Curriden knocked, the door opened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a brunette, pale-skinned woman about my own height wearing a yoke-collared shirt with a Johnny Mack Brown bib and pearly buttons for a housecoat. Under that shirt, legs like pruning shears. Red-orange polish on her toe-nails.

Curriden gave her extra money. “Sabrina, Danny Boles. Danny, Sabrina Loveburn. Vito, Quip, and I’ll be downstairs eating, kid. Have you a time.”

“I’m off at nine,” Sabrina said as Curriden walked away.

“Not for what I just gave you, hon. Sides, he’s like to go off fastern a firecracker. Have a heart,”

“Come in, then,” Miss Loveburn said.

I stared at her toenails and might not’ve moved at all if a clatter of shoes on the stairs and a barrage of male voices hadn’t goosed me to it. Just as a gang of four soldiers burst through the door at the end of the hall, I stepped into Miss Loveburn’s room. She shut the door. The GIs knocked on every door in the hall, including hers.

“So yo’re a ballplayer,” she said. “One that don’t talk.” Curriden had told her, maybe even before we showed up.

I didn’t even try to answer. Her room had a low, narrow bed-more like a couch with no back or arms-a folding chair, a pole lamp, and a door across from the one I’d entered by. Like prairie dogs, the ladies of The Wing & Thigh had at least two exits from their burrows.

Over Miss Loveburn’s bed hung a glossy oil portrait of a Tahitian or a Samoan maiden in a sarong, with one brown breast showing. The sun going down behind her had exactly the same plump roundness as her nude breast.

Miss Loveburn’s violet eyes halted their gaze at the top of my skin. She was semipretty, with the looks of a pissed-off school teacher. If she hadn’t been birthday-suit-skinny under her Johnny Mack Brown shirt, I could’ve imagined her sitting tight-kneed in a Baptist church pew.

“Give me ballplayers over sojers,” she said. “Especially if they’ve just played a game. Not too many of yall pass up a shower afterwards. A GI, though, you never know about. Some come in smelling like cologne factories, some like geedee goat stalls, pardon my French. If they’ve scrubbed with a clean washrag, yo’re lucky-s bout the best you can hope for, barring a campwide flu and the weekend off.”

Miss Loveburn let her gaze drill into my skin. “Cmere. This aint something you can do by phone.” She shook her head. “If you don’t talk, of course, bout the only thing you can do by phone is dial it, right? Or listen maybe. You look like a decent nough listener. Cmere. Lemme smell ya.”

All her talk’d taken most of the scare out of Miss Sabrina Loveburn. I went to her. She put her hands on my shoulders and sniffed me under the chin and around the ears, a dog going over its owner’s trouser legs after a cat’s been by. While she smelled me, I sniffed her hair-wavy burn-brown wool. It smelt of cigarette smoke and talc. I liked it.

“Not bad,” Miss Loveburn said. “Kinda little kiddyish.” She went from my ears to my breastbone and from there over to my arm pit, sniffing from one spot to another. “Shower or no, yo’re starting to get a smidgen ripe about here.” She slipped her hands under my arms and stood straight up. “What do I expect, huh? A young he-fella cliding wi the climate. S okay, though. You’ll do.”

She sniffed my mouth. “Smoke already, huh? Shouldn’t.” She lifted my lip, to let the air polish my canines. “Turn these pearlies yeller. Least you don’t chew. Got a little hunger on yore breath, though. You hungry?”

I had a dinner date, but Miss Loveburn wouldn’t let go of my shoulders.

“Turnabout,” she said. “You say what swampy perfumes come off me bout now. Fair’s fair.”

To oblige, I smelt her forehead and eyebrows: talc, stale smoke, woman sweat, the oils of long-gone lovers. All pretty faint, nothing too foul. But from the room-from her bed-a rancider smell fanned out: sweat, stained linens, downstairs cooking.

“But you cain’t say, can you? Never met a dummy before-not sure I believe in em. Lemme see. Open.” She prised up my lip again and got me to open wide, then loosened the knot on my tie and peered into my mouth. “Relax. This is okay. You aint a gift horse, are you? Given who paid, I’m liker to qualify. No looking in mine, though. Fair’s fair, but smart’s smart and wise is wise.” She put the tip of one finger on my tongue. “Lips okay. Tongue okay.” She probed with a finger. I had to warn myself not to chomp down. “Throat okay. Vocal cords, ah, ah, open, keep it open, ah, I cain’t even see em. Someone cut em out? Yank em like burnt-through wiring?”

I shook my head.

“Then why this speechlessness, honey? It don’t become a young man of yore achievements.” Miss Loveburn walked me to the bed, where she tugged me to a sitting position on her right hand. Sitting, she lost the coverage till then afforded by the tail of her shirt. I saw the smooth white cables of her thighs, the dark bird-nest tangle at their join. I could feel her warmth. Until that moment, nothing about The Wing & Thigh as a fancy house or Sabrina Loveburn as one of its women had brought me anywhere near horniness, but I reached it sitting there, and she noticed.

“Spare me yore flusterment, Danny. I’ve raised the dead. For feisty young rams like you, all I’ve got to do’s breathe. Anyhow, nothing happens till I say the word.” I put my hand on Miss Loveburn’s beautiful knee. I leaned into her and nibbled her throat. “Tonight, Danny boy, yore Open Sesame aint Reese’s money or any ol guppy nibbles. You gotta say, ‘Love ya, hon,’ or ‘Shut my mouf.’ Otherwise, it’s no go. I don’t sell to crips-one-arms, hair-lips, dummies-as Reese hissef knows. So tell me you love me, Danl.”

Ooooi. Mama, God, and the please-and-thank-you morality of Tenkiller meant about as much to me just then as the prose on a mattress tag. I wanted Miss Loveburn under me, her cowboy shirt hiked to her greyhound-lean rib cage, her legs slicing me into smaller and smaller satisfied pieces.

I love you, I whispered. (I could whisper-Pumphrey hadn’t stolen my ability to whisper.)

“Loud-talk it!” Miss Loveburn said. “Say it right out!”

But to do that, I needed a diagram of all the fleshy parts in my throat and instructions for making them twang.

“Shore it’s a lie. If you loved me, I’d get me to a nunnery. But you have to say it-something-to prove I’m not peddling myself to a draft-dodging crip. Got that?”

I got it okay, but no matter how hard I tried-curling my tongue, gulping air-I managed only voiceless stammers.

“Uh-uh. That won’t do.”

I kept trying, straining like a cur with a bone in its throat. A Nazi would’ve taken pity; a Jap, even. Finally I stopped trying, shoved Miss Loveburn over, and wedged one knee between her legs. Did it count as rape if you tried to have your way with an ass-for-hire who’d taken money and then set conditions that had nothing to do with her price or the exact bedroom yahoo level she’d tolerate?

“Stop it, Danl! I’m warning you!”

She raised a knee into my crotch, hard, but the slam was a billiard kiss off one ball. To keep her from using her knee again, I rolled my hips and pubic bone down on her and smoodged a hungry kiss over her lips, chin, and jaw.

Then a boulder fell out of the sky and crushed the back of my skull into a backasswards sort of headache powder.