Cartoonist Read Online Free

Life was very close to cartoons, he had said, whether you liked it or not. That’s why they were funny. Cartoons took life and sifted out the beauty, the sweetness, the fleeting moments of glory and left you as you really were.
    He could do a cartoon about himself, he thought, about his turned-in feet. That was the stuff of cartoons, no beauty or sweetness, no moments of glory in turned-in feet.
    In the first scene he’d be walking down the sidewalk with his turned-in feet and he’d meet a man with regular feet. The man would say, “Turn those feet out, son.”
    In the next scene he’d meet a woman. She’d say, “Better turn those feet out, sonny.”
    In the next scene he’d meet a group of children. They’d yell, “Hey, turn your feet out like us. Look at our feet. See how they turn out!”
    In the last scene he’d meet a duck and a pigeon. They’d say, “Your feet look all right to us.” And the three of them would waddle off into the sunset.
    He smiled.
    He came to the front door of the house and paused before entering. The smile left his face because he was afraid he couldn’t get to the attic before his mother caught him.
    “What happened at school?” she’d ask, eyes shining. She loved gossip, even about people she’d never heard of.
    “Nothing.”
    “Oh, come on. Something must have happened.”
    “No.”
    “Come on. I’ve been sitting in this house with nothing but Pap and TV for company. What happened?” Sometimes she would make him tell her at least one thing before he could go to the attic. “Well, we had a substitute teacher in World Studies.”
    He opened the front door quietly. There was no one in the living room, but he could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen. Quickly, silently he climbed the ladder and pushed open the trap door. The warm attic air felt good against his face. He thought of this door as an escape hatch, like the kind on a submarine.
    Long ago, when his father was alive, he had felt like this about the junkyard. His father, starting from nothing, had built up a wrecking business. He called himself the Wreck King of West Virginia. His junkyard covered seven acres. On top of the concrete building where his father conducted business was a huge crown made of hubcaps.
    To Alfie, the junkyard had been as good as Disneyland. Car after car, some brand new, some rusted and old, an ocean of cars that would never move again. To crawl into those cars, to work controls, to sit and dream was as good as a ride on a roller coaster.
    Alfie especially liked to sit in the old Dodge sedan because every window in it was cracked and splintered, so that when the sun shone through, it was as beautiful as being in church. And the Chrysler Imperial—its windows had a smoky distortion, so that, beyond, figures seemed to float through the junkyard like spirits through the cemetery.
    His last memory of the junkyard still hurt him. It was the day the yard was sold at auction. Alfie had sat on a wrecked Ford pick-up truck, on the fender where a dent made a perfect seat, and had watched the junkyard go to a man named Harvey Sweet. For a long time after that, Alfie had been as lost as a bird without a nest. Then he had found this attic.
    Suddenly he heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was complaining to Pap. “Oh, I wish Bubba was here, don’t you, Pap?”
    “What?”
    “Don’t you miss him?”
    “Who?”
    “Pap, put down that paper!” Alfie heard her crumple it. “I’m talking about Bubba. Don’t you miss Bubba?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t you ever miss anything?” she asked in exasperation.
    He took the question seriously. “I miss the junkyard,” he said after a moment.
    Slowly Alfie let the trap door close. He knew what Pap meant about missing the junkyard. It was possible to miss a place more than a person, if the place was where you felt at home. And Pap had been more at home sitting on an old Coca-Cola crate in the shade of the hubcap crown than he had ever felt in