The Backwoods

He noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. Shit, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before she’d started boozing hard and passing out every night, leaving their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and—

Well, that was another story.

He opened the jar, was about to grab an egg, but—

Holy shit!

The stink from the jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his head.

Smells worse than a fuckin’ pile a’ dead dogs.

He put the jar back, revolted; then—

“Daddy?”

—his eyes bolted open, and he spun.

Shit!

There was someone else in the shack.

A slant of moonlight fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl—mid-teens, he guessed, but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.

It must’ve been something in the water.

But whether it was or not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all fucked-up in the head to begin with, and now—razzed and bristly over busting the cracker’s coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a late- night bonfire—he was even more fucked-up.

His blood felt hot, excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt tight.

“You’re not my daddy!” she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a worried glance down at the empty cot.

The guy was lying in darkness behind Ricky. She can’t see him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the comer of the room out of the moonlight. “Aw, now don’t’choo worry ‘bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He’s outside runnin’ a errand, but he’ll be right back. Me ’n’ him are good buddies.”

The girl’s lower lip trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was looking at the rest, though, his lust holding his eyes open.

“But I ain’t never seen you before,” she questioned.

“Oh, well, that’s ’cos me’n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab boats.”

Yeah. Ricky was all fucked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?

Well, never mind what he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out into the night.

(III)

Patricia dreamed of smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable, safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it only stoked the heat of her own desires.

“That’s what the heat is,” a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a chair by a stand of trees. “The symbology of the dream mechanism. Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex for the concrete world around us: dreams.”

The voice drifted like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor’s words and discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She felt flushed; she felt . . .

Oh, God . . .

“Just a dream,” she muttered to herself. At least she knew that. “It’s just a dream, so I don’t have to worry about it.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its fabric frayed.

. As though he’d just climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long time.

“The death of Freudian dynamics, I suppose,” he said, disheartened. “Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I’m afraid. I’m dead.”

For whatever reason, then, Patricia laughed.

“But you’re right,” he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? “This is a dream, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

Patricia peered at him through smoke.

“And you don’t have to worry about what you do.”

The smoke engulfed him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath them. Her sexual urgency—her feminine heat—rose with the flames. At one point she broke through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she was wandering along the edge of a lake—no. . .

A pond.

The realization seized her then.

This is the pond at Bowen’s Field. . . .

Moonlight blared in her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her reflection on the pond’s glass-flat surface.

The vision gave her a mild shock.

She stood pantiless in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration. She seemed a caricature of female sexuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of the dream. Her breasts were ample in life; in the dream, though, they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could’ve been pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives. The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when (with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt, she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing pubic hair as well.

Her desires squirmed with her nerves. The night’s heat drew more sweat from her skin, leaving her in a veneer of indeterminable lust.

It was Ernie who rose from the water: naked, his smile sweet and eyes reaching. Patricia’s eyes yearned back, but her own smile was clearly one of wantonness, the greed to slake her own needs moistening her. She simply stood there, lifting her hem again up past her navel.

Why should she feel guilty now? It was a dream, and even Dr. Sallee—evidently a doctor whose professional philosophies were dead—had affirmed that she could do what she wanted. And when she’d talked to the real Dr. Sallee on the phone, he essentially told her that she had defeated the trauma of her past.

This dream proved that, didn’t it? Here she was at the very site of her rape, but she stood now as a normal and very untraumatized sexual being.

Her sensibilities corroded. She felt lewd, trampish. Was this her real self coming out? Was this the real Patricia? Or was the dream just giving her the luxury of cutting loose in a way she couldn’t in real life?

“It’s only your sexual socialization evolving,” Dr.

Sallee’s unseen voice guaranteed. “Superego versus id. The societal verisimilitudes of modem man reinforce the self-maintenance of our regrettable sexual repression.”

She tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t.

“We’re all animals, Patricia. We just act like we’re not. Hence the repression and its debilitating effect. Ultimately, it’s what? Unnatural.”

What am I doing? This is a dream. Am I waiting for my doctor’s permission to have sex? She nearly laughed at the absurdity—in a dream no less. The idea behind his comment hawked down on her. We’re animals but we pretend that we’re not.

“Cavemen didn’t repress themselves,” the doctor’s voice assured her next. “Neither did cavewomen.”

Well . . .

Her eyes hooked on Ernie. He was naked in the Water, on his knees. The dream, too, had augmented him