A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Read Online Free PDF Page B

jet-engine whine of vacuum cleaners and whoosh-whoosh of the superintendent’s broom on the foyer floor as he cycled the dirt and twigs and dead butts back to the street. There was nothing keeping me there except the thought of an empty house and two pounds of hamburger thawing in the sink. I switched on the gooseneck lamp, reached into the John King bag, came out with
Deadtime Story,
and read six chapters. This one was about an accountant on the run from the Mafia, or the Syndicate, as Booth called it. The accountant was a decent guy who happened to be good with numbers, and whose love for recording long columns of figures and magically transforming them into sums at the bottoms had obscured the realization that he was working for a mob boss who contracted murder as casually as a cab driver ordered a hot dog in a diner. When an attempt was made on the accountant’s life to shut him up, he woke up and took off with the books.
    I stopped reading just as he and the ledgers were fleeing north of the city in search of a place to hide. My eyes were scratching in their sockets, but that wasn’t why I stopped reading. Something had begun to grow, and I thought that if I kept reading it would shrivel. I tried to look at the thing, but it stopped growing when it was being watched. I needed to quit thinking about it. Whatever it was, it would have to finish fleshing itself out in the dark, like a potato.
    I’d brought in a fistful of cassette tapes from the box the trailer park manager had given me. I put batteries in the tape player, selected one of the cassettes at random—
George Takei Sings the Best of the Beatles,
or some such thing—poked it into the slot, and hit the play button.
    Buying blank cassettes can be expensive if you’re in the habit of doing a lot of recording. Audiophiles who are always taping music off the radio or transcribing it from compact discs and long-playing albums often stretch a dollar by buying pre-recorded cassettes at yard and garage sales, snapping Scotch tape over the holes on the top corners where the tabs have been removed to avoid accidentally recording over the title tracks, and using them in place of blanks. I’d done it myself and had a number of cassettes in my collection that looked just like the ones that had belonged to Eugene Booth. If what I had in the player sounded anything like Mr. Sulu’s rendition of “Yellow Submarine,” or Patsy Cline if she was more to the preference of a seventy-year-old tough-guy writer, I’d wasted Louise Starr’s money at Best Buy.
    What I had was silence, a lot of it, then the whir of air stirring around a microphone, followed by what might have been the legs of a chair scraping a floor and then a groaning sigh like a soul crying in hell or an old man sitting down. A throat got cleared, a long gargling acceleration broken in the middle by a cough, sharp as a pistol report. Some fumbling with the mike, then a low fuzzy bass that might once have been rich and pleasant, the voice of a fair roadhouse singer-pianist before too much whiskey, too many cigarettes, and three or more trips too many around a rundown block had hammered it into that dull monotone you hear at last call and over the loudspeaker in the eleventh inning of a pitchers’ duel:
    “Midnight, now, past curfew. Even the sirens are tired and sound as if they want to go home. They’re saying … What the hell are they saying? What do they ever say besides ‘eeyow’? Jesus, Booth. And why’s it have to be midnight? Nothing ever happens at midnight except lousy poetry and a trip to the can. If that’s the best you can do you might as well write a crappy horror novel and let ‘em stick a skull on the cover. All the really horrifying things happen in broad daylight. Well, hell, there’s my opener: ‘All the really horrifying things happen’—no,
truly
—’All the truly horrifying things’—no, no, fuck that, that’s a goddamn romance word. ‘All the really horrifying things