The Ruby Slippers Read Online Free

going down.
    The moment Rosa’s sad figure has retreated away, it begins: the worn-out old argument that has happened as often as Old Rosa has come along this street and they have been there – which is just about every other day. They cannot resist, each taking his habitual position.
    Floyd, who likes stories because they contain surprises, is quick to revive the legend that is the source of their differences: ‘She rich, I telling you. My old man tell me this, since I was so high.’
    Harrison, who hates stories because experience has shown him that life holds no surprises, is fierce to deny it: ‘Don’t give me no shit!’
    Big Dale, as usual, is content to listen, nodding his head, eyes growing wide on the meat of the quarrel as the guys battle to outdo each other with their own versions of the living truth.
    ‘She rich! That apartment she live in, man it stinks and it’s all shit an’ everything, just like you would imagine it, but she got big bucks in there too.’
    ‘So who seen it, Bro? Show me the man who seen it?’ At this, even Big Dale can’t resist chiming in, ‘I heard that. I heard that, too. I heard she got the money in the mattress.’ Which makes Harrison spit with contempt: ‘So, like she tell every nigger this? Like I say, show me the man; tell me the name of the person who seen it, cause it sure as shit ain’t so.’ Floyd, though, sticks with his side of the story: ‘There’s people been in there, like nurses and social workers an’ stuff. They say that once upon a time she been some kind of aristocrat an’ stuff. She got a whole lotta money, that for sure.’
    But it’s Harrison who wins the day with a perfect one-liner: ‘An’ I got a crocka gold up my black ass!’ The others crack up at this. Impressed by his unaccustomed turn of phrase, they concede the last word to him, and he heads off down the road, feeling pretty cool about himself.
    ■ ♦ ■
    The hospital is just around the next corner on Fifth and still his inner fury is not spent. But James knows when it comes to it that he will bow his head as a nurse dispenses here and a doctor deliberates there, and that he will speak with a small, holy voice as men do at
times like this
, and that he will put on the meek, sneaky role he has been allotted to play. For it is a sad fact that no one has told Paolo that he is going to die, nor has Paolo ever come close to asking. So if, by chance, he has not yet slipped into the cold embrace of a coma, James has prepared himself to talk to his dying lover about small, sweet things that have passed in the hours since his last visit. How the rain came down like hushed cymbals in the night. How he forgot altogether to eat and never noticed the passing of time. How the marmalade cat from downstairs crept into the apartment and curled up on Paolo’s vacant side of the bed. With each ephemeral phrase James knows that he will surrender Paolo to the great emptiness, and with each hollow utterance, something of the keen edge of his own humanity will be blunted.
    In his savage preoccupation, James does not take in the weather, which, as it happens, is cold but sunny. Nearing the Park, he’s oblivious to the people hurrying past him so eagerly: the mother with her unruly brood; the old couple sharing a thrilling squeeze of hands; the ramrod man wearing medals. And all of them sporting faces made vacant for anticipated pleasures. James simply is not prepared, then, when a fat, brassy blast of music bounces along the Park railings, shaking him from his private stone. And then he sees it.
    ‘My God, the Parade!’
    There it is, flouncing up the Avenue towards him. A teeming sea of banners and badges, of chests puffed like sails to fill tunic and tabard, of batons leaping like Masai competing for the sky.
    Fine things are sometimes best encountered obliquely, when our senses are trained elsewhere: a beautiful woman glimpsed across a crowded carriage; a heavenly aroma beckoning from a rusty grate.