She said, Take a shower Henry and brush your teeth and come to bed. I’ll explain everything to you in terms that you can understand.

THROUGH THE WINTER he filed his applications. In March the offers began to arrive: seasonal ranger jobs at Arches, Isle Royale, Grand Canyon, Gila Wilderness, Glen Canyon; fire lookouts at North Rim, Glacier Park, Tonto National Forest…. Nixon still in office, the war yet smoldering on, prosperity burgeoning, Henry Lightcap the permanent part-time career anarchist enjoyed a wide choice of attractive low-paying untenured futureless upwardly immobile temporary jobs. The only kind he wanted. The only type he thought he needed.

In April he made his selection and on May Day (Law Day in the US, Workers’ Day in the SU, Fertility Day in pagan Europe, Homecoming Day in Henry’s heart) he started work as a five-month fire lookout on a mountaintop near Globe, Arizona, one hundred miles by road from Tucson. He might have preferred other places but by this choice he remained within easy driving distance of his young wife, who had three weeks of school remaining in May and would return to school in early September. They would sublet the apartment through the summer.

In mid-June they celebrated their first conjugal anniversary with caviar (red), champagne, wild flowers and commemorative love on the lookout’s chair (mounted on insulators) inside the cabin of the fire lookout tower. Love at timberline again, seven thousand nine hundred ninety-two feet above sea level.

That same day, in the evening by a ceremonial fire on a rim of rock overlooking five separate mountain ranges, the canyons of the Salt River and a gran finale of a sunset beyond Four Peaks and the Superstitions, Claire informed Henry that she wanted a baby. That she wanted to become a mother. That she was out of b.c. pills and ready to begin ovulating most any time. Like right now.

Anatomy is destiny, agreed Henry, but what about your musical career? Lightning crackled nearby—the smell of ozone blended with his wife’s Shalimar by Guerlain Inc., New York. His choice, not hers.

Fuck my musical career, she said, leaning toward him in the firelight. Her eyes shone like a tiger’s eyes. No, blue-gray but fiery, like the eyes of an ocelot. Fuck me.

Goodness gracious. Such language from my child bride. Honeydew Mellon, I’m shocked, really.

Thunder rumbled through the woods.

Shut up and kiss me you fool. She sprawled upon him, flattening him to the stone. Her tongue probed his mouth, her knees clutched him by the rib cage. Defenseless, overwhelmed, he lay on his back with his pants down, his prick up and one hand hanging idly, helpless, over the edge of a fifty-foot drop-off straight down to a nest of timber rattlers sleeping in a bed of stiletto-bladed yuccas. Raindrops splashed on his face, dribbled through his hair, soaked the shirt on Claire’s slender back and ran in rivulets down the sweet cleft perfection of her bottom, trickling from there onto his balls. The rain increased but failed to quench or even dampen the fire of their reciprocating lust. They came when they came—her phrase—like overlapping fumaroles spouting molten magma in the night. His image. Coiled together they lay in the falling rain, drenched, besotted, gasping for air, searching for their scattered wits.