Easy enough to laugh off the incident, which had been, after all, more comical than anything else. (Like being caught by a satyr, as she would describe it to friends.) But there was also something lingeringly unsettling about it. That she had never felt in any real danger didn’t mean there hadn’t been an element of violence in his behavior. More troubling, perhaps, was something she saw in his face at the time but did not identify until later: far from being ashamed, the old goat had been proud of his arousal.

Even with the slump of age, he was several inches taller than her and, however weak, still carried considerable bulk. It wasn’t hard to see the powerfully built man he must once have been. Not hard at all to imagine a dangerous and virile young brute capable of seizing a helpless woman he happened to meet in a lonely spot and whom she’d have had no hope of escaping.

It was doubtful that the old man remembered this encounter any better than he’d remembered any previous one. In any case, after that morning she never stopped to speak with him again. Each time she saw him, though, she was struck by the same thought. Here he was, in his eighties at least. No memory, no legs, no wind—yet how the mere sight of a bit of female flesh could knock him off his perch. Surely it had been a while since he’d been capable of fucking. But still. He wanted. He lusted. Even at the risk of falling and breaking a hip—the catastrophe that spells the end for so many old folks—he just had to cop a feel. The wildness in his rheumy eyes, the panting, the crude guttural noises—it was as if there among those ancient sunstruck green hills she had been confronted not by a fellow human being but by some uncontrollable force.

V