Daniel braked his mallet midway to the chisel and glanced up. "Yeah?" His flat black bad-guy cowboy hat bounced on his long greasy pony tail, and his scraggly beard bobbed a question mark between his bony blue adam's apple and his twisted roman nose.
"No, I wasn't calling you," Steve groaned from the roofbeams-huge ponderosa pine logs that he'd just learned to call "vigas". Daniel, after all, happened to be a Motherfucker, and proud of the name: a former vegetarian peacemarcher who'd seen the light long before Chicago or even the Pentagon, he was a founding member of New York's Lower East Side anarchist chapter of SDS, known to the public as the Motherfuckers, and even now, here in New Mexico, he wouldn't drive to the nearest bodega for a six-pack without his sawed-off 12-gauge pump beside him on the front seat of his beat-up International. "I just smashed my frigging thumb again, that's all."
"Well, why don't you curse, then? Say 'Liberal', " Daniel smirked disgustedly, and returned his attention to the doorpost he was carving from a weathered cedar. "You know, Steve-O, as a fuckin' carpenter, you'd make a pretty good fuckin' editor."
Steve decided to ignore the jibe. He stuck his throbbing left thumb in his mouth and sucked hard. It didn't ease the pain much, but the taste of blood, his own, gave him something else to think about. He shifted his weight from one ham to the other, then back again immediately-a knot had jabbed him squarely in the ass-hole. From his vantage point-where the garage roof would be, if and when he ever got these watchamecallems, latillas, aspen saplings, nailed down in a herringbone pattern for the ceiling-he could see the whole show spread out between his knees: two dozen wierdos ex-speed freaks, street fighters, and acid heads, playing at craftsmen on a twelve-room adobe mansion with all the frills and conveniences of both the 18th and the 20th centuries; just for instance, there was to be a fireplace in each and every room, and also copper heating coils, at seventy-five cents a foot, under all the flagstone floors in case the owner-to-be didn't happen to have a match or two sticks to rub together.
Two dozen happy-go-lucky hippies, plus one past-thirty exeditor with a mangled thumb. And a budding bodhisattva, named Bill, from Boise, Idaho, for a boss. There went Bill now, galloping down the hillside towards the tool shack with his shoulder-length blonde hair streaming in the breeze, leaping over wheelbarrows and piles of adobes, to answer the strident phone. Most probably it was only one of his straight partners wanting to complain again about the lack of progress and the swelling payroll. That was a daily occurrence, and there was certainly reason: a crew of six would have been optimum at this point in the job, but Bill could never lay anyone off, or turn a deaf ear to the plaint of a hard-up freak. Bill, however, was praying, and everyone else was hoping, whenever the phone rang, that it would be some retired Birchite manufacturer or air force general with $80,000 in his bank account and a taste for sumptuous quasi-authentic Territorial architecture. Still, Steve wished Bill would stop galloping around the place all day; the rest of them were lethargic enough without the stark contrast of Bill's saintly energy.
Besides, Steve told himself, it was Bill's own fault if the crew wasn't worth a shit today. He-Steve-had been doing fine for a change, until Bill passed that joint at coffee-break. Any dope really can knock you down at seven thousand feet above sea level, at least until you're completely acclimated, but this was super-grass; it must've been. Christ, and it hadn't even blossomed yet-what would it be like at harvest time? Two tokes, and four hours later, including lunch, Steve's brain was still quacking like Donald Duck. If the roach had made it around the circle one more time, he'd probably be hallucinating. He hadn't tried acid or mesc since he'd been here, and he wondered if he would ever dare.
Look at Jerky Jerry now, supposedly tending the concrete mixer, staring raptly into a swirling, roaring, liquid maw that had become the Great Wheel of Life, a hogshead of Gallo muscatel, and his wife's gamy cunt all at once. A mind for which "blown" was a euphemism-Hiroshima, August 1945, was as close as Steve could come by way of literal comparison. "I'm an alcoholic and a hard worker," Jerry had told Bill, who asked, "But I thought the Native American Church was down on drinking?" Jerry nodded brightly: "Peyote's my religion; alcohol's just my problem." Bill put him first on trucking adobes, and Jerry immediately backed the flatbed into a freshly laid wall. At least the mixer was stationary but if Morris didn't come by and goose him back in the general direction of reality with his shovel-handle every quarter-hour, one of these afternoons Jerry would slowly merge nose-first with the sloshing gray source of all his bleary speculation, and his fat wife would have to go back to panhandling around the plaza. The Original Dirty Hippie, as even Daniel the Motherfucker called her, she was such a sorry mess that not only tourists but occasionally even one of the Indians would toss her a nickel. "Ever try it standing on your head with all your clothes on in the closet?" Jerry had suddenly asked the crew at large the other day at lunchtime. "My wife and me did last night. We try all kinds of different things-she read in a book that that's the way to have a meaningful relationship." Usually, though, he wasn't sober enough by noon to discuss anything more than who was going to lend him fifty cents and drive him in to the liquor store for another pint of sweet.
Here came Morris with his shovel, a good five minutes early. He wasn't in that much better shape than Jerry, when it came down to it. If his Flatbush Kosher mother could only see him now: barefoot, bearded, beaded, and breechclothed, making goat's milk cheese for lunch in his last pair of socks, his woolly head stuffed with astrology and primitive Christian rites, a bone ankh on a cheap silver chain around his neck and a yin-yang tattooed around his bellybutton.
Morris was seventeen; he'd run away from yeshiva the week before his bar mitzvah; dropped his first acid on the Coney Island IRT; came down briefly to find a New Orleans bartender sucking his cock in an Oklahoma City motel; snorted smack in Denver; woke up again behind a row of plastic garbage cans on Nob Hill with a spikeful of speed in his elbow; cleaned up for a summer and subsisted on brown rice, dandelion greens, surreptitious fig newtons, and nightly group sex on an organic farm above the Russian River; hitch-hiked to L.A. and promptly got rolled, raped, and busted for possession; spent three months getting rubber-hosed and corn-holed by the guards on a state farm; landed next in a Venice pad where he found Christ by way of Kahlil Gibran and starred in Ka queer 8mm. color epic; escaped with a first-class case of Vietnam clap to the Berkeley free clinic; and finally joined the exodus to New Mexico because all of California (plus probably Arizona and Nevada, for good measure) was due to fall off into the Pacific at any star-determined moment. A fairly typical biography, good for a third of the crew with heterosexual adaptations or probably half of the other hippies on Canyon Road.
Yet Steve had come to Sante Fe to save his sanity. Quite seriously. Of course, there had been hardly any freaks around the previous summer, when he and Ruth and the kids had come through and made up their minds that this was the place to escape to-plenty of alcoholic D.H. Lawrenceera bohemians, nuttier probably by far than anything Haight Street ever saw, but few of these love-generation guerrillas.
What the hell: it was still a glorious place, and he and his wife and son and daughter all had a happier, healthier life here than they could ever have imagined back in New York. In three short months each had changed so completely that no one in Manhattan would recognize them. Steve gazed down past the bib of his still-starchy Sears-Roebuck overalls: his beer belly was gone, absolutely; his calves and thighs were starting to show the contours of functional muscles; and his cracked, scratched, bruised hands with their split, blackened nails were brown and strong for a change, capable of manipulating more significant implements than typewriters, pencils, bottles and steins. His face, as he knew from hurried early-morning glances in the chipped piece of mirror that hung from their pumphose wall, was still considerably cross-hatched by years of brainwork; but behind his lengthening sun-reddened hair and wild new beard, it was tougher, leaner, darker, younger than he had seen it in fifteen years.
Ruth hadn't had a potbelly like Steve's to lose, thank God-her figure hadn't altered a millimeter since college-but the crows feet and that sidelong cocktail-lounge leer were leaving her eyes; her shoulders no longer curved inward in their always futile attempt to shield or conceal her full breasts; and the high-heeled stalking gait was gone from her slender legs. She was barefoot most of the time now: dancing lightly in a tattered ankle-length skirt around the old kitchen where she produced an endless procession of pies, cakes, and whole wheat bread from her ancient cast-iron woodstove that Steve had discovered in the Albuquerque flea-market; or crawling on muddy elbows and scuffed bare knees-wagging her lovely ripe ass all unconsciously but most invitingly-along each meticulous row in her garden, seeking out every weed or bug that dared to trespass.
Jack, fifteen, was now an avid gardener, too, among many other roles: his seeds had been started late, but if the frosts held off until October, he'd harvest at least two kilos of grass as good as Bill's was-plenty to keep himself and his old man stoned all winter. Or maybe just the old man; Jack didn't seem much interested even in smoking dope these days, he was too busy: hunting, fishing trapping, tanning, whittling, galloping the horse up and down the arroyos.
Last winter-trying to conjure up a cab in icy rain on Second Avenue-Steve had seen this son of his disappear around Gem's Spa into St. Mark's Place, and hadn't distinguished him until he was too far away to catch or call to, from the hundreds of other dropped-out runaways who panhandled and scored along those gritty sidewalks. Jack hadn't quite run away or dropped out-he seldom vanished for more than two or three nights at a stretch-but given another year in New York, it would no longer be the truant officer or the assistant principal in charge-of discipline in whose company Steve chiefly met Jack face-to-face; it would be Captain Fink's Ninth Precinct goons, or a team of narcotics-squad sadists.
Steve closed his eyes and for the thousandth time, at very least, thanked God or Providence or Whatever for the land: first of all the hundred and twenty-six acres that were theirs by virtue of blind fool's luck and a skimpy down payment in the form of the cash value on his last remaining insurance policy, but even more for the unmeasured and untrampled blue valleys and yellow mesas and green-gray-gold mountains that lay all around and beyond them. This land, the Southwest, was the best and the only real insurance that Steve knew. Here his family had some hope of joy and health and harmony. Here he and Ruth had a chance to mend a marriage that both-but he much more than Ruth, Steve now admitted-had torn apart in a hundred different directions. Here their son and daughter might just possibly grow up into whole and free human beings.
Their daughter, Sheila, was nearly thirteen and, to Steve, an almost total mystery. Still a little kid in so many ways-and, child-like, an absolute conservative. She helped Ruth a little in the garden and the kitchen, and she was learning to sew on a venerable Singer treadle they had acquired at Goodwill Industries Inc., but mostly she kept to herself, playing with the dolls she had just begun to be somewhat ashamed of, sharing her secrets-if at all-with her pair of gray cats or the pregnant Nubian goat. Steve realized she wasn't ready to believe in all the changes in their lives. She wasn't prepared yet to trust anyone or anything transplanted to this new environment, especially her father. He could see in her eyes on those rare occasions when he caught them looking in his direction that she still half-expected him not to come home one of these nights, or if he did, to be drunk out of his mind and redolent of a recent fuck in a strange bed. Steve hated to recognize the fact-but it might be years before Sheila could enter her parents' room again, confident of finding both, and only, her mother and her father there.
This train of thought was bringing Steve down fast. He'd better get busy nailing these damned latillas and think about how things were now, or in half a minute he'd be remembering a dead-white but expressionless twelve-year-old face, with pigtails, in a half-opened doorway, as seen upside-down through tangled sheets and the crack of a friend's wife ass.
Joyce, good old Joyce. They'd bumped into each other, literally, on the 42nd Street Shuttle platform; it was everyone else's lunch hour, and Steve was finally on his way to work, hung-over slightly more than usual. Hadn't seen each other in years, at least three-not since the time she'd "Left Teddy for good" because of his "constant philandering," spent a
Friday night tossing and groaning on his and Ruth's studio couch, and departed at last after a Saturday breakfast that began with biallies and tear-spattered cream cheese, and ended with gin-and-porter boilermakers around midnight, Sunday. She certainly looked better now: jet hair in a braided bun the size of a basketball; iridescent green tights; a sequined purple dress that started and quit about three inches either way from her hourglass waist, under a beaver coat that could've been Kate Smith's.
"You clumsy bastard! That's a thirty dollar pair of shoes you just tromped on-Stevie! How's Ruth and the kids? What in hell've you been doing with yourselves?"
He yelled the usual inaudible responses into her perfumed ear while several trains pulled in and out, and eventually learned, (by this time, somehow, they were into their second double martinis in a Lexington Avenue Blarney Stone), that Teddy had just sold six paintings and was getting a one-man show together, and that Joyce had had two abortions, three affairs with mutual acquaintances, her face full-page bleed in Redbook, and hot pants for him ever since the marathon breakfast. Steve confessed to a lech for her of even greater duration but vaguer origins, and didn't try very hard to explain what he'd been up to. Teddy and Joyce were pre-war friends-pre-protest, anyhow-from his and Ruth's arty shill nonpolitical past. Strange, how some people had managed to go on through the Sixties as if they were still the Fifties, concerned about nothing but their own personal problems and careers. Even stranger, he supposed, now that the Seventies were here, how just about everyone he knew was drifting back that way-digging in, they called it, but what it actually amounted to was living their own lives again, for a change....
Another round of-watery doubles, and footsies had become kneesies, Viands beneath the table, and finally an unmistakable, fixed, steamy stare. Steve had phoned to tell the office he might not make it after all, paid the bill and run next door for a fifth of Gordon's-both with the ten-spot Joyce so smilingly and quickly provided-and had even flagged down a cab before she realized: Teddy would be stretching canvasses at her place all afternoon, if not in bed there himself with somebody or other. Quick calculations: still scarcely one o'clock Wednesday was Ruth's late day, kids wouldn't be home from school until nearly four. Okay-after all, you don't lust for a chick for nearly a decade, then ask for a rain check when she falls into your lap.
"...Funny how we never did this before."
"Yeah, well, too many hang-ups to get rid of first, I guess."
"That's for sure! Did I ever tell you, I nearly took the veil?"
This with both hands groping inside his fly and the green tights down to her knees, bouncing along 42nd Street. The beaver tent covered all-or almost all. "Nearly took it where, lady?" the cabby wondered, grinning down from his rear-view mirror; but Joyce's tongue was too deep in Steve's throat at that moment to manage a suitable reply.
She was naked and wrestling with his belt buckle before he finished locking the kitchen door behind them. It was a little disconcerting, being pushed this fast, and he began to wonder whether it was the root of Teddy's problems: everyone thought he was always chasing other women, whereas maybe he was only fleeing from Joyce....
"Stevie? What's wrong, sweetheart?"
"Nothing." Apart, that was, from not liking to be rushed into fucking, despising words like "Sweetheart", and hating to have an "ie" tacked on to his name. "I'd just like to set this bottle down somewhere, that's all." Crossing the kitchen was like wading through a tankful of snakes at feeding time-she was all over him. Finally he simply picked her up, charged down the hallway, and dumped her on the bed. She lay there while he stripped, as if raped, stabbed, and strangled. He fell beside her, placed his open hand on her belly-and she came like a firecracker. Wow! He slid a curious finger between her thighs, and she did it again.
"Are you on speed or something, or are you always like this?" The only answer was an ever-quickening series of groans. He hadn't even had a chance to look at her, and she ought to be well worth looking at: the kind of breasts and hips that Playboy pays for, as well as a Redbook face. He raised his other hand in the direction of those breasts now, and she exploded a third time, with a moan that was half a decibel short of a scream.
"Oh, god, Steve-let me rest a minute-"
"Rest? Christ, I haven't even got a hard-on yet." She didn't hear that; her whole body twisted and heaved in yet another, even deeper climax. The lady upstairs must be calling the cops on that one, he imagined, as he squirmed away and crept back to the kitchen for the gin and a handful of joints: the fattest ones in the stash.
"-Steve? Where'd you go-oo?"
"Nowhere, I'll be right there." He had a good stiff hard-on now, by god; a minute to think about it was all that was necessary. But as he padded down the hall again, he thought of just what in hell might happen if it ever reached its target. It wasn't the biggest cock in the world by any means, but the size of your torch wouldn't matter when you thrust it into a powder keg like this one. What did Teddy do, anyhow? Steve was seriously half-tempted to sneak back to the kitchen phone and give his old pal a buzz....
"Oh! Steve!" Frontal attack: she was out of bed, dragging the sheet behind her, scaling him like a cliff before he was through the doorway. The dope went flying, but he kept his grip on the bottle and used it to drive her back while he knelt and gathered up the reefers, then lit the biggest of all: one of Jack's super bombers.
"Now: this is for you." He passed it to her, careful not to let so much as their fingertips touch. "And this is for me." He tore the cap off the gin and took a monstrous gulp. "And you sit up there, at the head, and I'll sit down here, and we're gonna take our time and do this right, or not at all."
It worked; she nodded obediently, sat down, and started to king deeply. When the roach was down to her pearly, pointed nails, he lit and passed her another. Meanwhile he squatted tailor-fashion at the foot of the bed, swilling gin and looking at her; it was worth doing, all right. This was also a fascinating problem, one he'd never encountered before, he'd have been willing to bet she'd be frigid, if anything, and that was something he'd had more than sufficient experience with. It had taken Ruth five years of marriage to learn that an orgasm isn't entirely an act of God-or if it is, then it's true, the Lord really does help those who help themselves....
Three joints, and Joyce looked as relaxed as molasses. Steve crept across the bed slowly, and joined her in a fourth; he was feeling slightly volcanic himself by this time. A fifth, and they oozed down the mattress like a pair of Dali's watches. He was worried for an instant that he might have overdone it, but as soon as the tip of his cock slipped between her legs she was right there, with him perfectly. They fucked on their sides, face to face, in grand slow strokes, like loping across a lofty rolling plain towards a distant ridge that steadily receded, for an hour at the very least; and when they began to gallop, every muscle and nerve was fully ready, and it just went on and on, past fucking and kissing and licking and sucking, past imagery, into a realm as direct and as abstract as music. Then a floorboard creaked, and before he knew what it was or where or even who he was, there was a dead-white but expressionless twelve-year-old face, with pigtails, in a half-opened doorway, as seen upside down through tangled sheets and the crack of a friend's wife's ass.
Sheila had never said a word about this, to him or-he was positive-to Ruth; it was just there, and always would be, carved out of ice in both minds. Not that it would have mattered much if Ruth had known about Joyce; it would only have been one stone more in the very high, thick wall she and Steve had been building between them for years, in New York.
How things were now: there had been no discussions, no spelled-out agreement, but both had decided: no apologies, no confessions, no "Let's start-all-over" plans, and, as far as possible, no regrets. And it wasn't like being newly weds again: that would require at least prefrontal lobotomy. It was much sweeter, richer, and sexier, than being fresh young strangers could ever be. Those adolescent cliches had been mercifully excised, for one thing: virility and modesty and all that crap.
Take for instance last night (Steve's nerve-ends responded instantly to the suggestion; the tiny hairs across the small of his back lifted as the pores there tensed and dilated, and his cock twitched reflectively, like a dreaming hound, against his leg):
He'd been more than usually exhausted by a day that began, as usual now, at 5:15 a.m. There was the hour-long, twenty-five-mile drive each way on mountain roads, six of those dirt ruts; and in between, eight hours of lifting and shoving vigas-the ones he was perched on right now-up into place, under an unreasonably hot (for Santa Fe) August sun. He'd nearly fallen asleep over his supper; only the throbbing in his arms and shoulders kept him conscious. He spread a foam-rubber mat and a blanket in front of the cool, empty fireplace afterwards, and counter-attacked his soreness with bourbon and coffee, about a pint of each. He fell asleep before the sun went down. The next he knew, cool fingers were very gently unbuttoning his shirt, unlacing his boots, easing down his trousers.
The moon was down. The room was completely dark and silent, and almost cold. He could see nothing; then a firmer piece of nothing took shape, a long way away, down past his feet. All he could smell, besides the damp disused hearth and the dregs of bourboned coffee, was the scent of squeaky, fresh-washed hair.
It began with the soles of his feet: an icy smooth fingernail tracing each arch. Ghostly, like sharp twigs against a shuttered windowpane. He heard breathing suddenly become more urgent; it was his own. The fingernails began little patterns, asymmetrical, then broke them, skittering away like bats in the dark, just as expectations formed. Suddenly they passed his ankles, grazed his knees, jabbed like icicles into the softest parts of his thighs, and were gone.
Then the hair. It didn't feel like hair at all: snow, crystals, falling when there is no wind whatsoever: between his toes, up along the outer edges of his calves, and down the inner. Upwards again-he began to need will power to stay still-between his thighs, across his balls-oooh-very, very lightly up one side of his very, very rigid cock; twice clockwise, barely touching, around the quivering tip, down the other side; figure-eights across his belly, bigger each time, up to his chest, pause at each straining nipple, flick at each armpit, gone-no, across his lips, just the merest touch, left-to-right, right-to-left. Now gone.
Oh, sweet Christ: cold fingertips again, one in each ear for an instant, down his shoulders, lightning X across his chest, another, slower, to cross again at his navel, a third, excruciatingly slow, to mount his crystalline cock, meet at the very tip in a split-second pinch, and vanish.
Utter black silence, except for his roaring lungs and the incandescent blood pounding through his temples, behind his gaping eyes. Wait-at the edge of whatever-wait. He held his breath: his cock was ready to burst untouched, to shower the night with boiling sperm. Wait: he willed his heart to go more slowly. Sweating stopped; he was a statue of ice.
Hot wet flat tongue: squarely on his forehead. Sweat started again, in sheets; his entire body was now his cock, his juice might spurt as well from any pore as another. That disembodied tongue moved down, over nose, mouth, chin, throat, chest, and belly: a velvet hot steam-roller. To his cock. Around the base. Up the length like the stripe on a barbers pole. Oh my god, omigod-here it comes, here we go, down is up, up is-a cavernous river of lava, her mouth; her cunt is her mouth and my cock is my tongue and-
"HEY! WAKE THE FUCK UP, UP THERE!" Daniel the Motherfucker could raise the dead sotto voce, if he cared to. Everyone on the lot had been standing stone-still, staring toward the tool shed; now all heads swiveled as if controlled by one lever, to see what the hell had exploded up in the garage.
"Huh? What's the matter?" But Steve didn't need to be told what the matter was: here came Bill, back up the hill. He was walking-dragging his feet, even, looking nowhere. Portrait of a beaten bodhisattva.
The straight partners had finally done it. They were all out of a job.
TWO.
"So what're you gonna do?" Daniel asked for at least the twelfth time, and then, for at least the dozenth, didn't wait for a reply. "Me, I'm gonna do all right. Find a little cabin somewhere, somethin' I kin have just for lookin' after it, get back on food stamps, sixty-eight bucks worth we git for two in cash a month, an' fuck the winter out. Got a hundred clams in the sock right now, an' there's still damn near a week's pay due us yet. That'll keep me fine in gas an' kerosene an' soap an' Bugler. Me an' my ole woman an' the kidsll do all right, that's no shit. Apples an' peaches an' apricots an' chilis an' tomatoes're just comin' into season, farmers up the Rio Grande'll give a bushel for every two or three you pick. Ole woman'll can up a storm. Git me a permit, cut my own wood on government land. Gotta scrounge up a chain-saw somewhere. First thing to do, though's, to find an empty cabin somewheres we kin light in. Not goin' back to the commune, that's for shit-sure.... "
Steve wasn't exactly listening; he'd gotten most of this recitation by heart an hour ago. He wasn't doing much, as a matter-of-fact, besides clutching his glass with one hand and the greasy edge of the bar with the other. Time to go home, a sober cranny in his brain reiterated quietly; time two hours ago. Shades of 'old New York. Cautiously, he made a forty-five-degree turn on his heels in the filthy wet sawdust, and calculated the distance, through smoke and gloom and the shuffling crowd, to the John door. Shades of old New York, all right.
"Where you goin'? "
"Piss call."
"Mngh. So what're you gonna do?" Daniel had turned to poor Jerry, propped like a disused broom in the space between the jukebox and the pay phone. Everyone else from the late-lamented crew had disappeared. "Me, I'm gonna do all right.... "
The distance was not insurmountable after all. There were two large supercilious Texans, a somnambulant Indian, a trio of what looked like Upper Third Avenue dykes, and a coiffured Afghan and a tortoise-necked, turtle-rimmed (Steve gave that piece of his inventory another go, then gave it up) middle-aged fag with a silver-and-turquoise leash stretched fiddle-string between them. All these creatures separated Steve from the John quite unexpectedly, but otherwise it was a cinch. He would have made it easily, if the Indian hadn't suddenly grown a third foot, or if the youngest of the dykes hadn't taken off her sunglasses just as Steve squeezed past their table.
He made the last six feet like a falling redwood, slammed the door to, and slumped heavily against the inner side. Jesus, it just couldn't be! No, of course not, he tried to convince himself, you're just drunk and stoned and seeing things. But he wasn't, not now; he was immediately disgustingly, sober. Didn't even have to piss anymore, the stench of raspberry disinfectant notwithstanding. And no wonder-all that beer he'd drunk now stood quivering on his forehead as cold sweat.
It-was-not-Julia. Repeat that, slowly, sixteen thousand times. It just simply could not be. Julia's in New York. Thank god, and the magazine. She might be capable of some fantastic tricks, but she can't, she absolutely cannot, be here and there at the same time. Remorselessly, that stubborn little cranny in the rear of Steve's brain-the one that had told him a minute ago that it was time to go home-now began to point out that he had no direct sensory evidence that Julia was in New York at this particular instant, whereas his eyes, and indeed every jangling nerve-end in his body, had just informed him that she was here, in Santa Fe, seated at a table two yards away from the far side of this flimsy plywood door. No. His eyes were wrong. Anyhow, she wouldn't be lying in wait for him in this particular bar with a couple of dykes for company; she wouldn't know he was going to be laid off today and then wander in here with his fellow unemployed freaks to get stupidly soused....
Julia.
"Remember me, Steve."
That's all she'd said to him that final gray morning, and it was the most unnecessary admonition of the century. She knew a million ways of making sure he could never forget her, and she'd used most of them the night before.
"Let's do everything we ever thought of doing to each other, so there won't be any room for regrets."
Candle light, and Duff Gordon sherry, and excellent grass, and not a single reproachful word. She'd dragged every mattress in the house into the living room and erected a sumptuous satin and velvet bed. Incredible String Band playing, quietly, followed by Lay, Lady, Lay. Steve's solitary regret was that he'd ever met her.
"...Mmmmm, that was nice. Was it good for you? Fuck me up the ass now, we've never done that before ... "
He'd been insanely entangled with plenty of other girls, and crazy enough, at times, to consider seriously leaving Ruth. That wasn't ever a question, with Julia; it would be psychic suicide-"-OPEN UP IN THERE!"
Another redwood crashing: or was it fuzz? If a tree falls in the forest, and it lands on top of you ... Steve slapped his pockets automatically as he shifted his weight from the door to the side of the urinal. There wasn't room to be anywhere else if the door was going to be opened. He was clean-of course he was clean. There's no law against internal possession, not even in New Mexico ...
"What were you doing in here?" The chelonian faggot. And his damned Afghan. At least it wasn't the cops. Or the bartender. Or Julia.
"Playing with myself. Want me to deal you in, next hand?" The dog seemed much more outraged than his master; he even growled a bit, MGM lion style. Steve slipped sideways and got to hell out.
Why'd I have to make a crack like that? I was shouting too; everyone in the bar must've heard it ... But nobody seemed to have noticed; all Steve could see as he stood now, with his back pressed to the side of the door inscribed "Caballeros", was other backs, and the scissoring sides of loud-talking faces. He shut his eyes deliberately, turned towards the dykes' table, and forced them open again.
It wasn't Julia. She didn't even begin to resemble Julia. The sunglasses did, though, and Julia had a sweater almost that shade of burnt orange. She used to wear her hair sort of the same way, too, but it wasn't ever mousy like that. He must be going blind. Or losing his mind.
"Lookin for sumpin? Trouble mebbe?" An honest-to-god bull-dyke, in tweeds no less, next to the ex-pseudo-Julia. Certainly not Upper Third Avenue. Must've chewed a ton of chicle to learn to talk like that. Slipping her hand into her big black oblong leather pocketbook. Probably fitting on her trusty brass knuckles.
"No, ma'am! Not lookin for nuttin, an shorely not trouble with you!" Steve bowed graciously, counting the Indian's feet this time beneath the next checkered tablecloth, and shot for the bar. Daniel had five full beers in front of him now. There were three fresh ones waiting for Steve.
"Where did these things come from?"
"Jerry was buying. So was a couple of tourists. Drink up." Granting the absurd proposition that Jerry had obtained either currency or credit in his absence, that added up to three well enough, but how it give Daniel five? Two minutes longer in the John, Steve intuited, and it would've been seven and one, or eight and none. "So what're you gonna do? Me, I'm gonna.... "
What am I going to do? Beyond getting outside these beers somehow, and inside my truck somehow, and somehow home tonight? What about the monthly payments on the land, and all the other expenses? September only a couple of days away-too goddamned late in the season to have much hope of landing another construction job. And there's nothing else to be had around this quiet little rich man's town. Steve poured and swallowed, swallowed and poured, a patented nonstop beer-guzzling machine. Vaguely, over the space of an absent minute, he became aware of something eagerly fumbling between his knees, then rising. He was being gently but thoroughly goosed.
"Oh, say, fella, you looked really under the weather in there. I do hope you're feeling better now. You look better. You really do." Afghan and Master. Now, there's a neat trick: teach your dog to feel out all the prospects for you. And there's an idea: he could hire out as a imagine-man to good ol, turtleneck-tortoiseshell, here. Canyon Road Callboy: I Was One. Write a book about it when you run out of steam. Sell like City of Night and pay off the frigging mortgage. Steve turned his back to the bar, hooking his elbows over it; the dog, undismayed, commenced to nuzzle his fly.
"You know, he looks like W.B. Yeats."
"Pardon?"
"Your dog. He looks like the poet. Yeats. Irish."
"Oh, Thank you. Quite a compliment, I suppose. Tell the man thank you, Dusty."
"Not exactly. All Afghans look like the poet Yeats. More or less."
"Oh." Master tugged at the leash, and Dusty desisted. He licked his chops and looked baleful.
"Thing of it really was, Yeats looked like an Afghan."
"Mm."
"Grr." That was Dusty, towards Daniel, who ignored him utterly. "I lost my job."
"Oh?"
"So I got drunk."
"Or anyways, I tried. Have a beer. I've got two more."
"Oh, no thanks, really. I was just going to offer to buy you one. Really I was."
"Mnn. I don't think I could."
"Drink another one? Well, perhaps a-"
"No, deal you in next hand. Sorry, but I just don't have it in me. You see, I was hopelessly corrupted at a very tender age by another sex.... " Steve was now talking to the smoke-webbed air, so he stopped. He didn't have two beers left, anyhow. There was suddenly less than one. He forgot about the glass and drained the bottle in one long tasteless gulp, then started for the street door in the wake of Dusty and Master. Daniel wheeled, half a second late, and grabbed at the strap of Steve's Sears Roebuck's. "Hey, man: so what're ya gonna do?"
"I will arise and go now, "Steve threw back over his shoulder, "and go to Innisfree,/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:/ Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,/ And live alone in the bee-loud glade...."
"Me, I'm gonna do all right. Find me a little cabin.... "
The truck wouldn't start, naturally. Dead battery, but it shouldn't be, only six months old according to the former owner; which meant it was the generator or regulator or some goddamned thing he could no longer afford. The single advantage New York had, as Steve already knew, all too well, was that you didn't have to own a frigging car.
So he had to go back to the bar and talk Daniel and the Indian-Jerry was, as he had been most of the day, far past any talk-into giving him a push. Two crew-cut but leather-jacketed and totally unnecessary-bikers happened by and joined in. The amp gauge, once it was gunning, showed a healthy charge despite his fears. All of which meant, back to the bar for a last, large round, on good old Steve. The Indian, who had only been in the way all the while they were trying to push, ordered a double scotch. So the sun was completely down by the time he reached the highway. Only the mauve and amber ghost of a magnificent sunset hovered over the Sandia Mountains, reflected in his rear-view mirror.
He wondered, briefly, what kind of thoughts Ruth might be thinking about him at the moment. Or Sheila. As his hands perfunctorily sawed the wheel around the spiraling goose-neck of curves, and scrambled for lower gears, his deflated brain played, and lost, the ancient game of Don't-Think-of-an-Elephant:
Julia certainly was nothing like an elephant. Her totem had to be something small and quick and carnivorous. Julia, witch of the weasel clan.
Julia--why, for Christ's sake, did he have to be reminded of that bitch?
Julia was not a bitch. No. she wasn't. Ask her anything and you'd see. Julia was an eminently reasonable, personable, completely emancipated young woman. Any discussion with Julia was always very lucid, unemotional, analytic. Julia argued everything strictly according to the soundest possible logic. The maddening part of it was, she always won. Julia in bed was another-oh, no, you don't; you're not going to let yourself think about that end of the elephant, anyhow. You've got enough problems right here and now....
Julia in the office: precision personified. Steve recalled the day she applied for the job as his assistant, how he'd spent the first half-hour telling her why she didn't want it. She was too cool and too smart, he thought-or thought he thought-for a struggling political-literary monthly like theirs. Her clothes weren't actually Saks Fifth Avenue, he found that out soon enough; they only looked far out of place among those buried desks and unswept floors because of the way she wore them. Not that her figure was especially striking, or her face either, for that matter; it was just that she knew, completely and devastatingly, every use to which both could be put. So now she had his desk, his deadlines, and the whole mess all to herself. Good luck and good riddance to kit and kaboodle.
Julia at home: that same first day. He'd offered to take her to lunch, and she said, something about a mix-up with the nursery school, but her apartment was only five blocks across town, why didn't they eat there with her daughter? And her smile got broader and broader to match his awkwardness, waiting dumbly for the elevator, then the bus, and then after four flights up, for her to find her keys at the door. Then when she called the school and the mix-up was all straightened out and her daughter wouldn't be home until three o'clock as usual, the smile was almost an outright laugh as she peeled off her coat and asked, "Bourbon or beer? All there is to drink. There's some Lebanon hash if you'd rather. Very nice." Steve, looking at the feminine clutter of the place, experiencing deja vu even more dumbfounding than when she said: "Hello, I'm looking for someone named Steve," an hour before, told her: "That ll be great," and then it really was a laugh at last, a very deep and full one for a girl her size. She brought him all three, in tumblers and a hookah on a tray, and then announced, "No, there's no man in this menage, if that's what you've been trying to snoop out. Gee, you blush nicely. Do we have lunch before or after we screw? And by the way, am I hired?" That was when he learned about her clothes. They looked like what they were-Alexander's, not even this year's-as soon as they hit the floor.
He might as well give in: every side of Julia he ever knew led straight to bed.... Steve swerved and blinked: a doe and fawn broke from a clump of juniper and bounced, as if on pogo sticks, straight across the macadam road twenty feet in front of the truck.... Take, for instance, Julia as Mother:
The latest issue had finally been put to bed, and so had they. Three o'clock and the hallway door slammed loudly. "Julie?" Tiny scuffing steps to the darkened bedroom threshold.
"Fayaway, get yourself some milk and cookies in the kitchen."
"Uh-uh. Is that Stevie fucking you?"
"Don't grunt, say 'yes' or 'no'. Yes it's Steve."
"You're grunting. Both of you are."
"That's because we're fucking. Don't start silly arguments. Go hang up your coat."
"When you and Stevie done fucking, kin I fuck too?"
Fayaway was four, the gray-eyed terror of every boy under twelve in the world with her precociously graphic grip on the central facts of life. She threw her coat in the closet, pulled off her panties and smock and climbed up on the edge of Julia's double bed to observe.
"Fayaway, get down from there this very second. You know better than to climb on my bed with your street shoes on."
Sulking, the child stripped off her Fred Brown sandals and white cotton socks, then stuffed them viciously under Steve's right leg. "Now kin I fuck, too?"
"No, we're not finished."
"Jesus. I am." Steve writhed and wilted under the wide gray gaze that he couldn't see but knew was fixed, as securely and impersonally as surgeon's clamps, on his naked balls. But nobody wilted on Julia-oh no, unless it was her idea. Skillfully painful fingers probed back there, above where those steely clamps were fixed. A pointed fingernail flicked at his prostate, but it might just as well have been a doctor's stubby index in one of those greasy digital condoms they use, for all the reaction it got.
"Steve?"
Nobody but nobody. Ever. "Steve."
Brutally, desperately, he squeezed his eyes shut and forced his mind to flash a never-failing image: Ruth straddled by a huge black lover, naked in a pile of fresh-mown hay. His cock rose sluggishly, in time to imagined rhythms, like a zombie summoned to a voodoo rite, and he slammed it into Julia's narrow pelvis as if it were a spike being driven by John Henry himself, again and again, forever it seemed, until she suddenly bit deep behind his earlobe, dug her sharp knees up into his armpits, and came with a shrill little groan. He collapsed beside her instantly. Giggling, Fayaway scaled his numb waist, squirmed between their slipping thighs, and pumped her tiny pink buttocks determinedly, back and forth against both heaving bellies. After a minute she mimicked her mother's cry, then clutched a pendant breast on one fist, a tuft of hair from Steve's chest in the other, and settled down for her afternoon nap. Steve's near-shout of a whisper didn't even cause her to stir.
"Julia, I know all your reasons, I've read everything you've quoted and I know you're honestly convinced that this is the way to raise a healthy human being-and maybe it is, for all I know-but Jesus Christ, it drives me right up the fucking wall!"
Julia shooshed him like a colicky baby, then feigned falling softly asleep herself. Later that afternoon, with Fayaway out of earshot, she called him a jealous, selfish, bourgeoi's, cowardly, vindictive, infantile, reactionary, constipated, Victorian baboon. As usual, he found himself admitting at length that she was pretty much right....
Ruth was mending a pair of Jack's dungarees by the kitchen stove, where his hours-old dinner sat congealing, when Steve came through the door. She didn't look up: ominous. "You've gotten two telegrams today. There on the table by your plate. Have you eaten?"
"No, I-huh? Telegrams?" He decided to sit down and think for a minute before telling her about the job. He slit the envelopes with the butter knife.
Both were datelined New York, one noon, the other 4:30. The first said only:
"CALL MY HOME IMMEDIATELY MOST URGENT. J.D."
The second was much more explicit:
"YOU BETTER CALL OR MEET ME COMING
OUT REGARDLESS JET ALBUQUERQUE 12:45
TONIT E.--ALL LOVE JULIA."
THREE.
CHAPTER THREE:
As soon as the operator started to say, "Go ahead, Sir," Steve blurted: "Julia, don't be insane, you can't come out here now, it's-it's impossible!" He knew that otherwise he might never get it said, and it comprised the whole purpose of his racing ten miles to find a phone that worked.
"Steve. Can't you even say hello?"
"Hello. You can't come. Not right now, not conceivable. It really is impos-"
"Hello yourself. I'm coming. In fact, I was just running out the door. There's a cab with my luggage in it waiting out front. Ten seconds later and you wouldn't have gotten any answer."
"You can't!"
"Of course I can, if I only reach the airport in time. I've just got fifty minutes, so please don't make me talk too long. I have my ticket right here in my hand. You can meet me in Albuquerque, can't you?
It won't take you any longer to drive there from where you're at than for me to fly there from here. What time is it out there right now? Is that the Mountain Zone you're in? You certainly don't sound two thousand miles away. What's the weather like? Will I need a jacket when I get off the plane? You can't even breathe here, it's so muggy."
"Julia! Shut up! I said you can't visit us now. Don't you understand that?"
"You're the one who doesn't understand. I'm not coming out just to visit you."
"Huh? I can't hear you very well, I'm at a payphone in a garage and somebody's starting a car-"
"I said: I'm not coming out just to pay you a visit."
"What? What's that supposed to mean? What are you doing, then?"
"I'm coming out to stay. For good."
"Julia, you can't!"
"Can't? Is that all you can say to me? Can't? And do you think you're the only person who can't bear New York anymore? Is there any law that says, just because you moved to New Mexico, I can't live out there too?"
He wished there were a law like that, but he knew it wouldn't make any difference. "Just what are you going to do here?"
"I'm going to live with you. I'm going to be your wife."
"I've already got a wife!"
"So what. Now you'll have two. Aren't you the lucky man."
"Look-" Think, he told himself. Figure out what you're saying before it's said. There's got to be a way to talk some sense into her head. "Look: don't you think Ruth has a voice in how many wives I should have?"
"Suddenly you're worried about Ruth? She didn't have much say on the subject back here in New York, I noticed. You didn't ever call her up and request permission to crawl into my bed, that I recall. Or any of the others you used to crawl into. And there were plenty of others, as I've discovered since. I've got a list of four for your very last week in town-did I miss any? But I don't have anything.... "
"Don't hang up! Never mind that fucking plane! You can't come out here, don't you see that?"
"All right, Steve I'm going to talk for exactly twenty seconds more and I want you to listen to me and hear every word I have to say: I mean it when I say I've thought about this, and I'm sure I'm doing the right thing for once in my life. This is not a spur-of-the-moment decision-I've been agonizing over it for weeks, months. I should never have let you leave here without me, but I didn't realize that until you were gone. I've been through hell ever since, pure hell. Your guess about George was entirely correct: I've been fucking him, and I've been fucking damned near everyone else in sight. And it's simply no good; it's you I'm looking for in every man I take to bed, it's your cock I want fucking me, and nobody else's. And so I'm coming out and we're going to make it work somehow. Is that clear?"
Silence. Then Julia was laughing softly, in a cluttered room two thousand miles away. He had no idea why she was laughing, but the unexpected, all-familiar sound was more persuasive than all the words she had ever spoken. Steve tasted blood before he realized that he had bitten through his lower lip, trying to keep one syllable from getting out. He listened to his breath rattling the diaphragm in the receiver. The laugh faded into a chuckle.
"...Fayaway let the cabbie into the hall; he heard every word I just said, and he's red as ketchup. I'm sure hell get me there on time. So I'll see you then at 12:45 I love you Steve goodbye-" Click.
It could have been La Guardia, or Kennedy, or Newark or Dulles. Or any other large airport in the U.S. or its farflung colonies, Steve supposed; they're all stamped out of the pastel plastic. The cocktail lounges especially. And all the people in them. Here in Albuquerque it was mainly Air Force stiffs from the nearby Sandia base, departing on or returning from their leaves: blonde chihuahuas in checkered sportshirts and loafers. They eyeballed Steve's mustache and sideburns as they entered, and went straight for the stools at the far end, as if they expected him to toss a bomb or go limp.
The drinks were plastic, too, even the bottled beer. And so were the drunks. Nobody would ever barf on these spotless floors. A fight was unthinkable. If voices should reach beyond the decibel range of the muzak, there was probably an automatic switch built into the air-conditioner that put everyone in the place into immediate suspended animation, pending the arrival of MPs and police. If not, rest assured, it was already in the works.
He hadn't gone back to tell Ruth. Naturally. That would take courage. She didn't know that he had no job any longer, either; all he'd said was, "Julia wants me to call her right away-I guess there must be some crisis with the magazine," and then he'd split, but quick. Ruth knew well enough that Julia had more than the magazine to send him telegrams about. Oh, Ruth'll get a real charge out of it. won't she though, when you come barging in at three o'clock in the morning and say, "Move over dear, make room for wife number two-and I'll bet you can't guess who." Yeah. Well, cheer up. There's lots of tractor-trailer traffic on Interstate 25, maybe it's your night to become another statistic ...
Steve realized he wasn't fooling anyone, not even himself: he was actually very flattered, excited, and pleased. Not many men are paid this kind of compliment. Then it struck him-that's what Julia was banking on, the balm to his ego involved, to get whatever it was she was really after. That whole phone call-quite a performance. But what if she does mean it? What happens then? She means it, you idiot; she's played some incredibly imagine games before, but she's not going to fly clear across the continent just to-but what if that's it, what if she's home in bed right now, picturing me running all the way to Albuquerque to eat my stupid heart out? Waiting for me to finally wise up around one-fifteen and call up again to ask "Why aren't you here?" Just a periodic checkup, making sure I still jump smartly through her hoops?. . .
The particular theory stayed long enough for Steve to order another frozen Budweiser; then he remembered how the phone call had actually felt, and was back where he'd begun. 12:27eighteen more minutes to wait.
George: now that was some ace up her sleeve. That fat, grinning son of a bitch: he must be the one who gave her the rundown on that unbelievable final week in New York. Four, she said. How'd she put it? Other beds he'd crawled into a euphemism, considering, which he wouldn't, thank you. Four: was that all? It had seemed more like forty, but he'd never counted, and he certainly wasn't about to here and now. It was George, positively: like Bfuckner, his favorite composer, he had a grisly fetish for counting everything....
Bfuckner was what he'd played that last night, in fact, when Steve dropped in-on the way to Julia's, or so he thought-to say goodbye. That divinely nutty adagio from the Seventh Symphony, the section that climbs up and up and up, and almost but never quite reaches its totally impossible climax at least 30 minutes of unbearable, gigantic straining and striving. George put just that one side on the changer, and swung the arm out so it would replay all night. Then he went off to the kitchen and whispered awhile with Dolores. She was new; at least, Steve hadn't seen her before, but he hadn't been coming around much lately; and there was that sort of Bronx bloom about her that doesn't last very long around Tompkins
Square. Stoned on top of half drunk on top of totally exhausted, Steve lay back in George's overstuffed "company" chair, and listened while the inspired Austrian maniac cranked up his monumental machinery.
"Like some more dope?" George was back at his desk, his vast red face a perfect gargantuan cherub's above his full blonde beard. "Real dope, I mean, no more of this kid stuff we've been smoking up till now."
"I'm flying already, but what've you got."
"Would you believe kif? Jamaican ganja? Opium?"
No time to say no; here was the waterpipe all ready, a huge cut-glass decanter filled with cracked ice and creme de menthe. Steve was past telling what else was in it, but it could easily have been all three. Bfuckner promptly grew still louder, and so did George, who talked on and on about their friendship, everything they'd shared in-hard to believe isn't it-seventeen years; he dredged up epic drinking bouts, girls they'd competed for whose names neither could begin to recall, verse and fiction they'd composed together, fishing trips, brawls, getting busted, jealousies and grudges, all that suppressed affection their old Hemingwayesque style and values had forced down out of sight....
Blearily, Steve wondered, "Are you propositioning me, or something?"
"Briefly-yes." George stuck out his hand like a traffic cop; he must've been fairly smashed himself by that time, despite his fabulous capacities. "Don't worry, I'm still as hidebound and hung-up a heterosexual he-man as ever. And so are you, for all you radical politicking. And yet, our love for each other over the years has been more real and more intense than anything I've ever felt with a woman, and in your case, I suppose only your life with Ruth would rival it. Right? In a civilized time and place-in other words, if we were whole and free human beings-we'd have been lovers as well as friends. Imperfect as we are, we couldn't possibly exchange any real pleasure through kissing or fucking or any other physical contact. All such capabilities were viciously rooted out us in our repressive childhoods; we are totally maimed in that respect. Which is why we need Dolores."
"Huh? Dolores?"
"Dolores. The girl who's living with me at the moment. Which is why, as I was saying, we couldn't go to bed together alone, we need her to serve as a transmitter between us: because we're too goddamned uptight to give or take pleasure directly." George paused; Steve was still having trouble following declarative sentences, so he continued. "From me to you or vice versa. So come on-" he stood and beckoned dramatically, "I love you, Steve, and you love me, and for old time's sake, let's go to bed."
Right on cue, Dolores bellowed from the other end of the railroad flat, clear across the Bfuckner: "Hurry up, you guys! These sheets are cold!"
Very stoned: Steve's brain had clutched at the phrase repressive childhoods, and he was viewing everything that went on in precisely those terms. Getting undressed worried him, even though the bedroom was quite dark; he couldn't decide whether he was expected to turn his back, or not. He tried to recall what had happened the only other time he'd gone to bed with a man, and drew a complete blank. As it turned out, he hesitated in the doorway and George walked around the bed; they quickly stripped facing across it, and climbed in on opposite sides. It was just the sort of thing that bothers you when you're very high.
In fact, there were no problems at all. Beautiful little eighteen-year-old Dolores handled everything as expertly as if she'd been such a transmitter all her life. Steve's cock was up to the hilt in her ass before he even realized it wasn't her cunt; and George was banging away on the other side of a membrane that seemed to ripple like a shaken sheet of tin. Her hips wriggled deliriously, and her tongue whipped back and forth, a dizzy windshield-wiper, from George's eyelids and ear to Steve's. The build-up, thank to Anton Bfuckner, went on for absolute ages; they finally came all together, in a hurried anti-climax, while the turntable was clicking and whirring between playings.
The next Steve knew, Dolores lay across them sucking George's cock back into shape, and at the same time kneading his own against her large, soft breasts. Then she was in the middle again, but the other way around, face-to-face with Steve. She grinned and giggled in his ear: "It's just like the Eskimos!" They all seemed to come very quickly this time; Steve was engrossed in her frenetic twitching, and forgot about George entirely until his basso groans broke tempo with the music. Dolores made the same remark on the next go-round, like a girl at a dance with one bright line for the evening. It wasn't until then, the fourth time, that Steve understood this was an Indian-wrestle as well as a remote-control act of love: George wasn't going to quit until he did. The masculine contest forever. Bfuckner spun on, and so did the indefatigable Dolores; dawn was dirtying the sheets when they all lost both count and conciousness.
Breakfast took place in the bleak withdrawn silence of a seventeen-year-old hangover. All Steve could think of was, Christ, Dolores was still creeping around in diapers when we started gulping aspirin for these headaches.... They rode grimly downtown in the weary fag-end of the rush hour; but as Dolores skipped through the doors at her stop, she winked back over her shoulder and yelled, "Remember the Eskimos!"
12:32. Thirteen minutes. Only one thing was definite: somewhere between Santa Fe and this airconditioned neverneverland, Steve had started smoking again. And given the present rate, it was four packs a day instead of his former three. He couldn't afford one, anymore; he'd better quit again or else follow Daniel's shining example and learn to roll Bugler, left-handed. Can you get food stamps for two wives? He wished he knew more about the Mormons. Did the government imprison the wives as well as the men? Most probably not, and it was undoubtedly one of them, the first poor bastard's number two, that started it all. Steve strained his memory at a history-book photograph: a ragged row of rabbinically bearded gentlemen in black high-crowned hats, striped suits, and leg irons. At least they didn't make you shave, back then-
"I knew I'd find you here. "Julia's hand passed his unblinking eyes, took the pilsner glass from his, returned it a swallow lighter. Then she kissed his ear. She was real enough. Her tongue was on fire. The stool-top twirled until he faced her, but he hadn't moved a muscle. Yellow teeshirt, no bra as always, blue suede jacket, bronze miniskirt, bare white legs, grass sandals. Red hair pulled back tightly in a braid reaching her waist, to make her small head smaller. No make-up anywhere. Colored string about her long curved neck, silver ND symbol dangling from it between her tiny breasts: the only jewelry. Sixteen at the outside, and obviously a virgin. So much for appearances.
"We were twenty-two minutes early, imagine that. I suppose you shut your ears to the loudspeaker, though, and weren't going to turn them back on until the scheduled time. There's Fayaway-" Amber, stringy curls and red-rimmed steely eyes on top of a suitcase beside the lounge door. Candybar, unopened, in her grubby fist. Very sullen, wide awake, and not about to let herself cry. "Well? Can't you talk? or smile? or wave as we go by? I love you."
"So it would seem. You're here."
"Steve. Smile at me. Just slightly."
Somehow he'd put down the glass, stood up, even pocketed his cigarettes and change, and now they were actually moving. She was real, all right; there was an Ash Wednesday smear of New Jersey soot above her left eyebrow. Two Samsonite suitcases, an Orbach's shopping bag stuffed with Fayaway's favorite dolls, the remains of two biallies and cream cheese in a damp wad of wax paper.
"I sent everything by railway express. It cost a fortune. They said it would only take ten days. Do you believe that?"
Fayaway insisted on walking, unattached; Steve picked up the luggage, Julia took the doll bag and his elbow. Down the whirring escalator, through the soundless automatic doors, past the empty cab stand. Getting even more real. He could smell her now. Breck shampoo and violets, probably a soap.
"You look completely different. Hairier, by far. Very brown and slim and ten years younger. Everyone told me you would, but I didn't believe them. Do I look any different? Is this your truck, honestly? I didn't even know you could drive. Can you maneuver this monster? Here, Fayaway, a whole back seat to yourself. She wouldn't sleep a wink on the plane. Making eyes all the way at a general, wouldn't you know. How far do we have to go?"
"Good question."
"Steve. Please. Don't start again, not yet. I meant: how far from here do you live?"
"Eighty-odd miles. It's a good two hours."
"I'm sure it will be."
Fayaway was soundly sleeping even before they were through Albuquerque, and so, to all appearances, was her mother: legs tucked underneath her on the front seat, cheek against Steve's shoulder, hands folded and resting lightly on his right thigh.
"I hope Santa Fe doesn't look like this."
"It doesn't."
"This could be Los Angeles almost, except there isn't any smog."
"They're working hard on that."
"Are the stars always this bright and this many out here?"
"Pretty much."
"Mmmmm. What's that hulking, scary black shape off there to the right."
"The Sandia Range."
"Oh. Steve-I still can't believe that I've done it, that I'm actually here in New Mexico, with you."
"You and me both."
"Steve."
"Yes?"
"Don't be angry with me. At least not yet."
"Angry? Who's angry? Why should I let a little thing like your coming out here expressly to wreck my life get under my skin? Would I do that?"
Julia curled closer. Her hands were now, as if accidentally, deep in his lap. "He's not angry with me.
"I forget where I heard it first, but there's a most appropriate old saying: 'A stiff prick has no conscience.' "
"That's nice. So's your stiff prick."
"I hope you're aware that what you're doing down there isn't conducive to safer highway conditions."
"I'm not doing anything. He started it."
"Okay, be kittenish. See if I care."
"You'll., care. You're caring already. Obviously." She had his fly unbuttoned by this time; her thumb and forefinger were playing measuring-worm across his belly. "Mmmmm. Farmer's clothes are sexy. Lots of room."
"Come on, Julia, knock it off. We've still got seventy miles ahead of us and I'm trying to remember how to think."
"There isn't very much traffic. Divided highway, anyhow. I think I'll find out how good a driver you are. You can always pull over and park for a while, if it gets to be too distracting. I want to tell an old friend how much I've missed him.... "
She clasped his cock with both hands and swung it free of his overalls, at the same time stretching her legs to lie full-length across the seat and ducking her head beneath his right arm to rest in his lap. She puckered his gaping fly around her mouth and blew in wet warm air: "I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!"
"Julia-for Christ's sake-"
Her lips parted, and just the very tip of her tongue came out to lick, daintily, halfway around the place where his foreskin would have been if he had one. "Mmmmm. Just what I've always wanted-a hot popsicle." She giggled, tongued the head of his cock, and nibbled the flaring edge very, very gently. "Oooh, and it's got ruffles, just like underneath a mushroom.... "
The speedometer told him he'd dropped from sixty to twenty-five. It felt more like a hundred and twenty. At least he was still in the same lane, more or less. Deliberately, he relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, and watched his knuckles change from ivory to purple in the moonlight.
"I never told you before, but I'm a Cannibal." Little-girl voice, just like Fayaway's. "Not an Ordinary Cannibal, of course. I'm a Gourmet Cannibal. I only eat the Very Nicest parts of the Very Nicest people.... " As Julia's head descended steadily further into his lap, he felt distinctly each ridge in the roof of her mouth slide across the quivering fish's lips on the end of his cock, and then he could feel the soft, rough, pulsing, fleshy part, and finally the cartilage and muscles of her throat. Her teeth gnawed down the shaft, excruciating inch by inch. She kept on going, down, down, until he was sure she would choke, but she couldn't stop or falter until her lips were securely fastened at the base. Then she began to suck, with every bit of strength in her cheeks and jaws and throat, using her tongue like the piston-head in a force-pump. A sign flashed in the headlights: REST AREA-ONE MILE, but Steve knew for certain that he couldn't make it that far. He pulled to the shoulder and yanked the emergency brake and came in a screech of loose gravel, and came and came, as passing headlights flickered across his eyelids, and she sucked up every drop, and kept on sucking, until it felt as though there was nothing left of him outside her throat but a shriveled dry flat of skin.
"...Steve?"
"Mngh." If raisins could talk, he now spoke their language.
"I've come here only because I love you so much. You know that, really, don't you?"
His mouth was still too desiccated to transmit human noises, but that didn't matter, because he had nothing to say in reply. They made the mile in second gear, mostly along the shoulder of the road. There was a lightless semi parked towards the near end of the rest area; Steve cut his lights, too, and coasted in, as far as possible. Julia had her jacket off by that time, her skirt as well, and her filmy bikini briefs.
"Should we trade seats with Fayaway? No," she decided abruptly, snaking her teeshirt over her shoulders, then fumbling with the fastenings on his overall straps. "It just might waken her, and I know you wouldn't like that. Here, come out from under the steering wheel, where I am."
As Steve shifted over obediently, she tugged his pantlegs down to his ankles, then perched on his knee to open his shirt. It couldn't be done, he was positive; but with tongue and lips and nipples and fingertips to exercise the drought, and the end of her braid as a gentle scourge, she brought a shower of juices to the desert of his skin, and the organ-cactus finally bloomed again in the fading light of the setting moon. Then she squatted in his lap, her feet beside his hips, her knees against his shoulders, his face between her breasts, and let his cock glide imperceptibly upward, into a cauldron of feathers. They fucked that way for an hour straight, until she was radiantly exhausted, and he was stone-cold sober and wide awake.
A coyote yipped not far away, and then a rabbit screamed, as he started the engine again and pointed the truck back north towards the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and home.
FOUR.
Steve lay in bed, awake but not wanting to be, long past when he knew everyone else must be up and out of the house. The preceding night came back to him gradually, in pieces that wouldn't join together. He didn't even try to make them fit. Only a nearly bursting bladder could, and finally did, drive him out into sunlit reality. Then the need of coffee kept him there.
Breakfast, as he expected, had been cleared away, but there was one strong cup still left in the pot at the back of the stove. Once that was safely inside him he listened for other signs of life: jays scolding in the yard, then, from out back by the sheds, and almost like a jay, Fayaway's strident voice-Sheila was showing her the pregnant goat. In snatches from the other direction, through the western window-he couldn't catch words, or even be sure whose voices they were, so he risked a look.
Well, Chicken Little, the sky hasn't fallen, not quite yet at any rate. Julia and Ruth knelt side by side in the salad patch, thinning out the rows.
On the strength of that idyllic vision, Steve scrambled himself three eggs, dousing them liberally with chili sauce. Only then did he begin to get an estimate of he w much beer had gone through his system in the past twenty-four hours: it took four slices of bread, three glasses of milk, and most of an hour to clean his plate. Then his right hand clutched, with ancient instinct, at his left breast pocket, and found the mangled remains of a cigarette package there. He snarled at it for half a minute and tossed it at the fireplace.
Jack came in, with fly rod, sleeping bag, and .22, while Steve was still calculating the effort involved in a fresh pot of coffee. Bare-chested and sandaled, with a rawhide thong across his brow to keep his uncombed hair out of his eyes; no good-morning, nothing past what he was after: "I'm going up to the mountains for a few weeks. Drive me out to the highway, and I'll hitch."
The highway, hell. The mountains for a few days sounded like a brilliant idea. Except: a) Jack didn't invite you; b) you can't just split, with nothing explained to Ruth; c) even if you could, Julia would get hold of some bloodhounds somewhere and track you down again.
Steve compromised with his inclinations by driving Jack clear to the aspens (just beginning to turn), then going the long way back, through town. He drove past the building site, more out of habit and for something to kill time with than the hopes of finding anyone around: it was empty, suspended, incomplete, just like his mind. All this occupied most of the rest of the afternoon, thank god. And mercifully, no one had noticed him driving out of the yard with Jack-no one, anyhow, had been able to volunteer to come along-until they were waving and gone.
Everything still looked cozy when he returned: Ruth was busy at the woodstove, Julia rinsing something at the sink, Sheila-probably sick to death of Fayaway's precocious chatter by this time-corkscrewed into a book in the chimney corner, and Fayaway still screeching around out back, chasing the poor goat or Sheila's cats, or both.
"No more job. The Bodhisattva's partners cut off the bread."
"I know." Ruth didn't bother to turn around, but there wasn't any edge to her voice. "So you told me this morning, when I tried to wake you at the usual hour."
"I did?"
"In those identical words."
"Oh.... What else did I say?"
"That Julia and Fayaway were here. But I can read telegrams, too, you know. That's why the cots were set up when you came in. Whatever time that was."
"Oh." like a cash register, his brain clicked shut and rang up No Sale.
"Why don't you sit down. Supper's nearly ready."
So he did, and pondered the sunset through the window-when was he going to replace that cracked pane?-and wished he'd saved whatever was left of those cigarettes, until frijoles refritos, tortillas tostadas, and stuffed green chilis arrived. He got an incredibly piquant chili on the very first bite, and grabbed for the salad bowl. That was pretty fantastic, too: very heavy on the mustard greens, onions, and white radishes.
"Like it? I made it." Julia's first words to him today. She sat at his left, facing Ruth across the table, her red hair falling as freely as Ruth's although much farther down her breasts than Ruth's blonde hair. Both in faded flannel shirts, old ones of his, and dungarees, barefoot. Wow. Was Ruth hip to this sister act? Or to the entire thing? like, she must be aware of how Julia's coming on to her, if not to-Bare rough toes scraped his left leg, inside his pantleg but above his sock.
"Hmmm? Oh, yeah, the salad. Next time, go a little easier on the mustard."
Now there were bare toes jabbing his right calf, and Ruth blinked a scowl, as if he'd been rude. To a guest? or what? Holy shit, intimations of what you're asking for, what you're going to get, if you don't do something, soon. He swallowed a protest along with the rest of the chilis on his plate. But maybe Ruth meant, you shouldn't infer that there's going to be any next time. He glanced back and forth, without turning his head; no signs of tension either way.
Behind both the yellow and the auburn curtains, jaws were placidly chewing. Still, he couldn't see either pair of eyes, and had no idea what they'd been saying to each other all day long in the garden. Maybe, if he just sat tight, it would all work out somehow. Oh, yeah....
Fayaway was nodding into her cornstarch pudding, and Sheila,-for a wonder,-volunteered to take her off to bed. Tucked her book under her arm, and actually bothered to say goodnight for a change. Lord of the Rings again, Steve noticed; must be her fifth or sixth time through it. Wasn't she ever going to get tired of that medieval Disneyland fascist?
"I brought some nice tea out." Julia to Ruth, one veteran tea bibber to another, which neither one was. "Why don't I brew a pot right now?" Up and off to her suitcase, open but neatly pushed under her cot in the corner. "English Breakfast. Twining's. Very nice any time of day, though. You'll have some, won't you, Steve, too?"
"Sure. Fine." No under-the-table poking or prodding necessary this time. Anything to keep the old ball rolling, that was him....
Coming. The first sip. He didn't know what, but it wasn't just plain tea. He glanced at Ruth as she drank. No notice; but, of course she'd put in a spoonful of alfalfa honey. Julia, as he looked left again, blinked deliberately and drained her entire cup in one long swallow. Now she was watching him. Okay. He gulped the rest of his and put the mug down firmly. Ruth sipped steadily at the rest of hers, watching the last salmon and cobalt coagulate and finally fade from the darkening window.
"The sunsets are one thing you never get over, out here."
"Are they always this magnificent?"
"Incredible. Every night."
Two little old traveling ladies, in Schrafft's. How cozy.
Whatever was in the tea, it came on strong, and smooth, and very quickly. Not acid, Steve decided. The sunset had left the window completely, but it hovered still across the table. The stacked plates shimmered, emerald and topaz, the spoons and forks glittered transparently, like quartz crystals. If it was acid, it was the best he'd ever had: no teleidoscopic effects, no queasiness, just that beatific, glowing vividness to everything. What the hell. Steve tossed down the second cup and held out his mug for more. Julia gave him another splash, about a spoonful, and reached over to refill Ruth's cup a third time. That emptied the pot. Ruth looked up, grinned, and swilled it off. Already smashed on whatever it was, must be....
It seemed as if no one spoke, or breathed, until the moon had appeared and perched for several hours in the upper left-hand corner of the window. The light fell directly on Ruth's upheld, pale forehead, closed ivory eyelids, and blue, sphinx-smiling lips. The effect was so unearthly that Steve shook himself at last and reached back for the kerosene lamp on the shelf above his head. He very nearly dropped it-or no, it was more that he very nearly let it float away, up towards the rafters. The table was another long time coming back into his view. He opened his mouth to ask for a match, but his tongue was out to lunch. Tongue on the loose: the opposite of a loose tongue. The phrases struck him as inexpressibly hilarious. Now, when and if his tongue ever came back, he'd tell Ruth and Julia, and they'd all have a good laugh....
The lamp was lit. They were all laughing, and had been laughing for hours, but Steve couldn't begin to remember why. Oh, god he wished he could stop laughing now, his throat and jaws were so sore, he wished-he looked down at the gold velvet circle of lamplight, down from the blue velvet circle of close, laughing eyes, and saw: Julia's right hand clasped tightly in his left; Ruth's left hand in his right; and two other white arms extended across the table, beyond the lamp. Of course. How natural. How inevitable. How good. Nothing to explain, nothing to worry about. The Way It Was Meant To Be. He squeezed Julia's fingers, and felt that pressure travel around the circle, to reach his other hand through Ruth's. Then they all were laughing again.
"Couldn't we be more comfortable?"
Julia had said that, hours and hours ago. Now they were all standing up, they were actually moving, going somewhere-somewhere more comfortable. His left arm around Julia's shoulder, hand cupped beneath her pointed, small breast, right arm around Ruth's shoulder, forefinger stroking her long, hard nipple, flannel so smooth against both hands, and their hands, and their hands clutching each other's elbows behind his waist. More comfortable-only one mouth: Ruth's reached it first, in the bedroom doorway, and Julia settled for his left ear. Hands everywhere; no telling whose were where, not when he couldn't be sure which were his own.
"I'll go back and get the lamp. "
That's what Julia must've said, a long, long, time ago; that's why she's not here now.... Never mind Julia; Ruth was locked tight against him, her fingers playing the diamond xylophone of his spine, her breasts hot and pulsating against his chest, her pelvis cleft and nibbling upwards, looking for something-hmm, what? Just as he figured out what, and began to wonder where that curious gadget had gone to, the lamp appeared.
The lamp!
Grand Entry of the Lamp.
Leap apart with arms outstretched!
Long-lost friend with the lamp!
Tears, and still more laughter. Glittering wet tears on Ruth's long lashes, impossibly beautiful. Then Julia pressed tightly between them, hugging both. So long away. So good to have her back. So lovely.
"Be careful while I set this down somewhere. "
Julia said that, too, yes; ages since. She said so many marvelous things, but that was especially wise and wonderful; memorize it, and tell it to your grandchildren....
Julia put the lamp down, tenderly-it seemed to take her eons-on the windowsill, light-years away. And then she taught them the Long-lost art: sitting down, it was called; you did it ever so slowly, very, very patiently. She took both their hands, each pair in one of hers, and drew them down, down, such a long way, and it was so unbelieveably soft when they were finally there.-Remember sitting down? Remember what it was like, away back there, miles out there in the kitchen, on those hard, straight chairs? Ridiculous, not like this soft bed at all. We didn't know how to sit down, not ever before, until Julia....
Hands together in a heap, in their mutual lap. Warm, friendly, soft hands, so soft-and friendly-and warm. Just look at them, they're chasing each other; Julia's are hiding under mine, but Ruth's will find them ... Julia's hands are digging down deep, looking for something; wasn't Ruth looking, searching for something, somewhere, sometime? Here come Ruth's hands now, mmmm, warm ... What's everyone looking for?-Oh. That. Well, it looks like they've found it. Yep. There it is, by golly. Gosh and geewhiz. I remember, that's-wow, how you have changed, old friend of my childhood, companion of yore. How very long you've grown. The better to fuck you with my dears. Come on, old pal, don't be so bashful, now. Stand up and take a bow for the ladies, that's the stuff.... Seems like I had a pair of hands, too, somewhere around here, sometime ago ... Just going to lie down for a second, friends, want to see what became of my hands, I'm sure I ... mmm, that flannel's soft and nice, feels so good-Ruth? Don't go away, Ruth, please, don't go ... now Julia's going too ... wait, wait for me, I-oh, there they are. This bed is enormous, we'll have to build a bigger house to keep it in. But there's Ruth and Julia, at last, so comfortable, with Julia's red hair fanned out across Ruth's breasts. Ruth has such beautiful breasts, she shouldn't keep them covered up like that. Come on, Ruth, hold still, well just undo these last two buttons ... There, that's lovely, Ruth lying back like with her nipples pointing, one for each of us ... and see, Julia's are very pretty, too, not so full as yours, but-there're my hands; I wonder what they've been doing all this while? There's Julia's hands, too, and Ruth's, they're guiding mine. Do I have to? All those buttons and buckles and things? Right now? God, what a lot of clothes you've both got on-and then there's all of my clothes, too; oh, Christ, I quit, this ll take all night, and I really don't remember how ... Phase Two.
Enter phase two, that's how it announced itself. Click, the lights came on.
Absolutely lucid now, everything in place, the way it ought to be, the way it always was.
Three warm naked bodies, upright, facing, on their knees, hands joined, the lamplight low, and all their hair on fire. Julia's especially: crimson and creosote. Darkness velvet green behind her, body white and vibrating, nipples taut and glowing somehow, lips just moistened, sparkling, open, words a long time coming out, never heard, already known and foreordained:
"Steve, fuck Ruth now, please. "
Of course. A smile of understanding engulfed them all. Ruth slipped back against the bunched up sheets, blue eyes wide and focused straight at his, knees apart, rosy cunt petals just beginning to unfold in her tawny bush, right hand still clasped tight in Julia's.
Steve flew forward, all cock and eagerness it seemed, but it took forever to reach her-and then it felt as if he wouldn't ever stop, he'd fall straight through her, through the bed, the floor, the earth below, and disappear. Everything was made of tiny feathers. Then Ruth's arms and legs were suddenly firm around him, keeping him from falling, up or down-but up or down-but up and down and other directions he didn't have words for were still tugging at him all at once, and other hands were coaxing, kneading, urging him inwards or outwards, he couldn't distinguish. And a tongue: starting at the small of his back, around and down, over each rib, into his armpits, flat and hot against his nipples-then away to Ruth's nipples, strumming there against his; back again and down, and up, and down-that wasn't an oncoming freight train, it was Ruth breathing in his ear, roaring, rushing past him, as she came pounding up around him, slamming into his hips, battering his collarbone with her chin, until he had to come, too, or explode.... and then he didn't, he didn't have to do anything, he was free, flying up, somehow clear, and Ruth was slipping down, away, broken, sobbing his name.
"Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.... "
"Oh, Jesus, Ruth I'm sorry, I-"
"Oh God, what do you mean you're sorry? That was just too much, too much.... "
"Steve move Steve down down here-"
He pulled back and up, to his knees, as Julia's sticky lips swept his cheek, then her cold back slithered down his chest and belly, and she slipped in front of him, between Ruth's raised knees, and pushed him back with her wriggling ass until she could bury her face in Ruth's drenched cunt. Her own glistening crack was pointing straight up, staring directly at him. He stared back-at two strange pink eyes, one with a very tight squint-thinking of nothing catching his breath, until she reached over her shoulder and tugged his ear impatiently. He climbed to his feet and fell forward.
He seemed to be incredibly far above the bed. No sense of touching anything, or moving: he was floating up there, on reconnaissance, on top of twin balloons. Far below, in a tangle of red and blonde hair, Ruth's hands and hips were writhing and twitching, trying to steer this whole, weird, wonderful cloud-machine. Julia's ass transmitted Ruth's motions on to him, with refinements and amplifications, and Steve simply relaxed, and flew. Navigator to pilot to bombardier. Ruth's breasts rolled from side to side, a strange new semaphore that he found he could decipher, if he concentrated: he met her eyes, miles below then dived-and his outstretched tongue met hers, as all three came at once on a single, sustained, shrill groan, and collapsed in a tangle of boneless limbs and hot damp hair.
Steve came to again with his cheek against Ruth's left breast, Julia breathing steamily across at him from the right one. Legs and arms seemed to have doubled in number. Ruth hugged heads to her breasts, crooning softly in short, breathy gasps. Julia's lips reached for his, and then they moved up, to meet again in Ruth's mouth, three pulsating, probing tongues, while their hands groped across acres of trembling flesh to come to rest, in a heap again, between Ruth's legs.
At length they fell asleep that way.
FIVE.
Thinking. That's what's wrong with ever waking up; you'll have to stop dreaming and start thinking. Dreaming just now, or was it thinking, four years ago-or when? Phyllis and John leaving for San Francisco, and Blonde on Blonde ... maybe it's all a dream, Julia's still in New York, and you're still a carpenter, building a damned fool millionaire's adobe mansion ... Oh-oh, too late. But I warned you. Now you're thinking, not dreaming, thinking about what's a dream and what isn't, and you can't go back to the dream. Don't open your eyes yet, anyhow; stretch a bit, roll over; now the other way. Yep, bed's empty-but Jesus Christ, maybe it was a dream after all: you wouldn't wake up after a night like that one with a hard-on, or would you?
One eye open, barely, just for a second: across the pillows a strip of noonday sun continued in a zigzag up the whitewashed wall. This sleeping half the day away could easily become a habit, Steve decided virtuously, before he slid back under the sheet and off again into another half-dream of last night, which gave way in turn to total recall of that night four years before....
At a scarred round oak table, under a brightly handpainted tissue paper lamp, four sadly smiling, stoned, beautiful faces-all beautiful, even if one was his own, and couldn't see it; Steve knew he had to be beautiful, too; because he was so stoned and happy and sad all at once, because they all were. The rest of the vast Prince Street warehouse-still John's studio, and would be for a few days longer-was absolute darkness, except for one tiny ruby eye gazing benevolently at them from the most distant wall: the light on the amplifier, from whence issued the presence of Dylan, intoning Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
John was rolling yet more joints with his pale, long, flat-nailed fingers. His wispy, flaxen hair fell forward on either side of his slender face as he tried to concentrate, to make the crumbs of grass and chunks of black hash lie still inside the creased red paper. Phyllis slowly took up one of the finished joints from the willow-ware saucer in the center of the table, slowly lit it, slowly toked, slowly passed it to Steve. She kept her tiny brown fingers cupped around his ass he dragged, and his legs closed against them inadvertently. Her hand smelled like cloves. The roach, and her fingers, went to Ruth's lips next, then John's. Her loose yellow sleeve, silken and shimmering, slipped back to her elbow, the fine hairs on her tanned arm glinted in the colored light. No one spoke, except Dylan. Was he really saying "Now warehouse-ize my radiant drums"? Far out.....
John and Phyllis weren't old friends, but the couple of years that he'd known them were the fullest of changes in Steve's life, and the two of them had always been at least one full turn in the road ahead of himself and Ruth. Breaking up, and back together again on terms of so-called "mutual freedom," into the grisley analytic trip for a while, dropping out of the fame and riches race, digging this funny new pop music that funny new groups with funny new names like the Beatles were playing, dropping acid, messing around with radical politics-and now they were leaving New York, and Steve for the first time was realizing that sooner or later he and Ruth would have to leave, too. Weird, like seeing yourself as you will be next year, being friends with this couple; weirder still, the thought of them so far away and ahead in a single jump: San Francisco.
You can't dance to Dylan. Especially not to "Sad-Eyed Lady." But Phyllis stood up and danced. Very slowly, stately, delicate, medieval; a sort of pavane, Steve thought. After a smiling, long while, Ruth stood, too, and joined her. The two women, one fair, full-figured, tall in a long green gown, the other dark and child-like in yellow shift and white tights, dipped in and out of the circle of light, a wordless goodbye to each other. Then John rose out of his chair and stepped between them, took their hands in his, and all three promenaded the length of the studio.
Steve stayed at the table, treading heavy metal waters, swamped in a sea of memories, too stoned to swim for shore. He heard the others talking, laughing, somewhere out there, but not anything that they said. The record ended, time began again-how long had he been sitting there, alone? A minute? Two hours? All night? He listened: nothing. Then finally, another record dropped and Dylan was very softly singing Mister Tamborine Man.
A floorboard creaked; Steve didn't turn to look, but Phyllis was standing behind his chair: the scent of cloves. She bent down and stroked his beard-he had one, then-and whispered, "Come join us, Steve," in his ear. Warm skin against his cheek, her hip and belly. She was naked. The instant the fact registered, his cock was straining against his pantleg, a stony, stoned, all-night hard-on. He pulled her to him with both hands on her buttocks, searching her crinkly black bush with an urgent tongue. "No," she whispered, squirming and laughing as his beard tickled her thighs, "Come on and join us, let's say goodbye together," fumbling with the top button on his shirt. But his tongue had found what it was after, and as he licked and rolled the tiny bulb of pulsing flesh, she stopped trying to pull him out of his chair, and bent over him instead, so that he could slide both hands down and around the crack of her ass to rub both index fingers back and forth, inside and outside the lips of her cunt. Crooning, she leaned down over his back, pulled up his shirt, and as she writhed and quickly came, she managed to get his belt unfastened and his fly open. "Mmmmmm, that was nice," she said, chuckling softly, both hands under his wet chin, tugging him upwards again. "Now come with me-I think you're being cuckolded!"
His clothes disappeared, by magic, as Dylan sang that he was ready to go anywhere, to fade into his own parade, and he followed her across the darkness to a corner with a thick white rug covered with cushions and abandoned clothing. By the light of a scented candle guttering in a silver dish, he saw Ruth's yellow hair spilled across John's belly, her legs locked around John's head, John's head, John's cock vanishing down between her breasts, appearing again, vanishing now up into her mouth, and back again, faster and faster, while John's hands on her hips ground her ass furiously against his face. Phyllis knelt beside her husband and stroked his back with one hand,, while the other crept up Steve's leg, caressed his balls, drew his cock towards her lips. Her tongue came out and traveled, hot and gluey, once around the head. Too excited for such play, Steve fell to his knees between John's thrashing legs, pulling Phyllis to him over Ruth, pushing her legs up and outwards, heaving himself on top of her, against Ruth's gyrating ass, forcing his way into that tiny, tight cunt, and burying his face between those pear-shaped breasts, source of that odor of cloves-
Someone was gently lifting a corner of the sheet off Steve's blissfully buried face. Breath against his cheek. His eyelids struggled momentarily, but managed to stay shut. The sheet was returned, chin-level. Footsteps, sandals on a gritty brick floor.
Prince Street vanished. No question left about where and when he might be, but he risked a slitted squint: Julia walking around the bed to the roomier side, shedding a sweater and a wrap-around skirt on the way. She wore nothing else, except for the sandals. He heard those go skidding under him, then a brief complaint from the plywood slab between the cinder blocks and the foam rubber mattress.
"Oooh!" She'd discovered his hard-on. She slid a Fingernail down it, feather-light, to his balls, "I knew I'd come to the right place," she murmured, nestling closer.
How'd she mean that? Back to bed, or out here to New Mexico? "You're not sleeping, you phony," she suddenly announced in a loud voice, straight into his ear. "You heard what I said, and you're thinking about it. Aren't you?"
Steve jumped, but persisted in his act.
"Come on, you possum. You can't fool me."
You can't, you never could, that's what's really terrifying about Julia ...
"Steve." No-nonsense-now voice, while her thumb and forefinger threatened a pinch at the tender fold of skin directly under the head of his cock. "Steve. Lover. Husband. Fuck me." Her belly jumped against his, cold and demanding, as she put her leg across his hip and thrust his cock up against the spread lips of her cunt.
"Where's Ruth?"
"Where's Ruth?" she mimicked, and stuck out her tongue. "Don't worry, Ruth just went into town to do some shopping. I was going to go with her-you know, I haven't even seen Santa Fe yet, you'll have to take me there this afternoon-but I decided that coming back to bed with you would be more fun. And I was right." Deftly, she slid downward until the full length of his cock was inside her, and her mouth was buried in the hollow of his throat. "Did she say anything?"
"Mmngh? Who?" Julia's hips began to rotate, clock-wise, with a confident rhythm, taking his unwilling cock around with her, grating it against both pelvic bones.
"Ruth."
"Yes." Julia slipped one index finger into his available ear, and the other down the crack of his ass, both wriggling in counter-rhythm to her hips. Steve still refused to move.
"What did she say?"
"Let me see: 'Good morning,' and 'How many eggs,' and 'Have another cup of coffee,' and 'I'd better make a fresh pot for Steve before I go,'and 'Thanks,' because I said I could do that, and 'So long, I should be back before lunch.' End of report. Now fuck me."
"Where's Sheila?"
"Oh, you uptight bastard! She went with Ruth. So did Fayaway, for god's sake. Now fuck me, will you! Or I'll bite through your jugular."
Steve rolled on top of her, shut his eyes again, and began to pump, methodically at first, but then in her insistent, building tempo, as she locked her ankles around the backs of his knees, and slammed her belly up against his; but he'd be damned if he'd give in entirely, and he forced his mind back stubbornly to cheat her, back to Prince Street, and it was the memory of Phyllis he pounded against and spurted deep into at last, not Julia at all. Not that it mattered to Julia: she came twice before he finally did, and once more, terrifically, with him, and then seconds later leaped out of bed in a whiplash of sheets, with a contented smirk and a cat-like stretch yawn.
And his little mental infidelity hadn't done Steve that much good, either; he'd kept remembering John and Phyllis as he and Ruth had seen them last, the previous year, on a communal farm in northern California: withdrawn and ascetic, very much involved in Zen and macrobiotics-one trip he hoped he and Ruth weren't due for. And then, at the crucial instant, he couldn't help recalling Julia's off-hand dismissal of them once when they'd come up in conversation-really a small world, New York; she'd known John and Phyllis there, too, years, before she met Steve-as "an uptight pair of middle-aged would-be swingers, trying too hard to be with it' and 'cool' on every front."
All in all, it was a pretty lousy piece of ass, as far as Steve was concerned, and a piss-poor way to start any morning, but particularly in the one to follow last night....
"This is just lovely. You promise to show me around Santa Fe, and the whole afternoon's tour is going to consist of twenty garages, a shopping plaza, and now the State Employment Bureau. I might as well've stayed in New York."
"I kind of wish you had, you know."
"No, you don't, not yet. But you will, if you keep me waiting in this goddamned truck all day."
"Look-" It was glaring stupidity ever to attempt an argument with this crazy bitch, he should know better by now. "This particular stop happens to have been dictated by the first practical notion that's entered my head in forty-eight hours-"
"Since I arrived, you mean."
"Even longer, I'm afraid. Since I lost my job. In any case, I'm gonna find out whether I'm eligible for any handouts, and you're gonna sit in this miserable truck and wait for me, whether you like it or not."
"I'm gonna stomp in there and haul you out by your fat prick if you're not back here in ten minutes," she growled in a parody of his anger, with a swift peck at his cheek and an even swifter grab at his fly. Steve slammed the truck door and backed away, straight into the long, bony arms of Daniel the Motherfucker.
"Hey, man!" Daniel slugged him across the shoulders with as much feeling as if they'd been parted, tragically, for years. "Shit! How ya bin? Goin' in there, huh? Know what those bureaucratic cocksuckers told me? Gotta have six months work before ya git a fuckin' nickel. Sonsabitches. I ain't never worked six months straight in my life and no fuckin' government"-the way Daniel pronounced it government was a much more obscene word than its adjective-"is ever gonna make me. Who's the chick? Yer old lady?"
"Kind of," Steve heard himself saying lamely.
He'd very nearly said, "one of them." The question came as a total surprise, a sudden intimation of the casual complications in store for him in this new life of his, and he didn't much relish the prospect. Or the presence, just now of the persistent Daniel-who, at least, had missed the implications of Steve's response to his last question, doubtless because he was already launched into the next one:
"Kin you gimme a lift, Bro? My fuckin' truck broke down this is morning on the way in."
"So'd mine." Which was why the twenty-actually only four-garages, where Steve had learned he'd probably be needing a new fuel pump, and a generator, and sooner than he cared to think about, a new engine. And also why the shopping plaza; Ruth barely reached the highway before the goddamned thing started missing; she'd turned around and limped back, and come in the door scarcely a minute after he'd shot his bogus wad into Phyllis/Julia. Why that should bother him, after last night, Steve hadn't found the time to figure out yet. Or last night, for that matter-what it might mean, in terms of the future. Ruth hadn't let on that it ever happened, but then she'd only seen her today for a few minutes, and Sheila and Fayaway, as well as Julia, were right there all the while. "But it runs now, after a fashion. Where'd you leave yours?"
"Just the other side of Tesuque. It's nuthin' serious, a cracked distributor cap. We kin pick one up at a junkyard on the way out."
"Sure." Julia's famous tour of historic Santa Fe will now feature forty junkyards, Steve thought savagely. "But first I wanna try my luck in there. Julia, Daniel. Be right out."
And he was, more or less, in twenty minutes to be precise, with one large load lifted, at any rate, by the fairly firm promise of fifty round dollars per week for the next six months courtesy Uncle Nelson Rockefeller and the Interstate Claims departments in Albuquerque and Albany, respectively. That would meet the mortgage; they'd eat, somehow, and the truck and everything else that needed to be repaired or acquired would just have to wait, that's all. All that had to be worried about, on this score anyhow, was whether Good Old George filled out the respective forms properly. Maybe he'd better call, collect of course, to be absolutely certain George didn't find a way to blow it for him ...
His truck's windows, Steve noticed as he walked back across the parking lot, despite its standing directly in the sun, were all tightly closed now. He found out why as soon as he opened the door: the sweet smoke poured out, as thick as tear-gas in Chicago. Julia and Daniel giggled conspiratorially.
"This is ... the ... very best stuff ... I've ever done ... anywhere-honest," Julia squeaked, over full lungs, giggled again, and lost it.
"It's ... the altitude!" Daniel chortled back. "You're not ... used to it yet."
"This is a public lot, in case you hadn't noticed, full of cop-type people," Steve inserted, "that you two idiots picked to turn on in."
"Also ... it's ... very good shit," Daniel smirked. "Should be ... grew it myself." Both he and Julia found this remark inexpressibly hilarious. People were already stopping to stare. Steve climbed quickly behind the wheel and prayed that this rolling ecological crime of his would start without the usual struggle.
It did, it actually did. And Daniel was right, it was truly fantastic grass-he passed the joint over at the first red light; Steve took it, thinking, reasonably, that as the only straight head present, he could best be counted upon to swallow it if they should be stopped; and after one small poke, he was instantly positive they'd been waiting there forever, that light would never again turn green. All he could think of was the Beatle lines about the man who blew his mind out in a car not noticing that the lights had changed.
And when they finally did, he very nearly didn't; but it was suddenly good to be alive again, and in Santa Fe, and unemployed, and, even, to have Julia there beside him, rubbing her hand along his thigh.
SIX.
It felt really great to be up early-before breakfast for a change, before everyone else in fact-and doing some actual work again. Sawing juniper logs for the fireplace, up on the mesa behind the house. Just the trees already undercut and doomed, anyhow, by the gaping arroyos starting up there and slashing down across the land to the broad empty riverbed below. Next time he went to town he'd have to see about getting a permit to cut most of their winter's supply on the federal reserve. Steve had forgotten, if he'd ever learned, how big a cord is, but he was sure they were going to need a lot of them for that rambling old adobe; a fire felt good most evenings and some mornings-like this one-and damn it, it wasn't even Labor Day yet. And he'd have to scrounge a potbelly for the end of the house where Jack and Sheila slept, and maybe another for the disused room off the kitchen that would probably become Julia's; if Julia stayed, but that was another whole set of questions that Steve, with the sun just getting up to where it could help the saw work the kinks out of his back, still wasn't quite ready to figure.
Nothing had been resolved last night: he and Julia returned, still stoned, after whatever supper there had been was cleared away, and Ruth merely said, "You'll have to for yourselves, I'm tired and I'm going to bed now-to sleep," and Julia replied, 'That's a brilliant idea," and curled up immediately on the cot she'd slept in the first night. So, after a prolonged bout of the marijuana munchies, Steve had fallen into bed with Ruth-and a swift, sweet, wordless fuck, followed by deep, dreamless sleep.
It was great, too, to be alone for a change, and to have time to consider practical problems like fuel, and the bigger shed he'd have to build for the goat before her kids came, and the place in the corral that the horse kept climbing through, and the holes in the chicken-house roof. Great to have time to take care of those things, great to be Unemployed. This, after all, was what they'd had in mind when they'd first come to New Mexico: to live on and in the land itself somehow, to get out of the vicious money and skill slavery cycle, selling your time to buy the goods and services you therefore no longer have the time to produce or perform for yourself. Employment, what a filthy word-go employ yourselves, you mother-employers!
Time to take off his sweater, and maybe his shirt as well. Steve stepped back to admire the heap of logs he'd already sawed, and to examine the palms of his hands, where his infant carpenter's calluses had started to slough off already with the last couple days' inactivity, and angry little blisters were beginning to form under them. Good hands all the same, good enough, they'd toughen up eventually. He was learning the secrets of the bucksaw, the best angle to hold it at, how to lean into the down-stroke with just enough weight. And not to attempt anything much over four inches across; when Jack came home from the mountains they'd try out the two-man crosscut on this bigger stuff....
Catching his breath now, looking out across the land past the riverbed, still in black shadow cast by the ridge. And beyond the ridge, a corkscrew of white smoke rising: the nearest neighbors, three miles away by the road, the multitudinous Chicano family who'd sold them these hundred and twenty-six acres. Above that drifting white plume, drifting too and shimmering orange in the sun against the otherwise unmarked blue, a broad double contrail pointed north and west, towards Los Alamos: another sort of neighbor and too goddamned close for comfort when you stopped to think about it. Which Steve wasn't going to do, not now; instead, his mind began to replay, revise, and expand the zonked conversation begun yesterday afternoon while making the rounds of the junkyards. He couldn't remember what started it off, but somewhere in that wilderness of giggles and the wrong distributor caps, Julia had accused him of becoming "provincial" and "apolitical" out here, of ignoring what was coming down under Nixon, in Chicago and Detroit and everywhere, against the blacks, the freaks, all "the people":
"Okay, I'm apolitical, if running through the streets with ballbats and motorcycle helmets is politics these days. I mean, I can feel for the Panthers in all their agony, but I'm more and more convinced that neither they nor anybody else trying to 'organize' in the cities are in the vanguard of any revolution that I am, or want to be, a part of. I think we should let those bastards-the Establishment, or whatever the movement epithet is this season-let Them keep Their deadly, dying cities, as the NLF did in Vietnam, because as long as we stay in them and try to fight it out there, we're at the mercy of so many things that They control completely: food supply, shelter, public transport, utilities, the streets themselves."
"So you're simply going to abandon the urban poor? Or do you expect them to be able to split the cities as easily you have?"
"It's grim, but yeah, I think well have to write them off-all of them, anyhow, who aren't young and loose enough to scream on their own and learn to grow and make and do everything for themselves again, in order to spread out in the countryside and dig in, where Their massive powers are a disadvantage."
Julia labeled this a rationalization for Steve's own cop-out, and himself as cold a bastard as anybody in Nixon's administration, if he really thought that way. But Daniel waded into it at this point, and he was no dumbbell, Steve discovered; he might sound like a cross between a Queens cabbie and a West Virginia redneck, but that was just his political patois. He could do some original thinking; for instance his analysis of the movement cliche that Julia happened to tuck into her tirade:
" 'All Power to the People,' huh? That's bullshit. Pure bullshit. Ya take 'All Power' and ya spread it around, evenly, give it back to all 'the People', and it ain't power anymore-it jest dissappears like. Cause, you see, power, political power, only exists when it's concentrated in a few hands. What you and all them other idiots must be talkin about is, Destroy All Power: let each one of us have power, all the power, over our own self, and no fuckin' further."
Julia, however, ignored him, and rambled on into subjects she admittedly didn't understand, like Tijerina's Alianza, and the influx of longhairs into New Mexico. Steve was tempted to ask her what she thought she was doing out here, then, but thought better of it and instead launched an explanation of how the real land problem in the Southwest is the government, local and federal, which together controls just about exactly half the total land area in New Mexico, and absentee landlords, who own another twenty-five percent, leaving a bare-and you could be damned sure it's the barest-quarter for the Chicanos and the hippies to scramble for; and then he tried to describe how many younger Chicanos have been deserting the land ever since the second world war, preferring an Anglo job in the cities, with all the plastic installment-plan trimmings, to so-called subsistence agriculture-
"Alianza, huh?" Daniel snorted at Julia. "When
Chicanos're talkin Land Grant, I let 'em, cause after all who the fuck am I but a damn gringo; an' besides, I'm all for anyfuckinthing that's against the government. But let me ask you a simple question: who the fuck was the King of Spain, to cut up this country like a cherry pie? Did he have any more business here-'ceptin the fact his goons got here before us-than we do? If this land belongs to anyfuckbody, it's the Indians, and they usta know bettern to talk about ownin' land: the land owns you, if you're lucky, and if ya treat it right. Otherwise it disowns you and you're screwed ... "
Drifting up the arroyos now, in tattered fragments ripped by the wind, Ruth's voice was calling him for breakfast. Steve hung the bucksaw on a limb, stretched, and started running down. Lizards and a solitary, terrified grouse scurried for cover as his boots sent the loose rocks clattering before him.
"Fayaway says she and Julia are going to live with us forever. Is that so?" Sheila at the breakfast table, her profile a smudged, paler, slightiy smaller copy of Ruth's. Just the three of them; Fayaway had grabbed a doughnut and split to pester the poor old goad some more, and Julia was still in bed. The cornmeal mush had turned to glue in Steve's mouth, but Sheila wasn't looking in his direction for an answer; Ruth did, though, for a split but interminable second, before she herself replied:
"Forever's a long time. But yes, they're going to live here, it seems."
"Julia's in love with Steve. Isn't she?"
Maybe some coffee would help-Christ, it's scalding-
"Isn't she?"
No help from Ruth on this one; and Steve had nothing whatsoever ready, goddamned fool that he was. A beautiful morning it had been, all right, up to this minute. Why, why in hell, while he was up there on the ridge thinking, really thinking for the first time in three days, hadn't he spent a few minutes preparing for this inevitability? "Yes," he said finally. "That is, I guess so, I mean.... " Shit-he could go on qualifying all morning, and each muttered word would only make it worse. "Yes," he repeated, and shut his mouth resolutely.
"And you're-" Sheila switched the question, and her stare, abruptly back to Ruth, across the table. "-He's sleeping with her?"
Quaint words in an almost thirteen-year-old mouth. Sheila's chin was trembling with the effort required to produce them. Probably she'd spent hours off by herself, bitterly phrasing all of this. God only knew what it meant to her; all Steve knew was that he should have expected it, and hadn't, and was thereby a horse's ass, and this scene was meanwhile ruining everyone's breakfast. No telling what else it might be ruining. "Yes, I am, I have, I no doubt will again. What are you getting at?"
Sheila showed no sign of having heard him, and kept staring at Ruth. "What about you?"
"What do you mean? What about me?"
"Do you still love him?"
"Yes. Certainly."
"And you're going to go on living with him and her?"
"It looks that way, yes."
"And sleeping with him, too?"
"Goddamnit, Sheila-" And goddamn Dr. Spock, as well: Steve felt his own father's righteous indignation vibrating in his temples, pre-Spock, pre-Neill, pre-everybody but the Old Testament, at this impertinent incursion into something that was none of the kid's business; and then he realized that his father would never have had anything remotely resembling this business to be questioned about-a furtive piece, a kept woman somewhere, but not in a million years under the same roof as his family-and the would-be bellow stuck in his throat as Ruth cut in with the calm, enlightened tones they usually shared:
"Steve, she's got a perfect right to know where we stand; after all, she has to live here, and she only wants to be sure that her whole life's not going to fall to pieces on her tomorrow." Ruth stopped for a cup of coffee and closed both eyes for an instant; only for that instant did her face show any strain or doubt.
"The fact is, Sheila, Steve and I haven't had much chance to talk about all this yet, ourselves, together. But yes, I think things will go on pretty much as before, except that Julia will be here, too. And Fayaway."
"But it's-" She'd looked it up beforehand in the dictionary, Steve was positive, and she was pausing now to be sure she got the accents in the right place, "-polygamy."
"That's one word for it. It's still a family. It's worked in other societies-"
"It's against the law."
Christ, what are we raising, a Republican? Here's a kid who was on a picket line before she was ten, who's overheard Thoreau and Malatesta and Trotsky and Marcuse and god knows who else quoted around the house since she was in kindergarten, and what's bugging her is the legality of the situation. "It would only be breaking the law if Julia and I took it into our heads to go down to city hall and get a marriage license. Which I can absolutely promise will never happen. Ever." Crazy I may be at times, but not stark raving mad. "So you don't have to have nightmares about us getting busted or something."
"I wasn't! I only said that because, well, because it is against the law." Indignant herself now, confused or relieved or both, Sheila was staring down into her plate, crumbling a doughnut there absently. "And because I don't like it, that's all."
"Don't like what?"
"What you're doing to my mother. "
So that's the way it is-or is it? "But you just heard Ruth say it's okay-"
"She did not say it's okay!"
"Sheila: it's okay." Ruth was crumbling a doughnut, too, now. Steve glanced down at his own plate, and his fingers, too, were crumbling one. Portrait of three doughnut-crumblers at their crumby breakfast table....
"-Well, I just don't like that goddamned little brat tagging after me every minute. She bugs the shit out of me. Really."
This was more like the point, Steve thought. And a sure sign the worst was past, Sheila using a word like "shit"; her speech was usually most lady-like when she was most upset. "Tell her to leave you alone, then."
"What good will that do? Who else is she going to tag around after? And she pesters the goat and the chickens, and the cats, and.... "
"I'll speak to Julia about it, okay? And well see if we can't get her a kitten of her own, or something."
"Thanks. But I pity the poor kitten, if you do." As if as anxious to be rid of the entire topic as he was, Sheila was suddenly up and out the door; but she wheeled around on the stoop to toss back a final, real complaint: "And she keeps on telling me how you're her daddy, too, now, and you're gonna do this and that and everybloodything for her. And you haven't even built that new pen for the kids I told you months ago we'd be needing. And Guinivere's due any minute now."
"Okay. I was planning on doing that today, and I will."
"Thanks!"
Wow, two whole thankyous. For nothing, my darling daughter, absolutely nothing at all. And that bloody: what British novelist is she reading now?. . .
"You still want that coffee? It's cold." Ruth was clearing the table already, and at the same time frying another batch of doughnuts.
"No, I'd better get back to work. Unless you want to talk?"
"Not now. That was plenty of talking for me.
Unless.... "
"Yeah? What?"
"Unless you'd like to tell me what it was that you and Julia slipped into the tea the other night."
"Huh? I had nothing to do with that."
"Steve, I've never yet, in seventeen years, had to accuse you of lying to a direct question. Oh, you'll lie your head off indirectly, but that's all right. I do that, too."
"Don't you believe me?"
Ruth looked straight at him, without blinking, for at least half a minute. Finally she said, "But I still want to know what it was."
"So did I. All I know is, it's so new it doesn't even have initials yet. Julia said she told a whacked-out Yale graduate chemist what she wanted it for, and that's what he gave her."
Ruth smiled, a slow, downward curling of her lips. "Julia is a very strange person."
"Yeah." Steve found himself wishing he had Ruth's detachment from the subject, and at the same time wondering, uneasily, how she came to have it.
"You don't want me to be jealous this time; or do you?"
Reading his mind; no other-explanation. Ruth did it all the time, but it was one trick Julia lacked. Thank god. Or maybe Julia just didn't bother, it wasn't necessary, she had plenty of other powers over him. "...I'm not really sure," he said at last.
'"Indecision is the price you pay for independence.' You said that to me, once upon a time, very stoned."
God, what a woman, he thought. How in hell did I ever get involved with any others.? Where did I ever find the time, and more, the presumption? Loving and living with and learning to understand this one is much more than I'm capable of, already....
"Oh, yes, and I wanted to tell you something, too. Sheila began her first period yesterday. Which may explain a little bit. And also make you feel ancient. It did me."
Yeah. As ancient as that mesa up there. And as dense.
SEVEN.
Steve found it hard to believe at first, but it was going to work, it really was: the three of them. It took a while to develop the ground rules, but Julia was-for her-amazingly tactful throughout, and Ruth appeared to be just as determined-for reasons Steve was at a total loss to understand-to see that the arrangement had every possible chance of succeeding. Both women pitched right in and had the room next to the kitchen scrubbed, painted, and very comfortable in a day and a half. Steve threw together another cinderblock, plywood, and foam rubber bed for it, and a plank chest and wardrobe.
"I'm not ready for any more nights like that first one," Ruth said, "So, look, Steve, when you want to sleep with me, come into my room"-it used to be "our" room, he noted-"alone, and come prepared to spend the whole night."
Julia nodded agreement, adding, "We shouldn't need any rigid schedule-but it'll be up to you, Steve, to see to it that neither of us feels cheated or left out."
This state of affairs lasted for less than a week, and as it happened Ruth herself was the first to break the firm rule she'd laid down. She tapped on Julia's door one night, just as Steve's cock was responding to some vigorous preliminaries:
"It's only me. Insomnia. Mind if I come in for a minute?"
"Not at all," Julia replied, sniggering as she swatted Steve's hand, which was automatically reaching out to pull the covers up. Ruth shut the door carefully behind her. She was hugging her ragged old chenille robe around her, looking shy and vulnerable and more than a little surprised at herself. There was something rehearsed, and still awkward, about both the way she perched on the extreme foot of the bed, and what she said next:
"I'd just like to watch, if that's all right with you.... I've always wondered, 'Is voyeurism really any fun?' Now's my chance to find out."
"And our chance to explore the renowned pleasures of exhibitionism," Julia answered, with the closest thing to a curtsey she could manage, kneeling and nude.
Steve was lying on his back; his cock, the object of intensive scrutiny now by three pairs of eyes, drooped with stage fright. "No, you don't," Julia admonished it, and bent down to administer a swift, expert lick, from balls to tip. The droop vanished; his cock was instantly steely hard, throbbing and pointing almost straight up in the air. Julia's tongue flat and dry and rough as a cat's now, crept slowly up across his belly and chest, while her hands pinned his shoulders down against the pillow. She wriggled her ass coyly above him, rubbing the lips of her cunt very lightly around just the quivering end of his cock for several minutes, and then she suddenly sat down, hard, with the whole length of him deep and immobile inside her. His hips thrust upwards of their own accord, but she pushed him down again with all her strength and held him there, grinning. She ran her fingertips down his ribs, then picked up his hands and pressed them against her tiny breasts. When he tried to pump up against her again, she dug both heels into his ass, stuck out her tongue, and chuckled, teasingly, "Gotcha!" Then, quickly, she was up, forward, her tongue in his surprised mouth and only the swollen head of his cock still inside her; then just as quickly, bang, her ass was back, grinding hard against his pelvis. "-Where I wantcha!"
The next time she rose straight up, very, very slowly, lifting her arms gracefully, pressing the palms of her hands together above her head like a Burmese dancer, bending his cock backwards so that the shaft rubbed hard against her clit. Then she began to sway from side to side, very far each way and faster and faster, until he was sure she'd break his cock right off at the roots; the head churned around inside her, probing quivering soft crannies, jelly canyons, never explored before. Her nipples grew gristiy under his fingers, a deep blush spread up her belly and down her thighs. She threw her head forward, caught both his thumbs in her mouth, and gnawed on them as she came.
"Was that nice to watch?" Julia turned and asked Ruth, as soon as she'd caught her breath. "Or would you rather be a participant?"
"It was pretty exciting, I guess. But I don't think being a voyeur is my thing, after all."
"Then why don't you join us?" Julia slipped off Steve and stretched out beside him, smoothing the sheet between them invitingly.
"I'm not sure that's my thing, either. I'd never made love with another woman, until that other night.... I'm afraid I have too many hang-ups about it, and I wouldn't be much good for either of you."
"Well, just come lie down here, and relax and be with us, and we'll just see what happens."
Relaxing wasn't exactly what Steve was in the mood for, just then-happiness may be a warm gun, as the Beatles have it, but his was overheated at the moment, and still undischarged-but he didn't feel like arguing, either. He did, very much, want Ruth to join them: perhaps watching hadn't done much for her, but being watched-by her-keyed him up fantastically, and she looked so lonely and cold, hunched into herself down there at the foot of the bed; she'd never been more desirable. He stretched down his hand towards her, and after another moment's hesitation, she let him draw her up between them, and let Julia pull her robe down off her shoulders.
"Do you like making love with other women, Julia? I mean, have you done it much?"
"I like making love with people I love, whether they're men or women. But no, I guess you couldn't call me a very accomplished lesbian, if that's what you mean. I've only been to bed with two other women in my whole life, actually. And both were like you, or us, rather; I mean, men-lovers mostly, and men brought me together with them, at first." As she spoke, Julia was brushing her lips in little figure-eights across Ruth's nearer breast, and lightly caressing Ruth's belly with the back of her hand. Timidly at first, Ruth did the same to Julia, while her other hand, behind her back, absently toyed with Steve's impatient cock.
"...I suppose I've led a pretty sheltered life ... but I'm not even sure what women do to each other, or how ... would you teach me?"
"There's nothing to teach. It's much simpler than with men, really, because all you have to do is what your own body wants. Here-" Julia drew herself up, crouched on her knees above Ruth's head, then gradually unfolded down across her, letting her own trailing hair and light warm breath trace a tingling path the whole way, from Ruth's forehead to her lifted hips. As their heads disappeared between each other's legs, they rolled over on their sides, away from Steve; their bellies began to heave against each other's breasts, their breath came louder and faster-and Steve was beginning to feel as lonely and left out as Ruth had looked when she first came in, until Julia reached across and drew his cock into Ruth's cunt from behind just as both women came. Steve barely had to twitch, he was so tense with excitement, before he came, too, in a flood of sweet relief. Ruth turned back, over her shoulder, to kiss his eyelids, and he fell instantly into deep, welcome sleep.
The following day both Julia and Ruth were more than usually affectionate towards him, and shy and withdrawn towards each other. And that evening, as soon as Sheila and Fayaway had gone off to bed, Julia told Steve, "I think you should spend tonight just with Ruth, I think she'd like that," then went straight to her room and swiftly closed the door.
Steve and Ruth took a long walk together in the darkness-the moon was in the last quarter, and not up yet-and then sat by the fire, writing letters and reading, not talking but feeling very close, until almost midnight. In bed, Ruth said, "I'd like to do just what you want to do, tonight," and lay very quietly as he went down on her for a while, and then fucked her, missionary fashion, for half an hour without either of them reaching any climax. At last he squeezed her legs between his, making a tight vise of her cunt, and pumped himself into a frenzy that left them both slippery with sweat and his come.
"How did you feel, last night?" she asked afterwards. "Did what Julia and I were doing turn you off?"
"Quite the contrary."
"That's funny; I'm sure I'd be very turned off, if you and another man went down on each other in front of me."
"I'm sure I'd be, too."
"Have you ever?"
"Nope. A guy blew me once, but that's the extent of my homosexual experience." Except for that marathon night with George and Dolores the Eskimo, Steve thought, but he saw no point in telling Ruth about that right now; and technically, it didn't qualify, anyhow.
"Anybody I know?"
"What?"
"The guy."
"Yep."
"Don't tell me who-just how it felt."
"It didn't. Maybe he was just a lousy cocksucker, I dunno; but it got me nowhere whatsoever."
"And then what happened."
"Well, I finally fucked him in the ass."
"And what was that like?"
"To misquote Oscar Wilde-who after all was referring to a woman-it was like a piece of cold mutton. But I came, I guess I was able to pretend he was a woman, and that was the end of it."
"Now you've really got me wondering-but I don't want to know who he was, if he used to be a friend of ours.... Sodomy: that's the word for it, isn't it? Was it a popular pastime in Sodom, I wonder? If it was, I kind of understand why the brimstone. You did it to me once, remember? We were visiting somewhere, for some dumb reason I'd forgotten to pack my Diaphragm, you were impossibly horny, and yet you couldn't come in my mouth."
"I remember." And would much rather not. What an "impossibly horny" young man I used to be....
"I didn't like it at all. It hurt like hell, and it was such an intrusion, an indignity, a travesty, if you know what I mean."
"Hmmmm."
"Was that the problem with this guy? You couldn't come in his mouth? I mean, is that often hard for you to do?"
"It used to be. And terribly exciting to try. It wasn't fear of being bitten off so much as fear of my own aggression, I guess. Something like that. Anyhow, the problem with 'this guy' was simply that he was a guy-I don't dig the way men feel or smell, that's all. And I can't imagine kissing one. Ech."
"Poor, limited heterosexual."
"Yeah. But it's a limitation I think I can live with, so long as there's women handy. Now tell me how you felt last night. That's what all this is leading up to, isn't it?"
Now it was Ruth's turn to say "Hmmm."
"Have you suddenly discovered, at the end of your fourth decade in the present incarnation, that you're actually a dyke?"
"I hope not," she laughed, "but I have learned that women feel and smell all right. Just fine, in fact. And Julia's correct-it really is much easier, simpler than with a man. With any man but you, I'm sure; I think I must know you, your body, at least as well as myself, my own, by now."
"So you really liked it?"
"With Julia? I liked it fine. A little too fine, in fact, for all my deeply ingrained hang-ups on the subject. Which, incidentally, is why I don't intend for it to happen very often."
"Just special occasions, huh?"
"Holidays and leap year."
"Otherwise it's back to straight polygamy?"
"Mmmmm. And seeing as tonight's my turn with the patriarch, I want my money's worth."
Their second go, to Steve's surprise, was very quick, and very good. But then, his main hang-up had always been with passivity in women, Steve reflected as they drifted off to sleep in a tangle of damp sheets. Exceptions like Redbook Joyce only reinforced the rule....
The next night it was Julia who had questions to ask; and, uncharacteristically, she didn't even wait until they'd done some fucking.
"What's Ruth been telling you? About me? About us?"
"Not much, really. If you mean your little sixty-niner two nights ago, she said she dug it, but not as a steady diet. I don't understand why you two don't talk to each other-why you depend on me to carry all the news back and forth."
"I was afraid things might be, well, moving a little too fast for her, that's all."
"Look, if things are moving too fast for anybody, it's not Ruth, baby, it's me."
Julia sniffed at that notion. "You-you're in your glory, you old goat, and you know it."
"I am, huh?"
"You certainly are. And you are an old goat-you're beginning to smell like one." They were sitting side by side on the edge of her bed, peeling off their clothes; to demonstrate, she put her head in his bared lap, and wrinkled her nose. "But I like it," she added, and scoured his navel with her tongue. The next moment though, she was thoughtful again. "Back in New York, I was positive that this would be a lot harder to work out than it's been. So far, that is; I'm still not so sure that Ruth's really accepting my being here for good."
"What more do you want? Her signature, notarized, on a contract stipulating which of you gets my services which nights for the rest of my life?"
"I just want to know, for certain, that she doesn't resent me subconsciously."
"You're too much. Of course she resents you subconsciously," Steve said, and could have added, So do I, but decided against it; let well enough alone. "You really should talk to her about it."
"I've tried. All she wants to discuss with me is the garden, and the meals, and when Guinivere's going to have her damned kids, and how many eggs the chickens might lay tomorrow, and who's going to bake the bread or do the dishes, and-"
"Okay, okay. All that's important, too, you know."
"Sure, sure. But sometimes I catch her looking at me, when I'm busy with something or other, and she always smiles very strangely, and turns away, quick, as if I'd almost caught her thinking something about me that she doesn't want me to know."
"You're imagining things. You must have a vestigial conscience, after all."
"Why'd you say that?" Julia frowned at him, very nearly offended. "Have I done anything to be sorry for? Have I hurt her in any way? It's not as if I'd come out here to grab you and run off, you know. I've been completely straightforward and fair."
"As straightforward as a Sherman tank."
"Shut up and fuck me, you sonofabitch." Julia pushed him back across the bed, with his shoes still on and his overalls hobbling his ankles, and rode his cock to one of her lightning climaxes. But as soon as she'd come, and just as Steve was getting interested in the activity, she sat up again and returned to the subject:
"I really don't get Ruth, at all. She's just too goddamned reasonable about it. I'll bet she's planning some elaborate revenge."
Steve chuckled and shook his head, but he didn't feel entirely easy about Ruth, either; in an odd way, he discovered as he let himself begin to think about it, he was almost disappointed that there hadn't been any big, dramatic showdown to get past.
"I wonder if you know her any better than I do, really."
"Of course I do," Steve said: his turn to take offense. "Seventeen years better." But he wondered about that, too, even while he said it.
"Have you ever been into anything like this, before? The two of you? Oh, I know, you were both sleeping around quite a lot for several years, but I mean, actually having a third party living with you?"
"Nope." Julia's doubt was becoming harder and harder to avoid sharing. "There was a couple-but that was just a one-night stand." Steve described the
Phyllis and John thing briefly, without mentioning their names. "And, barring some wandering hands, that was strictly Ruth and the guy, and me with the wife.... And then there were a few cases, maybe, with close friends we both saw a lot of, where either of us knew damned well"-George had been one on Ruth's side, he was pretty certain, but again, he didn't care to tell Julia all about it-"but we'd always be careful to pretend otherwise until it was over."
"That's what I thought. What about your shrink?"
"Huh."
"Didn't you tell me you went to an analyst, once upon a time?"
"I guess everybody did, once upon a time. Everybody I knew, beyond a certain age, in New York, anyhow."
"Did you and Ruth go to the same one?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Because that's what Arnie-you know, Fayaway's original begetter-and I used to do." Julia grinned, boyishly, or perhaps it was just the thick crop of freckles the New Mexico sun had spread across her nose and cheekbones that looked boyish. "You wouldn't've recognized me then-I was an uptight, uptown bitch, really frigid, really messed up. Arnie had gone to this old bastard ever since he reached puberty, I guess, and on our second or third date he took me to his office; had to get the doctor's approval before he could get serious with me, you see. Well, anyway, as soon as we got married, we were both going there once a week. Very proper old fart, Vienna diploma, white goatee, gold watch chain across his paunch, the works. And I've got to admit it-he cured my frigidity. Cured me of Arnie, too."
"How?" Steve asked, suspiciously.
"By fucking me on his horsehair sofa, every goddamned week, at twenty-five bucks a throw, of course. Oh, he was thoroughly professional about it. The idea was all mine-or so he made me think, at the time. And he never saw me outside his office, or beyond my appointed fifty minutes. Whenever I'd ask him any question about himself-whether he was married, even-he'd say, 'Dat should not concern you. Dis relationship is a strictly therapeutic vun.' I was nineteen, and super-innocent; never made it before with anyone but Arnie and, just once, a Princeton track star. Thinking back now, the doc was a damned good lay for a sixty-year-old. Nothing imagine, but as dependable as his solid gold watch. Maybe not twenty-five bucks worth, either, but after all, Arnie was paying the bill, not me. And he did, eventually, remove all the fear and distaste for sex so carefully bred into me, and taught me to relax and enjoy it. I was bothered at first by the ethnics of what we were doing, but he'd say, 'Vhatefer vorks, vhatefer cures, is ethical.' And once, when I almost wigged out, he said, 'Dis is much better for efryvun cpncerned den vhat you actually vant, no? To screw you own fadder?' "
"Huh." Steve didn't want it to, but the story was making him extremely jealous and excited. "So that's why you dig elderly types like me. I suppose I'm a safe substitute for your papa, too?"
"Sure, what of it? You're a pretty decent substitute for all sorts of things, as a matter-of-fact."
"Well, for his sake, I hope the good doctor didn't have too many frigidity or father-fixation cases, at that age. And also that his heart was sound."
"That's what used to bug me most-not his health, the idea that he was fucking all his patients, including Arnie. I guess I finally got to be such a pest about that-coming in early, trying to catch him with his suspenders down and his vest unbuttoned-that he had to pronounce me cured. And I was, and since Arnie and I had very little else in common, it was quickly the end of my marriage, as well."
"You know, you've just about cured me of my hard-on with that cautionary tale."
"That's seldom difficult to repair." Julia rippled her fingers down his belly, cupped his balls with both hands, and started to nibble his shoulder and armpit. Up came his cock again, obediently, and she slipped it between her thighs, just inside the slippery outer lips of her cunt, and then commenced a delicious shuddering motion with her hips. "What about your analyst, though?"
"You mean with Ruth? I doubt it very much. We went to a clinic, at the New York taxpayers' expense. No horse-hair sofas there. And it's only those high-priced bastards you've gotta watch, anyhow."
"Mm, maybe ... let me roll over, now, and climb on my back ... there, that's lovely ... ooh, very lovely ... but you don't have to be quite so gentle.... "
So he wasn't; he pounded into her upheld ass until the cinderblocks under the bed started to do a jig across the floor. She chewed her own hair and a corner of the pillow, groaning, gripping his locked elbows to pull him in still tighter, thrashing her legs, kicking the backs of his knees, finally sobbing out, "Oh, oh, mister, ooh!" as he knocked her flat and breathless at the ultimate moment and exploded miles away, down inside her hungry, squirming cunt-deeper than he'd ever gone before, or so it seemed as he lay there spread-eagled on top of her afterwards, trying to catch his breath and deciding, silently, that the dirty old doctor deserved more of his gratitude than his hatred....
Julia slipped down and around beneath his dead weight, until her head could nestle against his breastbone, and her hand could gently stroke his tingling balls and battered cock. But once a thought was lodged in that sweet, hard, little head, apparently nothing could ever jar it loose:
"...Just remember I said so," she muttered against his chest, "Ruth is up to something.... "
EIGHT.
September went fast.
The new goat-shed, the corral, the chicken house roof: none of that took very long, once Steve got into motion. Then there was a new compost bin to build, and what was left of the garden to harvest, and next year's to prepare three times as much land for, and a four-day paying job: shelves and a counter for a head shop that Bodhisattva Bill and some friends were going to open on Canyon Road.
Then Jack returned from the mountains, without the deer he'd hoped to poach, and with scarcely enough trout to flavor the brown rice for a single meal, but even leaner, tougher, more taciturn than when he'd gone. He and Steve took the axe and the crosscut out to the federal grant and brought home eight cord of pinon, cedar, and juniper, two or three loads every day for a week, with Julia driving the truck back and forth while they cleared and cut and trimmed. The next week they helped a Chicano farmer bring in his last crop of alfalfa, and were paid with enough bales to see the horse and goats through most of the winter.
Jack knew Julia by sight from New York, had known what the score between her and Steve was there, and asked no questions when he walked in with his pack and rod and rifle and found her still there, barefoot in a pair of his own patched jeans, scrubbing a frying pan at the kitchen sink.
"Hello, Jack."
"Hi, Julia."
No questions at all, then or later, and Steve resisted his impulses to ask what was going on behind those expressionless, never-blinking faded blue eyes, so like Ruth's-it would have seemed to himself at least, a little too much like seeking approval. Jack had discussed sex only once with his old man, a year ago, when he was fifteen and both happened to be very stoned-discussed it to the extent of remarking that, as far as he was concerned, his parents' intense and abiding involvement in it, together or separately, was "natural, but don't it ever bore you?"; and that he'd tried it himself a couple of times (with whom? Steve couldn't begin to imagine); that he didn't get much pleasure from it; and that "girls never shut up."
Steve had no doubts that his own respect-not to mention envy-for Jack exceeded any emotions Jack ever felt towards him; but then, Jack's clean and easy independence from all of the rest of humanity was one of his more obvious traits, if impossible for anyone twice his age to really understand.
It was more than a Generation Gap, Steve realized-it was more of a Grand Canyon. It was even comical, if you were capable of enough detachment: here's your own flesh and blood, and he's everything you truly believe in, besides: everything in the whole new world of free, young, turned-on human beings that gives you any shred of hope for the future of the species and the planet; and this is precisely why you ll never feel like "father and son" or ever be "buddies". His rectitude and certitude will always keep you an entire age apart; you spent the first quarter-century of your consciousness painfully and expensively gathering the knowledge he simply knows. Hell never debate the right of any government to order him around, never register for the draft or any other such nonsense (at least not under his own name), never waste his days in college or at a steady job, never allow any person or habit or thing to obtain any hold on his essential self. And each moral issue is so piercingly clear to him: neither a master nor a servant be; treat the biosphere as what it is, your nest, your mother, your life; don't eat what you won't kill or kill what you won't eat; never, ever, trust another man's generalities....
Only in work could Steve share anything meaningful with Jack, and the days spent sweating on opposite ends of a singing saw, or taking turns hoisting green hundred-pound bales onto a wagon, were priceless.
Meanwhile, the orchards were ripening in the Rio Grande valley, and as Daniel had promised, many farmers were happy to let you keep a bushel for every two or three you picked. They all picked, even Fayaway in a ragged last-year's Easter basket, from dawn until sundown, drove home exhausted in a sticky, fragrant mess of apricots, peaches, apples, or pears, and then stayed up past midnight, peeling, pitting, stewing, canning, jelling, jamming, buttering; or slicing, stringing, and drying; and whenever cucumbers, onions, squash, or watermelons came their way, pickling as well. When most of the willing orchards had been picked through once, Steve drove to Albuquerque and scrounged four hardwood barrels and a second-hand press, and then they went back for the windfalls, for cider. The horse and goat (still no kids, yet) grew fat and drowsy on peels and cores and pulp. The humans grew nauseous at the mention of another pie or shortcake. And every shelf and cupboard in the house, including the new ones Steve knocked up, sagged with jars, while every viga was draped with strings of puckering fruit.
Julia, through it all, was just amazing. She worked almost as hard as Ruth, worked until she dropped, until she could scarcely mumble goodnight if Steve climbed into bed beside her; and then, after a few hours' rest, she'd rouse him in the dead of night for a swift, sweet, sleepy fuck. The splash of freckles across her face gave way to burns and blisters, her hands became as chapped and calloused as his, her hair full of snarls and split ends. She looked and acted, and was, healthier and happier than she had ever been before in her entire life. But then, so were they all.
It suddenly occurred to Julia one morning that, if Steve was eligible for unemployment checks, as his former replacement at the magazine so probably was she, and the mortgage could be whittled away twice as fast. Trips to town, like the one occasioned by that particular brainstorm, or days when the truck was laid up, were their only holidays all month except for the couple of times Daniel and his old lady and their twins, and some of the other freaks encountered out picking, came home with them afterwards and got stoned and stayed the night.
Miranda was originally an Okie, a graduate of two girls' reform schools and the Glorious Summer that was the Height of the Haight; but, in her GI combat boots, heavy dark ankle-length skirts, blue cambric work shirt overlaid with her own gorgeous embroideries, and the flamboyant jewelry Daniel made her out of bone and copper, she looked more like an Uzbek tribeswoman or a Cossack's wife. She'd met Daniel on a commune in New Hampshire; he was a Pisces and she a Cancer, but it was outasight at first sight, anyhow. She and Ruth dug each other right away, despite nearly two decades' discrepancy in age and all the other differences. They sat together by the stove, swapping recipes and herb lore like two avid witches, while Julia perched beside Steve at the fireplace, rapping with the men and getting zonked on Daniel's homegrown super-boo.
One of the other pickers, Daniel's firm Brother and the first head Steve had met in New Mexico who was actually older than himself, was called Freaky Fred. A sawed-off, powerful, bow-legged man with a pug nose and only two facial expressions to choose from-fierce scowl and fiercer grin-Fred wore a greasy sailor cap along with his motorcycle boots, levis, and serape. There was twenty years' reason for the cap: he'd lied his age and joined the navy at fifteen, and was now retired from it at full pension, "-Which buys one helluva lotta dope an pinto beans," and which also enabled him to enjoy a degree of leisure and security beyond the reach of most rural freaks. Enjoy it he certainly did, laying lids and tabs on long-haired friends and strangers with a prodigality only a confirmed nark could help but admire.
Hair was the chief qualification in any recipient of Fred's mind-expanding largesse; he'd been letting his own grow ever since his discharge four years before, and it hung now halfway down his chest and back, as ruddy as Julia's and twice as thick, causing the sailor cap to look about as much out of place as handlebars on a horse. Fred could rap for hours on the virtues of hair, how the lack of it makes men easier to order around, how an abundance begets gentleness, virility, and independence of thought.
While Daniel taught Steve the West Texas rules for dominoes, Fred drew Julia off into the chimney corner:
"Say, what's a groovy chick like you doin' loose, runnin' aroun' God's country without no old man?"
"I've got an old man." It was difficult for her, as it had been for Steve at first, to get used to the dated vernacular out here; if anyone in New York had laid a "groovy" on her within the past two years, she'd have been willing to bet money it was fuzz, either an undercover nark or the red squad. On the other hand, there were words here that were new to her, like "scarf", meaning to cop something, or to gobble it down, if it didn't belong to you....
Fred was grinning his ferocious best. "Oh yeah? Where's he at? Doin' time?"
"Nope. Right there."
"Oh yeah? Steve? I thought he was that chick's old man, there."
"He is."
"Huh?"
"And he's my old man, too."
"Far out. Real Old Testament scene, huh? Must be some dude, with a pair of swingin' old ladies like the two of you in tow."
"He does all right."
"Far out. An' right on. But look, like, if this tandem ever gets draggy, let me hear, dig?"
Daniel's and Miranda's reactions to the arrangement were even more interesting: for Daniel, Ruth simply wasn't there, while Miranda ignored Julia in an identical fashion, and both carefully avoided referring to "your old lady" whenever they spoke to Steve. Which illuminated a curious aspect of the hippie ethic, because neither was straitlaced in any sexual sense, except perhaps regarding homosexuality, or otherwise atypical of New Age folk. Steve remembered what Daniel had said that afternoon, while they were picking winesaps off the same tree: "I got me a damn Good Woman there, Bro-gave her the clap twice and crabs three times, and she never said a word. Course, it wasn't never on purpose, you understan'. " And meanwhile Miranda, Steve gathered from remarks all three had made, had fairly recently gone off with Freaky Fred for a while. One old man or lady at a time, with frequent but always brief lapses, seemed to be the rule....
In bed with Ruth that night, Steve tried to talk about this, and the pattern of their own lives as it had begun to arrange itself, at last, in his head. Their guests were spread out on the kitchen floor, mostly near the fireplace, probably, but possibly anywhere, including just outside their door, so they kept their voices low:
"...Most people erect fragile personal 'nests' that won't stand any extensions or excursions; that's what it is, you know-that, and sexual cowardice, and mutually viewing the objects of their affections as objects, to be exclusively possessed-that keeps most of us, straight or hip, more or less monogamous.... "
"I don't know, Steve whether I understand you or agree or not."
Ruth's whisper grated with her physical exhaustion. "...Sometimes I'm afraid I don't know anything about myself or you or how we relate, or don't, or ought to, or whatever. But after all, I guess, this is your trip.... "
"What d'you mean, my trip?"
"Well, it is, isn't it, so far?"
"And what does that mean, 'so far'? "
"Oh, you're too stoned and I'm too tired, there's no use talking now."
"Okay, I'm stoned and you're tired. But look, you know damned well I didn't plan any of this trip with Julia, and you also know you could've said
'stop' at any point, and somehow, it would've stopped. You still could; it still would."
"No, I couldn't, and no, it wouldn't."
"Why not?"
"To begin with the obvious, Julia."
Steve grunted noncommitably, realizing that he must be very stoned indeed to have minimized the difficulties there. He wished he could take back that stupid question, and the whole argument, but it was too late now.
"She intimidates me almost as much as she does you; or she would, if it ever came to that. If I did want her to leave, I wouldn't know how to go about making it happen-I'd be scared to death she'd somehow wreck everything on her way out the door. And don't deny it, so would you be, too.
"And then there's you-you said you wanted to get away from her and all the rest of the scene and the pace in New York, everything that was driving us farther and farther apart; you probably believed it, probably still do, but the fact is you weren't and still aren't, really ready to settle down and be content with me.
"And then there's myself to consider-what I've just said about you applies just as well to me, I'm sure. There were all those years there, at first, when you were the only man, almost the only person, who was real to me at all. I guess I was expecting-demanding-too much of you; anyhow, it didn't work, and then came the inevitable reaction, where instead of never doubting anything about you, I rejected everything. Fortunately for both of us, that didn't last very long; I realized as you must have, that whatever was wrong between us, we'd both invested too much time and energy in each other to ever be able to pull out completely and start all over with anybody else.
"So then came the years of trying to make it new-independent but together, no jealousy, no possessiveness, no quarrels; lives that ran parallel and complementary, an equal partnership, a so-called modern marriage. I wonder if you ever realized how much hell it put me through, in the beginning. That's when I learned how much I'd actually been depending on you, how deeply I'd wanted you to be all mine: when it was too late, after I'd agreed that we weren't going to be 'like that' anymore.
"Okay. I got through that period somehow. I learned to stand on my own two feet emotionally and intellectually, for the first time in my life; there'd always been my father and mother to lean on, and then there'd always been you. In other words, I finally grew up, somewhere there in my mid-thirties. I learned to take what I needed as it came along, wherever and however I found it, and not to expect to get it all in one package, from you."
Involuntarily, Steve reached out to touch her. She brushed his hand aside. "Don't interrupt me. Please. I've been getting ready to say all this for a long time, and if don't finish it now, I never will....
"Well. There we were, and a lot was better, but a lot was still wrong. Most it was where we were living, the world around us, the city. Or so we thought. And we tried to change some of that, directly but outwardly: the Movement. No good. Oh, there were plenty of dividends, good people to get to know, a clearer notion of what we really wanted, a sense of having at least tried all that. And you met Julia. And I met Lang."
"We both met Lang."
"I know. But you know what I meant. Shut up, won't you, and let me say this. It isn't easy."
"Okay." But what was it? A small knot in the pit of his stomach began to grow, and tighten.
"Lang was the first man, after you, ever to be a real, whole person to me. I was old enough to be his mother, but that didn't matter. I didn't feel old with him, or guilty or sorry or-I'm not saying any of this very well ... "
"Hm." Just come to the point, doddammit, and get it over with; that knot was very nearly gordian, already.
"So. Everything happened so quickly-Lang, and Julia, and you and me coming back together again, and the whole idea of the Movement falling apart around our ears, everyone we knew dropping out, getting out of the cities as fast as they could, and suddenly here we were-in New Mexico, trying to start all over again. And it was so great, Steve, really, I mean it, I've never been so happy in my life-"
"Until Julia came along."
"No-it's not that simple. I mean, I'm not at all sorry about that. Julia's coming was a shock at first, of course, but she's been very good for you, for both of us. I didn't realize, until she came, but I was starting to lean on you again, in all the old, wrong ways. Wrong for us, anyhow, both of us ... God, I wish I had a cigarette."
"Huh? Hm."
"I guess it's all this talking. For the first time in months, I've got to have a smoke."
"So do I. Somebody had a can of Bugler out there; I'll see if I can find it."
"Don't wake anybody up."
"I won't." The kitchen looked like Gettysburg the evening after; treading warily, Steve made it to the fireplace, and there on the mantle was the can, half full, with a folder of papers. He took it back with him and rolled a clumsy bomber. "...Bed's gonna be full of tobacco crumbs."
"That's all right." Ruth lit it with a wooden match; her hand was shaking. She took a deep drag, coughed, and passed it over. Somehow it was better than dope, just now. Steve felt a great rush, and then calm.
"Steve-I wrote to Lang and asked him to come visit. Hell be here any day now."
"Yeah."
"You don't sound surprised."
"I knew it, the moment you first spoke his name."
"You understand, though? Don't you?"
Thank Christ for tobacco. "Sure." Suddenly he wanted to fuck her, so urgently he was afraid he would burst out sobbing if she said no. So he didn't dare suggest it.
"Give me another drag on that, will you?"
"Here, it's yours."
"No, that's all I want.... It's going to be all right, Steve."
"Yeah. Sure."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
In minutes-before he crushed out the butt on the brick floor-he could tell by the change in her breathing that she was really asleep. The bitch. No, he didn't mean that, he was just jealous. He lay there listening to the sound of deep, restful sleep, the sleep of someone who'd gotten something very heavy off her chest. Yeah. He rolled another cigarette; it took three papers to make one that stayed together long enough to light.... Well, Julia had been right. How'd she put it? "Ruth is up to something." Yep. Yes, indeedy. The funny part was, there was no one on earth he'd rather see than Lang-no man, no human being outside of those now living here under this roof, he felt closer to or kinder-say it, more loving-towards. But none of this meant it was going to be easy to get to sleep, tired from a long day, a lot of long days, in the orchards as he was.... There was still that knot in his guts to be untied, and this cigarette was giving him tongue-burn. Maybe a glass of water ... or a joint ... or Julia. Yeah ...
He should have thought to make a body-count on the kitchen floor. Or thought, period. Or noticed the sliver of light under her door. But he didn't-and there it was: twice as much long red hair as usual splayed across the pillow, and Freak Fred's muscular brown ass pumping away between Julia's perpendicular white legs. "-Excuse me," and a tall, cold glass of water, all right, and back to Ruth's bed with a fistful of joints, wishing for at least a dozen grains of morphine. Yessir, all in all, some night....
All the guests were gone when he finally awoke, and everyone elso out of the house but Julia, who fetched him in a cup of coffee as soon as he'd opened one eye:
"Fred said to tell you he didn't mean to 'scarf your evening's lay, and that he sincerely hoped he hadn't caused any 'bad vibes'. "
"Urn."
"I told him that my off-nights were my own, and besides, that you should've knocked."
"Right on."
Deadpan, both of them. If that's the best way to deliver a kick in the balls, Steve told himself, it's also the best way to take one.
NINE.
Lang brought the first snow as well as a quarter-pound of magnificent hash, and all sorts of capsule-form goodies. That was three days later. They woke to leaden skies like back east, almost, but still twice as high and broad and a wet wind out of the Sangre de Cristos. Enormous flakes fell all during breakfast, the whole world was white when they went outside, and then the sun came out, blinding, and the last trace of the stuff had vanished within another hour. There wasn't even any mud to show for it; it simply and literally evaporated. Then Lang came trudging up the road.
He was only there long enough for Steve to pump his hand, and to mutter an explanation of his shorn hair, "Court appearance, damned ACLU lawyer talked me into it, and then they just postponed it again," then Ruth drove him back to town to pick up his luggage at the bus station.
They didn't return until midnight. Steve had gone to bed with Julia before nine, fucked her furiously for at least two hours, until she drifted off into a blissful coma, and was sitting at the kitchen table, struggling with the Bugler-which had been sitting under Ruth's bed until then, forgotten by whomever it belonged to-and actually managing to think about very little. Lang, of course. Julia hadn't even met him, hadn't been told he was coming, either, had just glimpsed him driving off with Ruth, and hadn't seemed very curious, even when the truck hadn't returned for lunch, for supper, or at the usual bedtime ... suspicious in itself, her lack of curiosity, now that Steve thought about it; he'd told her nothing, beyond the fact that Lang was a draft resister they'd known in New York. But what had Ruth said?
Anything?
Truck complaining up the road, too fast, in low. Brakes, too hard. Door slam. Footsteps, voices, more steps, then Ruth, alone, in the doorway:
"What're you waiting up for?"
"You, I guess."
"Oh, yes? Well, you're not getting any tonight. Your little wife is all fucked out."
Steve stubbed his cigarette, nothing to say except the obvious "You're drunk" which she ignored.
"And very well fucked, too, I'll have you know."
'"I'm sure you are. Where's Lang?"
"Taking a piss, I suppose. He's really something."
"Great."
"Better than you were, even, at his age."
"That must be ten times better than I am now."
A twinge of pity in her glassy smile. He'd asked for it, after all: pity. But it didn't last very long. "For one thing, he's got a huge cock. Have you ever seen it?"
"Not to notice it was 'huge', no."
"Well, it's not that much longer than yours, but it's really enormous in diameter. And that's what counts most to a woman, you know."
Steve couldn't resist it, he'd reached his natural limit: 'A woman your age, anyhow."
"Just for that, I'm going to tell you all about it."
"I thought you probably were, whatever I said, so why the hell shouldn't I be nasty, too?"
And she would've told him all about it, but at that moment Lange came in. Without his General Custer hair, Steve thought, he looked even younger than his twenty-one or-two years, big-eyed, and pasty-face, as if he'd been puking his guts out down in one of the arroyos. Maybe he had, at that. In any case, he wasn't drunk. And he'd overheard at least part of their cozy marital dialogue. He gripped Ruth by the elbow. "You'd better get to bed," he told her, looking several questions at once in Steve's direction:
-You do agree, don't you?
-You aren't gonna leap at me with a cleaver or something, are you?
-Are you gonna put her to bed, or am I?-And where in hell is it?
The last was simplest to answer, and covered them all. Steve just pointed, and sat there watching them glide by. Lang certainly would've made a great male nurse, he was thinking; too bad his conscience won't let him accept conscientious objector status ... tactful young man, too, to leave the door ajar like that so I'll know he's planning on coming out again ...
Ruth sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and kicked off her shoes. Steve interpreted that much of what he heard. Then silence: probably Lang was having to help her the rest of the way. Then she murmured something, and Lang answered, "Goodnight," and she murmured something else, and he repeatedly still more clearly and decisively, "Goodnight." Then a pause, probably while he kissed her, and then she mumbled what could've been "Goodnight." Then Lang came out. Closed the door, and stood wearily beside the table, trying to smile.
"Pardner, you look plumb wore out," Steve said; then added quickly, when he heard the unintended meaning in those words, "Were you on the goddamned bus all last night?"
"Yeah. And yeah ... Do you wanna talk?"
"Not especially, right now. Not if you're too beat. There's always another day."
"Guess so ... Where'm I sleeping?"
"That's up to you."
"Yeah ... Got a cot?"
Steve had to grin. And so did Lang, then. It hadn't been bad, any of the way, really, but now it was all okay. "Sure. I'll get it. Your stuff's all in the truck?"
"Yeah, but I'll just get my sleeping bag for now." Steve put up the cot in front of the fireplace, then went into Julia's room and shut the door before Lang came back inside. Julia, thank god, was still sleeping soundly. So, surprisingly, soon was he.
Breakfast was interesting. Jack and Sheila were both overjoyed: Lang, their long-lost big brother. Fayaway, instead of her usual grab-a-doughnut-disappearo act, hung around to watch the fun. Ruth was quiet, busy at the stove, probably hung over dreadfully, and determined not to show it-so determined, nothing else showed, either. The interesting part, for Steve, was Julia; at the fine art of artful questions she was certainly a genius, but she wasn't getting very much here for all her pains:
That Lang had just come from Berkeley, was originally from Ohio, had known Steve and Ruth for two years, was appealing the Big Five for draft refusal, didn't relish the prospect of prison, didn't know how long he'd be staying.
Total.
Cot still standing to show where he'd slept.
Didn't show the slightest curiosity about Julia's presence, which should've irked, but mostly seemed to puzzle her ...
Later, the first mention of Julia that Lang made to Steve was:
"Thought I knew her face from somewhere. Just figured out why. She's a dead ringer for the chick in red with Dylan on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home."
And so she was, except for her long, dark red hair, and just since she'd been out here, the strong, healthy color in her face.
They were digging a new hole for the shithouse, Steve and Lang. It took them all morning, and it was a perfect job for talking, one shoveling and the other with the crowbar prying loose the rocks, taking turns, pacing what they said with their reciprocal efforts.
"...I suppose Ruth told you something-about Julia, I mean, and the way things are, or have been, around here?"
"Well, yeah, but not much, really. I sort of gathered that she's the chick who was keeping you occupied back there, before you split from New York. That so?"
"The one who kept me out of your way while you were balling Ruth, you mean. That's her, all right." Lang grinned. "I always dug the apt way you have of putting things."
"You're pretty cute yourself about answering questions. What has Ruth told you?"
"Like I said, not much. We mostly talked about me, which I never mind, you know. But we didn't do much talking, anyhow."
"Too busy fucking, I guess?"
"Aw, come on, man-how much fucking do you think you can do in a bar, or that truck of yours?"
The truck: Steve got a vivid flash of himself and Julia, the night she arrived-and immediately another, same scene and actions, with Lang and Ruth. Lang's reportedly huge cock, Ruth's loving fingers, cunt, and mouth. want to tell an old friend how much I've missed him ... Mm, just what I've always wanted, a hot popsicle ... " His face must have shown it clearly, because Lang tapped him playfully with the shovel handle.
"-You really get a trip out of being jealous, don't you?"
"So will you, my young friend, when you get to be a dirty old man like me."
"Gee, that's nice to look forward to. But you were gonna tell me "What goes on, I really wanna know'-Lang" did a two-second skit, arms, legs, and face all flying, to illustrate the song swipe. "Or will I need a diagram?"
"Maybe we both will, I dunno."
"That complex, huh?"
"It's been pretty strange up till now, yeah. With you around, god only knows what ll happen."
Instead of another half-joke in reply, Lang leaned into the shovel and, with an unidentifiable kind of a smile, studied Steve's face, until finally Steve asked:
"What'd I say?"
"...Mnn ... Nothing," was Lang,'s response, as he went back to heaving sand out of the hole.
On his next break, standing by while Steve pried out a smooth, almost square hunk of granite, Lang asked brightly:
"What'd you say to the suggestion that we do some of that mescalin I brought?"
"Tonight?"
"Yeah."
"Who's W?"
"Anybody who wants to. Everyone, I should hope. There's enough to stone half the population of Santa Fe."
"Okay by me."
After lunch, Ruth went for a walk up on the mesa with Sheila and Fayaway, Lang and Jack went rabbit hunting, and Julia cornered Steve at least, while he was reassembling the two-seater over the new hole.
"Why is it nobody ever tells me anything around here?"
"I give up, why?"
"Very funny. Who is this guy, and what's going on?"
"He's a friend of ours, and he's visiting us."
"Okay, be that way. I'll find out for myself."
"I'm sure you will."
"Damned right I will-what're you grinning about?"
"Just you. You're such a little kid. Can't bear not to know everything."
She stuck out her tongue by way of reply, and Steve turned back to the nail he'd been driving. A grave tactical error-she kicked him squarely in the ass and he went sprawling. When he reached his feet again she was twenty yards away, sprinting down the arroyo. He flung down his hammer and gave chase. She ducked around a bend, up a blind alley, and he cornered her there. She squealed "Rape!" and dragged him down to the smooth, cool, shadowed sand. Her skirt was up and his overalls down in a matter of seconds. At her legs locked around the small of his back and his cock found its entrance, a jackrabbit broke from cover in a niche just beside them, and went thudding straight over their heads.
"Wow, I feel like Eve, or something."
"Believe me, you're much more like Lilith."
"Who's that-never mind, don't tell me, I don't care who I am, so long as you're inside me-ooh, mmm, harder, deeper, ooh, baby, come on now!"
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the rooster crowed insanely, and Quinivers, unattended, sedately gave birth to two brown and white nannies and a coral-black billy.
Stoned.
In blocked capital letters, great R. Crumb letters, gamboling across the molten, star-swept air before your scudding eyes.
S-T-O-N-E-D.
Just the four of them: Jack was duly invited, but didn't dig night tripping, and anyway liked to go to bed with and get up with the sun; and Sheila, of late, was anti-getting stoned at all, on obscure but absolute principles ...
STONED! In Keystone-Kops, zipping-around-the house fashion; grining, eating, grinning, talking, grinning, drinking, grinning-all happening with the speeded-up, two-dimensional quality of a scanned memory. Then time abruptly skidding to a halt for an eternity of a moment seen in full depth, seen forever, eerie, wrenching, exquisite, inexpressibly good ...
Too goddamed STONED, having to think out the simplest of actions, always before automatic: steering a fork to your mouth, walking straight up across a picture-flat floor, holding onto a glass-full of incredible viscous liquid, known to be water but unpredictable as mercury ...
Then my-oh-my-this-is-nice STONED, the-four-of us-together STONED, and let's-go-out-for-a-moonlight stroll STONED; followed swiftly by why-don 't-we-go-see-the-newborn-kids STONED, where-the-hell's-the goat-shed-been-moved-to STONED, come-on-let's-play tag-down-in-the arroyos STONED, omigod-I'm-lost STONED, what 's-happened-to-everyone-else STONED, switching instandy to how'd-I-ever-get-back-in-house, look-there's-everybody-else STONED, and jesus-christ it's-o nl y-nine-o'clock-we 've-been-tripping-for-barely an-hour STONED; and finally, shit-this-is-super-heavy dope STONED, but-no-it's-not finally, nothing-is-ever the-end STONED, followed by I-know-I-can't-trip-out-any-further STONED and there's-nothing-to-be-done-about-it, this-is-really-and-truly-going-to-go-on-and-on and-on-for-absolutely-ever STONED-
Midnight, quite abruptly, and you think you're coming down, everything perfectly still and all in order; but you know you're not down for good yet, this is merely a breathing space, but it's awfully nice to be aware of other people again, outside the trillion ring circus in your own head ...
Julia leaning back into Steve's lap, Lang into Ruth's-suddenly it's both touching and ridiculous, at once-on either side of the fireplace, facing each other across the fantastic light show of a bed of cedar coals, smiling, saying warm, brilliant things that won't bear recall two seconds later....
Ruth's fingers perform intricate minuets in Lang's still astonishingly short hair, while she relates the longest and funniest joke in the world, all about a lost bottle top....
Julia shouts, "Why don't we smoke some dope, too!" and leaps up, actually manages to remember where the joints are, and comes dancing back with a fistful. She's lost all her clothes somewhere, and is draped in a ragged army blanket....
Lang lighting the joints on a flickering ember, passing them around until they all seem to clutch at least one in each hand, meanwhile slipping down across the hearth until his head is wedged in Ruth's crotch, and his bare toes are wriggling through Julia's pubic hair, that glints and glitters like winking coals itself in the soft, uncertain light ...
Steve feeling the hash and grass mix, on top of the mescalin, come on like the finest opium, but not disembodying like opium, not at all; feeling, too, his cock burrowing like a mole through the folds of his overalls, shoving back with a will of its own at Julia's twitching ass, while Lang's inquiring toes shove her more tightly against him ...
"Ruth, you come up with the greatest get-evens ever," Julia giggled, rolling, over onto his back, spreading the blanket across most of the hearth with her out-reaching arms and legs. "Here I am, Friends, Fellow Freaks, and Countrymen-who's first?"
"Me, by the looks of things." Steve answered, struggling with his shoulder straps. Lang's head had disappeared beneath Ruth's skirt, while all Ruth's attention was apparently focused on the complicated task posed by Lang's belt-buckle and fly. Julia's hands were raking Steve's clothes back, her teeth nibbling the insides of his thighs, as his open mouth traveled the breadth of her tense, flat belly, tasting salt and sun and woodsmoke, then farther down, his own dried sperm from that afternoon; her lips closed on the head of his cock just as his tongue found her clitoris. Her hands cupped his balls, thumbs pressed hard against his ass-hole, as she sucked his shaft further and further into her mouth. He took each cue from her at first, imitated each thrust and caress.
Meanwhile, beside them, inches from Steve's eyes, Ruth's face lay against Lang's hip, his cock clasped lightly in both hands, like a flute, her tongue between pursed lips licking on the engorged tip, semicircularly, very gently but very fast.
Cues fantastically complex now, each of them four people, all four one, doing and being done to; Steve pushingn forward, nose and mouth buried in Julia's pulsing hot cunt; Ruth's breasts squeezed flat against Lang's heaving chest, her skirt still on, bunched up around her waist, legs pulled up tight and kicking, as Lang took long, leisurely licks the full length of her cunt, with the whole of his flattened tongue.
Imitating Lang now, watching Ruth watching him imitate Lang, as she imitated Julia, or Julia imitated her; feeling Julia's lips and tongue and teeth doing to his own cock exactly what he saw Ruth doing to Lang's; hearing four bellowing pairs of lungs, four pounding hearts in unison. Seeing Lang's balls and buttocks lift and twist and tighten, sensing his own doing the same, observing and observed at once, really understanding what the word ecstatic means for the first time, as Ruth received and swallowed a gushing gob of sperm that was his as much as Lang's, and as Julia's leaping, lunging cunt overflowed, spilling slippery honey down his chin, Ruth's as much as Julia's. In and out the looking glass....
Steve sprawled on the blanket with his cheek against Julia's hip, catching his breath, watching Ruth sit up, smooth down her crushed skirt, rebutton her wrinkled blouse. Between them, still giddy and gasping, too, Lang and Julia made tentative, vague motions towards each other.
"Goodnight, I'm going to bed." Ruth stood up; uncertainly, but she stayed on her feet, with the help of fingertips played against the edge of the mantle. "You can come if you like Lang."
"...Mm-hm ... " A shade reluctantly, Lang drew himself upright, pulling his dungarees after him, over still-turgid cock, fighting for his balance. "...G'night all ... "
Julia sat up to watch the pair negotiate the dark kitchen, hand in hand, but she waited until Ruth's door had shut behind them to sniff, "Well! That was cetainly selfish of her. Guess I'll have to make do with leftovers." The mescalin returned, for Steve, with a golden, vertiginous rush as she tumbled astride him, sucking his tongue into her salty mouth and his cock into her cunt simultaneously, with a force that brought starry tears to his eyes.
He could never recall how it came about, but he woke early the next morning in her bed, right side up with pillow and blankets properly positioned, fairly rested, and, wonder of wonders, with all systems intact and functioning-wich they were able to prove beyond all doubt, twice in fact, before Fayaway stuck her head in the doorway to call them out to breakfast.
TEN.
"Let's go to the hot springs today."
It was Ruth's suggestion originally, but immediately and unanimously passed. Even Steve-who found himself unreasonably irritated because Ruth wouldn't meet his eye all during breakfast, and because it seemed to him that she addressed everything she said to anyone in care of Lang, for his tacit approval-even Steve had to admit that he liked the ideas.
Weird business, jealousy: Lang's stiff prick pumping in and out of her mouth was okay, so long as Steve was there to watch it; but Lang receiving shy, morning-after glances or bringing a school-girl blush to Ruth's cheeks with shared, unspoken memories of other, unobserved delights-that really, somehow, pissed him off. But this was hardly a point to start being jealous, he told himself, and eventually he managed to become convinced that he wasn't, actually-just tired and strung out a bit by the dregs of the dope. Sure was heavy mescalin, all right; his brain was still churning at half again its normal rate.
Sheila made him slightly nervous, too; she wasn't missing a thing, and she made an unmistakable point of not speaking to any of the four adults: whenever she wanted something passed to her, she asked Jack or Fayaway for it, regardless of where it happened to be placed on the table.
God know what goes on above those frizzy pigtails-all physical forms of affection probably look as lurid through her round blue eyes as anything Hieronymus Bosch ever painted. Somebody oughta write a parent's handbook, How To Liberate Yourself From Your Own Sexual Hangups Without Saddling Your Offspring With Still Worse Ones....
Then there was Sheila beside him, casting gushy sidelong glances, too, in Lang's direction, while giving Steve's cock, through his pantleg, a proprietary squeeze under the table. Enough to make him wonder what might've gone on between that last minute he was able to recall, out on the hearth last night, and the first one when he opened his eyes in Julia's bed this morning. Not quite enough, though, to provoke him into questioning anyone about it.
Only Lang and Jack were behaving normally, planning another deer-poaching trip to the mountains. And Fayaway, scarfing down the doughnuts....
By the time they'd packed a lunch and loaded it and everyone into the truck, it was nearly noon. No matter; now that the harvest and woodcutting were over, there were only odd jobs to be done, like replacing that damned cracked pane above the kitchen table; so why not make a whole day's expedition out of it?
The ride itself was worth it, once you got past the Los Alamos area-mile after mile of infuriating cyclone fences with signs every twenty feet proclaiming, "U.S. Government Property/Keep/Out/Danger/Explosives." Steve always felt like driving into one of those mysterious checkpoints along the highway and demanding to know, "What're you doing up in the canyons, you sneaky bastards?" like bad little boys jacking off behind the barn, they were-proven guilty by their own furtive behavior. The trouble was, their dirty little games could blow up the whole state, if not the whole fucking planet. Of course, Steve never stopped; he'd taken part in too many such "confrontations" back East to expect anything much out of them but a few weeks' or months' rest in jail.
Suddenly, after long, looping miles of dusty pinon and juniper, you're climbing the blue-gray spine of the Jemez Mountains, lots of water again, some of it snowy patches already, in the alpine meadows among the ponderosa and aspen groves.
"God's country!" Lang shouted happily. "Wow! Why didn't you buy land up here?"
"Because God's title to most of it is disputed by the Department of the Interior," Steve told him, pointing to a "Santa Fe National Forest/Land of Many Uses'? "
"What's that mean, 'Many Uses'? "
"That means big lumber companies can cut the ponderosa, but cattle corporations can grage their stock, and we longhairs and Chicanos can picnic or soak out butts in the hotsprings, if we behave ourselves."
"Sounds familiar, and I'm sorry I asked-I'm supposed to be on vacation from all that political shit."
There was a pair of battered freak busses, as well an an official looking pickup in the roadside parking area nearest the hotsprings. They discovered the reason for the latter as they trudged up the last stretch of perpendicular trail: a ranger was affixing a shiny, new reversible, tin sign to a tree trunk. On one side the sign announced, "Bath Vacant" and on the other, "Bath Occupied/Please Wait Here." The ranger paused, pursed his lips like Gary Cooper in an attempt at a smile, and tipped his Smokey-the-Bear hat.
Steve nodded. "New policy, huh?"
"Yep. Lady driving past-" he pointed back towards the highway on the far side of the canyon, at least a quarter-mile away "-saw a naked man standing up here on a rock. Upset her terribly. Wrote her congressman about it. Upset her so much she keeps coming back this way to be sure he's not still standing there."
"We gotta wait down here now, really?"
"Well, the rule's so everybody gets a chance. As long as it's just you hippies, it's okay with me. But other folks don't like strangers around them when they're naked. Especially naked strangers. Funny that way. You gotta humor them some."
"Sure thing. Peace and freedom, brother. Come and join us when you're done here."
The ranger grinned and flashed a bent V. They went on climbing through the Cezannesque jumble of boulder and pine, towards the natural stone basin that crouched, steaming in the sunlight, at the top of the ridge. About a dozen beatific grins were already bobbing on the surface of the pool, so they decided to eat lunch first.
Over his homemade yogurt with fresh peach marmalade, Steve noticed that a couple of the nude forms draped around on the sundrenched rocks above the pool belonged to familiar faces. One was very familiar; his enormous honey-colored shako of kinky Jewish hippie-hair was the first clue, but the bone ankh dangling from his neck and the blue yin-yang tattoo around his navel really clinched it: Morris, ex-fellow employee, quarter-hourly saviour of Jerky Jerry. Morris recognized Steve at the same time, waved, and ambled over. No wonder about his starring in a queer movie, once upon a time the kid was hung like a Missouri mule. There was a one-inch-wide pale border all around his pubic bush, and the rest of him was burnt umber; he probably hadn't worn anything but his breechclout from dawn until dusk since spring.
"Hey, far out! How ya bin, man? What're ya into?"
"Nothing much, making do. How about yourself?"
"Nothing much, making do. How about yourself?"
"Oh, getting by. Moving around. Spending a lotta time up here at the spring, lately."
"You wouldn't happen to be the naked man the lady wrote her congressman about?" Steve asked.
"Worth writing to somebody about, I'd say," Julia giggled, with an appreciative glance at the limber brown hose between Morris's thighs.
"Huh? Oh yeah, heard somethin about that. Say, you folks got any spare dope?"
Lang produced a joint, lit it, passed it over; Morris consumed two-thirds of it in one swift toke, then reluctantly passed the rest on.
"Heard about Bill?" he squeaked, over locked lungs.
"The Bodhisattva? Yeah, he's started a head shop in Santa Fe. I helped him get it ready."
"Nah, that was a month ago. He's dropped all the way out since then. Latest thing is, he is starting up a commune about ten miles back up the road from here. Jerry's up there with him."
"Far out ... " A major sort of egress was seemingly in progress down at the pool, and Steve began to peel his clothes off. Lang and Julia were stripped before anyone else, and clambered down together-they looked a very good couple, Steve caught himself thinking, as he watched their slender, tough young bodies flashing in reflected dapples of light. Ruth helped Fayaway out of her smock, then dropped her own skirt and yanked her sweater over her head. Her full breasts swung free like two plump white Leghorns. He knew it was mainly the strangeness that had existed between them ever since the announcement of Lang's arrival, but her nakedness was much more exciting to Steve then he cared to admit; he wanted to bury his face between those soft, well-known breasts and forget all about everyone and everything else.
Morris stood aside, watching them all undress with a friendly leer, paying particular-professional?-attention to Jack. Sheila waited shyly until everyone else had gone down, then finally appeared at the side of the pool swathed from neck to knobbly knees in the biggest towel she could find; she hung back there, too, until she was sure nobody was looking her way, before unwrapping quickly and plunging into a sheltered corner. Steve caught just a glimpse, above the cleft between her skinny legs, of wispy brown curls he'd never noticed before, and before she could cover them up with her crossed arms again, hard little tits the size of lemons. Odd, unreal, and debilitating occupation, fathering a daughter: Steve could remember changing her diaper as vividly as if he'd done it an hour ago; but it wouldn't be long before some other male would be spreading those pink thighs apart for quite a different purpose. The notion was as unendurable, and every bit as inevitable, as growing old. To jog his tired mind off the whole train of thought, before it landed him in the Slough of Self-Pity, Steve recited one of Good Old George's brighter sayings under his breath: Incest begins at home....
"-Oh, wow, this is delirious," Lang groaned. He was sitting, chin deep, in the very hottest part right below where the water oozed out of the mountainside between Ruth and Julia. Aside from Morris, who plopped back in unobtrusively, near Jack, and a couple devotedly shampooing each other's hair with biodegradable soap they had the pool all to themselves now. The temperature was perfect-as high as anyone could possibly stand, it seemed at first, then gradually, as you relaxed, just precisely right. And the minerals, or whatever, in the water buoyed you up completely, so that you could relax muscles that you never realized were tense, or even that they existed at all before.
"Squatting weightlessly on just his toes, with his knees pulled up against his chest, Steve propelled himself by flicks of his fingers around the pocket typhoon that Fayaway was joyfully kicking up, until he was bobbing face-to-face with Lang. Vague fingertips tickled his chest, others rubbed lightly across his upturned ass and tweaked his limp, floating balls-that would be Julia, he was sure, so the ones above were possibly Ruth's. He let his own hand go loose, to drift about in grottoes of slippery, smooth skin, no telling whose. Above the steaming surface, they rubbed wet cheeks and noses all around, happily and indiscriminately.
"Mmmmmlet's never get out," Ruth whispered. The steep stone walls around them amplified and distorted every splash, every word spoken, like a YMCA swimming pool; but there all comparison ended.
"Only to fetch some dope every couple of days," Julia whispered back.
"Too much trouble," Steve said. "And once you're in here, who needs dope to get high?"
An hour, though, was as much as any of them could take; limp as jellyfish, they dragged themselves out and oozed over the rocks to the fallen log where they'd hung their clothes. Most everyone else had gone, and they toweled each other in a frenzy of purely tactile pleasure, lolled around, played tag, behaved like any troop of wild, healthy primates until almost sundown. Even Sheila after she'd put her shorts and blouse back on seemed to enjoy it; she and Jack and Julia got into a tickling contest that finally involved everyone in a great, sexless group grope ...
Drying Steve's back for him after a quick, last minute plunge back into the pool, Ruth murmured in his ear, "I'm sorry about last night."
"About what last night?"
"The way I acted."
"I still don't read you."
"I was furiously jealous."
"That didn't show."
"I mean, that's why I went off to bed. I couldn't stand to watch you with Julia any longer."
"Oh. I thought it was so you could be alone with Lang."
"No!. . .Well, that, too, I suppose. I guess I just wasn't ready to share him with her, as well as you. But it was really because Julia's so much better at loving you than I am. She always knows exactly what to do."
"That's debatable. Highly debatable."
"I'm glad you think so." Ruth kissed his earlobe, then flicked her tongue inside. Just as Steve was about to ask whom she intended to sleep with that night, Lang called over, "It'll be dark soon, hadn't we better be going?" and Jack muttered a complaint about there being no one at home to feed the stock. Then Steve noticed that Julia was missing. And so was Morris. And Fayaway decided to start in bawling.
They had been waiting in the truck for barely ten minutes before Julia came up the trail. Night had fallen so quickly and completely that Steve didn't see Morris behind her-in breechclout and world-war-one army overcoat, nothing else, toting a shopping bag that probably contained the rest of his earthly possessions-until they'd both climbed into the front seat beside him.
"Mind dropping, me off at Eco-vana, man?"
"Where in hell's that?"
"Bill's commune up the road ten miles, man, I already toldja. Ranger getting too hard-assed about my coming here."
"Sure." Steve would've like to stop and see the place, and Bill, he was curious; but Jack was right, they'd better get back, and they wouldn't see much in this Stygian night, anyhow. At least he more or less knew how to get there, now ... As soon as Morris got out, Julia stabbed Steve in the ribs with a sharp fingernail and growled:
"Why didn't you tell me, you sonofabitch?"
"Tell you what?"
"That he's a goddamned faggot, that's what."
"I didn't realize he was exclusive. Besides, you didn't ask."
"All he wanted from me was an angle on how to get into Jack's pants."
Howls from the backseat, mainly Lang, and a snort from Jack.
"You poor dear," Steve said, patting her knee. "Some days you can't win for losing, can you?"
Julia stuck out her tongue and curled up, suddenly kittenish, on the seat beside him. In minutes she was asleep, and it was a lonely drive home, with nothing to listen to but a laboring transmission and contented murmurs from Ruth and Lang, far in the back.
ELEVEN.
Steve remembered, from back there several ages ago when he used to think of himself as a literary person, a pretty damned kinky German novel entitled Elective Affinities, by no less an author than Goethe. Well, it was something like that, their four-way arrangement, but minus the capital-R Romantic element, thank god; everyone involved might suffer some jealousy or hurt feelings, but nobody was going to drop dead from guilt or whatever ...
It certainly could get just as complicated, though: for instance, the afternoon about a week after their hot springs trip, when Steve drove back over that way, with just Julia and Fayaway along this time, to see what Ecovana was like.
Bill showed them around, but Julia soon lost interest in his tour-guide talk, and took Fayaway off to find some kids her own age to play with.
"-The whole point is to live within the natural balance just as much as we're able to," Bill was explaining, "without disturbing the eco-structure any more than we absolutely have to. like, we're planting things like corn and beans and spinach next spring. I suppose, but eventually we hope to learn how to subsist on native grasses, roots, pinon nuts ... "
An amazing amount had been accomplished in a month, actually. There were about forty people on the place already, mostly earnest young couples with small children, who'd come here directly from New York or California. You could tell which were which at a glance, by how much tan there was under the sunburn. A lot of the men wore breechclouts like Morris, or nothing but a string of beads. Most of the chicks, though, wore the full hippie uniform, cabric or khaki workshirts half a dozen sizes too big, and heavy, colorful ankle-length shirts. All had the bright spiritual eyes and pure expressions of dedicated vegetarians.
"These three hundred acres as close, in both geological and biological terms, to the canyons along the Rio Grande as we were able to acquire," Bill went on. "Those canyons are where the Pueblos settled during their dark ages, when they were under attack from the barbarians-Apaches and such-and their civilization was crumbling because of the heavy rip-offs they themselves had caused, by timbering the slopes and destroying the ground cover. They originally depleted this whole region, you know; almost all this land used to be forested, and had two or three times the present normal rainfall.
"Anyhow-we wanted to get one of the actual canyons where the Pueblos lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where they finally worked out man's proper position in the biosphere and developed on of the few truly harmonious life-concept systems in the history of the species. But all those canyons, as you already know, I'm sure, are being used by the Los Alamos scientists, or else 'restored' as 'national monuments' by the parks department.
"...Here's the cook shack, what'd you say we have a cup of wild peppermint or sagebrush tea? This shack's only temporary, you under stand, and so are all those tents and A-frames you can see scattered up along the canyon walls. By next fall, we expect to be living entirely in caves, with at most two or three unobtrusive adobe structures down here, kitchen, dispensary, etcetera, and nothing around the place that won't return quickly and harmlessly to the soil when we pass on--. "
"Steve! STEVIE!" a voice shrilled; and he knew the voice, all right, but not, at the moment, its owner. Then a body hurtled out of the corner between the stove and the wall, and grafted itself to his chest. He knew the body, all right, too-none quite like it anywhere, at least not in Steve's direct experience: no iridescent green tights this time, no sequinned purple mini-dress, no beaver coat; but it was Redbook Joyce all right, by god.
"What in the name of St. Fuck are you doing here?"
"Living. Being. Seeking. I came to find YOU."
"Oh, yeah? How long you been out here."
"Three weeks, I guess."
"Then you're full of shit. You could've gotten our address from any number of people back in New York or out here if you wanted to find me."
"Well ... the fact that I knew you were out here made New Mexico a lot more attractive. And a whole caravan of my Revolutionary Sisters and Brothers were coming out-"
"Your what? When'd you join the movement?"
"What'd you mean, Steve!" Stamping her pretty bare foot-really that indignant. "I may not've been out marching or going to jail when you were, but I always knew that, underneath the glitter, the whole goddamned system was bullshit. I guess it was really Che's death that got me into becoming active ... "
"The last time I saw you, you thought more of Andy Warhol than Che Guevara."
"Andy Warhol! That male chauvinist-"
By this time they were somehow halfway up the canyon, inside Joyce's A-frame, sitting side by side on her bed, and she had his fly gaping, both hands stuffed inside, while his fingers were whipping up quite an egg-cream in her gyrating cunt.-This is insane, Steve told himself, as she plopped herself into his lap and terminated the conversation abruptly by shoving her plump, hot tongue halfway down his throat.-This is absolutely nutty, Steve insisted, as he slipped both hands up under her tattered, tight black sweater and fondled those incredible Playboy tits, while Joyce slid gaily up and down his cock, having at least three fantastic orgasms to every four strokes.-All we need now, Steve's internal monologue reasonably continued, is for Julia to come crashing in here and-
"Hah!" Guess Who, in the doorway classic pose, arms akimbo, the works.
Joyce gave vent to an uncharacteristically lady like little squeal, and leaped off his lap. All she could see for several seconds, as she whirled to face the open doorway, was a feminine silhouette against the brilliant sunlight. "Ruth?" she asked, shaking her skirt back down over that lovely inverted valentine, her ass. Then her eyes adjusted. "You're not Ruth! Who in hell are you, anyway?-Steve, is this your new old lady?"
Julia clipped off an answer for him, real high-noon style: "Yep."
"I didn't know you'd split up with Ruth, I'm so sorry." Joyce sounded as if she were really heart-broken about it, for some obscure reason, perhaps because Julia looked extremely formidable right now. Joyce still addressed her questions to Steve, who was beginning to see some humor in the situation, but was totally immobilized in all other respects, seated there on a torn, greasy sleeping bag with his cock drooping out of his overalls like a dying daisy. But Julia remained planted squarely in the doorway, and she didn't appear to think it was funny at all.
"He didn't split up with Ruth. He's got two old ladies now. I'm the other, and get it clear: two's plenty. So just pull your claws out of him, bitch."
-Time to button up and go, fella, Steve told himself, and finally got some degree of obedience out of his motor reflexes.
"Just who'd you think you're calling a bitch, you skinny little cunt-"
"Joyce, it's been great, see you around." Steve was past both of them, and ten yards down the canyon with Julia hard upon his heels, before Joyce replied:
"Steve! What I said first about why I came to New Mexico-I meant it!"
A wave and a grin said all he cared to say in response.
"...Just why is it," he asked over his shoulder, climbing down to the creekbed, where Bill was patiently waiting to continue the tour, "That you can screw Freaky Fred any time you feel like it, not to mention attempting to screw poor little Morris, and probably anyone and anything else that strikes your lecherous imagine, and yet you feel entitled to ride here on my behavior like the vice squad?"
"Anytime you want to be with me, Steve, you know you can be. But it's not fair to ask me to sit still and be 'faithful' to you while you're with Ruth. And weren't you supposed to be with Ruth that night I balled Fred? Weren't you planning to spend the night with Ruth when I went off with that other little jerk?"
"How'd you know what I was planning?"
"What goes on where you're concerned is never any secret to me: I love you, Steve."
"Thanks, I guess; but what I don't get is, you're free to fuck around whenever I'm with Ruth, and by extension Ruth's free to fuck around whenever I'm with you-right?"
"Damned right."
"And when am I free to fuck around."
"You're not."
"Hm. Where's the justice in that arrangement?"
"For Christ's sake, Steve, there's two of us, and only one of you to go around."
He still couldn't quite penetrate her logic, but they were within earshot of the Bodhisattva by this this time, so Steve let it go. But later, on the ride home, he asked her:
"You said there's only one of me to go around; what about Lang? Doesn't he balance out the equation a little bit?"
She shook her head. "Nope. Lang's got nothing to do with it, really."
"How so?"
"Oh, shit, how can you be so dense about people? If Lang's anything on his own, he's competing with us for you. And Ruth would never even look at Lang, or any other guy, if she didn't realize that she'll always have to share you with me, or some other chick. And even so, she wouldn't if you didn't make her, out of some silly idea that it somehow squares things, that it makes it okay for you to have me."
"Boy, that's quite an analysis. You oughta hang out a shingle. Did you hear, dirty old doctor teach you how to figure folks out that neatly?"
"Whenever you try to be sarcastic, I know I've said something that's true."
It was a flattering version of their situation, certainly; but Steve couldn't make up his mind whether a) it was true; b) she was putting him on for some shrewd purpose; or c) she believed it because, as she'd said earlier, she really loved him in an utterly exclusive way, so-for her, anyhow-he naturally seemed to be the central figure in all their entangled relationships.
That last reading was sad, if true; the only person with whom Steve could even imagine himself reciprocating that all consuming kind of love was Ruth. And obviously he wasn't capable of it, even with Ruth or there wouldn't be any Julia in the picture, at all. So he pushed the conversation back a couple of notches:
"What about your balling Lang?"
"I never have, yet."
"Oh, come on. Do I need my glasses changed?"
"What I meant was, so far it's always been the four of us together, and that doesn't mean the same thing. That's a party-and parties are just fun."
"Oh, I see. But the word most people would use, I think, is 'orgy'. "
"Most people are full of crap. But look, Steve, I'm being serious. Balling somebody and really meaning it, to me, means at the very least that the two of you are alone, and that the actual fucking is only a symbol of what's really passing between you. And once you can ball with somebody like that, Steve, it's a crime to waste your fucking on just anybody that comes along and spreads their legs for you, like that dizzy cock-collector back there. You've got the real thing going, both with Ruth and with me. And we've only got it, each of us individually, with one guy: you. So it's okay for Ruth or me to fuck somebody else whenever you're busy making it with the other one of us. But if you're making it with someone other than me or Ruth, then you're cheating both of us of the chance of really and truly being together with anyone. Don't you understand that?"
She was wholly in earnest, and wide-open. Steve had never seen her like this before, so vulnerable, and somehow, full of innocence. It was kind of scary, and more in self-defense than for any other reason, he tried to make a joke out of it all:
"How'd you know I don't have the very same effect on every chick I do the honor of climbing into? Maybe you and Ruth are just trying to corner the market on what ought to be every woman's privilege, at least once in her otherwise unfulfilled exist-"
Julia plugged his mouth with her tongue, and he nearly went into the ditch.
"Hey! I can't see through you!"
"Then quit driving."
"We can't stop here, this is all Los Alamos. And those uptight bastards'll never believe we stopped for a quick piece of ass. They'll hang an atom-spy rap on us. You wanna end up like the Rosenbergs?"
"Julia slid out of her jeans and started in on his overall straps. "I'll give you two minutes to find a parking place, and then here-I-come, ready-or-not. And meanwhile, just to be sure you don't get away ... " She ducked beneath the steering wheel, yanked his cock clear of his fly, and took the tender flap of skin under the head between her sharp little teeth.
"Ouch! The commissioner of highway safety oughta hear about you. Will Bandelier National Monument do for your obscene rites? Here's the turn-off, sign says three miles. Leggo, goddammit, and put your pants back on, we gotta stop at a ticket window."
There wasn't any ranger on duty, off-season, apparently. The park itself was one of those canyons Bill had been talking about, partially restored cliff-dwellings, with neat asphalt walks from one point-of-interest to the next, and numbered signs to tell you all about it, if you bought the dollar guide book.
They left Fayaway sleeping soundly on the back seat, and followed the steepest path. There was absolutely no one else in evidence. Beautiful, narrow, curving valley, bright green with willows and shrubs and good-sized stands of trees; the walls above very nearly perpendicular, hundreds of feet high, light gray tufa-a kind of rock so soft you can scratch a cave into it with a hard, pointed stick. A series of twisting stairways and lashed-pole ladders led them to one of the highest caves: round, domed, about four feet high at the center, ten across. The tufa was rough and blackened towards the top with the soot from ancient fires, everywhere else worn shiny and smooth as satin by long-gone feet, shoulders, buttocks. The sun was almost over the canyon rim now, but had probably been pouring directly into the cave all afternoon; in any case, the floor and walls were still glowing with as much warmth as if there had been a ghostly bonfire going to the hollow scooped out for that purpose.
"Aren't you glad we waited?" Steve asked, crawling though the low entrance-way, reaching back to help Julia up the last vertical rungs.
"Nope." Giggle. "We could always've fucked once or twice in the truck, and then again here."
"You seem to think I'm inexhaustible as well as irreplaceable."
"Oh, you are, you are, baby, you're everything ... " She fell on top of him, tearing at his clothes and then, too impatient for that business, grinding her crotch urgently into his, dry-fucking until she came once, sharply, like teenagers used to. This operation occupied less than a minute, and Steve didn't move a muscle.
"Now, let's take our time."
Julia slowly removed all Steve's clothes, then her own, meticulously folded each article, placed it in the shadows at the back of the cave. In the failing light her eyes, lips, nipples, bush, and long, freed hair were glittering jet, her skin was luminous.
She started with his fingers, licked between them, sucked each one, then ran her tongue down and around, like the stripe on a barber's pole, from the palms of his hands to his armpits. Then the same treatment for his toes and legs, Then pulling each throbbing testicle in her mouth and twirling it around with her tongue. Then her busy mouth snaking between the cheeks of his ass, hands shoving him gently over into his side, mouth working back and forth across his buttocks, up his spine, sucking unbearable sharp sensations from nerve endings he'd never known were there. Meanwhile-and this was something he observed with detached curiosity, like a scientist-his face, chest, belly, and hands felt useless, extraneous, wasted; in contrast to recent nights, those four-way "parties" as Julia had called them, just the two of them seemed incomplete: only one step removed from jacking off alone ... Julia finished her loving journey glued to his back, breath coming in hot gasps in the hollow of his neck.
"Would you like me to do all that to you?"
"No-or yes, but let's fuck first."
Yin-yang: Steve sitting tailor-fashion, arms braced back against the smooth wall, Julia with her ankles locked together above his buttocks. The cave seemed to throb and spin and leap around them; they didn't move, they were timeless, the still point in a dervish world. Tongues outstretched, tips touching only; when at last they came it was everywhere and forever, all at once, more like electricity charging through them than any orgasm he'd ever experienced before. And afterwards, he could've sworn they had both become incandescent. The cave danced with purple lights.
"You like big, pneumatic tits, don't you?" Julia's voice, at the end of long, deepening silence, was as jarring as a blast of atonal music. The memory of Joyce still bugged her, obviously. It took Steve what seemed hours to find a voice with which to reply:
"They're interesting for a change, yeah, but not as a steady diet."
"Here's your steady diet, baby," Julia whispered fiercely, shoving her own small, pointed breasts against his mouth, one after the other. "Suck me! Harder! Go ahead, bite me, you bastard!"
He served her body every bit as thoroughly and harshly as she had done his, scouring every inch of skin, probing every crevice until his tongue was numb with the effort, and his lips were cracked and raw. She urged him on, insatiably; finally, he knelt with her knees hooked tightly over his shoulders, her fingers stuck in his ears to tug his face ever deeper into her cunt, and she came half a dozen times in as many minutes, each time more fiercely, until he came again, too, without being touched at all-spurting great gobs across the darkness, to run in streaks down her back.
When Steve came to, the gibbous moon was shining squarely in his face. Julia, bending over his feet now, retying his boots, had very gently dressed him. His smile, in the moonlight, was as pure, as sweet, and as hair-raising as a ghost's.
TWELVE.
Those "parties" where happening nearly every night now. They usually began around the fireplace, as soon as the kids were in bed and supper was cleared away; the four of them sprawled haphazard across the hearth, slowly and comfortably getting good and stoned on Lang's abundant hash. Then hands would begin to wander, and mouths; clothes would come off-invariably Julia's first-and eventually they'd all wind up in bed together, usually in Ruth's because it was slightly wider....
Julia on her side; Lang facing her, his cock penetrating her cunt to the hilt; Steve wrapped around her back, his cock inching upwards into her tight, squirming ass; Ruth above them, perched against the head of the bed, one foot tucked under Steve's cheek, the other one under Lang's, fingers twining in their sweaty hair; Julia's forehead pressing into Ruth's belly, her tongue daintily separating the pink, protruding petals unfolded around Ruth's clit-
Steve across the middle of the bed, cock between Julia's scissoring legs, head between Ruth's; Lang across the top, cock slowly pumping into Julia's mouth, tongue flicking out at Ruth's eyelids, ears, and lips, hands kneading both women's breasts....
Lang curled back against the edge of the bed, Julia's heels digging into his armpits, her ass against his belly, his cock sliding in from behind; her body twisting across, to bring her lips down hard and hungrily over the head of Steve's cock; Lang's face buried between the cheeks of Ruth's ass; and Ruth stretching back across the bed, her tongue thrust out, fencing skillfully with Steve's....
Ruth flat, spread-eagled, on her belly, Lang's cock plunging between her legs, her tongue busy between Julia's; Steve, exhausted, sitting beside them, watching, while Julia's fingers played with his balls then Lang throwing himself forward over Ruth's back, pressing his head into Steve's lap, shoving Julia's hand aside, nuzzling and gnawing Steve's spent cock until it rose again.
"Here, take my place."
Lang drew back squatting on his heels at the foot of the bed, while Ruth rolled over.
"Better put all the pillows under you-going to be heavy."
Ruth lay back again, arms and legs thrown wide, cunt open and tipped invitingly upwards by the heap of pillows and blankets Steve and Julia had thrust under her ass. Steve knelt between her thighs, kissed her clitoris, and slowly crept upward; his cock found entry without guidance and slipped quickly inside her until their pelvic arches met, and seemed to lock. Then Lang knelt between Steve's legs, and began to massage and relax his ass-hole with a gentle, wet thumb.
"What're you going to do?" Steve asked, craning back over his shoulder, trying to see. "Can't you guess?"
"Yes, and I'm not at all sure I'm gonna like it."
"Don't tell me you're a virgin, Steve."
"I most certainly am, in that region, so take it easy, will you, please?"
"You won't even know what fucked you, friend, believe me ... "
The mere touch of the tip of Langs' cock to his ass-hole was more than Steve thought he could bear; but the head slipped in easily, and then, inch by inch, all the rest of it, until he bore the full weight of Lang's hips on his buttocks. Meanwhile, far inside, again and again in a galloping rhythm, around the head of his own cock.
"Steve? You all right?"
"-Ooooh-yeah, but for god's sake, don't anybody move ... "
They all lay as still as they could; but just the motion caused by three pairs of lungs drawing breath caused more pleasure/pain than Steve felt able to take without coming instantly.
"What's it like?" Julia asked, little-girl curiously, stroking the hollows between their ribs straight up from Ruth to Steve to Lang, all the way down again, sending a ripple of intense delight from belly to belly to back to belly-with smooth, cool fingernails.
"Incredible-I begin to understand what Tiresias went through-"
"Who that?"
"Mmmmmgh-never mind ... "
Julia sprawled on her side across the top of the bed, with one leg beneath Ruth's neck, the other hooked over Lang's, crushing their faces into a sweet, gluey jumble of tongues and ears and tangled hair; Lang nibbled the inside of one thigh, Ruth licked the other, and Steve by stretching his neck as far as it would go could just barely tickle Julia's clit with the tip of his tongue. When her fingernail had completed its journey up and down all their ribs, she slid her hand down Lang's spine and deftly inserted her middle finger into his ass. He sighed, and pushed still deeper into Steve, who passed the pressure on to Ruth, who-but very quickly there was no telling where any sensation began or ended....
At first, to Steve, Lang touching him anywhere was strange and revolting. Lang's body seemed rough, hairy, clammy, bad-smelling, definitely a turn-off. And the taste of Lang's come, in Ruth's or Julia's mouth or cunt, nearly made him retch; and yet he knew, intellectually, that he couldn't possible distinguish Lang's from his own-it was just the idea, and all the taboos he'd been raised with. He remembered what George had said: "All such capabilities were viciously rooted out of us in our repressive childhoods ... "
Not so with Lang; his attitude was Julia's: "I like making love with people I love, whether they're men or women ... " Of course, he was a whole generation younger, that much freer and farther out to begin with like Jack, he was born simply knowing things Steve couldn't even imagine until he'd unlearned tons of crap that had been stuffed in his head by uptight parents, schools, church, and government. But Lang understood Steve's hang-ups, or at least recognized their existence, and never tried to force him past them; after that first time he went down on Steve and then fucked him in the ass, he waited several nights for Steve to recover and digest the experience, before he so much as put a hand on his shoulder again.
Still, it wasn't until Lang had blown him many times-deeply, lovingly, without shame, and more skillfully than any woman Steve had ever known, Julia included-that Steve could bring himself to even attempt to reciprocate. The first tries were hopelessly awkward, as he should've known they would be....
One of those nights when he found himself with a seemingly indestructible hard-on and Lang was limp for once, just feeling out of it: Steve fucking Julia and sucking Ruth, both their heads burrowing in Lang's crotch to no avail....
"Here, let me try," Steve said, detaching himself at both ends, and crawling over.
Lang lay back obediently, Steve bent above him and kissed his belly; then made himself go lower, buried his lips in Lang's bush, fingered his balls, lifted his cock and touched it, twice, with the tip of his tongue: no good, the male taste and smell were just too strong ...
"Steve-it's all right. I know you would if you could. Don't push it, don't do anything that doesn't feel right to you." Even Lang's fingers along his cheeks and through his hair were all wrong, like stroking a cat's fur backwards.
"No. I want to. Just tell me what you want."
"Can't tell you, man-but here, I'll try to show you-" Lang swung around on the bed, into the sixty nine position with him, and took the head of Steve's cock between dry lips, rolling it back and forth lightly, tracing the V beneath with the lower edge of his tongue. Laboriously at first, Steve imitated each motion, trying too hard and aware that he was trying too hard, but unable to do anything to help that.
Lang pursed his lips firmly, just below the flange, and began to spread and scrub each individual crease in the head of Steve's cock with the flat of his tongue; Steve followed suit again, but it was labor, not love-a manic little voice at the back of his brain kept screaming: don't do it! it's dirty! it's queer!....
Diversion: a warm, soft, smooth body slithering down his back, slippery leg sliding under his head, hot wet cunt like a compress slapped into the hollow at the back of his neck, nickering into him there, shoving his mouth down further over Lang's gradually swelling cock, while a cool tongue crept through the crack of his ass, and lips began to nuzzle at the back of his balls. Then a commotion of the same sort on the other side, behind Lang's back-and suddenly eye-to-eye with him, there was Ruth, nuzzling Lang's balls; as she drew one into her mouth and swirled it around with her tongue, she rubbed her nose against Steve's, Eskimo-fashion ... meanwhile Julia's cunt was pumping away against his neck and shoulders, driving him deeper into Lang's crotch, and Lang's cock deeper into his mouth, and at the other end of the bed-a long ways away, and yet right there-a mirror-image: he was Lang, Lang was him, Julia was Ruth, Ruth Julia-and he was coming, oh-god-was-he-ever-coming, Lang was sucking, harder, harder, deeper, faster, and Lang was coming, and Julia, and-ohh, good, good, don't anyone stop, not ever, come on, keep it up, keep ... between Lang's legs, Ruth's mouth and tongue reaching towards him, for a long, sweet kiss, before they both collapsed, swallowing down Lang's come....
Even Ruth's bed wasn't big enough for all four of them to sleep comfortably afterwards, so somewhere along in the freezing middle of the pitch-black night, Julia would prod Steve awake enough to disentangle himself and lurch across the kitchen with her to her room.
Then, one night, Julia didn't wake him; he opened his eyes with a start when the first light reached his cheek from the small, high window, aware only that something was wrong ... no, not wrong, after all, just different-the window was on the opposite side of the bed from Julia's. Familiar blonde mop on the pillow beside him, instead of the now almost-as-familiar red one. He stuck his head out of the covers, just far enough to be positive: no Lang there, either. Humm ... Too sleepy still to figure it out yet, really, but the feelings he fuzzily sensed were definitely mixed. One, however, won out, as he snuggled down again around Ruth's warm, insensible back-it had been a long, long time, damned near a month already, since he'd been completely alone with her....
His cock rose up smoothly and-look, maw, no hands-found its own way between the backs of her legs. She wriggled and sighed in her sleep as it slithered past the lips of her cunt, and very gradually penetrated to its full length. Steve held his breath, lay as still as possible, concentrated on feeling her, from inside. All too soon, the slight lift and drop of her stomach wall with each unconscious breath, and the even slighter internal contractions this caused, were intolerably delicious; he couldn't hold back, here it comes, oohmigod-one thrust and groan and it was all over, the most sedentary act of sexual congress in vertebrate history, excepting perhaps amongst three-toed sloths ...
"...Oh, christ, Lang, please, let me get some sleep ... "
"Guess again."
"Steve!"
Miraculous gymnastics-she was face-to-face with him so fast he wasn't even aware of uncoupling or reinsertion. And this time around may easily have established records of the opposite kind: the cinderblocks complained until Steve was sure they'd cracked a couple; and Ruth's pelvis smashed up into his with such hungry force that he began to fear a fracture there, too. She came with a groan that was more like a warwhoop, collapsed, snuggled into his chest, and immediately fell fast asleep again ...
Later that day, he and Ruth took a long walk together not saying much, not feeling any need to talk, just digging being a couple again for a change. And that night, after supper, instead of doing any of it, Lang and Steve got into working out algebraically all the different possible permutations there were among the four of their bodies, considering only genital, oral-genital, and anal-genital linkages. It got to be very complicated, especially as they kept smoking hash; they used up half of a ream of paper with scrawled formulae like "L(c) to J(a), J(c) to S(c), S(m) to R(c), R(m) to ... " and finally, came up with a huge chart with all the ones they'd already done checked off in red crayon. Julia and Ruth got bored and sleepy, and each went to her own room; so when the men finally gave it up and stumbled bedwards, Steve wound up with Ruth again, and Lang presumably spent another night alone with Julia.
THIRTEEN.
November coasted past them: clear, warm, brilliant days, freezing with equally brilliant starscapes every night. There was nothing that had to be done, wouldn't be until spring, so if they balled until dawn and slept it off until noon every once in a while, that was right. But there was still a lot to do, and most of it got done. T at kitchen window was replaced, finally, and all the sashes and doors in the house repaired and repainted, primary red or yellow. Steve scrounged a rusty old plow and some mendable harness from an abandoned old barn up on a neighboring mesa, and Jack began to teach the mare their functions. Lang proved to be quite a cabinetmaker, built a great yogurt incubator, and a brooder for the next batch of chicks, and several chairs and chests. Ruth taught Julia to knit, and between the two of them they produced a lifetime supply of sweaters, scarves, mittens, and socks for the whole family.
And it was a family, a surprisingly efficient and harmonious one. Fayaway throve on having two fathers to tease, two mothers to pester; but it was clear from the start who her favorite parent was: Lang took her to the pound for that long-promised kitten, and came back with a pup that looked like a cross between Snoopy and three St. Bernards. Sheila never lost an opportunity to hang around wherever Lang happened to be, either, but also got on more smoothly with everyone else, and didn't appear to be especially upset anymore by open signs of affection between Steve and Julia, or Ruth and Lang.
Nobody talked about the fact that sooner or later Lang's appeal would most likely be turned down, and he'd have to decide whether to go to prison or split for Canada.
Thanksgiving was a big blast. Daniel and Miranda were invited, and brought along Freaky Fred. Dinner was the two hens that hadn't been laying lately, homegrown pumpkin and homemade mince pies, and hashish honeycake; and they all got a distinct buzz on from sampling the cider in all four barrels, trying to decide which was hardest.
Lang's presence made for an even more interesting set of reactions than Julia's had done at first. Fred was the one who broached the subject:
"I see you got yourself an old man of your own. Tricycle didn't pedal too well, huh?" This was meant for Julia's hearing, mainly, but Fred was three or four mugs and several honeycakes past the point where he could keep the old shore-patrol roar out of his voice.
"Lang? He's no more my old man then he is Ruth's," Julia answered.
"You mean you all four--? Far out."
"Here's to the demise of the nuclear family," Steve proposed, unsteadily refilling cups and mugs all around. "From vat number three again, the strongest yet."
"I can dig it," Miranda said, squeezing Daniel's knee beside her, and winking at Fred across the table.
"Dig what?" Daniel wanted to know.
"Vat number three, of course." More winks and another squeeze.
Here's to Syndicalist Sex," Lang put in. "Down with Bourgeois Boudoir Capitalism!"
December continued the warm, clear weather-so warm, in fact, that adobes could be made, if you started late in the day and quite fairly early, and threw a tarp over the fresh ones each night to keep the frost out. Steve, Lang, and Jack were turning out four hundred bricks a day, with the immediate objective of building a solar-heated bath house and a sauna, and next spring adding on a couple more bedrooms: one all her own for Fayaway, one for just the hell of it. Then, for a week, the three of them went up into the national forest with Daniel and Fred to cut vigas-Daniel had been given the use of a house with twenty acres and a spring, on condition that he replace the roof. While they were camped up there, they caught enough trout to make a smoke shack worth building, and Fred bagged a good-sized buck, which they cunt into strips and jerked on the spot, with Jackwho really could move through the woods as noiselessly as any Indian-posted on the trail below to watch for rangers.
Home again, there was one gala stoned night with the four of them, but the next morning Lang said he'd like to go back to sleeping just with Julia as a regular thing, at least for a while. Steve didn't mind at all, and was certain Ruth didn't either; the two of them, alone, after all the changes of the past months, made very sweet, exciting sex together. Nothing permanent in the arrangement, of course-nothing is permanent, you know, especially not the working of the human mind and heart. The trick is, Steve thought, to learn how to relax and enjoy each mood as it comes along to its fullest possible extent, and never to try to rush anything or to prolong it ...
But eventually there always comes a night when you feel like balling somebody until dawn, and Ruth had just begun her period that afternoon, and what's more, had a lousy headache. Steve said, "Okay, no big thing, I'll read awhile," and did, science fiction until somewhere past midnight, but it was an increasingly big thing after a while: visions of orgasms danced in his head ... out to the kitchen for jerky and fresh whole wheat bread and cider; there's a slice of yellow light under Julia's door....
"Hi. I'm not intruding, am I?"
"Yes!-I mean, no, but I was just going to put out the light and get some sleep."
"Oh, Well, then ... " Why'd Lang have to pull the covers over his head as soon as the door opened? And why did Julia look like she'd just seen Richard Nixon? Steve stood uncertainly in the doorway. "Is anything wrong?"
"No!"
Strange. Pretty goddamned strange, as a matter-of-fact. Steve took a step toward the bed; Julia, too, pulled up the covers, clear to her chin, and tucked them still more tightly around the huddled form beside her.
"Look, I just wanted to talk to you and Lang for a minute. Feeling lonely ... Lang?"
Muffled words from under the blanket, nothing audible.
"Are you sick or something?"
"Steve-" Julia speaking, "just go away, will you? Please?"
He hesitated, still uncertain, still not thinking straight ... no, doddammit, there's something very weird going on here ...
"Tell me what's bugging you first."
Julia chewed her lip; she looked just like Fayaway when she did that, her face very small and white in that big bed, with the green blanket pulled up all around her, and the big, still lump curled up beside her.
"All right. But remember this, Steve: you insisted-" Julia flung back the covers. She was naked, of course. And so was Jack; he pulled himself up into sitting position beside her, grinning sheepishly, covering his hard-on with his hand. "Hello, Dad," he mumbled.
'. . .Say it, Steve," Julia said softly, almost coaxingly. "Tell me I'm a dirty, insane bitch. Blame it all on me. But for christs's sake, get it over with."
"I think it's already over. Everything. And I think I'm going to puke-"
He couldn't, after all; but swaying over the sink, pumping a basinful of icy water to plunge his face into, was yet another mistake: it gave him half a minute in which to think. Back, whiz, to Julia's doorway; she hadn't moved, but Jack had crept under the covers again.
"Is Lang where I think he is?"
She didn't reply, didn't have time to, and didn't have to, anyhow; he knew, one glance at her face and he was positive, and he was at the other end of the hallway, with Sheila's door flung open, smashing into the wall beside him, before any word could stop him:
Deja vu. Oh, yeah. But with a couple of crucial differences ...
It wasn't Sheila's dead-white, expressionless face in the doorway this time, it was his; and it wasn't his head in the crack of a best friend's wife's ass, either, it was Sheila's deep in Lang's lap, her twelve year-old lips stretched thin and tight around the taut, red tip of Lang's cock, her fingers lovingly stroking his ass-hole and balls, while Lang's tongue slid in and out of her upturned, gaping, hot little cunt-and while Fayaway, wide awake, with her flannel gown flung up, diddled herself at the foot of the bed and looked at the scene absorbedly.
Steve didn't speak, he couldn't and neither did Lang. But Sheila recovered instantly, sat upright, and tossed her pigtails back over her shoulders:
"Get out!"
Wiping a dribble-her own saliva or Lang's sperm? From the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist, but not bothering to cover her tiny, freckled breasts or still-exposed, wet cunt. Just livid, rigid, with indignation:
"You didn't even knock! Get the fuck out of my room! Now!"
Steve got out, all right. He even closed the door behind him, latched it, walked back to the kitchen, started a fire in the stove, put the coffeepot on, pulled out a chair, sat down. But he never could have explained how any of these feats were accomplished.
Julia came out of her room as Steve was pouring the coffee: her terry cloth robe drawn primly around her, clear to her chin, hair drawn back in a long plait, face white and small, eyes enormous, dark and blank.
"Can I have a cup?"
"Sure." He poured another, strong and steaming.
"...Wish I had a cigarette ... " She slumped into the corner across the table from him, gulping coffee so hot that Steve wasn't able to put his mouth to the edge of the enamel cup yet.
"Me too. There still should be whatever's left of that old can of Bugler somewhere around here, there it is, that top shelf, I can reach it."
"...What're you going to do now, Steve?"
"What d'you mean, what am I gonna do? Go fuck the goat or the mare, maybe they've got the only two unoccupied pudenda left, it seems."
"I mean, are you going to tell Ruth about ... Jack, and Sheila?"
"Sure."
"Don't, it'll end everything."
"As I think I told you once already," Steve said wearily, "it looks to me like everything is ended."
"I don't agree, but ... "
"And I don't too much care whether you agree or not, you know."
"But don't tell her, anyway. If you're right, it'd just be causing Ruth pain unnecessarily."
"Nope. There've been too goddamned many sneaky secrets around this place already, that's the trouble. We are supposed to be a family, remember?"
Suddenly, a gush of tears down her cheeks, but she kept her head up, and her voice steady. "We still are."
"Yeah. Well, I just put in my application for orphan status."
"Steve please ... "
"Don't please me, Julia. And you'd better turn off those tears, or I'm liable to come flying over this table and beat your lying face into hamburger."
"Steve, you're just an uptight mother-fucker after all, aren't you?"
"That's more like it. But nope, I'm not, and that could be the problem. If I had fucked my mother, as I probably unconsciously wanted to do and as I'm sure you would've advised if you'd been around at that time, maybe I wouldn't get quite so uptight about little scenes like the two I happened upon tonight. Where're you going?"
"To get Lang. Maybe he can talk to you."
"I strongly advise against it. There are too many lethal objects within my reach. And it's all I can do to keep from murdering you."
Julia sat down again, slowly took a deep breath, and looked steadily into his face for several minutes. Finally she said, matter-of-factly, "You really meant that."
"Yep."
"And you really mean that this is the end for us."
"Yessiree, bob."
"Boy. That's what you are, a selfish, spoiled, little boy." This was better: a flush of righteous anger rising now, her earlobes and nostrils turning pink with it, eyes flashing. "When you quit, you just quit. Pick up your marbles and go home and pout." But it wasn't working, she couldn't bring it off, and she knew it; abruptly, her shoulders slumped and her voice went dead again.
"There's nothing left, is there."
"No, there's not."
The glow from the open firebox had been the only light in the room; now it had died to embers, and the dark kitchen closed in around them. The slivers of lamplight, under Julia's door and Sheila's, grew brighter by contrast. In the silence, Steve heard someone strumming very lightly on a guitar ... that must be Jack, still in Julia's room, waiting for the all-clear to sound, or something. The chords were clumsy, but unmistakably Dylan's: It's all Over Now, Baby Blue.
Ruth was gone when he awoke, mid-morning, and the three of them were just stepping out the door, Lang with his knapsack and sleeping bag, Julia with a single suitcase, Fayaway hugging a grocery sack full of favorite toys. The neat stacks of the rest of their belongings, one on either side of the doorway, all in cartons and well trussed up with cord, waiting for the forwarding addresses. Quick work.
"Wait," Steve called after them. "Let me get some coffee in me and I'll drive you to town, or wherever."
Lang glanced at Julia, then said without meeting Steve's eye, "Okay, well be in the truck."
Three cups in quick succession finished the pot, and a further minute's doubts got nowhere, so he went out and climbed behind the wheel. They were all sitting in the back; it made him feel as impersonal as a cabbie.
"...Any notion where everybody else is?"
"Jack left for the mountains about dawn, I guess," Julia said, "and Ruth and Sheila went for a walk about an hour ago."
"I told her, Steve," Lang said quietly. "Ruth, I mean. All about it."
Nobody uttered another word until they pulled up in front of the bus station.
"This good enough?"
"Where we going, Julia?" Fayaway finally wondered.
"I don't know ... but not far."
"This is fine, Steve," Lang said, climbing out quickly. "Thanks." When he'd lined up their luggage on the curb, he stuck his head back in the window and whispered urgently:
"I didn't hurt Sheila, I'm sure of that. And Ruth'll get over it, I know. And you don't have to worry ... there's not the slightest chance that Sheila's pregnant."
"Gee, that was considerate of you. I mean, not knocking everybody up while you were at it." Steve didn't turn his head, so if there was a hand offered, or a wave from the curb, he didn't see it.
"And I love you all of you and I'm sorry and goodbye."
"Yeah." The motor was still running, Steve jammed it into first and popped the clutch. When he looked in the rear-view mirror at the stop sign on the next corner, the sidewalk in front of the station was empty.
So was the house when he got home. He took the twenty-gauge ... Jack must've taken the .22 ... and went out hunting; when he got back, empty handed, after sunset, his supper was on the back of the stove and Ruth and Sheila were both in bed, asleep or pretending to be. He lay awake, flat on his back on what used to be Julia's bed, until the rooster crowed and the vigas gradually took shape above his head.
That day he stacked all the adobes he and Jack had made, and covered them with tarpaper. Then he filled the trenches back in, where they'd started to dig the foundation for the bath house, so the spring rains wouldn't turn them into arroyos. There'd be a bath house, and a sauna, too, all right; but next summer would be a better time to build....
That night, Steve was so exhausted that he fell asleep untying his boots. He wasn't aware, until sunrise, that Ruth had finished undressing him and then spent the night crying in his arms.
They fucked in the gray, snow-laden dawn as swiftly, clumsily, unimaginatively, and intensely as a pair of virgins.
Barely a week went by. The weather was Indian Summer again ... but wow, it's almost Christmas. Two cards arrived together, one postmarked Montreal, the other Espanola:
"Hi ... "They still said five years, so here I am, for keeps, I guess. Please send stuff c/o above address, that's the deserter's committee that's finding me a place to stay and a job. Will reimburse as soon as I'm ... ugh ... working. Behind the second stone to the right of the wall above mantle you'll find what's left of the you-know-what. Think of me when you turn on, will you? Thinking of you ... all of you ... all the time, there's little else to do ... L."
The other card had no salutation, just this message scribbled with a very dull pencil:
"Guess what, Freddy and I joined Ecovana! It's far out, we're all really digging every minute, especially Fayaway! So the next time you go to the hot spring, drop in ... and I hope that's fairly soon, cause we really need a lot of stuff I left behind. Yrs affectionately irregardless, J. P.S.: Joyce says hello, you bastard you." Hard to
Hard to believe, how much perspective a week can bring, sometimes. Steve, at the kitchen table, scanned the two postcards and passed them over to Ruth. She read them quickly, smiled, and handed them over to Sheila, who snickered slightly at Julia's, tossed them both down on the table, and strolled out the door without further comment or, apparently a care in the world.
"You know something?" Ruth asked, sitting down across from him and shoving the coffee pot to a point where both could reach it. "She's almost over it, already. Amazing, but I really think so ... "
"Mmmmmm. You know something else? I don't want to sound like Pangloss, but so am I, and so are you, and I'm even beginning to think it was maybe for the best. All of it. No kidding. Something we just had to go through, to get the last of New York out of our systems."
"Yes," Ruth said, and then smiled the same faint smile again. "Until next time."
"No. I don't think there's going to be any 'next time' this time."
"You never think there's going to be any next time."
"Just how'm I supposed to take that remark?"
Before Ruth could reply, they heard a truck roar into the yard. Then another. And a third ... Was that a fourth? Screeching brakes, slamming doors, Steve craned his neck to peer out the window, unnecessarily; they'd both know that bellow anywhere:
"Okay everybody, this is it, the end of the long dusty trail!" George, his blonde beard streaming in the wind like Moses' white one, was pounding on the hood of a Dodge panel truck, to gain the attention of the descending multitude. "Hey, Steve, you dropped out cocksucker! Guess what we did! Brought out the whole fucking magazine! We're gonna publish it right in your front yard, by Christ!"
"Sheila! Can you really be little Sheila? Goddamn, how you have filled out ... " Around the corner of an aluminum camper on the back of a Chevy pickup, Steve couldn't see him, but that was John's voice ... but they're in Cali ... yeah; and Good Old George is supposed to be in New York ...
Phyllis and Dolores the Eskimo romped into sight, giggling, more than a little hysterical, Steve thought; but then, he was more than a little hysterical himself by now. Several other shouting, joyful freaks bounded around the yard that he didn't recognize ... leave it to George, he's probably expanded the staff to rival Time, Inc.'s.
"This couldn't be a 'next time', could it?" Ruth asked, with a wry, tired grin.
"It just might be, at that," Steve admitted weakly. Thunder of approaching footsteps on the porch....
