Jaguar (29 page)

He rummaged through the scraps of kindling at the bottom of the woodbox. He didn’t find any newspaper, but he did find the hatchet leaning against the shelf. Eddie dumped the groceries out of the bag, crumpled it up and dropped it into the stove.

He lit the paper, closed the stove and stepped back.

Five kerosene lamps lit the room. A world of saddle blankets and antlers opened up around him. The small cabin’s high ceiling and open loft made it feel huge.

Beside the door were a sink, a small set of cabinets and a large water jug with a wood spigot at the bottom.

Maryellen jostled his reverie.

“What happened to our fire?”

Eddie opened the stove and a thick billow of smoke puffed out. The damp paper smoldered away, but didn’t catch.

“Must’ve been too wet,” Eddie mumbled.

He splashed to the truck for the drugstore bag. When he came back he slipped the box of rubbers onto the counter beside the door, behind the water jug. He crumpled up the bag and a few pages of his
Sports Afield
and rebuilt his fire. Maryellen watched as he arranged each splinter and stick, everything just
so
, then she said, “Try this.”

She held out a can of kerosene.

“My dad throws a cup or so on the kindling if he can’t find any paper. Or if the wood’s too wet.”

Eddie reluctantly doppled some of it over his set-up. He lit the paper and closed the door.

“Keep it open,” she said.

He did, and waited for an explosion.

The fire caught with a slow
shoosh
and the dry cedar popped its heat straight for their bones. The psychology of the fire helped Eddie relax a little. He reloaded the stove and shut the door.

As though reading his mind, she said, “It doesn’t explode as a liquid, only as a mist. Organic Chemistry.”

They stood together with their backs to the
pop
and
hiss
, daydreaming in a flicker of soft lamplight.

“That should keep us for awhile,” Eddie said. He wished he had something more to do.

“Yep,” she answered. She had her back to the stove, to him, so he didn’t see her suppress a giggle.

His uneasiness relieved her. She was thankful for it, wanted to tease him with it. He’d helped her be happy already, simply by not being anything like her stepbrother.

They faced each other across the stove.

“‘Organic Chemistry?’“ he mimicked, with a chuckle. “In whose body?”

“It just blurted out,” she said. “Actually, it was a dreamway souvenir a few years back. I don’t remember where I picked it up.”

Eddie looked at Maryellen, confident as a church, and he wished for the right thing to say, the correct script. He’d picked up a few tips on the dreamways, but none of them seemed to apply, somehow.

He suspected that people managed this nicely all the time, but he was at a loss. Something besides bed. . . .

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

Eddie sorted through the groceries that he’d dumped out onto the floor and stacked them on the table. When Maryellen didn’t answer he turned and saw that she had her back to him and her hands to her face.

Shit,
he thought,
she’s crying. Goddammit, what’ve I done now?

He held her tight from behind, his arms underneath her breasts, and he was going to say
What’s the matter?
when he saw that she was laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

He held her closer, kissed the back of her ear.

“Us. This,” she pressed her cheek to his lips. “The whole thing.”

She leaned her head against his chest and held onto his arms. He clenched her tight in a bear hug, and nuzzled her neck. She squirmed and played at getting away while he held her tight enough to keep her but loose enough that she could turn around and kiss him, long and hard.

“Hi,” she said.

Eddie knew they’d just met in a world of their own making, quite different from the one either of them had left, quite different from the one that they visited in their dreams.

“Hi.”

He watched her watch him. The fire popped beside them and a fine steam rose from their damp clothes.

“Can you make coffee?” she asked.

“The best.”

“The pot’s in the sink, coffee’s in that first cupboard, and water’s in that jug beside the door. The water might be stale.”

“You going someplace?”

“I’m going to the outhouse. In case you need it, it’s around the other side of the cabin from the driveway.”

When she left he took four of the foil packages from his box of rubbers behind the water jug and slipped them into his pocket. Then he put the coffee together and set the pot on the stove.

He saw the footboard of a large double bed up in the loft. Every bed, chair and bare section of wall was covered with old saddle blankets with Indian designs. His uncle collected them, too, and hung them everywhere.

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.