The girls stop to put up the top on the Mustang and get some refreshment, unwittingly putting on a show for the locals.

Half an hour later, a few minutes past noon, on a different road, clouds had come up west of us. Dark clouds, the kind every Midwesterner learns are full of rain. I turned off the highway down the Main Street of a small town and pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of a Piggly Wiggly.

“Put the top up?” asked Dolly, getting out on the passenger side.

“I think we’d better,” I said. We pulled the soft top out of the boot. It stretched reluctantly, but we got it extended over the passenger compartment where we struggled with the latches to hold it in place.

“Woof!” said Dolly as she got it fastened on her side. I’d already finished, but I knew from experience that the pins on the right-hand side did not slide as easily. I grinned at her, holding one hand up limply and she stuck her tongue out at me.

Which produced a noise from the six or seven men standing around watching us. We hadn’t noticed. I know I blushed, but Dolly acted delighted, fluffing her hair and smiling.

One particular tall man grinned at me and I kept blushing. I guess I got flustered because I sort of suddenly turned around and headed into the Piggly Wiggly, maybe just for something to get me away from all the attention.

Dolly caught up with me inside and handed me my purse. “You forgot this,” she said, smirking at me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Why were they staring at us like that?”

“They’re men,” she said. “It’s what men do.”

“Arr,” I muttered.

“Wanna get an RC and a Moon Pie for lunch?” Dolly asked.

“I hate RC.” Royal Crown Cola, a weaker, fizzier, Pepsi-like soda pop. “I’m not big on any pop, but I prefer Coke.”

Dolly giggled but didn’t explain why. “How about a Yoohoo?”

We wandered toward the cold cases and found two bottles of Kayo, better than Yoohoo, any day. Pleased with ourselves we headed back to the cashier.

We stood in the short line, and I got some coins out to pay when Dolly startled me by asking, “You like guys, don’t you?”

“I...uh?” I didn’t know how to answer.

“Weren’t you dating that Jimmy character for a while?”

“That was your idea,” I protested. Jimmy Lane was a weightlifter with a thing for girls with something extra. If he'd had two brain cells to rub together something might have worked between us.

“Hmm,” she said.

We paid for the drinks, including deposit on the bottles, and headed back out to the street. The Piggly Wiggly actually had a screen door like a house, and I paused where I could look without being seen. The tall man who had grinned at me was just walking away from near the Mustang, but I didn’t see any of the other guys hanging around in the area.

“C’mon,” I said, and we scooted out and back into the car where we sat and sipped our Kayos for a minute. It being June, we rolled down the windows so we wouldn’t cook, but a breeze from a river somewhere made it actually pleasant.

“The reason I asked if you like boys...” Dolly began.

I interrupted. “Is because you want to know if I’m going to get in your way?”

“Uh, sort of. I mean, I don’t want to start something with, like, a pair of guys and find out you aren’t willing to double date.”

I took a bigger swig of my drink. Kayo is made with milk and coats your mouth with a creaminess that Yoohoo just doesn’t have. I savored the sweet, chocolatey taste and the rich mouthfeel. I didn’t want to think about Dolly’s question.

She didn’t dig at it but let it lie there while she chattered about needing a new lipstick because most of the ones we lifted from the show were pink. “And pink lipstick makes me look sallow,” she concluded.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, it does.”

“No, I mean, I don’t know if I like… like guys. The way you mean it….”

“Hm.”

“What if they like me back?” I wondered out loud, thinking as I did so what a lame question.

“Oh, they will. And I think you do.”

“Huh?”

She waved with her pop bottle. “Earlier when those guys were laughing, you looked at that one guy, and you made your eyes big and he saw that and his eyes got big and if you had wanted to right then, you two could probably have found a bush somewhere and started making out, right then and there on the eighteenth of June here in Sterling, Muhzzurah. Boy howdy.” She said it all at once just like that, and I had to stare at her.

“I did what?” I protested.

She turned toward me and demonstrated, lifting her eyebrows and making her big, brown eyes even bigger.

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did,” she insisted. “And you hooked him, girl. I saw it in his face. I’m just surprised he didn’t follow us into Piggy Wiggy or wait outside for us. He wanted you.”

I remembered him walking away as I paused in the screen door of the store. At least, I thought it must be the same tall man. Jeans and a white shirt with a pattern of like, fences and horses or something. Brown Stetson with a yellow hatband. Flat-heeled walking boots. I blushed all over again when I realized how vivid a memory of him I had.

Dolly giggled and made as if to toast with the Kayo bottle. “Yeah, you like boys. I thought so, ‘cause, you know, you never look at me that way.”

We tapped bottles. “I guess you’re right. You’re… you’re my sister, like. Not….”

“Not,” she agreed.

I had two other sisters, but at the moment I felt closer to Dolly than I ever had to either of them.

We finished our drinks, and I put the bottles in a cardboard box behind the passenger seat to turn in for the deposits later. Dolly used the mirror clipped to the sun visor to check for chocolate stains around her mouth and reapply her lipstick. I licked a tissue and scrubbed my own mouth without looking.

She laughed at me then folded the mirror back up and put her lipstick away. I twisted the key in the ignition, and the starter made that urgent clicking and grinding noise you tend to hear on cold winter mornings. But the engine did not start.

* * *

In two minutes we had exhausted our knowledge of what to do. I’d never owned a car before and Dolly drove but didn’t actually have a license.

“I know how to hotwire a car,” she offered.

I waved the key at her.

“Oh, yeah, huh? Well, get out and put the hood up and stare into the stuff in there and try to look helpless,” she said.

I turned to glare at her but she seemed serious.

“It’ll work,” she said.

“I don’t know anything about what’s under the hood,” I said. “And I don’t want to get grease on me. Or my clothes.”

“I know, I know. Trust me.”

“You’re expecting some guy to see me and offer to help?”

She nodded.

I protested. “You do it. You’re little and cute and more girly than me.”

She shook her head. “You’re the tall, skinny blonde. You’ll attract more attention.”

“Oh, so now I’m a blonde?” I puffed air at a lock of hair hanging in my face. “I’m not skinny and I’m not that tall.” Tall for a girl at five-nine, though. And skinny enough to wear a size ten. “C’mon. We’ll both do it.”

Sighing, I got out of the car and moved in front of it. I stared at the little horse emblem, realizing that I had no idea how to even open the hood. I looked at Dolly who had gotten out of the passenger seat to come stand beside me and we both shrugged.

“Problem?” someone said.

We looked around and here came the same tall man again, back from the direction I had seen him disappear before. A slender black man, nearly as tall, walked beside him, both of them smiling.

Dolly snickered beside me. Her plan had certainly worked quickly.

“It won’t start,” I said, feeling helpless and relieved and hating that just a little bit.

“Let me take a look,” he offered.

I stepped out of his way and he put his hand below the chrome of the grill and pulled something there. The hood popped up a bit and he reached into the space created and opened the hood.

Dolly winked at me.

“Ken will take care of you,” said the black man, still smiling. “I’m Otis,” he said directly to Dolly.

“Hi, I’m Dolly,” she said. “Bunny and me don’t know nothing about cars.”

Bunny? I glared at her and she grinned.

“Try to start it again,” said Ken.

I got behind the wheel and tried. It made the same futile noise as before but did not start.

“Hmm,” said Ken. He looked around the hood at me in the driver’s seat. “You ladies in a hurry? Otis and I were just heading over to the tent for some lunch. You can join us and afterwards I can come back with tools and figure out what is wrong with your car?”

“Tent? Lunch?” I said feeling a tiny bit ambushed.

“Uh, place we call the Barbeque Tent on the south edge of town. Best BBQ between St. Louis and KayCee. Otis’s cousins run the place, and they’ve got pulled pork, ribs, whole chickens and beef brisket, with beans, cornbread, light bread, and peach cobbler and... uh…” He trailed off looking at me.

I hoped I wasn’t drooling but breakfast had been a long time ago in St. Louis and one bottle of Kayo had not done much to forestall hunger. “We’d been planning to stop in Jeff City to eat,” I protested weakly and untruthfully.

++++++++++

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It's not a date, it's BBQ!

Ken did not take no for an answer and we all ended up in his spanking new Ford F-250 crew cab with the white-over-green paint job. Somehow, I was in front with Ken and Dolly in back with Otis.

“Where you girls from?” Ken asked. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here local.”

“Uh, well, I’m from St. Joe, originally. Everyone in St. Louis thought I sounded like Nebraska,” I admitted, then wanted to kick myself for telling the truth.

“I’m from everywhere,” Dolly said. “Military brat.”

“Oh, me, too,” said Otis. “Do you speak German?”

Dolly shook her head. “I can get by in Okinawan and a little Japanese. My mom is from the Philippines so I can gossip in Filipino and Spanish, too.”

“Whoa!” Otis shook his hand like he’d burned it. “I thought I was hotshit with my German and bad French.” We all laughed.

“I’m from right cheer,” said Ken, twanging like an Ozark hillbilly. We laughed again but when I glanced at Ken he was looking back at me and I felt my own skin turn hot. Damn, I thought, knowing that I get red all over when I blush.

Ken pulled into a grassy field and parked the big pickup amid a fleet of lesser trucks, many of them primer gray or just rust-colored up to their door handles. The sparkly new vehicle looked almost like royalty visiting the peasants. The boys both popped out and opened doors for us but Otis didn’t offer a hand to help me down from the tall seat. He might be friends with the local rich kid but he knew he was still black and this was the South, even if not Alabama or Mississippi.

I didn’t know for sure how I should act. Around Blueberry Hill, no one gave much notice to race, everyone there had other problems. The show had black and white and mixed acts, drag was a great leveler. I hadn’t been a performer but I did dress out most days to work in the office; after being exiled for crossdressing I felt I had a license to do it as often as I wanted.

But now I was trying to pass, not to give a show and as a white girl I wasn’t sure how to act with a polite but very handsome black man. I didn’t want to cause trouble for him but I didn’t want to seem like I was snubbing him either. Even smiling at him could be the wrong thing to do. Yikes.

Ken came around the front of the truck quickly and took my arm, and for a moment there I really wanted to kiss him for saving me from awkwardness. And then I felt bad about my relief, it surely wasn’t Otis’s fault that I didn’t know how to act. And at the same time I felt myself turning red again. Maybe this whole idea of posing as a girl while crossing the continent was too crazy.

“Chicken or pork?” Ken asked and somehow the suggestiveness of the question seemed almost obscene.

“Ch-chicken,” I stammered.

“Light or dark meat?” he asked, standing so very close and breathing. Yes, of course he was breathing; why the heck was it such a problem to be so near him?

And I knew he was going to ask the question about meat color, why hadn’t I said pork?

“Pork meat,” I nodded. I squeezed my eyes shut, maybe it would help not to look at him. He had both of my hands in his, so it didn’t really help at all.

“Did you say ‘pork’ or ‘dark’?” he asked.

“Park?” I answered, completely helpless.

He laughed and pulled me closer, putting an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get you a plate and some pulled pork so you don’t end up biting your fingers trying to eat chicken.” He hugged me up and kissed me on the eyebrow. I didn’t bite him so I guess I must have liked it.

I tried to distract myself by looking around. We were on the edge of a small forest with cornfields stretching one direction and some other sort of grain another. Under the trees amid the dappled sunlight sat several structures, some wood, some brick, some metal and one enormous centerpiece made of canvas.

The Barbecue Tent was a huge, apparently semi-permanent installation as big as something a small circus might use. A dull tan color, it rested on two enormous telephone-pole-size center supports with twenty or so smaller supports holding up the skirts all around. The openings into the tent measured at least seven-feet high. Inside trestle-type tables with all manner of benches and chairs around them took up most of the room. On two sides, more tables held food items, like white loaf bread in stacks, sweet potatoes, macaroni salad, cornbread, pickles, sliced tomatoes in trays and in big, sweaty metal cans with spigots, lemonade and iced tea, Southern-style. Tubs and coolers of various kinds, most sitting right on the ground, held iced beer and pop in bottles and cans.

Smiling women, most of them black, helped people fill their plates using ladles and tongs in exchange for multi-colored paper tickets. Frowning men, also mostly black, wearing the sort of belt change machines I associated with ice cream trucks and bus conductors, stalked around trading tickets for coins and bills. It looked and sounded chaotic with everyone gesturing and talking at once, shouting really over the live music.

A brick arbor half covered in vines served as a bandstand with an accordion, two banjos, two trumpets, a guitar and a saxophone doing murder to a ragtime tune. Not good but certainly loud. Perhaps the heat had detuned their instruments.

Some of the heat came from the summer sun but a lot of it spilled out of the metal-topped building where several brick-lined pits were tended by shirtless men and boys of all available colors. Heat and the most amazing smells came from the barbecue; the world seemed to reek of smoke, hot meat and sweet and spicy sauces. A line of sweating patrons with plates and grubby tickets clutched in their hands waited for attention from the cooks, one of whom seemed entirely occupied with piling up and disassembling mounds of chicken, ribs, catfish and corn on the cob.

People have killed and been killed for idols, treasures, and delusions not half as worthy of passion as that smell. I almost swooned and Ken held me upright, laughing. “When do we eat?” I moaned.

Still laughing and joined by Dolly and Otis, we crowded into the tent. Ken stopped to buy wads of tickets, five cents each for yellows, twenty-five for reds and one dollar for blues. A plate and plastic flatware wrapped in napkins cost a yellow and a cup with ice cost two. Beer and pop were reds and filling a plate with meat and two sides was a blue. Other extras were priced accordingly. Change was given only in tickets.

Past the line of servers on the far side of the big tent I saw two cinderblock buildings, one evidently an ice house and the other a double ended latrine, the ladies’ half sporting the only other line in evidence. At least, I thought, they didn’t seem to be collecting tickets to use the facilities.

The servers, cooks and ticket takers kept some order in the chaos and I noticed a couple of big, black guys, one in a sheriff’s deputy uniform just standing around watching. Security, I wondered? They were shortly joined by a white deputy of similar size who also watched the crowd with a benevolent expression while sipping from a cup of what looked like iced tea.

“There are more people here than in the town. Is it always like this?” I asked Ken.

He laughed. “Summer weekends and holidays yeah. People come from thirty, forty miles away for the food.”

“I believe that,” I said, trying not to drool as the servers piled the goodies on my plate.

With plates covered in pulled pork (you didn’t have to wait in line at the barbecue pit for that), sweets and savories and a wedge of cornbread, we found a table with four empty seats and sat down. The boys hopped back up immediately to fetch drinks, beer for them, Dr. Pepper for Dolly and lemonade for me.

We tried not to nibble while waiting for them to return but I couldn’t resist. If barbecue were announced as the new religion I would have converted instantly. A bite of pork, one of sweet potato and another of crunchy pickle and Heaven was in reach.

Dolly shouted something at me across the table. I shrugged. She reached across and pulled my head closer to hers. “Nice, huh?” she screamed. “You going to suck his dick?”

I boggled at her, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, probably displaying half-chewed sweet potato. She broke up laughing and pointing at me. What a friend!

“Why do you think they’re being nice to us?” she screamed over the noise.

I sat back, chewed and swallowed. I guess I was stupid but I had not really considered it. They seemed nice boys and… and…? Well, I wasn’t completely naïve; a lot went on back at Uncle T’s bar and some of it probably involved actions that might have been considered illegal. Of course, homosexual behavior was illegal in most states just for starters and even heterosexual sex had legal restrictions. Missouri outlawed almost everything.

Did the boys know we weren’t… well, weren’t anatomically correct girls? I leaned forward and screamed back at her. “We could get in a lot of trouble!”

She grinned, nodding. “Or have a lot of fun!”

“Your name isn’t really Bunny is it?” he asked.

About that time, Ken landed on the seat beside me and passed me a tall cup full of lemonade and ice. I took a quick sip, mostly to avoid saying anything to him right away. The taste was unmistakable; he had spiked the lemonade with something very like raw alcohol, probably moonshine. Ye cats! It must have been almost half liquor!

I glared at him and put the cup down. He looked directly at me and widened his eyes. I felt a flush of heat that could have been the alcohol or the spices in the BBQ but probably wasn’t.

Otis suddenly jumped to his feet across the table from us, knocking his metal folding chair to the floor. Dolly glanced at me with an expression I had never seen on her face. She looked scared. Beside me, Ken stood more slowly, using his right hand to push down on my shoulder.

Otis said something I couldn’t hear, butI clearly heard Ken say in a cheerful voice, “Hey, no. It’s a party, fellas. Relax.” He stepped out away from the table. Three big men in rough work clothes confronted Otis with condescending amusement on their faces.

“What’s going on?” I mouthed at Dolly. She made faces back but I didn’t get any useful information from it and then she disappeared under the table and I felt a pair of hands dragging me out of my seat!

The men’s voices were getting louder but I could only make out Ken saying something about an apology in a reasonable sounding voice before Dolly pulled me under the table.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” she said.

I whimpered. I mean, my barbecue heaven was still on top of the table. But I nodded reluctantly. We hiked our skirts up to mid-thigh and started crawling out of the tent, keeping under tables where we could and trying to avoid getting kicked, accidentally or on purpose.

The noise level above seemed to be rising and started to have an angry tone. I risked a glance back but couldn’t see anything from under the tables. I turned back to follow Dolly again but she had disappeared and in her place stood a large yellow and brown dog glaring at me.

“Grr!” he said.

“Nice doggie,” I said. Maybe he thought I was after one of the greasy bones discarded in the sawdust and dirt under the tables. I was trying to poke such a morsel his direction when the mutt started sliding across the floor backward with a surprised look on his face. He tried to turn around to bite whoever had him by the hind legs but he didn’t really have the room.

I quickly scrambled out from under the tables and got to my feet. Dolly stood up also, leaving the dog half-under a chair. She grabbed my arm instead and we both tried to make progress at getting out of the tent. We didn’t look back because it sounded like a real fight had broken out and we weren’t the only ones escaping.

“Truck!” screamed Dolly.

“Truck!” I agreed.

We were filthy. Dirt on hands and knees and the hem of our skirts, sawdust and grease in our hair. Dolly even had a dollop of barbecue beans behind one ear. We ran for the grassy field where Ken had left the oversize pickup we had arrived in. The gleaming green-over-white newness of his ride stood out among the smaller, duller vehicles and we had no trouble finding it.

The driver’s side door wasn’t locked and I boosted tiny Dolly up into the cab then hauled myself in behind her. “See if there’s a key hidden somewhere?” I said.

“It would probably be outside, under the body or bumpers,” she said but she opened the glove box anyway. A black plastic object fell out, looking a bit like a skullcap for an octopus.

Dolly held it up for a moment, glaring at it.

“What the heck is that?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she admitted. “But somehow I think this is why the Mustang wouldn’t start.”

“I–you–he? You mean Ken may have sabotaged our car?” I sputtered.

“Lock the doors,” she ordered and we took a moment to click all four locks.

“We’ll be safe in here,” I said watching out the side window at what seemed to be turning into a full scale riot around the tent. The two deputies and their beefy buddy were wading into the melee swinging black nightsticks and yanking people out of their way by the collar or other handy appendage.

“Safe?” said Dolly, producing a screwdriver and a tiny wrench from the glove box. “We’re leaving!”

“Uh,” I said. “You think you can hotwire this thing?”

She wriggled in under the dash and her voice came out of the instrument panel. “I can,” she said with confidence and set to work. A moment later the engine roared to life, Dolly emerged triumphant then underwent a spasm of head shaking and cursing when the baked beans she’d been wearing fell into her ear canal.

I put the big monster truck into gear and eased out of the line of parked vehicles, honking once to let people know that we were moving. Dolly reached back into the glove compartment to flip on the emergency flashers. Ken’s truck had all the options available.

Once I reached a lane, I turned toward the tent.

Dolly yelped. “The road is the other direction!”

“We’ve got to get the boys,” I said.

“Oh-kay!” she said grinning. “You’ve decided that he’s going to suck your dick.”

I winced. “Shut up,” I said but then we both laughed.

Moving oh-so-slowly through the crowd, I drove right into the tent toward where we had left out two — dates? Kidnappers? They had probably tricked us into coming along by disabling our car but that wasn’t important just at that moment. Getting them out of there before they needed a trip to the hospital or jail mattered more.

Chair and tables got crushed under the bumpers and wheels of the big crew cab truck, along with a quantity of marvelous food. Several people pounded on the side of our pseudo-tank but we ignored them and their shouting.

I saw the boys in the middle of a clot of men pushing and shoving and swinging at each other with the nightstick-wielding deputies only yards away. “Get ready to unlock the back door on your side when I pull alongside,” I told Dolly. She got up in her seat and leaned over to reach the switch.

I bumped someone in the ass, moving as slowly as I could manage but sending him flying into the mashed potato table anyway. The servers and ticket takers had all disappeared. I got the feeling suddenly that this wasn’t the first riot at the barbecue.

I honked the horn, one short and one long blast, and everybody jumped as if electrocuted. Otis reached the door of the truck first and Dolly unlocked it. He piled in with Ken right behind him, having to kick someone off of him before he could close the door.

“Woo-eee!” yelled Otis.

“You girls are the cavalry!” said Ken, laughing. “Let’s get out of here!”

I guided the bouncing truck through the barbecue tent onto a dirt road between the other buildings and eventually out to the highway, not turning back toward Sterling because all of the other traffic was already heading that way.

“Where are we going?” asked Otis.

“Somewhere that ain’t here,” I said and everyone laughed in relief.

Ken reached over the seat and touched me on the arm. “Your name isn’t really Bunny is it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s Martha.” I had no idea I had decided that until just then.

“That’s why she has everyone call her Bunny,” said Dolly, smirking.

“My brave little Bunny,” said Ken with a chuckle.

I rolled my eyes. “Where are we going? Seriously. I don’t know anything about where we are,” I said.

Otis spoke up. “Go down about two miles, turn right, we can cross the river and go up to Linn. There’s a motel you girls can get a bath in while Ken and I go get your car fixed and bring it back to you.”

“A bath?” I thought about it for fifteen seconds; we were filthy. I checked silently with Dolly in a glance and said, “Sounds like a plan.”