chair, a lamp, linens, books, paper, pencils, and bottles of red, white, and blue touch-up paint for his cherished tee ball bat, and a few other vitally important personal possessions, including several old friends.
         "It was terrifying, Mother," he retells the tale in an effort to distract her from her drunken nagging. "Mitigating circumstances dictated that I leave our lovely little southern city immediately, although not permanently, certainly not. Now that I have a second home, of course I'll be back and forth between Hollywood and Richmond. You and I have always dreamed about Hollywood, and like settlers on a wagon train, we set out to find our fortunes, didn't we?"
         His ploy works. He has redirected her attention along a scenic route that avoids thin soup and not enough sap.
         "Only I didn't feel too fortunate at first when I somehow got off North Twenty-fourth Street and ended up in a godforsaken slum called Liberia where there was an ice cream truck."
         He talks around the pencil as if it is a bit in his mouth. The pencil substitutes for a smoke, not that tobacco is a health concern or a bad habit, but rather an expense. Pogue indulges in cigars. He indulges in very little else, but he has to have his Indios and Cubitas and A Fuentes, and most of all, Cohibas, the magic contraband of Cuba. He is smitten with Cohibas and he knows how to get them, and it makes all the difference when Cuban smoke touches his stricken lungs. Impurities are what kill the lungs, but the pure tobacco of Cuba is healing.
         "Can you possibly believe it? An ice cream truck with its sweet, innocent jingle playing and these little Negro children coming forward with coins to buy treats, and here we are in the middle of a ghetto, a war zone, and the sun has gone down. I'll just bet there are lots of gunshots fired at night in Liberia. Of course I got out of there and miraculously ended up in a better part of town. I got you to Hollywood safe and sound, didn't I, Mother?"
         Somehow he found himself on Garfield