She wasn’t black, but she wasn’t white either. She wasn’t crazy, and she was not sane. She was pretty and she liked to fuck. I was fifteen and that was ideal.

I first met Rohn in the summer down south. The weather was hot, and the air was close and heavy with dry grass and small dead rotting animals. Snakes slid out of their skins.

Before I met her I had seen her up at Bell Eagle Esso, the little grocery and filling station that our landlord owned. Sometimes she was with her mother, a thin, pale woman who wore big hats to keep the sun off her face, and who, whenever she spoke, mumbled. I did hear her speak once, and she sounded funny. My grandfather said that she was a foreigner. She usually had Rohn by the arm. Or Rohn was with her older brother, the one most like the mother. People always looked at them funny.

The day I met her, she was astride a big roan mare.

She had a black cowboy hat on, pulled low so that it shadowed her eyes. Her thick red hair fell down onto her shoulders.

We were in the middle of a pasture. Over by a pond some cows stood still as if they’d been painted there. I was walking home from a neighbor’s house, where I’d gone after school.

I kind of stepped backward because the horse was so big.

She grinned, flashing her dark face under the hat’s shadow.

“How you t’day?” Her drawl was soft and gentle. It wasn’t high-pitched and evil like a peckerwood’s, so it didn’t scare me.

I said, “I’m all right.”

She pushed her hat back and I saw that her eyes were green in gray. Her brows arched with the grace of a bow. I think my heart did something.

“You wanna ride home?” She told me later I had a kind of half smile on my lips to make her wonder.

I climbed up and she pulled me the rest of the way onto the horse. From up there I could see the tin roof of my folks’ house. Smoke was coming from the chimney, going straight up. Grandma was starting supper.

I wedged into the saddle between her thighs. Her arms encircled me, and she rested her hand holding the bridle on the horn between my legs. Her breasts were small and firm and pressed against my back. I was too shy to move.

She asked me what grade I was in, and did I like going to school in town, and she bet I didn’t like arithmetic. I thought, at the time, that she was a senior in high school or maybe already in college. We rocked in time to the horse’s movements. I felt her arms tightening about me and the horse walking slower.