Your Day in the Barrel by Furst Alan

Author:Furst, Alan [Furst, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780689107276
Amazon: 0689107277
Goodreads: 1109273
Publisher: Atheneum
Published: 1976-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

"Everybody talks about death, but nobody does anything about it.”

Grover Dill

At five-thirty I enter Genelle’s apartment. It’s hot, and somehow oily dirt has managed to ooze in under the locked (and barred, and gated, and chained) windows and spread itself around. It also makes me a little crazy being around all her stuff and Robbie’s, seeing presents I gave her, and smelling her perfume in the bathroom. I flash a picture of her up in the Adirondacks somewhere, a coach’s whistle bouncing against those nice firm tits across which is written on a T-shirt: Camp Ti-Ti-Ga-Wa. What felt like an over-complicated life sure looks tasty now, Genelle sitting in the front seat of the Yacht and making sandwiches and Robbie watching the tube in the back.

I peer through the window and don’t see anybody that looks like my expensive detective. There’s a crowd of fat ladies on the comer, which, depending on who they are slandering, looks either up, or down, the block. There’s lots of kids, all colors and ages, tearing an abandoned car apart. There’s one or two beautiful women walking through all that dogshit and garbage in the street, too goddamn good-looking to live in all this. Way down the block I can see a junky stealing an attache case from a new Buick Rivera and there’s a gang of folks playing conga drums and smoking dope on one of the stoops. Across the street a small guy with black hair and a gray summer suit is strolling along, eating what could be a pastrami sandwich. And there’s one old man in a canvas chair on the sidewalk, reading La Prensa and smoking a twisted cigar and ignoring the whole fucking circus. Him I admire.

I rummage around for something to eat, find a can of tuna fish in the cupboard and a frozen bagel in the refrigerator. This makes something like a sandwich, a Jewish-Catholic sandwich. Genelle’s folks are French Catholic, from Lafayette, Louisiana, originally. What is my head doing to me?

I finish eating and check the window again. The same action is going down, except the old man has gone inside, the ladies have moved about five feet just by shifting around in their conversation, the junky has disappeared, and the guy in the gray summer suit is now walking up the other side of the street at half-speed, eating an ice-cream cone.

EEK!

Right away I dial Lieberman, but he doesn’t answer. I find a kitchen knife that fits in my pocket and go downstairs into the lobby and hide behind a very pissed-on drape. Gray-suit swings by and ever so casually glances up, could well be at Genelle’s window, from my angle I can’t be sure. He!s about five feet six, real heavy beard shadow, tight black curly hair cut short, wearing a T-shirt underneath an orange silk sport shirt, with little black chest curls crawling over the top. He holds himself like an ugly guy at a dance in Brooklyn in the fifties—scared shitless but sticking his hands in his pockets to prove he ain’t.

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