The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  He was about to come; for the first time he looked fully into her face. His eyes had been alternately open and closed, and he’d caught only glimpses of her fleeting, tortured expressions. The pleading, mesmerized, wanton and primitive abandon he saw there grabbed hold of his incipient climax and began to pull it out by the roots. He heard a voice which he was dimly aware was his own and then another higher-pitched one joining it in a complex oratorio in which the two of them somehow managed to suggest an entire orchestra and chorus performing some orphic, primeval rite of spring.

  Finally it was too much, too much! They exploded together. He plowed himself again and again into her uplifted, offered vagina. She received and absorbed every thrust, every last shuddering spasm—rolling them over inside herself in that feminine reciprocity which converts thrust and counterthrust to concentric waves of pleasure.

  That was the first time they made love.

  Chapter 28

  Eugene woke before dawn as usual but didn’t get up immediately. He lay on his back, thinking about last night. What a way to break a fast! Blood-rare steak washed down with chili and champagne after a seven-day juice fast.

  Intimacy: the woman had invented the word. Any sense of inhibition she possessed must be as easily removed as her clothes. He hadn’t seen any sign of it. Her seductive and conspiratorial smile, promising everything and delivering it, was like the light at the end of a tunnel which became a cavern into which she’d beckoned him farther and farther down into the bowels of the earth. Finally, he’d come to believe that she was the cave—while the light, that mischievous beckoning smile, was the spirit of sex itself.

  Some things about the night he only vaguely remembered. And even only vaguely, only fragmentally, they astounded him. She’d shown him—or at least led him to see—parts of himself he’d forgotten were real. Oh, they appeared in occasional fantasies; but somehow he’d come to disassociate himself from such appetites and feelings, as if they existed only in fantasy and not in the flesh itself. Well, now he knew different again. Now he remembered what it felt like in the bones and sinews to surrender to the fire. God bless that down-winding sulfurous cavern leading to the pit. If that heat couldn’t burn out the impurities in a man’s soul, nothing could.

  He rolled carefully onto his side so as not to disturb her and lay there with his arm propped beneath his head watching her sleep. Contemplating the paradox of the clawing, insatiable demon of last night lying here so peacefully beside him now called attention to the scratches on his back and shoulders. He leaned over and placed a kiss at the dimpled juncture of her lips with the same delicacy as dawn’s roseate materialization among the evergreens.

  No, dawn had a lighter touch. His provoked a murmur and smile of contentment. Without opening her eyes or even rising from sleep, she held out her arms to him. He embraced and grew hard against her; they made love with such soft tenderness that she never completely awakened. And he fell asleep inside of her without ever coming.

  Half an hour later they woke up in each other’s arms. The sweetness in Catherine’s breath had been transformed by sleep and last night’s wine and marijuana to a pungency that had something of the fire and brimstone of her cave in it—maybe even a bit of the dragon’s musty lair. But there was something funkily attractive about it too, and it made him less self-conscious of his own, which also reeked of the night’s gamy pleasures.

  Of course after they’d kissed long and deeply, odor became indistinguishable from taste, and there was no part of the other’s body that each of them had not tasted and found delectable in one way or another. It was the residue of sleep which Eugene now found so fascinating. Something of its intimacy and mystery remained after all the other scents and flavors had been assimilated, so that he had the sense of meeting and kissing a part of her that, even after last night, she still hadn’t revealed and surrendered until now. There was a body heat in her mouth—not so much of passion, more like the spot where one has lain all night.

  They’d had their fill of love-making. Actually, Eugene was getting ready to begin all over again when Catherine stretched and sat up; but he was willing to wait. “Am I hungry!” she said, completing another luxurious stretch. “I’ll fix some eggs if you’ll make the coffee.”

  “Deal.” He stretched and sat up himself, relishing the brisk morning air on his bare, honorably wounded shoulders. Then they both slipped into clothes that were stiff and slightly damp from the night and started moving around to get warm.

  Their preparation and hearty dispatch of breakfast was wordless. Catherine seemed preoccupied; she returned his smiles almost perfunctorily. Her eyes didn’t linger and even when looking into his own left only enough room for one-way traffic. Once or twice a genuine warmth appeared in them but couldn’t sustain itself. When he focused on it, she blinked and averted her eyes. They sat and drank their second cups of coffee in silence.

  Catherine was experiencing the letdown that inevitably followed her sexual conquests. With occasional exceptions, due usually to a particular lover’s extreme skill and charm, the more difficult and eagerly anticipated her triumph, the bigger the crash afterwards. She’d recovered from a number of these downfalls in time to salvage a romance or friendship, but that didn’t make them any less painful or depressing when she was going through them.

  And since she’d never been able to sustain a long-term relationship, she had begun to wonder whether the pit of despair following most of her peaks with a new lover established an initial pattern, as regular as a sine wave, which the relationship was never able to outgrow. No matter how long the high lasted when it returned, it was always shadowed by its mirror image. The more intense or beautiful the beginning had been, the more devastating the end was likely to be.

  At least this was her frame of mind at the moment. Part of her recognized this as self-pity and knew it wouldn’t last. But another part looked morosely back across her life through this dark lens and saw it at its worst. Having once again achieved her heart’s desire, was she willing inevitable suffering on herself as well? Was she really willing to repeat that whole cycle again?

  Her depression wasn’t due to any disappointment with Eugene. He was a very giving and sensitive lover. His open, maybe slightly puzzled smile elicited a wave of compassion and self-disgust. Why was she ignoring him to sit here feeling sorry for herself?

  Eugene would have asked the same question had he known what was going through her mind, but he didn’t have a clue. He had assumed that last night would bring them closer together if anything. That’s certainly the way the morning had begun.

  It occurred to him that they’d made no plans for the day. In fact, now that Catherine had shown him this special place of hers—which had become rather special for him as well—they had no plans pending at all. What about his original purpose in coming up here, B.C.: before Catherine? He’d come to accept her as possibly connected in some way with his trip to Shasta. Fine, now it was time to follow his own instincts for a while. Since she knew the mountain, Catherine had been calling most of the shots, but what was he looking for?

  “...Wasn’t it Friday the guy at the health food store said this woman has her meetings?”

  Catherine looked up in surprise. “You’re not thinking of going are you?”

  He hadn’t been actually; the previous encounter had just popped into his head. “I don’t know. It might be a good place to start.

  “Start what?”

  “Looking around—gettin’ to know people up here a little. Learning some of the Shasta ‘lore’.”

  “I thought you’d already started,” she said.

  He realized the thoughtlessness of his remark but plunged ahead anyway. “Well of course—you’ve given me an unforgettable introduction.” He held her with a smile. “...Now I want to know everything. Maybe get some other perspectives too—some other viewpoints.”

  “What do you mean?” Catherine asked.

  “Well, do you know any of the people up here?”


  “I never go into town—not much anyway. I know some of the store owners, but I don’t come up here to socialize.”

  “I know you don’t; I’m not interested in socializing either. But it might be interesting to talk to this Roberta or whatever her name is.”

  “You really think so? What about?”

  “What harm can it do?”

  “It’s just a waste of time, that’s all. I’m not interested in spending an evening in some fireside chat—with anyone that clown at the health food store recommends particularly. It’d drive me up the friggin’ wall.”

  Eugene looked at her curiously. She was getting worked up about this. Something in him wanted to push her; he asked himself where the impulse was coming from. He was annoyed with her for some reason—maybe her moody silence, maybe the snotty way she looked down on the people up here. Roberta’s meetings had sounded pretty quaint for his tastes too. The picture he’d gotten was of some dowdy old lady surrounded by moony-looking kids and faded flower children gone to seed.

  But for some reason he was becoming more curious by the minute—or at least more determined not to let Catherine have her way just because she felt above these people. If she could give him one good reason for not going, or even just make a decent request that they spend the evening doing something else, no problem. But she wasn’t going to get her way with arrogance and sarcasm.

  “Tell you what,” he said—“let’s check it out and if it turns out to be as bad as you think it’ll be, we’ll go. If it’s nothing more than a fireside chat, I won’t be any more interested in staying than you will.”

  It was becoming obvious to Catherine too, of course, that this stupid Mt. Shasta conclave wasn’t really the issue here. She could see as readily as Eugene how excessive her reaction was. There was something deeper that had been triggered by her preconception of some ego-driven woman mesmerizing a small following of spiritual groupies, in the sort of Aquarian Gothic setting whose tawdry pretension would have brought Evelyn Waugh to his knees. What was she really reacting to? She and Eugene had been fencing with this, circling it, from the beginning. Now that they’d gotten their (or her) sexual infatuation out of the way, the antagonism had resurfaced.

  She didn’t respond to his suggestion and neither of them spoke for a while. He knew she was going to refuse. This ridiculous incident was going to blow up into a real confrontation. Why?

  He’d opened himself to this woman—and God knows he’d had his doubts about doing so, it hadn’t been easy...was a one-night stand all she’d been interested in from the start? It wasn’t just the little that had been said; there was more to come, he could sense it. And not just from her side: he could feel himself closing up, an old bitterness rising. He hadn’t experienced this for a long time, but then it had been three years since he’d let himself become this vulnerable again.

  Surely, though, he’d learned a few things since then. Surely he possessed more self-mastery now. He couldn’t control what was going on with Catherine, but he sure as hell ought to be able to handle himself. This was no more than a misunderstanding, one of those rough places that two people getting to know each other intimately are bound to run into. She probably felt vulnerable herself and was covering up with this sullen and defensive withdrawal; he could understand that. He spoke as gently as he could, putting as much acceptance into his voice as he knew how: “Can you tell me what you’re feeling?”

  “I just...don’t know who you are really—do I? I hadn’t expected to meet anyone up here this summer, I planned to be by myself. In fact part of the reason I came up here was to get away from someone else....I guess I’m beginning to wonder what we have in common.”

  So there it was. “Beginning? That was the first thing I asked myself,” he said, more intensely than he’d intended. “I’m just now getting to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “We’re a bit out of sync aren’t we.” Catherine’s head was cocked to one side and she looked up at him from beneath her brows and a lock of hair.

  “I don’t know,” he said impatiently, “are we? So what—that’s common enough at this stage of the game, isn’t it?”

  “What game is that?” Now it was Catherine’s turn to be surprised at the sound of her own voice. What a bitch! How would he take it?

  Eugene just snorted—a humorless one-syllable laugh. “I’m beginning to wonder myself.” There was another silence. They were both holding onto their coffee cups though they’d been empty for some time. “Well, you’re free to do whatever you want, of course,” he said at last, getting to his feet. “I’ll go rinse these out and we’ll get outa here.” She handed him her cup and he took both of them down to the stream.

  Catherine watched him walk away but her thoughts were elsewhere. That broad retreating back was a recurrent image in her life. The first time, it had been her father’s. It suddenly occurred to her that her first memory of him was from this angle. The recollection startled her. What in the world had prompted it? Was the memory genuine or a fabrication? Was there some connection between...Eugene and her father? The thought was as depressing as it was disgusting. All of a sudden she realized how empty she felt inside...how dead.

  Into this emotional vacuum, like lava inundating a depression in the earth, a wave of bitter sorrow swept into her stomach. The searing pain was unbearable. Taken by surprise, she gasped and clutched at her belly. She saw herself as a small child—ignored, forsaken. The scalding pain erupted into her throat, producing a lump as big as a tumor, until she was actually afraid of choking on it.

  A whole chain of broad backs stretched back to her infancy. Stark, faceless, brutal, they were symbols of denial: of self, of human warmth, of comfort and security. For a child, any child, to retain this image as symbolic of the parent—and the world at large. For an instant her sense of anguish was excruciating. And then the sorrow turned to anger.

  She wanted to vomit. The tumescent lump was malignant with repressed sadness; she wanted to tear it from her throat. In a seizure of blood lust she longed to rip these unseeing, uncaring backs from her memory forever. Her skin was on fire, her heart was pounding out some frenzied war dance. Alarmed, Catherine struggled to calm herself, hugged her arms tightly around her to restrain this furious drummer. She took a deep breath... and then another. Gradually she regained a measure of composure. But she was shaken by the experience. She had to walk.

  Eugene saw her start up the trail as he was returning from the stream. She’d covered a hundred yards by the time he got back to the tent. Christ, was she training for the Olympics? She disappeared around a bend, and he stood there for a moment watching the empty trail, then began to take down the tent.

  Chapter 29

  The Gang had spent the night at Panther Meadows. Other than missing its outhouse, which they’d toppled and destroyed in a bike-pulling contest, the campground wasn’t too much the worse for wear. But the bikers themselves were coming down with a virulent and highly contagious variant of cabin fever, to which the compulsive city-dweller is susceptible when subjected for any length of time to the ravages of nature. The wilderness heebie-jeebies. The Leader, nervously now, watched his authority continue to erode.

  He figured he had another day at most to find the loner and his girlfriend before he’d have to give in to the Gang’s demands and return to L.A., where they’d been headed when Eugene crossed their trail. He couldn’t bear the thought of letting this guy get away. He had to nail him. Why? He didn’t know why; he didn’t ask himself. What good were reasons against a feeling this powerful? Would they satisfy it or make it go away?

  To the Leader reasons were bones you threw to people who’d rather gnaw on something than devour it. Maybe bones held flesh and blood together, but they didn’t satisfy a man’s hunger. He’d done well enough so far with just his instincts to guide him. They hadn’t failed him yet. And now they were driving him to find this guy, hunt him down. Later, after he’d won and the Gang had taken care of his victim, the Intellectua
l could pick through all the bones he wanted to.

  Early this morning before anyone else was up, the Leader had taken out the maps and tour guides he’d grabbed three days ago at Mom ‘n Pop’s. He didn’t bother reading about all the “beautiful and interesting places to see in our fair country”; he spread everything out on the ground, put his left hand in his jacket pocket, and began to trace the outspread fingers of the right lightly across the maps. He did this over and over again, his movements random, smooth and unforced, his eyes glazed, almost as if he were in a trance. And while his right hand glided over Mt. Shasta’s streets and roads and trails, the left fondled with cool detachment an object he had picked up in the same reflexive manner as the maps. It was the broken hose clamp from Eugene’s bike.

  Imperceptibly, the random movements began to concentrate on one map in particular and then on just a corner of the map. This area, about the size of a saucer, continued to shrink in size until it had become no larger than a silver dollar, then finally no bigger than a dime. At this point he opened his eyes. What he was looking at was a topo map of the Mt. Shasta area, a section from the U.S. Geological Service’s system of topographical quadrangles into which the whole country is subdivided. It had obviously been prepared for local hikers because recommended “Short Hikes” were circled. There were only two words in the square to which his index finger pointed: “Whitney Falls”.

  Now the Gang was ready to move out. The savage sounds of Harley engines started and revved up were like the feeding or mating challenges of ferocious animals. Never had Panther Meadows seemed more aptly named.

  “Goldilocks, you ain’t comin’ with us!” the Leader yelled to Pretty Boy. “I want you t’ go show our friend in town how we feel about false information! We’ll meet you there later.”