The Last Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF

it home, collapses onto
the couch, and falls into a drunken sleep without even realizing he’s once again left her without a way home. It happens at least once a week, usually after a busy Saturday night when
she’s at her most tired, when her feet are killing her, when she’s been grabbed one time too many by one chump too many, and wants nothing so much as the comfort of her own bed.
    She cares for Neil, despite his flaws, despite the way he treats her son, but sometimes she feels like strangling him till he’s dead. He can be so thoughtless, and all tomorrow’s
apologies mean nothing to her now. They’ll mean very little then.
    Vivian finally pushes through the back door and sways across the parking lot toward her, saying sorry about that, had to get some money out of Heath.
    ‘Money for what?’
    ‘Leland did some work for him couple weeks ago, asked me to collect it.’
    Candice nods, takes another drag from her cigarette, offers it to Vivian, who pinches it between two fingers, sucks the last drag from it, and flicks it out to the asphalt. It hits the ground
and a small scattering of orange embers flash on the air, briefly looking like a miniature fireworks show – one for the ants and beetles – before going dark.
    ‘Where’s he been lately, anyway?’
    ‘Leland?’
    She nods.
    ‘Had a movie last week, five full days of work.’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Twelve hours a day every day.’
    ‘Was it a speaking part?’
    ‘Not this time. But maybe soon. It’s about building relationships with producers. You know, it’s less to do with talent than knowing the right people.’
    ‘Come on,’ Candice says, pulling on a locked door, ‘my lady parts are freezing off.’
    They get into the car and Vivian starts the engine.
    ‘You need to do something about Neil. The way he leaves you stranded is rotten.’
    ‘He doesn’t mean it.’
    ‘If it only happened once I’d believe that.’
    Candice shrugs, and as Vivian pulls the car out of the parking lot and into the street she turns to the passenger’s-side window and looks through it, out at the city, her breath fogging
the glass in front of her.
    She likes this part of the night. The bars have closed and the night owls have gone home, everyone from the zoot-suited Mexicans to the Negro-speaking hipsters, but it’s too early yet for
even the earliest risers to be pushing through their front doors. The city is still and silent and possesses the feeling of possibility, like an unhatched egg. You can almost forget it was long ago
parceled out and sold. You can almost forget that crooks live in its mansions while honest people live in tarpaper shacks. You can almost forget that racial violence rages everywhere, from
Hollywood Stars games at Wrigley Field to burning crosses in the yards of Negroes who dared to buy homes in white neighborhoods. You can almost forget that gangsters dine with famous actors and
grin from newspaper photographs while honest, hardworking men die unknown.
    You can almost forget, but not quite.
    She knows the chief of police, William H. Parker, has promised to clean the place up, but she knows too that the Bloody Christmas beatings were only three months ago now, and if the man
can’t control his own cops, how is he supposed to control a city?
    The answer’s simple. He can’t. And in truth she doesn’t blame him for that. Los Angeles is a monster, a beast whose primary nutrients are Hollywood glitter and dumb violence.
No one could control such an animal.
    They drive north till they hit Sunset Boulevard, then head east, past the point where it hooks right and becomes Macy Street. A few minutes after that Vivian turns the car left onto Bunker Hill
Avenue, and Candice finds herself surrounded by the comforting familiarity of her neighborhood, crumbling though it is.
    The car rolls north on a street punctuated by potholes. Up ahead, on the right, in front of their small house, their small crumbling house with its asphalt-shingle