He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.
“Fuck you,” Clyde said.
Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw her arms around him. “You’re amazing,” she said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“God, I admire you. Do you know that? Do you know how much I admire you?”
She held him tight, and there it was: the joy. After all the dark years, his joy was shining forth again.
Returning to the camp, they collected the two guitars and laid them on the bed of Ruth’s truck. The sun was now white, the glare intense on the road down the back side of the ridge. （To Russ, when he’d stayed with Keith, it had been the “front” side.） Dangling from the rearview mirror was a small plastic Snoopy, not necessarily an indication that Ruth liked Peanuts. All sorts of random trinkets turned up on the reservation.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” Frances said.
“Don’t be. It was brave of you to be here at all.”
“It’s like the feeling comes over me and I can’t control it. I wonder if it has to do with Bobby—the way he died. I don’t remember always being so afraid.”
“The important thing is that you did it. You were afraid, but you did it.”
“Can I say something else?”
Russ nodded, hoping for a stroke in return.
“I desperately need to pee.”
The canyon was devoid of shrubs to pee behind, but the old farmstead was close ahead. Russ increased his speed, Frances squirming at every bump. When he pulled into Keith’s old yard, she had the door open before he stopped. She hobbled behind the shell of the little house, and he took his own leak behind a cottonwood. Watching the wood go dark with his urine, he thought of the bare ground going dark with hers, her pants around her ankles. In the sun and the thin air, he felt dizzy.
Returning to the truck, he saw her inside the roofless house and joined her there. The bedroom wall was still extant, but the door and its frame were gone, the floor covered with drifted sand. Nearly thirty years had passed since he’d lain in the bedroom and pictured the Navajo dancer. Even now, when he was enlightened enough to deplore a white man’s lust for a Native American fifteen-year-old, the thought excited him.
“I don’t know what to think,” he said.
“About what?”
“About everything. About Keith. I hate to think he deliberately cheated Clyde’s family. But that’s the thing about other cultures—an outsider can never really understand what’s going on.”
“That’s why you have your own culture,” Frances said. “That’s why you have me. I’m easy to understand.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Want to bet?”
In two quick steps, she was pressing against him. Her hands were inside his sheepskin coat, her neck straining upward for a kiss. He gave it to her, tentatively.
She wasn’t tentative. She gave a little hop and he lifted her off the ground. She was a very determined kisser, harder of mouth than Marion, more aggressive, and it was entirely up to him to keep her aloft. How sharp the discontinuity between fantasy and reality! How disorienting the step from the generality of desire into the specificity of her kissing style, the hundred-odd pounds of dead weight he was holding. When he set her down, she backed against the wall and drew him after her. Her hips were as aggressive as her mouth, denim grinding against denim, and he thought of the heart surgeon. He thought of the lakefront high-rise apartment in which, he could now be certain, she’d done with the surgeon exactly what she was doing with him. Far from dismaying him, the thought helped him make sense of her. She was a widow who wanted sex; was good at it; had recent practice at it.
She paused and looked up at him. “Is this all right?” She seemed genuinely worried that it wasn’t. He loved her all the more for that.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said.
“It’s the nineteen seventies?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs. Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleepy. “There we are.”
It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life.
“We should get back, though,” she said. “Don’t you think? They’re probably wondering what happened to us.”
She was right. But now, being felt by her, he lost his mind. He covered her mouth with his, unbuttoned her jacket, pulled out her shirttails, reached underneath. The smallness of her breasts, in contrast to Marion’s, was extraordinary. Everything was extraordinary—he’d lost his mind, and she wasn’t saying no. She wasn’t saying they had to go back. The sun was warming his head and raising a smell of old smoke from the wall, but the place had lost its sound. Not a vehicle had passed on the road. No croak of a raven bore tidings of a reality larger than the two of them. In his madness, with the back of his hand scraping against her open zipper, he dared to part her private hair. She tensed and said, “Oh, Jesus.”