Coldheart Canyon

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog’s ashes and a man’s ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust?

You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don’t you? There’s always some light in the darkness, somewhere.

Can you hear me, Todd? There’s an ambulance on its way.” For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. “It’s Maxine,” she said. “Remember me?

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey’s eye was still half-open, but it didn’t look back at him any longer. Where there’d been a sliver of bright life, where there’d been mischief and shared rituals—where, in short, there’d been Dempsey—there was nothing.

He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head.

Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a harmless

There’s nothing heroic about sacrificing yourself for him,” Zeffer pointed out. “He wouldn’t do it for you.” “I know that.

but she felt as though whatever she’d been given in the Devil’s Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse.

First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for instance)

You could sometimes guide people’s opinions, but if they didn’t want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work.

He gave a moment’s consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forgo cleanliness in favor of making a fast exit.

Arnie had always called her a dreamer, and maybe he was right about that.

Men and your hunts,” Lilith went on, addressing, it seemed, some larger error in the Duke’s sex. “If you hadn’t been out killing healthy stags and boars in the first place, you could have married and lived and loved. But”—she shrugged—“we do as our instincts dictate, yes? And yours brought you here. To the very edge of your own grave.

Well, I am denying it. You think the world revolves around sex. It’s pathetic.

You think I’m finished, so you’re leaving me to be crucified by every piece of shit journalist in the fucking country.

You don’t think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?” “I don’t want to know who made it,” Tammy said. “But I know who fed it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place.

I want an explanation!” “I’ll give you one,” Maxine said: “You’re crazy.

It’d just be another opinion,” Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she’d picked up. “People would go on believing their favorite versions.” “You think?” “For sure. You can’t change people’s opinion about stuff like that. It’s embedded. They believe what they believe.

Well, she’s lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.