Freedom [172]
“Oh, what is it?” she said.
“You have to go slow with me.”
“Slow, slow, yes,” she said, kissing his tears, wiping them with her satiny thumbs. “Walter, are you sad?”
“No, honey, the opposite.”
“Then let me love you.”
“OK. You can do that.”
“Really OK?”
“Yes,” he said, crying. “But we should probably hit the road.”
“In a minute.”
She put her tongue to his lips, and he opened them to let her in. There was more desire for him in her mouth than in Patty’s entire body. Her shoulders, as he gripped them through her nylon shell, seemed to be all bone and baby fat and no muscle, all eager pliability. She straightened her back and bore down on him, pushing her hips into his chest; and he wasn’t ready for it. He was closer now but still not fully there. His resistance the night before hadn’t been simply a matter of taboo or principle, and his tears weren’t all for joy.
Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance. Now that he’d driven her away, he keenly wanted her again, but he had a dim recollection, from the stories he’d heard and read about men in his position, that this was the terrible thing about them: that it was known as stringing a girl along. He sat for a while in the changeless purple-toned streetlight, listening to the trucks on the interstate.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m still trying to figure out how to live.”
“That’s OK. You can have some time.”
He nodded, taking note of the word some.
“Can I ask you one question, though?” she said.
“You can ask me a million questions.”
“Well, just one for now. Do you think you might love me?”
He smiled. “Yes, I definitely think that.”
“That’s all I need, then.” And she started the engine.
Somewhere above the fog, the sky was turning blue. Lalitha took the back roads out of Beckley at highly illegal speeds, and Walter was happy to gaze out the window and not think about what was happening to him, just inhabit the free fall. That the Appalachian hardwood forest was among the world’s most biodiverse temperate ecosystems, home to a variety of tree species and orchids and freshwater invertebrates whose bounty the high plains and sandy coasts could only envy, wasn’t readily apparent from the roads they were traveling. The land here had betrayed itself, its gnarly topography and wealth of extractable resources discouraging the egalitarianism of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, fostering instead the concentration of surface and mineral rights in the hands of the out-of-state wealthy, and consigning the poor natives and imported workers to the margins: to logging, to working in the mines, to scraping out pre- and then, later, post-industrial existences on scraps of leftover land which, stirred by the same urge to couple as had now gripped Walter and Lalitha, they’d overfilled with tightly spaced generations of too-large families. West Virginia was the nation’s own banana republic, its Congo, its Guyana, its Honduras. The roads were reasonably picturesque in summer, but now, with the leaves still down, you could see all the scabby rock-littered pastures, the spindly canopies of young second growth, the gouged hillsides and mining-damaged streams, the spavined barns and paintless houses,