When the Nines Roll Over Read Online Free

When she stood up she beckoned for Tabachnik. Tabachnik did not want to lean into the cabin and he guessed that SadJoe didn’t want him to either. But Molly kept curling her finger and everyone seemed to be waiting, wondering who he was, so Tabachnik went to the side of the car and crouched down until his head was level with SadJoe’s.
    SadJoe pointed at the odometer. “What does it say, pilgrim?”
    Tabachnik squinted at the numbers, white on a black field. “Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
    â€œAnd nine-tenths. I’ve already flipped the first hundred. This is mile number two hundred thousand coming up.”
    â€œWow,” said Tabachnik. Wow sounded ridiculous, but what was he supposed to say?
    He shook hands with SadJoe and backed away. SadJoe pulled himself halfway out of the window and called out to his assembled friends: “Everybody who’s helped with this car over the years, Gary and Sammy and Gino, thank you. Thank you, Lisa, for the hubcaps. Molly, thanks for my song. Mom, if you can hear me in there, thanks for never complaining when I practiced the drums. And most of all I want to thank dad for buying me this car when I was in high school, when it only had ninety thousand miles on it.”
    Everybody clapped and whistled and SadJoe put the Galaxie into gear and rolled into the street. He took a left and drove very slowly and all his friends walked behind him. Candy, loyal squire, trotted alongside the car. Tabachnik followed in the rear. He glanced at SadJoe’s house and saw an old woman standing in the window, the curtain pulled back and gathered in her hand. She was watching the car’s stately progress. She looked much older than SadJoe’s father.
    In the middle of the block SadJoe hit the brakes, leaned on the horn, and began yelling and pumping his left fist out the window. The four men in the back jumped out and high fived each other as if the Jets had finally won another Super Bowl. The crowd cheered and started singing “The Ballad of SadJoe” a cappella. A few boys about high school age set off a round of fireworks. Everyone watched the rockets hurtle into the dark sky above the brightly lit street, higher and higher and higher, disappearing into the blackness, everyone still watching, their faces upturned to the nighttime sky, waiting for the rockets to burst, for petals of blue flame to drift slowly downward. Everyone watched for a full minute, until it became certain that the rockets were duds.

    On the train ride back to Manhattan, Tabachnik asked Molly if she loved SadJoe. It wasn’t a question that he had planned on asking, and he didn’t think it was a smart question to ask, but he wanted to know.
    She was staring out the window. She said, “I guess there was a Shell station near where he grew up. And him and his friends, they had a rifle, and every now and then they’d get drunk and shoot out the S . You know, make it the ‘hell’ station. And the next week there’d be a new S up there and SadJoe and his friends would go over and shoot it out again. They got caught, finally. And the judge said, well, this is the first time you’ve been in trouble, and he let SadJoe go. His friends had records, so they were sent to a JD center. Anyway, a week later he shot out the S again. And they brought him back to the judge and SadJoe said, ‘I want to be with my friends.’ ”
    Tabachnik nodded and studied the various New Jersey towns listed on the train ticket. He did not believe the story. It was too romantic, too perfect a history for a rebellious punk rocker. But he thought about the street SadJoe grew up on, with its concertina wire and methane stink, and he thought about the razor scars, and the mother behind the window with the curtain bunched in her hand, and he thought about the friends who had piled into the backseat so they could be there for mile number two hundred thousand,