Enduring (41 page)

“Miss,” she corrected him, listening to all of the birds in all of the trees singing all manner of birdsong.

“Do tell?” he remarked, beaming. “Why, how come such a keen-lookin gal like yoreself happened to turn out a maiden lady?”

She didn’t like that expression, “maiden lady,” although she preferred it to “spinster” or “lone woman” or even to “bachelor girl,” so she was vaguely grateful for his tact. “Nobody ever asked me,” she lied to him.

“Aw, I aint about to swaller
that
,” he objected. “Such a peachy dream as you, them fellers down to Demijohn must all be old men or else their eyes is all on the wrong side of their heads.”

“They are just all already married,” she said, and added, “like you.”

“Why—!” he exclaimed. “What gives you the idee I’m married?”

“I haven’t yet met a good-looking man who wasn’t.”

He blushed and asked, “You think I’m good-looking?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” she affirmed but cautioned herself to take it easy and let him do the courting.

He blushed even deeper, and coughed, and hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, let me tell you something, honey, and I don’t keer if you believe it or not, but
you
are the most scrumdidliumptuous lookin creature I ever seen in all my born days.”

That made her laugh at length before she said, “Nobody ever called me that before.”

He joined in her laughter and said, “Well, they just aint any words. You’re cute as a bug’s ear.”

She liked him. She liked the simple kinship of the situation: he and she happening to be alone together, fishing at this spot on this morning when all God-fearing people were getting ready to go to church. He was so easy. If he had snapped his fingers and commanded her to disrobe, she would have shed her clothes right then and there. It seemed like a different lifetime in which she had last experienced the bodily thrill that was Sonora’s practically every night. Through her head paraded all the men she’d had any contact with for the past ten years, and not a one of them was as becoming and worthy as this fellow named Dolph. But she had to remind herself that it was like fishing: she had to let him play her before taking the bait.

He seemed to have lost his interest in fishing for fish and was more interested in fishing for her. “I declare,” he remarked, with a wink in his voice if not in his eye, “aint you a little bit skeered to be way out here in the woods all by yoreself?”

“No more scared than you,” she rejoined.

“Some old goat might could come along and try to lead you astray.”

“I expect he’d find me hard to
lead
.”

“Never kin tell when there might be one of these here
sex fiends
a-runnin around loose.”

“Life is full of dangers.”

“Why, for all you might know, I might even be one of them myself.”

“You sure don’t much look like one.”

“Caint never tell. Them that don’t look it is probably the most likely.”

“Do you
feel
like a sex fiend?”

“Well, by nature I gen’rally feel pretty harmless, but any man would get to feelin kinda roosterish after lookin at you long enough.”

“Now that’s too bad, because roosters can’t last more than a poke or two.”

He blushed but said, “Haw! I happen to know one particular rooster who kin shore last a lot longer than that.”

“Braggart,” she could have teased.

“I’d be right glad to prove it to you.”

Her wit could not come up with a good retort to that.

“How about it?” he asked, no longer joking, and she had to say something to that.

“Fast, aren’t you?” she managed to say.

“Thank you. Folks up home is always saying that Dolph Rivett is slow as molasses in January.”

In view of her decision to do it, she wondered why she was being so coy. What did it matter? Perhaps now that he had sunk the hook into her, she had to put up a little resistance. But her memory of Sonora’s most recent description of making love with Hank Ingledew made her begin to breathe deeply.

“All right,” she said, after the deepest of breaths.

Dolph Rivett looked at her strangely, not understanding, uncertain. “All right
what
?”

“All right prove it.”

“You honestly mean it?”

She nodded, smiling her best smile.

“You mean…” he was suddenly uncomfortable, not expecting her to give in so readily. “You mean me and you…I hope you understand what I’m talkin about…now do you honestly mean that it’s all right with you if I…if you would…if me and you were to…to sleep…?”

“Not sleep.”

“Naw, I mean…you know…”

“I know.”

He stared at her for another moment, and then asked, “You’re not a…you aint…you’ve done it before, have you?”

She nodded.

“I—” his voice was apologetic. “I aint got no…none of them…them things, you know, them safes…you know, them rubber—”

“It’s all right,” she assured him.

“Are you sure?” he persisted. “If you wanted me to I could…I could…stop beforehand…before…the seed…”

“I just finished my monthlies,” she prevaricated.

“Well now, that’s just jim dandy,” he said, beaming, and began to look around him, as if looking for a nice spot to do it on. He did not notice that a fish had taken his bait and was pulling it down into a hole in the bottom of Ole Bottomless.

“You’ve got a bite,” she said. She couldn’t help pointing it out to him.

“Huh?” he said, a little panicky, perhaps thinking she’d made some accusation which precluded the anticipated tumble.

“There,” she said, pointing out the line being unreeled and disappearing into the water.

“Shoot fire!” he exclaimed, and grabbed up his rod and began reeling it in. After a minute’s work, a large fish appeared, a gollywhopper, the biggest catfish you’d ever seen, thrashing around and trying to pop the hook loose from its lip. Dolph Rivett was as a man torn. He would love to land that prize cat, but feared that during the several long minutes it took him to play the fish out Latha might change her mind, and thus he’d lose the larger fish.

“Aw dad hackle it!” he said and jerked the line hard to remove the hook from the fish’s mouth. “What’s a ole fish at a time like this?” He reeled in his line and put down the rod and asked her, “What about that willow thicket over there?”

She shook her head. “The chiggers’d chew us alive.” Then she pointed up at a ledge on the side of the mountain. “There’s a little cave up there.” Immediately, she regretted saying this. If she supposedly came from Demijohn, how would she know about the cave?

“Just lead me to it!” he said, rubbing his hands together.

The two of them climbed up to the ridge, a hundred feet above the creek, and walked along beneath an overhanging ledge until they came to what was not actually a cave so much as a nook, a recession in the rock where ancient Bluff Dwellers had had a shelter. The dirt floor of this cavern was still littered with the fragmented relics of this strange non-Indian tribe that had owned the Ozarks in the time of Christ. With his foot Dolph swept an area clean of bones and shards.

His black and tan mongrel had followed them. “Go tree a bird!” Dolph commanded it, but it sat firmly on its haunches with its head cocked to one side, curiously watching these two crazy people. She didn’t mind, but Dolph did, and eventually he threw a piece of two thousand-year-old pottery at it, and hit it, and it yelped and dragged itself out of sight.

She unbuckled her belt and unbuttoned her jeans and sat down on the dirt floor to tug them off her legs, and then sat upon them as a mat of sorts. The light in the cavern was dim, but not dark, not really dark enough. For this reason, Dolph Rivett could not remove his trousers; he merely unbuttoned his fly. She got a fleeting glimpse of his privates before he knelt before her: one of the heavy hirsute stones was still inside the fly, the bolt swollen and bolt upright, taut and straining.

He didn’t bother with any preliminaries, assuming she was already aroused and ready. The sight of his equipment would have anointed her passage with some erotic dew, but not enough, not enough to ease his sudden hard deep entrance. It hurt. She cried out. It had been so long since she last harbored a bloated penis within her that there simply wasn’t room.

He stopped. But only for a moment. Yet a moment of welcome respite that gave her time to expand and to lust and to seep. Then he, having groaned repeatedly and having mumbled “Ah, Lord Jesus,” could have begun to pump, from the first stroke driving at full speed, an unvarying tempo of banging jolts. She wanted to churn in response, but because of his weight upon her and the hard earthen floor beneath her she couldn’t. So all the work was his. And he didn’t last very long. Just as she began to catch sight of the top of the mountain, he, crooning “Goody,” to the beat of each shuddering sock, disgorged his gob into her and she felt the pulsing spasms of the unloading, the throbs shortening and weakening, until there was no movement or sound remaining but his breathlessness.

He rolled off of her, and lay by her side.

After a while, she said, not bitter nor even teasing, but dispassionate: “Rooster.”

“I beg pardon, Sue,” he responded. “I reckon I just had it stored up too much.”

Then he talked to her about his wife, who, it seemed, would only let him “bother” her about twice a year.

The two of them lounged for a while on the dirt floor of that rock shelter, talking to each other about themselves. She didn’t learn much of consequence. Then they talked, idly, about various things. He even talked about politics. “I been readin in the papers about this here
D.A
. feller up to New York, fergit his name, but they say he could shore give old Franklin D. a run fer his money.”

“Dewey,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the one. I heared tell that one of them gallop polls says that Dewey’d git fifty-two per cent of the vote right now. ’Course, I’ve voted Democrat all my life.”

By and by, she impulsively reached out and wrapped her fingers around his drooping piece. It was what she thought was the first time she had ever touched one. What Sonora had told her was called “petting.” And because it was also what she thought was the first time she’d ever had an opportunity to take a good look at one up close in the light of day, she began to study it while she fondled it. He was fidgety at first, because nobody had ever fondled, let alone studied, his member. But then he became less fidgety and more fiery as he felt himself beginning to stir beneath her touch.

She was thinking that it was a durn shame that society compelled a man to keep his genitals always covered, because there was something uniquely handsome about a smooth, sleek, sinewy, tall-standing stalk of healthily pink flesh. There was a carnal grandeur about it unequaled by any of Nature’s other deliberate inventions.

And she didn’t need to tell him that she needed it.

He started to bestraddle her again but she asked him if he didn’t mind taking off his pants. Blushing deeply, he did.

Then he was into her again, and this time, because there was no great pent-up gism thrashing to break loose, he managed to last a good bit longer, his strokes steady and not quite so violent—a mechanical piston, a skin-sheathed ramrod. If she had bothered to count, she would have found that he kept that up for nearly three minutes before reaching the point where he quickened, and his breathing began to puff “Goody, goody, goody” to the beat of his beats, and her cinctures expanded and contracted with the throbbing of his spewing.

But this time, when he rolled off of her, she had the mountaintop in sight and she rolled with him and pinned him down and climbed aboard, and in the brief minute left to her before his magic wand lost its turgid magic she rode upon him, tilting and pitching her hips, fashioning her own elaborate alternating measure, with irregular stresses that sung a cadence of touch and sensation her strings could be moved by. She would have been so busy constructing this great resplendent ascent of the mountain that she would not have noticed that Dolph Rivett was beginning to say “Goody goody” yet again. All that she could have been conscious of, as she closed her eyes and wildly wrenched her bottom, was the surge of her substance merging with all nature, while in the background the cockles of her heart rollicked and roistered.

When she came to, how much later she did not know, she found that Dolph had soaked his handkerchief in cold creek water and spread it over her brow and was fanning her with a frond of fern.

“Why, I declare, Sue, darlin,” he declared when she opened her eyes, “if you didn’t just pass plumb dead out. Give me kind of a skeer. But, boy golly, I liked to of passed out myself.”

She rose and put her jeans back on, and climbed down to the creek and found a spot along the bank where a spring flowed into it, and she cupped her hands and lapped up a refreshing drink.

“You know somethin?” Dolph, at her side, said, “That there was the first time in my life I ever let off even twice, let alone
three
times. Holy snakes! Who would a guessed I had it in me?”

She retrieved her fishing pole and her catch, and asked him a test question: “I wonder how far it is from here to Stay More.”

“Couldn’t rightly tell,” he replied, to her relief. “If we was up on the road I might could spot a landmark, but it’s hard to say from here. I reckon it aint more’n maybe three, four mile, at the most. You aimin to head that way?”

“No, I’m just going on back down to Demijohn.”

“Sue…could I…I got me a horse…could I sometime maybe ride down to Demijohn to see you?”

She pretended shock. “Lord have mercy! Dolph, my daddy and my six brothers would shoot you on sight if they even caught you talking to me!”

“Well.” He seemed dejected for a moment, but then he brightened. “Is there any chance you might be comin back here fishin again?”

“More than likely,” she replied.

“Then maybe me’n you might could…might could
get together
again.”

“Sure.”

“Then I’ll be lookin fer ye, Sue. I shore am much obliged. You’ll never know what a good turn you did me.”