bruised fruit.
The end of the bat fit into his head in a gentle curve.
Dodge made some notes into his flip pad, walked back out through the clean, sweet-smelling hallways, got into his car, and drove back across the moat of the water separating the islands from Tampa. Light broke over the bay, golden and flecked over the asphalt streets and dirty old buildings and through the downtown, as he wound his way back down Lafayette and Grand Central where a pro wrestler named Harry Smith, aka Flash Gordon, aka Georgia Boy, had opened up a health club.
Harry was the kind of guy who would wander around the gym and kid the Italians for being too loud and the Cubans for being womanizers. And if you were from Alabama or Bumfuck, Florida, you were shit out of luck. Because Dodge had seen Harry take plenty of men down a few pegs.
At the gym, Dodge worked out for a half hour, took a steam and a second shower, and then called over to the station and said he wanted them to bring up Rivera for a lie detector.
The desk sergeant said: “He’s gone, Ed. Bailed out early this morning.”
“Bailed out? Bailed out for what?”
“I don’t know, I just got here. I’m just reading what it says.”
THERE ARE wingless planes and a thousand words from a tattered dictionary in my dreams before I wake at the little studio in the Georgian apartments, boil myself an egg, make a pot of coffee, and feed the cat that appears on my first-story ledge every morning. My room is only large enough for a Murphy bed and a small kitchen and has a tall closet that you have to walk through to get to the little bathroom covered in honeycomb black-and-white tile.
I have a narrow little gas stove and a tiny box for a refrigerator where I keep quart beers and bottles of milk and cartons of cigarettes to keep them fresh. I have maybe two hundred paperback books in wooden crates I’ve fashioned into a shelf: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson (one with a really nifty cover of Treasure Island with grinning pirates flashing swords), the poems of Robert Penn Warren, a complete set of the Tarzan adventures, and a Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Erle Stanley Gardner. But the most dog-eared, beaten-to-hell book on the shelf was Merriam-Webster’s old boy, a clothbound wonder, highlighted and underlined with a broken spine and ringed with coffee stains. When I couldn’t sleep—which was often—I’d play my records and flip through the pages looking for words that I didn’t know existed. Pneumatology. Esotropia. Escutcheon.
I’d underline them and say them out loud and nod, and then read out the definition again before searching for a new word. Last night, the dictionary had fallen off my lap and found its way to the floor—splayed open next to a marble ashtray—my record player caught in interminable rotation, scratching and bumping in that slow, sealike rhythm until I fell asleep shortly before dawn.
A cold shower, coffee, two cigarettes, and the egg. I heard a couple above me screaming at each other, pots rattling. Next to me, a radio crackled to life, and I heard my neighbor playing some Dean Martin and pouring water into her coffeepot. People talked outside my window, walking down toward the bay. Bright gold light crawled through my blinds and into my room, and suddenly the world was awake and I was, too. It was hard to remember much of the last twenty-four hours because the world wasn’t quite in balance. The Old Man who kept the order in this town was dead, and we—the newsboys—would be kept just outside the circle as police needled and pricked and crawled under holes to find some kind of sense to the thing.
I’d be the mirror and would follow and gossip and laugh at jokes that weren’t funny and shake hands with men I despised because that was the way the game was played, and we would ride this thing out until our readers were goddamned sick of hearing about how the Old Man was killed.
“Where the hell have you been?”
The end of the bat fit into his head in a gentle curve.
Dodge made some notes into his flip pad, walked back out through the clean, sweet-smelling hallways, got into his car, and drove back across the moat of the water separating the islands from Tampa. Light broke over the bay, golden and flecked over the asphalt streets and dirty old buildings and through the downtown, as he wound his way back down Lafayette and Grand Central where a pro wrestler named Harry Smith, aka Flash Gordon, aka Georgia Boy, had opened up a health club.
Harry was the kind of guy who would wander around the gym and kid the Italians for being too loud and the Cubans for being womanizers. And if you were from Alabama or Bumfuck, Florida, you were shit out of luck. Because Dodge had seen Harry take plenty of men down a few pegs.
At the gym, Dodge worked out for a half hour, took a steam and a second shower, and then called over to the station and said he wanted them to bring up Rivera for a lie detector.
The desk sergeant said: “He’s gone, Ed. Bailed out early this morning.”
“Bailed out? Bailed out for what?”
“I don’t know, I just got here. I’m just reading what it says.”
THERE ARE wingless planes and a thousand words from a tattered dictionary in my dreams before I wake at the little studio in the Georgian apartments, boil myself an egg, make a pot of coffee, and feed the cat that appears on my first-story ledge every morning. My room is only large enough for a Murphy bed and a small kitchen and has a tall closet that you have to walk through to get to the little bathroom covered in honeycomb black-and-white tile.
I have a narrow little gas stove and a tiny box for a refrigerator where I keep quart beers and bottles of milk and cartons of cigarettes to keep them fresh. I have maybe two hundred paperback books in wooden crates I’ve fashioned into a shelf: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson (one with a really nifty cover of Treasure Island with grinning pirates flashing swords), the poems of Robert Penn Warren, a complete set of the Tarzan adventures, and a Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Erle Stanley Gardner. But the most dog-eared, beaten-to-hell book on the shelf was Merriam-Webster’s old boy, a clothbound wonder, highlighted and underlined with a broken spine and ringed with coffee stains. When I couldn’t sleep—which was often—I’d play my records and flip through the pages looking for words that I didn’t know existed. Pneumatology. Esotropia. Escutcheon.
I’d underline them and say them out loud and nod, and then read out the definition again before searching for a new word. Last night, the dictionary had fallen off my lap and found its way to the floor—splayed open next to a marble ashtray—my record player caught in interminable rotation, scratching and bumping in that slow, sealike rhythm until I fell asleep shortly before dawn.
A cold shower, coffee, two cigarettes, and the egg. I heard a couple above me screaming at each other, pots rattling. Next to me, a radio crackled to life, and I heard my neighbor playing some Dean Martin and pouring water into her coffeepot. People talked outside my window, walking down toward the bay. Bright gold light crawled through my blinds and into my room, and suddenly the world was awake and I was, too. It was hard to remember much of the last twenty-four hours because the world wasn’t quite in balance. The Old Man who kept the order in this town was dead, and we—the newsboys—would be kept just outside the circle as police needled and pricked and crawled under holes to find some kind of sense to the thing.
I’d be the mirror and would follow and gossip and laugh at jokes that weren’t funny and shake hands with men I despised because that was the way the game was played, and we would ride this thing out until our readers were goddamned sick of hearing about how the Old Man was killed.
“Where the hell have you been?”
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