There Fell a Shadow Read Online Free PDF

“I guess it’s you and me, pardner.”
    We started up Madison together.

M adison Avenue stretched downtown before us, a canyon of snow. The snow limned the mansard roof of the Polish Consulate hulking above us. It covered the solid Palladian block of the Morgan Library just ahead. It hung from the window ledges of the seedy gray apartments over the Korean grocery. It hung from the edge of the gutter. It hid the dirt and the gritty stone. It frosted them over, made them softer somehow. It muffled the hum and throb of the early morning.
    Colt and I walked side by side in silence. We looked at the street around us. The light was like crystal in the thin, cold air.
    â€œNice town,” he said after a minute. “Nice town, Manhattan.” He was slurring his words a little.
    So was I. “Yeah. In the snow. It’s quiet in the snow.”
    He gave me a glance. “Ah. You’re not from these parts, are you?”
    â€œNah.”
    â€œMassachusetts?”
    â€œMaine.”
    â€œMaine,” said Colt. “I was wonderin’. I knew you weren’t city bred anyway.”
    â€œOh yeah? Why’s that?” I made an overly expansive gesture. “I got rid of the accent years ago, man.”
    â€œI know, I know. And you’re a city slicker now but … I saw it in you. I did.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, breathed plumes of mist into the night. “The way I figure it, a man always has something in him from the country. If it was ever in him at all, it stays that way.”
    â€œAw, it’s a long time ago, Colt, long time ago. I haven’t even been back.”
    â€œStill,” he said. He gazed down the street. “When you come from the country to the city, it’s always as if you were living a second life somehow. There’s always a whole part of your mind set in different places, with different colors, different smells.”
    I grunted, nodded. “I was just thinking about that. I was just thinking how when I was a kid, when the first snow came, my old man used to take me up into the woods. On this mountain out in front of our house, see. And he’d take me way, way up there and man, sometimes, it’s just like you say: sometimes, standing right in the middle of town here, I can still hear the quiet of it. So quiet. And white. And nothing moving. No motion at all except sometimes you’d see a drift tumble out of the highest branches of the pines, and then you’d hear it go whump in the snow.” I looked over at Colt. He hoisted his shoulders. Shivered. He was gazing way downtown now where a golden campanile gleamed against the black sky. “He was a forest ranger, my old man,” I said. “He’d take me to this stream he knew. All frozen over except for a trickle down the center between the ice. And he’d show me the tracks in the snow where the animals came down to drink. Raccoons, deer, even moose sometimes. He taught me all of them. I could tell them all.”
    â€œYeah,” Colt said vaguely. Then more clearly: “Yeah, that’s what I mean. City folks never know that stuff. Not really. And we never really know what they know either. Doesn’t matter how long we stay.”
    â€œWhat’re you?” I asked him. “Oklahoma?”
    He laughed. “An Okie from Sutterdale, that’s me. A town with a population of seven hundred, and most of them lived out on ranches, somewhere way the hell out in the plains. I’ll tell you, I can remember runnin’ through the dust of the streets of that town, out to the edge of it. Standin’ there on the brink of this plain of grass that I swear to God went on as far as the ocean. I’d run out there to catch sight of the train, the freight train, rollin’ out to the northwest.” He took one hand from his pocket. He raised it in the night air. Extended it to show me the train rolling away from him. “I’d stand