Call Me the Breeze Read Online Free Page A

need you so bad,’ sneered Hoss, ‘for all the good you’ve ever been.’
    ‘Ten men dead in the snow, slaughtered for sweet fuck all!’ he snarled, finishing up his drink.
    ‘If you’re not in it then stay well out of it!’ snapped Hoss as Carson the former Provo banged the door behind him.
Big Sur
    I wondered what The Jace — I felt I knew her so well now it was OK to call her that — made of all that stuff, the killing and bombing, I mean. It was a long way from California, that was for sure. I had a fair idea she didn’t give a fuck. ‘If that’s how they want to live their lives, well, that’s fine. All I can say is, include me out.’ The unblemished sands of Big Sur stretching out for miles behind her and the Pacific surf crashing. I couldn’t stop thinking about things turning out differently for Charlie if he’d gone down the road of Carlos Castaneda and stuff and not got stuck with violent revolution and shit — just how great it all could have been. I’d been reading in the Ed Sanders book about how they used to live in the desert and drive around in these dune buggies, and I’d see myself then just sitting on a rock, sharing a toke with Charlie. And him nodding as he said: ‘You know what? You’re right. You’re right about love, you and Jacy.’
    ‘Me and The Jace,’ I’d say, ‘I think we got it right. Two flowers in a beautiful garden.’
    As, behind a monster spliff, Charlie ‘The Gardener’ twinkled!
Cops
    Hoss got his name from one of the Cartwright brothers in the TV Western series
Bonanza
and was built like a brick shithouse. One man you didn’t argue with was Hoss Watson for he’d take you apart without even blinking. Ever since the salesman’s death the cops had been shadowing him because they were pretty sure he’d been in on it. And now that the British Ambassador had died they had got it into their heads he’d been involved in that operation too, because of a comment he’d made to the sergeant one night. ‘Good enough for him,’ he’d quipped, orsomething like that. But they had nothing on him they could make stick.
    You couldn’t move now without the cops watching you. One night I got talking to one at the corner, the radio on his hip spitting static. ‘What do you think of this town?’ I said, not really caring what he said, just to make conversation more than anything. He was a young fellow not much older than myself, looking at me with his face so pale. ‘What do I think of this town?’ he said. ‘I think it’s hell.’
    I felt sorry for him that he had to think that. Thinking that about anywhere, in fact. Especially when things were going so well for me. Not knowing what to do when only minutes later I’d seen her and her pal coming out of the office where she worked. I ducked down into the entry and watched the two of them going up the street. The other chick I didn’t know but she was completely different to Jacy. Definitely no Charlie Manson joints there, or trips in dune buggies, I kept thinking. She was just an ordinary country girl who, I figured, worked in the bank or some place, with this little skirt and jumper on her. But any friend of Jacy’s was a friend of mine, I reckoned, and all I could think was that it was real good to see them together that way, just rapping away there the way chicks do.
    In the nights now I couldn’t sleep at all — just thinking of the flowers on her collar and the way she slung the bag across her shoulder. I wondered what was in it. A diary, some books, perhaps some dope. I wondered what she read. I had found myself being amazed by some of the writings Charlie’d been influenced by — it gave you a list at the back of Ed’s book and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some of those. They sounded like fantastic reading material. Even better than the stuff The Seeker had given me. Lyric poetry. Philosophy. ‘
The printed word is the key to the truth. Knowledge is power
,’ he used to say to The Family.