Read Online The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter - Free Book Online Page A

stupid straw hat, his own eyes were at once too big and too small. Whites as fat as boiled eggs, corneas shrunken and the palest blue. He appeared to be blind and astonished at the same time.
    Bill asked me what I was “into.” It was the sort of aimless question you ask a boy you don’t care to converse with. I replied that I did not know, but Bill was no longer listening. Pop answered for me in a loud voice. “History,” he said, so proud. “Most boys play hooky to smoke a weed or squeeze on the girlies. Not my boy. Rowan here gives guided bus tours of historical landmarks out of the kindness of his heart.”
    Bill pretended alarm at hearing this. “I have always considered,” his assault began, “that our past is but an inferior version of the present. A rehearsal, if you will.” I hated Pop at that moment; he had offered up something precious to me so that this hairy-arm hero could slap it down. “Although,” Bill added, “I find it delightful for a young man to show an interest in something.”
    â€œWell put,” said Nguyen.
    He seemed to be making an effort to win him over, but Bill returned a withering smile. “I don’t mean your present,” he said. “Your present”—he gestured at the ruin around us—“is even sorrier than his.” He touched me.
    We were in sight of the water now. I saw the sun melt over the lagoon, splashing pink across the launchpad and spilling through the flame trench. In the flatness of Floriday, night falls too slowly. A person has too much time to consider what the darkness might contain. Never live anywhere with too long a sunset, daughter.
    In the way-back I heard Faron drum his knees. He couldn’t take all this irrelevant talk of present and past. All he wanted to do was punch Bill Reade in the back of the head, and all he wanted to know was when. When would he get to fly a missile?
    â€œNo need, big boy,” said Mae Reade. “Me and Bill’s stunt pilots. Any flying that needs done, we’ll handle it.”
    The Reades had attained the rank of lieutenant in the Consolidated Air Force after distinguishing themselves in the Montreal Uprising. They had taken out a Canaday parliament bunker and a Gunt convoy. But they didn’t stick around to collect their medals. Instead, they stole a fighter jet at a victory flyover and flew it all the way from Ronto to Californdulia. When they touched down at the Hollywood Airport with their baby girl asleep in the cockpit, the Reades were not met by Consolidated Enforcement but by a grinning talent agent from Bosom Entertainment. He guaranteed asylum and high-paying jobs in the movie trade.
    The big Chiefs, Misters Bosom and Darling, play at rivalry. They trash-talk, firebomb each other’s assets, and exalt one another’s foes. Gentlemen have their own games.
    For years, Bill and Mae Reade did right by Hollywood. They flew stunts in a dozen movies from The Battle of Crystal City to Guts III to Cain Versus Abel: The Final Conflict. They piled up enough money to buy a freestanding home in the hills, but luxury only postpones a criminal yearning.
    â€œYou steal one aircraft,” said Bill, “you get the bug.”
    After they tried to abscond with a passenger jet, Bosom offered the Reades the same terms they’d given us. Europa or the Pens. Their daughter, having by then formed certain adolescent attachments to the Earth, reacted with characteristic noncompliance. “Sylvia gave Mr. Nguyen here a right bully beating,” said Mae. “Took off his, um, hairpiece.”
    The victim of Sylvia’s abuse pulled to a stop on a broad plain of concrete. A mound of sand and broken cement reared up beside us. “Anyway,” Terry said, “nobody will be flying any day soon.” Training would occupy us for nearly a year. “I do, however, have something to show you, Faron.”
    He said wait in the van, he