Machine Dreams

through her clothes, he felt a small hardness throbbing like a pulse point. Her whole body, spread-eagled on the seat of the car, turned on that hardness. Kato draped one leg over the back of the seat and the other over the column of the steering wheel so that Billy was just at the vee of her crotch, leaning back against the door on his side and watching her. She threw her arms out as though floating on water and kept her eyes closed, and Billy watched her with no self-consciousness. She worked up to her own feeling a little shyly, in private; when she couldn’t keep her eyes closed any longer that was a signal. If he kept touching her then, it was an unspoken promisehe wouldn’t stop, and when she came her whole body rippled lengthwise with a delicate vibration that reminded Billy of horses shivering their flanks. Often he didn’t let her go that far; he liked to feel the trembling tight around him, from inside her. Her muscles seemed to imitate a spastic lapping of water. It was so gentle and felt so foreign, so mysterious, something fluttering against the inner walls of a cage. To Billy it didn’t seem part of either one of them; if he was lost in his own sensation, he missed hers altogether and couldn’t tell if she’d felt it. So he tried to wait and while they were touching each other, taking turns and trading off, he was priming himself to wait; they were intent and usually stopped talking except for involuntary sounds. This was a drug between them; there was the weightless high of dope but they were excruciatingly alert and wound tight. They could go on for hours.
    Finally they took their clothes off and the heated interior of the car was like a capsule with steamed windows, drifting in space. They lay down in this isolated nowhere and cried out with relief at his first thrust inside her. They made love every way possible in the cramped room of the front seat, one of them changing position when they felt him almost coming. At last they let go and rode their own movement, not thinking, racing: he opened his eyes for an instant and a small shape in the steamy window had teared clear. The snowy hill below the plant lot was a luminous slant in the winter dark. Far below, cars moved on the Winfield road. Billy saw the lit points of headlights in the midnight blue of the cold air, but knowledge of what he was looking at was nowhere inside him.
    First he was conscious again of sounds; he heard the hum of the car heater, he heard Kato breathing. “You there?” he whispered.
    “I’m here.”
    He sat up, pulling out of her as she touched him. She’d used their clothes as a pillow; now she gave him his pants and shirt and pulled her coat on over her nakedness. “I’d feel better if we parked behind the drive-in,” she said. “It’s spooky here, all these old trucks.”
    Billy zipped his Levi’s. “You scared?” He circled her throatwith his hands, pulled her closer and kissed her forehead. “I used to come here when I was a kid, same trucks. Doesn’t seem spooky to me. Besides, there are always two or three cars parked behind the drive-in—the police swing by. And who knows which police.”
    “He wouldn’t,” Kato said. “I’d never speak to him again.” She pulled her jeans on under the coat.
    “What have you told him, anyway, all this time?”
    “I haven’t told him anything lately. About a month ago, I just said I couldn’t see him for awhile.” She reached into her purse for a cigarette.
    “Kato, suppose I wasn’t getting drafted?”
    “We were seeing each other again before you knew you were getting drafted.”
    “But not as much.” He raised his brows, smiling. “Maybe you have a thing for uniforms.”
    She lit the cigarette. Now he saw her clearly in the glow of the match; her eyes glistened with moisture. What was she feeling? Her eyes always looked wet after they made love, but the wetness seemed an automatic response, like the tears of someone choking or sneezing.
    Kato held the cigarette and looked at Billy, her hand shaking a little. “Maybe I do, Billy,” she said, and her voice broke.
    He touched the steering wheel. It was cold and suddenly he was cold; he felt the cold dark seeping into the car. He leaned forward, switched the heat on higher. The blower hummed.
    “I’ll write to you, Billy.” She pursed her lips when she exhaled smoke.
    “Maybe you will at first,” he said carefully. “But it’s okay. You’ve already written to me.”
    She flung her blond