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.“Amen!” said the Animals again.“And they’re handy for lightin’ firecrackers off of,” added Jeff as he bent over an incense stick and set a string cracking.“Hallelujah!” said the Animals.Each offered to share some kind of memory of Blue, but all of their stories quickly degenerated to orifices and squishiness, and no one wanted to go there in front of Troy’s grandma, so instead they threw firecrackers at Clint while he read from the Twenty-third Psalm.Before they cracked the second case of beer, it was decided that after dark, three of them-Lash, Troy Lee, and Barry-would take Blue from Lash’s apartment, load her into the back of Barry’s station wagon, and take her out in the middle of the Bay in Barry’s Zodiac.(Barry was the diver of the bunch, and had all the cool aquatic stuff.They’d used his spearguns to help take down the old vampire.) Lash braced himself as he opened the apartment door, but to his surprise, there was no smell.He led Barry and Troy into the bedroom, and together they wrestled the rolled-up rug out of the closet.“It’s not heavy enough,” Barry said.“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Troy said, trying furiously to unroll the rug.Finally Lash reached down, grabbed the edge of the rug, and whipped it up over his head.There was a thudding sound against the far wall, followed by the jingle of metal, like coins settling.The three Animals stood and stared.“What are those?” Asked Barry.“Earrings,” answered Troy.Indeed, there were seven earrings settling on the hardwood floor.“Not those.Those!” Barry nodded toward two clear, cantaloupe-sized, gelatinous lozenges that quivered on the floor like stranded jellyfish.Lash shivered.“I’ve seen them before.My brother used to work in a plant in Santa Barbara that made them.”“What the fuck are they?” Said Troy, squinting through a drunken haze.“Those are breast implants,” Lash said.“What are those wormy things?” asked Barry.There were two translucent sluglike blobs of something stuck to the rug near the edge.“Looks like window caulk,” said Lash.He noticed that there was a fine blue powder near the edge of the rug.He ran his hand over it, pinched some on his fingers, and sniffed it.Nothing.“Where’d she go?” asked Barry.“No idea,” said Lash.20 – It’s a Wonderful LifeGustavo Chavez had been born the seventh child of a brick maker in a small village in the state ofMichoacan,Mexico.At eighteen he married a local girl, the daughter of a farmer, herself a seventh child, and at twenty, with his second child on the way, he crossed the border into the United States, where he lived with a cousin in Oakland, along with a score of other relatives, and worked grueling, twelve-hour days as a laborer, making enough to feed himself and send more money home to his family than he could possibly have made in his father’s brickyard.He did this because it was the responsible and right thing to do, and because he had been raised a good Catholic man who, like his father, would provide for his family and no more than two or three mistresses.Each year, about a month before Christmas, he would sneak back across the border to celebrate Christmas with his family, meet any new children that might been born, and make love with his wife, Maria, until they were both so sore it hurt to walk.In fact, the vision of Maria’s inviting thighs would often begin haunting him around Halloween and the hapless night porter would find himself in a state of semiarousal as he swung his soapy mop, to and fro, across fifteen thousand square feet of linoleum every night.To night he was in the store alone, and he was feeling far from aroused, for it was Christmas night, and he could not go to mass or take Communion until he confessed.He was feeling deeply ashamed.Christmas night and he hadn’t even called Maria-hadn’t spoken to her for weeks, because like the rest of the Animals, he had gone toLas Vegas, and had given all his money to the blue whore.He had called, of course, after they’d first taken the vampire’s art and sold it for so much money, but since then, his life had been a fog of tequila and marijuana and the evil attentions of the blue one.He, a good man, who cared for his family, had never hit his wife, had only cheated with a second cousin and never with a white woman, had been undone by the curse of the blue devil’s pussy.La maldicion de la cochadel diablo azul.This is the saddest, loneliest Christmas ever, thought Gustavo as he dragged his mop past the canvas doors leading into the produce-department cooler.I am like the poor cabron in that book The Pearl, where by simply trying to take advantage of some good fortune, I have lost all that I care about.Okay, I did get drunk for a week and my pearl was a blue whore who fucked the chimichangas out of me, but still, pretty sad.He thought these things in Spanish, so they sounded infinitely more tragic and romantic.Then there came a noise from the cooler, and he was startled for a second.He wrung out his mop, so as to be ready for anything.He didn’t like being in the store by himself, but with the front windows broken out, someone had to be here, and because he was far from home, had nowhere else to go, and the union would see that he was paid double time, Gustavo had volunteered.Perhaps if he sent home a little extra, Maria might forget the hundred thousand dollars he’d promised.There, something was moving behind the plastic doors of the cooler, which were waving slightly.The stout Mexican crossed himself and backed out of the produce department, swinging his mop now in quick swaths, leaving barely a hint of dampness on the linoleum.He was by the dairy case now, and a stack of yogurts fell over inside the glass doors, as if someone had shoved them out of the way to look through.Gustavo dropped the mop and ran to the back of the store, saying a Hail Mary peppered with swearwords as he went, wondering if those were footsteps he heard behind him, or the echoes of his own footfalls resounding through the deserted store.Out the front door and away, he chanted in his head [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]