Ginny Gall полностью

But Baco knows she is lying even if he doesn’t especially care one way or the other and has no love for nigras that is sure, inconstant loafers, vexatious to one like him who can be depended on in the worst conditions, hurricane or fire, etc., to do what he is supposed to do. Let em learn to get the job done first, he thinks. But this too isn’t accurate and he knows it. He was brought up in the care of a negro man who could repair watches or stoves or automobiles or any form of working device, and he was the most intensified man he has ever known, Harwell Sims over to Taxus county, where Baco is from. There were others, smart and dumb; it was mixed as everything is. And besides, as Billy says, anybody’d move slow when backbreaking work is all he is ever headed to.

This is beside the point because Baco is still the one who stood in the hotel room behind the lawyers with the fat girl who seemed as if her blood had been drained out and replaced with shop poison and then she’d been set back on her feet and propelled by this streaming toxicant into the world to bring havoc to these eight boys. Well, you couldn’t do much about any of it. She had a way of speaking so filled with spite that you knew it was the spite itself she loved, the making of it and the stacking of it as high as she could get it, like a wall between her and what hurt her, stuff she didn’t talk about despite the ugliness she had no trouble revealing. And it didn’t matter because in a way everything she said was true. She had been defiled. All her life really. And she was a white woman who claimed that eight colored boys had raped her, and of course the doctor said somebody — some somebody — had recently enjoyed her favors. She also had a second on her motion. Hazel Fran. A scrawny duplicitous girl unable to read or write, a scatterbrained person hardly more capable than a child, if a child could have been as distracted and meager and without connection to human sociability as Hazel was. She clung to Lucille like a monkey to its mama. But he could see in her eyes the gray color of road dust that she was not telling the truth. Like a daunted child, it hurt her to lie. So he talked to her in a mild way, offering her bits of ginger candy from a little paper sack and speaking offhandedly of Jesus who was of course keeping a merciful eye on the proceedings, and he could tell she picked up on it. She liked the candy. But she too claimed that these boys had committed sexual battery. With thumb and two fingers she pulled down hard on her long nose like she wanted to pull it off, squeezing it at the end, and said, “You bet they went at it. Like some devil was gaining on them every second. It burned like fire.”