~ 6 ~

        Rode hard and put up wet, I awoke Wednesday morning with my satchel sore from one all-get-out rambunctious night.  Three times we’d gone at it.  Each rut lasting longer than the last.  Though I was plenty willing, Walt was rollicky as a randy otter—rolling us afire and rocking us sweaty.  
        Around ten o’clock, when he reached down for more, I swatted his hand away and said, “My monkey smarts.  You’ve plumb wore me out.”
        He slapped my bum, hopped up—his hoe handle wagging—switched on the TV, and flipped the channel to a game show.   I studied him while he pulled a corner of the window curtain aside, the sunshine pouring in.  He peeked outside, scratching his straddle, and then went into the bathroom, kicked up the commode seat with a toe, and let loose his morning branch.  
        Right there was my man—the curve of his make, the sturdy thighs, his weight slung on one leg, like a stallion’s hindquarters.  Hair askew every-which-a-ways, he grinned at me over his muscly shoulder, shook his doodle dry, and said, “What you lookin’ at, girl?”
        “At one handsome sight.”
        Bending over to hit the flush lever, he swung his backside my way, and arsled bass-ackwards out of the bathroom.  Reaching around to his bum and grabbing a cheek in each hand, he spread open his hairy pucker, waggled that and his beardy tallywags at my face, and tooted out an itty-bitty poot.
        “You fucking pig,” I shrieked and took in thumping him with a pillow.
        Grunting like a hog, he crawled under the sheets, snorting and snuffing, rooting his snout up and down the length of me.   Squealing laughs, I wrassled away and pushed him off.  But when his nose found what it was hunting, and then his tongue, I locked my thighs around his ears, and joined the choir of oohs and ahhs of the game show audience. 
        All the talk about sex that people do, talk that had made me puzzle what I was missing—all the novels and movies making it out to be the best thing there is—I’d scarcely understood until now.  At last I’d let myself go—gone to heart-strutting wildness, an animal with the hobbles off, finally free.  That’s what all the talk was about.  Everybody, everywhere, caught in their everyday human traps, yet crawling atop each other in the dark, hungrily groping for the pleasure of becoming again the animals we all are.   
        By quarter to noon, I’d showered, and Walt had neared his daily dose of morning game shows.   Fixing my face and hair in the mirror, I looked myself dead in the eye and wondered where all this was going.  Walt had sure enough won my prize—as for my body.  All what we’d done last night, I’d never had any notion that such was possible.  I’d not only let him do things to me—and I to him, which just the week before I would not have thought decent—I now couldn’t get my fill of it.  
        The pleasure I took from him I did my blamedest to give him back.  And what he did to my body rendered me into a woman—not the woman I’d thought I’d one day come to be, but one with a cookstove in her straddle smoldering to burn more of his firewood.   All those catch-as-catch-can beaus from Clandel had kindled only a sputtering flame or two.  But after less than a week with Walt, I was stoked.  I’d found a part of myself that I knew had to be there.  My mistake had been that I’d reckoned it would be someday bestowed on me by some prince.  Sure enough, Walt had put a match to me and fanned my flames.  But only after I’d opened wide my stovepipe’s damper, did this blaze arise.  
        For a fact, Walt had fired up the woman in me, but was he truly the man for me?  On the other side of the bathroom door, he lay sprawled across the bed, stinking up the room with his third or fourth Raleigh of the morning, staring at yet another game show on the blathering TV.  I’d run off with him for an adventure, for an escape, and now here I stood wondering what I’d been caught up into.  
        Not once since our first morning together had either of us said a word about love.  What I’d told him back then about love being the good of your soul giving itself to another soul’s good for the good of love—that was just something I’d read in some novel.  How could I ever know what love is if I’ve never been in love?  How could I have known what sex was until I’d set myself loose with it?
        I finished up in the mirror, swung open the bathroom door, and asked him, “Do you love me?”
        He rolled his head to me, blinked away some surprise, and said, “Belle, I’m nuts about you.  You’re the sugar on my donut.  You’re the hole in my donut.  You’re the tires on my wheels.  The gas in my tank.  The key in my ignition.”
        “I didn’t ask you that.  I asked if you loved me.”
        “Shoot... course I do, Annabelle.”
        Yet as he said so, I wondered whether he really knew how to love.  In Walt’s eyes lived a look plain to see that fancied I’d hung the moon.  But what was it he loved?  Me, whoever that was?  Or was it the me he saw behind his eyes, or felt with his tallywags?  Other than when he’d beset his randiness on me, his attention was mostly elsewhere, leaving me to abide with scarce admiration.
        He searched my eyes for what I might say next, and then asked, “Do you love me?”
        “I’m trying to figure that out.”
        He smirked, turned back to the TV, and said, “Let me know when you come up with the answer.”
        “You’ll be the first to know,” I said, and left it at that for now.  
        Thinking I’d maybe hurt his feelings, or let him down, I curled up next to him on the bed.  We watched the tail end of the game show and said nothing more.  It appeared that my question, and my lame answer to his, had brought us to a stage where there was now a curtain up between us—a curtain that if we took down would reveal either what we wanted to see, or what we did not.  And it felt best to leave it up for now, until it lowered on its own, or one of us tore it away.
        I allowed that much of what Walt said was what he’d say in order to get what he wanted.  That was his game and he was good at it.  Even though he told me he loved me, something just didn’t quite ring true.  And right then and there, for me to say I loved him echoed clunky inside me, like a loose string on a banjo.  
        The last few days with him had doled out comfort and excitement all at once—most of the time.  But was he the man for me?  And was I really the woman for him?  I’d opened my satchel to Walt, but would he be open to the needments of my heart?  We’d quickly learned to give and take our pleasures, but could we learn the give and take of love that lasts?
        I’d thought I had a notion of what love was, yet now looking love in the face, I blinked.  Trying to make out the blurry haunt of all I’d heard tell of love, the more I squinted to bring it into focus, the more I saw it wore my own face.

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        Walking toward us, backlit by the light towers, a short man in a cowboy hat escorted a girl on his arm.  As the fire’s glow grew into their faces I saw it was Madeline and her father.  After they took care of business with Yanko and dragged some chairs over into a circle of older carnies, I left Walt retelling his tale, grabbed myself an empty chair, and set it next to Madeline.
        “Hey, Annabelle.  How’s it goin’?”
        “Oh... fair to middling.”
        “You ain’t met my pa have you?  Pa, this here’s Annabelle.  Annabelle, Tex.”
        Tex leaned forward off the chair an inch, tipped his Stetson with a finger, and said, “How do, Annabelle.  Those ribs turnin’ on that fire smell mighty tasty ‘bout now.  You fixin’ to git you some, too?”
        “Yes sir, I surely am.”
        “T’ain’t nothin’ like Gypsy ribs I know of.  ‘Cept maybe Fort Worth barbecue.  But Fort Worth’s quite a stretch away tonight.  Gypsy ribs be fine by me.”
        “Yessiree.  Truth be told.”
        Tex turned his attention to the talk around the circle—predictions about how Beckley, the next spot, ought to be.  I leaned into Madeline’s ear and whispered, “Have you ever been in love?”
        She jerked her eyes in Tex’s direction, then told him, “Pa, Annabelle and I are goin’ to take a little walk, for some girl talk.”
        “That’s fine, sweetheart.  Don’t be tardy for the ribs.”
        I guzzled down the rest of my beer, tossed the empty can into a cardboard box with a pile of others, and we strolled off into the woods.  Moonlit barely enough to see, we found a newly-fallen hickory trunk to sit on.  Madeline fished a skinny joint out of her bra and fired it up—pulling long and hard on it, the weed crackling and the burning ash casting a glow onto her pursed-up face.
        She passed it to me, and as she breathed out the smoke, said, “Yeah... Love.  I reckon I’ve been in love, once or twice.  But not quite enough, I guess.  Or maybe not enough with someone man enough for me to take up with.  Pa and me, we’re a team.  It’s gonna take someone extra-special for me to swap what we got for I don’t know what.”
        I sucked in a lungful and passed it back.  The dope rushed into my eyes—the space deepening between the trees around us, their trunks appearing nearer and stouter among the jumble of shadows cast from the moon.  Notes of laughter and guitar sang out above the murmur of voices from the gather-all, in tune with the low thrum of the diesel generator.  
        After our greedy pulls on the joint cooked it down to nothing in no time, I asked her, “What was it that made you believe you were in love?”
        She thought on this for a piece, and then said, “Well, maybe because those beaus felt different than the others.... The one I was most tempted to take up with, Toby, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Cute he was.  But not drop-dead handsome like Walt.  But there was somethin’ that perked up his eyes when he gawked at me that told me how he favored me so.  
        “He had barely two nickels to rub together.  Ran a bust-one balloon joint on the Williams’ show when we were with them over in Ohio last summer.  At a couple of spots our joints got located across from each other.  On the sly, I’d watch him.  His face, hang-dog much of the time.  Then when he’d eye me, it lit up like a kid’s at a birthday cake.  
        “We snuck off, here and there, for a little kissy-face bump and grind.  I didn’t let him in me, but we got hot and sweaty never-you-mind....  He was kind to me, and gentle.  He made me laugh to high heaven.  
        “The last spot we played together, he asked me to go with him.  I fretted over it mightily.  But I had sense enough to count up that apron and see the foolishness of it....  Still, I wonder.”
        The trees in their silence felt of wonder, too.  I asked, “What do you reckon love is?”
        “Shoot, Annabelle.  Just another fairy tale for all I know.  I can’t rightly tell.  What’s your take on it?”
        “I used to think it was something that hit you like a bread wagon.  And when it did you’d know it in a heartbeat.  Like in the movies.”
        “Honey, movies are the biggest illusion show goin’.”
        “Yeah.  Well, like in books.”
        “Books are as full of hokum as anything else.  One book sayin’ one thing.  Another, another.”
        “I found a book in the library today that said that real love wasn’t something you fell into, it was something you learned to do.  Like an art.”
        “There you go.  One book says either, the next one, neither.  And it’s likely neither either, nor or.  It’s likely both.  You fall in love—but then you learn more about loving, to make it last if it’s good.  That don’t take no book to tell you.”
        “No... I don’t allow it does.  And no book’s about to tell me whether or not I’m in love with Walt.”
        “What’s your gut feel of that?”
        “Plumb bumfuzzlement.  Part of me’s hot as a red beet for him.  Another me wants to get shut of his ways.  One minute I’m all a-torture over him.  The next, I’m sorely out of heart.”
        “Does he treat you right?’
        “Yeah....  In his way.”
        “That’s the way with menfolk.  It’s their way to do things their way.  And with some, it’s their way or the highway....  But I’ll tell you what, girlfriend.  Now I’m no Ann Landers, so what I’m about to say comes from someone who don’t know much more than you do.  It appears to me—and I see it when you two are side-by-side—that Walt is flat-out crazy about you.  And I see you leanin’ toward him, more than away from him.  
        “Annabelle, you already done hopped aboard this freight train.  So what sense is there in jumpin’ the tracks till you see where you’re goin’?”
        “I reckon so…. It just feels of cutting up a big hog with a little knife.”
        She chuckled and agreed, “That it is.  That it is.  
        “And I bet those Gypsy ribs are soon comin’ off the fire....  Annabelle, listen, I can’t say whether this’d be good for you or not, but it’s turned my head around for the better in some ways.  Cheeks has some acid, and I’m hankerin’ to get a taste of it.”
        “Acid?”
        “Yeah.  LSD.”
        “Doesn’t that make you think you can fly?  And jump out of buildings?”
        “It gets you flyin’, but I never seen nobody on it wantin’ to jump out of no window.”
        “You’ve tried it?”
        “A couple times.  Trippin’ ain’t no walk in the park, girl.  But where it took me was well worth the ticket.”
        “Where’s that?”
        “Oh.... I’d say it took me somewhere that gave me a different outlook, both outside myself and inside.  And what I saw seems to have mollified some of the foolhardy contentiousness that used to plague me so.”
        “Madeline... I don’t know.”
        “You give it some ponderin’.  Let’s go gnaw some ribs right now.”

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copyright © 2012 by S.M.Fernand