Cannibals in Love Read Online Free Page A

over me one more time. And finally, when she was satisfied, she nodded, and I thanked her for letting me fly in spite of my crimes against National Security. I bowed and I genuflected, and I tried to reorient myself on the other side of the metal detector. I sort of expected not to understand what was going on here.
    *   *   *
    We stood in Cullen’s driveway, kicking ice and passing our last two cans of beer. A snowplow went by in a cloud of silted exhaust that stained the snowbanks brown. We watched its orange and yellow lights flicker as it dropped the blade with a harsh metal scrape, before gathering, and running cleanly along the snow again.
    The stinging cold was sobering in small doses, and not entirely unpleasant. I always found myself more sensitive to the weather coming back to it. The low-watt sunshine and the sharp, leafless trees. The frozen, invisible smells of cordite and gasoline in the air. And the cool, continuous quiet of nighttime. These long, gray, birdless winters. Buffalo, a girl once told me, was where clouds went to die. I always liked that.
    We’d decided to go out to a bar and someone said something about a taxi. Louis and Cullen were bickering about dooeys , which was a term I didn’t know. Louis was saying who had what dooeys and when.
    â€œDooeys?” I asked. “Do both of you have DUIs ?”
    â€œJust one ,” Louis said with a scowl, and I nodded dumbly.
    The taxi was an old yellow minivan with a peeling checkered stripe. Cullen pulled back the door and held it, like a gentleman, as I slid across the bench seat next to Louis. I could feel the heater on blast, buffeting us with the smell of sweat and smoke and Febreze. Our driver turned his head toward the dome light as he waited: an impossibly fat young man in a Santa hat.
    â€œHo, ho, ho. Where to?”
    â€œWe wanna get drunk at the Summit Street Saloon, Santa,” Louis said.
    â€œRight-o.”
    He popped the minivan into gear and began eyeballing me in the rearview. I held my face down in a frown, which was a plea not to speak. Santa had big clay ears and tiny marble eyes, and greasy skin that duffled around the neck. He wore a pencil sketch of a mustache that was marred, in all directions, by violent constellations of acne, running off his cheeks and into his collar.
    This was the guy I pictured when someone said the word lardass .
    â€œI was just thinking,” he finally said. “You boys look like you could use a little ganja tonight. Am I right? Santa’s running a special New Year’s deal.”
    None of us said anything, not a word. We just left the poor kid hanging there, which seemed to depress and demoralize him all out of proportion. Santa was not much of a pusher, which was too bad for him.
    â€œ No body?” he said.
    I was actually sort of relieved that Louis and Cullen weren’t interested, but it was too late. Santa gave up, right there on the spot, and offered to smoke us out for free. No one was strong enough to say no to free drugs, and this made Santa fat and jolly again.
    I watched as he let his belly out into the wheel and took both hands away. A lighter flickered in the dark and he inhaled asthmatically, slowing the car down with him. I took the glass bowl over his shoulder, and I passed it away to Louis. Everything about this made me anxious, and I reached behind me for my seat belt then. Santa struck me as a guy with a couple dooeys at least.
    That first hit seemed to liven him up, too, and he started telling us racist jokes about ragheads and sand niggers . I was inhaling deeply and not following how this began. But Cullen was hee-hawing in a way meant to mimic Louis’s laughter. Leaning across me with a big, shit-eating smile. But Louis wouldn’t bite.
    â€œNo, dude, that’s not funny,” Louis said to Santa, in total seriousness. “You’re telling it wrong. You’re stepping all over the joke.”
    And suddenly