Free The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever

had a thousand cans of feed stored in his garage but as an independent he was helpless to bring them profitably together. Remembering this, he had another glass of sherry.
    It was dark by then. The light had gone from the window and he dressed to go down for supper. He was the only customer in the dining room, where Mabel Moulton brought him a bowl of greasy soup in which a burnt match was swimming. The burnt match, like the chamber pot, made his hatred of St. Botolphs implacable. “Oh, I’m awful sorry,” Mabel said, when he showed her the match. “I’m awful sorry. You see, my father had a stroke last month and we’re awful short-handed. Things aren’t the way we’d like to have them. The pilot light on the gas range isn’t working and the cook has to keep lighting the range with matches and I expect that’s how a match got into your soup. Well, I’ll take away your soup and bring you the pot roast and I’ll make sure there’s no matches in that. Notice that I’m taking off your plate with my left hand. I sprained my left hand last winter and it’s never been right since but I keep doing things with it to see if I can’t get it back into condition that way. The doctor tells me that if I keep using it, it’ll get better. Of course it’s easier for me to use my right hand all the time but every now and then . . .” She saw that he was unfriendly and moved on. She had waited on a thousand lonely men and most of them liked to hear about her aches, pains and sprains while she admired the pictures of their wives, children, houses and dogs. It was a light bridge of communication but it was better than nothing and it passed the time.
    Johnson ate his pot roast and his pie and went into the bar. It was crudely lighted by illuminated beer signs and smelled like a soil excavation. The only customers were two farmers. He went to the end of the bar farthest from them and drank another glass of sherry. Then he bowled a game on the miniature bowling machine and went out the side door onto the street. The town was dark; turned back on itself, totally unfamiliar with the needs of travelers, wanderers, the great flowing world. Every store was shut. He glanced at the Unitarian church across the green. It was a white frame building with columns, a bell tower and a spire that vanished into the starlight. It seemed incredible to him that his people, his inventive kind, the first to exploit glass store fronts, bright lights and continuous music, should ever have been so backward as to construct a kind of temple that belonged to the ancient world. He went around the edges of the green and turned up Boat Street as far as Honora’s. Lights burned here and there in the old house but he saw no one. He went back to the bar and watched a fight on television.
    The favorite was an aging club fighter named Mercer. The challenger was a man named Santiago who could have been Italian or Puerto Rican. He was fleshy, muscular and stupid. Mercer had it all his way for the first two rounds. He was a fair, slight man, his face lined, so Johnson thought, with common domestic worries. He would have kissed his wife good-bye in some kitchen an hour ago and he was fighting to keep up the payments on the washing machine. Agile, intelligent and tough, he seemed unbeatable until early in the third round when Santiago opened a cut over his right eye. Blood streamed down Mercer’s face and chest and he slipped on the bloody canvas. Santiago reopened the cut in the fifth and Mercer was blinded again and staggered helplessly around the ring. The fight was stopped in the sixth. Mercer’s spirit would be crushed, his wife and children would be heartbroken and his washing machine would be taken away. Johnson went upstairs, got into a suit of pajamas printed with scenes of a steeplechase and read a paper-back novel.
    His novel was about a young woman with millions of dollars and houses in Rome, Paris, New York and Honolulu. In the first chapter she made it