Read Online Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online

contained, she claimed, a resonance to which she was sensitive. Once, in her cups, she said to me, “I’ve always been a swinger. When I was just a cheerleader in high school, I knew I was going to swing. I thought it would be a damn shame if I didn’t get to fuck half the football team.”
    â€œWhich half?” I asked.
    â€œThe Offense.”
    That was rote between us. It soothed the waters. She could give her large laugh, and I might offer two slightly widened lips.
    â€œWhy is your smile so evil?” she would ask.
    â€œMaybe you should have fucked the other half.”
    She loved that. “Oh, Timmy Mac, you are nice at times.” She took a deep puff of Hurricane. Never did the ravages of her hunger (for what, I cannot name—I wish I could) show so vividly as when she drew in smoke. Then her lips curled, her teeth showed, the smoke
seethed
—like a strong tide going through a narrow gate. “Yeah,” she said, “I commenced as a swinger, but as soon as I got divorced the first time, I decided to be a witch. I been one ever since. What are you going to do about it?”
    â€œPray,” I said.
    That broke her up. “I’m going to blow my bugle,” she told me. “There’s a real moon tonight.”
    â€œYou’ll wake up Hell-Town.”
    â€œThat’s the idea. Don’t let those motherfuckers sleep. They get too powerful. Somebody’s got to keep them down.”
    â€œYou sound like a good witch.”
    â€œWell, honey, I am a white witch. Blondes are.”
    â€œYou’re no blonde. Your pussy hair says you’re brunette.”
    â€œThat’s carnal taint. My pussy hair was bright gold until I went out and scorched it with the football team.”
    If she had always been like that, we could havekept drinking forever. But another toke put her on the promontory of Hurricane Head. Hell-Town began to stir.
    Let me not pretend I was immune to her occult claims. I had never been able to make a philosophical peace with the notion of spirits, nor come to any conclusion. That you might die but still remain alive in some vale of our atmosphere seemed no more absurd to me than the notion that every part of your person ceased to exist after death. Indeed, given the spectrum of human response on any matter, I was ready to assume that some who died remained near, and others went far away, or were altogether extinct.
    Hell-Town, however, was a phenomenon. When you smoked Hurricane Head, it became a presence. Over a hundred and fifty years ago when whaling was still active in these waters, a whore town sprang up on the other arm of Provincetown harbor, where now there was nothing but a long-deserted spit of sand. In the years after whaling ended, Hell-Town’s warehouses and brothel cribs had been put on rafts and floated across the bay. Half the old houses in Provincetown had those sheds attached to them. So while much of what was most crazy in our moods on Hurricane Head may have come to us compliments of Patty Lareine, part of the manifestation emanated, I think, from our house itself. Half of our holding of sills, studs, joists, walls, and roof had been ferried over from Hell-Town more than a century ago, and thereby made us a most materialpart of that vanished place. Something of a perished Klondike of whores and smugglers, and whalers with wages hot in their pockets, lived in our walls. There had even been unspeakable cutthroats who, on moonless nights, would set a beach fire on the back shore to encourage a sailing vessel to believe it was rounding a light. Thereby the ship might come around for port too soon and run aground on a shoal. Whereupon these fiends would plunder the foundering vessel. Patty Lareine claimed she could hear the cries of the sailors who were slaughtered trying to fight off the marauders’ long boats. What a Biblical scene Hell-Town must have offered of catamites and sodomites and whores passing the