by Leona Gom
“Delacour, look,” she whispered.
“Oh, my,” Delacour said. She came up and stood beside Bowden, watching.
“It’s hard to believe he can keep it all tucked away up there when it’s not in use,” Bowden said.
“You know,” Delacour said, “I’ve never actually seen one out like that before. Except in pictures.”
Delacour’s horse was straining forward for its water, snorting and shaking its head impatiently. It was also a male, but its penis wasn’t extended. Bowden set the water down in front of it, and it guzzled greedily.
“Is it safe to ride him when he’s like that?” Delacour asked, still watching the other horse.
Bowden laughed. “It doesn’t last forever, you know.” And even as she said it, the erection started to subside, and soon it had all pulled back inside.
“Very interesting,” Delacour said. “I hope it happens again.”
“Poor thing,” Bowden said. “It probably misses its mate.”
They went back to the bank and just stood for a while looking down at the river curling away into the distance like a thick blue string, at the deer, at the great, unpeopled emptiness around them. The sun lay itself across their shoulders like a friendly arm, and two white butterflies flickered in the grass at their feet.
Suddenly Delacour said, “Ah, lord, isn’t it almost too much? A surfeit of beauty!”
And then, her voice so impassioned that Bowden could only stare at her in amazement, she cried, “Oh, Bowden, I feel such a — such a restlessness in my life! I’m so hungry for everything, but all I consume leaves me wanting more. My life seems like just a series of things I have to rush and finish and then move on, when what I want, what I truly want, is to stop, to be satisfied, to be still.”
The air seemed quieter than before. Bowden waited a long time before she answered. “And am I just something to finish? Before you move on?”
Delacour turned, her face strained, the muscles at the corners of her mouth compressing the skin into bloodlessness. She lifted her arms, put them around Bowden’s neck.
“Of course not,” she said.
Bowden reached up, took hold of Delacour’s wrists and pulled her arms down. Her hands dangled from the cuffs of Bowden’s fingers as though Bowden had severed their nerves.
“You’ve been with that student, haven’t you? Why won’t you admit it?” Bowden said, trying to keep her voice calm, not allowing it to tremble.
“She doesn’t matter —”
“She matters to me.” Bowden let go of Delacour’s hands. She turned and walked back to the horses.
Delacour’s voice followed her, a rope, a lasso she was throwing to try to pull her back. “Bowden, listen to me. The others are just … transience, empty experience. But you, you’re — please, turn around, look at me.”
Bowden stopped, turned. She concentrated on her heart, beating slowly in her chest, as though if she didn’t will it to continue it would falter, stop.
“You’re at my centre, you’re my still centre.”
The horses, alarmed at the tense voices, the jerky movements, had been trying to back off from them, raising their heads and pulling at the reins tied loosely around the poplar trunks. Delacour’s horse had almost pulled open the knot, and Bowden, relieved at the excuse, hurried over and grabbed its halter. Delacour came and stood beside her, and they stroked the horse’s damp, satiny neck.
“Whenever you go with others I feel you’ve left me,” Bowden said.
She thought, with sudden sadness and yearning, as though of a long-absent friend, of the person she had been eight years ago, laughing at the foolish restrictions of a monogamy-bond. (Why would we need a monogamy-bond? We are everything to each other.) Monogamy-bonds had been, she knew, one of the things about which people argued all the time before the Change. We have eliminated so many larger problems since then, she thought — why did this one seem to defeat us?
Delacour was combing her fingers stiffly through the horses’s coarse mane. “How could I ever leave you?” she said. “Without you I’d be even more stupid and confused than I am now.” She fisted her hand in the horse’s mane, released it.
“You, stupid?” Bowden said. But she felt herself giving in.
“Yes, I am,” said Delacour. “In the ways that matter. You’re the wise one —”
“Wise!” Bowden snorted, but she was pleased at the word, even as she could see how it was manipulating her, because she knew in some way it was true, that she had a sense of her place in the world, which Delacour didn’t. Perhaps it came from holding in her arms every day the dying people of the world, giving them calm and comfort, and to do that she needed a calm and comfort inside herself, which Delacour, with her rummaging through history and sensual pleasure, could never have. A still centre: yes, she thought, I suppose that is what I do have, what I must have. But if that is true, then why do I fear so much losing Delacour, fear her choosing someone else?
“I don’t want us to quarrel, Delacour,” she said.
Delacour stroked the horse’s neck. Then she nodded and said, “All right,” as though something had been agreed, settled between them.
But we haven’t settled anything, Bowden thought unhappily.
They picked up their lunch packs, mounted the horses, and continued on, quickening their pace without really intending to. There was still an unease between them, but as the rhythm of the horses worked its way through them they began to relax, and by the time they reached the Trail Company’s midway cabin, where it was recommended they spend the night, Bowden felt comfortable with Delacour again. Comfortable, she thought — what did that mean? Did it mean she would be able to see Hythe leave her apartment again and say to herself, well, it doesn’t matter; Delacour will come back to me? She watched Delacour’s lean back rise and fall in the saddle in front of her. Comfortable: if that were only what Delacour wanted, too, everything would be all right.
“We don’t have to stay here tonight,” Delacour said, turning in her saddle. “It’s early enough; we can go on and camp somewhere.”
“I’d just as soon stay here,” Bowden said. “I’m rather tired.” It was a better reason to give Delacour than saying it would be safer at the cabin.
“All right. My buttocks are worn raw, anyway.”
They unsaddled and rubbed down the horses, and then they set up in the cabin, which seemed to have been prepared for them fairly recently, with new sheets and a full coal-oil lamp, an emergency beacon and radio, plasti-sealed pails of fresh water, and even, above the bed, a shelf full of books, including duplicates of their maps and instructions. They giggled and shrieked like children as they saw a mouse scuttling across the floor, and finally they managed to get it shooed out the door. They built a fire in the large cleared and charred area outside and ate their supper there, watching the flames send sparks into the darkening sky, and they talked of inconsequential things, careful not to be too serious.
Delacour had brought along some of the books from the cabin, and she flicked through them without interest until she came to a poetry collection, which made her exclaim, “Imagine finding this here! I remember reading some of her work when it was first discovered years ago. A pre-Change poet, early twenty-first century — not much work by our people survived from then.”
“Read me some,” Bowden said, lying back and propping her head on her bent arm.
Delacour leaned closer to the fire so she could see better and flipped through the pages, pausing to skim and then moving on. “It’s rather difficult,” she said. “Look at this one, for instance.” She tapped a page. “The explanatories take up more space than the poem itself.” She turned another few pages, hesitated. “Interesting passage here. Listen:
The squirrel my brother shot down with the .22
so the dog could play.
The dog just sniffed the dead fur
&nb
sp; & looked up the tree again, eye
cocked for the squirrel.
It is always in our damn heads.”
“The .22,” Bowden said, “is that a gun? So he shot the squirrel? Just for fun? How horrible!”
“Yes,” Delacour said. “But the rest of it — what a clever observation. The dog, you see, is only interested in what’s elusive, up in the tree, the idea of the thing.”
“Killing,” Bowden said, in her mind the squirrel still falling from the tree. “It’s what they knew best how to do.”
“I’ll find something less depressing,” Delacour said. She leafed through the book for some time before she chose one. “Here,” she said. “This one has love in it. It’s called ‘Gorgeous.’” She lay down and put her head in Bowden’s lap, holding the book expertly entwined in the fingers of one hand above her head. “It ends like this:
What are our chances.
What are our chances.
If our cancer can be removed without fear, under
local conditions.
The chromosomes unrolled and kissed,
until they are better.
& the woman gets out of the bed.
The blood on her legs, overflowing the small
stopper.
The bird risen in the branches.
In what book, concealed, is its name.
I river, I river, I river.
Trust the verb.
Motion
In the line, too, motion.
I love you. The book is ended.
the blood gorges gorges gorges the bed.”
Bowden looked at the page Delacour had read, the small print fluttering in the firelight. “I don’t understand it,” she said.
“Well, it’s how they used to write then. More symbolically.” Delacour closed the book and set it on her chest.
“All that about blood. What’s it mean?”
“It’s about menses. A celebration of it.”
“But why celebrate that? They didn’t have extractors then, so it must have been an inconvenience. I don’t understand.”
“I suppose the poem is asserting pride in non-maleness. It tells us to have courage, to trust ourselves. It’s about surviving, about curing what was wrong with that world.”
Bowden sighed. It was just something else of Delacour’s world she couldn’t understand, that made her feel inadequate, excluded. A still centre: yes, she remembered bitterly, I have a still centre — in a still centre nothing moves; poetry is nonsense, a nuisance of words.
She thought suddenly of how when they would go walking in Commercial people would smile at her, and how it pleased her, that they felt such a commonality with her. But she thought now that their smiles meant something else, too, that they claimed her as predictable and ordinary, boring. Strangers never smiled at Delacour.
Delacour turned her head, looked up at Bowden. “You’re more beautiful than any poem,” she said.
Bowden laughed, let the easy words reassure her. She pulled her hands gently through Delacour’s hair, snagging on a knot and working it slowly loose. She massaged her scalp, the back of her neck.
“Ah,” Delacour said.
The delicate colours in the sky drained slowly away, and it grew dark. They looked up at the spectacular stars, trying to find the old constellations. The moon had become entangled in clouds, looking like a great bulge of brightness in the sky. In the west Bowden saw a meteorite, such a brief streak of light it was hard to believe she’d seen it at all. They used to call it a falling star, she remembered. She looked into the dark forest, as though she expected to see it there, fallen, setting the trees ablaze.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, her hands freezing on Delacour’s shoulders.
“What?” Delacour leaped to her feet.
“There.” She pointed, but the two bright feral eyes she’d seen on the edge of the forest were gone.
“It’s okay,” Delacour said. “Just something afraid of us.”
But Bowden, chilled, insisted they go inside, so they poured water and dirt on the fire, Bowden shining the flashlight on the remaining coals even as she realized how absurd it was to illuminate what was already bright, until they were sure it was completely out, and then they moved their things inside. Bowden wanted to push the table up against the door, but Delacour laughed and said surely it wasn’t necessary.
They made love in the narrow bed, more hungrily than they had in a long time, stopping just before orgasm so they could begin again, their bodies like sweetness held in the mouth, brimming with juices saying swallow, saying now, saying yes and yes.
Delacour fell asleep almost immediately after, her hand still cupped on Bowden’s shoulder, but Bowden lay awake for a long time, thinking about what had happened during the day. She looked nervously through the windows, expecting a sudden wild face to appear. What she did see, finally, was a flare of sheet lightning on the horizon, and it made her get out of bed and stare anxiously out into the night. She hated lightning, could never forget it had killed her parents, her house ablaze when she came running down the thundering road from school.
A white bolt shot down the south sky. She trembled, clutched her arms tightly to herself. The cabin was in a clearing, close to the river — it was a bad location, she knew. And tomorrow, if they had to travel in a storm — She glanced at Delacour, soundly asleep, little snores puttering from her mouth, and she almost went to wake her, but of course it would have been foolish; what could Delacour do?
She watched the horizon tensely, her eyes circling the spot where the flash had been, but there wasn’t another. She stood there for about half an hour, shivering, afraid to go back to bed, as though it were her watching keeping the storm away. At last, the sky quiet and cloudless above her, she took a sleep-pill and went to bed, and the pill closed her eyes against the fear and let her fall into a thick, dreamless sleep.
• • •
IT WAS THE NEXT day they encountered the bear. They were about halfway between the cabin and Fairview, still early in the day, away from the river now, rounding a curve in the trail, and there it was, right in front of them, a large brown bear snuffling at something in the bushes.
The horses went wild when they saw it. Delacour’s reared, and she toppled to the side before she even knew what was happening. Bowden saw her fall and land with a rattly thud in the underbrush. She had no time to think of anything, then, except keeping her own horse under control, as it shied back and fought against the reins that kept it from turning and plunging after its companion down the trail. She couldn’t see Delacour at all.
And then the bear stood up. She saw it from the corner of her eye as her horse danced sideways — suddenly twice the size it had been four-footed, as tall as she was in the saddle, its huge head and predator’s eyes fixed on her.
The stunner, she thought, her mind lunging as desperately as her horse for safety. Keeping her left hand taut on the reins, she fumbled in her pack. She didn’t dare look down, and her fingers had to identify what they found — food pouches, papers, clothes —
The bear fell to all fours, and, keeping its head high, began to pad forward slowly, not toward Bowden and her frantic horse, but toward where Delacour had fallen.
“No,” Bowden shrieked. “No!”
Her fingers were almost at the bottom of the pack when they closed around something metal. It could be something else; it could be the flashlight, the radio band, the soap cylinders — but she had to take a chance and pull it out, spilling what was above it from the pack.
It was the stunner. She glanced at it, cold and alien in her hand. She had never held one before, let alone used one. It had a large round hole in one end, so she knew that must point at the bear, which had stood up on its hind legs again, directly across the trail from where Delacour had fallen. She settled the stunner into her hand, found a trigger
that must activate it, and aimed. She was a long way back now, and she knew it was useless to try to urge her horse forward, so she just had to hope she was still within range. She pulled the trigger. She felt a slight vibration in her hand, but there was no spurt of flame, no sharp crack of sound, and the bear did not change position. The batteries must be dead, she thought in horror, as she pulled the trigger again and again.
The bear sank down to all fours, and then, slowly, tidily, its legs folded themselves under, and it settled to the ground. Its neck and head reached forward as though they had no intention of following the direction of the rest of the body, but then slowly they, too, collapsed, extending rigidly along the ground. Relief flooded through Bowden, but she forced herself to remain where she was, waiting for movement in the bear. Only when she was sure did she slide down from her horse, lash its reins tightly around a tree, and run forward. The bear’s glazed open eyes watched her approach. When she was a few yards away she stopped and looked for the first time from the animal to the underbrush.
“Delacour!” she shouted. “Delacour!”
There was a small movement in the bush, and she ran toward it. “Are you okay?” she cried. “You can come out — it’s safe. Are you okay?”
Delacour stood up, covered in leaves and twigs, her face white. “The bear,” she said.
Bowden ran up to her, grasped her arms, the stunner still in her hand. “It’s all right,” she said. She led her slowly out of the brush, checking her for broken bones, but the worst she could find was a bruise along her right thigh. Bowden sat her down on the trail facing away from the bear, but Delacour turned and stared at the downed animal.
“You did that,” she said. “You knew what to do.”
“I have to go after your horse,” Bowden said, turning Delacour’s face to hers to make sure she understood. She might still be in shock. “Will you be okay here alone? I’ll leave you my stunner.”