Chapter 3

It may have been November, but this was southern Mississippi after all, so by the time it was getting too dark to see each other clearly, they were spending more time swatting mosquitoes than they were talking. Finally, Roger offered, "Catalina, I don't know if you've eaten yet, and I know I haven't. Let's head inside, get out of the bugs and into the air conditioning. I'll throw something in the microwave. It'll be out of a can, but we can eat it."

"Cans don't bother me," she replied. "I've mostly lived alone and don't get all that big a thrill out of cooking something elaborate for myself. I've had a lot of suppers of ramen noodles over the years."

"Same here," he smiled as he got up. "Although I don't care much for ramen noodles. I'm normally pretty big on Lean Cuisine but don't have the freezer space here."

"A man after my own taste," she smiled as she got up. "In the states, my dinners are mostly by Dinty Moore, Chef Boyardee, or Hormel."

Roger let her go ahead of him as they went into the RV. It was the first time he had a look at her back in the swimsuit -- and was surprised to see a large and elaborate black tattoo there: a pair of cattails blowing in the wind, all done in black. The pods were up just below her left shoulder; the stalks curved well onto her right side before they turned back to the center. Just judging from the curve as it dove below the swimsuit, it looked like the stalks would come out of the crack of her ass. Several leaves took that windblown curve halfway up onto her back. "Nice tat," he commented.

"Thanks," she smiled. "I kind of like it."

Roger was normally not much on tattoos -- he'd seen too much crap on guys in the plant, Confederate flags, Dale Earnhardt "3"s, and other inane stuff. But this was something different. It was art, reserved, elegant, well-stated. Once again, he was impressed, but he didn't want to stare. It was with some effort that he turned his head away to a cupboard and asked, "So how about letting Dinty Moore be the cook tonight?"

"Fine with me," she said. "I'm hungry."

"It'll take a few minutes, the microwave isn't real powerful," he said, pulling a couple cans out and reaching for the can opener. That wasn't enough to get her tattoo out of his mind. "Just out of curiosity, what made you get a tat like that?"

"Oh, that's a long story," she said. "You read much?"

"Quite a bit," Roger told her. "Especially the last few years."

"I do, too," Catalina nodded. "It gets lonely sometimes in a place like Pusan, and it always helps if there are books to turn to. Well, a few years ago I got to reading a fantasy book by Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart."

"Never heard of it," he replied as he hunted for the large microwave bowl. "But I don't usually read that kind of stuff."

"This is really involved and really good, and a lot about the main character, Phadre, really rung well with me. The gal in the cover painting even looks a lot like a younger me. Without going into the complications, she has this really elaborate back tattoo that's actually a symbol indicating she's bought her way out of bondage, and it really means a lot to her, a real point of pride. I got turned onto the book by the guy I was more or less living with at the time, and I told him I thought it would be really cool. So one night, just for fun, he painted a version of Phadre's marque on my back, in poster paint. Well, that was cool, but a marque has to be personalized. He's sort of an artist, and I had some ideas, and over a period of time we worked it out. He did my back in poster paint several times before he got it where we both liked it. I still wasn't sure about it, so he did it again in permanent marker. After a while that started to fade, so I just went apeshit one night and had it made permanent by a guy who ran a tattoo shop in the neighborhood. That was in Pusan about a year and a half ago where I was teaching."

"Well, it looks real nice, what I can see of it," Roger smiled, not really wanting to make a big deal of it. "A bunch of it has to be under your swimsuit."

"Oh, I don't mind showing it off," she laughed and turned around so her back was to him. She pulled the straps of her one-piece off her shoulders and slid them down her arms, then slid the suit and her shorts down to expose her whole butt. "I guess I'm a bit of an exhibitionist. One of those places I mentioned I worked at was a nudist resort in California."

"Very nice," Roger commented, not specifying exactly what he was talking about. He noticed that the cattail stalks did indeed end well down in the crack of her ass, but was really more appreciative of her nice butt. Under the circumstances he knew enough not to push it.

"I really figured Mom would freak when she saw it, but she thinks it's real nice," Catalina replied, pulling the swimsuit and shorts back up as he turned to get the microwave going. "My dad probably wouldn't have been too cool with it while he was still alive; his family is fairly straight, but he pretty much always wound up doing what Mom and I wanted, anyway."

"Yeah," he sighed. "I know exactly how that works. I always seemed to wind up doing what my wife wanted." He drained the beer that he had been nursing for a while and decided he could handle one more, so got one from the refrigerator and went to sit across the dinette table from Catalina. He knew he would be there for a while; in normal circumstances it doesn't take long to heat up a couple cans of beef stew, in practice the microwave was so small and weak that it would take a few minutes.

"You've got Michigan plates on this van," she said to change the subject. "Is that where you're from?"

People from Michigan have a sort of recognition signal. If you ask someone where they're from in the state, and if a true Michiganian they're likely to hold up their right hand, thumb out a little. The palm makes a pretty good map of the Lower Peninsula, and there's a way to do the Upper Peninsula with the left hand. He pointed down toward the right of center of the heel of his Lower Peninsula hand and said "Wychbold, down about here."

"Hi, neighbor," she smiled, "I'm from Amherst." It was a town about the same size as Wychbold's 2500 people, perhaps thirty miles to the west.

"Another touch of home," he laughed. "I spent my first month or so down here working with an Amish crew from Shipshewana."

They sat exchanging hometown details for a while. It turned out that while she called Amherst home, she really didn't live there much. "Base out of there" would be a better term -- she left stuff at her widowed mother's house when she was out and around, and sometimes it was a couple years between visits. They talked about other things, too -- they both agreed George Bush was an incompetent idiot at best and the way he'd loused up the Katrina recovery efforts proved it if nothing else did. With his daughter in the Air Force Roger was especially sensitive to the way that Bush had loused up things in Iraq.

Eventually it began to smell like the stew was hot, so he got up, turned off the microwave, got out some plates, and dished up dinner. It really didn't take long to finish eating, but that didn't keep them from sitting there in the dinette for the next several hours, just talking and learning about each other. Right from the beginning Roger thought Catalina was a pleasant woman to be with, and he enjoyed hearing her stories.

He told her more about himself, of course, but compared to her he felt his life was drab -- his story could basically be summed up by high school, Army, Ford, family, and retirement. Hers was far more elaborate. He found out she'd never gotten close to getting married -- with a life like she led she knew it would be a struggle to keep a relationship going, so she'd never bothered. That hadn't kept her from having several long-term boyfriends at one place or another, but apparently both sides had gone into it from the start knowing it was not going to be permanent. The guy in Korea was her most recent -- he'd been another English teacher in Pusan. The apartments they were provided with were tiny, not a lot larger than the RV, and after a while she and Chuck worked out a deal to store most of their stuff in one apartment and live in the other. They had a pretty good six or eight months, which included the addition of the cattail tattoo. But his contract ran out and he decided not to renew, so she was pretty much alone the second year of her term there. "I guess I'm pretty much a loner at heart," she explained. "But I occasionally need a fix of American food and unaccented English to keep me going."

Eventually it got late and they got tired -- they'd had a busy day in uncomfortable conditions, and tomorrow didn't promise anything better in either work or weather. Altogether, Roger thought that it was one of the most enjoyable evenings he'd had in a long time and was sorry to see it come to a close. Best of all, he got the impression that she'd enjoyed his company, too.

The next day was even hotter and even more humid, if possible. To make it worse, some of the precut, prefabbed sections didn't quite fit together, so there had to be quite a bit of cutting and fitting. To top it off, there was a small crew that day and they weren't making much progress, especially considering some of the amateur workers weren't much help in the fiddling to make pieces fit. Tempers got a little short, and everyone was glad to see the day come to an end; Roger and Catalina were just as happy to see taillights, leaving them alone at the site. "You up for a shower and a beer again tonight?" he asked her as the last person drove out.

"Jeez, yes," she said, the sweat still running down her face. "How about I provide the food for dinner tonight, just to be fair?"

"Well then, just to be fair, why don't you get your shower first, then you can go find the food while I take mine?"

"How about if I get it now, and I can cook it while you take yours?" she responded. "I want to let that air conditioner work on me for a while. Once I get cooled off I don't know if I want to get back out in this heat."

Once again Roger sat out under the awning, smoking his evening cigarette while sipping a Millers and unwinding, trying to put a tiring and frustrating day into perspective. Though not knowing the area, the heat and humidity seemed unseasonable for November, even for the Gulf Coast. This crap has got to break sometime, he thought. He happened to glance off to the west and thought the sky looked like it might turn threatening and rather hoped it would -- a storm might turn things for the better.

He wasn't out there long enough to finish his beer -- Catalina stuck her head out the door and said, "OK, you're up. I hope I didn't use too much hot water."

"If you did, I can stand a cold shower," he snorted as he got up. "Anything to cool off."

"Boy, there's no bathing with a friend in that shower, is there?"

"There's just about no bathing by yourself," he laughed at the thought of the two of them in the shower. They might both get inside, but it would be very, very close with hardly even any room for the water.

Roger headed inside to discover that she'd put on a flower print thong bikini. When he looked at her backside there was just about nothing there but thick strings, and it was cut low enough that he could see almost to the base of the cattails on her back. "You look cooler," he smiled.

She flashed a grin at him. "I'll slip on a T-shirt later, but I thought you might like to have a better look at my back," she smirked.

"Interesting," he teased. "But that gives a pretty good view of the front, too."

Roger headed for the back of the RV as she turned toward the kitchen. The night before he had waited outside while she changed clothes just to be gentlemanly, but she showed no sign of doing the same thing. Oh well, he thought, after she had talked about being a nudist last night she's not going to see anything she hasn't seen before, so he guessed he didn't mind. Still, he turned his back as he stripped out of his hot, sweaty work clothes, then headed nude to the shower.