Prologue
The moon smeared in
his eyes. He’d been staring as he waited, staring across the gulf
of night to the other side of the river. He smiled. Soon . . .
The moonlight
revealed sleeping bulldozers, stacks of foundation molds, and
telltale trailers erected as construction offices. It’s progress, his benefactor had said not too long
ago. Progress equates to more jobs, more
satisfaction, and more money. In your pocket and mine. It’s
exponential.
Dwayne’s command of
the English language excluded that particular adjective—but he got
the idea. He was going to help speed progress along, and that was a
good thing, wasn’t it?
The voice grated out
of the dark: “Do a good job.”
“I always do, don’t
I?” Dwayne Parker said. Huffy redneck that he was, he felt mildly
insulted by the other man’s comment.
“You do, yes. I’m not
denying that.”
“Ain’t none been
found, right?” Dwayne challenged.
″Right.″
Workboots came
forward, crunching softly. In the moonlight Dwayne could see leaves
and moss stuck to the tops of the boots, but no mud like Dwayne’s.
Here was what Dwayne guessed was the real difference between white
collar and blue collar, the brains and the brawn. Big fuckin’ deal, he thought. Bet I get laid twice as much as he does. . . . It
seemed a fair recompense for brawn.
“Sounds like you
don’t trust me to get the job done,” Dwayne finally got out. “The
tone of your voice ‘n’ all. Like maybe just ’cos I ain’t no big
college graduate like your cronies.”
“Don’t be insecure.”
Now there was something else to the tone. Dwayne didn’t like it,
yet he didn’t push it. The boots crunched forward another few
steps, twigs crackling. Moonlight flowed through the trees, bars of
shadows from branches splayed across the other man’s face. “I have
the utmost confidence in you,” he told Dwayne, and passed him an
envelope.
That’s better. . . .
The envelope
contained five crisp hundred-dollar bills.
The other man’s voice
seemed to resonate, a dark flutter from the face barely visible.
“You won’t have to do this too many more times before they all
leave.”
“What happens then?”
Dwayne asked.
“Your wife sells the
land to me. She’ll be rich and so will you.”
Dwayne pocketed the
money. Yeah, that’s right. And until then, I’m gonna have a lot of
fun.
The cicadas were
thrumming, a nearly electric drone that issued out from the woods
in all directions. If a sound could be cloying, this was it. It
pressed down on him like the sickly sweet humidity of the
marsh.
“Here’s fine,” Dwayne
said.
The girl seemed
surprised. “Here?” she questioned. “Don’t’cha wanna go back to my
shack?”
Dwayne frowned. He’d
seen where the Squatters lived: mostly sheet-metal huts on the
bayside of the Point. He hesitated, “Well, uh—”
“Oh, it’s nice,” the
girl promised. ”Not like lots of ’em. My brothers built it for me,
and I got it all to myself now that I’m eighteen.”
Dwayne repressed a
grin. Eighteen? Shit, this girl looks
fourteen, if that. She was a twig of a thing, ninety pounds
maybe, but then all the Squatters seemed small—Stanherd’s clan. The
tallest males stood five-seven if they were lucky, and the girls?
They were all like this one: four-eleven, five feet tops. Must be
something hereditary, in the ancestral blood. Stanherd’s Squatters
were small people.
But what had she been
saying? Don’t want to turn her trick in the
woods, he remembered. Wants me to go
back to her shack—well, fuck that. Someone might see
him.
“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. . .
.