Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [75]
“Oh, well, then they’d just think you’d gone off the deep end with too many pet goats. They’d think you were a city gal with her nose in a book and not one lick of sense in her head.”
She grinned at her coconspirator. “Not a problem. That’s what they think now.”
{11}
Predators
From inside her dark cocoon Deanna listened to the racket of a man in her cabin: the door flung open, boots stomping twice to shed their mud at the door, then the hollow clatter of kindling dropped on the floor. Next, the creak of the stove’s hinge and the crackling complaints of a fire being kindled and gentled to life. Soon it would be warm in here, the chill of this June morning chased outdoors where the sun could address it. She stretched her limbs under the covers, smiling secretly. Getting up to a warm cabin on a cold morning without having to go outside for firewood first, that was tolerable.
She felt something sharp against her leg: the plastic edge of one of his strings of condoms at the bottom of the bed, twisting there like a strand of DNA. She’d been astounded when he first produced these packets of cheerful little rubber disks in the primary colors, a whole procession of them strung together as if they’d come off some giant reel of condoms somewhere. “That’s my stash,” he’d said, utterly nonchalant, pulling them out of his pack like a magician’s tied-together scarves from a sleeve. He claimed to have gotten them free at some walk-in clinic that urged them onto its clientele. She disliked thinking of his ambling into such a place for treatment of God-knew-what. Didn’t really care for the grim realities of this man at all, the fact that he was a seasonal migrant picking up occasional work, salmon fishing, carving knife handles for cash. A male who shacked up for shelter, she suspected. She’d done her best to run him off, flying into her rage at him up in the chestnut log, yet he persisted in her territory. He’d been out several years from Wyoming—with his hunting rifle, following his passion, which they did not discuss. He talked about everything else instead, and she found herself swallowing his stories like bits of live food brought to a nest: the Northern Lights unfurling like blue-green cigar smoke in the Arctic sky. The paraffin-colored petals of a cactus flower. The Pacific Ocean and tidepools, neither of which she’d seen, except for the artificial versions of the latter in the Chattanooga Aquarium. She thought now of the pink anemones waving in that water. Like herself, when he’d first spied on her with her sensitive, fleshy tentacles of thought waving all around her, until he’d touched and made her draw up quickly into a stony fist. But he knew just how to touch her, speak to her, breathe on her, to draw her out again. Physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety.
The stove’s metal door banged shut and she heard the hush of his jeans shed onto the floor. Her body tingled with the anticipation of his return to her bed. She waited, though, and for a minute too long there came no body diving headfirst into her world under the quilts. She poked her head out into the morning and blinked at its brightness. It was late morning already. The sun was a dazzling rectangle at the window, where a naked man danced in silhouette, batting both hands at a frightened moth.
“Hey hey, careful!” she cried, causing him to turn to her. She couldn’t see his expression because he was backlit, but already she knew that face, its guilelessness.
“I wasn’t going to kill him,” he insisted. “I’m just trying to catch him and put him outside. Little bugger snuck in here, he’s trying to see you naked.”
She sat up and squinted at the desperate wings flailing at the window. “No, now that’s a female. She’s looking at you.”
“Hussy,” he said, trying to clap the moth between his hands. “Look at her, she’s terrified. Never saw such a display of manhood in all