'A fellow took me here once,' she says. 'Sometimes there's a hunter or two, but no one else. Anyway, you can always see the hunters' cars.'
Some fellow? I think, wondering if she's already been defiled. But she guesses my thinking and says hurriedly, 'I didn't like him. I made him bring me back. But I remember how we got here.' And her tongue darts out a moment, to wet each corner of her mouth.
Then shade, and an incline; the ground is firmer and bumpier; I hear rustling under the Edsel and smell pine pitch - in Iowa, of all places! A branch lashes the car, which makes me jump and bump my nose on the steering wheel.
When Lydia stops, we're in a dense grove of new pine, old deadfall, flat-leafed fern and spongy, half-frozen hunks of moss. Mushrooms are about. 'See?' she says, opening her door and sliding her legs out. Finding it wet and cold out there, she sits, her back to me, dallying her feet above the ground.
We're on a knoll, in a scruffy thatch of tree and shrub. Behind us are cut corn and soybean fields; in front and well below, what must be part of the Coralville Reservoir lies frozen at its fringes, open and choppy in the middle. If I were a hunter, I'd take my stand on this hill, deep in the ferns, and wait for the lazier ducks to fly this shortcut between one feeding ground and another. They'd come over low to the ground here, especially the fat, sluggish ones, their bellies bright with a glance of the sun off the lake.
But leaning against the Edsel's armrest, I extend my foot to the small of Lydia Kindle's back, and for just a moment feel like propelling her out her open door. But I just touch her spine, and she looks over her shoulder at me before she swings her legs inside and shuts the door.
There's a blanket in the car-boot, and an older-looking girl in her dorm has bought beer, she tells me. There's a nice cheese, too, and a warm, circle loaf of pumpernickel and apples.
Climbing over the front seat, she lays this picnic spread in back, and we hunch the blanket over our shoulders, tent-like and cosy. Under the blanket, a bit of cheese sticks to a tiny blue vein on Lydia's wrist. She snares it with her fast tongue, watching me watch her; her legs are crossed under her in such a way that her knees face me.
'Your elbow's in the bread,' Lydia whispers, and I giggle witlessly.
She squirms her legs and shakes the blanket around us for crumbs; I watch the bread roll to the floor; I see her skirt lift to her hipbone as she pulls me further up in her lap. She has baby-pink and baby-blue flowers on her slip, flowers too reminiscent of one of Colm's early crib blankets. She says, 'I think I love you.' But I hear a measure to each word, so deliberate that I know she's practiced saying this. As if she too feels it didn't sound quite right, she amends it: 'I think I know I love you.' Pressing her fine, thin leg against my side, she shifts to one hip and gently tugs my head to her thigh. My heart hits her knee.
There are the same damn flowers on her panties, too. A baby in her bunting; such frilly, flowered things for Junior Misses.
She squirms again and gives a weak pull on my ears, aware that I've seen her flowers. 'You don't have to be in love with me,' she says, and again I hear the practiced measure. Somewhere, I know, in Lydia Kindle's dormitory room, there's a piece of notebook paper - with this conversation written out like a script, scribbled on, revised, perhaps footnoted. I wish I knew what responses she has written for me.
'Mr Trumper?' she says, and as I kiss her under her hem, I feel a tiny muscle slack. She tugs my head up to her bird's breast, her suit jacket open, her blouse a thin shiver over her cool skin.
'Vroognaven abthur, Gunnel mik,' I recite. Old Low Norse is safest in such circumstances.
With the slightest shudder, she sits up against me, but even an ark like an Edsel is awkward, and there's much wriggling before she's free of her suit jacket. My hunting-coat snags on the rear window handle; sitting back against her, bobsled style, I manage to unlace my cloddy boots while her hands braille-read my shirt buttons. Turning back to her, I find she's unbuttoned herself, but she is hunching on her knees, arms folded over her bra; she shivers as if she was undressing for some unsure dip in a winter river.
Almost relieved, she stalls against me, happy to be hugged still semi-clothed, her skirt unzipped but only half down one hip. Her damp hands skitter across my ribs and pinch the unfortunate fold that curls slightly over my belt.
Lydia Kindle says, 'I never have, you know ... I have never ...'
I drop my chin to her sharp, bony shoulder and brush her ear with my mustache. 'What does your father do?' I ask, and feel her sigh, both let down and relieved.
'He's in burlap,' she says, her fingers finding my kidneys. And I think, He's in burlap! All the time? Wrapped in it, dressed in it, sleeping in it ...
'He can't be very comfortable,' I say, but her hard collarbone is numbing my jaw.
Lydia says, 'You know - feed bags, grain sacks ...'
Imagining Lydia Kindle's huge father, hefting a hundred-pound burlap duffel of onions and swinging it against my spine, I wince.
Lydia straightens up on her knees, pulling away from me, her hands at her hips, working down her skirt; she has the smallest bulge of a tummy under her flowered slip. Seeing her hands so busy, I slip her bra straps off her shoulders. 'I'm so small,' she apologizes in a tiny voice as I drop my pants to my ankles. Hoisting my feet over the front seat, my clumsy heels strike the horn; with all the windows closed, it sounds as if it's from another car, and Lydia suddenly crouches against me, allowing me to unhook her bra. The label reads: A YOUNG PETTY-PIECE UNDERTHING. How true.
I feel her hard breasts pushed against me and I shrug off my shirt, aware that the fly of my boxer shorts is gaping and how she's staring down at me; she's rigid, but her hips help me get off her slip. There's a mole, and the brief V of flowers, baby-pink and baby-blue.
She says, 'You've got such tiny nipples.' Her fingers wander over them.
I cup her small, round breasts - just oranges to the touch - with her nipples as hard as the knuckle that is digging into my leg. Slowly I lay her down, getting one glimpse of her body, taut and ribby, and one look at her up-poking breasts, a tint of powder in her narrow cleavage. Then she pulls my head down to the powder spot, but I feel my stomach tighten at the scent. It reminds me of Colm's baby shampoo; the label says: NO TEARS!
She says, 'Please ...'
Please what? I think, and hope she won't make this my decision. I have such trouble with decisions.
Kiss a soft, straight line down to her navel; see the marks her panties' waist band has grooved on the small swell of her belly. It bothers me that I can't remember when or how her panties came off. Was it her decision or mine? It strikes me as an important bit of forgetting. My rough chin rests on that fluffed fringe. When I move, when she first feels my kiss, she scissors my head hard and gives my hair two quick painful tugs. But then her thighs relax; I feel her hands slide off my head and cup my ears, so that I can hear the sea in stereo - or the Coralville Reservoir rising, making our odd hill an island; to maroon us under the dusk-flying ducks, over the dust-choked odor drawn up like groundfog from the soybean fields.
One of my ears is released; the sea rings one-sided, monaural. I catch a flash of Lydia's free hand swooping along the floor and fumbling in her pear-colored suit jacket. What is in the sleeve? She says, 'There's a rubber. A girl in my dorm ... had one.'
But I can't fit my hand up her jacket cuff, and she's obliged to shake her suit, saying, 'There's a secret pocket in the lining of the wrist ...' What for?
Her breasts are parted: I see her lip held in her teeth; I see her ribcage quickly lift, hold itself up and slide the tinfoil-wrapped rubber down her belly to my forehead; then her ribs fall, and the queer, small swell to her belly quivers; her hips shake. Out of the corner of my eye I see her arm swinging free, her wrist slack; wadded in her palm, like a sponge ball, is what must be the heart of the pumpernickel, torn from the center of the fresh loaf. Her thighs tense and slap my face hard, then fall flush to the seat, and the hand that holds the bread-heart lets the dark wad
fall.
I hear the tinfoil tear and crinkle; I wonder if she hears it too. I lay my head on her breasts and hear the flutterstep of her heart. Her elbow is propped on the seat, her forearm dangled over the floor. Her wrist is so sharply bent that it looks broken; her long fingers point down, unmoving, and the cloudy sun through the window is just strong enough to glint off her high school ring; it is too big for her finger and has slipped askew.
I shut my eyes in her powdered cleavage, noting a sort of candy musk. But why does my mind run to slaughterhouses, and to all the young girls raped in wars?
Her thighs close gently on my shielded part, and she asks, 'Aren't you going to do the other?'
And my frail part shrinks in its thin, pinching skin; it recedes when Lydia Kindle flexes her thighs.
Again she says, 'Please ...' And in a very small voice, 'What's wrong?'
Slowly I raise myself off her, kneeling between her legs; I feel her fingers stronger on my shoulders; there's a blue, thread-thin vein that's pulsing in her cleavage, a diagonal between her far-parted breasts. As if she's conscious of her heartbeat showing, she drops one arm across herself, and with the other hand hides her crotch, A YOUNG PETTY-PIECE! saved, for a while. And for whom?
I feel the rubber roll up. While Lydia Kindle, swinging her legs off the seat, says, 'I never even asked you to be in love with me or anything. I mean, I've never done this before, or that other, and it just didn't even matter what you really thought of me - I mean, to me. Don't you even know that? Oh, my God ... Shit, and I thought I was pretty naive ...'
As if she's got the cramps, she bends over, her face on one knee, a lash of hair in the corner of her mouth, and in that familiar angle between her elbow and her knee, the breast nearest me is simply too small and perfect to swing; it points like a thing painted on her, too perfect to be real.
'It's complicated,' I try to tell her. 'No one should ever leave things up to me.'
I fumble with the latch and open my door for the cold reviving pain of the air. Standing cold and naked in the wet, crunchy moss, I hear Lydia rummaging through the car. Turning, I duck my boots; she's on all fours in the back seat, shoveling my things out the door. Wordless, I gather each article as it falls and make a ball of my stuff and clutch it to my chest. Brainless, Lydia Kindle tosses her own clothes from the back seat to the front seat, and from the front seat to the back seat, and then from the back seat to the front seat ...
I say, 'Let me drive you home, please.'
'Please?' she shrieks, and over the knoll, like stones thrown over my head, a low rush of ducks wings by, black in the dusk; startled, they veer off, honking to see this naked fool with his clothes held over his head.
Now watch Lydia, dashing nude around the inside of the Edsel. She is locking all the doors. Still nude, she slips behind the steering wheel, her fine nipples brushing the cold ring of the horn. The Edsel convulses, belches and blurts a thick gray wad of exhaust out its rusted pipe. For a second, though I make no effort to move, I believe Lydia is going to run over me, but she surges in reverse. Jacking the wheel, she spins herself back into the tire ruts that mark our coming here. Wrenching the hard-to-turn Edsel, her breasts at last move like live things. I fear for her nipples on the horn ring.
It's not until I watch her Edsel rocketing over the soybean bog that I realize my predicament. He died of exposure on the duck-flown shores of the Coralville Reservoir!
So I began to slog through the soybeans, keeping my jogging eyes on the spattered Edsel, churning through the far field of corn stubble. I could barely make out the pale line of the road by which we must have come. Running nude and slippery through this swampland, I gambled that if I cut along the shore line of the reservoir, I might intersect the road ahead of her and be able to flag her down. By then, she might be in more of a mood to be flagged down. Flag her down with what? I wondered. With my strangely clad part?
My clothes bundle high and dry in my armpit, I dug through the painful saw grass and spongy muck along the thin-iced edge of the reservoir. A black burst of coots took flight in front of me; once or twice I sank to my knees, feeling terrible oozy and decaying things in the bog slime. But always I keep my clothes bundle high and dry.
Then I was into some uncut corn, bent broken stalks, the running painful on the crinkling cornhusks underfoot, as dry and sharp and brittle as thin pottery. There was a slight pond between me and the flat line of the road; it was not so firmly frozen as it looked, and I crashed waist-deep striking a downed fence underwater, the fenceposts just visible at either side of the pond, with the barbwire slanting under. But I was too numb to feel any of the cuts.
By now I could foresee our lucky collision. Lydia's sea-green Edsel had a dust tail like a kite trying to leave the ground. Reaching the ditch of the road just ahead of her, I was too exhausted to wave; I simply stood there, my bundle of clothes casually under one arm, and watched her roar by, her breasts as straight in front of her as headlights. She didn't even turn her head, and her brake lights never flickered. Stupefied, I jogged a little in her dusty wake - so thick a dust that I stumbled off the road's crown and had to grope my choked way along.
I was still trotting as her Edsel increased the distance between us, when I saw, so close I almost ran into it, a shabby red pickup truck parked along the side of the road. I sagged against the truck's door handle, seeing that I wasn't more than six feet from a hunter busy cleaning a duck on the pickup's hood. He had the floppy neck of the bird draped over the arm of the side-view mirror, while blood and clotted parts spilled to the road, and down feathers stuck to his gutting knife and thick thumb.
When he saw me, he almost cut his wrist off, with a sudden wrench that squeegeed the duck over the hood and skidded it wetly down the fender away from him, and he cried out, 'Holy shit, Harry... .'
I panted. 'No,' I gasped, convinced that I wasn't a Harry yet, not seeing the man in the driver's seat of the truck; his elbow wasn't more than a few inches from my ear.
'Holy shit, Eddy ...' the driver answered, so close to me that I jumped.
I took a minute more of panting to compose myself, then asked casually, 'Are you going to Iowa City?'
They gaped at me for a long time, but I was too proud and too weary to unwrap my bundle and dress myself.
Then Harry said, 'God, are you going to Iowa City?'
'They won't let you into Iowa City like that,' said Eddy, still holding the gory duck.
Dressing in the road beside their truck, I noticed that my condom was still attached. But if I'd removed it, it would have been too much like admitting to these hunters that I really did wear such a thing. I dressed right over it, simply ignoring it.
Then we all got in the truck, amid much changing of seats and bickering about who'd drive. Eddy finally took the wheel and said, 'Jesus. We saw your little friend go by.'
'If she was your friend ...' Harry said to me. But wedged in between them I didn't answer. I could feel my feet warming and bleeding in my boots beside the bloody ducks.
Cautious Harry kept the guns between the door and his knee, putting them far from my reach, understandably not trusting a run-around nudist and madman.
'Jesus,' said Eddy, as if still trying to convince himself. 'She was just batting like hell down that old road ...'
'She almost swiped you,' said Harry.
'Well, Christ, I was staring so hard,' Eddy told him, leaning across my lap, 'I almost forgot to get out of her way.' He paused, then added, 'Holy shit, she had such a nice little pair on her, sitting right up there, behind the wheel. It was almost like she was driving with them ...'
'Well, God; I was up here in the cab,' Harry said. 'I could see her whole thing. Shit! I was looking right down in her lap!' He paused, then added, '... such a nice little bush ...'
Envious Eddy said defensively, 'Well, I saw her pair, anyway. I got a good look.'
I almost entered the conversation then; I wanted to say, 'I got a pretty good look myself.' But I looked down at the floor a
t a duck's slack neck and upturned, downy belly; the feathers near the neat slit, the careful gash, were soaked with the blood.
Then, loud beside me Eddy said, 'Sweet Jesus, here she is again!' All of us stared at the sea-green Edsel parked at the side of the road ahead.
'Slow down,' Harry said, but I thought, Please don't slow down too much.
Slowly we cruised past her, three gawking faces turning to look her over. Harry and I turned around and watched the Edsel shrink behind us while Eddy used the mirror, swearing softly, 'Shit shit shit, oh, shit ...'
'Oh, shit,' echoed Harry.
But I was relieved to see Lydia Kindle dressing behind the wheel, applying the finishing touches, buttoning up under our gapes; it showed me she was somewhat sane again.
And how sane she looked! There was such a cold, unrecognizing look in her face - unsurprised to see me in the truck, or not even noticing; or poised enough, in an awful adult way, to pretend, with frightening composure, not to notice any of us.
The violation was complete; Lydia Kindle was defiled more perfectly than any pervert could have planned it.
I shifted my throbbing feet, Eddy farted and Harry answered him. Inches from my boot, the viscous eye of the duck was drying up, the shine dulled.
'Jesus,' I said.
'Yeah, shit,' said Eddy.
'Yeah, Jesus,' Harry said.
Grief shared; we were a threesome of disappointment.
On Interstate 80, the sea-green Edsel hurtled past us. Eddy honked his horn and Harry cried, 'Go, you little honey!'
And I thought: Lydia Kindle will probably transfer to another section of freshman German language lab.
Eddy took the Clinton Street exit, bringing us in by City Park. As we crossed the river, Harry began to pluck a duck, savagely seizing great clumps of down in his fist and stuffing the feathers out of the side-vent window. But half the feathers blew back inside, and his sloppy speed tore the duck's oily skin. Harry didn't seem to mind; fiercely intent, he ravaged on. A feather stuck to Eddy's lip; he spat and rolled down his window, creating a cross gale. Suddenly the cab was awhirl with feathers. Harry hooted and threw a handful of them at Eddy, who swerved on to the shoulder of the road and swiped at mad Harry's throttled bird, reaching across my lap and clucking like a loon.