Love and Sleep Read Online Free Page B

never in doubt who would win this debate; Joe Boyd, though loyal to his mother's state, the state where he had been conceived, could not himself name enough virtues in it to keep up.
    "Name a hero who came from Kentucky."
    "Daniel Boone."
    "Name another.” Joe Boyd didn't name Abraham Lincoln, though Pierce had counterclaims if he had.
    "Well name one from New York,” Joe Boyd said.
    "Peter Minuit. He had a peg leg. Peter Stuyvesant. Alexander Hamilton. Joe DiMaggio. Thomas E. Dewey."
    "Who?"
    At length Joe Boyd chose another way to settle the matter. It wasn't so unfair a match as it seemed, as it seemed to Hildy who pointed out that Joe Boyd was two years older: for Pierce had already begun the weedlike, apelike (so he would one day think of it) burgeoning that would take him to a thick six feet, and Joe Boyd took after his light-boned and delicate mother. Joe Boyd still won handily, being less afraid of giving and getting pain than his cousin, and more willing to fight to conclusive victory. Pierce face down in the odorous dust of the floor was made to admit that Kentucky, the state where he now lived, was a better state of the United States than New York, the state where he had lived with his father and mother, but where he lived no more.
    "Wanna go again? Two out of three."
    "No."
    "Say uncle."
    "What?"
    "Say uncle."
    Pierce, not ever having been forced to this formula of surrender, made his own sense of it. “Uncle,” he said.
    * * * *
    For a long time after he let Pierce rise, Joe Boyd sat with his arm around Pierce's shoulders, Pierce shy to shake him off; and after this meeting of the lodge was over, and supper eaten, Joe Boyd took Pierce up to his room to show him his treasures.
    Unnerved by the sudden intensity of his comradeship, Pierce looked in silence at Joe Boyd's beautifully preserved comic books and his Long Island seashells. A branch on which real stuffed birds perched with real bird feet, jay, cardinal, robin. Snake's skin and deer's skull. His plated six-guns, which hung in their holsters over the bedposts, little worn these days. An engraving of Robert E. Lee, which Joe Boyd had begged as a souvenir from Arlington when the Oliphants had visited there on their way South: something in the sad-eyed noble-dog figure, gloved and sashed, had touched him.
    Lastly he drew out from its box and opened to Pierce his latest project.
    "It's a battle,” he said.
    It was a tall roll of smooth white paper such as Pierce had never seen before, which Joe Boyd called “shelf paper.” He unrolled a foot of it, revealing pencil-drawn figures, tiny ones, many of them. They were in fact engaged in a struggle; each little stick man had a stick-gun which he fired, or aimed, or lay dead gripping. Dotted lines showed the trajectories of these guns’ bullets toward a facing crowd of armed figures, which Joe Boyd now revealed farther along the scroll.
    "I can draw better people,” he said. “But this is the quick way to draw lots."
    He'd said it was a battle, but it wasn't really; there were no massed formations maneuvering, no regiments or officers. The dozens on each side fought independently over the crudely drawn landscape, aimed from behind rocks and stumps, fired and died alone in dozens of carefully conceived attitudes. Some bled tiny penciled puddles.
    "But look at this,” Joe Boyd said. He unrolled the shelf paper further, revealing that the opponents of the first bunch were themselves being attacked in the rear by a third group; some had already turned to face them. It was evident that this new band would be vulnerable too, though Joe Boyd hadn't got that far yet. There was no reason for it ever to stop.
    "I'm going to do more,” Joe Boyd said, rolling it up. “Lots more."
    No, Joe Boyd would never be his mentor, nor ever entirely his friend, whatever Sam hoped. And though Pierce would anyway show no trace of Axel's inclinations, would soon begin accumulating evidence that his nature contained none, still one