I am safe. Even asleep, I know I am safe. Safety is something I smell, something that is warm and strong around me. It is safe to sleep now, safe to dream, as it has not been for a very long time. Like a swimmer plunging into blood-warm water I will myself deeper, feel the dream close in over me.
I am dreaming a summer day when I was nine years old, in the last of my one-digit birthdays. I am in the forest. It is the height of summer, and the forest is a sleeping animal. I walk over its skin, feeling its breathing all around me. I am sensing the wholeness of it, leaf and twig, bug and bird. I am tired of being an intruder here. I want to join it, to be within it and have it inside me.
It is a hot day, so very hot that I am unfastening my clothes and throwing them aside as I walk. I unbutton my shirt and throw it aside, pull my undershirt over my head and toss it over a branch. My pale skin looks dead, unnatural, but in a matter of moments the sun browns my chest and back and belly, until they are as dark as my hands. I stop briefly and skin out of my jeans, baring white legs and flopping ape feet. But as swiftly as my sun-browning, hair sprouts on my offensive legs, cloaks and covers them. I feel a tightening and turning of muscle and bone, feel my feet contract into tiny graceful white hooves. And there I am, a faun, as free as he, finally truly belonging to the forest. I try my new legs, and I can caper and prance as elegantly as he can. I find the muscles and make my tail whisk, keeping time with my high steps.
Something occurs to me, and I halt suddenly, my hooves cutting skids in the moss. I lift a cautious hand to my head, grope through my hair until I find them. They are small yet, and it feels incredibly good to scratch all around the horn buds. I have a leisurely scratch, and then notice the position of the sun. It is almost past the time, I am almost late. My dream self does not know this, but I hurry her on anyway. Down the survey cut, over the boggy places, skipping and leaping over the water from tuft to tuft with a wholly new grace. This time it will be right.
I follow the flow of the slough, come to the place where a tiny creek feeds into it, follow the creek until it is running through a gully with steep-edged sides. The day is hot, but down here it is cool, for the alders and birches lean overhead and shade the smooth mud banks. Cool green ferns drip down the side, and overhangs of moss drape groping bared roots. Baby’s breath is in bloom, tiny white flowers sweetening the air until it is almost too potent to breathe. I am going to a place I discovered last weekend, a smooth place on the bank that showed many hoof tracks and the fossil-like print of a hairy flank pressed into the cool earth. I think it is a place where a moose calf sleeps away the height of the day’s heat. Today I am going to catch him napping.
I come upon him now as I did then, with a suddenness that takes my breath away. He is sleeping, skin and flank pressed to the cooling earth, no moose calf at all, but the very young god of the woods. His lips are smudged red with berries. A few still cluster in his carelessly outflung hand. For a time I stand on my side of the creek, staring at him, just as I did so many summers ago. In that other time, I was afraid to awaken him, fearing both the wrath of the god of the stories and that he would flee and I would never again look on such a wonder. In that other time, I left him sleeping there, and came back, day after day, to look upon him sleeping until the day he awoke and found me and was not afraid. But this time, I wade the stream, setting each hoof carefully on the wet rocks that slide under my weight. I awaken him with a gentle tug on his curls, and he sits up, rubbing his eyes sleepily but unafraid. Then his sleepy eyes widen and he leaps to his feet. His eyes travel up and down my self with undisguised delight, and I know that he sees we are the same, that we belong together. He embraces me, the hard hug of the overjoyed child, and I return it, holding him so tight that I wonder if we will meld into one creature. He steps back from me suddenly. He waves his hand, and the wind strikes up, piping a wild tune through the branches of the trees. We take hands and begin the dance.
We move well together, doing the wild steps perfectly, spinning and prancing, dancing the years down around us. The seasons pass around us, gold autumns, white winters, pale springs, and verdant summers, and we grow together, my hair getting longer, his beard coming in. He gains height on me, but my new breasts jut more proudly than the shining black tips of his wicked horns. His chest and shoulders muscle from boy to youth, but my arms are as round and brown and strong as his. Step for step, I match him, as the dance pits us against each other. The muscles of his back move under my hand, and I feel him hold me as we spin, refusing to let the impetus whirl us apart. The dance brings us closer together, until we are dancing breast to chest, lip to mouth, eyes never closing, and the dance never pausing as I feel him enter me, forming the link that makes us one.
Relief sweeps over me that we can be one, that I truly belong at last. “I’m home, I’m back,” I say into his mouth, and he laughs into mine. Everything that ever bound me and kept me from him is gone, swept away like debris carried away by the river’s rising. I feel the force of the final thrust that plants me with his seed and suddenly there is earth beneath my back, and I am aware of my body, supine, sprawled, weight atop it. The world spins wildly around me as I reorient myself on its face, back down, the moon and stars and tangled branches over me. And his face, looking down into mine, eyes brighter than any stars. It is still a dream, I think, until my ears feel his voice so close, words warm with breath as he tells me, “Yes, you’re home.” It is as he withdraws, warm, wet, that I come fully awake.
I shudder, shocked at our sudden separateness, and it passes into a shivering I cannot control. But he holds me, and the strength of his arms, the warmth of his skin, are all I could ever ask for. Slowly the shaking passes, but I don’t let go of him, and mercifully, he holds me firmly, safely. His embrace was the safety I dreamed, his scent let me know I could relax my guard.
Time slides by like a slow river. We are covered by his blanket, pillowed on my pack, enclosed by the great crotch of cedar roots where I had decided to sleep. Gradually I become aware of more things, of my jeans and panties tangled still around one leg, my shirt open, my bra pushed up. I don’t wonder how I slept through it, I simply struggle free of them to lie skin to skin with him.
His eyelids are drooping, his breathing is deep and steady already. There are a thousand things I need to tell him, questions I must ask, apologies to make. I take a deep breath to begin, but his hand comes up swiftly, two of his fingers gently silence me. “Have you ever noticed,” he asks of the night sky, “how much better it all is when we don’t talk with words? For one thing, it’s much harder to lie to each other when we don’t speak.”
I am very still, then I nod cautiously. He lifts his fingers from my mouth, skates them lightly over my face. I am motionless, hypnotized by his touch. “Sleep,” he suggests, the word fuzzy by my ear, and I do, finding a sleep deeper than dreams can follow.
It is not morning when he wakes me. It is not even starting to be morning. But by the time he has mated me twice, the light is starting to change. I am dressed and have gathered my belongings by the time there is enough light to distinguish shapes. Pan seems to have no possessions other than the pipes on the string about his neck and the blanket we share. We move silently through the woods, trying not to disturb leafy branches heavy with dew and yesterday’s rain. It is a black and grey world we move in, reminding me of old moody films. There is not enough light for me to distinguish color, but as my eyes become accustomed to functioning in the low light, I find it restful. Shape and motion become more important than color; I find my senses strangely sharpened, and I think I am seeing more in this half-light than I ever did in the sun’s full dazzle.
Color and life slowly bleed into the day. We are miles from where we slept before the birds begin to stir. We strike a road, and follow it, not on the shoulder, but paralleling it through the brush. He pauses once, reaches back to pull me close to his back. “Stay right behind me,” he whispers in my ear. “In the wake of my scent.” I am puzzled, but I obey.
It i
s still too early for humans when we turn aside from the road. He leads me boldly down a driveway that winds for half a mile between tall poplars before it widens out into a farmyard. There is a white mobile home with pink trim, with a collie asleep on its rickety porch. The dog doesn’t even flicker an ear as we pass.
Behind the mobile home is the old barn, its boards gone silver with age. Relic of a bygone era, there is room within its loft alone for a winter of hay and straw. Its stalwart indifference to the years make the trailer house a cheap toy. The sheer size of it dwarfs us all, but Pan doesn’t even pause to look up at it. Mindful of his words, I follow in his shadow, and when he finds a door left ajar and enters, I follow him.
Within is a warm darkness flavored with the breath of animals, with stored grasses and grains and the droppings of beasts. We go past two stalled horses, and then a sow in a box stall with a litter of piglets feeding. None of the animals express any surprise or interest. As certainly as if he were the proprietor, Pan leads me on to a meshed room of chickens dozing on their roosts and in nesting boxes. He motions me to stand still while he enters, to thieve eggs from under sleeping hens without stirring so much as a cackle from them. I hold out my shirtfront and he fills it to sagging with small brown banty eggs. Then we leave the barn as we came, but from the farmyard we do not return to the road. Instead, we cut across a field of corn, walking between the tall stalks. He adds four ears of young corn to the load in my shirt, and in the next field, he harvests six carrots, their bright orange smudged still with damp earth.
He never pauses in his steady pace as we leave the plowed lands behind and enter yet another stretch of woods. This is a fairly young forest, one that has been logged off and burned over, but was never replanted. Trash trees and brush have taken it over, and it is more open and airy than the woods of last night. Its greens are paler greens, its trees delicate twiggy things, and the morning breeze sets every leaf to fluttering. When the sun becomes a presence in the sky, and the day birds and insects start to sing, he halts our trek.
We sit in a dappling shade, to suck the eggs and leave the empty brown shells in a mound. He rubs the carrots over the moss to clean them while I strip the husks from the pale corn. The kernels are pale but full, and very sweet, and so tender that Pan eats his cobs and all. He shares out the cleaned carrots, and they finish our meal. It is more than I have eaten in days, and with a mouthful of water from the canteen, I feel satiated.
I lie back on the mosses and sweet grasses, and it seems only natural for him to lie beside me. I close my eyes as he loosens my clothing and pulls it away. Sex with him is natural and easy. I do not even need to think about orgasm, it is a gift we share when the time is right. The mating is simple and straightforward. No time is wasted trying out inelegant and obtuse positions; we do not compete to prove which of us is more imaginative. Yet each enactment is endlessly varied; it will never become routine between us, there will never be a time when his touch is any less electric. Afterward, we sleep through the heat of the day, mate again as the shadows begin to lengthen, and resume our journey in the cooling grey twilight.
The burned-over forest stretches long around us. We cross a stream, where we drink and fill our canteen. I remove my shoes and briefly cool my feet in it, while Pan hovers and waits. There is no impatience in the way he stands, but I sense his urgency to be moving again, and I do not linger.
As the colors are fading from the day, I make a kill. He sees the rabbit first, shows it to me with a jerk of his chin. I freeze instinctively as he continues a casual walk that will take him close by it. The rabbit is as still as I am, ears up, body tense, but almost invisible in the shadowy brush. Pan springs suddenly, too soon, he has misjudged the distance. I see his hand slip over its hindquarters as the rabbit shoots off and he tumbles face first into the brush. Two bounding steps let me intercept its flight. It runs straight into my hands and I clutch it firmly, one hand closing over its furred head. I swing it up as it kicks wildly, and snap it like a whip. The weight of its body breaks its neck with an audible pop. It gives a few feeble jerks and is still.
I stand there, gripping its head still, feeling the weight of its body depend on it. It is a large rabbit, weighing about as much as a newborn infant. I heft its body, feel the warm loose weight of it. Alive, dead. Quick as a snap. Fast as flicking off a light switch. Alive, dead. Like that. But there’s no going the other way. No dead, alive. Here is this body, in perfect working order save for a break in the spinal column. If it was a machine, a mechanic could go in there, redo the connections, put the protective couplings back in place, turn the key, and hey presto, the rabbit goes again. But it’s not. The finest surgeons in the world couldn’t take this rabbit, repair the damage, and start it up again. Even if they fixed all the connections perfectly with microsurgery, even if they rewarmed the body, renewed all the fluids, they couldn’t start it up again. Alive, dead. That must be the weirdest thing about the living things. Once the spark is gone, it’s gone, as if it had never been.
Pan takes the rabbit from my hands. He is looking at me oddly. I look back at him and realize with sudden horror how fragile he is. It’s not in his sturdy body or bright eyes, not in the softness of his hair or the curve of his lips that his vulnerability lies. It’s that he’s alive, and if that is interrupted, if the heart ceases pumping, the brain stops firing, the lungs stop swelling—he’s gone. There’s no fixing him. All it takes is a brief pause. He reaches to touch my arm questioningly, but the contact jolts me away from him. It’s not safe to love him, no safer than it was loving Teddy. Fingerprints, hoofprints, the rain washes them all away just as swiftly.
I stare about me, suddenly seeing stumps and carcasses. All of it temporary, every leaf, every buzzing insect. Nothing permanent here.
Nothing permanent save the earth beneath our feet. Whatever falls there does not perish, but is sucked in and broken down, to be renewed, to live again as rhizome or spore, butterfly egg or speckled fawn. I shake my head abruptly, feel that foreign world view subside. I touch gazes with the faun, who slowly nods. I am convinced he knows exactly what passes through my mind. Once more, we move on, the rabbit dangling limply from his grip on its hind legs.
When full dark of night comes, we halt and make a tiny fire. I offer him my knife, but he shrugs, and snips a tiny incision in the rabbit’s belly with his white teeth. He sets strong fingers in the tiny hole, widens it with a tug, and then rips the hide loose. He works his fingers in between skin and meat, sliding them up over the rabbit’s naked body, gradually widening the hole he works within. His fingers are strong. I hear the sharp snaps as he breaks the forepaws and hind legs at the last joint, and leaves those scarcely meated parts inside the hide. He slips the rabbit free of its skin neatly, and with a final twist and jerk pops its head off. He is left with a rabbit skin with the skull and feet ends still inside it, and a bloody carcass with the guts still membraned inside it. His strong fingers claw the entrails out and separate the liver and heart. He offers them to me, but I shrug, so he eats them himself, a quick chomp and swallow for the heart, a more leisurely chewing for the tender liver. His lips and mouth are red, I know, but the jumping light of the flames shows them only as darker. He snaps and rips the rabbit into portions, skewers them on green sticks, and props them over the fire. He pauses to see they are secure; then he comes for me.
We make love while the meat cooks. Firelight licks his body with the wet sheen of polished wood, polishes mine to gold. His mouth tastes of blood, and his hands leave dark tracks on my skin. The smell of the fresh blood mingles with his own intoxicating scent, lending it darker overtones. I glimpse the legends as he takes me, the wilder side that panicked Roman maidens at the sight of him, the purposeful carnality of him. This is no prancing Disney faun; this is the satyr, penis apricked, from a hundred Greek vases and bas-reliefs. Abandoning all pretense at civilization, I pull him to me boldly, daring myself to embrace this darker side of him. For the briefest of instants he resists, and I know that I have
surprised him, that he had expected me to draw back from this aspect of him. But I have not, and he laughs aloud, a sound of discovery as he surrenders control to me.
The fire has burned low by the time we get to the meat. I expect it to be burned, but it is more smoked than cooked. We devour it quickly, gnawing the small bones clean and then throwing them into the fire. I think we will make love again, but for once Pan seems content. He wipes his hands clean on the moss, and takes up his pipes. He plays very softly as the fire burns down, a piping that is a weaving back and forth, the music of life consumed by other life and fueling new life. I lie back and stare at the stars, and let the music console me. The pipes take the sudden cessations of life, the jarring halts of mortality, and weave them into rests in the music, soft pauses in a song that goes on and on. Nothing to fear, it says, the song itself will go on forever, though each note may be played but for an instant. Under the influence of the song, I surrender myself to the small death that is sleep without fear.
That first day sets the pattern for all others that follow it. Each day I am awakened by his lovemaking. We travel in the times of the changing lights, spending both the times of full light and the times of full darkness in rest. Always we travel, always north, though I have never spoken of any destination. Each day, we forage what we need, from gardens, from the forest, once from a roadside produce stand, even from a farmer’s smokehouse. I grow leaner and lither, feel the years dropping away as every day I do no more than walk and eat and make love. It is a simpler life than any I have ever known, and sweeter.
The frequent coupling, four and five or six times a day, seems a part of the rhythm. Whenever he touches me, I desire him. So simple. I am aware, peripherally, of the way his scent changes, how he masks our passage through farmyards by exuding some neutral scent. A part of me knows there is something in the way he smells when he comes to me, some powerful attractant in his spicy musk, that numbs any hesitations or inhibitions I might have. Pheromones, I think to myself occasionally, sleepily, and picture moths flying for miles to follow one elusive scent. But like the trees of the forest, names do not matter here. Pheromones or love, it all feels very, very nice.
Cloven Hooves Page 27
