Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

The next afternoon, Slade left Tom at the beach.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

He returned to the cabin, delighted when he heard the familiar music. He crept toward it, his head down, and he took up his place at the window to watch the woman in her white bra and shorts, to listen to her playing. He had been there only a minute or less when Nita stepped from behind the side porch. She had obviously followed him from the lake.

Fearful of revealing his secret interest, feeling discovered, Slade started to walk away.

Nita said in a whisper, “You’re spying on my mom.”

“No I’m not.”

“Don’t believe you.” She squinted at him and smiled and in a wheedling voice said, “Want to see my special house?”

“Sure,” he said, to humor her and avoid any more questions, and as he agreed it occurred to him that Nita looked just like a monkey.

Nita bent over and slipped under the porch, duck-walking into the crawl space. Slade followed her, hearing the mother’s music, like bright light blazing through the cracks in the floorboards. The crawl space was cool and smelled of cat shit and sour dust; the shadows were thick with cobwebs. At its edge was a banner of sunlight, for the cabin was on blocks, no basement, only the crawl space and the splintery wooden underpart. Slade felt disoriented by stepping under the house and hearing the music from the room above, and by the insistent beckoning girl among the shadows and the smells. He was dizzy and distinctly felt that he was doing something wrong.

“This is my kitchen. I could fix you a meal. This is my living room.” She had a hoarse husky voice. “Bedroom’s over there.”

The places she named were just sun-striped portions of dust and cat shit, littered with stones and blown leaves, an overturned bucket serving as a stool.

“And this is my bathroom,” she said.

Slade was half kneeling because he was so much taller than she was and there was so little headroom.

“You can use it if you want,” she said.

“Use it like how?”

“Like what do you think, silly.”

She slid her panties to her knees and squatted, defying him with her mother’s green eyes, seeming to hold her breath while he watched and listened. He stared at her, the little bare-assed monkey with the wicked look squatting in the dust, but all he heard was her mother’s music slashing through the floor from the cabin just over their heads.

Even crouching, Slade could see nothing more of Nita than her bulgy small-girl knees, for she was compact and squatting. But when she stood up and straightened, with the same defiant look, leaving her panties at her ankles, he got a glimpse of sunshine through her legs, but little else, and it seemed a mystery. What was she hiding? When he went closer he saw the subtle, slightly parted mouth of what seemed a secret incomplete face, a simple frowning mask at her crotch. Only then did she tug up her panties, as though as an afterthought.

“Your turn now,” she said, and hiked the panties up tightly.

He found he could not speak at first. He had a reply but couldn’t utter it while transfixed by the way the slit-like frown under her belly showed through the panties. At last he said, “You didn’t do anything.”

“At least I tried.” She was irritable. “Go ahead, fraidy cat, no one’s looking.”

The demanding sharpness in her tone aroused him and worried him at the same time. He wanted to linger, he wanted more of her. To be alone in the shadows of a summer cabin with a willing wicked girl was like a dream. But her body was skinny and incomplete, she was too small, she was reckless. The danger of her recklessness excited him but made him afraid, and in the seconds of trembling there he felt only panic. What if someone saw or heard them? He bent over and tried to rush out of the crawl space, but not bending over far enough, he cracked his head against a low board under the cabin floor, and then was on his hands and knees in the sunshine, his head ringing.

His sensation of having been deafened by the knock on the head was heightened by something else that was wrong: the music had stopped. In the instant he realized this, still groggy, he saw a pair of sandals approaching. They were trimmed with fake cherries. He struggled to his feet and came face to face with Tom’s mother, who was bent over — she was taller than he was.

“What’s going on here?” she said, and the mother’s demand had an echo of the daughter’s scolding voice.

“Nothing,” Slade said, but he glanced behind him and saw Nita climbing out from under the porch.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the beach?”

But Tom’s mother was not speaking to him; she was addressing the little girl, who sulked and walked away. When Slade started after her, Tom’s mother said, “Not you. You’re staying right here where I can see you.”

Slade went hot with blame, and looked away from the woman’s face, and dropped his gaze to her shoes, the wedge-heeled sandals. The fake cherries on the straps were chipped, but her toes were lovely with pink polish.

“What would your mother say if she knew you were misbehaving?

“I don’t know,” Slade said miserably. He could not keep the tone of guilty pleading out of his voice. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Under the house with Nita,” she said. “I think you were being fresh.”

Slade was terrified. He knew he had no control over what Tom’s mother was saying. He could not contradict her, and he hated the little monkey girl for tempting him.

“Come in here,” Tom’s mother said, and she stood aside. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bronster.”

Only then did Slade notice that Tom’s mother was dressed as she had been the day before, in a white bra and loose shorts, the same blue ribbon on her braid, her winking navel in the sallow skin of her bare midriff. The steel guitar was set up where she had left it, the amplifier like a battered suitcase, the sheet music on a metal stand.

“I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”

“You can trust me,” he said in his pleading voice. “I didn’t do anything.”

In her thick-heeled sandals she loomed over him, and she turned on him and said sharply, “Your knees are filthy. Look at your hands. You need a good shower. Get over here.”

She beckoned him to the back of the cabin where, on a slatted platform, there was a shower stall — a plastic curtain, an overhead pipe and nozzle. She turned on the shower and the water spattered and splashed on the boards.

“Go ahead.”

Slade wanted to please her yet he hesitated, his hands on his shorts.

“I suppose you think I’ve never seen a naked man.”

When she said “man,” Slade did not think of himself; he thought of Tom’s father, who was never there.

“Now make it snappy.”

He turned away and slipped off his T-shirt and dropped his shorts. He entered the pouring shower, hiding in the torrent, his back to the streaming shower curtain.

But he could tell from the way the water splashed that Tom’s mother was watching, crowding the shower stall entrance. Then she stepped away and the water fell straighten Slade soaped himself, still trying to please her, and after he had rinsed off he saw her at the bathroom door, holding a towel.

“Here,” she said, and dangled it, but when he walked toward her, naked, she held on to the towel, gripping its corner as he dried off.

“You’re certainly not putting those dirty clothes back on,” she said, and kicked his shorts away as he reached for them. She gave him a small limp handful of soft silk.

“Put those on.”

He was uncertain, almost afraid.

“Do as I say.”

He drew them on, black lace panties, consoled that his nakedness was covered yet feeling foolish. But the woman’s seriousness helped him. She was matter-of-fact; she could have teased him but didn’t.