Undertown

Undertown — page 3 — SUNDAY

Undertown — page 4 — chapter 111 LYING ON THE WARM TEAK DECK GLANCING UP PAST the gleaming brass struts and rails and fittings adroop with bright-orange life preservers and the tall tapering mahogany mast from which the jib and mainsail flapped gently in the breeze Timothy Murphy thought that the balmy summer sky might as well be counted as one more blessing in his nearly perfect life Timothy spent a lot of time counting blessings Then he reached out for the book he’d set on the deck beside him and inadvertently touched flesh female flesh and jerked his hand back to rest safely on his stomach The sky above was perfect perfect the boat below was perfect Only one thing was wrong Better return to the blessings he thought To start with there was his loving father Make that his loving but likely to be absent father Tom who tried to compensate for lack of face time with a sequence of expensive presents Timothy was the first on his block to get every technological gizmo from an Xbox to an iPhone though sometimes he had to wrestle them from his dad’s grip Tom liked to think of himself as a kid at heart in touch with the 33

Undertown — page 5 — needs and desires of young people To some extent that was correct correct since Tom’s Tees the business that kept him working late five or six or seven nights a week allegedly so that he could afford to purchase whatever Timothy wanted relied upon a mystical connection connection with his ten to twenty-year-old customers Expensive leisure wear provided a comfortable lifestyle for the duo that Tom liked to refer to as the Murphy Men as if he and Timothy had chosen to embark on a grand adventure after Timothy's Timothy's mother died That hadn’t been much of a blessing Yet there were other things in life besides death Timothy reminded himself of this as a cloud in the shape of a cauliflower drifted across the spar from which the sail hung To start with there was school Timothy was a good student perhaps too good for his own benefit He wasn’t smart enough to frighten anyone but he was smart enough to irritate Thus the atmosphere at Montclair Junior High was for him a toxic mix of social and physical torture Often Timothy spent class silently debating whom he’d most enjoy throwing into a pit full of starving starving hyenas moronic dictatorial history teacher Mr Tasman or handsome loathsome popular Brian Pfeiffer who’d mastered the art of twisting his gym towel into a lethal locker room weapon frequently aimed at Timothy’s butt Only one thing Timothy had to admit about school It wasn’t as bad as cancer Lots of things were better than cancer Sunshine was and so was rain Actually Timothy rather preferred damp soggy days at least until the X-tra Large arrived During precipitation he wasn’t expected to join a neighborhood version of whatever professional sport was in season at the moment Nor was he expected to bike aimlessly seeking adventures on the dull suburban streets of northern New Jersey Whenever it was raining he could lie back on the wicker couch on the sunporch with a black-and-white milkshake 4

Undertown — page 6 — milkshake another thing that was better than cancer and lose himself in a book which was not only better than cancer but better than a milkshake Reading on a sunporch in the rain might very well have been Timothy Murphy’s favorite activity in the world At least until the X-tra Large arrived Since then reading on the deck as the boat rolled over the currents by the Jersey Shore was his absolutely favorite activity Still gazing at the clouds that had shifted from vegetable to animal now resembling a whale a weasel a camel with one no two humps or Brian Pfeiffer in a guillotine he groped blindly on the deck for the novel he’d been immersed in over the last few days It was Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep infinitely superior to the Hollywood movie Sometimes Timothy would lose himself so completely in a book that he’d miss the dinner prepared by Loreen the Murphy Men’s housekeeper and wake up on the couch the next morning unsure whether he was in Montclair or Orbis Tertius Fortunately his favorite author was Isaac Asimov who had written over five hundred books so he wasn’t afraid of running out of titles Even if he read every one of the millions of words Asimov had written he suspected that he could start over again without it spoiling any of the plots Another blessing was money Well not money itself Timothy considered himself a socialist or maybe an anarchist if someone someone could explain the difference but the goods and services that it brought into his life Timothy knew that he was fortunate to have enough money to purchase however many books Asimov or the other science fiction gods he worshipped wrote Vaguely he remembered a time before the family had real money enough to purchase all the nifty stuff a half-orphan could want except for a mother or time with his dad 5

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