Flight to Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

room was dim, with only
the bed light on. She came over and sat on the edge of the bed and
said, “There.”
    It was suddenly very much more than I’d
expected. When she was that near the true feeling of it struck me
and I reached for her hand. I made it as much of a gesture of
instinct as I could.
    We sat there holding hands. It was abruptly
ludicrous and I let it go. She moved closer to me and said, “It’s
all right. I think I know how you feel.” It was almost a
whisper.
     
    Leda was from a good family that had no money.
They’d put her through the best schools on their name. She was a
wild one and she showed it. A suppressed, combustible wildness. She
was the type you might wonder about having a knife sheathed in the
rim of her stocking. But you’d want to look, anyway. She seemed
greatly interested in art, but had the idea people would kill art.
They would kill the artist and he didn’t have a chance. Through
ignorance, through wanting something other than what the artist had
to offer.
    “ I don’t like persons like you,”
she said. “Because I saw it happen to father. All the fine things
he did went into the furnace. They heated the front
parlor.”
    “ Forget it.”
    “ You’ve got to have
money.”
    Her father had hung himself, and her mother
had gone to Germany before the war and joined the Nazi party for
excitement. She’d been a fancy collaborator and had her own radio
broadcast on a par with Axis Sally. She’d died in the explosion
when the station was bombed. Leda rather lauded her
mother.
    “ Really all right,” Leda said.
“Misplaced, that’s all.”
    So then she got her ideas about nursing and
here she was, a First Lieutenant in the Army. That was her
story.
    “ Help me fix the pillows so I can
sit up.”
    “ You feel strong tonight?” God, the
way she said those things.
    “ Very.”
    She stood beside the bed and leaned over me to
fix the pillows. I put my arms around her and drew her down and
kissed her. I put a lot of pressure into that kiss, holding her
down against me, and she started to let go. I knew that when she
did let go, put herself into the kiss, it was going to be
something. Her lips trembled and her breasts were against me and
her hair formed a kind of tent over my face. We were in the tent
together and it smelled good.
    “ Leda.”
    She fixed the pillows. I sat up against
them.
    “ Leda.”
    “ It was a trick,” she said. “You
shouldn’t have done it.” Her lids were still heavy. But beneath
those lids the blue of her eyes had changed to gray. She walked
over to the door. “Enjoy yourself.”
    “ Leda—”
    She went out. The door closed quietly and I
heard her crepe-soled shoes whisking down the hall.
     
    I lay there and though about home with Leda
all mixed up in it, her eyes, lips, and body drowning in the
daydream. Because I was afraid of sleep—afraid of the real
dream.
    There was Lenny Conn. I wondered if he had
changed; if he was still living on the bayou, fishing, and mowing
lawns. Did he still live in that shack with the pictures on the
walls? And the flat glass cases shelved in the mahogany cabinet
he’d made. Like collecting butterflies. Only they weren’t
butterflies. And I wondered where that subtle perversion of his had
led him. Women. Lenny Conn and his collection about which even the
law could do nothing. Lenny. Not very old and not very smart, of
backwoods heritage—but cruel. Cruel as the person who tears the
wings off flies and watches them squirm is cruel. Lenny Conn, whom
I had known most of my life, who had once been a conductor on a
Pullman train, who loved women in the blind groping darkness of a
fantastic wish, and who mowed our lawn and trimmed our hedges.
Wily, at times inscrutable, clever and secret and laughable. Lenny,
along the shoals in a skiff with a gig in this hand, watching for
flounder. Lenny, who was unable to comprehend why the Garths lived
in a huge old pillared home with live oaks and drives and misery
when he