Jericho Read Online Free PDF Page A

almost slipped in what we call hummer juice. The police had to burn coffee on the stove to try to get rid of the smell. Me, I usually smoke several cigarettes right in a row as soon as it’s done, even though I don’t smoke at all other times and never have.
    One night that summer I was down in the prep room and I saw blonde hair peeking out from under a sheet. I got curious and I pulled the sheet back to look. There was an attractive young woman with her faced fixed in horror. I know that’s a cliché but here it’s true. Usually facial features relax at death and you can’t tell if the person was smiling or in pain or frightened or whatever. I was shocked by the look I saw on her face. Turning to Mr. Steenrod, I asked him the cause of death. “Gunshot wound,” he said. I looked and it was true; you could see where the bullet went in, right below the collarbone on the right-hand side.
    Then I got my second surprise. Mr. Steenrod, who usually kept his thoughts to himself, said it looked like a posthumous referral from that fellow everyone used to call Boots. I still didn’t let on like I knew anything.
    I read in the newspaper that there was a war going on among the drug dealers in the Downtown Eastside and that the Asian ones were killing the anglo ones and vice versa. One side was favoured but I don’t remember which one, it’s been so long. Steenrod’s was starting to get some of its business back. But I asked myself: at what price?
    They say everybody has two homes: his real one, and Snaketown. That’s what they say, because everyone needs two places to be from, one for every day and one for company,a place to reap and a place to sow, a halfway house and a safe house. Snaketown was zoned for healing. With so many other places to be, why be there? Well, Snaketown was where people went for excitement in those days. It was one contradiction that made them feel like they was whole. It made order out of the confusion they’d bring down on ourselves. Only archetypes lived there. (You think I don’t know that word but that shows how ignorant you are about me. I am a largely self-educated man, a student of Walt Whitman and others like that.) Look in the phone book if you don’t believe me. Only archetypes need apply.
    How did Snaketown get its name? Legend says that long before the Europeans, when the cries in the night were natural cries and wolves made discreet enquiries, the snakes would come down to the riverbank and mate and sign their names in the sand with a flourish. You dig?
Snaketown
is a translation of something the Indians used to call the spot. That’s the folklore anyway. Personally, I think the district was first and the name came later. In its heyday, Snaketown was a place that really slithered. Ask anyone who was around back then. Any of the elder reptiles will confirm what I’m telling you. Try looking under the Snaketown Bridge where the people without homes go to be alone. Or ask around the lobby of the Dempster Fireproof Hotel, which once boasted eighty sleeping rooms, most with running water and no questions asked.
    Snaketown was really a riverside district after the prospects disappeared down the drain. On a summer day, the whole place wavered in the heat, uncertain, cagey-like. At night the neon came on. Fall meant the start of death but it was also when the streets got most alive. I wonder what it looked likefrom the air. Probably either too dark or too bright to see. All the play was inside, and people pined for anyone who could question the reason for anything. There were joints you had to climb down into from street level and others you had to take some old freight elevator up to and then knock very loud on a steel fire door. Inside there was always a party-for-pay. I see a leaf suspended in a spider’s web, the ends like fingers in rigor. Do they point or do they, like, beckon? The horizon crops the image. The border is a black line across the eyes to hide the suspect’s