Blood Relations Read Online Free PDF Page B

sank as I saw my rotten face reflected back at me again, in her black eyes.
    “No, I don’t think so. I mean, anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”
    She stood up, started down the stairs again. I remained slumped on the step, head dropped, staring into my crotch, staring at the same cutoff denims and same yellow-white T-shirt I’d been wearing since... when?
    “Maybe,” she called back, snapping me right out of it, “I could take another look. Maybe , you could bathe. Maybe , you could get some vitamin A into yourself. Maybe , you could detoxify by the time school’s out this afternoon...”
    I jumped up and called, much too loud to be cool at all, “Maybe.”
    As she slinked that confident, slinky walk down the street, I grabbed my head with both hands. The jump had done the screwy thing to my circulation again, making me teeter. And I smiled so hard my dead face muscles ripped me with a sensational pain.
    I showered with lavender soap, my mother’s Jean Nate shower splash, and dandruff shampoo that felt like battery acid seeping into my scalp. I worked a big gob of some spermy hair conditioner through my hair, clipped my curling, doglike toenails, and baby powdered all my problem areas. I even shaved, even though I was a couple of weeks shy of needing to, just so she could see and smell the effort of the blood on my neck and the lime Edge gel in the air.
    Two hours before school was out, I was ready, sweating, thirsty, my stomach all flippy. I sat, nibbled saltines, sipped ginger ale, changed my shirt twice, watched Green Acres , The Beverly Hillbillies , and Andy Griffith .
    When Evelyn walked up to the house, I sat on the front steps shining dully like a pearl.
    She laughed out loud.
    “I’m goin’ in the house, dammit,” I said.
    “No, no, no,” she said, grabbing my hand and putting my little fire right out. “I didn’t mean to make fun. I think this is nice. You do smell like about twelve different things, but each and every one of them is better than what you smelled like before. Truly, I’m moved.”
    Truly or not, I bought it. “Where should we go?” I asked.
    “The museum.”
    “The museum? You’re taking me , to the museum ?”
    “Well, I’m not taking you anywhere. I’m going to the museum, and you seem to want to go someplace with me, so there we are. You don’t have to go.”
    “No, I want to, I want to. I was there before. Eighth-grade field trip. Had a swell time. It was colorful, I remember.”
    “Ah, yes,” she said, smirking, “that’s the place.”
    The museum looked like a neat clean prison, with its tall slitlike barred windows, concrete everywhere, flat roof where there might be armed guards planted on all corners. High above the main entrance hung a massive banner with pictures of round cupids flying over a sign that read THE AGE OF RUBENS . The cupids were shooting arrows downward, and my eyes followed, down to where the arrows would land, down to the broad front lawn of the grounds, where they would lodge if they were real arrows, which they weren’t, and if the cupids were real, which they weren’t, into the back of the crying Indian who lives there on the lawn on his horse. I pass that Indian a couple of thousand times a year and I look at it maybe ten. Because it does something to me and I don’t like what it does to me. He has a full headdress on and it’s falling down his back as he stares straight up at the sky. His hands are pointing straight down at his sides, his palms facing us on the street. He might be crying, which is why I call him the crying Indian. He might be screaming. He might be laughing, but he doesn’t feel like a laughing statue. He might just be soaking up the rain, or the snow that lies on his naked arms so much of the year and makes me feel stung frozen and hollowed out just to look at him.
    The Indian stood there when the big banner said RENOIR . He stood there when it said DEGAS . And when it said GOYA, and THE SECRETS OF