Page 30 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

The Hermits

not occur to the imbecilic youth that Al Osmoser had not been
tending his shriveled vegetable patch for several months.
“Hello there, Wilson,” said Al, with an affable grimace.
“Uh, hello, Mr. Osmoser.” The boy’s legs became tangled, one
attempting to pivot, the other to stride. The vector of his lower
limbs resolved into the stance of a hockey goalie.
“Been out shopping, eh? What have you got there?”
The scion of the house of Lafong slowly parsed the pair of
questions. Their inevitable linkage forced his gawking gaze down
to his brachial extremities: a newspaper held his fingers at bay,
preventing them from curling into their normal configuration, a
fist.
“Yep. That’s it, alright. Lorraine wants to read something.”
Al leaned forward, supplementing his wobbly knees with the
hoe handle.
“Really? That’s nice. I didn’t know Lorraine read the papers.
What sort of thing does she like to read, Wilson?”
“Uh, uh,” began the youth, bouncing the pinball of his
consciousness between bumpers of vocabulary. His eyes followed
the internal progress of the search; after almost tilting back into
their sockets, they suddenly lit up with recognition as they came to
rest on the windows of Al’s upstairs bedroom.
“TV,” he blurted.
Al struggled with verbal charades. “Something she saw on TV?
Something you want to see on TV? You want to buy a new TV?”
“Naw, she thinks the paper has a picture in it. Picture on TV
just comes and goes, Mr. Osmoser,” Wilson confided, with a grin
connoting levels of sophistication unattainable by those limited to
electronic media.
“Oh. What is the picture of, may I ask?”
Shadows of doubt flitted across the otherwise sunny features of
the boy. “Don’t think Lorraine wants me to say.” The eyes and
tongue began their pendulous counterpoint.
Al abandoned his line of questioning: Wilson Lafong was about
to bolt.
“Oh, that reminds me: I wanted to see the paper, too. I think
there’s an ad in there about the, uh, free circus that’s coming to
town. Don’t want to miss that, do we?”

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