If you want to win a fight kick a man in the balls. It ain’t real fighting in the movies. They got bottles that break easy. A king beats a queen a queen beats an ace an ace beats everything. If you shake a pinball machine too hard you’ll tilt it.

Stars are cold so’s the moon. The sun’s hot. Hotter than hell. It can cook you just like that. Don’t drink out of cricks ’cause cows shit in them. If your kid has asthma stick a lock of his hair in a hole in a sourwood tree a little higher up than the kid is tall. When the boy grows taller than the hole his asthma’ll be gone.

Some people are sad and some ain’t. Jesse’s sad. He got sad when Claudine got dusted and stayed that way. Daddy was happy most the time. Mama was happy. I’m happy except when the Little Devil starts in. He ain’t happy nor sad nor mean nor nice. All he is is hungry or not hungry. He’s nothing but need and teeth and claws.

I saved a dog once and I saved a man.

The dog belonged to Mr. Sayre. I was hunting crawdads down by the crick and I heard some pitiful howling and whining. I first thought to run home but said to myself, You ain’t yella, and snuck to the noise keeping well hid.

Mr. Sayre’s pup Queenie had one of her paws stuck in a beaver trap. She was crying and thrashing and snapped at me when I come close. I had the idea to use the tow sack I was carrying for the crawdads to cover her muzzle so she couldn’t get at me. She took off when I sprung her and run crying all the way back to Mr. Sayre’s house. He give me a dollar coin and a bag of peppermint sucks for setting her free and said she’d’ve died if I didn’t come along. Her leg was broke too bad to fix but she got around fine on three.

The man I saved was a miner that turned up missing at the end of a shift. A wop named Scalo. The bossman called everybody in to search. Daddy wasn’t none too happy about it. Said, The bastard’s probably drunk in some tavern.

He was pulling on his boots getting ready to go and I was playing with ants on the porch drawing a finger across their trail to watch them scatter when a blackness come crashing down on me. Daylight turned dark and I thought I’d been struck blind but little by little like they do when you go from inside to out at night my eyes started working again. Only I wasn’t on the porch no more I was down in the mine.