The Nirvana Blues Read Online Free PDF

funds, was sitting on the floor between the counter and the kitchen, a bullet lodged in his abdomen. “What the hell happened?” Eddie asked.
    â€œThey said I gave them lousy cheeseburgers.”
    Meanwhile, Teresita Irribarren had returned to her room. She lay on her bed, exhausted, listening to a KKCV news program emanating from her small electric heater. After a while, she plugged in the electric blanket and picked up a Texas country-and-western program issuing from the blanket’s coils. Then she noticed somebody was selling clothes in Spanish on a program being broadcast from the light switch. Teresita shrugged and went to sleep. She thought she could hear the violin of an aged friend, Espeedie Cisneros, back in the old days, playing a faint Sunday melody, the beautiful “Vals de Entriega.” And was that Juan Ortega’s accordion?—but he had died three, or was it four? years earlier. His music was related to a time now characterized as “Long Ago.”
    Across town, Eloy Irribarren sat behind the wheel of his decrepit pickup truck, weeping quietly, exhausted from his fruitless search, and all out of money he needed to buy more gas to travel around the valley, searching for his beloved wife.
    Fifteen minutes after Eddie Semmelweis put out an all-points, hoping to identify the fingerprints of the two dead gunmen who’d plugged Morty Gimbell, a Southern Pacific Gas Company odorant machine, used to scent the normally odorless gas so people could tell if their pipes were leaking, dumped fourteen times the normal amount of stink juice into Chamisaville’s natural gas lines, causing utter panic. Stores, office buildings, bars, homes, and tourist traps emptied. The streets became clogged with hysterical people convinced the entire town would explode within seconds. To make matters worse, those who dialed Southern Pacific Gas Company headquarters for an explanation found themselves listening, instead, to a tape-recorded dirty joke dealing with three traveling salesmen, a farmer’s daughter, and a watermelon patch, apparently the prank of a demented person who had tapped the phone lines and wired in the recording.
    Next morning, Teresita Irribarren awoke at dawn, dressed, walked out her front door, and almost toppled into a six-foot-deep hole that had appeared at her cabin’s front stoop during the night. She limped unhappily over to the mayor’s office, and Sonny Christiansen sent Robert Needles to investigate. By the time Robert arrived, the hole was ten feet in diameter and eight feet deep. Robert contacted Jim Bob Popper, an ex-cop now head of city sanitation, asking him to dump a truckload of refuse into the Dynamite Shrine sinkhole: Jim Bob happily complied. But that first truckload of garbage vanished into the pit like a peanut disappearing into a zoo elephant. Jim Bob blinked, and called for a second dump-truck load: it also vanished. With that, Jim Bob advised Robert that they had a “live one” on their hands. And for the next eight hours the town’s two garbage trucks lumbered in and out of the Dynamite Shrine courtyard, feeding that insatiable hole. By dusk it had slowed down a bit, digesting the day’s garbage made by thousands of people. But next morning the hole had widened slightly, devouring Teresita’s front stoop—once more she summoned the mayor.
    Sonny Christiansen, Peter Moose, Ken Eagleton, Robert Needles, and Jim Bob Popper gathered at the edge of the hole, frowning. Then they sent a fleet of town and county trucks to Randolph Bonney’s wrecking yard, and proceeded to dump about a hundred old rubber tires into the hole. The tires joggled, settled, and disappeared. Sonny tapped his upper lip thoughtfully with a pencil eraser, wondering, pensively, if the jig was up. Maintaining a calm exterior, however, he marshaled a group of town employees to wrestle over a few car hulks from the Bonney Junke Yarde, and the wrecks were duly