Free Dance on the Wind by Terry C. Johnston Page B

answered. “You know how it is when a man and a woman love each other and wanna be husband and wife. It’s how we was at the swimming hole a couple weeks back.”
    “I … I—”
    She prodded him coyly, “You remember, don’t you?”
    “Ain’t never gonna forget.”
    He pulled a gay red bandanna from a front pocket of his britches and swiped it across his forehead, glad it was so hot that she wouldn’t ever tell how it made him sweat just talking about this with her.
    “In a way,” Amy said, her voice softer now, those big doe eyes of hers darting left and right before she leaned forward confidentially, “I’ve been thinking on how good that made me feel—how I’d like to feel that good again sometime soon.”
    “S-soon?”
    “Maybe real soon,” Amy answered, leaning back andbringing her legs under her to rise. “Maybeso tonight: you come look me up over to my folks’ tent after supper chores is done.”
    “Tonight. Yes.”
    He rose unsteadily beside her, his temples pounding, hoping it was just the heat that made his head swim on rising waves of pressure. Then she was pressed against him, rubbing a breast against his arm. He looked down at the contours of her straining beneath the thin fabric of her dress.
    “You want to touch ’em again, don’t you, Titus?”
    “I, I surely would.”
    Planting a kiss lightly on the singed redness of his hairless cheek, Amy giggled and turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “Look me up, Titus—an’ we’ll sneak off so you can do all the touching you want.”
    Godamighty!
    He watched her sway side to side, moving off through the grass and sunlight toward the bustle and din of the fair, her long skirt sweeping this way then that as she threw those rounded hips of hers about. It made his mouth go dry just remembering how those hips felt in his hands, how he hadn’t just held them, more even than a frantic grope, but had clawed at them as he attempted to drive himself into her there in the cool black water of that stream.
    Into … inside … he never had been inside her, if there was an inside to women. Maybe there wasn’t and everything was all outside, like he was. And a man was just s’posed to get his pecker laid down atween their legs, getting hisself pointed just right afore he shot. And that was what made babies grow: was when a man shot center—the way he was determined to shoot center this evening—and his juices landed in just the right place on a woman’s privates.
    And then he felt some self-imposed embarrassment, just in thinking about it. There was no one he could ask. Nary a friend from the Rabbit Hash school he dared mention his fears to. Sure was he that they were as ignorant of such primal matters as he was. No father he could presenthimself to and ask for answers to such vital questions. Maybe only Amy herself held the key.
    He’d have to learn the mysteries from her—if he dared.
    Dared … because he was scared, frightened right down to the soles of his feet that he had put her with child already. Lying down atop a gal and pointing his pecker in the right direction, then shooting center to make a real mess on her, to make a mess of their lives.
    It was one bit of marksmanship Titus wasn’t all that sure he was so proud of right now as he leaned over and nuzzled the redbone hound.
    “C’mon, you
ol’
ranger. Time for me to take you back to the folks afore I mosey off to the shooting range.”
    Tink whimpered a bit, mostly howled as he leaped against the length of rope tied around his neck when Titus left him behind, secured to a tree beside his folks’ pair of poor lean-tos.
    Thaddeus had pitched their camp right beside a Cincinnati pot merchant who was selling his kettles and ovens beneath an awning of bright-blue Russian sheeting. In cherrywood boxes he also displayed the medicinais he had to sell, English ague and fever drops, as well as butter tubs and cream jugs made of fired and painted clays. On the other side of them sat