He lies. The thought bloomed and then disintegrated. Of course he was a cop; he had the look. She had only just gotten Danny back, and already he was slipping into his man-man thing, urging her to wait on the stranger, pulling his pint of whiskey from their supplies. She ladled reconstituted beef stew out of the kettle and saw with some satisfaction that it was lukewarm now as she poured it on a plate for him. He took it from her with an absent nod, his whole attention fastened on his conversation with Danny.
A mosquito stung her cheek and she slapped it away dead, felt the pop of its blood-filled sac on her cheek. She moved closer to Danny, and he put his arm around her, but his mind was on the red man. He was always like this when he met another cop; they had their own language and they were like dogs sniffing each other, checking out mutual acquaintances, and then settling happily into war stories.
She stared sullenly into the flames and heard only bits of their conversation.
"You got a real antique of a jail down there, I hear," Danny was saying.
"Rocky Butte? It's better than it was—since they filled in the moat and closed the dungeon. Our offices are some better too. They moved us out of the courthouse and put us out on Glisan by the airport. Don't have any windows, but they painted it before we moved in."
"You like Checks?"
"Let's say it's a challenge. Some of those paper hangers
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are smarter than hell. We had one person—and I mean a really, gorgeous person. Bounced them at I. Magnin and Meier and Frank's Designer Shop so fast, she was out of town before they ever hit the bank. I picked her up in San Francisco and she was livid. Outraged dignity until she saw I was really going to put the cuffs on her. Then she flings her arms around me and starts sobbing and offering what you call sexual favors."
"You're shitting me."
"Naw. In other circumstances, I would have gone for it, but. ... So I pull away and she's still hanging on and shaking—and her wig fell off and I like to shit. She's bald. Only it's better than that. She's not a she—she's a he. One of the best-looking broads I've ever seen, and it's not even female. He started to cry and kick and the motel manager says to me, 'You shouldn't be so rough with a woman'; so I grab one tit in each hand and pull and they end up around the paperpusher's hips, and you never saw such a look as that manager's face. Hell, I had to buy the guy straight clothes to bring him back on United. All he had was dresses."
Danny was loving it. Joanne had to urinate; she tried to ignore the pressure in her bladder, but it only got worse. She whispered to Danny, and he turned to her impatiently: "Well go, baby. You've got the whole woods out there."
"Danny." She tugged at his sleeve and felt like a child. "I'm not going out there by myself."
"We'll be right here. You don't have to go very far. Take the flashlight."
"Danny." She was embarrassed and she hated the interloper with a passion that startled her, hated Danny too. "Come with me."
"O.K." He turned toward the stranger and laughed. "The wife's got to take a whiz. Scared of the woods. We'll be back."
"Don't go too far in," he warned. "I don't think I've come that far since I ran into the bears; I've got a feeling I've been circling. Holler if you need help."
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They moved away from the clearing and Danny pointed the flashlight toward a fallen log. "Go on, babe. Hurry up."
"Well don't shine it on me for heavens' sake. He can see me."
"He's not looking. Dammit, Joanne, go ahead and pee; it's freezing out here."
She squatted just beyond the perimeter of the circle of light and struggled to hold her jeans away from the stream of urine, her buttocks vulnerable to the cold air and whatever was beneath her. She heard a splattering sound from Danny's direction. Everything was easier for men; they didn't risk getting poison oak all over their private parts—all they had to do was haul it out and go. She pulled up her jeans now and felt the wet spots at the waist already turning cold and clammy. If he wasn't so damned impatient, she wouldn't have missed.
"You done?" He wasn't waiting for her; he'd already turned, ready to go back.
"Danny!" It was a hiss, furious.
"What now?"
"Come here! Stop a minute."
"What?"
"I don't like that man. I don't want to camp with him."
"Joanne.. . ." His voice was heavy with annoyance. "Joanne, we've got no choice. You want me to boot him out and send him downtrail when it's pitch dark? If the animals didn't get him, he'd fall off the mountain."
"There's something wrong with him."
"What?"
"I don't know. He just sneaks up on us, and you welcome him like he's an old buddy, but he makes my skin crawl. How do you know who he is, really?"
He sighed. "Joanne, he's O.K. He knows who he's supposed to know, and he talks the language. Besides, I saw his I.D."
"When?"
"When you were cooking. You think if he was some kind of pervert he'd be up here? It's not exactly your prime stalking grounds."
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"Maybe it is."
He turned away from her and then said, "I think you're mad because things aren't going just exactly the way you want. You're acting like a spoiled little girl, and you'd better learn that people have to adjust to circumstances. He'll be gone when it's daylight."
"I don't like him."
"Then don't like him. I'm going back. Are you coming with me?" He walked away, taking the light with him, and she ran to catch up. The stranger was running her supplies and cooking gear along a rope he'd tied between two fir trees. Danny grabbed the end of the rope and held it taut as the big man positioned the canvas sack equidistant between the trunks.
"I know I'm spooky," he grinned at her. "But after today, I think we'd better be extra careful that we don't make ourselves an attractive target. I hope you don't mind?"
She shook her head, wordless, and she would not return his smile.
"This wasn't my first encounter with old Brer Bear. I was in Glacier Park in 1979, when one of the lodge girls was killed." He paused, and his voice was tight when he continued. "I was in the party that found her, and it was . . . an ... ugly thing. Grizzly took her arm and half her head . . ."
"Hey," Danny said, jerking his head toward Joanne. "Maybe we better talk about that in the daylight."
"Sorry."
She would not let it go. "Why do you hike then, Mr. Dwain? Why don't you stay down in Portland where it's safe?"
She had asked the question, but he looked at Danny when he answered, dismissing her. "I guess I don't like to think any creature can stop me from doing what I like, don't like to be scared off. But it's made me cautious. Anyway, the girl Glacier had a dog with her and was sleeping in a tent with her supplies. Broke all the rules."
"So she deserved what she got?" Joanne's voice was hard.
"Joanne!"
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"Nobody deserved that, ma'am. I'm sorry I made you nervous. I shouldn't have brought it up."
She bent down and grabbed her bedroll, picked at the knot that held it in a tightly-packed sausage. "I'm going to sleep now. It's late." She waited for Danny to say he was coming with her, but he had turned away and was pouring whiskey for the red-headed man.
She lay six feet from them, watching their silhouettes against the fireglow, hearing fragments of conversation about guns and sex and arrests, their voices deep and rumbling and then bursting into laughter that seemed drunken. She watched the moon move across the sky. It was very, very late when Danny turned to her, fumbling at the zipper to her sleeping bag. He was singing in slurred, sibilant phrases.
"Please come down and let me in, please come down and let me in. Please come down and let me in. I'm Barnacle Bill, the Sailor—"
She turned on her side and pretended sleep, but he was persistent, sliding the zipper down slyly, letting icy air creep under her shirt and up her spine like a snake. She pushed his hand away and pulled the zipper back up.
"Baby?"
She stayed silent.
"You mad?"
"I'm asleep. Go to sleep."
"Let me in. It's cold, and I can't get my fucking bedroll untied."
"Cut it. Bite the cord in two. You're a big, strong man."
"You're mad at me. Joanne's mad at me, and it's cold out here. Come on, honey, don't fool around. Let me in."
"Go sleep with Pistol Pete from Portland."
"He smells."
She laughed. "So do you."
Even drunk, he saw that she had weakened and he played on it. "But you're used to the way I smell. Joanne . • • Joanne, remember how I said I was afraid of snakes. Well, for God's sake, let me in. I'm scared to mess around with my bedroll."
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He made her remember the good time on the trail, and she let herself think that tomorrow would be better.
"O.K. But no fooling around."
"Absolutely not. It never occurred to me. I'm just so fucking cold I couldn't get it up anyway. I swear."
She let him enter her canvas capsule and felt that he was naked and hard. He was on top of her, pinning her backbone to the pine-needle-carpeted turf beneath her.
"You lied."
"I know," he giggled. "I'm a rotten, filthy, stinking liar." He pawed at her jeans, managing to slide them off her hips and down somewhere to the bottom of the sleeping bag.
"Danny, we can't. Where is he?"
He kissed her mouth and ears, gluing his face to hers as she tried to turn away from him. "Him? He's to hell and gone over by the lake. He can't see anything. Couldn't see anything anyway. We're all covered up inside here, safe as a bug in a bug, pardon me, a bug in a rug, two bugs in a rug."
"You're sure he can't see us?" She felt herself responding to him. "Be quiet for a minute. Be still!" He stopped moving, and they listened, hearing nothing but a few last pops and hisses from the dying fire.
"See," he whispered. "He's way over there, sound asleep, and we're not going to let him spoil our good times, are we? I'm sorry I yelled at you because you had to pee, because all God's little girls have to pee, don't they? Now, just lie there real nice and still, and nobody will know what we're doing."
She let him enter her, feeling his penis strangely cool from to exposure to the frigid air.
|I thought you couldn't get it up if it was cold?"
"It wasn't easy."
It was quite good for her; she held him long after he had nnished with a muffled groan, long after he had slipped out her, held him like a child against her breast, his head wy with sleep, loving him fiercely and protectively. 16 opened her eyes at last to chart the passage of the •on toward dawn. And saw the big man's face above
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them, leaning over and staring down at them without expression. She shut her eyes in horror, and instantly opened them again to see nothing but the crescent moon and scudding fingers of cloud. A dream. A half-dream born from her suspicion and the fear of discovery. He could not have been there watching; she would have heard his feet crushing the spongy ground as he fled, and she had heard nothing.
After a long time of listening for something beyond Danny's heavy breathing, she relaxed and curled herself around her sleeping husband and dreamed with him. The she-cougar screamed again, but she didn't hear.
10
Joanne woke to sunlight, morning light—not yet full of heat, but pale lemon drifting down through the treetops, speckled with motes. Danny had been with her in the night, but he was gone. She sat up quickly, and zipped herself free of the constricting bedroll.
"Danny!" Her voice, distorted, bounced back at her from the wall of the forest. "Danny! Where are you?"
She heard crashing noises then and footsteps approaching.
"I thought you were going to sleep all day." It was Danny, and he was alone. "Don't move fast; there must have been rocks under all that moss, and it's going to hurt to stretch out."
She jumped up and laughed at him. "One of us was in shape, my darling, and 7 feel wonderful."
"Then I must have been on the bottom." His eyes lidded with the memory of their mating. "I didn't start out on the bottom, though."
She remembered then the fleeting glimpse of the stranger standing over them, or when she had seen him there in her
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mind, and remembered too that they weren't alone. "Where is he?"
"Dave? He's gone downtrail. He said he'd probably take off when it got light. Nobody's over there now, and his gear's all gone. You weren't very nice to him."
"He gave me the creeps but you were nice enough for both of us. Oh, let's forget him; I guess I was pretty bitchy. You hungry?"
"Do bears shit in the woods?"
He'd answered her that way a hundred times, a thousand times, but it jarred now. "Couldn't you have said, 'Do birds fly?'"
"I'm hungry. O.K.? I want eggs and bacon and pancakes and biscuits and gravy."
"Dream on, and shinny that pack down for me and I'll see what your choice is."
He brought water from the lake that seemed safe enough, and she made coffee with it, and mixed it with dried beef stew, fried eggs, and wrapped canned biscuit dough around a stick to bake it. They ate together, silently.
"You want to go over?"
"Over where?"
"Into the Okanogan country. If we do that, we go on up north over Bowan Mountain, and then it's five and a half hours to the Pacific Crest Trail."
She handed him her plate to finish.
"Do we have to decide now?"
"Nope. That's the beauty of it. We're free, and we don't have to decide anything. That's finally beginning to come through to me."
He looked years younger; the puffiness under his eyes gone away, the tension lines ironed too after two good nights of sleep. She reached out to him and touched his hand. "You know something? And I think it's all right for me to say this now, and I don't know why I know it's all right. I think I might just walk off this mountain with a baby started."
He stared back at her, and seemed to be weighing something unsaid. And then he lifted her hand to his lips
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and kissed it, and she felt his love unfettered by desire. She leaned against him, trying to make the moment last as long as she could.