Odd to have a stream’s water be the warmest part of the surroundings. Nadezhda was just a shape now between trees, her hair the most visible part of her. Something in the sight gave Tom a quiver: naked woman walking up a streambed in the dark, between trees. Wisps of steam were just visible. Ferns on the bank curled in black nautilus patterns, like fossils held up on stems for their viewing.
When he came to the next pool Nadezhda was standing on its concrete bench, knee deep in water, waist deep in steam. The moon was coming up over the east wall of the canyon, and to his dark-adjusted eyes it was as bright as any streetlight. He almost wished it weren’t there. But then his pupils shrank and again it seemed dim, dark even. Nadezhda watched him. “You’re right,” she said. “It is warmer.”
“Good.” They sat side by side on the edge of the pool, feet on the concrete bench below. They passed the slim bottle back and forth. The wind had almost dried their bodies, but after a bit it felt cool, and they lowered themselves into the water.
“I hope Oscar finds Doris.”
“I guess.”
“Well, he has to try.” She laughed. “Pretty bodies.”
“Yeah. Especially Ramona and Jody.”
She elbowed him. “And Kevin and Hank!”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And Gabby and Mike and Doris and Oscar!”
He laughed. “It’s true.”
She took a slug from the bottle, shifted closer to him. “Except, I don’t know, I am thinking they are a little unformed. Like porcelain, or infants. To be really beautiful a body has to have a bit more to it. Their skin is too smooth. Beautiful skin has to have some pattern to it.” She pinched together the skin of his upper arm. “Like that.”
He laughed. “Yeah, they need some wrinkles, show some character!” He laughed again. Here I am, he thought; here I am.
“I have a lot of character,” Nadezhda said, and giggled.
“Me too.”
“And, and their hair is always just one color. No mix.”
“Pied beauty. Give thanks to God for dappled things.…”
“Pied beauty, yes. On a chest with some heft to it.” Her fingers traced lines over him.
Tom’s hand found wet warm silt, beside the concrete rim of the pond; he picked some up, drew his initials on Nadezhda’s chest. “Hmm, TB, looks good but subject to confusion.” He changed the two letters to boxes.
Nadezhda got a handful, put stripes on his cheeks and forehead, around his eyes. “You look scary,” she said. “Like one of the holy wanderers in India.”
“Aaar.” He worked on her face too, pulling it closer to his. Just two stripes on each cheek. “Spooky.”
“I bet they don’t know how to kiss, either,” she said, and leaned into him.
When they stopped Tom laughed. “No,” he said, “I bet they don’t know that.”
As they fell further into it, they kept drawing patterns on each other. “Bet they don’t know this.” “Or this.” “Or—oh—this.”
The moon was half full. Tom could see Nadezhda well indeed, her body all painted and pulsing, glowing pinkly, warm as the water under him. A muddy kiss of her breast. Taste of the earth. He was too bemused to hold a thought in his head, there was too much to take in. The wind in the trees, the flow of hot water over his legs, the half moon all marred, the perfect stars, the body sliding up and down between his hands. He held skin and felt it slide over ribs like slats in a fence.
They heard the distant yowl of coyotes, yipping in astounding glissandos that no dog could even approximate—crazily melodic, exultant, moonstruck. From the direction of the cabin they heard a single cry of release, and looking at each other they laughed, laughed at the way everything was falling together in a pattern beyond any calculation or hope of repetition: we do these things once, then they’re gone! The distant coyotes kept howling and the wind picked up, swirled the branches overhead, and Nadezhda hugged him as they moved together.
When they returned to the world she laughed with her breath, shortly. “Our blessing on all of them.”
* * *
Kevin and Ramona, horse and eagle, walked up the canyon past the spring and into the darkness of dense night forest. If there was a trail here they couldn’t see it. Kevin smiled, enjoying the twisting between trees, the stepping over fronds and fallen logs. It felt good to be out of the water and into the wind—his body was overheated at the core, and his face kept sweating so that the hot wind seemed cool, refreshing, comfortable.
He stopped as the canyon bottom divided into two forks, and Ramona came up beside him. Pressed against him. He knew these canyons from boyhood, but in the uncertain light, distracted as he was, he found it hard to concentrate on what he knew, hard to remember any of that—it was just forest, night. Moon would be up soon, then he would remember. Meanwhile he chose the left fork and they continued on. Should eventually get them onto a ridge, and then he would know their location.
It was rougher up this side canyon, which rose like a broken staircase; there was a rock with a long oak bannister. They used their hands to pull themselves up. A final scramble brought them up the headwall of the canyon, and they stood on a broad ridge, sloping slowly up to the long crest of the range that led to Saddleback. Here the ground was dry and crumbled—a layer of dirt over the sandstone below. Dwarfish scrub oaks and gnarly sage bushes dotted the ridge irregularly, and in most places it was easy to walk between them.
To the east the horizon glowed, then broke to white. Moonrise. Immediately the stars dimmed, the sky became less purely black—it was a pastel black now. Shadows jumped into existence like solid ghosts, and everything on the ridge suddenly looked different. The half spheres of the sage bushes crouching on the earth like hiding animals, the wind-tossed scrub oaks crabbed and threatening.
When the moon—big and fat, its dark half just as visible as the bright half—when this ball, half light, half dark, was almost breaking free of the horizon, they saw movement in its face. “What?” Then Kevin saw that the movement was on a ridge to the east. Silhouetted against the moon, animals pointed their long thin muzzles at the sky. A few dream seconds of silence later they heard the cries.
Coyotes. “Hank gets around fast,” Kevin whispered. The weirdness of the sound, the impossible slides up and down, the way the yips and barks and sliding yowls crossed over each other, making momentary harmonies and disharmonies that never once held still—all sent great shivers up Kevin’s spine. The skin on his arms and back goose-pimpled. Thoughtlessly he drew Ramona to him (a little static shock). They embraced. This was something friends often did in their town, but Kevin and Ramona never had—given what was and what was not between them, it would have been too much. So this was the first time. They drew back to look at each other in the fey light, and even without color Kevin could see the perfect coloring of Ramona’s face, the rich skin, raven hair—the whites of eyes and teeth … teeth that bit lower lip and then they were kissing. The coyotes’ ecstacy yipped from inside them now, a complete interpenetration of inner and outer. Their first true kiss. Kevin’s blood transmuted to something lighter, faster, hotter, freer—to wind. His blood turned to wind.
* * *
For Doris it was not like that. She left the hot springs angry and then morose, and paid little attention to where she was going. Upcanyon, yes, in the direction that Kevin and Ramona had gone. But she would never follow them. It would be stupid. And anyway impossible. But if only she could come upon Kevin and say to him—shout at him—why? Why her and not me? We’ve made love before, how many times? We’ve been good friends, we’ve lived in that house together for how many years? A long, long, long long time. And you never once looked at me like you do at her. We had fun, we laughed, we made love, we seemed to be enjoying ourselves, but still you were never all there, you never committed anything. You were never passionate. Wanting. It was just floating along for you, a friendship, “Damn you,” she said aloud. In the noise of the wind, canyon soughing like a great broken flute, no
one would ever hear her. They were in conspiracy together, she and the wind and the canyon, covering for each other, protecting each other. No one could hear. Unless she screamed. And she would never do that. “Not me, I’m not the kind to scream. Shout, maybe, or perhaps a sharp, staccato, cutting remark. A stiletto of a remark. But no histrionics from Doris Nakayama, no, of course not,” voice rising with every word, till she let out a little shriek, “Aah!” Clapped her hand over her mouth, bit her fingers, laughed angrily. She sniffed and spit the snot out on the ground. Dashed tears from her cheeks. It felt good to stumble through the trees ranting and raving, crashing through brush when there was no obvious way. “Stupid fool, I mean just because she’s tall and beautiful and smart and a good fucking shortstop. And she’s sweet, sure, but when will she make you laugh? When will she make you think or teach you anything? Ah, fuck, you’re two peas in a pod. A very boring pod. The two of you together have no more wit than a rock. So I suppose you’ll never miss it, you bastard.”
The canyon forked and Doris bludgeoned her way to the left, up a steep side canyon that gave her a lot of opportunity to work off steam. She attacked the boulders like personal enemies. Overheated from the damned hot springs. Muttering to herself she walked straight into the middle of a sage brush, and a whole flock of sleeping doves shot away, cooing and clucking and landing in a bush nearby together. Their liquid calls pursued her as she continued up the defile. She smelled of sage now, the very smell of these hills, of this wind, of Orange County itself. Before the people and the oranges and the eucalyptus and the labs it had smelled like this. She crushed a twig of it between her fingers, smelled it. Hank and his loony ceremony, she hummed the Aum, smelled the sage running all through her. They were more her hills than anyone else’s.
She topped the headwall of the canyon just as the coyotes began their mad song, and so she had just turned up the ridge when she saw the figures above her. Frightened, she dropped behind a bush. They would think she had followed them. All thought of getting Kevin alone and lambasting him disappeared as she crouched to the ground. Finally she dared to move, to peer around the side of the hemispherical sage. And so she saw them embrace and kiss: silhouetted figures in the moonlight, like a silver on black nineteenth-century etching entitled “Love”. Careless of noise she turned and ran back down the ridge, tore down into another canyon.
* * *
Ramona broke away from their kiss. “What was that?”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you hear it? And I saw something move, out of the corner of my eye. Back the way we came.”
“Maybe another coyote.”
“It was bigger than that.”
“Hmm.”
The shape Kevin had seen in the night, after his first council meeting. He had forgotten it, but now he remembered. And there were mountain lions in the Santa Ana Mountains again, it was said—Kevin had never seen one. It was unlikely one would have come so close to people, though—the areas they liked were higher, up on the back side of Saddleback. Well, he wouldn’t mention the possibility, for fear it would spoil the mood.
“Do you think it could have been a mountain lion?” Ramona said matter-of-factly.
“Nah.” He cleared his throat. “Or at least, it isn’t very likely.”
The coyotes’ yipping seemed to assure them that it was, on the contrary, entirely possible.
“Let’s go down the next canyon over,” Ramona suggested.
Kevin nodded, and they walked the top of the ridge, winding between sage brushes. The rounded edge of the ridge curved in a big bow, until they had the moon at their backs. Their shadows stretched long before them, black and solid. The wind threw their hair across their faces. They stopped often to kiss, and each kiss was longer and more passionate, more a complete world in itself.
To their right, and so back in the general direction of the hot springs, they saw a rather shallow, wide canyon. “Look!” Ramona said, pointing down into it. At the first dip in the canyon floor there was a copse of big old sycamore trees. The biggest stood by itself, overlooking the canyon below, and there seemed to be a vine dropping from one high, thick branch. “It’s the swing,” she said. “It’s Swing Canyon!”
“Sure enough!” Kevin said. “Hey, I know where we are now.”
“Come on,” she said, leading him down, looking over her shoulder with a girlish smile. “Let’s go swing.”
* * *
Down at the big tree they found the swing was the same as ever. It was not an ordinary swing, but a single thick rope, tied to a crook in a side branch, so that it hung well clear of the battered old trunk. The ground fell away in a smooth slope downcanyon, so it was possible to grasp the rope over a round knot and run down the slope, and when lifted off the ground one could put one’s feet on a bar of wood holed and stuck above a knot at the bottom of the rope. And so one swung out into space in a long slow arc, above the brush-covered drop to the lower canyon.
They took turns doing this. Kevin rode into space feeling the mounting exhilaration of the kisses between rides, the rough contact of their bodies as they stopped each other, the windy joy of the rides themselves, out in the wind and the spinning moonlit shadows. At the end of each flight he felt lighter and lighter, as if casting off dross with each spin. He was escaping by degrees the pull of the earth. The wind was rushing downcanyon, so that each flight was pushed further out among the stars, and on the way back in he found he could face into the wind, spreadeagle his spirit and land light as a feather, to be caught in Ramona’s strong arms. He felt they had joined the people on Mars, and flew in gravity two-fifths that of the world they had known.
“Here,” Ramona said breathlessly at the end of one run. “We can do it together. Hold on from opposite sides, and run down and put our feet on each side of the bar.” They kissed hard and their hands explored each other hungrily. “Do you think it’ll work?” “Sure! I mean who knows? Let’s try it.”
“Okay.” Kevin seized the rope. Ramona’s hands closed just above his. They took off running. When the rope pulled them free of the earth their feet scrabbled for a hold on the bar, which teetered under them. Finally they balanced on it, and could take their weight off their arms. Standing together, face to face, flying through the night with the hot dry wind, they kissed long and hard, and their tongues spoke directly to each other in a language of touch so much more direct and powerful than the language of words that Kevin thought he might forget speech entirely. Ramona pulled away, laughed. They were spinning slowly. She pressed against him. “Do you remember when we were in third grade and we went behind the school and kissed?” she said in his ear. “No!” Kevin said, astonished. Had that really happened? She kissed his ear, thrust her tongue in it. That whole side of his body buzzed as if touched by some electricity of sex, he almost fell off. He held the big muscles of her bottom, larger than the full spread of his hand. She breathed in his ear, rubbed the hard band of her public bone over his thigh. They were spinning. The wind rushed by as they unzipped each other’s pants. “I want to kiss you all over,” Ramona said under her breath. She reached into his pants and squeezed him hard—Kevin gasped, the shock of it shot straight up his belly and spine, he very well might fall off, Ramona pulled her pants down and kicked them off into the night, pressed against him and they kissed, spinning. They had no weight at all, they were lofted like tufts of dandelion in the dry wind, spinning—
“Oh hey,” Kevin said. “Here comes the ground.” With a rush they were stumbling up the slope, hanging onto the rope to keep from falling over, sliding over the soft dirt, slewing to one side. They fell together, collapsed onto the ground, let the rope fall away. Seemed Ramona’s pants were actually still on, his too, how had that happened? Mind getting ahead of the game. Exquisite delay to get them off, over her butt, down her long legs, shove them to one side. Undressing twice? he noted hazily. Very nice idea. One of the best parts, after all, unbutton each other’s buttons, pull each other free of all that raiment, reveal the naked
self inside. When we are naked we are still clothed inside, but the beautiful, physical, sexual thereness of the flesh, pulsing warmly under the fingers, bodies pressed together, seeking maximum contact, skin to skin, everything touching everything and all those cloth barriers gone—it’s easy to be overwhelmed by that. And to be inside her, to be the male half of a new creature the two of them made, to have such a female half there all around him.…
He looked up and saw that the rope was swinging idly in the wind, that it had knocked down some of the periwinkle blooms that spiraled up the sycamore trunk. Petals and whole flowers floated down diagonally in the wind and were landing all around them, on his back, in Ramona’s face (eyes closed, mouth open in a girlish O of surprise), petals like leaves falling around them, little fingers on his back, piling up, drifting against their sides until they moved in a mound of periwinkle blossoms, a blanket of them. He saw a pure black mountain lion pad by, purring its approval. It levitated with a casual leap into the lowest fork of their tree, where it sprawled over both sides of a big branch, legs all akimbo, perfectly relaxed, staring at them with big moon eyes, purring a purr as deep and rasping as waves breaking on shingle, purring a purr that enveloped them like the sound of the wind in the branches. Kevin felt it deep inside, vibrating both him and Ramona completely as they plunged toward oblivion, the universal now. They were spinning.
* * *
Oscar had lost the canyon trail immediately, almost falling in the little gurgling pool at the source of the spring; he had to sink to one knee abruptly to keep from pitching in. Spiraling blade fronds slapped him gently in the face. He stared transfixed at the roiled surface of the pool, which turned over itself as if a hose were spurting out water somewhere below the surface. So odd—here they were on a desert coastline, the mountains mostly bare and brown, and before his eyes water poured out of a hill. And steaming hot to boot. Where did it come from? Oh, he knew that. Law classes, surprising how much you had to understand for the law to make sense. And the way Sally taught that class, up in Dusy Basin and down on the campus; he felt he understood groundwater basins. He stood on the bony cracked hills, eons old, porous to water right down to the bedrock. So the ground beneath him was saturated, up to some level below him, a few feet, several hundred feet, depending on where he stood. Water down there slowly flowing, down its secret watersheds. A rib of bedrock, an underground upwelling. This was the top of one, pouring out a crack. A reservoir filled with stone. Underground waterfall. And hot because some cracks in deep bedrock were letting the earth’s internal heat seep up. My God. Could it actually be that hot down there? Well, the crust was only a few miles thick, and after that it was a few thousand miles to the core. Essentially he was standing on a ball of molten lava, with something as thin as aluminum foil insulating him from it.