Read Online The Cat's Pajamas by Ray Bradbury - Free Book Online Page A

nodded the merest of nods.
    â€œWhy would someone want to kill me?” I said.
    â€œYou know too much!”
    â€œI know nothing!”
    â€œYou do! Andale! Vamoose!”
    And we were out the door from hot burning summer to cold April, but were thrust aside by a cloud of weeping followed by the weepers, a dark mass of women shawled in black and shedding fountains.
    â€œNo family weeps that hard,” said Sam. “Former lovers.”
    I listened.
    â€œSure,” I said.
    More crying followed. More women, larger and plumper, followed by a solemn gent as courtly and quiet as guidon spears.
    â€œFamily,” Sam said.
    â€œWe’re not leaving so soon?”
    â€œThere’s a crisis. I wanted you to see everything so you would take it in like a virgin observer, nonjudgmental, before you latched onto the reality.”
    â€œHow much you charge for that bag of manure you just filled?”
    â€œNo manure. Just artists’ blood, artists’ dreams, and critics’ judgments to be won and lost.”
    â€œGive me that bag. I’ll fill it for you.”
    â€œNo. Step back in. Take one last look at genius slain and truth about to be corrupted.”
    â€œYou only talk this way late Saturdays with your clothes on and the bottle empty.”
    â€œIt’s not Saturday. Here’s my flask. Drink. One last swallow, one last stare.”
    I drank and stood in the door where the harvest weather breathed out smelling of hot candle wax.
    Far away calm Sebastian drifted on his white cloth boat. Far off some boy choirs chirped.
    Â 
    O N THE FREEWAY , speeding, I guessed.
    â€œI know where we’re going!”
    â€œShh,” said Sam.
    â€œTo where Sebastian Rodriguez jumped.”
    â€œFell!”
    â€œ Fell to his death.”
    â€œLook sharp. We’re almost there.”
    â€œWe are! Slow down. Ohmigod. There they are !”
    Sam slowed down.
    â€œPull over,” I said. “God, I must be out of my mind. Look.”
    â€œI am !”
    On the freeway overpass bridge there indeed they were.
    â€œSebastian’s paintings on the gallery walls!”
    â€œThose were photos. These are real.”
    And indeed they were, brighter, bigger, phenomenal, mind-blowing, cataclysmic.
    â€œGraffiti,” I said at last.
    â€œBut what graffiti,” Sam said, gazing up as at a cathedral’s stained glass.
    â€œWhy didn’t you show me these first?”
    â€œYou did see them, but with peripheral vision at sixty miles per hour. Now you’ve got them twenty-twenty.”
    â€œBut why now?”
    â€œI didn’t want the real to interfere with the crazy mystery. I wanted to give you answers so you could imagine all the lunatic questions.”
    â€œThe photos in the gallery, the graffiti up there on the overhang. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
    â€œHalf chicken, half egg. The priest Montoya sped under these miracles a month ago, did a shocked double take, and almost braked himself into a road wreck.”
    â€œHe was the first art collector of Sebastian’s freeway annunciations and holy revelations?” I guessed.
    â€œRight on! Staring at these Latino-American beauties he spun and ran back for a camera. The resulting blowups were so mind blasting, so eye and soul riveting, Montoya conceived a super master plan. Since most people would snub any freeway graffiti art, why not nail Sebastian’s white-hot bouquets on the gallery walls to burn people’s eyes and inflame their purses? Then, when it was too late to renege, change their minds and ask for their money back, stage the big revelation: ‘If you think these gallery eye-winkers are God-given,’ Montoya cried, ‘fix your eyes on Freeway 101, overpass 89.’ So Montoya hung these windows on burning life as photos and prepared to spring the truth on the critics when they were all safely on board. The problem was—”
    â€œSebastian fell