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Douglas Woolf Books

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“Pete offered tobacco and paper, but Claude brought out his cigarettes and they both decided to try those. Pete provided the match. When he had their cigarettes burning strongly he turned to look back at the road, then straight up ahead. "We'll get there for supper if we get there," he said, and Claude laughed. Pete was a young man, but had a wild old grin stretched all out of shape in the corners and punched full of holes.”

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“Outside he hurried again, for he had several blocks to walk and the beer turned out to be no more than cool. He told himself he would remember next time to deal from the bottom - but the civil sirens sounded, surprising him with his silly private thought. That's what they blow them for. Thought is a national product, issued, like survival, on a day to day basis. There you go. Until tomorrow. When he understood this would be a long one today, he hurried on.”

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“Are you the owner of this car?" A cop has something you don't have, something you gave him earlier. "No, I'm just delivering it to Oklahoma City for a lady. " "Do you have plates for this car?" A cop needn't be vicious, but he can be so, safely. "Just those stickers." "Do you have the registration?" Presidents and premiers can annihilate millions, but only a cop can explain away your solitary murder.”

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“They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt's city, until a sudden wave of water blinded his wipers and drove him along with everyone else to the curb, where the crackling radio reported an old man had just now been swept from his backyard by a cloudburst, the latest in a series deluging Tulsa. Clinging there to the side of the hill, no hand brake, Claude rode out the storm, stuffing blankets into the cracks under the doors, watching overhead drips as best he could with the babyseat. When the car next in front crept away from the curb, Claude followed as far as a gas station. There he wondered aloud what lay ahead, but the attendant couldn't say, having swum to work just five minutes ago. Now as Claude pulled away the rain suddenly ceased, it seemed from exhaustion, and for the next hundred miles he spun his dial to catch the latest reports: that old man was still missing, he had last been seen floating downhill toward the river, he had been found, he was dead, he was dying, he was still missing... Claude turned off the radio, for he was beyond range of Tulsa, and Joplin had not heard the news yet. He raced in silence toward the night which he knew already had begun not far ahead.”

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“the canvases which Mr. St. Jones referred to with a paintbrush that was long and slightly bowed: for the most part interiors, or undergrounds, of pocked and craggy holes, rock vaults with mossy floors and slimy walls, or narrow scenic vistas that skinny silver streams squirmed through like sidewinders flipped on their backs, beneath downward grasping tentacles of roots, stalactites dagger-sharp and dangling by threads of stone, stalagmites teetering, all doused, frozen in molten electric white that suggested what a glimpse of hell might be, too beautiful, some still lifes too, great bulbous beets, hoary legumes, giant scallions, white carrots, tomatoes, berries, squash in huge radiant bowls, and portraits, signed by Ionia, of shadows, from which gleamed eyes and teeth and nails and, here and there, a glowing bubble, or scrotum, caught the eye. Near the door a counter clacked but rather quietly.”

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“So he stopped at the first of them, a frigid hothouse whose front tipped forward over the street in defiance of gravity, taste, and ordinance; inside, the tender daytime flowers could be seen huddling in family groups beneath a constant, unseen sun, and behind them was the hermetic door to the dark Cactus Room where the shy nocturnal plants, genus cereus, could bloom in privacy at any hour. Vivien, once out of the car, appeared less constrained. She did not have that stiffness so many have on first entering bars, that air of waiting stubbornly for alcohol to loosen them, which so often presages their manner when it comes' time for bed. She was already excited when the martinis came.”

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“Come on, Princess," he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of them, but no man could fairly say she was too wide. The most that could be said was that she did not have much further to go before she would have to start squeezing it in and strapping it up, which she clearly did not do now. She let it hang where it was, and it did very nicely by itself. As she passed among the boys they looked her over with unconcealed envy, as though they knew she had something they didn't have but were not quite sure what it was. One thing was certain, she got more exercise than they did. The next to be noticed were her braids, they hung forward over her terrain, ignoring as much as possible her contours, like two shiny black meridianal lines demarking her longitudes as far down as the equator. It was not hard to imagine oneself spending a long lifetime on that bare little island alone, with no plan or ambition, too overcome with the heat to continue on south to the pole, far less return to the continents. Nothing productive could ever be accomplished there, but there would be comfort such as few men have known, there would be torpor. The body swelled with such thoughts, the mind shrank from them, and the longing eyes traveled finally up north, to where those meridians came together at a point above a bland white area vaguely charted, with few landmarks, no doubt sparsely inhabited. There the imagination halted.”

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“With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly back from Mexico, pulling up finally at an outlying bar-ex-saloon (they had covered the old adobe face with knotty pine, substituted big stone matades for the cuspidors) and having brought her wrecklessly this far did not park her in the little parking lot but in front of the church next door. They had lifted that face too and neonized, but it did no good, they seemed to know they had no chance against an older god, their doors were closed. Thus one could join the pagan worshipers with a self-righteous shrug, through latticed doors.”

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