“Hi.” She was some looker. “You seen the guy running that dozer?”
“Ummm,” she said. There was a teasing little smile on her face. Jock couldn’t believe what he was seeing and what he was thinking. Billy was a real cocksman, but this wasn’t Billy’s kind of chick. This one was high-class stuff.
“I saw him,” she said, with what amounted to a knowing smirk. “He said I should see you, too. He said you would be nice.”
Once in Dallas Jock had taken seconds on one of Billy’s girls, a kid who just couldn’t get enough. He was a true believer. Still, there was something about this girl. “You pulling my leg?”
“He’s down there waiting,” she said. “He asked me to come and get you.”
That damned Billy. Only man Jock knew who could find a piece in the middle of the woods on the job. He followed, his interest growing. The girl didn’t talk any more, but she spoke with the swing of her hips. Jock followed her down a little trail into thick brush and then into a small clearing beside a fallen tree. “Where’s Billy?” he asked.
“I told him I didn’t want an audience.” She was opening her blouse. Jock’s throat constricted. He moved toward her.
“No,” she said sharply. “I want you to take off your clothes first.”
“This some kind of gag?” Jock asked.
“Is it?” She dropped her hotpants, and he licked his lips and began to move toward her again.
“No,” she said. “I want to watch you undress.”
“You do it for me, honey,” he said, moving.
“Humor me,” she said. “I have a thing about it.”
He halted. She was just a few steps away, the hotpants down around her ankles. As he watched, she kicked them aside. She was nude, lovely, soft, all woman. “Stand over there where I can see.”
He did. He hung his shirt on the tree and bent to take off his boots, and he didn’t even look up.
By pushing the accumulated dirt from the overhanging roots, she was able to cover them. She put their loose clothing under the top one and then pushed the dirt in and then pushed away leaves and got down to sand and used a stick to dig and push until there was a layer of dirt a foot deep atop them and all the nooks formed by tangled legs and arms were filled in. Then she covered the whole thing with leaves and, dressed, gathered pine straw to cover the entire clearing so as to hide the foot marks.
Then she examined it carefully for blood and other signs and, satisfied, skirted the bay, gained the road, and walked slowly and tiredly to the house. There she got out the gun cleaning kit and scoured the barrels of the gun. She oiled it, put it away, and showered. It had begun to rain, a hard downpour which, she knew, would settle the freshly raked leaves in the clearing and eliminate all traces of her having been there. It was Friday. The machines would sit all weekend in the raw, ugly cut. On Monday, there would be no one to run them. That, she knew, was only a temporary condition. There would be others. There would be many others. Too many. But for a time, at least, the pain was lessened.
She spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the big room, watching the rain fall on the small shoots which were once again sprouting up in George’s cleared areas. Now and then, as if she’d heard something pleasing, she’d nod and smile.
11
It was one of the most beautiful weekends in George’s life. Hot, Jesus, it was hot. He spent Friday working, on one of his regular days off, getting out a couple of rush jobs, and then finding it surprisingly simple to repair Dr. King’s polygraph. Just a bad wiring job. A cold solder joint. He traced the circuit, found the break, and cleaned off the bad joint. Then he soldered it and hooked up the gadget, after reading a few pages of instructions to a high school kid who liked to hang around and talk electronics. The electrodes were registering the movement of electrical currents on the skin, and George was pleased. He carried the machine home and put it in the big room.
There was a movie on in Port City which had received good reviews and was, seemingly, headed for Academy Awards. It was about a tough cop who called a spade a spade. George, a true Southerner, cringed when he read something about “a black from Alabama.” “Blacks,” to him, were primitive natives of some British colonial country. “I say, old bean, the blacks are restless tonight.” All that sort of rot. He thought the movie to be refreshing because it called crime crime even when performed by a “black.” George believed in law and order for everyone, saying after the movie, that laws held civilization together, defining civilization as those things which made him comfortable, relatively knowledgeable, and free to do things which pleased him as long as he did not infringe on other people’s freedoms. The movie also pleased him with its direct approach to the drug problem.
“That cop wouldn’t vote for legalization of marijuana,” he told Gwen.
“We never needed drugs,” Gwen said dreamily. She was snuggled in her bucket seat, her head back, listening to George with half an ear. “The air itself was wine.”
“Boy,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I was sort of daydreaming,” she said, sitting up straight and touching his leg. “You must think I’m a real nut.”
“Think?” He laughed. “Honey, I know.” He put his arm around her, and pulled her close—as close as you can pull a girl in a bucket-seat sports car. “But I love you.”
“Please go on loving me, George.” The urgency in her voice touched him. “I need you now, more than ever.”
“You’ve got me, kid.”
She had him. It was wild and exciting and very athletic. He zonked off into sleep and woke to a perfect Saturday. She was bright and cheerful. The heavy equipment across the waterway was working, but the machines were down into sterile earth, digging bare sand and piling it into dikes around the long, raw pit. He read the paper at breakfast, ate too much, and worked the crossword puzzle while she cleared the table. They walked their “estate.” George remarked that he should get around to clearing paths and buying those horses. Gwen said she had all the animals she could take care of, what with Sam and the new Pup. She very carefully, as usual, avoided mention of Satan. The cat, cleared of the bum rap of rabies, had found a nice home on a dairy farm in the adjoining county.
The wild flytraps at the boggy end of the clear pond were seeding. Their traps were healthy, red, and voracious. The inside plants were equally healthy. Gwen decided, although the plants propagated best from root stock, to try some seeds. George watched her gather some of the eggplant-shaped seeds and said, “Those things have a fascination for you, huh?”
“They’re unusual.”
“That I know. They grow only in this small coastal section.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting to speculate why,” George said.
“The soil is acid,” Gwen said.
“This isn’t the only acid soil in the world.”
“They don’t like to be too far from—” She didn’t finish.
“From what?”
“Oh, I don’t really know.” She walked away toward the house.
“How did they get the name Venus-flytrap?” George asked, catching up with her.
“Obvious,” she said. “They’re from Venus.”
“Sure.” He swatted her on her well-padded fanny. “And in the books, it’s Venus’s-flytrap, anyhow, indicating that they were named after the goddess, not the planet.”
“There is a connection even there,” Gwen said. “Venus was not exactly of this earth.”
“You are one spooky broad.” George laughed. She glanced at him, her eyes hooded.
Inside, she stored the seeds. George stripped and put on a bathing suit. “Come for a swim?”
“I’ll watch.”
He hit the water on the run, knifed into it, splashed, swam, and bellowed at Gwen, who sat on the balcony. She had gin and tonic ready when he came dripping his way onto the deck. “Before the sun crosses the yardarm?” he asked.
Pleasantly potted, he moved speakers to the balcony, juiced the amp up to three-quarters volume, and blasted the woodland with the choral movement from Beethoven’s Ninth. There was a breeze to blow away bugs. Gwen danced to “Turkish Bath,” after George had his fill of grandeur and went into something that just sat there and swung. After the walk in the woods, she’d changed to hotpants and the effect of her energetic belly dance was a good one on George. He smoked, enjoying the cigarette as only a cigarette can be enjoyed after a few tall ones, clapped, urged her on, and repeated the selection. He forced her to dance until she was laughing and panting.