— You all right, cher?
— Tell me some more about the Djadadjii.
— I don’t know much more. They all have wide mouths. Their mouths expand. They could swallow a football if they wanted. They could bite it in half. And they have a refined sense of smell. If a fang’s been near you, they’ll pick up the scent. Roy told me they’re all beautiful and the ones I’ve known were beautiful. and dumb. Dumb as chickens.
A fisher bird swooped low above the hyacinth, and the faint chugging of a generator came from somewhere upriver.
— Take off your top for me, said Sandrine.
— I. I don’t.
— I won’t touch you. I know you’re shy and you’re not ready, but I want to look at you this once. She pretended to pout. It’s not fair you can see me and I never see you.
Hesitantly, I reached back and undid the strings of my halter. I fitted my eyes to the red winking light atop a water tower across the river and held the halter in place for a second; then I let it fall.
— God, she said. I’d forgotten.
— What is it? I asked. Is.
Shh! She reached down to the river and cupped her hand and scooped up some water and let it trickle between her fingers onto my breasts. Cool and lovely, little rivers spilling over my contours. I felt beautiful and grand, a hill divided by tributaries. My skin pebbled where the water touched me. One nipple poked up hard.
The halter slid off my lap. Sandrine handed it to me and told me I could put it back on.
— No, it’s okay. My hair curtained my face, hiding my excitement. It’s nice. sitting here like this.
One afternoon when I was fifteen and feeling downhearted, I hitched out to the old boneyard set in a fringe of Florida jungle south of town and sat beside the big gray angel, drinking from a pint of lime-flavored vodka I’d lifted from Momma’s stash. Forty years ago a bunch of DuBarry kids went skinny-dipping at night in the ocean near St. Augustine. Their bodies were never found (it’s assumed they were caught in a riptide) and the town put up the angel beneath a twisted water oak for a memorial. They must have skimped on the sculptor, or else they were going for something different. or maybe getting vandalized four or five times a year has taken a toll, because except for more-or-less regulation wings, it resembles the husk of a half-human female insect nine feet high. The grave tenders have gotten slack about scraping paint off it, and the statue has acquired a crusty glaze over the head and torso that makes it look even weirder. Used to be there were some goth kids who lit candles and sang to the angel, but that provided an evangelical preacher with an excuse to rev up his campaign against devil worship and their parents smacked the goth out of them. Now kids come there to bust bottles on the headstone and howl and dry heave and screw, and I guess some believe they gain power over death by pissing on the angel or smearing it with paint, behavior the town apparently deems more in keeping with the moral standard.
I got pretty smashed and lay on my back, thoughts drifting from one depressing topic to the next, watching the dusk and then darkness settle in the oak boughs. A car purred along the dirt drive, its engine so quiet I heard the tires crunching gravel. Headlights swept over me. I figured it for kids and didn’t pay any attention. Someone came to stand above me — the salesman who had given me a ride out, a chunky middle-aged bald guy in a madras jacket.
— You still here? he asked.
— Naw, I said, wondering foggily what he was doing there — he’d told me he had stops to make in Hastings and Palatka.
He toed the empty vodka bottle and then stuck out a hand. Come on. I’ll ride you into town. This ain’t no fit place for a young lady.
Calling me a young lady must have pushed my daddy button, because I let him haul me to my feet. He had doused himself with cologne, but I could smell his sweat. He pulled me close and ran a hand along my butt and said thickly, Man, you are one sweet-looking piece of chicken.
I started to freeze up but recalled Momma’s advice.
— There’s a motel down near Orange Park that don’t ask no questions, I said.
I didn’t think he bought my act. He held me tightly and seemed confused; then a smile split his doughy face.
— Damn! he said. I was halfway to Hastings before I realized you were putting out signals.
All I’d done in his car was not look at him and grunt answers to his questions. He gave my breast a squeeze and I rubbed against him and said in a breathy voice, Ooh, yeah!
— You like that, huh? he said.
With my free hand I hiked up my T-shirt, exposing the other breast. He played with it until the nipple stiffened, then grinned like he was the only one who could work that trick.
— I been watching you for must be an hour and a half, he said. Here we could have been having some fun.
He placed his hand on the small of my back, the way you’d squire a prom date, and steered me toward his car — a crouching animal with low-beam eyes. I broke free and kneed him in the crotch. He puked up a groan, grabbed his jewels, and bent double. A string of drool silvered by the headlights unreeled from his lips. He went down on all fours, breathing heavy, and I kicked him in the side. That’s where I departed from Momma’s plan of action. Instead of running like hell, I grabbed the vodka bottle and busted out the bottom on a headstone and told him if he didn’t get the fuck gone I’d slice him. He came at me in a clumsy run, a hairless bear in a loud sport jacket, cursing and reaching for me with clawed hands. I slashed his palm open and lit out for the trees, leaving him screaming in the dirt.
For a time I heard him shouting and battering through the underbrush. I moved away from the noise and tried to circle behind him but lost my bearings. After hiding for half an hour or so, I thought he must have given up. A big lopsided moon was on the rise and I could smell the river but had no other clue as to where I stood in relation to the graveyard. I located the river and trudged along the bank, detouring around thickets, figuring I’d head north until I recognized a landmark. Crickets sizzled, frogs belched out loopy noises, and beams of moonlight chuted down through the canopy, transforming the bank into a chaos of vegetable shapes spread out across the irregular black-and-white sections of a schizophrenic’s checkerboard.
If I hadn’t cut him, I told myself, he would have probably slunk away. It don’t do to piss off that kind more than you have to, Momma said. Otherwise they’re liable to get obsessed.
I pushed back a palmetto frond, ducked under it, and stopped dead. The salesman stood about forty feet away in a slash of moonlight, thigh deep in weeds and gazing out across the river with a pensive air, as if he were rethinking his goals in life. He’d shed his jacket and was shirtless — the shirt was wrapped around his left hand, the hand I’d sliced. A thin shelf of flab overhung his belt.
I retreated a step, letting the frond ease back into place, and he looked straight at me. I could have sworn he didn’t see me, that he had simply caught movement at the corner of his eye and been put on the alert. Then he sprinted toward me. I ran a few steps and pitched forward down a defile, gonging my head pretty good. Dazed, I realized I’d fetched up among ferns sprouting beside an abandoned shack. The door hanging one-hinged. Roofless. The moon shone down into it, but the light inside was too intense for ordinary moonlight — it cast shadows that looked deep as graves and flowed like quicksilver along spiderwebs spanning broken windows and gapped boards. Shards of mirror covered the interior walls, reminding me of those jigsaw puzzles that are one color and every piece almost the same shape. I picked myself up and was transfixed by the image of a bloody terrified girl reflected in the mirror fragments.