Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  She felt as much an outsider coming back to the darkness of Spirit Ridge as she’d felt at the Whites’. The silence and camping-out feel of the Ridge was a downer. She had to admit that to herself as she’d approached R’s yurt. It was the largest of the little homes on the land, and had niceties like an indoor sink with a drain to take water outside, though no running water, and a built-in couch-bed downstairs, where Katie slept when R wanted her own space up in the loft.

  She was a little surprised to see that Abeo was there, sitting next to R, on the couch-bed. She’d been totally blown away to hear that Abeo had come to live on the land. Trannies were cool, but she had not imagined the mostly separatist land women, and especially the man-hating R, would want to live with one. Truth? The thought of an M to F trannie kind of creeped her out. Like, was there still a man in there? A wolf in sheep’s clothing?

  R had covered the big bird, so the yurt was quiet except for the music in her head—maybe the X-Files theme—something a little spooky anyway. The air was nearly solid with woodstove heat, way hotter than R normally kept it, but she still felt chilled. The place had that vegetarian food smell so unique to lesbian kitchens, a highly spiced, carefully herbed meatless food smell that made her want to gag. Or maybe it wasn’t the smell that was gagging her.

  “Wassup, Abeo?” she asked.

  She’d learned right away that R wasn’t someone who wanted hugging and kissing, even after a long day apart, so she smiled her hello across the room as she set down her equipment and took off her leather jacket. The land women had objected to that, to wearing the skin of an animal, but it was so kickin’, Katie tried not to think about where it came from. If she dwelt on that kind of thing, she’d never eat another steak.

  R and Abeo were now talking low. She wondered if there was something left over she could nosh on, and trained her flashlight over the countertop. A vase held gayfeathers, that purple flower Donny and Chick grew out in front of their store, like their own personal gay flags. R and her guest had been eating brie with hunks of bread, and carrot sticks. And chocolate-covered strawberries. She hadn’t seen those foods in R’s cabin since their first days together. It must be R’s take on guest food, she thought, a little smug that she was no longer a guest in her home.

  “Okay if I mac out on some of your cheese and bread?” she asked, sampling it.

  R said, “Bring it over here.”

  As she assembled a plateful—one strawberry, two, three, four—they whispered more. It sounded like R was importuning Abeo. R, who asked no one for anything, drew what and who she wanted to herself. What could she admit to needing from this maricon—no, from this trannie?

  She’d sat down and taken a bite of seeded baguette when R, her voice fluidly imperious, said, “Katie, we want you to film us.”

  “Cool. Bring up the lights. I’ll shoot as soon as I get supper down.”

  “Making love,” R added.

  Anger flushed her body until it burned. “Run that by me again? No, never mind.” She stared at R, looked at Abeo, then back to R. “Is this your mellow mode of giving me my walking papers, R?”

  “I told you this was the wrong way, Snake Lady,” said Abeo. “You don’t tell somebody this shit like saying you’re going out for a quart of homo and the daily rag.”

  Katie pulled her gaze away from Abeo, who really did have a skin color she’d love to film. “You two are—” She didn’t want to show or know how shaken she felt. “You’re—”

  “We’re two feathers blown together in the breeze,” R said. “There is no we. What I’d like you to film is a trans male-to-female lesbian and a female-born lesbian making love for the first time.”

  “Why?”

  There was a pause, then R explained in her fluid hypnotic voice, “I believe it’s important, Kate. Stripping the mystery will lead to acceptance.”

  Wind blew through a gap in a window held to the wall with a hook and eye. The candle went out. Katie remembered what R had told her about her first woman lover, the eleven years they’d been together both during and after their marriages, R’s expectation of forever and the quick surprising death of Birch from brain cancer. How R claimed that her heart had gone away with Birch into an unexpected kind of forever. There’d been no process, as there was for a living ex-lover, to reclaim her heart. None.

  So this was what was left for R, solemn semiritualized physical intimacy that evolved from her politics. She’d sensed it in their own lovemaking, the purposeful give and take that dampened what she felt. If it had dampened R in the right places, that would have been cool. It was—she couldn’t tell if it was her or if nothing turned R on. She’d be shaking with lust, and R would have on her smile, all Mona Lisa.

  Katie pitied her and recognized what she should have seen right away—that no one was home. Had R ever wanted or even tried to recover her heart so it would be available to give again? Maybe she should be kind and satisfy this new craving of R’s. Who was she to put R down for her carnivorous ego? Wasn’t it always about our own egos? If she chose to be kind to R, wasn’t she actually trying to gain favor with her? Didn’t it all come back to keeping our look-goods intact, whatever pretty words we used?

  She heard a plastic lighter flick. Abeo brought the candle back to life with a yellow disposable.

  It took a minute before Katie found her TV studio laugh—her canned laughter, she called it. “I’ve heard a lot of wild projects, girls, but this one’s beyond weird. You want me, your lover, to film you taking a new lover?”

  “Would that be a problem for you, Katie?” R had a way of asking something with a tone of such intense caring that a negative response became an admission of ineptitude and weakness.

  Katie tried not to take the bait. “I don’t know. It would be an experience. But me siento mal,” she added, knowing they wouldn’t understand that she was saying she felt bad. She thought of the material she couldn’t use from Chick’s attack on M.C. “Since it’s so important, what if I show it for, say, educational purposes?”

  “No. The images will be of our bodies. It would belong to us, although we might choose to show it.”

  “Now I’m an unpaid hired camera. Are you sure this isn’t your way of telling me to fade?” she challenged, sugaring her voice to sound like her bitchy Aunt Luz. Her dad had disappeared, but his family had stayed around and kept tight with her mom.

  “Move out? No,” exclaimed R, her voice infinitesimally louder. “I want you to stay, Kate. And I want Abeo to join us.”

  Abeo looked small. She was biting her lower lip and toying nonstop with a yellow scarf tied around her neck. To hide her goddamn Adam’s apple, thought Katie. Abeo smiled apologetically at her.

  “So we’re going to be a threesome?” Katie asked, trying the concept on.

  “I suppose that could happen,” R replied. She went silent, eyes toward the ceiling, like a supplicant asking for celestial guidance. “Yes. I’d be open to that. But for now, I’d assumed we’d interact one on one.”

  “Oh? Like Abeo on you? Me on you? You, R, being the operative word?”

  “Whatever spirit moves us,” R answered with smugly pursed lips.

  “Fuck that shit,” said Katie, and she realized that she’d shredded the bread on her plate into little pellets of dough, and knew that she’d counted all fifteen of them over and over.

  Emotions shifted inside her. One—anger, two—hurt, three—pride, four—rebellion, five—revenge, six—pain; she felt like a damaged kaleidoscope.

  The candlelight burnished Abeo’s dark skin. She wore a mint-green vee-neck sweater and black ladies’ slacks, the kind with a permanent crease. Her hair was covered in a patterned yellow and black scarf that almost matched the scarf around her neck. She’d told Katie she was forty-six, but there wasn’t a gray hair in sight or a line on her delicate triangular face. There was an athlete in that transformed body. She guessed Abeo could probably give as good as she got in bed.

  Is that what R wants, Katie wondered? Or was it the
novelty? The audience? She realized that she didn’t know a thing about what made R’s brain click and whir. Tonight she questioned whether R even had what she needed to learn. Was this business with Abeo the mark of a deeply spiritual woman, a woman who possessed true serenity? Of someone who professed to be at one with the universe? Or was R at heart an excitement junkie like Katie, who wore her mantle of composure to cover this up?

  There was R’s need for frequent new lovers, a need Katie had hoped would subside for a few years at least. The argumentative nature that kept everyone around her in a turmoil of decisions, changes, and efforts to please her. There were her projects in the community, which she’d start, then abandon to underlings who practically fawned for approval at her follow-up visits. There were her disappearances to unknown rendezvous. For all they knew, she was reporting on the lesbian-feminist underground to the FBI. That would be enough to feed an excitement jones.

  If R turned out to be a fraud, where did that leave Katie, the almost big-time sophisticated journalist who’d given up her TV career to do what she believed in? Oh my god, she thought, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve gone all idealistic on myself.

  But R was no fraud. The woman was as sincere as she knew how to be. Katie wondered how far she had to go to learn what R could teach her. Did this adventure with Abeo have something to do with being open and accepting? God, she was so confused.

  She was reminded of a brown-skinned Latina she’d loved to distraction for three months. How they’d danced in Connie’s single bed—sisters, twins, two halves! The nights had been bright with fierce music. They’d played Gloria Estefan and Kim Carnes until the lyrics were imbedded in her brain for life. Connie’s hair chopped and dyed—yes, mint green. They’d been sixteen, sweet sex-crazed sixteen. And the girl had gone straight.

  That interlude had made her half-crazy. All she could do afterward was pace—around the trailer, around the park, around school and the neighborhood, though she’d had to curb that when men tried to pick her up. She’d fling herself to the floor of the trailer, cheek against the rough braided rug, and lie there, not daring to rise until the flood of pain had passed. Her skin had felt flayed, her heart scored, she’d been insane. “So you’re having a breakdown,” from one of Melissa Etheridge’s songs, filled her head when she thought back to that time.

  No! She thought. Not again. She would not let R take her down into a mental snake pit like Connie had, like others had since then. Like poor sweet Jeep almost had until Katie ditched her guilt and adopted R’s policy: everything happens for a reason which will be revealed some day.

  This was not a ride she wanted to be on, this plunging roller coaster of emotions. No! She had work to do. She had a name to make for herself so she could keep working, so the man in his many guises, corporation or non-profit or government, would pay her to accomplish her goal. She would tear the hypocrisy off the face of Amerika. Like Melissa Etheridge sang—she’d talk about how the bigots paid their dues and never had to get their hands dirty, paid some crackpot organizer to rid the world of queer vermin, Hispanic vermin, the plague of dark-skinned vermin. All those people who didn’t see her, Katie, because she was not like them. But she saw them, all right. Oh, yes, she saw them for what they were, and with her Sony she was going to show every hateful sneer, lustful leer, every bald spot, every hair on the bellies she despised. It was what she’d been born for, and she was damned if anyone would sidetrack her, even R. Love the spirit, leave the danger alone, she told herself.

  Abeo was a fucking man. She didn’t believe his trannie bull. He was only another man chasing sex or a mother or a new turn-on, and she was damned if she’d watch the moves of a man in a woman’s body, submit to the touch of a man released from a male body. She would not encourage R’s fascination with this new kink.

  Or should she film it, she asked herself. If she said no to this, would R shut her out? I’m screwed either way, she told herself. Either I give her what she wants or I lose what I want. How was this different from the world she’d left? Couldn’t she avoid compromise anywhere?

  Damn R. She had no business messing with people’s hearts like this. Truth? Maybe she should capture what she saw and turn it loose on the world some day. Show up this craze where boys thought they were girls and girls thought they were boys, as an attempt to make sense of gender and try on different bodies now that unisex clothing was an ancient rebellion.

  She thought of Jeep’s appealing innocence and how she’d wanted to protect her. No, lesbians were vulnerable enough. Transsexuals too. They didn’t need one of their own queer ilk exposing them, explaining queerness away. She wanted nothing to do with this one. They could have their fun. She had enough on her plate. She would not cower. If R blasted her out of Spirit Ridge, she’d have a strong clue that R didn’t have what she was looking for.

  “You’ve told me, R, how you like to go over every edge you come to.”

  “So you’ll do it,” R said, eyes on Katie’s hands.

  “We have different edges. You don’t ask me to go over yours, and I won’t ask you to go over mine. Deal?” Like a sleepwalker, Katie turned away, picked up her jacket and the Sony, and walked to the door.

  “I’m drawn to the unique,” R called to her back, as if afraid that Katie was criticizing her. “Change is challenge. I like my challenges.”

  Kate turned back to the room, to the candlelight’s macabre shadows. This entanglement would gut her. No, she thought. No, no, no male flesh would touch hers. She felt sick to her stomach.

  “I’m a living, breathing woman, R, not some forbidden fruit to be tasted, not a wild thing to be imprinted. You enjoy your challenges, but I’m going to accomplish what I need to, not do the wild thing with every player that comes down the pike.”

  When the chill evening air hit her she wondered if, without a witness, R would play out the scene. There’s something wrong with this picture, she thought. Did R pick me or my camera?

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Second Story

  “You okay?” Chick asked in a mumble as Donny eased out of bed.

  Donny bent back, nudged the crystal necklace over, and left a kiss at the hollow of Chick’s throat. “I can’t sleep worth a damn tonight.”

  “Full moon,” Chick said before she turned her face back into her pillow.

  Donny was hot and itchy and damp in hard-to-reach places. She tiptoed into the sitting room overlooking Stage Street. Almost silently, from long practice on these sleepless nights and from years of doing shift work, she opened the window high. Chick was right. The moon was showing her stuff, clouds like wispy gray scarves floating across her face. The windowsill was wide enough to perch on. She looked down at Stage Street in the white moonwash. Beyond it the freeway was almost empty, one car buzzing by like a bug in a hurry.

  It had been a month since the M.C. bust. Chick hadn’t even known Donny had been part of it except that she had to make a statement and, because she was so often a contact in the bigot battles, the whole thing was all over the papers.

  “I know Joan appointed you deputy so you can do drug prevention talks, but why did you get involved in all this rough stuff?” Chick had asked, looking completely baffled.

  “I wanted to help,” Donny told her, but didn’t say that it was Chick she’d wanted to help.

  Chick had put her arms around Donny and held her close. “That man was dangerous.”

  “Not as dangerous as letting him do his thing.”

  Chick’s hold tightened. “I’m glad you didn’t get any more damaged than putting a second joint in your shoulder.”

  The emergency room doctor had popped that sucker back in, and, aside from some lingering soreness, M.C. might never have fallen on her. And while Chick wasn’t one hundred percent, she was laughing more, and touching more.

  “I’m so glad,” Donny said. With Chick, it was never the details that mattered. They had too much respect for each other—and that wordless thing, trust—to need to know everything. What did th
e talking, Donny thought, was their love.

  Damp as it often was here, and hot as menopause often kept her, tonight’s warmth was soothing. She recalled a day, at least a dozen years ago, that had felt something like this. She and Denise Clinkscales had lived in a railroad flat on the South Side of Chicago.

  “Where’re you taking me for our anniversary tonight?” Denise had asked. She had a Sylvester tape playing and was wiggling her bottom to the beat. “Three’s my lucky number.”

  Except for the music and Denise’s hot-to-trot energy, the wide-windowed apartment sometimes felt peaceful after the streets. Denise kept it shining clean and neat as a magazine ad. Donny had come home from her job as graveyard fry cook. Her whites were spattered with grease, her hands smelled like old pan drippings, but the apartment smelled like fresh clean clothes.

  “Out? Why? So I can show you off?” She pulled the slip Denise had drying on a black wire hanger across the bedroom door to her nose and breathed in the soap smell. “I love all your frilly stuff hung up to admire.”

  “You think I’m doing this for you, woman?” Denise replied with a swat. “Get your hands off before I have to go down and wash it again.” That was one reason they’d taken the place despite the elevated rumbling by non-stop—a communal washing machine in the basement. “Where you going to take me for our anniversary, honey-boat?”

  “To this bed of ours.”

  “We do that every morning, woman.”

  Donny slipped to the other side of the room and pressed herself to Denise’s round butt. The iron gave off a damp steaming-wool smell that took her back to her coming up days. “You complaining?”

  Denise, tall as Donny, was able to rub her nightgowned bottom against Donny’s tummy. “You haven’t taken me out,” she went plaintively on, “since New Year’s Eve. Six months, honeypot.”

  Donny let go. “Don’t you love staying home?” She went to the window and thrust it up, dislodging paint chips from the sash. Daylight fell in. Balmy air, such as she smelled maybe once a year in Chicago, flowed over her face like an angel’s cloud. A jet made a clean getaway overhead, its roar buffered by the cries of kids on the street. She thought she could smell the lake. “Look at that sky! Our own second-floor place on top of the world, Dee. We don’t need some borrowed room or a crowded dance floor any more. We have our privacy and our cuddle-down time.” She spun around and struck the lead dance position, arms out. “You want to dance? Come to The Don! We’ll dance till night!”