With (55 page)

“Please don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ It makes me feel old. If Sugrue’s ghost is everywhere, why haven’t I seen it?”

I wish I could tell ye on account of he’s just shy, or just invisible like me. But that aint it. Y’see, us in-habits outrank ghosts, I mean we’re more powerful than them, so I’ve let that there ghost know that I don’t never want him to show his hide—or his spirit.

“Do you mean there’s nowhere we could go that he couldn’t see us?”

Out to the barn, maybe. He don’t never go near that barn, cause he’s afraid it’ll fall on him, but me and you know that ’ere barn’ll still be a-standing there when me and you both are ghosts.

She’d been keeping Bess in the barn for some time now, and knew it was safe, but she didn’t like the idea of ever becoming a ghost. If she became a ghost, she’d really have to associate with Sugrue again. She wondered if ghosts could ever have sex. But she went out to the barn, and she assumed that Adam was somewhere behind or beside her. The kitten Latha tried to follow, but she shooed it away. Then in a dark corner of the barn, she said, “Now, Adam, if you’re so good at play-like, would you like to pretend you’re giving me my first kiss?” She held out her arms.

Silence. Then his voice said,
When you was still my age, I used to kiss ye all the time, specially when you was asleep. You may not know it, but you’ve been kissed many a time before.

“Kiss me now. So I’ll know it.” She continued holding out her arms. She closed her eyes, to aid her own make-believe. And behold, verily it seemed that a pair of warm lips pressed against her own, for a long moment. She whispered, “Put your tongue in my mouth,” and she opened her mouth and her tongue seemed to feel a wet tongue sliding along it, all the way to the back, and then rolling around inside her mouth. Her knees buckled and her whole body trembled with desire. “Kiss my neck,” she requested, tilting her head. And behold those splendid lips of his kissed her in several places from her collarbone to her earlobe. “Oh,
Adam,”
she said. She unbuttoned her dress so that the top of it would fall below her breasts. “Kiss my breasts,” she asked. His kisses there turned her knees to jelly. Fortunately they were standing amidst the hay that she’d cut and stacked for Bess’ winter feed. She reflected that it was Adam who had taught her how to cut hay and how to stack the hay, and she wondered if he had even anticipated this use that they would put to the hay. She pulled him down with her into the soft hay. She asked, “Is your dick hard?” Silence. Had she said the wrong thing or in the wrong way? She waited, and then apologized, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

I jist don’t much care to hear you call it that, on account of that’s what Sog called it.

“What do you call it?”

Actually, I don’t call it nothing. But if you’ve just got to mention it, I reckon you could call it my dood.

She laughed. “Oh, goody! What if I called it your doody? Then it would rhyme with my poody, which it’s supposed to fit.”

Call it whatever you care to.

“But you
do
have a doody?”

Sure as shootin.

“And is your doody stiff right now?”

Iffen you’re so good at make-believe, why don’t ye take aholt of it and see for yourself?

She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath and reached down between them. It was her duty to feel his doody. And there it was! He must’ve already unbuttoned his fly. Good heavens, but it was
big.
Much bigger than that limp weenie that Sugrue had had. She wrapped her fingers around it and used her index finger to explore the smooth knob on the end of it. In the back of her mind she knew that she was just imagining all of this, that this was just play-like, and she knew also that she had had so much to drink that she could imagine she was flying away if she wanted to. But she did not want to fly away. She wanted to lie here in Adam’s arms and she wanted Adam to put that walloping doody inside of her. “Your turn to feel me,” she told him. And he did, timidly at first, lifting the hem of her calico dress. She was wearing the pair of silk panties Latha had given her, and she let Adam feel her through the silk for a while and then she took her hand off his doody so she could remove her panties. “Adam,” she requested, “why don’t you take off all your clothes?”

I aint never done that in all the years I’ve been here.

She sniffed. “It’s a wonder they don’t stink if they’ve never been washed.”

Aint you a barrel of laughs, though? Okay, there, do I look any better now?

Adam had just a little hair on his chest and around his doody. She was fascinated, as she was with jacks-in-the-pulpit, with the two large lumps clinging to the root of his doody, which her girlfriend Kelly had first taught her to call nuts, or balls. She cupped them in her hand; they were not hairy but downy. She wondered if he had a special name for those too, and she asked him, and he coughed and said them was just his cods.

She had an overpowering urge to creep down and take his doody into her mouth and see if it was more fun to do it because she wanted to do it and not because he, like Sugrue, had made her do it. So she did. Adam gasped and she could feel his fingers in the back of her hair. She understood that what she ought to do is not suck it as you would suck a thumb or a nipple but move it in and out of your mouth over and over. So she did. She took her mouth off long enough to ask him, “Do you like that?”

He confessed,
I used to allus imagine ye a-doing that whenever I…when I was…when I didn’t have nobody to…when I was trying to…

He didn’t have a word for that, whatever it was that happened to boys when all of a sudden their doodies throbbed and spewed out a lot of fluid, the equivalent of what she had called
reaching.
So she used that word to supply the end of his sentence, “…when you were trying to make yourself reach?”

Yep, if ye wanter call it that, and if you keep that up, I’m sure enough a-going to.

Instead of understanding that he wanted her to stop or slow down, she speeded up and, recalling a scene from
Lighting Bug
that was so exciting she had memorized it, she was swallowing and unswallowing his doody as rapidly as she could bob her head and her head was bobbing so rapidly it shook her whole body, and he grabbed her hair and tried to pull her away but she hung on for dear life and buried her lips at the root of his doody and waited until the last spurtle had dribbled down her gullet. It was so real, the taste of him, all that warm liquid in her dry mouth, that she knew she could not possibly be just making-believe.

He lay there panting and she waited a long time to see if he might reciprocate what she had done for him, but either because that would be beyond the thoughts of a twelve-year-old or because he didn’t even realize how good it would make her feel and that she could come too, he made no move to do it and she lacked the words to ask him. She said to herself, “For heaven’s sake, woman, you’re in charge of this whole thing for yourself, so do whatever you feel like doing.” But she could not will him to do that. By and by, they began to talk again, about nothing important, or about the barrel she was going to try to make in the shop, or about the saxifrage plant she’d found, which he called alumroot, with small but lovely white flowers and large glorious hairy leaves. He talked about the uses of alumroot, but then he said,
It’s got hard again, if you got any more idees.
And she certainly had one idee, which she’d intended all along: just to do it the way it is supposed to be done, with her legs spread and him above her. She cried out when the mighty dood pierced her poody. All he knew to do was to thrust, in the same way but faster and faster, which was fine but not the best, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and used her hands on his butt to show him the best.

What convinced her beyond doubt that she had not merely created this whole thing in her imagination or make-believe was that she never once touched herself. When she finally and triumphantly reached, it was entirely from what he was doing to her and for her. And he let her know that it was happening again to him too, and she could actually feel herself filling up with his fluid. When they were both recovered and stopped breathing so hard, she remarked, “This has been the best birthday I ever had.”

Through the rest of the autumn and the relatively mild winter and on into the spring, they did it whenever they felt like it. He helped her make her own barrel in the cooper’s shop; it was so much more complicated than just making a firkin, but it was a real barrel. Twelve-year-old Adam had not ever made an entire barrel himself, only a churn, so in a sense she was making it for both of them. Of course they often had to interrupt the making of the barrel to make love in the cooper’s shop, on the earthen floor or even standing, or sometimes with her sitting on the toolbench and him standing between her legs.

She never again had to use her hands on herself. She was so filled with longing and love that she was inspired to use the paper Latha had given her to begin writing stories. She wrote one story about what was going on down in Stay More between Latha’s granddaughter and the man named Larry, who lived in separate houses but finally got together. She wrote another story about the skeleton Sugrue. She wrote a witty story about Robert, her bobcat. One story which she couldn’t finish although she even read it aloud to Adam and asked for his suggestions, was about what happened to Adam when he went to California and grew up and became rich but did not live happily ever after. She had better luck writing about things that she knew from her own experience, and the best of all these stories was about a seventeen-year-old woman and her passionate affair with a twelve-year-old boy.

But despite the believability of this story, and of her own experience upon which it was based, it was not “real.” It lacked tangibility, or palpability or whatever you call the actual contact of living flesh.

For a long time she had been thinking of asking Hreapha to get her a horse for her eighteenth birthday. A horse was powerful and she could ride it all over the mountain. Her lover Adam agreed with her that a horse would be a mighty fine thing to have. He could ride it behind her…although he could never ride it beyond his haunt.

But as the summer came and her eighteenth birthday loomed, she realized it was not a horse she wanted or needed. More than anything, what she most desired to have was a living, breathing, visible
man.

Chapter forty-five

W
oo. The bad news about the babe Latha was that she was a night sleeper. The tough shit about all these so-called
tame
cats was that they took up the habits of humans, who for some stupid reason liked to sleep away the best time of day or rather night, namely dark, when everything is happening, man. For ten fucking years now he had had to put up with it, even pretending, early on, that he was asleep himself, just so’s he could cuddle up with them under the blankets, when all the while, for hours, he’d have rather been perched on a rock ledge in the moonlight, watching the world go by and ready to pounce or score or just hang easy and let it all happen. He’d hoped, when Latha signed on with the crew, that she might join the night shift along with himself, Ralgrub and her boys, Pogo, and now the other new one, Ged, or Alma Giddyup or however the fuck you pronounced her long name. (He wasn’t sure about Sparkle, who seemed to sleep all the time anyway.) But no, Latha, a real bearcat who didn’t take long at all to grow out of kittenhood into ripening puberty, was always asleep when he came pussyfooting around, midnightish, with action on his mind. If he had any hope of banging her, he’d have to do it at night when his wife was asleep and he could sneak away.

Hroberta had never been able to accept the simple law of nature that no self-respecting wildcat stud is monogamous. He’d never forget the first time he’d slipped away from her and was gone all night, coming home in the morning soaked with the fragrances of a dame,
of his own species,
mind you, and Hroberta had torn into him and chewed him up and then went and told her brothers and her mother, his sweet old mother-in-law, and they had ganged and jumped him and chewed him up and left him for dead. Woo.

He ought to have learned a lesson, but there is simply no going against nature, which dictates that wildcat dudes must mate up with anything they meet up with. Meet up with, mate up with, that had always been his motto. How else would he have mated up with a dog in the first place, for godsakes? Hroberta probably liked to think that he thought she was charming and alluring and desirable, but actually she had just been a handy hump, and a bit too big for him at that. Females of his own species were less than a third the size of males, which means that a female bobcat is not much bigger than a so-called
house
cat, which unfortunately Latha was determined to become, spending all her nights curled up at the head of the Queen’s bed. By the way, that was one of the differences between cats and dogs: dogs wanted the foot of the bed. In his childhood and youth, about which he often had sentimental memories, Robert wanted the head of the bed, where he just pretended to sleep while he had thoughts of a rock ledge in the moonlight.

The dogs thought that because the Queen loved them and provided them with a home and took good care of them and petted them, she must be God. Robert knew that since she loved him and provided him with a home and took good care of him and petted him,
he
was God.

The dogs, and some of the other animals too, especially Paddington before he took it on the lam, were always “marking” what they thought was their territory, pissing all over the place. Robert didn’t need to do that because he
knew
that all of the territory was his. The only marking he did was to spray his special atomizer on anything he desired, such as Hroberta or a passing chicken or the davenport.