No Cure for Death Read Online Free

industrial river town, with twenty-some thousand residents, whose only mild claim to fame is having a famous ex-resident in Mark Twain. As Sam Clemens, Twain used to edit the
Port City Journal
and had a house along the river front that he said in later years provided the most beautiful front-porch view of the sun setting on the Mississippi he had ever seen; a couple years ago the old house was torn down to make way for a Skelly station.
    I wondered if Janet Taber really would call me when she got back. It wasn’t just that she was attractive, though thathad something to do with it; but the story she’d told me about her mother and the house burning down, not to mention my encounter with that one-eyed nightmare in the terminal, made her rather like the beginning of a fascinating serial running in a magazine, the kind where you’re afraid you might screw up somehow and miss the next issue.
    “I said the town hasn’t changed much,” John said.
    “What?”
    “Christ, two years to catch up on and all you can do is sit there daydreaming.”
    “Oh. Sorry, John. Just thinking.”
    “This is where I’m supposed to say, ‘What’s her name?’”
    I grinned.
    “Nice?” he asked.
    “Not bad. She’s been through all hell lately, so she wasn’t looking her best, I’d wager.”
    “Want to talk about it?”
    I pulled onto Grand Avenue, which brought us within a few blocks of my trailer, and said, “Do you believe in hate at first sight?” And I told him about Punjab.
    The Rambler and my account of the bus station brawl sputtered to a simultaneous halt in front of my housetrailer. John kind of grinned when he saw the trailer, but that didn’t bother me.
    I liked my trailer.
    I didn’t mind that it was a dinosaur of its kind. Just because its dull aluminum hull was battered here and there didn’t mean it lacked a heart—didn’t you ever see
The Wizard of Oz?
—and it was roomy for its age, probably the biggest model made during its period of our distant history. The old guy who lived in it before me obviously thought a lot of it, too, having used it asa lake cottage for years and years, then hauling it up onto this landfill vacant lot and moving in for good after his wife died. He had taken the time and expense to panel the walls, and put in a modern kitchenette. In fact, if the old boy hadn’t died, he’d probably still be in it, but his son, who I bought it from, hadn’t been nearly so sentimentally attached to it.
    “Going to bunk in with me?” I asked John, wondering whether or not to haul his stuff inside.
    “No. I better stay with Brennan. You can drive me over there later, if you don’t mind.”
    “Sure.”
    We started across the big yard, all its grass brown now with oncoming winter, toward the trailer. Even with its good size, the trailer looked small on the large and otherwise empty plot of land—an oversized beer can littering an undersized park. The neighborhood was otherwise middle-class residential, and my trailer was out of place—but nobody had wanted to build on the experimental landfill my trailer sat on. I figured that only after thirty years or so passed without my trailer sinking into the ooze would the folks I rented my space from want to move me out so somebody could build.
    John and I made our way through the door and into my living room, which was cluttered with books and records and plates of half-eaten food.
    “As you can see,” I said, “I spruced the joint up for you.”
    John didn’t hear me; he was still thinking over the bus station brawl I’d just told him about.
    I scooped up some of the plates and dumped them in my sink. John sat on the couch and glanced around at the posters covering my dark walls: a
2001
movie one-sheet; Jane Fonda in her pre-political
Barbarella
days; and a fantasticpanorama called “Disneyland After Dark,” depicting an orgy attended by all the Walt Disney characters. None of this fine fantasy caught John’s notice; he was still mulling over my