Drop City

she wanted to outdo him.
    “All right,” he said finally, “all right--Christ, you're like a demon here. Alfredo was right.”
    “About what?”
    He looked off across the field to where the trees staggered down to the river. “I don't know. You want to take a swim?”
    The water was a living thing, animated in every rill and ripple, and she entered it in a smooth knifing motion that started with her prayer-bound palms elevated over the arch of her neck and ended with a fillip of her ankles and feet. Marco's splash was muffled by the sound of her own, the cold immediate shock, and then they were racing to the far bank, her crawl against his butterfly. He came on strong at the end, pounding the surface to a froth with the spread wings of his arms and the dull hammering explosions of his kick, but in her mind she was back home at the lake, thirteen years old all over again and the strongest swimmer in her age group, out to the raft and back, and she never lost once, not all that summer. She touched the rocks on the far side and turned to face him. Two beats, three, and he was there, naked against her in the flutter of the current, and he took hold of her as if he'd been chasing her all his life.
    Later, when the sun wore a groove down the middle of the river and fell off into the trees, they swam back in tandem, pulled on their clothes and started back up the hill. Her feet glided over the dirt of the path. She felt clean and new, the way she always did after a swim, her muscles stretched taut and then stroked and massaged till they were like the veal her mother used to pound for cordon bleu, first one side, then the other, _whack, whack, whack.__ They'd made love in a cool dimple of grass on a sandbar, Marco taking his time, using his tongue and his fingers to pry each soft gasp from her, and she arching her back, taking him in, making love to him every bit as much as he was making love to her. Then they lay there in the grass a long while, watching the cobalt sky and a single hawk on fire with the sun, and then Marco nuzzled her, and she rolled herself on top of him, every square millimeter of her skin lit from within, and she thought of a film she'd seen on TV one late night when she was in high school and her parents were asleep and dead to the world--_Hiroshima, Mon Amour,__ that was it, a French movie--and the thrill it gave her to see the two lovers just like that, skin to skin, her breasts to his chest, their loins pressed tight, their legs, their feet. She didn't feel dirty. She felt clean. Pure. Felt as if she'd never lived in her parents' house, never gone to religious instruction or holy communion or listened in red-faced horror as Mrs. Montgomery took the seventh grade girls aside and told them about the penis and how the blood flowed to it to make it erect and what that would mean to them if they couldn't keep their knees together till they were married. She didn't think of Ronnie. Didn't think of the teepee cat. Didn't think of anything at all.
    Nobody saw anything. Nobody knew anything. But she came up from the river with Marco, her hair trailing wet all the way to the small of her back, her hand swinging in the grip of his and nothing but pleasure and peace in the world, and there was the guitar, the strings crawling loose in the leaf litter and the fretboard splintered into glittering shards that were no better than souvenirs now. They crossed the road and saw what looked like the remains of a rummage sale laid out beneath the tree, his books, his clothes, even his toothbrush. Marco never said a word. He didn't stoop to examine the books or try to reassemble the pages or tape the covers back together--all that would come later. He just turned and started for the back house, his shoulders set, arms rigid at his sides, and she didn't say anything either--or maybe she did, maybe she gasped out some crumpled little wad of nonsense like _Who?__ or _Why?__--but she followed along behind him.
    Sky Dog was out on the porch, and Sky Dog saw them coming. What he did was get up out of the swaybacked kitchen chair he'd been sitting in and call out to somebody inside the house--to Lester, Franklin, Dewey--but no one answered the call, and now Marco was coming up the steps in a furious headlong rush and Sky Dog, all hands and extruded eyes, was backing away from him. “I got no problem with you,” he said, narrowing himself in the corner, ready to flinch and duck and throw out a warding arm. Marco went