An hour ago Martin Williams was sitting at his desk in his third floor office at Pan Pacific Cargo staring at his pencil. The pencil was the same deep yellow-orange as the skin of a bulldozer—the very bulldozer parked on the hill above Martin’s house, the very bulldozer in which Martin now sits, staring down the hill at his home and the house next to his home.

Martin has never been in a bulldozer before. His work, freight dispatcher for Pan Pacific, doesn’t require bulldozers. Martin’s work doesn’t require a pencil, either; he uses the computer. The pencil is for puzzles. Earlier this afternoon the yellow Eagle #2, sharpened to a perfection, had pointed birddog still at the latest sudoku booklet Amy had given him, its rows of boxes waiting patiently to be filled in, until Martin picked up the pencil, twisted it into his fist, and jammed it point first toward the middle most sudoku square.

He stopped short.

He rubbed his forefinger up the pencil stem, considering the pure function of it. Shaft to hold the lead as well as to hold on to. Lead to make the words or numbers. An eraser in case you make a mistake. Plus room for lettering down the side. Advertising. Until everything is sharpened away, written down, erased.

Martin tapped the point against the hardwood of his desk. He tapped again. A small sharp pop of a sound. Carpenters hammering nails. Women in high heeled shoes. Some of the secretaries at Pacific Cargo wore high heeled shoes. Martin couldn’t remember Amy ever having any. Boots. Sandals. Saddle-shoes. Best of all, barefoot. Her little toes—the way they tasted. Light as the air of dreams. He’d tasted every part of her, from those tender toes to those delicate ears. Especially those ears. He’d capture the whole of one in his mouth, and she’d twist away, saying, “Don’t! That tickles!” but in a way which made him know she liked it. Carpenters! Martin hammered the pencil point-first into the sudoku puzzle hard enough to snap the shaft. The drive home took ten minutes.

§

Calm now, Martin fingers the bulldozer’s heavy levers. The one between his legs is big as a baseball bat. Martin as boy dreamed of playing baseball in the major leagues, but he’d dreamed too of operating heavy construction equipment: power shovels, steam rollers, wrecking ball cranes, and especially the bulldozers, the big ones which could dismantle buildings and move mountains of earth with equal ease. Back then he expected to do both—play centerfield for the Giants and, in the off season, drive a powerful orange bulldozer. Somewhere in his brain, marriage and children figured in—a pretty, blue-eyed wife and blond, curly-headed children: two boys and two girls, with dogs for the boys and kittens for the girls and pink and blue bicycles lying on the driveway. He could teach the boys to hunt and fish and play baseball, and his wife could teach the girls to cook. Back then Martin didn’t really understand girls, except that most of them supposedly couldn’t throw a baseball and they didn’t drive bulldozers—but that was okay—they baked cherry pies—at least according to song. Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy, can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?

As it turned out, Amy bakes a great cherry pie—though Martin prefers her rhubarb—and she has twinkling blue eyes. And she is as pretty now as the day six years ago when Martin first laid eyes on her at the county fair selling tickets to the baseball toss. Knock over three stacks of three clay milk bottles and win a kewpie doll—three throws for a dollar.

“How many milk bottles do I have to knock over to win you?” Martin asked.

Amy’s blue eyes twinkled. “All of them plus one,” she said. Maybe she’d heard the line before. Maybe she knew that Martin’s thirteen words were thirteen more than he’d spoken to a female his own age in all his eighteen years, six months, and eleven days at St. Anne’s Academy for Orphan Boys.

“Let’s get started,” said Martin, laying down his first dollar.

Amy was wearing a short skirt, and when she bent over to pick up the fallen bottles and baseballs, Martin could see her peach panties. Martin kept throwing—his jeans were stuffed with San Diego Padres’ bonus money—and neither his arm nor his eye tired. It wasn’t that easy. Unlike Amy, the bottles were big and bottom heavy, and the two at the base were set almost apart enough for the baseball to pass straight through. It took a perfect pitch. 127 kewpie dolls sat goggle-eyed on the shelf, watching Martin wind up. It took him just over an hour to win them all.

“That’s it,” Amy said. “You’ve wiped me out.”

“What about the plus one?” Martin asked.

Amy closed her booth, and Martin gave her a ride in his brand new pickup truck to a secluded spot near top of Spartan Hill where they kissed until almost sun up. “Wow! I didn’t know you could come just from kissing,” Amy confessed.

“You didn’t?” Martin said. “I mean, you did?”

Amy laughed and slipped her hand into his shorts. It didn’t take long, and it turned out she could come making him come.

At little after sunrise, pink licking the sky and birdsong licking their ears, Martin drove Amy home, her peach panties soaked but still on. Two month later they were married at city hall. Their orgasms continued to come, oodles of them, from kissing and touching and fucking, kiss after kiss, touch after touch, fuck after fuck, orgasms galore, but no kids.

Shellacked in two seasons of double-A ball, Martin gave up his dream of the major leagues. Maybe some of his poor pitching had to do with being away from Amy. “I miss you so much,” he said to her over the phone as his second season drew to a close.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “What about me do you miss most?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“Don’t be shy,” Amy said. “You can tell me. Do you miss my perky little titties? Do you miss my sweet ass. Do you miss my tight, hot cunt?”

“Oh, God,” Martin said. “You’re making me hard.”

“I know, darling,” Amy said. “You’re so fun to tease. I can’t wait till you’re home.”

“Me, neither,” Martin said. “Most of all I miss making you come.”

“Mmmm,” Amy said into the phone. “Mmm-mmm-mmm.” After the sighs abated, Amy would say, “That was nice.” It was nice, but there was more to Amy’s orgasms than the sound. There was the scent and the sight and the feel. There was being there. There was Amy herself. “Pitch well, honey,” she said.

“I will,” Martin answered. But his mind was elsewhere.

On the final road trip, two cute teenagers met Martin in the parking lot a few steps from the team bus. “You’re a player, aren’t you?” one of them said. “You’re cute,” said the other. “Want to play with us?”

“I can’t,” Martin said. “I have to pitch tomorrow.”

“We’ll just warm you up a little, like in the bull pen,” the first girl said.

“Yeah,” said the second. “Like you can be the bull, and we can be the bull’s-eyes.”

“Sorry,” Martin said, trying to step past them onto the bus. “I’m taken.”

“You don’t look taken,” the second girl said. “You look lost and forsaken.”

“Those girls giving you a hard time?” Lombard, his roommate, a catcher from Iowa, said to Martin in the bus. Martin tilted his head to the side and raised his shoulder, a half shrug. “Cuz they give me a hard time all the way out to here.” Lombard patted his groin, then moved his hand a foot and a half forward.

That night in the hotel room Martin was almost asleep when Lombard came into the room, a girl giggling at either elbow. “Wake up, sleepy-head. Lookee who we got here.”

“Just a little pitch and catch,” one girl said. “A little shag and tag. A little ball and ch—hey, where you going?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Martin told Amy from the lobby phone. “I can’t sleep without you.”

“The season’s almost over,” Amy said. “We’ll have all winter to...”

“The season’s over,” Martin said.

The next afternoon the girls from last night watched him warm up in the bullpen. “Way to pop it,” one of them said, after his fastball clapped Lombard’s big mitt. “Ooh, baby, that sound makes me wet, wet, wet.”

Martin took the mound staked to a three run lead. It wasn’t enough. He could throw hard, he could throw straight, but his ball didn’t move. It didn’t rise or fall, sail or dip, it just went straight in—straight in to the batter’s bat, and straight out into the outfield or beyond. As he trudged to the dugout between innings, one of the girls smiled at him. “Your fast ball’s got real pop,” she said. “But your curve is pure candy. And you’re not wild enough. Don’t you know you got to scare these guys? Nail a couple in the nuts and they won’t hang over the plate waiting to feast on your stuff.”

Martin smiled sheepishly.

Next inning, his last, he was rocked even harder, knocked out of the box once and for all.

The baseball disaster didn’t diminish Martin’s dream of family. He landed a good job with Pan Pacific and Amy finished college and started teaching morning pre-school. Almost every night for the next two years, Martin and Amy worked on their family, but without success. They spent the last of Martin’s bonus money on fertility clinics, where a succession of doctors said there was no reason for infertility.

“Your uterus has a little tilt to it,” Dr. Burrows, the first of the doctors, told them early on. “It’s canted slightly forward, but that shouldn’t make a difference. If anything, the angle makes entry from the front easier. More conducive to clitoral friction.”

“No reason,” Amy said to Martin at home, striping off her clothing the moment she was through the front door. “And my cunt has a cant to it.” She pushed Martin back on the couch. “Want to test my conducively canted cunt, big boy? Come on, honey, fuck some beautiful babies into me. Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah. My cunt has a cant to it and we might drown.”

No reason, but two years later there were still no kids. After the final session, Martin started to ask the new doctor, the fourth of their quest, a question. “Do you think ... is there any chance that ... that...”

Dr. Elizabeth Hartley, the pretty woman doctor with the tidy blonde bun and the big round glasses, waited patiently for Martin to form his question.

“Amy gets excited very easily,” Martin blurted. “Some times, she ... before we even ... before I’m even...”

Dr. Hartley smiled. She took off her big round glasses and blinked before she spoke. “Then I’d say she’s very lucky. You’re both very lucky.”

“But couldn’t it ... couldn’t that... ?”

Still smiling, the doctor shook her head. “The woman’s orgasm if anything makes conception more likely. During climax, the cervix twitches rapidly, sort of like a tiny whisk broom sweeping semen into the womb.”

On the way home, Amy said, “I can’t believe you asked that. That’s so stupid. It’s like asking if which way the bathtub faces makes a difference.”

“The bathtub?”

“Yeah, in the olden days people used to think the direction of the bathtub could make the difference between a boy and a girl.”

“That’s crazy,” Martin said. “Isn’t it?”

“Duh!”

A few stoplights later, Martin said, “Maybe we should try it in the bathtub.”

“Huh?”

“Well, a boy or a girl ... we’ll take either one.”

Amy ruffled his hair. “You’re so silly! You’re my silly boy.”

When they got home, Martin ran the bath. He filled it almost to the brim. Amy watched the steam rise up. “It’s not too hot, is it?”

“You’ll just have to try it,” Martin said.

“You first,” Amy insisted.

Martin eased into the tub. The water was just right. Amy eased on top of him. As ever, she was deeply moist. She rocked up and down. The water sloshed. Martin watched the bathwater ripple her pubic hair. He helped her rock. After a while the water was everywhere. “My pussy feels like it’s drowning,” Amy said. “Come in me now,” she panted just before orgasm surged through her. The water didn’t hurt Amy’s orgasms—after Martin came, Amy came again just from looking in his eyes, and that made him hard, and she came again from the feel of him growing in her. No, the water didn’t hurt Amy’s orgasms, but it didn’t help her get pregnant.