Dark Rivers of the Heart Read Free

beer.
        Judging by the palpable melancholy of the patrons in the bar, it might actually have been June, 1940, with German tanks rolling down the Champs-Elysees, and with omens of doom blazing in the night sky.
        A few minutes later, the waitress approached Spencer again. "I guess I sounded a little paranoid," she said.
        "Not at all. I watch the news too."
        "It's just that Valerie is so…"
        "Special," Spencer said, finishing her thought so accurately that she stared at him with a mixture of surprise and vague alarm, as if she suspected that he had actually read her mind.
        "Yeah. Special. You can know her only a week, and… well, you want her to be happy. You want good things to happen to her."
        It doesn't take a week, Spencer thought. One evening.
        Rosie said, "Maybe because there's this hurt in her. She's been hurt a lot."
        "How?" he asked. "Who?"
        She shrugged. "It's nothing I know, nothing she ever said. You just feel it about her."
        He also had sensed a vulnerability in Valerie.
        "But she's tough too," Rosie said. "Gee, I don't know why I'm so' JUMPY about this. It's not like I'm her big sister. Anyway, everyone's got a right to be late now and then."
        The waitress turned away, and Spencer sipped his warm beer.
        The piano player launched into "It Was a Very Good Year," which Spencer disliked even when Sinatra sang it, though he was a Sinatra fan.
        He knew the song was intended to be reflective in tone, even mildly pensive; however, it seemed terribly sad to him, not the sweet wistfulness of an older man reminiscing about the women he had loved, but the grim ballad of someone at the bitter end of his days, looking back on a barren life devoid of deep relationships.
        He supposed that his interpretation of the lyrics was an expression of his fear that decades hence, when his own life burned out, he would fade away in loneliness and remorse.
        He checked his watch. Valerie was now an hour and a half late.
        The waitress's uneasiness had infected him. An insistent image rose in his mind's eye: Valerie's face, half concealed by a spill of dark hair and a delicate scrollwork of blood, one cheek pressed against the floor, eyes wide and unblinking. He knew his concern was irrational. She was merely late for work. There was nothing ominous about that. Yet, minute by minute, his apprehension deepened.
        He put his unfinished beer on the bar, got off the stool, and walked through the blue light to the red door and into the chilly night, where the sound of marching armies was only the rain beating on the canvas awnings.
        As he passed the art gallery doorway, he heard the shadow-wrapped vagrant weeping softly. He paused, affected.
        Between strangled sounds of grief, the half-seen stranger whispered the last thing Spencer had said to him earlier: "Nobody knows… nobody knows… That short declaration evidently had acquired a personal and profound meaning for him, because he spoke the two words not in the tone in which Spencer had spoken but with quiet, intense anguish.
        "Nobody knows." Though Spencer knew that he was a fool for funding the wretch's further self-destruction, he fished a crisp ten-dollar bill from his wallet. He leaned into the gloomy entryway, into the fetid stink that the hobo exuded, and held out the money.
        "Here, take this."
        The hand that rose to the offering was either clad in a dark glove or exceedingly filthy; it was barely discernible in the shadows. As the bill was plucked out of Spencer's fingers, the vagrant keened thinly:
        "Nobody… nobody…"
        "You'll be all right," Spencer said sympathetically. "It's only life.
        We all get through it."
        "It's only life, we all get through it," the vagrant whispered.
        Plagued once more by the mental image of Valerie's dead face, Spencer hurried to the