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She laughed, lifting her breasts up to cup my face. 'No, it's still there,' she said. 'Both of them.'
'You have two?'
Then she stretched out on her stomach, across the bed, reaching for the ashtray on the night table, where she deposited the gum and a wad of my hair. I bore the puff over my shoulders like a cloak and stretched out over her. Pumpkin Rump! It was impossible to lie flat on her.
She turned so that we could tangle sideways, and when I kissed her, her teeth were parted. In the blue light that glowed off the snow, we pressed down under the canopied puff and told each other stories of our vague education and more vague experience with books, friends, sports, plans, politics, preferences, religion and orgasm.
And under the hot puff (one, two, three times) the drone of a low, coming airplane seemed to carry us loudly beyond that frosted room, wung us out over those blue miles of glacier, where we exploded, and our burnt, melted pieces were flung apart, snuffed out like match-heads in the snow. We lay separate and barely touching, the puff kicked back, until the bed seemed to cool and harden like a slab of the glacier itself. Then we bundled against the perishing dark and lay scheming under the puff as the first shot of sun glanced off the glacier. Gradually its bright, metallic glint cut slow rivulets through the frost on the windowpane.
Also there, in the harsh sunlight, looming beside our bed in a puff of his own, Merrill Overturf stood shaking and swaying, his face the color of city snow, his hand holding aloft a frail phallus - his hypodermic syringe, with 3 cc's of cloudy insulin to clear his bad chemistry.
'Boggle ...' he began, and in an ice-thin voice gave a fearsome account of his ill sleep; in a hot dream he had thrown aside his puff and lay naked and uncovered through the cold night, wetting his bed and waking to find his hip fastened to the bedsheet with frozen pee. And when he filled his morning hypo with insulin his hands were shaking too much to give himself the shot.
I sighted down the needle to a spot on his blue thigh and took a gingerly poke, which glanced off. But he never felt it, so I cocked back my arm and flicked my wrist like a dart thrower the way I'd seen doctors do it, and drove the needle in a bit too deep.
'Jesus, you got a muscle,' Merrill said, and not wanting to hurt him any longer than necessary, I snapped my thumb down on the plunger to get the stuff into him quick. But it resisted force, and the murky fluid seemed to move into him like a wad of dough. He appeared to swoon and attempted to sit down before I could pull the needle out, and the syringe separated from the needle, leaving the needle in him. He lay across the bed moaning while I found the needle and removed it. Then I looked him all over for frostbite while he looked at Biggie, actually seeing her for the first time; in German, forgetting she spoke it too, he said, 'You got her, Boggle. Good work, good work.'
But I just smiled at Biggie. 'She got me too, Merrill.'
'Congratulations to both of you,' he said, which made Biggie smile. He seemed so frozen and vulnerable that we stuffed him under the puff with us, letting the warm musky air trapped in there waft over him and pressing him between us as he shivered fiercely. We held him until he began to sweat and make obvious wriggling movements and suggest that he would feel better if he could be facing Biggie instead of me.
'I'm sure you would, Merrill,' I told him. 'But I believe you're better now.'
'His hands are all better,' Biggie said. 'I can tell you that.'
Later, his hands were occupied with the steering wheel. While Biggie and I fed him oranges from the back seat, Overturf drove the sputtering Zorn-Witwer, '54, through the crunching main street of Kaprun. No one else was about except a postman walking, for warmth, beside his mail sled, coaxing the furry horse, whose breath steamed like diesel exhaust. Higher up, the sun was thawing the crust on the glacier, but all the valley villages would stay frozen until midmorning, a layer of silver dust over everything, and the air sharp enough to breathe only in careful bits. Kaprun seemed seized in such a brittle cold that if we'd blown our horn a building would have cracked.
Outside the skiers' inn in Zell, Merrill and I waited for Biggie to finish her business, watching a growing number of the men's team forming on the steps of the hotel, looking us over. Which one is Bill? They all looked the same.
'You better get some air,' Merrill said.
'Why?'
'You smell,' said Merrill. Yes! Biggie's rich wild-honey scent was on me! 'The car smells,' Merrill complained. 'Jesus, everything smells like it just got laid.'
On the steps, the skiers looked at Merrill, thinking he was the one.
'If they attack us,' Merrill said, 'don't think I'm going to take the credit for something I didn't do.' But they just looked us over; some of the women's team came out on the steps and milled around too. Then a clean natty man, older than the others, came out and stared at the '54 Zorn-Witwer as if it were an empty tank.
'That's the coach,' I said as he came down the steps and walked around to Merrill's window, a plastic flap which snapped together like a baby's rubber pants. Merrill unflapped it and the coach poked his head inside the car.
Always of the opinion that no one spoke that language but himself, Merrill spoke German. 'Welcome to the vagina,' he said, but the coach appeared to have missed it.
'What kind of car is this?' he asked. He had a face like the football players on those old bubble-gum cards. They all wore their helmets, and their head-shapes were all alike, or maybe their heads were helmets. 'A Zorn-Witwer, 'fifty-four,' said Merrill.
The coach showed no recognition. 'You don't see many of them around any more,' he said.
'You didn't see so many around in 'fifty-four, either,' Merrill said.
Biggie was coming down the steps with an airline flight bag, a US Ski Team bag and an enormous duffel. A member of the men's team carried her skis. I got out to open the Zorn-Witwer's trunk. The bearer of her long skis: Was this Bill?
'This is Robert,' Biggie said.
'Hello, Robert.'
'What kind of car is this?' Robert asked.
The coach came over to the trunk. 'What a big trunk,' he said. 'They don't make them like that any more.'
