Free Red Jacket by Pamela; Mordecai Page B

smell as she lifted her arms, saw round firm breasts, nipples plump and alert as the pointy ends on figs. It lit the tree at his belly-bottom. He looked down. She joined his gaze and grinned. “Et bien?”
    He was pulling her to him when it landed, no mischievous monkey but a beast that slapped him, shoved him down, toppled him backwards on the bed. He stiffened. His eyes rolled over. His body, hard as board, slammed the mattress.
    â€œJimmy? Jimmy!” She touched his forehead and recoiled. He sensed her tucking bedclothes round him. He was shaking recklessly, his face contorted, lips peeled back, bared teeth making a ridiculous rhythmic noise. He bit his tongue and tasted blood; felt her finger in his mouth covered by cloth that set his teeth on edge.
    â€œJimmy … James! Come on!”
    Later (he couldn’t afterwards say how much) his body relaxed, his face slack, his jaws loose enough so she could pull her finger from his mouth, he twisted in the sheets to wipe sweat from his body and then opened his eyes to see her finger bleeding into white silk. He shifted over to her, peeled the cloth from her finger, and sucked the bite marks. They lay silent for a bit, then she pushed herself up on one elbow to look full into his face. He was still perspiring.
    â€œJimmy, what was it?”
    â€œWhat?” He rubbed his head on her shoulder, smearing the moisture on her warm skin. He dared not think about what had just happened. Sex was a saving grace. He prodded her with his penis. “This?”
    She sighed. “Ici.”
    Afterwards he wondered what the nuns had been teaching in Benke. She’d been like a youngster playing games, eager to demonstrate all the things she was good at, now and then slipping in questions tagged with, “But don’t tell me, if you don’t want to, Jimmy.” By insisting he needn’t say anything, she dug most of what had happened out of him.
    Coming up to daybreak, curled up against him, her back to his front, she asked, “Jimmy, is there more to it than you’ve told me?”
    He risked his morning fart. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”
    â€œEnfin de compte, c’est pas un problème.” True, all things considered, it was not a big deal, but he felt he should give her fair warning nonetheless. “It’s not always a puff!” he said, grinning his cute grin, looking past her, through the louvres, into a sky sporting the fizzled fireworks of the remaining stars.
    Six months later, she was dead.
    â€œMon ami? Tu vas bien?”
    Simeon’s voice brings him back to the present. “I’m fine thanks, Simeon. Just a little distracted.”
    â€œTu le veux?” He offers the last mango.
    â€œNo thanks. You go ahead.”
    Simeon dispatches the ninth fruit in short order.
    Jimmy battles with the sex thing, worrying about it with each damp waking morning. He and Nila were given to extravaganzas of ebullient lovemaking. Now he is like Sisyphus, forever pushing away his lusts only to have them roll back down on top of him. How is he to give himself completely to God or keep a vow of chastity, when the merest memory of her, a glimpse of someone looking like her, makes his body stand to attention and salute?
    One dismal morning late in the second year of his novitiate, a short man, white, rotund, ragged at the edges, arrives, “bearing nothing but empty arms” as the Mabuli saying goes. Father John Kelly’s arms are hairy, short, and powerful, and plugged into an equally hirsute chest. His cotton shirt, open halfway down and soaked with perspiration, hugs his plump curves. The priest arrives with only a small backpack, for it emerges that the airline has sent his bags not to Ouagadougou but to Guangzhou. He flies into Ouaga because the airport near Benke is closed yet again on account of sandstorms, which occur with frequency because of the drought. No one is prepared to guess when the bags will