“It goes in for a long way but gets worse,” Elsie admitted. He turned off the ignition and the headlights. Such darkness! It pounced upon them with an audible crackle; it locked around the windows as if the car had plunged into a black river. As Owen’s eyes adjusted, he saw a star or two high in the windshield, in the spaces between the great still trees overhead. Occasional headlights on the dirt road a half-mile away twinkled. Their own headlights must have been equally visible. Elsie’s face was a mere glimmer in the cave of velour, rubber, shaped steel, and shatterproof glass. His lips found hers, and they were full and moist, but the old melting, one mouth into another, met impediments, things he couldn’t put out of his mind. Suppose the Chevy didn’t start when they wanted to go? Suppose he couldn’t back it out on this overgrown road, the bushes a solid mass behind them and he without the machete he used on the surveying crew? He felt life, a silent vegetable life, enclosing them, on this her father’s land, this man present in every leaf and reaching branch. Owen was still young enough to invest the darkness with spying presences; they distracted him when he should have been purely bent on the treasure at hand, in the deepest privacy he and Elsie would ever know.

It was August; she wore shorts and no girdle. As their embrace gained ardor and flexibility her crotch came into his hand as if rising to it. She lifted her hips on the car seat so he could slide her shorts down; through his clumsiness her white underpants came off with them and Elsie did not try to grab them back. She seemed to stretch, elongating her belly. Even in this darkness he saw wet gleams upon her eyeballs like faraway fireflies and the pallor of her long belly descending to a small soft shadow. Frightened of that shadow, he turned his attention to her breasts; with a touch more practiced than with her underpants, he unhooked her bra and tugged up her short-sleeved jersey. She crossed her arms and pulled the jersey the rest of the way, up over her head, with the bra. Her hair, cut shorter this summer so she could be in and out of the lake at the Lutheran camp, bounced, releasing a scent of shampoo. The bony smooth roundness of her shoulders gave him the shock of her nakedness; he hid his face in the side of her neck, saying, “Oh God. I can’t stand this.”

Her cheek tensed, smiling. “Now you, Owen,” she breathed into his ear. “Your shirt.”