Florida Heatwave Read Online Free PDF Page A

in his father’s photo magazine.
    The woman on the rock was tall with loose, luxurious black hair that fell down her back. Her arms were poised slightly away from her wide hips as if she meant to take a swan dive into some unseen canyon. Her breasts were full and round, her nipples as dark and taut as fresh raisins. A tangled thatch of pubic hair formed a mysterious shadow a few inches below her navel.
    He studied that bush for hours when his father was away on his business trips and his mother was upstairs relentlessly cleaning the house.
    His parents didn’t question Johnny’s long absences in the basement for they believed he was engaged in a constructive hobby. In one corner of the basement he had cordoned off a workshop area where he fashioned model cars from kits. He specialized in Ford hotrods, the ‘32, the ‘40, which he modified with his X-acto knife and soldering iron. Johnny chopped and channeled their molded bodies and customized their interiors with corduroy and other fabrics that he glued to the bucket seats to replicate rolled and pleated upholstery. Then he delicately placed screws that allowed the seats to swivel outward. His creations had even won trophies at local contests.
    It was the first pubic hair of Johnny’s life. Lush and snarled like a nest that some strangely beautiful creature had woven and left behind in the branches of a tree. Hiding inside that mat of hair was some unimaginable bliss that weakened Johnny’s knees, flushed his cheeks, and tensed his breath.
    While he listened to his mother’s tread on the floor above, he held the photo up to the light, cocked it at different angles, even used a magnifying glass. Still he could not penetrate the dark wooly triangle.
    Months earlier while exploring his father’s stash of magazines, Johnny had first discovered the photograph. The page was dog-eared, a small fold in the corner as if something in the photo had caught his father’s attention. Arnold Fellows was a plain and colorless businessman who neither cursed nor boozed nor sinned in any way that Johnny had ever noted. He wore dreary suits and seemed more pale and quiet than the other fathers. So Johnny was certain he’d marked the page only because the photographer had employed some arcane technique that his father was trying to master.
    Johnny, however, was struck dumb by the eroticism of the image and returned to it again and again, lured from his glue and spray paint and his modified antique Fords. Drawn to the cabinet where he knew she was standing on her rock, everything exposed. Her dark hair, her deep navel, her swollen hips, her faultless breasts.
    She became for him, during those hours when he stared at her, the guiding image of his adult life, his anima, his secret touchstone for sexual thrill. The woman on the rock in black and white with the shadow of her perfect body flattened on the cliffside to her left. The incalculably deep cavern that opened before her was beyond the frame of the photograph. But he knew it was there. She had that look on her face. The expression of someone teetering on the edge of an abyss.
    He called her Myra. He didn’t know why he chose that name. To his youthful ear it sounded vaguely exotic. When he considered Myra later, and the role she would play in his adult life, he could never sort the chicken from the egg. Had his fascination with the photograph of Myra, the long hours he’d spent gazing at her, implanted that image of a dark goddess in his psyche? Or was that image preexistent in his sexual genome, and Myra simply became the first and clearest manifestation of what was already lurking within him?
    After graduating from college, Johnny married a thin blonde, whose body type and complexion was similar to his mother’s. He loved Candace in a clear-cut, uncomplicated way. He found her familiar and easy. Like Johnny, she worked in the public schools. Candace taught math to the brightest high school kids, while Johnny was a guidance