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Show =36 try to grab the bridle and I would ride Billy right over the top of him, tromp him down iiylie ground. I knew a man on a horse is superior to one on foot. But when I did meet him nearly two weeks later I was standing in the crowd around the dance floor at Sid's Cesspool. Sid's Cesspool wasn't its real name, just the one everybody used. It set a mile west of town down in the river bottom on what was useless land, gravel, and swamp; Sid had built his dance hall on the gravel and had left the swamp, a flourishing one with as nice a stand of watercress and cattails and mosquitoes as you could find anywhere, probably better. The hall was a big barn of a place with a false front painted white once and with tall black lettering: THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Sid's last name was Eden. But it wasn't exactly a polite crowd down there and my mother would a lot sooner I didn't go. She was stylish for a farm woman and pretty in a faded way, though not from scrubbing clothes, and she belonged to a bridge dub and thought I should just go to the Rainbow girls' dances and such. "Aw, that's kid stuff," I said, not having a Rainbow girl. "And you're a man, I suppose. Just because you grew up like a weed. That's no place for a sixteen-year-old." "Mom," I teased, "what could happen in the Garden of Eden?" She gave me her good-sport look. "Son, that's just where all our troubles started. And that place-if it's the Garden of Eden, I'm a monkey." I found it paradise enough but I couldn't argue that. So I said it wasn't near as bad as she made out, that lots of high-school kids went and took dates too. "I don't care how many of those wild girls go down there," she said, twisting my meaning. "It's not a nice place, all those Mexicans and things. And now those CCC boys. Swarming everywhere." "Mom, you know Mexicans aren't allowed in the Garden of Eden." But she wasn't in a joking mood any longer; she gave me her religious look instead and said how it was an evil place, full of sin and the Lord only knew what other shenanigans. She didn't know the half of it. She knew there was "drunkenness and bad language and worse," but in her mind "drunkenness" was two or three drinks and "worse" was as vague and shapeless as fog. For Mother even sin kept respectable limits. I saw no point to broadening her, and I sure didn't tell her that the evil and sin was exactly why I wanted to go. My innocence oppressed me even more than my respectability. Of course, I wouldn't have gone if my father had said no, but since it didn't cost him anything he didn't care one way or the other. So on summer Saturday nights I'd be there, once in a while buying a ten-cent ticket and dancing with some high-school girl down there with her date, but though I knew men did take wild girls outside to the back seats of cars, I never tried. I knew in general what was required but I wasn't at all confident about specific details. And though I'd gone outside and stood with a group while they passed the bottle, I never touched the stuff. I knew that one drink would send me home roaring curses and vomiting and smelling forfewo ia\/s>ai^ 214 |