by Mark Slouka
She still hadn’t turned around, though she wasn’t pulling as hard. As if she knew the act couldn’t hold. She laughed quietly. “C’mon. What’s the matter—scared?”
We saw her at the same time, a woman in a long, flowery dress walking through the woods toward the dirt road. She was carrying a basket covered with a towel.
“Shit, now what?” Tina said. She’d dropped my hand.
“Maybe she’s cool,” I said. I could feel my heart, slowing.
“This is a beautiful place,” Tina called out.
“You guys want some mushrooms?” the woman said, like she’d known us for years. “I can’t help myself—when I see ’em, I—” She saw Tina’s eye. “Oh, wow—you should probably put somethin’ on that.”
IT WAS LIKE SOMETHING out of a shampoo commercial, only real: a wooden cabin at the bottom of a stone staircase set into a hill, a small, still lake alive with the rings of fish like a slow rain. Swallows were dipping and wheeling over the water, touching their wings; a striped yellow butterfly fanned slowly on a hanging basket dripping with long-necked blooms.
A strong-looking shirtless guy with a scraggly, graying beard and a ponytail looked up from an easel as we came down. “Any luck?” he said.
“Almost more than I can carry,” the woman said.
“And somebody to help us eat them—cool.”
We’d just realized we’d been hearing kids screaming when two little girls, one naked, came tearing out from behind the cabin and started going back and forth around their father’s legs, trying to fake each other out.
In an instant he had them both and was walking across the grass to a narrow dock, the paintbrush clamped between his teeth.
“Gotcha! Hey, shtop wiggling.”
“No, Daddy, no.”
“What’d I shay?”
“No, Daddy.”
“Fish gotta eat.”
“No, Daddy—”
“One, two—” Somehow he’d managed to move them both to the same side, a squirming bundle of kid—“three!” And with a great heave he sent them flying—a tangle of arms and legs, one upside down—out over the water.
He came walking back to us, pleased with himself, dusting off his hands. He had a smear of green paint on his temple. “Hi,” he said. “Hungry?”
They made us fried mushrooms, eggs and toast, offered us a joint, gave Tina an herb thing for her eye that smelled like licorice and manure. They made her take the hammock that hung from hooks in the wall—she was wounded, they said. I’d never been in a place so weird, so—easy. We talked about music, the war, the lake, largemouth bass and Henry Kissinger. We listened to Louis Armstrong and Jefferson Airplane and some stuff I didn’t know and at some point the kids, who turned out to be a boy and a girl, led us to the kitchen and introduced us to Sacco and Vanzetti—two white rats who sat on the counter turning crusts of toast in their little red hands like corn on the cob.
We returned to the living room, ducking our heads under the bundles of drying twigs and leaves hanging from the crossbeams. A rust-colored cat lay curled in a salad bowl, a baby slept in a half-covered basket with wilting dandelions tucked into the mesh over its head.
“This is so cool,” Tina said.
“Think so? You haven’t met the neighbors,” said the painter, who was scrunched up on the couch moving his toes around with his fingers like he had a cramp.
“We dig it,” said the woman from the kitchen.
“Anyway, it’s a beautiful place,” Tina said.
“Bug in every bloom, take my word for it.”
“Mostovsky’s pretty cool,” the woman called out. We could hear her talking to the rats: “Come here, sweetheart—you want an olive?”
Someone at the A&P had told her the baby looked like Moses in the Bullrushes, she said.
“Jesus.”
“No—Moses.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Moses ’n’ the Bullrushes’—didn’t they open for Hendrix at Monterey?”
The painter chuckled. “Hey, baby, you want to bring the papers?”
“Who’s driving?”
“You are.” He turned to us. “Sure you won’t partake?”
I shook my head.
“Sure, if it’s cool,” Tina said.
His wife came in and handed him a bag of weed and some papers.
“Anyway, all I was saying was, you know, it’s been tried before, no ties, no guilt”—he licked the joint and lit it—“and it hasn’t worked out so well. All those utopian communities in the nineteenth century—it always gets fucked up in the end.”
“So then how come you guys aren’t married?” Tina said.
He handed her the joint. “Marriage was invented by the church to control sex—everybody knows that.”
“See, that’s what I mean. All this shit that keeps us, like”—she passed it back—“tied down and miserable is changing, right? I mean, you guys are a perfect example of …”
“Muddling,” the woman called from the kitchen. “We’re a perfect example of muddling.”
He took a long toke. “Anyway, don’t get me wrong—I’m all for love. It’s just, you know, I don’t think it’s free.”
He started rummaging around in a pile of books. “Ever read Marcuse?” He tossed a paperback into the hammock. “It’s about how—fuck, what’s it about? It’s about how we’ve been, like, pacified by stuff.”
“Because affluence represses the need for liberation,” the woman called out.
“Right. Exactly. It’s like we’re living in a big room so full of shit we can’t even see that we need to be liberated.”
Tina took a hit and passed it back. “Sure, OK, but what’s that got to do with—”
“OK, so you ever see Let’s Make a Deal? Yeah, like on TV. So they give you a prize, some medium-sized piece of crap—let’s say a TV—and now you have to choose to, like, keep it, or trade it for something behind door number one—which the lovely Katie is pointing to—or door number two or whatever. If you guess right, you get to trade in your medium-sized piece of crap for a bigger one. If you guess wrong, OK, you get what’s called a Zonk—which could be a llama, or a lot of food, or a room full of old furniture—and everybody laughs. After the show of course you get to trade it in for bread.”
“We once met a guy who took the pig,” the woman said, coming in and taking the joint.
“You what?”
She took a hit, let it out. “We met a guy who took the pig. This huge sow. He’s …” They were all laughing by now, squeaking out “he took the pig,” and “zonked with a pig.” “He’s supposed to trade it in after the show for, like, I don’t know, whitewall tires or the Encyclopaedia Britannica or something—”
“It’s like Joseph McCarthy with hooves.”
“—and he says, like, fuck you, I want the pig. It’s staring out the bars of this little Green Acres pen like it’s tryin’ to figure out who to kill first but they have to give it to him ’cause it’s in the contract so they bring it down in the service elevator and throw it on the forklift to get it in his truck and he drives away.”
She walked back to the kitchen.
The artist wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Jesus. Anyway, the machine is like Let’s Make a Deal, man. It controls all the options. Want to know what matters? Pick a curtain. Want to figure out who you’re gonna be? Pick a box. Because that’s your choice: door number one or door number two. When the truth is, we’re surrounded by doors, when every breath we take is a door.”
Tina was sitting up in the hammock. “But that’s exactly why we have to, you know, get off the show or pick the pig or whatever—”
“Sure, yeah, I’m cool with that.”
“So—”
“All I’m sayin’ is it’s not all out there, OK, it’s not all the man—that people are pretty good at poisoning their minds all by themselves. That while you’re, like, fighting to get free from Big Daddy you can’t forget the little daddy in your head bec
ause he’s busy knocking together a cell with your name on it. It’s like, I don’t know, original sin or something, except God’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
The woman came into the room, wiping her hands on a rag. “We gotta split, Mike.” She looked at us. “Listen, you kids want to stay?”
THEY WERE GONE in ten minutes. They didn’t care that we weren’t a couple, or that they’d just met us. It was cool either way, come or go, leave or stay, one of us or both. A quick, disorganized little whirlwind—“Yeah, it’s a drag we have to go into the city … Go, you can get dressed in the car … You want to bring the turtle, bring it”—and they had the rats in a cage and the cage in the car with the kids—the little girl walking up the hill naked dragging a long striped towel, the boy carrying a turtle ahead of himself like an offering—had flashed a quick peace sign through the window and split.
We just stood there in the quiet, listening to the car bumping down the dirt.
“I can’t believe they’d do that,” Tina said. “That’s just so cool.”
I could feel her there next to me—her hair, her sun-brown neck, the hollows below her hip bones just above her jeans. I could feel my stomach, tight against my belt.
She turned and started back down to the cabin. “What do you want to do? Man, I am so high.”
“I should probably take off,” I said. Something in me was shaking like those leaves you sometimes see spinning like crazy when nothing around them is moving. She was barefoot, stepping down carefully from rock to rock. When she swayed, reaching out to steady herself against a tree, her hip, like it had turned liquid, kept going till it brushed the bark.
I tried again: “It’s just that it’s late and all and—”
We’d reached the bottom. It was going to rain—the swallows were everywhere, flashing white, dipping, banking over the water.
“So what do we do now?” she said, turning to look at me.
I couldn’t speak. Somewhere in the woods, a thousand tiny frogs were screaming at once. A fat bumblebee, drunk on pollen, bumped twice into the screen over the window and buzzed away.
“You want to go skinny-dipping?”
“I—”
She took a step toward me, beaten, beautiful, the look on her face somewhere between a smile and a dare. “Would that cool you off, you think?”
“I don’t—”
“Is that what you want?” She reached behind her back, breathing through her mouth now, and the halter fell to the ground. “How about this—this what you want?” And she was in my arms, the heat of her coming through my t-shirt, her hips pressed against mine, her lips, her nose, the freckles on her cheek right there, right there. And she had me by the hand and was pulling me toward the door.
It was a blur, a haze—the tangled sheets, the way she moved, the smell of cedar and damp and her hair falling over my face—all of it unbelievable even as it was happening. She did everything—I didn’t even know I was naked and she was over me, her thighs pressed against my hips, and I felt her reach under and back, her breasts spreading against my chest, and suddenly I’d broken in, was sliding up into that clutching warmth, and I just lay there—too young, too scared, to know what to do, knowing this thing was happening, feeling her moving over me but terrified that nothing would happen, that something was wrong with me. And then I felt it: a stirring, a fullness rising up in me like a wall, irresistibly, shamefully, and she sat up, feeling it too now, slowing, then slowing some more, whispering “Come on, give it to me then,” and blind to the world now, desperate, I clawed higher and broke in her like a wave, then again, and again, and heard her laugh, surprised, then ride it down into stillness.
She was still moving, breathing hard, holding my face in her hands. “I guess it’s been a while, huh?” She pulled back, flushed, to look at my face, and stopped. “Oh, no, you’re kidding,” she said.
I couldn’t speak.
“Oh, my God,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Baby, I had no idea that—”
I’d begun to get hard in her again. I was sixteen.
She kissed me deep. “What’s this?” she whispered. “We have more for Mama?”
She’d started moving again. She was looking right at me, one hand on my face, the other slipped down between us, vulnerable, beautiful. “What the fuck,” she said, her words spacing to the rise and fall like someone riding a horse, “might—as well—ring it in—right.”
I SKIPPED THREE DAYS in a row. The first afternoon she dropped me off a block from my house and I walked home in the rain and let myself in like I was coming home from school. I told my parents I’d be doing my homework at Frank’s. I was nervous they’d notice something, see the change in my face, my voice, my life. They didn’t. I found her where I’d left her, listening to the radio, her brown leg sticking out the car window. Later that night I called to say I’d be sleeping over at Frank’s house. They were fine with it.
I did the same thing the next night, and the one after. Was it alright with Frank’s mother? Absolutely, I said. I knew they didn’t have the number, wouldn’t look it up. I’d left a note with Ray, asking him not to come by the house, that I’d explain.
Every morning she’d call me in sick: I was still down with something, she’d say, looking at me, mouthing the word “me.” I was running a fever, she said—my glands were swollen. She’d hang up the phone. “Well, really just the one,” she’d say, “but it’s so swollen—I don’t think you can go to school like this.” She’d have me out by then. “I better not be your mother,” she’d say.
It rained, off and on, the whole time. It didn’t matter. I built big smoky fires in the fireplace. We made tacos out of the stuff she bought in Putnam Lake by herself because we didn’t want to chance somebody seeing me. One day the sun came through for a while and she walked naked over the steaming grass and out on the dock and dove in and I watched her moving under the surface, ghostly, familiar, parting the water like she was squeezing through a row of narrow windows. I’d never felt so free. On the other side of the lake I could see a fisherman in a rowboat, his line snaking back and forth against the trees, but he was far away.
I have no idea what we talked about. Everything, I thought. We didn’t leave much undone. Whole afternoons would pass while we made love or lay in bed, the sky getting darker, and I remember sitting up while she read my palm, her fingernails tracing my lifeline which intersected with something else. It didn’t make much sense to me. I wasn’t really listening, anyway. I’d be a poet or a murderer, she decided finally, then whispered, “Hey, I’ve got something for you that I think you’ll like,” and slid down and took me in her mouth.
“I can’t believe I’m balling little Jon Mosher,” she said to me once as we lay together, her head tucked under my chin. She laughed, squeezed me around the ribs. “I didn’t mean it that way, baby—you’re fine—it’s just, you know, I’ve known you since you were a baby. I remember when your brother—” She stopped. “Oh, wow. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
She leaned up on an elbow. “I wasn’t …”
“Really,” I said, “it’s fine.”
It was almost dusk. “Do you remember him?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“He was a sweet kid.”
“I’ve heard.”
“You really don’t remember him? You have to remember something.”
I shook my head. “I mean, I was only four when it happened.”
She’d been running her fingers absentmindedly up and down my chest as we talked.
“Still, you’d think—” She stopped, looked up at me. “Oh, my God,” she said. She breathed out—her smile rueful, warm, suddenly protective: “You’re sixteen?”
I WANTED TO GO with her, I said. I meant it. I had no reason to stay. We’d had a great time, she said.
“I want to go with you,” I said.
“Where?”
“I don’t care. Anywhere.”
“Baby, I ha
ve no idea where I’m going.”
“Fine.”
She was pretty sure that was called kidnapping. She’d been planning to split, anyway, she said.
She didn’t laugh when I told her I loved her. She didn’t pat me on the head or patronize me or tell me she wasn’t into being exclusive with a sixteen-year-old kid. She didn’t make me feel bad for sitting there on the edge of the bed like some six-foot one-inch infant, wiping my eyes with my wrists, humiliated. She didn’t push me away any harder than she had to—she just left. She gave me a hug and told me I was a great kid and that we’d see each other again someday and then she put me in the car and dropped me off a block from my house and drove away.
And the way I learned to think of it, I’d had my three days. Though I’d miss out on all the grooviness the next summer, I’d had my share of the promise, of Richie Havens singing “Freedom” like a cry, like that rhythm could make it so, like he was John Henry up against the machine and he’d pound those strings till he died. I’d had a taste—this is what I told myself—and cut out just before the mud and the shit came down.
MOST THINGS didn’t change much—some did. Summer came and went, a heavy blanket you couldn’t get out from under. School ended and they killed Bobby Kennedy and then it was the Fourth and we were watching them turn the hose on the field where the fireworks had set the weeds on fire. I took long runs around the reservoirs in the mornings before the heat came on, slapping deer flies into my hair. The afternoons I spent in my dad’s store, the two of us working quietly, sorting, stacking, then walked over to Ray’s, sweating up that long hill as the light changed, then died, and the first soft thunder like bombs in the distance sounded in the still air.
We didn’t hang around the house much because his dad’s hours had been cut back. I’d come over some days and Mr. Cappicciano’d be sitting on the couch in the heat staring at the TV like he wasn’t seeing it at all, a can of beer in his hand and I’d say, “How you doin’, Mr. Cappicciano?” and he’d turn his head slowly from the TV and look at me for a few seconds like he didn’t know who I was, and then something would click in his eyes and he’d nod.
