Read Bluebottle for Free Online

anything else by the simple fact that I didn't
     want the story to end.
    Stories never do end, of course. That's their special grace. Lives end, people die or walk away from you forever, lovers depart
     in moonlight with paper bags of belongings tucked beneath arms, children disappear. Close Ulysses and nothing has ended. Molly's story, Leopold's, Stephen's, Buck Mulligan's—they all go on, alongside yours.
    LaVerne brought Big Chief tablets and Bic pens when I asked. What with drugs and pain, I wasn't sleeping much. I started writing
     one night at eleven or so, Such Men Are Dangerous propped (and prop it was, in every sense) against the bedside lamp.
    When I first met Eddie Bone he was wearing a tuxedo jacket shiny as a seal's skin with wear over fatigue pants held up with a rope at his waist. The pants were so big and shapeless it looked like he was wearing a gunnysack. He told me he'd lost his turkey.
    I'd heard about Eddie on the street. God knows where he got it, but he had this young turkey, walked around with the thing
     on a leash. He'd give it the food he pulled out of trash cans out back of fast-food places and restaurants. Plan was, he was
     gonna fatten the turkey up and sell it just before Thanksgiving.
    Not too long after that, Eddie himself got lost—just disappeared off the street. And no one seemed to care, no one went looking
     for him. Except me.
    'That friend of yours still doing freelance secretarial work?" I asked Verne on her regular visit a couple of mornings later.
    "Roberta? I think so. Sure."
    Roberta had been Chee-See, Honey Brown and Baby Blue before she'd turned intelligence, determination and substantial savings
     towards classes at LSUNO and a business degree. In the life, crowding thirty she'd looked sixteen, rare capital. Dividends
     came in fast, and most of it (over ninety percent, she once told Verne) had gone unspent I handed Verne three of the tablets.
    "Think she could type this for me?"
    "She getsfifty cents a page, Lew."
    "So I'll take out a loan."
    LaVerne stood reading down through the pages.
    "Hey, this is good."
    I shrugged and stood slowly, using lots of arm on the dismount, making sure I had my balance before I moved farther. Still
     hurt like hell. Ribs taped. Muscles that came out of nowhere to settle in like squatters, building fires.
    "Get you anything?" I asked LaVerne. "A drink, cup oftea?"
    "Beer would be nice."
    She carried the tablets over to the swayback couch by the window. I brought her a Jax and, settling alongside, feigned interest
     in a biography of H. G. Wells, a curious artifact prepared by one of Wells's contemporaries, a diehard Fabian. Its thesis
     seemed to be that Wells never put leg in pants, word on paper or penis in vagina without first considering how such activities
     might be entered by accountants looking after his Socialist ledgers.
    When Verne reached out, groping blindly only to find the bottle empty, I brought her another Jax.
    Finally she looked up, closing the last tablet, Indian head nodding shut. She sat there a moment.
    "It's so sad, Lew."
    She tiltedthe can twice, drank off the last of her fourth beer.
    "I knew Christa was going to disappear, but I kept hoping she wouldn't. I knew Lee was never going to find her, and I knew he knew, though I guess each of us in our own way kept hoping he might. They're all so real, Lew. Even that guy on die uptown streetcar for, what, half a page? I don't know how you do that."
    Me either—aside from knowing that I could. It had something to do with capturing voice. All our lives, every day, hour after
     hour, we're telling ourselves stories, threading events, collisions and recollections on a string to make sense of them, making
     up the world we live in. Writing's no different, you just do it from inside someone else's head.
    "I'll drop it off at Roberta's tonight," LaVerne said.
    "Think she'd be willing to bill me?"
    "Don't worry about it."
    "I don't want you paying for this, Verne."
    "She's a