They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt’s city, until a sudden wave of water blinded his wipers and drove him along with everyone else to...

He died of a breaking heart,” Pete said, making a stout log fence of his hands around the glove compartment and leaning forward to peer at the luminous clock, “but he was an old man....

… family men, Claude.””Then why aren’t they home with their families?””You haven’t been listening to me, Claude. It takes lots of honey to raise a family these days…” No, it isn’t even that, these teddy...

Outside he hurried again, for he had several blocks to walk and the beer turned out to be no more than cool. He told himself he would remember next time to deal from the bottom...

Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude.”Seen this yet?””No.””Don’t read it,” Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. “It will only...

Whether or not, he felt very much at home in this state. It was to places like this that they had sent him all over the world in defense of New York, until he had...

Yet he could not enjoy the walk. In the morning especially a bougainvillaea looks handmade, lawns are always lawns, and it is true indeed that dogs smell fear. Cats don’t say.

Pete offered tobacco and paper, but Claude brought out his cigarettes and they both decided to try those. Pete provided the match. When he had their cigarettes burning strongly he turned to look back at...

With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly back from Mexico, pulling up finally at an outlying bar-ex-saloon (they had covered the old adobe...

At the high school a pretty girl strolled across the parking lot to her black stallion, let her cigarette dangle from her lips while she put on her helmet, adjusted her goggles. Throwing a slender...

Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don’t mean as a bride, I’m not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour...

They were mostly French, a few Arabs, and despite their uniforms they didn’t look very important any more. Later I learned that if you watch men die, especially if you’ve known them at all, they...

Come on, Princess,” he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of them, but no man could fairly say she was too wide. The most that could be...

So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon.

He found the building in front of which he had stood in the sun all day waiting to be discharged, in which the crazy doctor had suggested that he stay over another day to let...