The Divined Comedy, Barry Rachin [early reader books TXT] 📗

replenishing the feeder on a weekly basis from late November through March. “A person can be shiftless,” she continued, “and still maintain his personal dignity. Of course that presupposes the individual in question does nothing flagrantly dishonest.” Ava watched as a pad of butter melted on medium heat. She lowered the sandwich into the Teflon pan and pressed down with a spatula. “Exactly how much of Mrs. Sardelli’s retirement savings did you squander?”

Earlier in the week, an article had appeared in the Community Section of the Brandenberg Gazette: Local investment advisor indicted for misappropriation of client’s funds. Gary had covertly moved an elderly woman’s entire life savings from government-backed securities to a high-risk hedge fund that relied aggressively on selling short, leverage, swaps, derivatives and arbitrage. Three weeks into the transfer, the fund tanked and investors lost everything. Now the district attorney was indicting Ava’s brother for fraudulent misappropriation of funds.
“Does dad know?” He brushed her original question aside.
“Not yet.” She flipped the sandwich over and pressed down with the spatula again. Gary sat down and massaged the back of his neck distractedly. “You could sell your house,” Ava suggested, “and try to negotiate with the authorities for a reduced sentence.”
“And where the hell are my wife and kids gonna live?” He whined with unfocussed rage.
Ava wasn’t about to suggest that he move back home. The disgrace would kill her father. And anyway, adding Gary, the flimflam artist, and his nuclear family to the mix would turn their idyllic existence upside down. Try as she might, Ava couldn’t muster a grain of sympathy for her brother. “I’m the job Gypsy,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
She removed the sandwich from the pan and sliced it at a diagonal. Placing a dill pickle on the side of the plate, she brought the meal to the kitchen table. “When I finished high school last year and couldn’t find steady work, you used to ridicule me. ‘Ava’s a brain-dead, job gypsy - can’t settle down, score a husband and make a normal life.’” “I’d rather be a shiftless job gypsy living at home with my widowed father,” she observed, raising the pickle to her mouth, “than a two-bit crook.”


In the morning, Rufus arrived early and began cutting the wallpaper into seven-foot strips. With an aluminum square, he marked the pattern repeats, trimming the paper at a right angle. Using a plum bob, he determined the placement for the first sheet. “How did you make out with the carpet steamer?”
“Great!” Ava was sitting on the third riser of the stairs leading to the upper level, nursing her morning coffee. “Once I got that vacuum plate screwed down, it worked like new.”
Rufus rolled a sheet of prepasted wallpaper inside out and submerged it in a plastic tray of lukewarm water. Beginning in a corner near the picture window, he positioned the sheet against the wall. Mr. Frick had chosen a sedate fruit pattern in pastel green and gold hues. The cream-colored background caught the early morning light brightening the room while creating the illusion of more space. “Nice choice,” he said with genuine enthusiasm. Rufus brushed the wet sheet out with the bristle brush, smoothing in both directions from the middle toward the outer edges. When the first piece lay flat against the wall, he ran a small tool with a serrated, metal wheel over the bottom edge trimming away the excess and pressed the paper snug against the baseboard molding. “These older houses,” Rufus noted, “got character. The high ceilings and ornate cornices – you don’t see that anymore.”
“Yes, the place has a special warmth.” The girl was still in shock over recent, domestic developments. Ava and her father had their own, separate agendas. Days could pass without seeing one another. And yet, their mutually exclusive lives intersected in random, unforeseeable ways, which is to say, they loved each other at a safe and manageable distance. Mr. Frick never questioned what Ava was doing with her botched-up life. For sure, her father was going through his own dark night of the soul since losing his wife.
Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas. The pithy, Yiddish adage left nothing unsaid.. Ava would get everything, while Gary received a lengthy prison sentence and the Bronx cheer. “Are you familiar with the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard?” Ava asked.
Rufus chuckled in a gruff, throaty manner. “I quit high school in the eleventh grade. Outside of an occasional Playboy or Hustler, I haven’t read a goddamn thing since then.” He grabbed up a second sheet and soaked it in the tub. “Why do you ask?”
“Since high school, I have been trying to structure my life around Kierkegaard’s guiding principles.”
“And how’s that going?” Rufus eased the dripping sheet in place, butting it firmly up against the first.
“Hard to say. It’s not the sort of thing where you go to sleep in a metaphysical quandary and wake up the next morning thoroughly enlightened.” The wallpaper was coming nice. “Hopefully, before I’m carted off to a nursing home in geriatric diapers, things will fall into place.”
Ava went to the market. When she returned Rufus had already finished two walls and was trimming the paper over the fireplace. “My father left a check for you. I’ll place it on the dining room table, if I leave before you’re finished. Rufus, who was balancing on a ladder, grunted something unintelligible. “You’re doing a swell job!” Ava waited a discrete interval, but there was no reply.


In December the weather turned sharply colder with temperatures dipping well below freezing in the early morning hours. Ava began dressing in layers. At the Emerald Square Mall just over the town line in North Attleboro, she bought a pair of fleece-lined snow boots, thermal underwear and a week’s worth of heavy-duty, woolen socks.
Snow came down the first week in December. From the relative warmth of the gas station office, Ava watched the fluffy whiteness envelope the blacktop. An hour later with the snow already several inches deep, a metallic blue dodge Caravan pulled up at the last row of pumps. Ava traipsed out to car. The driver didn’t even bother to roll down the window. Rather, he cracked it open, an infinitesimal sliver, and barked, “Fill it with regular. Check the oil.”
Thump! The hood of the minivan lurched upward as the driver pulled back on the latch release. Ava loosened the gas cap. She topped off the tank, raised the hood vertical and pounded on the driver’s side window with a gloved fist. “We need to be clear about something.”
Reluctantly, he lowered the window. The man’s pleated tuxedo shirt was outfitted with shiny black studs, a cummerbund encircling his waist. “Is there a problem?” The tone was shrill, petulant. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“Problem is, you’re always in a hurry.” Ava leaned her elbows into the van depositing a clump of dry, powdery snow in the man’s lap, “As I recall, every time I fill your gas tank you ask me to check the oil but never purchase anything else. If I didn’t know any better …” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
The man shoved a credit card through the window. “Forget about the stupid oil.”
Ava processed the card and brought it back to the car. The fellow mumbled something angrily under his breath. “Excuse me?”
“Just close the hood so I can get back on the highway.”
Ava gazed out across the whiteness. The dry cold didn’t bother her. The new woolen socks and fleece-lined work boots kept her feet toasty warm. If anything, the crisp, early-season snow was invigorating. She bent down and stuck her nose up against the frosty glass. “Not this time.” She strolled back to the office, turning around in time to see the Caravan fishtailing crazily out of the gas station.

A steady flow of customers passed through the Texaco Gas Mart up until dusk, when the streets became completely deserted except for an occasional snow plow. In the cramped office, Ava flipped the space heater on high to take the chill out of the air. Around eight-thirty a foot of snow was already blanketing the ground. A lone pickup truck skidded around the corner and pulled into the station. Rufus, wearing a stocking cap and green plaid jacket, slogged through the packed snow toward the front of the building. “Any of that wallpaper fall down yet?” the tall man inquired with a sly smile. He had a face like a lopsided, weather-beaten pair of shoes, the heels worn away at a perverse angle.
“It’s still where you left it,” Ava grinned back at him.
“Hell of a night to be pumping gas.” Rufus arranged himself in a chair and extended his damp boots toward the heater.
“I might not be long for this job.” She told him about the musician floundering around in the snow.
Rufus made several vulgar references regarding the piano player’s parentage then cracked his knuckles. “That Danish philosopher you mentioned the last time I saw you...”
“That would be Soren Kierkegaard.”
“What would Mr. K say about the bonehead in the blue Caravan?”
Ava thought a moment. “‘Think of a hospital where the patients are dying like flies. Every method is tried to make things better but it’s no use. Where does the sickness come from? It comes from the building; the whole building is full of poison.”
“Society is morbidly sick, and the piano player is Typhoid Mary.”
“In a matter of speaking, yes.”
Rufus let loose a throaty chuckle, the steamy air floating toward the ceiling. “At least you turned the tables on the creep by refusing to do his bidding.”
“If he complains to the boss, I could lose my job.”
“Do you care?”
Ava grinned brazenly. “No, not at all.” A car pulled into the station and the girl went out to pump the gas. “Why did you come here in this awful weather?” she asked when the customer was gone.
“I like talking to you.”
“But you hate people. You’re a self-proclaimed misanthrope.”
“True enough,” Rufus returned, “but you’re the exception that makes the rule.”
“I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment.” Ava slid open the ‘Lost and Found’ drawer and pulled out the velvety, pea green pouch. “What do you make of this?” She emptied the contents on the table.
Rufus stared at a ratty-looking book, the cover of which had been completely torn away, and three brass coins. “Are these subway tokens from another planet?” The three coins were about the size of quarters but thicker with square holes in the center. The surface of each was inscribed with an exotic script.
“This,” Ava picked up the frayed manuscript, “is a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Change, and the coins are used to predict the future.” She told him about the fellow with a penchant for lottery tickets and chewing tobacco who ran off in the rainstorm. “A week ago Tuesday, was the two-month anniversary so I decided to open the bag and take a peek.”
Rufus gazed out the window. The snow was leveling off now with no additional accumulation; like a Frost poem, the pristine whiteness exuded a certain picaresque serenity. “Do you understand how it works?”
Ava held one of the queer coins up to the light. “Assign the value ‘three’ to each head result, and ‘two’ to each tail, and then add the values. The total will be six, seven, eight or nine. A chart in the back of the book explains how to interpret the numbers and construct hexagrams from the bottom up.”
Rufus picked up the book and thumbed through the tattered pages at random. “Have you tried it yet?”
“No, but my brother got himself in