Summer Winds (14 page)

“I’ve lost eight lovers,” she said as I filled her glass and mine. I said nothing, and finally she burst forth with a giggle, as if she could no longer refrain. “Aren’t you curious?”

“Kansans think it’s impolite to pry.”

“Well, I’m prying into
your
love life.” The wine had obviously emboldened Cash, and her forwardness made me laugh. “But if it’s any guy within a twenty-mile radius, stop before we get to the bedroom part.”

“Eight.” I shifted the conversation back to her. “Does that mean you took a lover at age fifteen or do you merely fall in love annually?”

“I like the chase more than the capture. And the relationship inevitably gets serious and boring. Settle down, job security, social status, the right house, the right car, the right something that tomorrow is the wrong something and now you need something else. Buck thinks I talk crazy. He swears you’ll change me.”

“I don’t have any more answers than you do.”

“But you’ve changed me.” When I didn’t respond she continued.

“It’s just the way you are.” She drank the last of her wine and we sat in silence for a long while. I was comforted by her presence but nervous over the energy that seemed to hang in the wind. “Do you ever feel like if you could get that ‘one thing’ you’d feel great, then you get it and you feel great for one day, then you go right back to feeling the way you did before? It’s like a constant search for something and it drives you crazy.”

“The wind comes closest to filling that void for me. Blows through and rolls over my skin and thrills me into hanging on, whispering change is coming. Of course later I realize it’s just spring turning to summer, or summer to fall, but still the wind enticed me into staying alive.”

“I should make the wind my lover.”

“The land is mine.” I thought about those words after they’d left my lips and realized I’d put every ounce of strength, my heart and my soul into this windblown vista. After that, I had nothing left to give.

In the distance popping sounds, then whistles, then patterns of light exploded into the air and we sat very still watching the Fourth of July display from the porch. The celebration, much like the fireworks inside me, witnessed from afar, were muted, muffled, not nearly what I’d expected when I was young.

“There’s your fake fireworks,” I said, feeling melancholy for no reason.

“First time they’ve seemed pretty.”

“So tell me about the big eight, your lost loves. Or at least start with the last one.”

“Tall, handsome, wild, big drinker,” she said with a shrug.

“What attracted you to him?”

“Her.” Somewhere in the dark I heard a loud whistle and the sound of something breaking apart and blowing up. My brain exploded along with it, and I fought a physical urge to jerk back as the pronoun bounced around inside my head. The stillness palpitated and I fell momentarily off balance.

Of course “her.” I knew that, didn’t I?

“Buck says an attraction to a woman is a reversible condition.”

“Is it?” My voice quiet, I already knew the answer.
Nothing
about Cash Tate would be reversible. In fact, she was completely
irreversible. One way, no going back.

“You know it’s not.” Her piercing eyes upended my thoughts, seeming to convey she knew how I felt. I looked away.

I took a deep breath and then finished off the wine. “Maybe it’s not about whether you’re attracted to men or women but that you’re not able to be monogamous with either.” Not knowing for a certainty that monogamy was the issue, I was nonetheless willing to bet a thousand dollars that with those eyes, opportunity was always knocking at her bedroom door. “We’d better go inside before the mosquitoes eat us alive.”

I left the wineglasses by the sink and went immediately to my bedroom, telling Cash good night over my shoulder.

Closing the door quietly, I turned and sagged back against the cool wood. Now the truth was spoken and I could no longer pretend the exhilarating breeze between us didn’t exist. Maybe that’s why I felt drawn to her; she was accustomed to attracting women, comfortable in her own sensuality, and the attraction I felt was either in response to the energy she was emitting or it was, unfortunately, causing it.
Either way, it’s my responsibility to put a stop to it.

Launching myself away from the door, I paced, trying to decide if I should pick up the phone and dial Buck. He knew she was gay and he didn’t have the courtesy or good sense to tell me that.

I plopped down on the bed, grabbed the phone, then hung up.

I picked up a book by the bedside table and turned on the adjacent lamp, twisting the plastic knob with such strength that I heard it crack as the light came on. “Damn.” I bent under the shade to examine the tortured device, then slapped the book down and flipped the switch off again, unable to concentrate on reading.

From the kitchen came sounds of Cash washing something in the sink—the wineglasses perhaps. The floorboards creaked irregularly as if she was walking softly and trying not to make noise.

Then I heard her door latch snap shut and was aware of my own quick breath.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
This doesn’t
have to change our relationship. She felt comfortable enough to
share her past with me, and while it doesn’t exactly jibe with my
experiences, there’s nothing wrong with her being gay. In fact, if I
believe television, gay is in. Eighty is the new sixty, and sixty is the
new forty, and forty is the new twenty. Good to know I’m twenty
again because I’m acting like it.

I hopped up and went into the bathroom to shower, flipped on the light, and faced myself in the mirror. “You need to get serious about finding some nice man around here, like Donnetta said.” I spoke to my slightly flushed face and took a moment to examine my figure. I was well proportioned. Nothing had gone terribly south. I still had a waist and fairly firm breasts. I carried myself erect, if not stiff, and held my head a bit too high, but my eyes were soft and I had good skin. Mid-length ash blond hair was pulled back off my face, although most of the time it escaped. I could still be considered in the game, a thought that immediately amused me since I’d never considered how I looked at all, much less conducted a survey of my naked self.

This is all good because it means I’m physically waking up
after all these years. I want someone to love me
. Thinking those words made me smile, and standing naked in the bathroom, half drunk, grinning at myself in the mirror caused me to shake my head.

“You’re an idiot,” I said, not unkindly, to my image and stepped into the tub.

After a long, cool shower I rubbed dry with a thick towel, then dried my hair in no particular style before crawling into bed.

I had architected my life to avoid losing someone ever again and, to date, I had been successful. My ranch, my animals, my heart, all intact.

Now Cash comes along and confesses that she moves merrily from person to person as if they’re dispensable. What was she like with them…coffee, drinks, bed, good-bye? And when she made love to these women, was she on top, acting the dominant partner—what did they do? I closed my eyes and a mildly erotic sensation ran the length of my body.

Perhaps secretly I longed to get lost for a night in a place where no one knew me and I could experience any lover I chose without strings, without recrimination, without the fear of disease. Just pure pleasure from someone I might enjoy and then never see again. Is that what Cash had done? Among the eight, was there one she barely knew? And after, did she lie beside her looking like a freeze-frame from
Gentleman’s Quarterly
, an androgynous god of beauty smug that she had taken the woman or tricked her or been better than the woman had ever thought possible?

The house was quiet except for the faraway boom of fireworks exploding and perhaps scaring horses and cattle. My mind drifted to Cash and the long white shirt she apparently slept in, as she occasionally came out into the living room looking like a rumpled angel. Her luscious black curls would lie in stark contrast to the white pillowcase. Her strong hands would embrace her lover and hold her, precluding escape.

I caressed my body, pleased that I was still smooth and soft to the touch despite my muscled arms and more than occasionally rough hands, and I wondered about the curvature of Cash’s tall frame and how she might fit up against a body like mine and if she was as soft in all the hidden places. Then I sat up in bed suddenly and gave a muffled growl and punched my pillow with my fist.
I will find the
appropriate outlet for this.

As if in answer to my plan, a loud burst and then white light flared across my window, followed by a sizzling, searing sound that streaked through the sky, then a bright array of color whistled nearer and nearer. I lay back on the bed and let the flickering display flash over my body. This particular Fourth of July would not end in a simple midnight bang but culminate in a sky-shattering release of pyrotechnics.

Cash kept looking up at me over her morning eggs, making expectant eye contact. What she was expecting, I wasn’t sure. “What?” I finally asked impatiently. She’d reduced me to someone of her age acting as if we were in school and had a crush on one another, and I had happily gone along with it, sharing sexual forays like teenage girls at a dance. I was done with it.

“Just checking to see if you’re still okay with my staying here after I told you about myself.”

“Does being gay—”

“Lesbian.”

The word stopped me. I’d never particularly liked the harshness of it and thought anyone would go out of her way not to label herself with it.

“Does being lesbian in any way inhibit your ability to buck hay, drive a tractor, or feed the horses?”

“Some might say it enhances that ability.” She grinned.

“Well, then maybe we need to hire more lesbians in order to get Perry’s list of chores done by noon.” I handed her a torn piece of lined paper with Perry’s schoolboy scrawl on it:
Use the weed eater around all the pasture fence
posts, mow the east paddocks, and pick up all the loose
tree branches down by the grove.

It was three days’ worth of work but I acted as if it were nothing. I rinsed my plate, loaded it into the dishwasher, and went in to take a shower, leaving Cash alone. She needed to stay busy and keep her head on straight and not think I intended to be a nightly sounding board for her failed relationships or titillated by her sexual preference.

At noon the heat was oppressive and Perry was in the back pasture checking the cattle, primarily to see that they were all there. Cattle thieving had surfaced again in our county and we were watchful. It wasn’t that hard to back a truck up in the dark, cut the barbed wire, and herd a few cows up a loading ramp, so Perry checked the fences daily and made minor repairs where needed.

I drove over to the east paddocks where Cash was working. My arrival went unnoticed as the whirr of the weed eater overpowered the sound of the XUV. I sat silent and watched her work, slicing away foot-tall weeds around the fence posts that stretched ahead for acres. God, there must be five hundred posts, I thought.

She finally caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye and shut off the motor, slinging the device to the ground, the shoulder strap falling off her sweaty T-shirt. Bits of grass stuck to her wet body and festooned her hair like confetti. Her face was smudged with dirt but the smile greeted me.

She went around to the back of the truck and opened the spigot on the large water tank and washed up before taking the drink I handed her. I offered a tinfoil package as well.

“Can you eat? I brought you a sandwich.” Taking the workers something during the day to quench their thirst or feed them was a courtesy I tried to maintain for everyone, including Perry.

“I’m too hot. Think it would make me sick. I’ll stick to water. If you’ll put that in the fridge, I’ll eat it later. Maybe on the porch with a glass of wine?”

“I think by the time you finish you’ll be anxious for a hot shower and a good night’s sleep.”

“I’ve tended bar, worked at a hospital, taught aerobics classes, and I used to party all night, shower, and go straight to work. But I’ve never done anything that’s busted my ass like weed-whacking 101.” She looked surprisingly happy.

I didn’t want to hear about her former life that involved partying all night, and I thought her referencing it was bravado. “Well, I’m going to get out of your hair—”

“Lot of things in my hair…” She yanked at bits of weeds. “… but you’re not one of them. Can we talk this evening? I mean, you know, on the porch. Rock?” She suddenly giggled. “I’ve gone from asking women to rock my world to asking a woman if she’ll rock on the porch.”

I paused, not certain if she was making fun of me or the old ranch porch. She was clearly comparing her former life experience to her current one, and I was certain ranch life came up short. When the summer ended, we would be part of her repertoire of quaint memories that would make great storytelling in a gay bar: the old guy who spat into the wind and the widow woman who clung to her ranch.

She must have sensed my mood because she tried to amend her statement, but I drove away as if I had other work to do, which in fact I did.
She should walk up to the well if she’s thirsty. Let her talk
to the wind.

Around six o’clock I left a sandwich wrapped inside a checkered napkin, along with a pitcher of iced tea on the porch and a note pinned to the chair bottom with a rock. I’d composed another list of activities to keep her busy tomorrow and a postscript:
Into town
tonight. Rock on.
A little dig, perhaps, if I analyzed it too deeply.

I made sure I was out of the driveway before she came up from the pasture. I needed to begin thinking about my life and what it could become and who I should share it with. That’s what this was all about, this being drawn to conversations with Cash. I was lonely, and good for her that she’d dredged that emotion out of me. I
did
long for conversations in the evening on a porch swing. Maybe it was time.