Green shadows, white whale v5 Read Online Free Page B

Wouldn't you hate to be married to that kind of woman, kid?"
    I sat back in my chair, my mouth full of food I could not chew nor swallow.
    I looked at my genius employer and then at his wife then back to John and then back to Ricki.
    Her head was bent.
    "Yellow," said John, a final time, and blew smoke.
    As I looked down at the dead bird on my plate, I recalled a scene that now seemed so long ago.
    In August, I had wandered, stunned, into a bookstore in Beverly Hills looking for a small, comfortable-sized copy of Moby Dick. The copy I had at home was too large to travel. I needed something compact. I shared with the proprietor my excitement about writing the screenplay and traveling overseas.
    Even as I spoke, astonished, a woman in the far comer of the shop turned and said, very clearly:
    "Don't go on that journey."
    It was Elijah, at the foot of the Pequod's gangplank, warning Queequeg and Ishmael not to follow Ahab off 'round the world: it was a dread mission and a lost cause from which no man might return.
    "Don't go," said the strange woman again.
    I recovered and said, "Who are you?"
    "A former friend of the director's and the former wife of one of his screenwriters. I know them both. God, I wish I didn't.
    They're both monsters, but your director's the worst. He'll eat you and spit out your bones. So—"
    She stared at me.
    "—whatever you do, don't go."
    Ricki's eyes were shut, but tears were leaking out of the lashes and running down to the tip of her nose where they fell, one by one, onto her plate.
    My God, I thought, this is my first day in Ireland, my first day at work for my hero.

6
    The next day after lunch, we circled Courtown House, the old mansion where my director stayed. There was a large meadow and a forest beyond and another meadow and forest beyond that.
    In the middle of the meadow we met a rather large black bull.
    "Huh!" cried John, and whipped off his coat.
    He charged the bull, shouting:
    "Ha, Toro\ Tow, ha!"
    One minute from now, I thought, one of us will be dead. Me?
    "John!" I cried quietly, if such is possible, "please, put on your coat!"
    "Huh, Torol" my director yelled. "Ho!"
    The bull stared at us, motionless.
    John shrugged his coat back on.
    I ran ahead of him to toss Fedallah overboard, assemble the crew, bid Elijah to warn Ishmael not to go, then launch the Pequod to sail off and around the world.
    So it went, day on day, week on week, as I killed the Whale each night, but to see him reborn each dawn, while I was lost in Dublin, where the weather struck from its bleak quarters in the sea and came searching with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain.
    I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and found it dry.
    Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.
    Then, late each afternoon, I taxied out amidst Kilcock's gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the rain falling down for weeks as I worked on a script that was to be shot in the hot sun of the Canary Isles sometime next year. The pages of the script were full of hot suns and burning days as I typed in Dublin or Kilcock, with the weather a beast at the windows.
    On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door of my hotel room revealed Mike, shuffling.
    "There you are!" he exclaimed. "I been thinking on what you said. You to find the Irish, me to help. I got me a car! So would you get the hell out to find some wild life in our land? And forget this damn rain on the double?"
    "Double!" I said gladly.
    And we blew along the road to Kilcock in a dark that rocked us like a boat on a black flood until, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar