Carnal Innocence

dust. “What are you doing over there in the dark with that girl?”
    “Less than I’d like to.” He was beside Lulu in two strides, bending himself nearly in half to kiss her powdered, paper-thin cheek. “Pretty as ever,” he pronounced, and she giggled and swatted him.
    “You’re the pretty one. Look more like your ma than she did herself. You, you there.” She signaled to Caroline with one bony finger. “Come on over where I can see you.”
    “Don’t you scare her off,” Tucker warned. “Cousin Lulu, this is Caroline Waverly.”
    “Waverly, Waverly. Not from these parts.” She cast her bright bird’s eyes up and down. “Not your usual type either. Tucker. Doesn’t look top-heavy or pin-headed.”
    Caroline thought about it. “Thank you.”
    “Yankee!” Lulu set up a screech that could have shattered crystal. “Christ in a sidecar, she’s a Yankee.”
    “Only half,” Tucker said quickly. “She’s Miss Edith’s granddaughter.”
    Lulu’s eves narrowed. “Edith McNair? George and Edith?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Caroline said with her tongue in her cheek. “I’m staying the summer in my grandparents’ house.”
    “Dead, aren’t they? Yes, they’re dead, but they were Mississippians born and bred, so that counts for something. That your hair, girl, or a wig?”
    “My …” Automatically, Caroline lifted a hand to her hair. “It’s my hair.”
    “Good. Don’t trust bald-headed women any more than I trust Yankees. So we’ll see. Tucker, you take my cases in and get me a brandy. I need you to call that Talbot boy about my car. Lost my muffler somewhere in Tennessee. Maybe it was Arkansas.” She paused at the base of the steps. “Well, come on, girl.”
    “I was … I was just leaving.”
    “Tucker, you tell that girl when I offer to have a brandy with a Yankee, that Yankee better drink.”
    With that, Lulu clumped up the steps in her army boots.
    “She’s something, isn’t she?” Tucker asked as he switched off the purring ignition.
    “Something,” Caroline agreed, and decided she could use a brandy at that.

c·h·a·p·t·e·r 12
    C y Hatinger’s palms were sweating. The rest of him wasn’t exactly Arrid-dry either, as they said in the commercials. His armpits dripped, despite his conscientious use of Ban Roll-On. He had hair there now, had for the best part of a year. Between his legs, too. The fact both thrilled and embarrassed him.
    His sweat was the sweat of youth, clear and mostly inoffensive. It came from a combination of the thick morning heat and his own fear and excitement. What he was doing would bring his father’s holy, belt-flashing wrath down on him.
    He was going to ask the Longstreets for work. Of course, his father was in jail, and that comforted him some. The fact that it did brought on hot little flashes of guilt that made him sweat more.
    Aren’t you glad you use Dial? he thought. Don’t you wish everybody did?
    He didn’t know why he was thinking in commercials, unless it was because his mother left the flickering old TV on day and night. For company, she would say, wringing her hands and looking at him dully out ofred-rimmed eyes. She cried just about all the time now, and hardly seemed aware of him or Ruthanne at all.
    He might come across her sitting on the sagging and faded sofa. Still in her bathrobe in the middle of the day, a basket of laundry at her feet while she sniffled and watched
Days of Our Lives.
At this point Cy wasn’t sure the tears were for herself or in sympathy for the trials and tribulations of the people in that mythical town of Salem.
    To Cy the Hortons and the Bradys of Salem were more real than his mother, who wandered the house like a ghost each night while the TV droned on through Leno’s monologue or reruns of sitcoms or commercials for gadgets like the Clapper, that magical boon to society that allowed you to turn on lights or turn off TVs and all you had to do was applaud.
    It was like congratulating an electrical appliance, and Cy found it creepy.
    He could imagine his mother with one, weeping in the front room and clapping her hands together while the lights jumped and the TV flipped on.
    “Thank you, thank you,” the dusty screen would say. “And for my next number, here’s the Reverend Samuel Harris to show all you sinners the way through those gates of paradise.”
    Oh, yes, his mama was right fond of all those religion programs with their hypnotic-voiced Reverend this or that, shouting down sin and