Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [88]
“Worried ’bout bein’ with a nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.
“Who … are … you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured to be able to speak.
“Wailll …” she smirked. “Dey calls me Shoofly.” She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, “But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That’s my proper name.”
Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk soles of her feet—everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.
“That’s … a fine … name,” he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.
The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. “I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that,” she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.
His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarrassed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this attitude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning—sometimes condescending, other times rudely compassionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.
“You’re beautiful,” he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.
The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.
“Like niggers, huh?” She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.
Lloyd could feel some violence coiling up inside her. She might have pulled a water moccasin out of her breast—or a blade—but he made no move to protect himself.
“Rub my feet,” she commanded.
“W-what?” he stammered.
“Rub my feet, boy,” she repeated, with a face like a fist, and in one fluid motion she brought her legs up over the lantern and into his lap, so that if she had extended her toes they would have pressed against his straining hardness.
Lloyd gulped and took the right foot in his fingers—and, without being able to take his eyes from hers, he began to stroke and caress the arch and ball, feeling the coarse skin soften with the oil of his palm. The girl blew out the lantern.
His parents did not know where he was. No one on board knew where he was. He did not know whom he was with. She might have been mad, for all he knew—and must have been mad in some way to be hiding down there in that hole, stalking the boat alone late at night, with no family or traveling companions. A girl her age. And a Negro—or half Negro. Yet, plunked down now in complete darkness with her, massaging the calloused flesh of her foot, he was flooded with an unknown calmness. He kept his hands at their task, trying not to breathe.
What seemed like a very long time passed, and at last the girl said, “It’s different in the dark. Some folks is afraid of it. I ain’t—I’m not. Are you?”
“Sometimes,” Lloyd managed. “But not … now …”
“Call me Hattie. What I call you?”
“L-loyd.”
“All right, then. Lloyd. Were you really going to jump?”
Lloyd could no longer picture her firmly in his mind. Just her eyes. He felt as if he were caressing the darkness itself. Her tone was sultry and soothing, but the words were young and white. Southern. Mixed up. Like someone in a dream.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“Someone’s affer you,” Hattie said, again sounding black.
“How do you know that?”
“I can feel it. I can smell it.”
“I thought that was mutton.”
The girl gave a light grunt.
“Well, you don’t have to tell me about it, if