Toni had been wronged, but how deeply she was affected she could not know. Her attackers were to find out, however, in ways they were defenseless against-four years later. As Kenneth Walker and Peter Fletcher put it, in Sex and Society: "In another human being, man or woman, we see our own living image; another person who possesses an equal right to life, who claims the freedom we claim to make choices and decisions and to take action. For this reason, we cannot without betraying ourselves treat other people as things existing for the satisfaction of our appetites, or to be used as instruments of our own private purposes. By doing so, we should deny the validity of our own claim to human consideration. Sexual desire in man is rooted in his need for love ... and is not merely a physical hunger. Love is a modification of hunger ... To love a thing you must think of it, in the first place, as something other than yourself; in the second place, as something in contact with which you will overcome the loneliness which is the source of your present dissatisfaction. Love impels us to a search, not for an unknown something to consume or enjoy, but for an unknown someone with whom we can hope to establish a reciprocal, and therefore completely human, relationship."
CHAPTER ONE
Toni Francis stepped from the bus at the side of the highway in Jamestown, looked around at the familiar scene she had not seen for so long, and waited while the vehicle pulled away with a crunch of gravel. Then she looked across the highway at the town she had lived in for so long, until she'd left four years before. And as she walked across the two-lane road, she saw the grove of trees on the edge of town that had had such a profound effect on her life shortly before she left. The trees were tall, completely hiding the buildings that made up the main street of the little California foothill town, and a thick growth of underbrush made penetration difficult. But Toni, on the night before she was eighteen years old, had found that there was a rutted track leading into the center of the grove-a track capable of admitting a car if the driver knew exactly where to drive.
It had happened on the night she'd graduated from high school-the day before she reached the magic age of eighteen. She'd walked to her turn in the makeshift podium to receive her diploma from Harold Schockley, the district superintendent. It was a warm night, and the ceremonies in the football stadium behind Tuolumne High School managed all the pomp and ceremony inherent in a backwoods graduation, but the receiving of the garishly printed piece of paper came almost as an anti-climax to most of the seniors, who had spent four years performing the meaningless tasks imposed on them by their ill-prepared and disinterested teachers. Graduation night meant nothing more than the opportunity to stay out all night, go to any one of several parties except the "official" party held by the school in an effort to keep the students out of their cars and perhaps extend their lives a little. Heavy drinking and sexual excess were part of the plans-at least for the boys. The girls shared the enthusiasm for drinking, but the lovemaking was left to individual circumstances.
Toni had gone to a party in Volponi Acres, a housing development half-way between Jamestown and Sonora, and had been a little revolted at the sight of the drunken females stumbling over each other and the furniture, so she had held her drinking to a minimum, nursing one drink for as much as it was worth. She stayed to herself as much as she could, not really enjoying herself, but not wanting to go home to her mother's house in Jamestown, for the old woman offered her nothing but a roof and meals, copiously seasoned with nagging and bitching.
She watched while Kathy Gibran, a slender-hipped, big-busted girl with a raucous laugh and hair under her arms pushed Charlie Hanson down on the couch and began to tickle her. As they struggled her dress got hiked way up above her knees, showing the tops of her stockings, her garter belt, and pink panties. Charlie tried to keep her from tickling him, and in the process managed to run his hands over much of her body. Kathy didn't seem to mind, and in fact seemed to be making herself more than available to his groping.
Then she was straddling him, laughing drunkenly, resting her hands on his stomach for support and balance. Toni was a little disgusted by the scene, but she couldn't take her eyes off it, and nobody else seemed to be paying any attention. She saw Kathy fumble with his belt, and then, as they both glanced around, she spread her voluminous skirt over them to hide what was happening. Toni could see the material of her skirt jump as his hands sought her flesh beneath it, and after a moment or two of adjustments, the couple seemed lost in a world of their own.
Suddenly Kathy leaned forward, oblivious now to the possibility of being observed, and humped herself against him passionately. Her skirt still hid most of the action, but Toni knew what they were doing, and would have even without seeing, for Kathy was moaning loudly with passion, clawing at his shoulders in an effort to fuse herself to him as completely as possible.
It was over finally, and Kathy rolled herself heavily from atop him and hurried into the bathroom. Toni turned and looked out the window, sickened and a little disgusted at the open display of animal lust between the two.
Kathy came running back into the room suddenly, crying, "Get me a Coke! I need a Coke, damn it!" She rushed into the kitchen, found a Coke, and dashed back into the bathroom. As she passed Charlie Hanson, now resting comfortably on the couch, she hissed, "You bastard! You told me you had one!"
He grinned and shrugged.
"I had," he said. "I still have."
She gave him a vicious glance and left the room again.
A little later, trouble arose when three girls Lorry Capp, Susan Ewe, and LaVerne Carliff-pushed her into a corner and started yelling at her all at once. They were too drunk to speak coherently, but Toni knew what their antagonism was. Each of them had a special boy friend among the youths of Tuolumne County, and Toni had been on dates with each one of them at various times recently. Each had asked her, each had tried to make love to her, and each had been refused. She still carried undeniable proof of her virginity, but that meant nothing to the three girls who had backed her into a corner, for it was fairly common knowledge that each of them put out regularly for their boy friends. So they assumed she had done the same, and the tone of their accusations became louder and more strident, as they worked their tempers to fever pitch.
Suddenly Lorry, a broad-shouldered, masculine type, stepped forward and hit her solidly with a clubbing fist. That was the signal for the other girls to move in, and Toni crumpled to the floor in an effort to protect herself from their slaps, blows and kicks. She tried to fight back, but was ineffectual since there were three of them, all determined to hurt her. They struck blow after blow until she was numb from the pain, feeling that it would never stop, that she had lived with it from the beginning of time.
Then suddenly, she was aware of cessation of the pain, and felt herself being pulled to her feet. Stumbling, supported by an unknown pair of hands, she was led from the house and into a maroon Ford with a black stripe over its center. She was sobbing wildly by then, and cradled her head on the shoulder of the boy who had rescued her. After a long time, she recovered enough to lift her face and see who her benefactor was.
"Th-th-thanks, Roger," she gasped. "Those ... those...."
"Don't talk," Roger Kelly whispered. "Just take it easy and get hold of yourself."
She rested her head on his shoulder once again and gradually regained control of herself. When she stopped sobbing, she straightened up and wiped her eyes.
"I'm sorry, Roger," she said. "I ... I guess I made a mistake coming here tonight."
"They shouldn't have done that," he said, caressing her shoulder softly. "It wasn't right."
She laughed bitterly.
"I went out with their boy friends. They act like they own them, or something." He shrugged.
"They'll probably marry them," he said. "It's sort of been the tradition."
"What the hell do I care for tradition?" she asked sharply. "I grew up in Jamestown, with two strikes against me because I lived there. The 'nice' boys from Sonora wouldn't have anything to do with me unless they thought they were going to get something from me. Haven't you heard the famous Sonora slogan, 'Be sure and flush the toilet, Jamestown needs the water?'"
"But everybody knows they've been going with these girls."
"So? I didn't ask them to take me out. They asked me."
"You have a point, but I don't think Lorry or La Verne would admit it."
She blew her nose noisily, daubed at her moist eyes, and then sat up straight, pulling away from his arm, which had been comforting around her shoulder. She straightened her skirt under her and slid away from him slightly. He grinned.
"Afraid of me?"
"No. I just wanted to get comfortable."
"Afraid of me," he repeated. "No. Should I be?" She looked at him sharply. "You might. Don't ever trust a male you don't know."
"But I know you. You've been in the same class with me since we came to high school."
He laughed softly, and she became aware of the fact that he had been drinking heavily.
"You couldn't know me if we had lived in the same house for all the years we've been alive," he said. "And you think four years are enough."
"You're like everybody else around here," she said. "You think you're right, and you don't give a damn what anybody else thinks."
"There's a bottle in the glove compartment," he said, ignoring what she said. "Have a drink."
"No, thanks."
"Well, hand it to me. I want one."
"All right."
She handed him the bottle, which he tipped back. He swallowed twice, and then wiped the neck and handed it back to her.
"Sure you won't have one?" he asked.
"What the hell," she said. "I might as well be drunk as the way I am."
She grabbed the bottle, took a swallow of the fiery liquid, then capped the bottle and replaced it in the glove compartment. The liquor burned going down, causing tears to start in her eyes, and for a moment she didn't know if she was going to be able to keep it down, but after a moment it hit her stomach and burst into a thousand relaxing sparks of inner light.
"That's better," he said. "You feel better now, don't you?"
She nodded, blinking back the tears.
"Not good, but better," she managed after a moment.
He reached forward and snapped the motor to life, revving it sharply once or twice.
"Where are we going?" she asked, no apprehension in her voice.
"Just for a drive," he said. "I think we ought to get away from here. Don't you?"
"Yes. But where are we going?"
"Down toward Jamestown," he said. "I don't want to go back inside."
"Neither do I," she agreed. "But why toward Jamestown? I'd rather ride up toward Twain-Harte."
"I'd rather go down to Jamestown," Roger said. "It's more swinging."
She snorted, knowing that the row of whorehouses reputed to be there had long since closed, though they lived on in tradition. The only action consisted of freelancers like her mother.
"Nothing in this God-forsaken country swings," she said bitterly. "I'll be glad to go to college and get out of here."
"I didn't know you were going to college."
"Because I'm from Jamestown?"
"No, no, I didn't mean it that way. It's just that ... well, you never seemed too interested in school or anything."
"You call that a school? I wasn't interested in it because it's just not interesting."
"Maybe," he said. He put the car into gear and drove slowly up the hill away from the highway, to the side road that curved around and made entrance to the highway easier, on a flat, straight stretch of road. "It may not be interesting, but it's the kind of thing you have to put up with to get ahead."
He stopped at the sign by the highway, waited while a truck rocketed past, bearing a load of lumber from the sawmill up the mountain. Then he turned right and headed down the hill toward Jamestown, less than a mile away. The highway had once gone straight through the center of town, but several years before it had been relocated north of town, so they had to turn left across the ribbon of concrete to cruise down the main street of the little town. At the far end, where the main street once more joined the highway, a thick grove of trees grew in the crotch of the Y formed by the two roadways.
He pulled to the gravel shoulder, turned slowly toward the trees, nosing the Ford into the underbrush at this spot so close to town and yet really so remote.
"You can't drive here," she protested, looking around to see where they were going.
"Oh, yes I can," he said, grinning at her. He put the car into low and nosed through the underbrush, branches scraping against the windows, and after a moment the car broke clear into an open space completely hidden from the roads that passed so close on either side. "See?"
"Well...." she said, surprised to see there was another car already parked in the clearing. "I didn't know this was here."
"Nobody else does, either," he said proudly. "I found it a couple of weeks ago."
"Nobody else? What about that car there?"
He chuckled as he snapped the lights out, and she knew he'd turned toward her, for she could smell the whiskey on his breath.
"That's Ken Barnweld's car," he said. "I thought you'd recognize it."
"I hadn't looked at it that closely," she replied. "Does he know about this place?"
"How'd his car get here?" Roger asked in a tone of strained patience. "If I didn't show him?"
She tipped her head sideways and didn't answer. She knew why he'd brought her here, but it didn't matter. She'd had to face this same kind of thing on every date she'd ever had, and if the pattern of clumsy seduction by the high-school Romeo was the same from boy to boy, so was her method of discouraging them. So she wasn't particularly anxious or apprehensive about Roger. In different circumstances, she might have been interested in petting with him-she wasn't so warped that she hadn't done her share of exploring with some of her dates. She'd let several boys touch her breasts, and one or two put their hands up her dress. At first she made them keep their hands on the outside of her underclothes, but as she became more hip she'd let them force their fingers inside her bra or through the band on her panties. It had been a rule, though, that she'd never take her panties off, nor would she touch the boy, no matter how much he tried to get her to.
She wasn't interested in petting with another car there under any circumstances, and she just didn't feel like it after the battering she'd received from the drunken girls at the party. She'd gotten a reputation for being a tease because she'd petted with her dates after she entered high school. The boys talked about her in gym class, and since then it had been difficult for her to manage a date without some kind of fumbling attempts at her virginity. Tonight was apparently not going to be any different, and she resigned herself to the prospect of pushing his hand from her breast or her leg-and it would depend on whether he was a breast man or a leg man.
Instead of reaching for her, though, he got out of the car and walked toward the other vehicle parked nearby. She saw him talking to the driver, but in the dark ness, she couldn't see who else was in the car. She assumed that Ken Barnweld had a girl there-even though he was supposed to be going steady with Lorry Capp. He was a super-male who felt that there was only one purpose for a female's existence, and that was to provide him with erotic gratification.
Roger returned a couple of minutes later, opened the door on the driver's side and stood beside the car. Toni sensed that he was uncomfortable about something, but she had no idea what it was. So she waited patiently for him to re-enter the car, when she planned to make him take her home. She didn't see any possibility of enjoying the balance of the night anyway.
"Toni," he said finally, his voice strangled. "Toni."
"What?"
She whirled to face him, suddenly concerned that the situation was something more than she had anticipated. Whatever it was had upset Roger considerably.
"What is it, Roger?" she said firmly. "What's going on?"
"Ken ... he ... well...."
And his hesitation told her the whole story-all of the planning that had gone into getting her here at this remote spot where she was at their mercy.
"Who else is there?" she demanded, her voice tight.
"Frank Long, Ron Kidd, and Ken."
"Some party you planned," she said bitterly. "My knight in shining armor."
"I didn't plan it," he protested. "Ken ... it was him who did."
"You brought me here," she said evenly. "You can't get away from responsibility for that"
"But...."
"But nothing. This whole caper was planned, wasn't it?"
"Well...."
"Well, it was. You and Ken got together and planned the whole thing, and you decided on me because I'm the best-looking girl in Tuolumne County!"
The truth left him silent, and he stood nervously shifting from one foot to the other. She could hear his feet crackling in the carpet of dry branches in the clearing.
"Well!"
"I'm sorry, Toni," he said.
At that moment another figure appeared out of the darkness.
"Don't talk all night," Ken Barnweld said. "You know what we planned"
Roger moved away in the darkness, leaving Ken standing beside the open door.
"You know, Toni baby, it'd be a whole lot easier if you was to get in the back seat."
"Go to hell," she snapped. "I'm not getting in the back seat with you or anybody else."
Ken laughed loudly, crudely, and she knew he had been drinking heavily too.
"You don't have to get in the back seat," he said. "You know it don't make no difference to me where I get it."
"What makes you think you're going to get it from me?"
"What makes you think I'm not?"
"I don't want to, and you can't make me."
He laughed again, lecherously.
"I can make you if I have to," he said. Other figures appeared behind him, and she could make out Frank Long and Ron Kidd. Hanging back behind them all was Roger. "I've got enough help to hold you down, if necessary."
She looked from one to the other and knew that none of the tricks she'd learned to avoid sex would work. These boys had all been drinking heavily, and they had obviously planned this party carefully, and had sent Roger to the party to get her. The accident of her being slapped around by the girl friends of these same youths was coincidental-they must have felt more aggravation than ordinarily since their boy friends hadn't come to the party with them. Toni derived a certain ironic pleasure from the fact that these particular boys were involved-that they preferred her, even this way, to the girls they could have if they wanted to bother.
Ken reached inside and pulled her out, slammed the door shut, and then snarled, "Well, you gonna give us trouble?"
"Damn right," she snapped, pulling away from him. "You don't get anything from me but trouble."
"Now that's hardly the way I'd expect you to talk," Ron said nastily. Frank and Roger remained silent, content to let the other youths speak for them. "You can't get away, and nobody's going to come help you."
She looked from one to the other, unable to read the expressions on their faces in the darkness, but hating every one of them for what they were doing to her. She knew she couldn't get away, and almost before the thought could be formed in her mind, Roger spoke and gave her the reason she should agree.
"You're liable to get hurt if you fight him," he said quietly. "It'd be better for you if you didn't."
She remained silent for a moment, her anger threatening to get away from her, then she sighed deeply. She had quickly weighed all the possibilities and resigned herself to what was to come.
"When does the party start?" she asked, a note of deep disgust in her voice.
"That's the way, baby," Ken said, taking her by the wrist and dragging her toward the trees at the edge of the clearing. As the other youths started to follow, he whirled on them savagely.
"Gimme a little privacy while I screw, will ya?"
They backed away in the face of his antagonism, and then she was alone with him. He threw her to the ground and forced her skirt roughly around her hips, ripped her panties off, and fell heavily across her. He had already opened his clothing, and she tensed as she felt his manhood against her. He didn't even try to prepare her, for his passion required no response. All he needed was a female body in position to receive his male body. He was no different from any of the animals ready to mount a female in heat, take his pleasure and leave without a thought.
The piercing pain that followed left her numb, so that she really knew nothing of what was happening except that he was slobbering wetly in her ear while his body jerked spasmodically against her, raking tender flesh and tearing her. She felt his warm wetness finally and knew that it was over as he struggled to his feet and walked away, leaving her alone in the darkness.
Ron Kidd was next, and he was no more gentle, though he took more time, pawing her roughly, forcing her bra uncomfortably up above her breasts so that he could mouth her nipples. She was only vaguely aware of his violating her, for by this time there was nothing left to feel but the dull ache in her lower body. It wasn't so bad this time, though she didn't understand the reason, and it was easier to take him than it had been Ken Barnweld. He wasn't so big, but he slobbered just as wetly in her ear until his moment was upon him, then he, too, disappeared in the darkness.
Frank Long appeared a moment later, and Toni had the feeling that he had sneaked up in the darkness so he could see and hear what was going on. He was true to his name, but cringing and afraid at the same time. He was a born follower, though he came from the wealthiest family in town.
"You won't tell my father, will you?" he whispered when once he had located her. He was poised above her on his hands and knees, and though she couldn't see him, she sensed that he had gotten out of his clothes completely, unlike the other two, who had merely opened their pants. She could feel the hot flesh of his manhood resting on her stomach.
"Just get it over with," she said bitterly. "I want to go home."
He remained motionless for a moment, then pressed tightly against her, his manhood still hot against her stomach as he moved clumsily, reached down and tried his best, but he didn't know how to couple their bodies.
"Oh, for God's sake," she muttered finally, doing the job for him, and clenching her teeth in fury when he whispered, "Thanks, Toni. I won't forget that."
It was just what she'd expect him to say. He was a punk kid born to follow, but who by a wrenching of fate had wound up being born in a family of money and position. His father owned the only independent bank in the county, and as a result Frank's family had more respect than their collective or individual ability warranted. Their fortune was founded on the operation of a particularly successful brothel in San Francisco by Long's great-grandmother, during the heyday of organized prostitution in the Bay city. She provided some of the specialties other madams avoided, such as "le vice Anglais" and her storeroom was an arsenal of bizarre, pain-inflicting devices. The old girl turned a trick herself now and then, and she got caught one night and damned near died when she found she was pregnant.
When the boy was born she established a household for him in the East Bay area, where he grew up steadfastly resisting his mother's efforts to make a man of him. She called him Jack, though legally he was named Albert, because, as she said, "The little bastard was born to play with himself instead of being a man!"
There was constant strife between mother and son, and when she died during a drunken orgy in her place of business, he left the Bay Area behind and journeyed to the foothills, where the money left him by his mother allowed him to buy his way into respectability. He married the daughter of a lumber-mill owner and together they controlled much of Tuolumne County's economic prosperity. He was a vigorous moralist, fighting the houses of pleasure in Jamestown, Standard and Colum bia-though it took the Red Light Abatement Act to rid his county of open vice.
Frank's father was a hypocrite who reverted to type-at least in his private life. On the surface he was a model of respectability, but Toni knew that the old man was as lecherous as a goat, that he was hot for anything with a skirt on, and that he went to great lenghts to keep his preoccupation with sex from showing. But enough people knew that it was a kind of secret knowledge among the girls who, like Toni, had mothers who had attracted the lecherous banker's eye.
Then Frank had come along, a cringing, cowardly boy completely overpowered by his father, completely subject to him in all things. It was a foregone conclusion that Frank would have a good job in the bank, even though he didn't deserve it, when he'd graduated from high school.
Now he'd graduated and committed rape, all in the same night.
Then he was gone, cringing in the darkness to the rest of his kind. Toni prepared herself mentally for Roger, the last she would have to endure. She didn't move, though. She hadn't moved since she'd been thrown to the ground and had her maidenhead torn from her.
CHAPTER TWO
A moment later she had heard the sound of A motor starting, and she sat upright as, for a panic-stricken moment, she thought she was being deserted. Then headlights came on, stabbing the darkness and revealing her nakedness to them, and she saw that it was only Ken Barnweld's car-Roger's car was black and silent. He spun around and beaded for the road. The darkness seemed doubly thick when she heard Barnweld's car hit the road and race away at high speed.
Then a 'voice spoke to her out of the darkness.
"I'm sorry, Toni," Roger said softly. He sounded close to tears. "I ... I never thought it would be like this."
"This is a fine time to think about it," she snapped bitterly. "Go ahead and have your turn." She flopped back on the ground and spread her legs.
He was silent for several minutes, and the only thing she could hear was the sound of the wind in the trees.
"I ... I can't, Toni. I feel so rotten about the whole thing."
"You should!"
"Toni, I'm sorry," he said, his voice choked up. "I ... well, I want to take you home."
She struggled into a sitting position, groped in the darkness for her panties but couldn't find them, and took Roger's hand as he helped her to her feet. She burned as she tried to walk, and knew that she was bleeding. She leaned heavily on his arm as he helped her to his car. She sank back gratefully on the seat and closed her eyes. There was nothing within her now but dull aching of her body, and a growing black ball of hatred that started in the pit of her stomach and was soon to spread throughout her body until it became a consuming passion with her.
He started the motor, backed slowly around and drove carefully through the underbrush to the road. Then he turned toward the station of the Sierra Railroad, just beyond which was Toni's house-in a ramshackle part of Jamestown where none of the "nice" girls in the county came from.
"You ... you aren't going to tell on us, are you?" Roger asked nervously as he drove slowly in front of her house.
"Why shouldn't I?" she demanded.
"Well, it would get me into a lot of trouble." He looked at her carefully, trying to see if she were really as angry as she sounded.
"Why should I care about that?" she snapped. "After what you did tonight?"
"I didn't ... didn't do anything. Not really."
"Oh, hell no! You just took me there, and you damned well knew what was going to happen. And you stood by while those three bastards hurt me and you didn't do a thing about it." She clenched her fists in helpless anger.
"But ... but...." he stammered, trying to find the way to plead with her that would have some meaning.
"But what?" she demanded. "What do I owe you?"
He drove slowly around the block, not ready yet to stop and let her out. The town was dark and the streets were deserted, for at four a.m. there was nothing to do and nowhere to go except home. A lone street light shown two blocks away, feebly piercing the darkness with a tiny glow.
"This is a small town," he said. "And those guys ... well, you know who they are. They'd probably not get into any trouble at all. Ken's old man owns the only new-car agency in the county, Ron's old man is the richest dentist, and Frank's old man owns the bank. You wouldn't have a chance against them. They've got most of the money and all of the power in their hip pockets."
"What about you?"
"I'm like you," he said. "A maverick. I don't fit into this damned town either. But if you went to the sheriff right now, he'd get on the phone, and by morning those guys would have stories with enough witnesses to prove that they were someplace else. They'd make you out to be the worst kind of ... well, whore."
"And they'd say you did it, wouldn't they?" she asked softly.
"I guess they would," he admitted. "I'm the perfect patsy in a case like this." He laughed bitterly. "And I didn't do anything to you."
She didn't want to argue the point with him, so she nodded, hating him for his cowardice, but knowing that basically what he said about the other youths was correct. She was from Jamestown, and that meant she already had two strikes against her. And there was the matter of the beating she'd received from the girls earlier in the evening. They could claim that her charges of rape against the boy friends of those girls would just be an attempt to get even. It was all too neatly stacked against her for her to do anything at all. She would just have to suffer the indignity, the pain, the humiliation of her violated body, and say nothing.
"All right, Roger," she said finally. "I won't say anything."
"That's swell," he said, relief flooding his voice. "That's just great, Toni."
"Take me home now," she said dully. "There's nothing else to talk about."
"You're right, I guess. There's not anything else to do."
He turned the corner and stopped in front of her house, seeming almost too eager to get her out of the car. It was over then, even though he hadn't gotten any, and so it was his turn now to turn away from her. She would have liked for him to comfort her then, when she really needed it, but she couldn't ask for it. He would have to sense her need and offer.
"Toni," he said tentatively, turning on the seat to face her. "There's something you ... you should know."
"Oh?" She was hopeful that perhaps he would say something redeeming, something to take some of the sting off the events of the night.
"I mean ... after what happened ... you should ... should...."
"I'm not that stupid."
She climbed out of the car and walked slowly up the porch steps, each movement agony for her. Inside the house, she looked into her mother's bedroom and was sorry that she had, for stretched out nude and ugly was her mother and a man Toni didn't recognize-one of the many denizens of the Jamestown bars with whom her mother went to bed almost every night. Toni muttered, "Ugly old whore," and went into the bathroom. She did what was necessary to avoid any unfortunate aftermaths of the vicious rape, thinking as she did how much she hated the four boys. She'd agreed not to tell anyone about what had happened, but she hadn't promised not to do something to get even. At the moment, she didn't know what it was, but she wouldn't rest until she had done something. It would have to be something that would hit them at their most sensitive spots, something they would never recover from. Something that would make them suffer as she was suffering, and as she would continue to suffer long after her body had healed.
She went to summer school that summer, so that she wouldn't have to stay in town. She didn't want to see the four boys, for she wasn't sure that if she saw them, she would be able to remain silent. So she'd enrolled in summer school at San Jose State College, where she bad planned to go in the fall anyway. School wasn't as exciting as she'd hoped, for hanging over her now was the blackness of the night in the grove. It colored everything she did, every thought she experienced. The gaiety and good times she saw around her were meaningless for her, for she couldn't enter into the spirit of the young college students she associated with in class every day. They were the same age, but her black secret separated her from the rest of them as effectively as if they spoke a foreign tongue.
She never forgot the pain and humiliation she'd suffered at their hands-the raw, country youths who'd raped her in Jamestown. Sometimes at night, she would awaken in a cold sweat, thinking she was back in that thicket, about to be violated once again. She would sit bolt upright in bed, stare around her in the darkness in terror, and then switch on the light to be sure she was safe in her own bed-alone. Even when her eyes adjusted and she could see the familiar surroundings, she still couldn't shake the feeling of fear that seared her. She relived the terror and pain of the experience again and again, never lessening in intensity.
She remained a loner during the first two years of her education, refusing dates as they were offered, for she had no desire to become close to any male. She worked during the school year as a counter girl in a frostie stand, and during the summer, in order to avoid having to return to Jamestown, she worked in a tomato cannery on the edge of town. In that way, she didn't have to ask her mother for a cent. She was determined never to have to ask her mother for a thing again, except perhaps a roof temporarily when she would finally have to return to Jamestown.
When she began her third year in school, she was permitted to move out of the school-supervised dormitory and into an apartment of her own. It cost her more to live, but she was able to escape the prattle of the eternal sophomores who talked of nothing but dates and getting married. The hip broads in the dorm didn't talk at all-they did as they wanted and went their own way silently, but Toni wasn't close to them, either. She was alone, without a friend, without a purpose or goal except to get through school so she could return to her home town and extract the vengeance that was hers. She shared the apartment with a girl she'd met before, in her gym class, and she was able to come out nearly even with the expenses.
The girl's name was Thelma-a broad-shouldered, husky girl with a mannish way of walking. She usually wore mannish clothes and "sensible" shoes, and often she derided the ultra-feminine women she saw on campus for their appearance and behavior. She called them a number of foul names, the politest of which had to do with the intimacy she suspected each of them of indulging in with their boy friends on weekends.
Like Toni, Thelma didn't date and spent most of her time in the library studying. Since they both worked, it was seldom that they went anywhere at all. Once in a while they would go to dinner at Hawaiian Gardens or Original Joe's, but not more than once a month. Finally, during Christmas vacation, when they both agreed that they weren't going home for the holidays, they decided to treat themselves to a party at home.
They started by ordering a Chinese dinner from a little restaurant on San Fernando near Third, then picked up some wine at a liquor store on the way home. While Thelma prepared the meal, Toni went into the bedroom and changed from her street clothes into a filmy negligee she'd bought recently when she'd felt particularly depressed. Before she dropped the garment over her shoulders, she stood nude in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. Her body was beautiful, and she knew it. Her breasts were large, jutting straight forward into perky points, where her nipples completed the circuit of attractiveness by tipping upward saucily. The roseate shield was small but intensely pink, as though there was correlation between their color and the desire her figure provoked in men who saw her. Her waist was slender, and her stomach was smooth, only slightly rounded and unmarked with stretch marks, as her mother's was. Her hips were rounded in the classic model of Greek sculpture, and her legs were long and tapering, ending in tiny, shapely ankles.
She cupped her breasts and raised them on display, feeling the stirring of passion deep within her. The feeling surprised her, for she hadn't experienced the slightest feeling of desire during all the months since her rape in the woods. But the feeling, whatever its source, was refreshing and good, so she allowed it to continue to grow, delighting in the honeyed warmth that started as a growing ball in the pit of her stomach and grew and grew until it finally exploded, filling her limbs with warm weakness.
Finally she dropped the filmy garment over her and found that the play of shadow through the filmy material made her body even more desirable. She pulled the matching robe about her shoulders and went into the dining room, where Thelma had the meal set, complete with white tablecloth, candles, and soft music.
She sat down, accepted the glass of wine Thelma handed her, and drank a silent toast to something neither of them knew completely or understood at all, but which was there between them just the same. It was the feeling of warm closeness, and Toni knew it was related to the feeling of passion that had been growing within her. They ate the rich, filling food and drank the wine freely, until finally Toni felt heady and a little dizzy, with her passion higher than ever.
Thelma moved her chair close to Toni's and slid her hand gently onto the girl's knee. They sat quietly together for several minutes, not moving. Toni's head spun and she didn't even realize what was happening as Thelma took her hand and led her toward the couch. Her body was on fire, but her desire was unfocused, not centered on any particular source of gratification.
They lay together on the couch nearly motionless for a long time, and Toni enjoyed the warmth and closeness of Thelma's body pressing against hers. She wasn't turned off when Thelma turned on her side and kissed her softly on the mouth. She gave just enough response so that Thelma didn't turn away, and they moved to adjust their positions so that they were both more comfortable, their bodies close together. Toni was a little startled when, as they moved, Thelma rested her leg on top of her own, pushing her knee forward so that Toni had to part her legs a fraction in order to remain comfortable in the face-to-face position they were in.
The girl's thigh was in contact with the center of Toni's womanhood, and the pressure brought her once again to a high point of desire.
Thelma kissed her again and let her arm fall carelessly across Toni's chest. The weight of her arm pressed heavily on Toni's breasts, and she twisted away from the weight, though she didn't mind the contact. As a result of her movement, Thelma's hand rested on her breast.
"Don't," Toni muttered dreamily, her eyes closed. She was caught up in the warmth and security offered by Thelma's arms, and the touch on her breast was only a minor interference with her nature. Thelma renewed her kiss, and then gradually began massaging Toni's breast, until she felt the saucy nipple grow firm. Then she rolled over, pinning the voluptuous girl beneath her, pressing her down with her hips, moving back and forth against Toni's in a perfect imitation of a man loving a woman in the time-honored, missionary position.
Toni didn't say "don't" this time, for her breath was corning in short gasps. She kept her eyes closed and let the waves of honeyed warmth sweep over her, accepting the sensations produced by Thelma rubbing against her body and reinforced by the wine she'd drunk. Thelma's weight shifted again, and her knee pressed tighter against Toni's inner thighs, forcing them apart so she would have complete access to the girl's body.
Suddenly Toni tensed and tried to sit up, her eyes open with fright. "No!" she cried. "Don't!" The scene in the Jamestown thicket had suddenly returned to her, with Ken Barnwell forcing her legs apart roughly with his knee.
"Easy, baby, easy," Thelma said gently. "It's only me."
Toni looked at her for a moment, realized that she had suddenly been transported back to that midnight black thicket, where she had felt the male sex for the first time. She had felt Ken moving against her with his hot, hard flesh ready to penetrate her, and she had felt again the terror she had felt that night. She was breathless with fright for the sensations she'd felt that night were still with her, unabated in force.
When she saw she was stretched on the couch with Thelma she relaxed a little, feeling weakness flood through her as the aftermath of her emotion. Thelma pressed her back on the couch gently, her body pressed tightly to Toni's as she felt the girl beneath her relax. She moved Toni slightly, so the girl was supine with her knees parted, raised slightly in the perfect position of love.
"Easy, baby, easy," Thelma repeated, moving her body against Toni's in a total rhythm of sensuality. Her hand slipped carefully between their tight-clasped bodies and found the point of greatest sensation in Toni's, and caressed her there in a way only known to women.
Toni gave herself up to the erotic sensations that filled her with a kind of satisfaction she had never known in her life before. She could fed Thelma pressing her hips forward so that the points of their womanhood made contact. She didn't know when or how Thelma shed her clothes, or how the girl managed to force her negligee up over her hips, but she had. Their naked flesh melted together as Thelma, skilled in the tribadic practice of love, moved in such a manner as to stimulate her partner to the greatest degree possible, and to receive at the same time the sensations that would build her passion higher and higher, bringing her closer and closer to the moment she knew was there but which she had never made.
Toni made it moments later, arching her back and lifting her partner clear of the couch from the force of the sensations that rocked her. They remained locked tightly together as wave after wave of erotic pleasure washed over her, spreading in weakening waves from its point of focus in her lower belly and filling her body with a jelly-like warmth. Her mind was clouded with the erotic pleasure that throbbed her body with its sensations. She wished it would never stop, but when she tried to renew the motions of love she found that the sensations were so acute they were almost painful.
Gradually she relaxed, lowering Thelma once again to the couch. She opened her eyes when Thelma carefully dismounted and stood looking down at her with a feeling of warmth in her eyes. The masculine girl caressed her half-nude body with her eyes, visually fondling the marks of her womanhood.
Toni felt self-conscious beneath her gaze, so she pulled her negligee and robe down over her smooth, young flesh. That was, however, the last time she ever felt self-conscious with Thelma, for they began a systematic study of every means of providing themselves with erotic gratification they could find. They sought the information from medical and psychological textbooks, from popular marriage manuals, and from any other source they could lay their hands on. It became almost an obsession with them to find new ways to stimulate each other, either simultaneously or in turn, and when one of them discovered something new she could hardly wait to get into the other to try it.
It was almost six months after they began that Thelma experienced her first moment, the first she had ever known in her life, and her gratitude and love was overwhelming for Toni. She had spent her life trying to make it, but had been unsuccessful-until the night Toni had felt so wildly abandoned that she went down on Thelma completely, without thought of pleasure for herself at all.
At the moment that Toni felt her friend's body break open with the throbbing sensations of completion, she heard Thelma cry, "Ed, Ed, Ed!" Toni didn't understand the screamed name, for she couldn't know of the events that had taken place years before, when Thelma had made no secret of her love for her brother. They'd been home alone, their parents having gone to one of the movies they went to at least three times a week.
Ed had been in the bathtub when they left, and when he came out, he was wearing nothing but jockey shorts-which, while they covered him, didn't hide the configuration of his manhood. He was fourteen, shaved daily and had a thick growth of hair on his chest. Thelma, looking at him lying on the couch reading a book, began to wonder if his growth of hair was as profuse everywhere on his body. She thought about it so much that finally she decided she had to know.
She went into her bedroom, changed clothes, and re-entered the living room wearing only her robe.
"Want to watch TV?" she asked, sitting on the floor next to the couch.
"I'm reading," he answered absently. "What are you reading?" she asked. "A book," he said.
"I can see that," she said. "What kind of book?"
He closed it, and she noticed that it was covered with a brown paper cover.
"Just a book," he said crossly. "And I can't read much if you're going to jabber at me."
"Don't be that way," she said. "We don't get much time to be together alone."
"Oh, hell no," he said. "Only three or four times a week."
She was silent as he stared at her, obviously trying to make her go away. She knew what he wanted, but she refused to respond. Her love was too warm, too moist, for her to turn back now.
"Ed," she said, putting her hand on his arm. "Is that book ... the one you had under your mattress?"
"How'd you know about that?" he demanded suspiciously.
"I help Mom change the sheets, remember?"
"So?"
"So I saw it hidden there, and made sure Mom didn't see it."
"Did she?"
"I told you I made sure she didn't."
"It's a good thing. I'd have been in bad trouble if she had."
"Why?"
"Just because."
"Because why?"
"I told you. I'd be in bad trouble."
"What's the book about?"
"Things."
"What things?"
"Damn it, Thelma, don't be so nosey."
"I want to know why you'd be in trouble if Mom saw the book. Is it a hot book?"
"No!" he said, too quickly. "It's not that kind of book."
"Then what kind of book is it?"
He tightened his lips as he sucked his breath in, exasperated at her insistence.
"All right, Thelma," he said finally. "I'll show you what kind of book it is."
He flipped it to the title page, and she read it with interest. It was a sex manual, a "how-to" book couched in medical and pseudo-psychological terms-and while it didn't fit the classification of a "hot book," it had obviously been chosen by Ed for its erotic appeal.
"Well?" he demanded challengingly.
"It says it's illustrated," she said. "What kind of pictures does it have?"
"Nothing much," he said. "It just shows how men and women are built inside-there."
"Oh?"
"Yeah." He flipped pages until he came to a typical drawing of female genitalia in cross-section. "It doesn't do much for me."
She looked at it for a moment.
"It doesn't do much for me either. Is there one of a man?"
He laughed.
"That would appeal to you," he said. He turned to the picture she wanted to see.
She stared at the drawing for several minutes, fascinated by what she saw. The passion she'd felt beginning to flow through her earlier was now intensified to a great degree. It was the first time she'd seen anything that resembled a male's penis, and the fascination was the same she'd felt the first time she'd seen a cage full of snakes in a zoo. She couldn't take her eyes from the page.
"Never saw one?" Ed asked suddenly. "No," she replied, her mouth dry. "Not ever." He looked down at her.
"You're a virgin?" His tone was incredulous, as though at seventeen, she should have been widely experienced.
She nodded, feeling somehow inferior because of it. "I'd never believe it," he said. "I am," she insisted. "I ... I never found a boy I liked that much."
"Yeah," he said. "I know what you mean."
"You ... do?"
"Sure." He grinned self-consciously. "You never found a guy as good-looking as me."
"That's right," she said softly.
"Hey, you're serious," he said, laughing self-consciously. "I was kidding."
"I'm serious," she said. "I ... I love you, Ed."
He sobered instantly.
"You're my sister," he said nervously.
"I can't help it. Ever since you ... started to grow up, you've been all I thought about."
"Really?" She nodded.
"I get ... I get to feeling that way whenever I see you in your shorts like this."
"I'll get my robe," he said. "Don't Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Let me ... see you."
"No."
"Please."
"What'll you do for me?"
"Anything you want."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
"I don't know. It's wrong."
"No, it's not. Not if I just look." .
"Is that all?"
"That's all. I ... I just want to look at you."
"But you'll do anything I want?"
"That's what I said."
"All right."
He stood up, looked down at her where her breasts swelled, partially visible beneath the loose and half-open robe she wore. She was aware of his gaze, as well as the fact that there was suddenly greater pressure within his shorts. He hooked his thumbs into the band of the garment, and, with a sudden move pushed them low so that they dropped around his ankles. His erection seemed to fill the room.
She stared for long moments, fascinated by the size, the firmness, the masculinity of what she saw.
"Like it?" he said. She nodded.
"I never thought," she said, "it'd be so big." He smiled proudly.
"I'm not the biggest," he said. "But I'm not ashamed."
"I don't see how ... how it would ever fit," she said. He reached for the book. "I'll show you."
He flipped to a picture, another line drawing, that showed the relative positions of the male and female bodies when they were joined in sexual intercourse. She stared at the drawing for a long time, understanding for the first time at least part of what happened when men and women made love.
"Oh ... it's like that?" she asked meaninglessly.
He remained silent while she stared at the drawing, trying to imagine what it would feel like to receive the male in that manner.
Suddenly he spoke.
"Let me see you," he said, "What?"
"Let me see you," he repeated. "All ... all of me?"
"Everything," he said.
She swallowed nervously, then pushed her robe from her shoulders, revealing her flat breasts with their tiny, male-like nipples. She was afraid he would laugh, but he didn't. He stared at her breasts, and when she seemed reluctant to take her robe all the way off, he waved his hands impatiently. She stood up slowly and left her robe behind. She felt ashamed that her body bore such sparse marks of womanhood-which accounted for her fascination with her brother's heavy growth of hair on his body.
They stood facing each other wordlessly, the thing between them now, not yet committed but close, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Thelma picked up the book and looked at the picture again.
"Like that," she said. "I want you like that."
She moved to the couch, placed herself on it and reached up for her brother. He fell across her, and after some initial fumbling managed to couple himself to her.
"How does it feel?" he asked.
"I ... I don't know," she said. "I don't feel anything."
"We're supposed to move," he said. "That's what the book says."
"How?" she asked.
He showed her, and at first the sensations were thrilling, filling her with the deepest kind of erotic feeling. But then, before she could achieve that final transport of ecstasy, she realized what she was doing. She twisted suddenly away, receiving his love stickly on her belly, her own passion unsatisfied.
"I'm sorry, Thelma," Ed whispered, rolling away, embarrassed suddenly by his nakedness and his spent love. "I'm sorry!"
He rushed from the room, his shorts in his hands. She pulled her robe around her, went into the bathroom and bathed. From that day on, sex meant only the possibility of sex with her brother, so she effectively removed herself from the possibility of sexual enjoyment. Only after long months of Lesbian love with Tom, the only person she'd ever permitted herself to love, was she able to release herself from the tormented suppression of denied pleasure.
They experimented with various forms of manual stimulation, with many different objects to substitute for the male, and finally, with lingual simulation that they both found to give them the ultimate in deep and abiding pleasure. After they overcame the initial hesitation they felt, taught them by the implied and sometimes expressed attitudes of the people around them, they found the kind of satisfaction in this kind of loving that both bad searched for without even being aware that they were searching. Thelma, the experienced Lesbian, had had many experiences with women, but they had always left her aching and empty for complete satisfaction. Only after she and Toni discovered the degree of closeness obtainable this way did she find real fulfillment in sexual experience,. Toni, on the other hand, had denied sexual pleasure after the brutal rape of two years before, and though she had experienced moments of fulfillment brought on by her own stimulation in the privacy of her bath or bed, she hadn't done anything to give herself pleasure after that night.
Now, though, they were both able to find the deepest kind of fulfillment in each other's arms, and when they weren't studying in the library or in class they were in each other's arms. They were self-sufficient then, needing no one, and in fact resenting anyone who tried to intrude on their lives. They finished the first year of living together and began their senior years in college still as much in love as before.
But as graduation time approached, there came some bitter moments, because Toni refused to agree to go to Los Angeles with Thelma, get a job and live with her, continuing the relationship they'd had for so long. She insisted she had to return to Jamestown, and she never explained why. She had never told Thelma about being raped, nor could she now tell her why she had to go back and get revenge on the boys, now men, who had harmed her so.
So, after walking across the stage in Morris Dailey Auditorium and receiving her diploma, Toni packed her things and, early the next morning, she was on the bus that would take her to Jamestown for the first time since she'd left four years before. The feeling in her heart as she boarded the bus was one of mixed apprehension and pleasure. It warmed her to think she'd be able to destroy the men she hated so much.
She rode the hundred and fifty miles trying to sleep, but she was so tense she couldn't relax. The bus rolled through Livermore, climbed the Altamont, then headed due east for Modesto. Beyond the valley town, the road began climbing through the red-clay foothills, where a century before thousands of miners had raped mineral wealth from the earth. Now it was barren, unable to support the meager population that lived in the foothills, except for the few who had managed to capture the source of much of the wealth-men like Frank Long's father, Ken Barnwell's father, and Ron Kidd's father.
What a pleasure it would be to destroy them, she thought as the bus rolled slowly through Oakdale, past the fair grounds and then started up the low Mis that would grow steeper and steeper the closer she came to her destination. The steeper hills were covered with scrub at this altitude, but later, high above Sonora, the scrub would give way to redwood trees that provided deep shadows and cooling shade for those who had the sensitivity to appreciate it. Toni knew of one man who chose the redwoods in preference to any man's company, and she wondered if he would still be there in the familiar haunts when she returned.
CHAPTER THREE
So she stood for a moment looking at the grove of trees, unchanged after four years, and then she looked at the town. It was unchanged after a hundred years, since the days when the greed of gold miners brought men here from all over the world to establish communities here in a virgin wilderness, from which they raped the land of its mineral wealth, and then left, indifferent to her fate.
She walked slowly down the main street of the forgotten little town, the ramshackle buildings needing paint as much as they had before, the loafers in front of the saloon needed something to occupy them as they always would. She walked past them without a sideways glance, but she heard one of them exclaim as she approached, "By God, that's Toni Francis."
That's right, she thought. Toni Francis is back in town. Not one of you bastards gave a damn about me when I lived here, but now that I'm back, you're going to pay attention to me.
She walked in front of the railroad station, turned at the corner and walked up the short rise to her house. She didn't knock, so she was stunned at the scene that met her eyes as she walked into the familiar, musty old house.
Her mother and a strange man were wrestling on the couch, laughing and tickling each other. A bottle of whiskey stood nearby on the floor. Neither of them had any clothes on.
Her mother saw her the moment she walked in the door. "What the hell you doin' here?" the old woman demanded, making no effort to hide her nakedness.
"I've come home, Ma," Toni answered, trying to ignore the sight of the man's passion, which he didn't try to conceal either.
"Get the hell outta here!" the old woman ordered. "I'm busy!"
Toni backed out of the room, embarrassed suddenly at the thought that her mother was naked in front of her. She went out the front door, slammed the screen and waited. A moment later the laughter resumed, so she knew she no longer had a place in the weathered, frame dwelling in which she had grown up. She wondered how long this man had been a part of her mother's life-or if he were just one of a steady stream that found its way flowing through her house.
"Eleven o'clock Saturday morning is a hell of a time for sex," she muttered to herself as she passed once again in front of the Sierra Railroad station and headed down the main street of town. "Or maybe she's working the early shift."
She knew she'd have to get to Sonora some way, and it was a three-mile walk along the highway. She was wearing high heels, and had no desire to stumble along the gravel shoulder of the road for three miles in the rising heat. Nor was she willing to take a chance on accepting a ride with one of the flatlanders who would be driving along the highway, bound for Pinecrest and the resort areas. There were no taxis, no buses, no transportation at all unless one had a car-and she didn't have one.
But as she went along the main street, she saw Larry Schaffer, a former classmate of hers, driving in the direction of Sonora.
"Larry," she called. "Drive me to Sonora?"
He pulled to the curb quickly, smiled at her as she walked up, and when she opened the door, he said, "Toni Francis, by God!"
"That's right" She smiled at him.
"What are you doing back in town? I thought you were gone for good."
He drove forward, paused at the stop sign where the main street joined the highway, and then shot forward.
"I went to college. I just graduated yesterday."
"And you came back here? What the hell for?"
"Just to look around. I don't expect to be here more than a week. But I wanted to see some people, and take care of some unfinished business."
He looked at her sharply for a moment.
"Are you staying with your mother?"
She shook her head.
"I'm going in to get a room at the Inn," she said. "My mother ... wasn't home when I got there." He looked at her sharply again. "Was he there?"
She nodded, realizing now that Larry knew whatever there was to know about her mother.
"They were ... both there," she said. "What's going on, Larry?"
"He's a lumberjack, when he decides to work," he said. "They got something going about a year ago, and she's been supporting him ever since."
Toni nodded.
"It figures. I interrupted them...." She shrugged. "But what the hell. It's her life."
They were silent as they drove by Volpone Heights, on their left.
"What about some of the kids?" she asked.
"Like who?"
"Susan Ewe, LaVerne Carliff, Lorry Capp, to start with," she said.
"They're all married," Larry said. "Susan married Ron Kidd, Lorry married Ken Barnweld, and LaVerne married Frank Long." He chuckled. "They all got what they deserved."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, something happened about the time we all graduated," Larry said. "Nobody knows what it was, exactly, but these three girls all of a sudden got the hots to get married. More than they had before, I mean. It was like they found something was wrong and all had to get married at once, but since none of them have had any kids in four years, it couldn't have been that. They got married a week apart, though, in the red church. Talk's pretty much died down about it now, but there was plenty of wondering at the time."
"Funny," Toni said. "Nobody knows why?"
"Nope. Lot of ideas, though. Most people thought they'd all gotten pregnant graduation night, but like I said, none of them have any kids, so I guess it couldn't have been that."
She smiled secretly to herself as they came into Sonora, the roadway following Woods Creek almost to the center of town, and then crossing it on a wide stone bridge and climbing the hill to Washington Street. The Inn, with its motel units behind it, was on their left.
"Have time to have lunch with me?" he asked.
"Sure, if you can wait long enough for me to get a room and wash my face."
"Sure." He pulled into the parking lot behind the Inn, turned the motor off and smiled at her. "Hurry back," he said. "I'm hungry."
She went into the desk, registered and exchanged pleasantries with the desk clerk, a tall, spare man with a ready smile and political ambitions. Then she went out, got her bag from the back seat of Larry's car, and went up to the motel room she'd taken. She washed her face quickly, brushed her hair and changed shoes, then felt ready to go out and begin the work she'd come to do. She would have to rid herself of Larry quickly, she decided.
They ate at the El Rancho, an all-night coffee shop catering to the tourist traffic that poured through the town winter and summer. The meal wasn't the best one that could be had in town, but it wasn't the worst, either. They chatted during the meal of the various people they both knew, but there was only one she hadn't mentioned so far that she hadn't had courage to ask about. She'd learned that Frank Long was an officer in his father's bank, that Ken Barnweld was foreman in his father's garage, that Ron Kidd managed a super market on the outskirts of town-where the highway turned up the hill toward Twain-Harte and Pinecrest.
"What ever happened to Roger Kelly?" she asked over coffee.
"He's the only one of the class, except you, who went to college," Larry said. "I was talking to his mother the other day, and he's due to get in town the first of the week. It's funny you should ask."
"Why?"
"Well, his mother told me he asked about you the last time he wrote her," Larry explained. "Funny you should ask about him."
"I don't see what there is Lo make it so funny," she said.
"I mean, that he should ask about you, and then you ask about him." She shrugged.
"He was just a guy I knew when I went to high school here," she said. "Nothing else."
"Oh, sure," Larry said, grinning. "But everybody remembers how he was there to pull you out of the fight at the party."
She flushed, but chose to ignore the jibe.
"So he was there at the time and helped me," she said. "It's not my fauk."
"Sure," Larry said. He sipped his coffee. "How was college?"
"About what I'd expect," she said. "A lot of uselessness between the covers of a book, and even more uselessness wrapped up in gray-flannel suits called professors."
"But you got your degree."
"Sure I did. I graduated with highest honors and all the rest, but what the hell difference does that make? I'm not any different as a result of having memorized so much junk."
He didn't reply for several moments, then he looked at her levelly.
"Do you know about your mother?"
"Just what you told me," she replied.
He nodded and looked out the window of the coffee shop. Across the street was an old hotel building, dating back to the days of gold mining in the region, whitely reflecting the bright sunlight that poured down upon it. In front of them, cars streamed up the hill for the high altitude resorts above Twain-Harte.
"She's not the same woman she was four years ago," he said.
"I gathered that," Toni said. "I ... I saw her with her friend."
"She's in the bars almost every night," he said. "For a while, she was taking home any kind of riff-raff that drifted into town. Then she took up with that lumberjack, Pete Malinowski, and the two of them have been the center of gossip ever since."
"Like what?"
"Oh, they don't always wait until they get home before ... well, you know. One night they were singing up on the hill in front of Bud Bastle's house, and then they stopped singing and made love right under a tree in his yard."
And Bud Bastle was in his window, watching them," she said bitterly.
"What would you do, if you heard a couple of drunks going past your house?"
"Leave them alone, unless they were doing some harm," she said.
"But they were drunk," he protested.
She shook her head.
"I can't argue with you," she said. "She's my mother. I don't have any use for her, especially now, and the feeling's mutual. But I have my own reasons for disliking her, and they have nothing to do with her sex life. I don't think that a person's sex life ought to be held against them."
"Okay, okay," he said, laughing. "I'm sorry I brought it up. But I can tell you this. An attitude like that hasn't got anyplace in Sonora or Jamestown. Not in the whole county, as a matter-of-fact."
"The hell with the whole bunch of you," she said. "You're so smug in your little world up here that you let the whole world go right on by you."
"You don't have to be like that," he said. "You grew up here."
"Sure, but I'm still an outsider. My mother and father weren't born here, and my grandmothers and grandfathers weren't born here. Even then, I'd be a marginal case."
"Why'd you come back, then?" be asked.
"Just to look around, to be sure that I wasn't making a mistake. I also have some unfinished business to take care of."
"With who?"
She shrugged.
"Not you," she said. "And not anything important, except to the people involved."
"I'm glad I'm not involved," he said. "The way you said that, I'd think you were pretty bitter."
"I'm not bitter. But I don't take anything from anybody."
"I'm also glad I'm not Ken Barnweld, or Frank Long, or Ron Kidd, or Roger Kelly."
"Why them?"
"Because I think whatever you've got to do here, you've got to do with them." She twisted her lips wryly.
"The people I've got to settle up with don't even know there's a score between us," she said. "Now forget I said anything. I've been running off at the mouth this morning."
"How long will you be in town?"
"A week, maybe. Not any longer than that."
"Less?"
"Maybe. It all depends." He nodded.
"I'd like to take you out to dinner one night soon," he said. "May I?"
"Call me. You know where I'm staying."
He nodded, helped her to her feet, and together they walked out of the coffee shop.
"Shall I drive you back down to the Inn?" he asked.
"No, thanks. It's a nice day. I'll walk.
"See you."
And he walked away. She watched him walk back to his car, get in and drive away. He was a tall, slender man, a high-school basketball star and first-string football end. Good-looking in a rugged sort of way, without being super-masculine or coarsely male. She thought back and regretted that she hadn't had a chance to know him better during his years in school-but in those days, he'd been completely taken up by Sandra Barron, a well-fleshed country girl who, like a head of livestock, would calf periodically for her country-boy husband until she was worn out, and then cook and clean for him while finding nothing in her life to value for itself.
But was he still walking in Sandra's shadow? She wondered. Before she left, she'd have to find out.
Turning, she walked slowly down Washington Street to the Inn, without being tempted to walk up the hill toward the red church-built on Piety Hill and beneath which miners had ripped millions of dollars during the gold rush. To do so she would have to pass many retail shops, most of them known to her and in which she would almost certainly encounter people she knew. She had no desire to have the news of her return spread any faster than it would already, so she chose to return to her room, where she showered, and, dressed only in a robe, sat down to plan her course of action so that during the few days she was going to be there, she would be able to accomplish her purpose.
To do so, she first reconstructed everything she could about the people who were involved-three girls and four boys. Now they were three women and four men, married with one remainder. She smiled grimly at the thought, and then picked up the phone and ordered some beer sent up to her. It was going to be a hot afternoon.
Sipping the beer, she remembered some of the high points in her life with her mother-some of the events that had endeared her mother to her. The first memory she had of her mother was of trying to climb into bed with the old woman and finding that she already had a bedmate-which she knew wasn't her mother because of the coarse beard she touched when she tried to get up on the bed. A heavy hand slapped her away, causing her to fall heavily to the floor.
"What the hell's goin' on?" her mother growled.
"Somebody tried gettin' into bed with us," he growled.
"Toni?" her mother called. "Is that you?"
"Yes, Ma," she answered. "I want to sleep with you."
"Not tonight. Go back to bed."
"But...."
"No buts, damn it! Go back to bed."
She obeyed, but she listened for a long time to the sounds that followed, and though she didn't understand them then, she came later to realize that by awakening them she had begun the lovemaking process all over again.
The next morning she met her first "uncle," only one of the many that would troop through the ramshackle house by the Sierra Railroad tracks. At first she believed her mother, but as she grew up, she heard some of the other children laughing about her mother, and the question of the name she heard flung made her wonder. She knew she couldn't ask her mother, but she had to find out. So she started watching for an opportunity to find out for her own sake, if her mother really were a whore.
She tried to stay awake on any night her mother went out, because there was a good chance that she'd bring home an "uncle" with her. The first couple of times she tried, she fell asleep, but finally she was awake when she heard her mother stumble drunkenly up the front steps with a man right behind her.
"Don't make no noise," her mother whispered loudly. "After all, we don't want to wake my kid up, do we?"
"Damn right, we don't," the man laughed drunkenly. "We just want you and me awake."
"Oh Lasley," her mother giggled. "What do you think you're gonna get from me?"
"What I came for," Lasley replied. "Otherwise I'm for goin' back to the bar where I can find me something to screw."
"You don't have to go back down there," the old woman said. "You got the best in town right here."
"Damn right," Lasley said lecherously. He was a blond musician who made his living playing banjo from bar to bar whenever there were enough tourists around to line his pockets. When there weren't, he traded his good looks to find a soft bed and a couple of good meals. Toni grimaced in the darkness as she realized who her mother had brought home.
He must really be hard up, Toni thought. "If he's willing to put up with her."
She watched and listened until the small sounds of passion from the bedroom told her it was safe for her to go take a look. What she saw stunned her, for they were not making love at all-at least from what she knew lovemaking was supposed to be. Lasley was flat on his back on the bed, his legs hanging off and his feet touching the floor. Her mother was on her knees on the floor, kissing him tenderly below the spot where her hand caressed his passion. She watched the scene in horror, amazed that even her mother could so humiliate herself. Then her mother moved, raised the point of her kiss and took him fully, stimulating herself at the same time. Toni could see every detail of what went on in that room, right up to the point where Lasley, slobbering wetly, arched his back and grabbed her head.
It was over finally, and Toni returned to her bed, sickened by what she had seen. She tried to sleep, but could not. She knew her mother was promiscuous-she knew it now for fact rather than suspicion born of gossip. But if it was hard enough for her to accept the idea of her mother's sexuality, the struggle she fought within herself because of what she had seen her mother doing was monumental.
From that night on, she had nothing but contempt and hatred for her mother, and they had fought incessantly. Everything was the subject of a battle, from a sink full of dirty dishes to a dress Toni wanted to wear. No matter what it was, they fought, so that finally, after she was in high school, Toni went out every chance she got. Fighting off an over-eager kid in the back seat of his car was preferable to the kind of screaming she had to endure from her mother.
Now, sitting in her motel room, aware that her mother hadn't changed and wasn't likely to, Toni smiled grimly. She wasn't going to see her mother again, and she had no reason to seek vengeance on her. The old woman was punishing herself enough, and that was sufficient for Toni.
CHAPTER FOUR
Toni STAYED CLOSE TO HER ROOM FOR THE BALANCE of Saturday, and on Sunday slept until almost two in the afternoon, had a quiet meal in the dining room adjoining the inn. She didn't want to see anyone until Monday, when she would be able to approach the girls without their husbands being present, and likewise the husbands. Her philosophy was simply-divide and conquer. By the time the weekend was drawing to a close, she had a pretty good idea what she was going to do, and the thought filled her with a warm sense of pleasure.
Monday morning she was up early, breakfasted in the inn, and then set out on her day's business. She walked slowly toward the red church, at the top of Piety Hill, looking down on Washington Street. At the top, she followed the highway to the right and down the hill to the high school, where she had spent four unhappy years, and then beyond, up the hill to what was considered the "best" part of town. Of course, by flatlander standards, it was nothing more than solidly middle class, but it was the best Sonora could offer, so it constituted the neighborhood of the local aristocracy.
She walked up to a house located about halfway to the top of the hill, set in a cliff overlooking the canyon through which Washington Street wended. The house was on street level in front, but in back it was at least two stories above the ground-supported by steel I-beams bolted to concrete foundation pillars.
She smiled as she stood in front of the building for several moments. The next few moments were going to be sweet.
She walked up to the door and rang the bell.
The frowzy blonde who answered the door was dressed in a sweat-stained bathrobe, had her hair up in curlers and her feet in faded mules.
"Yes?" she said.
"Don't you remember me, Lorry?" Toni asked. She was secretly pleased that she was so well-dressed that not a wrinkle marred her outfit, not a hair was out of place in her coiffure.
The woman looked more closely, then groped in her bathrobe pocket for a pair of thick glasses.
"You look familiar," she said. "But I don't recall ... "
"Toni Francis."
"Toni!"
"That's right-"
"I'll be damned." Lorry Barnweld didn't move. She stood motionless, staring at Toni. "I didn't know you were back in town."
"Aren't you going to invite me in?"
"Goodness, my house is such a mess," Lorry said. "And I look a fright."
"I didn't expect any better," Toni said, and when Lorry looked at her sharply to see if she were being insulted, Toni added, "dropping in on you this way, I mean."
Lorry nodded, only half satisfied.
"Come in," she said reluctantly. "Have a cup of coffee with me."
Toni smiled warmly and walked into the messy house behind Lorry Barnweld, once Lorry Capp and her sworn enemy. Lorry led the way to the breakfast nook, off the kitchen, and Toni could see dinner dishes from the night before still piled in the sink-alongside an obviously new dishwasher. Coffee was poured for her in a half-clean cup, and she sat opposite the frowsy blonde, smiling with supreme consciousness of her superiority.
"How ... how have you been?" Lorry asked when they were seated at the sticky-topped table.
"Good," Toni said. She was going to let Lorry stew awhile. The last time they had seen each other had been the night of the fight, and Lorry could not know the purpose of her visit. But it was necessary that she be placed off guard, for she mustn't suspect anything at all of Toni's intention. "I just got home again."
"You ... you went to college, didn't you?"
That's rijgit. I graduated Friday."
"Congratulations."
"Not necessary. It was a waste of time. I'd have been better off staying right here in town."
"Oh?" Fear was in her voice.
"Yes. I could have had a job, making money all this time. Better than going to school. I could have made something of myself if I'd stayed."
"College is good, though. I kind of wish I'd gone."
"You'd have wasted your time, just like I did. Look what you've already got." The sweep of her arm included the whole house.
"This," she said bitterly. "A constant mess that needs to be cleaned up."
Toni shrugged.
"It's better than living in a motel."
"I wonder. There I'd at least have a maid to make the bed for me."
"What about Ken? Doesn't he help you?"
"Him?" Contempt filled her voice. "He doesn't do anything but bitch at me about the mess the house is in. And why should I clean it up? It would just get messed up again."
"I see," Toni said, secretly gloating over the fact that Lorry was so openly unhappy with her husband. It would make Toni's task all the easier. "Sort of a treadmill, I guess."
"Sort of a treadmill?" Lorry sounded astonished. "You've got no idea."
Toni nodded.
"What do you do for excitement?" Lorry looked startled. "What do you mean?"
"Just what I said. What do you do for excitement?"
"In Sonora?" Toni grinned.
"I know there's not much to do. But you've got to do something or go stir-crazy."
"I'm not stir-crazy."
"So how do you keep your sanity?"
"Promise you won't tell?"
"Of course. What the hell do I care what you do?"
Lorry looked at her for a moment, then stood up, walked to a cupboard, and after moving several items in front, pulled a bottle of liquor from a dark corner. It was all Toni could do to keep from laughing at Lorry's secret sin, so comic and so tragic at the same time. She drank, kept it a secret from her husband, and was silently destroying herself up there, half-way up the hill she'd longed to top in time to enjoy her victory over her peers. But by the time she would get there, if she ever did, she wouldn't care any more. The bottle would be just as attractive in a Jamestown slum as in the best house in Sonora.
"A little nip helps make the day bearable," Lorry said. "Jon me?"
Toni nodded, smiling inwardly as she watched Lorry pour half a glass of raw whisky for herself, then look up questioningly.
"You like it mixed?"
"Ice cubes will do, if you have them."
"Of course."
Lorry opened the top of her refrigerator-freezer, pried a tray of ice cubes out, ran the tray under running water for a moment, then popped a pair of cubes in a glass. She splashed whiskey over them.
"Here's mud and all that sort of rot," Lorry said, essaying a sorry smile as she raised her glass.
Toni sipped just a drop of the scalding liquid, while watching Lorry take two healthy swallows. They chatted for some time, discussing people they both knew and events that had taken place in town since Toni had left. They carefully avoided the fight at the graduation party, as well as the reason for Lorry's marriage to Ken so soon after they got out of school. As they talked, Lorry kept working on her glass, until finally she stood up, refilled it, giggled a little as she sat back down, and looked at Toni accusingly.
"You're not drinking," she said. "And I'm drunk."
"You're not drunk," Toni replied evenly. "But you're unhappy as hell."
"Does it show?" Lorry said wryly.
Toni leaned forward and patted Lorry's knee, allowing her hand to linger caressingly before she removed it.
"A little," Toni replied. "Sorry."
Toni leaned forward again and this time let her hand rest on Lorry's knee. "Ken?" Lorry nodded. "Bad?"
She nodded again, "Sex?"
Lorry flushed and nodded quickly. She dropped her eyes and for a moment Toni thought she was going to cry.
"It's lust terrible, Toni. He ... he just doesn't ever leave me alone. Every night."
Toni nodded sympathetically.
Lorry continued. "He comes home about six, after stopping off at The Glass Pole for a couple of drinks, and the first thing he does is grab me. He doesn't even wash his hands first, and they're always so greasy from the cars he works on all day."
"Men don't understand women," Toni said while Lorry took another swallow of whiskey. "They think we're around just to satisfy their lust"
"That's for damn sure."
"So you either give it to them, or they're nasty as hell. That's why I'm not going to get married."
"You aren't?"
"Of course not. I don't have to buy the bull to get a steak."
Lorry grinned and nodded.
"I see what you mean," she said. "But I wish to hell there was something I could do."
"There is," Toni said carefully. "There's always something you can do."
"What?" Lorry said, taking another swallow of whiskey.
For an answer, Toni stood up, looked down at her for a moment, then bent down and kissed her on the lips. At first Lorry tensed with surprise, but then she relaxed a little, accepting but not sharing the kiss. Toni continued to move her lips lightly over Lorry's, and slowly, gradually she opened her lips to receive the fullness of Toni's tongue, turned into spear of flame as she felt Lorry tip her head back to make their contact fuller.
Toni supped her arm under Lorry's arm and lifted her from her chair, without separating their lips. She led her, their kiss interrupted only because of the clumsiness of walking while walking, to the couch in the living room, where she laid her gently on her back.
"Oh, Toni," she whispered. "Oh God, Toni!"
"Don't talk," Toni commanded.
She slipped Lorry's soiled robe from her shoulders and ran her fingers lightly over Lorry's body. The flabby flesh, showing the results of four years of hard, desperate drinking, no longer reflected the youth and attractiveness Lorry had once shown. But her lack of beauty wasn't to the point right then, for Toni's purpose was centered solely on bringing this girl out. She began by kissing her nipples, feeling them grow larger, firmer and erect, and she knew she was going to be successful.
She slipped her hand lightly down Lorry's stomach, gathered her nightgown in her hand and inched it up around her waist. Then she ran her hand along the inside of Lorry's thighs, gently working her way higher and higher, to the very center of Lorry's womanhood. At first contact, Lorry gasped her surprise, then opened herself to Toni's touch.
Toni used her skill adroitly to bring Lorry's passion high, and soon she had the slatternly woman writhing with desire.
"Oh, God, Toni," she cried. "I can't stand it! I can't stand it!"
"Oh, yes you can," Toni whispered. "This is the gay life, and you've wanted it for a long time."
"Yes, yes," Lorry answered. "But I never thought I'd find it here in this town."
"It's here because I brought it to you," Toni said, increasing the pace of her touch to keep time with Lorry's thrashing thighs. "And it's going to get better."
"Yes, yes," Lorry cried. "Oh, do it."
Toni bent forward, running her lips lightly over Lorry's body, feeling the flabby muscles tighten as her tongue moved lower ... lower ... stabbing finally at the point of ultimate sensation, and only a moment later she felt Lorry rocket through the throbbing spasms of fulfilled desire. Lorry grasped her tightly, twisting her fingers in Toni's hair and pressing her tightly, seeking to keep the sensations coming. Toni finally broke away and rolled on top of the breathless girl.
"Happy?" she asked.
"More than ever before," Lorry replied.
"I thought so. I'm glad."
"You ... are?"
"Of course. It's a way of life for me."
"I don't understand."
"I learned that it's the only way to keep from getting hurt and at the same time keep from going out of my mind."
"I wish I'd known about this before."
"Before what?"
"Before Ken."
Toni nodded understandingly.
"He's got to be the worst," she said.
"He is." Lorry was silent for a long time before she continued. "But ... what will I do when you go?"
"You'll meet me tomorrow night at my room behind the inn," Toni said. "And I'll teach you even more than today."
Lorry was silent again.
"I ... I don't know."
"Why not? You have nothing to lose."
"But...."
"But you're not being false to Ken-if that's what matters to you. What can happen? Nothing. What can you gain? Plenty. So come."
"Well, all right," she agreed reluctantly. "I ... I want to ... to have more. I've got to have more."
"Then come to my room tomorrow night at seven," she instructed. "Make sure you don't let Ken know you're going anywhere. But be sure you have a lot of time."
"I hope I can," she said doubtfully. "Ken doesn't let me out of his sight when he's home."
"You'll have to do something. Otherwise, I'll make other plans."
"Oh no," Lorry gasped. "Don't do thatl"
"You'll be there?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Toni stood up, hastily tossed Lorry's clothes over her nakedness and straightened her own garments. She looked at the alcoholic, flaccid-skinned woman before her, and smiled.
"I'll be looking forward to seeing you," she said. "I have a special party planned for us."
"Oh, Toni, I'd have died if you hadn't come along."
"I don't believe you."
"I would. I didn't know this was what I wanted, but now it's happened, I know it's what I've wanted all my life. I don't need Ken."
"Oh, yes you do. You need him more than ewer, now. You need him for cover."
"I don't understand."
"I'll explain tomorrow. Okay?"
"Okay. I hope I can last until then."
"You have your friend to help you."
"My friend?"
For reply, Toni went into the kitchen, poured Lorry another glass of whiskey, handed it to her and then departed. She walked slowly down the hill toward town, her thoughts now focused on the husband of the girl she'd just left.
Ken Barnweld had made a big thing out of being a male, during the years when they'd been going to high school. He only went out for the rough-and-tumble, bodily contact sports-football, wrestling and such, regarding the sports requiring deftness and skill as beneath him. He talked frequently of queers, and what he'd do to a "lousy queer" if he ever met one. His most vehement insult was to call another youth a queer, a fag, a homosexual. The jokes he laughed loudest at were those that placed a homosexual in some kind of ridiculous position. Few of his friends in the backward little town had any experience with any kind of homosexuality at all, and it never occurred to them that Ken's preoccupation with homosexuality was possibly because he was himself homosexual.
But Ken Barnweld knew, deep within himself, just how important the whole idea of homosexuality was to him. It was necessary for him constantly to renew his equilibrium concerning it, to force the dangerous, threat ening thoughts from his mind so that he could be sure he was male-all male, super-male. He never knew just where the idea came from, that it might be pleasurable to have a male touch him, caress him, stimulate him, but he was aware that it could be done long before he reached puberty.
He sometimes thought of a slender, blond boy who lived in his neighborhood in the little town, who invited him into a building being built not far from their homes. The boy was only a year or so older than Ken, perhaps seven at the time, and he enticed Ken in with the suggestion that he wanted to show him something. The "something" was his organ, boyish and yet erect.
"Let's take our pants down," the boy suggested. Kan resisted, refused, even when he was told that "There's a way men do it."
Ken wasn't sure what "it" was, but he was frightened, especially when the boy grabbed his hand and forced him to touch him. The flesh was smooth and firm, and touching the boy excited Ken a great deal, but it frightened him, too, so he broke free and ran home as fast as he could.
He never told anyone about the experience, and never again was it repeated. The boy lived in the neighborhood throughout the years, but the momentary event of their childhood was never mentioned by either of them. Ken often wondered if the boy even remembered, or if he cared. Certainly he didn't seem tormented by the thoughts that tortured Ken.
For Ken couldn't forget that touch of so many years before. The night after it happened, he lay awake for a long time, his body aching in a way he didn't under stand, and there built up in him a longing for something he couldn't put his finger on. The longing stayed with him for a long time, unresolved until he found a slender, red volume in his mother's bedroom, the title having to do with living a sane sex life. He sat on the edge of his bed and read, not understanding all of what he scanned, but enough years had passed and he'd heard enough sidewalk talk to get a general idea. At the same time that he read, he played with himself, after making certain that his door was closed and that his parents weren't likely to enter and surprise him.
What did surprise him, though, was the moment of pleasure that burst upon him suddenly. He hadn't expected it at all, for he had no knowledge of the mechanism of sex beyond the mere fact of insertion. He'd often wondered about it, wondered what bodily function it was that produced pregnancy, and finally decided that it must be equivalent to relieving himself. He felt such repugnance to the idea that he wondered if he'd ever be able to make it with a girl if he had the chance.
Thereafter he spent every available moment in autoerotic practices, trying to vary the act as much as possible to provide himself with the widest kind of sensations.
But underlying everything he did was the memory, largely unconscious now, of that touch of so many years before. What would it be like to be touched? he wondered. And as soon as he became aware of. the thought, he suppressed it with savage fury, for to admit that he might find pleasure in such an act would be to admit that he was one of the creatures he hated most-a homosexual.
There was in the town one person who knew something more than he was willing to say, for he knew Ken Barn weld in a way no man on earth had ever known him, and in a way no man on earth ever would know him if Ken was really conscious of what he was doing. His name was Lenny Young-like Toni, he came from Jamestown and so wasn't in the 'right' group around school. But he was a swinger who knew everything that was going on in town, and he very quietly waited for the right moment to use his knowledge. As a result, he was hated by those on whom he had used the secrets he'd gleaned, but he didn't mind, for in any case, he was ahead of the game. He hated them worse than they hated him.
Lenny had run into Ken one night during their junior year in high school. Lenny was thumbing a ride to Jamestown after haying spent the hours after school in the pool hall next to the city hall on Washington Street.
"Get in," Ken said, stopping his car with a jerk. "I'll drive you home." Lenny climbed in.
"Thanks, Ken" he said. "It's gettin' colder than a well-digger's ass in Alaska out there."
"Happens that way," Ken said. "It's winter."
"Rough. I mean, when it gets cold like that."
"Why don't you wear a coat?"
"I don't need one during the day, and why the hell should I lug one around just to stay warm for a while at night?"
Ken shrugged, oblivious of the fact that Lenny Young didn't own a coat, and for him to get one, his father would have to give up drinking for several nights in a row-an un-likely prospect
"Say," Ken said, after they'd ridden in silence past the point where the old highway dropped down into the gulley, to join the main road a mile beyond. "You must know where there's some stuff in Jamestown."
Lenny looked at him.
"Man, you guys are all the same."
"What do you mean?"
"You all think the whorehouses are still open in Jamestown. But they're not. The only action is in the bars, and we'd get kicked out if we went in, even in Jamestown. So forget it, man."
"I could sure use a piece," Ken said. "Like I've been turned off for so long it's not funny."
"What's the matter with that chick you go with?"
"Leave her out of it," Ken said sternly. He paused. "Besides, it's her time of the month."
"Oh." Lenny's reply seemed to say that Ken shouldn't let that stop him, but the thought wasn't expressed, so it was dropped.
"She can't get out during the week much anyway," Ken went on, not realizing that he was tacitly admitting to what Lenny knew anyway-that he and Lorrie made it often when they were alone. "But I'd sure like to find something tonight."
Lenny shrugged.
"Nothing much around here for a couple of guys like us. Oakdale's different, I hear."
"How?"
They shot past Volpone Acres at high speed.
"Action, man. On the streets. Young stuff. Like high school."
"Like for us?" Ken said eagerly.
"Sure, what else? Only it takes bread, and I don't have any."
"How much?"
Lenny shrugged.
"Oh hell, I dunno. Five apiece, maybe ten if she's a looker. Plus something to drink."
"I got enough," Ken said. "I got paid by my old man today."
"Then let's go. It's not far."
"You're right."
Ken punched his car up to high speed, and they shot down the highway toward the flatland town of Oakdale. They were almost past Jamestown when Lenny said, "Let's get something to drink here before we go down the hill."
"Why? Can't we get it down there?"
"Who the hell knows? I know I can buy it here."
"Okay." Ken slowed down, made a dangerous turn at the end of town around a thicket in the crotch of two highways, and headed back into town. "Where?"
Lenny showed him the liquor store, told him to park in the alley, and then disappeared with Ken's money. A few minutes later he was back with a case of cold beer and a gallon of wine.
"What the hell's the wine for?" Ken demanded.
"You drink what you like," Lenny said. "But for me, I know what wine can do to a broad. Beer just makes them want to pee. Wine makes them hot."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. If you don't know that, man, you're stupid."
They drove on down the hill, taking the curves at speeds that would have been fatal if a tire had blown, but neither of them thought of that. Ken started on beer, and then, with some urging from Lenny, decided to try some wine. By the time they got to Oakdale, they were both higher than hell, and neither of them fit to drive an automobile.
After cruising the streets of Oakdale innumerable times without success, Ken turned on Lenny.
"I thought you said there were broads down here!"
"Easy, man, easy," Lenny said. "There are. They just aren't out tonight."
"Crap! I might as well have stayed in Sonora."
"Have a drink," Lenny said placatingly. "It'll make you feel better."
He handed Ken a paper cup filled with wine. Ken drank half of it in a gulp, then started to drive toward the edge of town again.
"Where are we going?" Lenny asked.
"Home, that's where, "Ken growled.
They drove in silence until just after they passed an all-stone building sitting right beside the highway. Then Ken said, "Christ, I'm getting sleepy."
"Want me to drive?"
"Hell, no. Nobody drives my car but me."
"Then pull over and get some sleep. I don't want to get killed."
"Where the hell can I?"
"Just before Keystone," Lenny answered. "There's a spot where the highway used to dip down to cross a bridge over a creek. They built a new bridge, but you can drive around the barrier and get down to the bridge and nobody can see you from the road."
"You really know the country around here, don't you?" Ken said admiringly.
"I got to have something to fall back on," Lenny said cryptically.
They parked, and as soon as the motor was off, Ken asked for another drink. He gulped the wine without regard to anything but increasing the glow that was building inside of him. He regretted not finding a broad, because he really felt like he could use one. A piece was just what he needed, damn it, and he thought that all broads everywhere were bitches because there weren't any for him to have right then. He rubbed his crotch, picked up the nearly empty wine jug and poured some more sloppily into the paper cup.
He didn't remember anything that happened after that, and Lenny told him he just went to sleep, but Lenny was lying. Ken didn't remember what happened, but he didn't pass out until after he'd made a pass at Lenny, and Lenny had opened his clothes and let Ken kneel on the floor of the car in front of him, kiss him passionately, and take his love as fully as he could. Then he passed out, and Lenny crawled into the back seat with a blanket that was folded on the floor, and went to sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Toni walked down the hill from lorry barn weld's house well satisfied with herself. She felt a little queasy as a result of the lovemaking-not because she had any objection to the acts she'd performed on Lorry, but because Lorry would have been one of the last sex partners she would choose under any circumstances. Lorry was broad-shouldered, masculine in gait-a real bull, a four-stack diesel. But she was too new to the gay life to play the active role. She would need experience to overcome her learned hesitation and repugnance to performing the genital contact herself. Sooner or later, though, Toni was sure that Lorry would swing gay all the way. She wouldn't be there to see it, although she would enjoy the torment and the anguish her former classmate would undergo in the process of adapting herself for the new values her modified sex life would demand.
She walked down the hill she'd climbed only a couple of hours before, once again passed the high school, then climbed up Piety Hill alongside the spot where a local power company had sealed over the entrance to the Big Bonanza Mine, where miners years before had taken a fortune in gold. There was no more gold, no more anything of value in the foothills except the magnificent stands of redwoods being castrated where they stood.
The red church still looked as lonesome as before, for the only attention it received was from tourists who hiked up the hill to photograph it. She paused in front of it, though, and looked across the street at a sign that caused her to smile. It read "Turn right two blocks to meet the Original "Mother" Lode and taste her Gold Mine Pies." Another tourist trap, designed to separate the traveler from his dollars, and not really different from the house of pleasure on Sullivan Creek just out of town, or the row of houses in Tuolomne.
She continued on down Washington Street, where once trees had lined the curb, until the demands of the ubiquitious automobile intruded on the orderliness and quiet of the mountain hamlet. Now there was plate glass, chrome and fluorescent lighting striving desperately to hide the heritage of a cruder, less commercial age. There was a park two blocks down, one block square, with the county courthouse on the far side-she'd often wondered how this much land in the center of the commercial district had been dedicated to the people, and then she decided it had probably been done long before Sonora had any future at all that wasn't connected to gold and its allied industries.
Her goal was a red-brick structure in the block past the inn. It had once been an opera house, in the days when any form of entertainment had been eagerly sought by the miners, but which had now been turned into a garage. Tettrazini had sung here, but now the only music was the sound of hammers swung in body repair, and the oaths of the mechanics as they wrestled with a recalcitrant nut, the counterpoint provided by the smell of gasoline and the universal smear of grease.
Ken Barn weld was the foreman in this garage.
She walked in and looked around in the gloom for him. At the back of the building was the stage, once the arena for the world's greatest talent-now the storage place for broken, rusting parts.
She saw Ken as soon as she entered.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, walking up to her but not really looking at her. "Can I help you?"
He wore a white jacket with his name embroidered in red on it. The name of the garage was under it.
"Don't you remember me, Ken?" she asked softly.
He took his eyes from the shop, where he had been watching a mechanic at work, and looked at her.
"Toni!" he cried in surprise. "Toni Francis!"
"That's right," she said, staring at him fixedly. "Toni Francis."
"What are you doing in town?" he asked. "I thought you weren't ever coming back."
"You'd have liked that, wouldn't you?"
"I ... I don't know what you mean." He glanced around nervously. "I mean, you don't seem to fit into a small town like this." , She smiled at him, amusement playing with the corners of her mouth. "You don't have to worry," she said. "I've forgotten about everything that happened ... before."
His face relaxed, his smile grew to match hers, and he took her arm and led her to a small cubicle where there was a desk littered with papers.
"What did you come here for?" he asked, sitting down behind the desk and pointing her to a chair in the corner.
"To see you," she answered simply. He blushed.
"Well," he said. "That's a surprise."
"Is it?" she asked archly.
He looked at her sharply for a moment, then his face became suffused with pleasure.
"You came here just to see me?" he said slowly.
"That's right, Ken. I couldn't come here without seeing you."
"Now that's something!" he exclaimed. "You just couldn't stay away from me, eh?"
Her stomach constricted in the face of his egotism, but she savagely put down the feeling within her, determined to lead him to the point of propositioning her-and she knew that a man who made the effort to appear the super-male the way Ken Barnweld did would only have to think that she was interested in him to leap at the opportunity of taking her to bed.
So she said, "Well, Ken, some people are hard to forget."
He took it to mean that she still remembered with pleasure the night he had thrown her down in the darkened thicket in Jamestown and torn her virginity from her. He stood up, came around the desk and closed the door. Then he pulled her to her feet, pressing her tightly against him.
"Oh, Toni baby," he whispered hoarsely. "I've thought about you for so long."
"Me, too, Ken," she replied, pressing against him tightly and feeling the swell of his passion grow greater and greater. "I've thought about seeing you again for a long time."
"Look," he whispered, letting his hands stray over the curve of her buttocks, "out back, behind the garage, there's an old Volkswagen bus. Walk around the corner and then meet me there."
"Kenny, Kenny," she said reproachfully. "That's no place for what I have in mind."
"It's all right," he assured her. "The guys fixed it up just for ... that."
"You've used it before." It wasn't a question, but a statement of certainty.
He shrugged, embarrassed.
"Once or twice," he said. "You know how it is."
"I guess," she said, pouting a little.
"Aw now, Toni," he said placatingly. "A guy gets to feeling that way once in a while, and he gets a chance ... so he does. It don't mean anything."
"It doesn't mean anything?"
"Not with some of the tramps around town," he said hastily. "I didn't mean you."
She nodded, only partially satisfied.
"I don't want you calling me a tramp," she said.
"Toni," he said reproachfully. "How can you think I'd say anything like that about you?"
"I just wanted to be sure."
"Naw, honey. Not after all the thinking I've been doing about you."
"It's a good thing."
"Why?"
"Because I'd be disappointed at not being able to ... well, meet you later."
"Ah," he said, his self-satisfaction restored. "Where and when?"
"Tomorrow night," she said. "At my room in the motel behind the inn. I'm in room 69. Seven-thirty."
"Why should I have to wait so long? I want you now."
"Last time you wanted me, you didn't even wait to be invited. This time it's my turn to call the shots."
"Okay," he said ruefully. "But don't tell anyone about us. You ... you know I'm married?"
She nodded, letting a little frown suggest to his male ego that she was disappointed.
"I heard," she said. "I didn't know you'd gotten married so soon after I left to go to college."
"You know how it is," he said. "I was all broken up, 'cause I thought you'd want to stay around town and all. I guess I just didn't know what I was doing."
"You happy with her?"
"Are you kiddin'?" He snorted derisively. "She don't do nothin' but mope around the house, like she was some kind of queen or something. She won't clean the house, she won't cook decent for me, and she might as well be a log in bed."
"That's a capsule description of a love-match if I ever heard one," Toni said sarcastically.
"No, really, Toni," he said earnestly. "You don't know how miserable I've been since you've been gone." He ran his hands once again down over her buttocks, cupping them and pulling her hips tightly against his own. "God, I've missed you."
She moved her body against him slowly, carefully, delighting in the effect she was having on him, for she knew that the more she could get him worked up, the more eager he'd be to keep the date with her the following night. His breath was coming sharply as he thrust hard maleness against her, and she knew that he would be just as he had been four years before-selfish, self-seeking, interested only in his own pleasure. He could, she decided, easily drive a woman to drink-or into the arms of a woman.
"Easy, Kenny," she whispered. "Don't waste it all now."
She pushed him away gently, so as not to discourage him too much.
"Come on, honey," he said hoarsely. "Let's go out into that old Volks."
"I'm not that kind of girl," she said emphatically. "Come to the motel tomorrow night at seven thirty and I'll have a surprise for you."
He grinned lecherously.
"I'll bet you will, baby," he said. "You got the body for a whole bunch of surprises."
She smiled warmly at him, her moist lips inviting, and he bent to kiss her. She pulled back at the last instant
"Not till tomorrow night," she said. "I don't want to get all messed up."
"Okay, baby, okay." He released her and stepped back. "But tomorrow night you'll be ready for me?"
"Sure, I will," she said, smiling up at him with feigned warmth. "I'll be ready for you like I've never been ready before."
"Great, baby."
She turned and walked from the office and out the double doors of the Opera Hall Garage. Just before she turned onto the sidewalk, she heard one of the mechanics ask Ken, "Who's the broad?"
"Just a tramp I used to know," she heard Ken reply. "Can't expect nothin' from broads like her. She's from Jamestown."
This evidence of the universal hypocrisy of men didn't phase her a bit. She had Ken Barnwell pegged accurately-a super-male who had to deck every broad in town in order to keep reassuring himself that he was truly masculine. To him, the only measure of masculinity was successive seduction of every viable female who came within his ken. She smiled at her plan, for it would certainly destroy him in the best way she knew.
She returned to the inn, surprised that it was only one-fifteen. The sun was high in the sky, and the quiet of mid-afternoon had settled over the little town.
She had an hour before she wanted to appear at the spot where she could carry out the next part of her plan, so she decided to return to her room and freshen up, in addition to ordering some lunch sent in from the coffee shop.
The dark coolness of the room was welcome, after the heat outside, so the first thing she did was to peel off the dress she'd worn that morning and stand in front of the air conditioner in her half slip, bra and panties, and let the cool air flow over her smooth, firm flesh. She became aware of the mirror on the opposite side of the room at the same time that she realized the effect the events of the morning had had on her. She'd experienced a whole series of emotions during the three hours she'd been out, from the delight of passion in the highest moments with Lorry Barnweld to the lowest feeling of degradation in the arms of Ken. But the net result had been to leave her with a warmth deep within her belly, ready to spread throughout her body if once she broke the reserve in which she held herself tightly.
She peeled her bra off, then rolled her half-slip down over her hips. She wore black biniki panties, a garter belt, stockings and high heels, and for a moment, she stared at herself in the mirror. She had a passionate, stimulating body, and she knew it. As she watched her image in the glass, she knew that if she saw someone with the same kind of beauty, she would be wildly excited at the prospect of love with her.
"Narcissistic bitch," she muttered. Then she released the fastening of her garter belt and rolled her stockings down her long, tapering legs. She stepped out of them and left her shoes on the rug, leaving her bikini panties covering her thighs.
She sighed in discontent, not knowing exactly why she felt out of sorts, why she felt vaguely dissatisfied with everything and everyone, particularly with herself. All of her plans were moving rapidly in the right direction, so she should feel a certain elation, but it just wasn't there. The gray mood that so often threatened to turn black was with her as she walked slowly around the room, trying to come to grips with herself sufficiently to shake the feeling that filled her.
To have something to do, she laid out the clothes she intended to wear that afternoon, and as she dug in the suitcase for a clean bra, her hand brushed the box hidden in the lining, and she felt a stirring deep within her. She knew now that the answer to her discontent was within reach, and so she smiled secretly to herself as she moved purposefully to ready herself for her shower. She peeled the panties from her hips, took her special skin soap from her suitcase, picked up the box, weighed the idea of taking it into the shower with her then decided against it and tossed it onto the bed, and then closed the bathroom door behind her.
She adjusted the water to as hot a temperature as she could stand, for she wanted to be completely relaxed, with her skin tingling, during the few minutes that would follow her shower. She stepped in and soaped herself generously, running her hand over her large, perfectly symetrical breasts, delighting in the rising nipples that presaged her arising passion. She leaned back against the shower wall and let her hands wander widely over her soapy, sleek body. She cupped her breasts and let them fall, then ran her hands down over her smooth, flat stomach and along the insides of her thighs. Again and again she circled the center of her womanhood without touching herself, for she wanted to save every sensation for what was to come. But her touch was stimulating, and her mind clouded with passion as she caressed herself again and again, until finally she could stand the rising tension no longer.
She toweled herself only minimally dry, then hurried to the bedroom, where she stretched on the bed and lovingly opened the box she'd tossed there a few minutes earlier. She gazed at the device cradled in the velvet-lined box with devotion akin to awe. She'd owned it for almost a year, but she hadn't yet gotten accustomed to it, nor could she touch it or use it without a secret thrill coursing through her. Carefully, as though she could harm it if she handled it too roughly-though it was made of insensate, flesh-colored plastic.
She coupled herself to it quickly, once she'd made up her mind to touch it. Then rolling over onto her stomach, she began the motions against the bed that produced the greatest thrill within her, at the same time that she reached down and found the delicate nerve endings that sent intensely erotic feelings coursing through her. She closed her eyes and let the sensations control her, raising her passion to higher and higher levels as she closed her eyes and continued her self-stimulation. Her eyes were closed and she saw cloudy images of the figures who moved in the darkness to love her-none of them had faces, but they all were equipped with instruments of love, and they were intent on using them on her.
She rocketed up to her moment then, experiencing the kind of release she only really got when she was alone with her plastic love. It was fulfilling in a way that nothing else had ever been-not even her best moments of Lesbian love. She was left breathless.
Slowly, very slowly, she separated herself from the object and rolled over onto her back, staring at the ceiling in an effort to recuperate her strength so that she could dress for her next encounter.
She thought of the difficulty she'd had with Thelma over the object, when she'd brought it home. She thought Thelma would be just as interested in it as she, so she hurried home after receiving it.
"It's so ... so male," Thelma said in disgust. "It's just like the real thing."
"But we've always looked for ... different ways," Toni protested. "And this looks like it could be one of the best yet."
"Not for me, baby doll," Thelma said brusquely. "I don't want any part of it. Nothing on God's green earth could convince me that that's the best way to have sex. If I was going to let that happen, I might as well let a man have me."
"No, that's not the idea at all," Toni said. "A man's rough, coarse and selfish. Besides, he can make us pregnant, too-and you sure as hell can't accuse Thing of that."
Thelma smiled in spite of herself.
"Thing, huh?" she said, smirking. "Is that what you call it?"
Toni shrugged, blushed and then grinned, all in the space of the moments it took for the girl's words to sink in.
"So it's a pet name," she said. "I give pet names to everything I really like."
"You never gave me a pet name," Thelma said petulantly. "But you named that thing as soon as you brought it home."
"See," Toni said, grinning. "You called it by the same name. So Thing it is. And if I don't do anything else for the rest of the year, I'm going to convince you that this is a way to swing."
Thelma walked out of the room and locked herself in the bedroom, while Toni, her curiosity and passion aroused by the strange object, filled the bathtub with a bubble bath and prepared to immolate herself with it.
The water was as hot as she could stand it, and she inched herself into it carefully, a little breathless as the lapping water closed over her taut, young flesh. The bubbles hid her body from her sight, but she was intensely aware of every sensation her body afforded her. Finally she was submerged, and it was with a feeling of awe that she removed the object from its case and, unable to look at it without a strange feeling pervading her, she submerged it beneath the bubbles quickly. Her breath caught in her throat at the thought that the Thing was in the tub with her. It was the first time for her with such a thing, and the prospect was a little frightening-it was awfully like the night in the thicket, but it was different, too, because she could control it, taking just as much as she wanted, quitting whenever she wanted to, without the necessity of being hurt.
She approached contact carefully, her stomach churning with all sorts of emotion-everything from the fear that it would be like Ken Barnweld or Frank Long, to the guilt that was a part of the pattern she'd learned as a girl-that anything that brought pleasure was necessarily evil, a work of the devil, and therefore not to be indulged in. Nothing was more forbidden, not only to her, but to everyone around her, than the frank and open avowal of pleasure produced by any kind of sexual encounter. Men were understood to desire frequent sexual connection, but afterward they were supposed to feel guilty that they had given in to their weakness. The whole idea was religion-born, built out of a tradition that included a pagan volcano-god transmuted into something resembling the sun god of Aknaton, but with the characteristic of grimness that denied the sheer joy that should be a part of sexual pleasure.
She gasped as she found the mark and carefully, slowly, accepted her new-found love fully. It was a feeling she wasn't sure of at first, so she explored it carefully, testing, moving carefully-and then, suddenly, she found the combination that satisfied every need she felt within her, so that she knew the direction she had to go with it. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to the fullest enjoyment of the erotic sensations coursing through her body, focusing ah" of her attention on the new feeling that was going through her. It was something she'd never known before, and she knew, at the moment that she rocketed through her climax, that this kind of loving was for her.
She came to regard the object with a strange kind of awe, akin to worship, whenever she had to handle it. It was, objectively considered, nothing more than a hollow tube of flesh-colored plastic, but it had taken on mystic meaning for her when she first saw it, and after she had experienced it in its fullest power, she could never regard it merely as an inanimate object. Anything that could produce such powerful emotional reactions in her had to have greater significance than that.
She tried to convince Thelma that it would be a good idea at least to try it, but during the entire time that they lived together, the broad-shouldered girl would not. Toni never understood her refusal, for she had thought of their relationship as a means of providing sensual gratification in the absence of a male. Not that she wanted a male particularly, but she had not come to regard herself as wholly dependent on a female, any female, for her total satisfaction. Whatever source of gratifications he chose, it was merely an interim measure, a means of avoiding the kind of relationship she saw around her so often, where a male would devote himself to a female until they were established in some kind of hanky-panky arrangement, and then the guy would treat the girl like dirt. She didn't want that, and she certainly didn't want to lay herself open to the possibility of any kind of repetition of her night of horror. So she could love Thelma, or Thing, or anything else that seemed appropriate, without feeling any kind of qualm of conscience. The important thing in such a relationship was that she found her own pleasure, and in such a way that she didn't feel guilty or anxious afterward. In such a relationship, the object played an important role, providing her with the nearest thing to the fullest depth of satisfaction that she could know, without actually encountering the male who could love her fully, completely, and to whom she could give herself without restraint.
All these thoughts were with her as she lovingly caressed the object which had just provided her with surcease from the torment of her desire, looking on it now as her lover, complete and satisfying within itself.
CHAPTER SIX
The object which she replaced so lovingly in its velvet-lined box, bad been purchased for her as a going-away present by a man she'd met during the last months of her junior year in college. His name was Henry Siklen, and he'd traveled out of New York for his company-a national printing firm. He'd spent a lot of time in tire Bay Area after he'd met her, trying always to win her to his way of thinking concerning a quick rofl in the hay. She'd refused him, hadn't even dated him, but had on occasion let him take both her and Thelma out to dinner. He'd understood after a while that the relationship she had with Thelma was such that it excluded him altogether, so when he finally bad to continue his trip, he'd given her the package and said, "Just try it sometimes, when you're lonely. It might give you the answer to something."
She hadn't understood at all what he meant, and he wouldn't let her open it that evening until after he was gone. When she did see what was in it, she was insulted at first, but then her fascination overcame her sense of indignity, and she tried it. It proved better than anything Thelma had been able to do for her, and she began to appreciate Henry's insight. Perhaps he knew more about her instinctively than she knew about herself. Then they tried it together and explored every ramification of sexual practice they could, until finally it took a regular place in their arsenal of love techniques.
He told her he bought it in Los Angeles, from a mail order company that, sold them by the thousands to people all over the country. She never bothered to find out if it was true, for she guarded her single instrument with loving care. She rinsed it, dried it, and replaced it in its luxurious case.
Then she dressed again, this time in a completely different kind of outfit than she had worn before. She still wore the same kind of erotically thrilling panties and her black garter belt, but this time she put an a bra with the tips cut out, so that her nipples pressed against the material of the blouse she put on. Then she put on a black half slip-she chose not to wear a full slip because she would have need of a magnificent view of her breasts later, something she could offer to the man she was going to see next.
And she smiled at herself as she thought of the effect her showing the tips of her nipples pressed tightly against the material of her nylon blouse would have on him. He would be beside himself in his eagerness to have her, without the necessity of offering him such a view of herself, but she wanted to drive him really wild.
For a skirt, she selected a flaring white affair, decorated with brilliant red roses almost a foot across, edge-to-edge around the hem. It accentuated her narrow waist and jutting breasts, while giving her an opportunity to display as much or as little of her legs as she wished. It was an advantage of flaring skirts she'd discovered a long time before-just about the time she'd learned men could be handled more easily if they were allowed a peek now and then of her smooth, nubile flesh.
It was quarter to three when she left the motel and walked along a back street one block, then turned and walked the one block to Washington Street. She entered the red-brick bank building at the corner opposite the best cigar store and magazine stand in the town. She stood in the austere lobby for several seconds, looking at the scene she'd only imagined. Never, in the course of her life, had she been inside this building.
She walked to the enclosure in the rear and smiled at Frank Long.
"Hello, Frank." The nameplate on his desk identified him as assistant cashier-a job he couldn't have hoped for if he'd been competing for it on any kind of fair basis. But since his father owned the bank, he had been promoted to assistant cashier after a minimal amount of time as a teller. Since he could never seem to balance at the end of a day, and since the bank's customers went out of their way to avoid him, he was moved from the front line of banking to an administrative post where he had someone else to do the job he should have been doing and to correct the mistakes he made.
He looked up and smiled-the bland smile of an ineffectual executive greeting a customer. Then he recognized her.
"Toni...." he gasped. "When ... when...."
"Recently," she replied, reading the question he was trying to form "And I thought I ought to stop in and see you right away."
He swallowed nervously.
"Why ... me?" he asked.
"Because you were one of the last boys I ... went out with ... before I left. I thought I ought to drop in and say hello."
"I ... I don't understand."
She shrugged.
"I just thought you'd be glad to see me," she said. "Aren't you?"
The challenge was more than he could handle readily. He licked his drying lips, swallowed again, and stared at her with his stomach roiling in fear. She knew something about him she could tell his father and he could be bounced from a sinecure that provided him with more money than he could hope to make from any other source. And standing there as she was, she constituted the biggest threat to his ordered, bachelor existence.
"No, I'm not," he replied at last. "Not at all."
"Why, Frankie, is that any way to treat me?" she asked. "After all, I spent four years away from town, and now I've come back."
"I don't want you here," he said sharply. "You don't belong here."
"Why?" she asked. "Because I can tell something about you that shouldn't be known about a budding young banker?"
"No, no," he said hastily. "It's just that ... you could do better for yourself if you were in a big city someplace. Sonora's too small for you."
She shrugged.
"I like it here. That's why I came back." He stood up, leaned across his desk toward her, and whispered, "You can't stay here."
"Yes, I can. I like it here."
"But...."
"But nothing. Besides, I didn't really come here to see you. I came in to see your father."
"You ... did?" She nodded.
"Tell him I want to see him."
"What for?"
"None of your business."
"It is my business. He won't see just anybody."
She smiled, reached across the mahogony railing and caressed his cheek.
"He'll see me, no matter what my business is. Just tell him I'm here."
"I have to tell him what you want to see him about."
"Tell him I want to open an account," she said.
"I can take care of that," he said testily.
"Tell him I want to make a sizeable deposit"
"I can still take care of it."
"Not of the size I want to make," she insisted. "Now tell him I want to see him, or I'm going to see McGee at the newspaper, and tell him what happened four years ago."
"You wouldn't,"
"Why not?"
He looked at her for a moment, caught m the toils of indecision, then decided that he'd better do as she said. He picked up the telephone and dialed an intercom number. After speaking for a moment, he pointed at a door nearby.
She smiled at him, patted his cheek once again and became aware of the sour look of an old-maidish secretary sitting nearby. She recognized the woman, smiled at her, and said, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Stoeker." The woman sniffed and looked the other way. Toni giggled as she walked past, on her way into Charles Long's office. She had the key to the whole situation, and she knew it, and the feeling engendered by her power made her happy. She was moving rapidly ahead on her plan of revenge.
"Hello, Mr. Long," she said, after she'd closed the door behind her. "It's been a long time since I saw you."
He nodded self-importantly.
"Why did you come here?" he asked bluntly. "Frank said you wanted to make a big deposit."
She smiled, and took her time settling herself in the chair in front of his desk. In settling her skirt, she made it a point to be sure he saw flashes of her upper thighs as she swung the material around. Then, catching the picture of his interest in her body, didn't use the final weapon at her disposal-the sight of her breasts pressing tightly against her blouse. She'd save those for the final volley, when she moved to get him to do what she wanted him to do. But she knew enough about Charlie Long to know that all she had to suggest was her willingness to put out for him and he'd come slobbering around to her.
"I didn't come to make a deposit, exactly," she said, still fussing with her skirt, so that he was able to catch glimpses of the tops of her stockings, where her black garter belt fastened her hose. She smiled at him as he dropped his eyes when he became aware of her looking at him. "I just came in to say hello, and to see if I wanted to start an account here."
"Now see here, young lady," Chartie Long said self-importantly, "I don't have time to talk to everybody who thinks they might want to do business with this bank."
She leaned forward, letting her nipples jut forward against the sheer material of her blouse. His eyes were riveted to them instantly, without regard for anything else around him.
"Don't you have time for me?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, engrossed with what he was looking at. "Yes. Plenty of time."
"Good." She sat back, hunching her shoulders forward to spoil some of his view. "I just wanted to say hello."
He looked at her balefully, as though she were wasting his time, even though his desk was clear of any papers at all. He probably hadn't done any work for the bank in years, but he kept deluding himself that his was an important job in the operation. He didn't recognize the fact that his chief teller and cashier really ran the bank, and that he was just a figurehead, and he didn't want to see it. His position as town banker made him important in the local economy, and he wasn't willing to relinquish his position.
"What ... what brought you back to town?" be asked.
She shrugged.
"How should I know? I live here. What else can I tell you?"
"That's a good enough reason," he said. "I'm glad to see you."
"I can tell," she said archly, looking at him with a strong come-on in her glance. "But I'm glad to see you, too."
He looked at her nervously for a minute, then summoned his courage and said, "Look, Toni, ... how about ... well, us going to dinner out at Sullivan Creek Lodge tonight?"
She smiled warmly at him, stood up with a swish of her body so that her skirt swirled high about her legs. "I'd love to, Charles. Pick me up about seven."
"Where?"
"At the inn. I'm in the motel out back."
"Good," he said, also standing and rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. He knew the reputation of this girl's mother, and he reasoned along the line of "like mother, like daughter." Besides, the lodge where he'd offered to take her had the reputation for being the hangout of the local prostitutes, and the cottages in back were sometimes used for hot-pillow activities. "I'll see you at seven."
She turned and left the room, pausing at the door to flash him a warm smile. Then she composed her features as she returned to the lobby of the bank, where Frank Long was waiting anxiously.
"Well, Frankie," she said softly when she had walked directly in front of him. "That was a very interesting conversation."
"What ... what did you talk about?"
"Things." She shrugged and looked at the floor. "Just between the two of us."
"Did you ... did you ... say anything about ... well, you know?"
She raised her eyes slowly to meet his.
"Frankie, I kid you not," she said. "I went in there intending to tell him everything."
"But why?" he cried desperately. "It was so long ago!"
"You think time has made it any easier for me?"
"No, but ... "
"But I didn't say anything," she said evenly. "I thought I'd give you a chance to make it right."
"How can I do that?"
"Don't be naive, Frankie," she said. "You know what I want from you."
"You mean ... money?" She laughed throatily. "You catch on quick."
"How much?" He was almost whispering, and his face was pale.
"Five thousand dollars," she said. "In cash."
"I can't get that much money."
"You'd better," she snapped. "Bring it to my motel room tonight at seven-thirty. Don't be a second sooner-or late."
She turned on her heel and walked away, knowing that he would follow her with his eyes all the way to the door. She could also feel the eyes of his fussy old secretary on her back as she left. The thought of the impression she was making pleased her greatly.
She had no intention of accepting any blackmail money from Frank, but the thought that she would was enough to make the rest of the afternoon hell for him, and in the meantime, she had her own plan for him and if she were successful with it, there would be little left of Frank's life as he had known it.
But as she left the bank, thoughts of Frank Long and his lecherous father were left behind for the time being as she hurried back toward the arcaded entrance to the Inn. She asked the desk clerk if there was anyone who could drive her a short distance, and in a few minutes she was fixed up with a car and driver. She directed him to drive out toward Columbia, then had him turn up the hill on a road that climbed the ridge and wound through the back country all the way to Twain Harte. About a mile and a half up the slope, she told the driver to stop.
"Here?"
"Here. Wait for me."
He pulled to the narrow shoulder and stopped. She got out, and after looking carefully for a short time, she plunged off the road on a narrow trail that led down into a canyon covered with scrub pine trees and an undergrowth of a plant known as "miner's misery." Behind her, she heard her driver shout, "Where the hell you going?" but she chose not to answer. Let him think she was searching for cover because she had to relieve herself. She didn't have to explain to him where she was going, or why.
She reached the bottom of the canyon, where a tiny stream splashed over gray granite, and then she began climbing the steep slope on the far side, scampering up the red clay hillside still following the faint track.
A short distance beyond, she passed the rusting hulk of a Model I truck, and just past that she came to an old cabin, around the weathered front of which was clustered a lot of rusting tools she had never learned to identify.
"Hey," she shouted, then stood alone, listening to the wind sighing in the treetops. Nothing disturbed the natural sounds of the countryside, and if it weren't for the cabin and the rusting mining equipment, she could easily believe that there was no human being who'd ever come to this spot before. "Hey!" she repeated.
"Who's there?" came a muffled answer from within the cabin.
"Toni, you crumb," she replied, smiling and walking closer to the cabin. "Put your rifle down and come on out."
A moment later a tall, spare figure appeared in the door of the weathered cabin. He was dressed in tattered, faded old clothes, and his hair hung down to the top of his shoulders.
"Glad to see you, girl," he said, smiling and showing crooked, rotting teeth. "Didn't think you were ever coming back to town."
"Shouldn't have," she said. "But I got to get even with some bastards."
"Don't," he said, sitting on a nearby log and indicating that she should come sit next to him. "I know who."
"You do?" He nodded. "I heard about it."
"About what?" she asked suspiciously. "Them four guys, the night you graduated."
"How'd you hear?"
"They was scared, so one afternoon right after that they come up close here and was talking about it. I was on my way to Columbia, and I heard 'em."
She looked away.
"I didn't think anyone but me and those guys knew about it."
"I didn't tell anybody. I figured if you wanted anybody to know, you'd have told them."
"That's right. And I don't want you telling anyone about it, no matter what happens now."
"What are you going to do?"
"You'll find out when it happens." She grinned and patted his arm. "You always find out everything anyway."
He grinned in response.
"That's right," he said. "Everybody trusts oM Pete."
"Old Pete." She stared musingly at the rusting hulk of the Model I across the clearing. "Old Pete. My old man."
"You ashamed of me?"
She turned to face him, looking into his rheumy blue eyes.
"Never," she said fiercely. "Never in a million years. I'm ashamed of my mother, but never of my father."
He smiled a gentle, warm smile. "It's good to know there's one person who values you."
"I come back whenever I can, Pete. I left four years ago so I could have time to get over the ... thing that happened. I was hurt and mad, and I knew my old lady would never understand, or even want to do anything about it."
"You should have come to me," Pete said. "I'm always here."
"I know. But I didn't think then. AH I wanted to do was get away from here and all. I did, and that's all there is to it. Now I'm back, but I'm leaving in a few days."
"Where are you going?"
"To Los Angeles. To live with a friend of mine."
"College?"
"She was my roommate for a long time. I ... I like her a lot."
Pete nodded, then looked at her evenly. "You ain't telling me the whole truth." She shrugged.
"I'm in love with her," Toni said. "I have been, for a long time."
"That's your business. I don't even care. But I do care what you're gonna do here before you leave. This is a small town, and anything that happens has effect on everybody else."
"What the hell do I care? Nobody cared what happened to me."
"They might have, if you'd told anybody."
"Crap. You know as well as I do that those guys are part of the protected few-the ones who can damn well do what they want to without having to worry about it."
"I don't believe it. There are some good people, even in this damn town, who'll take care of lawbreakers, regardless of who they are."
"I don't believe it. I never have believed it. The only way to make sure somebody gets what's coming to him is to give it to him personally."
"So you're gonna get even with them four?"
"That's right. And then I'm leaving for good."
"Think you'll be happy?"
"Happier than I am now, knowing they got away with raping me."
"Sure. Then who're you gonna fight with?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I don't expect you do. You remember what I said, though. Remember it when things look like they're real bad."
"You may be right, but it's something I've got to do."
"You know," he said after a moment of silence. "You're trying to hurt the wrong people."
"The hell I am. I know who raped me."
"But who's responsible for that sort of thing? Not just the people involved. Other people, too."
"Like who?"
"Like me, for instance."
"You? How the hell could you be responsible?"
"Well, I could have been more willing to live the way your mother wanted, instead of always digging in the ground, trying to find the gold that's probably not here any more anyway."
"That's not important."
"Yes, it is. I never was home, and I never had anything to say about the way you was raised. Besides, with me in the hills all the time, your mother got lonesome sometimes, and there'd be different men she'd bring home with her."
"I know," Toni said bitterly.
"So you didn't see the kind of childhood you should've. I could have given it to you, but I didn't"
"So what's that got to do with what happened four years ago?"
"Well," he said carefully, "because your mother had the reputation for being a whore, some of it rubbed off on you. So them guys just figured they was taking what you'd give 'em anyway. And it's my fault that I didn't stay home and keep you from getting that kind of reputation."
"You're trying to assuage your guilt," she said sharply. "You couldn't have done anything about my mother even if you'd stayed home. Not unless you spent every minute with her. She was a whore when you married her, and she stayed a whore afterwards, too."
He tipped his head sideways and looked at her.
"You're right about that," he said. "But I shouldn't have left you there to grow up with her."
"I can take care of myself," Toni said. "I'm going to show you, too. I'm going to show you that I'll wipe those four guys out in a way they'll never forget. They'll know it's because I set out to get even with them. I can't ask for anything better."
Pete shook his head.
"Vengeance is dangerous," he said. "It'll destroy you, too, unless you're mighty lucky."
"I'm the lucky sort," she said, standing up. "But right now I've got to go. I've got a car waiting up on the road for me."
He nodded.
"It's a shame the road don't come by here anymore," he said. "It sure was convenient."
"That was twenty years ago," she said. "And it was damned near impassable then."
"Well, I got a long memory." He stood up and looked down at her. "You're sure a pretty girl," he said. "Makes me wish you wasn't my daughter."
"If I weren't, I wouldn't be here," she laughed.
He grinned, too.
"Have any cigarettes?" he asked. "You used to always bring me cigarettes."
"Not a carton, like I used to," she said. "I left town in a hurry. But here's part of a pack, and one I haven't opened, I'D try and get some up to you before I go."
"When are you leaving?" he asked, taking the cigarettes and lighting one eagerly.
"Within the next couple of days," she replied. "Just as soon as I get everything taken care of."
"Okay. But I hope you change your mind."
"I won't And why should it matter so much to you, anyway?"
He sat down again, and wreathes of gray smoke curled up around his face, causing him to squint.
"I guess it's because I had some ideas about the kind of girl I wanted you to turn out to be," he said. "I mean, in spite of what your mother was, and what I am. I wanted to prove that the people around here were wrong."
"That's what I'm going to do," Toni said firmly.
"Not that way," the old man said. "I mean in a fine, good way."
"What's good about a broad from Jamestown?" she asked bitterly.
"That's what I wanted to show them." He stared out across the hillside to where it dropped away into a deep canyon. A couple of miles away a tree-clad ridge cut off their view toward the west. Deep blue-green mist filled the air, and the stillness seemed to catch them up and bind them closer together.
"You see, Toni," he went on after a long time, "I've always known what your mother was. She and I grew up in this country together. When we were in high school, she was the local round heels. She used to have a little shack at the end of the street behind the high school, and she'd take on the guys there for four-bits she was a high-priced whore in those days. I took my turn with the rest of them while we were in school, until they picked her up. In those days, they didn't have all the molly-coddling they give kids today. She went to juvenile hall for whoring, and that was that."
"I didn't know...."
"She came out of juvenile hall after six months, and she went right back to whorin' again. Only the second time she was more careful, and only worked guys she knew, in their cars or in their houses. She made enough money that she bought her own car before she graduated from high school-and those were days when most folks around town didn't even own cars. There wasn't much money around, but she managed to corner a whole heap of it.
"It looked like things was pretty good for her, and there wasn't no reason she couldn't have anything she wanted as long as it could be bought with money. But then she got ambitious and decided she really wanted to cash in on what she could do best. We got to seeing her around town with a flatland bastard with a little mustache and a gold-yellow coat that glittered in the sun. I'm damned if it didn't glitter in the sun. Anyway, next thing we know, she's organized. I mean, they start working in a little motel just over the bridge on the old road up toward Twain-Harte, and there's some other girls working with her. They each got a little cabin, and damned if that slicker with the glittery jacket doesn't sit behind the desk and 'register' the guests. Right away, prices went up, and pretty soon it was costin' two bucks for what we used to get for fifty cents when she was working by herself. A lot of guys couldn't afford it, but the sheriff in those days used to get a lot of it.
"It was kinda funny, because he'd charge accordin' to what you wanted, and you'd fill out a little slip of paper with a phony name on it, and he'd write some numbers on it that told the girl what you paid for. The only number I ever understood was 69, but maybe that was because that was what I usually wanted from her." He grinned and looked away, a little embarrassed at his admission. Then he shrugged. "But what the hell. You know what your mother is."
"I know," Toni said softly. "I just didn't realize it was going on as long as it was."
"All the way from the time she was a kid," Old Pete said. "But after she got busted the second time, she was put away for almost two years. They sent her down to Tehachapi that time."
"I never knew that."
"She came back, and everybody thought she'd go back to whoring, just like before. But she didn't. She tried to get a job, but nobody'd hire her. They all thought the same thing, so she got just madder'n hell, but she still wouldn't give in. She finally got a job working from midnight to eight at the restaurant up where the El Rancho's located now. It was a tough job, because all the guys she used to ding with would come by and proposition her, and when she'd turn them down they'd get mad and call her all sorts of names-real insulting names. But she stuck it out, just the same.
"I got into a couple of fights over her, just because I hated to hear some of the guys talking about her the way they did in the restaurant. I guess she knew about it, because she started being extra nice to me, and the next thing you know, I'm dating her just like she was ... well, just like she was a regular girl. Everybody thought I was gettin' it on the side from her, but I wasn't. I just enjoyed taking her out, and there wasn't any place to go m this God-forsaken town except to the movie twice a week. We weren't old enough to drink-at least I wasn't. I still don't know exactly how old she was.
"The change came over her when I asked her to marry me. I didn't do it because I wanted it from her. Hell, I'd had her often enough before. I guess I was in love with her in those days. Anyway, she got mad at me, called me a lot of dirty names, but then the next day she said she would. We drove over to Nevada in her car and got married, spent the night in a motel just south Carson City, and then we drove back over Sonora Pass. It took us two days to get over the road the way it was then, and we spent that night in the car. It was the last time we were ever able to make it without fighting.
"When we got back to town, she took up her old ways again. She quit her job at the restaurant, and she used to whore while I was at work up at Pickling Lumber Company. I didn't find out about it for almost a year, and by then she was pregnant with you. I couldn't leave her when she was going to have a baby, even though I didn't have any idea whether you were really my girl or not."
"You ... know?"
"Sure. She never said anything to me, but I know she used to laugh about it behind my back. It don't make no difference to me. You're my girl, and that's that. You understand."
He looked up at her, his rheumy blue eyes more moist than ever.
"I understand, Dad," she said, using a name she'd never used with him before in her life. "And I'm glad."
"Yeah," he said. "So when you were born, I stuck around for a while, and then I left. I came up here and started digging, just to have something to do. I found enough color to stay alive until the state finally came along and paid me for digging a hole."
"You found gold up here?"
"Sure," he said. "There's plenty in there. Come here. I'll show you."
He got up slowly, painfully, and hobbled stiffly into the tunnel behind the shack where he lived. He lighted a Coleman lantern and led her into the blackness. They'd gone about a hundred yards into the timbered tunnel when he pointed to a partially blocked tunnel going off to one side.
"There's color there," he said. "I think it's probably one of the richest pocket mines in the country. Maybe even richer than the one on Piety Hill."
"You're kidding!"
"No, I'm not. I found a nugget in there once worth a thousand dollars, at least. That was when I closed the shaft up."
"Why?"
"Think of all the trouble it would be, if I was to get rich now. I'd have to fight bastards to keep 'em off my land, and they'd be pestering me all the time. I like it just the way it is."
Toni shook her head.
"I guess I don't understand," she said.
He chuckled.
"Well, maybe you'd understand if I told you that I never got a divorce from your ma. If I found gold up here, she'd get a big hunk of it. I'm just not willing for her to have it"
She nodded, understanding something of Old Pete that had always escaped her before. She turned wordlessly and walked away, pausing at the edge of the clearing to turn and wave, but he had not followed her from the tunnel. She knew he was inside watching her leave, but his preference for solitude drove him from sight whenever possible.
She followed the path back up to the road, climbed into the car and rode back to town. She was depressed, as she always had been, after seeing Old Pete. He was content to receive his three hundred dollars a year from the state Board of Mines for the work he did in the worthless mine he was digging in whenever weather and his own health held up. He survived on the kindness of a few of the old-timers who sometimes left food and other supplies for him-and once he'd appeared in a movie being filmed in the foothill country.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back in town, Toni stopped for a cup of coffee in a large, red mansion across the street from the red church-an historic building that had been doomed to destruction before being purchased by a donut shop operator and converted into a commercial enterprise. She had restored parts of the interior, and during the tourist season charged for tours through the lower floor of the structure. Toni was glad to see the building still in existence, for she enjoyed the weathered, settled nature of the building, even though she'd never want to live there herself.
Feeling somewhat refreshed after her coffee, she walked a half-mile down a road that went behind the high school and followed a creek-bed out of town, finally coming into Jamestown along a back route. When she came to the yellow ranch house, she paused for a moment in front of it, looking carefully at the signs of suburban contentment that surrounded it. The garden and flowers were well-kept, high shade trees lined the western side of the lot so the afternoon sun would be cut, and a large air-conditioner hummed softly in the quiet afternoon.
Toni crossed the bridge and walked up on the porch. Inside, she could hear the television set tuned to a popular daytime serial, brought into that remote region by cable.
She rang the bell, waited, then rang again. Finally she heard the sound of footsteps approaching. A colored girl opened the door. "Is Susan home?"
"Just a minute, ma'am," the maid said. "Who's calling?"
"Tell her Toni Francis."
"Yes, ma'am." The maid closed the door, leaving Toni standing alone, and then in a moment reappeared. "Come right in, ma'am," she said.
"Toni," Susan said effusively, coming forward with her arms outstretched as soon as Toni was in the house. She was immaculately cared for-not a hair was out of place, her "at home" gown flawlessly pressed. She looked like an expensive toy for somebody to play with, and Toni filed that thought in the back of her mind. "It's good to see you again. Goodness, it's been simply ages since you've been here."
"I've never been here," Toni said simply, accepting the embrace of the dark-haired girl cautiously. She was alert for any sign that Susan Kidd was likely to be receptive to a Lesbian advance, but she decided that Susan was simply one of those outgoing women who thought nothing of physical contact between females. There was nothing sexual in her embrace. "I haven't been in town since you got married."
"That's right, you haven't," Susan said. "Goodness, how time flies."
Toni nodded as she was led into the darkened, cool living room. Susan sat her on the couch, then took up a seat in an easy chair directly opposite the television set. It was obviously the spot where she spent most of her time during the day, for it was equipped with two end tables, on one of which there was a coffee carafe, and on the other were several open packages of cookies, crackers and candy.
"You don't mind if I watch to the end of this program, do you?" Susan asked. "I just live for this show every day."
Toni nodded her assent and settled back into the cushions of the couch to watch the remainder of the insipid drama. It was one of the afternoon tear-jerkers about a wife being wronged by her husband-or so it seemed, though there was the definite inference that the husband was wrongfully suspected by the wife. In any event, the action presented in this episode was so miniscule that it was really impossible to tell if there was really any plot to it at all.
It was over finally, and Susan signaled to the maid to turn the set off.
"That's all right, LaVerne," she said. "We'll skip The Life of Cindy McGovern this time."
The colored maid shrugged and snapped the set off.
But from her expression it was obvious that she was used to watching this particular program, and she resented missing it. She stalked from the room angrily, an ' after a moment the women in the living room heard the door slam.
"She's mad," Toni said.
"Well," Susan said, "you can't tell about the civil rights people. They get mad at any little thing."
"I don't understand," Toni said, frowning. "I mean, what has civil rights got to do with her getting mad because she can't watch a TV program?"
"It's obvious, isn't it, Toni, dear?" Susan reached into a box and pulled out a cheese cracker. "I mean, you let them have a few privileges-to make them feel equal, you know, and then you have to take one of the privileges away even for one day and they get mad."
Toni shook her head.
"You've changed, Susan," she said. "I hardly know you."
"I'm not really any different than I've always been," Susan said. "It's just that now that I'm a married woman with a home of my own, I'm able to have things the way I want them."
Toni smiled.
"You seem to have things pretty good," she said. "From the way things look."
Susan let a little troubled frown crease her forehead.
"It's ... it's not bad," she said. "But Ron...." She shook her head sadly.
"Isn't he a good provider?" Toni asked maliciously. "Oh, he's a good provider," Susan replied, completely oblivious to Toni's vicious comment. "He works hard at his job-he's manager of the Sav-Rite Market on the road where it turns up toward Twain-Harte, you know-and he works on his day off in the liquor store down on Washington Street. No, it's not that."
Toni grinned at her former schoolmate and said, "Then what in the world can it be?"
Susan looked at her for a moment, as though questioning the wisdom of confiding in her. Then, deciding that she could, she leaned forward and let her voice drop conspiratorally.
"Toni, I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone else in the world," she said.
Toni leaned forward in the same manner, as though she was being let into some kind of deep secret, though inwardly she was laughing at the ridiculousness of this woman who sat before her, steeped in all the small town prejudices and hypocrisies.
"I won't tell a soul," she said.
"Well, like I said, it's Ron," Susan said, her voice a hoarse whisper. "I ... I never thought marriage would be like this. Not with a good, normal boy from Sonora."
"What's that got to do with it?" Toni asked.
"I mean, where did ... did a nice boy from Sonora learn ... about those things?"
Toni looked blank.
"What things?" she asked. "I don't understand what you're talking about."
Susan looked at Toni for a long moment, then stood up, walked across the floor and sat down beside her.
"Toni," she said desperately, "you just have no idea what I have to put up with."
"If you mean sex," Toni said with the same tone Susan had in her voice, "it's something that's part of marriage."
"I know that, I know that," Susan said impatiently. "But not like Ron wants it." Toni shook her head.
"I don't know what you mean," she said. She was secretly pleased that this woman was so willing to confide in her, for she would unwittingly give her the clue to Ron's destruction. "I mean, sex is sex, isn't it?"
Susan shook her head rapidly, her upper Up curling in an involuntary movement of repugnance.
"You have no idea," she said. "You just have no idea how ... how it can be."
"I guess not," Toni said softly. "I wouldn't know much about it, being not married and all."
Susan turned her large, moist gray eyes on her.
"I ... I learned a lot right after we were married," Susan said. "I just don't know where he learned it. Nobody else in this whole town knows about it. It just isn't done here, that's all."
Toni looked at Susan inquiringly.
"Tell me about it," she said in a whisper, as though her curiosity was intensly aroused. "So I'll know what to watch out for."
"Oh, Toni, I don't know if I can," Susan said. "It makes me go all creepy just to think about it."
"There's nothing to worry about," Toni said encouraginly. "There's just us here."
"I know, but it's so awful. You'll think I'm terrible just for staying with him, when you hear about ... what he wants to do." , "I promise I won't," Toni said reassuringly. "I know you have your own reasons for staying with him, no matter what, and I won't even ask you what they are."
Susan seemed satisfied. She stood up, walked to the door where she could see the colored maid, La Verne, working in the laundry located in the garage.
"I just have to be sure she isn't listening," Susan said. "She listens any time I give her the chance."
"Terrible, the liberty the help takes these days," Toni said, her sarcasm veiled by the honeyed-sweetness of her tone.
"Oh, you know it," Susan replied. "Especially up here, where there are so few of them."
"I know," Toni said. "Now tell me about Ron."
"Well," Susan said nervously, "you know ... you know the facts of life, don't you?"
Toni's laugh gave assent to the question.
"All right," Susan continued. "Well, when Ron and I were going together, I mean, when he'd proposed and we knew exactly when we were going to get married, I used to let him ... well, let him touch me once in a while."
Toni nodded understandingly, silently urging her to continue. She did.
"I mean, I could have waited until we were married, but I sometimes got to feeling ... well, that way, and I didn't mind as long as he couldn't see me. We'd usually be sitting in his car on the hill up behind Volpone Heights, you know."
Toni nodded.
"I'd let him ... reach inside my panties," Susan said. "Oh, Toni, I'm just sure you think I'm awful for telling you things like this."
"Not at all," Toni assured her. "I need to know things like this so I'll know what to do if I ever am in the same situation."
"Okay," Susan said. "I'm so glad you understand."
"I do."
"Well, in those days, he was satisfied if he got to touch me all he wanted to. I mean, he'd play with my breasts lots of times, and it didn't matter much, but when I got to feeling, well, hot I'd let him really feel me up that way until I'd had enough."
"How could you tell when you'd had enough?" Toni asked, as though she were a veritable virgin.
"Well," Susan said, blushing intently, "there's something that happens ... to a woman sometimes ... that's the greatest thing in the world. It's all throbbing and relaxing and all, and it used to happen to me once in a while when Ron was touching me like that."
"Doesn't it happen any more?"
"It hasn't since we got married," Susan said. "I ... I want it to, but I just can't seem to make it happen. Even when he touches me the same way. I don't know what's the matter."
"Maybe you're trying too hard," Toni suggested.
"I don't know. But it makes me feel terrible, that it doesn't happen any more."
"It must really be good, for you to feel that strongly about it."
"Oh, kid, you just don't know."
"Maybe it'll happen to me some day."
"I hope so. It should, if you find a man you really love."
"I don't think that's ever going to happen," Toni said. "But go on with your story."
"Well," Susan said after a moment's hesitation. "Once, when we were up there on the bill, Ron ... took ... opened his pants ... and tried to make me touch ... it. But I wouldn't, and I told him right then that if he ever tried anything like that again, I'd call our engagement off and tell everybody why. Of course, I'd have been too ashamed ever to tell what happened, but anyway, he didn't do it anymore."
"That must have been a hell of an experience," Toni said.
"Oh, kid, you just have no idea," Susan said fiercely. "I was so scared I almost wet my pants. And the idea of ... of what he wanted to do with it almost made me sick to my stomach."
"I can guess," Toni said.
"He tried to say I owed it to him," Susan continued. "That I got him all worked up and took my own pleasure without giving him any. His very words, if you can imagine such a thing: that I took my pleasure and didn't give him any. As if he didn't enjoy touching me, or else why did he want to do it all the time?"
"I don't know," Toni said. "Was he really like that?"
Susan nodded.
"And it got worse after we got married. I knew what to expect ... I mean, I'm not stupid about sex or anything like that, and it wasn't so bad at first. It wasn't as good as I thought it would be, because I still couldn't forget what he was doing to me, and I never did get the feeling that I wanted. But still, it wasn't that bad. It hurt me, usually, and I felt sick afterwards, but I could even have put up with that, if he hadn't started ... started ... the other things."
"What other things, for goodness sake?" Toni asked.
"Come," Susan said, standing up and taking her by the hand. "It'll be easier to show you than to explain it. I ... I feel funny in my stomach when I talk about it."
Toni followed her down the hall toward the back of the house, into the bedroom she shared with her husband-with twin beds set on opposite sides of the room. She carefully closed the door behind her, then went to Ron's bed, lifted the mattress, and pulled out a book. Toni grinned when she saw it, for it was a title she'd long known, long since read and incorporated into her behavior those things that seemed appropriate to her. She read the title, An ABZ of Love.
"Look at it," Susan said, handing it to her. "Look at the pictures."
Toni took it, thumbed through it, expressly stopping only at those line drawings that were totally innocuous. She shook her head.
"I don't see anything wrong with this," she said, returning the book to her hostess.
"But what about this," Susan said, turning quickly and surely to a drawing of a man with a full erection. Her swiftness amused Toni-she obviously knew exactly where to look.
"Well, it's graphic," Toni said. "But if that's what a man looks like when he's like that, so what? It shouldn't have any effect on you, being married and alL"
"Yes, but what about this?" She took the book again and turned this time to a picture of a man loving a woman, kissing her intimately. Susan watched Toni carefully for her reaction.
Toni decided to put her on as much as she could.
"My God, Susan. Is this what you've been talking about?"
Susan nodded.
"Can you imagine letting a man kiss you there?" she said, indignation masking only incompletely the intense satisfaction she felt coursing through her.
Toni shook her head-expressing the first really true expression of feeling she had made since she'd entered the house an hour before. She did reserve the thought that if it were a woman kissing her that way, the pleasure would be intense and desirable, but she would never let a man have her that way-or any other way, if she could help it.
"Well," Susan said, "what do you think?"
"I ... I don't know," Toni said with mock hesitation. "I don't know what to say."
"That's what Ron wants to do all the time," Susan said. "He asks me at least once every night, and it's caused more fights between us than anything else."
"That's terrible," Toni said, not believing what she spoke.
"And that's not all," Susan said, carefully feeding out little bits of information in an effort to shock her guest as much as possible. "He ... he once even asked me to do the same to him."
"No!"
"Yes. Would you believe it? A good Sonora boy asking for a thing like that-and from his wife! Just like I was a common prostitute or something." Toni shook her head.
"You have a lot to put up with, don't you, Susan?" she said with mock sympathy. Susan nodded.
"If there was just something in it for me," she said, like there used to be before we got married, I wouldn't mind so much. But there's nothing. I feel nothing but disguest when I feel ... it ... inside me. And when he ... he ... does it in me, it's just awful. I can hardly stand it."
Toni nodded sympathetically.
"I understand," she said. "I think I'd feel the same way, if something like that happened to me."
"You would?" Susan looked at her eagerly. Toni nodded again.
"Almost certainly. I wouldn't want a man doing that to me, if I could help it."
"But isn't a woman supposed to enjoy sex with her husband?"
"Not necessarily," Toni said. "Not when they don't agree about what they should do and when." It was Susan's turn to nod.
"You've made me feel a lot better," she said. "I always wondered if maybe I was some kind of freak for not letting him do what he wanted. I read a book about sex once that said it was all right, but even so I couldn't manage it."
"Books aren't always true," Toni said. "And you're not wrong. You just keep him at a distance for a while, and sooner or later he'll come to see things your way."
"I hope you're right," Susan said. She opened the bedroom door and led the way back into the living room. "I just worry about it all the time, and it's making a nervous wreck out of me."
"I can understand that," Toni said, watching Susan collapse in her chair again. "I can certainly understand that."
Susan looked up at her gratefully, then said, "Look, Toni, why don't you stay for dinner tonight?"
"I'm sorry, Susan, I'm busy tonight. Something I've waited a long time to do. I can't pass it up."
"I'm sorry," Susan said.
"But why don't we go out Wednesday night?" Toni asked. "I'm tied up tomorrow night too, but Wednesday night I'm free. We could go someplace nice and have a good time."
Susan looked hesitant.
"And," Toni continued, "if there's any problem of money, I've got plenty."
"Oh, it's not that," Susan said. "Ron makes plenty. It's just that with our expenses so high and all, we don't always have any money left over to have fun."
"Let me take the two of you out, then," Toni said, her feeling of satisfaction growing strongly as she spoke. "We can consider it a kind of celebration of my coming home."
"All right," Susan said, almost too quickly. "Wednesday night it is. What time?"
"Why don't you pick me up about seven?" she suggested.
"Oh dear, Ron doesn't get off until seven," Susan said.
"So what? If he has to change clothes, we can pick him up. You come to the inn and get me about seven, and we can make some kind of arrangements for getting Ron later. All right?"
Susan nodded.
"All right," she agreed. "I'll talk to Ron about it when he gets home tonight."
"He'll be glad to go," Toni said with certainty.
"I'm sure he will," Susan agreed. "We don't get to go out very often."
Toni smiled.
"I've got to go," she said. "I've stayed too long as it is."
"I'm sorry," Susan said. "It's really been good to see you. I don't see much company up here. We did at first, when we first got married, but every one of our friends dropped away when we couldn't entertain them like they did us. So we live pretty much to ourselves."
"Well, we'll have a good time Wednesday night," Toni said. "You just watch and see."
Susan nodded.
"If you're going back toward town," Susan said, "why don't you ride with LaVerne? She'll be leaving soon."
"LaVerne?" Toni said questioningly.
"My maid," Susan replied. "Ron thought she was a luxury at first, but he's finally gotten used to the idea that I need somebody to do things for me?"
Toni nodded, smiling secretly to herself.
"If she's driving into town, I'd be glad to ride with her," she said. "I feel like I've walked a hundred miles today."
"Good." Susan stepped to the back of the house, called the maid and made arrangements. "It's all settled," she said, returning to the living room and snapping on the television before falling exhausted into her easy chair. "She'll be off in about five minutes."
Toni waited until the maid appeared, dressed for the street. Then she said good-bye to Susan, reaffirming the dinner date for two nights hence. Susan nodded to her absently, her eyes once again glued to the idiocy on the boob-tube.
She walked out to the driveway, where LaVerne indicated her car, and moments later they were driving up the hill toward the red church.
"You a friend of hers?" LaVerne asked as they rounded a curve.
"Not really," Toni answered. "I knew her husband better than her."
"It figures," LaVerne said. "I never see a woman like her."
"What do you mean?"
"I heard what you was talking about," LaVerne said. "She talks about it to everybody who comes around."
"Well, it's important to her. It must be, or she wouldn't talk about it so much."
"Shee-it," LaVerne said. "AH she thinks about is the fact that he wants to eat her."
Toni shrugged.
"It's still important to her."
"He wants to eat her, and she don't want him to. That's all there is to it. He likes his sex that way, and she's stupid not to give it to him."
"Why not?"
"Because he gonna get that way, whether she gives it to him or not."
"Oh?"
"Shee-it, no. He eat me, when we gets a chance, and I eat him. He's good at it, too, baby, let me tell you."
"You have him instead of his wife?"
"Any time he can get with me," LaVerne said. "He think it's the greatest, and she real stupid for not learning about it."
"But doesn't he try to force it on her?"
"Shee-it, honey, a woman's only way of holdin' a man's through sex," the maid said. "And if that the way he want it, then she ought to learn to give it to him that way. If she don't, she gonna find he's gettin' it someplace else."
"Like from you?"
"That's right. And why not? I like it with him, and he like it with me. I let him do what he want, and I get a kick outta it. I do for him, too, and even if I don't like it too much, I get what I want first, so I got no kick coming. He always gets me off before he asks me to do for him, so how can I complain?"
"I guess you can't," Toni said. "You don't mind?"
"Mind? Shee-it, honey, I got to do it or lose my job. Them two can't no more afford a maid than I can, and if I didn't keep him happy in bed, why hell, he'd bounce me quicker than owl-shee-it."
"That's one way to look at it," Toni said.
"It's the only way to look at it practical," LaVerne said. "If I don't look at it that way, I'm out of a job."
"Does she ... ever look like she'd like to try you?"
"Shee-it, no. Not because she couldn't learn something from it, but because she's so dam' afraid of sex. She no more loves her husband than I do, but she likes the things he gives her, so she puts up with him. Me too, as a matter-of-fact."
"Have you ever had a woman?" Toni asked.
"Not yet," LaVerne said. "But not because I ain't thought about it often enough. It got to be better than a man."
"Take me," Toni said. "You? You one o' them?" Toni nodded.
"Either way you like it," she answered. "You gotta be kiddin'."
"I'm not kidding," Toni said. "I want to go to my motel right now. I've had a hard day, and I need some loving to make it possible for me to get through the next few hours."
LaVerne stopped at the stop sign by the red church and looked at her closely.
"You puttin' me on?" she asked.
"Not for a minute," Toni answered. "I know the route, both ways, and all I need is for you to come to the motel behind the inn with me for a few minutes. I'll do for you, or you can do for me, or we can do for each other at the same time-whatever you prefer."
"Shee-it, honey, I never thought I'd find me a white woman who swung my way."
"I swing your way," Toni said. "And the sooner you drive down to the inn, the sooner we can get this show on the road."
LaVerne jerked the car violently ahead as she started down the hill toward the Inn.
"I just don't believe it," she said. "It just don't make sense to me."
"What doesn't?"
"You. I never figure I find me a swinger in this town."
"You live here. How come?"
LaVerne shrugged.
"I got to live some place."
"Come on, that's no answer."
LaVerne looked at her strangely for a minute.
"I can trust you?"
"Sure. I don't care if you killed your mother, I wouldn't tell anybody."
"I didn't kill nobody, but I had to leave Frisco in a hurry."
"Oh?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
She had LaVerne park on the parking lot behind M the inn, as close to the stairway as possible, since they both knew that if they were observed going into the room together there would be the likelihood of trouble. Toni's body was a raging torrent of passion as she instructed the colored girl to follow her five minutes after she'd colsed the door of the room-the precaution necessary in case anyone had seen them drive up together. Then she got out of the car and hurried inside the room, where she immediately peeled her clothes from her body in anticipation of the coming girl who would be along so soon.
She was only down to her bra and panties when LaVerne walked in, and her first reaction was one of surprise.
"Man, you got yourself a build, ain't you, honey?" she said, looking admiringly at Toni's more than ample curves. "No wonder men look at you when you pass."
"I like it," Toni said simply, bending forward and reaching behind her to unfasten her bra. "And so do lots of other people."
"I guess, I guess," LaVerne said. "And like I say, I can understand why."
"Well, are you going to keep yours hidden all afternoon?" Toni demanded.
"No, ma'am," LaVerne said. "I was just waiting to be asked."
"You think I stripped like this for practice?"
"If you need it," the maid said, starting to unbutton her uniform down the front. "But I don't think you do."
"I had me a thing going in the Fillmore District a couple young chicks hustling for me. We got us a new DA. and the old payoffs didn't count anymore, so I hadda leave. They found out my girls was under age."
"And you never tried them?"
"Hell, honey, if I owned me a bakery, I wouldn't eat the product"
"Good point."
"Shee-it, honey, you talk like you got paper between your legs."
Toni grinned and shrugged her shoulders. There was nothing she could say to LaVerne that would really mean anything, for the colored girl was much more experienced in the ways of the world than she. She was willing to do anything in the line of sex that seemed expedient, and that was all Toni required. LaVerne had a sleek, young body that would be a delight in bed, and the sooner the better. The best she could do would be to remain quiet and learn from her, for she sensed that the maid was much more than a maid, that she had had experience that went far beyond the possibility of the kind of experience she could have gotten in Sonora, especially in the bed of Ron Kidd. Because whatever else he might be, Ron Kidd was not the sort to have mastered anything much in the way of sexual technique. LaVerne had probably taught him quite a few things in the months they'd been making it together.
She stepped out of the simple cotton garment, then pulled her slip high over her head.
"My underwear's not as fancy as yours," she said apologetically. "But my body's every bit as fine as yours."
"I agree," Toni said as the girl freed her breasts from her bra and rolled her panties over her hips. Her smooth, brown flesh was passion incarnate as the two women moved together, their bare flesh melting into a passionate embrace. Toni clasped the girl's buttocks and pulled her thighs tightly against hers, at the same time that she rubbed her hips against her in an agony of desire. "Oh, baby, I want you so."
"Me, too," LaVerne whispered, pushing Toni back toward the bed. "But me, I likes to rest when I loves."
Toni spread herself on the bed and expected that LaVerne would lay alongside her for some preliminary love-play, before they came to making a move toward real lovemaking. But she was mistaken, for hardly had she settled herself supine when she became aware of the girl kissing her passionately on the inner thighs, her tongue a dart of fire against Toni's firm young flesh.
"Oh, yes," Toni cried eagerly, "yes, yes, yes!" It had been days since she'd really had the satisfaction she knew was coming, and the ersatz thing she'd known earlier in the afternoon couldn't begin to compare with this. "Yes, LaVerne, yes!"
LaVerne's kiss thrilled her to the depths of her soul, and she writhed in erotic abandon as the girl raised her passion skillfully. Moments later, she rocketed through a moment that was as thrillingly satisfying as anything she'd ever had with Thelma.
A moment later she looked down, to catch the glance of a smiling LaVerne, looking up at her over the swell of her smooth belly.
"You like me, don't you, girl?" the colored woman asked.
"I sure do," Toni said breathlessly. "You're the greatest."
"Then you gonna do for me the way I ask you, ain't you?"
"If I can," Toni said, struggling into a sitting position, a little surprised still that her passion had been satisfied so soon.
"You can," LaVerne said. "All you got to do is watch-and do whatever you feel like doin' from watching."
"Easy enough," Toni said. "But what are you going to do?"
"Just watch, white girl, and learn how it's done."
LaVerne spread herself on the bed in Toni's place, but instead of pulling the dark-haired girl down to love her, she reached down and began stimulating herself.
For a moment, Tom sat on the bed alongside the dark-skinned girl, but then she moved to a chair not far from the bed, from which she could watch every move the girl made. LaVerne focused her attention on the erect center of her womanhood, and soon was writhing in passionate abandon as she did for herself. Watching her, Toni felt her own passion rise again, and in a few moments she was doing the same for herself, following the same rhythm as the maid. They reached their moments-La Verne's first and Toni's second, almost simultaneously.
Toni grinned as they both came back to earth. "You have a bell of an effect on me," she said. "You too," LaVerne said. "On me. Ain't it stupid?"
"Why?"
"What's a white girl and a colored girl in bed together got in common?" she asked. "We got everything working against us-everything from race to being queer."
"I don't mind being either," Toni said.
"Not now, but if it made a difference to you, you would," LaVerne said. "And I'd make a difference to you the first time you couldn't get a job because of me."
Toni looked at the wise girl for several minutes longer, then she said, "Then get your ass out of here, because if you stay here any longer, I'll fall in love with you and forget why I came back to this God-forsaken town."
"Don't do that." LaVerne scooped up her uniform, fastened it around her and left without bothering with any of her underclothes. She rolled them in a ball and stuffed them under her arm as she walked out, leaving Toni nude, breathless, and satisfied.
After a long moment, Toni stirred and said, "One more visit before I get ready for Charlie Long tonight." She stood up, considered taking a shower and decided she didn't have time, then dressed again. She knew the coming encounter wouldn't involve sex immediately, so she didn't bother with underclothes at all-except for a bra that held her breasts at parade rest, and which could be snapped to attention whenever she threw her shoulders back.
It was almost four-thirty when she left the motel to go visit Ron Kidd at the supermarket he managed. She was tired as well, for she had had a trying day, with two sexual encounters-neither of which she'd anticipated. She felt bad about LaVerne, for she knew that Susan was taking advantage of her in a lot of ways, though not in bed, and the thought of the lovely colored girl having to submit to Ron Kidd in order to keep her job struck her as obnoxious. But then, she'd never figured there was anything fair or just in this life.
She walked past one of the two theaters in the town, past the Opera Hall Garage where she had seen Ken Barnweld that morning. She was careful not to look in, for she didn't want to have further conversation with him then. Time enough when he kept his date with her the next night. Then she continued up the hill, past the old houses with their walls of schist topped by cyclone fences. The sidewalk after she left the heart of town degenerated to a path, and along it was several feet higher than the highway below, so that she was looking down on the roofs of the oars that passed her.
She crossed the parking lot of a large lumber and hardware store, after stepping carefully over the tracks that constituted the yard of the Sierra Railroad in town-a local service line ranging from Tuolumne in the hills to Modesto, in the valley far below. Then she was on the parking lot of the Sav-Rite supermarket. It wasn't busy at this time of day, for it was too early for the after-work people who stopped off to pick up a few things on their way home from work, and Monday wasn't a particularly busy day anyway.
She stepped inside the modernistic brick-and-plate glass building and was gratified to feel the sweep of air conditioned coolness cover her. She stood still for a moment, watching the bustle of the clerks and stock boys busy with the few customers who were in the store, but she didn't see Ron Kidd. Just about the time she was ready to decide that perhaps he wasn't there, one of the checkers called for the manager to approve a check.
Toni stepped back so that she was partially hidden by a soft-drink machine as she watched, and a moment after the loudspeaker call, Ron Kidd came from the office in the front of the store, walked over to the cash register, initialed the check in question, and then hurried back into his office. Toni smiled, for she knew now how to get him to come out, and she anticipated with pleasure the coming encounter.
She pushed a shopping cart into the store, picked up a couple of items she knew she could use in the motel-a couple of six packs of beer and some cookies to serve as a snack if she got hungry later that night. Then she walked to the checkout stand with her purchases, her checkbook in her hand. When she offered the chesty girl who waited on her the check she'd written, the girl asked, "Do you have one of our cards?"
"No," Toni said. "But I have plenty of identification."
"I'll have to call the manager." She reached behind her absently, picked up a push-to-talk microphone and interrupted the background music with, "Manager service at Four, please."
They stood at impasse for the moments it took for Ron Kidd to come scurrying from his office. He smiled, said hello, and took the check to look at it without really seeing her. At this point he was totally professional, but when he saw the name printed on top of the check he did a classical double-take.
"Toni?" he said, surprise and anxiety filling his voice. "You ... you came back."
"That's right, Ron," she smiled sweetly. "After four years, I finally came back."
"Did ... did you want something special?" he asked.
"Right now, you can okay my check, and then we can go into your office and talk. I don't like to talk out here where just anybody can hear us." She glanced significantly at the chesty checkout clerk, who was all ears as they chatted. Ron nodded, initialed the check and handed it to the clerk, who looked disappointed that she wasn't going to be privy to the rest of the conversation.
Toni picked up her groceries and followed Ron into his office. When they were alone, she said, "That girl who checked me out-you and she have something going, don't you?"
Ron jerked his head around and looked at her as he settled himself behind his cluttered desk.
"No, no," he said too quickly. "There's nothing between Carol and me."
Toni smiled knowingly.
"I'm not your wife, Ron," she said. "So I don't give a damn whether you have or not. And you'd better be glad I'm not, because you don't lie very well."
He looked at her evenly for a long moment, fear growing within him.
"What do you want, Toni?" he asked finally. His voice was strangled, showing the tenseness he felt.
"Nothing, Ron," she replied, her voice soft and reassuring. "Nothing at all, really. I just came to see you because ... because I remembered you ... even after all this time."
The appeal to his vanity overwhelmed his fear.
"You mean, you didn't come here to make trouble?"
She laughed throatily.
"Never. Why should I want to make trouble?"
"I don't know. I thought maybe ... "
"Don't think any more. Just remember that I came to see you."
"All right." He settled back in his chair a little more comfortably.
"Now let's start over," Toni said. "You and that girl out there have something going, don't you?"
He grinned sheepishly and nodded.
"She works late sometimes-closes the cash registers for me. It just sort of happened one night, and since then she's been more jealous than my wife."
"It figures. Susan's happy if she's got her television set and a maid to wait on her."
"How do you know that?" He sat up quickly, completely knocked off balance again.
"I just came from seeing Susan," Toni replied simply. "You don't mind, do you?"
"You ... you didn't tell her anything, did you?"
"Of course not. Ron, you've got to believe me that I came back to see you, not spread gossip from a long time ago."
"All right," he said reluctantly. "But I wish you hadn't gone to see her."
"Why?"
"Well, I don't know. It just doesn't seem right, somehow."
"You mean I'm not fit to associate with your too-too precious wife?"
"No, no, I don't mean that. I don't know what I do mean, in fact."
"One thing I know," Toni said carefully, "is that you've something going with LaVerne, too."
"How the hell ... "
"Easy. I can spot it in a second, and I rode back to town with your maid. That's all. But relax. I'm not going to tell anybody."
"I don't like anybody knowing about it, though," he said. "I've got my career to think about."
"Sure, you have, Ron. But not everybody's able to see little things like that the way I can. And so your secret's safe with me."
"I hope so," he said, beginning to perspire nervously. "I hope so."
"To show you I don't mean any harm," she said, "you and your wife are going to have dinner with me on Wednesday night"
"Oh?"
"It's all arranged with Susan. I'll take the two of you some place like Sullivan Creek Lodge."
He nodded. "So what's that going to prove?"
"Nothing, except that if you work it right, you can stop by the motel where I'm staying before you go home to get Susan."
"Oh?" His interest in her and the coming event revived.
"Sure, Ron," she said softly. "I don't want to have to spell it out few you too much, but you and Susan are supposed to pick me up about seven-thirty. Maybe you should come about six-forty-five or so-maybe even meet her there in the inn. But in any case, we could have a few minutes before she's to show up."
He nodded, his eyes afire, though he tried to keep the feeling that was stirring deep within him from showing. He stood up, walked around the desk and pulled her to her feet. His embrace was crude and coarse as he cupped her buttocks tightly in both hands and pulled her body against his, and his lips crushed hers in a travesty of a passionate kiss. His tongue was rough and insistent against her lips, and she relinquished enough of herself to maintain the promise of oral delight to come.
His hard fingers probed deeply through the bunched material of her dress, actually seeking entrance, but she moved deftly to avoid it.
"No, Ron," she whispered. "You'll mess me all up and I won't be able to walk back to the inn without everybody knowing what's been happening."
His breath was coming in hot, harsh gasps.
"Look, we can ... you can ... for me, here," he said. "Oh, Toni, baby. It's been so long. I've thought about you for so long."
"I'll bet," she whispered. "Just like I've thought about you. But not right now. I'll ... I'll do anything you want Wednesday night. I don't want to start anything now, with that girl outside knowing I'm here."
He straightened suddenly, as though she had turned off his passion completely.
"You're right," he said. "She's a little jealous, and if she thought anything was going on in here, she could report me and I'd lose my job."
Toni smiled and ran her hand caressingly over his cheek.
"Whatever Ronny wants, Ronny gets on Wednesday night," she whispered.
At that moment, there was a call from Carol, the checker, for him to come and okay a check.
"I'll bet anything at all that it's a phony call," Toni said. "She just wants to make sure nothing gets started in here."
He looked down at the bulge in his pants.
"That's the first thing she'll look for," he said. "You go on out, because I can't do anything about it as long as you're here."
She left, smiling warmly at Carol, who didn't even acknowledge seeing her. Then she walked away, down the hill and back toward the inn. She had only time left for a meal then a shower before her first encounter-I with Charlie Long, lecherous banker and father of a spineless, less-than-human son.
But as she walked down the hill, she thought about the man she'd just left A germ of understanding began to filter through, and she saw why he behaved the way he did. Susan, his wife, was up on a pedestal, too high, too pure, too good in his eye to be a sexual object in reality. And she, of course, contributed her own bit to this as much as she could-her nasty-niceness made any kind of sex repugnant to her. Ron interpreted this as the "goodness" of a wife, and by a curious kind of blending, wife and mother became one to him, psychologically speaking, which further removed his wife from the possibility of being a sex-object. So he was able to achieve satisfaction only with women who were beneath him, who were not "good" in the sense his psyche demanded. Only by making love with a woman who was beneath him could he find sufficient degradation in the act to justify it to himself.
She nodded warmly to herself as she entered her motel room, pushing the supercilious market manager from her mind. The only thing she wanted from him now was the opportunity to destroy him, and his cheap, panting manner told her that he would be the easiest of all. Nothing would be easier than taking his sexuality, twisting it to her own advantage, and wiping him out. And since he was so concerned with position, with appearance, his destruction would be all the more complete. He reminded her of all the hypocritical couples across the country-the Johns and Emilies-who were more concerned with what people thought of them than with what they were inside themselves. They became the hollow people, the meaningless lumps of protoplasm inhabiting the earth.
CHAPTER NINE
The only thing that remained before Charlie Long arrived was for Toni to slip into her skirt and tuck her blouse in. She purposely held off this final bit of dressing, planning to use it as a means of giving Charlie an opening for the kind of thing she wanted from him. She knew her man well enough to know that he really wouldn't need any kind of excuse, but she wanted to get things started as quickly as possible. She had only half an hour to achieve what she wanted, and in order to do it, she wanted to waste no time. It was essential that he do just as she wanted him to, so that the timing would be just right.
A knock on the door told her that Charlie was there. She stepped into her skirt quickly and, without fastening it, hurried to the door.
"Oh, Charlie," she said, "come on in. You caught me a little behind schedule."
The paunchy, self-important banker sniffed and sat down in one of the chairs next to the window. He pulled the curtain back, looked carefully out over the parking lot, and then let it drop in place again.
"No need to worry about being late," he said. "I'm in no hurry to get anywhere."
"That's good," Toni said, reaching behind her and fastening her skirt, carefully allowing her blouse to ride up just a bit, to allow him a peek of her black-net bra. "I just couldn't seem to get started tonight."
"Maybe you don't want to go out?" Charlie said.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
He shrugged, at the same time licking his lips salaciously.
"We could always eat here, right in the room," he said.
She smiled at him non-committally and walked to the phone.
"I could order us a drink, just to get things off on the right kind of note," she said. "Okay?"
He nodded eagerly, and while she spoke to room service, she began tucking her blouse into her skirt. When she turned back to face him, she saw the desire in his eyes and knew that he was having trouble keeping his seat. Then, waiting until she heard the boy with the drinks coming up the steps outside, she sat down and, shielding the view only partially with her body, she pretended to be adjusting her stocking on the leg away from him. Charlie stood up and moved quickly toward her, his lips dry with anticipation. Just as he was about to reach out for her, she turned on him and smiled.
"Take care of the drinks, Charlie, please."
He stopped abruptly, frowned his annoyance and moved toward the door. He took the tray, gave the boy a bill, and then closed the floor.
"Don't lock the door," Toni said.
"Why not?" Charlie asked.
"It's a ... a funny thing I have," she said. "I get to feeling all cooped up if I'm in a room with the door locked. I feel like I have to get out."
"That's silly."
"I know it is, but that's the way I am. If I know the door's unlocked, I don't mind at all."
Charlie shook his head in bewilderment, but snapped the bolt back so that the door was unlocked. Then he handed her the drink she'd ordered.
"Toni," he said huskily as she stood in front of the mirror, brushing her hair. "You're very lovely."
He walked up behind her, reached around her to set his drink on the dresser, then put his hands on her waist.
"Why, Charlie," she said sweetly. "How nice of you."
He smiled and pressed closer to her.
"You know," he said. "I always admired you. Even when you were in high school, I used to watch you when you'd walk down Washington Street, and I used to think that you were the best-looking girl in town."
She smiled at the mirror so that it was reflected back to him.
"You're nice," she said. She turned so that she was facing him, their hips only inches apart. She leaned back on her elbows, her breasts jutting high and pertly toward him. "I like you."
He reached forward and unbuttoned her blouse. She remained motionless while he undid the fastenings then pushed it from her shoulders, bunching around her elbows. Her breasts were tightly encased in the black net bra, holding them high and saucily as she held her position that offered up to him her charms on display.
Charlie reached behind her and released the fastenings of her skirt and pulled it down around her ankles. He took her black half-slip with it, so that she remained clad only in bra, black panties and garter belt, and her stockings.
"Oh baby," he said, slobbering in his eagerness. "Oh baby, what a body you got."
She smiled, stood up slowly and began to pull her clothes around her again.
"Wait," he cried in dismay. "Don't do that."
"Why not, Charlie?" she asked. "I didn't invite you in here to paw me."
"But ... but you let me undress you."
She nodded.
"And if you want anything more from me," she said evenly, "you've got to do what I tell you."
"Anything within reason," he said. "You're so damn lovely."
"Take off your clothes," she commanded.
"Of course, of course," Charlie said, hastening to obey. It took him only a moment and his flabby, gray body was exposed to her view. Even with his passion as high as she knew it was, he was flaccid. If her plans included love with him, it would require careful and extended preparation.
"Now what?" he asked, standing before her proudly, as though his body were really something he could be pleased with.
She looked at him, smirking a little as the time for the climax of this part of her plan came near. A tiny, traveling clock beside her bed was all she used to be sure the time was right, for If she looked at her wristwatch too obviously, Chariie might get the idea that she was waiting for someone.
"I'm a goddess," she said, moving into the center of the floor. "Worship me!"
He frowned, not understanding what she wanted him to do.
"Get on your knees and worship me," she said, raising her hands high above her head. "Like I was a goddess and you were a priest begging for a favor."
He nodded and dropped to his knees in front of her, his forehead on the carpet beside her feet. His backside faced the door-which she hadn't planned but which would add a little touch to the effect she planned.
"Spread your knees," she commanded, the hands of the clock showing only two minutes before the door should open.
Charlie did as he was told, and when he was spread in the position she wanted him, she gave the final command: "Charlie, play with yourself!"
"But...." he protested, his voice muffled by the carpet.
"Do it or forget the whole deal!" After a moment's hesitation, he did as she ordered. "With both hands!"
He rested all of his weight on his shoulders, head and knees and thrust both hands between his legs to do as she wanted.
At that moment the door opened and Frank Long burst in.
"Toni, I brought the ... "
He stood transfixed at the scene before him, embarrassed by what he saw, though he hadn't yet recognized the man on the floor.
Charlie, at the intrusion, struggled to his feet and whirled. At the sight of his son there, his face turned a brilliant red and his eyes popped out, "Get out of here," Charlie ordered. "I'll ... I'll explain later."
"Father!" The word was strangled, containing all the torment of an over-protected son who's made an ideal of his father and suddenly discovers the clay feet he never suspected. The young man turned and stumbled from the room, gagging and choking until he reached the rail outside the door. He leaned over the rail and vomited, spewing forth not only his dinner but the accumulated bile that stretched back over years past.
"What's that pup here for?" Charlie demanded, trying to put his arms around her, even though the door was still open.
"Because I wanted him to see what his father was Eke," she snapped. "And I wanted you to see what he was like."
"I don't understand."
"Hell, no, of course not. That little bastard out there raped me four years ago."
"No!"
"Yes."
"Frank, come here," Charlie called.
"Go to hell," Frank answered weakly from the rail. "Straight to hell." He was sobbing desperately, and tried to move away as he heard Charlie moving about in the room behind him.
Then suddenly Toni scooped up Charlie's clothes, dashed through the door and threw them over the rail onto the parking lot below.
"Get out," she ordered, turning to face the nude, flabby banker. "Get your ass out of here right now!"
"But Toni...."
"Don't 'but Toni' me," she snapped. "Out."
"But my clothes!"
"They're in the parking lot. It's your problem how you get them."
He started to protest, but before he could get the words formed, she pushed him hard and he went stumbling through the door onto the balcony of the motel. Then she slammed the door shut and bolted it.
Then she moved to the window and watched the scene as it developed outside. Charlie tried to get Frank to go down and get his clothes, but Frank wouldn't let his father get near him. Instead, as soon as the door was locked to the room, Frank hurried down the stairs and away into the darkness, leaving Charlie standing nude on the balcony.
Seeing that he was helpless, Charlie slunk away down the balcony toward the far end, where there was a set of steps leading to the parking lot. He would stand less chance of being seen that way, but as he reached the bottom of the steps and grabbed his clothes, a car pulled onto the parking lot. His flabby figure was out-lined as he tried hastily to pull on his pants, and in his haste he got tangled up in them.. The car stopped and kept the headlights on him until he struggled fitfully to his feet and managed to turn his back on it.
Then, as he was successful in getting his clothes on, the car moved closer and the red light on top began to flash.
Toni grinned with suppressed excitement as she put the phone down, after reporting to the police that there was a nude man running around on the parking lot. She watched him being hustled into the car, and knew that she was, once and for all, even with the Long family for the wrong perpetrated on her so long ago. She was relatively certain that there would be nothing much done to Charlie Long-he held mortgages on too many important pieces of property owned by too many important people for him to be put away. But his image of middleclass respectability would be destroyed forever, and more important, the relationship between Frank and his father was crumbled beyond repair. Not a chance in the world that they would get together, for the father had shown an unforgivable, weakness to the son, and the son had proven impossibly corrupt.
The feeling of success warmed her, letting her know that if she were as successful in the remaining episodes, she would be able to leave Sonora with a deep sense of accomplishment. Vengeance, for which she had purpose, returned to the foothill community, would be sweet indeed.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the telephone "Toni," came a voice, "this is Larry Schaffer."
"Hello, Larry," she said hesitantly. "Have dinner with me?" She swallowed, wondering if she should. "All right," she answered after a moment. "Give me a few minutes to get dressed."
"I'm in the lobby," he said. "I'll wait for you here."
"All right. And Larry?"
"Yes."
"Can we go some place ... out of Sonora? I'm already sick of this town."
"Sure. No problem at all."
She hung up then turned and began picking up her clothes from the floor where they had been tossed in the sadistic play with Charlie Long. She smoothed the wrinkles in the skirt and slipped into her blouse, brushed her hair and prepared to go downstairs to meet Larry. She couldn't understand why she even bothered Larry hadn't been that good a friend when she'd lived here before, and she didn't think he would be that good a friend now if he knew what she was up to.
But instead of calling him and excusing herself, she fluffed her hair into some semblance of order, slipped into her shoes and left. The acrid odor of vomit greeted her as she left the room, and she realized that Frank had been really, terribly upset as he'd stumbled out.
"Serves him right," she said grimly, walking on past the scene of her victory toward the steps that would take her to the parking lot, where she could cross the street and enter the back door of the inn, where Larry waited for her.
She felt curiously leaden as she pulled open the door and approached the tall, handsome, former basket batl and football star. Back in the days when they'd been in high school together, Larry had been completely taken up by the fleshy country girl named Sandy, and she didn't know why they hadn't followed the tradition of the town as so many others had, and married as soon as they graduated. But when they'd met a day before, no mention had been made of Sandy, and Toni was certain that Larry had not married her. She knew they had made it often enough, for Larry had joked about it openly on more than one occasion, calling Sandy a sex maniac to her face, when the whole bunch of them had been sitting on the football field behind the school during lunch period. Sandy had blushed, but that was all she hadn't gotten mad the way Toni had expected that she would. Her flaming cheeks spoke of the truth of Larry's label-at least within the framework of the slang usage of the teen-agers of Tuolumne County.
On one occasion, Toni had doubled with them during her senior year in high school, and after the dance at the school, they went to the El Rancho for something to eat. Afterward they drove down to Volpone Heights, and then up into the trees behind the house owned by Dan Kaufman, an English teacher in the school. The spot they chose was on a flat that overlooked the canyon through which Woods Creek wound. On the far ridge were the tracks of the Sierra Railroad, while just below them the flatlander cars shot past, on their way up and down the mountain.
Toni's date was a young kid named Bill. It wasn't her first date with him, but she'd never done anything with him, not even petting, because he was so young in his manner that she instinctively knew he wouldn't know how to do anything. But she knew that Sandy and Larry would make it, or at least she thought they would. As soon as the lights were out and the motor was off, they snuggled down in the front seat, set the volume of the radio softly, and then turned to their own business.
Bill was sitting stiffly in the middle of the seat, holding Toni's hand and obviously wanting to do more but just as obviously terrified at the thought of being in the situation he was in. Toni didn't move, not willing to do anything to make his task any easier. She was more interested in watching and listening to the little animal sounds Sandy was making in the front seat. She couldn't see much, but there was some light through a break in the plastic of the radio, letting a solid ray of light through. She arranged herself so she could see as much as possible, and what she saw was enough to inflame her senses. Larry had placed her with her back against the door on her side of the car, and then he'd folded his long frame some way so that he fitted on the floor beside her. He'd gotten her panties off in the few short minutes they'd been parked, and while she cradled his head against her breast, his hand sought the apex of her passion, stimulated her in a manner that was open completely to Toni's stare. She wouldn't have been able to see anything at all if it hadn't been that Larry's car had a gap between the two halves of the back seat, and the single ray of light that played over the half-nude body of Sandy.
She began a rhythmic moaning of "Oh Larry, Oh Larry, Oh Larry," in cadence with his touch. Then Toni felt her stomach tighten as Larry started to open his pants and remove his manhood. He started to move into position to top Sandy, but she shook her head and whispered, loud enough to be heard in the back seat, "No. They're not doing anything."
But Larry was not willing to be denied everything and he guided Sandy's hand to his organ-and Toni could hardly breathe as she watched the phenomenon of growth that took place beneath the farm girl's touch. She was even more astounded at the moment of release that she was able to watch. She'd grown up knowing nothing of the male sex, for her mother never told her anything meaningful about sex. It was all the ugly old woman could do to explain the basic facts of a woman's menstrual cycle to her daughter, and the idea of explaining the nature of a man's peak was well beyond her. She didn't completely understand it, either, but she never wanted to find out. She was happy enough to be able to experience it often, and she left that part of her daughter's education to the girl herself. And as she watched Larry spill his love she felt her stomach churn with excitement. She knew that it was the counterpart of the throbbing release she knew her own body capable of, and suddenly a great many things about sex that she hadn't understood before became clear. She knew how it was done, and now she understood what the whole mechanism was for.
And right then she wanted the release that was possible from the driving desire that filled her. Larry had struggled back up to a sitting position, so Toni knew that not only was he satisfied, but that Sandy was satisfied as well. A few minutes later they drove down off the hill behind Kaufman's house, and Toni was glad. She couldn't abide the thought that Bill might be able to provide her with the kind of release she wanted, for he was just too clumsy, too immature ... and right now, his breath was just too bad.
Larry dropped her in front of her Jamestown house before he drove back to Sonora. She entered the house quietly, for she knew her mother would probably be there with whatever man she picked up in the bar she frequented on the main street of Jamestown. As she went down the hall to her room, she saw that there was a light on in her mother's bedroom, and that she had a man with her, just as Toni had expected. But as she passed the crack in the door, what she saw stunned her, and she stopped to watch as the man took a bottle of wine and poured a galumph on her mother's stomach and then bent to lick it off, wherever it ran. The old woman laughed as the man's tongue coursed over her flabby flesh, and then he settled to the real business at hand, and Toni was once again thrilled by the sight she watched. Her passion, already high, soared as she imagined the sensations of what she watched. She'd never been able to imagine anything being done to her that would really thrill her, but as she watched her mother writhe and groan in passion, she pulled her skirt in a bunch around her waist, thrust her hand within the band of her panties and found the bead of her desire and rolled it carefully, sensually, in the way that produced the greatest sensations with her. She beat her mother to her moment and leaned weakly against the wall as she caught her breath, watching the scene in the lighted bedroom to completion.
Then she went into her own bedroom, after watching her mother lock her legs behind the man's back and almost smother him as her moment broke over her. She tossed restlessly when she was alone, finally wrapping her legs around her pillow and pressing it tightly against the bed. With fantasies of the sensations produced by an intimate kiss, she finally managed to drift asleep, where her slumber was disturbed by dreams of the same nature.
CHAPTER TEN
They drove down to angels camp, dropping down the canyon to Carson Hill and then climbing the steep mountainside on the other side of the river canyon. They were silent during most of the ride, for Toni didn't feel much like talking, and Larry, after an abortive attempt or two, respected her silence. They pulled up finally in front of a restaurant on the main street of Angels Camp, went in and sat through as good a dinner as the town could provide, still without much conversation.
On the way home, Larry pulled the car to the side of the road overlooking the river before plunging down into the canyon on the switchback road.
"Toni," he said gravely, "what's the matter?"
"I know you better than that, even though we've never been really close friends. You just aren't the strong, silent type."
She smiled ruefully in the darkness.
"I don't feel too good," she said. "I ... I had a rough experience tonight."
"Oh?"
"Yes. And I'd rather not talk about it."
"I'm not prying."
"I know. I'm not being fair to you, Larry. You deserve a better time than I'm giving you."
"You're just fine. I was afraid it was something I'd done."
"No. It's my own doing."
"Good." He reached across the seat and took her hand. "Would you mind very much if I kissed you?"
"It's novel, being asked," she said. "No, I don't mind."
He pulled her gently to him, kissed her strongly but without the insistence of passion pressing against her.
"Thank you," he said finally, releasing her.
"You're a funny one," she said. "Not at all like the boys I've known."
"So?"
"So I'm not used to being treated like a lady, that's all."
He chuckled, turned toward her a little more, and said, "As long as you're in an agreeing mood, would you mind if I made a pass at you?"
"I'd rather you didn't."
"I'm crushed."
"I'd only have to say no."
"I'd be even more crushed then, since I'd figure if you said you didn't mind a pass, you'd really be saying you didn't mind making love."
"I do, in both cases. But it's not because I don't like you."
He shrugged and started the motor.
"Just thought I'd ask," he said.
"You're sweet," she said.
They drove down the canyon, back up again into Sonora, and he let her out on the parking lot of the Inn.
"Good-bye, Toni," he said, and there was a curious note of finality in it.
"Good-bye, Larry," she said. She walked to her room with a puzzled frown on her face, wondering about the strangeness of this youth she'd just left. Unable to decide anything at all about him, she went to sleep shortly after.
The next morning, when she went into the coffee shop of the inn to have breakfast, she was stunned by the headlines on the newspaper. Frank's suicide, his father's arrest, were boldly printed for the world to read. But more-because of the notoriety, an emergency, middle-of-the-night call had gone out to the Board of Bank Examiners, and a team of experts were on their way in to examine the affairs of the bank before anything could be covered up. The story hinted that there was a good deal of wrongdoing involved in the bank.
Toni read every word, her heart in her throat at the thought she might be implicated, but clear to the end she found no mention of her name. She breathed a sigh of relief, for she realized that Charlie, hypocrite to the end, refused to be associated with someone like her, and so he was keeping his meeting with her a secret. The thought that somebody might have been blackmailing Frank was suggested, for he was found to have a large sum of money on him when his body was found, the top of his head blown off with a forty-five.
She shuddered at the thought, for she had never intended her work to have such terrible consequences. But, she reasoned, she'd just happened to penetrate a particularly rotten family, and one unable to cope with the pressures suddenly unleashed. She got up and returned to her room without eating breakfast.
She stayed in her room all day, until hunger finally drove her out. She had a light snack about six o'clock, then returned to the room to prepare for the arrival of Lorry Barnweld. Lorry would have had second thoughts about the gay life in the time since their first encounter, for her conscience would have played hell with her during that time. She would have been feeling guilty and full of remorse, so Toni knew she would have to make the whole scene appear particularly desirable.
She showered carefully, after checking the stock of liquor she'd brought back up to the room with her. Then she laid out fresh clothing-paying particular care to her underclothing, before turning attention to getting her body into tip-top shape for seduction. She shaved under her arms, carefully applied perfume to vital spots, and did all those other little feminine things a woman does to be dainty.
Then as seven o'clock approached, Toni rolled her panties up over her hips, bent forward and caught her large breasts in her bra while reaching behind her to fasten it, then put on the black cocktail dress she'd selected for the affair. It swirled from her shoulders in two bands, meeting well below her breasts and allowing an ample amount of flesh to show. She chose to wear no stockings, for she was certain that they would have no effect on Lorry anyway-men were the ones who went buggy for nylons and black garter belts.
A final survey in the mirror, a brush through her hair, and she was ready for act two in what she had started calling, privately and only for herself, "The Tragedy of Toni's Return." A few moments later she heard a light, hesitant tap on the door, and she knew that her second prey was coming into her net.
She opened the door and took Lorry by the wrists and pulled her into the room eagerly, without giving her a moment for thought.
"Hello, darling," Toni said, smiling warmly at her. "I'm so glad you came."
"I shouldn't be here," Lorry said. She'd dressed to try to look dressed up, but nothing could hide the dumpiness of her figure, brought on by four years of drinking to drown her frustration. "And I can't stay too long."
Toni leaned forward and kissed her before she could pull away.
"Nonsense," she said, smiling warmly. "We have all the time we need."
"Maybe you do," Lorry said nervously. "But I've got to think about Ken. He gets furious if he thinks I've been off any place he wouldn't approve of."
Toni laughed easily.
"He doesn't need to know what goes on," she said. "And he certainly can't object to you seeing an old girl friend. It's not as though you were going out with a man."
Lorry shook her head.
"I don't even know any men to go out with," she said bitterly. "If I wanted to."
Toni pulled her close to her, embracing her as a lover and looking down at her with warmth in her eyes.
"And you don't want a man, do you?" she asked, her voice husky with desire. "Not ever again."
"Not ... ever?"
Lorry looked at her questioningly.
"You want the gay life, don't you?" Toni asked the question softly, with her tone conveying the idea that she knew for certain that Lorry did indeed want to live the life of a fully inverted woman.
"I don't know, Toni," Lorry said. "I wanted to talk to you about it."
"It's a wonderful way to live," Toni said, gently caressing the girl she held. "There're no worries, no problems-just all the pleasure you want when you want, the way you want it."
Mentally, she crossed her fingers as she spoke, for she didn't tell Lorry of the hours of frustration that arose because no two people, of the same or opposite sex, have the same appetites for sexual pleasure, and few can simply accept their role as homosexual without many pangs of conscience. All that she was willing to tell Lorry right then was the bright side, the advantages, to be had from accepting without question the life of a Lesbian.
"Don't people hate you for being what you are?" Lorry asked, looking troubled.
"No, because it's none of their business. Nobody thinks anything at all about two women living together. They think it's just to have companionship and to save money. What goes on in their apartment after the lights go out is none of their business, and shouldn't be."
Lorry nodded as Toni knocked away one by one the objections to being gay that she had thought of since her virginal Lesbian encounter the day before. Toni knew from the way she spoke that Lorry longed desperately for the kind of happiness she imagined was part of the gay life, just as she knew that such happiness wasn't part of Lorry's life on any level-because Lorry couldn't achieve that kind of happiness with anyone. The failure was within herself, though, not because the possibility of happiness in the world didn't exist.
"I ... I guess so," Lorry said hesitantly. "I just wish I knew what the answer was."
"The answer's simple," Toni said, unzipping the dress the dumpy housewife wore. "I give you the way out, then you take your own time to decide what you want to do about it. If you want to live the way I have for the last three years, then all you have to do is decide to do it. It has a lot to offer in its favor-not the least of which is the fact that you never have to worry about getting pregnant."
Lorry nodded.
"That's important, isn't it? I mean, Ken grabs me sometimes and I don't always have time to get ready. He won't let me take the pills, either."
"That's too bad," Toni said with mock seriousness. "You must worry."
"Every month," Lorry said. "It's just awful I can't enjoy sex when there's a chance that I'll get pregnant."
"With me, darling," Toni said softly, "if you get pregnant, it'll be the miracle of the century."
Lorry smiled a tiny smile.
"I ... I hope I don't disappoint you," she said, "You won't," Toni replied. She pulled the girl's dress over her shoulders and dropped it around her ankles. "As long as you're concerned about what might happen to me, then you can't fail."
Lorry shook her head as though deeply troubled, but she didn't object as Toni reached behind and freed her breasts from her plain, white-cotton bra. Then she pulled the straps of the girl's tattered slip, together with her bra, down over her shoulders. It took some doing to get the garments over her spreading hips, but Toni worked the garments carefully and finally they dropped around Lorry's ankles with her dress. Lorry stood before her dressed only in her panties and shoes.
"Toni, I shouldn't be doing this," Lorry protested. "I just shouldn't"
"Nonsense," Toni said. "Nothing can come of this but good."
She was glad she still had her fingers crossed mentally.
"But I'm so ... so ugly," Lorry protested. "And you're so beautiful."
"And you've spent four years giving yourself to a man," Toni said. "While I've never had a man since I left this town."
"You ... haven't?"
Toni shook her head as she gently cupped Lorry's breasts in her hand and rolled the nipples between her thumbs and forefingers. The girl's nipples grew to match her rising passion, and Toni saw her eyes glaze and knew that their conversation was at an end. It was a good thing, for the time was growing short. She pushed the girl gently toward the bed, laid her in position and removed her panties, then straightened to remove her own clothing.
A moment later she was nude, and her kiss caused Lorry to moan with passion. Sensing that her moment was near, Toni maneuvered herself into position so that when she kissed the girl intimately, she was herself in readiness to receive the girl's kiss. But there was no need for her to make special preparations, for as soon as her lips touched Lorry, the inexperienced girl clasped her tightly and rolled her over, so that she was on top. Her eagerness overcame her lack of experience, and Toni found herself responding in spite of herself.
She gave herself up to the waves of pleasure that coursed through her, and at the same time did her best to provide her partner with the same kind of pleasure, clasping her around the buttocks and pulling her tighter against her. Shortly, her moment rocketed through her, filling her with the all-too-familiar feelings of contentment and quiet, while at the same time she knew her partner needed more before she would make it.
She continued her stimulation of her partner, aware now that the door, left unlocked as part of her plan, should have sprung open before now. But she knew Ken would be there, and just as she felt Lorry's body tighten against hers in the preliminary sensations ahead of her moment, she heard Ken arrive.
"Toni?" he called, opening the door part way. Then he pushed inside and his eyes opened wide with surprise when he saw his wife in embrace with the girl he'd raped so many years before.
For a moment, he stood silent, motionless; then he moved. He reached forward, rolled his wife away from the Lesbian ghi, but not before she had moaned her way through the relaxing peak that so many women sought and so few ever achieved. It was something he couldn't offer her, something be couldn't give her, and he knew it instinctively. So he hated the whole concept of female homosexuality.
"Bitch!" he snarled. "Get away from her!"
Lorry lay on the floor, clutching herself and moaning loudly as wave after wave of pleasure washed over her, even though she was separated from its source. Toni rolled to where she could look at super-male Ken Barnweld.
"That's your wife, buddy," she snarled viciously. "You'd better take her with you."
"Her?" Ken's eyes were wide with astonishment. "I don't want her."
"You have no choice," Toni said. "Because if you don't get her out of here, the whole town will know about you tomorrow morning."
"You wouldn't dare."
She smiled, secure in her power.
"Yes, I would. I had Frank Long in this room last night."
"No!"
"Yes. Now get your queer wife out of here and leave me alone. She's as queer as you are, and the two of you deserve each other. Understand me? You're both just alike."
"No," Ken cried. "I'm not like that."
"No?" Toni sneered. "Then why do you dream about men loving you? Why, when you make love to your wife do you imagine you're doing it to a man? Why do you do things to your wife you could only do to a man?"
It was shots in the dark, but every shot hit home.
"I'm not like that," he screamed. "I'm a man. A man, do you hear? A man!"
By this time, Lorry had struggled to her feet and stood nude, dumpy and astounded, watching her husband protest his masculinity to a woman who denied everything masculine in the world.
"Kenny," she said with sudden resolve, "we're going home."
"What?"
"You heard me," Lorry said, looking with contempt at Toni. "We're going home. We're going to try to forget this night. It may take the rest of our lives, but we're going to manage to forget it. Okay?"
Ken glanced from Toni to Lorry and back again.
"All right," he said finally. "This broad is nothing. You're all I want."
Lorry gathered up her clothes, put on only her dress and stuffed her underclothes in her purse.
"Good-bye, Toni," she said. "I hope this is the way you wanted things to turn out."
"It's not, but that's all right," Toni said. "As long as you're willing to live with a rapist, I should care."
She shrugged.
"Come on, Lorry, let's go home." Ken took his wife by the arm and led her out.
The word home struck Toni sharply. It was something she didn't know, and couldn't.
But she knew she'd been successful in forcing an entering wedge between Ken and his ever-precious Lorry. She knew that Ken's super-masculinity was rooted in the fundamental fear that he was less than a man, that his homosexual inclination was something that damned him to live apart from the rest of the men in the world. He didn't know that many men shared some of his thoughts, his fantasies, his experience, and that these men were not homosexuals in the true sense of the word. But what Toni didn't realize as she watched the two depart was that she had actually provided them with a key to a kind of sexual satisfaction they'd never known between each other before. For Ken, like most males, found the idea of Lesbian love extremely stimulating, and he was able to indulge m certain aspects of his own homosexuality by transferring them to females. The thought of loving a woman who had been loved by a woman was terribly exciting to him, and whenever he could get her to, he asked Lorry to tell him, in detail, what she and Toni had done together, how it had felt, while at the same time he encouraged her to play with herself. She was thus able to achieve her own satisfaction without him, and in the process she aroused him to such a peak that when they made contact with their bodies, it was all over in a moment for him. He regarded the whole thing as a result of Lorry's getting better in bed, and their lives settled into a routine that was at least balanced between them. They were able to indulge in the wildest kind of sexual behavior together now, with out either one feeling reluctant, guilty or anxious about it. That at least half of their acts were legislated against didn't bother them in the least, for crimes against nature just weren't their concern. All they wanted was the kind of spasm that spelled release and satisfaction for themselves.
The whole situation seemed to straighten out that night, just as soon as they got home.
Lorry collapsed on Ken's shoulder and began to sob, crying wildly and trying to talk, but incoherently. Ken led her to the bedroom, placed her on the bed and got a cold cloth for her head. After a while, she got more control of herself and she cried tearfully, "Don't hate me, Kenny. I ... I couldn't help it."
He didn't say a word, just looked down at her seriously for a moment. He started to turn away, unable to speak, but she reached out and grabbed his hand.
"Kenny, don't go," she cried. "Kenny, I want you. I want you so much."
"Really?" he asked doubtfully.
"Right now," she sobbed. "I want you to love me, and make me forget that awful girl."
"You know," Ken said slowly, "she was trying to get even with me."
"For what?"
"For raping her, four years ago."
Lorry's eyes opened wide in surprise.
Ken nodded affirmation to the question in her eyes.
"Then we've both had her," Lorry said slowly. "That makes her our common property."
Ken reached for his belt buckle, dropped his clothes in a heap at the foot of the bed, and joined his wife on the bed, and in moments the musk of their passion rose up around them in a cloud, completely blanking their surroundings from them as they explored a kind of passion they'd never known before. Even in the many nights they'd spent making love, either in Ken's car or in one of the motels down by Jamestown, they'd never managed to find the kind of fulfillment that they got right then. Ken went the route with her she'd thought about so often, his tongue tracing a fiery course down her stomach, and then he kissed her. She arched her back in frantic abandon and accepted his obeisance, at the same time clawing at his body eagerly to get him into position so she could love him the same way. Moments later they both rocketed through moments of release that was the first real satisfaction they had known. Then they were clasped in each other's arms, drifting slowly into a warm sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Alone, Toni was unhappy. She was restless, annoyed, unable to settle down to anything in particular. She knew what she needed, she knew what she wanted, but there was nothing she could do about it. Thelma was in far-away Los Angeles, and she knew there was no way to find LaVerne, her love partner of the afternoon before. She needed LaVerne right then she needed someone who could provide her with the kind of mindless relaxation that accompanies the wildest plunges of erotic delight.
Having no way to contact the maid, she decided to go down to the Glass Pole, the cocktail lounge in the inn, and see if she could at least find some conversation that would be rewarding enough to keep her mind off the aching void of loneliness that filled her.
She found a seat at the end of the U-shaped bar, watched and listened to the endless chatter between the bartender and the regulars clustered around for their alcoholic surcease from care. Joe kept everybody entertained with his quips, his jokes, his insults never meant seriously, but his mood tonight was subdued. The main topic of conversation was the suicide of Frank long and the investigation that proved his father to have embezzled almost half a million dollars out of the bank. One woman, seated where Toni couldn't see her face, said she knew there was a woman behind it all, but nobody would stand up and say who it was.
A man chimed in with the thought that it was probably that "Jamestown slut who'd just come back to town." Joe glanced nervously in Toni's direction and at the same time signaled the speakers to cool it. Then he walked back over to Toni.
"It doesn't matter, Joe," she said softly. "Maybe I am just a slut from Jamestown."
"Don't ever kid yourself into thinking so," Joe said. "I know you well enough to know you're a good person."
"Thanks." She smiled ruefully. "I needed that."
"I'll buy you a drink." He mixed a drink and put it in front of her. "You look like you could use one."
"I could." She swirled the liquid in the glass for several moments before she spoke again. "Joe, what do you do when you set out to ruin the lives of your friends, and you succeed?"
"You're worrying about what that broad over there said," he replied. "And you shouldn't. Whatever you do, as long as you're satisfied with yourself, you shouldn't get anxious about it."
"Sure," she said. "But as long as I'm satisfied that's the key. What happens when I'm not sure I'm loing the right thing?"
"You do the best you can and hope for the results that you want."
She shrugged, finished her drink and left. She'd sort of vaguely hoped that there would be some action in the bar, but there was nothing for her there but a noisy bunch of high-school teachers, all men who had eyed her carefully when she came in but whom she had been careful to ignore. She knew them all, and knew that even if she swung their way, she wouldn't go to bed with any one of them. One was an overweight football coach who pitched softball in the summer, the other was an English teacher who specialized in journalism and drew girlie cartoons in his spare time, and the other was also an English teacher-though he'd graduated in anthropology and couldn't ever forget it.
Back in her room, she smiled grimly as Joe's words about being satisfied with herself came back to her. She knew that the only way she'd get to sleep this night was through her own efforts, and as she undressed she considered the use of the instrument of love she carried with her. Deciding against it finally, she slipped into a black-lace nightie and climbed into bed. Her touch was slow and sinuous, unhurried as she gradually brought her passion up higher and higher without caressing the central focus of her desire. She knew if she built herself by slow caressing of her breasts, her inner thighs and anywhere else her hands could reach as she lay on her back with her knees up and spread, that when the time came it would take only a touch, only a quick caress, and she would rocket through her moment of delirious release, following which she would roll onto her stomach and sleep without releasing her hold on herself.
And she did just what was necessary to bring herself quickly to the brink of sleep.
The sleep she had was that of the just.
The next night Ron showed up right on schedule-half an hour ahead of his wife. He was still dressed in the slacks, short-sleeved white shirt and clip-on bow tie that was the uniform of his profession. A thin band of sweat lined his upper lip as he stepped from the warm night air into the chill of the air conditioned building.
"Hello, Toni," he said nervously, looking at her with eyes that undressed her. "It's good to see you again."
"Oh?" She grinned. "I didn't know if Carol was going to let you out tonight."
He pursed his lips in annoyance.
"She doesn't have anything to say about where I go, or when," he said. "Besides, she thinks I'm going home to my wife. She can't object to that, can she?"
"I guess not," Toni said sarcastically. "Even the most demanding mistress has to let her man go home to his wife once in a while, if only for the sake of appearances."
"True, true," Ron said. "Have you got anything to drink, Toni? I'm terribly dry."
"Sure, help yourself." She pointed to the dresser, where she had liquor, mix and ice cubes in preparation for his coming. "You can mix me one, too."
"What are you drinking?"
"The same as you."
"You're easy to please," he said. "I wish Susan was pleased so easily."
"Thanks for comparing me to your wife."
"It's not that," he said, busying himself with the drinks. "It's just that she's so demanding, always wanting something more from me than I've given her. Even mixing a drink for her gets to be a major decision."
"Don't put up with it," Toni said. "Slap her silly."
"You're kidding," Ron said. "Me slap Susan? Why, she's too good to slap."
"Who do you slap?"
He looked at her and grinned.
"Every once in a while I slap Carol around a little," he said proudly. "But she loves it."
"She told you?"
"I can tell. That's why she provokes me to it whenever she feels like she wants to be batted around."
"Oh, I see."
She watched as he walked slowly back across the room toward her, where she had taken a seat in an upholstered arm chair, swinging her legs up over the arm so that she showed him a generous amount of leg, tightly encased in a black-nylon stocking. He paused in front of her, holding a drink in each hand, looking down at her with his appreciation burning in his eyes.
"Like what you see?" she asked.
"Every inch of it," he said huskily. "Every inch of it"
"It's all mine," she said. "Every inch of it."
"I'm sure of it," he said. "It was then, too."
"Yes, it was." Her voice went leaden as he mentioned the midnight rape of four years before. She hastened to cover the slip, so that he wouldn't suspect her intentions. "But it's better now. More of it."
He continued to stare at her silently, and she felt that if she didn't make some kind of move, precious moments would be lost and her own careful planning would be fruitless. She reached forward and rubbed the front of his pants.
"Like what you feel?" he asked.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
"It's all mine," he said proudly. "Just like before."
"I'm sure of it," she whispered, finding the tab on his zipper and running it down. He wore no shorts.
"I came prepared, just like a Boy Scout," he said, tensing as her groping hand found him. She pulled him free of his clothing and touched him lightly, feather brushing him to bring his passion up strongly and firmly. "Oh, Toni, am I prepared."
"No Boy Scout ever helped me across the street looking like that," she said, looking up at him impishly.
"Never send a boy to do a man's work," he said, his voice becoming hoarser as he felt her touch on him skillfully, raising him higher and higher toward that over spilling moment when he'd collapse into the valley of contentment.
She leaned forward and kissed him, letting her tongue become a dart of fire against his passion. A moment later she sensed that his moment was almost upon him, so she stopped, pulled away and stood up.
"Toni, baby, you're the greatest," he said. "But why stop? I love it that way."
"Because I'll be damned if I want you to have all the fun," she said, peeling her clothes off. "If I do for you, you won't be interested in doing for me, but if I hold out until you do for me ... that way ... then I'll do for you and we'll both be satisfied."
She stood before him, nude and erect, her body seeming to exude passion.
"You want me to do ... that to you," he said hesitantly.
"That's right. You don't mind, do you?"
"No, no," he protested quickly. "But ... "
"But what?"
"I've never done it before. I've thought about it a lot, but I've never had a woman who'd let me."
"I'll not only let you," Toni said. "I want you to. Now stack the pillows in the middle of the bed."
"What for?"
"You'll see. Just do as I say."
He obeyed, taking both of the thickly stuffed pillows and piling them in the center of the king-sized bed. By the time he'd finished, she was ready to undress him, and she hurried her task, as though she could hardly wait for him.
He wore nothing beneath his slacks, as she knew, and no undershirt, so it took only a moment for her to have him nude. His passion was manifest as she looked at him-the first time she'd seen him without clothes, even though she'd known him more intimately than most women know more than one man in their lives. She carefully checked the clock so that he would not be through too soon. She needed to keep him busy for at least ten minutes.
She rolled onto the bed and wiggled her hips until she was arched high on the pillows, her buttocks pressing tightly down against them. Every detail of her womanhood was revealed to his gaze.
"I ... I never saw a woman like that," he said breathlessly. "It's kind of ... well, overwhelming."
She smiled at him, at the same time cupping her breasts and rubbing the nipples in the palm of her hands.
"Watch," she said, indicating the nipples as they began to grow firm "Like what you see?"
He nodded as he fell across her, his lips and tongue engulfing one nipple while she continued to play with the other. His arm fell across her smooth, firm belly and his fingers probed her womanhood deeply and roughly.
"Oh, Ronny," she moaned in mock passion. "You know what I want. Do that!"
His tongue traced a fiery path down the under slope of her breast, across her smooth, flat stomach and down ... down ... until the contact made her gasp as his beard raked her tender thighs.
Then she had to push him away as he tried to maneuver himself into position so their lovemaking could be simultaneous.
"No, no, Ronny," she whispered. "That comes later."
"What then?" he said, genuinely puzzled.
She took his head and pushed it gently in the direction she wanted him to go, at the same time twisting him around so that he wound up on his knees on the floor beside the bed, leaning over at the waist to reach her.
"Yeah," he said huskily as he looked down at her, his lips moist with desire for her. "This is what I've wanted for a long time."
And then he turned to his work with a will, burying himself in her womanhood and stubble-burning her thighs with his movements. There was nothing in it for her, for he was a man and wanted to take her later, to penetrate her and violate her. But she was willing to put up with him, let him do just what he wanted, because she knew the tableau they presented would be overwhelming when Susan walked in-due just two minutes from now, as she glanced at the clock after checking to see that Ron was so wrapped up in his task that he couldn't see that the loving he was doing was having no effect on her.
But Susan was almost ten minutes late, and Toni had trouble keeping Ron going that long, for he couldn't believe that she hadn't made it in that time.
"You'll know," she insisted as he started to pull away. "It's something that can't happen without you knowing it."
"All right," he said reluctantly. "But it's sure taking a long time."
He returned to his task, and Toni, to sweeten the pot a little for him, dropped her feet from the bed and ran her toes over his manhood as best she could. She didn't realize it, but it was all the stimulation he needed. His love spilled wetly in the air.
At the same moment, Susan opened the door and hurried inside, eager to escape the warmth of the night air outside.
"Oh God!" she gasped when she saw the intertwined bodies, and her face went gray when she recognized the male figure as he raised his head and looked at her.
"Susan!" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"
She leaned weakly against the door and stared at the scene, unable to speak.
Ron scrambled to his feet and hastily put his pants on.
"That's your husband, Susan," Toni taunted. "That's the way he'd like to have you. That's the way he'd like to have any woman."
"I ... I don't believe it," Susan stammered. "You corrupted him."
Toni chuckled, keeping her position because she knew the sight of her nudity so openly displayed would be disturbing to the nasty-nice Susan.
"I didn't corrupt him," Toni replied. "Ask him. Ask Carol, the checker where he works. Ask LaVerne."
"LaVerne?"
Susan's eyes grew wide with fear as things she'd refused to notice fell into place too suddenly for her to cope with them. She knew it was Ron's insistence that she keep LaVerne, she knew that Ron often drove the maid home, she knew he often sent her shopping to Modesto and stayed at home on his days off with the colored girl.
"Yes, LaVerne. She knows which side of the mattress her job is buttered on," Toni said. "Doesn't she, Ron?"
"Toni, shut up," Ron said, his mouth so dry he croaked.
She laughed.
"Ronny likes to eat it," she taunted. "And Susan, if you want to keep your husband, you better learn to do the same thing. Otherwise, he's going to go running after any woman who'll let him do what he wants."
"Never!" Her mouth twitched at the thought that she might be involved in some kind of perverse act. "Never!"
"We'll see," Toni said. "Won't we, Ron?"
"Ron's going home with me right now," Susan said. "And he's not going to get involved in anything like this ever again. Are you, Ron?"
"No, no, Susan. I promise. If you forgive me now, II never do anything like this again."
Toni's laughter was wild and delightful as she watched Ron button his shirt and follow his wife out the door. Just as they were leaving, a new figure intruded itself into the room.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Roger!" she cried in surprise as he started to back out of the room right after Ron and Susan had left. "Don't go."
"But...." She laughed.
"Half the population of Sonora has seen me without clothes on," she said, rolling off the pillow and walking across the room and reaching for a robe in her closet. "Why shouldn't you?"
"Because I might get ideas about you," he said. "I haven't ever forgotten that I never made it with you."
"It's a good thing," she said bitterly, turning around and giving him a glimpse of her body before she fastened the robe around her. "Otherwise I'd kick you in the groin and send you out to join your friends."
"My friends?"
"Your cohorts-or whatever you want to call them."
"Toni, that's a long time ago. It's over."
"Not for me. I still owe one guy a lot."
"Who?"
"You?"
"Me?"
"You."
"You're kidding."
"No, I'm not. You were there."
"But I didn't...."
"That's right. But you didn't stop those other crumbs, either."
"What could I do?"
"You could have stopped them."
"You're right, I could have. But there's something about that whole thing you don't know."
"Oh?"
"Yes. I planned it."
"No!"
"I did. I wanted you then more than anyone else in the world, and I was too afraid to do anything about it on my own."
"You bastard!"
"Listen to me. I've called myself worse names for four years, wondering what effect the whole thing had had on you. I can't help it. I ... I guess I'm in love with you."
"Well," she said bitterly, "I wish you'd known that four years ago."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I came back here to take care of the guys who raped me. I figured you'd be exempt because you didn't really do anything. But you planned it. How in the hell did it happen that you were last?"
"We ... we drew numbers. I got number four."
"Number four. And you never got it, not then and not now."
She looked at him with great contempt in her eyes. "You ... you killed Frank Long, didn't you?" She shook her head.
"He killed himself," she said evenly. "He came up here and saw what his father was. I guess he couldn't take it."
"And Ken?"
"He was taken home by his wife, after super-male Barnweld caught his wife being loved by me."
"Ron?"
"His wife came in while he was doing ... that ... to me. His wife couldn't take it."
"It figures. Ron's the guy who always claimed 69 was the midnight snack fit for a king."
"He would."
"What about me?"
She looked at him for a long moment, indecision in her face.
"I don't know whether I'd do more to you to give it to you or deny it to you."
"Toni," he said desperately. "You don't understand. I've tortured myself for a long time, thinking about what happened."
"Good. Think about it some more."
"But ... you're all right, aren't you."
"No, I'm not. Because of what happened to me, I ... well, I'm different."
"How?"
"I'm queer." The word jolted him. "I don't believe it."
"I can't help what you believe. I'm queer. I'm gay. I'm a Lesbian. What else can I say?"
"You're not. You can't be."
"Why not?"
"Because I love you."
"To hell with you."
"Don't say that."
"Why not?"
"I told you. I love you."
"Show me."
"What do you mean?"
"Show me how much you love me."
"How can I?"
She shook her head. "I didn't think you were that dense."
"You mean you want me to show you ... myself?"
"Show me how much you love me," she repeated.
He shook his head. "That's not the answer."
"You're damned right. You don't love me enough."
"You're warped. You're twisted."
"I'm glad you finally realized it."
She started gathering her clothes up, turned to face him and asked, "Will it upset you too much if I get dressed? It's time I left town. Everything I came here to do is done."
"I want to go with you."
"You're out of your mind."
"I want to go with you. Where are you going?"
"Back to my girl friend. She lives in L.A. She's a hooker, I think."
"I don't care. Let me drive you."
She dropped her robe and turned to face him.
"Hands off," she said. Then she moved toward her closet and took out an outfit which she lay on her bed.
"When you do that," he said, "I could show you how much I love you-if you insist on thinking that love's measured by passion."
"What else is it measured by?" she demanded.
"Well," he answered, "four years ago, four men desired you, were passionate for you, and worked out their passion on you. But three of them didn't love you."
"You're right." She had her underwear on, and pulled a simple cotton dress around her. "Love and passion aren't the same thing."
"Let me show you I love you," he said. "I don't care how long it takes. When the day comes that you really can tell me honestly that you prefer your girl friend to me, I'll leave and never bother you again. But give me a chance."
She nodded slowly. "A chance," she answered. "You've got a lot to make up for."
"I know that," he answered sincerely. "I wish you could tell how much I know it."
"All right," she said. "We'll leave for L.A. tonight. Don't touch me until I ask you to. That's all I ask. If I ask you to leave, I want you to go and never see me again."
"Agreed."
They were on the road in half an hour, leaving behind a scene of shattered lives. They slept the first night in separate rooms in Bakersfield, when Roger got too tired to drive farther. The next day they drove the remaining miles to Los Angeles, and when Toni walked into Thelma's apartment and found strange clothes in the closet, she was stunned. It had taken Thelma only a few days to acquire a new lover. She stumbled from the apartment with her head reeling.
"Bad?" Roger asked, when she returned to his old Dodge.
"Take me away from here," Tom said, the sight of Thelma in the arms of another girl, writhing in passion as they had so many times, tearing her up inside. "."
"Sure," Roger said. "Anything you say."
They got into Roger's car and drove east out of Los Angeles, across the desert beyond San Bernadino, through Needles, to Phoenix, where they slept. The next day they were on their way once again, speeding along the highway to Lordsburg and El Paso. Every time they came to a city with a split in the highway, they would shrug their shoulders and take a road, never knowing exactly where they were headed but maintaining a generally easterly direction all the time.
Leaving El Paso they headed southeast, through Van Horn, Fort Stockton, Austin and Houston. They drove almost constantly, trading off at the wheel and staying awake through the use of tiny yellow pills and frequent cups of coffee. Beyond Houston, they went through Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, and they both realized at the same time that their destination was New Orleans.
"Why?" Toni asked, when Roger said they would stop there for a while.
"How should I know?" he said. "It's a good city, with a swinging area. What more do we need?"
She looked at him closely, then reached out and put her hand on his arm.
"I need you," she said softly.
He smiled.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
"That's not what I mean," she said. "Just get us to New Orleans, get us a place to rest, and let me have time to clean up. Then you'll see how much I need you."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded as they drove along the narrow highway that led down from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. The raised concrete divider seemed to melt into a blur of gray as they hurried onward.
"I wasn't sure," she said. "Not until just recently. But now I am."
"I'm glad," he said.
"You see, Roger," she said, staring straight ahead at the pavement shooting past the car, "I went back to Sonora full of bate because of what happened to me. It had happened four years ago, but it was just like it was right now-yesterday-it was so strong. I couldn't do anything without thinking about it. And thinking about it made me want to get even with the bastards who did it to me. Thinking about vengeance was all I had for a long time to keep me going."
He nodded with understanding as she continued.
"But finally, when I had my chance and was successful, nothing turned out the way I wanted. Frank Long's dead and his father ruined, Lorry and Ken have found out about each other, and Susan has a tighter hold on her husband than ever before. And out of that, what has happened? Am I any better person? Do I feel any better about things?"
She shook her head. "No," she answered herself. "No, there was no good to come out of the whole thing. Nothing at all. Being screwed by three boys in the woods didn't make me what I am, and it didn't keep me from becoming something I probably would have anyway. All it did was give me the excuse for being that way, and let me hide my true nature from myself."
"That should be a positive value," Roger said. "Self-knowledge is the dearest bought."
"Maybe," she said. "But at what cost? Not to me. But I reached in and changed the lives of a lot of people, and then I walked away as though I had no part in the consequences."
"Do you?"
"I should. I should go back there and do what I can to assuage the harm I've done."
Roger shook his head. "You can't go home again, a wise man said once. And you can't go back to Sonora to do anything."
"I guess you're right," she said sadly. "But I'd like to redeem myself."
"You can, darling, but not in the way you think."
"How?"
"By living a life that suits you, where you never find yourself in conflict with yourself again. Where you do only those things that will leave you really fulfilled."
"Hmm," she said, pursing her lips and looking at him speculatively. "I just might take you up on that."
She slid across the seat next to him and began rubbing the inner part of his leg. As she felt him respond to her, she was gratified to feel her own passion begin to flow. She tugged at his belt, managed to get his pants open, and removed him from the strictures of his clothing. Gently, lovingly, she caressed him, examining him all the while with great interest.
"If you're going to keep that up," he said after a while, "you're going to spoil a developing friendship."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I was just interested, that's all."
"You'll have plenty of time for that sort of thing," he said. "But I've been wanting you for a long time, and so I'm pretty close to exploding with passion right now."
"Roger," she said softly, a little embarrassed, "I've got an idea."
"What?"
"Find a side road," she said. "Let's see if we can find a grove of trees ... something like that one in Jamestown."
"You mean...."
She nodded.
"That's right. And it'll end the affair of the thicket. Everything will have come full circle."
He turned from the highway at the first opportunity, and found a clump of trees that successfully shielded them from prying eyes. She shed her skirt and panties, helped him take his pants off, and then they fell to the soft ground, clasped in a tight embrace.
"Come on, Roger baby," she cried, clasping him to her. "Give it to me good. Make me a woman."
Roger rested above her for a long moment, looking down at her. Their bodies made only casual contact, his manhood touching her in fiery point.
"Don't wait, damn it!" she commanded, and as she spoke she adroitly made contact complete between them.
He obeyed her command, and as he stroked her their rhythm built and built, until finally they made it together, and as the waves of throbbing release coursed through her, all of the hatred and bitterness over the incident so long ago flowed out of her. She stood up later feeling cleansed inside in a way she never had before.
They took an apartment over the Red Garter in New Orleans, and both went to work. Never again did they make it in such a way that had so much significance for her, but their love deepened as the months went by. Roger asked her to marry him two weeks before she discovered she was pregnant, and they were married right afterward. As the months went by, she felt that her life was finally taking on shape that had meaning. All of the blackness, the bitterness, the hatred was behind her, forgotten at last in the richness of a new, rewarding life.
