The sign read THE SHIRT SHOP, Hepsibah Jenks, Proprietess, but Rod Kelsey knew better. It should have read THE PRICK SHOP or CUSTOM CUNT. That neat, white, harmless looking upper story behind a New Orleans balustrade of curlicued wrought iron was one of the most exclusive hook-shops in the city. Two insurance agencies and an appliance sales headquarters downstairs were just diverting camouflage to keep the vice squad pacified. "Fuck them all" was Hepsibah Jenks' motto "but don't advertise."
Rod tried not to hurry as he climbed the outside stairs. It had been an eight-mile drive from his suburban hideout, and ever since he'd called Marta and made reservations his prick had been painfully erected. He might be darned near forty and his hair thinning, but he still needed his raw ass regularly, and ever since Hepsibah had introduced him to that blonde bombshell Marta Swan his screwing periods had been stepped markedly in frequence.
Opening the door of the shirt shop, Rod heard a bell ring in Hepsibah's private office as he entered the comfortable outer lobby. Heps believed in handling the sucker Johns real fast and never letting one customer see another if she could help it. She was right on the ball now to get Rod stashed away in a stall awaiting the attention of a "seamstress" who would take his measure. Hepsibah made shirts all right. The lobby was decored with samples, designs, models, etc. But the main source of her income was from a hot sex racket.
"Hi, Heps," Rod said breezily, spinning his hat over to a hook. "I just called Mart. She said she could take me."
"Sure, Rod, we like to favor our steady customers."
She took his hand in her pudgy, little mit and led him back into a hall to the fitting rooms that were really screw cribs.
The stall she selected for him didn't look so innocent on the inside. A nice, white single bed with the sheet spread cool and tight stood against one wall. At the head of the bed was a wash bowl and a doorway leading to a shower. Rod sat on a chair beside the bed and began loosening his clothes and kicking off his shoes.
"I'll tell her you're here," Hepsibah said. "Too-dle-oo now." She gave him a finger flutter. Heps was a stoutish, old-like bitch who lived a double life as a butcher's wife in San Jo, the neighboring university town. She had two cute boys and belonged to the PTA and Ladies Aid Societies ... until she disappeared every morning into the smog of Sun City where she ran her sex racket under another name. Heps was a four-way woman, Rod had heard, for anyone who wanted anyone as old as that. She fucked front, in the ass, french and by hand. A few old boars still patronized Heps, but most of the cunt-hounds went for the juicy young fillies that Heps hired as seamstresses, designers, machine operators, etc.
Rod went in and took a piss in the toilet bowl alongside the shower stall in his fitting room, then went back to the chair and finished getting off his clothes, hanging them neatly on the hooks and racks provided. Nobody could ever call him a sloppy bachelor whatever else fit him from reprobate to cuntlapper. He always fit the cliche "neat as a pin" and was puritan proud of that fussy rating.
Reclining on the bed, he lit a cigarette and picked up a magazine with a lot of nudies in it. While looking at the tits and cunt lines, he gently jacked his ready cock, mentally estimating how fast he would blow his ass after Marta got to him with her super sex appeal and professional fuck-off technique. Before meeting Marta Swan, Rod hadn't hesitated to jack off when he got to suffering for a piece of ass. But now he saved it until it damned near drove him crazy.
It seemed Marta would never finish the bastard she was fiddling with when he came in. It had never bothered him before, thinking about what a whore was doing while he waited for her in his turn. Now it irritated him to think of Marta fucking around with some bastard who didn't give a damn about her and just wanted to get his nuts off.
Suddenly, the door latch rattled and a smiling female face looked in with cat-like eyes and a bleached hair-do and a husky, sultry, cocksuckery voice whispered loudly, "I'll just be a minute, Roddy boy ... take care now!"
"Okay," Rod bleated to that advertising model head before it disappeared and the door was latched again.
Marta Swan always paralyzed him the moment he laid eyes on her. She had that hypnotic something about her that emanated from a quality far deeper than mere superficial fleshly beauty. Of course she was a living doll of a style model slightly damaged from too much window exhibit and man-handling (wow!). Her phony blonde hair was always done like a Breck shampoo ad. She wore her clothes swankly showy and flambouyant. Every item of her get-up was carefully studied for its contribution to the perfected whole of super-sexed feminine lure. A more conservative and unbiased judge would have considered Marta "too good", overdone and a bit embarrassing to have around unless you were pimping for her.
Rod waited in a trance on the fuck-off bed. Now that it was only a matter of minutes before he would be with her again, he couldn't think of anything but the thrill of locking up with her divine gut. He tried to shut out of his mind the thought of her douching the other guy's semen out of her cunt about now, not in fear of pregnancy (she had an ovarectomy), but for prophylaxis. Whores were always scared of v.d., Rod knew. The good pros were the cleanest women in the world. Marta would be squatting down on the bathroom floor about now with a douche attached to a tap in the washbowl, giving herself a fountain syringe internal bath with soap and germicide. He'd watched her douche out, had even helped her do it. A basin caught the overflow under her ass. When finished she'd empty the basin into the toilet bowl and wipe herself dry, ready to work off another prick. The trouble was, all this washing made her membranes dry and subject to irritation, so she frequently had to lubricate herself with cold cream.
Rod knew the score on all this whorehouse shit, but it didn't serve to dampen his ardor in the least. The only difference with Marta was that other men bothered him. He couldn't get enough of her and already he was wishing he could corner the market and be whole hog in her fuck pasture. But Marta was money hungry. He just didn't have the bread to siphon her off the fuck market. The best he could do on his district manager salary was maintain his status at Hepsibah's as a ten-dollar-man, meaning he paid ten bucks for prick service no matter what he got. A lot of chiselers paid only three bucks. These cheap bastards were tolerated and despised. They got "locals" usually, that is, a hand job, jacking them off in a towel and wiping them off, getting their three bucks and shooing them out.
But a ten dollar man might get half an hour of fiddling around and shooting the verbal shit. He might get fucked regular, masturbated a little and even frenched (they called sucking off "the kiss"). Ron had already gone to twenty now and then, and for double money Marta would give him an hour.
At last the door opened for real and Marta came in all fresh and wholesome in her spotless white uniform dress which she hung up carefully during sweaty jobs on the beds of the different stalls or cribs. She looked like a svelte, sexy nurse in a hospital except for the cap. Her bleached, sprayed hair held its do fairly well although it got rough treatment sometimes from the bully boys who mauled her around in their brutal lusts. When she got real big pricks she kidded them into letting her lie on a sewing table with her ass out at the edge. Then she could wriggle back when they bored into her and keep from having her liver shoved up into her stomach.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, deary," Marta said in her deep, rich voice that connoisseurs would call "gravely". "Kind of a rush I guess. Sometimes they all seem to come at once." She laughed. "I didn't mean that the way it sounds."
"You can't help it, Marta," he comforted her and rationalized his jealous resentments. "A guy has to stand in line in a place like this. I'd sure like to have you where I was the only customer in sight."
He watched her undress to take care of him, hanging her uniform on a rack carefully to avoid wrinkling. Every curve, every line, every inch of skin was an invitation to the sex feast. He reached out and ran his hand up the inside of her thighs, reveling in the soft, warm, feminine contact. She reeked sex. You just had to look at her and you wanted to eat her ass or have her jack you off.
"I'd sure like to get you out of here, Marta," he repeated his burning desire. "Why not come out to my place in the country and live with me a while?"
She plumped her sexy ass down beside him on the bed and reached over to his prick, helping him play with it. "You'd get tired of me if you had me all the time," she put him off. "Anyway, I'm expensive."
He tried to kiss her, pulling her down to him, but she evaded him skillfully. Whores didn't like to kiss as a rule. They said it was fear of infection, but Rod always suspected they hated the idea of romantic love. All they wanted from a John was money for getting him off. To hell with affection and le grande passion.
Marta melted into him as he stroked and fondled her breasts and then got his fingers wet in her pussy. She had the scar of a salpingectomy on her white belly just above the golden brown cunt hair, which meant that she could never get pregnant. He masturbated her expertly and she stroked his cock and tickled his balls. In a couple of minutes he was panting and snorting his way between her baby doll legs while she carefully bedded her hairdo in the pillow to keep from mussing it up too much. Hairdos cost money and she always wanted to look like something in the window at Saks, Fifth Avenue.
He worked his cock up into her vagina and began to pump, and she clutched at his naked back with her long, sharp nails, whispering huskily, "Give me hell, lover boy."
Ron had never seen her so enthusiastic about a sex session, and he was half convinced that she might be actually falling for him seriously. He butted and writhed into her warm, soft thighs, noting how she spiraled into him steadily, suggesting that he play with her breasts while he fucked her as she got more kick out of it that way. It was encouraging when a popular whore enjoyed screwing you. They usually didn't really give a damn and couldn't even put on an act that would convince a hepcat.
He never could hold it with Marta. She had that priceless gift of a good whore of being able to get a man fast, "swing" them, so to speak. Rod struggled desperately to hold his come and enjoy more voluptas, just punching her and loving her and rolling her around over the bed, but she kept at him relentlessly with her agile ass, her hands and her coaxing voice, even kicking him in the back with her heels, and in a couple of minutes he banged into her violently, holding her ass tight against him to keep her from getting away while he shot his load deep into her precious gut.
"Now ... that's better, Roddy boy," she whispered, nursing his prick and getting the last drop of come and the last pulsation out of him. "You know you carry too heavy a load, Roddy. You shoot off like a god-dam stud horse. You should let me draw you oftener."
"That's what I've been told," he panted, wanting her to know he had been around before. His bridge was sagging as the starch went out of his drained prick.
The sweet-scented perfume of her sex-warmed body rose up in his nostrils like a narcotic. It angered him that he had shot his load so soon and couldn't go on ravishing her wonderful body.
"Take it easy, lover," she comforted. "We can always do it again. Just turn over beside me and let me do all the work this time. It's what I'm paid for."
Jesus! She was really accommodating today. Usually she was inclined to be lazy and indifferent and a bit bored. He relaxed on his back beside her, and she lit cigarettes for them from the stand table at the bedside. After she took a few whiffs from her smoke she put it on an ashtray and wriggled down and began sucking his half-hard cock and stroking him deftly with her beautiful hands, striking him lightly under the balls with her long, sharp nails. He loved the slight, quick pain of that trick. The touch of her was electrifying, He studied her avidly as she gobbled his cock, giving him the tongue flutter. She tried to pass for thirty but he guessed she was damn near as old as he was. Not that it made any difference even if she had been fifty. Women that really had it like Liz Taylor and Marlene Deitrich or Barbara Stanwick could be old as hell and still get your prick up.
He wondered what her real name was. Jesus! It was funny to think of actually marrying a whore, really getting personally interested in her. Most people thought old Rod would never marry, that he was a confirmed bachelor, but a man ought to get married at least once in his life and Marta had made him think a little on the subject.
Whores usually operated under aliases, trade names that were usually sexier than their real monikers. Marta's real name would probably be Sadie Jones or Maude Hicks. How the hell could a John really get next to a whore on the outside? Of course you could date a whore, have a wild night at a club then take her home and screw her. But you usually called a cab in the morning or drove her to some place where she got out and walked on home. You didn't really know her like you did a regular date. He wanted a lot more than just a hot date with Marta Swan-Maybe he was crazy for even thinking of marrying a whore. But, after all, wasn't he a poet, at least in his spare time away from the shoe business? Poets never acted according to hoyle socially. They were always sticking a spoke into the wheels of the establishment.
Man, oh man! Marta was really making him today. He knew she was good with her tongue but she was surpassing any previous performance this afternoon. Lying down on her side with her knees doubled so she wouldn't hang over the end of the bed she took him from below, always the best position, since her tongue could work on the tender under side of the cock and especially the "frog" where the foreskin was sort of pinned together under the meatus. This was the center of sensation for the male. You could fiddle with the frog and start pulsations of preliminary come in a few seconds.
Marta lolloped her hot tongue up and down the mast of his swelling prick which was warmed by the temperature of her mouth and throat as well as the lavings of her expert tongue. She fondled his balls with her graceful, practiced hands, striking his testicles lightly with her sharp nails. The pain was excruciatingly delightful and she knew he liked it. He was getting a rigid hard-on again as he stroked Marta's cool, smooth hair, careful not to mess it up. He knew she was infuriated by guys who spoiled her hairdo.
"You're really on the ball today," he gasped as he held her beautiful head to his cock, shutting his eyes and baring his teeth as the exquisite pleasure mounted. She didn't break contact to answer him but let her skilled fingers riffle up his belly to his tits, pinching the nipples and stroking softly around them.
Usually he couldn't get up real good for nearly an hour after being fucked off deep. After all, he was almost forty and not as fast or as frequent as in earlier years. But Marta was driving him mad today with her caresses. She was getting stuff out of him he didn't know he still had.
He didn't want to blow off in her mouth. That was okay for some cotton-picking little bitch who was just meat and nothing more. With Marta it had to be regular in the end. Maybe it was the puritan in him still asserting itself. Then, again, it may have been the normal man's instinctive preference for the natural way of doing it, no matter what preliminary excitations were indulged in. It had always been his conviction that a guy wasn't really, a pervert unless he preferred orgasm in an unnatural manner or couldn't get satisfaction in any other way.
It occurred to him that maybe Marta was really getting hot with him today. Maybe his longing for her was shared a little. It was easy for wishes to be father of the thought. Usually, whores didn't blow their asses with a John. He had never been such a dope that he could be fooled by phony passion in a fuck for hire. But Marta certainly put on an act this afternoon. He could have sworn she was really getting hot with him and wanting to be fucked off all the way.
Then she seemed to confirm his high hopes when she suddenly let his cock out of her wet mouth and scrambled back up alongside him to the pillow, lying there with her legs spread and a smoky look in her hazel-green eyes.
He needed no urging to twist up and over her in a regular fuck bridge, driving his pulsating erection into her pink-lipped vagina. It was fast work as he had been almost ready to blow his nuts from her tongue work. She spiraled and jerked and pumped his hot prick, skillfully adjusting her movements to the pendulum swinging of his impetuous ass, his rutty pushes forward.
In a minute she had him, was drawing his second load of semen with such violence that he thought his guts were coming out with the geysering jets of white stuff...."Ah-h-h," he groaned like a slapped kid as her sharp nails drove at his tender-skinned buttocks.
He couldn't be sure if she was having an orgasm with him, but she certainly acted as if she were sharing all the pleasure, letting herself go for once...."We do it better together," she murmured, absently. "Why are we so good with each other, Roddy?"
Bridging over her, he held most of his weight on his elbows, keeping his naked body in close contact with her as his subsiding prick slipped out of her retching vagina...."Maybe it's because we really like each other," he ventured, breathlessly.
"Could be," she murmured.
"Why don't you ever want to kiss me?" he pressed what he thought was an advantage, almost afraid to believe he was making personal progress.
"Oh, I dunno," she put him off. "Afraid of getting or giving something in the face I guess." That was the old excuse, he knew. It was just that they didn't want to kiss a John. Actually they despised most of them, considered them stupid suckers. Whores went for pimps and geeks or lesbians. They wanted to feel superior, or at least the equal of anyone they fucked for fun. Johns were mostly decent but hypocrites, and worse still, Johns wouldn't really care for a pro whore seriously. So they beat their customers to the punch and deliberately cheated them.
Now Marta turned her hot lips to his and let him kiss her, though she didn't kiss him back so he could notice it. He thrilled to the feverish heat of her mouth. No wonder she was such a good screw. Her blood was hot all over. He drank her spit greedily and worked his fingers in under her hair at the nape of her neck. After he had kissed her mouth several times he moved down and kissed all over her, stroking around her sides and back, sucking her pink tits that still were teatly youngish though she was beginning to dry up around the edges. She never had had a kid as far as he knew. He knew from her casual talk that she had seen better days, but with the froth gone from the sex glass she hadn't been able to hold the big shots. That scar on her belly was from an operation after an early abortion. She'd had everything out. She'd come west from Chicago, desperately ill from God only knew what. Maybe because a rich gangster had kicked her out and she could no longer lay the big shots in the aisle. They were always after young stuff and the turnover of eligible cunt was tremendous. Somehow she had missed the boat financially and now she was a bit too old to rope in a millionaire.
He kissed and caressed her all the way down along the curves of her soft, sexy body. She was always so scrupulously clean, boasting that no so-called virtuous housewife was as clean hygienically as she was. Rod could believe that. Now, as he got down to her cunt he could see a pearly drop of his semen from his last discharge in her lying in the rose-bud-like puckering of her pink vagina. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Though he wasn't a muff diver, and still shrank from sucking off a woman (although he didn't mind having it done to him by a female), he couldn't resist sticking out his tongue and licking at the white drop in the rosebud setting. It actually tasted good though he felt a little guilty at so degrading himself. Sucking off a whore, Jesus!
In reaction he began kissing the tender insides of her thighs with passionate abandon, stroking down over her slender feet and bud-like toes, smoothing up around her calves. Every inch of her was sweet, so sweet. How could a whore be so wonderful? He must be crazy to adore her like this. She had just finished a lustful brute and after she left him she'd be with another, the kind with big cocks that she had to back away from to keep from being ruptured. He'd seen whores with bruise spots on their thighs where guys with big pricks had forced them to take the works.
"Rod," Marta said sleepily with her eyes half closed.
"Yes, darling," he maundered effusively.
"Will you do something for me?"
It was sort of like a cold douche the way she said that. So now it was coming out, why she had given him all this special attention. Oh, well, what did he have to lose...."Sure, darling," he said, "anything to please."
"Will you drive me to San Jo? I knew it's a lot to ask but my mother's sick in the hospital over there. She's just been operated on for a busted appendix. My brother's with her but I ought to be there. You understand, don't you?"
"Of course, of course, darling," he hastened to show his good will. "You should be with her. I guess I can take the rest of the day off. The senior salesman can take care of anything that comes up."
This was a chance to impress Marta with his moderate financial status. "Guess I'm lucky to have an uncle who is regional director for Zarak Shoes. Otherwise, I'd be getting the sack for neglecting my duties."
"Heps will let me go. All I have to do is dress. Of course I'm not going in my uniform."
"Course a-course," he routined wondering how she would look in street clothes. He shrugged off the fact that she showed no concern for him neglecting his job to do her a favor. After all, wasn't this just what he had been wishing for, a chance to know Marta on the outside so he could really get to her? The ball had dropped right into his little mits. Now he could run with it for a touchdown. Already he was dreaming of Marta shored up in his suburban hideout, his alone, the market cornered on a choice piece of ass.
"I can be ready in ten minutes," she couldn't wait to sink the hook in the fish she had caught for this emergency. "I'll meet you on the street, but not in front of the shop. Heps don't like that."
"I'm parked right around the corner on Palm Avenue," he said as he got up and began putting on his clothes.
He slipped a twenty dollar bill out of his billfold and handed it to Marta. Heps would get a cut of that for the house. Then Marta went out with a "be seeing you". It was almost like a threat. Somehow the whole world had changed. He had switched levels from a whore-mongering bachelor, who didn't care for amateur sex pots, to a mad lover who could die on a kiss like the poet he liked to think he really was, though neglected by the critics.
Tripped down the stairs to the street, demonstrating how spry he was for his age, he walked down to where his switch-top was parked and climbed playboy-like over the door and under the wheel. He started the motor and pulled up a little until he could see the street in front of the shirt shop. His car was three years old but still a smooth job, rakish enough to high-hat the jalopies and junkers, even though it wasn't a Jaguar or Mercedes by a long shot.
He caught his breath presently as he saw Marta coming down the street. Wow! What a vision! A cream tan sports jacket with a white blouse and pale green skirt that showed her sexy calves and how they curved down to silvery, French-heeled pumps. The blonde vision of rapist bait was topped off by a cute beret of mauve velvet piped with gold.
"Whew!" he whistled as he let her into the front seat. "I'm on the Riviera of Hollywood and Vine."
"Oh, shit ... these old rags," she sniffed. "Rod, I really do need a lot of new clothes."
"Honey, you don't need anything," he chirped as he drove off toward the highway that led to San Jo.
All the way to the hospital he maneuvered for intimate approaches. For the first time in his life he was really getting acquainted with a whore. His practical common sense told him he was merely being used as a sucker in an emergency, but the romantic poet in him dreamed of the impossible, that this just might be the great love of his life that would make up for all the bum pitches that had ended in misery and disillusionment. Suppose he could dramatically reform this fallen angel, give her an honest housewife status for which she would be abjectly grateful all her life ... and he amply compensated with a super-gadget to screw on the bed that would also keep house for him. He chose to overlook the incongruity of super-sexed Marta making beds and washing dishes. The hell with reality. That could come later with the other bridges.
Suddenly he was beginning to live. He had himself a fuck, was earning it by the minute. He reached out and felt of Marta's hot thigh as he drove with one hand. She pushed his hand away impatiently and said irritably, "Can't you get any more out of this god-dam hearse of yours?"
"Sure ... sure," he stepped on the gas obligingly.
After all, even a whore would be concerned about her sick mother. He could wait till later. She'd probably reward him with a premium piece of nooky when he got her home again. Home? Didn't she say she lived in a swank complex on jet-set row? He might feel like a cheap-skate but he had to muddle through somehow from here on. The love bug had really bitten him and he was breaking out in a rash.
At the hospital they found Marta's mother looking like a robot in suspended animation. Everything in the supply rooms had been attached to the old lady who appeared in critical condition after an operation that she had barely survived. On a chair near the bed sat a heavyweight young fellow in a baggy gray suit of clothes, obviously his Sunday best. He looked worried and barely acknowledged the introduction to Rod. Now it came out. Marta's real name was Adele Jepson and the guy in the chair was Reese Jepson. The ruin on the hospital bed with all the attachments was Myrtle Jepson, their mother. Just as he had suspected. Common as pig-pen mud. Marta's brother suggested a cup of coffee at the cafe downstairs and the missing pieces began to fill in as the worried young fellow spilled his guys to his sister's male friend. Reese was just a good-hearted palooka who had been building houses and selling them and keeping his old mother when she fell ill. Now his financial shoe-string was parting under the strain and he was desperate and miserable with grief and fear for the future.
Rod tightened up as he instincitively felt a touch coming. After all, he wasn't taking the whole damned family even for a special piece of ass. He felt better when Reese insisted on paying for the coffee. At least the guy wasn't an out and out moocher. The question that kept hitting him under the belt was, "Does he know his sister is a whore?" If the guy knew he certainly didn't let on. He seemed a pretty good sort. No foul talk or anything like that.
Back in the hospital room Marta's mother was babbling deliriously, her words unintelligible with the saliva suction and the oxygen tube in her nose. Red saw the old wreck look over at him as if she had known him in the past ... "She's talking about pappy before he died," Marta said. "She thinks you're pappy when he was young."
It gave him the creeps. The old girl looked awful. A sight like that sure took the fuck out of you. Funny, he'd always noticed that when you saw a girl's parents your prick got soft, especially if they were ugly. It was as if you could see how lousy a cunt would look when she got a few years on her. He tried to see Marta's sexy body in the remains of her mother and her big lug of a brother but it just wasn't there.
He kept learning more about Marta and most of it he threw out along with the Adele Jepson identity. Fuck the past. It was what Marta had become that he wanted. The old lady's name was Myrtle, he was discovering, and she had been a widow for several years. They had a farm back in Missouri but it didn't pay very well, which was why Reese had tried to get into building contracting on a shoestring. Just one more miserable story of failure.
It was decided that Reese would stay the night at the hospital. Their mother wasn't expected to live. Rod would drive Marta home which meant dinner at that hour. But his prick was readying for a hot piece of ass and the sexy nurse coming in had also stimulated him. So he could bide his time a little longer. Of course he had to be considerate. After all, maybe her mother was dying and a guy couldn't demand much under such conditions. But, then, wasn't Marta selling it, and didn't he deserve special attention after the favor he had done her?
Marta ate like a god-dam sow and fiddled with the head waiter's hand at the table. He felt like kicking the bitch. But this was her line ... men! She never missed a chance to work up a prick and get it started on the assembly line. He'd have to stop that horsing around if they ever got hitched.
After he paid the check at the cafe and got her out to the car he made up his mind that he would drive off the road somewhere and pour a hot screw into her. But the minute she sat down beside him, even before he stepped on the starter, she said crossly, "Just drive me to my hotel, Rod. I'm bushed."
"I know, I know," he hastened to sympathize. But he hung on to the idea that she would take him up to her room and let him stay a while, which meant he'd get a workout after all.
But he was learning about whores by the minute as he suffered along the road back to the city with all that hot flesh alongside him and yet he couldn't touch it. A woman could put out a barrier when she didn't choose to give. You could mess with her but she seemed like a statue of ice. He didn't bother to force her, but he felt like hell. All that time and a big check at the cafe and he wasn't even going to get his ass off with a quickie. God-dam women anyway. Didn't they have a lick of sense?
"I get awful tired on the job," Marta complained as they drove into the thickening city lights. "And this on top of it really conks me. You understand, don't you?"
"Sure ... sure," he lied like hell. He wanted to kick her out of the car. Why couldn't she give him a piece of ass like she was taking a John up at Hepsibah's? He could have been satisfied with that for the present. But, shit, he was getting less than if he were just another three dollar man.
Marta had always let him think that she lived in a swell layout like the Ambassador or the Had-ley Arms. But, shit, when she gave the address he knew it was in the warehouse district or on the edge of it. It turned out to be a third class cockroach trap called the Belleview. His skin crawled with imaginary vermin as he let her out at the curb. His prick had been up for a visit to her room but after he saw the unpainted front of this old dump he lost some of his enthusiasm. Even a wash like Marta couldn't make this go down.
"I have to live here," she blubbered as she noted his surprise. "I owe so many doctor bills. When I came here from Chi I nearly died and...."
"Maybe I could just come up to your room for a little while," he wheedled weakly.
"Oh, I never do anything up there," she said as she opened the car door. He was glad for that. Somehow he didn't want to be seen lettin' a dame out at such a place. "They think I'm a private eye on a case," she added, still hitting him under the belt. "I've got to get some sleep. I'm dead tired. Call me tomorrow, Rod, won't you, and drive me to the hospital."
"Okay," he said kicking himself for a chump. Why was he taking all this?
He watched her walk into the Belleview. She'd mentioned that her room was on the second floor but she went in on the lower floor and he saw her go down a narrow hall through the dirty lobby window. Suspicion shook him. God-dam her, if....
He drove off with the gas pedal to the floor in his emotional tension. Judas, a flame like Marta living in a flophouse like this was inviting rape, murder and perversion! What had he got himself into? It just didn't make sense. Hell, maybe she was screwing some psycho for her rent, and another for her meals at the greasy spoon downstairs. And he had promised to pick her up next day which meant that the senior salesman would be in charge again. If his uncle ever found out how he was neglecting business to chase cunt he'd get the sack for good. He'd have to work fast and hog-tie Marta or he'd be living on skidrow himself!
Why was he doing this he asked himself as he drove to his house out in the boondocks, a long, dark, lonely ride that made him more miserable than ever? He had given up serious romance years ago after getting nothing but disappointment out of puritanical squares. Prostitutes had been a safe compromise he thought, a little better than his hand and no danger of getting serious. The hell of it was he had to fall for them to get a real thrill out of screwing them. He could imagine all sorts of rubbish about whores while messing with them, and even write poems about it. Poetry was his hobby. There had been others, like Sue Hawks, an ex-chorus girl who had a pimp lover she was keeping. The guy rode a motorcycle and cracked up with her one day. Rod had paid her hospital bills, and been duely disillusioned. Next, a masseuse at a massage parlor, who specialized in frenching pricks. He happened to see some of the mokes she worked on and quit her in disgust. He compromised with a mistress out of a matrimonial agency, a big brunette who looked as if she had some Negro in her. One night while he was pumping her in bed he pulled out to cool his cock a little and she farted a gas bubble out of her vagina that really finished his illusions about her. And then he had started going to Hepsibah's.
The thought of Marta fucking off a lover up in her hotel room, or downstairs where he had seen her going down the hall, roweled him unmercifully as he drove into his place on Rosalind Street and parked in his vine-smothered car port. His chow dog Bluff came woofing out to meet him. He kicked the dog to keep him from jumping on him and went on in for a can of beer to soothe his ruffled composure. Damn women, they could sure make a mess of a man's peace of mind. He didn't know if he had made progress or proved himself to be the biggest asshole in town. It made him so mad as he thought about it that he charged around the floor carrying his can of beer and kicking over everything in his way, until the excited barking of his dog outside cooled him. He let the dog in for company and went over to his typewriter where he puttered around with his poetry. It always helped if he could blow up on paper.
His prick felt uncomfortably itchy so he dug it out and let it stand up half hard as he concentrated. This usually kicked over his thought processes. He sat numbly, his mind a blank, staring at the typewriter, and beginning to play idly with his prick, thinking of Marta in a dull agony of suspicion as to what she was doing. His eyes strayed to the telephone on the writing desk not far from his typewriter and a crazy compulsion to call Marta came over him. Why shouldn't he know what was going on at that dump she lived in? She had given him her number now that she was expecting him to take her to the hospital, but he remembered her saying she'd have to go downstairs to answer the phone. She didn't have one in her room.
While he was struggling with indecision and the agony of suspense the phone rang and scared him as if a gun had gone off.
It was probably Ben Pogue, telling him something about the office. He lifted the receiver and a funny, husky voice responded to his "hello" with the god-damndest statement he had ever heard over a telephone in his life.
CHAPTER TWO
KNIGHT ERRING
"All that you ever wanted is speaking to you, lover boy," the voice said muffledly. It was a woman trying to disguise her voice. " I am the answer to all your prayers. You need me now. Listen as I put the receiver to the place of pleasure."
He listened and could hear a rhythmic rustling sound. "Put your hand on the thing and work with me," the throaty voice spoke again.
It was crazy but he did as the voice said and as the rustling sounds resumed he masturbated in the same cadence, but he couldn't feel anything. He was too dumbfounded as to who and what was up to have any strong sex reaction.
"Let me hear you loving yourself," the voice insisted. So he put the telephone down to his prick and jacked hard enough to make it audible at the other end of the line. He began to suspect that it was Marta playing some kind of crazy game. But what was she up to?
"Say, listen," he snatched the receiver away from his cock and demanded, "what the hell is this all about?"
"Oh, Rod baby," it was definitely Marta now, "I just thought I'd call you and cheer you up a little. You don't mind do you?"
"You don't sound right," he snapped. "What the hell are you doing and where are you?"
"I'm in bed with my girl friend here at the hotel," she said but he didn't know if he could believe her or not. "She has a room downstairs and a telephone and we're just lying here with our cunts showing trying to go to sleep."
"What's wrong with you?" he pressed, his tone of voice rising in exasperation.
"I've just had my sleeping tablets and Deana had a bottle so we're just enjoying each other. Aren't you glad I called? Listen, now ... I'm rubbing the telephone on my cunt...."
He listened and heard the rhythmic rustling sound again, then the fuzzy voice said, "Now, this is on Deana's cunt."
It was the same sound over again. "Look, Marta," he almost shouted when she spoke again, "if anybody's listening at the phone company you're liable to get your service cancelled and they could even bring charges."
"Oh, fuck those bastards," she scoffed, and now he could tell she was lit. "They're enjoying it more than you are. You must be some kind of a jerk, lover boy. You'd better get used to this kind of language if you're gonna be my lover boy."
"You're drunk," he said disgustedly. "And why didn't you ask me up to your room, damn it?"
"Because I wasn't going up to my room and I had something waiting for me to put me to sleep."
"Why couldn't I put you to sleep?"
"Because you don't know how, lover boy. You're just an innocent little country boy and mamma has to teach you an awful lot. Wanta talk to Deana?"
He didn't want to. He was mad as hell but what else could he do?
A blurred female voice mumbled into the phone, "We ate it, lover, and now we're going to eat it again. Do you like that? Want to hear the slurps, lover? Listen, I've got the telephone rite down there where you want to be, lover boy. Now, listen, I'm sipping the soup. Hear me? Get your prick up and keep time with me. You'll sleep better after you do that."
He didn't know whether to hang up or scream at them to shut up and leave him alone. They were both lit and maybe doped too with those sleeping tablets they were taking. He listened to the rustling, smacking sounds, and then heard Marta's sleepy voice and heavy breathing.
"I'm coming ... her tongue is so good ... I'll have to teach you, lover boy. You don't know anything yet. Toodleoo, darling Pauline ... see you tomorrow morning...."
She hung up leaving him suspended in thin air. He didn't know what to think. His prick was still hanging out but it wasn't hard by a long shot. The thought of Marta being sucked off by a butch angered him, yet pacified him. At least she wasn't with a pimp or another John. So this was how whores talked over the phone. Jesus! How did they get away with it? He'd have to cure her of that if he ever married her.
He went to the fridge and got another can of beer. All thought of writing any poetry had gone with the wind. He felt painfully tense and wrought-up as he gulped down the beer and tried to get sedation out of it. He had some barbital tablets on prescription for knocking him out when he couldn't sleep. He hated the stuff because it always made him dream nightmares and froth at the mouth. But he took two of the pills, aware that he shouldn't mix barbiturates with alcohol. But then beer wasn't very strong.
Cripes! If he didn't get any sleep before driving Marta to the hospital next morning he'd really be a mess. He hated getting all worked up emotionally. It always poisoned him.
Thoughts of Marta and her lesbian friend fucking around in bed tormented him as he put out the dog and got ready for bed. He lay back trying to relax and got out his cock, stripping down his pajamas so he could get more area of sensation. He had to have some kind of relief from the awful tension that was building up in him as a result of the aggravating frustration and the maddening teasing of Marta's telephone call.
The barbital began to hit him along with the glow of the beer and he hoped this would help him work up his cock to a good fuck-off. He knew how it was when he got this way, all knotted up inside. He could pump his cock half the night and never get any satisfaction, and the longer you worked at it and couldn't get anywhere the worse you felt.
He began getting a hard-on as the barbital sedated him, making him a little drowsy. But his prick persisted in being anesthetic and by this time he knew that he had to blow his lump or stay awake all night and feel like hell next day.
For a couple of minutes he whacked his prick so hard that his balls hurt and he could hear the slap of his fist against his belly. But all he got was a sore foreskin, so he got up and rubbed some lanolin on the irritated places and went back to bed, taking it a little slower and trying to build up an erotic vision of Marta stripped off naked and ready for business. But the aggravations of the day kept interfering ,and making him mad all over again, so he decided to try not to think of her, but just concentrate on himself narcisticly.
His prick refused to respond sensitively to his manipulations, so he got up and went to the bathroom again and got a rectal douche that he used for enemas occasionally, and worked this up his ass for about three inches. It created a painful sensitivity, especially when he pumped it a little as if he were being buggered by a homo, pumping his prick with the other hand meanwhile.
He was more than half asleep now from the barbital and beer mixed. He felt awful and wished to God he could blow his ass and get some relief. But he had one of those spells of dead center due to nervous strain. He'd had them before after bad days at the office or rejection by some cunt he had hoped to make. Usually he could get himself off eventually and get some sleep before the night was over, but it could be a terribly ordeal.
Lanolin didn't seem to work tonight. It wasn't slick enough to imitate cunt goo. Saliva might do better. But he had to keep spitting on his cock as he pumped it as the saliva kept drying up and evaporating under the friction.
He knew the last resort was hot water and soap. The soap had just enough irritant in it when suded up with hot water to excite the surfaces of his prick and with the addition of rapid hand friction he was pretty sure to bring up his come.
Leaving the enema douche up his ass, he went to the bathroom wearing nothing but his pajama jacket to keep the chill of the night off. Standing over the wash bowl with his stubborn tool sticking out, he ran hot water to just the right temperature, a little above the heat of woman's vagina, and began working up a lather with strong bath soap. He lathered his prick with this, working it in behind the gills of the head and down under his balls, and then with his hand slicked with suds he started whacking his cock so fast and hard that it sounded like a beaver slapping water with its tail.
If this didn't do the job, nothing would. He had to get off or go crazy. It was all he could think of now. That god-dam bitch Marta had certainly left him out on a limb. He ought to beat the hell out of her tomorrow when he got her in the car to drive her to San Jo. She wouldn't say anything if he drove her off the road and raped her. Or could a guy rape a whore?
He didn't know what he was thinking about when he finally felt his semen beginning to swell. He redoubled his effort, crouching over the wash bowl and giving his prick everything he had. He thrust out his ass as he hunched down as if he were driving his cock into a vagina. And then, at last, the blessed relief of his semen spurting up from the swollen head and splashing on the wash bowl and the shaving mirror above. He didn't give a damn where it went as long as he could get it out of him.
Man, did that feel good! If Marta had been there he would have rubbed her face in it. He milked himself out thoroughly enjoying the last pulsation of ejection. The douche up his ass had added to his sensation as his come muscles had shut down on that pressure around the prostate and the rectal sphincters had been convulsed as well which was part of the thrill that homos got from fucking in the ass.
As he washed off his rod with the tap running, disposing of the soap suds down the drain, he felt a lot better. Maybe he could sleep now. Pulling the douche out of his ass, he scrubbed the shit out of it, which had been forced into the holes under pressure without any water from the overhead bag. He scrubbed the douche with soap and water until he could no longer smell the awful, acrid stench of tamped shit, and then put it away in the box of applicators that he used with his hot water bottle. It occurred to him with a smile that he hadn't resorted to every device tonight. He hadn't filled his hot water bottle about a quarter full and folded it like a cunt, and then fucked between the pressed halves with soap suds or surgical jelly.
He finally got back to bed, groggy from the barbital, and tucked himself in. His prick didn't bother him for the moment and he hoped it wouldn't until he got some sleep. But you never could tell when the emotions were really riled up. Why did a man have to torture himself with women? They didn't really give a damn. They just wanted money and luxuries. Chances were they'd fuck off with some long -haired bum or a lesbian like Marta had done tonight when she got drunk after sending him home without any nooky and teasing him by telephone with cunt rubbing noises and dirty talk. Cripes, what a kook she was! Could he ever tame a bitch like that? It took a god-dam poet even to dream of taming a cunt like Marta Swan. He wondered again if her brother Reese knew she was a whore. And the dying mother ... what was she thinking? He remembered how those feverish, sick eyes had looked at him as if he were next on the death schedule. Marta had said he reminded her of her dead husband. Gruesome to say the least. Well, he'd see. He fell asleep thinking about it and began dreaming awful nightmares from the barbital that was sedating him. It never was natural sleep. He always drooled into his pillow as he struggled through his nightmares and awakened damned near as tired as when he went to bed.
It was worse than usual next morning. He felt as if he had a hangover. Coffee helped a little. He had a notion to call up Marta and tell her the deal was off. He wasn't going anywhere today unless to the office maybe about noon. But he didn't have the backbone to break with her. She had him over a barrel and he had to see it through. It was always that way. When he had fallen for legit women and girls it had been pure hell until something happened to break it off for good. Then he convalesced for about six months and was ready for another siege of love sickness. Now it had really happened to him with a prostitute and God help him! Something told him it was going to be a lot worse than with legit women. Maybe you could only finger fuck Sunday school girls until you married them, but you didn't get so seriously ill either when the engagement was broken, if it had ever gone that far. He remembered an old quatrain of doggerel as he drove out of the yard after feeding the dog:
"Here's to the maid
Who's not afraid,
Her boyfriend's prick to handle.
To hell with the lass
Who sits on her ass
And fucks herself with a candle!"
Well, god-dammit, you never got in deep with the ones who wouldn't do anything. Those bitches were at least neutral even though you cursed the civilization that made them scared of a stiff prick. So now he was hooked by a god-dam whore and driving off into the mists of a gloomy morning after as if he had been on a drunk when all that was the matter with him was too much excitement that even jacking off couldn't cure. Fuck Marta! She'd have to shit or get off the pot today. It made him sick to think of neglecting his business for the second day in a row. Old Ben would be reporting him to his uncle in Chicago and his soft job would be just one more miserable memory.
He knew it! Just as soon as he laid eyes on that laughing shanty Irish face of hers as she came prancing out of the Belleview Hotel to his waiting car he forgot all his grievances and thanked his lucky stars that he knew Marta Swan or Adele Jepson or whatever. She had something that made all the petty details of the earthly world seem like so much cowshit after the old girl had left on her jump over the moon.
"Hi, Rod, it's sure good of you to think of me like this," Marta said as she plumped into the front seat with him. She was dolled up as usual in way-out getup that must have cost a lot of dough in the distant past. He gathered it was somewhat out of date.
"Thanks for the cock teasing via Mountain States last night," he said as he drove away from the curb.
"Oh, that god-dam Deana! She's a card," Marta crowed. "Whenever I get with her I'm in trouble. But really you didn't mind?"
"I hope you got your ass off better than I did," he observed dryly.
She reached over with her artful hand and squeezed his leg. His cock wasn't peart yet after the whacking he had given it the past night but Marta's proximity quickly revived him...."I'll make it up to you, Rod, honest I will," Marta said. "But I expect a guy who really cares for me to think of something else besides getting his ass off especially when my mother may be dying."
Shit! Wasn't it just like a woman to make you feel like Simon Legree just for wanting to get your ass off?
"Okay, okay," he said. "I stand corrected." He did feel better now that Marta was with him. She was one of those charmers who could make a man feel at home and reconciled even if he were headed for the gas chamber. It was the old lie of sex that demanded propagation though the earth crumbled on doom's day.
Marta's mother had made a miraculous comeback during the night and was resting easier. Reese looked haggard but a little more cheerful as he said goodbye to drive home and get some much needed rest. Marta would get the day off at Hepsi-bah's and stay until Reese came back in the afternoon. She took Rod aside and said so no one else could hear, "Why don't you go up to Hepsibah's and let one of the girls take care of you before you go to the office?"
It shook him to hear her talk like that. "But it's you I want, you know that," he protested.
"Oh, Rod, you know I can't be doing that with my folks in such a mess." It sounded kind of silly. He could work at the office but she couldn't spread for him because her mother was sick and her brother going broke.
"I can wait," he fumed resentfully.
"I'll make it up to you," she repeated her promise, and he had to believe she meant it.
He showed up late at the office but wasn't good for anything. He left it all to Ben Pogue. All he could think of was Marta and the situation that seemed to be leading on to God knew what. Whatever happened he didn't seem to be able to stop now. He left early for the hospital in San Jo and found Marta with plenty to tell him. Her mother was mending fast and they couldn't afford to keep her in the hospital a single day longer than was necessary. But where could they take her? Reese was selling the partly built house at a sacrifice and loading his truck for the return to Missouri as soon as his mother could travel, but that would be several weeks to a month yet. She was weak and had to convalesce.
"Rent a house for me, Rod," Marta begged, "and let them think I did it. They don't know I'm in the racket and I don't want them to know."
The thought of having her all his own in a house he was paying the rent on tempted him irresistibly. He sure didn't want all of them in his place on Rosalind Street. A house in town would be like a trial marriage.
"We'll have to be real careful until after the folks leave," Marta warned him, but he could be optimistic about that. They'd find a way. He wondered if her folks didn't secretly know that she was a prostitute and just didn't want to let on that they did. Anyway, it made little difference. They had to put on the act for a while until the heat was off.
He didn't delay action taking Marta to look for a house. After all, he wouldn't be paying much more for the rent than he was for service at Hepsibah's. He took a day off at the office and celebrated by driving Marta around looking at houses. She wore a sweater that showed her tits seductively and a pair of blue jeans sawed off at the knees with black, ballet-heeled slippers and a purple scarf over her shiny yellow hair. He felt like he was mistressing a movie star and the way the landlors ogled and drooled he knew he was envied.
They settled for a two-bedroom place on Elm-dale Avenue not too far from Hepsibah's. Marta could walk it in a pinch. It wasn't much but it would do for the present. Ron paid the hundred dollars rent and had the receipt made out to Marta. Now they could move her from that lousy hotel and maybe work in a bed session before her folks put the kibosh on monkey business. He was saving up for an orgy an hadn't even jacked off since that first miserable night.
Moving Marta from the hotel he met a couple of creeps who shook him. The hotel clerk, a tobacco chewing Swede about fifty, called Marta by her first name and acted too familiar, Rod thought. Fuck the old bastard, he may have paid Marta for a few if he could get it up but he'd better lay off now or it would cost her. Then there was a geek working in the cafe on the ground floor who invited them in for coffee while they were bringing stuff down from Marta's room. This bastard disturbed Rod a lot more than the old Swede did.
"Oh, Rod, I want you to meet Jody," Marta said. "He's a friend of the family. He might even go back home with Reese and mother."
"Hi," Rod said as they sat down for coffee in a booth at the back.
Jody had big ears and a face like a rat. His beady little eyes seldom left Marta. It was easy to see that he was drooling for her. A typical example of an excessive masturbator, Rod thought.
Sort of emaciated. It gave him the creeps to look at the guy. How could Marta stand such dopes? He could hardly stomach the coffee served by this repulsive character.
"He's only a kid," Marta said after they left to continue moving. "He doesn't even know what it's about."
"I don't know what the score is around here," he told Marta, "but you'd better square up with these guys if you want me on your string. They stink."
"Don't be such a snob," she chided resentfully. "These fellows helped me when I came here sick from Chi."
"Yeah, you screwed them for your room rent and meals," he accused. "Who the hell owns the Zippy Cafe where this geek Jody works?"
"Oh, you'll meet him someday. He's a friend of my aunt's named Elmo Dahl."
"I don't know if I want to meet him," he said. "Looks to me as if I was just shoveling their shit. Mean to tell me this old Swede hadn't been in your pants?"
"You're crazy," she bristled angrily. "Fats Hagen is old enough to be my father."
"Oh, that would really discourage him, in a pig's eye," he razzed her. "What kind of a chump do you take me for?"
She could see that a quarrel was making between them and after they got everything loaded in the car she reminded him that they would have the house to themselves for the rest of the day. Reese and her mother wouldn't move in until that evening. It was infuriating to think that he couldn't even have all night with her, but he ached for her so desperately that he could settle for anything.
The minute they got back to the house Marta led him inside and locked the door. She knew what would pacify him as she undressed for bed and pulled the covers down to the mattress sheet. Rod got out of his clothes with trembling hands. He wasn't as hard as he wanted to be. His emotions were holding him in an uptight.
Martha reached out and squeezed his cock, laughing, "Oh, come on now, Pauline, you can do better than that."
"Don't call me that," he protested irritably. "After all, I'm not just a stiff prick. I'm in love with you and some of this is hard to take."
"You mean the guys at the hotel? Oh, shit, forget it. They all want to screw me of course. Can I help that? You wouldn't want me if nobody else wanted me."
"How much do you owe these guys?" he demanded.
"Forget it, I said," she repeated, irritably. "If you want it, here it is. I like guys who can give me hell and get it over with."
He flung himself on her and gripped his prick in his fist to make it stiffer as he worked it into her gut. After he got it in the heat of her internally made him forget his beefs. His hard-on improved, too, and he began to pump her slowly, to prolong his pleasure if not hers. But she wouldn't cooperate. She spiraled into him and fucked him off fast. He was blowing his load in two minutes.
She let him stay in her a little longer. Obviously she hadn't blown her ass. He felt frustrated as hell as he felt his prick softening up and slipping back out of her ... "All right, Pauline," she murmured tauntingly. "Take it easy now."
It infuriated him to hear her call him that. He knew what it meant. He wasn't as virile as he ought to be. A Pauline was an effeminate man. Well, he didn't consider himself so effeminate. It was just that she wasn't giving him a break. She was making it tough for him all the time.
He could see the pearly pool of his semen lying in the rosebud orifice of her vagina. She hadn't the retentive powers to hold his come up in her like a virtuous woman could. He remembered what had happened up at Hepsibah's and moved down over her white belly until he could cup his mouth over her cunt.
"That's right, eat it out of me," she said, parting her thighs wider to let him get at her. "But don't scratch me with your beard. You aren't shaved very close for eating cunt."
He was wild with lust for her. Maybe she was a god-dam fraud cheating him every step of the way, but he wanted her anyway: Her body hypnotized him somehow. He wanted to drink her, inhale her, chew her slowly and digest her.
Trying to keep from scratching her with his beard stubble, he worked at her vulva with his pursed lips and driving tongue. The taste of his own semen hadn't phased him. He was getting to like it, especially when it was mixed with cunt goo from Marta. Under her spell he could forget the other guys she'd had, that filthy old Swede at the clerk's desk, the rat-eared Jody who was waiter and fry cook at the cafe, and all the unknown men who traded with her at Hepsibah's. After all, he had her now.
"You're pretty good at that, Roddy," Marta said in a thickening voice. "Milk my tits a little as you use your tongue on me."
He raised his mouth long enough to say, "I'd like to get you off just once."
"I come so hard I almost die," Marta said, "but it takes a while. You'll have to stay with me. Get down alongside the bed and I'll shift over so you can get at me better."
He did as she directed and saw immediately how much more advantage he had. She put a leg over his shoulder and as he bent over he could get his face down between her legs easily. She was fucking steadily at his face now and her breath was coming in long gasps as she got hotter.
His prick began to itch for attention and she seemed to know this as her hand dropped lazily over the edge of the bed and she took his cock in her hand and began jacking him. With her other hand she pushed down on his head as if to guide him to her sensitive parts and correct improper pressures.
He was finding her clit and flibbling it with the tip of his tongue, them biting it a little with his teeth. The expression on her face told him he was getting to her. Moving his tongue on down the soft, gooey trench of her cunt, he licked into her vagina as far as he could, then back to her clit, meanwhile gently stroking and kneading her pink-tipped breasts.
"You're a natural," Marta panted. "You've got the idea already. Don't stop. Stay with it. I need that. I've got to have it now."
His prick was hard now as she jacked him but he was having as much fun sucking her off as he was getting himself masturbated by her beautiful hand. He was making fucking motions with his ass and she was too. The smell of her rose in his nostrils like a narcotic asphyxiation.
Suddenly he felt her knot up and cry out. He felt her vagina surging in his mouth, gasping like a pouting mouth. Marta was blowing her ass! A vacarious convulsion balled up in his huts and for a minute he hardly knew what was happening. His prick began throbbing in Marta's jacking hand and as he felt his semen starting to burst again (he hadn't dreamed he could come again so soon), he lunged up on the bed, hooking his hands under her thighs on either side and rammed his pulsing flesh deep into her.
"Ah-h-h-h-h!" she let out a long, mournful moan as if it was her dying gasp.
He spurted into her, grunting and panting. It was really spilling his guts, the most perfect intercourse he could ever remember. Her white body steamed up under him as if it were smoking ... giving off an unearthly fragrance of lust and hype rfemininity.
"God ... God!" he gasped, "Why can't we do this all the time?"
"You hurt me, you bastard," she had to spoil it all by complaining. "I wasn't expecting you to do that and you caught me wide open. Don't you know you can't do it to me that way? I'm fragile up there. I rupture easily."
"Oh, shit!" he scoffed. "Do you expect me to believe that?" He was lying between her legs, soaking in the drench of his semen and her glandular bath that was almost like an ejection of male fluid.
"I'll have my doctor talk to you," she threatened. "Or Fats Hagen will tell you. I'm like a daughter to him."
"That kook? An incestuous father no doubt. How does he know you're so fragile? Is his prick too big for you?"
"Get off me!" she pushed at him. "I'll have you beat up if you talk like that to me."
He knee-walked on the rocking bed and his prick slipped out wet and limp, and he could see again the pearly jelly ball of his come lying in the gaping flower of her lax vagina. She just couldn't hold his come up in her. That's what swinging ninety men in a day had done for her. Yeah, she had boasted that when she was in her prime, a thousand dollars a day, after her Chicago gangster daddy had decided she was too loose for him and he wanted more fresh country cunt.
"Sure ... I'm just a John to you for your goddam pimps to beat up. Who the hell are they? Not that rat-eared jackin' off fart at the Zippy Cafe. Not him ... or maybe it's this sloppy old Swede that's always taking free coffee up to your room at that cockroach trap down on skidrow. Do you like tobacco juice on it ... or maybe it's this Elmo Dahl? His god-dam name even sounds like a pimp's. Wait till I see that bastard!"
She beat at him hysterically and screamed, "Get off this bed and get out. I never want to see you again."
He got off the bed slightly mollidfied, realizing he had lost his cool and flipped. But she had maddened him with all this sleazy, double-rossing shit, god-dam her. He started putting on his clothes again. Marta turned over on her side and buried her face in the pillow.
"I had to go there," she blubbered muffledly into the pillow. "I didn't have anywhere else to go. I was too sick to do any better. My face looked awful and I was all skin and bones. They helped me. They're good people, I don't care what you say. My brother wouldn't take me in. He said our mother was all he could take care of. He did pay some of my doctor bills. I can't throw out those guys who helped me when I was sick."
"Shit, you're still sick!" he fumed at her as he buckled up his pants.
She saw that he might be taking her at her word, that he was really thrown out, that maybe he wanted the excuse to break off with her no matter how it hurt at first. So she turned over and reached out a hot, feverish hand and pulled him over on the bed.
"Oo wouldn't leave me, toodle-ums," she baby talked him as she often did in certain phony moods that boiled up out of her sick son-of-a-bitch of a mind.
He sat down on the bed ashamed of himself for losing his starch. What did she have on him that he would take all this from her? Bending down, he kissed her sensual lips, felt the fever of them steal into him like a witch's spell.
"Okay, Marta, I'll stay," he blubbered like a simpering jackass.
"Reese is bringing mother tonight," she went on in a calmer tone of voice but still on the edge of tears. "We've got to be careful. I don't want them to know what I do."
"You mean I have to act like a lover who is intending to marry you."
"Well, you do want to marry me don't you?"
"Ye-e-es," he said but he wasn't so hot about it as he had been. "But I don't want to suffer for a month until your mother and brother get out of this house."
"We can manage it now and then if we're careful," she wheedled.
"Why can't I come up to the shop like always?"
"But Heps wants a cut every time I take a customer up there. Besides, you're my man now and that makes it different."
"Oh, it does, huh? You mean I'm last on your list now of who you spread your ass for?"
"Don't talk like that," she fired up a little again. "After all, you know I'm in the racket and if you really care you'll play along and consider my position."
"Yeah, I suppose so," he sat down on the bed glumly.
She reached into his pants and got out his cock with her hot, skilled hand and began caressing his genitals as they talked. It turned him into a purring kitten. In a minute he had his hand up between her legs and was masturbating her pussy...." Sure, I know what you're doing up at Hepsibah's," he maundered on, "but I don't want it rubbed in my face. Keep it away from me, all those guys. If I had the money I'd buy you, all your time in bed. But I'm not a millionaire. I can't even afford this house. I'm still paying for my place out on Rosalind Street where you've never been."
"I'll not do anything here in this house," she avowed. "Nobody will ever take advantage of me here. I swear it!"
"Okay," he said. "I hope you really mean that."
He kept masturbating her and she kept jacking him off, and she let him kiss her feverish lips again and drink the all-satisfying nepenthe of her. She could quiet him, soothe him with her presence. With her he could enjoy death row and think he was in heaven. Unnatural, that was the word. Marta was a witch. Sex with her enchanted him and made the whole world seem tolerable. He remembered a wise bird who once had told him shrewdly regarding himself, "Rod, you know the score but you don't let yourself believe that you know. You want disillusionment. You ask for the double-cross. Fuck your women and let it go at that!"
Why couldn't he be that way? The poet in him made him a prize chump, a typical sucker for romance, and now a pro had him. This would be the worst. Oh, shut up, mind voice. Quit torturing me!
He finally broke away after they had scared up a bottle and had a few hiballs together. Marta liked her whiskey but as yet he hadn't noticed any excesses. On the other hand, she might be a sot. The first whore he had fallen for, Sue Hawks, had turned out to be an alcholic and he hadn't noticed it at first. For the present he didn't give a damn. He was determined to go through with it. After her folks had moved on back to Missouri he envisioned having the house in town all alone with Marta. She might be fucking and sucking and masturbating the customers at Hebsibah's, but he could push that aside in his mind and pretend it didn't exist. Eventually, somehow, he'd marry Marta and take her away from it all. She'd fall for him all the way and come to live with him as a decent wife out on Rosalind Street, where he could fuck her all he wanted to and she'd give him all her come and all her time, like she'd be saving her come for him now. It would all work out ... in a pig's eye, bull shit.
CHAPTER THREE
LOVE AND SUFFER, BOOB!
He had left the house on Elmdale Avenue long before Marta's brother drove into the yard with his loaded truck and his old mother all bundled up and barely able to get to the house with help. It had been agreed that Rod would act the part of a respectful suitor who expected to marry Marta. Naturally they could be smoochy but for outright stripped-off bedwork and rocking the god-dam house with fuck and suck, no dice!
Rod saw himself as really out on a limb now. He was cut off at Hepsibah's by his new rating as a whore's man on the outside. His fuck money was all invested in Marta's house rent, and all he had was his hand when he couldn't arrange some way of getting into bed with Marta without shocking the Missouri squares. Hovering close to the surface in his mind was the conviction that Myrtle Jepson and Reese Jepson both knew that their daughter and sister was a whore but they were nice people and just couldn't admit that they knew. They had to pretend otherwise, and in a way this made Rod Kelsey a real chump in their opinion as they saw him as letting himself be suckered into a legal marriage to a god-dam whore, their own daughter and sister. As Rod well knew, most people just couldn't see a whore as marriageable material. The old cliche "once a whore always a whore" clinched the old-wives'-tale philosophy of the American masses. Any man who married a whore was a fool and would pay the price of his folly. This brought him back to the grim truth of his life; deep down he was a poet, the kind of nut who always stuck a spoke in the wheels of the establishment to see what would happen even if he got himself lynched for it.
Marta called Rod by telephone, refraining from her dirty acting and talking. She knew he didn't like that. He was still a square when it came to telephone girl operators listening in on fuck talk between his number and a house he had rented. It was all lovey-dovey shit and he ate it up while trying to make himself useful at the office where he actually was nothing but a dummy executive holding his job with pull in Chicago while chasing cunt all over the valley. They didn't know yet about Marta but he figured they'd get to it. Old Ben Pogue had a nose for cunt news even though his participation might be doubtful. Rod wondered if he could see his prick past his macaroni and cheese belly.
But his hand got really tiresome as he champed the bit several days letting the Jepsons get settled and convinced that their loving daughter had really rented a house for them. Then on his Saturday off when Marta would be home in the afternoon he drove into the front drive at the house on Elmdale Avenue and parked his car. He could see Reese's stake truck standing out in the back yard loaded with household goods for the trip back to Missouri. To make the act good he even knocked at the front door. Reese let him in. He was smiling and in his shirt sleeves and shook hands heartily with Rod. A likable bumpkin, a bit squarish but dependable. Rod liked Reese tolerably.
"Mom's in the front bedroom," Reese said. "We have two beds in there and I sleep in the other."
Yeah, that figured. Marta would have the master bedroom in back where the fuck work went on and she had that dirty telephone right alongside for her fuck calls. He figured she'd be getting them for a while anyway, before guys knew she was living with a John (he'd have to forget that word "John"). After all he was her lover and just might be her husband someday.
Marta was in the back bedroom when he arrived and when she came out through the kitchen in a quilted house coat that covered her sex stuff she looked cross and irritable as if she had been on a spree...."Oh, hello, Rod," she said as if he was just anybody.
It shook him the way she acted. She might have come up to him and kissed him. It would be part of the act. Then he looked on past her and his eyes sprouted forward as his eyes periscoped out of his god-dam head.
Who was that washing dishes in the kitchen and humming a popular tune but that rat-eared beady eyed masturbating slob from the Zippy Cafe who had given them the vile coffee on moving day!
Old Jody didn't even look around as he clattered around with the sinkful of dishes. But his voice was raised a little and now Rod could hear the god-dam words of the son-of-a-bitching song that Jody was singing to himself. It was, "The Best Things in Life are Free!"
Rod felt a flush stealing up his face and his prick wilted in his pants. That god-dam dirty rat in there washing dishes for Marta as if he belonged there, and she was sleeping alone in the back bedroom. What....
He'd heard that whores often went for monsters that were real freaks and queers. Maybe this goddam greasy spoon fry cook was her secret sin that she was giving all her home come to? It was an awful thought. He just wouldn't allow himself to believe it as Marta said, noticing how he was staring into the kitchen:
"Oh, Jody's sleeping with Reese in the front bedroom. He's going back with them and do part of the driving."
"Oh, I see." What a lukewarm imitation of nothing that response was, he told himself. It made him sick to think of this god-dam Jody living here with his prize nooky. The guy might be a masturbating bastard but he was young, not more than twenty, and he could stand a lot, and the way he looked at Marta it was like dog worship. He'd eat her cunt and maybe he was an expert at getting her off.
Jesus! He'd drive himself nuts thinking things like that. Maybe it was all right. This damned Jody could be just a crumb who worshipped Marta from afar and fucked his fist all night. But a guy couldn't help thinking things.
He went in and said hello to Myrtle. She was all propped up in bed and looked a little better. Her greeting was pleasant. She was good people like Reese and Rod bet she hadn't been the cause of Marta becoming a god-dam whore. By this time he knew that there had been nine in the family and that all the others were conventional apparently. If they hadn't been Marta would have romped on them with her vile tongue because she always cursed married women as being whores that sold it to one man and then cheated for the rest. If she had any opening at all she never hesitated to beat the rest of the god-dammed world down to her level and then shit on it.
"We sure appreciate you goin' to all that trouble for us," Myrtle said.
"Oh, it was nothing at all really," Rod demeaned his charities. "After all, you're Marta's mother and Reese is her brother."
He thought he saw a shadowing in her eyes and her expression became momentarily vacant. Had a cloud passed over the sun of her life just then? Maybe she didn't appreciate favors she got from her erring daughter Marta's depredations among men, especially honest men.
But he brushed it off as his own imagination and went back to the master bedroom to show this goddam Jody that he had certain special privileges. The main bedroom opened off the kitchen and across from the bedroom door was the backdoor with a night lock on it. For the first time Rod noticed how convenient this was if Marta wanted to let a god-dam John into the house after everybody was in bed. All she had to do was leave the night lock open and the guy could slip in and go to bed with her. Why the hell hadn't she told him about this convenience?
Marta had been lying down resting. She was always tired, it seemed. She'd had a hard morning at the shirt shop. Rod wondered how many guys she had screwed, sucked or jacked? He sat down on the edge of the bed but she whispered up at him, "Sit on the chair. Jody'll see you."
"Oh, shit," he mumbled but moved over to the chair.
He wanted her but he saw that a barrier was up between them. He didn't dare risk being seen at night if their act was to be convincing. But how long could he stand the denial? It wouldn't have been so bad if this geek Jody hadn't been around and even sleeping with Reese in the front bedroom.
"When can we?" he whispered desperately.
"Oh, don't be such a baby," she shushed him. "They'll only be here a few weeks."
"A few weeks!" he husked out. Jody had stopped singing that god-dam song about "The Best Things in Life are Free" but the damage to his ego had all been done and it couldn't be repaired easily. Once a man started suspecting a woman he might as well divorce her, he had always believed. But this situation was different. He was on the pot but he just couldn't get his turd out. In other words, he was stuck on center. He had a whore but couldn't screw her. It was like having your cake with your mouth tied shut and chains on your ankles.
"Don't hound me, Rod," Marta pleaded. "I have my problems. Reese wants me to pay back the doctor bills he settled for me but I haven't the money."
"Well, after paying the rent here I'm flat," Rod mumbled. He had brought a bottle and he felt like a drink. "How about a highball?" he asked glumly.
"Bring it in," she groaned. "I need it."
At least they could drink together he thought as he went out to the car and brought in the bottle and a quart of 7-Up?
Jody had finished the dishes and was sitting out in the front room reading a magazine. Reese was in the bedroom with Myrtle. He got ice at the sink and mixed a couple of highballs. He poured a double for himself. Jesus! If the liquor went to his guts he might rape Marta and shock the whole god-dam family and rub prick juice in Jody's face. Well, he could at least think it.
He noticed a little terrier dog around and when he brought the drinks in Marta had the dog on the bed with her. "It's Reese's dog," she said taking her glass and gulping down a big swallow. "Her name is Mitzy."
"A bitch, huh?" Ron smircked.
"She's a darling," Marta said, petting the dog.
"When I come home from the shop tired I come in here with Mitzy and lock the door and just kind of pass out."
"Humph," Rod gulped a slug of whisky and 7-Up, "maybe that dog has a hot tongue?"
"Oh, your mind is always on cunt," Marta sneered, gulping down another slug of booze.
"I suppose while I'm suffering for it the goddam dog is licking you off."
"All right, suppose she is," Marta defied him. "Can't I have a little pleasure and relaxation without a god-dam man in my hair? I get sick of men. I could go on forever without ever screwing a son-of-a-bitch again."
"Yea , I believe you could and I'm just a prize sucker."
"Oh, shut up, Rod, and get me another drink. I'm spitting cotton."
He went and got another highball for Marta. Maybe if he got her lit she'd lose some of her conscience about the folks being around and let him throw a fuck into her or eat her ass a while. Anything was better than marking time with your prick itching for action.
"Oh, Rod," Marta warmed up but not in the way he wanted her to, "I'm flat broke after paying the telephone deposit and getting a new prescription for my sleeping pills. Go out and bring in some groceries for us and you can have dinner here tonight. Be a good boy and help me. I don't feel too well."
Holy cripes! Groceries and still no ass. What next?
He belted down another highball and with the glow heating him up he said, "Okay, I might as well do that as sit around here and suffer. Who's going to do the cooking?"
"Oh, Jody's good at that. He'll take care of everything."
"Yeah, everything," Rod muttered. "The guy's a regular Rosemary Cluney singing 'Come On To My House'. Fuck it!"
"Now, don't be so jealous," she mocked, twirling her drink idly and petting the dog.
"Jealous!" he snorted. "Of that?"
But the truth was he did suspect Jody. He knew this as he went out to his car to go for the groceries. She had given him a list. The trouble was, Marta was a whore and whores were noted for taking on monsters and finks. They always wanted their lovers to be inferior to them, dependent. It gave them a sense of being needed, while a John was self-sufficient and actually a level above them or higher. Johns were fair game, to be cheated for their money. Johns didn't really respect a whore and so they hated them. Maybe Marta really despised and hated him for getting serious about her. He had something there but by God he was going to forget it. He had gone too far now to turn back. He had to muscle on until her folks left and they had the house to themselves. Then he would get his reward.
He had dinner with the family that night, Jody doing all the work. He and Marta were high and Reese had had a few. Jody didn't drink anything stronger than beer. Rod noticed how Marta kept passing the food to Jody and favoring him in every way while she paid no attention to Rod who was supposed to be her favored lover. Of course if he called her about it she'd say Jody was a poor geek who needed sympathy while Rod was a favored turkey who could eat himself sick any time he wanted to. He was beginning to know more about Marta but he didn't particularly like it.
Marta eased him out after dinner and he went home leaving half the whisky in the fridge. It wouldn't be there when he came back again. Marta could drink like a fish inhaled water. Maybe she had a bottle hidden somewhere all the time. Why was she broke? She made good money at Hepsibah's and she sure wasn't paying any rent now.
He stopped in at a cocktail lounge and pushed his foot up into the slipper arch of a B-girl he knew, buying a couple of drinks for her. But he just couldn't make the effort to date her and maybe fight half the night for a piece of ass and then not get it. He had his stuff paid for and eventually he was going to collect.
A couple of days later he dropped in on Marta and family, still knocking. When he walked in he nearly had a hemorrhage. Old Fats Hagen got up with exaggerated politeness from where he had been sitting on the davenport. The old reprobate extended a bony hand as if to a fellow sucker or the latest on the list.
"I yust was stoppin' in to say hello to Marty," Fats said as Rod shook hands with him mechanically. "We sure miss Marty down dere. Nobody to carry coffee up to in the mornings."
"Yeah," Rod said out of the corner of his mouth.
He had visions of old Fats sitting on the edge of the bed drooling after bringing Marta her coffee.
Maybe he'd get his fingers wet as part payment for his favors.
Marta wasn't home at the moment or Rod would have given her a piece of his mind. She didn't come in for an hour and Rod thought he would fly to pieces sitting around and trying to be congenial. But old Fats finally pulled out. His junker car was standing out at the curb. After that Rod could get himself together. He had another bottle out in the car and when Reese came in from the bedroom he suggested a drink and asked casually where Jody was.
"Oh, Jody's still on the job at the cafe. Elmo leaves the place to him pretty much these days. They ain't doing too well I hear."
Yeah, Rod thought, Marta eats too many steaks and chops for the ass she gives out. But of course he didn't have any visible evidence of that yet. It was simply circumstantial. He brought in the liquor but while he was mixing drinks for Reese and himself he noticed that the last bottle he had brought still stood half full in the fridge. Funny. He couldn't believe Marta would leave it, and then it occurred to him that she was concealing her drinking from her folks. Alcoholics were noted for hiding their bottles. That half bottle in the fridge was a grandstand play maybe and partly for his benefit. After all, if Marta was really an alcoholic like Sue Hawks had been she wouldn't want her prize sucker to know it. She had enough against her without that too. Well, he'd see.
Reese and he got warmed up on booze and were going good when Marta came in. Right away Rod could see that she had been drinking. Old Fats had picked her up in his junker and brought her home.
"I hate that place!" she blew off right away. "I'd like to have a business of my own." Of course Rod was the only one supposed to know what kind of business she referred to.
Rod mixed her a drink and joined her in the back bedroom where the dog was waiting with its tongue hanging on. Rod kicked at the dog. "You god-dam son-of-a-bitch, you're getting my pussy," he grumbled.
Marta flung herself on the bed with a house coat thrown over her bra and panties. She didn't go around stark naked under her house coat as long as the family was there.
Reese went back into the front bedroom with his mother-leaving the lovers alone. "Well, what's the score this time?" Rod asked sitting on the edge of the bed and trying to get his fingers wet by slipping them up under Marta's panty leg.
"Oh, leave me alone," she bitched at him. "I don't feel like that."
"Oh, so you got yourself off at the shop, huh?" he flung at her bitterly.
"Shut up that talk!" she ground out angrily. "You know I never come with a John."
"Well, I know damned well you never came with me when I was a John ... whups, maybe I still am a John in your book?"
"I'm just miserable, that's all. It's hell having the folks here like this."
"Yeah, especially when you have your old suckers coming in all the time like this Jody and old Fats," he could not forebear flinging at her.
"They don't get a thing!" she snapped disgustedly. "You're just a god-dam jealous square and don't know the score. You think a woman fucks every guy she sees like you want to do with every girl you see. I know how you are, you bastard. You want to suck off every young girl that passes you on the street."
"Well, god-dam you, if I have to depend on a bitch like you to take care of me you can't blame me for wanting to eat the pants off a Sunday school girl and throw her god-dam dead body out on her father's lawn."
"You talk like a god-dam psycho!" she blazed at Rod.
"You oughta know what that is," he belted her.
The fight was really building up when the telephone rang. Rod went back into the kitchen to mix more drinks while Marta talked to whoever it was that had called. Rod wondered if it wasn't a John trying to make her on the outside. Well, he'd put a stop to that later. But it wasn't a John. It was another female. He could tell that from the talk. Maybe it was this Deana butch that had put on the show with her that night she had called him out at his house and rubbed the telephone on her cunt and all that shit.
When he came in with the drinks Marta was lying across the bed with her house-coat off and her ass barely covered by her panties. She was starting to talk dirty with this cunt on the other end of the line. Whore talk he figured. He hated it. He was too much of a square ever to go for dirty talk over a telephone. God-dammit, people might be listening in and you could get yourself in a jam talking like that over a telephone if the wrong people were listening.
He got madder and madder listening to that talk while he stood there with an unsatisfied prick and his mouth watering to cup itself over her genitals.
"Did you get your finger up her ass really?" Marta was saying. "Oh, she bit your tits, huh? Well, the god-dam little bitch, I didn't think she had it in her. Say, how about that bell hop, Louie? Has he jacked off in front of you lately, that little son-of-a-bitch...."
Rod flipped for a minute as he walked around the bed. He could just get through to the phone between the bed and the wall. With a curse he snatched the telephone away from Marta and slammed it down on the hooks.
"Shut up that god-dam talk, it makes me sick," he grated at her, as he walked around to the other side of the bed.
Marta was pretty well lit. He knew damned well she had been drinking before she came home. She knee-walked out into the center of the bed and glared at him. "You god-dam sick bastard," she lashed out. "You're nothing but a stupid square and I despise you."
He saw red as he swung a haymaker at her. His blow smashed her on the side of the head. She went down to the bed but she wasn't out.
Struggling up, she glared at him wildly. "I'll call my brother. He'll beat the hell out of you. You hit me, you bastard. Guys have been buried in concrete coffins for hitting me."
"Yeah, I don't doubt it," he was cooling a little. "All right, go and tell your brother. Maybe he will beat the shit out of me and then maybe he won't. Just maybe he'd like to beat the shit out of you when it comes right down to it."
She got up to call his bluff and put on her house coat. He stood in the kitchen with a drink as she went into the front bedroom. He didn't hear any loud voice or anything. When she came back she had a package of cigarettes. That was all she had gone to her brother for. Shit! She wouldn't tell her brother anything and she knew why. She had deserved that whack on the side of the head. Maybe that's just what she needed, a damned good beating.
In the end she cooled and let him close the bedroom door and throw a fuck into her. But it had to be a quickie. It wasn't nearly enough to satisfy him but she wouldn't let him really get going with her folks in the house.
He went home after bringing in some more groceries. Jody was back by that time ready to cook dinner, but Rod excused himself. He had no desire to sit there at the table and see Marta favoring Jody and ignoring him like a whore loves her pimps or her gigolos and despises her Johns.
At least he had got his nuts off in his favorite pussy. God only knew what else he would have to take if he kept on with Marta. But he had to hold the fort until the family had pulled out for Missouri. Then ... then they could really go to town with their bed work.
The next time he came in he had the displeasure of meeting Elmo Dahl. He rather expected it after Fats Hagen and Jody had shown up to feed off the new sucker. Dahl was courteous but too cool, he thought. A toughish looking character with glassy blue eyes and a hard look that belied his patronizing speech. Rod thought of pimp the minute he looked at Elmo Dahl. This guy would sell a girl's ass for a cut, especially since the restaurant business wasn't too good according to Reese.
Marta introduced him as "her aunt's friend". Everybody was somebody's friend or a relative, which was a good excuse for having a pimp or a John around. '
"Glad to see Marta has somebody rooting on her side," Elmo Dahl said. "She's had it pretty tough. You ought to have seen her when she came here from Chicago. Mighty sick girl, but we nursed her back to life."
"Yeah," Rod thought. "You sure did and you got your pricks off with her in exchange." Aloud he said, "Well, she's not doing so bad now."
What was this bird after, Rod asked himself. Marta couldn't have the excuse that Elmo Dahl was a geek or old enough to be her father. Elmo was younger than Rod, maybe in his early thirties, and he sure looked capable of ramming his prick into a hot cunt. It sure looked as if Elmo was the sponsor down at the Belleview. She had eaten free at his cafe apparently even though Elmo might not have paid her room rent. Fats Hagen might have taken care of that for the free feels, and whatever, he had received while carrying up coffee to Marta's room while she lay in bed ready for ass work and maybe sweating for it, at least when she wasn't able to go out and sell herself.
Elmo Dahl left shortly after Rod arrived on the scene, and as he and Marta returned to the main bedroom for a few drinks, he couldn't help bringing up the status of this latest addition to the creep gallery at the Elmdale house.
"Elmo is just a friend," Marta swore up and down. "He's helped me because I'm practically in the family through his friendship with my aunt."
"Fuck your aunt," Rod snapped. "It looks pretty thin, him being around. If I ever seen a pimp he's a dead ringer for one."
"Well, you could learn a few things from Elmo," Marta fired back. "He can get a hard-on any time and last all night, that's something you can't do, Pauline."
"Just how the hell do you know he can get a hard-on fast and last all night?"
"I know some of his girl friends. He broke one in just the other day and they screwed for hours up in a hotel room. Both of them were so sore for days that they could hardly get around."
"Oh, so that's all you know about him? Maybe you expect me to believe that." Rod hated Elmo Dahl now. He had merely disliked Jody and Fats but this god-dam pimp son-of-a-bitch who could fuck all night ... this bastard was somebody to really be jealous of.
"I don't want a guy that fucks all night," Marta tried to cover for herself. "You know I don't like guys who can't get it off. They hurt me."
"Okay, okay," he fumed, hoping she would let him have at least a quickie. But he didn't even get that as old Fats Hagen came in to shoot the shit and then Jody. They had groceries this time. Reese had done the honors. So Ron didn't have to spend any more money for the cunt he wasn't getting.
He bowed himself out before dinner time, leaving the field to Fats Hagen and Jody and maybe Elmo Dahl if the bastard came in. This Elmo Dahl he didn't like. The son-of-a-bitch was a menace to the happy love nest he planned with Marta after her folks had left for Missouri. But what could he do about it? They could all say he was imagining things. And now he was certain that Marta would lie on a stack of Bibles to keep him on the string. He had to swallow his resentment and hang on for a while. Maybe everything would work out. At least that god-dam rat Jody would be out of the way after the folks left on the trip back to Missouri.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CREEPS
Old Jody had a helluva habit of singing that damned song "The Best Things in Life are Free". Rod tried to convince himself that the dumb kid didn't mean anything by it. But the knowledge that this god-dam creep slept at the house every night while Rod had to pound his pud out on Rosalind Street really pfssed him off. He could see this oily son-of-a-bitch stealing out of bed late at night when Reese and Myrtle were asleep and getting into bed with Marta and maybe sucking her off and fucking her too. The guy might be an awful masturbator but he was young enough to spare some juice for a sexy chick like Marta whom he eye-fucked every time he looked at her.
Whores liked creeps and queers and monstrosities, he had always heard and read. They were sick women and they had sick ideas about people. They got a sadistic satisfaction out of giving their come to pitiful inferiors like the creep Jody or an old brute like Fats Hagen. As for Elmo Dahl, this bastard didn't give a damn about her but if he was her pimp, or trying to be, he'd have his ready prick into her whenever he felt like it, and maybe it was pure bullshit that she didn't like an everlasting hard-on. Maybe she just didn't like her Johns to take too long at getting their asses off and the fee earned.
Hell, for all he knew this god-dam Elmo Dahl was stealing in at night through the back door that Marta kept open for him and going to bed with her. He'd have nerve enough to pull that off regardless of what Marta wanted him to do. He was just that kind of a bold burglar of a bastard, and with that one-of-the-family line he just might pass muster with Myrtle and Reese as being harmless sexually around Marta. If you could believe that....
What tortured Rod was to know that Elmo Dahl could get a hard-on any time while he had trouble that way. It got worse about the god-dam creeps being around the house. Now, whenever he came in he found one or two of them, or even all three, hanging around, reading magazines and smoking. Old Fats drank a lot but he usually brought in his own booze. Rod got foxy about bringing in quarts. He could just about kill a pint with Marta, and she had begun to expect him to bring in a bottle a couple of times a week whenever he showed up to pay his respects as Marta's real boy friend. Her moods were nasty to say the least, and she laid it all to having her folks around and cramping her style.
It became harder and harder to get a piece of ass from Marta. She was either tired or sick or not in the mood. He had never seen anybody so peevish. And then she admitted that one night Elmo Dahl had threatened to slit her throat with a butcher knife. Rod wanted to know why of course and Marta let on that Elmo wanted her ass and she wouldn't give it to him. He had flipped but old Fats Hagen had come in about that time and put Elmo in his place. Her brother Reese had been out when this happened and Myrtle apparently sleeping in the bedroom.
It sounded phony to Rod. The way she talked about it sounded like the maunderings of an alcoholic. Why didn't she have Reese throw Elmo Dahl out if it was just sex? Back in his mind lurked the conviction that there was some kind of deal between Marta and Elmo. She owed him money for meals, of course, and maybe he had quit collecting merely from pieces of ass with her. He wanted a cut of her profits, and just maybe he was getting fuck dates for her on commission. Maybe an argument about splitting fees had caused the butcher knife incident.
Fats Hagen elaborated on this one afternoon in the front room after he had driven Marta from work. The old Swede seemed to take a liking to Rod, or at least he pretended to. He never failed to mention casually that "Marty's too old for me.
I'm yust like a fadder to her." But shit for that. Marta had probably put him up to it to keep her latest sucker deceived about the truth of her relationships with all these god-dam creeps from the skidrow hotel.
"Look out for dis Elmo Dahl," Fats warned him. "He's the only one you got to be afraid of. That guy ain't no good for Marty." But he wouldn't say just why he felt this way. And Rod was too finicky and cautious to press for details. If Elmo Dahl had been screwing Marta for her meals, until he got tired of her and wanted real cash, Rod didn't want to know it for real. As a suspicion he could sort of wrestle it around like a hot potato and let it gradually cool in his mind. But if he knew ... well, if he knew he'd quit Marta and everything would be off. He lived on the precarious edge of reality. If he really knew he'd fall off and go smash.
Old Fats Hagen's warning bugged the hell out of him though. It was his worst fears almost realized. All he had now was Marta's assurance that she wasn't screwing anybody at the house, that whatever she'd had with Elmo Dahl, it was in the past. After all, she was a whore, wasn't she? He'd always have to consider that with respect to any situation in the past.
But the idea that he was getting all her come was for the birds. Maybe the dog Mitzy was licking her off when she locked the bedroom door, but it could be that one of the Johns at the shop was really getting to her. And always this god-dam geek Jody got into his hair and bugged him.
Jody got crazier than ever the way he moped around, ogling and staring and looking as if he were about to jack off in his pants. Marta told Rod how Jody had been married but his wife had been killed in an auto accident. He had pictures of his wife and a baby that had been farmed out to welfare. He often showed people these pictures in his wallet. But from what Marta said the marriage was just something he had imagined. She doubted if he ever had been married.
One afternoon when Jody was off at the cafe and he had come in to cook dinner he came up to the bedroom door while Rod was talking to Marta. The geek just stared in at them as if he had lost his mind. Marta said, "Don't pay any attention to the poor kid. He doesn't know what he's doing."
But it made Rod uncomfortable to have this kook looking at him and Marta and he wanted to tell him to get the hell out of there. By the expression in his eyes the guy was sort of enjoying Marta by proxy just watching Rod fool with her. He never said a word, but just stood there in the door watching.
"He's nuts," Rod muttered to Marta. "Looks as if he's been in your bedroom and knows what goes on here."
"He doesn't know a thing," Marta contended.
"You sure he doesn't eat it?" he dug at her.
"He doesn't even know what that is," she said.
"The guys trying to bug me," Rod said and pushed out through the bedroom door to get a drink mixed.
"He doesn't know a thing," Marta contended. "You sure he doesn't eat it?" he dug at her. "He doesn't even know what that is," she said.
"The guys trying to bug me," Rod said and pushed out through the bedroom door to get a drink mixed.
Jody seemed to take the hint and wandered off into the front room.
When Rod came back with the drinks Marta confided with him. "I was making the bed where Jody sleeps with Reese and I found an old wash cloth under the corner of the mattress. It was stiff with dried-up come. Jody uses it to jack off in nights. He dreams of me and jacks off."
"Yeah? Even I have to do that," Rod said, but it relieved him a little to know Jody was jacking off a lot. Maybe he wasn't fucking or sucking Marta, but that didn't clear old Fats Hagen or the worst one of all, Elmo Dahl.
He wasn't getting much from Marta and it really bugged him with all these creeps around. When he got it he had to be satisfied with a quickie. No time to eat Marta's cunt like he wanted to do and had done that first day they had rented the house. It would be a week or two yet before Reese and Myrtle and Jody left for Missouri. Sometimes he wondered if he could stand it that long with all these creeps around and maybe crawling into bed with his girl.
His passion for Marta was the same as ever if not worse. He didn't want anyone else, even if he could have afforded to finance other cunt. On top of the rent he had paid he was spending money for groceries every few days and with his house payments and all he was really bent.
"I'll make it up to you, after the folks are gone," Marta kept telling him, and he had to believe it or go nuts. It hounded him continually that a whore ought to be able to take care of her man, especially one as easy to handle as Rod Kel-sey. What in the hell got into a woman that because a man was really in her bag he could be left out on a limb sexually with the excuse that she was tired doing it at the shop, or that they had to be careful because her folks were around? Shit! She could have gone out with him in his car and fucked him off or gone home with him for an hour or two. It just didn't make sense. The whole damned situation was a phony and he had just about had it with all these geeks around smelling the ass of this bitch like a bunch of dogs out in the street. Fuck the whole damned situation!
It got down to the last week. Myrtle was up and around, feeling pretty peart. They planned to leave the following Monday morning. Rod didn't usually come in on Sunday but since this was their last day at the house he decided to accept the always standing invitation to mid-day dinner that Jody would cook as usual. He brought in a pint of liquor for Marta. There had been a sale on brandy and he had picked up a pint of eighty proof stuff instead of the usual whiskey. Marta had taken one look at the brandy and said irritably, "You know I don't want that shit. I want whiskey."
"Okay, we'll exchange it."
"Never mind," she said. "I have to go to the drug store anyway. I'll exchange it."
"Okay, I'll drive you," he offered.
"No, I need the exercise. I'll walk it."
He noticed how she was all dressed up in her cunt clothes, the blue jeans, ragged around the knee, the cream yellow silk blouse that showed her tits to good advantage, the green ballet-heeled slippers that looked so sexy on her baby doll legs, and then the fresh hair-do. She had been to the beauty parlor Saturday and must have spent plenty.
"Jesus, you're all dressed up," he commented.
"Well, the folks are leaving tomorrow morning you know and...."
Just then the telephone rang and she went back into the bedroom to answer it. He didn't go back with her. Myrtle and Reese were out in the front room and Jody was in the kitchen, so he just stayed in the front room.
When Marta came out again he noticed that she kept looking out the front window, drawing the curtain aside every now and then. Who the hell had called? He wondered and what was she looking out the window for as if she expected to see someone, maybe a car pulling up? But he decided he was imagining things again. Why should Marta be up to something on this last day that the folks would interfere with their bed work? It just didn't seem possible that she would pull anything off today.
Finally she went and got the brown bag containing the brandy and said before she left, "I'll be back in about an hour, but don't wait dinner for me if I'm a little late. Just go ahead and eat."
Rod was used to her ignoring him as if he didn't require attention. The bitch was full of mean tricks like that. He could overlook it especially since he was going to get taken care of Monday but good. The rent was paid for a week yet before the first month was up.
Marta walked out. Later he knew that a car picked her up on the corner where it wouldn't be seen from the house. That was what the telephone call had been about, to decide where she would meet the son-of-a-bitch. But nobody suspected her then. Rod was sure Reese and Myrtle weren't in on it in any way.
Well, the hour passed and no Marta. Dinner was put on the table and they all ate. Rod didn't have much appetite. He was worried about Marta, but she had said to go ahead and eat if she was a "little late". Maybe everything was okay. But what would take her so long at the drugstore? If she were getting a prescription for sleeping tablets it wouldn't take her that long, and exchanging the brandy for whiskey would only take a minute if she paid the difference in price.
Rod tried to keep his cool. Jody had gone back to the cafe for duty the rest of the afternoon and Reese was getting everything loaded into the truck and puttering around while Myrtle rested to be strong for the trip. They had a bed made for her in the back with the load spaced to make room for her.
Finally, when three o'clock rolled around, Rod was so uptight that he was about to shit colored water. Something was wrong sure as hell. Marta wouldn't stay out like this on the last Sunday with the folks. It was more than he could keep to himself and he spilled his guts to Reese, who was sympathetic immediately and obviously pissed off with his sister.
"She's my own sister," he burst out, "but you can't tell a thing about what she says. She's as likely as not soaking it up at some bar. Hell, I paid her doctor bills when she came out here sick from Chicago and I've never seen a penny of it. Now that we really need it she won't pay us a cent. You're a good guy, Rod, and I hate to see you get mixed up with her. She's my own sister but she ain't worth a god-dam, I'm sorry to say."
Myrtle had sensed the supense and heard some of the talk. She came into the kitchen where they were talking. She looked glum as she said, "She was always contrary, Rod. When she was little she'd crawl under the table and sulk when ever we had to wash the dishes. The other girls would help but she never did. Then she ran off with this no-good kid when she was only fourteen and God knows what happened to her. We never heard from her for years."
"Well, I don't see why she'd leave like this," Rod said gloomily. "The rent is paid until the end of next week. I know because I paid it."
Myrtle looked glummer than ever as she said, "I figured it was something like that. But I wish the guy had paid the rent that should-a paid it!"
She might as well have socked him under the belt. It knocked the wind out of him to hear that. All his fears and suspicions were triggered off in a blast like a time bomb. God-dam the bitch! So there had been another guy. His mind hit on Elmo Dahl unerringly, but he didn't dare ask. He didn't want to know. It was enough that somebody else had been sneaking into her bedroom and her folks knew it. Now he was sure that they knew but just didn't want to talk about it.
"She'll never be any good, Rod," Reese said.
"You're too good a guy to be taken in by her. Get out while you can. Forget that you ever saw her. She's not worth a serious thought."
"None of her other sisters are like her," Myrtle said on the verge of tears. "I told her you was the best of the lot...."
The best of the lot! God ... then there were more than one. Elmo Dahl wasn't the only one screwing her and at the house too from what Myrtle said. She must have seen these bastards and knew they were screwing Marta in the back bedroom. That god-dam door leading through the kitchen to the back bedroom....
Rod didn't want to talk about it. He was too sick. He didn't want them to know what a fool he had been, paying the rent and Marta scewing guys in the back bedroom until even her mother and Reese knew it, and he wasn't even getting his ass off regular! Fuck the whole god-dam dirty racket. He'd been a fool'and then some. But he could sure cure that.
"I still think she might come in," he said lamely. His voice sounded as sick as he felt inside. "I'll wait till four o'clock and then go. You can tell her I waited till four," he looked around dazedly, hardly knowing where he was.
"Take everything you loaned her, everything that's yours," Myrtle said. "I wouldn't leave her anything. You deserve better than her, Rod."
He wished to God Myrtle would shut up. Every time she opened her mouth she buried him deeper. He hadn't realized how crazy he was about Marta. Until now that he faced the bitter end. This was too much, way too much. He never wanted to see her again. Now he could understand why that son-of-a-bitch of a John had become nothing but a walking skelton after Marta had ditched him. The poor bastard had spent all his money for her ass and then when he was down and out he had just walked the streets and pined away. She talked about it with snug satisfaction. All Johns were just suckers to her. They didn't deserve any better, and she wouldn't have any sympathy for Rod Kelsey the latest victim. Hell ... Jody and Fats Hagen were luckier than they knew that she had never put the bee on them as her man. As for Elmo Dahl, she deserved that pimp-faced son-of-a-bitch. Why hadn't he really slit her throat with that butcher knife!
Four o'clock came and no Marta. He had been sort of hoping right up to the last that she would show up and he could have it out with her with her parents to back him up. Maybe it was just as well. Suppose Marta broke down and begged when her back was to the wall. He'd probably stay with her and reap that supposed harvest on Monday when the folks were gone at last. Now he had the guts to walk out on her and never see her again.
CHAPTER FIVE
GO SMASH
She had a lot of things of his that she had borrowed like the vacuum cleaner and a record player and a lot of dishes, pressure cooker, etc. He put all this stuff in his car out in the drive while Reese and Myrtle stood around and cheered him on. They enjoyed seeing the disgrace of the family get her just desserts. They couldn't know the hurt in him, the screaming pain of his humiliation and rejection. Just one more god-dam romance, the worst of them all. He had to be taken in by a whore.
He got all his things into the car and got in behind the wheel.
Myrtle and Reese stood up close to the car window on his side...."We can't pay you back now for what you did for us," Reese said. "But we'll do something for somebody to make up for it."
"You don't owe me a cent," Rod said. He felt ashamed that they should blather this way about what he had done for them. All he had wanted was Marta. He didn't really give a damn about them. The old lady was about finished anyway. Might be better if she had died in the hospital and saved them all a lot of trouble. But he had to pretend that he was the injured good guy, such a god-dam lamb for Jesus! Fuck it!
"Watch the steps," Myrtle said as he backed out of the drive.
He hardly knew what he was doing as he drove out of town. He wanted to go home he thought but somehow he got on the wrong road. Half an hour later he realized he was turned around and lost. He didn't know one end from the other. That goddam bitch had really bombed him.
No, he didn't want to go home. His dog could wait for his feed a while. Furthermore, he didn't want to be within hearing distance of his telephone after Marta got home. She'd be calling him and mad as hell or bleating and weeping, one way or the other.
The first thing Monday he intended to have his telephone number changed to an unlisted one. If old Marta wanted to see him she'd have to break the jinx and come out in a taxi or have old Fats drive her in his junker. Or else write him a letter. It wouldn't do her any good. He was through with her and only wished he could beat the shit out of her for what she had done with him.
He began to come up for air and got himself straightened around as to directions. He remembered it was Sunday and people he knew wouldn't be at work, maybe out for a drive. He needed company, anybody to keep him from eating on himself and going mad. Stopping in at a liquor store he picked up a case of beer of a brand that the San-fords liked. Will Sanford and his wife Pearl were young married people. Rod had bought advertising through Will who worked for an agency in town. They had got acquainted and Pearl had wiggled her ass for him to stimulate business. He had never screwed Pearl, but he figured he could if he really tried and Will might tolerate it as la-gniappe for business. They weren't doing too well buying their furniture and a house on the installment plan. So they'd appreciate the free beer when he drove in, that is, if they were home.
If they could only scare up a piece of ass for him. He felt like fucking himself to death to spite Marta who had cheated him of his honeymoon at the house.
The Sanfords were home when he drove in and welcomed him as an old grad to a fraternity get-together...."Who gave you the dried up rubber this time?" Will asked. "That blonde prostitute you were bragging about?"
"I told you to lay off those-whores," Pearl crowed triumphantly, defending her nineteen-year-old housewife status.
Rod thought while Will opened beer cans, "If Pearl was my wife I'd have her god-dam teeth scraped." Just the same he would settle for her tonight. He remembered how Will had suggested that he sleep with them some night. It was the modern friendly thing. The Eskimos all did it. Will liked to be way out. He had a university degree and an unsatisfied literary ambition, and Rod's poetic leanings (amateur) provided a special homo attraction to which a wife could be sacrificed, with advertising contracts on the margin of course. Rod thought, "I'll take them up if they still want me to go to bed with them as a token of their special favor for a special friend."
He didn't dwell on his heartache and smashed pride. They had to think Marta was just a passing flame as an attraction. Swigging down beer on top of the liquor he had drunk with Resse before saying goodbye, he began to swing and rush the bathroom to drain.
In the excitement of pouring down cold beer the three became poetically inspired and Will got out some of his college records and played his poems as read by himself, especially the one that went: "Remember me when snow is on the grass...."
Rod thought of the one about the fire in the furnace when there was snow on the mountain. It just about fit him the way he felt tonight with his hair a little thinner. Will Sanford stunk as a poet he thought but he liked his hot, young wife in spite of her tartared teeth. The bitch might be a phony in her attitudes socially but she smelled of steaming cunt, and it got hotter as they consumed the case of beer.
Hinting at a good sized advertising contract for Zarak Shoes that Will could get a commission on, the lid came off of restraint and inhibitions. Pearl sat on Rod's lap and sucked tongues with him while Will strummed his lyre like another fathead Nero. Rome might not be burning but Pearl sure was and Rod could feel the heat of her cunt through his pants where his suffering prick was stowed away with all its accumulated frustration for Marta. His hand just couldn't pacify it but maybe nineteen-year-old Pearl could take care of him. He was willing to try.
Will got sick as he usually did and went to the bathroom to heave up and get drunk all over again like a good Roman. While he was out Rod got his hand up in Pearl's panties and really swabbed her pussy. It sure felt good and Pearl groaned and lay back with her teeth bared as he masturbated her. She made a grab for his fly but about that time Will came back in and started orating poetry and playing Wagner on the stereo until the whole god-dam house sounded as if a chorus of valkyrs were galloping to a battlefield to pick up some fresh hard-ons.
Finally it got so late that Will had to think of getting some sleep so he wouldn't be dead with a hangover when he went to work. He got up and announced that as a special favor to a prince of a man Rod Kelsey was going to sleep between him and his wife...."Just like the god-dam Eskimos!" he ripped off that one as if he had never said it before.
"As a special favor to His Highness!" Pearl seconded the motion, holding a half empty can of beer high in one girlish hand.
Rod thought, "Jesus, what a whore she would make if Will decided to put her out for hire. But she'd have to get her damn teeth cleaned." He was so woozy he couldn't keep on one track mentally, but there was one thing he could remember. He was going to bed with the Sanford's and this time it wasn't going to be platonic. He'd fuck off in Pearl's soft, gooey ass with all its heat even if Will shot him for it. He had always wondered if Will had the guts to go through with it really. Of course he probably was tired of Pearl anyway. She sure wasn't a college girl and could hardly match him mentally. But the poetry of her ass made up for that evidently.
They piled into bed drunk, Rod stripping off to his underwear and Pearl getting into her baby-doll jacket. Will didn't wear anything. He said, "The beer immunizes me to catching cold. It's the vitamins in the hops."
Ron didn't care how Will went to bed as he crawled in beside Pearl. God, but he wanted her. She wasn't the trick that Marta was but she was good, honest, frustrated housewife stuff. Maybe she didn't wash all the crud out of her cunt like Marta did, and maybe you could knock her up and have an illegitimate child by her, but one thing was for sure, Pearl wanted it bad and he bet she'd blow her ass all over him the first time they did it.
He hardly knew what he was doing as he snuggled up to Pearl's warm, smelly body under the covers. It was a bit chilly that night so they covered up. Will still kept droning his god-gam poetry while his wife (not Rome) burned. Rod had such a hard-on it hurt, and as he ran his hand sneakingly up under Pearl's baby-doll top and got into her wet, hot pussy, he thought he would blow himself before he got started. But Pearl reached down and got his prick in her young girl hand and somehow soothed him so he could hold it.
"I hope you two aren't fooling," Rod gasped as he rolled over and raised his knee over Pearl's soft leg.
Will Sanford's voice rose to impassioned inspiration. It was as if he were singing himself to sleep or to anesthesia. Maybe he did or didn't give a damn about his wife playing Eskimo mate. It didn't matter to Rod any more. He had to have this. He ached for it.
Pearl was young and soft and hotter than a fox. She wasn't harsh and douched out like Marta and Rod knew he was fucking a woman who could blow her ass the regular way. He worked his cock into her gently and Pearl gave a little nudge of her ass and sank him into her clear to the balls.
God, but that was good! Will could kill him and he'd die happy.
He began fucking Pearl gently with a tender rhythm. Her breath was coming in long, slow gasps. What Will was doing or saying didn't seem to matter any more. They were temporarily disturbed slightly when Will suddenly rolled over out of bed and left the room. Maybe he just couldn't stand it. More likely he was after another can of beer and was going to play one of his poetry records so he could mourn over his martyric neglect as a literary artist.
"Oh, God, you're killing me, Rod!" Pearl gasped after Will left the bedroom.
"You don't sound as if you were suffering," Rod panted as he plowed into Pearl, dunking his prick in her warm love juices. He could feel her vagina clutching at him, her ass complementing each surge of his lusting body. Usually he would blow himself long before this, but the emotional hang-up he had seemed to change his whole metabolism and nerve tension. Sex was like that. You never could tell what you could do. Some men could ride all night after a funeral, and married people were known to fuck like satyrs and nymphos after a quarrel when they just about sued each other for divorce.
He was like that tonight. He was pouring his guts and his hurt heart and tortured pride into this young swinger wife of Will Sanford.
"Gee, you're good, Rod," Pearl whispered. "I thought you said you were rabbit. You can hold it longer than Will."
"I want you to come," he gritted into her breasts as he fucked her desperately.
"I've already come once," she answered. "I'll make it again when you come. Now give it to me, daddy."
He jazzed her hard. For a minute he wondered if he might not be able to get there. It scared him to think that he couldn't come with all this good stuff. It would be Marta that did it, that witch bitch!
Then he got there, racing uphill for it. "Now, now," Pearl whispered, driving her ass into him and spiraling around his cock to bring him on.
There it was! His prick was jetting like a stud in a mare. His whole body balled up and shot itself out through his throbbing cock. He felt as if he were making quints in Pearl's fertile young gut.
And she wanted him to be the father. She wasn't like bitch Marta, holding out on him. She was giving herself as a woman should.
He shot and shot into her and she put her warm hands behind his ass and flibbled his balls to get him milked out good. For a moment or two he lay on her and let it soak. Out in the front room they could hear Wagner opera on the stereo. Will was playing it softly and declaiming some of his poetry or else playing a record.
"He don't give a damn for me any more," Pearl sobbed suddenly. "He'd let a dog screw me right in front of him, the son-of-a-bitch."
"For God's sake, don't make me listen to a fight tonight," Rod begged. "You've put me in heaven. Don't take it away and push me back into hell."
"Oh, we won't quarrel," Pearl said, running her hand over his thin hair and down his back. "I wish I was married to somebody like you ... but it wouldn't work. Marriage is for the birds."
He pulled out of her and lay on his back resting. He was pretty sober now and he knew he had to get home and get some sleep so he could show up at the office tomorrow. He could leave the receiver off the hook to be sure Marta couldn't get in touch with him, or wake him up once he got to sleep. He had no desire to stay all night with the Sanfords. They might blow up and have a fight. Besides, in the light of dawn it would be like waking up in your own drunk puke. He just wanted to sleep on the wonderful piece of ass that Pearl Sanford and Will, too, had given him.
While he was lying there thinking about getting his clothes on, Will came in. Pearl had gone to the bathroom. Will got into bed naked and threw an arm over Rod.
"All this marriage business is for the birds," Will said in a low, husky voice. "Friendship between men is much higher in the scale of emotions. We could be very close, Rod. I could be your En-dymion. We could go places together Pearl wouldn't care. You see how she is."
Rod felt a cold chill stealing up his spine. He hadn't suspected that Will Sanford was a homo. Men had never attracted him. Now he could feel Will's stiff, young prick shoving up against him suggestively. In a minute the bastard would be on his ass ramming his hard-on up his rectum. Maybe he wanted to do this to spite Pearl. Who could say?
"I know how you feel, Will," he lied manfully. "You're Rupert in Lawrence's 'Women in Love' and I'm Gerald. Remember that?"
"Yeah...." Will pulled back wincingly. "And Gerald got hooked by a nympho and walked off into the Alps and froze to death."
"Maybe I'll end that way," Rod said, "but for tonight I've got to get home and get some sleep."
"Okay," Will said as Pearl came in from the bathroom and they rolled apart on the bed.
After Rod got on his clothes the Sanfords came out and made a ceremony of saying goodnight. They would be seeing him soon again. He didn't know for sure about that. Something told him he could never repeat this. For one thing he wouldn't be in the same emotional mess that had toughened him sexually. Next time he had Pearl, if the Eskimo welcome still prevailed, he'd come so quick she'd be disgusted with him, and somehow he couldn't see her for eating puss. He'd keep remembering her teeth and comparing her with Marta who was like a rose to Pearl's stink weed.
He got some somehow, glad that he could drive while drunk. Bluff wasn't around to greet him. The dog would be over to a neighbor's where he had mooched his dinner no doubt. He went in and took the phone off the hook. For a minute he debated jerking it out of the wall. Fuck Marta. She better not try to call. Then he took three barital tablets and got under a warm shower.
Flinging himself on the bed, he tried to pass out, but as the barbital took over he merely sunk down into a kind of suspended animation with his mind fouled up by horrible dreams. It was a hell of a sleep. Toward morning he awakened, groggy and dazed, with a painful hard-on. The best he could do was pump his prick and remember Pearl Sanford. It helped him keep Marta out of his mind. But he couldn t blow himself and he had to get up with a sore prick that refused to go one way or the other.
After a cold shower he felt merely miserable as he made a cup of coffee with instant and hot water. He had no desire to eat at home. He'd put out food for Bluff and go downtown for Breakfast. Anything to keep going so he wouldn't have time to think.
It occurred to him he could call the telephone company and have his service cut off until they could give him an unlisted number. That was what he did just before leaving the house. If Marta wanted to get in touch she'd have to get off her high horse and come down to earth. Why hadn't she ever come out to stay with him all night? It was just more proof of the dirty, lousy deal she had given him. How could a woman stoop so low? Whore ... yes, by God, she really was a whore, in every sense of the world. He'd been just a John, just high enough in the world so it was worthwhile double crossing him, making a sucker out of him, feeding her god-dam geeks at his expense, giving them her ass, when he was dying for it. What a sucker he had been for that blonde bitch!
Unloading his car and putting away all the stuff he had loaned her, he tried to envision her reactions when she got home and found him gone. Reese had said she'd probably get in late and be in a bad humor, meaning drunk and ugly. Maybe she wouldn't know he was gone for good until morning when her folks told her he had left and that he knew the truth about her contemptible actions. Added proof would be that the vacuum cleaner and stereo and dishes, etc. were gone. Well, she didn't have to pay off on Monday for the house and all, but the rent would be due in about a week, and about that time....
Rod laughed. He'd bet his bottom dollar that before the week was up, just before the rent was due again, he'd hear from Marta. She'd be out to see him, maybe Fats would drive her out to his house. Or he'd get a letter from her after she found out she couldn't call him.
Rod laughed as he drove into town for breakfast. "Two bits she writes me ... if she can write. I wonder. She won't have to face me. She wants me to knuckle before she tries to look me in the eye."
He wished he could be as brave as his words. But his heart was a stone that hurt so much he wanted to tear it out of him and sling it as far as he could away where he could never find it again. It had always been this way when he fell for a woman or a girl. Misery! A little joy, a brief dance of folly ... and then the disillusionment, the coming up for air. Three to six months of durance vile to get her out of his guts. How long would it take this time? He was older now ... and Marta was still a whore. That could kill a man. Yes, it could!
How he got through that day he couldn't remember and didn't want to. Every minute was hell. When he talked to Ben Pogue or his secretary-bookkeeper his voice seemed far off and inconsequential like in a dream. He had been flying so high like Icarus into the sun and now he had plunged to the harsh, unyielding ground. Only a god-dam poet could suffer like this over a woman, particularly a whore. What hurt more than anything was to realize that if he tried to weep on anybody's shoulder they'd laugh at him. He had to act as if he were taking it in his stride like old John Wayne kissing a dancehall girl goodbye.
A hangover from the Sanford spree didn't help any. Before noon lunch he staggered out through the office on some flimsy excuse. The bars would be open at eleven and he needed a bracer. Sneaking in the back way at a joint several blocks from the office, he tried to hide in a booth while gulping down a vodka with tomato juice. Screwing Pearl had been a pleasure but it was too much like a dream. He knew that if he hadn't been stoned, Pearl would have made him puke. She always had bad breath and body odor.
Vodka wasn't supposed to smell on your breath, so he ordered another. The stuff didn't help much. It seemed to stir up the mess in his mid-section. Stimulant wasn't what he needed ... if only somebody would slug him senseless. It would be what he deserved for falling in love with that blonde bitch, letting her make another walking skeleton of him ... no-o-o! no-o-o! Not that. He got up and sneaked out of the bar into the alley, running from the terror of what had come to his mind ... remembering that story Marta told about the god-dam John who had just wasted away on skidrow because he couldn't have her any more. That's what she could do to weak men, and he couldn't doubt it now. Well, he was weak all right but he had been strong enough to leave her with his big day coming up after suffering through those weeks. He wasn't leaving her because he was broke or had no cunt credit. It was just that she had dragged his valiant banners in the shit of a whore's contempt and he couldn't take it, wouldn't take it, not if he had to put a bullet in his head.
And then he began to think ... why kill myself? Why not kill that bitch and rid the world of such scum?
He got through the day somehow. About all he remembered doing was checking with the phone company to get his unlisted number. He had left the house open for them. Driving home, he stopped for coffee and tried to eat something. Food stuck in his throat. He knew liquor wasn't the way out but he had to do something. He couldn't go back to the Sanfords. It would make him sick like looking at puke in a washbowl next morning. Will Sanford was just a conniving chiseler and now he realized that he was a homosexual who wanted to bugger him and get buggered. That poor little bitch Pearl! No wonder she had fucked the hell out of him playing Eskimo hostess.
After feeding his dog and glancing into his cold, silent house he drove off in the direction of a cocktail lounge where they had a hot number tending bar. If Jackie Lee was behind the bar he could expect amusement. A cool, slim, rusty redhead, Jackie was getting a divorce and bridging over with her boss who was going to marry her rumor said. She could tell a dirty joke and laugh at one without being nasty or crude in any way. Then, if business was slack and you were tanking up, she'd come around and sit on a stool beside you and let you push your toe up in the arch of her slipper. You might even get her to take off her slipper. She once had been a hostess at a swank hotel called the Westward-Ho House and how she did bat that around as if she had been just one more "ho" at the Ho House. Rod saw Jackie as a helluva good lay who called her shots but good. No small fry got to her. He had dreamed of making Jackie before she married again but so far he hadn't even got farther than poetry and his hand.
It was something to keep his mind off Marta. The minute he came in at the Chez Amie he knew Jackie was on the job. The whole place glowed with her light. She had the juke box going and the few customers who got around on blue Monday night were really tanking up.
"Where's the funeral?" Jackie asked in her throaty mating-call voice as Rod climbed onto a stool at her bar.
"Cripes, do I look that low? Gimme a bourbon hi."
"You look like you ate it before you looked."
"Do tell ... well, I never could match you, Jackie. How do you keep up that front?"
She set out his liquor. "No kidding, Roddy, it's sure a front today. That husband of mine has a tail on me and the son-of-a-bitch is sitting across the street in his car watching the place. If I make a wrong move it may cost me plenty of alimony."
"The hell ... how could a guy ever divorce you?"
He followed her sexy lines down over her tit mounds and the curves of her lithe waist to the soft V lines of her cunt approach. He hoped he might get his face between her legs and nurse for about two hours. For what he had it would be like the comfort of a mother's breasts to a starving babe.
"Oh, you know how it is ... Frank's just another ape who can't stand competition. He wouldn't want me if nobody else wanted me."
"He sees his sun setting," Rod said and his voice sounded hollow and hurt.
Jackie bent down and looked carefully into his face. "Say ... do you feel all right?"
"Sure, I'm all right, quit crying in my beer."
She filled his glass again. "This one is on the house, pal. I've got to turn you on some way."
She had time to come around and sit beside him and as the liquor hit him he felt a glow in his pants. Jackie Lee was really something. If only he could wet his fingers in her prize pussy he'd give a month's pay. She could make him forget that blonde bitch.
He shoved his foot up under Jackie's and said in a low voice, "Do you know why Alice in Wonderland got bigger?"
"No, darling," Jackie leaned nearer until he could smell her cunt and underarms mixed with bath salts. It was stronger than the booze...."why did Alice in Wonderland get bigger? I thought she drank something...."
"No, that's the helluv it, she didn't drink anything after she got knocked up."
He pushed harder with his toe under her slipper and she pushed back insinuatingly. They were foot fucking, as it were, and his cock stirred excitedly. If only he could keep this up....
"I dunno about you, Roddy," Jackie said.
"You could find out," he blurted desperately. "Maybe I can shoot that private eye out there in the car. Would you give me a date if I did that?"
"Rod, you're a bastard. It's a good thing I'm a bitch or I'd have you thrown out."
"No, seriously, why can't we have a little party? I've got a married couple that likes to play Eskimo." He was sweating now. Only desperation and bourbon had inspired him to try and date Jackie Lee. Jesus, everybody wanted her.
Jackie had a call for mixed drinks in a booth and the imitation French flower girl came forward to get the stuff. Rod eye-fucked the waitress while Jackie poured the drinks. Then she was back leaning toward him over the bar...." I've got to be careful, you know that. That damn lawyer of Frank's would sure like to get something on me."
Was she shitting him? He hadn't believed he could date Jackie. She must be having him on just to placate him. But even a ghost of a chance was worth working at. If he could get into Jackie's pants....
He knew better than to say anything about her rumored engagement to the liquor dealer who owned the Chez Amie. That would be a fatal faux pas. He figured Jackie would slip out on her boss and play around if only to stay even with his rumored mistresses. Some said he was getting cirrhosis of the liver from getting sucked off by the country girls looking for jobs.
"Tell you what, Rod," Jackie informed him confidentially, "drop in now and then and I'll let you know when the heat is off. Maybe I'll dare do something."
"Okay," he mumbled trying to act like Cary Grant who did things like this every day and even brushed them off disdainfully. Inside he was reeling. It couldn't be true. Jackie had almost said yes. If he got her over to the Sanfords some night with plenty of booze, why not champagne? he just might bury Marta Swan forever under the sexy flesh of this rare redhead.
He took on quite a load, much more than he had anticipated, as the bar began to fill up and Jackie had to keep busy. Driving home he held grimly to the wheel to keep from weaving. He'd stay with Jackie. She was a life saver. And then when he got home and took a shower and the liquor began to lose its glow, he flung himself on the bed miserably and with his eyes tight shut faced the likely truth. Jackie was just having him on. She knew he was a good spender and if she could keep baiting him with a dream date he'd keep the bar going through dull evenings. It was an old trick. The helluv it was she had him at a distinct disadvantage. He was desperate for comfort and a born sucker for a sexy woman's come-on. One thing she had done for him. She had got him hard and he would whack off without too much trouble.
He rigged up his hot water bottle, filling it about a quarter full of hot water. It wouldn't take long to cool down a little. Then he slicked the rubber with surgical jelly from a tube he had for the purpose. The jelly was colder than a polar bear's paws without the heat of the hot water bottle.
Getting a pillow he folded the hot water bottle inside of it and bulked it up on the bed. It made a pretty good mock-up of a woman's hot ass. Bridging into position, he could shove his stiff prick into the hot water bottle fold inside the pillow and start fucking off. He tried to build up a vision of Jackie Lee stripped to the skin, her florid, soft, pinkish skin aglow with cunt fire, her arms cuddling him to her uptilted, rosebud breasts, as her lithe legs embraced him and her heels thumped his back with enthusiastic ardor. But the vision kept getting fouled up with Marta's grinning face. The god-dam bitch was laughing at him, sneering at his ignominious defeat.
The mocking face of the woman he loved and hated almost nullified the vision of Jackie and he had to pump like hell to keep from going soft before he blew his ass into the slot of the folded hot water bottle which made a pretty good cunt for just makeshift. He knew guys who had rubber women that they could inflate and there were vaginas made of foam rubber that you could heat with electric pads. They even had bulbs you could squeeze to make the vaginas suck the cock like it was a female orgasm. But he was too fussy a square and semi-puritan to want anything around the house that would give him away as a fantastic masturbator. When he finished with the hot water bottle he could wash off the jelly and come and hang it up as if he had never used it for anything but enemas or to keep his belly warm when he had the colic.
He felt pooped after blowing his nuts into the artificial cunt. Putting away the bottle as fast as he could and checking the pillow case for come stains, he got his barbital tablets with a shaky hand and decided to take three again. It would knock him out even though it was piling misery on misery. Blundering and smashing around the house he thought of the telephone and found that the number had been changed. Fuck it! Nothing meant anything to him any more. It was all a fraud, a monstrous skin-game calculated to burn a man down and drive him to his death.
The barbital began to hit him and he sank into an unnatural sleep, kicking and moaning, his mouth frothing as the nightmares romped in like all the devils from hell.
Time passed. That was all he could say. Jackie Lee provided his only consolation. If he could just keep kidding himself that she was sincere. But she wasn't on duty every night and he struggled through his waking hours as if they were an extension of his barbital nightmares.
One thing he didn't forget about Marta ... the call or letter he expected just before the rent was due again. And he didn't miss in his predictions. Two days before the rent was due he found a letter in his box. It was in her familiar school girl scrawl. He opened it with disdain and prejudiced hostility. Well, she could actually write. He remembered her saying one day when the creeps were around that she had gone to college. Elmo Dahl had sneered, "Yeah, cow college with buckets and stools."
It read:
Dear Rod:
Please don't be mad at me. I didn't want them around. They got in my hair, especially Elmo. I owed them money. I couldn't kick them out. I'm all alone at the house. I'll be waiting for you. Don't you remember what we were looking forward to?
All my love Marcia
Shit! Marcia was one of her racket names. "Don't you remember what we were looking forward to?" What did she mean we? He was looking forward to it not her. They were all laughing up their sleeve at him.
The letter did him good though. It soothed his battered ego. She had at least pretended to beg and that was something from her.
He sat down at his typewriter and with a concentration he hadn't enjoyed since going haywire over Marta, he wrote a scathing, contemptuous, nose-thumbing letter in answer to her phony plea just before the rent was due. Dear Marcia (or whoever):
Your letter just before the rent is .due wrings my heart. I am forced to permit the guy who should have paid the rent to do the honors this time.
You double-crossed me all the way and you can go to hell with all your lousy creeps.
Keep "all your love" for the rats you sleep with.
Rod
Tucking this in an envelope he was tempted to send it Special Delivery just to envision her fixing her mouth for a check to cover the rent, and then finding the finger, the middle finger. But he refrained from dramatics. Ordinary mail was good enough for that bitch:
He felt somewhat better after enjoying the pleasure of telling her off and knowing she needed the rent. Then he could look forward to her next move. It tickled his vanity and soothed his hurt ego to think that she valued him enough to make a play to get him back. The more she tried and the harder he could punch her in return the better he would feel. Meanwhile, he could sit at the bar at the Chez Amie on Jackie's shifts and breath deep the intoxicating smell of her cunt. She might be having him on with the private-eye-watching-me line but it kept him hoping a little and when a man was grasping for straws to keep his will-to-live afloat, Jackie Lee's cock teasing really helped.
Will Sanford got his advertising contract, although Ben Pogue didn't approve. Zarak Shoes didn't need it, Pogue said. But the Sanfords had to be paid off for that night in bed. Of course it was there for him again if he wanted it, but he wasn't in love with Pearl and he shied away from deeper involvement in that situation, knowing that Will was a homo. One thing he could use them for ... a date with Jackie Lee. The Sanfords knew Jackie well and when Will had a few bucks to spend he and Pearl usually went on a binge at the Chez Amie when Jackie was on shift. He could put more pressure on Jackie suggesting that she go to dinner with him at the Sanfords.
The next letter he had from Marta was postmarked Dallas. She had quit at Hepsibah's (or maybe got fired) and was living with a girl friend in Dallas. They were obviously selling their asses. It was the same old line. Forgive and forget, Roddy dear. I couldn't help myself. She said she was still keeping the house on Elmdale Avenue, evidently sending the rent by mail. He didn't answer this letter but it gave him a lot of satisfaction. Either she was more desperate than he guessed to land a paying sucker with her aging and all, or else she had found something in him that pleased her. He remembered how she had said he was a "natural" at sucking a cunt. Maybe that was it. Well, he'd try to practice up on Jackie, if he could promote a dinner date at the Sanford's. He knew Jackie got lit. She even had to call in the doctor for some of her hangovers after a blow-out at the Westward-Ho House (ho! ho! ho!). If he came through with champagne he figured Jackie wouldn't resist. He'd have his prick and his mouth up her legs and make her pay for all this expensive cock teasing over the bar.
As for whores, he was more than fed up. Marta had been the last, he swore. He hadn't the slightest intentions of going back to Hepsibah's. It stunk. The whole racket stunk. Besides, they'd be sticking up for Marta no matter what they thought of her. After all, Rod Kelsey was just a good-paying John. In a crises he always ranked as the contemptible enemy.
More letters came from Dallas. His ego bloomed to this evidence that Marta prized something about her Pauline Peter, if it was only his tongue. Horse sense told him she missed the service of his love. After all, she boasted that she didn't have a pimp. Elmo Dahl had wanted to pimp for her, she claimed, but she wouldn't have him. Could be all a lie, but any whore might appreciate a man who was crazy about her and had money enough to pay the rent and buy the groceries. But his wacky poetic ideals always lighted the incense pots and made him think that Marta really cared, that she was really the mad, mad lover-mistress she claimed to be when she was lit, avowing that she loved more than other women not less. The logic of this was that she had sacrificed all for the pleasure of men. Fooey! So what! She sure as hell hadn't sacrificed anything for his pleasure.
He almost felt normal when Jackie Lee announced that the private eye had stopped tailing her apparently. She just might make it to the San-fords with Rod. He couldn't believe it but he took her at her word. They set the date and had everything fixed at the Sanfords, champagne and all. Pearl would cook the dinner. A hot sex party was implied after Jackie got going. Ron laid off his hand work at home to accumulate a heavy load for Jackie. He was at the Chez Amie every night when the flame thrower was on shift.
A temporary rift occurred when Marta wrote that she was returning to the house on Elmdale and leaving Dallas. The implication was that she had accumulated a bankroll swinging a line of men. Rod took that with a grain of salt. Marta was too old for swinging them like that. He didn't answer that letter and he didn't call the house. With Jackie Lee coming up he hadn't the slightest idea of going back to Marta.
Then he got a spoke thrust into his own wheel when Jackie announced the night before the dinner that the private eye was back on the job. Her husband had smelled a mouse she implied. It would be best that she took a rain check for the dinner. That would be just what her husband was looking for. They might even rush in with cameras in the middle of the orgy.
Rod was stumped. His prick ached for a workout and on such short notice he couldn't hope to get anything satisfactory and the last thing he wanted was another Eskimo party.
He hadn't dreamed that he would soften in his attitude toward Marta. But her abject letters, imploring him to forgive and forget, had allayed the pain of his bitter disappointment. In a weak, vacillating moment he dialed the number of the house on Elmdale. Was she there? Holy Judas, she welcomed him as if he were a resurrected p.o.w. and she his faithful love-starved wife.
"I just wondered if you'd care to go to a dinner with me at a friend's house," he said with all the cool he could muster. "The girl that was going with me had to call it off." That ought to squelch her, filling in for another preferred date.
"Always glad to do anything for you, Rod," that thick, sexy voice slathered him with excess. She sounded as if her mouth was filled with ejaculating prick.
"Okay, I'll be there for you about six."
"Toodle-oo," she said.
Why was it that she had sounded as if he were in the bag again? Didn't the bitch know he was through with her forever? That he was just using her to fill in at a dinner party. Fuck the bitch ... and yet....
CHAPTER SIX
DOWN THE RIVER, SUCKER!
He had never thought he would drive into that house again to see Marta Swan. She couldn't have a thing for him again. Jackie Lee was worth a shipload of Martas. He even preferred Pearl Sanford. But when he walked into the front room after she opened the door something like a loose board flipped up and socked him in the puss.
She didn't even say hello. It was as if he had never left her. And the get-up she had on ... sex to kill, the silky white blouse falling away to reveal the swell of her breasts, the short, flared skirt swirling around her legs like a dirndl, her platinum blonde hair-do fresh from the beauty salon, and her hot fingers behind his neck as she bellied up to him with her subtly made-up face, green shadowed eyes, plucked brows, painted mouth, and that haunting voice saying, "I love you, Rod, I've always loved you. I can't help being like I am. Just take me. I'm yours."
A record player ground out dance music softly in the background. With his eyes looking into hers he began unconsciously dancing, walking around the front room to the music, but seeing only the unleashed power of her mesmeric eyes. The dinner at the Sanfords drifted off into inconsequence. The feel of her body, the fragrance of her flesh, be-spelled him. It was the old enchantment of Marta that had been his doom, but now she was really pouring it on with all she had. It was like being swept on to an unpredictable destination by a flash flood. From now on he didn't know and didn't care what happened as long as he could be with her and revel in the euphoria of her.
"I hated it in Dallas," she said. "All I could think of was you. We had to dance in a hotel bar after one o'clock every morning. All those brutes staring at me. They were like animals, cannibals. Oh, Rod, don't ever leave me again."
He was saying things he didn't mean, couldn't mean. Blubbering about how she had meant everything to him, how he just wanted to marry her and make a home for her.
"But I owe so much money," she groaned as they gravitated arm in arm to the back bedroom. "After I get out of debt we can think about marrying."
"If I thought you meant that," he said as they began to strip.
"I'll show you I mean it," she avowed as she dazzled him with her naked flesh. He had never seen her more ravishing. What had she done to herself ... or had he just forgotten?
His prick stood up as she ran her skilled fingers over his balls and gently jacked him. He buried his face in her breasts and began kissing her savagely, moving up to her hot mouth. Why did he love her kisses so much? He could eat her alive from the mouth down. But she was pulling him back on top of her as she fell over slowly on the bed with her thighs parted for him. Never had a cunt promised such boiling pleasures. She was running her long-nailed fingers up his back and neck and into his hair, her thighs writhing and spiraling to draw him into her gut.
With a whimpering cry of all-out self-giving he plunged his suffering prick into her, felt her leap up convulsively to welcome him, snapping his hard-on expertly as she seated him for the ride.
"Don't hurt me, Rod, you know I have to be careful," she cautioned him.
Why did he believe that shit? It was only a whore trick, yet he was falling for it as he pumped her gently, letting her adjust his depth and stroke with her agile ass. She was giving him a fuck to remember and he could take all she had.
His prick swelled to bursting but he managed to hold his come. He wanted to ride her to a frazzle, make her say uncle. But he was so hot he despaired of lasting more than five minutes at most.
"Give it to me now, Roddy boy!" She was taking over and romping the hell out of him, running her sharp nails down his back and striking him under the balls.
"N-yah, n-yah, n-yah," he made funny noises in his throat trying to protest at the way she was milking him.
And then he was giving it to her, jetting into her hot gut as she kicked him in the back with her heels, spiraling around his cock and then holding him tight to her so he could get all the contact possible as he blew his lava like Vesuvius erupting after forty years.
"I can't ... stand it," he murmured as he laid to her, shooting the last of his saved-up load.
"You still shoot like a stud horse, Roddy," Marta kidded him. "You must have been carrying an awful load."
She let him soak in her, giving him a squirm now and then to keep the bubbles coming up from his prostate, and putting his hands on her hot tits to start him masturbating them.
He milked her tits as his prick gradually softened in her vagina. He hadn't made her say uncle by a long shot but he had made a good try at it. They'd be at it again before long and next time he'd last longer. But he wished she had come with him.
"I quit going to Hepsibah's," he said as he let his prick work its way out tickling all the way until he had to wince and jerk and grit his teeth.
"Yes, I know," she told him complacently. "I'm going back to work for Heps Monday."
"The hell you are. I thought you were going to marry me."
"You think I won't, huh? Well, I'll call your bluff. If we can get a j. p., but this is Sunday."
He hadn't brought any liquor. All that was out at the Sanborn's. But Marta had a bottle. They got up naked and mixed drinks in the kitchen talking as if they could never get it all said.
"Heps says to tell you never to leave me again," Marta needled him a little.
"You better tell her that my wife isn't working for her any longer," he came back stubbornly.
The liquor was getting to them and his prick began to react to her snuggling. They took their glasses into the bedroom and Rod spread her again on the bed just so he could lie between her legs and gloat over her. So she admitted she loved him, that she wanted to marry him. Maybe that was just a trick to tie him to her again, but it sounded wonderful.
She slid down and gobbled his prick to get him real hard again. The way she could do that when she really wanted to!
"I want to make you come with me," he said. "You never have come with me while I was fucking you."
"Well, I've never kidded you about it either, have I? Some women will act like they're turning wrongside out but not me."
"You mean you can't fool me like you would some dumb John from the country," he fired back at her.
"I don't have to bother with that shit," Marta sneered. "The guys want me any way they can get me."
He was working himself up in her as they talked, trying to steady himself so he could give her a long ride. What she said about other men wanting her angered him. He grabbed her by the ass and rammed his prick into her with intentional violence.
"Rod, you're hurting me!" she protested, pushing at him.
"I'm going to punch your god-dam liver out," he snarled at her, and began hammering his ass into her.
"Easy now, lover boy," she stroked him, backing off skillfully and blocking every assault. "If you want me to come with you that's no way to work at it."
He cooled a little and began pumping her slowly, way in and way out. "How's that?" he asked, sulkily.
"Better, but too deep for me. Just give me a couple of inches."
They were both panting now. He had her hot all right. He could tell by the feverish intensity of her eyes, the flush of her cheeks that wasn't just from exercise. He was doing most of that. He milked her tits and noticed how they were tilted up with tension. They rocked together steadily and his come tension mounted rapidly. He couldn't resist her very long and she knew it.
In a frantic effort to restrain himself he rolled over on the bed and threw her up on top of him. It gave him a minute's respite as she sat up, laughing and jeering at him...."Hold it, lover boy, hold it and make me come," she said as she began a pendulum swinging with his prick pivoting up in her.
She bowed her head and the falls of her hair swept him coolingly as she fucked and fucked at him and he gritted his teeth and shut his eyes to stop the threatened eruption that would take the pazazz out of his hard-on.
"Now, now, darling lover boy," she cooed. "It's not good for you to fight it that way. Give to mamma."
"Damn you!" he groaned as he gave up and let it go up in her penduluming gut.
She felt the jets of his come hitting up at her womb and hunched down on him, holding her ass tight to his prick hair and grabbing down behind her to milk his balls and dunk up into his ass.
It was worse than the first time. His strength melted away. She was a vampire sucking his life blood, but it was a wonderful way to die. He shot and shot into her as she smothered him with her unnatural loveliness, the poisonous, all-consuming effulgence of her rampant lust.
"You got me," he mumbled in despair, yet luxuriating in the narcosis of her lecherous intimacy.
"Pauline," she teased him with that abhorred name. "My darling Pauline Peter."
He gripped her arms cruelly and made her cry out for mercy. Then he pushed her off to the bed and got up to mix a drink, his prick hooking over, wet and lax.
"Mix me a double, lover boy," Marta called after him. "I'm calling a j.p. to see if he can marry us."
Did she really mean it? Funny, he was the one backing off now. Something told him, "Don't do it, chump! You'll really be in for it then." But she was calling his bluff like he had once called hers.
He heard her talking over the telephone as she lay stretched out naked on the bed. The j.p. was out of town it being Sunday on account of Jackie Lee's hours week days...."Hurry up with that drink," Marta yelled as she hung up. "If the judge gets back from his fishing trip we can still make it. They have a clerk who makes out licenses. In fact I just talked to her but the j. p. won't be back till late."
She grabbed the drink from him and tossed down half of it. "Listen," she said in a thick voice. "You've been fooling around long enough. You've got to get me off. I'm crazy to be taken care of and you're just a cunt teaser with your prick, Pauline, you bastard."
"Okay," he said, "take it easy. But we've got to call the Sanfords and tell them we'll be late."
"Fuck the Sanfords," Marta snorted jumping around the'bed like a dog with turpentine on its ass.
She parked over on the side of the bed opposite the telephone where there was a rug for his knees. "Go into the bathrom and shave as close as you can with my underarm razor," she said. "I don't want any of your four o'clock shadow rubbing off on me. You can call the Sanfords when you get back."
Marta was getting lit and he wasn't so dim himself. Rummaging around in the bathroom cabinet he found the razor and plugged it in, running it around over his face, especially around his lips and chin. Marta came in with a potent looking highball and sat down on the toilet bowl naked, taking a piss and farting a couple of times, before she got up and stepped into the bathrub to wash off her parts...."You can't say I'm not clean," she reminded him as she began rubbing herself dry with a fat towel.
He held his face over to her and she ran her fingers over his beard...."Okay," she decided.
His whole body had begun to tremble with unholy desire as he followed Marta back to the bedroom. It was getting" dark and she had pulled down all the shades to make the room darker still, then switched on a 7-watt night light that gave out an eery glow making their naked bodies seemed ethereal and dream-like.
Rod dialed the Sanford's telephone number and stammered and stuttered in trying to save face as he admitted that he and Marta were having a little reunion. Marta reached over and grabbed the phone and brayed into it exultantly, "We're having a little rerun, darling! It'll be another hour. Don't hold the dinner." She romped up and down on the bed. "Hear the bed springs?"
Pearl squealed with laughter. "Hey, save some for later, can't you?"
Marta looked woozy as she hung up the phone. Rod thought maybe she would be sick. Cuddling her like papa with a new baby he wrestled her over to the edge of the bed and opened her up. She lay back on the pillow almost as if she had fallen asleep as he knelt at the altar of the source of life.
Her cunt was beautiful. In the dim light she seemed fantastic. He could expect her to melt away into the mists of dreams when he tried to touch her. Then he knew she was there as he began kissing his way up between her thighs from side to side, stroking her toes with one hand and kneading her tits with the other. She reached out and palmed the back of his head, guiding him, adjusting his pressures as her sensuous lips parted and she began to breathe heavily.
"Work on my breasts awhile," she whispered.
He moved his mouth up dutifully and began sucking her tits one after the other, playing with the one he didn't have his mouth on." She let him do this awhile and then pushed his head down to her cunt, letting him stop long enough to twirl his tongue into her belly button. The fragrance of her passion-crazed body dizzied him with its musky pungence. He couldn't wait to slake his lust in the cooling font of her vulva as he cupped his drooling lips over her genitals. Ah-h-h-h, he heard her relaxing sigh of contentment as he eased her tension with his driving tongue and the machine-gun attack of his greedy lips and teeth.
"Not so hard, not so hard," she whispered, her hot palms on his cheeks pulling him up a little.
He mumbled an unintelligible acknowledgement and tempered his impetuousness.
The taste of her was indescribable. He thought of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the fabulous fruit of life. Maybe this was what Eve had eaten and found so miraculously good that Adam couldn't resist it. Flowers lured bees with nectar like this. He gulped the oozing reek of her focused femininity, the eye of the cyclone from which the storm of orgasm was brewing.
He enclosed her cunt from clitoris to vagina in the hot vacuum of his drool-soaked mouth and lashed her with his tongue tip again and again until her body was writhing and spiraling into his face and her long nails drawing blood in his scalp and at the back of his neck.
Ah-h-h-h, ah-h-h-h," she moaned with her sensuous lips curling up and away from her half-open teeth. The foot over his shoulder kicked down at his naked back and held there while she pulled his face into her cunt desperately, seeking more and more of the blessed relief of his hot masculine tongue, the sobbing eagerness of his assault on her deeply buried nerve forces. A life of flagrant lust and debauchery had enormously multiplied her neural urge for voluptas and orgasm yet dulled her sensitivity to frictional excitations. She needed not only his skill, which was as yet amateurish though gifted, but his all-out giving of his deepest self, the inspiration of his mad passion which came like the nth powers of a Paganini in violin concerto.
She must not have had an orgasm for weeks he thought dimly as he toiled at her passionately, heeding every suggestion, every murmured word.
On her instructions he moved a hand under her bedward thigh and arched up two fingers into her vagina to imitate an erected male organ, while he nibbled and tongue-fluttered her clitoris at the top of her fevered slit. Then he hooked a little finger into her rectum and opened up her ass until he could hook his thumb in it. This way he could give her the devil-prick fuck, the devil supposedly having a two-pronged cock that enabled him to commit sin above and below each time he jazzed a mesmerized victim.
Rod's cock had responded to the wild greed of his mouth on the fiery fountain of life. He had began fucking the side of the bed in his rutting tension of build-up. Marta's hot hand snaked down on her smooth arm and looped around his aching prick, stroking him gently, hitting down at his balls and making them ache a little. His own guts were retching with preliminary come now as he worked frantically at Marta's dormant come mechanism.
"I've got to, I've got to!" she moaned as he struggled with her.
Jesus, it took an athlete to suck Marta off. He was beginning to play out but she wouldn't let him stop. On ... on until he was ready to drop with exhaustion. God only knew what time it was. He had to get her somehow. He wanted to get her. No wonder he couldn't make her come regular. Nobody could fuck her off with his prick unless he was the devil himself.
He pumped her vagina and ass with his fingers and thumb, bit her clit and drove his tongue into her pee-hole while milking her tits with his other hand. His own come was building up now under Marta's convulsive jacking over the edge of the bed. It made him want to cry to think he'd blow his ass before she did after all this struggle.
Then, suddenly, she let out a yell and leaped right up at his face. Her vagina shut down on his fingers. He felt her rectum buckling in, and then a long, shuddering gasp rattled out of her throat as she sagged down slowly. She had blown her ass at last!
But his prick was exploding in tremorous bursts of seminal ejaculation. He rammed into Marta's hand and then surged up on the bed instinctively.
Marta's relaxing thighs parted wider for him while her cunt still throbbed and quivered with the come he had dr-edged up out of her depths. His fluid shot out on her belly a couple of times before he buried his throbbing prick in her regurgitating gut and let her milk him dry.
When he was spent of the last dribble he pulled out and rolled over to his back beside her, exhausted. For several minutes he didn't say a word but just lay there getting his wind and getting the cramp out of his arms and legs. What a session! He felt as if he had won the prize for pushups. Every muscle in his body had been pulled and stretched.
Marta lay as one dead. Orgasm like that had really drained her. He remembered how a doctor and told her that was the most weakening way she could have it done to her. He was beginning to see her problem. Yet he loved to suck her. He wanted to get at it again just as soon as he was rested.
"Mix me a drink, Rod," she finally evidenced life.
He had taken off his strap watch and left it on the dresser. Now as he went out to the kitchen and looked at the electric clock he saw that it was nearly nine o'clock. Jesus! They had been at it nearly two hours!
Dazed and weak, he mixed a double for both of them and as he brought Marta's to her, and she sat up enough to take a gulp and reach for a cigarette, he said:
"We'll never make it to the Sanfords. They'll have all the champagne to themselves."
"Fuck the champagne," she said, lighting up and handing him the pack.
Dimly he realized what he had done. He had gone back to Marta Swan, the woman who had really done him in. How could he have done such a thing? He felt like a chump and yet ... he wanted it that way. He remembered how she had tried to line up the j.p. for a Sunday night marriage. She sure had called his bluff!
"Lie down with me, Rod," Marta said. "Lie with your mouth on my cunt so I can sleep after I take my tablets."
"That stuff doesn't mix with liquor," he said as she got her tablets out of the bedside table drawer and popped two of them in her mouth.
"It doesn't bother me," she said washing the tablets down with a gulp of the highball, and then sucking her cigarette. "Nothing bothers me any more."
He stretched out with her on the bed and she shifted her ass over toward the center so he could lie at an angle and cup his mouth over her cunt. He found that he liked this. He could relax on his doubled up arms and let the weight of his head rest partly on her pubic mount. It was pacifying to both of them.
She switched out the bedside light and only the faint glow through the Venetian blinds from the arc light on the street corner illuminated their naked bodies.
"Rod," Marta said as if half asleep.
"Um-mm," he mumbled without taking his mouth off her cunt.
"I want to go in business for myself instead of working for Heps. Just long enough for me to pay my debts, then we'll get married. You don't have to be associated with it at all. I'll have girls do the actual work and you can have all of me right here at the house. Don't say anything now. Keep on doing what you're doing. It feels wonderful. We can sleep together every night and you can take care of me. You're real good at that. I've never known anyone better, not even a butch."
He kept on eating her cunt with words balling up to explode in his retching throat. What was she getting at? Did she expect him to finance her in a whorehouse business? Holy cripes, if his uncle ever found that out he'd be disowned by the family. As it was he was quite a black sheep.
"You can quit now," she said sleepily after a pause.
He couldn't wait to join her on the pillow and tried to get at her mouth with his cunt-smelling lips but she pushed him away and said, "Let me take care of you now."
She was going under from the sleeping tablets but it didn't keep her from wriggling down to his prick and giving it her sexpert treatment. With her head on the pillow that she had dragged with her she could work on him without much strain. Maybe this was how she expected to get a favorable answer from him about the whorehouse venture.
"I'm up to my ears in debt myself," he said enjoying the oral action on his prick and the way she kneaded up under his balls.
She sucked him a little more, running his hardening prick in and out of her mouth and giving the underside of the head a tongue flutter. Man, did she know how to suck!
"I'd have to borrow money if I financed you," he said, wondering what kind of a sap he had turned out to be. This couldn't be him saying that.
Now she had his whole cock in her mouth, the head pointed down her throat, and his come muscles were beginning to throb a little. He could feel her pressing just under his balls where she could feel the ejector muscles quivering and jerking.
"I might raise a thousand by borrowing on my house equity," he said. Chump! What the hell was the matter with him. He must be nuts agreeing to finance Marta after what she had done to him.
He began to knot up and grimace in the dark. She was getting him off again and it was going to tear his guts out this time. He hadn't come three times in a few hours since he was twenty-eight. She stuck to him like a leech until he stiffened out like a corpse and began to come into her mouth.
Man, he could die that way. To hell with the money. He could even take the creeps if she'd just keep doing that to him every night or two.
She swallowed all his come and then crawled back up to the head of the bed with her pillow and stretched out beside him ... "A thousand will be enough to get me going," she murmured. "I'll give Heps notice tomorrow that she's going to have competition. I'm tired of whacking my guts out for somebody else."
"I can't be associated with it," he squeaked like a trapped mouse.
"You'll be my man, that's enough. Nobody can hold you for what I do. But we'd better not get married just yet."
"Why?" Not that he really wanted to marry her yet. He was just curious as to her answer.
"The vice squad don't like married racket people," she said. "It sort of makes you a technical pimp if you're legally married to me and know what I'm doing and you'd have a hell of a time convincing anybody that you didn't know what I was doing."
"How about these creeps Fats Hagen and Elmo Dahl?" he demanded. "Are those bastards going to be around smelling of your ass?"
"Hell no," she said. "But Fats has been sleeping here while I was in Dallas."
"And he'd still be sleeping here if I hadn't come back," he concluded with a trace of sarcasm.
"Rod you can't hold that against me. What could I do after you walked out on me because my stupid folks turned against me, damn them! They're so square it's pitiful. They don't know the problems I have."
"Okay," he said. "I'll try it out but you'd better take care of me or I'll blow for good next time."
She started babbling as if she were half asleep. He lay there beside her unnaturally secure as if he didn't want anything else in the world but Marta beside him in bed. He dropped off listening to her restless, unintelligible jabber, and when he awakened at dawn he had a whopping hard-on and had to drive it into her from behind. She let him. Her cunt was so hot that he blew in about three strokes, and then she said:
"I don't like it before coffee, Rod. Go in and switch on the pot. It's ready to go, all loaded. I'll teach you how to make it."
CHAPTER SEVEN
HELL HOUSE
In a twinkling of an eye the whole world had changed. The witch had enchanted him again. Moving about in a sort of robotic somnambulism, Rod mortgaged his house equity for a thousand dollar loan and brought Marta the currency to avoid any record of the transaction. She had a location all picked out and had brought an idea from her roommate in Dallas who had been a slightly successful poet-artist.
Instead of a shirt shop she'd have a studio, giving art instruction supposedly and selling a few art supplies in the outer foyer. But the studio stalls where the students worked would be whore cribs.
Rod arranged for a neighbor to feed his dog and practically closed his house, bringing in essentials and moving into the front bedroom where Myrtle and Reese and Jody had stayed. Ostensibly he was a roomer and Marta his landlady. Actually, he would crawl in bed with her every night and enjoy the exclusive favors of one of the most popular prostitutes in Sun City. It looked as if his dream had come true at last.
But the moment Marta got the thousand bucks he began to notice a change. She beefed that he bothered her at night. She didn't want that every night. She was too tired from trying to get the studio going (or maybe screwing these ready Johns that wouldn't settle for her country girl help!) He smelled like a horse, she said, though he bathed twice a day religiously. She just couldn't sleep with anybody and there was nothing he could do but sleep in the front bedroom like any other routine roomer. It killed him ... and then she blew up about his slow-to-rise hard-on. She liked men who "get on and do it and get it over with." She began calling him Pauline Peter again with jeering persistence. And he had to bring in groceries continually and keep her supplied with liquor. They couldn't afford to eat out, nor did Rod want to be seen with her in public with his business connections. It would take quite a while before the studio could really make more than expenses with all the renovating to do and the building contractors to be paid. Rod wondered if she wasn't fucking off some of these expenses. He could begin to believe it with her finding excuses at home for not taking care of him. She hadn't sucked him off since that night of their reunion, but she sure worked the hell out of him when she decided that she had to have her ass off.
Though Rod couldn't afford to be seen much around the new whorehouse downtown called MARCIA'S, he checked on it now and then out of curiosity. Marta had all her ideas from her pal in Dallas. The sign was a big artist's palette that reminded Rod of a one-sided cunt. Echeloned crazily on this background were the letters of Marta's racket name MARCIA with an apostrophed S. He didn't go in beyond the art supplies and decor of the lobby. The cribs or student rooms gave him the creeps. He remembered how Sue Hawks' motorcycle boy friend had come in at the massage parlor where she worked and looked around glumly, even examining the dirty laundry. He guessed any man would uptight a little in a place where his girl was selling her ass.
He noticed that old Fats Hagen could use the toilet at Marcia's without risking his rep. Sitting across the street in his car watching, he saw Fats go in as if he knew his way around. Was this old crumb a kind of a pimp who solicited business for Marta, or was he getting free feels or rather collecting for coffee at the Belleview? Maybe he was one of the skidders that Marta owed money to. Jody would be back in Missouri, he supposed, but how about the mean looking one, Elmo Dahl?
One afternoon as Rod drove in at the Elmdale house after leaving the office early he saw Fats Hagen's junker standing at the curb. Marta wasn't due home for an hour or two. The door was unlocked when he walked in indicating that Fats had a key. The old Swede met him coming out carrying a small suitcase.
"I vas yust pickin' up a few t'ings," Fats explained hastily, extending a raunchy hand which Rod shook mechanically. "It's good you back wit' Marta. She loves you ... but you got to look out for dat Elmo Dahl."
"Yeah, I know," Rod said. "So you still have a key to the house?"
"Veil, I vas staying here after you left her. She didn't vant to be alone." Fats was in dead earnest. "But if you vant da key here it is."
"Nah, keep it," Rod said. He wasn't admitting jealousy whatever Fats was to Marta. "By the way, where is Elmo?"
"He's over on da coast last I heard but he'll be back. He moves around a lot, dat no good son-of-a-bitch. Vile you vas gone he chases Marta aroun' da house again wit' a butcher knife. Lucky I came in an' took it avay from him. Dat guy iss a nutty cook. Alvays butcher knives, dem nutty cooks."
How about nutty hotel clerks? Rod thought, turning away in disgust as Fats walked out to his car and drove away.
It would be an hour or two yet before Marta came home from the studio and sometimes she was later. Obviously she went out to bars without him. Not that he wanted to be seen with her in public but it occurred to him that she could do her drinking at home along with her fucking and sucking. God-dam her, she was getting to be just like she was when the folks were with her, but now she didn't have that excuse.
Rod pulled at his prick and worked it up by hand. It was a helluva note when a guy backed a whore in business and couldn't even get her to jack him off. It looked as if he were still the last man in line to get taken care of. Not that he could be sure she was actually taking the Johns herself, but with all the pressure on her, and nobody liking her girls as much as they did the madame, he figured she was working in a pinch, especially when a big fee could be had. It gnawed at him that this was why she was too tired to take care of him when she got home, and why she was so irritable and insulting.
He massaged his neglected flesh all alone in the deserted house mournfully reviewing his precarious finances. Ye gods, he was actually bankrupt. What a fool he had been to help Marta when she wouldn't even get his ass off regularly! If he could just sleep with her, feel her near him, it wouldn't hurt so much, The euphoria of her was better than barbital which he was taking again so he could relax if only unnaturally during the long nights when she wanted to be alone and when, worse yet, her telephone rang after the bars closed usually and some drunk with a hard-on tried to date her. God-dammit, he didn't want those calls coming to the house but what could he do about it? She always squawked that she couldn't afford to insult her customers. She could always kid them along and get them to come to the studio next day. In a pig's eye, he thought. The bastards wouldn't wait that long. Pretty soon they'd be coming up to the house and slipping in through that back door in the kitchen just across from her bedroom door. And he might be asleep, only he wasn't sleeping much these days. Cripes, how a man could torture himself thinking things like that, especially when they just might come true?
He hunched up and whacked his meat viciously, almost deciding to blow himself to spite the bitch. But that was for the birds. She wouldn't give a damn about how many times he jacked off. She wanted his mouth and tongue not his Pauline prick. That is, she wanted his mouth and tongue if she hadn't found a twenty-dollar John who liked to eat her ass at the studio and happened to be good at it.
Jesus! He was driving himself raving mad with these beastly thoughts. He had to believe that his blonde angel was true and that it was just the strain of getting the studio going that made her so uncooperative sexually.
He went out and put a chicken in the pressure cooker, leaving it to cook until it fell off the bones. That was the way Marta liked it. She also had to have her steak lean and fried rare fast. He was learning to cook all over again. Steak and green peas was about all she'd eat. Her shit was stringy and black from the way she lived.
Rod went back to the front bedroom after he got the dinner going and resumed work on his cock. He hadn't had a piece of ass for three days but he wasn't too hard or sensitive because of losing sleep and worrying. Jesus! He really was getting to be a Pauline the way Marta treated him, He pulled down his pants and got both hands on his prick and really romped on it in a desperate attempt to build up come pressure. He was getting right up to it when he heard a car drive up behind his switch-top out front under the car port. He hastily stuffed his quickly subsiding cock into his shorts and buckled up his pants in time to get out to the front room and see who it was. He had left the door unlocked for Marta's return.
It was old Fats Hagen and he had something ... he had Marta limp as a corpse in his arms, maneuvering his way in.
"For God's sake, what's wrong?" Rod shouted, pulling aside the door.
"She's drunk," Fats said. "Passed out while we was havin' a drink on da way home."
Fats walked heavily back through the kitchen to the back bedroom calling over his shoulder, "Put on some coffee. She'll be all right. She jus' got vun too many."
"Looks to me as if she's had two quarts too many," Rod said, coming in behind Fats and staring at the lump of female shit that the old Swede had spread out on the bed. "How often does she get this way?"
"Oh, I t'ought dat you knew," Fats said blandly. "Marta's a alcoholic." The old Swede seemed to wall the word around in his mouth as if he liked it.
Rod staggered out into the kitchen and blundered around starting a pot of perked coffee the way Marta wanted it, just done and with a pinch of salt. Of course he hadn't known she was an alcoholic although he had suspected something like that several times. This explained a lot of things like her locking herself in her bedroom with the family dog and not wanting him to sleep with her. Maybe she was getting up in the night and taking a swig from a secret bottle. Now he could see why she had left the whiskey he brought in the fridge. She didn't want him to know she was drinking excessively. The sick thing had been buying her own liquor all the time.
Fats came in as Ron plugged in the percolator and the bubbles began to thump up in the glass bowl that Marta had brought from Paris on some whore spree years ago.
"Jody was da one dat slipped it to her while da folks ver here," Fats confided, dipping some snuff out of a round box. "She didn't vant you or her mother an' Reese to know she vas on da stuff like dat. Jody vould put the whiskey mix in da commode at da bottom of her dresser jus' inside da door so she could get it ven she vanted it."
"That explains a lot of things," Rod said glumly. His reactions were mixed. He rejoiced in this new excuse for Marta neglecting him sexually and recoiled at the horror of realizing that he was stuck for more than he had bargained for. A whore and an alcoholic. Jesus!
"Wa-a-a-ah!" Marta let out a wild yell from the bed. "I wants drink. I want whiskey. Bring me whiskey, you god-dam dummies. Who do you think you are, you bastards? Bring-me-whiskey!"
Rod crawled inside at the insult of that awful bawling voice.
"Don't pay no attention to her," Fats said. "She's always like dat. Goes off her nut an' thinks she is in Chicago with dat gangster lover of hers who shot a torpedo from New York who tried to muscle in. She vas a material witness. They still after her sometimes. Lot a money, tryin' to git the guy out of prison fer gunnin' down dat rat. She can't never fergit the high times she had wit dat bunch of throat-cutters. Then she married a son-of-a-bitch who was nothin' but a god-dam pimp. He drove her all over the country sellin' her. They'd make a thousand bucks a night an' then hit da breeze clean across da country from one coast to de udder."
"Wa-a-a-ah!" Marta shrieked. She was sitting up in bed and before they could run in and catch her she rolled to the floor and tried to get up. They put her back on the bed and Fats said sternly:
"Now you stay dere, damn you!"
Rod heard the coffee stop perking and knew it was ready. He went back into the kitchen to pour a cup black. Fats stayed a minute and then came out. "She's passed out again," he said, "I gotta get to da hotel. I'm due on shift. Jus' get some coffee down her an' don't give her no more tuh drink."
"Okay," Rod said. "Thanks for bringing her home."
"Fergit it," Fats said. "It ain't da first time I've carried her tuh bed."
Rod winced at that. Fats went out and got into his car and drove off while Rod went in to Marta with the coffee.
He heard her mumbling and moaning and her eyes were looking around sightlessly as he bent and raised up her head and put the coffee to her lips. At first she struggled, but finally she began to drink a little. Encouraged he got about half the cup down her when she suddenly jerked up and hung her head over the bed puking it up.
"I want whiskey," she gasped, staring around wildly. "Give me whiskey ... where am I?"
"You can't have any whiskey," Rod grated into her face. He was getting really disgusted and jittery too. Maybe he had a mad woman to contend with.
"Who the hell are you?" she demanded getting up to one elbow and glaring at him. "You're nobody. My husband Randy Swan was ten times the man you are. Was yer name, w'as yer name? Oh, yeah, I remember you, you're Pauline, you're Pauline Peter the guy that can't get a hard-on."
He hauled back to smack her on the puss and then desisted. After all she was drunk and out of her mind. He bore down on her and squeezed her god-dam mouth open as if he were drenching a god-dam horse and poured the coffee down her until she began to choke.
"Drink this, damn you!" he snarled into her ear.
She finally gave up and drank the coffee. When she could get a breath she snarled at him, "I'll have you beat up for this, you bastard. My lovers will bury you in a concrete coffin. Pve got real men sleeping with me, you Pauline Peter you. My husband could fuck seven times a night when he had me. Randy Swan was a man."
"Yeah ... Randy Swan," he spat at her contemptuously, "that's the rat you told me about who drove off the bridge and committed suicide the day of his mother's funeral. Wow! He loved you did he, the mother lovin' son-of-a-bitch. Another Paul Morel out of Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers', only you can't read enough to understand Lawrence, you cow college shit-face. Oh, that buzzard loved you, that no-good pimp who sold your ass all over the country and took a cut. Oh, he was God's annointed lover all right."
He realized how he had flipped as he saw her staring at him glassily. She was coming out of it a little. Maybe some of his diatribe had penetrated her foggy skull through the mists of booze She reached out to him suddenly with a trembling hand...."Don't leave me, Roddy, don't ever leave me," she whimpered in a right-about schizoid feint. "I don't know what I'm saying. I'm out of my mind when I get this way."
Her change of attitude placated him a little and he began helping her undress. The thought that she might let him screw her or suck her, that she would need the euphoria of sex when she began to come out of the stupor and delirium, urged him on. He got all her clothes off and helped her into a bed jacket which left her tits exposed and her cunt hair too. She was talking like a baby now.
"I've got to eat something, Rod," she said. "I haven't been eating right."
"You sure haven't," he agreed. "What can I get for you?"
"I want a piece of lean steak fried rare, fast," she said, "and green peas. Dump them into the pan frozen and let them thaw while they cook."
"Yeah, I know," Rod said. "No salad or pulpy vegetables. No wonder you shit blackstrap. Your guts are all dried up, Marta."
"I'm all dried up all over," she sobbed.
While he was putting on the steak and peas he heard Marta crawling over to the telephone and then dialing for long distance. Who the hell could she be calling? She kept on calling, telling central to try other numbers. It was somebody in Chi. He thought of her mobster lovers and the guy who had shot somebody over her and she was a material witness to the crime. He'd bet it was one of her mobster lovers as her husband was dead after the accident(?) the day of his mother's funeral. She couldn't get anybody. These mobsters moved around fast and chances were they didn't want her to call them. Maybe she was too hot and besides she was old now. They had younger, fresher stuff to suck them off and pop cherries with.
In the end she hung up and lay racked with sobs on the bed, face down. He came in and tried to comfort her...." If I could just talk to one of them," she blubbered. "I can't find where they are."
"If you mean your gangster playboys, crud like that can't be depended on. They're dead or behind bars."
"Shut up, you ... you Pauline!" she raised up like a goaded she-bear. "You're nothing compared to them. They were men!"
"Damn you," he said, "I ought to walk out on you right now and take my losses. You're not worth a god-dam, Marta. I was a fool to come back to you."
"Oh, Rod," she backed down again abruptly, crawling weakly over to his side of the bed, "I don't know what I'm saying. I'm sick, I'm a sick woman. You have to be considerate of me."
"Yeah, you're sick all right. You're sick of being yourself."
The steak and peas were about ready and he went into the kitchen and put the food on a plate and cut up the steak for her. The steak was fried black though not burned. It occurred to him that it was the same color as her shit. He took the plate to her where she was sitting up on pillows drinking another cup of coffee. While she was eating he returned to the kitchen and poured himself a drink but not letting her see him. Getting this down in a couple of gulps, he began to get ready for a sex session. If he knew her, she'd be crazy for an orgasm to relieve her sick tensions after the alcohol began to wear off. He wanted her regardless of what they had said. He could kid himself that her insults were partly the prejudice of her conscience trying to square itself. Regardless of how low people got they still could react to kindness and berate themselves for betraying it. Human rats even killed themselves out of sheer self-hatred in knowing how ungrateful they were, how unworthy of the things that people did for them.
It was eleven o'clock lay the time Marta finished her steak and green peas. He took the plate and fork from her and poured her another cup of coffee.
"I'll take my tablets now," she talked vaguely to herself. "Maybe I can get some sleep."
Rod put the dish and fork in the sink and went to put on his pajamas. She would crack wise if he came in stark naked. It was funny how contrary she could be about some things. She could romp around the house in a diaphanous cunt costume which gave her tits and cunt hair the benefit of a veiled mystery, but if he went naked it was just ridiculous.
He craved the euphoria of her thighs, her hot, redolent, fuck-off thighs. He could debase himself utterly just to be inside her gut and butting up against her flesh, fucking her or eating her. Somehow, in this very debasement of himself to a prostitute he could feel a divine exaltation as if by the utterly utter of his sin he could redeem himself in a remorse and repentance surpassing all remorse and repentance for ordinary sins. If you were going to be bad be a god-dam son-of-a-bitch and proud of it! The trouble was with him, he just couldn't be really bad. He hated that in himself.
She asked for a glass of water and had her tu-in-als ready, they were potent yellow jackets that could knock the piss out of a normal person, but she was inured to them, conditioned, and they just could do it for her. Mixed with alcohol they could drive a person berserk. Rod knew it wasn't just alcohol that was wrong with her. It was mixing these narcotics with liquor that deranged her mind. But you couldn't tell her anything. She booed at you and soaked in her poison. Worse than the delirum for him was the fact that drugs and alcohol anesthetized her sexually and at the same time increased her neural urge for the euphoria and relaxation of violent orgasm and the volputas preceding it. She wanted it more yet was less able to get it.
After she took her tuinals he sat in the chair beside the bed in his pajamas, playing with his prick by slipping his hand down inside his pajamas. He didn't want her to notice that he was masturbating. She'd only have a cruel wise-crack. It was all right for him to masturbate her but he was just Pauline if he did it to himself.
"Rod," she maundered sleepily after taking her pills and responding psychologically to the euphoria of the dope, "we'll go to Chicago after we're married and I'll start a millinery store. I know just the spot."
"Yeah, back to your mobsters, mooning around in the old dives," he mumbled, resentfully.
"No, that's in the past," she chose to act noble. "I can forget it and you never had it. You know what my past has been. I can't change that now."
"It's what the past has made of you that's important," he said, working at his cock and wondering when she would want him. His prick refused to get excited, yet he needed the euphoria of sex as much or more than she did.
"Don't preach to me, Rod, just love me as I am," she protested weakly.
"Too bad I'm not like that husband of yours. I ought to be a pimp married to you."
"As soon as I get out of debt we'll get married and I'll quit the racket, honest I will," she said.
"With the thirst you've got it'll take a lot of fuck money to get you out of the red, and I'm bankrupt already, at least I'm insolvent."
"Oh, you talk about money as if it was important."
"I don't know what the hell you would do without it. Your booze bill must be plenty."
"Oh, I don't drink so much," she wheedled.
"Phooey on that," he sneered.
She lay silent a moment and he let his eyes run over her sexy body. Drunk or sober, sick or well, she was one helluva fuck. You could breathe her and have an orgasm.
"Rod," she whispered, putting out a hand toward his half hard prick, "get me a drink, just one, please."
"No," he said flatly. "You don't get another drink tonight. Not while you're in this house."
She lay silent again. The sleeping drug would be getting to her now. Her thighs parted suggestively and she fucked her ass slowly. Rod leaned forward ready.
"Take care of me, lover boy," she murmured. "Take care of me real good. I've got to have that or I can't sleep. Masturbate me for a while. You know, I've had guys masturbate me and it was better than getting sucked off."
"Well, I'm just Pauline," he mumbled sarcastically. "All I've got is a hot tongue."
"Are you shaved close."
"Damned near to drawing blood," he said. "I'm always shaved close before you come home but most of the time I don't get anything."
"I'll bring girls home for you, Rod," she said, coaxingly. "They can take care of you when I'm tired."
He knelt at the bedside and took her ass in his arms and she kicked a foot up over his shoulder...." None of that for me," he objected to the girls. "It's you I want. You're the one I'm in love with though God knows why. Sometimes I wish you were dead. That would release me from my god-dam bondage."
"Oh, fuck it, and get busy," she fumed, fucking her thighs up at his face.
He lowered his mouth to her pink genitals. God, she was beautiful there! Not so old that she was shrinking or drying up on the outside. Age was only apparent around her eyes and the lines of the mouth and the gold in her teeth when she smiled wide.
"Ah-h-h-h," she sighed as his hot mouth cupped her cunt and his tongue drove out at her twirlingly. She took his head in her hands to work him at will and he tried to interpret her desires. As always his prick began to swell as he vicariously experienced her excitement. There was something narcistic in this, as if he were sucking himself, and even that he had a cunt, that her cunt was his like his prick belonged to her sometimes.
She began rocking gently at his face as he sucked her deep and hard but not too hard. He shifted his fingers around under her ass and worked two fingers up her vagina to give her the hard prick feel as she began to heat up and contract and expand. Meanwhile, he kneaded her tits and jacked the tips of the nipples.
"My ass, my ass," she whispered with her eyes closed and sensuous lips parted.
He knew what she meant. She wanted pressure up her rectum to enhance the sensation. He hooked his thumb up into her asshole and had the prong of the devil working her parts as his lips and tongue and teeth aggravated her quivering clit.
It went on and on. Her hand snaked down dutifully, and with perhaps a vicariously inspired urgence, to his half hard prick and as she jacked him with her feverish, beautifully formed hand he got a full hard-on.
She began to murmur and fuck at him more urgently. He knew what was wrong. Alcohol and dope had deadened her responses, yet the more she was frustrated the more she wanted the blessed relief of orgasm exploding her nerve tension.
Time crawled on. His pleasure began to give way to impatience, exhaustion and anxiety. Maybe he couldn't ever get her tonight. The thought of failing her tortured him not only in his own postponed satisfaction but in knowing that it would give her a club over him. Pauline Peter couldn't fuck her off at night seven times as she claimed her husband once could, and if he couldn't even suck her off he really was in the ash can.
"What's the matter?" she finally blubbered irritably.
He couldn't answer with his mouth full. Anyway, what was the use? He had to stick to her and keep all the slack out of the come rope. Once she subsided he'd have to work her up all over again and he was about pooped. Jesus! He must have been sucking her for two hours.
His prick began going down with the rise of his anxiety. Marta let go of him impatiently and pushed his head away...." Bring me a drink," she said. "You're no good. You can't get me off. I'll have to call Bill at the studio and have him take care of me."
"Who the hell is Bill?" he flung at her resentfully.
"Oh, he's just a guy around town. The girls say he's real good with his tongue."
"The girls!" he threw back at her accusingly. "Maybe you slipped. Maybe you are working down there after all."
"Oh, don't be such a granny," she railed at him, turning over to her side. "God, if I could only sleep. I've got to. I've got to have that."
She turned over on her back and dug at her clit with a long fingernail. "Try again, Rod," she begged. "I've got to have that. I'm going out of my mind."
"If you're not already out of it," he said ruefully as he went at it again.
This time he spit all over her and got her real slick, and then raised up her ass to where he could really crowd all of her cunt into the hot cavity of his mouth. She held his head tight with fingers clutched in his hair and her long nails digging into him. He lashed her vagina with his tongue until the root ached from the stretching strain and got his thumb around to where he could push down into the little trench at the top of her labia where the clitoris stuck up like a tomcat's erected prick. Then he reached up behind her and got two fingers up her ass and began slowly buggering her digitally.
"God! God!" she cried. "Keep on."
He redoubled his efforts, tongue fucking and masturbating her clit and buggering her ass, and finally she grabbed for his prick and jacked him violently.
It was about midnight as they struggled on the bed when Marta finally gave it up. A groan like the dying gasp of a sick person rolled out of her chest as she bowed up epileptically to the human leech that was sucking the vitality out of her by way of her genitals. Rod's hot cock was burping in her jacking hand and just as he felt her begin to come down off the high of her orgasmic convulsion, he rose up on the bed, jerked her thighs apart and poured one into her to the balls. God, that was good! Jetting into her while she came after the exhausting struggle over a period of nearly three hours. Nothing had ever felt so wonderfully good. And he was off the hook as to his prowess tongue-wise.
"Damn it, you'll knock me up, you stud," Marta said. "You may be Pauline but you sure can shoot a load."
"It's your fault I'm carrying it heavy, damn you," he said. "Hell, I have to masturbate half the time in this god-dam hell-house of yours."
She let him soak in her. She was groggy now with the effect of the narcotics and the aftermath of alcoholic excesses. Maybe she was going off her rocker again. He couldn't be sure.
"I'll do better, Rod, I promise," she said in a placative, tolerant mood.
"You damn well better," he threatened enjoying the fever of her guts as his prick gradually stopped pulsing in her vagina.
She went off into fantasy again after he pulled out of her and said that she could see people standing around the bed and watching her. She said she had exhibited herself for money letting a dog lick her off, and she seemed to be doing this over and over again in her delirious fantasies as she tried futilely to lure sleep. Rod guessed that exhibiting a dog licking her off had been a shock to her that she would never forget. After all, she had come from a square family with puritanical concepts about such perversions and depravities. She might be a rebel but she wasn't clear across the bridge yet from bigotry and false conscience to the Mc Luhan sex world of the future. He always found a contradictory mixture in her of puritanism and abandoned depravity. Maybe that was one thing he loved about her. She was a female counterpart of his own revolt against modern sex morality. Yet he could envy her to some extent in that she had gone much farther on the rocky road to sex reform, down ... or up. Depending on how you looked at the problem.
He stayed with her faithfully feeling better now that she had pumped off his load in a cosmic burst. But it disturbed him deeply to hear her muttering about the past. It was like the death of Poe who conversed with spectral beings that no one else could see. Alcoholism complicated by a kind of dope addiction and the mess of her racket life. It was enough to drive anybody nuts.
Finally she dozed off about four o'clock in the morning and he went into the front bedroom and tried to relax. But he was wide awake, tense, miserable. He had come back to Marta, back to hell, and now it seemed there was no way out. He was really caught on center in his life. He had sworn never to love again, to defy nature, and nature had laughed at him and fettered him hopelessly to a crazy prostitute. You couldn't beat the game. It had you coming and going. Life must go on. Kids must be made to propagate the race even though flood and famine and the next ice age threatened. Nature didn't give a damn. Fuck she said. Fuck or die. And if you tried to fight you got something like this!
He hated the whole world tonight in his misery of hopelessness. That thing in there. He belonged to it. He could never break her chains. Only death could free him. God ... and suppose he'd see her after death! No, that was going too far. Surely a guy could be free if he blew his brains out!
Next morning she dragged off sick. Rod worried through the day, wondering if she would be carried home dead drunk again. But she was apparently okay when he got to the house. It wasn't to happen every day apparently.
"After I eat I've got to sleep. I'm dead for sleep," she said. "Don't bother me, Rod. I'll die if I don't sleep."
"Okay," he said. "I'll see that everything's quiet."
He sat out in the front room reading. He had his typewriter but he practically never wrote any poetry. Life was too painfully insistant for creative concentration.
It was about ten-thirty he thought when he heard the back door open and close. It startled him. He couldn't believe it at first. Then he began to hear voices in Marta's bedroom. One was a male voice unquestionably. A cold chill crept over him. God-dam her, if she had brought a John in at this hour in her bedroom....
He walked back stiffly through the kitchen. As he turned into the bedroom door he saw a young sandy -haired fellow sitting in the chair that Marta always had beside the bed. She had the covers over her ass but her bed jacket was showing the curves of her tits as she sat up on a pillow.
"Rod," she said as calm as you please, as she saw him enter, "this is Bill Curry. He's a friend of mine ... from way back."
"Hi," Bill Curry said looking un unconcernedly.
Where had he heard that name Bill? The guy she had said could get her off had been named Bill.
"Good evening," Rod said stiffly.
"I left the back door open for him," Marta said, heaping on coals of fire.
"Yeah, I see you did," Rod said sarcastically.
It wasn't this guy's fault that he was there. Marta had invited him in. He guessed this was one of the guys who talked to her late over the phone.
"Okay," he said abruptly, his rage firing up though he managed to keep a frigid cool, "I'm leaving. I'm loading the car tonight with my stuff and pulling out. You can entertain your friend from now on. This is it."
She didn't say anything. The guy had a funny look on his face. He could see what was up all right. Rod was ragingly jealous and not acting anything like a pimp.
Rod went out into the front room and put his typewriter in its carrying case. He felt all thumbs, stunned, groping. He began to shuffle his papers and get them into a bunch.
Then Marta came out with a drink she had mixed. Bill Curry came with her. He was a pleasant looking kid, enjoying the excitement his visit had kicked up, but not vindictive at all. Obviously he wasn't in love with Marta. Just about as obviously he had screwed her as a John and probably intended to blow his ass in her for a few bucks before he left that night. Marta must have deceived him regarding her control over her "Pauline".
"What the hell's the matter with you?" she demanded flaring up belligerently. "You god-dam square, I ought to kill you for this."
"You damned near did, you bitch," Rod threw back at her.
She picked up a glass ash tray from the coffee table and hurled it at him. He hadn't expected that. He didn't even dodge as the tray barely missed him and hurtled against the wall.
"God-dam you!" she raged at him while the guy sat smirking on the davenport. "You don't dare leave me. I'll have the cops on you."
"You will shit!" Rod defied her as he opened the front bedroom door and began getting his things together and loading them into his car.
While he carried things out to his car the visitor pulled out the back way. He probably had a car out in the alley maybe expecting to take Marta out on a fuck date. But the fight he had stirred up was getting too rough for him. Being sober he didn't want to get mixed up with a whore and her man.
Rod kept on until he had all his things in the car. Marta poured down drinks and sulked in her room. After he had loaded his car he came in like a damned fool to say good-bye. Why couldn't he just get the hell out of there and leave her flat?
She had had time to put on her god-dam armour. She had on a trapsarent nightgown that was one of her fuck outfits. It made her tits and cunt hair look glamorous and mystic with something more than just raw gut for hire.
"So you're really going," she had calmed down a lot and was realizing the spot she was in. She needed his faithful contributions here at the house. Not every day could she land such a juicy sucker.
"Yes, I'm going," he said, coolly. "I can take most anything but not that. Bringing him right into your bedroom and me not getting taken care of as I should. Who the hell do you think you are, you bitch?"
Why did he want to stay there and wrangle with her? Why didn't he just get in his car and gun out to his house on Rosalind Street?
She walked up to him as he stood at the door ready to go. She snuggled up with all her sex heat released. She looked like a screw-crazy goddess in that transparent nightgown.
"I love you, Rod," she said huskily. "I can't help being the way I am. But I'll promise not to bring any more guys into my room if you'll stay. Look, I belong to you. Here I am!" And with her long, sharp nails like scissor blades she suddenly slashed up the front of her nightgown and tore it to shreds, standing half naked with the gauzy stuff flowing out around her as she writhed her cunt into his prick.
He couldn't help it. He took her in his arms. She melted him as if he were so much butter. Her hot lips lifted to his and he drank her sick, lustful soul through them. Always when she kissed it was special but tonight it was super-special. To put on an act like this she must care for him a little.
One more workout wouldn't do any harm. Now that he had the queen of the whores for real he might as well collect his last favors.
He picked her up in his arms and with the shreds of the nightgown trailing, carried her to the davenport. He didn't bother to fuck her. He turned up her ass as she embraced him with her legs and fastened his mouth on her hot cunt. As he began working on her she reached down and palmed his prick. The light was still on bright and the door hadn't even been locked. Neither one of them seemed to give a damn about somebody walking in on them. They were beyond caring about anything that happened outside of their little world that had almost suffered a catastrophe.
The witchery of her swallowed him up as he loved her on the couch. Never had he known her to be so passionate, so flamingly outgoing in her mesmeric subjection of a man. Surely she must care for him in the weird way she had of giving herself to a man. Maybe she was blind, utterly blind, to the values of exclusive possession. Then again she might be struggling futilely to reconcile her racket life with the virtues of domesticity. It would never work of course. But desperation was driving her to cling to a square and somehow compromise him, profit by his dog-like faithfulness while still selling herself. But he never could see her way of life. No matter how deparved he became he would always want exclusive sex rights over her. That was the one thing he had to demand always. Yet could she ever adapt herself to the routine round of a housewife? People said of her, "She even looks like a whore!" Too much, too much sex, she screamed it. And she knew this, that she never could be a wife.
But now that she gave herself utterly what could he do but try again? Maybe it would be better after this crisis. Maybe they could work out something.
As she knotted up to give her come he climbed on the couch between her naked thighs and poured himself into her feverish, throbbing gut. He cried a little as he hunched into her and shot every drop of himself, until he ached all over with erotic pleasure. If this were to be a farewell fuck ... but already he had decided to stay, and she seemed to know this as she relaxed on the couch in the remnants of her ripped night dress and let him soak in her.
"Mix me a drink, Rod," she murmured finally.
He pulled his softening, limp prick out of her with a wince and walked out to the kitchen to mix a drink for her and another for himself.
"Okay, I'll stay," he said as he brought the drinks in. "But no man enters that bedroom but me unless I give the go sign."
"All right," she said. "I promise."
They were exhausted after the nerve-racking blow-up and the wild sex that had followed it. Marta got on another night dress and crawled into bed, while Rod got his pajamas out of the car. The rest of the stuff he could unload next morning before he drove to the office.
He didn't ask to sleep with her. He'd give her that much of a break. Dutifully he stretched himself on his bed in the front bedroom after switching out the light. Surely he could sleep after getting fucked off like that and making a truce with Marta. But sleep simply wouldn't come. He'd have to get up and dose himself with barbital again.
As he was thinking about getting up for the barbital he heard a shuffling sound in the bathroom from which a door led into the front bedroom. It would be Marta after something. He lay very still in the dark, realizing that she too was having trouble going to sleep. Suddenly he heard the bedroom creak a little as it was pushed open quietly from the bathroom side. Cripes, she was coming in and sneaking about it. What the hell was up?
He lay very quietly as if asleep. With his eyes open a little he could see her shadowy form coming in. She had on a nightgown light enough to make her look ghostly. After what had happened and the crazy things she had done and said he couldn't help being afraid of what she might do. Suppose she had a paranoid tendency. She might really be intending to murder him as he slept. He couldn't see her hands from where he lay. Suppose she had gone to the kitchen for a knife?
Tensing himself for a quick grab at her arms if she made a hostile move, he lay quietly pretending sleep as she came up to the side of the bed and looked down. He could see her hands now clearly enough to realize that she had no weapon. But why was she creeping up to him this way?
She stood silently a moment looking down at him. He couldn't see the expression on her face. Then she turned and shuffled out through the bathroom, closing the door softly behind her.
It gave him the creeps, yet it might have been entirely innocent. Maybe she wanted to see if he were asleep and since she thought he was, she hadn't disturbed him.
He waited a while, more wide awake than ever, then he went to the kitchen ostensibly for a drink of water. While there he managed to peek in on her. She had the bedside light on and was lying on the bed half naked staring up at the ceiling.
"I can't sleep," she moaned miserably. "Stay with me, Rod. I went into your room to see if you were asleep. I thought you were so I didn't disturb you."
"Well, that's one for the book," he confessed as he sat down at the bed. "I didn't know you were that considerate."
"I'm not really bad, Rod," she gloomed. "Inside, I'm a good person. I don't know why I do crazy things. You won't ever leave me, will you, Rod?"
"I'll stay as long as I can," he promised. "But I'm not sleeping right. I can't live like this forever and neither can you."
"I know ... if I could just get out of debt."
"Just how much do you owe, Marta?" he put it to her straight.
"Oh, my God, thousands," she groaned. "See these clothes I've got lined up in the clothes closets?"
"Yeah, things you'll never wear in Sun City. It's mostly winter stuff."
"Well, you ought to see what I've got in cleaning plants all over town," she said. "When I want to wear something I have to remember what company has it so I can go and pay that much of my bill."
"Why don't they sell it?"
"They do sometimes but I beg them to hold it and...."
"Make a fuck date with some cleaner," he satirized.
"Well, I'm a pro," she sulked. "Even now I'm a madam."
"You've got to quit this racket, Marta, if you want me to stay with you. I can't stand much more. I'm beginning to develop a cough that worries the hell out of me. I had a tendency to TB when I came out here and my uncle gave me this job as district manager. If I keep on like this I'm going to have a relapse."
"You're lucky that's all you've got," Marta said. "I was a sick alcoholic when I came out here. After my husband killed himself I went blotto. I've never been right since. I guess you know that now."
"Yeah, Fats Hagen told me," he said, "and then I saw it with my own eyes."
"Fats is an alcoholic himself," she sniffed. "That's why he understands."
She asked him to lie down with her and he stretched out by her side, staring vacantly out into space as if he could envision the future that way. There was something uncannily restful about lying beside her regardless of what she was. That old devil love had him and when you loved a woman you'd burn in hell for her and even like it.
But he didn't get better. He began to cough almost continuously and even barbital couldn't make him sleep. His dreams were nightmares of sorrow and misery, old, ruined houses, endless caverns and labyrinths, monstrous sexual things groping about, torturing him. It seemed he was in a kind of twilight of his life, that he had been hurt so much, had suffered so long that he was immune to pain and feeling.
And in the midst of this, with Marta struggling on at the studio, fighting a losing battle with liquor and competition and the vice squad badgering her, Elmo Dahl came back from the coast. He walked in the back way as if he owned the place, the same old braggart, swaggering about, scoffing at love and matrimony, a typical pimp, Rod thought.
"Well, Marta says your her aunt's friend," Rod said, ironically. "I suppose you're like one of the family."
"She's lucky to have you," Elmo gave him full credit.
"We're going to be married," Marta told Elmo defiantly.
"Who'd marry you?" the pimp in Elmo sneered.
Rod winced but had to admit that Elmo had something. They had forgotten all about marriage somehow. It was farther away than it had ever been.
Elmo's visit ended up with him lying on the bed and showing Rod how he could get his prick up in nothing flat. "The medics say I'll lose it quick when I do slow down," he tried to be modest and self-effacing for Rod's benefit. "Lots of guys are slow to get it up. Nothing against their manhood at all. Mart has no business calling you Pauline Peter. Hell, she's not much herself, I'd just as soon Screw a sack of potatoes as Marta."
Ouch! Did that hurt!
But Rod couldn't fight back. He was too dead inside. Marta laid down on the bed in the middle and Rod lay beside her on one side and Elmo on the other with his prick sticking up proudly.
Marta had a perverse, crazy streak as she said: "Rod, why don't you suck Elmo off? He needs it."
"No, thanks," he muttered. Her suggesting that was the last straw that broke the camel's back he thought.
It was just like her to make him degrade himself all the way so she could call herself his equal. If she got him to suck off a man, a pimp, he was really her victim. God, how rotten could a woman get and still survive!
Elmo understood why Rod wouldn't go down on him. He also understood that Marta was a goddam bitch for suggesting it. He finally left and Rod went off to his bed in the front room to sick to protest at what had happened. A few weeks before he would have fired up and left if old Elmo had come in like that and laid on the bed with Marta and him with a hard-on sticking up naked. Now he just couldn't fight any longer. He wanted to die, and the recurring cough he had made him think he just might do that in the near future.
Nadine, the girl Marta had bunked with in Dallas, came for a visit and to work at the studio. It didn't last three days. Nadine was poet enough to appreciate Rod's amateur efforts, and they made a hit with each other. Marta didn't squawk when Rod went to bed with Nadine in the back bedroom and gave her a sucking off that won her eternal gratitude. But when Marta saw that Rod and Nadine were hitting it off so good that Nadine might take over as number one in the harem she really flipped with jealousy and furious resentment.
Rod slept with Nadine in the front bedroom and she got him up so much and they fucked so hard that he developed stiff muscles inside his thighs and Nadine said her cunt was getting sore.
Nadine and Marta had a fight at the studio which ended it all. Nadine went back to Dallas mad as hell, but making Rod promise to write her about his poetry. They had something in common, she said. If he ever decided to quit Marta she'd have a warm welcome for him over in Texas. "You deserve something as big as the Lone Star state, Rod," she said. "I don't see how you can stand Marta."
Neither did he see how he could bear up much longer. Only that inexplicable passion he had for Marta held him in her thrall. He had stopped fighting, it seemed, and was just waiting for something to happen that would kick him on down the mountain. They almost never fucked now. He didn't have energy enough to raise a hard-on.
He was getting as thin as a skeleton, like the poor sap of a John that Marta had jeered about, walking the streets of skidrow and pining away for her after he could no longer pay her price for gash. Marta Swan was making a walking skeleton and a skidrow bum out of him too.
He had to borrow more money to keep up his payments. Old Ben Pogue was needling him at the office, hinting that he was getting in bad with his uncle in Chicago. In his listless illness he had no punch at all for his work and couldn't even write poetry to express his miseries. The cough continued from bad to worse and it became obvious that he was going to be a very sick man.
Marta didn't object when he put it up to her matter-of-factly.
"I'm dying here, Marta," he said. "It's too much strain on me, living here with a whore and no chance of getting out that I can see. You won't marry me and quit the racket. You say it's your debts, but you know damn well it isn't. We could pay off all that legitimately. You just can't change, Marta. You'll always try to pull me down to your level and make a cheap, lousy, henpecked pimp of me. If I took you to Chi and bought you a millinery store you'd still be screwing on the side and making me like it."
She didn't argue with him. She knew he was sick and had to do something. So, when he packed his car this time it was for real.
"You call me when you're feeling better, Rod," Marta said. "I'll make it somehow. Business will pick up, if the god-dam vice squad would only quit needling me. I'm sure Heps is egging them on to knock me over. She hates my competition. I got some of her best paying customers away from her but the god-dam girls are stealing me blind and...."
"You have to take some of the guys yourself," Rod capped her bitterly. "They won't settle for your god-dam milkmaids and amateur chippies."
She didn't answer him. He was so sick she wouldn't argue with him.
He drove out of the drive like a man heading off into the blue yonder and leaving the whole world behind. He had no volition left. He knew only that he had to go home and rest. Away from Marta he was sure he could get rid of his cough. As for his zest for life, he doubted that he'd ever get it back. This poisonous passion had blighted him like the breath of burning drouth on a blooming flower. His soul drooped in the sun and his leaves withered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A HOLE IN THE HEAD
Rod took a week off at the office. They knew he was coughing bad and looked peaked. How much they knew about Marta and the whore house he couldn't be sure. But he sensed that Ben Pogue knew plenty because he continually needled him with little warning remarks about the importance of his responsibilities as manager of the branch office for Zarak Shoes.
The first night on Rosalind Street he slept like a baby, and in the morning his cough was almost gone. It had been mostly neurotic. His youthful tendencies to succumb to tubercular infection had been completely overcome he was sure. It would take a lot of abuse to bring that up again.
By the second day his cough had disappeared altogether and he had his appetite back. He felt drained and spiritually dead but he was definitely on the mend. He didn't call Marta and she didn't call him. She still did not know his unlisted number and he didn't intend that she should. If she wanted to see him she could do what she should have done long before ... come out to Rosalind Street and go to bed with him where she belonged. Now that he knew her better he realized that the stillness and sunshine out here on the edge of the city where a coyote even howled now and then on a deep-in foray for chickens, would probably drive her screwy. Her sick body and mind had to have the sick city atmosphere to keep it artificially alive. She lived in a whiskey highball sitting at a bar or in a booth getting lit with some prospective cunt girl or a juicy John who would dig up real dough to have his ass off.
The third day Rod had a glow of inspiration and in the quiet sadness of his voluntary cloistery he sat down to the typewriter with his dog lying at his feet and typed out in one draft with almost no hesitation a poem that he immediately titled "Marcia".
"Marcia, in some golden time to come,
Our kindred ears
May hear a prolonged note
Through sunset years-"
A tone of singing beauty long sustained." That was all. Just a fragment he knew, but it was poetry, the only thing he had ever written that he could really be satisfied with. Something told him that it was literally and metaphorically his "swan" song to Marta Swan. His whole life had been lived and suffered just to inspire that one precious fragment. Nadine would agree with him and he had a notion to send her a copy. As for Marta, no. She'd never get it. It would be just a lot of sentimental bullshit to her, especially if she thought Nadine had anything to do with it. She hated Nadine now with a furious, jealous hatred because Rod and she had liked each other so well (even though it wasn't that sick and deadly love that Rod had for Marta).
He'd never live the "sunset years" with Marcia or Marta or Adele Jepson, her real name. He was sure of that now. Marta wasn't the marrying kind. She was Lilith in Eve's garden as deadly as the serpent himself. But the dream would go on and on into eternity where dreams like sound waves went on forever. It didn't matter after all what happened to the putrid flesh. Better to burn yourself to a crisp with the heat of furious living and rise from your dead ashes in glorious freedom to whatever there was beyond death. Fuck the world! Disease didn't matter. Lust didn't matter. It was the bellowing fury of the consuming flame that mattered. The poets had written:
"Let me live out my life in heat of blood, Let me lie drunken with the dreamer's wine, Let me not see this soul-house built of mud Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine!" He had about lived it. Marta had been the all and the end all. One thing she had done for him, hurt him so bad that he couldn't feel a god-dam thing anymore. He didn't want sex. His prick was dead to his hand. He didn't give a damn about Jackie Lee or Pearl Sanford and her free Eskimo screwing. He just wanted to lie and dream, eat and sleep.
The day before he was to return to the office Ben Pogue telephoned him that a message had arrived from Chicago marked for him personally. He had given orders that he shouldn't be called except in an emergency. Obviously this was it. A few weeks before he would have been deeply shaken, but now it didn't seem to matter much.
It would be from his Uncle Joel all right. Maybe he was getting the sack which he knew he deserved. Ben Pogue had been taking most of the responsibility for years and he'd undoubtedly become district manager if Rod were fired. He drove in a day early to get the telegram. All it said was that Uncle Joel was arriving at the airport on Flight 772 the following day at one P. M. Obviously he was to meet him and find out what was cooking. From the attitude and buzz of talk in the office Rod sensed that they all knew the top brass was coming. Pogue had probably notified them, Could be they knew he was getting the axe at last. Maybe old Ben or one of the itchy-cunted old maids in the office had double-crossed him and reported his immoral life with Sun City's most notorious prostitute. Fuck them, He was ready and didn't give a damn what happened.
Leaving the office (his vacation still had a day to go anyway) he proceeded to find a secluded bar where he wasn't known and to soak up nine bourbon highs with 7-Up. It was a god-dam amateur's drink but he was proud that he still was an amateur, not a dry drinker like Marta. The stuff crawled up in his mind and took a diarrhetic shit. In other words, he didn't cheer up. He fell completely to the bottom.
Leaving the bar and climbing into his car, he drove off aimlessly through the city, wishing he hadn't tried to drown anything in liquor. He kept driving for nearly an hour before the alcoholic pressure began to relax and he felt more normal again. At last he risked the secluded solitude of his house, driving into the yard about sundown.
He heard his telephone ringing as he let himself in. Not many had his unlisted number. It was Pogue telling him he had been trying to get him for a couple of hours. The old boy was rather peeved.
His Uncle Joel had called to say no one was to meet him at the airport. Rod was to be in his office awaiting him. It was something about seeing some big-shot at the airport meanwhile. He might be there a while.
"Okay," Rod said. "I'll be in at noon tomorrow."
It was just as well that he didn't have to meet the old boy at the airport. It wouldn't be pleasant. Better they saw each other in a strictly business atmosphere.
He spent the rest of the evening trying to compose himself and get into a mood so he could get some rest before the ordeal. If it was anything but bad news he'd believe in miracles. After all, he had been expecting this for years and he ought to be ready. In a way he was glad that Marta had immunized him to shock. After her, nothing on earth could really get under his skin.
The old bat had deliberately arranged to cancel the meeting at the airport just to torture him, to prolong his agony, even to humiliate him before the office personnel. As the night wore on and he tossed sleeplessly, immune to barbital and unable to raise a sedating hard-on, he became obsessed with the sadistic malice of that old fool, his father's brother, who hadn't changed his goddam hair cut in sixty years. People called him the "iron man" with his homburg hat and velvet-collared overcoat, always precision, always on time. Rod wondered how Uncle Joel screwed. Did he hold a time clock on himself and blast off punctually after thirteen jabs to the bottom of the gut? Fuck the bastard! Why did he have to be obligated to such a cantankerous old blue-nose?
He hadn't seen his uncle for years but he knew he couldn't have changed. Old Ben had been back there to a big staff meeting and he said Joel Kel-sey reminded him of historic pictures he had seen of old Bismarck, the kraut statesman. Dry ice for a brain and a body that melted only at twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Morning finally came to his tired, smarting eyes. The birds singing seemed to mock him. He wanted to take his shotgun outside and shoot every damned one of them. And he had hours ahead of him before the ordeal was over. How much did his uncle know and where had he got his information? It seemed to him that the whole world was against him now that he faced the end. End? Of course it was the end. What could he do to help himself?
He had lived for years on a big pay check he hadn't earned. A real wet-eared mamma's boy. His chin quivered as he thought of his dead mother and how she had cherished him, petted him, doted over him, defended him from the stern, unbending ruthlessness of his father who was so much like his Uncle Joel. Well, they were gone now and he was glad they'd not see his finish or even know about it.
He got into his car and drove off to town, unaware that his dog was whining and begging for attention and sat mournfully in the drive as he pulled out, looking off after him glumly and uttering little whimpers deep in his throat.
They all knew. He could tell by the way the buzz talk ceased the moment he entered the outer office. He snapped a good morning around at them like a peevish dog and headed straight for his office. Ben Pogue followed him in solicitously (on the surface). Was there anything he could do to get things shipshape for the "inspection"?
"Inspection hell!" Rod blurted out. "I'm getting the sack and you know it."
"Oh, I don't think it'll be that bad," Pogue pretended to sympathize. "But...."
"Shut up and quit needling me!" Rod flared. "I've a damn good notion to clear the whole office and declare a holiday. By God, that's just what I'll do! Send the god-dam mourners home and tell 'em I'm gonna be cremated!"
"But you can't do that!" Pogue put out a fat hand to restrain Rod. "Your uncle told me he'd hold me responsible for everything that happened in this office until he got here."
"So that's how it is," Rod snarled, pushing Pogue away from him. "I'm technically fired already."
He charged back and forth around his desk, kicking the waste basket over into a corner, sweeping the report trays off his desk to the floor.
"You'd better cool down, Mr. Kelsey," Pogue said menacingly, "if you don't I'm going to have to call the police."
"You would shit!" Rod scoffed. "It'd be bad publicity. A private dick is your speed, just one more business gangster. Fuck you, Ben, you're just a god-dam square."
"And I'd like to know what you've become?" Ben shot at him in a low, withering, cold tone of voice.
"Go on, get out," Rod snarled. "Just leave me alone till he comes. I'll keep your p-i-e-c-e." He spelled out the word contemptuously.
Pogue left abruptly and Rod locked the door behind him. He had brought a small envelope containing four barbital tablets. He knew what it meant taking the stuff during the day. You went off your nut. But in an emergency it sort of knocked you out, and that's what he needed now. He went to his private toilet and got a paper cup of water and swallowed all four of the tablets. He was loaded with accumulation and there was no telling what the stuff would do to him. He laughed aloud at the picture of himself sitting dead at his desk when his uncle came in. The old bat would be cheated of his last sadistic orgy. But no such luck could be anticipated. At worst he'd collapse unconscious and they'd have to call an ambulance.
There proved to be no kick-back from the dosage and he simply subsided to a semi-conscious sleepwalking indifference, slumped back in his swiv-eled desk chair, staring off into space, thinking of Marta and wondering what the bitch was doing, and who she was doing, now. Fuck Marta and Uncle Joel! He'd live it out without either of them. The barbital numbed his fears for the future.
They had to knock on the door when his uncle arrived. He got up and opened for them mechanically. Then he was looking at his fate, framed by the office door, glaring at him with steely blue eyes that never had shed a tear on this earth. Everything was the same except the god-dam velvet collared, velour overcoat. It was too hot in Sun City for that.
"Welcome to Sun City, Uncle Joel," he heard his voice saying from a seemingly far distance.
"Don't welcome me to this funeral," that hard, clipped voice hit straight to the testicles. "I've had all the sentiment I can stand from you and for you. You're fired as of now and you've been actually without authority for several weeks while I finished my investigation."
"Investigation?" Rod queried innocently.
"Don't soft-pedal me!" his uncle strode forward menacingly as Rod collapsed into his desk chair automatically. "I'm retiring you on two hundred a month and that's for your father's sake, not yours. Your father was a man. You're a fart? Get it? a fart!"
"I seem to smell the odor of digested beans," Rod said kittenishly. The barbital made him silly.
"The beans you'll be eating!" his uncle shook a raunchy, hair-backed fist under his chin.
"What, may I ask, are the reasons for this highhanded, inconsiderate treatment of your loving nephew?" Rod asked, tapping his fingers together like a Lily Tomlin.
"Christ, as if you don't know!" his uncle raged. "I've been having you thoroughly investigated. You've been living with a whore and even financing her illegal operations in this city and she's under the police axe right now. I've seen to that. This criminal Jezebel is mixed up with a notorious murder in Chicago. Some mobster shot a man because of her. And she's a material witness in proceedings to try and spring him. This Marta so-and-so has an FBI record as long as the list of your losses since I made you manager of this territory, you no-good black sheep. Don't worry, I'll see that you aren't publicized in this mess, when they put this bitch away for good. But you'd better lay low. The best thing you can do for the family and Zarak Shoes is leave town. Go to Mexico or Hawaii. I'll see that you get your check wherever you go."
"Thanks ... thanks for the small favors," Rod said dreamily, getting up and staring out the window at the moving traffic below.
"Small favors!" his uncle snorted. "You sissy!"
Rod didn't speak. He just kept looking out the window with his hands behind his ass, the fingers interlaced.
"I'll expect you cleared out of this office in an hour," his uncle rasped with finality.
Rod turned slowly. "I'll be out of here in five minutes! Now you get the hell out of here in nothing flat or I'll smash you right in your god-dam puss!"
For a second he saw amazement and even admiration in his uncle's hard, heavy face for the first time that he could remember. Then, with a contemptuous laugh the old boy was gone and a burst of subdued noises came in from the outer office as the door opened and closed.
He was as good as his word. He was out of the office with everything personal in his briefcase in less than five minutes. He didn't look at anyone as he walked out to the elevator. They hadn't exactly hated him because he had been pretty easy, but he felt that they secretly despised him, and that there was no love lost with his leaving.
Of course he was bankrupt. Two hundred a month wouldn't pay his installments on the house and loans. In due course the bank and loan company would take over his property on Rosalind Street. Even his car was mortgaged. That he could do anything about it seemed impossible as trying to emulate Hercules in mythology. He had never really made a living in his whole life. He had been the American style gentry, born to money and power, not quite a I, II, III, IV millionaire whose distant ancestor had bought the lot for the Empire State Building for a few beads from the sucker Indians. But gentry just the same. And now he was facing the music of reality. Could he live on beans? Was he man enough to survive skidrow?
The barbital had worn off a little when he arrived home. In the mail box he found a letter addressed to him in a familiar schoolgirlish scrawl that Marta had learned in "college". It sure hadn't been Radcliff!
He tore open the letter lackadaisically. What could she possibly have to say to him? If she had known he had got the sack would she have bothered to write? He doubted it.
She had moved. The new address was closer to work. Sometimes she had to walk now or call a taxi. Bleat, bleat, bleat! The sob-sister, crocodile crying bitch! Wouldn't he come to see her? How did he feel now? She missed him terribly. At least she didn't ask for money. That could be implied. The letter was signed, "All my love, Marcia". Still the phony right up to the last. All of her love was like a cup of cold tea for whisky in the movies.
Then it occurred to him that he might as well go and see her. What could she do him for now? He was really on the rocks after today. But it gave him some satisfaction to realize that he wasn't a "walking skeleton", pining for her feverish fuck like that fool she had boasted about. He'd fuck the bitch and call his shots from now on, and she couldn't get blood out of a turnip. He grinned and shrugged as he wondered how long it would be before she gave him the gate and quit giving him "free flesh", as if any John ever had anything free from her.
She still had the same telephone number. She'd need to keep all her old contacts at her new address. It helped to realize that other men didn't bother him now. He just didn't give a damn what she did. One thing was for sure, he'd never live with her again. When he got his ass off or sucked her to orgasm he'd walked out and leave her as if she had never existed ... until next time, if there was to be a next time.
That night at eight she was waiting for him. It flattered his vanity to see how carefully she had dressed and bathed and shined up her hair in order to lure him back to bed. The new house was much like the old one ... a place to sleep in and have breakfast, a shack in the richest country on earth.
"We love each other," she whispered throatily, embracing him hungrily, with her naked legs as well as her naked arms, and giving him her fever-hot kisses generously, as they collapsed on the bed.
He was all stored up and threw a fast fuck into her, but the big lift of her diabolic, spiritual witch self was gone. He got a vicarious thrill out of finishing her with his mouth but it was like an artist practicing for himself only. The divine passion just wasn't there any more.
Finally they lay spent on the sheets and he told her of his uncle's visit and how he had got the sack, all because of her, well, not really all but that had triggered it.
She didn't seem surprised and didn't deny her criminal record...."I talk to lawyers from Chi every now and then," she told him complacently. "Forget it, Rod. Forget your silly job. I hate this god-dam town anyway. The people here are no-good. As soon as I make a killing we'll go away and I'll start a millinery store. You'll have your two hundred a month from the family. We can live like we used to, just for each other."
"When was that?" he asked dully. "Nope, Marta, I'll never live with you again. I've been tortured enough. I know just how it would be with you ... always other men for money. You couldn't resist. It's in your blood. You were born to be a whore. And in the end you'd have me bringing them to you and toadying to your every whim, listening to your ravings when you get drunk and maybe bailing you out on hangover mornings or putting you in a drying out sanitarium. Nix! Forget it. Let me die in pieces in peace."
He got up to go, coldly indifferent, as if in a blanket of ice. But she wouldn't submit to it. She was actually begging him to stay...."Don't leave me, Rod! I'm so lonely. You're the only one who really cares."
"Yeah," he pushed at her. "Ye-e-ah!"
All the way to the front door she pulled at him, pleading piteously. Finally he deigned to go back to the bedroom and let her give him the treatment which was her highest priced specialty, reserved for great or extremely profitable, occasions. Never before had she been so artful with her mouth and tongue on his prick. Yet the thrill of her sucking him off was only physical now. That priceless ingredient of successful sex was gone with the wind, the cold, bleak, merciless wind of time and hellish circumstance.
He agreed to stay until she was asleep. In the end, as she finally passed out, he got off the bed as quietly as he could, stealing out into the night and back into his car and on through the city lights to his house in the suburbs. God, God, would it never end!
The drug of sex had helped. He went back to Marta almost daily. It was his innings, he thought. He was collecting like all the other creeps that she owed for favors in the past. And every night he had to lie with her until she fell asleep or else fight his way with physical violence out the door. She even threatened to kill him for ignoring her. He could have stopped coming to see her but it did him good to see her suffer for wanting him. Then the axe fell.
He had just walked in to Marta's new location for his usual evening with her when Fats Hagen drove up and got out of his car alone. Rod knew something must be wrong by the expression on the old Swede's bloated, drink-reddened face.
"Dey picked her up!" Fats blurted out thickly, his breath stinking of booze. "Dat dirty, double-crossing vice squad got her."
"Where is she?" Rod asked, surprised at his own unshaken cool. He had been prepared for this. He remembered his uncle's threat that he would get Marta.
"She's down at da police station bein' booked," Fats said. "Her an' her girl Brenda. She only had da one girl at da last. She was goin' broke. Dey was houndin' her, da bastards."
"Can she pay her bail?" Rod asked.
"I t'ink so," Fats said. "But da lawyer will clean her an' she'll fight. She's madder'n hell at them." The old Swede bristled at Rod suddenly. "If you hadn't left her dis wouldn't have happened!" he burst out. "She got desperate an' took chances takin' guys herself."
Rod turned away coldly and said nothing. It gave him sadistic pleasure to hear that. So she really had started taking Johns herself ... if she hadn't been doing plenty of that before.
Two hours later Marta came in with her girl Brenda. Rod had never seen her so soberly furious. The vice-squad had double-crossed her. She had kept her end of the bargain, she claimed, giving the cops fuck and suck for free whenever they wanted it. And then suddenly they betrayed her with arrest and padlocking the studio.
"Those bastards!" she raged. "I'll show them they can't railroad me. It's Hepsibah's doings. She needled them into raiding me. I've got the best criminal lawyer in Sun City to defend me. I'll show them they can't make it stick. And then I'll sue them for false arrest, those pricks!"
Rod smiled inwardly though looking preacher sober and sad on the outside. This was really the end of a chapter and maybe the whole book, he thought. A tricky lawyer might bet Marta off with a fine and the magistrate's instructions to leave town, routine procedure for whores caught with a prick in them and money on the table. From what he had heard of rackets in the city that was about the best she could do. Beating the rap was just an alcoholic's dream bubble.
"I wish I could help," Rod said without much sincerity, for deep down he couldn't help exulting. She had shit in her own bed. If she had married him and quit the racket this wouldn't have happened. Greed and lust had destroyed her.
He realized that he had left her just in time to escape the deluge. It might have been embarrassing if he had still been living at the house. Fats Hagen had been doing all the front work apparently and had been sleeping in one of the bedrooms, just a watch dog, or maybe a dog with a hot, hungry tongue for blonde pussy on nights when they both were blotto on booze.
While marking time before the hearing, which would also be the trial, the girl Brenda left town jumping her bail, while Marta stuck it out but with her feathers folding. She looked drained and peaked, pitiful in her helplessness, her feeble efforts to maintain defiance. Elmo Dahl didn't show up. "Dat rat left town," Fats Hagen fumed. "He was tryin' tuh be her pimp. Dey could hook him for plenty. It goes harder for da man."
Evidently Fats hadn't actually been soliciting for Marta. He was more in Rod's category legally.
That gray day in the city court Rod sat alone among the handful of spectators. Rapping whore was just a routine. Marta's fame had been limited to the shoestring jet set who hid from all publicity like rats deserting a sinking ship.
Rod could see Marta in the magistrate's chambers with her lawyer whenever the door opened as the bailiff went about his duties. He had never seen her so frowzy, so gray and old. She had aged fifteen years. Maybe she was just putting on an act to get sympathy. But it all sickened him. Jesus, how sordid! And to think he had once loved her. Maybe he still loved her deep down like a zombie loves its master, like a walking corpse loves and obeyes the command of a dying witch.
Presently she came out and sat waiting to be called to the bench. Fats Hagen sat with her like a father. Rod didn't even pretend that he knew her. It was all over in a few minutes. Marta stood up with her lawyer before the judge...."$200.00 or ninety days in jail and leave town before midnight of day of sentencing." Monotonously perfunctory. The judge hardly looked at her twice.
The next case was called and Rod went out into the corridor of the courthouse wondering if Marta could pay her fine. He knew he couldn't let her go to jail if he could help it. Maybe it was partly that he wanted to get her out of town and out of his life forever. In his badly bent financial condition he didn't have two hundred bucks on him nor even in the bank. He hoped that he wouldn't be called on to pay these last expenses.
Then Fats Hagen came out looking for him with a stony look on his heavy face.
"Ve can raise a hundred fifty. Ve need fifty more."
Rod heaved a sigh of relief as he got out his billfold and shucked out two twenties and a ten. It was almost all he had. Fats grabbed the money and hot-footed for the courtroom. Rod walked out reviewing his resources from now on. His credit cards would be good for gas and he could charge groceries.
Now how the hell would she leave town if she was clean after paying the fine? He drove to her house knowing old Fats would drive her home. When she came in an hour later, as he sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, she looked damned near fifty years old. She and Fats had hoisted a few at some bar but they weren't at all cheerful.
"I haven't a cent left," Marta bleated, "and Fats doesn't have any money either. Rod, you've got to help me get out of town." Her defiance had vanished now and she was like a worm wiggling its head out of the ground before somebody stepped on it without looking.
"I might let you have bus fare to the coast," Rod offered but without enthusiasm. He felt absolutely dead inside. She was just a tub of guts that had to be disposed of.
"But I need a rest," she whined. "I can't work the way I am. If I go over there...." she broke off as if with a bright idea dawning.
Rod and Fats stared at the floor glumly while Marta lit a cigarette, thinking.
"I know!" she burst out with more spirit. "I'll load all my things into your car, Rod, and you can drive me to Vegas. I've a brother there who will take care of me until I feel better."
"I'm just about down to skidrow," Rod said grimly. "But maybe I can manage."
Fats helped them load the car. The Swede promised to ship what they couldn't carry. With her clothes and all that would be plenty.
In two hours after her fine was paid they were heading out of town for Las Vegas. Rod knew Vegas was quite a whore town. Marta had swung a few Johns there before and after she got back in shape she might be hot enough to make a living, especially in a joint that took all colors.
Marta began to look better as they drove. Motoring always stimulated sex and he could begin to feel the heat of her. A cruel urge flamed up in him to give her one last fuck for all the hell she had caused him. When he drove off the road in a secluded place she complained, "What are we driving out here for? You know I don't feel like doing anything."
"Where have I heard that before?" he rasped at her as he stopped the car in a country lane with only a few houses to be seen in the distance.
"Rod, don't do anything here. We'll have all night in a motel and I'll go to my brother's in the morning."
"The hell with that," he said. "I'm getting mine right now."
He threw up her skirt and dragged off her pants. He shouldn't have had a hard-on but for some reason or other he was stiff as a poker. Not that he was so ready. It was more of a piss hard-on caused by hysteria.
She didn't fight him. She parted her thighs and let him plow into her. He could see her face twist up with pain. Maybe it did really hurt her. So what? He pumped violently, grabbing her soft ass and holding her into him so he could ram her clear to the balls.
"Fuck, damn you!" he whispered hoarsely. "Fuck for your money, you bitch!"
She roused up a little in a vicious, resentful reaction, and with her face screwed up writhed and jerked at his hard prick as if she were trying to break it off.
"Fuck, you bitch!" he snarled as he pumped the hell out of her.
He hardly expected to come yet he did. His semen balled up like boiling mush and began to jet into Marta. He could see her head bend back as if she were suffering intensely as he blew himself in wave after wave of violent orgasm. For days he hadn't had any sex and now under all this emotional strain he was coming as if throwing a fit.
After he was finished he held her to him, letting it soak and she murmured in a cold, listless voice, "Well, are you satisfied?"
He pulled his prick out of her with a jerk. "You know damn well I'm not satisfied! What have you got for a man? I hate you, Marta. I hate every inch of you, every heart beat, every pore of your sick, rotten body that's like a poisonous orchid growing in a rotting stump."
She reached for her panties and said harshly, "Why the hell don't you write a poem about it?"
He thought of the one poem he had written to Marcia. It seemed a long time ago, as if in another lifetime. " ... in some golden time to come...." No! No! He yelled out the "no!" as if talking to himself.
Back on the main highway he drove grimly with his eyes on the back-sweeping ribbon of the road and the other cars zooming toward him on the left or occasionally passing him. The old switch-top didn't have the pazazz it used to have and neither did its master.
Marta began to talk as if nothing had happened along the road...."After I get well at my brother's you can come for me and we'll go to Chi and I'll buy the millinery store. Everything will be all right. We love each other. You can't help it and neither can I...."
"Love in your life," he snarled at her out of the corner of his mouth.
His seething fury got to her and she could see that he was unrelenting, until finally she said in a low, flat tone of emotionless resignation:
"Are you going to kill me?"
He didn't think much about it at the moment. He'd heard her ask that before when they had quarreled. And then he got to thinking about the snub-nosed .38 he had in the side pocket of the door beside him. He always carried that in case of emergencies. Maybe he could get it out and surprise some bastard in case of a hold-up.
Until that moment he had never actually considered really killing her. On the contrary, he had been more afraid that she would kill him like that night when she had stolen into his room after the showdown when she had hurled the glass ashtray at his head.
"Well," she repeated lifelessly, "are you going to kill me?"
He glanced at her with one eye on the road and said, "I don't know. I really don't know."
After a few more miles she began talking again about the problematical future. He hardly was aware of what she actually said. A pall of horror had descended upon him like a dreadful chill from outer space. This was the end. What use was there in going on? He couldn't live with this thing beside him and he couldn't really live without her. Hadn't he decided that it didn't matter what happened to their earthly shells? That they would rise again from their ashes like phoenix birds reborn in a better world?
He thought of the gun again in the side pocket of the car. Jesus! He hadn't fired it for ages. Maybe the damn thing wouldn't even go off.
They came to a barren, desert stretch dotted with mesquite trees and greasewood with washes winding here and there palely green with paloverde.
Without any real volition he suddenly turned off on a hunting trail and they bounced along slower.
"Not again," she said disgustedly.
"I've got to take a piss," he said.
"I could stand that myself," she responded as if nothing were amiss.
It was just as well that she didn't know, he thought. She might go haywire and start to jump out of the car or beat at him. Out here, if she tried to run away, she wouldn't get far and she could yell her head off and nobody but him would hear her.
He finally stopped the car in a wash with pal-overde looming around giving them a pretense of cover. He took the pistol from the side pocket of the car and said in a flat voice, "Get out."
She climbed out obediently not saying a word. She couldn't help but know what he was going to do after seeing the gun. What would she do? Have hysterics? Kneel and beg for her life? Or did she know as he knew that there was nothing left for them to live for, that she might just as well be gone as to suffer through the last years.
He got out his side of the car and walked around to her, carrying the pistol. A faint path like an animal trail led away from the car along the wash. He couldn't say why he didn't want to do it here. Maybe he was seeking the lonely vastness of the desert where his act would be lost in the impervious grandeur of raw nature, out here where they could die like crushed scorpions or pack rats swooped up by an eagle.
"Start walking," he said, motioning along the trail.
She began to walk, wobbling on her french heels. He followed a little behind her.
"You think you're going to kill me," she said. "But you haven't the nerve. You're just a chicken-hearted square, Rod. I've known real men."
He didn't respond verbally. There was no pity in him, no love, not even hate. He was beyond all sensation or emotion. He seemed to be moving as if by previous momentum, an empty shell of a man that had stopped living far back there somewhere in the merciless battle of life.
They had reached a frightfully bleak stretch. It was like the skeletons of death all around them. Nothing could live here, nothing had ever been intended to live here.
"That's far enough," he finally said, and as she stopped, he lifted the gun. "Why don't you start running?" he asked.
"Where would I run to?" she asked dismally. "I don't care what you do. I'm glad to go, Rod. Life just doesn't make sense. It never could be right for us. It's just as well this way."
"You've got more guts than I thought you had," he confessed, miserably.
"It's not guts," she answered in a harsh, dead voice. "I'm already dead."
He remembered how years ago he had shot an old dog that had been a pet. He had shot it from behind the head so the poor beast wouldn't know when the trigger was pulled. This was the way he would do it now.
"Turn around," he said.
As she turned obediently he raised the pistol to the back of her mussed up, bleached hair-do and fired.
She jerked and slumped forward to her face, her body quivering as it slowly stretched out, and then fell still. Blood welled from the hole in the back of her head, dyeing the shining blonde hair with a spreading crimson stain.
He looked up at the peaceful sky and the golden eye of the unseeing sun. Vaguely it came to him ... how could such misery be concentrated in one insignificant human being?
As a kind of ceremonial he murmured the words of the poem he had written to her and which no earthly person other than himself had ever seen or even knew about...."in some golden time to come...."
He looked down at her body and turned it over slowly with one foot. Her dead eyes were so peaceful now. The sensuous lips were parted as if awaiting his kiss. It occurred to him that she had been purified by the blazing fires of sudden death bursting in her brain before the final falling of eternal night.
It came to him in a dim, sketchy visioning how the newspaper headlines would spread the sensation. Old Uncle Joel might be slightly shaken from his icy aplomb. Fats Hagen would get drunk again and weep in the bosom of some dirty whore. Elmo Cahl could check another prospect off his percentage list. Back in Missouri Myrtle and Reese would breathe sighs of relief to know that it was over and fittingly.
Of course he could never get away with this. The sheriff would have him in no time. He had no intentions of enduring the ordeals of booking and questioning and news cameras, jail bars, etcetera, followed by the agony of a courtroom and then the gas chamber, or worse, the endless torture of life imprisonment.
He raised the pistol resolutely and pressed the cold muzzle to his burning skull.
With eyes tightly closed, he clenched his teeth and pulled the trigger.
His body was found lying across Marta. His cold cock was on her cunt even in death, and their corpses made a cross of dead flesh on the wastes of the desert.
