Free Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper

precise line beneath his chin, the air from outdoors sweeping over him and comforting him with its chill. The smell from outside was of exhaust fumes and hamburgers and garbage cans, but to Jake it was an otherness smell, a clean smell.
    He could not always avoid her. When she was drunk, she became sly, hiding behind doors to catch him, grab him, set him on her lap. Then, the cigarette hanging from the corner of her lips, the smoke around her head like a cloud, she would ask him questions about his life, how was he doing at school, what did he think of her new friend. He learned to answer these questions as briefly as possible, to avoid the wrath that would inevitably come later if she went on drinking. She always started joking and ended up in a fury, and he learned to be far away when she reached the last stages.
    Another window to the outside opened on the first day of school, when an eager young teacher told the class they could find out anything in the world if they paid attention and learned to read. To Jake it came as a revelation, the missing piece of the puzzle of his life! Here was the secret of existence he had known must be somewhere! All the mysteries of hisexistence would come clear, all the things he wondered about, if he would only learn to read. He did learn, quickly, passionately, with the ardor many boys reserve for sports. He read the backs of cereal boxes and the small print on packages. He read abandoned newspapers at the bus stop. And then, in a book checked out from the school library, he read the story of Johnny Appleseed. When he came to the last word, he turned back the pages and read it again. Casting aside as irrelevant all that stuff about apples, Jake knew immediately what the story meant. It was not actually about apples or trees at all, but about him. This man, this father man, went through the world dropping his seed wherever he went, making babies, raising a crop of sons. Like Jake. Or maybe including Jake.
    When the teacher had a moment, Jake went to her desk, politely begging her attention.
    â€œYes, Jake?” She smiled encouragingly. Jake was a good student, an almost perfect student, but he treated her as though she were some kind of machine. Though he was never rude, he was never in the least friendly.
    â€œIn the Johnny Appleseed story. Did he … I mean, he could have put the seeds just anywhere, couldn’t he?” Jake asked. “It didn’t matter where he planted them. Just wherever he was, right?”
    â€œThat’s right, Jake. He planted them as he was traveling, wherever he was, and the strongest trees lived, of course, to produce fruit that produced other trees. We call that natural selection.” The teacher was young and eager.
    Jake nodded, one short, definite nod, and returned to his seat. The story explained everything. His mother was just there at the time, convenient. She wasn’t important. The father man, the mysterious wanderer, the stranger in disguise, had simply used her as a kind of flowerpot. The father man was the important one. Women, a lot of women, most women, maybe all women, were just conveniences.
    He went on applying his reading skill to the daily paper, and to the newsmagazines he stole on Saturdays from the corner newsstand, and the books he continued to check out from the school library, returning them scrupulously on time so he could check out others. He read about cowboys and Indians and great hunters and adventurers, all men, and when he came across a female character, his eyes skimmed across that section, denying to his mind that any such person could exist in any context save that of convenience. He also read compulsivelythe stories of the rich, the famous, the powerful. He made a list of their names, a double column in a blank-paged little book that he swiped from a gift shop and carried with him always, and he read the list aloud to himself sometimes, like a litany or invocation. When someone on the list died