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  Betty Jean cut me off real quick. She rubbed my arm and scooted closer to me. It was a good thing I had on long sleeves so she couldn’t see the goose bumps on my skin. “Odell, don’t go yet. I was hoping I could get to know you better.”

  I gulped and my chest tightened. “Better than what?”

  “Better than I knew you when I first laid eyes on you.”

  “W-why?”

  “Because I really like you. Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  I had used the same line on Joyce, and it had worked. “Uh, it’s possible, I guess.”

  “Well, I do too,” she purred. “As soon as I laid eyes on you, I wanted you to be my man. Don’t ask me why because all I can tell you is that there is just something about you. . . .”

  The shit I’d walked into was rising so fast, I’d have to swim my way out if I didn’t get going soon. But I couldn’t move. My butt felt like it had melted into the couch. I stared into Betty Jean’s eyes. “You must be the prettiest girl I ever seen and I do believe in love at first sight. And if I was still single, I’d be . . . well—like I told you, I’m married.”

  “So what? Like I told you, the man I was with for two years got a wife and it didn’t stop him, so why should it stop you?”

  “It’s . . . it’s complicated.”

  “You can’t fool me, Odell.”

  “Who said I was trying to fool you?”

  “I know you like me so I don’t know why you trying to come up with enough reasons to scare me off.”

  “No, it ain’t that.” I exhaled and gave Betty Jean a hangdog look. “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way. But I work forty hours a week and me and my wife do a lot of things together. Even if I wanted to be with you, I don’t have a lot of time to spare. And since I live fifty miles from you, I’d have to allow time to drive over here and back. Then I’d have even less time. You’d be in the same situation with me that you was in with your other man.”

  Betty Jean leaned over and kissed me. If somebody had shot me with a crossbow, I couldn’t have felt more shocked. “Odell, if you really wanted to see me, you’d make time.”

  “Please don’t do—”

  She cut me off by kissing me again, this time poking my tongue with hers. When she pulled away she whispered, “If you don’t like me and don’t want to get to know me, just tell me.”

  I looked dead in her eyes and told her, “I . . . I . . . do like you, Betty Jean.” My voice was so hoarse, I could barely talk.

  “I’ll make you feel so good, you’ll find time for me. And I promise you won’t regret it.”

  I didn’t know if I was crazy, stupid, or both. The last thing I wanted to do was cheat on Joyce, so why was I even telling Betty Jean I didn’t have time to spare for her? Why had I left that restaurant with her in the first place? Why was I sitting here alone with her? My head was telling me to let this girl go on about her business and for me to get in my car and get my horny ass back to Branson.

  Running into some members of the Ku Klux Klan was not the only death threat I had to be concerned about. Betty Jean could cause me to get killed too, because if Joyce ever found out, she’d skin me alive. And if she didn’t, her daddy or mama sure would.

  Even with all the outrageous thoughts swimming around in my head and my common sense, my dick was telling me that if I didn’t get a piece of this beautiful girl now, I never would.

  Chapter 19

  Joyce

  WHEN I WALKED INTO THE LIVING ROOM THIS EVENING, I DIDN’T even know Mama and Daddy had stopped by on their way home from church. They had kicked off their shoes and made themselves comfortable on the couch. Daddy had even unloosened his tie and unfastened the two top buttons on his shirt.

  “It’s high time you dragged your tail in here,” Mama complained as she adjusted the hat she had on, which looked like a doughnut without a hole. “We been sitting out here for twenty minutes.”

  “I was in the bedroom folding clothes and didn’t hear y’all come in,” I explained. “Y’all want some lemonade or a bottle of Dr. Pepper?”

  “Naw. We ain’t going to stay but a few more minutes. We just wanted to drop in to say hello. We came by last night but y’all wasn’t home,” Daddy said in a gruff tone. “Where was y’all?”

  “We went to Mosella’s for dinner,” I said, clearing my throat.

  “Again?” Mama said. She and Daddy looked at each other at the same time, then back at me. “Where is Odell now?”

  “He left this afternoon to go run the car. It’s taking longer for him to get used to it than we thought it would.”

  “No wonder y’all didn’t make it to church today or last Sunday,” Daddy said harshly. “That’s a black mark against your name in the sin book.” Every time I missed church, he reminded me how important it was to go. But as far back as I could remember, he would always doze off within minutes after Reverend Jessup started his sermon. He would sleep until Mama woke him up when it was time to leave. “I just hope you don’t backslide too far.” When Daddy was in a grumpy mood, his eyes darkened and his jaw twitched. He was in a real grumpy mood today. “Now that you done finally got a husband, I hope you’ll start behaving more like a married woman.”

  “I thought I already was,” I snapped.

  Daddy reared back in his seat, gave me a critical look, and started talking in a loud voice. “Humph! I can’t tell. For one thing, you don’t need to let Odell go off by hisself too often. Last Sunday he went to ‘run the car’ and was gone for hours. The next time he go run the car, you need to go with him so you can start learning how to drive yourself.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t do that already,” Mama slipped in with her eyes narrowed. “Besides that, it ain’t fitting to let a man have too much freedom. It’s a recipe for trouble. Especially after all that ruckus you put us through so we’d let you marry him.”

  I didn’t think it was smart for me to remind my mother that I was a grown woman and didn’t need permission from her or Daddy to “let” me do anything. That would have led to another argument and we would have been going back and forth for hours. It was a good thing Odell was not in the house. He would have said something in my defense, and I knew it would have upset Mama and Daddy even more.

  “Odell gives me just as much freedom as I give him,” I said hotly. “And he did ask me if I wanted to go with him today. If he was going to get in some kind of trouble, it would happen whether I was with him or not. Things couldn’t be better between us. But they won’t stay this way if I start badgering him, or tagging along with him every time he leaves the house.”

  The “few more minutes” that Mama and Daddy said they’d stay was two hours. By the time they left, my head was aching on both sides. They had complained about everything from the weather to the wrinkled-up dress I had on.

  * * *

  It was almost time for me to put supper on the table and Odell still hadn’t come home. I figured he was still just driving around, or had changed his mind at the spur of the moment and gone fishing. Then again, the car could have broken down and he was stranded somewhere waiting for help to come along. That really worried me. One of the worst things that could happen to a colored man was for him to be stranded by himself on a country road without a weapon. I’d told Odell that after we had the baby, we were going to save up enough money to buy a better car and a shotgun.

  Right after I took the cornbread out of the oven, I heard a commotion in the living room. I ran from the kitchen with the pot holder and the pan of bread still in my hand. I made it to the living room just in time to see Odell moaning and stumbling across the floor, looking like he’d seen a ghost. “What in the world happened to you?” I asked. I set the pot holder and pan on the coffee table and ran up to him and wrapped my arms around him because the way he was hobbling, it looked like he was about to collapse. “Where all did you go?”

  “Joyce, I’m so glad you home!” he hollered, swaying against me like a man with one leg.

 
“I was getting real worried. Did the car break down or did you get lost?”

  “Baby, you won’t believe what all I been through!” He was almost out of breath as I guided him by the hand to the couch, where he dropped down like a sack of rocks. The way he was huffing and puffing, you would have thought a dog had chased him in the house.

  “What happened? You left here almost five hours ago.” I could tell from the bug-eyed look on his face that he was already in enough distress, so I kept my voice soft and low. I sat in his lap and draped my arm around his shoulder. He started wincing like he was in pain. “And why do you have bruises on your neck? Looks like you ran into a nest of yellow jackets.”

  “That’s exactly what happened. Let me tell you the whole story first.” Odell stopped talking long enough to let out a few deep breaths and rub his neck.

  “As I was creeping along that dirt road that leads to Carson Lake, I made too sharp a turn and ended up in a sand trap. I tried to spin out, but the more I mashed on the gas pedal, the deeper the tires sunk down. I had passed a few houses a couple of miles back, so I decided to walk back to one and see if I could get some help. Well, would you believe that the old white man who lived in that first house came to the door with his shotgun? He told me that if I didn’t get my black behind off his property, he’d fill it full of buckshots.”

  “My Lord in heaven! What did you do?” I checked out Odell’s neck again. When I looked back at his face, I noticed a bruise on his cheek, too.

  “I got back on the road and started walking until I got to the next house. There was a pickup truck in the front yard, but nobody came to the door when I knocked. I tried the back door but nobody answered that one neither. Since I wasn’t having no luck, and was taking a chance on getting myself shot or worse, I went back to the car. I decided to get me some tree limbs and slide a few up under the tires hoping that would help me jiggle the car out of that sand. The first tree I went up to had a yellow jacket nest and it was a big one! Right after I had plucked off a few limbs, the nest fell and them damn things got on me like white on rice.”

  My mouth dropped open and I shivered. I’d been stung by yellow jackets before, so I knew the kind of damage they could do to a human being. I’d had the same kind of bruises Odell had on his neck. I had been lucky that day because I’d been able to duck before they got to my neck and face, so they had only stung me on my hands and arms. But ten years ago, one of my teenage cousins stepped on a nest that had fallen from a tree. So many yellow jackets stung him, he died later that night. I didn’t know what would be worse, my husband getting shot to death by a mean old cracker, or stung to death by a swarm of yellow jackets.

  “Odell, I waited too long to get you. If something ever happens to you, they’ll have to bury me with you. . . .”

  Chapter 20

  Odell

  “I WISH YOU WOULDN’T SAY THINGS LIKE THAT. IT’S BAD LUCK,” I told Joyce. I rubbed one of the spots where Betty Jean had sucked on my neck. I couldn’t believe Joyce was naïve enough to swallow my story about the yellow jackets. And I couldn’t believe that I’d been so caught up in Betty Jean I hadn’t even noticed how hard she was nibbling on my flesh until it was too late. She had done the same thing on other parts of my body too. But as long as I kept my drawers and undershirt on and got naked in the dark like I usually did, Joyce wouldn’t see the rest of the damage.

  Words couldn’t describe how good Betty Jean had made me feel. She had made me see sex from a whole different angle. I was still in a trance, which I’d been in from the minute I’d scrambled out of her bed. As much as I had enjoyed her amazing body, Joyce was still the most important woman in my life. I knew that the sooner I returned to reality and focused on her, the better off I’d be.

  “Let me put it this way, Odell. If I ever lose you, I wouldn’t want any other man in my life.”

  “Now you talking even crazier. If something was to happen to me, I’d want you to find somebody else. We both know what it feels like to be alone and I didn’t like it no more than you did.”

  “If I died, you’d get married again?” Joyce wiggled in my lap and that got me excited all over again, but not for her. I slapped the side of her hip and pulled her closer to me.

  “Hell yes.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed, so I had to soften the blow.

  “But it would be hard for me to find another woman as wonderful as you, and I probably wouldn’t. Because when God made you, he broke the mold.”

  That compliment seemed to cheer her up. She smiled and squeezed my knee. “Do you think you could ever love another woman as much as you love me?”

  “I don’t know about that.” I coughed and scratched the side of my face. Not only was this conversation making me uncomfortable, holding Joyce too long on my lap was no picnic. She weighed almost as much as I did now, which was over two hundred pounds. “Look, I don’t like to talk about things like this, and the only reason I’m doing it now is because you brung it up.”

  “I just want to know what I’d have to face in case something did happen to you,” she pouted.

  “If something happens to me and you don’t want to get married again, that’s your business. Whatever you decide to do, I hope you’ll be happy.”

  “Thanks, baby. I feel better now. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy every minute we have together and worry about the rest when and if it happens.”

  “Good. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Joyce let out a loud breath and glanced at the side of my neck again. She tapped it. I winced and let out a soft groan. “I’m sorry, baby.” She moved her hand and placed it on my shoulder. “So how did you get out of that sand trap?”

  “Well, with them yellow jackets after my blood, I couldn’t take the time to use them tree branches. Right after I’d been stung a few times, I jumped back in the car and sat there until this young boy drove up in a pickup truck. He pushed me out. Come to find out, he was the son of the man that had chased me off with his shotgun.”

  “Well, at least you got out of that mess all right. Did you have a good drive?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Pretty soon you’ll be so familiar with that old car, you’ll be able to drive it with your eyes closed. But I’m telling you now, you’ll be driving up and down the roads without me. If I had been with you today, I would have had a heart attack as soon as I saw those yellow jackets. Where all did you go?”

  “Um, I drove through Scottsboro—”

  Joyce wasted no time cutting me off with a gasp and a slap upside my head. “Scottsboro? Odell Watson! Have you lost your mind? You know how dangerous it is for colored men in that town! What’s the matter with you?” Three years ago, nine colored teenage boys had been accused of raping two white girls on a train in the hick town of Paint Rock near Scottsboro. They had all hopped on that train illegally so they could travel around to look for work. The Depression was responsible for a lot of colored men and boys doing some foolish things, but raping white girls wasn’t one of them. Even with no evidence, no witnesses, and one of the girls claiming later that she and her friend had lied about being raped, eight of the boys had been found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. The other boy got life in prison because he was only thirteen at the time of the bogus rapes. Newspapers all over the world covered the story. Some of the colored people who had lived in Scottsboro during the trial moved away. Things had cooled off over there, but it was still a dangerous place. I had enough sense to keep my distance, but the lie about driving through that town had rolled off my lips before I could stop it.

  I rubbed the side of Joyce’s arm. “Calm down, sugar. I’d never rape nobody.”

  “You don’t have to! Those boys didn’t either. But if a white woman says you did, that’s all the law needs to hear and your life wouldn’t be worth a fake nickel.”

  “Joyce, I was born and raised in Alabama, just like you. You ain’t telling me nothing I don’t already know
about the Jim Crow laws. One town is just as segregated and dangerous for a colored person as the next. We can’t keep living in fear of white folks and be happy. Until I have a problem with some peckerwood, I’m going to keep going wherever I want to go. And every white person ain’t crazy, or racist. I know a bunch of good crackers. They spend a lot of money in the store and treat us real nice.”

  “I know all that. But that’s not enough to keep me from worrying about you. Just promise me, you’ll always be careful.”

  “I promise you, I’ll always be careful.”

  Joyce swallowed hard and looked pleased. But a split second later, her body got as stiff as cardboard and she started sniffing my neck. “Y-you smell like fish.”

  “I ain’t surprised. I had my fishing rod with me so I tried my luck in Carson Lake before my run-in with them yellow jackets.”

  “What did you do with the fish? I hope you didn’t leave them in the car to stink it up.”

  “I caught a few blue gills but they was so small, I threw them back in the water.”

  Joyce sniffed some more, frowning the whole time. When she leaned back and rubbed her nose, there was a puzzled look on her face. “You don’t smell like raw fish. You smell like fried fish,” she pointed out.

  I was a good liar, even better than I was before I married Joyce. I could make up a believable fib at the drop of a hat. “I stopped off at this hole-in-the-wall restaurant along the way and picked up a few fried catfish fillets to nibble on during the drive back home.”

  “Well, I hope you didn’t nibble too much. I’m going to put supper on the table in a couple of minutes.” I was so happy Joyce stood up because my lap had become numb. Betty Jean had also sat in my lap, but compared to Joyce, she was as light as a chicken feather. “You sit here and I’m going to go get some salve to put on the spots where you got stung. You can’t go to work tomorrow with your neck and jaw looking like a beaver’s been gnawing on you.”