Dirty Work (4 page)

She burnt Matt Monroe’s ass up. Broke a yardstick on his ass and then grabbed a lightcord and flayed him with that for a while. I laughed out loud. And Matt Monroe saw
me. I’m sure Thomas Gandy with his superior brain knew better than to laugh. I didn’t.

People don’t know what it’s like to be poor. I was raised poor. We got our water from a well and we had to carry it to the house in a bucket. I never lived in a house with running water until I was fourteen years old. Instead of turning on an air conditioner we sweated.

When it was real hot, in the middle of the summer, Mama would let me put my bed out on the back porch and sleep out there. You could catch that night wind and hear everything out in the woods calling, crickets and frogs and birds. You could even hear a fox bark once in a while, or coondogs running down in the bottom. You could see our cotton patch down behind the house with the night laying over it, letting it cool down. See the rows in the dark. Lie there in the cool and think about how nice it was to just stay right there and not have to be out in the sun, chopping cotton, sweating, working your ass off. You could even, for a while, forget about people like Matt Monroe. The perverted little bastard.

I’d have to call Matt Monroe trash. There’s nothing else to call somebody like him. You could just tell by looking at him that he was trash.

But of course trash is always in the eye of the beholder. I know. There were probably some people who thought we were trash. I know there were people who looked down their noses at us because we were on welfare. That and my daddy being in the pen.

I know people who say, well, I wouldn’t be on welfare
and take food stamps or handouts, I’ve got too much pride. That’s fine. Pride is a fine thing to have. The only thing is, you can’t eat pride. But you can eat commodity eggs and flour and rice and cheese and butter and powdered milk, and your babies can eat commodity cereal and drink commodity formula and fruit juice and live without pride. Pride ain’t worth a damn to a hungry kid who wants something to eat, and if a man says he wouldn’t take welfare food when his kids didn’t have anything to eat, if he said that, he’s lying, and I’d tell him so. I know. My mother swallowed her pride and went every week and got that stuff.

Some people from the welfare office in town came around every week to the post office in London Hill and gave out food to the people on the list. My mother never said anything about it, but I know it hurt her. We had to walk about a mile to get up to the post office from our house. We lived on the south side of what you could call town if it was a town. But it’s not. It’s just a little community about like a thousand others scattered all over the state. Just a little crossroads up in the hills where somebody a long time ago decided to build a house because it had a creek they could get water out of or there was some good timber to cut. The school’s gone now, they tore it down a long time ago. But I can go by there any time I want to and see the spot where Matt Monroe first got me down on the ground.

The welfare people always came on Thursday afternoon at four o’clock. I’d go home from school and my mother
would be out in the field, and she’d come in and wash up and get ready. Then we’d leave the house and walk back up to London Hill. The roads were all dirt then, and if somebody came along in a vehicle while we were walking, we’d have to get over on the side of the road where the grass was and walk there until they passed. In the summertime it would be dusty, and the dust they raised would settle on us and you could smell it in your nose like something old and sour.

There was at one time a store that sat in the middle of London Hill, an old store. The tin on the roof had rusted brown a long time before that and the whole thing leaned a little to the left. It had a faded red kerosene tank out front with a pump handle, and old wooden benches that were covered with knife cuts and people’s initials where men had sat there year after year and whittled on them, and it had yellow signs with thermometers and ancient Coca-Cola signs tacked all over the front. The screen door was patched with wads of cotton and it had a strip of blue tin in the middle that said Colonial Bread is Good Bread.

I never went in the store much when I was little because I never had any money to spend. Usually the only time I’d go in there was when my mother sent me to the store for Kotex. You ever had to go to the store for Kotex? I have. And it’s embarrassing. It’ll also get you into trouble with white trash like Matt Monroe if somebody like Matt Monroe is in there when you go in for your Kotex.

I think this was the first time I ever scored any Kotex, without knowing what it was. Mother had called me into
the house from whatever I was doing, I don’t remember what. She was hiding behind the kitchen door, just her face looking out. Kind of pale and worriedlike.

“I need you to go to the store for me,” she said. She had a dollar bill crumpled up in her hand. “I need some Kotex.”

“Kotex,” I said.

“It’s in a blue box,” she said. “Don’t get the Junior. Get the Super.”

“Super.”

“And hurry.”

“You want me to run, Mama?”

“Yes, honey. Run. Please.”

“Can I get me something if there’s any left over?”

“Yes, get you a Coke or something, but hurry.”

So I hurried. I didn’t know what Kotex cost but I was sure it wouldn’t cost a dollar. I was hoping it would only cost about ninety cents. I could get a Coke for a dime, that or a big Nehi grape. And it was entirely possible that the Kotex would only cost eighty cents or something like that, so that maybe I could get a Moon Pie to go along with it. All the way up there I was wondering what to get. And I was happy. I wasn’t even tired from that mile run. I slowed down when I got close to the store, and there were about seven or eight old men sitting around out front there, spitting and whittling some more wood off the benches. Talking about cows and stuff, I guess.

I didn’t know any of those old men and I was shy, too,
so I just looked down at the ground when I walked in between all their legs. Of course they were quiet when I went by. I stepped inside the store and the boards creaked. They sagged in places, and the holes in them were patched with pieces of tin nailed down to the wood. It was dusty and dark and there was a stove in the center of the room with a pipe going up through the ceiling. And behind the counter was the meanest looking old man I’d ever seen. He had white hair and a leathery old face with white whiskers bristling all over it and he had brown stains going down from the corners of his mouth. I knew what his name was. He was Mr. Davis. He had faded blue eyes and his voice sounded like gravel sliding across a washtub.

“Hep you?” he said.

“Yessir,” I said. I stepped on up there with my dollar. “I need me some Kotex.”

He acted like it insulted him. He gave me a sharp look. He moved out from behind the counter, shuffling in his house shoes. His black pants were baggy and his white shirt was dirty. The Kotex was up on a high shelf and he reached and pulled one down and swatted the dust off it with his hand. I laid my dollar on the counter and waited while he brought it over. Blue box. Kotex Sanitary Napkins. Junior.

He’d already set it down and started back around the counter. I looked at him and he stopped.

“Well,” he said. “What else?”

“Super,” I said.

“What?
Speak up, boy, cain’t hear you! Damn near deaf!” he screamed. He had one hand cupped behind his ear.

“Super!” I shouted. “Need the Super! She said not get the Junior!”

“Goddang, boy,” he said, and he snatched the box off the counter. “Speak up, speak up.” He muttered and mumbled while he shuffled back across the room and reached and put it back and got a box of the Supers.

“All right. What else?”

“How much?”

“Sixty cents. Out of a dollar.” He’d already picked up the money.

“I want to get something else,” I said. He waited while I went over to the drink box. I opened the lid and looked down in it. The drinks were all in glass bottles and they were standing up to their necks in ice cold water. Cokes and Nehis and SunRise Oranges and 7-Ups and Royal Crown Colas and Dr. Peppers all lined up in formations like soldiers. It was hard to decide what I wanted. I settled for a big Nehi grape and closed the lid. I opened it and looked around for the Moon Pies. There was an open box of them on top of the drink case. I got one and carried it and the Nehi back to the counter.

I asked him if I had enough money to get all that but he didn’t say anything. He just rang it up and gave me my change. Twenty cents. Two dimes. I thanked him and started out.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Here’s you a sack.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need a sack.”

“You better put it in a sack. So everbody won’t see it.” He kind of mumbled that.

I couldn’t really see the logic, but I waited for him to put it in a sack. I dropped my Moon Pie in there, too.

I went out the door and the voices hushed again when I went by. I didn’t look at anybody and I kept my head down until I got past them. Then I took a drink of my Nehi and walked straight into Matt Monroe. He was standing there waiting for me. He pulled an ambush on me and I walked straight into it. I think he asked me where I was going. I said I was going home, I was in a hurry.

He wanted to know what I had in that sack. I said nothing, and started around him, sipping on my Nehi. Boy it was good and cold. Delicious. Mean little son of a bitch.

“I know you,” he said. “Don’t I?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got to go.”

“Yeah, I know you,” he said, and he caught hold of my shirt. “You the one that was laughing at me when Miss Lusk gave me that whippin’.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”

“You a lyin’ son of a bitch.”

I stopped. I had to. I couldn’t move.

Let me see how to put this. I enjoyed watching Matt get his ass blistered by Miss Lusk. I enjoyed that. He deserved it. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Thomas eat the cowturd, too. But part of me also
hated
watching Thomas eat the cowturd. Because I knew that
it could very easily have been
me
eating the cowturd. So I should have known not to laugh when Miss Lusk tore his ass up.

I was scared. Scared bad. I’d seen the fear in Thomas Gandy’s eyes, and how easily Matt Monroe had thrown him down and gotten on top of him. I was afraid that Matt Monroe was about to do something terrible to me, and I was right.

He drew back his fist and hit me in the nose so hard I couldn’t see anything. I turned loose of everything and sat down in the gravel. When I opened my eyes he was drinking my Nehi. He set it down and started in the sack after my Moon Pie. I got up to take it away from him, but the sack ripped, and the blue box of Kotex fell out on the ground. Matt Monroe didn’t even look at the Moon Pie. He had eyes only for the box of Kotex. I wiped a little blood away from my nose with the back of my hand and bent over to pick it up.

“Kotex,” he said.
“Kotex,”
like it was a dirty word.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t crying a little by then. My nose was hurting so bad I still couldn’t hardly see anything. Bleeding pretty bad. I was scared of Matt Monroe. I knew there was nothing I could do about him drinking my Nehi. I knew there was nothing I could do about him eating my Moon Pie. But I knew I had to get that Kotex home in a hurry because my mother was standing behind the kitchen door looking worried about it.

I looked back at the store, knowing what I’d see. All those old men looking at me, watching Matt Monroe take my stuff away from me. And they were. Every one of them
was watching to see what I was made of. And they saw. Chickenshit. That’s what I was made of.

I picked up my dirty Kotex, and I went on home.

That day, anyway.

I tried to wipe all the blood off my face before I got home so Mama wouldn’t see it. I pulled my shirttail out of my pants and tried to wipe it away, but it didn’t work. She saw it as soon as I walked in the house. She was still hiding in the kitchen, and she saw it when I handed her the Kotex.

After she did what she had to do in the kitchen, she came storming out from behind the door and grabbed me. She asked me what had happened to me. She was almost screaming, and that scared me worse than Matt Monroe had. I told her a boy named Matt Monroe had taken my stuff away from me and hit me in the nose and that he was a bully and he was too big for me to fight. I guess I was expecting some sympathy. She was the wrong place to look for it.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What do you
mean
letting him run over you like that? What did he say?”

I told her he didn’t say anything. He just hit me in the nose and knocked me down.

“And you just
took
it? Without fighting back?”

I was crying and she was shaking me. I know now that she was ashamed of me. Not my father’s son. Hell, I was ashamed of myself.

“Did he say anything about your daddy? You tell me. What did he say?”

“He didn’t say nothing. He just hit me.”

She turned me loose then. I wouldn’t look at her. She sat down in a chair. I’ll never forget what she told me.

“Boy, I’m gonna tell you something. If you don’t take up for yourself in this world, there ain’t nobody else that will. If you let him run over you once, he’s gonna run over you again. The next time he sees you, he’s gonna run over you. Cause now he knows he can. So you got to teach him right now that he can’t. Either now or the next time, it don’t matter. Is he bigger than you?”

I said Yesm, a lot bigger.

“Well,” she said, and she got up like it was all settled. “I guess you gonna have to just pick you up a stick, ain’t you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ain’t you?”

Yesm.

“Don’t you never let nobody say anything about your daddy. You hear me? I don’t care what you have to do. Just don’t you let it happen.”

That was the end of that conversation.

I went to bed that night and thought about it. I thought about watching Thomas Gandy and wondering about how he felt when Matt Monroe got him down on the ground and shoved that shit in his mouth. And I knew then that he’d felt just like I did right then. Awful.