Read Online All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage - Free Book Online

pins between her lips. Then she’d smile all of a sudden like someone on a merry-go-round. Rainer had found her someplace, saved her. It’s what their uncle did, save people. Now he was saving them. You could see she’d lived hard. In her eyes you could see her quiet past. After she cut onions and cried or rolled out tortillas, she’d rub her hands like they were sore. Her cooking tasted good, and she was nice to him. Sometimes she pushed his hair off his forehead with her damp, onion-smelling hands and said, Tan bonitos ojos. Just wait till the chicas find you. They no let you alone.
    His uncle warned them to stay away from the ex-cons, who lived in a cinder-block addition off the back porch, but this one named Virgil did card tricks and one time pulled a blue feather out of Cole’s ear. He had a face like a mess of old wires. See here, he said. I got the devil in my pocket. He turned his pockets inside out, black dust running through his fingers. You ever seen somethin’ like that?
    No, sir.
    I already been to hell and back, can’t go twice.
    What was it like?
    Let me show you somethin’. He sat down and untied his shoes and took them off and set them aside. Then he rolled off one of his socks. The bottom of his foot was charred black, like he’d walked through fire. See what they done? That’s what you get in hell.
    How’d you get out?
    Virgil glanced up at the sky. The man upstairs got me out. That’s the only explanation for it. But I know somethin’ ’bout you.
    What’s that?
    Virgil took a pencil from behind his ear and drew an oval on a piece of paper and gave it to Cole. Hold that there, over your head.
    What for?
    Go on.
    Cole did what he said.
    Hallelujah! I’m in the presence of an angel.
    You’re crazy. Cole crumpled up the paper and threw it away. I ain’t no angel.
    They would talk about their crimes: what they did, what they should’ve done, what they would’ve done different if they’d had the chance. By the time some of them had gotten caught they were ready and went willingly. Others put up a fight. It seemed to Cole that their prison memories kept them company, like old friends.

    Their uncle’s business gave them hope. To his assembled infantry he would declare, Here’s your chance at redemption. Make it count.
    Solemn as pallbearers, they’d line up to receive their ammunition: a squeegee, a sponge and Rainer’s marvelous window-cleaning solution, the recipe for which he would take to his grave. Everybody jammed into Bertha, a boxy copper van that said Truly-Clear on either side of it, and, like warriors, they set out to wash windows all over the county, from Hudson all the way to Saratoga.
    On weekends, Rainer let the boys work off the books. Even Cole got paid, and he absorbed the experience like an education, peering into the fancy houses in Loudonville or the crooked old row houses down in Albany or the factories on the river, the dirty windows blinking in the sunlight like the sleepy eyes of gangsters and thieves. They did the old house where Herman Melville had lived as a boy, and his uncle gave him a rumpled copy of Moby-Dick. Read this, he said.
    Cole did. He stayed up turning its pages, the book heavy on his chest. Wade fussed, yanking the blankets up over his head, but Cole kept reading until his eyes drooped. Then he set it down on the nightstand and closed his eyes, thinking about the sea and the smell of it and the sound of the wind and what it would be like out there in the middle of the ocean, and he wished he could go. He wanted to be free, to be on his own. When he worked for his uncle he felt good and he enjoyed it. He liked to use his hands. To go out in the truck. You saw things on the road, people doing stuff you never thought of. Ordinary things. You’d catch people doing this and that.
    You see all kinds of things in this business, his uncle told him. Rich and poor, we see it all.
    One time they did the college, named after some Indian chief. The campus was