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.
— Bitch!
The salesman spun me around, gut-punched me, and slung me through the door. Next I knew he had me straddled, pinning my arms with his knees and fumbling one-handed with his zipper, telling me what he had planned for the rest of our evening. When I made to buck him off, he slammed my head against the floor. He gaped at something behind me and I rolled my eyes back, wanting to know what had distracted him.
A ghost.
That was my first thought, but she had more the look of animation, a figure with just enough lines to suggest a naked woman, her colors not filled in.
The salesman scrambled to his feet, and she seemed to flow around him like a boa constrictor, locking him into an embrace and drawing him toward the back room, where they vanished, slipping through a seam that opened in midair and then closed behind them, leaving no trace. I don’t believe he made a single sound.
I had a strong desire to leave and got to my knees, but the effort cost me and I blacked out. When I came to, I heard her humming an aimless tune. I slitted my eyes and had a peek. She sat cross-legged by my side. She was more defined and her colors were brighter, though they were still ashen. except for a single drop of blood below her collarbone. She smiled, exposing the points of her fangs. I scooted away from her, but she had me and I knew it.
— Don’t fret, cher, she said. I won’t hurt you.
She noticed the blood drop, touched her finger to it, and licked the tip clean. I was too scared to speak.
— That man, she said. You’re safe from him now.
My head had started to clear and I felt the creep of hysteria. Is he dead?
— Not dead. He’s. waiting for me.
— Where is he? What’s going on?
— He’s where I sleep. Go slow, now. Calm yourself and I’ll tell you all about it.
Just her saying that had an effect on me — it was like she’d turned down my temperature.
— I’m Sandrine, she said. And you are.?
— Louie.
She repeated the name, pronouncing it like she was giving it a long, slow lick.
— If you want to go, I won’t stop you, but it’s been such a long time since I had someone to talk to. Sit with me? For a little while?
I didn’t have any run left and I felt drowsy, scattered. My eyes skated across the mirror pieces. In each of them was Sandrine’s face — pensive, fearful, frowning, in repose, moving as if alive. Hundreds of Sandrines, almost all of her, were trapped in those fragmented silver surfaces.
I must have spoken, because Sandrine laughed and said, I’ve been talking to them forty years and they haven’t answered yet. For a pretty girl like you, though, they might just whisper a little something.
Cracker Paradise lies about four miles east of DuBarry on State Road 17 and consists of a spacious one-story structure of navy blue concrete block set on a weedy patch of white sand that’s round as a bald spot and surrounded by slash pine. It doesn’t sport a huge neon sign like some roadhouses, just a little plastic MILLER HIGH LIFE sign above the door, and it has a slit window that’s been painted over so you can’t see in. When I was younger, Momma would leave me locked in the car while she partied, assuming glass would protect me from the men who peered in. I used to create fantasies about the place based on glimpses I had of the interior when the door swung open. Even today, now I’ve been inside a few times, it remains a kind of fantasy. I’ll hang out in the parking lot, sipping on a wine cooler slipped me by one of Momma’s friends, and picture slinky waitress queens dancing barefoot on sizzling short-order grills and serving slices of fried poison to travelers in bathroom fixtures, while out on the purple-lit bash and rumble of the dance floor, checkout girls from the Piggly Wiggly, acne-blemished counter girls from Buy-Rite, pretty-for-a-season Walmart girls with clownish face paint and last decade’s hairdo, they shake themselves into a low-grade fever, they make suggestions with their hips that turn the loose change in men’s pockets green, they slice hearts and pentagrams on the beer-slickered floor with their spike heels, looking to give it up for love-only-love and a cute duplex in Jax Beach.