Play Me Backwards Read Online Free Page A

it.
    â€œLeon,” he said, “you’ve been a fine minion, and I want to help you. I think I can help you feel so much better that you’ll end up wanting to let me have your soul for free as a thank-you gift.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” I said.
    â€œKeep an eye on the front for a while, okay? I’ll be back in a few.”
    I went up to the front and sat on the counter, and Stan went out to his car and drove away. I hoped he wasn’t using all this as an excuse to ditch me at work or something, but that wasn’t really his style. And there wasn’t any work to leave me with, exactly; there was nothing for me to do around the store but defrost the front-of-the-house freezer with a screwdriver and try to keep my mind off Anna by wondering how the hell an ice cream place came to smell like the inside of a pizza box. Which it did.
    Twenty minutes later Stan came back with an armload of CDs.
    â€œWhere did you go?” I asked.
    â€œLibrary.” He walked up and dropped the CDs on the counter.
    â€œWhat the hell is all this?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s the Moby-Dick audiobook,” he said. “Unabridged on nineteen CDs. Start listening to it.”
    I stared at the pile of jewel cases. “You think listening to a classic novel is going to make me seem all intellectual or something?”
    â€œIt won’t make you any dumber,” said Stan. “But that’s not the point. Drive around tonight and listen to it.“
    I took the stack of CDs to my locker in the back and wondered what in the fresh, green hell Stan was thinking.
    â€œYou’ll thank me later,” he said when I came back out. “You’ll see. Thus begins the Resurrection of Leon.”
    The walk-in cooler kept on humming, and I arranged three gummy worms from the mix-in tubs into an A for Anna.
    Sometimes, you just have to trust that the dark lord knows what he’s doing.

3. FISH
    All through the rest of my shift, as the sun set over Venture Street and a round of fresh, wet, gloopy snow began to fall, I wondered what Stan’s angle was in giving me an audiobook about hunting for a whale. Maybe he figured that with so many CDs, the answer to all my problems had to be in there someplace . Or maybe he thought it would keep me occupied for a really long time so he wouldn’t have to hear me whining about Anna.
    Or maybe he thought listening to a book about a whale would motivate me to finally sell Willy the Whale, the whale-shaped ice cream cake that had been sitting in the front-of-the-house freezer for ages. We’d found it buried in the walk-in in the back, and since it was way too old to be safe to eat, we put it on sale priced as an antique. Willy-shaped cakes had been off the market for years, so it may have been a one-of-a-kind collectible now.
    And, of course, there was the very real possibility that hejust thought listening to Moby-Dick would somehow get me laid because it had the word “dick” in the title.
    When my shift ended, I cruised around town for a couple of hours listening to the first two CDs. In that amount of time you can drive from one end of the Des Moines metro area to the other several times; I drove past George the Chili King, the state capitol, the three or four skyscrapers we had, all four malls, the sculpture garden, and just about everything else we had that we could possibly count as a landmark. Twice, in some cases. All the while, Ishmael, the narrator, rambled on through my shitty car speakers about how he came to sign up for a voyage on a whaling ship. I’d never read Moby-Dick before—honestly, I hadn’t read anything all the way through in a long time—but I did read a Classics Illustrated version of it when I was about ten, and I was pretty sure that I remembered it ending with everyone except Ishmael dying.
    Okay, so . . . Ishmael. Now here we have a talker. The man goes to church and repeats the entire fucking