that word of it spread over all that part of Florida, and men were driving in from Gainesville and Tampa and other cities to get in on the fun. Many charter boats with home ports elsewhere along the Gulf coast put in temporarily at Cedar Key.
And of course there was no way that Silas and Ruby Frost could not hear of it in nearby Rosewood. They had heard rumors of where Minnie was, ever since she had climbed out the window that night and struck off walking somewhere.
“Where she goin, you suppose?” Silas had asked.
“I don’t reckon it makes any difference to her, long as she’s goin,” Ruby answered.
Ruby had known that it was only a matter of time before the girl moved on, but she was with them long enough for them to grow attached to her. She was a sweet girl, but she had itchy feet, and itchy other parts of her body, too, if Ruby’s intuition was correct, and she would have bet that it was, and I suppose that the truth of my intuition is borne out now, proved, Ruby thought. The image in Ruby’s mind of the girl sitting in the ditch beside the road, just sitting there minding her own business like it was the most normal thing in the world for an eleven-year-old girl to be out there all by herself not knowing where she was nor where she was going, that image seemed to Ruby to define Minnie: that maybe that was her place, her home, alongside the road, and any other place she lit for more than a few days would soon start to get old to her. She had that Gypsy blood in her, all right, and she had told them right off that’s what she was, a Gypsy. So it was no real surprise to Ruby and maybe not even to Silas when one morning they found her room vacant, the window propped open with a stick of stove wood, and her gone, like she’d just turned to vapor and blown away. Like she just appeared out of nowhere, lingered, and then vanished, so that their little cabin was no more to her than the sandy ditch Silas had found her in.
Ruby and Silas had both known that it was dangerous to grow as fond of someone as they had the girl, someone you don’t have any firm ties to, either legal or blood or even race. Still, she had seemed close to kin almost from the start, moving into the little lean-to room off the kitchen, wearing one of Ruby’s house dresses that had been cut down for her, them watching her grow from a half-starved, skeletal child into a healthy young woman, Ruby herself the mother instructress when the girl’s first blood came, the nurturer when the girl was sick, putting cold rags on her forehead when she was feverish. Answering her questions, and some of her questions about what men and women did together were very specific, indicating to Ruby that she already knew the answers. She was extremely curious about all that. Only four years, but I knew you, Ruby thought, maybe even better than I knew my own child if that is possible, since he was a boy and then a man, with that core of mystery that is always there in someone of a different gender, even between mother and son. And I knew, could have predicted, that you would wind up right where you are now, before you have even lived out your fifteenth year. I’m just glad you didn’t mess with Silas, as some would have, and him an old man with a dilly that ain’t good for anything anymore except running water through it.
In the end there were forty-one chances sold, which gave Miss Hooten a quick profit of $410 before any merchandise had changed hands, so to speak. She promised to split it with Minnie, right down the middle, half and half, though her usual split was forty-sixty, so that every time one of her girls turned a trick she pocketed fifteen dollars and Miss Hooten kept ten, out of which came Miss Hooten’s profit, all the expenses of the hotel, and a bribe for the local police department. It was an arrangement that was fine with the girls, since in other houses they had worked they made less than half, and those who had worked with pimps had gotten much less than that. Miss Hooten believed in keeping her girls happy.
Minnie was excited. Just this once would net her $235. But she was thrilled just to finally get to do it and find out what it was like, and she was pleased that forty-one men had forked over ten bucks apiece just for the chance of going to bed with her. They had been looking longingly at her ever since her plump little breasts had made their first appearance at the Coronado Hotel.
“They weren’t all men,” Paula told her. They were talking about the forty-one who had bought chances.
“They weren’t?” Minnie asked.
“Three of them are women,” Paula said.
“How’s a woman gonna deflower me?”
“Oh, they’d find a way,” Paula said.
That information bothered Minnie only moderately, since she had heard the other girls talking and she knew they considered that being with a woman was only different from being with a man, not any less pleasurable and certainly not unnatural, as Minnie was inclined to feel it was, since somewhere in her past she had been told that it was strange and not right. She supposed, though, that she would get used to it. She was not locked into anything she had learned in her previous young life, since this was a new life with all new rules and possibilities. She was just anxious to get on with everything and she didn’t really care who her partner was as long as he wasn’t some pervert who wanted to knock her around and hurt her.
The day finally came. The lounge was crowded with men, and when Minnie came in there was wild cheering and applauding and stomping. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes hovered against the ceiling. She became nervous and started having second thoughts when she saw the men’s eyes; they looked like wild animals’ eyes must look just as they are about to be released from a cage. Miss Hooten had dressed her in a frilly blue dress, with white lace at the collar and at her wrists and around the hem of the skirt. The bodice was tight, so her breasts were shown to good advantage.
I must be pretty, Minnie thought. Since so much had been made over her, she had lain awake at night trying—and failing—to see herself as men saw her. Up until now she had been shy and extremely self-conscious about her eyes, her eyes that had got her rejected by her own family and that everybody she came in contact with felt the need to comment on, as though when they looked at her that’s all they saw, a pitiful little girl with mismatched eyes. The eyes had provided a buffer for her shyness, though, when she was a little girl; nobody ever saw Minnie, they just saw a blue eye and a green eye, so the real Minnie was shielded from them as surely as if she had on a suit of armor painted blue and green. Her deviant contrasting eyes may have made her ugly, but they protected her. They allowed her to withdraw into herself as a counter to anyone who might want to reject her again, as she was convinced everybody wanted to do. Because of her eyes, she was alone in the world, cut off from everybody normal.
It would take Minnie a long time before she stopped thinking of herself as a freak. Her family had branded her, as certainly as if they’d pressed red-hot steel to her flesh. She didn’t think about her family much any more. The pictures of them in her mind had grown faint, vague, like photographs wasting in sunlight. Her father’s misshapen felt hat, jammed down on his head, and her mother’s cotton dresses, worn everywhere she went because they were all she had, were two of the few details that stuck in her mind. She couldn’t even remember what her sisters looked like, as though all that had happened to her, starting with old Alexander Mossback Frill, had erased a part of her mind, the part given over to memory, the part that assures us all that we are alive and that we have been living a life, accumulating remembrances of events and people that shaped us and that add up to who we are. That part of Minnie was fragmented, almost gone, had been since the moment they put her out of the car, so that when she lived with the Frosts she began being somebody new. She did not decide to do it; it seemed to be already decided for her. And she just was. The crawling through the window in the middle of the night (something she did not have to do and knew she didn’t; she could have left anytime she wanted to) was like being reborn into a new Minnie. She reinvented herself. She even found herself creating memories to fit who she had become, though those memories proved to be ephemeral and were soon replaced by others that were equally fictitious and vaporous. So her life was like a series of dreams that you wake up from and can never recall again.
It was Captain Donohue Taylor Sledge whose name was called. Immediately Minnie looked at Miss Hooten, who gave her the slightest wink. Of course it was a put-up job. She didn’t care; it was not her business, though she didn’t know that Captain Sledge had paid Miss Hooten an extra fifty dollars to win the raffle. (Later it would occur to her that Captain Sledge had probably