Black Wings Has My Angel

And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.

I smiled, pulling my left elbow into my chest so that I could feel the shape of the gun in its holster. I made it look as if I were scratching. If she wanted to play it girlish, I’d play it boyish. I’d scratch. My gun. The time had come to kill Virginia.

A good Southern fly fisherman is the best there is, because he’s used to watching out for cotton-mouths with one eye and trees and bushes and yellow jackets and God knows what all with the other, and making the cast by feel and prayer.

“Tim, I was going to get out of here. You’re such a queer one. And believe me, I’ve seen some queer ones but you’re the champ. Your face last night.” The smoke wasn’t so good now. “You look big and healthy.” She laughed. “And you’re good in bed and you don’t snore. But you give me the creeps.” The smoke tasted foul. “You move around like a damned t

She looked more like she used to than she used to, if that makes sense.

weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and ninety-eight, and I don’t guess she’d’ve weighed in at more than a hundred and eighteen if the girdle had been loaded with silver dollars. But trying to strip the thing off her was like trying to skin a baby python with a sledge hammer for a head.

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

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.

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