Open Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

dominance in a subset of the primate family. Again, the girl took a shag of his hair. His hair had been cropped short in the Navy but it was growing out in a wild black halo. She ripped a tight clump of it. The roots came out whole, rounded, like tiny white pupae.
    He butted her face.
    She circled her fingertips over her cheekbone where a little egg was rising. Willis touched her cheek, inspecting her sore spot. He said, “Miss, that’s a shiner in the works.”
    “Willis Pratt, are you serious? A black eye?”
    “I regret it,” he said.
    “Wait a minute. What did you call me? Did you forget my name?”
    He said, “I was talking about your eye.”
    “Fuck that. What’s my name?”
    “I didn’t forget.”
    “Say it,” she said.
    “Look. If ‘Miss’ is too formal for you—” He shoved herthrough the traffic and back onto the sidewalk, away from the onlookers. She shrieked and ran ahead of Willis. He was right behind her, stepping on the heels of her cream-colored shoes. When she turned to face him, she was standing in her stocking feet. She was a tiny girl, and in her tights she looked like a pixie who had lost all her magical abilities. She was helpless against her own bad temper until she grabbed a rock from the gutter, a chunk of pink curbstone. She crashed it down on Willis Pratt’s arm.
    His plaster cast released a small puff of dust.
    “Apologize for that,” Willis said.
    She laughed with pleasure. She jabbed the sharp rock at Willis, weaving her arm back and forth in a cobra’s zigzag. Plaster chalk sifted over his jeans. She went for his face, but he lifted his heavy white arm across his eyes. She hammered the cast with metered accuracy until the bone-colored fabric ripped open. The plaster was pulverized, revealing the mesh wrappings, the inner fluff, and a tattered gauze sock.
    A swell of white powder drifted in the still air.
    She dropped the rock at her feet. Her jaw fell open, then she shut her mouth.
    Willis waited for the pain to level off, testing its edge and duration. His arm was blazing with ripped nerves. He recognized a possible setback in his recuperation. Perhaps it was a major setback. His mending fracture felt freshly skewed. Without his trying, a twenty-milligram morphine sulfite suppository surfaced as a vision. Rennie’s heavenly wax nugget: one end was tapered, the other end had an indentation for his fingertip. He acknowledged the pharmaceutical ingenuity behind the notch for his index finger.
    The girl went back to where her shoes had come off. She toed them over and slipped them on. She went around a parked car and waited on the other side.
    He walked over to her. “Settle down,” he said.
    She didn’t say anything. Her lips made a two-inch crease.
    “Listen to yourself,” he said.
    She crossed her arms and lifted her chin, then dropped her face and squinted at him.
    “Do you hear what you’re saying?” he told her.
    “I didn’t say shit.”
    “The language I’m hearing. From a nurse,” Willis said. The tremolo in his voice was unrehearsed and added authenticity to his reprisals. The nursing student looked suddenly dazed, like a sparrow after it hits a plate-glass window. She was ashamed of her assault and the wounds she had delivered.
    Willis reached into one of the parked cars, touching the radio knobs with his left hand.
    “From Pilgrims Landing, it’s WPLM. ‘Sophisticated Swing.’ ”
    He didn’t have a key for the ignition. The radio was dead.
    “Musical methadone for your nostalgia addiction,” he said. Willis learned every kind of radio patter; he had an automatic memory for whatever came across the air waves. Yet his words were broken off. Pain was causing his lungs to tighten in a mock asthmatic reaction.
    “It’s me, honey, your dean of déjà vu,” he told her. He started to sing. He was singing ragged phrases.
    “Make the world go away. Get it off my shoul-ders. Get it OFF MY SHOUL-DERS.”
    A mist of sweat sparkled along his eyebrows.