Adult swingers arkansas dating“Salad, madam?” the waiter asked while clearing away the dinner dishes. “I get up. Out of bed. Tomorrow already, when I should be on my way home to Glendale, but how could anybody tell? Exactly why I let you keep buses out there, so I can sleep these hours and not be forced awake by noise in the lot. So I head out there to check it out, what do I see? Nothing. Nobodylurking — and no Jim Durant, that’s for sure. So I’m thinking, where the fuck is this guy? I spend twenty, twenty-five minutes driving around the park to find this man, the one I am letting live here for free, keep shit here for free. For the work he is not doing.” “This is not just a random killing. Nineteen men. It has the sound of a conspiracy, of a plot. I still wake at night from nightmares of my mother and sisters being bayoneted, my father and uncles swinging from gibbets. They just wanted to be left alone too. But then a few men in the English government started plotting.” My red phone showed me that it was four twenty-six in the morning. I stood up, feeling dizzy and weak. I sat down and thirty minutes passed in what felt like an instant. I stood up again and dressed. “Now leave the good doctor be,” Polly scolded the man as they reached the physician’s station, and when the mate retreated she took up a position in front of the cramped chamber as if to assure Duncan’s privacy. Opening the wooden chest that served as the brig’s dispensary, he stared in amazement. It was filled with drugs, bandages, bleeding cups, lancets, even a bone saw neatly inserted into tiny brackets under the lid. He dropped a vial of laudanum, the tincture of opium, into each of his waistcoat pockets then began filling two sacks. Into the first he dropped another vial of laudanum and little jars of the diaphoretic James’s Powder, and set it aside. Into the second he dropped more laudanum, wrapping each vial in a linen bandage to protect it, a small tub of unguent, and two sharp scalpels, also carefully wrapped. He stepped behind the curtain that provided privacy for the little alcove where surgery was performed, quickly removed his waistcoat and shirt, then fitted the drawstring of the second sack over his shoulder and dressed again. ~ ~ ~ “Money,” she answered. “But for Heaven’s sake, tell me what he has…” “The field overseers carry clubs and whips,” the superintendent explained with an amused expression. “But they also have lovely tin horns. One blast of the horn and my pharaohs fly down on the wind. Most have clubs and swords. Those riders are my elite guard. They are much less merciful than me,” he declared with another of his hideous laughs. He continued as he led them back outside. “Some enjoy their own particular instruments. One has a net and trident. I saw him pierce a man at forty yards with that forked spear. Lord, what a mess. What the dogs didn’t finish we gave to the pigs,” he chuckled, then quickly sobered. “Leave this stable or work crew without permission, and you become fair game.” The view from the crest of Kambar isn’t dependent on the season, or on any time for that matter; it’s unreal. The coldly gentle light overenhances naked contours, and a traveler thinks: This isn’t real, I’m not here. This damn fog could still be here. The feeling of Los Angeles is that of free fall, I wrote in the little journal that I pilfered from our housekeeper.There’s nothing to grab onto but it’s beautiful if you could only stop and appreciate the view. * * * Let’s not get into that. “Aldo,” my mother said from the doorway behind me. Now she was cutting filo dough into little triangles, hands white with flour. I wanted to say that her kind of immigration— from Soviet Armenia through New York and Los Angeles, thirty years ago — was different from this kind, across the border with Mexico. This kind was more deeply entwined in contexts of racism, for one thing. Plus, I wanted to say, we had a two-party political system that, encountered with a phrase like “the largest growing demographic,” preferred to accomplish nothing, knowing that actual solutions would only hamper xenophobia and large anonymous political donations. In fact, I wanted to say to my mother, talk was the problem. All anyone did was talk. I don’t know. Act as if I’m sleeping. Yet I yet I yet I might. |