Fool on the Hill (34 page)

SURPRISE PACKAGES

I.

Breakfast the next morning was almost exactly as it had been in Aurora’s dreams. They had fresh eggs specially purchased for the occasion, bacon, toast, butter, milk, and orange juice. Very traditional, but at the same time not, for once again Luther was up on the table partaking alongside them. The dog was the one element she had not dreamed in advance, but all else was the same: she and George smiling at each other across the bacon plate, her father laughing from the corner at some joke or other. Both men were
red-eyed from the previous night’s smoking activity, but Aurora tactfully did not mention this.

When the last bit of egg had vanished from their plates, Aurora stood up and led George out of the house in much the same way as Walter had last evening. George did not even ask where they were going, for he had decided overnight that anything this family did after a meal was bound to be enjoyable. While Walter saw to the dishes, Aurora took George on a long, meandering journey through the surrounding countryside, stopping here and there to show him the memory-places of her childhood. Once they knelt to drink with cupped palms from a partly frozen stream, and she asked if this wouldn’t be a good site for destiny to bring two lovers together. George said he thought it would, and Aurora grasped his hand and pulled him to his feet, making him run upstream with her to an open field where a farm had once been. The field was heavily overgrown now, the only outbuilding left standing being a dark and weather-stained barn. The barn looked less than inviting—it looked haunted, in fact, perhaps with the spirits of long-departed milk cows—but it was to this very place that Aurora gestured.

“Inside,” she told him.

“What’s in there?”

She grinned and kissed his mouth. “It’s a surprise.”

II.

Many miles east, a snowball fight had whipped up on The Ithaca Commons. Two teenagers had started it, but it had rapidly spread to their friends and then to a group of younger children from the local elementary school, let loose for the holidays. Preacher and Jinsei—out to take advantage of the sunny Christmas Eve day—got caught somewhere in the middle of the fray and, laughing, began to pelt each other with armloads of snow.

About this same time, a particularly juicy slushball winged out of control and knocked off the hat of a beefy lthacop who was just stepping out of McDonald’s. The cop grunted and fixed a baleful stare on the eight-year-old pipsqueak who had thrown the slusher.

“Hey,
cop!
”
piped the pipsqueak, who last evening had snuck into his parents’ bedroom to watch
Blackboard Jungle
on late-night TV. “What’s ya name, cop?”

“Doubleday,” the cop roared. “Sam Doubleday.”

“
Ooooooh!
”
replied the pipsqueak, matching bellow for bellow. “Ooooooh,
Double
-day!” And he winged another slushball, hitting dead center on the chest this time.

Doubleday, murder in his eye, unhooked his nightstick from his belt and did a lumbering buffalo’s charge at the pipsqueak. The pipsqueak, immature but not stupid, made an immediate run for it. What followed was an uneven chase, for Doubleday, with his considerable bulk, was restricted to the paths an early plow had cleared on The Commons, while his small tormentor scrambled easily over the highest snowbanks.

It was into one of these snowbanks that Preacher and Jinsei had collapsed in a tight embrace. Both of them would have been content to remain locked together until the spring thaw, but the passing of the pipsqueak (the bellowing Doubleday remarkably close on his heels) disturbed their intimacy. Preacher raised his head to glance around at the commotion, receiving a severe shock from what turned out to be an optical illusion. His eyes at a low angle, he spied a nearby pair of black boots, black pants, the hem of a black trenchcoat . . .

“Rag!” he blurted out, an instant before realizing that the head sticking up above the collar of the trenchcoat was that of a jaundiced woman with coke-spoon earrings. The woman made no attempt at recognition but walked onward in search of leather goods, leaving the two lovers to their business in the snow. Jinsei reached up to the touch Preacher’s face; he shied back, the mood ruined.

He had long since given up feeling guilty, of course; guilt is a difficult emotion to maintain when you know you have done nothing wrong. But the loss of a best friend—you can agonize over that forever, even if, again, you rest assured of your innocence. Ragnarok had done a heroic job of avoidance over
the last two months, yet while Preacher had not seen him personally he kept encountering reminders of him, which were no less upsetting.

“Let’s walk,” Jinsei said, forcing him to stand. Down at one end of The Commons, Doubleday had successfully chased the pipsqueak up a traffic signal pole and was shouting the most dire threats at him; they turned and headed the other way. Speaking in soft tones, Jinsei tried to lull Preacher back to pleasanter thoughts, only to be thwarted by the appearance of another figure garbed in black. This fellow, a mime, wore a bulky robe rather than a trenchcoat, but his face was painted an obscene pale white and he stood within an inch of Ragnarok’s height.

The mime was handing out flyers; Jinsei and Preacher moved to avoid him but he sidestepped even as they did, thrusting a paper in Preacher’s hand and then whirling away with a wink.

“What does it say?” Jinsei asked him. Preacher shrugged and handed her the flyer, which read:

THE NEWLY FORMED BARDIC TROUPE OF ITHACA

gives advance announcement

of a wondrous Shakespearean event Coming in March

ROMEO AND JULIET

“A tale of star-cross’d lovers . . .”

and

JULIUS CAESAR

watch for further details

in the coming weeks

Jinsei looked at Preacher and smiled.

“‘Star-cross’d lovers,’” she said, squeezing his hand. “I like the sound of that, don’t you?”

III.

The hayloft was high above the barn floor, the ladder leading to it rickety enough that you were quite content just to make it safely to the top, though there was precious little to see. The last bales of hay had long since been removed, and all that remained on the hard wooden platform were some rusting farm implements, a scattering of chaff, and a pair of plaid quilts that were a little moldy but good for sitting on. It was warm in the loft, surprisingly so; a draft whined somewhere off in the rafters but did not disturb them.

“So what do we do?” George asked when they had got themselves settled. “Enjoy the view?”

“The view’s exciting,” Aurora said seriously, glancing down at the distant barn floor, “but I had something else in mind.”

She lifted a loose plank near the corner of the platform, and in what seemed to George an act of pure magic, produced a bottle of red wine and two crystal goblets from the space beneath.

“How did that get up here?” he gasped. “What did you do, sneak out in the middle of the night?”

“No, silly,” Aurora laughed, wiping the goblets with the sleeve of her coat. “These have been here since I was twelve.”

“Since you were twelve?”

“Yep. This was my secret hideout when I was little. All of the other kids were afraid of it because there were supposed to be monsters inside, but I had a great time playing here. This loft makes a great pretend balcony for a Princess to address her loyal subjects.”

George nodded, smiling. “But what about the wine and the cups? Where’d you get them in the first place?”

“A man gave them to me.”

“What man?”

Aurora shrugged. “I don’t know. A stranger who was standing outside in the field one day. Southern European looking, Spanish or maybe Greek. Friendly eyes. Maybe I should have been afraid of him but I wasn’t. He said he had a present for me, something I should save until the time was right.” She handed George the wine, and a silver corkscrew. “Here, you do the honors.”

George studied the bottle in his hand.

“Interesting label,” he said. “‘
Leidenschaft von Heiliger
. . . ‘”

“‘Doctor Faustus Vineyards,’” Aurora finished for him. “‘Vintage 1749.’”

“Sounds like a joke,” George decided. “And there’s no way it could be that old. I’ll bet it’s just grape juice laced with codeine—that stranger was probably a drug pusher out to get you hooked.”

“I took codeine once,” she said. “For an car infection. It’s not all that terrible.”

“Might be poisoned, too.”

She shook her head. “It’s not poisoned.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I know it’s time to open it. I just do.”

Nodding, George argued no further but broke the wax seal on the bottle and inserted the corkscrew. The cork came out with a pleasant ease; the wine murmured comfortably as he poured it.

“Tell me about the monsters,” George said, when they had toasted each other.

“Hmm?”

“The monsters that were supposed to be inside the barn when you were little.”

“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “Plain old ghosts, I suppose . . . whose I don’t even know. I guess I couldn’t bring myself to be scared over what was dead and buried. It was nice, really, having a private place where nobody else would bother me.”

“Nice,” George agreed, his tongue already heavy though his goblet was not yet half empty. Heady stuff.

“You know I’m still a virgin,” Aurora said next, and the wine must have affected him, for the sudden change of topic did not, as it normally would have, cause him to choke, drop his cup, or otherwise lose control of his bodily functions.

“Ever read Fariña?”

“Fariña?”

“Richard Fariña. Went to Cornell in the late Fifties and raised some hell with this dude Kirkpatrick Sale from the
Sun;
the two of them would have made prime Bohemians. After graduation Fariña married Joan Baez’s sister and wrote this wild novel about college and hell-raising in general. Motorcycle accident killed him two days after the book was published.”

“Perfect timing.”

“Really. I should be so lucky. Anyway, the novel’s protagonist is a very Fariña-type guy named Gnossos Popoudopolos, and Gnossos has this theory about virginity being spiritual . . . .”

“Is this like your theory about the nobility of gay people?”

“Hey, Fariña knew that of which he spoke. The idea, see, is that you can screw every man and woman in the jolly United States of America and still be a virgin. The membrane only breaks when you make love.”

“But you’ve made love, haven’t you?” Aurora asked. “With Calliope?”

“That’s true.”

“And I’ve never even screwed anybody.”

“That’s true.”

“So how is Fariña’s theory possibly relevant to our situation?”

“Well, it isn’t,” George said. swallowing a long draught of
Leidenschaft von Heiliger.
“But it’s bad luck to pass up any chance at a literary reference. Beside, it’s a great damn book.”

“Sure it is,” said Aurora. “Finish that drink and teach me how to seduce you.”

IV.

“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to go through the graveyard.” It had been Jinsei’s idea to climb The Hill in a show of pure defiance against the snow, but
now, at the lower entrance to The Boneyard, she balked. “Look, the plow hasn’t even been through there,” she pointed out. “And I’ll bet the drifts are pretty deep “

“At least we won’t have to dodge cars,” Preacher replied. They had been walking in the road, for the plow that had cleared University Avenue had inadvertently erected a scale rendition of the Alps above the only sidewalk.

“We’ll get our boots wet,” Jinsei countered.

“No matter. Look, Jin, that snow’s virgin. Don’t you want to be the first to walk on it?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You scared of what’s buried under?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little. Aren’t you?”

“No point to it. Dead body’s like a waxwork, lady. Might as well get uptight over a scarecrow or a dresser’s dummy.”

This did not seem to comfort her a great deal; smiling gently, Preacher clasped her hand and took a step toward the cemetery gates.

“Come on, Jin,” he said. “Let me tell you another secret: as long as you walk in under your own steam there’s nothing to fear. When they hire six guys to
carry
you in, that’s the time to wig out.”

He tugged lightly on her arm and she relented, following him through the gates. Just beyond, a group of snowbound mausoleums jutted out of the side of a slope, like a great townhouse for the dead. Jinsei spied this with more than a little apprehension, but of course it was not the dead she ought to have been afraid of. Not at all.

Kicking up small clouds of snow, they turned left when they could, and headed unwittingly toward the north end of The ‘Yard.

V.

George undid the last button on Aurora’s blouse and slipped it back, revealing the warm pale shoulders beneath. He thought to himself that that was an odd word,
pale—
a
word that could be positive or negative depending on the context, one that could describe everything from death to the forehead of a medieval princess.

Ah, literary to the last. He bent his head and began kissing her breasts. Time went away for a while, like a tactful fade in a romance novel; when it came back they were both naked, lay pressed together on the quilts. They had kissed and touched and explored one another and now the Moment was upon them.

“This might hurt some.” George warned her. “Since you've never done it before.”

Beneath him, Aurora smiled. “Did you read that in some book, too?”

“Read it in a lot of books. Had a few friends describe the pain to me, too. In detail.”

“Same here.” Her lips parted to kiss his shoulder. “But right now,” she said, “right now I feel very . . . relaxed. I don’t know if I could hurt, feeling like this. Maybe that’s what the wine was for.”

“Maybe,” George agreed. There was nothing more to say; he went into her with a kind and dreamy gentleness. There was no pain.