Adam & Eve (33 page)

Like a marine’s colors. But he had been a foot soldier, in camouflage imitating the hues of olive green, dry rock, desert sand.

“Let’s walk,” he said. “It isn’t far.”

“‘Come down to Kew in lilac time / In lilac time, in lilac time. / Come down to Kew in lilac time— / It isn’t far from London,’” she quoted.

“Shakespeare?” he asked.

“No. Alfred Noyes. Also wrote ‘The Highwayman.’”

“‘The road was a ribbon of moonlight …,’” he quoted.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “The road is a white-hot poker.”

She stumbled, and he caught her quickly under her elbow and took the black case from her again.

After walking, trudging, stumbling, in silence in the broiling heat, Adam thought he could see oil oozing out of his skin, or melted fat, not just sweat. When he looked up from his skin, there was the bubbling green of the tops of trees, probably acacia trees, surely visible at the meeting line of sky and earth.

“Broccoli,” she said suddenly. “I always think of that when I see the tops of trees from an airplane.”

Like a brand on the buckskin flank of sand, a black circle off in the desert distracted him. He pointed to it. A black doughnut. Large. “Looks like a campfire once,” he said.

The stones were arranged very nicely so that the inner edges of the flat stones created what appeared to be a perfect circle. The ash in the center of the circle was gray, and sometimes it wafted in a ghostly way up from the circle in a twisting column. He wished the breeze would come over to the road.

“They’ve been cooking, like good Boy Scouts,” she observed.

Yes, he could see two Y-shaped sticks, and a horizontal rod resting at the bottoms of the V’s of the Y’s, passing from one upright to another.

“They’ve left some meat, I think,” he said.

“It looks charred,” she responded. “Inedible. A waste of energy to go there.”

Hadn’t he warned her about waste?

“I want to see,” he said. “You’re probably right. The stones are probably black with soot. The rocks around here are white, or gray.”

“The sticks must be some kind of rebar, construction iron.”

He told her to keep walking; he would catch up. Did he hear her murmur, “And I—I had just wanted to cry?” Maybe there would still be some moisture in the meat. He was hungry, anyway. Then he saw the place where an army jeep, or some other vehicle with heavy treads, had left the road to drive over to the campfire. He hurried along, but he looked back to check on the woman,
his companion. She was shuffling like an old woman, but he had remembered her as someone pretty, desirable, though he’d acted the part of a gentleman.

The terrain was beginning to slant upward; the circle of stones had been constructed just before the crest of a sand hill. He couldn’t see what was on the other side. For a moment he worried that men might be lying out of sight, hidden, with their rifles stretched out in front of their bodies, with the sights of the guns waiting for him. But the imprint of the tire treads looked old to him. He had a mounting curiosity about the site; he had been in 4-H, not Scouts, but he had made just such campfires. The other boys loved to set their marshmallows on fire. They claimed to like the black char and almost-liquid goo inside, but he always carefully browned his marshmallows. They were goldensided, deliciously browned, never burned.

He stopped. Not hands. Not feet. But human parts had been skewered. He would not name those parts, but he knew their shapes. Parts such as he had drawn. Parts such as he had touched on his own body. He retched once, twice, but no bile was left in him.

He would not look there again. He turned and went back, not following the tracks but cutting across diagonally toward her new position on the road. He took note of the speed of her progress and calculated how to angle his path so that he would intercept her at the right moment. He had played football. He had been a quarterback. Not his mind but his body knew how to calculate the intersection of two trajectories moving at different speeds. Only this was slow motion.

The principle was the same. At the movies, he had always loved the mysterious moment of sudden slow motion. It sanctified things, sometimes.

When he caught up with her, they would be close enough to see the brown trunks and limbs of the bubbling broccoli trees. Maybe a clean blue creek would flow near their bases.

When he reached the road, and Lucy on it, shuffling, she tilted her bowed head, looked him square in the eyes, and greeted him.

“Hi, gal,” he said. He would not remember what he had just seen. Erased.
A blank. Even the crossbar spit was gone, and he saw only two upright Y’s. “It was nothing,” he said. “I should have listened to you.”

“Let’s camp in the trees,” she said. “Maybe it’s an oasis. Maybe there will be fruit trees. Or dates or olives.”

Not until close range could they see that most of the trees were thorny acacias; some were yellow acacias, and the tips of the branches drooped with sprays of lovely yellow leaves. Beyond the trunks was a ribbon of blue water. Eve broke into a trot. “Come on,” she called, like a teenager—eager, full of her own energy.

Then she stopped and began to sob. Walking rapidly to her, he saw blanched bones; human and animal rib cages arched up in the sunlight, beautifully white with the blue water flowing through. Threaded with scraps of cloth, purple and red, many human skeletons lay in or near the water, where the sandy bank was almost white.

“Never mind,” he said. “Never mind, Lucy.” He made himself call her by her right name. “We’ll just walk upstream a bit. Out of sight of all this. Upstream, where the water is clean.”

“But, Adam,” she said, “suppose it’s poison. Suppose they died because they drank poisoned water.”

He took her hand. “Come on,” he said. He made himself smile. It was a flirt’s smile. He remembered how to smile that way. He’d never known a high school or college girl who could resist that careful, no-teeth, fragile smile. It melted resistance. “Let’s go see.”

They trudged through the loose, fine sand, their feet sinking almost up to their ankles. “We’ll just take our time,” he said. “Don’t try to hurry now.”

Despite his encouragement, she finally sank to her knees.

“This is just the place I thought we should stop,” he said. “Here, let me carry you to the water.” He put down the French horn case and scooped her up in his arms. Black spots appeared before his eyes, in a rectangular grid. Deprivation spots, he thought, but he was not afraid. They were too close now. Whether the water was poison or not, now they would drink. Eve would understand. They would do it together, at the same time.

The sun was setting rapidly behind them, and their own shadows stretched
out long across the sand toward the trees and water. The short, shaggy trees looked humped, four-legged, like a distorted camel. How light she was in his arms, her arms around his neck. He still carried the French horn case. Among the trees, he saw shaggy movements with humps. Two creatures. One golden as a sand pile, the other dark, almost black. Two camels. Two wild camels. He named them Day and Night.

He sat Eve on her feet.

“Look, darling,” he said. “Wild camels, among the trees.” But he savored the word
darling,
delicious as a fig or a date on his tongue.

“Are they dangerous?” she asked, and answered herself, “They’re beautiful.” To steady herself, she clasped his arm.

“See what they’re doing?” he said. “They’re drinking. The water is safe. Let’s just wait. Then they’ll move. They might not be wild. They might have escaped from a caravan.”

“Like us,” she said softly.

As the camels lifted and curved their long necks, water streamed silver from their muzzles.

Slowly, their big bodies began to glide on. Adam listened to the gritty sound of their large splayed feet sinking a little, compacting the sand.

What the humans wanted most was to drink. Then they wanted to submerge their bodies in the cool, flowing water.

Automatically they pulled off their orange and camouflage clothing: the hand-sewn blouse and skirt, the borrowed shirt and army trousers. Orange parachute and tan camouflage fluttered to the ground. Over her head, Lucy lifted the black cord and the titanium-cased memory stick and placed them on top of the soft mound of orange. They looked down at their bare, worn feet and laughed. Their feet would be the first part to relish the water. Yes, happy tadpoles for toes, wiggling and laughing. Then there was a plopping down, female and male, bottoms first into the water, which was beautiful and cool, clear, only—say—ten inches deep. But it covered and refreshed their private parts, male and female. And then there was nothing else to do but to
lie down fully in it. Sometimes on their backs with their necks tilted up so they could breathe. Sometimes on one side or the other, with a bent elbow to prop up their heads. In that posture they talked and laughed and every utterance was joyful, in praise of water, which they gulped by the handfuls. Then they flopped onto their stomachs, and he let the scant hairs in the center of his chest over his heart have their fun, and she let her breasts float and bobble.

When they propped again on their elbows, facing the stream and catching the flow of it on their chests, they might as well have been kissing. They cupped their hands into scoops and splashed their faces. Finally they sat up and wetted their hair, bowing the crowns of their heads into the stream or bringing water to their scalps with their hands. For each other, they made bowls of their hands, filled them, and then opened the seamed bottom of their bowls to let water drop down on each other’s heads.

“God is good; God is great,” they chanted. “And we thank him for this food.”

“What food?” they both exclaimed, and laughed.

They tilted their heads and exposed their throats to the air and looked up in the sky for manna.

Skyward, sustenance did sway among the branches of fruit trees. Fruit ripe and ready.

What they envisioned were men hanging head-down from trapezes without lines, their bent knees hooked over the lineless bars; trapeze artists free as angels were swooping down and bearing in their hands white china platters filled with fruit—oranges, lemons, pears, apples. Or maybe the woman and man had climbed the trees and picked the fruits. In any case, mercifully, magically, sustenance appeared. Lucy and Adam sat down on the sand beneath the trees, reached into the branches, took, and ate.
This
is Eden, they insisted.

Any oasis is Eden,
they amended, their mouths full of the mush of fruit.

Shall we put on our clothes now?
they asked.

We’re dry now,
they agreed.

And the air is chilly.

It’s night.
And they covered their bodies again, he with Riley’s clothes,
and she with the orange ones she had sewn herself for the journey back. She replaced the memory stick around her neck.

But look at the stars.

A starry, moonless night is the most blessed of all nights.

Diamonds.

Worlds unseen.

Stars galore.

The word galore—it comes from some place deeper than the throat.

From the belly of God. When he’s generous.

“Lucy,” he said. “Make love with me.”

She smiled at him. A smile she had never given anyone before. She felt its newness on her face.

“Tonight, for this moment,” he said, “I know you for who you are, Lucy. I know your name. Let’s make love while I know who you are.”

“I’m new,” she said. She laughed a little. “Clean and fresh, refreshed,” she said, denying the warning implied by his invitation. “Adam—”

He held his finger, upright, sealing his lips.
Shhh
—he signaled, shy of his own name.

She reached to his chest, to the smooth button beside the label
F. Riley.
“Adam,” she whispered again despite his signal for silence.

He nodded. She unbuttoned the first button. Gesture was the only language. Down the row of buttons, each slid more easily from its fastening than the one before; each felt more silky to her fingertips than the others and more precious than pearls. He pulled the tail of her orange blouse from the waistband of her skirt and lifted loose handfuls of blouse over her head. She drew the black silk cord over her head and laid the old talisman among the orange puffs. There were her breasts for him to kiss. To cherish by starlight.

Before he leaned toward her, with a single downward glance he memorized the shapes of her breasts as he had not done before. In a future, given soft pencil and creamy paper, he would draw them.

But now was bliss, as she folded her arms across his shoulders and pulled him closer. Then there was kissing. Sweeter than the berry, she thought, an echo of a half-forgotten song.

Finally she said softly, “Stand up now,” and she reached to unfasten the army trousers. “Country people in the South say, ‘Shuck out of them pants.’ That’s country talk.”

“Like shucking corn?”

“Like shucking an ear of corn of its wrappings.”

“In Idaho, we grew wheat.”

“But you’re stalwart as Iowa corn. And golden. Sweet.”

Smell the air.

Perfume. Lemons.

“Anoint my head, my hair with lemon juice,” he asked.

She reached for a half of lemon they had squeezed and sucked for its sour piquancy. He knelt on one knee, and she squeezed the juice into his dark hair and rubbed it in with her fingertips.

“The stars should smell like lemons,” she said.

Lie down again.

Hold me.

Hold me.

Your body.

Your body.

You.

You.