Mississippi Sissy (8 page)

“Gimme my clothes back,” I whimpered.

“Ain't nobody gonna see you,” she said, grabbing my shorts and shirt and sitting on them. “Them Baptists don't never come back
here to this old ball field no more. They just use these dugouts to store stuff in like them signs yonder. Softball's a girl's game anyways, my mama says. She says it was too underhanded for a bunch of Baptists. Git it? My mama's always makin' up jokes. She's always sayin' ‘Git it?' I gotta pee—
scoot,”
she said, charging at me as I headed out into the afternoon sun. I forgot all about my nakedness as I pondered why my one and only friend had to have her privacy to urinate since she had already exposed her butt hole to me. I wondered how high I could get if I started to count. “Okay, you can come back in now,” she beckoned me when I got to around twenty-seven. I reentered the dugout. Its dirt floor had darkened and began to take on a noticeable dankness as the afternoon sun shifted and no longer lit the place with its slivers sliding through the slats. I could just make out the outline of my neighbor's eight-year-old body lying back in the shadows. She too was naked now. She lay on her back and had positioned the now upside-down pile of IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs to serve as a pillow, her head centered on the inverted W so that a pair of horns seemed appropriately to be sprouting from her head. Her legs, bent at the knees, dangled in the air, a toe or two teasing the one ray of dying light that dawdled above her and flickered like a tired firefly. “Take a look. You like my crawdad hole?” she asked and fingered herself between her legs.

Together the two of us had often “fished” for crawdads by sticking a needle of pine straw down the moist mound of dirt that was a sign one of the small Southern crustaceans had burrowed itself into the earth. If we were lucky, a crawdad would grab onto the needle when we cleanly jerked it from the hole. I stared at where the girl continued to finger herself and she was right: Her tiny mounds of earth-toned flesh did, in fact, resemble a crawdad's busywork.

“Wanna touch it?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“Don't be a baby,” she said, issuing once more that favorite warning
of hers. “If you don't touch it, I'm gonna tell your mama you did. If you do, I won't say nothing,” she keenly negotiated. I sat closer to her. She took my hand and guided my fingers to her flesh. She quivered at my touch. She closed her eyes. “Stick one in me,” she said. I slowly ran an index finger inside her as deep as it would go. She gasped, but approved. I began to insert the finger over and over until I realized my shirt, wadded up over in the corner, was wetter than it had been before I stepped outside. I pulled my finger free. She opened her eyes. “Don't stop,” she said, her demanding tone turning into what sounded remarkably like a plea.

“What happened to my shirt?” I asked.

A devilish grin crossed her face as she put her own finger back inside herself. “I wasn't watching where I squatted when I peed,” she told me. “Sorry. It'll dry.”

I picked up the shirt and wiped my finger on it. “I'm gonna git in trouble for sure,” I said. “My mama's gonna know we been bad.”

The girl's grin girded itself for the smirk it always turned into. Sitting up, she pulled on her panties. “We ain't been bad,” she said. “It's
tellin
that makes it bad. As long as mamas and daddies don't know something, then it ain't bad. They the ones that make things bad and good. We just kids. We just do stuff.” She next pulled on her jeans. “Fix my cuffs,” she told me, back to being the boss. Still naked, I knelt at her feet and, careful not to spill their remaining contents (a few more cigarette butts, a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, two red Lifesavers), creased her cuffs back into place.

We stepped outside after I had pulled on my shorts, she her top. She took my shirt and hung it from the chicken wire that rusted where it had been nailed up along the front of the dugout so a long-ago bunch of visiting bat-happy Baptists could watch the action without worrying about foul balls. “This'll dry in a minute. I promise. You'll see.” We climbed up on the bench outside the dugout. She put her arm around me and entwined her right ankle with my left one
where our feet dangled and began to swing our legs to and fro. She circled the conversation back to Captain Kangaroo and talked of his comparative coolness to Mr. Greenjeans and Tom Terrific. She calmed my fears about my imminent enrollment in first grade, dispensing advice about eating paste and the vomit-inducing power of the merry-go-round. She told me not to worry, that what had just transpired between us didn't make us man and wife because “you ain't stuck your peter in me yet.” She gave me one of her red Lifesavers. She lit another cigarette butt. She belched and made me blush. The air smelled of rain.

“Kevin!” my mother's voice thundered as she, like the approaching wad of clouds the humid spring sky had longed for all day, rolled toward us with the maximum force she too could muster, not tornado-watch-worthy in that summer of tornado watches, but wondrously frightening all the same in her own sudden bluster that could change the day's temperature just as easily, tighten my throat in anticipation of its outcome, make Coco bark. The girl's mother now shouted her name with equal gusto, forming a duet of anger as mine continued to call, “Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!” her worry sung aloud at soprano pitch, my friend's mother's voice lower, an altogether annoyed alto emerging from her throat, ever-phlegmy with the smoke from the cigarette on which she was no doubt puffing.

The girl unwrapped her arm from my shoulder and, burying her own cigarette in the dirt, bolted toward the pitcher's mound. “Come on! Hurry up!” she called, not such a big shot after all. “We're in deep shit,” she warned as she ran back and picked up a few sticks that were scattered about the dugout's bench. “Take some of these. Say we were out here looking for stuff.” Such a generic cover story seemed dumb, even to dumb little me, but I didn't have anything better to suggest, the truth in the last few days becoming an evermore treacherous option.

Real thunder now sounded in the distance as our mothers appeared,
marching toward us over the ridge that led to the ball field. My friend's mother had put on her new sundress but mine still wore her bathing suit and looked madder than any Miss Mississippi who had failed to make it into the Top Ten of the Miss America pageant after winning a couple of preliminaries. Then there it was—not even the continued roll of thunder could compete with it—that aural warning of her displeasure, which, as I look back on it now, was that summer's signal call, a sound that no subsequent one has ever been able to drown out: her well-worn flip-flops flapping against her agitated heels. My baby sister, Karole, was held on her hip and bounced about as my mother's angry stride increased in speed once she spotted me. Coco and my brother, Kim, both came scurrying behind her trying to keep up as they each panted with the toll it was taking on their little legs. Coco—as long as my mother fumed—found the will to bark.

“We're in trouble,” I whispered to my friend.

“You sure are,” my mother said, somehow having heard me and pulling me toward her out on the third-base line with her Karole-less hand.

“We were just trying to find stuff,” my friend said to her own mother, who grabbed one of the sticks from her and began to spank her with it as, sure enough, a cigarette dangled from her fixed and smoky frown. My friend ran in circles around her—her mother kept jerking her about by her wrist—and began tearlessly to yelp each time the stick landed on her thighs. Her mother spit out her cigarette in the infield toward first base and spanked her harder.

I handed my mother a stick so she could start hitting me too but she just threw it on the ground. “Never ever go off without telling us where you are,” she insisted and seemed about to cry herself while taking in the scene with a careful sweep of her heightened sensitivities, an ability of hers I was to inherit, like her knack for putting an outfit together or lowering her eyes in my father's presence. Karole began to wail. “You two both know that there's a pervert lurking
about,” my mother said, mentioning something she called a Peeping Tom that had recently terrorized our neighborhood as she jostled Karole on her hip in an attempt to quiet her.

My friend's mother, tiring of her attempt to elicit tears over on her side of the pitcher's mound, was able to light another cigarette and jerk her little hellion home all at the same time. The price tag was still attached to her sundress and, feeling it scratching at her freshly shaved armpit, she reached up and ripped it off with the yellow-fingered hand that brandished her unfiltered Pall Mall—her newest favorite brand of cigarettes, ever since she had developed a crush on its spokesman, Dale Robertson, that “tall drink of water,” as she called him.

Kim picked up the stick my mother had thrown on the ground and tried to get Coco to stop barking and retrieve it. My mother grabbed me by my own wrist now and led her maddening brood back to our little green-shingled house. “Look what you've made me do,” she said. “You've made me cross the street in my bathing suit.” Tears no longer seemed to be about to surface in her voice. Instead, an unlikely laughter bubbled up beneath it. She shook her head. Her short blond hair fell into place as perfectly as Peter Pan's had back in December when I pointed out the wires that helped Mary Martin fly on television. It was the first time I had ever realized I might be clever enough to debunk any semblance of life's magic. My mother straightened a strap on her bathing suit and regained her composure. “If that Peeping Tom is hiding behind a tree, he's getting a good look!” she said too loudly toward a looming pine, repeating that name she kept using for the pervert, one that sounded to me like he was nothing more than a harmless cousin of Peter Pan's. “Goodness, gracious. Where's your shirt?” she asked, eyeing me with new suspicion, as did an ever-more-curious Kim, who was carrying a now silent Coco and holding on for dear life to one of our mother's bare legs. The smell of her Coppertoned flesh wafted about us. “What have you been up to
back there with that girl?” she asked, not wanting an answer. “Go on. Run get your shirt. We'll wait for you.”

I retrieved my urine-soaked top from where it hung on the dugout's chicken wire. When my mother got a whiff of it she really was leery of what sort of lasciviousness my friend and I had been up to back in that ball field, but whatever dirty thoughts were going through her mind, she kept them to herself. The rain, right then, violently burst from the clouds that arrived directly overhead and cascaded about us, washing the piss from the shirt I now held above me and scaring Coco so that she shook with the same waves of tiny trembles that seemed to have shot through my mother only moments before when she warded off the kind of laughter that would have been somehow indecent to indulge in within her children's earshot. “You can't play outside the rest of the week,” is all that she said as we ran inside the house, the rest of us squealing with delight and dread as we were drenched by the thunderstorm's power. I actually quite enjoyed sitting in my room by myself and was certain she was just being maternally sly, biding her time before my father could get home and mete out a more dire form of punishment, as he was the strict disciplinarian in all our lives. I had yet to be the recipient of one of his spankings from the Big Black Belt when he hauled it out of his closet in order to teach Kim or Karole a lesson.

I climbed into my father's brown leather recliner (an act which, if he were home, would be reason enough to be punished) and contemplated what lay in store for me as I watched my mother dry off Kim and Karole and Coco with the offhanded care of all harried mothers who still wanted to wear their bathing suits on just such days. I refused the offer of the damp towel she then made to me, too busy reasoning in my little head that perhaps I had a bargaining chip with my father since he did not want me to tell anybody the secret we shared, the one I wouldn't even tell my best friend next door. Or would I receive two beatings if I brought that secret up ever again? Were shared secrets something to be wielded at the right moment? Or were they to
be woven silently into a closer relationship? Such confusion—my naked afternoon, that out-of-bounds secret I shared with my father, this odd reaction my mother was having to my bad behavior (she seemed rather tickled by it)—caused an hour's worth of tears to surface. I fantasized about how that Big Black Belt would finally feel against my flesh. “Please don't tell Daddy,” I pleaded with my mother as I cried and cried. “Please don't tell Daddy. Please. Please. Please. Don't tell him. Please. Please. I'm sorry. Please.”

My histrionics, at first so troubling because of their intensity, had begun to bore her by dint of their unrelenting fervor. She obviously had other things on her mind. Kim and Karole needed to be fed. Coco needed to be put back outside in her pen now that the thunderstorm had abated. And she was also expecting the football coach's wife to drop by at any minute. They were planning to perform at a school talent show as a surprise to their husbands, who were the judges, and she had to get ready for her visit. She decided to put her own bargaining chip on the table. “I won't tell Daddy about you if you won't tell him about me and Coach Kirby's wife practicing our song over here this afternoon,” she said. “Is that a deal?” I whimpered through the last of my tears and looked at her outstretched hand. I timidly shook it. “That's my boy. We'll just keep everything to ourselves. We're playing on the same team,” she said, using the lingua franca of this coach's house so fraught suddenly with secrets. I ceased to cry when it dawned on me that I was the only one there who was privy to all of them. Exhaustion did not dry my eyes that day. My mother's practiced empathy did not. A newfound knowledge did. An inchoate sense of power. “I'm right, aren't I, Kevin? We're on the same team,” she said again, needing assurance. I nodded affirmatively. It was her turn to feel better.