Harmony In Flesh and Black Read Free Page B

in again, but the smell followed. It was embedded in the package Smykal had made, a crumpled oblong wrapped in newspaper that smelled of bacon grease and old dust, crotches and cigars.
    *   *   *
    Fred, being a lapsed bachelor right now, was living outside Boston, in Arlington, with his friend Molly Riley and two children. The house and children were Molly’s. Fred was liking being there, despite it being a big change for him, and they seemed to be glad to have him around. Molly, alert and protective of her children and her turf, was fond of him, and Fred thought he was getting somewhere with the eight-year-old girl, Terry. Terry would take his hand, even, sometimes, without thinking. The boy, Sam, twelve, was harder.
    Fred hadn’t thought to be attached to anyone, to anything, again. If he looked at it, he couldn’t understand it, nor could he trace how this had come about from the first pleasure he had found, more than a year ago, joking with the nice woman behind the reference desk at the Cambridge Public Library before going back to sleep on the mat in Charlestown in the bare room in the house he had bought—was still buying—with the other guys.
    Fred saw the guys still. He occasionally played chess there in the evening. And he paid his share of the mortgage though he wasn’t using his room now and he knew someone else was sleeping there regularly. All he needed the place for now, it seemed, was for somewhere to keep a locked box of things he didn’t want at Molly’s. And it made a home base to return to if it came to that in the future. He paid more than his share since he was making money and others could not. The guys could use the help, and there wasn’t much coming from anywhere else, whether out of the Veterans Administration or from the alumni association of unmentionable clandestine activities.
    He was late, and he was getting to like the feeling of being expected by a woman and two children. Fred had his own primary objective, and he wasn’t going to let Clay’s business crowd in front of anything as fragile as what he was working on with Molly and the kids. It was going to be tough to find a safe corner at Molly’s to keep a picture, what with bicycles, hair dryers, fishing rods, the portable TV, and the rest of it; and he didn’t really like mixing Clay’s business into that part of his life. But Clayton would have to take his chances.
    Fred turned right at the river and then headed west on Route 2.
    He’d thought for a long time that he was destined always to be a loner. He was changing. His prime objective now was not being a loner. He didn’t have men to watch out for anymore; so let it be Molly and the kids, if they would let him.
    He was eager to see Molly. Molly was a very pretty woman. Fred told her that she could be found in paintings from the school of Fontainebleau, and that she’d been prefigured by Italians working for French royal taste—though she was pinker, on the whole.
    Molly said that didn’t keep her, with her short brown curls—and especially when she was wearing an apron—from looking like the kid sister of the rosy farmer’s wife in children’s books from the thirties. If she didn’t watch it, she’d get fat.
    Traffic was slow and heavy. The green and pink dresses of spring were ruffled across the trees along his route, making him think with extra pleasure of Molly waiting for him.
    The thought of Clayton Reed in Smykal’s place was amazing, interesting, and most spectacularly odd. What devious twist of fate or research had brought him there? Whatever it was, Clayton had been seduced by the package now in the trunk of Fred’s car. Out in the air, with the close reek of Smykal’s nest of slime receding, Fred’s appetite began emerging cautiously. He was anxious to see the painting Clay had discovered in such unpleasant