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Show 42 guys were football players, both drank and drove too fast and got into brawls, and pretty soon the two Kates got to be known as fast, especially Katie Cannon. In high school she went steady with Pat for almost three years and yet she was thought of as fast. I guess she smiled too promiscuously, danced too closely with her partners. Our senior year there were rumors that she'd had an abortion. A friend of mine who worked part time in a photography studio once developed some film for a friend of his, one of the guys of the two couples who'd been out in the country fooling around, and he showed me a snapshot of the two girls, both naked. I think they were standing on the bank of a stream. Their faces looked like they were trying to stop giggling, but they were naked all right, very naked, frontally naked, absolutely naked, and for one frozen instant I saw Kate. Then I realized it was her older sister Helen. In my junior year I was taller than most girls, the following fall I would be first string running guard on the football team, I was a wrestler at 140 pounds, I dated Liz Brown, I was doing all right. Liz had turned out shiningly blonde and beautiful, and every once in a while we were on the verge of going steady. Then in the spring the law got me, my father got me, and so on that June day when Katie walked down the driveway to talk to me, instead of being in town with the rest of the family I was crawling in the dirt of the vegetable garden. By that age I had learned to be ashamed of my father for being a hick, I was slightly ashamed of myself for being a hick, I was disgusted with myself for the way things had turned out with the law, and I was thoroughly ashamed of my clothes, a faded blue shirt, frayed Levis, clodhopper shoes-just the clothes my children might have preferred. And worst, an old felt hat which my father had worn out and passed on to me, sweat-stained and shapeless, dirty, a disgrace. |