The door of the driver’s side opened as if on its own volition. Jane pulled off her absurd stiletto sandals, hiked up the silvery skirt of her narrow, ankle-length sheath and slid in behind the wheel.

The car engine jerked alive with a muffled roar even as Jane was moving her seat far enough forward to be able to operate the pedals. Which one’s the brake? This big squishy thing down here? She smiled impishly at me and the others watching, many of whom believed she really might not know. But then she undermined her own joke by pressing the accelerator pedal with her naked foot and sending them off fishtailing wildly toward their bridal bower in an awkward spray of gravel.

The silver convertible disappeared into the summer night. I turned to find Sunny staring up at me forlornly, holding Jane’s white lily as if she thought I might ask her for it. Why did you come really? she said. Her sister would be dead within the year.

#


Aren’t we merely indulging our own egos when we mourn those who we have failed to protect?

I remember you naked in your mountain stream, Jane, with your violently hacked-off hair sticking up in tufts and bristles. You looked like a defiant water sprite washing yourself, intentionally soaking the strips of gauze that I had wrapped around the slash wounds on your arms, making me be the one to decide if they should be replaced, daring me to do that too.

And I remember how I had packed your filthy old rucksack with what I thought you might want—hoped you might agree to continue wanting or, rather, agree to pretend to want—had burned your verminous and blood-splattered sleeping bag; and how I had repaired your sandals then rinsed out your foul clothes myself since you refused even to acknowledge that they were yours, your mad eyes watching me scrub faded cotton tee shirts and baggy trousers, the one pair of bikini panties I had managed to find, elastic gone, crotch panel stained to the rich ferrous of rusted iron, the wad of mismatched cotton socks with holes torn by your uncut toenails, and you staring at me, Jane, squatting at the stream side as if you hoped that what I was trying to restore might dissolve in the flow of the current, come apart in my hands like decomposing strips of tissue paper.

There had been reports of someone breaking into cabins. The Rangers in the Angeles National Forest said the problem was usually caused by clandestine marijuana farmers who’d run out of food but these break-ins seemed different. There were also tales of a small blond woman misbehaving with patrons at the Dog Star Bar, walking out of the mountains alone then walking back in the same way, and this second clue helped me narrow my search.

When I began draping your garments over a rick of stripped willow branches to dry in the wind you turned away, walking back toward the fire road, arms clean enough, legs clean from the knees down from standing in the stream but your fleshless thighs and hips and sunken belly and scabrous back and buttocks still streaked with mud and dried blood so that I had to go get you, Jane, bring you back to the stream and finish it myself, the large absurd nurturing male washing the small crushed enraged female, using my bare hands to gently stroke you clean, trying to avoid further inflaming the infected wounds or pus-oozing sores, with some of the caked blood on your inner thighs perhaps even from before starvation had strangled off your menses. So you can stand the smell long enough to fuck me? you said, eyes glittering with malice, fuck me in the ass with your big dick? Because the local boys won’t touch me anymore. Other than my mouth. They’ll still stick it in it. So what about you, Jacky jackrabbit, which hole for you?

But I had already begun our disengagement from the San Gabriel Mountains much in the same way I had addressed the bartender at the Dog Star, had even threatened him, I’m ashamed to say, proposing a compensatory violence as if to balance off what he had allowed to happen to you without admitting to myself that my real grief and outrage and fear was personal, selfish, was at my own complicity, my own inability to confront my recognition that tucked within any rescuer lies the larval heart of the owner.

Most men will settle for suck, you announced as we waited for your clothes to dry so we could begin the walk out, but not you, Jacky the jackrabbit. You say you believe in love. Jackrabbit love. Hopping along together, happy as bunnies on the funny-bunny trail. But love is the one kind of porno I can’t provide. Not for you. Who could ever love you?

The walls in his bedroom were decorated with posters of sports heroes and rock stars, all of whom had preposterous hair styles.

Would you like to know how you can help me?