by Edward Lee
“Everd supposedly blesses the Point every morning,” Ernie said.
But Patricia was still looking out. There were actually two planks, she noticed now, the second sunk directly into the sand berm. But it wasn’t a cross painted on it; it was some sort of a squiggly design. “What’s that second one there?”
“Some kind of clan good-luck sign,” Ernie said. “Don’t rightly know exactly.”
More superstition, Patricia realized.
One of the Squatters approached them, a knobby-kneed man in his fifties, with a sun-weathered face and the trademark coarse, jet-black hair of the Squatters. He seemed to be bearing the lid of a bushel basket as a waitress would with serving tray.
“Howdy, Regert,” Ernie greeted him.
Regert, Patricia thought. What a strange name.
The man kept his eyes downcast, the way servants wouldn’t look directly at their masters, another thing that had always struck Patricia as strange. “Miss Patricia, Mr. Ernie.” He returned the greeting with a curt nod. He set the basket lid down on a dock table. “We made ya both a clan breakfast. Hope you like it. It’s a blessing from the land.”
“That’s mighty nice of ya, Regert,” Ernie said, then to Patricia: “This is great; come ‘n’ have some.”
Patricia got back up to look. Two tin tumblers of liquid sat on the tray, along with a plate of shucked oysters and a bowl of . . .
What are those? she wondered. Prunes? Figs?
“Try our home-brewed ald, miss,” Regert said, passing her one of the tumblers.
“Thank you, Regert,” she said, mystified. Ice cubes floated in the tumbler full of a thin pink liquid.
Ernie took a glass for himself. “You could almost call it a Squatter highball.”
Patricia rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to have a cocktail at nine in the morning!”
But Regert sternly responded, “The clan do not imbibe, miss. Our bodies are gifts from on high, temples of the spirit. Everd the sawon says so, and we follow his word. The clan will not disgrace our bodies with alcohol, the elixir of the devil.”
Patricia was amused. This guy sounds more like a Southern Baptist.
“There ain’t no booze in it,” Ernie assured her. “It’s stuff they make from roots ‘n’ bark, stuff like that.”
It didn’t look terribly appetizing. “Well, you’re the one who said I was adventurous,” she dismissed, and took a sip.
Her lips pursed at once. It doesn’t look good, and guess what? It tastes like it looks.
Ernie laughed. and downed his in one swig. Patricia elected not to offend Regert’s hospitality, so she just said, “It’s . . . very interesting.”
“Tastes like chalk at first, but give it a minute.”
Patricia would give it more than that. Then she noticed that Regert, like some of the others, also wore a cross pendant, which appeared to be made from tiny vine twistings, and a dark stone hung from a second pendant. By now she had to ask, “That’s an interesting cross, Regert. So you’re a Christian?”
Regert nodded, still not making eye contact. “Yes, miss, the clan believe in God’s only Son, and in the earth that He has bestowed and in the deliverance that He has promised, and in the earth and in the water and in the holy universe.”
Now that’s a mouthful, Patricia thought, nearly bidden to laugh. The holy universe?
“And earlier you referred to Everd as—what did you say? Asawon? That means he’s, like, the governor of the clan, right?”
“No, miss. Only God is our governor. Everd is our seer.”
The comment piqued her. “You mean like a psychic person, a visionary? He sees the future?”
Regert seemed on guard for some reason, less enthused to answer. “No, miss. The sawon sees the paths that God wants us to travel in life, and he shows us those paths.”
Patricia was about to ask him to elaborate, but he quickly nodded again with the same downcast eyes, and excused himself. “Good graces be with you both, but I must return to my work, which is a gift from on high.”
And then he was walking away.
“Thanks, Regert,” Ernie said after him.
Patricia watched the man amble back to one of the dock sheds.
“Yeah, they definitely got their own ways,” Ernie commented.
Patricia agreed. “They’re very gracious people, but . . .” She slid her tumbler away. “I can not drink any more of this.”
“You’ll have some oysters, though,” Ernie said, eyes alighting on the plate. “Remember how you ‘n’ me used to see who could eat the most when we was kids?”
Patricia felt touched by the memory. “Of course.”
“And you always won them contests, if I remember right.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” But oysters, like crabs, she’d always loved; she’d practically been raised on them. “These are huge,” she remarked, looking at the sprawl of six-inch shells on the plate.
“The Squatters dredge a couple a’ bushels every morning.” Ernie slurped three in a row raw off the shell. “Then we sell ’em to a few of the local markets for two bucks a dozen; then the markets resell ’em for about four.”
Patricia sucked one down, curling her toes, it was so fresh and briny. “In D.C. they’ll charge close to twenty dollars for a dozen oysters in a restaurant. And these are ten times better.” When she turned up the next shell to swallow the oyster meat, a gout of juice ran down her chin and neck. Great. Now I’ll smell like oysters all day.
Ernie ate a few more. “I never did figure out if it was true what they say, though.”
Patricia stalled over the comment. Earlier she’d been abstracting that Agan’s Point seemed to be working some obscure aphrodisiac effect on her, and now here was Ernie—whom she’d already had a sexual dream about—mentioning the same supposed effect of oysters. But did he mean anything more? He had a crush on me for years, she thought. And we never did anything. We never even kissed. “I think that’s just an old wives’ tale,” she finally said. Her next oyster spilled more juice on her. “Jeez!”
“Gettin’ more on yourself than in your mouth.” Ernie laughed.
This time the juice ran down her chin and continued right down into her cleavage. She felt spaced out for a moment, and suddenly she was fantasizing again: Ernie pulling her blouse off without a word, and licking the delectable juice out from between her breasts. Next she imagined herself fully naked, right here on the dock, more and more juice running salty rivulets down her stomach, filling her navel, trickling down. . . .
And Ernie licking it all away.
God, she thought, feeling flushed.
The oysters were gone now, and Ernie addressed the last object on the bushel lid. “Naw, I don’t know about oysters, and I don’t know about these, neither. But just ask any Squatter. They’ll tell ya these are the best aphrodisiacs in the world.”
Patricia was glad for the distraction; she looked at the bowl. “Figs?”
“Naw. They’re pepper-fried cicadas, and the ones we got here are the biggest of ‘em all. They dust ’em in wild pepper, then fry ’em in oil.”
Patricia simply shook her head. “Ernie? There’s no way on earth I would ever eat one of those things. They’re bugs. And I don’t eat bugs.”
Ernie grabbed a handful from the bowl, munching on them. They crunched like fried wontons. “Aw, don’t chicken out. Believe it or not, they taste kinda like asparagus, but crunchy.”
“Bugs don’t taste like asparagus; asparagus tastes like asparagus,” Patricia said. “I’m not eating bugs.”
Ernie ignored her. “You grab one by the wings, like this. . . .” His finger plucked one up. “Then pull it off with your teeth. But don’t eat the wings. They’re like wire.” He demonstrated, eating another, then plucked one up for her. He held it right before her mouth.
Patricia shook her head with vigor, insisting, “No!” Then she closed her lips tight.
“Come on. Like the Squatters say, it’s part a’ God’s bounty. Don’t be
a chicken. Won’t kill ya to try somethin’ new.”
Patricia smirked. Shit. I can’t believe what I’m about to do, she thought, then ate the turd-looking thing off his finger. It crunched between her molars, but actually tasted interesting, not repulsive. “Not bad,” she admitted.
“Good. Have another.”
“No! One bug’s my limit. Now let’s go!”
Ernie chuckled as they walked off the pier, the sun beaming on the water behind them. “What’s that building there?” she asked of a long white-brick structure just up from the dock. “Another washhouse?”
“Naw, that’s the line.”
“The what?”
“The new pickers’ building. We call it the line.”
Patricia noticed small windows and a number of window-unit air conditioners. “It looks new.”
“Three, four years old. In fact, I think Judy told me once that it was you who lent her the money to fix things up. So she had that built. You remember the old pickers’ shack that your daddy built, don’t ya?” “Yeah, and now that you mention it, it was . . . a shack,” she said, thinking back on the old rickety open-aired building. Squatter women would sit together at long wooden tables inside, monotonously picking the meat out of hundreds of crabs each per day. “Can we look inside?”
“Sure. In a way, it’s yours.” He opened a metal door, after which cool air gusted out.
A peek inside showed Patricia why they called it “the line.” Like a production line, she thought.
Over a dozen Squatter women—from eighteen to sixty—sat at long wooden tables. Cooked crabs would be dumped in the middle of the tables, and from there the women would dismantle the spiny, bright-orange creatures and begin to pick the meat out of them. Each woman wielded a small, unsharpened knife with which she’d tease chunks of the white meat from intricate inner shell channels. The meat would be flicked into plastic one-pound containers, which, when filled, would be scurried back to a walk-in refrigerator by a younger Squatter girl. Another girl would hurry back and forth, removing the shell debris.
“They do it so fast,” Patricia remarked.
The women’s hands pried apart and demeated each crab completely, in only minutes.
“They get a lot of practice,” Ernie said. “I can pick a pound pretty quick myself, but nothing like them. Couple of our girls can fill a pound tub in ten minutes. We wanted to enter ‘em into the annual pickin’ contest up in Maryland, but they wouldn’t go, and that’s a damn shame, ’cos they woulda won.”
“Why didn’t they want to go?”
“They said it was ungodly, or some such. To them, crabs, like all food, are some kind of gift from the heavens, and shouldn’t be turned into a sport.”
More weird philosophy, Patricia thought.
She couldn’t imagine more tedious work. Picking crabs all day, every day? But as she looked inside, the women couldn’t have appeared more content, chatting quietly amongst themselves as their hands and fingers blurred through the process. In the background—barely audible—an evangelical radio station murmured oral missives from God.
“Just wait’ll the Squatter cookout,” Ernie promised. “They got their own recipes for crab cakes, Newburg, and cream a’ crab soup that’re better than anything you’ve ever had, even in them upscale D.C. restaurants.”
Patricia believed it, and she could even remember a bit of it from her childhood.
Ernie closed the door and showed her back to the path. “Guess we better be headin’ back to the house— er, I should, at least. Gotta cut the grass. What’choo got planned today?”
“Nothing, really. I’ll go back with you, check on Judy. Then I might go into town, or maybe go for a walk in the woods.” This was another refreshing aspect of being back: not having to follow any agenda. But she knew she should at least check her e-mail and give the firm a quick call. Then she thought: And Byron! I haven’t called him in a day and a half! In fact, she’d actually spoken to him only once or twice since she’d arrived. He’ll be worried. . . . But when she patted the back pocket of her shorts, it occurred to her that she’d left her cell phone back in her room.
The tree-lined path wended further upward; spangles of heat draped across her face and chest from the sun pouring in through leafy branches above them.
“There’s another one,” Ernie said without stopping. He pointed to a tree as he walked on.
But Patricia paused.
A small plank, painted white, had been nailed to the tree in what appeared to be a crude decoration. But out here? In the woods? It seemed so peculiar. A simple but ornate drawing adorned the plank, some squiggles and slashes; they seemed symmetrical, in some disordered way
“Another one of their good-luck signs?” she asked.
Ernie had stopped just ahead of her, looking back. “Yeah. Ya see ’em every now and then out in the woods. The woods are blessed land to the Squatters.”
Patricia peered closer at the design. “It just looks so . . . unusual, doesn’t it?”
“I guess,” Ernie said without much interest. “It’s more creepy than anything, if ya ask me.”
Creepy . . . Yes, she supposed it was. The color of the paint used to form the design was odd, too: a tannish slate. Is it even paint? she wondered, touching it. Her finger came away smudged almost black. Doesn’t feel like paint. More like crayon.
Then she realized what it reminded her of. Last night . . . The note she’d found in the garbage, addressed to Dwayne. Since then she’d paid no mind to the weird sheet of paper she’d found, the sheet with one word written on it. . . .
Wenden.
Was it a name? She could look in the phone book but . . . Why? There was no reason for her to care, so why did it seem to bother her now? The word looked as though it had been written in some kind of thin-lined chalk, similar to this good-luck sign on the tree.
“What’choo doing?” Ernie asked with a smile. “Hopin’ some a’ that Squatter good luck’ll rub off on ya?”
“Maybe,” she said, and broke away.
But Ernie was right. The design was . . . creepy.
A narrow creek broke the path, its crystal water burbling. Ernie stepped over it in one easy stride; then Patricia hopped across herself. She sighed as her mind cleared—a rarefied luxury for a city attorney—and concentrated only on the cicada throbs, the babbling creeks around them, and the steady crunch of Ernie’s boots as he strode onward. This odd sequence of sounds and sensations seemed to tranquilize her as effectively as a low dose of Valium.
Ernie stopped and turned around. “Well, here’s a problem.”
“What?”
Another creek crossed the trail, several yards in girth and full of jagged, algae-covered stones.
Then it occurred to Patricia that she was barefoot.
“You don’t wanna cut’cher feet all up on them rocks,” Ernie said.
Patricia laughed. “Ernie, I don’t think I’m quite the city priss you take me for. It won’t kill me to walk barefoot through a creek.” She grinned, about to take her first careful step onto the stones. “Of course, you could always carry me.”
She’d said it as a joke, and was completely taken by surprise when he grabbed her and picked her up. “I was only kidding!” she exclaimed.
“Ain’t no trouble.” He chuckled, hefting her. “Us country boys’re strong. Feels to me like you don’t weigh much more than a bag a’ peanut shells anyway.”
“You say the sweetest things, Ernie,” she joked back. “Now, if you’d said I weigh more than a grand piano, I’d know it was time to join Weight Watchers.”
He carried her easily with one arm bracing her back, the other under her thighs. Her feet jounced in the air with each step, while her own arm clung fast to him around his shoulders.
“I hope there’s another creek,” she kept joking. “Then we can try piggyback.”
“Don’t’cha be teasin’ me now.”
But the rocking motion that came with each step lulled her more. She let her
head rest against his shoulder. He seemed to grip her tighter under her rump, which increased the friction between her legs—a pleasurable but aggravating sensation—and the position caused her right breast to rub against his chest.
Did the cicada sounds begin to drone louder? She felt deceptively relaxed in his grasp, rocking, rocking, as he stepped over more rocks; she could’ve fallen asleep. Some strands of his long hair brushed her face. The vee of her blouse looped up; then she drowsily realized that one nipple was showing.
She pretended not to notice.
Oh, God. The thought moaned through her mind.
She felt so strange, burning up with pent-up desires but lazy, slothlike. The cicada drone continued to fill her head, and the rocking motion continued to stimulate her sex, her breasts. But he remained the perfect gentleman; he couldn’t have not noticed her nipple. It tingled, felt like it was swelling. . . .
“Here we are. Ten cents for the ride . . .”
On the other side of the creek he set her back down on her feet, and she wasn’t even aware of what she was doing when she pressed right up against him, reached around and squeezed his buttocks, and kissed him, and it was no friendship kiss. It was a famished one, a kiss incited, even crazed by desires she couldn’t identify, just some sexual arcana that had swept her sense of reason away and left nothing but cringing nerves and raw, animal impulse.
Ernie seized up in the sudden shock and leaned back against a tree, his opened hands out—the roots of some moral reaction, perhaps: that though this was a woman he’d been in love with so long ago, she was married now, off-limits. But Patricia only pressed closer, slipping her tongue into his mouth and squeezing his buttocks with even more deliberation. Finally, threads of his resistence began to slacken. She moaned into his mouth, put her arm around his waist, and squeezed her groin to his.
Patricia’s mind raced in a desperate delirium. The suction of her kiss drew his tongue into her mouth. She was never even aware when she unbuttoned her blouse and bared her breasts. It was almost violent then, when she grabbed some of his long hair and urged his head lower.