Swamp Sister

6

Leaving the main road, Shad passed along a shadowbarred path and approached what at first sight seemed to be a small landlocked lake. Black turf sloped down on either edge, and black snaky tree-roots gleamed in the moon below the black-glass surface of the water. Out in the centre of the pool the moon had thrown a great smear of silver, and it rocked there gently like mercury in a cup. A soothing murmur, endless and smothery, came from the silver shoulder of a small weir at the foot of the pond. On the east bank, snug inshore, sat the squat dark houseboat.

Shad found the short gangplank between bank and boat and stepped onto it, grinning. He was remembering the night he brought Elly Towne out here and they'd tried to break into the houseboat. Elly had been too scared of snakes to lie in the bull grass in the woods, and Shad had suggested Bell Mears' old floating shanty. But it hadn't worked out. The houseboat had been locked drum-tight. Finally they'd settled down on the aft porch, amid a litter of old papers, cans and whatnot.

"Wasn't much of a gal at that," he reminisced. "Then she went to being scared of spiders. Never seen such a girl fer spookiness."

The forward porch had been an open-air workshop. He could see the black shape of the cutting table, and hanging on the forward wall, a tangle of racks and frames for drying the pelts, square racks for coon, narrow frames for mink. He went aft along the skinny gangway.

He reckoned that Elly had been the most inexperienced girl he'd ever cut across. There had been nothing new, nothing different, nothing exciting about the girl. But thought of her brought Dorry Mears back to mind, and then Iris Culver. Iris he knew about-perhaps knew too much, to the point where it was getting a little old. But Dorry- His mind, perverse with desire, tricked him into listening again to the giggles and hot whispers of Dorry Mears as she thrashed about unseen in the thicket with Tom Fort. Instantly he was infected with the remembered sound. He wanted to see her again, to mix with her kind, to have himself accepted as one of kindred sensuality.

He leaned against the frame corner, staring hard at the motionless night. "Got to find me a somebody," he muttered. "Somebody soon."

A coon had found itself a frog, had captured it, and now brought its prize down to a moony patch on the bank. Shad watched the minor spectacle absently. The coon held the frog in its forepaws and commenced peeling it, freeing the corrugated skin with a short, jerky, tearing movement. Then it washed the limp blob of flesh in the water, and straightened up to begin its meal.

Shad shuffled his foot, making a scraping sound. The coon froze, its body seemingly all sharp little points of listening attention. Abruptly it shoved the frog in its mouth, showed its tail and became a part of the night.

Life and death, Shad said, thinking now of something he'd read about the survival of the fittest in one of the books Iris Culver had given him. Well, I got mine because I was the fittinest of all of 'em.

And now he was going to buy a piece of the world with it. A big granddaddy piece. But as he unlocked the padlock with the key Bell had given him, he knew at that moment the only thing he really wanted was Dorry Mears.

It was musty inside. It smelled of decay, of mice and old newspapers. He fished up a match and struck the head with the edge of his thumb, exploding a small blare of saffron light. He walked the yellow ball over to the hingetable on the starboard wall and lighted the lamp he found there and looked around at his home.

The cook-stove stood against the forward wall with the dish cabinets on each side of the stovepipe and the iron ventilators above the heating shelf. The windows were shattered. Under the right window was the deal table, and under the left a bunk bed. Over the bunk on a shelf stood an old rust ball-dialled clock, its stiff hands insisting that the time was 5:32-any day, any year. A woman must have lived in the shanty at one time or another, because two or three potted tomato cans with grotesquely twisted dead geraniums stood on another shelf alongside the door. Shad grunted.

He went over the bunk and inspected his bed. The blankets were dustbags with a few nameless little crawling things, and the sheets were filthy. He gingerly gathered up the whole mess, took it out to the aft porch and heaved it overboard. Tomorrow he'd have to invest in some new bedclothes. He went back inside and surveyed the bumpy mattress. It seemed fairly sound, but the springs underneath screamed like a girl stepping on a cottonmouth when he pressed them.

"Old Bell should'a ast couldn't he pay me to live in here," Shad complained.

He went back to the table, sat down, opened his carton of tailor-mades and lighted up. The smoke hung about his head like swamp mist around a cypress knee. He stirred its sagging coils when he moved, pulled out his roll of bills and spread the six remaining tens on the table.

He'd only been back in the village maybe three hours, and already nearly forty dollars was gone. Funny thing, he thought, how short-lived money was.

It was damp hot in the little room where Dorry and her sister Margy shared a bed. And because they were girls, and because this was their room, and because of the summer-thick night there was a heady female odour.

But the not too subtle emanation that compounded the room's atmosphere was merely a nuisance to the sisters. Their warm, supple bodies, naked and only sheet-covered, stuck wherever they touched and formed glowing bubbles of perspiration. When they sighed with exasperation and pulled apart, the sweat-beads would plop and run down their smooth thighs and hips.

Margy was listening to the night music – the male crickets fiddling their leathery forewings, the bullfrogs grunting their deep bass notes as they hop-flopped about the garden searching for slugs, and somewhere the ethereal trombone bay of a night-running hound. She listened, trying to forget the heat and her own sleeplessness.

Dorry was listening to her parents' bedsprings, listening for the last squeaking cry as they moved fitfully in their own aura of middle-aged connubiality, settling down into moist sleep.

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."