Thirty
After an all-too-brief motherly scolding and hands-on physical, Emily opened a surprise package of hot dogs and Wonder bread buns she’d covertly acquired while I was debating myself over an extravagant purchase of camping pillows. After dinner, more or less rejuvenated, we set up our tent and hid the bear box that now contained two hot dogs, three buns, an apple, and a handful of trail mix. Together we scavenged for more firewood, which was not so simple a task in spruce and fir environs with one working flashlight. The farther we wandered from the campsite, the more we concerned ourselves with the task of bear detecting, stopping every few feet to scrutinize all upcoming bushes, boulders, and even a few blank pockets of moonless night. Through the right eyes they all resembled black bears in sinister, shape-shifting poses. The most convincing of them crept onto the trail thirty feet behind us, then camouflaged himself low against the thicket to play an inchoate evergreen. He stared at us through sad, crescent-shaped eyes, his short sigh-breaths like a warm, bulky breeze.
“Let’s spear him,” Emily whispered. “We’ll make bear hamburgers for breakfast.”
“Shhhh!”
I warned her, attempting to draw out the bear with a fist-sized stone. It thumped against the trunk and shook the branches. I laughed out to embolden myself.
“I told you it was nothing,” she said. She moved onto a flat slab of rock to pick up a few midsize logs. After gathering a few of my own, and while reaching for what I assumed to be a long shadowy branch, my stomach suddenly dropped. A feeling of intense vertigo struck me as I realized that the black branch I’d been reaching for was the spectral night and nothing more. Emily screamed and dropped her logs, which clanked against the rock. She continued screaming on the ground, kicking backward, and I dropped down next to her, gripping the rock with my hands and knees, my elbows and feet, sensing the cliff moving in on all sides.
We turned the flashlight off and waited. When our eyes had adjusted to the darkness we crawled back to the campsite hunched over like frightened cavemen knuckling their way to safety. We assembled the tent and then lay silent on uneven ground, side by side, awaiting the next disaster. As my fears gave way to exhaustion I silently laughed at my recent attempts at religious faith and servitude, those mysterious creeds my parents and grandparents had clung to over the years. Already sliding toward the foot of the tent, I threw an arm over Emily and whispered good night. I placed my hand over her chest and felt her heart thumping. After I’d begun rubbing her breasts and she’d rolled onto her stomach, I tried to guess where we would’ve woken up after our near free fall in the cool black sky. Midway through the night I dreamt up the faint murmur of a phone ringing. I squirmed from the bottom of my sleeping bag and crawled from the tent, digging the phone out of a cubbyhole in the side of a boulder.
“This is George Flynn,” I said.
“I know,” the voice answered, low and throaty.
“Who am I talking to?”
“This is Special Agent Tikki Tavi of the FBI.”
“Oh,” I said, quickly coming to my senses. “Did you get him yet? Did you catch Nicholas Parsons?”
“Gotcha!” Katie yelled, cackling much longer than seemed fit. “Come on, George.
Rikki Tikki Tavi?
Are you even awake?”
“Barely. You didn’t keep your promise, did you?”
“I’m keeping it now. I’ve never been to Colorado, except when I changed planes once in Denver. So if you care at all about my time capsule, you’re pretty friggin’ cold searching around up in the mountains. And one more thing. I miss you, George. I’ve got lonely lips over here.”
Thirty-one
I suddenly feel I’ve wasted enough pages on our Rocky Mountain camping trip that in the end proved more unorganized and toiling than adventurous and romantic. I’ll consequently forgo detailed descriptions of our mournful alpine descent and even more tragic return to Des Moines, which mostly involved Emily jerking from lane to lane, begging me to comment on her nerve-racked recklessness. Concluding the matter, I’ll say that on witnessing Emily’s bloody-footed reappearance, Mrs. Schell was far less sympathetic than my own parents, who were still adhering to the laissez-faire mind-set of the weeks following Katie’s death. While Emily merely sketched the punishing new schedule she’d been assigned, the severity of her situation was well reflected in a stony new expression and pair of black aviator sunglasses that perfectly articulated her detachment from any emotion connected to sorrow, vulnerability, or pain. That said, she made no attempts to seclude herself, and engaged nearly every trick imaginable to arrange our furtive rendezvous. She was as enthusiastic as ever when it came to impersonating our inimical Perkins waitresses and psychoanalyzing foreign dictators and outwitting her mother, though her soldierly posture in more intimate situations hinted that she was not only a hardened babe with a history, but smarter than all the nitwits around her, including myself. (It should be noted that two weeks after our trip she was fired from the Public Playhouse performance of
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
after taking up the cause of her Sudanese co-lead, a fellow cast member from
Othello
who confided grave fears of exploitation, typecasting, and alienation from his community of disapproving brothers.)
Only three days before my collegiate departure, I received a call from a Menard’s pay phone where Emily was meant to gather materials for a laborious gardening project in her parent’s backyard. She asked me to meet her at Saylorville Beach, which had recently expanded when the park board bought a load of sand from Saudi Arabia. This purchase turned their little pebble farm into a quarter-mile of Maui, only with an infestation of milfoil weed and much fewer coconuts or waves. While I can’t explain why, I was certain Emily had chosen this venue to more dramatically present her plan for our bold new lives as urban Chicago cohabitators. Before hanging up I was already imagining massive bartending tips and hands-on business training programs.
It turned out that the only other beachgoers that day were a glaringly pale middle-aged couple fumbling with an unassembled volleyball set and two obese preteens trying to wade as far out as they could without getting their shorts wet. We laid our towels down at the edge of the woods, allowing ourselves to easily switch between the sun and the shade. After ten minutes of silence I was still convinced that Emily had some major news to impart, though I was certain it had nothing to do with us moving to Chicago together. She didn’t make the slightest attempt at conversation and went about sunbathing as though I wasn’t there. While I first interpreted her behavior as a statement about the peaceful quietude that average nincompoops always felt the need to fill, I soon gathered that the real cause of her silence was her anger over the fact that I hadn’t brought a swimsuit.
In no time her body was glistening. She had one arm thrown languidly over her forehead, revealing the tiny black stubble of her armpit as her chest rose and fell, her breasts leaning slightly to the sides. I turned my attention to the ripples in the lake, fully tortured as beads of sweat trickled down my brow and cheeks, salting the edges of my mouth. I pictured Katie’s body swaying stupidly in the weeds and I told myself that if I was a soldier and the solution lay on the other side of the battlefield, I’d cheerfully lead the charge. I’d go it alone if need be, facing down bullets and land mines if there were only a simple flag to capture, brightly colored, flapping high on a hill. But as it was I was still squatting in the foxhole, unsure how to engage the enemy, who the enemy was, what this war was all about. Emily’s bikini breasts swelled before me as she rolled to her side and lowered her sunglasses.
“Not going to take your shirt off?”
“I will.”
“If you want, you could probably get away with wearing your boxers. Those guys won’t tell the difference from over there.”
“I don’t feel like swimming. That’s why I didn’t bring a suit.”
“All right,” she said, rolling onto her back again. “But I didn’t say anything about swimming.”
She pushed her sunglasses back into place, smirking a little and leaving me to wonder if she was serious about some sort of sexual exhibition. I made a point of loudly unzipping myself. Emily sat up and watched me remove my shorts and T-shirt. I guessed she was curious if I had an erection after staring at her for so long. I didn’t know if I should be embarrassed at not having an erection or embarrassed if I did. I felt the situation could go either way depending on what she said next.
“Better?” she asked, taking a drink of bottled water and handing it to me.
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe you’d be even more comfortable without the boxers.”
“You think so?” I said, understanding that she was testing me. The two girls were swimming now and having a splash war. Their bras were perfectly visible under their T-shirts. I lifted off the sand and peeled my boxers down, dismayed by the childlike fuzziness of the red plumage below. “Why don’t we go into the shade?”
“Think that would be safer?”
“Sun damage,” I said. “We’re too young to let ourselves go.” Emily chuckled and gave my thigh a little pat. I wrapped my towel around my waist and crawled to a weedy stretch of shade at the edge of the woods, semi-obstructed by a crooked maple. It seemed unlikely we could get away with anything serious, but I decided I wouldn’t let two blubbery kids or poison ivy stop us if Emily wanted to try. We lay side by side on our backs, staring up through the branches. Soon Emily’s hand was searching between my legs and I found myself distracted and my resolution faltered. A cool breeze blew over us and I shivered, suddenly alone, again picturing Katie in a dark underwater cavern, her face numb like the victim of a half-assed lobotomy. For a few long seconds I could hardly breathe and felt claustrophobic in a way that I can only compare to the sensation of a superior wrestler locking you in a hold you can’t get out of, but you still haven’t been pinned. My penis was crawling inside itself.
The situation grew worse when I began to expect that at any moment Emily would take her sunglasses off and put into words all the questions I was already asking myself in a man-to-penis interrogation. As she continued stroking me I closed my eyes to indulge in all the Katie Schell fantasies that since her death I’d steadfastly denied. I pictured her staring into the bathroom mirror, lifting her nightshirt to massage her petite, conical breasts. I saw her nipples presented in full when she greeted me at the edge of the bed, requesting immediate attention to that overanxious seedling that in her Celeste Elston novels would “pop forth from the warm earth like a prized radish.” For one night only she’d beg for experience in every pose and position, desperate that her future lovers never know a piece of flesh I had not already tasted. I placed my hand flat on the bikini triangle between Emily’s legs. She parted her thighs in stages as my penis swelled, soon inviting me to slide my hand under her bikini and over a mat of moist hair. As she fondled me with her right hand, she placed her left hand on top of mine, directing it up and down in long pressing strokes. Her hips lifted off the towel. Her sex was wide awake, bursting open even as my penis outstretched in her hand. She stroked faster as I dipped my finger inside her.
“What do you think?” she asked, her voice like a siren’s voice calling out from deep beneath the sand, all the way from Saudi Arabia. I’d often imagined us making love for first time on Saylorville Beach, hours after the park had closed. We’d park down the road and hike through the woods, mostly knowing what we were going to do and bringing the necessary precautions, but not speaking of it. We might have gone there every night to practice, keeping our lips locked the whole time and speaking simultaneous gibberish, not understanding a word, letting our awkward knees, elbows, and noses say the stupid things while our hips and thighs poeticized.
I reached for Emily’s sunglasses. When I pulled them off I found her searching the edge of the woods. I turned toward the volleyball couple who’d now disappeared, possibly relocated to a hiding place from which to spy on us. I wiped the sand from Emily’s legs and stomach. She pulled her bikini off, inviting me to stare for a while at her wet tawny wirework.
When she undid her top I slid over her and kissed all around her chest. In the sunlight slipping through the shadows her nipples were the same color as her lips. I wasn’t sure if my erection was aimed correctly or if it was somewhere above or below or stuck in the sand. As she reached down I kissed her. She was deeply concentrating and still squirming when I felt her body suddenly surrounding me and clenching. Her neck bones protruded as her chin jutted out and her head stretched away.
“Slow,” she said, whispering in a strained grunt, low and unpleasant. I started to pull back but she gripped my hips and held me. “Tell me how it feels.”
“I love you,” I said.
Emily closed her eyes. She directed my hips back and forth, pushing and pulling until I was moving fast, feeling an initial coming sensation burn its way from my testicles up through my entire body. I pressed into that feeling, praying it would lead to a moment of clarity that would solve our lives in one fast shot (despite my certainty that it wouldn’t). I felt suddenly thrown into a weird translation of my own fantasy, mistimed to include fat girls, a middle-aged couple who might’ve gone for security, a ghost on the set. I kept diving in and out, changing knees, pressing for a new deal, wanting harmony but achieving only morsels. We were two bad actors and there was almost no pleasure involved, just the feeling of the first seconds when I thought nothing and only felt—that initial vaginal clench, her hands squeezing my upper back and sides, that tingling pendant of hope.
“I love you,” I said, louder than the first time. Emily reached into the thicket, holding herself in place by grasping at roots sticking out of the mud. Her head bobbed about brainlessly. Her breasts thrashed round and round, losing their shape like lopsided bowls on a potter’s wheel. It was all guilt and nothing good until she pressed her forehead against my neck and we stopped colliding and moved together. She kissed my lips and suddenly we were okay and nothing was broken between us and I thought I understood the answer to everything. But whatever knowledge I’d gained in this moment was lost the second I shoved backward and Emily’s thighs slammed closed and I came into the weeds. She watched the milky mess ooze out of me onto the maple tree. When it was done she parted her legs and sat up, staring in disgust at the red traces of blood on her inner thighs and stomach.