Sin City Read Online Free PDF Page B

and only an oil stove in the back of each classroom for heat.
    Mina was called high desert, nearly a mile above sea level, but you couldn’t tell that by looking. Every direction out of town was flat, sagebrush and alkali flats. Mina itself was a dusty little kindling-wood town with about a hundred houses and a block of scattered businesses stretched along Highway 95. It wasn’t noted for anything except a whorehouse.
    The class burst into laughter as Nancy Barr broke into tears and ran out. Mrs. Wormly, she pronounced it Vermly, glared at us and banged her yardstick on her teacher’s desk. I got the same yardstick on my butt so many times I wouldn’t be surprised if my rear had inch marks on it.
    â€œBe quiet. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
    Mrs. Wormly had a round tummy, protruding rear, big, heavy breasts, thick arms and legs, puffy red cheeks, and a double chin that bounced when she got excited and talked fast. She wore flowered dresses and always had her hair pulled back into a bun. Her husband, who taught the third through fifth grades next door, was short and stumpy, with a round tummy like his wife’s. He had a bald pate with a ring of red hair and so many freckles he looked like he was rusting.

    â€œNot another word. You should be ashamed.”
    She was right, but when you’re twelve years old like I was, some things are funnier because you just don’t know any better. Nancy Barr, who was in the eighth grade, a year ahead of me, had gone up to the front of the class to put the nine times multiplication table on the blackboard. It was Gibbs who saw the small dark stain on the back of Nancy’s dress and said, “Poo-poo.” Janey Hopper called him dumb and said the stain was from Nancy’s first period, but by then us boys were laughing and shouting “caw-caw.”
    â€œThe next person who laughs goes to the office.”
    The “office” was a small room that had a desk, phone, bookshelves for extra books, a closet where brooms and mops were stacked, and a bathroom with a toilet and sink. All three teachers used it, although Mr. Wormly, who was also school principal, called it his office. He used to teach us older kids, but he developed hives and itched all over and the doctor in Hawthorne warned him he would have a nervous breakdown if he dealt with us anymore.
    The Wormlys belonged to the Holy Roller church, which was in a quonset hut even uglier and smaller than the school’s. I went there once with Gibbs and his mother and it scared the crap out of me. People yelling, clapping, and stamping their feet, a woman foaming at the mouth and mumbling some kind of gibberish they called speaking in tongues.
    Mrs. Wormly gave me her “you-little-bastard” glare. She always focused on me as the school troublemaker, maybe because I saw her playing with herself. At the beginning of the school year, I had to pee real bad and the other boys were holding the boy’s bathroom door closed so I couldn’t get in. I ran into the office and burst into the bathroom. Mrs. Wormly was on the toilet. Her hand was down between her legs and her mouth was open, her tongue hanging out the corner of her mouth. She screamed when she saw me. I screamed, too, and ran. I never saw a woman’s twat, though I knew it had hair like a man’s, and I didn’t know why she’d have her hand down there, but Gibbs told me his sister, who went to Hawthorne high school, jerks off by rubbing a button down there, that he had once rubbed it for her for a quarter, and that was probably what Mrs. Wormly had been doing. I ended up peeing behind the school.
    Mrs. Wormly called Roberta Potter up to the board and I went back
to watching for dust devils. We liked to chase them down on our bikes and run into them. At three o’clock we ran out of the classroom and I headed for Main Street with my buddies, Gibbs and Gleason.
    Mina didn’t have any street named