Shadow Country

’em. And he thought a minute and then he said that he reckoned he respected himself well enough, it was his wife who disrespected him. That wasn’t true-he only said that because he got jealous of you at Lost Man’s-but I thought it might be good for him to think that way, at least for a while, so I shut up. Then Speck branched out into running guns south to the Spanish countries, and Owen started to feel guilty, but even then, he didn’t give it up, just went to drinking-well, that finished it. I didn’t aim to live with a damned drunk who made his money peddling deadly weapons. I warned him I would leave and I finally did.”

When Lucius said he was truly sorry and hoped things would work out, she only shrugged. “I’m sorry, too, I reckon. I sure tried.” Though she said nothing more, she raised her eyes and returned his gaze for one dangerous second too long. Both nodded then, smiling a little as they cast their eyes down. Not sure what all this meant-or if it meant anything at all-he was careful not to touch her. As Nell had said, Lucius Watson knew little about women’s ways, and since he tended to agree, he was afraid that if he took this high-strung Sarah in his arms at the wrong moment, she might fly to pieces.

She stood up, straightened her dress, brushed off her bottom. He said, “Miss? May I help with that?” and laughed out of jangled joy and nerves. “Not today, thank you,” she answered flatly, without the flirtatious inflection he’d expected. Love-besmirched, he dusted off his own inconsequential ass before taking her home to her cousin’s house in Naples.

Weeks later, having thought about little else, he went to find her. Forgetting what he’d come to say-and knowing how feeble this must sound-he cried, “How are you?” She led him into the front room and sat down beside him on the thin settee before answering sadly, “I don’t think I know.”

To comfort her, he took her hand and she took his in both her own and settled the three hands in her lap. Her impulse seemed innocent enough, yet feeling her warm lap through the light cotton-God have mercy! His hand was a mere inch from what his father, in affectionate reference to Josie Jenkins, had once referred to as “milady’s honeypot.” His fevered brain must have sent these rude vibrations, for Sarah abruptly tossed his hand into the air as if freeing a wild bird. She lifted her arms to pin her hair, releasing a light captivating scent of perspiration. Edgy, she said, “Let’s go somewhere.” They had not mentioned Owen.

In a booth at Rusty’s, his spilled-beer-and-sawdust roadhouse on the Marco road, Lucius repeated his staid hope that his old friends might find their way back together. Sarah looked away when she raised her glass to acknowledge his kind wishes. Unspoken was the shameful knowing on both sides that he coveted that old friend’s wife, and that she, too, was confused by mixed emotions, confessing now that she and Owen were negotiating her return; he understood that she was not yet ready for another man. Saddened but perhaps also relieved, they consoled themselves with Sarah’s flask and the unhappy rewards of love virtuously relinquished.

“Here’s something you white-boy historians don’t generally put in books,” she teased him, wisely detouring their thoughts onto a safer path. “Learned this from Owen, whose grandma was descended. Chief Osceola was a breed named Billy Powell ashamed of his own blood, only he was ashamed of the white blood, not the other-not like some! Most of his warriors were black Seminoles, what they called maroons, and later on, he took black wives along with a few red ones, had offsprings on every doggone one, which accounts for the mixed-up bunch that’s running around south Florida today. Some of our so-called Injuns got a nap so thick you couldn’t put a bullet through it!” Her hoarse smoker’s laugh had a deep rue in it, and he laughed with her, she delighted him. Her barefoot toes, seeking his foot under the table, shot small honeyed arrows into his groin.

“It’s mighty fine to see ol’ Lucius laugh this way!” Sarah cried happily. But pointing out laughter put it to death, and she looked cross. “Course folks weren’t too particular in frontier days. Some of my kin at Chokoloskee who are so mean about nigras better not go poking around too much in their own woodpiles. Might be some red boys in there at the very least.” Her bare foot kicked his calf under the table. “Don’t laugh. I know what I’m talking about. Better’n you.”

In the car again, she smoked one of her “funny smokes.” When she proffered a second, raising it to his lips-“Come with me!” she breathed, comically mysterious-he held on to her warm fingers and drew on his first reefer. At her whispered instruction, he held the smoke a long time in his lungs, then swallowed on it, suffusing it all the way up to his temples. When he exhaled at last, the smoke seemed to drift out through his ears. His brain swam and his mouth slid toward a grin. “Reefer madness,” she laughed, her mouth so close to his that he longed to fall into it and close it after him.

Right beside him sat the lovely Sarah Harden of Lost Man’s River-how had this happened? Why was Sarah sitting so close to Lucius in his old Model T, smiling at him in this soft, beguiling way? He cleared his throat, determined to counsel Owen’s sweetheart against leaving a fine man: was she really so sure it was all over? Couldn’t they patch it up? However, no voice came.

He was feeling at rest in the present, neither here nor there. “Where to?” his voice said, though he’d already turned toward home. Did this wild creature want him to make love to her? She laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear. “Can I lay low on your old barge if I stay out of your way and don’t cause trouble?”

“Lay low,” he heard his voice agree. And now this strangely languid and unbridled person draped herself across his arm and shoulder. Cocking her head, she peered close around his chin in comic awe until her lips brushed the corner of his own.

“Better back off.” He kissed her hard without slowing the car, stirred by the sweet smell of her hair.

“Just a-hangin on my darlin’s every word, is all it is.”

“Stay away from bad girls, Mama tole me-”

She hushed his mouth with another fulsome kiss. “Oh, I ain’t so bad,” she murmured huskily, surfacing again. “Under my glitterin ve-neer, a plain ol’ cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.” She lay her head back and went pealing off into some private laughter.

“And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your sinful tendencies?”

“Sickens ’em. Just purely sickens ’em. They feel like pukin.” Suddenly her smile was gone, her scowl was real, she looked as if she might well puke on purpose. Something anarchic surfaced in her eye which he tried to deflect before she blurted something they might both regret, and in his distraction, on a curve, he rolled two wheels onto the shoulder, coming too close to running the car into the roadside canal.

Sarah took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology. In guilt, her mood had turned bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. Then she said in a peculiar voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right? You’re getting your balls in a uproar.”

He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey, come on now.”

“Go stick it in the mud. You stick it into me, by Jesus, you will goddamn well regret it! I’ll tell Owen.”

“Oh Lord-”

“And another thing”-she was yelling now-“stop lookin me over like some mutt dog eyin meat! You always done that, since the first day you showed up at Lost Man’s! Think I never noticed? Go find your own damn woman! Find that widder you was mopin about ’stead of trickin young women that’s already spoken for into your tin tooter!” She banged the outside of the car door. “What are you anyway, some kind of a fanatic? That why she give up on you? Cause your daddy’s death is all you care about? The past?”

She fell back, spent, gasping for breath.

He held his tongue, drove on in silence; how could he have considered an affair with a friend’s wife, this drug- crazed cracker, when what he really needed was a wise and gentle person such as Nell-but here good sense quit him and he turned to the fray.

“Miss?”

“ ‘Mrs.’ Mrs. John Owen Harden to you. Your ol’ buddy’s everlovin little wife, case you forgot.”

“Wasn’t it my ol’ buddy’s wife who came slipping around to Caxambas to renew acquaintance? Who’s been flirting for the last three hours-”

“You want me to get out and walk? That what you’re saying? Slow down, Buster!” But moments later, weeping, she subsided. “I’m a mess. I drink too much, Prof. So do you. In fact, come to think of it, this fight is all your fault.” Though she fished out a hankie and blew sniffles, she could not hide her smile. Soon she laid her head against his shoulder and languorously touched his leg, trailed her fingertips along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, the backs of her fingers rested in his lap, light as a kiss.

In awe of their wordless decision, they drove in silence to Caxambas and made their way in half-embrace out