W. Kinsella - If Wishes Were Horses

At times the woman was Francie Bly. I have no reason to believe Francie has any interest in me, she seems relatively happy with Adam, who is only slightly less interesting than lint. I rationalize that I dreamed of her because I knew she was due to visit. On other occasions the woman beside me in the convertible seemed to be Maureen Renn. Dreams, memories, wishes, interweave like the colors in variegated thread.

In one dream I was seventeen and Maureen’s arms were tight about my neck, her thighs locked about mine, her mouth hot and thrilling as we made love on a blanket spread over a stack of grain sacks behind the manger in her father’s barn. The scent of dried hay was mixed with the thick, wet odor of cattle. A cow lurched forward in her stanchion, her pink nose protruded beyond the manger wall, her dull eyes stared at us, green straws bristled on each side of her mouth.

Maureen climaxed violently, taking me with her. She slowly unlocked her arms from around my neck, our mouths parted.

I still can’t imagine how, at sixteen, Maureen could instinctively have known so much about sex, and I could have been so unknowledgeable.

Maureen was a tall, strapping farm girl with a mop of dark-red hair. She pitched hay, did farm chores and drove tractors and combines alongside her hulking brothers. My father made his precarious living from his second-hand store in Lone Tree. The most physical duties I performed were helping my father move an oak table or bookcase from the shop to a waiting truck. Though I was athletic, I was neither large nor particularly strong. My older brother worked for an insurance company in Des Moines until my father retired and sold him the business. My sister, Agnes, a year younger than me, was as my father said, ‘Homely as a mud fence and proud of it.’

‘So how did it feel to have my virgin body, McCoy?’ Maureen asked, staring into my eyes in the dim light of the barn, half smiling in the way she always did, so I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me.

‘Well …’ I said. I was watching a tine of sunlight that pierced the roof like a golden laser and angled to the far wall. She had just had my virgin body. It had never occurred to me that it might also have been Maureen’s first time.

She seemed to know so much more than I did. She had been so calm, apparently privy to knowledge I had no access to. I won’t detail the embarrassing struggle I had with one of the contraceptives I carried in my wallet until Maureen pointed out how it should be used. When I was between her thighs, after Maureen had used her hand to guide me into the heat of her, I came almost immediately, but she imprisoned me with her strong limbs.

‘Lie still, Sugar,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gonna be so good,’ and she twitched involuntarily as the sheer heat of her revived my desire.

‘Am I better than the second baseman?’ Maureen asked, a lilt in her voice.

I was too surprised to answer. ‘Well …’ I said eventually.

‘Kiss me, Sugar. Make us so close.’ I did.

‘“Well …” What kind of an answer is that? Am I better than fucking your second baseman?’

‘Much better than my second baseman,’ I said, watching the arrow of sunlight. ‘You were wonderful. He shaves and chews snuff.’

‘All right,’ said Maureen, ‘that’s better.’

I swallowed hard. Everything about me was so incredibly awkward. I have no idea what Maureen saw in me. It was easy to be rowdy and raucous with my friends, my teammates, but put me alone with a girl and I might as well have had a garrote around my neck.

‘I wish you’d look at me, Joe. You never look at me, never make eye contact.’

She shifted out from under me, pulled herself to a sitting position. ‘When we kiss you close your eyes, otherwise you look at some spot in the distance over my left shoulder.’

‘I like to look at you,’ I said lamely.

Maureen had thrown her plaid shirt over her shoulders so she could lean against the outer wall of the barn without scratching her back. She was peeking through thick strands of plum-colored hair, almost as if peering between her fingers.

‘You don’t believe this was my first time,’ she said, fishing in her shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. The shirt hung just to the outside of each nipple. Her large, freckled breasts rose and fell rhythmically with her breathing.

‘I never thought about it,’ I said. But I had. She talked so freely and openly of sex, I’d just assumed she’d had other lovers, though I couldn’t think of who they might have been.

‘I want you to know you’re the first outside the family, McCoy.’ She glanced at me, that same wry, enigmatic smile on her face.

I couldn’t keep a surprised expression off my face.

‘Shit, that’s what you expect me to say, isn’t it? A brother has his sister in bed and says to her, “You’re better’n Ma.” And the girl answers back, “That’s what Pa says.”’

Maureen drew deeply on her cigarette, let the smoke out slowly between her teeth.

She had read my mind. The Renns were, as my father often said, a wild and woolly bunch. ‘Disreputable,’ would be the consensus of the community. Her father was a prodigious drinker. One of her brothers was in jail; the other two were terrors, roaming the countryside in souped-up cars. They drank, fought, fucked, stole anything that wasn’t nailed to the earth. Only the wildest white girls or Indian women from the reservation near Tama were ever seen with Harley or Magnus Renn.

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