Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, page 369
He yanks the sodden boots back on and crashes out into the ice, whacking with the ax-handle, butting whole sheets aside. He’s making it! Ten more feet, twenty! He rams with the boat, bangs it up and down like a sledgehammer. Another yard! Another! His teeth are clattering, his shins are bleeding, and it’s cutting his thighs now, but he feels nothing, only joy, joy!—until suddenly he is slewing full-length under water with the incredible cold going up his ass and into his armpits like skewers and ice cutting his nose.
His hands find the edge, and he hauls himself up on the side of the boat. The bottom has gone completely. His ax—his ax is gone.
The ice is still there.
A black hand grabs him inside, he can’t breathe. He kicks and flails, dragging himself up into the boat to kneel bleeding, trying to make his ribs work and his jaws stop banging. The first sunray slicks him with ice and incredible goose bumps; he gets a breath and can see ahead, see the gleaming ducks. So close!
The paddle. He seizes it and stabs at the ice in front of the boat. It clatters, rebounds, the boat goes backward. With all his force he flails the ice, but it’s too thick, the paddle stem is cracking. No bottom to brace on. Crack! And the paddle blade skitters away across the ice. He has nothing left.
He can’t make it.
Rage, helpless rage, vomits through him, his eyes are crying hot ice down his face. So close! So close! And sick with fury he sees them come—whew-whew! whew-whew-whew-whew!—a torrent of whistling wings in the bright air, the ducks are pouring over the pass. Ten thousand noble canvasbacks hurtling down the sky at him silver and black, the sky is wings beating above him, but too high, too high—they know the range, oh, yes!
He has never seen so many, he will never see it again—and he is standing up in the boat now, a naked bleeding loco ice-boy, raging, sweeping the virgin twelve-gauge, firing—BAM-BAM! both barrels at nothing, at the ice, at the sky, spilling out the shells, ramming them in with tearing frozen hands. A drake bullets toward him, nearer—it has to be near enough! BAM! BAM!
But it isn’t, it isn’t, and the air-riders, the magic bodies of his love beat over him yelling—canvasback, teal, widgeon, pintails, redheads, every duck in the world rising now, he is in a ten-mile swirl of birds, firing, firing, a weeping maniac under the flashing wings, white-black, black-white. And among the flashing he sees not only ducks but geese, cranes, every great bird that ever rode this wind: hawks, eagles, condors, pterodactyls—BAM! BAM! BAM-BAM!! in the crazy air, in the gale of rage and tears exploding in great black pulses—black! light! black!—whirling unbearably, rushing him up—
* * * *
—And he surfaces suddenly into total calm and dimness, another self with all fury shrunk to a tiny knot below his mind and his eyes feasting in the open throat of a girl’s white shirt. He is in a room, a cool cave humming with secret promise. Behind the girl the windows are curtained with sheer white stuff against the glare outside.
“Your mother said you went to Santa Fe.” He hears his throat threaten soprano and digs his fists into the pockets of his Levi’s.
The girl Pilar—Pee-lar, crazy-name-Pilar—bends to pick at her tanned ankle, feathery brown bob swinging across her cheek and throat.
“Um-m.” She is totally absorbed in a thin gold chain around her ankle, crouching on a big red leather thing her parents got in where, Morocco—Pilar of the urgently slender waist curving into her white Levi’s, the shirt so softly holding swelling softness; everything so white against her golden tan, smelling of soap and flowers and girl. So clean. She has to be a virgin, his heart knows it; a marvelous slow-motion happiness is brimming up in the room. She likes me. She’s so shy, even if she’s a year older, nearly seventeen, she’s like a baby. The pathos of her vulnerable body swells in him, he balls his fists to hide the bulge by his fly. Oh, Jeeze, I mean Jesus, let her not look, Pilar. But she does look up then, brushing her misty hair back, smiling dreamily up at him.
“I was at the La Fonda, I had a dinner date with René.”
“Who’s René?”
“I told you, Pe-ter.” Not looking at him, she uncurls from the hassock, drifts like a child to the window, one hand rubbing her arm. “He’s my cousin. He’s old, he’s twenty-five or thirty. He’s a lieutenant now.”
“Oh.”
“An older man.” She makes a face, grins secretly, peeking out through the white curtains.
His heart fizzes with relief, with the exultance rising in the room. She’s a virgin, all right. From the bright hot world outside comes the sound of a car starting. A horse whickers faintly down at the club stables, answered by the double wheeze of a donkey. They both giggle. Peter flexes his shoulders, opens and grips his hand around an imaginary mallet.
“Does your father know you were out with him?”
“Oh, yes.” She’s cuddling her cheek against her shoulder, pushing the immaculate collar, letting him see the creamy mounds. She wants me, Peter thinks. His guts jump. She’s going to let me do it to her. And all at once he is calm, richly calm like that first morning at the corral, watching his mare come to him; knowing.
“Pa-pa doesn’t care, it’s nineteen forty-four. René is my cousin.”
Her parents are so terribly sophisticated; he knows her father is some kind of secret war scientist: they are all here because of the war, something over at Los Alamos. And her mother talking French, talking about weird places like Dee-jon and Tan-jay. His own mother doesn’t know French, his father teaches high school, he never would be going around with these sophisticated strangers except they need him for their sandlot polo. And he can play rings around them all, too, Peter thinks, grinning, all those smooth sweating old young men—even with his one mare for four chukkers and her tendons like big hot balloons, even with his spliced mallet he can cut it over their heads! If he could only get an official rating. Three goals, sure. Maybe four, he muses, seeing himself riding through that twerp Drexel with his four remounts, seeing Pilar smile, not looking at him. She’s shy. That time he let her ride the mare she was really frightened, incredibly awkward; he could feel her thighs tremble when he boosted her up.
His own thighs tremble, remembering the weak tenderness of her in his hands. Always before your voice my soul is as some smooth and awkward foal—it doesn’t sound so wet now, his mother’s nutty line. His foal, his velvety vulnerable baby mare. Compared to her he’s a gorilla, even if he’s technically a virgin too, men are different. And he understands suddenly that weird Havelock Ellis book in her father’s den. Gentle. He must be gentle. Not like—a what?—a baboon playing a violin.
“You shouldn’t fool around with older men,” he says and is gratified by the gruffness. “You don’t know.”
She’s watching him now under the fall of her hair, coming close, still hugging herself with her hand going slowly up and down her arm, caressing it. A warm soap smell fills his nose, a sharp muskiness under it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, he thinks choking, she doesn’t know about men. And he grunts something like “Don’t,” or “Can it,” trying to hold down the leaping heat between them, but is confused by her voice whispering.
“It hurts, Pe-ter.”
“What, your arm?”
“Here, do-pee,” and his hand is suddenly taken hold of by cool small fingers pulling it not to her arm but in wonder to her side, pressed in the rustling shirt under which he feels at first nothing and then shockingly too far in not his own wide ribs but the warm stem of her, and as his paralyzed hand fumbles, clasps, she half turns around so that his ignited hand rides onto a searing soft unnatural swelling—her breast—and the room blanks out, whirls up on a brimming, drumming tide as if all the dead buffalo were pounding back. And the window blinks once with lemon light shooting around their two bodies where her hip is butting into his thigh making it wholly impossible to continue standing there with his hands gentle on her tits.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Pilar. Don’t be a dope, your mother—”
“She’s a-way now.” And there is a confused interval of mouths and hands trying to be gentle, trying to hold her away from his fly, trying to stuff her into himself in total joy, if he had six hands he couldn’t cope with electric all of her—until suddenly she pulls back, is asking inanely, “Pe-ter, don’t you have a friend?”
The subtle difference in her voice makes him blink, answering stupidly, “Sure, Tom Ring,” while her small nose wrinkles.
“Dopee Pe-ter, I mean a boyfriend. Somebody smooth.”
He stands trying to pant dignifiedly, thinking Jeeze, I mean Christ, she knows I don’t have any smooth friends; if it’s for a picnic maybe Diego Martine? But before he can suggest this she has leaned into the window bay, cuddling the silky curtain around her, peeking at him so that his hands go pawing in the cloth.
“René has a friend.”
“Uh.”
“He’s older too, he’s twen-tee,” she breathes teasingly. “Lieutenant Shar-lo. That’s Charles to you, see?” And she turns around full into his arms, curtain and all, and from the press of silk and giggles comes a small voice saying forever, “And Re-né and Shar-lo and Pee-lar all went to bed together and they played with me, oh, for hours and hours, Pe-ter, it was too marvelous. I will ne-ver do it with just one boy again.”
Everything drops then except her face before him horribly heavy and exalted and alien, and just as his heart knows it’s dead and an evil so generalized he can hardly recognize it as fury starts tearing emptily at him inside, her hand comes up over her mouth and she is running doubled over past him.
“I’m going to be sick, Peter help me!”
And he stumbles after down the dim cool hall to find her crumpled down, her brown hair flowing into the toilet as she retches, retches, whimpering, convulses unbearably. The white shirt has ridden up to expose her pathetically narrow back, soft knobs of her spine curving down into her pants, her tender buttocks bumping his knees as he stands helplessly strangling a sopping towel instead of her neck, trying to swab at her hidden forehead. His own gullet is retching too, his face feels doughy, and water is running down into his open mouth while one of her hands grips his, shaking him with her spasms there in the dim hospital-like bathroom. The world is groaning, he is seeing not her father’s bay rum bottle but the big tiled La Fonda bedroom, the three bodies writhing on the bed, performing unknown horrors. Playing with her…
His stomach heaves, only what it is, he is coming in his Levi’s in a dreadful slow unrelieving ooze like a red-hot wire dragging through his crotch, while he stands by her uselessly as he will stand helplessly by in some near future he can’t imagine or remember—and the tension keeps building, pounding, the light flickers—a storm is coming or maybe his eyes are going bad, but he can see below him her pure profile resting spent on the edge of the toilet, oblivious to his furious towel; in the flashing dimness sees the incomprehensible letters S-E-P-T-I-C A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N snaking shadowy down the spine of his virgin love, while the universe beats Black! Flash! Black! Drumming with hooves harsher than any storm—hurling him through lightning-claps of blinding darkness to a thrumming stasis in which what exists of him senses—something—but is instantly shot away on unimaginable energies—
* * * *
—And achieves condensement, blooms into the green and open sunlight of another world, into a mellow springtime self—in which a quite different girl is jostling his hip.
“Molly,” he hears his older voice say vaguely, seeing with joy how the willow fronds trail in the friendly, dirty Potomac. The bars and caduceus on his collar are pricking his neck.
“Yes, sir, Doctor sir.” She spins around, kneels down in the scruffy grass to open Howard Johnson boxes. “Oh, god, the coffee.” Handing him up a hot dog, swinging back .her fair hair. Her arm is so female with its tender pale armpit, her whole body is edible, even her dress is like lemonade so fresh and clean—no, radiant, he corrects himself. That’s the word, radiant. His radiant woman. He shrugs away a tiny darkness, thinking of her hair sliding on his body in the Roger Smith hotel bedroom.
“C’mon sit, Pete. It’s only a little dirty.”
“Nothing’s dirty anymore.” He flops down beside her, one arm finding its natural way around the opulence of her buttocks on the grass. She chuckles down at him, shaking her head.
“You’re a hard case, Pete.” She takes a big bite of hot dog with such lips that he considers flinging himself upon her then and there, barely remembers the cars tearing by above them. “I swear,” she says, chewing, “I don’t think you ever screwed anybody you were friends with before.”
“Something like that.” He puts his hot dog down to loosen his GI tie.
“Thirty days to civvies, you’ll be in Baltimore.” She licks her fingers happily. “Oh, wow, Pete, I’m so glad you got your fellowship. Try the coleslaw, it’s all right. Will you remember us poor slaves when you’re a big old pathologist?”
“I’ll remember.” To distract himself he pokes in the boxes, spills coleslaw on a book. “What you reading?”
“Oh, Whately Carington.”
“Whatly what?”
“No, Whate-ly. Carington. A Limey. Psychical research man, they do that veddy seddiously, the Limies.”
“Uh?” He beams at the river, blinks to get rid of a flicker back of his eyes. Amphetamine withdrawal, after six months?
“He has this theory, about K-objects. Whatever thing you feel most intense about, part of you lives on—Pete, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
But the flicker won’t quit, it is suddenly worse; through it he can just make out her face turned nurse-wary, coming close, and he tries to hang on through a world flashing black—green—BLACK!—is trapped for unbreathing timelessness in dark nowhere, a phantom landscape of gray tumbled ash under a hard black sky, seeing without eyes a distant tangle of wreckage on the plain so menacing that his unbodied voice screams at the shadow of a metal scrap beside him in the ashes, 2004 the ghostly unmeaning numbers—STOP IT!—And he is back by the river under Molly’s springtime eyes, his hands gripping into the bones of her body.
“Hey-y-y, honey, the war’s over.” Sweet sensual pixie-smile now watchful, her nurse’s hand inside his shirt. “Korea’s ten thousand miles away, you’re in good old D.C., Doctor.”
“I know. I saw a license plate.” He laughs unconvincingly, makes his hands relax. Will the ghosts of Seoul never let him go? And his body guiltily intact, no piece of him in the stained waste cans into which he has—Stop it! Think of Molly. I like Ike. Johns Hopkins research fellowship. Some men simply aren’t cut out for surgical practice.
“I’m a gutless wonder, Molly. Research.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Pete,” she says with total warmth, nurse-hand satisfied, changing to lover’s on his chest. “We’ve been over all that.”
And of course they have, he knows it and only mutters, “My Dad wanted me to be an Indian doctor,” which they have been over too; and the brimming gladness is back now, buoyantly he seizes the coleslaw, demands entertainment, demonstrating reality-grasp.
“So what about Whatly?”
“It’s serious-s-s,” she protests, snickering, and is mercurially almost serious too. “I mean, I’m an atheist, Pete, I don’t believe there’s anything afterward, but this theory.…” And she rattles on about K-objects and the pool of time, intense energic structures of the mind undying—sweet beddable girl in the springtime who has taught him unclaiming love. His friend. Liberated him.
He stretches luxuriously, relishes a coleslaw belch. Free male beside a willing woman. No problems. What is it man in woman doth require? The lineaments of gratified desire. The radiance of her. He has gratified her. Will gratify her again.…
“It’s kind of spooky, though.” She flings the box at the river with tremendous effort, it flies twenty feet. “Damn! But think of parts of yourself whirling around forever sticking to whatever you loved!” She settles against the willow, watching the box float away. “I wonder if part of me is going to spend eternity hanging around a dumb cat. I loved that old cat. Henry. He died, though.”
The ghost of a twelve-gauge fires soundlessly across his mind, a mare whickers. He sneezes and rolls over onto her lap with his nose in her warm scented thighs. She peers dreamily down at him over her breasts, is almost beautiful.
“Whatever you love, forever. Be careful what you love.” She squints wickedly. “Only with you I think it’d be whatever you were maddest at—no, that’s a horrible thought. Love has to be the most intense.”
He doubts it but is willing to be convinced, rooting in her lap while she pretends to pound on him and then squirms, stretching up her arms, giving herself to the air, to him, to life.
“I want to spend eternity whirling around you.” He heaves up to capture her, no longer giving a damn about the cars, and as the sweet familiar body comes pliantly under him he realizes it’s true, he’s known it for some time. Not friendship at all, or rather, the best of friendships. The real one. “I love you, Molly. We love.”
“Ooh, Pete.”
“You’re coming to Baltimore with me. We’ll get married,” he tells her warm neck, feeling the flesh under her skirt heavy in his hand, feeling also an odd stillness that makes him draw back to where he can see her face, see her lips whispering, “I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid?” His heart jumps with relief, jumps so hard that the flicker comes back in the air, through which he sees her lying too composed under his urgency. “Don’t be afraid, Molly. I love you.”
But she is saying softly, “Oh, damn, damn, Pete, I’m so sorry, it’s a lousy thing women do. I was just so happy, because.…” She swallows, goes on in an absurd voice. “Because someone very dear to me is coming home. He called me this morning from Honolulu.”
