Chapter 22

The fish were biting, and that probably saved the day, at least for Bernadette and Hilda Mae. Both were horny, and both were with a boy that they were very curious about. Had there been long stretches of idle time to fill, both girls might have stepped over one more line that was already barely visible in the imaginary sand under their feet.

Instead, they talked quietly. Some of the talk was light, and of no real account. Some of it was more serious. Those parts were remarkably similar in some ways, and remarkably different in others.

“You shouldn’t have touched me like that,” said Curtis Lee, taking a fish off Bernadette’s line for her.

“Because you’re a Negro?” she asked.

“For starters,” he said.

“What if I like touching you?” she asked.

“I have dreams about you, Bernadette,” he said intensely. “Bad dreams.”

“I’m so horrible I give you nightmares?” She sounded hurt.

“You’re teasing me,” he said. “You flirt with me in school.”

“That’s not so bad,” she said.

“I’m not talking about the dreams. I’m talking about what gives me the dreams.”

“What are they like?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said stolidly. “I just do bad things in them ... that’s all.”

“You would never hurt me,” she said, her voice full of confidence.

“Of course not, but the things I do in the dreams could hurt us both.”

“Why?” she insisted.

“Because you’d get pregnant!” he hissed, frustration overcoming his reticent to tell her what his dreams were about.

“Oh!” she said, startled. She had dreams too, but they were only of sucking his penis, and that wouldn’t make her pregnant.

“You can’t tease me like that any more,” he said.

“But it’s so much fun,” she complained.

“Fun for you ... danger for me,” he said softly.

“I wouldn’t hurt you ... I like you,” she said.

“You’re not allowed to like me. Haven’t you read Romeo and Juliet?”

“No,” she said.

“Miss Flossie has it. You need to read that,” he said.

“I can’t believe you did that,” said Moses, talking softly. They were standing side by side, shoulders touching.

“It was fun,” said Hilda Mae.

“You know how much trouble you’d be in if anybody ever found out?” he asked. “How much trouble I’d be in too?”

“Well, then, nobody can find out.”

“What if your brother found out? He’d kill me!” said Moses urgently.

“No he wouldn’t. I told him I kissed you.”

“What?“ he yelped.

She elbowed him and shushed him.

“I told him I made a promise. We’ve been taught to keep our promises. He understood that.”

“You’re the strangest girl I ever met in my whole life,” he sighed. “I never met a white girl like you.”

She looked at him. “And I never kissed a Negro boy before that either.”

They were quiet for a while.

“I liked it,” she said.

“You did?”

“Yes. I feel like kissing you again right now.”

Moses moved away from her fractionally. He knew what happened the last time she’d kissed him. He’d had to beat off again before going home.

She caught a fish, and like Curtis Lee, he took it off the hook for her.

“Did you like it?” she asked.

He didn’t know whether she was asking about the kiss, or jerking him off. In either case the answer was the same.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“That makes me feel good,” she said. “It makes me want to kiss you even more.”

“But we’re not supposed to do that kind of thing,” he said. “It has caused ... people like me to be ... hanged.”

She turned to face him.

“I know that” she said intensely. “But what that makes me think about is the reason they did that. I mean they did it because there were others like us, you know? Other women and other men? Don’t you see? That means it isn’t so strange. Other white girls have kissed other Negro boys.”

“But they killed them for it!” moaned Moses.

“Only when they found out,” said Hilda Mae.

Moses got a bite and hauled in a nice pan-sized fish.

Her meaning was clear. She was willing to face the danger, to do the things they did. Neither of them thought about how much more serious the consequences were for the male in such a situation. Like thousands of others, they banked on not getting caught.

“Kissing you makes me want to ... touch you.” he said.

“Like in the water?” she asked.

“Yes ... and maybe more...” he hazarded.

“I might like that too,” she said.

She did kiss him. She kissed him a total of three times. They were long, lingering kisses, and his hands cupped and smoothed over her firm round bottom. On the second kiss, she reached for his hand, and brought it to her bulging breast. On the third, she felt for his penis, and squeezed its stiff length.

Things would have gotten completely out of hand, except that Johnnie Sue called a halt to the contest.

Johnnie Sue’s team, of course, won the contest. They had fifteen fish between them. Curtis Lee and Bernadette had seven. Hilda Mae and Moses had only four. They took a lot of ribbing about falling so short this time.

“I guess your worm gave out on you this time,” joked Johnnie Sue.

“There’s always next time,” said Hilda Mae, her eyes flashing.

The subject of the Mansion came up again while they were getting ready to leave. Bernadette still wanted to see the attic. Eventually, they agreed to meet at the mansion the next Saturday. They would forgo the skinny-dipping and catch some fish on the way back home, once they had taken a quick look at the attic. This decision was made by the girls, and it had more to do with how they were all feeling at the moment, than it did with any urgency to see the attic.

For Johnnie Sue, the urge to ask Nathan if he’d let her jerk him off made her nervous. He was so much older ... he might laugh at her.

For both of his sisters, they recognized the almost uncontrollable urges they had each felt as being ... almost uncontrollable. Both were quite sure that, if they had been able to get the boys off alone, they would have talked them into blow jobs. They were quite aware of the dangers they faced, crossing racial lines like this. As for the play itself, they sensed, in a non-specific kind of way, the danger that might lead to. Both of them had let Nathan push his thick finger inside them, and that felt so good that it scared them. Neither of them felt like they were anywhere close to being ready to let anything else inside them. That was what they thought consciously. But lurking under that, there was a troubling yearning to feel something pushing inside them ... something long ... longer than Nathan’s finger ... and maybe a little bigger around too. As much fun as it was to play, and to have those body-shaking orgasms, it was the kind of fun that was hung with a faint feeling of unsettling danger.

A trip to the mansion was also a way of cooling off, and the girls all felt compelled, though they couldn’t articulate why, to cool off.

Flossie felt better the next week. The flirting stopped. It stopped cold. There were no little touches, and no lingering looks. The kids applied themselves to their lessons, and helped with the younger students.

She only saw one time when Curtis Lee and Bernadette’s heads were together, momentarily, as he leaned over to say something too soft to hear, and she shook her head. Had she been able to hear what was said, her bells would have jangled louder.

“Are you mad at me?” Curtis Lee whispered softly.

She shook her head. “No, I’m just being careful ... like you said.”

“You still want to fish with me?” he asked, hopelessly tangled in this spider’s web.

“I still want to do lots of things with you,” she whispered. “Now, leave me alone. I have work to do.”

Flossie didn’t see any particular relevance to Bernadette’s request to borrow Romeo and Juliet. She was just delighted that the girl would show an interest in classic literature. She didn’t think to ask how Bernadette knew she had it.

They gravitated towards the mansion in small groups, or singly. Moses met the Wilson children at a pre-arranged spot they knew how to find, and led them to the house. Johnnie Sue, Luthor and Jesse were already there. They waited outside for half an hour before getting impatient for Curtis Lee to put in an appearance. They were arguing about whether to go in or not when he arrived, panting from running.

“I had to help my Mamma with some stuff,” he said.

Johnnie Sue grinned.

“What?” he asked.

“Your ... Mamma? A grown boy like you, and you still call her your Mamma?”

“She’ll always be my mamma,” he said. “What do you call your mamma?”

“Mamma,” she said, smiling.

She took them upstairs to the room, over which she thought the wall was. They looked up at the ceiling, which was bare of plaster. There were gaps between the lath, but it was too dark to see anything through them.

“Even if there is an attic, how would you get to it?” asked Luthor.

“A hidden staircase!” gushed Bernadette. She realized she was standing beside Curtis Lee. She hadn’t done it intentionally. She took a step to the side. “Behind the wall, maybe?”

Jesse went out of the room, and next door. He called back that the wall wasn’t thick enough to have a staircase in it.

Finally, Johnnie Sue climbed Curtis Lee, like she had done last time, and pulled at the lath until she could stick her head up inside. She climbed back down and dusted off her hands. She stepped to the middle of the room and looked up.

“That wall is right up there,” she said, pointing up. “But it looks exactly the same from this side as it did from the other side. It’s just a wall.”

“No attic?” Bernadette sounded tragic. She was about halfway through Romeo and Juliet, and was feeling tragic a lot.

“Nope,” said Johnnie Sue. “Just more rafters.”

“Why’d they put a wall up there?” asked Luthor.

“Beats me.” said Johnnie Sue. “But there’s nothing up there.”

The damper that was put on the great adventure, was lessened somewhat when they went back downstairs and Jesse started poking around in the pile of lumber that had, at one time, been one corner of the house. He pulled out several long boards and examined them.

“I still think these would be good for a treehouse,” he said.

Jesse and Johnnie Sue joined their blood brother. They examined the wood and agreed it was sound enough to use for such a purpose.

“How do you plan to get enough wood to wherever we’d build the thing?” asked Nathan.

“We could each carry some boards,” said Jesse, his eyes shining now that his project might actually see the light of day. “It might take a few trips, but the wood isn’t that heavy.”

“What about nails?” asked Curtis Lee.

“My Daddy has an old keg of them out in the barn. They’re rusty, and it’s only a quarter full, but I think they’d do,” said Luthor.

The others pitched in, taking the boards that were suitable, as they were handed up, and stacking them near the door. The other scraps and broken boards were piled on the floor near the pit. In the process of moving boards, a whole door, in a partially crushed frame was uncovered. It had another of those crystal doorknobs on it. Luthor had brought his hatchet again, and hacked the knob loose. The obverse was also granite, but was pink this time, instead of blue. It took both Nathan and Curtis Lee to pull the doorframe and the sagging door out of the pile to see if there was any lumber under it.