Lost River Read Free Page B

trailing down the front of his white shirt. He got up to shuffle to the mirror over the washstand to study the dots on the drawn and grayish flesh of his face for a few puzzled moments before pouring some tepid water from the pitcher into the bowl. Using the ragged cloth, he scrubbed until he couldn't see the splotches anymore.
    He lay back down on the bed and closed his eyes, reaching into the shadowy corners of his brain for some clue to how his clothes and flesh had been soiled, and a gradual pantomime came to life.
    The fellow had turned around, startled. A pistol cracked and in the next instant his eyes flew wide in shock as he staggered and then went down in a heap. In a few gasping seconds, it was over. There was some odd comedy about getting the body into a house and leaving it on the parlor floor. William remembered sneaking back into the night and looking up to see one blazing star in an indigo sky—a good sign.
    He opened his eyes and the images fluttered away. Maybe it had been a dream. He had those, wild with colors, shrieking images, and bizarre, clownish characters. Maybe so; but he wasn't imagining the stains on his clothes.
    In a spike of alarm, he stripped down, rolled the greasy trousers and shirt together, and hurried to stuff the ball in the back of the closet. His pulse calmed when he closed the door, and he wandered pale naked to the window, where he stood running an absent finger over the scar on his torso. The squalid box of a room offered no view to speak of, just the flat roof of the next building, and beyond that more buildings, and more after that, shades of gray and brown, all the way to the river.
    William could see a small stretch of the Mississippi, wide and olive colored, polluted with oil from the ships and barges and foul wastes of the sewers, and loud with a racket of clanging bells, screaming whistles, rude honks, and low moaning horns, all carried along on the slap of the dirty water.
    There was more filth on land. The streets were crowded with automobiles, trucks, hacks, and carriages, the gutters awash in horse manure. The whole city smelled of rust and decay and the sour sweat of humanity. There were too many people, and too many of them stared with eyes that made it hard for someone like him to hide.
    He knew that if he pushed his mind, he could make this world dissolve and he'd be back on the ward, gazing out over the rice fields that rippled like a gentle green ocean. On the far edge of the last verdant plot was a line of trees. Far beyond that was a ribbon of river that he remembered vaguely as a placid curve of silver that meandered from one horizon to the other as if lost.
    A whistle shrieked, tearing a hole in the canvas, and William once again was surveying the dirty panorama of New Orleans. There would be salvation, and soon. Once his work was done, he could leave it forever.

    Valentin descended onto Spain Street to the hooting of the barges out on the river as they floated their tonnage to the Mandeville Street wharf, not a quarter mile away. He strolled at an easy pace, enjoying the bright early autumn day. At the corner of Esplanade, he stopped at a newsstand for the morning
Picayune
and stepped outside just in time to climb on the northbound car.
    The run up to St. Claude took only a few minutes, and he kept the newspaper folded under his arm until he transferred to a westbound car. It was fifteen jostling, stop-and-start minutes to the beginning of St. Charles, and he took the time to look over the front page.
    The top story was the trial of several defendants in the dancehall shoot-out at the 102 Ranch six months before. Valentin remembered hearing about the gunplay and feeling a tug in his gut. He knew at the time that had he been around, he probably could have cooled the action and saved some lives. As it was, the popular saloonkeeper William Philips and a rival named Harry Parker had died and three others had been wounded.
    In the aftermath, there had been grousing