All the Voices Cry Read Online Free PDF Page B

he had been thinking about the way Cynthia’s eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks.
    Maybe a brush with mortality was what Kelvin needed. Not the serious kind of brush that would leave you armless or tin-faced or worse, but the positive kind of cathartic full-length body shiver that made you relieved to be alive; eager to find out what was next. Initiation. Was that what it was about? Scarification rituals, raiding parties, controlled bloodletting and long walkabouts in cracked dry lands. Surely every culture had a way of galvanizing teenaged slothfulness into energetic adulthood? Brian had only to think of the Canadian way. He considered himself to have had his own brush with mortality at eighteen, when he’d worked a summer for his grandfather, a lumber-camp foreman in the age of the mechanized saw. Arguing and chain-smoking they had driven for hours into
northern Ontario until the cratered bush road finally brought them to a settlement of Quonset huts in a clearing. There a tribe of rank sweaty bears with chainsaws drove themselves day and night in the single-minded testosterone-fuelled ecstasy of a back-country lumber camp in full swing.
    A blaze had broken out in an adjacent sector and Brian remembered his entire body shaking as he stood mesmerized by the sight of crown fire leaping from tree to tree across the crest of the hill, roaring like a locomotive on the move. They had made a run for it in the truck, and days later Cynthia, still in her gin-fizz waitressing days, had wrapped her long arms around him when she heard the story, and had murmured something into the still smoky shirt (he had not washed it) and he had said, what? She had repeated the words, and he still had not understood, but he had pretended to. That had been the beginning of their relationship.
    Yes, a good galvanizing brush with death, that was what Kelvin needed. Not role-playing HriÞkringle the Bard of the Basement; not altercations with the pizza delivery man. But wait, hadn’t there been a school friend of Kelvin’s who had been sent home in a box from one of those places where you are thirsty all day? Now that Brian thought about it, that kind of thing could throw you off balance. Somalia or the Sudan? Cynthia would know. It was a pity that they were not talking.
    Obviously the woman behind the bar was not going to do anything but clean. Brian downed the last of the beer and, as he felt for his wallet, recalled tucking it under the floor mat of the car.

    He looked at the mopping woman, raising his open hands in a multilingual apologetic and exasperated shrug. Then he opened up his jacket and pointed at the empty space where the wallet ought to be. Surely she would understand that. He was just bringing his hand up into the gesture of an imaginary telephone and was considering how to mime that he would be back to pay after the automobile association had unlocked the car, when a man built like a fire hydrant emerged from the shadows, head butted him off his stool, shoved him back towards the door, grabbed him by the arm and tossed him out into the parking lot.
    Life flashing before your eyes and all that: there’s not as much time as you might think when you are being flung through the air. In Brian’s case all he experienced was a brief sensation of passing through a cool column of air followed by the impression that the gravel reached up and pulled him down, blasting its sharp points into his shoulder. All he managed to think was: and now my head goes down, which it did, hard.
    For some minutes Brian found himself unwilling to leave the horizontal world where the vertical mottled stripe of the parking lot softened into bulging green hillocks and where the rain apparently fell upwards like bubbles in an aquarium. Meanwhile the last battle of the cosmos had come upon him. Giants were uprooting burning trees out of his left temple and tossing them into a frazzled prism that had appeared in his right eye.
    He flinched and