Dance on the Wind (26 page)

The rest of the night proved all the more raucous as he grew warmer, his forehead and the end of his nose more and more benumbed as time seemed to slither by without notice, and people with it. After the longest time now he suddenly remembered the boat crew and took the mug
from his lips, turning slowly around so he wouldn’t topple over as he slurred at her.

“Where they go?”

“Who?”

“Ebenezer and the rest.”

“They got their own places to be tonight,” she replied, back at the tiny fireplace, where she laid more of the kindling on the first licks of flame. It was finally beginning to drive the chill from the narrow room constructed of chinked logs, a low, sloping roof overhead of oiled canvas on which saplings had been laid, then brush, followed by a thin layer of sod to turn out the heavy rains and wet snows that battered the Ohio country three seasons out of the year.

He gazed down into the mug, saw there wasn’t much left. He swilled it back, then leaned forward to plunk the mug back upon the table. That made his head swim and he felt mushy in the knees, as if he might go down. As heavy as his eyelids were, Titus struggled to prop them open as he tried to figure just what to do, weaving slightly on that spot where he was rooted for the moment.

Then he lunged forward with one step. From the corner of his eye he saw her turn slightly, saw her cheeks flushed with the warmth of the fire she was tending; then he kept on trudging flat-footed toward the bed near the fireplace. Banging into it with a shin, he grunted more in surprise than in pain and clumsily wheeled about, causing his mind to swim in a great, sweeping wave as if it were unhinged and adrift, rocking back and forth within his skull. Like a tow sack filled with rocks, he collapsed back onto the bed, let out a sigh, and sank backward across the rumpled quilts and wool blankets.

“Lift your foot up,” she told him. “Best we take off these here moccasins afore your feet get froze.”

After she flung them over to the pounded clay floor by the fire, the woman kicked one leg over him so she could straddle him. He stared up at her face, trying so hard to focus, just to keep his eyes open. He groaned from the effort it was taking, sleep calling him more fervently now.

“You ain’t gonna get sick, is you?” she asked. “You get sick—you’ll be cleaning your own mess up.”

He tried smiling at her to let her know he wouldn’t as his eyelids grew too heavy to fight them any longer. Not sick. Just sleepy.

She was tugging on the long tail of his shirt, yanking to get it out of his leather britches. He felt himself giggling softly. So damned warm, inside and out.

Titus did not know how long he had been asleep, but he was sure he had been. Time had passed. He knew this feeling, coming awake slowly, drifting down in the warm immersion of that land between sleep and wakefulness. He giggled again, not really sure if he made a sound with it, or just laughed within.

Then he groaned. And remembered groaning for the last few minutes, sensing the rise of pleasure. He felt his breathing grow shallow, increasingly rapid as the fixed, physical joy intensified, warmth radiating from his groin. Slowly he opened his eyes, hoping to discover just what was overcoming him when he found her hands working over his rigid flesh.

The woman had it standing up straight as a poplar volunteer bursting from the ground, about as hard as one of those hickory wiping sticks Amy Whistler’s pap kept curing in that trough all the time. And just as he worked a pumice stone up and down a new wiping rod he was making for his own rifle, the woman kneaded her hands up and down his hardened flesh, making it almost too hot to be comfortable.

Groaning again, he closed his eyes, not wanting to wake up and find out that this feeling was nothing more than one of those dreams he used to have back in that darkened sleeping loft outside the tiny hamlet of Rabbit Hash. Such pleasure simply could not last this long. This exquisite torture hadn’t lasted anywhere near this long with Amy—none of the times at the swimming hole or in the woods when he had decided it didn’t matter anymore and he no longer gave a damn, he was going to have her body whenever he wanted.

This time when he opened his eyes halfway, she looked up and found him watching her.

“It don’t matter you gone and got yourself drunk.”

“I’m drunk?”

“Had yourself a man-sized snootful this night, I’ll tell you,” she declared. “But Mincemeat’s real glad you ain’t had you so much she cain’t get your pizzer hard for our fun.”

“Our … our fun.”

He looked up from the tops of her breasts in that bulging chemise to find her eyes burning into his.

“You wanna touch ’em?” she asked, her whole face alive with a knowing smile.

“Touch ’em?” he asked in reply, then brought a wobbly hand up.

But as he did, she reached up and yanked down the front of her chemise. Both breasts spilled out over the top of the chemise and the leather bodice she had laced around her midsection. He was startled at the size and shape of them, larger than any he had seen before. Hell, he had only seen Amy’s, and only then in moonlight at best. Hers had been smaller, hard and firm. But these—as he brushed his fingers across the flesh of one—were soft, pliant, and seemed to have a strange and direct effect on just how he felt down there where she continued to rub him.

She inched back, withdrawing the breasts just beyond his reach, saying, “Tell me if’n you like this.”

Once she laid his hot flesh within her cleavage, she used both her hands to press her breasts inward, encircling him as she began to rock back and forth on him, moving slightly up and down as she squeezed and released her breasts against him while keeping her eyes locked on his.

“Don’t you worry ’bout nothing,” she cooed. “I can tell just from looking at you when you’re ’bout ready to toot. An’ I won’t let you toot till I’m good and ready for you to do just that.”

His mouth had gone dry again, so dry. Rolling his drumming head to the side slowly, he spotted the mug on the table. Then remembered he had drained it. There had to be something else hereabouts for him … but in another heartbeat Titus’s thoughts no longer dwelled on his thirst.

He felt her shift her weight atop him, taking her breasts from his flesh as she went to her feet beside the bed. There she yanked furiously at the oiled-leather whang
that lashed the bodice beneath her breasts. After pulling it and the rumpled chemise over her head, she tugged at her belt and shimmied out of her long skirt, skipping out of the long, quilted pantaloons at the same time, while he stared hypnotically, captivated by the sway and bobble of her heavy breasts.

By the time she had placed one knee back on the low bed, he had rolled to the side and reached out for her, locking her shoulders in his hands, flinging her down to roll atop her.

“Think you know what you’re doing, do you, young river rat?” she murmured.

He was rocking back slightly to plant himself when she took him in her hand and drove him against her.

“Right there,” she groaned. “Gimme all what you got for Mincemeat—right there, now, li’l river rat.”

He wanted to stop and tell her he wasn’t a river rat. He wasn’t a man who worked the Ohio like the others. He was just a runaway farm boy wanting something different. Something more. But Titus didn’t stop, and he couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth, what with all the whimpering he heard himself making as he worked himself in and out of her growing wetness that clung to him all the more with every thrust.

It had never lasted so long—not this high-pitched ringing in his ears as he clawed up toward the pinnacle, expecting to explode any moment as he fought his way upward. With Amy it had been so earth-shattering the first time, so violently short the next times—none had lasted like this.

He thought he could feel her raking her chipped and battered nails along his back, digging furrows along the straps of muscle as he hammered harder still. Sensing the woman’s ankles lock behind his buttocks as she throbbed back into him with every one of his strokes. For just a moment he gazed down at her face, finding her eyes become catlike slits, the tip of her pink tongue just peeking between her browned teeth. Lower still he noticed that the firelight glistened on her neck, some strands of hair plastered against her damp skin. Dewdrops of sweat stood out like clusters of diamonds on her soft breasts, the shape of
those mounds changed somewhat—perhaps flatter now—as she lay on her back, moving against him.

In that next moment those flickering droplets he watched seemed to explode into a million fragments of whirling, shattered particles of light. Shooting stars was all he thought of as the first explosion rocked him to the core. His hips drove forward to plant himself ever deeper within her center. As he slowed over her with the succeeding thrusts, Titus could feel her shudder beneath him at last, her chin arched back as her hips continued to grind upward against him.

With one last quiver he was finished, and he looked down at her, feeling an immense weight suddenly piercing his head from temple to temple. His body relaxed from the center outward, an inch at a time as he sagged upon her. Sensing the sharp angularity of her hips against his, the boniness to her rib cage beneath those breasts where her breathing eventually slowed like his, he slowly let go.

So tired was he that he thought he could rest his head in the crook of her shoulder for just a little while. Feeling his nakedness all the way down to the soles of his feet. Later he could drag his clothes back on and wander back to the tavern to look up the rest of the boat crew. Have some more of that beer.

And—mayhaps if he was lucky enough—Titus would talk this woman into bringing him back here to her bed one more time before he had to join Ebenezer Zane and the rest in pitting themselves against the Great Falls of the Ohio.

It all sounded good enough to be a dream.

His tongue felt like he had dragged it all the way up the trunk of a black walnut tree, tasted like he’d used it to clean out the stall muck caked within all four of the plow mule’s iron shoes.

Thirsty, Titus thought of getting his hands on more of that spruce beer … but that only made his head throb all the more. Slowly becoming aware of the pressure on his shoulder, he opened his eyes and looked down—finding her sleeping against him. The fire in the corner pit had all but died out.

Been asleep at least that long, he thought. And the tiny Betty lamp on the small table flickered low, its wick floating in oil the only light in that tiny room.

The arm she laid her head upon had gone to sleep, filled with painful pinpricks: he knew he had to move it. Inch by inch Titus dragged himself from beneath her, then slipped out from beneath the rumpled blankets she had pulled over them both—spilling onto the clay floor. Landing on his knees and one hand beside the bed, his head thumping like wind-driven waves slapping against the hull of Zane’s flatboat, Titus tried to remember some shred of what had happened since swallowing that first spruce beer. There was a piece of the night here, and there.

When he cocked his head around to see for sure, finding the length of her bare thigh and a portion of one naked breast peeking from beneath the greasy blanket—he was sure he had humped her. No … maybe she had humped him.

That would’ve been a first, he started to snort, yet it made not just his head, but his whole body, hurt. Then he recalled a pale vision of sitting with the four carousing boatmen in that stinking, noisy tippling house, their table wet from spilled ale and rye. Two more women were there, one bouncing animatedly atop Ovatt’s lap, and the other laughing as she stood directly behind Kingsbury, her partially exposed breasts secured on either side of his head like a wool muffler while he fondled her flesh and she rubbed his belly. She was a big one, that woman, and older than the others who plied their trade in the Kangaroo.

A voice or two came clear as he dragged his knees up and slowly squatted beside the bed. Titus remembered how the others had poked their fun at him while the skinny woman ran her hands over him, exploring more and more boldly as the night got older and older, kissing on his neck, pushing his curly brown hair back from his ear to breathe huskily in it—tickling, teasing, taunting him until he figured he just couldn’t take it no more and stumbled back here with her.

Now she was snoring lightly. And when he looked at her face, he recalled how Kingsbury, Ovatt, and especially Zane had all winked at him again and again throughout
the evening, as if they were privy to something he had yet to learn.

Maybe he would eventually find out why she was called Mincemeat.

From the disheveled end of the bed he carefully yanked one of the striped wool blankets so he wouldn’t disturb her, then draped it over his bare shoulders with a shudder. Scooting along on his knees, his head sagging heavy as a chunk of rain-soaked granite between his shoulders, Titus inched over to the table and peered down into the small tin where floated a feeble stump of wick in what his nose told him was bacon grease. It saturated the tiny room with the rank odor of cooking pork. What with supper last night, and all those meals the crew ate on the river—so much pig meat he sensed his stomach revolting, about to heave at the stench.

He dragged himself away, gasping for breath to keep from losing his stomach on the floor, sliding on his bare legs over to the fire pit beneath that sheet-iron chimney, and blew on the coals. Finding plenty of life in them, Titus began to lay bark chips and slivers of kindling on the glowing embers until he had a warming fire stoked once again. It did not take long for it to knock the chill from the log-and-chink lean-to constructed at the back of Mathilda’s alehouse and road inn.

In the corner sat a short three-legged stool supporting a copper kettle. What caught his eye was the handle of an iron ladle poking over the lip of the kettle. Ladling out some of the liquid in the kettle, he took a cautious sniff. Water. He drank his fill, dipper after dipper, nearly emptying the kettle before he got himself sated. His mouth was no longer so dry, but his eyes still hurt with a hot, gritty pain. Maybeso he could sleep some more now that he had taken care of his thirst.