WandaMay heard Bubba before she saw him. To be precise, she heard her coon dog Elvis barking and knew Bubba must be maneuvering his rust and blue Chevy pick up between the cars that sat on concrete blocks by her trailer. She was too lazy to sit up and look. Besides, her skin was stuck to the naughahyde sofa like your shoe soles did to the floor at the movie theater. But it would be better to get up now rather than later. Bubba might not find that “sssmmmoooccckkk” sound as she peeled her skin off the furniture attractive.
God she loved Bubba. He was rail thin with no butt, and he barely had enough hips to hold up his favorite jeans with the imprint of a tobacco can on the back pocket. She blushed to the roots of her frowzy blonde hair as she thought back on what she thought that imprint had been the first time she saw it. Bubba was a real looker, especially when he wore a wife-beater, his CAT boots and dressed up his belt with the six-inch oval Dukes of Hazzard memorial belt buckle.
She heard the squeak of the truck’s door and then his muttered curse as he kicked the chrome trim back in place before slamming the door. The savings and loan had nearly repossessed that truck last year when he’d been laid up from the hunting accident and couldn’t work. But Ole Man Crenshaw, who owned the chicken processing plant where Bubba worked, came though with the disability payments and the truck was still his. Now that he had a job on the swing shift, alphabetizing the M&Ms at the candy factory, he was making better money and WandaMay hoped that they might be able to afford the five-hundred-mile trip to Henson’s Holler to see the image of Elvis that had miraculously appeared in water stains on the ceiling of a doublewide.
Mere moments later, WandaMay heard him rap on the screen door with his knuckles. She quickly checked her appearance in the Budweiser mirror she’d won at the county fair and admired the way her lime green Capri pants and fuschia tube top accentuated her figure. She adjusted her bra strap and gave her hair a quick once-over with a rat-tail comb. When she stepped to the door and gazed at Bubba, she was dumbstruck. There he stood, a clean wife-beater tucked into worn jeans, CAT boots brushed free of mud, a brand-spanking new tattoo on his bicep and a freshly trimmed mullet. She shouldered the screen door open and threw herself into his arms.
“Miss me baby?” He pressed his lips to hers and she could still taste the RedMan he’d spit out by the porch steps just moments earlier. He nibbled on her lower lip and then trailed a string of kisses to her earlobe. “Are you wearing my fishing lures, babydoll?”
WandaMay giggled and slapped at his arm. “Hell, no, Bubba. I wouldn’t even think of messin’ with your fishin’ stuff. My cousin CandyLou got these earrings at the VFW dance last weekend. You remember? Virgil Hickman gave them to her as sort of a consolation prize after that incident with RobbyJoe.”
“Incident? What incident?”
WandaMay rolled her heavily made up eyes and gave Bubba a look that would have scorched asbestos. “Didn’t you hear how RobbyJoe yelled out ‘hoe-down’ and CandyLou hit the floor? Lord she was embarrassed. But Virgil had seen her eyeing these earrings and offered them to her as his way of makin’ things right. But since RobbyJoe gave her a pair just like it that he got when they went to the monster truck rally in the state capital, she brought ’em over here and…”
Bubba growled low in his throat and he sounded just like ole Elvis when he was on the scent of a coon. “Dammit WandaMay. You know how it turns me on when you babble like that.”
He took her mouth in a scorching kiss, running his tongue along the seam of her lips, asking her silently to open to him. She parted her lips and jabbed her tongue into his mouth, rubbing it against his tooth and moaning softly. WandaMay tunneled her hands under his t-shirt and moved her hands in circles on his skin.
Give me my babyback, babyback, babyback, give me my babyback played through her mind as she walked her fingers up his ribcage. Her fingertips brushed across the scars he’d gotten the time he and DwayneLee Crutcher had been drinking moonshine and mistook a bull for DwayneLee’s Rottweiler. The bull hadn’t inflicted nearly as much damage as the barbed wire fence they’d run into trying to get away.
A feeling of pure wickedness swept through her and she shoved his t-shirt up and over his head, tossing it on the faded red split-vinyl recliner that graced her front porch. Starting at his navel, she licked upward, pausing to give extra attention to the small tattoo of her name surrounded by a red heart. Bubba grunted and flexed his pectoral muscles, which gave the tattooed heart the appearing of beating. WandaMay admired his six-pack. And his stomach muscles too.
When Bubba grabbed her and pulled her closer, shivers went up and down her body as his cold metal belt buckle came in contact with her bare midriff. And when he deepened the kiss, a sizzle flickered through her veins like sparks from a bazillion bug zappers. She was powerless to resist him, incapable of refusing any request he made. She was Bubba’s woman, body and soul.
“Let’s you and me go to the lake and watch the submarine races, WandaMay,” he murmured, flashing a grin that showed his gold molar. “I got a fifth of Jack and some beef jerky in the truck. We can put my camouflage tarp on the ground and have us a picnic.”
“Whatever you say, Bubba. But can Elvis come too?”
the end* My deepest thanks to Jeff Foxworthy for his inspiration.
