Spider’s Cage Read Free

his eyes of Sal.
    â€œHow’d you find me Sal?” said the girl on the bed, still facing the wall.
    â€œWe never lost track of you honey. We just thought to leave you alone until the time came.”
    There was a silence. It seemed to Windrow that something was leaving. The woman on the bed waited a while longer, then spoke carefully. “Boojum…”
    Sal said nothing.
    Windrow blinked.
Boojum?
    The woman sat up. Facing away from Windrow and Sal she lowered her head. The blonde curls that descended to her shoulders parted evenly around the nape of her neck.
    â€œBoojum’s dead,” she whispered, not quite giving her words the inflection that would distinguish them as a declaration or a question.
    â€œHardpan found him last night,” Sal said, her voice gentler now, “just sitting in his chair.” She cleared her throat. “He died about a week, maybe ten days ago.”
    The girl held her breath a long time, then exhaled loudly. Her head lowered further, the shoulders slumped. She began to pick fitfully at a corner of the sheet.
    â€œHe was reading that book,” Sal continued softly, “the one you’d given him about the music business…?”
    The girl was silent, then she gave a big sniff and looked up at the corner over her head, where the wall met the ceiling. “
Gnashmill
,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “The fucking story of the fucking country fucking music business.”
    After a short silence, Sal nodded. “He was about halfway through it. Readin’ by lamplight, like always.”
    After a longer silence, the woman turned to look at Windrow. He realized that he hadn’t seen her face since just after Sal had appeared. It looked different than he remembered it. She looked from him to Sal and to the floor. “I’ll get into some clothes,” she said, and stood up. She moved naturally, without embarrassment.
    Windrow thought her most beautiful. As she poked around the guitar for her jewelry and clothes, looking under the bed, discovering a stocking under a lemon, her beauty displayed itself most advantageously, and in spite of the contraindicative circumstances, he managed to continue being aroused.
    Sal apparently sensitive to these things, looked at him and snorted. “Looks like the bull got left in the chute,” she observed.
    â€œHere’s that record,” the girl said softly, placing a record sleeve on the desk. She kissed him on his mouth, and brushed her now clothed hips against his naked ones.
    â€œDon’t forget me. I’ll come back for the six-string,” she said, indicating the guitar with a sweep of her arm. She smiled sadly and kissed him again. There were tears in her eyes.
    â€œJodie, what’s going on?” Genuinely puzzled, his eyes searched hers.
    â€œGoodbye,” she said, and hurried out the door and down the hallway. He could hear her heels on the first step of the staircase before he moved to follow her. “Hey,” he said, “wait.” But Sal was still there, her hand on the doorknob. Windrow was just confused enough by the way life had thought to treat him this morning that he’d not noticed Sal retrieve the wrapped roll of quarters from her jacket pocket. He walked right into it. Making a fist around them, she buried ten dollars in change in Windrow’s stomach. All the air went out of him with a whoosh. The little jar of Vaseline hit the wall on the opposite side of the hall, but before it made the floor, Sal had delivered the roundhouse with the weighted fist to the side of Windrow’s head. He didn’t hear Jodie yell, he was unconscious at the time. But he pirouetted on tiptoe, backwards, to his desk as if to answer the phone again. Then, as if the phone had stopped ringing before he got it, he twisted around, as if the conversation with Sal might continue past the interruption. But then the detective suddenly relinquished