The Coming of Bright (26 page)

Of all the poses they’d done that day, the Bird’s Nest had to be the most Dionysian. The most creative. The most ethereal. The most perfectly
wrong
. It molded the human body into a form that nature by herself never could have imagined. Only the human mind, touched by the gods, reaching for the heavens, looking to the earth, could have conceived of it.

“See, that wasn’t so bad. How do you feel?”

Zora’s fear of flying had disappeared. She was a bird, and goddammit she was going to sound like one. Loudly.

Cock-a-doodle-doo
.

Only one problem: no rooster could ever sound that feminine. Or look that beautiful.

“Exactly,
cock-a-doodle-doo
is right. Hold on, I’ll support you in the middle.”

Standing against her spread hips, he wrapped his left arm around her stomach. He elevated her entire body a few inches, to relieve some of the strain that gravity was putting on her poor arms and legs. For the third and final time that day, he entered her in an inverted position. Ever the gentleman, thinking of her pleasure before his own, he began to massage her clitoris with his right hand. The moisture of their bodies, from his chest, between her legs, began to drip onto the platform of the Trap.

“Ready to swing back and forth a bit?”

With his arm around her middle, he started her swaying on the canopy. The pendulum of her body swung the perfect distance in its arc to uncover and then cover again the full length of his penis. This time around he didn’t have to worry about conserving his seed, restraining his own excitement. After a few swings of the pendulum, he started swaying her in a wider arc, his penis coming completely out of her vagina and then diving back in all the way up the shaft. The feeling of coming completely out of her, feeling first the humid warmth of her body, then the colder drier air of the room, brought him to arousal much faster than expected. A few of these wider swings and he ejaculated, right as he came out of her. There would be some cleaning up to do.

The timing of his release had been impeccable. Even with him supporting most of her weight, Zora had been about ready to let go of the bars. Ready to tumble with him onto the platform. After all, they could have just as easily made love there. But the full otherworldly potential of the Trap would have been wasted if they had.

After he had climaxed, she released her legs from the cross-bar, landing back on
terra firma
. She collapsed onto the platform, heaving and shivering hot, oblivious to the cooling juices beneath her back. He joined her there and they huddled and embraced, legs and arms and lips tangled, the wreckage of a bird’s nest knocked from a higher place.

Finally they got up, slowly, stiffly, achingly, and removed themselves to the bedroom. Not for more lovemaking, God no, hell no—simply to get a good night’s sleep. In the arms of a beloved. A basic human need. Victor had a small decanter of ouzo on the nightstand and poured a glass for them to sip and share. The ouzo burned going down her throat. Zora felt the need to press him on a burning question. Coyly, of course.

“Was that the answer to my question? You love Pilates most of all? Jesus, Victor, I never knew you swung that way.”

He reached down under the sheets and pinched her on the ass in retaliation.

“I think I showed you tonight how I swing. But truth be told, I haven’t answered your question yet. Tomorrow I will.”

“Seriously? What’s going on tomorrow?”

“We’re meeting Jack and Vane at 6 o’clock sharp. An hour from here. Got to get up fucking early.”

The playfulness of the moment, its intimacy, drained from Zora like blood from a slaughtered lamb. She gave Victor a look that could curdle drained blood. She uncuddled herself from him, put some distance between them on the bed.

“What the hell are you talking about Victor? Why would I want to meet Jack and Vane tomorrow? Especially Vane—you know how much he despises me.”

“A good friend of mine owns a ranch about an hour’s drive away. We’re going hunting there tomorrow. Bowhunting. Whitetail. Big ones too, some real monsters. And don’t worry about Vane—I told you, he and I have come to an understanding.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Zora fell asleep that night away from Victor’s arms, angry, resentful—but despite herself, while she slept, she fell back into them. Try as she might, she could not escape his embrace. The fall.

Before she fell again, Victor tried to assure her that the trip would be fun, spectacular scenery, he tried to allay her fears of having to face the violent death of a living creature, told her she would play the role of the tagalong, they didn’t have equipment for her anyway. It didn’t help.

She was afraid of the blood, the innards spilling out and glistening sickly in the sun, the deer’s dead tongue lolling out of its mouth like a limp purple doll. Under the right circumstances, Zora was perfectly capable of turning a penis into sashimi, but she hated the thought of killing an innocent creature. Or of seeing it killed.

She dreamt that night that
she
was the deer, the bounding hapless prey, and that all three men were bent on her destruction. They wanted to kill her, fuck the life out of her, with their razor-sharp arrows. They cornered her in a canyon of rock, against a gigantic boulder, and at the same time shot their arrows into the terrified depths of her heart. They slit her throat and drank her blood. They flayed her and tore at her flesh with their teeth like ravenous beasts.

She couldn’t wake, the dream was too real, and her entire self was consumed in that horror of unwaking. She woke only when the three men had taken their fill of her and had fallen asleep themselves, lying upon her flayed skin after their orgiastic bloodfest. The moment of her waking was the moment of their slumber. She told Victor of the dream. He assured her with a faint smile that something like that could never happen—that hunters, three of them, could never shoot simultaneously into a deer’s heart with such accuracy.
Thanks for the cold comfort, asshole.

The drive was pleasant enough. The terrain got hilly and picturesque, a profusion of oak and mesquite, some cherry and maple thrown in for good measure. Not just hills: canyons and mesas. This was the karst country of central Texas, porous rock, caves and springs, underground tunnels of water, babbling brooks. Once upon a time, before the land turned pale, this had been Comanche country. The men would be hunting where generations of Comanche braves had once stalked the same species of prey. A lost cartography of the spiritual, of the sacred.

This was also Victor country. On the drive he told her of his childhood. His parents had both been lawyers in Austin, Bryce and Victoria Ras. They ran their own law firm together, very successful, thousands of clients over the years, partners in life and law.

His dad loved hunting like flies love shit, absolutely fucking adored it, the raw sensuality of it, the raw brutality of it. The taste of it. The smell of it. Every hunting season for years on end, before Vane had to go away, father and sons ventured into karst country, into the sacred grounds of the Comanche, to kill whitetail. Victor and Vane probably knew those hills better than many of the Comanche who had lived there—they had the adventurousness of boys, they enjoyed the permissiveness of their father, they had scaled, crawled, and dived into every nook and cranny of that karst-carved land.

They killed whitetail as well as the Comanche ever had. They butchered the animals themselves, preferred the bow to the rifle, arrows to bullets. They could no longer go with their dad—he was dead for many years of throat cancer, one Cuban cigar too many. Their mom was still alive but wouldn’t hear a word of hunting. She lived now in Costa Rica, on the 11th story of an all-glass condo complex in Puntarenas, on a peninsula on the Pacific coast, on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Nicoya. On the beach. She was glad she would never set foot in Comanche country ever again—one time, only one time, Bryce had talked her into going, as Victor had talked Zora. She was equally glad she would never again have to see in her freezer the body parts of a butchered deer.

“Look over to your left my love—that’s the ranch.”

Victor and Zora were almost to their destination. The highway they were on formed the easternmost boundary of the ranch. After skirting the property for a few miles, they turned off to the left onto a dusty dirt road. And abruptly stopped. The road was gated.

Victor and Vane both had keys. They were good friends with the owner of the ranch, Tom Nellis, that’s Senator Nellis to you and me, Republican from Texas. Longest serving member of the United States Congress. And one of the horniest and crookedest. If you know anything about the private lives of members of Congress, that takes some real skill. Their dad had done some legal work for the good Senator when he was caught with $90,000 of bribe money in his freezer and a hooker in his bed, both on the same day. Ouch. Not only did their dad get him a slap on the wrist, the Senator actually got some of the money returned to him, thawed of course, enough money to slap that hooker on the ass a few more times. So yes, Senator Nellis was grateful to the Ras family. They could hunt on his property whenever they wanted, in or out of season.

Vane and Jack were already waiting at the end of the road. How they had both arrived in one piece, riding in the same vehicle, Zora had not the first clue. Maybe Victor really had come to an understanding with his brother. Whatever the elder brother had done, whatever he had said, it didn’t entirely work when it came to Zora. Standing there at the end of the road, greeting his brother, Vane still managed to completely look past Zora. To utterly ignore her humanity. As though she were a rock or a tree in the landscape.

The men gathered their gear and the group split up into the same pairings they’d had in transit. There was a canyon that opened beyond the road, a natural extension of the dusty vehicular tracks. Each pair would tackle the terrain on either side of the canyon. Jack and Vane would hunt to the right of that gash in the earth, Zora and Victor to the left.

Aside from their hunting equipment, each pair of trekkers had a GPS, a two-way radio, and a cooler. Zora got to carry lunch for herself and Victor. That would be her job. Generic food from a convenience store along the way, stale sandwiches and syrupy drinks. Actually, her main job was trying not to spook the shit out of all the deer in a 5-mile radius by making too much of a commotion. Victor was there to sever the spine of a whitetail buck with his arrow, or bleed the creature to death from internal hemorrhaging—not dine on Wolfgang Puck or shush his lover.

Man and woman, hunter of deer and carrier of lunch, moved stealthily for an hour, through the scraggly rocks and brushy flora of the hills, without seeing a wisp of whitetail. Zora was truly happy about that. She had no desire to see Victor with blood on his hands, innards at his feet. The only four-legged life they saw was a hog-nosed skunk scurrying between some rocks. Out of their path, away from their nostrils.

Zora didn’t even bother looking for deer; she was too busy watching her step. The whole expanse of karst through which they traveled was littered with crevices and sinkholes large and small. One of those could swallow a man—or a woman—as easily as a whitetail could elude a shitfaced hunter. And from the number of shitfaced hunters in central Texas every year who shot a bush or a rock thinking it was a deer, that was pretty damn easy.

At the base of a large dome-shaped hill that looked as though its top had been sheared off with a giant scythe, Victor grabbed her arm, bringing her to a stop alongside him. He whispered.

“I want you to wait here for a little while. I’m going to go scout ahead for a path.”

“Why can’t I come?”

“It’s a special spot my dad showed Vane and me when we were boys. Sacred to the Comanche. But the terrain around this hill is dangerous, too many precipices in the rock, so it’s better if I find the path first.”

“Fine. Just don’t take too long. I’ve heard there are mountain lions up here.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’ve never seen one but I’ve found their scat. For a juicy morsel like you, a mountain lion might be tempted to venture out of the shadows. I know I would be.”

“Thanks for setting my fears to rest.
Shithead
.”

She shoved him forward. He stumbled over some rocks, almost pitching his head into a boulder, but regained his footing in time.

“The sooner you leave the sooner I can stop worrying. Get your ass moving.”

Without another word, he jumped through a screen of juniper bushes and disappeared quickly from sight, leaving her to stare at shadows.

After another hour, he still hadn’t returned.
Where the fuck is he?
The shadows of the terrain, of rocks and trees, loomed over her more and more. She was getting pissed. And very, very scared. She called out his name as loudly as she could, several times, getting nothing in return but an eerie woodland echo. Hollow sound bouncing back and forth off of jagged limestone.

She swore to herself that she would pummel him when he returned. Pummel him to a bloody pulp. She was not a courageous soul, not in that unfamiliar, that alien terrain, and every twig snapping, every ambiguous animal sound, set her heart palpitating. Even though she was surrounded on all sides by throbbing life, the vibrant flora and fauna of the karst, she began to feel the first whispers of the horror of isolation. The horror of being lost in the wilderness. And the heat was getting oppressive.