Billy Rock

The whole month has been something of a crap shot, and Billy was just trying to keep the apartment a place apart, a little haven for them, because the last thing they needed was the outside world creeping in here. He knew, Halloween night was going to be a menace. He had plans on that. He'd stocked up on good gin and good scotch, had gotten some opium from a man that assured it was clean and had blended that in with some of his tobacco, and was ready with plenty of music to drown out any noise outside their apartment. For twelve hours, it would be just them: him and Goodnight and the dog, and that was that. In the morning, he would go out and deal with that needed dealing with. He would not be pulled away before then.

But they had a week. And for now, Billy wasn't going to think about it.

For now, Billy had situated himself at the kitchen table. He was reading a magazine. It was a conspicuous one. He'd been doing this periodically recently, waiting to see if Goodnight would notice--he doubtlessly had--or comment--he had not, yet. Mercy was laid out at his feet, because they'd already been out on their run for the morning, and there was already breakfast, because Billy had picked it up on the way home.

Billy was reading a wedding magazine, and silently griping to himself that it was all brides and grooms. Nobody cared about wedding dresses when both people involved were going to be wearing a suit and tie.

Billy Rocks never went to school. He had some schooling, one could say; his mother had taught him how to read and write in Korean, and when he went away to Washington, he'd learned arithmetic and composition and a hundred other, smaller things, that the master's son would teach him when they were allowed alone together. His reading was not the best, but especially with Goodnight, it had improved in his adulthood.

To take classes at the college, he had to have a diploma or equivalent. To get those, you had to go to school or take a test. Classes had already started--he knew that--but the tests we a couple of weeks into the term, for some reason, and the people he had spoken to at the college had assured that the program he was looking at had a later start date than the standard classes.

So here he sat, a study book open, pamphlets and papers and his sketchy hangul in the margins of everything, feeling a bit out of place. He was going to be thirty in the summer. Wasn't it a bit odd to be thinking about schooling so late in his life?