Summer Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page A

in seeing her secret, disguised as thin fire, leap naked between herself, who knew, and someone else, who might discover.
    “Thanks, kid,” he said, accepting the new cigarette. “You’re a good kid: you didn’t nigger-lip it. I’m just in a lousy mood, that’s all. I shouldn’t ought to sleep like that. I was having dreams.”
    “I hope I was in them.”
    “I don’t remember nothing I dream,” he said, rubbing his chin as though he needed a shave. “So tell me, did you get them off, your folks?”
    “Just now—Apple wanted me to drive her home, and an old friend showed up: it was very confused, I came straight from the pier.”
    “There’s an old friend of mine I’d like to show up,” he said, and spit on the ground. “Mink. You know Mink? I told you, the guy I was in the army with. On account of what you said, I said for him to come around and take over this afternoon. The bastard owes me two bucks: I told him if he’d come around I’d forget it. So, baby,” his reaching hand touched the cool silk of her blouse, “unless the guy shows up,” and then, with a gentle pressure, slipped to her breast, “I guess I’m stuck here.” They regarded each other silently for as long as it took a tear of sweat to slide from the top of his forehead down the length of his cheek. “I missed you,” he said. And he would have said something more if a customer had not come rolling into the lot.
    Three ladies from Westchester, in for lunch and a matinee; Grady sat in the car and waited while Clyde went to attend them. She liked the way he walked, the way his legs seemed to take their time, each step lazily spaced and oddly loping: it was the walk of a tall man. But Clyde was not much taller than herself. Around the parking lot he always wore a pair of summer khakis and a flannel shirt or an old sweater: it was a kind of dress better looking and far more suitable tohim than the suit he was so proud of. He was usually wearing this suit, a double-breasted blue pin-stripe, whenever he appeared in her dreams; she could not imagine why; but for that matter, her dreams about him were unreasonable anyway. In them she was perpetually the spectator, and he was with someone else, some other girl, and they would walk past, smirking disdainfully or dismissing her by looking the other way: the humiliation was great, her jealousy greater, it was unreasonable; still, her anxiety had some basis: two or three times she was sure he had taken her car out driving, and once, after she had left the car there overnight, she had found lodged between the cushions a garish little compact, decidedly not her own. But she did not mention these things to Clyde; she kept the compact and never spoke of it.
    “Ain’t you Manzer’s girl?” She had been dialing for music on the radio; she had not heard anyone approach, and so it was startling when she looked up and found a man leaning against the car, his eyes screwed on her and half his mouth crooked in a smile that showed a gold tooth and a silver one. “I said, you’re Manzer’s girl, huh? We saw the picture of you in the magazine. That was a good picture. My girl Winifred (Manzer tell you about Winifred?), she liked that picture a lot. You think the guy that took it would take one of her? It’d give her a big kick.” Grady could only look at him;and that, hardly: for he was like a fat quivering baby grown with freakish suddenness to the size of an ox: his eyes popped and his lips sagged. “I’m Mink,” he said, and pulled out a cigarette which Grady allowed him to light: she began blowing the car-horn as loud as she could.
    Clyde could never be hurried; after parking the Westchester car he ambled over at his own convenience. “What the hell’s the racket?” he said.
    “This man, well, he’s here.”
    “So, you think I can’t see that? Hiya, Mink.” Turning away from her, he brought his attention to the floury smiling face of Mink, and Grady resumed her efforts with the radio: