|
R Ye Visit our sh Her color was high and her eyes sparkled with life and vivacity. "s, assorted kitchen staff, orderlies, and a janitor. Instead of throwing himself over the rail, as he might have done, he lit his pipe and smoked a bowl of tobacco slowly, watching the sun go down behind that distant, disappearing cloud on horizon ? that cloud which was the coast of Africa. He listened to the monotonous snarl of the riding lawnmower, saw her shadow, and, as so often happened when he thought of how weird Annie was getting, his mind recalled the image of the axe rising, then falling; the image of her horrid impassive deadly face splattered with his blood. He sat stiffly, hearing the small sound of something being set carefully back down (the penguin on his block of ice, perhaps), his hands clasped tightly on the arms of the wheelchair. The bad guys put Rocket Man ? only it was Rocket Man in his secret identity ? into a car that didn't have any brakes, and then they welded all the doors shut, and then they started the car rolling down this twisty-turny mountain road. Hanging from the lowest branch of this tree was an old-fashioned pair of blued steel handcuffs.To its left there was another door. , Paulie, and that's the name of the game now, isn't it? M "There,»she said. The Bourka Bee-Goddess was here. Some of "em look like they could carry all twelve volumes of the Royal Navigation Charts on their lower lips, ha-ha! He ate from cans, drank water from the new pitcher, took his medication regularly, napped each afternoon. The hall was wide enough for him to swing the chair around and face the door, but now his arms were trembling with exhaustion. The walls were rock, carelessly chinked ? they looked like a child's drawing of rock walls. The other two were Kreigs, the best locks in the whole world, according to his ex-cop friend Tom Twyford. Paul wanted Tony to get away with the murder ? for awhile, anyway ? because there could be no third act with Tony sitting in the cooler. "Geoffrey didn't, but quite suddenly he did know one thing ? who this late-coming visitor was. But I suppose other women have ? women who were much prettier than I am, and much bolder about their affections, as well. An awful memory bloomed there in the dark: his mother had taken him to the Boston Zoo, and he had been looking at a great big bird. She had never heard Geoffrey sound so, and would not have believed it if someone had told her of it. That she would do that to him ? that she could, when he had spent most of his adult life thinking the word writer was the most important definition of himself ? made her seem utterly monstrous, something he must escape. The quality of the light fanning through the half-open bathroom door had changed, grown brighter. "He actually had needed to urinate quite badly ? in all the excitement he hadn't had time to think of such things. Although her pet writer was now less than thirty-five feet away, Annie's voice remained composed. There he would be at the end of Chapter 6, Death in the Sky, unconscious while his plane went into a power dive. She brought it to him, the old scuffed Lord Buston he'd had since college, and put it in his hands. He woke up around eleven, and almost as soon as Annie heard him stirring about, she came in with orange juice, his pills, and a bowl of hot chicken soup. This time it was Hezekiah who grabbed Ian, but the bushes rustled again and Geoffrey looked into the clearing, his breath momentarily catching in his throat, as a bit of fabric may catch on a thorn ? he felt like a man who must walk up a rocky hill with a load of decayed and dangerously volatile explosives in his arms. Paul didn't think so but he wasn't sure ? not being sure of things, he knew, was a charmless corner of purgatory reserved for writers who were driving fast with no idea at all where they were going. He closed his eyes and saw Annie removing the jack and squeezing Elmer's Glue into the hole in the module. He fell back on that most common writers'-workshop euphemism: "It's got possibilities, all right. He tried looking up at the interlocked W's, but all too soon he was looking at the typewriter again. |