Manifesto for the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

girl’s death had seemed remote, but now he wondered about her, and who she might have been. He felt again tainted with guilt. The sun was like a white light inside his head; he felt pain deep inside his stomach. He did not want to go back down to his room on the Strip, not now. A man emerged on the street ahead of him. He was tall and thin and moved with quick steps, angling through the street hustlers, coming at him through the rising fumes. The Okie, Thompson thought. The man wanted his keys back, his car, his corpse. But the man was not the Okie at all; he looked emptily at Thompson, crossed the street, kept on going.
    Thompson felt the foreboding again, a trap about to spring. Planets misaligning, stars falling out of the sky.
    He tried to shake the feeling. He staggered up the hill to the penthouse, where Alberta would be waiting, like she always waited, he told himself, scrubbed clean, in her dress with her string of pearls, and her hair done perfect, and while he thought about her, he caught again the fragrance of the sweater, and felt an erection growing against all odds, sadly, morosely, emerging from the nowhere like a tombstone from the grass.

SEVEN
    He found Alberta in the living room. The light outside had begun to shift, and she looked pretty on the couch, in her loose cotton dress. He sensed the leanness of her body, and its softness too. Her face had aged, but unlike him, her muscles hadn’t yet gone to hell. She didn’t drink, and her eyes were still clear, though that clearness could be a sharpness sometimes, and her eyes seemed to strike everything she saw.
    She smiled to herself, knowing he watched her. There was something alluring in that smile, something bitter.
    â€œHoney?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI’ve got good news.” He sat down beside her and put his hand on her leg.
    â€œWhat news is that?”
    â€œWe don’t have to move.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI’ve got the deal all but made. With Miracle. It’s a sure thing.”
    He’d drunk too much. It was a tricky business, to maintain your balance. To walk the old beam. Too little, you got the shakes. Too much, and the whole world shook. He’d waltzed along pretty well for quite a while since his last tumble, two years ago, maybe three, but now that beam was narrowing down.
    â€œYour sister called from Lincoln.”
    Alberta got up angrily.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    â€œI broke a nail.”
    That wasn’t it. She’d broken a million nails. She was mad because they were leaving the penthouse. It all went back to that son of a bitch Lombard. If he hadn’t scuttled me that first time around, I wouldn’t be in this position now.
    â€œMiracle’s giving me two thousand.”
    â€œIt’s not enough. We still have to move.”
    â€œIt will hold us over. Until something bigger.”
    â€œSomething bigger’s not coming.”
    â€œWhat do you expect me to do?”
    â€œWhy don’t you have yourself a drink?”
    â€œI haven’t been drinking. I don’t know how you could say something like that.”
    â€œNo. You haven’t been drinking. I don’t have two feet. And birds don’t fly. I see how it is.”
    For an instant, despite everything, he felt like murdering her. Pushing her off the cliff, into the gray Pacific.
    â€œWhat did my sister want?”
    He studied her face. Then he put his hand under her shift. In the old days, when they were younger, that would have been the end of it, they would have tumbled backwards onto the couch. Now the longer they sat there like that, his hands caressing her leg, the more still and quiet she became, until it seemed she was not breathing at all, and in that silence there was again that question she’d asked him the other day.
    Why?
    It wasn’t just one question, but a million, and the answer seemed to rest in that space between her legs, where the light