Skinned Alive Read Online Free PDF

him in the back seat.
    They all introduced themselves. Her name was Sue. “Sue Helen, if you must know,” she said. She was wearing an adultbeehive hairdo perched imposingly over a small heart-shaped face with tiny features. On the street, in her heels and tight skirt and beehive she’d looked like an adult in her early twenties, even a young mother, but now Howard could see it was all just pretense and she was only sixteen or seventeen, like them.
    Soon they were in a bar, peering into a jukebox bubbling warmly and brilliantly under their red hands as they studied its magic charts and made their choices. Sue Helen sat with them in the highbacked booth and told them her sad story, how her mother had remarried and her stepdad was an Adventist who thought she was a sinner and a slut and how she had a job as a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman but she couldn’t sell anything, the women in Ely were all too poor and overworked and they wore cheap housedresses and curlers and had big butts and didn’t even use any makeup. Sue Helen said, “You guys are so … different. You’re so kind and speak so educated. I’d love to go to Chicago. People say it’s different.”
    Soon Otis was dancing with Sue Helen to a slow tune sung by Brenda Lee. Danny had shrunk back inside himself. His smile had faded. He’d looked at Otis with admiration. Maybe Danny had been attracted to Otis but had been afraid to show it, so he’d turned to Howard instead, as a substitute. Of course Howard had no evidence to go on; he continued building these castles with matchsticks but they kept tottering and collapsing.
    Howard already missed the sweet hot pulp of blueberries the day they’d found a patch and eaten them just as fast as they could pick them. He knew the woods would start filling up with snow in just six or seven weeks. Soon there’d be no paradise to regain. He could hear the lonely laughter of the loons. He could picture Danny’s naked body twisting and turning that one hot night as he moaned in his sleep, goaded by mosquitoes.
    After all that time in the wilderness the lights almost hurt and people’s voices seemed unbearably loud. Sue Helen looked minuscule in Otis’s arms. His eyes were closed as they slow danced but when he turned her around Howard could see hers were wide open.

Running on Empty
    On the charter flight from Paris to New York Luke sat on the aisle. Next to him, in the center seat, was a man in his mid-twenties from the French Alps, where his parents owned a small hotel for skiers. He said he cooked all winter in the hotel and then took quite a long vacation every spring. This year it was the States, since the dollar was so low.
    “Not
that
low,” Luke said when Sylvain mentioned he had only a hundred dollars with him for a five-week stay.
    They were speaking French, since Sylvain confessed he couldn’t get through even one sentence in English. Sylvain smiled and Luke envied him his looks, his health, even his youth, although that was absurd, since Luke himself was barely twenty-nine.
    Next to Sylvain, by the window, sat a nun with an eager, intelligent face. Soon she had joined in the conversation. She was Sister Julia, an American, though a member of a French convent for a reason she never explained, despite their nonstopchatter for the seven and a half hours they were in the air. Her French was excellent, much better than Luke’s. He noticed that Sylvain talked to her with all the grace notes kept in, whereas with Luke he simplified down to the main melody.
    It turned out Luke and Sister Julia had both been in France for four years. Of course a convent was a “total immersion,” undreamed of even by Berlitz. Nevertheless Luke was embarrassed to admit to his seat partners that he was a translator. From French to English, to be sure. It was pointless to explain to this handsome, confident Sylvain that a translator must be better in the “into language” than in the “out-of language,” that a translator