Green shadows, white whale v5 Read Online Free PDF Page A

and Heeber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.
    "Heeber!" cried Mike. "We're here for that wild night!"
    "A wild night it is!"
    Whereupon Heeber whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air and slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.
    "Nail everything down till I get back!" he advised his crew. "I'm taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever! Little do they know what waits for them beyond!"
    He opened the door. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as a spur to rhetoric, Heeber added in a roar, "Out with you! On!"
    "Do you think we should?" I wondered.
    "What do you mean?" cried Mike. "Would you freeze in your room? Rewrite the dead Whale?"
    "Well . . . ," I said, and slung on my cap.
    Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Mike's car, took my legs apart to get in, and in no time we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley. Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering
    King Lear.
    "A wild night? Ahead! You'd never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?" "I knew there must be an outlet somewhere," I yelled. The speedometer was up to one hundred kilometers. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.
    "Outlet indeed!" said Finn. "If the Church only knew, or maybe it figures: The poor buggers! and lets us be!" "Where?"
    "There!" cried Finn.
    The speedometer read 110. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Up over a hill, down into a valley. "Can't we go a bit faster?" I asked, hoping for the opposite. "Done!" said Finn, and made it 120.
    "That will do it nicely," I said, in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Somewhere in this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir women bright as lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam? Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither with silk and tassel, the absolute perfect tint of women unadorned? We passed a church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old-men's thatch. No. Yet . . .
    I glanced over at Heeber Finn. We could have switched off the lights and driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at the dark, flicking away the rain.
    Wife, I thought to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night, terrible as it may be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and way out in Galway, where the dead must go to die.
    The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet; my nose mashed on the windshield. Heeber Finn was out of the car.
    "We're here!" He sounded like a man drowned deep in rain.
    I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.
    Mike and I followed at a plunge. I saw other cars in the dark and many bikes. But not a light. Oh, it must be wild to be this secret, I thought. I yanked my cap tight, as rain crawled down my neck.
    Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heeber clenching our elbows. "Here!" he husked. "Hold on. Swig on this to keep your blood high!"
    I felt a flask knock my fingers. I poured its contents into my boilers to let the steam up my flues.
    "It's a lovely rain," I said.
    "The man's mad." Finn drank after Mike, a shadow among shadows.
    I squinted about. I had an impression of midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides, heads down, muttering, in twos and threes.
    Good God, what's it all