“If that's all you want, it shouldn't be hard to get it in this place. Nine-tenths of the male population in a ten mile radius ought to know by now that you were laid behind a log pile, felt up in the movies, and given a mouthful of prick in the car last night.”
“That's hateful-men who tell about a girl that way. But it would be nice if there was something in the way a girl walked after that was done to her — something proud, to let people know that she had done it.”
“I see,” I said. I had a hard time following her when she talked that way.
The swallows with yellow breasts flashed in and out of the barn, diving for the nests of hard mud and then zooming out to the fields again.
“I'm not ashamed of anything,” Jane said. “I'm proud. Isn't that the way to be?”
“Yes,” I said. “That's the way to be.”
“Every man in the world should be able to screw me,” she said. “Any man who liked me ought to be able to come to me and take me off with him. I think that's what a woman should be for.”
She leaned back on a joist and spread her legs. She patted her belly and made different sounds by patting herself and tightening her muscles, and then she pushed her fingers through her hair and touched her cunt.
“I used to do that a lot,” she said.
Her fingers dug for her cunt, and she raised her hips to show me how she had them stuck into her cunt and then she pulled them out.
“I won't have time to do that anymore,” she said, because it will always have a cock in it, and I won't ever be alone at night. I don't like to be alone at night. I'm still afraid of the dark.”
I put my fingers over her cunt, and then I poked one of them into it, and Jane slid down to make it easier for me to do. It was all like something that should have happened to me when I was a kid, and I knew that I was not going to forget that afternoon, whether I wanted to remember it later or not. And I didn't. I remember it all, everything, just as it was and just as it happened.
“I know it's not something I should ask,” she said, “but if Ruth knew that I was afraid to be alone at night do you think she would let me sleep somewhere in your room? I know it's an awful thing to ask.”
“What is it that you're afraid of?”
“I don't know. Forget that I said that. I didn't say it,” she said.
Ruth liked the girl enough to have slept in the bath tub and let her in bed with me. I knew that. She had told me often enough how much she liked her. I told Jane that we would fix it up some way.
“Why do you look like that?” Jane asked.
“I just lost a thousand years in the hay.”
Jane cocked her head to one side.
“I was ten thousand years old when we came in here,” I said. “Now it's only nine thousand.”
A man has to have something to believe in, and it might as well be something like Jane. I didn't try to explain that.
I dropped my head onto her lap. I kissed her thighs, her belly, and her cunt. I wormed my way between her legs and sought her cunt with my lips and tongue, and then I lay and licked her and sucked her until she became excited and flung herself over me.
“When you were doing that before I wished that it was your prick. But now I'm glad that it's your tongue. I thought that people Frenched pretending that a man's tongue was a prick and the woman's mouth a cunt, but there is more than that to having someone's mouth sucking and licking.”
I was glad to be down on her; as glad as I had ever been to have a cunt shoved in my face. I ravished her with my tongue and sucked her roughly.
“Oh, I wish that I could shoot like a man!” she cried. “I want to fill your mouth with something sudden and thick, like your jism, and know that it comes from me and watch you swallow it, make it part of you, like the jism you made is part of me now! I want something of me to be part of you.”
I jabbed my fingers into her cunt, and when I had shown them to her, shown her how they dripped, I put them into my mouth. I dove at her cunt again, and as my tongue shot in Jane scissored her legs around my head and squeezed until I felt myself smothering. My sight darkened, and the hay seemed to sink rapidly beneath me, falling away too fast for my body to follow, and in the buzzing that filled my ears I lost everything but the clear cry of her voice. I dangled in space, clinging to a thread of consciousness. Then the pressure was released, and I climbed back to the world.
Jane got to her knees and supported herself against a rafter. I knew that she did not realize how violent she had been. Now she was hardly able to stand, and when she took a step forward she tripped in the uneven hay and sprawled beside me. I pulled her soft body into my arms.
“I have to make supper,” she said at last.
I didn't want to let her go.
“To hell with supper. No one wants supper,” I said.
“Ruth's father will want some.”
“That bastard can wait.”
I had forgotten about him. I let Jane go, and letting her go made me very sore at Ruth's father, because if it hadn't been for him I could have stayed there with her all night. Just then I had forgotten that part of the money that Ruth and I were living on there had come from him, and it burnt me up to have him walking in on us that way.
Jane dressed quickly, and then she waited for me to dress. I was deliberately taking a long time to get my clothes on, but Jane waited. It reminded me of those people who risk their lives dashing across the street in front of traffic and then spend the few seconds they saved waiting for you to cross.
Jane looked in my pocket for my comb and combed the seeds and the broken straws out of my hair. We climbed out of the hayloft and went back to the house. The Buick was still standing out front. Most of the people I know who own Buicks are crooked politicians or proprietors of whore houses, and I wondered which of those Ruth's father was. I strolled down by the car, and when I saw the glass in one of the windows that was partly down I strolled back again. That glass was almost an inch thick, and they don't make it that way to keep the mosquitoes out or because it's any easier to see through.
I went into the house, and Ruth was in the front room with her father and when I entered the room he was lighting a cigar.
“Bill,” Ruth said, “I have asked my father to stay here with us for a while. That's all right with you, isn't it?”
“That's fine,” I said.
It would take Ruth to do it just that way. She could run off and five with a bunch of fairies, go on a trip to Mexico with a man she had met two hours before, not even leaving a note when she went to Toby and leaving me standing on a corner to meet her for dinner when she was getting on the train for the Mexican trip, but when she had asked her father to stay on a while she turned to me and asked if it was all right.
“I'll run the car up into the drive,” said Ruth's father.
I wondered how long a while was.
“What do you think of him?”
We stood by the window watching the Buick turn slowly in the narrow road and swing into the drive.
“What do I think of him?” I said. “What the hell can I think of him? It was you who talked to him.”
“His name is Jackson,” she said. “I mean, that's the name he's been using. I think we ought to call him that too. I think that's what he wants. He hinted at it.”
“All right, his name is Jackson. What's his racket? What does he do?”
“I didn't find that out,” Ruth said.
“It isn't our affair anyway.”
Ruth moved away from the window. She sat down and pushed a soggy cigar around in the ashtray with a match.
“It's awfully queer, having him show up this way. I think I liked it better when I didn't know him.”
“If you don't like him you don't have to have him around,” I said. “He'd go away if he thought you didn't want him around. I know that.”
“It isn't that, she said. “It isn't that I don't like him. Only, now that he's real, I can't have my dream any more.”