“You’ll do, Blossom, you’ll do.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough, kid.” I kissed her noisily.
“Tomorrow night you get a big plate of whatever-it-was.”
“Oh, God,” I said, “anything but that.”
We saved the champagne until it was good and cold. Then we sat by the fire and drank it from tincups. We both got a little fuzzy from it — maybe it was the altitude.
“Danny,” she said drowsily after we’d finished the bottle.
“Yes, Rosebud?”
“Let’s go to bed and make love.”
“What brought that on?”
“Well, damn it, it is my honeymoon, isn’t it?”
And so we did that.
The days drifted along goldenly. The biting chill of autumn had not yet moved onto the high meadows and, though the nights were cool, by ten in the morning the sun was very warm. As soon as she found out that there wasn’t a soul for ten miles or more in any direction, my flower child turned nudist on me. Her skin soaked in the high sunlight, and she started to tan deliciously. All I managed was a sunburn.
She even tried swimming in the beaver pond, but only once. She was almost blue when she came out. I was just as happy about that, all things considered, since I had designs on the trout.
We hiked around a bit and went horseback riding and laid around in the sun and made love at odd intervals. It was strange, seeing her walking around in her pink, innocent nudity in the places where so many other things had happened.
One night, in our cozy double sleeping bag, it got down to confession time.
“Danny?” she said tentatively.
“Yes?”
“You remember that first night — the time when you picked up Joan and me at the theater?”
“Of course I do.”
“I knew,” she said in a small voice.
“You knew what, dear?”
“I knew you’d never been to prison.”
“Oh? How was that?”
“You don’t have any tattoos,” she said, tracing designs on my chest with her finger. “Everybody who’s ever been to prison has tattoos — even if it’s only a few spots or something.”
I hadn’t thought about that. “Why didn’t you just blow the whistle on me then?”
“I wasn’t really sure until I got your clothes off,” she said.
“You sure could have brought it all to a halt at that point,” I said.
“I know,” she said, her voice even tinier.
“Why didn’t you?”
She buried her face in her arms. “I didn’t want to,” she said.
I kissed her on the ear. “I won’t tell anybody if you won’t,” I said.
“There’s something else,” she said, her face still buried in her arms.
“Oh? I’m not sure how much truth I can take in one day.”
“You remember how I used to talk — about orgies and all that kind of thing?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said, “I was kind of exaggerating. There was only one other boy really.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d more or less figured that out for myself.
“Are you mad at me?”
“For not being promiscuous?”
“No, dum-dum, for lying to you.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s pretty awful.”
She looked up, stricken, until she saw that I was grinning at her.
“You rat!” she said suddenly, pounding on my chest as I laughed at her. “You absolute, unspeakable rat.”
I folded her up in my arms and kissed her soundly. It was one of the better nights.
I suppose I’d been putting it off, but I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to go up there. I’d brought the damned pistol belt along — I’d told myself it was for coyotes or something, but I knew that wasn’t really it. I had to duplicate as closely as possible what it had been like, so the gun had to go along.
“I’ve got to go up on the ridge today,” I told her as I came out of the tent that morning.
“Oh? I’ll go along,” she said.
“I don’t think you should really,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’m going to see if I can find that deer,” I told her.
“Whatever for? Won’t it be all — well —”
“Probably.”
“Then why on earth do you want to mess around with it?”
“It’s not that I want to,” I told her.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point trying to talk you out of it?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” she said, “have fun.”
“That’s not why I’m doing it.”
“Men!” she snorted. We’d both taken to doing that a lot lately.
After breakfast I saddled Ned and came back up to camp. I went in and strapped on the pistol.
“Wow,” she said, “if it isn’t Pancho Villa himself.”
“Lay off,” I said. “I shouldn’t be too long.”
“Take your time,” she said, stretching. “I’m going back to bed myself.” She went on back to the tent.
I nudged Ned on around and on down to the lower end of the basin and across the creek. “Come on, buddy,” I told him. “You know the way as well as I do.”
He flicked his ears, and we started up the ridge. Even after this short a period of time, the ridge looked different. I couldn’t be really sure if it was the fact that the leaves hadn’t started to turn or what, but it took me quite a while to find Stan’s old post. I figured that would be about the best place to go down. I tied Ned to a bush and climbed on down to the wash at the bottom of the draw.
I covered the wash from the place where I’d entered it that day the year before to the cliff where the deer had fallen. Apparently, there’d been a helluva run-off that spring, because the whole shape of the thing was different. I’d have sworn that I could have gone straight to the spot, but once I got down there, I couldn’t find any recognizable landmarks.
I finally settled on a place that had to have been pretty close, but the shape of the banks was all wrong.
It was gone. There was no way I’d ever be able to verify for myself whether it had ever really been there or not. I suppose I’d dreamed about the damned thing so often that I’d begun to almost doubt my own memory of it.
Now, with the wash so changed from the way I remembered it, I was less sure than ever. And so the pale flicker in the brush that I remembered would always be a doubtful phantom for me. There in the shadows at the bottom of the wash, I felt a sudden chill. I climbed back up to the ridge and untied Ned.
“Struck out, old buddy,” I said, climbing up into the saddle.
He flickered his ears at me, and we went on back down.
That evening, as the sun was going down, Clydine and I were sitting on a log near the edge of the beaver pond.
“It’s just lovely up here, Danny,” she said. “I think it’s the most beautiful place in the whole world.”
I nodded. I don’t think I’d said more than three words to her since I’d come back down the ridge.
I suppose I’d been building up to the question for several months. I knew that it was inevitable that sooner or later I should ask it despite all its obvious banality under the circumstances. Even so, it surprised me when I heard myself say it —for one thing, it was badly phrased. You kind of halfway expect something a little more polished from somebody with my background.
“Don’t you think it’s about time we got married?” I asked her.
Just as I had known I was going to ask her, so she had known she was going to be asked. I guess every girl knows that even before the man has actually made up his mind. And so it was that she’d had plenty of time to devise an answer that would let me know how she felt and at the same time assert her independence.
She looked up at me, smiled, and squeezed my arm.
“Why not?” she said.