her intelligence, or her sensitivity, or else they did recognize it and it frightened them terribly. “It’s history,” Minnie told Miss Hooten, “I quit crying about it a long time ago.”
Cedar Key was accessible only by water, separated as it was from the mainland by salt marshes and the Cedar River, a wide stream that began nowhere and went nowhere and was prowled by several giant manatees. There was a ferry that ran four times a day, from the foot of Race Street across to where the straight sandy dirt road that ran through Rosewood, twelve miles to the east, ended abruptly at the water’s edge, this the selfsame road that Minnie had taken four years before, along with Silas Frost in his wagon, from the anonymous crossroads where he had found her to the Frost household in Rosewood. From which, after four uneventful years of milking cows, washing clothes, and helping with the cooking, she had eventually found her way to Cedar Key and Miss Ida Hooten.
Minnie had to content herself for the present with only being a maid for the older woman. It was not that Miss Ida Hooten did not see the potential in Minnie; she was pretty, and she was shaping out nicely, and those eyes were a definite advantage. Miss Ida Hooten herself was a tall woman, slim, with high proud breasts and a crown of curly red hair. Her face had numerous moles on it, as though it had been splattered with brown paint. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and rarely left the confines of the hotel, instead sending Minnie to the grocer’s market down the street or to the liquor store. The other girls saw Minnie’s potential as a whore as well.
“Them eyes,” said Margaret Hilton to the girl, “they gonna do you right.”
“Yeah,” said Clare. “And you gettin yourself a nice rack of boobs, too.”
The biggest problem, as Minnie perceived it, was that she did not look as old as she was. She spent hours studying her face and her eyes in the mirror. Even with the filling out, she still looked like a child. Miss Ida Hooten did not consider that a problem at all. Her plan was to begin selling Minnie, in her own little frilly room upstairs, as a virgin being deflowered over and over again. It was a trick she had picked up in Storyville, using animal blood after the real first time. With that gimmick, and the mismatched eyes, Minnie was sure to be popular and certain to generate a lot of cash.
“But Miss Hooten,” Minnie said, “suppose the man comes back? You know . . .”
“Oh, they don’t care, dear. It’s the fantasy of it. Some men will deflower you several times themselves and be the happier for it.”
The older girls had piqued Minnie’s curiosity about what went on in the upstairs rooms.
“It’s a great way to make a living,” a girl named Barbara told her, “especially if you like to fuck.”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Minnie said.
“Chances are you will,” Barbara said. “The only ones here who don’t like it are the dykes. But they manage to put on a pretty good act.”
By 1939, Cedar Key had become a mecca for the sport of deep sea fishing. With the waning of the depression and the new monetary feasibility of it, the sport was becoming popular again, and men and groups of men came from all over the Southeast to fish in the Gulf. Where once the harbor had been crowded only with fishing boats and shrimp boats, they now had to share with sleek charter boats. These men—salesmen, professional men, sportsmen, along with the men who worked the local fishing industry—made up the clientele of the Coronado. Much to Minnie’s surprise, even some women came to the hotel to purchase the wares of the prostitutes. Even though she had been raised early on in migrant camps and had slept nightly in the same room with her parents, and had, indeed, observed her sister fucking in the bushes with a boy, Minnie was virtually a naif in these areas.
One spring afternoon, as Minnie was putting clean glasses in their places in the downstairs lounge, there was a charter boat captain named Donohue Taylor Sledge drinking rum at the bar. Captain Sledge was middle-aged, with a flat belly and broad shoulders, and his head was completely bald and glistened in the dim lights of the lounge. “How much for that one?” Captain Sledge asked 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,
