Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Online Free PDF

didgeridoo. His voice had an inhumanly consistent warble to it, and the pitch of his laughter fluctuated uniformly around a stable root note, the way an electron from the tightest shell buzzes around a nucleus. And then he started to really sing. As in a song. In French. I didn’t have any idea what the song was, but it was definitely French and doleful and minor in key.
    By the start of the third verse I was thinking of Allison and wondering if she ever considered marrying me and having a kid instead of doing something really stupid like going to college? I pictured her, baby Simone, and myself living happily, simply, on a houseboat in Paris. Apparently, one of us has just been commissioned to paint a soon-to-be legendary mural (it must be Allison because I don’t paint). And just in the nick of time. Both scenes, the imagined and the real, got me choked up.
    Little Big Man affectionately lifted his meathooks from my arm and listened as Paul’s voice rallied unconventionally through a coda that he faded on naturally. You could have heard a pin drop, even on the carpet. Through the kaleidoscope of my tears I could see thatPaul was crying. Then he got up, apologized to Little Big Man and left the room for the remainder of the semester.
    * * *
    They herded the students, one class at a time, into the main assembly hall for a talk about suicide. They served up the pedestrian stuff about looking for signs of depression in our friends, how we should turn to God for strength in prayer, and how we shouldn’t hesitate to tell a teacher or another “grown-up” if we thought someone was “not okay.” Shit, I didn’t know anyone who was really okay, but I wasn’t talking.
    Ms. Duchampe, a crunchy leftover Jesus freak from the 70s, emceed the assembly. We were just glad to be missing class. I could feel Allison somewhere close to me even before I spotted her. She was resting her ear on her hand, and I could make out the wire from a single earphone running along her fingers, vanishing into her shirtsleeve. Oh, to be that wire upon her gloved hand. Her head and shoulders swayed ever so slightly as she flexed and relaxed her thigh muscles to—I could have sworn—the rhythm of an ultra-tinny ‘How Soon is Now’.
    The panel on-stage was peopled by our principal Father Clarey (whose talk was interrupted here andthere by his own winces and audible grunts of pain, just some of the perks from a recent and tricky urological procedure), Miss Hall (the ambiguously sexual, ambiguously qualified Gym/Health teacher), and a phantom corpse of a nun known only as Mumbles (who was apparently the school nurse).
    Duchampe was kind of hot for a hippie. She looked like an oily-skinned, blonde-haired version of Gloria Steinem’s stunt double. She had far-reaching bad breath that was, for lack of a better word, arousing. Something was changing in me, because before that semester, I would have thought a glimpse (or sniff) of Duchampe’s humanness would have been an instant attraction killer, the way an otherwise fine person’s ugly laugh can disqualify them from the list of those worthy of being loved. But her terrible breath made her sexy and I was learning to go with it.
    A couple of the girls in class considered Duchampe their buddy and told her she’d be gorgeous with some newer clothes, an updated hairstyle and a little help from Miss Clairol or Maybelline. Duchampe had been to Altamont, and that meant she was open-minded. I got to sleep more than once jerking off to a fictional, innuendo-heavy rendition of a very real talking-to she’d dealt my way.
    “We’re going to have to do something about your tardiness, now aren’t we?” In reality, it was worded quitedifferently, and she did not chew her eyeglasses which were textbook John Denver wire jobs, not tortoise.
    “Oh, yes we are,” I’d pant toward the ceiling, at the luminescent constellation of sticker stars left over from my childhood, as bare feet interrupted the lamplight that