Read Online The Axman Cometh by John Farris - Free Book Online Page B

family, but Ike and Mamie sent their regrets.
    "My dad's. Actually he never lets me touch it, but he came home drunk Saturday night, fell in a ditch and broke his leg."
    "Oh, I'm sorry," Shannon says mildly, but she has no great fund of sympathy for men who drink too much and fall in ditches. As if her attitude is in plain view, Perry Kennold hastens to assure her.
    "He hardly ever gets that bad. It was just him and some guys out celebrating, one of them had a kid—I mean, it was his wife who had the kid. So could I take you somewhere?"
    "I'm just going to my dad's hardware store to give him a hand this afternoon. It's right there. Thanks anyway."
    "How'd you make out in biology?"
    Shannon shows him two crossed fingers. "C on the final. That'll give me a C-minus for the year, and I don't have to take any more science for the rest of my life, unless I go to college."
    "Don't know if I passed or not," Perry confides, leaning out the window, driving with one hand as he rolls slowly along keeping pace with Shannon. "I did okay in English, though. I always do good in English. I just always did like to read. My mother taught me, even before I was old enough to start school.
    She wanted to be a schoolteacher once, but then she got married. She had high school and two years of college. She was really well educated. My dad only got as far as eighth grade, and I don't know how good he can read. I never see him read anything, and it takes him five minutes to sign one of his paychecks. My sister dropped out of ninth grade to get married. I don't know why I stay in school. My mother always said she'd skin me alive if I dropped out. But she's not around any more . Aren't you planning to go to college?"
    "I'm going to art school in Kansas City —or maybe Chicago," she adds, a recent inspiration.
    "If you've got a little time before you start helping your dad, would you like to go to the Dairy Queen? That's where I was headed."
    "Oh, I don't think so, Perry, Dab's doing inventory and needs me on the cash register."
    "Well, maybe I'll see you again some time this summer. I'm going to work for the Highway Department." He smiles, apparently not caring about the vacancy in his dental arch; he has something to be proud of. "I have to get up at four-thirty in the morning. But I'll be making a dollar-seventy an hour."
    "That's good, Perry," Shannon says, opening the door of the hardware store to the accompaniment of a little brass bell announcer. "See you." As the door shuts behind her she leans against it. "Whew!" Maybe he'll get over his crush on her, or just move on when his father's leg heals. But now he knows two places to find her, with school out. Should she give him a big thrill and—no; one of her hard-and-fast rules is not to date boys who drive pickup trucks. The other is more vague but implicit, having to do with status in her peer group and boys with serious complexion problems. She's in love anyway. Last night Robert called, from Pittsburg, Kansas, his last stop on his sales trip before heading home to Chicago. Mentioned something about her coming up for a visit to his family's summer place in northern Wisconsin. Shannon can just imagine what her folks would have to say about that. Hopeless. But in another sixteen months—fifteen-and-a-half months—she will be eighteen, and there are scholarships available from the Chicago Art Institute. In the meantime, she loves being in love.
    Dab is angry about something, on the telephone in the office behind the store, or with a customer. Which startles Shannon, who almost never hears him raise his voice.
    "I personally don't guarantee the merchandise, because the merchandise comes with a perfectly good guarantee from the manufacturer. I'm saying if you've got a complaint about the quality of that saw, and I must've sold a hundred of ' em in the last six years without hearing another single complaint, then you need to ship it back to the factory. The condition it's in, Leon, looks like it was