City Boy Read Online Free Page A

“Maybe some other—”
    “One drink. What the hell. No water, plenty of wine. Come on, don’t be a total killjoy.”
    He was exactly that, he was the King of Killjoys, and he didn’t want to get too chummy because he guessed, correctly, that this was only the first of many occasions when he’d be up here trying to get the kid to do or not do something; nevertheless here he was, taking the glass, sitting down on that ugly couch, not passing up the joint when the kid sent it his way.
    Or no, it hadn’t happened quite that fast. They were still in the kitchen when the girl, whose name no one had thought to tell him, shrieked without warning, “Mouse! Mouse!”
    She was squawking and pointing to the floorboard next to the refrigerator. Jack caught a disappearing glimpse of something gray and frantic. “Oh
God
,” said the girl. “Rich, we have to set some traps.”
    “What are you so scared of, you’re only what, five hundred times bigger than it is? It’s a living creature, it has a right to exist.”
    “I don’t care, I don’t like the way they sneak around on their sneaky little feet. And they’re dirty.” She appealed to Jack. She had some kind of dire stuff on her eyelashes that turned them into dark blue spikes, and a number of tattoos peeking out of her clothing like glimpses of underwear. “Don’t you think mice are just vermin?”
    Jack was struck by the notion that the times they’d thought the people upstairs sounded like mice, it might have been actual mice. No, a bigger concern was that the mice might begin commuting downstairs. He said, “Well, killing mice isn’t any worse than frying a chicken or—”
    “Exactly,” said the kid, happy to launch into this. “That’s why I don’t do that shit. Eat flesh. It’s unnatural.”
    Jack, who could never keep himself from meeting an argument with an argument, said, “Animals eat other animals. That’s pretty natural.”
    This stopped the kid for a moment, but then he kept right on coming. “McDonald’s isn’t natural. Antibiotics and hormones and brain and bonemeal in cattle feed isn’t—”
    “Okay, forget McDonald’s. We’re living creatures too, we’re allowed to exist, take up space, eat. You know, survive. We don’t have to apologize for being here.” By this time Jack was drinking the wine, which was so sharp and metallic, he found it necessary to get a great deal of it down, so as to anesthetize himself against the taste.
    “Survive, yes, not trash the planet so corporations can make big piles of money for their stockholders. The white man’s Bible spells it out, page one, where the Lord gives man dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth. It’s a fucking business plan.”
    He must be one of those white guys who went around pretending they were black. It seemed like a really tortured way of going natural. At the same time, Jack couldn’t entirely disagree with the kid’s sentiments, although he himself might put it in some less simpleminded way.
    The kid said, “Come here,” beckoning him through the dining room—at least that’s what it was in his own apartment. Here it was harder to determine function. In the front room the kid shoveled through a pile of books and came up with a frayed paperback,
Triumph Over Babylon
. The cover showed a city skyline, Babylon, presumably, skyscrapers and power lines and traffic signals, the works, everything wavering and crumbling. “This lays it all out. The roots of the struggle against the death culture.”
    “Oh. Sure.” Jack sat down to open it. The first chapter was called“The Black Jesus.” He wondered, not for the first time, why he bothered writing fiction, inventing things.
    He looked up to see a lit joint under his nose, the kid waving it so the curl of smoke scribbled back and forth. “Coming at you,” said the kid, in a strangled, trying-not-to-exhale voice, and Jack reached out and took