Dirty Work Read online

  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 almost say 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 from where a cow had hiked her tail against a post and told Thomas Gandy to eat it.

  Thomas said he wasn’t going to do it. Said he was gonna tell Miss Lusk on him.

  Matt Monroe’s eyes were too close together and he had long greasy hair that he used either Vitalis or Vaseline on. He weighed about eighty pounds. About forty more than Thomas.

  I think Matt said, “You tell Miss Lusk and I’ll knock your head off. You whore. You queermouth.” That’s the kind of child Matt was. He had Thomas backed up against the post by then, and Thomas was doing everything he could to keep that turd out of his mouth. He had his jaws locked. He had his eyes wide open.

  Matt told him to open his mouth and close his eyes, and he’d give him a big surprise. And just as he was about to try and jam the cowturd in, Thomas clamped down on his hand like a dog that hadn’t eaten in about a week and started gnawing it for all he was worth. He was slobbering a little, like Matt Monroe’s hand was the best thing he’d ever tasted. Matt finally got his hand out of Thomas Gandy’s mouth and he wasn’t happy about it. It was bleeding, and it had little fang marks all over it. Everybody just hushed. It was like seeing Sonny Liston get knocked down by Willie Pep.

  Thomas wound up on the ground with Matt on top of him. He let out this big grunt. Matt had his arms pinned, with his knees on his shoulders. He had that old cowturd right over his mouth. Thomas kept shaking his head. He set a record for holding his breath that day. He held it until his face turned purple, then black. Then he had to open his mouth to get him a big breath. And the old cowturd went right in there.

  People think man is cruel. Hey, what about the child of man? There ain’t nothing meaner than some little deranged six-year-old sadistic motherfucker loose in a playground. You think a person’s got to be grown before he’s a maniac? Shit.

  “Say it’s good!” Matt screamed.

  “Bood!” sprayed Thomas. “Beal bood!”

  “Now say you want some more!”

  “Wampfmore!”

  I think you’ll agree with me when I say that Matt Monroe’s mother should have put him in a towsack and drowned him when he was little.

  “Please!” Matt shouted.

  “PWEESE!”

  “With sugar on top!”

  Thomas never did put in his request for sugar on his cowshit because he started crying and could only say Shhh, shh, shh after that. I guess Matt thought that was good enough. He let him up and gave him back his glasses. Old Thomas wouldn’t even look at us when he left. But he did exactly what he’d told Matt he was going to. He went and told Miss Lusk on him.

  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 Neh
i. 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.