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The Fabulous Clipjoint
Fredric Brown
1947
1948 winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
Chapter 1
In my dream I was reaching right through the glass of the window of a hockshop. It was the hockshop on North Clark Street, the west side of the street, half a block north of Grand Avenue. I was reaching out a hand through the glass to touch a silver trombone. The other things in the window were blurred and hazy.
The singing made me turn around instead of touching the silver trombone. It was Gardie's voice.
She was singing and skipping rope along the sidewalk. Like she used to before she started high school last year and got boy-crazy, with lipstick and powder all over her face. She was not quite fifteen; three and a half years younger than I. She had make-up on now, in this dream of mine, thick as ever, but she was skipping rope, too, and singing like a kid, "One, two, three, O'Leary; four, five, six, O'Leary; seven, eight..."
But through the dream I was waking up. It's confusing when you're like that, half one way and half the other. The sound of the elevated roaring by is almost part of the dream, and there's somebody walking in the hallway outside the fiat, and --when the elevated has gone by--there's the ticking of the alarm clock on the floor by the bed and the extra little click it gives when the alarm is ready to explode.
I shut it off and rolled back, but I kept my eyes open so I wouldn't go back to sleep. The dream faded. I thought, I wish I had a trombone; that's why I dreamed that. Why did Gardie have to come along and wake me up? next >