The Drowner Read Online Free PDF

old companies up north. Not my kind, he thought. Not the scrambling kind of money a lucky cracker boy can make if he comes out of the sloughs at the right time with a claw hammer, an old truck, a pocket full of nails and brass enough to believe his personal trend is up.
    He realized he had forgotten lunch, so he ate a wedge of cheese and opened a second can of beer. A few more memories of her up here, because this wasn’t out of bounds. She never rested quite easy in her mind about it, scrunching way down in the front seat driving in or out. The shack was best, way out at the end of noplace. She was most loving out there, most likely to be able to bring it about for herself out where there wasn’t some part of her mind listening to sounds in the building.
    With the beer in his hand he stalked through the living room, the big room that Lucille had said the pansy decorator from Orlando had made look like the lobby of an art movie house. As he pushed open the soundproofed door into the ante-office, he heard the busy clatter of the typewriter. It stopped abruptly as Angie Powell gave a great leap of surprise and put her hand to her throat. Mrs. Nimmits was at the corner table running a tabulator, and she said, “I swear, Mr. Sam, if you come through that door forty times a minute, Angie here would try to hop outen her skin every time.”
    “I didn’t even know you were in there,” Angie said accusingly.
    Sam Kimber walked into his large office with Angie close at his heels, her hand full of notes. She closed the door behind her. He sat down, finished his beer and dropped the can in the wastebasket and said, “What new disasters we got today?”
    As was her sometimes irritating habit, she gave him the least important messages first, pausing for instructions after each one, making memos to herself in her book. Angie Powell was six feet tall in flats, a big, glowing, earnest, pink and white girl in her early twenties with lavender eyes, large shiny teeth and dark golden curly hair. She was a superb swimmer, diver, bowler, water skier, tumbler, skater, dancer and secretary. And she was overpowering; there seemed to be so very much of her. She lived with a harridan mother and a father so tiny, so wispy, so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. She was an only child. She had worked for Sam for three years, the last two as his secretary, and she was entirely devoted, entirely loyal, full of good spirits but essentially humorless.
    Long before he had become involved with Lucille, he had, in awe and out of curiosity, and perhaps like the climbers of mountains—because she was there—made a first and last valiant attempt to seduce her, making a reasonable excuse to get her into the adjoining quarters after overtime work. When he put his arms around her, she seemed to huddle and dwindle. And she began to shiver. He kissed her and it was like kissing a scared child. She looked at him, tears hanging on the lashes of the huge lavender eyes and said, “I can’t smack you.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know what to do. When boys try anything, I smack them a good one. Please let go, Mr. Sam.”
    He let go of her. “You always smack them?”
    “I promised God and my mother I’d never do anything dirty in my whole life.”
    “Dirty!”
    “I respectfully tender my resignation, Mr. Sam.”
    “What if we forget this happened and it never happens again?”
    She thought it over. “Then I wouldn’t want to resign, I guess.”
    Since that unwieldy episode he had learned, through observation and the most subtle of questions from time to time, that this big glowing girl had apparently never felt the slightest tremor of desire or curiosity in her life, and probably never would. She was the most implausible neuter in central Florida.
    She came to the final note for his attention. “Gus Gable has been trying and trying to get hold of you, Mr. Sam.”
    “Tell him to come on over.”
    “From Jacksonville?”
    “Oh, I didn’t know he’d