Heat of Night Read Online Free PDF

right, Bea. All right.”
    “What’s this you promise?” Rosa said.
    “Nothing, Mama,” Al said. He turned, facing Juan. “Who is this guy? I’ll talk to him. This afternoon.”
    “Is not so simple,” Big Juan said again.
    “Why not?” Al stared at his father. He’d never heard the big man admit defeat before. It worried him. It was as if he returned after an eternity to find Big Juan old and feeble. He studied him, troubled. But Big Juan looked the same, physically as strong as ever. “Why you keep saying that?”
    Bea said, “Now, Al, if Juan wants to handle this his way, you just let him — ”
    “Shut up, Bea,” Al said across his shoulder.
    Big Juan padded to the screen door, stood staring at the glazed sheet of the bay and the churning Gulf beyond the channel. Clouds piled black along the horizon. There was the smell of a storm in the air.
    It was hot and still in the room. He turned his back on the clouds, stared at his family.
    “We try to talk to Dolores — you mama and me. Both try. But she say if we interfere, if we open our big mouth — this she say to her mama and me — she will run away and live by herself so she can see this man any time she like.”
    “This is why we got to be so careful, Alberto,” Rosa said, chewing at a hangnail.
    “Oh, she’s just gone nuts,” Al said. “A dame falls for some guy and she won’t listen to anybody. Beat her. Hell, take her over your knee, Papa, pull down her pants and beat hell out of her.”
    “Oh boy,” Bea said. “That’s what I love about you, Al. Your realistic approach to your problems.”
    “It’s what she needs,” he yelled at her.
    “Oh. Oh. Ohh.” Big Juan shook his head. Here was one of the first angles he’d discarded. “She’s got one big bad temper — ” he tried to smile — “must be she gets it from her mama. But I can see in her eyes. She would love to have me try this — try to beat her. Her eyes dared me. Just try to spank me, Papa, say her eyes. This is all she needs. She really walk out then…. We cannot stand to lose her. It would kill me…. I would not want to live if any one of my kids hated me. It is something I cannot take. All of you are more than my flesh and blood. Part of my heart — each of you. So we got to do something. But what? Is drive Rosa and me out of our senses.”
    “Keeps-a me cry,” Rosa said. “When I cry my nose runs. All the time, find myself crying, my nose running.”
    Al shook his head. “Well, if you can’t talk to Dolores, there’s the guy. If he’s in his thirties, he ought to have sense enough — ”
    “Do you have sense enough, Al Venzino?” Bea said. “Sense enough to what? Some men never get any sense. If you had good sense — ”
    “Ho boy,” Al said. “Here we go. What’s eating you now?”
    “You ogle every tramp you pass. All the time. You’re thirty. Have you got sense about women? Your tongue hangs out most of the time.”
    “So I look at the girls at the office. On the street. My God, am I blind or something?”
    “Oh no,” Bea said. “You’re not blind. I’ll swear to that. You’re not blind, all right.”
    Rosa shrugged, giving Alberto an indulgent smile. “Is one thing to look at pretty girls. But is another to be in love with them — to want to touch their pretties when you are twice as old.”
    Big Juan swallowed hard and turned away to the door again. He did not want them to see his eyes. He could not forget Ruby. That young Ruby, so young, and he had not realized he was getting so old and that girls could be so young, and they were lost to him like the free hot days on the Gulf were lost. He couldn’t get out of his mind the way she had undressed for him, her fingers frantic for she wanted him so terribly, and the way he had stared at her, so pretty and so open to him, and the way he had wanted it and knew nobody had touched her as he would touch her, and the way he had felt himself growing hot, crazy hot in the crazy night, gushing