Page 60 (1/2)

Soh the Retarded Desert; it’s Gundi, his landlady and owner of the Fiat She has clothes on today Sheher intireen slip of paper toward hiet out of the car, but puts down his portable keyboard and sits with his elbow out the , like a driver waiting for a long line of traffic to pass

"A registered letter for you, Jax," Gundi says in her purple silk voice with its foreign, deeply ereen slip, but he is still listening to the dark carved valleys of her r’s: "A registered letter for you" If his name were Robert, the sentence would have been musically perfect

"This is a letter?" he asks eventually

She laughs, a purple silk laugh "You have to sign that

Coive the letter to anyone but you It must be very important"

Jax totes his keyboard and follows her "vurry im pohr tant"

back over Gundi’s invisible path of safety through the desert

She es of her shoulder blades She’s wearing leather sandals of the type worn by practitioners of yoga and pacifis in the line of a black brassiere, he can’t get the full picture fro, satisfactorily transparent scarves

Bill the mailman stands patiently in his blue shorts on the entry patio of Gundi’s stone house He has left a large pile of letters and catalogs in the little grotto by her door, where all residents of Rancho Copo corotto was foro and put in one of her own sculptures, a bright-colored dancing dog with a parrot in its mouth

"Mr Jax Thibodeaux?" the mailman asks

"I am he" If Jax had a hat on, he could take it off and bow