Through the head or heart — a clean hole, no blood.
He had kept innocency.
Do their guts or their brains come spilling out?
Currant jelly where a face was, the chin shot off.
Or down there that other — His arm beat the air like a wing: he writhed.
If you lose that?
Done, die.
He clutched his throat in his anguish.
They bent down eastward along Academy Street, having turned right from the little caudal appendage that gave on the northeastern corner of the Square.
The boy’s mind flamed with bright streaming images, sharp as gems, mutable as chameleons.
His life was the shadow of a shadow, a play within a play.
He became the hero-actor-star, the lord of the cinema, and the lover of a beautiful movie-queen, as heroic as his postures, with a superior actuality for every make-believe.
He was the Ghost and he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact.
He was those heroes whom he admired, and the victor, in beauty, nobility, and sterling worth, over those whom he despised because they always triumphed and were forever good and pretty and beloved of women.
He was chosen and beloved of a bevy of internationally renowned beauties, vampires and pure sweet girls alike, with fruity blondes in the lead, all contesting for his favors, and some of the least scrupulous resorting to underhand practices in order to win him.
Their pure eyes turned up to him in everlasting close-ups: he feasted virtuously upon their proffered lips and, conflict over, murder sanctified, and virtue crowned, walked away with his siren into the convenient blaze of a constantly setting sun.
With burning sidelong face he looked quickly up at Gant, twisting his convulsive neck.
Across the street, a calcium glare from the corner light bathed coldly the new brick facade of the Orpheum Theatre.
All This Week Gus Nolan and His Georgia Peaches.
Also the Piedmont Comedy Four and Miss Bobbie Dukane.
The theatre was dark, the second show was over.
They stared curiously across the street at the posters.
In this cold silence where were the Peaches?
At the Athens now, upon the Square.
They always went there after.
Gant looked at his watch.
11:12.
Big Bill Messier outside swinging his club and watching them.
On the counter stools a dozen bucks and ogling rakehells.
I’ve got a car outside.
Dalliance under difficulties.
Later, the Genevieve on Liberty Street.
They all stay there.
Whisperings.
Footfalls.
Raided.
Girls from good families, some of them, I suppose, Gant thought.
Opposite the Baptist Church a hearse was drawn up before Gorham’s Undertaking Parlors.
A light burned dimly through the ferns.
Who can that be? he wondered.
Miss Annie Patton critically ill.
She’s past eighty.
Some lunger from New York. A little Jew with a peaked face.
Some one all the time.
Await alike th’ inevitable hour.
Ah, Lord!
With loss of hunger, he thought of undertaking and undertakers, and in particular of Mr. Gorham.
He was a man with blond hair and white eyebrows.
Waited to marry her when that rich young Cuban died, so they could take honeymoon to Havana.
They turned down Spring Street by the Baptist Church.