"I'm the local expert on Mary June," he said, with a softness I found both startling and sweet. "You might even say I was her brother."

Mary June used to sneak out of her bedroom while her mother was watching Johnny Carson and take long rides in men's cars through night country, headlights off. Mary June wore short chiffon skirts that flew up around her waist in the spring and stuck to her thighs in the summer. Her panties she either left in her laundry basket back home, or balled up under the seats of her lovers' cars. Cars were her favorite place to fuck, her legs spread in a reckless V while her lover bucked inside her.

She always laughed while she was making love, even when she was coming, as if she were trying to make up for the silence she kept inside her mother's house. Eventually that laughter drove the men away, and her lovers spread the rumor that Mary June screwed like a mad hyena bitch. Only her brother knew how to make the laughter stop.

Mary and John arrived at the farm on Mullen Road on a summer day, just before harvest time. Two weeds plucked from a foster home, the girl and boy held hands as they confronted the woman who would be their guardian. Though they were not related by blood, the children were joined by a rope of coincidence and desperation. The girl was named Mary, the boy John. Both had been assigned the surname of Smith. To escape the anonymity of their names, they had added their birth months and became Mary June and John March.

When the children weren't working on the farm, they invented games that involved one kind of prison or another. Mary June loved these games. Something about the farm made her want to play that way, seeking places in the woods where she could act out her dreams of being bound in coils of rope. She became a prisoner of the Martians, of evil cowboys, or-her most cherished fantasy-of a corrupt county sheriff. The threat of law pleased her, gave her a sense of ritual and weight.