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The aroma stirred a memory in him but he wasn’t quite sure what it was so he didn’t try to draw it up. Whatever it was, it belonged to the past. He was a man of the future, which was becoming the present second-by-second. He figured that in this tough old world if a man wanted to live he had to learn to shed his skin like a snake and move from the shadow of one rock to the shadow of another—move, move, always move—because the other snakes were on the move too, and they were always hungry.
Indeed, she appeared to be wearing a doll-like mask that allowed absolutely no expression, which intrigued John Partlow because the idea of hiding one’s true self—or one’s true face—was never far from his motivations.
John Partlow mused that it was the ultimate fate of all confidence men: the loss of wit and quickness, the slide into a bottle because only there the Big Dream lived on, and without the Big Dream the confidence man had nothing to live for.
the only value of a name was as a disguise and so he had gone through many of them, many disguises and many masks, and down deep where the ashes lay ever-smouldering in the burnt-out cellar of his soul he had the satisfaction of being smart and quick, a survivor to the core.
He understood why Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker played around with guns, to get and keep that feeling of power. To be able to take a person out of the world, or aim a gun at a person and then decide to let them live…it was nothing short of the power of God.
What did the con man live on but the sharpness of his wits? When those were age-riddled and full of holes, what more was there to living? No, it was a slow fall to oblivion—to nothingness—and Pearly hoped that when—if—he got too old to think straight somebody would put a bullet in his head as cleanly as it had been done to Doc Honeycutt.
He needed a listener. Oh, how badly he needed a listener this night of all nights.
This was like setting up a blind man to walk off a cliff believing he was going to get new eyes if he just stepped down a little.
think of a radio. You set up the wire and it pulls in the different stations that are sendin’ out their signals. Hang me if I know the particulars, but it’s plain to hear that some stations are stronger than others. Well, your boy’s kinda like a radio. He can pull in signals from other listeners…only I’m bettin’ a lot of ’em don’t know they’re what they are, they just think they ought to go to the funny farm ’cause they’re gettin’ thoughts that are not their own.
“The world is wrong, Curtis. It’s a bad place. It just…lulls you along, day-by-day, and then…when you’re figurin’ ever’thin’ is goin’ smooth and easy and you see where you’re goin’ for the rest of your days…then…then…it hits you.”
They were everything he detested about life: the unfairness of it, the brutal and merciless wheel of fortune that doled out the good luck to the haves and the bad luck to the have nots, the false cleanliness and faked uprightness of the upper crust, when it was obvious to one and all that Ludenmere had made his money down in the mud that had mired Pearly to a state of near-poverty and certainly at times a numbing desperation. Oh no, Ludenmere wasn’t clean, he thought. Far from it. And these two kids standing here smiling under this electric fan in this parlor room in this mansion fortress are
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They’re going to make life pay, he thought, because it is time the wheel of fortune favored a man who was thrown away as a baby and never ever had a chance to breathe air that didn’t have the stink of despair in it.
Ever’body’s soul is a bird, wantin’ to fly free. Whole of life is about gettin’ the wings loose from all earthly weights and ever’thing that binds you to this.”
life is so full of mysteries that only the Good Father can answer. We can’t pierce the veil. I don’t know how I do what I do. It’s grown on me, is all I can say.”
“I appreciate her bein’ a friend to me,” Curtis replied. “She’s a mighty good listener.”
so here they stood in the beautiful room, neither speaking, each uncomfortable in their unaccustomed freedom, both waiting on the other like shadows soon to pass.
The woman used language that a whole crate of soap could not wash from a person’s mouth.
Something for nothing. It was the engine that drove all confidence games. People thinking they were going to get something for free. And all he was ever selling was air. But this time…he had merchandise to sell, and by this time tomorrow the deal would be done.
all she could do was offer him a listener.
he felt himself going away, as if he were dissolving into the very earth itself. But he had done the right thing, he thought. It seemed to him that any right thing called for a price to be paid. He was glad to pay this one, and he had no regrets about it. His life for theirs…a small price, he thought.
It was true that the Devil could be a man or a woman. That the Devil could be the hard spring in the seat of a car, a gnat in the eye or the whack of a wooden baton on the iron bars of a jail cell. True also that the Devil could get behind the wheel of that car with the hard spring in the seat, and drive crazy and wild with no regard for any human being, and cause one hundred and ten million kinds of suffering for anybody and everybody until the Devil, he drives that car right over the cliff and it smashes to pieces on the sharp rocks underneath. “Then,” said the widowed Methodist preacher who
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