More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame.
She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slategray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pits and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn't look
...more
She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
Do you like orchids?" "Not particularly," I said. The General half-closed his eyes. "They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute."
When I looked back she had her lip between her teeth and was worrying it like a puppy at the fringe of a rug.
She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.
Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.
I didn't know what I was waiting for, but something told me to wait. Another army of sluggish minutes dragged by.
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust.
Her eyes became narrow and almost black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray. She had had an idea.
I don't know hell's first whisper about you.
First off Regan carried fifteen grand, packed it in his clothes all the time. Real money, they tell me. Not just a top card and a bunch of hay. That's a lot of jack but this Regan might be the boy to have it around so he could take it out and look at it when somebody was looking at him. Then again maybe he wouldn't give a damn.
"Yes. She'd make a jazzy week-end, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet."
"You can't drink liquor in here," the clerk said. He had a washed-out blue smock, was thin on top as to hair, had fairly honest eyes and his chin would never hit a wall before he saw it.
"If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat — just to see what ran out of it."
"Cute, aren't I?" she said. I said harshly: "Cute as a Filipino on Saturday night."
I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.
A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch.
He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
The purring voice was now as false as an usherette's eyelashes and as slippery as a watermelon seed.
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.
