No Place for an Angel Read Free Page A

hear. That is all.” He was startled. The camera roved beautifully, over rooftops, lowered to a street where a woman at a distance walked thoughtfully. He had sat straight up really to pay attention. “Turn that off,” somebody said. “Perry Mason is on six.”
    Barry, for one, could never get Perry Mason straight. There were people in the bar who did it easily, even after six beers. “Thought so,” they muttered, nodding to one another when the murderer was pointed out or, seeing what was coming, broke down, or bolted. For himself, Barry thought he would never understand what had happened if he saw it four times through cold sober.
    Somebody had left a loaded gun by a sleeping man and a woman came in and thought the gun was empty and the man was dead and called the police; then somebody else came in and found the man awake and the gun handy and shot him, but was it that gun or one brought for the purpose and did they switch guns and why was the man asleep if he hadn’t been doped and what was the woman doing there in the first place? Perry Mason always reconstructed the whole event, but Barry Day could never follow it. He got too busy watching the sleeping man, the alert lovely startled woman, the hand of the man hanging toward the floor, his shirt rumpled and head pillowed on his elbow, the tiny frown beginning between the woman’s big velvet eyes, the sudden dawn of alarm, then terror. A car drew up to a rainy door. Then cabs, the police, the district attorney, Perry, Della Street, Paul, all came spilling out like face cards in a worn, familiar deck. He could never understand what they were saying or doing. Who can follow a story any more? What story is worth following? He didn’t know.
    Before taking up sculpture, he had been a painter. Surfaces drew him as if many magnets had been secretly installed in them, the way Russians installed tiny microphones any and everywhere. Door sills, the full firm limbs of girls, their knees, ankles, etc., babies’ heels and eyebrows, the slippery hexagonal surface of a beer stein, the flat composed length of the bar, a man’s shoulder beneath an unpressed coat . . . anything he clapped his eyes on he seemed to stick to. The only way to get rid of what he saw was to sketch it, paint it, mould it, farm it off onto something else. Out of this impulse he had started, quite young. And this, he now suddenly realized, was why he was scared of bombs. To see those surfaces break and crumble, tear, shatter, burst, dissolve, sink into rubble and carnage. Irreplaceable, every one of them, and irreplaceable, too, the eye of Bernard Desportes, alias Barry Day, who saw them as they were. He steadied himself on beer and television. What would the show have said, the one they turned off?
    He worked all day, lunched on peanut butter, needed to find a girl.
    â€œYou from the South, ain’t you?” the bartender asked him after three months.
    â€œThat’s right,” he said.
    â€œWhat line you in?”
    He said something, worked uptown crating dress goods, that would do. It was true he had done this for a while, when he got back to New York after a time in Rome. Once he had told somebody who asked him this that he was a jockey. Though far from home, having left himself wide open for getting run out of the South ten years ago, he still knew himself by what had been said about him in his childhood, and once when he was about twelve his uncle had taken him to the races in New Orleans and had said on the way home, guzzling beer from one roadhouse to the other, all the way back to the Gulf coast: “Boy, if you don’t grow any more you going to make a good jockey.” He had grown some more, but not much, and he would still make a good jockey, he often thought, could see himself sometimes in that Lautrec picture of the horse with the big satin behind galloping off on an inside track. But down in New Orleans, not the Champ de Mars.
    Barry