334 Read Online Free Page B

advertising clock on the face of First National Citibank said 2:15. That wasn’t possible. Birdie asked two of the old people on the benches if that was the right time. Their watches agreed.
    There was no use trying to get to the test now. Without quite knowing why, Birdie smiled. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down to watch the ocean. In June there was the usual family reunion at The Sicilian Vespers. Birdie polished off his tray without paying too much attention to either the food or the story his dad was dawdling over, something about someone at 16th Street who’d opted for Room 7, after which it was discovered that he had been a Catholic priest. Mr. Ludd seemed upset. Birdie couldn’t tell if it was the idea of Room 7 or the idea of having to cut down his intake because of the diabetes. Finally, to give the old guy a chance at his noodles, Birdie told him about the essay project Mr. Mack had arranged, even though (as Mr. Mack had pointed out and pointed out) Birdie’s problems and his papers belonged to Barnard G.S.A., not to P. S. 141. In other words, this would be Birdie’s last chance, but that could be, if Birdie would let it, a source of motivation. And he let it.
    “And you’re going to write a book?”
    “Goddamn, Dad, will you listen?”
    Mr. Ludd shrugged, wound the food on his fork, and listened. What Birdie had to do to climb back to 25 was demonstrate abilities markedly above the abilities he’d demonstrated back on that Friday the 13th. Mr. Mack had gone over the various components of his profile, and since he’d scored most on Verbal Skills they decided that his best bet would be to write something. When Birdie asked what, Mr. Mack had given him, to keep, a copy of By Their Bootstraps.
    Birdie reached under the bench where he’d set it down when they came in. He held it up for his dad to see: By Their Bootstraps. Edited and with an Introduction (encouraging but not too clear) by Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp. Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp was the architect of the Regents system.
    The last string of spaghetti was wound and eaten. Reverently Mr. Ludd touched his spoon tip to the skin of the spumoni. Holding back from that first taste, he asked, “And so they’re paying you money just to … ?”
    “Five hundred dollars. Ain’t it a bitch. They call it a stipend. It’s supposed to last me three months but I don’t know about that. My rent at Mott Street isn’t so bad, but other things.”
    “They’re crazy.”
    “It’s the system they have. You see, I need time to develop my ideas.”
    “The whole system’s crazy. Writing! You can’t write a book.”
    “Not a book. Just a story, an essay, something like that. It doesn’t have to be more than a page or two. It says in the book that the best stuff usually is very… I forget the exact word but it means short. You should read some of the crap that got past. Poetry and stuff where every other word is something foul. I mean, really foul. But there’s some okay things, too. One guy that didn’t finish eighth grade wrote a story about working on an alligator preserve. In Florida. And philosophy. There was this one girl who was blind and crippled. I’ll show you.” Birdie found the place where’d he left off: “My Philosophy” by Delia Hunt. He read the first paragraph aloud:
    “Sometimes I’d like to be a huge philosophy, and sometimes I’d like to come along with a big axe and chop myself down. If I heard somebody calling out Help, Help! I could just sit there on the trunk and think, I guess somebody’s in trouble. But not me, because I’m sitting here looking at the rabbits and so on running and jumping. I guess they’re trying to get away from the smoke. But I would just sit there on my philosophy and think, Well, I guess the forest is really on fire now.”
    Mr. Ludd, involved in his spumoni, only nodded pleasantly. He refused to be bewildered by anything he heard or make protests or try to understand why things