The Upright Man Read Online Free PDF

lot, muttering in the dark. Bye-bye, Sarah, go find someone else. Bye-bye, William, bye-bye, Lucy. You’ll hate me for this, I know, but you would have come to hate me soon enough.
    At some point he seemed to accept he was into the realms of fatal dose, after which it all became more relaxed. Everything seemed easy, in fact. The forest got a little warmer too, though it was possible he just wasn’t feeling his extremities anymore. Everything went fuzzy and liquid as he sat and swayed in perfect darkness. He was cold and not cold, bone weary and awake. Fear circled in the bushes but stayed just out of reach, until he was barely aware of anything and didn’t bother to keep putting things in his mouth. He sobbed briefly, then couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking about. Trying to follow thoughts was like walking alone down a deserted street where the stores were closing one by one.
    When his eyelids began to flutter he tried to keep them open, not with any sense of desperation, but as a child might ward off the sleep he knew could not be fought. When they finally closed it seemed lighter in his head for a moment, and then began to fade into slate gray and beyond. He expected, insofar as he had any expectations left, that this process would continue until everything became black and silent. A brief dreaming moment, as if tilting slowly backward, and then not even that. Good-bye.
    He wasn’t expecting to wake up in the middle of the night, still drunk, wracked with whole-body shivers. He wasn’t expecting to be alive, and in thirty kinds of pain. He certainly wasn’t expecting to see something standing over him, something big, something that smelled like the scent of rotted meat carried on a cold, cold wind.

C HAPTER TWO
    THE RESTAURANT WAS A BIG ROOM SPLIT UP INTO different areas, with a section of tables in the center and booths around three sides. Small lanterns hung at the entrance to each booth, but they didn’t work anymore. The walls had been done out in big retro-style murals, lots of powder blue and pale pink and scratchy black lines. The scalloped double-height windows at the entrance showed a parking lot blown drab with old leaves, and I watched as a cold wind played with them awhile. I was in my usual spot, one of the booths in the back of the room. I liked it there. The bench wasn’t too close into the table, so you didn’t feel hemmed in. The menu was riddled with cunning puns and full of stuff like burgers, burritos, big old chef salads, and chili (Cincinnati- or Texas-style, “Hot, Hotter, or W-W-Watch Out!”), which is very much my kind of thing.
    All in all it was a perfect place for dinner, aside from one thing. The service sucked. I’d been waiting a long time now and no one had bid me welcome, reassured me I was in the system, or given me ice water I wouldn’t drink. And actually, it wasn’t just the waitstaff who were slacking. When I first arrived I saw someone had knocked over most of the chairs in the central portion of the room, whichlooked messy. I’d put them back up, tucking them neatly under the tables, but that really wasn’t my job. It wasn’t my job to replace the lightbulbs either. I considered going back into the kitchen, but I knew it would be pointless. It was even quieter back there, and darker.
    I leaned forward on the table, wondering what the hell I was doing there. Three days is too long to wait for a bowl of chili, no matter how damned good it is. Even I was feeling ready to bid farewell to Relent, Idaho.
     
    I KNEW A LOT ABOUT TOWNS LIKE R ELENT BECAUSE that was where I’d spent most of my time in recent months. I had wandered directionless across a great many miles of backwoods and prairie in the country’s least glamorous states. Initially I’d been staying in motels, then one afternoon I’d gone to an ATM and found there was no more money. It’s amazing the difference a little brightly colored rectangle makes to your well-being, to your sense of identity