The Empty Copper Sea by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

wrapped some in a hand towel and got the bleeding slowed to where I could get a good look at the gash. It was an inch and a half long, quite shallow; close to the eyebrow, and slanting toward my left ear. The impact had evidently broken a little bleeder close to the surface. I had her cut a dozen very narrow strips of adhesive tape with her nail scissors. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held a hand mirror so I could instruct her in just how to pull the wound shut, lacing it with the narrow strips of tape in a series of X's. Then we placed a small gauze compress against it and taped that in place.
    She said she knew how to get the dark dapplings of blood off the chest and shoulder of my pale blue shirt, and she took it into the tiny kitchen alcove and set it to soaking in something.
    She told me she had thought he was giving me a terrible beating and it had made her start to cry.
    She told me it had been a funny time for her lately, kind of bored and listless and lonesome, like waiting for something to happen. She said if I was to happen to her, it would be okay, no matter what she said earlier. She said she knew what she was doing. She wasn't any kid. In the right light she could pass for twenty-five because she'd had a real good Mexican lift, "but don't ask how old I really am because I always lie." She hung on me, and I took her to bed, but after a while she got up and put a yellow towel on a small lamp on the other side of the room and turned the other lights out and said she always slept with a night light on. She said she had some really good grass, and did I want to share a joint? I said I didn't, thanks, and she said she had some coke too, not very good because it was cut too far down, and maybe I'd like some. I said no thanks, and she said it really didn't mean anything to her one way or the other, except she didn't believe in the hard stuff, ever, but would I mind if she had just a little grass? because then she could be sure of getting it off. I said I didn't mind, so she got a saved butt out of a little box in the nightstand drawer, good for five deep drags, well spaced, then pressed it out and came back down to me with that sad, sweet, oriental tang on her breath.
    Four
    I AWOKE a little after four in the morning. I could look across her to her improvised night light. It made yellow highlights on the sprawl of her small lean naked back and small mound of buttocks. She had her face pressed against my ribs, and I felt the long, slow heat of each exhalation from the depths of her sleep. She had one leg linked over mine, her right arm across my middle. A frizzle of that kinked platinum hair tickled me just under the armpit with each breath I took. The night bugs made small whirring sounds, and a wind made a sudden rainsound in the palm fronds.
    I sighed in a kind of habitual dismay at my own involvements. This one had a locker-room drabness about it. Hey, guys, the first night I stayed there, I screwed the piano player.
    How was it, fella?
    Well, to tell the truth, not bad. A lot of little extra frills and trills and improvisations, just like her piano playing, but not much real intensity, you know.
    The why and when of the inadvertent affair is never simply explained. I remembered a few years ago, Meyer pressing a book upon me by one L. Rust Hills, entitled How to Be Good. Mr. Hills was explaining to his peer group how one might retain a modicum of goodness in a sadly corrupt world. One chapter in particular seemed appropriate to the situation in which I now found myself. He described the awkward union which he terms "the charity fuck." This is when a person finds himself in a situation where he suddenly realizes that the other party is ready, willing, and eager to make love, and because the place is available and private, and the time is available, and both parties are reasonably healthy, the only possible reason for saying no thanks is because you find the other party physically unappealing. Any excuse at