I told my boss that I never took work with me when I went camping, but she didn't listen to me. If she had, she'd never have sent her son and his fiancée out to my campsite in order to give me the packet of material I'd already told her I wasn't going to look at until Sunday night. But she did, and it led to nothing but trouble.
She knew that I did this at a set time every year. I'd put in for the time off months in advance. This group has been meeting in the Blackwater River State Forest for twenty years. What, did she think I was going to take my laptop out there? The conditions are very primitive--no electrical hookups, no water hookups, no showers, no toilets. More importantly, cells and Blackberries don't work there. Wi-Fi? Ha!
That's the way we like it. As soon as we arrive at the site, cell phones and wristwatches are ceremoniously removed and stashed in the glove boxes of our cars, not to be donned again until camp has been struck and we're returning to the outside world.
It's a beautiful site—reached by a long, winding, red dirt road and flanked by a creek with swift, tea-colored seventy-degree water. The campsite itself remains the same, but not the creek. Sometimes it is very low, sometimes high after a year of heavy rains. But the water is always cold, and there are always shifting pebbly sandbars with tangles of driftwood that shine silver in the sun.
For once I managed to get it together early, taking off from Houston shortly after midnight, and I and made great time on the road, so I got there at midmorning, before it got really hot. Even so, Karen and Del Hannity were there before me. They do live within a few miles of the forest, after all.
We hardly ever correspond during the rest of the year, but we're always glad to see each other when the time comes. Melea Plauger had come from Atlanta, and there were Mike DeCastro and his wife and daughter, who had come all the way from Pompano Beach.
Karen and Del and I greeted each other with hugs, and Karen said that no one had yet put dibs on the space next to their tent. I pulled my tent, air mattress and sleeping bag out of my car and slung them down there, before parking it out of the way.
"Where's your truck?" I asked Karen, for I didn't see their big old Dodge Ram truck anywhere around. Before Karen could answer, the truck in question came up the road leading in and stopped in the clearing in front of the tents. A tall, lean young man got out, came to the back of the truck, and let down the tailgate. He had clear sallow Mediterranean skin overlaid by a bronze tan, curly dark hair, and a fashionable stubbly beard. He was shirtless, but wearing those stupid looking pants that young dudes still like, that make them look like little boys who stole their dads' Bermudas. He even had the print boxers showing above the waistband of the pants, which were riding low; on the other hand, it revealed a nice portion of his taut, flat lower belly, even to where his crotch hair was trying to climb up into his navel.
"Mm-hmm, who's that?" I said.
"That's my nephew, Jesse," Karen said.
"Ah, come on, since when did you have a nephew?"
"Well, a sort of nephew. A step-nephew? He's my sister's stepson--her husband's from a previous marriage. Don't mind if he seems kind of down while he's here. Sheryl got us to bring him along to take his mind off things. He's a drummer, and the band he was in just replaced him. He's kind of bummed out."
"Well, no wonder," I said. "Poor guy. Say, all this history and genealogy is nice, but what I'd really like to know is, is he legal?" Thinking: young and pretty and dark-haired
and
a musician. Jackpot!
"Legal?"
"I like looking at young stuff, but I enjoy it more if I can be sure that I am not committing statutory rape in my heart."
Karen rolled her eyes. "He voted in the last presidential election," she said. "I know because my car was in the shop and he drove me to the polls. You can meet him. By the way, it's always Jesse, never Jess." I raised an eyebrow of inquiry. "His last name is Picken. Yeah, I know. Groan. I don't know what his momma and daddy were thinking." She started toward the truck and I flexed my chest muscles, sucked in my tummy, and followed her. "Hey, Jesse. I want you to meet a friend of mine, Esmé Trent from Texas."
Merry green eyes crinkled at me as he took the hand I gave him to shake. It was big, long-fingered, a bit rough, and cold because he was handling bags of ice.
"Glad to meet you, Ms. Trent," he said. When he smiled, the sun flashed on a silver bead in his mouth--was that a tongue stud?
"Esmé, please. Ms. Trent is what I am at work. Tell me, does that hardware in your mouth ever get in your way?"
"Not so far."
"Jesse, I want you to put ice in the coolers that have food in them," Karen said. "And drain out that one that has mostly water and put a full bag in. And please, be gentle with the beer. I'm gonna open one as soon as I've got things set up."
Karen put Jesse to work, and I set up my tent. It was one of these new tents that are so easy to set up that they practically go up by themselves. I staked it down, plunging the slender steel pegs into the sandy dirt, and arranged my air mattress so that the valve was next to the door. I hooked it up to my hand pump and had gotten the mattress about half inflated when Jesse came back.
"Let me finish that for you," he said. I thanked him and let him take over, while I got my sleeping bag out of my car. I plead guilty to letting guys follow their chivalrous instincts, especially if it involves something that calls for upper body strength or is likely to strain the back. Take tires. I am perfectly capable of changing a tire, and I've done so, but if I get a flat in the daytime out on the interstate and a human being with testicles comes along while I'm getting the tire off the lugs, I'll let that human being take over every time. And now this air pump. I got the rest of my stuff out, and then unfolded a camp chair to sit down and watch how Jesse's muscles moved under his skin.
There are always a certain number of kids at this campout--it has been happening long enough to where some of the kids that came at the beginning have grown up and have kids of their own. I wish I knew the art of establishing rapport with rug rats. Oh, I can get along with them--my college friend Sidonie asked me to be godmother to her two kids. I had fun sending them birthday cards with money in them and attending their games, programs, graduations and weddings, but I'm very glad that nothing happened where I had to raise them. They, and their parents, sometimes came to this event, but not this year--there was another wedding in the family pending and everybody was heavily involved with that.
The pack of young kids asked if they could go into the creek, and their parents said they could, if someone would watch them. A young teenage girl undertook to shepherd them, and they scrambled down the steep bank like little goats and disappeared. One could hear their shouts and splashes faintly over the rushing of the water.
Now Karen and Melea produced pre-rolled joints and fired one up. We drew up camp chairs in a little circle, got ourselves drinks, and the joint started to come around. This was practically the only time I smoked reefer anymore. I did my share in college and in the years after, but you know how it is—your friends, i.e., your connections grow up and grow old and quit, and it's not worth the effort to drum up new ones. Connections, that is.
The rush hit me sometime between the second and third time the doobie came around, and as usual, I felt like laughing. Then the other effect of the herb started to kick in. Pot, if it's any good, tends to make me ferociously horny. All my sexual thoughts come stampeding to the forefront from every corner of my mind, like a houseful of cats who hear the can opener. Naturally I want to find some man and jump his bones, and in absence of that, there's always solo flight... The sensations are more sensational, and the orgasms are O-ier, and seem to last for minutes instead of seconds. My nipples pointed up under the tank and light-weight bra I was wearing, just thinking about it, and my pussy started to ache--in a good way, of course.
Young Jesse was close at hand, looking quite frankly delectable, despite the silly clothing. I didn't know what his attitude toward older women was, and for all I knew, he could have a girl somewhere, although he didn't bring her and Karen didn't mention one. But I could dream, couldn't I? I could look at him through half-lidded eyes and take in some of the details I hadn't noticed before. Like his cute pointy quarter-sized nipples; how they'd feel under my tongue, and was he the kind of man who liked having them messed with, or was it merely a reaction of erectile tissue that he could take or leave alone? I was glad to see that they were not pierced, because the very thought made me want to clap my hands protectively over my own. His wide angular shoulders; the thin skim of hair on his chest; the way the skin on his belly went into fine folds like puppy skin when he leaned forward, because there was virtually no subcutaneous fat there. Nice long legs--I don't generally admire the long-waisted, short-legged look some men have, no matter how attractive they are otherwise. It does not age well. Look at their fathers and be warned. I wondered what kind of package he had, and felt nostalgia for the good old days when guys wore pants that fit and you could take a guess.
I stretched languorously, extending my legs in front of me, tensing my quadriceps. Something about flexing that set of muscles always makes me feel sexy, because it involves tilting one's pubis up. Suddenly I looked across and saw two of the women in the group looking my way; one said something to the other in a low voice and they laughed. Another one of the effects of weed is paranoia. Also, I noticed it was getting hot.
"I think I'll go for a dip," I said. "I need to cool off." I stood up and put my Coke can, which I had emptied, into the trash bag we reserved for aluminum cans.
One of these days I am going to get a tent big enough to stand up in. If there's anything that's awkward, it's changing clothes while sitting on the ground. Hardly anybody looks graceful doing it. It's worse than having a mirror on the bathroom door while you're sitting on the toilet. I got out of my shorts and tank top and into my tankini, wondering if it was time to think about retiring from the cougar game. I put on surf booties against the gravel and mysterious sharp objects at the bottom of the stream and descended one of the narrow twisting ways down the bank to the water, not as quickly as the children had done. Once the water had gotten past my ankles, it felt wonderful. I took up handfuls of water and splashed my upper legs, to make going into deeper water easier, and my face, which felt hotter than usual. Further upstream, there were some deep-water holes. I came upon the first of them unexpectedly--I mentioned that the creek changed from year to year and season to season. I went from knee-deep to hip deep all of a sudden. It must have rained up north, I thought. The creek bottom sloped less precipitously as I went on, and then the creek got shallower. I got the feeling that someone was behind me, and when I turned around, it was Jesse. He had changed out of the rapper pants into Hawaiian print swimming trunks.
"Hey."
