Small sounds came to her, intimate sounds, as if she'd lifted out of herself and become an omnipresence-a cough, a giggle, a sigh, the faint soughing of Jiminy's breath catching in the back of his throat as he rocked against Merry's sweat-slick skin in the downstairs bedroom of the main house a hundred yards away. She could hear the leaves respiring and the sap creeping through the branches in the way of blood, slow blood, blood like paste. Termites whispered in the duff, the hooves of the goats grew and expanded with a sharpedged sound that teemed and popped in her ears. And then the book, the one in her hand, rematerialized in a ripple of color, pink and yellow and a single human eye staring out of the page, and she knew it at once, Julio Cortázar's _Blow-up and Other Stories.__ It was a book Ronnie had turned her onto, back in New York, and she in turn had bought it for Marco-there was the imprint of the secondhand book shop in Sebastopol, FREEWHEELIN__' BOOKS__, 25¢, right there in a faded pink blur on the inside page. All right. At least she had that, and though the words still wouldn't cooperate, though they grouped and regrouped and pitched and bucked across the page and every mouth in the forest buzzed in her ears with tiny voices that kept burning and screaming out their testimony till it was all just a blur of white noise, she could dream the stories, dream of the axolotl and the man who kept vomiting up bunnies, and she did, until she had to pull out all the books, one after another, and let the stories infest her.
And then she was down out of the tree, barefoot in the biting leaves, scattering an armload of books like glossy seeds, because that's where they'd found them, she and Marco, on a dense hot sweating afternoon that went off like a time bomb, and where was he now when she needed him? He was with Norm, she reminded herself, that's where he was. In Santa Rosa. Getting supplies. He'd promised to drop his acid at the same time she dropped hers, so they could ride the wave together, and she saw him doing that as the van lurched down the road and Norm bellowed along with the radio in a voice that was like a long sustained shriek from the house of pain, but Santa Rosa wasn't Timbuktu, and they should have been back by now, shouldn't they?
With a sweep of her instep, she interred the books beneath the clawlike leaves. They'd smashed his guitar, torn his clothes, eviscerated the books, and now she'd laid them to rest again, but carefully, carefully, with proper obsequies and all due respect. New books, with fiercer colors and truer stories, would sprout up to replace the tattered ones, a whole living library growing out of the duff beneath the tree, free books, books for the taking, books you could pluck like berries. Or something like that. She lingered there a moment, struggling for focus, then found herself drifting toward the main house, a knot of people sunk into the front porch, music rising up out of unseen depths, joy and sisterhood, but it didn't feel right, not yet, and she struck off into the woods instead. Here she was on her own-on her own trip-the earth gripping her feet like custom-made shoes, _hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye,__ and the trees giving way like a parting crowd all along the path down to the river.
The air was thick, the sun tortured the water. Birds dropped like meteors out of the sky. She sat on the bank, listened to what the current said, dipped her fingers and her feet, and still she didn't feel right. She couldn't seem to catch her breath, that's what it was, as if she'd overdosed on espresso or taken one too many white crosses in a long streaming night behind the wheel and the Rockies rising up out of the wastelands like a big gray impenetrable wall that could have stopped whole armies. Was she afraid? She was. Afraid of nothing and everything, of things that weren't there and things that shifted and mutated just beyond the range of her vision. She closed her eyes and watched the images play across the dark stage of her eyelids in a careening spastic dance she couldn't slow or stop.
She'd been with Marco the day they trashed his things-out in the field behind the main house, where he was laying the pipe for the leach lines. She'd come out with a pitcher of Kool-Aid, barefoot, in shorts and a peasant blouse with blue quetzal birds stitched into the bodice she'd picked up at a secondhand store in New Mexico-a blouse that made her smile even now to think of it-and she'd sat watching the way the muscles gathered in his back every time he bent to fling a shovel of gravel into the ditch. He said she was beautiful. She said he was beautiful himself. “So we're a mutual admiration society,” he said, flinging gravel. There was another shovel standing there all by itself, thrust right up out of a mound of loose stones as if it were a gift of nature. “Want me to help?” she asked, pulling the shovel from the gravel with a sound like grinding teeth, then striking a pose for him, one bare foot poised on the edge of the blade, both arms digging at the haft.
“Barefooted?” he said, straightening up to wipe the sweat from his face with a wadded-up paisley scarf that doubled as a headband. “You must be one tough woman.”
And she was. For the better part of an hour she worked beside him, pitching and thrusting, her movements matched to his, the gravel rising in the ditch like a gray tributary cutting across the dun chop of the field, and she could feel it in her hamstrings, her arms and lower back, and her feet-her feet especially, which couldn't have ached more if they'd been pounded with bricks the whole time-but she never let up. She wanted his praise, and more: she wanted to outdo him.
“All right,” he said finally, “all right-Christ, you're like a demon here. Alfredo was right.”
“About what?”
He looked off across the field to where the trees staggered down to the river. “I don't know. You want to take a swim?”
The water was a living thing, animated in every rill and ripple, and she entered it in a smooth knifing motion that started with her prayer-bound palms elevated over the arch of her neck and ended with a fillip of her ankles and feet. Marco's splash was muffled by the sound of her own, the cold immediate shock, and then they were racing to the far bank, her crawl against his butterfly. He came on strong at the end, pounding the surface to a froth with the spread wings of his arms and the dull hammering explosions of his kick, but in her mind she was back home at the lake, thirteen years old all over again and the strongest swimmer in her age group, out to the raft and back, and she never lost once, not all that summer. She touched the rocks on the far side and turned to face him. Two beats, three, and he was there, naked against her in the flutter of the current, and he took hold of her as if he'd been chasing her all his life.
Later, when the sun wore a groove down the middle of the river and fell off into the trees, they swam back in tandem, pulled on their clothes and started back up the hill. Her feet glided over the dirt of the path. She felt clean and new, the way she always did after a swim, her muscles stretched taut and then stroked and massaged till they were like the veal her mother used to pound for cordon bleu, first one side, then the other, _whack, whack, whack.__ They'd made love in a cool dimple of grass on a sandbar, Marco taking his time, using his tongue and his fingers to pry each soft gasp from her, and she arching her back, taking him in, making love to him every bit as much as he was making love to her. Then they lay there in the grass a long while, watching the cobalt sky and a single hawk on fire with the sun, and then Marco nuzzled her, and she rolled herself on top of him, every square millimeter of her skin lit from within, and she thought of a film she'd seen on TV one late night when she was in high school and her parents were asleep and dead to the world-_Hiroshima, Mon Amour,__ that was it, a French movie-and the thrill it gave her to see the two lovers just like that, skin to skin, her breasts to his chest, their loins pressed tight, their legs, their feet. She didn't feel dirty. She felt clean. Pure. Felt as if she'd never lived in her parents' house, never gone to religious instruction or holy communion or listened in red-faced horror as Mrs. Montgomery took the seventh grade girls aside and told them about the penis and how the blood flowed to it to make it erect and what that would mean to them if they couldn't keep their knees together till they were married. She didn't think of Ronnie. Didn't think of the teepee cat. Didn't think of anything at all.