Sinners Football 02- Wish for a Sinner

by Lynn Shurr

  He shoved her from a huddled kneeling position to flat on her back. “You look like one of those Greek goddesses, all white—but rosy here and here—dark hair, here and there.” He knelt between her legs and ran his hands over her torso. “What was her name—Pandora?”

  “Pandora opened the box of troubles, Joe. Get your classics straight.”

  “Well now, that might be the case. I should stick to what I know: Disney films, Tink.”

  “You called me that in front your mother.”

  “She thought it was cute. Let’s forget about nicknames because I am so ready for this and we aren’t likely to get any tonight at Mama’s house.” Joe sank into that hot, snug but yielding place only a woman could provide. He withdrew again and rummaged under Nell’s hips for his jeans.

  “You get no points for staying power, Joe.”

  “I need a condom. Just give me a minute.”

  “You don’t need to…”

  “I do. I told you I’m always careful. There, on in a jiffy. No more interruptions.”

  Snowballs put his head over the fence and bellowed. All the cows turned to stare in their direction.

  “Ignore him. He’s envious.”

  Nell closed her eyes to the hot sun overhead and gave herself over to the sensations of Joe massaging her breasts, kissing her lips and meandering down her neck. He raised her heels to his shoulders and kept his weight off of her that way. The new angle made her push against him and claw his hips with her nails. Her legs slid down and she sat almost upright on his thighs, her legs wrapped around his waist. Joe held her against him as he finished with a series of quick, powerful thrusts that brought her along, too. They fell back into the pile of clothes.

  Joe rested his whole weight on the lower half of Nell’s body, his head on her stomach. She toyed with the two dark curls on his forehead. “First class roll in the hay, I’d say.”

  “Me, too,” he managed to get out. They rested for a while, getting a tan in places usually left covered. The sound of horses tearing at the grass, the cicadas singing in the trees, and their heavy breathing were the only noises in the meadow until a boat with a small engine putt-putted up the bayou.

  Joe rolled over and snatched his jeans out from under Nell when it sounded as if the boat might be coming to shore. He stood in a hurry, ostentatiously zipping himself.

  “Ah, dere you are Joe. I t’ink your horses might of got loose. Was going to bring dem back to the barn for you. What are you doing dere?” questioned a man about Joe’s daddy’s age and build, but thinner and grayer. Nell hunched behind Joe’s legs and peeped out through a tiny gap in the weeds.

  “Just taking a leak, Uncle Wylie. I thought you and Dad were working today.” Joe motioned to Nell to stay quiet as she rustled the grass trying to get her clothes on.

  “Don’t ya know we got indoor plumbin’ now, Joe? Dat new house of yours gonna have six bat’rooms?” Uncle Wyle put his engine into idle and sat back to chat.

  “Like you never took a leak over the side of that boat. Actually, seven baths, one downstairs, too. And a shower for the horses in the barn.”

  “Gaw! You ridin’ bot’ dem horses, Joe?” Uncle Wylie chortled and spit some tobacco into the water.

  “Nope. Nell must have had something bad to eat. She’s off in the bushes. Don’t embarrass her now.”

  “Mais jamais! Poor bete.”

  “Catchin’ anything?”

  “Few catfish. It’s too damn hot to plow and too damn hot to fish. We broke off early. Your daddy’s probably home by now havin’ a cold beer and watching a ball game. Dat’s where I’m headed.” Uncle Wyle used a paddle to push off from the bank where the little aluminum boat had drifted. He cranked up his engine again and crept out of sight around a bend in the river.

  “That’s it. Take your time, Joe. Just let me lay here covered with insects,” Nell whispered from her nest in the grass.

  “You look sweet as a fawn curled up down there. Besides, those are just sweat flies, not red ants. Up you go.” He helped her dress, did a booty check for grass stains, and plucked weed fragments from her hair. “Mama will be on the lookout for signs,” Joe told her. “But you’re okay.”

  They mounted up and the horses ambled back to the barn where Joe tossed the reins to Bijou and ordered a good rubdown for both animals. He and Nell strolled back to his parent’s house. They were hand-in-hand again, no tension between them.

  Nadine Billodeaux saw them coming up the drive from her kitchen window. “Ain’t that sweet, Frank?”

  Glued to the small television Nadine used to watch her soap operas while she cooked or sewed, Frank took another handful of pork rinds from the bag on the table and washed the snacks down with beer. “What?”

  “Look, quick, quick. They holdin’ hands.”

  Frank tore his eyes from the screen and took a brief glance. “So, Nadine. Don’t get all excited. Joe Dean got women in hand all da time.”

  “He never brings ’em home, no. This one is special.”

  Frank shrugged at his wife’s comment.

  The young couple came into the kitchen. Joe sniffed. “Smells good. What’s for dinner?”

  “I got a pot roast in the crock pot for after four o’clock Mass.” Nadine crinkled her nose. “I smell—horse. Get you a shower before we go. You’ll go wit’ us, cher?”

  Nell, who had been holding her breath about what Mrs. Billodeaux might be smelling, nodded and hurried through the kitchen, calling out, “Dibs on the shower, Joe.”

  Joe started after her, but was waylaid by a mixing spoon across the stomach.

  “You ain’t going in the shower wit’ her, no, so just sit down and watch the game wit’ your daddy.”

  His father passed the pork rinds and opened another beer.

  “No more snacking and get that beer off your breath before Mass, you hear?” Nadine snatched up the cellophane bag, folded it over and closed it with a chip clip. She stowed the pork rind bag on top of the refrigerator. “I’m going to get dressed. Mind, you hear?”

  Nell made it through the Mass in Chapelle’s historic church fairly well. The service was not all that different from the Episcopal version except for the extra “and ever” in the Lord’s Prayer. When the congregation rose to file up for communion wafers, Nadine Billodeaux leaned across her husband and whispered. “You just sit, Nell.”

  Also in a stage whisper, Mrs. Billodeaux called across to Joe on the far side of Nell. “Joe Dean, when you las’ been to confession?”

  “Aw, Ma!” He refused to look at his mother.

  “Joe Dean, you answer me,” she said a little louder.

  “For Christ’s sake, last September, I guess.”

  Two elderly women, eighty-five if a day and sitting in the pew directly in front of Joe, turned and raised their eyebrows. “For shame!” the one with the shoe-shine black hair said. “The language!” her redheaded companion chided.

  “Miss Lolly, Miss Maxine, sorry,” Joe Dean said.

  “You stay on your knees and pray till we get back, son. Next week, you do your confession, you hear,” Nadine Billodeaux ordered as the usher came to help Miss Lolly and Miss Maxine down the aisle. Her husband in tow, she followed the old women to the front of the church.

  As soon as his mama got in line, Joe Dean slipped off his knees and seated himself next to Nell again. “It was worth coming to see you down on your knees, Joe,” she mocked him.

  “You’ve seen me on my knees plenty, just not in church.” He preened when she blushed and checked behind to make sure that pew was empty, too. The service ended with the recessional and blessing shortly after Nadine and Frank returned to their seats.

  “Now we got pot roast waitin’ and a nice quiet evening ahead. Tomorrow, we all going crabbing at the Point early, so get your sleep,” Nadine informed the couple in the back seat of her Honda sedan as Frank drove sedately down the back roads to their home. Nell ended her first day in the warm clutches of the Billodeaux family the same way, sedately.r />
  TWELVE

  Nell enjoyed crabbing at the Point despite the fact that the tip of her nose turned red and was sure to peel. About half the participants came home with a sunburn making them look as red as the catch boiling in a pot. The baseball cap Nell borrowed from Joe hadn’t done much good in keeping the sun off her nose, but his old blue shirt, rolled up at the sleeves and tied at the waist protected her back and shoulders very well. Frank, of the perpetual farmer’s tan, and Nadine, who had the sense to wear a large straw hat and long sleeves even in the heat, went unscathed.

  By the time crabs filled three coolers, the children had lost interest and were chasing each other in a game of tag involving hitting their target with the bedraggled turkey necks tied to string for bait. Frank called an end to the catching phase and a beginning to the eating phase. He stopped at a roadside gas and grocery and picked up an extra bushel of crabs to make sure no one would go hungry.

  Now, the men stood around under the carport at Allie’s house dumping ice-stunned crabs into the boiling water and sipping beer. The women spread the Sunday papers over two long, redwood picnic tables under the oaks and had cold drinks and conversation. Allie bragged on her oldest boy who was starting at the university at Lafayette in the fall and would major in petroleum engineering. That same eighteen-year-old son, mingling with the men, had a beer can covered with an insulated purple and gold LSU holder in his hand—as if his mother would be fooled.

  Allie’s sixteen-year-old daughter leaned against her mama’s chair and boasted during a lull in the conversation, “Uncle Joe says he’ll put me through veterinary school at LSU if I keep my grades up.”

  “Better do something about those math grades, then, honey, and don’t go telling your daddy Joe is going to foot your bills. He makes good money in the oil patch. We don’t need the help,” Allie said. Her daughter went off to sulk with Eenie’s three girls who sat under the oak trees passing around teen magazines.

  “That one girl is more trouble than all three of her brothers. Boys, you can put them outside and they find something to do. Girls, they’re on your feet and in your face all day. I tell you Nell, don’t have girls,” Allie recommended.

  “Oh, girls aren’t so bad,” said Eenie who had only daughters. “But Darryl worries about who’ll take over Three Brothers when the old men are gone and he needs some help.” Nell had swiftly been informed that Eenie’s husband, Darryl, was the only one of the sons-in-law who continued to farm sugarcane.

  “Your girls are only starting their teens, Eenie, so you just don’t know. Darryl can always sell out to one of the big corporations or the development people, then we can all split the pot.” Allie resembled her mother in all ways and dominated her younger siblings. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure that out, Nell thought.

  “Sell the Billodeaux land!” Eenie looked horrified.

  “Maybe Joe will buy him out, too, like he did Uncle Hal,” suggested Lizzie who worked hard as a LPN and had four kids to put through college.

  Her oldest girl wanted to be a real nurse, she told Nell. The two boys said they were going to play football like Uncle Joe, but at ages ten and eight, what did they know? Six-year-old Lisa wanted to be a mommy. What did she know either? Liz confessed she had not married well, but she stuck it out for the kids. Charlie over in the carport was getting a buzz on already and she’d be driving him home again.

  Izzy, who had gone to college and taught the third grade for several years before marrying a high school history teacher, pulled her toddler’s hand away from the bright red hot sauce bottle on the table and gave him a ring of keys to play with. The child bounced against her full belly.

  “This one was an accident,” she confided in Nell. “Looks like I’ll be sitting out the first few weeks of school if she doesn’t get here soon.”

  “Don’t say my number thirteen grandchild was an accident.” Nadine patted Izzy’s stomach. “You come out when you ready, cher heart.”

  “How many children do you want, Nell?” Izzy asked.

  Nell spilled a dribble of Diet Coke down the front of Joe’s blue shirt. Her head buzzed with the Billodeaux family dynamics and confidences thrown at her in such a short time.

  “I don’t think about it.” She looked over at the driveway to where Joe and Allie’s oldest organized a basketball game around a rusty hoop and tattered basket. Joe held up Lizzie’s eight-year-old so the boy could dunk the ball. “In my situation, you take one day at a time.”

  “That’s right. You work with all those sick kids, don’t you?” said Eenie. “It must be hard.”

  “Sometimes. What I do helps.”

  “Of course it does.”

  The group edged away from the topic and went on with their husbands’ strengths and failings until the men approached the table with trays of steaming crabs. The aroma of the boiling spices rose off the pile and permeated the taste of the red potatoes and corn mixed with the seafood. Soon, cracking and crying began as smaller children begged for help getting at the meat and the adults compared the best techniques for opening crabs.

  When the shells piled high, the men rolled up the newspapers and put the waste into the covered trash barrel. The women went inside to bring out the desserts: a plate of watermelon slices, a yellow sheet cake with a brown sugar and pecan topping and homemade vanilla ice cream melting in the heat. After the children, who had spent more time pinching each other with crab claws than eating, filled up with goodies and grew drowsy, the party broke up. The old folks stayed until the mosquitoes got bad at dusk, then headed home with Nell and Joe again riding in the backseat.

  “I’m turning in early,” Frank announced as they pulled into the drive.

  “Me, too,” Nadine said.

  “Nell, what say we take the Porsche out for a spin? The night is young and the moon is coming up full,” Joe suggested.

  His mother frowned. “You be careful. Don’t go too fast, Joe Dean.”

  “Who, me?” He laughed and extracted Nell from his mother’s car and placed her into his own.

  They drove only a few miles before Joe turned the Porsche on to a tractor path between two fields of cane. They bumped along, the deep ruts hard on the undercarriage of his low-slung vehicle. As soon as Joe came to a crossing, he turned the bend, parked and turned off the lights. The tall stalks formed a wall between them and the world. He leaned over and put Nell’s seat back as far as it would go and paused for a kiss on the way.

  The kiss went on and on with tongue and teeth coming into play. Joe’s hand slid under the knot in her shirt and rubbed her stomach before continuing upward to unhook her front-snap bra. He rubbed one of her nipples between his fingertips and the other pebbled up in envy. He slipped a hand into her jeans and stroked lightly with one finger until he caught an elbow on the gearshift.

  Getting out of the car, Joe circled around to her side, paused for a minute with his backside pressed against her window as he struggled with a condom, then folded himself on to the floor between Nell’s legs. His position was so incredibly awkward, Nell laughed.

  “What’s the matter—remind you of your high school days?” Joe said.

  “Oh, no! My high school years were about anger and proving something. This is about fun.”

  “It’s about more than fun, I think.”

  Nell continued to laugh. He slid her farther up the seat, took off her jeans with one pull and dove in head first between her legs. As soon as his tongue touched her most sensitive spot, the laughter stopped. She sighed and moaned as he loved her in and out. When she writhed and her back arched upward, he rose over her and entered. He sustained her orgasm as long as he could before giving up and letting go.

  When he collapsed over her, his head close to her ear, he whispered, “Who’s laughing now?” but the trouble he had getting up and out of the car set her off again.

  “Damn, tomorrow I’m getting a truck with an extended cab and a long bed. I need one for the ranch anyhow.”

  Next day, they d
id drive to Lafayette to shop for a truck. The dealer had nothing in stock meeting Joe’s specifications, but said he could check around on the computer and maybe have something by the end of the week if Joe wasn’t particular about color.

  “I don’t care if it’s purple so long as it’s roomy,” Joe Dean grumped because they had nothing he could drive off the lot that afternoon when he offered a cash deal.

  On the return trip, Joe pulled up before the church on the square and went in to do his confession because he had promised his mama. “You can wait here. I won’t be long,” he assured Nell.

  “Really?”

  “Look, I’ll pick a number, say one-hundred-one acts of fornication, and throw in the sin of pride. It keeps things simple and gives me a little credit for the next few weeks.”

  Joe did return in a fairly short time. “Told you so.”

  “And what was the penance?”

  “A large check for the church restoration fund and one-hundred-one Our Fathers on my knees. I’ll put the check in the mail, but I got to save the knees for football. God will understand.”

  “I’m sure.”

  They picked up hot loaves of French bread from Pommier’s Bakery across the street from the church and a bottle of wine, some sharp cheese and red grapes from the Winn-Dixie on their way to the building site. Joe and Nell picnicked on the slab laid for the pavilion and went riding afterward.

  When an afternoon shower blew up out of the west, Joe gave Bijou the rest of the day off and they holed up in the barn. On the picnic blanket spread over the straw, they made love as the water drummed on the metal roof and curious barn cats, eyes glowing in the twilight of the storm, watched from safe corners.

  “Better than the beach, don’t you think, Nell?” Joe asked her as she curled on his chest and he warded off the cats closing in now that the action had stopped.

  “Don’t know. We’ll have to try the beach.”

  They set off to Grand Isle in the morning and returned in time to pick up his new truck on Friday. Joe took communion on Sunday because, he said, he thought his confession was good for a few more weeks.