The Backwoods

“I am?”

“—and I’ve seen you on the line a lot. One of the hardest workers at the picking den. That’s what I told my wife.”

“Bet’cher just sayin’ that,” she toyed. “Why, I bet ya don’t even know my name, even though you do the pay envelopes every week.”

“Of course I remember your name,” Dwayne insisted, still cossetting her breasts, but then he thought, Fuck? What’s this hosebag’s name? “Uh . . .” He paused. “Sunny, right?”

“Close,” she told him, seeming at least pleased by that. “It’s Cindy. Least, that’s what I’m called mostly.”

Dwayne didn’t really give a flying shit what her name was . . . yet the comment nagged him. “What’cha mean, mostly? It’s either your name or it ain’t.”

“It ain’t my clan name. It’s awful.”

He worked her breasts harder, with more focus. “What’s your clan name, then?”

“I ain’t tellin’!” She seemed ashamed. “You’d laugh!”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Everd says when we’re ’round local folks, we use our other names; we only use our clan names around ourselves. Everd says it’s easier for us to fit in. We all know we don’t fit in with ya all.”

Dwayne was only worried about one thing fitting in, and it had nothing to do with names. But the man she referred to—Everd Stanherd—was a strange coot indeed. He was the clan’s elder, the wise man, so to speak, for all the Squatters. The fucker claimed to be sixty but he looked eighty . . . except for his hair. Not a gray hair on his head anywhere, just jet-black. All the clan had weird shiny jet-black hair, even the older women. Dwayne couldn’t see folks like this using hair dye.

“You feel really good . . . Cindy,” he guttered. As his own arousal steepened, the dense chorus of cicadas seemed nearly deafening. Now his hands roamed all over—she felt tiny in them, the lithe frame, the reed-thin physique almost disproportionate to breasts firm and full as the popovers Judy made on holidays—and just as warm.

Playtime was over; Dwayne was more than ready behind the zipper. He urged her through trees hanging with mops of Spanish moss, sort of pushing her along with his groin, and his fingers slid back up to her nipples. She was panting when he got her to the clearing.

“Yeah, right here,” he said. He turned her around, placing her hands on his belt, telegraphing that it was time for her to take off his pants.

Now her words sounded parched from desire. “You sure you don’t wanna go back to my shack?” she almost pleaded.

His jeans fell down. ?Naw.?

“It’d be lots more comfortable. What’s so special about this place?”

Dwayne dragged her down into the dirt, and as he pushed her knees to her ears, his thoughts answered her question: This place? It’s only about ten feet from where I dug the hole last night. . . .

(I)

I wonder how he died, came the spontaneous thought. Even as a lawyer, Patricia White never imagined herself to be capable of such mental ill will, but here it was, secretly staring her in the face. Her promotion couldn’t have been farther from her mind, nor the idea of so much extra income via the profit sharing. No, there were only these fleeting thoughts of darkness and morbidity. Judy said he’d been murdered but she didn’t say how. The next question bloomed as she gazed numbly at a series of Ming Dynasty-styled statues:

I wonder . . . how. . . .

Yes. Exactly how had her sister’s husband been murdered? What circumstances? And what modus? Gun? Knife? Bludgeoning?

Then: I’d better get my head back on straight, before my own husband thinks I’ve completely flaked out.

Byron sat across the table from her, trying not to look like he noticed her distraction. His first tack—when he knew something was bothering her—was to get her talking from any tangent available. “I’m not yet sure if this is the best Chinese restaurant in town,” he said, “but I’m prepared to proclaim even at this early interval that it’s the best-smelling Chinese restaurant in town.”

So deep was Patricia White’s distraction that she hadn’t noticed until he’d mentioned it, but when she did, her eyes widened. Slim Asian waitresses scurried back and forth, bearing huge trays of food that seemed to draw aromatic banners throughout the restaurant. “Oh, Byron, wow. You’re right. The aromas here are almost . . .”

His broad face widened as he grinned. “Erotic.”

“You would say that, Mr. Perverted Food Critic.”

He splayed his hands over the soup bowl that had until a moment ago been filled with shark-fin soup. “Good food is supposed to involve a sensual reaction; it has since early man began cooking. I see nothing perverted about it.”

She couldn’t help it, leaning over to whisper, “Except for maybe the time when we were in L.A., and you insisted on bringing the slice of Chocolate Martini Cheesecake home from Spago’s and eating it off my stomach when we got back to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“Um-hmm. And I think I can honestly describe your reaction to that as particularly sensual. And don’t forget, Mrs. Perverted Power Attorney, what you did with the whipped cream first.”

Patricia blushed immediately. How had she forgotten that part? More wonderful aromas rose to her face when their own entrees arrived: tangy sauces and elaborate spices and herbs carried upward in steam.

“So before we dig into our northern-China feast,” Byron said, “why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?”

Why not just say it? “I feel bad,” Patricia admitted, “for not feeling . . . bad.” Her eyes glanced up from the exorbitant plate of seared langoustines in shallot sprouts. Her normally stable gaze was confused now. “Does that make any sense?” she asked.

Byron’s chopsticks stalled as he would have plucked up a strip of flash-fired abalone, his broad face contemplative in candlelight. “Honey, in this case it makes perfect sense. It’s hard to put into words because we’re not supposed to speak badly of the dead. That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

“Yes . . .” She set down her own chopsticks on the porcelain prop. The circumstances were obviously killing both their appetites, which was a shame in such an upscale restaurant known for such exotic cuisine. “Part of me feels so bad for Judy, but most of me feels . . . Oh, damn it. I feel like such a shit heel for even thinking it.”

“Let me finish for you; tell me if I’m on track. Most of you feels good for Judy, because she’s too good a person to be married to a guy like Dwayne. Dwayne was a pretty crappy person. He was a liar and a criminal and a con man, and now he’s dead. And some part of you is glad he’s dead. And you feel guilty about that. I do too a little, but I’m also glad he’s dead. Nobody ever liked that guy. I only met him that one time, and I could tell at a glance that he was a shifty redneck who only married your sister to make his own life better. He was causing her great grief that she didn’t deserve. He used to slap her around, for God’s sake. Well, now he can’t do that anymore. All in all, Dwayne’s getting killed was a good thing. The world’s a better place without him, and Judy is better off.”

“I know,” Patricia confessed, ?but—?

“But she’s your sister,” Byron continued, “and you love her and you know that you’re not supposed to feel happy that her husband is dead. A situation like this can never be simple.”

“She was always convinced that he’d change eventually, that it was just his background that kept him down—?

“Of course, because that was the only thing she could think to ever have hope. The truth is, guys like Dwayne don’t change. They’re predators till the day they die. You can blame environment or upbringing or bad education or whatever, and sometimes those really are factors that need to be considered. And sometimes they’re not. Dwayne was simply a bad person, and always would have been.”