the skinny girl, holding her immobile. “Stop that!” she said. Vyra struggled in her grip for a few seconds. Then she started to cry.
Crystal Beth walked her over to the bed, arms still wrapped around her. She muscled Vyra onto the mattress, right next to me, holding her down with one shoulder, her hips over Vyra’s thighs. “Stop it,” she said again, kissing Vyra’s cheek. “Just stop it, now.”
Vyra went from sobbing to sniffling, then gulped a breath and shuddered down into silence. “Good baby,” Crystal Beth said softly to her. “That’s right.”
I got up and started to put my clothes on.
Crystal Beth unbuttoned Vyra’s blouse. Vyra sat up slightly so it could come off her shoulders.
I zipped up my jeans, grabbed my jacket off the back of the easy chair.
Crystal Beth whispered something to Vyra.
“I’ll bet he can’t,” Vyra giggled, unhooking her bra.
Crystal Beth turned her face toward me. “Stay there,” she said. Then to Vyra: “What do you want to bet?”
Vyra whispered something.
“No,” Crystal Beth said. “This.” And whispered something back to her.
I put one arm into my jacket.
“Please stay,” Crystal Beth said, sweetly this time. “Just sit in the chair for a few minutes, smoke a cigarette, okay? Just watch us. Then we can talk.”
I turned around and sat in the chair. Then I took my eyes out of focus and watched them through a soft filter as Crystal Beth helped Vyra undress. When it got to her shoes, Vyra put up a battle and they wrestled around for a while, but Crystal Beth finally wrenched them off and threw them across the room.
Then they made love, generous to each other.
It ended with Crystal Beth on her belly, face buried in a pillow, moaning softly, Vyra behind her, face buried in Crystal Beth. They let go at the same time, explosively. Then stayed softly locked together for a couple of minutes, just off the edge of passing out until . . .
Crystal Beth took her face out of the pillow and looked over her shoulder at Vyra. “I win,” she said, a happy laugh bubbling in her voice.
“Sleepy,” Vyra murmured, her face against Crystal Beth’s broad hip.
I covered them both with the sheet and went downstairs.
“You know how much this weighs?” Herk asked me. He was doing curls with some setup he’d jury-rigged from the supplies we’d laid in—two pairs of two-and-a-half-gallon plastic jugs of water threaded together with insulated wire through the handles and anchored with a piece of wood he used as a grip. He had one set in each hand.
“About forty pounds apiece,” I told him.
“How’d you know that, bro?” he asked, grunting rhythmically with each lift.
“Quart of water weighs about two pounds,” I said. “Four quarts to a gallon. That’s eight, right? Times two and a half is twenty. Double that and you got each hand.”
“No. I mean, I can do numbers. That kind, anyway. How’d you know what a quart weighs and all?”
“I don’t know, Herk,” I said honestly. I know stuff, stuff I read, stuff I heard. It’s all in there somewhere, mixed in so thick I could never separate it out.
“You know how big an acre is?” he asked me.
“About the size of a city block. The whole block, square.”
“Yeah!
“For farming?”
“Nah. I ain’t gonna be no farmer. Gardens, they ain’t like farms.”
“Because they’re smaller?”
“ ’Cause you do it all with your hands, gardening. Remember when they asked old Dante if he wanted to be a trusty, work outside on the grounds?”
“Yeah.”
“He wouldn’t do it, right?”
“Dante was old-school,” I said. “He thought all trusties were rats.”
“Maybe. But that wasn’t it,” Herk said, not breaking the rhythm of his curls, banded muscle popping out on his forearms. “You know what he told me? They had nice gardens outside. Flowers and all. But they worked the beds with those little tractors. Dante, he wouldn’t have none of that crap. He said, if you didn’t work it with your hands, you wasn’t a gardener, you was a farmer.”
“I got it.”
“He gonna go for it?” Herk asked.
I knew what he meant. Didn’t know the answer. Shrugged.
“But if he don’t, you got another plan, right?” the big man asked hopefully.
“Got a bunch of them,” I promised.
“Knock knock.” A woman’s voice at the head of the stairs. Herk and I both turned in the direction of the sound. And the click of spike heels on the steps.
Vyra popped into view, all dressed up again but with her hair piled on top of her head and the makeup gone.
“Can you come—?”
She stopped when she saw Hercules. He stood bare-chested, his long hair matted with sweat, frozen halfway through a curl, the bandage white against his skin. Over his heart, where the swastika lurked.
“Crystal Beth didn’t tell you to come downstairs, did she?” I asked mildly.
“She said to get you,” Vyra said, a defensive tone in her voice.
Hercules just stared at her.
“She said to
“Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it?” Vyra came back, standing with her hands on her hips.
I said
The big man carefully placed the water bottles on the basement floor, wiped his palms on the side of his jeans and walked over to where Vyra was standing. He held out his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said.
“Likewise.” She smiled.
“Those are beautiful shoes,” Herk said.
Vyra looked down at her feet. At the iridescent green high heels with a tiny dot of gold at the toes. Kept her head down while she said “Thank you” in a little girl’s happy-embarrassed voice.
I left them there.
“Now you know,” Crystal Beth said defiantly. As though she was expecting something bad. And was ready to deal with it.
“What is it that I know?”
“About me and Vyra. About what we . . . do.”
“So what?”
“So that’s what Pryce knows too. That’s what he knows that would end everything for her.”
“I don’t get it,” I told her, puzzled.
“Her husband. He would never . . . I don’t know if I can explain it to you. Men have . . . boundaries. Different ones for different men. He knows Vyra has . . . relationships. But he would never—”
“How can you know that?” I asked her. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“They watch . . . movies together. Not movies, I guess. Tapes. Vyra picks them up. She picks everything up
