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agreed among themselves that Lord Byron must have been a great cocksman, but why he had bothered to write poetry they couldn't figure.
    While Mr. Cecil was trying to decide what poetry to read that day Sonny got Joe Bob Blanton's algebra homework and began to copy it. For a year or two it had been necessary to threaten to whip Joe Bob before he would hand over his problems, but in time he began to want to be popular and handed them over willingly. That morning, to everyone's surprise, he held up his .hand and got in an argument with Mr. Cecil over one of Keats' poems.
    "I read the one about the nightingale," he said. "It didn't sound so good to me. It sounded like he wanted to be a nightingale, and I think it's silly of all these poets to want to be something besides what the Lord made them. It's criticizing the Lord."
    Everybody snickered except Mr. Cecil. Joe Bob was sort of religion crazy, but nobody could blame him for it, considering the family he had. He was even a preacher himself, already: the summer before he had gone to church camp and got the call. Everybody figured Joe Bob had just done it to get a little extra attention from the girls at the church camp, but if that was it it sure backfired. So far as Brother Blanton was concerned the Lord's call was final: once you heard it you were a preacher forever. He started Joe Bob preaching sermons right away.
    Mr. Cecil never quite knew what to do when Joe Bob got started. "Oh, I don't really think he wanted to be a nightingale, Joe Bob," he said. "Maybe he just wanted to be immortal."
    Joe Bob was not satisfied with that either; he took out his pocket comb and slicked back his blond hair.
    "All you have to do to be immortal is lead a good Christian life," he said. "Anybody can do it if they love the Lord, and you can't do it by writing poems anyway:"
    "Maybe not, maybe not," Mr. Cecil said, chuckling a little. "Here, now let me read you this."
    He started reading the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but the class was not listening. Joe Bob, having said his say, had lost interest in the whole matter and was doing his chemistry. Duane was catching a little nap, and Jacy was studying her mouth in a little mirror she kept behind her English book—she had been considering changing her lipstick shade but didn't want to do so hastily. Sonny looked out the window, and Mr. Cecil read peacefully on until the bell rang.
    Civics class was next, a very popular class. Sonny and Duane had taken the precaution to sit in the back of the room, so they could cheat or sleep or do whatever they wanted to, but actually, in civics class, they could have done about as much if they had been sitting in the front row. Coach Popper taught civics—if what he did could be called teaching—and he could not have cared less what went on.
    Not only was the coach the dumbest teacher in school, he was also the laziest. Three days out of four he would go to sleep in class while he was trying to figure out some paragraph in the textbook. He didn't even know the Pledge of Allegiance, and some of the kids at least knew that. When he went to sleep, he never woke up until the bell rang, and the kids did just as they pleased. Duane usually took a nap, and Joe Bob made a big point of reading the Bible. The only girl in class was a big ugly junior named Agnes Bean; the boys who didn't have anything else to do teased her. Leroy Malone, Old Lady Malone's grandson, sat right behind Agnes and kept the class amused by popping her brassiere strap against her back. Once he made her so mad popping the strap that Agnes reached under the desk, slipped off her brogan shoe, and turned and cold-cocked him with it before he could get his guard up. His nose bled all over his desk and he had to get up and sneak down to the rest room and hold wet towels on it until it stopped.
    Another time, for meanness, the boys all ganged up on Joe Bob and stuck him out the window. They hung onto his ankles and let him dangle upside down a while,