Free Gump & Co. by Winston Groom Page B

here that I want to show my gratitude by cutting you in on one third of our profits. Now, how about that?’
    Well, I was kind of surprised, but it sounded pretty good, an I tole him so.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    Finally the time come for little Forrest to go back to school. I was not lookin forward to it, but it had to be. The leafs was just beginnin to turn on the sycamore trees when I carried him to the train station in the truck. Wanda was ridin in the back, account of she was too big now for the cab.
    ‘I want to ask you somethin,’ little Forrest says.
    ‘What is that?’
    ‘It’s about Wanda. I mean, you ain’t gonna . . .’
    ‘Oh, no – no, I ain’t gonna do anythin like that. I think we’ll keep her on here as a brood hog, you know? She’ll be fine.’
    ‘You promise?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Well, thanks.’
    ‘I want you to be good when you get home, hear? An do what your grandma tells you, okay?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He just set there lookin out the winder, an I got the feelin there was somethin wrong.
    ‘You ain’t unhappy about anythin, is you?’
    ‘Well, I was sort of wondering, why can’t I just stay here and help run the hog farm?’
    ‘Cause you too young, an you gotta go back to school. We’ll see about that later, you know? But it ain’t time right now, okay. Maybe you can come back for Christmas or somethin, huh?’
    ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’
    We got to the station an little Forrest gone around to the back of the pickup truck an got Wanda down. We set on the depot platform, an he was huggin her around the neck an kind of talkin to her, an I felt real sorry for him. But I knowed I was doin the right thing. Anyhow, the train come along an he hugged Wanda one last time an got on board. Him an me, we just shook hands, an I watched him through the winderas the train pulled out. He give me an Wanda a little wave, an then we gone on back to the farm.
    Well, let me say this: The days that follered was crazy, an Mister McGivver, he was busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kickin contest! First, he done expanded the hog breedin operation tenfold. He is even
buyin
hogs from all over, an so in the months that come, we has got upward of fifty or sixty thousan hogs – they is so many of them, we lost count. But it don’t matter, cause the more hogs we got, the more methane gas we produce, an by now we is not only lightin up Coalville, but two other little towns down the road. People from the federal government up at Washington says they is gonna use us as a model example an even want to give us an award ceremony.
    Next, Mister McGivver has gone to work on the project of buildin the pig-shit fleet, an almost within no time, he has got three huge ships under construction over on the Atlantic Ocean at Norfolk, Virginia. This is where he spends so much of his time now, he has left most of the hog farmin bidness to me. Also, we has had to employ about a hundrit workers from the town, which was a great relief to them, as most was out-of-work miners.
    Furthermore, Mister McGivver has expanded the hog-slop garbage collection to ever military base within three hundrit miles, an we is got fleets of trucks pickin up the garbage, an what we don’t use ourselfs, we sell to other farmers.
    ‘We are becoming a great national enterprise,’ Mister McGivver says, ‘but we are leveraged up to the hilt.’
    I ast him what that meant, an he says, ‘Debt, Gump, debt! We have had to borrow millions to build those ships and buy more land for the hog farm and trucks for the garbage operation. Sometimes at night I worry about goin broke, but we are in too deep now to quit. We aregonna have to expand the methane gas operation to meet expenses, and I’m afraid we’re gonna have to raise our prices.’
    I ast him what I could do to help.
    ‘Just keep shoveling shit fast as you can,’ he says.
    So that’s what I did.
    By the end of that fall, I figgered that we has got somewhere between eight hundrit thousan an one million