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“main”; it’s just what we called the line of businesses along Highway 95, the two-lane road that ran hundreds of miles down the middle of the state. There wasn’t much in the way of businesses along the main drag: a motel with most of the fourteen one-room units rented out to locals, a general store, two gas stations, three bars, and two restaurants. The only institutes of significance in the town were the three-room school and the whorehouse.
    An old-timer had left property to build a better school, but it was across the tracks, near the whorehouse. The choice was between the whorehouse or the new school and the locals decided on the whorehouse because it paid a good chunk of the taxes in Mineral County, which says a lot about Nevada. Mineral County covered nearly four thousand square miles, three times the size of Rhode Island, and had only about six thousand people, about a third of whom lived in Hawthorne, the county seat.
    â€œWhen a girl has a period,” Gibbs told me and Gleason as we walked toward the main drag, “that means she’s ready to get pregnant.”
    â€œNancy Barr’s gonna have a baby?” Gleason asked.
    Gleason was also in the seventh grade, but he was a puny, four-eyed runt with skin so pale we called him “polar bear.” Unlike Gibbs, who was an authority on sex, and me, who knew just about everything else, Gleason only knew book stuff, which meant he didn’t know shit from Shinola.
    â€œNo, numb nuts, she’s not pregnant. But the bleeding comes when a girl’s old enough to get married and have kids. Now she’s ready any time a guy sticks his boner in her.”
    â€œNancy’s getting married?”
    Gibbs lifted his eyebrows and I swatted Gleason on the back of the head. “Don’t think about it, okay? Your dad say it’s okay we ride on the train?” Gleason’s father worked for the railroad.
    â€œYeah,” Gleason said. “My dad’s letting us ride in the caboose.”
    Gleason headed up the street to Wilson’s Motor Court, where he lived with his mom and dad in a one-room cabin, and I huddled with Gibbs for a moment.

    â€œDid you get the pamphlets?” he asked.
    â€œI’m getting them. MaryJane said she’d have them.”
    MaryJane was the madam who ran the Pink Lady, the town’s whorehouse, across the highway and the rail tracks that paralleled the road. I also lived across the tracks, in a three-room shack with my mother, Betty, and her boyfriend. We hadn’t discussed the pamphlets in front of Gleason because he wasn’t as tough as me and Gibbs. The little yellow belly would get scared and tell his mom and spoil it for us to make some money in Hawthorne. MaryJane was giving me sheets advertising the Pink Lady because I told her a man who worked on the train was going to pass them out in Hawthorne. But Gibbs and I were going to do it.
    â€œA hundred sheets at ten cents a sheet means ten dollars; seven for me and three for you.”
    â€œWow, that’s cool,” Gibbs said.
    Three dollars was more money than Gibbs ever had in his pocket at one time. I got the bigger cut because the Pink Lady was my personal contact.
    Gibbs and I split at the corner. I headed down the main street, passing the barbershop. The old guy waved at me from where he was reading the paper in his barber chair and I waved back. I didn’t like the guy much. He liked to talk about the size of a boy’s dick as he cut your hair.
    At the café, Betty was standing at the end of the counter in her white blouse, black skirt, and white nurse’s shoes. A coffee cup with red lipstick smeared on the rim and a cigarette burning in an ashtray were in front of her.
    Betty always looked the same to me, even though she was pretty old, about thirty-four. All the kids at school said she was the prettiest woman in town, though some of the mothers didn’t like her. Women were jealous of her