'I can try,' I told her, feeling a little absurd. I touched her breasts, and she held me close. But my erection was still gone.
'Don't tell Pete,' she said, taking me by the hand. 'He'd kill me. We've got a . . . kind of a thing.'
She led me underneath the back steps, where the grass was cool and matted with aromatic pine needles. The shadows made cold venetian blinds on her body as she slipped out of her dress.
'This is so crazy,' she said, and she sounded excited.
Then we were rolling together and my shirt was off. She was working at the snap on the front of my jeans. But my cock was still on coffee break. She touched me, sliding her hand inside my underpants, and the muscles down there jerked-not in pleasure or in revulsion, but in a kind of terror. Her hand felt like rubber, cold and impersonal and antiseptic.
'Come on,' she whispered. 'Come on, come on, come on . . . '
I tried to think of something sexy, anything sexy. Looking up Darleen Andreissen's skirt in study hall and her knowing it and letting me. Maynard Quinn's pack of dirty French playing cards. I thought of Sandy Cross in sexy black underwear, and that started to move something around down there . . . and then, of all things to come cruising out of my imagination, I saw my father with his hunting knife, talking about the Cherokee Nose Job.
['The what?' Corky Herald asked. I explained the Cherokee Nose Job. 'Oh,' Corky said. I went on.]
That did it. Everything collapsed into noodledom again. And after that, there was nothing. And nothing. And nothing. My jeans had joined my shirt. My underpants were somewhere down around my ankles. She was quivering underneath me, I could feel her, like the plucked string of a musical instrument. I reached down and took hold of my penis and shook it as if to ask what was wrong with it. But Mr. Penis wasn't talking. I let my hand wander around to the warm junction of her thighs. I could feel her pubic hair, a little kinky, shockingly like my own. I slid an exploratory finger into her, thinking:
'Where is it?' Dana whispered in a high, breathless voice. 'Where is it? Where . . . ?'
So I tried. But it was like that old joke about the guy that tried to jam a marshmallow into the piggy bank. Nothing. And all the time I could hear the soft sound of the ocean grounding on the beach, like the soundtrack of a sappy movie.
Then I rolled off. 'I'm sorry.' My voice was shockingly loud, rasping.
I could hear her sigh. It was a short sound, an irritated sound. 'All right,' she said. 'It happens.'
'Not to me,' I said, as if this was the first time in several thousand sexual encounters that my equipment had malfunctioned. Dimly I could hear Mick Jagger and the Stones shouting out 'Hot Stuff.' One of life's little ironies. I still felt wrecked, but it was a cold feeling, depthless. The cold certainty that I was queer crept over me like rising water. I had read someplace that you didn't have to have any overt homosexual experience to be queer; you could just be that way and never know it until the queen in your closet leaped out at you like Norman Bates's mom in
'It's just as well,' she said. 'Pete-'
'Look, I'm sorry.'
She smiled, but it looked manufactured. I've wondered since if it was or not. I'd like to believe it was a real smile. 'It's the dope. I bet you're a hell of a lover when things are right.'
'Fuck,' I said, and shivered at the dead sound in my own voice.
'No.' She sat up. 'I'm going back in. Wait until I'm gone awhile before you come up. '
I wanted to tell her to wait, to let me try it again, but I knew I couldn't, not if all the seas dried up and the moon turned to zinc oxide. She zipped into her dress and was gone, leaving me there under the steps. The moon watched me closely, perhaps to see if I might cry. I didn't. After a little while I got my clothes straightened around and most of last fall's leaves brushed off me. Then I went back upstairs. Pete and Dana were gone. Joe was over in a corner, making out with a really stunning girl who had her hands in his mop of blond hair. I sat down and waited for the party to be over. Eventually it was.
By the time the three of us got back to Bangor, dawn had already pulled most of her tricks out of her bag and a red edge of sun was peering down at us from between the smokestacks of beautiful downtown Brewer. None of us had much to say. I felt tired and grainy and not able to tell how much damage had been done to me. I had a leaden feeling that it was more than I really needed.
We went upstairs, and I fell into the tiny daybed in the living room. The last thing I saw before I went to sleep was bars of sunlight falling through the venetian blinds and onto the small throw rug by the radiator.
I dreamed about the Creaking Thing. It was almost the same as when I was small, I in my bed, the moving shadows of the tree outside on the ceiling, the steady, sinister sound. Only, this time the sound kept getting closer and closer, until the door of the bedroom burst open with an awful crack like the sound of doom.
It was my father. My mother was in his arms. Her nose had been slit wide open, and blood streamed down her cheeks like war paint.
'You want her?' he said. 'Here, take her, you worthless good-for-nothing. Take her. '
He threw her on the bed beside me and I saw that she was dead, and that's when I woke up screaming. With an erection.
Chapter 27
Nobody had anything to say after that one, not even Susan Brooks. I felt tired. There didn't seem to be a great deal left to say. Most of them were looking outside again, but there wasn't anything to see that hadn't been there an hour before-actually less, because all of the pedestrians had been shooed away. I decided Sandra's sex story had been better. There had been an orgasm in hers.
Ted Jones was staring at me with his usual burning intensity (I thought, however, that revulsion had given way
