Bad Boy by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online

exercise, coupled with the cold water, so calmed my relatives that they at last thought to relatch the lock on the mill. I was able to swing back to the platform, and thence descend to earth where, everything considered, I got off pretty lightly since everyone was exhausted.

8
    M y sister Freddie was born during a severe economic depression. It was a hard winter for the nation in general and for the Thompsons in particular. Pop had begun to dabble in the oil business, and not very profitably. Mom was in the hospital much of the time.
    Our house had twelve rooms (Pop had felt that we needed something larger with the advent of Freddie), and the fires of hell couldn’t have kept it warm. The plumbing was constantly freezing and bursting. I froze and burst out with cold sores which my schoolmates promptly diagnosed as cancer. Looking back, I find my cold sores to have been the one cheerful facet of that winter. I had but to wave my festered hands and the toughest bully in school fled before me shrieking.
    There were repercussions with my recovery, but even these worked out to my advantage. I got a great deal of splendid exercise in racing up alleys and shinnying over back fences. My reflexes became trigger quick. Without losing the look and the feel of it, much of my awkwardness disappeared.
    To take Mom’s place while she was in the hospital Pop hired a woman who, with undeserved generosity, shall be known herein as Mrs. Cole. A large puffy woman with a ragged topknot of walnut-stained hair, she was the indigent relative of some friend of Pop. That was all the recommendation he needed.
    I came home from school one night and found her lying on the lounge in the front room. She was wearing house slippers and a shapeless mother-hubbard. She waved at me limply and remained prone.
    “Let’s see, now,” she said. “You’re Johnnie, ain’t you?”
    “Huh-uh. I’m Jimmie.”
    “You hadn’t ought to say huh-uh, Johnnie. You ought to say yes ma’am and no ma’am.”
    “Why?” I said.
    Mrs. Cole frowned slightly but made no answer. She intended, apparently, to make friends with me. “I got awful bad rheumatism, Johnnie. I can’t do much. You’re sure going to help me a lot, ain’t you?”
    I said I guessed I was. “What you want done?”
    “Help me set up, Johnnie.”
    I took her by the hands and helped her to sit erect. Groaning and panting prodigiously, she got to her feet. With a kind of funny feeling in my throat, I watched her go into Mom’s room and close the door.
    After a few minutes she came out, smelling strongly of medicine or something, moving much more spryly. Maxine came in and was put through the same rigmarole that I had been. At first Maxine said no, she wasn’t going to be a good girl and help a lot. Then she said maybe she would.
    “What time does your pappy come home?” Mrs. Cole inquired. And learning that he was due any minute, she went into the kitchen. When Pop arrived she was setting the table, obviously suppressing great pain.
    Pop was impressed and alarmed. “You’d better sit down awhile,” he suggested. “There’s no hurry about supper.”
    “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Cole in a piteous voice.
    “But you’re sick. Do you want me to get a doctor?”
    Mrs. Cole said she was past the point of being aided by doctors. “I’ll be all right, Mr. Thompson. I been sufferin’ for twenty years and I reckon I can stand a few more. Don’t you worry none. I ain’t going to be no burden on you.”
    “Why, of course you won’t be,” Pop declared warmly. “You just sit down, now, and I’ll fix things. Jimmie, run down to the store and get some beans, peas, corn, catsup and…”
    He and Mrs. Cole ate about a quart each of the “succotash.” Maxine and I sopped up a little of the juice with some bread. Afterwards, we went to the store and charged a chocolate pie and a pound of wienies, and ate sitting out on the steps.
    Pop had to leave town for a few days early the next morning. He did