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I don't need to drink my milk do I?
and Daddy signaled
No, honey
but Pearl blinked and wakened and intervened which was just like that woman, eyes in the back of her head when you didn't want it. “Clara, drink your milk. That's whole milk. That's expensive milk. You kids,” Pearl said, her voice rising dangerously, “have got to drink your milk you're going to get polio.” So Clara was sniveling, and Carleton said to leave the girl alone, and Pearl said, “They told us and told us, they told us ‘Give your children whole milk, they're going to get polio if you don't, going to be crippled if you don't,'
they told us.
”
    Carleton settled it by fishing the fly out of Clara's glass of milk with a spoon. Now, Clara could drink it, though making a sour face bad as Sharleen.
    The baby was crying louder. Rodwell was kicking up a storm.
    Carleton rose from the table. Crack in his ass like fire, and pinching pains in his back, between his shoulders, every damn joint in his legs. “Goin out for a while. Don't wait up.”
    Christ he needed fresh air: anywhere, to get out of here.
    His good friend Rafe, Rafe that was like a brother to Carleton Walpole, he'd be waiting for him. The two men deserved a few drinks in town, Rafe had a bitchy wife and kids, too.
    At the sink Carleton washed his hands. A lukewarm rust-tinged water emerged from the hand pump, he worked up a meager lather out of the gritty-gray 20 Mule Team bar of soap. Wiped his hands on his thighs, his work pants. Still a little wet, he wiped them on his hair, smoothing it straight back from his forehead, caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror Pearl had taped to the wall: except for his stubbly jaws, and a corkscrew-twist kind of look in the eyes like he was wanting to break somebody's ass, Carleton was surprised he looked so young, still. Women coming up to him in the tavern saying
You ain't from here, are you? You look like some mountain man.
    Carleton hugged Clara saying he'd bring her a bag of pretzels from town, be a good girl and clean up the dishes, and Clara hugged her daddy hard around the neck begging him to take her with him,and now Pearl was scolding, muttering it would be a cold day in Hell he'd bring them anywhere except the fields or the bus to make them work like niggers in a chain gang, and Carleton raised his fist to quiet her, and Pearl laughed at him, and Carleton set Clara aside to deal with Pearl, and Pearl snatched up the bawling baby out of the cardboard crib saying, “Go ahead! Hit us! Hit your flesh and blood, go ahead, coward!” But Carleton would not, and hastily departed the cabin, and Clara was in the doorway calling after him, “Dad-dy! Dad-dy!” like her little heart would break.

    It was almost twilight. So far south, this godforsaken whitetrash-and-spic state, the sun was big and bloody like a spoilt egg yolk leaking down into the flat scrub horizon, seemed like it would never get night. Every day was like every other day like for Christ sake somebody'd torn out his eyelids. Couldn't shut his eyes. Sunlight slanting off the packing sheds and piercing his brain. Pounding sun on his head through the crappy straw hat. Gabble of spics—Mexicans—dark-skinned as Indians, but not like niggers, their hair wasn't nigger-hair and their lips and nose, not. Carleton felt how he and his kind were the freaks here, pale-haired, fair-skinned so they burnt instead of darkened, had to wear long sleeves in the field and long fuckin pants stiff with dirt. Still, this camp at Ocala was a damn lot better than the previous one outside Jacksonville where they'd lived in tents. When it rained the tents bunched up with water, leaked and caved in. Mud everywhere. Mud, flies, fleas and them flying roaches big as bats: palmetto bugs. In the Sunshine State, that was your major crop.
    Anyway here they lived in tar-paper shanties, that got hot but not so wet. Heat you get used to. The other day Carleton had been questioned by some Jew-looking man with glasses