Читать книгу Red Earth White Earth - Will Weaver - Страница 14

4

That September the teachers in Flatwater put Mary Ann in first grade. Her first day she beat up three smaller boys who laughed at her size, then bit the wrist of the teacher, who dragged her off to the principal’s office.

“Wasn’t my goddamn fault they put me in the wrong class,” she said. She and Guy and Tom sat together on the school bus. She spoke with her teeth clenched together and moved only her lips. “Dumb fuckers. I know how to do things they never heard of.”

“What happens tomorrow?” Guy asked.

She shrugged.

Guy saw a folded note in her hand.

“What’s that?” Tom said.

She looked down at the note. She wadded it in her palm. “From the principal. Supposed to give it to my daddy.” She stood up and began to open the bus window.

“Wait,” Guy cried. He grabbed her arm.

She struggled to throw the note out the window.

Tom grabbed it and leaned away to read it.

“It says . . . you can’t read,” he said. He and Guy turned to stare at Mary Ann, who looked down. “Shit, that’s why they put you in first grade. You can’t read.”

Two older girls in the next seat, fifth-graders, glanced around at Mary Ann, then began to giggle. In an instant Mary Ann had one girl’s ponytail pulled back and her arm around the girl’s white throat. The girl’s eyes bulged and she gasped for air; her friend flailed at Mary Ann with a notebook. The bus driver was slowing onto the shoulder of the highway before Guy and Tom separated the three girls. With the driver still glaring at them in the overhead mirror, the bus slowly picked up speed again.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom hissed at Mary Ann. “You can’t go around beating up on people every minute of your life.”

“Why not? My daddy taught me how to fight back.”

She glared at the two bigger girls in the next seat.

Guy stared at Tom and shook his head. “You don’t always have to punch somebody,” Guy said.

“Why not?” she said stubbornly. “My daddy says you turn the other cheek you just get your head knocked off.”

“Because you’re going to stay in first grade the rest of your life, that’s why. You’ll be the only full-grown person in first grade,” Guy said.

“You’ll get full-grown and your desk will stick on you,” Tom added. “You’ll have to walk around the rest of your life with this little desk that looks like it’s sticking out your ass.”

“Shit,” she said. She grinned, but then stopped and turned to look out the window. Several telephone poles passed. Finally she said, “If I stop punching kids, I still can’t read.” When she turned back the late-afternoon sunlight gleamed in her eyes. Guy saw her blink back tears.

He and Tom stared at each other. “Shit, anybody can read,” Tom said.

“We’ll teach you,” Guy said.

“Cinch,” Tom said. “Two weeks, max.”

The next Saturday Mary Ann came to school in the hayloft. Tiny shafts of sunlight fell from the barn’s roof and made yellow eyes on the hay-bales-and-boards school desks. Guy and Tom had also made a plank-walk across a deep hole in the layers of bales.

“Any punching, spitting, shitting, pissing, or nose-picking during class, you walk the plank over the alligator pond, is that clear, class?” Tom called out as Mary Ann climbed the bales toward the classroom.

“One problem, teach,” Guy said. “We’ve got an alligator plank but nothing to read.”

“Shit,” Tom said. He scratched his head.

“I brought some magazines,” Mary Ann said. She emptied a sack of them onto the desk.

“Jesus!” Tom said.

“Holy smokes,” Guy said.

“They’re Bub’s,” she explained. “They was the only magazines in the house.”

Guy stared. The magazines gleamed in the sunlight. On the covers were women bent over being fucked or women with their eyes closed and men’s cocks in their mouths.

“There’s words later on,” she said. “I know because Bub reads them to himself sometimes.”

“Whoee!” Tom shouted.

“Shhh!” Guy hissed, stepping over to look down the ladder to the barn below. No one below but cows. He began to page through the magazines. He paused to stare at a black man who had a cock as big as a horse’s and had it halfway inside a skinny, blond-haired woman who had her face all scrunched up. White pussy.

“Listen to this,” Tom whispered. “Harry slid the tip of his throbbing, bulb-bulb . . .”

Guy looked where Tom’s finger had stopped. “Bulbous. That means shaped like a light bulb.”

“Bulbous banana into the hungry red mouth of her cherrypot as its waiting lips eng . . .”

“Engulfed,” Guy said. “Must mean gulp. Like in don’t gulp your food.”

“Engulfed its spurting white . . .”

“J. Is. M.,” Guy said slowly. The word was new to him.

“Hey—you said you could read!” Mary Ann said suddenly.

“We can,” Tom said quickly.

“Sometimes you run across a word you never seen before,” Guy said. “It just takes a second to figure it out. Jis. M. Jism. Jism,” he said. “You see, that’s how you read. You sound out the letters.”

“I’m tired, I want to go home,” Mary Ann said. The up-and-down shafts of sunlight now slanted across the loft.

“Three more sentences,” Guy said.

“Five,” Tom said. They sat bent over the magazine with Mary Ann pressed between them.

“Okay, four,” Guy said.

Mary Ann sighed and began again. “The tick . . .”

“Th sound,” Tom said impatiently.

“The thick, wit . . .”

“Silent e,” Guy said.

“White,” she murmured.

“Good, keep going,” Guy said.

“The thick, white rod of his coke . . .”

“I don’t see no silent e,” Tom said.

“. . . of his cock slid . . .”

“Great,” Guy said. Mary Ann smiled and leaned closer to the words.

“Into her wet muffin.”

“Not muffin,” Guy and Tom both shouted. “There’s no f ’s in that word.”

Mary Ann frowned. She stared down. “Pussy,” she said.

“You’re guessing,” Guy said.

“I’ll never get it,” Mary said, pushing away the magazine.

“Hey—get this sentence right and we’ll let you go home!” Guy said.

“Miss it, the alligator plank,” Tom said.

Mary Ann glanced behind her at the bales. The hole was in shadow. She stared again at the sentence and scrunched up her forehead. “The thick white rod of his cock slid into her waiting . . . mouth!” she finished. “Mouth!”

“Yea, hooray,” Guy and Tom shouted. “You were reading! That was reading!”

“Really?” Mary Ann said. Her eyes were more open and shining than Guy had ever seen them.