This is my very first novel, and it happens to be my own autobiography in a manner of speaking, I hope the title I've selected will make things a little easier for all of you. You see, there actually was and is a Passion's Vineyard, and it happens to be the one I inherited from my father. And what happened in, around, and about it goes to make up this story.
My name is Carl Venturi, and my dad was born in Cremona, the home of the great Antonio Stradivari, who, as some of you may know, made such wonderful violins that they cost a fortune and are very rare, and are usually played only by the greatest concert artists. But my father, while he liked music well enough, liked his vino much more, and that's why when he inherited a few acres of fertile land near Cremona, he began planting grapes. He wanted a harvest of magnificent, juicy grapes that would produce incomparable wine. To my father, whose name was Marcantonio Venturi, wine, not bread, was the staff of life. There were a few good reasons for his feeling that way about it. Wine, in his opinion, made a man happy and philosophical and emotional. Wine made his staff grow hard as a rock and ready for a good romp in the hay into the soft and willing pussy of a brownskinned, flashing-eyed farmer's daughter whose loins would cradle a man and drain out of him the very juice of life itself. This juice he would replenish, to be sure, by drinking more wine, and so the wonderful cycle would go on. My father, as you can guess, was something of a character.
When he was about twenty-nine, and had been working his land for about five years, he managed to produce by means of grafting one cutting onto another vine a particularly juicy white grape from which could be gleaned a wonderfully robust and yet flowery white wine not unlike Orvieto or Soave, which ranked as Italy's two greatest white wines. Red wine was easily enough yielded, and any fool could grow it, according to my father. It was, to be sure, the staple commodity of a good vineyard, but your real profit and your prestige therefore came from a genuinely great white wine.
So my father came to California, as do all good Italians, Sicilians and Armenians in due course, in their quest for rich soil and the warm sun and enough rain or piped-in water to fertilize the soil and to make it thrive. At first he rented a few acres of land from a wealthy farmer who was really an amateur and who traveled a good deal in Europe screwing one female after another since he was rich and a bachelor, two incomparable qualities necessary to the full enjoyment of pussy. My father used to say that a bachelor was like a vintner, because he could experiment with many kinds of grapes and find the sweetest juices that would delight his palate, whereas the married man has to suffice himself with one grape alone, and if the juice be sour, alas for his prick's happiness.
Be that as it may, my father prospered as a tenant farmer-vintner, and when his wealthy patron returned from Europe as the beaming and portly bridegroom and consort of a voluptuous nineteen-year-old girl from Naples to whom he had taken a fancy and whose mother had been shrewd enough to tell her daughter not to open her legs until there was a wedding ring at the end of the line, the old fool decided to sell my father this good land.
Two years later, when my father was about thirty-two, he produced his first really good crop. The late September harvest was a bountiful one for Marcantonio Venturi. He had an old overseer named Jacopo Lasparri, who had worked in the Valley for over thirty years and who knew grapes better than most men know the capabilities of their own pricks. He had created a label which he proudly called "Venturi Vino," and at first cautiously he had made a very excellent Burgundy and then had attempted a white Sauterne. They were small bottlings, but they sold very well in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The strange thing about Fresno is that while it is an area extremely productive of good wine, few of the natives drink it. I suppose it's like working in a candy shop and not caring to eat the candy that's all around you. But for whatever reasons, the sales of my father's first bottlings were very encouraging.
With the money he got, he went to the bank and borrowed still more. In those happy days, the Bank of America still remembered the principles of its great founder, who had been an Italian himself and who had believed that the wealth of any country comes from the encouragement of the humble people, the farmers and the workers who till the soil and who build and who do things with their own hands. So the great Bank smiled upon my father's endeavors, and gave him more money, and he bought more land.
And when he was forty, the name of "Venturi Vino" was known throughout the State of California, though he had not yet begun to have his bottlings shipped beyond the Rockies. He was almost an illiterate man, was my father, but the salt of the earth and robust and over six feet tall, with a flowing beard and a strong hawklike nose and flashing dark eyes, and he could still at the age of forty do a day's work in the vineyard that would put a man half his age to shame.
At forty he decided it was time he took a wife. Now mind you, my father had not remained continent or virgin through these forty years. That would be to belie his entire philosophy of life. No, at each harvest time, my father had carried on the ancient Italian custom of winetreading. It's a very simple and delightful custom. You take some wooden vats, you put grapes into them, and you let pretty young girls get into the vats wearing short skirts (or if they insist upon wearing long ones, hoisting them above their waists), and you let them trample the grapes while they move about, smiling at the spectators, showing their sun-bronzed thighs and maybe, if they aren't wearing panties, the tempting dark triangle which heralds another place where a man can find the wine of life. And the girl who treads the most grapes and produces the most wine from her trampling with her dainty bare feet wins a prize. Well, the prize was some money and it was also a seance in my father's bedroom. And since my father was a robust and virile stallion, I can tell you that almost all the girls who worked in his vineyard looked his way whenever he passed down the rows where they were picking grapes or pruning the wines and hoped that he would summon them to his bedchamber long before the harvest festival. And to be sure, he usually did.
But as I say, at forty, with money in the bank, a good vineyard of some five hundred acres, a fair reputation for his honorable name stamped on the label which identified a tall bottle of good wine, my father believed it was time to start a family. He therefore sent back to Cremona for the prettiest maiden. Her name was Rosa Bonaventura, which means "good adventure." For her it was one indeed. Her family was enchanted to think that their only daughter would go to fabulously rich America and live like a queen. And she didn't do badly at that. My father had a ranch-type house out where the Fig Garden now is, a huge yard in which he grew gourds and acacia trees and about twelve different kinds of fruit trees including apricots, pears, figs, oranges and apples and grapefruit, and he had an old Model T Ford which he had preserved year after year. When he drove into Fresno's business district with that chugging antique, everyone knew that Marcantonio Venturi had come to town to put more money in the bank.
So Rosa and my father got married, and exactly nine months to the day from their wedding night I came lustily bawling into this world, got smacked on my bottom, was pronounced a boy, and my father handed out cigars and bottles of his best white wine.
I won't bore you with the details of my youth, but I have to tell you something about the quarrel which estranged my father and me and took me away from Fresno for about five years.
First of all, my father was a very domineering man and he wouldn't listen to any arguments. He was right and there were no two ways about it. And since my poor mother, rest her soul, tried all she could but couldn't have any more kids after me, my father had to put up with what nature had given him. Sometimes he thought he had got a helluva of a bargain, and he always let me know about it. His favorite way of letting me know about it was using his razor strap, and I had to drop my pants, put my hands on my hips, and bend over and let him whale away at my naked rump. When I was seventeen, I got mad and turned around and pulled the razor strap out of his hand and hit him on the jaw. He burst into laughter, hugged me and said that I was a true son of his loins and that he would never whip me again.
But that didn't keep him from giving me hell whenever I got out of line. I was almost kicked out of college because I was pussy-conscious too, and the dean of men caught a pretty little Greek girl and myself screwing on his doorstep at about four in the morning. It took a lot of tall talking from my father and a special donation to build a new swimming pool to keep me from having my name expunged from the roster of students.
What bothered my father most, however, was that I didn't really care very much for the good life in the vineyard. I'd gone through college and taken a business administration major, and then I'd looked around in Fresno for a job with some department store or real estate firm where my savvy, enthusiasm and youth would come in handy.
Fresno is a funny kind of town. It's had a lot of great people, but they don't live there anymore, like William Saroyan. It's near Los Angeles and it's near San Francisco, and everybody who lives in Fresno always tells you that it's so handy if you want to go for an exciting weekend to the big city. But there isn't much excitement in Fresno itself. Ifs a lazy town, it's frightfully hot in summer, particularly since they've built an artificial lake and an artificial dam which brought about humidity to what was already scorching dry heat, and it's in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. It has one newspaper, a couple of radio and television stations, and it frowns on non-conformists. If you're a poor non-conformist, you're dead in Fresno. The only reason my father wasn't dead was because he had a substantial bank account, owned land, and besides he didn't give a damn what people thought about him. Now I felt the same way, but when it came to getting a job, just about every door was closed to me. I was a second-generation Italian, I was the son of a winemaker whose morals had been frowned at by the bluenoses when they had found out about his harvest-time fucking frolics and the pretty girls with bare thighs trampling down grapes in the vats. So I fretted and chafed under the lack of opportunities and the snobbery I ran into, and I think that's what really had got under my skin enough to row with my father so that he finally told me to get the hell out of town and never darken his door again.
Chapter Two
My mother had died when I was nine, of a sudden and unexpected cerebral hemorrhage. My father brought me up himself, along with an occasional buxom housekeeper. Whenever he could find a woman in her late thirties or early forties who was still good in bed and of not too low a moral character, he hired her. When she had some free time out of bed-for my father was a demanding cocksmith even late in life-, she looked after me. There were about six housekeepers that I can remember between my ninth and my seventeenth year, and they invariably left because my father was just too much for them. As a European, he was accustomed to being treated like a king in his own house, and woe betide a broad if she didn't give him the red carpet treatment, which included kneeling down and putting her tongue and lips to his vigorous staff of life and the balls which held the wine of life as well.
Anyhow to get you up to the present time, I had just about decided that there wasn't anything in Fresno for me when I met Sally Jeffries. I was about twenty-three, I'd been working for a year in San Francisco for a real estate firm and learning the ropes, commuting in my Thunderbird back to Fresno for the weekend when my father wasn't in too sour a mood to welcome me back and offer me the fattened calf the way it says in the Bible they did the prodigal son.
Sally Jeffries had just moved to Fresno with her widowed mother, who had got a small pension because her dead husband had been a pretty good baker back in the Midwest. Sally was twenty, black-haired, slinky, with almond-shaped green eyes like a cat's, and she had an olive skin and a figure that gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her.
I happened to see her as I was driving down Broadway enroute to my father's house at the other end of that street, and there she was walking out of a little bungalow in a white cotton dress, bare legs and thong sandals, her black hair tumbling in a glossy cascade to her shoulderblades, her proud pear-shaped titties thrusting forward like the prow of a ship that was cleaving a fierce avalanche of waves and knew it could get through them. I pulled the car over to the curb, gulped, took a long look, and then another, and then I got out of the car and called to her, "Excuse me, Miss, I'm lost, I wonder if you can help give me directions."
That was the start. That was the start of what was to estrange my father and me for what turned out to be five long boring years. And once I got back to Fresno, you'd better believe that fate had decided to make it up to me for all that boredom and to put me through the wringer. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
Sally Jeffries knew I was a fresh-face, all right, but it didn't seem to faze her any. She turned back to look at me, gave me a jaunty little smile, and then walked slowly back to where I was standing beside my white Thunderbird. She looked me up and down, decided she liked what she saw, and said saucily, with a deliciously husky accent, "You mean to tell me you don't know where you're going in a car like that? You could ask a policeman, you know."
"I happen to be an oddball, honey," I told her. "I like girls any time, even asking questions from."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you're normal in at least one respect. Now where did you want to go?"
I didn't tell her right then, but it was on the tip of my tongue. Where I wanted to go was to bed with Sally Jeffries and as fast as her consent or the law would allow it. I was staring at her titties when I told her that I was looking for my father's house and I gave the address. She told me that I was in the right direction but all I had to do was to go about five miles further on and I'd find it.
"Wait a minute, honey, I don't even know your name," I called out to her as she started to walk away.
"It's Sally Jeffries. I live here with my mother."
"Mine's Carl Venturi."
"Then your father must make wine," she said as she turned back and smiled at me.
I told her that he did, and I asked if I might take her to dinner some evening and have a bottle of Venturi wine on the table for her sampling. She blushed a little at this, and then she said, "Maybe, we'll see. I'm in the phone book-that is, under my mother's name of Lena. Do call me. Nice talking to you, Mr. Venturi."
Like I say, that was a start. I called her the very next day, and we went to dinner that night. I brought along a bottle of good Pinot Chardonnay, which has always been one of the coveted white wines which every good vintner tries to produce at its peak, bottle under his own label, and have recognized as a superior brand. This is the real way to profits in the wine business.
Sally liked the wine, and I think she cottoned to me. We held hands on the table, I told her that I was crazy about her, and I said I wanted to see more of her. I meant just that literally. I wanted to see her bare-assed-naked, with the black crisp fur of her pussy there at the top of those lovely long thighs. She was about five feet six inches, classically proportioned, not too plump and not too lean, but maybe a little on the svelte side. And that olive complexion of hers and those mercurial green eyes and those full red lips were making my prick achingly remind me that at twenty-three I was something no good Italian boy ought to be, a guy without a regular piece of tail.
Even in San Francisco on my own, much against my father's will, I hadn't done any fucking to speak of. I guess maybe I just don't like the idea of paying for pussy, and what I don't like most of all is sticking my cock into some cunt that's had a little too much traffic there already and might have a few unpleasant and unhealthy souvenirs from it. The hookers in San Francisco can be found in various categories, from the street hustler on Mission Street to the expensive call girl who sometimes doubles in brass by working as a receptionist at a big advertising agency on Montgomery Street, or the in between kind who sometimes are owned by the syndicate and to whom a private cab company will take you once they've checked out your references and found out that you're not a cop. Sure, I'd done a little courting, and I tried to coax quite a number of fillies up into my inexpensive little apartment on Green Street, near Chinatown, but no dice. So that's why I was still a loner, and it was getting me down. What I had to do was use my hand at night, close my eyes, pretend that some gorgeous bitch was lying next to me giving me a French job and getting me ready for a fucking. And now that I had seen Sally Jeffries, instead of just a vague female image at night when I closed my eyes and pretended that I had at last found a girl to share the sweet mysteries of life with, it was Sally Jeffries's face I saw hovering above my cock, Sally Jeffries's pear-shaped bombers dangling over me as she crouched on all fours over my prone body preparatory to impaling herself on my rampant ramrod.
Anyhow, I went crazy about that broad. I spent almost every weekend with her for about three months, and I was just at the point of scoring with her, when my father sat down to the dinner table one Sunday afternoon with me and gave me a stern look and said, "Figlio mio, I've heard some bad reports about you and a whore. I want you to tell me the truth, Carl. And no lies, because I'm still strong enough to use the razor strap on your ass."
"Now wait a minute, Marcantonio," I always called him by his first name, "you just try that razor-strap stuff again and this time I'll use it on you. What's all this about a whore? There's only one girl in this town I know, and I want to marry her. Her name is Sally Jeffries."
"You idiot! That's the whore I refer to," my father said, twirling his white mustachios and giving me a flinty look out of his dark brown eyes. They were still sharp and gleaming, and they still had plenty of zing when he put them on some gorgeous female worker's legs or titties or ass out there in the fields. "I have it on good authority that she has several men, and that her mother looks the other way and even takes the money this young bitch gives her from her earnings."
"That's a Goddamned lie, Marcantonio! You've been listening to old wives' tales!" I shouted and I banged the table with my fist.
"Be sensible," he wheedled. "If you must sleep with a girl to relieve the pressure in your cock, you have here in my vineyard quite a few young bitches who would be proud and honored to have the son of Marcantonio Venturi mount them. If it is a wife you seek, there are two or three estimable families in this miserably hot town who have daughters that I would permit to accept the honored name of Venturi."
"Thanks for nothing, Marcantonio," I growled, "I'll find my own pussy and I'll find my own wife, and neither you nor anybody else is going to pass judgment on my selection, get that straight!"
"You eternal idiot," he shouted, "what do I have to do to convince you that this girl is a whore? Ask her yourself why she has so many men coming to that bungalow where she and her mother live. Ask her!"
I stormed out of the house, and I drove around in my Thunderbird until I cooled off. By then it was late, and I had to drive back to San Francisco and be at work in the real estate office at nine the next morning, because I had a date with a client who just might buy a house. So I didn't see my father again until the next weekend. At first I drove to Sally Jeffries's bungalow and rang the doorbell. She wasn't home. But her mother was. And her mother was a strikingly handsome woman, perhaps not quite forty. Of medium height, with big round titties, shapely hips and good thighs, and a still slender waist. Blue eyes, golden hair that was helped a little out of a bottle, and a sensual mouth and dark blue eyes. Also pale white skin that could make a man randy.
"Come in, Carl," she greeted me with a cozy little smile. "I'm Lena, Sally's mother. I'm sorry Sally isn't in right now. She's out on a date, you know."
I didn't know, but I guess I couldn't really grouse about it because I hadn't yet popped the question to Sally, I was just working on her. First I had to find out if our chemistry was working properly, and then there was time enough first to screw her and, if she was a good enough lay and had other virtues, to make an honest woman out of her. And besides, I hadn't really got myself set on my job in Frisco, and even though I knew I was my father's only heir, it went against the grain to take anything from anybody that I hadn't earned myself. I was one of those proud independent sons of bitches, like all Italians, I guess.
My face showed a little disappointment, and Lena saw it, and she put her hand on my arm and said softly, "You poor guy, did Sally stand you up? Why don't you have a cup of coffee with me and I'll try to cheer you up some."
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather when, after that cup of coffee and some homemade cake, Lena Jeffries actually made a pass at me. She was wearing just a thin housedress, and she didn't have on any stockings, and just sandals. I couldn't help noticing her pale white calves and her knees out there in the kitchen, because they were extremely shapely even for a woman of her age. And you've got to remember I was still damn near a virgin at that point in my life. Because all of a sudden as I got up, she got up too and faced me, and then she put her arm around my waist and murmured, "You're an awfully handsome guy, Carl. I wonder if any girl has ever told you that?" And then the next thing I knew, her mouth was on mine, and liquid fire was in my veins, and I felt my prick getting hard as a rock and I put out my hands and I found her big bombers, and I was just about to commit incest. Incest because I wanted to fuck her daughter, and here I was getting ready to ride Mama instead.
I suddenly pulled away, my face went red, and I mumbled something about having another engagement. And then Lena laughed at me, "Why, you poor sap, no wonder Sally won't give you a tumble! She's a good girl, a little fool, but even a good girl deserves a man who'll give her what she needs. And Don Foster, the guy she's out with right now, is going to do just that, and he's going to marry her too."
"Thanks for telling me, but maybe I can change that, Mrs. Jeffries," I said angrily.
She had her hands on her hips, and there was a taunting smile on her red lips, and her titties were thrusting out against the thin bodice of her dress as she faced me. "I don't think so. Don Foster's father happens to own KJZ-TV, and he's worth a million dollars if he's worth a nickel. And my little girl won't have to do what I've been doing to stay alive in this stupid town. You see, Carl, I married a handsome but dimwitted young baker when I was eighteen, and he got bounced off job after job because he didn't have the guts or the know-how of getting along with people. And I came out here because I've got a cousin who works at the Pink Rooster, and she showed me how to make some dough, and I'm making it, and I'm going to spend it making sure that my girl gets herself set for life, even if her mother does have to earn her keep by taking on fellows."
A great light dawned on me. My father had been right about the Jeffries clan, except his information had named the wrong bitch. It was Lena Jeffries who was the whore, not her daughter. And it sickened me. Not that I thought that I was too good for Sally Jeffries, but I just hated to have my father shout "I told you so!" if I walked in the house with Sally on my arm and told him that I was going to marry her. He'd come out with all that filthy gossip and make Sally wish to hell she'd never been born, and I wouldn't put any decent girl through that.
"You mean if I'd made a pass at you tonight, it might have been for free, Lena?" I said savagely, and I rejoiced to see her turn pale and bite her lips. "All right, I won't give your secret away, you don't have to worry. You just tell Sally I wish her well. I'm going back to San Francisco and stay there and find myself a girl whose mother isn't pushing to get her married to a millionaire."
And with that I walked out of the bungalow and back to my Thunderbird and I drove like crazy back to San Francisco. And that's where I stayed for the next five years until my father died.
Chapter Three
Like I said, my father was too proud to tell me that he'd been going downhill ever since I'd walked out on him after that argument we'd had about Sally Jeffries. I knew he had plenty of dough, and when I left he got a pretty snazzy-looking housekeeper, a black-haired, stocky but very screwable Mexican-Indian who was putting out some of the best chow I ever sank a fork into and whose dark eyes and full mouth told me that if my father was still as good in bed as ever, she was more than willing and able to take care of that part of her housekeeping duties, too.
Me, I wanted to be on my own, and I really didn't care much about wine. Sure, I drank it, and it was nice to see the family name on the bottle, but apart from that it didn't do a thing for me. Maybe it was because we never really had a family life, after Mom died when I was just a kid. And then there was the dreariness of Fresno, which I've already pointed out has driven away more people than it attracted. I just couldn't see myself finding any sort of decent job there, so long as I wasn't going to take over Dad's vineyards.
Well, to make a long story short, I got my real-estate broker's license, and I was doing pretty well, and I had finally scored in the bed department. Believe it or not, up to the age of twenty-three which was when I pulled out of Fresno, I had scored only once, and that was with that cute Greek bitch on the steps of the college dean of mens' house. And then the old geezer, whom we'd both felt had been out of town, had come out on the porch and caught us there just when I was about to shoot the wine of life into her greedy little snatch. So even that one experience hadn't exactly been successful.
Yes, about six months after I decided to go it on my own, I happened to be out in my Thunderbird showing a handsome widow a couple of houses she was interested in, and we'd spent a couple of hours and I could see that she was interested, but so far she hadn't earned me any commission.
Her name was Marcy Gage, and I sort of liked her style. She had honey-colored hair which she wore in a very youthful way, helmet style, which you figure only young girls will try. She had an interesting face, with a somewhat slantingly highset cheeks, firm chin, a straight little nose with very thin and widely flaring wings, and a soft rather small mouth. But there was nothing selfish or arrogant about that mouth, and I caught myself looking at it and wondering what it would feel like to kiss it.
Most of all, she had a simply gorgeous body, and maybe she was Sally Jeffries' mother's age, and maybe she was a couple of years younger, but she was sure stacked. Figure a broad about five feet five, and give her a 36 bust, 23 waist, and 37 hips. This meant that Marcy Gage had a juicy ass, and she sure did. But she had a pale white skin to go along with her blonde hair, and she had big brown eyes, and the composite total spelled out a hard-on for yours truly.
I might stop right here and mention that I've got sleek-but not greasy-black hair, I'm rangy, about six feet tall and I weigh about 170, dark brown eyes, and my name was originally Carlo, but it was a little too sissified for me, so I changed it to Carl when I got to Frisco. It was almost five-thirty and the fog \/as starting to come in from the ocean and Seal Rock, which is near the Cliff House and out along the Avenues and the end of Golden Gate Park. I didn't have any plans for the evening, except maybe to take in a movie and some chow in Chinatown (I may be a dago but I go ape over beef-subgum), and then maybe a walk down to Fisherman's Wharf. And I hadn't done too well this particular week.
My dad hadn't even bothered to telephone or write me after I'd walked out, but I didn't expect him to. I just told myself that I was going to make it on my own and I didn't want a nickel of his dough no matter what. So I felt like a hellraiser, maybe that's why I scored on my first really leisurely piece with Marcy Gage that night.
I leaned back in the driver's seat and I looked at her and I said, "Where do we go next, Mrs. Gage?"
"Oh dear," she said with a little smile, she had a nice, brisk cool voice, and she was wearing a print rayon dress and charcoal-brown nylons and a little toque hat that made her look quite sophisticated, and a cape around her shoulders. That was because Frisco always gets damp and chilly when the sun starts to go down, and I don't care what month of the year it is. "I've really taken up a lot of your time, Mr. Venturi. But I really do want to buy a house. You see, my husband and I were born in the East, but we always had a dream about coming to San Francisco. He died just a year ago, and he left me a good deal of money, and after I got over losing Ed, I told myself that the first thing I was going to do was buy a nice house just about where he would have liked it. And then maybe I'll go back to work."
"Work?" I echoed. I couldn't fancy this rich widow going to work in Frisco. One thing about this town, there just aren't too many white-collar jobs for anybody unless you've got pull or happen to be native-born. That's the way it is in Frisco. You make money in the real estate business, the insurance business, and in the medical profession, because it costs more to get sick and die in Frisco than anywhere else I know. But Marcy Gage looked like class to me, and a little sophisticated and maybe a socialite, and I just couldn't figure her sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 and drawing a paycheck.
"Of course, Mr. Venturi," she calmly replied. "I was a pretty good secretary until Ed married me. Fact is, I was his secretary. He was a publisher, you see."
"Well, there aren't very many publishing firms in this town, Mrs. Gage," I told her. "Now if you were to go to L.A., you'd have a better chance."
"All they publish there are sex books and magazines with lots of pictures of girls without any clothes on, Mr. Venturi," she crinkled her pretty nose at me.
I chuckled. "Well, you've hit the nail on the head. But, although it's none of my business, if you've money enough to buy a house, I should imagine you don't really have to work for a living."
"No, I don't. My husband left me almost a quarter of a million dollars," she said very calmly and without a fuss.
I looked at her in a new light. Now don't get me wrong, dear reader, I wasn't looking at her with tail light in my eyes and figuring that here was a ready-made setup where I could move in and become Marcy Gage's new gigolo. I'll be damned if I'll take a broad's money and let her tell me what I'm supposed to do around the house besides fuck. It operates on the same basis as my breaking off with Dad, because I couldn't have cared less about his vineyard and the fact that I was his only son and heir. But what I mean about Marcy Gage is that if she had all that dough, I figured she could easily buy the best house on our list and I could use the commission. So I decided to go to work on her but good.
"Look, Mrs. Gage, you've seen about five houses now, and you're not really convinced about any one of them. Why don't you let me invite you to dinner and then I've got one of two real prizes that you can take more time to check over," I suggested.
That was fine with her, so we had dinner at Cliff House, and then I drove her out in the direction of Daly City, and we finally wound up in Pacifica, which is right on that rolling Pacific Ocean with almost a kind of low mountain view, and homes that don't go for peanuts. And about nine o'clock that evening, she walked through the living room of a beautiful ranch-type house and said, "I'll take it. This is exactly what Ed would have wanted."
I felt the way a freshman might feel if the coach sent him in for the last minute of the last quarter and he catches a touchdown pass and gives his alma mater the victory over a traditional rival. I mean, this house was peddling for nearly a hundred thousand smackeroos, and my commission was just about enough for a year's salary if I lived modestly and that's the way I had been doing in San Francisco till I met Marcy Gage.
When I found out that she wasn't kidding and that she was taking out her checkbook to give me a binder on the house, I blurted out, "I feel like kissing you, Mrs. Gage. This is the first really important sale I've ever made."
She cocked her head, studying me a minute, and then a slow smile crept over those sweet red lips of hers. "I wouldn't mind, Mr. Venturi," she murmured.
The house happened to be slightly furnished, because the owner had been sent to a Federal penitentiary for mail-order fraud and it was being put up at sale to pay off some of the crook's indebtedness to his creditors, including Uncle Sam, who was after him for unpaid back taxes. There was a big low couch there, the kind a horny pussychaser dreams about. Wide enough for two people to stretch out full length and screw without falling off the edge. I sat down on it, put my hands out and took hold of hers, and drew her down towards me. She stooped accommodatingly, and our lips met. A white flame ran through my body, and the next thing I knew my hands were grabbing for her bombers, firm juicy cantaloupes that didn't need the bra I could feel through her rayon dress. The cape had fallen off her shoulders, and to this day I don't know whether she did it herself or whether I helped it.
She gave a little whimper, and then she sort of sank down on the couch, and the next thing I knew, we were lying side by side, and she had her right arm crooked around my neck, and my left hand was on her juicy bottom, and my right hand was cupping one of those gorgeous titties of hers, and we were exchanging kisses. Quick little wine-sipping kinds of kisses, the kind lovers take when they're leading up to long deep draughts of passion's liqueur.
What happened after that gave me back my male ego and also officially lost me my virginity, which I felt I still technically had because that fuck with the Greek girl had been interrupted at the crucial moment. And yet throughout it all, Marcy Gage acted like a perfect lady. Not like a whore at all, nothing vulgar or cheap. It all seemed so natural and beautiful, that we hardly knew what we were doing. Somehow her pantie-girdle got pulled down, somehow my zipper got tugged down and my cock liberated to find the way to that darkblonde lovethatch of hers and then I was on her, and sinking down into infinity and eternity and bliss.
I didn't hurry it. I didn't know when I was ever going to get as juicy a piece of cunt as Marcy Gage again, so I tried to make it last. I rose and sank slowly, and I felt her hungry hot moist sheath grabbing my prick and holding onto it for dear life as her soft little hands cupped my cheeks and now her lips began to take more demanding, stinging kisses from my lips. Her eyes were huge as saucers, humid and glowing. She wouldn't strip naked, but she didn't mind when my hands squeezed her titties or reached under her to grab hold of her jouncy bottom and hold on for dear life while I impaled her with my commendable manhood. I think I owe a candle to Venus for giving me enough staying power not to shoot off the first minute or so that I was inside that hot draining chasm of Marcy Gage's.
Not that I wasn't tempted, not that it didn't take every ounce of self-control I didn't even know I had. The way she was nibbling at my prick with those sweet vaginal walls of hers, I thought I was going to explode any second. But somehow I managed to grit my teeth and hold it back until she began to buck and weave and wriggle her ass and finally fling her legs around me and sob out, "Oh my God, Carl darling, don't hold back now, I need it so, oh please give it to me, please!"
And then there was an earthquake which had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault, and we actually did roll off that big wide couch. And after it was all over, she opened her eyes and stared at me, and she broke into a slow smile and she whispered, "My gracious, I was a naughty girl. But I don't think Ed would have minded. He always said to me, 'Marcy, if anything should happen to me, you're the sort of woman who needs the loving of a good strong man, so don't stint on it.' That's what he said, Carl darling."
Well, everything seemed to run pretty well for me then after that. The sale went through, I got my commission, and I invited Marcy Gage out to a house-warming party by first taking her to dinner at Ernie's, which is just about San Francisco's finest gourmet restaurant, and then I took her for a drive in my Thunderbird all through San Rafael, and we wound up not warming her house or my apartment but a motel cabin on the edge of that delightful little town and we stayed the night.
For about a year, I was Marcy Gage's official boyfriend, and she kept me humping-and I mean that literally. She was insatiable. I guess her late husband Ed had been quite a cocksmith in his day, and after a year without prick, lovely wealthy beautiful widow Marcy saw no reason why she shouldn't go back to the thing she did best. She didn't say any more about going back to work, and I didn't encourage her at all. I Wanted her free for afternoons or nights or even mornings when I had a little free time, and I used to pop in on her unexpectedly, especially after I'd made a sale that made the boss happy.
After about a year, there was a letter from my dad, simply enclosing some papers for me to sign which he was going to give to his lawyer, Charlie Karogian. Charlie Karogian was an honest Armenian, almost sixty, and he had fathered eight little Karogians and two of them had already made him a grandfather several times over. I hardly even looked at the papers, but there was a short letter which Charlie Karogian had apparently drawn up himself, requesting me to give my consent to converting part of Dad's acreage to fruits and vegetables. Apparently Dad had willed me everything he had, but of course he maintained a life interest, and he figured that he just wanted my official approval to do what he was going to do anyway. I signed it, and I added a P.S. to the effect that I hoped he was doing all right, and then forgot all about it. If I had used my brain at all, I might have got a little worried. Dad was a vintner from start to finish, and the fact that he was about to change half his acres of grapes into maybe tomatoes and melons or lettuce and berries indicated that something was drastically wrong with his operation. But then, I was the guy who didn't give a damn whether I ever saw those vineyards again or not.
Well, I'd better get up to the present, so let me say only that my gorgeous widowed bed partner Marcy Gage gave me the bounce a few months later because she up and married some snot-nosed kid just out of Stanford, even younger than I was. He happened to be a devotee of Zen, and she was getting mystic all of a sudden. She told me that my successor had a great soul, and that thousands of years ago in history he had been some kind of guru. Remember, this was before the hippies started to move in. So I told her thanks for the memory, and I concentrated on selling houses and office buildings and putting dough in the bank and tried to find myself another piece of ass half as talented as Marcy Gage. It wasn't easy, I can tell you.
But one thing she had taught me and that was how to fuck and have confidence in my ability so that I could make a pass at even the sort of girl you put on a pedestal and don't even think she wears panties because she's so pure. That's how I happened to go to bed with Patricia Allister, who was the daughter of a sugar tycoon with offices on Montgomery Street. That was during my third year in Frisco, and our burning romance lasted about six months, and then Patricia went to Europe (I still think her dad sent her there so I wouldn't become his son-in-law); and then I met a cute little nurse at La Honda, which is a kind of old folks' home. Her name was Peggy Daniels, and she was the most delicious little piece of ass I'd ever encountered until that time. She was about four feet ten, with harlequin glasses yet, soft silky light brown hair that fell in a thick pageboy to her shoulders, a button nose, and a saucy little full red ripe mouth that made me want to kiss it every time I saw it.
She had a sweet little-girl voice, she was twenty-four, and we met quite accidentally. I almost ran her down in my Thunderbird one foggy evening. She had put on a gray raincoat and hat, and she sort of blended with the gray dreary atmosphere. I was really happy that I put my brakes on in time. I got out of the car, apologized, and I was shaking life a leaf. San Francisco is one town where the pedestrian has the right of way even if he or she is jaywalking. But when I saw what a gorgeous piece of ass Peggy Daniels was, my knees started to shake just at the thought that I might have been responsible for maiming or hurting or even killing such a luscious dish. She was the one who apologized, to my great surprise, told me it was her fault because she hadn't been paying attention and daydreaming, and hoped that I hadn't been hurt. I looked at her, then I started laughing, then we both laughed, and I wound up taking her over to Original Joe's for steaks and a bottle of good dago red and listened to the story of her life.
She'd come from Chicago, where she'd been a social worker, and she'd come to Chicago from Newark, New Jersey, because her parents were squares and owned land and didn't believe in civil rights and all that sort of stuff. So she'd quit a promising college career, jilted a pompous horse's neck her parents had wanted her to marry for social reasons, got her degree at the University of Chicago, gone into nursing at Billings, and then up and moved to San Francisco when she thought that maybe her parents had put a private eye on her tail. I could understand that, because it was a simply delicious tail. She had showgirl's calves, long and slinky and beautifully muscled, slender graceful thighs, and a very saucy and spankable bottom, and pale baby-pink skin without a flaw on it. You add up skin like that, a petite figure like that, harlequin glasses, and a little-girl voice, and you could understand why Peggy Daniels and I were constant bed companions until I got the news about two years later that my father was dying.
By then, I was almost ready to marry the girl, I had about ten grand in the bank, a brand new Thunderbird, and I even made Herb Caen's column for a real estate deal I pulled off in a single hour, and then I got a wire from Charlie Karogian that I'd better get back to Fresno fast because my father wasn't long for this world.
I kissed Peggy goodbye, though I thought it was only au revoir at the time, got into my Thunderbird and headed for the San Joaquin Valley.
Chapter Four
Charlie Karogian was right. And I'm glad he had the forethought to wire me, because Dad would have turned up his toes and passed into the Great Beyond without showing a sign of weakness by letting me know he wanted me around. That was the sort of pioneer stuff my old man was made of. No, it wasn't heartless at all. My dad had the feeling that a kid was sort of like a baby duck; you threw him into the pond and let him sink or swim. If he had guts enough and instinct to survive he would, and then you could coach him a little.
What I didn't know and what I should have guessed that Dad had refused to go to the hospital. I drove into Fresno, narrowly avoiding a couple of crashes because of some stupid college drivers who were necking in the front seat and not watching where they were going, and I went right to Charlie's office and I barged in there past a perfectly gorgeous olive-skinned brunette who was his secretary and flung open the door and shouted, "Charlie, tell me what hospital my dad's in!"
"Simmer down, Carl," waving his hand at me getting me to notice he had a client in his office already. And what a client! Goldenhaired, maybe in the late twenties, great big blue eyes and a sweet full ripe mouth you'd just love to have working on your cock. A dark blue rayon dress hugged the melons of her titties, and did wonders for her lusciously ripe hips and full womanly thighs. She had a little felt turban on, perched very jauntily, and a pearl necklace around a skin that was already pretty white for a blonde. She also had a wedding ring on the third finger, left hand. I noticed when I had taken time to simmer down.
"Your father, young man, happens to be at home. He's dying from a combination of things, the first being old age, then arteriosclerosis, and I also suspect he may have just a touch of stomach cancer from the way he's been rejecting food. It all started to hit him at once. Now you get back over there as fast as you can, and as soon as I finish with Mrs. Maynard, I'll be along."
I flushed like a kid that had been called down by the teacher in front of all his classmates. "Excuse me, Charlie, but I had a hell of a drive and your wire didn't tell me where Dad might be. My apologies, Mrs. Maynard."
She looked at me and smiled. She had gorgeous white teeth, and then she crossed those luscious legs of hers so that her skirt hiked up just above dimpled kneecaps sheathed in beige-colored nylons, and she purred in a husky little voice, "That's quite all right. It's a nice quality in you to be worried about your father."
I nodded to her, then to Charlie, and I beat it back to my car and got up to the old house as fast as the speed laws would permit: Fresno's cops are not very sympathetic if you happen to go more than one mile per hour past the legal limit, even if somebody is dying. There was the house, just as I remembered it, the huge front porch, divided in two by the archway and the steps leading up to the door, the thick hedges at the front of the lawn at the sidewalks edge, and then all around the house, the old driveway and the garage where I had used to park my car when Dad and I were sharing the same roof. And up there on the second floor, was the old desert cooler. Air-conditioning is just about a must in Fresno, but all of the old-time residents go in for these fan-type arrangements which make a hideous racket and really don't do half the job a modern G-E would do. But Dad would never dream of changing, not he. He had paid for that desert cooler out of his own labor, and it meant something to him.
I rang the bell, and to my surprise the door was opened by a sultry-looking, rather tall auburn-haired young woman who wore a white uniform and white stockings and shoes and who obviously was a nurse. But in spite of her antiseptic outfit, she had one of the sexiest shapes and faces I had noticed since I first became cunt-conscious. "Yes?" she said in an icy, high-pitched voice.
"I'm Carl Venturi," I snapped. I was mad at myself for feeling the throbbing of my prick at a time like this. But I guess it was a Venturi trait, passed down from father to son.
Her face softened a little, but my cock didn't. "I'm sorry," she said in a less chilly tone. "Come with me, please. Your father is on the second floor left. It was always his favorite bedroom."
I knew that well. It was a big sprawling low double bed, and I wondered how many times it had creaked under Dad's weight while he was drilling for love-oil between the thighs of his accommodating housekeepers. My bedroom had been on the other side of the floor beside the downtown side of Fresno. I hadn't done much mattress-creaking though, except when I was so pussy-hungry that I couldn't sleep and used my right hand and dreamed up a whole harem to be right there and take care of my needs.
She led me to the door, nodded to me, and then discretely vanished.
There was Dad propped up by the pillows, and he looked like hell, but I recognized him just the same. He had been a big tall guy like me, but with a lot more meat on his bones. He'd lost most of his hair, and what little he had was white. But he still had that hawklike nose, that full sensual mouth, and those highset cheekbones which had made him such a devil with the girls, because he had looked like a real Italian pussyhound with cogliones constantly filled with the juice of which life is made for those thirsty pussies. But his color was terrible, there were big hollows under his eyes, and his nose looked bony. Yet those dark brown eyes of his were still fierce, and they lit up when he saw me coming.
"Good," he said in a hoarse weak voice. But it still had enough of that guttural bass which had scared the hell out of me when as a kid I had done something I ought not to have done. "You look fine, you bastard. I guess this is the last time, eh, Carlo?"
I sat down on the edge of the bed and I held out my hand, and he pulled his out from under the sheets and tremblingly held it to me. His fingers were gnarled from all the work he'd done all his life, and they were trembling so pitifully I had to glance away and pretend I was hunting for a cigarette or something because I felt like bawling. And that would have really teed my father off. He'd always said that funerals ought to be as joyous as weddings or births, because your spirit went on living and if you'd led a good life, there wasn't any reason to cry about it.
"I wish to hell it had been a long time ago, Dad," I said.
"That's all right. You're a Venturi. You've got the same pride here-" he brought his hand towards his heart-" as I do. Otherwise I'd disown you as my son. Are you married yet, have you got some bambini to carry on the name for the vino?"
I shook my head. "Nope, Dad. I couldn't find a girl who'd put up with me."
That made him laugh, and the way he tried to laugh and the sound that came out made me look away again and fight the tears.
"You see, you no good son of a bitch," he finally growled when the spasm had passed, "you didn't know when you were well off. You could have stayed here, helped me grown the good grapes, make the vino, screw some of the beautiful paisano girls, and had lots of bambini."
"I know. But I wanted to make it on my own."
"I know that. I know what you've been doing up in the big city, boy." He gave me a hard look. And then he started to cough, and I grabbed a towel and put it to his mouth, and it came away bloody. I looked around for the Goddamn nurse, but she was nowhere in sight. I owed her a fantailing for that. He managed after a few minutes to get some strength back, and then he quavered, "Sorry, Carlo. Didn't want you to see me like this. Anyhow, I know you've been a good boy. You haven't made much money, but you've held a job, you haven't disgraced the Venturi name. Good. Only now, I've got nobody else to take the land and make the vino from those grapes, boy. I want you to take it for me and go on with it."
"All right. If that's what you want, I owe you that much."
"No, you owe me nothing. But I don't want a stranger to have this. It's run down, because I haven't been well for nearly a year now-don't look at me like that, boy. I can still get out of this bed and use a strap on your ass, you know."
I began to laugh through my tears. Good old Dad! I wished to hell I hadn't been so proud, so cocksure that I wanted nothing to do with Fresno and the good earth and the grapes. I had forgotten about Sally Jeffries. Seeing Dad on his deathbed had driven everything else out except the fact that I was his son and there wasn't anybody else. "I believe you could at that," I finally told him. "Well, I'm not doing so well right now selling real estate, so I'll give the land a try if that's what you want."
"The cuttings ... in my safe. Somebody's stolen some of them, Carlo," he gasped out as he reached for my hand. "My old foreman, Jacopo, he died two years ago. I had to take the best man I could get, his name is Tulio. Tulio Verduga. He's a wop, too but he's not a good man. I can't prove it, boy, but the harvest wasn't good last year, and there's a mortgage the bank put on the land where we make the vino."
"I'll take care of it. Your old friend Charlie Karogian will show me all the papers, Dad. You just rest now. I'm here to stay."
"Good." He closed his eyes, and gave a great sigh, and then suddenly his head twisted to one side and I knew he was dead.
"Nurse!" I yelled. I was mad as hell that she hadn't been around to take care of that bloody phlegm, because he must have been spitting it up for a long time. "Nurse, Goddamnit, get your ass in here!"
I heard footsteps down the hallway, and then in came the auburn-haired broad who'd let me in at the front door. She had an angry look on her face, and her hazel eyes were flashing. "What did you say to me?" she snapped, and she raised her hand to slap my face.
"I said to get your Goddamned ass in here," I snarled. "My father's dead. And he's been spitting a lot of blood and it looks as if he'd been doing it for a long time. What the hell have you been doing today, besides parading around in that fancy uniform and acting like a Picasso painting on display?"
"How dare you!" And then she did slap me.
I saw red. I never was much of a gentleman, and the frustrations of the last five years seemed to burst inside of me as I grabbed hold of her slapping wrist, twisted it behind her back, and fastwalked her over to a low couch by the door, my right knee banging her bottom along the way while she yowled and threatened to have the police on me. I sat down on the bench, I flung her over my lap, I hoisted up the white antiseptic skirt and the whiter slip underneath it, and there was a bottom ideally made for spanking. Spacious, jouncy, sheathed with a white satin-elastic pan-tie girdle, and the tabs clung to her white stockings as if they loved her legs so much they'd never let go.
"You stop that, or I'll have you sent to jail for life, you filthy swine you! Who do you think you are to treat me this way?" she yelled at me, straining to get loose. I clamped my right leg over her calves, I grabbed one of her wrists with my left hand, and I raised my right hand and I let her have the hardest spank she'd probably ever had in all her life, flattening down the plump right cheek of her behind and letting it spring up again. She let out a yowl that would have passed muster for a wildcat, and she tried to throw herself off my lap. I wasn't having any. My hand rose and fell over her big backside with satisfying, noisy whacks until she stopped cursing and screaming and threatening me and began to sob and finally to yell, "Oh my God, you're killing me, please stop it, stop it! For God's sake, give me a chance to talk!"
I let up after about forty wallops, and I rudely shoved her onto the floor. She fell on all fours like a cat, and she shook her head several times as if dazed, and the tears were streaming down her face, and then she put one hand back to her bottom and began to massage it carefully, while she looked back at me and sobbed, "You big overgrown bastard, you bully you! I've only been here an hour because Miss Tolson, the regular nurse, got sick and Doctor Franklin had to get a substitute in a hurry, and I was just going out of town on my vacation. And this is the thanks I get."
The anger was all out of me now and I sat there dully, and I stared over at my dead father, and then back at this auburn-haired cutie, and then suddenly I began to laugh my fool head off. What a hell of a homecoming it was after five years! Yes, I had sure made some headway all on my own in San Francisco. I'd learned how to forget my almost virginal shyness towards women and take a strange broad over my lap and blister her bottom black and blue at first meeting. I wasn't sure that was the kind of social grace that would be acceptable in Fresno. But at least it showed that I had Venturi blood in me, and I think maybe my father, wherever he was now at this moment, was probably laughing too and calling me a bastard in that inimitable way of his and thinking that maybe after all I could make the grade.
Chapter Five
All the time I was laughing, this auburn-haired nurse whose behind I had just walloped crouched on her knees and with her left palm on the floor and her right hand still rubbing her burning seat, her eyes very wide and her mouth gaping, as if she had just recognized a lunatic. I couldn't really blame her. Here my father had just died, I had given up my job and everything else in San Francisco, and made my father-I guess because of the sentimentality of the occasion, I had called him "Dad" instead of Marcantonio as I'd always done before-and then without showing any respect for the dead at all, I'd grabbed the poor girl and given her a fantailing she hadn't really deserved at all.
"Okay, nurse," I said, "just put it on the bill. If I made a mistake, I'm sorry as hell. And I won't give you any alibi that because my old man just took off for the stars, I lost my head. You can call me whatever you want, you can call the cops and prefer charges against me if you want to." Then I grinned, some of my old devil-may-care arrogance coming back: "But I'll say one thing, whatever I have to pay for spanking your gorgeous butt, it'll be worth it."
She had got up now, and she was still rubbing her bottom, and then she shook her head and began to giggle even through her tears. "If that doesn't beat all!" she finally managed. "I thought your father was a regular heller, and I was only here a few hours, and now this. You know, I don't think I'll be able to sit down for at least a week. And my job's over now anyhow, and here I was going on my vacation."
"Let's have a cup of coffee in the kitchen, since you won't be sitting down for a while anyhow, and talk it over," I proposed. "So old Doc Franklin is still in business. I'll call him right now and let him make all the arrangements."
She glanced rather ruefully at me, and then she went out of the room, and I walked back to the bed and then I did a damn stupid thing which I was just as glad she didn't see. I took my old man's hand and bent my head and kissed it and I said, "Listen, you grouchy old bastard, you sort of trapped me into promising you I'd stick around Fresno. I'm going to do it. I may make some changes, and you may not like them, but I'll keep your name on those bottles of vino. And maybe when it's all over, I'll have a kid for you and name him Marcantonio. And boy, if he misbehaves, will I ever take a razor strap to his ass!" And that was my funeral service for my dad, so far as I was concerned.
I made the phone call. Old Doc Franklin said it was probably best this way and that he hadn't liked the idea of Dad's refusing to go to the hospital, but actually it had probably been good for him to be in his own bed and to feel that he was still boss of his own home. He would have given the nurses at the hospital a tough time, chewing them out and maybe even trying to get his hand under their skirts. Although I personally have always felt that a nurse's white uniform is so damn sexless that a guy has to be pretty hard up to want to make her. Maybe that's exactly why the doctors have the cute nurses dress that way, so that the patients and the visitors won't be propositioning them all the time and will leave them for the doctors to screw.
I went on down to the kitchen. It was getting dark, and from the kitchen you could look out into the huge back yard and see those crazy gourds and then the orange glory of the sunset. You plant seeds, and up come vines, and all of a sudden you've got dozens and dozens of the most outlandish and grotesque gourds which can be dried out and kept almost forever. They're not good eating-in fact, they're poisonous- but they're decorative as hell. I could also see that there were a few gopher holes in the lawn. That I was going to have to do something about later on. Gophers are savage little demons, and once they get into the lawn or a fruit grove or just about anywhere else, they use those sharp teeth to destroy and to dig and to kill roots and even bite through foundation wood. And if they ever latch on to your leg, you'll think a shark has taken a bite.
My spanking victim was standing at the sink, carefully tilting the old iron coffee pot and letting some steaming coffee spout down into two big china mugs. Dad had had that coffee pot, I'll bet, ever since he had come from Cremona, and the mugs were just about as old. They held about two standard cups of coffee, and we both drank ours black and strong and hot. If there's a Freudian symbol there, make the most of it.
"Here you are, Mr. Venturi," the auburn-haired nurse said as she pointed to one of the mugs and picked hers up, swigged a swallow down and then made a face.
"Hot as your bottom, I suppose," I quipped as I picked up my mug, clinked it to hers and then took a swig myself.
"You're a very outspoken person, Mr. Venturi. I think it's time we ought to introduce ourselves to each other. My name is Madge Fryburg. I'm a practical nurse, and I got called here on this job by Dr. Franklin because, as I was trying to tell you, the only registered nurse available came down with appendicitis yesterday. Dr. Franklin called me last night and asked if I could replace her, and so I figured my vacation could be shoved up a week or so and it wouldn't matter. And this is the thanks I get."
"Well, you'll have to admit, Miss Fryburg, we got to know each other better back in Dad's bedroom than if I'd taken you out on a dozen dates." Again I was flip, because I had the same uncomfortable feeling about death that Dad had always had and also because I was sort of grudgingly admiring the philosophical way Madge Fryburg had taken her undeserved paddling. I flexed my right hand, because it still remembered the jouncy amplitude of that beautiful firm ass of hers. "Did you make this coffee?" I asked.
She nodded. "I'm a pretty good cook. But then, even a practical nurse is supposed to know how to prepare a few things. And as for your father's hemorrhaging, he had a mild one this morning and I stayed with him for a whole hour looking after him. Dr. Franklin had told me that something like that might happen anytime, because your father had just suddenly started to deteriorate. He'd been sick, I understand, for over a year, but he'd had such a rugged strength and a will to him that he wouldn't let himself die until he was ready. That's what Dr. Franklin told me, and though I was only here a few short hours, I quite agree with him."
"You're all right, Miss Fryburg. Well, what can a guy say when he's spanked the wrong girl's bottom? Or spanked it for no reason at all? I know it might sound a little ghoulish so soon after Dad's going, but can I buy you a dinner? And of course I'll pay you for the time you've put in. I imagine Dr. Franklin ought to be here in a few minutes, he said he'd come right away."
"I-I think I'd like dinner. I-I've never had a patient die on me before," she suddenly confessed. And all of a sudden she didn't look like such a sultry, haughty bitch as she had when I'd first seen her at the door letting me in as if I were Jack the Ripper. She was just protecting her patient from somebody she didn't know, and she'd probably had her hands full because she was only a practical nurse, and the regular nurse had come down sick and there hadn't been time to find anybody else and she'd been kind enough to give up her vacation to come look after Dad. Boy, I had really started off with a bang my first day back in Fresno after five years."
"However," she showed she had a sense of humor too as, after another swig of coffee, she looked me in the eye and said, "I think we probably ought to find some hamburger joint where we can stand up and eat right off the counter. I don't think I'd dare try sitting down at least until tomorrow."
"I can always ask the waitress for a pillow," I told her. And then she really blushed, and she looked like a much younger girl and a sweet one when she did it. "Don't you dare," she whispered fiercely at me and she gave me a really dirty look, and then she blushed so violently that I'll bet that she was red even under the collar of her nurse's uniform.
"Just trying to be helpful, Miss Fryburg. Well, while we're waiting for Dr. Franklin, tell me a little bit about yourself. How did a gorgeous girl like you decide to go into nursing?"
Now, in this lonely house, with no lights on, and Marcantonio dead upstairs in his bed, waiting for Doc Franklin to come write out the death certificate and make all the arrangements, I suddenly felt empty and useless, as if I had been a pawn in a chess game picked off a board a couple of thousand miles away and suddenly set down on another one with entirely different position about which I knew absolutely nothing. I wasn't quite the tough hard-as-nails, self-sufficient guy Dad was, not by a long shot, even though I had tried to prove it to him by staying away from him for five long years.
She gave me a sharp glance, and her face softened. It was still streaked with tears, and her lips were trembling just a little, and I noticed that one of her hands every so often crept back to her bottom to see if the swelling had gone down any, but maybe she saw me in a new light. Anyway, she gave me some statistics about her life. She was twenty-four, she and her folks had been born in Omaha and her dad had got transferred to Fresno fifteen years ago by a meat packer who had started a branch about a dozen miles out of this hot, dead town. She'd gone to school, fallen in love with Florence Nightingale as a heroine, decided she wanted to go into nursing, but had taken a college major in commerce and business administration. Since she didn't have a boyfriend, most of her evenings were free and so she'd spent them as a volunteer Gray lady for about a year, reading stories to sick people and passing out good cheer and goodies which the rich folks of Fresno contributed to the downtrodden. Then she'd taken a night-school course in nursing, and had got herself listed at a couple of the smaller hospitals and with three or four pretty good doctors as a practical nurse.
Last year, her mother had got fatally sick with a tumor that turned out to be cancer, and she'd nursed her until it had been time to go to the hospital for radium treatments which hadn't done any good. Her father had died just about five months ago and left her about fifteen thousand dollars in life insurance, a little bungalow, and maybe five thousand in savings. She hadn't had a vacation since she and her folks had gone to the Grand Canyon when she was twelve. So she'd been all set to go to Yellowstone Park and maybe wind up in Vancouver, had even bought her tickets and made her reservations and was all set to leave yesterday morning when Doc Franklin had called her and begged her to fill in for Miss Tolson. And that was about it.
She was a brave kid, and now I could see that what I had taken for sultry sex and arrogance was really her defensive way of trying to prove that she too was self-sufficient in spite of all her grief at losing her folks. If I were an orphan, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be stranded in Fresno. But come to think of it, that was exactly what I was. Only I was an overgrown orphan, twenty-eight, not married, not even remembered back in the town where I was born, and I didn't have too much to show for my twenty-eight years when all was said and done. Just the Venturi name and I was the guy who didn't give a damn about wine except maybe to drink a bottle every now and then with a good dinner at Ernie's or Grison's Steak House. I would sure miss those great San Francisco restaurants here in Fresno, because there were only about two or three decent places to eat, like at the Hotel Californian and the Hacienda Motel, unless you wanted to go in heavily for Armenian shish-kebab, and I could always take that or leave it.
About that time, Doc Franklin drove up in his old Nash, which he'd had when I left Fresno and which had then been about eighteen years old, as I recall. He greeted Madge Fryburg warmly, shook hands with me and went on upstairs. Then he came down and asked me a few questions, and I gave him what details he needed to know, and everything was all set. It was a Saturday, and the funeral would be Monday. There was an undertaking parlor in the next block-that kind of business always thrived in a town like Fresno -and Dad had already bought his cemetery plot a long time ago, and he'd be laid to rest next to my mother. He told me he'd stay until the ambulance came from the undertaking parlor, and I told him I was going to live in the house and look after the vineyard.
"That's good, Carl," he looked at me gravely. He was a little fellow, sort of pudgy, with wispy gray hair and great big horn-rimmed spectacles, and big ears, and you wouldn't pick him out in a crowd as one of the best M.D.'s in California, but he was just that. He'd been practicing for over forty years in Fresno, and I happened to know that he'd saved a lot of Dad's braceros and paisanos, as well as their bambini Under very trying conditions. And he'd done all that anyone could do for poor Mom.
I told him that it looked as if I had spoiled Madge Fryburg's vacation and that I was going to take her out to dinner. He gave me a sharp look, then glanced at her, and his lips sort of crinkled in what might have been a smile. "Won't do either of you any harm," he allowed. "Maybe you can talk Miss Fryburg into staying around for another month before she takes that vacation of hers. We're short of nurses here, and Miss Tolson is going to be out of circulation for a couple of weeks. Some complications after that appendicitis. That's what happens with age, because everybody's living so fast they haven't got time to relax and enjoy life. Take good care of her, Carl. Good nurses deserve a special seat in heaven among the angels."
His eyes widened a little when he saw Madge Fryburg blush. I could have told him why. I don't think she could have taken that celestial seat, not if her eternal salvation had depended on it. Because even as he was talking, her slim hand kept edging around her backside to rub and rub again.
Chapter Six
I drove Madge Fryburg in my Thunderbird out to the Hacienda Motel, and we'd had a reasonably tasty steak, a good salad, some giant shrimp with a tasty sauce to start the meal off, and an ice cream parfait and little cakes for desert. I had asked for a bottle of Venturi Pinot Chardonnay, but the waitress looked at me as if I had started talking Swahili. So I had to settle for a bottle of Beringer's good red Burgundy, which wasn't a bad wine either.
As we were finishing dinner, who should I see walk through the dining room on her way out than Mrs. Maynard, the goldenhaired, blue eyed, melon-tittied and ripe-hipped broad who had been conferring with Charlie Karogian earlier this afternoon. She paused to look at me, flashed me a dazzling smile with those full red lips of hers, and showed me that she had no cause for dental alarm. She gave Madge Fryburg a glance which wasn't half so cordial, and then continued on her way out. Madge was still wearing her nurse's uniform. When nobody had been looking, I'd sneaked a cushion from a chair in the hotel lobby, hidden it under my sports jacket, and slipped it under Madge's chair just before she'd sat down. She'd gone down very warily, inch by inch, and when she hit the cushion, her eyes had widened and then her mouth had opened, and then she had glared at me, and then blushed. She was really a nice kid.
It felt better on a night like this to look across the table at a good looking broad. I think that's maybe why some guys get a kick out of screwing girls in cemeteries, just to defy Old Man Death and prove that they're still full of hell before they actually get down there. Death is an immensity that nobody likes to think about in spite of its inevitability. But I felt the way my old man had; after all, he was seventy-nine, he had a good rich life, he'd made something of it, and so there wasn't any need to shed tears and tear clothes and go into hibernation. If anything, my father would have preferred that I tear some clothes off broads and get to work on his posthumous grandson. That would be a good way to remember him, too.
But I had a few other things to think about besides pussy. One of them was an interview with that new foreman, Tulio Verduga. He'd been handling the vineyard for two years now. And Dad had been a little suspicious about him. It was up to me to find out why. Also, I wanted to know why Dad had turned half his land away from grape production.
However, Madge Fryburg noticed the undressing look I had managed to give Mrs. Maynard. In a low voice, she murmured, "I'll bet you'd like to spank her too, Mr. Venturi."
I did a double take, because in a way she had been reading my mind. Much as I had enjoyed fantailing Madge's pantie-girdle-sheathed behind this afternoon, I had already remarked that the honeyhaired broad in old Charlie Karogian's office had one of the most spankable tails I had ever glimpsed. I think its time for a brief word on why I seem to notice a woman's bottom first of all her charms. I've already told you I was just about a virgin until I hit San Francisco, apart from that unfortunate coitus interuptis with the Greek Coed on the steps of the house of the dean of men. Now long before that I had become very pussy-conscious, probably around the age of thirteen or fourteen. But my father was the cocksmith of the hour, and you don't think his gorgeous grape-treading girl workers in the vineyard were going to pass him up in favor of a little snotnose like me. I used to play with a couple of boys and girls my own age down the block, and I had a secret yen for one chick who was about fourteen then, as I recall. Her name was Angie Lavolla, and she had long black hair down to her waist, and a Madonna-like face and a very delicious body even then. But she was actually a little devil and a teaser, and she was also something of a tomboy. There were times when we would wrestle, or play touch football, and I always wound up scuffling with her until one day I got mad at her because she kicked and bit, and I pulled her over my lap and spanked her saucy bottom, and I felt myself getting a hard-on and all of a sudden my pants got wet.
I think she had a pretty fair idea of what was happening to me, because she kept teasing me after that, and I did spank her a couple more times, and I invariably stained my trousers, until I might have got brains enough to open my fly and do something about the stain before it was lost in the wrong place, when Angie and her folks up and moved out of Fresno to Modesto.
Then when I was in my last year in high school, I got an absolute itch in my balls for a simply sandy-haired blonde with a sweet face and a seraphic smile and a big pair of titties and an even juicier tail on her, who was second to me in class. I was the top student, and I wanted to stay that way. She was going out with the football captain, and I was sort of awkward and gawky and didn't even make the scrub team. So naturally she wouldn't give me a tumble. One evening I sat down and wrote a short story for my English composition class, and after I finished that, I found myself typing another story-definitely not to be turned in!-in which I was a bold Italian pirate and my privateer ship sailed into a port and my crew went out and kidnapped some twenty squealing beauties. And lo and behold one of them was Clara Brent, my sandy-haired Nemesis. In my story, Clara refused to yield the prize between her lily white thighs, so I had her stripped from the waist down and tied to the yardarm and I took a cat of nine tails and swished it gently over her bottom until she started wriggling her pussy against the rough wood of the mast and finally begged me to give it to her instead of heating up her behind so cruelly. And I did, and we were true lovers ever after.
That was my dream-fantasy. And I know that the last couple of months of relationship with that gorgeous little nurse at La Honda, I used to play spanking games with her, and she got awfully hot.
All this leaped into my mind when Madge Fryburg slyly got back at me for what I had done to her so unceremoniously at our very first meeting this afternoon. At least I had added a little fillip of amatory technique to the traditional Venturi line of fuck them and leave them happy. The only difference was that I was still on my best behavior trying to make it up to Madge for the injury and insult I had done her delectable person.
But my dad had once told me that it was just as well to be hanged for a wolf as for a sheep, and so I stared into Madge's hazel eyes and I said boldly, "Since you put it that way, yes I definitely would."
"I'm worried about you, Mr. Venturi. You just can't go round spanking girls, you know. You're likely to be arrested for indecent assault."
"There was nothing indecent about my spanking you," I protested. "I didn't give it to you on the bare, which is what I most prefer."
"You just keep your mouth shut about that, if you don't want me to walk out on you here and now," she hissed, then she got very red in the face again, and moved uneasily on the cushion I had so thoughtfully slipped over her chair before we had started dinner.
After dinner, I suggested that we go for a ride in the Thunderbird. I've always liked driving at night, because it's a kind of unreal and yet more intimate world. First of all, there are not so many people around, and on the highway you have the feeling of personal destiny, as if the world existed just for you. With the air coming at your face and the stary sky over head, you drive effortlessly past buildings, towns, long stretches of uninhabited landscape, and you tell yourself that out there everyone is asleep while you alone are left to guide the destiny of the world. This is part of what I suppose Dad would have called my romantic twaddle. But there is also a practical reason; if you're a native resident of Fresno, you swelter through the summers and at night you can look forward to some relief. And driving along in the car creates enough stir of a breeze to cool you off-unless, to be sure, a prick-whetting pussy is close beside you heating your blood in a very different and far more thrilling way.
Madge Fryburg hesitated a moment when I suggested the drive, and then with a little sigh agreed. "All right. I don't really feel sleepy anyway, and if I'm going to be uncomfortable, I might as well be in a car enjoying the ride instead of here in a hotel dining room wondering if people are watching me squirm about and wondering what's making me do it. And you know it's all your fault."
I tried to look contrite, but all I could manage was a sly grin, and that only made her blush again. It was strange, but all of a sudden her nurse's uniform didn't seem quite so sexless as it had when I'd made my dramatic entrance into my own house. My own house- those words brought me up short again. Dad was gone now and I was the only living Venturi, which meant that I would inherit everything. I didn't think of that in a greedy sense at all; I thought of the obligations I was going to inherit with the material things like the house and the vineyard. The problems that had been bothering Dad, the conversion of half his land away from the beloved grapes which made the Venturi vino, meeting all the people who had worked for Dad all the years I had been away in San Francisco trying to forget that I was the son of a vintner.
I must have looked especially soulful, because all of a sudden I heard Madge Fryburg ask me with a little concern in her voice, "What's the matter, Mr. Venturi?"
"I'm sorry, Miss Fryburg. Look, why don't I call you Madge and why don't you call me Carl? There's no need to stand on ceremony by this time is there, now that we've broken bread together?"
Her lips began to crinkle, in just a ghost of a smile. Now that I could scrutinize her up close, I had to admit that Madge Fryburg was really a dish, nurse's uniform or not. She had an interesting face, and as I've already said before it was sultry. Her hazel eyes were sort of almond-shaped, which was something I've always liked in a broad, and her cheekbones were highset, and she had a firm jaw and chin, with an adorable little dimple just at the left and near the edge of it. She had a small straight nose, with rather sensuous nostrils, very thick and short lashes, but surprisingly thick brows for a girl. And they were auburn too, just like the hair on her head which did not come out of a bottle; at least, I was pretty sure it didn't. She wore her hair, I suppose because she was a nurse and in the interest of hygiene, in a rather short bob, which left the nape of her long slim neck bare and showed off her dainty little ears. She didn't wear any jewelry at all and she didn't use too much makeup, just a pale pink for her lips, no eye shadow, and a dash of what looked like pancake makeup over her cheeks. Her skin was tawny, and there was the hint of sunburn to it, as if she tanned easily. What was I saying-I ought to have known, because I had tanned her, after all. I hadn't really considered her body, except for my awareness of her magnificent bottom. But she was across the table from me as she was, and sitting rather stiffly and uneasily in her chair for reasons made self-evident, she presented me with the thrust of high-perched conical-contoured titties which pressed very firmly against the cling of that tight uniform and even suggested that she didn't have any need for a bra.
Also, she was just about the height I liked, I'd say about five six and a half or seven. In low-heeled shoes, she came up very nicely to about my throat, which meant that she was a nice big girl for stretching out horizontally as well as for using any of the other more complex positions of love-making. Not that I expected to make love to Madge Fryburg tonight, not after insulting her dignity the way I had. What I was really on was a peace mission, not a piece mission, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, she blushed again when I asked her about going on a first name basis. Then she tartly remarked, trying to show that she was very sophisticated, "Well, I don't see any harm in calling you by your first name. You certainly know me better than any other man I've ever been with. Not even my own father did to me what you did this afternoon."
"I wonder if I'll ever be able to live that down," I ventured.
"I very much doubt it. I'm not even sure it's safe for a girl to be alone with you even in a car. Of course, if you promise to drive along the highway where there are plenty of Highway Patrol officers cruising around, I'll go for a drive with you. That way, if I scream for help, I've a fair chance of being rescued."
"I give you my word of honor as a Venturi if not a gentleman that I won't spank you in the car, Madge," I promised, as I rose, beckoned to our waitress for the check, paid it with a generous tip, and then offered her my arm. We strolled out of the restaurant like a happily domesticated couple, and I noticed that quite a few male diners at the other tables laid down their forks and knives long enough to give Madge Fryburg the eye even in that antiseptic outfit she was still wearing.
The night was wonderful. It had cooled off considerably, the stars were out and so was the moon. It was a full moon. I think some of the romanticism I've always had about the lunar planet has been taken away the last few years because of man's insatiable desire to go exploring. There's probably no man in the moon, it's not made of green cheese, and it doesn't smile down just for lovers. Just the same, its light has a prick-stirring effect on a red-blooded American male when it shines down on the expressive face of a very pretty girl. From time to time I glanced over at Madge as she leaned back beside me, her eyes closed, letting the wind play with her short bobbed curls. She had a lovely, pure, rather high-arching forehead, and it was relaxed now and not furrowed up the way it had been when she had opened the door of my own house to me and later when she had been assuming the angle over my lap and discovering that the glad hand I was giving her wasn't one of welcome.
"I've told you about myself, now why don't you tell me a little something about yourself, Carl?" she suddenly proffered.
It was the old trap. But I was careful not to overdo it and fall in all the way. If I sounded boastful, she would just conclude that I was a cocksure guy who thought he had made a conquest just by turning her over his lap and giving her behind whatfor. I very briefly cited my background as a teenager, I certainly didn't mention the episode with the Greek girl at college, and I just said that my father and I hadn't quite agreed about what my career ought to be, so I'd gone to Frisco to try to make it on my own and had been selling real estate. I also told her I wasn't married.
By the time we reached Modesto, she was sitting a little closer to me, but she was still squirming a bit. Then it was my turn to blush when our eyes met, "I'm sorry, Madge," I murmured. "I've never done a thing like that before in all my life, but I'm not going to say that I'm sorry. I liked doing it to you."
"That's what I thought," she murmured. And then, to my amazement and delight, she slipped her left arm around my waist, put her cheek against mine as we waited for a light to change, and whispered, "I just want you to see the damage you did. But I don't go in for exhibitionism in a car, so why don't you take me either back to my place or yours so I can show you just what an impression you made on me this afternoon?"
Chapter Seven
I gaped stupidly at auburn-haired Madge Fryburg for a minute, and then I gulped and said, "Your place."
It wasn't because I was afraid of profaning the place where Dad had drawn his last breath. I guess I already had done just that by whacking Madge's luscious bottom right there in the bedroom where my father lay, but the real reason was that I had a yen to find out more about this enigmatic piece of quim. I wanted to know, too, what she was like in her own surroundings, what made her tick. I thought she'd be a little more uninhibited in her own pad than in mine especially after that startling admission that she wanted me to inspect the damage my good right palm had done on her luscious tail.
She gave me directions, and it turned out to be a little house, more of a bungalow actually, on El Centra Avenue, which isn't an especially swanky part of town. The hedges were trimmed to the same height all along the block. That's another thing about Fresno; you start letting your hedges grow an inch or so above what the neighbors are doing, and you'll get anonymous phone calls asking you what sort of a crank you are anyhow. Nice and neighborly and conformist to their final breath, these Fresnans.
She got out of the Thunderbird and walked down the short paved strip up to the porch of the bungalow. I followed slowly, because my eyes were fixed on those extremely voluptuous hips. I could see that she had an ample bottom, and it didn't seem to have an ounce of fat to it, though my hand had verified that a few hours earlier today, after all. Even in that white skirt, sexless as it was, her hips had a certain take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me lilt to them.
She unlocked the door and I went in, and she went on in into the small but very long living room and turned on a lamp beside a low wide couch. Then she turned to me and gestured me to sit down, and I did so. With this, she promptly pulled off the nurse's dress and then the slip, and there she was in that pantie girdle, a matching white satin bra, and the white stockings and low-heeled white shoes.
Methodically, her face very impassive and her eyes lowered, she stopped to undo the garter tabs, then unfasten the sheath itself and began to yank it down. I just sat there with my eyes wide open and my mouth practically the same way. I wasn't sure exactly what she wanted me to do but I was going to play it by ear entirely. She was just too amazing for words, was Madge Fryburg.
Down came the sheath and she stepped out of it, wearing only her white stockings and low-heeled shoes and the bra. She had already turned her back to me, but of course not before I had seen a very thick though compact triangle of dark auburn pussy curls over a plump snatch, hiding the lips. And her bellybutton was shallow and wide and a delightful place for kisses as well as finger-tickling. Her skin was wonderfully tawny, very soft and satiny, and I could see how finely grained it was by the way it fitted over the ribcage. She had a slimmer waist than I had thought, from which her hips flared mouthwateringly. The cheeks of her bottom were wonderfully rounded, with a rather sinuous though gradually widening shadowy groove to separate them. Her thighs were nice and long and not too full, her calves were beautifully muscled and high-set, exactly the kind I liked. She had a set of legs a man would love to have wrapped around him so that he could feel every muscular flexion while her loins and belly and bottom were weaving in and out to that age-old rhythm of prick and cunt in unison.
Then, to my further astonishment she put her hands on her stockinged knees, and bent forward, turning her bottom to me. My face went as red as the face before me. I had really laid it on mercilessly, I'm afraid. It must have been sheer torture for Madge Fryburg to sit through dinner even on that cushion, so I could forgive her for the occasional surreptitious squirming she had executed all through the meal, as well as for the occasional wrigglings beside me in the Thunderbird. There wasn't a single inch of tawny untouched bare skin visible from the tops of her hips to the tops of her luscious thighs. It was angriest at the summits and the lower summits, and there it was a really dark and ominous red, like the color of sunburned brick. The cheeks were twitching, too, but whether it was from outraged modesty at exhibiting herself thus to me or the nervous reactions after the spanking, I couldn't quite tell. All I could tell was that the sight of this magnificent Callyphygian beauty made my prick angrily stand at attention and want to do something about the matter.
"I don't know my own strength," was all I could find to say.
She straightened, but without turning back to me, put her hands behind her back and unfastened the bandeau of the bra and let it fall. Now she was practically naked, but those damn white stockings which had begun to sag just past mid-thigh hampered my full enjoyment. Yet this was her house, I was an invited guest, and I decided to bide my time and await developments.
"You certainly don't," she said in a husky voice. She put her hands out of the dark scarlet contours and thoughtfully massaged them. "My father occasionally spanked me, but only till I was about eleven, and those were lovepats."
"Well," I quipped, "they say that hate is akin to love, and at that particular moment, I hated your guts. But that was before I knew you."
She turned to me then, with a curious little smile about that lovely whimsical mouth of hers, and I saw that it was moist and quivering, and she murmured, "That was before you saw my bare bottom, you mean. Do you want me?"
"The question is rather do you want me, Madge."
"Now if you're going to be humble, you can get the hell out of here," she suddenly blazed. "I don't usually put on a strip tease like this for a strange young man I only met a few hours ago and who started our relationship by taking me over his lap and cursing at me and bruising my tender skin. Not hardly. Do you want to screw me or don't you? And I'll tell you in advance that I'm not a virgin, that you won't have to use a safe, and that you've made me so hot already in back you might as well finish the job in front."
Chapter Eight
The whole thing about this was that Madge Fryburg wasn't a whore. I don't think that even Dad himself would have called her that in spite of her somewhat brazen and certainly startling offer. Suddenly I got the hunch that she was a pretty lonely little bitch who had been through hell ever since her parents' death, had worked her ass off to make a little money so that, probably being independent just like me, she wouldn't have to live off her inheritance and could feel useful. And here I, Carl Venturi, blundering oaf that I was, had given her hell because I had thought she hadn't been looking after Dad with all his hemorrhaging and had cursed at her and whaled the hell out of her poor backside. Her gorgeous backside, I mean to say.
And now she was standing facing me, and she was absolutely mouthwatering. Those sweet titties of hers were warm and jouncy, and they had a certain pendant contour to them along with a conical shape. The aureolae were wide and narrow, a sort of dusky coral which went marvelously with that tawny-sheened skin of hers, and her nipples were extremely exciting, swollen and tumescent, and they seemed to be trembling as her bubbies rose and fell with her quickened breathing. She had asked me a question, did I want to screw her. I think she could see the answer right then and there as I got up from the couch. My prick was resolutely tilted in her direction.
"What do you think?" I muttered as I walked over to her and put my hand on her gorgeous rump and felt the cheeks still warm and tingling from where I had laid on with a vengeance. She moaned a little, and she set her teeth in my shoulder, so that I could feel them through my shirt and undershirt. My fingers tightened on those juicy nether globes of hers, and I rubbed my prick back and forth slowly against the hairy thatch of her lovecurls. She was a perfect height. She wasn't drooping, but she stood erect in all her five feet seven, and I just had to lean a little bit and I could smell the nice clean fragrance of her scalp and her hair. She didn't wear any spicy perfumes, and she didn't need to. With a body like that, her bare flesh was stimulant enough to make even a jaded prick come to life, and mine wasn't jaded, not by a long shot.
"I hope I didn't ask for more than I bargained for," she whispered in a husky little voice in my ear, and then she set her teeth against the earlobe and lightly nibbled. My ringers were exploring the delightful contours of her nether hemispheres. I was working my way towards the furrow, and I had a forefinger running lightly into that intimate and narrow and ever-so-satiny cleft, and she was shivering, and then her arms went around me and she hugged me hard until her titties flattened against my chest.
"Let's go to bed," she muttered, "I'm getting sort of shy now, and I know you don't want that. I've been an awful naughty girl, and I guess I deserved that spanking, but I didn't figure I'd get it so early in the game. You're a great big handsome brute, Carl Venturi, and I'm going to hate myself in the morning, but right now I need it awful bad. Please hurry!"
I stooped and lifted her up in my arms, and she was a nice big girl but not too hefty. I stared down at her belly and the soft curls of her cunt, and those damn white shoes. She saw where I was looking, and she giggled and kicked off the shoes, then she murmured, "I don't like those stockings, either, but I'm afraid it's regulation. You know, I've often thought it might help a patient's morale if a nurse with good legs wore real sheer and maybe black nylons and looked sexy."
"That's true," I murmured, as I strode down the hallway towards her bedroom, "but on the other hand, you might give the poor guy a relapse. You almost gave me a heart attack when you started to undress, you know."
"That's fine. You deserve a little suffering for what you caused me. OOOHH! Darling, that's awfully nice! Please hurry and find the bed before I just go stark staring raving mad in your arms and get thoroughly ashamed of myself," she suddenly panted, and she started to wriggle in my grasp. The reason was that I had bent my head and put my lips to the soft, silky curls of her cunt and nuzzled the delicate, twitching lips beneath the fur, and given her vulva a long and passionate kiss.
I don't know why it is, but whenever a man does that to a girl who has been awfully aloof and snotty, she always begins to melt. I wouldn't say it's a sign of Lesbianism, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed her reaction.
I found her bed. It was low and wide and most accommodating. I put her down gently, then I pulled off the white stockings and flung them into a corner. Then I undressed and joined her. By now my prick was bursting. Her eyes were very wide as she saw the trouble she had stirred up, a veritable hornet's nest. It was going to bite and sting, and she knew it, but she spread her thighs like a brave little girl, and she reached out her arms to me. I sank down into that welcome embrace, and I knew I was back home in Fresno and this was the real homecoming I had always wanted.
Her bottom kept squirming the second my prick brushed through the tangled curls and found the petulant lips of her quim. Then she gave a little groaning sob as my prick pushed them aside and started to find the road to Paradise. She was tight, hot and humid, like Honolulu in August without trade winds, and she was just as beautiful and just as passionate and just as exotic.
I felt myself sink down to my entire length, till our hairs merged. Then she flung her legs over my bottom and really hugged me to her, tilting up her bottom and her pussy so she would take the deepest angle of penetration I had to give her. Her fingernails dug into my armpits, and our lips met and her tongue lashed against my gums. No, she wasn't a virgin, but she felt tight as one, I can tell you.
"Don't leave me after you've finished, because you've started something that's going to take a long time," she panted when I began to accelerate my thrusts. "Oh my God, dearest, oh darling, oh Carl, I want it now, darling, but I want another long, slow, delicious one before you leave. You hear me?"
"To hear is to obey, my beautiful one," I panted back, as I thrust myself to my very balls, and then I exploded. I hadn't meant to go off so soon, but I defy the greatest cocksmith in the world to enter Madge Fryburg's cunt and not give her everything he had saved up.
Her hips were squirmy and weaving all the time, and when she felt the lash of my gism, she uttered a wailing cry and pulled my head down to her titties and cupped my cheeks with her hands, and I understood she wanted me to suck and kiss her nipples, and I did.
Her body was jerking and trembling and throbbing under mine, and I felt she was at spasm-point herself. She came with a long-drawn sobbing gasp, and her head turned to one side and then her arms limply sprawled along the sheets, but her legs remained locked over her bottom as she seemed to arch herself up to gobble up the last drop of spunk. I could feel her cuntwalls kissing my embedded prick long after I had thought it was all over, and I felt the old gnawing ache that told me I had still plenty of life left.
"Oh, that was wonderful, Carl, but can you do it again right away, and nice and slow this time, darling?" she breathed. She was starry-eyed, and her nostrils were shrinking and flaring, and there was a wonderful glow to that sweet face, and how I had ever thought it hard and aloof I'll never know. It just goes to show you, if you get to the seat of the trouble in time, you can make everything all right in the end.
"If you're game, so am I," I murmured. "I just wanted to get my second wind. Besides, I wanted her to perform the necessary ablutions. But she had other ideas. She caught my cheeks between her palms, pulled my face very close to hers, and whispered in my ear, "Let me have my way just this once, because you've had yours. I'm just in such a lovey-dovey mood now, it would be a shame to break apart and spoil it. Maybe it won't be so much fun for you, but it will thrill me a lot. Please fuck me again, and do it nice and slow, darling."
I was still hard, it was true. So accommodatingly, I drew myself back to the brink of her cunt and then went slowly back home to the roots, and I could feel the moisture I had created in that narrow tract of hers. She began to weave her bottom again, and this time she shifted her bare legs and hooked them over the small of my back, arching up her cunt and bottom to me as if I owned them. Then she flung her arms out in cross, tilted back her head and breathed, "Nice and slow and gentle, darling. I want to die from it. I just want to float off into space. You owe me that much, seeing as how you've practically ruined my vacation. I was going to ride horseback, I'll have you know, and you don't think I can do that very well now, do you?"
"I'll give you a better ride," I promised. And I kept my word.
After I had established a slow, rhythmic in-and-out, I began to discover that the moisture of her quim wasn't quite so fastidiously annoying to me as I had thought it would be. And for Madge Fryburg, it was sheer rapture, if I was any judge of the convulsive jerkings of her legs, which locked around me and seemed to increase their muscular hold with each new thrust. Her head began to turn restlessly from side to side, her thick lashes fluttering, her nostrils dilating and shrinking, as I went in and out of the wet, sweet cunt of hers. And strangely enough, I began to feel a kind of building torture in my balls, as if I hadn't fucked at all. I got really excited then, and began to quicken my pace, but she tried to slow me down by shaking her head and begging me, "Oh no-please, dearest, do it the way I want. Just this once, nice and slow, don't hurry, we've got all night."
That was true. I wasn't yet a working man, because I'd have to go to the funeral and start checking with Charlie Karogian as to the exact condition of the estate I had taken over.
She had the most muscular legs of any girl I have ever fucked, bar none. She seemed to control me, too. Each time I had reached the brink of her twitching slit, she would sort of stiffen, and then her crossed calves would flex and press my back down and I knew she wanted me to dig in deep to my balls, and I did.
I felt it building in me, and I felt her getting squirmier by the moment. Little whimpering gasps and sobs, inarticulate moans and little cries began to exude from her lips. Her eyes were glassy and staring, and very wide; they were looking up at the ceiling, but she wasn't bored like a gumchewing whore, I could promise you that. All of her body was racked and tensely awaiting the liberation of her tensions. And I suddenly felt her thigh muscles surge and take a tighter hold over me. I felt myself suddenly drawn over the edge of the precipice. I shot it out, and I exploded again, and it felt to me as if I'd had even more saved up than the first time, which was nonsense and not at all scientific. But the point was that she drained me like a succubus, and I felt everything go back with a nice sweet lassitude.
I don't know how long it was before either of us spoke. We just lay there reveling in the pulsations of merged prick and cunt. This was the ultimate fruition of life. Even if I had been trying to give Marcantonio a posthumous grandson, I couldn't have fucked Madge Fryburg any more lovingly than I had.
Chapter Nine
In order not to compromise Madge Fryburg's reputation, I crept out of her little bungalow at about two in the morning, via the backyard, and made my way down the alley to the corner, whereupon I turned up and walked along the sidewalk jauntily as if I were out for a insomniac stroll, got into my Thunderbird and pulled away as quickly as I could. One thing that is so unusual in California and especially in towns like Fresno, that you're very often likely to be stopped by a cruising squadcar and asked to identify yourself and, even though they are satisfied that you're not a burglar or a rapist, they'll still ask questions to find out whatever made you want to use your legs. Fortunately, there weren't any squadcars in the vicinity.
I lit a cigarette and I thought how much had happened in this short span of twenty-four hours since I had said goodbye to my cute little nurse in San Francisco, asked my boss at the real estate office for about two weeks in which to be with my dad and clean up any personal matters that might arise from our reunion. I was ready to phone him Monday and kiss the job goodbye for at least a while. And I guess I was going to have to kiss my little nurse more than an au revoir kiss, too. Unless, of course, she felt like commuting weekends down to Fresno, or I could arrange doing the same thing myself in reverse.
But right now, her charms had begun to grow hazy and almost indistinct, after the torrid hours I had spent in Madge Fryburg's bed. She had been insatiable and uninhibited. She had given herself to me with an almost savage joy, as if somehow she were punishing herself for having remained continent so long. And she hadn't told me any bedtime stories about her bedtime history either. All she'd said was that she wasn't a virgin. But she wasn't a whore either. It had been a kind of catharsis for us both, in which she had obviously tried to forget something, and I had almost gratefully enjoyed her embrace to put aside the thought of what I'd lost in the way of a straight-shooting, hard-nosed old son-of-a-gun who had really loved me more than I had ever deserved or that I had ever been able to show I appreciated. It was all a little mixed up, just like my sentences, I guess. But I think Madge Fryburg had understood what I was feeling.
This would be as good a time as any to go visit the property I had just inherited, mortgage and all. I drove down M Street, made a right-hand turn up Divisidero, and drove north for about ten miles, then cut off the freeway at Mulaheney Drive and headed west towards the Venturi Vineyard.
The night had grown a little cooler, and the moon was still beaming down. It was peaceful out here. Here was where life really meant something, putting something into the earth and having it come up, replenishing the age-old cycle, and I began to understand my father's love for the soil and for the wine which came from the grapes, the wine of life, the wine which was drunk in joy and in pride and to commemorate happiness or even sorrow. We Italians have a naked shamelessness to our emotions sometimes, even when we're Americanized as I was. And as I sat out there parked in the Thunderbird, my body relaxed and my mind lulled by the passionate fire with which Madge Fryburg had purged me, I began to feel a little more grateful and humble.
I could see that there had been a lot of developments since I'd left Fresno five years ago. There was another vineyard next to ours, and the boundary was a tall stone wall about eight feet high. It was a good piece of land, too, and I wondered how my father had ever let it get away. If he'd been prosperous, he would certainly have taken an option on it, and not let some stranger sit side by side with him and try to produce those good white grapes which gave the Pinot Chardonnay he was always after. In fact, my practiced eye determined that Dad's next-door neighbor had probably as much acreage as he had.
I started up the Thunderbird again and moved towards the wall, because I thought I discerned some of those vines on which the white grapes were flourishing. You need a lot of things to produce a good crop of grapes anywhere in the world. Good soil, the right amount of rain, plenty of judicious pruning, and first of all you have to know what kind of grapes to plant and how to get the best yield and what to put into the ground to give them that special tang which, after fermentation, makes for a truly great wine. Much of it is an act of God, some of it is just a little commonsense, and then there's the element of luck. You take California sherries, for instance. When they first came out, they were raw and sweet and so full of alcohol that you could get drunk on them, as on a cheap muscatel. Now they're getting a little more subtle, and one of these days they'll be just as good as what comes out of Portugal and Spain.
Well, maybe coming back to Fresno wasn't really getting out of my league after all. I'd been selling real estate in San Francisco, and this was real estate that belonged to the Venturi clan in the town where I was born. Maybe there was a meaning to it. I owed Dad enough to find out and also enough to try to solve some of the problems which had been plaguing him on his deathbed.
Then I heard a noise, a strange noise which sounded like a crack of a branch, but it was followed by a muffled whimper. Then it came again, a sharp crack and then the whimper. Something very fishy was going on, and it was on my side of the wall. From the road, our property was segmented off by strong steelwire fencing, not quite six feet high. I got out of the Thunderbird, put my hands on the top of the fence, and dug my sport-shoe toes into some of the small holes trying to get myself a footing. I managed, and I wasn't too badly out of condition-though I was just a little bit tired from all the gymnastics I'd been performing horizontally on Madge Fryburg's bed. I landed on the other side with a thud, which thoroughly woke me up, and then I crouched down and made my way in the direction of that strange combination of sounds. I heard them again, a little more distinctly this time. They were farther off towards the west, down along the last row of vines just on the other side of the wall which separated Dad's acreage from his neighbor's.
The sounds kept getting closer and closer and also faster and faster as I crept like a Commando out on a mission against the Nazis. There were a couple of shade trees planted right by the wall, and that's what sort of obscured my view. And then all of a sudden I saw what had been making those strange noises.
One of the thick-trunked shade trees was about midway down the long row, going right smack up against the wall. A burly, black-haired, rather squat man stood there with his back to me, and his right hand was lifted in the air and it held a flexible switch, apparently broken off from one of the small branches of the shade tree. Directly in front of this guy and bound to the trunk of the shade tree, was a youth. He was wearing jeans which were almost skintight, work shoes, white woolen socks, and his shirt had been ripped down from the neck to the waistband of the jeans, with the torn folds wrenched apart to expose the entire back. It was slim and pale white, and there were ugly welts all over it from the neck to exactly where the tight band of the jeans bit into the slim waist. The youth's arms had been wrapped around the treetrunk, and probably tied at the wrists on the other side which of course I couldn't see, gave the illusion that the poor guy getting his licks and not his kicks was embracing the improvised whippingpost.
From his build I judged him to be rather young, in his late teens, maybe; he had closely cropped sandy-colored hair, and his head was bowed and a part of his face was pressed right against the treetrunk. But that's not what was keeping him from crying out under those whistling cuts of the switch in his assailant's hand; because now I could see a dirty white handkerchief tied around the sufferer's neck, which could mean only one thing: a gag.
With a grunt, the burly fellow in front of me lifted up the switch and brought it down hard, in a vertical slash from the neck almost to the waist. The youth's body seemed to jerk and stiffen under that brutal slash, and an angry red line immediately appeared upon the pale white flesh. This time the muffled groan was very loud.
I straightened, and I tapped the whipper on the shoulder. With a vicious oath in Italian, the immediate translation of which was that I must have been born out of the womb of a diseased hyena spawned in hell's lowest cavern, he whirled round and raised the switch against me. His face was just as ugly as what he had been doing. It was a bulbous nose, with many red pores, which suggested that he was overly fond of the stuff that came out of the grapes growing all around him. He had piggish little black eyes which squinted, a swarthy complexion, thick sensual lips, and a dark stubble of beard along his jaws. He had big ears too, and a narrow forehead.
"Gently, friend," I told him in Italian, "Know whom you're hitting before you make a mistake."
"Per Bacco! And who in the name of God are you to tell me, Tulio Verduga, what to do in my own vineyard?" he growled.
I stood my ground, even though that was a pretty heavy switch and he had it raised high over his head and his wrist was quivering with impatience to bring it down across my face. "Your vineyard?" I echoed with a sarcastic little smile. "I was under the impression this belonged to the Venturis."
"And so it does, you meddling pig," he snarled at me. "And you are trespassing. I am the foreman here. And who are you? Speak up, unless you want what your friend here is getting."
The figure tied to the shade tree seemed to shiver and to press himself even more tightly against the rough bark. And he didn't turn his face back to see who had tried to save him. That was all right. Maybe he was embarrassed, at being naked to the waist though we were both of the same sex. But my business now was with this Tulio Verduga, because that was the name my father had pronounced on his deathbed as a bad Italian, his own foreman of whom he wasn't quite sure. After old Jacopo had died, my father had to take what he could get, and it hadn't been too good a choice, if Tulio Verduga's behavior towards me was a criterion.
"I happen to be Carl Venturi," I told him. "Put that switch down and tell me what the devil you think you're doing treating a young kid like that!" I gestured towards the welted back and shoulders of the sufferer.
"You mean you are the son of Marcantonio Venturi?" Tulio Verduga exclaimed, and in his squinty little piggish eyes there dawned a light of grudging respect.
"Marcantonio Venturi died yesterday afternoon in his house, and I was there," I told the foreman. "This vineyard is therefore mine and you work for me, I believe."
"That's true, padrone," he lowered the switch now and grinned ingratiatingly. "Ah, in the midst of life there is always death, is that not so, Signor Venturi? But I was protecting your father's interest, padrone. I caught this one trying to trespass. We had had some problems with the white grapes, Signor padrone."
It was curious how humble and fawning he was all of a sudden. I guess he hadn't bargained for me, figuring that I was safely away in San Francisco and that I had been on the outs with my father and probably wouldn't show up, at least not here in the vineyard. "I'm glad to hear that you're looking after my father's interests," I coldly told him. "But I don't think that on his worst-tempered days Dad ever took a switch to the bare back of a kid, just for trying to steal a few grapes."
"It's not exactly like that, Signor padrone," Tulio Verduga whined, rubbing his hands as if he were a pawnbroker. Then he turned and gave that welted back a quick nervous glance before he looked at me again and went on, forcing a deferential smile to his thick moist lips, "You see, Signor padrone, this one was actually trying to get away with a cutting. I was making my rounds, and I heard a noise, and then I found this one here with a knife and a little plastic envelope. I wanted to know what it was all about, and I got an argument. So I decided that a good lesson was in order, Signor padrone."
"I tell you what, Verduga," I said. "Why don't you go back to your house wherever it is, and I'll see you at the office Monday morning bright and early. I want to do a lot of talking about the property. I just came in yesterday from Frisco, just in time to talk to Dad before he died. And I guess I'll be taking over for a little while, anyhow. If you're the foreman, you're answerable to me."
"Si, Signor padrone, of course," he assured me. "You need have no fear about any trouble. Everybody around Fresno knows that those who trespass in vineyards belonging to others deserve to be punished, and it is not always the police or the jail we send them to. I shall say prayers for your beloved father, Signor padrone. Why do you not go to bed, for the hour is late and you surely must be mourning your beloved father?"
His sudden touching solicitude for me didn't ring true at all. I had the feeling he wanted to get rid of me in a helluva hurry. I pushed him aside and I walked up to the tree, "Not so fast," I said to him. "I prefer the modern methods of calling the police if something serious is going on. Then you've got legal witnesses. This way, you take the law in your own hands and you might start a blood feud. You don't even know who this person is, and he might be working for the fellow who owns the vineyard next to ours. I'll take care of this, Verduga. You get back home, and that's an order!"
I saw him clench his fists for a moment, and his face turned dark and ugly. Then he bowed his head, and in a very humble and obsequious voice, agreed: "You're right, of course, Signor padrone. I will see you Monday then. My God grant your worthy father a place among His angels, for truly Marcantonio Venturi was a righteous and good man."
Then he turned and made his way back down the row of vines till he reached the fence, turned to my left and disappeared from view.
I scowled when I looked at that pale white back again. It looked awfully frail, and some of the cuts were bleeding. Now, me, I like to spank a girl's pretty bottom, you understand, and get myself worked up for a good fucking. But I don't go for the brutal sadism bit, and I don't like to see skin broken and blood flowing from anybody. As an esthete I don't like it because it leaves permanent marks and damages beauty. You just want to warm a girl's bottom nicely until she's crying and squirming nicely and getting awfully hot inside her pussy so that she can take you on and make it up to you for the trouble she's caused that brought about the spanking in the first place. That's something else again. But this was deliberate and vicious cruelty, and I wasn't even sure it was called for. So I fumbled in the pocket of my slacks and I found a jack-knife, and I went around the tree to cut the wristbonds, that's when I dropped the knife and stared and gaped like a fellow who has just seen the Empire State Building for the first time in his life after coming out of a little hamlet in the backwoods of Tennessee. Because the "fellow" tied to the shade tree with a backfill of welts was a girl!
Chapter Ten
No sooner had I cut the ropes tied around the wrists of the captive whom Tulio Verduga had been whipping at the shade tree than the unfortunate young girl staggered away and turned so that I wouldn't see her bare back. The shirt hadn't been ripped down the front, so her titties weren't showing at all. She reached behind her neck to try to unknot the handkerchief which had been tied over her mouth, and she was trying to say something, but there was a gag still between her lips. "Let me do that," I volunteered. I approached slowly, the way I would a strange animal, so as not to cause any fear. Nevertheless, she kept backing away until she bumped her naked back against the wall. Then she cried out and slipped down on her knees and bowed her head and begun to rub her bleeding back. I turned to send a last savage look at Dad's foreman, but he had long since disappeared. Whatever this girl had done, it couldn't have been bad enough to merit a thrashing like this. Those welts were deep and dark, where they hadn't broken the skin, and when you whip like that you do it for viciousness, not for sensual pleasure-unless of course our friend Tulio got his kicks that way.
"I'm sorry. I own this vineyard, and I didn't know this was going on. Let me get that handkerchief off and take that gag out. Then you can tell me all about it," I said soothingly. I knelt down, my jack knife in hand, and unknotted the girl's head. She whimpered and didn't move, I saw her shoulders shuddering and after a moment I figured it would be all right, so I deftly cut the handkerchief on the back of her neck and let it slide off. She opened her mouth, and I could see that another handkerchief had been crammed between her lips, and I pulled it out.
"That's better," I went on softly. "Now suppose you tell me who you are and what you were doing here to make that heavy-handed foreman lace into you like that."
"I-M-my name is J-Jane Wilson. He-he wanted to-to rape me, I think, and I wouldn't let him so he tied me up to the tree and he was b-beating me. I think he would have killed me, he was so mad because I wouldn't let him-let him-"
"All right, we'll forget that." I scowled again in the general direction which Tulio had taken. "I'll have a talk with him on Monday, and we'll see if something can't be done to curb his little extra-curricular activities. What are you doing here so late? Do you realize it's almost dawn?"
"Yes. I couldn't help it though."
"You're not making sense, Miss Wilson. Damn it, we'd better do something about that back of yours. It's pretty late to be getting a doctor, but I've got an idea." I had, too. I was going to take Jane Wilson back to Madge Fryburg's and put Madge's practical nurse's training to work. I'll admit it was rather ungentlemanly, seeing as how we had both honked each other out and poor Madge was probably sleeping by now, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time. I didn't like the look of those welts at all. "Don't tell me you work in the vineyards, a young girl like you? You'll admit that wearing jeans and a shirt like that, and coming here in the dead of night, a foreman might get the idea that you were up to no good. And what was that Tulio said about trying to make away with one of the cuttings?"
"That's a lie!" She slowly got up from her knees, wincing with pain, and I saw that she had sky-blue eyes, and they were filled with tears. Her face was haggard, and it was very piquant. I could see how easy it was to take her for a boy, quite apart from her slim figure and that man's costume she had on. She had small orange-like titties, widely spaced, and they hardly filled her shirt out enough to catch the lecherous male eye. She was about five feet five, and the jeans moulded out long slim legs, very gracefully slender thighs and calves, and a compact, jouncy round-cheeked bottom that was also very boyish. With her closely cropped hair, her dainty little pugnose, and her small rather thin mouth, she had a certain provocative and yet troubling charm. I didn't think she was much more than seventeen or eighteen. But I could see how a lecher like Tulio would be greedy for her pussy, especially if she was cherry. Lots of guys like them young when they're still unfledged, just to prove what brave cocksmiths they are. Me, I don't like overly green fruit.
"It's not true, what he said," Jane Wilson passionately broke out. "I wasn't trying to steal any cuttings. I-I wanted to show him one from another vineyard, if you want to know the truth. I-I have a cousin who has a few acres on the other side of town and wants to learn how to grow really fine grapes, and Mr. Verduga said he'd give me some good pointers for her. I was to have dinner with him, and I did, pretty late, maybe about ten-thirty or eleven. And we got to talking, and then he suggested we come out here and he'd show me what he meant. And then he tried to-to-rape me."
She was shuddering now from the aftermath, and she suddenly put her arms around my waist and leaned her chin on my chest, and could glance and see the ugly-looking streaks on that slim pale white back of hers. Maybe her story was too pat, and maybe I didn't entirely buy it all, but there was no mistaking the fact that she had really got herself a good sound thrashing without any fun in the process. That is, if I were a girl, and even if there was only one man on earth and his name was Tulio Verduga, I think I'd rather die a virgin. I noticed that he had a bad garlic breath, decaying teeth, and I don't think he'd taken a bath in at least a week. Not that you expect the foreman of a vineyard to be a beau brummel, not if he's producing good bottlings for you, but on the other hand you don't expect to find him tying up a young girl and whipping hell out of her at about four in the morning in the vineyard itself.
"Well, I'm certainly going to give him hell when I get to him on Monday, Miss Wilson. Meanwhile let's get out of here and into my car, and I'll take you somewhere where your back can be treated."
"Oh, please, I'd rather not. I can go home, I'll be all right. I don't live far from here."
"Look, Miss Wilson, I told you my name is Carl Venturi and I own this vineyard. And anything that happens on it concerns me. For all I know, if I let you go now and there's an infection, you'd have every right to bring a civil suit against me. The least I can do is to have your back treated so that you can rest comfortably and get what sleep you can. Now you get into that car before I get really firm about it."
"Well, I suppose I better. My back does hurt."
"Of course it does. Here, I'll carry you."
I was really getting gallant within this short span of twenty-four hours. I had started by fantailing Madge Fryburg for the wrong reason, I had just come from a couple of memorable hours of the most passionate fucking I had ever indulged in, and now I had blundered upon a strange nocturnal scene of sadism, and I was carrying off the victim to what she could probably say would be my lair for more fucking. Moreover, she didn't exactly appeal to me, even if I'd had that in mind. I remembered that Tulio had said something about finding Jane Wilson there with a knife and a plastic envelope. The moon was starting to set, but there was still enough light to look in the immediate vicinity of the shade tree to which my charming armful had been tied for her switching. I couldn't find a thing.
The thought came to me that she might have concealed the damning evidence in the pockets of her jeans, but right now wasn't exactly the time to search her. She might really have thought I was going to rape her and take seniority over the foreman by dint of owning the vineyard, and if she had thought that and decided to screech her head off for help, I would really have made a dramatic debut back in my home town. Now that I'm on the subject, I might as well add that my dad had never really been accepted by the gentry, because even in a town that got its origin from farming, the people on the right side of the tracks who came later on always looked down their cultured noses at the sons of toil who do what they considered menial jobs and don't belong to the country club at the local orchestra hall. You can say what you like about the East and some of the snooty cliques who blackball you if you move into their territory and try to join a golf-course or a tennis court or what have you, that I personally have found more snobbery in California than anywhere else in these United States.
Jane Wilson didn't weigh too much, and she felt nice. I let her fling her slim arms around my neck, my left arm was just around the tops of her slim hips, and my right arm was against the hollows of her knees. I eased her into the Thunderbird after walking about a hundred yards till I came to a gate which could be opened only from the inside, and then I drove back to Madge Fryburg's bungalow and rang the bell and waited, while Jane Wilson twisted to one side, so that she wouldn't have to lean her sore back against the seat, huddled herself and kept out of sight all she could.
I leaned on the bell, and I was ashamed of myself but I couldn't think of anything else at the minute. Finally a light flashed on in the living room of the little bungalow, and then the door swung back on the bar and a husky sleep-thickened voice wanted to know who it was. "I'm back for a repeat performance, Madge," I told her.
I heard her gasp, and then the door closed and was pulled open and she stood there in a sheer white nylon nightie, the dark patch of pussyhair plainly outlined between those luscious thighs of hers. She was wide awake now, and her eyes were flashing: "What sort of man are you, anyhow, Carl Venturi? Don't you think you're a little bit inconsiderate? I had just fallen off into the nicest sleep. I was even dreaming about you."
"I'm very flattered. But seriously, Madge, I drove over to the vineyard and I found my foreman beating up some poor young gal. I chased him off and then I drove her here because I didn't know anybody else who could take care of her this time of night. He took a switch to her back and he cut the skin pretty badly. All I could think of was that you're a nurse."
"All right, I'm sorry to go off halfcocked again," she said wearily. "Bring her in and I'll do what I can."
I started chuckling. She looked at me and frowned as if I were nuts. Maybe I was, but she had just made a Freudian slip. I muttered to her, "I would have sworn you were born with a sweet little furry spot between those lovely long legs of yours, and here you're talking about going off halfcocked."
"Another crack like that, Carl Venturi, and you can just look elsewhere for your nursing services," she angrily retorted. And I kept on laughing, because this time she had talked about cracks, and there was no doubt that she had one of the hottest and tightest ones I've ever dipped my candlewick into to get on fire.
I hurried back to the Thunderbird, lifted Jane Wilson out of it and carried her into the little bungalow.
As soon as Madge Fryburg saw Jane's back, she let out a gasp and then she looked at me and said very softly, "I'm sorry. This time I'm doing the apologizing. Take her into my bedroom and get that shirt off her and I'll go get some hot water and medications and maybe a bandage or two, then she can sleep there."
I carried Jane Wilson back into the bedroom. The sheets of that bed where Madge and I had celebrated my homecoming to Fresno were rumpled and didn't speak well for her being a tidy housekeeper. But I thought she could be forgiven under the circumstances. I laid Jane carefully down on her tummy, and then suggested that she let me take off the shirt. She didn't raise any objections, but I noticed that she clamped her hands under her titties as soon as the shirt was off, and closed her eyes and shivered. There was something disturbingly sensual about her body, now that all she wore were the jeans and the sox. Of course I'd taken off her shoes. She had such a saucy bottom I wondered that it hadn't tempted Tulio into pulling down those jeans and switching her bare ass. Probably, if I hadn't come along when I had, he might have got down to that eventually. Something was going on in the winegrowing business, and I began to feel glad that I had come home, and sorry that I hadn't come home sooner. Maybe Dad and I could have had some hunting or fishing up in the Sierra Madre range and got to know each other better. But it was too late for that now.
Madge came back all prim and pretty in the white nurse's uniform-though she didn't have anything else under it except a slip-and started patching up the cuts and bruises and the ugly welts with which my foreman had decorated Jane Wilson's pale white back and shoulders. She moaned and squirmed a little, but it began to ease the pain, and then Madge put on a little mentholated salve, told her to get some sleep and then turned out the light and walked out with me back into the kitchen. "Well, Mr. Venturi," she said rather prissily, "I'll say one thing, this is more exciting than a vacation. The day started with my trying to take care of your poor father, then I got myself bruised and blackened in the process because of a misunderstanding, next you took advantage of my loving nature and finally after I had thought I would finally get some sleep, you brought me another woman. I wouldn't have been surprised at all if you'd 'fessed up and told me that you were the one who had laid on that switch. After what you did to my bottom, I wouldn't have been surprised at all, I'll tell you honestly. And now of course I won't be able to get back to sleep at all and it's going to be one of those dreary Sundays in Fresno. Hot and miserable, instead of being in Yellowstone Park, I'm sitting here in my own kitchen with you wondering what I ever did to deserve all this."
I bent over and kissed her on the forehead, and then my hands moved down from her shoulders to those gorgeous gourd-like titties of hers and squeezed gently. She started to protest, but I silenced her with a kiss which is still the most effective way a man can shut a woman up. "I know an excellent soporific," I murmured after I'd finished the kiss.
Her eyes questioned me. I smiled. Then, my hands tightening on her swelling titties, I muttered, "If you've got another bed in this house, we could always resume what we had been doing just before I left. I guarantee to put you to sleep this time, Madge baby."
She stared at me, her brows arched, her eyes suspicious for a minute. Then she started giggling, and rose from the kitchen chair into which she'd wearily sunk down. "Oh, very well, Mr. Venturi. We might as well. Maybe it will be relaxing this time. Because it wasn't before, you know. You made me so hot I actually couldn't fall asleep at all after you left. And maybe too, now that you're a little tired, there won't be any danger of your reverting to your apparent mania for spanking or whipping. Come along, I'll put you up in the guest room for what's left of the night."
And she did just that. And the surprising thing about it was that tired as I was, I felt just as horny as when she'd done that striptease for me some hours before. Madge Fryburg didn't get too much sleep at all, I'm afraid, but after two more exciting love bouts, I fell into a deep dreamless slumber with my head cradled on those juicy loveglobes of hers. And if he was already in Heaven looking down on his only son and heir, somehow I don't think Marcantonio Venturi disapproved at all of the way I had spent my first night in Fresno.
Chapter Eleven
I caught up on sleep Sunday, and by the time I opened my eyes it was time to go back to bed again, because the sun had set and the house was ghostly and still. I took a shower, I gave Dr. Franklin a ring at his home and thanked him in a less hectic way for what he'd done about Dad, and I also told him to send me a final bill so that I'd get it quick. I was going to add a little donation to his clinic-he spent a couple of hours every day, apart from a very heavy practice, old as he was-giving his time free to the poor and needy.
While we were on the phone, he pulled my leg a little about Madge Fryburg. I told him I thought I had slipped her the convincer about postponing her vacation a little while longer, and he said in the chipper way he had, "Good, good! I rather thought you might. You know, that young woman is really a remarkable person, and she needs plenty of affection. She had a fiance a couple of years ago, from a very good family here in Fresno, and they were very much in love. The trouble was, he was too ambitious for his own good. He wanted to make money quickly, and all he was doing was working in a store for about seventy bucks a week, with a promise of maybe being assistant manager in another couple of years for another ten or twenty in his pay envelope. So someone got to him and asked if he'd mind doing a little night driving between here and Eureka and Bakersfield, and he grabbed it, and the next thing he knew he was pulled in by the narcotics boys for smuggling marijuana and a little cocaine. He's doing about twelve years at Folsom. It broke Madge up pretty badly, and she was obliged to turn to nursing. I guess she felt that worrying about other people's troubles might help her forget her own."
I silently determined to up that check to Dr. Franklin another couple of hundred bucks on my own, because it explained a couple of things about that sultry auburn-haired baggage whose bottom I had spanked so unceremoniously. She ought to have been married and had a couple of kids by now by her guy, but the dreariness of this town and the way they frown on anybody who's young and enthusiastic and ambitious had got to her boyfriend. Of course, he had probably had a little weakness in his character to start with, or he wouldn't have blindly accepted a deal where everything looked like money with no risks. There just ain't no such animal these days.
I began to have an idea in mind, and I went to the Hotel Californian for some chow and a little wine, and then I walked around the mall and then I got into my Thunderbird which I'd parked at the mall and I drove out to the highway, towards the Hacienda Motel. I don't know what I was looking for, but Sunday evening to me is the most lonely time of the entire week. Tomorrow would be busy enough, walking into that bottling plant and that fancy office and meeting all the people who had worked for Dad and having a heart to heart talk with Tulio Verduga, and finding out what the hell he thought he was doing at four in the morning by laying a switch on the back of a girl. If he had actually tried to rape her, the way Jane Wilson had told me he had, I wasn't sure I was going to keep him on the payroll. But already at the back of my mind there was a sort of vague feeling that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark and much more presently, right here in Fresno.
I went into the Hacienda, went to the bar, listened to the juke box, and then went into a pay phone and checked the alphabetical directory. I was looking for Sally Jeffries. I didn't find even her mother, Lena, listed. Then it dawned on me that her mother, after having made a pass at me and probably professionally too, had said something about her marrying Don Foster, a big shot on KJZ-TV, which had all the viewer-ship in Fresno and the adjacent suburban area. Sure enough, Don Foster was listed over in the Fig Garden area. It figured. It was about the swankiest residential part of the town. On an impulse, I dropped a dime into the slot and dialed the number.
There's an old saving, "when a man answers, hang up." But this time a man did answer and I didn't hang up. "Don Foster?" I asked.
"This is he," came back at me in a nice snotty, rather high-pitched voice.
"Is this the Don Foster of Station KJZ-TV?" I pursued.
"Of course it is! To whom am I speaking?" His bass sounded impatient. I could hear faint music in the background and I could also hear something else I couldn't quite identify, like sniffling. Well, in Fresno the hayfever season was just about there, and there was a lot of pollen from the ragweed and all the other foliage which is so plentiful in this climate.
"If you're the Don Foster who married Sally Jeffries, then I'd like to drop over and visit you," I said. "My name's Carl Venturi."
There was a click at the other end of the line and I knew that I had been disconnected. Well, that figured. With a voice like that, Don Foster had acted true to type. But something kept nagging at the back of my mind, and so I got into the Thunderbird and drove out to the address I had found in the phone book. When I got there, I had to whistle low and long. It was really a terrific house, with plenty of rolling acres, hedges, lawns, gardens, and a magnificent driveway with a garage that had room for at least four big cars. Sally Jeffries, if she had married this guy, ought to have done well enough to have taken Lena off the hooking line.
I parked the car in the driveway and rang the bell. A butler received me, looking very supercilious and frosty, as butlers traditionally are supposed to do. This one had evidently been imported, because he had a perfect London accent.
"Whom shall I say is calling, sir?" was his line.
"I'd like to see Mrs. Foster," I gave it right back to him. "Tell her that an old friend from San Francisco was just passing by. It's urgent"
"If you'll wait here, sir," he gestured to a little antechamber right off the huge living-room. There was an archway and drapes which were just slightly parted enough to allow me to see into that living-room and get a gander at the costly bric-a-brac which was cluttering up the room, including a thick Oriental rug which must itself cost a fortune. The antechamber had a tiny little table, two stiff-looking chairs, and a mirror on the wall framed in goldleaf. I sat there and looked at my image, and noticed some dark circles under my eyes. That figured too. I had postponed Madge Fryburg's vacation in a very valiant and taxing way. But somehow, I found myself glad that I had given way to that fit of temper and grabbed her and put her across my lap. I might not have ever got to bed with her any other way if I had tried the usual gentlemanly courting route. Some women react best to an atavistic line, the caveman approach, because they have the seed of masochism in their pussies and it just needs a little encouragement to sprout.
In about five minutes, the butler came back and he was accompanied by Sally. I stood up and my eyes goggled at her. She was more beautiful now than when I had first met her and wanted to get between those olive-sheened thighs of hers. Now it all came back to me, those gorgeous almond-shaped green eyes, that full passionate red mouth with the riper underlip which sometimes she used to catch and hold between her teeth and look ever so wistful, as if she was just dying to fuck but just didn't dare; the black hair which tumbled in thick ringlets to her shoulders, the proud pear-shaped titties spaced so beautifully apart, which thrust now so beautifully against the tight shimmering cling of a tight, silver-sequined evening gown; the lissome waist which curved into those luscious hips and those ripely endowed thighs which held everything a man could want out of fucking between them.
This was Sally Jeffries five years later. There was a smell of perfume to her and of expensiveness. She hadn't had that before; there had been a kind of hungry look to her in the old days, when she and I were both groping for what we didn't know. Maybe she had found what she wanted; I wasn't sure that I had yet.
"Carl!" she gasped as she took a step towards me. "I never thought you'd come back here-and why did you come here now?"
It wasn't exactly the reply I had expected after five years of separation, even if she had got married. We'd been pretty good friends, and I think she'd sensed that I was going to pop the question.
"I came back because my father died yesterday," I told her. "I came back because once you were my girl, and my father didn't agree with my selection, and we had a quarrel and I went to San Francisco because of you. Now he's gone and I'm back and you're married to Don Foster. But I wanted to talk to you if I could and find out what happened. And what about your mother?"
"I think, Mr. Venturi," that high-pitched, snotty voice interposed again as Don Foster hoved into view, pushing the butler aside with an impatient thrust of his hand, "that you certainly aren't going to get any answers from my wife. This is my home, Mr. Venturi, and you're not welcome here. Is it your custom to visit decent citizens late at night, especially on a Sunday, without first calling for an appointment and even if you're not welcome?"
There you had in a crystalline sentence all the Fresno philosophy of life-the philosophy of the haves, that is. The have-nots had their own ideas, but they never got to first base. And I could see that even though my dad had lived a good life and contributed a little something to the enjoyment of others by putting out a damn good wine with his name on the label, Don Foster and his kind couldn't have cared less, and they were probably glad that my father was now just a memory and ashes because they wouldn't have to bother with his kind again.
"I wasn't aware that I had to make a phone call to see an old friend," I told him. "I don't intend to see her again, if that's what you're worried about. Although I've heard it's very popular sport in Fresno to go around wife-swapping or have affairs on the side. I just wanted to talk to Sally because we were friends for a while and because she used to mean a lot to me, just about all that Fresno did mean."
"How very touching!" he sneered. He was just about as tall as I was, and maybe two years older at most, but he had a paunch, the start of a double chin, an ineffective little moustache on his upper lip which looked more as if he hadn't shaved or bathed recently, and a sneer on his face which didn't make him any handsomer at all. I knew his type, and it isn't limited to Fresno. I'd run into plenty of his kind in San Francisco as well, and I suppose there are that kind of snobs in every city in the United States if you go looking for them. Sometimes you don't have to look, they're all around you.
I said to him, "I'm sorry if I disturbed you. I didn't want to see you, though, just Sally."
"Throw this man out, Edwards," Don Foster said to the butler. I got the hint.
I said to Sally, "If you feel like it, call me at the office. Dad's office. I'm going to take over the vineyard and stay in Fresno and find out why I'm not welcome around here any more," and then I went out. But no sooner had the door slammed behind me than I heard a most characteristic sound ... the sound of a slap, followed by a little cry.
Then I heard Don Foster's voice, and it was shrill and angry, and Sally was crying, and I debated within myself whether I should break down the door and slug the bastard, and then I decided against it. I'd probably only cause poor Sally more trouble, and I'd already done enough already. I don't know what it was, but an impulse made me creep around the side of the house to see what I could see. The way he had talked to her and treated her, I had a feeling that she was in for a stiff lecture if nothing less. And she didn't deserve that on my account, no matter what she had thought of me. I came to a huge row of hedges, and there was a kind of half-open balcony window and I could see the outline of a beautifully brocaded bedcover and a very low, wide bed. And then suddenly the door was flung open and Don Foster appeared in the doorway pushing Sally inside. I crouched down behind the hedge, used my hands to pry the branches apart so I could make a sort of peephole for myself. I could also hear perfectly.
"So this is what you do when my back is turned, you little bitch? You're just like your mother, aren't you? The only difference is, you don't do it for money because you've married money."
It was Don Foster starting his lecture, and then I heard Sally sob, "Don, how can you be so hateful? Didn't he tell you himself he'd been away in San Francisco all these years until his father died yesterday. Do you suspect me of having an affair with every man alive?"
"If you want to know something, yes, you bitch. Look at yourself in that slinky dress, and that nice warm skin of yours and those bold breasts," he sneered. "Your mother taught you how to be a successful whore, and that's the only difference. She had to take what she could get and she had to charge the going rate. You held out for me because you knew I was coming into a fortune when my father died and left me the station. You don't love me and you never did."
"You don't give me any reason to, the way you treat me," she flashed back. That cost her another slap, and I saw her stumble to her knees and put her hand to her reddening cheek. I saw Don Foster go to a drawer, take out a little riding crop with an ivory handle, and he was licking his lips, and his eyes were narrow, and there was a light in them I didn't like at all. Then suddenly he raised the crop and slashed it down on her naked back, because the silver-sequined gown was cut very low, almost to the chinkbone at the back. There was an angry red welt on that olive skin, and Sally screamed. And then there was another cut and another, until finally, as she tried to huddle in a ball to protect herself, he thrashed at her buttocks with two vicious slashes. She screamed and rolled over on her side, sobbing as if her heart would break.
He stood there panting, his face flushed, his chest heaving. The ivory-handled riding crop was still in his right hand, and he could have posed perfectly for an illustration in a sadistic novel. He had played that scene as if he enjoyed doing it. I was beginning to think Sally Jeffries had had five years of living hell while I was having myself a good time in San Francisco. What he then said convinced me I was right:
"That's just a sample of what you're going to get one of these nights, dear. I'm going to take you downstairs into the closet room. You know what that is, you've been there before. I'm going to strip you naked and blindfold you, you bitch, and I'm going to leave you there with the clock ticking away, so you'll wonder when I'm coming back. Of course, you'll know that when I do come back, you're going to get a real thrashing. It always makes you sexy when you've felt the whip. Look at yourself now, with those big eyes full of tears and those big breasts of yours panting away. And I'll bet you're getting wet between the legs and you wish that bastard Carl Venturi were here. I don't ever want to hear his name in this house again, do you hear me? I thought we could get rid of people like the Venturis, but I see that bastard son of the old man is back to stay now. Well, my dear, you're going to know what hell on earth is like, for all your bitchiness to me!"
"What makes you think I don't already, Don?" was her choked, sobbing answer.
He drew back his right foot and kicked her behind, and then he strode out and slammed the door behind him.
I left my hiding place behind the hedge and found my way back to the Thunderbird and went home. Even my lonely shadow-haunted house of death was far more cheerful than the house I had just quitted.
Chapter Twelve
So on Monday morning bright and early I got into my Thunderbird and drove out to the vineyard and to the series of buildings on the east side where Dad had spent just about every waking moment of his long and arduous life. There was the office building, the processing plant, the bottling building, and there were also platforms for the stocking of baskets of grapes as they were picked. Harvest time would be sometime around the middle of September, and that was always a festival day for the workers. That was the time that the pretty girls got into the wooden casks filled with green and purple grapes, hoisted their skirts high and started trampling with their bare feet, showing their pussies and their inner thighs and tummies to all the glittering-eyed braceros and paisanos. Yours truly would be in the front row, that was for sure. But at the moment, I wasn't thinking so much of pussy as I was of Tulio Verduga, that surly wop who had given poor little Jane Wilson such a hard time at four in the morning just after I had finished giving Madge Fryburg a harder time but in a different kind of way and certainly more pleasurable for her.
There was a crew of about ten in the main office, girls and fellows who handle orders, correspondence, and the switchboard, just about what you'd find in any packing plant or small business. Just about all of them were Italians, too. Dad believed that blood was thicker than water when it came to making wine, so he gave his own people a first crack at the job. Considering how tough it was for a different ethnic group to find a foothold in Fresno, that was a good gesture. But the only trouble was that apparently during the past few years, what with Dad's illness, he hadn't been able to screen his help thoroughly, and so when old Jacopo had kicked the bucket, he had had to settle for a surly bastard like Tulio.
There was a lanky black-haired girl, with a very long, almost horsey face at the switchboard just as I pushed open the swinging doors and walked into the room and she gave me a cold stare and a snippy "Yes?"
"I'm Carl Venturi," I told her. "My father died Saturday, and I'm taking over."
She didn't recognize me. She was new. Besides, even when I had been back in Fresno years before, I had already told Dad that I really didn't give a damn about wine making or the business, and that's one of the reasons why we'd had our quarrel. The other main reason had been Sally Jeffries. So this lanky brunette who was probably about nineteen, feeling very important for herself, tossed her head and sniffed, "You say you're Carl Venturi, and you say that Mr. Venturi is dead, but we haven't heard anything about that and I don't know who you are."
Once again I saw red. And it wasn't the color of the good vino which came from the Venturi vines.
"What's your name, baby?" I demanded.
"It's none of your business," she tossed her head again. She had long black hair which needed combing and most of all a good shampooing. The other people in the office had started to look up, attracted by the trend of our conversation and they were gawking at me. There were about four girls and five fellows, and to my right I could see a low pair of swinging doors which led to Dad's private office. The office door was closed, there was opaque glass all around and on the door it said "Marcantonio Venturi, Owner." And just below that it said, "Venturi Vineyards and Fine Wines." It was all very well to advertise right in your own shop, but what we wanted was distribution that would go beyond Fresno, taking its rightful place on the shelves with the better known brands like Italian Swiss Colony and Gallo and Beringer.
"Well, Miss," I said, "if you won't tell me your name, then there won't be any paycheck this Friday. I sign the checks from now on. All you have to do is call Charlie Karogian, Dad's lawyer, and you will find out who I am soon enough."
"Perhaps you had better see Mr. Verduga," the snippy little brunette bitch at the switchboard tossed at me and then turned back to her switchboard with another audible sniff.
"That's a good idea. Why don't you send for him right now? Tell him Carl Venturi is here," I told her.
"Just one moment, please," her voice expressed considerable annoyance. "I've other calls to attend to. This is a place of business, you know."
I let her sit while I stared at her. I was memorizing her features and also her figure. She didn't know it, but she was going to get a good sound spanking, too. The spanking that Madge Fryburg got, this little snip ought to have had, but on the bare so she would really feel it. Nobody else in the office made a move to come to the desk towards me, so I just bided my time and smoked my cigarette. Finally the brunette turned to me and said, "Mr. Verduga will be out here in a few minutes. I hope that it's important. He is very busy getting ready for the harvest."
"I would think so," I said sarcastically. Then I pushed open the swinging doors and walked on in towards Dad's office.
"Now just a minute, you can't do that! The very idea!" my little switchboard friend cried out as she got up and left her board and came running to me. She took hold of me by the elbow, and I turned around to get a good look at her. She was about five feet five and a half, rather lanky, with long slim legs, but I noticed that she had saucy upstanding bottomcheeks which her tight brown rayon skirt caressed very lovingly. I didn't feel like caressing them lovingly, I can tell you that. My hand itched. She also had big ripe melon-like titties, which seemed to be about a size 38.
"You better take your hand off me, Miss," I said pleasantly, "or I'll give you a hand where you ought to have had it when you were small."
"You just watch your tongue, Mister," she snapped at me, "because I'm just about ready to call the police. You come in here and give me a story about your being the son of Mr. Venturi and that he is dead, and then you act like a boor!"
"Maybe that's because I was treated like one," I snapped back.
"Mister, whoever you are, you'll have to wait out there until Mr. Verduga or someone else in authority can talk to you," the brunette insisted. She gave my elbow a tug. That did it.
I grabbed hold of her right wrist, and I bent it just a little. She squealed. I put my other hand on the scruff of her neck, got behind her and pushed her forward to a leather-padded chair right outside my Dad's old office. I sat down and flung the little bitch over my lap. She was screaming now for help and asking me what the hell I thought I was doing. But still no one in the office made a move. There was some young punk with sandy-colored hair falling down in a curly mass on one side of his forehead, with pimples and a weak chin, who shouted out, "Don't you dare-Jane, call the police!" And a girl near him, a plump girl with glasses on, who could have been pretty if someone had told her not to use the wrong kind of makeup and to wear such a painfully tight dress and also to stop eating starches, made a scramble for a phone and in her excitement knocked it over and squealed aloud herself. But the others stood there goggle-eyed as I dealt out a good lesson to my snippy little switchboard operator. She was mine now, because I had inherited her along with the rest of the office staff. Plus Tulio Verduga.
She had on a shiny brown skirt that reached down to just about the hollows of her knees, and her legs were bare. She wore black pumps and she had already kicked them off in her frantic efforts to throw herself off my lap. I clamped my right leg over her ankles, I pulled up her dress and a pink slip underneath it, and the brunette uttered a scream that could probably been heard all over Tulare County. She wasn't wearing any panties at all. I must confess that I was somewhat dumbfounded to discover how she came to work. Even granted that the weather was hot, I didn't think that girls wore so little in offices any more. Unless, of course, the boss was screwing them and that made things more convenient and faster.
She had pale pink skin like a baby's. And she had an interesting broadly oval pair of buttocks which tightened as she felt the air on them. And then she felt something else. My right hand rose and fell violently, in five swift and consecutive arcs without a pause. She got three spanks on the top of the right buttock and two at the base of the left, and I was just warming up when all of a sudden Tulio Verduga walked in and cried out, "Madre mia, que pasa?" He spoke Spanish as well as Italian. Maybe that was one of the reasons Dad distrusted him. I looked up from what I was doing, and I had pinned the brunette's wrists behind her back and my right palm was lying just across the very tight and narrow groove between her buttocks and I answered: "What's happening is that I am not accustomed to being treated like a criminal in my own business," I said coldly. "What is this girl's name?"
"Why, padrone, it's Maxine Lavolta. She's been at our switchboard for two years."
"And this is her last day," I said. "I'm going to pay her off and I'll give her a week's pay in lieu of notice. And there is no charge for the rest of what I am going to give her."
With that, and while the rest of the office crew was gaping at my recognition by the foreman I raised my hand and proceeded to give Maxine Lavolta the best spanking she had ever had in all of her tender nineteen years. She wriggled and squealed and tried to fling herself off my lap, but after about twenty hard stingers, she was crying like a baby and begging for mercy. Those resilient satiny ovals of hers were flaming by the time I let her up, pulled down her skirt and slip for her, and told her, "You can either wait here for your check or I will mail it to you, Miss Lavolta, and the next job you get I suggest you put panties on." Then I gave Tulio a sharp look and then I said, "Come into the office, I want to talk to you."
Chapter Thirteen
Even though I had the door closed, I could hear the hubub outside in the outer office where Maxine Lavolta was loudly lamenting what had just happened to her at the start of what had otherwise promised to be a dull Monday on the job. It was also her last. I opened the humidor and took out one of Dad's strong black cigars and tossed one at Tulio, then lit one myself, leaned back in Dad's swivel chair and said, "All right now, Tulio, let's make it fast. I know just the essential facts about the wine business, but if I'm going to do anything at all for Dad, it's going to be to sell the bottles of his vino with the Venturi name on them. I've got to depend on you, the foreman, to get me a good yield and to make sure that I can get a fair price when I try to sell that vino."
"Of course, padrone." He gave me a sickly grin which showed that his teeth were actually as bad as I had first thought them to be out there by the shade tree when I had stopped him from taking the skin off poor Jane Wilson's naked back. "This year, I do not think it is as good as it could be."
"Now let's hear your reasons why, Tulio."
He shrugged. "Who knows, Signor padrone? Much of it is God. We haven't had as much rain as we should have had by now. And then we'd plant only half the acres with the good grapes. Do you not know this?"
"Charlie Karogian told me as much on Saturday when I got to town," I answered him. "And apparently there's quite a mortgage on the land. How did that happen?"
"Well, Signor padrone, when old Jacopo died, things were in very bad shape. Your father-with all respect to you, Signor padrone-had not been well for some years. But he wouldn't take time off from his business, not he. He bought more bottling equipment, labels, he spent much money. And the money from the vino, it didn't come in. So he went to the bank and he put a mortgage on the land, that is all."
"Well, that's possible. I'm going to have to spend some time with Charlie and read up on what's been happening. You've been here two years, then. I still don't understand what got you out of bed at four in the morning to track down that cute little girl. I didn't find any jackknife or plastic bag, and didn't see any vines cut either."
"I couldn't sleep, Signor padrone, so I went for a walk, and I heard a noise and there was this girl. The light wasn't too good, and it seemed to me that she was cutting something."
"Her story is quite different, Tulio," I broke in. "She claims you offered to help her friend who has a few acres of grapes by giving her some advice and maybe showing her a cutting or two. I haven't any objection to that, so long as we don't give away Dad's prize cuttings. Now where are they?"
"There is a little greenhouse downstairs, Signor padrone, in the basement of this building. He has kept them in a safe, and they are in moist earth and they are watered frequently so that they will not die."
As I said before, I had just about ignored the elemental processes of growing grapes and turning them into wine. Oh, sure, I knew the theory all right, but I'd never actually worked in the vineyard with any great interest, except maybe during the summer vacation or two just to keep in condition. But things were different now. I was the Owner carrying on Dad's name. And I had better learn as much as I could as fast as I could or the Venturi name wouldn't stand for vino, it would stand for mud. From Don Foster's treatment of me, I could see that there were probably plenty of bigwigs in Fresno who would be happy if I followed in my father's footsteps six feet under. And I wasn't going to give them the chance to be pallbearers at my funeral just yet.
So I took a puff at my cigar and I stared hard at Tulio and I said, "Let's go down and see the safe, I suppose you have the combination."
"Si, Signor padrone. And of course your father too, naturally."
"And that's all?"
"That is true. And of course, before I came, old Jacopo."
I knew what Luther Burbank had done about grafting fruits and vegetables to produce finer crops and healthier stocks of plants. The vintners from the old country usually bring along cuttings from their finest vines and graft them on the new vines in good soil in California. And if everything goes well for them, and there's enough sun and rain at the right times, and a little luck, then they can sometimes bring out a great wine which does an honor to them and their vineyard. I guess Dad's dream was to have his wine cited in some of the famous restaurant industry magazines, or to be mentioned in magazines like Holiday. Well, it was up to me to carry out his plans and realize his dreams for him. And nobody whether it be Tulio or that sadistic socialite Don Foster, was going to stand in my way once I got going.
We left the office and walked out into the hall all the way down to the end and down the stairs to this safe. I noticed that Maxine Lavolta had already left, and the other people in the office were staring at me with a new respect. And apparently nobody had called the cops yet. Somehow the word must have got around even to Maxine that I was the new big boss and that there was no court of appeals. Besides, maybe she had even liked what she had got. But that didn't concern me now.
Tulio went into a little room which had a door he had to unlock, and there was the safe, and he twirled the dial and opened it. There was a special soft diffused light in the ceiling, not the glaring kind you often find in factories or plants. I could see that there was a long metal tray filled with earth, and green shoots and vines. Tulio pulled out the tray, and then he scowled. "This is not good, Signor padrone!" he exclaimed.
"What's the matter?"
"Some one has taken two of the best cuttings of the Pinot Chardonnay. It was only Friday afternoon that I counted them last, and there were a dozen. Now there are only ten."
It didn't make sense. If only he and Dad had the combination of this safe, how could anybody steal two cuttings? I looked at him skeptically. "Well, somebody must have opened this safe if it wasn't you. And I'm sure it wasn't Dad. He was much too sick to have got out of bed and come down here, from what Doc Franklin tells me. Perhaps you didn't count them right, Tulio."
He swore down on a stack of Bibles that he had made an accurate check. He even went over to a little desk near the safe, opened it and took out a little ledger book and showed me my own father's handwriting. Some of these cuttings had already been used, and grafts had already been made and then cuttings had been taken from the developments of those grafts. And they had been tested, and now according to this ledger, there were a dozen and they were supposed to be the best cuttings that one could get if one wanted to produce a really superb Pinot.
I put the ledger back in the desk, and then I went back upstairs to Dad's office. Tulio followed me, silent and a little worried. I guess he knew what I was thinking. I was thinking that he might have decided to help himself to a couple of cuttings and one day start his own little vineyard. Things like that had been done before. But what I was more concerned about was lifting the mortgage off the Venturi land. First of all, I had to find out where the mortgage was, and how friendly the banker holding it happened to be. There is a cute trick known as foreclosing, and you don't have to play the music to "East Lynne" to know what's going to happen if you're getting ready for a harvest and all of a sudden somebody like a sheriff walks onto your property and shows you a document telling you that the holder of the mortgage has decided he wants it now and you haven't got it and so goodbye.
I asked Tulio if Dad had had a secretary. He nodded, and gestured toward the plump though pretty girl with glasses and the much too tight dress. "That's Dora Corlani. She takes dictation and she types pretty good. Lots of times, your father-may the saints keep him beside them always!-liked to do his own letters, you understand, Signor padrone."
"Well, I'll give her a trial. I've got a few friends in San Francisco I might send some letters to. Have Dora come in. And you get back to the vineyard, and I want a full report by the end of the week as to when you think we're going to hit harvest time and what you think our yield is going to be. Maybe this afternoon I'll find out about that mortgage and go talk to the guy holding it."
"I can tell you who has it, Signor padrone," Tulio Verduga said. He was a good deal more respectful than he had been out in the vineyard at four in the morning. And he looked a little worried, too. That was fine. I didn't like him, but I didn't have any real reason to fire him just yet. But I was going to watch him like a hawk from now on in.
"Who does, then?"
"It is the Overland Trust and Savings, Signor padrone. There is a Signor Philip Young who is a vice-president there who did business with your father, Signor padrone."
"Thanks. I'll look him up this afternoon too. Now get Dora in here. I'd better arrange to make out a check for Maxine. Who has the records on the payroll?"
"Dora does, Signor padrone." Tulio Verduga walked out of Dad's office and beckoned to the scared plump girl with the glasses and the tight black dress, which was absolutely the wrong color for her rather tawny skin and doll-like fluffy chestnut hair. She pointed to herself in pantomime, and my foreman nodded and beckoned to her again and then gestured towards me standing in the door. I guess poor Dora felt as if she were being summoned to the scaffold, after seeing what Maxine Lavolta had just got on the bare. She came forward, steno pad in hand, blinking her eyes very rapidly behind black tortoise shell glasses, and when she got up close I could see that she was blushing. She had big brown eyes, a straight little nose, and a very soft and tremulous mouth. She had also a pair of juicy melon-like titties spaced very closely together, and a really stunning bottom which the tight dress called attention to all the more disconcertingly. She had good full thighs and rather plump calves, but she had just the hint of a double chin, just like that sonofabitch, Don Poster. I think that maybe a week or two working out in the vineyard or maybe passing up Mrs. See's wonderful but fattening candies for about a month might have slimmed Dora down to a very voluptuous shape. But as it was, she was still interesting enough to give me a twinge in my balls.
I gestured her into the office, closed the door and nodded to Tulio as I did, and then I went back behind my desk, sat down, with a fresh cigar out of Dad's humidor and started to dictate.
Dora Corlani didn't really look too Italian, but she certainly looked sexy. She crossed her legs, and she had on beige-colored nylons, and the skirt went up to about midthigh and I could just catch a glimpse of the tab of the garterbelt or the pantie girdle which was holding her hose up. She caught me looking once or twice, and she turned scarlet and stared very nervously at her book and made some flourishes with her pencil.
"Don't be afraid, Dora, I won't spank you the way I did Maxine, unless you deserve it," I joked.
"Oh! My goodness, I-I never saw anything like that before in all my life, Mr. V-Venturi," she stammered. "But she had it coming if you want to know something. She's the worst gossip in the office, and she's lazy too, and she snitches on everybody-that is she did, to your-to your father."
"It looks as if you're doing a little snitching to the new boss yourself, Dora baby."
"Oh no, sir, I mean-I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression." In her nervousness Dora Corlani uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again the other way with the left leg uppermost. Her skirt slid even higher, and now I could see not only the tab of the supporter but also a tiny glimpse of very soft tawny skin. It reminded me of Madge Fryburg, and that in turn reminded my prick to stiffen with longing. Fortunately the desk hid my erection from my blushing new amanuensis.
"Well, then correct my wrong impression if that's what I'm getting, Dora," I twitted her.
"Mr. Venturi, I don't like to say it, but I've been working here about five years and I loved your father. He was such a wonderful man, so honest and full of life and he wanted his wine to be liked by people everywhere."
"Thanks, Dora. That's exactly what I'm going to try to do while I'm here so as to carry on his dream." I found myself telling her.
"But nobody likes that foreman Mr. Verduga. He's always sneaking around the girls in the office here and trying to get them to come out to his little house. I know what he wants. Only Maxine went there. I know she did. She's such a sneak."
This was an interesting bit of gossip which might have some bearing on the missing cuttings. I thought it over while I puffed at my cigar and considered Dora's shapely thighs and calves. Then I started to dictate, and before I knew it it was time for lunch.
"You've done a good job, Dora," I told her when she read back my letters to me without a single mistake. "They tell me you are in charge of payroll. If that's the case, you'd better make out Maxine's last check, plus a week instead of notice. And while you're at it, put down ten dollars a week more for yourself. But you're going to earn it, I can promise you that."
"Oh, Mr. Venturi-I mean-that's wonderful-oh, Mr. Venturi-I could kiss you!" To my astonishment, bespectacled plump chestnut-haired Dora Corlani sprang up from her chair, walked around the desk, flung her arms around me and gave me an exceptionally eager kiss right on the mouth. Her big bombers mashed against my chest as she did so, and I felt my fingers flex. It was the old animal instinct working on me again, and I very nearly grabbed hold of that juicy bottom of hers. It would have been much more interesting to spank than Maxine's. Maybe I would get the chance.
Ever since my interest in the female bottom, which began during my adolescence, I'll have to admit that I've occasionally read on the sly, quite a few magazines and books dealing with corporal punishment. For example, I have every issue of CORPORAL, and I reminded myself to have my belongings shipped from San Francisco as soon as I could arrange it. I wanted to read those publications over again. I thought I recalled a letter whereby a boss put his new secretary on a kind of spanking probation. At the end of each week, he would review her mistakes out of his own memo pad, and if she had got herself enough demerits, she would have to take the consequences. With a bottom like Dora's, it would be a very interesting little game. And what was more, judging from that kiss, I had a feeling that this cute little bespectacled secretary of mine might even enjoy playing it.
Chapter Fourteen
I drove downtown, had a bite to eat at one of the restaurants in the Mall, and then made a beeline for Charlie Karogian's office. I had to wait a few minutes, and when his door opened, out came that gorgeous widow, Mrs. Maynard, the one with the honey-colored hair, the sweet helpless-looking face and a gorgeous bottom. She wore charcoal-brown nylons and a skirt that didn't hit the hollows of her dimpled knees. She looked very fetching and not a day over nineteen, though I suspect that she was on her way to thirty. She was quite well preserved, and her pale white skin was extremely delectable. She gave me a dimpled smile, a long sultry look, and then went out and Charlie cleared his throat and beckoned to me from his old beaten-down swivel chair. There were piles of papers on his desk, and it looked like W.C. Field's set.
He picked up the phone and told his girl not to take any calls, and then we had a chat for about an hour. He showed me the books, and he showed me the transaction of the mortgage. It was fifty grand, and it had been taken out about two years ago, just about the time Jacopo, Dad's reliable old foreman, had gone to his last reward. As to why half the acreage had been converted to other crops besides grapes, Charlie's explanation was that it was probably part of the mortgage deal, because my father had been worried about declining harvests and hadn't been getting top prices for his vino as in the past.
Then I drove over to the Overland Trust and Savings, which was about two miles away and on one of the new roads they had put into the southern end of Fresno since I had left for my loner work out in Frisco. It was a one-story white building with lots of glass, a big parking lot, and across the street from a drive-in Supermart. I walked into the bank and I asked for Philip Young. There was a cute girl at the reception desk, wearing pigtails, with big blue eyes and a gorgeous smile. She looked a little too young for me, and very ingenuous. Knowing what banks paid their help, all I could wish her was meeting some nice young millionaire as soon as possible and getting out of the banking business fast before she lost that smile.
A few minutes later, a tall, very elegant-looking silver-haired blonde wearing a powder-blue rayon dress whose skirt just covered her knees-which was a pity because she had simply breathtaking legs-came towards me and forced a smile to her thin supercilious mouth. "Mr. Venturi? Would you come with me, please? I'm Mr. Young's secretary."
"He's lucky," I quipped, but I didn't get a tumble. With straight shoulders, head held high, the silver-haired blonde escorted me towards the back of the office and down a little hallway where there were private offices with shiny walnut doors and opaque glass and the names printed, in goldleaf. She knocked at Philip Young's door, he called for us to come in, and the blonde opened the door and let me go ahead.
"That'll be all, Brenda," he said pleasantly. Philip Young was a man of about fifty, almost completely bald like Yul Brynner, with a Roman nose, a gray moustache adorning his upper lip, and his mouth was fleshy and sensual. He had gray-blue eyes, small ears, and I noticed that his hands were exquisitely manicured and groomed. They were almost like a womans, with long slim fingers and soft cuticle. He had a kind of caressing tenor voice, which made him seem more youthful than he was. He rose from behind his desk and extended one of those artistic hands towards me. I shook it, and I wished I hadn't. It was limp and moist. He didn't look like a faggot, but then you could never tell these days. Nowadays you can't even tell whether a hippie is male and female unless you go up and feel, and I've never been drawn to the unwashed. "Mr. Venturi? A great pleasure to meet you at last, sir," he said in a very dignified manner, then gestured me to a seat.
"I came to find out about the mortgage on Dad's property, Mr. Young," I told him.
He pressed the buzzer at the side of his desk and the silver-blonde he had called Brenda came right back in. She had delicate eyebrows, which looked painted on. She had an aquiline nose with very thin and flaring wings, a firm chin which showed a lot of character, and gray-green eyes which were extremely compelling and, at the moment, icy when they turned in my direction. He told her that he wanted the file on Marcantonio Venturi and the Venturi Vineyards, and she went out and came back in a few minutes with two folders. Then she closed the door behind us and left us to ourselves.
"About two years ago, Mr. Venturi, your father came to us to borrow fifty thousand dollars and put up his land as collateral. One of our advisors who isn't with us anymore, but a very reliable man-he left for the East to accept a much better opportunity, you understand-as I was saying, he advised your father to divert some of his acreage into more immediately profitable crops. The wine business does seem to be hazardous at times, whereas lettuce and fruits always find an immediate market. So your father agreed, and converted as was suggested."
"I see, Mr. Young. Was my dad able to pay anything against the mortgage?"
Philip Young scowled as he took out one of the sheets from the folder at his right. "Only about five thousand dollars so far, Mr. Venturi. It's a five-year mortgage, I might tell you, but it is payable upon demand. However," this with an ingratiating smile as he looked up at me, "it isn't the practice of Overland Trust and Savings to force its creditors to the wall. We realize that in the Valley here, the growers must have a certain leeway if they're going to make profits and pay back their debts. However, we would like to see some more money paid before your next harvest if that's possible, Mr. Venturi."
"I'll see what I can do. Some of those other crops ought to be getting to market pretty soon, Mr. Young, and I'll have to check with Dad's lawyer about the estate. I'm the only living heir, so there ought to be some money somewhere."
"As to that, I can possibly enlighten you, Mr. Venturi," the baldheaded banker gave me a sympathetic smile. "This of course is confidential, you understand, but in view of your father's death, I see no reason why I can't tell you. Your father had spent a great deal of money in improvements, machinery, scientific research. He had a man flown in from Italy last year at quite an expensive cost to himself, I might say, to examine some of the cuttings, and to make tests of the soil and of the yield. I should say there's possibly ten thousand dollars in cash in your father's account, and of course whatever may be in the vault which will have to be sealed for ninety days in accordance with the state law."
"I wasn't looking to inherit any great fortune when I came back to Fresno, Mr. Young," I said rather coldly, because I didn't like his manner. "And if that ten thousand bucks goes over to me, I'll put it on the mortgage, you can be sure of that. I don't want Dad's name to have any black marks attached to it I have the feeling that already in Fresno a lot of people are sort of glad he's no longer around and probably wish me the same."
"How can you say a thing like that, Mr. Venturi!" he seemed shocked at my outburst. Just then there was a knock on the door, and Brenda walked in. He decided to introduce us, and I found out that her last name was Corey. He'd mentioned to me that she had been his secretary for three years, and my estimate of her was that she was about twenty-six. She might have looked younger if she had learned how to smile. Her skin was delightfully pink and white, a real carnation. But the silver-blonde tint of her hair was definitely artificial. Then he had a long-distance call which he had to take in the president's office and Brenda Corey and I were left together. She turned to me and her eyes were softer as she murmured, "I understand I have reason to thank you for what you did for my cousin Jane Wilson the other night."
"Oh yes! I didn't know she was your cousin," I said.
"Yes, she is. She's a very sweet and shy girl, and I was horribly distressed when I heard what that beast of a foreman of yours had tried to do to her. She was just trying to help me, you know."
"You mean to say that you own a couple of acres of grape-producing vines?" I chuckled.
She got icy again and very huffy. She seemed to draw herself up to more than the height nature had given her as she retorted, "What's so strange about that, Mr. Venturi? My mother left me some money, I had Mr. Young here at the bank invest a little bit in land, so I own about ten or fifteen acres. I happen to love this country, and not only because I was born in it. And why shouldn't I use the land to try to produce a little wine?"
"For several reasons. You don't have any real capital, you haven't got any bottling equipment, no crew and no foreman."
"I know that. That's why when Jane talked to your foreman, she thought that perhaps he would be kind enough to give us some help. It's not unusual, is it, if a big vintner like your father were to process some of the grapes from his neighbor's acres for which the neighbor would pay him a fee?"
"No, I suppose not, if you put it that way, Miss Corey. I tell you what, why don't you have dinner with me this evening and let me see what I can do about helping you? I like to see any young ambitious working girl get ahead." I said rather facetiously. I really didn't think she'd accept my invitation, but she stared at me, and for the first time she smiled, and she really looked pretty when she did.
"All right," she said, "I'll do just that. Do you want me to meet you? I have my own car."
I told her we'd meet at the Hacienda Motel about seven o'clock, and that I was most appreciative. She gave me an enigmatic smile, and left the office just about the time Philip Young came back.
He offered profuse excuses, and then said that he and the other officers of the bank would be only too glad to extend any courtesies to me. I assured him that within a few weeks he'd know more about the mortgage, and then I drove back home.
It had been quite a day. But the mystery was deepening. Maybe it wasn't unusual for a banker's secretary to own some land, but it still didn't explain why Jane Wilson had been out there in my own vineyard at four in the morning getting herself marked up with a switch.
Chapter Fifteen
I took a brief nap, then a shower, and by then it was time enough to get over to the Hacienda Motel for my date with Brenda Corey. I was looking forward to it. If she was Philip Young's secretary, she might be able to tell me a little more on the human-interest side concerning Dad's mortgage with the bank for which she worked. I didn't much like the five-year-mortgage deal, and still less bald-headed Philip Young's hint that it contained this trickey little clause about payable on demand at any time. That meant that Fresno's answer to Yul Brynner could move in on my vineyards tomorrow morning, and if I didn't have the cash, out I went.
I sat in the lobby and waited. And then there floated through the swinging door an aching prick's dream. It was Brenda, wearing a blue faille gown which seemed so airy and transparent that I was positive I could see peach-colored panties snugging the oval cheeks of her highset backside. She had delicious long legs, nervously muscled all the way from ankle to upper thigh. And the gown did wonders for calling my attention to her titties, which were like hard, uptilting pears spaced rather narrowly together. She had styled her silver-blonde hair in a tantalizing guiche bob, with a very narrow and high-placed fringe along the top of that high-arching forehead of hers, and two huge pointed curls riding out along her cheeks about midway. It gave her a very sophisticated and chic look, and it was a fairly expensive hairdo. I know about such things because my cute little nurse back at the La Honda Home in Frisco was forever spending her wages on appointments at the beauty parlor, having her hair streaked, and I was dead set against it.
There were silver-lame pumps and charcoal-brown nylons of the very finest gauge, to complete Brenda Corey's ensemble. Also, she wore white gloves just past the elbow, and they were made of lace and net, and they did wonders for her slim, beautifully chiseled arms. Her fine carnation-skin was appreciably enhanced. An outfit like this cost a nice bit of change, and I wondered who Brenda Corey's angel was. On the other hand, she'd remarked she'd been left some money by her mother, and it was possible her getup was honestly come by.
She let me order, and we had blue points, a tossed salad with bleu cheese dressing, the best steaks in the house, and cottage-fried potatoes to go with, ice cream parfaits and cookies, and strong coffee. Again I asked the waitress for a bottle of Venturi wine, and again I got a blank stare, so I settled for another bottle of Beringer Burgundy. With our coffee, however, Brenda had a creme de cacao and I had a pony of twenty-year-old brandy.
Her voice was rich and contralto in range. Her diction was really elegant. As we kept chatting and fencing with each other, I kept wondering what in hell a smart bitch like this was doing in a town like Fresno, and especially working in a bank. She could be secretary to the president himself, and I was willing to bet she still didn't make more than four hundred bucks a month. I didn't know what kind of car she drove, but obviously since she had said she owned one, it must have cost some change somewhere. And no matter where she lived, she'd have to pay a fair to middling rent, unless somebody else paid it for her.
She lit a cigarette, and I asked if I might smoke a cigar, and lit it with her permission. Then very carefully I began to ask her about Dad's business and what she knew about it. It turned out that all she knew was that Dad had come into the bank a couple of years ago and sat down with a Mr. Restori, the fellow who had since gone East, and then her boss had taken over the deal. What surprised me was that there wasn't much more than ten grand left in Dad's bank account, and that didn't make any sense at all. I knew that he wasn't in the same class as Gallo or Beringer yet, but I certainly thought that after all these years he'd have accumulated a little more than that.
Then the conversation got back to the act of heroism which I had pulled off by stopping Tulio Verduga in his lustful attempt to rape her cousin Jane Wilson. I kept protesting that any red-blooded American boy would have done the same thing, but Brenda Corey was looking across the table at me, leaning on her elbows and staring with a rapt little smile. Her icey manner was a thing of the past, and the aura of her very subtle and very expensive perfume, together with the good meal we had consumed, had begun to make my prick throb and ache with longing.
"Well, Miss Corey," I concluded after I had finished my cigar, "you've been very helpful and it's been a very enjoyable evening. Where do you live?"
She looked at me and laughed softly. "You mean you're going to take me back home and not even make a pass at me? That's not in character, you know, Mr. Venturi."
This baby was a little too smart on the uptake. A girl like that could deflate a man's sails and reduce his ego to a great big fat nothing. Maybe that was one reason I didn't see a wedding ring or even an engagement ring on her proper finger. I said to her, "I didn't say that, you did, Miss Corey. But after all, I've only just met you, and for all I know you may be a wife and mother."
I saw a shadow cross her face, and her lips made just a tiny kind of grimace to indicate that the prospect was certainly repugnant to her. Then she shook her head: "I'm sorry to disillusion you, Mr. Venturi, but I'm still unmarried, and I'm also what might be called that rarity among contemporary females, a virgin at twenty-six." So my guess about her age had hit the nail right on the head.
"Don't be ashamed of that. Some of the nicest guys I know have married virgins," I said lightly. But she didn't even crack a smile. She was back to her old vigilant and wary ice-maiden attitude, as if she had gone too far with me already.
"Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Venturi. I just haven't had time for romance, as you might say. I had to work as a waitress in San Diego after Mother's death, and I just barely finished my schooling before she got sick. Mr. Young was very nice to offer me this job and bring me back home. I was born in Fresno, and went to high school here, and then I went to college in Santa Barbara for a while and finished up at San Diego, where my mother lived until she died. Jane Wilson happens to be the only daughter of Mother's sister, who also lived in San Diego-that's of course why Mother went there when she got tired of Fresno."
"Does Jane have a job somewhere?" I wanted to know.
"Not really, Mr. Venturi. Jane hopes to go to the University of California at Berkeley this fall and get her degree in English Literature. She might even go into teaching. She's a very unhappy and restless girl, and her mother died, too, you see, so she didn't want to stay in San Diego when I moved back here."
I nodded. I was mulling over all the facts I had assimilated today. And from the way Brenda Corey's face was tight and hard, I didn't think she wanted to continue the subject about her cousin.
After a while, I paid my check and walked out to my Thunderbird. Brenda Corey got into a new Plymouth parked just behind mine, so I turned to her and gaily proposed, "Want to have a nightcap before you go back to your place?"
"All right, but we'll have it at my place, Mr. Venturi."
I let her take the lead down the highway, and followed at a respectable distance. At night on the main highway of Route 99, the highway patrol boys are out to make more than their quota of tickets. If one of your lights is on the blink, if you seem to be weaving or following too closely, if you use your horn too much, or do a dozen other unmentionable things, you can expect to have a flashing blue light pull up near you and a siren telling everybody you've been a bad boy, and then a booted trooper gets out and pleasantly walks over to the side of your car and asks, very politely, if he may take a look at your driver's license. The Highway Patrol boys are incorruptible, and the worst mistake in the world you can make is to try to bribe em. I once found that out just after I'd got my first car and just after I'd left for Frisco. Dad had to come down to the pokey and bail me out, and then make me listen to a stiff lecture by a tough old sergeant who wouldn't have given a damn even if my father had happened to be mayor of Fresno.
It turned out that Brenda Corey lived about a mile to the east of the bank where she worked. It was in a two-story house, and she lived on the first floor. She told me she was renting it. That was possible. North American Aviation had laid off about three thousand employees in Fresno just before I had gone back to be with Dad on his deathbed. So people who had bought homes and moved here from the East or the Midwest had had to sacrifice everything, and you could rent a beautifully furnished house for a song. Making that song in Fresno, to be able to pay the rent, was another thing, and we won't go into that.
She let me in, turned on the lights, and I had to admire her taste. She had evidently put quite a bit of money into the furnishings, because she told me she had rented the house about three years ago, so it hadn't had anything to do with the layoff at the aviation plant, after all. She had brought hardly anything from San Diego except some silverware and household linens. There was a wonderfully thick wall-to-wall carpeting in the living-room, a magnificent low, wide, and very comfortable couch, several armchairs, a brand-new fireplace set decorating the stone fireplace, and other little touches which indicated that Brenda Corey was a pretty good interior decorator on her own.
She went over to a decanter on a sideboard in the corner of this big room, poured out of the decanter into two glasses, and came back to offer me one. I sipped at it and found it was excellent port. I couldn't quite identify it, however, except to be sure it was domestic and of exceptionally fine quality. She smiled at me as she sat down beside me: "Don't you recognize it, Mr. Venturi? You ought to. Your father made it about five years ago."
I flushed with embarrassment and sipped at the wine, and I understood that Dad had wrought better than he knew. If the old reprobate had been alive and with me in the room, he probably would have thanked Brenda Corey for her appreciation in a very bawdy way. I wasn't to be outdone, and in his spirit and in his memory, I put my left arm around her waist and brushed her cheek with my lips.
She didn't move, and she didn't shift her gaze to look at me, and she didn't say anything. The subtle perfume she was wearing was beginning to make my cock and balls twitch with a desire for action. I wondered how Madge Fryburg was making out, and whether she had decided to stay in her bungalow and postpone her vacation as Dr. Franklin had wanted.
I didn't tighten my arm around her waist, but I kept kissing her lightly all over the cheek and chin and jawbone and ear, and she smiled softly and let me go ahead. Suddenly she turned and let me have her lips. Thin though they were, and ascetic, nevertheless she had plenty of temperament. Her kiss burned me to my very marrow. My right hand groped for and found one of those pear-shaped titties through the blue faille.
"No, please don't, Carl," she said softly. She looked down at my hand and then looked back at me reproachfully. I got the point and took my hand away. Still, in the brief minute I had been allowed to salute her bubbie, my fingers had told me that it was wonderfully resilient and springy.
There was a soft flush to her carnation cheeks. "You have to be slow with me, Mr. Venturi-I mean, Carl," she murmured. "I've been so busy trying to make a living and absorbing myself with trying to learn about the wine industry so I could turn my few acres into something worthwhile, I haven't had much interest in or time for dating."
"No need to apologize. When the time comes for you to cat around, Brenda, you'll have plenty of males to choose from. Maybe there's somebody even at the bank."
"Don't be vulgar." She was key again. "There's nobody at the bank. They hire mostly young people, and the executives are all old and married or on the make, and I'm not at all interested. They're all stuffy. But it's a good place for a girl who's ambitious to get ahead and learn about financial matters."
"Oh, I don't know," I said flippantly, "if you should happen to meet a millionaire there, he could put up the cash for a bottling plant and all the processing you'd need to turn your acres into another Italian Swiss Colony plant. And you could do a lot worse. By the by, that's a very pretty dress you're wearing."
She nodded slightly, to acknowledge this tribute. Then she looked at me and said, "Do you think you could give Jane Wilson a job in your office, Mr. Venturi-I mean, Carl?"
"I don't see why not. I just fired a switchboard operator this morning," I said.
"It would be wonderful if my cousin could be in a real winery, and maybe you or your foreman could show her how wine is made and what's needed in the way of machinery and things like that I've just grown a few grapes so far, and Mr. Verduga said he would get one of his men to harvest them when the time came. I'm going to pay him, of course."
"No need to," I said generously. "I'll just give him an order to do the job on my own payroll. I've probably got labor enough. If need be, I can always put you to work trampling down the grapes in the vats. That's an old Venturi custom, you know. We do it every harvest-time."
She looked at me wide-eyed, and then she giggled a little. It was a sound I hadn't expected to hear, and it made her a lot more feminine. I tightened my grip on her waist, and this time I kissed her right on the mouth. For a moment her eyes flashed fire, and she pushed my face away. Instantly she was contrite.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Carl! I-well, I guess I wasn't used to anything like that. You'll have to put up with me. I told you you'd have to be slow and easy and gentle. I-I had a bad experience some time ago, and I haven't quite gotten over it."
"Sure, I understand."
"You really mean what you say about Jane?"
"Of course. You tell her to come to my office at nine, and I'll put her right on the switchboard. It's easy to learn, in case she doesn't know anything about it, and I'm sure the pay will be as good as I can manage it."
"You're very sweet, Carl," she said huskily. And then she did a simply amazing thing. She turned to me, and she put her right hand between my legs and reached for my zipper and drew it down and pulled out my cock. Then she stuck her other hand in the bodice of her blue faille dress, and came out with a scented lace-trimmed handkerchief. Then she began to frig me with the handkerchief. It was a trick that lots of high-school girls know about before they reach their senior year. It happens lots of times when a wolf goes out with a cute little chick who isn't quite sure enough of herself to let him go all the way, and yet doesn't want to walk home twenty miles by herself, or else get cuffed around if he gets importunate. So she just eases him of his load, and uses her handkerchief and her slim fingers so that she doesn't have to feel distasteful about touching his ugly old thing, and meanwhile he's having his kicks and thinking her the greatest that ever came down the pike. Brenda Corey was trying that trick on me; why, I didn't know, but just the same I liked it. She was looking down at what she was doing, too, absorbed in it, not even looking at me. Her lips were parted and slightly moist and her eyes were wide and humid. That dainty nose of hers was twitching, too. And those magnificent pear-titties were vibrating very nervously.
I set my teeth and closed my eyes and let her do whatever she wanted. I felt my seed gush out of me into the handkerchief, and then I heard a little gasp, and then she was mopping me up and stuffing my cock back into my fly and pulling up the zipper of my pants.
Then she murmured, "There! That's just to show you how grateful I am. I can't do any more than that, and don't ask me to now."
"My God, Brenda," I ejaculated, "I wasn't even thinking you'd go that far. It was wonderful. But you didn't owe me that."
"No, but Jane did. And I've always paid her debts. We went to school together, and we're very close. She's a sweet darling."
I wasn't exactly sure about this going to school together, because Brenda figured to be about six years older than the cutie whose back had been marked up by Tulio Verduga's switch. But I let that pass. I was a little befuddled by now, because I really hadn't expected to make too much of a pass at Brenda Corey, and here I had already had my ashes hauled, and I still didn't know what she looked like naked.
She got up then and poured me another drink, and I had a cigarette, and I thanked her for a very lovely evening and went on back home. I tried to call Madge Fryburg, but her phone didn't answer. Maybe she was out on a case. I had certainly been out on one. And I was more mystified than ever. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, and none of the pieces seemed to fit. And I didn't know how much longer I would have for the game before I could put everything together, and whether if I did, I could forestall the foreclosure. There had been something in Philip Young's manner to lead me to believe he was just the sort of double-dealing bastard that would smile at you while he faced you and try to sneak a dagger in your back at the same time when you least expected it. And don't ask me why, either, but I had the strangest feeling that Brenda Corey had decided to date me because of Philip Young.
Maybe it was just that I was too suspicious of everybody after my reception in Fresno by a guy like Don Foster. Maybe it was because I was lonely and a little homesick for San Francisco and the wonderful restaurants and theaters and museums, and the magnificent view from Twin Peaks, or driving over the Golden Gate Bridge late at night into Sausalito for a late snack at Ondine.
I couldn't get to sleep right away, and I lay on my bed and looked at the walls and the ceiling. Then I had a whimsical idea that appealed to me. When I got my belongings shipped back from Frisco, I meant to go through the issues of CORPORAL and also the Kama Sutra and make my own kind of wallpaper. I was going to put up illustrations from my spicy books, all over the walls of my bedroom. Then I would bring a cute filly up to my bedroom, after the proper preliminaries such as wining and dining and dancing, blindfold her and tell her we were going to play "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." Then I would spin her around, shove her in a direction, and tell her "Go, girl!" Then she would stab with her right forefinger here or there as the inspiration seized her. And when I would whisk off the blindfold, she would have to assume whatever position was indicated by the illustration her dainty finger had indicated. I could foresee countless thrilling possibilities. It was quite possible I could induce Madge Fryburg to get herself her second spanking in short order in the Venturi house, and this would be one which she herself would select. It was a capital idea, and I was so amused by it, I fell asleep.
Chapter Sixteen
Jane Wilson reported to my office first thing the next morning. This time she wore a dress, a very tight-fitting red cotton affair which showed off her slim legs to greatest advantage. There was something very troubling about her, because her sandy hair was still closely cropped and she didn't wear any makeup at all. I summoned her to my private office and we had an interview, or what passed for one. I agreed to give her seventy-five dollars a week for nine-to-five switchboard duties and occasional filing and correspondence whenever needed, and she was quite happy.
She told me that she felt very much better and that Madge Fryburg must have put some very effective medications on her back. I told myself it was time to put some effective medications into Madge Fryburg while the latter was on her back, too. That little handkerchief trick which Jane's cousin had perpetrated on me last night had only served to make me randier, though maybe it was because of my fantasy of the bedroom wallpaper. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind introducing Brenda herself into my bedroom with a blindfold on. I could envision that slim, haughty, silver-blonde piece tied up by the thumbs with a yardstick between her legs, naked except for a bra, hose and a garterbelt and nothing else, a blindfold over her eyes, me standing before her with a feather in one hand and a hairbrush in the other, reaching around to bang her naked bottom to make her lunge forward so that I could tickle her pussy until she spent. If I ever got a chance to do that, I promised myself, Brenda Corey wouldn't be able to satisfy me just with her fingers shielded by a handkerchief.
In the afternoon I went over to Charlie Karogian's office and told him about my conversation with Philip Young. He had the will out to read for me and, just as I had figured, there was only about ten thousand dollars in cash as Dad's inheritance gift to his only and rather profligate son. I suggested to Charlie that I pay about eight grand of that on the mortgage, and he thought it was a splendid idea. From what he knew of Overland Trust and Savings, he was a little leery of their way of doing business. They seemed to be quite adequately financed, and they seemed to have as much cash as they had paper out, which was healthy, but he had heard some rumors about stock manipulations and transfers of deeds of property which didn't set too well with him. Apparently, when they got hold of a guy they could pinch, they really tightened the screws. I asked Charlie if he thought they could take away Dad's land, and he nodded gloomily.
"I'm afraid they can, Carl boy. This eight thousand dollars you intend to put down will be a very substantial payment plus interest, but still that miserable clause in that mortgage gives them the power to demand full payment at any time before the five years are up. I can't for the life of me understand why your father let himself be conned into signing a proposition like that."
I couldn't either, for the life of me. But I told Charlie I was going to go to work in the vineyard myself, just like a common peon or paisano, getting some of the sun, working with the rest of the laborers, and being in on the harvest. I had made a couple of wealthy friends in San Francisco while selling real estate, and maybe I could hit them for a loan and even give them an option on some of Dad's acres. Probably the acres which had been converted to fruits and vegetables, so they could get some money back at once. Charlie thought that was a good idea, too. But he warned me to prepare myself for a dirty deal at any time, just in case, so I wouldn't be too disillusioned.
I didn't go right home after work, and instead drove down to the mall and had supper at a nice little restaurant, more of a tearoom. I didn't want any shish-kabob or spicy foods, because it was still pretty scorchy. A good chicken salad and some iced tea hit the spot. Then I decided to take in a movie, so it was about quarter of eleven when I got out and went back to the Thunderbird and drove into the driveway of the house. There was a light in the living room. I frowned. I didn't have any valet or butler or maid, and so far as I knew no one else had a key to Dad's house except myself. Who the devil could be there?
I saw a small green sports roadster parked in front of the curb right smack opposite the front walk leading to the house, but I didn't recognize it. I unlocked the door, and there was Sally Jeffries-Sally Poster, rather. She was sitting on the couch, hugging her knees, looking very scared, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Sally-how the devil did you get in?" I wanted to know.
"I-I came here about half an hour ago; Don had to go down to the studio because they had a power failure, and he expects to be there all night. I left a note that I had a terrible headache and was going to town maybe to see a doctor and might take a drive to cool off. We've had some terrible arguments ever since that night."
"I'm sorry, Sally. I couldn't help overhearing some of the snotty things your husband said to you," I said. I didn't think it exactly ethical to tell her that I had seen him whipping her while I was in spying position crouching behind the hedge and looking through the half-opened French doors of their bedroom.
She nodded, bit her lips. "I know. But I got in because I went around the back and the kitchen window was open and-well-I'm awfully sorry, but I just had to see you, Carl dear, so I got in this way and then I decided to turn on the light and wait for you."
"Well, just so long as I know you weren't here to burgle the place, it's fine," I said with a smile. "Only trouble is, the house to the south is owned by a real old gossipy and nosy bitch who knows what everybody and his brother are doing at any hour of the day or night. I've seen her peeking out of the curtains, looking over here, every so often. She's trying to find out if I'm having an orgy. Every time I go out to the garbage can, I can see her nosing around, trying to see if I'm going to burn it without a permit." That's one thing about towns in California-you're allowed to burn your own garbage, but you have to get a written permit from City Hall, and you're only given certain days and certain hours you can do it.
"That's awful."
"Yes, it is. But maybe the poor old gal gets the only enjoyment she has in life by watching what I'm doing, so I don't want to deprive her. But I was thinking of your reputation. If she just happened to see you crawl in here, chances are she'd call the police or first come over here and glue her ear to the window to hear what was going on."
I was referring to Mrs. Henrietta Steerway, a dowdy old crone in her early sixties, who used to screech at her grandchildren, "Don't make so much noise, you little bastards, or I won't leave you my money when I die." I had known all about her when I had been living with Dad. Oftentimes she had telephoned Dad to tell him I was making too much racket warming up my jalopy in the garage, or that she'd seen me downtown walking with some girl. He had hated her guts as much as I always had. And I was sure she knew I was back by now, and she was just lying in wait for me, to see how I was going to act.
"But that's not the reason you came over here, Sally," I went on. "What's on your mind?"
"It's Don. I never should have married him, but Mother wanted me to, you know."
"I understand. My dad didn't want me to marry you either, so that makes us even."
"He's terribly jealous. He's never really had any reason to be, but now that you're back and you made the mistake of calling on me at the house, he's just been wild. He-he beat me that other night, after you'd gone."
"He did?" I hoped my voice showed enough surprise.
"Yes. You want to see?"
Before I could stop her, Sally Foster had risen from the couch, hauled off her dress and slip, and stood there before me in a pair of black nylon panties and matching bra, and she wasn't wearing any stockings, and she had on open-toed sandals. Her warm, olive-sheened skin, the sight of her thrusting titties, her magnificent behind, made my prick strain and shudder with desire. I could see the welts on her back, faded though they were. They were still ugly stigmata against that lovely skin of hers.
"He does this to me all the time, Carl darling. I wouldn't mind so much if he'd only love me, but he just laughs and says my mother was a whore. He says the reason he married me was so he could feel superior."
"I know the type. I sort of sized him up when we had a little chat in the hallway there, you know."
"You know, I've always loved you, Carl. I need love so bad. Please love me now," Sally Foster whispered. She sat on the edge of the couch now, her arms around me, and her lips were moist and trembling against mine. I could see her and taste her and smell her, and my prick was bulging with savage lust.
My hands found her titties and squeezed them through the thin bra. She moaned arid put her tongue between my lips, and all the old fiery lust I had always had for her came back a thousandfold. I lifted her up in my arms and carried her upstairs to my room. There weren't any illustrations up there yet, so we couldn't play the Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey yet. But we could play other games that would bring back the lost years.
I know it was crazy. There was always the danger that her husband might come home early and put two and two together and drive out here and try to stage a little jealousy act That wouldn't have been fair to Dad's reputation, even though I didn't care about my own. On the way upstairs, Sally Foster unhooked her own bra and let it flutter down the stairway. Her titties were gorgeous. The aureolae were darker now, the nipples were pouting and standing stiff with longing. I bent my head and kissed each one in turn.
I laid her down on the bed, turned the key in the lock, and began to undress. But when I was naked and coming towards her, she wriggled onto her belly, wearing just her panties now, having kicked off her sandals, and she put her chin on her folded arms arid murmured huskily, "Oh darling, I've been such a naughty girl to have forsaken you! I ought to have gone to San Francisco after you. What I need is an awfully good spanking before you fuck me. Please do it to me, Carl, because Don beats me all the time in hate. I want to be beaten in love."
I understood now. Sally Jeffries had perhaps always been a masochist, and perhaps that was why she had married Don Foster, because she realized that through his arrogant snobbery and high socialite position, he would be the type who would take the cudgels to her. Only she had got more than she had bargained for. He probably wasn't the screwing kind, but maybe liked to thrash her and then jack off all by himself.
"Whatever happened to your mother, honey?" I said hoarsely. It was torture to watch her thus, because she was wriggling her bottom to and fro, and the black nylon panties followed every voluptuous curve, even to the sinuous crease between the cheeks of her luscious bottom.
"She married somebody about two years ago and moved to Los Angeles, honey. But please don't waste time talking. Give me a good sound spanking, then fuck me. I need it so badly," Sally Jeffries murmured.
I lost my self-control. Five years of wasted time and nostalgia and longing were all pent-up in me. I crossed over to the bed, knelt on it, rucked down her panties to her thighs, and then, with my left palm on the middle of her moist, olive-sheened back, I raised my right hand and I gave her fully as hard a spanking as I had given Maxine Lavolta.
She whimpered and writhed, she moaned and sobbed, but her face was a mask of sensual ecstasy. And when at last I had finished, she twisted herself over onto her scarlet bottom, spread her legs after first kicking off her panties, and held out her arms to me.
"Oh God, oh God, it was so good," she groaned. "Fuck me, fuck me, Carl, fuck me hard and make me cry!"
I did.
Chapter Seventeen
By the middle of August, I had settled down into a grinding but somehow satisfying routine. I spent half a day out in the fields, getting hard as nails and my lily-white skin tanned until I looked like a bracero. In the morning, I worked in the office, got out correspondence, made long-distance phone calls to potential wholesale buyers of Venturi Vino. What startled me most was that some of the best names among these outlets which every winegrower has to have on his side if he expects to make a decent living seemed to get very disinterested the minute the name Venturi crept into the conversation. I was just bold enough and stupid enough to ask why. And finally, one of them, an elderly man who sounded British as the very Dickens himself (pun intended!), an executive with the firm of Heppelthwaite and Gordon in Los Angeles, laid it on the line for me. "I can appreciate your enthusiasm, old man, seeing that you're the son and a chip off the old block, no doubt. But to be honest with you, Mr. Venturi, the last two or three bottlings we purchased from your establishment were most unsatisfactory. The corking wasn't good, and there was a good deal of sediment in your reds. Consequently, old chap, we could hardly give your father the top price, and with so many offers of better merchandise, our buyers decided to bypass you for a while."
This was a real black mark against Dad's name. It could be expunged only by future performance, by bringing out wine that was not only of superior quality as to bouquet, but also perfectly bottled and corked and identified with the Venturi label. We didn't have any money to spend on advertising, not with a bank balance such as old Charlie Karogian told me we had, so it would have to be done by word of mouth. I would have to take samplings into various buyers, satisfy them, take token orders which would necessarily be small, and hope that they would be happy enough with what they bought to place a larger order next season. If there was a next season, that is. Because if our mortgage got foreclosed, yours truly wouldn't be around any longer to care whether the Venturi name on a bottle meant anything or not.
Dora Corlani and I got along just fine. I saw that I could tease her a little bit as she gained a little more confidence and got used to my speedy dictation, and she was really very neat and efficient and almost dedicated. I gathered that she had thought tremendously of my old man, and I gave her full marks for that to start with. She told me that she heard that Maxine Lavolta, the horsey-faced long-legged brunette whose bare bottom I had spanked my first day into the office, had got herself a job behind a counter with a mail-order house near the mall. I only hoped that Maxine treated customers a little better than she had treated me, or she'd be out looking for work again. And when there isn't any more work in Fresno, she might find herself having to hang out the shingle. There are plenty of pros in town if you know where to find them. Generally they're over at the Pink Poodle, a bar that gives itself fancy airs and is right over near Fulton Street in the heart of the city. You'll see a gal there sitting on a bar stool and next to her is a purse with straps, and she generally shoves it a little ways away from her so that if a guy sits down on the next stool, he begins by asking her if that's her purse, and thus a great passion for pay is born.
I got the ten grand and I decided to turn it all over to Philip Young at the bank to pay down on that lousy mortgage. I hinted around that I'd like better terms, so that he might take out that clause of payable on demand, but he just smiled a superior smile and said he'd rather wait to see how well we did around harvest time in September.
Yes, I worked in the rows along with the sweating peons and paisanos, and it did me a world of good. The sun was brutal, but I got used to it, and fortunately I was in pretty good trim so I could take it. Just the same, there was many a night when I flung myself down on my double bed without even bothering to wash or eat. And even if Madge Fryburg had been there naked and waiting for me, I don't think I could have done her any good.
Not that I didn't see Madge, though. About a week after I'd seen the baldheaded banker and found out what was what, I phoned my auburn-haired spanking victim and asked her for a date. To my surprise, she was rather cold. She was sorry she couldn't make it, but Dr. Franklin had assigned her to a case with a very elderly man, a paralytic, and it was going to take her several weeks. It looked as if her vacation was going to have to be postponed until perhaps the end of September. I told her that I probably would try to call her every so often and see if we couldn't have a drink together downtown if nothing else, or maybe a quick drive at night, and she said rather distantly that that would be nice. And that was that.
By the middle of August, I had to give Tulio Verduga some grudging credit. He knew his job, he seemed to be able to get the most out of his crew, and we had already made about nine thousand bucks peddling our fruit and vegetables. It wasn't anything that Dad would have been proud of, except that the quality was pretty good and the market happened to be right just about then. What I really wanted to see was a damn good crop of vino. I wanted to call up that elderly British buyer in Los Angeles and tell him that I was coming down there with a couple of bottles of the best wine he'd ever tested on his ornery palate and that he'd better buy at least five hundred cases if he knew what was good for him.
I kept careful charts of the progress of various rows. Several of them had the cuttings which Dad had grafted in his search for the perfect Pinot Chardonnay. The grapes looked wonderful, and we had a touch or two of rain at the right time, and everybody was working hard and it looked as if we might have a decent harvest.
But there was still twenty-six-thousand bucks, give or take a few thousand, to be given to the bank before I could breathe easily. I figured that if we paid half of it off by now in just a little more than two years, even Philip Young ought to be satisfied that we were a pretty good credit risk.
Jane Wilson did wonders at the switchboard. She was soft-spoken, sweet and considerate and neatly handled all the incoming phone calls, and she turned out to be a pretty good file clerk too, so we really didn't miss Maxine Lavolta.
What I did miss, though, was Sally Foster. I'd never forget that night when I screwed her for the first time. That night when I'd come home to find her waiting in my living room, telling me what a mess she'd made of her life with that pompous husband of hers who got his kicks cuffing her, talking to her as if she were a two-dollar tramp and using an ivory-handled riding crop on her. I knew that she was a masochist. The way she'd taken a spanking of mine and then consumed me with the maw of her greedy, burning cunt, leaving teeth and nail marks all over me, had been the payoff. I wanted her desperately, but I found that I didn't think of her any more as my dream girl on the pedestal, not as the unattainable olive-skinned beauty whose image had been before me all those years in San Francisco even when I was screwing around elsewhere, especially with that cute little nurse. And the nurse romance was definitely over, I happened to get a postcard from her the first week in August in care of the Venturi Vineyards, telling me that she had just got herself engaged, was going to be married in October and go on a world cruise with her husband for a long and happy honeymoon. She deserved it.
I saw nothing more of Sally Foster, however, until about the third week in August. And then when I got home to my lonely house on Broadway Avenue, I found her waiting for me again-but this time in my bedroom.
By then, all my belongings from Frisco had been shipped in, and I'd spent one weekend making up my improvised sexy wallpaper. I'd cut out pictures and line drawings from CORPORAL, a lot of other girlie magazines and some of the bondage and whipping books I'd collected over the years. All four walls were thoroughly covered, and there were also fornication poses, as many as I could clip out of the Kama Sutra and other rare erotica in my collection. I was just about ready for a trial run at my little blindfold pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey stunt, so when I saw Sally Foster lying on my bed as I trudged wearily upstairs after having stopped long enough in the kitchen to open a bottle of beer and grab a meatloaf sandwich, I told myself that tonight I was going to have some fun for a change.
"I suppose the kitchen window was open again," I said.
"Um hmm," she murmured, wriggling slowly as she turned to look at me. She was wearing just a green rayon dress, and her legs were bare, and she'd even kicked off her sandals. The magnificent pear-shaped globes of her titties thrust up against the tight cling of the dress, in such a way as to tell me that she didn't have a damn thing on beneath. She proved it a second later when she lazily arched up one dimpled knee, and I could see the dark furry triangle of pussy.
"I need you, lover," she purred.
"I'm sweaty, I haven't shaved, I've been out in the fields all afternoon, and I'm just a little tired, baby," I growled. I sat down on the chair near the door, fumbled in my tee-shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes, found just one and lit it, and I watched her.
"That's the way I want you, Carl darling. All man, cruel and savage and sweaty and dirty. I want you to use me and have me."
"Where's Don?" I rather brutally interposed.
"Oh darling, you make me so mad sometimes. Here it's been weeks since you and I were together, and that's the first thing you could think of. For your information, Don is in Los Angeles. He's trying to merge with a big chain and get better films and prime-time shows, if you must know. We can have all the rest of this week, if you'd like to."
"I see. Why don't you divorce him, Sally? I don't see how you could take that kind of treatment all the time."
"What else would I do? Everybody knows that my mother was-well, let's face it, a whore. She got a pretty good price, but she was still a whore. I'd be done in the Valley if I left Don Foster, and I'm not especially trained for a job. It's not easy after you've been married five years and had everything you've ever wanted...money, clothes, jewelry, and trips, even to Japan. Yes, Don took me there two summers ago."
"Well, maybe we ought to sit down and figure things up just for the economic hell of it," I said sarcastically. "Let's see now, you've been married five years, which means three hundred sixty-five days a year. How many times a year do you estimate that you and Don go to bed and screw? Then all you have to do is add up the number of fuckings you had, divide that into the aggregate price of all the goodies he's piled upon you, and you know what you're worth."
"You're insulting! I oughtn't to stay here!" she snapped, and she got very red in the face.
"No, you really oughtn't to. But I'm going to let you tonight. Because I think I need an emotional purge. I've been driving myself like a madman just to keep Dad's vineyards from falling into the hands of a bank and a particular baldheaded bastard I don't like. But if we're going to play tonight, Sally, you're going to play my way. Get down off that bed and come to me at once."
"Yes, Master," she said in a little-girl voice as she swung her luscious bare legs off the bed. She came slowly, in her sultry way, swiveling her hips, undulating herself like a cat. She put her arms around my neck and just brushed the tip of my nose with her lips. They were red and soft and moist, and there was a devil of lust in her eyes. It would have been so easy to fall into the trap. But I wanted to spring my own trap on her.
I reached into my pants pocket and got out a handkerchief. I bound it around her eyes, and she wanted to know what for. I said to her, "Baby, you came unbidden to my bedroom, so you're going to have to pay the penalty. We're going to play blindman's buff. It goes something like this. I'm going to turn you round and round, and then say, 'Go, girl' and then you're going to grope along and suddenly stick your finger out and point it to a particular spot. And when I get the blindfold off, you'll see what position you're going to have to take to earn your keep here for the rest of the night."
"Oh, my! I've been lying here looking at those pictures of yours. Now I begin to see why you put them up. You're wicked! You're worse than Don."
"Correction, I'm more imaginative than that overbearing, arrogant snob of a husband of yours, Sally, and you know it," I corrected. "He uses you as a whipping girl just for his own ego, not particularly for sex, unless I'm a worse judge of human nature than I think I am. When I spank a girl, it's in fun, it stirs up her voluptuous latencies, and it makes her hot for a good fucking. So both of us get a kick out of it. But not Don. He's morbid and warped, and as I say, I don't know how you judge life, but whatever you've earned from him, you've been underpaid."
"Oh darling, when you talk like that, I wish you'd never left Fresno!" She was rubbing her bottom against my crotch as she stood with her back to me, and she wanted me to pull off the blindfold, grab at her titties, and fling her down on the bed and fuck her then and there. But it wasn't going to be that easy.
"If you hadn't listened to your mother and thought that you had got yourself such a prize in Don Foster, you could have come to me in San Francisco, we could have got married, and made a go of it," I told her. "No, I wouldn't have been able to give you what Don's given you. I don't think I'll ever be able to do that for any woman. Dad left a lot of debts, and he got screwed but good and, I think, by his own help the last couple of years before I came back. I'm fighting a mortgage that ought never to have been written, because the penalty clause in it is the kind you put on a poor farmer you expect to go broke in six months, not on a reputable vintner who's only had trouble the last few years because of lousy help. But no, you and your mother wanted to get into society. You know what I think of Fresno society. Or if you don't, better not get me started on it or we'll never get to bed tonight. Now, are you ready to play the game?"
"How you must hate me," she murmured, and I felt her shoulders shake with sobs. Either she was a damn good actress, or she was really beginning to see the light after five long years. The marvel was that it had taken her that long.
"I don't hate you, Sally, because that wouldn't be right. You weren't entirely responsible for it. Your mother drove you, and then the two of you were up against the worst snobbery there is. Everybody was watching to see if daughter would turn out like mother and judging you in advance. To save yourself from that, you up and married Don, and because Don figured the only way he could ever get a woman to bed with him was to buy her, he thought you were a prize. Then when he found out that the rumors were true, he began to abuse you. Isn't that just about it?"
"Yes," she choked and bowed her head.
Yes, I felt sorry for her, but my prick was hardening and telling me that I hadn't had action in far too long a time. "Go play the game, baby," I said without any affection at all. I took her by the shoulders, turned her round and round, and then I pushed her. "Go, doll," I told her, "Find your own forfeit, because whatever position you pick, you're going to pay that forfeit or else we don't ever play any more."
I watched her. She hesitated, put out both palms and found herself up against the left-hand wall of my bedroom, quite a distance away from me. She drew back with a little gasp, and then she tapped her right middle and forefingers against first this picture and then that. Then she moved a little to the right, hesitated a moment more, and then put her finger up as high as she could and then said, "Here! What did I pick, Carl darling?"
I came over to have a look. Sally Foster had really picked out quite an ordeal for herself. There had been an eight by ten photograph from one of the newest horny magazines on the stands which I had deftly cut out and Scotchtaped in a particular section of the wall, surrounded by all the other photos and line drawings and reproductions which I had so assiduously collected.
It showed a girl on a bed, lying on her head and shoulders, with her legs up in the air and her knees pulled back towards her titties. A naked man was crouching over her with his stiff cock edging towards her mouth, and his left arm was circling her calves to keep her from getting out of position while his right hand was aiming a hairbrush at her upturned naked bottom.
"Ohhhhh!" Sally Foster gasped as she stared at the illustration, then back at me. Then her pink little tongue crept out of one corner of her mouth as she whispered, "Do I have to do that, darling?"
"If you want to stay here any length of time, the answer is yes, baby."
Sally Foster shivered voluptuously. Then she sank down on her knees, wound her arms around my back, and put her cheek against my crotch, closing her eyes as she shivered again in a very seizure of sensual and masochistic ecstasy.
"If only you'd married me, lover, how happy we could have been together! I guess you've guessed what really attracted me to Don. I need a master, as well as a lover. Mother tried to dominate me so much, she even wanted us to be sort of like sisters together and work as expensive call girls. You see, we were always pressed for money-"
"I know the story, Sally, and there's no need to remind me of it. I feel bitter enough as it is over the lost years both of us could have had. Don't sully it. You're not the Sally Jeffries I once knew, and maybe I'm not the Carl Venturi you thought you liked, either. Just let's get with it. You want to be dominated and fucked, and I'm the guy wants to do it to you. Get that dress off fast." I drew back my hand and I slapped her face. She groveled there on her knees, and she hugged me, and she put her mouth against the fly of my trousers, searching for my prick. I bent down, plunged my fingers into her hair and twisted until she rose with a cry. But I ordered her again to undress, and sure enough, she had nothing on under that dress.
I took my time about undressing, and when I was naked, I took her by an earlobe and marched her over to the bed as a father might usher a naughty girl when spanking time came around. I made her clamber on the bed and assume that exact position, and I knelt behind her, and my stiff throbbing prick brushed over her nose and lips, and I told her to start sucking if she knew what was good for her. I had found a hairbrush with very stiff bristles, and as I put my left arm around her calves, I gave her a good hard whack with the bristled side of the brush right over both cheeks, so that some of the stiff bristles probably dug into her extremely sensitive asshole. She uttered a wild cry, twisted her head about, and her lips grabbed the tip of my cock and began to suck noisily.
I felt myself shuddering now, because the demon of lust had taken hold of me. This wasn't Sally Jeffries, the girl I had put on the pedestal for so long and worshiped from afar. This was a bitch, a conniving and masochistic bitch who would wallow with any man who was capable of rousing the sluttish emotions that she had always had inside of her. And I had left my father for her. What a fool was I, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
I will admit that I spanked Sally Foster partly out of revenge over those years and over the misunderstanding that my father and I had had because of her. She got a great deal more than she bargained for that night.
I thrashed her ass and thighs and even her calves, as well as the insides of her thighs, with both the flat surface and the bristles of the brush. She took me twice in her mouth as I already related, twice in her cunt, and finally I made her kneel on all fours, with her legs spread as far as she could and her head bowed to the floor and acknowledge that I was her only master. Then I ordered her to grip the swollen cheeks of her behind and open them up. I'd never buggered a girl yet, but I was going to bugger Sally Foster. I spat on my cock, I rubbed the saliva in, and I managed a final hard-on. Then pitilessly I gouged myself into that tender puckering crack of hers, and her shrieks and groans and incoherent cries told me that she wasn't suffering so much as wallowing in the glory of her debasement and defilement.
It was three in the morning when I finished my little game. And I was weary and sick of myself and of her. As she was taking a shower in my bathroom, I lit a cigarette and told myself that now Sally and I were quits, and that each of us was free to go ahead and live an independent and uninvolved life. For damn sure, I didn't want to give Don Foster the opportunity to stomp into my house with a shotgun and claim that I had cuckolded him. There was nothing to cuckold. And it wasn't poor Sally's fault. You can blame it on environment, you can blame it on her mother, you can blame it on the particular genes that went into her makeup.
Just the same, when she finally left, after I'd called a cab for her, her knowing smile and her whispered, "It was just heaven, lover! I can't wait till we get a chance to do it again. Are you sure you wouldn't like to come over to my house tomorrow and start all over again?"
"This will have to do me until harvest time, baby," I told her. I gave her a kiss on the forehead. It was the chastest thing I could do for her at the time.
Chapter Eighteen
By the first of September, with the harvest roughly about two weeks away, I was really frantic. The morning mail had brought me a stiff, stilted letter from Philip Young of Overland Trust and Savings, indicating that he and his directors felt that it would be necessary to call in the balance of the mortgage by the first of October, following which the Venturi Vineyards would be taken over by the holder of the mortgage. I had spent the last week or so, without any need for going into lengthy details, hopping planes from Fresno to L.A., Frisco, Oklahoma City, Houston, and even Chicago, talking to the biggest wholesale wine and liquor dealers, and naturally talking to Venturi Vino. I had managed to take along a few bottles of good white Pinot Chardonnay, and a couple of bottles of Dad's finest Burgundy. I got a few orders, maybe about six or seven thousand dollars in all, but it wouldn't meet the mortgage in full. I was working there without any salary, and for these trips I was actually using part of the money I'd saved up while I was selling real estate in Frisco.
To show you how earnestly I worked, I didn't once think about pussy during all that barnstorming I was doing.
But when I came back on the first of September and got that nasty letter from Philip Young, I called Tulio Verduga into my office and laid down the law to him. He thought he could have the harvest by the fifteenth, which fell on a Saturday. I immediately sent wires out to the big wholesalers I had visited along my itinerary, inviting them to an old fashioned festival complete with wine, women and song. Then I phoned the big L.A. and Frisco papers and let them know that I was going to stage an all-out grape-squeezing contest and pick "Signorina Vino," who would be not only the most beautiful girl in the valley but also the one whose dainty and talented bare feet trampled out the most juice from the white and purple and red grapes.
In Tulio's crew, who had about a hundred workers, half of them were born with cogliones. The other half were daughters of Eve, and of those fifty, I'd say that about twenty or maybe twenty-two were really lookers.
After the luncheon break, I went out to the fields in my jeans and tee-shirt, and I had a little soap-box meeting in which I announced the contest. Every girl taking part would get an extra day's pay, no matter what the results were. The winner would get two weeks' salary and plenty of T.V. and newspaper publicity, as well as a trophy that I myself would award. And I didn't mean the emblem of the order of my prick, either, although I was sure that Dad had personally managed to screw just about every worker for a good many years. He told me as much back in the days when we had a little communication together and before I'd taken off for the Bay area.
After all that was done, I phoned Philip Young at the bank and told him that I felt I could make the deadline and fork over the twenty-six grand. He expressed polite surprise. I would have until midnight of that day, which was damned decent of him. But I would have to pay down every penny of the balance by that time, or else.
Then about four o'clock that afternoon, I got into my Thunderbird and made the rounds of the TV stations, but big ones. There was CBS, NBC, and the big independent, KJZ-TV, which was a UHF channel and owned by that son of a bitch, Don Foster. His merger was just about going through, and soon the station would become one of ten which dominated California from San Diego to Eureka.
I had asked for the promotion director of the station, but instead I got ushered into Don Foster's office. His moustache was growing nicely, and he looked prissier than ever. He gave me a contemptuous sneer, listened to my enthusiastic outline of the harvest festival contest I was staging, and said, "We aren't interested in country bumpkin stuff, Venturi. This TV station is in the big time now, it's not just a 10,000-watter in Hanford. Radio stations like that will be happy to take all the stuff you can feed them. But you're not welcome here, and you personally will never be."
I was tempted to throw a punch at him, but it wouldn't do poor Sally any good. I just thanked him for his time and got the hell out of there. The other stations, however, were a great deal more cooperative.
By the end of the week, I had acceptances by wire from about five of the big wine and liquor wholesalers whom I'd met on my junket. If they liked the quality of merchandise at the festival, there was a pretty good chance they would place orders and buy and they might give me letters of credit on which I could draw at the bank to cover the deficit on the mortgage.
I still kept trying to get Madge Fryburg, and she was still acting unavailable. She had forgotten all about her vacation, she was working on cases for Dr. Franklin, who she suspected was coming down sick pretty soon from overwork, and she just didn't have time for social activities. I was almost tempted to ask her what about sexual, but it wouldn't have worked, because the tone of her voice didn't indicate that she was particularly interested. I wondered what the hell I had done to change her so drastically. But I just didn't have time to fool around with it any more. The time for decision was coming up real close, and I frankly was scared.
And the, about three days before the festival, on a Wednesday evening, to be exact, just as I was about to leave the office and tell faithful Dora Corlani she could call it quits for the day, in walked Brenda Corey. Jane Wilson at the switchboard blew her a kiss, and the two young women conferred for a moment in whispers, and then Brenda made her way through the swinging doors towards my office.
I was haggard and exhausted, I had a day's growth of beard, but to me she looked like prime pussy, and from the smile on her face I began to wonder if maybe she had finally succumbed to my virile charms.
Her silver-blonde hair was now done in a very sexy upsweep which left her nape bare, and she had golden earrings clipped to her lobes, and her lips were very red and humid and sexy. So was her dress. It was a mini-dress, showing about three inches of thigh, and her legs were bare, and she had white strap-on thong sandals. I shivered when I saw the way her calves flexed, and she gave me a teasing smile, seating herself in my chair, and crossed her legs so that I could admire even more of her bare flesh. As she adjusted her skirt, I caught a glimpse of a very gossamer pair of white pantie-briefs.
"Carl, you're quite a stranger," she reproached me. "I thought sure you'd call me for a date, but it's been ages."
"I know. I'm a working man these days, Brenda. Don't tell me you gave up the bank?"
"Oh no, heavens no!" she uttered a peal of silvery laughter and tilted back her head so that I could admire her throat. And I'd say that the top of the dress was rather low cut down to the valley of those gorgeous bombers of hers, and my pulses began to accelerate just a trifle. I'd eaten hardly any lunch, a very scanty breakfast, but I felt myself getting awfully hungry for what those gossamer panties concealed. "I'm on my vacation, you see. I've got another two weeks."
"Three weeks!" I whistled admiringly. "What I wouldn't give to be in your place. But on Saturday I've got a big harvest festival to be master of ceremonies over, and after that I might have to take a permanent vacation, depending on what your boss thinks about our efforts to raise dough."
"I know. But don't worry, I'm sure you'll make it. Mr. Young personally thinks you will, too. But I didn't come here for that, Carl dear."
I reached for a cigarette and I leaned forward, because what she had called me was quite out of character. "Oh?" I asked. "What did you come here for, then, Brenda honey?"
"To ask you to let me take part in your wine contest, Carl. You know, your foreman had been awfully nice to Jane and me. He apologized for-well, you know what he tried to do to Jane. We both decided it was best not to say any more about it and get unfortunate publicity, because Jane's so shy. But anyway, we did harvest some of our grapes, so I feel that in a way I'm a worker in your vineyards. And I would love to get in one of those casks and trample out the grapes and maybe win the prize. Oh, if I did win, you could give the money and the trophy and the other stuff to the girl who came in second. But I'd just love the chance. Say you will, dear?"
I was flabbergasted. The last person in the world I would have figured wanted to go into such an earthy contest, showing off her legs and everything else she had-because a lot of my girl workers don't wear panties, especially in hot August and early September- would have been Brenda Corey, that fastidious, aloof silver-blond. "Are you serious?"
She nodded. "Terribly so, dear. Why don't you take me to dinner, and we could talk about it?"
So the upshot of it was that I took Brenda Corey to dinner at the Hotel Californian, and then she insisted that I drive her over to my place. She made a tour of inspection of the house, but of course I saved my bedroom for the very last. I hadn't forgotten those grimaces of repugnance when I tried to neck and pet, and then the startling way she'd given me relief via a perfumed handkerchief. I still have it, by the way, a love souvenir.
Well, we finally made it into my bedroom, and when she saw all the pictures and illustrations, she gasped and blushed, then turned to me: "You're wicked! I shouldn't have come here at all."
"Probably not. Back in the middle ages, there used to be a motto of some royal family engraved on the hilt of a sword to the effect that it was never to be drawn except in honor or sheathed without having tasted blood. Suppose I were to open my fly and show you how much you excite me, Brenda? If I did that, it would be drawn in honor against your honor, but I promise you I wouldn't sheathe it until it had tasted what you've got to offer a man," I told her.
"Shall I tell you something, Carl dear?" she stepped very close to me, put an arm around my waist, and ran her right hand over my chest. "If you'll give me the chance to compete Saturday, I'll come up here again and then you can draw your sword and sheathe it Win or lose."
My prick began to ache and my heart to pound wildly. This aloof beauty, this patrician snob, was exactly the kind of pussymeat I secretly yearned to master. If I had this obsession about spanking girls, it was because of my sour-grapes experiences along the way. I'd done a lot of sublimating in my time, and I had thought quite a good deal about Brenda lately. She had begun to haunt my dreams. I could see her as a slave bound to the whipping post, blindfolded, and awaiting the executioner who would rip her garments from her and apply the lash. Not to the blood, not the way Tulio Verduga had whipped her young cousin Jane Wilson. But just enough to redden that proud flesh, enough to make her squirm and sob and beg for mercy, enough to make her plead to be fucked and to suck and do anything her master's heart should desire -as well as his cock!-if only the lash would be spared her.
I think that every virile man, somewhere in his makeup, has a yearning to own a female slave, if only for a dulsatory hour. Perhaps because they've never found a real true love, perhaps because I've been disillusioned about Sally Jeffries, now Foster, my spanko-mania had returned to haunt me and to be intensified in all my sexual longings. I glanced over at the wall, and all those pictures and illustrations from CORPORAL, and then back at lovely, exciting Brenda Corey. "Win or lose," I repeated. "No matter what happens at the contest, if I let you get those lovely legs into a cask, you'll come up here Saturday night ready to expect the worst?"
She nodded. "I'll do better than that," she whispered. "I'll give you a pledge in advance."
And then to my overwhelmed surprise and ecstasy, Brenda knelt down, took hold of my zipper and dragged it swiftly down, put a slim hand inside my work trousers and drew out my stiff and throbbing prick. Then, closing her eyes, she turned her cheek, and rubbed the angry, throbbing meatus up against the satiny smoothness of her flesh, turned her head slowly, so that I felt her chin brush against my cock-tip, and finally nuzzled it with her lips and pressed a long and lingering kiss upon the puckering slit through which the wine of my life would flow in a gushing torrent.
Then she rose, and while I crammed my agonized cock back into my fly, she murmured. "There, does that convince you, Carl darling? You can have me, all of me, any way you want, Saturday night, if you'll let me play games with the other girls."
Chapter Nineteen
Well, it was the big day. And for once, Mother Nature had cooperated by giving us a beautiful sunny day but without one of these hundred-degree affairs. There was even a mild southeasterly wind.
I could see that the TV coverage was going to be pretty good, and there were reporters from the Fresno Blade, the only paper in town, as well as from L.A., Frisco, San Diego and other points around the California compass. We had twenty-three casks, big wide barrels whose tops reached about the titties of each girl contestant-that is, if the casks had been empty, that's where they would have come. But since they were all piled high with grapes, the girls began about mid-calf-deep, naturally perching on top of the casks for everybody to see. As they kept treading down the grapes, through a funnel at the bottom of the cask, the wine they trod out would go into vats which would be measured by gauges. The contest would take one hour, and would begin promptly at the stroke of high noon.
Dora Corlani was beside me, steno pad in hand, taking notes as I dictated. I had a couple of promotional ideas for later on--assuming I paid off the mortgage and still own the property. I hadn't noticed Dora too much as a woman, but out here in the sunlight, I happened to glance at her and my eyes almost popped out of their sockets. She had done some slimming down, don't ask me how, shed at least twenty pounds, and now she was exceptionally pretty. She had gorgeous big bombers, but they were firm and solid, she had a magnificently undulating pair of round buttocks with a gradually widening cleft, full rounded thighs and exquisitely curved calves. She didn't have the hint of a double chin anymore, either, and her face was sweet and trusting and defenseless, and the glasses made her even more so. She also had developed out of nowhere -or else I just hadn't been looking-a perfectly ravishing creamy complexion. All things considered, I began to wish I had initiated Dora Corlani into the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game in my bedroom quite some time ago. A little horizontal exercise might have slimmed her down even more.
Tulio Verduga came out, leaving the lovely contestants behind him. And there was Brenda Corey, but she wasn't wearing skirts. She apparently was the only one who had put on a pair of bikini panties, and a matching skimpy bra, and that was all she had on, and there were loud wolf whistles from all the spectators, and the TV cameras started to grind. Well, there wasn't any law that a girl had to wear skirts and hoist them up while she trampled grapes, at that. And Brenda Corey had really the sort of legs you see on a high-priced Manhattan call girl or else one of those gorgeous chorines at the Copacabana or the Trocadero.
The prettiest girl of my own working crew was probably Amelia Lorando. She was twenty, she wore a peasant blouse that was off the shoulders and showed about half of her jetting, closely spaced round titties, and she had a bottom on her that would have been a flagellant's dream come true if he could ever have locked her up and had her at his mercy. She had long flowing black hair falling to her hips, sultry dark brown eyes and a sensual mouth, but she had a somewhat hooked nose. Her skin was golden tan, and she wore a flowing skirt down to her ankles. But she climbed to the top of the pile of grapes in her cask, she stooped and hoisted up the skirt and there were more cheers because she had absolutely mouthwateringly curved legs, and she was showing them practically up to her tiny pair of yellow cotton panties which fitted her like a second skin and followed faithfully the insinuating groove which led from her cunt to her provocative bottom-hole. Amelia happened to be engaged to a sturdy young bracero named Alfredo Marchiso, and he was a hotheaded youth very quick with a knife and nobody dared to look at his girl, not if they were formally betrothed. He stood there glowering in the front row, looking up at his fiancee, and I bet he was mad because she was going to show off her legs and practically her pussy to all these other men. He would probably give her a beating tonight and then there would be a wonderful reconciliation as only Italians can reconcile. The lucky bastard!
But I quickly forgot my envy when I remembered that the girl in the bikini pants and bra was coming to my bedroom no matter how many quarts of vino her shapely, dainty little feet managed to trample out.
Tulio Verduga stood on the platform with a stopwatch in hand, waited until he had everybody's attention, and made sure that the TV cameras were focusing on him for the moment, and then he delivered a long and flowery oration about the traditional honor of this festival, concluding by hoping that the most able worker would win. Then, glancing at his stopwatch, he cried out, "Let the contest begin!"
I had a hunch that Tulio had made his own arrangements for pussy when the contest was over, and maybe the girl who accomplished the worst record would be forced to come to his little house late tonight and pay the kind of penalty that a surly sadistic son of a bitch like Tulio Verduga would demand of a helpless young girl who needed her job and so had to put up with his whims. He'd be mighty careful about not letting me see any acts of brutality, and he had even watched his vulgar language in the presence of the girls when I had accompanied him down the rows of vines.
If you've never seen a grape trampling contest, come to Fresno around the middle of September and give your old eyes a treat. Here we had about twenty-three beauties, hoisting their skirts,-with the exception of Brenda, naturally-and turning round and round, flashing coquettish smiles at all the men, their beautiful bare legs moving up and down in a churning rhythm. It was primitive, fecund and it told of the good earth from time immemorial when life was simpler and when there weren't any amateur psychiatrists running around and when a guy didn't have to sublimate when he wanted a piece of cunt.
At the halfway point, Tulio Verduga called a two-minute rest halt, and the girls slumped down, bowing their heads, their tities heaving, sweat running down their flanks and down their cheeks and along the valleys of their swelling titties. It was a magnificent sight, and I don't think there was a man watching it who didn't feel a certain aching between his legs. I know I did.
I lit a cigar and walked over to the vats below, glancing at the gauges. Brenda didn't have a Chinaman's chance. The other girls were workhorses and she was a racing filly, but that kind always tires in the home stretch. Just the same, to watch those beautiful long legs flash up and down, with glimpses of the dark pussymuff through her clinging wispy bikini panties, was enough to renew my faith in womanhood. It looked as if Amelia was going to walk away with the title, because she was fully a gallon ahead of her nearest competitor.
The contest resumed with Tulio calling out the time. I could see the TV cameramen getting good shots, and I could see some of the reporters making notes and whispering to one another and also asking some of the braceros to give them a little data about the history of winemaking and the technique and all that sort of stuff. We were certainly going to get plenty of publicity; but I wasn't so sure about the business we'd do. The public is fickle, and even if this were aired all over the state of California, it still wouldn't bring in the big buyers from the other states, the men I'd seen and tried so earnestly to sell Venturi Vino.
At last the contest was over, and Amelia indeed was declared the winner. She had surpassed her nearest rival by at least two and a half gallons. She clambered out of the cask, her bare legs stained with the purple grapes, and Alfredo eagerly gathered her in his arms, and then carried her away out of sight. He had to be restrained by a couple of laughing braceros to bring her back for the rewarding of the prize. I, as the Signer Padrone, had that honor. I even gave Amelia a kiss, but on the cheek, to Alfredo's great relief. He would have killed me if he had caught me kissing her on the mouth, even if I had been his boss, and I didn't want to chance it. I could be dead another way by October 1st if all this folderol didn't pay off at the box office.
Then of course, there were refreshments, a big barbeque and plenty of free vino, and gradually couples paired off and went back out into the fields and lost themselves from view-ours as well as their own-and nature took its intercourse. The reporters and the cameraman gathered up their tools of trade, thanked me for my hospitality, and went their various ways. Tulio Verduga remained on the platform, grinning, showing all of his decaying teeth. "A great success, Padrone," he called.
I nodded and waved to him, and then I called, "We've got a few buyers who mean business, Tulio. They've gone to my office. Take care of them and give them the best price break you can. Try to get some down payment or a letter of credit. I'm beat."
I was. I'd been standing there in the hot sun, getting hard-on after hard-on, and Brenda Corey had been sending me sultry glances from her lovely eyes. I had watched the muscles of her thighs and bottom undulate and shiver and ripple, until I was almost of a mind to leap into that cast and fuck her then and there.
I went into the shower-room which was reserved for the field hand, stripped naked, got off the sweat of the day, toweled myself and dressed again. I lit a cigarette and went back out to the platform with all those now forsaken casks, and there was nobody around. Even Brenda had disappeared. I suddenly felt a loneliness, and I wondered if Dad were looking down wherever he was and what he was thinking about the whole affair. I said a silent prayer, and then I went into the office to join Tulio and the three men who had come and shown enough interest in Venturi Vino to want to talk business ...
It was nine o'clock at night, I'd made myself a little light supper and had stretched out on the couch in the living room, but of course I couldn't fall asleep. Brenda had promised that she would come to see me tonight, win or lose. My prick was aching, and I wanted to draw it in honor, or any old way at all, so long as it got between her legs. Apparently, she wasn't a natural silver-blonde; the shadow of pussyfur at the peak of her bikini panties had been dark brown. That was one deception. Not that it was important, mind you, but it was a deception, after all. Her hair looked so silken and fine-spun, but her pussyhair looked coarse. I told myself that I was seeing ghosts and that I was just on edge. I was, in more ways than one.
And then the doorbell rang, and when I opened it there was Brenda. She had on a sort of terrycloth robe, loosely belted, and as soon as she stepped inside, she dropped it and there she was clad in only the bra and bikini panties affair and sandals.
"I'm here, Carl darling," she murmured. "I'm sorry I couldn't win, but it was fun anyhow. What was thrilling was thinking what was going to happen now. Make it happen for me, dearest."
I uttered an oath in Italian, and then I stooped and lifted her up and carried her upstairs and into my bedroom. She lay there on the bed with her head pillowing her arms, arching up her titties, smiling at me lazily. "Rip them off and fuck me, dearest, "she whispered. "You don't know how much I've wanted you to do that."
Don't think my fingers weren't itching! And then I swore again an even viler oath in Italian as, just when I was reaching for that bra to rip it from those luscious titties of hers, I heard the phone ring.
"Let it ring, dearest. This night belongs to both of us now," Brenda Corey murmured.
But the phone was clanging insistently, and I felt my prick subside, because I still had to think about October first, and after all I knew that call night have been from one of the big buyers who was making a decision. "I'll be back in a second, Brenda darling. Don't go away now," I told her.
I had to go all the way downstairs to answer the phone in the hall just to one side of the front door, but anybody who called me knew that I had this problem and let the phone ring a long time. And when I got to it, I almost snarled, "Hello!"
It was Dora Corlani. "Mr. Venturi-I-I'm awfully sorry to bother you this late at night, but I'm down here at the office and I just found out something I think you ought to know about," her voice sounded scared.
"What is it, Dora?"
"I-I maybe I'm just upset over nothing, Mr. Venturi, but you know how important it is that we have a good harvest and pay off the mortgage and-"
"Yes, yes, damnit, Dora, get to the point," I said testily.
"All right. Did you know that I just caught Jane Wilson opening the safe and taking out the cuttings, Mr. Venturi?"
"You just did what?"
"I was here late because there were some wires from the buyers you were counting on, Mr. Venturi. They placed some good orders. And they're willing to give letters of credit, too. I wanted to answer them in your name, and I wasn't sure where you were, and I thought of calling various places, and-"
"Dora, I'll come down there and turn you over my lap and pull your panties down and give you the spanking of your life if you don't get right to the point this minute. I've got a guest here." I almost shouted.
"Yes, Mr. Venturi," she sounded very scared and very timid, and I heard her gulp at the thought of a spanking. "There was a phone call for you, and I answered it at the switchboard. And I was looking around for a pad to write something on, and I saw a letter, and it was addressed to Jane Wilson, and I just happened to read it-"
"Dora, I'm warning you," I snarled. "I'm practically on my way there with a hairbrush for your bottom, girl!"
"You-you can spank me any time you want, Mr. Venturi, but I've just got to tell you this! Please won't you listen?" Dora pleaded.
I was so overwrought at being bothered just at the moment I was going to fuck Brenda and also by this news about Jane Wilson that I didn't quite catch the meaning of her quick remark about not minding whenever I spanked her. I just told her to go ahead and make it fast or else.
"Well, Mr. Venturi, the letter was in a plain envelope, but it was signed Philip Young. The man at the bank, you know.
Now it was my turn to gulp. "Say that slowly, and give me all of it, Dora," I commanded.
She did. Philip Young had instructed Jane Wilson to get the rest of the cuttings which Marcantonio Venturi had brought from the old country. He congratulated her on her cleverness in getting a job right in the plant, and he told her that she would be assured a very good job at a far higher salary once he foreclosed the mortgage. He also asked her to convey his best wishes to Brenda for a very clever little stunt in distracting me so that she could make away with the cuttings. The letter had come special delivery and registered, and Jane had signed for it. And it was just my good luck that the stupid little bitch had left it at the switchboard while she had gone down into the basement to open up the safe and to get the cuttings.
Then Dora had gone downstairs, acting on a hunch, and found Jane in the act of opening the safe. There had been a struggle, and she had bumped Jane's head against the open heavy metal door of the safe, and Jane had been knocked out. And she wanted to know what to do.
I told her to get some rope and tie Jane Wilson up and call the sheriff, and then I went back upstairs to the bedroom where Brenda Corey was impatiently waiting.
"My heavens, you took the longest time, Carl," she said deviously. "It isn't very romantic, you know. I'm not so sure I want to let you make love to me now, if business means so much more than I do."
"I'm sorry, darling. I'm going to make it up to you, though. You'll see." I walked over to the bed, got onto it, and moved towards her on my hands and knees. Her eyes were wide with surprise: "Aren't you going to undress first, Carl lover?"
"I don't think I have to yet, baby," I said, and then I gave her a right hook to the jaw and she slumped unconscious. I tied her up very neatly, and then I got into the Thunderbird and went down to the plant.
Jane Wilson was just coming to, and she was really scared. Dora had slapped her face, pulled her hair and was shaking her, and insisting that she tell the truth or else. The sheriff hid his smile under his hand and rather solemnly told Dora that that was no way to treat a suspect, even if she were guilty. When I arrived on the scene, Jane Wilson was blabbing all.
And what she blabbed was enough to make my blood run cold.
Brenda Corey was a secretary to Philip Young, all right, but she was also my illegitimate sister. Some years ago Dad had screwed the winner of just such a festival contest as I'd held this noon, fallen in love with her as men will sometimes do with a particularly nice piece of pussy, and promised to marry her. The girl had believed him, and had kept harping at him. Finally he'd given her a big cash settlement and told her to beat it, that he wasn't about to marry a tramp like her, anyway.
She'd gone to San Diego, married a guy, brought up her kid and tried to implant the seed of vengeance in Brenda Corey's heart. She was to do everything in her power to ruin me. And when I had come back from Frisco to take over the Venturi Vineyards, Brenda Corey had set her sights on me. She was going to cry rape, and then she was going to make a full statement to the newspapers that I, Carl Venturi, had actually tried to rape his own sister.
Jane Wilson wasn't her cousin, either, Jane was a Lesbian introvert whom Brenda had discovered working in a grocery store in San Diego, and had brought her along for her own perverse enjoyment. Jane was a consummate little actress, and had proved very useful to her.
But the thing that made the cheese binding was that Philip Young was in cahoots with none other than Don Foster. Foster wanted to buy the vineyards, and operate them himself.
He had hated my father's guts because my father had once refused to spend any money with his station, not liking Foster himself-for which I could hardly blame Dad's judgment. And when I had come along and tried, as Don had thought, to take his wife away from him, he had sworn real vengeance, no matter what it cost.
After the sheriff had led Brenda and Jane away, I was left alone with Dora Corlani.
She took off her glasses, cleaned them, and there were tears in her eyes. Then she put her glasses back on again, and looked at me in a scared, little-girl way and quavered, "Do-do you want to spank my bottom now, Mr. Venturi, or would you rather do it tomorrow morning before I start work?"
Chapter Twenty
I answered Dora Corlani's question by ordering her in a very surly voice to get herself primped up in the washroom and then follow me to the Thunderbird because I was going to drive her home.
I drove to my home instead, I parked the Thunder-bird in the garage, and then I walked her into the house and up the stairs and towards my bedroom. She was glancing at me in a very scared way, but she was also blushing. I swung the door open and I gestured for her to enter.
When I turned on the light and delicious Dora saw the panorama on all the walls, she turned redder than ever, and then she turned to look at me with huge eyes as she stammered, "Oh, Mr. Venturi, I do deserve an awful spanking. Because, you see, I've wanted you to do it ever since I saw you spank Maxine right there in the office."
"I see. How long have you felt this way, Dora?"
"Oh, ever since then Mr. Venturi! And then just now when you told me on the phone you were going to spank me if I didn't tell you what was happening, I-I-I'm afraid I purposely rambled a little so you'd get real mad and maybe do it," she confessed.
"I see," I said, sternly. I clasped my hands behind my back and stared at her for a long minute. Then suddenly she began to cry, bowing her head and putting her hands to her face, and she wailed, "Mr. Venturi, I can't help it, I guess I'm just crazy about you. And I know I'm just a fat stupid girl from a poor Italian family and I shouldn't even dare think of a fine handsome rich man like you, but-"
"Just a minute, Dora, let me get this straight. What's this business about a rich young man?" I interrupted her.
She dropped her hands and lifted her lovely face to me, streaked with tears, her eyes huge and now shining with delight: "It's true, Mr. Venturi. I called Mr. Karogian at home as soon as I read that letter, and before I went downstairs and found Jane Wilson, and he said he could put two and two together and figure out that that mortgage was a fake. He said he was willing to bet that your dad had signed one set of papers and Don Foster and Philip Young had just transferred that signature onto another set and given them that payable on demand clause they were holding over you. And Mr. Karogian said he was going to call the president of the bank and tell him the whole story, and he knew the president wouldn't foreclose on you until an investigation had been made. And Tulio Verduga says that he's got orders for about fifteen thousand dollars worth of Venturi wine, and-"
"That's enough, Dora."
"Yes, sir. Do you want to spank me now?"
"You talk too goddamn much, Dora darling. Come here to me," I said roughly.
She stared at me as if she couldn't quite believe her ears. I took a menacing step towards her, and with a sobbing cry, she flung her arms around me and turned her face up to mine. I kissed her, and she wasn't fat or bespectacled or timid any more. She was a dish. She was a real Venturi dish, the kind you have for dessert, the rich kind.
I had never had such a thrilling kiss, even from Madge Fryberg or even my little nurse in San Francisco. And when it was over and I had to come up for air, I said, "Maybe I'm crazy, but you've been dieting, haven't you, Dora?"
She went red as a beet then, and turned her face away, and I had to put my hand to her chin and force it back to look at me: "Haven't you?" I repeated.
"Yes, yes sir. I knew you wouldn't want a fat ugly girl like me. Not that I've even dreamed you'd ever want me at all, but I said that I was going to lose weight so that maybe you'd notice me. I was always in your office and I saw how you looked at the pretty girls, and I wished I was as pretty as they were so you would look at me that way. And I thought that maybe if you spanked me on the b-b-bare the way you did Maxine Lavolta, you might get-well, get excited and want-w-want-"
"Suppose you just shut your big sweet adorable mouth and let me take over from now on Dora Venturi," I said.
* * *
Well, it's almost Christmas now. And Dora Corlani is Dora Venturi, and we play our little game almost every night. The blindfold game. Dora's a masochist too, but not a perverse one. She just wants to be spanked by me, and then fucked by me alone. And there's certainly nothing wrong in that. We've tried about seventy-five of the different positions by now, and I have a hunch that Dora's about to give me a little bambino in about seven months hence.
Madge Fryberg? She came to our wedding, and she'd thought I'd made a wonderful choice. She's going to work in old Doc Franklin's clinic, and there's a handsome young doctor whose going to work with her, and I've got a hunch that Madge Fryberg is going to get over her bitter loneliness and she won't need a man to fuck her as a catharsis. She'll just want to be fucked because it's nature and love, and that's the way it should always be.
So there you have it. Fresno has its faults, but the Venturi Vineyards are passion's vineyards now, and the earth is good and the grapes are rich and the wine excites Dora and me, and we're going to stay around awhile and give old Marcantonio that bambino he always wanted. And probably a lot more than one, too, by the time we've acted out every single illustration on my bedroom walls.
