Kindle Notes & Highlights
And then, suddenly, he choked and his face went white, and he started vomiting. … That’s when he really changed. He was never quite the same boy after that.
If a mother doesn’t know her own son, who does? Some teacher, a miss? Someone that’s never had a child in her life?
imagine I look quite as well as most women my age. As long as you’re clean and neat and respectable, that’s what counts.
“Well, gosh,” he said. “Gee whiz, Mom!”
I do not recall that kids looked that way in my day. I think it must be the times, this age we live in, when the reasons for existence are lost in the struggle to exist.
No paper in the Star chain would have quoted him or printed his name if he’d sailed the Atlantic in a salad bowl, so I passed him by.
That kid… Jesus, this was going to be pretty bad for him! But—well, I hadn’t invented anything, had I? I hadn’t exaggerated? No (I answered myself), I hadn’t. The dirt was there, and I’d dug for it. Dug pretty hard. But I hadn’t put a gun to anyone’s head. I’d simply talked and let them talk, spilling out the dirt that was in them.
I don’t need to take anyone’s word for what’s right. I can tell them. Because I’m a newspaper man, get me? An all around, two-handed man. It’s all I’ve ever done, all I ever want to do. Take me away from newspapers and I’d die, and I’d want to die. And you can’t understand that, can you, Skysmith? You can’t because you’re not a newspaper man. You’re just a punk who got the breaks. A college boy who lucked himself into a Pulitzer and rode it for all it was worth.
“Kossy’s all right,” Charlie said. “He’s one good Jew if you ask me.” “What you got to say a thing like that for?” I said. “He can’t help it if he’s a Jew, can he? What’s wrong with being a Jew?”
All I’m saying is that you sweated that kid until he didn’t know his ass from an adding machine. He’d have sworn that he killed Christ if you told him to.”
“I’ll get him off, Clint,” I said. “I’ll get a verdict or a dismissal. You ain’t got a God damn thing but the confession, and I’ll rip it to pieces. It’ll have more holes in it than a whores’ convention.”
For the law has changed, but people have not. They are still lingering back in the shadows; thumbs turned down on the fallen, hustling wood for the witchburner, donning their bedsheets and boots at the first smell of blood.
I wonder why it is that supposedly intelligent men, men of at least better-than-average intelligence, will always marry the stupidest women they can find.
