Two-Gun & Sun Read Free

That was it. I was done. Pale light shone in the windows now, just as the navigator had said it would. Day one of my new life and a wasp of anxiety buzzed from rib to rib inside me. A month to get the newspaper out. I fought a sense of welling panic, the fear that I might have tackled too much, was attempting the impossible and therefore was doomed to failure. And then the fear of succeeding, of feeling this beast leap to life under my fingers. What then?
    Someone in town must know about my uncle’s printing machine, who ran it, and where I could find him. I rolled to my feet.
    With a rag that reeked of kerosene I rubbed furiously at my stained fingers and knuckles, squeezing through the cramped back shop as I worked at my hands, past the drawers of type, shelves of ink cans, stacks of paper. Newsprint smudges from Uncle’s thumbs blackened the doorknobs, window sills and tin walls. Against the back wall, a washtub streaked black and full of jars of putty knives and rags and solvent. Above it a battered metal mirror, where I checked my face for streaks of black, then stuck my head under the tap to rinse my mouth. Uncle had a tin of denture powder on the shelf. I sprinkled some onto my finger and rubbed it over my teeth, rinsed again, and dried my face on my sleeve.
    Hanging from a bolt in the wall next to the sink was a calendar. It had 1922 neatly printed over a painting of an orchard not unlike ours back home, and I could see why Uncle had picked it. I tore off the May, June, July and August pages from the pad at the bottom. A pencil had been tied to the bolt, and I grabbed it up to strike through September 1, yesterday, and September 2, today. I spun around and left the pressroom, the pencil clattering against the wall behind me.
    Next, my coveralls. They slid into a heap around my ankles and I shook one foot and then the other to step out of them, smoothing as I did so the lavender-grey pleats of my travel outfit, even more rumpled than before. I was ready.
    The opera poster still lay at a crooked angle on the counter. I’d pin it up later. The front office was the only room in the building where anything could be pinned. Its walls had been framed in wood and then finished with lath and plaster. It could use some brightening, though, because the white paint had yellowed over the years.
    I felt along the shelves underneath the counter, finding trays of rubber bands and bundles of envelopes, pencils and paperclips. I took up one pencil and stuck in into the sharpener screwed to the countertop, cranked the handle five times and pulled it out. Perfect. The sharpener in my old classroom used to chew the pencils to bits. On the second shelf I found a ledger, and behind it, at last, the thing I had been looking for, a notebook. Spiral-bound, brown cover, the inside pages a series of calculations, my uncle’s attempts to tally income and expenses and find a balance in his favour. I had the same habit and made a mental note to stop it. This was like finding someone’s love letters, all their emotions and fears laid out for the finder to examine: my uncle’s frantic discovery that he was nearing bankruptcy, each series of sums tallied hopefully, and then crossed out angrily. I tore out the scribbled pages and tossed them into a wooden box full of other scraps of paper.
    Then I lifted the hinged counter and dropped it with a bang behind me.
    Outside I was struck by the sensation of plodding through a dust storm. I could barely make out the wooden sign in my neighbour’s darkened window: General Store. The navigator was right. A low-hung sky of dark grey turned mustard grey about the edges where the sun must be trying to burst through. Feeble as the daylight was, I could see what I had missed last night. No need for a lamp. To my left, thick black trunks of chimneys belching smoke. To my right, a strip of simmering walls of black metal pipes and roofs. Soot-stained windows that glowered dully. I turned in