In his book, Sex in Society, Alex Comfort writes: "It is unfortunate that so much which is written about early sex experience and teenage behavior is written by men and by unmarried women for perhaps the key problem of sex education, physical, social, and moral, is to give boys, who in our culture are the more sexually aggressive, some rudimentary insight into the way in which girls' responses differ from their own. For a man, defloration is an achievement but no more if anything, he is doing his partner a favor making a woman of her. For the girl, every act of penetration; then' or later, is an invasion of her body by forces outside herself. She can never feel exactly the same toward a man who has 'known' her thus...." But at Fillmore High School it was difficult to tell who was more sexually aggressive. The game of lust ruled the campus, and all played it too well the instructors were merely sucked into the mad morass.
CHAPTER ONE
Fillmore High School. Just another suburban high school in another nice extension of the metropolis. Vine-covered walls of immense cement blocks, sparkling clear windows, huge parking lot to accommodate the many automobiles driven by the affluent youngsters.
It's 8:30 in the morning; the kids are filing in. Mr. Thompson, the speech and drama instructor, checks his watch. On the other side of the school, at another doorway, Mr. Grossman, a biology instructor, stumbles on a low front step, straightens his tie and moves on.
Most instructors who have early classes are already in school. Those arriving late are surrounded by attractive young girls in their teens who are chattering away, and slender young men discussing recent sporting events of both an indoor and an outdoor nature.
The girls have a freshly-scrubbed look, because Fillmore is a fairly wealthy suburb where pretty females are the rule. They wear their hair quite long and down, as a rule, and they wear suggestive outfits like tight sweaters, short tight skirts that are always climbing too high, tight blouses under which might reside artifacts of a somewhat plastic nature. These kids are very advanced.
The school is filling. Locker doors are clanging. There's a great deal of chattering in the halls as the kids social climb with each other.
Teachers say hello, look as if they're in a hurry. Principal Ben C. Trane says hello to some people, walks into his office with an air of polite disdain for everyone which he does not really feel, but which is necessary if he is to keep fawning underlings at arm's length.
His is not an easy job; lately the school administration has been the target for severe public criticism. These have been teen-age gang fights, teen-agers caught at heavy drinking parties, teen-agers assaulting residents on their private beaches, young girls having to "go to California" because they have been caught pregnant, and other small scandals. Ben Trane has been blamed because people feel that the schools are breaking down, that they have reneged on their power to influence the young, that they aren't doing enough to influence how Fillmore youngsters spend their after-school hours.
All of which might very well be true if it weren't for the fact that Fillmore was having no more difficulty with its young people than any other American community of similar size and influence.
"Good morning, Dorothy."
Dorothy Dockstader, Principal Trane's secretary, a tall, dark spinster who has been secretly in love with her bachelor boss for a good many years. She nods shyly as he enters his inner office.
Ben Trane breathes a sigh of relief as he shuts the door to his office. He has run the gamut of attendants without any undue difficulty.
Now he can relax into the easy chair at his desk, prop his feet up on the desk, and peruse the latest issue of Newsweek.
"Good morning, Sally."
"Good morning, Mr. Grossman. I have to talk to you."
The girl looked around nervously. Harvey Grossman gave her a puzzled glance. As a rule, he was not chosen as an instructor-to-be-confided-in.
"Well, why don't you come and see me in my office at 2:30?" he told her, fiddling with the dial on his watch. "I can see you then." He looked at her closely. "It's something important, is it?" he asked with some concern, as the last thing in the world he wanted was to get involved in any student's personal problems and Sally looked as if she was suffering from something like that.
"Yes, yes, important," she said nervously, still looking around, licking her lips.
He nodded, pursing his lips, hoping quickly that there would be no complications. He didn't value personal talk with students. They were too far removed from him, too much a part of a strange, unknowable world that he would never understand or have the slightest chance of gaining entrance to.
He put his hand on her shoulder (not too familiarly, he hoped). "All right, Sally. See me in my office at 2:30. Will you do that?"
She nodded wordlessly.
"Good," he said, then he stepped into his classroom.
As he usually expected from a morning class, the students were somewhat disorderly. On one side of the room, someone was throwing something at someone else, amid gales of laughter, and generally the kids were talking quite a lot. Harvey Grossman sighed and adjusted his glasses, opened his briefcase and began to thumb through his papers. As be did every morning, he vowed that hereafter he would have to come in earlier and be better prepared. Then he wouldn't always be faced by such raucous prospects and the necessity of shouting down thirty-odd vibrant teen-agers.
He found the papers he was looking for and called the class to order. The youngsters fidgeted nervously in their seats.
You're no more nervous than I am, Harvey thought, mopping his brow with a stained handkerchief. He had never quite gotten used to the fact that every morning, without fail, he had to begin. Beginning, getting started, whirling into the day ahead was the hump that he had never succeeded in mastering. Every first morning hour was a challenge akin to swimming the Hellespont or sweeping the Aegean stables. He knew that he had to do it, but he had never dreamed, back when he had been only another student, that it was so hard. Where did one begin? How did one plunge into learning daily and swim out safely on the other side by nightfall? What was the secret? How did one keep from being terrified by these awesome menacing creatures known to the public as teen-agers?
"Today we're going to have a look at the reproductive processes of the frog," he said, and he began wiping the blackboard.
This was when he expected it, and this is when it came.
There was a loud snicker from somewhere.
He didn't turn around, but it cut into him, as always, with the sheer efficacy of a laser beam.
"Does that have anything to do with sex, professor?" came a voice.
Harvey felt something clutch in his throat. Forcing himself to turn around was an effort beyond all human reason.
"Who said that?" he said when he did, in a very soft, casual voice that did not, he thought, betray his terror.
"Me."
It was Douglas Tucker, scion to a pharmaceuticals dynasty, worth more at sixteen than Harvey Grossman would be at sixty-five if he saved every penny he ever earned, and whose father was on the school board.
A nice-looking boy, tall, blond, with wavy hair and the sort of all-American looks that gave Harvey a pang of jealousy as he replied: "Douglas, you know very well that 'reproductive processes' is just another euphemism for sex. And you know very well that I, as a father of three, am in no small measure familiar with both terms and related terms that you have probably never even heard of when you're swapping dirty stories with your friends back of the schoolyard or on some drug store corner. So why do you choose to interrupt the class at this time?"
The boy said nothing. He looked completely miffed. A dark color rose up from the base of his neck and settled around his earlobes. Harvey thought that he was probably correct in assuming that the youngster didn't know the meaning of euphemism.
He turned back to the blackboard, hastily sketching in some details of frog anatomy, writing a few descriptive words that would be necessary. Then he moved over to one side and turned over a series of charts until he came to a large colored one that dealt in detail with everything that was froggish.
He found himself sweating. Lured into another demeaning situation; struggling; giving come-uppance to a boy scarcely old enough to remember Eisenhower as a president, half his own age; fighting, all the time fighting. The war never let up. It was undeclared, but it never ceased. What if the time came when he would be stymied for something to say to these little bastards? Sometimes he woke up in a cold sweat nightmaring about it. What about when the day came, the moment in time when he suddenly found himself without speech?
He began to speak. Harvey Grossman, biology instructor at Fillmore High, on the gracefully swank northern shores of exurban Lake Michigan. Harvey Grossman, father of three, thirty-two years old medium height, indistinguishable dark Jewish features, but his nose just a little large; brown, unpressed baggy instructor's suit, thick lips, eyes blue and vague, hands meaty. Harvey Grossman, who wanted to go to graduate school so that he would never again have to teach in a high school. Harvey Grossman, who wanted anything in the world but to have to be on intimate terms with persons of the teen-age gender.
Harvey began to speak. His voice came out somewhat high and fluty, and his hands were clammy. His students watched him for the slightest sign of weakness, like lions held at bay by a cracking whip.
In the background, the school band had struck up something in the playground. It was The Marseillaise. Harvey noticed briefly that a dark young girl in the front row had crossed her legs so that her skirt had climbed all the way up to the top of her thighs, revealing nyloned meaty legs and black garters. She was a dark girl with the long, wavy black hair and an opulent bust. Her grave dark eyes stared at Harvey with the concentration of a cat watching a robin, and her small mouth curved into a sort of smile.
Harvey Grossman, thirty-two years old.
"Good morning, Mr. Thompson," was the first greeting that instructor Lee Thompson received as he entered the Fillmore High School auditorium. It came from an admiring slender redhead of about seventeen who had serious ambitions about going onto the stage.
"Good morning, Genevieve." He made a mental note to get to her at the earliest possible moment.
Lee Thompson, twenty-seven years old. He has a purposeful stride as he comes down the aisle toward the stage, a kind of handsome dash that compels females of all ages to take him seriously. He is blond, tall and slim, well-groomed in a sleek way, and he wears blue suits because he knows that blue is his best color. Lee is a career teacher in speech and drama subjects who hopes to take graduate work next year because high school girls are getting to be too young for him. With a graduate degree, he'll qualify to teach at some all-girl college, he hopes. That's something he's very dead set about. He's calculated ratios of female-to-man for most colleges of the country that use speech instructors. He knows just what he's up to.
He's a career bachelor, too. You might have guessed.
Sally Ames was there, looking somewhat disconsolate, Evaline, Tracy Tucker, some other girls not quite so pretty, and the usual complement of effeminate boys and a few boys who were not so queer but just theatrically inclined.
This season they were doing My Fair Lady and a mime show. He was having devilish troubles with sets for Lady, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to the play following Death of A Salesman.
The girls crowded forward, their faces beaming adoration, good will, and ambition. As Lee was sole casting director for the school's theatrical attempts, he was the perfect object on which to practice their future roles as teases and seducers of men-who-could-do-them-some-good. Lee Thompson had groomed himself for this role in life as carefully as he brushed his gleaming golden hair every morning.
He looked up from his briefcase. Oddly enough, although the term was half over, he hadn't had a single girl in the group yet, he'd been so tied up with girls in his classes. Now he studied them with the interest of a man who needs to embark upon something new. The little girls who had developed crushes on him in his classes were already beginning to bore, and one of them had even broken down and cried last night.
He liked that sort of thing not at all.
"Begin at the beginning, kids. We'll do this without props for the time being. Harry said he'd be able to help us with sets tomorrow."
Harry was the old janitor. More dead than alive, he had promised equipment for sets about a month ago, and had been unreliable up until the very last moment when they were doing the first play of the season.
"Go ahead, Sally."
Sally Ames was a blonde girl with very fair hair and a honey complexion. Only this morning she looked somewhat pale and uncomfortable.
She didn't seem to have heard him. She was staring straight ahead at the stage as the others mounted it
"Sally?" he asked.
She seemed to snap out of her reverie; she jumped out of her seat with a mild exclamation and ran up onto the stage. He was glad of that, because he liked to hear her sing. She was a pretty girl with a nice singing voice, and it was apparent that, if she had the drive, a career as an actress was a definite possibility for her. Knowing his own limitations, he felt a twinge of resentment, but this was relieved by a warm feeling as he realized that Genevieve Carter was seated directly In back of him, staring into his neck with the intensity of liquid fire. He was almost certain that she was going to be his next fare. She was slender, but full-breasted, and she had the sort of long red hair and freckles that appealed to him. He wondered idly what sort of a ruse they would use in order to bring themselves together.
And it was about at this moment that Sally first showed signs of fainting. It came during a sort of dance. She began to fall for no reason whatever; and if she hadn't immediately stood up again, he might have been worried.
The school got through the day. Principal Ben Trane successfully avoided all responsibilities of any weight, delegating all tough jobs to his underlings, and finished up the afternoon throwing darts at a dart-board that he had pinned to the inside of his closet door.
Once over the initial hump, Harvey Grossman drifted into the remainder of his classes with a sort of practiced ease, breathing more slowly. There were a few minor eruptions during his day that were of no consequence a girl asked permission to cut a class, a boy was caught AWOL and sent to his advisor, some kids got out of order and made a lot of racket that he had to shout down. But all in all, an average day.
Douglas Tucker, after being called down by Mr. Grossman, was somewhat quieter for the rest of the day. He spoke to his friends somewhat, kidded, talked sports, eyed the girls, went to swim team practice, had a brief conversation with Sally Ames during which he looked ill-at-ease and somewhat subdued, anxious to get away.
Lee Thompson, immediately at the close of morning rehearsal, saw to it that he joined Genevieve Carter in a conversation, during which some casual mention was made of the fact that perhaps he should give her some private coaching in the evening in order to bring her up to par in her role. They agreed to this without looking at each other, and no one would have been able to tell what both of them suspected.
High school is a noisy affair. Young people coming and going, instructors in the halls with gleaming smiles or cross, busy faces, and noise, noise, noise, noise, noise: The shuffle of two thousand pairs of feet, the murmurs and shouts of almost as many voices, the rustle of books and folders and briefcases, the clanging of metal locker doors, the locking of combination tumbler locks.
All this was part of the cacophony of sound that assaulted Harvey Grossman and Sally Ames as they met at his office on the third floor at 2:30.
Harvey was surprised to see her, at first. He had completely forgotten his promise. When it dawned on him, he said very coolly: "Come in, Sally." Then he opened the door, allowed her to enter, and closed it behind them.
Outside, sunshine was covering fresh green lawns. It was a hard thing to imagine the town of Fillmore without sunshine.
Harvey put up his briefcase on the desk, looked around to see if he had any mail or any memos of interest, straightened up things a bit, and offered Sally a chair.
He looked at her closely now for the first time. She was blonde girl, a sort of whitish-blonde, about seventeen, he supposed. He had had her in two biology classes, one this year and one the year before; she was a girl with the kind of sleek, slender, tall blonde good looks that one expected from a town like Fillmore. A girl who wore plaid skirts, and sweaters-not-too-tight, a girl with a small, lovely face who had everything going for her that the world could allow fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. Harvey could just imagine this Sally Ames at a party, harmlessly necking with some boy, giggling, drinking a little, going for long rides and picnics, to Fillmore beach, attending luncheons of the Junior League, or brunches, or dinners, or whatever it was that the Junior League had, or threw. Eventually, she would make her "debut," and when she married her name would appear on society pages of all the metropolitan dailies.
He pursed his fingers. "Well?"
He studied her; she seemed to be in some difficulty. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were somewhat red around the edges, that her make-up was smudged, that her small lips trembled, and that she was rather pale.
Her fingernails, he saw, had been chewed, and her knees, now crossed, appeared so bony that he wondered how he could have ever thought her pretty.
"Mr. Grossman," she said abruptly in a quavering voice, "I I think I'm going to commit suicide!"
Stunned as he was by this initial revelation, he didn't know what to make of her face dropping into her hands, of her sobbing so that her entire body shook from it.
He grasped and attempted to compose himself. Suicide? In his office? For what? He'd be ruined!
He put his hand on her arm. "Now, Sally "
She looked up at him, her face so shaken, so full of some unnameable fear that he could feel that fear himself feel it radiated outward from her much as the electric coils of a broiler radiate heat.
"Mr. Grossman, I-I'm going to have a baby!"
Holy God! Harvey looked up at the ceiling, at the walls of his little cubicle, at the door. No assistance in any form seemed about to materialize. He was trapped in a closed room with a teen-age maniac girl whose only interest in life seemed to be his destruction.
"Well-but, why tell me--? "
She looked at him with eyes of pleading. "You know about biology. I I need lidp! Please! I can't bear this baby, Mr. Grossman! My parents would kill me!"
He tried to smile and felt something rather large lodge in his throat. When he felt it dislodge, he was able to say: "Yes, but I'm no doctor, Sally I'm just a schoolteacher." He spread his hands. "Honest, that's all I am. Just a stupid schoolteacher."
What the hell am I saying?
She began to cry, really cry. Large tears rolled down her white cheeks the size of mothballs. He didn't know what to do. He was terrified of touching her, yet at the same time he knew that he had to do something positive, had to break out of the chain of negative events with every power at his command.
It took every effort at his disposal to put his hand on her shoulder and say very gently: "Have you spoken to your family doctor about this?"
She shook his hand off and shuddered. "I couldn't he's a friend of my father's."
"And he's probably a friend of yours, too, Sally."
Her deep blue eyes looked up into his. "I don't want anybody to know. I can't have the baby but I've got to have an abortion, Mr. Grossman!"
She began weeping again, as if "abortion" had been the hardest word in the world she had ever had to say.
Without thinking, he put his arm around her shoulders, looked up at the ceiling. This had certainly turned out to be a fine day.
CHAPTER TWO
"Harveeeeee-e-e-ee-e-e!" called the woman from the second floor window to the man getting out of the car in the street. He looked up at her and catalogued her: she was as familiar to him as the back of his own hand.
"What is it, honey?" he called up.
"Harvey, will you get the laundry, please? It's down in the basement." With that she shut the window and disappeared.
Mildred Grossman, age twenty-nine, graduate of University of Chicago, wife of Harvey and mother of David, Alicia, and Poo-poo. Overweight, with short, dark hair, somewhat buxom, big ass, stout legs, a discus thrower would have been proud to own.
Harvey went down into the basement, peered around at the clothes. He couldn't tell which clothes on which line might belong to his menage. Nodding thoughtfully to himself, he grabbed a clothes basket and dragged it over, began taking things from lines and throwing them into the basket willy-nilly.
Sally Ames had left him considerably disturbed.
But why had she supposed that a biology instructor would be able to help her any?
Why? Because the young were inculcated with the idea that if you had adult problems see an adult. It would never occur to them that old folks were no more adept at handling their problems, if they had any magnitude, than they were.
So he knew a lot about mammalian reproductive processes. Big deal. Who didn't. Kids on the corner knew more than he did, despite what he had told Douglas Tucker.
Which brought to mind something he hadn't wondered before. Who was the father?
He grunted, struggling with the wash.
He didn't know any abortionists, and if he did, he certainly couldn't send the kid to one.
But he couldn't let her commit suicide, either.
He pulled the basket up to the front steps of the basement and propped his briefcase up on top of it.
He had taken her phone number and promised her that he would think of something. He had even (foolishly, he realized now) given her his home telephone. He had made her promise to put suicide out of her head for the time being.
But what was in his power to 'be done?
Upstairs, he set the wash down on the kitchen floor. Two of his own kids came rushing up to meet him. Poo-poo put her little head between his legs, looked up at him admiringly. "Pa-pa," she said.
"Very good," he murmured, touching her blonde locks, "to the head of the class. You've recognized me again."
Alicia just looked up at him shyly, shaking back and forth. She was the quiet one, shy. She would wait for him to come to her. Perversely enough, she was the one he felt closest to. Perhaps because he himself had been quite shy at one time.
Both of the girls were sort of blonde, Alicia mostly so, although their parents were quite dark. David, the boy and the eldest, was a brunette, much as his father had been at his age.
He stretched out his hand for Alicia and she came to it.
He looked up, through the house. The sound of Mildred scuffling off somewhere, nothing from David.
He loved the children, but it was times like these, when he was home after a hard day and wanted nothing more nor less than just a complete solitude, that he felt the most trapped. Hemmed in by the forces of his past, forces unleashed through the unreasoning sexual performances of his glands. Trapped in the company of others, forever. Kids during the day, kids and a wife at night. Ever a quiet beer? Rarely. A moment alone? Difficult.
"You had a telephone call." Mildred came charging back into the kitchen. She was a strong person who dominated not through her ideas, but through the powerful miasma of her personality.
Harvey winced. "Telephone call? Who?" He almost didn't want to know.
Mildred gave him a scribbled note. "Miss Ames. Who's she?"
"My secretary," he garbled, and in that echoing moment he felt himself take his first step out onto the limb.
But it held. Mildred said nothing more. She had no interest. It would have been so out of character for Harvey to be having an affair that she was not capable of conceiving that he could receive anything other than a business call from a strange woman.
She added, "She wanted to call she wanted you to call her back."
Harvey nodded wordlessly. He unpried Poo-poo, let go of Alicia, and walked into the dining room.
The police car strolled silently alongside Whelan Fillmore City Park. A figure could be made out in the dark distance, swimming in Lake Michigan. The two city patrolmen decided to stop the car and see what was going on.
Policeman John Stefanski radioed in their position: "04-04, bather at the beach. Checking on it. Over." His thumb left the transmitter.
He looked over at his companion, Patrolman Carphogus. They were two beefy men of a relatively fearless variety. Both of them had graduated from the Chicago police force, moved north to Fillmore where things were somewhat safer. Now they had had a beer for the evening, a couple of cigarettes, and told a few dirty stories. They were ready to do some serious investigating of any treacherous bathers who might be out breaking the law.
Anyway, such harmless maneuvers, as any good cop knows, kept them from being shot at by needlessly alarmed burglars.
They trudged across the grass toward the beach. It appeared now that the swimmer was a girl. She had a towel around her, and was drying her hair. They made a few noises as they walked across the sand so that they wouldn't alarm her.
"Good evening, young lady."
"Good evening, officers."
Stefanski waved a hand. "You been out swimming'? "
"Is there a law against it?"
"Beach can be dangerous at night, Miss. Me and my partner here, Mr. Carphogus, thought we oughta warn ya."
"There's no law against my being here, though, is there?"
Stefanski looked at Carphogus. The other cop shrugged; he was too busy studying the girl's figure to think very deeply about legal matters. like most cops, the two partners were not very well versed in all laws governing every situation; they just played it by ear.
"No law, miss. But ain't it cold swimmin' out there like that? This time of year?"
Sally Ames shrugged. She was in a nervous state to begin with, and she could scarcely come up with the dialectics necessary to carry on an argument with minions of the law. She hugged the towel around her, sat down on the blanket, and reached into her purse for a cigarette.
Carphogus whispered to his partner: "Hey, is she wearin' a bathin' suit?"
Patrolman Stefanski blinked and stood motionless. He studied the girl up and down with the intentness of a man peering down a dark hallway. In this light it was difficult to make out anything, and he wasn't sure that he really wanted to. If she had been swimming nude, well, there was no longer any evidence of it. Arid in any case, so long as there was no one else present, She could scarcely be taken in for indecent exposure.
Stefanski curled his lips. All he wanted now was to make a graceful exit. The girl had been duly warned, and they could come by the beach on their next go-round just to see how she was doing.
He touched the brim of his service cap gallantly. "Well, miss, we just wanted to warn ya. That's our job, you know."
"I know. Yes, thank you. I'll be all right officers."
"Okay." Stefanski made a motion to Carphogus. Together they turned and walked back to the police car. Carphogus kept looking over his shoulder at her. She was a very pretty girl.
The police car gurgled up, oozed off into the distance.
The park was silent for a long while. Sally sat, legs underneath her, staring off into the distance. The million waves unfurled, foaming whitecaps, striking the beach with the soothing sound of something not quite of this world nor of any other. From back of her, in the Fillmore business section, come the sounds of cars roaring up, stopping, moving on.
All very peaceful. Wind whispering through the trees that had stretched out their branches to soak up the spring. Cold grass underfoot in the park. Cold sand at her rump. She lay back, her blonde head joining the sand, taking it up into its strands, stared up at the endless, starry sky. She had never been able to make out the constellations, and she could not do so now.
From off to one side came the sound of shoed feet moving heavily on branches. She sat up and clutched the towel around her bosom.
"Mr. Grossman?" she asked, peering off into the thick darkness.
It was he. He came up like an apparition out of the black, sank down heavily on his haunches, finally nestled solidly into the sand with a sigh of great depth.
"I'm so glad you came."
"Damn," he murmured. He looked at the lake, the boundless waves. He looked at her. "What the hell are you wearing under that?" he asked in a tired voice.
He hoped that she wouldn't try to prove that.
Harvey ran his fingers through his hair. He was surprised to see that any of it was left. "Why the hell did you want me to meet you here?" Suddenly his voice sharpened. "Don't you realize that I'm a married man? That I can't just go skulking off into the darkness anytime I damn well please?! "
She was biting her lip.
"Oh God, don't cry. You little bitch," he added under his breath.
For a while they continued to stare off into the darkness, into nothingness, at the long beach and furling waves that stretched before them, then something else occurred to him.
"Have you been swimming?" he asked sternly.
She nodded, and he noticed for the first time that she was shivering. "Get over here," he ordered, "and make it snappy."
She came into his arms, trembling uncontrollably. His first reaction was to look around for her clothes as he held her and tried to warm her with his hands. "Where the hell are your clothes?"
She reached for them with one hand.
"Get them on in a hurry," he told her curtly, and she did, but when she was finished putting on her jeans and sweater under the towel, she was still shaking fiercely and he had to hold her tightly. "We've got to get you some place warm. Come on."
She went obediently, taking his hand, letting him guide her to his car. In another ten minutes they had stopped at a drug store. He made her go inside with him, bought aspirins, and ordered a couple of hot chocolates for her.
"Go ahead, take two, drink up."
She did. Then he made her take some hot soup.
It was right then that he noticed the man in the mirror.
At first it was just another blond, good-looking young man, Harvey was so engrossed in his own thoughts; but then the identity dawned on him: another instructor from Fillmore High!
He gulped, gasped, choked. He looked around with the air of a trapped animal. "Meet you at the car," he whispered quickly, then stood up from the counter and walked quickly toward the door.
He nodded, and the blond man smiled. Harvey couldn't remember his name, did remember that he was a teacher of speech and drama at Fillmore.
Of all the luck! As he broke out into the street, he felt himself coming out in a cold sweat. He looked staring at him. Cursing his stupidity, he shuffled quickly away.
Goddamn! He jumped into the car furious. The smartest thing to do right now was to get as far away as possible. Why had he looked back? Surely everything in his manner had given him away.
He held the wheel of the car tightly in his hands, found them sweating. Suddenly the blond man came out into the street. Harvey gasped and ducked his head. But the man only looked around, then went back into the drug store.
Sally came out a few moments later. She hurried to the car, looked around, jumped inside.
Harvey started up the motor with a roar and sped off. As they went past the drug store he thought he saw the blond man staring at them through the glass doors.
But Lee Thompson had come to the drug store only to buy the prophylactics Genevieve Carter had insisted upon. When he had first seen Harvey Grossman he had recognized him immediately, felt subconsciously guilty, but had been pleased to see him.
But no exchange had been forthcoming from the other instructor. He had merely hurried quickly past, just giving him a nod of the head.
It had seemed quite strange. With just an iota of curiosity, Lee had gone to the door and looked around, then returned inside. He hadn't noticed Sally Ames at all, for some reason. Probably as he was too preoccupied.
The evening had gone well. Genevieve had stayed after school and they had met in the auditorium. They had gone over her lines, had a few laughs, talked lightly, for about an hour and a half. Then, as the day was wearing on, he had asked her if she would care to come to his place to hear some recordings of her role he had made in New York. With a bittersweet, knowledgeable smile, she had agreed, then gone to call her parents so that they would know she would be home late.
He wondered idly what excuse she had given.
"That'll be $I.50," said the druggist, dropping his eyes over so personal a matter.
Lee handed him some small change, accepted the package, and went out to the car.
Yes, it had gone even more smoothly than he had supposed. He felt very pleased with himself as he drove, basking in the warmth of his own singular admiration.
He had taken Genevieve up to his apartment, a perfectly safe location. Set as it was on the top of a garage in back of one of Fillmore's more fashionable homes, it was easy for him to bring his car up the alley, park it quietly, and guide Genevieve carefully up the darkened staircase to his flat. A very private matter. No prying eyes. No questions.
He had taken off her coat. Asked her gallantly if she'd like a drink. Of course the child didn't want to seem immature, so she had been happy to accept anything he cared to offer in this case, gin and tonic, which she had sipped cautiously.
Then the talk had fallen to his collection of books on the theater, of which he had a rather large selection most of which he had never read and never would.
As a part of his seduction program, they required frequent dusting and the sort of careful rearranging that left them looking as if they were constantly poured over, the permanent subjects of his questing mind.
Young girls interested in the theater, of course, were inevitably fascinated by such magnum intellectual activity. Ah, what a great mind he must have! What a sensitive spirit!
Genevieve was no less. She curled up daintily on the floor by the bookcase, looking beautiful, as pretty as a Renaissance painting, her red head bent in intense concentration on whatever book she had selected.
The lights were low, carefully selected for color and mood. As she was pouring through odds and ends of the bookcase, he put some music on the hi-fi, made himself at home by discarding his coat and tie, rolling up his sleeves, taking a drink and seating himself beside her.
She had an overpoweringly clean, freshly-scrubbed scent. As she turned her head, her red-orange hair tickled his nostrils. He liked her freckles on the side of her nose, and the way her young breasts poked so pointedly from beneath her red sweater. He felt his palms go sweaty.
At long last her dark, deeply shaded eyes glazed into his.
"Genevieve.. . " he whispered, as if trapped helplessly in an emotion not of his own choosing, a feeling so strong that he was swept away completely, beyond all reason...
She looked as if she were in a daze. Her eyelashes fluttered, her mouth parted slightly, her creamy cheekbone lifted up to graze the day's growth of beard on his chin.
"Genevieve.. . " he whispered again in that helpless tone, as he drew her hungrily up into the circle of his arms, into his demanding, hungry kiss.. .
"Mmmmmm, delicious ... Sweet lips, the sweetest he'd tasted in a long time. He drew on them voraciously, Eke a vampire at the throat of its victim. His arms enfolded her slender body, his hands fanned out along her flanks; they slid to the floor together, deeply engrossed in the enchantment of this overwhelming first kiss.
But when he tried to push up her skirt, she looked at him sternly and spoke in a scolding tone: "Do you have protection?"
"Huh?" It took a moment for him to understand what she was saying.
"I don't want to have a baby," she said for emphasis, and she rubbed her silky cheek against his rough one, slid her slim hand up his trouser leg to touch his penis.
He wanted her so badly he'd've promised her anything. "Sure, I'll get you protection," he said hurriedly.
"All right," she said, and she drew her arms away, crossed them in front of her chest.
"Right now?" he said in a weak voice.
She smiled up at him, then patted his cheek as if he were just a little boy. "You don't expect to put it on afterward, do you, dear?" And then she gave him her mouth with a sort of greedy violence, using her tongue, her hands on his legs but promptly broke off their kiss and shoved him away.
He got the message. Cursing under his breath, he slipped on his coat, looked back once to scowl at her briefly, and then hurried back out into the night.
Now he was hurrying back up the stairs. His pants were on fire, his breathing was strained. He had all of the agitated look of an archly dramatic lover who has been put off too long. He was as earnest in his passion as the most desperate of men.
"Genevieve?"
He had opened the door to the apartment. Through the dim light he looked across the room. A dressing-screen had been pulled in front of the bed but two slender, naked legs protruded from it. He wondered desperately if she were naked or what?
A lazy moan or murmur, or some sort of vague sound, greeted his approach. He passed the screen.
Genevieve was still dressed. He grunted thoughtfully to himself and reached into his coat pocket for the little can of prophylactics. Apparently she had fallen asleep; her skirt had lifted all the way up her creamy knees and thighs, so that he found himself staring at a pair of molten pink panties through which a dark, fascinating patch of foliage shone through.
He gulped, steadied himself, removed his coat and began removing his shirt. In another moment he was just in his trousers and undershirt. He dropped to the bed and put his hand on her cheek in order to draw her mouth up to his own.
"What what?" She rose up in protest as he grabbed her, but he was insistent. He blotted out her mouth as effectively as a fly is crushed under a falling boot. He stifled all protest. Momentarily he grabbed her hair and pulled her head back long enough to tell her: "I've brought protection," then he resumed the kiss.
This piece of intelligence seemed to excite her, and her arms snaked around her neck, held him passionately close.
The more demanding and cruel he was with her, the more excited she became. When he became tender, when his kisses were soft and gentle, she was disinterested.
But when he forced her mouth open, forced her into a deeper kiss than she seemed to want, she whimpered and held onto him for dear life.
His hands moved under her sweater. He unleashed her brassiere and took her firm, small breasts into his hands. The nipples were already distended, hard and deeply sensitive to his touch.
Here again, she seemed to want cruelty. When he touched her nipples gently, she was made of wax; but when he began to pinch and pull on them in a way that he imagined to be quite painful, she squirmed torturously. He pressed her breasts in, squeezed and mauled them dreadfully, finally lent Ms chin into them to scratch them back and forth so that now she thrashed like an animal, whimpered and moaned as if being driven out of her mind.. .
He gasped, ripped heatedly at the zipper on her skirt, then pushed the skirt down around her legs, which rose up as if in reflex to encircle his thighs.
He pushed at her panties and forced her legs away. She was syrupy and steaming. Clenching his teeth, he forced her panties down. As if in afterthought, he finished his own undressing.
She watched him through half-closed eyes as he drew out the prophylactic, fitted it carefully, and then turned over to press her legs apart.. . they joined ... he went into her pussy and a soft cry burst from her lips, and then his nose was in her hair, and she was helping him work ... slowly ... slowly...
"Oh!"
"Hurrrr...."
A convulsive shudder of desire shook him, and then he was enveloped by a feeling of ecstasy so sweet, that he wanted to die...
CHAPTER THREE
He had been surprised to find that she was so fluid, so lacking in tightness. Just a moment into her, and she had come with the ferocity of an alley cat, ripping at his skin with her long rapier nails, thrashing wildly with the ferocity of her consummation, her young body arching into him. He had been genuinely surprised.
Now they lay spent on the bed, arms and legs akimbo. She was breathing softly, her eyes shut. He supposed that she must be dozing.
His own eyes were alive, searching the room. On the floor to one side was the mangled, destroyed evidence of her "protection." He recognized it as a symbol of modern civilization and smiled softly to himself. It was a very characteristic item, he thought, and really ought to be incorporated into the NATO flag.
He ran his hand up her smooth flank and she sort of purred, turned over to face him. He put his fingers into the furry softness at her mound, received no response, and bent his lips to touch lightly at the tips of her swollen little breasts. No reaction to that, either.
He pressed his mouth on hers, and she kissed as if in a dream world, her hands coming up on his behind. He could feel himself becoming aroused again.
This was a good little girl. He put his hand between her legs and found that she was hot again. She was going to be a good kid. He was going to enjoy her a lot. With a thirst born of desire, he propped one of her legs up, found her crevice in the darkness, and once again entered. She stiffened, gripped him tightly, and began to moan with a sound that resembled nothing human.
After they had left the drug store, Harvey had driven Sally Ames around in a panic-stricken mood, rushing aimlessly. When he finally managed to calm himself, he couldn't imagine why he had been so upset.
She sat very straight in the seat, staring straight ahead. Her gold-white hair was still dank and plastered irregularly around her head. Her eyes serene. She had the look of a goddess, he thought. For a girl with looks like these, nothing was impossible.
Why hadn't he just left her in the drug store altogether? Why not just driven off? He didn't want to answer himself.
"That was Mr. Thompson in the drug store," she said lamely.
He nodded, remembering. Thompson yes, speech and drama. He remembered now very well.
He tried to change the mood by asking: "Who got you into this mess?"
"You wouldn't know him."
They continued to drive aimlessly. She took out a cigarette and began smoking, rolled down the window on her side just a jot. For some reason, he didn't think she should be smoking while pregnant, although he couldn't remember where he had read anything about that.
"Shouldn't he marry you or something?" He tried to sound indignant.
"I don't want to get married. I'm too young to get married."
"But you're not too young to have a-" He was about to say bastard and cut himself short.
"I'm not going to have anything. I'll just get an abortion."
He sighed and shook his head. "I've tried to tell you I don't know the first thing about abortions."
He pulled the car off to the side. They were at the edge of a large, dark park. Oak branches waved in the breeze. The night was very silent. At one end of the park sat an old, old church, black and morose. Harvey felt weighted down like Atlas, but he was glad to be out of the traffic and someplace quiet and private.
"But you're a biologist," she insisted, as ever.
He groaned, sighed, scratched his ear, all simultaneously. "Biologist for God's sake, all I have is a college degree do you know what that means?"
She shook her head and looked woeful.
"What it means, in plain language, is that I've had maybe six lousy courses in biology, only one of which contained any information to any extent, on the human body." He took her small, delicate hand in his. "Sally, what I know 'best are frogs, amoeba, paramecium, lions, uh, dandelions, and lot of other stuff that is of no earthly use to human beings. In short, I don't know a damned thing."
She sighed, sounding as if all the air in the world had left her. She looked disconsolately down at her hands. "I wonder if I could do it myself."
He choked, grabbed her shoulders and shook her violently. "Listen to me, you must never even think that!"
They paused in a silence more dynamic than sound, stared deeply into each other's eyes. After a moment he had to look away, and he let her go.
After that they didn't speak again for several minutes.
She opened it: "If you would help me, I'd do anything you wanted me to," she said softly.
A teen-ager's dream, he thought wistfully. A helpless blonde captive prepared to do my bidding.
He looked over at her. Her jaw was set in a firm, patrician line. He couldn't remember what it was her father did, and for no relevant reason he began to think of that, began to wonder. Did he work in an office? Chairman of a board? Shop owner? What? Did he play golf at the country club on Sundays? How did he feel about Jews?
"That isn't the point," he said. "The point is that I don't know anything about it and I might kill you. And if you did it yourself you might kill you. We don't have experience in this sort of thing."
"I'll do it myself," she said as calmly as if she were talking of going to the kitchen for a drink of water.
"How old is the boy who did this to you?" he asked cautiously watching her out of the corner of his eye.
"He's younger than I am."
He felt a note of jealousy well up in him, unbidden. It flared out and filled him like an amoeba of amazing proportions.
He curled his lips in distaste. His mouth felt like seven mornings in a row. "Well, I can't help you."
"That's all right. I'll do it myself, I guess." She looked out the window. She had rolled it all the way down, and she was able to gaze up at the stars.
Harvey thought again about what she had said: ". . . do anything you want.. . " He swallowed. Why not? Why not take a little something from life, be a hedonist. When he had been in school, that attitude had been all the rage.
But the theories of college students were just that, theories. In a moment, you went to apply for job; in another moment, you forgot about your bright theories of social salvation. You left them behind with your tennis shoes, seeding the campus, left them to be picked up by yet another year of bright, perceptive students who imagine they have discovered some brand new answers to man's never-ending search for happiness.
He said abruptly, not as if he had lost a battle, but as if he were moving forward to meet one: "All right. I'll do it. I'll do a little extra studying and find out what we can do."
She looked at him in that cold darkness. Her hand snaked out for his, but he avoided it.
"Did you drive to the beach?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"I'll take you back to your car."
"Yes."
They drove back in silence. He deposited her by the car and said shortly, "I'll call you." He gave her a deep look. "Do you promise not to worry?"
"I promise," softly.
Then he left her.
In back of him, patrolman Stefanski wrote down his license number with the aid of a flashlight, not knowing exactly why he was doing so. His partner, seated to his right, slumbered on with big snores that made their squad car shake sideways from time to time.
Then he snapped off the flashlight, saw the lights of Sally Ames' car go on, and watched her in silence as she disappeared in back of him, rounded a turn on Sheridan Road, and was gone.
It wasn't very late when Harvey got home, but Mildred was asleep.
He peered in on the kids before going to bed, muttered something to himself, then began to remove his clothes.
Mildred was deep in the soft breathing of sleep when he crawled in beside her. He put his hand on her hip, ran it over her behind, palmed the flaccid belly, put his face into her short curly dark hair.
She slept on.
He felt around for her breast, found it, plucked a large dark nipple between his fingers.
Nothing. He wasn't even responding himself. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine what it would be like to be lying like this, belly-to-back, with Sally Ames.
He tried to imagine her smooth white flanks, the firmness of her slender back, the way her backbone would protrude out into his fingertips.
His face would be in her white-yellow hair, his penis down between her legs, and his arms would be around her, both hands on a breast and stiffening nipple.. .
"Harvey.. . " Mildred squirmed as he started to prod her. Her legs opened, but she was dry. "Harvey ... not this week ... come on ... I'm tired "
Everything left him. Dead again. He looked at himself. One would think he was eighty years old, as impotent as he was. He felt disgusted with himself.
He got up from the bed and went into the dining room, foraged around in Mildred's purse for a cigarette. Ordinarily he didn't smoke, but this was no ordinary night. He lit one and went over to the window.
They lived in Palmer Square, a considerably less fashionable section of Chicago than suburban Fillmore. Every morning he made the trip north, struggling with the traffic, struggling back late in the afternoon. About thirty minutes each way.
Now Palmer Square was quiet; it was late. A little rain had started, and the cars swished as they moved in the streets. Harvey gazed thoughtfully at the buildings across the street, at cars stopping at a stop sign, at stretches of park in the corner of his vision, "You awake, Harv?"
It was Mildred, rubbing at her eyes with a wrist, stretching the misshapen nightgown over her misshapen child-borne body.
"Yeah." He looked her up and down, waited for her to say something, looked out the window again.
"Jezz, what're you doing up at this hour? What time is it?"
"Eleven, I think."
"That all?" She went into the kitchen, turned on the light, probably looked up at the clock, and came back. She put her arm around him and nestled her tousled head against his shoulder. "Cancha sleep?" she asked.
"Just restless." He looked down at her. Her eyes had closed.
"Mildred," he said, "I think I'm going back to school in the fall."
Her eyes opened. "Huh? What? What for?"
"I think I should have graduate degrees. I can't get anywhere if I don't."
Her mouth seemed to sour. "Oh yeah? And what do we do for money while you're going to school?"
"I'll get a fellowship."
She smirked. "Enough to support three kids, huh?"
He didn't say anything, although she seemed to be waiting for something. After a few seconds he was surprised to feel her hand coming around and gripping him between his legs. For some vague reason, the gesture seemed lewd.
She played with him for a little bit, worked him up, then she muttered: "I'll get some jelly," and crept back into the bedroom.
He followed her back there. She was ruffling a table drawer, finally found a jar of vaginal jelly and, removing the top, began to work some between her legs. Harvey felt vaguely disgusted.
In another moment she was lying back on the bed, her nightgown pulled up to reveal the dark mystery of her sex, her legs propped up, ready for his entrance.
"Come on," she whispered, holding out her arms. "Come on.. .baby...."
With a sigh of surrender to something unnamable, he dropped onto her, pushed himself between her legs, and insinuated himself into the sweet, cloying pussy. In another few moments, clenching his teeth, he began to think of Sally Ames, and then spurts of excitement started to well up in him. He gasped, grunted, and found a weak sort of nirvana just a few thrusts later. As for Mildred, she showed no sign of anything whatever.
Douglas Tucker was peeping at his sister through the keyhole in the bathroom door when the telephone rang. He went to get it with no eagerness whatever. For about a half hour he had been watching his sister as she stepped in and out of the shower, tailored her toenails, and paraded before the bathroom mirror, bending over in front of it to see just how her breasts would hang, pulling her long brown hair over them, and doing various other tricks like pursing her lips in a kiss, dancing, and a variety of other strange things.
He had had his hands in his pants pockets when the telephone rang. "Yeah?" he said crossly when he answered.
"Hello, Doug?" It was Sally Ames. He cursed mentally.
"Hi, Sal. What's up."
"You haven't called me."
"God, swimming practice every night, Sal No kidding. I'm really hung up."
"I think I've found somebody who can take care of me."
His throat went dry. "Yeah?" he said, licking his lips.
"You don't know him."
I don't wanna know him, either, the boy thought. "Swell, then whatdya want me to do?"
"Just call me once in a while, so I wouldn't feel so lost. I feel so cheap."
Oh, God. Douglas Tucker was coming up against one of man's age-old problems what do you do with a woman when you no longer have any use for her? He found it almost impossible to understand how he could have been so incredibly hot for Sally Ames at one time last year; yet now felt as if be would be relieved if she just dropped dead. After all, his own sister had bigger tits. He found it hard to believe that he had at any time been so mortally excited over the prospect of taking a girl to bed whose breasts were so small. One might as well make love to a man: if a girl didn't have tits, she no longer existed for Douglas.
He said: "Gosh, I'm sorry. Sal I just "
"You don't want to see me any more?"
He sighed. "Well-"
"Douglas, if I die, I'm going to leave a note behind me, and I'll tell all about what happened between us."
"Sally "
But she hung up. He cursed and put the receiver back on the hook.
Of ail the times to call As he walked back to the bathroom, he wandered if she would really carry out her threat. Anyway, she wouldn't die. That was nothing serious. Why did she make a big thing out of it
She had said once she might commit suicide. And she knew that marriage was impossible. What if she did die? Would that look so bad for him? Lots of guys laid girls, he was no worse than anyone else. His old man would probably foe plenty proud of him.
He arrived back at the bathroom door, squatted down so that he could peer through the keyhole again.
His sister was sitting on the toilet and doing something funny with her fingers. He grimaced. That was one hell of a place to do anything like that.
She was squirming like crazy, her brown hair flying all around her shoulders and arms. He felt vaguely sick, and straightened up.
Sally had been a fairly quiet lay, although she had whimpered a little afterward. He wondered a little what a squirming lay like his sister would be like, but he didn't wonder too hard. He had no expectations along that line; he just liked to watch her undressed.
He went back to his room and puttered around. He had some girly magazines that he ignored. Most of his trophies were up on a shelf in a corner of the room. School papers and notebooks lay scattered across his desk.
He fell back on the bed and picked up a paperback book. Although he had purchased it for its lurid cover, he had been disappointed to find that there was nothing very salacious within.
He said a foul word out loud, and then heard his sister entering her room next door. The keyhole between them had been plugged for a good many years, so there was nothing to do except think about her a little, a few other girls in school, and something about his latest sporting feats.
He was getting to be quite an athlete, and looked forward to be first string on the baseball team next year. He already had letters in swimming and track.
He dropped the fly on his trousers, wormed out of them, and pushed his hand into his drawers. Now, this was real satisfaction. What women could substitute for the vividness of an active imagination? And besides, the imagination was around a lot more regularly-and didn't nag as much.
He continued to play with himself until he heard the knock on the connecting door to his sister's room.
"Yeah?" He jumped out of bed and picked up his jeans.
"Open up, Squeegee. Are you decent?"
"Yeah, I'm decent." He zipped his jeans up and went to the door.
Tracy had put on a kind of gauzy nightgown that puffed out in all the right places. He caught the heady scent of cleanliness plus something she must have just sprayed on for going to bed.
"Come on in, kid. I was just looking over the stuff I got to hand in for tomorrow." He went to the desk as if he had just gotten up from it.
He worked through his papers for a while, trying to look as if he was concentrating. Meanwhile, he heard her sit down on the bed.
He cleared his throat. "What's cooking?"
She bounced on the bed a little, making the springs squeak. For no apparent reason he began wondering what time their folks were coming home. He was aroused like crazy, and he wished to hell that Tracy would get back to her own room. In his present condition, he didn't want to stand up.
"I was just thinking," she said.
"Yeah?" He felt exasperated. Everything that had happened to him in the last half hour was having a definite thwarting effect. In short, he was frustrated.
"Moose Gorber asked me to the dance at school next week."
He turned around in his chair. "Yeah?" Moose Gorber was an all-state football player, as big as any professional, and he was rumored to be very rough with the girls.
She wriggled her toes. "I wasn't sure whether I should go out with him or not."
Now he was really concerned. "They say he's pretty fast with the girls."
"What do you mean by fast?"
He had never discussed sex very much with his sister, and he didn't imagine that now. He looked around blankly.
She looked down at her toes. She had pulled her gown around in front so that her burgeoning breasts were well-concealed, but the way the gown slid up her thighs made him definitely nervous. "Douglas, would you tell me something honestly if I asked you?"
"Oh, sure," he said, completely doubtful.
"Have you ever had a woman?"
He pursed his lips. He felt like bragging, which is the natural reaction for young men, but at the same time he didn't. He didn't look at her as he said, "What d'you mean?"
"You know. Have you ever gone into a woman with your-" the sentence dropped off.
"Sure," he said evenly. He looked at her. "Why?"
She pursed her lips and looked away, kept her hands huddled carefully in her crotch. "Oh, nothing, I just wondered what it's like."
His eyes narrowed. "You never ? "
She shook her head. "A couple of guys have tried to feel me, and that's not so bad, but I never let anybody put his hand ... or do anything...." Her voice trailed off.
He looked thoughtful. The blood was pounding in his veins.
Suddenly the downstairs door slammed. "You better get back to your room," he said right away, and she hurried to the door.
"We'll talk about this again? Okay?"
"Okay," he said, nodding, and then he found that after they had closed the door he had broken out into a cold sweat.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fillmore High School. Just another suburban high school in another nice extension of the Chicago metropolis. Vine-covered walls of immense cement blocks, sparkling clear windows, huge parking lot to accommodate the many automobiles driven by affluent youngsters. Everybody has a car these days.
It's 8:30 in the morning; the kids are filing in. Lee Thompson checks his watch, feels a warm glow of contentment. On the other side of the school, at another doorway, Harvey Grossman looks thoughtfully at a low front step, moves carefully up concrete stairs, apparently deep in thought.
Most instructors have early classes and are already in school, yawning at their students as their students yawn back at them. Those arriving late are surrounded by attractive young girls in their teens who are chattering away about whatever it is young girls chatter about, and slender young men discussing recent sporting events of both an indoor and an outdoor nature.
The girls have a freshly-scrubbed look, as befits a wealthy exurb like Fillmore where natural heredity is going to produce prettier girls than elsewhere in the city. They wear their hair long, as a rule, and they wear suggestive outfits comprised largely of tight sweaters or blouses, short tight skirts that are always creeping too high, and bosom-enhancing artifacts of a somewhat plastic nature. These girls are okay.
The school is filling. Locker doors are clanging. There's a great deal of talk and commotion in the halls. Another day had begun.
After school Harvey drove down to Northwestern University library and picked up everything he could on abortions.
He read until his eyes were weary, until he felt as if they would snap out of his head.
He hoped to get more from medical journals. There were a few books on the subject, and he took out whatever was available. Unfortunately most of them dealt with the legal and moral aspects of abortion. Only in minor instances could he find anything even remotely related to the mechanical act. He wondered if he should contact a doctor for advice.
It didn't occur to him until he had left the building that he had nowhere to hide the books at home or at school. His office at school was shared by several other people, and his desk was not immune to casual search or glance on one pretext or another. And there was no privacy at home.
Why was he doing this, in any case? When it occurred to him that he might actually go through with such an incredibly hideous and illegal act, his entire body began to tremble.
What sort of deep strength had welled up to give him the power to tell Sally Ames so assuredly that he, he alone was going to be her rescuer?
Actually, he didn't like the idea. It was really too much like murder. Philosophically speaking, it was already a live human being who had a right to life if it could survive. With babies so easy to give away, or sell, or get adopted, did a mother, even this kid, have the right to destroy it--when it was already alive?
The moral question had evaded him until this moment. Now he cringed with the thought of it.
I'm a swine, he thought.
Why did I tell her last night, with such certainty, that I would do this thing? I must have been out of my mind. It must have been the darkness.
But he couldn't let her kill herself.. . ?
Got to see her tonight, got to talk to her. Another damned long drive back to Fillmore. Shit.
He plodded to the car, threw the books into the trunk, and drove home.
Nor was Sally inactive. When she got home, the first thing she did was to go over to Fillmore Township Public Library and look up everything she could on abortions. There were no books available, but there was a surfeit of magazine articles listed in the Reader's Guide to Periodical literature, most of it of a very legal and abstract nature. She read through most of it with some sort of interest, then went home.
Bryan Maxwell called, and she agreed to go out with him Saturday night. After that she looked listlessly through her homework papers, then called some af her girl friends.
Sally was not an unpopular girl. Up until the time she had started seeing Douglas Tucker, she had had a wide circle of young acquaintances who called her day and night and invited her to parties of one kind and another.
But, going steady with Douglas, she had turned down a number of boys who had wanted to date her. Bryan was one of those but he had hung on a bit more sturdily than the others.
She had also somewhat lost touch of the clique of her girl friends. While she was dating Douglas, those imagine convertibles driven by her young girl friends no longer showed up in the Ames' driveway with windblown, handsome girls waving, their rosy cheeks excited, their long hair caught in the wind. Douglas was her beau, and gradually she had lost contact with much else.
Tired of her.
She was in her bedroom now, and she looked into the mirror of her bureau. She was still a pretty girl anyone could see that she was attractive. Except for the slightly red eyes, from lack of sleep and nervousness. Why then, had Douglas thrown her over?
It seemed as if only yesterday she had been as carefree as a lark, the cares of the world as much a joke as a point of philosophical discussion.
Only yesterday discussing what could be done about riots, about poverty, about the Beatles, about Mayor Daley, about the frug, about long haircuts, about tough instructors, about how to get into what college, about race relations, about bathing-suit fashions. And today she was pregnant, faced with something so serious for a single teen-ager that it was not something that could be conceivably faced alone within the context of American culture.
She pursed her lips, licked the inside of her mouth nervously. The white blouse she was wearing today had become soiled somehow, yet she was not very inclined to be rid of it. Lately she had become somewhat careless about her dressing habits. She didn't seem to have the same energy she used to have.
Some impulse struck her, and she removed the blouse, working very carefully on the pearl buttons. It came away and there was her brassiere, which seemed to her to be sagging a bit. She removed that also.
Breasts. Larger than Douglas Tucker remembered them, nipples wider and more sensitive. They were full and quiet, with nothing whatever diminutive about them.
She turned away from the mirror, picked up a brush and began brushing out her hair without enthusiasm. It was quite long now, almost a pure white, with stands of gold. Somehow she felt it was currently too stringy and unkempt, but she wasn't quite sure of what she was to do about it. It hung down without any attempt at style or organization. Natural, the way most of the girls in Fillmore Township wore it.
She made a mental note that she was going to try to get back into a more normal swing of things. She couldn't bear to see Tracy Tucker again, or to call her, but she supposed that she could start doing things again with her other girl friends. She would have to. Lately her mother had taken to criticize her staying-at-home habits, and Mr. Ames was giving her strange looks.
She hoped desperately that Mr. Grossman would be able to help her. He seemed like an honest person, and he had promised. She was at least a little bit relieved to know that she was not totally alone. Ever since she had stopped menstruating last month she had been almost out of her mind with worry.
My Fair Lady would have to be her last play this season, too. Every rehearsal seemed to be more discomfiting. She often found herself staring off into space, or just dozing off for no reason, and Mr. Thompson had become quite critical and anxious about the way the play was going.
Too much dancing. She wouldn't be able to hold up much longer. Perhaps she should ask him to release her right away, get someone else.
Strange how he had noticed her in the drug store the other night. Looked right through her, but she was almost positive that he hadn't seen her, recognized her. He had been quite preoccupied.
"Sally?"
Her father! She jumped up and almost immediately felt faint. "Yes?" she said weakly.
"Can I come in, honey? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Just a minute." She put on her bra and blouse again, stuffed the blouse down into her waist.
"Hi," he said, entering. He went immediately to the window and threw it wide open. "Pee-yew, what stinks in here? Kind of close, isn't it?"
He closed the door, took her hand and sat her down on the bed. "Come on over here, honey. What's wrong? We hardly ever see you downstairs any more. Why do you spend so much time in your room? Or out roaming the streets till all hours? I can't let you take the car if you're going to disappear until too late. That's too dangerous."
She took in all of this, nodding wordlessly.
He put his arm around her shoulder. "What is it, huh? What is it that my little girl can't tell me?"
She feH against him, sobbing.
David Farnum Ames gasped. "I demand to know what it is," he said urgently.
When she was finally able to speak: "I've broken up with Douglas, father."
Ames was relieved. He grunted, patted her on the shoulder and bugged her. "Well, if that's all. I thought it was something important. Just puppy love. Read your Bible tonight before going to bed, and you'll realize how silly this all is. You're just a foolish little schoolgirl, Sally Ann."
She nodded.
He kissed her ear lightly. "Okay, honey, now get a little rest Don't worry about your homework for the rest of the week. Just relax. Sunday you're going to start going to church again like always, and Sunday night there's the crowd of kids at the church that you want to start seeing again. Start getting out of yourself! See your old friends! Then you'll be okay."
"Yes, dad."
"Okay, now kiss me good night, and we'll say no more about it"
Ames had always kissed his daughter good night on the lips from time to time, but this was one time he was in for a distinct surprise. For Sally unthinkingly, just from reflex after thinking about Douglas, inserted her tongue between his lips...
He jerked away as if he had 'been struck with a torch. Her face contorted in pain, rage, and shock.
"And just where did you learn to kiss like that, young lady?! "
She said nothing.
After a moment, his teeth clenched, his jaw tight, her father hurried from her bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
"Dr. Rosenberg, this is Harvey Grossman."
"Yes, Harvey. What can I do for you?" Harvey could conceive of the doctor saying this as he wiped his hands on a towel.
"Uh I'm writing a novel, doctor, and I wondered if you could give me some advice about some things."
Soundlessness from the other end. Dr. Rosenberg consulted something. "Could you come in tonight Harvey? I'd be happy to talk to you."
"Thank you, doctor. I'll come in right away."
It wasn't far. Harvey thought of what he was going to say on the way.
It had first occurred to him to talk things over with Dr. Rosenberg on the way home from school. For one thing, the Doctor was an old family friend. He'd known him practically all of his life, ever since years ago. And the Doctor had always taken a kindly interest in him, he thought.
There was almost no one else in the waiting room of the clinic when he arrived. He gave his name to the girl at the switchboard and sat down to read a magazine.
In about fifteen minutes, a woman went in to see Dr. Rosenberg. Harvey studied his watch, compared it with the clock on the wall. He was becoming nervous.
It must have been another twenty minutes before Doctor Rosenberg came out to see him; a portly little man with thick eyeglasses and a funny waddle when he walked.
"Come in, Harvey." Dr. Rosenberg showed him the way; Harvey had been to this office often enough, ever since he was a little boy.
The door closed. Rosenberg took a cigar, lit it, sat over on the other side of his desk with his knees crossed. Harvey took the chair across from him.
"How've you been, Harvey?"
"Just fine, doc."
"How's mom and dad?"
"Fine, thank you."
"And your sister Julia?"
"Fine, thank you. She's in California now."
"Mmmmmm. Still single?"
"Yep. Julia just--likes to work and party a lot."
"Mmmmm. And yourself?"
"I'm teaching at Fillmore Township High School. Biology."
"Mmmmm. like it."
"Oh yes." Definitely. "You're writing a novel."
"That's right"
"What is it you want to know?"
Harvey gulped, cleared his throat, shifted in his seat. He leaned forward. "What I want to know is this Doc, can you that is just how does one go about
uh, giving an abortion?" He hurried on, "You see, I have this character.. . "
Dr. Rosenberg looked piercingly at him. "Just how old is the female in the case?"
"About sixteen, maybe seventeen."
The two men looked at each other.
Harvey went on. "I'd just like to know some of the details about how one goes about this sort of thing
you know, just to make the book authentic."
Doctor Rosenberg launched into a rambling narrative dealing with how one could tell pregnancy, various legal and moral obligations of the medical profession in such cases, recent cases of abortion that had landed in the courts, and finally into the more mechanical details of the operation.
Harvey felt dry, felt as if he were gasping for air by the time Dr. Rosenberg had finished. His hand had clenched around a paperweight on the doctor's desk, and now he was holding it so tight that his knuckles shone white. He dropped it hurriedly, but Rosenberg had seen.
Harvey stood up and thanked him profusely.
Dr. Rosenberg slapped him on the back. "Think nothing of it, Harvey. I'll be looking forward to seeing your book. Glad to be of help. Give my regards to your father."
"I will." Harvey opened the door. "Good-bye."
"Good-bye,"
He was half way down the hall when the good Doctor called to him again. "Oh, Harvey!"
Harvey looked back at him suspiciously.
"Harvey," doctor Rosenberg called. "Let the girl live. Let the baby live. Don't do it, Harvey. Don't do it."
He turned the corner quickly, and didn't look back.
Dr. Rosenberg closed the door with a sigh. He stood staring into space, toward the door, for several moments. The he turned around and picked up the telephone book. In a few moments he had the number he wanted.
"Hello, Mildred? Yes, this is Dr. Rosenberg. Remember me? I was wondering if we couldn't have a little talk."
They met at the park bench again. He had only been able to get through to her on the telephone by telling her father that he was Mr. Thompson, of the speech department.
Now, as he sped off quickly, he didn't notice at all the quiet police patrol car that was coming toward them the other way on Sheridan Road. Inside of it, Patrolman John Stefanski muttered something almost inaudible: "Mmmmmp, same blonde. Mmmmmmp." He noticed also that Harvey's beat-up old Plymouth was the same one he had seen drop the girl off at the park the night before.
"What's 'at?" said his partner, a colored boy of slender proportions, but Patrolman Stefanski forgot to answer him. He just said "Mmmmmmp." again, and made some obscure notation in his notebook.
Harvey took her down Sheridan Road, driving furiously. It was a good fifteen minutes before he got control of himself, and by then they were inside Chicago city limits.
He looked over at her. He had had the hots for her something terrible since last night and his debilitating bout with Mildred. He needed her now, there was no question of that. And he wasn't going to deny himself.
She had tidied herself up a bit, and put a blue ribbon in her hair. She reminded him of all of the lovely Anglo-Saxon girls he had watched around the campus when he was going to Northwestern for summer school. Money; they reeked of it. Wealth. Cleanliness. Sex. Slender legs; hairless, encased in nylons. Sunburned cheeks. Perfect complexion. Blondes, blondes. Firmness. Beautiful arms. Carefully done hair, long, fine. Hair ribbons and sexy sweaters, tempting walks, swinging hips. Firm pointed breasts. White teeth. Perfect lips made for kissing. Long lashes. Blue eyes. Dark eyes. Deep eyes. Knowing mouths.
"I decided to take you up on your offer," he said in a low very business-like manner, eager to give himself away, masochistically daring her to change her mind, call the whole thing off, scream for help.
She said nothing, just stared straight ahead.
They pulled up on a side street somewhere. It was dark. He asked her for a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands. "I've decided to take you up on your offer," he said again.
He looked at her, daring her. "Remember?"
She looked uncomfortable. He felt his collar with his fingers. His coat was constricting. This new role was a different one, he'd never been a very dynamic person.
They sat like that for some time, without saying a word.
"Well?" he said at last.
"Do you want to do it in the back seat?" she asked pleasantly enough to make him feel deeply guilty and ashamed.
"Sure." He wasn't quite clear on why exactly the back seat should be better, but thinking back to his college days he remembered with some clarity that sort of maneuver had been all the rage.
He went first, lumbering clumsily over the back of the front seat.
She giggled delightfully, and he couldn't repress a smile. "What the hell's so funny?" he demanded.
She rested her chin on the seat. "You. The way you go over. It's just like a water buffalo." Then she chuckled wildly. He grabbed her arms and helped her over. He felt hard as a stone.
They maneuvered around for a few moments trying to get the hang of the necessary proportions. "Is this how you do it."
"Move over a little bit."
"I can't seem to Ouch."
"What's that?"
"Just my finger. I think I bent it." She put her finger into her mouth and sucked on it.
He snorted, smiled, pushed back her skirt.. . She was lying under him now, with everything arranged except their clothing.
Creamy legs. The sort he had dreamed of.
He ran the insides of his fingers up her smooth thigh. She grimaced, contorted her stomach, closed her eyes, bit down on her lip. One hand formed a halo over her blonde hair, the other rested on the tops of her breasts.
He glided his fingers further. Touched the hallowed temple of her love vault. She winced, lay still He could feel small curling hairs under his fingers at the band of her panties. He was so excited that he could feel something happening in his trousers.
He cursed soundlessly. It would be hell if he came too soon after all-
He unbuckled his trousers, slid himself out of his underwear. He hadn't seen himself this stiff since he was seventeen. He tugged at her panties, drew them up over her graceful knees, slid them down to her ankles, off her bobby sox, over her shoes.
She was moist. He was a little surprised. A severe trembling took him from head to toe, then, cursing, he lurched forward...
He was big for her. She arched forward, but they were desperately tight.
When he finally made it, slid it home, a piercing little cry of anguish broke from her lips, and then she hugged him tightly, murmuring something unintelligible. He took the strokes wth agonizing sweetness, drawing them out, quaffing every strange, delirious brew, and then he clutched her so tight that he thought he must be breaking her back, put his mouth on her ear, her neck, her throat, her lips, and growled mercilessly, like the animal he was, until he was finished.. .
CHAPTER FIVE
Douglas Tucker roared up to his house sitting on top of the back seat of an ancient Model T roadster. The driver hooted his horn twice, just to hear it, and the other boys in the car laughed and cuffed each other about. They had all been drinking pretty heavily, mostly beer, and Douglas was in no condition at all to leap from off the back seat onto his concrete driveway. He slid on the side of his right foot, caromed to one side and struck the side of his head on the driveway with an efficiency that would have been envied by any normal assault-with-intent-to kill convict.
The boys in the car jeered and hooted, laughed, drank some more beer. The motor was gunned and the roaster roared off down the street.
Douglas picked himself up. He looked up at the windows of the Tucker home. It was a majestic sort of place, about fifteen rooms (no servants, but two handy colored girls who came in), with a large double garage fronting the street to the left of the house.
The light in his sister's room was the only one open except for the bulb that glowed so effervescently over the doorway.
He trudged up the driveway, keeping his eyes focused on her windows.
The interior of the house was very silent. He took the stairs two at a tirne. In a few seconds he saw flashing at him the light from her open door as it passed the railings.
He was at the second floor landing, his breath coming very hard. He put his hands on the side of her door and pressed it slowly open with the thumb of his right hand.
She was seated on the bed, propped up on her legs in the middle of it, her blue peignoir falling in loose folds over the full curves of her figure. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could make out the dark spots on the tips of her breasts.
"Hi," he said, drunken, reeling, struggling for composure and something else that he could not name.
"Hi." She looked at him curiously. After a little bit she said, "You've got blood on your head."
She came up to him and peered at the place where he had struck his head, almost touched it with her fingers. "I'd better fix that."
He nodded, his eyes smoldering, staggered over to the connecting door and went into his own room.
He fell down on the bed like a dead one. Somewhere, he could hear her in a cabinet in a bathroom, getting some iodine perhaps, or a bandage or something.
He dozed instantaneously, awoke to find her cleaning his forehead with a damp washrag.
"Where'd you go tonight?" she asked.
He gulped as he watched her breasts dangling under the gown. "Out with the guys. Where's the folks?"
"Opera."
A scent of lilacs or something came from her, enveloped him in a mist of fine spider-silk. "What'd you do tonight?" he asked.
"I went to the Youth Center with JoAnne Van der Veld."
"Lotta kids there?"
"Yeah."
"Meet any nice guys?"
"Oh, they were okay, I guess." She looked away, did something with the rag, put it to another piece of his face. She was cleaning the bruise.
He put his hand on her hip. She didn't say anything. Her hair was a brown tent across the shallow valley of her back.
"What's it like for the woman?" she asked abruptly as she made a bandage for him.
"What's what like?" His eyes narrowed.
"Sex."
His heart was pounding in his ears, like a great tidal sea crashing against the shore of his being. "You have to experience it," he finally said "What's it like for a man."
"Good."
She applied the bandage, then slowly let her hands fell down the sides of his face. Her blue eyes peered deeply into his. "I'm afraid, Douglas," she said. "Don't be."
"Were you drinking tonight."
"Yeah."
"That's not good for you. You shouldn't go out with those guys."
"They're all on the swimming team."
They gazed into each other's eyes for a long time. There was nothing left to be said. He reached up and palmed her breasts. The nipples were stiff. A surging waving of desire rippled through him. He pushed her breasts up and she closed her eyes. He felt them like that, squeezed, got to know their contours, pinched at her tips. They were very full, very, very firm.
She bent her head, breathing fast, and began to unlock his shirt. She spread it open, lifted up his T-shirt and immediately bent her head to plant a hot kiss on the muscled firmness of his athletic stomach. She kissed him there again and again, murmured something incoherent that sounded something like: "I've wanted to do that for a long time.. . " Then she began to undo his trousers which, skin tight as they were, were already being strained.
The zipper went down and she clasped him in her hand. Together they worked to remove his shirt. She pulled down his trousers. He felt so sleepy, so dreamy. He felt as if he were walking in some unimaginably deep forest. A cluster of green leaves were a part of the earth at his feet. Overhead the trees were a ceiling of darkness that masked off the sky. Coolness and humidity swam up from the forest depths.
His shoes pounded the floor as they dropped. His sox were next. She stared smolderingly at his underwear, finally drew them down and off...
For a long time she just stared at his penis, studying him from all angles, fascinated. She had never seen anything like it up so close. Her fingers moved in and touched a part of what was his. He winced. Her fingers glided more. Studied. As if they were eyes in her head. Then, unexplainably, her head fell forward. "There.. . "
His body ached terribly. His head was on fire.
Then she doffed her peignoir. He gasped, breathed as if he were on death's door, reached for her. Her mouth met his as fast, and then they convulsed, met, and found...
"Ooooh, Douggglasssss.. . "
Lee Thompson had gotten home from school early. He was surprised to find Genevieve there, waiting for him.
"Don't you know it's broad daylight," he said crossly as he put the key in the door, looked up at the big Fitzsimmons mansion across the yard.
She ran her fingers playfully through his hair. "Oh, come on, Lee. Don't be such an old sticky."
He looked at her curiously, pushed the door open and lit the stair light. She followed him upstairs then, where he quickly got rid of the groceries on the kitchen table.
He pulled down the blinds, lit a cigarette, and sat down on the table next to the groceries. "Well, what is this? What's up?"
She came up to him and ran her long-nailed index finger up into the collar of his suit. "Lee, honey, you don't sound very glad to see me."
His eyes narrowed, his face whitened slightly. "What's cooking? What're you doing here?"
"I just want to know if you still love me," she said puckishly.
His eyes rolled. "Sure, I still love you. That doesn't mean I want to find you on my doorstep every forty seconds."
She developed a consoling tone. "Don't be so harsh with me, honey. I just wanted to see you."
His eyes narrowed, he blew smoke. "Yeah?" For a guy who's just screwed a seventeen-year-old girl-"
He blanched, his mouth fell open. The dangling cigarette fell to the floor and began to systemically eat away the linoleum.
"What the hell are you saying?" he demanded when he finally caught his breath.
"Statutory rape," she said sweetly.
He felt as if he had been hit in the stomach by a telephone book attached to the end of a hydraulic pile-driver. He sort of doubled over; straightened up again. A fearful pounding began in his brain and his eyes felt as if acid had washed into them.
For a long while they just sat there. In his wildest dreams he wouldn't have been able to think of any reply. His jaw clenched until he felt as if he would bite right through his head.
She jumped uip from the chair perkily and went into the living room, humming to herself. He watched dolefully, hate welling up inside of him a great red stream, as she selected records for the hi-fi.
Finally he managed to begin thinking again in some semblance of order. First of all, he couldn't sleep with her again. He could notify the police; he would notify the police. They could station themselves outside tomorrow and be there when she came to see him. They would see right away that she was approaching him; that would be the evidence.
Other dire schemes came to mind sandbagging her and dropping her into the lake off a pier, or off the end of a boat. He could see her going under struggling with her bonds, trying to scream through the gag, her red hair floating downward through the water like some kind of seaweed.
The music was on the hi-fi; something sooothing by Count Basie. His lips curled, he stood up and began to pace. After a while she came over to him and put her arms around his waist. "You're not mad at me, love, are you?"
"Get the hell out of here."
He began to consider other alternatives leaving the state, dismembering her into several pieces, strangulation, a number of other things. Nothing seemed quite satisfactory.
She moved one of her hands down to his crotch and started lightly caressing him there. No response.
Finally she broke away and took something out of her purse it looked to be a very thin, homemade cigarette. She lit it and he watched her curiously.
"What's that?" He walked over to her. "What kind of cigarette is that?"
"Marijuana," she said, as easily as she might have named a common brand.
Somehow, he wasn't very surprised. "Oh."
She blew out a few smoke rings, then looked at him. "Come on, let's stop this fooling around."
He felt his breath come very fast. He guessed she was right. There was nothing he could do for the time being anyhow. She held all the cards for the moment. He would just have to continue to take her to bed and then work something out later.
But it certainly seemed--likely that he would have to kill her. No girl had ever threatened him the way she had. Another good argument for quitting the high school scene.
"I suppose so," he said. He walked toward her and took her into his arms. In another few moments he was ripping off her clothes, propping her legs up as he rammed her hard against the wall, making her whimper feverishly, cry out in agony, moan in delight.
He was in no hurry. He let her have it for a long time before he finally led her back to the bed. And then he took his time. He wanted a lot of time to think about what he had gotten embroiled in this one, how he could keep from making the same mistake in the future, and what he should do about her now.
This last seemed explicit; if he couldn't find some other way out of this mess, he would have to kill her.
"How was that?" Harvey felt stupid almost immediately after saying it.
Sally nodded; she said nothing. Her eyes glinted in the darkness, quarter-moons of yellow reflected from lamps that shone in the darkness around the park. Her legs had become unclenched and were slowly working their way back together. Her hands still held tightly onto the material of 'his shirt at the shoulders.
She nodded. She seemed to be studying him with great intentness. He didn't want to ask her anything further.
The perfectness of this night! He looked around, completely pleased with himself. He had never felt so great, so immense, so entire.
To think, that a little thing like that could do that for a man. It almost defied imagination. Such power in those little movements, those grinding hips, those swaying limbs, those straining lungs. Such power to make a man feel so tremendous!
In all of his married life with Mildred, he could not remember the sexual act as having had such a tremendous, spell-binding, sword-wielding effect. It was as if some potent adrenalin had flowed into his vitals, drenching him in this complete feeling of power.
He gazed down at her. He felt so dominant. She was a flower, a rose petal of perfect virtue. He had slid into her with ease, and out again with such a feeling of divinity that.. .
He helped her to bring her legs together again, then they shuffled over on the seat until he could take her adequately into his arms.
They were silent for so long, that he was surprised when she finally spoke. "How many children do you have?"
"Three."
"How old are they?" He told her.
"Is your wife very beautiful?"
"Yes," he lied.
"Are you very happy?"
He looked into her eyes. "Never more in my life than I am at this very moment."
She looked perfectly stunned, speechless, in awe of some unnamed something that lay between them. She wanted to pick it up, to fondle it, to understand what it was, but it could not be seen, or touched, or held.
"I don't think I've ever felt the way I felt just now," she said.
More, very long silence.
"Go away and have the baby. I'll send you money."
She looked away. "You can't do that. You can't have that much money. Anyway, I don't want my baby to come into the world a bastard."
There was no answer to that. He took her into his arms, held her close. Outside, the moon was fading. Her blonde hair was in his nose. The scent of something indefinably sweet approached him. "AH right," he said at last. "If that's what you want, I'll start preparing for it. But where will we do it?"
"There's a garage at my house. We can go there some time during the day, when no one's home. My dad's out downtown at work, and my mother goes shopping most of the day."
He grunted, but he didn't like the sound of it.
"How did you become a schoolteacher?" she asked suddenly.
"I don't know. I just did. It seemed like an easy way to make a living. Why?"
She looked at his hands, turned them over. "I don't know. It just seems to me you have very strong hands--hands that should have been doing something else."
He laughed, stroked her hair. "When I was very young I wanted to be a cowboy, or a lumberjack. But you see, I'm Jewish, and we're city people. I guess my folks didn't like the idea of my doing any work with my hands. Jews in America don't work with their hands. It's the custom that they get educated, work with their minds, make money that way. A Jew doesn't become a cowboy or fight forest fires. See?"
She didn't exactly, and he could tell. She was very thoughtful, then offered: "My Uncle Eddie is a forest ranger in a national forest. Maybe he could get you a job."
Harvey laughed. He could just imagine what his mother would say if he decided to do a crazy thing like that. It wasn't normal.
"No thanks," he said. "I'll just stay where I am."
"But why should you, if you'd rather do something else."
They nag you to do as they want, and they nag you to do as you want, he thought with solemnity. If it's female, it nags. Part of the species.
Douglas rolled off of her. His sister lay with her eyes shut, her face turned off to one side, looking completely spent, used and contented. Her tummy was thick with moisture that spread down into her legs and up into her swollen breasts.
Douglas couldn't get over how good she'd been for him. She'd been the absolute best, ever.
He got off the bed and went to get a towel. In the bathroom he wiped himself off, then wiped her.'
Suddenly the downstairs door opened. Tracy was cooing, "Ooooh, that was heavenly...." and then suddenly they were both on their toes, running for their clothes.
The Tuckers came into the front hall and began taking off their coats. Cartwright Tucker called up the stairs: "Tracy ... Douglas...."
There was no response and he went slowly up the stairs. Suddenly it seemed to him that he could make out the scuffling of feet. Then there was a kind of rumbling as if there were several people running around in his children's rooms.
He hurried up the stairs. "Tracy ... Douglas ... I"
Could it be burglars? Or something worse? He banged on his son's door. "Douglas! Douglas!"
"What is it, dad?" Douglas opened the door looking for all the world like the sleepy student. He had wrapped himself in a towel.
"What's all the commotion up here. I thought I heard a couple of wrestlers going at it. Are you all right?"
"Sure. I was just doing some exercises, that's all. 'Night."
"Good night, son," Cartwright Tucker muttered in puzzlement as his son closed the door. Then it occurred to him to wonder why Tracy's hair ribbon had been on the floor of Douglas' room.. .
He thought about that for some time afterward. When he was downstairs making small talk with Mrs. Tucker before going to bed, he thought about it, and later, when he was nestled for the night in his wife's arms, he thought about it as they made middle-aged love.
He even found himself more sexually powerful than he had been for some time as he imagined Douglas and Tracy.. .
But no, that was impossible. He cursed his own too-vivid imagination, completed his bout with Mrs. Tucker, and then rolled over, off of her, and went to sleep.
Later he woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Why had Tracy's hair ribbon been on the floor of Douglas' room?
He went downstairs to the refrigerator. He opened it up and hunted around. Cold milk turned out to be very refreshing.
As he sat there at the kitchen table, sipping delicately, without hurry, for the first time in his life he gave some thought to the fact that Douglas and Tracy, being about the same age, their rooms connected by an unlocked door, could possibly be a serious temptation for each other.
They were, after all, teen-agers. At that age attraction knew very little about the recognized bounds of moral propriety. When teen-agers felt an attraction, they felt an attraction, and that was all there was to it
He shook his head. Ugliness was very seldom a part of his everyday life, and he was a stranger to it. But it was possible if not very probable.
Still, what could be do about it? Lock the connecting door? That might cause a scene.
He shivered at the thought. Pillar of the community, leader in church and civic affairs, member of the Rotary, Lions, etc., exemplar business leader accusing his own son and daughter of-
He winced, shook his head, drank up the rest of his milk, then put out the lights and attempted to find his way back upstairs in the dark.
CHAPTER STX
Harvey somehow managed to get through the next day, although his elation was mixed with foreboding.
After he had taken Sally back to her car, they had agreed that tonight would have to be the night. He would leave school early, and then they would go off to her father's boat, which was parked in Wilmette Harbor. The boat hadn't been used in several seasons, and it was an ideal place for privacy. What he didn't like about it was the possibility of sudden bad weather. Even the smallest of spring storms could be disastrous in such a situation.
Still, he couldn't help but feel swamped at the tremendous wonderful feeling she had invested him with. Nothing Mildred had ever done had ever compared with it.
Compared to Mildred, Sally's twisting, churning young platinum-blonde body was a holocaust of fire created specifically for the purpose of melting men's hearts and bodies when he eased himself between her heated legs, he felt a series of thrills that could not possibly be matched by anything else that existed in the world. And when he ground into her ferociously, up and down, in and out, fire exploded in his brain and flesh.
He was able to leave school early by talking Myrtle Tinweather into taking his study hall class, and then he made right for a store.
In a way, he felt tremendously giddy and self-assured.
As if all this were the most natural thing in the world!
He didn't realize at all, when he arrived home, how strange his cheerful manner must appear to Mildred, who was never used to seeing him looking other than vaguely tired!
"What are you whistling about?" she asked crossly as he entered the kitchen.
He clammed up, cursing his stupidity. The last thing in the world he had wanted was to arouse her suspicions.
He kissed her on the cheek. "I got off work early, that's all. Something wrong with that?"
She looked at him suspiciously. There is if you're planning to commit an abortion," she said.
He gasped. The package in his fingers clattered to the floor.
"What's that?" She knelt down and reached for the bag of freshly-purchased items.
He kicked it out of her reach. "Get away from that!"
She looked up at him coldly. "Pretty touchy, aren't you?"
"Keep your hands off my stuff!" he said ferociously, his fists doubling.
She was still kneeling. She was wearing an old, unattractive cotton dress that opened deeply at the neckline to reveal a haven of immense breasts. He had almost forgotten what tremendous globes she had. These days he felt her body only in the dark.
"Are you going to hit me?" she asked.
"I might." He went across the kitchen and retrieved the bag.
"Dr. Rosenberg called," she said, still kneeling for full view of her breasts, still watching him carefully.
"Oh?" he tried to sound uninterested. He stuffed objects in the bag back into place.
"Yes. He said that you had asked him about the details of performing an abortion that you had claimed to be writing a novel or something, but that he was worried about you."
"Worried about me?" He clutched the little bundle possessively.
"Who are you giving an abortion to, Harvey?" she asked abruptly.
"That's none of your business!" Startled by his own outburst. Harvey took a step backward.
"It is my business if you're my husband. Don't I satisfy you? Have you taken up with somebody?" She stood up and brushed herself off, gazing vaguely down at her dress. He didn't answer. She went on: "I can scarcely believe it. I always thought you were a little nobody who didn't have the guts to do anything. And now I find out you've been giving it to somebody else all along. If that doesn't beat everything."
"Mildred!" He was genuinely shocked. He had never heard her in such vulgar talk.
She looked at him and grinned. "All right. So what has she got that I haven't got?" Carefully she undid the bun at the back of her head. Her ebony black hair came spilling out in a cascade of shining inkiness. She wiggled her head back and forth in order to loosen it forth, and her immense bosom jiggled with every movement.
Harvey could feel his mouth water. He stared at her in awe and vague anxiety.
"All right, Harv," she said shamelessly. "What does your little trollop give you that I can't?"
Suddenly she reached forward and grabbed his trousers. He started. Without realizing what was happening, she had aroused him, made him want her.
He was surprised at the intensity of his own need. Perhaps that was the secret of Sally Ames. She had given him that she had made him want sex all the time now.
"Mildred "
"Shhhh, don't say anything." She came forward and snaked her free arm around his neck, pulled his open mouth down to her moist, humid one. Her huge breasts, expanded with years of motherhood but still jouncy, ballooned against his chest.
Her hot, searching tongue wound around the in-sides of his mouth, caressing his teeth, tongue, sides, while her energizing hand continued to manipulate him.
Suddenly there was the shirring sound of his trousers fly coming open. Mildred knelt swiftly in front of him like some abject slave of olden times, her dark hair swirling around her shoulders. "Mildred, what in the "
Her mouth took him in and his body stiffened. "Oh, God.. . " he murmured. Her searing tongue cajoled, licked, caressed. Her hungry lips struggled to receive his offering of ecstasy. They were lips so moist and full, so swollen with the heat of earnest sensuality that he felt himself being carried away on a great tide of warm, steaming ecstasy.
His fingers curled in her hair, controlling her eager head as it moved. A great swelling pleasure seeped through his body like the sweetness of a divine cotton candy. His buttocks began to jerk ever so slightly. His belly was spasming.
"Don't bite.. . " he whispered, and she heeded him, making him spasm even more.
Now he clutched her head desperately. The fierce erotic pleasure that swam through him was so lewd that he wanted to die in the flame of it.
Gradually it built toward its quenching explosion. His body periodically stiffened as his aching flesh yearned for that beautiful release. And then it came wave after wave of joy that made his body shake and tremble.. . Her mouth accepted greedily this naked tribute to her abilities...
She stood up and smoothed her dress as he leaned backward, weakened, and gasping for air against the kitchen table.
"There, that wasn't so bad was it?" she said.
A sigh escaped his parted lips. It had been tremendous. Immediately he wondered whether Sally Ames would be as good at that ... her pink child's lips had a certain succulence that should lend themselves eagerly to this sort of bizarre satisfaction...
He had only had this sort of experience once before in his life. Once when he had been fourteen, an older girl of fifteen had shown him how it was done. But he couldn't remember that she had accomplished the feat with the same sort of expertness that Mildred had just shown.
"Where in the hell did you learn that?" he demanded.
She grinned slyly. "Wouldn't you like to know," she said mysteriously, and then she wound her way out of the kitchen. He stared after her partly mad, partly curious, partly angry to think that she had perhaps practiced this lovely rite with someone else at one time or another. Forgetting totally about Sally, he dropped his bag of purchases on the dining room table with a clatter and stamped toward the bedroom.
Mildred had laid down as if for a nap, her eyes closed, a dreamy sort of coquettish smile on her full cherry lips. Her bosom heaved as if she were giving birth, spilling forth abundantly from the tight bodice of her house dress, the skirt of which had slipped all the way up to the top of her creamy, sturdy thighs.
Her legs were full and warm. In earlier years he had often thought that they were the most exciting thing about her. They were full in the thighs, with slender knees that tapered into well-rounded calves, finally descending into very tiny ankles and feet. It was easy to imagine those sensual legs locked licentiously around one's hips, driving, jerking, spasming.
From where he stood he could also see the underside of her panties. A faint aroma pervaded the room that seemed to come from-
She was wearing no stockings, so that nothing was attached to the see-through panties. A jungle of dark foliage like a black diamond made the setting for the joining of her legs. Wisps of it curled around the edges of her panties.
For a moment he wondered vaguely if he were up to it, and then he discovered with some astonishment that he was ready again.
He gulped. He had never in his life been so spontaneously excitable. It was like being a teen-ager again!
"Where are the kids!" he asked lamely as he began undoing his trousers again.
"Playing outside, maybe," she said dreamily. "Don't worry. Just come to me."
She lifted her hand airily, as if reaching for him, and her leg fell open mindlessly.
"I asked you before where you learned what you did to me just now," he said. He had finished undressing and dropped his clothes to the floor. Her thighs were yawningly open.
She didn't reply. She just smiled mysteriously and pressed the fingers of her right hand down between her legs, rubbing herself ever so delicately.
"Aren't you going to give me any, Harv? Odd, I need it so bad. Come on please."
"Are you going to tell me where you learned to use your mouth on a man's body like that? Oh am I going to have to beat the answer out of you?"
She looked up at him and sneered. "You're not man enough. Come on, quit your kidding."
That was the last straw. Uttering a low snarl of anger and impatience, he grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it violently, leaving the buttons scattered all over the floor.
"You-you-you bastard!" she screamed.
He laughed with the pleasure of getting her angry at last. Her huge, bulbous breasts quivered with her fury, the tremendous wide dark aureoles shaking like dark brown egg yolk. Thinking quickly, he reached down and grabbed one of her nipples, twisting it savagely.
She screamed in pain.
"How's that you bitch!" he shouted, and then with his left hand he swung widely around and delivered a stinging slap to her other breast.
She cried out again, thrashing her legs and starting to get up. "Harvey have you lost your mind? What in the hell ? "
Doubling his fist, he used his arm as a club and knocked her powerfully back down again. Then he proceeded to pummel her thrashing body, striking her savagely in her wildly kicking legs, stomach, and breasts. Each time he saw a blue mark rise, a deep glow of satisfaction welled up in him that was like nothing he'd ever known before.
A low growl was beginning to grow in his throat. He felt swift shoots of ecstasy cascading through him. He was amazed that an act of brutality could so turn him on, surprised that Mildred's pain was acting as the catalyst for his dark, mysterious pleasure. . .
"Harvey, stop.. . " she pleaded, but it was no use. He struck her again and again, flailing at her dangling watermelon breasts as if they were soft punching bags.
He felt their softness spill over his hands, he watched her squirm in a weird mixture of agony and delight! Mildred was enjoying this too!
As the realization dawned on him, he was astonished, then pleased. What they had been missing all these years by not trying every possible lewd combination of sensual satisfaction! He was just beginning to appreciate the possibilities that lay open.
He grabbed her nipples fiercely and twisted them until he thought they would start bleeding. She screamed and squirmed, her voluptuous mother's body thrashing wildly.
"Eiiiieyyyyeeeeeee!"
He dropped his mouth to her tremendously distended nipples and bit at them savagely, threatened to rip them right off of her expanding blue-veined breasts. Then his fingers came to rip away at the thin material of her panties. It came away in shreds in his hands and his fingers plunged--
Her body clenched, arched fiercely upward, as she mouthed vulgarities that he had never even dreamed she knew. Her back bent. He prodded her without mercy, squirming his hand to meet her every wild movement. She was a combination of lightning and fire. Dropping onto her with a throaty little moan of desire, he put himself into her...
She moaned and began sobbing...
"Give it to me, Harv ... harder ... harder ... give it to me good and hard...! That's it. . . keep moving don't ... aaahhhhh ... help ... eeeeeyyyeeee!"
Sally had been waiting for an hour and a half before she saw Harvey's car come spinning around the corner.
Originally she had been waiting for him to call her at home, but when he hadn't she had just supposed that he was probably waiting for her at their park meeting place. She had taken one of the family's cars without her dad's consent and driven to Fillmore Park, Now, as she watched Harvey come down the street, she was glad that she had waited. She felt a deep sigh of relief well up in her chest and expunge itself in the cool spring night air.
"Hi. Get in," he said coldly through the window of the Plymouth as he came alongside her.
She didn't say anything, just climbed in.
She couldn't repress a little shudder of desire sitting next to him. She looked down at the black hairs on the back of his hands as they handled the steering wheel with such confidence. The blackness of that hair seemed to her to impart to him an aura of great strength.
She couldn't forget that only a little while ago those hands had made her quiver with passionate delight, had helped to impart to her a tremendous explosion of joy through the sexual act.
Douglas Tucker hadn't been anywhere near as good. For some reason, she had it for Harvey. Maybe it was the blackness of his hairy body, maybe it was because he was so much older. Whatever the reason, she got a kick from having him inside that was utterly fantastic. She had never dreamed that so much pleasure could exist in the world.
Harvey didn't say anything. He stared straight ahead. He had a rough idea where Wilmette Harbor was, and he didn't feel like asking directions. The experience with Mildred had left him feeling quite mellowed.
He had never dreamed that his wife could be capable of kicking up such a fuss sexually. Where had Mildred learned it all? Could she possibly have had a lover during their marriage? Were all of the children really his? Or had she just had a lot of experience before marriage?
He looked over at Sally. Because of this little platinum blonde beauty of the firm young breasts, he had indirectly uncovered a side of Mildred he had never even guessed at.
What other secrets did his friends and acquaintances conceal about their private lives?
"There it is," Sally said.
She was right. He had been so deep in thought that he had almost missed the turn-off.
He put his arm out to signal and swerved off sharply to the right, down a dark gravel road that led steeply down to the harbor. The night was quite pitch black.
"Where's the boat?" he said.
"Down there. It's that cruiser with the coat of arms on the spinnaker. See it?"
He nodded. He saw the boat. Outlined in the full of the moon, it looked like a ghostly cross between a pirate ship and a slave-smuggling vessel of the nineteenth century. He applied the brakes lightly and spun gravel as they approached it.
It was some cruiser all right. Sleeping four in double cabins, it had every possible convenience. The lights went on in a jiffy, and he began rummaging through his sack. Sally busied herself for the moment by looking around the ship with the air of the curious teen-ager she was.
He dumped everything out on a galley table and began arranging things. He checked the water from a convenient sink tap it was fresh, and the gauge showed plenty more available. A stove stood near to the sink, and a pantry opened on a wide assortment of utensils, plates, pots and pans.
"Harvey.. . " came a syrupy voice. He looked around and, dropping everything, walked back to the cabins.
"Over here," came the voice. His head shot to the right to discover Sally lying on her back on one of the bunks in a cabin, her right leg propped up, her slender arm resting in back of her platinum gold hair. She was wearing a tight red sweater that outlined starkly the matchless points of her straining young breasts. Beneath that was a tight blue skirt that curved in all the right places. Her young body moved on the bed with graceful little feline jerks.
From where he stood, Harvey could look down Sally's propped up knee, down her nyloned thigh to the tabs that connected her dark hose to her pink panties, through which a white hump shone enticingly.
He felt a sharp intake of breath. "What-what is it," he muttered awkwardly.
"Come here." She tapped the side of the bed.
He went and sat down by her side. The bunk gave and she slid over next to him. Her eyes were closed as her slender fingers fell on his thigh.
He studied the long, tapering clear nails of her fingers, the fine hands with their total absence of hair. Her pink lips were parted and a very delicate tongue shone through. He wondered idly whether or not she would go for the same sort of perverted lewdness that Mildred had lavished on him just a few hours ago.
Suddenly he made a decision. Gazing down at her rosy pink cheeks, the fluttering dark eyelashes on her cheekbones, the finely molded face, he knew that he would have to insist on having her in that strange fashion which Mildred had...
His shoes dropped to the floor. His fly became undone. Suddenly he was clambering over her. He mounted her upper body, then pushed himself upward-Now his rod was directly over her face, and he lowered...
Her eyes opened, first blankly, then with astonishment, but her lips parted hungrily to receive the offering he so ardently pushed toward her...
At first her lips teased him. Her tongue flicked maddeningly at the underside of his manhood, and his entire body trembled. But then those greedy pink lips opened and she took him inside a little at first, then more and more...
He felt as if every nerve ending in his body was tumbling down a deep abyss full of molten lava. Her young mouth was so eager, so starved for what he had to offer...
She licked at him, caressed with her tongue.. .her slender teen-age hands reached up and fondled everything about his maleness...
He felt a deep well of pleasure seeping up like lava through a fissure. She accepted everything and cried for more...
Her blonde-white head bobbed back and forth as she accepted this most ardent of devotions. He pressed his fingers into her glistening hair and moaned in delirious agony.. .
Then he approached ... paused ... approached again ... and suddenly went off in a supreme spasm fire that had no beginning and no end ... that was only a delirious spinning over and over into space...
Afterward he lay gasping by her feet, stretched across the lower end of the bunk. Her fingers curled delicately into the moisture-laden curls of his hair.
"That was great," he murmured with reverence.
She smiled softly to herself but said nothing.
His lips were pressed accidentally against the sleek smoothness of her stockinged calf. Suddenly he realized that he wanted to have the genuine touch of her flesh against his lips. He reached upward and undid her stocking tabs with trembling hands, then slid her hose downward to let them festoon around her dainty ankles. The warmth of her teen-age flesh came closing in around his nostrils. He pressed his mouth ardently against one sleek calf, then followed her skin with sucking little bites up to the milky sheen of her quiveringly expectant thighs.
The deliciousness of those young thighs made him feel heady with some crazy impulse. A demanding perfume was coming from the direction of the joining of her legs, enveloping him in an over-powering muskiness.. .
His lips continued their mad journey. Her young body began to jerk and twitch. A series of small moans echoed from her squirming lips.
"Ooooohhhh ... oooohhhh...."
His fingers reached for the delicate waistband of her panties and inserted themselves inward. He found an oozing heat that he could well imagine dissolving his fingernails.
The panties came down there she was in a blinding glare of milky softness...
His mouth worked ardently up her thighs, sucking, biting, nibbling. His hands caressed her nervously twisting legs. Her entire body seemed to be a wild mass of squirming young female.
Finally he found what he was so eagerly seeking.. .
She clutched his hair and moaned in delirium. His lips and tongue continued to work feverishly, surrounded by the musky steam of her passion. Then suddenly her hips began to work, jerking upward and back in time to his movements ... and she began to fly, fly ... he could see her shoot straight off to the moon on a thrill older than time.. . and then a great scream of joy rose from her pink young throat that threatened to capsize the entire boat.. .
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lee Thompson had found Genevieve waiting for him again when he had come home after school. At first he had been mildly angry, but then after she had proceeded to fix his place up, he had begun to to feel somewhat domestic.
She had also fixed an excellent dinner of welsh rarebit, ham, cottage cheese, and some other odds and ends. Afterward as he sat in his big leather easy chair with his eyes fixed on the evening newspaper, feet propped up on his favorite ottoman, he had begun thinking that maybe domesticity was not such a bad deal after all.
He was still watching her from the corner of his interest as she worked at tidying up the small kitchen.
Her movements were fluid and graceful, and her long orange hair swirled around her deftly moving figure, outlined glowingly against the green of her dress. Her young body had a lithe gracefulness to it that nothing could hide. It was slim, and yet she was masterfully full-breasted. He knew her globes very well from the memory of his hands and mouth. They were sumptuous pears of perfect firmness, with nipples like black diamonds that distended half an inch whenever they were touched The memory of their deliciousness was still full in his mouth.
She came over to the ottoman and began unlacing his shoes.
"Hey what the hell...? "
"More comfortable without your shoes," she said with a sweet smile. She dropped his shoes to the carpet with a pair of dumps.
He watched her walk away with a growing sense of urgency. The swaying of her youthful hips beneath the green skirt was very noticeable and exciting. He knew very well the slender smoothness of that firm young body. Suddenly he knew that he had to have her, immediately....
He stood up quickly and dropped the newspaper to the carpet.
She didn't appear to hear him as he approached nervously from behind her. She was working at the sink and didn't give any attention to the sound of his zipper dropping, or the loosening of his belt buckle. He reached into his underwear and freed the erection he had for her. Then he came up behind her and put his arms around her.
"Lee!" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Shut up, you little witch." He pressed his mouth onto the delicate curvature of her milky neck and bit it savagely.
She struggled in his grasp. "Wait-"
"Now!" he insisted. Bearing down with all of his weight, he forced her to her knees under protest, then pushed up her skirt to reveal frilly yellow panties.
With a little murmur of appreciation, he stuck his fingers into the elastic...
"Ow! That's not my-"
He cuffed her on the side of the head with his open hand. "Shut up!" he growled savagely. He stuck his fingers deeper in, seeking the most hallowed of He found it!
She was already squirming and moist as his fingers found her. Pulling her panties aside, he climbed on top of her from the rear, forcing his iron hardness against her.
He met with a great deal of resistance. She was still partially dry. But he didn't care. He continued to force with all of the male power at his command. He located her properly, but.. .
"Ooooooohhh.. . "
She exulted and her slender body jerked as he finally rammed himself home. His body lay across her, his face in that glowing orange hair. She was still propped up on her hands and knees, supporting the both of them, as he struggled for lubrication.. .
Finally she started to give the silky smoothness he required. She became increasingly moist, until finally he was spinning through with a tremendous speed and mastery, back and forth, as her squirming young rear wiggled from side to side, shook up and back in an earnest desire to help.. .
A deep cry of exultation echoed from his lips as he erupted, and a series of thrills rippled through his ecstatic body as be finished...
He climbed off of her and sank down on the kitchen floor. "Whew," he murmured.
She frowned and laid down next to him, facing him with her head propped up on her arm. Her lips extended in a kiss, and their mouths met lightly.
"You know, you didn't satisfy me," she accused.
He grinned and shut his eyes. "So what?"
"So I'm a normal girl and I have a right to be satisfied, that's what!"
"You don't like it? so leave," he told her.
A deeply angry look passed across her face. "You're a rat," she murmured, and she snuggled against him.
"Beat it," he said. He was in no mood for her, now. As he had often told his friends, he liked a woman "in my bed and not in my hair."
"Watch out how you talk to me," she warned, and she stood up, went over to the sink.
His left eye opened and he looked up at her as she smoothed down her dress. It had picked up some dirt on the floor, but was only a little rumpled. Her red hair held up well, too. He couldn't imagine it ever getting mussed. It was very long and a deep orange-red, relatively straight but thick. It had the perfect consistency for love.
"Now just what in the hell do you mean by that?" he asked her carefully.
"I'm only a kid. You'd better remember that." She began to do the dishes again. Water sprayed onto him from above.
There it was again. The implied threat. Twenty years in jail for statutory rape. He didn't like the implications in the least, to be sure.
But kill her?
The thought had run through his mind quite a bit in the last twenty-four hours. His first angry impulse had been rejected as immature and, probably, premature. He had decided that I.: he would wait to see if she threatened him again, and that he would not rush into murder without some careful planning. Electric chairs were full of people who just killed on impulse without thinking of what they were doing.
He gave a low grunt and picked himself up from the floor. He looked at her once, quickly, then retreated again to the living room, where he picked up his paper. '
He could see her in the kitchen from where he sat. He had left her vaguely dissatisfied, and now she had one hand up the rear of her dress, caressing herself. Small sounds of pleasure echoed from her. She continued finishing the dishes with her other hand.
He shook his head and brought his eyes back to the paper. There was one particular headline that caught his imagine. Several students from Fillmore had been involved in some kind of a riot the night before on an exclusive estate that front the Winnetka end of Lake Michigan.
It seemed that the students, about sixteen of them, with an equal number of boys and girls had raided a private family get-together on the estate, throwing beer cans at protesting adults, and that several boys had dragged the lady of the house off into her own bushes and raped her.
Lee snorted and smiled to himself. He could just picture the screaming, struggling matron being dragged off for a couple of hot pants sixteen-year-olds to rip her dress off and force themselves between her struggling PTA-Chamber of Commerce legs. He imagined readily them giving it to her, in and out, while she screamed for mercy or screamed because she was enjoying it.. .
There was one family that would never be the same again, all right. He turned the pages.
Usual stuff from Viet Nam. American soldiers putting the one-rice-bowl per-day Viet Cong on the run, shooting up stray villages, and catching their Veitnamese "allies" misusing the foreign aid money. Old news.
Nothing new on the political scene. He rummaged through the paper to the funnies, read around in them, and finally dropped the paper to the floor.
Looking into the kitchen, at first he didn't see Genevieve. Then suddenly he noticed her legs on the kitchen floor, peering past the door-
She had her bare legs spread, and her fingers were dug deep inside the rim of her panties. Wisps of orange hair curled up from them. She was making love to herself! Her hand moved like a pile driver and she whimpered strange little slogans as it did so. Lee felt himself go hot just watching her. What a tremendous little piece!
He got up and went into the kitchen. She was really there, on the floor, her skirt up around her ears, her fingers inside of her smoldering gold panties, her body locked in a torment of self-manipulation.
Her body arched and strained, her head was straining back, the blue veins pulsing vigorously in her young neck. Her eyes were closed, and she was oblivious to everything in the world except her own crazy joy. She had unbuttoned the front of her dress and loosened her brassiere, so that one immense breast was falling out, its huge dark aureole pulsing with life, its nipple hardened and distended as her free hand manipulated it, pulling and fondling.
He watched her for several moments before she finally made it with a profound series of whimpers and hoarse cries, then climaxed with a moan of great depth.
The sweat poured out on her forehead as she opened her eyes and looked at him.
"I couldn't help it," she said. "I had to."
He smiled and shrugged. "Don't make excuses to me. Your sexuality is one of the things I like about you, you see."
She made a face and pushed her dress down around her shapely legs again. She stood up and took his arm. They walked into the living room.
He sat down in the easy chair and she curled like a cat at his feet, her legs pushed sidewise under her buttocks.
"Are you happy in your work?" she asked him. "Why in the hell do you ask that?" She shrugged and reached for her purse, which was lying on an end table. She extracted a pack of cigarettes and took one of those, lit it up. Marijuana. Lee watched the smoke curl up around her ears and felt vaguely dissatisfied with her.
"Must you smoke that stuff?" he asked. She shrugged again. "It's kicks," she said, and she drew deeply.
He could see the strange light come into her eyes.
She really should be on LSD, he thought. That's what everybody's high on these days. It's fashionable.
"You didn't answer my question," she said.
"Oh?"
"Do you like your job?"
He felt rankled. "Now, what the hell business is that of yours, tell me?"
"I should think if you had degrees in Theatre, you'd want to be working in it."
"I'm not that good," he admitted, thinking of some former fiascos. "Teaching is easier anyone can teach. Not everyone can act."
"I didn't mean that," she went on, "not necessarily. But, aren't there other jobs in the theater besides acting or teaching, for a man?"
He snorted. "Oh, sure. I could be a stagehand or something on Broadway."
His eyes narrowed. Where was all this questioning leading to, anyway? "What is it you're driving at?" he said.
She looked at her hands coquettishly. "Well, you see, I've always wanted to be an actress, and if you moved to New York or Hollywood and worked in drama, and I went with you "
"Went with me?" He fairly leaped out of his chair.
"Well, we could be married, of course. It would all be perfectly legal.. . "
So that was it the little bitch wanted to get married! Lee felt a tentacle of pain grab at his chest. Married to this seventeen-year-old-she-monster what a thought!
"That's an idea you'd better can from your head altogether, you sex-crazed little jailbait!" He picked up his newspaper again and ruffled it for effect.
"Put down that damn newspaper," she insisted, glaring at him angrily.
"You don't like it, you know what you can do," he told her.
She made a face and twisted at the curls of the carpet. "You don't love me," she said. "You never loved me."
He roared with laughter.
"What's so damned funny?" she said, looking up.
He glared down at her with undisguised venom. If she had been ice, she would have been melted into rainfall. "Love you? Are you kidding? I can't stand you!" He stood up and threw the paper down, so that it flopped all over her pretty red hair and slid down her dress.
She gripped the cuff of his pants as he tried to pass her. "You've just been using me," she said accusingly.
He laughed again and shook her off. "Using you? Are you kidding? Of course I've just been using you! I just wanted to have some nice, pretty, young red-haired piece to grind myself into. But you're making a federal case out of it!" He turned and started to leave the room, then he revolved again.
"And what did you get from me, pray tell?" he said. "Who's been using whom? You've been doing some terrific moaning and squirming yourself! Every time I squirt into you, you get a thrill that sends you flying right to the moon. So don't give me any of that 'Using me' jazz. I'm the one who's been used so you could get those young rocks of yours off and I know it damned well, too, you bitch!"
With this last remark he swung wildly with his foot and caught her savagely on the side of the head. Not a sound rose from her. She crumpled like a rag doll.
"Genevieve?"
He knelt down beside her. Suddenly a worried look came into his eyes. The side of her head was filling with blood. He hadn't realized that his rage could have such force.
He pushed up the lids of her eyes, then picked up her hand to feel her pulse.
It was weak, but it was there. He felt a vast wave of relief wash through him. She was alive! For just a second he had thought been afraid-
He picked her up and carried her over to the couch. She was mercifully unconscious. Then he went into the kitchen to see if he could find some beer.
What a blunder. He should never have struck her before he was ready, never have allowed her to egg him on to that point of no return-
He came up with a can of beer and opened it handily with his belt buckle. Then he drank down the entire delicious cool brew in practically a gulp.
What now? For one thing, there was a good possibility she would scream bloody murder once she came out of it. He could go to jail for years his entire life would be finished, ruined by one catastrophe! In one fell swoop, all of his great plans would be wiped clean from the slate. All of his struggles worthless.
And what would she get out of it? Just the profound sympathy of the community. And, more--likely than not, her name wouldn't even be released to the newspapers that was the custom in cases where the girls were so young.
He could go to jail for a million years, but she, she would merely spend a few days weeping in court and then return to school with the explanation that she was home sick with a cold. And she would never hear of him again. College would be hers, and mature 'beauty and all of the lucky things that went with it.
And he, he would just rot.
He looked through the kitchen door at her sleeping body. Her breast rose and fell very slightly beneath her blouse.
There was no getting around it. Tonight would have to be the night that he did away with her.
He looked out the window. The darkness of twilight had come up very fast. He tried to think of where the best place would be for him to-
He had an interesting idea: why not make it appear as if she had been raped and murdered by some sort of sadist? If she was knifed beyond recognition.. . In any case, it would completely eliminate any possible suspicion near to himself. Who could be less suspect of such a monstrous crime than a schoolteacher?
Still, he couldn't help but wonder.. .
He saw her stir on the couch and was instantly alarmed. The chance that she might wake up and let out a scream was terrifying.
He quickly ran to the cupboard and came up with a large paring knife. Then, as he was about to rush into the living room, it occurred to him that he couldn't have her bleeding all over his apartment.. .
He dropped the knife with a clatter and searched for something blunter but equally as lethal. He found it in the shape of an old hammer that he had almost forgotten he owned. He had brought it with him from home in Iowa for some reason that was totally obscure at this late date.
Home. What a word. If his mother could see him now, preparing to bludgeon a young girl to death...
A moan came from the living room as Genevieve stirred. Grabbing up a towel, he raced panicky into the next room.
Her young body was writhing, contorted, on the couch. Small, incoherent moans broke from her bloodied lips, revealing darkly bloodstained teeth teeth that only moments before had been a perfect pearly white.
He wrapped the dish towel around the head of the hammer and approached her with severe trepidation. There was a pounding in his distressed brain that wouldn't quit. Every nerve ending in his hardly pressed, belaboring body seemed to be exposed directly upon the surface of his trembling flesh.
"God...." he whispered in reverence to something mysterious. He gazed down at her beautiful churning body and felt his throat choke off with a lump the size of an asteroid.
"Genevieve.. . " he whispered. But as he said this, she suddenly reached out one gnarled, searching hand and he was horrified. Unable to stand the anxiety any longer, he struck out wildly.
Something had snapped in his mind. Now it was not a human being pummeling this helpless teen-age girl, but some sort of incredible animal.
He brought down the hammer again and again. The first time it broke her left cheekbone and her face seemed to cave in into a shapeless mass. As he continued to pound it, emitting low, savage growls, Genevieve's dying face progressively took on the look of some sort of red putty that might be in use in a college art class. It quickly caved in, lost consistency. Bone structure disappeared, the nose was broken, teeth knocked down her dying throat, her helpless skull caved in as if it were made of plastic.
"Lee.. . " that dead face whispered. He jumped out of his skin; he screamed; he dove at her again in ruthless, merciless terror, striking again and again. All the time that long red hair, so alive and vital, mocking him with its vigor as it sworled around destroyed death's head.
"Die, damn you!" he screamed, and he continued, continued, continued...
It seemed like hours later before he was able to see light again. The dead body of the girl came as a shock for just a moment, and then he remembered.. .
He picked himself up off the floor and staggered to the kitchen. Splashing his face with cold water in the kitchen sink, he knew just what he had to do next.
He would take her body down to Wilmette Harbor...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Douglas Tucker had played baseball all after-noon with some of his friends mostly members of the Junior Leaders, his fraternity in the lot in back of Fillmore High School after school. Now, coming home tired and dusty, he felt the terrific need for something cold and soothing.
"I'm home," he called out as he entered the kitchen, banging the back door against the wall the way everybody did. But there was no answer from the silent house.
He shrugged and pulled open the refrigerator door. Grape juice, good. He reached for it eagerly, picked up an apple from a lower shelf and placed it between his teeth. He kicked the refrigerator door shut with his foot and walked over to the kitchen table.
Taking the apple from his teeth, he called out: "Ma?" There was no answer and he sat down, starting to eat. He chomped the apple, and opened the jar of grape juice.
Just then there was a rustle of activity from another part of the first floor. He looked up and waited for the appearance of whoever it might be.
"Hello, Douglas." It was his mother. She rustled in in some sort of print kitchen outfit, all middle-aged smile, bent down and kissed him lightly as she went. "Have a good day today, dear?" she said as she busied herself with whatever it was she was doing so actively. His mother had a gift for making big projects out of small ones.
"Sure, mom." Now that she was here, he didn't want to drink the grape juice from the bottle the way he usually did. He went to the cupboard and brought back a glass.
As he drank, he couldn't help but lay his eyes on his mother's steadily moving figure. She was in her forties, but she was still buxomly put together with a trace of voluptuous girlhood. He knew from various side glances in recent years that his mother still had a tremendous and unusually firm bust. He remembered very well her abnormally enlarged aureoles that were as big as his palm, the strong stout legs that he saw daily. She was still all right and since he had had Tracy, well.. .
No, that was to absurd to even conceive of.
God, what am I thinking of? he thought lamely, but the idea still rested on a far shelf of his mind, ready to be dusted off again.. .
"Your father had to work late tonight," Mrs. Tucker said. He could see now that she was baking something. She was leaning over the stove and peering into the open door. Her lusty calves shown full and strong where her dress lifted up over her nicely curved behind.
"Oh?" Douglas said carefully.
"Yes, but that's all right I'll just hold dinner a little later, that's all."
"Mmmm." Douglas nodded. His father would be late. "Tracy home?" he attempted to ask casually.
"No, but she'll be home soon. She went shopping with some girl friends after school. Why?" She looked at him curiously, he thought.
"Oh, nothing." He fumbled around in his pants pocket for a few moments, feeling awkward, then he just walked out of the kitchen without a word.
But he felt the steam pop out on his forehead as he went upstairs to his room.
That was close, he thought. He mustn't be so obvious.
And he must stop thinking about his mother. The way she had straightened up, and made little movements over the stove, had turned him on something terrible. After he closed the door to his room he laid down on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and began to open his trousers.
He was surprised at how turned on he was. Methodically, then, his hand began to work...
Where was Tracy anyway? Damn it. And now he had to do this all by himself...
The screen door opened downstairs. He heard his sister's voice. Almost by reflex, he catapulted from the bed. He was zipping up his jeans and out the door by the time she came tripping up the stairs, her brown curls rippling down the nicely curved estuary of her back, her full firm breasts pointed like shields against the tight blue of her sweater.
"Hi, Doug," she said cheerily.
"Hi," he said, then added in a lower voice. "Get in here as soon as you can. Okay."
"Okay," she agreed eagerly.
He must have waited for her a good half hour, smoking one cigarette after another.
But she turned out to be well worth waiting for. When she entered his room she was wearing a very pale chiffon negligee that had little holes for the tips of her breasts to shine through. Her nipples were rosy with lipstick.
"like it?" she asked, whirling around.
The breath caught in his throat. like it! He wanted to eat her up!
Breathing fast, he told her, "Get over here, in a hurry. Be quick!"
"Yes, Douglas." She looked puzzled, but then she saw the size of his erection. "Goodness," she murmured. "And what have you been doing all afternoon?" And without another word, she got up on the bed.
Douglas had pushed down his jeans and underwear, and she took them completely off for him. He stiffened as her long brown hair tickled across his thighs, kneecaps and calves. As she dropped his jeans to the floor, she impulsively bent down and kissed his toes. Then, something seemed to seize her. She took his big toe completely into her mouth, washing her tongue over it, sucking, drawing it out desperately. He groaned in agony as her hair flaked over his legs and one of her dainty little hands reached upward to grab him.. .
"Uuuuihhhhhhhh.. . "
Her fingers caressed flagrantly his most sensitive area, the long nails scraping. Her right hand held his foot, fondling it as her mouth exhausted the possibilities of his big toe.
Then her face turned upward toward him. Slowly she bent to kiss his ankle. His hands reached down feverishly and began pulling at her negligee. He pulled it up, over her bare exposed white waist.. .
He reached down again and plunged the fingers of his right hand inside her buttocks. She moaned a little sigh of surprise, but refused to protest as his fingers found their way in. He wanted to know every juicy little part of her. Very cleverly his fingers worked as they inserted. She was tight, but getting less so, and from the way she squirmed he could tell that she liked it. She was going wild with delight.
The negligee had come up around her soft white neck, and now she bent so that the hardened nipples of her young breasts grazed maddeningly back and forth over his kneecaps. He felt himself going blind with desire. Something spurted upward toward her belly. His teeth chattered in his head.
"Hurry ... please...."
She came forward and bent down again, pushing the full beauty of her gorgeous full breasts into his crotch. She squirmed delightedly, pushing those pillows against him, uttering little cries of pleasure. He groaned with helplessness, caressing her buttocks, her small waist.. . Finally she came upward still further and dropped one of her opulent love-globes full into his ravenously hungry mouth. With one hand he fondled and caressed her dangling right breast, pinching its pink nipple and pulling at it, while her left breast fell directly into his gaping jaws. His tongue and lips took in her nipple hungrily, feeding on it as if he were a man possessed.
"Mmmmmmmm ... goooood...."
Then her legs parted. Her hand moved downward to grip him, and she positioned him properly.. . A deep moan of ecstasy shot from her lips as his hips jerked upward into the circle of her legs, and then she was impaled ... He slid into the warm, silky moistness of her, making her whimper...
He grabbed her buttocks again and made them separate, then he assaulted her from the rear with his fingers. This dual siege front and rear made her dead to the world, dead to anything but her own quivering sensational ecstasy.
She rode him up and down for what seemed like an eternity, and Douglas felt little explosions well up in him that were like a string of bursting Chinese firecrackers.
And then she made it. He thought that the scream that echoed from her lips would make the walls fall down. She fell across Mm in a dead-to-the-world heat.
And in another moment, Mrs. Tucker's footsteps were on the stairs. Douglas jumped from the bed. He pulled Tracy to the connecting door, partly dragging her, opened it and shoved her inside. "Cut yourself or something, quick!" Then he ran for the door to the hall, grabbing a towel as he went.
Just in time to catch his mother at Tracy's door.
"What is it, Mom?"
She jerked her hand away from the knob as she saw him. "I thought I heard your sister scream," she said.
"Yeah, I think she did. We'd better find out what it's all about." He went over to Tracy's door and took the doorknob from her. His mother took a step backward. He opened the door.
Tracy was sitting at her dressing table stark naked. The negligee had fallen around her glistening full thighs. She was holding her right hand, which was bleeding. She looked up as they entered. "Hi," she said gaily.
"What happened?" her mother wanted to know.
"Oh, nothing. Just cut myself on these scissors." She held up a pair of shears used for sewing.
"And how did you do that? Is that anything to rattle the windows about? I thought there was a banshee up here."
Douglas laughed and put his hand on his mother's shoulder. "Now, Mom."
"I did, too." She shrugged his hand off, and looked down at Tracy as if she were seeing her for the very first time.. . the huge uptilted breasts with their rosy points ... the flat girlish belly with its kiss-nook dimple ... the round hips . . the thighs ... the smoothness of her daughter's flesh everywhere ... the pulsing vein in her clean young neck ... the long hair ... the soft down between her legs ... the sparkling eyes and full, pouting lips ... pink tongue ... well-darkened eyebrows and long lashes...
Mrs. Tucker gulped and turned around on her heel. She didn't want to look any further. She wanted only to get downstairs and to the kitchen. It didn't occur to her until after she was in the hall again, that Douglas was still in the room with his naked sister.. .
"Douglas, come out here at once!"
"Yes, Mom." He stepped out of Tracy's bedroom, closing the door gently behind him. "What is it?"
She looked him up and down. He was naked, too, except for the small towel that only went halfway around him. She couldn't help but notice the firmness of his youthful vigor, the flat, muscled hardness of his young body, the way the skin clung tightly to bone and sinew. His father used to look like that, she found herself thinking involuntarily ... The long, sturdy, swimmer's legs ... the broad shoulders ... the wiriness ... the long blond hair and clean boyish face.
With something clutching at her throat, she turned from him suddenly, hurrying down the spiral staircase.
She looked back up at him once, and he was still looking at her, eyes coldly appraising. And they knew that now something had changed, and that whatever this house would become, it would never ever be quite the same again...
Harvey had begun without haste, but now he was sincerely worried.
He had given her a goodly dose of straight whiskey, then followed it with half a bottle of grape wine. He was frankly surprised that she hadn't thrown up altogether.
Drugged as she was, she squirmed desperately and cried out.
Is this all there is to it? he thought with some sense of wonder.
Finally, after what seemed like a million years, she seemed all right.
He looked down at her. She was locked in merciful sleep. Suddenly he had a terrible thought. He bent down and put his ear to her breast.
Still beating thank goodness!
He felt a terrific need for a cigarette. He went upstairs to the deck and gave himself some time to look at the stars.
But stars weren't all that he saw.
Quite a ways across the water from where he stood, on the dock in front of the boats, an eerie figure was bustling about in the moonlight. He was carrying something that seemed to be weighted at the legs odd, Harvey thought to himself, why did I choose to think of that end of whatever he's carrying as "legs?"
The man was stooped by the weight of his package. It must have been about five feet long, quite bulky, and wrapped in a sort of blanket affair.
Harvey watched with no small fascination as the man appeared to look around, then heaved with a distinct grunt the ponderous burden from his shoulders. It went into the water with a splash.
Harvey didn't quite understand why, but he felt unaccountably nervous. That he had watched such a strange performance, however fleeting, was remarkable enough in itself. Now, would he compound the mystery by just standing complacently by while the distant, unseeable figure departed once more into the blackness?
Acting more by reflex than anything else, and full of curiosity, he reached into his back pocket and came up with his flashlight. As the figure on the pier stood there, Harvey shone it full on the side of the mystery man's face...
"Hey!" The man threw his arms up into the air.
It's that speech instructor, Harvey thought to himself. Whats 'is name.
Lee Thompson disappeared ass fast as his legs could carry him. Now he was just a sound of rustling in the distant trees.
Full of crazy impulses, Harvey began to take his shirt off. He dove in still wearing trousers and socks.
The bay was not deep, but the water was quite cold. He went down about five feet before he realized that he wasn't going to be able to make it. Just as he circled for the surface again, though, he spied the strange package that the speech instructor had dropped from the pier. Strings of hemp swam up from their knots. Harvey would have sworn, as he surfaced, that he had glimpsed a human arm waving through an opening that had come undone...
He swam to the boat with hurried measured strokes, pulled himself aboard, and sat panting on the edge until he could recover himself. He was freezing.
What the hell got into me? he wondered to himself. Then he hurried back down below.
Sally Ames was still lying down, but she was wide awake now. Her clear blue eyes followed him earnestly as he entered.
She sat up with some difficulty, rubbing her arms.
He poured some hot coffee from the little electric stove in the cabin and passed it quickly between his chattering teeth.
The first thing she said was: "You're dripping wet. Come over here,"
He went over and sat down on the bunk.
"You look dreadfully cold," she said. Come here."
She took him into her arms without another word and pulled the blanket over them. They were a strange sight he in his wet clothes, she pale.
"Please don't," she said as he checked her. "I'm dreadfully sore." She took his face into her hands. "All right?"
"Sure." He sat up and lit a cigarette.
"You're not mad at me?" she said in a worried voice.
"Of course not. He shut the door to the deck, then hurried out of his clothes. Again he thought: What in the hell came over me, to dive in like that? Must be losing my marbles.
He grunted something unintelligible and came back to the bunk with some wet rags and a towel.
"Come on, let's get you washed off," he said.
She nodded encouragingly, and made little sighs of pleasure as he applied the cloths. He would damp up what he could, then rinse the rags in a bucket.
"What were you doing topside?" she asked, positioning her legs.
"Huh?"
"I mean, why did you go on deck?"
He hesitated. "Just wanted to get a cigarette where it wouldn't bother you."
He didn't think she believed that, but she didn't argue. He couldn't help but think again that she was one of the sweetest individuals he'd ever met.
But as he thought about it-the whole thing was very peculiar. That instructor whatshisname tossing a sack into the harbor; it could have been a body, for all he knew.
A body why had he thought of that?
Harvey shrugged and made some notes in his head. Probably just some garbage the guy wanted to get rid of without paying dump fees. Wilmette city fathers would really go for that kind of business.
He tried to think of how Mildred might look wrapped up like that, tied at both ends like a hunk of meat. She was about average height. But he couldn't picture it
"You're almost clean now," he said. "Thank you."
"It's all right." He wiped her off with the towel, then climbed naked into the bed with her.
He took a cigarette from the bunk bureau and lit it The smoke curled up to the ceiling winsomely. "What does your dad do?" he asked out of a clear blue sky.
She rejected the cigarette when he pushed it toward her pinkish lips. "He's chairman of the board for several interlocking corporations downtown."
Harvey moved his eyebrows expressively. "Sounds important."
She snuggled up to him. "I don't really know much about it."
He allowed her to guide his hand to her breast, where he fondled one of her nipples in a way that made her breath come fast.
Something else was still bothering him. "Do you remember one night we were at the drug store near Main Street? Do you remember we ran into one of the other teachers from Fillmore?"
"No."
He pursed his lips. Well, why should she remember?
"Why?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing. Nothing important." He looked at his watch on the bureau. 11:30 already! It was high time they were getting home. Sally's parents would want to know where she'd been, and Mildred would be on the warpath.
Yet, as he lay here with this beautiful platinum-blonde girl, he couldn't imagine that he would ever really want to return to the outside world.
He caressed her smooth shoulder. "Do you think we should be getting dressed? Your parents will probably ask a lot of questions if you're out too late."
"Yes."
They gave it a few moments, and then sat up. Outside a storm was brewing. The air crackled with it.
"It would be hell," he said, "if we were caught out here when a real storm came up."
"Yes," she agreed again.
They hurried to get dressed just as the first large drops began to fall. Immense cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds that lifted their anvil heads high into the towering sky-began to roar up overhead of the little boat, threatening a second deluge. And the sky rumbled like an old bear in anger.
As soon as the downpour started, Douglas got up out of bed and went to the connecting door.
Tracy was sleeping like a baby, her hot little hand still clutched around her throbbing breast. Sheet and blanket had been thrown off, and her other hand rested down low in the down of her splendid glowing crotch. A warm smile rested on her sleeping face.
He tiptoed out without waking her. He had just wanted to be sure that she was asleep.
Still moving almost soundlessly, he went down the hall to his mother's room ... stark lightning flashed in the huge windows that held each end of the long second-floor corridor. The wind roared and whistled, rattling the panes and chandeliers downstairs. Thunderbolts shook the heavens like Armageddon with a deep, rolling swell of sound that was like eternal drums.
He knocked softly at Mrs. Tucker's door. "Mother.. . ? "
"Who--who is it?" He could picture her pulling the covers up over her massive breasts.
He opened the door. "It's me Douglas."
"Oh!"
"I couldn't sleep," he said as he walked across the room, closing the door behind him.
She looked nervous, and pulled the blankets up tighter. "Well what do you want?" she demanded in a voice that struggled to be authoritative.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and she backed awkwardly away. After all, he hadn't actually done anything yet.. . how could she explain that she felt nervous and ill-at-ease about her own son...?
"Where's Dad?" he said right off.
"Your father stayed in town tonight because of the storm warnings and he had dinner with some friends."
""I got scared when the lightning and thunder started up. Is it all right if I stay in here with you for a while? Just until it lets up?" He fingered the edges of her blankets. "Why, I "
"Gosh, Mom, I'm terrified. No kidding." He looked up and around. "Every time that thunder rolls off I turn into a trembling ball of terror." Congratulating himself on his literary imagination, he went on mournfully: "I wish you'd let me stay in here until it clears up.. . "
"Douglas ... I don't see how ... you never before had this sort of reaction...."
"Please," he begged.
Confused and in rout, she stammered: "Well, I suppose it would be all right for a little while.. . "
"Gee thanks, Mom." He wasted no time in getting under the covers."
"Douglas!" She shrank from him'as if he were bearing bubonic plague.
He looked at her innocently, his long lashes and blue eyes combining to make a singularly helpless picture. "What's wrong, Mom?" He stretched himself out to full length under the covers. "Gosh, if Dad was here, of course, I could stay with him "
For some reason the thought of that upset her even more. She fell silent, not having the slightest idea of what to say or do.
When Mrs. Loralee Tucker went to bed, she always let her long dark hair down. She had never had it cut, and it swam all around her lovely face, her shoulders, and what Douglas could glimpse of her nightgown. The periodic lightning made her a very clear picture, the eyes staring at him in amazement, the pouting moist red mouth, the promise of bulging tremendous bosom beneath those quivering blankets that she held tight in her tiny hands.
"Go on to sleep, Ma," he told her, and he turned over on his side, seeming to accidentally graze her leg with his as he did so. She winced as if electric fire had shot up through her thighs. Her heart began to moan as she studied his square shoulders, his slender hips, the hips she had given him.
It was with some misgiving then, that she turned away from him and faced the opposite wall.
Douglas smiled to himself. Soon she would be fast asleep. He had all night. He would take her very slowly, with great finesse, he told himself.
He was already in excruciating pain of desire with his need for her. He wondered if she had noticed. The bottom part of his pajamas was sticking out a mile. He reached a hand down inside his pajama bottoms.
Of course there was no way for her to reasonably throw him out of the bed without creating a scene she didn't want to look like a fool. In any case, after a little while she began to calm down, and then she discovered sleep just as Douglas had supposed that she would.
With her asleep, he very carefully edged over to her so that their bodies were touching. He could feel the warmth exhuded by her hips. He passed his hands over her wonderfully large round buttocks, pushed his fingers in between them. Mrs. Tucker squirmed and moaned desperately, deep in a sweet dream of something else lewd.
Slowly her left leg lifted to allow his hand greater freedom of movement. He shucked off his pajama bottoms and pressed forward, in back of his fingers. She moaned in delirium, sounding as if she were crying, her breath coming fast in high, fluted whistles.
Douglas drooled. She was wet as the inside of a fish's mouth. Very carefully he lifted up her nightgown. There was her great and glorious behind in full view. He like to fainted from the beauty of it. He put his hands on her cheeks and strained forward. A pounding wave of pleasure surged through him; he had penetrated!
"Uuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...." she whistled. He sank into her deep moistness with an exultant moan. Mrs. Tucker's body lurched forward as he began pumping her.
"Go go go go-" he yelled, every muscle in his body straining. The cords of his neck stood out as he agonized into her. He buried his face in her long fragrant hair and reached around to clutch at her massive breasts, fondling her huge nipples desperately with his fingers...
"Uuuh-uh-uhhhh...." Mrs. Tucker moaned and whimpered in delirium and then he knew she was making it: her body arched and she screamed out loud.
And then he made it slowly at first, and then with mounting heat. Until finally his young body began to shudder in an ecstasy more fantastic than anything he had ever known in his life.. .
CHAPTER NINE
Douglas my God! What are you doing!" She squirmed forward to get him out of her.
"Gee Mom, don't be such an old fuddy-duddy."
She scampered away from him; he struggled after her. "Gee, Mom...."
She fell over the edge of the bed, her hair disheveled, and glared up at him. "If your father knew what you were doing, he'd thrash you within an inch of your life might even kill you," she added as an afterthought.
"Aw heck, Mom.. . " He reached down and inside of her negligee. Before she could stop him, he was fondling one of her mammoth breasts.
"Oh, my God...." she murmured as he prolonged that sincere titillation.
He had found her left nipple. It had become huge, hard, and distended, and he worked on it purposefully. "Gee, Mom," he went on convincingly, "you couldn't let dad kill your own little baby, could you?"
Her only answer was a muffled gurgle. Finally he grabbed her by the armpits and lifted her back onto the bed; removing her gown as he did so. She let it spin up over her head without protest. Almost immediately he began nuzzling one of her furry dark armpits, simultaneously pulling at her nipples with his fingers.
She moaned in helpless desperation.
He was pleased to see how full and firm her belly was. He caressed it gently with his left hand.
Her legs were stout, strong tree trunks, very long. The thick jungle that rested between them was a heavenly dark oasis of warmth. Her waist was still small, and her breasts they were the most immense things Douglas had ever seen in his life!
Working furiously, he finally prodded her into a position where she was kneeling on all fours above him. Mrs. Tucker looked very dizzy, as if she didn't believe she really existed. Her nipples were a very dark brown like those of a colored woman and they hung inches distended in front of his face. He reached up and pulled them down to his hungry lips-
"Douglass...."
"Douglass...."
His mouth first grabbed the huge dark love-bud of her swinging left breast, sucking it deeply into his ravenous maw, practically pulling it down his throat. It was so big it practically filled his young mouth.
His hands were at work, too. He reached up with both hands to try to encompass her hanging breast, but he couldn't do it they were too large. He pulled on it, manipulated it, tried to draw it out and then he moved on to her right breast!
Mrs. Tucker moaned in torment. "Do you like those, sweetie boy...? " she asked, her eyes half-closed in delirium.
He tried to express his delight, but could only get out some weak, muffled noises. He was afraid he might lose her breast if he let go of it. And it tasted so good.
But he needn't have worried she was helping him now. She was straddled nicely over his manhood, her tremendous love globes swinging over him as he grabbed them alternately, pulling on her nipples, squeezing, fondling, pressing in and pulling out, letting them balloon around his hands like pasta in the hands of a pizza maker.
His mother moaned in agony. From time to time she was letting herself drop downward onto him, then arching back up. Each time a heavy gurgle of desire broke from her lips. She continued to insert him, just a little each time, pulling up and out-
"Mama--I--I'm coming!" she blurted out.
And then the sweet juice of life squirted upward and located a well of sensation deep within her lascivious being. Mrs. Tucker shrieked out as if she had been struck. Then her head rolled forward and she fell, jerking, across his body...
Harvey Grossman didn't sleep well that night; he kept remembering what he had seen, and it bothered him for no reason that he could well understand.
Mildred kept tossing and turning all night, too, and once he had to get up when one of the children called for a glass of water. By the time morning came around he was a nervous wreck. He resolved upon getting up that he would try to seek out the man he saw throw the garbage into Wilmette Harbor.
He arrive at Fillmore High School early and began roaming the halls. Then it occurred to him that the best place to get a line on someone in the speech department would be to hang around the auditorium. Instructors in drama and theater were constantly congregating there for secret cigarettes and gossip.
But there was no one in the auditorium this early. He waited until about eight-thirty, and then he had to get to class.
As he hurried to the door he was met by an answering wave of students who came chattering toward him through the auditorium's swinging doors. He sidestepped them warily and started to move forward again.
Then suddenly he was brought up short. He remembered the man's name immediately Lee Thompson, instructor. Thompson was coming at him at a deadly nervous pace. The two men gazed into each other's eyes.
There was not a spark of recognition on Thompson's part; he seemed so engrossed in something or other that Harvey felt to disturb him would have been like shattering a statue with a high-powered rifle.
So instead he just stepped aside as Thompson went past him, rambling down the long, curving aisle toward the stage. He turned around very slowly, watching the blond-man carefully. Thompson took the stage in his stride, and mounted it without misstepping or looking back.
"Okay, kids," Thompson said, taking the podium in twitching hands, "We're going to start out with that With a Little Bit' number! Let's go!" Harvey turned and finally managed to exit.
But he didn't go to his morning biology class; he went instead upstairs to the balcony of the auditorium.
By the time he got there, the kids were lined up on stage. The girls in the group were especially pretty. Harvey felt his muscles harden as he watched them move. Girls were so graceful at that age. It was enough to make any full-blooded man want to do desperately lewd things with them.
There were redheads, and brunettes, and blondes, and girls whose hair was shades of everything in between. Without thinking about it very much, he found himself dropping the zipper on his fly.. .
Suddenly his hand was gripping his rod. It began manipulating. He was thinking about the girls on stage. His hand popped feverishly upward and downward.
Lee Thompson was calling the roll. Sally Ames was absent, for one thing. Harvey was surprised. He hadn't even known that she was in the play. Now that he thought about it, he realized that he hadn't taken care to pry too deeply into her life; she was a closed book to him. He didn't even know who was the father of the baby he'd murdered the night before. Yes, he was a murderer.
Harvey's hand moved harder, faster. He was getting such a thrill out of watching the girls, out of his unusual situation, out of his crazed thoughts...
"Where's Genevieve?" somebody said.
Thompson didn't look up. His head was bent, his face intent on his little attendance book, into which he was scoring the latest figures for student dedication. "Genevieve?" he finally said casually. He looked around.
Genevieve? Harvey thought.
No one else said anything. After a pause, the people on the stage began talking about something else.
Harvey continued watching the girls. He couldn't get over the way their breasts jiggled underneath their sweaters and blouses, supported by just the narrowest waists. It was amazing to think that at one time Mildred had been built like that, had had firm, hard pink love-globes of the tenderest hue, erect cherry nipples that shivered at every command, that felt sweet and young against the teeth...
His head fell back and he groaned. His hand was working with great speed, pumping up and down. He scarcely noticed anything else in the world ... the girls were parading across the stage, like so many harem houris, their long hair swinging, their busts extravagant, their legs strong and young, their waists nonexistent.. .
He cried out loud. Then he groaned and shuddered seven times...
"Who's that up there?" a voice demanded. Harvey jumped from his seat back into consciousness.
As he looked down at the faces turned toward him from the auditorium stage, he realized with a feeling of relief that none of them could actually see him, encased as he was in the deep twilight of the balcony. Turning on his heel, without a lost moment, he hurried up the stairs to the balcony doors and disappeared through them. Then he was lost quickly in the shifting groups of moving students and instructors.
Sally had stayed home from school because of the pain. She still felt quite sore.
She couldn't help think of what a masterful person Harvey was. The way he had driven into her so relentlessly, sparing nothing of his great Jewish power. The way he had used his tongue. She got a charge just remembering the way he had looked with her legs wrapped around his dark head.
And when she had done the same for him! She could not remember anything so large, hard, powerful and strong.
The door slammed downstairs. The sound filled her with trembling apprehension. Her father! He would want to know immediately why she wasn't in school. Ordinarily he didn't come home this early and ordinarily she was in school.
She heard the tread of his heavy goosesteps upon the stairs.
"Sally.. . ? " The door was pushed open and there he stood, in his standard dark suit, briefcase in hand.
Her father was not a bad-looking man by anyone's standards. He had considerable white in his hair, but it was thick and curly and framed a very handsome face. For the rest of him, he was trim as a movie star.
"Why aren't you in school?" he demanded.
"I decided not to go to school today."
He grabbed her by the wrist and she struggled to wrench free. As she was sitting up in bed with nothing but a white nightgown on, this movement caused her gown to slip from one shoulder, revealing one magnificently rounded pink breast topped by a delicious palm-sized aureole.
Mr. Ames gasped and staggered backward. "My Lord," he said, "you're naked!"
She noticed with some satisfaction that a large bulge was appearing at one side of his trousers. Suddenly all caution snapped in her pretty young head.
"Is that so terrible, dad?"
He wheezed. "Why you're nothing you're nothing but a flagrant hussy!" He backed away from her as if she were a roaring fire.
She only smiled at this outburst and watched the growing bulge of his trousers with increased interest.
He vanished like a magician. Sally laughed and rocked back and forth on the bed. It was the first time in her life she had ever seen him genuinely unable to cope.
But her laughter was short-lived. Suddenly he was back at the door with the longest belt she had ever seen!
"Dad-what ? "
She tried to cover up her bare breast, but it was too late. Thwack! The belt came down like a thunderbolt. She screamed out in pain. "Dad please "
Thwack! This time the heavy pointed belt buckle struck fully on the pulsating pink nipple of her joggling breasts. She screamed again, lurching backward on her haunches.
"I'll teach you, you bitch!" he hollered at her, and then he continued to deliver resounding smacks all over her throbbing hot young body. Her nightgown came away in shreds, revealing her naked white flesh, her beautiful breasts, her wide soft shoulders, her dimpled flat tummy, the white down below her curvaceous belly, the bare slender legs that tried to scamper away-
But he would not let her escape. As she scrambled fearfully off the bed and crawled across the floor, he brought the belt down fiercely on her lovely white backside. Huge, crisscrossing red welts began to appear on her helpless young body. She crawled across the floor like some small animal evading a hawk, her white-blonde hair straggling over body like a frayed shroud.
And then, through all of this perversion, a strange feeling began to assault Sally.. . She looked down at her legs she was moist. Suddenly she realized just how excited she had become. As her father brought the belt down again and again, she felt like a slave girl beneath the lash of a dread overseer. The feeling was terrifying but at the same time exciting! She felt herself oozing a tingling warmth that asked only the dreadful taste of that terrifying lash for its sustenance.
Ecstasy beat through her with a force that could not be ignored.
"Oooooooohh.. . " she moaned with delighted lust each time the belt burst savagely across her helpless flesh. "Daddy harder ... oh please...." she begged.
Mr. Ames was taken aback. For just a moment he withheld the instrument of torture. Could this bleeding, pleading slave be the same sweet young blonde daughter who taught Sunday School? To see her so crazed with lust just because he had given her a perfectly average beating made him lose his cool. Suddenly he noticed that his trousers were tight.
"Daddy please help your little baby...." She held up her hands entreatingly.
"You're a harlot!" he yelled. "You deserve damnation!"
"But I'm only a sweet little girl," she begged, crawling across the floor toward him.
"That's what you say," he said suspiciously, crossing his arms. "If you ask me, young lady, you're a dirty little whore you and that pink body of yours. You have a lot of nerve asking me to "
She knelt obeisantly and kissed his shoe tops. Mr. Ames winced. An electrical sensation coursed through him, as if he was sitting in a bathtub supplied with his favorite voltage.
She continued kissing. Her lips were at his shoelaces. She licked them with her tongue.
"You're a helpless little love-slave," he muttered crossly, watching her.
He passed his fingers through his hair, wondering if he was nuts, wondering if he was imagining all this. "You and those globby little things of yours," he muttered.
She was at his kneecaps. Her long-nailed fingers reached up his pants legs. He felt her nails scratching his very sensitive shins, curling the hairs on them.
"Sweetheart, you really mustn't "
But she continued unmercifully. She bit at his kneecap through his trousers, ran her hands up the backs of his thighs, pressed her head between them, reached up and ripped off the buttons of his trousers with a feverish intensity. "Why can't you use zippers, like other men," she demanded, and then her groping hands attained him...
"Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.. . " He groaned with lust as her hand pulled him down and aimed him unerringly for her waiting red mouth. Her hot lips were all around him, enveloping him in steam. He felt the insides and undersides and topsides of her lips. She laved him all over as if he were the only man existing in the entire world, her tongue tickling and caressing all at the same time.
"AaaaaaaaaMhhhbhoooohhhhhhh ! ! "
He felt an ecstasy that was too great to be borne; and then he could no longer control himself. He erupted in a fury of wanton lust. She choked and gurgled. Then a great pleased smile washed across her face as she held his shuddering hips.
They lay around in bed for several hours after that. Mrs. Ames was at a meeting of the Junior League or something, and could be counted on remaining with her mah-jongg players for several hours.
Mr. Ames looked well-spent. Sally was lying back with her long blonde hair flowing around her body looked even more so after a bout with love. Her legs caressed each other wantonly. Every so often her pink little hands would reach up to fondle the little love-buds on the soft melons of her chest, but her breasts were in a very relaxed state. They showed no sign of life.
She sighed. He cradled her head deep in his guilt, almost resentful of the way her body snuggled against his. He smoked his cigarette in deep thought.
"Sally," he said philosophically, "how old were you when you first discovered you were a wanton?"
"Oh, I don't know; why, dad?"
He put his arm around her and took a very serious tone. "Because, sweetums, it's not going to do at all for you to throw open your legs every time you feel like having your daddy-kins throw one into you. People have ugly words for that kind of thing."
"What kind of words?"
"Unprintable," he said mysteriously. Sally looked around as if to see if there were any newspaper reporters present.
"I should think it would be worse if I went out and had sexual relations with just anyone a stranger, for instance," she said.
He shook his head dolefully and ran fingers through his whitening hair. "Not in our society, sweetheart. You'd be better off throwing open your legs to a garbage collector than to your old dad."
She looked miffed. "Nobody lets me have any fun," she said, twisting grotesquely.
Mr. Ames sighed. There was no getting along with teen-agers these days.
Suddenly Sally got up on her knees and swung around in front of him, her full, firm breasts brushing his face. "But you like these, don't you?"
"They beat gin rummy," he admitted, nipping at a nipple with his teeth.
She straddled her legs across his hips and reached downward. Her eyes lit up brightly. "You're ready again, daddy."
He groaned as she touched him. "Is nothing sacred?" he asked in a tight, little voice. "Years spent working for the Lord, making myself a pillar of our chamber-of-commerce community, all to see my good works shot to hell and gone in a matter of moments.
Ah, that's show-biz."
Suddenly she fell on him. She was impaled on the flaming sword of his togetherness. It burned brightly, like a star, within her.
Sally began bouncing up and down, uttering little squeals of delight as he greased up and down through her. Then she felt herself making it slowly at first, then with greater and greater force-
"Aaaaaaahluihhhluihh.. . ! "
He grabbed her breasts and pulled them back and forth. Then he punched them with his fists. Then he pulled on them and she moaned terribly, squirming on him licentiously. Deep gasps for air seemed to wrench her body dreadfully. She jerked and twisted, her blonde hair flying all around them.
And then he felt something shoot up from the very depths of his being. His body convulsed, and, like a shooting star, something hot and bright flashed through every nerve ending in his body, as if he were a flashbulb on an indefinite exposure.. .
Lee Thompson allowed the girl to bring him coffee. She was a very big girl, built on classic Junoesque lines, with tremendous breasts that stuck out like torpedoes or Nike missiles, tree-truck legs, large swinging hips, beautifully curved belly, and long waving brown hair. Her face was every bit as voluptuous as her magnificent body, with thick, sensual lips and large deep eyes. She did in fact tower like an amazon over him.
He had let her take Mm home because he had been so despondent over the Genevieve affair. Then, too, he had noticed Harvey Grossman in the auditorium that morning and it was not hard to guess why he had been there. Grossman knew that he was the man on tht pier last night. The question was how much else did he know?
JoAnne Van der Veld was not a bad little girl-she was a senior at Fillmore High School and about eighteen. He had had an affair with her the previous May, but luckily she was not the sort of girl to hold that against him. She had no objection, apparently, to being loved and left. Possibly because she liked to do the same. He was pretty sure he knew of at least five other men teachers who had had affairs with her, possibly to insure good grades. She was a young girl who knew how to use her body to best advantage.
"There," she said, placing a tray with coffee and roll on his lap. He looked up into her eyes.
Because Jo Anne's parents were semi-divorced and flying all over the world with the jet set, she lived alone in her little apartment in Fillmore, with the lease in her mother's name. So she was free as the wind as far as restrictions were concerned.
"What's bothering you, Lee?" she asked, sitting on his lap.
"Oh, nothing." Then he confessed: "I'm in a bit of a jam."
She nodded, but didn't ask him to continue.
He studied her thick thighs and wished they were wrapped around him. He could remember very well the swelling movements of her Mps as they rode together toward some sensational finish.
"You haven't killed somebody, I hope," she said jokingly.
He felt terror break through his body with the force of a blow. But he managed to control himself, saying with a grin: "Nothing as serious as all that!"
He tried to think of where he had failed. Actually, the difficulty had been quite accidental. Grossman had been on the boat quite by chance but why had he been on the boat?
A light bulb flashed over Lee's head. Of course he would swim out to the boat and find out whatever ... But how would he know which one had been the boat Grossman had seen him from? He put his head in his hands.
What a rotten business, he thought sourly.
JoAnne ran her fingers into his blonde curls. "I do declare, Lee, you're taking something very seriously."
He shot her an angry glance. "It's nothing, I tell you. Leave it at that!"
She winced. "Well, you needn't shout, need you?" Her face took on a very hurt expression.
He put his arms around her marvelous waist and placed his head in her breasts.
Ah, safety, he thought comfortably. Even if she did sit on my coffee and roll.
"Gosh, I feel all hot," she said suddenly. She put some fingers under her skirt, reaching upward. "Lee," she exclaimed, "I'm hot and wet!"
"Well, if you hadn't sat in my coffee "
She jumped up from his lap and the tray joggled to the floor, spilling roll, coffee, plates and spoon all over the plaice. He jumped up with her, his trousers covered with coffee.
She started bawling to beat the band.
"Oh hell," he grumbled. "Get off those wet clothes and we'll see if we can get straightened out,"
He helped her to pull the sweater over her head, revealing a tremendous brassiere filled to the brim with a pair of earth-shaking beauties. He felt his tongue go hard the moment he saw them. He quickly reached around in back of her and unhooked it.
His heart stuck in his throat. He had never seen anything so massive and firm as these two Nike missiles. They were not just huge they were protruding, circled by a pair of dark purple bulls eyes as large as his hand, each of which were surmounted with rows of fascinating tiny pimples that made his mouth water.
He had forgotten just what a tremendous gravity-defying bust Jo Anne had. They were just what he needed.
"Oh, there's the newsboy," she said as the sound of something kerplunking landed on the back porch. She squiggled out of his arms and went into the bedroom to get a robe.
A few moments later she had the newspaper in her hands and was reading it. He peered suspiciously over her shoulder.
"Genevieve Carter!" she exclaimed. "Why I know her!" She looked over at Lee. "Wasn't she in the cast of that My Fair Lady thing you're producing?"
"What does it say?" he asked crossly, trying to get a glimpse of the headlines.
She held the paper away from him. "Never mind. You answer me first, y'hear?"
He looked noncommittal. "Yes, I know Genevieve. Why, what's it all about?"
"She's disappeared!" She held up the newspaper for him to see. He scanned the story quickly, then let go a deep sigh of genuine relief. He was safe thus far.
It seemed that all anybody knew was what her parents had told the papers: she hadn't shown up since the previous afternoon, she had been keeping irregular hours, and they often didn't know where she was going. She had just disappeared. The story hinted at foul play and, possibly, that she had run away from home due to some difficulty with her parents.
Lee Thompson chuckled to himself and tried to calculate. There were just a few months remaining of school. If he could last it out and not lose his head, not do anything to cause suspicion, he could just depart Fillmore in the normal manner, by not renewing his contract. He would go elsewhere, and wash his feet forever of the whole dirty, ugly mess.
"Gee, that's too bad," he finally said. "I hope she isn't in any trouble. I guess I'll have to get someone to replace her in the play. That's two girls I had absent today Genevieve and Sally Ames. But Sally called in sick, so I know she's not out permanently."
"She did?" JoAnne looked very thoughtful. "I didn't think Sally had been sick a day in her life. She's a professional little good girl, if you know what I mean."
She pushed Lee back on the couch and opened her robe, forcing his face into the cleavage of her breasts. He had the distinct sensation that he was drowning, but he didn't mind very much. He reached up and fastened his hands on her budding nipples and aureoles. Her aureoles had that quality of being able to form second mounds on the mountainous curves of her globes. Just the sort of thing he went for in a big way. Now that he thought about it, he wondered just why in hell he had ever given her up. He must have wanted novelty in an awfully big way, to dump a woman like this one.
"Come on, baby, how about giving me a little?" she begged.
He thought about that for a moment. Condition he was in, he could easily give her a lot more than that.
"I don't know," he said. "What'll you give me in return ? "
She giggled. "Wanna see?"
Suddenly her mouth clamped hungrily upon his. Her tongue forced its way in, laving the sides of his mouth, his teeth, gums, practically pushing down his throat. Lee had the awful sensation of falling down and abysmally deep well.
As her tongue licked his neck and her mouth moved with little sucking noises down his throat, he looked past her toward the enormous picture window that fronted on the downtown section of Fillmore. It was such a beautiful little town, really, all decked out for commerce. People walked its bright streets with a delightful air of purpose, nicely composed, beautiful people. It was a beautiful clean town full of people who had probably never had a nasty thought in their collective lives. He felt somewhat dismayed that he himself should turn out to be the blotch, the cancer on its fair name the progenitor of its only degradation, the stain on the plate glass window. He, Phi Beta Kappa, class president, straight A student; and all that jazz.
She had taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, now had fallen to licking the golden hairs on his chest. "Zowie," he muttered.
She didn't appear to hear him. Her hands pushed his shirt open wide and her tongue sought out the little dark buds on his chest. He uttered a fluted little moan and felt a sharp intake of breath as she flicked at them. His body stiffened, every nerve aching for ecstasy, his teeth clenched tightly together.
The fingers of her right hand delicately scratched the protuberant bulge in his trousers. His teeth chattered in his head. She continued to scratch up and down. Finally her entire hand cupped and fondled the symbols of his maleness. He groaned and heaved with desire. Lust etched little beads of sweat across his trembling face.
"You like that, honey?" she asked, smiling with every tooth in her head.
He was unable to speak. An inefficient gurgle was his best attempt.
Finally her hand went to his zipper and pulled it down. He almost fainted with desire. Her groping hands were in his shorts touched! He shivered with ague.
Slowly she knelt before him. Her lips curved into a smile again; her mouth parted. He looked down and could see her gleaming white teeth, the thick waves of her brown hair, a darting pink tongue, deep brown eyes with long lashes that gazed up at him with the look of conquest in them.
And then she moved forward...
"Uunnnnnnnnhhhh!" His hips jerked involuntarily forward. A deep and penetrating spasm seemed to convulse his entire being. Her mouth surrounded his very essence, plunging forward, up and back, tonguing, driving him mad with lust. His body jerked in a frenzy. He gripped her hair and began to snarl incoherently. Wave upon wave of besieging ecstasy coursed through him. His flesh was dissolving in flame, her mouth so warm, so delightful ... so warm ... all around him...
"Ah ah ... ahhhhh ah ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahah!"
His teeth chattered; he shuddered violently.
His hand relaxed in her hair. She gulped as be looked down at her. He had never seen her quite so radiantly lovely; she fairly sparkled.
Her eyes held his as if by a law of nature. She said laconically, "Now, how about me?"
A deep smile passed across his face. He remembered just the way she liked it.
Without wasting another word, he reached down and grabbed her legs. With a minimum of convolution she was suddenly upside down, supporting herself on her back and hands. The robe fell to the floor, revealing all of her lusty nakedness. Her legs spread wide and rested across his shoulders. Without hesitating, he bent forward from where he sat, his hands grasping her hips.
Then his lips and tongue found her unerringly. A musky smell enveloped him. He prodded her mercilessly with tongue and lips, until finally she began to scream for mercy.
Quite a sight she was, her brown hair a pillow for her head, her massive breasts falling against her face, her hands forcing them so that she could tongue her own nipples...
"Eeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiieee ! " she screamed as she began to reach her seventh hell and, oddly enough, this was the first moment that Lee Thompson began considering that he might have to kill Harvey Grossman, too.. .
CHAPTER TEN
TRACY? Doug?" Mr. Tucker called upstairs.
He looked out the front window toward the driveway. Doug's car was parked there.
Without thinking anything more of it, he began taking the stairs one at a time. He had called Loralee from the office and she had seemed unaccountably worried about something. For the life of him he couldn't imagine what it might be.
He was going past Douglas' room when he heard the strange noises inside. At first he thought that he might be hearing things, then he looked downstairs to ascertain if maybe the strange noises were coming from outside the house.
No, they seemed to be coming from the second floor in fact, from Douglas' bedroom. They sounded very much like someone engaged in the act of intercourse.
He didn't mind Douglas fooling around a little, of course-after all, young bucks had to sow some wild oats but he was astonished to think he might have had the nerve to bring some little chippy into has very own house like this!
"Ooooooooooohhh Douglas," hissed the girl's voice. There was the sound of squishing, of bellies slapping together in heat, the inevitable bedsprings that modern technology had found no cure for.
"Take that!" Douglas was saying in a harsh voice, and the girl of his attentions moaned and gargled all the more ecstatically.
Considering the situation, Mr. Tucker felt honor bound to see what was going on.
Not disturb the dear children, of course. Merely have a look-see ... to ascertain what-
The Tucker home was a very old one that had been purchased from the Indians about 1300 A.D. As a consequence, it contained every gadget known to man, including very large keyholes. Mr. Tucker bent over and pressed his eye to the one in Douglas' door...
On Douglas' bed lay the happy couple. The girl had long brown hair, and while he couldn't make out her face, he could make out everything else about her quite readily.
Her sleek brown legs were wrapped around Douglas' hips and she was pumping away, uttering little inchoate moans of pleasure. He, in turn, had wrapped her securely in his arms. His buttocks were jerking in and out, tightened dreadfully in the act of consuming his adolescent lust.
Mr. Tucker uttered a little sigh. His hands seemed to find its way to his trousers, where he was being obviously affected.
His fly came open and he came to grips with the situation. Suddenly he fell backward onto the floor, his hand jerking wildly. A crazed look came into his eyes.
He sniffed and pulsated wildly. His entire body seemed to consist of one long convulsion.
Mouth parted widely, he echoed little moans of rapture "Uh unk ahhhhhhhhhnnnnn ! "
The squeaking bedsprings and sounds of squirshing were his background music and aphrodisiac rolled up together. His body arched, strained and thrashed and then-
"Uuuunnnnnnnnnnnn ! " He shuddered from head to toe, and then slowly began to sail back toward earth...
"Wheeeeeeehw!" he exclaimed as he began closing his trousers again. When he was finished, he got to his knees and went to the keyhole again.
Tracy!
He almost fainted! He couldn't believe his eyes his daughter and his son!
Without thinking further, he threw the door open! "You bastards."
"Dad."
"Hi, Pop."
Andrew Tucker III came raging up to where his children lay, their bodies lasciviously entwined. "God in heaven!" he bellowed wildly, his eyes blazing.
"Aw heck, dad," Douglas said, "don't get blasphemous. We might get thunderbolted." He looked up as if watching for a signal from the Lord.
Mr. Tucker blanched. He was speechless, miffed, completely at a loss. To think that he had harbored such venomous lechers in his house for so long-
"This is incest!" he screamed madly.
"Yeah," Douglas agreed, smiling. His hand pawed one of Tracy's honey-tanned breasts and her head fell back against his shoulder, her face all light and dreamy.
"But-but-you can't do this! It's illegal, immoral, and probably fattening!"
Douglas put his mouth down to his sister's nipple and drew on it heavily, shaking it back and forth while she moaned with contentment. "You forgot to add that it's fun, pops," he said when he was able to come up for air.
Mr. Tucker thought about that. "Well, yes-I suppose " Then he came to his senses again. Despite everything, he was beginning to feel a kind of hardening and it wasn't of the arteries.. .
Acting on impulse, he turned from the awful scene and hurried to his room. The .45 police automatic that he kept in a lower bureau drawer leapt easily into his hand, then he hurried back to Douglas' bedroom as he loaded it.
He kicked open the door with a violence born of hate, and leveled the gun on their jerking hips.
"You bastards," he growled one more time as he started to squeeze the trigger-
"Andrew oh, Andrew!"
His wife! She was downstairs! He jumped into the room and slammed the door shut behind him. This was all getting just too involved! He couldn't let Loralee find out-
"Oh, Andrew " came her voice as she ascended the stairs.
Mr. Tucker raced for the bed, dragged Tracy from underneath Douglas' spasming body, completely disconnected them. He dragged Tracy over to the closet and forced her inside it with him, placing his hand tightly over her mouth.
The knock at the door came swiftly over Douglas' protests. "Douglas," came Mrs. Tucker's voice, "who's in there with you?"
"Uh, nobody, mother."
Mr. Tucker heard the door to the bedroom swing open. He looked down at his daughter. The fleecy softness between her legs was intriguing beyond all imagination. He felt an intense desire to reach down with his hand and-
Her deep brown eyes stared knowingly into his. Suddenly she grabbed his hand. He tried to draw away, but suddenly be felt devoid of all will to resist. She took it and placed it between her legs ... Slowly his finger curved up ... into a silky moist smoothness ... a musky scent rose up around them ... Tracy's knees buckled and she began to sigh and moan softly in rapture. She clutched his shoulders for support. His eyes steadied themselves on her breasts. They were so full and firm Mrs. Tucker's were very huge, but they didn't have that same rock--like firmness--
Suddenly he thought he heard the bedsprings squeaking again. Tracy began panting and whimpering, and he ignored the bedsprings. He wanted to touch those breasts.
He bent his mouth to her nipples, nipping each one in turn with his teeth they blossomed into delightful hardness within his attentive lips.
He put one hand behind on her buttocks as he continued to nibble. She was so delicious he couldn't get over it. Her behind was nice and firm, yet juicily pliable. He kneaded it with his hand, inserted fingers from the rear so that she was dually besieged. She squirmed and began to fight him.
His hands worked faster, faster why in the hell were those bedsprings squeaking? She made it a kind of gurgle washed up into her throat. He stifled sound with a hand over her mouth; and she licked his hand as her body shivered back to normalcy.
Her hand reached now for his open fly, found quickly what it was she sought. She went to her knees.. .
"Ooooooooohhhh, Traaaaaaccccyyyyeeeee...." He curled his fingers into her hair...
It seemed like scarcely a moment before he, too, was shuddering as if in the grip of some profound malaise. Her lips worked with an expertise he would have expected only in a much older woman. And then he shot his bolt A deeply satisfied look passed across her devestatingly sweet face...
She stood up and he took her into his arms. Somewhere he heard the .45 automatic dropping to his feet in the closet. As their enclosure was only slightly larger than an average telephone booth, a musky odor completely surrounded them, so thick Mr. Tucker could almost taste it. He wondered vageuly if it might not dissolve his clothing, it was so tremendously pervading.
There seemed to be no sound coming from the bedroom now. They were too cramped for him to bend to the keyhole, and there was too much clothing in the way.
Warily, then, he proceeded to open the door.. . Douglas was lying on the bed with a peaceful smile on his face. There was no one else in the room.
He stepped out of the closet cautiously and took Tracy over to the bed.
"Who was in here, son?"
"Nobody, pop. Just me." Douglas made himself bounce up and down on springs.
Mr. Tucker looked skeptical. Douglas made a gesture toward him. "Your fly's open, pop."
Mr. Tucker closed his fly angrily. "Watch your tongue, young man," he scolded.
"No-that's what Tracy--likes to watch," Douglas told him, smirking openly.
Tracy giggled and put her hand into Mr. Tucker's. Douglas went on: "Come on, pop. Why try to fight it? A new day's dawning. The revolution has arrived bathed in blood, sweat and tears and sex. There's going to be a lot of changes made around here."
"like what, for instance?" Mr. Tucker asked sarcastically.
"First of all, pop-'get out of those sticky clothes and into bed. Come on." He held the covers open. "I will not!"
Tracy didn't seem to have heard. She began methodically stripping him. The whole thing was carried out with such utmost cool, that Mr. Tucker couldn't compose himself fast enough to protest.
Before he knew what was happening, he was down to his shorts. He looked down at himself and gasped. He was fully aroused again.
"Come here, baby," Douglas said to Tracy. "Give old dad a chance to adjust to the new situation."
Tracy went over to him obediently. She lowered and swung her breasts across his face. Mr. Tucker gulped. The sheer erotic licentiousness of this perverted scene was enough to-
He jumped out of his shorts and ran for the bed. By now Tracy's mouth was directly over Douglas' crotch and slowly descending, her face ecstatic...
He rammed her from the back. At first she jerked and moaned, then he pried her cheeks open more fully. While she applied her oral ministrations to Douglas' muscled supine form, Mr. Tucker inserted from the rear with his rod.
She squealed and shook. A deep hissing sound issued from her throat. She gulped and gagged. Mr. Tucker began panting like a man running the three-minute mile. He jerked in and out, riding her for all she was worth. He buried his face in her long fragrant hair, and then, with Douglas' cauldron rising to a boil, the three of them made it all at once-
They exploded off the bed in all directions. Mr. Tucker clunked his head against the wall. Tracy went sprawling in good daughterly fashion across the floor. Douglas seemed to bounce three feet into the air, then landed back down on the bed, which crashed under his weight.
"Whew," Mr. Tucker said again.
"Gosh," said Tracy in profound admiration of their mutual achievement of accord.
"Wow," muttered the boy wonder.
"Gee whiz," said Mrs. Tucker from her vantage point behind the keyhole of the connecting door to Tracy's room, where she was busily running a miniature picture camera.
That's the last time he'll leave me without any spending money, she thought with some truth.
Mr. Tucker stumbled to his feet. He was still mildly horrified, but only mildly. He gazed down at his lovely daughter and then gave her a hand up-
They sat down on the bed. Mr. Tucker lay with his head across Douglas' chest and smoked a cigarette. Tracy soothed him by massaging his calves.
"We've got to think this thing out," he said philosophically, his eyes narrowed.
"Sure, Pop. Whatever you say."
"Stop calling me Pop. Say, how about fixing this bed so that we can lay around in it properly?"
The mattress supports had crashed to the floor under Douglas' flying weight, and one of them was busted altogether. The three of them combined to put the bed back into working order. They got the box spring and the mattress off onto the floor, re-installed the slats, lifted the box spring back, threw on the mattress, and then they all bounced onto it with singular enthusiasm.
Mr. Tucker lay on his back as Tracy dropped her breasts into his crotch and rubbed him there. He was thinking.
Murder the old lady? No, that was too crude. They would just have to stay under cover an amusing thought as long as they could, and see what happened.
If she found out, then he would consider what to do next. God, poor innocent Luralee right under her very own roof. She'd probably faint away into a state of catatonic shock if she ever learned what was going cm in the house.
Not a bad idea at that. So far as Andrew Tucker III was concerned, his wife was a frowzy old bag anyway. He failed to remember what he could ever possibly have seen in her except possibly her 46-inch bust. He'd been a nut on busts when he was younger.
Suddenly he seemed to hear a whirring sound in the air. He looked around, but was unable to detect where it emanated from.
He shrugged and dropped the matter from his mind. In a few moments he was happily dozing, Tracy still dropping her breasts between his legs while Douglas assaulted her from behind.
"Harveee! Oh, Haaaaarveeeeee!"
Harvey struggled up the back stairs. There were times, upon hearing his wife's voice, when he could easily imagine a banshee wailing for judgment.
"Coming, sugar," he called out.
He had been thrashing with the Lee Thompson problem all day. Lee Thompson. Sally Ames. Between the two of them they had combined within a very brief period of time to virtually eliminate the normal complacency of his life.
What did Sally mean to him, anyway? She was a terrific roll in the hay, and he realized that he was going to be needing her increasingly so, as with drug addiction, each time they met. But what did he really know about her? Was she, for instance, a good girl, a bad girl, indifferent, a fallen Venus? Did he really need her white blonde hair and her creamy smooth young body?
Yes.
And Lee Thompson all because Sally had singled him out for attention he had seen Thompson cast a strange package into Wilmette Harbor. But who was Thompson? What more did he need to do about him? He had the vague feeling that something was still un-concluded about his relationship with the fair young speech instructor. Yet, how? What was bothering him? What was remaining that was unsaid, undone, incomplete?
Was there any connection to the fact that Genevieve Carter had turned up missing?
Who was Genevieve Carter? A pretty redhead he had seen around school. She had sat in one of his freshman biology lectures. But what else did he know about her? What kind of ESP was nagging at him about her? From time to time in his life he had had some terrific precognitions, or premonitions, and had even been invited to be examined at Duke University. But what was his very minor and latent ESP trying to tell him this time? Was it high time he consulted a ouija board?
"Your dinner's getting cold," Mildred told him as he finished mounting the stairs.
"Poo-poo ran up and threw her arms around his legs before he could answer her. He glanced once at a huge carving knife that sat upon the stove.
"Hello, pa-pa," Poo-poo said.
"Hello, sweetheart." He lifted her up in his arms and carried her across the kitchen.
"Don't go far," Mildred whined. "I've got this stuff hot, and you're going to eat it while it's hot!"
"Sounds interesting," Harvey remarked. He continued on into the dining room, where Alicia also came up and put her arms around his legs. If anyone else grabs my legs, he thought, I'm going to collapse.
He took the children into the bedroom and tried to tell them a story before going to dinner. He started out with Red Riding Hood, somehow got involved with Three Bears, then finally finished up with Cinderella. He had no idea how he had managed that.
Then Alicia said something that struck him as rather strange.
"Daddy, do you know a man named Mr. Tom-son?"
"Huh?"
"I met a man in the park today who was asking about you."
He stiffened. "When?" Suddenly he felt beads of perspiration rolling out on his forehead.
"Oh, about last hour." She looked at him coyly. "He asked me about you."
Harvey gulped. Lee Thompson? "How did you know his name was Thompson, sweetheart?"
"He had it written on his bag."
"You mean his briefcase."
She shook her head up and down. "Uh-huh."
Harvey congratulated himself on having taught her a little how to read. That little trick might well save his life, he thought with some foreboding.
"What did Mr. Thompson want to know, darling?"
"He gave me some candy and asked me to pull up my dress."
Harvey blanched. "And what did you say to that?" Somehow he couldn't really picture Lee Thompson as a sex maniac. She must have made that part up. That's all I need, he thought, another sex maniac in the house. My daughter. She's putting me on.
"I wouldn't, of course," she said in a very lady-like way. Poo-poo giggled something and put her fingers into her father's ear. He wondered how much of this she could understand.
"What else did he say, sweetheart?"
"What time you came home?"
"He wanted to know what time I came home."
She played with her little fingers. "And if I was your little daughter."
He smiled in spite of the situation. She was so cute. Some day she would be a real world-swinger. If she lived that long.
Why had he thought that? What was this fellow Thompson up to? He would have to force a showdown on the whole strange business and settle it once and for all.
"You coming to dinner?"
Mildred was at the door. He turned to her with ill-concealed distaste. "Coming right up," he said, and then he dropped Poo-poo to the floor and headed for the kitchen.
The soup was rotten, the potatoes worse. The roast beef tasted as if it had been boiled in vinegar for an hour previously. He had never liked frozen entrees.
"This stuff tastes rotten," he told her.
She made a sour face. "How come you were home so late last night?" she asked.
"I had to work late at the office. Anything else you'd care to know right now?"
She smirked. "Work till all hours of the night in a high school? Cut it out."
"Sure. Some student came down with a severe case of nervomania and I had to shoot her full of penicillin."
"Is that all you had to shoot her full of?" She turned around from the stove and gave him the full force of her black-eyed gypsy glare that was so unnerving.
"Sure. Would I kid you? You don't suppose I had to spread her legs to make the injection, do you?"
She blanched. He had taken the words right out of her mouth.
He walked up to her and flicked his fingers under her bust. Her full blouse quivered at his touch. "I know you pretty well, Mildred. You're thinking I've got some little cutie at school that I'm banging. Right?"
She gulped. She hadn't expected him to be so quick on the up-take. "Well, no, I-"
He sat back down again and pushed his plate until k damn near fell off the table. "If you would feed me some decent food once in a while, and not this frozen, re-activated, cellophane-wrapped plastic stuff, maybe you wouldn't have any cause to worry."
"Then you have been with another girl!"
Completely losing his cool, he picked up a frying pan from the side of the stove and whanged her on the side of the head with it. The strike made a slightly metallic sound that was not at all bad.
"That hurt," she said, rubbing her head.
"It'll hurt a lot more if you don't close your teeth and start seeing about making me some hot tea."
She went grumpily about doing just that. She had never dreamed that he would actually put the slug on her just out of conversation. Few women ever do.
As he sat sipping his tea, he concentrated on giving the Lee Thompson question his fullest attention.
First of all, it was all very nebulous as to what was going on unless, of course, he had actually been the witness to the finale of some ghastly crime.
Of course, he may just be building molehills that didn't exist. Maybe Sally had caused him to lose his senses. Was he exaggerating a situation out of all proportion to its actuality?
As he sipped his tea, he was vaguely conscious of something remarkable going on in the vicinity of the stove.
Mildred had opened her blouse.
He gagged. Her full, motherly melon breasts were pressing violently at the thin brassiere. He could see the full dark aureoles through the scanty material, and the love-buds of her nipples were starting to break through to the surface.
"C'mere," he said in a husky voice, placing his teacup squarely upon the table.
She edged slowly over to him. There was a strange kind of light in his eyes, and she wasn't sure whether or not she should be afraid of it.
As she went, she unhooked her brassiere from the rear. Her massive love-globes flopped out, firm and soft, and tremendously huge. His fingers reached instantly for her distended nipples. He twisted them violently and she cried out.
"Huuuurrrrrrrrrtttt ! Ohhhhhhhhhh...."
He continued to knead them dangerously with his hands. The more he hurt her, the better she liked it and the deeper she moaned. He twisted them and pulled at them; up and down, back and forth. She squirmed in an agony of lust. Her eyes shot fire, and her mouth parted to echo lewd sayings that belonged only on toilet walls.
"Do it to me me! Here! Right here! Hurry, darling ... ooooooohhh ... please...."
Harvey looked around. He could still hear the children cavorting in the bedroom, breaking dolls and screaming at each other. He pressed Mildred back against the stove and lifted up her dress.
"Oooohhhhhhh, Harveeeee.. . " She was delirious with delight, alive with desire.
And she was wearing no panties. He reached his hand into her squirming moistness, almost to the wrist. She gasped and clung to him for dear life, her legs crawling up around his hips.
"For God's sake, let me get my pants open, will you?" he scolded her, trying to get at his fly.
Her face took on a miffed expression but that was quickly changed to one of startled joy as he rammed fully home, whipping back and forth in order to cover every possible nerve ending.
Deep tremors of sensation and thrill shook her violently. She began moaning, pleading and whimpering. Her breath came in agonized sharp gasps. She seemed to be alternately moaning, crying, whispering, hissing, and panting. By the time he felt himself reaching his go point, her eyes were ceiling-ward, her neck chords straining, every muscle in her body straining toward an impossible surcease...
And then she drew in her breath sharply. Harvey cursed her, and this seemed to help both of them. And suddenly they were riding stark, raving crazy toward the finish line, bumping hell-for-leather ... she clutched him and squirmed blowing to the moon and he felt an equal explosion that he thought would rip his guts right out of his trembling, aching body-
They slid to the floor in a mangled, spent heap. They didn't notice at all that Poo-poo and Alicia were standing at the door to the kitchen, watching with sincere interest.
Poo-poo was licking a sucker. Alicia asked: "Are you hurting Mommy?"
Mildred gasped. "Get out of here," she yelled when she recovered her presence of mind.
"I wasn't hurting your Mommy," Harvey explained patiently, like the perfect father that he was, ever interested in his children's welfare and education.
"I was merely helping your Mommy to have a good time. That's why people get married, dears."
"Oh," said Alicia. Poo-poo merely giggled.
Harvey looked blankly at them. He tried to think of a better illustration. Finally he spread-eagled Mommy on the floor.
Mildred squirmed in his grasp. "You bastard the children! What the hell are you doing?"
"Honey, the old moral laws are passed," he explained patiently as he forced his freshly aroused self into her. She grunted as he drove home. He continued, much like a professor at the lectern before an auditorium full of eager students: "You see, it's up to each of us to provide the leadership that has heretofore been ignored. In the new world that's coming, our children and their children's children will be freer than ever before "
He droned on as they continued to hump and grind. Mildred was beyond understanding a word of it; the children stared fascinated.
". . . You see, it's up to us as parents of the modern world to guide our children properly to be sure there are no dark corners no secrets. In this way we eliminate the Puritan bias of our society. Our children will grow up healthier and happier if they have an honest attitude and understanding toward sex. We don't want them to be frustrated; that leads to neurosis. And the less that is hidden, the less they will be inclined to experiment promiscuously ... we must eliminate the aspect of 'forbidden fruit' that leads young people on, that entices them into sex games before they are ready.. . we must eliminate all artificial glamour that is the safest way to keep our children pure.. . "
Alicia and Poo-poo left the kitchen to see if they could think up any new games. Mommy and Daddy continued to hump on the floor, sliding all over, as Mildred had spilled some butter there only a half hour ago and neglected to clean it up properly. They slid Kke fish in a greased pan, scales and fins flopping.
Harvey kept sliding back and forth. The rhythm of his thrill climbed higher and higher. He had never in his 'life been quite so in love with Mildred. And when he finally made it, he thought the ecstasy would dissolve him.. .
When he stopped moaning and flopping, he slid out of her with an extravagant sigh. She had never been quite so good when engaged in normal-style convolutions. He laid back on the kitchen floor and looked at her.
She sighed. Her legs were still spread wide, her fetching jungle open to his interested inspection.
He listened for sounds of the children, and waited expectantly for her to start nagging him again. He didn't have to wait very long.
"Harvey," she started in, "Do you think it's wise for us to have sexual intercourse in front of the children?"
"You think it'll stunt their growth?" he asked her, with all the seriousness of a wise father.
"I don't think it'll do them any good, if it comes to that," she replied.
"I guess you're right," she sighed. "And she added in all seriousness, " this kitchen-floor bit is awfully tough on my back." She twisted and touched her backbone with her fingers. "If my mother thought you were throwing it to me on a linoleum floor, she'd have an absolute fit."
Harvey smirked. "Your mother," he said, "is of the old school. She's living proof of the theory that there's only one way to keep a nice Jewish girl from putting out and that's to marry her."
"Are you criticizing my mother?" she asked harshly, standing up and smoothing out the ruffles of her dress.
"Are you kidding? Have you ever known me to criticize your mother?"
"You mean within recent history?" She hooked her brassiere back up and went into the dining room. He followed gallantly after her, zipping up his pants as he went.
They found Poo-poo and Alicia playing together in the bedroom. They were very relieved to find that their playing was of a very clean variety.
Mildred picked Poo-poo up into her arms, hoisted her high into the air. "I'm glad you didn't give our darling girls any dirty ideas, you wretch."
"No hurry," Harvey told her, "there'll be plenty of time for that later."
She shot him an angry glance.
"Remember," he told her, "the family that plays together stays together!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lee Thompson had been stalking Harvey's apartment building for about an hour. Up and down in front of Palmer Park, hands in pockets.
The wind was fearfully chill, and now he wondered just what had ever prompted him to come out on such a rotten night.
First consideration was that he had to effectively ascertain just what it was Harvey Grossman knew, if anything. It may well have been that it had been too dark that night at Wilmette Harbor to make out anything very clearly. Maybe Grossman's suspicions were too vague to be of any importance.
At that, all anyone knew thus far was just that Genevieve had disappeared. Unless Grossman was going to encourage dredging operations in the harbor, swim down to the body himself, there was really no way he could know anything.
Still, the whole situation had a dangerous ring to it. If Grossman had seen him, eventually he might connect Genevieve's disappearance might become curious. There was no telling what might happen then.
Which was why the best solution was probably to kill him.
He felt in his pockets for the gun and the knife. The gun had been a gift from his father, just in case he should ever want to "blow his fool head off." The knife he had picked up in an army surplus store on south State Street. It had a spring catch and was advertised to be capable of springing into a man's belly on a moment's notice. While Lee felt somewhat like a teen-ager to be carrying it, he felt that it gave him an extra edge of confidence that was very necessary.
He was walking through some open grass in front of the Grossman's apartment building when he suddenly saw the front door open. Jumping behind a tree, he was surprised to see Harvey Grossman come charging out the door, wrapping his coat around his moving body. Almost immediately, a window sprang up on the second floor. He darted back of the tree again.
"Harveeeeee!" called the woman in the window, and then she proceeded to curse Grossman with a vehemence that was positively frightening.
"Same to you," Grossman yelled back, and he hurried to an automobile waiting at the curb.
Windows seemed to spring up all around, in Grossman's and connecting buildings. The woman Thompson took to be Mrs. Grossman quickly shut her own, and Thompson leaped from behind his tree. He scarcely had time to climb into the saddle before the other instructor was off like a shot.
He gunned the motor and roared after him into the night.
He must have tailed the other man for about a half hour before he finally came to rest before Fillmore Park, the one that fronts on the beach. Thompson often went swimming there during the summer and he was quite familiar with the area.
For a long time he sat there puzzled, trying to figure out what Grossman was up to. He just seemed to be sitting in the car, windows rolled down, hands in his lap, staring into space like one in a trance.
Who on earth could he be meeting at this hour, at this lonely place?
Or was it some kind of crazy trap designed to catch him? But how could it be?
Another little car drove up, a Corvette, and parked in back of Grossman.
Lee Thompson winced. There was a girl in the car, a blonde. So that was it! Grossman had a girl on the sly! If only he could find out who it was!
Unfortunately, before he could approach them, the girl had left her car and was running to Grossman's, her blonde hair flying in the wind.
She climbed into Grossman's Plymouth. They embraced ardently. What a man, Thompson thought with some admiration!
But they didn't start the motor, as he expected. Instead, they continued to make love! Their arms tightened around each other; the kiss became prolonged. Their mouths seemed to be locked tightly, beyond all imagination. Occasionally the kiss was broken and their mouths wondered all over each other's faces.
Thompson could tell by the way the girl was squirming that Grossman's hands were going under her skirt. For one thing, one of her legs was threatening to climb right over the back of the seat. Thompson felt himself getting hot just watching them. He passed his hand down to his trousers. Yep.
Moving stealthily, he left the car and went on tiptoe through the spring grass to where Grossman was parked.
Arriving at the car, he went to his knees and crawled up to the window.
He peered over the ledge and got the shock of his life. Grossman had the girl in a sexual embrace and was pumping her for all she was worth. Her legs straddled him widely, sliding up and down along the steering wheel. A sort of steam seemed to cover the front windows. He could see her face over Grossman's shoulder very clearly...
Sally Ames! Thompson couldn't have been more shocked if it had been the Queen of England! Of all the girls in the world! Fantastic!
Her face was contorted with the excruciating power of her lust; her lips strained as if she were moving at three g's through the stratosphere. Her blonde-white hair flew gloriously around her strained, tear-glistening face; her eyes rolled skyward. Her head was thrown back in desperation. Desire seemed to fill her struggling body with convolutions and contortions that were beyond all reason. Thompson felt a crazy, intense desire just watching her.
He looked down at his trousers, and felt them-
So engrossed he was in what was going on, that he scarcely noticed the squad car that had pulled up on the other side of the street.. .
"It's that pair again," said patrolman Carphogus as they pulled to the curb.
"Yep," said Stefanski. "I wondered when they'd be around again." He pulled out his little citation book. "What can we ticket 'em for?"
"Whatever we like," Carphogus told him. "But why bother?" He poked into the glove compartment and came up with a miniature camera. "I've got the most terrific little camera in the world right here. Takes film with an ASA of 1000. Absolutely foolproof."
"Whaddyou mean, ASA 1000?"
"Means the film is very foolproof, very high speed, very sensitive."
"Yeah, but don't you need a very steady hand with that kind of stuff?"
Carphogus grinned. "I brought a tripod."
"What!"
"Yeah. I got it right here." He reached into the back seat and came up with a little oblong leather case. He opened it--there was a tripod inside.
"Gee, I always thought you was carryin' a rifle in that thing."
"Are you kidding? What do I need a rifle for?"
Stefanski laughed. He had never thought of that. Of course the way they always drove the other way whenever they spotted a burglar, particularly if they thought he might be armed when would Carphogus ever have use for a rifle?
They left the squad car stealthily. Stefanski moved toward one side of Harvey Grossman's Plymouth, and Carphogus brought up the rear, unfolding the tripod as he went. It was quite dark outside, but he hoped that with the high-speed film and a time exposure he'd be able to get something interesting.
Then it occurred to him that with all of the movement in the front seat of the Plymouth, he'd probably get an over-active picture. Still, there weren't many time exposures around anywhere that showed the action of sexual intercourse...
The two policemen peered over into the front seat. From the side of the car they were on, they were able to see Sally's platinum blonde head bobbing up and down in ecstasy. Her legs were spread wide, and Harvey, his pants open, was deep within her. She had her hands on his rear and was squeezing him and ripping him bloody with her long nails.
"Holy Moley," said Stefanski. Carphogus only nodded completely enthralled. He had put the mini-camera on the tripod so that it just barely peeped up over the bottom of the window. He pressed the shutter release.
Muted groans and shuddering released echoed from inside the car. Sally's sweater was lifted up; her bare breasts pressed hard against Harvey's chest. Her panties were askew to one side of her legs. The two of them were grunting like animals of some abysmal jungle.
On the other side of the car from Carphogus and Stefanski, Lee Thompson had reached a great decision. He had unzipped his trousers and decided to make the best of a difficult moment. His hand was inside his shorts, moving actively. It was just at this moment that Carphogus spotted him-
"Hey, Bill," he said to his partner, "you notice anything funny over on the other side of this car?"
Stefanski gazed across the front seat; all he could make out of any interest were Harvey's shivering legs, his trousers scrunched up almost to his kneecaps. "Yeah, I kin see this guy's legs why?"
"That ain't what I mean kin you see the window over there, in back of him?"
Stefanski caught Lee Thompson's bobbing head immediately. "Holy cats!"
"We've got a Peeping Tom on our hands, Stef. Shocking but true."
Stefanski could see Thompson's hair and eyes rise straining backward, jerking his hand around. He was panting like crazy, occasionally supporting himself on the grass with his free hand while he peeped from time to time over the bottom edge of the window of the Plymouth. His tongue was lolling out of his head, his eyes were rolling, and saliva had filled his mouth. He was the perfect picture of a moral pervert consumed by a licentious desire that would send him flying toward ecstasy in a matter of moments.
Stefanski and Carphogus began to edge around the car very slowly. At precisely this moment, Sally began to utter a deep sigh of relief. Harvey stiffened, then plunged again, and finally shuddered with a long string of thrills that popped like firecrackers one, two, three, ad infinitum-
Sally and Harvey rolled away from each other. They lay panting at either ends of the automobile.
"Wow," said Harvey.
"That's the best yet," murmured Sally.
They both heard the shufflings around the car at just the same moment. They looked at each other as if to ascertain whether they both had heard the same thing. Awareness and mutual understanding shone in their eyes like tiny fires.
"There's someone sneaking around this car," Harvey said, glancing out the window. His eyes fell on Lee Thompson's gyrating body without recognition. Oh brother, he thought to himself, making a wry face.
Sally shifted in the seat, trying to climb over him so that he could take the wheel. Her full, globular firm breasts dangled and brushed against his face. He impulsively grabbed one juicy hard nipple with his lips and nibbled on it. Sally groaned with rapture.
He slid under her, struggling for presence of mind. He had to get the car started right away, before he started getting too excited again.
He twisted the ignition quickly, pressed his foot on the gas almost immediately. The Plymouth started up with a roar compounded of too much gas and a broken muffler.
Stefanski jumped from the front of the car and narrowly missed having his leg run over as it roared off into the distance. Carphogus, who had been bringing up the rear, was left standing alone with a beautiful view of his $500 camera-and-tripod combination being smashed to smithereens.
And in the meantime, Lee Thompson was rolling on the ground, deep in the throes of his ecstasy. . .
Officers Carphogus and Stefanski walked up to their red-handedly caught pervert. They let him finish without disturbing him. As Thompson trembled, and then lay still, sweat breaking out across his face, Carphogus tapped him very lightly on the shoulder with his nightstick.
"What!" Thompson jumped into the air as if his ass had been pumped full of bumblebees.
"Pardon us, bub, we'd like to take you down to the station for questioning."
The impact of having a police officer stare him full in the face at such a crucial moment, was such that ii goaded Thompson into a wild frenetic burst of activity. He leaped high into the air, then took off northward across the park grass at a full gallop. Sea Biscuit in his best days would have found him a tough man to beat.
"Hold it!" Carphogus yelled to the retreating figure, which was fast becoming lost in the moonlight.
"Wait a minute!" Stefanski grabbed Carphogus' firing arm. "You can't just shoot the bastard because he's a pervert. That's a 'cruel and unusual punishment.'"
Carphogus snarled. "He's resisting arrest, ain't he? If he gave up peaceable, he'd just demand to talk to his lawyer, anyway. Save the state the cost o' the trial."
He aimed carefully at the fast disappearing human figure, holding his service revolver tightly in both hands.
Then he squeezed carefully. The gun went off.
The bullet sped across the hundred yards of open space like a guided missile. Its .38 slug blasted Lee Thompson's backbone to shreds immediately on contact. The last thing he said before he was completely dead was: "Rosebud." Carphogus and Stefanski arrived at the corpse just in time to rifle its pockets with a casual air, taking care not to get any blood on their uniforms.
Route 42 winds up through Fillmore Township, Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, and a few other places before coming to rest at the Wisconsin border. It's a twisting road built with very little planning originally it had been an Indian trail.
Harvey continued to drive aimlessly for some time, just following the twists in the road. He looked over at Sally once or twice.
He was considerably relieved that they hadn't been followed. He couldn't help but remember what a strange sight that Peeping Tom freak had made rolling on the ground in his self-induced agony. He wondered if he himself looked that crazy when...
Sally cleared her throat. He looked over at her again.
She was really quite lovely. If Mildred hadn't improved so much over the past few days, he might have considered divorce. As it stood, he had the best of two worlds-a woman who could make him feel important by nagging him to death, and one who was very sweet, quiet, and interested only in sex.
He pressed Sally's hand affectionately. She was okay.
He wondered idly what it was he had struck as he roared off from the park. It had sounded like some kind of equipment.
Ah, well, no matter. The important thing was that the evening wasn't a total flop. He pulled her over close to him and began pawing her breast.
"That feels nice," she whispered.
"Nothing to it," he answered grandly. He could feel himself getting interested again.
This can't go on, he thought with some sincerity. Tonight I would have been working on my lesson plans for tomorrow. I still have letters of application to write for graduate school.
But how can I quit? It's all too good. The sort of thing every man dreams about. Even the most perverted degenerate hedonist couldn't imagine the wonderful deal I've got going between Sally and my wife.
But I'm going to be a nervous wreck in no time at all. It's not as if I were still a teen-ager. In those days I could go indefinitely.
Nowadays I'm only good for about six times a night.
Harvey pulled on the steering wheel. He made another turn up Sheridan Road.
He was considering how his life had changed so radically in such a brief time. Only a little while ago he had been a very respectable father and husband. He had been hardworking, kind to his children, had never dreamed of raising his voice to his wife, and had never, at any time, indulged in any sexual perversions in the marriage bed.
But Sally had acted as an aphrodisiac. The weirdness underlying their entire strange affair had literally turned him on Dr. Jekyl into Mr. Hyde. In the space of a short time he had beaten his wife, indulged in some of the most fantastic sexual perversions known to man and taken a mistress! His entire life had gone topsy-turvy! It no longer bore any genuine relation to reality!
"Where are we going?" she asked, interrupting his train of thought.
"Why? You have to go home?" He looked over at her. She had rolled her skirt up to her thighs. They were creamy smooth and musky with warmth.
"No," she said daintily, scratching her upper thigh and finally sliding her fingernails beneath her panties. "It's just that I'm starting to get itchy again down here, Harvey." She looked at him with a deep ring of sincerity in her voice. "And you're the only guy I know who turns me on like this."
Sally had changed, too. It seemed to him that when he had first met her she was just another sweet, hardworking student. Now there was a definite tinge of crassness in her voice. She was oversexed, there was no question of that.
She never spoke of her future plans. At first she had been interested only in getting rid of the baby "whosever it might be", now she seemed to be interested solely in one sexual thrill after another.
What would she do when she got out of high school? Would she go away to college, leave him?
"Can't we pull over somewhere?" she said.
He nodded and pulled the car off the road. She was definitely ready again. He could smell her and the windows were starting to cloud up.
He went down a small side road toward the lake. Large, beautiful houses grew all around. They rose up like sentinels in the eerie darkness.
Cutting off his motor, he turned to her.
She had pulled up her skirt. He could make out the little white curling wisps sticking out of her panties. Suddenly he gulped. He felt, unexplainably, an extremely intense desire for something so degrading-
She slipped her fingers into the top of her panties and pushed them down.
"God, you're beautiful," he murmured, a touch of trembling in his voice.
"I have silky legs," she admitted. She ran her fingernails up her elegant patrician white thighs, directly into her quivering crotch.
Then she pushed her panties the rest of the way down, and finally off of her legs. Now she was wearing just her bobby sox, tennis shoes, skirt pulled up around her waist, and bright blue sweater that was pushed up around her lovely swan throat.
He grabbed her breasts, punching her hardened nipples in with his thumbs.
"I have nice knockers, too," she said. "Any boy would be happy to munch on them."
"I'll say." As if to emphasize this, he bent his head and took one of her delicious little chunky love-buds into his mouth. He rolled its cherry sweetness over his tongue with the lingering tasting of a man enjoying a gourmet dinner.
"Harvey?" she said in a small voice.
"Yeah?" he answered between a couple of savoring nipples that made his thighs twitch.
She put her hand to her hair. "I have pretty hair, too."
"That's true." He continued savoring the delicious morsel of her. His hands pushed at her jouncy globes, making them giggle delightfully.
"And a nice belly."
"Yes, yes."
"Harvey?"
He stopped everything. "Now, what the hell is it? Say it, for heaven's sake."
"Would you do to me what you did the other night?" she asked, curling her toes up gracefully.
He tried to think of what he had done, what it could be she was referring to. Nothing particular came to mind they had gone to the boat, and done a lot of-
Then it occurred to him. "Oh," he murmured.
He looked down at her spreading legs. A deep wave of affection overcame him. Suddenly his head darted downward...
"Harvey ... oooooooooohhhhh ... yessssssss," she hissed, "I like that so much when you get your lips and your tongue ... the waaaaaaayyyy you use them ... right to the moon...."
Her legs lifted effortlessly around his ears. She clutched his hair like a madwoman and began to shiver.
Harvey had never tasted anything quite so good. His hungry hands ran up her legs, his tongue licked mercilessly. Sally's body arched and pulsated with passion in the confines of the little front seat.
Harvey worked his mouth in with all the desperate eagerness of his perverted lust. His hands reached under her buttocks and grabbed them hard. They jerked spasmodically in his violent, tightening grasp.
Sally moaned in ecstasy, her head strained backward. A deep sigh of rapture rose up from the depths of her being.
"Harvey ... I think ... I'm ... making it ... I Uh uh uhnk! Unnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhh...."
And then she blew her head off. A million stars shot off into space. Ten million tingles stabbed her. Her entire body quivered madly. A wave of sensational lust came running down the boulevard and knocked her down as if she had been hit by a club of tremendous dimensions.
As for Harvey, he felt his breath suck in sharply, and then a minor atomic explosion seemed to envelop his crotch. He whistled like a man in a graveyard. Harvey's life would never be the same again.
What goes on in a community's high school, to the people who teach or study there, cannot be kept a secret from the world. In the United States, any act of any individual will plant its mark on whatever institution he's involved with during his working life.
And so it was that Lee Thompson's strange death came as quite a shock to the entire Fillmore Township community. Even some Chicago newspapers caught up the news of his crime and his unfortunate demise.
They played it up big, because it was billed partly as a perverted sex slaying of a menacing Peeping Tom, partly as the killing of a criminal who tried to escape the police. As it was near the end of the month, Lee Thompson's slaying also helped to preserve metropolitan Chicago's statistical balance of two killings per month, which was important from the standpoint of tourism and preserving the city's exceptional reputation.
As for the effect of his death upon the staff and administrators of Fillmore High School, it was considerable.
In the course of just a few days a beautiful young student, Genevieve Carter, had disappeared from the face of the earth and now her instructor, who was rumored to have been especially cordial to her, had been shot to death by police as a sex pervert who haunted parked cars.
The entire story simply reeked. What with the perennial difficulties with teen-agers and everything else, the entire parent population of Fillmore was up in arms. They stormed the school. They demanded answers of principal Ben Trane. They wanted to know who was in charge, and who was responsible.
Ben C. Trane had every intention of trying to satisfy them. As a $20,000-a-year executive, he felt that it was his patriotic American duty to hold onto his soft job for as long as was humanly possible.
Soft touches did not come along every day for a man of Mr. Trane's years. And anyway, if he had to move on to something new he might not be able to keep up his Wednesday rounds of golf with the bankers, doctors, and soft cover novel writers of the swanky Fillmore Township Country Club.
So he called a press conference. To clear the air, he told newsmen.
Anyway, he wanted to get rid of the pickets who were marching outside of his window. That sort of thing did not look very good to the community.
"Gentlemen," he began, starting another one of his famous attempts to forestall the possibility of ever having to leave Fillmore High and have to go to work for a living, "Gentlemen, there have been some serious accusations made, by persons who should know better, that the school is not living up to its role as morals builder of the community--. "
"Hear, hear!"
Trane shot the offending newsman a scurrilous glance. He had never been challenged on his own ground before.
And after all the work he had put in getting things ready for this group.
Special limousines had brought them from their offices in the north suburban area. They had been plied with wine and caviar in the basement of the school, even with classes in session in nearby chemistry laboratories. They had been given free tickets to fine dramatic shows currently appearing at the Goodman Theatre, and they had been asked to be Mr. Trane's personal guests at an elaborate dinner at the Empire Room of the Palmer House in Chicago.
His office he had equipped with special plush chairs for the occasion, and bright, pretty young teenagers who came around with drinks on trays and caviar, bending low in order to reveal their very excellent young cleavages.
He had hoped to be able to encourage the girls to do a little more than just allow their opulent young busts to be shown in the deeply v-cut white blouses and tight sweaters they were wearing, but had been somewhat afraid of carrying the situation too far.. .
After all, they might complain to their mothers. Or one of the newsmen might defect or something--
"As I was interrupting I mean, as I was saying," he went on, running his fingers nervously through his balding scalp, "there's been a lot of bad-mouthing of our fine institution lately. But after all, gentlemen I put it to you squarely is rioting and rape by a bunch of teen-agers, the disappearance of a lovely young redhead, and the shooting of an instructor, who incidentally also happened to be a sexual pervert, are these isolated instances necessarily a reflection of the school's role in our community?
"I put it to you again whose fault is it? Isn't it true that these occurrences are more or less the result of the lackadaisical moral climate of our times?"
He walked around his desk and picked up a cigarette from a silver table-box. A young blonde came up and offered him a glass of wine from her tray, rubbing her leg amorously against his crotch.
"No, dear, not now." He looked at her significantly. She got the message.
The room was full of smoke. Several of the girls went to open up the windows. The incoming wind blew their skirts up in the air so that the newspaper reporters were able to get a full glance at their attractive little garters and hose. Ben Trane smiled nicely to himself.
He went on. "No, I say to you that it is the parents who have failed in their duty. They have let down their children and they have let down all of us. We've all heard those rather ghastly rumors about swap parties "
The reporters laughed.
Trane continued right through them. " and everyday our citizens are getting together in board rooms to fix prices illegally, or paying off people with bribes for something or other. I say to you, it is time the entire moral climate of our nation was given a close looking-into!"
No one cheered.
One reporter belched, another looked kind of sorrowful, another pinched the girl who was serving him on the behind and she squealed. Others just looked bored and attentive and cynical. Trane didn't like their faces one bit.
He continued: "Parents are no longer training their children. They're putting all of the responsibility for training in manners, sexual morals and comportment "
"What was that last word, Mr. Trane?"
"Comportment." Trane spelled it for him. "They're putting all of the responsibility for these things on the educational institutions. And I can tell you, gentlemen, we're hard pressed. Very hard pressed."
One reporter looked up as he kept writing. "Then you don't think the schools are up to handling it, Dr. Trane?"
"Is that what I said?"
"Roughly."
Trane pursed his lips. "Well, don't read it back to me. Let's just say that the burden is far too great for the time and money we're alloted." He walked grandly around the room. "Why, I must spend sixteen hours a day at my job! It's a crushing burden but one I'm very happy to bear, if, gentlemen and I say if if we can get cooperation from parents!"
The newsmen laughed out loud, almost to a man. Principal Trane looked very dejected.
"Well, anyway, it's hard work. And we need more money in this school, and "
One by one, the reporters began to stand up.
"Haven't you anything new to tell us, Dr. Trane?" asked one of them, his pencil at the ready.
The principal looked puzzled. "Haven't I said enough?" His hands twitched nervously.
"You sure have," answered another newsman. "Let's go, boys."
The other reporters followed him out of the room, one by one but the last one to go stopped for just a minute to finger a cute little redhead in a mini-skirt. She shrieked, the reporter laughed and ran for the door.
Ben Trane watched them go from his window. They marched to their cars (all of them illegally parked) like a small battalion of freedom fighters headed for open combat on the front lines. He didn't like the look ol them at all.
The girls tittered. He turned back to them. "What the hell's so funny? You girls get back to your classes. On the double!"
The girls stopped tittering and ran for cover. Ben Trane stalked out after them.
"Miss Dockstader! Come in here!"
"Yes, Mr. Trane!" His secretary jumped to her feet with an efficiency that was startling. She followed the boss into his office and shut the door.
He went around behind his desk. "It didn't go well at all, Miss Dockstader. I've been scoufed!"
She put down her steno pad and pencil on his desk, and went around in back of him, dropping her fingers to his forehead. "There, there, sir, you're just over-tense."
She began rubbing in, imparting a gentle, soothing feeling that only a bald-headed man can appreciate. Ben Trane sighed. He hadn't felt anything so good all day, or all of yesterday, for that matter.
"Trouble is," he said philosophically, "they're all a bunch of nincompoops!"
"Yes sir." She continued rubbing soothingly, now passing her fingers into his bushy eyebrows, then around his hair-bitten thick ears, finally under his throat. Ben Trane sighed with an overpowering contentment.
He went on, "The entire moral fiber of our great nation is sliding downhill, Dorothy. Men don't want to fight the wilderness anymore, or kill Indians, or steal land, or whip slaves. They've got it too easy. They've lost-harumph!-the frontier virtues." He looked up at her. "Wouldn't you agree?"
"Emphatically, sir."
Her thighs were nudging his chair and the back of his head. He looked at them thoughtfully. "How would you like another raise?" he said.
"I'll take whatever raise you can give me, Mr. Trane," she said, grinning.
And then they looked at each other for one long moment.
Suddenly he yelled: "Baby!" He jumped up from the chair and ran for her arms.
"Papa!" she yelled as she welcomed him in. They kissed long and hard before he finally pressed her back against the edge of the desk. Her nicely shaped buttocks slipped back onto it neatly.
Quickly he had her dress up. She reached for his zipper and jerked it down, then reached in for a handful! of him. Unable to wait, he pressed forward. Her panties, out of long practice slipped conveniently to one side.
"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.. . " He slid home into her with a minimum of confusion. She was a well-oiled track that he knew very well, and now that she wrapped her legs around him she was in his favorite position. He proceeded to pump across the top of the elegant mahogany desk that had been a present from the people of Fillmore.
And in another moment the taxpayers got their money's worth.. .
CHAPTER TWELVE
Douglas had been pretty despondent all day.
For one thing, he had run into Sally Ames that morning, coming out of his biology lab, and he had felt rather guilty.
He hadn't asked her, of course, what she had done with their baby. He didn't want to know.
What I don't know won't hurt me, was his earnestly-arrived-at conclusion.
Anyway, who needed babies?
She hadn't said anything; she'd merely looked him directly in the eye as if she didn't really see him.
Actually, she didn't look too bad. She seemed a lot less harassed than she had previously, when she had been nagging the hell out of him. Her hair had a nice shine to it, her walk was jaunty, her body looked more delicious than ever. There was good color in her cheeks.
What had worked such a miraculous change? And she hadn't seemed interested in him in the slightest.
Getting something on the side, he thought with considerable element of truth.
Then there had been those reporters in the school, getting in everybody's way and making people nervous. Principal Tane had brought them in in the morning, but they had returned in the afternoon, looking over people's shoulders, monitoring everybody's classes. Very nerve wracking.
Lastly, but most important, he had been drubbed off the swimming team for ineffectual workouts and failures to report for practice and instruction. That had been quite a blow.
The house was pretty quiet when he came home. He tried to think of something interesting to do.
Then he heard the rather muffled noises going on upstairs. Taking off his shoes and moving on tiptoe, he hurried up the stairs.
Oh boy, he thought.
Tracy had come home early to find her mother at work on the dishes. The maid hadn't come in that day.
"Hello, dear," said Mrs. Tucker, attempting to plant a kiss on her cheek.
They were both surprised when the kiss landed on Tracy's full young lips, a rather ardent one at that. Mrs. Tucker gazed into her daughter's charming eyes with some apprehension.
Tracy looked knowledgeable into hers. "Thank you, mother dear, for that sweet kiss." She put her hand on Mrs. Tucker's cheek. It had become flushed and hot.
"Oh, it's nothing Tracy...."
Little Miss Tucker grinned happily and went up the stairs to her bedroom.
Taking off her clothes slowly, so she could admire all the elegant contours of her voluptuously body, she gazed long and hard at her own reflection in the long wall mirror she kept by her bed. Not bad.
She took a sustained bath with plenty of bubble soap, then toweled and placed a subtle taste of perfume in all of the most intimate niches of her sensitive flesh. This accomplished, she sat down on her bed so that she faced the mirror, and began to apply a bright red polish to her toenails.
There was a knock at the door.
"Yes?"
"It's mother, dear."
Mrs. Tucker opened the door nervously and closed it in back of her. "I just thought I'd see how my little pumpkin is doin'. "
"Oh fine, Moms." Tracy finished the last of her nails. She was stark naked as she raised her leg to admire it. "How does it look?" she asked.
Mrs. Tucker gulped. She felt a terrific thirst seize her by the throat and threaten to fling her down the front stairs.
"Very nice," she finally said in a choked voice.
"Would you like to do my hair?" Tracy asked sweetly. She jumped out of the bed, her heavy breasts jiggling, and went to the bureau. Sitting down on the little stool, she took up the hairbrush.
"Well?" she said sharply.
Her mother hurried to comply. Quickly she took the hairbrush from Tracy's fingers and bent to her task.
She took the brush through her daughter's long shining brown hair in quick even strokes, marveling at its silkiness. She didn't think that she had ever been quite aware of what a sensationally beautiful girl her daughter was.
That supple small waist, so smooth and shining, that beautifully formed bust carrying two sumptuous pears and their large, rosy aureoles topped by a pair of succulent strawberries ... the way her lovely hips flared ... her long, smooth legs ... her nicely square shoulders and well shaped back ... that perfect face that God had given her...
"What are you looking at, mother?"
"Oh! It's nothing-nothing, Tracy!"
"I caught you looking at my globbies," Tracy said to the mirror. She lifted her breasts like gourds and squeezed them. Mrs. Tucker gasped.
"You like these?" Tracy asked.
"Are those your 'globbies'? " Mrs. Tucker asked in a puzzled tone.
For answer, Tracy reached in back of her head and grabbed Mrs. Tucker's hand. She forced Mrs. Tucker's fingers unerringly to her burgeoning hot nipple.
Mrs. Tucker pinched Tracy's nipple and felt a tremendous thrill of excitement. "God ... Tracy...." Moving as if under control by a force greater than her own will, she grabbed Tracy's head and twisted it around ... burying her mouth under an avalanche of kiss that was more soul-enveloping than anything she had ever known during all of her married life.. .
Acting without words, the two females moved toward the waiting bed ... Tracy lifted the covers and began to undress Mrs. Tucker, who began shaking and sighing uncontrollably.
Tracy pushed her face into the older woman's massive breasts. Mrs. Tucker moaned. Slowly the girl fell back onto the bed, grabbing her mother's shoulders.
"I command you," she said, and then she gripped Mrs. Tucker's hair and twisted it until the older woman agreed to do her bidding.. . Slowly Loralee Tucker's mouth traveled down Tracy's elegant flesh to the place of ultimate privacy and excitement. . .
"Mother ... Mother ... oh! Aaaaaaaahhhhhh...."
Mrs. Tucker's tongue moved with artful flicks tasting, savoring ... her lips pressed hard ... her face and nose rubbed luxuriously...
She gripped her daughter's throbbing hips and bit Tracy's panting lips. "Ahhhh ... harder ... that's right to the right ... oooooooooohh ... olmhilihhhh...! "
Violent spasms of sensation shook Tracy's perfect body. Her back arched. Her hands forced Mrs. Tucker's head as close in as was humanly possible-
And then she made it! Great spasms of fire flashed through every bone in her body. Warmth and tingling and love and great feeling and thrills everything...
By the time Douglas reached the top of the stairs, things were in a slightly different position.
Mrs. Tucker was lying with her head near the end of the bed and her legs wrapped around Tracy's head. Douglas could not make out what Tracy was doing with her mouth, but he suspected that it was not very nice. That bitch! he thought vehemently. Two-timing me!
With grim determination he took the stairs two at a time down to the downstairs phone.
"Hello, Brad? This is Douglas. Look, can you get some of the guys down here right away? I've got some women for 'em. A gang bang."
"Naw, my old man won't be in till late. Today he always works late. Okay, I'll try to have some sandwiches and some beer. And Brad It wouldn't hurt anything if you got the guys a little liquored up before they got here. Okay?"
He busied himself about the kitchen preparing little ham and cheese sandwiches, and bottles of cold draft beer that had been stored in the basement. For himself he took a couple of large glasses of port wine.
"I'm going to need it," he said to nobody in particular.
The boys arrived only a short half hour later. An open convertible, vintage 1930, chugged loudly into the driveway and knocked over some garbage cans as it slid alongside the side door. Douglas went out to greet them, wiping his hands on a towel.
All of the eight boys jumped from the car carrying half empty beer cans. "Where's the drubs?" shouted Bradford Woughtonham III. Douglas grabbed him laughingly by the arm and led him into the kitchen.
"They're upstairs," he told him.
"Anybody we know?"
"Yeah my mother and sister."
Bradford pulled up short. The other boys did, too.
"Come on, they're not so hard to take They're waitin' for you guys."
Someone flung a beer can down into the reception hall. It crashed to the tiles with a fierce clang.
Bradfort looked very thoughtful. "I've always thought your mother was kind of sharp she's got a good set of bazongs. Although it will make me feel like I'm robbin' the coffin."
The other boys needed no encouragement. They stormed past Bradford and Douglas. "The room at the top of the stairs," Douglas shouted.
One of them turned the knob, another kicked the door open. A series of fierce shrieks echoed from the pagan Amazon bedroom.
"Help! Iiiii! What are you ! "
Douglas laughed uproariously. Then he ran up the stairs in order to help the boys finish the job...
By the time he was in the room, one of them was giving it to his mother from the side, another dangling himself toward her mouth, forcing her to take him. She was fondling still another. After the briefest of difficulties, Tracy was kneeling before a boy who sat on the bed with his pants rolled down. Her hair was clutched in his quivering thighs. Another boy was lying sideways on the carpet and giving it to her from the rear.
"Only two girls?" said Bradford as he followed the rest of them in. "I thought you said this was supposed to be a party!"
Mr. Andrew Tucker came home unusually early for this evening of the week. When he arrived there was a strange old car in the driveway, and the contents of nearby garbage cans had been knocked to the four winds. He assumed naturally that this must have been the work of some of Douglas' friends.
Picking up his evening newspaper from the stoop, he went inside through the kitchen entrance.
Nothing much interesting in the news what was that? He listened carefully. Sounded like some sort of ruckus going on upstairs.
The front hall was strewn with bent-up beer cans. He took the stairs to the second floor two at a time.
The door to Tracy's room was wide open. Boisterous howls and shrieks were issuing there from. He ran to the door.
"My God!" he shrieked.
Douglas, his friends, and the women of the house were completely naked. Some of them were drinking beer. One tousled head was deep within Tracy's crotch. Another boy was plunged to the hilt inside of Mrs. Tucker.
They all stared at him in amazement. Mr. Tucker jerked his feet out of the floor and raced headlong for his room.
Something had snapped inside his head. A violent ringing was careening from one end of his skull to the other. He hurried through his bureau and quickly found his .45. Loading it, he returned to Tracy's bedroom-
"Dad!" Douglas put up his hand as if it could stop the speeding bullet. It couldn't. Everyone screamed. They fell like meat stew in a red circle about the room. The .45 splattered guts, bone, intestine, sinew, muscles around the room with equal impartiality. When the crazed Mr. Tucker finished, there was not a single person alive except himself...
Harvey was taking the curves rather close. Sally had suggested that they spend the evening at the Ames' summer home on the lake, and that hadn't seemed like such a bad idea.
He looked over at her. So sweet, so gentle. She was sucking on the middle finger of his right hand, as if to indicate what was in store...
"Happy, sweetheart?" he asked her.
"Very," she said. Her hand reached for the bulge in his trousers.
Neither of them noticed Andrew Tucker's Cadillac as it came speeding around a curve. At this point on the highway, the lanes are very narrow.
Andrew Tucker struck the oncoming Plymouth at a speed of 90 miles per hour. Harvey had been doing about 60. At the combined speed of ISO miles per hour, not a speck of identifiable human hash was going to be left after the accident. The two cars went flying off into space like a couple of dogs in a fight. They rolled over and over, struck an embankment, and finally went flipping off down a 100-foot drop to a sandy beach fronting Lake Michigan, where they exploded elegantly into flames and black curling smoke...
This is Fillmore High School. Color it blue. See the young people going to their morning classes. Some of them are not returning. A couple of instructors are missing, too.
But this is an average American school. There's
THE END
Principal Ben Trane giving a warm greeting to his secretary. He hasn't seen the morning newspapers yet. Color him pink.
It's a lovely spring day. Near summer. Sun shines on the concrete around the school. Young girls in their tight sweaters, blouses, skirts, and black satin under-things are chatting and heading for class. The face of America. Young men are discussing girls they've been doing things with, copping cigarettes off of each other, telling dirty stories that the girls tell each other, only in the john. Instructors are leaving their cars in the lot. They will have a fine day. They head for their classes with a good spirit and a will to win out for one more day over the, teen-agers. America is behind them all the way.
This is the face of America. Fillmore Township, Illinois'. Fillmore Township High School. Color it lovely. Color it red, white, and blue.
