unwittingly passed him.
One quick tap on the head – stun her. All right, damn you!
But he stalled, looking beyond her. A light was showing in the shantyboat. Someone was in there with a lantern. The stick lowered in his hand. The suggested presence of a third party brought back the timidity he concealed under his ferocious crouch. The moral fibre of Sam's backbone turned to shreds, leaving him a ragbag of a man. The girl passed through the tupelos and down to the bank and gangplank. Sam dropped the stick.
'All right,' he whispered. 'All right, you bitch. Git after your fun. Whoop it up. But don't you think fer a minute, missy, you goan git off scot-free. Sam here is goan have him a look at who you misbehaving with.'
But as he slipped down the shelving bank he forgot his most important woods-prowling rule. He made a soft little noise in his throat, whimpered like a hurt puppy dragging itself for home.
Shad was sitting with his taior-mades and his money, feeling fat and drowsy in a warm mood of euphoria. In his mind he was plotting out his future – not too realistically; but it was fun just the same. He thought about the girls he would buy, and the expensive booze, and the cars and snappy suits, and maybe even a boat, some sort of cabin cruiser, say, but mostly about the girls. Then he heard a thunk of sound on the gangway and the houseboat stirred slightly.
He swept up his bills, shoving them furiously inside his shirt, letting them drop to where the shirt bloused at his belt. Thank God he'd left the windows shuttered. He started to get up, to go to the door, but changed his mind and sat again, reached for a new cigarette.
The door opened tentatively and four pale fingers curved around the edge and stayed there, holding four red beetles at their tips. At first he didn't understand, then he saw the long lamp-gold spifi of hair near the hand and knew it was Dorry Mears. An excitement that was akin to a violent sickness came highballing through his body, tensing him, robbing him of breath. He gripped the table-edge, watching, the tailor-made smouldering in his mouth. He didn't get up-wasn't sure he could; he sat there, thinking-Oh yes. Oh, indeed yes! Now we are goan have us a something here. I knowed it all the time.
The door inched further into the room and Dorry Mears peeked in at him, coquettishly. 'It's just me, Shad. Just Dorry,' she said. Cat's purr again.
'Nice of you to knock,' he said. 'I might ben gitting ready fer bed, and me in my shorts.'
She came further into the room showing almost all of her, leaned against the door, arching herself as she'd done earlier for him. 'I thought of that,' she said softly, and then laughed, low.
'Bet you did. That why you here?' He didn't see any reason to play around. He wanted her, God yes, and at another time he might have gone along with the game just to assure himself of final victory. But today he was a new man – a rich man, and he didn't have to mess with anyone.
Dorry pretended to be shocked. 'Why, Shadrack Hark! I'm purely convinced you got you an evil mind.' She gave a toss of her hair. 'Hit was too hot fer sleeping,' she said, not looking at him, speaking in staccato. 'So I took me a little stroll. No harm in that, is they?'
Shad shook his head. 'And ended up way down here,' he suggested. 'Coincidence, I guess.'
She blinked at him. 'Well,' she said defensively, 'I like it down here. I often come thisaway at night-when I cain't sleep.'
'Uh-huh,' Shad said.
She hitched her right leg around in a half-circle, tracing a faint dust path on the floor with her toes.
'I seen your light on and guessed you was still up. Thought we might talk. I couldn't sleep-' Her voice went off into the open night at her back and got lost there.
Even at that distance, even in the poor light, it was easy to see that she wasn't wearing anything under her dress. That did something to him, something extra. He approved of a dress that looked like that one did. Nothing for shoulders, and not too much to cover those things she was so eternal proud of. And all the rest of it tight. Her ma made Dorry's dresses, but Dorry always remade them – took them in in places, in all the right places.
'Why don't you fetch the rest of you on in?'
Dorry looked at him and smiled. She closed the door.
'They's a hook right handy to hit,' he said.
She looked down at the hook but didn't touch it. She looked at him again, an over-the-shoulder look. And that got him started.
'Why should I lock myself in a room with a boy I hardly know?'
'Hardly know? I had me the idea we was old friends- from the way you were slamming your hip into me tonight.'
Her eyes were bright like broken chips of glass in the lamplight. 'If you goan talk dirty, I'm going to leave! I don't like that kind of talk at all.'
And that was the funny thing about her, he reflected. She really didn't. And yet the things that girl had been known to do for pleasure-or was it pleasure?
'Dorry,' he said seriously, 'why you come here tonight?'
'I done told you. I couldn't sleep and-'
'All right, all right. I'm sorry I brung hit up.'
He walked over to her. She watched him come, but not straight on, which made the look something more than just a look. Shad leaned his left arm against the door, barring her in. He tilted her chin up.
'Dorry, you'n me is goan become good friends.'
She said nothing. Her mouth was open, partially. Her eyes were closed. When he kissed her, her mouth was like burning liquid.
He reached behind her as they clung together, body and mouth, and fumbled for the hook on the door.
He awakened once in the time of night that is vast, endless, and everything is dead. No man's time. Not belonging to the intricate mechanism of clocks that control worldly minutes. Universe night. Then he remembered the Money Plane and Dorry, and he smiled and rolled over in the dark, reaching for her.
She wasn't there.
Shad sat up, looking. Dorry was sitting in the square shaft of moonlight from the open window, sitting on the edge of the bunk, spreading his ten-dollar bills neatly on her bare leg. The shirt! The damn bills must have fallen out of his shirt.
Her head moved, her hair shimmering silver in the moonlight. She was looking at him, but he couldn't see her face. He was suddenly aware of the weir spilling, a feathery profound drone.
'Where at you git the money, Shad?' Her voice was low, husky, urgent.
He snapped his fingers. 'Fetch it back. That's my nevermind.'
But she didn't. She clumped it in a small fist and held it to her bare breast. 'Pa says you must a sold a heap of skins to afford twenty dollars outright.'
'Mebbe I did.'
'Mebbe-but ever'body else ben saying how porely the trapping is.'
'Mebbe they don't know where to look at.'
'Mebbe they ain't looking fer the right thing.'
Shad stalled for a moment, then said, 'What you mean by that?'
'Shad,' she whispered, 'you find that old Money Plane? Did you, Shad?'
'You hush up! Hear? Give me that money.' He snatched it from her hand. In that split second he was ready to belt her one, hard. 'I don't know about no Money Plane. Ain't nobody kin find that old wreck.'
She came for him, hip-sliding across the bunk. He decided not to belt her one. Instead he cupped her left breast in his hand. Red fire! That threw a man all out of whack.
'Shad,' she breathed, 'they's the most pure-out beautiful dress I seen down to Torkville the other day with my ma. Shad, you'd like me in it. Ain't homemade. I'd wear it just fer you. I could git it mebbe fer ten dollars. Shad?'
He grumbled a little in his throat, and finally shoved her one of the bills. 'But you keep shet about this here money, you hear? This is fer you'n me. I God shore don't want ever' Tom, Dick an' Harry pestering me after it. Dorry, you hear me?'
She looked up from the money in her hand and kissed him wetly. 'Shad-it ain's pelt-sold money, is it? It was the Money Plane, wasn't it?'
'I ain't got a God-made word to say about that money.'
