Theo Read Online Free Page B

gunshot, loud and echoing, close. The dogs startle, whimper. Theo’s ears dampen a little, sound gets slightly muffled.
    Theo sighs, leaves the pantry and shuffles back to the ballroom as the dogs orbit him, jumping. The sound whirls as crazily as the bird, moving now like an insect, flitting and erratic: scared too, Theo imagines.
    Colin stands across the ballroom, wearing boots and a towel wrapped around his waist, his ropy arm up and pointing with a silver pistol at the bird. He points the gun at the floor and does something clicking with his other hand: chambering, he’d called it before.
    Colin now has an eye closed and follows the bird with the gun, letting off another shot. Theo’s ears hurt.
    Colin, can you stop please.
    Birds makes me nervous. Too undisciplined. Or maybe it’s just jealousy. One more for luck and then we’re done.
    Colin fires out through the opened glass door toward the ocean – clears out the sinuses, that’s for certain. Prevents constriction of the bowels, too, man. Nothing like a little cordite in the morning to remind you why you’re alive.
    He clomps across the ballroom, smiling with big square yellow teeth in the sunlight, as Theo turns and moves back toward the kitchen. He wonders what happens to bullets if they don’t hit anything.
    I am starving, Colin says. He walks past Theo with a pat on the back and goes straight toward the refrigerator that still works and yanks it open hard, the silver doors big as room doors, and he bends to dig around. His towel falls, exposing his buttocks. Theo turns back to the pantry, and the cans: will the dogs eat canned peaches. Tinned is what Gus and Colin call them. Colin begins to sing something without words.
    Theo scans the pantry shelves: there is food, and there are other things. A very old teddy bear with spots of furless fabric showing, but with both button eyes; a long piece of brown bamboo with a hunting knife roped to one end; caramels, bags and bags of caramels; some clothes, stacked T-shirts with things printed on the front from concerts; a small television, and silver-gray round flat metal containers in which are coils of film, a stack of them; a rake with teeth missing; a stuffed woodchuck and several antlers, like branches locked in a pile; oatmeal, a lot of it, because Gus likes oatmeal; a crate of canned smoked baby oysters; a stack of masks, all the same, of a bear face; an ottoman on its side; a box full of jars of honey, a box half-full of jars of jelly, and several five-pound bags of sugar, one that still hissed and shifted when picked up, and the others, hard blocks wrapped in paper; a tower of cans of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie; a mummified gray mouse on a round piece of polished wood under a glass bell with a knob on top, which once held an Italian cheese Colin liked; a burlap sack filled with macadamia nuts, one corner of which has been gnawed open but Theo doesn’t know by what, because he’s seen people in here tearing at packages with their teeth; a row of boxes of Sugar Pops, like a shelf of books; scattered packages with Japanese writing, and different things inside, that look like candy but are the wrong colors, small round things andnoodles and one he knows is rice crackers; cans without labels; an old green and red cradle made out of tin with writing on the side that Theo can’t read; Colin’s ray gun collection, a pile of plastic and tin toy ray guns and a pile of other things like branches and things Colin has found that he thinks are shaped like ray guns – he keeps saying he needs to move it to a more suitable location; a sled; rows and stacks of coffee cans, some of which hold coffee and some of which hold nails, foreign coins, rubber bands, washers, salt, marbles – and one holds glass eyes.
    Theo marveled over the eyes, because no one knows how the can got there, and when he is in the gloomy pantry he likes to hold the can and look down at them looking back at him, but in a kindly way. The eyes