(Untitled)
They both stumbled up the stairs and back to room VII, where Pickles tossed his notepad onto the desk before dropping back into bed, still warm from their laying there.
"What kept you up, dude?" He asked, lighting a cigarette.
"What kept you up, dude?" He asked, lighting a cigarette.
Miniver sips the brandy, thinking for a few long moments.
"I came from a small town about an hour North from New York City on the train. Worked right bang next to the train station, lived like... I guess.... ten blocks away, a but more? All uphill, though. Mountainy town, right next to the Hudson river, which was huge and used to freeze over and get ICEBURGS. It was the coolest thing. Um, anyway, we didn't have much of a downtown sorta district... there were a bunch of little towns all lumped together in the river valley there, five or six of 'em, and Poughkeepsie was the biggest. Newburgh, New Paltz, Walden, Fishkill, Beacon... barely towns, I don't even know why they bothered naming them different things. You could get in a car and sneeze and not know you'd driven clear through one, 'cept you'd hit a mountain or big fucking river."
Another sip of brandy, offering Pickles the glass before continuing, "I was a railroad kid. I played in dust and begged food off the shopkeepers cuz mom was too drunk to remember to feed me most of the time and dad was always in the City working, by which everyone knew he meant screwing whores. There were lots of cats, and out neighbor had a fig tree, and I'd steal apples from down the way, blackberries from the woods, sometimes if you wanted to walk all the way up into the high mountain parts some of the guys up there'd have fresh curing venison in the fall now, and they'd give away scraps. Lots of cats."
He searches his mind for a happy memory of being a kid. They're few and far between. He mostly hid himself away in the library when he wasn't out wandering alone... but...
"Once, when I was REALLY little, maybe 4 or 5, my granddad took me fishing in the Hudson. We walked all up and down the stone walk downtown all evening and ate pot pies at this little cafe place looking out onto the river as the leaves set it all on fire in red and orange oaks and beeches and god, everything was bright. He's the one used to sing to me in Gaelic. All four of my grandparents were born in Ireland."
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