Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

"I've never made love with a giant before."

He turned her on her back and drove deeper. Perspiration shone between her breasts. As she wrapped her legs round him, the bed groaned. Anna pulled him in with her hands until he was lifting her high with each stroke.

Her shoes and fedora were by the door where she'd dropped them as soon as she came in. Her jumpsuit was sprawled, empty, across the middle of the floor. His uniform lay over a chair.

Outside, the afternoon dimmed. Inside a pearly greyness crept along the walls. The room was decorated with photographs of the Alhambra. The pictures trembled as he held her against a wall so that only her toes, barely, touched the floor. The whole wall trembled, like a vertical sheet.

She was weightless and strong. She seemed to ride him, to be on all sides of him, to swallow him and be swallowed at the same time.

When they moved away the wall bore the damp imprint of her back and his hands.

Her body had both a blue paleness and a sheen of life. His belly looked black against hers.

As he lifted her, the bed, the entire room seemed to rise. The more and deeper he had her, the further he went the next time, until he felt himself dissolving.

The radio in the room, the Capehart console, looked like an old trombone player napping in a chair.

The walls could be paper pages now, ready to burn, tear or fold back and drop him into space.

"You're crazy to do this," he said.

"Oh, yes, I've been certified."

"Certified?"

"Officially," she said and smiled.

It was the dual moment of knowledge. The learning of legs, hands, skin, sweat, when the body is the whole terrain and obsessive scope of attention. Every word echoes on and on and becomes the colour of action. Breath synchronizes and the sheets twist.

They sat cross-legged on the bed, the ashtray and haze of smoke between them. Although the heat of the day had faded, their sweat shone.

"I was in love," she said and lit a cigarette for him and put it between his lips. "I loved a French boy. He was very poetic. I loved a German boy. He was very depressed. It was fun to be in love. What I liked was the element of irrationality. This isn't love at all; this is pure irrationality."

He inhaled, filled his lungs and let the smoke escape so his breath filled the room. Of one thing he was certain. "You've never been in love before," he said.

Her gray eyes watched as if from a cat's distance. Until they closed and she arched. With her hair back, her forehead seemed higher, the lofty brow of genius, so the black hair was the giveaway, swaying, a flag whipping the dark above him. Until he pulled her head down and opened her mouth with his, and she gathered his hair in her fingers and would not let the kiss go. She asked, "You've been in love?"

"It was a flight to the moon, a night in June. Icy fingers up and down my spine, that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine."

She rested the tip of her finger between his eyes.

"Tonight is the last night in June."

"I knew one of them was right."

In total dark, he took her from behind, the deepest, final fit, the groove of her back against his chest. So deep it seemed he flowed into her for ever. So still, they both shook to the pounding of her heart.

The car was a Plymouth two-door she had borrowed from Teller at the dance. Joe had found jazz on the radio. Stars lit the road. Wind whipped Anna's hair around her face.

"I loved King Kong," she said. "I would have traded places with that girl. King Kong was very popular in Germany. And, you can play the piano."

"Great."

"And a boxer. I asked all about you."

"Was a boxer."

"You were good?"

"Not bad. I got interested in other things."

"Music?"

"I love the piano. I love the weight, the shape. Something about a concert grand, playing a high E in an empty house."

"And women? Is it the same, the high E in an empty house?"

"Well, a little. How did you get involved in neutrons?"

She thought for a moment, but Joe could already hear her voice. Most important for him was that a woman should have her own voice, and he'd never heard anyone like Anna.

"I could always see numbers. It's like having your own world, or a world you only share with a few others. Prime numbers.

Positive numbers and negative numbers in patterns like physics. I did a paper on reaction multiplication when I was sixteen to amuse myself. I was in a sanatorium."

"Why?"

"Hysteria. Anaemia. Pregnancy. It depended on which doctor you talked to. I was lucky to be in the sanatorium at all because they weren't supposed to take Jews, but my father, although he had lost his professorship at the university, was so respected I was allowed in. The sanatorium had once been a monastery with gardens and orchards, even lemon trees, that ran in terraces to the river, the Elbe. In one garden was a bower of honeysuckle that stirred with bees. I retreated there. I tried to think of things so small and insignificant that they would be almost pure mathematics, that they would have nothing to do with the larger, real world. I watched the bees move from flower to flower. This was just after the Meitner-Frisch article on fission, you remember that?"

"I think I was fighting in Chicago that day. I must have missed it."

"Bees and neutrons are, a little, the same. The paper was only a few pages and it couldn't be published because I was a Jew." For a moment Anna looked into the canyon, and to the mountains beyond, to distant lightning collecting at a peak. "You didn't tell anyone, did you, about Harvey? You didn't report your friend Roberto either, did you?"

"That doesn't mean I agree with Roberto."

"Or with Harvey and me."

"Two more weeks to Trinity and then it will all be over. Maybe it will fail." He could feel her disappointment. "I hate arguments. I'm a coward. True arguments are full of words and each person is sure he's the only one who knows what the words mean. Each word is a basket of eels so far as I'm concerned. Everybody gets to grab just one eel and that's his interpretation and he'll fight to the death for it. Roberto's from Taos, which he thinks gives him the right to say 'up' is 'down'. Harvey's from Texas, which makes it strange he and I agree on a goddamn thing. As for you and me?"

"Yes?"

"Which is why I love music. You hit a C and that's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."

"You're going to hear about me," Anna said slowly. "That I'm insane and a tramp. I don't care what people say, but I want you to know that only one is true."

"Which one?"

"Which one is important to you?"

Joe hesitated, and during that long moment they neared the first checkpoint. Joe kept the MPs supplied with cigarettes and ration coupons; he'd expected to be waved through as usual. Tonight, the checkpoint was a Western scene, the sort of painting daubed for tourists: the amber light of a shed reaching out to men on horseback, the riders slouched and weary, horses steaming in the night air. But also jeeps with their headlights on, blocking the road on each side of the checkpoint shed. He stopped fifty feet before the shed and left the Plymouth's lights on.

"Stay here," he told Anna as he got out. "If anyone asks, we were driving around, you don't know where."

The horses were lathered bright in the headlights. Among the riders was Sergeant Shapiro. Corporal Gruber had one arm in a sling.

Shapiro laughed.

"Fell off his horse, Chief. Broke his fucking arm."

As Joe pushed into the shed, Captain Augustino looked up from the map he was sharing with Billy and Al. The captain was sleek in an Eisenhower jacket. The two cowboys were crusty from a day's riding. Al's little eyes and mouth were drawn tight and there was a white stubble on his jaw line. Billy's hair hung lank, dirty and yellow.