“Poor thing.”
“What’s the white stuff?”
“Didn’t you ever have a Fluffernutter?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You weren’t raised right.”
He watched her address the sandwich as though she were demonstrating how all the various complex parts of her mouth worked: lips, teeth, tongue.
“You know, I was quite the tomboy as a girl,” she said, coming closer to him again. “I’d like to climb you like a tree.” She put the sandwich on the counter and reached up, joined her fingers around the back of his neck, pressed herself against him, and made a pouty face. “I’m still hungry,” she said.
Daniel was experiencing such a bioelectrical surge that he saw little spots of light before his eyes. Theta brain waves battled his hormones and enzymes in a fugue of acute sensation, fear, lust, rage. Behind it all loomed the governor of his emotions: the training. Loving Morrow turned her head up. Daniel noticed that her pupils were dilated, as he had been taught to observe.
“You wanna play with me?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“That is exactly the right answer. You’re good. I can tell already.” She slid her hands down and took one of his in both of hers and guided him out of the kitchen, down a hallway, and into a bedroom. It was heavily curtained and dimly lit. He had never known that there were so many shades and tones of pink as were evinced by the decor in this room. The bed was proportionately as large as the room. It could easily sleep more than two, and at various times had. She backed him up to it and tipped him onto it with a push of her finger. A fierce look of determination came over her face. “You gawn see something very special now, young man.”
She seized the plastic clamp from the back of her head and tossed it aside. Her ghostly silver-blonde hair fell around her shoulders and she swept a knot of it out of her face with an aggressive gesture. She wiggled out of her shorts and let them fall on the floor. Then she crossed her arms and briskly pulled off the camisole. Daniel watched the spectacle in a state of inflamed paralysis as she leaned over him, all soft roundness, and started undoing his things: shirt buttons, belt buckle.
“Skootch up out of that, now,” she said and she pulled it all off. “My goodness, will you look at that.”
Then she was upon him, lightly and softly at first, businesslike, as though trying out the saddlery on a new horse. He was startled to discover that the body of a woman fifty-one years of age was not, in her case, materially much different from the body of a younger woman, and that all their components worked exactly the same way. He obliged her even with the tumult churning inside of him, allowing her to choreograph changes of positions, activities, and themes until he was wedged up between her legs like a plowman and her wet mouth formed a gaping O emitting yelps of animal extremity, and she threw her head back culminating with a choked sob and a tender shriek that subsided into a giggle. In that train of events Daniel, too, spasmed, subsided, and rolled off to her side on the gigantic bed.
“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” Loving Morrow murmured with a conclusive sigh and no irony. She pushed herself up against the padded headboard. “You are good,” she said. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Of course you will. I’ll order you to,” she said playing at being stern before her mouth turned up again in its high-wattage smile and she bumped his thigh with the heel of her palm, and laughed musically. “Just kidding,” she added.
“I’ll be happy to see you again,” Daniel said.
“My heart,” she said, making a little fluttering gesture with her hand over her bare breast with its broad, pink tip. “I will send for you again. Meantime, don’t work so hard. “You take a little more time to yourself, hear? Save some of that youthful energy for me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t get up until ’bout one o’clock in the afternoon, so our time will be around now, most days. Most nights I’m in the studio recording with the gang until three, four a.m. Once in a while we see the sun come up.”
“What are you recording, ma’am?”
“Why, my music, of course, silly. You wanna watch us sometime. It’s just like seeing a live show.”
“I’d like that, ma’am.”
“I like how you call me that. So polite. I bet you were well raised after all, Fluffernutters or not. Well,” she said, fairly bouncing off the bed, “I’ma shower off my little wet bottom, and put the robes of statecraft back on, and get back on my own job,” she said, and by this time she was closing the door to an enormous adjoining bathroom with only her head still peeking out. “Can you believe I run this whole shebang?”
“Yes, I do, ma’am.”
“I mean, I got help and all. But still. Sheesh . . . Oh, the car’s outside down below whenever you wanna go. Bye now.”
In the days that followed, Daniel made regular visits to the place that everybody in the capital of the Foxfire Republic called the White House, with all its multiple layers of meaning. Loving Morrow’s temperament was steady and generally buoyant, her appetites reliably avid. Daniel always received his written instructions by ten o’clock in the morning and was able to plan his day with the object of meeting the sergeant and the car late in the afternoon in a different place near the center of town each time, “for security,” he was told. Every morning, after checking in and out of the Logistics Commission office, he rode his horse Ike on a twelve-mile loop across the patchwork of farms and plantations outside of town, down crop lanes and through woodlots, pastures, cornfields, and meadows, even jumping the hedgerows here and there. In the process, he became a better rider. And it was only on these lone sorties away from the bustle of Franklin that he forced himself to think about his mission and tried to plan exactly how he might carry out the primary deed itself, and what he would do in its aftermath to get away successfully. The Service people back on Channel Island had taught him many skills, given him many ideas, and run through many scenarios for the carrying out of his mission, but it was left to Daniel to determine the final details of execution, depending on what he discovered about
conditions in place,
as the jargon had it during training.
He fretted over these matters while riding Ike and he hoped somehow to formulate a final plan that would allow him to escape from Franklin on horseback. He looked for places outside the town checkpoints where he might be able to stash Ike and his tack for a few hours while he carried out the mission and got away from the scene. Being adjacent to the Foxfire capital, the farms and plantations surrounding the town were well-run operations. There were no run-down barns or abandoned sheds as he’d seen just about everywhere else in the country, though he noted several fenced pastures that were occupied by numbers of horses where he might hide Ike in plain sight among them for a little while.
And whether he brooded directly on one plan after another, or just let the matter percolate at the margins of his consciousness while losing himself in the exertion of riding through a landscape that had turned the russet colors of autumn, he could not arrive at a course of action that might accomplish its main objective as well as save his skin.
He continued to receive his pay in silver, and he saved a lot of it to finance his escape, but he allowed himself a leisurely lunch every day in one of several restaurants in town, his favorite being the dining room of the Yancey Hotel, which served a fried chicken special with onion rings, collard greens stewed with bacon, wheat biscuits and fresh butter, and, at this time of year, an excellent squash pie for dessert. Before leaving home, he had never eaten in a restaurant. When he was not diverted by riding or eating he was increasingly conscious of a generalized bad feeling inside himself, a vivid corrosion of the spirit in which he seemed to be marinating. He soon identified it, with a certain strange relief in doing so, as self-hatred. And having done that, he just as readily recognized the source of it as the dissonance between the pleasure he was taking in the company of Loving Morrow and his very deliberate intention to murder her. Even as he ruminated darkly on these things, he also consciously took pleasure in the leisurely routines that allowed him these ruminations, his mornings on horseback, the fine napery of his table at the Yancey, his meals, his pie, his chicory root and barley “coffee,” his fine clothes and boots, and the illusion of his independence.
Then, one late afternoon, as instructed, he met the big black car behind the Methodist Church off Cummins Street and was surprised to find Loving Morrow in the rear compartment with a splint basket and a guitar. The sergeant was behind the wheel as usual.
“How you doing, sugar?” she said as he climbed in beside her.
“I’m just fine, ma’am,” he said, sensing she was not.
They drove off through the checkpoint, out east on the Lewisburg Pike a mile or so out of town. Loving Morrow remained quiet, pensive. She chewed on the pad of her thumb, looking out the window at the passing landscape.
“Where are we going, ma’am?” Daniel said.
“You’ll see,” she said with a pained smile. “My special place.”
Daniel felt himself slip into a state of heightened alarm.
They passed tobacco barns, orchards, work gangs stooping in the fields digging yams and picking squashes and okra, people gawking in their dooryards at the queer sight of the automobile rolling along the bumpy road.
“How I’m gonna feed all these moochers, I’ll never know,” Loving Morrow muttered to herself.
“Something wrong, ma’am?”
“That goddamn Milton Steptoe is laying siege to Chattanooga now,” she said. “Just what I needed.”
The car turned onto an inconspicuous dirt lane in a patch of woods. A quarter mile up the road stood a little log cabin of impeccably accurate historic design, complete with dovetailed corners, moss chinking, a mud-and-daub chimney, and a broad porch. It stood on a bank yards from the lazy Harpeth River. The car stopped and Loving Morrow got out with the guitar.
“Grab the basket, would you, sugar?”
Daniel climbed out behind her. She was wearing a cotton print dress with a button-front pink sweater and beaded moccasin slippers on her small feet. She looked like a schoolgirl, Daniel thought.
“Why don’t you take off, Rusty,” she told the sergeant.
“I’m supposed to stick by you, ma’am.”
“Would you please just do what I say. Come back in two hours.”
“That’s not regular procedure, ma’am.”
“Well goddammit, dontcha think I know that?”
“Just sayin’, ma’am.”
“Can’t I just have a few moments on my own like a regular human being?”
“You’re special, ma’am. It can’t be helped.”
“You get out of here right now, Rusty, or I’ma send your ass to fight that goddamn Milton Steptoe over to Chattanooga, goddammit. I got this strong, upright young man to protect me. Go to the Yancey, for Gawd’s sake, and get some ribs or something and come back in two hours.”
“You know I can’t do that, ma’am. I got orders from General McBride.”
“Hell, I give McBride his orders!”
“Well, the general’s orders are to stick by you no matter what you order me to do, including like now tellin’ me to get lost. If that means I have to go to Chattanooga, so be it, ma’am.”
Loving Morrow uttered a grunt of exasperation, stamped her foot in the grass, and shook her fist at the sergeant through the open passenger-seat window.
“What’s it come to when a woman that runs a damn country can’t give a simple order to a noncommissioned officer.”
“Security procedure, ma’am. That’s what.”
“Would you just git your ass two hundred yards up the road, then?”
“I can do one hundred, ma’am. That’s all.”
“Aw hell . . . Well, git, then!”
“Send that young man up when you’re ready to go home,” the sergeant said.
The big car rolled back up the lane.
“See what I have to deal with?” Loving Morrow said. “Come on inside.”
The cabin was furnished with a reproduction rustic bed and some other simple antique furniture. As soon as Daniel put the picnic basket down on the table, Loving Morrow was pulling off his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt.
“Do you know what that goddamn Milton Steptoe did?” she said, opening his belt buckle. She didn’t wait for him to answer. “He invaded our camp at Ooltewah and let loose over two thousand niggers. What do you think of that?”
“What were they doing there?”
“They were hard cases. Ones that wouldn’t leave the state or took up arms against us.”
“I see.”
“I’m telling you I aim to stop this sonofabitch for once and for all. I got to send an army over to Chattanooga to whip his ass, and those are troops that were all ready to go up to Cincinnati. Now we’re gonna have to postpone that operation and winter’s coming on and all. Oh goddammit . . .”
Loving Morrow left off undressing Daniel, stepped back to the bed, sat on the edge, and cried.
“Look at me,” she said between sobs, “cryin’ like a little girl.”
Daniel felt helpless.
“Sometimes all this just, I dunno, gets to me.”
“I understand.”
“Armies and niggers and responsibility and all.”