Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon Read Free Book Online Page A

which during the day was not allowed, and fell down on his bed. He was supposed to be thinking things over but for a time there he could not think of anything to think. When something finally came it was like a weak joke—well, if you’re going to live at an orphanage you might as well be one.
    He got up after a while and took off his shirt and loosened his belt and pushed the front of his pants down below his belly button and stuck his stomach out over the buckle. He stood looking down at the stomach for a while and then shook his head and fixed himself up again. What he thought about just then was not the father squirting blood out of the mother’s nose or hollering drunk coming down the cowpath or standing like lost in the courtroom while they sent him up. It was his face the time George stole that first bag of groceries, his face altogether with broken veins in the skin and mottled patches and the dirty-white blonde eyebrows and hair and the two red scoops of his lower lids and his little washed out pink and blue eyes and all the snaggly stinking teeth—the whole nothing mess of a face with all the messy nothing parts, put together for just once, for just one lousy second, in a way that pleased George to think of, surprised and proud, saying he’d amount to something.
    George shook himself hard and lay down on the bed. He did not feel anything special, not even relieved. Well his father had not been any kind of a weight on him to feel good taken off.
    So finally because of that it came to him what he was supposed to be thinking about. He never did have no real plans, just overall to learn a trade and be able to get a job some place, but he never thought before the some place could be some other place than that one mining town or live in any other house but that shack on the cowpath. The father would be there and that is why he would go there. Now the father would not be there.
    So all of a sudden it hit him. Not hit him, it was not like a blow at all. Like one time when he was a little kid he was over to the river and he lay down in an old rowboat tied to some willows and drowsed in the sun. And lying there he watched the grain of the dry gray wood where once was a knot, and the way the deep furrows of the weathered wood swirled in and around and out of that knot, you see things like that sometimes that though they do not move your eye keeps going into and out of and around and back again there are two spirals of hair on a cat’s back that way. Anyway he watched that for a long time until he got to know it well and half asleep and he also got to know the feel of the side of the boat on his head and the bottom of the boat on his back and rump. And something made him sit up suddenly and there wasn’t anything around him he had ever in his life seen before. The boat had slipped the rope and drifted down the current a half mile or more. But what tore him like a big pair of hands one pulling up one down was how strange it was out of the boat plus how familiar it was inside the boat. He could not move for a long time except to look out at the strange banks and look down into that selfsame knothole over and over again and feel that selfsame gray board grinding his hip. It was like he could take all new or all old not both.
    George felt lost and ripped like that on his bed thinking about the father dead. Because here in the school was the most real living he ever done if living is going ahead into newer and newer things. It was here and now and real, but everything out there was all different and like it had never been what he thought it was last time he looked.
    He got up off the bed and looked out the window. It wasn’t but about four o’clock, a late spring day, and he had no place to be now till 6:30 anyway and even if he did not show then Mrs Dency would not say nothing, not today.
    Even if it was all right something made him be careful, he stopped halfway down the stairs to let two guys walk by down there and get