The Steam-Driven Boy Read Online Free Page A

rest of the day is sultry and oppressive with rage and desire, asthey all sit around the hotel lounge. Farmer spends hours scrawling Etta’s name on the tablecloth, even drawing his profile. Etta glowers at Theda, and tries to tear up his manuscript. In the ensuing fight, Theda loses an ear, which his opponent eats.
    Book Three:
Van
    With all respect to those who have gone before him, the columnist states that both Theda and Adrian have had their reasons for exaggerating some truths, concealing others. Perhaps it is up to a newspaperman, a dealer in facts, to get at some kind of objectivity about this, as he calls it, ‘love nest’.
    He makes no apology about his passion for Dick Hand, but let him cast the first stone, etc., for the truth is, there isn’t a man or woman among the eight who isn’t queer this third day.
    The little balding hagiographer, a former goalee for a prominent Canadian hockey team, now loves none but A. Warner. This architect, designer of the well-known Piedmont Tower and famed for his new building principle, the ‘concrete truss’, remains firm in his attachment to 35-year-old steel magnate Farmer Bill. The ironic quadrangle is complete, for Bill, long supposed an entrenched hetero, has conceived love for the narrator. Farmer Bill came to power through a merger between a steel corporation and the molybdenum trust of which he was co-chairman three years ago. He is now married to the former Theda Baker, and has one child, Ebo.
    The women also pursue a hopeless path. Theda loves patient Glinda, a gracious Southern lady with a flair for entertaining, granddaughter of the governor of her state. Glinda married your reporter six years ago. They have no children.
    Perhaps for this reason she is drawn to the youthful, robust Dolly Hand, who once danced for a living and can still kick high as a man’s eye. Her loves includes spinach, basketball, and Etta Peer Warner, the latter hopelessly. Etta allegedly remains true to her former love, the darkly beautiful, brawny brewmistress.
    Although the hotel staff do their best to make everyone as comfortable as possible, they are prisoners and they know it. When, late in the afternoon a plane flies overhead, they all rush out to the beach to wave at it. Passing low, it seems to be flying on out of sight without noticing them. Then as it reaches the mainland, it begins to bank around, coming back for another pass.
    Unfortunately it is too low for this manoeuvre. One wing brushes a treetop, and all at once the plane is a mass of flame, pinwheeling along through the forest. It explodes and settles, starting a forest fire on the mainland that rages all night, seen only by helpless witnesses on the island.
    Book Four: Dolly
    ‘I am a drug addict. Do not pity me. I ask only for your understanding.This illness has been my secret for a long time. Too long…’
    Thus begins Dolly’s amazing narrative. She gives the background of the persons present: addicts all. Dick, her Dicky-bird, was once addicted to cocaine stirred into cocoa, though now he lives on reserpine stirred into raspberry brandy.
    Etta and Adrian mix thorazine and thiamine, laced with Meretran and Serutan. ‘Pothead’ Van Cook and Glinda move in a dream of Nembutal and Hadacol, Darvon and Ritalin, while Farmer Bill and Theda have long existed utterly without food, taking in only methedrine and methanol.
    And of course Dolly herself. Having tried every drug in the vocabulary, she is currently experimenting, mixing drugs and liqueurs, such as benzedrine/Benedictine, such as dramamine/Drambuie … The night gets longer.
    Why is it, she wonders, that everyone lies? Wish-fulfilment explains some of it. Van Cook pretended Farmer Bill loved him when the opposite was true. But why does he ignore Theda’s love for him? How can he ignore her attempted overdose-suicide? Can he keep claiming she just wanted to hog the horse?
    Alas! If Theda could only love Glinda, things might be far different. Poor little Glinda,