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

U-Halt convenience store and at the pay phone there dialed a number that shuttled me through several blind relays and redirects before ringing.
    The phone was picked up without greeting.
    â€œSir,” I said, “perhaps you remember Marek Obtulowicz. Also used the name Lev Aaronson. We worked together in Gdansk, then again for a stretch in Santiago.”
    â€œYes. Went to ground some years back. In Budapest, if I remember. We were never able to confirm.”
    â€œI’ve been thinking about something he often said, an old Russian proverb: Do not call in a wolf when dogs attack you.”
    He waited a moment. “I see. This is the reason you have called on a secure field line, against every policy and all standard practice.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen let me offer in return something my father read to me when I was a child. It is from Karl Kraus, I believe. ‘To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.’ Is there anything else?”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œStay in touch, David.”
    And the connection was gone.
    I stood watching a bluebottle fly throw itself again and again at the window, buzzing furiously. The sill was lined with the desiccating husks of its predecessors.

15
    The road gives us release, reaffirms the discontinuity of our lives, whispers to us that we are after all free, that (around this curve, when we reach the next town, if we can only make it to California) things will change. Twain and Kerouac both knew the great American novel would have to be a book of the road. So did James Fenimore Cooper, before there were roads.
    When I left the agency, I sank almost my whole severance pay into a car. Since the agency took care of our needs, I’d never been in a position to accumulate things—clothing, automobile, house, apartment—and that car became virtually all I had. It was perforce, for several months, where I lived: a late-fifties Buick with auxiliary gas tank and custom sound, backseat scooped out to make room for sleeping and cargo. And in it I drove from Memphis to Dallas to Akron to Seattle, often reaching my destination only to turn around and start back or veer off towards yet another fanciful destination, spending nights at the side of wayward country roads or in motels that sprang up sudden and solitary as cactus along Oklahoma highways. And always in those months, music was playing: big bands, Bessie Smith, Bix, Trane, Eric Dolphy. Being on the road, and music, were all that made sense to me for a while.
    And so I drove southward now, and westward, thinking of Alicia across from me at the diner that morning. I had the radio tuned to a comedy hour. Jokes about wives, dogs, kids, bosses, kumquats, kangaroos. All equally alien to me. An absolutely impenetrable five minutes of double-talk on contemporary relationships from “The Professor of Desire.”
    â€œYou ever be back through here?” Alicia had said, watching me over her coffee cup.
    I shook my head.
    â€œYeah. Well, I didn’t think you would be. No way. But that’s all right.”
    The waitress brought our breakfasts and asked Alicia if she worked today. Off, she answered, but I have to pull the night-owl tomorrow.
    â€œThere’s something in you,” Alicia said when she was gone, “something you keep hidden. Dangerous, maybe. And maybe that’s why I wanted to know you. But it wouldn’t matter how well or how long I knew you, would it? That something would always stay hidden.”
    â€œThere’s something hidden in all of us.”
    â€œDangerous things?”
    â€œFor many of us, anyway. Even if we don’t recognize them, or know they’re there.”
    We finished our breakfast and coffee and said good-bye outside by the car. There’s never a lot you can say at times like that, apartness spreading like a stain between you, sky dumping its endless