Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.
    Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack’s good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn’t seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car but left the engine running. Carl slept for a time in Jack’s study, but one night when Miriam couldn’t sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.
    One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn’t stimulate him properly. Miriam didn’t think highly of Carl’s ideas but this one didn’t seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl’s truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn’t like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.
    “Nothing’s going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”
    “Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.
    Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack’s wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.
    Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug in the deer-foot lamp. Clearly, this would be the high point of each day for it.
    They took to the road that night and didn’t stop driving until daylight disclosed that the landscape had changed considerably. There was a great deal of broken glass and huge cactus everywhere. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus and prickly pear. Strange and stern shapes, far stiller than trees, less friendly and willing to serve. They seemed to be waiting for further transition, another awesome shift of the earth’s plates, an enormous occurrence. The sun bathed each spine, it sharpened the smashed bottles and threw itself through the large delicate ears of car-crushed jackrabbits. They saw few people and no animals except dead ones. The land was vast and still and there seemed to be considerable resentment toward the nonhumancreatures who struggled to inhabit it. Dead coyotes and hawks were nailed to fence posts and the road was hammered with the remains of lizards and snakes. Miriam was glad that the lamp was covered and did not have to suffer these sights.
    The first night they stopped at a motel, with a Chinese restaurant and lounge adjoining. Miriam ordered
moo goo gai pan
for dinner, something she had not had since she was a child, and an orange soda. Carl fed Jack some select tidbits from an appetizer platter with a pair of chopsticks. After they ate Miriam wandered into the lounge, but there was only a cat vigorously cleaning itself who stared at her