“We’re already lost.”
“Then what difference does it make?”
“I’m getting scared. He could pass us on this straightaway, but he’s not.” She eased acceleration, slowing down slightly. “Damn, he just flicked on his high beams.”
“Look. That sign. Loon Mountain Cabins. One mile on left.”
Teresa was adjusting the rearview mirror, trying to get the blinding light out of her eyes. “That’s where we’re going, right?”
“Yes. These lights are really weak. Barely see the road.”
“Tell me if you see the turn.”
“There, slow down. To your left. To your left.”
“Where?” She screamed.
“The gravel road. That’s it.” I yelled, pointing across the steering wheel.
“Get your arm out of my way. I can’t see.” She slammed on the brakes and fishtailed across the opposite lane, skidding on the gravel entrance, sliding out of control. The driver-side wheels lifted off the road and the van started to tip. I slammed my shoulder against the door and Teresa’s body lifted from her seat, one hand scrabbling wildly in midair as she held the steering wheel with the other.
Suddenly I got the impression an invisible force caught the passenger side, a flurry of white feathers swooped across the windshield, and the van righted itself. It then coughed and bumped a few times before stalling out.
The pickup truck zipped past on the main road, honking its horn, never slowing down.
“You all right?” I pulled myself up and reached for her.
“Yes, and you?”
“Smacked my shoulder, but I’m okay.”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “We’d better keep moving in case that jerk comes back.”
Teresa drove us silently through a thick pine forest on a narrow lane that wound alongside a stream. Between the branches of the trees, we caught glimpses of a full moon rising over the black silhouette of a mountain.
When the road dead-ended at a large circular patch of gravel, Teresa shot me a questioning look.
“This looks really spooky.”
I checked the hand drawn map Daisy had given us.
“Drive around the lot. There should be a path to the cabin.”
“You better be nice to me because I’m not having fun yet.”
I spotted a small, wooden, arrow-shaped sign with yellow numbers on it.
“Park here.”
I grabbed a duffel bag and Teresa lifted out our groceries. The flashlight had a strong beam and revealed a wide, mulch-strewn path through a pitch-black forest.
“Aren’t there rattlesnakes in Pennsylvania?”
“It’s still too cold. They’d be sluggish.” I grabbed her ass and squeezed. “Whoops. Maybe I was wrong.”
She yelped. “Stop it, or I’m going to get back in the van and leave you here.”
We proceeded carefully, searching the path ahead of us for terrifying creatures and rough terrain. Coming to a four-way split, we followed an arrowhead sign showing Daisy’s cabin number on it. The trail dipped into a ravine where we crossed a stream on a wooden bridge, then climbed a switchback trail on the other side.
The sky opened up before us and we saw a billion more stars than we had ever seen before. The tiny glimmerings of light greeted us, removing our blinders, revealing yearnings to return to them, to know their wonder.
“Wow.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful.”
The Milky Way blocked out the darkness of the universe beyond it. Stretching across the breadth of the heavens, the starlight revealed a large field of grass in front of us. A dark huddle, which I made out to be our cabin, rested down a gentle slope on the far side of the meadow.
I started forward.
“Wait.” Teresa stepped close to me, her face shining just inches from mine. I could feel her body warmth reach deep inside me.
She whispered, “I saw white-feathered wings when the van was flipping. Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Kiss me.” Our lips touched and lingered. “You make me believe in magic.”
“You’re the most incredible woman, like eternal love come to earth.” I gazed into her eyes, reflections of the stars above. “Somebody’s watching over us.”
Chapter 38
Despite severe rusty spots on the doorknob, Daisy’s key eased into the lock. The moon finally revealed itself fully above the mountains, the meadow and forests turned silver, and we paused to watch this silent dance of the night before we stepped into the cabin.
There were logs in the fireplace and wood stacked on a back porch, so we lit a fire and hauled the mattress from the bedroom, placing it in front of the comforting flicker of flames. After eating grapes and cheese accompanied by some Boone’s Farm wine, we smoked a joint and took a shower, then lay around naked.
Teresa had a habit of draping one leg over mine and brushing her hand over her cunt hair when we talked in bed.
“I’m afraid of acting so weird on LSD when we take it on Sunday that you won’t want to be with me.”
“I think I’ll be just as weird. But we don’t know this area, so we should try to stick together no matter what. We can’t go wandering off in the woods without the other knowing it. The problem is, when we’re tripping, we probably won’t think like that. It makes me wonder if acid trips should have guides.”
“I’ve read of Indian medicine men or shamans who shepherd people through peyote trips. Same with that powerful hallucinogenic drug down in the Amazons.”
Instead of answering, I began sucking on her tits. She started to stroke herself deeper and I watched, fascinated, never having seen her masturbate on her own. After she had climaxed, she rolled onto her stomach, and I entered her from behind. We fucked slowly, sometimes laying motionless, feeling our togetherness, drifting off to another world as one being.
Sometime later, I woke up, still inside her. We were laying on our sides, and she was cupped against me, gently snoring. The fire was dying out. One of us had managed to pull a couple of quilt blankets up around our shoulders.
As I got the fire roaring again, Teresa stirred. She smiled with her eyes and said, “This country air is amazing. We were sleep-fucking.”
“Maybe we should move out of the city.”
“Just sleep and make love.” She yawned. “Tell me a bedtime story.”
“Okay.”
“It better not be creepy or about that alley. Is it going to be about sex with other women?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“Sure, you never told me about the first time you ever did it.”
“Well, uh, y’know, well, it was only about a year ago.”
“Was she a virgin too?”
I laughed at my recollection of the events of that day.
“Ha, ha, no. I was in Philly on a class trip to the museums. There was an exhibit about dinosaurs, and I’d gotten zonked on some weed before getting on the bus. Yeah, a really good buzz. Anyway, as we were crossing a street from one museum to another, I spotted a pretzel cart, so I cut away from the group to buy something to munch on. Daisy had just sold a drawing of mine, so I had five bucks and some change on me.”
“I can’t believe you were selling your art in the Village while still in high school. I’m sorry—just jealous—go on. Tell me the story.”
“I didn’t get into the city much, and I was standing there, chomping away, looking up at the decorations along the tops of the building. Faces, flowers, very ornamental sculptures.”
“Great gig for artists.”
“Society must have valued aesthetics differently, back whenever.”
“So what happened while you were eating the pretzel?”
“This Negro woman started talking to me. She was wearing a pink miniskirt and a loose black blouse. I could see
most of her tits. There were huge, I mean bury your head and yell-for-help huge.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Yeah, and much older than me. Maybe thirty. Anyway, she asks if I want to buy her a pretzel. I said, ‘Sure.’ So we stood there eating together, and she wipes some mustard from my face with one finger, slides it across my lips real slow, and kind of murmurs to me, asking if I wanted to buy anything else.”
“Were there people around?”
“Yeah, I mean we were on a Philly sidewalk in the middle of the day. I guess I must have looked confused, because she licks the mustard off her finger and says, ‘We could finish these pretzels in private.’ ”
“She didn’t,” Teresa exclaimed in surprise.
“I managed to croak out an ‘Okay.’ She exchanged a look with the pretzel cart guy, and he nodded. They should have called their business Pretzels and Pussy. I followed her to a building right nearby, and we went up to a second floor apartment. She asked how much money I had, and I still had the five, so she says, ‘Oh, you’re a lucky boy then.’ She stripped off her clothes, y’know, just regular, nothing like a dance, but I’d never seen a completely naked woman before and just watched her, not really sure what was happening. I still had half my pretzel. Then she lays on this bed, pats it, and tells me to get undressed.”
“She’s bold. I can’t imagine doing that with a stranger. Well, maybe I did, with you.”
“She wouldn’t let me kiss her, so it wasn’t like fooling around with my girlfriend. Man, I felt like a total spaz. Total nervous jam-up. I was, uh...” I hesitated, suddenly self conscious. “Uh...only half turned on, even though I was... Do you really want to know the details?”
“You were playing with her giant tits. What are you, shy with me? After what you watched me do earlier?”
“Wow. You were beautiful. Okay, so let me see, back to the story. I started confessing that I’d never done it before, but she knew what to do, took care of my problem, and, presto, what can I say? I got laid while my class was looking at old dinosaur bones.”
“How did you feel?”
“I heard a little voice in my head say, ‘I did it.’ It kind of feels now like the whole act was an ego thing. There was no emotional connection like with you.”
“This is so bizarre. Didn’t any teacher notice you were missing?”
“Wait, you haven’t heard the weirdest part.”
“Weirder than a school trip to a prostitute?”
“Ha, ha. Anyway, she says to me that I probably want to know the name of my first lay and tells me to call her Mandy. I thought it was so cool to be with an older woman who knew all about fucking. I was secretly hoping that I could go into Philly anytime, and she’d do it for free with me. When she started to get out of bed, I wanted to stay next to her nakedness, so I stalled around by asking her if she wanted a cigarette. I got my pack of Kools, and she says, ‘Thank God you have a real smoke.’ So we puffed away for a while, then began to get dressed, and I asked her how I could find her again. She just laughed, told me we shouldn’t be seen leaving together, and points me to the door. Man, there’s this huge guy on the other side. Out of nowhere, he just grabs me and slams me up against the hallway wall.”
“Oh my god. Why?” Teresa’s eyes widened in alarm.
I sat up to pour the remains of our wine into the coffee cups we had been using, then continued, “Man, let’s see, everything was all a blur for a few seconds. Mandy screamed and hopped by me trying to put her shoes on. I remember her blouse still being unbuttoned. The big guy reached for her, but she slipped away and scrambled down the stairs. Then he shoves me into the room, and I just, like flew, and landed on my back.”
“What was going on? This is quite a bedtime story, Deets.”
“Then he yells, ‘What the fuck, you little piss-ant, are you doing in my apartment?’ and lunges at me. So I scrambled under the bed, and he kicks at it. One of the legs buckled, it was a cheap, squeaky bed, and these planks and a box spring came crashing down on me. He’s like, yanking at the bed, and I pushed my way out the other side. As I’m crawling away, my knee bumps this lipstick that Mandy must have dropped, and it spins around all crazy. This is nuts, but somehow I notice that when it stops, it’s pointing at the five dollar bill I gave Mandy. It’s just lying there on the floor, lost in the confusion, half-hidden under the edge of a pillow.”
“What, with a crazy man trying to kill you, you’re scoping out stuff on the floor?” Teresa sat up, shook her head in disbelief, took a gulp of wine.
“Wait’ll you hear the end. The angry guy’s drunk, really clumsy, stinks like beer, and he trips coming after me, falls down, and is lying face-to-face with me. For some nutty reason, I grab the money, tell him he can keep the lipstick, then dive past him, and zip out of there.”
Teresa rolled forward, smacking her hands together in glee. “Oh no, this is too much.”
“As I go flying downstairs, the pretzel guy comes by me, cursing. I yell, ‘Nobody’s dead,’ and decided not to stop and chat about the way he’s running his business. When I hit the street, I heard the big guy yelling from the second floor, ‘You let one of your nigger whores fuck in my apartment while I’m gone. Jesus Christ, I gotta burn the fucking bed.’
“So when I pass the pretzel cart, Mandy comes running up with her boobs bopping up all against me, and she starts trying to comfort me, y’know, apologizing. First she’s saying, ‘Oh honey, sweetie, you all right?’ Then she’s trying to convince me not to call the cops and hands me a box full of twenty-four warm pretzels. So I say to her, ‘Next time, we’ll meet at my place,’ and I split, quick.”
“What about the school trip? Did you miss your bus back?”
“I caught up with my class at the museum, and my teacher asked me where I’d been.” I laughed. “I told her I got pretzels for everyone.”
“And the five? Did you give it to Mandy?”
I sighed, “Nope, never did. Never went back to find her.”
“Well, she was lucky to have you.” Teresa paused thoughtfully, then clinked her coffee mug against mine. “Here’s to Mandy.”
Chapter 39
In the morning, we walked around the meadow and explored a short distance into the woods. The back of the cabin sat near a cliff comprised of a series of ravines cutting down a steep drop strewn with boulders. A thin stream, about a foot wide, ran across the open field then coursed over the edge, following a rocky spillway until it disappeared among jumbled stones and scree below.
Most of the encircling wooded areas were clear of undergrowth, easy to walk through, the ground-cover being soft pine needles, but occasionally, an impassable tangle of vines and bushes caused us to detour. We came across several promontories of gargantuan flat rocks jutting outwards, overlooking a deeply forested valley. We sat for a while on one ledge, our legs dangling, taking in the wilderness, spotting a number of large birds riding the thermals. An eagle, its white head clearly visible, rose in a circling pattern, then swooped away in a smooth glide over a nearby ridge. Another, a large white-tailed hawk, flew up from below us and then flapped hard, climbing sharply to clear the cabin roof. It landed in a tree near the meadow, and when we returned to our dwelling, it whistled a greeting. Or maybe, a warning.
We locked up the cabin, took the short hike back to the van, and drove to a nearby town that Daisy had informed us had a barn full of old junk and antiques. We found the place easily. Right away, I spotted weathered boards and slats leaning against its outside wall and bought a dozen of them. Teresa purchased a throne-like chair for the store, and I picked up some thin pieces of slate to experiment with and a box of baseboard moulding discards.
As we walked through the small village, my attention was drawn to a red pickup truck parked outside a hardware store. Teresa chattered on about the prices and quality of some of the antiques she had seen and didn’t notice the truck. I kept my
eye on it, positive it was the same vehicle that had harassed us the night before.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Uh, sure.”
“What was I talking about?”
“Prices, y’know—the chair you bought.”
“You weren’t listening.”
A sing-song wolf’s whistle with the second note drawn out to express the appreciation of a woman’s attractiveness split the air behind us. Teresa’s hips swayed fully as she didn’t break stride, but I glanced back to look at two men pacing us.
One of them, a husky guy with a blonde crew cut, obviously startled at seeing my face, spit in disgust.
“Damn, that’s a man.”
His partner, a skinny red-faced joker in oil-stained pants, snarled loudly, “Goddamn faggot.”
My hair was longer than Teresa’s, falling past my shoulders, and I had been mistakenly called Miss, pointed or laughed at in the city a few times, but the menace I felt from these two alarmed me.
“Hey, sweet stuff, you want a real man, we’ll show you a good time.”
I started to turn around, but Teresa grabbed my arm. “Don’t. Just ignore them.”
“Oowee, it’s obvious who wears the pants.”
We walked on, looking in store windows. Derisive laughter and sucking lip-kiss sounds followed us. Embarrassed and helpless, I struggled to pretend the insults didn’t bother me.
Hoping to avoid a confrontation, I gripped Teresa’s forearm and steered her into a tavern where we sat down in a booth and ordered burgers and a couple of sodas.
Through a window, I saw the men get into the red pickup truck and drive into the antique barn’s parking lot. They stopped behind our van, their engine idling for a few minutes. When they pulled back onto the street and drove past us, I had a clear view of two rifles on a rack in the truck’s back window.
“I didn’t know whether to give them the finger or the peace sign.”
“Oh, men are always being rude like that to me. I don’t mind the whistle if I’m in a safe place. Sometimes it makes me feel good.” Teresa wiped some ketchup from her lower lip. “Anyway, I’m still having a good time. What does it matter what two jerks think?”
Mayhem (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 1) Page 19