“Pied beauty. Give thanks to God for dappled things….”
“Pied beauty, yes. On a chest with some heft to it.” Her fingers traced lines over him.
Tom’s hand found wet warm silt, beside the concrete rim of the pond; he picked some up, drew his initials on Nadezhda’s chest. “Hmm, TB, looks good but subject to confusion.” He changed the two letters to boxes.
Nadezhda got a handful, put stripes on his cheeks and forehead, around his eyes. “You look scary,” she said. “Like one of the holy wanderers in India.”
“Aaar.” He worked on her face too, pulling it closer to his. Just two stripes on each cheek. “Spooky.”
“I bet they don’t know how to kiss, either,” she said, and leaned into him.
When they stopped Tom laughed. “No,” he said, “I bet they don’t know that.”
As they fell further into it, they kept drawing patterns on each other. “Bet they don’t know this.” “Or this.” “Or—oh—this.”
The moon was half full. Tom could see Nadezhda well indeed, her body all painted and pulsing, glowing pinkly, warm as the water under him. A muddy kiss of her breast. Taste of the earth. He was too bemused to hold a thought in his head, there was too much to take in. The wind in the trees, the flow of hot water over his legs, the half moon all marred, the perfect stars, the body sliding up and down between his hands. He held skin and felt it slide over ribs like slats in a fence.
They heard the distant yowl of coyotes, yipping in astounding glissandos that no dog could even approximate—crazily melodic, exultant, moonstruck. From the direction of the cabin they heard a single cry of release, and looking at each other they laughed, laughed at the way everything was falling together in a pattern beyond any calculation or hope of repetition: we do these things once, then they’re gone! The distant coyotes kept howling and the wind picked up, swirled the branches overhead, and Nadezhda hugged him as they moved together.
When they returned to the world she laughed with her breath, shortly. “Our blessing on all of them.”
Kevin and Ramona, horse and eagle, walked up the canyon past the spring and into the darkness of dense night forest. If there was a trail here they couldn’t see it. Kevin smiled, enjoying the twisting between trees, the stepping over fronds and fallen logs. It felt good to be out of the water and into the wind—his body was overheated at the core, and his face kept sweating so that the hot wind seemed cool, refreshing, comfortable.
He stopped as the canyon bottom divided into two forks, and Ramona came up beside him. Pressed against him. He knew these canyons from boyhood, but in the uncertain light, distracted as he was, he found it hard to concentrate on what he knew, hard to remember any of that—it was just forest, night. Moon would be up soon, then he would remember. Meanwhile he chose the left fork and they continued on. Should eventually get them onto a ridge, and then he would know their location.
It was rougher up this side canyon, which rose like a broken staircase; there was a rock with a long oak bannister. They used their hands to pull themselves up. A final scramble brought them up the headwall of the canyon, and they stood on a broad ridge, sloping slowly up to the long crest of the range that led to Saddleback. Here the ground was dry and crumbled—a layer of dirt over the sandstone below. Dwarfish scrub oaks and gnarly sage bushes dotted the ridge irregularly, and in most places it was easy to walk between them.
To the east the horizon glowed, then broke to white. Moonrise. Immediately the stars dimmed, the sky became less purely black—it was a pastel black now. Shadows jumped into existence like solid ghosts, and everything on the ridge suddenly looked different. The half spheres of the sage bushes crouching on the earth like hiding animals, the wind-tossed scrub oaks crabbed and threatening.
When the moon—big and fat, its dark half just as visible as the bright half—when this ball, half light, half dark, was almost breaking free of the horizon, they saw movement in its face. “What?” Then Kevin saw that the movement was on a ridge to the east. Silhouetted against the moon, animals pointed their long thin muzzles at the sky. A few dream seconds of silence later they heard the cries.
Coyotes. “Hank gets around fast,” Kevin whispered. The weirdness of the sound, the impossible slides up and down, the way the yips and barks and sliding yowls crossed over each other, making momentary harmonies and disharmonies that never once held still—all sent great shivers up Kevin’s spine. The skin on his arms and back goose-pimpled. Thoughtlessly he drew Ramona to him (a little static shock). They embraced. This was something friends often did in their town, but Kevin and Ramona never had—given what was and what was not between them, it would have been too much. So this was the first time. They drew back to look at each other in the fey light, and even without color Kevin could see the perfect coloring of Ramona’s face, the rich skin, raven hair—the whites of eyes and teeth… teeth that bit lower lip and then they were kissing. The coyotes’ ecstacy yipped from inside them now, a complete interpenetration of inner and outer. Their first true kiss. Kevin’s blood transmuted to something lighter, faster, hotter, freer—to wind. His blood turned to wind.
For Doris it was not like that. She left the hot springs angry and then morose, and paid little attention to where she was going. Upcanyon, yes, in the direction that Kevin and Ramona had gone. But she would never follow them. It would be stupid. And anyway impossible. But if only she could come upon Kevin and say to him—shout at him—why? Why her and not me? We’ve made love before, how many times? We’ve been good friends, we’ve lived in that house together for how many years? A long, long, long long time. And you never once looked at me like you do at her. We had fun, we laughed, we made love, we seemed to be enjoying ourselves, but still you were never all there, you never committed anything. You were never passionate. Wanting. It was just floating along for you, a friendship, “Damn you,” she said aloud. In the noise of the wind, canyon soughing like a great broken flute, no one would ever hear her. They were in conspiracy together, she and the wind and the canyon, covering for each other, protecting each other. No one could hear. Unless she screamed. And she would never do that. “Not me, I’m not the kind to scream. Shout, maybe, or perhaps a sharp, staccato, cutting remark. A stiletto of a remark. But no histrionics from Doris Nakayama, no, of course not,” voice rising with every word, till she let out a little shriek, “Aah!” Clapped her hand over her mouth, bit her fingers, laughed angrily. She sniffed and spit the snot out on the ground. Dashed tears from her cheeks. It felt good to stumble through the trees ranting and raving, crashing through brush when there was no obvious way. “Stupid fool, I mean just because she’s tall and beautiful and smart and a good fucking shortstop. And she’s sweet, sure, but when will she make you laugh? When will she make you think or teach you anything? Ah, fuck, you’re two peas in a pod. A very boring pod. The two of you together have no more wit than a rock. So I suppose you’ll never miss it, you bastard.”
The canyon forked and Doris bludgeoned her way to the left, up a steep side canyon that gave her a lot of opportunity to work off steam. She attacked the boulders like personal enemies. Overheated from the damned hot springs. Muttering to herself she walked straight into the middle of a sage brush, and a whole flock of sleeping doves shot away, cooing and clucking and landing in a bush nearby together. Their liquid calls pursued her as she continued up the defile. She smelled of sage now, the very smell of these hills, of this wind, of Orange County itself. Before the people and the oranges and the eucalyptus and the labs it had smelled like this. She crushed a twig of it between her fingers, smelled it. Hank and his loony ceremony, she hummed the Aum, smelled the sage running all through her. They were more her hills than anyone else’s.