The Backwoods (21 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: The Backwoods
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“Thank you, Regert,” she said, mystified. Ice cubes floated in the tumbler full of a thin pink liquid.
Ernie took a glass for himself. “You could almost call it a Squatter highball.”
Patricia rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to have a cocktail at nine in the morning!”
But Regert sternly responded, “The clan do not imbibe, miss. Our bodies are gifts from on high, temples of the spirit. Everd the
sawon
says so, and we follow his word. The clan will not disgrace our bodies with alcohol, the elixir of the devil.”
Patricia was amused.
This guy sounds more like a Southern Baptist.
“There ain’t no booze in it,” Ernie assured her. “It’s stuff they make from roots ‘n’ bark, stuff like that.”
It didn’t look terribly appetizing. “Well, you’re the one who said I was adventurous,” she dismissed, and took a sip.
Her lips pursed at once.
It doesn’t look good, and guess what? It tastes like it looks.
Ernie laughed. and downed his in one swig. Patricia elected not to offend Regert’s hospitality, so she just said, “It’s . . . very interesting.”
“Tastes like chalk at first, but give it a minute.”
Patricia would give it more than that. Then she noticed that Regert, like some of the others, also wore a cross pendant, which appeared to be made from tiny vine twistings, and a dark stone hung from a second pendant. By now she had to ask, “That’s an interesting cross, Regert. So you’re a Christian?”
Regert nodded, still not making eye contact. “Yes, miss, the clan believe in God’s only Son, and in the earth that He has bestowed and in the deliverance that He has promised, and in the earth and in the water and in the holy universe.”
Now that’s
a mouthful
, Patricia thought, nearly bidden to laugh.
The holy universe?
“And earlier you referred to Everd as—what did you say?
Asawon?
That means he’s, like, the governor of the clan, right?”
“No, miss. Only God is our governor. Everd is our seer.”
The comment piqued her. “You mean like a psychic person, a visionary? He sees the future?”
Regert seemed on guard for some reason, less enthused to answer. “No, miss. The
sawon
sees the paths that God wants us to travel in life, and he shows us those paths.”
Patricia was about to ask him to elaborate, but he quickly nodded again with the same downcast eyes, and excused himself. “Good graces be with you both, but I must return to my work, which is a gift from on high.”
And then he was walking away.
“Thanks, Regert,” Ernie said after him.
Patricia watched the man amble back to one of the dock sheds.
“Yeah, they definitely got their own ways,” Ernie commented.
Patricia agreed. “They’re very gracious people, but . . .” She slid her tumbler away. “I can
not
drink any more of this.”
“You’ll have some oysters, though,” Ernie said, eyes alighting on the plate. “Remember how you ‘n’ me used to see who could eat the most when we was kids?”
Patricia felt touched by the memory. “Of course.”
“And you always won them contests, if I remember right.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” But oysters, like crabs, she’d always loved; she’d practically been raised on them. “These are huge,” she remarked, looking at the sprawl of six-inch shells on the plate.
“The Squatters dredge a couple a’ bushels every morning.” Ernie slurped three in a row raw off the shell. “Then we sell ’em to a few of the local markets for two bucks a dozen; then the markets resell ’em for about four.”
Patricia sucked one down, curling her toes, it was so fresh and briny. “In D.C. they’ll charge close to twenty dollars for a dozen oysters in a restaurant. And these are ten times better.” When she turned up the next shell to swallow the oyster meat, a gout of juice ran down her chin and neck.
Great. Now I’ll smell like oysters all day.
Ernie ate a few more. “I never did figure out if it was true what they say, though.”
Patricia stalled over the comment. Earlier she’d been abstracting that Agan’s Point seemed to be working some obscure aphrodisiac effect on her, and now here was Ernie—whom she’d already had a sexual dream about—mentioning the same supposed effect of oysters. But did he mean anything more?
He had a crush on me for years,
she thought.
And we never did anything. We never even kissed
. “I think that’s just an old wives’ tale,” she finally said. Her next oyster spilled more juice on her. “Jeez!”
“Gettin’ more on yourself than in your mouth.” Ernie laughed.
This time the juice ran down her chin and continued right down into her cleavage. She felt spaced out for a moment, and suddenly she was fantasizing again: Ernie pulling her blouse off without a word, and licking the delectable juice out from between her breasts. Next she imagined herself fully naked, right here on the dock, more and more juice running salty rivulets down her stomach, filling her navel, trickling down. . . .
And Ernie licking it all away.
God,
she thought, feeling flushed.
The oysters were gone now, and Ernie addressed the last object on the bushel lid. “Naw, I don’t know about oysters, and I don’t know about these, neither. But just ask any Squatter. They’ll tell ya these are the best aphrodisiacs in the world.”
Patricia was glad for the distraction; she looked at the bowl. “Figs?”
“Naw. They’re pepper-fried cicadas, and the ones we got here are the biggest of ‘em all. They dust ’em in wild pepper, then fry ’em in oil.”
Patricia simply shook her head. “Ernie? There’s no way on earth I would
ever
eat one of those things. They’re bugs. And I don’t eat
bugs.”
Ernie grabbed a handful from the bowl, munching on them. They crunched like fried wontons. “Aw, don’t chicken out. Believe it or not, they taste kinda like asparagus, but crunchy.”
“Bugs don’t taste like asparagus; asparagus tastes like asparagus,” Patricia said. “I’m not eating bugs.”
Ernie ignored her. “You grab one by the wings, like this. . . .” His finger plucked one up. “Then pull it off with your teeth. But don’t eat the wings. They’re like wire.” He demonstrated, eating another, then plucked one up for her. He held it right before her mouth.
Patricia shook her head with vigor, insisting, “No!” Then she closed her lips tight.
“Come on. Like the Squatters say, it’s part a’ God’s bounty. Don’t be a chicken. Won’t kill ya to try somethin’ new.”
Patricia smirked.
Shit.
I can’t believe what I’m about to
do,
she thought, then ate the turd-looking thing off his finger. It crunched between her molars, but actually tasted interesting, not repulsive. “Not bad,” she admitted.
“Good. Have another.”
“No! One bug’s my limit. Now let’s go!”
Ernie chuckled as they walked off the pier, the sun beaming on the water behind them. “What’s that building there?” she asked of a long white-brick structure just up from the dock. “Another washhouse?”
“Naw, that’s the line.”
“The what?”
“The new pickers’ building. We call it the line.”
Patricia noticed small windows and a number of window-unit air conditioners. “It looks new.”
“Three, four years old. In fact, I think Judy told me once that it was you who lent her the money to fix things up. So she had that built. You remember the old pickers’ shack that your daddy built, don’t ya?” “Yeah, and now that you mention it, it was . . . a shack,” she said, thinking back on the old rickety open-aired building. Squatter women would sit together at long wooden tables inside, monotonously picking the meat out of hundreds of crabs each per day. “Can we look inside?”
“Sure. In a way, it’s yours.” He opened a metal door, after which cool air gusted out.
A peek inside showed Patricia why they called it “the line.”
Like a production line,
she thought.
Over a dozen Squatter women—from eighteen to sixty—sat at long wooden tables. Cooked crabs would be dumped in the middle of the tables, and from there the women would dismantle the spiny, bright-orange creatures and begin to pick the meat out of them. Each woman wielded a small, unsharpened knife with which she’d tease chunks of the white meat from intricate inner shell channels. The meat would be flicked into plastic one-pound containers, which, when filled, would be scurried back to a walk-in refrigerator by a younger Squatter girl. Another girl would hurry back and forth, removing the shell debris.
“They do it so fast,” Patricia remarked.
The women’s hands pried apart and demeated each crab completely, in only minutes.
“They get a lot of practice,” Ernie said. “I can pick a pound pretty quick myself, but nothing like them. Couple of our girls can fill a pound tub in ten minutes. We wanted to enter ‘em into the annual pickin’ contest up in Maryland, but they wouldn’t go, and that’s a damn shame, ’cos they woulda won.”
“Why didn’t they want to go?”
“They said it was ungodly, or some such. To them, crabs, like all food, are some kind of gift from the heavens, and shouldn’t be turned into a sport.”
More weird philosophy
, Patricia thought.
She couldn’t imagine more tedious work.
Picking
crabs all day
,
every day
? But as she looked inside, the women couldn’t have appeared more content, chatting quietly amongst themselves as their hands and fingers blurred through the process. In the background—barely audible—an evangelical radio station murmured oral missives from God.
“Just wait’ll the Squatter cookout,” Ernie promised. “They got their own recipes for crab cakes, Newburg, and cream a’ crab soup that’re better than anything you’ve ever had, even in them upscale D.C. restaurants.”
Patricia believed it, and she could even remember a bit of it from her childhood.
Ernie closed the door and showed her back to the path. “Guess we better be headin’ back to the house— er, I should, at least. Gotta cut the grass. What’choo got planned today?”
“Nothing, really. I’ll go back with you, check on Judy. Then I might go into town, or maybe go for a walk in the woods.” This was another refreshing aspect of being back: not having to follow any agenda. But she knew she should at least check her e-mail and give the firm a quick call. Then she thought:
And Byron! I haven’t called him in a day and a half!
In fact, she’d actually spoken to him only once or twice since she’d arrived.
He’ll be worried. . . .
But when she patted the back pocket of her shorts, it occurred to her that she’d left her cell phone back in her room.
The tree-lined path wended further upward; spangles of heat draped across her face and chest from the sun pouring in through leafy branches above them.
“There’s another one,” Ernie said without stopping. He pointed to a tree as he walked on.
But Patricia paused.
A small plank, painted white, had been nailed to the tree in what appeared to be a crude decoration. But out here? In the woods? It seemed so peculiar. A simple but ornate drawing adorned the plank, some squiggles and slashes; they seemed symmetrical, in some disordered way
“Another one of their good-luck signs?” she asked.
Ernie had stopped just ahead of her, looking back. “Yeah. Ya see ’em every now and then out in the woods. The woods are blessed land to the Squatters.”
Patricia peered closer at the design. “It just looks so . . . unusual, doesn’t it?”
“I guess,” Ernie said without much interest. “It’s more creepy than anything, if ya ask me.”
Creepy
. . . Yes, she supposed it was. The color of the paint used to form the design was odd, too: a tannish slate.
Is it even paint?
she wondered, touching it. Her finger came away smudged almost black.
Doesn’t feel like paint. More like crayon.
Then she realized what it reminded her of.
Last night
. . . The note she’d found in the garbage, addressed to Dwayne. Since then she’d paid no mind to the weird sheet of paper she’d found, the sheet with one word written on it. . . .
Wenden
.
Was it a name? She could look in the phone book but . . .
Why?
There was no reason for her to care, so why did it seem to bother her now? The word looked as though it had been written in some kind of thin-lined chalk, similar to this good-luck sign on the tree.
“What’choo doing?” Ernie asked with a smile. “Hopin’ some a’ that Squatter good luck’ll rub off on ya
?
”
“Maybe,” she said, and broke away.
But Ernie was right. The design was . . . creepy.
A narrow creek broke the path, its crystal water burbling. Ernie stepped over it in one easy stride; then Patricia hopped across herself. She sighed as her mind cleared—a rarefied luxury for a city attorney—and concentrated only on the cicada throbs, the babbling creeks around them, and the steady crunch of Ernie’s boots as he strode onward. This odd sequence of sounds and sensations seemed to tran
q
uilize her as effectively as a low dose of Valium.

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