The reason for the three vodka martinis was liberation, not celebration. He had it all: beautiful wife, a couple of mil, a nice house in a fabulous part of town, a minor reputation (enough to take some pleasure in), a grand future, a munificent multibook contract, a really cool project ahead, and a lot of guns.

Yes, he was that James Aptapton, minor local journo celeb who’d gone on to minor fame as a writer for money of hardcover books about gunfights and the stoic heroes who won them, and now he found himself at sixty-five improbably successful (in a small way) and awkwardly pleased to be himself. But also: Light as in Light for All, as a famous newspaper, located a mile or so up the very same Light Street, had proclaimed on a daily basis for 175 years or so, twenty-six of which he’d spent in its employ and where his wife to this day toiled. Light as in light of heart, light of spirit, light at end of tunnel, light as in amusing, fey, witty, light as symbol of hope and life. The street was called Light, and that suggested a kind of hopeful conclusion to the evening. One thing suggests another, and in this case the suggestion is appropriate.

After all, he had to walk only another few feet, cross the street, and then–ĭigression. He was one sheet to the wind, you might say, happyhappyhappyhappy, as three vodka martinis will do to a fellow with only moderate capacity for drink, and what lay ahead, although slightly challenging, didn’t really seem insurmountable. They were zephyrs of vodka, and they’d substantially loosened his grip on the solidity of the little chunk of earth that lay between the bar he’d just exited and the house where he lived, a few hundred yards ahead.Īptapton: alcoholic, writer, success, melancholiac, and gun guy, was in a zone that might be called greater than a buzz but less than a full staggering drunk. It just seemed so to Aptapton, because the winds that toyed with the stability of the sidewalk blew-“howled”-only through his own mind. Ditto with the “blown askew” and the “high winds howling through the night.”

The sidewalk before him bucked and heaved, blown askew by high winds howling through the night. “There’s something happening here” CHAPTER 1

–“FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH,” BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?Įverybody look what’s going down.

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