Panama Read Online Free Page B

hand?”
    â€œHurts a lot.”
    â€œYou had a nail in it,” said Catherine.
    Marcelline said, “A little crucifixion. What a droll guy. I hear you can’t remember anything. You’re full of little tricks.”
    â€œUsed to be he just talked funny,” said Catherine, “now he’s commenced acting it out.”
    Marcelline said, “Tampa is full of elderly nice persons who know they could eat it any minute. So they don’t talk nuts to get laughs. My, it hurts. That nurse just got in there and rambled. ”
    I looked at Catherine with her berserk mass of kinks and curls. I thought, it didn’t matter about men; but when push came to shove, these Southern girls only wanted to see each other. I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death. Catherine initiated the idea that I was a misfit. I took to the idea like a duck to water.
    I felt sleepy again. I heard a sprinkler start up, the first drops of water falling on the ground with distinct thuds. I heard the voice of my odious grandfather twenty years ago, “There’s a nigger fishing the canal and he’s got one on!” My hands were knit together and I was wonderfully happy and comfortable drifting away with the two pretty women chatting on the end of the bed, about Tampa, about the difficulty of getting nice cotton things any more, about Wallace Stevens in Key West.
    When I woke up a few minutes later, Marcelline was kissing Catherine. One of Catherine’s little breasts was outside her shirt and her panties were stretched between her knees. Marcelline slid the green skirt over Catherine’s stomach and bottom, then put it up under her. Catherine lifted one leg free of the panties in a gesture that put her leg out of the shadow the bed was in, into the sunlight. Marcelline slipped away and stayed until I heard the familiar tremolo of Catherine.
    When Marcelline stood up, tucking a yellow forties washdress around her good Cajun body, she laughed suddenly. “He’s awake!” Then leaned over and pinched my cheek. “I bet he jerked off the whole while!”
    When Marcelline left, I said, “So that’s it, eating pussy all day.”
    â€œOh, God,” she said, getting up. “I’m going to the beach. And when your hand is better, you’re leaving too.”
    â€œWhy did you take me in?”
    â€œI was embarrassed to have you nailed on the door.”
    â€œOh, Catherine. —Why am I itching?”
    â€œMy apartment’s got a cistern under it and the mosquitoes are coming up through the floor.”
    â€œHave you turned queer?”
    â€œDon’t talk to me like that, you.”
    â€œCan I read my old love letters?”
    â€œBurned them.”
    â€œBurned them! They’re worth a fortune.”
    â€œTo who? Other depraved perverts?”
    â€œI just don’t like that phrase. It’s not a clever phrase. It’s a dreary phrase and everybody’s calling me it. I’m sick of it. You hurt with those hand-me-down phrases. They suggest indifference. Will you get in here with me?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou committed a crime against nature with Marcelline. What’s wrong with me?”
    â€œThat’s not the point, my dear. You’ll forget we did.”
    â€œWhat’s Marcelline do?”
    â€œShe’s blackmailing a judge in Toronto.”
    â€œI still love you.”
    â€œFuck off.”
    â€œWith my whole heart.”
    â€œWhy did you tell the magazines you regretted every minute with me?”
    â€œBecause you’d hurt me by disappearing without explanation, by leaving me flat. You can’t do that to a psychotic.”
    â€œYou told them that I was a nouveau Hitler maiden. Why?”
    â€œOh, did I do that?”
    â€œThat’s why I call you a depraved pervert.”
    â€œSlip in here with