“I haven’t s-seen her.”

“Ya think she’s here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen. She hadn’t come home by the time I went to bed last night, and she wasn’t to home this morning either. Her bed leaves me clueless cause she hardly ever makes it anyways.”

The tic under Phoebe’s bloodshot eye took me aback.

“Think she took the starch out of Musselwhite last night? Or Curriden? Or whoever the hell happened to ask her home?”

“I don’t know.”

Phoebe paced the high concrete. I’d seen her upset before, but never this unhinged. She stopped, hands on hips.

“Well, should I go in there yelling ‘Mama, oh Mama, please come home’?”

“I don’t know. You’d probably sc-scare up a few guys in their sk-skivvies.”

“Oh joy. Smelly men in their dingy unmentionables.”

“We all sh-shower, Phoebe.”

Phoebe cocked her head funny. “You didn’t talk to me at Mr Snow’s funeral-not even a piddlin ‘Hi!’ ”

“I nodded at you. It was a f-funeral, not a ice-cream social.”

“You know, you were a damn sight sweeter when you couldn’t talk-pliter, more charmin.”

“Phieuw!”

Phoebe ignored my disgust. “So you don’t think it’d do for me to stomp upstairs calling for my mama?”

“Nome, I don’t.”

Suddenly-really suddenly-Phoebe knelt in front of me and gripped my thighs with her small, tough-looking hands. “Take me off from here, Danny. Carry me home.”

So I did. I pedaled that doddery bike with Phoebe perched shakily on its handlebars, her dress yanked up to her sunny red knees. Not once in the whole trip did I put my fanny to the bike’s liver-shaped and liver-tinted seat cushion, but we never spilled, and Phoebe invited me in for a Co-Cola.

“No thanks. I haven’t had br-breakfast.” I was nervous and wanted to get back.

“Spose I said a cherry Coke, Danny? Would a cherry Coke make you forgit Kizzy’s cantaloupes n biscuits?”

Somehow, coaxed along, I wound up in the living room of the Pharrams’ boxy little rental house. I knew-as well as, if not better than, Phoebe did herself-she was playing me like a gill-snagged trout, but neither of us knew when she’d yanked or where I’d land. We looked at each other a minute.

Then, like a kid at a pool getting rid of her coverup, Phoebe took off her blouse, showing me a bra-a brassiere!-more like a thin bandage than the double-barrelled slingshot I’d’ve expected. She looked frail, wounded almost, in that bandanna, sort of like the piper kid in that famous painting of a Revolutionary War fife-and-drum group. Then Phoebe’s hands fidgeted behind her back, and the bandage fell away. At least three guys on the Hellbenders-Fanning, Sudikoff, and Hay-had bigger bosoms than Phoebe, but the sight of hers-pear-shaped and jaunty-awed me the way a sunset would a man healed late in life of blindness.

Phoebe took my hand and led me to her bedroom, where her bed, unlike her mama’s, had a made-up spread and a pretty folded quilt across its foot. She turned the spread all the way back, the pears on her chest hardly growing even when she leaned over to turn it. But how blessed I felt looking at em.

“Now you,” Phoebe said, facing me straight on.

“What do you w-want to d-d-do?”

“Jes what they do at The Wing n Thigh.” She thought for a moment. “With lusty passion.”

“We’re not m-married. And I thought you wanted a s-s-sojer to, uh, d-do you first.”

“Married! I bet most human sex’s got zero to do with that n not much with love. A place like The Wing n Thigh tells me so. And so does my ever-lovin mama, thout sayin a word.” Phoebe’s voice softened. “I care for you, boy. S no fault of yores you aint a sojer. Take off yore shirt.”

I did. My chest caved to the breastbone, gooseflesh broke out on me like prickly heat.

“More,” Phoebe said. “S yore turn to keep it all goin. If you care for me too.”

There was a desk beside Phoebe’s truckle bed, with an old Royal typewriter on it and a photograph of Captain Luther Trent Pharram in his uniform and service cap. I sat down in the desk chair so I couldn’t see the ferret-eyed captain, and I untied my shoes. Not much is more ridiculous-looking than a grown man with his shoes on and his pants around his ankles. As I heeled off my shoes, Phoebe headed doorwards in her squad cars.

“Where you going?”

“For a French letter, Danny. Mama keeps em in the drawer nex her bed.”

“I d-don’t read French.”

“Goodness, you won’t-parlay vooz-have to. Be skinny by the time I git back. Even with Miss LaRaina in heat half the damn time, we prolly aint got all day.”

Not much of what Phoebe’d just said made a hoohah of sense to me. French letter. Parlay vooz. Besides, I was skinny even when I wasn’t. I recalled from Tenkiller creek dipping just what she’d meant to imply, though, and shed my pants and undershorts. For the looks of it, more than anything else, I also rolled down and ditched my socks.

When Phoebe returned, she wore nothing but a pair of satiny green panties. She hardly had any more hips than I did, but I thought her sexier than a thousand Venuses on a thousand pearly half shells. A bird and her bush are worth two out of hand. Me, I cupped my hands over my lap. That wasn’t hard because I wasn’t either. So far, the circumstances of our tryst-the early hour, the unfamiliar bedroom, the funny out-of-whackness of Phoebe’s behavior-had flustered more than aroused me. I kept waiting for an ashtray to bang down on my head.

“I may look right boyish, Daniel, but I already work like a woman. You gonna have to put this on.”

“What?”

“The French letter.” She held up a bronze packet about the size of a fifty-cent piece, only thicker. Straight off, I knew what it was. We had them in Oklahoma too.

“That’s a rubber.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a right tatty name for it. But call it how you like, you still got to put it on.”

For the first time since this whole freaky episode’d begun, I blushed. The blush scalded me down from my ears, face, and throat, to my chest, upper arms, and belly, like a head-first dunk in a turpentine bath. I didn’t move.

Phoebe said, “You want to do this or not?”

“I d-dunno. D-d-do you?”

“Why in a pig’s eye you spose I had you bike me home? Whym I standing her nearlybout birthday new?”

“Phoebe, I dunno.”

My reply teed her off, but she didn’t back down an inch from the vengeance she had in mind. (Not a vengeance on me, now, but through me.) She curled her finger into the waist band of her panties, rolled them down her hips and legs, and stepped clear. I stared. No weedy triangle between her legs, just a crooked, reddish diamond with pale flesh showing around it so the tuft itself stood out in relief-as pretty, and as damaged-looking, as a Special Service Force patch with a bunch of pulled threads. I stared at it, trembling.

“Show me,” she said. “It’s not fair for this to work jes one way.”

I moved my hands. Phoebe knelt with the rubber, which she’d popped from its case. I wasn’t feeling horny, though, just bossed and misplaced. Phoebe examined me, tilting her head to one side and then the other.

“No offense, Danl, but they sort of remind me o turkey wattles-the beak n the wattles, you know.”

I looked: veiny pink wattles and a small spongy beak. My groin hair was lighter and sparser than Phoebe’s, my bashful equipment as useless as a tissue-paper doorknob. Never in my life had I felt so exposed and ashamed.

“Howm I going to git this on you? It’s sorta like wrapping a pipe cleaner with a rubber band.” Phoebe touched. “Oh!” she said, “lookit the little booger grow.”

We wound up on her bed. We worked to fit, then to please each other the way grownups’re supposed to do. Phoebe’s body resisted even though she tried to make it stop. Her face-her damped lips, her wide eyes-showed the strain of her fight. I fought too-to stay off the crushable basket of her ribs, to stay hard, to slide in her dryness, to keep from running away.