hearing another’s breathing. That simple. Jasper did that. Past that don’t even go there. That was all she wanted or she would’ve asked.
The next day at breakfast which is cold meat and potatoes, in the garden, at the supper table, tending the fire, she is the same. The same calm eyes absorbing everything, the way a dark pond absorbs sunlight. The marvel of it. Women are like that. Pops is not, I’m not. He’s no fool, probably expecting some similar development since Day One. Whatever development it is, maybe nothing. After all we are some of the few people left on earth just about. It’s like one of those desert island jokes. The one about the hat. Be weirder if it didn’t happen, right, Hig?
Not really. Doesn’t feel like that. Feels frigging weird. Not weird, tumultuous. Momentous. Well, it’s probably nothing. Probably doesn’t mean a thing, I mean just an experiment to see how it felt after all those years. A sleep experiment.
His eyes rest on me a fraction of a second longer. That’s all. Subtle but loud. I can’t meet them. I look away. I get that Pops is a hard man where he needs to be hard, but beyond that he pretty much minds his own business and expects the same.
Does she want to be my girlfriend? What a stupid idiotic thought. Are you in goddamn high school? You are on the Beach man. Last man and woman left in what? Three counties probably. It’s your patriotic duty to follow that through.
It is?
No.
What then?
Shrug.
Do what you want.
What do I want?
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
The next night she came very late. I realized I’d been waiting most of the night without sleeping. Just waiting. Wondering what I would do, what she would. She lifted the quilt which I’d left unzipped and squeezed in and snuggled her mouth into my ear and murmured, Miss me. And fell asleep. It was an order and a question.
Pretty cramped. She lay in the crook of my arm which fell asleep, went numb. I felt her length, her thigh over mine, her breast against my side, the expansion of her breath. She smelled like smoke and something sweet, tangy the way sage is tangy. I got another bursting hard on. I lay there. You again? Becoming a regular are you? You are welcome, probably, pending good behavior. I lay there trying to make out constellations through the leaves, smelling her hair, listening to the relaxed concourse of her breath. In the middle of the night she found me, it. Slipped her hand down my belly and stroked. Lightly. Not a murmur, not a kiss, as if we were both asleep. We weren’t. My body felt like an air base in one of those movies when the incoming siren goes off. Everybody scrambling toward the fighters from everywhere. Every cell awake pouring its attention toward my surprised dick. Felt really really good. Wonderful. Her hand slowed, paused, twitched twice, she was asleep. I was still hanging on a terrible edge. I lay there in a kind of suspended, excruciating wonder.
Pops and I took the spade, the machete up to the meadow, worked on the runway. Worked in silence, moving stones, leveling, tamping dirt, cutting brush. If there was any awkwardness it was mine. We were rooting out a mesquite bush in the middle of the track. He was prying with the spade, I was pulling on a rope we’d tied to the slender stump. I swung around the arc like on a tether to yank from a better direction, and pulled, and a stout root freed itself and kicked dirt into his face. He stopped, stood straight, blinded. Slowly cleared the dirt, spat. He held the shovel with both hands like a pike.
Hig, you’re acting squirrely. More squirrely than usual.
He didn’t say Higs. He blinked out more dirt, wiped his eyes with a knuckle.
Do you need my blessing or something? Like a corny movie?
Shocked me worse than if he’d slugged me. I held the end of the rope as if I weren’t sure why, as if it were the tail of some beast I wasn’t sure I wanted to be so intimate with.
At this stage in the game I got bigger fish to fry. I was never that kind of dad anyway. I never once said, Have her home by ten.
I looked down at my hand holding the rope, at the dirt all over his face and started to laugh. Christ. I laughed. The more I laughed the more funny it was. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it was the pent up tension from the night before. Deadly sperm backup we used to call it. Maybe it was just the desert island cartoon thing, the protective father thing, the way that no one was acting like they were supposed to act. Was that it? Probably not. Probably simple relief that Pops hadn’t killed me yet. Or that he was standing there with dirt all over his face and not mad. Or just that I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in way too long.
Must have been after mid-June. I lost count of the days. Probably not a good thing to do. I mean with no newspaper, no apparatus to tell you the date. Once you lose count, well it’s gone forever.
We finished the venison, all but the jerky which we were saving for the trip, and we slaughtered a sheep and had been eating mutton for two days. Mutton and last summer’s potatoes and new greens, lettuce, chard, peas. The days were hot and the creek a slow runnel and the nights warm. She came just a little while after dark, after I’d settled in with the flannel bag beneath me on the hammock sleeping only in my shirt. She was wearing a long man’s shirt and her hand came to my face and passed over my cheek and she grabbed a tuft of my beard and pulled which made me laugh. There was a quarter moon like a ruddy lightship floating over the canyon and I could see her clearly. She was holding a blanket. She spread it on the dirt beside the hammock and lay down on her back, one arm propped under her head. She watched the moon, I watched her. I stuck my bare foot over the edge of the hammock and touched it to the wool of the blanket and pushed off and swung myself.
Playing hard to get? she murmured.
No.
I rocked. She unbuttoned the shirt. It parted. She pushed the far side of it off her breast with her free hand and still gazing at the sky she tucked her fingers under a button and pulled the rest of it to the side. It fell open. The rise and fall of her breath. The length of her. In the dark she radiated a soft light of her own like waves breaking at night. The smooth pale plain of her stomach. The—all of her.
Jesus Christ, Hig, don’t turn away, don’t close your eyes. Breathe, man! You are supposed to look, dumbass! It’s not impolite. If you don’t look you will insult her. Who the fuck do you think this is for, this is for you! She wasn’t, like, just in the neighborhood.
All of that in my clamorous head. Telling myself to be respectful, act like a grownup. Soak up every detail. She has vouchsafed you some portion of pure luck. Be grateful.
The rusty moon painted her without shadow. My toes dug into the wool and I stopped swinging. I held still and watched her. A kind of suspended awe. The way I had watched a royal elk step out of aspen: what you are seeing, Hig, cannot be real, it is just too magnificent. Don’t twitch a muscle or it will vanish.
She didn’t vanish. She turned her head to me. I cleared my throat.
You were in the neighborhood, I said lamely. My voice came out kind of high like an adolescent who can’t control the timbre.
She raised one eyebrow: maybe. She raised up on her elbows and shrugged the shirt down her arms. Then she rolled over and lay on her stomach, her head on her crossed hands. Offering another vista. The world can end but you are not immune oh no.
If you want, you can just look at me, she said. It’s probably been a long time. I’m in no hurry.
She raised her sweet butt into the air.
Um, is it okay if we rush through that part.
Unh huh.
I got my ass out of the hammock, shucked my shirt and lay down beside her. I don’t know why, but I thought of flying. How there is a checklist you tick down before starting the engine, before taxiing, before takeoff. How if you are flying every day all the motions are smooth, sequential, you barely look at the list, but if it’s been a while you are halting, thinking through everything, taking each item one at a time, making sure. So you don’t have a
