Free Anyone Can Die by James Lepore Page A

belt; a heavy equipment operator since the age of eighteen, working on bridge sites in Ohio and Kentucky and a tunnel in Canada; helping support his widowed mother while his older bother, Frank, was in the service: if anyone had asked, he would have said that he had earned the right to call himself a grown man.
    But that was before he met Lorraine Ryan, the incredibly beautiful Lorraine Ryan, with her long, silky red-blond hair, her green eyes and her dazzling smile. She had laid down a couple of rules: no sex until we’re husband and wife, quit the boxing, go to school for something. And he had obeyed: a boy again, desperately in love, despite his struggle to retain what he thought of as his dignity, which led them into a couple of terrible rows early on. Was that only six months ago, he asked himself, could it only be six months?

    Lorrie came out of the bathroom, still naked, and sat cross-legged before him on the bed. Like they had been hanging out naked together all their lives.
    “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
    “What question was that?”
    “Was it worth the wait?”
    “Yes, Lorrie, it was.”
    “Are you sure?”
    As she said this, Lorrie began stroking Pat’s thighs through the clean white sheet of their bed. Up one and down the other, coming close, but never touching his penis, which shortly began to lift the sheet as it grew. Pat blushed when he realized what was happening. He watched her breasts hanging heavy and free as she leaned forward to increase the pressure of her stroking. Before he met Lorrie, he had rarely blushed, even as a boy. Now his face was hot and red, like a teenager’s at a whorehouse.
    “Kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth,” Pat said. “For thy love is better than wine.”
    At this Lorrie quickly pulled the sheet away and knelt over Pat, straddling him, looking him directly in the eye.
    “The Song of Solomon,” she said.
    “Yes, I’ve been saving it.” Pat was breathing rapidly now, and pressing his crotch up into Lorrie’s.
    “You know, Paddy,” she said, reaching down to guide him into her, “you may have potential. You just may.”

    Five days later, they were in their rented car, Pat at the wheel, headed north on Route 522 in northern New Mexico’s high desert, looking for a bar called Elmo’s, where they would turn to head down into the Rio Grande Gorge to a hot spring they had been told about on the river. They had gone from Reno, where they were married, down into New Mexico at the Four Corners and then back to Nevada to tour the Hoover Dam and hike in the Grand Canyon. New Mexico had lured them back. Not for nothing was it called the “Land of Enchantment.” Yesterday they had hiked up Atalaya Mountain, outside Santa Fe, and made love at 9,000 feet. At breakfast they had heard about the hot spring up near Pilar and decided to pack a lunch and make a day of it, free and easy like any near-penniless, naïve young couple would be on their low-end honeymoon.
    Except that Pat was not completely free and easy. He could not believe his luck in landing Lorrie, and worried that it would not last once she realized that, though he could throw a killer punch and move the earth and build things, big dumb Irishman that he was, he did not know the first thing about loving someone or being a husband. And, now that they had made love twenty times or so—he was insatiable, which so far she didn’t seem to mind—there was something new. He could not entirely repress his feeling that their use of condoms—most of the time—was a mortal sin. He had thought he had shed his parents’ Irish Catholic guilt years ago, along with stopping going to mass and confession and all that hoopla as he
called it. But he was now learning the lesson, as everyone does, that theory was one thing, practice another. And neither, Pat was learning, was Lorrie all that naïve. She had definitely been a virgin, but how then did she know so much about making love, about how to please