65

Sharon is walking across his front lawn. Not in high heels but sandals. Bare, tanned legs, long and sleekly muscled and inviting, walking with the insinuating hip-swinging stride that is the patented walk of sexy young women the world over. Still sophisticated looking but in a thin, flowered summer dress, and sandals. Pretty as a picture.

Her arms are bare and she has rather slender arms, and this, too, is very sexy. He remembers other girls, some of whom had large breasts and relatively small arms. Inside his head he sees the medal of a proficient marksman and the line “expert in small arms."

Sharon's hair is long, loose, a spill of sensuousness, a cascade of silky femininity that flows onto her shoulder. He might ask her to let her hair grow and to wear it hanging to her waist, like his grandmother had, and he would help her give it a hundred strokes every night.

He feels his hands on her shoulders as he comes up behind her. Sees her turn and smile into his face, her eyes wide and the color of perfect emeralds. Eyes of desire.

Did he ever know a girl like her, a mere child of the farm community, perhaps, struggling to pull her child's grass sack through the rows of cotton? Did such a beauty learn beside him, as the smaller boys and girls were taught the rigors of front and back chopping and blocking the plants? Not here.

He had never known a Sharon. Never fumbled with one in the back seat of a car. Never walked one home from school. He had no memories of anyone remotely like her, a mystical, perfect, idealized dream girl who had blown in—and out—of his life.

There was scarcely enough of Sharon inside his head to construct a decent mental picture. The best he could do was a kind of half dream, part reality and part imagination, woven from the crude threads of a jailhouse fantasy.