"Well excuse me, miss, but I don’t think you need to be talking like that."
She give him the evil stare. "Like what?"
"You know, using the 'f' word."
"The 'f' …? Shit. You some kind of friggin' preacher or something?"
"Don't have to be no preacher to know what's right and what ain't."
"Shoot. 'Fuck' don't mean nothin. It's just a noun you know, like 'rather'. Fucking great just means 'rather great', right? Don't mean 'sex' or nothing."
"It's vulgar."
She laughed in his face. He noticed she had nice teeth. He'd never seen inside her mouth before.
"Vulgar? Where'd you get a word like that, man? They use the fucking 'f' word around here like breathing. If there ain't a 'fuck' in the sentence nobody understands it."
"Them's men, and they got no class. You're a lady and when you use the 'f' word you sound cheap. It ain't necessary."
He got to see her teeth again.
"A lady? That's a friggin' good one. I ain't never been accused of that before."
"If it means the same as 'rather', then use 'rather' why don'cha?"
"Fuck."
"You're saying it deliberate now. I don't wanna listen no more."
"You ain't got no choice, pal. You're training me, remember? You gotta listen to my filthy mouth for two months. And I'll say any fucking thing I want. Thank you." She walked off, still with that big rude smile on her face.
It was true. He was training her. Some hope. No one said he had to like her, and that was just as well, cause he didn't. She was unrespectful, and ignorant. It riled him that Desire was giving his job, a job he'd taken seventeen years to fine tune, to this little girl with no ambition. And they'd given him just two months to turn the sow's ear into a silk purse.
By lunchtime she was still a sow's ear, and if anything she was even less silky than when he'd started working on her. When the lunch horn sounded, she didn't bother to eat nothing, just crawled onto a stack of packing cases and went to sleep.
Waldo watched her curl up like a plastic playing card on a hot grill. She all but vanished. Bore no relation to a body. She was just some thrown-out overall in the corner. He fathomed that his right leg had to weigh more'n she did. Didn't seem fair that; one person having too much of everything while another got nothing. Couldn't be no QCO in heaven.
Couldn't of been no QCO when they built Roundly's neither. It was a big biscuit box with little windows so far up the walls you couldn't see nothing but the pearly gates. Least you would of been able to if they'd ever cleaned them windows. They was so greasy you needed to have the lights on, even on sunny days.
The ceiling was about high enough you could stand old Liberty up inside and her torch wouldn't even scare the rafter-pigeons that shat all over the plant. All that upward space didn’t serve no purpose other than to make heating a waste of time in winter. All the ball making went on down on the ground.
It's funny, everybody in the world probably handled at least one pool, or billiard, or snooker ball in their lives.But you ask 'em how the things is made and I bet you they wouldn't have the first idea. Bet you don't even know. If this was one of them well-researched serious novels, I reckon we could spend a couple of chapters explaining it all, round about here. But this ain't that kind of book and I never worked there, so I got no idea how the hell they make the frigging things.