“Just so.” Henry’s voice was a gentle bassoon. “Discovery there would mean disgrace for us. Discovery here would afford us yet some hope of preserving our reputations.”
“But it isn’t very amenable to… to play.” Miss Giselle laughed, girlishly. I couldn’t remember hearing her laugh before, and the feel of it sent a troop of caterpillars marching pleasantly down my spine.
“Giselle, we mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.”
“How you talk. I love how you talk.” In fact, Henry’s protest tickled the stew out of Miss Giselle. She laughed a little harder, pulling herself to Henry’s chest. “You sound like somebody out of a Brontë book.”
“On the road, I have few other-”
“Shhh. You can find a happier line to jilt me with than, ‘We mustn’t proceed on this precipitant course.’ How about ‘To go on as we have would be curtains for us both’?” She laughed again, but I didn’t know why.
“It frightens me, this series of trysts,” Henry said. “We expose to heartbreak even those from whom we hide.”
“Hide? Who’s hiding?”
“Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”
For a moment, Miss Giselle and Henry stopped talking. I heard them hug, her crinoline against his T-shirt, and wriggled to see past the squash leaves and coiling bean vines to their meeting place-but with no luck. Then Miss Giselle said, “Come with me, big fella,” chuckling, and I could hear them rustling through the garden again. I rose to my knees and crawled hard myself. They went even faster, rattling foliage and snapping stalks, so I penguin-waddled after.
Following them got trickier the farther into the garden we went. Tomato plants and other knee-high crops began to replace the beans and walls of tasseled sweet corn that’d shielded me earlier. I could see better, but so could my prey and then-WHOOSH!-the stalks in the next garden section got taller, a copse of leafy half-pikes. The lovers vanished into it like Hansel and Gretel into an enchanted wood. Henry sank beneath the okra stalks, and Miss Giselle eased into his lap.
“And why have you led me here?” Henry said.
“To rekindle your ardor,” Miss Giselle said. “Forget all musts and shoulds. Behold the okra and read my mind.”
I edged nearer. The okra leaves shivered. The gouged profile of the moon spilled a soft pewter on their stalks and seamed pods. The pods stood up or out, like tapered hard-ons. If leprechauns could reach the height and hot-bloodedness of men, this was how their members would look in the real world: a forest of tender, silver-green pricks.
“Long have I desired to free myself of animal compulsion,” Henry said. “Until you, I believed I had.”
“Well, I want to enslave myself to it. Don’t let cowardly scruple send me back to my dry, dry marriage.”
“You seek revenge for infidelity and neglect?”
“Well, sure. But more of what I want has to do with… holding and being held. Riding your body to places I didn’t believe I could visit anymore.”
“I am a monster. A freak. The caprice of a tortured man’s vanity.”
“Henry, you’re beautiful.”
“I should offer you that homage.”
“Holding me, you do. I feel it from the inside out.”
“Even when I cry, ‘Kariak!’ ”
“Cry what you like. I can’t reproach a man whose emotional faithfulness to his only wife has outlasted her death.”
“No. But we must end this deceit, this betrayal of both Mister JayMac and our better selves.”
“This sweet deceit. Call it sweet.”
“Don’t torment me. Neither tease nor quibble.”
“Shhhh. Look here.” Miss Giselle grabbed an okra stalk.
“Don’t. It will produce an insupportable itch.” He meant that the prickly hairs on the okra pods would.
“I have you for that. Here.” Miss Giselle snapped off a pod several inches long. “Kizzy or Euclid or a boarder should have picked this one already. They’re tenderest-unlike you-when smaller. See. This one has a horny rind.”
Henry took the pod and flung it away. It whirled through the okra forest and struck me on the neck. I touched my grated skin and ducked even closer to the ground.
“Do you like gumbo?” Miss Giselle said. “The clear sweet ooze of the pod? The way it thickens and quickens?” Sitting on Henry’s knee, she kissed him on the forehead.
“But we make nothing together,” Henry whispered. “I have lifeless seed and you a desolated womb.”
“We make each other happy.” Miss Giselle shifted so her hands clutched his shoulders and her hips rose and fell to an unforced rhythm. I lay on the blush-fed thumping of my heart.
“GOD!” Henry shouted, a thunderclap. I expected McKissic House to empty, our teammates to come pouring out to see what’d happened. I didn’t dare move. Henry’d know me for a snoop, and Miss Giselle would have me booted off the team.
After a time, Henry and Miss Giselle moved again, crinoline on cotton. I hugged the earth.
“Take me to Darius’s old place. You can’t leave me now.”
“But the possibilities of discovery, scandal, disgrace-”
“Now, Henry. Now!”
Henry gathered up Miss Giselle. He carried her through the okra, tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet peas, cucumbers, and corn towards the Bomber’s garage and the room above it where Miss Giselle’s faithless husband’s bastard son had lived and grieved the biggest part of his resentful adulthood.
As soon as they’d gone, I crept quietly back to McKissic House.
Two hours later Henry came to bed. I pretended sleep. He pretended to believe it. But for an hour or more, he sat on his mattress with his arms around his knees, a gray hulk in our cramped and steamy room.
53
Playing ball, you forgot the war. Riding the Brown Bomber, you read the papers or talked about it. The fact my dad’d died in the Aleutians made me listen up to any news from the Akskan theater.
On a road trip to Lanett, I read a story in the Highbridge Herald about Allied forces invading the island of Kiska, only to find-after taking beaucoups of casualties in the bedlam and fog:-the Japs’d already evacuated it. In other words, we’d defeated an enemy no longer there. The press called it the “blunder at Kiska.” Nobody could figure how, or when, the Japs’d managed to pull their otherwise doomed troops off the island. I showed this story to Henry, who’d been riding with his head lolling against the window and his hands twitching in his lap. He read it and handed the paper back.
“Stupid,” I said. “We let em get away.”
“The resourcefulness of the Japanese spared thousands from the maw of death. Why do you long to glut it?”