All Charles William and I really wanted to do was to go and watch some white trash in their bad behavior in the night. We wanted to drift down into the real dark heart of the night and see what we could see. We wanted to do any exciting thing we could think up to do and we had already been caving, been swimming in a borrow pit, gotten drunk a dozen times, played bridge with an old lady who drank cough syrup all day, driven up to Guntersville Lake and gone through the locks in a motorboat, let Charles William’s cousin give us Stanford-Binet intelligence tests (we were waiting for the results to come back from California), had my ankh made by a silversmith in Huntsville, put in an order for a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be smuggled in from France, and anything else we could think up to do, not to mention taking the pink pills Doctor Freer gave me. Not to even mention that. I took them three times a day, and after he found out how good they made you feel, sometimes Charles William took them too.

Now we were in Charles William’s mother’s Buick going to a cockfight. It was eleven-thirty at night, a Tuesday, and I had sneaked out the side door after my parents went to sleep. “Don’t talk much when we get there,” Charles William was saying. “Just be quiet and act like you’re interested in what they’re doing. Junior and Winston know we’re coming. They’ll take care of us, but don’t talk too much. They don’t really like women coming to these things.”

“Who are Junior and Winston? I forgot what you told me.”

“They used to work for my dad. They’ll do anything for me. Pass that bottle please.”

“The Coke or the bourbon?”

“The bourbon. The only way to understand white trash is to do what they do. I learned that in the theater. I want you to meet the theater people here, Dee. I bet they’ll want to put you in a play.”

“I was in a play once. I was the ingenue. I had to wear these lime green lounging pajamas Momma made me. They had frogs for fasteners. I hated them. I don’t look good in Chinese clothes.”

“Oh, Dee, I can just see Ariane making lounging pajamas for you. I don’t see you in green, though. I see you in mauve and violet and white. You’re so golden. You need mauve to cool you down.”

“Someday I’ll get rich and let you build me a house. What would you build?”

“White brick with many windows and gardens everywhere. A bedroom with a raised dais and a bed with mauve sheets and walls the color of shells.”

“God, it’s dark out here. Where are we?”