The Old Turk's Load Read Online Free

lobster claws, crab shells, sawfish bills, and stuffed octopus tentacles. A long aquarium behind the bar flooded the place with soothing blue light. Walking in there was like diving from the storm-tossed surface to the ocean’s bottom.
    He stood in the sawdust, waiting for his cherrystone clams, and watched the hands of Norbert, the burly man behind the bar. Forty years’ immersion in cold water had turned them orange and pink, and prying shellfish apart had humped layer upon layer of muscular gristle over the joints. To Kelly the hands seemed like malign clams bent on destroying their brethren. With an instant’s fatal pressure they’d slip the edge of the knife between the two halves of the shell, slit the muscles that held it together, scoop the quivering body loose, and flip the empty upper lid into the trash. After this operation had been repeated a dozen times, the hands set the platter of clams on the bar.
“Something the matter?” Norbert asked.
“Man’s inhumanity to clam,” replied Kelly.
And Her Name Was G . . .
S
    he thought Gallagher was going to come but he pulled out and went down on her, so she faked a second orgasm, thighs slamming his ears. Then he got back inside her and worked the furrow in long rolling waves.
    She was balling the well-known revolutionary Kevin Gallagher, but he was fucking Gloria Mundi, the millionaire’s daughter, and he was giving it a lot more effort than she. Gloria let him toil away. She thought of broken glasses, coffee grounds, the beach and blue ocean, her far-away sisters in Southeast Asia or Latin America—on their backs for grunting imperialists and revolutionaries alike, all their lives somehow keeping that marvelous, quiet dignity. Wholeness. You could see it in their eyes. She thought of a lioness glimpsed in a scraggly zoo somewhere, not Central Park, but where else could it have been?
    She’d been fourteen, just walking through, when she’d come across the lions doing it, the lioness a wiry, scrawny thing—just as Gloria had always thought of herself—behind black bars, getting down. The lion got his rocks in ten seconds and walked off to lick himself, but the she-lion kept rolling in the dust, ribs showing through like cage bars, no quid pro quo, no obligation to any king of beasts, or anything other than her own pleasure. Gloria recognized the absolute integrity of that creature. It made her insides tighten.
    The swashbuckling Gallagher had come on to her as a savvy veteran of the culture wars. Like many rich kids, Gloria had been raised by predators and opportunists, and was an expert manipulatrix. She had little trouble getting him to escort her to the front lines of the battle, where she gained intimate access to the marches, demonstrations, confrontations, and endless fiery meetings aimed at bringing the established order down. She felt it was important to be doing something, to have agency .The world was changing and she wanted to be a part of that change. Besides, it felt glamorous.
    That was also when she started getting tight with Irene Kornecki, an acquaintance from SDS meetings. Irene had been a law student when Gloria arrived at Columbia as an undergrad; now she was a lawyer, nominally a member of Kevin’s inner circle, but more like an observer. She catered to conscientious objectors and movement people and was, in her careful way, as dedicated to change as any of them.
    In the course of her dealings with Gallagher and his small band of activists (whom he called, in hip Latin American style, the foco ), Irene began to engage Gloria’s native intelligence. Soon she had her younger friend questioning the entire scene.Was it all about Vietnam? Okay, let’s get out of there. But what happens then? Do we really want to “bring the war home”? Did Gloria really want murder in the streets? Had she ever killed anyone? Had she ever actually thought about it? Imagined the feel of hot blood on her hands? Had she ever wondered where Gallagher’s