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 lounge before the lucky man could mount the stairs. The raffle was so unusual and provocative 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
