That night my grandmother died. It was the pole in the mound with her own King Philip from the East that got to her, I think. She was old, and she was going to die pretty soon after that time anyway. In the evening before she died we had a long talk.
I mean all of my family that was still alive then sat around the place, and we talked to my grandmother. She was very old, and I understand that before she died she had forgotten about the mound and the pole altogether. I believe that she was very happy when she died. She had a good life as those things go. This is not really a sad story that I have finished telling you. I thought of it because you mentioned that mound.
Rain
THE ADJOINING ROOM BECAME VACANT, AND HE INSISTED that Bob White take it. The Indian had slept on the patio, using Melinda’s egg-carton mattress, the night of the snake dinner. At midnight it had started to rain, and he had come in, to a corner of the room by the door, and finished the night there. In the morning it was still raining, and they had run back and forth from the car to Bob White’s new room, carrying his few belongings into it. When he was set up, he went with Allen and got cartons of coffee and fresh donuts from the restaurant and brought them back to the room, walking close to the building, under the narrow canopy, in the rain.
It was still raining up in the Sangre de Cristos where it had started. The clouds had come in black and low, and it rained as though when the clouds hit the mountain tops they had been ripped open. In the first three hours, the sand had held the water, but then it became saturated, and the remnants of old stream beds started to flow again. Before too long, before morning, the water coming off the mountains had entered the washes and streams below at the foot of the mountains, swelling them. After they had finished their coffee, by ten o’clock, some of the streets of the city were flooding. The road Bob White had taken into the hills to find javelinas was a shallow river, and the rich in the houses in the foothills were marooned. At noon, the rain slowed and settled from a flood to a steady downpour. The radio talked about isolation, closed businesses, accidents; it said it was going to rain for a while.
“I have heard it can rain here for quite a while,” Bob White said as they stood at the front glass doors, watching the sheets of rain. By one o’clock they had ordered the room. Allen had wiped each of the golf balls in the bottom of the shower stall and put them back in the gunny sack. Melinda had straightened up, discarding the remnants of the snake dinner, had made up one of the twin beds, had rested between jobs for a few minutes. Bob White had gone to his room to organize his belongings.
Allen backed the car in under the canopy, close to the door, and organized the trunk. He checked to see that it was dry, no water leaking between the seams, and he took the Tombstone Diamond matchbox and put it in a place in the wheel well where it would be easy to get at. Then he moved the car back off the
sidewalk, getting soaked when he hopped out from under the canopy to move it. At one-thirty Bob White came back, and they had a smoke together, and then Bob White excused himself and went back to his room. It was still raining. It was getting damp in the room, and the clothes he had taken off and hung on the shower rod to dry were not drying. He wore a robe, and he put the small space heater on in the bathroom to get some humidity out of the air. Melinda rested in her unmade bed, her head turned to the side, watching the rain come at a slant, keeping the glass doors opaque. By two-fifteen the only job left was the Laetrile. Allen got the works out, moved the table to the side of the bed, and tried to hang the bottle, the tubing dangling down, from the lamp fixture on the wall at the bed’s head. It would not hook up, and he finally put the bottle down between Melinda’s knees.
The insertion of the needle was quick and easy. Melinda’s small, intake of breath as the needle entered was lost in the sound of the rain. He put the strips of adhesive, crisscrossed, holding the needle to her skin with one hand, and in the other he held the bottle above her. When the strips were secure, he reached up to the bottle and adjusted the drip, his two hands, with the bottle in them, elevated. He was sitting on the bed at her hips, and before he could lower the hand he had raised to the bottle, she lifted her left arm and put her hand under the fold of his bathrobe at his chest and put the tip of her index finger into his hair and moved it until she touched his nipple. She then rotated her finger in small circles, outlining the hardening flesh. He looked down at her face; she was smiling. Lying on her back like this, gravity pulled at the skin on her cheeks, deepening the hollows in which the shadows in her pale skin rested. Her fingers moved in a twisted line through the hair on his chest, heading for the other nipple. He anticipated, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
“Snake trail,” she murmured, an edge of her smile twisting.
She reached the other nipple and circled it, then brought her thumb up and squeezed it. Her right hand moved to the bathrobe, along his leg. The needle was in at the front of her elbow, and she had little play, had to keep the arm from bending, but her hand could move from the wrist. She got it under the robe, flipping the fold off his leg, and ran her fingers inside his knee and just above it. He lowered his right arm slowly, leaving the bottle in the air, elevated, held in his left hand and dripping, and put his hand on the knot of her robe and disengaged it. His hand went under her robe; he lay it flat, his fingers spread on her lower belly in the deep hollow, the heel just touching the hair at the rise of her pubis. He gathered his fingers a little, holding and squeezing a span of her loose flesh. She shuddered fully, but with a shallowness that was indicative of her profound weakness, and he was at the dull edge of despair for a moment, but as she shuddered her fingers hit spasmodically at the tip of his nipple, and he was aroused away from it.
“Snake bite,” she whispered, and pushed her hips up into the heel of his hand. He moved the whole hand down, and she parted her legs a little, and he pushed up into the hair. She took the flesh on the inside of his thigh for support, keeping herself where she was. Her left hand slid from his chest to his crotch; she traced another snake line in the soft flesh above his penis.
She brought her hand out from under his robe, crossing her own body, allowing her left shoulder to settle into the bed, and arranged her arm in an L, her hand open and palm up on the pillow beside her head.
“Do it,” she said, and he looked up at his left hand in the air, holding the bottle, and checked the drip; it was regular and steady. And the rain outside was regular and steady, and the steady drops bit against the glass doors. He had not pulled the heavy curtains across them, and some of the drops sat there, and others made abbreviated snake trails in the glass. The sky was dark and cloud covered, and he could see the suggested outline of the car beyond the glass doors, but he could see nothing else.
He put two of his fingers into her and moved them from side to side; she was wet and healthy there, and he pushed deeply into her, and she opened her legs wider and tucked her chin down to see his hand on and in her, but the effort was too much for her, and she let her head fall back on the pillow and pushed into his hand, her eyes closing, then opening, and looking into his eyes. He smiled and took a third finger and touched her clitoris and brought his thumb to it and squeezed and rolled it. “Snake bite,” he said, and she growled, and ground a little against him.