Dirty Work Read Online Free PDF Page 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 sawme. 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