His hand felt hard, like a branch. Now that he was close, I could smell him. I didn’t smell barroom so much as I smelled him: sweat, dirty shirt, that pelt of jet hair. He slipped his fingers back a little farther, making the cotton tight. His thumb was at the front of me.
“Is it closed?”
I didn’t have to say yes or no. I just had to let his hand stay between my legs. I hadn’t wanted him until he touched me, so I didn’t know if it was just a hand I wanted, or him— cowboy, arch-angel.
Howling dog.
25
the cowboy stank.
When we started screwing in the kitchen, I pushed myself up on my forearms on the windowsill and stood on my toes to let him inside me. He fucked me standing in his jeans and boots, but after a couple of minutes, he pulled away from me and we went to the bed.
That was when I really got a whiff of him— when he stripped down. I smelled old sweat, armpit stink, and someplace underneath, wood smoke. He smelled a little like my college boyfriend Phillip, who didn’t change his shirts every day and whose scent could almost make me come, but he also smelled like Cree, my high school boyfriend, after he’d been camping.
But the cowboy was not Phillip and he was not Cree. He was entirely himself.
“You smell like meat,” I said when I got near him. He went to pull me on top of him, but I pushed him away. I buried my nose in his side and licked up his skin to the damp hair under his arm. He was bitter.
His cock was bitter, too. Not the drop of semen at the end— but his head and shaft. First I tasted myself, like salt, since we’d fucked in the kitchen, and then I tasted him.
“Goddamn it,” he said after a little while. “Let me fuck you.”
So I got his cock out of my mouth and then I climbed on top of him.
“Now I know you, too,” I said.
26
THE NEXT DAY, after the cowboy left— back to Wyoming, or Black-duck, or wherever it was that he was living— I picked my letter to Breville up off the floor. I had no idea if I would see the cowboy again, but something in my body told me I would. I knew I hadn’t had my fill of him, and I thought he felt the same way about me. Still, none of it was anything I could count on, and I didn’t want to give up what ever friendship or flirtation I had with Breville in the meantime. If I added the two men together, one with his constancy and the other with his black kisses, I had something complete.
When I read what I’d written about my orgasms, it seemed obviously crazy to send it. Breville told me the guards read prisoners’ letters, yet here I was writing about my sexuality to a convicted rapist in Stillwater state prison. But I remembered how Breville had held me the day I dropped in on him, how his voice had sounded when he called me sweet, and how he had offered me what he could when I felt bad. And I decided to finish the letter.
I wrote, “Sometimes it seems like my orgasm is a tiny animal inside me. It comes out when things are safe, when I feel relaxed. It’s blue-green, and moist. Other times my orgasm isn’t like that at all. It’s a rushed, pressing thing. I try to get my body to come before the man does, try to hold myself up on one arm and come on his cock.” Last night I’d come that way with the cowboy: kneeling at the edge of the bed, holding myself up on one shoulder, working my vibrator so urgently my hand cramped, while he screwed me from behind, standing. My cunt was just the right height that way, and he could wear his leg brace. But of course I didn’t put that in my letter to Breville.
“But that only stands to reason,” I wrote instead. “Even if each of my orgasms is similar to others in some ways, each one is also different. And the ways to get to them are always different.” But I didn’t tell Breville more. I didn’t tell him that I sometimes came in a matter of seconds if I’d been thinking of it long enough before-hand, or that my favorite fantasies when I masturbated were of women. I didn’t say that some days this summer I masturbated two or three times, in part because the time itself was so intimate, filled with swimming, stripping down and toweling off , damp skin and hair. I didn’t tell him that one day I had to hide in the corner of the cabin because I’d started to masturbate in the living room and had no clothing on when Merle had come knocking on the door. And I especially didn’t tell Breville that it was my current thrill to think of my breasts being bound or having my nipples pinched hard enough to hurt. The thought of those two things alone was nearly enough to make me come.
It wasn’t that I thought Breville wouldn’t like hearing all of it— if he was anything like other men I’d known, my fantasies of redheaded women and bondage would excite him. I just didn’t want to tell him. Those things were my private thoughts, and I didn’t want to reveal them. While nothing I ever wrote to Breville was dishonest, it was calculated.
Besides, there were always things I held back from a man. Even with my rape, even as I was trying to sort through my rage with Breville so that I might one day leave it behind, there were things I didn’t tell him about that night. But he was not the only person I withheld that information from— there were certain things I never told anyone. Not lovers, not friends, not the different therapists I’d seen over the years. For instance, I never told anyone about the worst part of my rape.
It wasn’t the gonorrhea or herpes, and it wasn’t the hard strokes of the fuck Frank L—— gave me. It was something he said to me when his penis was inside me.
Because I was dry, it burned each time he moved into me. It was like fire, it was like a knife— I didn’t know how to describe the slicing, burning sensation. But I lay still, thinking it would hurt less if I didn’t move.
“Good pussy doesn’t just lie there,” Frank L—— told me then. And because I wanted it to be over, but mostly because I didn’t want to be a bad lay and a lousy fuck, I began to move with him. I participated in my rape.
And that was the thing: because I had believed I was going out on a date, because I willingly got in the truck, because I was convinced on that day when I was sixteen that my main worth in the world was sexual, I believed I had to please my rapist. Him of the stinking hair and infected cock. And in that way, Frank L—— became king of my vagina, boss of my pussy, chief of my cunt.
That was the secret I shared only with my rapist. That was the thing I never told my friends or Breville.
27
I TRIED TO FULFILL at least some of Breville’s request the next time I went to Stillwater. I wore a black dress that buttoned up the front. It came a little past my knees, but I left the bottom two buttons unbuttoned. While I was standing still or walking slowly, the dress really looked no different than it would have if I’d buttoned it all the way. It didn’t look different until I was sitting down in the visiting room chairs, beneath the spider plant, across from Breville.
After we sat down, after I looked at the buttons on my dress and then at Breville, he said, “Open a couple more.”
“How was your week? How have you been?” I said, crossing my legs. When my one knee was up on the other, I passed my fingers over a button and slid it out of its hole.
After Breville replied, I went on. “I swam across the lake yesterday,” I said, opening another button as I talked. “One of the people who lives over there gave me a ride home. She couldn’t believe I swam all that way.”
Keeping my eyes on Breville’s face, I uncrossed my legs and slowly moved my knees apart so he could see more of my thighs and black panties.
I thought Breville would say something then— would compliment me or respond in some way. But he was silent. I could see from his face it all meant something, and that what ever was going on inside him was powerful. But his silence still embarrassed me.
“Do you like it?” I said, but my throat was tight and my voice didn’t sound right.
“More than you know.”
“Tell me a story,” I said then, pushing my shoulders down, trying to relax. “Tell me about the time you were in California, when you saw the Pacific. Didn’t you go to San Diego? Am I remembering that right?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Anything you want to tell me. How did you get out there?”
“I hitchhiked. I hitchhiked until I got to San Diego. And then I hitchhiked home.”
“You didn’t want to stay?”
“No, no. I don’t know. Maybe,” Breville said, his voice evening out a little. “I had nothing except the clothes on my back. Someone stole the rest of my stuff . Even my shoes.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy I was hitching with. When we pulled into a rest stop, I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, there he was, pulling away with all my shit. I had nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. A pair offlip-flops. He left me standing there.”
“God, weren’t you pissed?”
“Course I was. But what do you expect? There’s no honor among thieves,” Breville said. “I probably would have done the same thing to him, if I could have.”
He stretched his arms then and spread his legs wide open so they could be on the outside of mine. Then he slouched down in his chair and kept looking between my legs.
“I think the guy wanted to make a pass at me,” Breville said. “And when he saw that wouldn’t work, he stole from me.”
He brought one leg inside the angle of mine and bent down to tie his shoe. As he was tying, he stared down the tunnel of my thighs.
“I wish I could see it,” he said.
I looked at his face after he said that, but I didn’t know if he meant he wished he could touch me and be with me like a normal person, like a lover, or if he just meant he wished I hadn’t worn panties. I could have asked, and maybe I was going to ask.
“Do you ever shave it?” Breville said.
It took me a moment, but then I said, “No. No. It’s not my thing.”
“Did you ever think about it?”
“Not really,” I said. “People can either take me the way I am or they can leave me.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you that. I’m sorry.”
“You can ask. I’m just telling you the truth.”
“No, I shouldn’t have asked. Not here. Not like this.”
We sat silently for a moment, and when Breville looked away to the guard’s table, I inched my legs back together.
“I heard from that lawyer the other day,” he said when he turned back to me.
“What did he say?”
“He said I should try an appeal. That my case had merit. That I got bad legal advice to begin with.”
“He told you that?”
“I knew it all along,” Breville said. “If I’d pled guilty, I’d be out of here by now. It’s not like I killed anyone.”
When he said that, everything inside the room just stopped. Just stopped. I understood Breville was talking solely about his case, and I understood he had already served longer than the mandatory minimum state sentence for rape. But the words bothered me. Stuck inside me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think something died in me after my rape.”
Breville looked at me, and almost without pause, he said, “I felt that way too. After the rape.”
And I did not know what to say after that, either, because I didn’t know if he was telling me a part of him had died after he raped the woman in South Minneapolis, or if he had himself been raped in prison. I didn’t know, and for the second time that day, I didn’t ask Breville exactly what he meant.
It seemed neither one of us knew where to go after the comment. The rest of what we talked about was idle chatter. Nothing of consequence.
Just before Breville and I left our chairs to say goodbye in the taped-off square, he said, “Can I see it one more time?”
He again bent to tie his shoe and fix his pant leg. Again he looked down the channel of my thighs to my black panties. And when he sat up, he looked from his lap to my eyes and back to his cock. This time I knew the language well enough. And when Breville lifted his chin to me, his lips parted slightly, I understood that, too.
He must have wanted me to be sure, though, because he said, “Good enough to eat.”
I didn’t know how to feel when he said that. I felt confused by everything that had just passed between us. But a shiver went through me. I could not explain it because I did not feel comfortable or at ease, but there was this current that kept flowing out from Breville to me. Over to me and over me.
When Breville and I held each other in front of the guard that day, he said into my hair, “I’m falling in love with you.”
“Are you?” I said. And then we were pulling away from each other.
When we turned the last time to see each other before we each walked through our respective doors, Breville put his hand out to make the pass through the air as he usually did. When I put my hand out, though, I didn’t hold it flat to make the Steady motion. Instead I held my hand in the air, palm toward him. As if I were touching his chest, touching his skin. And Breville nodded. Three or four small, nearly imperceptible nods, but I saw them. And I knew he understood that I felt something for him, too. Even if I could not say, I felt it.
28
THE MORNING AFTER I came back from the Cities, Merle stopped at the cabin on one of his walks. He was wearing a jacket and his Kubota cap, even though it was already about eighty degrees out.
“Sorry to bother,” he said. “I was just wondering if you were around last night.”
“I was down in the Cities and got in late,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, I was away for most of the evening, and when I came home, my garage door was open.”
“And you didn’t leave it open?”
“Never do,” he said. “I just wondered if you saw anything. Heard anything.”
“I can’t say I did.”
“Strange. I just never leave that door open and there it was, standing open.”
“Does it worry you?”
“Oh, I’m not sure there’s anything to worry about,” he said. “I just found it notable.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll try to be on the lookout.”
“I also wanted to tell you they’re looking for a teacher, over to the high school.”
“What kind of teacher?”
“Your kind,” Merle said. “English, I mean. You can read it yourself. It’s in the paper.”
When I said I hadn’t bought the paper that week, he made me walk with him back to his place so he could get his copy out of the kindling box.
“I guess I might not find out who was in my garage,” Merle said as we walked.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “And they didn’t take anything?”
“No, not that I can see. I just thought I’d ask. In case you heard something.”
There was a part of me that wondered if the cowboy had been back. But even if he had been, and even if he’d been looking for me, what possible reason would he have for going up the road to Merle’s or for opening the garage door? It made no sense, and I chalked up the little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to my wariness and to Merle’s questions.
In fact, the whole conversation made me wonder what Merle was trying to get at. He walked the road at all times, several times a day, and he would have seen the cowboy’s truck at the cabin. Would have heard him, too. Each time the cowboy was here, we screwed long into the afternoon, and each time he came, he’d done his coyote howling. Even though the cabin was set back a ways from the road, who knew what Merle had heard?
“Thanks for the paper,” I said then, my hand on the screen door. “I’ll bring it back when I’m done.”
He waved his hand. “No need,” he said. “Keep it. I have plenty.”
When he said that, he sounded like himself, but his eyes were impossible to read under the cap. I told myself there wasn’t anything more to the conversation except someone fretting about a door left open when it shouldn’t have been. And if there was more, I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
That night when I came from a swim, the phone was ri
nging. When I answered, it took a second for the recorded voice to begin saying, “This is a collect call from an inmate at a Minnesota correctional facility.”
When the voice was done, I said, “Hey, how are you?”
“I’m sorry I’m calling,” Breville said. “You know I don’t like to call and stick you with the bill.”
“It’s okay. What’s going on?”
“You should know it’s usually bad news with me,” he said. “Do you have time for this?”
“I have time.”
“All right, then. I’ll just come out with it. I talked to my counselor today. About you. About us. I don’t want to tell you what she said. But I have to. I have to. She always tells me the truth, you know?”
“What did she say?”
“She said this was a false relationship. What you and I have. It’s an artificial relationship.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, “Artificial?”
“Because there’s no way for us to share experiences together. There’s no way for us to do things together,” Breville said. “It’s not a real relationship. That’s what she told me.”
“Well,” I said. “I think she’s probably right.”
“Jesus, I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Well, you can’t share anything with anyone,” I said. “Not while you’re in prison. But does that mean you’re supposed to go without friendship?”
“It’s not friendship I talked to her about. I told her I had feelings for you.”
“What else did you tell her?”
“That I cared for you, and that you were making a difference in my life.”
“Did you tell her about my rape?”
“I didn’t say anything about that.”
“You might want to,” I said. “You might as well be honest.”
“I don’t know. It would probably just make it worse. What she says— do you really think it’s artificial? What’s between us?”
“I think probably it is,” I said. “But it still means something to me.”
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