Whatever the reason, it seemed that just about everyone in Welch—men,
women, boys, girls—liked to fight.
There were street brawls, bar stabbings, parking-lot beatings, wife
slappings, and toddler whalings. Sometimes it was simply a matter of
someone throwing a stray punch, and it would all be over before you
knew it had started. Other times it would be more like a twelve-round
prizefight, with spectators cheering on the bloody, sweating opponents.
Then there were the grudges and feuds that went on for years, a couple of
brothers beating up some guy because back in the fifties his father had
beaten up their father, a woman shooting her best friend for sleeping
with her husband and the best friend's brother then stabbing the husband.
You'd walk down McDowell Street, and half the people you passed
seemed to be nursing an injury sustained in local combat. There were
shiners, split lips, swollen cheekbones, bruised arms, scraped knuckles,
and bitten earlobes. We had lived in some pretty scrappy places back in
the desert, but Mom said Welch was the fightingest town she'd ever seen.
Brian and Lori and Maureen and I got into more fights than most kids.
Dinitia Hewitt and her friends were only the first in a whole line of little
gangs who did battle with one or more of us. Other kids wanted to fight
us because we had red hair, because Dad was a drunk, because we wore
rags and didn't take as many baths as we should have, because we lived
in a falling-down house that was partly painted yellow and had a pit
filled with garbage, because they'd go by our dark house at night and see
that we couldn't even afford electricity.
But we always fought back, usually as a team. Our most spectacular
fight, and our most audacious tactical victory—the Battle of Little
Hobart Street—took place against Ernie Goad and his friends when I was
ten and Brian was nine. Ernie Goad was a pug-nosed, thick-necked kid
who had little eyes set practically on the sides of his head, like a whale.
He acted as if it was his sworn mission to drive the Walls family out of
town. It started one day when I was playing with some other kids on the