The woman was sucking my cock as I drove. That's a wild sensation. I was having trouble keeping my eyes on the road. I like to watch a woman doing that. I think that may be the most exciting thing in the world, to see your cock in a woman's mouth and watch her head moving up and down on it, so that the skin of it is glistening with her saliva. Unfortunately, in this case, all I could see was her blonde hair. It didn't matter a whole lot, though, because she was good at what she was doing, fine. Her lips were hot and soft around the shaft of my organ and I could feel her tongue tickling the tip of it.
We were in Ohio, heading south. My duffel bag was thrown in the back seat. I was comfortable. I was wearing civilian clothes for the first time in a long time and the jungles of Vietnam were so far behind me it was almost hard for me to realize that I had ever been in them.
She was taking almost all of my cock into her mouth when she came down on me. I couldn't believe that. I'm pretty big there (or so women tell me; I wouldn't know, not having done any comparing of myself to other men to speak of). I don't think I've ever seen an erect penis other than mine, outside of a few stag movies anyway and who can tell anything from looking at them? I've got a good, solid eight inches, though, and maybe you know more than I do about how that stacks up against other guys.
Anyway, she was taking it almost all into her mouth, letting it slide down her throat when she sucked in on it. It seemed to me that should have choked her, but apparently it didn't and apparently she loved it.
I took one hand off the steering wheel and slipped it around her body so that I could cup one of her breasts while she sucked on it. She wasn't wearing a bra and I could feel how taut and hard her nipple was. I took hold of it through her sweater and massaged it for her. I thought that was the least I could do, considering everything she was doing for a poor lonely hitchhiking veteran of the jungle campaigns.
She gasped some when I touched her that way and started sucking faster.
I could feel myself starting to come and I thought about warning her of it, but then I thought: to hell with it. She was obviously enjoying herself. Who was I to deprive her of her reward?
Then it blasted out of me into her mouth, hot and a hell of a lot of it, pouring into her and forcing me to jerk the car back onto the road. I had run off the shoulder as I started my orgasm and in about one more second I was going to be into a ditch.
Ah well, what the hell. There are a lot worse ways to die than being sucked to death on Route 76.
Being creamed in Vietnam, for example, in the remnants of a war no one ever wanted and hardly anyone remembers is still going on.
I don't know how the fuck I ever managed to win a Silver Star over there. I sure wasn't much interested in anything but staying alive.
She stopped sucking now and sat up. She leaned back in the seat for a moment, her eyes closed. Her lips looked wetly slick with my semen and her chest was rising and falling with the violence of her breathing.
"Oh Christ," she said then. She opened her eyes and looked at me. "I love the way you taste."
She was maybe thirty-five and she looked like she was fighting a war against her age and losing. She had that fleshy look that some bright, perky little cheerleader types never lose. When she was eighteen, I imagine, she was the sweetest little chick in school, twitching her tail at all the football players and never giving anybody a real taste of anything. Miss Popularity herself. And now it was all disappearing and she was desperate to hold on to anything that was left Maybe she was divorced now from the boy who was most likely to succeed, but didn't. She wasn't wearing any wedding or engagement rings, not that that proved anything. Maybe picking up hitchhiking marines and giving them travelling blow jobs was all she had left from her days of girlish glory.
On the other hand, what do I know? I didn't even know her name.
"I'm glad you liked it," I said. "Didn't you?"
"Sure, who wouldn't?"
"Was that the best blow job you ever had?"
"Yes." It wasn't. The best I ever had was in Saigon from a tiny little Vietnamese girl who said she was twenty-five, but looked about twelve. She might have been twelve, too, for all I know (and for all I care). They're starting early over there these days.
She smiled. "I'm glad it was." She sat up now, briskly, and picked up her purse from the car floor where it had fallen. She dug out a cigarette. "Want one?"
"Yeah, I'd like that."
She lit them for us while I tried to get my mind back on my driving. My pants were still wide open and my cock was hanging out, but if she didn't care, I didn't, and she wasn't showing any inclination to put it away.
We were driving through farm country, gently sloping hills and pastures. Off to our left just then was a herd of black cattle. I enjoyed looking at them. It had been a long time since I had seen anything that peaceful.
"What's your name?" she said. "Johnny Weeks."
"Well, Johnny Weeks, I hope you don't think I make a habit of this kind of thing."
That's exactly what I thought, but I didn't say that to her. "No, I know you don't," I said. "I can tell you're not that kind of girl."
She smiled. "I haven't been a girl for a long time, Johnny."
I shrugged. "I guess you're a girl as long as you think you are."
"Women are more fun than girls anyway."
"Sure."
I swung her Mercury out around a semi and shoved the accelerator down hard so that the car snapped into passing gear. I liked the way the big engine jerked the car out ahead.
"Where are you heading, Johnny?"
"I don't know. Just drifting for a while."
"What did you do, run away from college?"
"I'm not that young. I finished college three years ago."
"What was your major?"
"History. Maybe I'll go to law school one of these days."
"That sounds interesting. What have you been doing with yourself these last three years since you left school?"
"I've been killing people."
"What?" Then she laughed. "Oh, your duffel bag. You've been in the service."
"In the Marines."
"Are you still in?"
"Just got out."
"What are you going" to do now?"
"I don't know. I told you, just drift for a while." She crushed out her cigarette and moved over a little closer to me. She put her hand, down on my still-bared cock and stroked it gently.
"He's so big," she said.
"Not at the moment."
"Even now you're bigger than most men are when they're hard."
"Well, they tell me it's not the size that counts anyway," I said.
She laughed. "A good little one is better than a bad big one, that's true enough, but a good big one is the best thing there is."
She started stroking it now, moving the skin back and forth. I could feel it starting to harden again.
"Why don't we stop somewhere and you can fuck me, Johnny?" she said.
"Sure," I said, "why don't we?" I swung the car off the road sharply, into a dirt road.
She squealed in sudden fright and fell against me, then sat up, laughing breathlessly. "I didn't mean right there," she said. "I meant, why don't we stop at a motel somewhere?"
I drove the car around a curve and off into a copse of trees that hid us from the road. When I looked at her, she seemed a little frightened. I turned off the engine.
I flicked my cigarette out the window. I could hear a bird singing in one of the trees beside the car.
"Johnny, hey, I'm a little old for screwing in cars."
I reached over and slid my hand up her leg. She was wearing a skirt and sweater and no hose, so there was nothing between her and my hand except the thin fabric of her panties.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "It's just been a long time between women for me."
I could feel the heat of her cunt through her panties. The fabric there felt damp.
My cock was standing up full again.
I put my other hand up her dress and caught hold of the waistband of her panties. She shifted her weight so I could pull them down.
"My God," she said, "what if a cop comes by while we're doing this?"
"Nobody ever interferes with a veteran," I said. "That wouldn't be patriotic." I reached up under her sweater and unfastened her brassiere, then slid my hand around to hold her heavy breast. Her nipple felt as big and hard as a marble. I pushed her sweater up and bent over to suck at her nipples. They smelled sweet, like lavendar, as if she had carefully perfumed them. I liked that.
She was holding my cock as I played with her. Her cunt was wet and ready for me and I pulled her over under me and slipped into her, hard, deep, all the way in with one thrust. There wasn't any need to play the gentleman with her. She was ready for it.
She gasped in pleasure as I filled her and tried to arch against me, which wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do, considering that the steering wheel was pressing against us, but we managed.
I began to move in and out of her, hard, and I'll give her this: even if she wasn't the youngest women I'd ever had, she was as tight and firm in the pussy as any. I " was filling her up and I could feel her holding me with it. Every time I went down into her, I hit bottom and she would moan a little, but she raised right back with me, pushing, fucking me as much as I was fucking her.
She started coming quickly, one popping orgasm after another, grabbing at me, trying to kiss me and unable to because she couldn't catch her breath.
Altogether, not a bad welcome back to the states.
I had hitched a ride on an Air Force plane from Los Angeles to Dayton where I was mustered out and found myself standing on the sidewalk with nothing between me and poverty but a duffel bag full of stuff I didn't want to wear any more, that and $12,000 I had accumulated in back pay and poker winnings. Guys have come back from Vietnam with a lot less than that.
I started hitchhiking south. I don't have any family and I didn't have any place special to go. I just wanted to drift for a while, with no one to tell me what to do and no one hiding in the brush wanting to kill me. I just wanted to see some country and have some fun. What good is it to be twenty-five and have $12,000 in your money belt if you can't see some country and have some fun.
The woman picked me up just outside of Columbus. A truck driver had taken me that far. She was driving a 1971 Mercury Marquis. She said she was going to Cincinnati, which was fine with me. I hadn't even been to Cincinnati, and I figured it you haven't tried it, you shouldn't knock it. It had to be better than Anloc.
About an hour later, she started sucking my cock. It was really about that simple. First she asked me if I wanted to drive. Then she started talking about sex. She asked if I had read some book or other. Then she said my legs sure looked muscular, did I mind if she touched my thigh because ever since she was a little girl, she had had a thing about men with hard, muscular legs. So I let her touch my leg. After about ten minutes of that, I took her hand and put it on my cock. It was obvious that was what she wanted and I already had a hard on from having her stroked my leg, so I didn't see any reason to wait. I guess I figured the worst that could happen was she'd get mad and order me out of her car, and I didn't think she was going to do that. I was right. As soon as I laid her hand on my cock, she started playing and stroking it. She got it out and then she asked me if I'd mind if she did something really wild, something she had always wanted to do. I said, baby, if it doesn't hurt, be my guest.
And she was.
It didn't hurt.
I was starting to come again. I had raised up over her as much as I could so I could thrust down into her hard, and I could feel my orgasm starting, way up in my guts, then moving down into my balls until it shot out of my cock like a slug out of an M-16.
She grunted with the force of my last thrust and held me when I slumped down on her.
"Oh, Christ, you're good," she whispered.
I raised up again and pulled out of her and sat behind the wheel while she got up and pulled her skirt down. She reached down on the floor and picked up her panties and slipped them on.
"I guess we can go now," I said.
She giggled. "I guess so."
TWO
I dropped off in Cincinnati at the bridge that goes over the river into Covington, Kentucky, and stood there on the highway watching the Mercury disappear into the night. I had expected her to ask me to stay with her for the night, but she didn't. I guess she had something to do.
Not that it mattered. She was okay, but there had to be better than that around.
I shifted my bag to my shoulder and turned toward the bridge. It was about eight o'clock, just dark. Maybe I should stay in Cincinnati for the night, I thought, but then I decided to hell with it. The worst that could happen would be for me to get stuck somewhere out in the country and what could happen to me in Kentucky? I've spent a lot of nights in worse places than along a country road, and I had an itch to keep moving. There wasn't anything to keep me in Cincinnati and the episode with the woman had even blunted any immediacy I might have felt about making contact with some woman.
Hell, women always show up. They always have. I'm lucky enough to be just over six feet tall and my hair is black and I have blue eyes and I used to play a little football. Women dig me, which isn't bragging, it's just a matter-of-fact. I don't take any credit for it I didn't have anything to do with looking the way I do. I was just born lucky. The guy who's four feet tall and weighs two hundred pounds and goes bald at twenty three and still makes out, that's the guy who has something to boast about. Me, I'm just lucky. I keep bopping along and women keep turning up.
Not that I'm complaining, of course. I stuck out my thumb and waited. And waited. And waited. Until it was almost ten o'clock and a guy in a plain green Ford that spelled salesman picked me up and took me over the river and down into Kentucky. He was an okay guy, except when he found out I was just back from Vietnam he insisted on telling me all about World War II and how much tougher it was fighting on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal and all those places than it was in Vietnam. Maybe it was, I don't know. Who cares? There's nothing duller than another generation's war. Besides, I didn't want to talk about the war, mine or his either one.
Nearing midnight, we came up on a roadside diner, one of those places that are supposed to be great because there are trucks parked in front, which may only mean that there's no place else for a truck driver to stop within a hundred miles. The food may be lousy.
It didn't matter. I was hungry and so was my salesman buddy (I was right; he was a salesman. He handled hospital supplies.).
There were eight or nine guys inside sitting at tables. Salesman and I sat at the counter. That is, I sat down at the counter and he sat beside me. I wanted to sit there because there was a blonde waitress working there who looked a little like a young Elizabeth Taylor, black hair, smooth skin. She would have been perfect if she hadn't been chewing gum, but I didn't care about that I wasn't looking for culture, for God's sake.
She came over to us. The salesman acted like he was afraid of her, or didn't like her or something, but he managed to order a hamburger and coffee. I ordered three hamburgers, french fries and lots of coffee. I hadn't eaten for hours and my adventure with the woman in the Mercury had burned up some fuel.
She ordered the food, then came back to lean over the counter at us. "You fellows just travelling through?" she said.
"I don't think we look like we live here," the salesman said.
I glanced at him in surprise. His whole personality had changed since we came inside. Now he sounded faggy, bitchy, angry at the girl just for being a girl.
Well, that was his tough luck.
"Yeah, we're just passing by," I said to her. "Do you live around here?"
She looked like she was going to brush me off for a minute, as if the salesman's rudeness had completely turned her off, but I guess I looked okay, because she smiled and said, "Been here all my life. Can't say that I like it much, but I guess I don't not like it enough to leave."
"I wish you would leave," the salesman said. I glanced at him again. "Knock it off," I said. "I enjoy talking to her."
"I don't."
"So then you leave," I said.
"I don't have to do anything I don't want to."
"For Christ's sake," I said.
"What are you doing with him?" the girl said.
"Just riding."
"Not any more you're not," the man said. To the girl: "Are you ever going to bring us anything to eat or are you just going to stand around showing your tits all night?"
"Hey, man," I said, "what's wrong with you? Leave the girl alone."
From behind us, I heard a voice say, "You guys stop bothering that girl."
The salesman spun around. "You just fuck off and mind your own business," he said.
The guy standing behind us was big, beefy, with a red face. I knew the type. Hard hat. Nice enough guy, really, but the kind of man who didn't consider a night out a success unless he got in a fight and creamed somebody. Hopefully, with justification. That is, he would want to be able to say that the son of a bitch was really looking for it. And in salesman friend, and me, he had perfect patsies. We were bugging the girl so he could be the knight in white armor. Shit.
He laughed.
The girl said, "It's all right, Ernie. I can handle it." Ernie Big-guy said, "They don't have no business talking to you that way."
I thought, what's the use of getting beat up for this guy. He didn't mean anything to me and, truth to tell, he really didn't have any business talking to the girl the way he did.
"You're absolutely right, Ernie," I said. "This guy didn't have no business talking to her that way."
He looked at me in surprise. "He's your friend, ain't he, punk?"
"I just hitched a ride with him. Me, I think this is a mighty nice lady."
"That's right, Ernie," the girl said. "He was being real nice to me." She smiled and reached over and patted my arm. I could feel her hand was sweating and I took another look at Ernie baby. Apparently she knew him and he wasn't kidding. He was about to hurt somebody.
"You just leave me alone," the salesman said. "I don't have any business with you."
"You do now," Ernie said. "I'm going to kick your ass."
The salesman was white and scared now. He didn't say anything, obviously because he didn't know what he could say. He hadn't intended for this to happen and he probably didn't have any more idea of how to handle violence than my grandmother would have.
Very deliberately, I thought: oh shit.
"Go oh away, Ernie," I said, smiling at him. "I won't let him pick on the girl."
"You stay out of this, punk," he said. "This is between him and me."
I sighed and stood up. "No," I said. "If there's going to be anything, it's going to be with you and me, not my buddy here."
"Your buddy? I thought you said he was just a guy who gave you a ride."
"Naw, he's my bosom buddy. We fought all over Vietnam together."
He hesitated and then saw that I was putting him on. "Punk," he said, and then he swung at me.
I let his fist slide over my left shoulder. Then I chopped him hard, but not too hard, up under his rib cage. He grunted in pain and bent over. I stepped back. "That's enough, Ernie. I don't want to hurt you."
He had half caught his breath, but he panted when he spoke to me. "You couldn't hurt me with an ax, punk. I'm going to kill you." "Don't do it, Ernie," I said.
He came at me again and I kicked him in the balls. I tried to pull it some because it really didn't make sense for me to hurt him badly, but there's no way to kick a man easy in the balls. It has to hurt. And it did. He yowled in agony and dropped to his knees. He looked at me with hatred, holding his balls. He was sweating. "You son of a bitch," he said.
I caught a look at the girl. She was staring at me wide-eyed. So was Salesman, but his expression was different from hers. He looked scared, but excited, and he kept biting his lower Up. I thought he was going to have an orgasm. I don't understand people who get their kicks from something other than fucking. That's sick. Fucking is so much fun. Why bother with anything else?
Ernie was getting to his feet. He was hurt some now, but I'll give him this. He wasn't going to quit. He was looking at me differently now, though. I wasn't playing by the rules he understood. This wasn't the kind of Saturday night brawl he understood and I wasn't the kind of guy he was used to. But he was into it now and all his friends were watching. He couldn't back away. They'd never let him' live it down, and he had guts. He was smart enough to realize that I had pulled my blows with him so far, that I could have hurt him a lot more than I had, and I'm sure he was wondering what was going to happen next. But he was getting up and coming in to find out.
"Hey, Ernie," I said, "wait a minute."
He stopped. "What?"
"This is stupid, man. You're going to whip my ass and I'd rather you didn't. Why don't we just have a beer together instead?"
He hadn't expected that. "No, I'm going to whip you," he said.
"Listen, how about if you wait until my wound finishes healing and then I'll give you a crack at me."
He looked bewildered. "Your wound?"
"Yeah, I'm just back from the Nam. I'm really not up to taking on a guy like you. I mean, I like a good fight as well as the next guy, but I'm really not ready to make the weight with you."
I saw something flash in his eyes and I knew he knew I was lying, that I was trying to give him a way out, and I thought for a moment that he was going to pull on in at me. If he did that, I was going to have to smash him. He was too much bigger than me. I couldn't let him get his hands on me. I was going to have to chop him, and I don't know how to pull a chop. That's meant to kill a guy and that's the only way I know how to do it. I was either going to have to smash his face, which might drive his nose bones up into his brain, or break his neck, and I didn't want to do either one.
Then he straightened up and grinned. "Yeah," he said, "well, I ain't going to whip no veteran." He stuck out his hand. "You're pretty tough, kid. I ain't sure I could whip you, wound or no wound."
I took his hand. It felt hard and calloused, the hand of a man who had worked hard all his life.
"You're okay, Ernie," I said.
I saw Salesman stand up and head for the door. "Hey," Ernie said.
"Let him go," I said. "He doesn't amount to anything."
Ernie wrapped his arm around my shoulder. "Come on, kid," he said. "Let me buy you a beer." The girl was grinning at us.
So Ernie bought me a beer or ten. By the time the place closed, I wasn't drunk, but I was feeling pretty good, and I stood in the parking lot and watched Ernie and the other guys drive off into the night. Ernie had offered to let me go home with him, but I told him I didn't want to do that. I said I figured I'd just mosey on. Somebody would come along and give me a ride, I said.
Somebody did. The waitress locked the place up and came out to stand beside me in the night. "Where you going now?" she said. "Just somewhere."
"You have to sleep somewhere." I laughed. "Not necessarily."
"Come on home with me."
"You live alone?"
"With my sister, that's all."
I shrugged. "Okay," I said. After all, like I said, she looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor, so why not? She had taken hold of my arm and I could feel her breasts pressing into me. She was breathing a little hard and I swear I could feel her nipples growing taut under her brassiere.
She had ah old Ford. We got into it. She asked me if I wanted to drive, but I told her no, that it was okay, I wasn't a male chauvinist pig. It didn't hurt my pride for a lady to drive. She laughed, but I don't think she knew what a male chauvinist pig is. Which is just as well, since I wasn't in the mood for any intellectual discussions. Actually, what I was in the mood for just then was to take a leak. All that beer was beginning to tell on me.
"Hey, what's your name?" I said.
"Judy. Judy Lecliner."
"Well, listen Judy Lecliner," I said. "How about stopping the car for a minute."
She laughed. "You don't need to be in a hurry. My sister is a very understanding girl."
"Sure, but I have to attend to a little business."
She looked at me confused, then she laughed. "You mean you have to pee?"
"I thought you'd never ask," I said.
She laughed again. "Will you let me hold it for you?"
"If you insist."
"You're wild," she said. "You're an absolute wild man." She laughed again.
I didn't think having to pee made me an absolute wild man, but if she wanted to help me do it I didn't mind. I have had stranger requests than that. Once in Los Angeles a girl asked me to pee on her. She said it made her horny. Unfortunately, it only made her mad when I wouldn't do it, but I mean, who wants to screw a girl who's just been peed on?
However, having Judy hold my dick while I peed didn't seem all that nutty.
She pulled off to the side of the road and stopped. I got out and unzipped my pants. By the time I had it out, she was around pushing my hand out of the way.
"Oh, wow," she said. "You're really something."
She was working the skin back and forth gently. "You better stop that," I said.
"Why?"
"Because I can't pee with a hard on," I said, "and you're about to make me hard."
She laughed, but she stopped working on it. "Okay," she said, "fire away."
I did and she wrote circles in the dust with it. She kept giggling and laughing and I kept wondering what she found so interesting in it, but it didn't matter.
When I was finished, she waggled it some to flick the last few drops off and then she bent down to kiss my cock on the head. "We're going to have a neat time," she said. "I just know you're a guy who can give a girl a good time."
"So let's get to it," I said.
She stuffed me back into my pants. "Wait'll Sue sees what I have," she said.
Sue, as it turned out, was her sister, who was redheaded and asleep naked when we arrived. I know she was naked because she was in a bedroom just off the small living room we entered and when Judy snapped on the light, Sue sat up in bed and said, "Who's there?"
There was enough light so that I could see her. The sheet that had been covering her had fallen down to her waist Her long hair was down her back. Her virtually perfect breasts were pointing at me.
"It's just me, Sue," Judy said.
"I heard you talking to somebody on the porch."
"Just Johnny."
She pulled the sheet up and slipped out the side of the bed. I lost sight of her then until she padded into the living room. She had put on a light blue nylon robe. I couldn't see through it but I could see the outline of her nipples against the fabric. She studied me a moment, then smiled. "Hello, Johnny," she said. "Where did you come from?"
"Just passing through," I said.
"Go on back to bed, Sue," Judy said.
"Well, maybe I'd like to talk to Johnny."
"I'm going to do any talking to Johnny that gets done," Judy said.
Sue laughed. "You always were a greedy little minx," she said.
Judy laughed too, but she caught my arm and pulled me across the room and through a door that had been closed. Inside, she closed the door again. We were in her bedroom. It was neat and clean, the bed was made, and there was a big stuffed rabbit on it. She saw me looking at it and she grinned. "I've had that since I was a little girl," she said.
I started to say something, but she put her arms around me and kissed me before I could. Her lips were hot and moist and her tongue jabbed against my teeth, until my own mouth opened to let it in.
Her hand moved down between my legs to catch my sex. She squeezed for a moment, then moved again to unzip me. She reached in and found my hardening cock and pulled it out. Before I even realized what she was going to do, she dropped to her knees and began to suck me greedily. Past us, there was a dressing table with a mirror. I could watch her in the mirror, Watching my cock move in and out of her mouth until it was rock hard and huge. Then I reached down and caught her under the arms and pulled her up. I kissed her again then, hard, and then pushed her back some.
"Take your clothes off," I said. "You too. I can hardly wait to see you naked," she whispered.
We ripped off our clothes and dropped them in a heap on the floor. When we were naked, we fell onto the bed and she pushed me back so that I was lying flat. She came up over me then, kissing me hungrily, her hands moving over me rapidly as if she couldn't quite make up her mind what she wanted to do first. I put my hand down between her legs. She was so wet that my fingers slipped up into her as if her cunt were -lined with sweet butter, and when I twisted her around to lick at her there, she moaned down in her throat. She tasted good, fresh, clean, and she threw her legs apart so that I could open her up completely with my tongue, so I could spread the lips of her sex and push my tongue down into her as far as it would reach.
Her orgasms started then, ripping up out of her so that she couldn't keep quiet, and she moaned and then shrieked each time one slashed through her.
I turned her around then and lay her flat on the bed. I caught hold of her legs and spread them and then I went down into her as hard and as deeply as I could. She whimpered some with the size of me and with the force of my entry, but then she wrapped her legs around me and began to move in rhythm with me. She was able to squeeze my cock with her cunt and she did that while we moved, so that I had to stop once to keep from coming too rapidly, and then she just lay still under me and squeezed at me as if she were milking me.
I caught my control then and pulled out of her. She said, "No, don't stop," but I didn't have any intention of stopping. I rolled her over and caught her hips to lift them and then I went into her from the rear. Her ass was perfect, round and white, just full enough to be beautiful, but not big enough to be fat, and as I fucked her, I kneaded her flesh there, gently, then harder, until she was coming again from the mixed sensations I was giving her.
And then I was coming too, pouring into her, the spasms wracking me until I lost my rhythm and just fell against her, coming, coming, not stopping, and she was squeezing at me until every last drop was gone and I fell aside, exhausted.
She lay still for a moment, breaking the silence only with her breathing, and then she raised up and down over me to take my semen-slicked penis into her mouth, sucking softly, kind of kissing it with her tongue as she moved, not really trying to excite me again already, just being tender and good to it because of the pleasure it had given her.
I reached down and stroked her hair. There's something especially nice about a woman who will suck you just after you have come in her that way. I think that's probably the finest compliment a woman can give a man who has just made love to her. At least, I know I like that better than anything she can do or say just then. It says it all to have a woman take your softening cock into her mouth just then.
The door opened just then and Sue walked in. She had taken off her robe and she was standing there naked, her naked body almost a carbon of Judy's, her breasts full and standing up youthfully, her nipples taut, her pubic hair thick and curly.
"You two are the noisiest people I have ever heard," she said.
Judy let my cock come out of her mouth, but she laid her cheek down against it and looked at her sister. "Well, at least you stayed out long enough for me to get some first," she said.
Sue laughed. "Well, sister dear, you found him so that's the least I can do."
Judy twisted around to look at me. "Are you shocked?" she said.
"Shocked?"
"Sue and I share everything. We always have."
I laughed. "Well, Sue's welcome if you don't mind, and if she thinks I have anything left for her. You've done a pretty good job of tiring me out."
Sue laughed and came over to the bed. She sat down and reached over to cup my balls in her hand. "They don't feel exhausted to me," she said.
"Sure enough," I said. My cock was starting to get hard again. I mean, what the hell, I'm a young man, and it's every young man's fantasy to find himself in bed with two beautiful women at the same time. Only it wasn't fantasy for me, it was really happening.
Sue bent down then and took my cock into her mouth. Simultaneously, Judy rose up to kiss me and then to twist around so that I could reach her cunt with my mouth. I began to lick her. I could taste my own semen in her, but I didn't mind. I like the taste of myself mixed with the taste of a beautiful woman's pussy. It's salty and sweet all at once, like clean sea water. I could feel myself nearly completely hard now and Sue rose up over me, straddling me, settling down on me until I was fully in her and then she began to move up and down on me, slowly. She was even tighter than Judy was, so it didn't matter that she couldn't squeeze the way Judy had. Her cunt was hotter too, and slick, like heated velvet, and she threw her head back in pleasure so that her breasts arched up and out.
Judy lay aside now and let her sister work on me. I put my hands back of my head and just lay there still, letting her do it, until she started to come, and then I reached out and caught her hips in my hand and pulled her even closer to me. I started to thrust then, hard, fiercely. I was in perfect control of myself. I knew I could come explosively any time I wanted to, but I knew I wouldn't come until I was ready. I slammed into her again and again, hard, deeply, loving the way she was screaming with the pleasure, and then finally, I let go and poured into her with everything I had, filling her the way I had filled her sister, and she fell against me, panting, sighing, her red hair fanning out over us.
I glanced sideways and saw Judy smiling at us happily.
What a shame everybody isn't as loving as those two sisters were.
THREE
I left Judy and Sue at dawn. They were still sleeping, naked, rosy, tired, contented. We had played together for a long time until finally I just couldn't come any more. I never had reached the point where I couldn't get hard, but at last I was nothing but congested blood in my cock, no more desire left, and then they had laughed and said I was something really spectacular and that they would remember me forever, and then we slept together, the three of us, easily, comfortable together.
I woke early. Some noise outside jarred me up. I guess that was a holdover from Vietnam where you learned to wake easily and alertly if you wanted to stay alive. Then I lay there for a while, thinking. I could have stayed with Judy and Sue for a while. We could have had some fun. There wouldn't have been any ties or promises or responsibilities. Just fun and games and happiness. I thought about it. I considered it seriously, but then I decided that wasn't what I was looking for. I didn't know what I was looking for really. I just thought there was something somewhere that was going to matter to me when I found it and I thought it didn't matter just now that I didn't know what that something was. I would know it when it appeared. Until it did, I'd just keep moving.
So I got up quietly, put on my clothes, collected my duffel bag from the front room where I had left it, and I walked away. I hoped they wouldn't be unhappy when they woke and found me gone, but I didn't think they would be. I think they must have figured that they got from me everything they could have expected, and I hope they remember me with some affection and tenderness. We had a good night together.
It was a pretty morning. It had rained sometime during the night and everything smelled clean and good and young. That's a funny word, isn't it: young. I don't know why I think of that word when a day smells good, but I always do, and sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to be a Roman soldier in a world where fighting was more personal, but there wasn't any pollution anywhere and morning always smelled good and clean and you could drink out of any stream you came to, and the air was always clear.
Ah well, sometimes I think I should have been a poet, except how does a guy like me think in terms of bird thou never were.
I felt good that morning. I had that lilting feeling of anticipation I always get when it's a good day and I'm not going to get killed that day and I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, anything can happen, right? A flying saucer can land around the next bend and little green benevolent men can offer to take me to Venus and teach me all the secrets of the universe. Or Henry Ford could drive by and see me there and stop to say: young man, you're obviously just what I've been looking for. Report to work tomorrow morning because you're the new president of my company. Who knows?
Anyway, I felt good. A guy in a semi picked me up and took me all the way down to Louisville, where he dropped me oft. I liked him. We argued about football all the way down. He was an NFL man. He still didn't think that the AFL was playing as well. Hell, I don't know, but I argued with him just the same. I think he liked me, too, because he didn't ask me anything about Vietnam. Maybe he was in a war sometime and knew that you don't like to talk about it much afterwards, unless you were in the rear somewhere sitting on your ass and now you feel a need to make it sound like you were a hero.
After all, we were all raised on Rudyard Kipling and John Wayne. If you're in a war, you're supposed to get shot at, and if you managed not to be, you feel a little guilty about it.
Who knows?
I caught a ride out of Louisville with a man and his wife in a Cadillac, but I told them to let me out about fifty miles down the road. They obviously didn't like each other much and the woman kept pressing up against me and the man kept saying things like, you'd like to have him wouldn't you? And she kept making snide little remarks. I thought they were probably weird and building up to suggesting that I fuck the woman while the man watched. To hell with them. I have too much respect for fucking to play sick games with it.
So I was standing on the road, just outside a little town called Cloverport, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, when I hitched my next ride. The car was a brown Mercury, a 1971, and it was being driven by a young blonde woman. It's always amazing to me how many women will pick up hitchhikers. For all she knew I was a homicidal maniac who was just about to rape her horribly and then kill her. Maybe it's my peaceful face that lulls them into confidence about me.
She had the car in gear and was moving forward almost before I had the door shut.
"Where you headed?" she said. She had a nice voice, low, controlled, and she had beautiful brown eyes. Also, I would have bet my separation pay she was a natural blonde, although with professional beauty parlor techniques it's very hard to tell sometimes.
"South."
"Where south?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. Wherever I happen to end up."
She smiled. "Well, I'm headed south too, for what that's worth." She glanced in the rear view mirror. "My name is Mary Demarest."
"Johnny Weeks."
She glanced at me again. "You don't look like a drifter, Johnny Weeks."
"What's a drifter look like?"
"Well, these days he looks like a wino or a hippy."
"What's a hippy look like?"
She laughed. "Don't play games with me. You know what a hippy looks like and so do I and you're not one. So what are you?"
"I'm a man, that's all."
"Nobody's just a man."
"I am."
She looked in the rear view mirror again. She was driving at a constant speed of about 70, which was a bit too fast for the road, which was winding and curving along the river bank, but she seemed to have the car under good control. Besides, I don't worry about things like that. Vietnam almost made me a fatalist. I saw so many cases where men who should have lived, died instead, and men who should have died, by all the rules of probability and war, came out unscratched, that I have decided your time must be written down somewhere and when it comes, you're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it, and before it comes you can't be killed no matter what. So I don't worry about fast drivers. Maybe she was going to kill us, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Maybe she was a little nervous too, I decided, because she was smoking a cigarette and I thought I could see her hands trembling a little.
"The world would be better off if more people were just men," she said.
"Who knows?"
"You're not very talkative, are you?" I smiled. "Sure, what do you want to talk about? Metaphysics? The astronomers' black holes in space?
Politics? Religion? The race problem? Modern literature? Films?"
"How about the war?"
"Not the war," I said.
"Why not?"
"It's not very interesting."
"So you're a soldier," she said. "A good guess, Mary Demarest, but I'm not a soldier any more."
"Are you a deserter?"
I laughed. "Christ, no."
"You mean you've just been discharged."
"Yes."
"And you don't want to talk about the war?"
"No."
She took a curve that was sharper than she had been expecting and the tires squealed sharply before she could get the car back into balance.
"All right," she said, "we won't talk about the war." We passed a white Cadillac headed north and she jumped a little and watched it in the mirror until it was out of sight. I looked back over my shoulder. The car had a Kentucky license and was being driven by a big, heavy man with blond hair.
When the Cadillac was out of sight, she relaxed a little, but she said, "Did you happen to notice what state that car was from?"
"It had a Kentucky license," I said, "Why?"
"No special reason. I just thought I recognized it from back home, that's all, and I thought maybe it was somebody I know."
"Where's back home?"
She was driving even faster now that we had come out into a relatively straight stretch. I thought it was likely that some state patrolman was going to jump her any minute, but I didn't say anything. That was going to be her problem, not mine.
She was younger than I had thought at first, maybe twenty-two or three. I had been fooled at first into thinking she was closer to thirty. Her clothes were expensive and well tailored and in excellent, country club taste. And she was better looking than I had realized at first too. She was beautiful, not pretty, with an aristocratic, lean kind of beauty, the kind of face you see sometimes in the pictures on the New York Times society page, where their parents are announcing their engagements and invariably you see names like Wellesly and Radcliffe and Vassar. Quality and class and breeding are old fashioned words, but sometimes they're the only words that fit.
"Where's back home?" I said again.
"Connecticut."
"Well, I saw that car and it was from Kentucky, so if you're running from somebody with a Connecticut license, that wasn't him."
I don't know what made me say that, but she looked at me sharply. Her face had gone a little white. "What in the world makes you think I'm running from someone?"
I shrugged. "I didn't say I thought you were. That's none of my business anyway. I just said if you're afraid of a car from Connecticut, that wasn't it."
"You're right," she said, "it isn't any of your business."
I nodded and lit a cigarette and looked out the window in silence. I half expected her to stop the car and invite me to get out, but she didn't. She just kept driving. Once I glanced over and saw the speedometer needle was brushing against ninety.
After about thirty minutes, she said, "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"Snapping at you like that."
"It's all right. I asked for it, butting into your business that way."
She flushed for a moment, half angrily, and then she smiled. "Well, at least you're honest."
"Why?"
"You're still not going to pretend you didn't notice I was afraid of that car, are you?"
"If you want me to, I will."
"Aren't you going to ask me why I was afraid of it?"
"No."
"Why not? Most men would."
"It's none of my business. You were nice enough to give me a ride when I needed one. That sure doesn't give me any right to pry into your life."
"Maybe I'd like you to."
"Maybe I don't want to," I said.
She flushed again and became silent. I studied her profile. She was controlled and calm, but I thought I could see strain lines around her eyes and mouth.
"Tell me," I said.
"You said you didn't want to hear about it."
"I'll be glad to listen if you think it will help."
"You don't want to."
I laughed. "We could keep this up forever. I'm sorry I was curt with you. If you want to tell me something, I'll be glad to listen and make any noises that seem appropriate. I really will." She didn't say anything and I reached over and touched her arm gently. She jerked as if she had been shocked with electricity. "I'll listen," I said.
She gave me a long, silent, hooded look, and apparently something she saw satisfied her, because she nodded then and said, "I'm running away from my husband."
I didn't say anything.
"I married him while I was still in college, when I was only nineteen, and I've been trying to get away from him for the past year." .
"That shouldn't be so hard. Just divorce him."
"It's not that easy."
"Why not?"
"He's a strange and violent man, but nobody believes that. He says he'll kill me before he lets me go."
"The police will protect you."
"He's a member of one of the richest families in Connecticut. His father is a judge. The police wouldn't believe for a moment that he'd really do anything like that."
"Tell him that he's threatened you and then tell him that you've told them. If anything happens to you, they're bound to investigate him. He can't get away with it"
"I don't think He would care. He just assumes his money could buy him out of anything."
"It couldn't buy him out of murder."
She smiled, tightly. "That wouldn't help me after I was dead, would it?"
I shook my head. "No, I guess it wouldn't."
"Three times I've gone to a lawyer about filing for a divorce, and every time he has come after me and frightened me into coming home with him."
"So this time you ran away."
"Yes."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know. Florida maybe. Somewhere. I'll file for divorce and get one. I won't ask any money or property, so there wouldn't be any reason for a divorce to be hard to get, and then I'll just disappear from him."
"That sounds easy."
"I know he's looking for me, though."
"How do you know?"
"I know him. He won't give me up."
"Most men aren't all that crazy about hanging on to women who don't want them."
"No, most men wouldn't be, but he doesn't think he's like other men. He's a Carollton."
"Buddy Carollton?"
She looked at me and the car jerked to the right before she regained control of it. "You know him?"
"No, but I've read about him."
"I'll bet you have."
"In Time, I think."
"No doubt."
I whistled soundlessly. Buddy Carollton was a man who could buy and sell the entire state of Connecticut if he wanted to, and I remembered Time describing him as "a ruthless young man on the make, a bitterly determined man at an age when most young men are still trying to find out about themselves, a hard man to know, maybe a man impossible to control."
"Well," I said, "this is a big country. If you don't have to use any of his money...."
"I don't want his money."...." then it shouldn't be all that difficult to hide from him," I finished. "You don't know him."
"You're right about that, I don't know him, but I do know this is a big country."
"He's a big man."
I looked at her. She was staring straight ahead, but I could see that her lips were tight with tension. I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for her and I reached over and touched her arm. She jerked sharply and pulled away.
"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean anything."
"It's all right." She tried to smile at me. "You said your name was Mary Demarest."
"That's right."
"Don't you mean Mary Carrolton?"
"I was Mary Demarest before I married him. That's what I'm going to call myself from now on. I don't want to be Mary Carrolton."
I shrugged. "So be whatever you want."
"That's what I intend to do."
We were coming into a town called Owensboro. Population 33,000, according to the city limits sign she passed. Geographically, Kentucky isn't really a southern state, but psychologically it is. Owensboro looked southern somehow, pretty, with a flowery kind of softness about it, and an insulated look, as if most of the problems of the 1970's had passed it by.
We stopped at a light and she glanced at me. I thought I saw something hesitant in her eyes. Then she said: "You really don't know where you're headed?"
"No, I'm just drifting, trying to see something of the country while I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life."
"You want to stay with me a while?"
I thought about that. "I don't know. Why should I?"
"No reason. Maybe because I need you."
"Need me? Why?"
"Maybe to protect me from my husband."
I laughed. "What kind of protection could I be?"
She half shook her head, as if she couldn't quite formulate the thought she had. "You look ... I don't know ... manly somehow, as if you could do whatever you had to do."
I've never thought of myself as a knight errant, protecting damsels in distress. I'm not too anxious to be that either. In my experience, damsels in distress damn frequently are in distress because they asked for it. And anybody past the age of ten knows that one of the surest ways to get your ass burned is to interfere in the problems of a man and his wife. There was something vulnerable about this girl, though, something soft and pleading, something that made it impossible for me to be flip with her. Until I looked closely at her eyes, I started to tell her that this manly fellow didn't have in mind watching over anybody but himself, but when I did look at her eyes, I couldn't say that. She looked frightened and young. "I don't know," I said.
"I've got plenty of money," she said. "I can pay you for your time."
"I've got a little money," I said. "I don't need paid."
"I'd want to pay you. It could be dangerous for you if you stay with me. Buddy isn't a man to let go of something that belongs to him."
"You're not a something," I said. "You're a person."
"There aren't any persons for Buddy, only things. I'm a thing."
So tell me it's banal. Tell me half the women in the world who run away from their husbands claim it's because the old man doesn't respect their humanity. Tell me it's the oldest story in the world. But don't laugh at me, brother, until you look into a beautiful girl's eyes and know damn well she's telling the truth as far as she sees it.
Well, I thought what the hell? Old Buddy's probably forgotten all about her by now. What can it hurt to make her feel good and safe for a while? What do I have to lose?
If I had only known then what I know now about sweet old Buddy, I might have left her right then, beautiful or not.
"Okay, for a while," I said. "I don't have any place special to go. I might as well string along with you."
"One thing."
"What?"
"This is strictly business with us."
I was surprised. I really didn't know what she was talking about. I guess my face showed that because she added, "I mean, I'm not inviting you to become my lover. I just need protection. Right now, I don't care if another man ever touches me. Buddy taught me everything I know about sex."
For some reason, I felt a twinge of irritation, irritation that might have been described as jealousy if I weren't too damn old to be jealous of a woman I had known about three hours. "I'm so happy for you," I said.
She glanced at me sharply, then I could see her visibly trying to relax. "What he taught me, Johnny Weeks, is that I don't have any capacity for enjoying sex."
"Everybody has a capacity for enjoying sex."
"I don't."
"Yes, you do."
She flushed. "Sure, you're a man," she said. "It offends your sense of virility for me to say I don't like sex. You're sitting there thinking I'd bloody well like it if I was just lucky enough to experience your golden cock. You just forget it. Your cock is just swollen flesh like every other man's and I'm damned if any man is going to lay me on my back and stuff anything up me again. Ever."
"Okay," I said. "Whatever you say." She was right about one thing. I had been sitting there thinking that her problem was that I hadn't ever made love to her. She had enough sense of the male psychology for that. There are no frigid women, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are only women so unfortunate as to never have experienced my superior brand of lovemaking. Every man thinks that. We're raised to think our cocks are so marvelous that it seldom occurs to us that a woman can be anything but grateful for our willingness to fuck her.
Ah well, ego thy name is libido.
I laughed.
She flushed and turned her attention back to her driving. Her breasts were rising and falling rapidly with the force of her breathing. It made me wonder whether my ego was so mistaken, this time.
FOUR
My particular male conceit aside, as it turned out my ego wasn't mistaken this time, although it took a raccoon to prove it.
We had stopped at a small, momma and poppa motel just south of a crossroads village called Irvington, Kentucky. We signed in as brother and sister, Johnny and Mary Weeks, with adjoining rooms at the end of a one story building. By the time we stopped, it was past eleven at night and there wasn't any bar at the motel, only a greasy-looking diner, so there didn't seem to be anything to do but sleep after Mary thanked me for helping her and then disappeared into her own room and left me with the echo of her lock snapping shut.
I shouldered my duffel and went into my own room. I took a shower, dried, and lay down nude on my bed. I smoked a cigarette while I tried to find something to watch on the black and white television set and then finally snapped off the set, crushed out my cigarette and turned off the light. With that, because I must have been wearier than I realized, I dropped off to sleep almost instantly.
Sometime later, in the middle of the night, I sat straight up in bed, startled, and tried to think of where I was. There was a noise again that I finally identified as someone knocking on my door.
I cursed a little and got up and pulled my pants on. You know who I thought it was? I thought it was the Baptist (she had to be a Baptist because she had a Bible on the registration counter and a picture of Jesus on the cash register) motel owner come to check to make sure my "sister" and I weren't cohabiting, or whatever it is that people are calling fucking these days. By the time I reached the door, I had even decided on a little speech. Madam, I was going to say, you have offended me to the soul with your evil suspicions. I may report you to nearest minister as soon as dawn breaks.
If I could keep a straight face, that is.
I opened the door and Mary darted inside and pushed it shut behind her. "Be quiet," she whispered.
"What's wrong?"
"Be quiet?"
I asked her again what was wrong, but this time I kept my voice down.
"There's someone outside my window in the back, trying to get in."
"You sure?"
"I'm positive."
I moved around her and pushed the curtain aside far enough to give me a view of the parking lot. There weren't any cars out there suitable for Buddy Carrolton. Mary's Mercury, two old Chevrolets, one Ford and a pickup truck.
She leaned up against me and I could feel her trembling. She was wearing a light nylon gown and I could feel the soft looseness of her breasts against my arm.
"There's nobody out there," I said.
"I tell you, I heard someone trying to get in my window."
I had a momentary thought that could best be expressed by: what the hell am I doing here? But I was there and she obviously was terrified, so what's a hero to do?
"All right, stay in here," I said. "Don't leave me alone," she whispered, grabbing my arm.
I pried her loose and went outside. I pulled the door shut behind me, and stood still for a few seconds, straining to hear. Nothing but some crickets and tree frogs. Then, from around the corner, there was a clanking noise. I eased up the walk some and peered around. Nothing. Then the noise again. I went on back, mostly because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. What I found was a big raccoon digging around some trash cans. I don't know who was more scared, him or me, when we found ourselves face to face, but maybe he was because he was the one who broke and ran.
I stood still for a moment, breathing, and then I grinned at myself and went on around back to the room. I knocked gently and heard her say, "Who's there?"
"It's Johnny. It's all right," I said.
She opened the door and I said, "There's nothing out there but a hungry coon. That's all you heard."
She heaved a sigh and sagged against me in relief. In reflex I put my arms around her. She looked up at me in the dim light from the moon outside and I kissed her, gently at first, then harder as I felt her lips moving under mine. I could feel her heart beating. Her breasts were soft against my bare chest and her nipples were hardening. I could feel them.
Without thinking about it, I moved my hand around and cupped her breast. She didn't seem to realize what I was doing. She was just hanging on to me, still frightened, and I kissed her again and picked her up and carried her to the bed.
When I put her down, she whispered, "No, don't, please don't."
I lay down beside her. She tried to get up, but I held her there. Don't ask me why. It just seemed like the thing to do at the moment. She struggled against me for a few seconds, but I held her and then she relaxed and lay still. I moved my hand down and caught the bottom of her gown and pulled it up over her body, slowly, careful (I don't know why) not to touch her between her legs yet, until her breasts were bared. I could see them in the moonlight, full and soft, her nipples like dark little marbles in the dimness. I touched them, first one, then the other, and she sighed again, slowly, down in her chest, as if she were resigned about something. I kissed her again then, softly, gently, my lips hardly touching hers, then another time, harder. Her lips moved again. I let my tongue touch her lips, softly, like the wings of a butterfly against a flower, and she flinched and then lay still again.
"It won't work," she whispered.
"Be still," I said.
"I can't."
I kissed her harder to keep her from talking more. I trailed one hand down her belly then, slowly, teasing her with my fingertips, further and further down until I stopped at the triangle of pubic hair. It was curling and soft against my fingers.
I waited.
"It won't...." she said.
I kissed her again. And when I moved my hand down she let her legs come open some and I cupped her sex in my palm. She was hot there. I could feel the heat radiating from her, but when I touched her gently, she was dry and I could feel her trembling inside, just gently, and I knew she was frightened.
"I won't hurt you," I said.
"He always hurt me."
"I won't."
"I'm not like other women," she said. "I can't feel it. I've never felt it."
I used my fingertips on her then, gently, gently, hardly touching her, until I could feel her start to relax, until I could feel her start to believe (hope?) that I wouldn't hurt her. Then I used one finger to gently open the lips of her cunt I could feel moisture starting there, still not ready for entry, still afraid, but starting, starting, and I pulled back some and touched her clitoris for the first time.
She sighed again, this time higher, and I felt her move against my finger. Just a little. I kept my finger where it was, still, just touching her there until she sagged back again, waiting, trying to relax. Then I began to move it a little, slowly, slowly, gently, brushing against her only.
She was wetter now. It was beginning to catch her. She was totally relaxed, not afraid of me, just letting the unusual sensations carry her wherever they would, and I began to move my finger faster, still just brushing against her there.
I could feel her tensing, straining, and I increased the pressure on her, hard enough now so that I could feel the button hardness of her clitoris, feel it swelling as she got nearer to the top, growing larger. She was arching against me now, straining so hard for the thing she had never had before that she wasn't even aware that she had virtually turned her body into a bow, raising her back off the bed. She was almost there now and I took my finger away and bent to take her clitoris into my mouth, holding the swollen little bud against the heat of my tongue. Then starting to move my tongue against it, I heard her gasp once and then moan and she caught my hair in her hands and tried to pull me even closer to her. I knew she was loving what was happening to her, and then she was over the top, crashing over, and she opened her mouth to try to breath and I heard her wailing in surprise and pleasure, shock as the spasms splashed through her. I took her clitoris between my lips and sucked hard at it, wanting her to get all the pleasure there was.
Until she sagged back, exhausted for a moment, and I lay beside her, my hand cupped over her, one finger buried in her.
She was crying.
"What's wrong?" I said.
She tried to say something, but she couldn't. She was sobbing too hard. "It's all right," I said. "I didn't know," she said. "It's all right."
"It was so good. I never knew anything could feel that good."
I laughed. "The male chauvinist pig strikes again." She was silent for a moment, then she laughed. "You bastard," she said.
I started unfastening my pants. "What are you doing?"
"We're not finished yet."
"Oh yes, we are," she said. "I couldn't stand that again."
"Maybe you can."
"I'd die."
"Suffer."
"You can't mean it."
I was stripping off my pants by then. I pulled them off my feet and dropped them onto the floor. I lay back naked then and took her hand and laid it on my swollen cock. "Does that sound like I don't mean it?"
Her hand was rigid for a moment and then her fingers closed around me. "My God," she said.
"Don't you like it?"
"It's so big. Buddy's isn't more than half this big." I laughed. "Poor Buddy."
"I can't ... you can't get it ... there's no way that's going in me."
I laughed. "It's going in you, in more than one place," I said. "What?"
"I want you to suck it for me first."
"No."
"Oh, baby," I said, "there's no place for selfishness in abed."
"I can't ... I don't know how ... Buddy used to try to make me do that and it made me sick."
"Mine tastes like sugar candy," I said, laughing softly. "And it's guaranteed not to have any calories in it."
She laughed nervously. Then: "You're the gentlest man I ever knew. Please don't make me do anything I don't want to do."
"I wouldn't dream of it, but I just gave you pleasure, didn't I?"
"Oh yes, like I never felt before."
"And you want to give me pleasure, don't you?"
She hesitated and then she said, "Yes," in a voice so soft I could barely hear her.
"There's nothing wrong in anything you do that gives pleasure."
"I know, but...."
"Just try, easy."
She sat up in the bed and looked down at me. "Take your gown off first," I said. "I want to see you naked."
She raised her arms and stripped it off. In the moonlight, her body was the most beautiful I had ever seen, white and soft and perfect, like sculptured marble.
"You're beautiful," I said.
She looked down at me as if she wanted to say something in turn, but couldn't. She had a kind of puzzled look on her face, as if she didn't know how to handle admiration.
Then she bent down over my cock and nuzzled it against her cheek. She held it in her hand and rubbed it against closed lips, then moved down to kiss gently at my balls. I lay still, not touching her, waiting to see what she would do, and I felt her tongue come out, touching me wefly, and then move up the length of my cock, until she was at the head of it.
She kissed me there and hesitated.
"Open your mouth," I said, "and just take it in."
"I don't...."
"Open your mouth," I said.
She did it. She parted her lips and I moved up slightly so that the head of my cock was in her mouth suddenly. She held still there, like she was afraid, and I didn't press it. I lay still, my hand on the small of her back, my fingers tracing tiny patterns on her skin.
After a long time, she began to move her mouth on my cock, just a little at first, then more, until I was wet with her saliva, and then she was letting it slide in and out of her mouth, deeper and deeper, faster and faster, her hand cupping my balls, squeezing them as she sucked me.
I was full hard, massive, swollen, ready for explosion, and I stopped her. I knew she wasn't ready for me to come in her mouth, and I didn't really want to just then. My balls were aching for her. I wanted to be buried in her cunt, and I pulled her away from me then and pushed her back flat on the bed.
I rolled over her and she whispered, "No, wait, please wait," but I was in her then, just the head of me, holding her there while she reacted to me being in her. I felt her start to relax and I went on down into her, slowly, opening her with all the size of me, until I was buried in her so deeply I could feel my balls against her ass. She was hot and throbbing around me, but I could feel the tension in her, and I lay still for a long time, keeping my weight off her, just waiting, until I felt her body soften and accept me, and then I began to move, slowly, long, deep thrusts, opening her all the way, forcing her legs further apart.
"Lock your legs around me," I told her.
She put them up around me and linked them at the ankles. I put my hands under her buttocks and raised her up, forcing myself all the way down into her.
I was fucking her now, fucking her hard, fiercely, giving her everything I had, hurting her with my strength, slamming into her.
She was coming again. I heard her grunt as it started and then moan and then she opened her mouth to shriek in pleasure as the now familiar spasms wracked her again and again.
She was clawing at my back and I thought I was going to come, but I didn't yet. So close I was, so close and yet it didn't happen. It went on and on until finally it burst out of me like an explosion of energy, filling her with hot semen that burned both of us as it coated us.
I moaned then, the way she had, and she caught me to her body and pulled me down. I slumped against her, sighing, and she held me there, one arm around my back, the other hand in my hair, touching me, caressing me, and she was whimpering into my ear, "Good, baby, good baby, nothing was ever so sweet, baby."
I rolled aside and lay beside her. She moved onto her side and put her arm over me. She was silent for a long time and then she whispered, "I never knew it could be like that."
"Buddy Carrolton must be an ass," I said. "You're the most magnificent woman I ever saw."
"He likes to hurt people. He hurt me. It was like he couldn't enjoy anything unless he humiliated me. Once he even...." She stopped.
"What?"
"I can't tell you."
"It might help if you did."
"I'm ashamed."
I kissed her. "Don't ever be ashamed of yourself. I know you now and you couldn't do anything shameful."
"He tried to get me to ... make love ... to his dog." I laughed. "What?"
"He has a Doberman Pinscher and he wanted me to let it ... do it to me."
"Did you?"
"No."
"Well then?"
"He beat me and I said I would. I got down on the floor on my hands and knees and I would have let that dog do it to me, but the dog wouldn't."
"Dumb dog."
"Buddy killed the dog because he wouldn't." I felt a chill go over me and I began to wonder if maybe she wasn't right about Buddy Carrolton. "Go to sleep," I said. "I'm here with you."
FIVE
It was ten in the morning before we left the small coffee shop that was attached to the motel. We both had slept well, I because I was relaxed and tired, she (I suppose) because she felt safe for a change, safe and well loved (well fucked, anyway, which apparently was a novelty for her). While we ate our fried eggs, sausage and grits (no southern breakfast comes without grits) we talked about unimportant things. She kept looking out the window to marvel at the morning. It was a fine morning, clear and cool, with soft whisps of mist rising off the hills we could see out past the roadway. She kept smiling and talking about what a beautiful, beautiful morning it was. She said she couldn't ever remember having seen such a beautiful morning before.
We paid our bill and walked out to the car together. I think she wanted to hold my hand. Twice I felt her fingers brush against mine, but she didn't take hold of my hand and I didn't respond. I don't know why I didn't except that we were registered in the motel as brother and sister and I didn't see any reason to draw attention to the fact that we weren't. I still wasn't sure I believed in the pursuit power of Buddy Carrolton. I was still inclined to think she was just an unhappy wife who was exaggerating the evil character of a man she didn't happen to love any more. Women do that sometimes. I mean, what the hell? A man who could follow you across the country and find you no matter where you tried to hide? Not blood likely, I thought.
I stopped thinking that way by eleven o'clock. I was driving. We were drifting along at about fifty miles an hour because we were in steep bills, on a narrow road, and there didn't seem to be any reason to hurry. We weren't trying to make a schedule. We didn't even know where we were going really. She had just lit cigarettes for both of us when I happened to glance in the rear view mirror and saw a black Cadillac coming up fast behind us.
I dropped my own speed back some, intending to give him plenty of room to pass. At the moment we were headed up a long, straight grade. There was plenty of room to get around us.
Except the Cadillac didn't intend to go around us. It pulled up even with us and then dropped its speed back to match ours. I was surprised and glanced sideways. I saw two men in the car. The driver was staring straight ahead at the road, but the other man was staring at us. He was about thirty. I remember that. He was blond, with longish hair, and he was grinning at us.
Then, while I watched, dimly conscious of Mary staring past me, I saw the grinning blond man raise an automatic pistol and point it out his open window at us. Odd, but it all seemed to be in slow motion. I could see the gun raising. I swear I could see his finger tightening.
In reflex, or fear, I jammed the Mercury's accelerator to the floor and the big 429 engine roared and we jumped ahead. Behind us I heard a slapping sound and then we were accelerating at a speed that was too fast for us to make the curve at the top of the hill.
Mary was saying some words to me, but I couldn't make them out. I was concentrating too hard on trying to keep the skidding Mercury on the road. We went left, then right, then we straightened out and I was snaking my way as fast as I could through the winding curves that hid the pursuing Cadillac for the moment.
"Did you know those guys?" I said.
"No. At least I don't think so." She was swiveled around, watching out the back window. She seemed surprising calm, everything considered. "The one with the gun looked vaguely familiar. Maybe I've seen him somewhere sometime. But I don't know them. They're just someone Buddy sent."
"Maybe they're just nuts," I grunted, "or maybe that was somebody's idea of a joke."
"Here they come," she said. Still, her voice was calm and deliberate. "Maybe you'd better get out."
I was driving carefully, but as fast as I could. "What?" I glanced at her sharply, then back at the road. One misstep here and you could drop a thousand feet into the valley below. That wasn't exactly my idea of the best possible way to spend the next few seconds.
"They don't care anything about you," she said. "They're just after me." She had turned around. She wasn't even looking back at them now. "If you get out and run, they won't follow you. They don't want you. They're not paid for you."
"Screw that," I said. "They're not going to get either one of us." I looked in the mirror again. They weren't in sight, but as I watched, the Cadillac came around a curve behind me. I thought I could hear its tires squealing. I depressed the Mercury's accelerator more. We were hitting nearly seventy and I could feel the car quivering on every curve. I was praying that we wouldn't hit any oily or sandy spots on the roadway. The last thing we needed now was to skid.
"Hold on," I said. We were headed downhill now and our tires were screaming at every corner. Then we were going back up.
The Cadillac was gaining on us, though. The driver was leaning forward, watching us. I could see him as clearly as if I had been watching a close-up scene in a movie. I swear I could even see beads of sweat on his forehead and I knew then that the road was giving him as much trouble as it was me. I wondered (wondering too how my mind could wander so much while paying so much attention to the road at the same time) how much he was being paid for this.
We came around the side of a hill, to the left, and whipped into another sharp turn to the right, a turn so sharp that for one long gut-searing moment I didn't think we were going to make it. The Mercury skidded right, then left, and I thought I felt the left rear tire hanging in emptiness, and then we were back on firm ground and jumping ahead. I glanced at Mary. She was white and she was leaning forward a little, bracing her hands on the dashboard in front of her.
"Take it easy," I said. "We're going to make it."
I glanced in the rear view mirror. Nothing. The Cadillac should have been there, but it wasn't.
"Why are you slowing up?" Mary said.
"I think we lost them."
"What?"
"I think they're gone."
"They can't be gone," she said. "They're right behind us."
But they weren't. I thought I ought to jam the accelerator down and get the hell out of there now that I had the chance, but I couldn't. I had to know.
I slowed almost to a stop.
"What are you doing?" Mary said. "Let's go."
"I'm going back."
"What?"
"I want to see what happened."
"It's a trap."
I didn't think so. Not on that road, at the speeds we had been traveling. I knew what I was going to find and I don't know even now why I had to go back to see it, but I did.
I stopped the car at a dirt road and backed in, then went back the way we had come. A mile. Two. And there they were. Or rather, there they weren't any more. I saw their car three hundred feet below us, lying on its side. It wasn't burning, but it was crushed as if it had rolled several times on the way down there. I stopped and got out and looked down at them and I didn't feel anything.
Mary got out of the car and came to stand beside me. "What'll we do?" she said.
"Nothing."
"We have to do something."
"No, we don't. They don't have anything to do with us. It's just an accident."
"They were trying to kill us."
"Yeah, but they killed themselves instead. It doesn't have anything to do with us."
She shivered and took hold of my arm. "I'm so scared," she said.
I laughed. The sun felt good, warm against my skin, and I was fine because I was alive. I remembered feeling that way in Vietnam after a fight and I know it's just adrenalin and relief, but I don't care. It makes you feel damn fine to be alive after something like that.
"Don't be scared," I said. "We're going to be just fine."
SIX
She married him (she told me while we were lying in bed that night, naked together, still wrapped in the pleasure of what we had just given each other) when she was only nineteen. He was Buddy Carrolton, golden boy of the golden family, rich, famous, driving, a man no woman could resist (a woman could have, I thought, but a girl is blinded by golden light; but I didn't say that to her). Amazingly, he had been a perfect gentleman while he was courting her. He hadn't even attempted to make love to her and she would have been willing for it to happen. She wasn't a virgin. She almost was. Only one boy had been in her and that had been in the back seat of a car after a dance and that hardly counted because it was so quick and because it hadn't given her any pleasure. She had done it because she had been drinking champagne and because she was curious about sex, about the great all American pastime, but it hadn't amounted to anything. Buddy Carrolton, though, was a man (she thought) who was going to teach her about life.
He did.
They were married in New England's most fashionable wedding of the season. Five hundred guests. Formal reception. Newspapers sent reporters to cover it. It was the dream (she said) of every young girl who. ever wanted to marry a prince.
She would have been better off to marry the frog.
It was one in the morning by the time they were alone. Naturally the honeymoon was scheduled for the Bahamas, but they spent their first night in a hotel in New York that she had heard of many, many times, the Waldorf, and she was happy and giddy when they went into her room.
She sat down on the bed and smiled at him.
"Have you ever been fucked before?" he said.
There was a moment of shock during which the words he spoke didn't register with her. Just the harsh, unfamiliar one ... fucked ... unfamiliar not because she had never heard it or didn't know what it meant, but unfamiliar because it wouldn't have occurred to her that her husband would ask such a thing at that moment.
"Did you hear what I said?" he asked. "Yes."
"Well, have you?"
"Do we have to talk about that?" She felt (she told me) as if she were being whipped and she was scared, but mostly she was bewildered by this. She didn't understand the look on his face, that tight, hard look, as if he were looking at her as a stranger.
"Yes, we have to talk about that. Have you ever been fucked before?"
"I'm not a virgin, but I only did it once."
"I didn't ask if you were a virgin. I asked if you ever were fucked before."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"Say what?"
"Say, yes, I've been fucked before."
"I can't."
His lips thinned and she thought he was going to hit her. "Yes, you can, and you will. Say it."
She drew back a little, but she said it. "I've been fucked before."
"Were you naked?"
"No."
"What did he take off?"
"Just my panties."
"He left your bra on?"
"Yes."
"That's not true."
"Yes it is."
"He didn't play with your tits?"-"Yes, but he didn't take off my bra. He just unfastened it."
"Did you suck his cock?"
"What? No."
"You never sucked his cock?"
"No, I never did."
"Did you play with it?"
"No."
"You never touched it?"
"Once."
"How big was it?"
"I don't know. Just average."
"How do you know how big average is?"
"I don't know," she said. "Why are you doing this to me?"
"Take off your clothes. I want to see you naked."
She stood up, trembling, and undressed while he stood there smoking a cigarette, watching her. When she was naked, he looked at her and smiled, but there wasn't any gentleness in his smile. "You've got a good body," he said. "No wonder other guys fucked you."
"Only one did and he never saw me like this."
"Don't lie to me," he said. "You've been fucked lots of times and you're going to tell me about it, about every one of them."
"I haven't been," she said.
He smiled again and started taking off his own clothes. She wanted to look away, but there was something hypnotic about this situation and she wouldn't. She had to watch him and when his cock sprang into view, she couldn't keep from staring at it. It was thick and hard, climbing up from a bush of black curly hair, and since she really hadn't seen the only other one that had ever been exposed to her, she stared in fright at this male thing that she didn't understand.
"Come here," he said.
She walked over to him and he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down. "Kneel down in front of me," he said.
She did (and would you believe, she told me, I still didn't know what he wanted me to do).
"All right," he said. "Do it."
"Do what?"
"Suck it."
"Oh no," she said. "I can't"
He caught her by the hair at the back of her head and jammed his hardness against her mouth. "Suck it, bitch, or I'll beat you to death."
She tried to say something, but when she opened her mouth he was there and he hammered it into her so deeply that she choked and tried to pull away. He held her though and wouldn't let her move and when she didn't move either, he began to move his hips back and forth, so that she wasn't sucking him; he was fucking her in the mouth ... not so big (she knew now, she said) but it seemed huge to her, this foreign thing in her mouth, doing this to her.
She started to cry, softly, but he didn't notice, or didn't pay any attention. She heard him breathing harder and he was thrusting faster and faster into her and then suddenly he was coming, shooting spurts of hot liquid into her mouth, down her throat, and she gagged and tried to move away but he wouldn't let her. He was holding her more tightly now, trying to shove all his cock into her, so that she could hardly breathe, and she might have strangled except that he grunted suddenly and pulled away and turned his back on her.
Because she didn't know what else to do, she got up and went into the bathroom and closed the door. The taste of semen was strong in her mouth and she rinsed it out with water. She wasn't crying any more. She just didn't know what to do, and because she didn't she thought, maybe this is the way a man is the first time, maybe he is just hard in his passion.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She was pale and her hair was mussed some where he had been holding her, but she was beautiful (funny that I could see that then, she told me) and she thought, perhaps now he'll be more gentle, now that he has done this to me.
She opened the door and went back out. He was lying naked on the bed. He had turned out the light in the room now, but she could see him clearly because there was light coming in from outside, from the buildings across the street.
He didn't say anything to her and she crossed the room and got onto the bed with him. She wanted him to touch her. Maybe if he had touched her just then, been gentle with her, it would have been all right (she told me) but he moved aside slightly, as if he didn't want to be there.
"Buddy," she said, "I'm sorry."
What was she sorry for? She was sorry for not being what he wanted, for not understanding his need, for resisting what he wanted her to do. She loved him. She wanted him to love her and need her. She could learn.
"Bitch," he said.
"I said I'm sorry, Buddy."
"You're an awfully good cocksucker for somebody who says she never did it before."
"I never did, Buddy. I really never did."
He turned onto his side then, facing her, and put his hand on her breast, squeezing her until she winced in pain. "I'll kill you if you ever touch" another man," he said.
"I won't."
He moved against her and she was startled to find he was hard again.
Then he was above her, shoving her legs apart, jamming down into her when she wasn't ready. Wait, she wanted to say, let me get wet for you, but he didn't. He pushed on into her, hurting her because she was dry, and then he was fucking her, hard, thrusting, pushing at her, and she didn't know what to do because she was hurting and because she didn't know what he expected of her or what he wanted her to do.
He went on a long time this time, until finally he grunted again and slumped against her, and then he breathed deeply, once, and pulled out of her and lay beside her, silent.
She could feel the semen seeping out between her legs and she didn't know what to do about that either, whether to get up and go to the bathroom, whether to just let it happen. What? Why wouldn't he tell her anything?
"Buddy?" She was whispering.
"What do you want?"
"I love you."
He made a noise that she didn't recognize at first, and then she did. He was laughing.
"That's not funny," she said.
"Love me? What the hell does that mean? You just like being fucked."
"No."
"What?"
"No, I mean, I really love you. That's why I married you."
"You mean you didn't like being rucked by me. I'm not as good as the other guys you've fucked, I've just got more money, so you love me. Right?"
"No, Buddy, please."
"Then why did you say that?"
"I just said I love you."
"No, I mean, why'd you say you didn't like being fucked by me."
She was confused. "I didn't say that"
"Well, did you like it?"
"Yes, of course. Because I love you."
"You liked what I did to you?"
"Yes."
"As well as you liked it when other guys fucked you?"
"Buddy, I only did it once before and it wasn't any good at all."
"Did you come?"
"What?"
"When you did it with that other guy, did Ee make you come?"
"No." .
"Did I make you come?"
"No, but I'll learn. I haven't had any experience."
"You didn't come. Why not?"
"I just didn't, that's all. Sometimes it's hard for a woman."
"Whores never come," he said.
SEVEN
"He sounds like a very nice man," I said.
She crushed out the cigarette she was smoking. "It got worse. It never got better. By the time I ran, I was convinced that I couldn't ever enjoy myself with a man."
I smiled in the darkness. "Well, now you know better than that."
"Yes." She sighed. "Johnny?"
"What?"
"Does it bother you for me to talk about being with another man?"
"Not that man."
"Do you love me?"
"I don't know."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For being honest with me."
I laughed a little. "It's not hard to be honest once you make it a habit."
"I'm glad you didn't say you love me."
"I like you."
She sighed and moved closer to me. "I like you too, Johnny. Maybe we'll learn to love each other."
"Maybe," I said. "Who knows about things like that? You just go on a day at a time and pretty soon something happens, or maybe it doesn't."
She laughed. "You're a little crazy, Johnny Weeks."
"Yeah, I thought in the darkness, feeling the warmth of her against me, I must be.
She went to sleep first. I lay there a while thinking about the men who had chased us in the Cadillac and wondering what would come next.
What came next was a hippie commune where we all went naked and ate rice. Really. And I rapped with them some about Vietnam and they all thought that was wild that I was there and killed people and like that. They didn't approve, but they were willing to love me. So they said.
We were in Georgia when we found the place, which surprised me. Somehow Georgia isn't where you expect to find a hippie commune. Georgia is red clay and farmers and Lester Maddox and scared blacks and rebel flags and tough-faced kids in hot cars running around looking for some Yankee nigger-lover to zap.
Only it wasn't like that. Georgia was gentle and warm and the people were all friendly and nice and all the blacks I saw seemed well fed and happy enough. Read me some liberal lectures now. I don't know. I only tell you what I saw.
Anyway.
We were driving south when I saw this Hd on the highway, hitchhiking. I braked and stopped for him and while he was running toward us, Mary looked at me, surprised, and said, "Hey, what are you doing?"
"I'm giving the kid a ride."
"You think that's safe?"
I laughed. "Why not? He doesn't look like Charles Manson to me."
The kid opened the car door and tossed his knapsack inside. "Hey, thanks," he said. "Like, it's hot out there."
I put the car in gear and aimed it south again. "Where you headed?" I asked.
"Just a couple of miles. Down to the farm."
"You live around here?"
"Sure. Several of us do. It's a cool place."
"Where?"
"We have a farm down here. I mean, it's not really ours, but the guy who owns it lets us live there as long as we work for him a Utile bit. That's cool. He gets some work done and we have a cool place to Uve without putting out any bread, which we don't have much of."
"Okay," I said. "That sounds cool."
I was teasing his way of talking a Utile, but he didn't seem to notice. He leaned back in the seat and looked out. "Just a couple of miles," he said. "I had to go into town to buy some things." He jerked a thumb at the knapsack. "We needed some rice and stuff like that, so we got the bread together and I went into town for it."
He looked at us. "Where you going?" he said.
I shrugged. "We don't know. We're just drifting."
He looked surprised, then he smiled. "Hey, that's neat. You look square and you're not. That's neat, because nobody knows where he's going, only most of us aren't cool enough to realize that."
I could feel Mary relaxing some. This kid might have been a little strange, but he wasn't violent. You could almost feel the determined gentieness oozing from him.
She smiled at him. "We're just drifting," she said.
The farm was about a mile off the main road. The kid, who had said his name was Roy, told us we didn't need to take him there, but I thought, what the hell. It can't hurt and we're not going anywhere else.
It was set back behind some trees and when we drove in a big, black dog ran out to meet us. He didn't bark. He just panted and wagged his tail.
"That's Charlie," Roy said. "We call him that in honor of Charles Manson."
That surprised me a little and I glanced at him sharply. He grinned. "Charlie's a son of a bitch."
So we stayed there a while. I don't know why exactly, except that the kids who came out to greet us all seemed so relaxed and friendly, even the tall, black-haired girl who was naked and who had shaved off all her pubic hair. She was wearing a pair of rubber sandals and she was somehow beautiful despite the fact that she looked so odd, naked where she would have been dressed, shaved where she should have been hairy.
Oh, well, what the hell. I can't explain, except that the kids asked us to stay for dinner, and we did. We ate rice and when that was over we smoked a little grass (we all did except Mary, who said she didn't want to, and no one pressed her. I half expected her to object when I lit up, but she didn't).
Then it was late and everyone just sort of assumed that we would stay the night, so we did. They gave us a room on the second floor of the farmhouse, a room that obviously had been occupied by someone. I asked who was being put out, but they only laughed at the idea of being put out.
When we were alone, Mary wanted to talk, so I tried, but I was high and she wasn't, and that doesn't make for conversation.
She said, "I don't understand all this kind of living."
"It's not to be understood," I said. "It's to be experienced. I mean, it just is, that's all."
"Nothing just is. Everything has a reason."
"No."
"You like these people."
"Don't you?"
"I don't know. I never knew anyone like them."
"So what?"
"I can't relate to them."
I laughed. "I can't relate to not relating."
We were naked, sitting on the mattress together, and I reached over and touched her breast. It felt soft, as a rose is soft, and I leaned over to kiss it gently and breath in the sweetness of it.
Just then a girl and a man came into the room. They were both naked too.
"Hey," the girl said, "that's cool, you're touching each other."
"I can dig it," I said, and I laughed. The funny thing is that when I'm into marijuana, I know I'm talking nonsense and that seems to be the best thing of all, that I'm talking nonsense and realizing that it's nonsense.
Mary had gasped and she was trying to cover her nakedness with the sheet from the bed.
"Hey," the man said, "like, we didn't mean to hassle you. We only wanted to see if you're all right."
"We're not dressed," Mary said.
"So, who is?" the girl said. "We go around bare-skin a lot. It's a trip. I mean, you get rid of a lot of inhibitions that way."
I laughed again. My cock was standing up rock hard and huge and I thought that was pretty funny under the circumstances.
"We're into a little wine downstairs," the man said. I remembered his name was Marty. He was a big guy, strong looking, as if he might have been a football player once. His penis looked thick and heavy, but it wasn't hard and he didn't seem to be paying any attention to the fact that we were all naked there. "I thought you guys might like to have some with us."
"We're not dressed," Mary said again.
"Nobody downstairs is either," the girl said. She giggled. "Wine's a lot more fun naked."
They turned and went out, leaving our door open, and Mary looked at me and said, "Stop it, for God's sake. They're all crazy."
"Who knows about crazy:" I said, "Just because they're naked? What makes that crazy? You and I are naked and we're not so crazy."
"We're in private, or we were."
"To some people it doesn't make any difference.."
"It does to me."
I shrugged and got up off the bed. "Well, it doesn't to me," I said, "and if they've invited us down to share their wine with them, I'm going to go down and do it."
"Like that?"
"Why not? She said everybody's naked." I laughed again. "When everyone is naked, no one is. Or something like that."
"I can't go downstairs like this," she protested.
But she did. I think it was mostly that she was uneasy and afraid for me to leave her alone, but when I went, she went with me. Now it doesn't seem like such a big thing, but just then I remember feeling impressed at how cool she was. I've been in a lot of weird situations, but she hadn't, and it must have been hard for her to walk downstairs naked to face a lot of hippie nudists.
She did it, though. We walked into the living room and faced about twelve naked people who were lounging around, some of them drinking wine, some of them smoking marijuana (I didn't see anyone doing both). They all looked up and greeted us, but no one stared at us or anything so I guess that made her feel better.
It must have been about half an hour later when the couple across the room started making love. There wasn't any light in the room except for three candles and a hurricane lamp, but that was plenty for us to see what they were doing. They had been talking quietly, ignoring everyone else in the room, and suddenly the girl lay back flat and the man came up over her and then down into her.
"My God," Mary whispered.
The girl had her legs around the man's back and he was moving slowly but steadily in her. I don't know what you would have thought about that, but I was high enough to be able to watch them in the flickering light and realize that they were beautiful together. They were young and their skins were shiny and softly unblemished. Her hair was loose. Her breasts were perfectly formed, not large enough to sag. The muscles in his back were ridges of effort as he fucked her.
Fucked her.
That's what they were doing, I realized suddenly. They weren't a couple making love, they were two animals fucking and I could see clearly that there wasn't anything wrong with that, that animals fuck because nature made fucking a joyful thing, and if the animals happened to be human, well that was better still because humans were able to reason about what they were doing and realize that fucking is joyful.
Don't ask me whether that makes sense. It made perfect sense at the time, but I was stoned.
I reached over and touched Mary's breast. I heard her breath in sharply, but she didn't move away. She was watching the loving couple careful, intently, her lips parted slightly, and every once in a while her tongue would slip across her lips to moisten them.
Her nipples were taut and I trailed my hand down over her chest and belly into the softness between her legs. She was wet there, ready, and she didn't move when I touched her gently with my fingertips, except to shift her weight a little so that I could reach her more easily. My cock was so hard it was throbbing, but she didn't seem to notice that. She couldn't take her eyes away from the other couple, until:..
Until I caught her by the shoulders and pulled her back flat. She started to say something, but I covered her mouth with mine, forcing her lips open with my tongue, and then I was over her and down into her. She felt hot and tight there and I held still a moment, feeling my cock surge, afraid I was going to come right then, but the moment passed and I knew I was in control. I started fucking her then, slowly, deeply, thrusting in and out of her. Her face was strained with the pleasure she felt, the pleasure and the shock of what was happening to her. I could see she wanted to resist, and wanted to take me even more deeply into her at the same time, and then the resistance all melted away and she was fucking me as avidly as I was her.
Somewhere behind us I heard someone say something, but I couldn't make out the words and I didn't want to. I didn't want to think of anything but the body I was and the body she was, and the sensations we both were. She was coming already, her body arching under me, her cunt grabbing at me in that wonderful way some women have, and I felt strong, hard, able to fuck forever..
She was sobbing with pleasure, pushing, holding me with her legs. I was raised up above her, propped on my outstretched arms, looking down at her, slamming into her as hard as I could. She was grunting now, her breath lost in the crushing orgasms that were coursing through her, and suddenly I was coming too, huge wracking spasms of pleasure that made me groan with her.
I slumped onto her, exhausted for the moment, and somebody was cheering.
I rolled over and looked at the crowd. They were sitting around us, watching.
"Hey, man, you're sensational," one of the girls said.
I grinned. "I guess we sort of got carried away." I knew my cock was glistening wet in the candlelight, but I felt a little strange now and I didn't want to rub it. Somehow the sex had brought me down from my high.
"Listen, that's fine," one of the men said. He had a full black beard and he was smiling gently at us. "That's called doing your own thing and we all believe in that. You love each other and you didn't hurt anybody else. And that's a nice thing."
Mary was lying with her hands over her face. I thought she was crying, but then she took her hands down and I saw she was laughing.
"My God," she said, "I'm a sex maniac. I never felt anything so marvelous in my entire life."
One of the girls watching clapped her hands in de light. "Hey, we did that," she said. "You turned in to our vibes and that's what made you feel so good."
Mary looked at her and grinned. "Maybe so," she said, "but I think Johnny's cock had something to do with it too."
I touched her belly gently and smiled at her.
"Let me try some marijuana now," she said.
EIGHT
Buddy Carrolton's people caught up with us again in Atlanta. We were in a motel on the edge of town. I was lying on the bed, smoking, waiting for Mary to get out of the shower, when they walked in.
There were two of them, one white, one black, both big and hard looking. Neither one was showing a weapon, but I didn't have any doubts at all that either could have produced one if it was necessary. And I was naked. Somehow, a man feels most defenseless when he's naked. Even the Spanish Inquisitors knew that, which is why they always did their interrogating after stripping their prisoners naked.
One thing I know, though. You lose any edge at all if you blow your cool. That's a truism, but it's a truism because it's true.
I looked at the two men and twisted sideways to crush out my cigarette.
"You guys want something special?" I said.
"Where's the woman, punk?" the white one said to me.
"What woman?"
"Mary Carrolton," he said, "and the next time you play dumb you'll be chewing on your own balls."
"I don't know any Mary Carrolton," I said.
"The woman you're traveling with," the black one said. "It don't matter none what name she give you. Her name is Mary Carrolton."
"What do you want her for?"
Mary came in then, drying herself. She stopped and stared at them, holding the towel at her waist. They grinned when they saw her bare breasts and she caught herself and raised the towel to cover herself as much as possible.
Her face was white but her voice was steady. "What do you want?" she said.
"We don't want anything, lady," the white man said. "We just want to take you back to your husband. He's the one who wants something."
"I don't have a husband," she said.
The black man chuckled down in his throat. "That's between you and the man," he said. "We're just doing a job."
"I won't go back," she said.
"Yes you will," the black man said.
"We've got authority to use all the force necessary," the white man said. "Your husband told us he just wanted you back alive, but he didn't care much about your health otherwise. He said he just wanted you to be alive for ten minutes after he gets hold of you again."
The black man laughed again. "I think he aims for that to be a very long ten minutes."
I sat up on the edge of the bed and they both looked at me. "Don't try anything heroic, punk," the white man said.
"Leave him alone, please," Mary said. "He doesn't know anything about this."
"Sure," the black man said. "He's just an innocent bystander here."
"He's just a hitchhiker," Mary said.
The white man grunted. "Your husband's going to love that. You not only run out on him, you shack up with a hitchhiking punk."
I was getting more than a little tired of being called a punk. And I wasn't about to let them walk out of here with Mary.
"Just leave him alone," Mary said.
"Why don't you two guys pick on somebody your own size," I said.
The black man's hand snaked into his coat and came out holding an automatic pistol. A .45 with a muzzle big enough to discharge a hunk of lead that would decapitate me at that range.
If he hit me with it.
"You just cool it," the black man said. "If she's telling the truth about you just being along for a ride, then you better consider this none of your business. You had a lucky piece of ass and you may get out of here without your being busted. You just shut up and stay cool."
I stood up and held up both hands disarmingly. "Whatever you say, man. She's just another broad to me. Take her and go in peace."
The white man looked at me and I saw disgust and contempt flicker in his face. "Just shut up, punk," he said.
The both looked back at Mary. She hadn't moved, but the towel had slipped some and I could see her breasts again. So could they and they were enjoying looking at her. There are men who get kicks from terrifying women and apparenfly these were two of them.
"Drop the towel, baby," the white man said, "and give us a look at what your old man thinks is so fucking valuable."
"Fucking valuable," the black man said, laughing. "You got some sense of humor."
The white man didn't laugh. He walked over to Mary and jerked the towel away. She didn't move. He took one of her breasts in his hand and held it, weighing it. "I like them a little bigger than this," he said, "but it ain't bad."
He tightened his hand and she winced in pain. The black man laughed and I grabbed his wrist and chopped down. I heard two things. I heard the gun hit the floor and I heard his wrist snap. He threw his head back in what would have been a howl of agony, but I chopped his backhanded across the larynx and cut off the sound before it could escape. He dropped hard, like a sack of potatoes, and I scooped up the dropped .45 and leveled it at the head of the white man.
"I know how to use this thing," I said, "and if you move even one muscle, you're a dead man."
I took a step away from the black man who was holding his throat and trying to breath. His breath sounded rough, as if something were broken in his throat, but I knew he'd be all right. I hadn't hit him hard enough to do any permanent damage. Like kill him.
"That's not a smart move, punk," the white man said. He was watching my eyes, not the gun, and I knew he was a professional.
"It won't be a smart move for you to let me see you again either," I said. "If we're going to play guns, I know how to play as well as you do, maybe better."
He half smiled. "You don't look so tough," he said.
T walked over close to him and before he realized what I was going to do, I smacked him across the bridge of the nose with the automatic's barrel. He grunted in pain and slipped to his knees. When he looked up, the automatic was pointed at his right eye.
"You look old enough to know that you can't judge a book by it's cover," I said, my voice low and hard. "I'm tough to Mil you if I have to and never look back, and don't you make the mistake of thinking I won't do it. I'm going to keep this gun and if I see you again, I'm going to kill you with it. I'm not going to hesitate. I'm not going to ask any questions. I'm going to kill you."
He believed me now. I could see it in his eyes. Naked or not, I meant exactly what I said, and he could tell that I did.
"Maybe you won't see me coming," he said.
"You'd better pray I don't," I said, and then I slammed him across the temple with the gum He fell hard onto his side and lay still.
I walked back to the black man. He tried to get up then and I cracked him with the gun too, not hard enough to kill him, just hard enough to knock him out.
"Get dressed," I said to Mary. "They won't be in any condition to look for us for several hours, hut I want to be a long way away from here before they are."
"My God," she said, "you could have killed them."
"Would you rather I had let them take you?"
"No."
"Then get yourself dressed. We have some miles to make."
She rode in silence while I drove through the Georgia pine tree country, headed southwest now. She was curled up inside herself and I didn't ask her what she was thinking. I didn't have to. Until now, even with the men who had disappeared over the cliff, all this had been kind of a game. Intellectually she had known that Buddy Carrolton was serious, but until those men had threatened her personally, she hadn't been able to take it all seriously. Most people are like that these days. Violence never touches them, not really. Violence is something they see in movies or deplore on television. Most people live an entire lifetime and never look violence in the eyes.
I was proud of her, though, for the way she was holding herself together. I knew it couldn't be easy.
I stopped at a motel, one of those mom and pop places that you used to find everywhere until the big boys, the chains, starting driving them out.
When we went into the room, she put her arms around me before I had the light on and she was kissing me hungrily, savagely, as if she were trying to forget what had happened, or maybe trying to remember it more clearly.
I felt her hands fumbling at my belt and I picked her up and carried her over to the bed. She was writhing under me so much that I could hardly get her clothes off her, but then she was naked, trying to pull my clothes off me too. When I was naked, I fell onto the bed with her. She pushed me flat and got up over me, straddling me, and came down on me, jamming me up into her with one push.
She arched her back, leaning backwards, and she whispered, "Oh, my God, I need you to fuck me. I need it so bad."
We started moving together then and there was violence in the way we did it. She was slamming at me and I was thrusting back at her, as if we needed to hurt each other some to take the edge off the violence with the two men at the other motel. Her cunt was white hot and I know my cock had never been harder or bigger than it was then. It was as if her insides were electrically charged and we were shocking each other with each thrust.
I grabbed her around the waist then and spun her around flat, without going out of her, so that I was on top of her. I hooked my arms behind her knees and lifted her ass off the bed, holding her up that way while I fucked her. She was moaning and talking to me.
"Fuck me," she said.
"Jesus, fill me."
"Give it to ffle harder."
"Give me some hot come."
"I'm coming again, Christ I'm coming again. Oh, my God, you're fucking me so hard tonight, I need it, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, oh God, give me your cock."
I was giving it to her, as hard as I could. I stopped and pulled out of her and turned her over. Before she could stop me, before she even realized what I was going to do to her, I had gone into her ass. She screamed, half in pleasure, half in agony, but I was violent now too and I didn't pull back. Slowly, ever so slowly, I pushed down into her, half inch by half inch, millimeter by millimeter, into that most virgin part of a woman's body, until she was lying flat on the bed and I was as deep into the soft recesses of her ass as I could go. She was panting softly now and I felt her muscles relax a little as I held her there.
I started fucking her in the ass then, slowly, then faster, using her ass exactly as I had used her cunt, feeling my swollen balls bounce off the cheeks of her bottom, hearing her grunt every time I went down into her, knowing that I was hurting her, knowing too that I was giving her pleasure now, that she wanted me to stop while simultaneously not wanting me ever to quit doing that to her.
I knew I was exhausting her. I knew she would never be the same again after this. No woman ever is.
A woman can surrender her cunt without surrendering herself. These days, she can even give her mouth to a man's cock while still holding herself apart. But no woman can be fucked in the ass without knowing that she has surrendered totally. No woman can feel a hard cock impaling her in that most private of places and think that she has any secrets left. A woman can take a man in her vagina. She can suck him. She can even let him come in her mouth. And she still can think she has made love, or even that she has used the man for her own pleasure. But once a woman has had a man's cock full deep in her ass, there is nothing left for her to think: I have been fucked. That man fucked me. He didn't make love to me. He fucked me. After that, she knows precisely what the work fuck means. She knows what it really is to be possessed by a male.
I could feel it building in me now and I pulled out of her ass and flipped her over and went back down into her cunt. She moaned once more and then I was coming, hard, violently, splashing into her, spurting so that it almost hurt me to feel it going like that.
It was over then and I lay beside her in the darkness and lit a cigarette. My hands were still shaking with the tremors that had gone through me. I dragged deeply and breathed smoke at the dark ceiling.
"You son of a bitch," she said.
I didn't answer her.
"You didn't have to do that to me."
"I know I didn't."
"Why did you."
"I wanted to."
"You didn't care whether you hurt me or not."
"Just then I didn't. I just wanted to fuck you."
"You could have fucked me without doing that to me. You hurt me."
"You liked it." . '
"No I didn't."
"Of course you did. You know you did and there's no use lying to me about it any more than there would be in lying to yourself about it."
"I didn't want to do that."
"You didn't do it. I did it."
"You didn't have any right to do it."
"There are times when a man has a right to do anything he wants to, if he can."
"No, there aren't."
I sucked on the cigarette again. "Yes there are. There are times when I have the right to do whatever I'm strong enough to do."
"But you hurt me."
I didn't say anything.
"You're not even sorry that you hurt me."
"No."
"Why?" Her voice was almost a cry of anguish. "Because my pleasure was stronger than your pain."
"You don't have the right to take that pleasure."
"Yes I do."
She sat up in bed and looked down at me. Then: "You really are a bastard and you know why, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it didn't hurt you as much as you're pretending it did. Because you liked it and you're hoping I'll do it again sometime, but you don't want to admit that because it gave you feelings that nothing else ever did. Because it made you realize how much stronger than you I am. Because you enjoyed being taken like a female animal instead of some civilized woman and now your civilization veneer is returning and you don't want to admit what you felt. Because of all those things and because I know them and won't pretend that I don't. Because if I were playing by the rules of your kind of civilized society, I'd be pretending to be sorry now for hurting you."
"And humiliating me."
"It's not possible for a man to humiliate a woman by taking pleasure from her."
She lay back down. "You're right," she whispered. "I hurt even now, but I'm still so excited that I can hardly lay still. And I do want you to do it again. You make me wish you had three cocks so I could have you in my mouth and my ass and my cunt all at once."
"I know," I said. "If you're a good girl, I'll see if I can work that out for you."
"You son of a bitch," she said. But this time she was laughing in the darkness when she said it.
NINE
Because my momma didn't raise no fools, we sold the car and bought another. It was obvious that Buddy Carrolton had people looking for Mary's Mercury. Ergo: we should get rid of it.
We sold it in Jackson, Mississippi. Fortunately, the car was in Mary's name, not her husband's, and she had the necessary papers with her. The dealer who bought it was suspicious at first. We didn't haggle about money and we accepted about five hundred dollars less than the car was really worth. Naturally, he thought the car was stolen, despite Mary's assurance that she just had decided she didn't want that big a car any more. He even made a couple of phone calls to check out the validity of her papers, but eventually he decided we were honest, just stupid, and he gave us the money and we left.
At another dealer, we bought a Ford Torino. We paid cash and we put the car in my name. There was no way for Buddy Carrolton or any of his goons to know my name.
We drove out of Jackson, headed southwest, toward New Orleans, relaxed, sure we had some breathing room now.
In New Orleans, because we were tired of traveling, and because we didn't have anywhere else to go, and most especially because New Orleans fascinated both of us the minute we drove into it, we rented an apartment in the Vieux Carre, the French Quarter.
You have to see the Quarter to believe it. It's a combination of honky tonk, 1860, Greenwich Village, and early Mafia. I think I like it better than any place I've ever been.
Our apartment was off Chartres Street behind some wooden doors that make you think you're going into a warehouse when you're on the street. But it was one of those places you find all through the quarter. Go through the wooden doors and you're suddenly in an enchanting interior courtyard that makes you think you're Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara is coming to meet you. We had a fountain and a balcony from our second floor apartment. It was beautiful.
We made love there our first night. Mary said she didn't think she had ever been so relaxed in her life. I agreed with her. I don't think I ever was either.
I even found a job.
I didn't have to, of course, but somehow once we had found the apartment and had moved in, I began to get restless for something to do. I still had my discharge money and of course Mary kept telling me she had plenty of money, but male chauvinism is a hard habit to break. Somehow it seemed I ought to be getting up and going to work. So I did. I didn't tax my brain, of course, because I knew I wasn't going to stay all that long (how did I know?). I just hooked on at a Quarter bar as a bartender. Daytime hours. I enjoyed going home to Mary too much to be working night bartender's schedule.
She used to do things to surprise me while we were there. One Friday evening, for example, when I came home, she met me at the door in a hostess gown she had made herself that day. It was beautiful and completely transparent and she was absolutely naked inside it.
We had a good time there, until she disappeared.
That was on a Friday too. I had been working and when I came home I had to let myself in because she didn't answer my knock. That surprised me, but it didn't alarm me. There wasn't any reason why it should have. We were feeling perfectly safe. We had been there almost a month and we thought we had shaken off Buddy Carrolton.
When I went in the door, I called her name. She didn't answer. I walked through into the kitchen. Nothing. And no sign of anything cooking.
That was strange, but I thought perhaps she wanted to eat out. I walked into the bedroom, thinking perhaps she was in the shower and hadn't heard me call her.
I stopped just inside the door.
The room was a shambles. apparently they had sur prised her in there and she had put up a fight. The covers were ripped off the bed. The chest was overturned. In the bathroom the curtain was torn off the shower. The bathroom door was broken. Apparently she had locked herself in there and someone had crashed in.
There was some blood on the bathroom floor. Not much. As if maybe someone had hit her hard enough to make her nose bleed.
I cursed. I stood there in the middle of the room and I cursed myself for seven kinds of fool for leaving her there alone. Looking at it then, I couldn't remember how safe we had felt. I only cursed myself for letting them take her.
When my anger passed, I felt fear. Fear for her. I remembered the man in the motel saying that Carrolton hadn't cared if they hurt her, as long as she was still alive when they returned her to him.
I went into the living room of the apartment and poured myself a drink and sat down to try to think about what to do.
I considered my alternatives.
I could do nothing. I could chalk it up to experience and try to forget her.
That was stupid. I hadn't ever said I loved her, but with her gone I knew I did. I couldn't abandon her. I loved her and I knew she loved me. She had depended on me to protect her and hadn't done it. Somehow I had to get her back.
I could go to the police.
That was almost as bad. What was I going to say to them? Excuse me, please, but Mr. Carrolton's wife has been kidnapped by Mr. Carrolton and returned to him. By Mr. Buddy Carrolton? Yes. Rich and famous Mr. Buddy Carrolton? Yes. So long, kid. Every cop in the world is smart enough to avoid getting mixed up in the domestic hassles of somebody with as much clout as Buddy Carrolton. I could go after her myself.
The Torino was still there, which meant either that they had taken her in another car, or that they would be flying her back to New England. Somehow it seemed un-likely to me that they would fly her back. There were too many chances that way for her to make a break. Create a scene in an airport these days and you're likely to find yourself surrounded by the FBI and ten thousand Federal marshals.
On the other hand, if they were driving her back, it seemed next to impossible for me to trace them. I didn't know what kind of car they were in. I didn't know what route they would follow.
My guts turned over inside me as I thought about her being with them for several days while they drove her back to New England. I thought about her being terrified by them, abused by the, hurt by them. Raped by them.
And there wasn't anything I could do about it.
Except I could be there waiting when they arrived with her. And I could make them pay for what they were doing to her.
I got up then and called the airport and reserved a coach seat on the first flight to Hartford, Connecticut.
Then I wrapped up the .45 I had taken from the man in the motel. I wrapped it in plain brown paper and addressed it to myself, General Delivery, Hartford, Connecticut, and I went to the post office and mailed it. What with magnetometers and all, there wasn't any way I could get it on an airplane and I didn't want to be without it.
If Mary was hurt, somebody was going to pay for it.
TEN
Surprisingly, the gun arrived without any problems. I had been there three days before it arrived, and I was a little nervous when I went to pick it up. I've had more experience than a lot of guys, but I've watched the FBI on television too. You get the idea that they're infallible, them and postal inspectors. I could imagine waltzing up to the window to ask for my package and finding myself suddenly handcuffed and on my way to prison.
Nothing. No trouble at all. I asked for my package. The bored clerk asked to see some identification proving I was John Weeks. I showed him my service discharge papers and I walked out with my .45.
No problem.
Now that I was in Hartford, I had had three days to watch the Carrolton house-mansion really-and I knew perfectly well that I didn't really have a plan at all. I was reasonably sure that Mary wasn't there. I had seen Buddy Carrolton several times around his place, always alone, always apparently aimless. I hadn't seen anyone else except a black butler who kept bringing him drinks on the patio.
At night, I saw him sometimes walking through the house. He seemed to watch a lot of television, read a Utile, talk on the telephone infrequently, and go to bed relatively early. And evidently alone.
I concluded he was waiting for Mary to be delivered. There didn't seem to be anything for me to do but wait. I considered breaking in on him, threatening him into telling me where she was, perhaps even holding him prisoner until they delivered her safely back to me. But that didn't seem practical. How do you hold a rich and famous man for three or four days without the world finding out?
I waited.
I considered hiring a private detective to help me keep the house under surveillance. Obviously I couldn't watch it 24 hours a day. But I couldn't do that without telling someone why I was there and I didn't want to do that. I didn't underestimate for a moment the difference between what I could pay a detective and what Buddy Carrolton could pay? What would keep any detective I hired from selling me out? Nothing.
So I waited. I gave up the morning hours from nine to two in the afternoon. I gambled on that. I gambled on the idea that when they delivered Mary it wouldn't be all that easy to get her to go in the house willingly and that they would probably choose to do it during darkness.
The rest of the time I watched the house from a series of rented cars.
On the fourth day, they took me. I don't know why I was so stupid as to think they were stupid. It never even occurred to me that they might be as smart as I was, that they might be watching for me, but apparently they were.
I was sitting in the car when the door on the passenger side was opened. I turned, startled, and saw a man I had never seen before. He was holding a gun.
"Welcome to the big leagues, kid," he said.
Buddy Carrolton was sitting in his study drinking a martini when the man with the gun brought me in. He looked up and studied me while I looked back at him, studying him. He was a good looking man with prematurely grey hair. If I hadn't known anything about him, I would have thought him to be the perfect picture of a good citizen. As it was, the only thing wrong with him that I could see was something around the mouth. Some line or expression. Something indefinable that gave him a look of being both weak and cruel.
"So you're the one she's been with," he said finally. He put down the drink and reached into his pocket for a long, thin cigar. He lit it and blew a stream of blue smoke in my direction.
I didn't say anything. I only looked at him. Under the circumstances, there didn't seem to be any purpose in making some wise ass crack that could get my head busted from behind.
"What's your name?" Carrolton said.
"My name's John Weeks and I don't know what the hell this is all about," I said. I tried to look genuinely puzzled but I gave that up when I saw him smile at me. He knew I was lying and I suddenly felt more irritated than anything else. I was getting damn tired of this man.
The man with the gun was good. He was just two steps too far away for me to be able to make a move at him.
"Where's Mary?" I said.
"I don't see that as your business," Carrolton said, rolling his cigar between two excellently manicured fingers. "After all, she is my wife."
"Why don't you just let her go and forget her." I said. "What good is a woman who doesn't want you?"
"Oh, I think she might be good for laughs anyway." He laughed himself at what he had said and looked at the gunman. "Don't you think so, Harry?"
The man nodded. "Whatever you say, Mr. Carrolton."
Carrolton looked back at me. "What were you intending to do there outside my house?"
"Find Mary?"
"Then what? Were you going to come busting in here like John Wayne leading the cavalry?"
"Something like that."
He looked at me and smiled again, this time with what appeared to be genuine amusement. "I think under certain other circumstances I might have liked you, John," he said. "You do seem to have a natural masculine flair for the dramatically heroic."
"Why don't you go to hell?" I said. I didn't have any stomach for his Noel Coward act. "You've kidnapped your wife and now you've kidnapped me. In case you haven't heard, kidnapping is a capital crime."
He laughed aloud. "Oh, for heaven's sake, haven't you heard? The Supreme Court has outlawed capital punishment?"
"I haven't, you son of a bitch," I said.
My head exploded then in a mushroom cloud of sparks and I remember being almost to the floor before everything went black.
The first thing I did when I regained consciousness was try to hold my head because it felt like it was split wide open. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage that because I was tied up. My arms were behind me, tied, then linked to the ropes that had been tied around my feet. A classic hog-tie.
The second thing I did was wonder why I was naked.
The third thing I did was swear and try to get loose. I couldn't. Whoever had done the tying had done a damn good job. The harder I struggled, the tighter the knots became until I finally stopped tugging on them because I was starting to cut off my circulation.
I finally relaxed and tried to will my head into feeling better. I don't know whether that was working or whether it just stopped throbbing by itself, but eventually I started to feel better.
Eventually. I was lying on a bed in a comfortable looking, large room. I don't know how long I had been there. I don't even know how long I lay there before they came in. Time has a way of stretching out when you're in that kind of position. But after a time that may have been anything from thirty minutes to three hours, the door opened and three men came in. After them came Buddy Carrolton and Mary.
I was glad to see her even under those conditions. She was dressed and she looked a little tired, but she didn't look like she had been hurt any.
When she saw me, she stopped and her eyes widened and then she came over to me. I was a little surprised they didn't stop her, but they didn't. Carrolton closed the door behind them and leaned against it. The three other men just stood impassively and watched her.
She leaned down and kissed me. "Are you all right?" she said.
"I'm a Utile uncomfortable, I think, but I guess I'll make it," I said, trying to smile at her. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," she said. "I really am."
"You two are so touching I can hardly stand it," Carrolton said. , "Go fuck yourself," I said.
He laughed. "Oh no, you don't understand. That's not why we're here."
"Why are we here?" I said.
"Why, we're here to give Mary what she wants."
Mary stood up and looked at him. She didn't say anything, but she looked frightened. "Why don't you let him go, Buddy?" she said finally. "I'll do whatever you want if you just let him go first."
"Oh, you'll do whatever I want anyway," he said. "You'll have to kill me before I let you do anything to me, she said.
"No, I'll just kill him instead."
"What?"
He smiled at her. "The boys here are going to have some fun with you, Mary, and the minute you resist anything they want, I'm going to kill your boy friend. Believe me, I will."
"You can't," she said.
"I can and I will. Behave yourself and cooperate completely and maybe you'll save his life, his life and yours, Be anything other than totally cooperative, and I guarantee you that your friend John here will be dead within seconds."
"That's bullshit," I said. "He wouldn't dare kill me, Mary. Even all his money wouldn't buy off a murder rap. Don't listen to him."
"I might remind both of you that there's absolutely no link between John Weeks and myself. I think I have about a 99 to 1 chance of never having anyone find a link. I'll take that chance."
"Why do you want to do this to me?" Mary said.
"Because you were my wife and you insulted and humiliated me. You were unfaithful to me. You ran away from me."
"I just left," she said. "You didn't love me anyway."
"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "You humiliated me, now I intend to humiliate you. That's justice. And justice is what the world is all about."
He looked at the other men. "If you'll remove Mr. Weeks from the bed, you may begin at any time," he said. "Be sure to put him somewhere where he will be able to observe clearly. I want him to remember everything that is going to happen."
Two of them picked me up and dumped me into an easy chair beside the bed.
"This isn't the smartest thing you ever did, Carrolton," I said. "You're going to have a tough time getting away from it."
"I don't think so," he said. He sounded preoccupied. He wasn't even looking at me. He sat down in another chair and made a motion toward the other men. "Please begin," he said.
One of the men looked at Mary. "Take off your clothes," he said.
"No."
"Just a minute," Carrolton said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun. "Mary, I was really serious. If you say no one more time, I'll shoot this man, and then you'll get what you're going to get anyway. Now why don't you just relax." He laughed. "They always say if rape is inevitable, he back and enjoy it. Believe me, it's inevitable."
She looked at me, then at him. She was flushed, but she reached up and unbuttoned the dress that she was wearing. It fell to the floor around her feet.
I didn't want to watch her. I knew it made things even more painful for me to be seeing it, but I couldn't help it. I had to watch.
She unfastened her bra and I saw her breasts come out white and full and beautiful for them all to see. She slipped her panties off and her triangle of thick woman's hair was there for them.
She was naked, standing helpless in front of them, and I couldn't prevent anything from happening to her.
The men undressed then. Coldly, only a job to them apparently, they took off their clothes. When they were naked, I saw why Carrolton had selected them for the job. They were all massive studs, hung with thick, huge cocks that even half hard were monstrous.
She gasped when she saw them, but she stood still without backing away. She gave me one fleeting terrified glance that seemed to be begging me to forgive her for what they were about to do to her.
"Relax," I said to her. "Don't let them hurt you."
"Excellent advice," Carrolton said. "He's as smart as he is good looking. Take his advice, Mary, and you may five through this." He snickered and I looked at him. He was sweating and his lips were parted. He looked excited.
"Well, go ahead," Carrolton said, "which of you is going to be first?"
One of the men, the tallest of them, came toward her. He reached out and took her breast in his hand. Almost as if that were a signal, his cock started to rise in excitement.
He pushed her back onto the bed and climbed up over her. Her legs together, she lay still until he had pried them apart, and then he positioned himself over her, his huge cock at the entrance to her cunt, and then suddenly, like an animal pouncing, he pushed himself down into her.
She arched herself at the shock of his entrance, but then she tried to lie still under him. He raised up some and got his hands under her buttocks, lifting her, and incidentally giving me a perfect view of his cock as it went in and out of her, long and thick, glistening wet from her juices now.
Holding her that way, he fucked her steadily, hard, rhythmically, until she was gasping just with the force of what he was doing to her. I could see the way her cunt was holding him and for a moment I hated her for what was happening and then that passed and I felt sympathy for her because I knew what she was going through there, knowing that I was watching.
The man was up almost on his knees now, thrusting at her hard.
One of the other men laughed. "Jesus, you're really fucking her, baby. Leave something for us."
The man in her laughed with them without breaking his rhythm. "Can't wear one out, boys."
She was moaning under him. His cock looked so big in her it was almost as if she were being had by a pony.
Then he was coming. He threw his head back as if he were going to howl in agony for a moment, and his eyes closed, and then he shoved forward one last time and lay flat on her.
She lay still under him.
"Get out of her now, for Christ's sake, and let a man show you how to go about it," one of the other men said.
I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. His cock was not as thick, but it was longer and where the other man had seemed fleshy, this man seemed almost bony in his hardness.
He climbed up on the bed beside her as the other man drew out. His cock was still half hard and it was gleaming with his semen and her juice.
I closed my eyes for an instant, but I opened them again when the man on the bed now said, "Start eating on it, baby. There's nothing I like better than a good blow job."
I said, "No," and Carrolton laughed.
"I think we're getting to him a little," he said. "I don't think he enjoys this as much as she does."
Mary sat up, her legs still spread, and looked at me, then at Carrolton. I thought she was going to say something, but she didn't.
"Suck on it, baby. Now," the man said.
She bent down and took him into her mouth. I could see her lips soft against him and I wanted to scream with the agony of what I was seeing, but I grit my teeth and stayed silent. I was sorry even that I had uttered that one word of protest. I couldn't stop this, but I didn't want to add anything to Carrolton's satisfaction if I could avoid it.
I started thinking about killing him. Odd that I should think of killing him and not the men who were abusing her, but to me they were only instruments. I hated what they were doing, but I didn't hate them. They weren't even human to me.
Carrolton, I hated. And I began to make some plans for what I would do to him.
Mary gagged some just then. She was moving her head up and down on the man steadily and I knew she was trying to make him come as fast as possible. I felt sick when I thought about that, but I knew that she knew it was the only thing she could do. Wear them out and they would have to stop.
He was leaning back, watching her head bob up and down as she sucked him. When she would go down, he would thrust up slightly so that she always was taking more of him into her mouth than she wanted to, but she was working on his rhythmically, steadily, trying to make it happen. I wanted to cry out to her, to tell her it was all right, because I knew she was tortured most by wondering how I was feeling, what I would think of her after seeing this.
How did I feel?
What is there to say about watching the woman you love being forced to suck off another man? I watched. I saw her hands on his legs. I saw her take his balls in one hand, fondling them, trying to make it happen. I saw his cock in her mouth. I saw her lips around him. I saw his cock moving in and out shining with her saliva.
I watched it all because I wanted to remember. I wanted the image of this to be strong in my mind when I killed Buddy Carrolton. As I watched him die, I wanted to remember Mary crouched over this man, his cock in her mouth, her hair hanging loose, her eyes closed to shut out as much of the horror as possible.
I wanted to remember every moment of it because when Carrolton died with his own cock in his mouth, choking on his blood, I wanted to be able to remember the scene so I could ask him, was it worth it, you bastard? Did you get enough thrill from watching to make your own pain minimum payment?
The man was coming in her mouth now. She was holding still, not sucking him now, not trying to make him come any harder than necessary, just accepting it, swallowing rapidly. I could see her throat working. Trying not to choke. Not to embarrass herself any more than necessary.
The man was groaning with the pleasure of the sensations, lying back flat now, and the other two men were laughing and making ribald comments about it.
One of them said (I remember), "Jesus, did you ever see a better job of cocksucking?"
The other one said, "That's enough to make me wish I had had her do that to me."
The first one laughed and said, "What's the matter, you're not man enough to last more than one go around?"
"I'll last as long as you will, buddy," the other one said.
"Fuck her in her ass," Carrolton said.
They turned to look at him. "What?"
"One of you has been in her mouth and the other one in her cunt. I want the third one of you in her ass."
The one who hadn't been with her yet looked questioning for a moment, but then he shrugged. "Well, what the hell?" he said. "One hole's as good as another."
I wanted to remain silent but despite myself I made a guttural sound down in my throat. Carrolton looked at me and laughed. Then he looked back at Mary.
"Go on and do it," he said.
The man's cock was rock hard and huge. He might have been the biggest of any of them and I remembered how I had hurt her when I was in her ass. I had hurt her and she loved me. What was this going to do to her?
She looked at me silently, her eyes wide. "I love you, Mary," I said.
"Isn't that sweet," Carrolton said. "Despite everything, he loves her? Do you love him Mary? It's his fault you're going through this, you know. If you had stayed home and been a good wife, none of this would have happened. Even if you had run away, it might not have happened if you hadn't played the whore with him."
She looked at him and then she said, "Yes, I love him, and nothing you or these men can do is going to change that." She looked at me and smiled. There was pain in her smile, but she did smile and she said, "I do love you, Johnny."
The man started toward her and she gave him a look of infinite contempt and then she rolled over onto her belly. "Go on," she said. "Do whatever you want You're not men enough to make it matter, any of it. I've been fucked by a real man. You people are children."
The man flushed angrily and then he grinned. "We'll see about that, honey," he said.
He walked over to the bed and grabbed her legs and pulled her toward him so that she was lying half on the bed and half off, her bottom exposed to him. He took hold of her buttocks and spread them roughly and then positioned him self behind her and drove into her savagely. I don't know how she was able to take it without screaming, but all she did was grunt a little when he went into her and then she lay still while he forced his way completely into her.
He fucked her hard, as hard as a strong man could, ramming in and out of her roughly, again and again, jamming that monstrous cock all the way into her ass, until finally she couldn't take it any more and she started whimpering with the pain of it. I loved her. I had never loved anyone more. But she had taken all she could without breaking and now that she was whimpering, starting to cry, I knew they had broken her.
The man in her knew it too and he laughed and started hitting at her even harder.
His cock was moving savagely, ripping at her, and I knew the pain of what he was doing had to be excruciating. She was moaning audibly now, gasping for breath, and finally I heard her say, "Please stop, I can't stand it, don't fuck me that way any more, please stop."
Then the man who had taken her the first time' crawled up on the bed and stopped her voice. He did it by putting his restiffened cock into her mouth. She tried to pull away when she realized what he was going to do, but he caught her hair and held her head until she opened her mouth in protest and then he shoved his cock into her, past her lips. She didn't move her head. She just lay still and he fucked her in the mouth while the other man was fucking her ass.
That's when I broke too, God help me. I threw my head back and shouted. No words, just an animal scream of protest and rage, and if I could have broken loose just then I would have killed all four of them with my bare hands. Through the red mist of my rage, I heard Carrolton laughing and I remembered dimly seeing Mary staring at me wildly, her eyes huge in her white face, that thrusting cock in her mouth, that laughing son of a bitch still pumping into her bottom.
The rest of it is hard for me to remember precisely. I think I went insane there, literally. I think I went completely out of my mind. I remember struggling wildly against the ropes that held me. I remember swearing wildly. I remember screaming at Carrolton wildly, telling him I was going to kill him.
What they did to Mary went on and on. It seemed like hours to me. They stood her up and made her bend over and then they tied her wrists to her ankles and fucked her from behind while she was bent over that way. They all were in her at once one time, one in her cunt, another in her mouth, the third in her ass. They made her say things. They made her beg to be fucked some more. They made her plead for more come in her mouth. They made her kiss their cocks and swear she had never seen such beautiful things. They made her promise she would never fuck anyone else again. They spanked her, laughing. They held her down and smacked her ass until it was bright red and then they fucked her again while the fire of the pain was still in her. They made her lick their asses. They made her into an animal until she was lying on the floor, too exhausted even to cry any more, and then they flopped down on the bed and looked at Carrolton.
"I think we earned our money," one of them said.
He looked at her on the floor for a long moment. Her hair was tangled and wild, slick with semen and sweat. She was sobbing for breath. Her skin bruised. Her buttocks were still red from being struck. The way she was lying, they all were able to see her abused vagina, swollen and wet, still leaking semen.
"I think you have," he said.
He looked at me. "Now you, you son of a bitch, you're going to suck me off," he said.
The heat was gone from my rage by then, to be replaced by a cold fury that left me outwardly calm as ice. "No I'm not," I said. "You try that and I swear I'll bite it off."
"I could kill you," he said.
"Yes, but not before I bit it off and I will, you son of a bitch. I swear to you I will."
He looked at me for a long time and then he said to the men, "Cut him loose and hold him."
He fucked me in the ass then. There's no other way to say it. I struggled, but there were three of them and I had been tied so long my circulation was gone. I couldn't make my hands work in time. They spread-eagled me on the bed and Carrolton came up behind me and rammed his cock into my ass and he fucked me just the way they had all fucked Mary.
I lay there and took it without a sound. That's all I can say for myself at that time. I just didn't let him make me acknowledge what he was doing. It happened, but I didn't make a sound.
I felt him come finally. I felt the warm slick wetness in me and I felt the size of him decrease and then he was out of me.
They let me go and I rolled over and looked at him. He saw my eyes and he took a step backward before he regained his composure. He was sweating and I think he was feeling a little embarrassed at having done that to me in front of them. His pants were down around his ankles and he looked ridiculous.
"What do you want done with them now?" one of the men said. "Kill them," Carrolton said.
"Oh no," one of the other men said. "We didn't bargain for anything like that. Fucking the girl's one thing. That's what we said we'd do and that's what we did. Any killing, you do it and you do it after we're gone."
Carrolton pulled his pants up and buttoned them. He seemed to be making a visible effort to control himself. "I said to kill them," he whispered.
The three men looked at each other and then without a word they turned and began gathering up their clothes. When they were dressed, two of them went out the door. The third stopped first and said, "You want killing done, you give us a fifteen minute head start. After that, you can do anything you want."
"Run, you son of a bitch," I said to him. "Get yourself an alibi and then you keep running because if he doesn't kill me, I'll come after you and kill you."
He looked at me with something that was almost respect. I thought he was going to say something, but he only shook his head slightly and then he was gone.
Carrolton had found his gun again. Mary was still lying on the floor, looking up. I was sitting up on the edge of the bed, still naked. The circulation was returning to my hands now and I thought maybe I had a chance to take him.
He held the gun, staring at me, and then he laughed, a harsh, bitter sound that almost seemed to echo in the room. "I'll be back," he said. "I'll give them their fifteen minutes and then I'll be back."
He turned and ran out of the room. The door slammed and I heard him locking it from the outside.
I knelt down beside Mary. She put her arms around me and then for the first time she really began to cry. She was saying something that I couldn't make out, and then finally I did. She was apologizing to me.
"I'm sorry, Johnny," she kept saying. "I'm so sorry, Johnny."
ELEVEN
I held her and said, "There's nothing for you to be sorry for, Mary. It's not your fault."
"You'll never be able to forget seeing me like that," she said. "You'll never want me again after that."
"Don't talk that way."
"It's true."
I didn't have time to argue with her. I stood up and pulled her to her feet. I thought she was going to collapse again, but she didn't. From some internal reservoir of strength, she found enough to stay up.
"Get dressed," I said. "We have to get out of here." I began to search the room for my own clothes.
"What are we going to do?" she said. She was shaking, but she was pulling on her clothes.
I opened a closet door and found my clothes wadded into a corner. I began jerking them on as fast as I could. I didn't know how long Carrolton was going to give us before he came back after us.
"We're going to get out of here," I said.
"How? We're locked in."
"There's a window."
"But we're on the second floor."
I looked at her and gave her a grin that had more confidence in it than I really felt. "There are worse things than breaking a leg," I said.
I pulled my belt together and crossed to the window to look out. We were on the second floor just as she had said, but there was only earth beneath us, no concrete. I tried the window and despite the air conditioning in the house, it slipped up easily.
"Listen," I said to her, "I'm going out first."
"You'll loll yourself."
"I won't," I said. "We don't have time to argue. I'm going out and when I'm down, you come. I'll break your fall."
She looked more terrified about that idea than she had by anything that had happened earlier.
"You have to do it," I said. "It's our only chance. You have to do it."
Before she could argue, I threw a leg over the window sill, and lowered myself as far as possible. Then I let go and fell.
I landed with a jolt that felt like it had driven my thighs up into my abdomen. I drove my breath out of me and I lay for a couple of seconds, gasping. Then I forced myself up and looked back up at Mary. In the darkness I could see her white face peering down at me.
"Come on," I said.
I thought she wasn't going to do it for a moment, but then she did. She eased herself out, held for a moment, and then dropped. I did the best job of catching her that I could, but the impact smashed us both to the ground. We lay there for a moment and then I suddenly felt like laughing in triumph. We were out and we were alive.
"Come on," I said. I jerked her up and we ran. We ran.
We ran wildly, aimlessly, just trying to get away from the house, until we sagged against a building about two blocks away, gasping for breath, staring at each other, unable to speak, somehow not yet believing that we had escaped alive.
Amazingly, they had left my wallet intact. I found a cab and took Mary to a motel where I bedded her down after a drink of whiskey. I told her to sleep with the chain lock on the door and not to open the door for anyone, not even for President Nixon.
"If you're not sure it's me out there, you keep the door locked," I said.
"What are you going to do?"
The whiskey on top of everything else had just about knocked her out.
"I'm going to go talk to the police," I said.
She tried to smile at me and then she was asleep.
But of course, I wasn't going to the police. I was going back after Buddy Carrolton. I didn't have the gun any more. I was completely unarmed. I was tired. I was probably a little irrational. But none of that mattered just then. The only thing that mattered were the visions in my mind, the pictures I couldn't get rid of, the memory of what they had done to Mary and what Carrolton had done to me.
I had killed people in Vietnam. Close up. I had watched men die and it was only something I had had to do. I remember even feeling compassion and pity for the men I killed and wondering why it was necessary when I really didn't want to do it.
This was different.
This I wanted to do.
I was going to kill Buddy Carrolton. I knew I would never get rid of the memories until I had. So I left Mary sleeping and I went after him.
He seemed surprised to see me. I hadn't made any attempt to be secretive. I just went to his house, opened the front door that was unlocked, and went in. I found him in the den. He was reading a book and he had a drink in his hand. When I came in, he looked up and said, "You."
I smiled. "Didn't you think I'd be back?"
He closed the book and held it on his lap. He sipped at the drink and shook his head slightly. "No. Not really. I thought you'd probably run again."
"I used to have a karate instructor who said the smart man runs when he can and fights when he has to."
"Well, you could be running."
"No."
He looked surprised again. "I'm through with both of you," he said. "I wouldn't have come after you."
"I'm not through with you."
He stood up and walked over to the bookcase. He turned to the desk and I beat him to it. There was a gun lying there. I picked it up, but I didn't point it at him. I just held it down to my side. "What are you going to do?" he said. "What do you think?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. I think you're too smart to kill me. You'd never get away with it."
"What makes you think so?"
"I'm Buddy Carrolton."
There it was. He was Buddy Carrolton and in that one statement he revealed his entire philosophy of life. He was Buddy Carrolton, so ordinary laws and principles didn't apply to him. He could do what he wanted to do, but I couldn't retaliate because he was Buddy Carrolton and the police wouldn't ever leave it alone. That's why he didn't seem to be afraid. He really didn't think anything bad could happen to him.
I wondered how many years of sheltering it takes before a man can think that.
I laughed. "You're the one who said there's no link between us. What do the cops know about me? What makes you think for one minute that anyone is ever going to link old Johnny Weeks to Buddy Carrolton?"
"People saw you come here."
"I walked."
"Mary will know."
"Mary will be glad."
"You don't know Mary."
"Better than you do, Carrolton."
He wasn't smiling now. "You're not really going to kill me."
"Yes, I am."
"You can't."
"I can."
I lifted the gun and shot him. Just like that. I hit him in the left shoulder and he spun backwards against the bookcase and then slid down to the floor. He looked more surprised than hurt. He touched his shoulder and looked in amazement at his fingers when they came away bloody.
"Jesus Christ," he said. "You shot me."
I said, "No shit," and then I shot him again. This time the slug hit his right leg. He screamed in pain that time and kind of scrambled around on the floor trying to get away from the fire that was eating him up.
I waited until he was a little calmer. Then I said, "Tell me again about how I won't kill you, Carrolton."
"Please," he said. "Don't shoot me again."
I shot him in the belly and I laughed while he put his hand over the wound as if he could keep it from bleeding that way.
He looked at me again and he would have said something but before he could I shot him between the eyes.
I stood there and looked at his body for a while and then I wiped the fingerprints off the gun and dropped it back on the desk.
I didn't feel anything now about Carrolton. I had come to kill him, so I killed him, and now I could go back to Mary and try to make her whole again.
If I didn't get arrested first. I didn't want that to happen. I had wanted to kill Carrolton so badly that I would have done it even if the cops had been standing there watching, but now that it was done, I wanted to get away with it if I could.
I guess all murderers do.
I'm calm about calling myself a murderer even though I don't think of killing Carrolton as murder. I think of it as justice, as execution. Frankly, I don't give a damn what anyone else would think of it.
I left the house and walked away. I was careful not to run or to do anything that might call attention to me. I just walked away.
TWELVE
Mary was still sleeping when I got back to the motel. I pounded on the door until she answered me and then I went inside, kissed her briefly and fell across the bed. I was suddenly exhausted.
"What happened?" she said.
"Happened?"
"With the police."
"Police?"
I was so tired I was feeling stunned now. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open.
"You said you were going to the police."
"Yeah."
"Well? What happened?"
"I didn't go to the police."
"Why?"
"I'll tell you later," I said, and then I went to sleep.
I woke once and Mary was sleeping beside me. I looked at her for a moment and then I went back to sleep. I felt dizzy I was so tired.
When I woke again, she was up and dressed. She was standing by the window looking out. Her back was to me and I could see she was standing stiffly, as if she were afraid of something.
"How are you feeling?" I said.
She turned to look at me. "I'm all right. How are you? Are you all right?"
Her voice sounded hollow, unnatural. "What's wrong?" I asked.
"You didn't go to the police, did you?"
"No."
"I got a paper out front."
"Did you?"
She came over to sit on the bed beside me. I thought for a moment that she was going to touch me, but then she didn't. She only sat there looking at me.
"There's a story on the front page," she said. "It says somebody killed Buddy."
"Is that right?"
"I guess I'm really rich then," she said. "What?"
"I was his wife. I'll inherit his money." I hadn't thought about that and somehow it stunned me to think about it now. "Say something." she said. "What is there to say?"
"Why did you kill him?"
"It seemed like the thing to do." I felt faintly angry. She seemed upset, which was understandable, but somehow she also seemed to be accusing me of something, of trying to make me defensive, and I didn't think that was understandable. What had she expected me to do, just forget everything that had happened?
"I don't think you had to kill him."
"I thought I did."
"You could have gone to the police. That's what you said you were going to do."
"I didn't want to go to the police."
"Why not?"
Why not. Because I wanted to do it myself, mother. Because I didn't want to have to go through all the questions. Because I didn't want a trial that Buddy Carrolton probably could have bought his way out of anyway. Because I wanted to do it myself.
"Why didn't you go to the police?" she said.
"I don't know."
"Was it because of what he did to you?"
"Partly."
"Partly. What else?"
"Because of what he did to you."
She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them again. "You didn't have to kill him because of that."
"I didn't have to kill him at all," I said. "Then why did you?"
"Because I wanted to."
She looked at me a long time before she spoke again. "What are we going to do now?"
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know."
"If you don't know what you want to do, I can't tell you. You'll have to make up your own mind."
"I don't know how you could still want me after all that happened, after killing my husband."
I didn't say anything. "Do you?" she said. "Do I what?"
"Still want me."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I told you. I love you. Of course I still want you. Why wouldn't I?"
"Because of what you saw me do."
"I didn't see you do anything. I saw people do things to you. That's not the same thing."
"Almost."
"Almost is only good in horseshoes." I tried to smile at her and I reached out to touch her arm. "Just relax," I said. "Everything passes and this will too."
"I don't know," she said.
"I do."
She put her hand on my face. "Can you make love to me now?" she said. "Do you want me to?"
"Yes. Please."
I reached up and pulled her down to me. I kissed her. "Please," she said. "Hurry."
I took her clothes off her and when she was naked, I lay down beside her and touched her breast. She closed her eyes and I raised up over her to kiss her breast. I took her nipple into my mouth and sucked gently on it It hardened against my tongue and I rolled it like a marble until I could feel her breathing quicken. Then I pulled away and went down between her legs. I touched her clitoris with the tip of my tongue and held it still for a moment. I began to lick her then, softly at first, then harder and faster. She spread her legs further to give me easier reach at her and I put my hands under her buttocks and lifted them while I licked at her.
She was wet now and her clitoris was swollen hard like a tiny mushroom against my tongue.
I came up over her then and sank my cock down into her, easy, afraid she was still sore, but she gasped and pulled at me until I was completely in her, and then she threw her legs around me.
"Fuck me now," she said. "Do it to me now. Hard."
I started moving in her then, full thrusts, filling her with all the strength I had, pushing at her. I could feel myself completely under control and I knew I wouldn't come until I was ready, so I gave her everything I could. I went on and on and on until she was wet with sweat under me and still nothing was happening for her. Her eyes were closed and she was writhing under me, matching me stroke for stroke, thrust for thrust, but nothing was happening for her.
And when I realized that, something did happen for me. My own orgasm exploded out of me and I strained into her until it was over and then I fell against her, panting.
"Thank you," she said.
I pulled out of her and rolled aside. I reached over to the bed table and picked up a pack of cigarettes. I shook one out and lit it and dragged deeply and blew smoke at the ceiling. "What for?" I said then.
She turned her head to look at me. "For making love to me," she said. "You didn't make it"
"That wasn't your fault."
"I didn't say it was. I just said you didn't make it I'm sorry you didn't"
"I'm sorry too," she said. "It'll be better later."
"Sure."
"I tried. I just kept thinking about everything that happened and about you killing Buddy and I just couldn't make it A couple of times I thought I was going to, and then it would just kind of slip away."
"I understand."
She raised up on one elbow and looked at me." Do you?" Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"I don't know what to do."
"I know."
"I don't know whether to go back to the house where Buddy was or just go away with you and forget about the money. I don't know what to do. Tell me."
"I can't."
"Why?"
"I can't tell you what to do. You have to make up your own mind what to do."
"Do you know what you want to do?"
"Yes."
"What?"
Yes, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to take her away and I wanted to forget all about Buddy Carrolton and his fucking money. I wanted her but I didn't want anything else that had ever been Buddy Carrolton's. I knew if she took his money, I wouldn't be able to live with her because I wouldn't be able to live with the money, but I also knew I couldn't say that to her.
"Tell me what you want to do?" she said.
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't want to."
She started to cry. "I just don't know what to do," she said. "I wish I knew what to do."
THIRTEEN
We left the motel after showering, but nothing was settled. She wasn't crying any more, but she didn't know what to do with herself either. I felt down, hard, bitter about everything, lost inside myself.
If I hadn't been feeling that way, I might have seen the two men who were waiting in the car in the parking lot. As it was, I didn't see them until one of them walked up behind me and put a gun in my back.
"Let's go easy," he said.
I looked at him. He was one of the men who had raped Mary at Carrolton's house.
"In the car, both of you," he said.
Mary looked frightened, but she turned without a word and went to the car. So did I. There didn't seem to be anything else to do. The man had the gun.
In the car, we sat in the back while the two men sat in the front. The one with the gun kept turned around, facing us. He held the gun on me.
"You shouldn't have done what you did." the one with the gun said.
"Why not?" I said. "What's it to you?"
"People who go around lolling people make us nervous," the other man said, glancing over his shoulder at us. "If you had just gone away and forgotten everything, we would have forgotten it too, but if you're going to kill people, we figure we have to look out for ourselves."
"Number one," the one with the gun said, "we don't want to keep looking over our shoulders for you. Number two, we don't want the cops to pick you up and have our names come up in questioning. We just did a job for Carrolton. We don't want to be mixed up in anything else."
"Some job," I said.
The one with the gun looked at Mary and shrugged. "A job. Some jobs are just more fun than others."
"There were three of you," I said. "Where's the other one?"
"He didn't want to come. He figured you really just had it in for Carrolton, not us. He chickened out on this."
"You mean, he hadn't killed anybody and he doesn't want to start now," I said. "Something like that."
We were driving out of town. I saw the city limits sign passing on our right. "It's not necessary," I said.
"Who knows?" the one with the gun said. "You do what you think you have to."
The man driving laughed. "Nothing personal about it," he said. "We just have to protect ourselves."
"Sure," I said, "nothing personal about it."
I saw a police car coming toward us, but it moved on by without paying any attention to us. There was a lot of traffic, trucks. I wondered where they were taking us and whether I was going to have a chance to make a fight of it. They say that when you're in a really tight spot your mind can go blank on you, making it impossible to think, but my mind was working as clearly and fast as it ever had.
I had only seen one gun, but I had to assume the other man had one too. However, if I could get the one that was out, maybe I could get both men before the second man could react. But I couldn't even try as long as we were in the car. The one with the gun was turned around facing us, but he was leaning back, against the dashboard. He wasn't holding the gun over the seat to give me a chance to grab it.
Well, maybe this was it, I thought, but I wasn't going down without a fight. I wasn't going to stand up like a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey about to get its head cut off.
"Where are we going?" I said. "What difference does it make?"
"Seems like a long drive."
The man driving laughed. "What are you bitching about? We have to drive back."
The one with the gun laughed too. "That's an old joke," he said. "You ever hear it before?"
I shook my head.
"It's really about Russians."
We turned off the main road just then onto a country road. There was a truck stop and restaurant at the corner and I saw several men standing around a gas pump. I remember idly wondering what they were talking about, and then I forced my mind back to the problem at hand.
"You don't have to do this," I said. "You were right. I really did have a hard on for just Carrolton. You guys were just doing a job."
"Maybe," the one with the gun said.
"That's the way I feel."
"Maybe I'd believe that if you hadn't shot Carrolton so many times," the one driving said. "Me, I'm not so sure I want you walking around if you could shoot a man like that."
"We'll only shoot you once," the other man said. "We wouldn't treat you the way you treated Mr. Carrolton."
He sounded disapproving of me and I wanted to laugh at that. "You guys weren't so damn gentlemanly when you were working Mary over."
"I told you," the gunman said, "that was a job."
"What did he pay you to do that to me?" Mary said!
The gunman looked at her, surprised. He hesitated and then he said, "He gave us a thousand dollars apiece."
"That makes me a pretty high priced whore, doesn't it?" she said. "I bet I'm the most expensive whore in the entire country."
We drove around a curve and the driver pulled off onto a still smaller road. This one wasn't even paved and we kicked up a trail of dust behind us. I wondered if someone might see that and investigate it, but I didn't really think that was likely.
"Why don't you just fuck me again and let Johnny go?" Mary said to the men. "He doesn't care anything about me now anyway. He killed Carrolton because of what Buddy did to him, but he doesn't care what you do to me."
"Lady, that's tempting," the man with the gun said. "I really don't go much for killing people."
"Let it go," the one driving said.
"What's the matter?" Mary said to him. "You really think you'd get more pleasure from shooting me than from having me blow you again?"
"I could have both, lady." he said. "We took you before, we can take you again."
"Sure, but last time I didn't want you to," she said. "This time I do."
"What?" the one with the gun said, "I liked it, what you did to me at the house. I was scared, but I loved every minute of it. Besides, you're forgetting something else?"
"What's that?"
"All that Carrolton money. It's mine now and if I want to, I can give you a lot more than just one thousand apiece."
The one with the gun looked at the driver. "She's got a point there," he said.
"How much, lady?" the driver said. If we leave you alive when we're finished."
"How much do you want?"
"Ten thousand."
"All right."
"Each. Ten thousand each and we still kill your boyfriend there."
"You drive a hard bargain," she said.
I was looking at her silently. She gave me a sideways glance and then she looked at the gunman and smiled. "Ten thousand dollars isn't much for staying alive when Buddy left me so much."
"I still want that blowjob," he said.
"So do I," she said.
The driver pulled around another curve and stopped the car. We were in the middle of the country in a copse of trees. The one with the gun got out and opened the car door on my side. "Out," he said.
I slipped out and Mary came out behind me. She had started to unbutton her dress.
"Kill the son of a bitch now," the driver said. He was walking around from in front of the car.
"No," Mary said. "I'm not going to do anything with a corpse lying there watching me." She laughed. "You'll have to wait until I'm finished to get rid of him." She dropped her dress to the ground and unfastened her bra. Then she slipped her panties down and kicked them aside. Naked, there in the sunlight, she looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her before.
She walked over to the man with the gun and tugged at his belt until it came open. Then she unzipped his pants and took out his cock. She held it in her hand, working the skin back and forth until it was hard, and then she sank down to her knees and took it into her mouth. She sucked greedily on it and I watched her do it and I thought, bitch, you bitch, after everything.
And then she suddenly bit down, hard, and he screamed and she twisted sideways, pulling at the gun. It all happened so fast, it was like one fluid movement, and she was on her knees, holding the gun on them.
Then she pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in her hand and the slug ripped into the groin of the man she had been sucking. He shrieked in pain and went over backwards.
"Mary," I yelled. The other man was pulling out a gun.
She shot him then. She squeezed the trigger again and shot him in the face. He flipped over backwards without making a sound and he was dead before he hit the ground.
Mary stood up, the gun still in her hand. The first man was still alive. She padded naked over to him and stood looking down at him and then she lifted the gun carefully and shot him again. When the bullet slammed into his chest, blood splashed on her naked legs, but she didn't seem to notice.
She turned and looked at me then and the gun dropped out of her hand while she was running to me. I put my arms around her. "I'm sorry, Mary," I said.
"I had to do it," she said. "I couldn't think of anything else to do. "
"It's all right," I said. "They had to be killed."
"I don't mean that," she said. "I mean sucking him like that. I had to do that. I didn't want to, but I had to. I couldn't think of anything else to do that might give me a chance to get the gun."
"It's all right."
"I wanted to kill them," she said. "When I saw them, I knew I had to kill them."
"We all do what we have to do," I said.
We left them there. We left the gun there too. As it turned out, the police never linked them to us or to Buddy Carrolton either. They were just smalltime hoods and the cops figured they had double-crossed somebody bigger in the rackets and had gotten paid back for it. They only made the paper one day and that was on page two.
Mary dressed and we drove back to town in their car. She was silent for a while, but as we were driving back into town, she said, "I've decided what I want to do."
"What's that?"
"I want to stay with you, if you'll still have me after all this, and I don't want any of Buddy's money either. I don't need it."
"We don't need it," I corrected her gently.
"That's right," she said. "If you still want me."
"I still want you."
"Where will we go?"
"We still have an apartment in New Orleans. We can go back there for a while and take some time to decide what we want to do with the rest of our lives."
"Yes," she said, "that sounds fine." She turned and looked out the window, then back at me. "Johnny?"
"What?"
"Do you think we'll ever be able to make love the way we used to?"
"Yes."
"I'm scared."
"'Don't be."
"What if I can't ever make it again? You'll stop wanting to try before long."
"No, I won't."
"I'm scared."
"Just don't worry about it. We won't even try until we get home and then it'll be all right."
"You mean in New Orleans?"
"Yes."
"I like that."
"What?"
"You called it home."
"For now anyway, it is our home."
"I like the idea of having a home with you."
"So do I."
I reached over and patted her leg and smiled at her, but I was worried some too. She had been through a lot and I didn't know how it had affected her.
Hell, for all that, I didn't know how it had affected me either. Damn few men ever have to remember having seen the women they love on their knees sucking off another man.
I closed my eyes for just an instant to blot out the scene and then I smiled at her again.
FOURTEEN
We flew back to New Orleans. The day we landed it was one hundred and five with humidity of eighty three percent. When I got Mary's car out of the airport parking lot, we could hardly breath in it because it was so hot.
We didn't care, though. I drove her home and went into the apartment with her. It looked the same. Nothing had happened there in the days since we had left. It still looked disheveled because I had left in such a hurry I hadn't cleaned up the mess made when Mary was taken from there.
We stood in the living room, looking around, and she grimaced and said, "I have to clean up this place."
I felt oddly awkward with her now, too, almost as if we were strangers.
"Why don't you do that and I'll go down to the bar and see if I still have a job."
She looked at me curiously and I leaned over and kissed her. "Take it easy," I said. "We don't have to prove anything to each other."
"Oh, I know that," she said, laughing. She pushed gently at my chest. "You go on. By the time you get back, I'll have the place sparkling and have dinner on."
So I went, but we both knew that what I had said was nonsense. We did indeed have something to prove to each other and we weren't going to be able to relax until we had done it. We knew how important it was, how much it was going to affect the rest of our lives, and because of that we were both a little afraid of it.
At the bar, the boss wasn't too happy that I had been gone without giving him warning, but he was a nice guy and I had done good cheerful work, so I guess he figured, what the hell? The kid's a veteran. He needs a little settling down time. He told me I could come back to work the next day.
Then he said, "I don't know why you want to be a bartender, though."
I shrugged. "I guess I don't, not for all my life anyway."
"You're just a kid. You're plenty young enough to learn a decent profession."
"I've been thinking about going to law school."
"That's the ticket," he said. "Enroll at Tulane, work here some, take advantage of your GI bill. Don't be a punk, kid. Plenty of guys throw their fives away."
"That's right, I guess," I said.
When I got back home, Mary was in the bedroom.
There was something cooking that smelled like red beans and rice, and the house looked like it had been cleaned from top to bottom. I wondered how she had managed to get so much done in such a short time.
I walked back into the bedroom and found her just coming out of the shower. Her hair was still a little damp and she was drying it with a towel. Her arms were raised and her breasts were jumping a little with the movements of her arms.
"I'm back," I said.
"Hi. Why don't you take a shower too? You must feel awful sweaty and sticky with that weather out there the way it is."
She was right. I did.
I stripped down and jumped into the shower and turned it on full. The water came down stinging me like needles, but it felt good and I stayed in there a long time.
Maybe I was afraid to come out. When I finally did, Mary was sitting on the bed waiting for me. She was still naked. "I have to find out now," she said. "There's no hurry."
"There is for me. I have to be a whole woman for you, Johnny, or I can't be anything."
"One day won't prove anything."
"One bad day will only prove we have to try again another day. One good day will prove it's over and that I can love you again the way you taught me to."
"I told you, you don't have to prove anything."
"Yes I do," she said. "Now come on and let's prove it"
I laughed and I went over to her. She caught me around the hips and pulled me up to her and sucked my cock into her mouth. She moved her head back and forth hard, stretching it, until I was fully hard, so erect I was throbbing, and then she lay back on the bed and said, "All right, now, fuck me harder than you've ever fucked anyone in the world."
I lay down beside her and touched her.
"Don't be gentle," she said. "I don't want you to be gentle. I want you to fuck me so hard you hurt me."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"Stop talking and fuck me hard," she said. "Fro telling you what I want, now do it to me, please, hurry, now, fuck me hard."
So I went up over her and then down into her and she wrapped her legs around me.
I started to move and she thrust up hard under me, grunting with her own effort.
"Do it to me hard," she said.
"I don't want to hurt you," I whispered. "Other people have hurt you."
"Don't treat me like a little girl," she said. "Treat me like a woman. Nothing happened to me except that I got fucked when I didn't want to be. Now I want to be, so fuck me, goddamn you, fuck me until I can't breathe."
So I did, or at least I tried to. I drove into her hard, fiercely, savagely, and she cried out with the force of it, and then raised herself up off the bed answering me. She slammed back at me with every thrust. She twisted under me. She tried, my God, how she tried, until she was wringing wet with sweat, and still we fucked.
I could feel her fingernails on my back.
I could feel the tension in her legs around me.
I could feel the desperation in her movements.
I could feel the strain in her breathing.
And I fucked her hard ... on and on. I wasn't a man any more. I was just a blood congested cock and balls. I was just a machine tearing into her and she was almost there. I could tell she was almost there, and nothing quite push her over the top ... until....
... until I pulled out and turned her over and went into her ass I ripped into her there, hard, without hesitation, and she screamed out once because it hurt her and I didn't stop, I just went on into her until I was completely in, until my balls were lying against the round cheeks of her ass, and then I fucked her hard there. I ripped her there like a wild man and she was over the top then, over the top and swimming, crying down in her throat because the pleasure was there, because she had started to come again, and now the orgasms were washing over her like waves of sea water and she was crying with the pleasure.
I pulled out of her and turned her over again and went into her cunt again, and now it was sweet and good there too. She was shivering with each orgasm, spasming, clutching at me as they ripped through her body.
And I was still fucking her hard. I was still a machine.
I was still blood congested and hard and there was no real pleasure in it for me just then. I was giving it all to her. I was giving her back her womanhood.
Until finally I heard her say, "Stop, please stop, I can't take any more."
And I fell aside and lay there exhausted, still hard, still congested, still so close to coming myself and yet too far away.
"My God," she whispered. "I didn't know anything could be like that."
"I didn't either."
"I feel like you have torn me apart with that thing."
"You told me to hurt you."
"I wanted you to." She took hold of my swollen cock and stroked it softly. "You're so much man," she said. I was hurting because I was so hard, so congested. "What do you want?" she said.
"Nothing."
"Tell me."
"Whatever you want to give."
"Do you want me to suck you off into my mouth?"
"Do you want to?"
"Yes. I want to feel you come in my mouth. I want to taste you there."
"Then do it," I said. "I need it."
She raised up over me and took my bruised cock into her soft mouth and she began to suck on it gently, then faster, and I could feel the excitement rising in me now, my own pleasure, building, exploding, and I was coming in her mouth, filling her mouth with blast after blast of hot semen. She was sucking and swallowing and laughing all at the same time and then I started laughing too because I knew, and she knew, that everything was going to be fine. We were home and everything was going to be fine.
