Bright Orange for the Shroud Read Online Free PDF

salvage down the middle with the victim—who, without the services ofMcGee, would have had to settle for nothing, which, as I have often pointed out, is considerably less than half.
    It isn’t a very respectable dedication. So just say it’s a living. Sometimes I get a very faint echo of the knight errant psychosis. And try to make more out of it than is there. But everybody’s hall closet is full of lances and shields and other tourney gear. The guy who sells you insurance gets singed by his own secret kind of dragon breath. And his own Maid Marian yoo-hoos him back to the castle tower.
    Maybe, somewhere along the line, I could have gone the other route. But you get a taste for the hunt. You keep wondering how close the next one is going to get to you. And you have to see. And nothing can slow the reflexes like the weight of mortgages, withholding, connubial contentment, estate program, regular checkups and puttering around your own lawn.
    But now they are phasing out the hunters. Within this big complex culture, full of diodes, paperclips, account numbers, they are earnestly boarding up the holes, sealing the conduits, installing bugs and alarms in every corridor. In a few years there’ll be no room left for the likes of McGee. They’ll grab him, carry him away and adjust him to reality, and put him to work at something useful in one of the little cubicles in the giant structure.
    So who are you to think of a fuller life for Miss Chookie McCall?
    “Could it have worked out with Arthur?” I asked her.
    She shrugged those strong shoulders. “He’s almost five years older, but he seemed kind of like a kid. I don’t know. So considerate and so … grateful. He was getting to be a better lover. It was like at first, getting him to think things were hisidea. Trav, honest to God, what was I supposed to do? Ask him to please come to Jacksonville with me? I mean there’s pride too. He wanted to. But he thought it wouldn’t be right. I wanted him there. Maybe it was like putting up a wall, a little at a time, shutting out the hurt from Frankie. Maybe we could have made the wall thick enough and tall enough. Maybe not. Maybe when Frankie came back, it would have been the same for me, Arthur or no Arthur, Frankie crooking his finger and I crawl to him. I won’t ever know, will I, because Arthur didn’t go up to Jax with me, and so we didn’t have that three weeks and we didn’t have the four months back here before Frankie came back, broke and sick and mean as a basket of snakes. I came back and Wilma had Arthur skinned and nailed to the bar, and the son of a bitch shook hands with me as if he couldn’t remember my name. Pride still counts with me. I am not going to be a damned rescue mission, Trav. Believe me. Go look for a little mother somewhere else. He made his lousy choice.”
    “Okay. I see your point. But just stop by the boat and take a look at him.”
    “No! You don’t get clever with me. Once in Akron the dressing room was alive with mice, and I set a trap. All it did was maim one little bastard, and three weeks later, after I got him back on his feet, I turned him loose. He’d lick peanut butter off my fingertip. Trav, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Arthur.”

Three
    When I got back to the
Busted Flush
with Chook, Arthur Wilkinson was as I had left him, the note still there. I put on the overhead light. I heard her suck air. Her strong cool fingers clamped on my hand. I looked at her thoughtful profile, saw her tanned forehead knotted into a frown, white teeth indenting her lower lip. I turned the light off and turned her, and we went back to the lounge, two closed doors between us and Arthur.
    “You should get a doctor to look at him!” she said indignantly.
    “Maybe. Later on. No fever. He passed out, as I told you, but he said he just felt faint. Malnutrition is my guess.”
    “Maybe you got a license to practice? Trav, he looks so horrible! Like a skull, like he was dying instead of sleeping.