“Yeah,” he said. “Your blankets still there?”
“If nobody moved them.”
“Hawaii,” somebody said ten feet off. “I don’t know why I don’t take off for there right now.”
Lanya said: “John asked me if you wanted to take charge of the new commune latrine work project.”
“Jesus—!”
“He thinks you have leadership qualities—”
“And a feeling for the job,” he finished. “I’ve got enough work to do.” Blinking away after-images of firelight, he saw that the blond-haired guy, with no shirt now, stood on the lip, shoveling dirt back in the hole.
He moved with her into dark.
Once more he wondered how she found her way. Yet once more, in the dark, he stopped first when he realized they had arrived.
“What are you doing?”
“I hung the blanket up over a limb. I’m pulling it down.”
“You can see?”
“No.” Leaves roared. Falling, the blanket brushed his face. They spread it together. “Pull down on your left…no, your right corner.”
Grass and twigs gave under him as he lurched to the center on his knees. They collided, warm. “You know the Richards?” Artichokes…
He frowned.
She lay down with him, opened her fist on his stomach. “Um?”
“They’re stark raving twits.”
“Really?”
“Well, they’re stark. They’re pretty twitty too. They haven’t started raving, but that’s just a matter of time. Why do I have this job, anyway?”
She shrugged against him. “I thought, when you took it, you were just one of those people who has to have one.”
He humphed. “Tak took one look at me and decided I’d never worked in my life. I don’t need the money, do I?”
She put her hand between his legs. He let his legs fall open and put his own hand on top, thick fingers pressing between her thin ones. “I haven’t needed any yet.” She squeezed.
He grunted. “You wouldn’t. I mean, people like you. You get invited to places, right?” He looked up. “He’s a systems engineer, she’s a…housewife, I guess. She reads poetry. And she cooks with wine. People like that, you know, it’s funny. But I can’t imagine them screwing. I guess they have to, though. They’ve got kids.”
She pulled her hand away, and leaned up on his chest. “And people like us.” Her voice puffed against his chin. “Screwing is the easiest thing to imagine us doing, right? But you can’t think of us with kids, can you?” She giggled, and put her mouth on his, put her tongue in his mouth. Then she stiffened and squeaked, “Owww.”
He laughed. “Let me take this thing off before I stab somebody!” He raised his hips and pulled his orchid from the belt loops, pulled his belt out.
They held each other, in long lines of heat and cool. Once, on his back, naked, under her, while his face rubbed her neck, and he clutched her rocking buttocks, he opened his eyes: Light came through the jungle of their hair. She halted, rising. He bent back his head.
Beyond the trees, striated monsters swayed.
The scorpions passed, luminous, on the path below.
More trees cut out their lights, and more, and more.
He looked up at her and saw, across the top of her breasts, the inprint of his chain, before darkness. Then, like a two-petaled flower, opened too early at false, fugitive dawn, they closed, giggling, and the giggling became long, heavy breaths as she began to move again. After she came, he pulled the corner of the blanket over them.
“You know, he tried to cheat me out of my money.”
“Mmm.” She snuggled.
“Mr. Richards. He told Madame Brown he’d pay me five dollars an hour. Then he just gave me five for the whole afternoon. You know?” He turned.
When he pushed against her leg she said, “For God’s sakes, you’re still all hard…” and sucked her teeth.
“He did. Of course they fed me. Maybe he’ll settle up tomorrow.”
But she took his hand and moved it down him; again meshed, their fingers closed on him and she made him rub, and left him rubbing. She put her head down on his hip, and licked and nipped his knuckles, the shriveled scrotal flesh. He beat, till her hair on his thighs was nearly lost in some vegetative horror, then grunted, “Okay…” His fist hit her face three times, before he let her take him. She slid her arms behind his hip, put her legs around his, while he panted and let go of her hair.
Anxiety lost outlines beneath glittering fatigue. Once he did something like wake to her back against his stomach. He reached beneath her arm to hold her breast, the nipple a button on his palm. She took his thumb as gently, he realized, as she possibly could, in case he slept.
So he slept.
There was grey light after a while. On his back, he watched leaves appear in it. Suddenly he sat, in one motion, to his knees. He said:
“I want to be a poet. I want to be a great, famous, wonderful poet.”
As he looked toward the hem of darkness beneath grey streakings, something caught in his stomach. His arms began to shake; he was nauseated; and his head throbbed; and throbbed; and throbbed. He opened his mouth and breathed roughly through it. He shook his head, felt his face shaking, and dragged his breath back in. “Wow,” he said. The pain receded, and let him smile. “I don’t think they…make poets as great as I want to be!” That only came out as a hoarse whisper. Finally he rose, naked, to a squat and looked back at her.
He thought she would have slept through: Her head was propped on her hand. She watched him!
He whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
She pulled the blanket across her arm and put her head down.
He turned for his shirt, took the pen. He opened the notebook to what he had written at the bar. Cross-legged on the blanket’s edge, he readied to recopy. The paper was blued with halfdawn. While he contemplated the first word, distractions of book jackets, printed praise, receptions by people who ranged from Richards to Newboys…The twig under his ankle brought him back. He shook his head again, shifted his ankle, again bent to recast fair copy. His eyes dropped in a well of Time magazine covers (“Poet Refuses Pulitzer Prize”), the audience’s faces as he stood on Minor Latham’s stage where he had consented to give a rare reading. He hauled himself back before the fantasies’ intensity hit pain. Then he laughed, because he had still not re-copied a word. He sat a while more, unable to write for thinking, amused at his lack of control, but bored with its obvious lesson.
Self-laughter did not stop the fantasies.
But neither could the fantasies stop self-laughter.
He looked in the lightening sky for shapes. Mist bellied and folded and coiled and never broke. He lay back beside her, began to rub her under the blanket. She turned to him and hid in his neck when he tried to kiss her. “I don’t think I taste very good,” she murmured. “I’m all sleepy—” He licked her teeth. When he put his thumb in her cunt, she began to laugh through the kiss, till she caught her breath at his cock and another finger. His knees outside of hers, he swung his hips. His wet hand held her shoulder, his dry one her hair.
Later, he woke again with his arms tight around her, the blanket wound around them from rolling. The sky was lighter. “You know, I shouldn’t go back to that God-damn job,” he said. “What do I need a job for, here?”
“Shhh,” she said. “Shhhhhh,” and rubbed his shaven cheek. “Now shhhhhh.”
He closed his eyes.
“Yes, who is it?” with a timbre of complaint.
“It’s Kidd. Look, if it’s too early, I’ll come back—”
The chain rattled.
“No. No. It’s all right.” Mrs. Richards, in a green bathrobe, opened the door.
“Isn’t anybody up yet? I didn’t know how early it was.”
“It’s all right,” Mrs. Richards repeated. “It’s probably about eight.” She yawned. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Thanks, yes. Can I use your bathroom.” He stepped by before she finished her sleepy nod. “You know you got a letter in your mailbox, airmail?”
“I thought the boxes were broken.”