Jabbo and Bungalow came in out of the weather in a bathless reek of cold wool and splo whiskey.
A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road.
They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.
Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that.
There’s a kind of man that when he cant have what he wants he wont take the next best thing but the worst he can find.
Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do.
The faint light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot.
The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again.
The shape of the city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.
In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like heathen candles.
I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both.
Ich kann nicht anders.
Females of domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse.
He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.
All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.
Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?
The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent.
The boy was sitting quietly on the bunk, still wrapped in the blanket, watching. The man thought he had probably not fully committed himself to any of this. You could wake in the dark wet woods at any time.
He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God’s barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old.