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Drop City

Drop City

Titel: Drop City Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: T. C. Boyle
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something.__ They said, “Raise and call.” They said, “Two pairs.” They said, “Three jacks, pair of nines.”
    Joe was cramped in at the table with Sky Dog and Dale, shuffling cards. They'd been playing poker for the past twelve hours at least--since they got back from the Three Pup on the snow machines, anyway--and they showed no sign of letting up. They kept a joint circulating. They were drinking beer out of the quart bottle and they threw back reds and Dexamils according to need, and he'd sat in himself for a while and made sure to look after his own pharmaceutical well-being, but he'd got to the end of that and what he wanted now was some action, some fun, some _Halloween,__ for shitsake.
    Joe had the generator going because money meant nothing to him and he could fly in gasoline anytime he wanted, and so the lights were on, and that was a pure and beneficial thing in one way--at least you could _read__ to fight back the boredom that was already closing in like a smotherer's hand--but it was a curse too. It was curse and a royal pain in the ass to the degree that Pan, pacifist and flower child though he might have been, was considering triple homicide and maybe suicide into the bargain, because electricity meant music and for Joe Bosky music meant show tunes and country--“Oklahoma,”
    “The Sound of Music,” Kitty Wells, Roy Acuff, Flatt and Scruggs, Eddy Arnold, Gene Autry. _Gene Autry,__ for Christ's sake. Ronnie couldn't let himself think about it, and he stuffed his ears with toilet paper to try to blot it out, but the corny booming voices and twanging strings and country yodeling seeped through nonetheless, polluted his consciousness till he actually found himself _humming__ the shit. _The hills are alive__--if he heard the hills are alive one more time he wouldn't be responsible for his actions, he wouldn't.
    Of course, the irony, sad and piss-poor as it was, was that the hills were dead and so was everything else. Joe kept talking about trapping, about the excitement of running a line and seeing what was there for you _gifted up from nature,__ but he never did anything but talk. He was through with trapping, that was the reality. He was making his money flying booze in to the Eskimos in the dry villages along the Kobuk River, selling cases of Fleischmann's gin and Three Feathers whiskey and Everclear for ten times what he paid for them in Fairbanks. Ronnie had gone with him, twice, just to see what it was like, and it was the end of the world, that was what it was. Windowless shacks, chained-up dogs, dirt streets and garbage blowing in the wind, no roads in and no roads out--Boynton was midtown Manhattan in comparison. He'd made a buck or two himself, selling the odd lid of pot out of the stash he'd taken with him from Drop City--and he'd tried to _give__ the shit away to Norm and Marco and Verbie and he didn't know who else and still everybody treated him like a leper, and that wasn't right, even though when he looked at it in the light of day he could see where he'd fucked up, fucked up big time, and he re-gretted that, he did. But the Eskimos--little half-sized scaled-down comical cats with hair like walking grease who wouldn't look you in the eye if you set their shirts on fire--the Eskimos wanted it, oh yes indeed.
    “Wolves,” Joe was saying over the thin toilet-paper-muted buzz of the stereo, “that's where the money's at. For a pilot.”
    Ronnie had been reading one of the nineteen paperbacks in the cabin--all by Louis L'Amour and all dull as silt--and he rested the book facedown on his chest and took a sip from the silver flask he'd won from some cat at the Three Pup two weeks ago, eight ball, and he couldn't miss, and looked to the table.
    Dale Murray was wearing his sheepskin coat and a fur hat he'd bought off the head of some Indian woman at the Nougat for the price of three Brandy Alexanders--that was all she would drink, Brandy Alexanders, though the cream for them came from a can of Borden's evaporated milk and the brandy was grain alcohol filtered through a leftover tea bag. He and Sky Dog had about had their fill of the snowy north and for the past week or so they'd been trying to talk Joe into flying them to Fairbanks, because, as Dale kept saying over and over until it was about to stick to the walls, _California is where it's happening. Fuck this shit. I mean, fuck it.__ And Joe kept saying, _Tomorrow, man. When it clears.__ Now Dale glanced up from his hand and said,

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