Prodigal Summer: A Novel Read online

  "Sweet," he said.

  And she wondered, what? She glanced at his face.

  He glanced back. "Did you ever see a prettier sight than that right there?"

  "Never," she agreed. Her home ground.

  Eddie Bondo's fingertips curled under the tips of hers, and he was holding her hand, just like that. Touching her as if it were the only possible response to this beauty lying at their feet. A pulse of electricity ran up the insides of her thighs like lightning ripping up two trees at once, leaving her to smolder or maybe burst into flames.

  "Eddie Bondo," she tried out loud, carefully looking away from him, out at the sky-blue nothing ahead. "I don't know you from Adam. But you could stay one night in my cabin if you didn't want to sleep in the woods."

  He didn't turn loose of her fingers after that.

  Together they took the trail back into the woods with this new thing between them, their clasped hands, alive with nerve endings like some fresh animal born with its own volition, pulling them forward. She felt as if all her senses had been doubled as she watched this other person, and watched what he saw. He ducked under low branches and held them with his free hand so they wouldn't snap back in her face. They were moving close together, suddenly seeing for the first time today the miracle that two months of rain and two days of spring heat could perform on a forest floor. It had burst out in mushrooms: yellow, red, brown, pink, deadly white, minuscule, enormous, delicate, and garish, they painted the ground and ran up the sides of trees with their sudden, gilled flesh. Their bulbous heads pushed up through the leaf mold, announcing the eroticism of a fecund woods at the height of spring, the beginning of the world. She knelt down in the leaf mold to show him adder's tongue, tiny yellow lilies with bashful back-curved petals and leaves mottled like a copperhead's back. He reached down beside her knees to touch another flower she'd overlooked and nearly crushed. "Look at this," he said.

  "Oh, look at that," she echoed almost in a whisper. "A lady's slipper." The little pink orchid was growing here where she knew it ought to be, where the soil was sweetened by pines. She moved aside to spare it and saw more like it, dozens of delicately wrinkled oval pouches held erect on stems, all the way up the ridge. She pressed her lips together, inclined to avert her eyes from so many pink scrota.

  "Who named it that?" he asked, and laughed--they both did--at whoever had been the first to pretend this flower looked like a lady's slipper and not a man's testicles. But they both touched the orchid's veined flesh, gingerly, surprised by its cool vegetable texture.

  "The bee must go in here," she said, touching the opening below the crown of narrow petals where the pollinator would enter the pouch. He leaned close to look, barely brushing her forehead with the dark corona of his hair. She was surprised by his interest in the flower, and by her own acute physical response to his body held so offhandedly close to hers. She could smell the washed-wool scent of his damp hair and the skin above his collar. This dry ache she felt was deeper than hunger--more like thirst. Her heart beat hard and she wondered, had she offered him a dry place to sleep, was that what he thought? Was that really all she had meant? She was not sure she could bear all the hours of an evening and a night spent close to him in her tiny cabin, wanting, not touching. Could not survive being discarded again as she had been by her husband at the end, with his looking through her in the bedroom for his glasses or his keys, even when she was naked, her body a mere obstruction, like a stranger in a theater blocking his view of the movie. She was too old, about to make a fool of herself, surely. This Eddie Bondo up close was a boy, ferociously beautiful and not completely out of his twenties.

  He sat back and looked at her, thinking. Surprised her again with what he said. "There's something up north like this, grows in the peat bogs."

  She felt unsettled by each new presence of him, the modulations of his voice, the look of his fingers as they touched this flower, his knowledge of peat bogs she had never seen. She couldn't take her eyes from the close white crescents of his nails at the tips of his fingers, the fine lines in his weathered hands. She had to force herself to speak.

  "Lady's slippers up there? Where, in Canada?"

  "It's not this same flower, but it traps bugs. The bee smells something sweet and goes inside and then he's trapped in there unless he can find the one door out. So he'll spread the pollen over the place where the flower wants it. Just like this, look here."

  She bent to see, aware of her own breathing as she touched the small, raised knob where this orchid would force its pollinator to drag his abdomen before allowing him to flee for his life. She felt a sympathetic ache in the ridge of her pubic bone.

  How could she want this stranger? How was it reasonable to do anything now but stand up and walk away from him? But when he bent his face sideways toward hers she couldn't stop herself from laying a hand on his jaw, and that was enough. The pressure of his face against hers moved her slowly backward until they lay together on the ground, finally yielding to earthly gravity. Crushing orchids under their bodies, she thought vaguely, but then she forgot them for it seemed she could feel every layer of cloth and flesh and bone between his body and her thumping heart, the individual follicles of his skin against her face, even the ridges and cracks in his lips when they touched her. She closed her eyes against the overwhelming sensations, but that only made them more intense, in the same way closed eyes make dizziness more acute. She opened her eyes then, to make this real and possible, that they were kissing and lying down in the cold leaves, falling together like a pair of hawks, not plummeting through thin air but rolling gradually downhill over adder's tongues and poisonous Amanitas. At the bottom of the hill they came to rest, his body above hers. He looked down into her eyes as if there were something behind them, deep in the ground, and he pulled brown beech leaves from her hair.

  "What about that. Look at you."

  "I can't." She laughed. "Not for years. I don't have a mirror in my cabin."

  He pulled her to her feet and they walked for several minutes in stunned silence.

  "The head of the jeep road's here," she pointed out when they came to it. "My cabin's just up ahead, but that road runs straight downhill to the little town down there. If that's what you were looking for, the way out."

  He stood looking downhill, briefly, then turned her shoulders gently to face him and took her braid in his hand. "I was thinking I'd found what I was looking for."

  Her eyes moved to the side, to unbelief, and back. But she let herself smile when his hands moved to her chest and began to part the layers of clothing that all seemed to open from that one place above her heart. He peeled back her nylon jacket, slipped it off her shoulders down to her bent elbows.

  "Finding's not the same as looking," she said, but there was the scent of his hair again and his collar as he laid his mouth against her jawbone. That wool intoxication made her think once again of thirst, if she could name it something, but a thirst of eons that no one living could keep from reaching to slake, once water was at hand. She worked her elbows free of her jacket and let it drop into the mud, raised her hands to the zipper of his parka, and rolled the nylon back from him like a shed skin. Helping this new thing emerge, whatever it was going to be. They moved awkwardly the last hundred yards toward her cabin, refusing to come apart, trailing their packs and half their nylon layers.

  She let go of him then and sat down on the planks at the un-sheltered edge of her porch to pull off her boots.

  "This where you live?"

  "Yep," she said, wondering what else needed to be said. "Me and the bears."

  He sat next to her and brought his finger to her lips. No more talking about this, he seemed to be saying--but they had never talked about this, she was still not sure it was real. He guided her shoulders to the floor and lay next to her, stroking her face, unbuttoning her undershirt and touching her under her clothes, moving down, finding her, until it was only his mouth on hers that stopped her from crying out. She arched her back and slid her
weapon gently out and away across the floorboards. This was all much too fast, her pelvis arched itself up again and she did cry out then, just a woman's small moan, and she had to pull away to keep from losing herself to him completely. She opened her eyes and caught sight of her pistol at the edge of the porch, aiming mutely down the valley with its safety on. The last shed appendage of her fear.

  Carefully she took both his hands off of her, raised them above his shoulders, and rolled over him and pinned him like a wrestler. Straddling his thighs this way, looking down on his face, she felt stunned to her core by this human presence so close to her. He smiled, that odd parenthetic grin she already knew to look for. It's that simple, then, she thought. It's that possible. She bent down to him, tasting the salt skin of his chest with the sensitive tip of her tongue, and then exploring the tight drum of his abdomen. He shuddered at the touch of her warm breath on his skin, giving her to know that she could take and own Eddie Bondo. It was the body's decision, a body with no more choice of its natural history than an orchid has, or the bee it needs, and so they would both get lost here, she would let him in, anywhere he wanted to go. In the last full hour of daylight, while lacewings sought solace for their brief lives in the forest's bright upper air, and the husk of her empty nylon parka lay tangled with his in the mud, their two soft-skinned bodies completed their introductions on the floor of her porch. A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

  It seemed to take forever, afterward in the thickening twilight, to recover her resting heartbeat. He lay looking past her into the darkened woods, apparently untroubled by his own heart. Thrushes were singing, it was that late. A wind kicked up, shaking more raindrops out of the trees to ring like buckshot on the cabin's tin roof and scald the naked parts of their bodies with cold. She studied a drop of water that hung from his earlobe, caught in the narrowest possible sliver of a gold ring that penetrated his left ear. Could he possibly be as beautiful as he seemed to her? Or was he just any man, a bone thrown to her starvation?

  With his left hand he worked out some of the tangles his handiwork had put into her hair. But he was still looking away; the hand moved by itself, without his attention. She wondered if he worked with animals or something.

  Coming back from someplace he'd been, he moved his eyes to her face. "Hey, pretty girl. Do you have a name?"

  "Deanna."

  He waited. "Deanna and that's all?"

  "Deanna and I'm not sure of the rest."

  "Now that's different: the girl with no last name just yet."

  "I've got one, but it's my husband's--was my husband's. Or it is, but he was." She sat up and shivered, watching him stand to pull his jeans on. "You wouldn't know, but it leaves you in a quandary. That name is nothing to me now, but it's still yet stuck all over my life, on my driver's license and everything."

  "'Still yet,'" he mocked, smiling at her, considering her words. "That's the male animal for you. Scent marking."

  She had a good laugh at that. "That's it. Put his territorial mark on everything I owned, and then walked away."

  Amazingly, Eddie Bondo walked to the end of her porch and peed over the edge. She didn't realize it until she heard the small, sudden spatter hitting the leaves of the mayapples and Christmas fern. "Oh, good Lord," she said.

  He turned to look at her over his shoulder, surprised. "What? Sorry." His arc declined and dribbled out, and he tucked himself away.

  She said quietly, "You're still in my territory."

  Deanna had been chaste through her teens, too shy for the rituals of altered appearance that boys seemed to require and, lacking a mother, too far outside the game to learn. When she went away to college she found herself taken in and mentored by much older men--professors, mainly--until she married one. Her farm-bred worldliness, her height, her seriousness--something--had caused her to skip a generation ahead. She'd never before known what men in their late twenties had to offer. Eddie Bondo knew what he was doing and had the energy to pursue the practice of making perfect. They didn't get any sleep between dusk and dawn.

  It was first light before she recovered the calm or belated contrition to wonder what she might have lost here--other than, momentarily, her mind. She knew that most men her age and most other animals had done this. The collision of strangers. Or not strangers, exactly, for they'd had their peculiar courtship: the display, the withdrawal, the dance of a three-day obsession. But the sight of him now asleep in her bed made her feel both euphoric and deeply unsettled. Her own nakedness startled her, even; she normally slept in several layers. Awake in the early light with the wood thrushes, feeling the texture of the cool sheet against her skin, she felt as jarred and disjunct as a butterfly molted extravagantly from a dun-colored larva and with no clue now where to fly.

  From the look of his pack she guessed he was a homeless sort, out for the long tramp, and she wondered miserably if she'd coupled herself with someone notorious. By late morning, though, she'd gathered otherwise. He rose calm and unhurried and began carefully removing items from his pack and stacking them in organized piles on the floor as he searched out clean clothes and a razor.

  A criminal wouldn't take the time to shave, she decided. His pack appeared to be a respectable little home: medicine cabinet, pantry, kitchen. He had a lot of food in there, even a small coffeepot. He found a place to prop his small shaving mirror at an angle on of one of the logs in the wall while he scraped the planes of his face one square inch at a time. She tried not to watch. Afterward he moved around her cabin with the confidence of an invited guest, whistling, going quiet only when he studied the titles of her books. Theory of Population Genetics and Evolutionary Ecology: that kind of thing seemed to set him back a notch, if only briefly.

  His presence filled her tiny cabin so, she felt distracted trying to cook breakfast. Slamming cupboards, looking for things in the wrong places, she wasn't used to company here. She had only a single ladderback chair, plus the old bedraggled armchair out on the porch with holes in its arms from which phoebes pulled white shreds of stuffing to line their nests. That was all. She pulled the ladderback chair away from the table, set its tall back against the logs of the opposite wall, and asked him to sit, just to get a little space around her as she stood at the propane stove scrambling powdered eggs and boiling water for the grits. Off to his right stood her iron-framed cot with its wildly disheveled mattress, the night table piled with her books and field journals, and the kerosene lantern they'd nearly knocked over last night in some mad haste to burn themselves down.

  At some point they'd also let the fire in the wood stove go out, and the morning was cold. It would be July before mornings broke warm, up here at this elevation. When she brought over two plates of eggs, he stood to give her the chair, and she huddled there with her knees tucked into her flannel gown, shivering, watching him through the steam above her coffee cup. He moved to the window and stood looking out while he ate. He was five foot six, maybe. Not only younger but half a head shorter than she.

  "No offense," she observed, "but guys of your heighth usually get away from me as fast as humanly possible."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yeah. They kindly like to glare at me from the far side of the room. It's like being tall is this insult I arranged for them personally."

  He paused his fork to look at her. "No offense, Miss Deanna, but you've been consorting with too many worms and voles." She laughed, and he angled a grin at her, a trout fisherman casting his fly. "You're what we western boys call a long drink of water."

  He seemed to mean it. Her long thighs and feet and forearms--all her dimensions, in fact--seemed to be things he couldn't get enough of. That was amazing. That, she appreciated. It was his youth that made her edgy. She suppressed the urge to ask if his mother knew where he was. The most she allowed herself was the question of his origins. "Wyoming" was his answer. A sheep rancher, son of three generations of sheep ranchers. She did not ask what might b
ring a Wyoming sheep rancher to the southern Appalachians at this time of year. She had a bad feeling she knew.

  So she looked past his lure, through the window to the woods outside and the bright golden Io moth hanging torpid on the window screen. The creature had finished its night of moth foraging or moth love and now, moved by the first warmth of morning, would look for a place to fold its wings and wait out the useless daylight hours. She watched it crawl slowly up the screen on furry yellow legs. It suddenly twitched, opening its wings to reveal the dark eyes on its underwings meant to startle predators, and then it flew off to some safer hideout. Deanna felt the same impulse to bolt--to flee this risky mate gleaned from her forest.

  A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she'd grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name. It was a dread built into humans via centuries of fairy tales: give man the run of a place, and he will clear it of wolves and bears. Europeans had killed theirs centuries ago in all but the wildest mountains, and maybe even those holdouts were just legend by now. Since the third grade, when Deanna Wolfe learned to recite the Pledge and to look up "wolf" in the World Book Encyclopedia, she'd loved America because it was still young enough that its people hadn't wiped out all its large predators. But they were working on that, for all they were worth.

  "You had a rifle," she said. "The other day. A thirty-thirty, it looked like. Where is it now?"

  "I stashed it," he said, simple as that. He was clean-shaven, bare-chested, and cheerful, ready to eat up powdered eggs and whatever else she offered. His gun was hiding somewhere nearby while his beautiful, high-arched feet moved around her cabin floor with pure naked grace. It occurred to Deanna that she was in deep.