Victory Over Japan Read Online Free PDF Page A

started the motor and drove back out onto the highway. Rhoda crunched down lower in the seat, pretending to read her book. Who cares, she thought. I’ll get some as soon as we stop for gas.
    Getting cigarettes at filling stations was not as easy as Rhoda thought it was going to be. This was God’s country they were driving into now, the hills rising up higher and higher, strange, silent little houses back off the road. Rhoda could feel the eyes looking out at her from behind the silent windows. Poor white trash, Rhoda’s mother would have called them. The salt of the earth, her father would have said.
    This was God’s country and these people took things like children smoking cigarettes seriously. At both places where they stopped there was a sign by the cash register, No Cigarettes Sold To Minors .
    Rhoda had moved to the back seat of the Cadillac and was stretched out on the seat reading her book. She had found another poem she liked and she was memorizing it.
    Four be the things I’d be better without,
    Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
    Three be the things I shall never attain,
    Envy, content and sufficient champagne.
    Oh, God, I love this book , she thought. This Dorothy Parker is just like me . Rhoda was remembering a night when she got drunk in Clarkesville, Mississippi, with her cousin, Baby Gwen Barksdale. They got drunk on tequila LaGrande Conroy brought back from Mexico, and Rhoda had slept all night in the bathtub so she would be near the toilet when she vomited.
    She put her head down on her arm and giggled, thinking about waking up in the bathtub. Then a plan occurred to her.
    â€œStop and let me go to the bathroom,” she said to her father. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
    â€œOh, Lord,” he said. “I knew you shouldn’t have gotten in the back seat. Well, hold on. I’ll stop the first place I see.” He pushed his hat back off his forehead and began looking for a place to stop, glancing back over his shoulder every now and then to see if she was all right. Rhoda had a long history of throwing up on car trips so he was taking this seriously. Finally he saw a combination store and filling station at a bend in the road and pulled up beside the front door.
    â€œI’ll be all right.” Rhoda said, jumping out of the car. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”
    She walked dramatically up the wooden steps and pushed open the screen door. It was so quiet and dark inside she thought for a moment the store was closed. She looked around. She was in a rough, high-ceilinged room with saddles and pieces of farm equipment hanging from the rafters and a sparse array of canned goods on wooden shelves behind a counter. On the counter were five or six large glass jars filled with different kinds of Nabisco cookies. Rhoda stared at the cookie jars, wanting to stick her hand down inside and take out great fistfuls of Lorna Doones and Oreos. She fought off her hunger and raised her eyes to the display of chewing tobacco and cigarettes.
    The smells of the store rose up to meet her, fecund and rich, moist and cool, as if the store was an extension of the earth outside. Rhoda looked down at the board floors. She felt she could have dropped a sunflower seed on the floor and it would instantly sprout and take bloom, growing quick, moving down into the earth and upwards toward the rafters.
    â€œIs anybody here?” she said softly, then louder. “Is anybody here?”
    A woman in a cotton dress appeared in a door, staring at Rhoda out of very intense, very blue eyes.
    â€œCan I buy a pack of cigarettes from you?” Rhoda said. “My dad’s in the car. He sent me to get them.”
    â€œWhat kind of cigarettes you looking for?” the woman said, moving to the space between the cash register and the cookie jars.
    â€œSome Luckies if you have them,” Rhoda said. “He said to just get anything you had if you didn’t