Playtime Read Online Free Page B

starts to find his rhythm, breath coming
easier, legs starting to get loose and not feeling much pain at all from the
neck or spine. His problem with doctors is that they seem oriented towards
fixing you after you break, not keeping you well. And prescribe medication at
the drop of a hat. Nothing to do with all those drug reps calling.   
     He runs through the big, southern-style houses of
the prosperous: houses with pillars spaced along the front, houses that look
like plantations might have looked, two or three stories with the pillars going
all the way up, pools in the back, all the lots huge, many with palms spaced
strategically. Nice neighborhoods, with those signs on the poles warning that
the residents report all suspicious activity immediately to the police. Not
usually much suspicious activity on these streets: people jogging or walking
their dogs, kids bouncing on trampolines in the front yard, landscaping do-it-yourselfers.
The neighborhood is on a line from the poor sections of town down by Broadway
to the beach, though, and occasional stragglers do wander through who don’t
appear to belong: but not often, and the police patrol it well. Blaine has a
.22 mag North American mini revolver that only weighs 10 ounces loaded, and he
carries it sometimes when he runs at what he considers to be the bad times of
night, like 2 a.m. when the bars are closing, and people seem inclined to poor
judgment and bad driving. Straps it into a fanny pack around his waist. Can
hardly tell it’s there. Doesn’t bother him but he usually doesn’t pack it this
time of morning, when quiet solitude is the rule. 
     It is about 80 degrees even this early in
Galveston in June, and he is sweating a bit as he runs through the dark, though
not soaked like he would be in the afternoon sunlight. Sometimes he can make it
through an entire run in the early morning without seeing a car. One morning
he’d been running along when a girl pedaled up beside him on a bicycle and
paced him for a while. He recognized her from years back; she had been
beautiful then and was still real attractive. They had talked for a bit as he
ran, him remembering that he had heard she turned tricks now, recalling seeing
her on a bench on the seawall, stretching this way and that, looking
suggestive. After a couple of miles she invited him to her house. It had been
just a short time before dawn then, and he was thinking she looked like she had
been up all night. He had remembered also hearing somewhere that she had AIDS,
and so he had declined the invitation, regretfully. She had still been a very
sexy woman. He had always thought so. If she had caught him some other morning
he might have taken the risk. Almost certainly would have after drinking a few
beers. But he had someplace to go after his run that particular day. She had
given him the address, and he’d said he would come by. But he never did. A few
years later he heard that she had died.   
     He thinks about seeing the pictures of the
recently deceased in the obits and the tendency he has to read something … unfinished
into them. They had died after all, and are gone, or if not, then are at least
someplace else, somewhere that they can’t be reached. As far as he knows. Looking
at their pictures, he often peered at their faces, searching for some telltale clue
to their ending, and therefore lack of good fortune, in some form or fashion.
Not the old folks that died: that was normal and expected. But the youngsters,
those cut down by this or that before their time. He couldn’t help but look for
something in their expressions, some sign. Maybe it was politically incorrect,
but he couldn’t seem to shake the urge. But they seem no different than anybody
else. There is no reason to be found. 
     Blaine has never told that to anybody. And it
fights the natural feeling of sympathy that is present when he sees some young
person cut down in their prime, by disease or accident. That feeling is inside
him