The Steam-Driven Boy Read Online Free Page B

seven months’ PG, half blind from Sterno breakfasts, head-over-heels in love with Theda. She even offers to sit with little Ebo, while Theda takes her overdose.
    Adrian, after twice being the object of sick Dick’s affections, now returns the favour, but too late. Dick has written a poem to his new love, Etta, comparing the sound of her horn to the clash of waves on the seventh level of his consciousness. Etta tries to use him to get at Dolly, who admits feeling only disgust for the little Serutan-head.
    Words crowd in upon Dolly here. She never wanted to be an addict; they told her pot would help her march better, as she led the high school band. It was a lie.
    Now she leaves her manuscript for a moment to try to caress Adrian, who is passing in the hall.
    Now Adrian’s firm hand adds that he has smashed Dolly in the teeth with her steel baton. It is, he adds, manufactured by Farmer Bill’s corporation.
    Book Five:
Etta
    As only she and her husband know, Etta is an endocrinologist. In clinically precise terms, she details the events of the fifth day.
    Food and water are running low, and sanitary facilities are less than adequate. Etta has divided the remainder of the quinine and insect repellant, and rations it strictly. She tries to make do with a crude first-aid kit, treating Theda’s ear, Van’s eye and the lacerations on Dick’s face. Now a clumsy waiter spills
crèpes suzettes
on Farmer Bill’s lap, inflicting second-degree burns. Then there is Dolly’s mouth requiring dental tools Etta does not have, and Ebo develops diaper rash.
    Moving about only before or after the midday heat, the men gatherfirewood for nightfall, as well as a few straight boards for splints. The women tear up sheets for bandages. It becomes increasingly hard to sterilize everything, especially in time to deliver Glinda’s stillborn child, but by working night and day, Etta manages somehow, and somehow manages to keep up her journal, too. Glinda is very weak and very ill. Only the hope of Theda’s returning her pitiful love keeps her alive. Etta makes Theda be nice to Glinda.
    What a strange thing a woman’s friendship is, Etta thinks. Like the love of a leopard, it is wild, shy and a little hurtful. She means not only Glinda’s love for Theda but her own love for Dolly, who seems to be, poor silly bitch, in love with her own husband.
    But are the males less fickle? Today Adrian spurns the love of Dick Hand as resolutely as yesterday he sought it. Dick chases him from copse to copse as they gather fuel. Adrian expresses his concern about Glinda.
    ‘I don’t care whose child it is,’ he says hoarsely. ‘I’ll marry her, if she’ll have me.’
    But Glinda loves Theda, who loves her husband Farmer Bill fiercely. Now Farmer Bill brings in Van Cook, who has collapsed with sunstroke, and there is a new tenderness in the industrialist’s eye as he gazes on the stricken man. Ah, what strange things are our endocrines.
    Van Cook whispers in his delirium one name over and over: ‘Etta!’
    Book Six:
Farmer
    In tough, short sentences, Bill spells it out. He loves Etta. No one else. Others may have time to mess around. Not Bill. He knows what he wants, now, after a lifetime of banging around from one job to another. He wants to paint.
    Some say it takes guts to do this, to scrap your life and start all over. It doesn’t. A man does what he has to do, that’s all. Bill has to paint.
    It’s like breathing. From the chest. Where the heart is. If a man goes wrong, he might as well rip out his heart and smash it. Bill paints, and it’s right.
    He wants to paint Etta nude, maybe in fresco ten stories high, the way he feels about her. What she has doesn’t need a name.
    But Etta has a lesbo hang-up with the Southern girl, Gilda, who is mooning over Dolly the Dyke. It’s enough to make a real man puke.
    Doll is meanwhile gone on her own freaky husband, tricky Dicky. But he as usual has eyes for a man, Van Cook. If you can call him a man, the