back before she could think of a reason why not to. My name is Orren Clay Fenton, he said and she liked his bookless voice and the way his vowels clung to the back of his throat.
What sort of name is that?
England names. All the Fentons got names like that. I got a brother named Cash, Cassius Linus, he said. He watched her. How old are you? he said.
Twenty next week.
He smiled again and she saw he already had wrinkles around his eyes even though he couldn't be much older than she was. She wondered if he could tell that she didn't know anything about anything. With one hand on her hip, she breathed in and looked up like she was looking at something just beyond his head, the weathered skeletal shape of the trees or the blue sky, and then she sighed.
Well, I got to go back in, she said. It was good talking to you.
But we ain't hardly talked yet.
She gave him a look that had no meaning other than to look at his face again, but he divined something there that he liked, because he said, What if I come back?
What's that mean? she said and her hand unhooked from her hip and hovered birdlike at her side.
He tipped his cap up on his head and then, as if suddenly remembering it was there, he took it off and passed a hand through his band-pressed hair. His brown hair shone reddish in the sunlight and it reminded her of the flank of a brown horse her uncle's neighbor had owned, the way the sun petted it as it moved its weight, rubbing its sides on the wood of the fence, first one side, then the other.
What if I come back and took you out?
Took me out where?
I don't know. I ain't from here. Wherever you want to go to.
I'm not from here either, she said.
Well, that's interesting to know, but that ain't a answer.
She laughed.
Maybe, she said.
Come on now, he said.
She eyed him straight then and unsmiling like a boy would and she saw the yellow edging the iris of one blue eye. Well, suppose I say yes and then you don't come back? I'd be smart just to wait it out and see what you do. That way I don't have to play the fool. Still she did not smile, but she turned her head sideways, offered him her profile.
He grinned and propped his cap back on his head again. Then he took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his tee shirt, watching her, and one finger fished for matches in his pocket. He found none there and so he just stuck the cigarette lightless between his lips and a tiny twig of tobacco fell from its packed end. She took a few steps back toward the school without really turning from him. He watched her dance back a pace and he shook his head. I'm coming back, he said.
When?
Soon's I drop these yokels off, I'm coming back.
Tonight? she said, incredulous.
Hell yes, tonight, he said. I can see you ain't nobody's fool.
He did come back, and he came back again every other day after that. When classes were over in the afternoon and he was freed from work on the college farm, he showered, combed his wet hair, and tore through the three counties that separated them. He took her out in his truck as the sun was going down, and because he didn't know where he was going and neither did she, they went nowhere in particular. They just drove and he told her how big a farm he was going to own someday—bigger, much bigger than the one he had grown up on—and how to cut the testicles on a sheep and brand the hindquarters of a cow and she told him how it was to play a piano for a room full of people, to commit reams of music to memory. She liked the way he was silent and attentive when she talked about the piano, as though she were telling him about a country he had never seen. He nodded his head, his lips pressed together, and she studied his face like a score. But when she spoke, she could not really hear her own voice, but only imagined what all lay behind the press of those lips. And when the night grew late, they drove down the mountain roads to the blackened campus of the settlement school, where instead of dropping her off he parked his truck and the instant he took his hand from the steering wheel, before she could know what that hand was going to do, she scooted over and practically straddled his lap. She did not know what gave her the nerve. She'd never done a thing but kiss a boy once after a community dance and let him sneak his hand up the length of her shirt, but it took his hand forever to get where it was going and then, like an exhausted runner, it had collapsed on the finish line and didn't move but only cupped one breast. Orren's hands had considerably more endurance.
Does this mean I can come back? he said after they had kissed for two hours. She nodded, but they did not stop until the birds called for dawn.
He came back again and again and they took their drives into the mountain darkness. It was not more than two weeks before their kissing gave way to nakedness and her body gave way to his. When he pushed up inside her for the first time, she was unable to move for the surprise of it, not because it was unexpected—she had anticipated it in the unthinking way the body has of presuming its physical destiny—but because it brought the fact of Orren into a proximity she had not previously imagined. Within, but without at the same time and his face more open and more unreachable than she had imagined a face could be. It moved her in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. That and the way, when he was inside her and reaching and speaking into her hair, he made cuss words sound like praise words. She took for the first time an understanding of what it meant to have pleasure bound up in pain, like a gift in paper. And when there was pain, which there was at first and occasionally after, she was always surprised that she did not want to end it, as if her body knew to push through any hurting for some goal that she could not understand but knew to be there. The goal was not Orren himself, though she wanted him; it was something that she could strive for only through the striving of his body, his body which she held inside her, accepting it sometimes hurting and sometimes not.
They continued on through the chilly nights, through a spring and a summer, then on again into the winter months. Ever driving and ending up parked in a dark corner of the school lot, ever compelled to strip away their clothes without regard for the cold. She told him that she would someday get out of the mountains to study piano and he told her again and again of the farm he would own and if these two strands were like roads that could never converge, neither Aloma nor Orren cared to notice. They tangled, their bodies threshed of clothes, their mouths open to the other like the mouths of baby birds and in their meshing, they did not think about time and they did not think about difference.
Even the night when they almost went sideways into the Slaughter, Aloma did not think about it. They were swooping around a bend where the road fell off into the icy branch of the North Fork when the truck fretted to the right and began to swing out where the road was not and she saw sidewise the tremor in Orren's body as he tried to right the trajectory of its path and was barely able to. The truck juddered to a stop and when Aloma looked down out the window on her side, all she could see was the black swollen creek foaming white and no blacktop or dirt at all.
Out, out, Orren said and he threw his door open fast and before she knew what was happening he had pulled her out of the cab by the waistband of her jeans, jerking her clean past the steering column over the seat still warm from his body.
Holy shit, he said and pushed her behind him. She wasn't alarmed, she didn't have time to be, her vision was filled with the living shape of Orren's back and the patch of skin between his collar and the short hairs at the nape of his neck. She laughed for a split second behind him, fearless. Then Orren walked around the rear of the truck, gazing down at the black water, and she sobered, saw with her own eyes how close the tires had come to the edge. Orren shook his head and pressed the left back tire with the toe of his boot. Then he pointed her up to a hillock with one hand and, with the other, patted the tailgate as if to soothe it. He said to her, Set yourself down and let me fix this. Aloma turned and walked to the other side of the road, which represented the road-end of someone's corn patch. In the dark she could see the shagged corn stalks, close to the ground, casting ragged shadows. She sat down at their harvested edge and watched the road.