Some of Your Blood

by Theodore Sturgeon

  George really liked it there. Not that he ever said that, the whole place would macerate anyone who said that. Maybe it was just George. First of all he was big so he didn’t get pushed around. Next, any time in his whole life he had been with kids they were all from his town and they all knew about him and his drunk father and his mother couldn’t talk English so good, and him getting left back in school and all. In this place, nobody ever heard of him before and all they knew was he was up for burglary when most of them all they did was their parents didn’t want them or died or something. Next thing, everybody wore the same kind of clothes and slept in the same kind of bed, so what did they have to brag about? While back home, this kid had a bicycle and that one new shoes and the other’s father was personnel manager at the mine. Next thing: school. Any kid who was well along in school before he came just went right on with it. But any kid who was behind—especially kids like George who were really behind because they got pushed one way or another and not because they were natural born dumb, well a guy like that got special time in the connies and a real chance to catch up with his age. George was really surprised by this school thing, he didn’t know school was that easy and that interesting too, he thought school was a place to tie you up out of the way most of the day and make it easy for them to catch you whatever you did. Here they showed him things he really did not know and should of, like just why it was the poles he used one time could lift a heavy tree off a deer, and also things he could use just as well as a figure-four trap, like how to wire six buttons and four bells so the buttons control the bells you want them to, and when to knock down bread when it was rose enough with the yeast. Last of all, why George liked it there, had a lot to do with George what he was and nothing or nobody else. George kept his mouth shut. George always kept his mouth shut from when he was a little boy, at first because he was scared or shamed to open it and later because it was just too much trouble to get people to understand and at last because he just got the habit. Now most of the people in the world who are in trouble are liars. The wisest thing anyone ever said about lying is this, that to tell the truth is the best because if you tell the truth you never have to remember what it was you said. Well even better than to tell the truth is to keep your mouth shut. If you lie someone is going to make you try to prove it. If you brag, even with the truth, someone is going to call you and you got to make good. If you say anything at all there is bound to be someone listening who don’t understand you or who don’t hear you right. There would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody if most people just did not talk so much. These are things that George thought a lot about when he was grown and not when he was fourteen in that place, but that’s the way he acted anyway, he kept his mouth shut. He never got the habit of running with anyone special either, so he could keep himself to himself. So all the time if he figured out something was good for him he done it. He did not try it out on anybody else and he did not make speeches about it so somebody could maybe talk him out of it. Because there are a lot of people around who can talk real good but do not know very much, they could win an argument about if you should breathe.

  Anyway, you can learn a lot more with your mouth shut. You open your mouth you block your ears.

  About some things you should have some way to block your ears. If George was out by himself he would not have to listen to all that talk about screwing and everything. Every day, every minute somebody was talking about that. George had seen enough screwing to last him a good long time, he did not have to wonder about it which is what most of those guys were really doing. At the same time it was while he was at the school he changed from a boy into a man and he felt it. He felt it more than he should because of all that talk. He finally put his mind to it and thought it through, lying in bed nights. And it was a long time before he got that thinking finished, but the way it turned out was this.

  Being able to shoot your load did not make you nothing special because every rabbit could do it.

  Shooting your load maybe was more fun than crapping or peeing but when you come right down to it it is not so special because you don’t have to make yourself do it—you can’t help it. You wait long enough and it’s just naturally going to bust loose, like when you are asleep; you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to just like sooner or later you got to go to the john whether you want to or not. So it’s nothing anybody has to work at or worry over, which is what all that talk does. If the pressure builds up and you don’t want to wait, go get rid of it. You usually go to the john before you absolutely have to too.

  But the number one top thing about sex is something that George always felt, somehow, but only figured out much later when he was grown. He figured out that everything that is alive in the whole world keeps taking things in and then working them over and then throwing out what it could not use. No matter what a living thing is doing, what it lives for is the taking in part. It does that first and then it works it over and then it gets rid of the exhaust. Taking in is why it goes and why it grows and how it grows too. No matter how good it feels or how much talk there is about it or how many laws get passed, you can’t duck the one thing, that sex is part two not part one. It’s one of the things you leave behind you while you go ahead. When they got General Science in the school and it come to Biology George memorized a line in the book, no living organism can exist in an environment of its own waste products. And thinking about that and trying to find words to hang it to, he come up with this and it finished the subject for always, that the first part, taking-in, gives you Satisfaction and the second part, throwing-out, gives you Relief. There is a whole lot of people in the world sick and crazy too who do not know that difference. They go all around looking for relief and then they get upset when it don’t satisfy. Well of course it don’t satisfy, it can’t. Satisfaction is ahead, all what you need to keep you going if you are going to be alive. Relief is what you get by dropping what you don’t need any more. It’s behind you and if you want to go chasing back to pick it up, don’t be surprised if you look a little crazy and get yourself stunk up some too.

  Well George done his two-year stretch and worked in the fields and learned to carpenter pretty good and to bake some and what he really liked was the electric shop, by the time he left he could wind a squirrel-cage electric motor or shunt. And he could solder real good, not just wires but pipe wiring which damn few know how to do any more but it is good to know, and sheet metal joining, lapped or formed. Also auto shop. Also he was pretty good with math, by the time he left he had enough geometry to measure a field or a wall-to-wall carpet and enough trigonometry to figure the angles for a timber truck-ramp and enough algebra to last him the rest of his life, he didn’t like it or English. He did not play ball but he liked to root for his building. Any job he could do by himself he liked best. He did not like to hold one end while someone held the other. From General Science the Physics part he got the word Resultant. Put down a weight and drop a rope against it, and you pull one end north and I pull the other end west, the weight will not move north and it will not move west but it will move in a resultant direction northwest. Now when George pulled north he liked the load to go north, not anything different. So whatever other people called cooperation George called Resultant and it made him uneasy until he could do it alone.

  Almost two years and no hunting and that was a funny thing because after they let you out of the Cage—that was the big building with the barbwire they took you to first—you were not tied down. You had to be where they told you when they said, and that was most of the time, but there was woods across the fields to the south and if you wanted to slip away maybe and hunt a little you could. George just did not seem to want it. Well they kept you busy and there was never enough time to do all the things around the buildings you wanted to do. Hunting, he just never thought of it.

  But then right at the end of the second year they called him to the office and he said to himself well this is it, I’m sprung. But that was not what they wanted to tell him. The
y said they were sorry about the news but his father was dead. He just stood there in the office and stared at them, Mrs Dency the fat matron and Miss Grasheim the big ugly nurse although she was nice, and one of the typists who you could see was horning in to see if she could get a charge out of him breaking up or something. Well she had to do without as he kept standing there sort of blinking and trying to percolate the idea all the way in until finally Mrs Dency said, “I’ll tell you what, George, I’ll phone your building and tell them to let you upstairs. Perhaps you’d like to lie down and think it over for a while.” Which was just exactly one hundred percent what he wanted just then. Which was the good thing about that fat Mrs Dency, about eight times out of ten she could hit it right on the nose, whatever you needed. As he walked away she told him he could come talk to her whenever he felt like it. When he got to his building she had phoned ahead so he went right up, which during the day was not allowed, and fell down on his bed. He was supposed to be thinking things over but for a time there he could not think of anything to think. When something finally came it was like a weak joke—well, if you’re going to live at an orphanage you might as well be one.

  He got up after a while and took off his shirt and loosened his belt and pushed the front of his pants down below his belly button and stuck his stomach out over the buckle. He stood looking down at the stomach for a while and then shook his head and fixed himself up again. What he thought about just then was not the father squirting blood out of the mother’s nose or hollering drunk coming down the cowpath or standing like lost in the courtroom while they sent him up. It was his face the time George stole that first bag of groceries, his face altogether with broken veins in the skin and mottled patches and the dirty-white blonde eyebrows and hair and the two red scoops of his lower lids and his little washed out pink and blue eyes and all the snaggly stinking teeth—the whole nothing mess of a face with all the messy nothing parts, put together for just once, for just one lousy second, in a way that pleased George to think of, surprised and proud, saying he’d amount to something.

  George shook himself hard and lay down on the bed. He did not feel anything special, not even relieved. Well his father had not been any kind of a weight on him to feel good taken off.

  So finally because of that it came to him what he was supposed to be thinking about. He never did have no real plans, just overall to learn a trade and be able to get a job some place, but he never thought before the some place could be some other place than that one mining town or live in any other house but that shack on the cowpath. The father would be there and that is why he would go there. Now the father would not be there.

  So all of a sudden it hit him. Not hit him, it was not like a blow at all. Like one time when he was a little kid he was over to the river and he lay down in an old rowboat tied to some willows and drowsed in the sun. And lying there he watched the grain of the dry gray wood where once was a knot, and the way the deep furrows of the weathered wood swirled in and around and out of that knot, you see things like that sometimes that though they do not move your eye keeps going into and out of and around and back again there are two spirals of hair on a cat’s back that way. Anyway he watched that for a long time until he got to know it well and half asleep and he also got to know the feel of the side of the boat on his head and the bottom of the boat on his back and rump. And something made him sit up suddenly and there wasn’t anything around him he had ever in his life seen before. The boat had slipped the rope and drifted down the current a half mile or more. But what tore him like a big pair of hands one pulling up one down was how strange it was out of the boat plus how familiar it was inside the boat. He could not move for a long time except to look out at the strange banks and look down into that selfsame knothole over and over again and feel that selfsame gray board grinding his hip. It was like he could take all new or all old not both.

  George felt lost and ripped like that on his bed thinking about the father dead. Because here in the school was the most real living he ever done if living is going ahead into newer and newer things. It was here and now and real, but everything out there was all different and like it had never been what he thought it was last time he looked.

  He got up off the bed and looked out the window. It wasn’t but about four o’clock, a late spring day, and he had no place to be now till 6:30 anyway and even if he did not show then Mrs Dency would not say nothing, not today.

  Even if it was all right something made him be careful, he stopped halfway down the stairs to let two guys walk by down there and get out of sight, and then instead of striking off across the fields he went to the hay barn and through it and down that way.

  Once he was in the woods he felt better right away. Up here it was mostly oak and maple and he missed the ragged skinny birches and without the jack pine it smelled way different. But the leaves were all new and not growed yet. Right away he seen a red squirrel but he did not do anything about it, a gray squirrel he might but never a red, they can about jump over a bullet and duck down and peek up at the underside before it’s gone by. But he saw droppings on the new grass and just when he thought woodchuck he saw the torn maple leaves on a new sprout so it was hedgehog and he cussed, he couldn’t catch up with old Porky without he had gloves and a knife which he had not, no knives in that place. The red squirrel paced him in the trees overhead yammering louder’n two jaybirds and a dry axle.

  Suddenly George fell down and lay still but he had the right cocked way back as he lay on his left side. He never tried this before but it was in a book about a gray fox in the library.

  The squirrel spooked out to the outside hair of a maple where there wasn’t nothing but two leaves and a breeze to hold him but he was held up somehow, and all the time chit-chitting and scolding and quarreling fit to drive everything from ants to elk three quarter miles. George never moved. The squirrel liked no part of that. He never seen this before and seem like he did not think it was right. He scampered back to the tree trunk and down and out again lower down and took to hissing and squeaking and clacking his teeth together even, but George never moved. The squirrel ran back to the trunk and flaked off a couple scales of bark with his teeth and brought them back and dropped them one by one on George, one hit him right on the cheek and eye, and he never moved. The squirrel cussed up a storm and ran back to the trunk and right down on the ground and stood there on three legs with one front paw on the trunk ready to scoot back up in case, but George never moved. The squirrel grounded the fourth paw and shut up a minute and still George lay there. The squirrel came forward the way a squirrel and specially a red squirrel never does, not jumping but squiggling along on his claws with his legs stiff and his tail straight out behind and for eight, nine inches or so he looked like he was on little wheels and then he hit dry leaves that rustled and scared him and he disappeared like in a trick movie and there was his head peeking around the tree trunk. And now when George did not move the squirrel came out in two big bounds and stopped a yard away and began giving him hell again, and made one small jump closer and George lashed down with that cocked right just in that split second while the squirrel was in the air in the one small jump; if the little redhead saw it coming which he certainly did there was not a thing he could do about it. George’s fist slammed him down so hard if the squirrel wasn’t there the fist would of gone into the ground up to the wrist but instead he killed that squirrel altogether flattening ribs and all between them against the ground. After that George felt lots better.

  He stayed in the woods for another hour but did not see nothing but a brindle bat asleep upside down under an aspen crotch and who wants to bother with bats. He would of liked a large jackrabbit or a young possum but this woods seemed to be fresh out, anyway the squirrel had done his bit and that was a heck of a whole lot better than nothing.

  After supper he went to see Mrs Dency. She put him in a connie and went for some papers and then came back with them and closed the door. “Sit down, George,” she said because he had lea
rned to stand up and wait.

  “Thank you ma’am,” he said because he had learned to say Thank you and Ma’am both.

  “Feel better? Yes, I see you do. George, I’m awfully sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” George said.

  She leaned back and pursed up her mouth the way she always wrapped small surprises. She had black hair with a patch of white on one side in front and round black-rimmed glasses with a snivvy fixed to them where they went behind the ears with a cord on so if they dropped off they would just hang. George said, “I always figured to go back but now I don’t care.”

  Mrs Dency unpursed the mouth and smiled. “How—about—your aunt?” She handed over the idea like it was a chocolate-covered thousand dollar bill. The smile went away because George just sat there. “Wouldn’t you like that, George?”

  George said No.

  Now this aunt, the mother’s sister, had put in for George a couple times before. The two sisters never did get along and Aunt Mary was the oldest and was real mad that George’s mother got married first and things like that. Then when the father took to drinking and things got bad and she found out, she would ask to take George every once in a while but just to put on the dog or rub George’s mother’s nose in it, but not that she wanted George. Then she married this two-bit hillside farmer in Virginia and more than ever the best way she could think of to put her sister down was to ask for George because it was a way of saying he would be better off with her, which was a way of saying she was better off. Now that the mother was dead George did not trust this offer one bit because he could not see no reason for it. Also George did not get along with Aunt Mary’s husband the little he had seen of him. Also George knew the both of them would hold it against him he got sent up for breaking and entering and attempted burglary, and never let him forget it. But George did not say any of this because he never did say much of anything and besides he thought it was his business, he just said No.