by Bill Ransom
Maryellen came in soaked again. She took a towel down from one of the shelves by the sink and rubbed her shaggy hair as dry as possible.
“If you don’t get to it right away, it tangles real bad.”
Her wet hair haloed in the lamplight and Eddie felt as though he’d been there, with her, forever. Nothing he could do now would be wrong, or misplaced, because now there was no wrong. They had the two of them, the world that they made in the warm cabin, and whatever words they might conjure to lift them through the night and their private days ahead.
Jaguar, you haven’t got a prayer against us, he thought.
Maryellen said something, tangled up in her brush and hair, that he didn’t catch.
“What?”
She pulled her hair back in a long twist and flipped it over her shoulder.
“I said, ‘What are you thinking?’“
She draped her coat across the back of a chair and moved it close to the stove. Then she sat next to him on the small, badly worn couch. All this time he was wondering whether he should tell her what he was thinking, or whether he should try to make up something that would pass for intelligent, or romantic.
“I was thinking about the Jaguar, about us.”
He watched her hands that rubbed each other warm, and asked, “What were you thinking?”
“I was wondering whether things were going . . . well, whether things were going the way they’re supposed to. And whether this would make strangers out of us.”
He looked up at her eyes, dark and wide, and held their gaze in his.
She closed them, and whispered, “I don’t know where to start.”
Eddie took a deep breath.
“It might be a little early,” he said in a rush, “but we could take off our clothes and go to bed.”
Eddie said it as calmly as he could. He felt he had to say it, and he had to say it soon, or his panic would bubble over and he’d get too nervous to say anything.
Maryellen walked over to their packs without missing a beat.
“We’ll have to make up the bed. We can’t keep any sheets or bedding up here because of the damp, so we’ll have to zip our bags together.”
He helped her untie them from the packs, then he carried them up the ladder and spread them on the bed.
“They won’t fit.”
“What do you mean, ‘They won’t fit?’ It’s a double bed.”
“They fit on the bed, they just won’t zip together.”
“We’ll manage,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll be warm enough.”
She handed up their packs, then blew out the downstairs lamps. A light from the door of the stove played on the far wall and the odor of kerosene thickened the damp air.
When she came into the loft, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, nothing. I didn’t want to start without you.”
She sat next to him at the foot of the bed and began to undress him. First, his shirt-buttons. Then his shirttail and the t-shirt slipped over his head and off. As she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants her gaze never left his.
His hands stroked her shoulders and the back of her neck. She pulled the back of his pants from under him, then down past his knees to his boots.
He wanted to say something funny, to joke with her about leaving his boots for last, but he didn’t know whether it would hurt her feelings or not, so he didn’t.
The slick cover of the sleeping bag was cold and slightly damp under him. The chill of the steel zipper cut across the backs of his thighs. His manhood, which he’d expected to leap full and ready from his pants, just lay there getting smaller with the cold. He was glad that the light was so bad.
She unlaced his boots and pulled them off. They clunk-clunked to the floor. Then she pulled his pants off his feet and pushed him over onto the bed, pressed full against him, her cold belt buckle icing his navel, her cold nose against his neck.
He unbuttoned her shirt from behind and pulled it off. She leaned back against his chest, sitting there in the nest of his lap. Eddie unhooked her bra and felt her breasts toss and wobble against his arms as she leaned forward to unlace her boots.
“You feel good,” he said.
He kissed her neck and shoulders, down the small of her back, all the time keeping his arms around her middle, her breasts cradled on his wrists.
Maryellen undressed herself as he held her, then she lay back against him, not sure what to do with her hands. She thought the last time she had been held like this was underneath her mother’s robe in the morning, before her father came home from the army.
When her father drank, he hugged her or hit her, sometimes both. She got so she sacrificed the hugs to avoid the hits. Lately, if she didn’t get hit she got no contact at all, except for Eddie. He’d never been afraid to hug her, even in school. Even in front of her stepmother.
“Cold?” he asked.
He felt her shiver against him, felt himself cringe against the snow bank of a sleeping bag at his bare back. Electrification of so much skin-to-skin paralyzed him with its exquisite pleasure. Eddie was afraid to be this close to anyone, even Maryellen. Getting close meant losing to Eddie, and he didn’t want to lose her.
“A little,” she said.
They pulled back the top bag and were just sliding under the warm flannel together when the coffee-pot boiled over and steam exploded across the top of the stove.
“Jesus Christ!”
Maryellen was the first one out of the bag. She slid down the ladder, lifted the pot off the stove with his magazine and set it beside the stove onto the floor.
She flowed in a soft blur, the light of the bedside lamp behind her and the ripple of fire from the stove in front. She had shown him sepia-tone photography once and she looked like that now, a reddish aura highlighting her hair from the fire. Her smooth legs muscled in pleasing counterpoint to the sway of her breasts.
Maryellen skipped the step-and-a-half back to the ladder and scrambled up. Her chilled dark nipples fixed him in their wobbly stare.
Eddie caught her around the waist and, as she leaned over him to blow out the lamp, he kissed her belly. His hands slid from her waist to her strong hips, then to her thighs, behind and up into her patch of crisp hair.
She lost her balance and fell on him, and one of the slats at the head of the bed gave way with a loud crack and they tumbled head down into a flurry of sleeping bags and smooth bodies.
“Is that what they call an ‘icebreaker?’“ she laughed.
Eddie kicked the sleeping bag back off over his head and into a heap on the floor. He rolled over onto her, kissing her hard and deep, pushing his legs up inside hers. Maryellen tapped her tongue lightly on his, pulled her knees up beside his hips and felt him there, hard against her thigh. He tickled and tingled her until the tickle came out the tips of her nipples hard against his chest and out her toes. She heard herself sigh ah under her breath at first then ah and Ah as her hips and his hand danced their wet ballet.
Then he pulled away from her, kissed her gently and lay still.
“What?” she whispered, her mouth next to his ear. Her breath was shaky; it was hard to whisper. “What is it?”
Eddie didn’t know how to start.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “You can tell me.”
Maryellen’s hand swept his hair back, caressed his cheek.
“Oh, no,” he said. He rolled away slightly. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But . . . well. Well, I didn’t know whether you were worried about getting pregnant, so I bought some, uh. . . .”
“Oh.”
“Well, I have some of them in my pants pocket, if you want me to use them.”
She didn’t want him to use them. Jane kept a few in their locker, more for show than for emergency. This first time she was willing to take the risk just to feel him there inside her.
But here we are, she sighed, and recited the facts to herself. This isn�
��t a daydream, and I don’t want to get pregnant.
“Yes,” she said, “I guess maybe we should.”
Eddie rummaged through the pile of clothes for his jeans. She felt the supple workings of his thigh against hers as he squatted, going through his pockets, taking out the little silver packets, standing and turning to the bed, to her.
He’d never tried to figure one out in the dark or otherwise, but thought it might be easier if he could see what he was doing. The firelight flicker had died out, and holding the packet close to the window didn’t help.
By the time he got one unwrapped, guessed which way it unrolled and got sat down on the cold sleeping bag, his body quit cooperating.
It’ll stretch, he thought.
He pressed between her legs again, and she shifted her hips so that she was more comfortable with the break in the bed. His strong hand moved against her, his fingers tickling in and out. Then something that was not his hand pressed hard against her there pushing, pushing its way and not getting in.
She lifted her hips higher and felt his fingers on either side and slowly, slowly it pushed and filled her until she thought she’d break, and then his hand slid under her hips, held her tight to him and just as she felt the tickle opening up in her belly he sighed oh and oh and pressed farther inside her then relaxed, out of breath, against her chest.
Maryellen kissed his face and ear and neck, rubbed his back with both of her hands, shifted her legs slightly to relieve some of his weight and noticed, with the shifting, that the tickle was still there, only now it had a pulse. So she moved against him there a while longer, an hour longer, all night, tomorrow. Then Eddie moved away and lay beside her.
“Whew!” was all he said.
But he held her, and she liked that. His hand rustled along her belly, over and under her sweaty breasts, back to her belly. It dropped down into her hair, damp and matted, and traced circles around the tops and insides of her thighs.
She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to touch him there. Maybe the dampness, the layer of slickness that she felt cooling on her own skin, maybe the thing he was wearing kept her hands on his back and hips. She pressed against him again, her back slightly turned, and rested one hand on his thigh and the other under his head.
Eddie jolted upright.
“Dammit!”
“What?” she asked, and jerked her sleeping against her chest. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The rubber,” Eddie said. “It’s gone.”
He felt around their tangle of a bed.
Maryellen felt around, too, and hoped that he would find it first. Then she knew where it must be.
“I know where it is.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Where?”
She sat up, cross-legged, with her back to him at the foot of the bed. The tilt from the broken slat made holding her balance difficult.
“Don’t look, please,” she said. “You’ll embarrass me.”
“I can’t see, it’s dark in here.”
“Not that dark. Don’t look, anyway.”
She slid her fingers inside herself, swampy, her cheeks blazing.
“Here,” he touched her thigh, “let me.”
“No, I can do it. . . .”
He heard it thlap to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He sat up beside her. The gusting rattle of rain slowed, rattled, slowed, and stopped. His hand still held lightly to the inside of her thigh.
“I am sorry.”
“It quit raining,” she said.
Eddie knelt on the bed in front of her, looked into her eyes that were huge and black in the low lamp glow. Now that the rain stopped he heard the tiny liquid click click of Maryellen’s eye blinks marking time. Her hand brushed the back of his neck, her eyes closed slowly and her mouth moved to his. This time, at the foot of the bed in the loft hot with the stove and in the stillness of the clearing night, the tingle in her belly exploded and she answered his unasked question Yes, oh yes in his rushing ear.
III
BEYOND
The dream is a natural occurrence, and there is no earthly reason
why we should assume it is a crafty device to lead us astray . . .
Nature is often obscure and impenetrable, but she is not like
man, deceitful. We must therefore take it that the dream is
just what it pretends to be, neither more nor less.
—C. G. Jung, Collected Works
The Jaguar had done a lot of sniffing with other peoples’ noses, and the trail of a certain rustler became hotter by the hour. He left that task to his underlings. The Jaguar’s energies were better spent on himself. Lately, he had invested them well and now he would reap the returns.
He had isolated the chemistry of the butterfly effect and found that it was not only a chemistry but a pathway. When he linked his Jaguar priests, he witnessed part of the principle that had taken him years to understand.
Like a coil, an old magneto, an accelerometer, he thought, they work in series to extend my reach, my power.
But the source of the power itself eluded him. At first, he was frightened by his power, by the illness it brought him. Then, he saw his salvation from the military, from his petty, pitiful life and, ultimately, he saw his crown.
Why me?
He’d wondered this thousands of times over nearly twenty years. Now he knew.
His brain was different. He presumed an accident of birth made him this way, but it could well have been one of his many beatings as a child. At times he felt his brain accumulate a charge, like the arming sequence on a missile. Discharge threw lightning into a neural circuit of the cortex that flung him through the fabric. It also generated a bit of heat, and swelling, and the charge took time to build.
But I have it now, he gloated. I can charge up that battery at will.
One day the rustler would discharge, and the Jaguar would move in, and the problem of his pitiful body would be solved. He shuddered when he thought of how close he’d come to making a fatal mistake. Had he taken one of his cattle, one without the pathway, no amount of chemistry would have helped him back to the dreamways. The Jaguar might have become cattle to one of his own priests, and the danger had passed too close to be amusing.
Maybe others tried this, and the histories called it “possession.”
Except the possession was mutual—the body trapped the intruder while the intruder overrode the mind.
No exit, he shuddered again, a living death.
The Jaguar felt the shudder this time, his real body was coming around. The Thanksgiving holiday made masking his awakening easier in spite of monitors and electrodes. He was saving up his charge in case his priests needed him.
They’ve botched things again, he thought. If I have to rescue them this time, heads will roll.
He corrected the thought, and allowed himself a sliver of a grin.
No. Heads will glow.
The hospital fielded a skeleton staff for the holidays. Most of the psych patients had been fed to lethargy, permitted leave or drugged to drool. The Jaguar kept this waking quiet. He would rest awhile, safe from the medical records clerk whom he knew to be the agency’s man. This sneak reported back to the brass every time his electrodes betrayed him. The Jaguar was getting a handle on the electrodes, too.
Max still had a way of getting product and the Jaguar had long since learned the folly of making it up. Max had a way of getting answers to questions he asked and to the more important ones that he didn’t. As far as Max was concerned, the Jaguar wasn’t asleep; he piloted a unique craft on a mission for his nation. Each time the Jaguar returned, Max was at his bedside for the landing, for the . . . debriefing. Each time this unpleasantness was finished, Max gave suggestions, inquiries to make, orders. He never made promises, he didn’t have to.
The dreamways pulled at the Jaguar now, he knew the clues: lapses of time, glimpses
of shadows dancing behind the blue translucence of the great fabric of being. The valley itself was a great, green vortex, a spot where the fabric pulled itself into a funnel that drained into the other world.
When he wanted back on the other side, the funnel was reversed and he felt like a salmon battering its way up a fishladder. This time, he had the feeling something had slipped past him, some quick shadow through the throat of the funnel too quick for a glimpse or a grab.
The hardest part of playing possum was the natural stuff: bowel movements, personal hygiene, restlessness. The corners of his eyes were wired to betray his dreaming or to report his slip into his peculiar non-coma coma. Since full coma was non-productive, they titrated his drugs to balance him below waking but above coma. No wonder he took twenty years to figure out the chemistry of the beautiful blue butterfly in his mind.
He didn’t know how he appeared when he was out. No amount of relaxation or self-reasoning countermanded his mother’s toilet-training, so simply letting it all go into the old man’s diaper they gave him was the hardest of all. He had to pick up clues from the occasional orderly or nurse who talked to themselves while they worked.
“Weeks go by you reglar as a clock, but you in trouble, now. One more shif like this an we gon do you a enema. But not on my shif, no sir.”
The Jaguar hated hearing their talk about him, yet he slavered for it. All he knew of the self that was left of him on this side came from them. The occasional nurse or doctor tried to elicit a pain response from him to measure the depth of his sleep. One nurse, a burly veteran of Korea, enjoyed this so much that the Jaguar spent some of Max’s precious time hunting him down on the dreamways and unplugging his brain axon by dendrite. Try as he might, he never got a chance at Max.
He must be reptilian, the Jaguar thought. Only insects and oysters are tougher brains to crack.
The techs didn’t like their duty over the Jaguar. They cursed him, and he heard their curses. He heard everything, even when he was out, and what he didn’t catch could be played back later from storage in some convolution of his brain that he had developed to help him catch up on this side. He knew what they felt, their revulsion. It must be a fearful thing to see a human vegetable wake up every month or two or three, talk to save its pasty skin then fall back into the blessed relief of the dreamways.