Bad Boy Read Free Page B

solve this immediate difficulty, then go on to improve and expand his learning in every possible field.
    Somehow, he managed to acquire the funds necessary for correspondence courses in law and accounting. During every minute he had free from drudgery, he studied. After some two years, he received an LL.B. degree by mail, as well as a certificate as an expert accountant. Meanwhile, he had got in touch with former intimates in Oklahoma. Feeling toward him had died down. If he wanted to come back, they’d stake him to expenses and also go his bond while he was fighting the case.
    Pop went back. He audited his own accounts and then argued his own case in court. He proved that not only did he owe the county nothing but that the county actually owed him several thousand dollars.
    Eventually, he became attorney and official accountant for the Oklahoma Peace Officers Association and developed a large private practice. But even when he was well on the road to success, his open-handedness and his reluctance to dun a client brought on long periods of financial destitution. During such times, Mom, Maxine and I resumed a practice we had begun when he fled to Mexico.
    We went to live with Mom’s folks in a Nebraska country town.

6
    I could say a great deal about the unpleasant features of living with relatives, of living in a gossipy small town where everyone knows your circumstances and has little else to talk about. But I have brooded overlong about these matters in other books (and out of them); so let us dismiss them with the statement that they did exist. Along with everything else, I often managed to have a wonderfully amusing time.
    For this, for the attitude which enabled me to have it, I am largely indebted to my Grandfather Myers, the most profane, acid-tongued, harsh, kind, delightful man I ever knew.
    I recall an evening when my ultra-pious grandmother had dragged me to a country revival meeting, and I lay shivering in my dark bedroom afterwards. I was too terrified to sleep. I was certain that my six-odd years of life—all spent in sinning from the preacher’s standpoint—had earned me one of the hotter spots in hell, and that I would certainly be snatched there before morning.
    Then, though I had made no sound—I knew damned well what my grandmother would do if I waked her up—my grandfather crept in in his undershirt and trousers. “Can’t sleep, huh?” he jeered, in a harsh, mocking whisper. “Let some goddam fool scare the pee out of you, huh? Well, goddam, if you ain’t a fine one!”
    He ordered me into my overalls and led me out of the house, pausing in the kitchen where he picked up a pint cup of whiskey toddy which he always kept warming on the back of the stove. We went out into the back yard and sat down on the boardwalk to the privy. There, after each of us had had a mighty sip of toddy and I had been allowed a few puffs from his Pittsburgh stogie, he delivered himself of a lecture.
    I cannot repeat it here, his acidly profane yet somehow hilarious discourse on certain types of religionists and the insanity of taking them seriously. Suffice it to say that, coupled with the toddy, it sent me into muffled gales of giggles. It sent me smiling to sleep, and left me smiling in the morning.
    Having suffered the cruelest of childhoods himself, my grandfather believed that anything that contributed to a child’s peace of mind was good, and that anything that disturbed that peace was bad. I hold to that same belief. It is one of the very few things I do believe.
    Grandfather, or “Pa” as he was known to the entire clan, was an old man from my earliest recollection—just how old even he did not know. Orphaned shortly after birth in a period of indifferent vital statistics, he had been handed around from one family to another, worked always, fed seldom, and beaten frequently. For all that his memory could tell him he had been born big, raw-boned and doing a man’s work.
    He might have been fifteen when he