Albert E. Cowdrey by Thrilling Wonder Stories

Author:Thrilling Wonder Stories
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-29T21:15:48+00:00

Next day Mama left, in floods of tears, with a man who picked her up in a shiny black Lincoln Continental. Farley hid in the azalea bushes and spied on him; the man had a long nose and wore a white Panama hat, and his big dark hands rested on the plastic wheel with its silver horn ring as he waited for her to join him.

She had ordered Olivia to send her clothes, so she just got in and they drove away together, to Cajunland. Or to Mars, what difference did it make?

The heat didn’t break. The city had been thirty-two days without rain and every day the newspapers reported the deaths of people, animals, and trees as front-page news. The papers made it sound like the end of the world because, while places like Arizona might go for three years without rain, in New Orleans it rained all the time and a month of drought in summertime seemed unendurable.

Since Farley’s world had in fact ended, the unnatural seemed natural to him. George tried to comfort him, but that was impossible, because he was only the sitter. Farley wanted his mother, and even though he hated the Cajun from Mars worse than anyone he’d ever known, worse than God who had let this happen, he wanted him, too—the father he had seen once, sitting behind the wheel of the great big Lincoln.

Tommy came and called outside the house, but Farley ignored him and after a while he went away. Farley went alone to the canal and sat in the tunnel and wept. Night after night he could not sleep, even when he drank three or four shots from the new bottle of Beam that George had brought home.

Through the long darknesses his anger grew. Mama wasn’t the only one who had rages, though his were silent and therefore worse. Cissy barked and barked, and a little after four o’clock on the fourth morning after Mama left, he decided it was time to feed her to Garmusk.

He got up, made a brief stop in the light of the refrigerator, and went outside. The moon was setting and it was low to the west. An ivy-covered fence, a sweet olive, and a tall myrtle tree cast impenetrable shadows. The yard belonged to another planet, with only the incessant insect chorus and Cissy’s barking to speak of Earth.

Farley slid through the shadows over the bristly dry grass, listening to the bugs grow silent and then start up again behind him. He knelt by the fence and held out a bit of cold cooked meat. Cissy came over to investigate, half growling, trying a tentative wag of her tail.

Farley had always had strong hands; he got them from the man from Mars. The chickenwire was a problem, but the hexagonal meshes were wide and his long, strong fingers got hold of Cissy’s throat and pulled her against the wire. The sudden scuffle, the gurgling gasp, and the final quiver came and went unheard.

Farley slipped

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