PIGGS - A Novel with Bonus Screenplay by Neal Barrett Jr Read Free Book Online Page A

the dusty scent of summer trees.
    Cat Eye turned the lights off.   Grape and the Cat stayed in the car.   The stock gate was rusty metal pipe that could swing open wide to let a cattle truck in.   There weren't any cattle inside, and the gate was second hand.
    She opened the padlock and slid off the chain.
    "Now this is interesting," Cecil said.   "I been by your place a hundred times, but I never been in."
    "Isn't much left for anyone to see," Gloria said, and walked off toward the trees.
     
    H e walked behind her through the pale morning light, the day still cloaked in muted shades of night, bleak enough still through the stand of ancient oaks to hide a dark array of ghosts.   He knew they were there, an angle and a shape, nothing real clear.   Dim and blurry phantoms, lost and indistinct, lost until one of them hit him in the head.
    "Whoa!" Cecil said, threw up his hands, touched cold metal and ducked beneath a wing.   Passed on quickly, kept the girl in sight.   Didn't know what he'd nearly hit.   Didn't know the ghost was a Hawker Hurricane, didn't know its foe, twenty yards ahead, was a riddled Messerschmitt, the pilot a blur under faded plexiglas, dying, now, or already dead.   Didn't know the pilot had served once before, served in the window of Flicker's Men's Store.
    Didn't know the Mustang he passed, didn't know a Storch.   Didn't know a Stuka in desert coloration.   Knew, though, it used to be a snow cone stand.
    Cecil didn't know and didn't care.   He'd passed the place before, scarcely glanced at the hollow relics then.   Knew it had closed down many years before.   Knew, later, that one of his dancers lived there, learned who it was when Gloria Mundi caught his eye.
    Cecil Dupree didn't waste a lot of time on anything that didn't have tits, anything without a dollar sign.   Didn't care what happened outside the walls of Piggs.   Didn't read the papers, didn't keep up with world events.
    He knew, though, that Gloria Mundi was a honey and a half, that she had a certain something the other girls lacked.   He didn't know what, but he meant to find out.   And, if he had to follow that fine-looking ass through a maze of rusty scrap, well he could handle that.
    As long as she didn't put him off.   Mess around yakking an hour and a half, all the preliminary shit a woman had to do before she quit.   Cecil hated that.   Hated walking through the fucking woods.   Hated being outdoors everywhere you looked.
    He was walking so close he nearly ran her down.
    "Hey, whoa," he said, grabbing her shoulders tight, "what we stopping for, babe?"
    Gloria gave him a weary look.   "We're here, Mr. Dupree.   This is where I live."
    "Where," Cecil said, "I don't see a thing."   He made a big deal out of stomping around, shading his brow, peering like an Indian through the stand of trees.   "You live in a hole, got a tepee somewhere?"
    "Up there."
    "Up where?"
    "Up there, Mr. Dupree."
    "I asked you to call me Cec–   Holy shit, you're kidding, right?   Doesn't anybody live up there."
    "Well I'm anybody, I take offense to that."
    "You're overly sensitive, anyone ever tell you that?"   Cecil peered up again.   "Maybe no one mentioned it before, this isn't your ordinary house."
    "I'm not a ordinary person, I don't pretend to be."
    That is the goddamn truth, Cecil thought, staring at the thing, looking straight up, looking at it perched there, thirty, forty feet up in the big oak tree, blocking out everything, blocking out the whole fucking sky.   How it got up there was something else again, but it was there, all right, a really big mother, bigger than the relics on the ground, just hanging in the branches like it grew right there, and Cecil knew it hadn't done that, knew someone put it there.
    "Well, it is something to see, I got to say that," Cecil said, because he couldn't think of anything else.   "Say, am I still going to get a drink?"
    "I said coffee, don't be expecting something else."
    "Coffee's