A Flash of Green Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the most furtive acts.
    Love, he knew, was the ever-handy refuge of the scoundrel. And it did heavy duty as the lyrical justification for a million illicit scrabblings each night, on beaches, on backseats, under bushes and on the useful high-density foam rubber of forty thousand motels. Love was that jungly place reeking of Gloria, of death, of madness, with no escape except to the desert beyond the jungle, where, in relative peace, you could allow the bitter sun to bake your skull and toast your heart to an enduring little muffin. Not love, please.
    The other rationalization to be avoided most carefully was that philosophical devaluation which asks who will give a damn a hundred years from now. That is the good old kosmic view of kopulation. Tomorrow, baby, they drop the bomb, so live tonight. It is an empty wind sighing through an empty place, and it works equally well for rape, theft and murder.
    When he denied his motive the benefit of any ornamentation, it came down to a stark and almost Biblical lust. I want the woman. I want her in spite of all my sickly little requirements of maintaining my good opinion of myself. Unhampered by this tottering ethical structure, I could run faster and score sooner.
    He could not think of desire as being a part of any plan, any enduring program. He could not see beyond the first time of taking her. It was a primitive need and a primitive act, and should it ever happen, he did not know what the world would be like until he was beyond her and could see what it was like on that far side.
    For a long time he had comforted himself by telling himself that no matter how increasingly strong the compulsion might become, he was safely beyond those puppy years when he might have let it disrupt those other aspects of his life, those reassuring routines and relationships, which he had erected around himself like one of those insect towers of sand and spit which, in time, turn into protective stone.
    Yet he had blithely told her of the Grassy Bay project. And that was like kicking the stone to see how solid it had become.
    He drove by the small area of commercial development on Sandy Key adjacent to the causeway, and when he was beyond it he looked south along the blue reach of Grassy Bay. The bay was narrowest near the causeway, widening out toward the south. As he crossed the causeway he saw a small white cruiser setting out from Hoyt’s Marina, with a stocky brown woman on the bow, coiling a line. Further down the bay he saw a pattern of flashingwhite on the water and saw the birds circling and diving in agitation. Maybe mackerel, he thought, in from the Gulf. More likely a school of jacks chopping the bait fish. Two outboards were converging on the roiled area.
    When he came off the causeway he was stopped by the traffic light at the intersection of Mangrove Road and Bay Highway. After the May and June hiatus, the summer tourist season was gathering a rather shabby momentum. In the winter months the biggest contingent came from the central states, and there were so many of them that at last, to the residents of Palm County, they seemed to become but one elderly couple, endlessly repeated, driving a bulbous blue car with Ohio plates (at wandering unpredictable speeds), the man in Bermudas, the woman with a big straw purse, questing through all the towns of the shallow-water coast, bemused, slightly indignant, frequently bored, like people charged with some mission who had lost their sealed orders before they had a chance to open them.
    As was so solemnly and frequently stated by all public officials and all Chamber of Commerce executives, the winter flow of this endlessly duplicated couple was the backbone of the economy, and it often seemed that the supply was inexhaustible, yet Jimmy Wing had noted among the businessmen of Palm City an anxious and almost superstitious attitude toward the continuity of the flow. They heartened themselves with every evidence of repeat business, no matter how