Border Town Girl Read Online Free PDF

cigarettes.
    When the door was shut and he was alone, Lane Sanson unwrapped the paper and rolled a sheet into the machine. He made a drink and set it near him. He lit a cigarette.
    Across the top of the first sheet he typed: A Daughter of Many Kings.
    He sat for a long time, sipping the drink. When the glass was empty he began to work. The words came and they were the right words. After six years, the right words. He forgot time and place and fear.

 
5
     
    THE DC-3 RUN BY THE FEEDER LINE TO BAKER was a tired old plane. Inside it had the smell and the flavor commonly associated with old smoking cars on marginal railroads. It had sagged and blundered its way through storm and hail, freezing cold and blistering heat. It had fishtailed into a thousand inferior runways. The original motors were five changes back. The airframe was like the uppers of a pair of shoes resoled once too often.
    The bored pilot cut the corners off the standard approach pattern and slipped into the Baker strip. The tires leaped and squealed on the cracked concrete and he cursed it for being a weary recalcitrant old lady as he yanked it around and taxied it over to the cinderblock terminal building. The attendants came trotting across the baked cement. The little line prided itself on a ninety second turnaround. The poop sheet said two off and one on at Baker.
    The pilot squatted on his haunches under the wing, a cigarette squeezed between his yellowed fingers. The copilot had gone into the building for the initialing of the manifest.
    The pilot looked at the two passengers who got off. One of them was easy. Local cattleman, from the cream-colored Stetson right down to the hand-sewn boots. The other one was harder to figure. The pilot decided he wasn’t the sort you’d want to strike up any casual acquaintance with. Brute shoulders on him. Stocky bowed legs. Long arms. Damned if he wasn’t built like one of them apes. But it wasn’t an ape’s face. First you might think it was a face like a college professor’s. Those rimless glasses and that half-bald head. Some crackpot, probably. The zany little blue eyes beamed around at the world and the mouth was wide and wet-lipped, set in the kind of smile that made you think of the time the psychology class went over to the state farm and got a look at the real funny ones.
    Only, the pilot decided, you wouldn’t want to laugh at this one. He wasn’t dressed right for the climate in that heavy dark wool suit, but you wouldn’t want to laugh at him.
    The two suitcases were off-loaded and the new passenger was put aboard. The pilot flipped away his cigarette and went aboard. The steps were wheeled away. The hot motors caught immediately and he goosed it a few times. He trundled old Bertha down to the end of the runway. He glanced back. The funny-looking stranger was just getting into a cab. He looked like a big dark beetle, or like a hole in the sunlight
    Inside the cab Christy leaned back. The trip from New York had been like walking across a dark room toward one of those little tinfoil wrapped chocolate buds on the far side of the room. You wanted it and you knew it was there and you were thinking about it so you didn’t see anything in the room or think of anything except feeling it between your fingers and picking it up and peeling off the tinfoil and putting it in your mouth. And Christy was never without chocolate buds in his side pocket. He took one out but already the climate had gotten to it. It pulped a little between his fingers. The expression on his face made him look like a child about to cry. All the others were soft, too. He dropped them out the window of the cab. His hands were very large, hairless and very white. The network of veins under the skin had a blue-purple tint.
    He thought of Diana and he thought of George. He threw his head back and laughed. It was a high gasping, whinnying sound. George was done. You could see that coming for a long time. And so, when it looked right, you