He found Molly in the upstairs bedroom she had transformed into something she grandly called a “studio”. She spent most of her time in there these days making weird little clay figures and oil paintings of mountains with big holes in them and cornfields with razor-sharp talons for tassels that blood dripped from the end of. He wasn’t terrible fond of that room. Just this moment she was bent over the table working on the clay figure of an enormously fat woman with conical breasts twice the size of its head.
“What the hell is that?”
“What?” she asked without lifting her head from her work.
“That…thing…you’re messing with.”
“Fertility goddess,” she said, cutting a nipple into one of the cones with her Exacto knife. “Mayan.”
“Little late for a thing like that to do you any good, ain’t it?”
“Very funny. Did you want something, Amos, or did you just come up here to make what little is left of my life as miserable as possible?”
“They’re down there.”
“Who’s down where?” She was working on the vulva with intense concentration, her knife making little curvy cuts between the figure’s legs. He had to look away.
“Them surveyors from the State. I think they’re measuring the boundary between our land and the State Forest. They’re going to build that goddamn road, Molly, that’s what they’re going to do, and I think we ought to put up a fight.”
She stopped working and straightened in surprise. “You do?”
“Yes, I do. Now I know you don’t hold with fighting the State and mostly I guess I’m with you on that, but goddamn it, this is different. This is my damn farm, been in the family four generations, and I’d kind of like to live out the rest of my days here and die here like my Daddy and his daddy and his daddy before him. Besides, that road’s a waste of money and it’ll destroy most of the forest on either side of the Brewer’s to boot. Don’t make no sense just to cut three minutes off a trip to Springfield where nobody wants to go anyhow. If they’re going to take my land, then goddamn it, I want to make them work for it, not just hand it over on a silver platter like broiled trout.”
He braced for the inevitable stinging rebuttal but she was smiling, actually smiling, and there was an evil gleam in her eye that he hadn’t seen in years. “You know, Amos, for once I do believe you’re right. I’ve been thinking about that myself, and it seems to me they’ve been mighty high-handed about the whole thing, acting like our land is their land to do with what they please and the State Forest is just a nuisance preventing them from making more money. We ought to do something that will at least make them think twice about what they’re doing.”
“You do?” He swallowed his surprise and seized on the unexpected moment she’d provided. “I thought I might go on up to the General Store tomorrow and talk to Miss Juliette Rose about it.”
“Yes,” Molly said thoughtfully, “that’s a good idea, talking to Juliette Rose. She’ll know what to do if anybody does. But you don’t have to go see her, for heaven’s sake. If I know Juliette, she’ll be down here tomorrow to see you. Best to see her on your territory, I think.”
He stared at her. “You’re a wonder, woman. You look like a movie star but you think like one of them corporate sharks that steal three companies before breakfast every morning. I sometimes think maybe you wasted your life down here on this little broke and piss-poor farm. You ever think that?”
“Sometimes,” she said with the crooked grin that always set his heart to melting and his groin to quivering like flames in the wind. “But then I look at you and I remember why I did it and I don’t regret a thing.”
“You’re so full of shit,” he said.
She put her arms around him. “And you love it. Want to go to the other room now?”
“It’s the middle of the afternoon!”
“So? You got someplace you have to be besides here?” Her hand stroked the front of his trousers. “I see you don’t.”
“I surely am glad you didn’t turn out to be one of them women who think once the kids are all born they’re too old for that stuff.”
“And I surely am glad you didn’t turn out to be one of them old farts who’d rather watch tv and eat their shredded wheat than give it to their old lady once in a while.”
She kissed him deep and rubbed his pants until like Siamese twins they stumbled into the other room as an ancient unit, like a pair of her fertility figures doing it just for fun.
