She topped the headwall of the canyon just as the coyotes began their mad song, and so she had just turned up the ridge when she saw the figures above her. Frightened, she dropped behind a bush. They would think she had followed them. All thought of getting Kevin alone and lambasting him disappeared as she crouched to the ground. Finally she dared to move, to peer around the side of the hemispherical sage. And so she saw them embrace and kiss: silhouetted figures in the moonlight, like a silver on black nineteenth-century etching entitled “Love”. Careless of noise she turned and ran back down the ridge, tore down into another canyon.
Ramona broke away from their kiss. “What was that?”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you hear it? And I saw something move, out of the corner of my eye. Back the way we came.”
“Maybe another coyote.”
“It was bigger than that.”
“Hmm.”
The shape Kevin had seen in the night, after his first council meeting. He had forgotten it, but now he remembered. And there were mountain lions in the Santa Ana Mountains again, it was said—Kevin had never seen one. It was unlikely one would have come so close to people, though—the areas they liked were higher, up on the back side of Saddleback. Well, he wouldn’t mention the possibility, for fear it would spoil the mood.
“Do you think it could have been a mountain lion?” Ramona said matter-of-factly.
“Nah.” He cleared his throat. “Or at least, it isn’t very likely.”
The coyotes’ yipping seemed to assure them that it was, on the contrary, entirely possible.
“Let’s go down the next canyon over,” Ramona suggested.
Kevin nodded, and they walked the top of the ridge, winding between sage brushes. The rounded edge of the ridge curved in a big bow, until they had the moon at their backs. Their shadows stretched long before them, black and solid. The wind threw their hair across their faces. They stopped often to kiss, and each kiss was longer and more passionate, more a complete world in itself.
To their right, and so back in the general direction of the hot springs, they saw a rather shallow, wide canyon. “Look!” Ramona said, pointing down into it. At the first dip in the canyon floor there was a copse of big old sycamore trees. The biggest stood by itself, overlooking the canyon below, and there seemed to be a vine dropping from one high, thick branch. “It’s the swing,” she said. “It’s Swing Canyon!”
“Sure enough!” Kevin said. “Hey, I know where we are now.”
“Come on,” she said, leading him down, looking over her shoulder with a girlish smile. “Let’s go swing.”
Down at the big tree they found the swing was the same as ever. It was not an ordinary swing, but a single thick rope, tied to a crook in a side branch, so that it hung well clear of the battered old trunk. The ground fell away in a smooth slope downcanyon, so it was possible to grasp the rope over a round knot and run down the slope, and when lifted off the ground one could put one’s feet on a bar of wood holed and stuck above a knot at the bottom of the rope. And so one swung out into space in a long slow arc, above the brush-covered drop to the lower canyon.
They took turns doing this. Kevin rode into space feeling the mounting exhilaration of the kisses between rides, the rough contact of their bodies as they stopped each other, the windy joy of the rides themselves, out in the wind and the spinning moonlit shadows. At the end of each flight he felt lighter and lighter, as if casting off dross with each spin. He was escaping by degrees the pull of the earth. The wind was rushing downcanyon, so that each flight was pushed further out among the stars, and on the way back in he found he could face into the wind, spreadeagle his spirit and land light as a feather, to be caught in Ramona’s strong arms. He felt they had joined the people on Mars, and flew in gravity two-fifths that of the world they had known.
“Here,” Ramona said breathlessly at the end of one run. “We can do it together. Hold on from opposite sides, and run down and put our feet on each side of the bar.” They kissed hard and their hands explored each other hungrily. “Do you think it’ll work?” “Sure! I mean who knows? Let’s try it.”
“Okay.” Kevin seized the rope. Ramona’s hands closed just above his. They took off running. When the rope pulled them free of the earth their feet scrabbled for a hold on the bar, which teetered under them. Finally they balanced on it, and could take their weight off their arms. Standing together, face to face, flying through the night with the hot dry wind, they kissed long and hard, and their tongues spoke directly to each other in a language of touch so much more direct and powerful than the language of words that Kevin thought he might forget speech entirely. Ramona pulled away, laughed. They were spinning slowly. She pressed against him. “Do you remember when we were in third grade and we went behind the school and kissed?” she said in his ear. “No!” Kevin said, astonished. Had that really happened? She kissed his ear, thrust her tongue in it. That whole side of his body buzzed as if touched by some electricity of sex, he almost fell off. He held the big muscles of her bottom, larger than the full spread of his hand. She breathed in his ear, rubbed the hard band of her public bone over his thigh. They were spinning. The wind rushed by as they unzipped each other’s pants. “I want to kiss you all over,” Ramona said under her breath. She reached into his pants and squeezed him hard—Kevin gasped, the shock of it shot straight up his belly and spine, he very well might fall off, Ramona pulled her pants down and kicked them off into the night, pressed against him and they kissed, spinning. They had no weight at all, they were lofted like tufts of dandelion in the dry wind, spinning—
“Oh hey,” Kevin said. “Here comes the ground.” With a rush they were stumbling up the slope, hanging onto the rope to keep from falling over, sliding over the soft dirt, slewing to one side. They fell together, collapsed onto the ground, let the rope fall away. Seemed Ramona’s pants were actually still on, his too, how had that happened? Mind getting ahead of the game. Exquisite delay to get them off, over her butt, down her long legs, shove them to one side. Undressing twice? he noted hazily. Very nice idea. One of the best parts, after all, unbutton each other’s buttons, pull each other free of all that raiment, reveal the naked self inside. When we are naked we are still clothed inside, but the beautiful, physical, sexual thereness of the flesh, pulsing warmly under the fingers, bodies pressed together, seeking maximum contact, skin to skin, everything touching everything and all those cloth barriers gone—it’s easy to be overwhelmed by that. And to be inside her, to be the male half of a new creature the two of them made, to have such a female half there all around him….
He looked up and saw that the rope was swinging idly in the wind, that it had knocked down some of the periwinkle blooms that spiraled up the sycamore trunk. Petals and whole flowers floated down diagonally in the wind and were landing all around them, on his back, in Ramona’s face (eyes closed, mouth open in a girlish O of surprise), petals like leaves falling around them, little fingers on his back, piling up, drifting against their sides until they moved in a mound of periwinkle blossoms, a blanket of them. He saw a pure black mountain lion pad by, purring its approval. It levitated with a casual leap into the lowest fork of their tree, where it sprawled over both sides of a big branch, legs all akimbo, perfectly relaxed, staring at them with big moon eyes, purring a purr as deep and rasping as waves breaking on shingle, purring a purr that enveloped them like the sound of the wind in the branches. Kevin felt it deep inside, vibrating both him and Ramona completely as they plunged toward oblivion, the universal now. They were spinning.