Earth Angel (26 page)

David touched my shoulder and I stopped moving. I looked over at him, my mouth still around his penis. I must look like an
open Pez dispenser, offering a pink Pez. Now I was part of Josh’s Generation Pez.

“If you keep going, I’ll come,” he said. “Don’t you want to, you know, have intercourse?”

I unimpaled my mouth. “Can’t we do both?”

He nodded. I continued ministering, moving to the beat of “Duke of Earl.” On the third chorus of “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of
Earl,” David came, came, came. This part I was good at. I just held his penis loosely and let it squirt against the back of
my throat, like a dentist rinsing teeth. When he finished, I swallowed. Then I got up and hurried toward the bathroom.

“You okay?” he asked.

I grabbed the box of sponges and held them up for him to see as I closed the door behind me. I bent over the sink, turned
on the faucet just enough for a quiet trickle, and rinsed my mouth. Quietly, I squeezed a little toothpaste on my finger and
ran it across my teeth and gums. I made a lot of noise tearing open the box while I swished and spit. I didn’t mind the taste—after
all, a major ingredient of semen is fructose, as in soft drinks and juice drinks served to kids (it stimulates the sperm to
become mobile—kids too I guess). I don’t know why I brushed, except it seemed wrong to taste any man’s semen other than Tim’s.
Swallowing was okay, tasting was wrong. Simple morality. I inserted the sponge and returned to the bed.

“You brushed your teeth,” he said.

“Are you insulted?”

“As long as you didn’t gargle, too.”

“I didn’t. Although good dental hygiene is next to godliness.”

He smiled. “You must be a good dentist.”

“I try to be. I care about my patients. I want them to get better.” I did, too. I wanted to heal them all, not just cure
whatever they’d come to see me about—usually a sprain, a fracture, a cold, a migraine—but all the symptoms I saw in them they
didn’t yet see. Future problems. Sometimes I’d suggest a remedy for something other than what they’d come to me about. This
was never appreciated. A person comes to a doctor, especially to a walk-in clinic like ours, for
one
ailment. One thing wrong can be fixed, they figure, no big deal. But if I mention something else, like a dark mole or unusual
heartbeat, there’s resentment. Two things wrong is a pattern, the breaking down of the body, the rapid slide into the grave.
When I’d complained to Carol about the lack of gratitude of patients for my free medical advice, she’d laughed. “Just fix
what’s broke. Then recommend they find a family doctor to get a complete physical. And make sure you write that recommendation
down in their file. Otherwise, they may come back and sue you later. ‘You taped my sprained ankle, doctor, why didn’t you
notice I had a brain tumor?’ ”

“Are you a good anthropologist?” I asked David. I hugged a pillow to my chest. I couldn’t talk with my nipples so hard and
exposed.

“Not really.” He reached under the covers and found my hand. He massaged my fingers while he talked. “A good anthropologist
observes and studies, gathers information without intruding. I’ll give you an example.” He twisted around, reached over the
side of the bed for his pants. He dug into the pocket. “But first, you mind if I smoke?”

This took me by surprise, both his timing and that he smoked at all. “Well, yes. I’m allergic to the smoke. Before my father’s
bypass surgery forced him to quit, I couldn’t breathe around him. My mother had a stroke recently, so she’s had to quit, too.
Weird that they didn’t quit when I was growing up and choking in their faces.” I sighed. “I’m rambling. Anyway, sorry about
the no smoking. You can have some peanut brittle.”

He dropped his pants on the floor. “No problem, I don’t
smoke. See, that’s what an anthropologist does, gets information without altering the thing he’s observing. I just got all
kinds of information about you and your family and the conflicts between you. And all I did was ask if you minded if I smoked.
See what I mean?”

“Yeah, you’re kind of a sleazy con man.”

“Kinda.” He dropped his head back onto the pillow. “A good anthropologist remains hidden in the shadows—”

“Like the Klingons’ cloaking device that hides their ships.”

“Exactly. We watch, we gather, we report. And from those reports maybe we all learn something about what we have in common
and what we don’t. What is our human nature and what we just make up. Like that serial kidnapper terrorizing Santa Barbara.
Is rape natural or is it social? With some animals, rape is necessary to release certain chemicals in the female to physically
allow intercourse. Without rape, the species would die. What about humans, though? What about us?” He leaned over, kissed
me quickly, then flopped back on the pillow. “See, that’s what makes me a lousy anthropologist. I don’t like to simply observe
daily life. I like to stir it up. Yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater and see who are the tramplers and who are the helpers.”

“What about the trampled? Aren’t you responsible for them?”

“Definitely. It’s a selfish methodology, more to satisfy my own curiosity than add to humanity’s knowledge. I never said I
was altruistic.”

I peeled back the blanket and bedspread to reveal his bad leg. The pattern of scars seemed human-made, not natural. “Is that
what happened to your leg? You satisfied some forbidden curiosity?”

He nodded. “Partially.” Then he pulled me down on top of him. We kissed. I felt the nudge of flesh behind me. I lifted myself
up onto my knees, rocked back, and guided
him inside me. I felt a rush of satisfaction I hadn’t felt in Mexico, like snapping in the final piece of a large and difficult
jigsaw puzzle.

His hands reached up and held my breasts while I raised and lowered myself. I wasn’t sure whether he did it as erotic stimulation
or to keep my breasts from jouncing up and down. Either reason was nice. I leaned into his hands so I could shift my hips
and begin rubbing my clitoris against his pubic bone. It didn’t take long. I rocked and rubbed, lost in the rhythm of movement
and sensation. I felt like a bubble of lava in a lava lamp, floating up and down. I was so lost in my own vaginal mantra that
I didn’t even realize he was ready to come until he was doing it. His hips thrust up against me, nearly bucking me off, but
I contracted and held on. My orgasm began just as his ended, and I twisted side to side until I came. I kept coming in a long
series of waves, like a radio station that keeps fading in and out of static. Another image came to me. I was a little girl
at the river near where we lived. The river was cold because it came down from the mountain. We kids had a thick and scratchy
rope hanging from a tree branch that reached out over the river. There was a giant knot at the bottom of the rope to rest
our feet while we swung out over the river and somersaulted into the cold water. I had never been afraid to let go back then,
but right now, in my mental picture, I was clinging to the umbilical rope for life. I kept swinging out over the water, farther
and farther. Just when I decided I couldn’t let go and I would have to drop back on the shore, I saw Mrs. Hudson and my mother
smoking cigarettes together. Mrs. Hudson flicked tarot cards at me and the edges cut my skin. Without thinking, I let go and
plunged into a bone-rattling orgasm that brought tears to my eyes.

I rolled off David and dropped to the mattress, exhausted. He pulled me next to him and sighed. “Say something
quick before I start to get mushy. I’m feeling very mushy.”

“How’s your prostate?” I said.

“The scars on your leg,” I said. “Tell me about them.”

He sighed. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t. I want you to want to tell me.”

“Another women’s magazine test?”

“I thought you said you were feeling very tender.”

We were in the bathtub. It was a small motel tub and took some strategic shifting of butts and angling of legs to get us both
in it, facing each other at opposite ends. We used my citrus shampoo to make it a bubble bath, so there was a strong scent
of oranges. One of David’s feet was propped on the rim of the tub, next to my head. The other foot nudged my hip. My feet
were on his chest and occasionally he would rub my toes. The water was filled to the very top of the tub and sometimes when
we shifted position, water would slop over the edges onto the floor.

“Speak,” I said, “or forever hold your peace.” I flicked some suds into his face with my toes.

“Okay, here’s what happened. I was living with the Moki tribe in Brazil. It was supposed to be for a year. Not much is known
about the Moki because they live so deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle. In fact, the Brazilian government didn’t even
know they existed until a few years ago. The university considered it quite a coup for me to get myself invited along.”

“How much did you pay them, or was it all charm?”

He laughed. “What do you pay people who don’t know what they don’t have? What could I offer them that they hadn’t lived without?”

“Mexican hookers?”

He shook his head. “They marry young and practice monogamy.”

“I don’t know. Flashlights, knives, beads?”

“Stories.”

I made a face. “Stories? What do you mean ‘stories’?”

“Water’s cold.” He sat up, opened the drain, turned on the hot water, swished it toward me. An underwater current of warmth
swirled against my skin. He churned the water to make more bubbles. “I heard the government was sending in a medical team
to inoculate the Moki. Now that civilization knew about them, it was only a matter of time before contact brought with it
new diseases that might wipe them out. The problem was, no one spoke the Moki language except the Moki, and they didn’t speak
Portuguese. That’s where I came in. I found out about a boy who spoke Moki, who was in fact one of them before he’d run away.
He’d been living in Rio de Janeiro for four years without ever telling anyone about his people. He taught me the Moki language
and since I also spoke Portuguese, I volunteered to accompany the medical team as translator. While we were there, I told
the Moki stories from our people. They loved them.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Anything I could think of. Biblical ones at first, just to see if there were any parallel stories in their own canon. Then
Arabian Nights
stories. Brothers Grimm. Peter Pan went over well. My last night I told them
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and something that started: ‘Listen to the story about a man named Jed. Poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed….’”

“You told them the
Beverly Hillbillies
as an example of our culture’s storytelling?”

“They loved it. Jethro is a god there now.” David closed the drain and turned off the hot water. Each movement washed sudsy
water over the tub’s edge onto the floor. He repositioned himself, head back against the tile wall. “Anyway, they were impressed
enough to ask me to stay
to tell them more stories. I bartered my way into a year’s sabbatical with them, as long as I promised to tell at least one
new story every night. Let me tell you something, you think you know a lot of stories what with all the books you’ve read,
television and movies you’ve watched. But within a couple of months I was doing episodes from
Charlie’s Angels
.”

“Is that how you got the scars? Telling
Charlie’s Angels
reruns?”

David closed his eyes and slid under the water. He popped up again dripping. “I refused to have sex, that’s why they did it.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

“Are you sure you’re not confusing it with something that happened to Farrah Fawcett?”

“I told you, the Moki marry young and cherish monogamy. Adultery is considered a major crime, not just against the families
involved, but against the tribe itself. You threaten everyone’s family when you commit adultery. The punishment is mandatory:
the man is fined heavily and the woman is gang raped by every other male over twelve in the tribe.”

“Jesus. You’re kidding.”

“Well, put it in perspective. The ancient Hebrews believed an adulterous wife should die and the husband was allowed to kill
her without any public trial. The common method of the time was to strip the woman naked and send her through a crowd of men
and women neighbors who would cut off her ears and nose, then stone her to death. In eighteen B.C.E. Rome, a law declared
that any man who knew of his wife’s adultery had to divorce her or be executed for condoning the behavior. If a man dallied
with one of the wives of a chief of the Solomon tribes in the Bougainville Straits, his penis was cut off and he was forced
to throw it in a fire himself. Then he was thrown into a pit with the woman and boiling water was poured on them. Then they
were buried alive.”

“Where do you come up with this gross stuff? It’s so grim.”

“I don’t come up with it. I study it. Anyway, this gang rape thing is not unusual. The American Cheyenne tribe did the same
thing.”

I reached under the water and found his penis, which was soft. “Just checking to see whether you were getting off on all this.”
I took my hand away and leaned back. “Go on. The scars.”

David squirted shampoo into his hair and began massaging his scalp. Suds plopped from his head into the water. “A girl in
the Moki tribe committed adultery. She was fourteen and had been married for three years. All the men were lined up to rape
her as punishment and they insisted I join them. No exceptions were allowed, since the community had to show a united front.”

“But you weren’t part of the community, you were just an observer.”

“They don’t have that concept in their language. As far as they were concerned, I’d joined their tribe. They didn’t think
that I’d ever want to go back to my world, not after I’d experienced theirs. They were always sending young, single girls
to my hammock for me to have sex with to see if I wanted to marry them.”

“And did you have sex with them?”

“No. They were too young.”

“So you were celibate for the six months you lived with them?”