Read The School on Heart's Content Road for Free Online

stuff stacked or standing.
    This house is an old farm place that rural people yearned to modernize and fulfilled their yearnings with avocado indoor-outdoor carpeting in the pantry and all the walls of the whole house done in cheesy sixteenth-inch paneling that doesn’t look at all like wood but just a picture of wood. Funny about fads. Probably in many of these old farmhouses, there is gorgeous golden real knotty pine board paneling completely plastered over with this 1970s plasticky latest-thing-gotta-have-it brown-black plywood sheet paneling.
    Also, here at the York residence, those tall, narrow, handsome, many-paned, good-for-the-soul, low-to-the-floor windows, the original ones, have been
ripped out
and replaced with small windows with cranks, set high like rectangular portholes, and, of course, in the living room, a bay picture window covered with glossy fiberglass drapes thick as a fort fence.
    In similar homes, you’ll find sliding glass doors, always with the accompanying dog-nose prints, splats and smears of ice cream or ordinary baby goo, pollen, woodstove smoke in filmy gray-green streaks with a view of the “deck,” where the barbecue and laundry basket and stuffed gray trash bags are kept, and maybe a cat is out there on the rail, licking her paw or eating a live mouse. But here at Rex’s home, fad has not gotten that far. The place still feels a
little
farmlike. Coats and jackets hang on hooks on the kitchen side of the thick old cellar door. The old white-painted corner cabinet top is heaped with papers and hats and tools and the innards of a broken lamp.
    Again the voice, calling “In here!” from the living room, where Mickey can see feet raised up on the footrest of a La-Z-Boy, feet dressed in black military boots. Mickey heads toward these feet.
    Yes, it is
him,
the one Mickey is looking for.
    Rex’s eyes fall on the rifle Mickey has in his hands, and he nods into Mickey’s eyes. Rex seems different. No army cap. No metal-frame sunglasses. No red T-shirt, just a stiff dark-blue work shirt. The shirt makeshim seem older, like a father or grandfather, just a regular age-fifty-looking guy. So bare in the face and head, more exposed. His hair is dark brown like the mustache, not much gray. But thinning a bit at the temples. And he doesn’t comb his hair funny to hide it.
    Mickey speaks an almost inaudible “Hi.” Mickey is sopping wet and the rifle is shining.
    The man’s deep La-Z-Boy is facing the TV, but the TV is blank-faced and silent. The TV remote control is still in his hand.
    Mickey says, “Sorry to bother you, but I have something. . . .”
    Rex York snorts and leans forward, his booted feet come down with a single thump, and he says, “What
really
bothers me was what was going on before you came in.” He aims the remote flicker, makes the TV burst to life, then kills it quick. He narrows his steely eyes. “Six o’clock news.” He sneers. “Next they’ll be telling us there’s a Santa Claus.” He tosses the remote onto a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him. “Whatcha got there?”
    Mickey says, “This is mine, Marlin Twenty-two Magnum. I wanted to see if you’d be interested in buying it.”
    â€œNot interested,” says Rex, as he pulls on his nose, eyes on Mickey’s face. “I’m not in need of one.”
    Mickey is frozen in place, standing with legs apart, the rifle loose in his hands, muzzle down, his little wet worm of a ponytail especially pitiful-looking, his small frame especially small. He says, low and soft, “I need to sell it for medicine. It’s for a sick baby.”
    Rex York’s eyes are direct, eyes that make you feel as though a permanent picture of you is being taken, the whole picture; your face, body, blood count, shoe size. He moves these eyes over Mickey as if to gauge the truth of this sick baby story. He says, “Whose