Farewell Navigator Read Online Free Page A

bats those big yellow eyes and goes, Interesting . But it’s not! Sex in dorm room: not interesting. White boy traveling in Morocco: not interesting. Old age home: not interesting, depressing , unless you make something cool happen, such as mutiny. Patients bludgeoning nurses with walkers, etc.
    The bell buzzes. Horace yells, Après moi , the razor blades! and I go for the door. Two ghosts and a scary clown hold out plastic pumpkins. I drop a bag of gumdrops into each pumpkin. Thank you, they say without enthusiasm.
    You’ve got boring candy, Horace tells me. Those kids are out there right now talking shit about you.
    And my degree of caring about that is . . . ?
    Higher than you’re willing to let on. You secretly wish you could give them something badass, like miniature guns that shoot chewable bullets. But all you have is piano-teacher candy.
    Dad liked gumdrops, I point out.
    And you greatly honor his memory by distributing them to pissed children. He had bad taste, face it. He liked bow ties and soft rock. He liked Mom , for god’s sake! Horace crushes out a dwindled cigarette on the teeth of the skull.
    When the beer is gone, cookie-dough bowl licked to gleam, he is still fretting about the singer. It’s just stupid , he repeats. How did that band get on a soundtrack?
    It’s only Cuddle of Death , I reason. It never even came out in theaters.
    Yeah, but.
    I yawn and he goes to my refrigerator to see if there might be any beer he didn’t notice before.
    Our parents were the same height—they matched. They traded off reading us bedtime stories, and neither minded reading the same story again and again. Either could fix a fine egg-and tomato sandwich on short notice. Our mother was better at dancing and driving, and our father had a better sense of humor. Our mother was good at comforting our father when he cried, all those nights when he sat on the couch holding hischeeks, weeping, grunting, shaking his head, and she told us to go to our rooms. Whenever we asked was Dad all right, Mom would say, Sure, goslings, he’s just feeling sad today.
    After his funeral, we moved from the city to a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly. The first time Horace got charged with a drunk and disorderly, in front of one of the two local bars, policemen held his face against a brick wall and tapped the back of his head with a flashlight.
    We do this a little harder, one cop said, guess what happens to your brains? Smash-o! and the other cop laughed.
    Smash-o? Horace repeated afterward, with disdain. What the fuck kind of word is that?
    I watched him fiddle with the gauze reddening on his cheek and forehead. It’s hard to get bandages to stay fixed on a mouth, so his broken-open lips just went ahead and bled.
    Feel like making out? he asked, lurching at me.
    Our mother worries first about self-harm and second—a close second—about the fact that Horace refuses to work. Her daughter, at least, has a job, the same job for several years running, even if it’s not a very interesting one. Her son hasn’t had a job in a year and a half, and she is getting a bit tired, frankly , of supplementing the income he makes from selling blood. He sells it as often as they let him, but blood money doesn’t go too far. Neither does the cash he gets from being a volunteer for medical tests that turn his feces white. Mom pays most of his bills and I accuse her of gross enabling.
    Better to enable than have him move back in with me, she answers. That really took its toll.
    She likes us to attend Sunday dinner at her house, because it reminds her of television shows where families eat togetheron Sundays with gusto and ceremony. Ladling sauced beef onto macaroni, she asks how our respective weeks have gone.
    Horace spears a finger of meat and lifts it up for inspection.
    I announce, They might put me in charge of planning the new vacation-package campaign.
    That’s great,