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helped me to the street.
    “Do you know that man, Dad?” I asked him. “The large man with the girl?”
    He’d say nothing to me then nor for a long time after.
    When I found out later that the battle in the state capital was about land and money, only land and money, I wondered why my father cared so much. When he died two years later, my mother discovered he had nothing. From then on, we were as poor as church mice. Poorer.
    But I’ll never forget the fat man’s eyes. They were as black as swamp water on a moonless night. When my father did speak, he told me about those eyes. He said they were mine shafts of evil. That man, he said, was cold-blooded and a thief who had no soul. He was dead inside. A ghost crawling the earth.
    I paused. So what the heck was all this? No soul? And a tall kid at the hotel like the tall man at the funeral? And all at the hotel my great-grandfather owned? I picked up the old postcard. I imagined the lobby inside the front doors. “Okay, this is nuts,” I said aloud. “Nutty-nutty-nuts!”
    I forgot that Dad was sleeping. He woke up with a start.
    “What? Huh?”
    I said nothing.
    “Jason? Jason!”
    “Sorry, Dad,” I said, getting up. “It’s this story. It’s so weird —”
    He stumbled noisily out of his bedroom, looked at his watch, and swore. “I’ve wasted the whole day!”
    “Dad, it’s only been a half hour —”
    “The guy’s coming! The real estate agent. You heard him. Why didn’t you wake me up?” He put his hands to his temples and clamped his eyes shut.
    “Sorry, Dad,” I said, closing the magazine. “I’ll work.”
    “I have to fix that gutter in the back. It looks stupid. It makes the whole house look like a dump.” He was storming around the kitchen now. “And where is that dumb girl who cuts the grass. Why is the lawn half done? Why would she leave it like that?”
    I gulped. “Dad, sorry. That was me. I didn’t know. I told her not to —”
    He turned to me. “You what? Who are you to tell her anything? What do you think we’re doing this for? Have you finished filling those boxes?”
    “Dad, let’s eat some lunch or something —”
    “You haven’t done anything! You wasted a whole hour! With that stupid magazine! Give it to me!”
    “Dad —”
    I wasn’t prepared for how quickly he would turn. He flew around and tore the magazine from my hands and threw it across the room. I heard the cover rip. His hand was still moving and knocked Grandma’s picture off the buffet. It crashed to the floor and shattered at my feet.
    “Dad!” I said, kneeling to the picture.
    “Never mind that, do what I told you!” he shouted.
    Before I knew it, he was through the kitchen, tugging a hammer and a can of nails from the cabinet under the sink. He swore again and again and slammed out the back door.
    Trembling, I watched him toss the hammer to the ground, go to the shed, drag out a ladder, bump it along the ground, and throw it against the corner of the house. He lifted himself up on the first step. Stopping, he turned his head down and looked at me through the screen door. I stepped away. He bent down, picked up the hammer and nails, and started up the ladder again.
    I stumbled back to the boxes, shaking, shaking. He had had too much to drink. Mom was right. Never mind. His mother just died. He had no father. He was mad. I got it. Never mind.
    When he started banging the hammer on the gutter, I swept up the broken glass and threw it away. Then I picked up the magazine. A three-inch rip across the cover tore one of the wings of the red-dress lady. It hurt to see that tear. I taped it up from behind and began to read again. The hell with him, too, hammering out there. I couldn’t help it. Holding the magazine in my hands again, I had to open it. I had to start reading where I’d left off.
    All those thoughts flashed in and out of my mind in the time it takes for a bullet to go chink!
    I slid around the corner and started running down the street.