The November Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page A

indistinct human organ) back and forth in the orange light. To that I had no response. I couldn’t tell her, Because of that cloud we saw, man . Which would have been true, in a sense. But I didn’t speak. Relief stabbed through me. I should have told her. She would have figured out, probably, the falseness of my position, which I did not realize until … well, more or less until I started trying to answer your question, ladies and gentlemen. And she would have talked me down, and all the confused nonsense that followed from our conversation might have been avoided. She’s good at talking me down.
    “It’s just like a project, right?” I asked. Digger was now sitting, still naked, against the wall, her after-weed cigarette dangling out the window, her arm stretched. From her bed, I could see the tender plate of muscle shift beneath her right breast.
    “A project? Since when do you do projects?”
    “Alex Faustner does all kinds of projects.”
    “That’s a retarded statement.”
    “What is it then,” I replied as I sat down and rooted through her bag for a smoke, “if not a project?” She pulled in her hand and barked it against the window frame.
    “It’s just peculiarity. And that’s all right with me. You don’t have to justify it to me.”
    “Justify it, justify it to you,” I sang (my singing voice is horrible), snapping my fingers in time, and then got up and looked down into the street for the accident or signs of the accident, but perpetrator and victim were gone; just the usual stream of honking cars remained, trying to make their way around a construction crew. Who, I could tell even from four stories up, were fat, were joke exchangers, and would work with infinite slowness and carelessness. They had orange helmets and orange vests and moved like an uncertain basketball team around the sandy pit they’d dug in the street.
    “How long have those construction guys been there?” I asked Digger.
    “Forever,” she replied, and let go of her smoke. It tumbled and bounced against the stone front of her house, spitting amber-red sparks.
    I didn’t take any of the numerous pages—they start coming in around this time, late afternoon/early evening—summoning me to work. Sometimes I made people wait. Selling drugs is the single market of exchange in which the customer is always wrong. And making people wait stops them from thinking you’re a lackey, which is necessary. Otherwise the customers wouldn’t value your product. On the other hand, take it too far and you get a reputation as unreliable. Your business dries up. You’re not, after all, selling smack to hardened, hollow-eyed fiends. You’re selling weed to rich kids, at once arrogant and frightened. Some of them this makes deferential, some it has no effect on, and some it prompts to show off their own dreamed-up toughness. So keeping people on the hook makes sense, for me, as a business and social proposition. You have to feel it out as you go. You have to set it up to imply that you’re doing them a favor.
    Don’t think I haven’t encountered all kinds of indignant objections to that attitude. I’ve even made a few myself, in world history. Standing up for Platonic ideas about human rights, equality before the law, do unto others, etc. What a sense of gut-clenching well-being that provides. Everyone looks on in bewildered approval: Addison may be odd, but his heart is in the right place! Not that I don’t hold those beliefs. Everybody does. At least, everyone I’ve ever met. Maybe generalizing is unfair. But these ideas don’t have some kind of independent meaning . They’re just words; at the small scale nobody behaves in accordance with all the high ideals they talk about; everyone acts like animals, domesticated animals maybe, but still animals. So why the fuck not? Why not make your presence felt? Why not exercise power if you have it?
    My father was sitting in the dark when I got home, waiting for me to ask him what the