Killing Time with Strangers by W. S. Penn

Author:W. S. Penn [Penn, W. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816547098
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

2.

Pal and Brandy moved into a block of HUD apartments constructed out of cardboard and inhabited by noise and violence.

“You’re going where?” Mary asked when he told her. “Well, if I can’t talk you out of it. Call me, will you. Collect.”

The man downstairs nightly abused his wife, at first verbally, screaming epithet-laden insults and threats at her until he had drunk enough liquor and at last his voice was softened by the blows he inflicted on her. The woman next door continually threatened her infant children, swearing she was going to take them out into the countryside and abandon them and let them fend for themselves if they did not stop crying and interfering with the visits of her boyfriends. One night he heard her swear that she would put them in their seat belts and push the car into the reservoir if they didn’t stop interfering. She sounded sincere. Pal tossed and turned with nightmare images until he was sick from them and he threw up.

Sleepless from lying there night after night having visions of the two kids, their faces pressed against the auto’s glass as water filled their lungs and slowly choked them to death, wondering what he should do, Pal talked Brandy into moving. After only two weeks, they walked out on their lease, losing half a month’s rent and the two-month deposit against damage. They moved into a rustic house on Mt. Madonna on the road to Watsonville which another Blue Note waitress named Ray-lin shared with a Quaker couple, a madman named Carl, who occupied the garage and spent his days collecting rags and newspapers to jam into chinks and keep out the fresh air, and a gentle heavy metal rocker named Mick, who developed the habit of bursting into their bedroom without knocking (“Sorry, thought you said come in”), hoping to see Ray-lin or Brandy and Pal doing something he only imagined in the metallica of his waking dreams.

The house was isolated on a bluff. Beyond the trees below were the winding streets of Gilroy’s upper class, miles in the distance. Though they had no near neighbors, the hills around the house were safe—as long as you overlooked Carl and the pair of puma who resented how the incursion of humans lowered property values in the area. The rent was cheap. The owner of the house had bought it during a real estate boom and was now having trouble selling it. As long as the kids took care of the place, he was willing to cut his losses by renting it for less than his mortgage payment and taxes. Even with Brandy and Pal’s share being a third, two-sixths of the total, Pal could afford to quit his night job handling sealed red bags of contaminated waste at the local hospital. (The seventh roommate, Carl, seemed to be the Quaker couple’s idea of charity. They held the lease, so no one argued with them, at least in part because no one wanted to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.