After the Plague Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the barstools beside him). “Listen, I was just wondering if you might want to join me down at Clubber’s for a while. Yeah, I know, you need your sleep and the big day’s the day after tomorrow and Zinny Bauer’s probably already asleep, but how about it. Come on. It’s my birthday.”
    â€œYour birthday? I thought your birthday was in December?”
    There was the ghost of a pause during which she could detect the usual wash of background noise, drunken voices crying out as if from the netherworld, the competing announcers of the six different games unfolding simultaneously on the twelve big-screen TVs, the insistent pulse of the jukebox thumping faintly beneath it all. “No,” he said, “my birthday’s today, August twenty-sixth—it is. I don’t know where you got the idea it was in December … but come on, babe, don’t you have to load up on carbohydrates?”
    She did. She admitted it. “I was going to make pancakes and penne,” she said, “with a little cheese sauce and maybe a loaf of that brown-and-serve bread… .”
    â€œI’ll take you to the Pasta Bowl, all you can eat—and I swear I’ll have you back by eleven.” He lowered his voice. “And no sex, I know—I wouldn’t want to drain you or anything.”
    She wasn’t soft because she ran forty-five miles a week, biked two hundred and fifty, and slashed through fifteen thousand yards of the crawl in the Baños del Mar pool. She was in the best shape of her life, and Sunday’s event was nothing, less than half the total distance of the big one—the Hawaii Ironman—in October. She wasn’t soft because she’d finished second in the women’s division last year in Hawaii and forty-fourth over all, beating out a thousand three hundred and fifty other contestants, twelve hundred of whom, give or take a few, were men. Like Jason. Only fitter. A whole lot fitter.
    She swung by Clubber’s to pick him up—he wasn’t driving, not since his last D.U.I., anyway—and though parking was no problem, she had to endure the stench of cigarettes and the faint sour odor of yesterday’s vomit while he finished his cocktail andwrapped up his ongoing analysis of the Dodgers’ chances with an abstract point about a blister on somebody or other’s middle finger. The guy they called Little Drake, white-haired at thirty-six and with a face that reminded her of one of those naked drooping dogs, leaned out of his Hawaiian shirt and into the radius of Jason’s gesticulating hands as if he’d never heard such wisdom in his life. And Paula? She stood there at the bar in her shorts and Lycra halter top, sucking an Evian through a straw while the sports fans furtively admired her pecs and lats and the hard hammered musculature of her legs, for all the world a babe. She didn’t mind. In fact, it made her feel luminous and alive, not to mention vastly superior to all those pale lumps of flesh sprouting out of the corners like toadstools and the sagging abrasive girlfriends who hung on their arms and tried to feign interest in whatever sport happened to be on the tube.
    But somebody was talking to her, Little Drake, it was Little Drake, leaning across Jason and addressing her as if she were one of them. “So Paula,” he was saying. “Paula?”
    She swivelled her head toward him, hungry now, impatient. She didn’t want to hang around the bar and schmooze about Tommy Lasorda and O.J. and Proposition 187 and how Phil Aguirre had broken both legs and his collarbone in the surf at Rincon; she wanted to go to the Pasta Bowl and carbo-load. “Yes?” she said, trying to be civil, for Jason’s sake.
    â€œYou going to put them to shame on Sunday, or what?”
    Jason was snubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, collecting his money from the bar. They were on their way out the door—in ten