Free The Bad Seed by William March

me and belittle me like everybody else does. I’m used to it. I can take it. I know I’m nothing but a poor sharecropper.”
    “Listen, Leroy,” said Thelma patiently. “Don’t try to tell me them lies, because I know better. You never was a sharecropper; you never even lived in the country, like I did when I was a girl. Your papa wasn’t any sharecropper, either. Your papa was a long-shoreman, and you know that as well as I do. Your papa made good money doing it, too. Nobody went hungry or wanted for anything in your papa’s house. It’s a pity you didn’t turn out like him.”
    “I didn’t have a chance,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to accomplish nothing.”
    “You had chances. You had plenty chances. You’re lazy.”
    She fanned herself languidly, pulling down the yoke of her dress; then, thrusting her legs against the banisters, she went on to berate him for his laziness, his lying, his dirtiness, his unwillingness to play up to people who could help him along, her voice carrying well over the radio. The way he acted, the way he insulted people, was about as silly a way as a man could act. No wonder he was always losing his job. For instance, she knew some of the people at the Florabelle who he was always belittling, and they wasn’t no way at all like the way he said they was—that Mrs. Breedlove, for instance, was a real nice, jolly woman, and a kindhearted one, too. Maybe if he started doing nice things for people instead of griping all the time; maybe if—
    Then, in the middle of a sentence, she said quickly, as though bored with her own moral advice, “How about a can of beer before I start supper?” She got the beer and brought it to the porch. It was still not dark, and the children were playing a game in the backyard, a game that seemed to require a great deal of bickering and screaming. Their voices interfered with the music, and Thelma went into the house and turned up the radio a little more. “Jesus Christ!” said Leroy, draining his beer. “Can’t a manget no quietness even at home? If I catch them kids, I’ll tan the tar out of them.”
    “You won’t catch them, though,” said Thelma placidly. “Them kids run too fast.”
    It was then that Leroy repeated Rhoda’s remark about the death of the Daigle boy, and Thelma, laughing a little, threw her empty can high over the fence and into the street. She got up from her chair, pulled her dress away from her sweating buttocks, and said, “I think that was a real cute thing to say.”
    “That’s a real mean little girl,” said Leroy. “I never seen a little girl like that one in all my born days.” He got out his pipe, lit it, and smoked in silence, thinking how the other children who played in the park—them other ones that wasn’t mean—were all afraid of him, just like he wanted them to be. He could make them jump and run out of the park if he barked at them loud enough; he could even make the little girls cry, and run off to tell their mammas on him, although he had always got out of it so far by being humble, and saying it wasn’t so, or that the little girl had been acting ugly—like trampling down the flowers, or trying to scoop goldfish in the lily pond. But that little Rhoda Penmark he couldn’t make no impression on at all—at least not so far. But give him time and he would. Give him a little time and he’d make her jump and run from him like the others. He chuckled in anticipation of that pleasant day, and then, defiantly, he spat into his wife’s flower bed again.
    Thelma, slapping at mosquitoes with her palmetto fan, said, “Your papa made good money all his life. Your papa was a good provider. That I can say for him, and do so gladly.”
    “That little Rhoda Penmark is a mean little girl,” said Leroy aloud. “But one thing you can say for her, and it’s this: she don’t blab nothing. Anything that happens, happens between me and her.”
    “Listen to me,” said Thelma. “You leave that