Read Online You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Matthew Sharpe
Tags: Humor, United States, Literary, Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, American, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction
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suffer immeasurably.
“Rack them up!” he said. It came out high and loud. He thought he saw Jones jump. He’d have liked to make him jump around the room like a panicked toad. He sensed that somewhere in this room on this afternoon was a boundary line that divided the past from the future, and, as with a boundary between one nation and another occurring in the middle of a swamp, the wanderer in time, as Karl surely was, might not sense when he’d crossed it. Aggression frightened him. Violence frightened him. Cruelty frightened him. He knew all men had the capacity to perpetrate them and felt the point of being a man was not to. More than humiliation or physical pain, it was the failure of the capacities of decency and restraint in the two boys who’d punched Karl that demoralized him; or, rather, the recognition of the fact of the weakness of those virtues in himself and their failure to prevail in that event over the baser forces in the boys. And now he knew the baser forces of the boys had merely been a stand-in for the baser forces of the man who’d just paid them, whose own body had become too weak a vessel for such forces—and what would come of Karl’s own, this hour?
Karl stood, Jones racked. Karl broke, sank a stripe, sank a bank shot, a cut, a combination, then missed, a miss in which all the other misses of his life converged.
The room went dim. Karl found himself before the map. “That’s Vietnam, my friend,” the voice behind him said, “that your cue is touching. You’re so close you may well taste Malaysia now. Unh!” That was Jones’s groan of pleasure at having sunk a difficult shot. He sank another and then approached Karl brandishing, it seemed to Karl, his cue. “I’ll need you to move to get a proper angle for this shot.” Karl, with Malaysia in his thoughts, did not quite hear. “I just, all right, if that’s, uh, okay, I think I’ve just—ooh.” Karl felt something sharp in his side. He looked at the table in time to see a solid green ball disappear into a corner pocket. What just happened? Jones, on the pullback, had poked him hard in the kidney with the butt of his cue.
“You just poked me?”
“I asked you to get out of the way.”
“I didn’t hear you. Do you then just poke someone like that?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jones said, and smiled as he’d done when he said, “Lawn mowing.” “You picked a bad time to have discovered Malaysia.”
The narrow end of Karl’s cue broke on the bony part of Larchmont Jones’s left shoulder; an eight- or ten-inch piece flew off, landed in the piano’s guts, and sounded a faint chord. Jones dropped his cue and looked wide-eyed at Karl. Karl thought he saw him smile again, it was hard to say, since most of his attention went toward examining the damage to the cue. He let it drop to his side, holding it in his right hand about a foot from where it had broken off at the narrow end. He was choking up on the cue, one might say, and he lifted it and swung it at his stepfather’s head. He had a tight grip but the impact hurt his hand all the same. He vowed to try to hit the head again without the pain this time. He hit it harder, in the same spot, and hurt his hand again. His hand was vibrating with pain, and sometimes a word will seem to emanate from the feature of the world it was presumably invented to refer to, and so the word mushy , to characterize the single bloody place on the left side of Larchmont Jones’s skull that Karl had hit twice, arrived in Karl, and that—rather than the moment, a second later, when Jones’s head hit the rec room floor—was when Karl knew he’d killed the man.
Karl dropped the cue and fled the house. Rat’s-eye Karl sensed an opportunity in the supine Jones. He scurried toward the body, broke the skin on the nearest calf, and dug out a meal.
FIVE
HE WAS SURE he had explored his house and yard more thoroughly than most had explored theirs. On any number of days of not leaving his
“Rack them up!” he said. It came out high and loud. He thought he saw Jones jump. He’d have liked to make him jump around the room like a panicked toad. He sensed that somewhere in this room on this afternoon was a boundary line that divided the past from the future, and, as with a boundary between one nation and another occurring in the middle of a swamp, the wanderer in time, as Karl surely was, might not sense when he’d crossed it. Aggression frightened him. Violence frightened him. Cruelty frightened him. He knew all men had the capacity to perpetrate them and felt the point of being a man was not to. More than humiliation or physical pain, it was the failure of the capacities of decency and restraint in the two boys who’d punched Karl that demoralized him; or, rather, the recognition of the fact of the weakness of those virtues in himself and their failure to prevail in that event over the baser forces in the boys. And now he knew the baser forces of the boys had merely been a stand-in for the baser forces of the man who’d just paid them, whose own body had become too weak a vessel for such forces—and what would come of Karl’s own, this hour?
Karl stood, Jones racked. Karl broke, sank a stripe, sank a bank shot, a cut, a combination, then missed, a miss in which all the other misses of his life converged.
The room went dim. Karl found himself before the map. “That’s Vietnam, my friend,” the voice behind him said, “that your cue is touching. You’re so close you may well taste Malaysia now. Unh!” That was Jones’s groan of pleasure at having sunk a difficult shot. He sank another and then approached Karl brandishing, it seemed to Karl, his cue. “I’ll need you to move to get a proper angle for this shot.” Karl, with Malaysia in his thoughts, did not quite hear. “I just, all right, if that’s, uh, okay, I think I’ve just—ooh.” Karl felt something sharp in his side. He looked at the table in time to see a solid green ball disappear into a corner pocket. What just happened? Jones, on the pullback, had poked him hard in the kidney with the butt of his cue.
“You just poked me?”
“I asked you to get out of the way.”
“I didn’t hear you. Do you then just poke someone like that?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Jones said, and smiled as he’d done when he said, “Lawn mowing.” “You picked a bad time to have discovered Malaysia.”
The narrow end of Karl’s cue broke on the bony part of Larchmont Jones’s left shoulder; an eight- or ten-inch piece flew off, landed in the piano’s guts, and sounded a faint chord. Jones dropped his cue and looked wide-eyed at Karl. Karl thought he saw him smile again, it was hard to say, since most of his attention went toward examining the damage to the cue. He let it drop to his side, holding it in his right hand about a foot from where it had broken off at the narrow end. He was choking up on the cue, one might say, and he lifted it and swung it at his stepfather’s head. He had a tight grip but the impact hurt his hand all the same. He vowed to try to hit the head again without the pain this time. He hit it harder, in the same spot, and hurt his hand again. His hand was vibrating with pain, and sometimes a word will seem to emanate from the feature of the world it was presumably invented to refer to, and so the word mushy , to characterize the single bloody place on the left side of Larchmont Jones’s skull that Karl had hit twice, arrived in Karl, and that—rather than the moment, a second later, when Jones’s head hit the rec room floor—was when Karl knew he’d killed the man.
Karl dropped the cue and fled the house. Rat’s-eye Karl sensed an opportunity in the supine Jones. He scurried toward the body, broke the skin on the nearest calf, and dug out a meal.
FIVE
HE WAS SURE he had explored his house and yard more thoroughly than most had explored theirs. On any number of days of not leaving his
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