Dreaming of Babylon , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Brautigan Richard

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113 pages

English

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When you hire C.Card, you have scraped the bottom of the private eye barrel. And when Card is hired to steal a body from the morgue, he needs to stop dreaming, find bullets for his gun and get there before someone else does. Not since Trout Fishing in America has Brautigan so successfully combined his wild sense of humour with his famous poetic imagination. In this parody of the hard-boiled crime novel, the adventures of seedy, not-too-bright C.Card are a delight to both the mind and the heart.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	03 août 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786890450
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0320€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Richard Brautigan, 1977
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 045 0
Typeset by Canongate Books
This one is for Helen Brann with love from Richard.
I guess one of the reasons that I’ve never been a very good private detective is that I spend too much time dreaming of Babylon.
Contents
Good News, Bad News
Babylon
Oklahoma
Cactus Fog
My Girlfriend
Sergeant Rink
The Hall of Justice
Adolf Hitler
Mustard
Bela Lugosi
1934
The Blonde
“Eye”
·38
The Morning Mail
The Boss
The Front Door to Babylon
President Roosevelt
A Babylonian Sand Watch
Nebuchadnezzar
The 596 B . C . Baseball Season
First Base Hotel
A Cowboy in Babylon
Terry and the Pirates
Ming the Merciless
The Magician
Barcelona
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Loving Uncle Sam
Bus Throne
Drums of Fu Manchu
Friday’s Grave
Smith
Lobotomy
The Milkmen
My Day
Christmas Carols
A World Renowned Expert on Socks
Good-bye, Oil Wells in Rhode Island
Pretty Pictures
Pedro and His Five Romantics
Smith Smith
Roast Turkey and Dressing
Cinderella of the Airways
Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots
The Morning Paper
Beer Tastes on a Champagne Budget
Earthquake in an Anvil Factory
The Private Detectives of San Francisco
Future Practice
C. Card, Private Investigator
Chapter 1 /Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots
Quickdraw Artist
Ghouls
Cold Heartless Cash
Time Heals All Wounds
The Jack Benny Show
A Strange Cup of Sugar from Oakland
Warner Brothers
The Babylon-Orion Express
Partners in Mayhem
Today Is My Lucky Day
The Sahara Desert
The Edgar Allan Poe Hotfoot
The Labrador Retriever of Dead People
Dancing Time
The Blindman
BABY
Stew Meat
The Lone Eagle
A Funny Building
The Five-hundred-dollar Foot
The Night Is Always Darker
Smiley’s Genuine Louisiana Barbecue
Into the Cemetery We Will Go
The Surprise
Good-bye, $10,000
It’s Midnight. It’s Dark.
Good Luck
Good News, Bad News
January 2, 1942 had some good news and some bad news.
First, the good news: I found out that I was 4F and wasn’t going off to World War II to be a soldier boy. I didn’t feel unpatriotic at all because I had fought my World War II five years before in Spain and had a couple of bullet holes in my ass to prove it.
I’ll never figure out why I got shot in the ass. Anyway, it made a lousy war story. People don’t look up to you as a hero when you tell them you were shot in the ass. They don’t take you seriously but that wasn’t my problem any more at all. The war that was starting for the rest of America was over for me.
Now for the bad news: I didn’t have any bullets for my gun. I had just gotten a case that I needed my gun for but I was fresh out of bullets. The client that I was going to meet later on in the day for the first time wanted me to show up with a gun and I knew that an empty gun was not what they had in mind.
What was I going to do?
I didn’t have a cent to my name and my credit in San Francisco wasn’t worth two bits. I had to give up my office in September, though it only cost eight bucks a month, and now I was just working out of the pay telephone in the front hall of the cheap apartment building I was living in on Nob Hill where I was two months behind in my rent. I couldn’t even come up with thirty bucks a month.
My landlady was a bigger threat to me than the Japanese. Everybody was waiting for the Japanese to show up in San Francisco and start taking cable cars up and down the hills, but believe me I would have taken on a division of them to get my landlady off my back.
“Where in the hell is my rent, you deadbeat!” she’d yell at me from the top of the stairs where her apartment was. She was always wearing a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.
“The country’s at war and you don’t even pay your Goddamn rent!”
She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.
“Tomorrow,” I’d lie to her.
“Tomorrow your ass!” she’d yell back.
She was about sixty and had been married five times and widowed five times: the lucky sons-of-bitches. That’s how she’d come to own the apartment building. One of them left it to her. God had done him a favor when He stalled his car one rainy night on some railroad tracks just outside of Merced. He had been a travelling salesman: brushes. After the train hit his car they couldn’t tell the difference between him and his brushes. I think they buried him with some of his brushes in the coffin, believing they were part of him.
In those ancient long-ago days when I paid my rent, she was very friendly to me and used to invite me into her apartment for coffee and doughnuts. She loved to talk about her dead husbands, especially one of them who’d been a plumber. She liked to talk about how good he was at fixing hot water heaters. Her other four husbands were always out of focus when she talked about them. It was as if the marriages had taken place in murky aquariums. Even her husband who’d been hit by the train didn’t merit much comment from her, but she couldn’t say enough about the guy who could fix the hot water heaters. I think he was pretty good at fixing her hot water heater, too.
The coffee she served was always very weak and the doughnuts slightly stale because she bought day-old stuff at a bakery a few blocks away on California Street.
I’d have coffee with her sometimes because I didn’t have much to do, anyway. Things were just as slow then as they are now except for the case I just got but I had saved up a little money that I’d gotten from being in an automobile accident and settling out of court, so I could still pay my rent, though I’d given up my office a few months before.
In April 1941 I had to let my secretary go. I hated to do that. I spent the five months she worked for. me trying to get her in the sack. She was friendly but I barely got to first base with her. We did some kissing at the office but that was about it.
After I had to let her go, she told me to buzz off.
I called her up one night and her parting shot at me over the telephone went something like this: “. . . and besides not being a good kisser, you’re a lousy detective. You should try another line of work. Bellboy would suit you perfectly.”
CLICK
Oh, well . . .
She had a lard ass, anyway. The only reason I hired her was because she would work for the lowest wages this side of Chinatown.
I sold my car in July.
Anyway, here I was with no bullets for my gun and no money to get any and no credit and nothing left to pawn. I was sitting in my cheap little apartment on Leavenworth Street in San Francisco thinking this over when suddenly hunger started working my stomach over like Joe Louis. Three good right hooks to my gut and I was on my way over to the refrigerator.
That was a big mistake.
I looked inside and then hurriedly closed the door when the jungle foliage inside tried to escape. I don’t know how people can live the way I do. My apartment is so dirty that recently I replaced all the seventy-five-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watters, so I wouldn’t have to see it. It was a luxury but I had to do it. Fortunately, the apartment didn’t have any windows or I might have really been in trouble.
My apartment was so dim that it looked like the shadow of an apartment. I wonder if I always lived like this. I mean, I had to have had a mother, somebody to tell me to clean up, take care of myself, change my socks. I did, too, but I guess I was kind of slow when I was a kid and didn’t catch on. There had to be a reason.
I stood there beside the refrigerator wondering what to do next when I got a great idea. What did I have to lose? I didn’t have any money for bullets and I was hungry. I needed something to eat.
I went upstairs to my landlady’s apartment.
I rang the doorbell.
This would be the last thing in the world that she would expect because I’d spent over a month now trying to elude her like an eel but always being caught in a net of curses.
When she answered the door she couldn’t believe that I was standing there. She looked as if her doorknob had been electrified. She was actually speechless. I took full advantage of it.
“Eureka!” I yelled into her face. “I can pay the rent! I can buy the building! How much do you want for it? Twenty thousand cash! My ship has come in! Oil! Oil!”
She was so confused that she beckoned me to come into her apartment and pointed out a chair for me to sit down in. She still hadn’t said a word. I was really cooking. I could hardly believe myself.
I went into the apartment.
“Oil! Oil!” I continued yelling, and then I started making motions like oil gushing from the ground. I turned into an oil well right in front of her eyes.
I sat down.
She sat down opposite me.
Her mouth was still glued shut.
“My uncle discovered oil in Rhode Island!” I yelled across at her. “I own half of it. I’m rich. Twenty thousand cash for this pile of shit you call an apartment building! Twenty-five thousand!” I yelled. “I want to marry you and raise a whole family of little apartment buildings! I want our wedding certificate printed on a N O V ACANCY sign!”
It worked.
She believed me.
Five minutes later I had a cup of very weak coffee in my hand and I was munching on a stale doughnut and she was telling me how happy she was for me. I told her that I would buy the building from her next week when the first million dollars’ worth of oil royalties arrived.
When I left her apartment with hunger abated and another week’s housing assured, she shook my hand and said, “You’re a good boy. Oil in Rhode I