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.Observe, please, the rakish open Arrow collar.See him hold his jaw to the light.Await the arrival of Florrie.Continue till dark.Do his duty.Discover a planet, that’s all he has to do.10It is hard, for a while, to get up in the morning.Clyde wakes at eight, the damp sheet tangled around his ankles.The white lace curtain hangs motionless, and from the farmyard comes the sound of cicadas.Someone, Roy most likely, is chopping weeds in the garden, the hoe producing a soft chup, chup in the soil.Roy showing him that life goes on.Like it or not.Now that college at Lawrence is out of the question, he has nowhere else to go.He has no offers in hand, unless he counts the endless rows of advertisements in the back of his magazines.HELP WANTEDMEN—Experience unnecessary; travel; make secret investigations; reports; salaries; expenses.Write American Foreign Detective Inst., 303, St.Louis, Mo.OBTAIN Employment! 70 Jobs offered one person! Get work you want, quickly, anywhere.Complete information, 50 cents.Money promptly returned if wanted.Better Yourself! New Idea Service, Box 39-D, Station K, New York.STEAMSHIP Positions—Men—Women.Good pay.See the world Free.Experience unnecessary.Send self-addressed envelope for list.Box 122-Z, Mount Vernon, N.Y.BE A Secret Service Man! $5.00 covers year’s membership, official detective journal, button and credentials.Continental Secret Service System, Box 81K, Waukegan, Illinois.Or unless he considers the sound of the distant train, itself a sort of advertisement, running at midnight through western Kansas, westbound to Santa Fe and California, carrying its sleeping passengers wherever the hell they’re going.For a while Clyde sits and sends away for anything free.Steamship positions, why not? His mother’s secretary, with its fold-down front and slots where you can stow your envelopes and clippings, sits in the corner of the dining room.He uses up all the envelopes sending away for these booklets and secret guides.“I’ll get more,” he says.“When you’re in town,” she answers.He buys them, twenty count, bound around with a paper strap.They hang in his pocket as he sits in the Bijou, feet up on the plush, watching meaty old George Bancroft make it with Betty Compson and her funny lip.Are you gonna let me have a good time in my own quiet way, he snarls, or do I have to take this place apart?After the oats dry they plow them under with the harrow.This takes a whole day and he hates every minute of it, the sky a stupid blue overhead and the blackbirds flinging themselves up from the earth, and after they have done this they plant a crop of autumn wheat with the idea of salvaging at least something.The seeds go glissading into the sowing tank and swirl around, and with his father at the wheel Clyde sits astride the metal funnel watching its slowly circling paddle, and every few minutes he wrestles a sack of seed from the trailer onto his lap and slices the top with his jackknife and pours the contents down between his knees, the sack losing its shifting heft until it is just an emptied canvas skin, which he then tosses back into the trailer as it jounces and rattles along behind the tractor.By lunchtime he is covered with wheat dust, as though he has been lightly floured.His mother brings them lunch at the wire, and they eat together on the soil sitting in the shade of the tractor; bread, butter still cold from the icebox, oven fried chicken with its skin done to crackling, hardboiled eggs already peeled and sliding against one another in the white china bowl with blue ivy trailing around its edges, potato salad with celery, bean salad, cucumber pickles, blueberry pie, cold water—two great jugs of it—and a sloshing cylinder of coffee.“And this,” his mother says, pulling a letter from her pocket.“From Wichita.”Clyde’s heart leaps a little, but he will not show it, not in front of his father.“I paid him,” he insists.He takes the envelope and works a floured nail under the flap.“I paid him up front.”His father, his mouth full, peers at him keenly.The letter is typed, the lines widely spaced on the wind-rattling page.The mirror Clyde sent for silvering, Carreau has written, it had such a good figure.It was nearly flawless, in fact, without a doubt easily the best he’d ever seen on a handmade 9-inch.But how had he solved the Foucault knife-edge problem? Had he finally dug the root cellar to dampen circulating air currents? At any rate it was very extraordinary and quite promising in such a young man on his own.And, as he would have an opening at his firm in Wichita within the year, was Clyde interested in taking a position as assistant grinder?“He wants to give me a job.” Clyde slips the letter into the back pocket of his trousers.“Sometime before 1930.”“Why, Clyde, that’s wonderful!” his mother beams.“Sure.”“Bench work,” his father puts in now, his mouth full.“Watch out for bench work.”Clyde considers his father for a long minute before he says, “I’ll take any goddamned thing.”In his room at the Wichita Hotel for Men he sets his suitcase on the bed, and in the mirror he is surprised to see that he does not look any different.The knots in his shoes are still tight, and his necktie remains where he left it after lunch, snugged up neatly beneath the cellulose collar that has preserved its shape all afternoon, through Great Bend and Sterling and Hutchinson, all along the Arkansas River, as the sun sank through the sky, good faithful collar that it is, the last one.He does not want to eat before dark, sensing that it is a provincial thing to do.It seems to him a real man of the world would have something more to do in his room after arriving in the big city.Well, he can think of a thing or two.He doesn’t do that and instead stands at the window for a minute looking at the streetcars until finally he just gets bored and without exactly noticing it he is out in the hall again with his hat jammed on.Downstairs at the cigar stand he buys a newspaper, which he tucks under his arm without looking at it.Then it is a sort of prison-yard walk across the echoing lobby into the restaurant.The other solitary diners, all men, look up as he enters, then look down again.He is shown to a table, and, speaking so quietly the waiter has to bend down to hear him, he orders a hot roast beef sandwich with gravy.“And a vegetable, sir?” the waiter asks.“No.And coffee
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