Miss Ida Hooten, indicating Minnie with a toss of his head.
Miss Hooten was perched on her stool behind the cash register at the end of the bar. “That one ain’t for sale,” she said.
“Why not?” asked Captain Sledge.
“I’m savin that package,” she said. “The man that opens that one is gonna pay well for the privilege.”
It made Minnie uneasy to hear them discussing her as though she couldn’t hear them, or as though she wasn’t even in the room. It annoyed her. She slammed a glass a little too heavily into its place and it broke. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her head down, as she raked the broken glass into a waste can.
“Don’t cut your hand, dear,” Miss Hooten said.
“I’ll pay for it,” Minnie said, “you can take it out of my wages.”
“Don’t be silly,” Miss Hooten said, “forget about it.”
“Here, let me pay for it,” Captain Sledge said. He slid some coins across the bar toward Minnie. Minnie looked up at him and their eyes met. “Hey,” he said, “this girl’s got a green eye and a blue eye! I’ll be damned.”
“That’s not all that’s unusual about her,” Miss Hooten said.
“Whattaya mean?”
“Think about it for six months and I might let you see,” Miss Hooten said.
“Six months! Shit.”
“Anything worth havin is worth waitin for,” Miss Hooten said.
“Hell, in six months I might be in Tim-buc-too.”
“She’ll be here when you get back.” Miss Hooten lit one of her wrinkled cigarettes and blew the smoke at the ceiling. She took another drag and inhaled deeply.
Captain Sledge was looking Minnie up and down. He smiled at her. She was wearing a thin white cotton blouse and khaki slacks. She knew her breasts looked good in the shirt. “I liked the way you looked when you bent over to pick up that broken glass,” he said. “Bend over like that again.” She looked at Miss Hooten. Miss Hooten smiled and nodded. Minnie bent over, her rump toward Captain Sledge. A sudden rush of warmth washed through her. It aroused her to have him looking at her like that. “That is fine,” he said, “really fine.”
“Isn’t it?” Miss Hooten said.
“She’ll fetch a pretty penny, that one,” the captain said.
“Indeed,” Miss Hooten replied.
A girl named Paula, who was from Orlando, a little town in the middle of the state, offered to let Minnie hide in the closet in her room and watch. Minnie thought that would help her not be self-conscious and nervous when she started turning tricks, which Miss Hooten had told her would be very soon. She was anxious to get started.
As she sat in the dark in the closet, she thought about her family. She wondered where they were and what they were doing. Whether her father had found work, and whether they were hungry. She missed them, but the truth was she did not think she could have had better mothers than Ruby Frost had been or Miss Ida Hooten was. Ruby Frost was gentle and kind, and life there had been unhurried and pleasant; Silas puttered in his truck garden, Ruby (with Minnie’s help) cooked their food, and they spent a good deal of their leisure time sitting on their front porch and rocking. It was the first time in her life that Minnie had known there was such a thing as leisure time. She had thought that everyone lived and worked and traveled at the hectic pace kept up by her family and the rest of the migrants. They were Gypsies, yes, but Minnie didn’t really know what that meant, other than the times her mother or her father lapsed into a language she didn’t understand, or used strange words to refer to something she knew was called something else, like “diklo” for scarf or “glata” for the younger kids. They were no different from the other migrant families, and Minnie, in retrospect, supposed that they were all Gypsies, too. Her mother and her father had told them their family were Gypsies, so there was no reason to question it or to wonder. They had been told that their ancestors had come to America from Romania, in the old country of Europe. She supposed that it was simply like Ruby and Silas being colored, and their ancestors coming from Africa. But Minnie’s people were not colored people, were they? She could see, in the mirror, that she was dark-complexioned, that her hair was black and thick. And she remembered the old man, Alexander Mossback Frill (she forced the image of him burning up in the fire from her mind), had asked her, “You ain’t a colored girl, are you?” She had asked Miss Hooten, right after she had first arrived on the key, if she was colored.
“Lord no, child,” Miss Hooten had said, “you are . . . exotic.”
“I’m a Gypsy,” she had said, and Miss Hooten’s eyebrows had shot up her forehead. She pursed her lips in surprise, regarding Minnie as if she had just that very second appeared out of thin air, had materialized without warning right there in front of her. And Miss Hooten had said,
“Why yes . . . yes you are!” The revelation, which if she had just paid the girl a little more attention she would have known, made her eyes glisten.
Minnie heard Paula and her man (“Do not call them ‘johns,’” Miss Ida Hooten said. “They register in this hotel under their own names or they do not register at all.”) enter the room, Paula giggling, probably at some lame joke her man had made. Minnie put her eye to the crack of the not-quite shut door. She watched Paula remove her dressing gown and drape it across a chair. Then she pulled her nightgown over her head and stood naked in front of the man. Minnie inspected the man: he was short and plump, with graying hair. She could see the front of his britches poking out with his erection. “Get undressed, honey,” Paula said. She sat on the bed. Then she lay back and stretched out. The man fumbled with the buttons on his shirt and yanked it off. He undid his belt and let his britches drop, pulling down his underwear. His thing popped out (she still thought of them as “things,” though she had learned numerous other names for them) and waved in the air, as stiff and straight as a metal pipe. “Nice,” Paula murmured, “you got a nice one, honey.” The man approached the bed and Minnie expected him to climb up and assume the position in which she saw the Mexican boy with her sister, but to her surprise he didn’t. He sort of crawled up between her legs and put his mouth on her down there and started licking and kissing and munching on her, right in amongst her tangled black hairs. “Oh, oh, baby,” Paula said. She moved her hips and moaned. After a few minutes of this, she pulled at his shoulders. “Come on, honey, you’re drivin me crazy, come on up and fuck me good.” Then the man slid up and Paula opened her legs wide and then locked her heels over his back. Minnie could see his thing go into Paula, sliding in easy and quick, and they began to buck against each other, both of them groaning now. They went on like that for a while, until Minnie saw the man’s back stiffen, and he let out a long moan and then collapsed on top of Paula. He looked like he would be heavy. They were very still, except that Paula was running her hands up and down his back. Then the man sat up on the edge of the bed and Minnie could see his thing, not so stiff now but dangling down and gleaming wetly in the light from the lamp. The man sat there for a while, then stood up and began to put his clothes back on. “Come back, honey, okay?” Paula said. She was still reclining naked on the bed. The man did not answer her. When he got his clothes back on he left, without a word, pushing the door to behind him.
“Come on out, Minnie,” Paula said. Minnie pushed the closet door open and stepped into the room; Paula made no attempt to cover herself. “Well, what’d ya think?”
“That’s it?” Minnie asked.
“That’s it,” Paula answered.
The day was fast approaching, and Miss Ida Hooten put blue and green crepe paper streamers all around the lounge. She devised a raffle, with the winner getting to deflower Minnie. Tickets were ten bucks apiece, and most of the men on the Key at the time bought one. For the winner, the visit to Minnie’s room would be an extra cost, of course, the standard twenty-five-dollar fee, which, as was her custom, Miss Ida Hooten would collect and deposit in the drawer of her cash register in the