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Show Go Love/106 lay in bed one night listening to him beat Mama. She said, 'Joey, get help. He's killing me. Joey, please." Mama said, "Joey, that's enough." "He was killing you, Mama You know it" O W. met me at the passenger door. And we fought one another out under a blue sky between soy fields where lazy cropdusters dumped poison on summer soy. It was the sort of day when boys oblivious to their own deepening voices fished pond banks, sometimes forgetting the sunfish lashed on makeshift stringers, so that when the line was retrieved a water moccasin writhed where fish should be, and the shock would be gut-level so they'd never forget to suspect duplicity in all things. Though the fight was quick, I managed a left hook that broke one of OW's front teeth and split my knuckle He got this I didn't know you'd do that look on his face, blood running down his lip. "You woodpussy," he said, and knocked my breath out. And for the rest of it, the whole time while he kicked my ass, patches of blue sky shone through the cracks where wrist-thick snakes writhed on summer lines, I remember thinking woodpussv? What the fuck was woodpussv? The big gray was the first whale me or Jimmy'd ever seen, coated in a slick layer of cottage cheese looking shit. It just lay there. No posters of living whales or Shamu with a beach ball on his nose or instruction on how to behave in such a beast's presence. Just a big, fat dead whale in a stinking trailer, getting hauled through towns like Lonoke, a skinny boy standing on the wooden platform below the monster sign Leviathan's arrival was an annual deal. Somehow it'd got out |