Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [42]
“Hey yourself,” she answered quietly. As if her heart were not pounding at its cage like a sudden captive. “How’d you find me up here?”
“I sniffed you out, girl. You’re a sweet, easy trail for a man to follow.”
Her abdominal muscles tensed. He might have thought he was joking, but she knew some truths about human scent. She’d walked down city streets in Knoxville and turned men’s heads, one after another, on the middle day of her cycle. They didn’t know why, knew only that they wanted her. That was how pheromones seemed to work, in humans at least—nobody liked to talk about it. Maybe excepting Eddie Bondo. “I’m fertile, that’s what got to you,” she said frankly, testing him out, but he didn’t flinch. “Just so you know, this is the day.” She laughed. “That’s what called you down from Clinch Peak.”
Eddie Bondo laughed, too, shining that high-beam smile at her through the late-morning drizzle. Could she pretend not to rejoice? How could she not want him back?
“How can you know a thing like that?” he asked.
“What, that my body’s talking to yours?” She stomped her boot down on the puffballs, releasing a cloud of spores that rose and curled like golden brown smoke, glittering in the sunlit air between them. Sex cells, they were, a mushroom’s bliss, its attempt to fill the world with its mushroom progeny. “Or how can I know about my timing? Which do you mean?”
He stomped the puffballs, too, squashing the leathery white skins like empty baseballs, releasing more puffs. The supply seemed endless. Deanna wondered if these tiny particles would cling to their damp skin or enter their bodies on an inhaled breath.
“Both, I guess,” he said finally.
She shrugged. Was he serious? A woman knew both those things if she was paying attention. Deanna turned and headed up-mountain, confident he would follow. “I sleep outside a lot,” she said. “I’m on the same schedule as the moon.”
He laughed. “What are you, a were-lady?”
She stopped and turned to look at him. It amazed her, the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind. “Any woman will ovulate with the full moon if she’s exposed to enough moonlight. It’s the pituitary gland does it, I guess. It takes a while to get there, but then you stay.”
Eddie Bondo seemed amused by this information. “So back in the old days, when they slept on the ground around the fire, wrapped up in skins or however they did, then what? You’re saying all the women in the world came into heat at the same time?”
She shrugged again, not really wanting to talk about it if he thought it was funny. It felt like betraying a secret. “Convenient, if you think about it. Full moon, plenty of light.”
“Damn,” he said. “No wonder that sucker drives men crazy.”
“Yep.” She turned uphill again, feeling his eyes on every muscle in her long, rain-slick thighs and calves, her gluteus maximus, and the small of her back as she mounted the slope. She was wearing cutoff jeans, a thin cotton shirt, and no bra. She’d had no thoughts of Eddie Bondo when she dressed that morning, only a rush of spring fever and, evidently, a body that wanted to be seen.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“Out for a walk in the rain.”
“It’s just about let up,” he contended. “Finally.”
“Don’t get used to it. We’re in for more.”
“Don’t tell me that. How can you tell?”
How? About six different ways: first, a wind just strong enough to make the leaves show their white undersides. “I don’t know,” she said aloud, shutting that door out of habit. Although it occurred to her that this might be the one man she’d met since her father died who would be interested to hear all six.
“You hillbillies around here must have gills like fish. Last few weeks I’ve been thinking I was going to melt.”
“You didn’t, I see.”
“Turns out I’m not made of sugar.”
“Turns out.” She smiled to herself.
“So. Where you going?”
“Nowhere—a place I like to go.”
He laughed.