a glint of eye

       A veil of ash lay heavily upon the smouldering ruins. Headless greek columns stood where the wood beams had fallen. Brick rubble led footsore into a scortched arbor. Climbing from the misty aurora, a young girl cancelled all vows. A skirt of school plaid clothed her loins. Her breasts were smeared with oily grime and between them dangled a spyglass on a lanyard. Her back had begun to blister. There were treasures to be found in this desolation. Talc and camphor. Thus she painted her nakedness like a Catawba moon woman.
     

         The Skilsaw spun its teeth across the plank and the end dropped off, joining the lumber junk on the grassy slope below. Motes of wood dust mingled with his sweat. Nape, wrists, and ankles itched. It was noonday July at a cool elevation. A spyglass higher up the mountain would reveal him, a white-thatched man in a blue chambray shirt and khaki hiking shorts, adding a Time-Life build-it-yourself deck to a chalet wedged into an arboreous lot along a populated lane through the Pisgah Forest of North Carolina. He stripped off his goggles and screwed his hawk-eyes to the skyline. If there was a spyglass, he did not see it.
         Nevertheless, he felt he was being watched, and he thought: maybe she's looking for me as much as I'm looking for her.
         Yesterday he had seen her. A waif amongst the trees at the edge of his property. A feral beauty. Flash of leg, glint of eye. Glimpsed, and leaving much to his fertile imagination, she seemed to be wearing tatters of green plaid and a clacking assortment of pelts, beads, and polished claws. Talismans and amulets. The only sure-shot visual he'd had of her was of those white canvas Keds. His mental camera's focus dot on the tag of blue rubber. A fleeing heel. A trick of memory? Perhaps, just perhaps.
        

                                                                                       *


        The first time he had seen a woman's breasts was when he was twenty, away from Mom for the first time, hoo-ray. Wanton hair-on-fire Moira O'Flaherty, a genuine Truro artist's model, halted their trek through the dunes and stooped, complaining that her heels (photographed and shown at a "Nude Feet" exhibit in Provencetown) were being chafed raw by her new Keds. All he had to do was to pretend to marvel at hazy summer summer expanse of Cape Cod Bay. Looking upon her frowzy melodrama, he saw for just a nanosecond her blazing Irish nipples within the windy ballooning of her madras blouse. A rite of passage, sort of, more than thirty years ago.  Keds. Breasts. He thought: I must be daft! The memory evoked the scent of bayberry soap. Moira bathed with it and kept bars of it in her chest-of-drawers, giving her clothes a singular freshness.
         Hemingway minted the term "A Movable Feast" with the title of his book about his early years in Paris. A movable feast is a rich and wonderful experience, sui generis, immortalized by memory. It can be enjoyed again and again. That summer on Cape Cod was just such a time in the life of the man adding a deck to a chalet in North Carolina. He savored this feast, smelling it, tasting it, all the sensations, all the emotions, feeling fully aroused. Moira, the artist's model, would say that his recollections had been edited like the canvas of an Impressionist painter. Ironically, the strength of his memory grew from the knowledge of lost opportunity. Rue and regret. He never became intimate with Moira, being too shy, too reticent. He did not return to Cape Cod. Hemingway's book, however, resided in his library. He had purchased it at the Cokesbury bookshop in Boston. It still bore Moira's mayonnaise thumbprint on the last page.



                                                                                       *


         At five o'clock he retired to his library. Panes reached to the apex of a dark timbered ceiling, allowing the sun to set especially for him.
         A Hank Williams CD crooned: "When the sun goes down, the blues come around."
         He mixed a pitcher of Rose's Lime Juice and Boodle's Gin with plenty of crushed ice. Like Hank Williams, the booze was something his late wife had enjoyed. It came from one of her books, an old John D. MacDonald paperback about Travis McGee. Sara never developed an appreciation for high-brow literature. Her greatest pleasure came from the wry philosophic exchanges between McGee and his economist pal Meyer, usually on The Meaning Of Life.
         There! The booze was ready. He could almost hear his spongy neighbor Roy Peterson rapping on the carport door. Together they would get pleasantly drunk and also get down to The Meaning Of Life.


                                                                                 *


          The story became sillier with each passing word.
           Drunk now, he was telling Roy about the girl in the woods. About how sometimes his thoughts would be invaded by gentle whispers, a chimerical voice, her voice, hailing him from the dappled sylvan light: hot summer fruit awaits the old coot who gives chase!
          "So, what do you think? Am I ready for the asylum?"
          "Don't know." Roy finger-combed his wavy brown hair, piled up from the brow. He was pacing the library like a circus bear.
          "Freshen your drink?"
          "Sure thing."
          "I drove the Jeep into town this morning. Found this book on the origin of consciousness and the break-down of the bi-cameral mind. Heard of it?"
          "Nope."
          "C'mon. You teach at the community college. Don't answer me like a hillbilly."
          He knew Roy had earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology.
          "All right, then." Roy's face morphed into something impish. He drained his drink and descended likean avalanche into the leather Master Recliner. His twenty-stone bulk forced the chair to groan. Already his moist blue eyes glittered with enthusiasm. His fake laconic drawl, replaced by a clipped rapid-fire Southern accent from Chapel Hill.
          Roy continued: "I HAVE heard of the book by Julian Jaynes. Although I have NOT gotten around to reading it, I don't think it has ANY bearing on the subject of the girl in the woods. Which REALLY interests me."
          Hot dog, the man thought. I've got old Roy's juices flowing. "Go on."
          "You ARE asking me to tell you a story?"
          "I'm asking you to share what you know."
          "All right, then. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. You are describing someone out of local folk myth. She is what classicists call a dryad. A wood nymph. I don't know anything in the literature that says these creatures possess telepathic powers, but there IS lore about Bigfoot that suggests HE can send mental messages to humans, reportedly--causing hallucinations."
          "Hmp."
          "Sceptical? Good. HERE's where it gets interesting. Tales about her began circulating maybe a hundred years ago. Got that? The plaid you saw came from a girls academy in Asheville, burned down right after the Civil War. The spyglass on a lanyard, who knows? The other stuff comes from woodland living. Folks believe her spirit absorbed some shamanic Catawba ghost culture."
          "You're putting me on."
          Roy grinned. "She seems to send  mental images to her victims. Images from their memories. True, false, or otherwise. Images that provoke DESIRE!"
          "Excuse me?"
          "From the anecdotal evidence, she scopes out people who radiate certain, ah, vibes, and then she moves in, FEEDING on libidinous energy."
          "So, the Keds she's wearing are from me?"
          "That's my theory," Roy concluded with a wink.


                                                                                          *


          Roy departed for home around one o'clock, ambling down the lane with his ursine gait. Into the pebbled shadows beyond the amber cone of light from the security lamp.
           Once again the man was alone with his thoughts. Suddenly he shucked his togs  and strode out to the deck. He offered belly and scrotum to the singing earth, penis and brain to the wheeling stars.
           Toes over the edge, he thought: This deck I've made is not a magic carpet. It's my Widower's Walk.
            A silver giggle resonated from the woods.
            "Come out! Damn you!" He shouted to the lunar boughs, and she strode forth.
            For a moment he swore it was Moira O'Flaherty. In her wild blazing hair, elements of tree. Her madras blouse was unbuttoned, and he could see her young breasts. Rosy aurioles the size of a silver dollars drew his miserly eyes away from her feral face. She  laughed with the mirth of a gorgon as she took in hand his undecided penis.
             "You want me," she declared. "Ever since Cape Cod."
             "No, you're not Moira."
             "Oh? What do you know?"
             "You're from these woods. You're something unnatural."
             "Come, my shy little man," she said, directing him toward the chalet. "We'll see what is unnatural."
              He ejaculated before they reached the door. He went down on one knee. The creature helped him inside and into the Lazy Boy. Moira's face, same as it was that windy day in the dunes when his cock stood in his pants hard as petrified hickory, gazed serenly upon his aged flesh. Cool fingers combed the white thatch of his head. He sighed, "Oh God."
               What had Roy told him? She tricks your mind and she feeds on your desire.
               "Mmm, wonderful," she shivered, sitting in his lap.



                                                                                        *


                "Drive me somewhere."
                "Where?"
                "Anywhere."
                All the time it was Moira, creamy belly with a curly bush beneath, wanton as he had expected, grinding, moaning, slapping his chest, scratching him. Not once did her mask fade from beauty. Not a shade of beast did he see, yet he knew this was unnatural.
                 They climbed into the jeep. She was wearing white Keds and her knees were lean and deeply tanned. This was the Moira he had dreamed of while making love to his wife. Everything he had imagined was true in the end. The Jeep cranked easily.