The Steam-Driven Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

way he simpers at Adrian Warner.
    At least Adrian has real balls. He’s hung on Theda, your narrator’s wife. The original castrating bitch. She’d like to castrate Bill, and keep him from painting. So he couldn’t paint Etta nude. Theda admits as much.
    She admits loving Bill.
    Book Seven:
Glinda-girl
.
    Because it don’t matter what Her sisters thought of Her that time in Billy Framer’s dirty-green roadster out back of the feed sump, everyoneseems like they’re dying and the afternoons so still you could hear the town bumblebee clear down to the Metro. At the Rich Hand place they got someone’s guts strung out hanging all over a tree at Xmas like firehose because Theda means death you know some folks don’t like Cookie what he done to Dolly’s nipples with the broken Agri-cola bottle was real mean even if she loves him and what father don’t but Cookie’s a idiot certified by Doc Sam H. Smith. She wishes it was Rich Hand in that car not Billy though he’s a hunchback too he at least has one pretty blue eye like Etta’s dress and loafers made of human skin Rich likes Dolly because she’s his son, that’s why he raped her with the dove-handle.
    Because Etta means teat She wishes Her sister Etta had gone ahead and hatched out that baby inside of her so that She could play with it but it was by Adrian, their son from that winter when they were so poor there wasn’t nothing to burn in the stove but dried snot Etra wants to be nice and flat for Billy. The rats ate his toes off that same winter and Theda the woman with no jaw she’s got hair on her chest Adrian says he should know he’s her mother but she wants him for some reason he only liked Theda whipping her with his saw again last winter the Doc took off her arm up to the elbow and Reverend Bregs said to thank God for what’s left only this year they took off the rest of it Theda says it’s time to stop being thankful she lost it the time Adrian’s pig hospital burned to the ground the same night he asked Etta to marry him he still loves her like a brother but she wants Billy to touch her again with his double finger he’s all fat and greasy She can see why Etta don’t want him no more but Theda does still.
    Because She loves Rich Hand even helping him dig his mother’s body up to make sure about the rings and something had eaten the fingers She laughed till She split but no one loves Her but Cookie all covered with sores from sand fights and can’t move his armpit since the railroad flood he says he never hanged a baby before.
    Book Eight:
Dick
: Epilogue.
    Much has happened since that fateful vacation. After their rescue these eight characters part and go each his own way in search of a story. Dick Hand keeps track of them, however:
    He has stopped loving Dolly and divorced her so that he could be with Adrian. Unable to bear this, Dolly has travelled to the tropics where she witnesses an unusual savage torture, organic crucifixion. She settles on this as her mode of suicide, and employs expert savage torturers to help her. First a
yab-yab
, or needlewood tree of the proper height and shape is selected. Four of its spiny limbs are severed, and to their stumps the natives securely bind Dolly’s hands and feet. In the fast-growing tropics, the limbs mature again in a matter of hours, piercing her extremities. To torture Dick, Dolly records every minutes of her seven-hour agony on the tape, and arranges for it to be mailed to him.
    Etta meanwhile has left Adrian and is actually on the train going to live with Dolly when she hears over the radio of the former drum majorette’s tragic death. Petrified with horror and grief, Etta descendsfrom the train at once, in the city where by chance Adrian lives.
    Adrian has just received a long mash note from Dick, which so depresses him that he goes to the train station, with the half-idea of throwing himself before a train. But he sees Etta and falls in love with her all over again.
    It is, alas, too late. In