Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,61

course.”

Keenan had been thinking of other similarities. “Well, I really do need to get some work done now.”

“Sure you don’t need me to run you somewhere?”

“No, thank you. The ankle is a little sore, but I can get around well enough.”

At the door, Casper persisted: “Sure you don’t want to go get some barbecue?”

“Very sure.”

Casper pointed toward the rusted-out Chevy wagon in Keenan’s driveway. “Well, if that heap won’t start again, just give me a call.”

“I put in a new battery,” Keenan said, remembering that the mechanic had warned him about the starter motor. Keenan had bought the clunker for three hundred bucks—from a student. He needed wheels, and wheels were about all that did work on the rust-bucket. His insurance hadn’t covered replacement for his antique Beetle.

“Heard you had to return your advance on that Zenith contract.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Keenan wanted to use his fists.

“My editor—your old editor—brought it up when we were talking contract on my new book the other day. She said for me to check out how you were getting along. Sounded concerned. But I told her you were doing great, despite all the talk.”

“Thanks for that much.”

“Hey, you know the difference between a sorority girl and a bowling ball?”

Keenan did not trust himself to speak.

“No? Well, you can’t stuff a sorority girl into a bowling ball!” After the university informed Mr Bauduret that his services would no longer be required as instructor of creative writing at the evening college, Keenan began to sell off his books and a few antiques. It kept the wolves at arm’s length, and it paid for six-packs. Editors no longer phoned, and his agent no longer answered his calls.

Casper was sympathetic, and he regularly carried over doughnuts and instant coffee, which he consumed while drinking Keenan’s beer.

“Zenith gobbled up Nazi Druids,” he told Keenan. “They can’t wait for more.”

The light in Keenan’s eyes was not the look of a sane man. “So, what’s next?”

“I got an idea. I’ve discovered a tie-in between flying saucers and the Salem witch burnings.”

“They hanged them. Or pressed them. No burnings in this country.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I bought a bunch of your old books on the subject at the Book Barn the other day. Guess I won’t need to borrow them now.”

“Guess not.”

“Hey, you want some Mexican for lunch? I’ll pay.”

“Thank you, but I have some work to do.”

“Good to see you’re still slugging away.”

“Not finished yet.”

“Guess some guys don’t know when they’re licked.”

“Guess not.”

“Hey”—Casper chugged his beer—“you know what the mating cry of a sorority girl is?”

Keenan gritted his teeth in a hideous grin.

Continued Casper in girlish falsetto, “Oh, I’m so-o-o drunk!” His belly shook with laughter, although he wasn’t Santa. “Better have another beer on that one!”

And he sat there on the couch, methodically working his way through Keenan’s stock of beer, as slowly mobile and slimy gross as a huge slug feasting its way across the garden. Keenan listened to his snorts and belches, to his puerile and obscene jokes, to his pointless and inane conversation, too drained and too weak to beg him to leave. Instead he swallowed his beer and his bile, and fires of loathing stirred beneath the ashes of his despair.

That night Keenan found the last bottle of rum he’d hidden away against when the shakes came at dawn, and he dug out the vast file of typed pages, containing all the fits and starts and notes and revisions and disconnected chapters that were the entirety of his years’ efforts toward the Great Southern Novel.

He had a small patio, surrounded by a neglected rock garden and close-shouldering oak trees, and he heaped an entire bag of charcoal into the barbecue grill that rusted there. Then Keenan sipped from the bottle of Myers’s, waiting for the coals to take light. When the coals had reached their peak, Keenan Bauduret fed his manuscript, page by crumpled page, onto the fire; watched each page flame and char, rise in dying ashes into the night.

“That was when I knew I had to kill Casper Crowley.”

Martine wasn’t certain whether she was meant to laugh now. “Kill Casper? But he was only trying to be your friend! I’m sure you can find a way to ask him to give you your space without hurting his feelings.”

Keenan laughed instead. He poured out the last of her gin. “A friend? Casper was a giant grotesque slug! He was a gross leech that sucked out my creative energy! He fed off me and watched over me with