If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go by Judy Chicurel Read Free Book Online

quickly.
    “Don’t tell Liz,” she said again. “She has a big fucking mouth, you know she does.”
    “I won’t,” I promised. Liz was at work, probably waiting for Cory to take her for another Thursday-night test drive. So far, they’d done it in a Chevy Monte Carlo, a Ford Mustang and a Cadillac Sedan DeVille. But he’d still never taken her to the movies or to the Sunrise Diner for coffee, or for a ride in his own car, a Triumph TR6 that he’d bought secondhand.Liz wanted to marry him, even though she said it still hurt sometimes when he balled her, that she’d lie awake all night, throbbing, afterward. Even when there was love involved, something always seemed to hurt.
    “Come on, man,” I said, growing impatient. It was late now. I took Nanny’s arm again and guided her through the moonlit alley. Once, she missed a step and caused us both to stumble in the darkness.
    •   •   •
    W hen we got back inside, Luke and Mitch were sitting in the far corner of the bar near the jukebox, both of them smoking like chimneys, talking so intently I didn’t dare go over. I went to play the jukebox instead, which was already buzzing with quarters, so I could listen to what they were saying. But between the music and the stoned babble all around me, it was hard to hear anything. I was turning to leave when I heard Mitch say, “You know how it is over there, the flowers?” I stopped to listen. He went on: “How sometimes you’d be walking and you’d forget for a minute why you were there? Because all around, man, so much damned beauty! All these exotic blooms, growing on top of each other! Orchids, right? You’d touch the petals and they gave off this scent, different from the flowers here, more delicate, but . . . pungent, that’s the word. Delicately pungent. Like a—a psychedelic garden. But it never lasted because of all the, you know, the smoke, the . . . you know, right? Yeah . . . so we’re walking, marching, by the river . . . the Mekong River . . . and we’re stoned out of our tits, man, the weed was, like, tripping weed over there, un-fucking-believable. Like the dope, man, everything so pure . . . and I see this, like . . . this giant . . . blossom, the biggest blossom I’ve ever seen, right on the river, like this unbelievably beautiful flower just floating on the river, getting bigger and bigger, like it was taking over the river, right? Like the river was a big, fucking, flowing flower! I was just blown away, man. Blown the fuck away. So I wentdown by the riverbank, so I can, like, touch it, pick a piece of it to take with me, for, I don’t know, luck or something, maybe give it to one of the girls to put in her hair or something. So . . . I start leaning in, to, like, pick a part of this river flower, and my buddy, Tang, he comes over and pulls me back, he’s like, ‘What the fuck you doing, man?’ And I’m like, ‘Get off me, man, I want to pick part of this flower, you ever seen anything so beautiful? You ever seen anything like it in your life?’ And he looks at me, and he says, ‘Asshole, that ain’t no flower.’ And I say, ‘Sure it is, just look at it, motherfucker! If that’s not a flower, then what the fuck is it?’ And he gets pissed, right, he shoves me so I’m almost in the river, and he says, ‘
You
look at it, motherfucker.’ And I turn and I put my hands on it, I plunge my hands right
in

it, and he’s right, man. It ain’t no fucking flower. It’s blood. Blood on the water. Spreading as far as the eye could see.” Mitch laughed. He laughed like he’d heard a really funny joke. I didn’t want to turn around, to seem as though I was eavesdropping. I didn’t hear Luke laughing. I hadn’t heard him say a word the entire time I’d been standing at the jukebox. I saw from the corner of my eye Len putting a twin set of shots in front of Mitch and Luke. Mitch downed his right away. “Anytime anyone asks me, ‘What was it like