The Black Stiletto Read Free Page B

and I’d feed her. She didn’t really like me, though. I’d try to pet her and she’d hiss and run away. I stopped feeding her and she didn’t come around anymore.
    I barely knew my dad. When the war started, he enlisted. It was 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, and he went out and joined the navy. I was still pretty young—I was four—so the last image I had of him was him waving goodbye to us as he caught a bus to take him into town. From there he went to boot camp and then was shipped off to the Pacific somewhere. He was dead just a few months later, one of the three hundred or so Americans killed in the battle of Midway. So, I never saw him again.
    Things went downhill for us after that. Mom tried to make ends meet as best she could, but our family sank deeper into poverty. Looking back, I can see how bad it was, but at the time I was just a precocious little girl, always getting in trouble, rough housing with my brothers and their friends, and driving everyone crazy. By the time I started first grade at South Side Elementary,I could beat up most of the boys in the neighborhood if I wanted to. I was a tough little hellion.
    Around the time I did start school, we lived near the corner of Whitaker and 5th Street. It wasn’t a shantytown, but we weren’t far from one. The Negroes lived just a few blocks south from us, across the tracks. I was too young to let it bother me. I walked to school with my brothers—John was in sixth grade and Frank was in fourth when I started first. It was a crappy school, that’s for sure. Everyone who went there were oil field roughneck kids. No one with a whole lot of class, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have many friends in school. I was a social outcast. Too much of a tomboy for the girls and too much of a bully for the boys, ha ha!
    My best friends were my brothers, and it got to where they thought I was weird, too. Pretty funny when I think about it now. I loved my brothers, though. They usually stuck up for me when I got in trouble, which was a lot. Unfortunately, they didn’t stick up for me when I needed them the most, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive them for that.
    I guess people might say I was an angry child. I don’t know what I was so angry about. I just liked to pick fights. There was a lot of aggression inside me, a temper that could be ignited on cue. There still is. I was born with it and I needed some kind of outlet. It drove my mom insane, or at least it drove her to drink. Well, it probably wasn’t all my fault, but I know I was a handful for her. She did start drinking, though, after Dad died. She wasn’t much fun to be around.
    Despite all that, I was a good student. Learning just came naturally to me. I wasn’t so hot at math, but I enjoyed science and history. I was particularly good at reading and writing, which is why I kept a diary for a while. I found that I liked reading books, so if I wasn’t outside playing football with the boys, I was inside with the latest Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew adventure. I wasn’t into comics, but my brothers were. Every now and then, I’d lookat their Superman comics, but they just didn’t do it for me. I thought they were silly. I like my adventure yarns to be a little more credible, set in the real world. Early on I had trouble with the physical act of reading, so my mom took me to a doctor to have my eyes examined. I remember she wasn’t happy about paying the money for a pair of glasses, but I guess I needed them at the time. From then on, I saw perfectly—I just looked like an idiot. I hated wearing glasses and it only got me into more fights in the neighborhood when the other kids teased me.
    Life pretty much remained the same until I turned twelve. When puberty kicked in, strange things started happening to me. I don’t mean the usual strange things that happen to all girls—you know, starting periods and growing breasts and all that—but other stuff that wasn’t quite normal. For one