Dawn Lee Martinez Owned My Soul That Entire Summer... and never had a clue

Rais’n Up Catfish: Forty-two

Dawn Leigh Martinez never had a clue that she owned my soul that summer, or that she held its fate in her tawny hands. I knew all too well. A couple of times I nearly wept knowing it, trying like hell to fight it. Feeling her magnetic pull upon every aching joint and inch of me, feeling powerless to do anything about it. How she had created such a spell over me, such yearning, such painful lust and puppy-like adoration while simply being herself was a magnificent new mystery, a more terrifying force of nature than I had yet encountered in my mostly imagined romantic life, a wildly, higher high. It was both terrifying and wonderful, discovering the power that one unassuming girl’s image and presence could rain down upon a boy. This boy. Every thought and breath I could manage some afternoons felt completely, utterly hers.

Imagine your surprise if, at the age of fourteen you discovered you were somehow responsible for the salvation or the downfall of another human being, someone you liked but hardly knew. We’re talking choirs of angels and streets of gold, or eternal damnation, hell fire and brimstone, and all the storybook trimmings. It has happened; happened even younger than fourteen if history is to be believed. Queens and kings, reincarnated lamas, rulers of nations and empires, thrust too soon into positions of incredible power and responsibility by simple genetics, by accident, by right of birth, or rebirth. Complicated stuff.

But imagine you’re the daughter of a mid-level manager named Bobby who works for Alleghany Ludlum Steel and likes a cold Budweiser before supper, and that your mom, Linda, is the bookkeeper for the local Wonder Bread distributor just across the state line, down in Southaven. You live a simple life with these two and your little brother, Bobby Jr. in a modest, three-bedroom, brick and clapboard, one-story on Brakebill Avenue in the middle of a quiet, middle-class, white neighborhood at the edge of a city that, though famous for its Beale Street Blues and smokey, pit barbecue, and infamous for the assassination of Martin Luther King a few years prior, and situated just a mile or so from a Shoney’s Big Boy restaurant and Elvis’ very own Graceland mansion is still just a collection of average white and ‘white-ish’ folk in some neighborhoods getting by. Add to that the fact that none of your professed, Southern Baptist family ever attends church unless your grandparents are visiting from Atlanta. Now, try on that weighty cloak of spiritual responsibility once again. How the hell does a pretty, fourteen-year-old girl in cut-offs and flip-flops end up with that kind of power?

She authored a crush unlike any I’d experienced before her, far more physical, which I’d have thought impossible at first, more animal, less cerebral, more debilitating. It was a drug that wouldn’t wear off and eventually that began to scare the hell out of me.

“What if she figures it out?” I fretted, riddling myself again and again with this and other questions. The idea of scaring her away or losing casual access to her during her frequent visits with my younger sister was almost too heavy a weight to consider. Weekends in Memphis: Friday nights when she slept over. Saturdays before and after I went off to church. Saturday nights, television and bowls of popcorn while Mom went out drinking with friends or on a date; probably with my boss. Leisurely Sunday mornings, me folding my laundry while they practiced domesticity, fixing me French toast or pancakes before Mom finally awoke to acclimate herself to daylight with a vodka-spiked coffee and a couple of Virginia Slims, hours before driving me back down the Delta, to Comfrey, or drafting my older-sister, Debbie and her boyfriend, Donnie to do it, offering him less money than the gas alone would cost.

Whenever Dawn appeared, whenever she walked across the street to hang out with my little sister, Cyndi, a violent storm was set to brewing in my heart and damn me all to hell, another wrestling in my pants.

I knew precious little about my kid sister’s best friend beyond what I could see of her, smell of her. She had a strange, rich, woody aroma, neither lotion nor perfume, that was unlike any person I had ever smelled before, a kind of whispered aura, borne seemingly from within her bottomless brown eyes as much as from her pores, a mixed-source sensuality that incited a new form of lust that swelled within me and spread.

She wore straight, chestnut hair, bobbed short and oval, tortoise-shell glasses, which rested, invariably, half way down her narrow but rounded, peasant nose. Supernally bronzed skin and a delicious, careless preference for skimpy clothes, halter-tops and tube tops, tight-fitting cut-off jeans; Dawn Martinez offered effortless perfection to these marvels of the day’s youthful fashion, leaving blessed little, and yet everything to the imagination.

I never once suffered from delusions that Dawn would win a full-ride scholarship to some tony, Ivy-league university or grow up to teach impoverished, blind children to read. She didn’t seem the type to fight her way into the Air Force academy to become a famous, pilot/astronaut or write a bestseller. She came from a good family of rather moderate achievements and seemed completely content to make her future within that easy, familiar world.

She was a better than average student and a fairly avid reader, in that realm of Little Women, Nancy Drew mysteries, Black Beauty and Flowers in the Attic. She rarely spoke of passions or aspirations, or even ideas when I was around her, but somehow none of those things seemed to matter all that much, for looking upon her, that long-ago summer was all I thought I could ever desire; visual perfection in a kindhearted, girl-next-door, ‘gorgeous beneath the cute,’ human form. 

Her smile, her laugh, the way she walked through a room or sat, draping a leg over the arm of a chair, casual and catlike; in those moments nothing else on Earth much mattered for she existed at some radiant, glowing pinnacle of physical existence, an absolute peak. Watching her was watching a miracle that hadn’t a single clue.

Her legs were smooth and firm, golden, butter and browned sugar simmering slow over low heat!  Graceful calves, sensual ankles, sculpted veins navigating over bone and muscle, and beneath smooth skin. The moist, creased backs of her knees, sleek, meaty thighs and tight, frayed shorts affording unhindered views of them.

Her naked feet were an erotic masterpiece, smooth and veined, exquisitely proportioned. They were brown as wheat husks in the autumn sun, tough enough beneath to walk comfortably on summer pavement, but silken and sensual, and graceful on top.

More than once when I could not sleep, I stared out from my sleeping bag on the living room floor, across the quiet suburban street and into her darkened window, silently rubbing and stroking myself through rising stages of delirium and release; warm, wet upheavals as I imagined coming to her in darkness, tracing the curve of her arches with my tongue and kissing her pretty toes. I can still picture them, delightful, unassuming nakedness, caramel and silk …and red polished nails. Upon them my unknowing ruler padded through the very core of me, wearing down a path, imprinting her earthly presence indelibly upon my imagination, a carnal hunger, with the casual footfalls of a goddess.