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I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.
The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
There was nothing in that for me, so I let it drift with the current.
Her smile was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
“I knew damn well you were trouble,” she snapped at me. “I told Joe to watch his step.” “It’s not his step, it’s the back of his lap he ought to watch,”
“I’m nice to be nice to, soldier. I’m not nice not to be nice to.”
So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.
He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
