Read Online The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma - Free Book Online Page B

of convicts known then as Australasia, before the gold mines of Kimberley were famous and the population of that island tripled with men searching for New South Wales’s very own El Dorado, young Shamus McGarry, a poor Irishman indentured to the Clarke Mining Corporation, had already spent six dark years sifting infinitesimal specks of gold from the earth. But then came the day that he and his partner stumbled upon a pure nugget the size of a man’s heart. Shamus and this other man instantly turned their pickaxes on one another. By luck or by fate, Shamus’s ax crushed the nameless man’s skull first—or else Shamus would have been the one without a name. He emptied the man’s skull, hid the golden lump inside, and then tore down the surrounding rock. He convinced the foreman that the wall had collapsed. It was easy enough to dig the man up from the grave pit that night. It was easier still to hide the heart-sized nugget inside his mouth and flee West, toward freedom, and fortune.
    • • •
    Australasia? New South Wales? Gold nuggets hidden in the drained skull of a murdered miner? It seemed patently unfair—just blatant showing off. I was keenly aware of being both outraged and jealous at the same time. Why hadn’t I been able to come up with anything like this? Was this slant ? This fantastic impossible dream? Made real with just the right words, with just the right sentences. Was I even capable of it? Or was Julian, as I’d feared, simply imbued with powers I would never possess?
    That night at the reading, I arrived with Shelly, who joined me in laughing at the parade of casual pretension that was settling into the auditorium around us: a white-bearded professor in an off-kilter black beret, a girl with two peacock feathers woven into her hair, a boy in a twenties-era gangster hat toying with a cigarette tucked behind one ear.
    “I don’t look like a writer at all,” I lamented, looking at my lightly stained button-down shirt.
    “You look more like a waiter,” Shelly teased. I had not even told her that I had worn this same shirt for three long summers, as I served pastries and espressos at Ludwig’s Café to people dressed just like the alumni who were steadily streaming into the reading. Shelly was wearing a simple, slim black dress that almost made me forget about my fear of breaking her.
    “Get a load of this one,” Shelly said, rolling her eyes at the doorway.
    I turned and to my great surprise saw Evelyn enter the room. Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. In the same leopard-skin hat, with the same high cheeks and bored eyes. The noisy chatter of the room seemed to fall away to whispers. My heart pounded thousand-degree blood out through every capillary I possessed. I had begun to forget her, the smell of sunlight in her hair and the taste of sweet tobacco on her lips, but the moment she walked in I could smell and taste nothing else. I shrank down in my seat suddenly, trying not to let Shelly see how red I’d gotten. Evelyn was followed in by a sour-faced woman with long, glamorous dark hair and a stern-looking gentleman in a tuxedo who looked just like Julian, but with less hair. They both looked as though they might buy the auditorium just to burn it to the ground. Even in this crowd they seemed most assuredly a cut above the rest.
    “Are those Julian’s parents?” Shelly asked. The resemblance was undeniable. “And who is that? His sister or something?”
    “I don’t know,” I lied. “I’ve never met her.”
    She frowned a little, so I clarified, “I mean, I don’t think Julian has a sister.”
    Evelyn was schmoozing with some alumni on the other side of the room. I wrapped my elbows around the chair arms and lodged my hands deep into my pockets, fearing my legs might propel myself over to her without warning.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Shelly asked.
    “Just trying to get comfortable,” I replied with a shrug, keeping my arms where they were.
    But just then, Professor Morrissey