Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer

Author:Gil Brewer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: pulp, noir, insanity
Publisher: Gil Brewer

I hadn’t been near Cypress Landing in a good while. It had grown some, changed. The main street glittered with chrome and plate-glass windows, fresh sidewalks, and newly laid road. People on the streets looked more browned by the sun and they wore more white than I recalled. The cars seemed longer and shinier and they traveled faster.

Modernity was settling in and I realized there were a lot of tourists. Even in summer. It hadn’t been that way. We passed the sheriff’s office and I supposed Clyde Burkette still lounged behind the scarred desk in that room of many smells. Clyde had never liked me much, though he did like my brother Frank. The whole town knew how Frank and I hated each other. I wondered if Frank would be at home with Mother now.

Norma and I had quit the bottle. But we still felt the liquor. I certainly did and she’d hit it harder than I had.

She motioned out the window. “Look.”

On the right side of the street a sand-colored building façade of planes, angles, and plate glass supported a sign of heroic dimensions reading: “FRANKLIN GARTH.”

The sign said nothing else.

“He’s gone great guns.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” Nothing else. Just Franklin Garth. He was that well known and the building had cost money. I tried not to think of that.

Leaving the business section, small and tidy, the smoldering lethargy of oldness set in. The streets were relaxed and quiet as they had always been; the houses crouched and heat flaked beneath spreading shade trees and supple palms awaiting God knows what without impatience but maybe with a kind of careless scorn.

Then that changed as we struck the beaches. New developments again. White and green and mauve and pink and tan cement-block cubicles baked in an ash-like wasteland of sand, breasting the Gulf of Mexico. Trees had been uprooted. New palms withering and sparse and crippled, rooted like dead men with one arm raised, fingers clawing at the sky, burned out, hellish and forlorn. The mark of civilization—like fly specks in an erratic line across the sticky side of a postage stamp.

Here and there the richer places, beautifully landscaped, carefully kept, but sided by sand and somehow sad.

“I want to go to my place,” I said. “The barn. Remember the barn?”

Norma had wept afterward at the lake and we hadn’t talked since. I hadn’t wanted to talk because of Leda; she was like an iron clamp on my mind.

“Yes, I remember the barn. It’s a mess, Eric. Needs cleaning. I used to go there sometimes and sit.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry. I’m all right now. Nobody else ever went near the place, unless maybe that man—Lenny. He went there sometimes.” She paused. “I saw him looking in the window once. Looking at that statue you made of a modern Venus.”

“How is Lenny?”

“He’s come up in the world some. Nobody knows how. Still lives in the same place, only rebuilt. He drives a car and dresses real sharp.”

“I told you about his collection. You ever see it?”

“You kidding?”

“Sure.

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