The Neon Bible Read Online Free Page B

and Aunt Mae I wondered how the two of them could be together without choking each other. I didn't know what they did on the porch. I never thought they could be making love like young people did in the movies. When the nights of Aunt Mae's giggling passed, those two began to be very quiet on the porch. And one morning, before dawn, when Mother was taking me to the bathroom, we passed Aunt Mae's room and she wasn't in there yet. I never asked Aunt Mae why she was still on the porch at three in the morning, but I remember wanting to.
    During this time I saw very little of Aunt Mae. After she came to breakfast, she would play with me in a halfhearted way for a while, and then return to her room to get ready for George that night. I could smell the perfume coming from her window when I sat in the yard watching Mother hang the clothes up. I could hear Aunt Mae singing, too, but none of them were songs I knew. Except for one, and that was one I'd heard coming from the barroom in town when Mother and I passed it once going shopping. I never knew how Aunt Mae learned it. When I asked her, she said her nurse had sung it to her when she was a little girl. But I knew that nurses never sang like that.
    I didn't like George from the first time I saw him. His hair was long and gray, and it was always greasy. There were red marks all over his face, and it was a very lean one. He stood pretty straight for being about seventy. His eyes were shifty and never looked straight at you. In the first place, I was mad at him because he took almost all of Aunt Mae's time away from me. He never paid much attention to me, but I remember when one night I was sitting in the living room and he was waiting for Aunt Mae he said I looked like a very tender one, and he pinched me so hard on the arm that the spot was colored for a week. I was always too afraid of him to scream, but I screamed at him enough in my dreams when I would see him riding my train over me as I was tied to the track.
    He carried on with Aunt Mae all through that summer and into part of the fall. Aunt Mae never spoke of marriage, so I didn't know why he was courting her, because all that normally leads to marriage somehow or other. I knew that Mother and Poppa weren't feeling so easy about it as they had been. At night when Aunt Mae and George were on the porch or out for a walk, I would sit with them in the kitchen and listen to them talk. Mother told Poppa that she didn't like George and that he was up to no good and things like that, and Poppa just told her that she was silly, but I could understand that he was wondering too.
    One night Aunt Mae and George went for a walk in the hills and didn't return until about six in the morning. I couldn't sleep that night, so I was sitting at my window, and I saw them come into the yard. They didn't talk to each other, and George left without even telling Aunt Mae good night, or maybe good morning. Mother and Poppa never found out. I was the only one who knew, but I didn't say anything. I saw Aunt Mae pass by my bedroom when she came upstairs, and there were leaves all tangled in the back of her hair. I thought maybe she fell down.
    About a month after that, we never saw George anymore, and Mother told me he left town. I didn't think anything about it. As a matter of fact, I was happy, because now Aunt Mae and I could be together more. But it changed her. She never took me walking on the street anymore. She only played in the yard. She wouldn't even go around the block to the drugstore but sent me there to buy what she wanted. Poppa and Mother didn't invite friends over much anymore, or maybe they didn't want to come. I got used to staying right in the yard and began to work up quite an imagination with my cars. Now it was Aunt Mae who was the slow one. Sometimes she'd just stare up over the trees for a long while, and I'd have to nudge her and tell her it was her turn to move her truck. Then she'd smile and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, David," and begin