Theo by Ed Taylor Read Free Book Online

the bay, there used to be rum runners coming ashore on the moonless nights, barrels floating in and bodies washing up at night, and during the day garden parties and lawn tennis and hot jazz in the gazebo, and those paper lanterns, and servants in white jackets. Like Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it’s not even past. We’re still in it, right now. But it’s past me to light this bleeding cigarette.
    Theo wasn’t sure what Faulkner and the past stuff meant. Colin said this while trying to light a cigarette but sweating so much that he kept putting it out. He threw one down beside the mattress and plucked another one out of a pack on the floor. Colin’s room had a huge broken wood bed that you had to stand on steps to get into, but Colin had the pieces apart, like Theo sometimes took apart sandwiches to eat them. Colin had laid the mattress on the floor and the box springs next to it and put some sheets and scarves on both of them, and so the bed was just a frame, which Colin used like a boxing ring sometimes: a couple of times Theo had seen Colin and other adults, mostly ladies, crouched inside the frame laughing and slapping at each other. Once Theo had walked past the door and saw Colin in jeans pretending to be a bull, Theo guessed, holding hands at ears with fingers like horns, and a woman with no clothes on holding a towel in front of him, saying o-lay.
    Colin was trying to light the cigarette from the one in his mouth but that didn’t work, so he produced a box of wooden matches from the pocket of his canvas shorts after wriggling on the mattress for an instant. Colin was sick that day. He was sick a lot.
    Theo. Theo baby.
    His mom, calling. Theo stops the story, stops talking, but keeps his hand on the gazebo railing, circles around the near side, shady early, and then travels out of the shadow into the sun facing the wall of windows and the dark cliff face of the house. She is waving. He’s been around the moon, and now here is earth in front of him, far away.
    Hi mom. He waves.
    She blows him a kiss, smiling, wrapped in some kind ofwhite fur coat or robe that rises behind her head in a fan. Hello my beautiful boy. Her voice is hoarse. Can you bring me my cigarettes. I think they’re in the car, darling.
    Okay.
    Theo knows that smoking is bad for you, that it can make you very sick. His dad smokes too. Lots of people do it, everybody around him it seems. Maybe it’s not so bad. Everyone seems fine, except sometimes they cough a lot in the morning. His dad says cigarettes help him sing, that they make his voice lower. His dad doesn’t like his singing voice, his dad says it sounds whiney and strained; sometimes he says he sounds like a girl. He usually sings harmony, but sometimes he’s the main singer. Theo’s heard some of his father’s early records and his voice does seem a little lower now. When he talks there’s a roundness to his voice like an old guitar, and an echo like he has a cold except all the time.
    Theo likes his father’s voice. He thinks of old wooden boats when he hears his father, solid and a little dark.
    Theo decides to run to the car and the house front. He’d forgotten about the man with no clothes – that man is now far away at the edge of the front lawn, squatting on one of the pillars that used to have a gargoyle, yelling at a car driving past on the beach road at one end of the long driveway. There used to be a wall there, then there was a hedge, Theo knew from photographs, and then just bushes and the front edge of the lawn and sand and the road, and two stone pillars on either side of the driveway entrances.
    The driveway is shaped like a horseshoe, curving at the house. The straight parts of the driveway are fifty yards long, Theo knows, because Colin once asked Theo to hold a watch and time him while he raced down it against Mingus.
    Hold this, mate. Colin handed Theo a watch, big and silver. Colin never wore a watch.
    Mingus wore his yellow rain slicker and a