My Three Husbands

by Swan Adamson

  Something was going on inside me. I felt like I was waking up. My senses were quickening. It was like drinking two double espressos double quick. But below the excitement there was this jangle of panic, as though I’d caught a sudden glimpse of a shadow I didn’t want to see. I wasn’t sure where the fear was coming from. I felt it the minute I saw those words: River of No Return Wilderness Area.

  As a honeymoon destination, the name sucked major league. It couldn’t have sounded more doomed unless it was called the You’ll Never Get Back Alive Wilderness Area.

  Stop worrying, I told myself. It can’t be that dangerous. You’re with three strong men. They’ll take care of you. You never have to leave your luxurious honeymoon suite. You can hole up with your handsome new husband and fuck like bunnies for three days straight. With time out for a facial, a hot-mud wrap, and a massage. And it won’t cost you a penny.

  I drew my legs up, pulled a blanket around my shoulders, and tried to think calming thoughts. How would we make love the first time? A beautiful suite would be so different from my dinky, messy apartment. I pictured us in a huge room with log walls and a stone fireplace. I might even wear the scratchy Patty Cakes shorty negligee that Bruce gave me. I’d been dieting all week, just in case.

  A real honeymoon! I tried to imagine how it must have felt for my mom, when Daddy took her off to San Francisco for their honeymoon. It must have been weird. She told me that Daddy couldn’t get a hard-on. “So out of guilt,” she said, “he ate me out and I had an orgasm that way.”

  A couple hours later we were, like, totally zonked and totally wired. That buzzy feeling of being exhausted and wide awake at the same time. With nothing to do. I looked up and saw the dads holding hands. They looked so sweet. Whitman’s hand rested on Daddy’s thigh.

  It gave me this crazy idea.

  We were covered by a soft Pendleton blanket, so the dads couldn’t see what I was up to. I moved my hand down to Tremaynne’s thigh. Gave it a slight squeeze.

  Tremaynne looked at me through half-closed eyes. I kissed him, darting my tongue into his mouth to turn up the heat a little. Then I began to feel him up. First his thighs, hard as the rocks he loved to climb. Then up, slowly, until I’d cupped his crotch. I felt around until I had his prick between my fingers. He spread his legs and slid his hips forward.

  The only sound was the tires humming on the asphalt.

  I rubbed and squeezed and felt his cock blossom and grow hard. I stroked and teased it. It was like playing with the stubby barrel of a revolver. Then I left it, swollen against the buttons of his jeans, and traveled higher, to his chest. I inched a finger into his soft flannel shirt until I reached a nipple. His were almost as sensitive as mine.

  My accomplice shot me a secretive glance, then turned to look out the window as I started a light, circular movement with the tip of my finger. The nipple stood up at attention. Tremaynne closed his eyes and lolled his head back as I worked my magic.

  “You’re certainly quiet back there.” Whitman turned around. I snapped my eyes shut. “Oh. They’re sleeping,” he whispered to Daddy.

  I opened my eyes again. I could see Whitman’s hand moving higher up Daddy’s leg. Daddy gave him a quick, bemused glance and glanced into the rearview mirror. I closed my eyes just in time.

  When I opened them again, I could see what Whitman was doing.

  The dads were totally unaware that I was spying on them as I jerked off my husband in the backseat.

  The landscape changed. It wasn’t wet, like on the west side of the mountains. It was dry. High desert, Whitman called it. “Part of the Great Basin,” he said.

  Whatever that was. In my mind’s eye I saw a huge sink.

  Tremaynne was totally engrossed in a set of maps he’d pulled out of his backpack. The maps were covered with intricate dots and squiggles and symbols marked in different colored inks. I didn’t realize until then just how interested he was in where we were going.

  My handsome new husband wasn’t being very communicative, so I tuned into the Dads Channel in the front seat. Whitman and Daddy seemed to be having a good time. They ignored us completely. They gossiped about friends, talked about their work, discussed financial issues, wondered when the economy would get back on track, made fun of politicians, laughed and carried on like newlyweds.

  Whitman told Daddy there was a secret hot springs somewhere in the vicinity of Pine Mountain Lodge. One of his “sources” had told him about the springs but begged him not to reveal their whereabouts in his travel story. Whitman was determined to find them. “These springs were sacred to the Indians, evidently,” he said. “The Indians called them si’pi.”

  “What does that mean?” Daddy asked.

  “Big Fart. Big Stink. Something like that. Sulphur, I guess.”

  I surreptitiously studied my new husband as he studied his maps. Would we ever have the kind of relationship the dads had? Driving someplace fun with twenty years of shared experiences behind us? Getting excited about a secret hot springs?

  My thoughts drifted back to my familiar world. Phantastic Phantasy, where I’d be if I wasn’t on my honeymoon. In the bright desert light, with not a building in sight, that furtive half-lit world of shooting sperm and pineapple-vomit-smelling disinfectant seemed a million miles away.

  I couldn’t stay in the adult entertainment industry forever. I had to for a while, because I lived from paycheck to paycheck. But maybe, eventually, now that I was remarried and my bankruptcy was behind me, I could think about doing something more challenging. I could go back to school. Get a degree in something.

  I didn’t know what Tremaynne would contribute to our new life together. We’d never talked about finances. His bankruptcy made him very cynical about banks, corporations, and credit-card companies. He had a whole theory about it. “They set up a trap and push you into it,” he maintained.

  He’d started charging when he was going to school in Berkeley. Now he was totally poor. And though I sometimes wondered why he didn’t go out to get a job, like everyone else in the world had to do, I also admired him for doing the kind of environmental work that didn’t earn him a dime.

  “Some jobs you can’t do for money,” he insisted. “You have to do them because if you don’t, everything on Earth will be destroyed.”

  I didn’t feel that same kind of urgency myself. But I was glad someone else did.

  Whitman was the navigator. He directed Daddy to turn right and left. We began to climb higher, through a dense pine forest.

  “Ponderosas,” Whitman said. “Wow! Look at that view!”

  I looked. Tremaynne looked up from his maps. All I saw was, like, nothing. No houses. Just a hundred or maybe a thousand miles of hills and pine trees with snowcapped mountains way in the distance. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I half-expected to hear the theme music from Bonanza and see the three Cartwright boys gallop past with their dad.

  This forest was different from the lush wet forests west of the Cascades. Or so Whitman said. He and Dad were talking geology, history, the evolution of plant species.

  “These ponderosas are amazing,” Whitman said. “They’ve learned how to benefit from disaster.”

  I asked how. Whitman explained that we were in a very high and dry area that got hit by lightning a lot. The ponderosas shed their needles, so lightning fires periodically swept through the dry forest floor, burning everything to a crisp. The trees, he said, had figured out an ingenious method of survival. “They use the fire. The fire is necessary to eject the seeds from their pine cones.”

  “Adaptive evolution,” Tremaynne said.

  Whitman turned around in surprise. “That’s right. Adapt yourself to your environment.”

  “Adaptive survival,” Tremaynne said. “If fire or something is your enemy, put the enemy to work for you.”

  “Are you saying that the trees can, like, actually think?” I asked.

  “They can think, communicate, and remember,” Tremaynne said, turning back
to his maps as if I’d offended him. “They eat, shit, breathe, and grow, just like us.”

  We left the main road and drove across a flat arid plain. Then suddenly Daddy made a sharp turn and we began to switchback down the side of a steep bare canyon.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Whitman said in his tourist-guide voice, “welcome to Hell’s Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America. The cliffs of this precipitous canyon drop one mile to the Snake River below.”

  Once I saw what was happening, where we were going, I couldn’t breathe right. The road was gravel. Narrow. There weren’t any side railings. A mile below us a river sparkled like a silver thread in the sunlight.

  The grade was so steep that the car began to skid and slide when Daddy put on the brakes.

  “Stop!” Whitman cried. “John, stop for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m trying to,” Daddy said, tapping the brakes as we skidded faster and faster. “It’s the gravel.”

  I was scared shitless. I needed something to grip. I lurched over to grab hold of my husband. His mouth was open.

  “If we go over the side,” Whitman shouted, “everybody jump out!”

  “We’re not going over the side,” Daddy said. He brought the SUV to a stop about two inches from a precipice, at the outside edge of a hairpin curve.

  We all sat there, real quiet. Daddy was clenching the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.

  “You need to put it into four-wheel drive,” Whitman said.

  “I can’t, until we get around this curve,” Daddy said. “It needs to go forward about a yard before it engages.” His voice was measured. He licked his lips and stared into the distance.

  “Why don’t you two get out of the car,” Whitman said to Tremaynne and me. “Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Daddy said through clenched teeth.

  “There’s no reason for us all to die,” Whitman said. “If you go over the edge, I want to go with you. But they don’t have to.”

  Daddy, clutching the steering wheel, looked stiffly in his direction. “It’s not that bad, Whit. I can back up from here and make the turn.”

  “You might slide on the gravel,” Whitman said. “Those treads are shot. It’s my fault. I should have put on new tires.”

  “Whit, I can do it,” Daddy insisted.

  “Get out of the car,” Whitman said to Tremaynne and me.

  “Should we, Daddy?”

  Whitman snapped, “I am your daddy in this case. Get out!”

  Dad One caught my eye in the rearview and gave a tense nod.

  “Here’s my cell phone in case anything happens,” Whitman said. “All the important phone numbers are programmed in. Call everyone and tell them I was happy right up to the last moment.”

  “Whitman, for Christ’s sake!” Daddy barked. The veins were standing out in his neck.

  “You inherit the house,” Whitman said to me. “The lawyer’s name is Jack Sullivan. Sullivan, Delaney, and Yost. Now go.”

  I felt like we had to move slowly, carefully, or something would be thrown off balance and the car would tip over the edge. I carefully cracked open the door. The second I did, a hot, violent gust of wind blew in and the door flew open. Tremaynne and I slid out. Stood on solid ground. Beneath the loose gravel, the packed-dirt surface of the road was slippery as a greased waterslide.

  Whitman called out, “Take the picnic basket just in case. There’s foie gras and gherkins—”

  “Whit, shut up!” Daddy bawled. “Venus, close the door. You two get out of the way. Way out of the way.”

  “Daddy, be careful!” I had a sudden horrible vision of the car toppling over and rolling down the canyon wall into the river. I couldn’t look, but I had to. I could see the dads in the front seat, their faces anxious.

  “Maybe you’d better get out,” Daddy said.

  Whitman shook his head.

  It was completely still, so quiet I could hear my heart thudding. I’d never seen so much clear blue open sky in my life. The light poured down in such a way that you could see everything clearly for miles around. There weren’t any trees in this canyon. There was no hiding.

  Another hot blast of wind came whistling down the gorge as Tremaynne and I trudged up the steep, slippery road.

  “They’ll be okay.” I tried to sound confident. I turned back to look at the car idling two inches from the edge of eternity. “My dad’s a really good driver.”

  “Give me that cell phone,” Tremaynne said.

  “Why? It’s—”

  “I just need to make one quick call,” he said.

  I didn’t want to piss him off, so I handed over Whitman’s phone.

  “You wait here,” Tremaynne said. “I’m going to climb up that rock and see if anyone’s coming. Just in case.”

  I wanted him there, at my side, but I didn’t want to seem needy. And who the hell did he need to call out here in the middle of nowhere on his honeymoon?

  I stood there, hair blowing in the hot dry wind, looking out across Hell’s Canyon. The world seemed to be slipping slowly out of control. I was losing all sense of what was familiar. I hate that feeling. It scares me. I wanted a cigarette bad but was afraid to light up. With my luck, the wind would blow a spark to the grass and set all of Hell’s Canyon ablaze.

  For the next few minutes my attention was evenly divided between watching the dads and watching Tremaynne. My husband, the rock climber, clambered to the top of a huge boulder and stood there like a statue, silhouetted against the sky, the cell phone held to his ear. He was talking but I couldn’t hear a thing except the wind hissing past my ears.

  Down below me, the SUV lurched backward and stopped. Daddy turned the wheels completely to the left. He evidently thought better of it and turned them straight again. Then he gently began to back up. The SUV made it about a foot before the rear wheels started to spin.

  I wanted to pray but didn’t know how. When people are raised with religion, they know who to pray to. They’re plugged into some God up there, and they can beg him for his help. I didn’t grow up with any of that. Carolee was more interested in tarot cards, psychics and astrology. And you can’t pray to a sign of the zodiac.

  I shielded my eyes and glanced up at Tremaynne. He was gone. The panic tapped me on the shoulder. Then I heard a roar and looked down to see the SUV shooting backward, spitting out gravel and dust. Daddy got it far enough back so that he could make a tight right turn around the hairpin.

  A second later the SUV stopped and both dads got out. Whitman waved his arms and shouted something, but the huge windy silence of the canyon sucked his words away. He ran around the SUV and hugged Daddy.

  There was a crunch of gravel. Tremaynne stood at my side. He didn’t say a word. He offered nothing. We silently headed back toward the dads.

  Whatever you do, I said to myself, don’t ask him who he was talking to in the middle of nowhere on his honeymoon.

  Chapter

  8

  Tremaynne refused to eat foie gras.

  “You know how they make it?” he asked me. I shook my head. I only had foie gras when I was with the dads. I loved it, and I wanted some real bad.

  Tremaynne gripped my throat and forced my head back, demonstrating the process “They take this funnel,” he said, “and jam it down the goose’s throat and force-feed it all this corn. Am I right?” he asked Whitman, who’d suggested we stop for a picnic.

  “You could just eat the gherkins and the French bread,” Whitman suggested. He glanced at Daddy—that secret glance couples use to say things without saying anything.

  “They force-feed it,” Tremaynne went on, going through the motions of viciously grinding corn down my throat, “and don’t let it move. When its liver turns all swollen and ready to burst, they kill the goose and use the diseased liver for that shit you want to eat.” He released my neck. “Go ahead. But not me.”

  I coughed. His neck grip wasn’t exactly gentle. I felt the sharp tang of passion. For a moment my husb
and turned into a handsome but brutal stranger. The stranger had me in his power. He was going to force me to strip, slowly, and perform lewd sex acts. What would I do?

  “Maybe there’s a restaurant somewhere,” Daddy said. He was getting a little punchy, the way he does when he needs protein. “Maybe they serve salads.”

  “This does not look like salad country,” Whitman observed.

  We’d come very slowly, in four-wheel drive, down to the bottom of Hell’s Canyon, another charming-sounding honeymoon destination. There were a few box-like houses scattered along the river but no sign of a restaurant.

  “Let’s ask that man.” Whitman pointed to a skinny old guy standing next to a dusty pickup truck. He had a wide red nose, close-set eyes, and was wearing an orange vest and feed cap. Daddy pulled over and Whitman rolled down his window. “Excuse me, sir,” he called. “Do you know if there’s a restaurant around here? Someplace that serves salads?”

  The man looked at him as if he were crazy. “Restaurant?” he said finally.

  “You know,” Whitman said, “plates, silverware, food?”

  “Nothin’ like that around here,” the man said, tilting his hat back and frowning. “Gotta go to Snakebite.”

  Of course we do, I thought.

  “And where’s that?” Whitman asked.

  “Keep goin’ and you’ll come to it,” the man said. He turned away, reached into the back of his truck, and pulled out a rifle.

  We all stared at the gun.

  The man grinned, showing a mouthful of stumpy brown teeth. “Bear season,” he said.

  “Oh,” Whitman said. “I didn’t know there were any bears left around here.”

  “Yup. And I’m gonna shoot me one of them motherfuckers right between the eyes,” the man said. He raised the gun and looked through its viewfinder. “And if I don’t get me a bear, maybe I’ll get me one of them tree-huggers.” He put his gun down and bent forward to squint into the back seat.