No . . . I ain’t never heard of that one.

Horace, Horace, Horace. Do you have to talk so countrified? All three of your aunts teachers and you saying “ain’t”?

What should I say then, Mr. Perfect-Talking?

You should have said, “I haven’t never heard of that one.”

Well, what is it anyway?

What?

Funking.

Fucking!

Okay, fucking. What is it?

You know, silly. When a man and a woman do it.

“It”? What’s “it”? Do you mean sexual intercourse?

Jesus! Listen at him: “sexual intercourse.” Using them big fancy words and don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.

I do too. It’s when a man inserts his penis into a lady’s vagena and ejaculates spermazoa into her utertum and it grows up to be a fletus and then it get to be a baby. See?

Well, I don’t know about all that. All I know—and I know cause Perry told me—is that a man takes his dick and puts it in a woman’s pussy and they fuck. See?

A dic—what?

A dick, fool. Ain’t you never heard it call that before?

Wha-what is it?

This fool.

Shoot. And a pussy is . . .

Yeah.

Oh . . . and fucking is . . .

Yeah.

Oh. But why do folks do it?

Now ain’t you the dumb bunny. Perry says folks do it cause it’s the best feeling in the world.

Yeah?

That’s what he says.

Shoot.

But that had been elementary school, long before he discovered a far more complex truth about men and women. He thought of John Anthony now, the high-school letterman in three sports, surrounded by girls and the aura of bullish manhood, no longer the nearsighted little boy who dreamed of building space ships to Uranus. Now they would go weeks and months without seeing one another. When they did they would only exchange Hellos, How you doings, Let’s do something soons. Horace taking chemistry, trig, advanced English, and music theory; John Anthony taking auto mechanics, advanced P.E., drafting, and bricklaying.

Horace became obsessed with having a girl friend. He had had a feeling that if a girl saw something in him, perhaps the reflections of a man to be, perhaps irresistible cuteness, or perhaps just the fact that somebody nice liked him, somebody outside his family and church members, then he would be whole. He set out, while in the sixth grade, to catch a girl friend, more like a hunter after a deer than a cavalier after a maiden.