Something to Be Desired by Thomas Mcguane Read Free Book Online Page B

laundry.
    Lucien didn’t feel very good. As they walked out into the dark, things rose to meet him, then passed. He once reached up to put an arm around Emily but missed completely without her noticing; his arm merely fell through air, then returned to his side.
    Lucien made a willow-leaf mouth whistle and blew two notes over and over until Emily took it away from him. She led him over a ridge and a ravine and kicked to dust an abandoned anthill. When Lucien passed a big cottonwood tree, his shadow shot up the trunk, scared him, and disappeared.
    In a depression between two small hills was the blue hole. Lucien had seen it before. It was a small steamyspring, pouring hot water out of rock slab, then brimming over into the woods below. You could see the stars above and the lights of town beyond. Lucien reached down to touch the water, to see where the surface was. The only way he knew his finger had arrived at its surface was by the mark of current that appeared and shone in the light; and down below were shapely round stones that were deep and far away.
    Lucien heard Emily’s plunge, then saw her emerge through the curtain of bubbles, wavering like an inverted flame. Lucien left his clothes on the bank and slid in thinking, Now it’s before I was born. They finned and treaded water in each other’s arms. Emily took Lucien and got him inside of herself. She held him on either side of his head with the flats of her hands while they made a queerish love with nothing to hang on to. Lucien came out of her just at the end, and a jet of sperm spiraled to the surface and floated. Emily trailed it off with the tip of her finger and smiled at Lucien.
    “It’s been a long time,” said Lucien. He felt himself rocketing into the past.
    Emily dug her nails into the backs of his arms. “Just what did that sonofabitch tell you, anyway?” she said.

5
     
 
    Emily had incomplete use of her hands from an accident she’d had some years ago in which her husband had figured. Emily was a talented pianist, and there had been this accident. Even when they were in high school she had been considered very gifted;beyond just high school in Montana. They’d all expected to hear something of her talent, and then came this news of her getting her hands mangled. Lucien used to go over to her house and she’d be practicing. He had a brief, luminous spell as her sweetheart, ended, as it often was, by the arrival of Emily’s future husband, the doctor. He was rugged, intimidating and athletic. He was probably about twenty-one at the time, but to Lucien he seemed to be some outlandish oldster like a millionaire or a Green Bay Packer. Lucien was nervous for the short time that he was around him, shuffling in the front hall of Emily’s house. She and the doctor were soon a hot item. After that, that is, down through the years, the few reports were not good. Her husband was a surgeon, a hard drinker, a big-game hunter, a man of wealth; and so far as Lucien could tell from rumors and long-range snooping, tough with Emily. On a hot day she blew his brains out at close range and turned herself in to the sheriff in Deadrock.
    This ranch had been meant as a kind of retreat for that childless couple. Since it was her neck of the woods—he was a Detroiter—Lucien guessed this meant a small capitulation for him. She came earlier each summer, but he never stayed past antelope season. Lucien had observed him a few times at the Bozeman airport, standing next to his luggage in a stadium coat arguing with the baggage handlers about his rifles. Lucien hadn’t seen Emily at all.
    But for a short time long ago, Emily and Lucien were going into the sunset as a composer and a painter, leaving the world a richer place. Within a few years he was distributing leaflets to Latinos for the U.S. government and she was getting knocked around regularly by her collegesweetheart. Lucien had spells of delicious blind ambition, spells of painting, spells of high courtship and