Primitive People Read Online Free Page A

wide-eyed and pallid.
    George said, “Don’t you know how to drive?”
    “You better tell Mom,” said Maisie.
    “I can’t,” Simone answered, and this seemed reasonable to the children.
    George rolled into the passenger seat, his face faintly flushed and sweaty. He showed Simone the parts of the car and what to hold down when. She braked and hit the gas and braked. The children tumbled forward.
    All day they practiced on back roads, bucking and weaving down the deserted narrow lanes and carefully working their way up to larger, more crowded highways.
    “We’re like water drops,” said Maisie. “Trickling into the river and drowning.”
    Happily, the children did know the route to the haircut salon. “It’s called Short Eyes?” George told Simone. “That’s what they call child molesters in jail in New York City?” When George was anxious, which was most of the time, every sentence was framed as a question.
    It took Simone a few seconds to figure out what George meant. Then she said, “How do you know that?”
    “Kenny told my mom,” George explained. “He tells everyone.”
    Short Eyes—Kuts for Kids was in a mini-mall designed to suggest a frontier town in a cowboy movie. Inside, the salon had a jungle motif, all zebra skin and rattan. Dozens of long-armed, brown, fake-fur gibbons were suction-cupped to the ceiling. Maisie eyed them competitively, chewing on a knuckle.
    A young man in a tight white T-shirt and jeans hovered over a traumatized boy, making predatory mosquito-like swoops around the child’s head. Finally he whipped a jungle-print apron off the boy’s chest. The child rotated rigidly and grimaced at his mother. He looked as if he’d just had his ears surgically enlarged.
    “Fabulous!” His mother pressed some bills in the child’s hand. “Give this to Kenny and say thank you very much.”
    “Thank you very much,” repeated the child, and followed his mother out.
    “Little geeks,” Kenny told Simone. “They’re lucky their mommies don’t drown them in sacks like kittens. Not these guys.” He saluted George and Maisie. “These guys are my buddies. That’s because they’ve seen this …”
    He reached into a drawer and took out a large, anatomically correct, flesh-colored rubber ear. “They know that this is what happened to the last kid who moved when I was cutting his hair.”
    The children had seen it and could share with Kenny a conspiratorial smirk, though George kept sneaking looks at the ear till Kenny put it away. Kenny muscled George into the chair, then hooked his arm around Simone’s neck and scooted her into a back room.
    “So you’re working for El Ditzo,” he whispered. “Hey, babe, I mean good luck.” He pushed Simone away to look at her, then drew her back to his side; it was strangely pleasant, being flopped around like a doll. He said, “Tall women. I love it! You’ve got a great look, like that actress—what’s her name—the one who played that gay junkie hooker Bob Hoskins fell in love with. Jamaican? Trinidadian?”
    “Why good luck?” Simone asked.
    “Don’t tell me,” said Kenny. “Haitian! I used to hang out in Brooklyn. Well, for one thing, when you get paid, if you get paid, try to get it in cash. That scumbag could freeze her assets any second now. Have you met the old man? Geoffrey Porter the Fourteenth?”
    “No,” said Simone. “I mean, not yet.” Sometimes the children spent the night with their father; he picked them up at school in the afternoon and took them back there in the morning. He had not come to the house since Simone started work.
    “Count yourself lucky,” said Kenny. “The guy could freeze anyone’s assets. Weirdly straight, very Jack the Ripper, very much in control. It’s fabulous to watch the dude, like talking to a schizophrenic, one half of his face looks entitled by birth to tell you what’s real and what’s not, the other half has to keep checking to make sure the old magic still works. There is