King of the World

  The dirt road to Loon Lake was deeply rutted and full of boulders. Cornell winced with each bang against the undercarriage of the lovely Rolls; it was as if he was being struck in his own lower belly.

  “This is awful,” he said. “We’re being torn apart.” He drove as slowly as he could and performed a virtuoso job of steering, trying to avoid the worst hazards.

  “If we can just get there,” said the girl, “we’re O.K.”

  She had made the same remark several times, and finally it got to him, even in the midst of his task. He wrenched the wheel one way to avoid a particularly brutal-looking rock, and then the other way to evade a cavernous rut, and said: “You mean we’re going to stay here forever?”

  “Nothing is forever.”

  He shook his head. “You’re nuts.”

  “Well, why did you take this road? And why do you keep driving? Do you have an alternative?”

  “No. That doesn’t mean it’s any the less nuts, though.”

  “It might be fun.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  After another hour or so they had covered the seven miles and there was the lake.

  The girl clapped her hands. “Just look at that.” It really was nice: an expanse of royal-blue water, the surrounding greenery, the golden sunlight, white puffs of cloud.

  “Mmm,” murmured Cornell. The road continued, very likely circling the lake, but he doubted if the surface would improve. “Should we stop here?”

  “Keep going until we see a good spot for the tent. Someplace with a slight grade, for drainage. Near enough to the shore so we don’t have to carry water too far, but not too close, in case there’s a storm.”

  He commented on her expertise.

  “FBI Academy,” she said. “Wilderness survival course. Never tell when that might come in handy, they always said. And here it is.”

  They had crawled and bumped halfway around the lake before she approved a campsite. It was on a modest knoll, perhaps eight feet above the shore. Running down to the rocky beach was a natural drainage channel, which also served as a path to the water, a function the girl demonstrated by running down it and stubbing her bare toe on a stone. She sat down and cursed vilely.

  “Will you put on those sneakers?” asked Cornell.

  He carried the folded tent from car to knoll, then looked down at the beach. She was skipping flat stones across the surface of the lake, having a simpleminded good time while he worked. The funny thing was that he did not resent this. There was something so innocent in her pleasure. Besides, he was built to carry loads.

  After a moment, as if she felt his eyes, she turned her head. “Isn’t this fabulous?” A flurry of wind blew her hair across her forehead. “Why don’t you stop working and come down and throw stones?”

  “I’d better get the tent up if I can figure it out Suppose it rains?”

  “Look at that sky. Don’t be silly.”

  He carefully went down the path and joined her. He looked all around the shoreline.

  “We’re really alone here. I can’t see another tent or car or person.

  “Here,” said she, “you hold it like this.” She showed him the flat stone between her thumb and forefinger. “Then you snap your wrist when you let it go.” She threw one that jumped three times off the water before it plunked and sank.

  It took him a while to get the hang of it By the time they had gone up to erect the tent, following the instructional pamphlet provided, the sky had clouded over. While Cornell was pounding in the third tent peg with the back of the axehead, the rain started.

  Among the things they had forgotten to buy was rain gear of any type.

  A perfect Woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command.

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1807

  17

  CORNELL SAT THERE on the air mattress, a knee on either side of his face, and stared at the water falling outside the tent door. The girl was in a similar situation on the other mattress. Neither had had the opportunity to change her, or his, impractical attire for the workclothes, and both were soaked.

  There had been complicadons with the tent, and a pool of water lay between the mattresses, another just inside the entrance. Water fell in droplets from one point in the sloping roof, on Cornell’s side, where the canvas had somehow got pinched. He had made it worse by rubbing the spot with his finger.

  He said now, with a gesture of chagrin: “We should have sat out the shower in the car. How dumb can you get?”

  “Well, we didn’t,” she answered acerbly, but then turned philosophical. “We can’t think of everything.”

  He rose wetly and went the two steps to the open entrance, his head lower than his shoulders, the highest point of the roof being about five feet off the ground, and looked down at the Rolls Royce glistening the rain. A gust of wind gave him a faceful of water. The manufacturers had failed to include the tent door of which the instruction pamphlet spoke so confidently.

  He fingered the drops off his eyelashes and suggested: “Why don’t we get into those dry workclothes and stay in the car till it stops?” He looked the other way, out at the lake, which the rain had made a blue blur. Then, because she had not responded, he turned to her, supporting himself, in his bent stance, on the front tentpole. “Isn’t that the answer?”

  But she gave another one. “You go. I’m sticking it out.” Her hair was plastered to her head, which seemed thereby even smaller. His own coiffure must be in a similar state: he didn’t dare touch it. Her thin, drenched blouse was probably pasted to her chest, but her drawn-up knees concealed her breasts, and the long skirt swathed her legs. Anyway, the light was dim over there in the corner. The whole place was gloomy and sopping.

  He asked: “Why should we make ourselves as miserable as possible? I thought it was your idea, yesterday, to live in the car.”

  “That would be a cop-out.” She dug her heels into the wet grit of the floor—there wasn’t much earth on their rocky knoll and therefore, at least, very little mud—and pushed herself back, unfolding and stretching full length on the air mattress. He saw her obscurely and foreshortened, with prominent, dirty soles.

  He asked: “You see this as some kind of challenge?”

  She spoke to the sagging roof. “It’s just that, you know, if you’re going to do something, then you have to go and do it.”

  His neck had begun to ache. He bent his legs so he could straighten his head, and took some of the weight off his hand by putting it on the pole.

  “I just wish I knew what we were doing. I keep coming back to that. It’s really got crazier and crazier, if you look at it. Here we are, two wet transvestites in the wilderness. What can we look forward to? When our food supply runs out, do we go back to that store and buy more? When the money’s gone, do we commit more robberies? If we stay here, how will we survive the winter? If we move on, where will we go? Do we intend to keep pretending to be the opposite sexes forever?”

  She ignored the moral issues. “We can catch fish and kill rabbits and squirrels.”

  Cornell’s calves were beginning to feel the strain from his crouch, but he had no taste to go back and sit, still less lie down, on that clammy rubber mattress. “Some outdoor type of girl took me fishing a couple of times. She put the worms on the hook—but hunting—.’” He grimaced. “Shooting those soft little things, with their bright eyes.”

  “You know how rabbits reproduce?” she asked, still horizontal. “The male fucks the female.”

  Cornell was offended. “Must you use that kind of language?”

  She proceeded as if she had not heard him. “But fish don’t fuck. They have their own kind of birth facilities. The female deposits the eggs in the water somewhere and leaves. The male comes along later and fertilizes them.”

  Cornell said, a bit crossly: “How do you know so much about that?”

  She sat up suddenly and cried: “You know why even a lot of women who have no objection to fishing disapprove of hunting?” She didn’t wait for Co
rnell’s response, which anyway would not have been forthcoming if she had tarried all night. She clapped her hands together. “It’s because fish don’t fuck, and warm-blooded animals do.”

  “I’m glad you figured that out.” He slid down the pole and sat in the puddle of water. His legs were sore, and his fanny was wet already, and there was apparently nothing he could do about her language.

  “We don’t like to kill animals,” she said, “because they remind us of ourselves.” This statement seemed to Cornell to negate the previous one she had made with so much vigor. “But!” She pointed rhetorically. “We don’t fuck.”

  “Listen,” said Cornell, feeling again the call of self-respect. “I’ve had about enough of this.”

  “I mean really. Buggering is called that, but it’s fake, it’s an imitation, and you know of what?”

  Cornell put up his hand. “Don’t say it again, please.”

  As if that made any difference to this foul-mouthed woman. “Fucking! A dildo is an imitation penis. Now, doesn’t it strike you as strange that the dominant sex would by nature have recessed genitals and that the recessive sex would have an organ that looks like a weapon?”

  Cornell lost his concern about terms. “It’s really a lot more vulnerable, though.” His favorite argument. “You may not realize that. That’s why we’re weak though larger. I just recently figured that out. It’s nature, and you have to accept it. I mean, we’re not to blame.”

  “What does that mean, ‘blame’?”

  He peered at her. “What a crooked thing humanity has made of what is so straight with animals. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She surprised him by answering: “I don’t know.”

  “That makes two of us.” He sat there in the pool of water.

  “I’m pursuing a train of thought,” she said.

  He said: “I’ve done a lot of that myself since escaping from jail. It usually ends by making my head spin. I don’t know if I’m very bright.”

  She pulled her legs up again and clasped the wet skirt to her shins. “Suppose everything you’ve been told all your life is a lot of shit.”

  He shook his head. “And maybe it isn’t. Animals don’t build bridges or fly airplanes. And what do they do when it rains?”

  “What are we doing?”

  “You’ve got a point.” He started to pull himself up on the tentpole. It came away from the roof, and the forward half of the tent collapsed on him.

  He astounded himself by not panicking amidst the wet canvas and darkness. He crawled about patiently putting things in order. While he did this, the rain stopped, and immediately he smelled the bouquet of wet greenery. The girl was laughing inside the tent.

  He secured the pole, laughing back at her, and went outside to watch the sunshine emerge from the clouds and gradually claim the lake and then their knoll.

  The girl came out, plucking the damp blouse away from her breasts and shaking it. “Look at you,” she said.

  His tie was askew and in his exertions he had lost a shirt button and the cuffs were filthy. The whole outfit felt unbearably nasty. He took off jacket, tie, and shirt, and rolled them into a bundle. The sun was warm on his breast scars.

  He tensed the muscles in his chest, something he hadn’t had nerve to do since the operation. When he had tits, this would make them rise slightly. He lifted his arms and made a pair of biceps.

  She said: “Stop bragging.”

  He went down to the car and unlocked the trunk. He rooted through the packages, boxes, and bags until he came upon the new clothing: for her, a wraparound skirt of denim, a black-and-white checked blouse of gingham—cut like a woman’s shirt—blue canvas sneakers, and white cotton schoolboy underpants. There were jeans for him and a blue chambray shirt. He changed in the back seat of the Rolls. When he emerged she wore the new outfit.

  He saw the axe and seized it. “We should start a fire and dry these clothes in a hurry. I’ll go chop some wood.” He went to the nearest Christmas tree and was starting to swing when she cried: “Hold it!”

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “The tree is green. The wood wouldn’t burn.” She pointed. “The third one over, with the broken-off trunk and most of the bark gone? It’s dead.”

  “It’s certainly big,” said Cornell. The jagged fragment of trunk was as tall as he, and about a foot in diameter. He wondered how a tree could get broken off in the middle of deserted woods. The rest of it, about fifteen feet, lay on the forest floor nearby, decorated with moss and screened by ferns. The breakage wasn’t new.

  He stepped to the standing portion and raised his axe.

  “Don’t cross your hands that way,” the girl said. “You’ll break your wrist. Right hand above the left, like a baseball bat. Here.” She took the axe, and saying, “Stand back,” swung the blade against the tree. A little chip flew off. She did it again, with no more of a result. At this rate it would take all day to get a fire of confetti.

  “I get the idea,” he said diplomatically, taking the axe.

  “O.K. I’ll get some kindling.” She tramped off into the woods. He had to get used to seeing her in this latest ensemble, which as always was too large.

  His own chopping at first achieved little more than hers, but gradually he learned the technique, the rhythm, and finally he was able to put his foot against the enormous messy wound he had hacked out; he pushed, and over went the hunk of wood. Now he must chop it into several short logs. He was breathless and his new shirt was soaked with perspiration. He sniffed his armpits. He had applied no deodorant since leaving the sperm camp. Clasping the axe handle again, he was conscious of an unpleasant warmth in his palms, followed soon by outright pain. He dropped the axe and saw that his hands were bleeding.

  Holding them out, he looked around for the girl. She was not to be seen. He went to the lake, knelt as close as he could without getting water in his shoes, and washed his poor palms. He got the senator’s white shirt from the ball of damp clothing and, wincing, tore it in fragments and wrapped them around his hands.

  The girl appeared with an armload of twigs. She saw the bandages and dropped her burden.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not used to this,” he said. “I’m an office worker.”

  She unpeeled the wrappings, which were already bloodied inside.

  “You poor thing.” She pulled him by the elbow. “Come on.” In the trunk, amidst their purchases, she found a first-aid kit.

  He recoiled. “No iodine!”

  She examined a tube. “Unguentine. This should do it.” She squirted ointment on his palms.

  He held out his greasy hands. “A lot of use I am.”

  “You’ve learned a lesson,” she said. “We have to take care of ourselves. We should have bought gloves.”

  He sat on the front seat of the car, in the open doorway, and rested from the ordeal. She retrieved her kindling and carried it to the knoll. Then she gathered a number of large stones, each of which looked too heavy for her, and carried them one by one up in front of the tent and arranged them in a circle.

  “Good thing,” she said, coming down, “that the storekeeper advised us to get a saw.” She found it in the back seat. It had a light metal frame in the shape of a bracket; across the fourth side ran a slender, toothed blade. She wrapped the handle in what was left of the shirt, went to the tree felled by Cornell, and began to saw it into pieces.

  After dinner they lay on the air mattresses, long since dried by an afternoon of sun, and watched the lake gradually fade away in the falling light. As it turned out, the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon had been needed to assemble the materials for, and to start, the fire. Despite the FBI’s wilderness-survival course, the girl was none too effective at the task, and Cornell of course was totally inexperienced in the area, as in most others, and invalided now to boot.

  And once the fire had been got seriously under way, as opposed to the many false starts which consumed several loads of kindli
ng without igniting the logs, the drying rack she had painstakingly constructed from branches erected between boulders collapsed, dropping their city clothes into the fire, somehow burning them hopelessly even though the garments had been sopping to the touch.

  And they learned while preparing the meal, which started out to be lunch, that it took hours to bring water to boil over a campfire, and almost as long to heat a slice of ham in a skillet, though the grease in the pan would soon burst into flame. So it was twilight before they ate their burned meat, half-raw potatoes, and cold peas from the second can she tried, the first having blown up when heated in the embers.

  But she stayed in an astoundingly good mood throughout, saying at every disaster, “We’ve got a lot to learn,” or “Back to the old drawing board,” an expression which made Cornell grit his teeth. He was not nearly so philosophical. It hurt his hands to cut the ham and spear morsels of hard potato, and gathering peas on the flat camp fork was a nightmare.

  The girl had made the meal as well. He lowered the tin cup filled with tepid, acrid coffee and said: “I’m totally dependent on you.”

  She gazed at the lake, which had gone almost black now from the insufficiency of light. “Either one of us might get incapacitated for a while, so the other has to do the work. I’ll be only too happy to let you do the chores when you’re better.” She turned to him. “How are the paws?”

  He put down his cup and carefully uncrooked the finger that had been through its handle. “Better, thanks. It was a shock to see them bleed.” He flexed his hands, feeling really more stiffness of skin than pain now. “Blood always does that to me. I almost faint if I cut myself shaving.”

  “Women bleed every month for more than half their life.” She smiled weirdly. “And it’s absurd, you see. It’s useless.”

  He remembered that while posing as “Harry” in jail she had delivered a diatribe against menstruation. He had then thought it odd that a man would care.

  She added: “The only time it’s supposed to stop is during pregnancy.”