When he went for the blanket he got a bottle of Weiss’s homemade strawberry wine from beneath the counter and two glasses and before he remembered the power was off turned on the faucet to rinse them. He settled for wiping the dust off with a towel and canting them against the sun through the window. They looked clean. He found the blankets stacked in a bedroom closet. Passing a mirror he fetched up, startled for a moment by his reflection, he and his mirror image were face to face conspiratorially like cothiefs ransacking a house, their arms caught up with plunder. Both their thin faces looked feral and furtive, harried.
Amber Rose lay on his left arm, her dress girdled about her waist. Their eyes were closed and he could feel the red weight of the sun through his eyelids. His right hand lay on her abdomen. The flesh of her stomach was cool and soft. He slid his fingers under the elastic of her panties and downward and when she made no objection downward further until he cupped the mound between her legs, the hair there crisp and curled, laid the weight of a finger where her flesh was cleft when she opened her legs. When he kissed her her mouth tasted like the wine and when he opened his eyes she was watching him. She seemed drained of volition, her face looked vacuous and stricken in the sun. Her dress was unbottoned to the waist and her brassiere unhooked and against the brown skin of her belly her breasts looked white and fragile, flowers unused to the sun. She reached a hand down and placed it over his own, guiding him, her hips a gently increasing pressure against the heel of his hand. The she moved the hand away and he felt it at his zipper. She took his erect penis in her hand and began to masturbate him gently. Even as she did so a part of him that stood observing all this wondered at her dexterity but did not dwell on it at any length. She slid her other hand down and clasped him with both hands. Then without saying anything she released him and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear and slid it down over her hips. He watched as she raised her hips from the blanket and slid the panties off one leg, then the other. She unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down until he arose and shucked out of them, feeling clumsy and absurd standing here in the heat of the day in his shirttail with her watching and he felt that the woods were full of folks crouched laughing behind the bushes but he couldn’t have stopped if they had been. If Hardin had leapt upon him with a hawkbill knife. He pulled the t-shirt off and when he laid it aside she was reaching up towards him.
“Pull off your dress.”
“Do it for me if you want to.”
She raised her arms and he pulled the dress awkwardly over her head and started to fold it but she said, “No, let it go, it don’t matter.” He lay on her balancing his weight on his elbows. “You won’t break me,” she said. “I’m not made of glass.” He could feel her breasts pooled against his chest, the hot length of his sex where their flesh lay as it fused.
It seemed to him there ought to be something to say but if there was he didn’t know what. For a crazy moment it occurred to him to ask her if she’d rather wait until they were married for in the last quarter hour or so he’d commenced thinking in just such a fashion. But her breath on his throat forestalled him. “Go on,” she said. “I want you to.” He reached down fumbling between them but after a moment she said, “Here. Let me.” He raised enough to permit her hand and she guided him into her.
She was hot and wet and tight and entry was harder than he’d expected and he hesitated, unmoving, glancing down to see if he was hurting her, but her eyes were clenched tightly closed and her hands were tightening on his arms.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go on, I want you to.”
In the slow, breathless moment of penetration he felt that he had wounded her beyond any restitution he had the power to make and he felt that he had thrown his lot with her forevermore, had in some manner inextricably tied their fate. Whether she wanted it so or not.
She made ready to go. They had stayed longer than she meant to and the sun was already burning away the timbered horizon in the west and the first bullbats were dropping plumb and sheer as if they moved in fixed isobars or were in some manner gyroscoped.
“You thought I was a whore, didn’t you?” Her voice through the fabric of her dress was muffled. She pulled the dress down and was arranging her hair, smoothing it backward with both hands.
“No. I never thought that.”
“But you thought I’d done it before.”
“I figured you had.”
“I guess I’ve heard them talk about everything two people can do to each other but I never did any of it. Mama always watched me like a hawk and Dallas, he’s even worse.” She pulled her panties on, her skirt caught up in them and she freed it. He was staring bemusedly at the hair crinkled against the cloth. “Quit looking like that,” she said. “You know I’ve got to go.” She arose. “I always used to have the idea that Dallas was goin to sell me off, you know, like to the highest bidder. A auction. Sacrificin a virgin.” She smiled ruefully. “I guess this is one time he got beat.”
After she had gone he dressed and sat on the edge of the porch with the blanket across his shoulders, for the day had grown chill. Blue dusk lay pooled about the fields. He thought to finish the wine but it had gone flat and treacly. He corked it and set it aside wondering how he had ever tasted summer in it. Without her the world seemed bland and empty. In the silence he imagined he could still hear her voice, some obsession with detail caused him to seek meanings where there were only words. He felt curiously alive, everything before this seemed gray and ambiguous, everything he’d heard garbled and indistinct.
He knew he should be going but here it still seemed to be happening, it was all around him, and some instinct of apprehension told him it might never happen again. It couldn’t be wasted. Every nuance, sensation, had to be absorbed. Dusk drew on and the horizon blurred with the failed sun and at last he arose to go, loath still to leave here for the dark house with its ringing emptiness and the gabled attic with its stacked books wherein he’d mistakenly believed all of his life was told. He went down the highway past the FOR SALE sign and climbed the locked gate and so into the road. He went on listening to the sounds of night as if he had never heard them before. He passed Oliver’s unlit house but the old man was not about and all he heard of life was the goats’ bells tinkling off in the restive dark.
In the last days of Indian summer the light had a hazy look of blue distances to it like a world peered at through smoked glass. It was windy that fall and the air was full of leaves. The wind blew out of the west and they used to take blankets below the chickenhouses where there was a line of cedars for a windbreak and lie beneath a yellow poplar there in the sun. Yellow leaves drifted, clashed gently in a muted world. Sad time of dying, change in the air, who knew what kind. There seemed little permanence to this world, what he saw of it came drifting down through baring limbs and the branches left limned against the blue void looked skeletal and brittle as bone.
Amber Rose would lie drowsing in the sun, an arm thrown across her face. He studied her body almost covertly, the symmetry of her nipples, the dark, enigmatic juncture of her thighs. Parting the kinked black hair with his fingers he leaned and kissed her there, she stirred drowsily against his face. Faint taste of salt, of distant seas. Some other taste, something elemental, primal, shorn of custom. His tongue delineated the complexities of her sex, he raised his face to study the enigma he found there. She seemed fragile and vulnerable, wounded by life at the moment of conception with the ultimate weapon, the means to be wounded again and again, cleft there with the force of a blow.