Libra by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page A

in bed. She worried about the worn-out rug, thought about breakfast, thought about lunch, tried not to be too foolishly proud of the renovated kitchen, large, handsome, efficient, with its frostless freezer and color-matched appliances, on the quiet street of oak and pecan trees, forty miles north of Dallas.

In New Orleans
    A classmate, Robert Sproul, watched him cross the street. He carried his books over his shoulder, tied together in a green web belt with brass buckle. U.S. Marines. His shirt was torn along a seam. There was smeared blood at the corner of his mouth, a grassy bruise on his cheek. He came through the traffic and walked right past Robert, who hurried alongside, looking steadily at Lee to draw a comment.
    They walked along North Rampart, on the edge of the Quarter, where a few iron-balconied homes still stood among the sheet-metal works and parking lots.
    “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”
    “I don’t know. What happened?”
    “You’re bleeding from the mouth is all.”
    “They didn’t hurt me.”
    “Oh defiance. You’re my hero, Lee.”
    “Keep walking.”
    “They made you bleed. It looks like they rubbed your face in it all right.”
    “They think I talk funny.”
    “They roughed you up because you talk funny? What’s funny about the way you talk?”
    “They think I talk like a Yankee.”
    He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn’t always tell with him.
    “We’ll go to my house,” Robert said. “We have eleven kinds of antiseptics.”
    Robert Sproul at fifteen resembled a miniature college sophomore. White bucks, chinos, a button-down shirt open at the collar. This was the second time he’d encountered Lee in the streets after he’d been knocked around by someone. Some boys had given him a pounding down by the ferry terminal after he’d ridden in the back of a bus with the Negroes. Whether out of ignorance or principle, Lee refused to say. This was also like him, to be a misplaced martyr and let you think he was just a fool, or exactly the reverse, as long as he knew the truth and you didn’t.
    It occurred to Robert that there was, as a matter of fact, a trace of Northern squawk in Lee’s speech, although you could hardly blame him for it, knowing what you knew of his mixed history.
     
     
    He spent serious time at the library. First he used the branch across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat cross-legged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. He’d read pamphlets, he’d seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.
    The branch was small and he began to use the main library at Lee Circle. Corinthian columns, tall arched windows, a rank of four librarians at the desk on the right as you enter. He sat in the semicircular reading room. All kinds of people here, different classes and manners and ways of reading. Old men with their faces in the page, half asleep, here to escape whatever is out there. Old men crossing the room, men with bread crumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.
    He found names in the catalogue that made him pause with a strange contained excitement. Names that were like whispers he’d been hearing for years, men of history and revolution. He found the books they wrote and the books written about them. Books wearing away at the edges. Books whose titles had disappeared