Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,29

him. He was back in the office, and Shiloh was speaking with considerable agitation into the phone. Several other people stood about, offering conflicting suggestions for treating heat stroke or sun stroke or both.

“Found you passed out on the road out there in the yard,” Dillon told him. “Carried you back inside here where we got the air conditioner running.”

Harmon became aware of the stuttering howl of an approaching siren. “I won’t need an ambulance,” he protested. “I just had a dizzy spell is all.”

“That ambulance ain’t coming for you,” Dillon explained. “We had a bad accident at the crusher. Some customer got himself caught.”

Shiloh slammed down the phone. “There’ll be hell to pay!” she snapped.

“There always is,” Harmon agreed.

Silted In

The pain in his chest was back again. Perhaps it was worse this time, but he couldn’t remember.

He leaned against the sink, trying to belch. The kitchen counter was stacked high with dishes: to his right dirty ones; to his left clean ones, waiting to dry themselves. He rinsed the suds from his hands, staring at them as the suds peeled away. Were the wrinkles from the dishwater, or had he grown that much older?

He sat down heavily at the kitchen table, remembered his cup of coffee. It had grown cold, but he sipped it without tasting. That was enough of the dishes for today; tomorrow he’d make a fresh start.

He hated the dishes. Each one was a memory. This was her coffee cup. This was her favorite glass. They drank together from these wine glasses. They’d picked out this china pattern together. This casserole dish was a wedding present. This skillet was the one she used to make her special omelets. This was the ash tray she always kept beside her favorite chair.

Her chair. He shuffled into the living room, collapsed across the swaybacked couch. Her chair waited there for her, just as she had left it. He wouldn’t sit in it. A guest might, but he never had guests now.

A broken spring pressed into his consciousness, and he shifted his weight. Not much weight now. Once he had enjoyed cooking for her. Now every meal he fixed reminded him of her. He left his food untasted. When he cleaned out the freezer, her dog had grown plump on roasts and steaks and chops, stews and soups and etouffees, fried chicken and roast goose and curried duck. After her dog died, he simply scraped the untouched food into the dog’s old bowl, left it on the back porch for whatever might be hungry. When his stomach gave him too much pain, he made a sandwich of something, sometimes ate it.

The mail truck was honking beside his mailbox, and he remembered that he hadn’t checked his mail all week. Once he had waited impatiently each day for the mail to come. Now it was only bills, duns, letters from angry publishers, some misdirected letters for her, a few magazines whose subscriptions still ran.

He was out of breath when he climbed back up the steps from the street. He stared at his reflection in the hallway mirror without recognition, then dumped the armload of unopened mail onto the pile that sprawled across the coffee table.

The phone started to ring, but his answering machine silently took charge. He never played back the messages, used the phone only now and again to order a pizza. No one comes up into the hills at night.

“Why don’t you answer it?” Bogey asked him. He was working his way through a bottle, waiting for Ingrid to show up.

“Might be my agent. He’s been stalling my publishers as long as he can. Now I owe him money, too.”

“Maybe it’s her.”

He ignored the poster and found the bathroom. He took a long piss, a decidedly realistic touch which was the trendiest verism in horror fiction this season. So inspired, he groped his way into his study, dropped into the leather swivel chair she had bought him for his last birthday. He supposed it was a gift.

He brought up the IBM word processor and hit the command for global search and replace, instructed it to replace the phrase “make love” with “piss on” throughout the novel. Yes, go ahead and replace without asking.

While the computer sorted that out, he fumbled with the bank of stereo equipment, tried to focus his eyes on the spines of a thousand record albums. He reached out to touch several favorites, pulled his hand away reluctantly each time. Every album was a memory. The