American Couple

American Couple

On the tweed-cloth couch of adobe colors she is comfortably on top of him, buried in the turn of his dark though clean-shaven jaw where it runs to his left ear, now nuzzled by her hair the color of siesta that flowed in curls flirting towards the small of her back, the pink cotton slip underneath blending into the flesh that seemed to breathe out of it. A kiss away from her dream-puffed eyelids his eyes are open, expressionless, but not dead, looking up and ahead at nothing in particular such as a young man does on a quiet afternoon when a young woman finds a comfortable crook between his neck and shoulder to softly breathe a smile into. He has his arms around her back, the hands almost reverently clasped though they do not touch, but matter-of-factly flat-lain across her spine and under her shoulder blades like a growth of grass under Big Sky Country. Her hands are pressed between her chest and his, and she feels the reliable red cadence of his heart in her palms keeping time, each beat a wound towards the future, expanding the settlement of the present. Somewhere in this shaded space he wants to know how it is that she loves him so much.

She laughs recounting their first date, rushing in the pick-up through Cheyenne territory. He tries to remember, eyes as casually open, mind alert beyond language, the ears attuned to timbre and delay. He turns a little and tries to lift her, and she senses and obliges, helping him help her up, slightly, so that he can see her eyes' memory of a long-ago light.

She was riding shotgun, with his bouquet of orchids and forget-me-nots bright as a torch that she cradled as if nursing. Around the bend of Injun Hill was a stretch of road that shot straight into the belly of sky ahead, and he had just gunned the engine owing to the matinee they worried to catch when Tom Petty's guitars started introducing ''Listen to Her Heart.'' The summer blues above was like gravity against the wheat-blonde hues flashing by when she saw the steady shine of sun on the road just as he shouted ''snake!'' and swerved.

At the end of a screech of tire tracks he stopped, quick as possible but not suddenly. He looked up into his rear-view mirror, then turned to her and smiled. He pulled the shift back and looked at his side-mirrors carefully, hand-over-hand settling the truck against an edge of road. With the same motion he used to snap-twist the keys he jerked his head to invite her out, and was soon crouching on top of glistening asphalt over that line of sunlight splayed like an arrow spent of flight. ''Careful,'' she called down the road as she walked after her words. He was still crouched there, motionless, when she caught up. She noticed her shadow over him, so moved to admit the light.

The snake was a meter of mosaic out of which she saw a second of tongue every so often. He was crouched almost entirely over it with his forearms resting on his thighs. Her breath was in her throat waiting on him. She looked at her hands, around. Behind them was a line of posts and concertina wire that stretched back the way they came. Where the sky met the hills it was dark. She saw lightning there.

The Stetson had been pushed back to his hairline. She saw the pulse in his fingers. She opened her mouth - and then he pinched it, right behind the head where the rest of the body wrapped around his arm. He stood up and with his free left hand grabbed his Stetson by the crown and gave his close-cropped hair to the breeze. He turned a little to face her and smiled with his right arm stretched vaguely at her.

''Yuck,'' she exhaled through a squiggle of lips that matched the rumble of rolls over her doubtful eyes.

''Female,'' he said. She tilted her head back, so he pointed to a vent where the tail began, over the inside of his elbow. She took three short steps, and leaned and stretched her neck the rest of the way.

''Hognose,'' he said. He slowly brushed the jeweled ridge over its eye. She took another step, and he twisted his hand and turned some more so that she could see its tongue flisking over the stub mounted like a truck's hood ornament.

She smiled. He replaced his Stetson, cocked it forward and inhaled deeply. He spun on his heels and clicked calmly across to a rash of reeds waving in the wind. He squatted and extended his right arm. A skin of lightning into a clod of grass.

He lingered a little bit before pushing himself off his knees. He turned and lifted his chin at her, then jerked toward the pick-up and smiled. She smiled. She followed. With the kick of acceleration she saw in the rear-view mirror a gavel of lightning beyond the hills. She was listening for thunder when she turned and saw his eyes dark as caverns.

''Because you smiled at me. Because you asked. Because I was there. Because you let me.'' Her hips are bent at his, her legs crawled up on either side of him, the buttocks splitting from her spine, rising off the flat of her back. He holds her head in his hands, his fingers rotating behind and under her ears where the rest of her body starts, where the sun rises over the purr of her back. She tilts her head and locks his hand between her neck and shoulder, but he slinks past, cusps her writhe of waist and lets her breasts pour over him.

for Beth Ann Fennelly and Stephen Shore