The fuel needle drops lower, and she steers back toward Kalispell. Barclay has not turned around again, has not acknowledged the wonders she has shown him. As they pass into the ordinary greatness of lesser mountains, she feels peevish and depleted, as though she’d stayed too long at a fair or picnic.
Clouds are coming in, getting denser and lower. By the time they land in late afternoon, it is overcast.
“We’ll have to wait out the weather,” she says to Barclay as he climbs out of his cockpit. She is casual, pretending she has not just kidnapped him and turned him upside down.
He looks at the sky. Calmly, he says, “I have a place here. An office. We’ll go there.”
As they walk into town, Barclay takes a ring of keys from an inner pocket of his jacket. “It’s a good thing,” he says, “this didn’t fall out and land on someone’s head back in Missoula.”
Anticipation hangs between them, making them awkward. The air is humid, thick with imminent rain. A man smoking in a doorway greets Barclay, and they exchange pleasantries while Marian stands off to one side, unacknowledged by Barclay. The stranger’s gaze flicks curiously over her.
The office is actually a small house on a side street. Only two rooms, close and warm. The first contains two desks with telephones and typewriters and lamps, a block of wooden filing cabinets, and a stove and sink. Everything is perfectly tidy. Barclay goes into the next room, a bedroom, and pulls the curtains shut with a brisk snap. She follows, tentative.
“Does someone live here?”
“No.” He indicates a closed door. “You can go in there to clean up.”
The bathroom is floored in white octagonal tiles. There is a claw-foot tub, a sink, a toilet with a pull chain. In the mirror she sees a wind-blasted urchin, face grimy except where her goggles had been, hair plastered to her head as tightly as a bathing cap. Clean up. She eyes the bathtub. Ought she to take a bath? Would that be strange? Would it be strange not to? She can smell oil and gasoline on her hands. They are, of course, about to go to bed together. How will she avoid starting a baby? He must have thought of that—he couldn’t want a baby.
She turns the tub’s hot-water tap, pees under cover of the noise. When the water is a few inches deep, she gets in, splashes and dips like a bird in a puddle, tries to settle her heart. She puts her head under the faucet and does the best she can with the small cake of soap left beside the sink. She has the feeling of readying herself for a rite, a sacrifice. After she gets out, she hesitates, wrapped in a towel, debating, then puts her dirty flying clothes back on except her socks and boots, which she carries with her.
He is sitting on the edge of the bed, but when she draws near, he gets up and goes into the bathroom, brushing past without a glance. She stands, bewildered, in the middle of the room, listening to him urinating. She goes to the window and peers through the gap in the drapes, holding her boots in front of her like an old woman with a handbag. She wants to lift the sash, let in some air, but feels she can’t. The light outside has gone gray, and the street is quiet. Now the sink runs and splashes. A black Ford trundles by. Water from her hair drips down her collar.
Barclay’s footsteps behind her. His chest is against her back, and he is reaching around and taking her boots from her and dropping them, unbuttoning her trousers, pushing them down, turning her. He unbuttons her shirt with shaking fingers. So speedily unveiled, she covers her breasts with one arm, but he pulls her arm away and tugs down her drawers. He steps back, looking at her. The ferocity of his interest makes him appear almost scornful. Who are you? She is not the girl she’d been at Miss Dolly’s. She’d felt more exposed wearing those flimsy borrowed clothes than she does now, naked.
On the bed, it is strange to be naked while he is still fully clothed. She feels the roughness of his wool trousers against the insides of her legs, his belt buckle scraping her belly, the buttons of his shirt against her sternum. She tries to undo them, but he pushes her hands away. He seems to want her to lie still. When she caresses his neck or back, he seems almost to flinch, and so she leaves her hands at her sides until he lifts one and uses it to squeeze his penis through his trousers. He puts a finger inside her as he had before, but when she rocks against it, he glowers, flattens his other hand hard on her stomach, holding her in place. She wants to ask how they will stop a pregnancy, but his stormy expression forbids it.
Finally, in one abrupt chrysalis, he sheds all his clothes. His body is nearly hairless, though there are sparse dark nests in his groin and armpits. When he stands to get something from a pocket of his jacket, his penis stands out from his body like a spigot.