I shook my head. “How on earth do we fight a movement like that?”
He lowered his eyes, and the light from the flame streaked across both our faces. Heat nipped at my cheeks.
I rose back up to a standing position. “Do we just keep running? Find other castoffs and build up a ragtag army against people like Uncle Clyde and the rest of the Klan?”
Joe cracked a small smile in the lamplight. “I like that.” He stood up, too. “An army of blacks, Catholics, Jews, Japanese, and queers would scare the hell out of the fucking KKK.”
I stepped back. “You sure have a foul mouth for a preacher’s boy.”
“Yeah, well, I haven’t been a preacher’s boy in a long while.” He turned back around to our path. “Come on. Let’s find a place to camp.”
A mere ten paces farther, we entered a small clearing surrounded by a fortress of trees whose tops disappeared high overhead. We both stopped and inspected the area by the light of the lantern.
“Do you think it’s far enough away from the cabin?” asked Joe.
“Well . . .” I cast my eyes toward the darkness that devoured the path back to the building. “It is nice to know the cabin’s within running distance, in case rain arrives. Or a bear.”
“What?” He gasped. “You think we’ll encounter a fucking bear?”
“Jeez, Joe! Stop using that word.” I crept over to the outer reaches of the lamp’s arc of light and bent down to study the dark outlines of a patch of leaves. “I don’t see any poison oak. Or any animal dens.”
He set the lantern by his feet and threw his carpetbag onto the grass. “Holy Mother of God, we’d better not get mauled by any bears.”
“Stop worrying about the damn bears. They’re the least of our problems.”
“Why are you getting after me for my language? You swear a lot for a girl.”
“I only swear when I’m pushed into situations like this. And my words are tamer.” I dropped the picnic basket and shook out the tan blanket.
Joe helped me stretch the bedding across the ground until it covered an area the size of two bodies. Then we both stood back up and stared down at the makeshift bed before us. I heard him swallow—or gulp was more like it. I swallowed, too.
“You can lie on it,” he said. “I’ll sit against the tree.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll get a sore back.”
“I don’t think you’d want me lying beside you.”
“I don’t hardly care right now.” I tucked the holster beneath the right side of the blanket and stretched myself out on the rough surface that scratched like a burlap potato sack. My hair felt lumpy between my head and the ground, but I didn’t feel like pulling out all the pins. “As long as you don’t mind lying down beside me,” I added.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
“Because of my skin color, of course.” I bit down on my lip and then added, “And my sex.”
“Now you’re just insulting the both of us.” He plopped down beside me and pulled out an object from his carpetbag.
I rolled onto my side, away from him. “Am I disgusting to you?”
“Hanalee . . .”
“Tell me the truth.”
He dropped a woolen garment in front of me. “Here, put this on. You’re going to get cold out here.”
“What is it?”
“A coat.”
I patted the sleeves and the buttons in the dark, verifying that it was, indeed, a jacket. “Won’t you get cold?” I asked.
“I’m wearing long sleeves. You’ve got your arms hanging out. You’ll freeze to death without it.”
“Well . . .” I tucked the coat over my shoulders like a cape. “Thank you.”
He shifted about on the blanket beside me. “I’m blowing out the lantern now.”
I shrugged. “That’s fine.”
He raised the chimney and puffed, and the forest went black. The temperature seemed to drop about thirty degrees, and I found myself shivering in an instant. I slipped my arms inside the sleeves of the coat and buttoned up the garment to my throat. Behind me, Joe wriggled around on the blanket until it sounded as though he faced in my direction. I heard him breathing about a foot away from the back of my neck.
“No,” he said, “you’re not.”
I lifted my head. “Not what?”
“Not disgusting to me.” He drew a deep breath that whistled through his nose. “Am I disgusting to you?”
I lay my head back down and tucked my hands inside the warm depths of his coat sleeves. “I haven’t yet decided.”
He didn’t respond.
“It’s not because of the boys thing,” I chose to add. “Although that’s still a bit confusing to me, to be most honest.”
Again, he didn’t respond.
I cleared my throat. “It’s because of the other thing. My original reason for hating you.”
“It’s still sometimes confusing to me, too.”
“What?”
He sighed. “‘The boys thing,’ as you called it.”
“I . . . I suppose that would be.”
“Everything would be a hell of a lot easier if . . .”