Free The Early Stories by John Updike

the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

Friends from Philadelphia

 
    In the moment before the door was opened to him, he glimpsed her thigh below the half-drawn shade. Thelma was home, then. She was wearing the Camp Winniwoho T-shirt and her quite short shorts.
    â€œWhy, my goodness: Janny!” she cried. She always pronounced his name, John, to rhyme with “Ann.” Earlier that summer, she had visited New York City, and tried to talk the way she thought they talked there. “What on earth ever brings you to me at this odd hour?”
    â€œHello, Thel,” he said. “I hope—I guess this is a pretty bad time.” She had been plucking her eyebrows again. He wished she wouldn’t do that.
    Thelma extended her arm and touched her fingers to the base of John’s neck. It wasn’t a fond gesture, just a hostesslike one. “Now, Janny. You know that I—my mother and I—are always happy to be seeing you. Mother, who do you ever guess is here at this odd hour?”
    â€œDon’t keep John Nordholm standing there,” Mrs. Lutz said. Thelma’s mother was settled in the deep-red settee watching television and smoking. A coffee cup being used as an ashtray lay in her lap, and her dress was hitched so that her knees showed.
    â€œHello, Mrs. Lutz,” John said, trying not to look at her broad, pale knees. “I really hate to bother you at this odd hour.”
    â€œI don’t see anything odd about it.” She took a deep-throated drag on her cigarette and exhaled through her nostrils, the way men do. “Some of the other kids were here earlier this afternoon.”
    â€œI would have come in if anybody had told me.”
    Thelma said, “Oh, Janny! Stop trying to make a martyr of yourself. Keep in touch, they say, if you want to keep up.”
    He felt his face grow hot and knew he was blushing, which made him blush all the more. Mrs. Lutz shook a wrinkled pack of Herbert Tareytons at him. “Smoke?” she said.
    â€œI guess not, thanks a lot.”
    â€œYou’ve stopped? It’s a bad habit. I wish I had stopped at your age. I’m not sure I’d even
begun
at your age.”
    â€œNo, it’s just that I have to go home soon, and my mother would smell the smoke on my breath. She can smell it even through chewing gum.”
    â€œWhy must you go home soon?” Thelma asked.
    Mrs. Lutz sniffled. “I have sinus. I can’t even smell the flowers in the garden or the food on the table any more. Let the kids smoke if they want, if it makes them feel better. I don’t care. My Thelma, she can smoke right in her own home, her own living room, if she wants to. But she doesn’t seem to have the taste for it. I’m just as glad, to tell the truth.”
    John hated interrupting, but it was close to five-thirty. “I have a problem,” he said.
    â€œA problem—how gruesome,” Thelma said. “And here I thought, Mother, I was being favored with a social call.”
    â€œDon’t talk like that,” Mrs. Lutz said.
    â€œIt’s sort of