Free When Is a Man by Aaron Shepard Page B

bringing her hand down to the fly of his jeans until she unzipped and pulled him free into the cold air. Her hand kept rhythm while she laughed and muttered things into his chest. Her teeth latched on to his sweater and yanked. Time jumped around. Or a moment disappeared in a blackout. He heard the crunch of her knees pressing into fresh snow, white flakes streaking past as though he were driving fast through a winter storm on a pitch-black, unmarked highway. She was up again, her teeth back into his sweater, close to the neck, and now his middle and ring fingers worked against and inside her, cotton brushing against his knuckles. “You don’t stop,” she warned him, and he hadn’t in real life, but in the dream he was racing off down the highway, careening wildly, and then awake.
    Most of him was awake. “So do you miss morning hard-ons?” Tanner had joked the day he left, and yes, Paul did miss them, especially after a dream like that.
    Two days had passed since his visit to Shellycoat, which he decided he hadn’t, after all, enjoyed. There’d been too much stimulus, too much awareness of his own body: the discomfort of searching for a bathroom, the self-consciousness of being a stranger. Not a tourist, just a stranger. And then, after being surrounded by people—the half-sincere smiles of cashiers and grocery clerks, music, and the café smells—the return to camp’s solitude was too abrupt, too absolute. The sunset, the red and purple light playing across the river until it faded into a dark shale grey, made him all teary.
    Yesterday, he napped by the Immitoin all afternoon, lost in its ceaseless tumbling sounds. A small brown lizard had paused among dead leaves, and a dipper perched on its boulder and bobbed like the coiled spring of some benevolent toy. The hills across the river, their peaks elusive in the hazy atmosphere, stretching back over the horizon, flashed bits of yellow and orange along its crest where bushes had dried from the summer heat. Sometimes the river created the disturbing illusion of voices—a child’s cry, a woman murmuring, a friend shouting from across the way—but the babble eventually won him over and lulled him.
    He finished up the morning count and sat outside the trailer, drinking tea and contemplating how to ration his food, the best way to wash and dry his clothes at camp while the good weather lasted—any possible way to stretch his time away from town. Tanner had supplied a solar shower, a black rubber bladder that hung from a tree near the creek where it could absorb the sun’s heat all day. It beat showering once a week at the community recreation centre. If he was careful, he could go maybe ten days between trips. So, two, maybe three, more visits to Shellycoat. That, of course, raised the question of what he would do after his final trip out, when the contract ended in mid-October, but he couldn’t even attempt to answer that one yet.
    Someone was driving up the mainline: a bad muffler, probably a pickup or an old model SUV . He heard a cranked stereo, heavy bass, and a rattle of loose wood and nails as the vehicle thumped over the bridge, and his heart sank. Tanner had said this place was quiet: it got more traffic than a city park. A few moments later, a rusted-out Jeep coasted down into the rec site, a stubby red kayak bungeed to the roof, the driver’s window open, hip hop blaring. The driver had his arm out the window, whooping as he rolled his truck beside Paul’s Pathfinder, his fist raised. He stared at the camper and at Paul, and his arm retracted. He turned off the stereo, and the door opened with a loud creak and pop, flakes of rust falling to the ground. He looked about twenty, sporting his cap backward on top of unruly blond hair, a surfer T-shirt and board shorts hanging off a toned and muscular body.
    â€œWhat the fuck,” he said, shuffling around in small circles. He pulled out his