Eye of the Cricket by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

careful getting in and out of cars and entering your home.
    If you see a suspicious group of juveniles as described above, call 911 immediately.
    * NOTE: Pants may be gray in color.
    "We've already handed out over a hundred of them," Norm said.
    "Okay."
    We do like to feel we're useful. Still, I couldn't help but think of all the grocery-store ads rolled into cones and tucked
     into my fence out front, restaurant to-go menus and housepainting specials rubber-banded to my door handle, real estate fliers
     stuffed illegally in my mailbox. Guys got half a cent apiece to distribute these and lived off the three or four dollars a
     day the work netted them. A Active economy held aloft by its own bootstraps, one that few people noticed or gave thought to.
    "I'll keep an eye out, Norm. That's really all anyone can do—even the police."
    "Good enough." He stood. So did the others.
    "Thank you, Mr. Griffin," Mr. Prue said.
    "We appreciate this," his wife confirmed.
    Pillar of my community, for sure.
    Norm's son lingered behind.
    "Something I can do for you, Raymond?"
    "Nah." He stood watching my rear wall. Anything happened back there, it wouldn't get past him. "My civics teacher says it
     was someone named Lew Griffin who stopped the guy that shot all those people from buildings back in the sixties."
    "Mmm-hmm."
    "Says he hunted the guy down and threw him off the top of one of the buildings."
    "I think I heard about that."
    "Yeah. Lots going on back then." Raymond looked at me. His father called from outside. "Don't guess that was you, huh."
    "Must have been another Lew Griffin."
    "Yeah. Yeah, that's what I said."
    I shut the door behind him and turned up the music again. Bach, a prelude and fugue, Wanda Landowska at her monster harpsichord,
     plucking the world back into order.
    Visitors gone, Bat shot down the stairs and sat mewing, waiting impatiently for me to provide an appropriate lap. No question
     which Lew Griffin he wanted.
    The one that was here.

7

    WHAT I WAS doing was counting, reduced by circumstance (liberals would say) from loftier aspirations—social conscience, the
     humanities, the pursuit of literature—to simple mathematics.
    There were 3 of them. I'd been hit 9 times, kicked 4.1 had 1 loose tooth. It was 1 o'clock. This was, would have been, my
     3 stop.
    I was also remembering: my mind in defense breaking free, floating above it all, recalling all those other times. Thinking that this sort of thing never happened to Proust, never sullied his remembrances. Give me a madeleine any day.
    Maybe the things that happen to us are things we make happen, things we somehow attract.
    Maybe all failures are failures of will.
    Maybe I ought to stop getting my butt kicked.
    Not that I held it against them personally. Fifty-year-old guy wearing a tie and coat, guy no one ever saw before, looks like
     a cop but he's not or he'd be flashing ID, shows up in the neighborhood asking questions. What else he gonna be but bad news,
     a repo man, skip chaser, collector of some kind? Sure as hell ain't from the IRS. And looks like he might have a few dollars
     on him, weighing him down? Civic-minded young brothel's just naturally gonna help the man out, provide him some answers. Natural
     as rain.
    But enough's enough.
    It was a trick, a technique, I hadn't had occasion to use in years. Like all technique, at first it happened instinctively.
     Only later did I ask myself just what was occurring and how. Then I broke it down, from initial impulse or stimulus to response
     and final result, prodding at disjointed segments, plotting the curve. Building a grammar. It had to be reproducible.
    You reach down and find the rage, the frustration, defeat and despair, find that black pool just beneath the world's surface
     that never goes away. You find it, you bring it up, you use it. For a while it takes you over. You become its vehicle. What
     voodoo practitioners call a horse.
    I turned onto my back, grunted with pain, gasped and held my