Rite of Passage

Sex in the Ship is for adults. If you are an adult, then it doesn’t matter particularly whom you do sleep with. Nobody checks. But just as anywhere, people tend to be fairly consistent, fairly discriminating about what they do, at least the people I’m likely to be friends with. I don’t think I’d want to know well the sort of person who makes notches on the end of her bed, the sort of person who takes sex wherever he can, the sort of person who takes sex lightly. I can’t do any of those things. I’m much too vulnerable. I enjoy making love, but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have confidence and trust, liking and respect, beyond the basic fact of physical attraction. I had known Jimmy for nearly two years and been attracted to him for nearly that long, but making love with him was something that I could not have done much sooner than I did.

In a sense, Jimmy and I were intended for each other. Whether we had met or not, whether we had liked each other or not, we stifi would have had at least one child, and probably more. But that is a mechanical process that has nothing to do with living together and loving. It was nice that knowing each other we could love. The passion of age fourteen is not an ultimate, but age fourteen does not last forever and passions do grow.

Sex in the Ship is for adults. We were not officially adults, but we needed each other then, and I was no longer quite the stickler for rules that I once had been. We needed each other then and it was the proper time. If we didn’t make it back to the Ship, who would ever care? And if we made it back to the Ship, we would be officially adults and the question would be irrelevant.

So we made love there in the dark with the rain falling outside, safe in each other’s arms. Neither of us knew what we were doing, except theoretically, and we were as clumsy as kittens. It was something of a botch, too, in an extremely pleasant way. At the climax there was simply a hint of something we couldn’t reach.

We lay quietly and after a few minutes Jimmy said, “How was that?”

I said, somewhat sleepily, “I think it takes practice.

Just before I fell asleep, I said, “It was comforting, though.”

The next night, we left our horses tied in the trees. We were miles from our camp of the previous night. We had arrived on the hillside in the late afternoon, then crawled through the woods to look over the army complex. Below us, in the gold light, was a town cupped in a bowl between the hills. On our side of the town was an enfenced army base, patrolled like all army bases by regular guards, and on what must have been their parade ground was sitting the scoutship.

“I got curious,” Jimmy said. “It seemed strange to me that they should have a scoutship. I snuck out there to take a look and I got careless and got caught.”

Buildings framed the parade ground on three sides. The enclosed short side was nearest to our vantage point high above. The open short side was at the far end of the parade ground nearest to the town. There were some few trees- mixed among the buildings. The fence was linked iron spikes, and it completely circled the camp. It was perhaps a hundred feet from the fence to the nearest building.

Jimmy pointed through the leaves. “See the two-story building just below there? That’s their headquarters. That’s where they took me until the police came from the town. That’s where we ought to look for my gear.”

The building was red brick with a gray slate roof and it dominated the end of the parade ground. Most of the other buildings in the camp were only single story — barracks and stables and the like — and the other two-story buildings were not as large.

We timed the guard on his rounds. It took him twenty minutes to walk from one end of his post to the other in the slow, casual way of guards killing watch hours. Sometimes he reached the end of his post at the same time as the guard from the adjacent post and they stopped and talked.

I said, “We couldn’t count on more than twenty minutes if we hit the guard.”

“No,” Jimmy said. “We’ll do best if we can sneak over without being seen.”

After we had checked everything, we crawled back out of sight on our knees, and then we went back to our horses, where we ate a cold meal. Jimmy’s mistake before had been that he had entered the camp too early, when people were still about and the guards were alert. We were both tired from riding all day and we went to sleep until well after dark. I woke when Jimmy shook me.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

We took our time picking our way down the dark slope, making as little noise as possible. I was glad to be with Jimmy. We did make a team, and with Jimmy along I felt something more of an effective hell on wheels than I did by myself. It was twenty feet from the edge of the brush to the fence, the space cleared. We crouched there in the brush, able to see the fence and barely able to make out the outline of the two-story headquarters building beyond.