almost forcing him to fuck me. I had to wait to get paid. After that first time, pop made me swear again and again that I wouldn't tell. He said if I toki they'd put him in jail and send me to the girl's reform school where they had an electric whipping machine. They strapped you in a bed, bottom up, and turned on the electric whipping machine and it wore out four razor straps before it cut off. I said, 'Listen, I won't tell, but I think you'd better plan to do it again now and then-to keep me from being a bad gir! with boys.'
'You're a sensible girl,' he said. 'It's better to do it at home than out there where you can get into trouble.' My pop wasn't a great lover. He just liked to crawl on, after a little titty chewing, and put it in. Well, that suited me. But he also liked to do it from the rear. The second or third time we did it he turned me over and put my legs together. Then he rammed his huge, long cock into me from the rear, him on his knees, his thighs holding my little ass between them. I got nothing out of it and told him so. After that, I had my way of picking up a quarter now and then. When he'd want to screw I was ready, but I told him I wanted something out of it, too. So I'd balk at letting him do me from the rear. We arrived at a compromise. He'd get my rocks off once and then he'd do it from the rear, after me crying and making him promise me a quarter.
Then the quarters started cutting into his wine money and he stopped and it made me mad. Meanwhile, I was getting out and around more and more, having a little now and then with nice boys, and pop was a little jealous, although he was convinced that he was keeping me virgin by screwing me once or twice a week. He started trying to make me get home by ten o'clock and I revolted and he beat me. I told the welfare worker who came to check on us that my pop had 'taken advantage' of me. She, willing to believe anything of a degenerate like Juby, went ape and called in her superior and, meanwhile, I thought about Juby going to jail, me going off to a home, my poor old mom left alone.
I cried and told them I had just been mad at pop and that he was a good, Christian man who always told me to be a good girl and, although it was harder to make them believe that he hadn't screwed me than it had been to make them believe that he had, they finally give up, sort of pissed off because incest would have been a feather in their cap. I mean, if they could have proved incest, they'd have got their names in the papers and all and they were sorely disappointed when I wouldn't admit that Pop had been throwing it to me. I told them I was a virgin and didn't really know what I'd said that first time.
But the incident put the fear of God into Juby. He stopped laying me, except now and then when he'd be drunk and out of his skull, and when he was like that I'd pick his pockets afterwards, while he slept it off, and he got wise to that and decided, I guess, that it wasn't worth it. Meanwhile, Ruf was finding his own girls and I was going up into high school. I was soon a good girl at home, except on rare occasions, and getting mine from my boyfriends.
I screwed more boys and men before I was seventeen than I did between seventeen and eighteen. I mean, in high school, I discovered the value of reputation, and although a Gore couldn't have much reputation around Old Town, I went to work and got nice clothes and began to act like the Ail-American girl.
Up to this time, I discover, having reread what I've written, I haven't described myself. I matured early. I don't know how I did it without getting fat on our diet, but I did. And, in high school, I was five-six tall, weighed about one-twenty or twenty-five, had my figure, by the time I was sixteen, and grew up to that perfect figure of the glamour girl. I had dark hair, almost black. Ever noticed, when watching hillbilly shows, how the hillbilly girls always have a shock of hair like a horses mane? Well, that's the way mine is. I have a great head of hair. It's full and I can do anything with it. Any do comes easily to me. And once in place, it's so thick and heavy it'll hold anything.
At eighteen, and I have not added a pound or an inch since then, I was a real brunette, I mean, dark, dark. I had wide, big, surprised eyes. I learned to accentuate them with make up. My eyes give me a look of innocence. My nose is classic and trim. My face is rather like Natalie Woods's in shape, and I have the same delicateness of feature. My lips are nicer than hers, bigger and softer. And I'm naturally dark. My mother had some Indian in her and, probably, since most southern tribes were touched by the tar brush, maybe a little bit of Negro. At any rate, I tan beautifully and am often mistaken for. Italian, or Black Irish. My blue eyes help there.
I started learning how to handle myself under the tender instructions of Pearl Phelps, the Beauty Queen's friend and lover. And I've never stopped learning. Talk about body language, I make it a career. I mean, I can move and men almost come in their pants.
So I'm a blue eyed, delicate featured, dark haired knock-out. Why be modest? In recent years I've made up for the lack of a good diet in my youth by eating only the healthiest of foods, limiting my intake of sweets, alcohol, starches. I like organic foods when I can get them. (A lot of my intake is organic in another sense, ha.)
So that's me, and my background, I'd guess that the odds of Ruby Gore making something of herself must have been five billion to one. Poor, white trashy, incestuous, amoral, you name it. That was me. And then I bribed the football team into making me Home Coming Queen, walked on old man Worth's cock and made him come and got to be Miss Mackerel, for Christ's sake, met Pearl Phelps and found out that a girl can almost make a career of entering beauty contests.
But let's get back to the Miss Mackerel contest, where it all began.
CHAPTER FOUR
Since old man Worth was Selena Smith's uncle, the smart money was on Selena. Old man Worth ran the Mackerel Festival and almost hand-picked his Queen, although they went through the motions of having judges. Of course, if anyone had stopped to think that Pearl Phelps was helping me, they might have realized something was up, because Pearl always picked winners.
The festival wasn't much. Girls from all over the country were elegible to enter and we had a field of about fifteen, including miss Sweet Pants Selena. There wasn't any talent contest, because most of those country chicks had none and my talent wasn't suitable for public display. We walked onto the stage and turned around in gowns, bathing suits and business suits and the judges picked a girl from up country as second runner-up and Selena as first runner-up and, wow, me as Miss Mackerel and I went parading out the ramp in my gown with real tears in rny eyes, because that was me, Ruby Gore, up there with the people clapping and whistling and the flash bulbs going off and Pearl, back stage, hugging me after it was over and me in a crown with a few gilded fish on.it and then riding the float in the parade and being at the head chair at the banquet for wheels, which included His Honor, the Congressman, a little man with a nice smile and a shock of grey hair, He was about sixty, I'd guess, and he sat on my left while Old man Worth sat on my right. His Honor the Congressman couldn't keep his eyes off me and after the banquet there was a small party at old man Worth's nice house and Pearl came up to me, after everyone was feeling no pain and said, 'Honey, you don't have to do this.' 'What?'
'Him.' She pointed to His Honor the Congressman. 'Mr. Worth has hinted that it would be great for Old Town and the ashing industry and for him if you'd, uh, be nice to the Congressman.' 'What's in it for me?' I asked.
'No more than the Queen usually gets.' The Queen got a couple of trips, a thousand dollar scholarship and the clothes she'd been given. I shrugged.
He looked nice enough. He was thin. His gray hair was wavy in an old fashioned style. He had laugh wrinkles around his eyes and his mouth. 'Shit,' I said, 'I don't mind.' He looked a lot like the father I dreamed about when I imagined myself a different person living in a big house on the hill with automobiles and all the nice dresses I would want and people looking at me as I walked by and saying, there's Miss McRae, the rich man's daughter. You see, even then, I was getting away from being just plain Ruby Gore. I'd picked out this great name for myself, Kitsy McRae. I liked the sound of it It sounded like some movie star or model or some member of the jet set, you know?
I was seated next to the Congressman. He had been given the seat of honor, at the head of the table at a dinner for all the^festival big wheels. Old man Worth was on Ms right and I was on his left. His Honor smiled at me and complimented me on my winning and said that I was, indeed, a truly representative fiower of the old South, He was very polite during the talk and the meal, not doting on me or paying me undue attention, except once he put his hand down under the table and squeezed my thigh. I smiled back at him, to let him know it was all right.
Now you might think that running into two kinky old men when I was young and impressionable would have had an adverse effect on me. There was old man Worth, with his shoe fetish and me walking all over him and
