The Long Home (16 page)

Amber Rose lay on his left arm, her dress girdled about her waist. Their eyes were closed and he could feel the red weight of the sun through his eyelids. His right hand lay on her abdomen. The flesh of her stomach was cool and soft. He slid his fingers under the elastic of her panties and downward and when she made no objection downward further until he cupped the mound between her legs, the hair there crisp and curled, laid the weight of a finger where her flesh was cleft when she opened her legs. When he kissed her her mouth tasted like the wine and when he opened his eyes she was watching him. She seemed drained of volition, her face looked vacuous and stricken in the sun. Her dress was unbottoned to the waist and her brassiere unhooked and against the brown skin of her belly her breasts looked white and fragile, flowers unused to the sun. She reached a hand down and placed it over his own, guiding him, her hips a gently increasing pressure against the heel of his hand. The she moved the hand away and he felt it at his zipper. She took his erect penis in her hand and began to masturbate him gently. Even as she did so a part of him that stood observing all this wondered at her dexterity but did not dwell on it at any length. She slid her other hand down and clasped him with both hands. Then without saying anything she released him and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear and slid it down over her hips. He watched as she raised her hips from the blanket and slid the panties off one leg, then the other. She unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down until he arose and shucked out of them, feeling clumsy and absurd standing here in the heat of the day in his shirttail with her watching and he felt that the woods were full of folks crouched laughing behind the bushes but he couldn’t have stopped if they had been. If Hardin had leapt upon him with a hawkbill knife. He pulled the t-shirt off and when he laid it aside she was reaching up towards him.

“Pull off your dress.”

“Do it for me if you want to.”

She raised her arms and he pulled the dress awkwardly over her head and started to fold it but she said, “No, let it go, it don’t matter.” He lay on her balancing his weight on his elbows. “You won’t break me,” she said. “I’m not made of glass.” He could feel her breasts pooled against his chest, the hot length of his sex where their flesh lay as it fused.

It seemed to him there ought to be something to say but if there was he didn’t know what. For a crazy moment it occurred to him to ask her if she’d rather wait until they were married for in the last quarter hour or so he’d commenced thinking in just such a fashion. But her breath on his throat forestalled him. “Go on,” she said. “I want you to.” He reached down fumbling between them but after a moment she said, “Here. Let me.” He raised enough to permit her hand and she guided him into her.

She was hot and wet and tight and entry was harder than he’d expected and he hesitated, unmoving, glancing down to see if he was hurting her, but her eyes were clenched tightly closed and her hands were tightening on his arms.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go on, I want you to.”

In the slow, breathless moment of penetration he felt that he had wounded her beyond any restitution he had the power to make and he felt that he had thrown his lot with her forevermore, had in some manner inextricably tied their fate. Whether she wanted it so or not.

She made ready to go. They had stayed longer than she meant to and the sun was already burning away the timbered horizon in the west and the first bullbats were dropping plumb and sheer as if they moved in fixed isobars or were in some manner gyroscoped.

“You thought I was a whore, didn’t you?” Her voice through the fabric of her dress was muffled. She pulled the dress down and was arranging her hair, smoothing it backward with both hands.

“No. I never thought that.”

“But you thought I’d done it before.”

“I figured you had.”

“I guess I’ve heard them talk about everything two people can do to each other but I never did any of it. Mama always watched me like a hawk and Dallas, he’s even worse.” She pulled her panties on, her skirt caught up in them and she freed it. He was staring bemusedly at the hair crinkled against the cloth. “Quit looking like that,” she said. “You know I’ve got to go.” She arose. “I always used to have the idea that Dallas was goin to sell me off, you know, like to the highest bidder. A auction. Sacrificin a virgin.” She smiled ruefully. “I guess this is one time he got beat.”

After she had gone he dressed and sat on the edge of the porch with the blanket across his shoulders, for the day had grown chill. Blue dusk lay pooled about the fields. He thought to finish the wine but it had gone flat and treacly. He corked it and set it aside wondering how he had ever tasted summer in it. Without her the world seemed bland and empty. In the silence he imagined he could still hear her voice, some obsession with detail caused him to seek meanings where there were only words. He felt curiously alive, everything before this seemed gray and ambiguous, everything he’d heard garbled and indistinct.

He knew he should be going but here it still seemed to be happening, it was all around him, and some instinct of apprehension told him it might never happen again. It couldn’t be wasted. Every nuance, sensation, had to be absorbed. Dusk drew on and the horizon blurred with the failed sun and at last he arose to go, loath still to leave here for the dark house with its ringing emptiness and the gabled attic with its stacked books wherein he’d mistakenly believed all of his life was told. He went down the highway past the FOR SALE sign and climbed the locked gate and so into the road. He went on listening to the sounds of night as if he had never heard them before. He passed Oliver’s unlit house but the old man was not about and all he heard of life was the goats’ bells tinkling off in the restive dark.

In the last days of Indian summer the light had a hazy look of blue distances to it like a world peered at through smoked glass. It was windy that fall and the air was full of leaves. The wind blew out of the west and they used to take blankets below the chickenhouses where there was a line of cedars for a windbreak and lie beneath a yellow poplar there in the sun. Yellow leaves drifted, clashed gently in a muted world. Sad time of dying, change in the air, who knew what kind. There seemed little permanence to this world, what he saw of it came drifting down through baring limbs and the branches left limned against the blue void looked skeletal and brittle as bone.

Amber Rose would lie drowsing in the sun, an arm thrown across her face. He studied her body almost covertly, the symmetry of her nipples, the dark, enigmatic juncture of her thighs. Parting the kinked black hair with his fingers he leaned and kissed her there, she stirred drowsily against his face. Faint taste of salt, of distant seas. Some other taste, something elemental, primal, shorn of custom. His tongue delineated the complexities of her sex, he raised his face to study the enigma he found there. She seemed fragile and vulnerable, wounded by life at the moment of conception with the ultimate weapon, the means to be wounded again and again, cleft there with the force of a blow.

When she could she would meet him at night. He cached blankets in the hollow at Mormon Springs and wrapped in them he would lie in the lee of the limestone rocks and await her. Dry leaves shoaled in the hollow and he could hear a long way off. It would be warm in the blankets and the night imbued Winer and the girl with a desperate sense of immediacy, or urgency, they lay tired but not sated for they were learning that there were hungers that did not abate.

Laughing she slid down the length of his body and took him into her mouth. The blanket slid away and he could see her dark head at the Y of his body like some spectral succubus feasting while beyond them the trees reared and tossed in the wind and the throb of the jukebox and the cries of the stricken and the drunk came faint and dreamlike like cries from a madhouse in a haunted wood. His hand knotted in her hair and pulled her atop him he could feel her heart hammering against him through her naked breast.

“You used to drive Lipscomb crazy,” he told her once. “He used to find excuses to see up your dress.”

“I know it. I wanted you to look though.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to make you hard, all right?”

“It’s all right with me,” he said.

Her face was pale and composed in the moonlight. Black curls tousled as if she slept in perpetual storm. His finger traced the delicate line of her jaw.

“Briar Rose,” he said.

“What?”

“I think I’ll call you Briar Rose. I like it better than Amber Rose and besides I like briar roses. They’re sweet and I like the way they smell. And you do look like somebody out of a fairy tale.”

“Like somebody’s wicked stepsister or something?”

“You can be a princess in mine.”

A new, soft world of the senses here she ushered him into. A world of infinite variety he had but heard rumored. On these sweet urgent nights he came to feel he was indeed living out an erotic fairytale, the dark prince who’d stolen the princess from the evil king. And like the protagonists of a fairytale they played out their games in a country of intrigues and secret corners and fierce inclement weather where nothing was what it seemed.

“You look like a man pickin cotton,” Motormouth told him. “Cept you grabbin trouble with both hands and stuffin it in a sack and never once lookin over your shoulder.”

“What you are talking about, Motormouth?”

“Listen at ye. You may not be as slick hardy as you think you are.”

Motormouth sat in Winer’s living room. He crouched on the edge of the sofa with a glass of 7-Up and bootleg whisky in his hand. The drink had the smoky, oily quality of nitroglycerin and he held it carefully as if dropping it might annihilate them both.

“I never was one for parables and hard sayings,” Winer told him. “You got anything I need to hear just say so straight out.”

“You think you’re in tight with him. But when he finds out, and he damn sure will, he will kill your ass and hide you or rig it up so it looks like he killed you in self-defense.”

“I’m still kindly left in the dark.”

“A little bird flew down and lit on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It said, ‘You better warn little Nathan. He’s buyin trouble by the pound and he’s got about all he can go with.’”

“That little bird, did it have a name?”

“You seen one of these little old birds you seen em all.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Hardin wanted her hisself,” Motormouth said.

“You did too,” Winer said. “But you never got her.”

Motormouth arose and stretched. He looked about the room. There was an air of time about it, as if folks had grown old and died here.
I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIVING GOD
, a glittercard above the fireplace said. “I got to get on,” Motormouth said. “Hell. I’m goin to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere. Someplace got some size about it. I’m burnt out on this damn place anyway.”

That was what he said but the only place he quit this night was Winer’s front room.

“This is nothing but trouble,” Winer told her. She lay against him beneath the blanket. “I’ve got to get a car somehow. A way of getting around so we can get away from him.”

Her hair was a soft black cloud against his cheek. She was warm in his arms, he could feel the delicate bones beneath her flesh. She was like some small beast he’d caught in the woods, held too roughly, felt jerking with hammering rabbit’s heart in his hands. He was afraid if he held on to her he’d hurt her but there was no way now he could let her go.

“This is all right,” she said against his throat. “You take everything too serious.”

“It’s better than all right but we’ve still got to get a car. If we had one we could drive into town anytime we wanted.”

She seemed to be thinking over the idea of a car. Then she said, “Or anyplace else we wanted to go.”

“It seems like I have to be with you all the time. When I’m not it’s like I’m drunk or on dope or somethin. I just drag through the day waitin for night to come. Everything else just seems dead.”

She didn’t reply. Everything seemed to be moving her closer to the line she didn’t want to get to. She guessed sooner or later everyone was going to have to know but she’d just as soon it was later. Slipping out would be easier than openly defying Dallas Hardin. Experience had taught her that defying Dallas Hardin was something best done from as great a distance as possible.

Then he went one night and the blankets were gone from the stumphole, the leaves kicked aside. He sat on the stone anyway waiting and the night crept by like something crippled almost past motion until the rind of moon set behind the blurred trees. The jukebox played on and approaching cautiously he could see the oblique yellow light falling through the trees and hear the sounds of merriment but she never came. He sat crouched in the darkness until his mind began to play tricks on him. He could hear feet kicking through the dry leaves, her soft laugh, see her face, conspirator’s finger to her lips. He grew apprehensive and felt something was watching him out of the dark with yellow goat’s eyes but if it was it never said so.

That was on a Sunday night and all the next week he wondered at her composure, at the duplicity flesh seemed capable of. Watching her move serenely across the yard he hardly knew her as the girl who lay against him in the dark, who cried out his name and clung to him as if she were drowning, being sucked downward into a maelstrom of turbulent water. Who whispered nighttime endearments the daylight always stole away from him.

When Hardin paid him off on Friday he said, “Winer, me and you got a pretty good business arrangement goin. You work to suit me and I pay to suit you. And I got other plans for us too, plans got some real money tied up in em.”

Winer didn’t ask when plans or in fact say anything. He had been waiting all week for this and he recognized Hardin’s speech as mere preamble.

“I don’t want to make you mad. But you kindly steppin on my toes here slippin around with that girl and I’m goin to have to put a stop to it. I thought you’d do me straighter than that.”