Chapter 3D

That was a sensuous summer. Mom's relationship apparently ran smoothly for a while and my stepdad-to-be took her out infrequently but regularly. Often it was on weekends when I was with my grandparents or godparents. But now and then they went out on a Friday, and I could be with Martha Jane. Each time, Martha Jane would show up on time and we'd fix dinner for each other, clean up, do a little homework, and then undress each other in the tiny bedroom. Soon the room echoed with our sighs and moans, our whispers of pleasure and lust. The only sex we had outside that bedroom was the one time Martha Jane showed up at our place one rare Saturday afternoon when I had not been shipped off to relatives for the weekend. Martha Jane had iced tea with Mom and chatted a short time, and told my mom she wanted me to come next door and help set up a record player that her sister Evelyn had given to Martha Jane and her mom.

She brought me to her apartment and as soon as we were inside she took me into her bedroom. I told her I thought she wanted me to help her with the new phonograph and she giddily and impatiently replied that the machine was set up already and she really just wanted us to be alone. "I don't know what's got into me today," she exclaimed, visibly shaky. "I feel so nasty. Lord, I hope we don't get caught!" She lay on the edge of her bed with her legs hanging over the side. Lifting her skirt, she panted, "Fingerfuck me, hon. Hurry. Somebody might show up." I put my hand under her waistband and fingerfucked her inside her panties. She came very quickly. Afterwards, nervous and fumbling, she lay me down the same way and jacked me with my zipper open until I felt that little buzz in my cock and she pulled a little drop out of me and licked it off. Then we straightened our clothes and went into her living room, where she settled down. And just in time: about ten minutes later her sister Evelyn arrived unexpectedly. I talked with her briefly and while Evelyn was in their kitchen making lemonade Martha Jane saw me to her door and whispered as I left, "That was close! But it sure felt good!" Afterward she told me we shouldn't try that sort of thing again, as the schedule in her place was truly unpredictable and so many of her mother's friends always popped in. And she said she never, never wanted to risk having us found out.

Had sex been the only aspect of our relationship, I have little doubt that both of us would have soon tired of this sitting routine and sought more varied pleasures elsewhere or with someone else. But we had a life outside the bedroom that was also special for us and that only added to our feelings of intimacy, devotion, and pleasure in the bedroom. On many occasions in that bedroom there was no sex, save for affectionate hugging and stroking.

My back yard was a small patch of lawn about the size of a modern suburban carport. It lay along the curb of one of access driveways way that fed into the project from the street. Near the curb was a large black oak. We spent many evenings under that tree at dusk, just after dinner, as the long summer days ended and the stultifying, humid Southern air turned breezy and cool, the sky glowing purple and orange. It was there under the heavy, leafy old oak tree that I told her about my strange dream with the roaches. She said she had no idea why I would dream such a thing, but she suspected the nuns had scared the hell out of me.

Martha Jane and I discussed our dreams frequently during those waning summer days under the tree. She often dreamed of her father coming to her in the night, but he was reduced to the size of a boy, a very small boy almost as small as an infant. His head was bloodied and disfigured (he had died in combat on Okinawa from head wounds). He would plead for help, but when she rose to go to him she saw the rest of the house was filled with more like him, thousands of them, moaning and reaching for her. In the dream her mother made tea, oblivious to it all and apparently deaf and unable to hear, but as she sipped her tea she said she didn't want to hear and appeared to have gone quietly insane. Overcome with helplessness and rage, Martha Jane would wake up sweating.

She said she once had a dream about me. I was standing in a dark room smiling at her. She said my eyes were very large and very dark, almost gigantic, and they glowed in the dark room. As she stepped toward me she became very small and felt faint, and suddenly I was very large and very much older and went to her with a glass of wine, gently cradling her head in one arm while holding the wine for her to sip. The wine was warm and was in a small silver chalice. She said the most striking part of the dream was my remarkably dark eyes that seemed to fill the room. They were kind and endearing, but there was something frightening and oddly dominating about them as well.

Across the access driveway were the small back yards of the building directly behind ours. I never knew our backdoor neighbors closely. Occasionally I'd look out our kitchen door and see one of the neighbor ladies standing in her kitchen and talking with Martha Jane across the driveway.

One of those neighbors, a Mrs. Johnson, would open her back door each evening just before dark and carefully slip her bathrobed, paraplegic husband in his wheelchair down the three or four concrete steps into their back yard. She would make him comfortable there on their little patch of grass, read the newspapers to him, or tune a station on their small brown GE portable that rested on the ground between his wheelchair and her aluminum lawn chair. Many afternoons, Martha Jane and I sat on the curb and watched this ritual. We would say hello to Mrs. Johnson and to Mr. Johnson, and Mrs. Johnson would smile and wave hello and bend down to Mr. Johnson and tell him who we were. Mr. Johnson was unable to respond. Nor could he move his legs or his arms or his neck. He slumped limply in his wheelchair, wearing striped pajamas and a brown bathrobe, his eyes ogling blindly ahead, a thin drool forever flowing down one side of his slack, expressionless face. Mr. Johnson had been blown almost to pieces on Taiwan. Even at my age I realized without being told that the man would never move or talk or lift a spoon of soup to his face.

Martha Jane would watch quietly as they performed this almostnightly routine for their brief stay in the open air. I would look up at Martha Jane as she watched and I'd see her swallow hard, for a different reason now, and she would murmur, "God grant the poor woman patience." I told her about Taiwan, and Guadalcanal. And she told me how my father had died. He was flight engineer in a B-24 on his 21st mission when the plane got badly shot up. They barely made it back to England, where they discovered that the front wheels would not remain extended for a landing. As engineer in this emergency, my father ordered everyone but the pilot into the rear of the aircraft, where most of them lay wounded and unable to parachute out. With the pilot bringing the plane in, my father stationed himself near the landing gear, lowering it with the manual crank and jamming the wheel's gears straight and steady with a crowbar. The wheel held up just long enough for the plane to land. Then the gear collapsed, crushing him. The other crewmen were saved.

"You're a lot like him," Martha Jane told me at the end of that story. "You'll try anything, just to see what happens. You're such a little outlaw."

We would sit there until the sky grew dark, seeing where so many others had gone and were going, talking vaguely about how far there was to go for everyone.

"Sometimes I think we're the only ones who are still in one piece," she sighed, her chin propped on her knees. "Sometimes I think we were put here so we could know how much there is to lose. So we can save whatever's left." She shook her head. "And sometimes I think: there's so little left to be saved."

On July 4th she took me to a movie at the neighborhood theatre, the Suzore's, a seedy, well used, crowded, sticky floored movie house if ever there was one. The place was a fallen relic of the 1920's, but it had a kind of homey who-cares air about it and the best popcorn in town. We held hands and shared the popcorn bag, laughing at the Bowery Boys and hiding our eyes when Charlie Chan crept through the hidden corridors of a haunted house. The walk back home was about seven blocks, down the steep, landscaped, four-block-long hill that led from the top of the project to our building at the other end.

It was one of those hot Southern nights, humid but cooling down, the air so still that the voices of people walking nearby hung in space long after the people had gone. In those days, before pollution clouded the view, we could see a multitude of stars overhead. As we walked I pointed out Orion to her, and Alpha Centauri. I showed her where the Weeping Sisters usually appeared and told her that the faint red dot near the steeple of St. Mary's Church was Mars. On our way down the long, long, hill lined with trees and buildings we tried to stay in synch singing verses from a song by a black gospel group, the Delta Rhythm Boys, that was popular then. The first lien of the song started on a low note, and each line raised the note higher and higher:

Well, yuh toe bone connected to yuh... foot bone
yuh foot bone connected to yuh... heel bone
yuh heel bone connected to yuh... ankle bone
yuh ankle bone connected to yuh... leg bone
yuh leg bone connected to yuh... knee bone
yuh knee bone connected to yuh... thigh bone
yuh thigh bone connected to yuh... hip bone
yuh hip bone connected to yuh... back bone
yuh back bone connected to yuh... shoulduh bone
yuh shoulduh bone connected to yuh... neck bone
yuh neck bone connected to yuh... head bone
Now hearrr the word of the lord.

We giggled every time we got out of sequence, usually getting the knees and thighs mixed up or leaving out the back bone. And we usually started out with a note that wasn't low enough, so by the time we hit the last line we were shoving our chins into the air like baby robins trying to hit that last note. And then we would laugh and try again.

I asked, "So what the word of the lord have to do with this song?"

Martha Jane said, "I don't know, but it's a cute song."

"Well, the words are easy."

"Hm, we're not doing *that* well with the words!"

The middle chorus was catchy. We usually got that one right.

A-Dem bones, dem bones, gonna... walk around
a-dem bones, dem bones, gonna... walk around
a-dem bones, dem bones, gonna... walk around
Now hearrr the word of the lord.

She said, "Okay, now, the word of the lord has to disconnect the bones, now. Right?"

"Yeah, you start high at the head bone, and you go down, and the notes get lower."

"Okay. Here we go --"

Well, yuh head bone connected from yuh... neck bone
yuh neck bone connected from yuh... shoulduh bone
yuh shoulduh bone connected from yuh... back bone
yuh back connected from yuh... hip bone
yuh hip bone connected from yuh... thigh bone...

Needless to say, by the time the notes lowered to the toe bone we had gone far too low, both of us shoving her chins down into our chests to hit the last ones, and me going onto my knees on the sidewalk.

"Oh, Speedy, get up. Those people over there will think you're crazy."

"No they won't," I said, getting up and still laughing with her.

We were standing in the dark of the open lawn near the project's administration building. She listened as I pointed out the constellations, and after a minute I stopped and watched as she looked up. I was very nearly her height, then. A half-moon floated just in front of her, outlining her face. Unable to resist, I softly cupped my hand over one breast.