The Dark Country Read Online Free Page A

of her nails as her fingers flashed violently around the material. The steam was rising up from the basin to surround her.
    I closed my eyes fast.
    Outside, a car came suddenly from nowhere and passed hurriedly by, swishing away down the empty boulevard. She finished the story. I didn't want to hear it, tried to block
    it out of my ears but she told it through to the finish. It didn't matter to her. She had never been talking to me anyway.
    My eyes jammed shut, harder and harder, until I saw gray shapes that seemed to move in front of me. Never before in my life up to that moment could I remember feeling so detached, so out of it. I leaned the heels of my hands against the washer. The quarter slipped from my fingers, clanked against the enamel and hit the cold, cracked cement floor.
    The last thing I heard her saying was:
    ". . .So afterward I tell the kid to go back to bed, to go to sleep, just to go the hell to sleep, but he can't. Or won't. He just sits there on the floor in the corner, the gun still in his lap, whimpering quietly. That was how I left him, the little sissy. ..."
    Disgusted—tired and sick and disgusted out of all memory and beyond all hope—I forced my things back into the bag and stumbled out of the laundromat. She said something after me but I didn't want to hear what it was.
    I pulled my coat up around my ears. I was starting to shiver. I snorted, at no one in particular, at the night and all the people in it, everywhere, the stupid, unthinking people who don't know enough to leave a man alone, just to leave you the hell alone the times when you need it most. There was no place left for me to go, no place at all anywhere in the city. And so, breathing steam, I made it away from there as fast as I could, heading off down the street in the same direction as the car and blinking fast, being careful not to step on any cracks, all the way back to my room. My quiet room.

THE WALKING MAN
    It was one of those long, blue evenings that come to the Malibu late in the year, the water undulating up to the beach like some smooth, sleepy girl moving slowly under a satin sheet. I must have been staring, because the bartender leaned over and pushed the empty glass against the back of my hand. "Another?"
    "Vodka," I reminded him. The sky, out by the point that shelters the Colony, was turning a soft, tropical orange of the kind one expects to see only on foreign postage stamps. The edge of the water lapped the pilings below the restaurant. An easy, regular rhythm, like the footsteps outside on the pier.
    He reached for a dry napkin. "Live around here?"
    "A few months," I told him. It was still true, for the moment, at least. I hoped he would let it pass. I didn't want to go into the alimony and the rest of it, not now.
    He had the Rose's Lime Juice in his hand. The way he handled it, I could see he hadn't been at this too long. He was young, still in his twenties; I wondered how he had got the job with all that sun-bleached hair. "Should've seen it back about May, June," he said. He picked up a cherry, one of the green ones, but I held up my hand and he put it back. "All that sand out there?"
    I turned back to the window and looked with him.
    "Rocks," he said. I heard the rough ice cubes drop into the glass. "Right."
    "Out there, I mean. Boulders like you never seen. Like the moon or something. Five, six feet of sand must've washed in over the summer."
    He was right. I remembered the beach below the sun deck of our newly leased house: the sand slick as a wet peach as far as we could walk at low tide, and piled in solid around the posts; and I remembered waking one morning to find it gone, washed out from under us during the night, everything but the rocky underpinnings, all the way out to the tide pools where mussels held to the sharp erosions, crusted hard against the beaks of the circling gulls. Now, the season and the waterline changing, it was all coming back. I remembered, and he was right.
    The drink was up. I