Sanford Patty is a dirty old man on the make. Tearing across the Irish countryside he picks up a little here, a little there, more than you'd swear any one man could handle. But when Sanford gets the lay of the land there's no stopping him - the dirtiest old man in the world! IRELAND WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.
"My name is Sanford Patty and I believe you have a car reserved for me."
The girl scratches her ass with the eraser-end of her pencil and then seems to get all hung up on a flea that is crawling on my beard.
"How long will you be in Ireland, Mr. Patty?"
I'm tempted to ask her if she sucks, right out, because you see, her mouth is all bunched up in the cutest pout...
"I'm a writer. As long as it takes to get a feel of the Irish people." Nice choice of words, there, Sanford.
"An American writer, how interesting. My father says they're all sex maniacs." The pencil is now being poked down under her bra, still scratching. I think the flea has the poor child itching all over. I sense too, by the expression in her pale-blue eyes, the existence of an inner itch as well.
"Your father must be a very well read man. Now about the car."
She comes out from behind the counter and says, "Walk this way," and I couldn't walk that way if I wanted to. Nonetheless I followed her out the front door of the airport terminal and to the driver's side of a Fiat. That would be the right hand side, for, as you will see, these Irish do everything ass-backwards, which in some instances can be quite jolly, if you happen to be an ass-backwards guy yourself and like a trip up the old dirt road now and then, which we all do, of course. But that's in a bed and this is in a car and I can see this is going to be a very confusing bit of business.
"Now be sure to remember to drive on the left side of the road. You Americans seem to be all mixed up about that so you'll be wantin' to keep your mind about it, now." She has a flashlight and she looks under something she calls the bonnet (the hood) and about all I can see of her is a surprisingly developed derriere hung over a front fender and that takes me from my study of tits to an even more-involved research of asses.
Although she is basically a very thin girl, the plump twin mounds rise steeply and invitingly, clearly outlined beneath the skin-tight capris of her uniform. As she arches the top of her body up to look around at me (and I think I was drooling), the hollow of her back is deepened, accentuating even more the pleasantly pouting plumpness of her amazing buttocks. She has a cute, doll-like face, puffing out of those blank pale blue eyes, but of course that has nothing to do with asses, so we'll return to the subject at hand. I stood over her, looking under this damned fool bonnet, still marveling at the arrogant protuberance of that amazing behind. Her big baby eyes stare up at me speculatively and her moist red lips are still playing with that pout. She takes note of my interest in the upturned fanny, those rolling, clenching plump and jutting, high set, moon-round haunches. The deeply divided domes of saucy flesh were taut and baby-smooth, with a slightly rosy glow to them where they pressed against the thin material of the capris pants. She reached in and tied a tag on the radiator and this caused the arching out of her buttocks to even more tantalizingly, superbly pronounced proportions. I must say, quite an adorable bottom, a beautiful fanny and I had visions of it in many positions, squatting and perhaps even some more intimate views than that.
She was smiling back at me (I think my hand was on her hip, and for the life of me I can't explain how that happened!) and she was saying something like, "My daddy was right, you are a mean crop of weeds, aintcha', love."
You see, it was about three o'clock in the morning and who the hell would know anyway, out there in that big dark parking lot, so what the hell, I slid a hand up under her blouse. It was awfully hot under there, for such a cool evening and the little tit was bra-less and smooth in my big rough palm. Right on the bare breast, just squeezing and fooling and playing with the nipple, all the time ramming against her from behind, digging junior into that splendid rear architecture, coming up closer behind her-you know, the fenders on a Fiat are sturdy. The ripely round hind quarters seemed to be lifting to me a bit and I got the impression she was on tippy-toes now. The impact against those hard firm and thrusting moons was so solid it even hurt a little, but nicely.
Her hips arched and thrust backward, offering that round, rosy red target, as though begging for more.
"Ya' can't have it here, not in the parking lot, ya' silly goose," she moaned.
"Well, I really don't know about this ass-backwards car, anyway. Why don't you come along and give me a lesson or two?"
"Sure you must be forty if you're a day, and look at ya' actin' like a young bull, ya' are!"
I wound up the clock mechanism in my legs and walked over to the car trunk, threw my luggage in, grumbling something or other.
"I'm thinkin'," she said, rebuttoning her blouse, "that the shock of it will kill you surely... but... you poor fellow, you're near mad with want. Still... me father says give an American your coat and he'll take your shirt and trousers forby."
"Young lady, let us get something cleared up. I don't give a shit what your father says, he sounds like a man with diarrhea of the mouth, to me." I slammed the trunk closed.
"Ha-ha. You're right and think of it, you n'ery met him once, attall. Tell you what, love. I get off work in an hour. You drive on up the road a spell to Fanny O'Day's and have ya' self a run of whackers, I'll be along in a bit."
"Fanny who's? A run of what?"
"O'Day and whackers," she said. "Fanny's place is open all night and very famous it is for egg flips."
"How nice for her. But see here, I don't understand a word you're talking about, and don't you have a car that wasn't put together on a drunk assembly line? I've never..."
"You'll get used to it, love, everybody does. Fanny's is a mile down the laneway, over there," she pointed. "See you in... oh, say half four. Ya' know I always wanted to write a book. Maybe you can teach me. Well, don't be drinkin' any Fair Day brew while ya' waitin' for me. Sure t'would smother a horse, it would." And she dances off, twirling in little round circles, like a moth spiraling a lamp.
My knees give way, my rump sags, and the entire carcass folds up like a Chinese lantern, and I'm sitting on the bumper of the little car and thinking: No wonder everybody comes back to the old sod. This Ireland is going to be something else!
***************
Fanny O'Day's at three o'clock in the morning, you wouldn't believe!
From hip to hip I would swivel around in my seat, gawking about me in every direction, until a blonde woman plucked at my sleeve and whispered: "Will it be a ball of malt you're havin'? Or is it some Powers?" I forget what it was I finally had but whatever it was it did wonders for the curl in my beard.
I was too taken up with the whole paraphernalia of the place-high stained-glass windows over the tall bar, curious mugs standing like soldiers on guard around the walls-and the barbaric ritual of the all night drinkers, standing here, lying there, dancing over yonder, a quartet twiddling a single note until they all ended up either coughing, gasping or spitting. Big lazy lumps of young fellows over in the corner picking it up where the quartet had committed vocal suicide, starting now to sing Gaelic; girls plowing their way through half an army of men, most of them hunkering back against their seats, tethering their restless gazing from one alcoholic face to another. It all blended together into a seething cauldron of color and I couldn't tell you whether that was because of the mass goings-on or the booze that was chewing up hot mouthfuls of my insides.
"Can I stand ya' another drink, American?" from a monkey-faced old Irishman with a cap pulled down over one bloodshot eye.
"No thanks. I'll just sit here a while and get my health back." I answered and that seemed to tickle everybody's fancy and right then and there I knew I was about to fall in love with Ireland. Of course my ass was dragging from no sleep and I didn't have a clue to what I was paying for the drinks, an-awful lot to do about shillings and half crowns and I kept getting six pounds of metal back for every five pound note I shelled out, but what the hell, I bought everybody a drink and I never felt so wanted in my whole life. Soon I was singing too and you'd be amazed how quietly everyone listened, just like I was Frank Snotnose or somebody. (Lots of them said I looked like Burl Ives, the beard and all-but promptly most everybody agreed I didn't sing like him).
Did you ever hear the story of how Hollywood got its name?
Well listen and I'll tell you from whence the old town came
Sure originally it was a cess pool...
... Let's face it, I was stoned.
They were all going to an early dawn wake and they almost insisted I come along. "But you see, I'm expecting this young lady."
"She'll come along, time enough, never fret. If she's a woman, she'll find ya' no matter where ya' are. They're all alike."
"Here now," the woman barkeep scolded him. "There'll be no scalding words about women folk, not here, not in Fanny O'Day's pub there won't." She was sitting hunched up on a window sill and she looked down at him contemptuously. This had to be Fanny O'Day herself, herself. "You'd scald the heart off a saint with that viper's tongue of yours. And why ain't ya' stayin' home at the fire with your own woman."
"'Cause I'm knowin' that you're needin' my custom, Fanny." And the house roared with laughter.
"That your dirty money may choke you, you sex-hungry old scaldcrow," Fanny said, rinsing the foulness from her mouth with fresh-sucked spittle.
I felt the need to change the subject, just like I used to do with Florie: "No I must really wait for the young lady. I hardly know her, she works down at the auto rental and..."
"Oh, Sergeant O'Brian's daughter," just about everybody chanted.
"Sergeant who?" from me, Sanford, and I think some snot sprayed out of my nose to emphasize the question.
"Our own Police Sergeant O'Brian, oooh, a fine body of a man! And it's Finoola his daughter you're waitin' for? Ooohh, now, we wouldn't want to be interferin' with that, now."
"Well... maybe I could go on to the wake with you fellows..."
But it was too late. Finoola of the elephant-ass was in the doorway.
***************
Now I know what I did in the next few hours was pretty damned foolish, her being a policeman's daughter and all. But you see, by then I was three sheets to the wind with all that booze, and they got a thing in Ireland called bed and breakfast and anyway, by now you ought to be used to me doing damned foolish things, I know I am!
Well, you've a right to leave me stewing in my own misery where I am. But the girl told me about the few ha'pence she gets for her work and how her old man was just about the meanest man in the world since Adolph Hitler and... and... well, you know what a soft hearted old fool I am, can't see young people suffer. So-o-o-o, I found myself following her rump-filled skirt up a creaky set of stairs, and I suppose next I'll have to tell you what kind of mischief I was up to by the time a sting of heat was beginning to creep into the morning sun. Right?
Right.
We undressed, looking into each other's eyes, and that's hard to do when your both stoned on Irish wishkee... eee... Then I had the cruel, brisk taste of her in my mouth, my tongue sliding over her lips and coming to a saliva'd rest on her upturned chin. Her tongue wiggled to the underside of one of my lips and it jutted against my teeth, jabbing. Her eyes were blue and hot, looking up at me, as if begging me to bite. Her young breasts leaned forward and she let them hang in front of me. They drooped gorgeously and a new sweat came out of me. Then she cupped one from beneath and aimed the tip right at my eye. Close up it seemed to open and close. Simmering, our bodies trembled against each other, sweating, tingling.
"God, I think I'll be eatn' you alive!" she screamed and fell to my feet, licking her way back up over me. Her mouth burned me everywhere, over my knees, upward, upward. Over my thighs, where it paused for a teeth nibbling meal, and then... her tongue claimed the big white knob, sopping it with bubbly saliva. Her body writhed and twisted, expressing its wrought up need. I looked down and I could see her white loins wild and wet, damp and thick with bristling flesh. The thickly moistened head of my prick danced in and out of her mouth, resting on her red tongue, moving back along it. I let go a moan of torment. Her mad eyes were open on it, fraught with greed. Her lips plowed deep beneath my balls and she winced at the taste of them. Her hands let the fingers thread menacingly through the thick hair, clutching and letting go in a desperate cadence. Her mouth prowled in circles, then straight up and over the knob again, drawing long sucks from it, stretching it. Her tongue moved slightly upward from it and played, separating hairs on my stomach. Then her hand gripped my cock again and lifted it up into her mouth, a clinging whirlpool of warm tongue revolutions, up and over and down and around. I felt my stomach harden and plead for freedom. Her shoulders were firey red and glossy white all at once. Her mouth gushed with the thick butter of my cock and she gulped at it, hungry for more, licking it dry, swallowing in great sucking gasps, her fingers kneading downward on my stomach, draining more out, drinking more in. I floated over a high, soft summit, and down into a deep, yielding valley, all behind closed eyelids. Her mouth was free of me now and she was crying with her excitement.
"More, more! Sure'n you've got to have more. I want you inside me. I want to feel you come inside me!" she screamed, losing the words as if not their owner.
"I've got more," I promised, doubting it.
"That's it, oh, put it in love. Put it all the way in! Ahhh!" She blew a long stream of hot breath from her mouth onto my lips. "Oh yes, oh yes! It's getting big again in there! Oh, Sanford, tis' grand you are. Uh-huh, that's it. Keep riding me, riding me." She yelped like a lunatic, twisted like a snake, unhinged from her little girl-brain, clasping at my cock, milking it in her lunges at it, her ass up off the bed, dancing a happy dance.
My doubting prick fought to outlast her but the end seemed nowhere in sight. I concentrated and kept plunging push-ups going at her, smashing at her, pounding at her. But she pounded back, unaware of the challenge.
"I'm drowning!" she screamed.
"Come, that's it, baby. Come some more," I demanded, sweat dripping from my hips. She pulled me closer and held me desperately up against her for a long, inflamed minute. Then she let me loose and her eyes smiled up at me calmly.
I rolled off her, onto the floor and I thought I had made the scene and it was over. I bolted, but only an inch or two upward, when her legs came over me and her knees choked me at the throat. A sweet tunnel oozed in front of my mouth. Her face was wild and dry while the creamy slice in front of my lips seeped moistly as if talking to me. With a savage grunt she touched my mouth with it and it opened and closed upon my chin. My lips were dry now, burning. Her head began to swirl in waving revolutions and with a forward thrust, she jammed it all into my parched mouth and, strictly out of habit, my tongue found her clitoris. A ferocious growl came out of her chest and the look she shot down into my eyes said she was my slave. My hands had somehow found their way to her stubborn anal entrance. A feverish shower entombed my mouth as she pressed down harder on it, burying me, locking me inside her, my tongue a dancing saber, my finger a saucy invader. A face of youthful lust looked down at me now, unashamed of her quick victory, but I wanted her to have it, to bathe in it, glory in it, and my tongue went busier, an unsatisfied glutton in a creamy well of raunchy nectar.
The cheeks of her ass were like flaming balls in my hands and her rectum breathed around my submerged finger.
My tongue jabbed gradually, deeper in the warm ocean of her until the whole thick tip of it was swimming everywhere.
Her hands went around my neck and she rammed my head up tighter into her, her convulsions shaking the entire room.
"Oh, love, don't move, I'm goin' to come right on your hairy face. Don't move. Leave your tongue in there. Ahh. There! And there! Oh God! I'm coming on your tongue! Uh... uh."
Eventually she unstraddled me and fell helplessly on her stomach gasping for new breath. Now she thought the battle was over, but to her rug-smiling surprise she felt my warm cylinder between her legs again, seeking its cracked-ass center mark. She grabbed at the rug and suffered the delicious pain of its rear entry in one chilling thrust, her ass rearing up to meet me until the whole smooth head of it hiccuped inside of her.
I anchored all the way into her in one victory charge that sent her screaming into the rug. "Oh, God, you're killing me. No. Leave it there. Now slide it easy in and out. Ahh, lovey, wonderful, wonderful. Just grand!" Her anus twitched, wide in yawning, stuffed to suffocation. The shiny cheeks of her ass swiveled and gnawed against my thighs, searching for more. I put my arms over my head and grabbed at the chair legs in front of me. My lips on her hot neck, brushing her skin again and again. Her hand reached behind and pulled me down into the fire of her no longer convulsing insides. Patiently and calmly I waited for the ruthless animalism to come alive again.
She stiffened as if in a death throe. The veins on her neck stood out like rigid blue worms. My tongue was lolling all over her neck. I gnawed at her shoulders, little teeth nibbling. Then I let breath blow into her ear, watching the goose pimples come out on the back of her neck. My prick was still in her, corrupting her insides. A pain-wracked, delicious feeling. It was as though she was pooling her lust for the next magnificent moment. Her body twisted and yawned wide and twisted again, and I lunged into her a little tighter, bigger I'm sure than any man she had ever had, alive inside her, pulsing, sliding, raking. Her legs came up and around the back of me and the heels of her feet stopped against the base of my spine, digging me into her. Pandemonium was wild in her body again and I was drunk with its many movements. I had her in a death lock, jamming it into her and she was screaming agonizing screams against my ears.
Hysteria gathered in her wide eyes. Her inside's turned over, slushing around my cock like a whirlpool of soft meat.
I held my big, wet cock deep in her, letting her move, letting the poor young thing come again and again. After all that is all she wanted in life-and the only food that she really needed. Ahh, Sanford, that's what you are, food for this starving young world. Rare, very rare.
After a sobering rest, she didn't jump anymore; only her cunt moving in little wet jiggles and the head of my cock jammed against it, demanding entrance to that mushy interior of soaked velvet once more. She did not speak, although her wet lips were at my ear and I could hear her soft breathing. A tiny pebble of flesh, dead center in her cunt, pushed back at my bayonet-prick every time I lunged at her. Her cunt was jumping and quivering, barely grasping the head of my cock, slipping it loose, reaching to grab it again, determined. All at once we were no longer probing, involved in wet fucking. I was plunged into her, out of her. I pressed her shoulders flat and tried to sink still deeper into that warm oven of cunt. She raised her ass, lifting my full weight and each pulse sucked me in deeper. I rubbed her breasts, her belly, her thighs, all furiously. My ass tightened to two cheeks of solid rock and I could feel my insides squeezing every drop of come into one pool of boiling jizzum, ready for the shooting. My prick fit tight and was like a greased hydraulic cylinder.
She smiled at me and lifted one hand to brush back, with a movement of artificial-somehow strained-delicacy, a strand of loose hair that had fallen across her forehead. I stopped for a tense moment, looking into her eyes, held in some sort of mushrooming relationship (you see, I enjoy picking my own relations).
Something was burning in my throat, just a warmth, not a flame. And then a current swept across my chest as her pointed breasts brushed there. Our mouths touched and I inhaled straight on her booze-drenched breath. She held my chin for a moment, smiling at me with suddenly undisguised confidence-the booze no doubt. She had downed a snoot full herself at wonderful Fanny O'Day's.
Her face was white and slender, with those great, watery eyes searching out my own. A hint of a sarcastic smile twinkled at the corner of her mouth and then was gone. It was both timid and wanton. I felt the warmth of her wet lips upon my own, pressing up at me, opening to my closed mouth and then a soft tongue dabbing slowly at my lips until they opened of their own accord. Her tongue danced inside my mouth, playing with my tongue, filling my mouth with her warm saliva; stroking at the roof of my mouth, searching out every hot corner of it. With a whisper at her ear I said, "Finoola, Finoola, whoa-not again."
Again.
Moving quickly I sucked viciously at her pussy with her screaming and lifting her legs high up over my head. She jammed my face into her and I could hardly get my breath, smothering in her juices, her hair in my eyes; I lay back naked as she licked at my feet, my legs, my ass, my back-and back down again over the front of me, licking, licking, licking. Her nipples were hard and then soft and then hard again, as if fluids were running mad inside them. Her muscles were twitching, stretching, reaching, straining, and then resting for a while, while she got her breath.
And then it was as if she would awaken mesmerized, and begin to lightly fondle my balls again. All the time watching anxiously out of one opened eye.
"Don't come! Don't come!" she gurgled. Her eyes were distraught, howling a plea out at me.
My fingers went sliding in and out of her, acquiring a thicker wetness. The lips of her cunt clung like a closed fist at my finger. My lips slid along the cream of her thigh and came to rest against my own submerged finger. She gasped, frantic. I lounged my lips around the hole, teasing, hearing her tormented gulps with my free ear.
I kissed it deep and long, pressing my stiffened tongue to penetrate a little deeper. Her stomach was all motion, all moving and I stiff-stabbed her a hundred times, soft-stabbed her another hundred. She heaved and tossed an insane dance, saying all kinds of crazy things, making all kinds of promises. I was half suffocating in her heat. She cupped her knees with her hands and pulled her legs higher and I sunk deeper into her, and for a minute she rammed my head still deeper into her, but I pushed her arm away. After that she didn't push anymore, just playing that same slow pumping motion. Then she flung her legs high and apart, her hips hinged up to me, and my whole face was submerged into her then, as she flowed flavor something like honey and my tongue rolled in it. I slowed down and just sipped at the whirlpool of her and this seemed to drive her to still higher peaks.
"Oh, I can't stand anymore! Love it, honey, love it, ya' sweet man".
I stood up quickly and then fell straight down on her, ramming my cock into her like a ripping sword.
And that hurt! You know, fucking can be a very painful thing at times. You are studying your lessons as we go along, aren't you? So far you've learned that Kotex is tax deductible and fucking can be painful. Pay attention, in the last chapter I'm going to ask questions!
Ho! Am I fucked out or am I fucked out. It's all over for Junior, he's a limp noodle and I examine my balls and there's nothing left of them but a couple of ball bearings in a beeby-sack. Humiliating. But relaxing.
She is sleeping and I hadn't noticed it before, but she is quite beautiful. Besides her ass, I mean. She is on her stomach and it's a good thing these Irish ceilings are high, because this ass you just got to see to believe!
Does fucking sober you up? It does me. And when you get sober you think all kinds of wasted thoughts-like about your wife (why?) and about this girl's father, a police Sergeant, Jesus, Mary and Joe! Right then and there I decide to hell with how beautiful she is, and I really couldn't take that ass as a steady diet anyhow, so I washed my face-yipe! Ice cold water out of the "HOT" faucet, these Irish really know how to hurt a guy. Seems their only talents are fucking and drinking. Well those are the basics of life, anyhow. So I tippy-toe to the door and that's when I find out one more thing about the Irish. As carpenters, they should have stayed drunk! The door lock doesn't line up with the door jam, the key doesn't turn and... may Richard Burton die of tit-suffocation, I'm locked in!
Now this takes a little quiet thought so I sit myself down on the floor and cry a lot. The window sill is six inches wide and below that a three-floor drop, forget it! (although I once thought seriously about becoming a tight-rope walker with the circus, but I was only seven at the time). I look at Finoola's sleeping face and, prisoner in this room or not, I don't regret a thing! As Bishop Sheen once said, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." And he ought to know (I think).
So now I have the choice of yelling like hell for one of the chambermaids or somebody to rescue me or just sit and look out the window for a while down on the street below and see what develops. By now it is daytime, I'm sober and able to think more clearly about the police sergeant father of the nude girl sleeping on my bed. So I decide to quietly look out the window, don't make waves when you're chin-deep in shit, right?
I stand, one foot propped up on the white-painted radiator, that doesn't work, looking out the broad window. And down on the wide street below a horse cart plops by, encouraged by the Gaelic calls of a boy with a red-blotchy face, each word coming out with the force of a sling shot. I turn from my window dreaming and draw my bushy eyebrows down threateningly at Finoola's uneven snoring. Women just shouldn't snore, ruins a whole image that I cherish dearly. She squirms and I think maybe she is going to wake up but no, she just sleepily smooths the bedspread, busy fingers fluffing the pillow, removing the hot water bottles. I let my eyes drop down over the tilt of her tiny nose and I wish to God I was twenty again. And the morning bells of the Catholic church around the corner ring on and on as if trying to tell me something, or worse still, demanding it.
I look at the white tile sink with the high faucets which are strangers indeed to the feel of hot water and I'm thinking maybe we Americans take too much for granted, got ourselves spoiled and weak. Still... hot water, a shower, the California sun, warm sweet and comforting-Christ, I'm homesick already! And above me, out this window, this damned heavy Irish sky, darkly hanging over the deserted town; and cold, my feet are cold, and this is mid-July! Death's cold embrace should not be playing its games with your toes in mid-July. That's only reasonable. The smile on Finoola's sleep-dreaming face is turning coquettish now, a devil of a girl she is. And later, no doubt a hell of a woman. Her face is white and I'm not too sure I prefer that to the tanned sexy ones of the California beaches. The white cheeks make her look too damned innocent, gets my soul-searching in motion and conscience I can do without! Hail, Finoola, full of grace and all that good shit.
Across the wide street, through another window I can see a young woman scrubbing a wash basin vigorously, sponging the mirror with the other hand at the same time. The double-movement fascinates me and my feet aren't cold anymore. She sees me (can she see that I'm near naked?) and waves. I wave. Christ this whole damned trip was insane, sentimental foolishness. Couldn't I just read HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY and get the same inspiration? Mebbe not, I dunno. Do you realize this place is ninety-nine percent Catholic, this kid's old man is a cop and these religion-soaked Irishmen just might ride me out of town on a donkey? God knows they got enough of them on the streets, outside the town hall, looking inside the men's public toilet, everywhere, donkeys, donkeys, donkeys. And me the biggest jackass of them all.
The last thing I see of the lady across the street is her fiery red hair, pony tail bouncing and I'm thinking she must think me a luney, a creep and some kind of weird. Oh, well.
The street down below is wide, a hundred and fifty feet in breadth, scarcely a soul anywhere (unless donkeys have souls, which they probably do), deserted except for three parked cars, a Ford, a Volkswagen (makes me more homesick) and my own Fiat, compliments of big-ass Bertha on the bed behind me. I look straight down below at the gravel outside the hotel door, and then wonder if there was any planning behind the colors of the two-storied houses across the way. One mint green, next mud-grey then pale blue followed by a peach one, all closely attached, arched doorways, flower pots in clean windows, stone chimneys with tile pipes pointing skyward like a giant organ. Up the street an arched alleyway, then a higher and wider building with the lettering OIFIG AN PHOIST over the paneled wood door. Must be the post office, a' bit of satisfying detective work there, what with the three mail shoots outside.
Three dogs come trotting down the center of the street just as I am wrestling with the problem of whether I have to shit or not (Yipe! No toilet in the room and the door locked shut! Forget it, think about something else). Jesus, here comes another donkey, this one running, pulling a flat cart with a barefooted, short pants boy on it and the boy can't be more than ten and doesn't look the least bit scared.
A few angry growls and a sassy bark and I figure out the situation on the dogs; two males and a female and one of the males is a coward because in short order the two lovers are alone and whimpering, happily, if a bit painfully. Did you know dogs have bones in their pricks? Well they do. (Read that on Yom Kippur in still another book. Somehow the association of circumcision and bones in pricks sounded all too painful so I never finished the book.) Damn, I do have to shit, now what?
Well I might as well get to it and tell you that the problem became very acute and the door remained stubborn. So I dressed, tried to draw courage from my seven-year-old thinking on the subject of tightropes, and finally forced the soles of my shoes out onto that six-inch sill. A bugger of a drop, there, and my legs are trembling, don't look down, DON'T LOOK DOWN!
But I do, looking straight down between my legs and letting a breeze-cracking fart drop three stories and for some reason I feel like the Luftwaffe over England. Between my legs I can see four Irish wives standing side by side, bosom beside bosom, three floors below. Irish women are chesty, something to do with the Spanish Armada, I think. They are looking straight up my rectum, my legs apart, and their mouths are wide open. I'm grabbing finger fulls of the stone wall and my thighs are doing some kind of advertisement for jello. I try to be brave and look down between my legs again at the eight breasts side by side down there. And that gives me courage because it reminds me of a song and when I sing to myself it has a remarkably calming effect.
So there goes Sanford Patty, your Man In Ireland, sliding one shoe to the other, heels hanging in space, women screaming below... and singing:
I got a lovely bunch of coconuts
See them all standing in a row.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head
Give 'em a twist, a twist of the wrist
That's what the man just said-
**********
The next room was empty, the window wide open (thank God!) and the door far more reasonable. I raced down the hall, tripped over a fire bucket full of sand and my shot at the throne, would have been a credit to Wilt Chamberlin. The crap was most enjoyable. Shimmering, Terrifying, Wonderful! Oh, I already said that (twice). But you see, my publisher pays by the word so go along with me a little, okay?
Chapter Two. "AMEN"
Sanford Patty, more popularly known world-wide now as "just plain Norm", -short for normal, made a silent and stealthy exit from the town of Shannon and turned his little Fiat northward. He tried to convince himself that he would hear no more of Finoola or her Fuhrer-cop father, but of course he knew he would.
By late afternoon he had had it with moving the faces of determined donkeys out of the road in front of him, waving back at old women on their way to church, dodging on-coming trucks on the narrow laneway. Once he stopped to ask a priest directions and the old Barry Fitzgerald type simply answered, "Follow me and may God go with you," and then proceeded to drive all ball-busting hills at ninety miles an hour. Normal Norm shifted, grunted, misjudged the bogs along the side of the road, almost run over a nun, shifted the upside-down gear shift again, grunted, burped and then decided the old priest must be nuts. He slowed the Fiat back down to forty and yelled out the window at the disappearing clergyman, "May God go with you, you need him more than I do! I hope you catch the crabs from your next confessional!"
In the late afternoon he stopped by the side of a river. He sat on a rock sticking up out of the water of braken. He was thinking, for the most part about Ingy, now and then about Finoola. Sitting there, like Napoleon at St. Helena, lonely, sleepy and bored. The afternoon sun of the summer day was sinking, but slowly, westward. He felt it burning his back as he stared, without seeing, along the vast stretch of four-foot-high bracken which lay between him and the out-cropping of other rocks at the foot of the limestone hills.
Those hills now blazed green in the heat and light of the sun. And the sky above pale blue with feathery wisps of motionless clouds. The only sound to be heard was the steady myriads of insects' wings. A salty smell, somehow that of the river, but he registered nothing, just dreaming. It was six o'clock in the evening and the bottom seemed to have dropped out of life, nothing real. And then the distant cawing of a flight of rooks, winging their way in formation toward the sunset. Now high over him, winged feathers and the great pinions moved in rhythm with the raucous voices. In order to watch the last of them, he lay back on the rock and stared into the sky from this awkward position.
For an hour he slept, awoke refreshed and only then did he see the sign by the readjust ahead of his parked car:
Kilmilhill Seven Miles Ahead
Seven Pubs and One Hotel
It took him twenty minutes to get the Fiat started again.
In the center of the town Sanford passed a stone statue of two executed heroes of the guerilla days in Ireland. What he didn't know was: Quarter mile away, down one of the little ribbon roads, Amen faced the pain of the realization that if he had not been delayed in Grotty's Tavern on the way home he might have made it in time. He slipped spit around in his mouth to wash away the taste of the Powers Irish Whiskey dished up by the pious publican behind that high-standing bar. At twenty years old, and after four years of drinking the stuff, he thought his taste buds should have become accustomed to the after-tinge of it, but no, no indeed. Whatever about it, by the time he was within sight of his own house his senses were to reawaken to find every window lit up and a mumbling group of neighbors already bobbing their heads round the door.
But it came as no great shock to him, for his mother had been with the ailment for almost a year now, had been anointed on four previous false alarms and actually it was the only reason he was back home here in this awful town of Kilmilhill. Awful after he had lived these past three years in Belfast. And now, for sure, she was gone. Gone, and for a moment he felt the cold touch of the future rudely invading the present, a brutal confrontation. His mother... and he straightened his narrow shoulders, pulled himself higher to combat his bantam stature, disguised the drink in his legs as he walked the last few yards of the laneway. He cautioned himself into sober silence and merely nodded to the whispers from the country friends: "Sorry. God Bless her. Courage, son."
They shuffled their feet, made a polite path for him to pass through and now he heard his sister's sobbing voice call:
"Ahhh, here you are Amen!" But the rush of words, though ravished with grief, held little trace of sympathy in it; rather, it was low-pitched and accusing. "Where have you been at all? Mammy dying and you nowhere to be found and all too soon 'twas too late."
Amen looked at the floor, shook his head, felt a tear rising now.
"Think shame for yourself, brother."
"I do, I do. Would it have made a difference? Did she know at the end?"
"No. You're right," and now his sister cried openly, "No one has ever known an easier death. We barely had time for the priest."
With legs still heavy and unsure, he climbed the twelve wood steps to the upper bedroom, looked in just in time to see the woman threading the rosary beads through his mother's tightly clasped fingers, while another fluffed the white hair to rest easier upon the pillow. Amen's lips quivered, while his eyes suddenly shut themselves, once more the scolded boy standing before his mother, as he had been so many times in years past.
The women stepped back to permit him to kneel at the bedside, and, face pressed to his cupped hands, he stared into the blackened deep of his closed eyelids. No use. He couldn't pray. He struggled to his feet and permitted his puzzled gaze to shift from one pitying old face to another. The crowd would start to come soon. Downstairs in the parlor he could hear the chairs being pushed back against the walls in preparation for the wake. No. He simply could not sit that out. He had come home to be here when she died, now that was done. There would be no drink at the wake, his sister would see to that. And he felt stripped naked in his need for it now. His face flushed up and his eyebrows drew together, trying to think of something appropriate to say, a word to project, this was the time! It was to no avail-only the wet tear drying on his eyelid and that damned longing in the back of his mouth.
He pushed past the women, ran down the steps and was halfway out of the parlor when his sister grabbed at his elbow. "Amen, where are you going?"
"To get a bloody drink!"
"Aren't we a right mean crop of weeds, though? You'll be the talk of the parish." Her voice was not lacking in conviction.
"The parish be damned! And am I to sit here like a mechanical toy and rush to every outstretched hand that comes through that door, everyone sorry, sorry, sorry. Can't take that, Dolly. Can't take it. And a clergyman staring at me all the time like a guard, while he himself slips out now and again to drink his fill and dare anyone to criticize. No, mammy is dead and someday you'll be dead and I will be dead and everybody dies and I'm going down to the hotel to get meself a run of whackers until me mind is numb enough so that I can handle the whole affair."
"Amen, please," And she stepped forward and gave him a quick hug, whispering now. "Haven't you shamed us enough with your riots in Belfast? Mother had to hear you called a terrorist and everything else before she passed. Can't you show her a little respect now?"
He appealed to the alcohol-numbed muscles in his thighs to pad him across the parlor rug, never looking back at his sister, silently ignoring the inevitable:
"Twas the will of God," at the front door, from the bowed heads.
Up the road, jaunting, releasing the tight tension in his thighs, now. An urge to whistle but he daren't. Walking beside the deep dark and mysterious currents of the River Shannon, over rocks and past stoned walls, green with wildly-twisting ivy, white with ancient cracks. And light as day though it was not half-nine in the July evening. Over an alley of splintered rocks that dug into the thin sole of his shoes, past the grey church with the sky-pointing steeples. A quickening step going by the two dimly lit pubs, no use of that now for only the locals would be in there and that would be no better than his own parlor. No, the hotel, where the tourists would be gathered round the bar, asking silly questions and trying to figure out what a half crown was in American money. Across the broad street in front of The Riverside Hotel, in the side entrance, over the carpeted lobby. And into the bar... sitting on a stool next to an old bugger with dark hair and a frowzy beard, devilish eyes. A nod to him and a, "Can I stand you a drink? My name is Amen."
Sanford Patty says "Huh?" and then "Oh, sure," and forces his beard open to a friendly smile. An outstretched hand, "My name is Sanford Patty, young man. But you can call me Norm, everybody does." They touched glasses and Norm had the thought that little Amen looked like a miniature Rover from back in Hollywood, and he didn't feel lonely anymore.
And that's when the Englishman came into the bar.
The Englishman's voice was horse-gentry and Imperial.
"When you're ready, my dear fellow!" He was tall, with a slightly tweeded stoop.
The hotel bartender swabbed the counter with a beer-smelly cloth.
"A beer off the ice, my good man." Norm looked down the bar at the man and became conscious of a beak-like nose that had a twitching-nostril thing going for it. The Englishman gripped his beer glass so that his bony knuckles came up blue and white. With meticulous care he placed the glass on the beer mat, staring in front of him, eyes glazed. "Are accommodations available here? Good meals, well served?" He asked.
"Have it in bed if you wish," the bartender let out the side of his mouth.
"Have what in bed?"
"Your breakfast, and what kind of a house do you think we're running?" The bartender raised one eyebrow, lowered the other, drank his own beer with drops escaping and trickling down his chin, then wiping his mouth with the heel of his hand. The Englishman managed a coughing smile, looked at Norm and Amen, and sipped the foam off his drink again.
"So, gentlemen, and do you sit here and feast your eyes on the bright young things that come in to cross their legs? Americans, French? Aha! But it would be London, the home of the mini-skirt where you might have a niftier time of raunching it."
"Here, now," the bartender did the eyebrow trick again, "The two gentlemen aren't bothering you none. So let them be. And yourself, an Englishman are you? With a double-barreled name no doubt. And the more resounding barrel perhaps belonging to your mammy, indeed. And now, if I know me trade, you'll be telling me how England is scarce of life and large of soul. And I'll be telling you that Ireland is rich in both, but starving just the same. Now then, with all that grand talk out of the way, our rate is twenty-seven shillings a day, meals included, three a day, high tea and low tea extra."
The Englishman let his smile go broader, then looked out the window behind him, the gaze still dwindling in his eye. "You Irish have acres of afternoons, don't you. It's night and no dark yet," and then looking up, "Is it going to spill?"
"Sweet bride of Christ, man! Do you people ever answer a question directly? Is it a room you're wantin' or not?" from the bartender, now red-faced.
"You know what might very well spill in Ireland, and pretty soon if you watch closely," Amen said, staring down the Englishman, "some thin English blood, that's what might spill, if you don't take your long English noses out of Irish affairs up north."
"I would say our Cromwell did all the blood-spilling that is necessary, wouldn't you, young man?" The Englishman stood, his arms limp but his fingers jerking with a life of their own. He turned and walked to the door, sawdust flaking his shoes.
"Wait a minute, limey, is it Cromwell you want to be talkin' about?" Amen was off the stool, raising himself straight again.
Sanford Patty breathed into his drink, "Oh, my. Nst. Nst."
"Be on with ya'," Amen snarled, "the smell of ya' has me stomached." Although he remained motionless, Amen's whole body from snout to prick seethed with controlled energy. Smothered tension dominated the room with a threatening fist. Sanford's drink was shaking.
Sanford was not listening to Amen's words but one thing was clear-there was only one enemy in the world left for the boy. The English.
The Englishman came walking back from the door with a confident gate to his long thin legs. It looked like a mismatch to Sanford, the Englander had to be six-two and the fierce vigilance of Amen seemed to repudiate the huddled body, craven, lumpish, dingy, the boy was a near-midget.
The words grew hotter and Sanford caught names he wasn't familiar with: Tom Barry and Roger Casement, who the hell were they? Must have been Irishman, though, because when the Englishman repeated "Casement" he spit-and the spittle sprayed Sanford's shoe. "Now see here! I'm an American and..."
Amen pounced. He grabbed the Englishman by the back of the head where the grey collar-hairs begin. He whipped up the head, shook it violently and slammed it violently to the ground. For one vulnerable second he loomed over his enemy, his slavering jaw content to threaten. A yelp. Amen's foot digging into the Englishman's side. A wild howl. Amen's fingers tearing at the Englishman's ear. Bleeding from the lacerated ear and jowl, the tall man struggled back to his feet.
Amen turned to Sanford. "You might as well take the cowardly brute outa' here. A limey's no use to fight once he starts giving tongue." Sanford, trembling and straining, trying to figure out which way to run.
The Englishman advanced cautiously. Every step he paused, straddle-legged, watchful, chin outthrust. Then he gripped Amen by the collar and was tugging him out in the street.
"Oh, cut it out, fellers," from Sanford. Then he followed them out, asking himself why?
The two fighters crouched, locked into stasis by the hate and fear that glared back at them through alien eyes. So long did they remain poised that a shout went up from the gathering street crowd when the tension was broken at last by the pouncing Amen.
A sudden skid of Amen's feet and it was the Englishman's chance. His body came to life, squirming, wriggling, jerking. Now Amen was bleeding, one eye damaged.
Someone yelled; "Relieve the poor Mr. Chips of half his bucking tongue, Amen."
Amen swung a round-houser, missed and caught unexpecting Sanford in his unprotected belly. Sanford doubled like an Oriental bow, his forehead cracked onto the Englishman's chin. Now Sanford's brow was scored and bleeding and through open fingers he looked down at the pavement. There, the Englishman was out cold.
A cheer from the crowd and then... "Alright, alright. Back up, back up." A blur of a blue uniform and the shiny peak of a stiff cap going past Sanford's eye.
Half an hour later both he and Amen were in a jail cell looking at each other and trying to remember the other's name.
"Well, I'm sorry. I'm feelin' mighty strong about the British these days," Amen said. "My sister will be down to bail us out soon as she hears."
Sanford shaking his head. Looking at Amen with unbelieving eyes, under a cut eyebrow. "Beautiful. This is just beautiful! I'm in Ireland one day and I'm in the hoosegow. You don't seem to understand, I'm a very peacable man."
"Yes, I thought you were. I like you, sir."
"Do me a favor and hate me. So far your friendship ain't paying off."
"My sister will be here."
"I don't need your sister. I got my own bail money. That isn't the point. They told me before I left the States not to play the role of the ugly American. And look at me. How much uglier can I get. You got a cigarette?"
"No."
"Figures. Why do you hate the English so much?"
"It's a long story. Goes back fifty years."
"Well then skip it, I only plan to be here another fifteen minutes until somebody tells me how much it cost to get out of this tank of shit."
Sanford, looking out the barred windows and humming:
"Oh, if I had the wings of an angel..."
The fine was ten pounds and Sanford paid it smilingly. "Let's see, that's twenty... four dollars, American money. There ya' are, sir."
"Sanford..."
"Yes, Amen?"
"Sure I don't think no one attall has told me sister. Will you stop by me house on your way and tell her?"
"Well... I really don't like to get any more mixed up in this thing."
"It's only four streets and you have to walk that way anyway, back to your car at the hotel."
"Well..."
"Send her for me and then we'll put you up for the night."
"Well..."
"Did you register at the hotel?"
"No."
"Well thar ya' are! They lock the front door at ten. And it's half eleven."
"Okay, what's your address."
"You go two streets to the left and then..."
***************
When he got to Amen's house Dolly was crying on the couch and except for the sobs the place was silent. She was alone. What's more, she didn't have ten pounds in the house. Amen would have to wait 'till morning 'till the bank opened.
"Well, Amen said you might be able to put me up for the night. But you being here alone, it might not look right..."
"Oh, Yes. Will you have some tea? Me brother has got you in a terrible jam, hasn't he. Yes... I suppose the neighbors would talk... if they knew I mean. My, you have a pretty beard. I've always liked men with beards. But beard or no beard, I haven't a man yet, and it's twenty seven I am. And alone. Have you ever been alone, Mr. Patty? Milk in your tea?"
So he talked to her for an hour on the couch, patted her hand and wished she'd stop fluttering her eyelashes like Zazu Pitts.
When he stopped patting her hand she started squeezing his. So he fucked her until she was a river.
***************
He shook her arm until she was half awake. He was sitting nude on the parlor floor and she was deep into the pillows of the couch. "Pssst. Where do I sleep? It's one o'clock in the morning."
Her loose arm pointed upstairs. Snoring again. Christ, why must women snore!
He climbed the dark stairs, took the first bedroom door he came to. Didn't put on the lights, neighbors you know. Got into bed on the left side, feeling, feeling.
Next to him, the corpse didn't move so he didn't know.
He fell asleep quickly, that first deep dreamless sleep. About three thirty he half woke, spent a half hour wiggling about and then became thoroughly convinced that Irish women were a passionless lot. Well, at least she had stopped snoring.
The bedsprings creaked as he shifted peevishly.
***************
It was hardly a peaceful night's sleep with sheep dogs barking, cattle bawling and roosters crowing their heads off at daybreak. He pulled the bedclothes over his head and that's when he decided he'd had quite enough of Kilmilhill. With the sun just an hour old, he slowly, quietly scuttled out of the house, along the pathway with a lurching, waddling gait. Passing the length of the outhouses and he tried not to breathe in. Scurrying, hurrying and scurrying again. Beside a thick hedge, bending through a hole in it, gambling o on a short cut with stamping feet and flailing ash-plant, he headed back to his car, still parked in front of the hotel.
This time it took a half hour to start. Damn Finoola!
Half a mile out of town he saw the bantam figure up ahead, cocked cap, a thumb in the air.
"Amen! How the hell did you get out?"
"Oh, soon as me Uncle Cecil came on duty he let me go. He's got no time for Englishmen hisself. Very sympathetic he was."
"Your uncle is a policeman?"
"Yes, a fine one. Say, where are you off to?"
"I dunno. Just off."
"Well, Sanford old boy, come with me then."
"To where, jail again?"
"Naw. Me mammy's dead and there ain't no need for me here anymore. I'm off to live a spell with some tinker friends of mine. I think we can find them up around the Kilrush area. They just wander around, free as a bird. You Americans call 'em gypsies, we jus' call 'em tinkers. Great life. Free. What say?"
"Oh your mother has died. I'm sorry. When did it happen?"
"Yesserday."
"Yesterday?"
"Yesserday."
"... Amen... where is she laid out? Today I mean."
"Couldn't say. Last I saw her she was in the bed upstairs in me house." Amen bites into an apple.
"... Upstairs. In the bedroom." Sanford blinks. He has to shift again, there going up another damned hill, "Amen, let me ask you something. How many bedrooms are in your house?"
"Just two. Why?"
"Oh, nothin'. Errr... this town of Kilrush, is it far? And... do you think I can get a bath real quick, once we get there?"
Chapter Three. "Ita"
It was the next morning that she saw him for the very first time and of course she hadn't a clue of how the man was to pick up the bent corners of her young existence and change her life into the most swishing, roaring around music tinkling merry-go-round, catch the ring, love, the world is spinning!
But when she saw him standing there in front of the new hotel in Kilrush (they had named it the Irish House), the sight of him hit her like a faraway boom of a cannon fired to announce a white ship coming into a harbor which had expected it anxiously for a long time. The boom, of course, was the flapping of a green and white awning above the hotel's entrance and above his head as well; but him, he was real all right.
She really couldn't guess his age, what with the beard and all, but he certainly was a young lifetime older than she, forty maybe. There would be evenings, later on, when the liquor was hitting him right, when his eyes would be lustrous and his face becoming younger. But right now he looked like forty to Ita, a man of confidence. And he thought well of himself and not without justification. His clothes were well cut and he wore them with assurance. He was somebody as opposed to the nobodies on the one main street, wide as a mile, in Kilrush. A nobody garbage collector with a slouch-backed horse that walked beside him pulling a fly-infested cart. A nobody kid from the milk wagon, running bottles back to each door. Nobodies and so was she... but him! standing there stroking his beard-a real somebody.
As he turned abruptly, he almost knocked into Ita. Indeed for a moment he caught her hand to prevent her from falling backwards. Then he stepped back, raised his lips in a smiling apology and went back into the hotel lobby.
Ita stared after him, gathering her "baby" blankets up in a resembling length again. Watching him walk away, that rare old feeling of coming loose at the joints again swept over her. He looked like the devil himself.
Then he came back. Like what he had seen the first time hadn't registered fully. What he had seen was Ita and under all that dirt how could it register. He stopped four feet in front of her. Ita cleared her throat, face warm with flush; "Tapence for the baby?" and then was sorry she said it, her better judgement giving her a little tug. The tremelo in her voice showed it.
He studied her as he would a jewel case. They stood facing each other and Ita begged herself to relax. As she watched his eyes cloud, his face underwent a strange formation. His cheeks smoothed and his mouth pursed and Ita had the feeling she was being stripped naked and washed with the warm wash rag of his eye.
"Baby?" He asked, with fixed eyes now, "Your baby?"
"No... err... I have no baby here. I'm just hungry, I guess. Sorry."
"No, don't be sorry. You... are very... lovely. Hungry, you say?"
"Mister, I'm a tinker and I can see you're an American, so I'm guessin' you wouldn't know about that. And you wouldn't be knowin' about hunger either."
"You'd be surprised, surprised indeed how much an old coot like me would know about. Read GOOD HOUSEKEEPING all the time. A tinker..." he went on, "I have a young friend here that tells me that means Gypsy. Well, now Gypsy, do you have a name? I can't call you gypsy or tinker, now can I?"
"Why call me anything? Just give me a tapence and I won't be bothering ya' none anymore. Me name is Ita, if it means anything."
"Well, Ita, my name is Sanford Patty."
She smiled, but there was something sarcastic at the corners of it.
"Why are you smiling. Oh, my name. It is a bit corny, isn't it. Tell you what. You know damned well a two pence isn't going to make a dent in a meal for your hungry tummy. What say I take you upstairs to my room, let you have a hot shower, and look, look! there's a dress shop down the street, I'll go pick you up something frilly while you bathe-yes, you'll have to settle for a bath, this damned hotel has no showers, forgot that-and then, and then you can have a real breakfast with me. Think that oughta' do it?"
"Breakfast? Me?... in there, in that dining room? Oh, no, I'd get me ass... I mean my behind busted up in jail, I would."
"Well I know some thin' about that subject too. How about it? The water isn't very hot and the bathroom is down the hall, not in the room. But these Irishmen really go all out on breakfast, tea, toast, hot cereal, rasher and eggs... you know what rasher is? Bacon, only found that out yesterday. I thought it had something to do with strawberries."
Ita licked her lips and didn't know whether it was over the likes of him or the sound of the food. She just nodded her head and that started the whole mad dream to rolling. He peeked into the lobby, saw that the woman owner-desk clerk wasn't about and the old arthritic handyman was sleeping with his chin propped on the broom handle, and then he whisked Ita up the thinly carpeted stairs, panting all the way to the third floor and humming:
There is nothing like a dame,
Nothing in this world
And they don't all screw the same,
There ain't anything like a dame.
**********
"The bath isn't really necessary," she said, but unbuttoning the back of her dress.
"Oh yes it is. I have a hunch... one of my rare hunches, bet you didn't know I was rare, did you... anyway I have a hunch that down under all that dirt I'm going to find the most beautiful bundle of torment a sperm-dominated man like myself could imagine."
She smiled shyly but not another word was said while she unashamedly stripped herself naked. And Sanford just watched, mesmerized, caught with the fantastic upward line of jutting, straining breasts, full bouncing, rigid and waiting, oiled for his sweaty hands, nipples spread for his thirsty licking, bright red nipples looking as though they were neon-lit, seeming to fizz with leaking passion. And those babyish, pouting lips and every pore of her filthy flesh breathing with emergency-heat.
Ita's eyes were unrepentant, watching his obsessive touring scrutiny. She was trying to act aloof to his stare, but she was betrayed when her huge nipples left their repose, disturbed by his eyes, and the ripe buds seem to inflate into elongated red grapes.
Big bunch-flesh honeydews that had Sanford utterly entranced by her raw and sprightly beauty and he longed to sponge that full and natural looking soft mouth with his pulsing, rearing tip of rare prick, then turning for an upward glance at the length of her legs, eyes dipping through all those squashy delights. Ho! All splashing with the love-syrup his over-active imagination created for him. She bent over to put her shoes back on for the jaunt down the hallway and Sanford took an eye-greedy hold on the tight and sweltering upturned cheeks, fat little hillocks (good gawd!) and he thought he heard himself wheezing a bit under the wet appetite that went prancing through his body.
"You better not parade down the hall like that, love. Here slip my robe on."
At the feel of the silk robe against her flesh, Ita let her mouth go all gulpy and cute. The feel of it was much the same as when a cool licking tongue would stroke at the undersides of her breasts and the sensation terminated deep inside her naval, making her whole insides an ice cube in a pot of hot syrups.
Out in the hall Sanford pointed a silent finger at the unmarked privy door and she walked off, giving him another perky smile and doing a few bumps and grinds for his wolfing-up eyes.
***************
Ita hummed happily as she dropped the robe to her feet, preparing herself for the plunge into the half-filled old fashioned tub. She had never thought much about baths, but now she associated it in her mind with a feeling of pure sensual delight. Then she stepped naked into the warm water. She scooped down low, lifting handfuls of it and letting it beat down upon her, the stimulating force of warm, stinging sensation exhilarating.
She carefully lathered the soft flesh of her body and then watched the soap disappear in rivulets down and over her tits, breathing belly, cream-fleshed thighs, legs. Stroking the bubbles, she devoted an extra measure of care of what went between those legs and again there was a sense of expansion in her nipples as a result of these circular manipulations. She always enjoyed how the tips pulsated with each heart beat. Then for a few delicious moments she caressed the vibrant hardness of them.
Ita soaked, refilled the tub again and soaked some more, watching the dirt drift up to the water's surface, form a ring of something resembling soot around the white tile of the tub. Not enough, this was grand! and she refilled the tub a third time, soaked again, soapless this time. Then she got out of the tub and, on her knees, ran the faucet over the back of her head, sudsed the dark hair into whip-creamy white softness. As she rinsed, the water grew colder and colder, causing her to gasp in shock as the needles prickled the back of her neck and ran down through the crevice between her boobies.
And the prince will take the Gypsy mess
And clothe her in a frilly dress.
She sang as she toweled vigorously until she fairly glowed with new spirit and vigor. Even though closely cropped, her hair was wild with waves, bright with lustre, thick with new life.
Going back down the hall, a school-teachery type woman with silver glasses was locking her hotel door and turned to Ita with a false smile, "Good morning, dear."
"Sure and it 'tis!" Ita gulped, walking faster. And then under her breath, "How good it 'tis y'al never know again, ya' old flabby assed walrus."
She was in the room and plopped in a sitting position on the bed before she even noticed that he was in the bed too, stark naked. Ho!
"Will breakfast wait for just a few minutes?" he smiled up at the back of her head from the pillow.
Without even turning to look she was aware of his bouncy prick stirring behind her.
Beads of sweat ran down my shoulders and it was here her tongue stroked first. I looked at her dark, spongy hair. Her voice was dreamy and distant. "You like it?" I closed my eyes as she dropped lower, stroking, stroking with that soft, warm tongue. She'd swallow the sweat and stroke again. I could see her face now and a tenderness came over it as she worked, mouth open, only her tongue touching me. My hand went around my cock and I lifted it to her, (I've always been quite generous about things like that), and junior was hard and beating. Her mouth opened wider to take it, but then she whispered, "No, lovey, your back first... here", and she turned me around. She licked down my spine, chilling it. And then her avid mouth was working harder and with more urgency, down under and around. I grabbed the wall for support as she went around to the front of me.
She had it now! Big and round and sucking at it furiously. Ho! Her eyes were half closed, languorously looking up at me, her mouth filled with me. My cock throbbed against the roof of her mouth and cupped it from below, but her teeth never touched it. She very delicately drew her white fingers over my springing balls, making them bristle. I could look down the cavity of her nude back and then her hips began a slow, easy indulation, resting on her heels.
I was watching her face now, and those eyes still looked up into mine, half lidded and asking, "You like it?"
Her fingers crept into my cock hairs and then stretched my magic margin deeper into her demanding mouth.
"Faster! Faster!" I ordered. I was always destined to be a leader, give orders, that sort of thing-oh never mind.
Her arms went above her head and each hand grabbed at the back of her neck, stretching her convulsing body even further. My hands were down on her breasts and they were like velvet and canvas, soft here, rough there.
Straightened again, she now half turned the silhouette of her firm breast up toward me, and in so doing, stretched the hardened nipples out of their natural roundness. How bold they stood! Hard and knotted and bold. Her mouth was soft and open and ready. I could not resist. Little thrills pinged through my balls, like velvet pins. I reversed my position, my lips on her mouth now and then sliding down her body over each delicious valley and curve. My hands found her moving hips and I eased her higher off the bed to meet my tongue. I moved it there, wedged between the two milky thighs. My tongue found its way in little circles around her thighs and she jack-knifed her legs up, presenting me with the warm, moist lobe. I continued, loyal to the little circle pattern, moving my mouth back up again to the cunt. It seeped with passion, sucking its red lips in and out. My tongue circled inward, found its depth, sucked and breathed in a slow calm beat. (You know, it's difficult to breath in a position like that; pity the poor scuba diver.) Simultaneously, she began equally slow throws back up at me. I licked up the flesh, my face moist, and panting harder now. I lifted my head and looked back up at her face. It told me that I was licking her into semiconsciousness. Keep your senses girl, these are the jolly times!
I wiggled my burning cock around and up to her and I felt her mouth enclose the burning rod again, the red, spongy knob. Her tongue was hot and moist and softly working. Warm saliva rolled from my knob with her strokes. She seemed to be drawing at my inner navel strings, sucking them out from inside me, deep in my entrails... entrails? Where did that word come from, I'm talking about my guts, no need to get to fancy at a time like this. Right? I lifted myself and looked down between our bodies and could see her full lips sucking me out, licking me back. She was like a vise on it now, cramming it, peeling it, taking it, gulping it. (You know something they don't have in Ireland? Popsicles!) Her creased brow as she worked told me that she was tortured in pleasure. I felt her shiver and writhe, moaning, and I slid in and out of the warmth of her mouth.
Her legs came higher and around my head and my tongue went still deeper and I could feel veins being forced out on my twisted neck. (Very uncomfortable but a fellow has to make certain sacrifices in the interest of international diplomacy.) Her head began to revolve furiously in counter-balance to her swinging hips. Her attractive features twisted with sweet agony and her soft ass squashed against my cheeks. My tongue moved about in the hot blaze. She was wild and rolling with me and then a long, lovely whine escaped her. "Oooohhh..." she groaned, "I'm coming!" Before the blood left my sweaty face, I noticed her legs had dropped down straight and she was breathing more evenly. Although the hot act was over, the skin of my prick slid backward, drew forward, in after-lunges. I looked down at her pretty face, watching her mouth twist in ecstasy around it. And I thought about Ingy.
I swung up and around, mouth to mouth, my beard on her neck. Her long leg muscles flexed in an open invitation to invade. And into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred. I waited for the first gyration of her ass to begin the new encore. Her breasts seemed to be leaping in short breaths... There was a hard nipple protruding against my mouth and I saw her swallow hard and lick her lips. A musk-like, girl-woman aroma was drifting up to me from her body in the sultry room. She was engrossed in my vulturous eating of her breasts. Another hard swallow from her throat. A lifting of her breasts from the hardness of my sucking mouth... and then the ass began its involuntary motion. I looked down at it. It was moving more freely now, uninhibited, and her thighs opened a little wider and she slid down a fraction of an inch until my prick became aware of the moist, moist warmth between her legs. Ho!
I moved my hand to that area and a finger opened to explore gently. The flesh of her round cheeks began to jiggle with a strange rhythm. Her body was newly hot and alive with slow, tantalizing motions, her eyes in the back of her head almost as if she were unaware of my presence... but she had to be... my finger was massaging the lips... lets pay attention girl! She turned over and her legs spread wide apart for me, stomach down and her ass seemed to quiver as if palsied. I moved on top of her again and my lips were close to her ear.
"In the back. In the back. In the back first. Sure I'll help ya'... here... Ooohhh, God!" She lifted to receive me through the unusual entrance and I was engrossed in the hot hole, that was trying to take the head of my cock.
The head of Junior burned something terrible, dabbing above her cunt at the tight tunnel. And still I wrestled with a fierce, thirsty desire for her. My eyes closed too, one finger now dipping into the subterranean recesses of that moving cunt. I longed to exchange that digit for my now swollen cock, natural is natural, right? The lips of her cunt folded into each other and pulsed together in a vibrant eternal rhythm. They clung to each other, around my finger, kissing and embracing it. She licked the dryness away from her lips, pumping furiously.
"Oh Sanford darlin', take all of me! I need you so!"
She uttered a small joyous outcry, pressing her back up to me, quivering. "It feels so wonderful!" And with these words I knew I was sunk to my deepest point inside her, my prick throbbing at her inner organs. She stopped pumping for a moment, and withdrew my hardened member from within her rectum. Gently turning over beneath me, she fisted it back into her cunt, running her palm over the lubricous folds of it. Panting now, her voice hissing against my ear. She clamped her legs tightly around me. I raised my body with her still clinging to me and placed my hands around the circumference of her ass, plump flesh and I fingered it madly. I upraised, lowered myself, turned her from side to side, moved her to various positions. Her movements up at me sunk me deeper into her, skewering, her cunt swallowing me up whole. Holding her up off the bed, a precious burden, sunk into her, drew out of her. I remembered reading that article in GOOD HOUSEKEEPING about heart attacks. The hell with that shit. I really don't have time to think about it now.
I soon felt the unmistakable tremors of orgasm sprinkle through her body and she was panting, breathless, perspiring. Clambering below me, coiling her legs about me and poising herself upward, driving herself downward, speaking her hots up at me, drawing at the fountain of my limbs every final ounce of juice in my marrows. In desperate hunger, she screamed, "OOOHHHHH..."
And I screamed, "HO!"
And she screamed "Daddy."
And I screamed, "GYPSY!!"
And she screamed something about some woman named Molly Polk and I felt I had to scream about somebody so I screamed, "Marlene Dietrich,"-because, I think, I once saw her in a Gypsy movie with Ray Milland.
"Try to get in the back again... please!" she begged.
I slid my old saber (it has been very trustworthy, you know), down again toward her rectum. Rectum? It damned near killed 'em! Or me, anyway. I nudged, pushed, sat up and plowed, wiggled, grunted, farted, jabbed and squeezed and finally got inside the little hole again. No sooner in (Christ, it was tight in there!) and I wanted out and I think she knew it because, breathlessly she was murmuring, "a little longer, a little longer". Her legs locked around my shoulders and her scorching flesh was a panic of movements, for the upteenth time. Her hands reached behind me, driving me into her steaming anus and the tears rolled down the sides of her face, and we rocked and rocked and rocked.
Hands pressed flesh together, lips opening to inhale and exhale. The plop-plop sound of a suction cup. And then male venom spitting out and her shuddering, relaxing.
I slid off her and staggered to my feet. I bumped into a wall, fell to one knee, got back up and said to myself: "Rare, shit. Sanford you're FANTASTIC!!!
Ten minutes later I was dressed but still trembling.
***************
"Still hungry?" I ,asked, but to tell you the truth I think she had completely forgotten about that. You see, I'm rare, very rare.
"Famished,! am. You?"
"Oh. Oh, sure. Regular glutton, that's me. Although I have had quite a meal, wouldn't you say?"
"Say, you got some Irish blood in ya'?"
"Why?"
"Nothin'." She coyly smiles. "I just think ya' must, that's all."
"Somebody's convinced you that only the Irish are that horny. Isn't true. I once knew a French girl named... oh never mind. You... Ita, are . , . quite a girl."
"Woman."
"Okay, woman, then. I study people, but I have to admit I've never come across one quite like you."
"Queer, am I? A fine thing to be telling a woman you just sank your chops into. And besides, you haven't seen nothin' yet, attall. If n I had a mind to I could have ya' backin' out the door on your hands and knees, beggin' for your spleen back."
I felt my eyebrows arch. "Show me."
"Naw, you'd never survive. Only the heart of a Gypsy could stand the heat at his hide. And you ain't no Gypsy."
"How do you know?"
"Cause I ain't never seen no tinker that looks like you. Tell me the truth, you ain't nearly as swell as you put on are ya'?"
Then she let a slow smile creep across her lips. "Okay, I'll prove ya' ain't no Gypsy. Show me how much ya' got left in ya'."
"More? Before breakfast?"
"Breakfast be damned! and she grabbed at my shoulders and pressed her tongue into my startled mouth again. Her eyes shuttered the cheeks slightly hollowed, the mouth itself curled into that slow blinking sex smile. "Oh, don't you like this." she murmurs and kisses me again, pressing her now cool body against me, "Don't you just wish we could screw forever?"
I thought about maybe plunging again into her wet network. Little saliva bubbles are beginning to form at the corners of her mouth and that wonderful pained look again. Her breasts rise up to my mouth again and she feeds me like a baby. My hands finger lightly on the trembling muscles of her ass. I can almost sense the tight-fisted quiver going on inside her twat, assembling, disassembling, Oh Gawd! Contracting again and again, gobbling at a poor prick that would be no wheres near ready to go inside again for a swishy swim.
"Sleep awhile," I said. "I'll jump down the block and get you that dress. Size... ten ought to do it. Then a big fat breakfast of rasher and eggs, what say?"
"Uh-huh,"-and she was sleeping soundly.
OUTSTANDING, SANFORD. OUTSTANDING!
Chapter Four. 'ITA AND AMEN'
Sanford Patty having breakfast with Ita, and Amen has joined them, knows Ita, says "Nice Coin', Sanford ol' pal."
The milk is as thin as water and Sanford exchanges it for an Irish coffee. In the kitchen the waitresses and the cook are loudly calling each other names.
Today a bright day, sun everywhere and they are discussing how not to waste it.
"We could get drunk," offers Amen. "I know a Gypsy hangout outside of town, a bar, I forget the name of it. Ita probably knows it. What the hell is the name of it, only your people go to the place at all."
"I want to go to Spanish Point. I understand I've got some Black Irish in my blood, want to see where my ancestors came ashore and fucked all the ladies. Oh, pardon me, Ita."
"S'awright," from Ita.
"Well we could go out to Spanish Point and watch all the nuns walking on the beach, that's all you'll see. That and a helluva' bucket of water," Amen says, brushing his crop of loose hair back. "The nuns are always very generous with us tinkers, they are. Oh hell to the priestess, what will they think of me in me new dress? I can hear them now, oh you've found Christ, you have, child and me telling them no, I've found Mr. Patty, much the same with the beard and all. A little fatter though."
"Here now," from Sanford, trying to lick the top cream off the coffee without burning his tongue.
"Are you Catholic?" asks Ita.
"Used to be. But now I just listen to Billy Graham get himself all excited once a month and let it go at that. And besides, you don't ask people a question like that right out, Ita."
"Here you do," snaps Amen. "Makes a big differ in Ireland. When the clubs start swingin' you'd be surprised what a differ it makes!"
"Well," says Ita, "I'm thinkin' it's you that's the only one with any scratch, lover Sanford, so where you want to be goin' that's where we'll be goin'. I could get very accustomed to this kind of feed."
**********
So they went to Spanish Point, Amen driving the Fiat and Sanford fingering Ita in the back seat. It was windy as hell at the Point and Sanford got his face windburned and found out that it was only the deserters that came ashore from the Spanish Armadas and fucked the girls in the little seaport towns. He learned that in a rather delicate conversation with a nun who was purposely making herself suffer, walking up and down with the habit blowing, reading The Book. Sanford wanted to tell her the joke about the patient who was leaving the Catholic hospital and wanted to kiss the nuns goodbye and the Mother Superior telling him it was okay if he didn't get into the habit. But he didn't, no guts, and besides the poor woman had enough problems with the hot black skirt to her ankles, the wind blowing... and her own fears.
On the way home, a stop at Amen's Gypsy bar and that was the mistake of the day. Or possibly of the summer.
Outside, on the street, a sort of "Spasm" band was giving it all they had, five ragged tinkers, armed with washboards, bells, car horns, and skillets, for musical instruments and singing to the top of their lungs, clamorous to lift their half-English, half Gaelic, half Gypsy clatter above the noise of the street. One, the smallest, was dancing, loose at the joints, like a skeleton on strings, his face a dark-skinned grin, looking almost like a minstrel from back home in the States. His soiled, wrinkled costume a combination of a mocked tuxedo, bow tie flapping, tails jumping; and pants as scarlet as a Seminole Indian's. The cave-dark courtyards next to the bar were smelly with the acid odor of piss. In the center a fortune teller promises a trove of paradise at the end of the world. Narrow sidewalks and low eaves, leaf-mould, rainstained gutters. Sanford is fascinated. The women are liver-lipped under frightful amber lights. On inside the shanty-like bar. Three Powers Whiskeys and Sanford is dancing with Ita, and he is looking over her head around the walls and thinking he has seen better barns abandoned to weeded cow pastures. It all looked like one of those crude bars seen in earlier Western movies, a grimy mirror the length of the wall, tall pyramids of sparkling glasses, liquor bottles, and the ruddy faces of Gypsies, dark hair and dark eyes and lava-colored bodies hanging their frames over the bar. Along the bar dark nimble fingers pounding like savages in a hepped-up sex ritual, music blasting the walls.
Amen found himself a girl with a loose fitting blouse, which brought out the cleavage of her tits and her tight red skirt was ripped from hem to thigh. He palm-tested it several times before striking up the conversation.
And everybody dancing, crotch to crotch, even Sanford, amid a sea of bodies, movements magnified as if charged by a hot wire up everybody's ass.
Two prying Gypsy boys were watching Sanford, whispering to each other. Amen took note of them, watched their maneuverings along the wall, closer and closer to Ita and Sanford. Ita's body was wet with sweat, the bronze flesh showing through, her arms up around his shoulders, jiggling her thighs like in the finale of the sex act itself. Sanford planted a healthy kiss on Ita's shiny lips and that did it!
One of the Gypsy boys grabbed Sanford by the wrist. With a single jerk he pulled Sanford and Ita apart.
Someone shouted: "Kill the motherfucker!"
Amen lunged through the crowd to the small clearing ringed round by groping bodies, flashing skirts and tentacle-like arms.
"What's the trouble?" Amen asks Sanford.
"Says I better leave Gypsies to Gypsies," Sanford answers.
"Ah, we don't like refugees. Americans, ptew! Stay away from our Gypsy girls. Or there's trouble abrewin'. Understand, American?" The Gypsy's wide mouth twisted at the corner.
"Excuse me," Sanford says softly, "but aren't Gypsies refugees? From everywhere, I mean?"
He shouldn't have said that. No, he shouldn't have said that.
A knife suddenly gleamed in the half-darkness, coming somehow from nowhere. Several women screamed.
Sanford, with his legs wide apart, arms up protectively, sidestepped from one end of the moving circle to the other, his gaze glued to the shining blade. One of the two Gypsies lunged, the other flanking Amen and a horizontal silver streak swept past Sanford's belly. The music had stopped.
Girls let out falsetto cries, followed by male shouts:
"Kill the whorelicker!"
Not knowing how he did it, Sanford sitting on the Gypsy boy's belly, trying to bend an arm out of socket. But the other one has Amen sprawled over in a corner and now he hurls his body at Sanford and they are locked in a vise-like grip, staggering to their feet, doing a hellish waltz.
The crowd is pushing them out in the street, in the pit of darkness. They are rolling in the gutter, bottles ringing as they are hurled down the sidewalk. Someone's head hit the bumper of a car. Maybe it was Sanford's. Anyway, he was out like a light.
**********
All at once Amen saw that the street had been vacated, like startled birds when a stone is thrown.
Someone is leaning over Sanford, who he didn't know.
Then, as if by sleight of hand, he was being lifted up, being dragged down the narrow, cave-like street, into a back seat of a little car. Sanford's brain sees fairy cities out of his childhood and Amen must be driving. He can hear the tires sloshing.
Chapter Five. WHO PUT THE PASSION-FRUIT IN MY SOUP?
Now we see me and I don't know whether I'm nobody or somebody or what. For a long time there, if you remember, I would only go into the bathroom for a long grunting and straining crap. SHIMMERING and all that. Then I come to Ireland and I'd really like to take a shower once in a while and there is only a bath and that's down the hall and more often than not I'm locked in my room. Now I'm in a tinker wagon, my arm is all bandaged up and there ain't no toilet at all! No bath, no shower, no crap. Unless I want to do like the others, jump off the side of the road, squat my bare ass to a possible hive of bees (YIPE!) and wipe the shit from my hole with a used corn cob or a scissor. I never got in this much trouble with children's books and they pay better too.
To make matter's worse I got problems with these Gypsy relatives of Ita's. They have been very nice, have taken care of Amen and me for four days now, but now Amen comes to the wagon and tells me I'm causing all kinds of trouble because Ita has told everybody that I'm going to marry her and take her back to the States (well, maybe I did put her on there a bit in that direction, but she oughta' know better than to believe a good for nothing liar like me). That seems to be just dandy with everybody but Ita's mama, who, as I understand it, has the hots for me herself. The old mother-daughter plot. Well, I really can't help it, you see I have a beautiful body. And so help me I haven't moved it once out of this damned smelly wagon in the whole four days. (Anxious to get into that Ita again, shit, she was wild! Ho!). But her Gypsy mama keeps bringing me soup and big white bones to gnaw at and that isn't doing my dentures any good. Anyway, Amen says mother and daughter are fighting like hell about who saw me first and mama says Ita ain't going to no America without her because kids are all alike, you raise them and then they marry into money and leave you flat. So mama is going to have a go at me herself and Amen says tonight's the night, right here in this bumpy wagon, which reminds me. I got rid of that dog back home who farted every hour on the hour and now I end up with A HORSE! that is on a fifteen minute schedule and every time I turn my head to the right there is his big fat cracked ass in my face and he seems to be doing it on purpose, lifting his tail and all. But they've convinced me I got a pretty good bump on the head that night and a cut arm to boot and I guess I was talking out of my noodle there for a few days. So what else is new?
Ita's mama has made arrangements for Amen to take Ita into town soon as it gets dark, just to get her out of the way for mama's big love scene. Amen thinks it's all very funny. What's the matter with that boy?
Uh-oh, it IS dark and here comes mama and I can't run because I forgot to tell you I also got a sprained ankle out of that pier-sixer the other night.
The woman is obviously in a state of pique, all hung up over me and I am really flattered but you know I go ape over young cunt and this old bag really doesn't turn me on. Shit, if I wanted that I coulda' stayed home with Florie who's just as fat but smells better.
"Do ya' feel better now? Ahh, lovely you look," and she smiles, one gold tooth catching the moon's light.
Lady, if we're gonna' fuck tonight we better negotiate it so your on the bottom at all times because I just couldn't picture it any other way. Jesus, look at them balloon tits, I'm liable to get lockjaw! And she's climbing up the big step into the wagon and grunting like an old sow with an ulcer. Aww, c'mon, Are you for real or are you for maybe? Honestly, I don't know at this minute whether I'm a brave coward or a terrified hero. She must have read the troubled expression on my face because she offered me some more of that damned soup. Then she threw her head back and laughed, blew a throaty puff on her cigarette.
"Ya' know Mr. Patty, I'm thinkin' you're a very smart man. But with all your fancy smarts you haven't learned yet, ya' old fool, that variety is the spice of life. Sure and you should be learnin' that, ya' know.
The wagon rolled on through leafy trees, black dust churned up from filthy roads and the woman talked on and on, touching me now and then. She said she lived in fear that the other Gypsies that cut me up wouldn't let it go at that.
"Gypsies don't let things lie, ya' know. They find out you're still alive and with Ita, they gonna' find you and finish the job fer sure, they are."
"We been traveling for days," I said. "Chances are they've lost all track of me."
"Ha! Not to a Gypsy nose. And besides, they'll be at the Tinker Carnival in Shannon come Saturday night and sos will we. Can't miss that, the pickin's are grand, lots o' old tourists with loose fitting pants."
"And that's where we're going? Count me out. I'm a very peaceable man. See here, I really think I can drive my car now and if not, Amen can. I better leave the caravan in the morning."
"Oh, ya' can't be doin' that, Sanford, darlin'. Why we haven't had a chance to... get to know each other." She tickled her own tit for my benefit. It was like a pickaninny poking at a watermelon.
"Listen," I says, "I am very fond of your daughter, nice child. But... well, that's it, I am very fond of Ita and I really would like to help her out of this... well, help her." I always have a way of saying the wrong thing, 'cause that started mama getting very mad. Oh she tried not to show it, snuggling up closer to me and making with the coo-coo bit. But when she saw she was actually turning my stomach she got pretty red-skinned and set her mind about raping me, just to prove a point I guess.
"Here, now... listen..."
"Oh, Sanford, darlin'... we could be so good together, we could..."
"Yes, undoubtedly, but you see... "
"When first I laid my eyes on ya', even though ya' were bleedin' like a pig, I says there's me man. I knew it right away."
"Could I have a little air?... your shoulder is..."
"And Ita should marry a boy her own age, have lotsa' kids."
"How many you got?"
"Eight."
"Yes. Could we sit up?"
She must have decided she'd lost her big chance and was going to settle for revenge, just a quickie that she could remember. Out the back of the wagon I could see, and felt smothered by, foaming growths of blossoming chrysanthemums, roses, and calla lillies. It didn't help. Not now. She was a hurt woman and you know how they are. If you don't, don't find out.
But she hadn't come unprepared. Determined woman, this.
She insisted I have a drink with her, something she pulled out of a big quilted bag, a smooth, thick liquid. Amen told me later it must have been her own personal love-potion, but I think it was just good old Spanish-fly. In any event, while she sat there looking at me and masturbating, the whole value of things seemed to change for me.
And you know, she wasn't so fat after all. And a lot younger than I had previously thought. And actually... kinda' pretty. Well, in any case, a lot of slack had been taken up in my passion gears and Christ, whatever was in that drink, my balls were burning for contact with anything. Took about ten minutes from limp noodle to roaring hard-on, from fat Gypsy mama to lovely exotic Dolly (that was her name too, just like Amen's sister. Never told the boy about that, thought better of it).
Soooo... Spanish-fly dreaming, Dolly became quite a beautiful creature to my glassy eye. I remember thinking that if I had tried the stuff back home with Florie, things would have been different. Maybe not. Florie would take a gallon of the stuff to make me see her beautiful. But beautiful was my hot Gypsy now. Sure I was duped... but it was a hell of a lot of fun anyway. Right Sanford? Right.
A guileless excitement came over her face as she threw her clothes over the chair. Her supple body was all wiggles and squirms.
I stood transfixed, watching her. My throat was tight and dry with a thick rush of anticipation. She studied the livid expression on my face. I was mute-with a new desire that I didn't have a name for yet. Her skin looked hot, a shade darker than red and spread over her bones in a smooth, fat creamy texture.
She turned to face me squarely, searching my eyes for a reaction. Her fat, sweet breasts breathed up and down. Shiny hair cascaded around her shoulders loosely. Her whole smooth body seemed limp and pliable as she sat back on the edge of the bed and she must have taken stock of the excitement in my face. Her breasts were a bit fleshy, but tear shaped. Rigid nipples pointed skyward and their size and deep color fascinated me. She noticed my fixed stare on them and she tickled one with the flick of her finger and it grew even larger, hard and erect.
"Ha-ha," she laughed. "I can see that ya'r more than just an American, ya'r very much a man." She inhaled her cigarette deeply as if performing for me. "You like to look at my ass, don't you love? Would you like to begin with it?"
I slid down to the floor in front of her and drank in each meaty detail of her naked body. Thrill pings danced through me. Without clothes on, she seemed more luxuriously plump than before. The blue-black in her hair reflected in the moonlight that sprayed through the wagon, shimmering shades of night, crystals of lighter highlights, strands of bouncing silver-glows. Her legs were the most beautiful part of her. Cow milk white with just a hint of blood in it, warm and silky, tucked into slim little ankles. Their wax-like texture curved out over a hairless calf and upward where a flush of whiter flesh rippled her thighs. The melons on her bottom clefted severely at the center into a deep, red tinted flesh. A wild stream of emotion was playing mad games inside of me. The skin between her breasts was shadowed in a magnificent moving V. A stretchy belly button opened and closed in her middle and her hips were tight with golden pink flesh.
The warm surface of her skin was wet and alive! And it all seemed to breathe out at me, all moving, all squirming fatly. My temples throbbed with fresh, excited blood. And the calm smile she was sending my way told me of her supreme confidence. My eyes measured the hard tit buds of her breasts. I estimated their three inch circles as the tips jumped just a bit, as if separate from the rest of the flesh. Must have a lot of gypsy in her, I thought.
My eyes ran up and over her again and again, never getting enough.
I squeezed her hand again and urged her to return to her dreaming, to her gentle masturbating. I drew a deep breath and I'm afraid I even let a wry chuckle inadvertently escape. I felt a quiver of fresh, hot blood race to my groin in expectation of the traumatic fuck that we were both about to experience. Her legs were beginning to spread, apart-and with her eyes closed she was all witch woman, hellish. But seeming to be a bit more relaxed now. My joint was throbbing like the thrust of a sabre presenting itself for the action ahead. Her nude body was rising up in a quickening cadence. I dug my hand into the flesh of her arm, urging her to keep talking, keep talking.
I pulled her down by the golden fat that melted around her bone structure smoothly, widening around her hips and flowing like silk into her pubic mound. I looked at the hair that hid all those lubricated inner parts of her. She relaxed her upraised knees and kept talking as I lowered my head to study the white flesh, aroused and moist. She put my hands back up on her breasts. As my lips caressed her cunt, my fingers found her nipples without looking and I fingered the little brittle diamonds. Gently, I stuffed my prick into her talking mouth.
It was hard and stiff and wet and mouth filling, and Dolly's excitement was far beyond her control. I was breathing heavily myself listening to her licking, sucking, caressing, nibbling. Suddenly she stopped, pulled away from me, and turned her back to me, laying her head away from my cock. She lifted her behind up to my lips and crushed my face between the crack. I found myself flat out now, face up. She fell backward on me and my tongue moved around inside her ass-hole, plunging up into her in straight, even strokes. Wet and thick with the juice of her, it sank tightly to its hilt, and then squeezed back out of her. I dismissed as unwarranted the feeling that her stomach wanted to drop out of her and splash down on my chest.
Quickly turning again, she put her knees around my head and held me tight and her body was working in a fury all over me. She groaned something down at me and coming to me muffled, it seemed a moan of anguish.
"Wiggle it, wiggle your tongue!" she commanded down at me. I wiggled it and it appeared that still a new sensation overcame her. I made my tongue move differently, inside of her twat, touching more things, pressing them, mashing them.
Her body swayed, locked to mine and it seemed I could not grasp enough of her flesh. Looking straight up over her thick waist and her big, knotted nipples, I could see her swinging her flushed face from side to side, and I could feel her legs burning my cheeks. I sobbed encouragement up to her with an overly expressive, "Mmmmmmmmm." I've always had perfect diction.
"Here, take it!" she shouted down into my eyes and I felt her coming, drowning me with it, and my tongue twisting to get all of it. My heart grabbed at my ribs. Christ, she was coming strong!
Then she sprawled out on the floor, lying face down and I looked over her at her ball-breaking ass, a development that sent the imagination on some kind of merry-go-round. That ass rose steeply and invitingly and I just didn't know if I could handle any more of her. Her hair hung in loose strands down over her shoulders. Her voice was husky, deep and drenched with hard-on inspiration. "Listen to the angel's sing, Darlin'!"
I marveled again at the protuberance of that swollen behind. She rolled one leg on the dirty rug and then the other. She had been aware of my eyes on that great behind from the very beginning, and now she was playing the advantage up to the hilt. I think I fully appreciated for the first time then what a truly beautiful woman she was, but so fat! The heat of her scorched the air around us. Now she was rolling over and over, enjoying the rough rug. I climbed over her and my tongue darted around and about her stiffened lips, encircling them, nibbling on the tender protrusions. Her shining red mouth opened slightly and it writhed and twisted against mine, murmuring, "Oh motherajasus, I'm still so hot." And then her tongue licked past my cheek and I could feel her lips move tautly against mine, forming the words, "Come fuck me some more dear. Ahh... ta' fuck. TA' really fuck." The last part of the words sprayed my mouth, as her tongue bounced with it. That ass was ripe and round and quivering. I was smiling down at it, feeling the lust in my own eyes, knowing a queer smile was on my lips. Then she arched her hips up and thrust her rosy red slice up at my stone-cock.
I kissed her warm lips and as I did, I was aware that her arms were moving behind her, reaching her hands up under her to prop those great big globe tits higher. When the kiss ended with a long sigh, she drew my face against her head. I swallowed hard at the dryness in my throat. The closeness of her nudity seemed to exude new warmth in my balls which strained themselves upward into my cock. I at once seized her at the hips, crudely, catching my hands under the elasticized flesh of her ass. She slammed her hands against her ears, "Oh love-please love me, sure I need it so badly!" Then her sad look turned to laughter, loud, raucous and continuing. Her face took on a tortured expression and her eyes were as distracted as a sleepwalker's, as if turning inward to a dream. She closed them then, and arched her upper torso backward at such an extreme angle that her whole body seemed divided in half from the trunk; shoulders and feet supporting its full weight. Her hands fell down beneath her clasping her ankles and her body was an arched bridge, high in the air, before my eyes. This forward thrust of her girdle, had the effect of mounting throbs throughout my body that began low and traveled upward. The entire inner recesses of her disclosed themselves, like a violated oyster, pearl-pink, gelatinous flesh.
She began to gyrate lasciviously and she screamed, "Oh eat me-show me that you love me too! Tis the will of the devil that I be yours. "Eat me again love, and again and again."
Second course: (and another swig of the love potion).
I encircled her thighs with my arms, bringing my mouth directly to the lip of the precious cup. The first movement of my lips produced in her a series of sporadic, forward thrusts which engulfed me with the full measure of her quivering cunt. "Oh, you bastard! Ya' lovely bastard! What are you doing to me-oh... hh..." That dilating cavity opened and closed at my lips, searching for my tongue. Her eyes were wide, the leer of lechery and hands surreptitiously gesturing, giving voice to her unspoken words. Finally, the door of her cunt closed on my tongue. I held her up in my arms for a long minute, my tongue gourmandizing the squirming magnificence of her body. I felt the fat quivering in her upper thigh. She lifted that disconcerting triad higher to my lips,, to my tongue, and it quivered too. The closeness, the open defenselessness of that breathing cove of juices caused me to press my hands down hard on my groin. Every pore in her flesh seemed to be aching to possess my body-and perhaps my soul too, for I had the notion she might be playing this game for keeps.
She was straining now with efforts to enclose my entire head inside of her.
"Slowly now, dear, don't press it all too hard. It will come." I said.
"It's something-something wonderful! I love it when you do that, I do, I do!" she moaned.
Oh! How swe-e-e-t it is!
Her face seemed fixated with a childish expression. She frowned and shook her head. She reached down beyond her ankles now and tugged at the bottom of the blanket, peeling it from the bed beside her. Then she hunched forward, and allowed herself to roll back and forth. Only her toes and shoulders were touching the floor. So extreme was her contortion, with her legs apart and her ass upraised. She remained like that with her smile etching into a frown. With one eye open I watched her, still eating furiously at her cunt. She began pulling at my hands and whining, "Touch me-feel me all over! I'll not survive!"
I immediately applied myself to the action she wanted. With the contact of her straining posterior against my mouth, my hands moved in all directions about her, under her, grabbing. I edged forward, and as I did, that cunt, sufficiently dilated just seconds ago to admit my probing tongue, seemed to seal itself up. She cried aloud, passion incensed. Her body was magnificently taut. She struggled beneath my determined tongue. I dug my hands into her hips, fastening her to me as the sensations rose up within me to a keen intensity, and I could feel the pressure of the inner throbbing veins threatening to burst throughout my body. I drove my tongue forward again-and again-and again, and she was climbing upward toward the release with fierce urgency. Then I felt her start coming again-that sweet, briney thick wetness, first bathing her organs, then running down past my lips. The chilling shock made me mouth her more furiously. She was in the throes of impulsive gyrations. I worked to stanch the liquid flow from her pulsating vaginal lips. Her orgasm was violent and rapid and then I raised my head and let my eyes run over her once more, appreciatively. Her breasts were as full as a man's head with extraordinarily rounded contours and with deep tinted pink skin, smooth and delectable, as if they had been polished. The belly button was as smooth as a fingertip's impression imbedded in the gentle slope of the soft abdominal meat upon which still breathed heavily the dark, rich herbage, then converging into a thick, wet underbrush. With two fingers in front of my face I proceeded to part the curling underbrush to slightly raise and expose the labial lips. Sanford Patty you're a devil!!
Her face was streaming tears at this point, "I know I love you. A total terror, ya' are!"
So carried away was she now that I urged her to take a deep breath and lie back but she shook her head and did not cease her compulsive movements. With the palm of my hand I continued rubbing and moving about the amazingly elastic tissues of her female vaginal confluence. Ho! Took you by surprise with that phrase, Hemingway.
Locked together we moved up to the disheveled bed.
"I am a-a passionate woman, Sanford. I have deep witchery. Can you tolerate that?" She looked at me, her eyes appealing. A piteous moan escaped from her throat. She rested my face in her hands. I moved up to her, made her lie back and stretch out on the bed and I sat alongside her, facing her.
Her eyelids fluttered. For a moment she was silent. Then her eyes closed and she raised her head and shoulders from the bed inclining her arms upward. Her lips were slightly parted, puckered softly for a kiss. As we kissed, I held her with my fingertips, reaching over to stroke her breasts. Though our lips met and I leaned slightly forward, I withheld most of my weight. Her kiss was sweet, nectared and warm. Using my fingers lightly and delicately, I sketched the contours of her tits, smoothing the nipples back with my thumbs. "Oh, Oh, darling!" she whispered, and I could feel her hips moving restlessly. I let my fingertips follow the line of her hip, trailing down to the silken hair, beyond that to the skin of her thighs then back up to finger the thick, soft, swaddling valley. It moved from side to side beneath my finger, dewey and moist, still being fed from some mysterious underground spring. Though she urged me to become a bit bolder, my purpose was to titillate her to her highest peak. This would not be easy, for the nerve ends around my limbs and balls were delivering little flares. I cautioned myself not to be bound up with her.
She raised herself now, ready for a third and legitimate fucking, that target, begging for the injection. Her face was twisted in a heavenly pain. I myself felt both pity and rage. My heart was pounding out wild rhythms, caught up high in my throat. I climbed in between her wide apart legs, my forehead resting on her ass, my tongue nestling into her sweet crack, licking, biting, licking. "No more of that, Fuck me!" she screamed. "Get on me, hurry!" I straddled those, big, ever jumping twin mounds and spread the crack far apart with two determined thumbs. I sunk my cock deep into the canyon between, thrusting and surging inward. Then she reached back and her hands cupped me from behind, pulling me down, working me up. Our bodies were wild with movement. I slid down. Groans and moans filled the room and the action became faster and faster and I was riding her as a jockey does his mount. I was sunk into her right up to the base of my in again, out again cock and my stabs followed her cheeky ass wherever it went. All at once, we were both swept up on a twirling, cresting wave of tight bursting madness and the world was insane with colors and I was licking at her ear from behind as she seemed to jiggle six or seven times and then her whole body shattered into a cracking, cracking of rigidness, and then went soft below me, pillow-like, with little weak after convulsions. I was still pounding into her, murmuring, "C'mon, c'mon, more, more!"
Quickly, she rolled over pushing me upward with her hands and I don't know how she maneuvered it, but now her legs were locked around me and I was in her and I tried to concentrate on whether I had come again or not. The panic of movement of her scorching flesh never ceased, her hands pulled me into her steaming cunt and the tears were rolling down the side of her face, wetting my cheek. An explosion of juices that seemed to come from nowhere, deep inside me, and it was over in one furious moment that escaped both of us at the same time, almost in harmony. I slid off of her and staggered back to a chair, sitting there nude.
It is important that I say a few things about Ita's mother. I got the feeling that it was only this one quick victory that she wanted. I will always feel that she will be forever sad that she had to resort to her witchcraft to accomplish it. Now I don't believe in witchcraft. Spanish fly I believe in. Witchcraft, no. But Ita's mother was a victim of that age-old problem of mama trying to keep up with daughter. (Ho. She didn't have a chance!) And that's sad. Very sad. I wonder what Florie would be like had we had a daughter. That would be even sadder.
So, with the fucking over, I think mama and I had a sort of understanding.
"You're a nice man. You usin' my Ita... or mebbe you really like her, huh?"
"I like her. Don't know exactly what to do about it though."
"Hah. I think, American, mebbe you jus' don't like to give up that good fuckin'. I know that, waddya' think, I'm stupid?"
"No Dolly. You may be a lot of things, but stupid you ain't."
"Men fuckin' me all me life. Don't do that to her, Patty. I'll ask ya' that. Keepin' her knocked up and barefoot all her life, I mean."
"I really don't know what you're talking about, Dolly. How did we get me mixed up with nil of Ita's life, as you put it? In a couple of weeks I'm going home and..."
"It won't be easy for you to walk away from Ita, I know that. Ita's got a lot of the witch in her. What she wants she gets."
"Oh."
***************
Sitting alone in the wagon, now, thinking about that. I looked at the dirt caked under my fingernails and that made me think of Florie's hands. Hands smooth, well cared for, white, the fingers pudgy and tapering: hands that surely smelt of soap and sanctity. But in ten years just as surely, they'd be knuckled with rheumatism and roughened with course and ugly skin. Sad, very sad.
And riding along, looking out and a gull by the side of the sandy road mews, a harsh discordant cackle, then rises on lazy sun-bleached wings. It flies high over the wagon and I hear it piping shrilly. And I find myself singing again:
Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets...
And little man, little Lola wants you...
***************
Needless to say I stayed on with the caravan while my arm healed. Amen came and went as regularly as clockwork, visiting me in the evening for an hour or so, playing out his daytimes with the tinkers. He parked my car for me in a little town on the way to the carnival and said we could pick it up again before we left Ireland. I really didn't need it, and with my arm couldn't drive it, and besides my existence was such that the clock had been turned back a hundred years, riding and living in a horse drawn wagon.
He would talk to me, something like a son, and I would laugh, mostly at the terrorist attitude of the boy. What's more he had seen through me instantly, and had had the guts to tell me so. And I could not help but admire him for sticking up for his beliefs, about half of them coinciding with mine.
He would suck his lower lip painfully, blow out a deep breath, and tell me some more of how he saw the world-or how he'd like to see the world. Listening to him, reading the troubled expression on his face, regardless of my aching knife cut, I knew the boy was a bit more than half right. He took these things quite seriously, of that I became convinced, and I tried to fall in line with the mood of his conversation. For the most part his point was valid-Iwo Jima, the misery of Korea, of all the human sacrifice... and now Viet Nam... and what had we gained? That's when he was talking about my country. At other times he would talk about his. There was a line of comparison to be drawn-very much the same, Ireland and America. What had either of them really gained? I wanted to tell him all that my young friends had taught me in the last year at Hippy Haven. Most times he was so intense on what he was saying, however, that it was difficult to get a word in edgewise. He was such a kid in many ways, nothing at all like me, and knowing he admired me, my new way of life (although he had no way of knowing it was my new way) stirred my already inflated ego, and I would let him go on with his endless flattery. It was all part of his growing up, I figured, so... what the hell! And to be truthful with you, listening to him, maybe I was growing up a little bit too. Sometimes, sitting there in my underwear, with him talking and every once in a while glancing down at my stallion prick, Ho! I reasoned that the boy wasn't instinctively curious about his own sex, if for no other reason than as a comparison to himself, he might have a few homosexual problems he didn't know about. Besides, maybe I owed this kid something for saving my life, if that's what he did. And I remarked as much as I lay back comfortably and watched him try to keep his mind on world affairs, while oggling junior.
"I didn't do much," he said, pausing to look down at me, and with a gaze blazing with veneration. "A guy like you is well capable of taking care of himself... somehow... I'm thinking. Sure I think you've got more guts and more on the ball than most. It's people the likes of me who wind up the victim."
"Well if someone hadn't scooped me up out of the gutter, maybe I'd have my throat cut instead of my arm," I said seriously. "That's about all I remember... so you see you did save my life."
"You were unconscious half the time," he added. "I thought you were dead... sure I don't think I could have lived with that. Me taking you to that hole and all..."
I glanced up at him then, realizing his genuine concern for me, and his gaze flickered, shifting to the horse's behind wobbling up ahead of us.
You know, I had the feeling at that moment that I was in a bit more trouble than I had thought. Christ, maybe everybody in this world was falling in love with Sanford Patty. I felt very generous-hearted, especially toward this kid who was beginning to get his fingers around my heart. "What do I owe you for what you did, Amen?"
"Nothing," he answered his voice final, flat.
"Just having you as a friend is enough."
"Oh, come on now," I tried to laugh despite the hurt. "If you were a broad I could understand that kind of talk... but... well, maybe we better not talk about it anymore at this time."
He blushed. Shit, the thought occurred to me that I had screwed his sister, and wasn't too sure I hadn't taken a shot at his dead mother, besides... and now him? Then my thoughts turned toward the still unsolved problem of Ita and her mother, Dolly. And that was a whole new ball park. Sanford Patty, you have one hell of a talent for getting yourself involved... and Jesus dad, you've only been in Ireland eight days! Rare, you're very rare.
Oh yes, there was once, when he was talking, I think it was about the Irish Republic, that he gritted his teeth menacingly. And I knew, though he had spoken lightly, that he meant profoundly what he said. Underneath that bland veneer lurked a determination capable of murder, and I knew then instinctively that he possessed the most awesome strength there is in man... that terrible, terrible strength of the weak! "You know... I never had much of a father... well we shouldn't talk about that now. Someday maybe, when we know each other a mite better, but I'm thinking not now... no for sure, not now."
And that's what really confused me. Hadn't Ita said something like that? Christallmighty maybe everybody in the world wasn't in love with my body, maybe I was just destined to be everybody's father. Don't know that I appreciate that line of thinking as much. Well, let's see what tomorrow brings.
As he left the wagon that Friday night, the night before we arrived at the carnival, he said, "You know, these Gypsys travel in wolf packs. And them bastards, sure as you're a foot high will be at the carnival tomorrow night. I'm thinking we might have both our asses in a sling all over again."
"That's what Dolly was telling me," I said. "Maybe I'll just stay here in the wagon tomorrow and forget the whole scene. A hero I ain't."
"Then I'll be staying with ya. We'll just have our own little carnival right here, what say?"
"You're a very thoughtful boy, Amen. I'd like that."
He left then, and I got back to my crocheting. Oh I forgot to tell you that too, Ita's mother had taught me how to do it. Very relaxing. Very relaxing indeed. And singing, of course:
This is the age of Aquarius, the age of Aquarius.
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius...
Later.
That night, driven by unbearable compulsion, I maneuvered things so that Ita was alone with me in the wagon. She sat down beside me and I was reminded of what a truly beautiful thing she was. Her own ardor had been aroused by my ripened fruits before her, waiting to be plucked. Oh Sanford, knock it off.
I did not attempt to kiss her face, though it was near mine, and our lips were only inches apart. She had no reluctance, however, in the use of her body. Her girlish embrace was warm and eager, her body twisting and squirming as she crushed it against mine tightly. Her hands played up and down my back, reaching to knead my shoulder muscles and my taut ass. For several minutes we twisted and rubbed together, sweaty with the warmth of our passion.
Ahhh, this girl, this girl!
Working in an upward stroke now, up and over the nipple, with my tongue. Then a circular swirling at it, all around it, the moving flesh of these magnificent tits! So smooth, so tasty. My cock is jumping up amidst the hair between her scissoring legs. She moves slow against it, such a thoughtful child. Now it is tight between us and she is working her belly muscles against it and junior is going to die a lovely death of suffocation. My hands take a feeling ride up her leg, stopping to press here and there at the spongy flesh. Until I'm cupping, with both hands, smooth ass skin and the feel of it reminds me of melted marshmallow. My mouth and nose are jammed in the crack between those lovely boobies. Her motion starts toward a new rhythm now and the roll of the wagon is throwing everything out of cadence. I slide into the delightful treadmill of that hot crevice and she is bending her legs up and around me, moaning her fuck back at me, sharing a sort of wet eternity with me. That soft mouth, so soft...just like Ingy's...
She's sliding her quivering lips around and around my gobbling mouth and the warm meat of her tongue is somewhere dabbing inside my head. She pushes my head down and leans forward to give me more of those sweet, fleshy babies. My prick aches itself to a new depth and the cunt-lips are locked tight around it. This girl moves like nothing I've ever held before! The butterfat thighs are at my hips, basting me. My prick is being sucked inside that tightly clenched little slit. Caught in another young-girl vise, how wonderful, how perfectly wonderful! My stomach is wet with that bush of her soaked hair and her body odor drives my brain on some sort of safari hunt, deep in humid jungles, cunt, cunt, cunt!
But I'm trying to make this whole thing a grown up affair and she is gurgling like some child for her bottle. She's panting and rolling around the wagon. But I'm nailed to her pussy so what the hell do I care where she rolls. All the while I can feel the young lips of her twat quivering. I remember guessing to myself how many times this little nympho had made it already. Healthy, very healthy! She clutches my back moving her hips rapidly now and my eyebrows ache as I splash my thick come into her, holding on to her gyrating hips, her sliding her body from one side to the other and me then shrinking from pulsing rock hard, to wet and limp, junior sliding out of her. I'm sure she hoped for more because her tongue worked busily at my lips for five full minutes afterward.
Afterward Ita rubbed down my wound with natural oil from sheep. And she demanded that I get plenty of sun. So each day, with only a towel spread around my behind I would sit out on the back of the wagon, a little narrow terrace of splintered wood. From that perch I learned to appreciate the sights and the sounds and the smells, unlike any other place I have ever known and it infiltrated my emotions like a spell, and embalmed with positive deliberation, every crevice of my mind. Ireland had drugged me and I was without knowing or realizing it until much much later: its most delighted victim.
The conglomeration of plant life growing along the side of the road soothed me to a great extent. Having been reared on a farm, in the out of doors, I felt at home surrounded by leafy growing things. I suppose that's when I began thinking seriously about Ireland. Perhaps I couldn't tear myself away from this place. Not that I wanted to shirk my responsibility. Back in the states I mean. I had always met my obligations squarely, honestly, face to face. I had never run away from anything, and particularly so in this last year. And in reality I did not want to part with the American way of life altogether, to make a clean break. Too much of myself was still back in California, a deep part of it, I had sank roots, had built events on which harbored most of my worthwhile memories, and it would be for me like breaking away from an old love, quitting before that love was yet dead. But Ireland was like my mistress, and I thrilled to it passionately, yearning for its gory bed on which to wallow with my emotions. Do you think everybody that comes to Ireland gets to thinking about it that deeply? Shit, maybe I'm too sensitive. One thing had not changed in me, however. The craving for more and more sex haunted the region around my groin. I walked the wagon like a wildcat in a cage. And at night, especially these summer nights when the silence was almost unbearable, with either Ita's hot blooded body close to mine or her mother's unsatisfiable gluttony ready to eat me again at a moments notice.
Once when sitting on the back of the wagon, taking my sun, I found myself singing:
There's a story the gypsies say is true
That when your love wears golden earrings,
She belongs to you.
Nonsense, the whole silly tune. Not one of these sex-inflamed tinkers wore a golden earring. People who write songs ought to do more research. Not one earring-and they all belonged to me!
And Ita was becoming addicted to me. I tapped her every time her mother looked the other way, or went off begging in some town, or, I think, whoring for some steady customers along the countryside. I sort of got the impression she was like a doctor, made house calls, specialized in beef injections, and kept everybody in Ireland healthy.
But how would I ever leave these people? Desert their affection for me. Well, I am all heart, gallantry, and that sort of rot. You know that, Christ you ought to know that by now!
On my arm there was but a tiny scar, a thin pink line about an inch long to the outer extremity of my bicep, a bit ragged, and still painful.
Well for me, the whole week was a tonic, both to my physical health and to my spirit. As Saturday night approached, I must admit however, my do-nothing-but-fuck days excited me, sharpened my wits, my greediness for activity.
On one occasion in the mid-afternoon I watched Dolly do a Gypsy dance, something very much like Voo Doo, and she must have read my eyes because immediately afterward she gave me a few sips of that magic liquid and so I fucked her in the wagon again until the horse's farts became just too much for both of us.
As we neared the carnival site that Saturday afternoon Ita's mother came to the wagon and talked to me seriously again.
"I've been so worried," she cooed laying a smooth hand over her breasts, which were so wet with perspiration the nipples shone through the thin blouse like dark brown acorns, "You mean what you say now? You're going to stay in the wagon tonight, for sure ya' are. Promise?"
She laid a warm hand on my arm. Her dark troubled eyes were on mine and they registered concern. I gave her a reassuring smile. "Oh hell, I get in scraps like that every night in the week," I boasted, filled with delicious bragado. "There isn't a knife made that can disembowel me, you just don't know us Americans!" Then I looked at her steadily for a tense moment, gauging this plump women for all she was worth. For an instant of clear thinking I did not hear the wild chattering of the birds in the trees nor the blaring invasion of the gypsy music from the wagon behind, or, if I heard I paid no attention. My gaze flickered and, beyond her, I saw Ita looking at me. Her lower jaw had dropped two inches and her eyes were glaring both with terror and speculation, conjecturing on the meaning of the expression on her mother's face. And perhaps too at my own dishonesty. Perhaps at that moment Ita knew I was a fraud, a cur, and a number of other improper names thrown in, but I tried not to be concerned with her convicting stare at the moment. I hadn't nominated myself, after all, to be her god in the first place and if I had toppled from the pedestal she had put me on that would have to be something she must wrestle with herself.
Ita looked down at the ground for a moment and then she lifted her head slowly, her eyes dark and limpid, twin pools of troublesome mystery. Jesus! A mother-daughter act on my hands wasn't going to be as entertaining as I thought.
Chapter Six. SANFORD PATTY TO THE RESCUE!
The long-feared Saturday night arrived and frankly, I thought every thing was just dandy. The carnival was two miles away from my wagon, Amen and I were playing cards and a cricket was clicking outside. That's when Pot, the greasy-looking husband of Ita's Aunt Gretchen came panting at the back of the wagon. He tried to tell us three times and finally I got it straight. The Gypsy boys from the week before had Ita!
"What the hell do they want with her?" I asked.
"The one boy has a hard-on for her. I see them all drag her away from the back of the bar, maybe they gonna' rape her. But I think it's you they want."
"Me?" and my cigarette drops in my lap, lighted.
"You have to go."
"I do?"
"To save Ita."
"Oh. Well... maybe we can talk it over with the boys, they seem like nice kids..."
I don't think I said anymore. Both Pot and Amen were dressing me, shoving me out of the wagon, then back in again when they decided two miles would take too long to walk. Nobody ever asked me anything. Then I remember being surprised that the old farting nag was capable of a misjointed trot. Next thing I knew I was in the bar from which Ita had been snatched, looking for the culprits. Hero time, Sanford, and my balls are shaking.
I didn't have to wait long. Through the tall, blood-colored door, which looked threatening itself, strolled the two gypsy youths. They were decked out in shiny silk shirts split at the navel, very much like the ones I had seen on Royal Street my first night in the Latin Quarter, way back in World War II. And their black hair was so greasy and so slicked back over their skulls, they resembled characters from an old Valentino movie. Dolled up and soaked with cologne, their skin-tight pants advertising, they cased the situation with the quick know-it-all eyes of detectives. Their sharp eyes slid over our table, lingered but minutely, so quickly only a trained observer would have noticed they had seen us at all, then they dispersed amid the dancers. Slowly, as if stealing their course, they made their way through the maze of bouncing flesh, the field of crotches and behinds, to the bar where they leaned, draped like stuffed dummys.
"They've seen us!" cried Amen, as the breath left his lungs. His arm was on mine like a vise.
"Have faith in Sanford Patty," I said dramatically, building in the words something I lacked within myself.
Amen's fists were on the table, knotted together, and his blue eyes, under the red light, had the stealthiness of a terrified serpent.
"It's like the Last Supper Of Christ!" he murmured between his tightly closed teeth and the tone of his voice made the hair stand up like bristles on my spine.
"Yes," I said, "but nothing's going to happen," giving him my cocky stare. "But we are going to get Ita back, be assured of that."
He went white, even under the red light.
"Couldn't we wait?" he muttered, his beer shaking over on to his hand. Funny how other people being nervous always makes me calm. Maybe that's a sort of bravery, eh, what do you think? Amen smiled a broken, nervous smile. "Maybe Ita will come home by herself, maybe she's okay." His voice sounded parrot-like.
I lay a warm hand over his. "Amen, we have got to find Ita... we don't know what's happened to her. Afterwards... after this is all over," I said, "we'll do anything you say... go anywhere you want."
Our eyes locked.
"Promise?"
I nodded.
I didn't have to muster enough courage to walk over to the Gypsie boys. They were coming to me!
"Hello, American. Want to finish now?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I would like to know the whereabouts of one Ita, before I call the police, that is." (Did that come out of me? Well it shouldn't have because that's when they chased me and Amen out of the place.)
I don't know what happened, the street was pretty crowded, and Amen and I managed to turn down an alley and get away from them momentarily, at least. Running, walking, falling, we came out on another street and I was beginning to convince myself that Ita would have to get out of this mess by herself, when I saw the two boys, now joined by six or eight of their friends, coming at us from up the corner. They didn't look like they were in the mood for a peace conference.
"Go that way," Amen yelled into my ear, pointing down the street.
So-o-o-o... I went thata' way.
Not a hell of a lot of time to think about it.
The Gypsies were thirty feet behind, no more.
I remember a thought skimming through my mind as I ran: What ever happened to "Peaceful Ireland, where green hills doze you into contentment..." that's what the travel brochure said. I'd like to meet the guy that wrote that! The sonofabitch.
At one corner stood a horse and a fringe-topped coach. It was one of those creaking, dilapidated surreys handed down from some lost generation, and was used solely for the purpose of escorting tourists about the nostalgic, historic town. Up front sat an old Irishman, decked out in a black wrinkled topcoat, a silk top hat and white gloves, and looking very much like a refugee from some bowery low-budget floor show. We climbed in and the old Irishman gave a low cluck to the horse,* a mangy sorrel, and we moved out, jerkily down the street. It was at a snail's pace. The tourists, uncertain on their feet, wobbling, some cursing, flooded the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, a moving stream of bloated faces, and we were caught in the vortex, like dogs drifting in midstream. Amen kept peering back over his shoulder as if someone were following, a flounce of his cheek flesh in the rickety surrey, and he was gripping the metal uprights which supported the canopy, sitting stiffly, as if a shout would send him into hysteria.
Sweat poured down my face in wild streams. I could feel it run down my chest, under my soggy belt, to my crotch, and in rivulets down my thighs and into my shoes.
To me, it was as if a blanket made of wool had been spread over the carnival, shutting out air, the damp breeze which usually blew in from the sea. Nothing seemed to stir, except this promenading mob, drifting under the hot carnival lights the crumbling aprons, the wood structures which disappeared up into the complete blackness of the night. Stifling! The old horse with sagging head, lathered too from the intense heat, could hardly put one foot in front of the other. And the old Irishman like a rag doll in some kind of mechanical toy land, lost through the repetitious monotony of going in a circle, slumped wearily in his seat, the whip dangling in one hand, the leather reins lying loosely in his lap.
I spoke to the driver. "My God! Can't we move faster?"
"Sure and would you be having us a hoss race," he mumbled turning slightly. "Mebbe ya' didn't know, but this is a tour of the town. Nothing more.' If it's a gallop you want, that'll cost ya' another pound." Stopping directly in front of an old boarding house, with a bicycle shop downstairs, the Gypsys caught up with us. They surrounded the horse and surrey. One of them grabbed the bridle bit, several others the tongues-and a horde of them, screaming like demons, tried to wedge the wheels.
"Have they gone crazy?" Amen screamed, slapping at the wondering dark hands trying to tear him out of the coach.
One of them tried to pull me out of the surrey, ripping my pants up the middle. Gulping, I clung to the material, kicking insanely, cursing, calling them "silly bastards" and other names I can't remember now.
One of them, a toothy kid with a thick mustache below his blunt nose, leaped savagely, caught me by the belt, tugged, as others joined in, trying to drag me down. Snatching the whip from the old Irishman's hand I managed to stand up and I brought it down whistling across their backs, their leering faces, with all my strength. Amen, in the back seat, drove his fists into them, kicked recklessly.
From the swinging doors of a bar, immaculate American tourists in clean clothes, gathered and watched, appalled. From somewhere out of the blaring commotion there was a falsetto of screams.
Like black ants over a bread crumb, devouring it completely, the Gypsies swarmed over the surrey. With one desperate convulsion, my mind as keen as I could ever hope it to be, I leaped for the driver's seat. With one foot I pushed the old Irishman overboard, saying "Sorry, Mick!" and jerking up the loosened reins I slapped them against the horse's rump. He leaped as if on springs. We lumbered down the street like a delirious runaway, through a nightmare of blaring bright lights, the surrey flinging out the pursuing Gypsies like bits of gravel on a country road. We all bounced and swayed like rag dolls, everybody screaming at the top of their lungs. The surrey hit a rock with a thud, sent everyone a foot above their seat, then falling back with a nerve racking jar as we crossed over it, through another puzzle of startled faces, shrill screams, screaming pedestrians. I suddenly realized that I had never driven a buggy before, and there was a wild pounding of hoofs, metal against concrete as we shot through the street darkness, dodging cars, scurrying people, terrified faces. Somehow (not easily), I brought the surrey to a halt. Amen bailed out and, leaping down, I tossed the reins over the horse's head. He was spent, his nose to the street, his tongue lolling. He didn't have the strength to move another inch.
Everything was still, so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I jumped down and looked in the surrey. Only two of the Gypsies had survived the wild ride.
But the wrong two.
From the back pocket of the one with the scar on his forehead, came a small innocent-looking derringer, and we were their prisoners.
At gun point, Amen and I are guided from the street, through an alley. Walking tripingly through fanciful darkness.
With the little gun at my back we were then led past skirting fat cow-shaped women, past markets decorated with strings of sausage like pricks dangling on horses, and it reminded me of shower stalls at some YMCA in the states, long ones, red ones, big ones, little ones, hairy ones, veined ones, all different... yet all the same. And I was trembling... all over!
We led the way, the two gypsies at our backs, cat-like down a narrow corridor lit only by several altar candles in a little niche along one wall. We stole down the alley, looking right and left, and of course behind us at the derringer, until we were around to the back door of the cathedral. There, opening the door a crack, one of the Gypsies, the shorter one, peered in. Then the other one, the one with the gun, motioned for us to go in.
A Gypsy, young and greasy and sweaty, leaped out in front of us. I recognized him as one I had kicked off the surrey. He was smiling and his eyes shone white and seemed to be winking at the candle, as if some unknown revelry went on between them concerning good and evil. A statue of Christ, robed in garments that almost looked festive looked down on us with a placid face. Going by him, Amen made the sign of the cross on his chest. At the arch doorway we paused, we were nudged from behind by the gun. We obeyed. "Now into the prayer room," the gypsy said musedly, poking me in the ribs. "Communion time!"
We entered a room really larger than it looked, for it was packed with Gypsies. They were a sad lot, some with their shirts off, others with them half way on, some tucked into loose fitting pants, some with their flys still unzipped, others only in their shorts. Their eyes had the look of apathy, their expressions stupid. The obvious mask of lust, their leering gaze upon us, film covered, like the lurid, lazily benumbed eyes of a turtle. Their stance was the obvious pose of the hustler, hands on slinking hips, legs wide apart, chins twisted inward, greasy hair in their eyes, their bodies streaming with sweat, all the dull look of the aftermath of sex, the smell of rancid flesh, of sperm, of soiled garments.
The sight was enough to turn my stomach. I looked at Amen and he looked at me, and I think we both thought of the same thing at the same time. Ita.
Then, without a word, their dark lava-colored faces gashed with a grin, they stepped back almost with the air of theatrics, and there behind them, in a gory heap, lay Ita.
"You bastards!" I shouted, leaping forward like an ape. Both Amen and I were immediately pulled down by several of the stouter Gypsies.
"Leave them be!" the leader demanded in a guttural voice, savagely. "What say we let them have their minute with her. There is no rush, for sure, we got all night to take care of her!"
When they let go of her arms both Amen and I rushed to her side. We bent over her lovingly, ignoring the Gypsies who stood leering above us. She was naked, her dress tossed recklessly over her loins. Her hair was in wet mats, clinging to her sweaty shoulders, the carpet, and lay wild in strands over the floor. The tops of her thighs were like raw meat as if beaten into a pulp, with long cuts along the sides about her fleshy buttocks. About her breasts were fingernail marks, like wild animal claws, and her shoulders and hips were dark mounds of purplish flesh. I was cut to the soul, as I bent down, lifted her tenderly into my arms. This girl, this girl! I held her close to my face, rubbed her lips, her forehead, pushed back her damp hair, and she was mumbling undistinguishable words to me crying softly. "Sanford... help me... help me... please!"
"We will, Ita," I said to her, taking her hand in mine, noticing how limp it was.
Amen stiffened, like one in death throes, the veins along his neck standing out in the candle light like worms. He was crying, over and over, pressing his face to her bosom, his sobs muffled, agonizing. I got to my feet.
Every nerve in my body tightened. I looked long at the faces that filled this room, animal faces, rampant with whiskey and sex. I wanted to lunge at them, rip them apart, tear out their leering eyes, rip out their lolling tongues, but we both know what a coward I am...
"I have some friends back in the States who could teach you boys something about love of your fellow man," I said to them, between clenched teeth. The one with the gun laughed a slow, drunken laugh.
"This is what we do to Americans who take our women-women that belong to the Gypsies, and no one else. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! We're just playing your Christian game."
I looked down at Ita and Amen huddled on the floor. He was trying vainly to put her clothes on.
"She's just an innocent kid," I said.
"Then why don't you leave innocent kids alone, yourself," he retorted, his tongue thick, drawing out that one word innocent.
"But she came to me willingly," I said, making ,a blunder. "Not like this. This is rape!"
My remark must have struck home. His dark eyes narrowed to slits. He began to sway on his feet, his jealousy of Ita gnawing into his remaining strength.
"That's all right, American, I'm not going to leave you empty handed. I'm going to give you your little lover boy, here." He nodded toward Amen. "Have you ever screwed an Irish queer before? Sure you seem to me to be a man who enjoys trying everything. Just because of that I'm going to let you screw him, nice and easy like. Are you worrying, American? Do I see you worrying?" He (poked around at his grubby followers, giving them a cue. They all laughed loudly, whirling around, I looked at Amen. He was looking horror stricken at me, and his eyes were the saddest I was ever to see. "Oh...? Didn't you know he was a homo? Pity, everyone else knows. Made quite a name for himself up there in Belfast."
He smiled again at the faces around the room and they smiled back. "Undress them, boys," he commanded, and they were on us like wolves, tearing away our clothes, stripping us completely. Then he made Amen lie down on the carpet on his stomach. Then he signaled me as the Gypsies grouped around him, waiting, expectantly. "Now-hop to it American!" I looked, half-way looked at Amen sprawled face down on the carpet, his flesh almost luminous under the shroud of candle light. His face was cupped in his hands, and he was crying. Ita, trying to rise, called out meekly: "Oh Sanford... Sanford!" Then she fell back with a moan. "You've got to be kidding," I blurted out to the leader, who stood at Amen's head, the pistol aimed at his skull. "I could never do a thing like that!"
"I give you my Gypsy oath, do it or he dies!" the leader flung back at me, his lips twisted into a hideous slit. "Get on your knees, American! Go to it! Take him, he's all yours, old man, all yours."
"I won't do it," I answered him, determined, and I think I was playing for time.
The safety catch on his pistol clicked. Every nerve in my body jumped. In his hopped up mental state, he would certainly pull the trigger.
Someone produced a jar of Vaseline, unscrewing the cap. Another dipped his hand into it, then taking a full handful of sand, mixed it into a painful looking concoction. Now that hand slathered the mess over my balls. I flinched in a mixture of pain and heat. Now sweat popped out on my naked body like goose pimples. I knew I had to do it-somehow-or Amen would die. Slowly I sank down on my knees, straddling his legs. Both our bodies trembled convulsively, like a bum with the D.T.'s. I suddenly realized the awesome pain he anticipated, and I bled for the boy. I lay down on top of him and drew my arms up under his chest, drawing his face to mine.
"Amen," I whispered into his ear, hoping desperately he could hear me above the noise of the savage yells and the drunken commotion. "This is gonna hurt... Amen. Can't you tell me what to do?"
"He'll kill me," he cried over and over.
"Forgive me, son." I murmured, knowing what I must do. It was either this or his death. The Gypsy bent down again thrusting the derringer against Amen's skull. Glancing up, I got the horrid picture of his addicted face, eyes rolling, lips dripping saliva, a bloated hunk of voyeurism, swollen with lust.
Gathering my faculties, I tried to summon emotion, concentrated on how much I liked Amen, his young body, the warmth of him, and I felt that warmth now as I cloaked him with my own body. His skin was silky and smooth, his inner thighs strangely heated and I tried to conjure sexual desire. I began to move my hips up and down, and Amen cried out. I was surprised that after a few movements he seemed to relax his tension and I knew at once that this wasn't going to be as bad for him as it was for me. The boy was beginning to respond. His body became pliable to my every move, joining a rhythm with me, not hearing the ridiculous laughter from the hovering mob, the jeers, their curses, nor even seeing their vile gestures. I decided what I had to do was to pool my hatred, turning it into sweetness for Amen. Now I felt his thighs being spread apart still more... widely apart and then the sudden contact of that hot, vibrant part of me that Amen wanted so very much. He arched up to receive it now and I felt the pressure being brought upon me increase until I knew we were joined. Then began the harmony and rhythm. The powerful thrusts were sure and direct and did not falter. Amen groaned with the delirious ache that he felt, and he must have known that I was giving of my very self as the thrusts began to increase and accelerate. Amen turned slightly to me that I might grasp what he wanted me to grasp. The boy was convulsing.
And then it happened.
Amen cried out as he burst with what must have been overpowering urgency, quivering tensely in aching gasps as the force within him rushed out to be spent. And the unbearable tension that I had held locked up within myself was set free too into a dazzling explosion of warmth and pleasure and we both sank into a momentary feeling of deep and joyous contentment. I gave and it was something akin to love. And when it was over, mercifully at last, and Amen lay sobbing in my arms, and with Ita trying to drag her limp, tortured body toward us, her arm outstretched, finding a touch of ease as she entangled her blood-smeared fingers in my hair, I found that I had a little bit of Irish in me too, and it was building into a wild, killing rage.
I stood up... Almost at once we were all blinded by the ice-blue searchlights which kept spinning from the police cars outside. The Gypsy boys leaped here and there, almost like a keystone cop movie, slicing the airless, hot room with their blades, hitting nothing, cutting no one. Some fell over the other, began to fight among themselves and the prayer room had turned itself from a morbid den into a rather lively comedy. I fell down to the floor and hovered over Ita protectively. The one thing I remembered hearing the most out of the melee of fists flying, people yelling, was the loud, shrieking sounds of police sirens.
The drunken Gypsies fled, going out every door they could find, flushing the cathedral-like rats when a building is on fire. I hung on to Ita, pinning her against the wall directly beneath the statue of Christ when the cops swarmed in-just as I planted a fatherly kiss on her bruised cheek.
"Oh baby, baby," I whispered against Ita's ear and I think in the excitement I mistakingly called her Ingy.
The officer who seemed to be in charge was in civilian clothes and next to him stood a very young-looking... priest!
"Appears I called you a few minutes too- late, Sergeant O'Brian," the clergyman said, eyeing my nakedness. Two uniformed officers had the young Gypsy leaders with their arms pinned behind them.
I covered my Vaselined crotch with a bunched up lump of shirt and looked up again at the priest. "Excuse me, Father... Did... you say... Sergeant... O'Brian?"
He nodded with wide eyes.
A picture of a face did a fanciful skip through my brain. No, not a face. A behind. An ass. A classic one. It looked familiar. I think it belonged to a girl named... Finoola.
***************
Chapter Seven. IF THIS IS TUESDAY, THAT MUST BE THE IRISH SEA!
"Finoola, darlin'," Sergeant O'Brian smiled into the telephone. Sanford closed his eyes. He didn't want to see or hear any of this.
"I have a man before me, an American and I've just brought him in from a dingy thing down at the church. The church... yes 'tis no wonder you didn't understand that word, I doubt if ya' been inside one since your dear mammy died. Well, to be it all, this American has in his wallet, which I'm just goin' through, gettin' the education of me life, a car rental card from the agency where you work. Huh? Right. So's I was supposin' that mebbe you could identify him for us and if he is who he supposed to be, some silly name... err... Sanford Patty, we can get him out of my police station and be better off for it. That's right, Sanford Patty, says his passport is in his suitcase in a car somewhere, probably the agency car. Yes, that's right, Sanford Patty. What? Where did I find him... yes, I found him, now don't think it funny... I found him in the church with no clothes on attall, attall. Yes, middle-aged, a mite on the stoutish side, beard... oh, ya' know him, that's grand. What's that, love? Oh, now Finoola, where'n the saints did you learn language like that? He what? Left you in a locked hotel room?... Finoola, sweet child,... what were you doin' in the man's hotel room? You went there on business, to get his signature on a receipt for the agency. I see."
"Yes, that's how it was. Can I go now?" from Sanford, try-to hide his open fly, the zipper being broke in that gypsy attack on his beautiful body.
"So, then, Finoola, he is an American and you know for a fact that he has a valid passport, do ya'?... err... Finoola, never mind that. Can you be tellin' me first how you got out of the locked hotel room and why the man did such a thing? He was drunk, I see."
"Well... a few beers maybe, but..." and Sanford waves his arm in a gesture of explanation. That's when his pants fell down again.
"The hell you say! Patrolman Clancy knocked the door down fer ya'. Finoola, daughter, I told you I want you to be seein' no more of Clancy, ever since that Friday night the two of ya' told the waiter you were Protestant so you could order meat. Nst. Nst. Yes, I know you included the little fib in your confession the next day, but no never mind, Clancy has an eye for the skirts and I'll not be havin' a daughter of mine... well, I'm thinkin' it funny that of all the broad-shouldered Irishman about, Clancy shows up to knock a hotel door down for ya'. Well, I can see ya' are a bit unstrung girl, or ya' surely wouldn't be usin' such foul language, ya' must take after your Uncle Danny. Well, I'll think no more of it dear. I guess we can let our Mister Patty go. Yes, he should bring the car back to you personally, yes I'll tell him that. Ohhhh, Finoola, you wouldn't do that to a man, would ya'? Now you sound like your dead mother,-bless her. A meaner woman with a meat cleaver ya' never did see. Yes, g'night... and daughter, I saw you goin' out the door ta'day. You know what I told ya' bout them mini-skirts. Bejasis, ifn they'd been wear'n them that short when I was courtin' your mother, there would've been trouble a brewin'... and you would probably be a few years older, besides. Yes, g'night, love."
Sanford Patty, pants being held up again by an elbow, and that hurts what with all that sand and Vaseline in his balls.
"Sergeant-"
"Now don't be telling me again that you're an American citizen and you got all sorts of rights. You're just lucky John F. Kennedy bridged the gap between your people and Ireland a few years back, or I'd throw your American ass in the bing for a spell and see what your Washington lobbyists could do about gettin' you some of these rights you keep hollerin' about."
"Does that mean I can go? Thank you, sir, thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank Jack Kennedy, God love him!"
"And sergeant... "
"Yes?"
"My friend Amen... Can you let him go too?"
"Amen? Fraid no. There's a want-bulletin out on him up in Belfast. A bit of perversion with one of them damned fool Protestant politicians. Oh, a big stink it is, you're better off to be out of it."
"Oh. Yes. Yes, I can see you're correct.... Will you be taking Amen up to Belfast yourself?"
"Me? Hell no. I went up to the Northern Ireland border once. Saw that big sign that says HER MAJESTY'S CUSTOMS. Well sir, that was far enough for me. There'll be no 'MAJESTIES' in MY Ireland! They can take their long-nose queen and shove...."
"Yes, well good evening to you, Sergeant. You've been most efficient. Yes, very efficient and after I'm back in the States, I will certainly write your superiors and tell them so."
"Would ya' do that, now? I'd be owin' to ya'. And Mr. Patty...."
"Yes?"
"Do you think the American voter can forget all this about the girl in the lake and young Kennedy and all?"
"Doubt it. Americans are very touchy about those things."
"Pity. Well, then we Irish will just have to wait for young John-John to grow up, I guess. And pray he grows up to be the man his father was."
"Yes... well... goodnight."
"So be it."
***************
Well, I think I better read Lolita again. Because, you see now we find me and I'm driving through Ireland again but... now I've got Ita by my side, and you're not going to believe this, but she's sucking on a lolly-pop, just like Humbert's "Lo." What's more I've decided to take her home with me to California. I am absolutely nuts, I know. But then, haven't I always been? What's one more kid at Hippie Haven and besides Ita needed a break. Well, of course I am not being completely honest with you. I am taking her home because she is absolutely the best piece of ass I have ever come across. There. Now I'm an honest man again. You know, when you can step outside yourself, turn around and say: "Self, you're an honest man," it's a hell of a good feeling. I would like to share that feeling with all of mankind: doctors, lawyers, accountants... yes, especially accountants and treasurers and those sort of people. For them in particular it would be a very delicious feeling. But, you can lead a horse to water but... well, anyway, Sanford Patty has changed a few people's way of thinking anyway, so maybe I ought to be satisfied. But I'm not.
"Lo... I mean Ita..."
"Yes, Sanford, love?"
"You are going to have to change a few of your habits when we get to America."
"Like what, fuzzy bear."
"Like calling me fuzzy bear, for one thing. After all, I am going to take you into the country as a sort of... visitor, a ward, yes, that's it, a ward. You are supposed to be sort of mother's helper and they have very strict rules about bringing a minor into the country or crossing state lines for... err... other purposes." Mother's helper? Jes, Florie is gonna, help me out of my skin when she sees this bundle of sex!
"Does that mean we can't fuck anymore?"
"And that's another thing. You got to eliminate a few words from that lively vocabulary of yours."
"Oh."
"Yes, and I think you may have to start wearing a bra."
"Why? They're sweaty."
"Well you walk around New York with them boobies of yours hanging out like that and you're going to end up a lot sweatier than any bra would make you. And you better be a track star, besides."
"Okay, I won't be natural. I'll wear a bra, won't say fuck or cunt or prick or nothin'. But you'll see, you won't love me anymore if I become high fillootin'. But I'll try. I'll be anything you say, Sanford. But you didn't answer my question. Does that mean we can't... have sex any more?"
"No need to carry things that far. You see, people in the States indulge in every type of meat plucking you can imagine. Then they go out the next day and vote some law in that says the whole business is against the law, disgraceful."
"Sound like a bunch of stupid bastards to me, they do."
"You'll fit in very well at Hippie Haven, Ita. Very well indeed. You got a lot of class... doesn't show much with no bra on and your blouse open like that, but you got a lot of class."
"Sanford..."
"Yes?"
"What's your wife like?"
"A cross between an uncomfortable sow and a determined cow."
"Is she like my mammy?"
"Precisely. Except in bed."
"You got a picture of her?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I have a small wallet and a weak stomach."
"Oh. You love her?"
"Haven't quite figured the answer to that question out. I love my pet fish but I haven't figured out a way to screw them yet. That's about the size of it. And in a way Florie looks like a fish, kinda scaley, hadn't thought of that before."
"Well why don't you divorce her and marry me?"
"Why do women always get around to that question? Must be built into them when they're born. Because you're sixteen and...."
"Seventeen."
"Sixteen, don't bull shit the old bull shitter. If I'm going to take you out of the country I have to know the whole truth about you. Even had to get your mother's signature on the dotted line. She says you're sixteen."
"Mammy's been knocked up so many tim sure she doesn't remember one kid from the other. I'm seventeen."
"When's your birthday?" asks Sanford, lighting a cigar while driving.
"All good witches have their birthdays on Halloween."
"You're not going to start that witch shit again are you?"
"Which witch shit?"
"Huh?"
"What which shit?"
"That witch shit about which witch shit about you and all that witch shit, that's which shit."
"Huh?"
"Oh, skip it. You are not a witch and I really don't give a good goddam when the moon is in the seventh house or when Lon Chaney Junior is going to change into a wolf again or none of that stuff. Christ!"
"How'd you git mammy to let me go with ya'. I'm thinkin' ya' bought me."
"People don't buy people anymore. No, I just told her I'd see to it that you got a fine education and become a gracious lady, that's all."
"Like Jackie Kennedy?" (Licking the Lolly pop again).
"Yes, well that might take some doing. I'm Sanford Patty, not a Greek with the hots."
"You got the hots."
"How can you tell?"
"Easy. Shows in your eyes."
"Yes. Well maybe the two situations are alot alike at that."
"What situations?"
"The Greek and me. 'cept he has a few boats. I got a row boat, like to fish now and then."
***************
Cork tomorrow and then a ferry ride, car and all, nine hours in a cabin with Ita, ho! and then Swansea, Wales.
Sanford Patty got sea sick flat in the middle of the Irish Sea, throwing up over the rail and singing, all at the same time:
***************
If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,
(Pey uuuuke, Christ!)
Then maybe at the ending of your day.
***************
Sanford Patty entering the hotel room in Maidenhead (Ho! Where'd they get that name for a town?) outside of London.
He had had it up to here with roundabouts on the so-called super highway all the way through Wales, now England, spooky castles, bobbies with curious eyes on Ita, bed and breakfast in roadside houses where prudish madames kept calling Ita "your daughter". Old bitches. Even a Greek restaurant in Barry and both he and Ita got the shits from the greasy food. And the bars closing down in the afternoons at the most ridiculous hours. Dicken's curio shoppe and the upstairs apartment where he wrote his materpieces, all very inspiring to Sanford but poor Ita never heard of Dickens, knew little about Tiny Tim and less about Christmas.
Dinner over the Thames, a boat ride around London and those goddam zillion steps up and down the Tower. Ita fascinated by the story of the Black Prince who kidnapped the King of France at the tender age of sixteen, brought the old king back to the Tower and then ransomed him back to France, taking the country broke. Sanford wondering if that story thrilled his French publisher as much as it did Ita. Probably not.
Sanford, Maidenhead, hotel room and Ita in a new negligee, which she almost immediately removes.
God, she was beautiful!
Clean, perfumed, radiant, sparkling, ripe and although he felt the urge, he did not stop to fondle her enticing body as he usually did; but he saw from the gleam in her eyes that she was entertaining a few notions of her own.
"Are the hotels in the States very swanky?" she asked, putting the cup down beside her chair. "I mean, are they posh, like all the magazines say?"
"You'll have plenty of time once we get back to New York to find that out for yourself," Sanford said absently as he busied himself opening a brown attache case.
"All right, but I jus' can hardly wait. You can understand that can't you, love? And I do love you so!"
She looked at him boldly for a long moment, then rose and crossed to the bed. Presently he vaguely heard her incoherent words as she sang a jouncy sort of sound. Finding the paper he wanted from the attache case, he looked back at her and she was naked. She held a cigarette in one hand, a large pink turkish towel in the other. The towel hung down, dragging against the cheap rug on the floor.
Sanford pushed his suitcase aside and looked at her. She smoked lazily. That abundance of Bible-black hair foamed about her head. Sanford almost had to smile with himself, counting all the rewards that his decision to take Ita back to the States with him offered. How long-limbed and lush her body was! Her movements languid and illusive. He knew that she enjoyed posturing; knew that she was aware that he was now sweating copiously; that his heart was thumping like a fuzzy frightened kitten.
The cherry-nipples of her breasts almost seemed to be talking to him and her lips were faintly petulant and very red.
Sanford watching, and Ita letting one hand play with a haunting cushion of her ass.
"Ita, Goddamit, we've got things to do, places to go!" he said thickly.
"Sanford, darling. I thought... we were always going to play around," she said, an accusing tone to her voice. "What's wrong? Aren't you feeling well?"
When he got to her, Sanford's big hand cupped the soft texture of her breast, tightening, tightening. The nipples felt as hard as marble spherules. His hands moved, explored her body feverishly-now roving, biting into the taut flesh of her buttocks, then brushing the satin smoothness of her thighs.
Sanford smiled as he felt her back stiffen and as her breathing quickened. He ground his lips against hers pulling her tight against him. The pink towel made a swishing sound as it slid to the floor. She shuddered involuntarily, as her jaws went slack, and she let her warm tongue touch his, thrilling him. He felt her legs sag apart, then she was whipping her luscious body into his... faster, faster.
Sanford's mouth, moving to one stiffened nipple.
Ita shivering, moaning, arching her back, gritting her teeth.
Her hips revolving, humping, taut. Her eyes rolling upward exposing the whites.
Sanford and Ita locked together, and he walking her toward the bed, and when he is there he drops her down on it, falls upon her as if she were a football he was covering. Her breathing is ragged, sobbing, and she kisses him with an unceasingly hot heat.
Her hips are like steel springs underneath his strong hands, and now she gives him a low, Irish sob of rapture, moving closer, tighter. "Oh Sanford, love! Ohhhh!" Ita's back is arched in a fantastic spasm of desire, and she bites at Sanford's shoulder, his neck, returning to kiss the very places she had nipped at. Suddenly they are both moving faster, like the increased frenzy of a Voo Doo dancer.
They are pressed together-each tremor becoming stronger and stronger after the preceding one. She turns, coils, moves against him. Her hands are roving, seeking, finding.
Ita is even more eager than Sanford now, demanding and vicious. Every nerve, every fiber in her lush body seems to be on fire, her buttocks bucking and rearing, turning sideways, upended, so rapidly, so viciously, that it is like trying to hold on to a hot flowing volcano.
Ita, screaming with sheer animal passion.
"Keep on! Keep on going!"
Sanford's keeping on. Thinking about his reputation, Sanford Patty with the six sets of balls, that was him. OUTSTANDING!
A young, sweet fuck in his arms again, and Sanford thinking he is using up number five of those six sets of balls.
"Oh, Sanford! Oh, God!" she cries.
He is surprised to hear her use the word God, but then thinks no more about it. Right now she is nominating him as being the best man that ever lived. Sanford can live with that.
Then she is going limp, crying out his name at the climax, "Oh darling Sanford! Sanford!"
Then Sanford and Ita, laying back together, still shuddering. But each shudder coming further apart from the preceding one.
Later, as he was dressing, Sanford reflecting again on that first night with Ingy. Missing her terribly, then looking again at Ita, who was now dressing and he said to himself, "Well, you lose a few and you win a few. And you must be able to adapt to each new situation. Right Sanford? Ri-g-h-t!
Chapter Eight. "DR. LIVINGSTON, I PRESUME?"
He shoved the girl away from him, then half dragged, half pushed her to the bed. She fell on her back limply, eager now to be ravished thoroughly in what appeared an exciting rape. The man peered down at her grinning, enjoying his complete power to do with her as he pleased. With one hand he lifted her smooth buttocks so that the slit of dewy flesh and black foliage formed a perfect target.
She groaned in ecstatic relief as she felt him breaking into her. He was so big! He drilled himself into flesh relentlessly, finding no resistance in the squirming creature beneath him. She felt the first orgasm taking hold. She rode the waves of her lust tightly, knowing that as soon as this one passed there would be more. She felt that she had to come with every thrust he made into her cunt. She knew there would be time for five or six more orgasms before her womb was filled with the load of this beast. She couldn't help but think of her father again. Remembering how he had hammered his juice into her belly, tormenting her young body in every way until she felt like she was nothing more than a series of openings, entrances for knobby cocks.
The girl arched her supple back, drifting sweetly off into these memories. She felt it build up in her as his rough hands manipulated her body. She shuddered from the exquisite pleasure her anguished voice mingled with his coarse grunts. "Daddy! Daddy! My daddy!"
The whole scene would be unimportant to our story, except that Sanford Patty had chosen this time to take one of his grunting craps in the toilet down the hall. Sitting there wondering why these places were always out of toilet paper, he noticed a wide hole in the wall around the plumbing. Hearing the couple's lewd conversation anyway and always on the search for a new plot, now that he was writing grown-up books, Sanford nailed an eye to the wall under the sink. And that's why it became important, even though Sanford at the time didn't know that the girl was actually an inmate at an English funny-farm and that the beast with her was one of the asylum's less scrupulous guards. Guard Fieldings had arranged things so that this particular patient could be easily slipped off the institution's grounds for a week end of bed-time rugby. Fieldings had thought about it for a long time, talked himself out of it week end after week end until now, when he could resist the whacky woman's body no more.
Repeat: Sanford Patty had no way of knowing any of this, but isn't it an amazing thing how the man can find his nose twisted right in the middle of these extraordinary games people play. Knowing the story behind the juicy scene before his eyes or not, there was Sanford watching and listening intently, smiling devilishly and humming quietly:
The shadow of your piles will color all my dreams and light the dawn...
An hour later Fieldings had left, said he was going to get drunk and Kailey (that was the girl's name) shouldn't leave the room or she'll be "pretty fuckin' sorry, Monday" when she got back to "that place." Sanford listened to it all, didn't know what it meant, heard something that sounded like a chain clanking now and then. Interesting.
"Go shopping," he told Ita when he got back to their room. "Here's twenty pounds. Now for Christ's sake get something a little conservative, something a mother's helper would wear."
After Ita left (doused in the new perfume they had bought in Piccadilly Circus), Sanford put his ear to the wall above the bed. Every once in a while he could hear the chain sound, nothing else. All of a sudden he could hear Kailey's voice, but he was sure no one else was in the room with her. Her nasal tone had that removed drone to it like someone reading a letter out loud. "I don't know who will find this, maybe my keeper won't come back at all. Maybe he'll just let the doctor think I must have escaped. I didn't. Whoever finds this, my name is Kailey Jones and please tell my doctor, who is a very nice man, that I can't make it. And tell him that I was the one who stole all those sleeping pills from his office in Building C. His name is Doctor Nathan Lance so if you find him tell him I didn't steal the pills to sell them or anything like that. I am going to take them all now and I think that ought to do it. I think I am going to die. He will probably say what he always says when I am in his office, 'mild depression and nervousness'. But he knows better. After I'm dead, he'll know my father killed me. Goodbye. I hope I don't make too much of a mess."
Sanford Patty, opening his eyes to a bug-eyed stare at a blank wall.
Running out in the hall, tripping over a garbagy breakfast tray on the floor outside his room. Grapefruit juice in his left sock. And a piece of toast in the cuff of his pants. Shit.
Pounding on the door of her room. "Coolie, or whatever your name is. Open up!... please?"
"Go away."
"Don't do it. Life can be beautiful."
"It stinks."
"Don't do it. Love is a many splendored thing."
"It stinks too. Get outa' here."
"Don't do it. Doctor Kildare!"
"Who?"
"Huh? oh... errr... Doctor Kildare. That's my name, I'm...you see... I'm a doctor. I can help you. Don't do it."
"You're a doctor?"
"Yes... Doctor Kildare, M.D., D.D.S. and oh, shit, open the door!"
"I can't. I'm chained to the bed. Doctor."
"Oh." Oh no, not the window sill again. Never. Let her croak.
"Wait a minute. I'll break the door down, just be patient dear, put the pills down."... Some Irish cop named Clancy did it, must have had bigger shoulders than me, shit, this thing is a stone wall. Oh... it isn't locked, well I'll be damned!
She was chained to the bed all right. A chain about four feet long, one end around her ankle, the other around the bed post. And still naked. Ho!
"Doctor..."
"Phew. Give me a minute to get me health back."
"Are you from the Cheshire County Hospital?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, sure." A pile of red pills were on the night table.
"Well then you know Fieldings, the guard. He may be back any time. You better get outa' here, Doctor. He'll break you in two."
"Why would he do a thing like that? In two, you say? Well, of course... see here, Doctors have to learn Karati. Made my whole weapon. Hah! and hah! and hah! Anyway, let's get those chains off, where's the key?"
"Fieldings has it with him."
"Oh. Well then... stand up. I'll take the bed apart... "
Sanford Patty, walking through the hotel hall, back to his room. He is carrying an iron bed Rail which is chained to a naked woman and she is asking him if he knows "nice Doctor Lance."
"Oh yes, excellent man, excellent. Open the door to that room. Lucky I happened to be staying at this, hotel... I think. And could you move a little faster, this footpost is heavy."
Inside the room Sanford locked the door, stood the bed rail up against his own and Kailey sat down on the bed.
"Put some clothes on. Have you no modesty?"
"Yes, Doctor, but..."
"After all, this isn't very clinical..."
"But my clothes are back in the other room."
"Oh. Well, I'll go... No I'd better not. This Gaylord Farquart or whatever his name is, is a bit hairy, you say?"
"Fieldings? Oh my yes. Break you in two."
"Stop saying that. Well, I guess I can find you something from the closet..."
"Why do you want me to dress? Doctor Lance always makes me take my clothes off."
"He does? I mean, yes, I know he does. That's only reasonable."
"I suppose you want me to lay down before you give me the E.S.T."
"L.S.D?"
"No, the E.ST.-Electric shock treatments. Oh, you probably call it something else, Doctor. But don't give me the Sodium Penathol first to dehydrate me. Whenever Doctor Lance gives me that I always have to push on my throat to make spit. My mouth gets like cotton. I can count backwards from one hundred without the Sodium needle first. Here, I'll show you, one hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight..."
"Interesting. Yes I can see why you'd have to be nude for that. Keep counting, what happens now?"
"Ninety-seven, ninety-six, oh, I usually hear WOooohs ringing in my head, then of course I feel the nurse strapping me down, that won't be necessary either, I've got the chain."
"Yes, the chain. What then?"
"Ohhh, then the first prongs of the helmet against my scalp. Then the E.S.T.-quite a jolt. After that I'm zonked, out cold. I don't know what the doctor does then. I guess you do. Why don't we just take it from there?"
"Priceless idea! You make believe you're zonked. My professional training tells me the doctor probably gives you ovary-manipulation therapy while you're err... zonked."
"You know how to do that, Doctor?"
"Madame, I am probably the world's most renowned administrator of the therapy. I could show you a long list of relaxed patients. Why don't you lie down. That's it. Now..."
"What's your name?"
"Kildare. You're lucky I'm not busy."
"Why are you undressing?"
"Very sweaty business."
"Doctor, are you going to fuck me?"
"What? Well, now watch this. There, now, isn't this a better idea than committing suicide?"
"Wow. Yeah, much better. Know what I always tell Doctor Lance when he asks me if I ever think about suicide?"
"No, (grunt) What?"
"I say, what for? Kill myself just to make everybody else happy? I guess this is all I needed. I was feeling awfully low."
The bed, untouched since the session with Ita, looked like a minor war had been fought on it. And no troop pullout seemed likely in the immediately foreseeable future.
She kissed him hard. Harder. She bobbed and weaved and squirmed until she was in position. Then Sanford's motion started. That's about all he had to do. She took it from there. Her mouth with twisting, sucking lips, legs flailing wildly, searching out and finding his limbs. Then her surprisingly strong arms tensing, gripping him around the middle, savagely turning him away, then close, then around and pouncing like a jungle cat, clawing at his back, entangling her moist skin with his. Sanford had the feeling he was just a stone statue, being peed on in some park or maybe shit on by a squirrel.
A panting, gasping twosome. Plus a chain.
He couldn't get with it. And he knew what the trouble was. It was Ita.
"Oh yes," Kailey screamed, "I need, I need, I need..."
A throbbing erectile stiffening inside her, yes, but it just wasn't the same.
Sanford looking down at her face, to the scarcely perceptible glacial eyes veiled by the, weary droop of heavy lids.
Her hip-swinging movements were exaggerated.
After he couldn't come and she had twice, she reached down between her legs and began to writhe and twist upon her own hand. Then Sanford felt himself engulfed by a mechanically-sucking mouth. His prick was like an encising blade splitting her lips.
***************
Sanford found the trembly courage to dash back into her room and get Kailey's clothes, watched her dress and tried not to be depressed. It wasn't like him. Not Sanford Patty.
Then the chain. Impossible. They'd have to live with it.
Smoking one of his cigarettes, she filled in the missing pieces of her story. Sad, very sad.
That's when Ita returned, her arms full, smiling that white smile... until she saw Kailey.
"We have to help this girl," Sanford said.
"How?" from Ita.
"I don't know. Maybe just get her back to the hospital. We can't let that freak guard have another go at her."
"But she's chained to a bed post, for sure."
"We'll put it on the top of the Fiat."
"Chained to her ankle?"
"The chain is long enough so... maybe if she is able to stick her foot out the window..."
"Love, you're nuttier than a fruitcake, ya' are. How would we ever get her out of the hotel? Maybe ya' better be just callin' the police."
"Lately I haven't been getting along too great with the fuzz, Ita. They just don't seem to understand me. No, I think we should get her back to her doctor what'sizzname. Let him wrestle with the chains and the whole problem."
"Can I say something?" from Kailey.
"No," from Ita.
***************
Sanford Patty, carrying the bottom half of an iron bed down the stairs, cursing. He walks directly behind Kailey, who keeps tripping and telling him to stay in step with her.
Ita, swaying her hips, fluttering her eyes and soft-lipping the English desk clerk to divert attention from the weird looking couple crossing the lobby calling each other "Sonofabitch" and "Clumsy bastard!"
First Kailey gets into the little car, plops into the back seat and then Sanford lifts the metal burden up on top of the Fiat. Whoops, up goes Kailey's one leg. That's no good, no way to close the door now. Kailey gets out again. He closes the door, pushes her ass as she climbs THROUGH the window. That's better. Except her head is under the seat. Well, she'll have to figure that part out by herself. Back into the hotel lobby.
"Ita, dear. We are ready to leave now."
"Oh, Mr. Patty, how jolly to see you again," from the desk clerk who is so English he can hardly talk at all. "Just having a delightful conversation with... your daughter?"
"Wife."
"Wife, yes. Good show, ole man!"
"Shaddup you sick imitation of Winston Churchill, or I'll..."
"We better be goin', fer sure, Sanford," Ita warns.
"Yes. Yes, we better." And Sanford gives the fat clerk one of his I've studied Karate looks.
Outside the hotel, three women (one with a cane and a hearing-aid), looking in the car window at the perils of Kailey.
This time the car took forty minutes to start, and only then after a garbage truck pushed them down a hill of bumpy cobblestones.
"Sanford," Ita says, "you were actually jealous of that desk clerk. That's wonderful, love. Gives me goosebumps."
"Yes, it scares the ass offa' me too," says Sanford Patty.
"Do you know how to get to this looney house?" asks Ita.
"Shhh..." fingers Sanford, then jerks a thumb at the back seat.
Kailey, suddenly upright again, says: "It's about half-hour the most. Right at the foot of Molly Folk's Hill. If you're a doctor you should know the place."
"Who's hill?" asks Ita, turning around.
"Molly Folk's. The legendary witch. People think she's dead a long time, but she isn't, of course. Everybody at Cheshire County Hospital knows that. Isn't that right, Doctor."
"About Molly Polk and her magical cures. We all trust Molly. More than any doctor, anyway, no offense Doctor."
"Oh, of course not. Now sit back and rest a bit."
Ita sat back too. Her eyes were wide and staring. "Molly Polk," she repeated aloud several times.
***************
They found it and Sanford wished they hadn't. He was sure, having this once heard its music, he would never be free of it again. The faces that looked out from the bars of the long gate were all the same, silent faces. Like that terrible silence of children who have been visited too soon by tragedy. In an instant, a certain glory had passed from this earth. A glory Sanford Patty had become very used to. Perhaps he would never be the same. They entered the grounds, driving slowly, past bowers of rose-of-Sharon blossoms. Then the driveway divided, one section turning along a row of stone benches, the other toward the main building. Without speaking a word, Sanford left Ita and Kailey in the car, entered the clinical white-tiled corridor of the main building, walked it with heels clicking and then came face to face with a bamboo sea of vacant wicker chairs with rocking bottoms. His imagination filled them with drowning faces that would sit and rock forever, staring at nothing, seeing only mixed-up glimpses of the past. He had to get out of here fast, he told himself. He couldn't take much of this.
Five minutes later he came out the main door again and down the steps, this time accompanied by a hairless man in a white coat and thick fish-eye glasses.
"Doctor Lance!" Kailey smiled from the back seat.
Ita was across the driveway talking to some old women with shaggy black shawls about their heads. One of the women saw Sanford, pointed a warted finger at him; "Run you rogue! Yes, you shall have a wife, a seven hundred pound one, and be married six years and not get a child. Cry with shame! A husband for a woman! A wife for the devil! Hang you! Rot you! Sink you! Confound you!"
Sanford got in the car while two attendants helped Kailey out of the back seat. "Ita, c'mon," he called.
Now the old woman pointed up at a hill outside the grounds. It had three dead black trees at the very top. "She's up there, your friend is. Molly Polk. Take the old man to her, Molly would like that. Cook his guts, she would."
Ita stared at the hill for a long time. Soon Kailey disappeared, helped by the attendants, into the main building and Sanford looked at the slow-rising hill now too. "C'mon, Ita," he yelled again.
At the foot of the hill, brimming it like a Mexican hat, were begonias of many varieties, a few with sinister-looking dark red, hairy, foliage and glittering leaves; harlequin plants with pink-speckled leaves; philodendrons, shielded by translucent green, almost luminous in the late afternoon light. In the field directly in front of the hill, a sort of gently waving sea grass.
. Ita just gaped at it, her dark hair ruffled by the same breeze.
Something was happening to Sanford Patty's world, and he didn't know what.
Then, with a slow even stride, Ita walked back to the car.
"You go on back to the hotel, ya' dear man. I'll be along."
"When? How? It's fifteen miles or more."
"I'll get by. Devil knows, I always have. I been on a few lonely roads before."
"Ita, please. Get in the car. This is nonsense."
"Yes, it 'tis, isn't it. I have to see the moon up there ta'night, Sanford, love. (She looked toward the hill again), then I'll be along."
"Ita, for Chrisakes, you're gonna' thumb a ride on these dark roads at night? I won't have it. I'll come back for you."
"No, love. This is... a personal matter."
"Oh, the shit it is. You're talking like a child."
"... I am a child, Sanford."
After that Sanford didn't say anything. He just looked up into Ita's face, that beautiful dark face with the sad eyes. Then he drove away, wondering why tears were forming in his eyes.
**********
Chapter Nine. NEVER MORE
Sanford Patty did not sleep that night. He bought a bottle, drank all of it, paced the hotel room floor, even talked himself into a few cheerful moments, reciting to an open window:
Once upon a midnight dreary,
I went to see Mrs. O'Leary.
He was drunk.
In the morning he got up early, sat on the side of the bed for a long time looking into the closet at Ita's fresh new dresses. Such a little waist.
He went down to breakfast, couldn't eat. The desk clerk gave him a dirty look but Sanford didn't respond. Somehow he wasn't mad at the man anymore. He wasn't mad at anyone. Just terribly lonely.
At nine-fifteen a chambermaid knocked at his door and told him she had a phone call for him on the hall phone.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Patty? Mr. Sanford Patty?"
"Yes, yes, this is Mr. Patty. Who is this?"
"Doctor Lance, here."
"Oh. I mean oh!"
"I was asked by Miss... let's see, I just have her first name... Ita, yes, that's it, to ring you up and deliver a message to you for her."
"Yes, yes?"
"Ita said... let's see, want to get this accurately... that you should go on without her. She is unable to make the trip at the present time. Yes, that's it, precisely... I think."
"Where is Ita! Put her on."
"She is having breakfast with the inmates at the moment. I really can't call her for you, you know."
"Why not? See here, if you've hurt one hair on that child's head, I'll..."
"Hurt her? Why would you say a thing like that? The girl said she really didn't want to speak to you. I... errr... I guess we both know why, eh, Mr. Patty?"
"What exactly do you mean by that, sir? See here, she is my ward, I've got her mother's signature..."
"Well, you can do about that as you wish, but the girl doesn't want to talk to you, see you or go anywhere with you. And I think she is in a severe state of mental shock, so if you would care to contest my professional opinion I..."
"No, no. But I am coming out to that nut house of yours right now and... shock? Is she a patient? Is that what you mean?"
"No, let us not be foolish, Mr. Patty. Ita is going to go to work for us, just in the kitchen at first, awfully short on help here, you know. She'll be paid two pounds ten. Not much, but budget, you know."
"I... I have all these clothes of hers... I..."
"We'll be happy to send a man for them if you'll be good enough to leave them with the hotel manager when you leave. Meanwhile she has her uniform, of course."
"Doctor Lance..."
"Yes?"
"Can I send her some money? Just a little spending money... to get her started."
"That would be very thoughtful. And Mr. Patty, we have our guard Fieldings in custody. If you would care to appear against him in the trial..."
"Can't do that. I... won't be in the country. Did... did Ita say anything else?"
"Yes, Mr. Patty, she did. Didn't know if I should tell you. I think we both know what she means, old fellow. She said... she said that you should be good to Mrs. Patty."
"Goodbye, Doctor."
"Yes, cheerio, Mr. Sanford."
**********
"Is it pride talking or morality?" the whore asked. I guess I had been crying in my beer, pouring my heart out. I think her name was Zelda, shit, I don't know what her name was.
I've got to stop being so morose, I'll try.
But try to understand, one whore is like another, anywhere. No lack of choice, numerically. But in point of quality, all much the same: young enough, most of them, but tired, I guess, and all with the same, or pretty much the same, angles to them. This one I found sitting on a bench near the water, changing her shoes for a pair of sneakers, of all things. Must have had a long day of walking. Sneakers! Christalmighty!
"I wonder if I might ask you, young lady...?"
"-Are you in the mood for a nice time of it? Just up the street a bit. Two pounds."
"Two pounds?"
"Just can't operate a business on less these days. And I have my reputation, you know."
"Very well. That'll be fine."
Up one street, down another.
"American, aren't you? Americans always cause trouble. I'm not sure I should be going with you. Ah well. Here we are, in any case."
Up two flights of stairs that creak. Small room with a sort of odor to it, familiar, very familiar.
The end of the bed is burned by a row of absent cigarettes.
"Two pounds first, deary. And a shilling for the maid."
"What maid?"
"The real pros have a staff, ya' know. Ta."
Up goes the dress, just like she's a doorman at a sauna bath.
Thin legs and the garters are raggedy. Oh, Ita, Ita...
"Here, I'll get things going. No, no need for you to undress, just the trousers, drop them. There, there, that's it now... oh, my, look at that, regular bull aren't ya'. Nst. Nst, naughty for a man of your age."
She reaches for me and a rubber slides painfully over Junior's head.
"Well, I thought a bit of ceremony first..."
"Here now, what do ya' 'spect for your quid? See? Americans!"
She flips her knees up, a big hairy valley opens and she helps herself to keep the position with supporting hands under her knee joints.
"Dive in, it's yours for the minute."
"But..."
"Afraid of it are you? Just goin' to stare at it? Take it."
Her finger indicates location.
Slushing into her. No trouble. Very loose. Ita... Ita.
"Oh, he's a lively one isn't he. Now let's get with the shake of things." Her crotch coming up to take all of it.
"Well here we go... a little of this and a little of that, c'mon now, C'mon, get the hang of it?"
"Oh... oh... there we go, hot as a biscuit, weren't you."
"Wait a minute..."
"All done? Stout fellow! There now, wasn't a bit clammy, was it?
Cold rag on my prick. Oh Jesus.
"Here now, clean you up a bit... nice and... sanitary."
She lights herself a cigarette, looks at a cheap watch on her wrist.
"I... wanted to talk to somebody."
"So talk. That will cost you three pound an hour."
Later, when she made the crack about pride or morality, I figured my hour was up. And she was out of cigarettes. Nothing.
***************
Outside of Bally Bunion I stopped the car and smiled. There was the wagon and the old farting horse laboring up the road ahead of me. Dolly was at the reins.
***************
"I knew, oh yes... I knew too well," Dolly said.
"I just don't know what got into her, Dolly."
"I do. Same thing, fer sure that is always into her. Molly Polk. Can't kill a good witch."
"Oh, what the hell are you talking about, I swear I think Ireland is full of middle-aged children."
"It 'tis, it 'tis. And I'm thinkin' mebbe you're the most middle-aged child of all. Don't ya' see, my man, Molly Polk just used ya' ta' bring her Ita to her. You was nothin' but a messenger boy for ol' Molly."
"Stop the shit! This Molly whatsername has been dead for centuries. Whaddya think, you're playing with kids?"
"No, Sanford Patty, it's you that is. Ain't that true?"
"... yes, I guess so."
"So. Molly got herself buried on a hill overlookin' all her children. An asylum, ya' say. That's rich! Good plannin', I call it."
"But aren't you just a little worried about your daughter?"
"Why in the hell for? She's with Molly ain't she? Ita will have a grand life now. Better'n yours, I'll say that. Now she don't have to beg no more. But you do!"
"How's that?"
"Ohhh... you'll keep on goin' round the world beggin.' Not fer money or bread, like us, though. Per young pussy, that's yer food, Sanford Patty. But ya'll never be forgettin' Ita. Bet yer talkin' jackdaw on that! You oughta' git ya'self a jackdaw. Great company they are. And ya' oughta' write one of yer books 'bout all this."
"Somebody already has. Rosemary's Baby. Too spooky... and too sad. No, I think I'm through with writing. Serious books, anyway. Don't have the spleen for it anymore. Might go back to children stories. I was always happy then."
"Wuz ya'?"
"Sometimes, Dolly, sometimes.
***************
And I drive on, now thinking about Florie and that, for some reason, leads to thoughts about the mantis, the praying mantis, the insect that eats its husband. And all the praying mantis in the world that eat their husbands. Nibble, nibble, right at the core of the soul, year after year.
And Hail Mary, full of... full of what? Grace, I suppose. And I'm not full of grace. Never have been, can't follow that road.
But I'm trying to follow this road and a damned narrow one it is, if a truck comes along I'm dead. An old man looks up from his work over a pile of turf, waves to me and yells:
"Go-ye-by!"
I wave back, don't know what the hell he's talking about.
Alongside the sea again and it reminds me of Dana Point in California, the graceful eloquent gestures of the slow sweep of seaweed fronds in the swell of the tide. No, I am not graceful.
Driving through Kilmilhill again, then a few miles beyond, and there it is, there it is, the same place by the water that I laid down to rest a while back... it seems like so long ago. I lay down now, but it's not the same anymore. No birds squaking in the sky above my head, nothing, just a damp bog. Nothing is the same anymore. Maybe it will never be.
But I lay there just the same, for a long time. And I find myself humming again, but it isn't a happy tune this time. It comes out of me, from where I do not know, maybe a song I heard in the States on the radio before I left:
Just let someone... start believing in you...
Let her hold out her hand, let her touch you and... watch what happens...
Someone who can look in your eyes...
And can see into your heart
Let her find you and...... watch what happens... '
Oh, God, Ita. And I'm crying again and I must stop this shit! I've got to get out of this country, leave it all behind! I'm only a few hours from Shannon Airport and that's it, it's all over. I've got to hear the noise of New York again, feel people around me or I'll...
That night I was on the plane and the woman sitting next to me was a school teacher from Georgia.
But I slept.
***************
He saved the beautiful countess' life, then joined her lustful band of tribades for endless nights of bizarre erotic pleasure... days of sin and carnal delight. Teaching her the joys of love with a man, he was drawn into a torrid fantasy of insatiable desire, fulfilled again and again by the subtlest perversion of Sapphic love.
