Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

to one another, shadow and musician, the bass player half-sat on a bar stool, ragged out in honestly worn jeans with a sateen tour jacket, hair to his shoulders, a single long earring.
    There was a sudden, machine-gun-like burst of hot jazz guitar.
    â€œOkay, Justin, we’re ready if you are. All saddled up up here. Let’s ride, man.”
    The cowboy on the stool beside me looked at me for the first time.
    â€œBoy’s your basic asshole,” he said, “but if there’s a better guitar player in four states I ain’t seen him.”
    He got up, ambled onstage, strapped on a bright red electric mandolin.
    â€œKeep it country,” he said, “just keep it country,” and the band broke into an uptempo version of “Faded Love” heavy on tremolo and sevenths. They worked without a drummer, and with that particular bass player, with the guitarist somehow laying in brick-solid rhythm chords and skirting all around the melody at the same time, they didn’t have much need for one.
    â€œFaded Love” gave way to “Sweet Georgia Brown” and that to a breakneck “Jolie Blonde.” Then a catchall of current hits with the guitarist singing while the mandolin player stitched bluesy licks and fills all through his lyrics.
    Sometime during the second set and third beer, the bar stool beside me stopped being empty.
    â€œOkay if I join you?” Alicia said. “Guess you changed your mind huh? God, I love these guys. Bourbon and water, Lou.”
    She had changed into black jeans, pink hightop canvas shoes, a voluminous man’s cardigan (sleeves rolled into doughnuts) over a lowcut cotton top. What appeared to be an authentic Indian arrowhead hung from a rawhide thong and pointed down into her cleavage.
    Foucault’s pendulum. Use it to deduce and demonstrate the earth’s rotation.
    â€œWe haven’t really met,” she said, “but I’m Alicia. You’re staying at the Island, too, I bet. Business trip, or pleasure?”
    â€œBusiness, mostly.”
    â€œYou ever mix the two?”
    I shrugged, and the gesture hung between us there in the air like a ghost struggling to keep its form, like a diminutive fire. She smiled and took a healthy swig of her drink, then a measured one. Accustomed to pacing out a night’s drinking.
    â€œWell,” she said. “You like country music?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYou don’t look like you would. Not the type, you know? And so much of it’s just junk anyhow. I’m gonna get drunk till I get over you. Kick me again, that’s the only time we touch. But then in the middle of it all there’ll be this one line, or this few seconds of music, that’s just absolutely right, that says what you need to say in ways you never can.”
    We had a couple more drinks and sat there talking. Alicia was twenty-eight, legally married but living on her own for about two years now, in furnished apartments mostly, sometimes with a dog, God she loved dogs, but the dogs, like the men, never lasted. They all ran away or turned mean.
    We agreed on one last drink, and towards the end of it she said: “Guess you must be pretty tired huh, being on the road and all. Prob’ly just going to go on back to your room and turn in.”
    I told her that I was.
    â€œYeah. Well, me too, I guess.”
    We said good-bye and I walked out into the parking lot, leaving the start of a new set and “Milkcow Blues” behind. An older man in a bowling shirt leaned against the wall puking. A jet whistled past overhead. The neon BLUE CORRAL sign flickered once and became BLUE COR AL . Lost at sea.
    Not long after, there was a knock at my motel-room door. I opened it. She was carrying her sweater.
    â€œThis is absolutely your last chance,” Alicia said. She looked beyond me into the room and smiled: “Or mine.”

14
    Outside a town named Stonebrook I pulled off the interstate, stopped at a