Don Russell: The dog ballers

Myra, her mysterious urge to fuck becoming almost uncontrollable, needed a time to be alone. She needed these quiet moments for thinking and hanging on and making her spinning universe settle into something she could recognize. This wild point of land seemed not only to defy the shape of reality, but to twist feelings and behavior among whatever humans dared invade it.

Surf curled onto the beach before her, its gray-green wall toppling in slow motion so that she caught herself holding her breath while she waited for the thud that seemed to shake the balcony floor beneath her feet. The dying hiss of each breaker drew itself out like the prolonged sigh that follows orgasm, amplified a thousand-thousand times.

And that was the whole problem, she thought. The whole scene throbbed with sex. The harder she tried to escape its erotic message, the more tightly it seemed to enclose her. The pulse of the surf felt like a majestic beat of the climactic waves of contraction. A lone seagull, soaring with motionless wings, reminded her of the full-curved silhouette of her own proud-standing breasts. The spray-laden breeze played over her body with the intimate caresses of a lover.

Where else, she asked herself, would she ever have considered such a weird notion as this: to come out onto the observation deck naked and stare at the scenery? More than anything else about Pulsegate, this behavior of hers was a symbol of the way the place was warping her impulses.

She loved the other two couples; she and Rocky had spent happy hours wondering lazily how many people were lucky enough to enjoy the kind of friendship they had with Leanne and Jim Stokes and Bonnie and Ward Ramos. She had concluded long before that the feeling was love – that mere "liking" could never be as deep and satisfying as the feeling they shared with their friends. But loving could be a nonphysical thing. At least, its physical components could consist of pleasant warmth in the harmless embraces they shared upon meeting or leaving each other and the occasional quick hugs that came spontaneously when delight bubbled over.

What was happening here was not like that innocent fairy tale she and Rocky had been living. Something – maybe it was the isolation from civilization, or the primitive savagery of the landscape, or the chemistry of pure, human nature – was reaching through the social fabric to awaken instincts and desires that must have belonged to prehistoric ancestors of man.

A flicker of movement in the undergrowth beyond the corner of the house to her right snapped the spell. She tensed in momentary panic, cringing inwardly and ready to scramble back into hers and Rocky's bedroom. But she relaxed when she made out the head and shoulders of wolflike Soldier, the strange, surly brute who had survived his master's death and continued to course the wild point in search of intruders.

Bonnie and Ward Ramos had been as surprised as anyone else to find themselves heirs to Pulsegate. Bonnie had known nothing about any recluse uncle, and she had clearly been stunned to learn about the lonely way he had spent the last twenty years of his life.

"A retreat!" Bonnie had exclaimed to the others when the facts had begun to sink in. "We can all use it for a retreat!"

And that idea had sprouted and taken hold until all six felt as if there had been no other alternative. So they were all here, airing the two-story lodge and turning it into a livable place to spend long weekends or vacations.

Bonnie's mother had confessed the family's conspiracy against Uncle Walt. They had excluded him when he had married the wild, sensuous Carlita; as if he had never existed, they had shut him out of their memories and away from mention. Until his death, thirty-six years later, they had known nothing of his whereabouts. They had been unaware of Carlita's death in the sixteenth year of the marriage, unaware of the decay of the Pulsegate land – not knowing Pulsegate existed and never hinting to the younger members of the clan that the haunting, abandoned works of the mysterious poet, Walt Mason were those of a relative.

"Cruel!" exclaimed Myra softly. "How could Bonnie be part of a family like that? Ugh!"

Soldier was the only moving creature in her field of vision, except for the solitary gull, and she found her attention drawn to the ghostly, gray beast as he wove his way among the huge boulders. His nose was close to the ground, and his tail was tucked close to his hind legs while he worked whatever old trail he had uncovered.

She shivered and ran her hands slowly over her naked hips and thighs. The silken warmth of her skin sent thrills of pleasure through her fingertips and a brief giddiness to her head.

"Good God, Myra!" she scolded herself. "What the hell's wrong? Pretty bad when you're so horny even the sight of a dog makes you think about screwing!"

They had arranged their vacations together all three couples – the way they had been doing for the past six or seven years. Only this time they had come here to Pulsegate with a purpose. The strange thing was that now, by the middle of the third day, the spell of the place had them all on edge. She knew the others were feeling it as acutely as she; they gave themselves away by the way they kept glancing furtively at each other out of the corers of their eyes and the way they had begun avoiding the normal little physical contacts that were so likely to occur among close friends.

"Everybody's afraid one of those accidental touches is going to explode into an orgy," she murmured to the seagull. "It's like threads connecting all of us, carrying currents between us all the time!"

Bonnie and Ward had mumbled something about inspecting the spring, and had left the house right after lunch. Leanne and Jim had used the excuse of exploring the surf cave on the north side of the point. Rocky had said something about the fence and asked her to go, but she had recognized her need for thinking time.

"Just to let the pressure off," she remarked now in a musing tone. "All of us know we've got to find a way to bleed it off. Christ! What did we have for lunch? I can't even remember; I had to concentrate too hard on not saying anything sexy! What kind of Goddamn black magic did Bonnie's uncle weave around this place?"

But she knew it had nothing to do with magic or the supernatural. It had to do merely with the fact that they were three females and three males, all healthy and vigorous and damned attractive, who loved each other well enough that the isolation and forced intimacy were breaking down conventional barriers. She had difficulty believing that the network of civilized rules could be that superficial. Surely, she kept insisting to herself, morality went deeper than this! But there was no way to deny the thrills that raced over her now, and the vivid immediacy of her recurrent fantasies about Ward and Jim.

Soldier paused beside a rotted post, sniffed, and cocked a hind leg at it.

"Marking his territory," she noted. A finger of the wind probed at her and she flinched at the sudden, hot flush that swept her skin. "Jesus! Territory!"

The notion of territorial privileges had slipped into her consciousness. Dogs in the wild – the wolves, for example – were like so many other animals in their territorial habits. Each male powerful enough to defend his territory established exclusive breeding rights with whatever females chose to live with him within his range. For an instant, Myra had allowed herself to imagine the feelings of such a female in Soldier's domain. She had deliberately, she decided, pretended for a moment to be that female and to thrill to the knowledge that Soldier's cocked leg had been a symbolic demonstration of his exclusive sex rights to the bitch who watched unseen.