Sunset Limited Read Online Free PDF

Dave?” she said.
    “My dad and I did.”
    “He was crucified?”
    “It happened a long time ago, Alf.”
    “The people who did it never got caught? That’s sickening.”
    “Maybe they took their own fall down the road. They all do, one way or another.”
    “It’s not enough.” Her face seemed heated, pinched, as though by an old memory.
    “You want some help cleaning those fish?” I asked.
    Her eyes looked at me again, then cleared. “What would you do if I said yeah?” she asked. She swung the stringer so it touched the end of my polished loafer.
     
    “MEGAN WANTS ME TO get her inside the jail to take pictures?” I said to Bootsie in the kitchen.
    “She seems to think you’re a pretty influential guy,” she replied.
    Bootsie was bent over the sink, scrubbing the burnt grease off a stove tray, her strong arms swollen with her work; her polo shirt had pulled up over her jeans, exposing the soft taper of her hips. She had the most beautiful hair I had ever seen in a woman. It was the color of honey, with caramel swirls in it, and its thickness and the way she wore it up on her head seemed to make the skin of her face even more pink and lovely.
    “Is there anything else I can arrange? An audience with the Pope?” I said.
    She turned from the drainboard and dried her hands on a towel.
    “That woman’s after something else. I just don’t know what it is,” she said.
    “The Flynns are complicated people.”
    “They have a way of finding war zones to play in. Don’t let her take you over the hurdles, Streak.”
    I hit her on the rump with the palm of my hand. She wadded up the dish towel and threw it past my head.
    We ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the back yard. Beyond the duck pond at the back of our property my neighbor’s sugarcane was tall and green and marbled with the shadows of clouds. The bamboo and periwinkles that grew along our coulee rippled in the wind, and I could smell rain and electricity in the south.
    “What’s in that brown envelope you brought home?” Bootsie asked.
    “Pictures of a mainline sociopath in the Colorado pen.”
    “Why bring them home?”
    “I’ve seen the guy. I’m sure of it. But I can’t remember where.”
    “Around here?”
    “No. Somewhere else. The top of his head looks like a yellow cake but he has no jaws. An obnoxious FBI agent told me he’s pals with Cisco Flynn.”
    “A head like a yellow cake? A mainline con? Friends with Cisco Flynn?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Wonderful.”
    That night I dreamed of the man named Swede Boxleiter. He was crouched on his haunches in the darkened exercise yard of a prison, smoking a cigarette, his granny glasses glinting in the humid glow of lights on the guard towers. The predawn hours were cool and filled with the smells of sage, water coursing over boulders in a canyon riverbed, pine needles layered on the forest floor. A wet, red dust hung in the air, and the moon seemed to rise through it, above the mountain’s rim, like ivory skeined with dyed thread.
    But the man named Swede Boxleiter was not one to concern himself with the details of the alpine environment he found himself in. The measure of his life and himself was the reflection he saw in the eyes of others, the fear that twitched in their faces, the unbearable tension he could create in a cell or at a dining table simply by not speaking.
    He didn’t need a punk or prune-o or the narcissistic pleasure of clanking iron in the yard or even masturbation for release from the energies that, unsatiated, could cause him to wake in the middle of the night and sit in a square of moonlight as though he were on an airless plateau that echoed with the cries of animals. Sometimes he smiled to himself and fantasized about telling the prison psychologist what he really felt inside, the pleasure that climbed through the tendons in his arm when he clasped a shank that had been ground from a piece of angle iron on an emery wheel in the shop, the