Melinda's a hot, latin lady who craves passionate, horny men. No man can ever feel sexually inadequate when he's with her-she knows how to bring out the lust in a man!
She comes equipped for action and when her long, lithe body's clad in a transparent negligee, it's no wonder a man can't help turning her other cheek!
Melinda goes on a spree of wild sexual play and looks for new lovers to satisfy her wicked and wanton urges. Her methods of seduction are surely the best around and any man who's had the pleasure of knowing her will tell you why they call her marvelous Melinda!
CHAPTER ONE
He had read about such things, but he had never associated it with himself. A line in a movie a few months back, where the doctor, played by a famous actor, told his temptress nurse, "You're wasting your time. I've been impotent for the last eight years."
He hadn't thought much of it at the time, except that those would be very clever words to use on a woman-probably challenge her into the best performance of her life, trying to prove she could bring any male animal out of retirement.
But Craig thought a lot about that movie scene lately.
He had read about hypnosis working for some men with this problem. He didn't know whether to believe that or not. He was a lawyer, and what would the boys down at the courthouse say if it became known he was being hypnotized into being a man again?
Just a few months before, on a Saturday such as this, he would be in front of the television set, watching his L.A. Dodgers increase their lead in the National League. But not this Saturday. He had wandered around in a half-daze all day long.
From nowhere, from nothing, could he salvage self-esteem, not even from his heroic stature, his well-made brawn. Standing before Laura, his wife, towering over her but raked by her upturned gaze, he felt himself to be not large but overgrown, not muscular but cumbersome, a cornered behemoth.
"Craig," she said, with the low cool voice that had affection in it, patience, concern, everything but respect, esteem, "you are in a spin. Craig, what're we going to do about you?" Still her bright blue eyes were firing upon him, appraising him, judging him. Any moment he might go crashing down before her, .before the keen little huntress who was his wife. Confusedly he reached for the newel post of the hall stairway.
Up ahead the children swung the oaken front door impatiently. "Dad, stop playing statues," said the older one, taking notice of his stance. "Dad, don't be so pokey," said the other.
With a forefinger to her lips Laura silenced them. "Really, Craig," she asked, "Why don't you come to the park with us? For an hour? Half an hour? It'll freshen you up."
"I'm all right," he said. "I'm fine." But he wasn't. All over again he had been made to feel the hidden infirmities in the frame that from the outside looked so powerful, the nicks and scars he had carried in his bones since his football days. A blank cartridge.
"Sweetie, it's Saturday afternoon," said Laura. "You don't have to go at it that hard, do you?" She was a handsome girl, it had to be granted, with her fresh skin, the feathery aureole of her tawny hair, her rose-leaf mouth, a creature of the outdoors and sunlight, the kind of girl who goes striding up a mountain all by herself. She was small, but never would she have to be helped across gullies. When for a few years she had worked, it had been at a man's job, a graceful one but man's work, as an architect. At one time he had considered it a cause for admiration, this comely strength of hers, hadn't he? Until-until it was borne in upon him one day that it was a strength markedly greater than his own, which to a man was unbearable, or, anyhow, to a man such as himself. "Oh, come on, Craig, relax," she said.
He held aloft a handful of legal papers. Finch v. Finch. A new brief, a new start. "This time," he said, "it's got to be right."
"Oh, it will," she said cheerily. "Why wouldn't it?"
He flushed. They were referring in their guarded way-the children must not have their curiosity aroused-to more fiascos than one. This professional, nurse-like tenderness Laura was offering him ... He must try, in spite of everything, to be a man to his wife. A man, not a patient. He must ... But no, he was a blank cartridge. Though he stood six feet and one inch tall, though often he had carried a football past plunging shoulders and grappling arms, he had lost his rating. Four weeks ago it had begun, this unwilling celibacy, twenty-nine full days ago, in fact. And night after night, ever since, Laura had gone on searching him with those keen blue eyes, waiting, waiting....
"Craig...." she began anew.
"I know what I'm doing," he said, sharply now. "This is my baby." Baby. Chagrined by his own evil choice of words, he gritted his teeth.
"What baby?" asked Ann from the doorway. "What's he talking about?"
"Ann," said J aura, "I wish you'd stop calling your father he."
"What should I call him-she?"
"Hello, she!" cried Betsy.
Laura shook her head severely and they subsided. It was then that she did the worst thing possible. She took hold of him by the forearm. Once again, with her small competent hand, she tried to tug him along-she the mahout, the elephant boy, and he the dumb beast. Exactly, again, as on that rotten night when the fiascos had started. Next, he thought, Laura will be fitting me for a nose ring. Years ago, it occurred to him, his mother must have tugged his father in just the same way through his drunken mists. "Stop it," he rasped, breaking loose.
"Himself...." she said. It was the pet name she had invented for him long ago, on their honeymoon, in the days when he had been "all right," had been fine, had been great, a world's champ in fact. And in those days too, in the flush, then, of their love, he had found pleasure, he had found pride, in her sweet elfin sinews. He had loved to have her rough him about like a sportive Lilliputian at Gulliver-he being utterly confident, in those days, that the giant of the two was, of course, himself. "We're really going to have to do something."
We, the royal we, the language of sovereignty, but not of esteem. Men, from the beginning, had fared poorly in this house of clever women. His mother first, and now Laura his wife....They had nursed their husbands, sustained their husbands, endured their husbands, everything but esteemed their husbands. Or was this all just something in his mind? Was it? Or on the other hand was ... Oh, he no longer had the clarity, not here and now, to weigh out the truth of it particle by particle. Instead, he snatched for the warming cup of anger. "Don't coddle me," he said. "For God's sake, don't coddle me."
"All right," she said, still studying him, studying him ceaselessly, perceiving so very much and yet not everything, "all right, Craig."
On the record, he had to grant, in the mind of a disinterested jury, she had not said one word which could be deemed offensive. Not ever would she choose to hurt him, the felled giant. Yet every single word had reached a vital organ, had murdered over and over again his sense of maleness, of manhood, of adequacy.
Bitterly he turned his back. "See you all later," he said.
When they were gone, when they were out of the house, he stood for a moment in the dark hallway and breathed heavily, alone finally, an escapee. Composing himself, he began to toil up the varnished oak cliff of the stairway, up toward the study. On the first-floor landing he observed that the door of his mother's office, her surgery, stood open. He strode past it determinedly-then inevitably was drawn back. There against the far wall it stood, flashing in the sunlight, the glass case with her surgical instruments. Forceps, clamps, dilators, hypodermics and shears, all so sternly metallic, embedded all in the chest of light and glitter. And also the scalpels, of course, the bright little knives which she could wield so deftly in her thin unhesitant hands. The little knives....
Abruptly he turned away, went laboring again up through the dark and silent house to the study, where all the briefs and writs and injunctions in the case of Finch v. Finch were laid out and waiting for him. A new brief, a new start. Fighting off the heavy heat of the June afternoon, he settled himself in a huge soft chair by the window with a bulky maroon-colored law text. Finch v. Finch, that fratricidal tragedy, a cause of crucial importance. Party of the first part, and party of the second part. ... May it be noted by the honorable Court that the remedy for which my client, as injured party, is herewith appealing-that the easement for which he is praying-the alleviation which he is entreating-the mitigation which he is imploring-Where, where did they lie? How, once again, could he be made to feel himself a man?
Through the quiet queasy heat of the city he thought after a while that he heard the telephone ring, but he did not move. It rang a third time, a fourth, but still he refused to get up from his chair, to cross the study and lift the receiver. He did not want to find once again that the phone had rung only in his desirings.
The ringing forthwith stopped.
Just as well, he thought.
The injured party-or parties. Longingly his gaze turned from the telephone instrument to the photo that stood next to it on the desk, to the image of that handsome young corsair with the black curls and the untamed eyes, the old-style youth with the winged collar and the huge lapels.
"My father...." he said, racked for the brilliant boy. "Steven...." he said, mourning the splendid father he had never seen alive, who had died at twenty-nine, the boy-father, an age already four years younger than that of himself, the posthumous son, becoming each year more and more the junior of his own issue. If only somewhere in this house Steven Harmon had left a message for him in the way that prisoners write a line of cheer on the cell wall for the successors they never will see but to whose fate they are already linked. If only in this house of silks and scents a cigar could still be found smoldering in an ash tray, a jacket still hanging across a chair. He had given his seed, Steven Harmon, and almost instantly perished, like the resplendent drone from whom, after long fatting, the queen bee one day snatches seed, genitalia and life together. Mother, and her little knives....
The telephone, he observed, was ringing again, the false one of course, ringing only because he prayed for it to ring, because it had been by telephone, the instrument of urgency, that most of the adventures of his life had started. But lately, and it was deeply disturbing, he had run three, four times a day to the phone to meet not a voice but only a dial tone. Give it up, he told himself. Delivery will not come from the outside-no files baked into a pie. But the horror, the real one, was the company you had to keep, the cellmate, a man whose every trait you had long ago come to know too well, all his stories, his mannerisms, his hopes, his failures. Yourself. Harmon v. Harmon. It was a brief he could no longer bear to hold.
The phone, he noted, had stopped ringing.
He yawned then and pulled himself up, rung by rung, from reverie to daylight. Finch v. Finch would not go to trial until the fall term of the New York Supreme Court. Nevertheless, he had insisted on taking home the papers for the weekend. He was feverish, of course, to make amends for Hutchins v. Webster. Bad business that. Lousy bad. But, after all, what lawyer hadn't fumbled the ball once or twice in his life? And I damned well never claimed to be a mouthpiece. The talk was all talked out of me years ago. By clever women. I'm a think boy strictly, briefs and contracts. And damned good at it when I want to be. The clear judicial mind. If the firm had nobody else handy to argue Hutchins v. Webster they should have moved for a postponement. His first court appearance in years-and he would have the bad luck to run into a two-fisted Portia, a perfumed cannon ball like Miss Ruby Hopkins, Counselor-at-law.
Portia, the lovely creature, had not hesitated to drop a couple below the belt. For the Irish juror in Seat Number Three, a riposte in brogue and a deft little parable about the two men of County Cork. For the Jewish juror in Number Nine, a nimble observation that all was not kosher with this witness, and please not to waste the jury's time with an entire megillah. The stratagems of Miss Attorney Hopkins had involved also the charming of one witness into complete forgetfulness, the tormenting of another into complete confusion, and the production further of two witnesses of her own who, Harmon was certain, had not been within five miles of the accident.
Trounced by a girl-he, the athlete-scholar with the Phi Beta Kappa key across his chest. Tricks, tricks-always, all his life he had shied away from them as something serpentine, yes, as feminine, putting his faith optimistically-or timidly?-in clarity of logic, directness of attack and justice of the cause. For this he had often been considered naive, which had not troubled him ... Trounced by a girl. When it was all over she sidled up to him, kitten-like, and measured him from head to toe, admiring openly his soaring height, the wedge-shaped torso. "Counselor," she asked, "can I buy you a drink?"
She had wiped the floor with him, a hundred pounds of frill and wile. "Thanks, but I'll have to take a rain check, Counselor."
She patted him consolingly, then, on the arm. "You're smart," she said, "darn smart on the law, but so scared of getting your hands dirty."
They tell us today that their brains are as good as ours, that women have more stamina, keener senses, greater dexterity, longer life and superior adaptability. Why then should it have rankled so much that...? Behind the shrewd little face of Counselor Ruby Hopkins, he had perceived suddenly the visages of other determined women: of his brilliant and talkative mother; of Laura his wife, with her deadly patience; of the two sharp little females who were his children; of all the mutinous women who these days stalked up and demanded in the words of that booted girl of The Master Builder, of Hilda Wangel, "I want my kingdom. The time is up."
Because they had found out that it was not so much, after all, to be a lawyer, a physicist, even a builder of bridges, nowhere near as much as had always been pretended to them, because they knew for themselves now what commonplaces were contained in "a tough day at the office," they had developed a way of saying, "You meet so few real men these days." They were inclined no longer to bring out the slippers-and-pipe at eventide. And in this gloomy old house where he was so outnumbered by females, where the boy who was Father had perished so quickly after being drained of his seed....
No. Nobody had gone after Steven Harmon with a knife. Alcoholism had killed him, not a scalpel. But there was that other little blade which women carried with them as almost a standard accessory. Lipstick, compact and-mockery. "Oh, now Craig, really!" his mother had a way of saying, as once she must have said across the table, "Oh, now Steve, really!" Even his little daughters, at six and seven, did not go unarmed. It was in the air here, it was an accepted fact in this house, that a man was a target. Only Laura, it was only she, who kept her cleverness sheathed, Laura with her deadly chivalry. The truth, the cold truth, was that she could have her kingdom anytime that she chose to reach for it. In the first years of their marriage, while she still worked at her drafting board, she had out-earned him alarmingly. At parties it was to Laura always that their friends turned, while he brought up the rear, the mute dinosaur. Seven years now since she had gone to an office, not since the "temporary" leave when she had given birth to Ann. Her houses now lay hidden, her city of graceful inventions lay locked away inside her desk and inside herself. It was for his sake, of course, that she had done it, to spare him from being merely the husband of his wife, as for so long he had been merely the son of his mother. He should be grateful to Laura, but it was murderous, this gallantry of hers, at one almost with the victorious condescension of Miss Counselor Hopkins asking, "Can I buy you a drink?"-but only after measuring him and deciding that, yes, he would be worth acquiring for a harem of males.
The worst of it was that it had followed only a few hours in the wake of the fiasco of Hutchins v. Webster. He had emerged from the shower completely nude. At her dressing table Laura had looked instantly about. Again there had pierced him a quick keen appraisal of all his "good points," the stature, the shoulder breadth, the foot runner's legs. A moment later Laura, of a height hardly to his chin, was nuzzling against him, stroking him, gripping him by the forearm, drawing him after her as she backed away toward the bed. If that was all he was wanted for, it had flashed through his mind, as a stud animal, if he was to be ringed through the nose and led off firmly to his duties, the only ones for which he was coddled, endured ... Blank cartridge.
Again the telephone was ringing.
In the way of men, he had always prided himself on that kind of prowess, could recall with exactness the time and place and circumstances of all the finest performances. But for twenty-nine days now, and twentynine bitter nights ... That hand on his forearm-if only it had been possible for him to take it as a gesture of simple wifely affection....This was surely the way Laura had meant it, wasn't it? He ought to remember, he must make himself remember, how once he had loved to have her tousle him-Laura who was newly his bride-to down him and bestride him in fierce-fond combat. But that was in another era, and that was another Harmon.
Still the telephone rang, the imaginary one, of course.
Must there be a conqueror in every double bed?
It rang and rang.
Laura was beautiful, yes, with her sun-drenched face, her trim and shining body-he must get himself to remember that. And to remember how, in the beginning, when she had taken him by the hand he had found it a cause for enjoyment-as in that sweet moment when she had first presented him to the warm bright circle of her family-racing an arm's length before him, drawing him proudly after and declaring, "This is Craig! This is Craig!" ... He recalled too that loving gymnastic of theirs in which she would come running at him from a long start-running full tilt and laughing all the while, foaming over with laughter-and fling her whole elfin self high upon his neck, and nuzzle him joyously, her adored giant. And beg him, "Oh, make a muscle, Craig! Flex your biceps. Oh, marvelous!" It had been taken for granted, in those days, which of the two was the larger. And it had been a time, too, when those blue eyes, so everlastingly keen, would turn their fire only upon others, and she would whisper to him, "The man's a fraud!
He is, isn't he?" And always she had been wonderfully, delightfully, right. ... But that was a long time ago, a time before his confidence had begun to ebb. Perhaps if he could have got away altogether from this house, and the glitter of his mother's scalpels, and the memory of the tragic boy who was his father....But there had been his mother's steely benevolence-"Now Craig, really-why, when we have this enormous whole house must you run off to some one-room mouse-trap, you and Laura?" Little by little, in this house of women, he had begun to fall back again. Little by little, Laura had gone into the ascendant. And now ... A man, he concluded, had better marry beneath him. A man had to be on top-it was nature's own posture-or he would not endure as a man.
Still the phone went on ringing. It suddenly occurred to him that the ringing of the phone was unquestionably real!
It was Frank Rhodes, the bosom companion of his college days, calling from Washington. He was with the State Department now, he said, and he was charged with recruiting personnel for a technical mission.
"Craig," he said, "how would you like to play God to fifty thousand South Americans?
I have a position for you as a legal officer and associate director."
"Wait ... not so fast!" Harmon said with a surprised laugh. "Let me have all the details."
Frank named an obscure little republic on the western bulge of the continent, one that spilled down from the Andes into the Pacific.
"It's the Good Neighbor in action," Frank went on. "A million dollars for a three-way rehabilitation job in one of their rundown provinces, Alba. Agriculture, public health, public works. Alba's been slipping for a long time; their cocoa went to hell in a plague ten years ago. Last winter there was a border war and Alba was the ball park. We asked everybody to kiss and make up. Our part-we'd patch up the damage and make Alba as good as new. Our dollars buy Alba a future and the blueprint for the rest of Latin America."
"What's this Alba like?" Harmon asked.
"It's the pits," said Frank, "with royal palms. Everything bad, from leprosy to absentee landlords. We figure the job for a year. I need you, Craig. Latin America was always a subject of yours."
There was a long pause.
"Legal officer," coaxed Frank, "and associate director. Say yes...."
"What about families?"
"No dice. Now with the child mortality of sixty percent, Alba is for men only."
For men only. Here it was, wasn't it, everything for which he had been praying-the easement, the alleviation, the remedy? All his heart was for calling a halt finally to the death march of his days, for wheeling in some new direction. "Frank," he begged, "is the job clean? I won't be an errand boy for the dollar diplomats."
"I asked you to play God, Craig, not Satan. This is old stuff. Public Health Service has been cleaning up backward areas for years. Monday noon? In Washington? I want you to meet your chief of party. Colonel Burling."
Downstairs, just then the front door banged open. There followed a clatter of cleated heels on the tiled floor of the vestibule, and the low cool voice of Laura.
"Frank," he said. "I'll have to call you back." His voice sounded tight and tense.
"South America...." Laura repeated. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, she had drawn the children to her.
At the corners of her rose-leaf mouth appeared the most delicate hint of a smile, private and in-looking. It was the smile, he thought, annoyed, with which a woman tells her husband to stop play-acting.
"I mean it, Laura. Alba is a hole, and I don't know one good reason why I should take the job, but ... I want it."
"Craig," she countered. "You know you're packing your bags."
"No!" he said emphatically. This was not to be admitted, not under any circumstances.
"Dad," asked Betsy, "Will we go by steamship or airplane?"
"Children," Laura said, "I'm afraid Dad will be going alone. I'm not going either. Alba is no place for either women or children."
Tenderly he held out his arms to his daughters. "Oh, come on," he said. "Let's have a hug." But silently, icily, they drew back on their mother. "For goodness' sake," said Laura, gathering them in, "call Frank back. Tell him you're taking the job."
"All right," Harmon said, reddening. Awkwardly he stood up. Awkwardly he walked across the room, sensing upon him all the while the gaze of his three clever women. Picking up the telephone receiver, he began to dial.
And two days later, Craig had all but packed up and shipped out. After making the phone call, it had taken him only seconds to decide that going on the mission to South America would be best for everyone. He wasn't entirely sure why he felt so strongly about the value of his decision, but he knew in his heart that he had made the right choice.
The night before he was to leave, he was lying quietly in bed with Laura. A strange silence hung over them, and he felt uncomfortable, restless, unable to sleep.
"Honey?" she asked softly, running her hand over his chest, teasing his hairs and brushing the flat of her palm over his nipples. "Would you like to ... well ... you know, just try?"
He felt a responsibility to his wife, a compulsion to somehow symbolically imbue this last night together with some sort of significance. He knew the only way he could do that was by making love to her.
Yet he remained tense. His mind was a flurry of ideas. If only I could just relax, he told himself. Maybe then I could do it. Maybe....
"Honey?" she asked again, looking up at him pleadingly. "I'd really like to v.. help you."
"It didn't work last time," he said in a dreary monotone. "I don't see why it'll work this time."
"Oh, baby, come on," she murmured, her voice low and sensual. "We can at least try...."
Without waiting for him to say anything else, Laura reached down and began fondling his soft cock.
She gripped it tightly, trying to squeeze it into hardness. She ran her finger under his balls, feeling the hairy globes, and she cupped them. She then played with his cock teasingly, jacking the foreskin up and down.
"Does that feel good?" she asked, kissing his shoulder. "Hmmmm, honey? Do you like that?"
"Yes, of course I do," he said woodenly.
"That's good, baby, because I like doing it ... I really do."
She worked his testicles back and forth between her fingers, trying to stir up his jism, trying to arouse the most sensitive spots to somehow enable him to experience pleasure-and to enable him to please her.
It had been too long since she had enjoyed the thrill of his pulsating hardness jabbing into her repeatedly, making her cry out in pleasure and pain as her vagina filled with his thickness.
Once upon a time he could drive her to the heights of ecstasy, his cock thrusting savagely into her pussy, as fiery as a white-hot poker.
It had been so long since she had felt the creamy load of cum sizzling into the inner depths of her cunt, filling her loins with a dreamy warmth that enhanced her sexual enjoyment.
She continued to stroke his penis, trying to bring it to life so they could successfully reenact the pleasurable times they had once enjoyed.
"Ohhh, baby," she sighed, "I think I feel it getting there. Is it working, honey? Is it working?"
Craig tried to relax, to let the familiar sensations take over his loins. He wanted more than anything to feel the persistent dull ache of desire only a hard-on could produce.
She had his penis in the hollow of her fist and was moving her fist up and down, up and down, establishing a steady and persistent rhythm that once turned him on so readily he had trouble keeping from cumming too quickly.
She took his hand with her free hand and placed it under the covers, on her cunt. Gingerly he combed his fingers through her thick bush, now wet with her aroused juices.
She spread her legs for him, giving him greater access to her pleasure haven. He automatically slipped his middle finger inside her slit, rubbing it against her swollen clit button.
"Ohhh, Jesus, honey, that feels so good," she moaned, her ass digging a hollow into the mattress. She began flailing at his cock, making a loud slapping noise as she jerked him off.
All Harmon could think of was: Will this ever end? Ami destined to be like this for the rest of my life? If I could only relax and enjoy myself, but it's this pressure I feel. Will I always feel it? Will it always be pressing down on me like a crushing weight?
"I feel it getting bigger," she cried triumphantly.
All Laura could think about were the times that they had made love in the past, the times that they had fucked frantically, sharing climax after thrilling climax late into the night.
She wanted to relive those days again. She wanted desperately to get Craig's cock hard so he could fuck her once more. The thought of him leaving her alone for a year troubled her, and she wanted to get at least one last moment of pleasure before he was gone.
She began kissing him all over his chest, still moving her fist up and down over his cock. Up and down his rough skin she dragged her tongue, trying to stir him up, trying to excite him, trying to turn him on. And she continued to stroke his penis, trying to get him stiff.
Each time she felt his prick twitch just a little bit, she thought that the caresses were working. She waited and waited for his manmeat to grow really erect, waiting with bated breath, but nothing was happening.
She wanted suddenly to laugh aloud. She was jerking him off so hard her wrist was starting to ache. If she kept it up much longer her entire arm would go numb!
What's the matter? she asked herself. When did it all start to go terribly wrong? How can I rectify the situation, especially when he'll be leaving so soon?
The answer was nowhere to be found.
The tip of her tongue trailed down his chest toward his crotch, leaving in its wake a thin trail of glistening saliva. She paused briefly to drill into his indented navel, then down to the inside of his thighs, momentarily ignoring his man-root and balls.
Harmon knew what was coming and wondered why he dreaded the moment so much. He remembered how those lips had once driven him wild with desire and excitement, her head down over his loins, wetting her lips by rolling her tongue over it in soft, moist slurps, using her fingers in the area where his scrotum joined his crotch.
The tremors would shake his body, then, his muscles would knot, and his fingers would run through her hair, bending her head down lower on it, her cheek against his thigh as he would arch back and climax, with her nose buried in the mass of hair, sucking, moaning on it, taking it all in great lusty gasps.
He felt her grip his balls and squeeze. He couldn't help moan and his cock twitched. It felt as if a spring was coiled tight inside his chest, ready to snap undone.
Relax, he told himself for the hundredth time. For Christ's sake, relax!
Her middle finger pressed against his tender, puckered red asshole. He spread his legs involuntarily and another moan escaped his lips.
"You want it, don't you, darling?" she sighed, her voice sounding on edge, full of expectation. Yet there was a dreamy sound to it too, as if she had all the time in the world.
He felt her finger corkscrew its way up his rectum, until the tip of it was pressing right up against his sensitive prostate gland. Only then did the subtle twitches in his cock become something more.
She leaned over his dick and covered his glans with her hot, red lips. Her tongue drilled into his piss slit in an effort to taste a few drops of his pre-cum. She had almost forgotten what the hot, watery substance tasted like.
But he was dry. Her lips clamped over his cock like a powerful suction cup and her head began to bob slowly up and down, up and down, until his entire dick glistened with saliva.
Her finger moved in and out of his shit passage, never entirely leaving it, and when it was all the way inside her knuckles would press tightly against his rump.
She took all of his penis into her mouth to suck and gradually it did begin to thicken.
Thank God, she thought. I was beginning to think he had turned into something inhuman!
With her free hand she squeezed and fondled his nuts, waiting for the exhilarating sensation of having his completely hard cock between her lips, ready to empty its precious contents into her eagerly awaiting mouth.
Warmth radiated from Harmon's loins. Yes, it's working, he thought, feeling his cock tightening, growing firm. Oddly enough it didn't feel natural. It felt forced; somehow unnecessary.
It was indeed time for a change. Sex was something that had always been pleasurable. That pleasure had gotten lost along the way. With Laura it just wasn't the same.
Yet his cock was becoming unquestionably hard. Harmon could feel himself relaxing. He was looking forward to the hot, wet tightness of his wife's cunt.
Her head became a mere blur as she sucked his tool to full erectness. She could feel it pulsate with desire. His finger caressed her clitoris and the pressure building inside her loins intensified immeasurably. She was becoming all worked up, caught up in her needs and his desire to fulfill his manly duties.
When he had become hard as a rock she let go of his cock and licked her lips. Gazing down on it hungrily, she quickly straddled his hips, reaching down to take hold of his saliva-coated cockshaft and raise it up so it was directly underneath her open pussy.
"Now it's going to happen," she said breathlessly. "This time it'll work, darling. See how big and thick your cock is, and all for me. Feel it, baby, feel it for me...."
She lowered herself down on his cock, spearing herself with it. She threw her head back and moaned, her mouth then opening into a silent O.
He humped up at her, meeting her thrust for thrust.
"Ohhh, yes!" she cried, "yes, yes, yes!"
Her excitement was infectious. He grabbed her hips and pounded into her, his cock feeling as thick as a tree trunk. He felt on top of the world!
Then the world caved in on him. He felt his cock growing soft again. Her cuntal muscles caressed his cock, trying in vain to keep it erect.
Just let me cum once, Laura thought, her lower body working like a piston, moving frantically up and down on his quickly dwindling tool.
It's no use, Harmon thought dejectedly. He lay back and closed his eyes, shutting out reality. Soon he was fast asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
They swigged beer from the bottleneck, they spat out of windows, they belched freely. They would roister each night in the Washington cafes, then stagger back to their hotel through the blackened streets singing in close harmony. They would mull over, the next morning, all the shenanigans of the night before, and shadow-box affectionately among themselves. They had a strong contempt for anybody who was not one of them.
The "Alba Gang" ... It was like stepping back, thought Harmon, to the locker room, the fo'c'sle, the poker table. He had come, agreeably, upon something he had thought long lost, that raucous camaraderie of men among themselves.
Burling, Ross, the others ... Their range of languages ran all the way to Chinese, Tagalog and the African bush dialects. They had lived under mosquito nets in half the hot countries of the world and referred to themselves defiantly as "tropical tramps." In the United States they had mailing addresses but no homes. Their wives and their children they had boarded out around the globe. There was not one of them who had not come close on some occasion or other to losing his life under a kris, a bolo, a machete. Alongside such journeyings, thought Harmon, his own had been tame. But they took him in instantly as one of their own. Among the Alba Gang his size counted for something.
By the paper-pushers of the technical section they were regarded with open awe. "You're going to Alba?" the paper-pushers would ask, the stay-at-homes dug in behind their Washington desks. "Why the hell not?"
"Well," the answer was put on one occasion, "You may not all be coming back on your feet, you know."
"Good show!" croaked Colonel Burling in that favorite phrase he had picked up from the British somewhere in his travels. "First son of a bitch to fall-I don't care whether it's malaria or VD-gets a hang-up funeral. 'He perished for the Hemisphere.'" (Laura, of course, would smile. Laura, of course, would say that it was all swagger.)
Around the technical section, in the low wooden building on Constitution Avenue that had been "temporary" for thirty-four years, since World War II, they banded exclusively together, their shirt collars open and their ties off, their feet on anybody's desk at all-but tolerated, of course, indulged even, as gladiators about to die. In the section lunchroom they would turn their backs on all outsiders, then shout their yarns aloud for the attention of any who might be eavesdropping.
"This goddam lady food"-Burling would say-"I could go right now for a nice tasty dish of fried bees."
"Python stew for me...." from Felix Horanyi.
"India?"
"With pepper sauce."
"Gentlemen, have I ever mentioned that when I was in the Congo...."
"Human flesh?"
"It was stringy as hell."
It would amuse them wildly to see the paper-pushers turn green. (Laura, of course, would consider this kid stuff. Laura would say they ought to grow up.)
Burling, round-faced and paunchy but with a stiff straight carriage, turned out to be an old West Pointer who had left the Army in the sixties. After a revolution he had dashed up from Rio, where he represented a steel firm, to offer himself for reactivation, but had lost patience in the labyrinths of the Pentagon. It could well be, he granted, that once the Army had let loose the tiger's tail it was not disposed to grab it again. He carried his jaw thrust forth like a baseball umpire's, but at the corners of his mouth there was a perpetual readiness for mirth. Five minutes after Harmon had met him, and they had discovered a mutual feeling for the underdogs of the world, Burling was rattling off a series of tales, genial and self-belittling, that pictured a man who knew all races and climes and was fast on his feet.
In China, related Burling in that gravelly basso, he had once shared a cabin on a river boat with a Chinese General. During the night a wild storm broke and the General hastily abandoned the traditional impassivity of his race. Planting his middle on a chair he forthwith commanded Burling to instruct him in the arts of swimming. "Craig, I gave him the whole goddam curriculum. Breast stroke and crawl. Overhand and side stroke. High dive, swan dive, back dive. In Peiping, later, he decorated me with the Golden Carnation." Burling's lips flickered. "The truth is that I've never been in water above my bellybutton." (Laura, of course, would say that it was hardly likely, made up out of whole cloth.)
In Bolivia, it came out, Burling had thrown up a fat contract with the tin operators because of their feudal treatment of their labor. And in Paraguay-his eyes narrowed-a landowner had once invited him on a hunt. Dogs, beaters and all. Halfway into the jungle he learned for the first time that the quarry was to be live Indian peons. The justification, in the mind of his host, was that the peons had run out on a bond of indenture. He had had to resign from that particular safari, said Burling, by force. ... But a moment later he was deep in a tale of the Sadat's Egypt and his discomfiture on a very dressy occasion when he had stood abaft a camel and remembered unhappily that ever since the days of the Prophet camels urinate with a rearward trajectory. (Laura, of course, would say ... When he had described Burling in a letter all that she could say was, "He sounds sort of windy, Craig, doesn't he?" But she had always had a way-he refused to think about it further-of being disconcertingly right about people.")
Now it was July and still they marked time in the sticky heat of Washington. Rhodes was having trouble filling out the complement. He still lacked a doctor and agriculturist. From the American Ambassador in Chimboya, capital of the Republic, came irritated cables. Anti-American elements, he said, were spreading rumors that the Alba program had been abandoned. He wanted American faces to show in the province at once. Also there were several relevant letters which had been intercepted on their way in from the Republic by postal censorship. "All their glorious promises to rehabilitate Alba," wrote a banker to a friend in Chicago, "have turned out to be the usual "yanqui" bluff. Again they have tricked us."
From another correspondent who signed only "Vicente" came an even sharper letter, one which gave Harmon the feeling all at once that a telescope had been turned on him from half a world away. "What kind of goods are they planning to ship us in Alba?" inquired Vicente. "The usual Conquistadores of the second class, those Colossi of the North who strut down our boulevards with an oilcompany gait? Heaven help us!"
Vicente, speculated Rhodes, was most likely one of the Latinos who were being subsidized heavily by Cuba. As if in answer, Vicente sent another letter soon after. "It is naturally a little difficult for me to picture the dollar diplomats and oil thieves as bearers of light and democracy. But whoever does not automatically sink to his knees as a yanqui goes by is labeled a fascist. Long live the Hemisphere!"
The ground was hot under their feet. Each morning they left their bags fully packed in their hotel rooms. But Rhodes, working doggedly from his green metal desk, sweating his drip-dry suits into damp bags by each evening, was reluctant to let the party take off without its medical officer and agriculturist. Constantly he was phoning or dictating telegrams, or combing the Civil Service lists and rosters of professional societies, always in search of " likely material." For agriculturist he had nothing more than expression of interest from a homely little man like a scrub oak, Walt Anderson, who was indeed an old tropical hand but was half-committed already to grow food in Thailand for that government. As for medical officer, any doc tor who'd ever prescribed a grain of penicillin had already been commissioned and rushed to trouble areas. A big operation was working up around a place with a Spanishsounding name, Cambodia. Felix Horanyi, the Mission's economist and anthropologist, knew the place. He'd once done a study of the Island artifacts on grant from Yale.
Horanyi-a Hungarian hussar with a black mustache and three gold teeth that flashed daggers of light whenever he opened his mouth. He had lived a good part of his life in huts, caves, tepees and igloos, and had a way of fixing each expedition by what new tastes he had acquired in alcohol. In Peru it had been pisco; in Mexico, pulque; in Africa, cactus brandy. And among the Quechua Indians of Ecuador-"chicha, they call it, and the way they make it is for the entire family to sit around a basin chewing boiled rice and spitting the rice into the basin and then letting the enzyme action of the saliva ... Ha, it's something delicious!" (Of course Laura would say that he had made it all up for shock effect.)
There had been a few reservations at first about the engineering officer, Fred Ross, a heavy boy with sloping shoulders, whose labors in the sun had given him a permanent scowl. He was only thirty and his highest previous grade in Civil Service had been second engineer.
"Hell," Ross came back, "you want a water system, I'll build you a water system. You want a seawall, I'll build you a seawall. What else you want built?"
Burling's lips lifted with amusement. "All right," he said, "I'll take you."
It was inevitable that Tom Mercer-even his boys' book name was right for it-should turn out to be a product of the Southern military academies. He sat in his chair throughout his interview as though braced for inspection. He snapped to on each question and answered directly to the point. And yet-"My God, sir, ten goddamn years a cadet, sir, and when a real shooting war comes along, sir, they turn me down for goddamn punctured eardrums, sir." He spoke Spanish thoroughly well, though in a kind of cockfight argot, because he'd been knocking around the past couple of years on plantations in the Caribbean. He would be perfect, Burling reckoned, for the thousand and one chores of running camp and handling native labor-"a regular little adjutant."
Burling, Ross, Horanyi and Mercerworld-wise and on their toes. Of course Laura-oh, the hell with what Laura would say. Just as soon as they filled out the team with a medico and a farmer ... Again there was a letter from "Vicente."
"Suddenly," he wrote, "we are having such a descent of the buzzards upon Alba as not even in the best days of the cocoa boom. The gringos, they have heard, will be bringing down a million dollars, ten million pesos. Every day, I am told, the Presidential Palace is jammed with politicos begging for appointments in Alba. Since these jobs do not pay enough, officially, to keep even a midget in tamales, you can imagine, dear friend, what the real attraction must be. How the feathers will fly when the two flocks meet over the corpse of our poor little province, the buzzards from Washington and the buzzards from Chimboya. What excitement! What diversion! Poor Cesar Montalvo, our Eagle of the Andes. Was it for this that he suffered his agony? I must send out for another bottle of brandy."
Vicente-behind the cleverness, behind the satanism could be heard a cry for something lost, for a world that once had seemed more shining. What, speculated Harmon, would he look like? Dark, obviously. Massive. A face with a grin that was not mirthful. "By the way," he asked, turning to Frank, "who is Cesar Montalvo?"
Frank shrugged his shoulders. "One of their presidents. They've had something like fourteen in twenty years."
It was just then that the imperious telephone call came from the dingy wedding-cake palace on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the desire of the Department that the Alba Technical Mission, as much of it as had already been mustered, proceed that same night to its field station in the Republic.
There was time enough, just, to phone Laura in New York. "Well," she said, "have lots of fun, sweetie."
It was disconcerting that she could always read his most private intentions. "Fun," he said, stiffening, "is not exactly the point."
She passed this over. "About the trouble, Craig-I know you're going to be all right."
All right? Of that there was only one possible kind of test, wasn't there, one touchstone?
"What I mean, Craig...."
Between the lines, she was giving him a signal, wasn't she, a tacit go-ahead? She was hinting, as a modern and tolerant wife, that for the year he would be away in Alba, if it happened during that time that his foot slipped ... or was he only imagining this?
"All I meant to say, sweetie...."
She was presenting him with a shooting license, good only for the year he would be away, valid only outside the continental limits of the United States, but a shooting license definitely. He had managed up to now to remain strictly monogamous. As with most married men, he had come to find that the only other women he knew were the wives of their friends or the girls at the office. He had not wanted to conspire against Laura with women who knew her, or of her. He had not wanted to be searching himself after the event for lipstick smudges and stray strands of hair. But now....
"Oh, well-you understand," said Laura.
How was this to be considered? As an act of generosity? Or was it that even of his derelictions-even of these, if any-Laura was taking charge? He flushed suddenly with new irritation. "Good-bye, Laura," he said. He was sure that Burling and Horanyi, for instance, did not wait for their wives to tuck away a shooting license in the valise. Or-was he being oversensitive? Unreasonable? It was impossible for him, any longer, to be sure. The slate must first be wiped clean. "Goodbye, Laura," he said. It could be, he thought, that he had long lost all knowledge of what his wife really was like.
In the dark of the airfield, on the borders of the city they loved so much, the motors of the international plane tuned up. There was none, among the twenty passengers, who did not carry a briefcase. Government warriors all.
"Any second now," called Burling from up ahead. Tom Mercer, the "Little Adjutant," had preempted the seat beside Burling's and was squirming hotly in every direction. Ross and Horanyi, defying the plane steward's orders, were peering out at the edges of the aluminum curtains. For the rest of the passengers this was a solemn moment, a departure into the unknown, the dangerous. But the Alba Gang-their eyes flashed, they nudged each other restlessly, they swore feverishly. "Let's go!" begged the Little Adjutant. "Let's go!"
It came to him, now in the moment of departure, that Alba was hostile country, after all. Not only for all that festered in its swamps, its jungles, in the very air-there was also "Vicente," that arch ironist, to think of-and the "buzzards from Chimboya." It had been predicted, so very freely, that not all of the Alba Gang would be coming back on their feet.
The clatter-clatter of the jet engine merged into a single high drone. Then suddenly, with savage effort, like a foot runner drawing on every last cell and nerve, the plane tore down the runway. Ross, the scowler, clasped his hands overhead like a winning prizefighter. Horanyi grinned widely, and bright little daggers flashed again from his three gold teeth. The Little Adjutant danced in his seat.
The plane shuddered.
It was in the air.
"Good show!" boomed Burling.
"We're off!"
"So long, America."
They gibbered with good feeling, were drunk on it. Alba-he wanted to call out-we're heading toward hostile country. But then it struck him, suddenly, that to a wanderer there was no hostile country but his own. It was from his own land alone that a wanderer was in flight.
In Alba, he hoped, he might finally stop feeling the cracks in his bones.
CHAPTER THREE
That humans should live like this, that it should be the whole measure of their lives, that they should know no other ... Angrily, yet with a certain odd pride, he took it all in: the rank, littered mudflat, the half-hundred shanties of cane that waded in the ooze on their stilts, the gray-green contamination that overlay everything, even the waters of the Pacific, and the buzzards, the buzzards. ... They roosted five and six together on the roofs and fences. They strutted in columns on the oyster-shell causeways. They sallied up to the very doorsteps, as placid, as commonplace, as pigeons in New York. Those black, hunch-backed chickens, compounded of offal and carrion....
In the late afternoon sun, from the porch of their cane tenement-they had screened it in immediately on arrival, like soldiers stockading themselves against an enemy-he was gazing out over Puerto Pacifico. A patch of wet desert it was, hardly a town. On three sides of the muddy square, connected with each other by causeways, stood the cane shanties. On the fourth was the crumbled seawall and the Pacific, here so scummy and ill-smelling, not believably the same pure sea that washed Hawaii and Tahiti and all those other sanded isles to the west. Into its heaving mass, pointing like a forefinger, went the long, splintered dock over which Alba sent out its fruits to a world which knew not its name: cocoa and coffee, oranges and bananas. It was only to load and unload that these sick stunted children of the Incas had burrowed here into the mud, sharing their lives with the buzzards. He must take photos of this place, dozens of them, and send them to Laura. He wanted her to know how bad life could be. Or was it-was it, really, that he wanted her to know how much he, her husband, could put up with?
"See? I told you the gringos would come."
"Well? They have screened a porch, they have built a toilet. For themselves."
Outside on the causeway, on the narrow white path of crushed oyster shell, stood two little men, neither of them quite five feet tall, their bronze-colored faces set in metallic folds. They wore patched denim trousers, no shirts or shoes. Their feet seemed to have grown a leather of their own. Either because they had not yet noticed him in the shadow of the porch, or because they did not realize how much Spanish he understood, they went on talking freely.
"Patience," said the eager one. Teofilo, it was, the porter with the resplendent Greek name, lover of God, whom they had just hired for the warehouse. "The gringos will bring us a new life."
"Mierda," replied the sceptic. "I urinate on a new life."
"New hospitals," Teofilo went on, doggedly, "milk for the babies, land for the peons."
"And all for nothing? Mierda." Just beyond them lay the mudflat, a puree of poison in which floated kitchen swill, broken crockery, dead clams and smashed crabs, all the trash of the sea. At low tide, as now, it stank with decomposition. They said that if you went wading in it and had the misfortune to scrape your foot, it could cost you an entire leg within forty-eight hours. At high tide, though, the sea would rush in, and then Puerto Pacifico would become a Venice, a small and rotted Venice.
"Man, man," asked Teofilo, shaking his head, "what do you believe?"
"But why should they be so good to us? Why?"
Over by the seawall, on a patch of built-up land, stood a sick little papaya, the one tree in the port, as ragged as a worn feather duster. Daylong the children would bring it cups of water and watch over it like an invalid. And everywhere went the buzzards, hypochondriacal-looking, jerking their feet upward as from glue when they walked, but bursting into a grand, imperial spread of wing whenever they took to the air, as if blown out by explosion from within. Pessimistically they clawed all day at whited animal bones and fruit hulls that had been picked over and abandoned a hundred times before. "In Alba," said Maria, the cook, "not even a vulture fills its belly." But they were respected citizens, protected by law, because in all the province there were no other garbage collectors. This morning, on the causeway, he had come across a flock of them obstinately barring the way. For a moment, wondering of what lost corpses their own evil flesh had been formed, he had hesitated. But then he had plunged ahead, on into their midst, thinking all the while that if it were Laura who had to face these carrion birds ... He must remember, in his first letter, to describe it to her, but only the facts, without seeming to boast.
"Only tell me," the sceptic repeated, "why they're so good to us?"
It was the question, thought Harmon, of a jungle dweller, of a man who has found that behind each seeming beneficence lies an adder, or a trap. They had lived for too many centuries, these children of the Sun God, under the heel of conquerors. They had found that living was only a state which must be endured until death. He was speaking, the poor wounded sceptic, from an ancient memory of his race.
But Teofilo, he the believer, the willing one, wagged his head eagerly. "The Mayor says-he read it in the newspaper-because of the Brotherhood of the Americas. What a rich expression!"
"I urinate on rich expressions."
To the right, high in the heavens, edged with gold by the sun, was a great cloud-like mass which he knew to be the Andes Mountains. To the left was the Pacific.
Between them, between these two great splendors, lay the province where he would dwell for the whole next year, a pit of mangrove swamps, choked plantations and a sick fertility. Everywhere, except in the salted mud of the port, something grew-wildly and malevolently, culturing poison and sickness. It was from danger, suppurating danger, that the Sun's children snatched fruits for the tables of the world, and died sometimes with the hand outstretched. The wealth that grew in the streets would go to others, never to themselves. From the labor of many thousands of these starved bodies, a few men would drink champagne.
But still Teofilo persisted, the innocent one, the hopeful one. "It said in the newspaper that the North American mission...."
"Mission? What are they, Teofilo-black Protestants?"
"It has nothing to do with religion."
"An oil company!"
"The newspaper said nothing about oil."
"Marines!"
"Where are the uniforms?"
"Then it has no sense. Why, why should they be so good to us?"
Wait, he wanted to say-I can explain it. There are some of us to whom the misery of any man is our own canker. There are some of us ... But to a jungle dweller, he thought uneasily, it would not be simple to say. It would pass away into "rich expressions." For many years now he had taken it for granted that he was the keeper of every brother who suffered, so many years that he no longer knew how to explain why. He knew only that he wanted Teofilo, the trustful one, the innocent one, to be right. He did not want that innocence cheated.
It was just then that the commotion broke out. From above, from the second floor of the house, came an outcry from one of the servants and a stamping of feet. In his pidgin Spanish, Colonel Burling croaked stern commands. "Outside-todos-everybody! Vamonos!" There was a mass gallop across the floor, and the slamming of a door, so hard that the entire cane tenement shook.
Harmon opened the door to find a panicstricken horde rushing upon him, all the houseboys, the cooks, the maids. "Vibora!" screamed one of the houseboys, Jacinto, the one with the bartender curl on his forehead. "Muy venenosa!"
A snake, he translated mentally, very poisonous.
Marching down the stairway in corpulent dignity, absolutely resolved not to be routed into disorderly retreat, came Colonel Burling.
"Where's Horanyi?" he demanded. "Where the hell is that snake charmer?"
"Up in Rosales."
"Damn it," said Burling, "damn it to hell."
"What about a snake?" asked Harmon. "Can I get in on it?"
Burling compressed his lips, chagrined obviously at a situation that had slipped beyond his, the commander's, control. "A pretty little son of a bitch," he said, "all red and green. It's loose in my room."
Harmon found, oddly, that the notion exhilarated him immensely. "I'll tell you," he said, "if somebody'll find me a machete...." A ripple of excitement ran up and down his legs. He stood in football style with his hands on his hips, burning for action.
"Absolutely not," said Burling. "We'll wait for Horanyi."
"Hell," said Harmon, "I used to work the fruit boats. I watched how the stevedores used to do it." This was his baby, or had been in the long, long ago. He wanted action. Turning to Jacinto, he said, "Come on, hombre, get me a machete."
Still Burling shook his head. "Stay away from it. This is a direct order, Harmon. We'll wait for Horanyi."
But Jacinto came back, instantly, swinging a machete, the yard-long steel cutlass that was the tool-of-all-work for the peon, that cleared brush, plowed the earth, chopped firewood and was known even, in cantina brawls, to have hacked off heads. Hefting it in his hand, feeling himself to be all nerve and muscle, as he hadn't for many years, not for so long, Harmon started for the staircase.
"God damn you, Harmon, come back!" called Burling. "Ole!" cheered the house staff. "Ole!" Up the steps he went, lightly but tensely, reminded all over again that he was an athlete, that he had a body which was equipped to spring, to grapple, to fight.
"Wait!" pleaded Burling from below. "I see Horanyi coming!"
He reached the top step, all flushed with combat now and not to be denied. "No soap," he called down to Burling. "This one's mine." Bit by bit, with his left hand, he edged open the door of Burling's room, holding the machete aloft all the while in his right hand. Suddenly he glimpsed it, just three or four yards beyond the threshold, a splendid jeweled creature lying at full length under a ray of the hard white sunlight that slanted in from the west window. Yes, a pretty little son of a bitch-in the words of Burling-all scarlet and emerald, a Christmas streamer and at least two feet of it. Suddenly he found himself under the gaze of its black-diamond eyes.
Before it can strike, he thought, it will have to coil. And before it can coil....
He lunged forward then with the machete, all in one sweep, as he had done so often on a quarterback's signal.
"Ai!" they shouted up instantly from below, knowing from the crash of the machete on the floor that he had struck but ignorant still of the outcome, and apprehensive.
The outcome was that on the far side of the broad steel blade a length of the Christmas ribbon quivered hopelessly. And on the near side a forked tongue fell forward desultorily between the hypodermic fangs. "All safe," he called.
Up the stairs, pressing excitedly behind Burling in his dignified strut, they surged.
"Harmon...." said the Colonel, glancing at the floor. "Why, Craig, boy!"
"Ole!" cried the house staff. "A cheer for our snake killer!"
Grinning, he passed the machete back to Jacinto. He tried, suddenly, to recall whether Laura was any good about snakes. It was his recollection that she was not....He found, all at once, that he felt wonderful, absolutely wonderful!
CHAPTER FOUR
Harmon couldn't sleep. The harder he tried to fall asleep, the more difficult it became, until he had to get out of bed. He decided to get dressed and take a walk.
Maybe a little fresh air and a walk will help straighten me out, he thought.
After throwing on some clothes, he walked outside and was immediately impressed with the freshness and the quiet. He found the stillness relaxing, yet at the same time somehow heady and stimulating, so that the thought of sleep suddenly seemed unimportant and faraway.
He decided he had made the right, decision coming to Alba.
It'll make a new man out of me, he thought with a smile.
He walked down one of the main streets of town, and then he found himself in a little side street -lined with throw-together shanties. Some of the little homes still had their lights on, and he could smell the aromas of a few late-night meals.
How simple and basic these people's lives are, he thought as he walked slowly down the street. It was a hard life, granted, but not a life cluttered with the problems an American, like himself, might have to face.
Then he thought that if his life was a bit simpler, it might be easier for him to....
Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a series of loud moans coming from one of the nearby shanties. Harmon walked toward the source of the noises, thinking at first that someone might be hurt.
As he approached the last shanty on the street, right up against a bit of jungle overgrowth, he paused and looked in the window.
There on a mattress on the floor were two people thrashing together in a fit of passion. A dark-skinned woman was underneath, writhing around as if she were impaled on the end of a spear. On top of her was a frantically sweating man who was pumping his cock into her pussy as if his very life depended upon it.
"Ayyyy! Mas, ohhh, mas!" she cried, digging her fingers into his rippling shoulder muscles.
The man responded by driving his penis into her with more force, fucking into her vagina with all his might.
The sight was so unexpected, so blatantly erotic and sensual, Harmon felt his crotch tighten and his cock begin to swell. He couldn't take his eyes off them. He knew he was intruding upon their privacy, but his legs felt as if they were stuck in fast-drying cement. He couldn't move from his spot, with its perfect vantage of what was going on inside.
Craig thought that this was how he should have left Laura on their last night together, and he suddenly felt depressed. It's just not fair, he thought to himself. What have I done to deserve this curse? Why can't I perform as well as the man inside the shack?
The woman wrapped her legs tightly around the man's buttocks, holding on for dear life as he slammed repeatedly into her snatch. Craig could see it all: the man's thick penis leaving her livid red cunt, glistening with her juices, his balls hung low and swollen with cum, slapping like tennis balls against her hairy slit.
He wished he was in the man's place. The woman, though not particularly attractive, and rather plump, somehow embodied all that was sexually exciting. Perhaps it was her complete abandon, the intensity of her lovemaking.
And she was obviously enjoying every minute of it. Craig couldn't tell if the man was actually hurting her; if he was she wanted it that way because her every motion encouraged him.
"Ohhh, Papa!" the woman howled, her face screwed up in pleasure and pain. She sensed that her husband was about to unleash his load of semen, and she wanted to feel it all boiling deep inside her pussy.
Craig felt his cock becoming stiff. It was an unconscious effort on his part. After watching the couple thrashing around on the mattress it was almost as if he was in the small room with them, about to participate in their feverish lovemaking.
She locked her legs tight, keeping the man's rapidly thumping hips in place, keeping the man's thick cock firmly inside her cunt.
Craig, suddenly feeling self-conscious, looked around to make sure he wasn't being seen. The noises the couple were making seemed so loud, but there was no one else in sight. It was almost as if the three of them were the only people on earth.
He was hypnotized by the scene in the little shack and he knew he couldn't find the strength to leave until they were finished with their lovemaking.
Meanwhile his cock was, surprisingly, as hard as a rock inside his trousers. Unconsciously, he rubbed the front of his pants, his legs going weak as a vague pleasure spasm radiated from his loins.
Without giving it another thought, his heart pounding and his breath coming in short pants, he unbuttoned his trousers and pulled down the zipper.
This is crazy, he thought, breaking out into a cold sweat. Depraved! He felt like a kid barely in his teens, peeking into a neighbor's window, seeing a couple making love for the first time, as if watching an X-rated movie.
What am I doing, he thought, one hand reaching into his pants to take firm hold of his throbbing hard-on. It was as if someone else was controlling his every move.
He whopped out his blood-gorged penis and began stroking it, in time to the man's powerful fuck thrusts. It wasn't hard to imagine he was the one fucking the dark-skinned woman, that his cock was the one ramming into her pussy over and over again.
She arched her back, nearly throwing the man off her. She screamed, a look of pleasure unlike Craig had ever seen stamped on her sweating face. She opened her mouth wide but nothing came out. But it was clear by the way her body was suddenly seized by spasmodic motions that she was cumming.
Her inner thighs were slick with her abundant cunt juices. Her juice dripped from the man's hairy balls and stained the mattress underneath her body.
She was making animal-like noises at the back of her throat, humping up to meet his downward thrusts. He sucked on her nipples while he fucked her, first one then the other, getting so worked up Craig was sure he would collapse from a heart attack. It was hard to imagine lovemaking between two people could be more fast-paced or any more enthusiastic.
Leaning with one shoulder against the side of the shack, he began pumping his tool, all the while imagining he was the one wildly fucking the woman on the stained mattress.
The woman continued to scream, her nails digging into the man's sides, running down his back, leaving red welts like zebra stripes on his flesh.
He whispered something in her ear, biting the lobe, and this drove her even crazier. She was thrashing around like a fish out of water, reaching another tremendous orgasm that sent her entire body in spasms of ecstasy.
Craig couldn't believe his eyes. He had never seen anything so erotic. He wondered how the man could endure it all without cumming. He had an almost god-like control over himself, a human fuck machine that seemingly could never stop.
"Give it to her," he whispered, momentarily closing his eyes and imagining he was doing it to Laura, giving her his all.
His fist flailed over his tumescent meat. He could feel his balls tightening, a sure indication he was about to cum himself.
He couldn't keep his eyes off what was going on inside. The two people, bodies slick with sweat, were struggling to achieve the ultimate in pleasure. Now the man was moaning, then bellowing, driving into the woman so hard it made Craig wince.
"God, what a sexy little bitch," he muttered under his breath. His legs felt weak. He was sweating profusely. His heart was pounding a mile a minute. He never felt so alive, so invigorated, and the ironic part was that he wasn't even participating in what was going on. He was the outsider.
"Papa! Papa! Papa!" the woman screamed. She pounded with her fist on her husband's back and shoulders. Her head snapped back and she experienced another devastating orgasm. The man's voice rose in pitch until it sounded like a little girl's.
He was nearing the end of his endurance. Yet the lower portion of his body still pumped away, his cock dripping with her juices, juices which thoroughly lubricated his every thrust.
The woman started to sob uncontrollably, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks. She tried to push the man away but to no avail. They were half-hearted attempts anyway. Another orgasm rippled through her and she clenched her teeth as his cock disappeared all the way inside her, only the man's balls remaining outside the confines of her pleasure haven.
"PAPA! PAPA!"
The pressure was steadily building inside Craig's stiff cock. He pumped it for all it was worth, knowing an orgasm of his own was only moments away.
If only I could be this way with Laura, he thought.
He bit his lower lip to keep from calling out. He opened his eyes wide, as if it suddenly dawned on him that he could indeed cum if he wanted to.
The man inside the shack reached underneath his wife and gripped her ass cheeks with both hands, hoisting her up so he could get a better angle in which to fuck her dripping vagina.
She reached yet another orgasm and her legs relaxed their hold around his waist. Her entire body slackened and she lay still, her eyelashes fluttering like a bird's wings.
Craig thought the man had killed her.
Yet this thought didn't stop him from continuing to pump away at his tool.
"Ohhh, God, I can feel it," he moaned, eyes rolling back in their sockets. He leaned hard against the shack to keep from sliding down to the ground.
A moment later his cock exploded and he looked down to see the thick glob of jism fly out of his gaping piss slit and splatter against the shack.
"Ohhh, Jesus, that's good," he gasped, eyes still glued to what was going on inside. The man was quickening rather than slowing down his fuck thrusts. The woman moaned, but remained still as death under him.
Finally, the man fell whimpering on top of her. He was thrust forward as if pushed from behind. His ass cheeks hollowed out and he emptied his cock sauce deep inside his wife's ravaged pussy.
It was clear from the expression on his face that all the effort had been worthwhile.
Craig finished cumming, semen oozing thickly over his knuckles. He flicked off the cum residue and gave his dick, now quickly dwindling back to its previous softness, a shake to rid the tip of any clinging remnants.
Instead of feeling exhilarated, he felt depressed. Why couldn't he be so potent with another woman? Was he doomed to live the rest of his life as a hopeless, pathetic voyeur? Was that the only way in which he'd be able to get an erection and experience any sort of sexual pleasure?
The prospect frightened him.
But after all, he thought, zipping up and quietly leaving the shack, where the two occupants had fallen fast asleep in each other's arms, it was the first time he had had an erection, not to mention an ejaculation, in some time. Perhaps if he found a woman things would be all right again.
Craig returned to his room, undressed, and fell asleep, mentally and physically exhausted.
He dreamed about the couple in the shanty. The man was panting and snorting, increasing the tempo of his in, back, in again movements.
"Ah-ahhhh!" the woman gasped, and accelerated the pace of her own movements, making them violent, spasmodic. Her shoulders twisted and writhed, tightening her muscles, slamming them in her hardened buttocks up and down on the mattress. The man's fingers clawed into her flesh, and her breasts heaved, nipples large and tight.
"Ohhh, give it to me ... harder ... more. More!" the woman almost sang, her eyes open and wide. Her legs were up in an almost fetal position, taking the sliding cock to the root, deep inside her, with each stroke. Her cunt opened and closed around it like a chewing mouth, wet and drooling.
Craig awoke, cock soft, perspiration dotting his forehead.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Thank you, Senor Associate Director," said the police colonel, bowing himself out. "A pleasure, Senor Associate."
Returning to his desk, Harmon picked up the title plate and gazed at it amusedly. "Director Asociado," associate director, it was inscribed-in a ceremonious Spanish lettering all filigree and arpeggios. When Hector Serrano, the office manager, had presented it to him this morning, a foot-long pyramidal spar, varnished and glittering, he had thought it absurdly pompous. He had accepted it, and with elaborately Hispanic thanks to match, only because Serrano seemed to have his heart set on it.
His token of office. Actually, when Frank had conferred the title on him back in Washington, it had been largely as a form. There was a "line" for it in the Mission's table of organization and it had seemed as convenient to throw it to Harmon as to anybody. A half-fiction then. Yet ever since the plate had begun to sit on the edge of his desk this morning, it had been working a certain spell-as, for instance, with the police colonel, who had stalked in stiffly to demand an explanation in some matter where the Mission, or rather hotheaded Tom Mercer, was woefully in the wrong. But then, taking note of the resplendent little mace, the police colonel had clicked to attention. Morning-long other callers, official and unofficial, had directed themselves, after a hasty glance, not to "Senor Harmon" but to the "Associate Director." A joke-but one with which, in this land of formalisms, it was easier to fall in.
Setting the title plate down again, he plunged back to work, which consisted at the moment of preparing an abstract of the national labor code for guidance of the Mission.
It was not long after that the bullfrog basso of Colonel Burling began to harrumph on the other side of the cane wall. "God damn it, Ross," he said. "Three weeks in the province-and all you can show me is blueprints and profiles. I want to see something going up."
"Right!" snapped Tom Mercer, the Little Adjutant.
"Hell," Ross came back, ever the bullyboy, "how can I build you a road without a dragline? How can I move you water without pipe? You give me something to build with, mister, and I'll build."
"Me give you? mister, what the hell kind of an engineer are you?" Always when they felt bellicose they addressed each other as mister, in a sham formality.
"Then it's up to those paper-pushers in Washington. Let 'em ship me a dragline, let 'em send me down five miles of good black pipe, and I'll do you a job."
"Jesus," muttered the Little Adjutant. "Sweet Jesus."
There followed a long throbbing silence during which Harmon could picture the blood flooding Burling's face until it would seem ready to jet from every pore. "Ross!" he roared finally. "There's a war on! You were told to make do with whatever you'd find in the field! God-damn-it!" He spoke each word of the oath separately and passionately. "God damn it to hell!"
What had become, Harmon wondered, of the fatherly comedian of Washington, the genial Falstaff, the urbane friend of the Young Marshal? In Washington everything had promised to be a lark.
"Look, Colonel," replied Ross stubbornly, "I been up and down the coast maybe a dozen times. Three times I flew all the way to Chimboya. This country is a poorhouse, boss, not a warehouse."
Burling began to pace, and even in Harmon's office the floor rattled under that fierce tread. It was in an interlude of this dangerfilled meditation that Serrano, the office manager, came in, short and gray-haired and portly, dressed as always in spotless white polo shirt and white trousers. "Two ladies, Senor Asociado," he said. "They did ask to see Colonel Burling, but in the circumstances...." He motioned archly with his head toward the cane partition.
"Who are they?"
"Do you know the Senora Serafina Bustamente? Our Mammoth of Mercy?" It was a substantial name indeed. With his hands Serrano puckishly described vast arcs about his chest and hips. "The Lady President of the Red Cross of Alba. Also...." now he smiled pleasurably " ... the Senora Manriquez."
"Manriquez?" The name stirred a faint recollection. "Is she anything to the landowner?"
Serrano pursed his mouth with distaste. It was evident that he was not on the side of grandees. "His wife. But a nice young lady all the same. Show them in?"
Senora Serafina Bustamente was large indeed, verging evidently on three hundred pounds, the kind of fat woman, fragrant and sparkling, of whom it is always said, "What a pretty girl she must have been." Sailing up like some lowly galleon, the gray ringlets quivering on her head, she seized both of Harmon's hands emotionally in her own and, with a glance toward the title plate, exclaimed, "What an honor, Senor Asociado, to meet you! To think that you and your compatriots have come from so far to rescue our martyr province!"
He bowed. "An occasion even more glorious for me, your happy servant." In Spanish, he reflected, there would never be a simple way for saying anything. But already this glance had moved on to her who had lingered behind. She stood midway between the door and his desk, half-smiling but inattentive, as if waiting abstractedly for all the formalities to be done. In distinctly American style she wore a shirtwaist dress of cotton, and black and white shoes. Her shining black hair fell to her shoulders; it accentuated strongly the smooth pallor of her face.
"Melinda!" cried the Mammoth of Mercy. "Come, my dove. Come meet the Senor Asociado!"
Rousing herself from her half-reverie, the girl came forward. "How do you do?" she asked, in English. There was no trace of an accent.
"You're not American-North American?" he asked.
"Oh, no," she said, in a rather muted faraway voice. He was surprised that with hair so black she could have eyes so gray. Her cheekbones slanted tautly toward the temples in a way that gave her face a look of tension. "But I went to school in the States. Ann Arbor. I went to the University of Michigan."
The shirtwaist dress, the black and white shoes-out of this tropical swamp, suddenly, had walked a girl of the campus. But her skin was moon-pale and there hung about her an aura that was incongruously spectral.
"Untrue," the Mammoth of Mercy was exclaiming, "that all you yanquis have hearts of chromium!" Her plump hands were aflutter and from one of them broke a wild sparkle that was all rubies and diamonds. She was wearing a ring, he found on closer inspection, that was nothing short of spectacular; a cross of rubies set into a disk of diamonds, and the whole thing was the size at least of an American twenty-five-cent piece.
"Solidarity of the hemisphere," he murmured with what he judged to be suitable magniloquence. He brought forward two chairs.
The Lady President lowered her great bulk in the manner of cargo being winched into a hold. A relief shipment, she declared, had only just arrived from her good friends in Chimboya for the poor of Alba. Since no suitable storage space was elsewhere available, secure against thieves and rodents, she was presuming to ask, in the name of the organization of which she had the honor for the sixth consecutive year to be leader, whether the Mission would permit her to store the crates momentarily in its own warehouse. This was a great presumption, naturally, but if the Senor Asociado could see his way clear to....
"Delighted," said Harmon, studiedly spare.
From the gray, thoughtful eyes came a flicker of amusement. He found himself pleased, instantly, that he had caused Melinda Manriquez to smile. But a new outburst just then from beyond the cane wall made both ladies start.
"Harmon told you that?" rumbled the Colonel.
"Boss, I had a motor all lined up in Lorca. I could have had the water works in Santa Ana running again inside forty-eight hours. But Harmon nixed me."
"Why?"
"Some bushwa about politics."
"God-damn-it!" swore Burling, again in three separate volleys.
The ladies lowered their heads studiously. In his swivel chair Harmon braced himself for what was certain to follow.
"Harmon!"
"Yes?" he called back mildly. "Come here!"
Dolefully he stood up. The office manager, he told the ladies, would arrange for porters to haul the crates from the dock. If there was anything else....
Once more the Mammoth of Mercy clutched his hands. "You marvelous, marvelous yan qui!" she cried. Again he sought out the gray, thoughtful eyes. For an instant they let up with an answering smile.
"Hell," raged Burling, "why did you go and louse Ross up on that motor?"
"Hell," he replied, with a trace of japery-he could afford to, he was sure of his ground, "the motor was offered by General Imports."
"And?" Sweat buds had erupted all over Burling's bald crown.
This was something that Burling should know. It had been mentioned only a few days before in a flyer from the Embassy in Chimboya. "They're on the Ambassador's black list. Hell, they're Commie agents."
Burling's harsh stubby hands searched the air for something with which to grapple. "Embassy!" he exclaimed with rich scorn. "How the hell will I ever make a showing on this job if those cookie-pushers won't let me?"
The snub-faced Little Adjutant grimaced as though he had tasted something nauseating.
"Well," said Harmon patiently-he wondered why all this should be necessary, "the idea is that any money we spend with General Imports will go to finance Commie activities down here."
Over the round fleshy face went a look of woe. I didn't realize, thought Harmon, how much he resembles a baby, a large, unhappy baby. "Hell, hell," moaned Burling, "I have a showing to make."
It was a word that was on his lips constantly these days-showing. For a moment Burling panted with weighty thought, then aimed one blunt forefinger at Ross. "Tomorrow morning," he ordered, "you're putting on three hundred laborers."
"What for?"
"Line them up in Rosales. Start grading every goddamn street and alley in town. Charge it up to malaria control."
"Mister," Ross protested, "those are dirt streets. They'll wash out at the first raindrop."
"I don't give a damn," said Burling. "Stop crossing me up." He whirled about instantly in his swivel chair, turning his back on them all.
"Window dressing?" asked Harmon thoughtfully, addressing himself to the imperious back.
"These monkeys love circuses. We'll give them one." Still Burling refused to face about. "Spades and wheelbarrows provided by us. We pay five pesos a day."
"Hmmm," said Harmon.
Now Burling swung about. "I'm sick of you no-boys!"
"I only wanted to say-" this was his department, he had to talk up-"that the code for common day labor...."
"Whose goddamn code?"
"The province's goddamn code." He snapped his answer back freely, exuberantly. This kind of sport, after all, was open to anybody, especially if you happened to be right. "It's six pesos a day for common labor."
On the bald crown the sweat buds burst and began to run in tiny streams. "All right," conceded Burling, "but I'm sick, sick, sick of you no-boys. Get out of here now, all of you."
At the door Harmon was struck by a thought. "Boss," he called back, "about lining up equipment...."
Burling stood up, full of thunderclouds.
"Would it make sense," Harmon asked, "if we were to work up a list of every engineering firm in the Republic and...."
Still Burling scowled.
"My notion-couldn't we draft a circular letter asking about any machines or materials they might be able to spare? For lease or sale, either way. We might even be lucky enough to pick up some black pipe and a dragline."
For one instant longer Burling held back. "Good show!" he boomed finally in that favorite phrase of his. "When can I see a draft of that letter?"
"By lunchtime?"
"Now," said Burling, "we're getting somewhere. The first real idea I've heard from anybody since we hit this hole."
Honestly, thought Harmon, it couldn't be that good, could it? Back in the States it would have been strictly routine.
"You're cooking, Craig boy," continued Burling, ever more lavish. "You're on the beam."
Well, he thought, that kind of wonder he could dream up any day in the week.
He found her alone in the warehouseSenora Bustamente was waddling off in diminishing perspective to the dock-alone and gazing despairingly into one of the crates from Chimboya.
"Goodness," she said, fishing up something which turned out to be a tattered chiffon negligee. She let it fall back and fished up a second find, a black taffeta dinner gown that had split into long vertical ribbons. "For the poor of Alba," she murmured, shaking her head.
"With the compliments," he added quickly, "of Marie Antoinette."
She smiled and brushed a vagrant lock of her black shining hair back from her face. "Last month when we asked for food contributions some of them sent-I know you won't believe it, Mr. Harmon-cocktail biscuits and anchovy paste." She spoke in a strange but pleasing voice which was two voices: one muted and substanceless, the other tolling behind it like a bell-buoy in a mist. Though it was bright morning, the bouquet that came from her was shadowy, night-like. "You must despise us," she said suddenly, "the foolish, foolish rich."
He bethought himself instantly of Senora Bustamente's badge of office, the Red Cross ring that was fashioned of rubies and diamonds, but made no answer.
Melinda Mariquez turned back to the crate. "Do you know," she asked, looking away all the while, "how many banana trees my husband owns in Alba? In Alba alone? Two hundred thousand. And when I think of all the cocoa and coffee and oranges...."
A strange girl. "It troubles you?" he asked.
Her answer was not direct. "These countries," she said, "are so full of extremes. There's a cruelty down here that you North Americans can't really understand. Rich toward the poor. Big toward the little. White toward the Indian." She faced about again, brushing a fallen tress back over her shapely head with her hand. "Do you know these countries well, Mr. Harmon?"
"Only the ports. And what I've read."
"When I think back," she said, glancing at him all the while, seeming to plead for his favor, "life in the States looks so wonderfully innocent. So gentle. The football games-the chocolate sodas-the juke boxes. In the States people go on playing for so much longer. Have you noticed at all what kind of clothing our children wear here in Alba? So few of them have children's things. At seven and eight they're grown-ups already-grown-ups in little sizes."
She must spend a good deal of time by herself, he hazarded, alone and in thought. She was so unexpectedly keen, and so selfcontradictory. Campus shoes-moon-white face. Campus girl-lady of sorrows. She lived in one world and dreamed on another. And she was trying so very hard, it seemed, to win approval from him. She was begging him not to think of her as belonging with the Conquistadores.
Her glance, he noted all at once, had darted toward the open doorway. Like a galleon fighting heavy seas, Senora Serafina Bustamente was making her way back along the oyster-shell causeway. "The Mammoth of Mercy," he murmured.
Melinda Manriquez smiled; it was as though a moon-ray had lit the slanted cheekbones. "How ever did you know that?"
"I've heard."
"Oh, poor Serafina," she said with a mingled fondness. "They started it up in Chimboya, the town wits. For years now they've played a game of pinning tags on her. The Gargantua of Good, the Leviathan of Love, things like that."
"Doesn't she ask for it?"
"The cross of rubies? I suppose. But her husband's dead and her daughters are all married off in other countries and she's terribly alone. And in her poor silly way she's trying dreadfully hard to be a modern woman. You have to know Serafina. She could surprise you sometimes."
"How?"
Abruptly the huge bulk of the Lady President corked the doorway. "Senor Asociado-" she cried.
He bowed deeply.
In a melodious torrent the Lady President poured out her thanks for his unstinting cooperation in the humane endeavors of the Red Cross of the Martyr Province. The Asociado, beyond all expectation, had proved himself great-hearted and noble, humanitarian and Christian. "And Melinda," she added, a sudden turn that was astonishingly different, "the boy is no pain to look at! Quick, Melinda, wrap him up!"
Back in his office, he plunged to work on the circular letter of which Burling had made so much. From the tail of his eye he caught a glitter of the title plate. Associate Director? Well, why not?
CHAPTER SIX
A signboard over the gateway read, "Palace of the Provincial Government," but the red-painted decaying planks of the facade were reminiscent rather of a waterfront warehouse. Here and there on the walls, mingling with such bold patriotic slogans as "Long live the Republic!" and "Death to the Invader!" had been chalked obscene words and drawings of nude women. The Palace served also as quarters for a company of Carabineros, the national police, and a number of these, their rifles stacked, lounged within the courtyard. They wore enormous straw hats and loose white uniforms that were like slept-in pajamas. A bugler, practicing a high run, blew sour notes over and over again. A young black man, one of the few Harmon had seen in Alba, kept firing unsuccessfully with a slingshot at the buzzards.
Beneath the soft Spanish intonation, the Governor's English was precise and elegant. He had been educated in England, it developed, and served there later in the Republic's legation. "Gentlemen," he apologized, as he seated Burling and Harmon in two rickety kitchen chairs alongside his desk, "the invaders did not leave us much in the way of furnishings."
"Mr. Governor," brayed Burling with the old heartiness, "we didn't come to Alba to drink pink tea."
"I fancy not," smiled the Governor.
On the scratched, bruised desk was an electric push bell, but lid and button were gone, leaving only the naked copper spring. All about the room ran open plank shelves upon which lay brown-paper packets, each tied with a red string to which had been affixed a cardboard tag. It looked like laundry long unclaimed.
"Yes," sighed the Governor as he followed Harmon's gaze, "our filing cabinets." But, amid all the dust and decay, he sat clean and fresh in a suit of sand-colored linen. He appeared to be in his early forties. Here and there his brown wavy hair was flecked with highlights of pure gold; his eyes were a tawny hazel. The Montalvo ancestry, evidently, had stemmed from the north of Spain, remaining unmingled still with Moorish or Indian strains. In New York or London the Governor would have been exactly right.
On the wall behind him, Harmon observed, hung the inevitable portrait of Cesar Montalvo. They seemed, on the surface, to be of two different races, the Mongolian khan and his exquisite Western son. Yet, continuing to study the image on the wall, Harmon found that the Oriental expression of the father lay wholly in the old-fashioned tufts of white mustache and goatee. Piercingly, grandly, but humorously also, the shrewd eyes looked down from the wall, taking charge of everything about. To have had such a father, thought Harmon, with a flare of the old longing. That genial emperor. Aloud he remarked, "One sees as many ikons of Cesar Montalvo here as of Christ."
The Governor nodded somberly. "The parallels are more than one. Do you know how my father died, Mr. Harmon?"
"There was an uprising, I've been told.
The landowners and the clericalists...."
"They took him from the Palace and tied him to mules. For two hours they dragged him about Chimboya, in the sun. Somebody thought finally of asking, 'Is he dead?' He opened his eyes, Cesar Montalvo, and said, 'No, you hoodlums, and he will never be dead.' They dragged him to the public gardens and made themselves a fine bonfire and...." It was an episode which must have crossed the Governor's mind many times these past twenty years, but still it caused him to shudder. "The famous 'Spanish fury.' Why do we do such things? It must stem, I suppose, from our deep Catholic tradition. Over and over we are compelled to repeat the Crucifixion. Study the lives of every hero whom we Latin Americans have ever had. Sucre, San Martin, Bernardo O'Higgins. Even Simon Bolivar, the greatest of all. In their lifetime we torment them. In their death we deify them."
Behind the young politico, thought Harmon, lurked a moody poet. It was in the tradition-so many of the Presidentes had in their youth written quatrains.
Outside, in the courtyard, the ambitious bugler reached a soaring trill and broke. "Well," said the Governor in an instant change of mood, "you did not come here for a philosophic treatise."
"Very educational," boomed Burling.
With his handsome gilded head, Marcos Montalvo gestured toward a window at his right, toward the ragged, dusty palms of the public gardens, toward the huddle of sagging shanties that was the provincial capital. "When I accepted this appointment," he said, "it was as a debt which a son owes his father. If we can do something now to continue his work, to change Alba from a garbage heap to a land where men may live with some dignity...."
"Exactly," said Burling.
"... and where children may be reared with some hope of a future rather than a coffin by the age of twelve...."
"Yes!" said Burling.
The Governor leaned forward across his desk. "I must warn you, Colonel Burling, that Alba also has its bad elements. Selfish, greedy, feudal. Hostile to anything North American."
Vicente, thought Harmon, that savage ironist.
"They will try to sabotage everything you do," said the Governor, "steal your supplies, spread vicious rumors." With his even, well shaped teeth, the Governor bit off a snip of fingernail. "When you run into that sort, please let me know."
Outside, coincidentally, the bugler blew a flourish that was like a call to arms.
"Good show!" said Burling, and they all laughed together.
Now from the breast pocket of his belted khaki jacket, the garment that was the uniform of the old tropical tramp, Burling drew a sheaf of papers. "Mr. Governor," he said, "the projects as worked out in Washington and Chimboya are excellent. But you local people are naturally a little closer to the realities. I would be very happy if you and your people would review these plans and criticize them in any way you see fit."
"Honored. I may keep this?"
Burling passed over the papers, then slouched low in the rickety kitchen chair and stared thoughtfully up at the cracked, stained ceiling. "The bulk of our operations," he said, "will be carried out directly by our own technicians. But there will be many smaller operations in which we will want to encourage, well, local enterprise. Repair of public buildings. Construction of furniture. And so forth. On contract." Into Burling's voice had come a sly ring. "Naturally, we don't want any of these contracts getting into the hands of the 'bad elements.' You yourself, I know, will be best able to advise us on which persons are deserving and which...."
Harmon winced. It was such a crude, naked insinuation: name your dummies, Mr. Governor...."
"The funds," broke in Montalvo, "are a public trust." Over his face had come a quizzical look.
"Oh, nothing out of the way!" said Burling. "Of course not. A sacred public trust." The chair creaked heavily as he rose from it. "All my life, Mr. Governor, I've dreamed of being able to give a leg up to my fellow man. This is it. I would like some day to be remembered as 'Burling of Alba.' And you, I know...."
"Either that," said the Governor, "or these poor devils might just as well cut their throats."
They drove in silence down the rutted highroad of Rosales, on which lay the stark white jawbones of animals and the hulls of fruits, on which the buzzards, as always, did their melancholy cakewalk. Here and there, alongside the road, cocoa beans had been laid out on immense canvas tarpaulins to dry in the sun. From the beans came the sour odors of fermentation. In time, hulled by the cleaner fingers of machines, powdered and packed into charming cartons, they would find their way to the tables of the world, a steaming confection of bonbons for the tongue. But here, lying by the thousands in the sun, the beans looked only like the droppings of small animals.
On they drove, past the crews of laborers who hacked and filled the hummocky earthen streets to bring them into order, and then, beyond Rosales, into a gray flat plain, so supine and female, stretched out as for ravishment. From the thick knotted covers of the mangrove swamps in the distance rose flights of birds-herons and ibises and egrets, unbelievably white and pure and elegant, the only clean things that had yet shown themselves in this contaminated land. How, Harmon wondered, did they manage to remain so unsullied?
"Boss," he asked finally, his eyes still fixed ahead on the road, "wasn't that a foul ball?"
"What was?" Drowsily.
"That business about contracts. Offering Montalvo the mordida, the bite."
Burling, coming awake from his drowse, chuckled. "Craig," he said, "there isn't one single operator in a hot country who doesn't earmark ten per cent of gross profits for the mordida. Otherwise you never get your import licenses-your tax reports are put on the pan-you get smothered under currency regulations."
"Yes, yes," said Harmon impatiently. "I wasn't born yesterday. But in the case of Montalvo...."
Burling patted him indulgently on the shoulder-and it was so irksome, this heavy cunning, that he came close to pushing Burling right back in the face. "They will talk day and night about their sacred idealism, Craigboy, but the hand is always there."
Tricks, tricks ... It was supposed to represent sophistication, this kind of cunning, but he had always thought that it looked more like fear. He had met, as a lawyer, many other such sophisticates: business schemers and Broadway characters and racing touts, even gangsters. And they had struck him in some ways as remarkably naive. Everywhere around them they saw a jungle full of dangers, these toughies, and their money was always up to buy their way out. Of course he had fears of his own-oh, he certainly didbut not these fears, other ones. In matters like these he was willing to take his chances.
"I tell you, Craigboy," went on Burling, still bubbling with self-appreciation, "that if you've helled around the tropics as long as I have...."
"Maybe," Harmon broke in wearily, "you've helled around too long."
Burling's reply was most surprising. He remained silent.
As he climbed the steep, shaky staircase of the Customs House he heard two voices arguing in Spanish-one with the orotund periods of the Andes highlands, the other with the cockfight argot of the Caribbean which dropped all final S's.
"Si, yo' conzco' bien, vosotro' lo' mono'," the Little Adjutant declared. "I know you monkeys inside out. You can't pull a holdup like that on me."
"Absolutely," was the answer. "Now go and tell your father I want to talk to him."
"The guy in charge of payrolls is me."
"Come, come, where is your father?"
The dispute, Harmon ascertained, was taking place in his own office. He opened the door to find Tom Mercer ensconced imperially in the swivel chair and declaring, with narrowed eyes, in a manner patently borrowed from Burling, his idol, "Fellow, I give you just five seconds to chase yourself the hell out of here."
"Dear me," said the visitor. He was a large man, Harmon observed, with a head of wild gray hair. He wore a wrinkled suit of tan cotton with sagging pockets, no tie. In his hand, like a burning scepter, he held a black and immensely long cheroot. A king of the hobos, thought Harmon.
"Ah," asked the visitor, taking note of Harmon's entrance, "are you somebody with authority?"
The Little Adjutant bolted up. "Mister...." he began.
"Tom," said Harmon, "sit down. Rest your gums." Inquisitively he tuftied toward the visitor and introduced himself. The visitor accepted his outstretched hand with a kind of royal indulgence. "Hidalgo is my name," he replied. "Lawyer by profession."
Yes, thought Harmon, he had seen the type hanging about the corridors of the magistrates' courts, seedy and rapacious, carrying their offices in their hats. But "hemisphere solidarity," in this instance, demanded politesse. "Senor Hidalgo," he said, "we're colleagues."
"Oh, splendid, splendid," said Hidalgo, seating himself. Out of everything he gathered a kind of private amusement which Harmon found irritating.
"He keeps yapping something about social laws," muttered Tom Mercer. "What the hell, we're giving away a million bucks free to the monkeys as it is."
Monkeys, thought Harmon-"our brothers of the Americas." Inquiringly he turned toward Hidalgo, becoming aware simultaneously of a strong bouquet of alcohol.
"Once upon a time," began Hidalgo, crossing his legs elegantly and speaking in the manner of a storyteller to very young children, "there was a Republic of Monkeys. Now it was the practice in this Republic to work the poor little creatures from dawn to dusk and to reward them for their labors with a little shred of coconut for each. There came finally a great revolution. It was decreed that henceforth the monkeys"-he grinned all the while in the direction of Tom Mercer that they could not be worked more than eight hours each day, so that they would last a little longer. Also, that when they fell sick, they would receive their shred of coconut just the same, for a little while. All this, Senor Harmon, went by the name of the 'social laws.'"
"Come," said Harmon annoyedly, "let's get down to cases."
Hidalgo's face darkened. "Well," he said, "when your day laborers were paid off today at Rosales, four of them were docked for sickness. The labor code permits three days a month of sick leave with pay."
"Hell," demanded the Little Adjutant, "what's that got to do with the Mission?"
Harmon disregarded him. "Senor Hidalgo," he asked, "just what is your own interest in this matter?"
"My fee!" declared Hidalgo with a broad grin which disclosed remarkably white teeth. "For intervening as counsel to the monkeys, I stand to be rewarded with a substantial molecule of their shreds of coconut."
By nobody, thought Harmon angrily, had he ever been made to feel so foolish-not even by Laura. "Seriously...." he urged.
Hidalgo drew brusquely on his cheroot. "The monkeys," he said, "were threatened with jail. They are too frightened to talk for their rights. Reason enough?"
"All right," said Harmon. "We'll abide by the labor code."
Instantly Mercer bolted up.
"Cool off," said Harmon. "This isn't even debatable. It was so agreed by Washington when the program was drafted."
Without a word the Little Adjutant stalked out of the room.
"You yourself," said Hidalgo cheerfully, "are the nicer kind."
Harmon sat down in his swivel chair, his throne of office. "Of what?" he asked, taken in by the urbane smile, momentarily off guard.
"Imperialist."
Instantly Harmon flushed. "Colleague," he said, "that isn't very friendly."
"Come, come, Senor Asociado," said Hidalgo with an ironic glance at the title plate which sat so pretentiously on the edge of the desk, "you are not really pretending that you've come to Alba for purposes of altruism."
That rancid boozy cynic...."Well," asked Harmon defensively, "what's wrong about building hospitals and purifying water?"
From one of the sagging pockets of his jacket, Hidalgo extracted a packet of the cheroots. "I don't think you'll want one," he said. Harmon shook his head and Hidalgo lit up with a hand that quivered slightly. "In the olden days," he said, "the Conquistadores came with the cross and the sword. Nowadays they come with hospitals and water. Otherwise the purposes are much the same. Have I been rude enough, Senor Asociado, or would you care to hear more?"
There was a lilt to his voice which made of the title something ponderously absurd, absolutely spurious, which turned it into an epithet even more insulting than anything else Hidalgo had said. Irritatedly, protectively, Harmon drew the title plate in closer to himself. "This is your country," he said. "Say what you please."
"Senor Asociado...." It was insupportable, this open mockery; now Harmon shuffled the title plate down the desk and into his lap, out of sight altogether. "You talk of rehabilitating this miserable little swamp and I'll wager some of you are even sincere about it."
"Is that wrong?" He was sure that on other terms, desperate as he had been, he would not have come here. He had begged Frank over and over to assure him that it was "clean," and Frank had assured him it was.
"Unhappily," said Hidalgo, "you can't possibly succeed. This kind of thing has been tried before, you know, and in a large way, really large."
In spite of his resolve to remain aloof, not interested, he found himself drawn in. "Are you talking of Cesar Montalvo?"
Again Hidalgo drew on the gnarled cheroot-that boozy shyster. "What defeated Montalvo," he said, but deeply earnest all at once, even melancholy, "was an old tradition, a terrible one, something stronger even than himself. The tradition of the Conquistadores, I mean. Of Pizarro and Cortez. Plunder. That these lands were to be used for nothing but conquest and plunder. It has been going on for a long, long time, you know. Into the fourth century. Now and then a great spirit comes along who tries to smash that tradition. The trouble-there are simply not enough Cesar Montalvos in these countries to go around. That part of it is our fault. I admit it freely. We breed far more Pizarros than Montalvos among ourselves. But, one way or another, the moment your Mission is gone the jungle will start growing back over everything you have done."
Angrily, defiantly, Harmon stood up. The title plate slipped from his lap and clattered to the floor, but he let it lie there. He wanted no part of it-not just now. He didn't even need it. "So we're here on a fool's errand?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Hidalgo, genial again. "Absolutely not. No Conquistador is ever really a fool. In the end he manages pretty well to carry out his purposes. Yes, even the Conquistadores of the second class."
Again that scornful phrase. Somewhere, Harmon felt, he had heard it before...."Well," he asked, trying to return scorn for scorn, "tell me what purposes the Mission is serving."
"Oh, you'll have to give me a little time to study that," replied Hidalgo, again with that satanic grin which showed the fine teeth, showed them as some inner part of the man untouched by wear and corruption. "My guess is that your Government sent you here for one set of purposes. You undertook, as individuals, to come to this stinking little swamp for another set of purposes-your private ones."
Damn him-the clever shyster! Damn him! How did he know so much? It was as though Hidalgo had focused an X-ray machine upon him suddenly and picked out relentlessly every single one of the cracks and scars in his bones that he wanted to forget. Overnight, in Alba, he had been presented with worth, importance, adequacy. And now this rum pot was trying to take everything away from him.
Defiantly, Harmon bent down, retrieved the title plate and, with a clatter, set it back on the edge of his desk.
"I'll tell you," went on Hidalgo, again with that false urbanity-was there no stopping him?-"what the Temperate Zone exports to the tropics is generally its failures. Why should a man, a successful man, want to come to a place like this-to the heat, the bugs, the discomforts of every kind? The truth is that successful men do not want these jobs. They are left open, everywhere in the world, to the failures. And the failures take them because it is only here, in countries like these, alongside people even weaker and sicker than themselves, that they can come to feel like men. And to receive rewards all out of proportion to their abilities. When I think, for instance, how many pygmies went out over the centuries to rule India ...!"
Damn him-damn him!
Stiffly, Harmon strode away from his desk to the window. Blankly he looked out over the mudflat. How much more did he knowthis rummy clairvoyant? For a moment Harmon's gaze was caught by the curious play of two buzzards on a rusty rooftop. Methodically, with unwonted delicacy, they kept crossing their long slim beaks-like fencers with foils. It was their manner of lovemaking, he had been told. Instantly, then, he bethought himself of a certain savage characterization. "The buzzards from Washington and the buzzards from Chimboya...."
Oh, yes, and that other scornful phrase too-"the Conquistadores of the second class...." Now he was beginning to remember. It was something that he would be able, in a moment, to use.
Boldly Harmon wheeled about. "Pygmies?" he repeated. "You apply all that to me?"
"Oh, please!" exclaimed Hidalgo. "Present company excepted. Always. I apply it to the boy who was so rude to me a few minutes ago. My guess is that he learned his Spanish by bossing labor gangs in Puerto Rico. True?"
"I don't know." To this fly-blown shyster he would concede nothing, absolutely nothing.
"You will agree"-again with that dazzling white grin-"that back in the United States there would be no such opportunities for him to boss other people, certainly not two or three hundred of them."
Mercer-in the States? He would find his level in life as a shipping clerk probably. Or a gas station attendant. This had to be admitted, but not openly. And Burling?-he was forced to ask himself. And Fred Ross? And what of the Mission itself-which so far, in truth, looked good only from the outside?
But he would admit nothing. Stubbornly he gripped his title plate, held it so tightly that the sharp wooden edges dug into the palms of his hands.
"Cortez and Pizarro...." the man went on. "They, at least, fought their way into totally unknown country. Against spears and poisoned arrows. That much, at least, must be said for them. But as regards the new ones, the invaders of the present day, the Conquistadores of the second class...." Hidalgo shook his head with sad affability, broke off in mid-sentence and made to go.
Now, thought Harmon. "One moment, please," he asked. Hidalgo, turning about, cast upon him a look that was utterly despondent. "Does your Christian name," asked Harmon, "happen to be Vicente?"
Hidalgo's hand, in the act of raising his cheroot to his lips, paused in mid-air. "Is that of any significance, Senor Asociado?"
"Well," said Harmon acidly, "you write very interesting letters."
Hidalgo gave it an instant of thought. Then, through the despondency, there came a flash again of the white, brilliant smile. "I'm considered important enough to be spied upon? Senor Asociado, this is very flattering." This time the dart fell against Harmon impotently. "In these days of revolution everywhere, Middle East, Iran, everywhere, the C.I.A. is looking in on a lot of people, I guess."
"Well, what do you make of me, Harmon? I'm a fascist?"
"Some people put it that way."
There was a burst of deep, pained laughter. "Oh, my dear young Colossus, I am about as important as a mosquito. Not the Anopheles, mind you. No-a non-toxic variety." He stopped laughing abruptly and stood swaying. "Take my word for it, Harmon."
What a disturbing man! The ruin, it must be, of something once much larger, much grander. Of what?
"This much you will have to grant, Harmon. If you've read my letters carefully, you must know that I have as little use for our own native buzzards as for the imported variety. I don't lay everything against the gringos. Not everything. In any case, let me thank you for your kindness in the matter of the sick pay. You are one of the better ones."
"A better buzzard?"
Hidalgo shook his head with a certain sweet ruefulness. "We will be living together in this swamp a whole year, Harmon. I would just as soon be friends."
As though leaving this for Harmon to think about, he did not offer his hand. Instead, he turned and went away down the narrow cane hallway, lurching slightly as he went, touching first one wall and then the other with his shoulders-but carrying himself, nevertheless, with a kind of magnificence.
A Danton, thought Harmon-a drunken Danton who no longer believed in anything, not even what he was fighting for. A man on his way to some kind of doom.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He was waked before dawn, in his cell of gauze, by phonograph music that came mournful but loud from one of the bars across the mudflat. To an ancient and stately measure from the courts of Spain, a piercing tenor sang of the vastness of the world and the smallness of man-of wind and rain, and man's own nakedness.
Across Harmon's room swept a white scythe of light. The revolving beacon of the lighthouse, signaling in a ship. Wednesday-therefore it would be the Relampago, the feeble little side-wheeler with the grandiose name Lightning. It would be bringing mail, newspapers, supplies and also Walt Anderson, who was joining the Mission as agricultural officer, after all. Things were going better these days-the circular letter had produced a few results-but Anderson would be a much needed addition all the same.
In the next sweep of light, Harmon held aloft his wrist watch. Not yet five o'clock. Dawn would not come until six, but then precisely at six, and almost full-blown, as every day here on the Equator. But already he felt wide-awake and fresh, ready for whatever might come, not, as in New York, wincing against the daylight. He yanked the mosquito netting up heartily from under the mattress and found his flashlight on the camp chair alongside his bed. Then he shook out his bedroom slippers carefully-for scorpions-and switched on the overhead light.
Directly above him, on the second floor, a cot rattled heavily, as if on the march across the room. Burling, it was, engaged in the reflections of waking. All at once his tuba voice blasted out a sardonic reveille. "Up, up you rascals! Rise and shine-and give out that glory, glory!"
"Up yourself mocked Harmon. Through the thin cane walls could be heard the characteristic sounds-he knew them so well by now-that marked the waking of all the oth ers. Ross groaned and stumbled about heavily, like a blinded Samson. Horanyi cursed cheerfully in several languages. Tom Mercer took brisk tight steps in all directions.
Piece by piece Harmon drew his clothing down from the line, shook out each garment separately, and dressed. He washed his face in a bowl of gray water. Again on guard against scorpions, he shook out the towel before wiping his face. Never again, he thought, would he take for granted the safe hygienic world of the Temperate Zone, where enemies did not always lie waiting, where every chink and crevice was an ambush. Here in this over-rich soil, in this incubator air, everything grew with equal fervor: cocoa and microbes, bananas and bacteria, coffee and vipers. If only a frost would once swoop down and sterilize this moist sick warmth....
He stretched cozily, yawning aloud, and walked over to the window that was merely a square gap in the cane wall. Over by the dock, torches and flame pots tore holes in the night. At their sandboxes the food hawkers were broiling fish and brewing coffee. A toy-like locomotive of the narrow-gauge railroad squealed and whined as it tugged a string of latticed box cars along the dock. From all sides of the town, men wearing white trousers and, on their heads, burlap sacks in the style of the Arab burnoose-the stevedores of Puerto Pacifico-converged along all the causeways toward the sea. They called tired, sad greetings to each other in the dark.
In the commotion of the ship's docking they heard an American voice call them by name, but it took a moment longer to pick out Walt Anderson at the rail of A-deck.
"Welcome," called Burling, "welcome to the glorious and invincible province of Alba, pearl of the Pacific."
Anderson raised a hand over his eyebrows, visor-like, and surveyed the mudflaton which already the sun was swiftly rising. "From where I stand," he said, "it looks like the anus of the universe."
"From anywhere you stand," said Harmon.
Anderson waved a canvas sack which he said contained their mail-he had picked it up at the Consulate in Lorca. Then he turned to a girl alongside him at the rail, a stocky and breasty maid with broad Indian features, and said something which caused her to giggle convulsively. "How do you like my sweater girl?" he shouted down. Lavishly he patted her on the rump. The girl ran away laughing. Anderson, gazing after her voraciously, tick tocked his head in time to her retreating haunches.
"Mister," called Burling, "I hope you took precautions."
"Three of them!" replied Anderson with a wild leer.
Between Washington and Puerto Pacifico, thought Harmon, a transformation had overtaken the weather-beaten, Gothic little farmer. In Washington all his talk had been about seed, soil, livestock. In Washington when he had talked to the stenographers, he had mumbled diffidently, his eyes averted. And now, making his entrance into the tropics, he was cavorting like a supercharged goat.
But then again, as Anderson came down the gangplank, he was buzzing with plans. "Colonel," he said, "I laid over in Washington an extra week so's I could start some seed shipments down. Air priority too."
"Good show."
"Also, I'm getting six acclimatized stud bulls from Ecuador. Holstein crossed with Cebu. For that demonstration farm, I'll want plenty of land. Do I get it?"
"Write your own ticket."
"I hear there's some first-class sisal in these parts. We'll be making hemp inside of three months. Rhodes sends you a short-wave radio as a personal gift. I understand you heroes have been having yourselves a time."
Grouchily, Burling opened his shirt. Across his chest flamed a furious rash, red nodules topped by amber pinpoints. "How about a medical officer?" he demanded. "When the hell is Rhodes sending us a doctor?"
"He has a new prospect, a fellow I knew in Costa Rica. And a ball of fire, too. Meanwhile Rhodes says to make do with the nacionales, the local boys."
"The nacionales!" spat Burling. "Cover it with banana leaves, Senor Director. Make a paste of cocoa powder and cow flops, Senor Director. God Almighty!"
"Live in the tropics," said Anderson placidly, "and you itch. God's law." Gazing at the mudflat, its tidal waters now pinked by the sun, he sighed with an odd contentment, then demanded, "Mister, does a man get any breakfast around here, or do you just throw him to the buzzards?"
After breakfast-a tumbler of orange juice for each, but only unbuttered bread and a gummy, bitter coffee-they spread out on the porch with their letters from home. "Hell, hell...." Ross kept mumbling as he combed through a thick, blue-tinted packet, "hell, hell." Burling glanced perfunctorily at an envelope with a Brazilian stamp-from the wife he had shelved in Rio?-and turned away to a batch of newspapers from Lorca. He made his way through them haltingly, humming out dispatches from places with names like Iran and Yugoslavia. ... Horanyi, stretched out in a deck chair, held a sheet of pink-tinted stationery before him at arm's length and yawned....What did she look like, wondered Harmon, the wife who bored Horanyi so? And the wife Burling had misplaced in Rio? And that other wife, Ross's, who alone was sighed for? What was it anyhow that joined women in marriage to men who would always be away, to seafarers, engineers, commercial travelers and tropical tramps? They were joined, such husbands and wives, only to be sprung anti-magnetically apart-in marriages to be carried on at a distance, save for the sporadic homecomings for purposes of reproduction. They must come each year to feel ever more abandoned, the Penelopes, ever more the mothers of their children and ever less the wives of these eternal runaways.
Tom Mercer, who alone had no letters from home, sat placidly on a stool alongside Burling and gazed out over the mudflat, a faithful Fido. Anderson, all the while, walked about the house, inspecting everything and shouting with good-natured outrage. "God Almighty! God Almighty!" Several times he stole into the kitchen and said or did things which caused the cooks and maids to shriek.
"Why," she wrote, "did we ever let you do it, darling? The food, the water, your living quarters! And to have to put up with that for all of a year. Is the work as important as Frank Rhodes seems to think? Good Neighbor-yes, I know. But it's all still vague to me, to be perfectly truthful, as to just why the Government had to send all of you off to an out of the way place like Alba in the midst of a world crisis-Craig, we certainly don't want you coming home a physical wreck. The whole thing seems to have been set up so hastily and thoughtlessly. Promise me-won't you? That if it turns out to be more than you really care to put up with, or anybody would, that you won't have any false pride about resigning. If it's going to be a wild-goose chase anyhow...."
He was brought to by an all-out blast from Colonel Burling that caused the buzzards outside on the causeway to leap five into the air together. "God-damn-it!" stormed Burling. "Damn it to hell and back!"
"Jesus," muttered the Little Adjutant faithfully. "Sweet Jesus."
Wonderingly, Harmon looked up. Burling, without a word, handed him one of the Lorca newspapers, holding it between thumb and forefinger like a contaminated object.
"Ministerial Committee Reviews the Alba Program"-ran a bold headline across the front page. It was a deftly phrased communique from the cabinet committee to which the Mission had been accredited. While the projects were all admirable in intent, stated the Ministers, many had been drawn in Washington at a distance of four thousand miles from the scene. It was their intention therefore to order some thoroughgoing revisions. Larger sums would be allocated to establishing new industries and repairing public structures. The technicians, further, would be ordered to draft plans immediately for the draining of the mudflat in Puerto Pacifico and...."
"Hell," said Burling, "if those monkeys think I came down here to be their water boy...."
"The jerks," said the Little Adjutant.
"If they have any notion that I'm going to jump through hoops every time they crack the whip...."
Anxiously Harmon put down the newspaper. "Look," he asked, "you don't really take this crap seriously?"
Burling turned a jet of scorn upon him that he supposed was meant to obliterate him. "Well, Counselor, what do you think?"
He reminded himself tartly of his conversation with Vicente Hidalgo and what he had learned from it. "That it's mostly an act. They're glad enough to take our million dollars, but there's one thing, you know, that no Latino politician can afford-they don't want it said that they knuckled under to the gringo imperialists. Every now and then they have to yell 'Down with the Colossus!' Hellwe can still build the hospitals."
But Burling was not appeased. "God damn it," he grumbled, "to go and needle me like that in the public prints...."
"Sure," said Harmon, "but you don't save face in private."
Still Burling refused to be appeased. "The bastards...." he rasped. Hands behind his back he began to pace, Napoleon on the bivouacs. The porch quivered and groaned under his footfalls. Ross, off in his own corner, was going through all his letters a second time and mumbling all the while, "Hell, aw hell...." Horanyi, holding off yet another pink-tinted missive at arm's length, yawned expansively and again the sun struck a volley of bright little daggers from his three gold teeth.
"I'll show them...." railed Burling under his breath. "Right here and now!"
This fat, bratty autocrat, thought Harmon. All that was missing was for him to stamp his foot and roll on the floor. There was not much about Burling that impressed him anymore. "Easy, easy," he coaxed. "Calm down." In his hand, all the while, he was holding the letter from Laura-the letter in which she pitied him for being in Alba and urged him to come home.
"Tom," called Burling, wheeling suddenly about. Up bolted the Little Adjutant. "Get a pencil and paper. Never mind-use this." From his pocket Burling took the letter from his wife, turned over the typed sheets to their blank sides and lay them on a magazine for backing. "To the Ministers of Welfare, Public Works and so forth...." he began.
"Right," said the Little Adjutant after a moment.
"The undersigned, as chief of a party of technicians sent to this Republic at the expense of the North American taxpayer...."
"Hell, hell," said Harmon, becoming ever more irritated, "why rub it in?"...." resents the efforts of the esteemed Ministers to make a political football out of the Alba program." Mercer, all the while, raced away with his pencil. "The tactic of criticizing the Mission in the public prints when the Ministers know full well that the budget has always been considered subject to revision...." On the peak of his flight Burling suddenly stalled. "Tom...."
"The tactic of criticizing...."
"... does not strike the undersigned as meeting the standard of ordinary good manners...."
"Jesus," said Harmon, "what Latino can swallow that?"
"...ordinary good manners which the undersigned has a right to expect. Be it noted, gentlemen, that the members of this Mission, all outstanding experts in their fields, have each sacrificed incomes of forty to fifty thousand dollars a year...."
"Ha!" cried Horanyi amid a new shower of gold daggers.
"Christ," said Harmon. "Be yourself."
"...in order to place themselves at the service of the suffering people of Alba. The thought of drafting plans to drain a town which is under water at high tide can only be taken by the undersigned as absurdly humorous. The expansion of dry ground in Puerto Pacifico is a problem of dredging and filling, not of drainage. Our sense of frustration at receiving orders of such a nature must be evident."
He paused at this point-for so long that Tom Mercer looked up and said, "I have it, sir."
As not in many weeks, mirth lifted the corner of Burling's lips.
Here it comes, thought Harmon, another trick.
"Your chief of party, therefore, is left with no alternative," Burling went on, "but to ask for the immediate relief of himself and the entire Mission staff, a request in which my associates join me unanimously."
"Ha!" cried Horanyi zestfully.
Now Harmon's anger exploded. "No!" he shouted. "Hell, no!" In his hand he crumpled up the letter in which Laura pitied him for being in Alba.
"Unanimously," repeated Burling.
Vigorously, determinedly, Harmon shook his head.
"Why not?" asked Burling, Coolly now. Mockingly. With a thin sour smile that was unbearable. "No nerve, Craigboy?"
"Because...." Away into his pocket Harmon stuffed the letter from Laura with its catalogue of all the miseries of life in Alba, with all its cogent arguments for returning home. Because...." But no-his reason was certainly not one that he could tell. It had been hard enough to admit it even to himself.
"Why not?" repeated Burling.
"You"-he would improvise some other reason-"you just can't talk like that to Cabinet Ministers. It's their country." As a rationalization, this had the merit at least of being true.
"Hell," said Burling, "it's my mission."
His mission-that overgrown, tantrum-ridden baby. "Look," begged Harmon, trying yet another tack, "at least talk it over first with the Ambassador. Fly up to Chimboya and see the Ambassador."
"Craigboy," said Burling, "stop wetting your pants. I can call the turns as plain as a square dance. The Ministers get my letter and their liver turns to water. They hightail it over to the Ambassador, who's an American, remember, and can't lose face for our own crowd. 'Gentlemen,' he says, 'I realize that the tone of this communication is somewhat direct, but we must bear in mind that Colonel Burling is a sincere and straight spoken man. My advice is to antagonize him no further." Horanyi chuckled.
"Then," said Burling, "I have them by the short hairs."
"Or else," said Harmon-it was what all along he had been fighting against-"they ship us right home."
"No," said Burling. "They couldn't afford to. They wouldn't dare to. Not on your life."
But the possibility left Harmon profoundly disturbed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After supper, because there was nowhere else to go on a Saturday night, they straggled across the mudflat to one of the cantinas, a flyblown little box with rickety camp chairs and worm-eaten tables. The owner, a thin melancholy man who was also Mayor of the port, wore a mint and cinnamon-striped shirt which must have been made over from a frock. Ai, he sighed, there was not one single drop of hard liquor to offer the gentlemen. The tax on spirits was so high these days, and the quality so rough, that it was not worth serving. He was in a position, however, to recommend the bottled beerriquissima, very rich.
But the beer, when it came to the table, was warm, because there had been no ice shipment from Lorca in three days; also it was thin and flat.
Walt Anderson, turning for diversion in a new direction, went tomcatting behind the bar after the barefoot waitress. She giggled a great deal but, with a constant eye toward the Mayor-proprietor, kept pushing Anderson away. He revenged himself by playing over and over, on a stereo, (barely working), a popular Mexican ditty, "Tu ya no soplas como mujer"-"You're not worth a hoot as a woman." Under the table the others slapped their ankles unceasingly in a running war with the sandfleas. The beer gagged them and they abandoned it, all of them, at the halfway mark down the glass, a cause of curiosity to the two or three mestizos who regarded them from the corners of the room.
Fred Ross, twisting in his chair, groaned, "That amoeba sure has got me."
"See Dr. Solis at Rosales," urged Horanyi. "I did." He rubbed his belly woefully. The Little Adjutant extracted a flea from inside his shirt, crushed it between his nailtips and said, "Try bismuth. Bismuth as usual."
"I don't know," said Ross skeptically.
Ross, the bullyboy, had not flourished in this mangrove swamp, thought Harmon. Every day he filled sheet after sheet with engineering sketches, then crumpled them and threw them away.
"Why the hell," asked Horanyi, "did we let ourselves run out of whisky? Tropics without whisky doesn't exist."
"Two cases coming in from Lorca on Tuesday," said the Little Adjutant.
"Tuesday!" said Horanyi. "I am so far gone I could drink donkey sweat."
"Have another beer," suggested Harmon. "Riquissima."
"Harmon, you put this beer in the same class with donkey sweat?"
Saturday night-and stranded with each other. It reminded him of those off-nights back at college when they would sit around at loose ends in the dormitory, restless and sodden, unable to bring one another to life.
It was the other side, he reflected, of life away from women.
Again Walt Anderson started the phonograph and scrabbled behind the bar after the barefoot waitress. "Judas priest," said Burling, eyeing the operation with a flare of interest, "five weeks a bachelor. I could do with a little nonsense myself."
"You bet," echoed the Little Adjutant, hunting meditatively inside his shirt again.
"When I look back," sighed Horanyi, "to some of the wonderful lays which I have had in my life-and which I did not properly appreciate ..
"To think that there were times even when I have pushed a woman from my bed....
"Cut it out," said Fred Ross.
"What's the matter," asked Horanyi, "are we steaming you up?"
"Cut it out."
Yes, a painful subject, thought Harmonone that down here he had succeeded in putting out of mind. Or had he?
"If you gentlemen haven't heard," declared Burling, "it's an absolute falsehood about Chinese women."
That old chestnut, thought Harmonin-evitable wherever men gathered by themselves.
"Sir," said the Little Adjutant, again crushing a flea, "I'm mighty sorry to hear that."
"I remember once when I was in Alaska ..began Horanyi dreamily.
These vague bawdy nibblings-where would they get anybody? A man, if he had other things on his mind, could do without, couldn't he?
"Cut it out," said Fred Ross. "Mister," said Horanyi, "you have got it bad."
"I left behind the sweetest little wife in the world," said Ross. "I swore to God I'd never take a field job again, and here I am."
"Paraguay...." interjected Burling, bobbing up from some pool of thought. "They had so many wars in Paraguay that they wound up finally with seventeen women to every man. A fellow couldn't go down the road without being jumped."
From behind the bar Walt Anderson turned on them a wild bacchantic leer. "Boss," he asked, "if they throw us out of Alba could we go to Paraguay?"
"That," said Burling, "was a while back."
Now, Harmon noted embarrassedly, they were all facing toward him. Now, as in a minstrel show, it was his turn for a little song and dance. But his lips would not open. Under the circumstances, he thought with a flush of shame, it would be a fraud, an utter hypocrisy. Tensely he sat in the camp chair and sweated, every eye upon him.
Luckily the Little Adjutant elbowed forward. "Once," he said, "I was jumped myself. By two old women. About thirty-five, they must have been."
"Crones," observed Horanyi, "withered hags."
"I was peddling magazines or something from door to door-it was a prize contest for a bicycle or something. I ring this doorbell and it's a mighty hot day, and this woman opens the door and all she's got on is pants. Little old lacy pants. And inside there's another woman, and all she's got on is little old lacy pants, too."
"Frightful," said Burling.
"Sir," said the Little Adjutant, "I regret to report they got me."
"Poor little fella," said Burling.
"Now for the rest of his life," said Horanyi, "he has got a complex. He wants to sleep with women."
"Cut it out," said Ross, "cut it out."
"You know," said Burling, plowing ahead relentlessly, "it'll happen sometimes that you get a thing about a little nobody, the most insignificant little creature in the world, and you could do handstands in front of her and she won't even know you exist. You could be President of the United States of America for all the good it will do you. Then, next minute, without your even trying, without your having the remotest expectation, some marvelous little thing will come along from nowhere and just throw herself at you. I was getting off a train once in Calcutta, and there is this perfect little beauty struggling with a suitcase. Not a porter in sight. I ask might I help her to a cab. Nothing in my mind but common ordinary politeness. Would you believe it-one hour later we were in bed and I was learning some mighty fancy things." He smiled richly at the recollection. "And the wife of one of the best known diplomats in the East. Craigboy, how do you account for a thing like that?"
Again the spotlight. Like every man he had his stories to tell. That woman on the cruise ship-the dancing girl in Havana-and half a dozen others from the days when he had been "all right," marvelously "all right." But now, in the circumstances ... "I'd just be grateful," he said, "and hope for more."
"Women...." sighed Burling. Cigarette in hand, he glanced about for a match. Out came Harmon's lighter. But already three other flints had sparked. Burling took Mercer's as the nearest to him. The others, proudly or apologetically, compared the effectiveness of their own lighters.
"Woman...." echoed Horanyi. With scientific precision he went on to relate some exotica he had discovered in the connubial practices of the Arabs. It appeared that once in Damascus....
"Hell," said Ross, "cut it out."
But on plunged Horanyi with his tale, mercilessly. A Syrian physician, he said, one whom he had come to know very well, had told him that....
Harmon no longer was listening. From afar, insidiously, he had begun to sense a presence that was spectral, a fragrance that was night-like.
On and on droned Horanyi with his epic from Damascus. It seemed to involve the harem of a very wealthy emir.
Her eyes, Harmon remembered, were so unexpectedly gray. She had talked longingly of the times past. She had reached out toward him-had she not?-as to a messenger from the years she loved.
Still Horanyi's story reeled on. It had to do, evidently, with filters and potions....
Her hand, when she had shaken his own, had been so white and silken. He had forgotten almost, in this world of competent women, that such hands still existed. She had striven so hard, he liked to think, for his good opinion. She must have seen him only as whole and strong, the way he wanted to be seen.
"Good show!" roared Burling. The saga of Damascus had come to some thunderous finish. Appreciatively Burling slammed the table with his open hand, then looked about again for a match. Once more the four flints sparked and four flames stood at attention. We're as proud of our lighters, thought Harmon, as our organs. Or instead of them.
With a groan Ross finally stood up. "Hell," he said, "I better get me back near the plumbing."
"Bismuth," urged the Little Adjutant once more.
Again Ross shook his head skeptically and started for the door. Once there, he stopped, on some impulse, and faced about toward Burling. "Boss," he said, "next time I'm in Lorca I'm buying me a gun."
Burling studied him. "What for?"
"Well, I went up the line the other day to inspect the water works in Santa Ana. All the way up in the train"-for an instant Ross hesitated-"all the way up in the train those monkeys kept looking at me and whispering."
"Why wouldn't they? You're a foreigner." Ross shook his head. "Heck," he said, "a man's got a right to protect himself."
Again Burling studied him.
"He's right," interjected Horanyi. "It's the engineers they always go for first."
"Hush," said Burling in a half-whisper.
Ross took this in and swung, instantly, toward Horanyi. "What're you talking about?"
"A matter of simple folkways," said Horanyi, shrugging his shoulders. "The engineer is a man who disturbs the balance of nature. He digs up soil. He moves rocks. He is a profane intruder on the resident spirits of nature. Among primitive peoples the first impulse is to blame all troubles on the engineer."
"And lawyers," added Harmon.
"Harmon, don't be a Philistine! I learned all this in London. Forewarned is forearmed."
"Right," said Burling. "We don't want any repetitions of what happened in Monopaxi."
Another of those sports of men among themselves, thought Harmon. You had only to show the barest hint of weakness and they were at you. But Ross wasn't exactly fair game, especially in his present mood, the worry-riddled ox. "Fellow," he said, "They're kidding you."
But Ross, stubbornly, swung to Burling. "What happened in Monopaxi?" he said. "What was it that happened?"
"Skip it," said Burling. "What's done," said Horanyi, "is done."
"Look," said Harmon, shaking his head, "this guy is a sitting duck."
But Ross was not to be denied his fears. "I want to know," he insisted, coming all the way back to the table. "What happened?"
"American citizens," muttered Burling. "All three of them. But never a word of protest from State Department. Not expedient. Those cookie-pushers."
"Fred," said Harmon, "go home and take care of your amoeba."
"What happened?"
Now Horanyi took over. "You know the oil diggings of Amro Petroleum? A gang of mountain Indians broke into the compound one night. First thing, they went for the engineers. Cut the throats of every last one of them."
"Yes," said Burling, "but before they ever got to that merciful act...."
"The stakes?" prompted Horanyi.
"Boys," said Harmon, "you're a lynch mob."
"Yes," said Burling. "Made every man jack sit down on a pointed stake. Their own weight forced them lower and lower. Never stopped till the stakes came clean through their skulls."
"Out of their mouths," corrected Horanyi.
"Boys," asked Harmon, "why don't you get together? Fred, don't you know when you're being kidded?"
Ross's lips worked uncertainly. "There was an attack on Monopaxi," he said. "Last winter. I was told about it in Lorca."
This was unfortunate. "Maybe," said Harmon, "but nobody was goosed on a pointed stake. And we don't have wild Indians in Alba."
"All right," said Burling, "let's forget it."
For a moment longer Ross looked about and pondered, then broke into chuckles. "I knew they were kidding me," he said, "I knew it all along." Even when he had left the cantina, even when he was halfway down the causeway, they could hear him laughing.
"The only amoeba that guy has," said the Little Adjutant, "is on the brain."
"Well," said Harmon reflectively, "two to one that we've lost an engineer."
"Poker?" suggested the Little Adjutant. "Hell, no," said Horanyi, "not again."
"We could fish from the dock," said Harmon.
"Not in the mood," said Burling.
This profound, sea-deep boredom-now they were touching bottom. But in a way, thought Harmon, he almost took pride in it, in the same way that the sufferers look admiringly, affectionately, on the record hot spells or cold spells that have laid them low....Through the open door of the cantina he saw a man approach the Customs House with a lantern-the night watchman of the port. Around his face was wound a thick muffler, the traditional safeguard against malaria. The watchman pulled on a rope and tolled a ship's bell nine times.
Meanwhile, out behind the cantina, Walt Anderson was haggling with the little barmaid. They were arguing over money, and finally he handed her a fistful of bills.
Grinning broadly, she dropped to her knees before him and began toying with his zipper.
"Just a minute," Walt said, his words slurred just a bit. "Let me check and make sure no one can see us."
He walked up and down the alley and appeared to be satisfied that they were well protected.
"There, honey, now get to work," he said. "And try and earn your money for a change."
As the barmaid continued playing with his zipper, a man walked past down at the end of the alley. He stopped to look closely, then he shrugged his shoulders and moved on.
"Fuck it," Walt hissed. "I don't care if anyone sees us no how. I won't be the first one to get his rocks off in the streets of this lousy town, anyway."
While Walt took another healthy sip of his beer, the barmaid managed to yank his zipper down and extract his big cock. Despite the fact that he had had a few too many drinks, Walt managed nonetheless to sport a thick hard-on.
"Es muy grande," the woman announced, stroking his throbbing meat reverently.
"Yeah, nice and big. And good enough to eat, baby. So get to it. I need my pleasure now!"
Walt began hunching his hips back and forth, stabbing his cock at her mouth. She laughed at first, but when Walt's thrusts became more insistent, she tried to back away.
"Oh, no you don't!" he yelled. "I paid big bucks for some of that hot little mouth of yours. Now get on that thing and suck it, baby. Pronto!"
The barmaid scooted up closer to Walt's crotch, now that he had stopped jabbing at her face. Then she looked up at him with a pleading look in her eyes, begging him silently not to hurt her.
Walt understood, and it wasn't long before he was moaning out his pleasure.
"Yeah, ohhhh, that's good, baby," he cried. "You really know how to give a man a blowjob, that's for sure."
Reaching around to grip Walt's clenching asscheeks, the little barmaid hung on for dear life as he face-fucked her. Each time he thrust into her throat, her head would slam back. And since her lips were fastened so tightly to his spit-slick cockshaft, her head was then carried forward as Walt pulled back.
Faster and faster he pumped, finally gripping the woman's head with one hand to keep her in place. As he came, he shouted out and tossed his beer bottle onto the ground where it shattered.
Back inside the cantina, Harmon and the rest finished up their beers.
"Lord," groaned Horanyi, "if it were at least time for a man to go to bed...."
"Alone?" asked the Little Adjutant.
"By Jesus, even alone."
It was just then that Walt Anderson returned. He smote the bar with the flat of his hand and gave out a war cry.
"What's up?" asked Burling, all attention. "Did your barefoot girl say yes?"
"The hell with her," said Anderson, "the hell with that Queen of the Incas. I just found out they're having a verbena tonight at Rosales. A dance in the public gardens."
"What," asked Horanyi, "is there to drink?"
"Brandy, she says. Five bucks a liter. It comes from over the border."
"Rosales for me," said Horanyi.
"Also," said Anderson, "there ought to be plenty of this and that." He wrapped his jacket tight about him and strutted. "Burling?"
"Not me."
"God Almighty," said Anderson, "after all that talk!"
"Not in the mood."
"Those clapped-up monkeys!" chimed in the Little Adjutant. "Harmon?"
Anything, he thought, anything to break out of this cage. "I'll get the car," he said. The truth, it then struck him, was that at Rosales he might catch a glimpse again of that girl with the gray eyes.
CHAPTER NINE
The night, and the lanterns glowing in the palm trees, had made soft and elegant-a court of Moorish kings-what he knew to be withered and drab by daylight. The sky sheen over Alba was continuous, like that of a length of satin; in spaces that until now he had thought deserts among the constellations burned new hosts of stars. The night could almost be tasted on the tongue, as a bland and succulent melon.
Not one but two dances were going on in the public gardens, by rotation. In the center bandstand sat a quintet of youths in blue silk slack-suits who played-from scores-American jazz, Spanish two-steps and Cuban rumbas. As the inscription on their bass drum indicated, they had been imported from Lorca for the occasion. But off in a corner, hunched on stools, sat a group of criollos, native Albanese, who played from memory upon guitars, tabors and panpipes. Their songs were all in a minor key, fandangos and Indian lamentations.
As there were two bands, so were there two publics. Around the center bandstand sat the gente decente, the respectable folk. The men all wore jackets. Their women had flowered out in summer prints, New York style, and high-heeled shoes. Among these the Indian blood was faintly dilute. But on the margin of the park, among the rotos, the down and outers, the skin was darker, the features broader, the eyes more slanted-in the mold of those brother Polynesians across the Pacific. Men and women a-like wore fiber sandals or no foot covering at all. They danced at arm's length from each other, somberly and ritualistically.
"Senor Asociado! Caballeros!"
It was as they stood on the border of the two worlds, between gente decente and the rotos, uncertain which way to cast their lot, that they heard themselves called. A sparkling white-clad man, of a size no larger than a boy, was beckoning from a table near the bandstand-Dr. Solis, the resident surgeon of the Rosales hospital. "Do us the honor of joining us!" he cried.
"Well-for a minute," whispered Anderson, gazing all the while in the direction of the rotos. "Hey, man, take a peep at that daughter of the Sun God! Some knockers...."
Seated with Dr. Solis was another young man, squat and broad-shouldered, through whose open collar peeped up curls of chest hair. Dr. Larrea, the resident from Santa Ana. "Senor Asociado," he sighed, desperately but affably, "what a month it's been. Four new cases of typhus. A new onset of tertian malaria. This is my first night off in weeks." He spat on the ground. "Anyhow, who can call it a hospital?"
"At Rosales," broke in Dr. Solis, "I order sterile sheets for the surgical table. Then they lay out the patient in her own filthy rags."
"Last week," added Dr. Larrea, "the Sisters refused to sanction an ovariotomy. The patient is whole, Senor Asociado, but dead."
Not once did they take their eyes from Harmon. They were pleading with him as with a father in whose means lies all bounty. "I know," he said, "I know. Our medical officer will be arriving from the States any day now. One of the best."
"Somebody with authority," begged Dr. Larrea. "Somebody who will remind us what medicine is supposed to be. Every day I am being pushed further and further back to the medicine of panther blood and lizard dust. We need some standards."
Yes, Vicente Hidalgo had said something like that. But he had spoken with despair. He had predicted so pessimistically that....
"My throat!" cried Horanyi, breaking in on his reflections. "The sands of the Sahara!"
Dr. Solis stood up and snapped his fingers smartly. "Waiter!" he called. From out of the dark materialized a tattered old gnome whose clothes were patches on patches. But all that he had to offer was soda pop, orange-flavored.
"Five times?" asked Dr. Solis lavishly.
The high life-thought Harmon. But promptly Anderson took command. He whispered something to the tattered gnome and passed him several bills.
With the orange pop, the waiter brought back two other bottles, wrapped in a newspaper, which he begged the caballeros to keep out of sight under the table.
"Patriots," muttered Horanyi, refilling his glass for the fourth time. "By day they curse the Invader. By night they smuggle his booze over the border." On each of Horanyi's cheeks burned a patch of crimson.
"Senor?" asked Dr. Solis, looking up smartly. It was evident that he had a smattering of English.
"A philosophic reflection," said Harmon, nudging Horanyi with his elbow.
"I'm an American," mumbled Horanyi, paying no heed, "free, white and American."
"There must be dozens," said Anderson, his eyes still on the rove, "dozens and dozens.
Now the young men in the silk slacks unleashed a rumba; in the storm of their music all conversation ceased. Melinda Manriquez, thought Harmon, looking everywhere about. A swarm of little dancers frothed up to the very edge of the table. "Man, oh, man," said Anderson, his glance running greedily over the sinuous hips and tossing breasts. But so far he had made no practical moves toward any of the ladies of the gente decente.
From the direction of the park gate, all the while, a large party moved hesitantly up the aisle, led by a man with a shapely gilded head. Marcos Montalvo.
"Senor Gobernador!" cried Dr. Solis, again springing up. "Do us the honor!"
Melinda Manriquez? No, she was not among them.
The table was not large enough to accommodate all the newcomers. There was a melee of plans and hesitations. Finally a second long table was drawn up and the Governor introduced his retinue, provincial officals and their wives, men of solid physical substancealmost the first that Harmon had seen here in Alba-and ladies whose coiffures were towers of black curls held together with many combs. "Engineer and Senora Gomez," said the Governor by way of introduction. "Welfare Superintendent and Senora Molina. Railroad Director and Senora Egas." For Harmon the Governor had a warm smile. "The Associate Director." Horanyi, embarrassingly, had failed to rise. With a pull, Harmon got him to his feet. "And Economist Horanyi." In the flurry, Agriculturist Anderson had murmured an excuse and made off.
Now the silken boys began a waltz and the ladies were taken off to dance. In the soft jeweled light of the lanterns Harmon and the Governor sat alone, save for Horanyi.
"Well," said Montalvo with a melancholy smile, "you were the victims of a little ambush the other day, weren't you?"
"The statement of the Ministers?"
"I hope none of you has a skin which punctures easily. My father in his day was denounced as the Anti-Christ from half the pulpits in the Republic. It was stated that he had stolen all the gold of the Treasury and shipped it to Paris. It was declared even that he had met my mother in a house of illfame."
Horanyi, reaching under the table, poured himself a fresh drink. "I'm American," he mumbled defiantly, "American."
The Governor darted a quizzical glance at Horanyi and bottle both. "I had made him out," he said, "as Hungarian."
"Hungarian born," said Harmon. And Horanyi carried it, he reflected, like some secret shame.
It was an instant later that he heard himself called by a familiar voice, one that was deep and regal. "Good evening, my dear young Colossus." From behind the Governor a large disheveled form was weaving toward the table.
"Good evening, Senor Hidalgo," said Harmon, rising. Swiftly the Governor glanced about, "Tu
...." he said, "you...." using the familiar form of address, but distantly.
Ironically, patronizingly, Hidalgo returned the Governor's gaze, "Yes, I."
"Well, do me the favor, Vicente, of going away."
"Senor Governador," was the instant rejoinder, and again it was with a lilt which turned the title into something ponderously absurd, laughable, "I was not talking to you."
"Tu-drunk again."
"He's a pretty fellow," said Hidalgo, "but such bad manners...."
The Governor bolted up. Rigidly, an arm's length apart, they stood then and faced each other. Between them boiled the hatred of two men who cannot endure the fact that the other exists. But it was a hatred, thought Harmon, that was profoundly intimate, between brothers.
"Stop it, stop it," whispered the Governor with desperate quiet, "or I shall turn you over to the Carabineros."
"Yes," said Hidalgo, "as a child, too, you used to threaten everybody with the Carabineros."
The Governor glanced about in every direction, but in vain. "Tu-tu," he repeated, "you walking corpse."
There was a flash again of that white, bitter grin. "Your Excellency," said Hidalgo, "I was hoping to have a word with Senor Harmon, but if you insist on making it impossible...."
Instantly the Governor sat down and folded his arms. For a moment Harmon stood halfbent over the table, caught in the cross-fire of their hatred, glancing from one man to the other. Casting his lot perforce with Montalvo, he slowly sat down, but kept smiling all the while in the direction of Hidalgo. "At some more opportune time," he apologized.
"Is he gone yet?" asked Montalvo, looking stonily away all the while. "Is he gone?"
"A brat," said Hidalgo cheerfully.
"Listen," said Montalvo, but with his face still averted, "I have not come to Alba to start the same wrangle all over again. If you insist on making trouble...."
"No, Marcos," said Hidalgo, "there will be no trouble. I am no longer that important." Then he nodded pleasantly to Harmon and said, "My apologies. It was gross of us to turn you into an innocent bystander."
"Is he gone yet?" repeated Montalvo. "Is he gone?"
Slowly, cautiously, Hidalgo wheeled him self about. Back, without another word, he went in the direction whence he had come, the corner of the rotos.
"Once," said Montalvo, instantly all smooth and airy again, "that man had great possibilities. For himself. For the Republic. He drowned them in a sea of alcohol. Hidalgo was one of my father's few failures."
That sad satanic giant. What had those "possibilities" been? And why had he drowned them?"
"A tragic case," said the Governor, and with that he ended the epitaph.
The music had stopped, and down upon the table descended the returning dancers. But now in their midst they enfolded a newcomer, a broad-shouldered man in a white linen suit who towered over all their heads.
"Ramon," called the Governor.
Following behind the young seigneur, hard-pressed in the swarming horde, was Melinda Manriquez.
The young seigneur marched nearer, and it was as though all who surrounded him were his liegemen and servitors, pressing in upon him for a touch of his person. But he walked among them with a melancholy aloofness, unnoticing of their homage.
Melinda ... But a shift in the throng had suddenly blocked her out. How, wondered Harmon, was she dressed tonight?
Manriquez reached the table. His hair was black and curling, his side locks grew half down his cheeks in the old Spanish fashion, but he looked powerful and commanding. What kind of woman, in the presence of this husband, was Melinda Manriquez?
All at once Harmon was being introduced to them, the black-haired handsome couple. He hoped that she would smile, show gladness to see him again.
"Tanto gusto," she said, acknowledging the introduction-but reservedly, with distant formality. A gown of sea-green chiffon she wore, that flowed with pale luminescence from shoulder to ankle. But why had she addressed him so formally, and in Spanish?
"Para mi tambien, Senora," he replied, falling in with her own reserve. But why, why had she failed to recognize him?
Now his hand was meeting that of the husband. He gave the appearance, Manriquez, of being dangerous. Probably he had once "killed a man," or several. But his hand took Harmon's limply, with that same pensive apathy with which he had walked among his adorers.
"Tanto gusto, Senor Harmon."
"Para mi tambien, Senor Manriquez."
He was moved by some primitive, involuntary design to measure himself against the height of Melinda Manriquez' husband. Identical.
"Greaseballs-niggers," mumbled Horanyi. He was weaving oafishly in his chair.
Worse and worse, thought Harmon. Wildly, helplessly, driven by the pain of some wound, Horanyi had found for himself an unguentand was wallowing in it....Cautiously Harmon reached under the table with his toe and tipped over the one remaining bottle.
At his left a short stout lady whose husband was the provincial director of railroads fired a cheerful volley of table talk at him. Indeed, he replied, the climate of Alba had turned out far cooler and pleasanter than he had expected. Oh, yes, he had been informed already that it had to do with the Humboldt Current, that mysteriously chill wave which ran through the Pacific off the coasts of the Republic....
Melinda Manriquez-only once, through the long thicket of heads at the table, had he succeeded in catching her eye, but again she had stared back unknowingly. Had he offended her in some way? At their first meeting she had appeared so friendly, she had leaned forward to him. Was there something he said? Or-or had she chosen to engage here in a kind of conspiracy? Indeed, he agreed with the Senora of the Railroads, the fruits of the province were matchlessriquissima. ... Once again he tried to throw a glance at Melinda Manriquez which should strike her like a tangible object and rouse her to notice him.
Instead, his eyes met those of her husband.
Ambushed.
If Manriquez wanted to make an issue of this. ... But no, there was something in those deep-set, contemplative eyes that was utterly unreachable. They looked out with the same mournful apathy with which the Spanish captains of old must have regarded their domains, never assuaged, ever self-driven, planning always on some newer conquest. He was the richest man in Alba, Manriquez, but it must be that this was not enough. It was the way they were made those somber captains.
"Senor Harmon...."
"Senor Manriquez?"
"Is it correct"-and Manriquez' tone was unexpectedly casual, ordinary-"that the Mission intends to acquire a tract of land?"
"Quite so. One of our first projects is a demonstration farm."
"I know just the site for you."
"Yes?"
"A tract from my own hacienda." From his own lands. Harmon's ears pricked up.
"Good soil. Plenty of water. And easy access."
Access, thought Harmon with a flare of excitement, easy access.
"How many acres do you think the Mission will want?"
Under the cover of reflection, Harmon stole a glance at Melinda Manriquez. Pale she sat, and withdrawn, her eyelids lowered. "How many? Three or four hundred, I should imagine."
"Take them," said Manriquez, "as a gift."
"Oh, no," said Harmon, "you're much too generous." But even in this lavishness there was no warmth, only apathy. And some deep design as well? "The Mission certainly is in a position to pay."
"As a gift. I insist."
Access, thought Harmon again, access. He was straining himself, the grand seigneur, to open his own gates. "Thank you, Senor Manriquez," he said. "In behalf of the Mission, thank you."
Suddenly across the still face of Melinda Manriquez, across the slanted cheekbones, went the faintest shadow of a smile. It was startling how wanton she looked.
"Niggers!" cried Horanyi in a new and more ferocious outburst. "Why are we sitting here with this bunch of niggers?"
"Que dice-what's he saying?" asked the Senora of the Railroads.
Under the table Harmon clutched Horanyi by the forearm. "Mister," he muttered, "we're not the only ones in Alba who understand English."
For an answer Horanyi bolted up and began to run.
"What's happening?" asked the Senora of the Railroads.
"Ai," said Dr. Solis indulgently, making a cup of his fist and tilting it toward his mouth.
"The Economista," said Harmon, rising, "has not been well."
At the park gate he caught up. "Horanyi," he said, "nobody has to get that drunk."
"Go screw. It's not in my goddam contract that I have to put my feet under the table with greasers."
For a moment Harmon studied him. "What the hell happened?" he asked finally. "Did you teach in one of those tank-town colleges? Were they always calling you a Hunky behind your back? Or did a girl do it to you?"
"I'm not a Hunky, God damn it! I'm an American! I'm a goddamn American!"
"It's a cinch," said Harmon. "Take my word for it."
Horanyi clawed at his hand. "Let me go!"
"Where to?"
"Back to the port."
"I can't drive you just yet."
"I have my own two goddamn legs."
The high-backed road led straight to the port. The jungle veteran would have no trouble finding his way. Harmon released his grip and Horanyi started running.
"Hey, Craigboy!"
At his elbow suddenly, bending over conspiratorially, was Walt Anderson. He smelled strongly of brandy.
"Walt, where have you been all night?" Craig asked, turning to face him.
"Prospecting. What's happened with Horanyi?"
"Gone home."
"Well...." he said in a miscalculatedly loud whisper, "pick yourself right up and follow me out of here."
"Where to?"
"Man ... man, I've been burning down a field for plowing. Two of 'em." He motioned with his thumb to the faraway corner of the rotos, whence was issuing now the lamenting music of the beggars' orchestra. "I got two babies over there just crying to be freshened!"
Craig hesitated.
"Come on," urged Anderson.
"Sosena ... Maruja," called Anderson as they reached the corner of the rotos. They turned simultaneously in their chairs, tawny girls, both of them, with large gentle features and flashing white teeth. In their orange calico frocks they were like Polynesian women, soft and languid and sunny.
"El Asociado," said Anderson, by way of introducing Harmon. Impressedly the girls gazed up. But then, pointedly, Anderson ran his fingers through the straight black hair of the one called Maruja. By agreement then, the one called Sosena leaned toward Harmon and smiled. "Let's go," Anderson said.
They drove off with Harmon at the wheel and Sosena pressed against his side.
Arriving at Sosena's modest apartment some time later, after weaving drunkenly over half the city, they fell to drinking heavily immediately. Anderson sat on a large couch with his woman, while Harmon sat in an overstuffed chair with Sosena at his feet.
"Well, this is what I call living, eh, Harmon?" Anderson called out as Maruja unzipped-his trousers. "Take a look at this little beauty, would you? Have you ever seen a finer pair of tits anywhere?"
The woman giggled as Anderson massaged her breasts, but she didn't back away. She reached into Anderson's pants and pulled out his stiff cock.
"Now that's the idea," he said. "Bright little woman she is, too. Very ... bright ... indeed...."
Anderson took her in his arms and began kissing her sloppily on the lips. While their lips locked, she slowly caressed his pulsating penis.
Craig finished off his drink and then wiped off his face. Sosena looked up at him and smiled tenderly.
"Another?" she asked, in heavily accented English.
"Yes, please," Craig said, feeling somewhat uncomfortable at the blatantness of what was going on just a few feet from him.
While Sosena busied herself in the kitchen, Craig watched Anderson and his woman roll around on the couch. Walt had two fistfuls of tit and his mouth was sucking greedily on her tongue. While he mauled her the woman continued to tug on his cock, at the same time pulling down his trousers and underpants.
For some reason, Craig found himself not worrying about his performance. He didn't know what it was, and he wasn't going to try and figure it out. He was just going to enjoy the sensation for as long as it lasted.
When Sosena returned, Craig took her in his arms and kissed her deeply. She responded immediately by holding him close, promising him untold pleasures with her eager young body.
Craig felt natural, and that felt good. He was totally at ease with Sosena and he was determined to enjoy her to the limit. He didn't know if it was because he had drunk too much, or what. But he was finding it extraordinarily easy to become excited and aroused.
It had been so long since he'd had a hard-on, that he couldn't believe it was actually happening. And so effortlessly, too! But sure enough, his cock was filling with blood, growing hard and thick while Sosena French-kissed him.
She rubbed his crotch, becoming aroused by the distinct shape of his growing stiffness. She leaned back and looked into his eyes. A quizzical look flashed across her face for a moment.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, touching Craig's cheek.
"No, nothing at all," Craig replied, smiling, then chuckling, as if at a private joke. "In fact, everything is right. Everything!"
Still smiling, Craig pulled her close and kissed her again. He ran his arms and hands up and down her back, and luxuriated in the flower-like scent of her fresh hair, the feel of her soft skin, the warmth of her supple body.
"Now," she murmured, tugging at Craig's shirt. "Please, let's go into my room now."
While Anderson and the woman cavorted naked on the couch, her legs spread and Anderson ready to mount her, cock erect, Craig and Sosena walked quietly into her room.
"That's the way to go!" Walt called out, his hand now lodged firmly in his woman's crotch. "Show her how it's done, old buddy. Yahoo!"
Craig smiled, thinking Walt would get a real kick if he knew about his problem. But as he watched Sosena undress in her room, he hoped that it would soon be his former problem.
He stood off to one side and watched the woman strip. She enjoyed taking off her clothes for him, and did so slowly, teasingly. She stood before him in just her bra and panties, gazing hungrily at his crotch.
His hard cock pressed against the front of his pants as she removed her bra, reaching behind herself to unclasp it and letting the article of clothing fall soundlessly to the floor in front of her. She lifted up her tits and ran her tongue suggestively across her lips, making them glisten.
Her hand traveled down her body, up over her tits, making the nipples hard and pointed. Craig felt desire flow through his veins like hot mercury. He started to unbutton his shirt.
She hooked her thumb and forefinger under the elastic waistband of her panties and slowly pulled them down, gradually revealing a thick thatch of black pubic hair, the ends of them dotted with her alluring moistness.
She swayed to and fro, bending over slightly until the last piece of clothing was around her ankles. She stepped out of the panties and walked toward Craig. He took off his shirt and she ran her hands over his chest and shoulders.
"I want you to fuck me," she whispered thickly in his ear, nuzzling on his lobe with her teeth.
He cupped her slender asscheeks with both hands and she rubbed her naked crotch against his, getting the front of his pants wet with her juices.
Just as suddenly as she was in his arms she pulled away and slipped quietly under the sheets before Craig could see or touch any more of her naked body.
Craig then shucked off his clothes eagerly, feeling no doubts whatsoever as to his ability. His manhood would not be compromised this time! Kicking off his trousers, he looked down to see that his cock was pressing hard and stiff against his briefs, throbbing like crazy between his legs.
He pulled down his underpants and his cock sprang into view.
"Oh, my, you have a good one," Sosena said with a satisfied grin. "Please hurry up and get into bed, baby. Hurry for me. Just for me!"
Craig did as she asked without thinking, easing himself down into the bed next to her. They kissed slowly at first, her tongue sweeping searchingly over his teeth and gums. Then their caresses became more frantic, more intense. They French-kissed passionately.
Rubbing her nipples until they became thoroughly hard, Craig then leaned over to lick her succulent titflesh.
"So good," she moaned, eyes rolling upward in their sockets. She sighed deeply as he moved all around her breasts, and then she pushed him downward.
"Please," she panted, "kiss me ... down ... there ... please ... now ... I can't wait ... any longer...."
Craig squirmed down along her voluptuous body until he was staring at her thick pubic bush. He ran his fingers through her curly hairs, sticky with her cunt juice. Then he buried his face in her cunt, his nostrils filling with her aromatic fragrance.
He stuck out his tongue and drove it between her moist cunt lips, thrilling her as he nibbled at her pussy.
He couldn't remember tasting anything so delicious!
He made slurping noises as he feasted on her love dew, his fleshy tongue utilized like a shovel to scoop out as much juice as her cunt could produce.
She ran her fingers through his hair, forcing his head down so that his face was buried in her bushy slit.
"Ohhhh!" she wailed. "So good! So good!"
He licked away at every square inch of her pussy, traveling deep over her cuntal walls, slick with her secretions. His Adam's apple bobbed furiously up and down as he swallowed her sauce.
His hands slid down under her buttocks, hoisting her up slightly so his tongue and lips and teeth could have a better angle from which to play with her oozing vagina.
"God!" she squealed, her voice unusually high. "I never felt this good before!"
And Craig believed her. He knew he was making all the right moves because her cuntal passage was starting to convulse, a sure indication she was about to cum.
And that would mean even more juice for him to taste!
He concentrated on giving her swollen clitoris as much sexual stimulation as possible. He wrapped his tongue around the tear-shaped nubbin, the surface of his tongue feeling both scratchy and soft as velvet.
"Good! So fucking good!" she cried.
Yes, so good, Craig thought, so fucking good indeed!
She was probing his scrotum, feeling the two balls, separating them with her fingers. Pleasure grew like some sort of animal inside her loins. It pressed against her cuntal walls and forced them apart.
Her clit button was swollen to over twice its normal size as he tweaked it with his teeth, nuzzling it gently and driving the woman up the walls.
"Ohhh, Jesus, yes, yes, just there ... do that again! Never stop! Yes, ohhh yes!"
He sucked on her clitoris, like a nipple, and Sosena thought she would hit the ceiling. The pleasure thrills were unbelievably intense, and they hadn't even fucked yet! She couldn't wait to feel his large cock deep inside her pussy.
"Fuck me now," she cried breathlessly. "I'm ready for it now. Now!"
She climaxed, her entire body shuddering in delight. Craig felt a deep glow of satisfaction spread through him.
Craig's passion had reached a new peak, and he was impatient to begin fucking her. So Craig raised up and knelt before her legs, spreading apart her pussy flaps with thumb and forefinger.
Then he gripped the solid shaft of his penis and prepared to enter her.
"Let me!" she called out, pushing his hand away and replacing it with her own. She gripped his man-root tightly, aiming it for her open slit.
He held his breath as she eased herself down on top of him, his cock going into her all the way to the root, until only his balls remained outside the tight confines of her juicy pussy.
"Christ!" he gasped as he felt her cuntal muscles and membranes caress his cock like myriad tiny wet fingers.
He thought he would cum right then and there!
He wrapped his hands around her hips, steadying himself as she rose and fell. He drove his cock up into her steadily, maintaining an intense pistoning motion.
"It's so big inside me!" she cried, pleasure lighting up her eyes until they seemed to glow. "I can feel the tip of your penis inside my belly!"
Craig felt an unmistakable pleasure sensation build in his loins. It was the first signal of his impending orgasm. When his balls began to itch, bubbling with their load of jism, he knew that in moments it would happen....
He held on to Sosena for dear life, waiting for the rush of his climax, waiting for his body to be overcome by the incredibly keen thrills of pleasure that accompanied an orgasm.
Sosena whimpered like a frightened child as he plowed into the inner recesses of her cunt, sending the tip of his cock to places where a man's penis hadn't been before. And the woman was loving every minute of it.
"Fuck me harder!" she wailed, her body twisting to and fro, his cock driving like a corkscrew up her pussy channel.
Her tits swayed to and fro like pendulums and he reached up to grab one with each hand. She leaned over and he slipped one nipple between his lips to suck on like candy.
"Ohhh, you're driving me crazy! Ohhh, my God, it should always be this good!"
She came, her body jerking spasmodically. Her fuck passage filled with juice, more than enough to lubricate his thrusting movements. She was so slippery, in fact, he had trouble staying all the way inside her.
For one ecstatic moment, he felt a tremendous rush of sensations rack his body. In a series of frantic spasms, he unloaded his cum inside Sosena while her lower body continued to move up and down like a jack-in-the-box.
Her cunt chamber milked every drop of jism from his balls. Semen oozed out of the corner of her slit and dripped off his balls as it crawled down his blood-gorged cockshaft.
He experienced more pleasure than he thought possible to obtain all at one time.
And when he managed to catch his breath, Craig knew that he was a man again.
CHAPTER TEN
He lay on his side under the mosquito netting, his legs drawn up, his forearms crossed in a fetal embrace of himself. The world outside was but a dim effulgence, of no consequence. Here inside the white cocoon was a republic of harmony. Nothing was asked of him but that he breathe. He had no exact notion of what part of the world he lay in.
The cot on the right was empty. He recalled then how he had driven back alone from Rosales in the blue light before dawn, how Anderson, fierce and insatiable, had refused to be torn away.
"Que hombre mas valioso-what a man," the girl had said.
Sosena-he thought next. That docile girl with her harem arts, an instrument for him, accommodating every whim, serving him every instant, not taking him ... I was "all right," he cried to himself joyfully. Marvelously all right! No fiascos! A four-star performance!
It was precious, this thought, something to tuck away under his pillow like a child's treasure until he was ready later to pick it up and fondle it.
He felt his cock becoming hard just thinking about it. The wet, velvety feel of Sosena's cunt. How her cuntal muscles had tugged on his cock, drawing out all the semen stored in his balls.
Craig reached down and cupped his testicles, just as Sosena had. He recalled the subtle touch of her fingers, how they had played over his cockflesh until he knew the impossible was indeed possible.
He closed his eyes and ran his fingertips up and down the underside of his penis. He was achingly hard now. He thought of her tits, the taste of her nipples, the way the rosy red knobs became pointed, like eraser tips, in his mouth.
He started to fist his hard-on.
Still that feeling of guilt crept into his thoughts. He could get it up with a sensual woman like Sosena, but couldn't do shit with his own wife. His Laura was a beautiful woman, her body was equally as desirable, yet things couldn't connect anymore.
Maybe we're destined to be apart forever, he thought dismally.
His fist moved slowly up over his stiff cock and he could feel his meat pulsating, the little spark that had been missing for so long now slowly being rekindled.
"Sosena," he whispered, picturing with his mind's eye her voluptuous body.
It was hot, suddenly very hot. His body was drenched with sweat. He shifted on the sheets, feeling the unmistakable power in his loins, a pressure that was steadily building inside his cockshaft.
He tugged down on his prick and moaned, remembering the first time he had jerked off. He had just turned thirteen and had a crush on a skinny tomboyish girl in his class. He couldn't even remember her name now. But he did recall how one night he went to bed thinking about her, in his innocence imagining what she looked like naked mentally undressing her until he could no longer ignore the strange sensations in his loins.
He began stroking his penis, unconsciously at first, until he knew something was about to happen-something he had never experienced before. God, how innocent he had been then, not like now!
The pleasure sensation had been unbelievably keen. So intense he had jerked off four times afterward, in quick succession. After that there was hardly a night once the lights were turned out that he didn't fondle himself. All that spilt seed! Enough to fill an ocean, he thought, chuckling in the darkness.
Then the dark-skinned woman filled his thought again.
"Sosena...." he murmured again, the word embodying all Craig found erotic and stimulating.
He humped into the hollow of his fist, pulling down on his foreskin, exposing his glans to the darkness, a pearly drop of pre-cum emerging and wetting his palm, making it sticky.
His fist made a slapping noise as it moved more quickly over his tumescence. The noise sounded unusually loud, second only to the pounding of his heart and the rushing of blood in his ears.
He half-opened his eyes and could visualize Sosena standing at the foot of the bed, starting to undress for him, her hips swaying softly, suggestively.
"I'm ready for you," he whispered, his fist continuing its up-and-down movement over his hard, blood-gorged cockshaft.
She stood before him completely naked, her hands wandering over her tits, then down her belly to her pubic triangle. She spread her legs slightly and threw her head back. Two fingers disappeared inside her snatch and emerged glistening with her juices. She ran the wet digits along the inside of her thighs, at the same time running her tongue over her lips.
"I want you," he gasped. "We'll do it again. Just like before. I'll be just as good for you. Even better!"
He writhed on the bed, his free hand fondling his own nuts as he pumped away.
"Come closer. I want to fuck you. I can do it again, I swear I can!"
His cock felt as big as a house, swollen beyond belief.
The woman stretched out on the bed beside him, their bodies barely touching. His asscheeks dug into the mattress, making a distinct hollow.
She reached out and let her fingers trail lightly up and down his right thigh. Her fingers then combed through his pubic hairs, moist with sweat. A drop of watery pre-cum suddenly emerged from his gaping piss slit, bigger than the first. There were more to follow.
She pressed her cheek against his chest and his heart skipped a beat.
"I want to fuck you. I want to feel my cock, so hard and thick, driving away inside your delicious little pussy. It was so tight ... so hot and wet and tight!"
He slowed down the tempo of his fist-fucking, wanting not to cum too quickly. He was totally wrapped up in his own erotic fantasy. It really was as if the dark-haired beauty was lying right beside him, caressing him tenderly.
That's how it had once been with Laura, he thought, and for a dreaded moment he thought his cock was going to go limp. But it remained rock hard, a grim reminder all wasn't lost, but that all wasn't right, either.
He felt her nipples, pointed and rubbery, pressing against his shoulder as she turned to lie on her side, facing him. He could feel her hot, excited breath against his cheek, fanning his flesh and making him moan with desire.
"Fuck me ... do it now," he whispered hoarsely.
Her hand, flat against his flesh, fanned up and down his belly. His chest muscles contracted. He pumped his cock a little faster, more drops of pre-cum rolling down his shaft, making his palm sticky. His fist made a squishing noise as it moved continuously up and down his prick.
Their lips touched and her hand disappeared down the inside of one thigh to squeeze his balls.
She hooked one thigh over his, her bush rubbing against him, smearing his skin with her delicious wetness. She whispered something seductive in his ear and he smiled, legs twitching spasmodically.
"Come on, baby," he intoned, his voice strained with emotion. "Mount me. You on top this time. Just like before." How many times had we fucked before then? And how many more times afterward? It was all a blur in Craig's mind.
Her voice was soft and low. He couldn't make out what she was saying to him, but it didn't matter. She drilled the tip of her fleshy tongue into his ear. They French-kissed, Craig's lips pursed as if actually making love to her.
She forced his hand from his cock and replaced it with her own. Her fingers knew exactly what to do. She knew intimately every square inch of his hard penis, and could bring about the most pleasure possible.
With her free hand she lifted up his cum-filled balls and lowered her head, her tongue massaging the hairy globes.
Craig jerked off faster, head thrown back, moaning like an animal in heat.
She let go of his nuts, now shiny with her hot, bubbly saliva. She quickly straddled his lower body, reaching down to take hold of Craig's stiff dong and aim it directly underneath her eagerly awaiting snatch. Pussy juice dripped onto the tip of his fuck pole as if from a leaky faucet. The inside of her thighs were slick with her abundant juices.
"Fuck me," he groaned, body writhing in ecstasy.
She slowly lowered herself down, spearing herself with his lusty cock. Craig's back arched as he felt himself entering her silky depths.
"Ohhh, Jesus!" he cried, asscheeks clenched as they hovered briefly over the mattress. He ejaculated, cum flying in thick globs up into the air. Pleasure radiated through his loins and it felt as if his cock was melting like warm butter in his hand.
Afterward, his cock grew quickly limp between his fingers, but it didn't matter. Craig had had enough. He fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, cum splattered on his belly and thighs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Long before the little side-wheeler was to take off for Lorca, on the night tide, its promenade deck was covered over with the recumbent bodies of the third-class passengers. They had come aboard, the rotos, carrying hens and geese and suckling pigs in little crates or baskets, and fallen down instantly wherever a space offered itself, as if murdered by some violent plague which hovered at the juncture of gangplank and deck. The food hawkers on the dock kept shouting, the rusty winches kept shrieking, and late arrivals came treading again and again from the gangplank, but nothing stirred the carpet of exhausted bodies. They lay in their various mannerisms of sleep: some huddled into balls, some straight and stiff, as if composed in coffins, some hugging the deck floor with hands and ears as if eavesdropping on a conversation below.
What a weariness, thought Harmon, as he and Burling picked their way gingerly across the human mosaic to the ladder that led up to A-deck, an existence that was self-defeating. Between dawn and dusk they lay in suspended animation, gathering strength enough in the dark to start the same round all over again by daylight. It was from the labor of thousands such as these, the human work machines, that Manriquez was a rich man. No wonder that Melinda had felt so stricken, no wonder that she had talked so penitently of the cruelty of life in these countries....
But that was all in the past now. Harmon was going home. He had only one regret, that he hadn't gotten to know Melinda better. But he took comfort in the knowledge that it was because of her that he was going home. Somehow, that seemed to him to be enough. He was going home now, strong and whole, a new man for all intents and purposes. Yes, and he had Melinda to thank for it, he grinned.
While gazing out across the river that was going to take them home, Craig thought about the events of the past few days. When he and Burling had gone to see the Ambassador, they received the news that the mission was being sent home. Burling had argued vehemently, but the Ambassador held his letter aloft, practically dragging the coarse paper across Burling's nose.
"But we haven't even started here," Burling had said, his face turning red as he prepared to argue. "We've got more than a year's work ahead of us. We can't go now."
But the Ambassador refused to listen to him, and Burling had no choice but to turn tail.
Even though Burling was taking this pretty hard, Craig had no reason to feel sorry for him. He knew that the grizzled old colonel would find another mission somewhere, that he would always find a mission, until he was eventually put out to pasture with the rest of his ilk.
Then Craig recalled the few hours he had spent with Melinda. She had come to his room while he packed his bags and explained to him what she had done to abort the mission. She told Craig how she had prevailed upon the Ambassador to remove Burling and his group because her husband planned to use their knowledge and expertise toward his own ends. Prime movers in the government were on her husband's side, and after they had their way, the entire mission would be co-opted for Manriquez' needs.
And the people of Alba would lose out in the end.
Essentially, what Melinda told Craig was that she used her influence on the Ambassador to get the mission to leave for the good of the people of Alba. She vowed that she would somehow try and keep her husband under control, and she hinted at the possibility of her working with Hidalgo and some of his friends.
Craig doubted her sincerity until she put her arms around him and kissed him full and hard on the mouth. She told him that she wanted to make love to him to prove to Craig that she was sincere in her desire to see her husband stripped of some of his power.
And while they made love in his room, grappling with one another wildly in the throes of love, Craig had no reason to doubt her sincerity. And from then on, he had no reason to doubt his potency, either. Melinda had reinforced whatever self-respect Craig had gained from his episode with the young native girl after the dance. She had shown him that whatever power he thought he had regained was genuine power. Once again, he was able to achieve his sexual potential. No longer was he a blank cartridge, the mere shadow of a man, struggling to put up a front so no one could determine his gnawing problem. No longer would he be ashamed to face himself in the mirror each day because he was unable to measure up to what was expected of him.
For the first time in months, Craig felt strong and alive. He felt his spirit equal to his finely tuned body for a change. He felt whole. And he couldn't wait to get back in his wife's arms and show her just how much of a man he had become during his short stay on the other side of the world.
And he didn't want her to think that he had become some overblown, macho character who was insensitive to the needs and emotions of women. No, that was far from the case. Indeed, he was looking forward to showing Laura just how much he had grown, how much fuller a person he had become.
Yes, it would hurt to leave Alba, that flat, ugly, over-fertile land where the buzzards walked like sparrows-to leave behind the sick hopeful children who had learned to trust him. Here he had come to find that his capacities were not after all dead.
Musingly, he glanced up and down the river and the gray-green huddle of shanties that -lined the banks. He would take away from this land of squalor-this land of potential-a kind of fond remembrance. And he could also never forget his companions here: Walt Anderson, that Don Juan of the cane huts; Horanyi, who could feel himself to be American only outside of America; Burling, who would surely manage to stand up again when again he found himself among a people weaker even than himself.
Himself ... He bethought himself suddenly of an adage-that it was possible, in a single act, to win all eternity. And manhood, too. When he got home again he must make Laura understand that he was not to be pitied, not even if he had to spend all the rest of his life over law briefs which did not interest him. ... Laura-now for the first time it had become possible for him to see her as she really was: gallant, not disdainful; magnanimous, not imperious. And she, in turn, must be made to see that there was no longer any throne for her to serve. He knew it for a fact that now his bones were really whole again, and that now he had height because he was tall and not because those about him had been made to kneel. It struck him that for some time lately he had begun to admire Laura, and now it had become possible also for him to love Laura.
