Read Online Brambleman by Jonathan Grant - Free Book Online

lingering stench. He looked over the contract, which was
office-store boilerplate, its blanks filled in with black ink. He
would be paid twenty dollars an hour “to do whatever is necessary
to complete Thurwood Talton’s unfinished historical work.” He would
live in the basement rent-free while performing his duties and
receive “half and only half” of the proceeds from publication. Fair
enough, even generous, if there turned out to be any royalties. He
raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have a problem with this?”
    “Of course not. I’ve already signed it.”
    “OK.” He pulled out his Waterman fountain pen
and did likewise. “Deal.”
    “Deal,” she said, shaking his hand. “Make
yourself at home.”
    With the crisis averted, Charlie set up the
computer in Talton’s study, then turned to the basement. In the dim
light that fought its way through the back door’s filthy window
panes, the place looked only slightly less foreboding than it had
at night. He breathed its fetid air, scuffed its crumbling concrete
floor with the toe of his hiking boot, and listened to joists creak
as Kathleen moved around the kitchen above him. He ducked to avoid
overhead pipes. Maybe with a shaved head, he could safely navigate
this place.
    Over the next few hours, Charlie cleaned up
his new living quarters. He threw out a ton of refuse: old bed
frames with sharp, rusty edges, sheet metal, fencing, corroded
buckets. The decomposing, moldy mattress came out in pieces, along
with disintegrating books and an ancient Erector set that once
aspired to be a robot. When he nailed up a dark green towel on the
door as a curtain, he realized he’d created the perfect hiding
place.
    He had a bathroom of sorts—a tiny shower
stall, a sink with a rusty old faucet, and a toilet that took
forever to refill, surrounded by plywood walls. The shower was too
gross to bother cleaning—it ran only cold water, anyway. He decided
he’d use the Decatur YMCA’s facilities to clean up, since he was a
member and needed to get back in shape anyway—although he had to
admit that cold showers might help him clean up his act. (In fact,
he’d been chastened by the porn debacle with Susan and vowed he
would be Onan the Barbarian no more.)
    That afternoon, he took a shower at the Y,
got a crew cut at Fantastic Sams, and bought clothes to create a
new image: Dickies work shirts and pants, like the ones he’d worn
for his summer job at the warehouse during college. At Optical
Shoppe, he bought some offbeat glasses with gray metal frames to
complete his trade unionist look, a statement of rebellion against
the racist Republican politics of the family he’d married into and
the suburbs he’d so recently forsaken.
    He also bought a space heater, dehumidifier,
carbon monoxide detector, air purifier, and a new laptop computer,
so he could get out of the house upon occasion. When he plugged his
new gadgets into the basement’s lone outlet, he blew a fuse.
Nevertheless, he embraced his cold, dank home. In this place of
penance he would practice the asceticism his task required. He
would be grim, stern, resolute, unrelenting. He would survive and
prosper in his dungeon.
     
    * * *
     
    Sunday morning, it took Charlie more than an
hour of huffing and puffing to bike over to Thornbriar to retrieve
his van. Susan had taken the kids to church and left him a note
saying, “I will pray for you.”
    “Pray for me to what ?” Charlie said
irritably, wadding up the note. Didn’t she understand that he
wasn’t coming back?
    He drove back to Bayard Terrace and spent the
rest of the day reading Talton’s manuscript. That evening, he
accepted Kathleen’s offer of dinner, free food being a welcome
benefit of his new job. As she worked in the kitchen, he sat in the
green chair before the blazing fire. The paper’s Metro section was
open atop the hassock. A small headline on a news brief caught his
eye:
     
    Forsyth County Man Shot to Death
    A Cumming man died after being