Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [91]
“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine look like?”
Lloyd choked on his words. “I … I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis … this ugly man … in an alley one night.”
The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.
“He take down your pants?”
“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart … and … and … he did me. Hard as he could.”
Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.
“He said … he said … I felt just like a little … pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.
Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking—the insistence on fulfilling it—than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering—so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola … so different …
More like some hideous revenge … of … Phineas …
The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy’s tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom—half boy’s, half girl’s and raked like a battlefield—hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.
He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life—dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious—and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.
“Shush, boy,” she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much—too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a tent roof too heavy with rain to tip. He was full of a lot of things, she sensed.
Boy though he was, she felt the manhood bursting out of him. It was surprising in one his age, but she had become accustomed to surprises. She stripped down his britches, as the garments had been rent from her in the past, taking hold of his privacy as if reaching for a chunk of meat. Maybe a different kind of darkness would cure his grief. Boys, like men, were like that.
Yes, he was young. Very young. But what did that matter when there were people hunting her?
She had done it before with a boy named Samuel and another named Tee, with a white man named Johnson and another called Cooley. She had always done what she had had to do. And she had survived what had been done to her. In a corncrib and a canebrake. In a shell-pink high-ceilinged bedroom, razor-stropped to an iron cot with the queer scents of magnolia and quinine oozing in.
Lloyd was too jangled to resist. Even as his precocious lust sprang forth, he gave in—let her lead. Hattie used him like a rag to staunch a hemorrhage. Hers—and his, too. She always imagined blood streaming from between her legs now. She would wake in a