Suspicious River Read Online Free PDF

teenage boy’s shy deception, charming and inept, and he said, “Reason for all the shenanigans is I was looking for a girl my buddy told me about. In addition to needing a room, of course. You wouldn’t happen to be her?”
    I leaned forward, wrist close to his fingertips. “Might be,” I said, singsong.
    He cleared his throat and straightened a bit. His voice was scratched. “So, I guess you know where my room is, don’t you?”
    I reached under the counter then and took 42 off the rack of plastic hooks and tossed it to him gently across the counter. It landed at his elbow.
    “42,” I said.
    Maybe he looked worried then, like a man in a restaurant who wasn’t sure how to eat what he’d ordered for dinner.
    Here’s your flaming rack of lamb, sir
, I might have said.
    I could see him swallow. He had the cigarette burning a small orange eye in one hand and with the other he smoothed the thin brown hairs on top of his head.
    “How much?” He opened his eyes wider when he asked it.
    “Sixty.”
    “Now?”
    “I’ll give you some time to get settled in your room, Mr. Smith,” I said, teasing him, feeling powerful and innocent as a child lying straight to your face.
    He forced a smile, but it wasn’t easy for him.
    As he was leaving, I could see he was wearing blond cowboy boots, his nearly new blue jeans tight around the ankles. The boots made a sharp sound on the linoleum, and the bells on the office door jingled tinny and cheap as he stepped out.
     
    There are different kinds of men, I thought then, but not many different kinds. There are men who aren’t as strong as they think they are, trying all the time to prove something. And there are men who are stronger than they think they are, trying all the time to prove something. It all adds up to the same thing in the end, until all men seem the same. But, I thought, Gary W. Jensen Smith looked like a man who was stronger than he thought he was, though he would never find it out for himself. He had the body of a boy—and the boots, the leather jacket, the jeans.
Rascal
, I imagined his mother saying under her breath about him until he turned forty and was still a boy.
    When I left, I set a plastic sign on the front desk that said RECEPTIONIST WILL BE RIGHT BACK .
    The rain had stopped, but it was dark. Only five o’clock. But the days were getting shorter, and this one had been dark to start. The air was damp, and it gave me a chill that began in my hair and crept down my back as I stepped over the puddles of rain, which were shallow and swirled with peacock colors from old oil. They smelled like tarnish, like the inside of an empty tin can. Iodine, or was it indigo, in the dusk.
    A cool steam rose ghostly from the hoods of the few parked cars, and I thought the silver Thunderbird must be his. Nice. Florida plates. I passed it on my way to 42 and touched the hood briefly with the palm of my hand. It was warmed from within, like an electric blanket, or a big cat.
    The metal railing vibrated, and it felt solid, heavy, but hollow under my hand as I walked up the stairs. Mrs. Briggs had hired a blond high school boy the summer before to paint it aqua blue, and the paint had already begun to peel, leaving ovals of rust like elbow patches where the smooth gloss was gone. My shoes were red—they matched my purse, back in the office, but they looked too bright to me on my feet that evening against the gray slab stairs.
    Gary Jensen’s door was open about an inch.
    This is common. Maybe they’re afraid you won’t wait if the door is closed tight and locked, but they don’t want to leave it gaping open either, especially in the evening, especially if it’s damp. I knocked.
    The week before, I’d walked in, and the man was already naked. Hard. Pumping his thing with one hand, a little plastic glass of whiskey and ice in the other. A big celebration. He must have wanted to shock or impress me, I thought, but he did neither. I just wondered to myself how it was I