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Stinson Beach, northern California, spring 1968. The house Bo Hathaway and I rented stood on a hill among other houses and trees behind the hamlet of Stinson Beach. An enclosed garden secluded us from all the houses which ran down the hill in Alice-in-Wonderland warrens of blind turns and dips to a general store. Across the northward winding Coast Highway stood a post office and cluster of lesser houses on flat land. Behind the houses, the beach stretched for a mile from rocky headlands in the south to the Stinson spit in the north.

Our front windows overlooked rooftops, the cluster of buildings straddling the highway, the beach and the big blue beyond. The windows gulped in light and space from the Pacific sky. Except in slanting rain, we kept the windows open, inviting in fog, radiance, and the rhythms of daily and seasonal changes in climate. At all times of year, we heard the ocean surf, and in summer, the higher pitch of city folk from San Francisco playing on the beach. The outside drifting through the house diminished confining effects of walls and created a grand open space of peace and possibilities. The house felt enormous for the two of us, but having lived in close quarters with men for years we were adjusting upwards to achieve a good running average of the space a man needs.

Bo and I had trained together at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, and served on the same assignments with Special Forces in Latin America and Vietnam. When we lived in Stinson, Bo worked on his tightly written and unapologetic war novel A World of Hurt.

Bo had gone out the evening before and had yet to return. I figured he was still with Roxie. Roxie was soft, curvy, and her constant needs fit against Bo fully. Her husband was away on business and I imagined Roxie cooking bacon and eggs to bolster them for another round. Bo and I agreed there was something special about the secret harmonies of making love to another man’s woman. I think the risk of primitive, naked violence from getting caught in the sack appealed to us too. I saw Bo enjoying the way women decorate their walls and the risk of the cuckold’s return. I didn’t expect him back before I left for Berkeley.

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• Over the Line
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© Copyright 2004 Keith R. Parker