Corn unfasten gleamingShe has the tendency to be disgustingly crafty in her replies if there are others besides me within earshot. In place of giving a direct no, as she wanted to do, she came up with a cunning countermove. One might even be led to think she’d attended a training camp for slyness and duplicity. Montemayor looked at Sponer. One night— not much later, but long enough afterwards so that my father and I had stopped pretending I cared about sports — I decided to get rid of the signed ball. Maybe the baseball was a reminder of the heteronormative boyhood my father pined after for me, but the truth is I simply thought the baseball ugly. The sloppy, illegible signatures were scrawled in a hideous green ink, and the spherical shape of the thing itself didn’t seem to belong with the rectangular shapes of my books, magazines, and video game cartridges. Even the furniture in my room was boxy and sharp, and the ball — a lone, edgeless blob — bothered me. I needed to get rid of it, and fast. I hear footsteps, but it’s not Edda. Edda drags her feet like a storybook ghost. It’s Hei?ur’s jerky gait. She climbs straight into the car. “I can’t stay, Deb,” Jude said. “Right after I talked to you I got this call. I have to go meet with the F-Troop Theatre Company. I’m designing the sets and costumes for their new show.” “I don’t know him at all! He was here when I came in, but he won’t say where Mortimer is!” I’m not afraid of those gangster runts. Don’t talk about drug dens. That was in a past life. Lubbi plods happily into the good garden, where he and Mom and Edda and I had seen better days. Isn’t that why one lives? To have seen better days. “Theon never told me about this debt,” I explained. “I haven’t signed a thing. And he left me with nothing. The bank owns this house and his car, all our accounts are empty, and the credit cards are as kissing close to being maxed out as you can get.” That is why I was born, that is why I have endured, that is why the outfit I wore at the races in 1913 can still be worn in 1946, because the new social conditions are still those that led me to clothe them. Hickey pursed his lips.‘I’d put nothing past that woman. Biggest mistake a me life, leaving me first wife for her. Poor Bernie. Heart a gold.’ At last, after four hours of fretful rest, he rose, scrubbed his face with cold water, retrieved a piece of paper from the library, and returned to the forge. The coals were cold. The smith was working outside, trimming the hooves of oxen. ‘Are you Tristram St Lawrence?’ the garda enquired for the record. I slunk away from this sophisticated party and went to bed. Edda came into my room, because she’d woken to the entertainment and asked whether I wanted to come and sleep in her bed. It didn’t strike me as the stupidest thing I could do in this situation. At least her room was far from the drinking ruckus. ‘Yeah. He wants the Metro North diverted to service his land.’ Silence descends, the same as before the question came crashing down on D?rfinna. The crumhorn makes no sound, the snoring has ceased, every single thing is silent, other than two hearts that beat, alternately light and heavy — slow down, speed up, slow down — like the footsteps of people searching along complex paths for a target that remains obscure. Combined with the surf. They asked me if I was coming, and I was on the verge of getting in the ambulance and accompanying him to the emergency room before I decided that it bordered on intrusiveness and abandoned the idea. At about nine he took the tram to the centre.. |