Dirty Work Read Online Free Page B

couldn’t figure out why that man was just lying in our front yard, not moving.
    My daddy killed him over something about my mother, but I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if this guy was trying to go with her or what.
    I think I heard the shot. I don’t know where I was. That’s what’s aggravating about it. Maybe if I’d seen it, I might have been able to understand what it was all about. But I didn’t. It’s like I just appeared on the porch and saw him lying there. A dog came up and smelled him. I remember that. Then the dog jerked backward and went away.
    I know they came and got my daddy that day. They must have. I mean you can’t just kill somebody and then hang around the house. When you do something like that, you’ve got to pay for it. I know. I’ve had to pay for a lot of things myself.
    After they hauled my daddy off to the pen, that left meand Mama to fend for ourselves, as they say. We had to get our cotton patch through the summer without the weeds taking it and then get it picked in the fall. I don’t know how she did it. But I do know how she did it. She got out there with a hoe and worked, all day, every day. Maybe I was five. I can’t think. My head’s still messed up. Five or six. I helped her. Wait a minute. Max is six years younger than me. Maybe she was pregnant when they took him. I bet that’s what it was. Hell. Maybe he freshened her loins the night before he shot that asshole, whoever he was. He must have been an asshole. He must have done something really shitty for my daddy to have to shoot him and go to the pen.
    Anyway I was thinking about Thomas Gandy. He was a little bitty kid with glasses and a crew cut. His head looked like a bristle brush, and his glasses could blind you in the sun if he bounced the light on you just right. You’d be throwing your hands up in front of your eyes like the Prince of Darkness was coming in the window. Thomas was a real milquetoast who cuts folks like me’s heads open now and makes a lot of money for fixing whatever’s wrong with their heads. I think that’s why I was thinking about him. I know they’re wanting to take a look inside my head. They’ve been wanting to do that for a good long while now.
    Yeah but old Thomas, he didn’t always occupy such a lofty position in the world. No sir. At London Hill, Mississippi, a long time ago, he was once forced to
eat
a large piece of dried cowshit and then say it was good and almostsay that he’d like some more, please, with sugar on top.
    Matt Monroe was a sadistic little bastard when he was six years old and the only thing that’s changed about him is he’s grown. And there was a time when he worried me a lot. He doesn’t worry me now. Now he’s as nice to me as he can be. There used to be a school at London Hill and that’s where I started. It was a big old white building on a hill. Kids from Paris and Potlockney and DeLay went there, but there weren’t very many of us in each class. I didn’t know anybody until I started to school. But it didn’t take me long to find out I didn’t want anything to do with Matt Monroe.
    He caught old Thomas Gandy out there in the yard about the third day of school. Miss Lusk, our teacher, had stepped down the hill to the store to get some more milk for the kids. I didn’t know what was happening, but Matt turned on Thomas and every eye on the playground turned with him. He backed him around the side of the schoolhouse and down to the fence where Mr. Autry Jordon kept his cows. Then he pulled Thomas Gandy’s glasses off. We knew something bad was coming. Thomas Gandy, future brain surgeon, was about to be humiliated. And we were like a bunch of little ghouls getting ready to watch it. One kid went to be a lookout on the corner.
    Old Thomas was sort of blinking in the sunlight, slowly. Trying to use the vast resources of his awesome mind to help him.
    Matt Monroe peeled off a piece of dried cowshit fromwhere a cow had hiked her tail against a