Breath of Scandal(2)

The dark-haircd boy shrugged. "Sure."

Frowning with displeasure, Neal flopped back against the



booth. "You're getting downright serious on us, Lamar. If you can't keep up, we'll have to start leaving you behind. "

Lamar's dark eyes filled with worry. "What do you mean 'keep up'T'

"I mean Re raising hell. I mean like getting laid. I mean like getting drunk."

"His mama doesn't like for him to do those bad things." Hutch effeminately folded his large, ruddy hands beneath his chin and batted his eyelashes. Speaking in a falsetto voice, he looked and sounded ridiculous. Lamar took the jibe seriously.

"I puked my guts out the same as y'all last Friday night!" he exclaimed. "Didn't I steal those watermelons this summer like you told me to, Neal? Wasn't I the one who bought the spray paint when we wrote that graffiti on the post office wall?"

Hutch and Neal laughed at his vehemence. Neal reached across the table and slapped Lamar's cheek. "You've done real good, Lamar. Real good." Unable to keep a straight face, he burst into laughter again.

Hutch's bony shoulders were shaking with mirth. "You puked up more than the two of us put together, Lamar. What'd your mama think of your hangover yesterday morning?"

"She didn't know I was feeling bad. I stayed in bed." They were bored. Sunday nights were always boring. The bad girls were recuperating from Saturday night bacchanals and didn't want to be bothered. The good girls went to church. There were no sporting events scheduled on Sundays. They hadn't felt like crabbing or fishing that evening.

So Neal, always the leader and strategist, had rounded up the other two in his sports car and they had cruised the streets of Palmetto, looking for something to do to amuse themselves. But after cruising the main drag several times, they had failed to find any action in town.

"Want to go out to Walmart and look around?" Lamar had suggested.

The other two chorused, "No."



Sandra Brown



Breath of Scandal

"I know," Neal said in a burst of inspiration, "let's go to one of the nigger churches. That's always a hoot."

"Un-uh," Hutch said, shaking his fiery head. "My daddy said he'd skin me if we did that again. Last time we went, it nearly started a race riot." Hutch's father, Fritz, was the county sheriff. Fritz Jolly had served as the boys' consciences on numerous occasions.

Their last resort had been to go to the Dairy Bam, hoping that some action would find them. As long as they kept placing orders and behaved themselves, the management wouldn't kick them out. Of course, there would be hell to pay if Neal was caught with the bottle of whiskey in his coat.

His father, Ivan, had told him before leaving the house not to take any beer with him. "How come?" Neal had asked.

"Because Fritz called me yesterday morning. He was good and pissed off. Said Hutch came home stinking drunk Friday night and that you had supplied the beer. He said the sheriffs son can't be driving around town drunk and raising hell. Dora Jolly was fit to be tied, too. I told him I'd look into it."

"Well?" "Well, I'm looking into it," Ivan had thundered. "Lay off the beer tonight."

"Christ." Neal slammed out of the house. Once he got to his car, he chuckled and patted the inside pocket of his jacket, where he'd hidden the silver flask of expensive bourbon. Ivan would never miss it.

By now, however, the fun of having pulled one over on his old man had fizzled. Hutch was devouring his second hamburger. His table manners disgusted Neal. He ate each meal like it might be his last, taking huge bites, gulping noisily, not bothering to suspend conversation while he was chewing.

Lamar was always a gutless pain in the ass. He was a perennial worrier whose company Neal tolerated because of Lamar's culpability. It was amusing to have a sucker around to be the butt of practical jokes and a target for



verbal abuse. Lamar was affable and above averagelooking, but the only real purpose he served was to be Neal's punching bag.

Tonight, he was as sullen and nervous as ever. Every time anybody spoke to him, he jumped. Neal supposed Lamar's habitual jitters came from living with his mama. That old bat was enough to make anybody jumpy.

Myrajane Griffith thought she was hot snot because she was a former Cowan. At one time, the Cowans had been the largest producing cotton planters between Savannah and Charleston. But that had been long before folks nowadays could remember. The Cowans had fallen on hard times; most of them had died. The old plantation house near the coast was still standing, but it had long ago been foreclosed upon and condemned.

Still, Myrajane clung to her maiden name like a runt shoat to a hind teat. She was an employee of the Patchett Soybean Plant, like almost everybody else in the three neighboring counties. She rubbed elbows with coloreds and people she wouldn't have spit on in better days. She had browbeaten her husband until he died. When Ivan viewed Lamar's father's body in the casket, he had remarked that the poor bastard was smiling for the first time in years.

Jesus, Neal thought, no wonder Lamar is nervous all the time, living with that harpy.

Neal was glad his mother had died when he was a baby. A series of nannies, mostly colored women from around Palmetto, had reared him until he got too old to spank and started hitting back. His mother, Rebecca Flory Patchett, had been blond and pale and the worst lay Ivan had ever had, or so Ivan had told Neal when the boy had expressed curiosity about his mother's nature.