Read Online Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper - Free Book Online Page B

stayed or came from, any more than he was sure that his visitor would be Mr. Webster himself rather than some minion bearing Mr. Webster’s instructions. A voice on the phone had said simply, “Mr. Webster would like you to be available tonight at eight, at your home.” To which therewas only one acceptable answer. No matter what plans he might have had, Jagger would have canceled them without a murmur. Anything for Mr. Webster’s convenience.
    Tonight it was evidently convenient for Mr. Webster to be late.
    Jake was more than willing to wait. Late or not, this meeting might prove the culmination of the dream Jake had held since he’d been a child huddled in his tiny cold closet of a room, the door locked from the outside, shut away from the music and laughter out there, shut away from more mysterious sounds as well. Ma was different when she got with one of her friends. She changed. When she was alone with Jake, she didn’t talk at all, but when she got with one of her friends, she never shut up. Jake often pressed his ear to the door, to hear what she was saying, but he could extract no sense from what she said, not from her words or the words of whatever man was with her.
    At night he was locked in, because Ma’s friends didn’t want to be bothered with little Jake—Jake the mistake, Jakey the Rat.
    Sometimes in the mornings one of Ma’s friends would be sitting at the kitchen table eating eggs and bacon and sometimes pancakes. The friend got orange juice or melon or bananas. Jake got cold cereal. Once he had thought he could get away with a banana.
    â€œWatch it, kid,” said the friend. “You’re messin’ up my paper.”
    â€œYeah, Jake, watch it,” Ma laughed. “You be careful, now, Ratty.”
    He’d thought Jake the Rat was his name until he started to school and Ma told him his name would be Jake Jagger.
    â€œWas that my dad’s name?” he had asked her. “Jagger?”
    Her lips twisted. The smoke from her cigarette made a curtain before her narrowed eyes. “What makes you think you had a dad, Ratty? You had a hit-an’-run, a pay and poke it, that’s what you had.” She laughed her bubble laugh, as if she were all full of something sticky, with slow bubbles rising up. Jake saw a TV show about Yellowstone once, and the mud pools reminded him of Ma’s laughing: round, sticky bubbles slowly swelling and popping, each one a ha, a ha. “You better be careful, you better watch it.”
    Late at night, from behind his locked door, hearing the rhythmic rattle of her bedsprings, he would remind himself towatch it, to be careful to stay away from her friends, careful to stay away from her as much as he could. When he came home from being out on the street, when he opened the door just a crack, he could tell whether she was there or not by the smell. She had a wet, sticky smell that was more ominous than the musty, smoky funk of rooms she had merely occupied. It was a swampy smell. The bathroom smelled like her. The wastepaper basket in the bathroom sometimes smelled intimately of her, mysterious and hateful.
    Jake had made himself a window in his tiny closet, using an old beer opener to scrape the mortar from between the bricks, removing the bricks, two layers of them, to create an irregular notched opening looking out on the alley. Once he had his window, he cut a piece of cardboard to seal it up and hid it behind a poster he cleverly mounted with tape. After that it was easier to be locked in. Even when he was only seven or eight, he kept the tiny space spotless and smelling only of Lysol and lemon oil that he swiped from the building janitor. His sheets, which he took down to the laundry room every Saturday morning, reeked of bleach. He stole the money for the laundry machines. At night, shutting out the sounds from his mother’s room, he would lie on his back, his hands at his sides, the sheets drawn into a