Grumpy salt foregoing
"Oh its a people eater all right." Shotwell plays jacks and I write descriptions of natural forms on the walls. Shotwell is enrolled in a USAFI course which leads to a masters degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin (although we are not in Wisconsin, we are in Utah, Montana or Idaho). When we went down it was in either Utah, Montana or Idaho, I don’t remember. We have been here for one hundred thirty-three days owing to an oversight. Thepale green reinforced concrete walls sweat and the air conditioning zips on and off erratically and Shotwell readsIntroduction to Marketing by Lassiter and Munk, making notes with a blue ballpoint pen. Shotwell is not himself but I do not know it, he presents a calm aspect and readsIntroduction to Marketing and makes his exemplary notes with a blue ballpoint pen, meanwhile controlling the .38 in my attaché case with one-third of his attention. I am not well. I wanted to take Joe Carp and Frank Reilly out to lunch to celebrate, but Joe said he had to buy some things for his wife, and Frank said he was meeting his cousin for lunch. I guess itll take a little time for them to get used to the changes in me. Everybody seems to be frightened of me. When I went over to Amos Borg and tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped up in the air. He had the case of dynamite open and was handing out the sticks in bundles.First and foremost weve got to get as much of this stuff home as we can, so we divide it equally and each carry a few pounds. Fuses and detonators —they’re precious. Divide them up likewise. Stow the stuff away and we’ll get going. Once we get across the footbridge we’re all right. But by now the enemy is over its little shock and after us in force. Let’s go. The Holy Man raised his fragile hands.Thank you—but no, he said gently. I showed my astonishment.What the hell does he drive? He asked,And what do you want? The Promise of Locar, she replied, as though the explaining were unnecessary, that a holy man would come from the Heavens to save us in our last hours, if all the dances of Locar were completed. He would defeat the Fist of Malann and bring us life.” For some time, these differences served to make our life together more interesting: our reactions were far from uniform, and this made our discussions livelier. But by degrees the bass drummer became more and more antagonistic to the rest of us. At first we thought that perhaps his instrument wasnt giving him enough scope, and several of us offered to spell him on the drum, and let him take a turn playing a horn, but this wasn’t what he wanted at all. He had soured on our whole way of life, and this set up an unbearable tension. Then there was Swifty Zavrakos, a little man with greying hair whose face was a kind of permanent exhibition of every known variety of nervous tic; he was our lawyer and a real walking encyclopedia of waterfront history; he could give you from memory the names of all the organizers, the sentences each had served and even the caliber of the guns they used. How about brothers and sisters? Holy woman? Faugh! She is no more a nun than I am. Her name is Pauline Dupree, an accomplished actress and a cold-blooded multiple murderess. She shot one man to death in San Francisco and two more tonight on theIsland Star. Get up, Clarice repeated. She combed a high forehead wave of bluish gray hair into place and smiled at me in the dresser mirror. He stopped at the next landing, but there was no sign to indicate on what floor he was nor any door by which he might reenter the store. Deducing from this that he was between floors, he took the escalator down one more flight only to find the same perplexing absence of landmarks. You wanted, said Ian, almost conversationally, to have him kill himself off. But he never quite did. And each time he came back for more, because he had it stuck into his mind, carved into his mind, that he wanted to impress you—even though by the time he was grown, he saw what you were up to. He knew, but he still wanted to make you admit that he wasnt a loser. You’d twisted him that way while he was growing up, and that was the way he grew.” Jediah crossed the corn patch to her side.What kinda trouble, Ma? Then Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the water, and crimson clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The kids, half on top of each other, lay like a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks in their hair— even on little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was black and curly like bubbling oil (like his mothers), the down on the small of his two-year-old back was a white haze across the copper if you looked that close to see. I went over to the main warehouse and through the gate to the landing field. The crowd was there, sitting around, standing around, moving around, waiting for the show to start. At the far end there was a platform, all lighted up with floods. It was bare except for a simple lectern at the center. Very effective. Miss Wellman hadnt arrived. Can you see ours, Charlie? Five minutes later, when the house-boy had gone, she returned to her bedroom. During the afternoon she came out to collect the film magazines in the bookcase..
