Ragged Company Read Online Free PDF

surprising the hell out of the three of us with a roll of bills the size of a good potato. Red Blazer’s eyes widen, too.
    “Ah, yes, well, I’m sure you will, ma’am,” he says waving at the young man in the booth to do business with us. “However, I’m not going to have any trouble from you, am I?”
    “Trouble?” Amelia says with an arch of one eyebrow. “Trouble? Feel much like trouble, boys?”
    We shake our heads. Wordless.
    “See? Way too cold out there for any of us to want any trouble in here.”
    “Yes. Yes. Good. That’s good. Well, I hope you enjoy the film,” Red Blazer says and waves us past.
    It’s like a scene from a movie itself. The four of us, clearly rough and tattered, walking slowly along this dimly lit corridor, our feet kinda scuffing over the carpet that sinks beneath us. No one says nothing. I don’t know about the rest but me, I’m shocked. Shocked by the sudden way the world you think you know can disappear on you. We move along this corridor where they got little signs telling you which picture’s playing in which room until we get to the next to last one that reads
Wings of Desire.
Can’t tell much from the sign, just a man’s face on a big blue backgroundand some kind of wings behind him. Me, I figure a good old-time war movie or even a romance about pilots. But we walk in and we just stand there looking. It’s a lot smaller than the movie rooms I remember. Kinda like a big living room with a dozen rows of seats and maybe a twenty-foot screen at the front. There’s no one there. Well, there’s us and one other old guy, looks about sixty, sixty-five. He’s all slicked up with a topcoat, hat, and a long looks-like-silk scarf. He one-times us from the corner of his eye but other than that there’s no reaction.
    The three of us take to eyeballing each other, waiting on Amelia to tell us where to go. My choice would be one of the back rows nearest the far wall so we can see the usher coming. Kinda hunker down over there and fade into the background. That’d be my choice. But Amelia starts down the aisle and heads right into the same row as the old guy. Me ’n Digger give each other the look and follow right after. I figure it’s close enough to be in the same row as the only other guy in the theatre but Amelia slides right along and plops down two seats away from him.
    “Hey, mister,” she says, “cold enough for ya?”
    Well, I gotta give the guy credit. He was cool. Real cool. He just sits there, gives her a small grin, goes “Ahem,” and moves on over one seat. No drama, no over-the-top freak-out or nothing, just goes “Ahem” and slides over. Cool.
    That would have been the end of it and harmless enough, I guess, until Amelia looks at him for a few seconds, goes “Ahem” herself, and slides over one seat too. Well, I about fell over. I figure now the heat’s gonna be on us for sure. This old guy’s gonna scurry off after Red Blazer himself and we’ll be back in the deep freeze again lickety-split. But the guy’s cool. He sits there, looks over at Amelia, looks over at the three of us standing there in the row like storefront dummies, nods once, looks at the screen, and starts playing with the buttons on his topcoat. That’s it. Just fiddles with his buttons.
    Amelia nods at us and we kinda fall into our seats—Dick right beside her, me in the middle, and Digger at the end closest to the aisle.
    “What the fuck?” Digger whispers to me.
    “I don’t know,” I say.
    And I sit back and look around and I can feel that feeling again. I feel dreamlike. But there’s no panic in it. No need to run away from this. Instead, it’s like that last light over the fields on the farm. The dividing line between day and night. That time when every sound you hear, from the cows mooing in the fields to the clink of the sink through the window to the creak of the porch chair you sit in, becomes another colour in the deep blue bowl of evening. Everything, even you, all