Quality Snacks

The Bad Reader

The Bad Reader Two grown men at the Dairy Queen consider a difficult case: a nephew gone astray, a gun brandished in a bookstore, shots fired. Red, the taller and older of the two men, wearing shorts and a blue polo shirt, stands by the plate-glass window, holding the stub end of hisice-creamconeathisside,inanonlickingposition.Hishiked-up white athletic socks cover his bowlegged calves without a wrinkle; his posture is not unlike that of a transmission tower supporting high-tensionwires.Hiscompanion,Bill,owneremeritusof Lapham Heating and Cooling, leans toward Red, holding his cone like a candle. “Let’s remember,” Red says, “that my nephew himself admitted he can’t see the world, that it doesn’t come through to him, that all the malarkey he heard over at the university about the world being all language struck him as the most fanciful malarkey he’d ever heard, because the sad truth was that the world did not declare itself to him in words—that it just was, and he didn’t know how to read it.” quality snacks / 162 “So he can’t see the world,” Bill says, and he licks his ice cream. “So he comes up to me at last year’s Fourth of July picnic and says that despite the fact he can’t actually see the world, can’t say a recognizable word about it, he wants to become a ‘fiction writer.’” “And you said.” “I said don’t give up what you’ve got going at the Sir Rents-ALot , no way. Stick it out there and you’ll be fine. Write if you have to, just don’t hurt any thing or any body.” “But he kept coming at you?” “He kept coming at me because he considers me some kind of success in the world, and for some reason he never got into any of this with his old man, God rest his irritable soul. In fact, the boy’s told me more than once that his old man could not see the world either and was only in it with difficulty. And me being his mother’s only brother, well, he—” “And you being a former high school football coach.” “Plus instructor of moral ethics and phys ed, don’t forget, and pretty familiar with confused young men, I can tell you. In fact, I made my own perilous journey of personal discovery when I was his age—how I found my coaching vocation!” “And there was no talking him back to our sense of reality? What we mean by it?” On the other side of the counter, the Blizzard machine spins to life.ItremindsRedof thewhirringlawnmowerbladesthatclaimed this same nephew’s right foot on his sixteenth birthday, and of his nephew’s sour face when he refused the Xeroxes Red had made of appropriate rehab exercises. “No talking him back whatsoever,” Red says when the Blizzard machine stops. “So he starts burning the midnight oil after his days atSirRents-A-Lot,staysupallnightreadingDostoevsky,andGeorge Eliot, and Henry No-Time-for-Outdoor-Sports James. I tried to tell The Bad Reader / 163 him,foronething,thatthosefolkshavebeenprettymuchforgotten by the undersixty set who’s likely out there buying books. And for another, I said, get off the highbrow kick—like I told him going for that master’s was adding insult to injury—and start on some of the more relaxed genres such as the mystery or the romance or the fantasy. You don’t just reach for the top rung of the ladder and expect to end up on the roof already.” Bill, a hipless man, almost depantsed by the overstuffed wallet in his back pocket, hitches up his sagging khaki shorts with one hand. “And what’d he say?” “He said that was a cruel way to talk to someone who couldn’t see the world, like I was putting more feed in the trough of his despair. You know the funny thing, though? He took my advice about the fantasy story. Tried a short novel about a clan of talking cats trying to dam a river. Said it was a cross between The Bridge over the River Kwai and Moby-Dick.” “But with cats.” “That’s right. It read like the fever dream of a ten-year-old girl. Sent it to a literary agent and got an incredibly polite but firm rejection letter, which he showed me.” “And it...