Free Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus Page B

it’s not so hot.”
    “Then maybe next summer I’ll have a baby.”
    “Why not.”
    “Damned if I know,” she said. “So why not.”
    The ashtray rested on his chest, and moved with his breathing. They lay quietly, as she felt the evening cool coming now to the lawn, and through the window behind the bed. She listened to the silence of the room, and their smoking and swallowing and quiet breath, and she felt held by tranquility and shared solitude, as the hands of her parents had held her on the surface of water when she was a child. She wanted to tell him that, but she did not want to speak. Then she knew that he sensed it anyway, and she lay, her bare leg touching his trousered one, her eyes closed, in the cool silence until he said he had to go now, he had to cook dinner for Richie.

SIX
    B ETWEEN RICHIE ’ S SQUEEZING thighs and knees, the sorrel mare Jenny turned with the track, and he saw the red barn, then she was cantering straight toward the jump, and over her head he saw Mr. Ripley’s white house and a flash of green trees and blue sky beyond its dark gray roof. He fixed his eyes at a point on Mr. Ripley’s back wall, directly in line with the middle of the upright posts. He held the reins with both hands, his leather riding crop clutched with his right, angling down and backward over his thigh, and with the kinetic exhilaration that years ago he had mistaken for fear, he glimpsed at the bottom of his vision Jenny’s ears and the horizontal rail. Then he was off the earth, flying with her between the uprights, his eyes still on that white point on the wall, his body above the saddle as though he sat on the air they jumped through. When her front feet hit he rocked forward and to the left but only for an instant, then he was in position again, his knees and thighs holding, and he leaned forward and patted her neck as she entered the curve of the oval track, and spoke to her: Good girl, Jenny. Good girl. Then she was around the curve and approaching the other jump; beyond it were the meadow and woods, and he found the top of the pine rising above clumped crowns of deciduous trees, and held his eyes on its cone of green. He listened to Jenny’s hooves as their striking vibrated through him like drumbeats, listened to her breathing as he felt it against his legs, and listened to his own quick breath too, and the soft motion of air past his ears: a breeze that was not a breeze, for he and Jenny were its sources, speeding through air so still that no dust stirred from the track before them. Then he was in it, in the air, the pine blurring in the distance, and down now, a smooth forward plunge that pulled his body with it, but this time he held, and when Jenny hit, his body did not jerk forward but flowed with hers, in horizontal cantering speed down the track, as he patted her neck, and spoke his praise. He did not take her into the leftward curve. He was still looking at the pine, and with his left knee he guided her straight on the track, then off it, past the curve and toward the woods. Because Mr. Ripley had said it was awfully hot for both him and Jenny, and if he wanted to, he could jump her for fifteen minutes and then take her on the trail to cool down, and pay only eight dollars instead of the ten for an hour’s jumping.
    He veered right, away from the pine, and angled her across the meadow, then slowed her to a trot and posted, his body moving up and down in the rhythm of her strides. He looked at the sky above the woods, then around him at the weeds and short grazed-over grass of the meadow. For a quarter of an hour he had smelled Jenny and leather, and now that they were moving slowly, he could smell the grass too. The two-thirty sun (though one-thirty, really: daylight savings time) warmed his velvet-covered helmet, and shone directly on his shoulders and back, like the hot breath or stare of God. For he felt always in God’s eye, even when he heard sirens, and knew from their sounds whether it