“Aw, Cricket! What’cha say that for? Now you got him scared. Don’t go, mister. She’s just teasin’.”
“No, I’ve got to—” He winced again. “Please, Mary, be careful with that razor—”
Now she was doing her underarms, rather obliviously. Scritch-scritch-scritch. She shaved the lather out of one armpit, then flipped it off the blade into the water. Collier noticed a thread-thin line of red.
“See, you’ve cut yourself—”
“Aw, it’s just a nick, but I can’t do it right with this hand.” She held up her index finger.
First glance made Collier think she was wearing a fat dark ring but then he realized it was a bruise.
“I got one, too, but not as bad.” Cricket showed her own finger. “I stole a piece of sugarloaf from the store and got caught.” A manic giggle. “But that ain’t as bad as what Mary got caught doin’—”
“Shut up!”
The gritted-teeth mask again. “She got five minutes ’cos she got caught kissin’ a boy at school!”
Mary laid a hard hand across the back of her sister’s thigh. The sound cracked through the woods.
“Ow!”
“Serves ya right. Mister, don’t listen to her.”
Collier’s mind churned over too much at once. Who were these girls? Were they staying at the inn? Collier doubted it. Probably a trailer park nearby. Then: Those bruises, he pondered. He couldn’t forget Mrs. Butler’s painful demonstration of the “Naughty Girl Clips” in the display case…
scritch-scritch-scritch
“Oh, please, you really shouldn’t do that…”
Now the blonde was shaving the other armpit.
“Do mine next, do mine next!” Cricket insisted.
“There ain’t nothin’ to shave!” Mary almost wailed. “You ain’t got no hair yet!” Another gleeful smile shot back to Collier. “She’s jealous, mister, ’cos I got hair and she don’t. I got the blood, too.”
Collier’s throat thickened. “The…blood?”
“The Curse of Eve, like our mother told us ’bout. Eve did somethin’ bad in the Garden of Eden, so now all girls get the curse. But the curse gives us hair. Ain’t that right, mister?”
Collier stood speechless. He cleared his throat and asked, “Are you, uh, are you girls from town?”
“Oh, yeah. We was born here.”
“Where are your parents?”
Cricket wriggled her toes in creek mud. “Our father’s away workin’ and our mother’s at home. Where you from, mister?”
“California—”
Both girls traded another glance that seemed in awe.
“—but I’m just visiting here. I’m staying at Mrs. Butler’s inn.”
Mary splashed off her other armpit. It occurred to Collier just then that, for sisters, the girls couldn’t have looked more different.
“We don’t know no Mrs. Butler.”
Must be from a nearby town, and wandered over here. But…had it really been that dog he’d seen last night? No. It was just a dream. Just a hallucination…
Yet it wasn’t too far-fetched to think that the dog may have gotten inside. Mrs. Butler had even suggested the possibility.
“Oh, yeah,” Mary informed. “There’s a man at the cooper’s named Butler, but he ain’t got no wife.”
Cricket piped in, “One time he was all drunk and he offered us half a dollar to show him our—”
“Cricket! Be quiet!”
Collier’s contemplations stretched like taffy.
“Hey!” Cricket wailed now. “What’choo doin’?”
The dog frolicked in the water, chasing plops of floating shave cream. It seemed to be trying to eat them.
“He’s a silly dog,” Mary offered.
“Sometimes real silly…”
Now the dog yipped, thrashing circles in the woods. At one point it stopped abruptly, to defecate. It seemed to look right at Collier.
“He’s poopin’!”
“I have to go—good-bye,” Collier said quickly and began to walk off.
“Don’t go yet!” Cricket objected. “Don’t’cha wanna watch Mary shave her…”
Collier lengthened his strides.
As he made off, he heard:
scritch-scritch-scritch
He walked straight in spite of the dizziness: half drunk, half hungover. He slowed his pace up the hill he hoped to God would take him back to the inn. White-trash kids or something, he guessed. Poor, negligent parents, no decent role models. It happened everywhere. Then he thought: Or maybe…
Maybe it was another hallucination.
The finger clips? The dog? A young girl shaving her legs in a creek?
The half-heard sound of giggling stopped him. But he must be a hundred yards away now.
Some perverted gremlin in his psyche made him turn against his will.
And peer back down into the woods.
The girls were still at the creek. “Dirty dog!” Cricket reveled amid a flood of more giggling that could only be Mary’s.
Collier’s stomach turned at what he saw, or thought he saw. Then he jogged as best he could for the inn.
CHAPTER EIGHT I
1861
“Good work, men!” Morris barked to slaves and white men alike. He stood before the work site on the back of the rear guiding car for the pallet train. Then he shielded his eyes and looked down the line as dusk approached. “I say it looks to me like some mighty good work! Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Poltrock?”
Poltrock stood aside, distracted. He was looking at the numbers: how many iron track rails and fish-bolt plates the crew had consumed since last Friday. Can that be right?
Morris grinned at him, hands on hips. “I guess Mr. Poltrock didn’t hear me—” All the rest of the men, the Negroes included, laughed.
Poltrock snapped out of it. “Yes, Mr. Morris. Perhaps even better than mighty fine…”
Morris’s long hair lifted in a breeze. “Until Sunday mornin’ then”—one of the strong-armers clanged the bell—“we are all off shift!”
Roughly a hundred and fifty men disbanded from their ranks, shining in sweat, bent by fatigue, but cheering as they broke away for the campsites. The bell clanged on, jarring Poltrock’s brain.
“End of another week.” Morris rubbed his hands together. “Hard to believe we’re deep in Georgia territory now. Goin’ on four years, ain’t it? Seems like ’bout six, eight months, if you ask me.”
Poltrock barely heard him. Only then did he notice a long side-knife in a tin scabbard flapping on Morris’s hip. “Mr. Morris, what is that thing on your hip? Looks part sword, part D-guard knife.”
The blade whispered when Morris unsheathed the fourteen-inch tool. “It’s called a saber-bayonet, sir. Fancy, ain’t it? It’s made’a folded steel from the Kenansville Armory. They add somethin’ called chromium to the metal—shit won’t rust even if ya leave it in a bucket’a water overnight. And the brass hilt’s so hard you can use it for a hammer.”
“Why’s a crew chief need a knife that long?”
“Don’t really need it at all—” Morris turned the blade till it flashed. “It’s just…pretty, I guess. Women got their fussy jewelry, but men got their guns and knives, I suppose.”
The point had never crossed Poltrock’s mind, but it was novel. “Now that you mention it, I guess I feel much the same ’bout my Colt .36,” he said, and gestured to the revolver on his hip. “Don’t have much real use for it neither, not with this army of strong-armers Mr. Gast’s hired on. If the slaves were gonna rebel, they’d’ve tried that a long time ago.”