All Flesh Is Grass Read Online Free Page B

phone and he had been embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “I don’t want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston.”
    Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he’d been no friend of mine or of anybody else’s. He’d been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man.
    That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a trouble shooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent.
    Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang—how were they getting on? And I couldn’t answer, for I didn’t know. They all had drifted off. There wasn’t much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around. I probably wouldn’t have stayed myself if it hadn’t been for Mother. I’d come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother had joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave.
    â€œEd,” I had asked, “do you ever hear from any of the fellows?”
    â€œNo, I don’t,” said Ed. “I don’t know where any of them are.”
    I said: “There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson and Marty Hall and Alf—I can’t remember Alf’s last name.”
    â€œPeterson,” said Ed.
    â€œYes, that’s it,” I said. “It’s a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together.”
    Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand.
    â€œWhat are you going to do now?” he asked me.
    â€œLock the door, I guess,” I said. “It’s not just the phone. It’s everything. I’m behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it.”
    â€œYou could run the business from the house.”
    â€œEd,” I told him shortly, “there isn’t any business. I just never had a business. I couldn’t make a start. I lost money from the first.”
    I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the curb and a dog was smelling a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.
    I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that everything’s all right and will work out in the end, but always something comes up that you can’t kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take away the phone had been that final thing I couldn’t kid away.
    I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.
    The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always