The Boy Read Online Free PDF

boy.”
    “Whose boy?”
    “You mean whose son?”
    The doctor, a man bovine in mass and apparent temperament, gave her a slow nod.
    “My neighbor’s son,” she said. “Friend and neighbor, actually. Good friend, stellar neighbor. Waters my plants when I’m away.”
    “Does he know?”
    “What?”
    “That you’re sleeping with his son.”
    “Who’s sleeping with his son? I’m not sleeping with his son. You think terrible things about me. All the time you think terrible things. Like I don’t pay you. Like I walk away without paying you.”
    “Why did you sleep like shit then?”
    “Because I kept thinking about my neighbor’s son, which is different from sleeping with my neighbor’s son. It’s a comparatively innocuous occupation, you must admit.”
    “But you couldn’t stop.”
    “Stop what?”
    “Thinking about him.”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Let’s see. Chemistry. Physical attraction. My body. His body. You know.”
    “His body wasn’t in your room last night. It’s not in this room today.”
    Anna cocked her head.
    “Excuse me?”
    “His body is not in this room.”
    “So?”
    “So what are you attracted to?”
    Anna let her eyes wander. “I’m weary of your traps, Doctor Roemer, so I’ll tentatively, very tentatively, say the idea of his body.”
    “That’s right. An idea that lives in your mind, which is the same thing as a story you’re telling yourself: I need this boy’s body to be happy.”
    “Who’s talking about happiness? This is sex at its most basic.”
    “Fine, let’s try a little variation. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”
    “It’s not untrue.”
    “So you have sex. Because of the nature of your attraction, you keep having sex. Then you start wanting things a . . . how old is he?”
    “Twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”
    “Okay. You start wanting things a twenty-year-old can’t give you and he starts wanting things a forty-year-old can’t give him, and what happens next?”
    “Train wreck.”
    The doctor smiled. “So let’s do this one more time. I need sex with this boy to be happy. Is that true?”
    “No.”
    “And if that’s not true, what is? ”
    For a while neither of them spoke.
    “I don’t know,” Anna said. “I don’t know what’s true.”
    The doctor clapped a soundless clap. “In China they say, live in a state of constant unknowingness.”
    “We’re not in China.”
    “China, not China, it’s all the same. If you were prepared to live in a state of constant unknowingness, you would not be sleeping like shit.”
    “Maybe I should move to China.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You got a place in China?”
    “No.”
    “That’s crazy. You’d think you’d have a castle by now, a place with a pool at the very minimum.”
    “I’ve never been to China. Have you ever not paid me?”
    “Never.”
    “Good. You got me worried.”
    “I start today. On account of all the bullshit you’ve been giving me without a fixed domicile in China.”
    “Anna.”
    “What?”
    “Leave the kid alone.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s fixing to fuck you up real good.”

Chapter Three
    S ummer ripened slowly. First the ground hardened, next the wind died and the sage, dormant throughout spring, came to life with a whisper and a smell to it. Anna took Eva and Paco to the river every day, and the two took turns jumping in and out with sticks in their mouths.
    The great river. The strong river of the north. Anna had looked it up when she first moved. To the Apaches it was Kotsoi, the Great Waters. For the Tewas it was Posoge, the Big River. Only the Navajos, the vanquished lords of what was once a nation, called it something else entirely. To them it was the Tooh Ba’aadii, the Female River, because it flowed south, a feminine direction, and no name seemed to Anna more intuitively attuned to the nature of a waterway that cuts canyons, threads basins, finds its way to the sea, with barely a whisper.
    At the water’s edge, the earth behind them