Read Online Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis - Free Book Online Page B

along quietly. And when I went to ground, it pulled into the parking lot between tourist cabin number nine and the sole exit.
    Fair enough.
    He knew the moves without having to work them out. I was no longer dealing with amateurs.
    The cabins were pure fifties postcard: fake frontier, as though some Titan’s idiot child had been given a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas and turned loose, complete with brown plastic chimneys and slab doors painted to look like four planks with crossties. Inside, it was even worse. You could barely turn around in there without bumping into something; it was packed full with a green Naugahyde sofa and chair, a bed whose headboard put one in mind of tombstones, matching blond dresser and bureau, a corner desk shelled with aqua Formica that after many years of bondage and struggle had almost succeeded in emancipating itself from its support brackets.
    I used the cabin’s phone and my own calling card to send a telegram to a deadfall address: Xanadu tomorrow stop .
    More confusion and background noise.
    I left open the canvas curtain with its frontier scenes—wagon wheels, lariats, a chuck wagon—and turned on the TV to a Special Report about recent mass murders in Utah. Canted newsreel footage of the suspect, of abandoned backyards and one-time schoolrooms, of a town square, a storm-laden sky. Interviews with a psychologist specializing in (caps? italics?) the criminal mind and with, unaccountably, a “television consultant.” (A what? ) Having become instantly, momentarily, an actor, each spoke his lines with heavy sadness and certitude. Apparently it occurred to no one that, inasmuch as explanations and answers did exist, they were complex ones, and might only be found in the suspensions of true discourse or of art, certainly not in homilies, slogans, threadbare aphorisms.
    Strike another blow, I thought inanely, for American no-how.
    The newscast was followed by a poorly dubbed Japanese mystery, Ransom, that nevertheless immediately swept me up and carried me off, more from the intensity of the lead character’s features and the stark, angular black and white of the film itself—like something out of his own mind—than for any facility of plot or technique.
    A three-time murderer (though none of them committed in passion), Osho is released from prison during war with the understanding that, in return for his freedom, he will kill again: this time a most peculiar patriot, an old, once-great soldier now leading his people away from confrontation and towards negotiation. Osho instead flees, settling in an obscure mountain village where he becomes protector for a young, mildly retarded woman with whom he falls slowly in love, and for her family. Raiders—refugees from various war zones, deserted soldiers—periodically come upon the village by chance only to be dispatched, violently, by Osho. There are brief flashbacks to beatings he received from his father as a child; to (at the beginning of this same war) the imposition of martial law and subsequent confiscation of his home village’s sole source of income, its fishing boats; to the single boat he and a friend carried into the hills and the officer they struck and happened to kill when he came upon them there; to the man whose throat he slit years later in a barroom brawl over a woman whose name he never knew or asked; to the face of a man he almost killed, but from whom he drew back at the last moment, in prison. By film’s end, despite all he has done, despite his final, passionate killing, one feels a great compassion, a spilling tenderness, for Osho. In the movie’s last frames, half a dozen policemen in plainclothes climb slowly up the mountain to put him to death for defaulting on his bargain. The country is at peace.
    I walked to the window, half-expecting the Mazda’s driver to be in the window opposite looking back, the same film coming to its end on the screen behind him.
    But