October Light Read Online Free Page A

meeting—little Dickey watching her, promising to be good—and it was the kind of book that girl would read, no doubt: common drugstore trash, you could tell by the cover. The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock, it said, and above the title, in big white letters: “A Black-comic Blockbuster” —L. A. Times.
    She turned the book over, clamping it tightly to keep the pages in, brushed futilely at a stain, then squinted, reading what it said in red letters on the back.
    â€œBlows the lid off marijuana smuggling, fashionable gang-bangs, and the much-sentimentalized world of the middle-aged Flower Child. A sick book, as sick and evil as life in America …”
    â€”National Observer
    â€œDeeply disturbing!”
    â€”St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    â€œHilarious!”    
    â€”New York Times
    She lowered the book, then half-absentmindedly raised it once more to reading range, her hands still trembly—the book was so dried out and bleached and cheap it was lighter than nothing—and opened it indifferently to “Chapter 1.” Lips puckered with distaste, brushing away dirt with the side of her hand, she read a sentence, then another. The print swam and blurred and the sense drifted up through her brain like smoke. She tipped up her blue plastic spectacles again and dabbed at her eyes with her hankie. She had, of course, no intention of reading a book that she knew in advance to be not all there; but on the other hand here she was, locked up like a prisoner, without even her sewing to occupy her mind (it was down on the table by the ruined TV). Forgetting herself, almost unaware that she was doing it, she eased down onto the bedspread and went back to the beginning. She let her mind empty, drift like a balloon, as she would when she sat down to television. She read:
    1
    THE DROWNED MAN
    â€œSnuff it, baby,” he’d hissed at the world, but the world dragged on.
    After thirty-three years of insipid debauchery—balling and whiskey and dreary books (poetry and novels, philosophy and science), more foreign ports than he could now remember and, between them, endless weeks at sea, where he shoveled his head fuller yet with books—Peter Wagner had come to the end of his rope or, rather (this time), the center of his bridge. All life, he had come to understand, was a boring novel. Death would be boring too, no doubt, but you weren’t required to pay attention.
    â€œIsn’t it the truth!” Sally Abbott said aloud, head lifting as if someone had spoken to her. Why she said it she could hardly have told you—except that it was something she’d occasionally said to her late husband Horace when he’d read to her, years and years ago. The truth in the novel she was looking at now was a trivial one at best, she was partly aware—even downright silly. But she wasn’t thinking with any care just now. She wasn’t really thinking at all, in fact, merely hovering between fury at her brother and escape into the book. Edging back toward fury, she held her breath and listened past the ticking of the clock for some sound from downstairs. Everything was silent—from outside the house not a cluck, not a whinny, not the grunt of a pig, and from the living room below, not a murmur. James was no doubt reading some magazine, little Dickey fast asleep. Heartless, both of them. She sighed bitterly, glanced down with distaste at the paperback book, then raised it again into reading range.
    His death was to be a grand act, however senseless. He’d drop without a sound through pitch-dark night to be swallowed by the Old Symbolic Sea. He’d read the grisly tales—suicides gruesomely, foolishly impaled on the radar antennae of passing ships or splattered obscenely on pilings or rocks—and had planned ahead. He had examined the span by daylight and had marked his spot with an unobstructive X in light green paint. Now the hour was at hand, in a