Soma Blues by Robert Sheckley Read Free Book Online Page B

eyesore. And then the plane was dropping down toward the airfield, and the seat belts sign came on.
    At last he was standing on the dusty tarmac, walking to the luggage area. There was a crowd of people behind the barricades, waiting for friends and lovers. Would there be someone waiting for him? Unlikely. It was close to six months since Hob had last been on the island, when he had come for Harry Hamm’s wedding.
    And then he was out and into a taxi and smelling the smell of the island: thyme and jasmine, oranges and lemons. He went by the low cubic white houses on the road into Ibiza City. In front of him arose the sight of the D’Alt Villa, the old city, a mass of white cubes rising up out of the ground, all odd angles and shapes, a cubist city of the past, like something out of remote Cycladean Greece.
    The driver wanted to chat with him in his rudimentary English. Hob didn’t want to talk, however. The first moments of the return to the island were precious. He searched the roadside for familiar landmarks. The map of Ibiza was covered with monuments to the peculiar personal history of the place. Here is the spot where Little Tony got busted by the Spanish drug cops. That pile of rocks is where Arlene had her old bar, where Elliot Paul used to come by for a drink, before the Fascists demolished it. Just down the road is where you met Alicia that first golden summer. And here is the dangerous crossroads where, one hilarious night, Sicilian Richard went off the road in his big gangster Citröen, and ploughed into an Ibicenco house, killing the brother and sister who lived there, catching them together in bed, so the story went. Richard never lived to tell of it. The Guardia came and took him to the hospital for a broken arm. He died of causes unknown on his way there.
    Hob’s first stop was in the village of Santa Eulalia. He had the taxi drop him off at Autos Carlitos where he hired a SEAT 700. He took the little car out on the road to San Carlos, in the hills just beyond the village. He got a lift of the spirits as he passed through San Carlos, noted the half dozen hippies drinking beer and playing a guitar at the wooden tables outside of Anita’s bar, went through the sharp curves with Robin Maugham’s house on the crest on the left, and turned into the rocky drive that led to his finca, Ca’n Poeta. He found room for his car near the big algarobo tree in front of the sheds. The house with its beautiful lines made him feel better at once. It was built according to the golden mean, or golden section, Rafe the Architect had told him. Whatever it was, the house looked good with its two wings separated by the second-floor drying shed that had laundry flapping from it now. He went down three steps to the flagstoned entranceway with its big grape arbor. There was no one home but a small dark-haired girl in a pink bathing suit lying in the hammock reading an Alistair MacLean paperback. Hob had never met her before. She said she was Sally, Shaul’s friend—Shaul being one of Hob’s friends from Israel—and that everybody had gone to the beach and who was he? Hob explained that he was the owner, and the girl complimented him on his house and his hospitality.
    Hob went inside, put his luggage in his second-floor bedroom, and changed into white cotton shorts, a gray three-button T-shirt, and espadrilles. He left again and drove back out to the San Carlos road, going back toward Santa Eulalia, then turned off at Ses Pines and drove inland between almond fields into the Morna valley. Soon he was climbing toward the Sedos des Sequines, the mountainous ridge that ran down the center of the island. The little car negotiated the steep road without too much difficulty. The narrow rutted road changed to a dirt track and climbed into the steep hills. Several times Hob had to negotiate around rock faces beetling into the road. In Ibiza they tended to build around things rather than blast through them. At last he crawled around a