Now Mr. Albemarle realized the aliens had given him no such assurance. They had said, in fact, he was too alienated in his affections already for them to bother with alienating them further, which was not unlike being deemed terminal by the good doctor.
At first the aliens pronouncing “The worm of your passion is twisted” had had an oddly calming, if not outright narcotic, effect on Mr. Albemarle. That explains everything! was what he had thought. Now he thought it explained nothing, and where it had calmed him it frightened him. “The worm of my passion is twisted,” he said to himself, and aloud over the moat, and all along the watchtower, feeling worse and worse and worse. “The worm of my passion is twisted.”
Mr. Albemarle then had a vision of his genitals twisted into knots. This was oddly comforting, also. It did not bother him. He chuckled, in fact, at the idea, and he recalled a woman once at a cocktail party declaiming to people whom she thought interested but who were not, “My husbands genitals are like knotted rope.” Everyone had left her and gone over to talk with her husband in sympathetic moods.
Mr. Albemarle knew that the aliens meant something deeper and worse, as they had told him, and that they were right. His passion was bent and his desire was dirty and veiled. He knew men whose passion was straightforward and whose desire was clean and open and who were not Pat Boone. They were true cowboys of the heart. They saw what they wanted (and knew it), they asked for it, and when they got it they sang praise around the campfire in a clear voice and got up early and made coffee for it and kissed it and hit the trail, the happy trail, until nightfall and bedfall and bliss. These cowboys had cowgirls: open-eyed girls in red skirts who danced with you if you asked and kissed you back if you waited long enough to kiss them first. And a true cowboy knew how to wait, and he knew whom to kiss in the first place.
Mr. Albemarle did not know whom to kiss because he wanted to kiss no one, really, and when he got tired of that he wanted to kiss everyone. At that point, waiting seemed contraindicated. Waiting for what? For everyone to say yes? It was ridiculous. He had the image of a real cowboy of the heart, his passion straight and clean and open, sitting a bull in the chute, packing his hand in the harness very carefully, and taking a long time while the bull snorted and farted and stomped and fumed and flared, giving the word when he was ready, and in a happy breeze of preparedness blasting into danger and waving for balance astride it for a regulation period and vaulting into the air and landing on two feet and walking proudly across the sand to receive his score, with which, good or bad, he would be content.
By contrast, Mr. Albemarle would not deign get on the bull until the last minute, and then would disdainfully sit sidesaddle on it, and it would erupt and the rest would be an ignominious confusion of injuries and clowns coming to his rescue. That is what “the worm of your passion is twisted” meant. It meant not a ride and a score but injury and clowns holding your hand.
Mr. Albemarle walked all along the watchtower, whistling gloomily and studying the clouds. He imagined the hearts in the moat — the aliens had said a spoilbank of hearts — in great cumulus piles, great billowy stacks of puffy, shifting, vaporous grief, under the still water.
He cupped his mouth and in a low, smooth, strong voice intoned to the moat:
“Cawboy to moat, cawboy to spoils of love—
“What am I going to do with myself, now that I know it to be useless? I am tenebrous, or tenebrious if you prefer, it’s all the same. When the big bulldog get in trouble, puppy-dog britches will fit him fine.”
The water, or whatever was actually down there, remained still.
On his next morning’s patrol, which he went about naked, having liked the sensation of discarding all the sodiers’ gear and not seeing the logical end to discarding things, he met a woman on the wall. This is the way it is in life, he reflected; when you go naked, for once, you run into somebody you might prefer not see you naked. There was a woman not fifty yards ahead and Mr. Albemarle at least had the gumption to keep going, not to run. His nakedness if anything emboldened his step, martialized it a bit, so that by the time he actually came up to her he was in a subdued goose step and was looking perfectly natural about it.
“Hey, cawboy,” she said with a leer. “I been hearing you sing the blues up here all the livelong day.” This testiness was coming out of an otherwise happy, innocent-looking woman reminiscent of Dale Evans. She had on the red skirt that Mr. Albemarle had pictured when he was taking inventory regarding straight desire and twisted desire. The red skirt flared out wide and short and had a modest but sexy fringe on it. It allowed you to see where the leg of the wearer began to be the butt of the wearer, and it gave the onlooker pause and a kind of stillborn gulp.
He was looking at this Dale Evans in her skirt saying this contradictory Mae West stuff to him, naked and in the arrested gulp and not now looking at the skirt or the legs or the legs grading into the butt, actually there was nothing gradual about it—
“Cawboy,” Dale Mae was saying, “I want you to sing me some o’ them blues.”
“I don’t sing,” Mr. Albemarle said.
“Yesterday you sang:
When the big bulldog in trouble
Puppy-dog britches fit him fine.
You sang this in a clear campfire voice that lulled the cows and woke me up. I been sleepin’ a long long long long long long time.”
“That sounds like a long time,” Mr. Albemarle said, stupidly, desperately trying to calculate how she heard him, where she was or had been to hear him singing to the moat. In the moat?
“Are you from the spoilbank of broken hearts?”
“The what?”
“The moat?”
“The what?”
“Is your heart broken?”
Dale Mae looked at him as if she had noticed for the first time he was naked, or as if he had lost his mind, which was, he considered, the same look. “Why don’t you get dressed so we can dance,” Dale Mae said. “Put on some of that Soldier of Fortune shit in a pile over there.”
“Sodier of Fortune,” Mr. Albemarle corrected, liking her. He fairly skipped over to the military paraphernalia and slapped on a quantity of it and stood almost breathless before Dale Mae in her flared red skirt and delicious fringe, ready to dance, or whatever.
“I warn you,” he said. “I put you on notice right now. I have…The worm of my passion is twisted.”
“It better be,” Dale Mae said.
“By all assurance, it is badly twisted.”
“When the big bulldog get in trouble, he should turn on some music and dance,” Dale Mae said. “Take this bitch in hand, sir, and fret not your twisted passion.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mr. Albemarle did as he was told. All along the watchtower, they danced. It was a stepless but not beat-less dance, hip to hip, pocket to bone, thrust to hollow. Gradually Dale Mae swatted away the annoying military hardware and left Mr. Albemarle as elegant as Fred Astaire, and gradually she herself softened and melted and fairly oozed into his arms, and they made in their heads plans to remain together and untwist Mr. Albemarle’s passion and to do to Dale Mae’s passion whatever in the way of no harm could yet be done to it. Dale Mae had a beauty mark on her cheek, which Mr. Albemarle admired until he touched it and it came off on his finger and appeared to be a piece of insect and he flicked it over the wall and thought no more of it and admired without impediment the dreamy, relaxed face of Dale Mae, who had come to him unbidden and unhesitant and unheeding of certain dangers. This gave him a good feeling and made his puppy-dog britches fit him a little less fine. He was bulldog big enough already to kiss this cowgirl on the neck.