Read The Deceivers for Free Online

the emptiness, or at least mask it.
    When he turned off the turnpike he looked west and saw the nightglow of the city against the overcast. There was summer lightning in the hills a dozen miles beyond the Silver River. It would be hot down in the city tonight, and theywould sleep on the roofs and fire escapes and in the parks and they would hope for rain. The neighborhood bars would stay full until late because it would be too hot to think of leaving the hum and frosty breath of the air-conditioner to go back to hall bedrooms. The young girls would walk arm in arm, giggling over their delicious mysteries, arching their backs slightly and whispering together when they passed the young men who stood outside the sundries store. And the young men would make casual appraisal of the young swaying abundance of hip, and the tilt of the nyloned breast, and spit toward the gunmetal trunk of the light post and, quite often, two of them would leave the others and saunter after the girls with enormous casualness.
    And, he thought, down in the city tonight there will be episodes of an ugly and savage violence. The sweating cops who make the arrests will be irritable and brutal. In small stale rooms the sweet coppery stench of blood will float on the motionless air.
    There were a lot of words for Hillton. Industrial complex. Lunch-bucket town. A forward-looking American city making a wise and valiant effort to solve its problems of traffic congestion, slum clearance, high taxes and high crime rate. Or, a vital clog in the industrial might of America. Or, a rather inviting target for an atomic warhead. Or, a foul and grubby place to live and try to bring up kids, for God’s sake, and keep them from running wild.
    It was, he suspected, like all of the other cities in the heartland of America. Or maybe all of the cities of all time. Dedication mated to venality. Energy and progress linked to idleness and sin. But in this time, louder than ever before, rang out the plea that was more than half command—AMUSE ME. Fill these sour hours of this, my own and only life, with the gut-buster joke, the rancid ranch-hand laments about love, the talcumed armpits and shaven crotch of commercial love, the flounderings and hootings and vomitings of the big bender. By God, I want the girlie shows and the sex books, and a big cigar is a sign of masculinity and success. I want to be slim without dieting, smart without half trying, rich without working. And I want to read all about it, read all about hell for the other guy—with pics of him strewn on the highway, or cleaved with an axe, or being carried out of the mine. So I can hug old precious, invaluable, unique and irreplaceable me. Amuse me. That keeps me rolling along,boy. So I can live without dying, and right at the end of my world, die without thinking. Then all the rest of you can go to hell because I won’t be here, and by God, when I was here, I had it good. I had it sweet and hot and often.

THREE
    After he had parked the wagon next to the little Hillman, known in the Garrett family as Lucinda May, he went into the house and hung up the gray sports jacket, took off his tie, rolled his sleeves up, pried holes in a can of beer. He turned lights on all over the house, opened windows to let a frail west breeze through, and turned on television. He checked the five available channels and found nothing that he felt like watching. He looked through his records and could find nothing he wanted to play. He leafed through the current copy of
Life
, glancing at the pictures, skipping the text. He threw the magazine aside and went into the kitchen and opened another can of beer. It was a little after ten, and he knew he could get a good night’s sleep, and it would be a sensible thing to do, and there were some pills that would push him over the edge into sleep in a gentle but convincing way, but he did not feel like sleep.
    He carried his beer out through the screen doors onto the patio. (Item: 1955