Spider’s Cage Read Free Page B

“for fellers too brittle to fall,” both located in the Los Angeles area, as well as worldwide charitable endeavors.
    To the end of his life, O’Ryan preferred the simple existence afforded by his two-room shack located in the foothills on his original oil property. Though electricity runs to every pump and well in the valley, he never had electricity installed in his home there. He preferred to read Greek philosophers and Latin poets by lamplight, and to live without “godforsaken modern gadgetry,” except for his Cadillac. “You ever see a cowboy didn’t want a Cadillac? Any butt ever sat a mean horse don’t want to do without one, or maybe two of ’em, one for each bun.”
    Why was O’Ryan known as Sweet Jesus? Long time friend and employee Hardpan, who would not give his last name (“I got one, but I can’t pronounce it.”), told the
Times
, “Ever time a well’d come in, whether he was standin’ on top of it, like the early days, gettin covered with s—, or in the penthouse office, in downtownL.A., knee deep in likewise, I reckon, he’d throw his hat or a monkey wrench or a secretary just as far as he could, and holler, ‘Sweet Jesus.’ No, I never knowed him to go to church, ‘less he was gettin’ married.”
    Edward O’Ryan is survived by a daughter by his second marriage, Mrs. Kitty Larkin, of Malibu, Ca., and his granddaughter, country-western singer Jodie Ryan, of San Francisco. His third wife, Pamela Neil, divorced from Mr. O’Ryan in 1975, also lives in the Bay Area.
    Windrow spun his desk chair around to face the window, put his feet up on the sill. The venetian blind lay in a heap in the corner, against the lower drawer of the file cabinet. He crossed his ankles one way, then another. He readjusted his sunglasses. He sighed. He let his feet down with a bang, stood, and paced to the office door, where he paused. Her guitar and case were on top of the refrigerator. He hadn’t heard from her. No doubt that, now, she could afford a spare. He would have time to teach himself how to play a mazurka in E fl at before she called for this instrument. He kicked the bottom of the refrigerator. Desultory? Not at all. The thin protective grill clattered off the bottom of the refrigerator and lay at his feet. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at it. Nondesultory. Oh for a desultory mind randomly flipping from thought to thought, like a severed lizard’s tail in a box of matches. Leaps. Hmph. Squat frogmind emits the lovemad croak and uncoils its rear legs, airborn, plop, into the same ontological topography as before: mud. Emotional mud.
    Must be my diet, Windrow thought: short on protein and ruffage. He opened the refrigerator and inspected its contents. These amounted, in short, to a serious indictmentof his personal nutrition. From the corroded and empty shelves of the old Kelvinator he extracted the ingredients of his breakfast. He poured a dark Mexican beer into a glass and broke a brown egg into it. He garnished the sepia barm with a dilapidated sprig of flaccid parsley, and drank. Ahh. He smacked his lips, chewed the parsley, and Pow, his mind made the leap. He paced back to the window.
    He’d first met Jodie Ryan on a television shoot on the Embarcadero. He’d been hired to find one of the gypsy crewmen working the production. Seeing Windrow, the startled subject fell off a pier into the bay and nearly drowned. Seeing Windrow and the shivering subject gave Jodie Ryan a distinctly bad taste for Windrow’s person, and they’d had a swell time ever since. This is to say, she’d call whenever she was in town and had nothing else to do, which occurred about every three months. Every three months was just often enough to keep Windrow interested, but not often enough for the affair to get respectable. However, he’d howled at the moon from beneath Coit Tower one night, and