Dead End Gene Pool Read Online Free

and I with a bag of Wise potato chips. One thing my mother knew how to do was pick out a good governess.
    Henrietta and I had a running joke about my mother’s schedule.
    “So when’s Mommy coming home?” I’d say.
    “When she’s darker than Sambo, lassie,” Henrietta would say back, laughing and choking on her own phlegm. Lighting a fresh Winston off the glowing butt of the last, she’d reach over and tousle my hair. “A wee more dip with those crisps, lassie?” We absolutely understood each other.
    Over the PA system, the captain came on again. “I’m sure y’all have noticed we’ve been circling. We’re trying to use up some a that big ol’ tank a gas before we come on in.” He proceeded to tell us that there was a little ol’ problem with getting the landing wheels to go down. That got everyone thinking. Now all you could hear was the vibration of the propellers slicing evenly through the dark, and the muffled terror of people mentally preparing to die. Only the Indians in the back appeared unconcerned; what did they care—they’d be back.
    My brother had gotten the window seat, despite my efforts to scratch and bite my way into it first, and since the captain’s announcement, he’d been springing up and down, calling out numbers. Every time I told him to shut up, he said he was counting the moons.
    “Fifteen . . . sheesh! I can’t believe how many there are,” Will said to his tiny oval aperture. He had his nose flat against its own reflection. The cabin lights had been dimmed for landing (or whatever), and an eerie column of light from the reading lamp bounced off my brother’s crew cut.
    “George is gonna be mad we’re late,” Will said to the glass.
    “He’s probably hoping the plane’ll crash and we’ll be dead, so he won’t have to drive us anymore.” I was trying to sound tough, even though my heart was starting to make weird little jumps in my chest.
    Will turned from the window. “You think we have time for one last Coke?”

    At LaGuardia (or West Palm Beach, the gateway to our grandparents’ house in Hobe Sound; or Bangor, ditto for the summer house in Maine), we were always met by George, our grandparents’ marzipan-pink, chrome-domed, unsmiling German chauffeur. He treated my brother and me like medical waste, propelling us through baggage claim by the back of our collars with a gloved vise-grip, out to the waiting Cadillac limousine. In magnanimous moments I reasoned that because George had never married, he was unable to appreciate children, let alone share our enthusiasm for acrobatics in the back of his car. Chaperoning us was clearly beneath his dignity, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job because George was a Nazi escaping justice. I knew he was a Nazi because one of my uncles was into Hitler. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham (we called him that because he said everything twice—like “Hitler was a good man! A good man!”) was my father’s younger brother. He liked to neutralize the effects of his Thorazine, which he took for an as yet undiscovered but clearly out there mental condition, with coffee, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, NoDoz, and four packs of Parliaments a day. This made him more than a little chatty, even to a kid. Over the course of a weekend with Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham, you could, through osmosis, learn enough about the Third Reich to write a dissertation on the Nuremberg Rallies.
    A Jewish friend of mine from summer camp had told me that German people liked to cover their lamps with lamp shades made from the skin of Jews gassed at Auschwitz. She was three years older than me, and I believed her.
    You think my grandfather’s shofur has some? I’d written her by return post. (No way could I spell chauffeur .)
    Duh , she had written back, and had gone on to graphically describe all kinds of atrocities on several sheets of Snoopy stationery, the visualization of which had kept me awake at night for a month.
    I’d asked Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham if he thought George