The man stopped the car in a small little hamlet named Bigelow and got the keeper of the General Store to leave his breakfast and open the store long enough for him to buy some fresh clothes for the two of them, and a jar of salve for his rope-blistered hands. Then he persuaded the storekeeper’s wife to sell him some boiled eggs and biscuits and pork jowl and a Mason jar full of steaming coffee. When the storekeeper’s wife saw Latha, the man said to her, “My wife and I got pretty bad muddied up down the road a ways and my wife ruined her dress and had to wear that blanket.”
“Them roads is sure awful this time a year,” the woman said. Then she asked, “Whar you folks heading?”
“Conway,” the man said.
“Wal, I’ll tell ye. Ron Lee Fowler don’t start runnin the ferry till noon, but he lives not too awful fur up the road that runs north of the landin, so if you’uns was to go to his house and ast him, he might take you on across.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Much obliged,” he said, and they drove on.
Before going on to the landing, he pulled off at a creek, and the two of them cleaned up, washing all the mud off, and donning the new clothes he’d bought. Her dress was a size too small, but it did nice things for her figure and was the first dress she’d worn in years. Her shoes were two sizes too big, but they were real shoes, her first footwear in years. Then they sat on the grass and ate breakfast together. It was very good, the first real breakfast she’d tasted in years.
Ron Lee Fowler agreed to take the car across, for thirty-five cents. The roads on the other side of the river were better, and they reached the city of Conway before any of the stores had opened. They left the town behind and headed east, not north. Was this the way home? She wanted to ask him where they were going, but assumed he knew what he was doing. He would announce the name of each village or town as they passed through it. “This here’s Vilonia,” he would say. “This here is Beebe.” Somewhere east of the latter town, he turned off onto an old trail that led through a grove of cypresses in and alongside a bayou. He drove as far as he could before the road got too muddy, then he stopped. It was a cool place, nearly dark, like a primeval jungle, with all the big cypresses and their beards of Spanish moss.
“Let’s take us a nap,” he suggested, and got out of the car and found a shady patch of soft ground with a bed of cypress needles. She followed. She felt very sleepy, and she was grateful for this chance to stop and rest and maybe nap a bit.
The two of them lay down, a few inches apart. He folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes, and she could see that he was dead-tired. She turned her head and smiled at him, and then she snuggled against him. He opened his eyes and smiled back at her and then he wrapped one arm beneath her and she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. She had just a few dreams of Jessica.
She woke, in the same position, about seven hours later, and as soon as she raised her head from his shoulder, he woke too. The two of them rose and brushed the cypress needles off of them, and resumed their journey.
He drove all night. Sometimes he sang songs, “Old Joe Clark,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “The Jealous Lover,” and “Sally Goodin.” He sang so loud and off-key that he probably couldn’t hear her humming the songs along with him.
Sometimes he just talked, telling funny stories. “I remember that day we was going off to war, and the Jasper Women’s Club come down to the staging area where the Army was fixin to pick us up, and those women said they was throwin a seein-off party for us patriotic fellers. So they served us punch and cookies and this one lady comes up to me and says, ‘Young man, would you make a speech?’ and I choked on my cookie and says, ‘For God’s sake, what about?’ And she says, ‘Just anything you like, and tell em what you think about it.’ So then I stood up and says, ‘Well, I like Miss Latha Bourne better than anything else, and I think she is wonderful.’ And then I sat down, a-wiping the sweat off my brow, and afterwards everybody comes up and says that is the best speech they ever heard.”
Latha thought of several things she could say, but she was able to speak none of them. Could this man really be Raymond? He sure had changed a lot.
He said, “J’ever hear the one Doc Swain used to tell about one time he gave Granny Price a dose of medicine and he says to her, ‘Keep a close watch, and see what passes.’ Next day he come back, and she was feeling a little better. He asks her, ‘Did anything out of the ordinary pass?’ ‘No,’ says Granny, ‘just a ox-team, a load of hay, and two foreigners on horseback.’ Doc Swain he just looked at her. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.’”
Did she laugh? She wanted to. She thought that a spontaneous burst of amusement would pop out of her mouth, but she couldn’t hear it. She wondered why she could not laugh. Hadn’t she laughed yesterday when they were stuck in the mud? The man kept on telling funny stories but she was not able to laugh again at any of them.
“This here’s the mighty Missippi River,” he announced around midnight, as they crossed a big bridge. “And this here big city is Memphis.” Latha remembered enough about geography to know that Memphis was due east from Little Rock a good little ways, and therefore they were not heading in the direction of Stay More. When he stopped at a café to pick up coffee and consult his road maps, she wanted to ask for a piece of paper to write on, to ask him why they were not going in the direction of Stay More, but she could not even pantomime the request for something to write with and on. Nor was she sure she’d be able to write if she did have something.
As the dawn came up east of Memphis, he parked beside a remote barn out in the country, and the two of them slept on the hay in the barn. Because she was in the habit of sleeping without clothing, she removed what she had on. He was already asleep, poor thing. She studied his face in sleep for a while, trying to determine if he possibly could be Raymond. No, he wasn’t handsome enough to be Raymond. Was it possibly Every?
She was not surprised when, sometime during the course of all her dreams, she began to think that Raymond—or Every—was making love to her. If you think about somebody just before falling asleep, you’ll usually meet them in your dreams. She couldn’t see his face, which he had lowered down between her legs so he could lick her. Then he suspended himself above her and tried to enter her, but she was too unyielding. He drew back and knelt and moistened her again with his tongue, and tried once more to enter her. Still she was too tight, but as he increased his pressure she suddenly unclenched and enfolded him and enjoyed the slow slide of him in and out of her. He backed. He forthed. She knew it must be Raymond, not Every, when he abruptly got over the mountain, filling her with his freight. She sighed as he fell off her, and realized she could never have married Raymond and was not going to think about doing so now. Her dream abolished him and went back to Jessica.
When she finally woke, in the early afternoon, and stood to dress herself, she felt a bit of his cream seeping out of her. So it had not been just a dream! With the back of her thumb she wiped it off her thigh. Then after thinking about it for a moment, she put her thumb in her mouth and sucked it. The taste wasn’t like cream but like the woods and the creek and the sky. It made her more homesick than ever.
When he woke, and the journey was resumed, he kept looking at her. She exchanged his looks. It was as if she knew that he knew that she knew what had happened during her sleep. She winked at him. She hadn’t meant to wink, but it was more spontaneous and involuntary than a laugh. It was some comfort to realize that whoever he was he was not Raymond.
Chapter twenty-four
The next big city they came to, he announced, was Nashville. Where was he going with her? But they did not leave Nashville. He stopped at a building that had a sign on the door, “Dixie Hotel.” It wasn’t much bigger than the little Buckhorn Hotel in Jasper. When they were in the room, he said, “Latha, I sure do hope you will be comfy here. I sure do hate to leave you for even a little while, but I’ve got to go out and look for some kind of job of work, to make a little mo
ney so we can eat. That guy down at the desk said I had to pay for a week in advance because we don’t have no suitcases, and that was the last of my money. Well, I’ve got just enough to buy you some bread and meat and some magazines to read, but then I got to look for work.”
He left her for a while, and she was afraid. But he returned soon, with a whole loaf of store-boughten bread and some bologna and a whole pile of magazines: Saturday Evening Post, Picture-Play, and Godey’s Lady’s Book. “Now you just stay here and try to be as comfy as you can,” he said, “and I’ll be back this evening. Don’t you go out.”
She read magazines for a long time. The bed was so comfortable that she fell asleep in the middle of the Saturday Evening Post. And it was full night before she awoke, just in time for his return. He was carrying a small cardboard box. “All I could find,” he said, “was a job washing dishes in a café, but I got two free meals and a dollar for it. And look what I brought you. I sort of swiped it from the café.” In the box was a complete dinner: big slices of roast beef, baked potato, fresh sweet peas, salad, and a big wedge of strawberry pie.
That night when she undressed for bed, he turned off the light and took off all of his clothes too. He lay beside her for a while. She was not sleepy. “Do you recall that time I took ye and Rindy on my stick-horse into make-believe Jasper? Working at that café put me in mind of the make-believe restaurant I took you’uns to.”
Although she could not say anything, she was playing with an amazing thought that had a name attached to it. This man, her hero, was Every Dill.
In a worried voice he asked, “Latha, caint you say anything at all?”
“Free,” she said, and was happy when he gave her a big hug and held her tightly. But she was not happy when his male figurehead rose up and tried to get chummy with her. She squirmed and whimpered, remembering her dream of that barn they’d slept in, when she thought he was Raymond. He got off her and just lay there. He lay there staring at the ceiling for a very long time. Occasionally she would open one eye to see if he was still awake. Not only did he remain awake, but his dinger kept a-standing. With one eye she studied it, and admired it, and wanted to enclose it in herself, her mouth or womb or her ear or her bellybutton…or at least her hand. She reached for it, but pulled her hand back. Why can’t I do anything? she asked herself. She could only go on admiring it, until the moment she felt he was turning to look at her, and then she shut her eye.
“Latha, are you awake?” he asked. But she could not answer, nor stir.
Eventually she heard him get up. He went into the bathroom. After a time, she heard him moaning, and then a sharp intake of his breath, and then the toilet flushed. When he came back to bed, she rolled over and snuggled asleep in his arms.
Saturday he worked at the café again, washing dishes, and that night he brought home another dinner for her. After she had eaten it, he said, “Let’s go see a movin-pitcher show.” He walked her several blocks up the street to a theater. The film was The Navigator, with Buster Keaton. It was very romantic; also rather funny. It was the first motion picture she had ever seen. She was enthralled.
Back at the hotel afterwards both of them took Saturday-night baths in the tub. She thought she caught him spying on her while she took hers, but it didn’t bother her the way Vaughn had when he spied on her at Mandy’s house. She made a show of languidly rubbing the soap all over her body and washing it off. She spied on him too, when he had his bath, enough to see that his dinger was fully alert throughout. Despite this, he did not attempt again to molest her when they climbed into bed. She snuggled tightly into his arms again, still moist from her bath and smelling fragrantly of the soap, as he did, and again she could determine that his dinger was swollen thick. She allowed it to wedge between her thighs but they did not move. He must have decided that he didn’t want to force anything.
She woke some time later to discover that it was still there, and still swollen, but he had gone to sleep and was snoring slightly. She went back to sleep herself.
The dawn was coming up when she awoke again. That remarkable stalk of his flesh was still taut and hard. He had the trace of a smile on his face as if he were having a sexy dream. She separated herself from him so she could remove the sheet that covered them and so she could take a close look at that instrument designed for both pleasure and procreation. Lightly she traced the sinews of it with her fingertips but it did not wake him. Firmly she grasped it but that also did not disturb whatever sweet dream he was having. She rubbed the tip of it with her thumb. That part of it impressed her as the prettiest, the smoothest, the most exciting. She scrooched down a little so that she could bring her lips in contact with it. The feeling of that smoothness within her lips nearly drove her over the mountain. She stopped long enough to collect herself, and then she put all of it into her mouth. She sighed. She hummed. She realized that all of that beautiful humming she’d done with Jessica was but a fantasy of what she was doing now. She adored this lovely thing in her lips and mouth and throat and could not get enough of it. That fancy word the doctor had used, fellatio, was like calling a great banquet an edible. She lapped the shank with her tongue, and rolled her tongue around that smooth tip shaped like a little hat, and tried to remember what else Flora had told her. Yes, she was supposed to put her fingers under his balls. When she did this he groaned and woke up, but she did not stop. She sucked on the tip as hard as she could and then tried to get the whole thing down her throat. “Hey!” he said, and reached down to pull her away, but he must’ve been having such a heap of pleasure that he couldn’t put much sincerity in his attempt to dislodge her from her plaything. Latha kept her eyes closed and became greedy, wolfing it in and out of her mouth as fast as she could. He groaned and threw his head back against the pillow. Then his hips began to buck, but she held on. She was swallowing and unswallowing it as fast as she could, her head bobbing so rapidly it shook her entire body. Abruptly his hands came down and grabbed her by the hair and tried to pull her away, but she hung on for dear life and buried her lips in his pubic hair and waited until the last spurtle had dribbled down her gullet.
Then slowly she slipped her mouth up off of it and raised her head and opened her eyes and smiled at him.
He smiled back at her, but his face wore a look as if she had given him something he’d never heard of or dreamt about.
She sat up and continued to smile at him.
He seemed to be struggling to find some words, and finally found them, “Have you ever done that before?”
She had done it often in her fantasies and in her dreams but never in life. She shook her head.
“Why did you squirm and whimper when I tried to make love to you the other night?”
She could have liked to know the answer to that herself, but did not.
He asked, “Was it because you didn’t like me?”
She shook her head.
“Was it because you didn’t want to?”
She vigorously shook her head.
“Latha, why can’t you talk?”
Oh, there was so much she had to say to him, but she could make no answer that he could hear.
“Is something wrong with your voice?”
She vigorously shook her head.
“Have you forgot all the words?”
She shook her head.
“Are you afraid of me?”
She could make a sound, a scoff, but she shook her head.
“Do you know who I am?”
She nodded her head.
“Say my name.”
She had it right on the tip of her tongue and even grunted in the effort to get it out but could not speak it.
“Do you feel good? Do you feel well?”
She nodded her head.
“Then why won’t you talk to me?”
There was nothing she could say.
“Do you want anything?”
She nodded her head vigorously.
“What?”
She could not speak but she
could reach down and touch him on his pretty penis.
He laughed and said, “Well, he shore don’t look very useful right at this moment.”
She smiled.
“However…” he said, and he reached for her and pulled her down to him and held her and gave her a kiss. He kissed her and she kissed him for a long little spell. By and by he swelled up again. He wanted into her and she let him in.
Because he was below her it freed her movements, and she moved, free and wild.
When she got to the top of the mountain, her head fell on his shoulder. She hugged him tight and tried to hold onto him but then she went over the mountain and that was the last thing she knew.
There was no telling how long a time passed before this swoon ended. It was broad daylight when her eyes opened, and her first thought was, “My, D Ward sure looks strange this morning!” Then she sat up in the bed and rubbed her eyes. She spoke aloud, “I do declare, it don’t look like D Ward at all!” She went to the window and looked out. She was in a hotel, by golly. She looked at the rumpled bed and she saw a man’s jacket hanging in the closet. She felt a mild ache in her vagina, and she clapped herself on the brow and said, “Oh my gosh, I’ve prostituted myself!” Quickly she began dressing, and said, “I’ve got to get out of here, fast.”
She ran downstairs, avoiding the look the desk clerk gave her. Outside the hotel she did not know which way to turn so simply by instinct she turned to her left and began walking as fast as her feet would carry her. She had not gone far before she had to stop and study her shoes. They were much too big for her. Had she mistakenly put on the shoes of the man she had sold herself to? And speaking of selling, she had no money on her. Where was her purse? She decided she’d better go back to the hotel and search for it. But she couldn’t face that desk clerk again. Or the man. And speaking of the man, what had happened to him? Stepped out for breakfast? She hadn’t even thought to check the bathroom to see if he might be in there. She retraced her steps only a short way, less than a block, before she determined that the best course of action was to continue on, so she turned again and walked faster, although the shoes hurt her. She scanned the buildings on both sides of the street, looking for anything familiar. This must have been a part of Little Rock she’d never seen before. But she hoped it wasn’t Little Rock, because if it was, they were probably looking for her, if she had escaped from the insane asylum. How had she done that? She ransacked her memory, but the last thing she could recall was at Christmastime when her sister Mandy had come to visit. The weather was warm now, so that must’ve been quite a few months back. How had she got out of the nuthouse? Had they dismissed her? And how had she sunk into prostitution? She was hungry for breakfast, or even dinner, if it was time for it, but what had happened to the money she’d earned with her body?
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 66