She cut the radio to the black station from Memphis, WDIA. It had already been set on the signal dial. At home I could listen to WDIA only three times a day, when the gospel programs came on. Now some sister was singing about not having enough meat in her kitchen.

We drove across the railroad tracks and pulled off a dirt road near a stand of trees. We didn’t have much time. Already I was wet.

We walked into the woods, and she pulled me to her and kissed me. We kissed a long time. I began moving a little bit, and I felt her growing big. I wanted her inside me and I kissed her harder.

But she had other plans.

She undid her zipper and told me to get on my knees. Halfway down I realized what she wanted.

I’d never done it before, I’d never even read about it, but it seemed a natural thing to do.

She took my face between her hands; her hands were smooth and they felt hot. The sky was still light though the wood was dark. One dead tree without any leaves stood in front of the others. There was an old sack or something caught in its high branches. “Don’t use your teeth none, hear?”

I opened my mouth. It was like a fat sausage, tasteless except for a little salt. I slid my mouth over it, like she told me, against the plump vein underneath. And I let her shove it against the back of my mouth. I squeezed her hips firm in my hands, and she massaged my cheeks and my throat with her thumbs, and ran her fingers all in my hair and on the back of my neck. She rotated her hips slowly. And then faster and harder I sucked until my tongue felt like lead, but it had begun to taste so good. She twisted real slow, and I grabbed and sucked. Time was passing. Grandma was waiting. Time was, I think, standing still. For us. A sheriff on a horse with a posse could have come out of the trees and we wouldn’t have known. Or two boys could have been watching us.

She came. I jerked my mouth away and spat, but some of it got on my shirt. Rather, my grandfather’s shirt.

I was hot, too, and between my legs was very sticky, so we lay on the ground and dry fucked with our pants up until I came. She was hard again, I think. But she said that she would go home to her mother.

We sped away in the car. The wind felt good. The slide guitar from the radio drowned out the crickets.

I had a playroom. It was just a curtained-off place between the kitchen stove and the wall where I kept all of my magazines, and where I went to read them and to fantasize.