Devil Red Read Free Page A

got to leave tomorrow.
    Early.”
    “Damn. I forgot.”
    “Figured you did. You been kind of preoccupied with your morality and your mortality … But it’s okay. I won’t be gone long. A week maybe.”
    “That’s too long,” I said.
    “Poor baby. You’re in the dumps.”
    “Big-time.”
    “Because you got shot a while back?”
    “Well, duh, that has something to do with it,” I said.
    “Would some sympathy pussy help?”
    “Well,” I said. “I don’t know I’ll feel any more right about what I did, and I won’t miss you any less when you’re gone, but it certainly would improve my spirits.”
    “I thought it might,” Brett said, shifting to slip off her panties.

5
    I slept a short while after we made love, and then I woke up and got out of bed gently and went to the bathroom. I came back and sat in the chair by the window. I looked out at the yard where a fence rose up and another house swelled on that side slightly covered by a large tree and its shadows. The darkness from the tree made the house look like a natural formation. There was moonlight in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, which was clear of trees, and there was a kid’s swing set back there; it looked like some kind of Martian insect lurking.
    I turned and watched Brett while she slept. The window was framed in such a way that it had four panes and the panes were filled with moonlight and the light lay across the bed and the thin slats that held the panes in place divided her like dark straight cuts. Her face was at peace and her mouth was open and she was snoring slightly. I could see her white teeth and the way her long red hair, which looked dark as the shadows, curled around her chin and spread out on the pillow like an oil spill.
    I loved the way she looked and the way she made love and the way she made me feel. But there was nothing she did or could do that would make me feel good about what I had done. Not tonight, anyway.
    I thought about going downstairs and reading, maybe listening to music with the earphones, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do it. I went back to the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the light and found a magazine on the back of the toilet, picked up the pair of Wal-Mart glasses I kept in there—I kept several pairs around the house—and put them on and sighed because I needed the damn things to read close-up print. I was too tired and too old to be beating people up. A man who was old enough for reading glasses should have a job in some place air-conditioned and his most violent activity should be sliding his zipper down.
    I read from the magazine, but nothing I read stayed with me. I finally gave it up and took a couple of light sleeping pills and went back to bed, and when I woke up it was late morning and Brett was gone.

6
    It hadn’t been that long since I had healed up from a bullet wound, and in the process of getting that wound, I had ended up splitting some good money with Leonard, so I wasn’t sure why I was working. It wasn’t my style to do something when there was money already to be had. I preferred desperation and overdue bills as a work incentive.
    I showered and got ready for work and thought about Brett and her whore of a daughter. Brett had gone off to see her before and had come back blue and not so friendly for a couple of days, and then she would see it all for what it was, come around, and be okay for months. Then some idea would strike her, or the daughter would e-mail her, or some such thing, and the blues would open up again like a deep hole in the sea, and down Brett would go. I couldn’t do a thing for her when she was that way. She had to deal with the depths and what was down there in her own manner and in her own time, same as me. She got like that, she was nothing like she was the rest of the time, and it was really best she did leave me for a while. That way they wouldn’t find my decapitated head on my pillow.
    But she was never like me. She