Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die by Charles Runyon Read Free Book Online

anyway.”
    “It isn’t?” Lifting her brows.
    “Well I mean, it’s not a hooker.”
    “It’s not?”
    “Psychologically maybe, but … look, do you mind if we just go on? I always get a sense of futility trying to explain it because it would be so much easier to, you know, just hand you a joint.”
    “All right. Let’s go on. Everything was going fine until the Learned Doctor came. Why did you call him that?”
    “Well he’d get into that pose, you know—deliver these educated opinions on matters. I think he had some degrees in the medical field, I dunno. His real name is Tom … something. We never went in for last names. I guess I’ve heard it but I forgot. I’ve forgotten a lot of things.”
    “How do you know?”
    “What?”
    “How do you know you’ve forgotten if you don’t remember?”
    “Jesus, that’s a tricky one. Well, I have these gaps in my memory. Like when you cut a piece out of a roll of wallpaper and then try to put it back together. The flowers don’t match, you know?”
    “I see. Well, suppose we just take it in sequence. After Tom left … then what?”
    “After that I began heating water for my bath, doing my pranayama in a supine position, cutting meditation time to three hours a day so I could work on my Japanese bridge. By spring I had it finished. I got an electric pump which carried water up the hill and then let it run down over a cataract of stones. About this time Boots got interested. He saw the cabin as a great place to bring a broad. He brought out some phony leapard skins which I threw in the ditch. He’s too busy for minor things like foreplay, wanted the chicks to start pulling down their pants the minute they stepped inside the cabin …”
    “Your sister, did she know?”
    “About Boots playing around? I doubt if she cared, really. She’s got her own scene. Her house was written up in
Better Homes and Gardens
. She brought a tear sheet out to the cabin. All I did was ask if it made her happy. I imagine she’s happy now.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Oh … she always expressed a great admiration for my brain, like it wasn’t really mine, but some kind of family heirloom which had mistakenly come into my possession. Now I’ve blown my inheritance and she’s still got hers. That’s the way she’d look at it.”
    “You mean because you were sent here?”
    “I mean the whole balance sheet. Medical discharge. Deported from Mexico. Busted for grass. She’ll feel quietly happy that she hasn’t got the kind of finely tuned sensitive brain that blows up under stress. I’m just telling how she sees it.”
    “How do you see it?”
    “I see it like when you’re walking across a barnyard and you don’t watch where you put your feet, you step in shit. Though it’s hard for me to figure exactly what I did wrong. I didn’t have much to do with the local Citizens—maybe that’s it. Citizens don’t like to be ignored.”
    “Didn’t you have visitors?”
    “Sure—out-of-town freaks I’d known here and there. They’d find out where I was and drop by for two or three days.”
    “Girls?”
    “Sometimes there’d be an extra female with the bunch, and if we made it together, fine. Sometimes one would stay on after her bunch left—but sooner or later they all thought of something they had to do elsewhere. So they moved on. I usually didn’t give them another thought. It was the way things were, casual.”
    “But did you wipe them completely from your mind? I can’t believe that.”
    “Well, I remember Christina. Shall I tell you about her?”
    “Please do.”
    “She came to my woods a couple of summers ago with a college bunch from Colorado. It wasn’t exactly a love idyll. She was a large girl, heavy on sentiment. Called her acid trips ‘divine madness.’ I don’t know what kind of place she went into. When the summer ended she walked through the woods breaking sticks in her hands and trying to decide whether to go or stay. She wanted