A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

—Your peter's up.

—It was your idea that we show all. Haven't you seen one before?

—Does it feel good? Yours is the first. You're as red as a tomato. I mean I've not seen one up before. Your balls are as pinky purple as a pomegranate.

—Two limbs higher, come on. By the good God, you can see the horizon all the way around up here.

—Can I get on the same limb with you? You can hold me around the waist.

—As long as we're trading secrets, we are, aren't we, I didn't know that girls had such a big notch.

—I know two girls my age who have hair already. I'm slow, I guess.

—Does Julie?

—No. Can I feel your peter? I mean, put my fingers around it.

—I guess so. I mean, sure, Anne-Marie.

—Marc.

—Pull its hood back, Anne-Marie.

—Le prepuce. It slides easy. Does it hurt, pulled back, I mean?

—Does chocolate cake with Chantilly cream taste good? Hold tight for another kiss. Slide it up, and back.

—And only God seeing us.

—And some interested angels, I hope. Can I touch, too? I know there's a place. Anne-Marie.

—Marc, cher Marc. Here.

Bernard's voice, from below:

—Anne-Marie! Marc! We heard something drop, and we looked all around, our hearts stopped, till we found your duds in a bundle. You're up there? Where? Don't scare us like this! —At the very top! can't you see us?

—Merde. At the fucking top of which tree?

—The one you're under. Look up. We're Adam and Eve by way of dress.

—Anne-Marie! Julie called. Marc! You're shameless! A scandal! Who would have believed it?

—We're OK up here, Marc hollered down. Go on with your smooching. There are lots of pastilles left.

—Come down! It's dangerous to be that high.

—Go wiggle your toes.

—We may stay up here for an hour or so, Anne-Marie called down. If I lose my hold, I'll float around awhile before drifting to the ground.

—What if somebody comes?

—They won't look up. Can you see us?

—Barely.

—I can't, Julie said. Show me where.

—What are you doing?

—Guess.

They were in the tree half an hour. At one point Bernard climbed halfway up, and was shooed down. Marc first, Anne-Marie right above him, they climbed down, whistling in duet Colonel Bogey's March.

On the ground, Marc said:

—Step onto my back, and jump.

Which Anne-Marie did.

They stood grinning, arms around each other's waists. Julie pretended to be shocked, and hid her eyes. Bernard divided his inspection between the two, for information. They were speckled over with sprits of pine bark.

—Have a good snuggle? Marc asked. Where's our bundle?

Julie fetched it from the boxcar, and tossed it to Anne-Marie.

The next afternoon, the summer keeping its blue sky, after Julie had helped her mother shell peas and hang out a wash, after Anne-Marie and Marc had been into Apt with Marc's mother to price school clothes on sale, and after Bernard had bicycled to the parsonage to pick up and deliver his share of the parish magazine, a chore farmed out among his scout troop, they each went by a different and deceptive way to their boxcar in the pinewood.

Bernard, the first to arrive, had washed his wheat-blond hair, and studied himself in the mirror for longer than ever in his life, except to make monster faces. He chinned himself ten times on the boxcar door before he realized that he was making his armpits smelly, quit, sat and cupped his hand over his crotch, shuffled his sneakers in pine needles, untied them and promptly tied them again. A billow of white clouds was piling up over the lavender fields from the east. He turned quickly. Marc was behind him, through the other door.

—Boy! are you sneaky!

—Wanted to see if I could slip up on you. Where are we all?

—A matter of who gets away when.

Bernard slipped his hand down into his pants.

—Like that, huh?

—It's awful.

—Whatever you're scheming won't happen. It never does. Going up the tree just happened. I couldn't have planned it in a hundred years. I see Julie coming through the lavender.

Big smile, and a skip in her walk.

She sat beside Bernard, hugged him around the shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek.

A bird whistled a trill, was silent, and began again with dotted notes and sharp rests, like a dripping faucet, before another trill.

Dry rasp of crickets.

—I didn't, Bernard said, know where Honduras was in class. Put my underwear on inside out this morning.

—Are we different? Julie asked.

Bernard lay back, fainting, his arms as far back as he could reach, legs straight up, pigeon-toed, eyes wide open, dead. Julie traced a circle around his navel with a compass of finger and thumb.

—Where is Honduras? Marc asked, picking at his shoe laces.

Julie, watching a ride of midges and a turn of motes in the diagonal shaft of light between the doors of their boxcar while teasing the tongue of Bernard's belt from its buckle, said that Honduras, full of parrots and Mayan ruins in its jungles, was one of the jigsaw countries in l'Amerique Centrale.

—Other people in other places, Marc said, are instructive to think about, as there are millions of them all doing something, the Chinese up to their knees in rice paddies reading Mao, Mongolians in ear-flaps riding yaks, and so on, with never a thought about us way on the other side of the lavender field, inside the pinewood, in the wilds of France, minding our own business. —Like, Bernard said from his collapse, fallen from the sky, saying poems. Everybody listen.

Sur le chemin de Saint-Germain 

J'ai rencontre trois petits lapins 

J'en mets un dans mon armoire 

Il me dit: il y fait trop noir 

J'en mets un dans mon pantalon 

Il me suce mon p'tit crayon 

J'en mets un dans ma culotte 

Il me ronge ma petite carotte

—That's vulgar, Marc said after a silence in which they could hear through the cricket racket somebody approaching.

Anne-Marie.

—I saw a lizard on the Roman wall, she said. He let me look at him for two seconds. And there's a stand of blue chicory just before you get to the old pear tree, as pretty as Monet. What was Bernard's poem about, sucking pastilles a deux?

—Nothing so refined, but sort of, Julie said.

Bernard fished around in his pockets.