Black Wings Has My Angel

Twice that night I touched her and each time she moved away from me so I decided the hell with it. Toward midnight I was hungry again and I piled out of the bag and found some bologna and bread. Up there in those mountains your belly feels brand new, like you never used it before and can never get it full, and that stuff tasted like smoked turkey a

We wore the long-billed silly-looking caps of straw Virginia had bought for us so we’d look like tourists. She said if we were going to look like tourists we might as well get accustomed to looking silly, because that was the biggest part of it, a kind of over-all silliness. I thought that was pretty smart. And I still do.

“Does it ever bother you a lot, darling, that I am what I am?” “No.” I kissed her on the nose and it was cold and innocent as a button. “Honestly, Tim?” “No, the only time you bother me is when you’re not what you are.” “That’s a lovely thing to say.” “I’m not trying to be lovely. I’m telling you what I think.”

The only empty stool at the bar was to the right of him and this was probably no coincidence. He kept talking to the others. Talking to them in the mirror behind the bar, the way newspapermen do in the movies. Most of them are carrying on terrific love affairs with themselves and when they talk into a mirror they can watch themselves and listen to

You’ve never heard a siren until you’ve heard one looking for you and you alone.

She was breathing oddly, her shoulders moving as if her lungs were upstairs there, in her shoulders. She wore a T shirt of some kind of cocoa toweling and when she leaned back hard against the seat it was a splendid thing to see. Her skirt was gray flannel and it fitted as if it had been smeared on her, and below it were the legs. You hear and read

There was the damnedest sunset, smeared like sirup of opals over everything and dripping off the clouds the way the molten metal comes out of the ladle in a steel mill.

I kept comparing the rocks and the sky with what we have down South and kind of gloating to think that the South, though lacking in chamber-of-commerce promotion, has the subtlest colors and teasingest smells a man could want. Out West all the smells are sucked up out of the baked land by the sun. And it’s as if all the colors in the ground are gob

It seems that when you’re rich you do a lot of waiting for night, since daylight is neither sophisticated nor secretive and is more or less devoted to perspiring and recovering.