Bright Orange for the Shroud Read Online Free PDF Page A

keeps telling me he can’t stand it, he’s got to do something.” She sighed. “But there’s nothing he can do. Maybe … when he gets out, he’ll be ready to settle down. Let’s get out of here.”
    Miss Agnes drifted us silently over to the mainland, to the Open Range, a place disfigured by mass production Texas folk art, steer horns, branding irons, saddle hardware, coiled lariats and bullwhips. But the booths are deep and padded, the lights low, the steaks prime and huge. Chook ordered hers so raw I was grateful for the low candlepower of the booth lamp. I invested some additional ditch-Arthur money in a bottle of burgundy. I have seen Chook under other circumstances do thesocial-eating routine. But with me she could follow her inclination and eat in the busy, dedicated, appreciative silence of a farmhand or roustabout, chugging her way deftly through tossed, baked and extra rare, and at last leaning back from the emptiness to give me an absent, dreamy smile, and stifle a generous belch.
    Judging I was at the exact moment, I said, “Small favor?”
    “Anything at all, Trav darling.”
    “I’m cutting you in on a lame duck who showed up. In bad, bad shape. It would be sort of for old time’s sake for you.”
    “Who?”
    “Arthur Wilkinson.”
    I thought I saw a momentary softness in her eyes before they turned fierce. She leaned forward. “I tell you what I am not. I am not a trash basket. I am no place you can dump the leavings from that pig.”
    “Put your wheels down, Chookie. Who’s the most naïve little chick in your troupe?”
    “Huh? Well … Mary Lou King.”
    “She engaged?”
    “Sort of. What is this, anyway?”
    “Now suppose say … Rock Hudson came barreling in at her, all guns blazing. What would Mary Lou do?”
    Chook giggled. “Gawd, she’d roll over like a dead bug.”
    “I’m under a handicap. I never did find out what status you reached with Arthur. He’d never volunteer that sort of information, as you well know. It was my guess it got pretty humid.”
    She studied her nails. “When Frankie took off that time, he busted my place up before he went. Everything. He even tore up my scrapbooks. He said I’d never lay eyes on him again aslong as I lived. And I don’t even know what it was we were fighting about. Okay, so I needed a gentle guy. Not for sex. I’m not cold—maybe I’m more the other way than I should be, but, hell, I can always put on old music and dig out old routines and a practice uniform, work hard for a few hours and sleep like a baby.” She gave me a quick dark glance. “I guess I should be honest. Mostly it was to have somebody close, but that’s no reason to knock the other part of it. And maybe I was trying to use him to tear loose from Frankie. At first I told him all my lousy troubles. And we took some walks. And then after one walk, we ended up in my bed. And if I left it entirely up to Arthur, we wouldn’t have. I had to make it easy for him without letting him catch on to what I was doing. You know me, Trav. I’m not a pig. I suppose … if I taught third grade in Webster Falls, I wouldn’t last too long. But in the business I’m in … I’m thought square. You know?”
    “I know.”
    For just an instant I had a feeling of waste and loss. There was so much shrewdness, native intelligence, perception there. The awareness of self, undistorted, a virtue growing ever more rare in our times. It made you wonder what this creature of such vast vitality could have become if she had taken some other direction with her life. Too many of the good ones aren’t being used up all the way.
    But a little personal resonance got to me. Because I’d never found the right way of using myself up. So I had settled for a variation of the lush life, bumming along the golden strand until funds sagged too low, then venturing forth to clip the clip artists, wresting the stolen meat—legally stolen usually—out of the bandit jowls, then splitting the