Read Online A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edmund White
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In my naïveté I imagined that all poor people, black and white, liked each other and that here, through Fountain Square, I would feel my way back to the street, that smell of burning honey, that blood as red as mine and that steady, colorless flare in the glass chimney... These hillbillies on the square with their drawling and spitting, their thin arms and big raw hands, nails ragged, tattoos a fresher blue than their eyes set in long sallow faces, each eye a pale blue ringed by nearly invisible lashes—I wove these men freely into the cloth of the powerful poor, a long bolt lost in the dark that I was now pulling through a line of light.
I opened a book and pretended to read under the weak streetlamps, though my attention wandered away from sight to sound. "Freddy, bring back a beer!" someone shouted. Some other men laughed. No one I knew kept his nickname beyond twelve, at least not with his contemporaries, but I could hear these guys calling each other Freddy and Bobby, and I found that heartening, as though they wanted to stay, if only among themselves, as chummy as a gang of boys. While they worked to become as brutal as soon enough they would be, I tried to find them softer than they'd ever been.
Boots approached me. I heard them before I saw them. They stopped, every tan scar on the orange hide in focus beyond the page I held that was running with streaks of print. "Curiosity killed the damn pussy, you know," a man said. I looked up at a face sprouting brunet sideburns that swerved inward like cheese knives toward his mouth and stopped just below his ginger mustaches. The eyes, small and black, had been moistened genially by the beers he'd drunk and the pleasure he was taking in his own joke.
"Mighty curious, ain't you?" he asked. "Ain't you!" he insisted, making a great show of the leisurely, avuncular way he settled close beside me, sighing, and wrapped a bare arm— a pale, cool, sweaty, late-night August arm—around my thin shoulders. "Shit," he hissed. Then he slowly drew a breath like ornamental cigarette smoke up his nose, and chuckled again. "I'd say you got Sabbath eyes, son."
"I do?" I squeaked in a pinched soprano. "I don't know what you mean," I added, only to demonstrate my newly acquired baritone, as penetrating as an oboe; the effect on the man seemed the right one: sociable.
"Yessir, Sabbath eyes," he said with a downshift into a rural languor and rhetorical fanciness I associated with my storytelling paternal grandfather in Texas. "I say Sabbath 'cause you done worked all week and now you's resting them eyeballs on what you done made—or might could make. The good things of the earth." Suddenly he grew stern. "Why you here, boy? I seed you here cocking your hade and spying up like a biddy hen. Why you watching, boy? What you watching? Tell me, what you watching?"
He had frightened me, which he could see—it made him laugh. I smiled to show him I knew how foolish I was being. "I'm just here to—"
"Read?" he demanded, taking my book away and shutting it. "Shi-i-i..." he hissed again, steam running out before the t. "You here to meet someone, boy?" He'd disengaged himself and turned to stare at me. Although his eyes were serious, militantly serious, the creasing of the wrinkles beside them suggested imminent comedy.
"No," I said, quite audibly.
He handed the book back to me.
"I'm here because I want to run away from my father's house," I said. "I thought I might find someone to go with me."
"Whar you planning to run to?"
"New York."
There was something so cold and firm and well-spoken about me—the clipped tones of a businessman defeating the farmer's hoaxing yarn—that the man dropped his chin into his palm and thought. "What's today?" he asked at last.
"Saturday."
"I myself taking the Greyhound to New Yawk Tuesday mawning," he said. "Wanna go?"
"Sure."
He told me that if I'd bring him forty dollars on Monday evening he'd buy me my ticket. He asked me where
In my naïveté I imagined that all poor people, black and white, liked each other and that here, through Fountain Square, I would feel my way back to the street, that smell of burning honey, that blood as red as mine and that steady, colorless flare in the glass chimney... These hillbillies on the square with their drawling and spitting, their thin arms and big raw hands, nails ragged, tattoos a fresher blue than their eyes set in long sallow faces, each eye a pale blue ringed by nearly invisible lashes—I wove these men freely into the cloth of the powerful poor, a long bolt lost in the dark that I was now pulling through a line of light.
I opened a book and pretended to read under the weak streetlamps, though my attention wandered away from sight to sound. "Freddy, bring back a beer!" someone shouted. Some other men laughed. No one I knew kept his nickname beyond twelve, at least not with his contemporaries, but I could hear these guys calling each other Freddy and Bobby, and I found that heartening, as though they wanted to stay, if only among themselves, as chummy as a gang of boys. While they worked to become as brutal as soon enough they would be, I tried to find them softer than they'd ever been.
Boots approached me. I heard them before I saw them. They stopped, every tan scar on the orange hide in focus beyond the page I held that was running with streaks of print. "Curiosity killed the damn pussy, you know," a man said. I looked up at a face sprouting brunet sideburns that swerved inward like cheese knives toward his mouth and stopped just below his ginger mustaches. The eyes, small and black, had been moistened genially by the beers he'd drunk and the pleasure he was taking in his own joke.
"Mighty curious, ain't you?" he asked. "Ain't you!" he insisted, making a great show of the leisurely, avuncular way he settled close beside me, sighing, and wrapped a bare arm— a pale, cool, sweaty, late-night August arm—around my thin shoulders. "Shit," he hissed. Then he slowly drew a breath like ornamental cigarette smoke up his nose, and chuckled again. "I'd say you got Sabbath eyes, son."
"I do?" I squeaked in a pinched soprano. "I don't know what you mean," I added, only to demonstrate my newly acquired baritone, as penetrating as an oboe; the effect on the man seemed the right one: sociable.
"Yessir, Sabbath eyes," he said with a downshift into a rural languor and rhetorical fanciness I associated with my storytelling paternal grandfather in Texas. "I say Sabbath 'cause you done worked all week and now you's resting them eyeballs on what you done made—or might could make. The good things of the earth." Suddenly he grew stern. "Why you here, boy? I seed you here cocking your hade and spying up like a biddy hen. Why you watching, boy? What you watching? Tell me, what you watching?"
He had frightened me, which he could see—it made him laugh. I smiled to show him I knew how foolish I was being. "I'm just here to—"
"Read?" he demanded, taking my book away and shutting it. "Shi-i-i..." he hissed again, steam running out before the t. "You here to meet someone, boy?" He'd disengaged himself and turned to stare at me. Although his eyes were serious, militantly serious, the creasing of the wrinkles beside them suggested imminent comedy.
"No," I said, quite audibly.
He handed the book back to me.
"I'm here because I want to run away from my father's house," I said. "I thought I might find someone to go with me."
"Whar you planning to run to?"
"New York."
There was something so cold and firm and well-spoken about me—the clipped tones of a businessman defeating the farmer's hoaxing yarn—that the man dropped his chin into his palm and thought. "What's today?" he asked at last.
"Saturday."
"I myself taking the Greyhound to New Yawk Tuesday mawning," he said. "Wanna go?"
"Sure."
He told me that if I'd bring him forty dollars on Monday evening he'd buy me my ticket. He asked me where
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