Things as They Are Read Online Free

about three feet high but God knows how he got over it with that bum hip of his. The police saw somebody moving around in there and suspected vandals so they went in to check on it.” Sonny paused. “He tried to run from them.”
    “Jesus.”
    “You ask me, he’s losing his marbles,” said Sonny. “He goes there every single morning, doesn’t miss a day, and now he’s climbing fences in the middle of the night.”
    “What was he doing in there?”
    “Search me. The police say he was just walking around, they thought maybe they heard him talking to himself. He isn’t talking now though. I can’t get anything out of him. No way he’ll confess what he was up to. Could be he doesn’t know himself. I hate to say it about my own father, but I don’t think he’s too sound in the head anymore. We try to discuss the situation with him but we get nowhere.”
    “He was always stubborn,” I said.
    I could hear Sonny take a deep breath on the other end of the line. “This Putt ’N’ Fun is no joke. I mean you just can’t go making free with people’s private property like that. And then look what happened last summer with that boy. He keeps hanging out there it’s bound to happen again. As Myra says, ‘It’s only a matter of time.’ He doesn’t know how lucky he was last year. If that friend of his, that Lila woman, hadn’t lied for him, God knows the hole we’d have had to dig him out of.”
    I hadn’t moved on to consider any of that. All I could think of was King wandering up and down the little dark streets, talking to himself. It made me cold, frightened.
    “You know,” said Sonny, “Myra and me, we’re coming to the conclusion that maybe the city isn’t the place for him.There’s too many ways he can get into trouble here. Dad’s not a city person. He doesn’t belong here.”
    Sonny waited for me to take the bait. But what am I supposed to do with King? All the accommodation I’ve got is the single I rent in the hotel where I worked all my life. I got no room for him.
    “You struck a bargain, Sonny,” I told him. “Keep your end of it.”
    Sonny claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about.
    Most people in Advance took King for nothing but a gay dog. Elsie and I saw the other side of him, the hidden side which moves him to climb fences, slouch up and down empty streets in the dark, mutter to himself. What Sonny’s first wife Lucy said about King, about him running after life, was true. But King’s got no clear notion of what “life” is, except maybe that it’s the opposite of unhappiness. King was determined not to be unhappy.
    The mood would creep up on him like a shadow. He might smile, even laugh, but if you watched him careful you’d notice it was only the muscles of his face doing a job. Everything was rote – the way he cut and combed hair, even the way his flat, empty laughter joined with everybody else’s. At our regular Friday-night poker game I gave him a nudge to remind him to crow if he won, or curse if he lost. He drank his whisky like water and it had no effect. At home he lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face, or sat in front of the radio, switching from one station to the other without pause, hearing nothing. He lost his appetite for everything but black coffee. There were times his hands shook so bad he had to hide them in his pockets.
    No, nothing’s wrong, he used to say.
    Needing King back we got frightened, Elsie and me.
    Sonny must have been reminding him of last summer. Every time he does, King phones to explain himself.
    “They kept running up my heels,” he said. “I was too slow for them.”
    “I know, King. I heard all this before.”
    “They were sniggering at me, him and the girl.”
    “You got to learn to ignore them, King.”
    “I was trying to line up a four-foot putt on the Hansel and Gretel hole. But I couldn’t do her, not with all that giggling going on behind me. A fellow can’t concentrate, those