Swamp Sister Read online

  "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."

  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.

  The aimless, expressive, can't-keep-'em-still fingers started a quiet little knuckle-snapping war, twisting and turning and pulling-and then the right hand retreated, flashing down to the left ankle to pursue an elusive itch that zig-zagged along a nerve end under his rolled sock and into his shoe.

  Sam was miserable. If he'd had a dollar-just one dollar- he'd be all right. But he didn't. Didn't even have a dime.

  "Aw hell," Sam said.

  What made it so imperative was he'd stopped by Bell Mears' place in his ramble that night. Not to visit. No one had known of his presence. He'd taken a post (one he'd used numerous times before) by the edge of the spring house, where he could look smack into old Mears' daughters' room.

  He'd only caught Margy twice. She hadn't been much to look at then-though he had-but she was hard to catch now she was getting older. She undressed in the dark. Now Dorry-now that was something else again. She always brought a lamp into the room with her, and she never pulled the blind. "That bitch!" he whispered almost hysterically. "That dirty little she-bitch!"

  He looked up then and froze, seeing a shadow flitting through the thicket. Who would be coming down that way so late at night? And off the main road too. Nothing to go at but the backwater and Mears' old shantyboat.

  Sam forgot about his troubles. He crouched and darted low an fast through the weed, heading for the trail. He might look grotesque when sitting or standing with his nervous agitation, but when he prowled he was as quick and silent as a snake slipping across sand. And now he had him a something to look into. There wasn't anything happened in the woods and Sam didn't know about. A cross fox made itself a new lair and Sam was sitting up in a tree marking the crossback's escape holes. An oldtimer set up a moonshine still so far out, so remote and hidden, that he was prompted to chortle and remark, "By juckies, they ain't nobody on God's hind legs kin find this still, now I tell yer!" and Sam was crouching behind a dead stump taking in the words. The silhouettes of a boy and girl blended into one in the darkness under the titis and Sam was squatting there in the bush, watching, licking his lips. You just never know when somebody's secret might come handy.

  It took him fifteen seconds to come within ten feet of where Dorry Mears passed a thicket-break.

  Trouble was Sam wasn't a fighter of any sort. Any suggestion of physical violence instantly threw him into a trembling state of hesitant confusion. The fear was so deepseated that even the thought of tangling with a husky girl like Dorry Mears (he guessed she outweighed him by twenty pounds) left him hanging balanced in self-doubt and indecision.

  But he knew that for once in his life he was going to have to make a traumatic decision, and make it on the spot.

  Take her from behind-but with what?

  He wildly looked around in the shadow. Saw a lightwood stick. Snatched it up. Came to a crouch as the girl unwittingly passed him.

  One quick tap on the head – stun her. All right, damn you!

  But he stalled, looking beyond her. A light was showing in the shantyboat. Someone was in there with a lantern. The stick
lowered in his hand. The suggested presence of a third party brought back the timidity he concealed under his ferocious crouch. The moral fibre of Sam's backbone turned to shreds, leaving him a ragbag of a man. The girl passed through the tupelos and down to the bank and gangplank. Sam dropped the stick.

  "All right," he whispered. "All right, you bitch. Git after your fun. Whoop it up. But don't you think fer a minute, missy, you goan git off scot-free. Sam here is goan have him a look at who you misbehaving with."

  But as he slipped down the shelving bank he forgot his most important woods-prowling rule. He made a soft little noise in his throat, whimpered like a hurt puppy dragging itself for home.

  Shad was sitting with his taior-mades and his money, feeling fat and drowsy in a warm mood of euphoria. In his mind he was plotting out his future – not too realistically; but it was fun just the same. He thought about the girls he would buy, and the expensive booze, and the cars and snappy suits, and maybe even a boat, some sort of cabin cruiser, say, but mostly about the girls. Then he heard a thunk of sound on the gangway and the houseboat stirred slightly.

  He swept up his bills, shoving them furiously inside his shirt, letting them drop to where the shirt bloused at his belt. Thank God he'd left the windows shuttered. He started to get up, to go to the door, but changed his mind and sat again, reached for a new cigarette.

  The door opened tentatively and four pale fingers curved around the edge and stayed there, holding four red beetles at their tips. At first he didn't understand, then he saw the long lamp-gold spifi of hair near the hand and knew it was Dorry Mears. An excitement that was akin to a violent sickness came highballing through his body, tensing him, robbing him of breath. He gripped the table-edge, watching, the tailor-made smouldering in his mouth. He didn't get up-wasn't sure he could; he sat there, thinking-Oh yes. Oh, indeed yes! Now we are goan have us a something here. I knowed it all the time.