XX
“I want to talk to you.”
It was late afternoon of the same day, and the daily downpour was raging outside. The rush of the water, which Lora sometimes found almost soothing, was threatening to drive her out of her mind. She was so sick of everything always being damp, and smelling of mildew! To say nothing of snakes and ticks and mosquitoes and—and men! Particularly one man. She glared at him challengingly as she cornered him at last, sitting at the mouth of the cave, pistol resting on his bent knees as he stared out into the pouring rain. He had taken good care to be out of the cave all morning, and she had a feeling he would have been gone now if conscience hadn’t demanded that he take over the guard duties so that Tunafish could rest. Ever since he had come back into the cave—bearing fish, this time, which they had baked on a rock and eaten for lunch—he had been behaving as though she were a mere acquaintance whose name he had trouble remembering. She had taken it silently, because there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do without making a fool of herself. But as he chatted with Tunafish, and even exchanged a few remarks with Minelli and DiAngelo while shepherding them outside to attend to nature’s call, she felt her grievance grow until she thought she would choke on it. Damn it, she was not disposable! She could not be used once and then discarded like a—a paper plate! As Tunafish dozed and Minelli and DiAngelo stared sullenly off into space, Lora glared at Max’s averted head and seethed. Suddenly, she made up her mind: as the advertisements said, she was mad as hell and she was not going to take it anymore! And so she walked determinedly to where Max stared out at the roaring rain and confronted him.
It seemed to take her words a moment to sink in. Then he turned his head slowly to look up at her. She stood, hands on hips, face belligerent as she glared down at him.
He sighed and lifted a finger to stroke his mustache. “Not now, Lora, okay?”
“Why not now?” Her tone was as belligerent as her expression.
He sighed again. “Would you believe I have a headache?”
“No.”
“Well, I do.”
“Want an aspirin?” Sarcasm stung through the seemingly solicitous request.
“That would be nice, yes.”
“Too bad. Tunafish has taken them all.”
Max sighed again, eyeing her.
“Just who the hell do you think you are?” The question burst forth from her throat of its own volition, fueled by the seething anger that had driven her to tell him off in the first place—and by the resigned way he was meeting her increasingly maddened eyes.
“This is about what happened yesterday, I take it?”
“You’re darned right it is! I don’t like being treated like a—like a—” she hesitated, searching for just the right word. To tell the truth, she didn’t know exactly what he was treating her like. All she knew was that she didn’t like it!
“Like a one-night stand?” he supplied helpfully.
Lora glared at him. “Yes!”
“I knew you wouldn’t.”
His calm response stopped her incipient tirade in its tracks.
“What?”
He eyed her. The resigned look was back, but this time Lora was too confused to respond with the fury it deserved.
“Look, Lora, if we have to have this out, why don’t you sit down? I’m sure Minelli and DiAngelo are having a ball trying to figure out why you’re shouting at me.”
Lora cast a furtive look over her shoulder. Like Tunafish, Minelli seemed to be dozing, but DiAngelo was watching them interestedly. She looked back at Max, who patted the floor beside him. She sat down with poor grace.
“If you want an apology for yesterday, you’ve got it. I apologize. Sincerely.”
“I don’t want an apology! I want to know what happened! Yesterday, when we were—were making love, you seemed—I thought . . .” Her voice trailed off as she found herself quite unable to put what she had thought into words, even in her own mind. “And then you changed,” she added obscurely. “This morning, too.”
Max looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable, then turned to look back out at the slashing torrents of rain.
“Just what did you think while we were making love, Lora?” The question was quiet, but the eyes that turned back to focus on hers were keen.
“I thought—I thought . . .” She floundered in a morass of half-formed sentences, and stopped.
“You thought that this might be the start of some kind of deathless love affair,” he answered for her. That was exactly what she had thought, she realized with chagrin, but now that he had put it into words, it sounded hopelessly sophomoric. And from the way he said it, he thought so, too.
“Well?” he asked, probing.
“What if I did?” she answered, her chin lifting defiantly.
“That’s what’s wrong, Lora. It wasn’t the start of a love affair. At least, not the way you think of a love affair. You’re a forever kind of girl, Lora. You want a husband and kids and a home. You’re not the type to just enjoy having sex with no strings attached, and that’s all I have to offer. Good sex while we’re stranded in this godforsaken jungle. That’s it. After that, good-bye.”
“And you think I couldn’t handle that?”
“I know you couldn’t. I’ve run up against girls like you before, Lora. You’re like spiders, trying to wrap a man up in little silken threads until he’s so bound to you that he can never escape in a million years. And once you’ve got him, you try to change him. I’ve been through all that, Lora, and I’m not going through it again.”
“What about yesterday?”
“Yesterday was not all my fault. You had something to do with what happened, too, you know. You goaded me until I lost control of my temper, and when I lost my temper all my other controls went with it. But what happened was only sex, Lora. Good sex. Great sex. But only sex. Which you enjoyed as much as I did.”
Lora stared up into that dark face, into the black eyes that were shadowed and guarded as they looked down at her. Her eyes touched on the square jaw almost black with whiskers, the hard, thin mouth, the silky mustache, the blade of a nose. They moved over the broad cheekbones, the thick black wings of his eyebrows, the forehead faintly lined with wrinkles as he frowned, the rough black hair that was growing longer so that it curled a little about his ears and neck. She looked at that face, at the muscular neck and broad shoulders and corded arms and the rest, and made a blinding discovery.
I’ve fallen in love with him, she thought, amazed. Something of her stunned expression must have gotten through to him, because he looked first puzzled, then faintly alarmed.
“You’re not going to cry, are you?” There was a note of panic in his voice. Lora stared at him. “I’m sorry I was so blunt, but—”
“No, I’m not going to cry,” she agreed absently. She continued to stare at him, unblinking. This was inconceivable—it couldn’t have happened, but it had. Apparently, she was as much a sucker for great sex as he had feared. She couldn’t let him know. That much was clear. Not now, not until she worked out what she was going to do. She had to have time to think—time to assimilate this catastrophic happening, this time bomb which had dropped out of nowhere into her heart.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” she said, standing abruptly.
“You can’t do that! Have you forgotten we’re in the middle of the jungle? And it’s raining.” He stood up too, towering over her, staring down at her with concern.
He must have thought she had lost her mind, she thought, and after a moment’s reflection agreed silently that she had. But not in the way he supposed.
“So it is,” she agreed, staring out into the torrents. “Then I think I’ll take a nap.”
“Lora . . .” He caught her arm, frowning. “Are you okay?”
She looked up at him. Impossible to believe that she had fallen in love with this disreputable roughneck whom she had never even set eyes on two weeks ago, this macho male who made it clear that all he wa
nted from her was a little sex. Impossible. . . .
“I’m fine. Just tired all of a sudden.”
“Oh.” He pondered that, watching her out of those hooded eyes with concern.
Lora said nothing more, just turned away and crossed to her bunk. She didn’t even lie down. Just sat there, staring off into space while he watched her with growing puzzlement. She needed to think. . . .
The rest of the day passed much as had every day since the plane crash: in preparing meals, sweeping out the cave with a broom made of leaves bound to a stick, shaking out the bedding and carefully examining it for unwelcome guests. Most of these tasks fell to Lora, whose semi-feminist soul would have been outraged at the men’s casual assumption that she would assume all the “womanly” tasks except for one thing: since she and Max were the only two able-bodied persons available, and Max was called on to provide food, stand guard duty, watch over Minelli and DiAngelo, and help Tunafish with his personal care, that left only herself to do the other tasks that needed to he done. Her innate fairness made her realize that, in this case, the work she was allotted happened to be traditional woman’s duties was just incidental. Here in the jungle, each did what life had best suited him for. Max was used to danger and guns and violence. She was not, but she could sweep the floor or cook a trout. So that’s what she did.
Night fell with the suddenness of a breath snuffing out a candle, and once it did there was little to do except sleep. Except for whoever was standing guard—Tunafish spelled Max throughout the night, but Max took on the bulk of the responsibility so that Tunafish could get enough sleep—the rest of the residents of the cave turned in nearly as soon as the sun went down. And rose with the sun as well.
Lora’s abstracted silence ever since her conversation with Max did not go unnoticed. Max himself eyed her warily, as if she were an explosive device that might detonate at any moment. Tunafish noticed, too, and watched her with a thoughtfulness that Lora wasn’t even aware of, so caught up in her own thoughts was she.
“You two have a fight?” Tunafish asked the question casually of Lora when she brought him his dinner of bananas and baked fish. He was sitting on a shelflike rock formation with his back leaning against the wall and his splinted leg propped on another rock. Looking down at him, Lora saw that, of all of them, he had fared the worst in this adventure. Besides the torture of his broken leg, which she knew still pained him a great deal despite Max’s inexpert care of it, he had lost a lot of weight. His flesh seemed to hang about him in folds. His skin had lost both elasticity and tone, and beneath the dark pigment lurked an ominous charcoal gray. His eyes were dull, too, glazed over most of the time, the whites yellow and bloodshot, the irises without life. Of course, some of that could have resulted from his cautious use of the drug. . . . How much, Lora didn’t know. Most of it, she hoped. She didn’t like to consider the alternatives. The specter of gangrene rose in her mind, to be swiftly banished. Surely Max would know if Tunafish had developed something like that.
“No, we didn’t have a fight.” Because of her concern, she responded to that more gently than she might have. Ordinarily, she would have tartly told him to mind his own business. Tunafish saw too much, and this secret she had uncovered about the way she felt about Max was not for public consumption. She didn’t want anyone to know; not Tunafish, and certainly not Max.
“Then how come you been walkin’ around like you seen a ghost all day, and Max been watchin’ you like you gettin’ ready to grow another head?”
“It’s your imagination, Tunafish. You’ve been shut up in this cave too long. Or else you’ve been sniffing that powder again.”
Tunafish grinned crookedly. “No, I ain’t. I ain’t had any dope for days. I ain’t comin’ out of this a junkie, not if my leg falls off. I’ve seen too much of what that stuff can do.”
Lora was suddenly curious. “Where, Tunafish?”
“Everywhere I’ve ever been, all my life. The worst was in ’Nam, though.”
“Did Max ever take drugs? Is that why he is so against them?”
Tunafish cast a sneaking look toward where Max stood pointing his pistol at a sullen Minelli and DiAngelo, whose hands he had untied so that they could eat. They were on the far side of the cave, perhaps twenty feet away with a rock formation partially blocking the area between them and where Lora and Tunafish talked. Still, Tunafish lowered his voice to a near whisper.
“We all did—in ’Nam. Only way most of us made it out of there reasonably sane. Max didn’t do nothin’ real heavy—a little weed, some speed mainly. In our line of work, you had to stay on your toes. Doze off in some of the situations we been in, and that’s the last nap you’ll ever take.” He drew his forefinger graphically across his throat, and Lora shuddered.
“Tunafish—did drugs have something to do with what happened at Mei Veng?” The question popped out of her mouth from nowhere, but even as she asked it Lora knew the answer. It would explain so much—how Max came to participate in such an atrocity, his later aversion to drugs.
Tunafish nodded once, his eyes moving again to where Max still stood with his back to them. “We was all wired out of our minds at the time. Else we never would have done it—not killed all them people, no matter what. But that stuff makes you real paranoid and meaner than a black snake. Me, I told myself that what we did ain’t no worse than anything else that happens in wartime, and I’m able to live with it. Max is more sensitive. He has those nightmares.”
“Yes.” Lora followed his eyes to the subject of their conversation. He was such a masculine man, tall and strong and sure of himself, cocky almost. A male chauvinist to his toenails, she suspected, as incapable of admitting to feeling hurt and lonely and afraid as a pig was of flying. But he was vulnerable too, enormously vulnerable. More than many people who openly asked for it, he needed love. He needed someone to hold him in her arms and convince him that what he had done was not so bad, was not unforgivable, did not put him beyond the pale of normal society. To convince him that he was lovable. And loved. And she meant to be that someone.
“Ain’t you gonna eat?”
Lora’s eyes snapped back around to Tunafish, who was regarding her knowingly. She didn’t even bother to scowl at him, just looked down at the half-eaten plate of food that he had managed to plod through while talking. Her own portion of bananas and fish waited for her by the fire, but the knowledge did not inspire her with enthusiasm. She was sick of bananas and fish.
“I suppose so,” she said without enthusiasm, and with a quick smile at Tunafish moved off to eat her own dinner. Max, she noticed, took care to stay away from the fire until she was safely finished and in her pallet. But the fact didn’t bother her. Now that she had, she thought, figured out what made Max tick, she had also figured out what to do about the problem of loving him: do it without telling him. She would sneak up on him, using the bait of sex to draw him close to her, hoping that by encouraging him to take her body she could find a way to take his heart. It was a dangerous scheme, one that could easily leave her bleeding to death if it failed. But it might work, she told herself. Anyway, it was the only chance she had.
Accordingly, she lay waiting for him when he finally came to his pallet. She judged the time to be around ten P.M., because that was when Tunafish usually took over to allow Max his scant four hours of sleep. She had been amazed to see how well he seemed to function on such a small amount of sleep; like the nightmares, another legacy of Vietnam, she guessed.
Her pallet was so close to his that she could almost feel the heat of his body as he wrapped himself in the blanket and settled down to sleep. She wanted to reach out and touch him, wanted to stroke that rough black hair and hold him in her arms as he fell asleep. But she knew that he was not ready for tenderness yet. What he thought he wanted from her was sex, and only sex. Lora was gambling on the hope that he was fooling himself. Her instincts told her that what he really wanted was love. But he was afraid of it, afraid of her, so he disguised his very human need as mer
e sexual desire, safe in the assumption that she would not permit him to simply use her for such a purpose. Or, at least, he thought he was safe. She meant to shatter that smug assumption into a thousand smithereens.
Cautiously, she lifted her head and looked around. At the entrance to the cave, on the other side of the small, flickering fire that served as much to frighten away whatever animals might be prowling in the dark jungle as to provide warmth, sat Tunafish, his broken leg thrust out stiffly before him, his arm around the bent knee of his good leg. A pistol lay on the ground beside him. One hand touched it absently as he stared out at the inky black night. Across the large cavern, Minelli and DiAngelo were rolled into their pallets, huddled under a single blanket. At night, for safety’s sake, they were bound hand and foot. Lora always worried that some night they just might manage to get free and sneak up on Tunafish while she and Max slept—she never worried about anyone sneaking up on Max—but tonight was not the time to start thinking about that. She had other things on her mind.
Except for the small, orange glow of light cast by the fire at the mouth of the cave, the rest of the huge cavern was dark. Shadows leaped and danced up the walls, highlighting the Mayan drawings so that they almost seemed to come alive. A neat little fence of stalagmites provided a small measure of privacy between where Lora and Max lay on their pallets and where DiAngelo and Minelli slept, but there was only the darkness to shield them from Tunafish’s eyes should he happen to look their way. Outside in the night came the sudden scream of a large cat. Lora shivered, and instinctively drew closer to Max.
She was huddled almost up against his back now, lying on the very edge of her pallet. She stared at the back of that rough black head, at the broad shoulders wrapped in the gray blanket, and for a moment her nerve almost failed her. She had never before tried to seduce a man. . . . But this wasn’t any man, it was Max, proud, stubborn, unreachable Max, with his still bleeding war wounds and his fiercely hidden vulnerability. Max, whom she loved. Taking a deep breath, Lora scooted over until she had closed the small distance between them, until she was lying on his pallet with him, curled against his back, luxuriating in the warmth and hardness of his body. She waited for him to move, to speak, to make some acknowledgment of her nearness. What she got was a snore.
Wild Orchids Page 24
