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Show RFVER that I might get tired of it or feel more foolish with each explanation or even begin to doubt my own story, but I didn't. I enjoyed it. Each time there was a different reaction. Ralph merely nodded. I asked him his own question. "What are you doing here?" "I'm a self-inflicted prisoner of this place. These are my neighbors and fellow inmates. I brought 'em down here to fish." The oldest boy, Thurmond, was almost as tall as I was, though he wasn't more than twelve years old. He and his younger brother Gabe flailed at the Ohio with their poles, while their smallest brother looked on in wide-eyed admiration. "Now that I get them down here, they don't seem so interested in fishing." He yelled over to the brothers, "Hey! You bugged me all day to bring you down here to fish, so why don't you fish already?" They paid him no attention, except to lash at the water with renewed frenzy. Ralph and I got acquainted as the brothers rampaged along the shore. He'd come down to Cairo from northern Illinois the summer before and now ran a leather goods store called the O & O-the idea being, as Ralph explained, that "Out of nothing shall come something." The bizarre political situation in Cairo had drawn him to the place because he thought it showed a lot of potential for organizing. "Now the place is driving me crazy." Ralph didn't seem crazy, except for an occasional flash in his eyes. In fact, he was one of the calmest people I've ever met, placid even, though the entire time I knew him he was surrounded chaotic, truly extreme craziness. Ralph was instantly likable. The brothers lived in back of Ralph's store with their mother. They came from a family with eleven children. Their father was in jail. They made their way -26- |