Before Shelley, Elgin had spent a long time without a woman he could publicly acknowledge as his. He’d gone with Mae Shiller from fifteen to nineteen, but she’d gotten lonely while he was overseas, and he’d returned to find her gone from Eden, married to a boy up in South of the Border, the two of them working a corn-dog concession stand, making a tidy profit, folks said. Elgin dated some, but it took him a while to get over Mae, to get over the loss of something he’d always expected to have, the sound of her laugh and an image of her stepping naked from Cooper’s Lake, her pale flesh beaded with water, having been the things that got Elgin through the jungle, through the heat, through the ticking of his own death he’d heard in his ears every night he’d been over there.
About a year after he’d come home, Jewel Lut had come to visit her mother, who still lived in the trailer park where Jewel had grown up with Elgin and Blue, where Elgin still lived. On her way out, she’d dropped by Elgin’s and they’d sat out front of his trailer in some folding chairs, had a few drinks, talked about old times. He told her a bit about Vietnam, and she told him a bit about marriage. How it wasn’t what you expected, how Perkin Lut might know a lot of things but he didn’t know a damn sight about having fun.
There was something about Jewel Lut that sank into men’s flesh the way heat did. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, had a beautiful body, moved in a loose, languid way that made you picture her naked no matter what she was wearing. No, there was more to it. Jewel, never the brightest girl in town and not even the most charming, had something in her eyes that none of the women Elgin had ever met had; it was a capacity for living, for taking moments — no matter how small or inconsequential— and squeezing every last thing you could out of them. Jewel gobbled up life, dove into it like it was a cool pond cut in the shade of a mountain on the hottest day of the year.
That look in her eyes — the one that never left — said, Let’s have fun, goddammit. Let’s eat. Now.
She and Elgin hadn’t been stupid enough to do anything that night, not even after Elgin caught that look in her eyes, saw it was directed at him, saw she wanted to eat.
Elgin knew how small Eden was, how its people loved to insinuate and pry and talk. So he and Jewel worked it out, a once-a-week thing mostly that happened down in Carlyle, at a small cabin had been in Elgin’s family since before the War Between the States. There, Elgin and Jewel were free to partake of each other, squeeze and bite and swallow and inhale each other, to make love in the lake, on the porch, in the tiny kitchen.
They hardly ever talked, and when they did it was about nothing at all, really — the decline in quality of the meat at Billy’s Butcher Shop, rumors that parking meters were going to be installed in front of the courthouse, if McGarrett and the rest of Five-O would ever put the cuffs on Wo Fat.
There was an unspoken understanding that he was free to date any woman he chose and that she’d never leave Perkin Lut. And that was just fine. This wasn’t about love; it was about appetite.
Sometimes, Elgin would see her in town or hear Blue speak about her in that puppy-dog-love way he’d been speaking about her since high school, and he’d find himself surprised by the realization that he slept with this woman. That no one knew. That it could go on forever, if both of them remained careful, vigilant against the wrong look, the wrong tone in their voices when they spoke in public.
He couldn’t entirely put his finger on what need she satisfied, only that he needed her in that lakefront cabin once a week, that it had something to do with walking out of the jungle alive, with the ticking of his own death he’d heard for a full year. Jewel was somehow reward for that, a fringe benefit. To be naked and spent with her lying atop him and seeing that look in her eyes that said she was ready to go again, ready to gobble him up like oxygen. He’d earned that by shooting at shapes in the night, pressed against those damp foxhole walls that never stayed shored up for long, only to come home to a woman who couldn’t wait, who’d discarded him as easily as she would a once-favored doll she’d grown beyond, looked back upon with a wistful mix of nostalgia and disdain.
He’d always told himself that when he found the right woman, his passion for Jewel, his need for those nights at the lake, would disappear. And, truth was, since he’d been with Shelley Briggs, he and Jewel had cooled it. Shelley wasn’t Perkin, he told Jewel; she’d figure it out soon enough if he left town once a week, came back with bite marks on his abdomen.
Jewel said, “Fine. We’ll get back to it whenever you’re ready.”
Knowing there’d be a next time, even if Elgin wouldn’t admit it to himself.
So Elgin, who’d been so lonely in the year after his discharge, now had two women. Sometimes, he didn’t know what to think of that. When you were alone, the happiness of others boiled your insides. Beauty seemed ugly. Laughter seemed evil. The casual grazing of one lover’s hand into another was enough to make you want to cut them off at the wrist. I will never be loved, you said. I will never know joy.
He wondered sometimes how Blue made it through. Blue, who’d never had a girlfriend he hadn’t rented by the half hour. Who was too ugly and small and just plain weird to evoke anything in women but fear or pity. Blue, who’d been carrying a torch for Jewel Lut since long before she married Perkin and kept carrying it with a quiet fever Elgin could only occasionally identify with. Blue, he knew, saw Jewel Lut as a queen, as the only woman who existed for him in Eden, South Carolina. All because she’d been nice to him, pals with him and Elgin, back about a thousand years ago, before sex, before breasts, before Elgin or Blue had even the smallest clue what that thing between their legs was for, before Perkin Lut had come along with his daddy’s money and his nice smile and his bullshit stories about how many men he’d have killed in the war if only the draft board had seen fit to let him go.
Blue figured if he was nice enough, kind enough, waited long enough — then one day Jewel would see his decency, need to cling to it.
Elgin never bothered telling Blue that some women didn’t want decency. Some women didn’t want a nice guy. Some women, and some men too, wanted to get into a bed, turn out the lights, and feast on each other like animals until it hurt to move.
Blue would never guess that Jewel was that kind of woman, because she was always so sweet to him, treated him like a child really, and with every friendly hello she gave him, every pat on the shoulder, every “What you been up to, old bud?” Blue pushed her further and further up the pedestal he’d built in his mind.
“I seen him at the Emporium one time,” Shelley told Elgin. “He just come in for no reason anyone understood and sat reading magazines until Jewel came in to see Perkin about something. And Blue, he just stared at her. Just stared at her talking to Perkin in the showroom. When she finally looked back, he stood up and left.”
Elgin hated hearing about, talking about, or thinking about Jewel when he was with Shelley. It made him feel unclean and unworthy.
“Crazy love,” he said to end the subject.
“Crazy something, babe.”
Nights sometimes, Elgin would sit with Shelley in front of his trailer, listen to the cicadas hum through the scrawny pine, smell the night and the rock salt mixed with gravel; the piña colada shampoo Shelley used made him think of Hawaii though he’d never been, and he’d think how their love wasn’t crazy love, wasn’t burning so fast and furious it’d burn itself out they weren’t careful. And that was fine with him. If he could just get his head around this Jewel Lut thing, stop seeing her naked and waiting and looking back over her shoulder at him in the cabin, then he could make something with Shelley. She was worth it. She might not be able to fuck like Jewel, and, truth be told, he didn’t laugh as much with her, but Shelley was what you aspired to. A good woman, who’d be a good mother, who’d stick by you when times got tough. Sometimes he’d take her hand in his and hold it for no other reason but the doing of it. She caught him one night, some look in his eyes, maybe the way he tilted his head to look at her small white hand in his big brown one.