Read Online Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan - Free Book Online Page A

half-empty glass of water. Gulls crying outside. I lay beside that woman, thick with unhappiness, thinking of my wife.
    Then I was back. The air in that theatre gone rich and hot. It was stingingly quiet. Gripping the arms of my seat, I pushed on out of it, its joints squeaking. The film was still rolling, the theatre soot-black, but even in that dark I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, their gazes weighing me down like a sack of ashes.
    Our minder whispered, ‘They’re going to show the documentary first, then afterwards your row will go onstage.’ But I wasn’t listening.
    My damned old legs wasn’t moving right. I could feel my heart punching away at my arteries, my whole body shuddering. Don’t you damn well look Chip’s way, I thought. Not one glance, Sid. I stepped hard across the minder’s knees, past the legs of all these folks, past Caspars.
    Caspars leaned forward in his seat. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ he hissed.
    I stood there, half-dazed, shaking. Feeling suddenly old. Shaking and saying nothing.
    You a damn coward, I thought. That’s what you is, Sid.
    No, I ain’t said nothing. I just started up the aisle, slow. The silence sharp as needles. Folks watching me leave and not the picture, and me feeling their stares. My face weighed heavy, like some great load I got to haul without dropping.
    Ain’t no one said nothing. But then from the darkness some son of a bitch hissed at me in German, ‘Shame on you.’
    I tripped a little. Stared at the pale faces in their seats. Then kept on moving.
    I broke through the doors, through the foyer, out into the night. The coolness of the city air rushed over me. I stood there in the empty square.
    Even at ten years old, Chip was a veteran liar. A real Pinocchio. I recall the Saturday I first met him: the Baltimore weather all sultry, the air stewed and stinking of sewage. Steam belched from the hot manholes, and walking through it, it stuck in your gullet like crumbs. I was sitting in the park where us blacks went, sitting with my sister Hetty – Hetty wearing the Philadelphia hat she wouldn’t take off her head for no one cause our pa give it to her. She was teasing me something awful. Calling me cross-eyed, gimp-legged. So when a kid come up in the distance, sank his tan overalls into the sandbox, I spat on my sister’s shoes and ran off to join him.
    He was a small, funny looking git, a real balloon head. Getting near, I reckoned him for a strange one. Those full round cheeks, those prize-fighter biceps that seemed borrowed from an older brother. As I come up, he never even raised his face.
    ‘You want to play ball or somethin?’ I said, glancing down at his crown. His Afro had odd bald patches in it, grey flakes.
    He finally looked up, and his weak sneer turned something inside me. ‘This look like a ball field to you, sucker?’ he said. ‘This be a sand box. For makin sand- castles.’ Shaking his head, he spat air through his lips. ‘I’m sittin in sand, and he’s talkin ball games.’
    I felt like a blue-ribbon idiot, all right. My face gone hot, I turned and started back to Hetty.
    ‘You live Peabody Heights way, right?’ the boy called out.
    I turned. He didn’t look no friendlier, nope, but there was a shrewder look in his face, like his attention been filed down to a single, sharp point. ‘You live down on Maryland Ave.’
    That thrown me a little. ‘How you know?’
    ‘I lives in Peabody Heights too,’ he said, like it was common knowledge. ‘Ain’t you seen me at church?’
    Believe me, if I’d seen this melon head at church, I’d have remembered. But I couldn’t risk his sneer again. ‘Maybe. Yeah, I think so.’
    My heart sunk into my heels as he spat all disgusted into the sandbox. ‘You a dirty liar,’ he said, his thin lips riding up on one side of his mouth. ‘You ain’t never seen me in all you life.’
    ‘Have too ,’ I said.
    He shook his head. But not wanting me to walk off again, he changed tack.