Cartoonist Read Online Free Page A

his chair in front of the television.
    He also understood why Pap did not miss Bubba. He himself was glad Bubba was gone—working at a gas station in Maidsville, married to a girl named Maureen. There was something about Bubba that overshadowed everyone, like the walnut tree in their old yard whose leaves were so thick nothing could grow beneath. Its shadow had been as black at noon as it was at midnight.
    “Well, I do miss him,” his mother said loudly below. She had come into the living room and was standing right below the trap door. “Something was always happening when Bubba was here. It was like all the life and all the fun went into Bubba, and the other children, well …”
    Alfie wished suddenly there was an easy way to close the ears. He could hear too much in the attic. You could shut your eyes, he thought, block out everything you didn’t want to see, but the ears …
    Alfie sat down quietly at his table. He did not turn on the lamp. A little light filtered in through the slits in the eaves, a soft dusty light like in very old paintings.
    “Oh, I’m going out,” his mother said below.
    “Where to?”
    “Out!”
    “Well, if you’re going to the beer hall, wait for me.”
    “You got any money, Pap?” she sneered. “They don’t take food stamps.”
    “They take Social Security money, don’t they? The government ain’t made a law about how we spend that, have they?”
    Alfie heard the front door close. He reached out and turned on the light. He looked up at his cartoons, his comic strips, his drawings.
    With one hand he reached for a pencil, with the other a fresh sheet of paper. A slight smile came over his face. He was home.

Chapter Four
    A LFIE LAY IN HIS bed. He was staring up at the ceiling. He did not see the sheets of pale plywood or the dark nail heads, because in his mind he was looking beyond the ceiling into the attic.
    Alfie squinted his eyes. He tried to imagine the house without ceilings, with only the rafters. He imagined his cartoons, Scotch-taped, pinned, thumbtacked to the underside of the roof, hanging down, enlivening the whole crooked house. He imagined people dropping by the house to look up at his drawings the way they went into the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo’s.
    Someday the attic would be famous. “This is where he began his cartoons,” they’d say. There would be people filing through, climbing, one by one, up the ladder to the attic. There would be a souvenir stand where copies of his comic strips could be bought and machines where his cartoons could be viewed for a quarter.
    He shifted and sighed. He was restless. He could not fall asleep. He knew this was because of the comic strip he had drawn after supper. He had been so pleased with it that he had taken it down to show his mother.
    “What’s this?” Squinting, she had turned it first one way and then another, as if it were a modern painting.
    “Like that,” he had said, putting it right. He looked over her shoulder with a pleased, expectant smile. It was the strip about his turned-in feet, and she would have to laugh at that. When he was little, she had laughed about his feet all the time and called him “Duck” and “Pigeon.” For the first time he had felt secure about pleasing her.
    “What is this thing?”
    “It’s a comic strip. I drew it.”
    She held it at a distance to see it better.
    “It’s about me,” he went on. “Don’t you see the feet?”
    “What feet? Turn up the light, Pap.”
    “It’s up high as it can get,” Pap said. “Forty watts is forty watts.”
    She tried turning the strip of paper sideways.
    “Never mind,” Alfie said angrily. He snatched it from her. The paper tore.
    “I want to see your drawing,” she said, offering to take it again.
    “Never mind.”
    “Well, just ’cause I can’t tell which way is up, that’s no reason to get mad, is it, Pap?”
    “Getting mad runs in our family,” Pap said, leaning back, getting ready to start a story. “Did