Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [115]
Jack nodded, hating the feeling of relief. “Okay. You’re right. Okay. Come to bed. I want you.”
She undressed slowly, in the middle of the room, dropping her clothing at her feet. “This is where we agree,” she said. “Without this between them, what man and woman can talk to each other?” She laughed, naked, her arms over her head in a deliberately corny pose. “You like me?” she teased.
“Bring that thing over where I can get my hands on it.”
“Come and get it.”
They made love on the floor, in the middle of the small room, and then, after the period of calm timelessness passed, she said, “We shouldn’t let this go. We ought to get married. What do you think?”
“I love you,” he said. “I was afraid you’d laugh at me if I told you. But I love you. I want to marry you.”
“I love you,” she said. “We have to get married. This is too good. I’ll never laugh at you.”
She crawled over on top of him and they kissed deeply, Jack conscious of the need to make this kiss sincere, and after a few moments she sat up and slid down on him easily, her arms out, her body moving slowly, her black hair down over her shoulders, her eyes on his; it began tenderly but moved quickly into the erotic, and Jack felt demonic, as if he had endless power.
“I’ll blow you through the roof,” he said between his teeth.
“Blow me through the roof,” she answered. Slowly she increased her tempo until they were both bucking and writhing like animals, and when it finally happened he clutched her to him so hard he almost cracked her ribs. “Oof!” she said.
Now she was gone again. He wandered through the casino, the coffee shop, out by the swimming pool. Everywhere he went it was noisy with people, a continual din that he associated with the lower but similarly constant noise of San Quentin. But these people were not in prison, not even in a metaphorical prison. Jack had known convicts who said that everybody was in prison, that life was a prison, or society a prison, even being stuck with your own identity was a prison; but Jack no longer believed that: prison was prison, nothing else. People might be in trouble, or feel stifled or restricted, or even trapped, but they weren’t in prison. It just wasn’t the same thing at all. The hotel might be a “glittering trap” for the bored and lonely, but that was a hell of a lot different from being sent to prison.
Just to prove it, Jack left the buildings and walked out into the desert. The transition was dramatic; the desert afternoon was blistering hot, and the purple mountains in the distance wavered in the heat, almost invisible through the thermal density. There were sounds, but not human voices. He could hear cars on the highway behind him, and he walked across the hot baked desert ground rapidly, away from the sounds of the cars and toward the mountains. It was a lot like the eastern Oregon country, but much lower in elevation, and somehow dirtier. Nature here was not more beautiful than the works of man, because nature had forgotten to air-condition the place or clean it up, and only the distant view was attractive. After a few minutes, Jack no longer believed in air conditioning—it did not seem possible that any place could be cool when it was so hot.
Even so, he was glad to be alone, and he felt satisfied that he was paying for his aloneness by absorbing the terrible heat. He turned, and he could see cars wavering along the highway like mirages, and he could see the high-voltage electrical towers crossing the sands, wriggling in the heat. He would have to walk miles to get away from it entirely, to be in a place where he wouldn’t see the buildings, the cars, the power derricks; and even then he would probably come across tourists on horseback, enduring the heat so they could say they didn’t spend all their time in the casinos and had the bad, black, blistering sunburns to prove it. Jack turned back, feeling immediate buoyancy from the air conditioning as he stepped inside. But he had enjoyed being alone; he had even forgotten, for