Summary: Chapter 8

His parents finally asleep, seventeen-year-old Joe silently shimmies down a rope that he has rigged outside his bedroom window. Scurrying into the barn, he puts on his new suit and consults his new watch, which he has forgotten to wind. Ready, he heads down to the road and waits for his date to pick him up in her car and take them to the dance.

Joe recalls how he first met the woman in town, accompanying his foster father on a trip to meet with a lawyer. When the consultation runs late, Mr. McEachern takes them to a dingy back-alley restaurant, staffed by a thirty-year-old waitress. After the two gulp down their food, Mr. McEachern tells Joe that the restaurant is the type of place he should always avoid and that he must never enter the establishment again. On the next trip to see the lawyer, Joe’s father gives him a dime. Joe immediately heads to the restaurant and orders pie and coffee from the same waitress. When he realizes he has enough only for the pie, the waitress covers for him when the proprietor’s wife notices.

Joe, unnerved by his sexual attraction to the waitress, avoids town and tries to lose himself in bouts of hard work. His father rewards his efforts by giving Joe a heifer. But Joe suddenly resumes his interest in going to town and accompanies his father on the next trip, carrying a half dollar that his foster mother has secretly given him. When he returns to the restaurant and tries to pay the nickel for the coffee he ordered last time, he is laughed at and quickly leaves, only to bump into Bobbie, the waitress, on the street. Two days later, Joe is early for the nighttime rendezvous that they have planned. Bobbie saunters up and tells him she is menstruating—a process that is not altogether familiar to the sheltered Joe. He strikes her and runs off, only to return a week later to drag her hastily into the bushes, where he has sex for the first time.

Soon, the two are seeing each other regularly, and Joe is stealing more and more money from his foster mother, all the while unaware that Bobbie is a prostitute whom the restaurant’s proprietors, Max and Mame, brought to town with them. Joe visits Bobbie at Max and Mame’s, where he is also given his first taste of alcohol. When he shows up to meet her on the street corner one evening and she does not appear, he goes to her window to discover she is entertaining another man inside. At their next meeting, he strikes her repeatedly before she calms him down and explains to him that she is a prostitute. Before long, Joe has been fully seduced into a life of carousing, and though his mother notices the missing money, his father still has no idea what his adopted son has been up to.

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