Buffalo Jump Read Online Free

five-five. He started the engine and put the gearshift in reverse,then put it back in park and turned off the engine. Got out of the car and retreated to a corner of the garage that was sheltered from the wind and the neighbour’s view. He opened his silver-plated cigarette case—both the case and the bomber jacket had once been his dad’s—and slipped out a thin joint.
    Just half,
he told himself, to take the edge off, get him to Kevin’s and back. He needed to calm down. Needed
something
to calm him down. Until he saw Kevin, a joint would have to do. He lit up and inhaled deeply, holding it in his lungs, watching smoke spiral off the lit end. The neighbours would smell it if they were outside, but so what? It wouldn’t be the first time. He exhaled and inhaled again, holding the smoke in until his lungs told him to cut that shit out and take in some air. He blew out a good-sized cloud and took one more hit, then butted the joint carefully against the cinder-block wall of the garage and put the remnant back in the case.
    No more, he told himself. Not until you get home. Don’t want to go past mellow into paranoid. Don’t want to be all red-eyed if you get pulled over for some reason. Especially on the way back.
    Thus fortified, Barry backed out of his driveway and drove down Lincoln Parkway, a wide boulevard with fine houses on large treed lots. That he lived in one of Buffalo’s more affluent areas was due more to his father’s efforts than to his own. His dad had left Barry the house when he passed away two years ago, and he and Amy had been more than happy to leave their frame semi near D’Youville College and live close to the Albright-Knox Gallery and the park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Live as his dad had, in his dad’s colonial-style brick house with the white portico in front, on a street where the neighbours were all professionals, just as his dad had been.
    Asked what he did, Barry would say graphic designer. True enough but not in the sense it had once been. He had started out in fine arts, like everyone else in his sixties circle, and eventuallyhad turned to Mac-based design to leverage his modest talent into a livable wage. He had been an in-house designer for more than twenty years, the last twelve at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, churning out pamphlets, brochures, reports and newsletters until the latest round of cutbacks claimed him. Why keep a middle-aged man on staff with benefits when work could be farmed out to twenty-two-year-old techies straight out of college who knew all the latest design programs and would charge half the price, the bony-butted pimply little shits.
    So now he was freelancing out of his home but work was hard to find. Maybe his lifestyle was catching up with him, or maybe he was just getting old, but he didn’t feel as sharp as he once did. Things didn’t click like they used to. He’d still be trying to master the latest page-making software when the company would release a new version. He couldn’t put in sixteen-hour days like cyberpunks fuelled by junk food, caffeine and the inexhaustible energy of their youth. His income had tailed off dramatically. For now he had modest savings and a decent stock portfolio his dad had left him, but there wasn’t enough to keep Barry and Amy going until their pensions kicked in. Thank God, thank God, thank God they had never had kids. Amy had wavered in her late thirties but Barry had held fast and hadn’t he been right? Look at them now. How would they manage if they had teenagers? Amy wasn’t faring any better than he was, financially or otherwise. Who needed a piano teacher with arthritis, barely able to play the notes her students stumbled through?
    The worst thing about being laid off—worse than the drop in income or the blow to whatever self-esteem had accrued to him during a relatively unaccomplished life—had been the loss of his dental, health and prescription drug benefits. As a municipal