'Wasn't much of a gal at that,' he reminisced. 'Then she went to being scared of spiders. Never seen such a girl fer spookiness.'
The forward porch had been an open-air workshop. He could see the black shape of the cutting table, and hanging on the forward wall, a tangle of racks and frames for drying the pelts, square racks for coon, narrow frames for mink. He went aft along the skinny gangway.
He reckoned that Elly had been the most inexperienced girl he'd ever cut across. There had been nothing new, nothing different, nothing exciting about the girl. But thought of her brought Dorry Mears back to mind, and then Iris Culver. Iris he knew about-perhaps knew too much, to the point where it was getting a little old. But Dorry- His mind, perverse with desire, tricked him into listening again to the giggles and hot whispers of Dorry Mears as she thrashed about unseen in the thicket with Tom Fort. Instantly he was infected with the remembered sound. He wanted to see her again, to mix with her kind, to have himself accepted as one of kindred sensuality.
He leaned against the frame corner, staring hard at the motionless night. 'Got to find me a somebody,' he muttered. 'Somebody soon.'
A coon had found itself a frog, had captured it, and now brought its prize down to a moony patch on the bank. Shad watched the minor spectacle absently. The coon held the frog in its forepaws and commenced peeling it, freeing the corrugated skin with a short, jerky, tearing movement. Then it washed the limp blob of flesh in the water, and straightened up to begin its meal.
Shad shuffled his foot, making a scraping sound. The coon froze, its body seemingly all sharp little points of listening attention. Abruptly it shoved the frog in its mouth, showed its tail and became a part of the night.
Life and death, Shad said, thinking now of something he'd read about the survival of the fittest in one of the books Iris Culver had given him. Well, I got mine because I was the fittinest of all of 'em.
And now he was going to buy a piece of the world with it. A big granddaddy piece. But as he unlocked the padlock with the key Bell had given him, he knew at that moment the only thing he really wanted was Dorry Mears.
It was musty inside. It smelled of decay, of mice and old newspapers. He fished up a match and struck the head with the edge of his thumb, exploding a small blare of saffron light. He walked the yellow ball over to the hingetable on the starboard wall and lighted the lamp he found there and looked around at his home.
The cook-stove stood against the forward wall with the dish cabinets on each side of the stovepipe and the iron ventilators above the heating shelf. The windows were shattered. Under the right window was the deal table, and under the left a bunk bed. Over the bunk on a shelf stood an old rust ball-dialled clock, its stiff hands insisting that the time was 5:32-any day, any year. A woman must have lived in the shanty at one time or another, because two or three potted tomato cans with grotesquely twisted dead geraniums stood on another shelf alongside the door. Shad grunted.
He went over the bunk and inspected his bed. The blankets were dustbags with a few nameless little crawling things, and the sheets were filthy. He gingerly gathered up the whole mess, took it out to the aft porch and heaved it overboard. Tomorrow he'd have to invest in some new bedclothes. He went back inside and surveyed the bumpy mattress. It seemed fairly sound, but the springs underneath screamed like a girl stepping on a cottonmouth when he pressed them.
'Old Bell should'a ast couldn't
He went back to the table, sat down, opened his carton of tailor-mades and lighted up. The smoke hung about his head like swamp mist around a cypress knee. He stirred its sagging coils when he moved, pulled out his roll of bills and spread the six remaining tens on the table.
He'd only been back in the village maybe three hours, and already nearly forty dollars was gone. Funny thing, he thought, how short-lived money was.
It was damp hot in the little room where Dorry and her sister Margy shared a bed. And because they were girls, and because this was their room, and because of the summer-thick night there was a heady female odour.
But the not too subtle emanation that compounded the room's atmosphere was merely a nuisance to the sisters. Their warm, supple bodies, naked and only sheet-covered, stuck wherever they touched and formed glowing bubbles of perspiration. When they sighed with exasperation and pulled apart, the sweat-beads would plop and run down their smooth thighs and hips.
Margy was listening to the night music – the male crickets fiddling their leathery forewings, the bullfrogs grunting their deep bass notes as they hop-flopped about the garden searching for slugs, and somewhere the ethereal trombone bay of a night-running hound. She listened, trying to forget the heat and her own sleeplessness.
Dorry was listening to her parents' bedsprings, listening for the last squeaking cry as they moved fitfully in their own aura of middle-aged connubiality, settling down into moist sleep.
Five minutes passed without a squeak. And then five more minutes. She smiled in the dark. She'd give them half an hour. That would make it about eleven. Nearly everyone should be asleep by then – except maybe Sam Parks. She frowned, thinking of the skinny little man who was always prowling the night like a moon-feeding wildcat. He'd almost caught her two weeks ago-one of the nights she'd slipped out to meet Tom in the bush. But she'd seen him slouching through the woods before he had seen her and had hidden behind a tupelo. She wasn't afraid of meeting him, not physically; but Sam told everything to Jort Camp, and everyone knew that Jort Camp had the biggest mouth in the county.
If her pa ever found out about her nocturnal activities, he'd switch her. Her smile came again, soft, and she felt an inner warmth of sensuousness wash through her, thinking of Shad, remembering how he'd reacted when she'd rubbed against his shoulder. She had felt that reaction. Twenty dollars he give Pa. Like it was pages from the Sears' book.
When she judged the half-hour gone, she listened a moment to her sister's breathing. She couldn't pick it up, and frowned. But she couldn't wait any longer. My goodness, she had to get some sleep that night. She raised the sheet, easy-and slipped from the bed, holding her breath. Then she suspended herself, standing full-bodied, naked, in the dark, listening. Nothing happened to Margy's shadow.
Dorry went to the battered highboy and eased the bottom drawer open, extracting from it her cheap bottle of Sin's Dream perfume. It had been the suggestive name -along with the symbolic jet, the transparent, twisted cone shape of the bottle-that had prompted her to possess the magical liquid. It had called to mind wicked adventure and shameful but ecstatic caresses. She had received it from a cologne drummer who had stopped in at Sutt's two or three months ago. She had received it in trade, in the hot night under the titi shrubs. The drummer (who could lie as well as any married man on the road) had told her it was listed at ten dollars a bottle, and that had made her doubly happy. And the drummer had been happy, too. After deducting the kickback on his commission he'd put 89 cents in the till from his own pocket and written Sin's Dream off as a sale.
Dorry turned the bottle toward the square of moonbright window suspiciously, checking to see if Margy had been 'borrowing' again.
She'd bathed earlier that evening down at the creek. But that had been before she'd gone into the woods with Tom. Well, the perfume would have to do for now – it simply couldn't be helped. She spified a generous puddle of Sin's Dream into her palm and began working it over her body. It felt cool, gave her skin a tang.
'What you at now?' The worded question hit the dark room like a mallet hitting glass. Dorry started, almost dropping her bottle. She looked at Margy sitting up in shadow.
'You hush!' she hissed. 'Git yourself to sleep.'
There was a pause, then-'You fixing to slip out agin.'
'I reckon it don't take no wizard to figure that.'
'Where at you going?'
'That's my nevermind. Go to sleep.'
Margy sighed disdainfully and settled back in bed on one elbow. 'You goan find yourself trouble.'
Dorry was shocked. 'Margy! Ain't you got no shame about you?'
Dorry put Sin's Dream away and came over to the bed.
'Cain't you hush? Do you got to lay there and beller like Jort Camp when he's drunked-up? I'm not going to see no boy. It's too hot and sweaty to sleep. I'm goan take a walk is all.'
Margy smiled in the dark. 'Want me to go with you?'
