George & Rue Read Online Free Page A

her two boys, now just seemed to aggravate his impoverishment: “Inky bitch gotta have kinky hair.” Or with a mouth that spat pure vinegar, he damned her as a hard-bitten bitch, a narrow, un-manning bitch. His honest emotion was sweat. Her marriage was an orchard of rotten fruit and dry, snapped branches, a wormy atmosphere. Not to mention cold winds, chilly rooms, cold gruel, and a bed frozen in frigidity.
    Asa was no longer crazy for incuntation with her. After a gallon of plonk, he’d go stumbling, jaundice-eyed, tar-faced, cussing, up and down the road, seeking some thoroughbred hussy, with his foul lust sticking out, dripping, his cock looking like dried-up muck, a worm of snot dangling from a nostril, and his whole being reeking of pork-scented smoke. And what he squandered outside their doors, on booze and big-ass broads, Cynthy couldn’t question. She couldn’t say to him, “Come with the truth, or leave your dog-ass home,” cos he’d slap her down, leave bloody spittle on her lips, put her out her own house. Times she was tempted to slink down dusty, pot-holed Panuke Road, to lay her burdens down by laying her head onthe train tracks, or to hold her two boys in her arms like two loaves of bread and stand in front of a smoking locomotive stampeding to Halifax. But she needed to survive—to revive soulfully in Montreal.
    Faced with Asa’s fists, his cussing tongue, and his lack of even a pittance of respect for her—a woman whose skin should smell of Moir’s fine chocolates, whose beautiful hair should always boast gold ribbons, and whose wardrobe should bristle with furs and shimmer with silks, Cynthy began to hope Asa would just drink rum and die. Or perhaps another man, hungry for her favours and angry at Asa’s shameless, fitful, alcoholic pawings of her excellence, would stick a shotgun at the back of Asa’s skull and pull the trigger. His horror, his ludicrous rummy’s stagger, his skin transporting the stench of greasy, sallow big fat bitches, all had to perish so Cynthy could be a beauty who could sit in windows and be admired. In a red dress.
    Why’d she need to fuss with some fool whose brain was muddy with rum? She desired fried liver with fried onions, fried chicken with rum, or fish ’n’ chips with salt and vinegar. Not constant pork—ham hocks, pigtails, sausages, tripe from the butchery. How could her looks be sustained by pigs?
    A nightmare of a dream, Asa made their lives a rum-splashed Damnation; he was Satan to Cynthy and their sons. The belt touched them so much, it was like their best suit of clothes. The wanton rage inside him was a lake of fire and melting rocks, as volcanic as alcohol, his one true faith. All they saw was a daddy who, after a nasty slug of rum, would “paint” the outhouse toilet with the dirt of his mouth or his ass.
    Polluted by their papa’s mean drunkenness, the boys grew like poisonous weeds. They were already learning to slip their skinny fists into that drunkard’s pockets to find any bit of coin they could—even if they got smacked or punched for their troubles. They spent their thefts on candy, bubblegum,potato chips, soda pop. Cynthy almost regretted letting her boys be born, for they were the phantoms of a devil father: they seemed like two good-for-nothings already, with their household thieving and angry lying, and they’d not even gone to school yet.
    Throughout her sons’ infancy and her husband’s rummy vileness, Cynthy came more and more to fancy a red dress as an emblem of civilization, one higher than that she knew. For four years then, every time Asa came in drunk, and she could get to clean his pockets before her sons did, she’d take the cash and coins and hide them away. She hoarded secretly what she managed to finagle, finesse, and filch from that monster of a husband. For four years, every time Asa cussed, slapped, or whipped her, she found a way to put away money.
    It was possible to live without money, for that’s what