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By Root 236 0

for him. She knew that, left on his own, Boyd would have kept right on staying with his aunt, Virginia Balsom, who already had begun to spread talk about Maggie “corrupting” her nephew. Ginny was a vengeful cow who, soon as she heard what those spy-boys had to report, was liable to try and poison Boyd against her by dragging up every wrong thing she’d done in her lifetime. The times she got a little tight and went off with some ill-chosen man. There had been a few of those times over the years. Things got away with her sometimes when she drank. After a few drinks this overwhelming feeling of license, of entitlement, would begin its tug. Look how you live, the liquor would whisper, all shut up on this island, cut off from most everything that makes life worth the uphill trudge. Said every sip: You deserve whatever pleasure you can piece together tonight. The booze would strike cells in the pit of her stomach and keep on surging southward and when it reached her loins it was like a waiter was there to take her order. Tonight’s the night, whatever you want.

Only she never let it get further than some sloppy kisses, some old boy equally as looped rubbing his hand up her stomach. Whenever she went off with one of these men, the booze would at some point blot out the desire it had awakened. She opted for drunk over laid every time. Wasn’t any high moral wrangling involved either. More like that buzzer went off in her stomach, Hit me baby, time for another patch, and she’d push away whatever worked-up male she’d dragged out to the dunes, set off to douse her fiery nerves.

Boyd said, “I got a place to stay.”

Straining again, not wanting to step in, not wanting even more for him to ruin everything, she said, “When Crawl or any of them come for a visit he can stay back at his aunt’s place.”

Woodrow smiled his okay, much as she was going to get out of him, and before Boyd could speak, Maggie turned and led him through the house and outside, calling good-bye to Sarah who had made herself scarce in some hidden corner of their neatly kept cottage.

“What in the world was all that for?” Boyd asked.

They were nearing the creek, close to the footbridge Woodrow had helped her father and the other men of the village build years ago when a storm washed out the previous one. She dragged him off the path and led him into a bowed shelter carved out by stooped and gnarled yaupons. The mosquito buzz sounded mechanized, like an outboard cranked up high. He slapped at his ankles as she pulled him closer, kissed what she thought of as some sense into him.

“I want you every night,” she said. “In a bed, not on some borrowed blanket in the dunes where those little brats are going to be every evening now, waiting on a show.”

“Hell,” he said, “that’s fine, but everybody’s going to know it still. I mean, me living back behind the only black on the island so I can bed down with my woman?”

“Lover,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Say I’m your lover. Don’t call me your woman. That sounds like some trashy song on the radio, talking about your wo-man.”

“Okay, lover,” he said, laughing. “You really think it’s better, me living over there behind them?”

“If you have a problem living behind Woodrow and Sarah, I believe we’ve got problems doing what we’re doing.”

“I like Woodrow,” he said. He looked confused for a minute, as if trying to decide what to say. “I don’t know that he cares too much for me. He’s never out-and-out rude or anything, but most of the time we’re out on the water he looks right through me. Sometimes he even tells Crawl something to tell me. Like I don’t speak English.”

“Woodrow likes you fine,” she said. “That’s just the way Woodrow is.”

“Talks to my shoes if he talks to any part of me.”

“You’d do that to him if you were black and he were white.”

“Hard to say. I’ve never been all that good at imagining anything other than what I got.”

Maggie filed this comment away, and in the years since he’d been gone, she trotted it out often, found ways to use it to justify what happened between them. She often felt she was the opposite—capable of