We Were Beautiful Once (12 page)

“What a rush, man, dig it, what a rush,” Trent had howled.

For Trent the rush was any stunt that produced its own aphrodisiac, adrenaline high, like mainlined heroin to a junkie.  Sex, too, brought on the rush.  He could feel it coming long before he had his way: sweat flowed, face flushed, a wild urge reached deep, deep into his loins, his stomach twitched, twitted and wriggled—insufferably euphoric, bursting, releasing.  He turned toward Anna, lifted her dress to the bottom of her panties.  She closed her eyes.  He took a long hard look at her white legs.  She put her thighs together, he pulled her panties down her legs to the floorboard, and she opened her eyes to see his reaction.  He unzipped his pants and put her hand on his boner.  She pulled it from the top of his shorts.  He lifted his leg over her hips and momentarily suspended any analytical thoughts until he penetrated, and in a few short minutes released an uncontrolled passion and recovered in her tight grasp.

The dew dissipated.  Everything stilled.  Trent saw her staring at the nearly de-flowered dogwoods at the far edge of the pond.  He imagined that she wanted him to tell her he loved her, or that he would miss her, or that he could not wait until he got home again.

“I feel great!” he whooped. “Can't wait to go.”

Anna spun her head in Trent's direction and glared.

“Thanks a lot!” she said.

Trent pulled a pack of Lucky's from his shirt pocket, tapped the open end and pulled out a butt.  He lit up and took a long, deep drag before blowing out a puff of gray smoke.  “I didn't mean it to sound that way.  I'll miss you, Anna, but I gotta go.  Got to find what's outside this burg.”

He pretended he did not notice her eyes welling.  She turned and sat still, lips pursed.  She had dated Trent on and off since high school.  What he liked about her, besides the sex, was that she never pushed him for a commitment.

 Pushing her hem below her knees, she started to say, “Well, I feel, I don't know.  I feel sad, and maybe...  ”  She stopped short.

What he did not like about her was that she always searched for meaning in things.  He puffed on his cigarette.  Pulling down the mirror visor, she dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

“We're so lucky to have the park to ourselves,” she remarked, yet sounded somber.

Trent pulled her in close.  A cat stalked a large raven across the pond.  A slight breeze kicked up and blew leaves near the cat, which forgot the raven and began to chase the leaves.

“Will you at least write me?” she asked, looking for some scrap of sentiment.

“Sure,” he agreed. To Anna, it sounded too easy.

“Like waiting for fall to end it all,” she said.

“What's that?”

“Oh, talking to myself.  Do you think you'll forget me?”

“How could I forget you?  No, I won't forget you,” he answered, sounding like he was trying out for a school play.

***

Jack had been the last guest to leave the Hamiltons' the night of the farewell party.  He grabbed Tracy's hand and led her to the stables where he'd parked the Ford.  They leaned against the car beneath a moon held in place by a cotton-like ring that forecast rain and stared across the graveled driveway into a field bordered by an ancient stone wall.  Jack caressed her, moving his hand toward her breast, until she casually reached up to hold his hand.  “Jack, remember the first time?”  

August '47.  Two weeks before Tracy and Jack would return to school, the couple had left their friends at the pool, wandered toward the stables and beyond, through the tall grass—a half-mile to the lake.  They followed a deer path filled with branches and twigs, and every so often Jack had to clear the way to reach the secluded overlook of the lake.

Leaning against a large boulder she'd gazed upon the water with her legs stretched out, unusually quiet.

“You look a little down, what's up?” Jack had asked.

“Well it's Daddy; he's pestering me.”

“About what?”

“It never ends, wanted me down at the bank.  All summer he wanted me to learn the ropes, he says.  Wanting me to meet Harvey Baxter, some guy working there for the summer.”

“Make him happy,” Jack said, annoyed.

“I'm just not going.  Too much to do with what's left of summer.”

Jack noticed Tracy pouting.  “You make me laugh.”

“You never take me serious.”

She brought her legs in close. Jack straddled her thighs.  “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What're you talking about?”

Her trademark coquette smile crossed her face, “One of these days I'll show you.”

“I'll bet you could
.
How's about now?...   Ouch! The goddamn mosquitoes, look at you, ain't got much cover.”

Her eyelids narrowed, her lips puckered. “Jack,
I said
, I can show you. Wanna watch them take a bloody bite?”

Jack kissed her.  He tasted her warm mouth.  He pressed against her as he had done many times, but this time she slid down, putting her head against his crotch.  He moved on top of her.  She spread her legs around his hips and started to rotate.  Jack felt the pliant crease between her legs, something she had never let him feel before.

“Wait, Jack.  Get off me.”

Jack moved aside.  He slapped a mosquito that had drawn blood from his leg, but was instantly distracted when Tracy pulled off the bottom half of her bathing suit.  She laid back in a clump of ferns and closed her eyes.  “What do you think?”

He put his hand on her belly and slowly moved it to her honey-colored, wiry crease.  He slipped off his suit.

“Jack, you have anything to put on?”

“Like where would I carry it?”

“Oh, Jack, never mind, hurry, hurry.”

Jack pressed on top of her.  This time pliant became penetrable.

“Oh Tracy...  squeeze your legs tight 'round my waist.”

He pushed her top above her breasts, put his full lips on her tan nipple, and then moved his lips up her neck, past her chin, burying his tongue deep into her opened mouth. “Oh, Jack!” Jack could not control the jolt of lightening that jerked his body. When they finished, they sat against the rock, letting the mosquitoes feast on their bare skin.   

Jack broke the silence. “What would Daddy say now?”

Tracy giggled. “Jack, if he didn't want me dating you before, he'd be absolutely bullshit now...  wouldn't he?”

***

On the night before he went into the Army, Jack wasn't interested in sex.  He wanted to tell Tracy something that she would remember, but his lips quivered, and she never heard what he had in his heart: that he loved her, and that she should wait until he returned, when they could get engaged.  She hugged him firmly and kissed him, her lips tightly sealed.  With her head on his chest she whispered, “Jack, take care of yourself.”  He started the car and drove toward the main entrance, while watching Tracy through the rearview mirror.  When she reached the front door, she walked in and never looked back.  

Jack took a last ride around Bridgeport, surveying the avenues, factories and old neighborhoods that, like a vault, held all the better emotions he had ever acquired.  Driving past the plant where his father still made lipstick cases, he wondered if he was working the night shift, wondered if he would see him at the station.  A vacant lot to the south of the plant marked the spot of the first town post office—torn down after World War I—the lot ensuring that every new generation of kids had a place to play ball.  Next to the lot was a dock where a half-dozen rowboats listed in the river, a wispy mist making them appear like they floated above the water.  Across the street, a lamp illuminated the clapboard side of a little theater and the mossy green of lichen mold that attached itself to the buildings facing the river.  In this part of town, there were no grassy lawns or flower beds.  The factories and their fulmination had long reduced the trees to wearing nothing more than ragged sweaters of leaves.

Except for the out-of-town students he had met in college, Jack only knew people from Bridgeport, and, oh yes, Fairview, where in summers he mingled with the rich kids, made love to Tracy and flirted with skinny debutantes in blue dresses.  He tried hard to be one of the tall, white skinned beaus with black and white saddle shoes, but never felt he had succeeded. In the morning he hoped to forget much of this for a while and experience the great country that lay beyond the rivers and fields that separated the vigorous from the spent.  But in his heart he knew he could not let most of it go: the feeling that he had yet to overcome his childhood pain, the feeling he would always be connected to Bridgeport, as rundown as it was, the feeling that his mother and sister would always be there if he needed them.  He could not think of a more important virtue than loyalty to the town he grew up in, his friends and those he loved.  These were the sentiments that held him together.  Under the fullness of the May moon, Jack headed home, his childhood landmarks committed to memory one last time so that someday when he returned, unlike Odysseus, he might recognize that from whence he came—a place where everything was familiar, quiet and old.

 

 

THE ARMY HAS A PATENTED RECIPE to transform a green lieutenant into a fighting specialist in the space of five weeks.  Take any aggressive, obedient, red-blooded American ROTC college grad, presumably between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, short, tall, skinny, chubby, fit, unfit, cocky, unsure, timid, rich or poor, smart or dumb, and in thirty-five days they can be made to dress, act and think like the previous class of second lieutenants, and the class before that, and the class before that.  The process reforms young men under the repetitive jack-hammering of induction, examination, regimentation, humiliation, subjugation and brutalization, into one solid whole.

In spite of the drill instructors who kicked his ass, hollered obscenities, forced him beyond physical, emotional and mental tolerance, Jack loved it.  Most guys did not.  More than one cried to sleep.  Only two out of three survived this trial by ordeal.  The unfit third were either too weak or too smart or too screwed up. Jack and Trent, reservists, had finished boot camp before graduating, but needed another round of Army orientation—a post graduate officer's leadership course of sorts—before being assigned to a unit for five months and then return home as weekend warriors to serve out their enlistment.

None of the soldiers had passes to leave post, but since Caesar's time, soldiers have tested the system in search of the nearest tavern and the eternal hope that they might “get lucky.”  One Friday night, Trent and two Texans that Jack did not have much truck with were being picked up by Dawn, a not so attractive thirty-year-old, who considered it her patriotic duty to bus GIs to the nearest bar on her nights off from Ho Jo's.  At the last minute, the Texas boys decided to drink 3.2 beer on the post, so Trent invited Jack to the off post outing.  Trent's buddy Wally Potter was pulling charge-of-quarters duty and would cover if bed checks were ordered.

At nine, the boys snuck out the barrack's backdoor and walked to Dawn's orange '39 Plymouth sedan.  Her brown hair hung loose below shapely shoulders, large shadowy eyes, and a round face plastered in pancake makeup that glossed over a few noticeable pockmarks.  Dawn was unperturbed by the change, saying whimsically, “Why not? Y'all wear the same uniform.”

They drove off past the guard house and the MPs.  Five miles from post they stopped at Robbie's, a cement-block beer joint with red, blinking lights and a sign that read
Country Music Every Fri. and Sat
.  Blue-dungareed townspeople and GIs in brown uniforms crowded a bar littered with beer bottles and empty shot glasses.  Jack got his first full view of Dawn when she sidled up to Trent.  Her head came to his shoulders—she was large boned, probably of Russian stock.  Trent had his body bumped up against Dawn's, claiming her.  She appeared surrendered.

Jack fidgeted with an assortment of nickels and dimes on the bar listening to the bartender tell a story about the time he and his high school buddies celebrated his WWII homecoming and drank a quart-sized flask of white lightning.  After two beers and bored, Jack dropped a nickel in the Red Rocket pinball machine—setting in motion chrome balls, bells, and flashing wonder women dressed in patriotic themes.  A heavy-set girl with stringy blonde hair and a low cut pink blouse walked over and leaned on the glass platen, while Jack jostled the machine.  He took his eye off the ball to gawk at her generous cleavage, and tilted out.  Annoyed, he excused himself to use his nickels in the jukebox.

Trent and Dawn danced every number and by eleven o'clock, her pink lipstick dappled the front of his khaki shirt.  At the bar, the cleavage-girl moved close to Jack.  She snapped her fingers while slowly rotating her hips to the music.  She lit a Camel, and Jack breathed in the smoke.  He studied her huge hungry eyes in the mirror.  She brushed against his arm.  He looked at the Schlitz clock over the bar.

“Yo, Trent, look at the time.”

“Yeah, time to head back.”

The cleavage girl held the last inch of her cig between her finger and thumb, inhaled deep and tried to make eye contact via the mirror.  Jack turned away.

Outside, a light rain shined the asphalt.  Depositing
Dawn in the front, Trent swung himself behind the wheel of the Plymouth.  Jack fell asleep still upright in the back seat. Trent hit the wipers while, on the radio, Patti Page crooned
“With My Eyes Wide Open, I'm Dreaming.”
 Kicking off her red shoes, Dawn curled her legs under her, the hem of her powder red skirt stretching over her chunky thighs.  Feeling tipsy, Dawn shut her eyes.  Trent moved his hand from the rim of the steering wheel to finger her hem.  He passed by the Burma Shave signs, all ten of them, but his hand was too occupied to stroke his face for signs of a five o'clock shadow.  He slid her hem up her thigh, feeling the silky nylon of stockings until he felt the garter's raised clasp.  His heart pounded.  She sat motionless.  His hand glided from the top of the nylon up her smooth porcelain skin until he felt the stiff garter belt.  His hand slipped between her fleshy, white thighs.  She remained motionless.  His boner pushed on his zipper.  His hand crawled to her crotch.  She loosened her upper leg, giving permission, and he pressed his middle finger to the slit beneath her panties.  He checked the road.  Rain pelted the windshield, and the worn wipers swished, blurring the headlights of oncoming traffic.  Encouraged by her willingness, Trent lifted her skirt to see the soft bulge at the apex of her thighs.