The fact was, I guess, that he just couldn’t stand for me to be any good. If I was any good, then I couldn’t be the low-down monster that had killed my own mother in getting born. And I had to be that. He had to have someone to blame.

I don’t fault him much for it any more, because I’ve seen a lot of people pretty much like he was. People looking for easy answers to big problems. People that blame the Jews or the colored folks for all the bad things that happen to ‘em. People that can’t realize that a heck of a lot of things are bound to go wrong in a world as big as this one. And if there is any answer to why it’s that way—and there ain’t always—why, it’s probably not just one answer by itself, but thousands of answers.

But that’s the way my daddy was—like those people. They buy some book by a fella that don’t know a god-dang thing more than they do (or he wouldn’t be having to write books). And that’s supposed to set ‘em straight about everything. Or they buy themselves a bottle of pills. Or they say the whole trouble is with other folks, and the only thing to do is to get rid of ‘em. Or they claim we got to war with another country. Or . . . or God knows what all.

Anyway, that’s how my daddy was. That’s the way I grew up. It’s no wonder, I reckon, that me and the girls always got along so well. I reckon I really worked at getting along with ‘em; sort of made a trade out of it without really knowing I was doing it. Because a fella has to have someone that likes him. He just naturally has to. And girls are just naturally inclined to like a man.

I guess when you come right down to it, I was making the same mistake that those people I was talking about make. Because there ain’t no bigger problem than love, nothing is truly hard to come by, and I was looking for an easy answer to it.

7

Well, sir, danged if I hadn’t got back to Pottsville on just about the darkest night of the year. It was so dark that I could have had a firefly sitting on my nose and I wouldn’t have been able to see it.

Of course, the dark didn’t really bother me. The way I knew every nook and cranny of Pottsville, I could get to wherever I wanted to go if I was walking in my sleep. So the dark was really an advantage to me, rather than otherwise. If anyone was up and around, and of course there wouldn’t be at that time of night, they wouldn’t see where I was going and wonder why I was going there.

I walked right down the dark middle of Main Street. I turned south at the end of it, and headed toward the river. There was just a speck of light down that way, sort of a little blob bulging up out of the darkness. I figured it came from the whorehouse, or rather from the little pier behind it. Those two pimps would be sitting out there, I knew, taking the night air and drinking themselves stiff.