nobody … no cop, no judge, no jury … nobody going to want to hear how that innocent little girl would come crawling into my bed when her mom wasn’t at home, wearing nothing but panties and little training bra, asking me to rub her back. Twelve years old, okay … but she’s got titties and she gets her period and—”
“Listen, asshole,” Camel finally told him. “She’s a child, you’re an adult. Doesn’t matter what she does, you’re the one responsible.”
He was nodding. “I know that, yessir I know that. I know what I did was wrong in the eyes of the law but—”
Wrong in Camel’s eyes too. “While you’re in prison I hope you get fucked up the ass on a regular basis.”
This fairly took the man’s breath away. When he finally was able to speak he told Camel, “You’re a hard man.”
People were always saying that about him.
The summer Camel first met Annie when she was a girl and he was a man, the eleven people staying at the beach house slept on cots and couches, in bedrooms and sleeping bags. Married couples were granted bedrooms, the three older boys tripled up, Annie shared a bed with the youngest boy who was hardly morethan a toddler, and Camel took a sleeping bag and mosquito netting out onto the porch.
The last night of the long weekend, three A.M. and Annie was suddenly all elbows and knees next to him.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Charlie has stinky feet.”
Camel laughed.
“He does! I hate stinky feet. I told him to wash his feet before he came to bed but he didn’t and now the whole bed stinks like his feet, I’m not sleeping there.”
“You’re not sleeping here either.”
“You got stinky feet too?”
Camel laughed again and started pushing her out of the sleeping bag but his hand slipped to grasp by accident a breast bud, hard and small like a golf ball. Annie reacted by locking her legs around him and becoming very still, waiting for what came next … Camel’s voice turning cold: “Get out of here.”
“What?”
“Go back to bed with Charlie or find somewhere else to sleep, you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
“Go on now,” he insisted, demonstrating with stony voice that he didn’t intend to make this into a game.
“You didn’t kiss me goodnight.”
“Get out of here.”
“You kissed me goodnight last night, in front of everybody … why can’t you now?”
“Go on, get out of here.”
“Give me a kiss and I’ll leave.”
He tossed aside the sleeping bag and stood.
“You afraid of me?” she asked.
In a way he was. “I’m going to find your mother, let her deal with you.”
“Okay,
okay
.” Annie got to her feet too.
Camel was holding the mosquito netting aside for her when,passing in front of him, she went up on tiptoes to kiss him quickly on the lips. And said, “I love you.”
“Go to bed.”
“I know what that is,” she said, touching him.
He pulled on the netting to make it come down between them. “I hear or see you again tonight,” he warned, “and I’m waking up your mother.”
“Tattletale.”
“Get out of here.”
“Grouch.”
He listened to her bare feet padding across the porch and into the house, then Camel lit a cigarette and thought assiduously of older women he’d known, women who rouged their faces and drew their eyebrows as arches not found in nature, who laughed cigarette-husky and drank whiskey neat, women with slack bellies and breasts that sagged from weight and time, whose brambles grew thick-black from thigh to heavy thigh.
The next morning as everyone was getting ready to leave he debated telling Annie’s mother what had happened but Annie and her mother were already in their car … Annie rolling down a window and throwing him a big kiss the way Dinah Shore did at the end of her television show. He didn’t throw one back, he just waved.
Although Camel remained friends with the people who owned the beach house he didn’t accept any of their subsequent
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