The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online Page B

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    â€œWas he?” I asked.
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œO.K. . . .”
    â€œYou know,” she continued, “I didn’t cheat on my husband much. Just maybe once or twice. This one guy, well, I told my husband I had taken his cock out and kissed it but I hadn’t screwed him though.” More stories: she’d placed an ad in an underground newspaper and gotten 50 answers. One guy left his phone number so Nina called him. She met the young, thin guy in a coffee shop. Then he asked her to drive him down to the park because he’d left his car at the park. “I drove him down,” Nina told me, “but I should have known better. He got me real hot, he knew he had me hot, and he had this huge curving cock like a scythe. I never saw anything so big. But he wouldn’t tell me his name. I didn’t want to get pregnant so I said no. He got angry and said, ‘I’d rather screw a guy—at least they don’t bother me with all this shit!’ ”
    â€œAnd you let him go?”
    â€œYes, and you should have seen it—Huge, curving, like a scythe!”
    I don’t know. There were many battles and many turnings between us. I made a living as a writer which meant I didn’t have much money but much time. Time to think—time to love. I suppose that I was in love with Nina. Even though I was 20 years older than her.
    One weekend I drove her all the way to Arizona where she put on a special three-hour dance show in a ranch-house with a homosexual. She wore a pair of red pajamas with strands that flopped open to show her belly and bellybutton.
    I drank most of the night in the game room, looking at dead and mounted animals, feeling quite a knowledgeable relationship with them.
    Finally, I walked into the poolroom of the ranch-house where they were dancing. I lifted the homosexual high over my head, but decided not to crack his skull on the ceiling. I set him down and then gave my own drunken version of the Dance—the Great White Bird Flying.
    When I finished, the fag walked up and said, “Pardon me.”
    I gave way and he danced with Nina and nobody seemed to object, not even I . . .
    Time and things went on, they do, you know.
    I gave a few poetry readings, got some minor royalties from a novel. Then I was up in Utah with Nina waiting for the big Fourth of July dance.
    â€œThat’s the only time when things happen up here,” she told me.
    So we made the little town big-time dance, and Nina met her big, dumb cowboy. Or maybe he wasn’t big and dumb.
    I watched him a bit and I thought, hell, he’d even make a writer if something got up and really sliced his soul, showed him where it was at. But nothing had bothered him too much, and so, let’s say he had soul of a sort and Nina knew it. She kept looking back at me as she kept offering it to him in the Dance. And I thought—here I am, a stranger in a shit town. I just wish I could get out and leave the Nina’s and their people and themselves to each other, but Nina kept slicing in closer and closer and offering herself.
    And that was it for me, because if she wanted him, she could have him. That was my way of thinking: the two that wanted each other should have each other.
    But she had to keep bringing him back to me after each dance. “Charlie,” she said, “this is Marty. Doesn’t Marty dance nice?”
    â€œI don’t know much about dancing. I guess he does.”
    â€œI want you two guys to be friends,” she said.
    Then the floor squared off and they danced together, everybody clapping and laughing and joyous. I smoked a cigarette and talked to some big-titted lady about taxes. Then I looked up and Nina and Marty were kissing while they were dancing.
    I was hurt but I knew Nina. I shouldn’t have been hurt. As they danced they kept on kissing. Everybody applauded. I applauded too. “More, more!” I demanded.
    They danced again and