Read Online Another Perfect Catastrophe by Brad Barkley - Free Book Online

it’s usually time to let the argument drop. I swing the sledge, miss, say nothing.
    â€œWe could move out of here and you’d still be his friend. I would, too. We don’t have to stay here.”
    I swing again, lay the wood open and wet. “Listen, I like living here. We don’t pay any rent. Sugar is a good guy.” I shrug. If you want your language to fail, try explaining your male friends to your female mate.
    â€œWhat is it you do all day with him? I mean, besides dig clothes out of trash Dumpsters?” I work only six months of the year, during heavy construction season. The rest of that time is downtime, nothing time, which I would not trade for anything.
    â€œThe street,” I tell her. “Sugar would never go diving some Dumpster. He says that fate hands him his wardrobe.” She knows all of this and only uses reminding as a way of shaming me with the details. When she first met Sugar she went right along, saying that he made her laugh. Sugar has always been like a big toy, and when the batteries finally go, most are done with him. He gets old, Sugar does.
    â€œYeah, fate hands him most everything else, too,” Lyndsey says. She adjusts her bra strap. “You’re both too young to just quit your lives.”
    Sugar leaves his carport and starts walking around the yard, within earshot. We fall quiet, but I know this argument has only gone underground for a while. Sugar has his welding helmet tipped open and is walking around in circles, studying the ground as though surveying it. Say what you like, the boy does have plans in his head.
    He walks over toward us, smiles at Lyndsey. She used to say he was handsome before his bothersomeness erased it. The welding helmet hangs over his face like part of some bird costume. The helmet when he found it (on Industrial Boulevard, leaning against a mattress) was missing its dark eye guard, so Sugar glued in a square of blue plastic cut from a soda bottle. The plastic leaves his vision wavered, like standing in the deep end, but he claims this makes for good sculpture.
    I motion toward the carport. “What’re you working on?” I know the answer already.
    He shrugs. The helmet falls down and he pushes it up again. “New sculpture. A Perfect Catastrophe , I call it.”
    I grin at him. This is an old joke. All of his sculptures, since the start, have had the same title, only with different numbers.
    â€œAnother Perfect Catastrophe,” I say. “I’ve lost count.”
    â€œFifty-seven,” he says. Lyndsey looks back and forth between us as if we are speaking in some elaborate code, which, I guess, we are.
    â€œHey, Reed, I need lumber,” Sugar says. “I mean, I ordered some and need to go get it. I need a ride.”
    Lyndsey turns and shoots me a look, one of those little signals of anger or lust that will make of us finally a couple.
    â€œHow soon?” I ask him.
    He laughs. “Hey, it’s like that old joke, you know, guy says I need a board, salesman says how long, guy says a long time, I’m building a house.”
    I laugh with him, at the joke and at the way he compresses every joke, his life, everything in it compressed, hurrying toward nothing.
economics 101
    That night in the bedroom, Lyndsey practices tai chi. She does Needle at Sea Bottom and Waving Hands Like Clouds. This relaxes her and focuses her both, she says, much the way TV and beer does me. I do Remote Control and Doritos while I watch her. I hate to be predictable, but I go with what works. On Friday nights I watch Lyndsey on the eleven o’clock news, when she does the Wall Street Wrap-up, three minutes of local stocks and investing tips sandwiched between the weather and sports. I like how she seems on TV, so distant and so much there all at once. I like how dressed up she is, her hair and makeup done, and how smart, talking all of us through graphics of the Dow and NASDAQ. She gave me another little