The fourth should orbit the guy. Instead it lands him off the blanket, body lengths away in the crowd. Now the first crew’s found another human volleyball and started up again. They’re joined by a third. And a fourth.
And the moment finally comes—time is splendid and inexorable—Bill Graham in the spotlight, a little thinner and weirder than last season, still sharp eyed, sharp edged as an aging buccaneer. “Ladies and Gentlemen, for the first time in three years—their seventh American tour—their third Day on the Green—from London, Rollo McInery, Nicki Cavanaugh, Harlan Parr, Tommi Rhymer! Welcome Belshangles!”
A sudden onslaught of sound and vision: a light blast exploding out over that compact forest of upstretched human arms and hands, sweeping the rosy waving flesh like a bed of coral polyps at the bottom of the sea.
Wish that all the lovers
I ever had were you:
Well I wish that all the lovers
I ever had were you.
What’s fast is too soon past
And the past turns future fast—
And it’s much too late for gettin’,
But you must admit the wishin’s new.
Wish you were the only
Traffic on my road:
Well I wish you were the only
Traffic on my road:
For you its concrete eight lanes wide
Top speed four lanes to a side—
Little red flag behind you
Sayin’ Caution: extra long load
So on down to the very final chorus, as the whole great crowd, holding up the appropriate fingers, chanted with him:
—MACH ONE!
MACH TWO!
MACH THREE—
Just SO long,
SO long sweet lover
As you don’t mock ME.
Time hastens. All the best shows are too soon over. The crowd shuffles out onto the concrete ramps, dazed and lowing like thirsty cattle. Knowing pain, withdrawal, loss for which there is no cure.
This young guy stumbling along behind me is practically shouting to the sky, “Oh God, I’ve seen what I wanna be when I grow up, and the job’s already taken!” You think that’s a funny line? Turn around and check his face. Not funny. “There’s gotta be room in the world for more of them! You think they could use a road company?”
I made it home and into bed unchallenged, and greeted in the quiet my usual concert after-symptoms: the high steady singing in my right ear and a kind of shimmery rustle in the left, like distant tambourines.
———
I don’t make the turn too elegantly; a steep left hairpin down into darkness. Then a tooth-rattling eyeball-bouncing cattle guard (Tom sits up rigid, like somebody goosed him), and a row of little white diamond-shaped signs with inspirational messages:
Side View of Chainsaw, Must Use Spark Arresters!
Side View of Motorcycle: Must Use Spark Arresters!
Side View of Cigarette: Crush All Smokes!
Side View of Nothing: Enjoy Your National Forest!
Twenty miles to go. Down the ridge I stutter in the log truck ruts and across the dam. Buck and sideslip up the far ridge, jitter down. Along Bright’s Creek, and across the bridge. El Dorado National Forest: Land of Many Uses.
One of the many happens to be logging.
The past two summers’ Federal Timber Sales have butchered half the woods between our property and Bright’s Creek. Big diesel Cats hauling off corpses of trees I’ve personally known since childhood have chewed all bloody hell out of the place. I wonder what the puzzled roots think, left in the ground. The bark still grows and tries to heal on them. The sap still flows. Death comes slowly.
Certain whimsy to National Forest signs: right out at the back of beyond you come on cryptic little wooden strips:
Leech Lake trailhead, 2.7 miles
Upper Franchiere (site) 3.8 miles
Snatch Springs 7 miles
Well here, in the middle of what looks like World War I, one of those small ecologically inoffensive strips says
Pardee Camp (private) 2 miles
We are farther from the world than we were.
They blocked our road at the timber sale boundary with cratered earth and splintered logs. We have to drive off south around a ridge and back, and join the stub of our past below the meadow. Fewer people come here by mistake.
Congress swelled Mokulumne Wilderness Area by 15,000 acres; it rubs uneasily against our eastern property line, as logging does against the west. Fiddler’s Lake is closed to vehicles now. One guy who’d fished in there for years defied the signs and drove in anyway. They made him take his jeep apart and pack it out.
Congress could take Pardee for wilderness, Papa says. And will, some year. Private ownership, like private love, doesn’t have much impact on their planning.
But the trick is, none of that really shows from Pardee Meadow. A quarter mile of our own trees stand tall between. Tom doesn’t know. And like a peculiarly modern Quasimodo, crying “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” where there is no sanctuary, hauling my Esmeralda (for the second time) up a bell tower the Church condemns for demolition—
I think that I won’t tell him.
My sanctuary is the Forest of the Night: less a tower than a journey underground. Here tree trunks grow to secret columns between floor and roof. Darkness amputates distance; there is no sky. Young trees crowd to meet us, combing their spikey hands along the car. Suddenly, we’ve arrived.
“You know. I got a question I’m afraid to ask.” Whispering on the porch. “How’d you get me in here? The time when I—y’know.”
“Carried you.”
“With your friend?”
“All by my lonesome.”
“My face is red.”
“Doesn’t look red from here.”
The rickety front porch at Pardee is black, moonless subterranean as the inmost gallery of a mine. The meadow is a vaulted hall; I see glowworms on the ceiling.
“Y’have the keys?”
“Oh, sorry.”
He told me to prop the door. Then he boosted my rear to the porch rail, and gathered me into his arms.
And I’m remembering something (he circled around in the dark close room) about being borne up on eagles’ wings—until his shins came up against an old sofa. We tumbled onto it: instant replay of the backseat in Carson City, only this was the remix, the extended play.
“We haven’t had our champagne yet!”
“Don’t shout, I’m right here, y’know.”
Together we went out and carried in his bag, his fiddle, our champagne, to where the kitchen light made an almost infinitesimal puddle of home comfort in the enormous blackness of the woods.
Papa eases his champagne corks out a micron at a time. Tom comes from a different school of celebration I can tell; he fires his off the ceiling.
“Have you a hammer in this place? Come on, I bet y’do. Nails too, what?” He took the hammer and a nail selected from the can, and climbing sock-footed onto the Formica table beside the fizzing, fuming poppy-painted bottle, surveyed the ceiling. “There ’tis.” He bent his knees and bit his lip, and ceremoniously nailed the champagne cork into the dent it generated. I admired the droll figure that he made, all long spidery arms and legs against the kitchen light. Taking a gold pen from his breast pocket, he wrote, there on the ceiling beside the cork:
Thomas Peter Rhymer
Miranda Dolores Falconer
August 17, l986
One glass for him. One for me. Second glass for him. Second for me. Third glass for him. I’m gazing up into the light. Wonder how it feels to be a moth and spin around it.
“Problem?”
“I’ve never split a bottle of champagne.”
“You want I should finish that?”
“Thought you didn’t drink anymore.”
“A man can’t be stone cold sober on his wedding night,” he said. “Well, it’s not proper. Y’got to pay tradition some respect.”
It was all gone,
anyway.
“Y’want to stay here, or camp out like we did?” He waited. Except for light that flowed in from the kitchen, the little bedroom was broom-closet dark. “Whose bed is it anyway? Your parents’?”
“Grandparents.’”
“Well that settles it: we stay here.”
I’m thinking. My grandmother hauled it from some old body’s attic when she was a bride, butched the legs and painted it (walnut country gothic was out as out in 1929), and then, when they bought real furniture, it came up here, and since their time my parents slept in it—
“Y’know—” he said, “—been eying the cut of that dress all afternoon, conjecturing—” He slipped his thumbs inside the neckline, just above both collarbones, and popped it deftly outward off my shoulders. “Ah.”
I said “Whoops!” or something like it, followed by “Wait! Wait!” The bra straps followed the shoulders they were pinned to. The sleeves were peeling inside out now, two long reptilian sheddings: soon I’d have no hands for anything. It all went down as far as my waist, and stuck.
I got inside the front; unsnapped the bra. “There.”
The thumbs continued their smooth passage down my sides. When they reached the waistband of my panty hose, they simply slipped inside. Every hair all over my whole body stood on end.
Dress, bra, hose and two quiet hands progressed toward the floor. When the thumbs reached the top of my briefs, those joined the party and went on downward with the rest.
Tom knelt, freed my left foot, naked, from dress and hose and briefs and shoe, kissed and set it naked on the wooden floor. The right followed, neat and clean and kind. It made me want to cry. If only he could get those thumbs inside that straightjacket euphemism of modesty, and slip it simply to the floor as all the rest.
Tom stood up and said, “Now me.”
It was a proper giggle; it was better than the wine. Standing naked in the dark, playing Easter hunt for little pearly rounds on a smooth cotton front. The last two were down inside his belt. I had to tug his shirttails out, steam pressed from being next to him.
Without the belt the cotton trousers found the floor all on their own. Kneeling on a pile of my own clothes, I picked his feet up like a pony’s and slipped away the cotton socks.
His shoes were under the kitchen table. His hips were a slender silhouetted blackness inches from my face. If he had on any briefs, I couldn’t see where they began or ended.
A vertigo’d mountaineer discovers going down and going up suddenly, and equally, unfeasible. Arms around his legs I clung, cheek pressed abruptly tight to body warmth, silky skin, hot clean smell.
“Well,” he said, “I thought you were going to make love to me for real this time, not just in your mind.” He waited for something to happen. “It’s easy. It comes with the body.”
With his, maybe: not with mine.
“Problem.”
“Yeah.”
“What.”
“I don’t feel like much of a woman.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t much feel like one.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like something else. Don’t know.”
“What.”
“A mind with eyes.”
“Huh,” he said, hoisting me by the elbows. “Let’s have a go.” The go he had was extensive. “You feel like a woman to me. Well, don’t you suppose I’d know?”
I did suppose. His whole front was up against my front, warm as summer and much more tangible. And I didn’t suppose he was faking. Not exactly. Oh, if only I could wrap him all the way around, and go to sleep inside.
“You feel exactly like a woman. Say I’m telling you the truth. C’mon. Saying’s easy.”
“You’re—telling me—”
“—and you taste just like my woman, and you—”
“What.”
He planted his nose against me and drew in, as if he could inhale me to the bottom of his lungs. If I were inside him, he would be my outside. I’d be wearing him. My battered but beautiful coat of many colors.
“—Smell exactly—like—”
“Like.”
“Like you’ve got the hots for me.”
Ridiculously true. No room at all for disagreement. And he did have briefs, because he found my thumbs and hooked them in the waistband.
“All right. Now say, you’re going to make love to me, because you’ve wanted to forever; longer than I’ve known you were alive. Say it.”
“Can’t.”
“Say it.”
“Can’t.”
Is saying easy? Is it? Is it? What I wanted, the only thing I wanted, was to submit to him. And now it seemed, even saying that might be impossibly difficult.
Whereas, in reality—it wasn’t hard at all.
Monday, August 18
Black dark. The moon had come and gone.
He reached out, keeping one hand on my wrist, and groped a light on. Scars. Two deep grooves below the wrist, growing shallow down the outside of my arm.
“I put myself through a glass door once.”
He raised a face of pure dismay.
“I call ’em my suicide scars, but it wasn’t on purpose. There’s a number more: it all took fifty stitches.”
Dismay mellowed to relief, and relief to cunning. He switched the light off. Some time later, a finger planted on my forearm. Back on with the light.
“Uh-huh. That’s one.”
The little shield-shaped scar, where one long sliver stuck straight in. He eyed it silently, a marred place on his property. Lights off.
Close to morning he turned it on again; he’d found the ziggy lightning bolt scar on the heel of my right thumb and the “zipper” down the middle finger. He turned my brown hand over in the light, surveying for more damage.
“That’s it,” I said, “You’ve seen the lot.”
He found the small white line that rings the outside of my little finger, from ball to nail.
“That’s not one, I did that to myself the first time I saw oysters growing wild; I was prying ’em off rocks with Papa’s jackknife and eating ’em on the spot, up to my knees in water and nobody anywhere around, and the knife closed up on me. I cried; I thought I’d bleed to death, but the oysters were such fine little things, I kept on prying.”
That got the slow grin, and the lights out, finally.
“Hey—” he said, “We’re not so very different, are we?”
Chapter 4
The mockingbirds don’t count; they sing all night. But aside from them, the earliest risers are the hermit thrushes. A little five-note rising, slurring phrase in the half-light—with my preoccupations, I always heard it as the first two lines of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”—repeated endlessly, first high, then low.
Liquid. Deliberate. Mischievous. Daybreak in the woods. I decided he was set to sleep all morning.
Well, those were his hours. That was what he did, sleep all morning. Somebody would have to get up eventually. Get up and make coffee. In England it might arrive at his bedside on a tray. Get up and make breakfast.
In other words, get up.
I extricated with the greatest care. He was a nameless lump under the comforter. My bare feet whispered on the dusty wooden floor. I’d gotten as far as the little hall when he hit me from behind. Still quite naked, but he had the comforter with him. He popped it over my head like a sack.
Through the kitchen, the front room and the front door he half-propelled-half-carried me, wiggling, giggling, blind inside the comforter.
———
Thinking, about a campy nineteenth-century poster that used to grace the inside of my bathroom door: the scantly clad shepherd boy and coy cozy shepherdess running from the rain under the billowing protection of his cloak. I used to have a pad and pencil on a string below it for friends’ captions.
Well, that’s how we look, only barer: the comforter flapping and batting around our heads; and there isn’t any rain; only autumn sun and we’re
running from it, clear across the meadow, dodging willow clumps, water spraying where we hit the marshy places.
In the aspens’ golden fluttering shade, between plump boulders scattered like hospitable gray granite pillows in the green shag meadow, he spun the comforter out wide.
He spun ourselves out wide on top of it.
“You’ll get it dirty!”
“So I’ll buy a new one!”
Then to be quite fair, there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.
But eventually the old wheels began to turn, thinking, how similar being really beautiful was to being super rich. You get one lover dirty, finding fresh ones was trivial as new bedding. They were lined up at Tom’s door. Thinking, how truly odd of providence to have put me in that queue at all: but at the head of it? Wondering about Harlan, how Tom had got him dirty. Hard to accept. Harlan and Tom together were Belshangles. Their music had been my lifeline once. But more than that—I realize he’s looking at me.
“One place on you,” he says, “I haven’t gotten in yet—” (with some alarm, I can’t imagine where). He plants a sleepy finger just between my brows. “—I mean to get in there.”
“Maybe you just think you haven’t.”
“No, no. Oh, I can hear the action going on, like a party happening down the hall, and I wasn’t invited.”
Funny. My feelings about him and Harlan once. They were at a party in each other’s heads; I wouldn’t ever be invited. But Tom had always been the guest of honor at my mind’s party, maybe the only guest. Curled with him in the comforter, below the meadow flowers, I wondered about Harlan’s party, whether all the fun was over.
“Like just now,” he said. “What were you thinking?”
“This moment?”
“This very moment.”
“Just now?”
The lush and weedy meadow stood up all around, leaned above us eager to hear: fragrant white cotton balls, tiny white lace balls, ragged purple star balls, all smiling and dancing on grassy stems, bowing to each other.
White Leather and Flawed Pearls Page 9
