Divisadero Read Online Free PDF

‘No.’
Tell—. ‘No.’ What am I like compared to her? ‘It was
just one night I slept with her.’ Ah good, you slept. She kissed him on
his doubtful face, then dressed and walked down the hill alone. Halfway home
she approached tears, but refused them. She tried to imagine sleeping with
anybody else. No one could ever know her as well as
Coop did. No one knew Coop as well as she did. She felt this gave her some power, in her walk down to her other life. She was sixteen
years old. Almost nothing.
    Anna went into Rex ’ s Hardware in Petaluma and bought a can of blue paint, a
speci fi c blue
to match the blue on one of the flags, and lugged it uphill to the cabin. Coop
brought his table out onto the deck. She eased the top off the can and stirred
the paint. The weather was strange that day, the heat interrupted by gusts of
wind, and they watched the fl ags bucking, almost breaking loose. Anna remembers every detail. She
wound up the gramophone for music. They waited to make love. She sanded down
the wood while conjugating French verbs out loud and then began painting the
table. All that colourless wood in the cabin had driven her mad, and this blue
was a gift for Coop. The wind died suddenly into silence and she looked up. The
sky was a dark green, the clouds turbulent like oil.
    Thunder exploded over the
deck while they were lying there, holding on to each other, as if it had come
down a funnel onto their nakedness. They didn’t dare let go. It felt to Anna
that whatever was in each of them had leapt out into the body of the other.
That she’d replaced her heart with Coop’s. She could hear nothing, the thunder
crash still in her ears. She was trembling in his arms. Then she saw a hand
come forward out of nowhere and grip the hair on Coop’s head and pull it back,
pull him off her, so that she saw sky for a moment and then her father’s head
looking down at her.
    He had ridden up to the
cabin to warn the boy of a storm, a possible tornado, had slipped off his
quarter horse that was shying under the claps of thunder, and walked round the
cabin onto the deck. It was not embarrassment that overcame him at that moment,
but a fear. He picked up his daughter, naked as an infant, by her shoulders and fl ung her off the deck
onto the slope of wet earth. Coop stood there not moving. Her father walked
towards him, with a three-legged stool, and swung it into his face. The boy
fell back through the collapsing wall of glass into the cabin. Then he stood up
slowly and turned to look at the man who had raised him, who was now coming
towards him again. He didn’t move. Another blow on his chest knocked him onto
his back. Anna began screaming. She saw Coop’s strange submissiveness, saw her
father attack Coop’s beautiful strong face as if that were the cause, as if in
this way he could remove what had happened. Then her father was kneeling above
Coop, reaching for the stool again and smashing it down, until the body was
completely still.
    Coming out of shock,
realizing that her father was not going to stop, that he was going to kill him,
Anna ran onto the deck and tried to pull her father away. But she could not
separate them. Coop looked unconscious, wasn’t moving. The stool came down hard
on his chest once more, and blood came out of his mouth. Again she tried to
embrace her father and pull him away from the body, but she was nothing against
his strength. She turned away from him, lifted a large shard of glass and
pierced it into his shoulder, pushing it deeper and deeper into his fl esh through the checkered shirt. There
was a sound like that from a bull, and he turned and struck her with an arm
that now held only half its power. He looked backwards and saw the triangle of
glass still in him. Anna evaded him until her nakedness was between him and
Coop. Her lover. Again her father swept her away.
Again she put herself between her father and Coop’s body. His strong left arm
came up slowly and clutched her neck and