Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (21 page)

We’ve discussed it over the years.

We’ve come to the conclusion that it was as though we lived in two worlds at once back then. There was the world of June and Henry along with everybody and everything else. Then there was the world of June and Henry. The first world was by turns fun and new and confusing and it needed to be learned. The second was known from the start.

Before my father died our bodies belonged to the second world. Known and completely accepted. But each of us had seen something else that afternoon beyond the sudden splash of blood and death that lingered. Something
linked
to the dying but not directly of it.

Because when my father was shot he was still inside her.

We saw that clearly as he turned at the noise behind him from where we stood to one side in the doorway. The thick pole of his cock half in and half out of her and how that was possible we had no idea but when he fell our attention was still there, on his cock and not on the gore spewed across the wall and ceiling, on his swollen glistening flesh dwindling and falling to his thigh like a flower parched and dying.

Only then did we even seem to
hear
Hanna screaming beside us or truly see the ruin wreaked upon the bodies or
become aware of the big man shouldering Pete aside and heading for the front door.

It was only when the flower died.

And after that, alone in the woods down by the lake or at home in the bath or the bedroom, we were pretty curious indeed.

A few times Hanna caught us. And that was a problem bigger than it might have been because once the fact that my father had gone to his Maker with his pants down got to be common knowledge around town my mother developed a sudden Baptist streak which went not only to churchgoing but to pamphleteering and preaching to anybody who’d bother to listen. It also went to severe punishments for little boys and little girls who
said
they were just playing doctor while the Lord knew and
she
knew that what they were really doing was carnal and sinful and damned.

We were locked in closets—separate ones—for hours at a time. We were spanked, pinched and knuckle-jabbed where it wouldn’t show, denied dinner or breakfast or lunch or sometimes all three of them together. There was a braided knotted rope left hanging on the door to the attic at all times to remind us of those other times when she’d used it. We were raved at, sermonized, forced to pray. We
would
be taught a lesson.

We never did learn.

We wanted to see the flower rise. The only problem was the
when
and
how
. We knew it would eventually.

We wanted to see just what would go inside her and how far.

I remember her first orgasm as well as I do my own. I think I might’ve even shared it in a way. It was the summer of 1967 and we were eleven. The Summer of Flowers was what the hippies were calling it. The day was sunny and we were down by the lake, a fairly secluded spot you could only reach by boat since the woods were still thick for acres behind it. The owner believed in rabbit and deer hunting,
not real estate and was considered a goddamn lunatic by most everyone else in town as a result.

We’d go skinny-dipping. Almost always we were the only ones around.

That day as we lay naked in the sun on an old beat-up checkered quilt I had two fingers inside her and she was wet and slippery of her own accord which was new over the past year and fascinating to us and she showed me how to guide the fingers on the outside too, in and out and up with what must for her have been a final understanding, a final access to expertise in her own nature. When she began to shake I withdrew, frightened that I was hurting her but she said
no no no
and pressed my fingers back to her and shut her eyes and worked the fingers as though they were her own.

She arched her back and moaned and I could feel her shudder all the way up my arm and began to shake myself as though some sudden breath of December had moved across the lake.

She fell back laughing, trying to catch her breath and then I was laughing too.

“My god,” she said. “What
was
that? I want to
die
like that, Hank! God I do. And Mama thinks there’s something
wrong
with this? Hanna’s crazy!”

We laughed some more and she reached up to tickle me, she was apt to do that all of a sudden and I squirmed over on top of her and tickled her back and we rolled around that way off the quilt and on again. We lay down exhausted.

“Put your fingers back in me,” she said. “Leave your hand there. I want us to fall asleep that way. Okay?”

“Okay.”

It was nearly noon and the blue sky unbroken by any cloud anywhere and we slept in no time at all.

We woke to somebody saying
shit
, look
at that
! and laughing and somebody else saying
Jesus, that’s Hank and June
! and we saw Danny Beach and Phil Auton heading
toward shore in Danny’s old rowboat, two kids in our class at school for godsakes, both of them laughing and yelling our names now that we were awake and sitting up staring at them, June with one hand between her legs to that spot mine had just deserted and the forearm of her other arm across the wide pale nipples and her breasts only just beginning to show.

Perverts! Fuckin’ queers
! they drifted toward us shouting, the last of which of course made no sense at all. I scrambled into my jeans and tossed June hers along with her tee shirt and she stood with her back to them while they yelled
nice ass, Juney! turn around, babe
! and pulled them on. We slipped on our U.S. Keds and I grabbed my shirt and the blanket and we ran off into the woods. It was the only thing we could think to do. Just to get away from them there.

We were shaken. Now everybody’d know. We walked along the deer-paths, June in the lead, going nowhere in particular, just moving deeper into the woods. After a while she turned.

“D’you think they’d sink the rowboat on us?”

“Wouldn’t dare,” I said.

“Do you think they saw where your hand was?”

“I dunno.”

But I did know. I’d seen Danny Beach staring directly at it. Staring between her wide-open legs. And it was as though she read my thoughts again, was completing yet another of my sentences.

“But you’re pretty sure they did, huh.”

“Yeah. I guess. Pretty sure.”

“Okay. Then we’re screwed,” she said.

We walked a while in silence.

“I don’t care,” she said finally. “Let them tell their parents. Let them tell the whole goddamn school, the whole goddamn town. What we did was nice. And we’re doing it again, aren’t we.”

She looked back at me for an answer and I had to laugh and shake my head, it was so much June.

“Sure we are,” I said.

My own first orgasm was inside her. The following summer.

We were twelve.

Hanna was in church where lately we had refused to go and we were big enough by then and Hanna sufficiently small beside us so that rage hell and damnation though she might she had no choice but to accept our decision. Besides, she now knew what the whole town knew. I suspect she was secretly glad we stayed away.

We were on my bed. We had made the flower grow.

I slipped into her as easily as a finger into a jar of jam and just as sweetly and began to spasm within only a few thrusts, June bucking up to meet me. It seemed I’d never stop coming—for a terrifying moment I thought I was hemorrhaging, pumping out blood inside her—these rythmic pulses so blinding and electric and soon she was rising from a pool of me.

We lay side by side in each other’s arms, not caring a damn about the glistening sheets beside us. Each of us smiling, the curtain behind us fluttering in the cut-grass-smelling summer breeze.

“If Willie’d been that fast,” she whispered, “
he might be alive today
.”

“You
bitch
!” I grabbed her and started to tickle. “You just goddamn
wait
’till next time!”

Then we both looked at one another and howled “WHEN!”

In September of our junior year in high school they tried to get her.

I was working the counter nights at Silverman’s Drugstore and Soda Shop and it was nearly closing time and June always came by to walk me home. Her habit was to stop in at 9:45, just enough time to have a chocolate egg cream with me before I locked up and not enough time so that it was likely she’d run into classmates.

We had friends among them but not many. Other outcasts like us. We used to call them the Halt, the Lame and the Blind. Actually they were more like the Exceptionally Gifted or Bright, the Ill-Favored and the Meek. But outcasts all the same. June and I were exceptions, being none of these exactly—I having grown up fairly good looking in a dark-eyed, hooded way and June having captured full womanly beauty at the ripe old age of seventeen. We were smart enough but not brilliant. And neither of us was meek.

On this cool September evening she was late. Only five minutes late but that was enough to make me close down early at some vague undeterminate urging and as I turned off the lights and locked the doors my pulse was racing. I could hardly breathe. Our house was just five blocks away, two down Main and three along West Cedar which was one of the perks of working at Silverman’s in the first place. You would walk there. But this night I took it at a run and I found them in a little stretch of wooded area a block short of our house. I saw them only as moving shapes in the moonlight through the scrub and birch and bramble but I saw them from the street as though I knew exactly where they’d be.

Danny Beach was one of them and the other three were seniors and we knew them well. She’d not gone easy. When I got close enough I saw that one of the seniors had a long thin bleeding gash along his cheekbone and the other was bleeding from the head from what must have been a rock and that was the one who had his pants down kneeling in front of her while Danny held her arms and the other two her legs. So it was that one I went for, the one with the head-wound, kneeling.

I don’t know where the rotten log came from but it was big enough in my hands and I took him exactly where the rock-wound glistened in the moonlight, rotten bark flying and when he went down Danny got scared and let go of her arms which was a mistake so that by the time I cracked the ribs of the biggest of them, the one whose face she’d
scratched, the other was off and running and June had Danny in a headlock and was pummelling his face in fury. I let her hit him a while and then said
hey, sis, don’t kill him for godsakes
, though it was certainly possible
I’d
concussed the other guy into oblivion. He sure didn’t move.

But my voice seemed to calm her somehow. She let Danny off with a bloody nose and lip and he and the guy with the cracked ribs hobbled off through the woods yelling that that they were going to fuck us up,
you hear that? you fucking perverts are gonna get yours
! but by then the guy on the ground was stirring so just we picked June’s panties and purse up off the wet leaves and left him there and walked away. The panties were torn. She stuffed them in her purse.

“They hurt you?”

“Bruises. Bastards.”

“You want to tell somebody about this? The police?”

“Jesus, no. That’s all we need. I don’t think they’ll try it again, do you?”

“No. I doubt it”

“Then let’s just leave it. Want to have that egg cream now?”

“Good idea.”

The night the dead began to rise we’d been living in New York City for eighteen years. Neither of us was particularly well-equipped to deal with Manhattan at first, armed with nothing more than B.A.s in English against an already Masters-in-Finance world. I worked as a reader and then as an agent in a literary agency while June tried her hand at acting under her new name, Celia Night. Over the years she’d done a few print ads, a non-union commercial, a lot of off-off-Broadway, a few seasons of summer stock and a walk-on in
One Life to Live
. Like most actors in New York she got by waiting tables. She kept her eyes open though and she wasn’t stupid. When I went out on my own as an agent and started to make some good money we went in
with a friend and bought a restaurant, stole an excellent texmex chef from a rival and kept the price down on the tequila. We did fine.

We were happy. We lived together as husband and wife. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Significant Others. Whatever you wanted to call it.

It was Manhattan. There was nobody to question us. Nobody to care.

The highrise on West 68th was built like a bunker against fires, all concrete walls and steel doors. So we were in no real danger at all that night. We just sat in the condo bedroom watching the news coverage on CNN, phoning friends when it was possible to get through to them and twice listening at the door to sounds of mayhem in the hall or else gazing out our sixth-floor window to the dead wandering through the eerie empty streets or being shot down by police. Tiny cracklings far below.

The homeless got the worst of it that night and over the days that followed. Dead or alive they were easy targets, half of them with senses already dulled by drugs or booze or mania and their population plummeted. But Manhattan never shut down the way more rural areas had done. Closed off to bridge-and-tunnel traffic the City’s dead proved almost manageable. For how long that would continue we didn’t know. But by the time we ran out of food a week later our walk across the street to the Food Emporium was no more eventful than usual, though the shelves looked skeletal. Deliveries were going to be a problem.