I cup her small, round breasts - just oranges to the touch - with her nipples as hard as the knuckle that is digging into my leg. Slowly I lay her down, getting one glimpse of her body, taut and ribby, and one look at her up-poking breasts, a tint of powder in her narrow cleavage. Then she pulls my head down to the powder spot, but I feel my stomach tighten at the scent. It reminds me of Colm's baby shampoo; the label says: NO TEARS!
She says, 'Please ...'
Please what? I think, and hope she won't make this my decision. I have such trouble with decisions.
Kiss a soft, straight line down to her navel; see the marks her panties' waist band has grooved on the small swell of her belly. It bothers me that I can't remember when or how her panties came off. Was it her decision or mine? It strikes me as an important bit of forgetting. My rough chin rests on that fluffed fringe. When I move, when she first feels my kiss, she scissors my head hard and gives my hair two quick painful tugs. But then her thighs relax; I feel her hands slide off my head and cup my ears, so that I can hear the sea in stereo - or the Coralville Reservoir rising, making our odd hill an island; to maroon us under the dusk-flying ducks, over the dust-choked odor drawn up like groundfog from the soybean fields.
One of my ears is released; the sea rings one-sided, monaural. I catch a flash of Lydia's free hand swooping along the floor and fumbling in her pear-colored suit jacket. What is in the sleeve? She says, 'There's a rubber. A girl in my dorm ... had one.'
But I can't fit my hand up her jacket cuff, and she's obliged to shake her suit, saying, 'There's a secret pocket in the lining of the wrist ...' What for?
Her breasts are parted: I see her lip held in her teeth; I see her ribcage quickly lift, hold itself up and slide the tinfoil-wrapped rubber down her belly to my forehead; then her ribs fall, and the queer, small swell to her belly quivers; her hips shake. Out of the corner of my eye I see her arm swinging free, her wrist slack; wadded in her palm, like a sponge ball, is what must be the heart of the pumpernickel, torn from the center of the fresh loaf. Her thighs tense and slap my face hard, then fall flush to the seat, and the hand that holds the bread-heart lets the dark wad
fall.
I hear the tinfoil tear and crinkle; I wonder if she hears it too. I lay my head on her breasts and hear the flutterstep of her heart. Her elbow is propped on the seat, her forearm dangled over the floor. Her wrist is so sharply bent that it looks broken; her long fingers point down, unmoving, and the cloudy sun through the window is just strong enough to glint off her high school ring; it is too big for her finger and has slipped askew.
I shut my eyes in her powdered cleavage, noting a sort of candy musk. But why does my mind run to slaughterhouses, and to all the young girls raped in wars?
Her thighs close gently on my shielded part, and she asks, 'Aren't you going to do the other?'
And my frail part shrinks in its thin, pinching skin; it recedes when Lydia Kindle flexes her thighs.
Again she says, 'Please ...' And in a very small voice, 'What's wrong?'
Slowly I raise myself off her, kneeling between her legs; I feel her fingers stronger on my shoulders; there's a blue, thread-thin vein that's pulsing in her cleavage, a diagonal between her far-parted breasts. As if she's conscious of her heartbeat showing, she drops one arm across herself, and with the other hand hides her crotch, A YOUNG PETTY-PIECE! saved, for a while. And for whom?
I feel the rubber roll up. While Lydia Kindle, swinging her legs off the seat, says, 'I never even asked you to be in love with me or anything. I mean, I've never done this before, or that other, and it just didn't even matter what you really thought of me - I mean, to me. Don't you even know that? Oh, my God ... Shit, and I thought I was pretty naive ...'
As if she's got the cramps, she bends over, her face on one knee, a lash of hair in the corner of her mouth, and in that familiar angle between her elbow and her knee, the breast nearest me is simply too small and perfect to swing; it points like a thing painted on her, too perfect to be real.
'It's complicated,' I try to tell her. 'No one should ever leave things up to me.'
I fumble with the latch and open my door for the cold reviving pain of the air. Standing cold and naked in the wet, crunchy moss, I hear Lydia rummaging through the car. Turning, I duck my boots; she's on all fours in the back seat, shoveling my things out the door. Wordless, I gather each article as it falls and make a ball of my stuff and clutch it to my chest. Brainless, Lydia Kindle tosses her own clothes from the back seat to the front seat, and from the front seat to the back seat, and then from the back seat to the front seat ...
I say, 'Let me drive you home, please.'
'Please?' she shrieks, and over the knoll, like stones thrown over my head, a low rush of ducks wings by, black in the dusk; startled, they veer off, honking to see this naked fool with his clothes held over his head.
Now watch Lydia, dashing nude around the inside of the Edsel. She is locking all the doors. Still nude, she slips behind the steering wheel, her fine nipples brushing the cold ring of the horn. The Edsel convulses, belches and blurts a thick gray wad of exhaust out its rusted pipe. For a second, though I make no effort to move, I believe Lydia is going to run over me, but she surges in reverse. Jacking the wheel, she spins herself back into the tire ruts that mark our coming here. Wrenching the hard-to-turn Edsel, her breasts at last move like live things. I fear for her nipples on the horn ring.
It's not until I watch her Edsel rocketing over the soybean bog that I realize my predicament. He died of exposure on the duck-flown shores of the Coralville Reservoir!
So I began to slog through the soybeans, keeping my jogging eyes on the spattered Edsel, churning through the far field of corn stubble. I could barely make out the pale line of the road by which we must have come. Running nude and slippery through this swampland, I gambled that if I cut along the shore line of the reservoir, I might intersect the road ahead of her and be able to flag her down. By then, she might be in more of a mood to be flagged down. Flag her down with what? I wondered. With my strangely clad part?
My clothes bundle high and dry in my armpit, I dug through the painful saw grass and spongy muck along the thin-iced edge of the reservoir. A black burst of coots took flight in front of me; once or twice I sank to my knees, feeling terrible oozy and decaying things in the bog slime. But always I keep my clothes bundle high and dry.
Then I was into some uncut corn, bent broken stalks, the running painful on the crinkling cornhusks underfoot, as dry and sharp and brittle as thin pottery. There was a slight pond between me and the flat line of the road; it was not so firmly frozen as it looked, and I crashed waist-deep striking a downed fence underwater, the fenceposts just visible at either side of the pond, with the barbwire slanting under. But I was too numb to feel any of the cuts.
By now I could foresee our lucky collision. Lydia's sea-green Edsel had a dust tail like a kite trying to leave the ground. Reaching the ditch of the road just ahead of her, I was too exhausted to wave; I simply stood there, my bundle of clothes casually under one arm, and watched her roar by, her breasts as straight in front of her as headlights. She didn't even turn her head, and her brake lights never flickered. Stupefied, I jogged a little in her dusty wake - so thick a dust that I stumbled off the road's crown and had to grope my choked way along.
I was still trotting as her Edsel increased the distance between us, when I saw, so close I almost ran into it, a shabby red pickup truck parked along the side of the road. I sagged against the truck's door handle, seeing that I wasn't more than six feet from a hunter busy cleaning a duck on the pickup's hood. He had the floppy neck of the bird draped over the arm of the side-view mirror, while blood and clotted parts spilled to the road, and down feathers stuck to his gutting knife and thick thumb.
When he saw me, he almost cut his wrist off, with a sudden wrench that squeegeed the duck over the hood and skidded it wetly down the fender away from him, and he cried out, 'Holy shit, Harry... .'
I panted. 'No,' I gasped, convinced that I wasn't a Harry yet, not seeing the man in the driver's seat of the truck; his elbow wasn't more than a few inches from my ear.
'Holy shit, Eddy ...' the driver answered, so close to me that I jumped.