City Boy Read Online Free

the pipe organ.
    The apartment was laid out like his and Chloe’s, same-but-different enough to make him feel as if he was the one who was stoned, or had followed a white rabbit down its hole. The kid was leading the way back to the kitchen, loping through the rooms with a sturdy gait that Jack well recognized. The music was still damn close to loud, and Jack took the opportunity to turn it down a few notches without the kid noticing.
    He had an impression of walls painted in bright, inflamed colors, turquoise and purple, and blinds drawn across shut windows, and curtains on top of that, and too much lamp light, and stale, overcooked air, a total effect of hectic claustrophobia. The television and stereo and their attendant cords and clutter took up one entire wall, like an altar to noise, or maybe to Bob Marley. A poster of him, his brooding silhouette edged in bands of rainbow, hung on the wall where, in his own apartment, Jack would have seen a newly hung print of Monet’s water lilies.
    There were stubs of melted candles in jar lids, paperback books, clothes hung on doorknobs, scattered newspapers, mail, drinking glasses abandoned with an inch or so of suspect liquid in the bottom, plastic forks, towels, a pair of ancient, peeling cowboy boots, magazines, a couple of empty jugs of supermarket wine, a Halloween maskof a green and melting-faced monster, a bag of foil-wrapped chocolate Easter eggs, a paddle racquet missing its tethered rubber ball. This and more was piled or strewn on floors and tables. He told himself it was just like the way he’d lived when he was the kid’s age, though he didn’t really believe it.
    When Jack reached the kitchen, the Raggedy Ann girl was there too. “It ran out right in the middle of doing the dishes,” she said, an aggrieved housekeeper.
    The kitchen wasn’t worse than the rest of the place, or at least it wasn’t exponentially worse, as he might have feared. It smelled of curry, and some other spices he couldn’t put a name to, something dank and weedy that he associated with countries where people died of plagues.
    The kid said, “I think maybe it’s the water line, the whole line coming into the apartment, because the bathroom doesn’t work either.”
    Jack pretended to examine the faucet, even made a show of opening the cabinet beneath the sink and fiddling with the valve. How dumb were these people? “Well, for whatever reason, it looks like your water’s been shut off.”
    “No way.”
    “God, Richard, weren’t you supposed to call them? Wasn’t there some kind of big deal deal with the bill?”
    “Shit, man.”
    The two of them looked incapable of formulating any sort of response besides staring longingly at the sink. Jack said, “There was probably some water still in the pipes when they shut it off, so you couldn’t tell right away. Tomorrow’s Monday, you can call the water company in the morning.”
    “This just sucks,” said the kid, peevishly. “I mean, we can’t even flush the toilet.”
    Jack only wished it had been the power bill. “Well … ,” he said, preparing himself to leave before they asked to come downstairs and use the bathroom.
    “Why do they even charge you for water, what kind of rip-off is that? It’s like charging for air.”
    “Or food,” Jack couldn’t resist, which made the kid give him that sullen, cross-eyed look again, before he decided it was funny, and laughed.
    “‘They belly full.’ Yeah man, some things just don’t change.”
    “Yeah.” He must have uttered some Rastafarian password without knowing it.
    “Hey, you want a drink? Look and see what we got.” The kid nodded to the girl, who opened the refrigerator and began rattling through the shelves.
    “Thanks, but my wife’s got to be wondering what happened to me.”
    “Tell her to come on up and party,” said the kid cheerily. He was sloshing a bottle of undrinkable wine into not entirely clean plastic glasses.
    “Work tomorrow,” Jack reminded.