And then there were the Halls. All six of the Hall children had been born mentally retarded1, and although they were now middle-aged2, they all still lived at home with their mom and dad. When I was friendly to the oldest, Kenny Hall, who was forty-two, he developed a powerful crush on me. The other kids in the neighborhood teased Kenny by telling him that if he gave them a dollar or stripped down to his skivvies and showed them his wanker, they'd arrange for me to go on a date with him. On a Saturday night, if he'd been set up like that, he'd come stand on the street in front of our house, sobbing3 and hollering about me not keeping our date, and I'd have to go down and explain to him that the other kids had played a trick on him and that, although he did have many admirable qualities, I had a policy against dating older men.
The family who had it the toughest on Little Hobart Street, I would have to say, was the Pastors4. The mother, Ginnie Sue Pastor5, was the town whore. Ginnie Sue Pastor was thirty-three years old and had eight daughters and one son. Their names all ended with Y. Her husband, Clarence Pastor, had black lung and sat on the front porch of their huge sagging6 house all day long, but he never smiled or waved at passersby7. Just sat there like he was frozen. Everyone in town said he'd been impotent for years and none of the Pastor kids was his.
Ginnie Sue Pastor pretty much kept to herself. At first I wondered if she lay around in a lacy negligee all day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for gentlemen callers. Back in Battle Mountain, the women lounging on the front porch of the Green Lantern桰'd long since figured out what they really did梬ore white lipstick8 and black mascara and partially9 unbuttoned blouses that showed the tops of their brassieres. But Ginnie Sue Pastor didn't look like a whore. She was a blowsy woman with dyed yellow hair, and from time to time we saw her out in the front yard, chopping wood or filling a scuttle10 from the coal pile. She usually wore the same kinds of aprons11 and canvas farm coats worn by the rest of the women on Little Hobart Street. She looked like any other mom.
I also wondered how she did her whoring with all those kids to look after. One night I saw a car pull up in front of the Pastor house and blink its headlights twice. After a minute, Ginnie Sue came running out the door and climbed into the front seat. Then the car drove off.
Kathy was Ginnie Sue Pastor's oldest daughter. The other kids treated her like a total pariah12, crowing that her mother was a. "hoor" and calling her. "lice girl." Truth was, she did have a pretty advanced case of head lice. She kept trying to befriend me. One afternoon on the way home from school, when I told her we'd lived for a while in California, she lit up. She said her mama had always wanted to go there. She asked if maybe I'd come over to her place and tell her mama all about life in California.
Of course I went. I'd never gotten inside the Green Lantern, but now I'd get an up-close look at a genuine prostitute. There were lots of things I wanted to know: Was whoring easy money? Was it ever any fun, or was it just gross? Did Kathy and her sisters and her father all know Ginnie Sue Pastor was a whore? What did they think of it? I didn't plan on flat out asking these questions, but I did think that by getting inside the Pastors' house and meeting Ginnie Sue, I'd come away with some idea of the answers.
Clarence Pastor, sitting on the porch, ignored Kathy and me as we walked by. Inside, there were all these tiny rooms connected together like boxcars. Because of the way the house was settling on the eroding13 hillside, the floors and ceilings and windows tilted14 at different angles. There were no paintings on the walls, but the Pastors had taped up pictures of smartly dressed women torn from Sears Roebuck catalogs.
Kathy's little sisters scampered15 around noisily, half dressed. None of them looked alike; one was redheaded, one a blonde, one had black hair, and there were all different shades of brown. Sweet Man, the youngest, crawled along the living room floor, sucking on a fat dill pickle16. Ginnie Sue Pastor sat at the table in the kitchen. At her elbow was the carcass of a big expensive roaster, the kind we could hardly ever afford. She had a tired, lined face, but her smile was cheerful and open. "Pleased to meet you," she said to me, wiping her hands on her shirttail. "We ain't used to getting visitors."Ginnie Sue offered us seats at the table. She had heavy breasts that swayed when she moved, and her blond hair was dark at the roots. "You-all help me with this bird, and I'll fix you a couple of Ginnie Sue's special chicken rolls." She turned to me. "You know how to pick a chicken clean?""I sure do," I said. I hadn't had anything to eat all day.
"Well, show me, then," Ginnie Sue said.
I went for a wing first, pulling apart the spindly double bones and getting all the meat trapped there. Then I set to work on the leg and thigh17 bones, snapping them at the joints18 and peeling off the tendons and digging out the marrow19. Kathy and Ginnie Sue were also working on the bird, but soon they stopped to watch me. From the tail, I pulled that nice piece of meat that everybody misses. I turned the carcass upside down and scraped off the jellied fat and meat flecks20 with my fingernails. I stuck my arm elbow-deep into the bird to excavate21 any meat clinging to the rib22 cage.
"Girl," Ginnie Sue said. "in all my days, I have never seen no one pick a chicken clean like you."I held up the spear-shaped cartilage in the breast bone, which most people don't eat, and bit down with a satisfying crunch23.
Ginnie Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder24 and passed them to us. "Birds in a blanket," she said. They tasted great.
"Mama, Jeannette lived in California," Kathy said.
"That so?" Ginnie Sue said. "Live in California and be a stewardess25, that was my dream." She sighed. "Never got beyond Bluefield."I told her and Kathy about life in California. It quickly became clear they had no interest in desert mining towns, so I told them about San Francisco and then about Las Vegas, which wasn't exactly in California, but they didn't seem to care. I made the days we had spent there seem like years, and the showgirls I'd seen from a distance seem like close friends and neighbors. I described the glittering casinos and the glamorous26 high rollers, the palm trees and the swimming pools, the hotels with ice-cold air-conditioning and the restaurants where hostesses with long white gloves lit flaming desserts.
"It don't get no better than that!" Ginnie Sue said.
"No, ma'am, it sure don't," I told her.
Sweet Man came in crying, and Ginnie Sue picked him up and let him suck some mayonnaise off her finger. "You did good on that bird," Ginnie Sue told me. "You strike me as the kind of girl who's one day going to be eating roast chicken and those on-fire desserts just as much as you want." She winked27.
It was only on the way home that I realized I hadn't gotten answers to any of my questions. While I was sitting there talking to Ginnie Sue, I'd even forgotten she was a whore. One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table.
WE FOUGHT A LOT in Welch. Not just to fend28 off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; maybe it was because life there was hard and it made people hard; maybe it was because of all the bloody29 battles over unionizing the mines; maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped30 and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids. Whatever the reason, it seemed that just about everyone in Welch梞en, women, boys, girls條iked to fight.
There were street brawls31, bar stabbings, parking-lot beatings, wife slappings, and toddler whalings. Sometimes it was simply a matter of someone throwing a stray punch, and it would all be over before you knew it had started. Other times it would be more like a twelve-round prizefight, with spectators cheering on the bloody, sweating opponents. Then there were the grudges32 and feuds33 that went on for years, a couple of brothers beating up some guy because back in the fifties his father had beaten up their father, a woman shooting her best friend for sleeping with her husband and the best friend's brother then stabbing the husband. You'd walk down McDowell Street, and half the people you passed seemed to be nursing an injury sustained in local combat. There were shiners, split lips, swollen34 cheekbones, bruised35 arms, scraped knuckles36, and bitten earlobes. We had lived in some pretty scrappy places back in the desert, but Mom said Welch was the fightingest town she'd ever seen.
Brian and Lori and Maureen and I got into more fights than most kids. Dinitia Hewitt and her friends were only the first in a whole line of little gangs who did battle with one or more of us. Other kids wanted to fight us because we had red hair, because Dad was a drunk, because we wore rags and didn't take as many baths as we should have, because we lived in a falling-down house that was partly painted yellow and had a pit filled with garbage, because they'd go by our dark house at night and see that we couldn't even afford electricity.
But we always fought back, usually as a team. Our most spectacular fight, and our most audacious tactical victory梩he Battle of Little Hobart Street梩ook place against Ernie Goad37 and his friends when I was ten and Brian was nine. Ernie Goad was a pug-nosed, thick-necked kid who had little eyes set practically on the sides of his head, like a whale. He acted as if it was his sworn mission to drive the Walls family out of town. It started one day when I was playing with some other kids on the tank parked next to the armory38. Ernie Goad appeared and began throwing rocks at me and yelling that the Wallses should all leave Welch because we were stinking39 it up so bad.
I threw a couple of rocks back and told him to leave me alone.
"Make me," Ernie said.
"I don't make garbage," I shouted. "I burn it." This was usually a foolproof comeback, making up in scorn what it lacked in originality40, but on this occasion it backfired.
"Y'all Wallses don't burn garbage!" Ernie yelled back. "Y'all throw it in a hole next to your house! You live in it!"I tried to think of a comeback to his comeback, but my mind seized up because what Ernie had said was true: We did live in garbage.
Ernie stuck his face in mine. "Garbage! You live in garbage 'cause you are garbage!"I shoved him good and hard, then turned to the other kids, hoping for backup, but they were easing away and looking down, as if they were ashamed to have been caught playing with a girl who had a garbage pit next to her house.
* * *That Saturday, Brian and I were reading on the sofa bed when one of the windowpanes shattered and a rock landed on the floor. We ran to the door. Ernie and three of his friends were pedaling their bikes up and down Little Hobart Street, whooping41 madly. "Garbage! Garbage! Y'all are a bunch of garbage!"Brian went out on the porch. One of the kids hurled42 another rock that hit Brian in the head. He staggered back, then ran down the steps, but Ernie and his friends pedaled away, shrieking43. Brian came back up the stairs, blood trickling44 down his cheek and onto his T-shirt and a pump knot already swelling45 up above his eyebrow46. Ernie's gang returned a few minutes later, throwing stones and shouting that they had actually seen the pigsty47 where the Walls kids lived and that they were going to tell the whole school it was even worse than everyone said.
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retarded
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| a.智力迟钝的，智力发育迟缓的 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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pastors
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| n.（基督教的）牧师( pastor的名词复数 ) | |
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pastor
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| n.牧师，牧人 | |
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sagging
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| 下垂[沉，陷]，松垂，垂度 | |
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passersby
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| n. 过路人(行人,经过者) | |
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lipstick
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| n.口红，唇膏 | |
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partially
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| adv.部分地，从某些方面讲 | |
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scuttle
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| v.急赶，疾走，逃避；n.天窗；舷窗 | |
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aprons
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| 围裙( apron的名词复数 )； 停机坪，台口（舞台幕前的部份） | |
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pariah
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| n.被社会抛弃者 | |
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eroding
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| 侵蚀，腐蚀( erode的现在分词 )； 逐渐毁坏，削弱，损害 | |
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tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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scampered
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| v.蹦蹦跳跳地跑，惊惶奔跑( scamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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pickle
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| n.腌汁，泡菜；v.腌，泡 | |
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thigh
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| n.大腿；股骨 | |
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joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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marrow
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| n.骨髓；精华；活力 | |
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flecks
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| n.斑点，小点( fleck的名词复数 )；癍 | |
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excavate
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| vt.挖掘，挖出 | |
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rib
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| n.肋骨，肋状物 | |
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crunch
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| n.关键时刻；艰难局面；v.发出碎裂声 | |
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cylinder
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| n.圆筒，柱(面)，汽缸 | |
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stewardess
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| n.空中小姐，女乘务员 | |
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glamorous
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| adj.富有魅力的；美丽动人的；令人向往的 | |
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winked
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| v.使眼色( wink的过去式和过去分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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fend
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| v.照料（自己），（自己）谋生，挡开，避开 | |
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bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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brawls
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| 吵架，打架( brawl的名词复数 ) | |
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grudges
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| 不满，怨恨，妒忌( grudge的名词复数 ) | |
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feuds
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| n.长期不和，世仇( feud的名词复数 ) | |
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swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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bruised
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| [医]青肿的，瘀紫的 | |
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knuckles
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| n.（指人）指关节( knuckle的名词复数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的第三人称单数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
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goad
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| n.刺棒，刺痛物；激励；vt.激励，刺激 | |
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armory
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| n.纹章，兵工厂，军械库 | |
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stinking
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| adj.臭的，烂醉的，讨厌的v.散发出恶臭( stink的现在分词 )；发臭味；名声臭；糟透 | |
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originality
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| n.创造力，独创性；新颖 | |
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whooping
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| 发嗬嗬声的，发咳声的 | |
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hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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shrieking
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| v.尖叫( shriek的现在分词 ) | |
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trickling
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| n.油画底色含油太多而成泡沫状突起v.滴( trickle的现在分词 )；淌；使)慢慢走；缓慢移动 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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eyebrow
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| n.眉毛，眉 | |
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pigsty
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| n.猪圈，脏房间 | |
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