Free Summer of Pearls by Mike Blakely

the hips. He liked horses spare in the flank and round in the loin. He knew them from throatlatch to tail, from hock to knee. He could even look at a mare and tell you whether or not she would ever “fall apart,” meaning to break down and lose her fine conformation at a certain age.
    Well, that summer I started applying Joe Peavy’s principles to females
of the human species. There was nothing gentlemanly about the way I ogled girls and young women, sizing them up like horseflesh. I too liked them spare in the flank and curved in the hips. And I could give you my opinion as to whether or not they would fall apart before the age of twenty-seven.
    I knew every vantage in town that facilitated a regular look at girls, and many of them were situated around Snyder’s store, for Pearl Cobb was the ideal against which all other specimens were judged.
    Behind the store there was a large oak tree with a comfortable fork about twenty feet up that afforded a perfect view of the stairs leading to Pearl’s room. I often perched there after dark, hoping to see her ascend. Then I would watch the window and wonder what she was doing. Occasionally I would see her through the curtains. I wasn’t exactly a Peeping Tom, for I had no real malicious intent. I was just a fourteen-year-old boy with raging curiosities.
    I was there in the oak tree when Billy Treat went up to Pearl’s room, and I hated him. I thought I knew what he was going to do with the pearl that should have belonged to me. That’s why I was so surprised to see the lantern come on. I saw them sit together at the table. They talked. Then they stood. Then he left.
    I didn’t know what to make of Billy. I was at first relieved. He hadn’t used his pearl as others had used theirs before him. He wasn’t trying to trade it in for the vague pleasures of Pearl in the dark. Then, somehow, I knew that that was what made him dangerous. He was a gentleman and I was not.
    I saw Pearl run from her room, down the stairs, around the store. I heard her call out to him. She came home alone.
    It confused me. Was he going to ruin everything Pearl Cobb was, or was he going to rescue her as he had rescued me from the sinking riverboat? I feared and respected him, admired and hated him. He wasn’t a particularly nice fellow to be around, but I liked him. I feared he would find work elsewhere and leave town, and at the same time, I couldn’t wait for him to go.
    Thankfully, something happened in Port Caddo that took my mind
off of Pearl Cobb and Billy Treat for a while. Some workmen came up from Shreveport in a government snag boat to remove the remnants of the Glory of Caddo Lake from the bayou channel. The snag boat had been built to winch stumps and dead trees up from the waters and cut them into harmless pieces. Those snags, as they were called, had ripped open the thin wooden hulls of many a riverboat.
    Every snag boat I ever saw floated on two hulls that would straddle a snag. A steam winch between the two hulls would lift that snag out of the water where the steam-powered saws could cut it up. The snag boat was invented by Henry Shreve, the old riverboat genius and founder of Shreveport. For years, the government employed him and his snag boats to clear the Great Raft from the Red River, so steamers could navigate above it. Shreve had been dead more than twenty years that summer, but his inventions were still whittling away at that immense logjam on. the Red.
    This snag boat that was pulling the old Glory apart usually worked at removing the Great Raft, but had come up through Caddo Lake to clear the wreck from our channel for us.
    Between baiting our trotline and checking it for fish, Cecil Peavy and Adam Owens and I spent a lot of time on the Port Caddo wharf watching the snag boat work. Billy Treat also came out to watch when he wasn’t cooking or cleaning up the kitchen in Widow Humphry’s inn. He seemed very interested. Every evening