Read Out of Their Minds for Free Online

family background, naturally, and sometimes their manners are appalling, but they really aren’t vicious. They’re under all sorts of pressures—you can’t imagine what social pressures they are under …”
    He grinned at her, a snaggle-toothed grin that had grimness rather than good humor in it. “I know,” he said. “I know. You’ve told me this before, when they were in other scrapes. They’re rejected. I think that’s what you said.”
    â€œThat is right,” she told him. “Rejected by the other children and rejected by the town. They are left no dignity. When they come in here, I bet you keep an eye on them.”
    â€œYou are right; I do. They would steal me blind.”
    â€œHow do you know they would?”
    â€œI’ve caught them doing it.”
    â€œIt’s resentment,” she said. “They are striking back.”
    â€œNot at me, they ain’t. I never done a thing to them.”
    â€œPerhaps not you alone,” she said. “Not you personally. But you and everyone. They feel that every hand is raised against them. They know they aren’t wanted. They have no place in this community, not because of anything they’ve done, but because this community decided, long ago, that the family was no good. I think that’s the way you say it—the family is no good.”
    The store, I saw, had changed but little. There were new items on the shelves and there were items that were missing, but the shelves remained the same. The old round glass container that at one time had held a wheel of cheese was gone, but the old tobacco cutter that had been used to slice off squares of chewing tobacco still was bolted to the ledge back of the counter. In one far corner of the store stood a refrigerator case used for dairy goods (which explained, perhaps, the absence of the cheese box on the counter), but that was the only thing that had been really changed in the entire store. The potbellied stove still stood in its pan of sand at the center of the store and the same scarred chairs were ranged about it, polished from long sitting. Up toward the front was the same old pigeonholed compartment of mailboxes with the stamp window in the center of it and from the open door that led into the back came the redolent odor of livestock feed, stacked up in piles of burlap and paper bags.
    It was, I thought, as if I’d seen the place only yesterday and had come in this morning to be faintly surprised at the few changes which had been effected overnight.
    I turned around and stared out the dirt-streaked, fly-specked window at the street outside and here there were some changes. On the corner opposite the bank a lot, that I remembered as a vacant lot, now was occupied by a car repair shop thrown up of cement blocks and in front of it a single gas pump with the paint peeled off it. Next door to it was the barber shop, a tiny building that was in no way changed at all except that it seemed somewhat more dingy and in need of paint than I remembered it. And next to it the hardware store, so far as I could see, had not changed at all.
    Behind me the conversation apparently had reached its end and I turned around. The woman who had been talking with Duncan was walking toward the door. She was younger than I’d thought when I had seen her talking at the counter. She wore a gray jacket and skirt and her coal-black hair was pulled back tight against her head and knotted in the back. She wore glasses rimmed by some pale plastic and her face had upon it a look of worry and of anger, mixed. She walked with a smart, almost military, gait, and she had the look of a private secretary to a big executive—businesslike and curt and not about to brook any foolishness on the part of anyone.
    At the door she turned and asked Duncan, “You’re coming to the program tonight, aren’t you?”
    Duncan grinned with his snaggled teeth. “Haven’t