You Live Once Read Online Free PDF

hadbeen there it had reminded me more than anything else of an old small private club, so long established that there are special customs and even a special language. Nobody makes any effort to entertain you. Unless you’re willing to stir around, you can be lonesome.
    I counted eight other cars up by the horse barn when I parked. I took my swimming trunks out of the glove compartment and went down to the house. Mary’s younger brother was in the living room. He’s a thin pale boy with heavy black hair that starts about an inch above his eyebrows. He’s a remote, terribly dignified boy, and handles himself with a certain style. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and white shorts, and he was sitting staring at a big chessboard on which a game was apparently in progress. As I looked at him he moved a piece and made a notation in a notebook.
    When I walked in he looked up and said, “Hello … uh … Clint.”
    “What are you doing?”
    He looked amused. “Do you want me to tell you?”
    “Go ahead. Just for kicks.”
    “I’m making a prepared variation involving the second move of the king’s bishop in the Nimzoindian Defense. I hope to use it in a tournament next month in New York, right after school lets out.”
    “You figure these things out ahead?”
    He gave me a lofty, patient look. “
All
tournaments are won these days with prepared variations of one kind or another.”
    “Are you pretty good, John?”
    “After this tournament, if I do as well as I hope, I’ll be the fifth ranking player in the country.” He grinned suddenly. “You don’t give a damn about this, so why ask?” For that instant he looked so much like Mary that it nearly broke my heart.
    “Is Mary around?”
    “Didn’t you hear? Aunt Myrna is spinning. Little Marydidn’t come home at all last night. She and Uncle Willy are down in town heckling the police.”
    “I heard about that. The police came to see me this morning because I was out with her last night. I figured she’d be here by now.”
    “She’ll turn up. She always has. But Aunt Myrna always worries. Mary’s no child, she’s twenty-six. I’m no child either, but try and convince Aunt Myrna.” Before I was out of the room he was back in his special two-dimensional world, engrossed in the cruel slant of the bishops, the hungry eccentric leap of the knights.
    I walked on down to the beach, to the stretch of sand between the two boat houses. There were a lot of people there, most of them familiar to me. I waved to a few, went to the men’s bunk room and changed. Then I started circulating on the beach, sitting on my heels to talk to various groups. They were casually interested in the fact that Mary was missing. It was a mild game to try to guess what had happened to her—what she had taken it into her head to do.
    I saw that the three girl children of Willy and Myrna Pryor were there. They were, of course, Mary’s first cousins. They are aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. They are brown and husky and pretty, with crisp brown hair. Due to Willy’s absence in town, they were considerably more relaxed with their three male guests than I had seen them on other occasions. Their swim suits were of the ultra-conservative cut (Willy’s idea, probably), but one of them was using the small of her boyfriend’s back as a pillow. Another girl provided a pillow for her escort in the form of a round brown thigh. The third pair had their heads together, whispering. The girls are called Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter—but I do not know which is which. They make me feel very very old.
    I had seen some of the other guests at the club last night and they knew I had been out with Mary, so I had to tell my story several times, always careful not to deviate from the one I had given the two officers who woke meup. I kept thinking of the silent body I had left in the woods.
    I took a short swim and came back to the beach. Somebody gave me a can of cold beer. I was talking to a