Free Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums Page A

upside-down pile of IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs to serve as a pillow, her head centered on the inverted W so that a pair of horns seemed appropriately to be sprouting from her head. Her legs, bent at the knees, dangled in the air, a toe or two teasing the one ray of dying light that dawdled above her and flickered like a tired firefly. “Take a look. You like my crawdad hole?” she asked and fingered herself between her legs.
    Together the two of us had often “fished” for crawdads by sticking a needle of pine straw down the moist mound of dirt that was a sign one of the small Southern crustaceans had burrowed itself into the earth. If we were lucky, a crawdad would grab onto the needle when we cleanly jerked it from the hole. I stared at where the girl continued to finger herself and she was right: Her tiny mounds of earth-toned flesh did, in fact, resemble a crawdad’s busywork.
    â€œWanna touch it?” she asked.
    I shook my head no.
    â€œDon’t be a baby,” she said, issuing once more that favorite warningof hers. “If you don’t touch it, I’m gonna tell your mama you did. If you do, I won’t say nothing,” she keenly negotiated. I sat closer to her. She took my hand and guided my fingers to her flesh. She quivered at my touch. She closed her eyes. “Stick one in me,” she said. I slowly ran an index finger inside her as deep as it would go. She gasped, but approved. I began to insert the finger over and over until I realized my shirt, wadded up over in the corner, was wetter than it had been before I stepped outside. I pulled my finger free. She opened her eyes. “Don’t stop,” she said, her demanding tone turning into what sounded remarkably like a plea.
    â€œWhat happened to my shirt?” I asked.
    A devilish grin crossed her face as she put her own finger back inside herself. “I wasn’t watching where I squatted when I peed,” she told me. “Sorry. It’ll dry.”
    I picked up the shirt and wiped my finger on it. “I’m gonna git in trouble for sure,” I said. “My mama’s gonna know we been bad.”
    The girl’s grin girded itself for the smirk it always turned into. Sitting up, she pulled on her panties. “We ain’t been bad,” she said. “It’s
tellin
that makes it bad. As long as mamas and daddies don’t know something, then it ain’t bad. They the ones that make things bad and good. We just kids. We just do stuff.” She next pulled on her jeans. “Fix my cuffs,” she told me, back to being the boss. Still naked, I knelt at her feet and, careful not to spill their remaining contents (a few more cigarette butts, a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, two red Lifesavers), creased her cuffs back into place.
    We stepped outside after I had pulled on my shorts, she her top. She took my shirt and hung it from the chicken wire that rusted where it had been nailed up along the front of the dugout so a long-ago bunch of visiting bat-happy Baptists could watch the action without worrying about foul balls. “This’ll dry in a minute. I promise. You’ll see.” We climbed up on the bench outside the dugout. She put her arm around me and entwined her right ankle with my left onewhere our feet dangled and began to swing our legs to and fro. She circled the conversation back to Captain Kangaroo and talked of his comparative coolness to Mr. Greenjeans and Tom Terrific. She calmed my fears about my imminent enrollment in first grade, dispensing advice about eating paste and the vomit-inducing power of the merry-go-round. She told me not to worry, that what had just transpired between us didn’t make us man and wife because “you ain’t stuck your peter in me yet.” She gave me one of her red Lifesavers. She lit another cigarette butt. She belched and made me blush. The air smelled of rain.
    â€œKevin!” my mother’s voice thundered as