Five minutes passed without a squeak. And then five more minutes. She smiled in the dark. She'd give them half an hour. That would make it about eleven. Nearly everyone should be asleep by then – except maybe Sam Parks. She frowned, thinking of the skinny little man who was always prowling the night like a moon-feeding wildcat. He'd almost caught her two weeks ago-one of the nights she'd slipped out to meet Tom in the bush. But she'd seen him slouching through the woods before he had seen her and had hidden behind a tupelo. She wasn't afraid of meeting him, not physically; but Sam told everything to Jort Camp, and everyone knew that Jort Camp had the biggest mouth in the county.
If her pa ever found out about her nocturnal activities, he'd switch her. Her smile came again, soft, and she felt an inner warmth of sensuousness wash through her, thinking of Shad, remembering how he'd reacted when she'd rubbed against his shoulder. She had felt that reaction. Twenty dollars he give Pa. Like it was pages from the Sears' book.
When she judged the half-hour gone, she listened a moment to her sister's breathing. She couldn't pick it up, and frowned. But she couldn't wait any longer. My goodness, she had to get some sleep that night. She raised the sheet, easy-and slipped from the bed, holding her breath. Then she suspended herself, standing full-bodied, naked, in the dark, listening. Nothing happened to Margy's shadow.
Dorry went to the battered highboy and eased the bottom drawer open, extracting from it her cheap bottle of Sin's Dream perfume. It had been the suggestive name -along with the symbolic jet, the transparent, twisted cone shape of the bottle-that had prompted her to possess the magical liquid. It had called to mind wicked adventure and shameful but ecstatic caresses. She had received it from a cologne drummer who had stopped in at Sutt's two or three months ago. She had received it in trade, in the hot night under the titi shrubs. The drummer (who could lie as well as any married man on the road) had told her it was listed at ten dollars a bottle, and that had made her doubly happy. And the drummer had been happy, too. After deducting the kickback on his commission he'd put 89 cents in the till from his own pocket and written Sin's Dream off as a sale.
Dorry turned the bottle toward the square of moonbright window suspiciously, checking to see if Margy had been "borrowing" again.
She'd bathed earlier that evening down at the creek. But that had been before she'd gone into the woods with Tom. Well, the perfume would have to do for now – it simply couldn't be helped. She spified a generous puddle of Sin's Dream into her palm and began working it over her body. It felt cool, gave her skin a tang.
"What you at now?" The worded question hit the dark room like a mallet hitting glass. Dorry started, almost dropping her bottle. She looked at Margy sitting up in shadow.
"You hush!" she hissed. "Git yourself to sleep."
There was a pause, then-"You fixing to slip out agin."
"I reckon it don't take no wizard to figure that."
"Where at you going?"
"That's my nevermind. Go to sleep."
Margy sighed disdainfully and settled back in bed on one elbow. "You goan find yourself trouble."
Dorry was shocked. "Margy! Ain't you got no shame about you?"
Dorry put Sin's Dream away and came over to the bed.
"Cain't you hush? Do you got to lay there and beller like Jort Camp when he's drunked-up? I'm not going to see no boy. It's too hot and sweaty to sleep. I'm goan take a walk is all."
Margy smiled in the dark. "Want me to go with you?"
"I want you to go asleep and mind your own business."
"You fixing to go out in the woods with Tom Fort again," accused her sister.
Dorry sniffed contemptuously, tossing back her hair.
"Tom Fort!" she said, applying scorn to the name and suggestion. "That boy! No, I ain't going to see Tom Fort. I told you I was-"
"Who then?"
Dorry hesitated, trying to see her sister's darkened features. "Margy, honey," – dulcetly this time – "I kin see a boy now and then if'n I want. You got no call to pester me about it. I wouldn't do hit to you."
"You wouldn't catch me doing the things you do."
"Oh, hush. Leave me be. The only trouble I'll git in is if you go to opening your big mouth around." She found her dress and slipped it over her head, smoothing it down on her hips. "Be sweet, honey. If Pa er Ma should git up, you tell 'em I went out to the privy."
Dorry went to the window and looked out at the moonflooded yard and distant pasture. "You'll see when the boys begin to hanker after you," she whispered.
Margy raised her head like a bass coming at the bait."Oh? Well, mebbe I know a something about that and you don't. Mebbe I know some boys that do hanker after me."
Dorry was interested. She looked back at her sister.
"Who? Who you know, Margy?"
"That's my nevermind."
"You just saying it. Hit don't really go fer truth."
"It do so!"
"Hush, cain't you? Well, who then?"
Margy hesitated, looking away from the window and her sister's silhouette. She put her lower lip between her teeth thinking of Shad and what he'd said to her earlier in the night, seeing again the cock of his felt hat on his dark head, the slow smile on his thin lips.
"Oh," she said finally, "mebbe a somebody like Shad Hark."
Dorry waited a moment, then came back from the window. Again she tried to see Margy's face but couldn't.
"You're a-lying. Shad don't even know you're alive."
"That ain't what he said on the porch tonight!"
"What did he say? What, Margy?"
Margy was pleased with herself. She could tell from Dorry's tone that she was bothered by the thought that any good-looking boy would look at Dorry's little sister instead of her. But her sense of euphoria stalled. Well -.
"He said he was thinking on trying me sometime soon," she said, carefully cutting the part where Shad had added in five or six years.
"Trying you on what?" Dorry said. "What's that mean?"
"I shorely don't know," Margy said with feigned indifference. "Ask him next time you see him. It don't mean corn kernels to me."
Dorry straightened up, satisfied at last that Margy had overplayed her hand. She was a dirty little liar, and she was merely trying to show off. Dorry almost laughed when she said, "Mebbe I will – when I see him."
7
Sam Parks was sitting in the weeds near the whispering river. He'd been out rambling that night, as was his habit, but now he just sat in the dark and felt sorry for himself. Nervous, restless, foot-itchy, he was a little, wiry man with bright snapping ferret eyes. A compulsive little man who had to keep busy, had to be doing something, anything-as long as it wasn't work.
There wasn't anything attractive about Sam, scrawny, weightless, head-hunkered-a bucktooth man; so bad that Jort Camp-his best friend, the one who made more fun of him than the rest, and they made enough-once said that Sam looked like a man who tried to swallow a piano and the keyboard got stuck.
But it wasn't only his looks the girls objected to – there was also a woodsy quality about Sam. Smell, is how they put it, and none too faint. But Sam couldn't help that. He was a woods colt conceived in the woods, gestated in the woods, and born in the woods three axe handles from a turpentine still, and no one, not even his mother, could say who his father was. And Jort Camp said that the reason Sam had remained in the woods all his life was because he was looking for that mysterious father. But what made it hard was that Sam didn't know if the old man would turn out to be a bull-snake with buckteeth or a polecat with dandruff.
Sam sat by the river and put his right fist into his left palm and worked it there, making a thick grime out of the dirt, grease, and sweat. He was used to the jibes and the jeers. He could take that. But the girls now, the juicy round little-he jerked his hands apart and put the left one to the back of his neck, the right one to his upper lip. He massaged his neck for a moment while he pulled at his lip, then he gave that up with a start and put the hands together again. Tucked them in his lap.