Read Online Sailor & Lula by Barry Gifford - Free Book Online Page B

sailboat. At about this time, Johnnie remembered, he’d begun to read books at the library such as Kon-Tiki and Clipper Ship Days . It wasn’t until much later that he discovered the novels of Joseph Conrad, who was Polish, and whose real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, and Herman Melville.
    The Polish boat builder stimulated Johnnie’s interest in the sea. He wondered where the man intended to sail once he finished his boat.
Johnnie asked the man’s sons, but they didn’t know. They just shrugged their shoulders, sucked in their pudgy cheeks and blew snot from their dirt-covered noses straight to the ground. Since Johnnie’s mother always snarled, “There he goes again,” whenever she heard the hammering, he never discussed it with her.
    One early-fall morning Johnnie was passing the Polish family’s house and he stopped to look at the boat. It was out in the yard inverted on two homemade horses and was about thirty feet long. The man was planing the sides. He nodded to Johnnie and continued planing. His bald head was covered with sweat and he was humming a fast, foreign-sounding tune.
    â€œWhere are you going to sail her?” Johnnie asked him. The man stopped for a moment and stared blankly at Johnnie, as if he hadn’t understood the question. Johnnie considered asking him again, but then thought that perhaps the man did not speak English very well, so he waited. Finally the man shrugged, gave a vague grunt, shoved his small pair of glasses up the bridge of his short, fat nose, they slid back down again, and he continued to plane. Johnnie watched him for a few minutes and then walked away.
    The following spring the Polish family left town. The boat was moved on a flatbed truck, strapped down with heavy rope. The man and his two sons and the grandmother drove away in a car behind the truck. Johnnie couldn’t remember who was driving the truck, but he recalled that when he went into his house and told his mother that the boat and the Polish family were gone, his mother said, “Thank Jesus, we won’t have to listen to that awful poundin’ no more.”

ROAD KID
    Outside Baton Rouge, Sailor said to Lula, “Sweetheart, keep your panties up. We’re in Jimmy Swaggart country.”
    Lula giggled. “Jimmy’s just another of them cheapskate preachers? Wantin’ somethin’ for nothin’, is how I see it.”
    â€œAt Pee Dee I heard about a guy named Top Hat Robichaux lives around here. Real name’s Clarence, I think, but he’s from the town of Top Hat, which is just north a ways, so that’s what they called him.”
    â€œWhat’s he do?”
    â€œUsed to be a safecracker. Now he’s got his own country church up in Top Hat, Louisiana. He started it at Pee Dee, called the Holy Roller Rebel Raiders.”
    â€œSounds like a football team,” said Lula. “ Two football teams.”
    Sailor and Lula both laughed. They were buzzing west on Interstate 10 in the Bonneville with the top down. Sailor kept on right past the capital city but slowed to a stop a mile or so beyond the western boundary to pick up a hitchhiker.
    â€œSure you want to do this?” asked Lula. “Might be a way they could track us.”
    â€œHe’s just a kid, honey. Look at him.”
    The hitchhiker was a boy of about fifteen or sixteen with a pack on his back, and he was carrying a large, covered cardboard box that he placed gently on the back seat next to him. His face was covered with freckles and acne. There wasn’t a clear spot on it other than the whites of his eyes, which were a washed-out blue. His long brown hair was straggly, uncombed, and looked as if it hadn’t been shampooed for weeks, if not months. He wore an old green army field jacket with the name MENDOZA sewn in capital letters on a white strip above the left breast pocket. The boy had an uneven smile on his face that exposed his