Crossroads Read online

  Returning to the truck, he saw her inside the roofless house and joined her there. The bedroom wall was still extant, but the door and its frame were gone, the floor covered with drifted sand. Nearly thirty years had passed since he’d lain in the bedroom and pictured the Navajo dancer. Even now, when he was enlightened enough to deplore a white man’s lust for a Native American fifteen-year-old, the thought excited him.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About everything. About Keith. I hate to think he deliberately cheated Clyde’s family. But that’s the thing about other cultures—an outsider can never really understand what’s going on.”

  “That’s why you have your own culture,” Frances said. “That’s why you have me. I’m easy to understand.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Want to bet?”

  In two quick steps, she was pressing against him. Her hands were inside his sheepskin coat, her neck straining upward for a kiss. He gave it to her, tentatively.

  She wasn’t tentative. She gave a little hop and he lifted her off the ground. She was a very determined kisser, harder of mouth than Marion, more aggressive, and it was entirely up to him to keep her aloft. How sharp the discontinuity between fantasy and reality! How disorienting the step from the generality of desire into the specificity of her kissing style, the hundred-odd pounds of dead weight he was holding. When he set her down, she backed against the wall and drew him after her. Her hips were as aggressive as her mouth, denim grinding against denim, and he thought of the heart surgeon. He thought of the lakefront high-rise apartment in which, he could now be certain, she’d done with the surgeon exactly what she was doing with him. Far from dismaying him, the thought helped him make sense of her. She was a widow who wanted sex; was good at it; had recent practice at it.

  She paused and looked up at him. “Is this all right?” She seemed genuinely worried that it wasn’t. He loved her all the more for that.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he said.

  “It’s the nineteen seventies?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs. Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleepy. “There we are.”

  It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life.

  “We should get back, though,” she said. “Don’t you think? They’re probably wondering what happened to us.”

  She was right. But now, being felt by her, he lost his mind. He covered her mouth with his, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled out her shirttails, reached underneath. The smallness of her breasts, in contrast to Marion’s, was extraordinary. Everything was extraordinary—he’d lost his mind, and she wasn’t saying no. She wasn’t saying they had to go back. The sun was warming his head and raising a smell of old smoke from the wall, but the place had lost its sound. Not a vehicle had passed on the road. No croak of a raven bore tidings of a reality larger than the two of them. In his madness, with the back of his hand scraping against her open zipper, he dared to part her private hair. She tensed and said, “Oh, Jesus.”

  His madness made him bold. “Just let me.”

  “No, it’s fine. It’s just—hoo. Shouldn’t we go back?”

  They definitely needed to go back, but he was touching Frances Cottrell’s vagina, a few steps from the spot where he’d entered the world of conscious pleasure, and there was no withstanding it. He’d come too far and waited too long. He opened his own pants.

  “Oh, wow, okay.” She looked down at what was pressing against her belly, and then at the hole in the front wall where a window had been. “Maybe this isn’t the best time?”

  His voice wasn’t his own; wasn’t under his control. “I can’t wait any more.”

  “It’s true. I did make you wait.”

  “You tortured me and tortured me.”

  She nodded, as if conceding the point, and he tried to take her pants down. She looked around more nervously. “Really?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I had no idea you were like this.”

  “I am utterly in love with you. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No, I guess I did wonder.”

  When he tried again to get her pants down, she gently pushed him away. “Can we at least be less visible?”

  In the time it took him to lead her into what had been the house’s bedroom, remove his coat, and spread it on the floor, the character of his madness changed—became less of the body and more of the head. Now everything centered on the deed and its attendant practicalities. She sat down on the coat and pulled off her shoes and pants. “I’m on the Pill,” she said, “in case you were wondering.”

  He wanted to ask if she truly wanted what he wanted, but there was a chance that her assent would lack enthusiasm, a chance that it would start a conversation. The air was still cold enough that she left her hunting jacket on. At the sight of her lying back in it, naked below the waist, he thought he might throw up with excitement. Before she could change her mind—before he could lose the mad determination to do the deed, before he could consider how far from ideal the time and the setting for it were—he tore off his own pants and kneeled between her legs.

  “My goodness, Reverend Hildebrandt. You’re rather large.”

  If large meant comparatively large, it was a comparison that no one had ever made. The stroke (oh, what a suggestive term Ambrose had coined) made him even larger. To his surprise, he found the largeness to be a difficulty.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You’re big, and I’m—tense.”

  It couldn’t have been clearer that he was making a mistake. Each passing minute would only add to her tension. But he simply couldn’t wait any more. As if time were a thing he could grasp in his arms and bend to his will, he kissed her and touched her with soothing unhurry. Her responses were ambiguous, speaking possibly of arousal, possibly of tenseness. Gone, either way, was her aggressiveness.

  “We can wait,” he admitted.

  “No, try it again. Just go slow. I don’t know why I’m so tight.”

  How quickly, once clothes had been shed, the wildly unmentionable became the casually discussable. It was like being whisked to a different planet. He felt as if he’d learned more about Frances in an hour than he’d learned in half a year. Thankfully, his heart still recognized her; his reservoir of compassion was still there to be tapped. He loved that a woman so confident of her desirability should have trouble relaxing for him. But alongside her specificity as a person, the sweetly imperfect person in whom he’d invested so much hope and so much longing, was the necessity to be, if only once, inside a woman who wasn’t Marion. How absurd the necessity, and how funny and human the constriction that impeded it, the quarter-inch out for every half-inch farther in, the lump in the sheepskin jacket that was murdering his elbow. In the end, he didn’t make it quite all the way in, and his satisfaction was pinched. But, God help him, he was keeping score, and this absolutely counted. Freed, at long last, from the weight of his inferiority, his heart returned to Frances. He shuddered with gratitude for the woman whose grace had saved him.

  “So, number one,” she said, “I need to pee again. Number two, we should definitely go back.”

  She gave him a sloppy kiss, the pleasure of it heightened by their union, their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to feel that he’d had, by far, the better half of the experience. He wanted to satisfy her, too. But the desire he’d turned on with his taming of Clyde now seemed to be turned off. She scrambled to her feet and put her pants on. Two minutes later, they were in the truck again.

  “So,” he said.

  “Right, so.”

  “I love you. That’s where I am.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  He started the truck and drove for a while in silence. There was no point in repeating that he loved her—he’d already said it twice.

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sp; “It’s strange,” she finally said. “The thing that makes you so attractive to me is the thing that makes it wrong of me to want you.”

  “I’m not so good. I think I told you that.”

  “But you are good. You’re a beautiful man. It’s all very confusing to me.”

  “You’re regretting what we did.”

  “No. At least not yet. It’s just confusing.”

  “I’m fantastically happy,” he said. “I have no regrets at all.”

  The hour was nearly noon, and he was driving as fast as he dared, too focused on road hazards to sustain a conversation, even if Frances had been inclined to say more. And so it happened that when he approached the chapter house and saw a big Chevy truck and a red-jacketed figure, Wanda, standing with Ted Jernigan and another man, Rick Ambrose, the latter glowering at Russ and Frances and registering their guilty lateness, waiting with the only kind of news that could have brought him to the mesa—bad news—the last words Russ had spoken were that he had no regrets at all.

  In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.

  On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.

  Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequelae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities. His rationality was blazing and tireless and all-seeing, and the problem of Larry made him sensible of the cost of ceaseless blazing, the body’s need for a little boost. The emptier of his two aluminum film canisters was in his pants pocket. He could rub sustenance into his gums without a sound, but he was plagued by unknowns, such as whether his sleeping bag would sufficiently muffle the sound of a lid’s unscrewing. Whether he could open the canister blindly without spilling. (Even a microgram of spillage was unacceptable.) Whether it was wise to partake at all from a canister already so depleted. Whether he shouldn’t at least wait until he could give himself a superior boost nasally. Whether, on second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to strangle the person whose interminable throat clearings were standing between him and that boost …

  Unh! The whether whether whether was of the body and its arrangement, its side deal, with the powder. Wholly apart from his body, lambent in his mind even now, was a key to millennia of fruitless speculation. It happened that, very recently, less than a week ago, he’d solved the puzzle of the world’s persistent talk of God. The solution was that he, Perry, was God. The realization had frightened him, but it was followed by a second realization: if a felonious and drug-addicted New Prospect Township High School sophomore was God, then anyone at all could be God. This was the amazing key. The amazement, indeed, was that he hadn’t seen it sooner. It had stared him in the face the previous summer, when he’d inked out the Gods in the Reverend’s clerical magazine and replaced them with Steves. How had he failed, that day, to grasp a key so exquisitely simple? The key was that Steve could be God. So could every other Tom, Dick, and Harry—all any of them had to do was open his eyes to his divinity. The instant a person experienced the mind’s truly limitless capacities, God’s existence became the opposite of preposterous. It became preposterously self-evident.

  The revelation had occurred on Maple Avenue, minutes after he’d withdrawn $2,825.00 from his brother’s passbook account at Cook County Savings Bank. The teller had counted the bills and then counted them again out loud, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty, and five, and tucked them into a nifty brown envelope. The rush of success was so titanic, he imagined an ejaculation blotting out the heavens. Knowledge so perfect could only have been God’s, and if he, Perry, possessed it, then what did this make him? In his earlier lunch-hour casings of the bank, he’d ascertained that the older, gray-haired teller, with whom he’d had dealings, was nowhere to be seen at 12:15. Behind the window, instead, was a frizzy-haired mademoiselle still sporting orthodontia, thus undoubtedly (beyond all question!) too new at the bank to know Clem. The scarlet-nailed hand that had taken his passbook was marvelously inexpert.

  “That’s a lot of cash. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a cashier’s check?”

  “I’m buying a sailboat.”

  “Wow. That’s exciting.”

  “It’s a beauty. I’ve been saving for three years.”

  “Do you have some ID?”

  She couldn’t have asked a question more perfectly foreseen. Everything had been foreseen: withdrawing an innocently precise number of dollars; wearing a nerdy cardigan and the disguise of his new eyeglasses; not only replicating and laminating a University of Illinois student ID card but meticulously abrading and soiling it with an emery board and charcoal, labors performed within feet of his soundly sleeping little brother and underwritten by his powder, which was also a focuser of attention, an enhancer of manual precision. He’d invested rather a lot of little boosts in his project, but the investment would be dwarfed by the avalanche of dividends he perfectly foresaw. When the metal-mouthed teller returned the ID card, having scarcely glanced at it, the investment had already paid off handsomely. Counting time spent manufacturing the card and practicing Clem’s signature, minus incidental drug expenses, he’d made $236.25 an hour. Not bad. But still far less than he stood to make—even factoring in the additional hours of labor in Arizona and the return of Clem’s money—after his transactions had unfolded as foreseen.

  There was no peyote, not one button, in Chicagoland.

  Thousands of Chicagoland hippies were desperate to try it.

  Only one person in the world had identified the demand and positioned himself to meet it.

  He owed the development of this logic to an earlier realization: for three years, he’d been treating the wrong disorder. He’d believed his mind to be diseased, in want of chemical palliation, when in fact the problem was somatic. It was his body, its exhaustible muscles, its irritable nerves, not his mind, that needed support. As soon as his guy had introduced him to Dexedrine and he’d learned the proper function of a Quaalude, which was to let his body rest, he’d entered a phase unprecedented in its excellence and serenity. Each day, the world was like pinball played in slow motion. His timing with the flippers was precise to the millisecond; he could run up the score arbitrarily high. He also knew exactly when to stop, allow the ball to drain, and eat his ’lu
des. Everything he did in early January had a rightness so complete that it controlled the world around him. Example: the very day he exhausted his Dexies, the very day, three thousand dollars appeared in his savings passbook, courtesy of his sister. Example: his bank did not require parental countersignatures. Example: his guy was not only at home and not only compos mentis, more or less, but willing to part with the entire remaining contents of his Planters Peanuts jar. The thought did cross Perry’s mind that he was overpaying, but the agreed-upon price was a minor fraction of three thousand dollars, and the guy fell upon his twenty-dollar bills with poignant greediness, suggestive of an individual who’d seriously hit the skids. As Perry fled down Felix Street, chewing pills, the world seemed even righter. His money had brought great happiness to both him and the guy. Their transaction, in theory zero-sum, had somehow doubled the money’s value.

  For yet a while longer, all had been righter than right, but by the time Bear delivered his judgment of speed, Perry was ready to hear it. What had seemed in the moment of purchase an all but inexhaustible number of pills had dwindled unexpectedly fast, and although their function was somatic he was experiencing less than salubrious mental side effects. Jay in particular was intolerably impatient-making, their sharing of a room a misery. Likewise his mother’s tender touchings. Likewise any Crossroads activity requiring physical contact. The world’s slowness had become more infuriating than capacitating, and meanwhile his body kept saying, “More, please.” His body had created a problem. He hated it for its inroads on his dwindling supplies, hated its drag on the flight of his mind. In a state of towering crankiness, when he ran out of pills, he returned to the guy’s little house on Felix Street, and this time no dog was there to howl at him. The front stoop was littered with rain-eaten advertising folios. Pasted to the door was a bright-yellow sheriff’s notice that he didn’t dare step close enough to read.