Savage Love by Douglas Glover Read Free Book Online

embarrassed.
    The old man dragged the policeman’s body into the pantry, not bothering about the incarnadine smear of blood he painted across floorboards. Good Luck poured coffee, and he field-stripped the pistol while they waited on the return of the boarders. He released the magazine and pulled back the slide to check the chamber, then he depressed the take-down plug under the barrel opening and pushed out the slide lock. He cocked the hammer with his thumb and pulled the slide back and off the receiver. Then he put it back together, chambered a round and drank his coffee. He killed Francis Ward and Miss Adeline Frick when they came like lambs through the front door. He laid their bodies side by side under the dining table, then collected the newspaper clippings and notebooks and burned them in the firebox of the cookstove. He brought the carpet bag inside and turned it upside down, searching for more paper evidence, but found none except an envelope with five postcards of naked women, which he also consigned to the fire.
    Now he was exhausted and confused. His mind ran away from his body the way it had when he was alone and starving to death under the sheepskins that long-ago winter. He wanted a horse, he thought. Two horses, a mule, tack and grub. But where would they ride? He was a soul inside a corpse, hard clay, difficult to convince of the necessity of action, all used up in the events of the last hour. He wasn’t defeated, he told himself, only indignant at the puny nature of flesh, this squalid frame for the implacable hunger that dwelt inside and through which he was connected to every other living thing. The mother voice sang in his head. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy. He recalled a blue girl on a glistening hill. He examined Good Luck’s face for a sign but found there only the same old terrible resoluteness of spirit, wordless and endless. He wanted to speak, but speech failed. How alike they had become in the expanse of time.
    He tucked the Colt inside his waistband then staggered into the kitchen pantry, retrieved their stocks of kerosene and coal oil, and doused the floor. He lifted the chimney off the lamp at the dining table, turned up the wick and threw the lamp. We are purified in the fire, he thought. Redeemed from seethe and scorn, he thought, and preserved from the corruption of memory. With the hot tongues of flame licking up the walls and smoke rippling across the ceiling, they supported each other to the ground-floor room where they slept, leaving the door ajar — nothing to keep out, he thought, nothing to fear. They lay together on the counterpane. He clutched the pistol in his right hand. He thought he would not need it. In the strange light, her lips seemed to contort as though she laboured under a compulsion to speak, but he knew that she would not. And we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow .

Crown of Thorns
    When Tobin was eight, he fell in love with his babysitter Aganetha, the awkward one with the large, damp eyes, floppy, uncontrollable bosoms and a soot-coloured hairwing she kept pulled down over her face to hide her acne. One night, waking up to pee, Tobin spied Aganetha and his father embracing in the rose arbour at the back gate. Aganetha’s sweatshirt was rucked up at her throat, her bra askew, one breast dislodged and bright as a second moon. The scene was enveloped in silence, lit by a real moon hanging over the garden like a Japanese lantern or a breast. Dormant, dither, delft, dreadful, death and dalliance — d -words from his book droned through Tobin’s head. Seeing the breast flattened against his father’s hand, Aganetha’s pale flesh bulging like putty between the rough, muscular fingers, Tobin thought, She must be cold. Then his mother was standing just behind him, in his bedroom by the back window, her fingernails chill talons digging into his shoulder. He thought, he made a connection, never