SECOND HALF

The Walkmen - "Victory"

I let myself in to the house on the hill. I went straight up the bendy staircase and straight into the wispy muslin bedroom at the end of the hall. I felt like a drowned rat served up on a gourmet dinner tray.

"You look like hell."
"You can't stay here. Call your mother or your sister or whatever goddamn relation'll take you in and I'll get you a cab to the station."
"Get out of my house. I told you I'd shoot you if I saw you here again."
I smiled at the thought of taking a bullet in the stomach, it'd be the only thing I'd eaten in three days. I took the torn piece of paper from my pocket and held it between my fingers. Suddenly she wasn't so chatty.
"You did it. You slept with him--"
"Denton!"
"--don't Denton me, not now. Just listen. I trusted you and you lied to me. You slept with him and everyone knows it 'cause you couldn't help but sign the back of your own goddamn photo. You had to sign every one of them, didn't you?"
"What do you care? You said yourself you'd never love a woman as cold as me."
"It's not me that cares, dollface, it's your husband. If I leave here without putting you in a cab headed to somewhere with real fast-moving locomotives, you'll be dead within the hour."

She cracked a fortune cookie and looked inside. I called for two cabs, headed to the airport and the train station respectively. I thought I'd better high-tail it to Nowheresville myself for a little while, something was telling me, with a thick and hearty throbbing in my lungs, that I wasn't too welcome in this town for as long as it takes to burn down my apartment and start a new identity. Perhaps I'll go with Banks this time. Dennis Banks.

"Hey look," she said, absently, the way an electric chair will absently tell you to have a seat, "this fortune cookie is all mixed up. The fortune is ripped in half, I can't read it properly."

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