The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

Eugene, on the other hand, grew quiet and introspective. In fact the more apparent Catherine’s desire became, the more ill at ease he appeared, as if he felt that something was expected of him which he was not prepared to give.

  Catherine saw this clearly, but it didn’t faze her. She rejoiced at how she was feeling; she rejoiced at being alive again in the real world, a world so much richer and more complex than she normally perceived it. The glorious challenge of it! The delicious and inexhaustible irony. This man had shattered most of her illusions about bikers—why not the macho stereotype as well? She sensed Eugene was different. Even Ram had said so.

  Time expanded until now was all the time and space there was. She and Eugene had the universe to play in, to recreate, to make fruitful with love. She teased him with her eyes. Her gestures, even though fine-tuned, seemed to her laden with suggestion and provocation. Yet they seemed right to her, orchestrated with the exact nuance she’d intended. This was only partially the seductiveness of a mature woman. It was more nearly the delight of a child. Its message was not, “Come on, Baby, let’s get it on,” but, “Wow! Feel this happening between us!”

  Meanwhile, the electric tension Catherine found so exhilarating was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for Eugene. In the company of this woman his mild buzz was getting out of hand. Something in him was responding in all the wrong ways, and he was feeling less and less able to control his reactions. He was becoming hard not in arousal but in defensiveness: in his heart instead of his cock.

  What was happening to him was new only in its severity, probably due at least in part to the pot. So he rode with it as well as he could, trying not to compound his confusion by dwelling on it; sensing that Catherine could see inside his skin and therefore not trying to hide his uneasiness so much as to outlast it, weather it—without ruining things for her in the meantime. But then that was largely out of his hands anyway. She didn’t need his help at all right now. He was grateful for that, although even her strength had a negative effect on him. Things were just happening too fast. The attraction he had felt for her was buried under…resentment. She was rushing ahead with something that should be drawn out, savored.

  Impatiently, he reached up and pulled off his bandanna headband, which had begun to feel like a tourniquet constricting his brain. Shaking his hair out as if this might clear his mind, he abstractedly picked at the knot until it loosened and came free. Suddenly he felt Catherine’s eyes on him and realized that for a moment he had all but blanked her out of his consciousness.

  He looked up. Her smile was that of a tolerant lover, not the adversary he had begun to imagine. He felt instantly lighter. Becoming aware of the bandanna in his hands, he flipped it a couple of times to unroll it and raised it to his face like a bandit’s mask. Catherine laughed. “Who is that masked man?” she said. Somehow it was the funniest bit two people had ever done together. They exploded into laughter and reached out to grab each other’s hands.

  As quickly as it had come, the laughter died on their lips. What was in that touch? Catherine had the instant feeling this had all happened before and was trying with half her mind to remember when and where, while the other half gazed in wonder at this man across from her. Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, melting one into the other, their mouths now organs of their hearts, perfectly and yearningly united in an unbroken seal whose bond was not the pressure of their mouths but some primal remembrance of fit and shape, contour and temperature and taste, as if they had grown up kissing each other—as if the whole world and all its secrets and sensations could be encoded in a kiss and conceived in the warmth and wetness of the mouth.

  Then Catherine felt, as in a dream, the thing she longed for drawing inexorably away from her. Her sweet confusion was pierced by indescribable anguish…while Eugene felt himself shrinking in stature and desire and the wish to share himself. He grew desolate, angry, despairing all at once and drew away from her, loath to meet her eyes. But he forced himself to, and once again there was someone there who, without understanding, accepted. She was waiting only for some word.

  For an instant he experienced intellectually what had happened to both of them emotionally a moment earlier: he was meeting someone in a way totally unlike anything he had ever known before. He should give her some kind of explanation for his behavior, but he didn’t know where to begin.

  He took a deep breath. “I’m gonna take a walk.”

  “In the dark?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with me. I need to be by myself for a while.” He reached out and touched her knee. “I’ll be back soon.” He stood up and she asked herself what she had done wrong. Nothing came to mind. Was he just afraid of women? He hadn’t seemed so earlier.

  “It’s all right, Eugene,” she said, puzzled and hurt and frustrated. He heard all of this in her voice and it both tore at him and gladdened him in a savage perversity. The realization of this, the discovery that he could be this much a puppet, jerked around by emotional strings from God knew what unconscious source disgusted and appalled him. He turned and felt his way cautiously into the dark, away from the fire and Catherine’s questioning gaze.

  If only the darkness were so impenetrable he could lose himself in it. That’s who he wanted to get away from, not the girl. But that was bullshit wasn’t it? It had started with her hadn’t it? Even in his intense discomfort, because of it, he was intrigued by her…by this extreme ambivalence in his response to her. The way they had met was all the more interesting now.

  Catherine was bitterly disappointed, not intrigued.

  This beautiful moment was going to waste. She stood up impatiently. Damn if she was going to go stomping around out there in the dark though. Why the hell had she stayed here anyway? Why couldn’t the moon come out? This guy was different all right—she didn’t much care for the difference. In resignation, she took her boots off and crawled into the tent. She’d probably be awake all night, she grumbled to herself. But five minutes later she had curled deep into slumber, wrapping a dreamless sleep around her as a comforter in the chill night air.

  Chapter 18

  Catherine awoke and lay quietly, letting the morning infiltrate her senses. Suffused with sunlight, the translucent sides of the tent had been turned a creamy golden color. Awakening beneath the nectar dome, she said sleepily to herself. She had slept soundly and felt refreshed. Her memory of the night before was like an interestingly shaped and colored rock beckoning from the bottom of a pool; all of its broken edges had been polished smooth in sleep. She plucked it from the water and examined it in that special clarity between awakening and rising which is one of the gifts of sleeping in the open. The stone’s glossy surface yielded no answers, but it was soothing to touch.

  Eugene wasn’t there. He’d apparently covered them both with his sleeping bag when he came to bed. It was luxuriously comfortable in that warm pocket. She stretched every muscle she could feel and wriggled against her own bag beneath her like a dog on its back. That morning mountain air! Filling her lungs with it, she sat up and leaned forward to stretch the web of muscles across her lower back. She extended the exercise by getting to her feet bent at the waist and, with her weight on the balls of her feet, twisting from side to side while slowly straightening. Then without bending her knees she reached to touch the floor of the tent, shrugging and stretching shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers. When at last she’d succeeded in working into her body the pleasant warmth in which she’d awaken, Catherine felt ready for anything.

  It was a gorgeous morning: rain-washed, storm-cleansed, with a sky as clear and blue as it ever got anywhere. Where was Eugene? She hadn’t decided whether to go or stay. Jebel would be restless as hell by now, but she dismissed that as an acceptable reason for leaving. A better one would be that Eugene’s behavior last night was his way of telling her, whether he himself had gotten the message or not, that they just weren’t on the same wavelength, however interesting they’d found each other at first.

  But was there mo
re to him, that was accessible and worth discovering, than he had revealed? Though it had been all too brief, the kiss they had shared had been extraordinary. In fact, as she held the memory of it in her mind, she found herself responding to it all over again. There was a feeling of wanting to open herself, with her arms unfolding like wings, exposing not only her breasts and loins but some even more intimate, inner part of herself; not just vagina and womb either, some part beyond flesh, though her flesh rejoiced at the feeling…some part that flesh became, or led to. She couldn’t take it any further; the image got too vague and she was getting needlessly stimulated. All this from just remembering. She regretted now that her ensuing disappointment had overwhelmed the unfamiliar, almost too-vulnerable sense of yearning. Again she recalled Ram’s apparent interest in the biker. What was that all about?

  Substantially the same argument was taking place in Eugene’s mind. He felt somehow that their paths had not crossed purely by accident. But had the two of them already learned all there was to be gained from the meeting, or was there more? His morning “meditation” had become a sort of intuition-scan. He liked the term though it wasn’t working.

  …The stallion, indeed quite restless, was placated when Catherine led him from the pine trees to the stream and then to that lush grass again. She was going in the water; after that she’d decide what to do. Maybe Eugene would be back by then and help her make the decision. She took a towel from her small backpack and walked down the trail to a smaller pool, out of sight of the clearing and in the sun.

  In seconds she was out of the tight jeans and sleep-smelling blouse, her bikini panties and bra, leaving them in a warm heap on a rock beside the pool. As far as she was concerned, there was only one way to go into a snow-melt stream: not toes and feet first and then wading in up to your knees, but all of you at once, without taking time to think it over. But this was a rather shallow pool, with rocks jutting from the bottom. She scurried around in nervous anticipation, searching the clear water for the safest spot to land and determining the best place from which to jump…then sailed in, pulling her knees up and flinging her arms out to cushion the impact. A perfect landing. Her feet came down on a slanting mossy rock that was perfect to push off from—and push she did, as reflexively as a healthy knee jerks when tapped in the right place.

  “Eeeowww!” She’d forgotten that one of the essentials of this kind of dip was a scream powerful enough to rip the needles off the nearest pine tree—and sure to bring any unsuspecting fellow campers on the run.

  “You all right?” yelled Eugene, running up in what couldn’t have been more than five seconds and stopping at a discreet distance as his eyes answered his question for him—as well as a couple of others he’d had since yesterday. Catherine wasn’t about to jump back into that water for the sake of “decency”. In fact for all practical purposes she was in mid-flight from the pool to her towel and clothes and couldn’t have altered course anyway.

  “Yes I’m all right I’m all right!” she managed to get out before snapping up the towel and wrapping it around her while simultaneously rubbing her shocked pink skin with all the nervous energy the frigid water had unleashed. She was in ecstasy. This exhilaration afterwards was what made the icy plunge worth suffering. It could leave your skin tingling for hours and the emotional high had been known to last all day.

  “See you back at the tent!” Eugene called as he turned with a certain amount of chivalrous regret from the enticing scene. Catherine was too busy rubbing and dancing in place to answer, but the abbreviated swim had accomplished what she’d hoped it would. She knew now that she wanted to spend some more time with Eugene. Hell, it couldn’t hurt. She didn’t want or need anything from him. Last night was last night. This morning she just wanted to keep flying. If Eugene couldn’t keep up with her, fine—she and Jebel would fly right on home. If he could…she shivered—then so much the better!

  He’d done the cooking last night, so she hurried up from the pool while Eugene was making the coffee and rummaged through his gear for food and utensils. Though to him her actions looked almost like an old-time movie projected at normal sound speed, to Catherine they felt rapid, smooth and fluid. In no time at all she’d located what she wanted to fix for breakfast—eggs again and granola, with bananas to slice over it; toast, honey, and frozen juice which of course was no longer frozen—as well as the necessary pans, cups and utensils, before Eugene had a chance to decline her offer to help or to offer his own.

  He prided himself on his efficiency, but he’d never made a breakfast this fast. The surprising thing was that none of her energy was wasted. She didn’t spill anything or pick up something only to make room for something else. She couldn’t have choreographed the meal any more precisely, and he was impressed.

  “Was that ordinary water you were in down there, or some kind of enchanted pool?” he asked dryly.

  “Try it,” she said with a smile—her whole breakfast was a smile—“you’ll never be the same again.”

  “I believe that’s where we met.”

  “Ohhh yes, so it was. Well, it’s the same water; did you feel any different afterwards?”

  “After gettin’ in the water, or after meeting you?”

  She laughed musically, without for a moment losing any of the concentration that was materializing their breakfast in record time. “I do seem to remember some harsh words being exchanged,” she said.

  “Not exactly ‘exchanged’.”

  “You’re right. You just sat there in the water with your eyes getting bigger every second, like you’d just met the demon of the lake or something…”

  “Which I had.”

  “Well, demon of the pool anyway—and I did all the talking.”

  “Screaming. In answer to your question,” he continued, slowing things down, “I haven’t been the same since I laid eyes on you. I’m not usually this…” He threw away a gesture of helplessness with a smile of self-deprecation. It was a simple statement, eloquent in its honest ambiguity. The food was ready and they sat down to eat. The meal was every bit as good as Eugene had anticipated.

  “You don’t seem like the sort of man to go all to pieces over a lady,” she said teasingly. This time she added an eyelid flutter to her arched eyebrows.

  Eugene grinned with a mouthful of scrambled eggs. When he’d swallowed, he added, “Not even one who treats food with such respect.”

  Catherine saluted him with her tin cup of orange juice. She hadn’t slowed down any and as a matter of fact had instilled some of her high energy in Eugene. Both of them were eating at almost the same accelerated speed with which she’d prepared the meal.

  “Not the best cook, the most beautiful woman—or the best lover,” she said when her mouth was nearly empty again.

  “I can vouch for two of those.”

  “Well thank you.” She rewarded him with a smile that went right to his core.

  “There’s a difference between going to pieces and going through some changes though. You’re an interesting woman, Catherine.”

  “Interesting? That sounds like the kiss of death.”

  He didn’t answer, and they drank their coffee in a silence that wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, just noticeable. Digestion had begun to slow them both down; they were beginning to feel really good again.

  “…Think I could ride that thing?” Catherine was looking in the direction of the motorcycle.

  “You mean would I let you, or would you be able to?”

  “Would I be able to.”

  “With a little instruction, sure.”

  “Well, do you feel like doin’ a little instructing?”

  “…I guess so.”

  “Don’t let me talk you into it.”

  “Tell you what—I’ll trade you lesson for lesson.”

  “Do you want to? You’re on. Which first?”

  “Let’s start with the bike. I don’t wanta get thrown on a full stomach.”

  “You won’t get thrown. Not with me teac
hing you—come on!”

  “What say we clean up first.”

  “Oh screw the dishes!” She was already running across the meadow, the high wet grass soaking her jeans clear to her waist. Her excitement was infectious; Eugene threw down his cup and sprang to his feet. “Yeah, screw the dishes,” he said to himself, laughing.

  Catherine was already pulling cover and branches from the bike in one clean sweep when he came up. It had survived the storm without so much as a water spot.

  “Shall I get on?”

  “Not unless you can ride it outa here by yourself. You ever been on a motorcycle?”

  “Never.”

  “Then wait till we get it back on the trail. If both of us got on after the rain we had last night, we’d cut hell out of this clearing.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  With Eugene pushing the heavy bike through the hip-high grass, Catherine had nothing to do but walk along beside him growing impatient. Motorcycles had never elicited anything in her before but disgust. Now all of a sudden, here in this pristine setting, the noise and exhaust and gasoline smell didn’t even occur to her. She thought only of enhancing the pleasure she was feeling—with speed. Instead of standing by passively while the morning flowed past her, why not ride out and meet it, head-on?

  At last they reached the logging trail that led out to the road. “Get on in front of me,” he said. She thrust her left leg nimbly over the gas tank and settled lightly onto the seat, wiggling her hips up against his crotch. He hadn’t quite realized until now how small she was physically. Her wet hair smelled like the sweet grass they’d been walking through. Her shapely little butt was as round and inviting as a piece of fruit swelling into ripeness. He had a sudden urge to slip his hands beneath her, one under each plum-ripe cheek. He cleared his throat instead.

  “This lever on the left,” indicating the handlebar, “is the clutch. You familiar with a stick shift?”

  “Of course. That’s what I have.”