Chapter 2
A COUPLE OF DAYS later I was sitting under the cottage sorting out my shell collection when Nell came pedaling up the beach on her bike. She wore a pair of faded blue jeans and a boy's shirt with the tail tied in a knot under her breastbone. Her midriff was bare. Her hair bounced in a ponytail.
She hopped oft the bike and pushed it up through the loose sand to the house. "Hi, Mark," she said. "Hi," I mumbled. I was ashamed to look at her. "What are you doing?"
"Just fooling around with my shells." Nell propped her bike against one of the pilings and walked over for a closer look.
"You sure have a bunch of them." Nell had always been nice and friendly to me, more than the others in the older crowd. The thought made me feel even more guilty about spying on her.
"What are you going to do with them?" . "Oh, I don't know. Glue them on cards, I guess. I'd like to take them home with me to show them in the science class in school."
She picked up a purple bonnet and turned it over in her fingers.
"Do you know the names of all of them?"
"I have a book that tells what most of them are."
Nell was standing close to me. She smelled good, soaped and healthy. Debbie doused herself in expensive French perfume.
Nell put down the shell and dusted the sand from her fingers.
"Is Debbie home?"
"She and Mom went shopping."
Nell looked disappointed.
"Pop came in with a big shrimp catch, the best he's had this year. They're unloading his boat down at the dock now. I thought maybe Debbie would like to watch."
I lost interest in my shells.
"I'd sure like to watch."
Nell smiled.
"Okay, Mark. You can be my date this morning."
I flushed. I suddenly felt grown up. Nell's gaze met my eyes steadily. A funny expression came into her eyes and a tiny shiver ran through her body. She flushed, laughed nervously, went to pick up her bike.
I pushed my bike out between the pilings and we pedaled down the beach with Pete trotting behind us, his tongue lolling out Nell and I chattered as we rode. She had a soft, drawling way of speaking-her voice got inside you like a caress. She was really a swell girl and she could be a lot of fun when she was away from that older bunch of stuck-up phonies, especially Paul Edwards. Why the heck she wanted to be engaged to a dope like him was more than I could understand. He was last year's football hero around these parts and I guess girls went for things like that.
The morning was beautiful. The sun glistened on gentle waves out as far as the eye carried. Pete ran ahead of us, barking at a flock of sanderlings that were racing along the edge of the surf on spindly legs.
Before we came to the harbor we had to get off our bikes and push them up over a high levee thrown up to keep out the sea when hurricanes struck.
A railroad track ran along the top of the earthworks. We stood on the steel and looked down at the harbor. I always got a charge out of seeing it. My home was inland and everything about waterfront life fascinated me. I could understand my Uncle Enoch's love of the sea. Our ancestry may have included a strain of seafaring men.
This was a shrimping harbor. At least thirty saucy, graceful shrimp trawlers were tied up at the docks, either unloading shrimp or taking on fresh supplies of fuel and ice before heading out again.
A rickety dock ran around the perimeter of the harbor. Tin sheds lines the shore. Most were packing sheds but some sold ice to the shrimpers or were repair shops. Scattered liberally among the other places of business were beer lounges. A lot of the shrimpers lived in the waterfront beer joints when they were "on the beach," which meant not working.
One of the shrimp boats started down the channel while we watched. There was a wonderful look about that boat. Its high prow cut the water with irreverent insolence. A flock of seagulls were dipping and squawking over the big net that hung over the deck.
Something tightened inside my chest. I wished I were on that boat and heading for adventure.
"Come on, Mark," Nell said.
She climbed on her bike and coasted down the incline.
From here we could roll all the way to the docks. We parked our bikes against a tin shed and walked around to the pier where the Sally Ann, my Uncle Enoch's shrimp trawler, was tied up. Actually the Sally Ann was a company boat, part of a fleet, and not Uncle Enoch's. The owners got a share of his catch as rental. Nell had explained to me how the system worked.
Right now a conveyor belt was transferring the shrimp from the trawler's hold into a packing shed. Shrimp spoil easily and the action in the shed was fast. Uncle Enoch was leaning against the pilot house, watching the operation.
Nell and I jumped from the dock to the boat.
"Hi, kids." Uncle Enoch grinned. He put his arm around Nell and winked at me. "How's it going, mate?"
He always called me mate. I think he did so partly because he had a hard time remembering my name. I liked him, even if my father did think he was a bum and a sinner. It seemed to me he led a pretty adventurous and happy life. He was anything but stern and preoccupied with business all the time, as my dad was. He laughed a lot and always had time to talk to us kids when his boat was in.
"Did you catch a lot of shrimp this time, Uncle Enoch?" I asked.
"You bet your boots, mate. We've got us a sixty-box haul, if I'm any judge."
His face was flushed and his voice was thick. I figured he had already been down to the nearest beer joint to celebrate. He gave Nell a squeeze.
"We can buy you that new dress you been wanting, honey."
Nell's eyes lit up. I guess a new dress was something special to her. Dresses were nothing to Debbie and my mother, who had their closets stuffed with them. I had hardly ever seen Nell in anything but a bathing suit or blue jeans. She had a whole swarm of little brothers and sisters. I guess, with a family like that, Uncle Enoch could afford few luxuries. Shrimping is an unpredictable business.
I moseyed around the boat, poking into the engine room and the cabin. The cabin was neat and compact. It held four bunks, a butane stove and an ice box. It opened into a tight little compartment where you steered the boat. I put my hands on the wheel and pretended I was out in open water.
Uncle Enoch came into the cabin after some papers.
"Gee, I wish I could go out on a trip with you," I said.
He laughed and rumpled my hair. "I'll sign you on, mate. You can work as a header. That's how a shrimper gets started. I'll pay you regular header's wages-three cents a pound of the catch."
"Honest?"
"Sure. If it's okay with your folks."
He found the papers he was looking for and left the cabin. I was too excited to stand still. He had seemed pretty full of beer. Would he still want to take me on a trip when he sobered up?
Later, when Nell and I were riding back up the beach, I asked her if she thought her father really would take me out on a trip with him.
She nodded. "I guess so, Mark. But I don't think your folks would let you go-do you?"
"Gee, I don't know."
Some of the excitement faded inside me. My father probably wouldn't let me go. He had no use for Uncle Enoch.
Nell and I pedaled along the beach with no particular destination in mind. We talked about our families. Nell got me to tell her about my home in the city and our ranch westward.
Her eyes had a far-away, wistful expression.
"Gee, it must be wonderful to be rich."
"I don't know what's so wonderful about it," I muttered.
I could see no point in our money if it kept me from going on a shrimping trip with Uncle Enoch.
"I guess your father must have about a million dollars, Mark."
"I don't know," I said. "He never said whether he has a million dollars or not. The only time he talks about money is when he's griping about how much the government is taking away from him."
"Well, he must have an awful lot of money. All those oil wells and those chemical plants."
"He doesn't own the chemical plants. They belong to a corporation. He's just the head of the corporation."
"Well, isn't that the same?"
"I don't know," I admitted.
Nell looked dreamy.
"I'm going to be rich some day. I'm going to drive a big Cadillac and own a lot of nice clothes and a summer house and have a cabin cruiser, too."
"How're you going to get all that?"
"I don't know. Marry money, I guess. That's the only way a girl can do it."
"But you're engaged to Paul," I pointed out, "and he hasn't got any money. His daddy is a shrimper like yours."
"I know," she murmured, knitting her brow.
I felt my spirits rise. Nell wasn't completely sold on Paul. I didn't like him.
We rode along in silence for a while. At last Nell glanced at me with a warm smile.
"You sure are a nice boy, Mark. I like you a lot."
"Thanks," I said gruffly. My ears got hot. "I like you, too."
She looked at me steadily for a few seconds. Then she said, "I'm going to show you something I've never shown anybody else in my whole life."
"Yeah? What."
"Never mind. You'll see." Her air of mystery got me interested. "What is it, Nell? Come on, tell me." She laughed.
"I'll race you."
She stood up on the pedals and started pumping. I had to go with all my might to keep up with her. We flew down the beach. Pete raced beside us, yapping at the wheels.
I never saw a girl who could race a bike like Nell. She sure was a keen girl.
The race ended a mile down the beach. We parked our bikes against a driftwood log and collapsed on the sand, winded.
Nell finally stood up and looked around to be sure no one was in sight. The beach was deserted. I saw just us and the sea gulls.
She led the way into the dunes. Sea oats waved in the breeze. Scattered among the dunes were driftwood logs and bits and pieces of wrecked ships. An old hatch cover stuck up through the sand. Beyond it lay the rotting prow of a boat.
We came to a flat plain where cattle grazed on the short grass. Pete had been running ahead of us, sniffing at everything. Now he went tearing off after a rabbit.
About a hundred yards from the dunes was a windmill and tumble-down shack. It had probably been built there by ranchers a long time ago and abandoned. The shack was Nell's destination. She walked around to the side and dug in the earth under a rotting step.
She dragged a wooden box from the hole. It was a little larger than a shoebox. Nell sat on the steps and patted the spot beside her, indicating where I was to sit.
"This is my treasure chest," she said in a low voice, gazing down at the box intently. "No one else in the whole world knows about it. Don't you ever tell a soul. Promise?"
"I promise," I said.
She brushed the sand off the box. The lid was tied down with rope. She picked the knots loose. The box swung open. One by one she removed her treasures and spread them at her feet.
"These are all things I've been finding on the island since I was a child." She showed me a handful of ancient Spanish coins, encrusted with age. "Doubloons. Maybe they're part of a pirate treasure. They're all I ever found, though."
I touched them with awe.
She took out a fruit jar filled with Indian arrowheads.
"Carancahua Indians," she said. "They once lived on the island. They were cannibals." She lifted a human skull from the chest. "They had a burial ground near here."
The skull had been polished to the texture of ivory by wind-blown sand.
"It glows on a moonlit night," Nell said.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
She put down the skull and removed other items from the chest, an old whiskey bottle turned purple by the sun's ultra-violet rays, a round glass fishing float half filled with water and no way of explaining how the liquid got inside, oddly shaped fragments of driftwood, a bottle with a note in it that was illegible.
I lost all track of time and place. This was the most exciting thing that had happened to me all summer, next to Uncle Enoch's offering me a job on his shrimp boat.
Nell showed me everything in the box and then astounded me by saying I could have all of it. I thought she must have lost her mind.
"You can't give this away," I exclaimed, my voice sliding up an octave, the way it had been doing lately.
She shrugged.
"I'm getting too old for stuff like this. It's okay when you're a tomboy. But I'm a grown woman now. I'm engaged. I've been waiting to give it to somebody. You're a nice boy, Mark, and I like you. I want you to have it"
I stammered out my thanks but words seemed totally inadequate.
Nell smiled at me. "You're a good-looking boy, Mark. You're going to be very handsome when you grow up. It's your dark eyes, I think-and those beautiful long lashes. You're going to break a girl's heart one day."
I flushed and kicked at the sand.
I felt her gazing at me in a kind of amused way.
"Have you ever kissed a girl, Mark?" she asked.
I didn't know if she was teasing or what.
"Oh, sure," I lied. "Lots of times."
"Show me how good you are at it."
I swallowed. My mouth was suddenly full of cotton.
"Gee, I don't know. Somebody would see us."
Nell laughed. "There's nobody around for miles, Mark."
She placed her palms against my face, turning it toward hers. Her eyes looked straight into mine, getting a bit crossed at such close proximity.
She bent and placed a kiss on my lips. Blood rushed to my head. I felt embarrassed.
She laughed again, a low, teasing kind of laugh.
"You've got a lot to learn about kissing, Mark. You'll be dating girls soon and a boy has to know how to kiss right or girls won't want to go with him. Here, let me show you."
Her head bent over mine again. This time her lips clung to mine and lingered. Her fingers slid to the back of my neck. Her mouth grew warm against mine. My head was spinning. A fist seemed to be squeezing off my breath. A sweet, forbidden longing churned through me.
Nell slowly moved her head from side to side and her mouth worked against mine.
I thought something inside me was going to explode. I never knew kissing a girl was like this. Everything about Nell not only smelled but tasted good.
I guess Nell was having fun kissing me, too. We kept it up for a long time. We stopped to catch our breaths, then kissed some more. We were completely alone, sitting on the shady side of the old shack.
Finally we started fooling around with each other. Nell was flushed and silent. I fumbled at her shirt with a blind, instinctive wanting. Her fingers moved up to the buttons. She opened them slowly and let me see the soft pink and white swells of her bosom, which was straining against a white cotton bra that seemed entirely too tight.
I thought I was going to smother with the wild feelings pouring through me. Nell said nothing. The air was quiet out here in the middle of the island. Even the surf was too far to be heard. The only sound was a soft twang now and then from an old galvanized windmill as it turned fitfully in a breeze I could not feel.
My fingers touched the beautiful swells of Nell's breasts, half-hidden by the cotton bra.
She was gazing at me steadily. Her eyes had taken on a strange kind of intensity. They seemed to have turned to the dark green of deep water. She was breathing hard. So was I. I could see a pulse beating real fast in Nell's throat.
Nell reached up slowly and her fingertips touched the white cotton bra.
She asked in a husky whisper, "Do you want me to take it off for you, Mark?"
I gulped. The blood was surging through my temples. I nodded.
She was flushed. Her intense eyes give mine a long look. "Don't you dare tell anybody."
"I won't."
"You promise, Mark?"
"Sure-I promise."
"Cross your heart and hope to die?" I traced an invisible X on my chest and spat over my left elbow.
She hesitated a moment longer.
"Sometimes a girl would-would like to do some things-but she can't with any of the boys her age be-caused they'd go around and blab to all the other boys and everybody would know about it. You wouldn't go blabbing to Debbie or anybody else, would you, Mark?"
I shook my head vigorously.
"Well-"
She chewed her lower Up. Then she got a reckless look in her eyes and suddenly untied the knot in her shirttail. She pulled off the shirt and laid it on the steps. Then she unhooked the bra, pulled down the straps. She let the bra slip down her arms and tossed it over near the shirt. She drew a deep breath and leaned back against the steps on her elbows, showing her naked breasts to me.
"See, Mark?" she murmured.
My eyes were straining. I made some kind of choking sound. Her breasts gleamed like white marble in the bright light, except for the rounded, pink tips. The nipples had puckered and stood out sharply.
"Do I look pretty, Mark?"
"Gee, I'll say," I blurted out.
"You want to feel them, Mark?" She took my right hand and pressed it against the velvet flesh. "Go ahead, I like you to. It feels good."
I squeezed the delicate flesh and caressed the pale globes. Nell fell silent, breathing hard through slightly parted lips, gazing at me steadily.
Her eyes trailed down and then away from me, and she shivered.
"Mark, you're a naughty boy." She laughed unsteadily. "You've gone and gotten me all excited."
I felt like a dumb kid. I wished to hell I was less dumb. I mean, I knew all about it. I'd known since I was twelve years old when a kid next door, back home, had told me all about it and showed me some dirty pictures he'd swiped from his big brother.
But talking about it with guys and thinking about it in bed at night and looking at girlie pictures was a lot different from really doing something with a girl when you never had done anything like it before.
But Nell was laughing at me in a fond, teasing, big-sister kind of way. Of course, the laughter held that note of excitement.
"You'd better let me help you. Let me see what you have in the way of muscles."
She reached over and fumbled at my shirt.
I was surprised. I also felt embarrassed and excited, like I wanted her to see me the way I was. I helped her to open my shirt.
She stared at me hard.
"Gee, you're a real big boy for your age."
She raised her eyes to mine again, a flush on her face.
"You want to see all of me, Mark?"
I nodded. Nell's trembling fingers opened a button and zipper on the side of her blue jeans. She stripped them from her long legs and pulled off her panties. Then she lay back, altogether naked, her legs parted, and let me look at her all I wanted.
Neither one of us said anything. My body was pounding so with excitement I thought it was going to fly apart. I stripped off all my clothes, too. I wanted to be closer to her. I guess she wanted me near, too. She got me to he down on the ground beside her. The silken feel of her flesh against mine was unbearably sweet. We were both breathing hard and perspiring.
Nell whispered in a strained voice, "Mark, have you ever done it with a girl-you know?"
I was scared. I shook my head.
"You want to do it with me?" she whispered.
I made a strangled sound and nodded.
"Paul's after me all the time to do it with him," she murmured, "but I can't. Not that I don't want to. He gets me in the mood something dreadful sometimes-but I know if I go all the way with him he'll spread it all over town. Next he'll drop me and then all the men on the waterfront will be after me because word will spread around that I'm easy. A girl can get a reputation like that in a hurry in a small shrimping village like this, and then she might as well move away. No man's going to bother marrying what he can get for free." She looked at me. "You understand?"
"I guess so," I replied, although I did not exactly.
"It would be all right with you, though, Mark-I think," she said breathily. "You're my cousin and you wouldn't tell anybody. We'd just have a little fun is all."
We were silent for some moments. She pulled me closer, her body straining against mine. "You know what to do?" she whispered. "Sure," I said.
But I just lay there helplessly, feeling inept and childish.
She wriggled around and under me, her hips working. Nell was an earthy girl. She did whatever she did in a natural and uninhibited way, without a lot of guilt feelings. Once she had made up her mind about what we were going to do, she went right ahead.
A whole new sensation spread through my body. Nell made a gasping sound. Her limbs clamped about me. She no longer had to tell me what to do. Our bodies were performing a wild sex dance.
Nell panted in my ear. The sky and earth spun around me and everything became blurred. Nell became my whole universe. We were a part of each other and somehow I knew that I was going to look back to this moment as a changing point in my whole life.
The excitement was over. We dressed. Nell seemed undisturbed and not at all self-conscious about what we had done. She was laughing and talking.
But I could neither look at her nor say much. I felt stunned. I expected a thunderbolt to strike us dead at any minute-or the earth to open up and swallow us both.
We buried the box under the steps again. I whistled Pete back. We walked to where we had left our bikes.
We rode slowly along the beach toward town. Neither of us had the energy to race. We rode into the main part of the village. I bought us a couple of milk shakes at the drug store. I had recovered from my first wave of shock but I was still self-conscious and found it difficult to look at Nell.
We finished the shakes and went outside. A black Cadillac was parking at the curb. Nell paused and looked at it intently. A man stepped out and came around to the sidewalk. I recognized Fred Turner, the big shot who owned the shrimp fleet Uncle Enoch worked for. Mr. Turner was bald and red-faced but the weight he carried looked solid.
He stopped and looked at Nell, at all of her, not just her face.
"Hello, Nell."
It seemed to me Nell should get sore about a guy's eyes eating her up the way Mr. Turner's did. But she just took a deep breath-which gave Turner even more to look at-and smiled sweetly.
"Good morning, Mr. Turner."
He came over to where we stood. He walked like a big cat. He took out a white handkerchief and patted his damp forehead.
"Sure is a hot one, ain't it?"
"Yes it is," Nell murmured, slanting her eyes at him. "Your daddy's boat come in?"
"Yes. He had a real big catch."
Fred Turner finally took his eyes off Nell long enough to notice me.
"This is my little cousin, Mark Harris," Nell said. "Hi, fellah," Mr. Turner said absently. "Hi," I muttered.
Nell was burning me up. She was acting like she did around her older crowd, when she was trying to impress the boys. She was all phony and putting on and not at all keen like she was when we were alone together.
She went on talking with Turner. I might as well have not been there.
Finally Turner said, "I have to drive to the city to sign some papers. I'm just going to make a quick round trip. Like to come along for the ride, Nell?"
I thought she looked a little scared and uncertain. Her eyes cut toward the expensive, air-conditioned Cadillac. She ran her tongue over her lips and nodded.
"I'd enjoy a ride in that, Mr. Turner."
They went off together, ignoring me. I got on my bike and rode down to the beach, feeling abandoned.
Nell sure made me mad sometimes.