He looked across the room and found Sarah Child looking at him. Without thinking what he was doing, he winked at her. She looked quickly away, but then she looked back. He shrugged his shoulders. She smiled at him.
7
The boat, a fifty-two-foot ChrisCraft, appeared around a bend in the Alabama River just before noon the next day. It blew its horn as it passed The Plantation wharf, went several hundred yards upstream, turned, and then came into the wharf and tied up.
Dick Canidy thought that there was a good chance, if he wasn’t careful, that the five-year-old boy standing forward with a rope in his hands would wind up in the river. But he threw the rope as if he knew what he was doing, and then the girl in the back of the boat threw one from there, and Ed Bitter and Brandon Chambers caught them and tied it up.
The children jumped ashore and were embraced by their grandparents, and then introduced, rather formally, to Dick Canidy. They were nice, polite kids, and when they had started up the wide lawn to The Lodge, Canidy said so.
‘‘Nice kids, Mrs. Chambers,’’ he said.
‘‘Thank you, Lieutenant Canidy,’’ she replied.
‘‘Unless you want me to come to the airstrip,’’ she said to her husband, ‘‘maybe I’d better stay here and help the Navy fuel her.’’
‘‘Right,’’ Mark Chambers said. He was dressed in a suit, ready to go to work as soon as he returned to Mobile. He walked up to Eddie and somewhat awkwardly put his arm around his shoulders.
‘‘You be careful when you get over there, hear?’’ he said, not comfortable with the emotion.
‘‘Thank you, Mark,’’ Eddie said, just as embarrassed.
Mark Chamb
ers turned to Dick Canidy. ‘‘You, too, Dick,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re counting on you two fellas to take care of each other.’’
‘‘Thank you,’’ Canidy said.
‘‘Good luck,’’ Mark Chambers said, and shook his hand.
Then he kissed his wife perfunctorily on the cheek and started up the stairwell from the wharf to the lawn.
‘‘So much for the husband,’’ Sue-Ellen said softly.
‘‘I’m flattered,’’ Canidy said.
‘‘I thought that if you had the balls to show up here,’’ she said, ‘‘it was up to me to give you an answer.’’
She stepped up behind him and slid her hand up the leg of his shorts, her hand moving surely past his underwear to grab him gently but firmly.
‘‘I’m a pushover for men with balls,’’ she said, laughing deep in her throat.
She squeezed him and let him go. She stepped to the side of the cockpit and called to Ed Bitter: ‘‘It’s run about seven hours,’’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘‘And it burns about twenty-five gallons an hour against the current, so it’ll take about two hundred gallons. Tell Charley to watch the dial.’’
She turned back to Canidy.
‘‘Everything all right with you?’’ she asked.
8
The coolness of Charley Chambers and his friends toward him was understandable, Ed Bitter thought. They didn’t mind competing among themselves for the virgins of the tribe, and they understood that there were not enough virgins to go around. But what they had not counted on was visiting warriors from a distant tribe, whom their own virgins found fascinating.
Ann Chambers had told him she thought Dick Canidy was a ‘‘doll.’’ Dick Canidy showed absolutely no interest in any of the girls. Dick, Ed thought, was an accomplished woman chaser, and not interested in girls who had just completed their freshman year of college. Dick was interested in women whom he could lure into his bed with only perfunctory attention to the ritual of courtship. He barely concealed his lack of interest, which of course made him more attractive to them.
What really surprised Ed Bitter was how much Sarah Child excited him. When Jenny Chambers had sent him over the night before to make him dance with her, the moment he’d touched her warm back there had been a stirring in his groin.
There was no way in the world that he would so much as pat the delightful little rear end of a nineteen-year-old college girl . . . but the thought was not uninteresting.
His profound philosophical reverie at the wheel of the Time Out was interrupted by the appearance of Sarah Child herself. She was wearing white shorts and a sheer white blouse.