The Boar by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online

to them in the bottoms expected them to step off the sidewalk in town.
    “Where’d you get these?” Abraham asked.
    “Papa,” and I told him about the wrestling match Papa had won. I told it so good you’d have thought I’d been there.
    “These don’t look like them others,” Abraham said.
    “I’ve read some of the stories,” I said, “and they ain’t like the others.”
    “You going to read some or what?”
    “I’ll read,” I said, and I was more than willing. Reading aloud was something I really enjoyed, even if I had to skip a word I didn’t know sometimes.
    And Abraham enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed reading.
    “What’s the name of these?” Abraham asked.
    I held them up, one at a time, running my finger under the titles. Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze was the one that grabbed his fancy, and it was my favorite cover too. It had this big, gold-looking fellow with funny eyes and a lot of muscles wearing a shirt so torn up it wasn’t worth patching or making rag cloth and ought to been thrown away. He had this little black doll in his hand, and there were three guys wearing funny getups looking out at him from behind this post. They sure didn’t look happy about much.
    “Read a story about the glowing fellow,” Abraham said.
    “All right, but it’s a long one and I don’t reckon to finish it today.”
    “We’ll do it like that other story that time, in parts. I liked wondering what was going to happen next.”
    That had been a fun way of doing it. I’d gotten three issues of this Sunday school magazine with a story in it about four boys hunting for lost treasure in a cave. I read a piece each time Abraham and I could get together, and I never did tell him there was supposed to have been another issue that finished up the story. Instead, I just made up an ending. Reckon the fellow who wrote the story couldn’t have done any better than I did. I know Abraham sure liked it. He said he thought the last part was the best, especially the stuff about the pirates and the cavalry and all.
    By the end of the day, I’d nearly read a third of the Doc Savage story, and it was a doozy. The place I found to stop was where this fellow was about to cut a silken cord Doc was hanging onto, dropping him eighty stories to the pavement. I figured when I got home I’d have to take a peek, just to make sure Doc made it.
    We talked over the story for a while and tried to figure out how Doc was going to get out of his mess, and by the time we’d gotten some ideas and decided hands down that Doc was our hero, it was near dark.
    I put the magazines inside my shirt, and when I was buttoning up, Abraham said, “You gonna come back pretty quick and finish reading it?”
    “Soon as I can. If it hangs around the house too long, it’ll end up in the outhouse.”
    “Outhouse?”
    “We ain’t got no room for a magazine collection,” I said.
    Abraham pursed his lips. “That ain’t no good place for stories to end up. We ain’t never had no magazines like these.”
    I had to nod to that.
    “I got an idea, Ricky. Leave them here. Yeah, that’s it. Bring them here and we’ll start our own one of them things where they keep books.”
    “Library?”
    “Yeah, one of them.”
    “Good,” I said. “Real good.”
    “We can start right now, and later on I’ll build us some shelves along the walls and we can put everything we get worth keeping up there. And it’ll keep you from going home today and reading the story, cause oncet you get it read I don’t know when you’ll come back.”
    Abraham had a point there. When I got home and started finding out what happened to Doc, chance was I’d read the whole thing. Kind of a halfway idea I had anyway.
    “Well, all right. I reckon they’re in as good a place here as anywhere. It’s drier than our house.”
    “There you go.”
    I unbuttoned my shirt, and with only a tiny bit of reluctance about not finding out what happened to Doc tonight, I handed the