Later that night the stars dimmed and then disappeared altogether behind a massing of clouds in which lightning at first shimmered soundlessly and then began to be trailed closely by low rumblings. The wind roused, gained force and began pushing hard against the sawgrass. The hammock palms tossed and clattered. The susurrous hardwoods swayed. An incandescent flash of lightning made a ghostly blue noon of the night and illuminated the shadowed corpse of DeSoto Tiger sprawled on the bank of the hammock with face up to the first sprinkles of rain, eyesockets freshly hollowed by a possum and teeming with ants at their ancient industry.
Now lightning jagged across the sky and thunder blasted close behind and the rain came crashing down, shaking the sawgrass, pocking the water. Lightning branched blue-white across the black sky. The sawgrass quivered under the explosive thunder as the storm rolled hard into the Everglades. Rain fell in a steady torrent and the water rose on the bank and after a time the dead man bobbed off the ground and was borne slowly from the hammock and out into the sawgrass channel. The body carried on the winding current all through the night and all the next day and then for two days more until it debouched onto the Okeechobee Slough and in another two days arrived at a canal being dredged to Fort Lauderdale. The corpse bloated now, blackened and malodorous, faceless for having been fed upon by birds, its ears and fingers gone to garfish.
Near noon of that day it was scooped up with a load of muck and the dredge operator saw the legs overhanging the crane bucket and he deposited the load on the bank and called to his fellows to come see what he found.
TWO
February 1912
SHE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL breasts and smoothly round hips and a wide sensual mouth. And she was blind. She’d shown up at Miss Lillian’s house in the tenderloin district of West Palm Beach eight months ago in the company of a stranger named Benson who drove a brand new Model T. This Benson raised eyebrows by leaving her to sit in the parlor and be leered at by other patrons who jutted their chins at her and grinned and winked at each other while he took his pleasure with one of the girls upstairs. When he was done with his business he raised brows higher still by getting his hat and slipping out the side door and abandoning her. The girl cried less about it than one might have expected. She told Miss Lillian her name was Loretta May and that Benson had proved himself a son of a bitch in so many ways already that this further proof came as no surprise. But she said she’d rather starve out in the road than return to Atlanta and the only living kin she had, a sister she hated who’d grudgingly taken care of her for all seven years she’d been blind due to a swiftly degenerative disease of the retina. “Only reason I run off with the likes of Benson is I couldn’t stand another day more with Berniece,” she said.
Miss Lillian felt sorry for her and offered to let her stay in a small room off the kitchen in exchange for whatever light housekeeping she might manage in her handicap. The girl said she never was much of one for housekeeping even when she could see what she was doing but she’d never been much of a shrinking violet either and one thing she knew she could do real well even blind was what she’d been doing with Benson in hotels every night since leaving Atlanta. She reasoned that from now on she might as well get paid for it and asked outright and with blushing cheeks if Miss Lillian was of a mind to hire her to work upstairs. Miss Lillian had already favorably appraised the girl’s pretty face and fine figure but she’d never worked with a blind girl before. She was sure some men wouldn’t care at all for a girl who couldn’t see what they were made of. Still, she liked this girl and was impressed with her grit, so she said, “Loretta May, honey, welcome to the house.” And although the madam been right that some of her patrons wouldn’t even consider humping the blind newcomer, others did it at least once just to see what it was like, and some of them liked it so much they wanted her every time thereafter. The girl more than earned her keep.
Among those who favored her was John Ashley. He’d been patronizing Miss Lillian’s since turning sixteen some two yeas before and the madam was fond of him and thought him handsome with his mop of black hair and wide amused mouth, his quick lively eyes that seemed to miss nothing. His visits were irregular but whenever he presented himself early in the week when the house’s business was at its slowest, Miss Lillian would let him have the whole night with Loretta May for the bargain rate of five dollars.
He liked that Loretta May’s skin smelled naturally of peaches and her short yellow hair was always freshly washed. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever put hand to, by far the best natured, the most ardent in the practice of her trade. He mentioned this last to her one time and she’d giggled and told him she was not so enthusiastic with others as with him. He thought she was lying but he could not deny the pleasure he took in the lie. Nor could he deny to himself how much he liked that she could not see him looking on her nakedness. He would often caress one part of her even as he secretly gawped upon another. Because she could not know where his gaze was set or see his face and whatever unguarded yearnings might show there, he felt possessed of a strange and keenly exciting power. But her defenselessness against his eyes also made him feel vaguely ashamed, and the way she sometimes smiled as he caressed her made him suspect she sensed his shame and that her knowledge of it gave her a kind of power too. His times with her were the best he’d had with a woman.
One cool Monday evening he arrived at Miss Lillian’s in the company of his brother Bob, who never tired of chiding him for sporting with the same girl on every visit. “Might’s well get married, you gone do
As John rapped on the door with the horseshoe knocker that hung there, Bob said it was feeling like a two- time night to him. They were admitted to the plush red-satined parlor by a husky and jovial moonfaced man named Easton whose duty it was to defend the house tranquillity against troublesome patrons. Miss Lillian greeted the brothers affectionately and they nodded hello to Sherman the Negro piano player and to a derbied man they knew who worked at the train depot. The only others in the parlor were a pair of strangers in suits and ties—one burly, one lean—who sat on a sofa with a couple of girls and looked with urban disdain at the brothers in their faded denim and worn brogans. In their eagerness to get upstairs the Ashleys paid them no heed. A minute later Bob was ensconced in a room with a greeneyed girl named Sheryl Ann and John Ashley was rapping lightly on Loretta May’s door and hearing her call, “Get on
As always she first bathed him in the large clawfoot tub Miss Lillian had placed in her room so that she would not have to use the common bath room the other girls shared—and so popular was she with the others that none but redhaired Quentin, who was quarrelsome by nature, had carped about her special privilege. After the bath she dried him and then dusted him with rose powder despite his usual happy protests. And then, because the moon was nearly full and its blue-silver blaze suffused the room, he extinguished the lantern and described to her the moonlight’s play in her bright hair and on her pale flesh stretched on the bed under the tall open window. She drew him to her and they entwined limbs and tongues and he entered her. They rocked together smoothly and when she emitted a small gasp deep in her throat that signaled her readiness he groaned in satisfaction and permitted himself to climax. He did not know if she truly came at such times or if she was simply putting on an act. He asked her one time, saying that he didn’t need any such pretense to enjoy himself, and she’d smiled and said, “Well, if you dont know, I aint gonna tell you.”
Then lay in the moonlight and smoked cigarettes and she put her fingers to his cheek and then his neck and said it felt like his cuts were almost completely healed. “Feels like there wont be hardly no scar at all,” she said. The first time he’d come to her she’d felt the freshly scabbed wounds he’d received in the fight with the Indian and when she asked where he got them he’d told her an alligator bit him. She laughed and said he was lying, that a gator bite would have done him a lot more damage, even she knew that. He said it was an old gator with only two teeth left in its head and thats why he only had the two scabs. She’d laughed even louder and kissed him hard on the mouth.
