She came scuffing in, glanced at him, and went over and slouched into a chair. Mrs. Kreiger saw him having problems with the wheelchair and hurried around and wheeled him over to the girl. He reached and grabbed her hand. He was weeping. “Bix. Oh, Bix honey.”
But Bix honey looked narrow-eyed at me. “Is this the big treat, you rotten, dirty bastard? You bring me back to this silly old fart? Where’s Eva? What have you done to Eva? Look, I’ve got to have a surprise. Honest to God, I’ve got to have a surprise or I’m going to go up the walls screaming.”
“You’re home now!” he said.
“Somebody get him off me,” she said.
“I thought you were dead, honey.”
She looked at him with the coldest dark blue eyes in town. “And I wish you were, old man. I wish to hell you were.”
Mrs. Kreiger said, “Doctor Kohn wants to have a look at her. Should I… take her along now?”
“Yes. And… let me know what they suggest, please.”
When they were gone he wiped his eyes and shook his head. “It isn’t possible she could change so much. What can… be done?”
“I think maybe you’ve got to make her able to live with somebody she despises. She despises Bix Bowie, and always has, but didn’t know there was a way to escape. It will take a lot of love, a lot of patience, a lot of motivation to make her ever believe that the Bix Bowie of the real world isn’t a total failure. Excuse me, but what else have you got worth doing?”
“It… it’s a second chance?”
“And very damned slim.”
“It’s the only thing I can do.”
So maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t give it the big try. Or it might last only so long. I wondered about that look in his eye. Maybe I’d only imagined it was there. Second try, second rejection. But maybe, just maybe, he might have the guts for the job.
I heard a rooster crow a long way across the silence of the predawn morning in Oaxaca.
Near dawn, and Elena was curled into me, fists against my chest, round knees pressing against my belly. So I kissed the sleeping eye that was nearest and handiest.
She grunted and came but partway up out of sleep, far enough to begin a slow and determined worming and squirming, trying to work the undermost leg under me, under my waist. When I saw what she was trying to do, I made it easier for her. She slid the leg under, and then hooked her calf back against me. She lifted the other leg over me, the drowsy weight of it coming down across my waist. She uncurled her fists and slid her hands around my ribs, one under me, one on top, and flattened her palms against my back.
So then there was the unseen questing, and a guiding touch, and then a snubbed pressure increasing until-celebrated with a little snuff of sudden insuck of air through her nose-we were suddenly, sleekly, deeply coupled. She hitched her self a little higher, changed her position, moved her hands further around me, and made her small warm sound of contentment.
I slid my hands down her back until they reached and cupped the warm, smooth, solid buttocks. And like some familiar, faithful, trusty, loyal little machine, that touch and pressure was enough to start the slow, rhythmic pumping of her hips, rich and sleepy and demanding.
So with gray at the windows, and her mouth turning upward for the kiss, with the slow deep steady beat that would begin to change only when we neared climax, this became the reality, this became the life-moment, this became the avowal, the communion, the immortality. The private rhythm of our need, a small and personal and totally shared thing, was that special thing in the world and in time which changed the Rockos and Evas, the Jerrys and Wallys and Bruceys and Carls, the Bixies and Beckys to scare-masks fashioned of cardboard and spit, empty things which hang on strings from an empty tree, turning in the parching wind that blows across the empty heart.
“Ah,” said the tireless, tawny, loving engine. Bless all the sisters, wherever they are.
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Travis McGee #11 Dress Her In IndigoJohn D. MacDonald