Stern Men

11

RUTH, WITH HER WHISKEY in one hand and Mrs. Pommeroy’s flashlight in the other, found her way over to Pastor Wishnell’s house. There were no lights on inside. She walked to the back of the house and discovered, as Mrs. Pommeroy had said she would, Owney. He was sitting on the steps. He made a big shadow in the dark. As Ruth slowly moved the beam of the flashlight over him, she saw that he was wearing a gray sweatshirt with a zipper and a hood. She went over and sat beside him and turned off the flashlight. They sat in the dark for a while.

“Want some?” Ruth asked. She offered Owney her glass of whiskey. He accepted it and took a long swallow. The contents of the glass didn’t seem to surprise him. It was as if he was expecting whiskey from Ruth Thomas at that moment, as if he’d been sitting here waiting for it. He handed her the glass, she drank some, and passed it back to him. The drink was soon gone. Owney was so quiet, she could scarcely hear him breathing. She set the glass on the step, near the flashlight.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked.

“Yes,” Owney said, and he stood up.

He offered her his hand, and she took it. A solid grip. He led her back through the garden, over the low brick wall, past the roses. She had left the flashlight on the steps of the house, and so they picked their way carefully. It was a clear night, and they could see their way. They walked through a neighbor’s yard, and then they were in the woods.

Owney led Ruth to a path. Now it was dark, because of the overhang, the shadow of spruces. The path was narrow, and Owney and Ruth walked single file. Because she didn’t want to fall, she put her right hand on his right shoulder to balance herself. As she felt more confident, she took her hand off his shoulder, but reached for him whenever she was unsure.

They did not speak. Ruth heard an owl.

“Don’t be afraid,” Owney said. “The island’s full of noises.”

She knew those noises. The woods were at once familiar and disorienting. Everything smelled, looked, sounded like Fort Niles but wasn’t Fort Niles. The air was sweet, but it was not her air. She had no idea where they were, until, suddenly, she sensed a great opening to her right, and she realized they were high up, along the edge of a gutted quarry. It was an old Ellis Granite Company scar, like the ones on Fort Niles. Now they moved with great caution, because the path Owney had chosen was only four feet or so from what seemed to be a serious drop. Ruth knew that some of the quarries were several hundred feet deep. She took baby steps because she was wearing sandals, and the soles were slippery. She was aware of a slickness beneath her feet.

They walked along the edge of the quarry for a while and then were back in the woods. The sheltering trees, the enclosed space, the embracing darkness was a relief, after the wide gape of the quarry. At one point they crossed an old railway. As they got deeper into the woods, it was hard to see, and after they had walked a half hour, in silence, the dark suddenly became thicker, and Ruth saw why. Just to her left was a shelf of granite reaching up into the darkness. It may have been a wall a hundred feet high of good black granite; it swallowed up the light. She reached out and brushed the surface with her fingers; it was damp and cool and mossy.

She said, “Where are we going?” She could really barely see Owney.

“For a walk.”

She laughed, a quiet, nice sound that didn’t travel at all.

“Is there a destination?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and, to her great delight, he laughed. Ruth joined him; she liked the sound of their laughter in these woods.

Now they stopped. Ruth leaned back against the granite wall. It was slightly tilted, and she tilted with it. She could just make out Owney standing in front of her. She reached out to his arm and felt along it all the way down to his hand. Nice hand.

“Come here, Owney,” she said, and laughed again. “Come in here.” She pulled him close, and he put his arms around her, and there they stood. Against her back was the cold dark granite; against the front of her was Owney Wishnell’s big warm body. She pulled him closer and pressed the side of her face to his chest. She really, really liked the way he felt. His back was wide. She didn’t care if this was all they did. She didn’t care if they held each other this way for hours and did nothing else.

No, actually; she did care.

Now everything was going to change, she knew, and she lifted her face and kissed him on the mouth. To be exact, she kissed him in the mouth, a thoughtful and long wet kiss and-what a nice surprise!-what a fat, excellent tongue Owney Wishnell had! God, what a lovely tongue. All slow and salty. It was a gorgeous tongue.

Ruth had kissed boys before, of course. Not many boys, because she didn’t have access to many. Was she going to kiss the Pommeroy sons? No, there hadn’t been many eligible boys in Ruth’s life, but she’d kissed a few when she’d had the chance. She had kissed a strange boy on a bus to Concord one Christmas, and she had kissed the son of a cousin of Duke Cobb’s who’d been visiting for a week from New Jersey, but those episodes were nothing like kissing Owney Wishnell’s big soft mouth.

Maybe this was why Owney spoke so slowly all the time, Ruth thought; his tongue was too big and soft to form quick words. Well, what of it. She put her hands on the sides of his face and he put his hands on the sides of her face, and they kissed the hell out of each other. Each held the other’s head firmly, the way you hold that of an errant child and get right in his face and say, “Listen!” And they kissed and kissed. It was great. His thigh was shoved so hard up into her crotch that it almost lifted her off the ground. He had a hard, muscled thigh. Good for him, Ruth thought. Nice thigh. She didn’t care if they never did anything but kiss.

Yes, she did. She did care.

She took his hands off her face, took his big wrists in her own hands, and pushed his hands down to her body. She placed his hands on her hips, and he pushed himself even closer against her and-he was deep in her mouth now with that gorgeous sweet tongue-he moved his hands up her body until his palms were covering her breasts. Ruth realized that if she didn’t get his mouth on her nipples soon she was going to die. That’s right, she thought, I will die. So she unbuttoned the front of her sundress and pulled away the fabric and pushed his head down, and-he was brilliant! He made a touching, quiet little moan. It was as if her whole breast was in his mouth. She could feel it all the way to her lungs. She wanted to growl. She wanted to arch back into it, but there was no room to arch, with that rock wall behind her.

“Is there someplace we can go?” she asked.

“Where?”

“Someplace softer than this rock?”

“OK,” he said, but it took them ages to separate from each other. It took them several tries, because she kept pulling him back, and he kept grinding his groin into hers. It went on and on. And when they finally did pull away from each other and headed up the trail, they raced. It was as if they were swimming under water, holding their breath and trying to make it to the surface. Forget about roots and rocks and Ruth’s slippery sandals; forget about his helpful hand under her elbow. There was no time for those delicacies, because they were in a hurry. Ruth didn’t know where they were off to, but she knew it was going to be a place where they could continue, and that knowledge set her pace and his. They had business to attend to. They practically ran for it. No talking.

They finally broke out of the woods onto a small beach. Ruth could see lights across the water and knew they were facing Fort Niles, which meant they were way on the other side of Courne Haven from the wedding party. Good. The farther away the better. There was a shed on a ridge above the level of sand, and it had no door, so they went right in there. Piles of old traps in the corner. An oar on the floor. A child’s school desk, with the tiny kid’s chair attached. A window covered with a wool blanket, which Owney Wishnell tore away without hesitation. He flipped the dust from the blanket, kicked away an old glass buoy from the middle of the floor, and spread out the blanket. Now moonlight came through the empty window.

As if this had been worked out well in advance, Ruth Thomas and Owney Wishnell stripped off their clothes. Ruth was faster, because all she had on was that sundress, which was already mostly unbuttoned. Off it came, then the blue cotton underpants and the sandals kicked away and-there!-she was done. But Owney took forever. Owney had to take off his sweatshirt and the flannel shirt that was under that (with buttons at the cuffs that had to be dealt with) and the undershirt beneath it all. He had to take off a belt, unlace his tall workboots, pull off his socks. He took off his jeans and-this was taking forever-finally his white underwear, and he was done.

They didn’t exactly tackle each other, but they collected each other very quickly, and then realized this would be a whole lot easier if they were on the ground, so that happened pretty quickly, too. Ruth was on her back, and Owney was on his knees. He pushed her knees back against her chest and opened her legs, hands on her shins. She thought about all the people who would be outraged if they knew of this-her mother, her father, Angus Addams (if he knew she was naked with a Wishnell!), Pastor Wishnell (terrifying even to think of his reaction), Cal Cooley (he would lose his mind), Vera Ellis, Lanford Ellis (he would kill her! Hell, he would have them both killed!)-and she smiled and reached her hand forward through her legs and took his cock and helped him put it inside her. Just like that.

It is extraordinary what people can do even if they’ve never done it before.

Ruth had thought a lot in the last few years about what it would be like to have sex. Of all the things she’d thought about sex, though, she’d never considered that it might be so easy and so immediately hot. She’d thought of it as something to be puzzled out with difficulty and a lot of talking. And she could never really picture sex, because she couldn’t picture who exactly she’d be puzzling it out with. She figured her partner would have to be much older, somebody who knew what he was doing and would be patient and instructive. This goes here; no, not like that; try again, try again. She’d thought that sex would be difficult at first, like learning to drive. She’d thought that sex was something that might grow on her slowly, after a great deal of grim practice, and that it would probably hurt a lot in the beginning.

Yes, it is truly extraordinary what people can do even if they’ve never done it before.

Ruth and Owney went at it like pros, right from the start. There, in that shack on the filthy woolen blanket, they were doing raunchy, completely satisfying things to each other. They were doing things it might take other partners months to figure out. She was on top of him; he was on top of her. There seemed no part of each other that they were not willing to put into the other’s mouth. She was up on his face; he was leaning up against the child’s desk while she crouched in front of him and sucked him as he clutched her hair. She was lying on her side, with her legs positioned like a runner in mid-stride while he fingered her. He was sliding his fingers into her slippy tight cracks and licking his fingers. Then he was sliding his fingers into her slippy tight cracks again and putting his fingers in her mouth, so that she could taste herself on his hands.

Incredibly, she was saying, “Yes, yes, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.”

He was flipping her over onto her stomach and lifting her hips into the air and, yes, yes, he was fucking her, fucking her, fucking her.

Ruth and Owney fell asleep, and when they woke, it was windy and cold. They hurried into their clothes and made the difficult hike back into town, through the woods and past the quarry. Ruth could see the quarry more clearly, now that the sky was starting to lighten. It was a huge hole, bigger than anything on Fort Niles. They must have made cathedrals out of that rock.

They came out of the woods in Owney’s neighbor’s yard, stepped over the low brick wall, and walked into Pastor Wishnell’s rose garden. There was Pastor Wishnell on the steps of the porch, waiting for them. In one hand, he held Ruth’s empty whiskey glass. In the other, Mrs. Pommeroy’s flashlight. When he saw them coming, he shone the flashlight on them, although he really didn’t need to. It was light enough outside now for him to see perfectly well who they were. No matter. He shone the flashlight on them.

Owney dropped Ruth’s hand. She immediately thrust it into the pocket of her yellow sundress and clasped the key, the key to the Ellis Granite Company Store, the key Mr. Lanford Ellis had handed her only hours before. She hadn’t thought about the key since taking off into the woods with Owney, but now it was extremely important that she locate it, that she confirm it had not been lost. Ruth held on to the key so tightly that it bit into her palm-as Pastor Wishnell came off the porch and walked toward them. She clung to the key. She could not have said why.