Fighting Blood

Extract:

I remember the first look I took at the cubbyhole on the top floor just about wound matters up. The walls is papered terrible red, or maybe this rabbit hutch kind of blushed when the landlady called it a room. A faded rag carpet on the floor, a white-enameled cot like you get in the hospital, a chair not even fit to use as a weapon, a bureau which I bet come off the Ark, a picture of Theodore Roosevelt with the compliments of the New York "Blade," a cartoon of a vase of roses in a gilt frame, a window with a wide crack in the upper pane of glassor else it was grinning at me: "Not so good, eh?"

Still, everything is as clean and neat as a new pin. But I can't sleep in a new pin. I'm looking for a out, when Mrs. Willcox, the kind of silvery-haired, sweet-faced old lady your grandmother was or is, takes things in hand.

"This here's seven and a half dollars a week with boardahumpin advance," she says, and looks at me. I guess she must of heard me gulping. I had eight dollars, even. "What did you say your name was?" she adds.

I ain't said nothing about my name, but I did now. "Gale Galen."

"Plannin' on stayin' in Drew City for a spell?" is the next question.

"That's up to Drew City," I says, telling the truth. "I"

"What sort of business you in, Mister Galen?" she cuts me off.

The "Mister" tickled me. Why shouldn't it at seventeen? I bet the first time you was called "Mister" it tickled you too.

"The business I'm in right now, Mrs. Willcox," I says, "is looking for a job."

"Ahump!" says Mrs. Willcox, plenty suspicious.

I leave her to be that way, for the reasons that I have already made up my mind that I don't want no part of that two-by-four room for seven and a half or for nothing at all a week. Even if I am a poor fish, I am no sardine. I like plenty of parking space. So I kind of moved to the door.

Dettagli