and wondered where a man could find a drink at that hour, looking hopefully at me, and then slumped off dejectedly, and then Billie came out in an expensive blue suit and we left the lot.
12
Billie knew where to go. I drove the MG. She sat deep in the red-leather bucket- seat with her head back on the folded tonneau and watched the sky. The wind made persistent little snatches at her candy-floss hair. It was just like platinum in the bright lemon sun.
We followed the feminine curve of the shore for a few miles. The narrow strip of pale white beach was off on our left and it looked lonely and end-of-the-woridish with its continuous line of surf quietly foaming like milk. Now and then we would come to a stand of royal palms and we would see a straggly clutter of meager huts nestled among the smooth boles. Fishermen shanties. Maybe some artists.
'Poor folks,' Billie said with complacent satisfaction. 'Can't live in the nice plushy Mediterranean like us.' She smiled and curved her body toward mine and took my right arm possessively.
I decided I could wait to see Freckles.
We pulled into a blue-shadowed palm grove and parked in front of a deserted shack. The shack was shingle-sided and the shingles were very old and weathered and bowed. A battered dishpan hung from a nail on one wall and the window panes were opaque with scum and two of them were missing and had been replaced with age-curling squares of cardboard. A tall mending rack adrape with old rotting nets and corks stood at the north corner of the shanty, and in the blaze of noon the scene looked like a prize-winning photograph from one of the camera magazines.
'Come on,' Billie said. 'Let's go swimming.'
'No suits,' I reminded her.
'Who cares? Nobody's around.'
She started stepping out of her clothes. I got so rattled I nearly fouled my zipper. I hesitated a moment in my shorts to see if she meant to go in in her bra and panties, but she didn't. She shed them with a quick smooth practiced precision and tossed them into one of the bucket-seats.
I couldn't help glancing at her underwear. They were nylon and they were very white and clean and I was very glad. I'm funny that way.
Say you meet a beautiful woman. That urgent something that is physical and yet not wholly physical and so must always go nameless sparks between you. You are both modern and sophisticated with adulthood and so you skip over that magical transitory period that other less worldly people observe which lies between the meeting and the bed. She undresses before you and she is graceful and careful and intimate about it and your passion is what the mountain was to Mallory. It must be satisfied.
And then you notice that her bra-strap is soiled.
What happens to your love? To your passion? And why?
I've seen it happen before. To me. And I never knew why. But this time I didn't have to worry about it. I reached for Billie.
'No,' she said. 'The sea first. The sea on our bodies.'
She went away at a run, like a sea-sprite, her tan lithe legs flickering back and forth, back and forth in the sun, her hair like a shining white helmet. I went after her. I felt a little silly that way-running without any shorts on-but it was certainly time I got in the water. Who the hell knew when some idiot might drive by? My goodness, George, look at that disgusting man on the beach who isn't wearing any clothes! Yes, dear, but look at what he is wearing.
I raced across the incurve of the beach, over the lacerating hotfoot sand and took a flat-out dive into the glassy water. It was perfect. Not cold, not warm. It was invigorating and clean. I came up and looked around for Billie.
She was wading in the tropic bay. She waded until water came over her breasts and then she threw herself forward and began to swim, doing it easily with a flowing, rhythmic overhand stroke, her head half under, mouth half filled with water all the time.
She swam in the direction of the path where the sunlight lay white as scattered moonstones on the blue water. I started after her.
'Hey!' I called. 'Where are you off to?'
Billie stopped swimming and looked around happily and her wet face was like a tear-blurred shine of something very beautiful and precious.
'It's glorious!' she called to me. 'It's like the Mediterranean. It's like our whole future is going to be!'
Right at that moment there was only about fifteen minutes of our immediate future that intrigued me. I caught up to her and took her hand.
'C'mon, Billie. Let's go back to that deserted shack.'
'No,' she said. 'It wouldn't be glorious there. Here, Thax. Right here.'
She threw her wet arms around my neck and kissed me. If she didn't mind drowning, neither did I. Not at that exact moment.
That afternoon we drove into a remote little settlement which was a bend in a country road by land and the flowing of one swamp lake into another by water.
There was a turpentine still and a general store and a huddle of shanties which crouched back under the cabbage palms and the pawpaw trees. Old Negresses had brought baskets of fruit, vegetables, tortoise eggs and black beans to sell under the shade of a tupelo. They closed up market in the afternoon by simply packing off their merchandise on their heads. The owner of the general store didn't seem too happy with the arrangement.
'Damn nigras,' he growled. 'They'd undersell a giveaway sample.'
I said ain't that a shame and asked where the Bentlys lived.
He was a beak-faced man in a wrinkled shirt and he gave me a sour look.
'You sound like a Northern fella. I suppose you're one of those damn nigger-lovers.'
'I've never tried it. How is it?'
He gave me a baleful look and said, 'Bentlys' is over there.'
What he meant was a place just across a gallberry flat. It was a farmhouse and it had a simple grace of line, low and rambling and one-storied, and it had gone gray and cracked for want of paint. There was a tin roof and it was mostly rust, and the porch barely left you enough room to pass in front of the broken-backed wicker chairs.
It was Freckles' brawny brother-in-law who came to the door and he was about as cooperative as a wounded grizzly.
'Naw, you can't see Jimmy. He don't want a see nobody.'
'I'm a friend of his,' I said. 'Just tell him it's Thaxton from Neverland. The guy who lives in the tree house.'
'He don't want to see nobody from Neverland,' the brawny one informed me. 'Is that plain or do I got to show you?'
I had an idea he could show me. He looked like a mighty burly boy. I scratched my nose and wondered what I should say next. Then a girl from _Tobacco Road_ came out on the porch with a bottle of beer in her hand and gave us all a flat look. She was actually something to see, bare dirty feet and all. Her voice was just about as you-all as they come.
'So mebbe he
Flem got hot about it.
'He said he didn't want to see nobody, LouElla. Hit don't mean a damn to me, but that's what he said, didn't he?'
'Well, mebbe this one is a friend.' LouElla looked at Billie and upped her bottle of beer. Then she looked at me. 'Y'all just saying you're Jimmy's friend, mister, or you another cop?'
