Read Green shadows, white whale v5 for Free Online Page B

an ego powerful enough to kill it. Nor, for that matter, was there a woman in the world whose flesh could smother Tom. There never had been, and now, this late, there never could be. Tom was his own mount and saddle, he rode himself and did so with masculine beauty. I could see by the way Lisa held his arm that she both angrily and happily accepted him for what he was, a single-minded man who had roamed the world and done what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, without asking anyone and without apologies. Any woman who tried to lay tracks down for Tom, why, he would simply laugh and walk away. Now, this day, he had decided to come to Ireland. Tomorrow he might be with the Aga Khan in Paris and the day after in Rome, but Lisa would be there, and it would go on that way until someday, many years from now, he fell from a mountain, a horse, or another woman, and died at the base of that mountain, horse, or woman, showing his teeth. He was everything men would like to be if they were honest with themselves, everything John wanted to be and couldn't quite live up to, and a hopeless and crazily reckless ideal for someone like me to admire from a distance, having been born and bred of reluctance, second thoughts, premonitions, depressions, and lack of will.
    "Mr. Hurley," I couldn't help asking, "why have you come to Ireland?"
    "Tom is the name. And . . . John ordered me here! When John speaks, I come\" said Tom, laughing.
    "Damn right!" said John.
    "You called him, remember, Tom?" Lisa punched his arm.
    "So I did." Tom was not in the least perturbed. "I figured it had been too long since we saw each other. Years go by. So I pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch and he says, Tom, come! And we'll have a wild week and I'll go on my way and another two years will pass. That's how it is with John and me, great when we're together, no regrets apart! This hunt wedding, now ..."
    "Don't look at me," I said. "My ignorance is total."
    "Lisa, here, didn't quite warm up to it," Tom admitted.
    "No!" cried John, swiveling to burn her with one eye.
    "Nonsense," said Lisa, quickly. "I brought my hunt wardrobe from West Virginia. It's packed. I'm happy\ A hunt wedding— think]"
    "I am," said John, driving. "And if I know me, it might just as easily be a hunt funeral!"
    "John would love that!" said Tom, talking to me as if John were not present, riding through green and green again. "Then he could come to our wake and get drunk and weep and tell all our grand times. You ever notice—things happen for his convenience? People are born for him, live for him, and die so he can put coins on their eyelids and cry over them. Is there anything isn 't convenient or fun for John?"
    "Only one thing," Tom added after a pause.
    John pretended not to hear.
    "What's that?" I asked.
    "Being alone." Tom was suddenly serious. "John doesn't like being alone, ever. You must never leave John alone, remember that, no matter what." Tom looked at me with his keen, clear, bright-water eyes. "John once said to me, Tom, the loneliest time in a man's day is the time between when he stops work and starts dinner. That single hour is as desolate as three in the morning of a long night, he said. Then is when a man needs friends."
    "I said that to you?" said John in fake astonishment.
    Tom nodded. "I got a letter from you last year. You must have written it at five, some afternoon. You sounded alone. That's why I call once in a while. That's why I'm here. Jealous, Lisa?"
    "I think I am," said Lisa. Tom looked at her steadily.
    "No," said Lisa, "I'm not"
    Tom patted her leg. "Good girl." He nodded up at John. "How about giving us a road test?"
    "Road test it is!"
    We drove the rest of the way to Kilcock at eighty miles an hour. Lisa blinked quite often. Tom didn't blink at all, watching Ireland loom at him in landfalls of green.
    I kept my eyes shut most of the way.
    There was a problem having to do with a hunt wedding. Quite suddenly we discovered that none had been