Read Online The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith - Free Book Online

commercial breaks, a tease for the local eleven o’clock news showsRichie, hands cuffed behind his back, stepping up into the back of a paddy wagon.
    Jumped by the goofy kid shot the goofy kid dead shot the goofy kid’s friend.
    For several days after that I just stare at my teachers without hearing them. I stare at my homework without lifting a pen. My history teacher knows I’ve grown up with Richie, sees I’m in a fog. He sends me to the school’s guidance counselor, who says, “Do you think maybe you’re upset because you’re putting yourself in Richie’s shoes? Are you projecting, Andy?” I have no idea what he means, only that he’s implying my shutting down is somehow my fault. I do know that other than the current spell of not being able to read or write, it doesn’t feel like I’m upset at all. I never feel close to tears. But my outsides have become even more frozen than before, and the tiny remnant of who I was before the house went silent has retreated even deeper inside the command center. This counselor is the first adult I’ve talked to intimately since my dad was fired, but he only asks questions about Richie Hollins. I don’t like him or trust him enough to say anything else.

3
    “Andy, get me a bucket,” my father calls up from the cellar. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says. He’s not usually an F-bomber. It’s Memorial Day, 1993, the day before my last week of high school. I am seventeen. He’s forty-five. He’s gained a paunch, and it’s taken him a while but he’s grown a full beard. One day in this era we’re driving together and another driver at an intersection waves us through a stop sign and yells as we pass, “Hey! Steven Spielberg!” When I hand him the empty bucket, Dad says, “Empty the Shop-Vac, will ya?” He’s bent over picking file folders full of drafts of old poems out of the muck. “Ah, Christ,” he says at the discovery of a fresh ruin. The iron soil pipe, three years shy of its ninetieth birthday, has caved in to old age. Six inches across, exposed, its outside a deep rusty brown and rough as stucco, it runs the length of the cellar wall from theback of the house to the front and out through the wall of Dad’s office to the curb, where it meets the city sewer system. Cracks in the soil pipe have caused minor floods down here the past few years, but today he’s come down to discover it crumbled, leaving the cellar an inch deep in wastewater. He keeps books and old records down here. Mom’s sewing machine and her fabrics are here. Theresa’s and my old toys are in boxes, among other boxes of china and silverware and glassware. Old tax returns. Christmas decorations. We walk the buckets upstairs, out through the kitchen, dump them on the grass in the backyard. My sister comes down to help, and then my mother.
    The muscles in my chest tighten when Mom starts down the steps. She’s forty-four, growing heavy and gray, too. When he’s around she closes herself behind a wall. She’s building a convent back there, no suitors allowed. There’s a school behind the wall, and a church. I’m always uncomfortable being in the same room with the both of them, but when something’s gone wrong—if the car breaks down or an issue with the house like this—it’s worse. It makes me feel for my father, and sympathy does not run easily from me to him in these days. Usually when he’s around I’m an ornery, passive-aggressive little fucker. I didn’t talk to him for a month or two after he was fired, and after that instead of Dad I started calling him Big Guy. He never said a word about it, just abided a fool’s condescension. But in this case it feels comical how rotten this is, shit in all his private files. No one deserves this. And to present the woman you’ve so severely disappointed with this latest misery seems beyond what anyone should have to take.
    The four of us work through the swampy late afternoon and evening, into the night, sweat dripping off our