Free The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin Page B

remembered.”
    I was growing tired of this orphan stuff. I had never traded on it, and didn’t want to start now. It was cheap. “How did you...”
    “You phoned and left a number. So I rang you back.”
    “So...”
    “So I thought it a bit strange you were calling from a hotel, though perhaps not so strange because your mother had after all died many years ago. I rang back and asked the desk where the Westbury was. And here I am.”
    Shushan was clearly delighted by this. “And here he is,” he said. “An unexpected visitor is always nice,” he explained, then revised. “Usually. And a professor. That’s more unexpected than normal. Russy, you keep surprising me to the good. Now I got a new friend in Del. And Del knows his stuff.”
    “Del?” I said.
    “My friends call me Del,” the professor said. “You’re welcome to as well.”
    “Del,” I said. “I’ve known you three years and it’s been Professor del Vecchio, and you’re here what fifteen minutes—”
    “Almost an hour,” Shushan said. “Came in just as you and Esther left. She okay?”
    “Oh yeah,” I said, wondering idly what he knew of his sister’s sexual orientation. “Del. Okay,
Del
, how come you’re here—I mean, seeing as how you knew I was bullshitting you.”
    Del shrugged good naturedly. He was drinking Scotch, neat. This was turning out to be a hell of a mourning period. Aside from Ira, who had all the
joie de vivre
of a tire iron, everyone was drinking, laughing, goofing around. I wondered if my own mother’s
shiva
had been like this. My father’s wasn’t. Del—how peculiar it was to call him that—put up his hand as if to stop me from going too far. “I knew it was
something
, so I came. I don’t have too many students like you, Russell. You probably don’t know that.”
    “You came to catch me in a lie.”
    “I figured
somebody
died,” he said. “And I now learn you delivered the eulogy—”
    “Beautiful,” Shushan said. “Everyone was crying.”
    “You wrote it.”
    “Yeah, Russy, so I’m Shakespeare and you’re Richard Burton. What’s the diff? Next time I got a funeral I’ll get Del here to write the eulogy and you’ll read it and then I won’t even be involved. Del’s a hell of a poet, did you know that? I have his book.”
    “Which one?” Del said.
    “
Forms of Remorse
,” Shushan said. “I like the one that begins ‘The telephone is an engine of unpassion, reducing...’”
    “Reducing apocalypse to noise,” Del finished. “That one I still like. Most of the others, eh.”
    “Don’t say that,” Shushan said. “Which one you like, kid?”
    Kid didn’t like any of them. And he did not like being grilled by a gangster on a poet’s work with the poet grinning on the opposite couch. “They’re all... great.”
    “You ever read any?”
    “Shushan, I never read none.”
    Shushan laughed. “Kid’s got balls, I’ll tell you that. Thinks he can make fun of my English right in front of my face.”
    “Better than behind your back,” Del said. “He’s not like that. Though I’m pretty sure he writes his term papers in the last week of the term.”
    “What’s the difference when I write them? You like them.”
    “I like them more than my other students’—but I think you could do better. You’re coasting.”
    “So?”
    “So coast,” Del said. “But don’t expect to get a great education out of it, only the minimum. You finish reading
Huckleberry Finn
?”
    “I read it when I was twelve—”
    “You’re not twelve now. You must have missed a lot.”
    “And when I was fourteen. And when I was sixteen, during another
shiva
, as it happens. You’re right, professor. It’s not the same when you’re a kid.
Tom Sawyer
, that’s a kid’s book you read once. But
Huckleberry Finn
you could keep reading forever.”
    “I’m gratified you feel that way.”
    “But I do know the book. I mean I know it intimately. I could write a paper right now.”
    “You could write a