Read Online Black Angus by Newton Thornburg - Free Book Online

“Listen, that was beautiful, man. For a minute there I thought you was going to bring the whole building down on our head, just like Samson done.”
    â€œMaybe if I hadn’t had a haircut.”
    Blanchard asked Shea if he could drive.
    â€œOn occasion.”
    â€œI mean, are you sober enough?”
    Shea held out his hands, making them shake as if they were palsied. “Look at that. Steady as a rock.”
    Again Little stepped in. “Hey, I always wanted to drive a Mark Four. What d’ya say, big man?”
    Shea got out his keys and tossed them to him. “Where he drives me, I will follow.”
    Blanchard told Little to take Shea back to the ranch, but Little had other ideas.
    â€œAw, he’ll be okay. We’ll drive around some and then maybe have coffee and eggs at home, at Grandma’s—she’s always in bed by now. Hey, why don’t you two come on over later?”
    Blanchard thanked him but declined. There was nothing he wanted less to do.
    As the Continental roared off, spewing gravel, Blanchard and Ronda got into his pickup. Normally she would have driven her own car, a Vega, and he would have followed her. But this night Reagan had given her a lift to work, so she wasfree to go with Blanchard. For a change they could have talked on the way to her place, they could have necked. But all Ronda did was move close to him and lay her head against his shoulder.
    â€œI think I’m scared,” she said. “I think those two scare me.”

3
    Blanchard first met Ronda at the Sweet Creek two months before, on a weeknight so cold and slow she had joined him right at his table, evidently intrigued by strangers who sat drinking alone and looking as if they had lost their last dollar on earth, which in fact he almost had, then as well as now. Though he was not looking for sex or another woman, he had gone home with her that same night, and probably a dozen times since. And each time had been so much like the others, so casual and impersonal, that until recently he had assumed he was not the only man sharing her bed. Now he was not so sure, for even though she made no claim one way or the other, there was never any evidence of another man. Nevertheless she seemed committed to keeping the relationship strictly sexual, like a one-night stand repeated over and over. And this was exactly what he wanted it to be, all he wanted it to be. For there was still Susan. There were still Whit and Tommy.
    But even if it had not been for his family, he knew that he and Ronda made an unlikely pair. He was thirty-eight and she was only twenty-two. He was a college graduate and she had not finished high school. He knew a good deal about the world and she knew only this small corner of it and a strip of bars and go-go joints in Kansas City. In addition, she read almost nothing, watched television indifferently, and in general troubled her head with little except the lyrics of country-and-western music, which droned from the radio and stereo in her mobile home almost constantly. Yet she was anything but stupid. Blanchard in fact was often amazed at the disparity between her obvious intelligence—her sure, quick grasp ofthe world around her—and yet her woeful ignorance in other matters that did not interest her, as on the night when there was a news item on the radio about President Carter and the senate, and she had turned to Blanchard and asked, “Just what the hell is a senate anyway?”
    Like most of the hill people—college graduates the same as grade-school dropouts—she gave no thought to the rules of grammar and pronunciation, preferring instead the same twang and slang and solecisms that served everyone else. And though the idiosyncratic spelling of her first name was her mother’s doing and not her own, she carried on the tradition to an extent every time she printed the name, forming the middle letter backwards, as и, a mistake so pervasive in the