The Backwoods

“Here’s fine,” Dwayne said.

The girl seemed surprised. “Here?” she questioned. “Don’t’cha wanna go back to my shack?”

Dwayne frowned. He’d seen where the Squatters lived: mostly sheet-metal huts on the bayside of the Point. He hesitated, “Well, uh—”

“Oh, it’s nice,” the girl promised. ”Not like lots of ’em. My brothers built it for me, and I got it all to myself now that I’m eighteen.”

Dwayne repressed a grin. Eighteen? Shit, this girl looks fourteen, if that. She was a twig of a thing, ninety pounds maybe, but then all the Squatters seemed small—Stanherd’s clan. The tallest males stood five-seven if they were lucky, and the girls? They were all like this one: four-eleven, five feet tops. Must be something hereditary, in the ancestral blood. Stanherd’s Squatters were small people.

But what had she been saying? Don’t want to turn her trick in the woods, he remembered. Wants me to go back to her shack—well, fuck that. Someone might see him.

“Naw, here’s fine,” he repeated. “All I got time for is a quick one.”

The girl was the sleekest shadow in the dark. “Oh, right,” she said. “It’s gettin’ late, and I guess yer wife’d wanna know where you been.”

“Just you let me worry about my wife,” Dwayne said, annoyed. “I don’t answer to her.”

“Don’t she ever get suspicious of ya?” The girl had asked the question calmly and, unabashed, kicked off her flip-flops and took off her shorts. “We all love her so much, generous as she is to us.”

Minimum wage to pick fuckin’ crabs, Dwayne thought with another hidden smile. And these pinheads think that’s a lot of money. Shit. Of course, Dwayne had done the same thing quite a bit in his life, or any other menial job where employers weren’t discriminating. Dumpster cleaning, refuse removal, oil-change jockey, and the like—any job his parole officer could land him. Dwayne was almost forty now, and he’d done three jolts with the Russell County Department of Corrections, totaling seven years in stir. After the last one (two years, assault with a baseball bat), he’d landed here for a job picking crabmeat at the Agan’s Point Shellfish Company. Not the best job he’d ever had. After a while he’d begun to smell like crab guts; no matter how many showers he took, the dank fishy stink emanated from him. But then he’d met Judy and his life had truly changed. She owned the company, which her sister up in D.C. had helped her revamp, a small-time operation that turned secretly lucrative. When Dwayne had pulled enough wool over Judy’s eyes, she’d practically been begging him to marry her. And now?

Made in the shade, he thought.

Dwayne wasn’t picking the crabs anymore; he was the supervisor of the Squatters and other lowlifes who did.

But there was never enough, was there?

The five hundred dollars in his pocket reminded him of that.

When the girl turned in the wedge of moonlight, Dwayne saw that she was fully naked now. Bitch don’t waste time, he mused. He also saw something else: evidence that she was indeed at least eighteen. Full, fresh breasts, dark nippled; very feminine lines from shoulders to waist to hips; a plush outgrowth of untrimmed pubic hair. Not that Dwayne would’ve been worried about statutory rape . . . No. Not with this one, he thought. Or those six others.

“Still can’t believe you wanna just do it here instead’a my shack,” she was saying. In the dark she was bending over, a gesture like someone putting on stockings. But why would she do that? In the woods?

“And like I was saying,” she went on, “what with your wife bein’ so kind to us, givin? us good work.” She looked up, looked right at him with dark sparkles for eyes. “I don’t feel too good ’bout doing this, you bein’ Miss Judy’s husband and all.”

Dwayne cut a frown. “Hey, a buck’s a buck, right? You don’t want to do me because of my wife? Then one of your other little friends will. In a heartbeat.”

“I know. . . .”

“Besides, the twenty bucks I’m payin’ you for five minutes of your time, you’d have to work three hours pickin’ crabs.”

“I know,” she repeated.

That said it all. The Squatters were poor, and they weren’t even on the books as citizens. Invisible, like illegal aliens. They worked hard for their low wages, and the better-looking gals—like this one—utilized other resources for increased income. The way of the world since humans came out of the caves.

Dwayne squinted in the dark. What’s she doing? She bent over again, which replayed his notion that she was putting on stockings or garters or something. Yes. She’d slipped something up high on her bare thighs.

“What’s that you’re puttin’ on yourself?” he finally asked her.

“Wheat bands,” she said. “Has to be a special kinda wheat, though, and they’re hard to make. Hard to get the kernels to stay together when you sew ’em on the band.”

The hell? he thought. But suddenly he felt distracted by a number of things. For one, the endless chorus of cicadas, these being the three-year variety. This part of Virginia, Agan’s Point got them all—the three-year, the seven-year, the thirteen-year, and the seventeen-year. As a kid, Dwayne had always found these waves and waves of insect sounds to be mysterious and captivating. But now—as an ex-con pushing forty— he found them annoying. The girl’s voice distracted him too, the accent. All the Squatters had it, at least those from Everd Stanherd’s clan. No one could ever quite place it. Part backwoods hillbilly drawl mixed with something that didn’t even sound American. There was something rich and swoony about the way they talked. When they spoke, their lips didn’t seem to move enough.

And then this new distraction. What the fuck? Dwayne thought. Wheat bands, she said?

Now she stood more directly in the moonlight, her fresh young body nearly luminous, breasts jutting, her belly button a perfect black shadow. She’d pulled a band up on each thigh, like corroded garters.

“Those bands are made of wheat?”

“Um-hmm. It’s middling wheat, and it ain’t from around here. The clan mother makes ?em, and every girl gets a pair soon as she gits her period. The magic goes back a long way.”

“Magic,” Dwayne said.

“Yeah. It’s for when you’re gettin’ with a fella. If ya wanna baby boy, ya put it on the left thigh, and if ya wanna girl, ya put it on the right.” She adjusted the strange bands daintily with her finger. “And if ya don’t want nothin’, ya put ’em on both.”

Dwayne shook his head. Squatters. Jesus. He knew there was a lot of weird superstition with them, but this was one he’d never heard before. Deep down he laughed to himself. Stupid cracker. The last thing she needs to be worryin’ about is gettin’ knocked up.

It was getting late. “Time to get down to business,” he said next, and walked right over to her. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill down on her clothes, then turned her brusquely around, her bare back to him, and reached around to slide his calloused hands over the soft skin of her breasts and abdomen. He rubbed his groin against her buttocks, feeling that forbidden charge. Her skin seemed to rise in temperature as he maintained his rough caresses, and she began to breathe harder. Dwayne thought with an inner chuckle, Look at that, I’m turnin’ the bitch on, gettin’ a whore all hot ‘n’ bothered. Guess them dirty little clan boys don’t do the job for her. Dwayne to the rescue . . .

He figured it was the least he could do, considering. . . .

He sucked her neck, playing intently with her breasts. The nipples felt pebble-firm now, and when he gave them a hard squeeze with his fingers, she squealed delightedly, rising on her tiptoes.

“I always had a big thing fer you,” came her strange accented whisper. “Just somethin’ about you . . .”

The evidence of that was plain when he delved his fingers through her thatch into her sex. Dwayne felt electrified below the belt. “I’ve had my eye on you, too, for a while.”

“Ya have not!” she playfully challenged.

“Sure, I have. You’re about the prettiest of all the clan girls—”