Love and Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

among his secret heroes would always be Georgie Porgie, puddn and pie, who kissed the girls and made them cry:
    But when the Boys came out to play
    Georgie Porgie ran away.
    Still Pierce wasn't offered membership in the Retrievers; perhaps Joe Boyd sensed in him some remaining reluctance about fellowship, or the work it entailed, that might be a source of disaffection. “I don't care anyway,” Pierce said to Bird and Hildy in their bungalow at night. “I already have a club. Sort of."
    The three of them were gathered at the brown gas heater, big as a chest of drawers, that stood in Pierce's room and heated the whole of the little house. It took all three of them to light it: Hildy to direct operations, and turn on the gas; Pierce to light the match; Bird, afraid of lighting matches but not afraid of the heater as Pierce was, to thrust the lit match into the hole in the heater's side.
    "What's your club?"
    "Well, it's secret.” He readied himself with match and box next to Bird at the touch-hole. Hildy crouched at the gas cock. “It's a secret club of my father's."
    "They let little kids in?"
    "Some."
    "What's the name of it?"
    "I can't tell you. It's secret.” He saw his father's face, binding him in an imaginary but suddenly vivid past to secrecy.
    "Ready?” said Hildy impatiently, whose skinny legs trembled with cold.
    "Okay."
    "Okay."
    Pierce, after a few misfires, got the match to flame, turning it in his fingers. Hildy had opened the cock already, too soon; Bird fumbled for the match in Pierce's fingers, each of them trying to keep farthest from the flame. She half-thrust half-threw the match within the hole and turned away. Gas built up within the chamber ignited with an impatient whump , not as loud as on some nights when the process took even longer.
    "Who all are members?” Hildy asked. “Can we be?"
    "Maybe,” Pierce said.
    "Can Warren be?"
    Pierce shrugged.
    "Can Joe Boyd be?"
    There was no reason to exclude him. There was also no reason, and Pierce felt no compulsion, to inform him that he was eligible for membership; or that his membership had been considered. And accepted. The taste of triumph, like the taste of the burned gas, was in the back of Pierce's throat. “Sure,” he said. “Sure he can."
    Later, in bed, his two cousins tried to guess the name of Pierce's secret lodge, or wheedle it from him. They guessed birds and beasts noble and ridiculous ("The Lizards Club! The Bugs Club!") until they got the giggles; they asked Pierce for the initials, the number of letters, the sounds-like. Pierce wasn't telling, though; he didn't yet know himself. He only knew that he was a member, inducted long ago (he with so little long-ago, that had recently come to seem so much to him), the brothers robed and smiling to welcome him, rank on rank. His heart was full of a wicked glee, that he wasn't alone here as they had all thought him to be, but one of a company, invisible for now but coming clearer to him all the time.
    * * * *
    The Retrievers soon passed out of existence, its clubhouse still uncleaned, as Joe Boyd turned his hungry heart elsewhere. Pierce couldn't later remember if he was ever formally sworn in, but Bird said sure he had been, didn't he remember, there were outings and official business that included him, and dues exacted. It would later surprise Pierce how much more his younger cousin could remember, of things they had both experienced, than he could himself. That first year he came to Bondieu must, he thought, have been so full of shifting challenges and things hard to understand that like the successive crises of a long dream they couldn't be retained in memory afterwards: only the umbrageous colors, and the sense of a struggle.
    "I can't even really tell you how we got there,” Winnie in Florida said to him, “with all our things, our trunks and clothes and the beds and things."
    "The marble-topped dresser,” Pierce said—locating it suddenly, vividly, just as it was on the point of