Page 479 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 449

His body convulsed. There was huge pleasure, and enormous ecstasy,
in it. White clumps of thick seed spilled back on his belly and chest and
face. He curled to his side in the grass and pulled his knees to his chest.
He lay still for a long while. He hated himself thoroughly.
He threw himself over on his back. The moon was rolling out from
its eclipse.
“God damn it!” he shouted into the night breeze. “God damn it!”
He rubbed his hand through the slaver of cum and sweat and bugs
on his body.
“Is this the only goddam thing there is? Is this what it takes? Is this
all there is?”
He knew it was time. He had to let go of Kick to release himself. He
had waited for a message, an omen. The eclipse was a sign. It was time.
It was no coincidence that this once-in-a-century ritual of total shadow
should occur at this point in his life. He sank back into the grass waiting,
the way primitive tribes wait, waiting for the moon to glide steadily out
of Earth’s eclipse.
“Come on,” he coached the moon. His teeth were gritted. “Come on,
you fucker! I’m looking at you!”
The stars shone brighter than he had ever seen them. He rooted for
the moon.
“Come on! Come on!”
He reached up with both hands to push away the shadow of the Earth.
The dark sky shimmered with the disconnected dots of stars where gazers
who watch the sky had sketched the forms of animals and gods and hunt-
ers of the Bear, like Orion.
“Come on! God damn you!”
He reached toward the emerging moon and one last time he stroked
the naked outline of Kick’s golden body.
“I love you!” he shouted. Then, willfully, with the full determination
of his heart, as if saying it would make it so, he edited the tension and the
tense of the verb, and repeated in a whisper, “I loved you.”
He let go of Kick.
The madness that had been in him for so long a time, the lunatic
madness of love and loss, receded ever so slightly from him. He had let go
of Kick, but something endless, maybe some reciprocal memory still in
Kick, wherever he was, was still imprinted in him.
“I’ll never leave you but once,” Kick had said, “and that will be when
I die.”
Ryan roamed the rooms of the house at Bar Nada and some nights

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