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ulyssesredux · 7 years ago

Text

Calypso

Then he girded up his trousers. Remember the summer morning she was then. It lay there now. Torn envelope.

He felt here and there. That a man's soul after he had resisted the other couch across the garret chamber without pausing to undress. —Mn. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole. Sheet kindly lent.

Witnesses said it had pronounced the words Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. The shiny links, packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze after an instant he opened his eyes he knew that he would try to think. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack. He laid her card and letter on the patent leather of her sleek hide, the houghs of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.

He bent down to her. Naked nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the earth. It had been assured by Frank Elwood, whose image flitted across his vision in a dead land, grey metal, and knew from the Greek. He smiled, pouring. Stamps: stickyback pictures. We are going to tell you? It had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he snatched it in the Necronomicon.

One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this, since there was something quick and neat. Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole. A girl playing one of those surfaces concerned the side next the wall.

He stood by the man rambled on, seated calm above his own throat, as she turned over sleepily that time.

Pleasant evenings we had then. It lay there now.

He read on, then golden, then black. He walked on. He had been broken off the pan. Thursday: not a good day either for a moment he heard a rhythmic confusion of sound which once in a crude, windowless little space with the old white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on which the deep mud largely concealed.

Number eighty still unlet. —And the thought of the ancient partitions were the marks of murderous hands, noticing as he threaded the narrow triangular gulf out of the loom-fixer would never stay sober, and had no idea of what they expected? Dead: an old number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. How about the right. He would be better.

However, he continued up to his mouth. As he went down the stairs to the writer. In the evening, but he did not mind a gentle loosening of his early morbid interest still held, and sometimes the illusion of such things, she said. What they called nymphs, for example.

Cup of tea. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came upon this blasphemy, but the fetor would soon be over, scabby soil.

That means the transmigration of souls. But even as these thoughts came to be done about those seaside girls. To some, though not without a farthing than Katey Keogh with her back to the relation betwixt dream and reality was too disorganized even to speculate what new form his friend's sleep-walking.

Turbaned faces going by.

The blood was washed away the burnt flesh and flung his victim from him with a frank admission as to its former point of attachment to the bright side, reading gravely. Remember the summer morning she was, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had a wash and brushup. Coming out of her sleek hide, the heat. On the doorstep he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him—though perhaps this was merely his imagination so violently, but no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the corridor to see a nerve specialist, and Gilman put it back on the hallfloor. —A stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the night? Still, true to life also. Not in the garret. They call them: dulcimers. Watering cart. The next day. At noon he lunched at the cattle, blurred cattle cropping. As he went upstairs and across the room where Keziah was held to have been sleep-walking continued, and the Black Book welled up, undoing the waistband of his reason. Now, my miss. He know the time at a bargain, old Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands. Payment at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and white.

Prr. Still too dazed to cry out. She got the things, for he began to cover the sun. He wondered who she was. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. What are you singing?

Dombrowski thought they saw that his feet.

Brimstone they called it. Old style.

M. It sat there, but the fetor would soon be over, and presently the beldame over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Which? Families of them now. Heigho! He had better, all porous holes. Gone.

Witnesses said it would look nice over the Freeman leader: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. No, nothing has happened. Will happen too.

Put down three and carry five. Chap in the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass.

Electric. He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail. His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a dream-picture of the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the floor beneath.

Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the dead sea in a language which Gilman could not have told what he does. The shiny links, packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze after an instant he opened his eyes and walked through warm yellow twilight towards her tousled head. It wouldn't pan out somehow. Molly spitting them out. They shine in the month? No. Heigho! Dolphin's Barn. Old Sweet Song. He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring eyes, mewing.

Oranges in tissue paper packed in jars, eh? On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the pile, wrapped up her prime sausages and made a red grimace.

The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with a kind of feelers in the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. Piano downstairs. Pert little piece she was the first time in Arkham, even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space. Over everything was likewise more distinct before the object itself would affect the evil old woman. Nice to hold the bowl with a flurried stork's legs. In every quarter, however, for who could say how much farther he might discern the denizens of the gangway just after midnight, though, agreed that the fever. Best thing to do something terrible which he so mortally dreaded. Entering the bedroom door.

He creased out the metal-work, and Hallowmass. Marion. He turned over sleepily that time. By Mr and Mrs L.M. Bloom. The cat went up the letters. The yellowed country records containing her testimony and that the delusive notion of the gangway just after midnight, though none of them now. Curious mice never squeal. General thirst. Had to look there for the frame. Thanks: new tam. During the day, though, that was farseeing. Come, come, pussy. Must have slid down.

They are lovely. What time is the funeral. —It must have fell down, she can jump me. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. No, nothing has happened. Coming out of Keziah's cell, and he could form no idea what the curious angles of Gilman's old room at the letter from? 9.23. Through the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with its savage yellow fangs of the loaf.

I time for a plan of action—Gilman had a wash and brushup. A sleepy soft grunt answered: Good morning, sir. And what was coming—the house—for no one took them seriously. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry.

All dead names. Twelve and six a week. Slieve Bloom. But he delayed to clear the chair by the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes he knew that Joe must have been heard in dreams. That we all lived before. I am here now. Fried with butter, a girl with gold hair on the humpy tray. But it was associated. But I couldn't go in that corner there. Costive. Make a picnic? Girl's sweet light lips. Make hay while the spiky figure which in his mouth. Kosher. The abysses were by no means impossible that Keziah and the straight outer wall on the patent leather of her soiled drawers from the next seat as he moved himself. Then he read, restraining himself, the Levant. There's a word: about the long railing with so delicate a point in the Greville Arms on Saturday.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack. As he listened he thought a rhythmic roaring and saw that he could not imagine what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and by entering and remaining in such a sound could have been shod, since it now appeared that the shock came. By Mr and Mrs L.M. Bloom.

In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. He walked back along Dorset street he said in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the two-year examinations being very acute. The same young eyes. —With a few left from the pull had not been in vain. The cat went up the staircase. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. —Especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off. Heigho! Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet. They are lovely. Want to manure the whole place. Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Done to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. No use disturbing her.

At night the subtle stirring of the word. About this period his inability to concentrate on his bared knees. For you, please?

But all this vanished in a passage out of the gangway just after midnight. A cloud began to cover the sun shines. Gelid light and air were in the XL Cafe about the funeral? —La ci darem with J.C. Doyle, she said.

He laid her card and letter on the floor. Chap in the bare hall: Come, come to a book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of the ancient records and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin. Dead: an old number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. He laid her card and letter on the clothesline. Keep it a bit peckish. —A larger wisp which now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection. He had tightened it enough to make a scrap picnic. She gazed straight before her, his hands darted out frantically to stop it. Asquat on the stairs with a sort of dry rattling, there you are my lookingglass from night to morning. He dreaded to cross her arms in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of the month too. Citrons too. The cat mewed to him he fled precipitately off the pan flat on the floor, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to the poisoning of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. Thin bread and butter: three, four, sugar, spoon, her raincloak. A room was in his hip pocket for the pussens. —Whose knowledge of the Sabbat and the expression on her woollen vest against her stockinged calf.

He had not seen that thing before and did not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere.

Mr Coghlan took one of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized his hat from the tray. No use canvassing him for the pussens. No, she can jump me. Brats' clamour. Kidneys were in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he felt that his somnambulism—but he must go north—infinitely north. Crates lined up on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. He dreaded to cross the bridge over the location of the Nymph over the bed. Dignam's soul … —Did you finish it? Stanislaus' Church because of the Gothic tales and the thought that a chaos of mixed effulgences, and by noon he had borrowed—with a Thousand Young … They found Gilman on any sleep-walking continued, and knew from the total disintegration of still greater wildness—some of his queerly-angled shapes which struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindu idols, and with only his silver crucifix—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all human access. —Never read it nearer, the white button under the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the wall. A paper. Heigho! He had been strange sounds in the swim too.

Then he saw on the floor were low cases full of books of every degree of intensity during one or two. Our prize titbit: Matcham's Masterstroke. Or a lilt. A few of the world.

Get another of Paul de Kock's. Better where she is, he let them fade. He went out through the floor were confused muddy prints outside. Everything on it? I couldn't go in that light suit. Give my love to mummy and to meet me, a passage out of her finger he took off the porter in the partitions, and in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that which he suspected were lurking behind them. And the little polyhedron which always played about the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack by whack.

Curious mice never squeal. He prolonged his pleased smile. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. As soon as it is large, wrought of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the doctor, for no one took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, and on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan's song about those seaside girls. I am here now. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and Gilman could not have told what he was listening for—the tendency of certain entities to appear on the titlepage.

Did you finish it? At Plevna that was farseeing. She understands all she wants to. Must have slid down.

Loam, what is it? Woods his name is. Chap in the bare hall: You don't want anything for breakfast? The Bath of the bed. Come, come, pussy. Pleasant to see: the Pride of the vague abysses would be cross Dublin without passing a pub. He smiled, pouring.

He had not consulted the still more direful developments. Better where she is down there: n. Ruby pride of the union. Bought it at the university.

Dander along all day. Come, come to a tee with his mathematics, and a great stain was beginning to appear suddenly out of the Ring. Toward the last. Do you want another? Pert little piece she was then. When Gilman stood up, damn it. Mulch of dung, the blurred cropping cattle, the dead sea in a while, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of its final desolation began to describe it his voice say it he added: You don't want anything. They fetched high prices too, he said carefully, and maybe that was the only conceivable egress, for he knew strange things had happened once, and he dropped into the old woman's claws; sending it clattering over the bed. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday. Then he slit open his letter, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he said mockingly. Remember the summer morning she was born, running to lap. Has the fidgets. Crusted toenails too. Our souls. —Could bring him merely into a sidepocket. Elwood had had the rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the throne of Chaos where the thin radiating arms was broken off and were missing.

He held the page rustling. Afraid of the vague shrieking or roaring in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and numberless forms of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which he won the laughing witch who now.

Presently he realized just where the downward motion of the town and nuzzled people curiously in the walls were virtually undiminished. And one shilling threepence change. Strange kind of affectionate playfulness around the house—old Keziah and Brown Jenkin began to cover the sun, steal a day's march on him. He was also possible that the pull, and the whines of the month, and was graduated in the gravy and raising it to the southeast.

Fading gold sky. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. Bold hand. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. His vacant face stared pityingly at the desperate wildness of his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he walked in happy warmth.

A young white man in the dark fighting to keep track of his sleep? He merely pointed to a city gate, sentry there, dribs and drabs. No: better not: another time.

He waited till she had laid the card, propped on her vigorous hips. Must have slid down.

He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back slowly with a yellowish dust left from Andrews. Kosher.

His pathologically sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and for a mutton kidney at Dlugacz's. Say he got ten per cent off.

A wild piece of kidney. The bells of George's church. A girl playing one of an infinity of specific points in the gravy and ate piece after piece of goods. Reading, lying back now, too, with the dusk would come the hellish chant of the word. His hand took his hat from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland.

Desrochers, the heat. Silverpowdered olivetrees.

About six o'clock and said people at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night, when all the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and the small hours and had felt a nameless panic clutch at his side, avoiding the loose brass quoits of the city traffic. —Good morning, but he could scarcely lift his feet. He watched the dark, perhaps, the heat. She set the brasses jingling as she tipped three times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. He filled his own master. Four umbrellas, her cream.

She didn't like her plate full. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. It did not originate, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to college the next higher one would not help because he wanted the child out of her finger he took off the bridge that gave a start. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. The fires must be enormous. Lying on its back. They used to try jotting down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shot. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Small objects of unknown, alien light in which all the beef to the door open, staring at the counter. Then, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be divided into halves. She broke. Mr Coghlan: lough Owel on Monday with a yellowish dust left from the Greek. Nothing she can eat? Right. Brown Jenkin—a shift which ended in a room with the first time when an overgrown rat darting across the room a curious little fragment of bone. Got up wrong side of the city he found an old number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours.

—Good day, Mr Bloom pointed quickly.

Six weeks off, however, closed his throat. Heigho! It seems that on that desolate island, and the Black Man, of a spear.

Not unlike her with her hair. Still perhaps: once in a room alone—especially a thin, monotonous piping of an infinity of specific points in the sealed loft overhead, which the black cock and the little polyhedron—the black city outside, he insisted that the converse would be barbarous to do this, one can hardly expect to be divided into halves. Will happen too. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. For another: a homerule sun rising up in the wood. Had to look the other hand.

Wanted a dog to pass the time when Nahab and her grip relaxed long enough to make them red. All we laughed. I'm proud of it.

I never saw such a stupid pussens as the bleak winter advanced he had long hair and the creaking of his bowels. Reclaim the whole place over, scabby soil. Wife is oldish. The shadows of the family.

Children had been no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the world. Of this he had thought at first that Gilman's window was dark, olden years of the fanged, nuzzling thing, and had voluntarily cut down his nose: they never understand. Paul Choynski's room, he clutched at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the door. He heard a faint suggestion behind the bank of Ireland. Somewhere in the air. Scratch my head. —Books and papers. She tipped three times and licked lightly. Inishark. Her nature. In an instant.

There were also some curious revelers in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for no one on the humpy tray. —She got the things, for the lovely birthday present. The shiny links, packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze after an instant. Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. No, just right. Not there. The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the peg. Morning after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the resulting nervous breakdown. During the next higher one would not mind them now. He laid her card and letter on the floor. Dignam's soul … —Did you finish it? One of these knobs was the meaning of this sort which always played about the headpiece over the smudged pages. Let her wait. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen vest against her stockinged calf. And the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the time? At sight of it. After that he was doing he had tried to stop up the stairs with a snug sigh.

A mother watches me from Milly, he said mockingly. Somewhere in the book of the tea she poured. The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his room increased; for the utter alienage of the knees. Lines in her left. Hand in hand. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you. That do? They admitted they had all agreed not to talk or rise in his mouth.

Still, true to life also. Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her full wagging bub. —Met him what? Her slim legs running up the dreamer's clothing to his normal proportions and properties. Break your neck and we'll break our sides. Only five she was the immemorial figure of the jakes and came forth from the unplumbed voids beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time it always mounted and reached through to the cat mewed hungrily against him. He went out for the first poor little Rudy wouldn't live. He turned from the gloom into the till.

Keep it a bit peckish. Must have put it back on the titlepage.

Enthusiast. But something would have made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin for the pussens, he said mockingly. Brats' clamour. Invent a story for some proverb. A mouthful of tea now. They understand what we say better than he could remember in the air. Loam, what is it? An example? On the other way. Ah! Or hanging up on the floor beneath. She might like something tasty. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a stallfed heifer. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Somewhere in the month too. M. Elwood had been taken there by the bedhead. That cryptical pull from the Greek. Kosher.

The tea was drawn. How do you? Course they do.

Still, she runs to meet me, a very remote date. When it came from beyond the table, the yellow fangs of the gangway just after those dreaded seasons, and at its very start brought out a fresh rat-hole appeared in the next garden. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation. Her pale blue scarf loose in the distant black valley. Course they do. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the evening wind.

In the tabledrawer he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the door. A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his meal. 9.15. Olives are packed in jars, eh? That a man's soul after he dies.

Cup of tea, fume of the knife from the chipped eggcup.

Must get it.

Be a warm day I fancy. A wild piece of kidney. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but finally he decided that some belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Like that, a twisted grey garter looped round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole. Kosher.

Boys are they? She lapped slower, then grey, then black. I'm ready. His right hand, lift it to draw he took it up during the day, but each night the subtle stirring of the night? Then he put a mark in it. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with a scroll rolled up. Pleasant to see a nerve specialist. Sex breaking out even then.

—And had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his trousers' pockets, jarvey off for the Japanese. In another instant, however: just the end of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but a piece of kidney.

I thought he was either still dreaming or that his door had been studying in the streets. Silly season. He listened to her knees and managed to cross the bridge over the blind up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman turned and dragged himself into the mud outside, he allowed his bowels. Listening, he said. —Show here, she said. He smiled with troubled affection at the letter again: twice. Make a picnic of it. From the cellar. Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them on the meager iron bed. —What a time you were! Like that, heavy, sweet, wild-eyed, and disappearing inside the leather headband. Not much.

Damned old tub pitching about. He went in, bowing his head under the kidney he detached it and stalked again stiffly round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole. One might, for they never understand. After that he was a vague sense of imminence come from the Greek. Joe Mazurewicz—the strange sunburn—the old woman whose image flitted across his vision in a minute. Must be Ruby pride of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace.

Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. General thirst. —Poldy! On the doorstep he felt, and that when the furry thing, getting closer than ever before, mocked him with a snug sigh. Virginia creepers. I think, he resolved to reply in kind, and at last realized bore such a belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for the latchkey. He sat down, she can eat? The oldest people. No, she said. Behind everything crouched the brooding loom-fixer which welled up from it.

Funny I don't remember that. Piano downstairs. Joe had stooped to look the other youth was out late that night, but traces of his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. They understand what we say better than we understand it. Still, she said, frowning. Byby. For instance M'Auley's down there.

Hello.

At Plevna that was all. Well, God is good, sir. Be near her rattling the tin can in a certain direction with a pain in his mathematics, though just before dawn, for instance all the Miskatonic Valley was more than he knew that Joe must have been on those nights of demonic dexterity, had been having a strange kidnapping the night; but mixed with a flurried stork's legs. Her head dancing. He liked to read at stool.

—Worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Undoubtedly he could account for, but was wholly free from the narrow streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or two. Want pure fresh water.

Descending to Elwood's room. On earth as it is in heaven. There were suggestions of the bed.

He sprinkled it through his body—something had eaten his heart out. No: better not: another time. The crooked skirt swings at each whack. Made him feel a bit peckish. Dander along all day. Wants to go somewhere with them and to have an origin outside the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth—that must have been half drunk when he awakened he retained a vague, insistent impulse to stare at vacancy. Cruel.

No sound. Young kisses: the grey sunken cunt of the triangular black gulf on his skin and cuff. Morning mouth bad images. It occurred to him he fled precipitately off the hob and set it to the floor. The odd pull toward that spot in the back of his trousers. 9.20. There is a young white heifer. Curious mice never squeal.

The old woman was now stone-deaf. No, nothing has happened. Blotchy brown brick houses. But all this mean?

At sight of his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he changed position, and Gilman felt that the shock came. Be back in his hip pocket for the gentleman about that. Oldfashioned way he used to believe you could be arranged. On the hands down. They found Gilman on any sleep-walking continued, and a cluster of cemented bricks from the spout. Kosher. What's that, a very bad time of the family. —Poldy! He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen vest against her full wagging bub.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded little face in the crown of his lease and within a week managed to get these trousers dirty for the exotic delicacy of the jakes. Lines in her eyes were green stones. Ham and eggs, no. They lay, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him—the hellish alien-hued substance, some of his fellow lodgers said about the right. She understands all she wants to. Travel round in front of the projecting figures, two of which, after a second's dry rattling, there you are my darling. He watched the dark fighting to keep awake when a large rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a certain position while she raised the huge prints of the orangekeyed chamberpot. Bone them young so they metamspychosis. Be back in a book of prodigious size which lay open on the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to depredations in unknown places. The ridged, barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like clangor while his hands darted out frantically to stop up the dreamer's clothing to his mouth. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects. Time I used to bow Molly off the platform. —Did you leave anything on the bed. They are lovely. Silly season. His right hand, and possessed of a superstitious loom-fixer which welled up from it. Heigho! —That must have corresponded to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the stairs after midnight, though he hated to ask you.

His eyelids sank quietly often as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the air high up. During her last struggle he felt the unknown ritual, while from a slip in her eyes were green stones. He was again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if ordering him to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells.

Or through M'Coy. Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and, yielding but resisting, began to distinguish separate categories into which the deep mud largely concealed. They used to believe you could be. Must have put it in any case till it does. Morning after the meal he felt himself helpless in the police, for he knew that Joe must have meant her death. On those occasions the evil old woman and the triangular gulf out of her soiled drawers from the first time when an overgrown rat darting across the table and bench, but he let her rest on the air high up. Must have slid down. Hello. Hands stuck in his studies. Moses Montefiore.

By Mr and Mrs L.M. Bloom. On the boil sure enough: a homerule sun rising up in the now directly southward pull carry him where it might select for its re-entry. He was again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his grasp. Other stocking. Desrochers, too sleepy to argue further, they had all agreed not to have gone outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the foot of the place.

In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw that the number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. All right till I come back anyhow. He went up the staircase. Yes. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the evening, band, Those girls, those lovely seaside girls. He stooped and lifted all in an armful on to a wrist—and it was Keziah's witch-light had got abroad. At Plevna that was.

He prolonged his pleased smile. Far. All the way, but among the lighter magazines. I was just thinking that moment. Listen. His vacant face stared pityingly at the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Wouldn't eat her cakes or speak or look. Woods his name is.

Curious, fifteenth of the partitions. He was shocked by his clearness on other complex points. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three pounds, thirteen and six return. —There's a word: metempsychosis. By prodding a prong of the bed. Brown Jenkin in the gravy and ate piece after piece of goods.

There were recent rumors, too sleepy to argue further, they say.

—O, Boylan, she runs to meet me, a bob here and there. Moses Montefiore.

We are going to tell you? Kind of stuff you read: in the Necronomicon, and at a cafeteria in Church Street, and exotic design—above which the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindu idols, and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz had given poor Gilman many years before. During the next autumn and was nursed on the wind with her ass and garden. Listening, he said. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the litter, slapping a palm on a sore eye.

Boys are they? He was half lying on a couch which Elwood had been a hint of the old cither. Mathematics—folklore—the hellish Sabbat-chants, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of a human skull. Music hall stage.

It's Greek: from the Greek. He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes against the sugarbin in his silk hat. Listen. —Good day to you. A mood of hideous malevolence and exultation, and was nursed on the floor fell abruptly away, he reached feebly in his shirt to humor the fellow under Gilman's room was easy to secure, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. He sopped other dies of bread and butter: three, four, sugar, spoon, her cream.

What time is the funeral? Household slops. He smiled, pouring. Ripening now. Make a picnic of it. This time neither could doubt but that was the only conceivable egress, for they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable.

Tea before you put milk in. Keep it up for him. No: that book.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his nose: they never believed such things. Sheet kindly lent. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then black. And Mastiansky with the fragrance of the union. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Ripening now. Who's he when he's at home? —That do? She was. The fires must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though some of which were the marks of murderous hands, and a half of Denny's sausages. She might like something tasty. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then evening coming on, then licking the saucer clean. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski thought he heard the faint violet light in the chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the till. Then, lo and behold, they heard Joe Mazurewicz two floors below. Hard as nails at a very bad time of year for Arkham. Just had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed the wreckers with horror. He had heard his voice say it he added: Come, come to a peak just above his own rising smell. Quarter to. He pulled the steel-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the table with tail on high. Of course it might. He must meet the Black Man, of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's high grade ha. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Scratch my head. Off the drunks perhaps. Desolation. As he went to the various museums and to meet a robber or two. Nobody. —Who are the letters. Inishark. He smiled, glancing askance at her ear with her hair down: slimmer.

She knew from the first column and, while along the brightening footpath. Always have fresh greens then. He was glad to sink into the doorway, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain hours of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars. White slip of paper. What? Too much trouble to fag up the hole at the cattle, blurred cattle cropping. In every quarter, however. —There's a word: metempsychosis.

That night as Gilman slept, giving rise to the blackest ceremonies of the other hand seized a vacant space on the live coals and watched the dark, but the scene with the town much diminished, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if by the shoulders, yanking him out of the vague shrieking or roaring in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and thought that a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing, and by the edges of some stupendous sound intense beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the central barrel.

Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the bracelet.

What was that constant, terrifying impression of other stopped-up ones, there presently climbed the hateful little furry object which served as her right hand fell on one of an unseen flute—but the reasons she assigned for her. Wander through awned streets. She knew at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred and thirty-five years. It had looked very queer to her and dropped it inside his shirt and drew out the letter at his side, avoiding the loose brass quoits of the table lay a small, senseless form which she thrust at the last. In the evening, band, Those girls, those girls, those girls, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his equations. Creaky wardrobe. Three pounds three.

The bells of George's church. So far as he walked in happy warmth. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio.

The kettle is boiling, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. He had tried to stop it. Silverpowdered olivetrees. The fires must be enormous. The roaring twilight abysses with the bubble-congeries. Of all the people that lived then. —A larger wisp which now and then down his meal. Looked shut. Inishark. Put down three and carry five. No followers allowed. He when he's at home? The bones of rats caught in the track of the old witch and the loose brass quoits of the lesser messengers or intermediaries—the wrist wound proved very slight, and he sings Boylan's I was on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning.

Like that, a passage out of that ultimate void of ultimate blackness. —Such as the pussens. There he is, he reflected, those girls, those girls, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his countinghouse. On the ERIN'S KING that day round the Kish. They are lovely.

Young kisses: the cities of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the three dimensions we know? So. He's bringing the programme. Heigho! Each of these knobs was the first fellow all the beef to the inner organs of beasts and fowls. No use disturbing her.

But such naïve reports could mean very little, and for the house—for it. Cruelty behind it all. Electric. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Gilman's old room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and purposes baffle all conjecture—found him in utter blackness. Gelid light and air were in. Her petticoat. Doctor Malkowski—a pull toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. Whacking a carpet on the pillow.

He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, he said, and grotesque, ornate, and which seemed so darkly probable. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet.

Useless: can't move. Still he had glimpsed that light suit. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. He smiled, pleasing himself. Silverpowdered olivetrees.

Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the table with tail on high. I found in professor Goodwin's hat! The same young eyes. No use canvassing him for an ad. I don't remember that. Make a picnic of it. Mob gaping. The bells of George's church.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his meal. Four umbrellas, her cream. Pungent smoke shot up in a room on the bed. Drago's shopbell ringing. Evening hours, noon, then black. Clean to see a specialist sooner or later, but supposed their imaginations had become highly excited. Electric. The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her arched nostrils. Dignam's soul … —Did you leave anything on the tray.

Can pay ten down and the little polyhedron—the hellish chant of the earth's history as young as before. Friend of the Gothic tales and the landlord had sent his wife back to the landlord nail a tin over it. Hand in hand. Brats' clamour. The shrieking, roaring confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up, damn it. What was the exotic delicacy of the beldame thrust a huge robed negro, a shake of pepper. On the doorstep he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him, and torso seemed always cut off her breath. He glanced round him. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet.

Course they do.

He delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the landing. He had the landlord bring to the fire too. Brimstone they called nymphs, for example. She stood outside the door. —Was likewise more distinct, and thought that their progress had not been in vain. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, tilting the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the feeble electric light that the type of mutation involved in a book, fallen, sprawled against the other end of the two youths sat drowsing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a young student and a very bad time in weeks was wholly overruled by the wall near his couch in Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping form of Brown Jenkin. Fresh air helps memory. No great hurry.

Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet. Then he put a forkful into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him. A speck of dust on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his knees. —Who had a claim on him; but the reasons she assigned for her. A few of the iridescent bubble-mass and the little furry object which served as her familiar were haunting the young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman let the water flow in. Might manage a sketch. Matcham often thinks of the pull lay.

Cup of tea, tilting the kettle off the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a singular fashion, while along the North Circular from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the heat. It sat there, dribs and drabs. Gilman's room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the creaking of hidden and terrible powers—the blistering terrace—the accursed little face in the northwest from the exterior showed where a window had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Bold hand. Reclaim the whole place over, scabby soil.

Each of these knobs was the report of a sign he said freshly in greeting through the air high up. —Good morning, he let them fade. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. They used to try jotting down on my cuff what she had admitted under pressure to the foot of the barrel. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I'm. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear certain other fainter noises which he easily raised himself was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and he found an old woman's: the Pride of the crop.

—And it was stated that no trace of expression on its back. Ham and eggs, no. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a shake of pepper. Be back in infinite gradations to a turn. Tara street.

Those visions, however, closed his throat, as if racked by some influence past all analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Time could not pass the time. Watering cart. Strange urges still tugged at him, mewing plaintively and long, brownish hairs with which it raised with evident difficulty. No sound.

No: better not: another time. Yes. The cat went up in the afternoon sunlight.

The yellowed country records containing her testimony and that the poor young gentleman. She certainly knew nothing about it. Not in the old white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on his bared knees. Just had a constant sense of imminence come from the peg over his collar.

He smiled with troubled affection at the University spa, picking up a paper from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in his hip pocket for the lovely birthday present. He listened to her. The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the second. Some say they remember their past lives. Moses Montefiore. Dislike dressing together. In the electric light that the creaking of his strange confidence.

No: that book. Wait till I'm ready. Old Sweet Song. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. Four umbrellas, her cream. He glanced back through what he does. For you, please. Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to Kearney, my miss, he says. Prr. In the later dreams he began to cover the sun slowly, behind her moving hams. They are lovely. The way her crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack by whack by whack by whack by whack by whack by whack by whack.

She understands all she wants to. Potato I have a few friends to make a scrap picnic. We are going to lough Owel on Monday with a pain in his hip pocket for the terrible, seated calm above his own garret chamber without pausing to undress.

Dirty cleans. And when he tried to strangle himself.

Where—if anywhere—had actually found the gate to those he could have been muttered of since Gilman's death. To some, though, agreed that the converse would be likewise true. Must get those settled really.

He smiled, glancing down the stairs after midnight. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. He said softly in the last. How about the funeral. Vain: very. I put a mark in it. He scalded and rinsed out the teapot handle. Or hanging up on the hallfloor. Curious mice never squeal.

Lot of babies she must have been half drunk when he awakened he retained a vague sense of dread that it is in heaven. Tea before you put milk in.

The door was the robed black man—the prayers against the broken commode, hurried out towards the next higher one would not help because he wanted to warn the gentleman about that. Reincarnation: that's the word. Illustration. Well, I am here now.

I used to bow Molly off the kettle then to let the cheap crucifix grinding into his inner pocket and, while along the brightening footpath.

Bought it at the piano downstairs. They decided, however. He passed Saint Joseph's National school. Leaving the door.

Strong pair of arms. What possessed me to buy this comb?

Professor Upham by his clearness on other complex points. He tossed it off the hob and set it to his bare feet.

Thursday: not a good day either for a moment later he had found something monstrous—or even comprehension.

The first night after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, then licking the saucer clean. A shiver of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. O, well: she knows how to mind it. —Found mixed with the boss and we'll break our sides. Poor old professor Goodwin.

He prolonged his pleased smile. She set the brasses jingling as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Fading gold sky. All soil like that Norwegian captain's. On his throat were the sinister old woman.

Damned old tub pitching about. Her pale blue scarf loose in the cattlemarket to the door.

Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. She said it had long hair and the small furry thing which scuttled out of her tail, the curious image could be changed into an animal or a tree, for sight of his somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing—and heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening.

The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which once in a certain vacant spot on the rubber prickles. Sound meat there: n. Those mornings in the mixed, almost hypnotic effect on him; and the fourth dimension, and who can say what underlies the old witch and small furry thing with the rotting walls of her hair, smiling, braiding. Yes. Can become ideal winter sanatorium. Queer I was on the dreams began early in March, and his efforts had been vacant from the ancient crone he did so its comparative lightness. He turned from the pile of cut sheets: the cities of the violet light again. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Every year you get a crucifix, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more inquisitive college doctor. He turned over the smudged pages. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not go out. Wander through awned streets. He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but he also found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the southward, but they did not believe anything would be better. His hand took his hat told him mutely: Plasto's high grade ha. The Bath of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now.

All we laughed. Lines in her hand? Valuation is only twenty-ninth Gilman awakened into a sidepocket.

—Even planets belonging to other spaces beyond, and on the wind with her hair, smiling, braiding. Better be careful not to have been sleep-walking. Rather stale smell that incense leaves next day. Creaky wardrobe.

They used to bow Molly off the hob and set it slowly as he walked in happy warmth.

P.S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Watering cart. Moses Montefiore. Three pounds, thirteen and six a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a plate and let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it, and whose relation to his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat. Must have put it back on the table with tail on high. He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but of course. She set the brasses jingling as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his disordered dreams. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the bracelet. He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the nextdoor girl at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and bewildered speculation; but seemed largely unconscious. Windows open. Having set it on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his left. The tall grass near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Ah! The spell completely, and he had never seen before—old child of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but he must check up on the willowpatterned dish: the overtone following through the air. Must get it.

His eyelids sank quietly often as he snatched it in his sleep-walking within his room increased; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own master. In the later dreams he had given him for an ad. He smiled, pouring. Sunburst on the humpy tray.

Keep it up for help on a saucer and set it to his desperation to hear that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he had entered college in Arkham, with the distant chant of the colloquy on paper, turning. He stood up, the green hillside—the blistering terrace—the green flashing eyes. But he delayed to clear the chair by the nextdoor girl at the time of year for Arkham. What they called nymphs, for his eyes shifting gradually westward.

Elwood retired, too, had supposedly been sealed from all his classes. Prevent. Farmhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping. O more. The crooked skirt swings at each whack. Why is that?

There was, he reflected, those lovely seaside girls. He did not speak, and in the morning. All we laughed. There would be better.

Milly too. A mood of hideous malevolence and exultation, and the sight of his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might go? Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. There was a matter for speculation, though with all his experiences. He watched the bristles shining wirily in the evening wind. Knows the taste of them now.

Let her wait. I got mummy's Iovely box of creams and am writing. It lay there now. Give my love to mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. Had he himself talked as well as other apparel were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the river, and saw the old woman's: the cities of the jakes and came forth from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. Was he going mad? He was pulled out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. They lay, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the governor's auction. Not much. Give my love to mummy and to certain dreaded periods.

Girl's sweet light lips. Agendath what is this that is? Wife is oldish. Neat certainly. Possibly Gilman ought not to have an origin outside the given space-time continuum—and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs' blood. All right till I come back anyhow. Clean to see first thing in one of the wildest kind.

That means the transmigration of souls. She swallowed a draught of tea, tilting the kettle off the porter in the inertia—but meanwhile he might discern the denizens of the city traffic.

I gave for the lovely birthday present.

—Poldy!

He tossed it off the porter in the north-west. The bells of George's church. Vindictive too. It was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible things. During the day, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the air. Matcham often thinks of the city traffic.

But he delayed to clear the chair by the building inspector. Ham and eggs, no small furry thing in the cosmic pattern. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a naggin bottle by the wall. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and suddenly he realized just where the downward slant met the inward slant. They like them sizeable. Naked nymphs: Greece: and for a plan of action—Gilman had a constant sense of having undergone much more than suggest what had been studying in the following June. While the kettle is boiling, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six return.

There is to be awaiting the fall of dung.

The cat mewed hungrily against him. The more Gilman looked at the letter at his side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number seventyfive. That means the transmigration of souls. —Thank you, my bold Larry, leaning on a sore eye. Inishturk. Elwood could tell him something, though with all his older lodgers to a book, navvies handling them barefoot in soiled dungarees. Wait till I'm ready. Far away now past. Whether the dreams began early in February. The pavement from which he won the laughing witch who now.

Doctor Malkowski—a rather large congeries of iridescent gray veined with green; and when it came from the tray, lifted the valance. There is a young student and a card lay on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last no one took them seriously.

They are lovely. Mathematics—folklore—the quasi-buildings; and its survival of the pan, sizzling butter sauce. Next day he would have to be divided, and about the small lifeless body. Invent a story for some sound in the wood. Keep it a bit.

Save it they can't mouse after. O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and more distinct, and the straight outer wall on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan's song about those seaside girls. The landlord was in 1692—the muddy alley and the dancers must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though the pursuit of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless entity Azathoth, which had begun to attack his imagination.

Everything on it? It bore the oldest, the evening wind.

Put down three and carry five. Then she had admitted under pressure to the college museum, save that it might.

Kidneys were in the now vacant room above him on the rubber prickles.

They like them sizeable. I'm parched. No sound. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. They admitted they had seen any odd thing they had seen any odd thing they had been near Joe's room, but a piece of kidney. Whether the dreams Walter Gilman did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Wonder have I time for a mutton kidney at Dlugacz's.

Mulch of dung. Anemic a little? His back is like that.

The dreams were wholly beyond conjecture.

It must have been, how he had talked with both Brown Jenkin began to talk or rise in his shirt to humor the fellow got such an odd notion? Cup of tea from her cup, watching it flow sideways. Right.

Had he signed the black cock and the small, regular features.

Hope no ape comes knocking just as I'm.

Destiny. I put a mark in it. She said. He passed Saint Joseph's National school. 9.15. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio.

#Ulysses (novel)#James Joyce #1922 #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Calypso #H.P. Lovecraft #weird fiction #horror #American authors #20th century #modernist authors #The Dreams in the Witch House #1932

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the-nature-of-the-art-beast · 7 years ago

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Happy Hour Murders I - V

Minerva Saldivar never knew an un-bitchable day of her life. She was a miserable little woman who never saw the good side of anything or anyone. She was coming from the doctor’s office one Monday evening when saw some motorcycles and pickup trucks in a parking lot. It was Humpy McDurvel’s parking lot. Humpy’s is a neighborhood bar with no grand illusions. Life happens here. Transients, neighborhood good guys and bad ebb and flow through its antique doors as regular as the tides of the Corpus Christi Bay. Not a lot remarkable happens here.

“Those people, sitting there drinking. They’re in there and God only knows what they’re really doing,” she thought to herself. Just as she was pulling away from the stop sign in her BMW, she saw some of “those people” sitting outside the building smoking. She shook her head again and then it happened, her car stopped moving. She jiggled the keys, pounded the steering wheel and, to her horror, the people smoking outside the bar were walking toward her.

She said in fitful panic, “God, don’t leave me here with these people!”

Phillip was the first to her door and he knocked on the window. She was frightened. She looked at him through the window and said, “What?!” As she was nearly in the middle of the intersection he asked her, “Ma’am, can we help you move your car?”

Well she didn’t know what to think. Her mind was racing and then struck quiet with Phillip’s voice, “Ma’am? Are you alright?”

“Yes I’m alright! Why wouldn’t I be?” She snapped.

Phillip smiled and said, “We just want to help. Will you let us or, do we have to call someone for you?”

Phillip Smithson, a retiree, is a transplant from the mid-west. He’s a good guy with an absolute atrocity for a wife. She uses her insecurities against him with cutting remarks nearly constantly. But, he seems oblivious, so they have been happily married now for forty-something years.

“I have a cell phone” she snapped at him again while she dug through her purse. “I’ll make my own call!”

Phillip cocked his head and turned to walk back with the rest of the group to the bar. Then he heard, “Mister! Come and at least move my car out of the intersection!” He turned, to see her getting out of her car. She was about 5’-nothing, wearing a pair of white jeans, a faded aqua shirt and a bowl cut hairdo, with a way too dark of a dye job.

He waved the others over and they joined him pushing her Beemer out of the intersection and into Humpy McDurvel’s side parking lot. She supervised the entire move, making sure they knew that her car was expensive, she had lawyers and that her nephew was in the FBI. They moved the car and got away from her as quickly as they could. Phillip handed the keys to her vehicle back and asked if there was anything else he could do. She said no in her cold manner. He wished her well.

Back inside the bar they were all at their usual table and when Phillip got to the table; they all looked at each other and said, “Wow.”

Just then she walked in the door, she looked scared and confused.

Ryan Castillo is the mid-shift bartender. He is the tallest surliest looking barkeep you’d ever meet. He is a 6’4”, broad shouldered, solidly built, and bearded man. His countenance is an almost permanent scowl, even when he smiles. But he is truly one of the best people walking the face of the earth.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” He asked.

Minerva turned quickly and nearly lost her footing but gathered herself, “My phone is dead! I need your phone to call the BMW dealership!”

“Yes ma’am,” he said handing her the bar phone.

She manically punched in the number and waited in a fidgety stance. Finally someone answered, “THIS is Minerva Saldivar, I picked up my new BMW yesterday and now it is broken down and I’m calling you from a BAR!” there was silence on her end. “Well, I’m in a BAR! I don’t know what it’s called.” She stood there with the phone pressed into her head like she was trying to shove it through. The bar was silent as they took in this weird little vignette of elderly frustration, elitism and entitlement.

Then from the silence a voice called out to her, “Minerva?” Chase Landress walked in the bar just as Minerva was about to really rip into the person on the other end of the line.

Chase Landress is an accountant, semi-retired. He is quite frankly one of the most hating individuals ever. Chase’s wife left him after about 42-years of marriage. Everyone wonders why it took her so long. She moved back home to Alabama to be closer to her family. It’s often been discussed that the wrong person left Texas.

“Chase!” Minerva was exasperated. “You talk to this impudent woman on the phone!”

He took the phone reluctantly, “Hello? Yes. Yes. OK well we’re at Humpy McDurvel’s. Oh you know it? OK, well if you could send that tow truck over....oh OK, I’ll let her know. Goodbye.”

"Well!"

“Calm yourself woman. Good lord you could drive Mother Teresa to murder.” He looked at Ryan and said, “I’ll take a Corr’shlight and she’ll have a Maker’s neat. You still drink Maker’s right?”

Minerva didn’t bother answering. She was quiet for as long as she could stand it and then she finally burst out, “Well, what did that slacker of an operator say?”

“They’re sending the tow truck and the courtesy van,” he said taking his first sip.

“That’s it!”

“What the hell do you want? A parade? A mass said in your honor? Perhaps a day of mourning because your precious Beemer died in front of a low down bar? Drink your Makers.”

She looked at the glass of bourbon on the bar. She whipped around to Chase and asked, “Well why can’t you take me over to the dealership?”

“Because I’m busy,” he picked up his beer, looked her square in the eye and walked away.

She walked out of the bar in a huff, mumbling something about a bunch of no good drunks.

“You know that woman?” Phillip asked Chase when he got to the table.

“Oh yeah, her husband I used to do business together. He was one of my clients. Good guy. She, of course, is stark raving bitch and that, I believe, was the reason for his early demise. Passed away in his sleep, as peaceful as peaceful could be. Really the only way he was going to get any peace in that house.”

“Why would someone marry a woman like that?” Those who knew Phillip’s wife were thinking, ‘Man, look in the mirror.’ But out loud they mumbled, "Dunno.....beyond me...." and went back to Minerva.

“They ever have children?” Angela asked.

Angela Wisdom is a private investigator. She works for the very well known personal injury lawyer, Waylon McBride, ‘si, se habla Espanol!” his television ads assure. He’s a good guy. She’s happy with him.

“Nah....evidently her legs were fused together,” Chase said lifting his beer.

They all laughed, they all drank, and eventually they all ordered another round. The conversation turned to Angela’s two-week vacation up in the Hill Country, when a deer in headlights looking guy, wearing a Chipman’s BMW uniform, came into the bar looking around. He looked like he half hoped to disappear.

He went up to the bar, "Excuse me sir, did you see a lady in here that was a little, ummmm...."

“Bitchy? Yeah, she’s outside waiting for you,” Ryan told the guy.

“She’s not out there. The tow truck just took her car but I can’t find her.” He left the bar after another glance around and no one else gave it a second thought.

Humpy McDurvel’s got its name from Jack Henry McDurvel II, of the legendary oil rich family. Jack Henry was called Humpy because he had an unfortunate weak right leg which gave him an unusual gait. He wasn’t concerned about what the world might think of him, or his condition. Not because he was one of the great and powerful McDurvels but because he just didn’t give a damn. Humpy’s attitudes endeared him to the every-day Joe. His family found him eccentric at best.

The family wasn’t all that surprised when Humpy decided to go into the bar business but months later when he married a beautiful lady bartender, Hazel McIntyre, there were some ruffled feathers. Within their first year of marriage, they had the first of four McDurvel’s, Jack Henry McDurvel III. Rose is the second eldest and, as the only female of Humpy’s children, was the apple of daddy’s eye but she wasn’t spoiled. She knows what it takes to earn a dollar. She was also one of the hardest working women, volunteering and fundraising for homeless women and children.

Austin, barely 11, died in a tragic Tilt-A-Whirl accident. The carnival was in town and back in the day drunken carnies operating huge, fast moving machines was not out of the ordinary. Austin, being a smallish child was catapulted out of his Tilt-A-Whirl seat like the rock out of David’s sling. It was a closed casket funeral and eventually led to his mother’s massive heart attack and her subsequent death.

Travis, the fourth child, was a mere toddler when Austin died and, unfortunately, was still a toddler when his mother died too, which made growing up a little difficult for him. One of the many aunts they had, Sophie took it upon herself to care for Travis as if he were her own. The problem with that was her children did as they pleased with little or no consequences. Travis grew up from a wounded child into a bitter and spoiled man with lots and lots of money, all of which makes a very bad combination.

When Humpy died in 1996, well into his 80s, he left a massive fortune to Hank and his siblings.

Hank inherited the bar and some couple of hundred of acres in the Hill Country, right around Enchanted Rock area in Fredericksburg, one third of the multi-billion dollar fortune. Rose got most of the up-town property Humpy had in Corpus Christi and several acres in Padres Island and her third of the money. Travis was left with several businesses in downtown and his third of the loot.

III

Angela was leaving the next morning for the Texas Hill Country and was looking forward to having quiet time. Two weeks of no phone, no television, no computer and of nobody. But tonight she was going to revel in the company of her friends.

The door opened but it didn’t disturb the conversation. Two patrol officers walked in and they stopped at the bar and spoke to Ryan. The group of regulars looked up at the bar and Angela decided to sidle up and see what was going on. Since she knew both officers from her work at the law office, it just seemed natural. It wasn’t always a great relationship, the police/private investigator relationship, but she was curious and her buzz was working her.

“Officer Roberto! Que tal?” She smiled at Office Ragland Roberts.

He looked at her with mild contempt, “Miss Wisdom.”

“So frosty; so formal,” Officer Tanger Washington admonished his partner. “Angela, how are you today?” Washington inquired with a slight bow.

“Finer than frog’s hair Tanger. So what are you and Roberto up to today?”

“Missing woman. Hey, were you here earlier?” Washington replied.

“Three beers, so yeah, I’ve been here for a bit. Why?” She answered.

Washington pulled out his note pad to start taking notes, “Did you see an older lady with car problems?”

“Oh the Beemer Biddy! Yeah we helped her with her car. It was dead in the intersection and we pushed it through to the parking lot around the side. It wasn’t dead dead, it had juice but wouldn’t drive.” Angela stopped talking and started thinking, “She’s missing? It’s only been a few hours. How is she missing if 24 hours has yet to go by....or have I been in this bar longer than I thought?”

Office Roberts answered her with some irritability, “She’s the mayor’s sister-in-law.”

Angela thought for a bit, “Hmmm, you’d think I would have run into her before.”

Washington shook his head, “Not from what we understand unless she goes to the doctor’s office, which is where she was prior to breaking down here, she rarely leaves her house. Pretty much just stays at home with her dogs 24/7.”

“How does she get groceries?” Angela asked.

Washington consulted his notes, “She has an errand girl. The girl, Grace Ayala, gets her groceries, her prescriptions and whatever other shopping she needs. She just goes in picks up and drops off. From what I understand the old lady isn’t that much fun to be around.”

“Yeah, that’s putting it lightly. One of my friends knows her, let me see if he’ll talk to you.”

“Alright, Missy Ma’am,” Washington said with a tip of his hat.

Angela was standing next to Chase and she gave them a synopsis of the conversation at the bar. Chase groaned, “And you want me to go talk to the cops I suppose?”

“Well, it would be your duty as a good American.” Angela knew Chase couldn’t pass up doing his “duty”...whatever it may have been. He was a frustrated soldier. When the draft came around he was found unfit to serve in the military because of his poor eyesight. Flash forward several years and he got laser surgery and perfect vision.

“Fahhhhhhhk, fine,” he drained his beer. He ambled up to the officers with Angela in tow and introduced himself.

“So you know the missing woman?” Roberts asked.

“That sour old cow ain’t missing. She’s probably flagged down a cab because she couldn’t wait five minutes for the courtesy van from over at the Beemer place. So there’s probably some poor tortured soul of a cab driver contemplating suicide because that biddy bitched him up one way and down the other.”

“So, you’re not good friends with her?” Roberts asked taking notes.

“Nope. Can’t say that. I know her because her husband was a client of mine back in the day. She killed him you know.”

The officers raised their eyebrows.

“Well not in the conventional murderous fashion. God just took him in his sleep because that poor bastard wasn’t gonna get no rest with that woman around. You know the old saying, ‘God made them and the devil put them together?’ Yeah, well it was 100% true in this case.”

Washington chuckled. “Yeah I know the type.”

“This one is the ORIGINAL of the ‘type.’ Really if she is missing, she didn’t go quietly. That woman doesn’t know from quiet. She put up a fight....unless of course...well...” He looked at the officers, “The only way she would’ve gone quietly is if she was taken by surprise. Even if she knew the person she would have put up some kind of ruckus.”

“Good to know,” Officer Roberts said. He told Chase he could go back to the table.

Washington turned to Angela, “Hey, wanna show us where the car was and where she may have waited?”

“Sure, my pleasure. The more time I get to spend with Roberto the better,” she winked a smile at Washington as Roberts rolled his eyes.

They went out the front door and she showed the officers where everyone was prior to the breakdown of the Beemer Biddy.

“We were sittin’ out here smoking and the Beemer pulled up slowly to the stop sign. The lady seemed to be staring us down. She kept shaking her head. I don’t think she approved of us. Then she made it to the stop and then she looked at us again and then tried to pull away but the car barely budged its way into the middle of the intersection. That’s when Phillip first approached her, we all voted to leave her to herself, but you know Phil is one of those guys that won’t leave anyone hangin’ like that. So at first she told us to back off and then next thing you know she was ordering us to move her car. We moved it over here.”

She took them around the side of the building; they could see tracks in the loose gravel, two sets of distinct tracks; that of the Beemer and those of the tow truck (the latter being heavier and wider). There were footprints in the loose gravel, several, too many…the tow truck drivers, the regulars from the bar who pushed the car and those of the Beemer Biddy. Loose gravel is not very informative. There are no real impressions that really look like anything solid.

You can see where a tire may have been but you couldn’t identify the lands and grooves of the treads, therefore you can’t identify the tire. You can see foot prints but you can’t get an impression of the sole of the shoes, therefore, you can’t identify one shoe from the other. It was a mess. And if this woman was indeed missing, it was going to remain a mess.

“So you think we should alert the lab boys?” Roberts asked Washington.

“For what? There’s almost literally nothing here.”

“Yeah but the mayor....” Roberts reminded him.

Washington turned his head to the heavens, “Ugh, that greedy old.....I mean that kind and benevolent man? I know, let’s CYA it. Let’s call Detective Bruno. He loves helping the mayor.”

“Brilliant,” Roberts smiled.

Angela has seen the Cover Your Ass game before. It was always wise for patrolmen to bring in bigger badges on weirdo stuff like this so that way the beat officer wouldn’t take the fall for something that might lead to nothing, or something way above their pay grade. She went back inside the bar and decided it was time for a shot of Espolon, especially if she was going to deal with Bruno. She went up to the bar.

“Ryan, may I have an Espolon?”

Ryan grabbed a bottle off the top shelf and poured a beefy shot for her, “They still out there?”

“Yep, they’ll be here for quite some time. They’re calling in Detective Bruno. That old lady was the mayor’s sister-in-law. It has to look like he’s doing something about it.”

“Great the rest of my afternoon is going to suck balls. No one is going to come in with that much black and white outside.” He handed her the glass.

She took the glass and said with a bright smile, “Yeah, but the good news is you’re stuck with us.”

“Yay.”

She drank her tequila, gave Ryan the glass then headed for the ladies room. The ladies room has five stalls only four that worked. The last stall in the corner was used more for storage than an actual potty.

She sat and commenced her business and she heard some funny hissing type noise. She looked at the floor and around her stall, but the noise didn’t seem to be coming from where she was sitting. Then she heard a low gurgle noise. After she finished, she washed her hands and she noticed that the sounds stopped. But it bugged her enough to make her start for the stalls to take a look, just then the whirlwind known as Gaylyn came in to the loo.

Gaylyn is now what one would call a mid-range call girl. Since the recession, she had to take a pay cut that’s why she’s mid-range. She is a raven haired wench with a shapely figure. If she were not so known as whore, she might have married well. But this being a small city, with everyone in everyone else’s business, there’s no way a man of wealth would marry her. She wanted the wealth. She had no children or pimp and she skated by the law because she was so well connected.

As she tumbled into the bathroom, she put her purse on the counter, waved at Angela and was on her cell phone with her engagement secretary speaking as casually as one might have talked about a pedicure.

“The Orion? OK, how many? Two....OK, a couple. Oh hey, Angela! Yeah I can be there by eight. Do I need to wear anything special? Oh good. I hate dressing up. Alright I’ll call you when I’m finished with this gig.” She got off the cell and attempted to tame the flurry of wildness she called hair. “Hey, Ang!”

The call really didn’t faze Angela. She was well acquainted with Gaylyn. She is a great source of information, “Hey, Gaylyn. How are you?”

“Fine, busy. So what’s up with Roberts and Washington out there,” Gaylyn asked.

“Missing person’s case. The mayor’s sister-in-law.”

“Really? Minerva Saldivar?” Gaylyn asked as she studied her face in the mirror.

Angela looked in the mirror to see what Gaylyn was looking at, “Yep.”

“She’s one tortured old woman.” Gaylyn said.

That statement took Angela back a little, “She didn’t come off that way. She came off as sort of a...”

“Bitch? Yep, that’s how she masked everything,” Gaylyn recounted the story of Minerva Saldivar as she fixed her make-up. “She was sexually abused as a child and traded it seems, very brutal. Her sister didn’t know anything about it because the sister was brought up with an aunt. See, their mother died when they were young. The father took Minerva, she was older by about six years and Susanna went to live with their aunt. So a lot happened that the sister never knew about, well, until quite recently. Minerva actually killed her father when she was 12. Bastard had it coming.”

Gaylyn pulled out another compact and was a flurry again with a brush, powder flying everywhere. “She should have strung him and his pals up by their balls. But being 12 well, what could she do? So she poisoned his food and nothing was ever said about it. Because everyone knew what was going on but, back in the day, even a rich Mexican could get away with such nastiness. But they really didn’t look at him like he was Mexican. He was very fair, from what I understand, had green eyes. Actually Susanna looks stunningly like him,”

She pulled out another compact out and yet another brush, her purse was like a little leather clown car of make-up. “Anywho, Minerva killed him and, everyone figured, good for her as it seemed like the law wasn’t going to do anything. So no one ever messed with it.

“Minerva, you see, never really recovered from the abuse. Though she married she never really trusted her husband. Well really, she never really trusted men ever. Not like our distrust of men,” she said with a chuckle. “Her distrust was downright psychotic. I don’t even know how she talked herself into getting married. She got pregnant within the first year of marriage but she had an abortion because she didn’t know what might happen if the child had been a girl. It drove her quite mad.”

Angela was blown away. Not a whole lot shocked her. She had seen some things, had heard some stories but for some reason this one really struck her hard. She had already made up her mind that Minerva was THE Beemer Biddy. She was an entitled, spoiled, my way or the highway, type of person who rolls through life like it were a demolition derby. And really to a certain extent she was that person, she wanted the world to hurt as much as she did. She never learned to turn her hurt into a foundation on which she could build a better life but then, when you think of it.....that’s a shit-ton of hurt. It’s not easy to move out from under a shit-ton.

Eventually Angela said, “Wow.”

“Yeah I know. What a nasty childhood but, I can see how people could look at her as a stark raving bitch. I’ve seen her go full tilt.”

“Grace Ayala is your secretary right? How do you know this story, through Grace? You know she worked for Saldivar too, yes?”

“Yep. One time Gracie got her meds and she took them up to the house on Ocean, you know it, it’s gigantic with the kind of medieval castle look to it?”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Well Gracie got there and she found Minerva lying on the ground. And she didn't know what to do so she called me. I got there and Minerva was passed out; a bottle of Maker's Mark by her head. She was drunk one day and told Gracie the entire story. She was furious at herself the next day for telling Gracie and, of course, took it out on Gracie. Anywho, that night we found her passed out, we took her upstairs and stayed with her. I was asleep in the chair beside her bed and she woke me with an alarm clock biffing me upside the head. She hollered and carried on and then threw up. Gracie came running in and calmed her just as much as she possibly could. We were both told to get our whore butts out of her house. So we did.”

With the final stroke of mascara Gaylyn added, “Well with all that and her husband committing suicide like that....it’s a wonder she ever got out of bed herself.”

Angela was puzzled, “I thought he died of natural causes.”

“Nope. El suicidio.”

“Wow. You can learn a lot in a ladies room,” Angela was thoroughly wowed.

“Oh you have NO idea!” Gaylyn tossed the final compact into her purse. "Shot?”

"Sure what the hell. I’m taking a cab home. Oh heads up, Bruno is coming up here.”

“Shit! Oh well… Le’s go git summa dat tekilla!”

The ladies came out of the bathroom and Ryan looked at them, Gaylyn was talking a mile a minute and Angela was listening intently. They got to the bar and ordered their tequila. They cheered each other and sunk it. Ryan got Angela another beer and went to making Gaylyn’s Cosmo.

He really liked Gaylyn especially since that misty morning, after a late night at the bar and a later night at Ryan’s, with a little this and a little that. She truly was a professional. Ryan was in love, even though she expressly forbade him to fall in love with her. “Friends with extreme benefits is what we are. I forbid you to fall in love with me.” Too late, Ryan was a goner.

Gaylyn stayed at the bar and Angela gravitated back to the smoking section outside the bar. Corpus Christi went smoke free in bars in 2009. Oh it was hard fought; people were outraged that their civil liberties were under attack. “It’s a bar for cryin’ out loud, not a health club,” some said.

Others were more colorful about it, “They wanna bring in fuckin’ Las Brisas and pollute our air with pet coke but we can’t smoke cigarettes in a fuckin’ bar?! Stupid mother fuckers.” Oh it was an ugly little time but political correctness won out over civil liberties.

“Aaannnnnnnnnngelahhhhhhhhh,” Detective Bruno was in a mood, one of his best. He figured there was a huge possibility that the mayor was just covering his ass so his wife would think he was doing something to find her sister and that the woman would be found quite undamaged and probably riled that everyone was getting into her business. So he felt he was getting paid to do nothing really.

Angela lit a cigarette, “Bruuuuuuuuuuunooooooooohhhhhh, que paso, senior?”

Bruno smiled, “Oh nothing. Just doing some looking around, asking questions, taking pictures...”

“C.Y.A.?”

“Yep. How’re you doing? I haven’t talked to you since that Coast Guard murder last year.”

“I’m fine. On vacation, leaving for Fred in the mornin’, be back in a couple of Sundays,” Angela was looking forward to this vacation. The Coast Guard murder last year was the first murder investigation in which she fully participated. It wasn’t pretty but now the bad guy is in the pen and he won’t see freedom ever again.

“That’s nice.” Bruno switched gears and said, “Hey why won’t you ever go out with me?”

“You’re a cop. I don’t date cops. It’s unprofessional.” She said with a wink.

“Yeah, hide behind your profession. You are askurred of magic that is the Bruno Love Essperience?” He said while flexing stocky physique in front of her.

“That must be it.” She laughed. “Get back to work Magic Man.”

“One day, you will knock on my door.”

She put out her cigarette, winked at him and went inside.

Bruno came in after her but now he had his serious cop game face on as he approached the bar, “Ryan Castillo?”

Ryan said, “That’s me.”

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“Sure, but I told the other officers everything I know.”

“Well other than that table of misfits over there,” he gestured to the table of regulars, “and the hooker at your bar” he looked directly at Gaylyn, “you don’t have a lot going on. So answer my questions.”

“Alright, alright....” Ryan said, red faced and temples throbbing. He wanted to put Bruno through the wall. “You don’t have to get nasty about my customers,” he said in a calm growl.

He asked the same stream of questions as the patrolmen did. Ryan gave the same answers, which pissed him off further.

Then Bruno asked, “Where’s this Chase fellow?”

“Over here, with the ‘misfits,’” Chase bellowed with a wave.

Not a lot of people were fond of Detective Anthony Bruno. He was a real hard ass. He kept the Fun-Flirty Bruno completely separate from Work Bruno. His parents literally swam across the Rio Grande and made a new start en los Estados Unidos. They lived in the Rio Grande Valley, where they picked fruit for the gringos. They didn’t want their children to pick fruit or cotton. They instilled the value of education in their children.

Bruno didn’t speak English until he was in first grade. But he made it his mission to make his family proud. Ever since he was a child he had this huge sense of pride and duty to his family. He worked very hard and got through school with flying honors. He ended up at University of Texas in Austin. He got a degree in law and a minor in criminal justice. He took the bar and passed it the first time through. So there, he was a lawyer but he didn’t like his fellow lawyers. He said he felt especially slimy after dealing with them. Then he realized one day when doing a plea deal, he truly was one of them.

“No, no, I’m going to be a detective,” he told his then wife, Maria Elena. “I’d rather deal with the law on that end, then on this end.”

Maria Elena soon left him. Not because of the hard life of a cop’s wife but because of the cut in pay. Maria Elena soon, he later found out, broke up the marriage of one of his law buddies and successfully married him. They’re very wealthy, so he figured that made her happy.

Being the eldest of six children, Anthony helped raise his brothers and sisters. God help the brother or sister who stepped out of line. They weren’t as scared of their parents as they were of what Bruno might do. Yes, even his siblings called him Bruno. This confused their friends at first. “So your parents named him Bruno Bruno?” “No. It’s just ‘Anthony’ just doesn’t seem to fit him. So we call him by his only other name.”

Bruno went over the same information with Chase that the police officers did and then walked away to consult his notes and compare them with Roberts and Washington’s notes.

“Chase,” Angela said, “You bes’ take a cab home tonight.”

“I ain’t takin’ no g’ahdamn cab.”

Phillip chimed in, “Chase, you better listen to Angela. She knows these guys.” The others nodded in agreement.

Finally a bleary eyed Chase Landress agreed, “Fahhhhhhhk. Fine.”

Angela had one more shot of tequila and then made a B-line for the ladies room. She remembered the noise she heard earlier and looked in each stall. There was no one there. She landed herself in the fourth stall next to the storage stall. She hadn’t bothered to look in it. She was doing her business when she saw what she thought was a wig hanging under the stall. “Probably someone’s Halloween costume from last year,” she thought.

Last year’s Halloween party was crazy. Travis McDurvel, the black sheep of the McDurvel family threw a Halloween party that rivaled anything seen in Corpus Christi as far as public debauchery was concerned. The stories of women stripping in order to be painted by an artist hired by Travis for the evening are still recounted nearly a year later. The free flow of tequila was mostly to blame. It’s hard to resist free booze…especially when you’re a booze hound. The bar staff was still finding bits and pieces of costumes in every nook and cranny since that party.

She finished her business and she just kind of tugged on the wig. She thought it would be funny if she put it on and went back out as a brunette. Truly the tequila was gaining on her. She tugged harder at the wig. It was stuck on something. She reached up under the stall and she felt a face. She bolted upright and stifled her shock. She went to the storage stall and she shut her eyes to steady herself, this wouldn’t be her first body but it just never got easy. She opened the door slowly and there was Minerva Saldivar, stuffed upside down, as if she were flung into the stall, dead as a door nail. She left the ladies and hollered for Bruno, “You need to come here!”

He went to her with a smile on his face. But when he saw the serious mug she had, he knew this wasn’t for fun and games. Sadly for him, it never was. She took him into the ladies room and pointed to the last stall. Bruno looked. “The missing lady, I take it?”

“Yep.”

Most of the bar had filled the doorway to the ladies room and all were angling for a better view. Not much to see though because the body was upside down and kind of crumpled looking. Minerva was not a big woman. She was very petite. Angela was looking at Minerva’s body and thought to herself, “It wouldn’t have taken a lot of strength to pick up her body. But why is it upside down? Surely whoever did this could have hidden the body easier and with less effort if they had left it right side up. Very odd.”

“Strange isn’t it?” Bruno asked.

“Yeah, I don’t get it. But then there’s a lot I don’t get about murder,” Angela said.

“Yep,” Bruno agreed. He pulled out his cell phone and called the crime scene unit and told them to alert the morgue as well.

“Lab guys coming?”

“Yeah.”

“K, can’t wait to see what there is to see when they bring her down.”

“What makes you think you will? You’re not involved in this case,” Bruno and his game face are nothing to challenge.

But Angela isn’t easily intimidated, “Oh, that’s how it’s going to be? OK, I’ll remember this”.

Bruno turned to the peanut gallery encroaching further into the ladies room, “Y’all get on back to your barstools. Mr. Castillo, lock your doors, no one in or out before I talk to them.” He got on his walkie-talkie and told Washington and Roberts that the bar was to be shut down until further notice, no one in, or out, past the smoking section of the front door.

He looked at Angela, who hadn’t budged from her spot, “You, you need to go sit on a barstool and drink a beer and stay out of my way until I call on you.”

She raised her eyebrows and said, “Fine.” and walked away. He knew this wasn’t “fine” and he knew this would cost him somewhere down the line. He didn’t care, this was his body, his murder and so, after Angela left the ladies room, he set to studying the scene.

The bathroom is paneled in wood with heavy patina of all the years smoke and Lord knows what else. Though cleaned regularly there is always some kind of debris, a bottle cap here or there, a lighter maybe and sometimes bits of some illegal contraband. The latter are rare though. Druggies tend to keep track of their drugs.

In the storage stall there were a couple of boxes, mostly containing decorations for various holidays. The largest one was marked “Halloween” with the “o” made into a Jack-o-lantern and the next biggest one was marked “Christmas 2” with holly underlining the text.

The other boxes contained various banners announcing specials and special events. All were clearly marked so Bruno didn’t have to go digging in them to find out what was inside them. But as part of the crime scene, they would be taken to the lab and carefully examined.

On the opposing wall was yet another storage closet, but this one had a lock. The toilet/storage didn’t. He made note and took some pictures with his phone. He tried the locked door and it wouldn’t budge. Next to the locked storage closet is the sink. There’s a generous countertop surrounding the sink and another storage space under the sink. There’s a large mirror above the sink and a soap and a towel dispenser to the right of the mirror. To the left of the dispenser is the only door to the room and on that a full-length mirror with a massive crack on it hung. It was a rounded crack and that spread a bit. It looked like a spider’s web.

Bruno leaned in and looked closer, “Well, lookey here…a hair but no blood. Could someone’s head crack a mirror and leave no blood? Or could this be old damage to the mirror? This could be a random hair,” he thought. He snapped a photo, took a pair of tweezers and plucked the hair from the glass and placed the hair carefully into a small zip baggie.

He walked out of the ladies room and approached Ryan. Ryan was already annoyed with Bruno and really didn’t want to talk to him anymore but he knew Bruno could do him up and make his life a complete hell. So he braced himself and Bruno asked about the bathroom mirror.

“Really? No I hadn’t notice. But then I wasn’t in there today. I went in there last night. A lady got really, really drunk and her friends couldn’t get her out of the john so I went in there and carried her up to their car and put her in but last night….no, I don’t remember it being broken.”

“Who were the ladies that were in there?”

“You got me, just some random people.” Ryan was lying his butt off. It was the Martinez sisters who were having trouble with their newly divorced friend in the john.

“Really? Random?”

Ryan thought, “Little mother fucker, he knows.” He said, “Yeah random. Not everyone who comes here is a regular.”

“Well no. But I was a lawyer for a lot of years and now I’ve been a detective for the better part of a decade, I know when people are lying to me Mr. Castillo. Why do you want to lie to me?”

“Look I don’t know who the drunk lady was, I just carried…”

“Yeah you carried her out to the car, did you see what kind of car it was, did you make note of the color? Anything?”

“No it was busy; I just wanted to get back to work.” Ryan was really digging a hole now.

“Great, I love looking at bar receipts. Hand ‘em over.”

“OK fine, it was the Martinez sisters, Hazel and Aletha. They were here with some friend of theirs, who I really don’t know, anyway she just got through a nasty divorce and she wanted to drown her sorrows.”

“And why were you lying for them?”

“Because they’re good people and they really don’t have anything to do with this. I just don’t want to bother a whole lot of people over this.”

“‘This’ is a murder,” Bruno’s words came out staccato and direct. “There is a dead woman in your restroom. Do you not understand the urgency here? I have to clear up a lot of things before I can even get to the body you dumb ass,” Bruno hated when civilians got in the way of doing his job.

“OK, I get it. I’m sorry,” Ryan surrendered.

The crime scene people pulled up in their vans eyed by half the bar. Phillip, Chase, Angela and Gaylyn were sitting on the bench in front and a couple of stragglers were smoking cigarettes or on their cell phones telling their wives or whoever, they were going to be late.

Phillip was on his cell, “Well I don’t know when, all I know is the cops are here and they’re not letting anyone in or out of the joint until they talk to all of us. For crying out loud Melanie, there’s a woman dead in the john! Oh great, the T.V. stations are here. You can flip on the flippin’ news and watch it. Look I’ll even fuckin’ wave to you,” he started waving frantically at one news camera that was up and running. “There, ya happy?” With that he hung up.

Hanging up on someone when you really want to slam the phone down on them and make a statement is very unsatisfying with a cell phone.

Gaylyn was laughing at Phillip, he knew it, “Well that woman, I love her and it’s not enough to love her. She’s just such a bitch sometimes.”

Gaylyn smiled, “Gracie, it’s me. Well I’m kind of in a pickle and I can’t leave the bar. Well someone up and got murdered here so the cops are keeping us here until they talk to all of us. Can you call the McGregor’s for me?” Gaylyn had a code name for all the types of clients she had. McGregor was for couples. “Yeah turn on the news. Right now we’re the only thing worth watching on T.V. Yeah I’ll tell you all about it later. Yeah Bruno is here…yeah.” Gaylyn was exasperated with trying to avoid Bruno or really just exasperated with Bruno’s presence. Just the fact that he was breathing the same air she does is enough to exasperate her.

Chase had no one to call, its not like the dogs could answer the phone.

The crime scene unit filed into Humpy’s carrying various cases and very serious looks on their faces. Angela recognized most of them and so did Gaylyn. Not that she let on, she had a good poker face.[R1]

Bruno dispersed the majority of them to the ladies room where the body was. The coroner arrived and came in with a stretcher. He was sent to the ladies room. The rest of the crime scene unit peeps were scattered around the bar area dusting for finger prints where Minerva stood and outside in the parking lot looking for anything they could tie or eventually tie to this murder. When they finished up their photographs and topical finds they let the coroner take the body from the stall storage and carry it out to the hall of the bathroom because there was no way to maneuver the stretcher around the corner and into the ladies room.

Humpy’s is like a double-wide trailer with beer taps. The front door is at the center of the building facing Buford Street and the second door is on the end facing Third Street. Up until a few months ago those were the only two entrances/exits for decades. Then when the smoking ban was enacted the McDurvel’s decided to make a back patio and put a third door across the body of the building from the front door facing the field out on the back side of the building where the patio is. The roof is a high-pitched barn roof styled attachment. It wasn’t original to the building. It was an add-on after the McDurvel’s figured it looked a little too much like just a double-wide trailer.

So between the roof of the trailer building and the inside of the high-pitched addition there was plenty of room up there to really open an upstairs to the bar. Hank had said many times, “A man can stand up in there. Of course he can’t get too near the sides without bumping his head.” The idea of some kind of balcony bar was tossed around and Hank was considering it. But then Hank was a long muller. He could mull over something for years before he acted. So no one was holding their breath.

Soon the coroner had the body in his wagon and was off to the morgue, the lab people were in the bathroom still processing when Angela went up to Bruno, “I’ve got to use the ladies room.”

Bruno looked at her, her legs were crossed and she was slightly bouncing, “Use the men’s and aim.”

Angela thought, “And then he wonders why no one will date him.” She cocked her head at him and said, “Fine.” without so much as a look back as she went to the men’s room.

“Shit, another ‘fine.’ I’m in big trouble,” Bruno said under his breath.

“Bruno?” The voice came over Detective Bruno’s radio clipped to his lapel.

“This is Bruno. What’s up Roberts?”

“Sir, Mr. Hank McDurvel and his brother Travis are here. They own this place.”

“Oh excellent, let them in, please.”

Bruno knew Hank’s reputation of being a good guy and it never waivered, so he figured Hank is an actual good guy. He didn’t know too many people in the bar business that were 100% clean but he figured this McDurvel came close.

Now Travis has a reputation too and it isn’t all that great. He has a couple of businesses downtown that are a little on the side of shady but nothing could ever be pinned to him. There were a couple of rape charges made that disappeared into thin air. It was rumored that there was a child born of one of these rapes too but no one, not even Hank, knew where the child was or if the child really existed. Travis had blown through most of his inheritance but always seemed to be rolling in money. Hank was curious but not too curious. He loved his brother dearly but he also knew what his brother was capable of and wanted no part of it.

Hank was dressed in belted pressed jeans, neatly pressed plaid shirt and John Deere cap and cowboy boots. He had just gotten back from the property out in the Hill Country when he heard the news. He was dropping in to give Angela the new key to the lock on the back gate to the property he lets a select few use. Travis, who was on his way to the bar for Monday night libation, was dressed in rumpled cargo shorts, a floral shirt, Reef flip flops and a baseball cap.

While Hank went directly to Bruno, Travis made a B-line for Gaylyn, “Hey sugar, all dressed up and nowhere to go?”

“Oh Trav, don’t you wish you knew.”

“I bet I do know…” he chuckled as he ran his finger up her forearm. She wanted to vomit but didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know he made her skin crawl.

“Travis!” Hank hollered at his brother. “Com’ere!”

Travis sauntered over to the ladies room, “What do we got here?” Hank and Travis were held in the hall just before the ladies room door.

“Well Mr. McDurvel, we had a dead body. It’s on the way to the morgue.”

“Anyone I know?” Travis jauntily asked.

“Mrs. Minerva Saldivar?”

“Nope, dunno’er. You Hank? You know ‘er?”

“Can’t say as I do. But then I’m not at the bar as often as I use to be, spend most of my time up in the Hill Country.”

“How much longer y’all gonna tie up the bar? I got people comin’ over tonight,” One of Travis’ parties was on the agenda for the evening.

“You’re gonna have one of your parties?” Hank asked. “A woman just died here. What’s wrong with you?”

Travis looked hurt, “Well, I’m just havin’ a few people over.”

Just then Angela stepped out of the men’s room. “Well, lookey here, it’s the Albino Amazon herself.”

Angela rolled her pale blue eyes, “Hank, just how did you end up with a jack ass for a brother?”

Hank smiled, “Angela, good to see you.” They shook hands. “So Angela what is going on here?”

He trusted Angela more than some strange cop.

“Let’s go out to the bar,” Angela suggested.

“Now you’re talking,” Travis said. “OK, let’s get our drank on!”

Hank pulled the lead, “Travis you go on up to the bar, leave me and Angela to do the talking.”

Travis shot his brother a sour look but happily went off Gaylyn’s way. She was in a close-quarters conversation with Ryan. He caught the sight of Travis out of the corner of his eye and gave Gaylyn a heads up. She looked at Travis as he slid his arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze, “Ba’tender! Git me and this lovely flower a shot. None of that Espolon shit. Git the good stuff out of my reserve.” The bottle in his reserve was a $7,000 bottle of Clase Azul Ultra Tequila. One thing about Travis, he has damn good taste in booze. Though Azul is more of a sipper, Travis didn’t have enough class for that. He shot it down. Gaylyn figured she’d savor the Azul. Espolon, though good tequila, was rot gut compared to this bit of liquid heaven.

Travis slapped Gaylyn on the thigh, “Shoot it, girl!”

“Travis, have some class.”

“Some ‘ass?’ WOOOOOOOOOO Let’s git this party started!!!!”

Gaylyn let out an exasperated sigh, “Seriously, why couldn’t you be more like your brother?”

Travis turned on her, red faced, lip in a snarl and snatched the drink from her hand, “I only drink with friends!” And he stormed away to the back patio.

“Drinkin’ alone again,” Gaylyn half whispered to herself.

Pretty soon, everyone was asked where they were, what they saw, who they talked to and all the answers were given. Not one answer strayed away from the original story. There was nothing to be had. The bathroom was processed rather quickly because there wasn’t any blood, all the prints had been collected, and all the contents from the stall storage were taken.

“Well you have your bathroom back,” Detective Bruno said to Mr. McDurvel. “And we’ll be cleared from here in a bit. Thank you for your patience.” With that he shook Hank’s hand and nodded at Angela and left the bar.

Hank followed Angela’s eyes that were following Bruno out the bar, “So, what can you tell me about our friend, the detective?”

“Well, he’s really good at his job. It’s his focus on his job that can make him an absolute ass. If that makes any sense,” She said.

“Yeah it does.”

Just then Angela’s cell phone was ringing. Her mind was darting in all different directions and all the murderous excitement of the last five hours killed her buzz. “Hello? Yes sir. Well I’m on vacation. I leave for the Hill Country in the morning,” there was a long pause. “I know the mayor’s sister-in-law. I…” another pause. “OK well…yes sir…I’ll get right on it….well no one knows anything right now. They just took all the evidence and all the statements. Besides how can I investigate the murder? I’m the one who found the body,” another pause. “Well no I didn’t kill her! But still it doesn’t look right. Yes sir, fine sir,” with that she hung up. “Shoulddah just gone up to the ‘Country this morning. Just shoulddah gone on up. Dang it!”

“Oh Little Girl,” that was Hank’s pet name for Angela. “You know that if you had gone on up Waylon’d call you up anyway. You’re too good at your job.”

“Yeah, he would have.”

“Ah stay and have a beer with your old friend. I could use one,” Hank raised two fingers up towards the bar and in almost an instant two beers, a Lone Star for Angela and a Shiner for Hank, were in front of them. It wasn’t often that Hank drank but when your bar is a murder scene well, you might want to have one…maybe even two.

Travis came back in the bar from the outside patio, “Oh having drinks now?”

“Well, I figured why not?” Hank said.

“If I asked you to have a beer you would’ve turned me down, but Lil’ Girl over there…”

“Now you watch it. I asked her to have a beer with me. At least with her I don’t have to argue my way through a beer.”

Travis looked hurt, for just a quick second, and then his face turned red. He turned heel and as he was making his way out the front door and yelled at Ryan, “If anyone comes in for me, tell ’em I’m at Chester’s!”

No one looked Hank’s way. They were embarrassed for him.

Angela sat and sipped her beer and finally Hank said, “Well, here’s to good times anyway.” They cheered each other and drank their beer. Their conversation ran off to the Hill Country and the sounds Enchanted Rock was making; it creaks and groans along with the rise and fall of the temperatures. That’s why the Native Americans in that area called it Enchanted Rock. Soon they were finished with the first beers, said their goodbyes. Angela went to see Phillip and Chase at the table. Everyone else had cleared out. Gaylyn was off salvaging what she could of her night. Everyone else went on home.

“Well guys, what are you doing here still?”

“Waitin’onagahddamn cab,” Chase slurred.

Angela wanted to laugh at Chase. While he wasn’t a fun drunk, he was a funny drunk….or at least darkly entertaining. His general angst and slurry vocabulary were happy hour gold.

“Angela, did Waylon call you?” Phillip asked.

She shook her head, “Yep.”

“Figured he would,” Phillip said patting her hand lightly.

“Fahkin’law’rs…” Chase chimed in.

Angela smiled at Chase and turned to Phillip, “Yeah well he’s good friends with the mayor and then the mayor saw me on the news standing outside with y’all and so the mayor called Waylon, Waylon called me and well shit rolls down hill.”

“All fahkin’ alike sumbitches.”

Ryan came up to the table and told the men, “Chase, Phil, your cabs are here. Ang, you takin’ a cab?”

“Ride with me,” Philip said. “You’re on my way anyway. Let’s split a cab! HA! Haven’t done that in years. Then again I haven’t spent near half the night in a bar in years either.”

“OK I’ll ride with you,” Angela said.

“Allfahkin’alike. Fahkin’ law’ers.”

More to come ....

#HappHourMurders #LauretteEscobar #murdermystery #fiction #happyhour #murder #AngelaWisdom #WaylonMcBride #Bruno #Hank #Travis #humpymcdurvels #mystery

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