Read Online Boonville by Robert Mailer Anderson - Free Book Online

surged.
    After going for the Big Spit, John felt ready to face the squirrels. He imagined how pitiful he must appear to them, red-eyed, unshaven, encrusted in what he hoped was his own vomit. The squirrels were definitely frowning. But aside from their totemic silence, there wasn’t much else in the front yard of his new domicile. Grandma’s cabin was situated in the middle of a hill, trees rising left and right, madrone, redwood, fir, pine, land sloping ahead of him toward a wire fence covered with brambles of blackberry bushes, then dropping drastically to give him a view of the valley; across to the east were hills of scrub oak; a receding fog bank covered the north; to the south his sight line was obstructed by forest. Down in the flat, he saw an airstrip, a field of horses, a school, a cluster of houses, and part of a small town. Boonville.
    His head was pounding. But all things considered, he thought, it wasn’t such a bad thing to wallow in your excrement—a certain womblike quality—the way he had felt as a boy discovering he had wet his bed, warm and safe, as long as the morning air didn’t get between him and the pee-soaked sheets. But then he moved.
    Lifting from the love seat, pain shot through his body, tearing at joints and nerve endings, screaming for him to sit back down. Even his hair hurt. He limped to the shack’s front door, which he found to be locked. Fuckup number one, he had failed to get the keys from Grandma’s friend Pensive Prairie Sunset. He tried a Bruce Lee entrance, a flurry of kicks and karate chops to the midsection of the door, yelling, “Why, why, why!” But his kung fu was no good here. The outburst made him feel nauseated. He tried another approach, through cracked lips pleading, “Open sesame.” Both strategies failing, he sent Plan C into action, the standard “find an open window.”
    Circling the cabin, John saw Grandma’s shack had five windows, one each in the bedroom and kitchen, two curtained picture windows in the living room, and one small screen window partially open in the bathroom that he could squeeze through if he could find something to stand on. He also discovered Grandma’s Datsun was parked behind the cabin, smashed and missing parts; gone were the headlights, hub caps, hood, bumper, grille. To compensate for their loss, a mountain of steel had been stacked on the roof. Coming closer, he realized the sheets of metal were road signs, some still attached to their posts.
    â€œHmm,” he said, calmed by the alcohol still flooding his bloodstream. “This, I don’t remember.”
    He tried to open the Datsun’s door, but it was locked. All doors were locked, including the trunk, while his possessions remained where he had put them in the backseat. He spied the keys dangling from the ignition and an empty whiskey bottle in the passenger’s seat.
    Dilemm-o-rama, John thought, staggering off in the direction of a rock planted at the base of a shrub. He dug the stone from the dirt with his fingers. Unearthed and in his hands, it felt as heavy as a mountain. Wasn’t there a parable about burden, involving a boulder, a saint, and a bottomless chalice? Or was that the beginning of a dirty joke? Unable to distinguish Bible stories fromborscht-belt humor, John carried the stone to the Datsun and hurled it through the driver’s side window.
    The car started on the first try. He steered it to the cabin’s bathroom wall, set the brake, then climbed on top of the car roof and road signs, reading the warning beneath his splattered shoes, “Deaf Child Near,” and tore away the window screen. He slid open the window and hopped into the opening. There was a moment of precarious equilibrium in which John was balanced half in and half out of the bathroom before he tipped the scale with a wriggle, dropping to the floor on his head.
    He was tempted to lie there on the linoleum, let the day go