'What's up, afraid she'll get pregnant?'
'Dan!' Cheryl said, disapproving more of his directness than scandalized by the sentiment itself. 'I didn't think that for a moment. She's only seventeen and I wondered how you felt about her.'
'She's okay. We have fun together.' Dan folded his arms, his brown work-hardened biceps bunching and stretching the short sleeves of his T-shirt. He was full of the confidence of the healthy good-looking twenty-one- year-old male, delighting in his own masculine appeal. And why not? Cheryl thought. If you didn't feel good at twenty-one there wasn't much hope for you.
She said, 'I guess you're old enough to know what you're doing.'
'I guess so,' he agreed, the same grin lurking at the corners of his mouth.
Was he making fun of her? Maybe she was losing her sense of humor, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. Resolutely she pushed the shadow away, kept it at arm's length. It occurred to her that perhaps the rest of the community was perfectly normal and it was she who was behaving strangely. After all, that's what paranoia was: to suspect others of having weird thoughts when they resided in your own skull.
The trail was steep and rocky leading up to Drews Gap, elevation 5,306 feet, and the horses were sweating and jittery. They sensed the danger of a slip or a stumble, their eyes white and rolling as they shied away from the drop. Thick vegetation and the spiky tops of pine trees dropped away steeply below.
Jo led the way, neat and trim in a check shirt and jodhpurs, the set and balance of her slim body just right on the broad flecked back of the gray. Dan derived a lot of pleasure from just watching her. Her long blond hair, pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck, gleamed like a silver scarf in the clear sunlight. When she arrived at Goose Lake with her parents two years ago she'd been an awkward gangling kid with long skinny legs, pretty much as he remembered her from their last meeting. He'd teased her and unkindly nicknamed her 'Stilts.' The teasing had lasted about a year, until shortly after her sixteenth birthday when (almost overnight it seemed to Dan) the proverbial swan had appeared. From then on he'd started to take notice in an entirely different way.
The trail leveled out and Jo coaxed the gray toward a small clearing guarded by a circle of slender pines, standing to attention like sentinels, the breeze whispering in their branches. Somewhere in the undergrowth a stream chuckled to itself as it leaped and gurgled over rocks. Jo slid down and the horse immediately began cropping the luxuriant tufts of grass. Steam rose from its flanks and hung in the sunlight, which lanced like pencil beams through the overhead cover.
'What was all that with Cheryl?' Jo asked, unfastening the straps on her saddlebag and pulling out a small bundle swathed in white cloth.
'She was worried that we might be sneaking away for a spot of afternoon delight. You know how they are.'
Jo looked at him sideways from under long fair lashes, her expression mildly scathing rather than coquettish.
'Naturally I told her the thought had never entered our heads,' Dan said with a perfectly sincere face that still managed to seem devilish.
'I'm glad about that,' Jo said. 'Because it never entered mine. From what I hear there's no shortage of that on Saturday nights with Baz Brannigan and his cronies, among whom you number yourself, so I believe.'
Dan actually blushed under his tan. Jo didn't miss much, though he hadn't realized it was common knowledge what Baz--Tom Brannigan's son--and the rest of them got up to; and not only on Saturday nights. He felt hot and cold at what Cheryl would say if she found out. In truth he didn't know how to take Baz--whether he liked him or even secretly despised him. Baz was assertive, cocky, a natural leader (or bully), and the focal point for the other young men at the settlement with high spirits to vent and wild oats to sow.
No, Dan decided, turning his feelings around to examine them, he didn't really like Baz at all. Yet there was something about him, an intense and almost mesmerizing quality, that was hard to resist. Sometimes Dan actually thought that Baz was mad--the way he'd suddenly switch from being passive to hyperactive for no apparent reason. Almost as if his brain had blown a circuit. Maybe the pill-popping did that.
'What's the matter?' Jo asked him as he jerked the straps on his saddlebag with unnecessary force.
He answered with a shrug, willing his hands to move slowly and methodically as he pulled out the food wrapped in silver foil, the plastic mugs, and the Thermos of chilled white wine and laid them on the sun-dappled cloth Jo had spread on the ground.
What was it, this irritation flaring suddenly into anger? Why did he feel this way? Was it the hot blood of youth, something he'd grow out of? He just felt that he wanted to reach out and seize hold of life, and that somehow the impulse was being stifled and thwarted. No, no, no, his mind kept insisting, he wasn't like Baz; the feeling was different, not the same at all. Baz really
And then he thought, stress from
He had to admit the stupidity of it, even while he was doing it, but there and then without thinking, while Jo's back was turned, he slipped the white pill into his mouth and washed it down with a quick swig of wine.
Propped on one elbow, tearing off strips from a chicken leg, Jo gazed around at the dense proliferation of vegetation. Even in her two years at the settlement she'd noticed a change in the local flora. She was under the impression that greenery was decaying and dying in the new atmosphere, not flourishing like mad. She asked Dan about it.
'Cheryl says it's to do with the abundance of carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in. They're being hyperventilated or something and it's speeding up their metabolic rate. There's a friend of Cheryl's who lives north of here, Boris Stanovnik, who's been studying the problem, and he says it's going to accelerate the growth as the carbon dioxide builds up.'
Jo tossed the chicken leg aside and licked her fingers. She looked puzzled. 'Then how come the oxygen isn't increasing? If the plants are growing faster and becoming lusher, they ought to be giving off more oxygen. It's a two-way process.'
'Hereabouts that's true, though it's not happening uniformly throughout the world. We wiped out most of the equatorial forests in the last century, which drastically reduced the oxygen supply. Only the stuff that's left'--he waved his hand at the encroaching greenery--'is flourishing. And there isn't enough of it to make much difference. What we've got now are huge tracts of desert and small areas with superabundant growth. The balance has been upset, so the whole thing's out of kilter.'
He reached for his mug of wine and clumsily spilled most of it down his T-shirt. The seeping wetness reminded him of a woman in heat, a potent sexual image.
'So what's going to happen, do you think?' Jo asked, nibbling a slice of cucumber. The shape of her bite made a serrated half-moon in the pale fleshy translucence.
'Do you mean globally?' Dan said, watching her mouth. 'Or just here, to us?'
'Isn't it the same thing? If the global situation gets worse I don't see how we're going to survive in our little Garden of Eden. Or are we somehow immune from what's happening to the rest of the planet?'
'You know something,' Dan said, his eyes fixed intently on her. 'You're a precocious little brat for a seventeen-year-old.'
'Well, you can't be old
'What do you think I am, middle-aged?' His eyes lingered on the jut of her young breasts under the check shirt. Above the third button there was a vee of smooth tanned skin. He picked up the Thermos, fumbled and nearly dropped it, and sloshed more wine into his mug.
'You're way over the hill,' Jo informed him, shaking her head. 'You can't even take your liquor.'
Dan set the mug down on the white cloth with studied care. 'I could take you,' he said, his voice ragged.
'What? Don't be silly.'
'I mean it.'
She went still, looking at him, guarded, a little less sure. 'Don't say things like that, Dan-You're just trying to scare me.'
'Are you scared? Or more excited?'
As he knelt up she noticed that his pupils were dilated, his nostrils flaring and closing with each breath. She'd never seen him like this before. He reminded her of an animal, without conscience or reason, at the mercy of pure
