A young country boy wearing dirty pink and black clothes and dusty black and white buck shoes came out of the store waving a bag of potato chips. He charged toward Pursley, complaining: “Mr. Pursley, this aint right! You charge me thirty nine cents for this big bag of chips. But, when I mashed them all up there was not enough to fill but even one corner of the bag. That seems like cheatin to me!” The boy poured the handful of potato chip fragments into his palm. Pursley looked at the boy and at us, shaking his head in silence as though to say: “There is nothing that you can do about country ignorance.”
He finally said, “I guess that ignorance was borned-in. It aint fun bein pore. When I was a kid we was so pore the only entertainment we had was burpin, hiccups and fartin. They did not cost nothin.”
JT went into the store to find some chewing gum. A boy of about thirteen sat on the counter. He was a thin young man with dark hair, light skin and dark freckles over his face and arms. He was reading a comic book and chewing gum at a furious pace. A light blue starched shirt was tucked inside his jeans. Highly noticeable, a long, fat roll seemed to be hiding under the pants leg of his jeans, a roll that traveled from his crotch almost to his knee. Now that is quite a tool, thought JT. The boy jumped down from the counter and took the money from JT and rang up the sale.
Outside, me and Pursley were talking. When JT walked up Pursley said: “Find ever thang you need?”
JT: “Yessir, the guy inside took my money”
Pursley cocked his head and said, “Now there is a funny feller, my son. He likes to play jokes on people. He sits on the counter so that women that come in can see the bulge in his crouch. Some of the women, they jaws drop open at the sight. That boy perfected his look by collecting Bull Durham tobacco sacks. He filled up one with tawlet paper and tied it around his pecker. ‘N’en he filled up another and attached it to the first one and so on. In the end, he got a string of full sacks hanging in a line down his leg, like he got a horse pecker. He ought to be a actor, he enjoys it so much!”
