Read Online Driver's Education by Grant Ginder - Free Book Online Page A

T-shirts sticking to our backs in wet zebra lines, and it’s uncomfortable, which is probably why we can’t stop laughing. We poke the foot, make it tap dance, do the cancan—things that are wholly inappropriate and borderline disrespectful. And it’s at that point that one of the butchers—this massive guy with a thick brow and arms the size of palm-tree trunks—ducks out from within the market to tell us, in so many words, that if we push that pig’s hoof one more time, he’ll give us something to laugh about.
    â€œYou coming here you need something?”
    There’s a brief moment when we have to unscramble his words, and then: “Yes. Yes, we need some help. We’re looking for a man named Yip.”
    â€œYou find Yip?”
    â€œYes, we find Yip.”
    He cranes his neck back and looks past the customers—the excited rabid women, the tourists in baseball caps, with cameras dangling from their necks—and then back toward the shop. “Yip at this time very busy. Yip a busy man.”
    â€œHe’s expecting me,” I say. “He knows my granddad. They talked.”
    He looks at Randal, and then at me, and then back at Randal again. “You wait here,” he says. Growls.
    The street and the stalls outside the shop are getting more crowded with pedestrians contending for space. Randal leans into me and asks, Who is this guy again? and I tell him the truth, which is that I don’t know, that I have no clue how he knows my grandfather or how he’s come to play Lucy’s keeper.
    â€œBut—they’ve spoken, right? As in, recently?”
    â€œI think?” Then, because I can tell his eyes are boring into my skull and I want to throw pigs’ feet at his head, “Yes.”
    â€œFinn—”
    It’s for an exhausting few minutes that we stand there, dodging women and their bags and the various chopped-up appendages hanging on all sides of us. We see the brute with the cleaver first, motioning wildly, waving his knife as he speaks to a man who’s half his height but twice his width, a man who we surmise is Yip.
    They bark back and forth at each other as they approach, but the brute slinks back when they’re about two feet from us. Calling Yip stout would be generous, I think, because the guy is straight-up fat. Fat and bald with a broad creased face that funnels downward, ending in three slick grey hairs that hang from a cleaved chin. He takes me in his arms immediately, squeezing me around the waist till I have no breath left, till all I can smell is the raw pork on his glowing head. Around us, the click click click of tourists’ cameras.
    â€œCan you think!” he shouts, and rocks me back and forth. “Can you think last time I seeing this one?” He buries his head in my chest but turns his face toward Randal. “The last time I seeing this one he so small!” He finally releases me. “Can you imagine? He so small and pinkI holding him like this!” Yip holds both hands in front of him as if he intends to cup water out of a fountain. “I holding him like little piglet! So tiny! And he moving like this!” He flails his arms and his legs in these waves. “He looking up at me and he dancing like this!”
    I look to Randal, who is now smiling and nodding earnestly, completely infected with Yip’s enthusiasm, and then I look back to Yip, to this bald man who is now holding both my hands in his blood-caked paws. “You no remembering me!” he says. And then, before I can say no: “Is fine! I expecting you no remembering me! I expecting this because the last time I seeing you you so pink and tiny and dancing like this!”
    He shakes his limbs again and more cameras click. When he stops, he points at the camcorder hanging from my shoulder, points at the bright red light next to the lens. “What, bub! Whoa! I am being on the Candid Camera ? I am being