Passing Through the Flame (58 page)

Ivan glanced at him in subtle male semaphore: a narrowing of the eyes, a minuscule cocking of the head, that asked him whether he desired a quick fade act, whether he wanted to be alone with Ruby. Stein thought about it, then looked at Ivan very steadily for an exaggerated interval, indicating he would. The whole exchange was concluded in the second or so during which Ruby looked away from both of them to pick up her coffeecup.

“Yeah, Barry is our Lenin,” Ivan said. “He brought this thing together, and he keeps it together. I’m a media star, I don’t pretend to be a practical politician. We’ve all got to do whatever we can and not kid ourselves we can do everything.”

“Maybe so,” Ruby said. “But maybe we should make some effort to get our personal trips more in line with the ideals we’re supposed to be fighting for, too.”

“You’d make a great little commissar, Ruby,” Ivan said, getting up from the table. “I’m going back into town and wallow in bourgeois male chauvinist sexual ego tripping for a while. I’ve found a shamelessly unliberated groupie who in her mentally enslaved state enjoys giving great head.”

“You’re such a pig, Ivan!” Ruby said in genuine disgust. “Oink, oink!” Ivan answered, slavering and rolling his eyes in a gross parody of animal lust as he did an ape shuffle out the door. “You going back into town, too?” Stein said after Ivan had left. “Maybe in a bit. But I’d like to talk to you about something first.”

“Okay.”

She sipped at her coffee, looking down into the cup. “Look, I like you, Barry, I trust you,” she said. “You’re not an infantile male ego like Ivan. I think we respect each other.”

“I think we do.”

“Okay,” she said, looking levelly into his eyes, “then I can say I’d like to ball you, can’t I? Without getting involved in a lot of sexist romantic bullshit. I like you, I respect you, and I’d like to be making it with you, but that’s as far as it goes. How do you feel about a relationship like that?”

Stein was transfixed, not knowing what he felt; he hadn’t been openly propositioned by a woman many times before, and certainly never like this. It was so cold-blooded. And yet it seemed to him that Ruby was anything but cold-blooded; with the temper she had, she was hardly the cool logical type she wanted to be. There was something about that dichotomy that he admired, that made him feel a surge of affection for her and let his face openly show it. Ruby wasn’t so much cold-blooded as ballsy—with all that that implied. It scared him a little, but in a way he could dig it. But all this was in his head; the way she had put the question left his body limp, though he knew that at the right time he would enjoy balling her.

“I think I would like to try it,” he said. “But... ah... it feels a little funny right now....”

“Because of the way I asked you? I know I’m not very good at this kind of thing. Maybe I don’t want to be. All I know how to do is be honest about it.”

Tentatively, he placed his hand on top of hers. It felt strange there, a forced gesture. “I admire that,” he said. “I really do.”

“But it doesn’t exactly turn you on.”

Stein shrugged. “It’s not you; it’s the circumstances.”

“Then let’s change the circumstances,” she said, turning her hand to grip his and virtually dragging him to his feet. “Which way is the bedroom?”

They led each other through the living room and into Stein’s bedroom: a good-sized room that seemed much smaller, crowded as it was with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, piles of the
Flash
, two chests strewn with clothes, and stacks of review copies of books and record albums, most of them still in their unopened mailing envelopes. In the middle of all this clutter was a good-sized water bed with graying white sheets.

Ruby didn’t seem to react to the surroundings one way or the other. “Lay down on the bed and take your clothes off,” she said matter-of-factly, “and I’ll turn you on.”

Stein, dumbfounded, sleepwalking, sat down on the edge of the water bed and methodically began to untie his shoelaces. Ruby watched him impatiently as he undressed, a strange, nervous sexual impatience. It didn’t seem like undressing for a lover at all, and when he sat up on the water bed, he felt cold and embarrassed, like a plucked chicken.

Abruptly, without taking off a stitch of clothing, without any preliminaries or niceties, she lay down on her belly on the water bed with her head between his legs. She slipped him into her mouth with a quick ungraceful gesture and—

She was beautiful!

She was fantastic, without fears or compunctions or hang-ups, and her mouth was buttered velvet, an instrument of pleasure on which she seemed to be able to play the love song she couldn’t put into words. Her tongue and lips weren’t merely agents of sexual ecstasy; they communicated nuance to his pleasure; they had feeling, they had soul and great affectionate tenderness. Stein was amazed. He was enraptured. He was out of his head. He blossomed inside her mouth like an unfolding rose. He couldn’t believe it, that a woman like Ruby, with her attitude toward men, with her supersensitivity to any hint of male chauvinism, could be giving head like this.

He moaned and writhed and let his consciousness flow into it, let himself become a throbbing thing of pleasure in the warm wet universe of love, heterodyning toward release—

Suddenly she let him slide from her mouth, and she was on her feet shucking her blouse and jeans. Burning with lust, Stein felt as if she were taking forever, even though she was actually stripping at formidable speed. Her naked body was somewhat squat and chunky, but it was strong, not fat. Her breasts were small and high and neat, and her thighs were heavy with muscle but tight as a drum. He liked what he saw.

“Now you turn
me
on,” she said huskily, her eyes smoldering, but her mouth set in an almost comic expression of determination. Without anything further, she was on her hands and knees over him, her curly black bush all at once filling his field of vision.

Stein was stunned, attracted, grossed out, chagrined. He was angered at her demand for fair play but couldn’t deny its justice. He was aching to sink himself into her and seek his own sweet release, not to delay his own satisfaction to rouse her, but at the same time he was turned on by the forthrightness of her demand. Somehow it was honest and clean and low-down dirty all at once. All this in the universe of her cunt as it enveloped him, and he plunged into it.

She sighed and let herself collapse onto him, burying his face in her body, rolling her pelvis lightly and gently against his lips, taking care not to bruise him in her excitement, as tender in her taking as she had been in her giving.

She took pleasure from him, and he found that he took pleasure in the giving, that her sighs and quivers were rewards in themselves, that he was no longer in any particular hurry. There seemed nothing to be in a hurry about.

She rolled off him and snuggled down beside him and agains! him, sliding her arms around him and hugging him softly. Her eyes were a little glassy, she was smiling, and she looked quite happy. She just looked at him like that, nose to nose, for a long time, and he looked at her. Then she closed her eyes and kissed him, a long openmouthed kiss full of intertwining tongues and little sounds, but gentle with a mutual balance of strength and tenderness.

“Now,
let’s make love,” she said when their lips parted.

And it was a good long bout of it, with Ruby on top as much as he was, careful to maintain her feeling of equality. Stein didn’t mind, he found it touching, and he suppressed even internal laughter. She was telling him something, and he didn’t mind listening.

Afterward they lay around touching for a while, had some coffee and doughnuts, finally got dressed, deciding to mix business with pleasure and drive out to the Bradshaw Ranch for the day.

How strange, Stein thought, here we are still smelling of each other’s sweat, and we still don’t know what we feel for each other. Or if we feel anything for each other. Are we friends who fuck or are we lovers? Is there any real difference between the two, or is passion really just social conditioning? Do I
really
believe that bullshit?

He turned the Karmann Ghia off the main road and onto a dirt track that broke an expanse of fenced-in country: rolling gray-brown hills with a five o’clock shadow of sparse chaparral. The gateway in the wire didn’t have a locked gate, but there was a fresh sign declaring “Private Road, Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

Is that the kind of relationship I’m having with Ruby? Have we both put up no-trespassing signs and wire fences? Is she just a convenient figure in my revolutionary fantasies? What fantasy is going on in her head about me?

Or am I just getting overexcited by an uncomplicated fuck?

The ranch house was located in the bottom of a small depression between two low hills, just hidden from sight of the main road by the ridgeline. Five big tents were pitched about fifty yards in front of it, and there were human outline targets nailed to posts set up in a row behind the tents. They were well shot up.

In front of the tents, about twenty men, naked to the waist, were lined up in two rows facing each other. They were throwing pulled karate blows to their partners’ windpipes to a “strike!... strike!... strike!...” cadence called out by a black man wearing an old army shirt.

“Sargent doesn’t screw around, does he?” Ruby said approvingly.

“This looks too much like Parris Island for my taste,” Stein said as he parked the car in front of the low rambling house, all weathered wood slats bleached by the sun to a terminal gray.

“It looks like a guerrilla camp in the Sierra Maestra to me,” Ruby said emphatically. “It looks like the people here really mean business, which is a real turn-on after spending so much time around ego trippers who make revolution with their mouths.”

“I’ll bet he also makes the railroads run on time,” Stein muttered.

“Barry, you’re not
jealous
, are you?” She seemed genuinely incredulous.

“I don’t exactly like being called a bullshit revolutionary.”

She squeezed his hand, kissed him half-mockingly on the lips. “I didn’t mean you,” she said. “You know who I meant. You don’t have a guilty conscience, do you?” He winced. She smiled. “Sorry,” she said, “I couldn’t resist it.” Somehow, it was the kind of apology that made things all right.

“Let’s inspect the troops, shall we, commissar?” he said.

“
Da
, comrade,” she replied in a thick Russian accent. It was the first time he had seen her enter into counterpoint with someone else’s joke.

They walked up onto the porch and tried the door. It was locked, which struck Stein as a little strange. He knocked, and in a few moments it was opened by an olive-skinned man wearing an army shirt and carrying a well-oiled M-16 automatic rifle.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked threateningly.

Stein was more pissed off than intimidated. “Who the fuck are
you
to pull a gun on me and ask me who the fuck
I
am? We’re two-thirds of the Revolutionary Action Committee, that’s who we are. We’re the people who set up this group; we’re the people running it.”

“I take my orders from Chris Sargent,” the man with the gun said diffidently, bringing the muzzle of the automatic rifle to bear on Stein’s midsection with what was meant to seem like a casual gesture. “Nobody comes in here unless he says so.”

Stein became more conscious of the fact that he was being held at gunpoint, a position he had never been in before. It angered him, but it was also beginning to seem a little frightening. “Then get Sargent’s ass out here,” he said with what was left of his physical courage.

“Right on, pard,” the gunman said, and slammed the door in his face.

“This is really out of hand,” Stein said.

Ruby looked calm, maybe even a little pleased. “The man just doesn’t know us by sight,” she said. “He’s doing a proper job. How’d you like the FBI to just walk in here?”

Stein gestured at the karate trainees practicing deathblows in the yard, the well-riddled pistol targets, the door behind which the man with the M-16 had disappeared. “How’d you like the FBI to see this whole scene?” he said. “How’d you like our brothers and sisters in the Movement to see it?”

The door opened, and Chris Sargent appeared: bareheaded in a fatigue uniform, with a Luger strapped to his belt. He looked larger than he had in Los Angeles, more powerful, very much a man to be reckoned with. Stein had met big-league dope smugglers before, but out here Sargent seemed more than that.

“Sorry Baum bummed you like that,” Sargent said. “But I’d have had his ass if he let anyone in here he didn’t know by sight.”

“Of course,” Ruby said.

Sargent led them into the house, down a hall, and into a small room equipped with a cot, a folding table, and seven director’s chairs. He closed the door behind them and sat down.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Stein sat down facing him, and Ruby took a chair equidistant from both of them. Stein didn’t like that. He didn’t like anything that was going on around here. “Who are you to tell me I shouldn’t be here?” he said. “I lined up this place. I brought you into this action. We’re two of the three leaders of this action. What’s going on around here?”

“Take it easy, Stein,” Sargent said. “I only meant that it wasn’t smart of you to come here because it was an unnecessary risk for all of us. If anyone was watching you, you could’ve blown it.”

“Nobody followed us up here,” Stein said.

“Cool,” said Sargent. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“This place looks like an armed camp,” Stein said angrily. “It looks like something out of a war movie.” Fantasies of leading partisan troops were one thing; driving up here and finding that Sargent was actually training a miniature army was something else again.

“This
is
an armed camp,” Sargent said. “What else do you think it’s supposed to be?”

“He’s right, Barry,” Ruby said. “What are you wringing your hands about? Chris is supposed to be training a strike force, so what else did you expect?”

Sargent smiled at her in a way that made Stein’s guts roil. “It’s nice to see that one of you understands the realities,” he said. Even worse, she seemed to bask in his compliment.