Read Online Ragged Company by Richard Wagamese - Free Book Online Page A

boys.”
    The boys were all taking huge nervous gulps from the bottles in their pockets at that moment, and he watched them from the corner of his eye. Then the lights began to fade and everyone settled deeper into their seats.
    As I said, some stories become your blood. As I watched this movie about a man who comes home for the first time in thirty years and finds an incredible gift from an old man he left behind, I felt it enter me with each frame. Here, in one place, was a story about falling in love with the movies, about shelter, about friendship, loss, and love itself. Here was a film about crying in the darkness. About seeing what you crave the most sometimes thrown up on the screen in front of you and recognizing it for the hole within you that it is. About faces, characters, and time—time passing, time stopping, and time reclaimed. It was wondrous. I couldn’t stop staring. I couldn’t sit back in my seat at all. Throughout the entire spectacle I sat leaning forward, elbows on my knees, chin cupped in my palms, crying sometimes, sighing, watching, feeling the blood moving in my veins, drinking it in, becoming it, feeling it becoming me. Invaded. Inhabited. Known.
    When it ended in a long series of captured kisses and the bright flare of romance, I felt alive. None of us moved. The five of us sat there in our seats staring at the screen and watching the Italian credits roll, lost in our thoughts. When the screen went blank I still could not move. Only Digger got us into motion again with a “Fuck” that was one part whisper, one part sigh, and one part the need for a drink.
    We walked out in silence.

Double Dick
    M E , I WANTED TO CRY . Just wanted to run off into an alley somewhere an’ ball my eyes out. Don’t know why on accounta sometimes what’s going on inside me gets past my head. But I wanted to cry. I couldn’t follow the story on accounta you had to read again but I knew what was goin’ on. It was about bein’ inlove with the movies. At least that’s how it started. Then it kinda got to be about rooms. Rooms you live in an’ learn inside out. Rooms you sit in all alone an’ quiet. Rooms you leave, all sad an’ alone an’ hurtin’. An’ in the end it was about rooms you come back to sometimes if you’re lucky, an’ I guess that’s what made me so sad on accounta I can’t never go back no matter how lucky I ever get. Me’n rooms is done. That’s how come I live outside. On accounta one room always looks the same as that one room I can’t never go back to. The one room I carry around inside me. The one room where my heart made big moves one time—big, sad moves. That Cinema Paradise movie reminded me of every-thin’ an’ I wanted to cry about it all for the first time in a long time. Cry an’ cry an’ cry. But I didn’t.
    “Drink, pal?” Digger asked, like he knew what I was feelin’. The others were using the washrooms an’ we stood outside waitin’.
    “Yeah,” I said, tryin’ hard not to look at him.
    “S’matter?” he asked, starin’ hard at me.
    “Tired, I guess. Too much work tryin’ to read what was goin’ on.”
    “Yeah. I know. Friggin’ good story, though.”
    “You think so?” I was glad he was gettin’ me away from my feelings an’ glad that he was sharin’ his rum with me.
    “Yeah. Little on the weird side, but it was okay.”
    “Digger? You ever think maybe someone else knows what’s goin’ on inside your head sometimes. Someone you never met?”
    He squinted at me while he took a big knock. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand an’ rooted around in his pockets for a smoke. “My head? Nah. I can’t figure out what the fuck’s going on there most of the time. Why?”
    “Guess that movie made me wonder if other people know stuff. Like where you been. What you done. What you was feelin’ sometimes. Stuff like that?”
    “This movie got you all rattled up inside, eh?”
    “Yeah. Made me think about what I don’t wanna be