“Naw, here’s fine,” he repeated. “All I got time for is a quick one.”
The girl was the sleekest shadow in the dark. “Oh, right,” she said. “It’s gettin’ late, and I guess yer wife’d wanna know where you been.”
“Just you let me worry about my wife,” Dwayne said, annoyed. “I don’t answer to her.”
“Don’t she ever get suspicious of ya?” The girl had asked the question calmly and, unabashed, kicked off her flip-flops and took off her shorts. “We all love her so much, generous as she is to us.”
Minimum wage to pick fuckin’ crabs,
Dwayne thought with another hidden smile.
And these pinheads think that’s a lot of money. Shit
. Of course, Dwayne had done the same thing quite a bit in his life, or any other menial job where employers weren’t discriminating. Dumpster cleaning, refuse removal, oil-change jockey, and the like—any job his parole officer could land him. Dwayne was almost forty now, and he’d done three jolts with the Russell County Department of Corrections, totaling seven years in stir. After the last one (two years, assault with a baseball bat), he’d landed here for a job picking crabmeat at the Agan’s Point Shellfish Company. Not the best job he’d ever had. After a while he’d begun to smell like crab guts; no matter how many showers he took, the dank fishy stink emanated from him. But then he’d met Judy and his life had truly changed. She owned the company, which her sister up in D.C. had helped her revamp, a small-time operation that turned secretly lucrative. When Dwayne had pulled enough wool over Judy’s eyes, she’d practically been begging him to marry her. And now?
Made in the shade
, he thought.
Dwayne wasn’t picking the crabs anymore; he was the supervisor of the Squatters and other lowlifes who did.
But there was never enough, was there?
The five hundred dollars in his pocket reminded him of that.
When the girl turned in the wedge of moonlight, Dwayne saw that she was fully naked now.
Bitch don’t waste time
, he mused. He also saw something else: evidence that she was indeed at least eighteen. Full, fresh breasts, dark nippled; very feminine lines from shoulders to waist to hips; a plush outgrowth of untrimmed pubic hair. Not that Dwayne would’ve been worried about statutory rape . . .
No. Not with this one
, he thought. Or those six others.
“Still can’t believe you wanna just do it here instead’a my shack,” she was saying. In the dark she was bending over, a gesture like someone putting on stockings. But why would she do that? In the woods?
“And like I was saying,” she went on, “what with your wife bein’ so kind to us, givin′ us good work.” She looked up, looked right at him with dark sparkles for eyes. “I don’t feel too good ’bout doing this, you bein’ Miss Judy’s husband and all.”
Dwayne cut a frown. “Hey, a buck’s a buck, right? You don’t want to do me because of my
wife
? Then one of your other little friends will. In a heartbeat.”
“I know. . . .”
“Besides, the twenty bucks I’m payin’ you for five minutes of your time, you’d have to work three hours pickin’ crabs.”
“I know,” she repeated.
That said it all. The Squatters were poor, and they weren’t even on the books as citizens. Invisible, like illegal aliens. They worked hard for their low wages, and the better-looking gals—like this one—utilized other resources for increased income. The way of the world since humans came out of the caves.
Dwayne squinted in the dark.
What’s she doing?
She bent over again, which replayed his notion that she was putting on stockings or garters or something. Yes. She’d slipped something up high on her bare thighs.
“What’s that you’re puttin’ on yourself?” he finally asked her.
“Wheat bands,” she said. “Has to be a special kinda wheat, though, and they’re hard to make. Hard to get the kernels to stay together when you sew ’em on the band.”
The hell
? he thought. But suddenly he felt distracted by a number of things. For one, the endless chorus of cicadas, these being the three-year variety. This part of Virginia, Agan’s Point got them all—the three-year, the seven-year, the thirteen-year, and the seventeen-year. As a kid, Dwayne had always found these waves and waves of insect sounds to be mysterious and captivating. But now—as an ex-con pushing forty—he found them annoying. The girl’s voice distracted him too, the accent. All the Squatters had it, at least those from Everd Stanherd’s clan. No one could ever quite place it. Part backwoods hillbilly drawl mixed with something that didn’t even sound American. There was something rich and swoony about the way they talked. When they spoke, their lips didn’t seem to move enough.
And then this new distraction.
What the fuck?
Dwayne thought.
Wheat bands, she said?
Now she stood more directly in the moonlight, her fresh young body nearly luminous, breasts jutting, her belly button a perfect black shadow. She’d pulled a band up on each thigh, like corroded garters.
“Those bands are made of
wheat?”
“Um-hmm. It’s middling wheat, and it ain’t from around here. The clan mother makes ′em, and every girl gets a pair soon as she gits her period. The magic goes back a long way.”
“Magic,” Dwayne said.
“Yeah. It’s for when you’re gettin’ with a fella. If ya wanna baby boy, ya put it on the left thigh, and if ya wanna girl, ya put it on the right.” She adjusted the strange bands daintily with her finger. “And if ya don’t want nothin’, ya put ’em on both.”
Dwayne shook his head.
Squatters. Jesus
. He knew there was a lot of weird superstition with them, but this was one he’d never heard before. Deep down he laughed to himself.
Stupid cracker. The last thing she needs to be worryin’ about is gettin’ knocked up.
It was getting late. “Time to get down to business,” he said next, and walked right over to her. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill down on her clothes, then turned her brusquely around, her bare back to him, and reached around to slide his calloused hands over the soft skin of her breasts and abdomen. He rubbed his groin against her buttocks, feeling that forbidden charge. Her skin seemed to rise in temperature as he maintained his rough caresses, and she began to breathe harder. Dwayne thought with an inner chuckle,
Look at that, I’m turnin’ the bitch on, gettin’ a whore all hot ‘n’ bothered. Guess them dirty little clan boys don’t do the job for her. Dwayne to the rescue . . .
He figured it was the least he could do, considering. . . .
He sucked her neck, playing intently with her breasts. The nipples felt pebble-firm now, and when he gave them a hard squeeze with his fingers, she squealed delightedly, rising on her tiptoes.
“I always had a big thing fer you,” came her strange accented whisper. “Just somethin’ about
you
. . .”
The evidence of that was plain when he delved his fingers through her thatch into her sex. Dwayne felt electrified below the belt. “I’ve had my eye on you, too, for a while.”
“Ya have not!” she playfully challenged.
“Sure, I have. You’re about the prettiest of all the clan girls—”
“I am?”
“—and I’ve seen you on the line a lot. One of the hardest workers at the picking den. That’s what I told my wife.”
“Bet’cher just sayin’ that,” she toyed. “Why, I bet ya don’t even know my name, even though you do the pay envelopes every week.”
“Of course I remember your name,” Dwayne insisted, still cossetting her breasts, but then he thought,
Fuck? What’s this hosebag’s name?
“Uh . . .” He paused. “Sunny, right?”
“Close,” she told him, seeming at least pleased by that. “It’s Cindy. Least, that’s what I’m called mostly.”
Dwayne didn’t really give a flying shit what her name was . . . yet the comment nagged him. “What’cha mean, mostly? It’s either your name or it ain’t.”
“It ain’t my clan name. It’s awful.”
He worked her breasts harder, with more focus. “What’s your clan name, then?”
“I ain’t tellin’!” She seemed ashamed. “You’d laugh!”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Everd says when we’re ’round local folks, we use our other names; we only use our clan names around ourselves. Everd says it’s easier for us to fit in. We all know we don’t fit in with ya all.”
Dwayne was only worried about one thing fitting in, and it had nothing to do with names. But the man she referred to—Everd Stanherd—was a strange coot indeed. He was the clan’s elder, the wise man, so to speak, for all the Squatters. The fucker claimed to be sixty but he looked eighty . . . except for his hair. Not a gray hair on his head anywhere, just jet-black. All the clan had weird shiny jet-black hair, even the older women. Dwayne couldn’t see folks like this using hair dye.
“You feel really good . . . Cindy,” he guttered. As his own arousal steepened, the dense chorus of cicadas seemed nearly deafening. Now his hands roamed all over—she felt tiny in them, the lithe frame, the reed-thin physique almost disproportionate to breasts firm and full as the popovers Judy made on holidays—and just as warm.
Playtime was over; Dwayne was more than ready behind the zipper. He urged her through trees hanging with mops of Spanish moss, sort of pushing her along with his groin, and his fingers slid back up to her nipples. She was panting when he got her to the clearing.
“Yeah, right here,” he said. He turned her around, placing her hands on his belt, telegraphing that it was time for her to take off his pants.
Now her words sounded parched from desire. “You sure you don’t wanna go back to my shack?” she almost pleaded.
His jeans fell down. ″Naw.″
“It’d be lots more comfortable. What’s so special about this place?”
Dwayne dragged her down into the dirt, and as he pushed her knees to her ears, his thoughts answered her question:
This place? It’s only about ten feet from where I dug the hole last night. . . .
(I)
I wonder how he died
, came the spontaneous thought. Even as a lawyer, Patricia White never imagined herself to be capable of such mental ill will, but here it was, secretly staring her in the face. Her promotion couldn’t have been farther from her mind, nor the idea of so much extra income via the profit sharing. No, there were only these fleeting thoughts of darkness and morbidity.
Judy said he’d been murdered but she didn’t say how.
The next question bloomed as she gazed numbly at a series of Ming Dynasty-styled statues:
I wonder . . . how. . . .
Yes. Exactly
how
had her sister’s husband been murdered? What circumstances? And what modus? Gun? Knife? Bludgeoning?
Then:
I’d better get my head back on straight, before my
own
husband thinks I’ve completely flaked out
.
Byron sat across the table from her, trying not to look like he noticed her distraction. His first tack—when he knew something was bothering her—was to get her talking from any tangent available. “I’m not yet sure if this is the best Chinese restaurant in town,” he said, “but I’m prepared to proclaim even at this early interval that it’s the best
-smelling
Chinese restaurant in town.”
So deep was Patricia White’s distraction that she hadn’t noticed until he’d mentioned it, but when she did, her eyes widened. Slim Asian waitresses scurried back and forth, bearing huge trays of food that seemed to draw aromatic banners throughout the restaurant. “Oh, Byron, wow. You’re right. The aromas here are almost . . .”
His broad face widened as he grinned. “Erotic.”
“You would say that, Mr. Perverted Food Critic.”
He splayed his hands over the soup bowl that had until a moment ago been filled with shark-fin soup. “Good food is supposed to involve a sensual reaction; it has since early man began cooking. I see nothing
perverted
about it.”
She couldn’t help it, leaning over to whisper, “Except for maybe the time when we were in L.A., and you insisted on bringing the slice of Chocolate Martini Cheesecake home from Spago’s and eating it off my stomach when we got back to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“Um-hmm. And I think I can honestly describe your reaction to that as particularly sensual. And don’t forget, Mrs. Perverted Power Attorney, what
you
did with the whipped cream first.”
Patricia blushed immediately. How had she forgotten that part? More wonderful aromas rose to her face when their own entrées arrived: tangy sauces and elaborate spices and herbs carried upward in steam.
“So before we dig into our northern-China feast,” Byron said, “why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?”
Why not just say it?
“I feel bad,” Patricia admitted, “for not feeling . . . bad.” Her eyes glanced up from the exorbitant plate of seared langoustines in shallot sprouts. Her normally stable gaze was confused now. “Does that make any sense?” she asked.
Byron’s chopsticks stalled as he would have plucked up a strip of flash-fired abalone, his broad face contemplative in candlelight. “Honey, in this case it makes perfect sense. It’s hard to put into words because we’re not supposed to speak badly of the dead. That’s what you’re talking about, right?”