All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel Read Free

well.”

2
    FORTUNATELY discontentment doesn’t affect my appetite. Sally had just walked out the door, mad, which made me very discontent, but just before she left she had fried a whole chicken and I sat at the ironing board and ate the half of it that was rightfully mine. The ironing board was what we were using for a kitchen table.
    Sally hadn’t really wanted to go to Lake Charles, when she left Godwin. I was completely in love with her, so I took her to Houston with me and a week later we got married. I wouldn’t have minded living in sin for a while, but Sally was scared of her parents. Lake Charles wasn’t very far away and she was afraid they would get wind of things, in which case her father would come up and kill us. I was just as glad to get married, but I was surprised at how often Sally got mad at me, afterward. We had only been married three weeks and she had already walked out in high dudgeon five or six times. I could never understand what I did to put her in high dudgeon, but whatever it was I always felt utterly to blame.
    It was a hot, muggy Houston dusk, and big Gulf Coast mosquitoes flitted against the window screen while I atemy chicken. The fact that Sally had gone away mad preyed on my mind and made me indecisive. It took me five minutes to decide whether to put her half of the chicken in the oven or in the icebox. Finally I put it in the oven, and just as I did someone knocked at the door. My immediate thought was that it must be Mrs. Salomea, a formidable lady whose backyard we walked through in order to get to our apartment. Just that morning I had done something absolutely inexcusable and I was sure Mrs. Salomea was coming to accost me about it.
    I think having Sally to sleep with had given me the confidence to do what I did. I had been wanting to for months, before she came, and hadn’t had the nerve. Mrs. Salomea had a terrific old tree in her backyard. Its top branches must have been two hundred feet above the ground, and it was always full of squirrels. I had a little single-shot .22—it had been the only gun I could afford all through my childhood, when hunting had been an obsession with me. I thought I had outgrown the obsession, but Mrs. Salomea’s tree full of squirrels made it come back on me. All the time I was writing my novel I could see the squirrels out the window and I kept wanting to go out and shoot one. Sometimes in the morning, before I started writing, I would sit with the .22 and shoot eight or ten squirrels in my imagination, always aiming at the ones on the highest branches. That morning, in a moment of complete happiness, I had actually shot one.
    Sally was the reason I was so happy. We meant to make love when we went to bed, but for some reason I got to talking and we didn’t. I guess we slept all night feeling sexy, because about dawn we woke up doing it. We had just sort of rolled together. I went right back to sleep and when I woke up again, about seven, I felt wonderful. Sally was still asleep. A crease in the sheet had made a crease on one side of her face. I felt clear and dry and hungry, and extremelylike working. Out the window I could see the squirrels in Mrs. Salomea’s tree. I felt that I had lived a routine life long enough. I would have taken a parachute jump, if one had been offered me just then. It was obvious to me that I could do much more than I had been doing. I put on some Levi’s and got my .22 and one shell and went outside. The thick St. Augustine grass in the Salomeas’ yard was wet with dew. Pale-yellow shafts of sunlight slanted down through the leaves of the great tree. I was only going to shoot a running squirrel, not one that was sitting. Finally a brown squirrel ran along a branch very high up, eighty-five feet I’m sure, maybe a hundred, just a movement on the branch with the sun flickering through the leaves right above him. I swung and shot and he dropped straight down all those feet of air, as if a string had been stretched from