Across the River and Into the Trees Read Online Free PDF

carried water from the Brenta, and he thought about the long stretch of the Brenta where the great villas were, with their lawns and their gardens and the plane trees and the cypresses. I’d like to be buried out there, he thought. I know the place very well. I don’t believe you could fix it, though. I don’t know. I know some people that might let me be buried on their place. I’ll ask Alberto. He might think it was morbid, though.
    For a long time he had been thinking about all the fine places he would like to be buried and what parts of the earth he would like to be a part of. The stinking, putrefying part doesn’t last very long, really, he thought, and anyway you are just a sort of mulch, and even the bones will be some use finally. I’d like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees. I don’t think it would be much of a nuisance to them. I could be a part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jumping horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of fly.
    They were up on the causeway from Mestre to Venice now with the ugly Breda works that might have been Hammond, Indiana.
    “What do they make there, sir?” Jackson asked.
    “The company makes locomotives in Milan,” the Colonel said. “Here they make a little of everything in the metallurgic line.”
    It was a miserable view of Venice now and he always disliked this causeway except that you made such good time and you could see the buoys and the channels.
    “This town makes a living on its own,” he said to Jackson. “She used to be the queen of the seas and the people are very tough and they give less of a good Goddamn about things than almost anybody you’ll ever meet. It’s a tougher town than Cheyenne when you really know it, and everybody is very polite.”
    “I wouldn’t say Cheyenne was a tough town, sir.”
    “Well, it’s a tougher town than Casper.”
    “Do you think that’s a tough town, sir?”
    “It’s an oil town. It’s a nice town.”
    “But I don’t think it’s tough, sir. Or ever was.”
    “O.K., Jackson. Maybe we move in different circles. Or maybe we have a differing definition for the word. But this town of Venice, with everybody being polite and having good manners, is as tough as Cooke City, Montana, on the day they have the Old Timers’ Fish Fry.”
    “My idea of a tough town is Memphis.”
    “Not like Chicago, Jackson. Memphis is only tough if you are a Negro. Chicago is tough North, South, there isn’t any East, and West. But nobody has any manners. But in this country, if you ever want to know a really tough town where they eat wonderfully too, go to Bologna.”
    “I never was there.”
    “Well, there’s the Fiat garage where we leave the car,” the Colonel said. “You can leave the key at the office. They don’t steal. I’ll go in the bar while you park upstairs. They have people that will bring the bags.”
    “Is it okay to leave your gun and shooting gear in the trunk, sir?”
    “Sure. They don’t steal here. I told you that once.”
    “I wanted to take the necessary precaution, sir, on your valuable property.”
    “You’re so damned noble that sometimes you stink,” the Colonel said. “Get the wax out of your ears and hear what I say the first time.”
    “I heard you, sir,” Jackson said. The Colonel looked at him contemplatively and with the old deadliness.
    He sure is a mean son of a bitch, Jackson thought, and he can be so God-damn nice.
    “Get my and your bag out and park her up there and check your oil, your water and your tires,” the Colonel said, and walked across the oil and rubber stained cement of the entry of the bar.

CHAPTER VI
    IN THE bar, sitting at the first table as he came in, there was a post-war rich from Milan, fat and hard as only Milanese can be, sitting