Then the meat becomes healthy and it isn't bad for you."
Bauer raised himself and supported his head with his hand. He looked at her.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I'm thinking about you."
"No," she said. "No, you're not. You're just obfuscating the truth-see, I can use the jargon too, when I feel like it."
"What am I obfuscating?"
"The simple and only fact: that I turn you on. You can't just accept that, you have to build a whole rational construction around it. It's silly to hassle yourself. Pleasure is the only truth."
"That's a pernicious philosophy."
She lifted a leg and placed her foot against his wrist. "Shee-it." She shoved, knocking away his support arm.
He dropped and she sprang upon him and rolled him onto his back, ducking her head, drawing his organ into her mouth. He began to tumesce. She loosed him, held him in her hand, smiled triumphantly and said, "Pleasure, Alex.
Your body doesn't lie." Imperiously, she sucked him, forcing him swollen and hard.
And it was pleasure, but beneath it he felt fraudulent and afraid.
Chapter 8
ONCE Eddie Meisler had had a summer cabin on Loon Lake. It wasn't a big lake, less than two miles long and one wide. There were two rough resorts that rented small cottages, and eight or nine other private cabins like Meisler's. The kids had been six, five, and three when he'd bought it.
They'd hand tamed chipmunks and coaxed raccoons to eat scraps on the porch.
The kids loved it, and Meisler's wife was happy there. Dawns, he fished in pleasurable, regenerative solitude. Midday he'd play with the kids or lie in a hammock reading, putter with the house, or go for a walk. He and Dot went to bed early, tired in a pleasant way, and the temperature often dipped into the fifties at night, snug sleeping beneath a light blanket or two, and their lovemaking was frequent and deeply satisfying at the lake. He'd had to scrimp and work a lot of overtime to buy the place, but it was altogether the best thing he'd ever done for his family and himself, and he never regretted it.
It was a past time now, but the memories still warmed him. Each year, as the kids had grown, another cabin or two had gone up on the lake, and then a new resort with a big rustic lodge where they served dinners and kept the bar open till the early morning hours, and you could hear the jukebox music thumping across the water at night, and then in the closing SOs and early 60s the process escalated, with most everyone having time and money to spare, and the big natural lakefront holdings were broken into one-acre and even half-acre lots, and the whines and poundings of construction sounded spring through fall, and the fishing-boat motors grew bigger and bigger, and then the power boats and water skiers appeared, a couple hydroplanes, and canopied pontoon boats that wallowed beneath floating cocktail parties, until at last it was ugly and noisily crowded, like a rough bar or a deep-city bowling alley, and Meisler was mortally stricken. It hurt him in his heart, it turned his blood bitter.
The kids were all grown and had children of their own. They were busy with their lives and the cabin was a thing of their childhood, they hardly went to the lake anymore. Meisler sold it, a thing of joy whose degradation he had been forced to watch, helpless to stop. He sat home and brooded the next two years, refusing to consider alternatives: he'd had what he wanted and it could not be replaced. Dot, who was sensitive and patient, and loved him, succored him gently, and the next year, his spirits restored, he bought them a camper. It was tough and could handle terrain too rugged for most vacationers, and, mobile, he would not be anchored to any single place; when the marauders came to begin their destruction, he would simply go somewhere else.
The first years of his retirement, he and Dot lived in the camper as much as they did in their own home and it was great fun. He grew eccentric. He tongue lashed campers who despoiled the countryside with garbage, people who abused the woods and streams, and if he came upon an empty site littered with someone's detritus, he'd police it scrupulously, muttering curses. Men, he'd come to believe, were descendants of the criminals and defectives of some stellar race who had dumped them on earth, a galactic asylum or penal colony. He had little love and less respect for them. He made a point of not reading papers or listening to newscasts.
They were traveling New England this summer. Eddie had bul led the camper a quarter of the way up a mountainside over the brushy remnant of an old homesteading trail. He parked and chocked the wheels on grassy plateau next to a clear stream in which there were German browns. He took the browns with a hand wound bamboo rod and dry flies he tied himself. It was the middle of the afternoon and Meisler was napping inside. Dot was sunning.
He woke to Dot's shout. "Shoo! Get out of he rel Sheol Go away!"
He rubbed his eyes and swung his legs down and went to the door. Dot was waving a stick at a bunch of dogs who'd knocked over the aluminum cans at the back of the camper. Meisler buried his vegetable scraps, and put everything else in the cans, whose tops clipped snug to foil raccoons and skunks. The big dogs had bowled the cans over and popped the lids. They'd strewn the garbage about and were snapping meat bones and licking grease, glancing up at Dot between bites. One, a wide-chested German shepherd, was chewing slowly and watching Dot with unwavering eyes.
"Get out, go ho me! Nowl" Meisler yelled from the door. Four of the animals backed away a little. The shepherd stood its ground, and swung its hard stare to Meisler.
"Scat!" Dot raised the stick high and advanced.
The shepherd snarled. A black dog growled.
"Don't push, honey," Meisler cautioned. "Those two don't look friendly."
Dot lowered the stick. "I don't know where they came from. I woke up when they knocked the cans over."
"Just stay where you are and don't threaten them."
He turned back inside and opened the storage drawer beneath his bed. A Colt Woodsman target pistol lay in the corner. Beside it, a loaded eight-round magazine. He slid the magazine into the pistol, flicked off the safety, pulled the slide back and let it snap forward, throwing a cartridge into the chamber. Meisler wasn't fond of guns but he knew how to use them, and he carried the.22 automatic whenever he camped.
To dispatch sick or wounded animals he found, to shoot a varmint when necessary, and as protection. It was tiny caliber, but he used hollowpoint slugs, and eight rounds gave him enough firepower.
Dot saw the gun and said, "Oh Eddie, don't hurt them."
"I won't." He pointed the muzzle in the air, bellowed at the dogs, and touched off three quick rounds. The dogs whirled and were into the woods by the third report.
Meisler and his wife righted the cans and picked up the garbage.
"It's outrageous," Meisler said, tossing a pork chop bone into a can.
"Now we have to put up with dogs too. I don't care who wants what for a pot, but if they're going to own dogs, then they have a responsibility, don't they?"
"Yes, dear," Dot said.