Rodney Parish for Hire

Начало книги

There was going to be a sorry boy on Farrow Street, and Rodney Parish knew who it would be. It would be Rodney Parish, and he could already feel his Daddy’s strap across his fanny. He hurried on through the twilight.

He mumblingly darned the kids who had urged him to join them, illicitly swimming in the condemned pond behind the Chesapeake Lumber Company. He darned and double-darned them, because he had missed dinner, and Daddy got madder than anything when that happened; Rodney’s Parish’s Daddy used his big wide barber’s strap pretty often, and Rodney hated that, hated the hurting. It wasn’t worth the swimming. No indeed not!

In fact, he didn’t much like his Daddy, when it came right down to it.

It was as he crossed Euclid Avenue that he saw the accident. The big blue car came out of the side street without stopping, and roared into the yellow-and-gray car with a smashing roar that made Rodney jump and clutch at his ears.

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