"It's prosaic enough to regard sex as responding to the laws of supply and demand," April Webley said, wearing her expression of unrelieved sultriness. "But whose tastes and preferences compose the supply curve and whose the demand?"
She crossed her legs and gave a shake to her shoulder-brushing blonde hair. It was the sort of rhetorical question one might expect out of an economist of her stature. Not intended for answer from me, a mere professor of art history. Solely to make her recherchi point. But I answered anyway.
"Man is the demand curve," I said. "Although I know you'll dismiss that as male conceit and vanity."
"Quite right," she smiled, taking a meditative sip of her scotch and water. She was very shapely, with a cool aura about her. Botticellian, except with none of the innocence either of visage or character. Not chaste or shy, but amorous, with an underlying and subdued pride and hauteur. And a disturbing kitty-cat aspect.
She was thirty-five with a body unmarred by childbirth, muscles toned by exercise machines at health spas, and a soft bra-held bosom with more inches than she had years.
Her eyes were green and curiously feline like those imaginary tigers that stalk in the bamboo groves on the temple wall paintings of Kyoto. I had read that the Japanese, island-bound at that time, did not know tigers and had created the images from myth and imagination. She was nearly as imaginary.
I smiled in return and took a swig of my own drink. It was Cutty Sark although McAlister Webley, April's husband, had poured it out of a Chivas Regal bottle. No need to waste expensive liquor on a faculty party, particularly of your own department, people you saw every day.
Webley was the standard cheapskate. Yet the room was art nouveau. Chinoiserie in shades of blue and gold; Utamaro and Hiroshige winter scenes framed in gold leaf; furniture in bamboo and camphor wood; a Coromandel screen; Japanese paper fans mounted inside glass cases with delicate Chinese porcelain. Around us buzzed the cliche-ridden chitchat of the intellectual class of the Great Southern University. Woman's place in society. Gay liberation. Government budget cuts.
"There has been a reversal of the sex roles," April continued. "Women now compose the demand curve." She took a ball point pen from a nearby table and did a simple sketch on her napkin.
"As you are probably aware," she said with mild condescension, "the demand curve shows a combination of points that connect a price that people are willing to pay with the quantities they would demand at that price. The higher the price, the smaller the quantity demanded. You have obviously been preoccupied with other things-archeological expeditions and the like."
"Yes," I acknowledged. I did have other interests. And there was no question of her superior grasp of even the most basic economic concepts. She was rapidly becoming the pre-eminent female labor economist in the country. Her writings on the wage trends in the prostitution market were widely acclaimed.
She was sought after on federal government committees and boards of directors of monopolistically competitive corporations. I briefly imagined her on the maple veneer table of the sales meeting room in some Holiday Inn. The directors gone home. A litter of styrofoam cups and pencils. Her blouse open and bra shoved up. A silver-haired chief executive officer feasting amid her breasts, murmuring to her rosy nipples sale lease-back with negative leverage talk.
"Yes," I said again, "but why should women necessarily be over on the demand curve? And what about your writings? I should think that prostitution is a fine example of a market where men demand and women supply."
"Clearly you've only read the dust jacket," she said. "One thing that my research has shown is the growth of male whores to meet the demands of the female consumer. And then there is the whole business of the degeneracy of man into homosexuality as woman gains the upper hand in society."
She said it with a certain coy firmness that made you almost want to fit whatever preconceived molds she had in mind. The effect was perfect. Lush sexuality veneered over by clothes considered sensible but chic; the sine qua non of the modern career woman. White herringbone weave blazer with matching skirt. Front skirt buttons that could be left partially undone to reveal the knee and calf. Forest green pleated front blouse. Very silky. A little tight across the breasts. Bra of course, but a soft rounded one.
You are so "now" and up-to-date, April Webley. It is rumored that instead of diaphragm or IUD you place a tiny electronic sensor in your mouth each morning which takes your body temperature and transmits to a microchip sexometer computer that flashes a green light go-ahead when you reach an infertile period. Could I "French" you with the sensor in your mouth?
"So you would argue," I said, "that at least as to the Western World, female prostitutes are no more than a curious anachronism?"
"Precisely. Of course I would concede that my data is limited to the markets of the U.S. and Western Europe. Your uh ... shall we say ... more variegated experience in the Eastern Hemisphere might cause you to dispute me there. But the Orient never did develop a particularly sophisticated market system that could be subjected to any real analysis."
"Suppose I were to baldly assert that I regarded myself as a purchaser in the sex market and not a producer? Would I then be merely the exception that proves the rule? Or would your argument be reduced to a tautology?"
"Well stated," she said. "Admittedly, the transferral is not a clean one. There are hold-overs. What I posit is a general trend and not a completely effected transferral. But I would assert that in a fairly limited period of time-a period that anyone would classify as the 'short-run'-I could convert you from consumer to producer."
I raised a skeptical eyebrow. "No more the satyr of the marketplace? No more comparison shopping?"
"Quite right. You would become a true producer. Even a producer somewhat alienated from your means of production. A man more interested in the price you receive for your wares in terms of worldly goods and services than in any satisfaction from the whole production process."
"A mere vendor of meat then?"
"Quite right. In essence, the status of woman prior to circa 1968 A.D."
I finished my scotch and glanced with a degree of envy at the liquor table. She thought she had the answer to every thing. But my life had taught me other things, that you live from event to event, roll with the punches. I wanted a fresh drink, but wasn't able to tear myself from the subtle guile, the dangling lure. April tore me from it rather abruptly.
"My husband wants to chat with you briefly. We can. continue this when you return from answering the summons." She waved me in the direction of the study. It made me feel unsettled, not so much because I was up for tenure that year, but mainly because of her easy ability to leave me hanging in the midst of an erotic idea. Was this the opening step to subjugating my will?
"I don't suppose you know what he wants?"
"To bore you to death of course. He's very upset by your discovery. The worst case of green envy I've ever encountered."
I couldn't help but smile. A drunken friend of mine, also my landlord, had discovered a Phoenician amphora when getting ready to plant some marigolds. It had struck some long dead romantic chord in my psyche and I had decided to make the whole thing public. It had all caused quite a stir in the news media. I got to my feet. "Any hints as to how you will shift me across the void?" I asked. It was best not to keep McAlister Webley waiting.
"Just one. Lysistrata was wrong."
"Oh? I didn't know you had a classical background."
"I picked it up from my husband. He's a great believer in the twin hills of Zion and Parnassus. Religious and classical instruction. He's never been able to comprehend the mammary image embodied there. Peculiar man, McAlister."
She made a lazy gesture and glided away with panther movements to mingle with her other guests. April, could you ever have been a blushing virgin of eighteen clawing the insistent hands of boys away from your burgeoning breasts? Or were you born full-blown and ruthlessly beautiful, your hymen already pierced?
I packed ice in my glass and filled it to the very brim with scotch. I was going to need it. I headed for the study feeling vaguely superstitious, looking idly for premonitory warnings of a coming disaster. The department had long considered me a renegade purely because I wasn't old, didn't need an afternoon nap or ulcer medicine. You could never know where you stood with the old farts. Run afoul of one of them on a day when his pacemaker was acting up or constipation had gotten the best of him and you were in hot water. And Webley was the worst of the lot. He couldn't have been more than forty-eight, but spiritually he was about seventy-two.
McAlister Webley sat in a wing-back armchair surrounded by the chintz pattern, his gouty foot supported on a pillowed stool. Baggy, blood-shot eyes. Double chin. Bald head with side fringe hanging down six inches long like some New England divine of the last century. On a table, a small glass of sherry was beside a bottle of Haleys M-O, relief from constipation. Open on his lap was Ruskin's Stones of Venice. He had two fingers lightly touched to his chin in a thoughtful reverie. It was like him to not mingle with the guests. Besides, his gout had become quite severe lately.
"Ah, Spender," he said, looking up. "Come in. Close the door so we can converse in private." I did as directed and sat down in a lyre-back chair. The room was Pre-Raphaelite. Framed yellowed drawings. Languid, effete, androgynous creatures of Rosetti and Holman Hunt. With one Renaissance silver point by Mantegna. Webley lived in what I at that time believed to be an innocent opium dream of total inconsequence.
"You're up for tenure this year aren't you?" he said, laying his cards right out on the table to reveal the winning hand.
"Yes. Yes, I am," I admitted.
"I've been giving it some thought lately. Ruminating on it now and again."
I waited.
"Your lectures are surprisingly popular, but then that's to be expected I suppose. All that dreadful preoccupation with genitals and mammaries." He was referring to my course on Ancient Mediterranean Art and Architecture. Art History 269.
"I'm sure you wouldn't expect me to be otherwise than true to the subject," I said. "After all, most votive art in the B.C. centuries was devoted to genitalia."
"Yes, I suppose," said Webley abstractedly. "There are times though when one rather wishes that such periods of man hadn't existed. The grossness of it does rather grate on one's sensibilities." He let his gaze wander to a fine triptych done by Ford Madox Brown depicting Hamlet and Ophelia. All pastels and purity.
"My wife is one of your staunchest supporters," Webley said, returning to the subject at hand.
"That's very kind of her," I said. "I mean I hardly thought she would have enough time to interest herself in the workings of the Art History Department. What with sitting on all those boards of directors and her frequent jaunts to Washington."
"Such worldly matters really require very little concentration," said Webley, giving his humbug snort. "She has a lot of time and energy left over."
"I don't doubt," I said, thinking of her body and Webley's decrepit frame. How was it that she was alluring and yet so decidedly un-pagan in aspect?
"The real bugaboo as I see it is this cowpasture discovery," said Webley. "What are you up to?"
"The Phoenician burial mound, you mean?" I corrected him gently. "It's all a bit of fun." I said frankly. I had had too much to drink to shade my words.
"Yes, I understand that's what you're calling it," Webley retorted drily. "A Phoenician burial mound. Personally, I have some rather grave reservations. The idea of such a thing being uncovered outside our town seems just a bit beyond the pale. As though more likely to be a hoax."
"We really will have to wait for the carbon-14 dating results on that before we can be sure," I said stubbornly. My life had always consisted of illusions and this one would die hard. After all, what is life but dreams, illusions, and a bit of nerve. Of course it's true, you asshole, I fumed silently. And I'm certain of my find. Indian artifacts from what is called the Hunter and Gatherer Period. Anywhere from 1,300 to 300 B.C. And stuck right in the middle of it a copper amphora. A jug with the Phoenician Mother Goddess on it. Tanit, also called Astarte or Aslitoroth. Late Bronze Age Mediterranean stuck in the ground right next to Post-Stone Age American. An absolutely incredible find. Flabbergasting. Mind-blowing. Proof positive that Europeans landed in America way before Columbus. A complete alteration in everything we have believed about Western history and perhaps about the development of Native American culture. The very thought of it sent my mind racing, made me feel alive again.
Webley cleared his throat. "Should it turn out to be false, your hunger for publicity could make the department into a laughing stock. That problem has been widely noted about the University and has excited some unpleasant comment, I might add. You are not in high regard at this moment."
My drink suddenly tasted oily. "I didn't call the bloodhounds of the press," I protested. "My landlord did that. And he, after all, was the one who discovered the stuff. While out plowing. All I did was tell the reporters what the objects looked like to me."
"Whatever your story, the damage has been done."
Webley, I thought, you should have been strangled at birth. Left exposed on a mountainside. Instead, I said, "Well, what do you recommend?"
Webley paused and made a tent of his fingers. He pursed his lips and squinted at me. "You need the right man in your corner. Someone with sufficient prestige that you can be pulled through, whatever the scientific results. Otherwise, I fear you'll be condemned to banishment to a somewhat smaller institution." He smiled a sinister smile. "Say Eutaway State. Or Mt. Goshen Normal School. Or St. Enid's."
I cringed at the image of these boondocks colleges. They seemed like something designed by Boris Karloff. A world of dreary rounds of faculty bridge and tea parties. Midnight Express wine mixed with Kool-Aid and canned peach slices. Required Sunday attendance at the Pentecostal Church. It's all in who discovered it, not what, I wanted to say, but I didn't. I needed to get tenure and settle down. Maybe the Phoenician burial mound was my deus ex machina.
"And looking on the bright side," said Webley, "let's suppose that it turns out that the artifacts are genuine. That Phoenicians really did visit America and travel this far inland. It will revolutionize all current thought on art and archeology. The publication possibilities will be enormous."
"Oh?" I said, trying to appear as naive as possible. The swine, the greedy, avaricious swine. He was going to steal my discovery.
"You'll need someone such as myself who already has a reputation with the publishing houses to guide you through the pitfalls. With my name first, there should be no problem getting into print."
"I'll certainly take that under serious consideration," I said, standing up to go.
Webley looked nettled. He had been expecting something closer to total surrender. "There has been talk" he said, halting me with my hand on the doorknob, "that work such as this which seems to interest you so belongs more properly in archeology and not in art history at all. That perhaps you ought to change departments. But of course with the cut back in state monies, archeology is going to disappear."
The threat was apparent enough. I nodded and went out. I put my glass down where I could find it again and went up the carpeted stairs to the upstairs bathroom. I didn't need to piss. It was just a place to sit alone and think. Webley was demanding to be cut in. If the amphora was genuine, he'd hog the credit. If it turned out to be fake, he'd disclaim all involvement and lead the wolves baying to fire me. It was dark inside the bathroom and I flicked on a light.
April Webley was sitting on the commode, pink panties half way down her thighs seeming to strap them together. Knees touching, ankles apart.
"We are well met indeed," she said, showing no surprise. "Why don't you lock the door?"
I turned the catch. "A Lupercalia of the bidet?" I queried.
"Come closer," she said by way of answer. It was a purring command from the kitty-cat queen.
I did as she ordered. "You're the best looking man on the University faculty," said April, not admiringly, but more as a straightforward business assessment. "Lean body, hard, weathered good looks."
I had always had this problem, id over ego. My mind was a series of hedonistic impulses weaving flesh, art and life together into a detailed eclectic tapestry. "I seem to be clay in your hands," I said. "I ought to be a ready enough subject for your experiment."
"Lysistrata was not a revolutionary," April said, laying her hands on my waist. Her nails were long and varnished. Very hard looking. Japanned, one might have said. By Coty high resilience nail enamel. They slightly pricked my sides. Provocative action added to her attitude. I noticed the wallpaper, a repeating motif of cornucopias, in ancient times a symbol of seminal resources.
"Withholding does nothing more than solidify man's demanding nature. At best it makes the demand curve more inelastic. But it does nothing to alter the basic relationship of the sexes. To effect a real change, you must liberate woman from all inhibitions. Make her a true libertine," she continued.
"Why is that so significant?" I said. She rubbed my crotch and my prick stiffened in response.
"Sex for a man is the ultimate act of domination. To obtain his savage exultation, he must feel that he is basically humiliating woman." Being careful of her nails, she unbuckled my trousers and slid the zipper slowly down. A white bulge of underwear appeared.
"Do you have any empirical evidence of this?" I asked. I certainly did but wasn't about to admit it; empirical evidence can always be altered, with discipline, determination, or dishonesty. She untangled my erection, and it stood out straight and aggressive. The head was swollen enormously.
"Easy enough," she responded. "The change in man's appetites. As woman learned to achieve her own orgasm, so standard intercourse became uninteresting to man. He wanted the 'blowjob'." Her lips were not more than an inch distant from my prick. Her pointed tongue flicked out and lightly brushed it. I struggled against my desire to ram it in her mouth. Her lips glowed in the dim bathroom light with a wet red incandescence. Ruby red lip gloss. A sunset conflagration. What was once called Bengal fire. How I craved to sully her.
"The standard literature," she said, "began to reflect this in the late 1960's-early '70's." Her fingers slid back and forth along the vaguely rippled surface, nails pricking it slightly. Her tongue licked again, wet and almost dripping. Then she drew me towards her and engulfed it with her lips, wetly sliding it in and out of her mouth, curling her velvet tongue around it. She withdrew it and regarded it with a certain air of satisfaction. With her red-nailed fingers, she wiped a loose pubic hair from her tongue and flicked it away.
"In the mid seventies," she continued, "woman began to lose her aversion for fellatio. Became omnivorous so to speak."
"Eating both animal and vegetable you mean?"
"Yes. Reduced the blowjob from an edition de luxe to a monotony-breaking routine on long automobile drives. Even more detrimental to man's position, she began to derive an obvious pleasure from it. To find that it excited her. That she hungered for it."
"Following your train of thought," I said, "with the potency worn off, man then must move on to new acts designed to humiliate."
"Precisely," agreed April in a near whisper. "I am poised at this moment to create an act of such supreme eroticism that a society truly absorbed in the joys of the flesh would applaud from the wings. A Hindu mogul. A Ming Dynasty emperor. One of the latter Caesars. All would fall into a delirium of pleasure. But contemporary Western society finds pleasure only in domination. Man over woman. Now woman over man. Observe," she directed, shaking her soft, loosely waved hair back from her face.
Wetly, she slid her mouth back over the viand, first nipping lightly with her teeth and then smoothing out the slight pain by a long massaging action of her tongue. Then, wholly without warning, she began to piss. A long, steady, satisfying, hissing stream into the water of the commode. A buffet d'eau. A Bosphorus with subtle Turkish delights flushing out the narrow jet of water.
I ran my hands through her hair and tried to force my shaft deeper into her throat. For one brief passage of time the excitement was such that I nearly came into her gorge. Then the flow of urine trailed off and I mastered the urge; postponed it.
She removed the flesh from her mouth and looked up at me with a glint of raw pleasure in her green agate eyes. "It's not enough is it?"
"I'm not sure," I confessed. "What is it that man must have then to remain on the demand curve?"
"Currently, it's butt-fucking. The pain for woman. The lingering societal taboos concerning anal fixation. It still rouses the fear that fellatio once did."
"And if woman learns to find the pain delicious?"
"Flagellation. Bondage. The last desperate maneuvers to subject woman to a form of slavery. But woman's responses are beginning to accelerate. Like the Phillip's Curve, she responds less and less readily to the controls. If we measure the present era from the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1834, it could be said that standard fucking held her in place for nearly 130 years. The blow job was only successful for a mere decade. In no time at all, woman will welcome sodomy with relish."
"And then man is finished?"
"He will be reduced to the same role he had in primitive societies with their matriarchal institutions. Seed bearer. Vendor of the elixir of life. But an authority on nothing."
"You propose to reduce me to this state by offering me all these otherwise forbidden pleasures joyfully?"
"You're a quick study. We have begun well this evening."
"Shouldn't we press on?"
"I think we should." She dabbed between her legs with toilet paper and flushed the commode. Then she slid out of her panties and kicked off her shoes. When she stood up, my chin came to the level of the top of her head. She smelled faintly of body shampoo.
There was a family size jar of Vaseline on the edge of the sink, and when she reached for it, she gyrated her rounded buns, giving me the flash realization of what lesson #2 would entail. The apples of Sodom.
She opened the jar and extracted two fingers full of the pale green goo. With a flourish, she smoothed it onto my weapon. "Have you ever watched police shows on television and considered how appropriate the frisk position is for certain sexual operations?"
"I seldom watch television," I said, "but I see what you're-dare I say-driving at."
She stepped lightly into the bathtub and pulled me after her, greasy fingers holding my wrist. She faced the wall and spread her feet the width of the tub, leaning forward, braced by her hands. I hesitated at the offering. It would be easy enough to enter her vagina from the back. To fill that nice wet hollow.
But she was offering me a more forbidden delight. One of the minor mysteries of aesthetics. That tiny dime-like orifice that gave such pleasure to Mycenean Greeks that they depicted its use on certain vases which have come down to us, albeit hidden in the store rooms of museums for fear of outraged reaction by the general public. Should I consent? Carry straight off an exquisite delicacy to excess?
"Don't be shy," she prompted. "Remember, I like it." She reached behind her and twisted her two grease-coated fingers around the head of my shaft and drew it toward her buttocks. Unerringly, she planted it in the promised puckered cavity. It was tight and resistant, despite the lubricant, but the entry was made. A tight sleeve holding me fixed and immobile. I took her hips in my hands and began to slowly drive it in. April gasped, "Oh my God" and gripped the shower handles.
"Don't turn that on," I warned, too late, as the mix of hot and cold water lashed me with appalling consequences.
* * *
It was Monday after lunch, and I was sitting in my cubbyhole office going over some worksheets that I always pass out to students asking their reactions to various works of art in primitive societies and comparing them to contemporary objects. The standard load of busy work that I never grade and only use to make the students think the course is a bit less than a total slide.
In the paper I was reading, the student's comments were mauve to say the least. Problem 21 directed them to go to the University's tiny art museum and look at the Mother Goddess clay statue from Minoan Crete. A female corn deity with enormously exaggerated breasts and thighs to emphasize her regenerative function. Her hair tumbled in ringlets and she held aloft a sacred snake in each hand. In one form or another, with one name or another, this was the first deity ever worshipped by organized religion. She symbolized earth and nature, fertility and birth. She preceded all male gods. The Egyptians called her Isis, the Greeks Gaea, and later Aphrodite, the Babylonians Astarte, and the Phoenicians called her Tanit. She was exquisitely portrayed on the am phora from the burial mound. It was Phoenician, I was sure of it.
"In gazing upon this simple clay deity I am filled with a sublime sense of my own-no, not femininity of which we hear so much these days that the word has become pejorative-but of my own sexuality-even sensuality-that I feel a deep penetrating urge-nay, desire-discharge itself through my very being, and I long to grip and couple with you as the ancient Greeks might have done in those longago harvest festivals."
Wow. I checked the front of the paper to verify that the student was in fact a female. One never knows these days. The name was Connie Vaudrey. I fell into a muse trying to picture her. She was in a lecture that met in an auditorium with perhaps a hundred kids in the class. It was impossible to know which she was. Besides, the auditorium was continually in darkness as I showed the color slides on the screen.
I turned to the short profile that I had them write about themselves, ostensibly to correlate their socio-economic background to their ideas and attitudes. Very researchminded. Very tenure-oriented sort of crap. Also useful at moments like this.
She lived in a country club, a particularly exquisite one at that. I knew it as the home of the true plutocracy of the entire state. Plain, ordinary folk who wintered in Palm Beach or on the Riviera and owned yachts with lengths in excess of sixty feet.
Daddy owned six or eight textile mills, she had forgotten which. Umhmmm. Very nice. Mother collected porcelain birds. Suitably tacky, yet clearly she had been raised in an environment where art was considered an investment, even if it was utterly misunderstood.
A knock came at the door, and I said 'it's open.' A figure glided in. April Webley. She always glided. Always panther like. Guided by her deep well of unsatisfied desires for power and pleasure. She was an animal out of Kipling's Jungle Book; a beast worthy of Landseer. Cougar. Catamount. Puma. Painter. Mountain lion. Katalgar.
She was dressed similarly to the night before except for the colors. Beige now with a deep blue blouse. Which was fine because the skirt opened in front again, giving a nice view of the inside contour of a thigh. A comma of blush on each cheek. Melon frost lipstick. A goose-egg sized diamond sparkled on her ring finger. Very De Beers. So Neiman Marcus.
"I've brought her," she said in her purring voice.
I sat with my feet up on my desk holding the student's paper and looking at April up and down approvingly. A vague sulphurous memory of the night before clung to my brain like ground fog in a morning meadow.
April moved back to lean against a crowded bookcase, and another creature entered the room and paused at touching distance. Very tall; perhaps 5'11" with a face worthy of a Donatello sculpture. Red hair hanging loosely down her back like a tawny lion's mane, and a body that doubtless extracted much critical admiration from the sweaty mob.
"Connie Vaudrey?" I queried.
"Who?" said April, showing no recognition.
"No one," I said.
The girl looked me over curiously. Not quite from head to foot, but inquisitively just the same. She was wearing faded jeans that fit her like a glove and one of those Victorian camisole underwear tops with frilled edges and a front that laced tightly together to shove her white bosom up like fresh baked bread. Or puff pastry.
"This is Bess Ogletree," said April. "Twenty years of age. Daughter of a Methodist minister. Business Administration major. Not a virgin, yet uncorrupted. She functions under my auspices and encouragement." April gestured towards the girl who still evinced no particular emotion. Calm. And superficial.
"Sweet Bess the innkeeper's daughter," I said.
"Pardon?" said Bess, finally speaking.
"Nothing," I said. "Just some remembered poetry."
"You will note Dr. Spender's finer points," said April. "Thick, wavy hair, slim, muscular physique, strong jaw, straight nose, heavy tan from lots of out-door activity. The general appearance of a male model in GQ."
"Mmm," Bess agreed.
"Take down your pants," April ordered. She was speaking to Bess, not me.
Bess gave a girlish shrug of her shoulders as if a frat boy had said "c'mon have anuther beer" and she had said "oh why not? I'm already blitzed."
She unsnapped the front of her jeans and peeled them down to the bottom side of her hips, snagging and taking the white panties along with them. A tawny bush of crotch hair showed brightly. Brilliant plumage, unusual in hue. Yet whatever the color, despite wars and floods, the eternal iconic symbol of emergent womanhood.
I took my feet down from the desk top and swivelled around in the chair. For the first time, I noticed her eyes. They were deep emerald green. Identical mates to April's. A false affinity?
I reached out and mingled the fingers of one hand with her russet autumn leaf pubic hair. She didn't draw back, just observed-submitted-with an absent-minded air. The hair was curious. It might almost have been the work of one of those New Zealand bower birds that create elaborate nests and then actually paint them with rare pigments. A nest lodged in the bifurcation of her limbs.
"Turn around," April commanded.
Bess did as she was told, jeans and panties down below her rump. I stroked that with my hand. It was nicely formed and firm the way a young girl's posterior often is. No need for exercise particularly. Just natural muscle tone. Cream colored with a slight rose-tint blush.
"What do you think of the-dare I say-bottom line?" said April.
"The prospect is wonderful," I said. "I couldn't imagine a more appropriate control unit for our experiment."
"You're on point there. Not only is she target-effective, but cost conscious as well. She renders her services in exchange for my executive training program."
"I get to fish in that tidal pool whenever I wish?"
"You can whip her if you like. Make her perform wild antics," said April.
"I'm incorrigible," I said.
"You may button up," April said to Bess, who did so. Obediently, but slowly-provocatively. Then to me: "She'll begin the series soon enough. I figure to have you transposed easily before the summer vacation."
She nodded at Bess, and the girl followed her out of the room. Bess paused at the door, gave me an oblique, seductive look and spoke for the second time: "I think we can make our relationship something really meaningful, Dr. Spender. Okay? Later."
"Charmed, I'm sure," I said. Then they were gone. I put my feet back up on the desk and sat remembering the articulations of her hips. The burial mound was a worthy diversion, but they were even better. My landlord was still digging without any luck, but it added new suspense to every day, seemed to give life some sort of purpose, like the fresh air of spring cleansing the lungs. But it was bittersweet this year because of my tenure fight.
Another knock sounded. The door opened and a slim, golden-tanned girl in jeans and a green knit shirt with an alligator on it glided in. Her hair was cut in a fringe across her forehead and down to the base of her neck behind. It was of such a pure, ash blond as to give her a Scandinavian appearance. Her breasts were nicely formed and firm so that they stood up unsupported by any bra and lifted the knit shirt just enough to reveal a slight wink of naval between it and her jeans. A body steadily ripening.
She carried a tennis racket and two spiral notebooks.
"Professor Spender," she said. "I'm Connie Vaudrey. Shall I lock the door?" She said it very sweetly and smiled as she spoke. The manner of the All-American blonde. Spontaneous, high-spirited, whimsical.
"Have you ever considered studying a bit harder to get the 'A', Miss Vaudrey?" I asked.
She laughed lightly. "It's not a grade I'm after, Professor Spender." She closed the door so quietly that the click of the lock as she turned it sounded almost loud.
"It's just that I really need an affair with an older man and Madame Ingomar recommended you. At first it seemed a bit weird. Not that you're not handsome and everything because I've always thought you were yummy, but it was just that I didn't think you'd be quite as appropriate as a married man."
"Madame Ingomar?" I asked.
Connie moved across the room, and laying down her racket and notebooks, sat on my desk, resting her feet on the edge of my chair seat. She was wearing flip-flops with double-thick soles. Her toenails were manicured and painted a cherry red.
"Don't you know her? She's really divine. She teaches languages. She's Greek I think. Anyhow, she advises our sorority, and she's taught us authentic Greek rituals."
"What sorority is that?"
"Why Alpha-Aleph, of course. I thought everyone knew about it." She reached up under my trouser cuff and began to run a finger along my leg. The sensation and her closeness gave me a conspicuous erection.
"Oooo that's nice," she said, shifting the attention of her hand up my leg and onto my crotch. I had to steel myself to keep from jumping. Yet there was nothing corrupt or threatening about her. It was the actions of the timid in a rare outburst of boldness.
"I mean we are a new sorority and all, but I thought we were quite well known. All the girls are sophomores and are going to spend their junior year abroad together next year."
It struck me that I had heard of Alpha-Aleph. Strange name that. First letters of the Greek and Phoenician alphabet. Alpha-Aleph. That which came first.
It was founded by a number of rich girls who didn't have the minimal grade point average to belong to the regular sorority system. They had no national chapter and had pooled enough Daddies' money to buy an old house outright and decorate it from top to bottom with antiques and Oriental carpets. They were the envy of the old-line, snotty sister clubs like Tri Delt and Chi Omega.
"Just what sort of authentic Greek rites has she taught you?" I said.
"Oh, they're terribly moving. The principal ones are Sapphic rituals from the island of Lesbos. They're very poetic. You'd like them a lot, you're such a spiritual person. When I listen to your lectures, I want to cry." As she talked, her roving hands slowly moved the zipper down on my corduroy trousers.
"How did you become interested in art?" she continued. "I mean a man like you and all. I mean Madame Ingomar told me that you had been a soldier and killed lots of people and things." Using both hands, she fished out my shaft of flesh. The bend snapped out of it, and it stood up rigidly, a blue vein pulsing slightly down its length. She took it in both hands like a baseball bat. "And now you're doing that romantic dig-finding out about times and people past."
I engaged her eyes for a moment. They were a pure blue, as deep and serious as the sea; a blue that belied the empty chatter of her conversation. A naiad blue.
I wondered how Madame Ingomar knew so much about me and how I came to be placed on a list of eligible studs for the sex education of sophomore honeys.
"It was while I was a soldier," I said, "that I became interested in art. I was in the Special Forces. We were on a secret mission into Cambodia. One of those things that only the President and the Secretary of Defense knew about. While I was there, I saw Angor Wat. Just as the sun rose and the jungle around it came alive with bird life. The ancient carvings with the tropical vines biting deep into them. It had moved Andre Malraux, and it moved me. I decided that there was more to the cycle of life than trying to sell hardware or pushing paper in an insurance office."
Connie slowly rubbed the head of my shaft, sending shivers through my body. "I think," she said, "that's the most beautiful story I've ever heard. Such a passionate response to beauty. Is that where it feels the best?"
"Huh? Oh, you mean on my dick. Yes it is."
"I mean there isn't much sensation down beneath is there?"
"No, you're in the right area."
"But it doesn't irritate you or anything if I stroke it all down the length does it?"
"No, quite acceptable," I said.
"My mother collects these porcelain birds," she said. "They're worth thousands of dollars. She even had the third in the set of Leda's Swan. Lyndon Johnson took one to Russia to give to Brezlinev. Another one's in the Smithsonian Institute. We have the third. Personally, I think they're tacky."
"I don't think much of them myself," I agreed. She rested one hand on my leg and leaned her head sideways against her shoulder. Her hair hung down bouncily.
With her other hand, she began a rhythmic working of my prick. It was a nice display of manual dexterity.
"Is this right? I mean, should I grip it tighter or looser or what?" Her voice held a natural exuberance.
"It's fine. You're very talented."
"I love talking about art. Everyone else around this school is so coarse and Philistine. Except for Madame Ingomar. I never get to talk with anyone about art like I'm doing with you now. Madame Ingomar says that in our attraction to the opposite sex we find our own temperament in its mirror image. That that's how we fix our own identity. Don't you think that's really heavy?"
"An echo principle? Indeed. Most discerning."
"I really think I've fallen in love with you. In fact, I know I have. I watch you up in front of the class, and you're so self-assured that I can't help but picture you naked. In my mind's eye, I see you with your thing sticking straight out and the little bag underneath it all drawn up and tight and I just die to pull off my clothes for you and give myself to you."
How very nice, Miss Vaudrey. Your twat empty and forlorn. Aching with the incompleteness of it. Just now I would love to reach up under your shirt and hold your breasts like two new-born puppies. "Is there some particular reason why you need to have an affair with an older man?"
"Why to learn about sex of course," she said, sounding mildly surprised.
"You strike me as extraordinarily precocious," I said. "Have you already taken the introductory courses?"
"Oh, don't be fooled by this," she replied. "I'm really a virgin."
I raised a skeptical eyebrow.
"Really I am. Honest. I mean you know how insistent boys are about getting their fingers up inside you and all. I've had that. And they always try to get you drunk at fraternity parties and then shove their wong in your face. So I've sort of learned to pull at a guy's thing. You know, just to sort of keep from being raped or something. But I'm really quite innocent."
Curiously, I believed her. She seemed so poignantly vulnerable.
She leaned forward towards my shaft. I longed to plunge it in her mouth. But one cannot go where one isn't invited.
"Are you going to shoot off or anything?" she asked.
"I can let it go if you want," I said.
"Tell me when it's about to happen. I want to try something."
"Roger," I said. "Just continue in that vein. So to speak."
She kept working at it, more rigorously now, watching it very closely. The idea came into my head that she was going to let it squirt into her mouth. That appealed to me enormously. I concentrated on coming and watched her breasts. They wiggled up and down gently with her movements, nipples hard and standing out against the green shirt.
"I'm about to climax," I warned.
She leaned over and drew my shaft under her shirt, pressing it between her breasts just as I cut loose with a drenching ejaculation. The delicate color of mayonnaise.
I fell back in the chair, emptied like a clay vessel. She continued to hold to me for a bit, working out the last residue of my seed and smearing it across her bosoms. Then she released it and pulled up her shirt to display her glistening wet breasts. Broad, pale, rose-pink nipples like the Bombax, the flowering tree found in the Canary Islands.
"I like the smell of it," she said. "It's so rank and earthy. It draws me near the soil. Makes me feel more fruitful." She learned forward and kissed me lightly and lingeringly on the lips. I reached under her shirt and touched a breast, making my fingers sticky with my own goo. The odor filled my nostrils.
She stood up and wiped her hands on the back of her jeans. Gave a beguiling smile that showed her teeth, glistening white and straight; no coffee or tobacco stains. Nice orthodontics as an early teenager.
"I shall want to be made love to properly," she said. "When it's convenient to you of course. I know you're a busy man and everything, but I'm sure you're the best around for the special tutoring I need."
"While I'm not technically perfect," I demurred, "I do have a certain tactical and working knowledge of the sexual skirmish."
"If it works out, I'll recommend you, and you'll get a lot more trade from the Alpha-Alephs. The rest of them are in as big a pickle as I am."
"A pickle?"
"There's just no real talent on the campus when it comes to sex. Meatball fraternity boys suffering from premature ejaculation. Poor Shelly went down at a frat party last Saturday night, and he didn't last three seconds inside her. She said it was positively yucky. All the apologizing afterwards. Mumbling and blaming it on all the beer he had drunk. As if that had anything to do with it. She cried all night. It was atrocious."
"I agree utterly."
Connie started to go, but paused and turned. "Professor Spender?"
"Yes?"
"You have a really nice donger."
"Thank you."
"I really mean it. It has a certain heroic air to it. Gigantic. Even Cyclopean in scale."
Her encomiums echoed my lecture on the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, but the thought was welcome.
"Thanks," I said.
"Bye," she said, making a little heart-shaped movement of her hand.
Miss Vaudrey, you are a deluxe velum-bound edition. Will I meet you gatoring one night? And you with your panties off?
* * *
"I really think it would be nice it you would fuck my wife." My landlord Canby R.-for-Raphael Simmes spoke in measured tones. With sincerity. He was off on his sharing kick again.
His wife didn't think much of his idea. She sat on the far side of their living room listening to an old Beatles album and ignoring us. She had heard it often enough to no longer be shocked, only irritated. Why Canby was so intent upon setting aside his husbandly prerogative, neither of us knew. It had begun soon after he had uncovered the Phoenician amphora in the cow pasture. I couldn't connect the two events in any meaningful way.
"Royal," Canby said, speaking loud enough to be heard over the stereo. "Don't you think it would be nice of you to fuck for Jack? Sort of a sharing kind of thing?"
Royal said nothing, sitting in a bent-wood rocking chair absorbed in the music, lost in some deep vein not of melancholia but of fond memory. 'Royal' wasn't really her name. Canby called her that because she came from Port Royal, South Carolina, a Colonial seaport that could be beautiful were it not entirely made up of mobile home parks.
Royal's real name was Dorelia Higham, a denomination she had had no trouble giving up upon becoming Mrs. Canby Simmes.
They were my age. The three of us had graduated from the University together in 1969.1 had gone off to the army and then gotten a doctorate in art history at Yale. Canby had gone to Australia and New Guinea in a copra schooner to learn cattle ranching; then he had returned to the University town, married Royal; and the pair had gone through all the progressive counter-culture stages typical of the dropouts of our generation. Crafts. Log cabin building. Farming. The only theme that ran through their dysfunctional lives was a joint devotion to music; he through writing songs that never gained him a record contract; she living in a dream world of the hits of the sixties.
They owned a twenty-acre farm out in the country where they lived in a long, log-cabin-like ranch house and rented me a solitary pre-fab Swiss chalet just down the cowpasture. They lived off the rent I paid them, money that Canby got from playing in clubs in town, and the sale of an occasional cow from their herd.
"Don't you think it would be a sharing kind of thing, Jack?" he said to me. "I mean we've all been best friends for nearly thirteen years now. And I think it would be a nice gesture between the two of you. Don't you agree?"
"Really, Canby," I said. "It's not that I'm against the idea. But if Royal doesn't feel comfortable with it, there's no point in pursuing the thing further. I mean it's not exactly a love match."
I took a drink of my Old Crow. Canby was big on whisky drinking. It was part of his cultivated antiquarian persona. Dressing like a Western movie actor one day, an Alabama farmer of the Depression era the next, an Australian stockman the day after. And drinking Old Crow or Granddad on the rocks or straight from pint bottles.
It was Royal who had delved into drugs and had run the gamut from LSD to quaaludes. Sometimes I wondered whether her brain hadn't been burned out on acid. She did seem nonsensical at times with her curious manner of communicating with you mainly through rock and roll lyrics.
There was nothing wrong with Royal's physique though. Long and leggy with shallow, domed breasts surmounted by large bulging nipples. Thick black hair cut short after the fashion of Grace Slick in the old days of the Jefferson Airplane. In stacked heel boots she was loftier than six-foot men and appeared statuesque.
But it was her rump that mostly caught the eye. A hard, shapely knot of posterior muscle. Negress-like in its attitude. Or reminiscent of Daisy Mae in Little Abner. Pert. Insolent. It seemed so very firm, that your temptation was not towards fondling it, but to attack it vigorously as a rugged piece of meat. To sodomize her brutally. Which given the more recent turn of events in my life made me wonder if April Webley wasn't correct about the last dying gasp of machismo.
I tried to change the subject. "McAlister Webley is on my case about the amphora. Tell me that the whole thing isn't a hoax." Canby and I had played many a trick on one another in our time.
"It's not, and I'll prove it soon enough," said Canby decisively. "I'm doing some heavy archive work and the evidence will be unearthed in due time. You know I consider the whole thing a challenge."
Canby poured us each another dollop of bourbon and got up to kick at the logs on the fire with his well-worn cowboy boot. It was one of those last chilly evenings in the Spring, and the fire felt good warming the large uninsulated log room. That's right, there was only one boot. He had lost his left leg to an unruly crocodile in Port Moresby, New Guinea and in its place insisted on wearing a wooden peg with a round knob on the end like a pirate.
Canby was tall and bean-pole thin; with his thick beard and bald head, he resembled a grizzled Army scout in a Remington painting. He was forever dressed in jeans and an old grey cloth vest with a buckle in the back. Often wearing a battered Moose River hat indoors as though in a bunk house. An appropriate artifact, given the way the room was decorated.
Sheepskin rugs. Stuffed black bear standing upright scratching its claws on a tree trunk. Duck motif lamps. Civil War musket over the mantle. Shelves of books on southern regional history and the Old West.
"Have you got any good leads?" I asked.
Canby ignored me and stirred the fire some more with the toe of his boot, then walked over and switched off the stereo. Royal snapped out of her reverie.
"I was just saying to Jack," he said, "that I thought it would be a nice thing for you to fuck for him." Royal shook her head in exasperation. There was nothing particularly rude about Canby's manner. He was just persistent. And had been for no reason that I could understand ever since he had uncovered the Phoenician objects while plowing.
Royal got to her feet. She faced her husband at eye level, hands on hips, lips pinched. "Oh, all right, all right, goddammit!" she snapped. "It looks like it's the only way I'm going to get any peace around here. Then you'll go back to your Phoenician burial mound."
"Good girl," said Canby, patting her on the behind and returning to his chair. He picked a book off a table and opened it to a place marked in the middle by the dust jacket flap. It was William Pidgeon's Traditions of Dee-Coo-Tah and Antiquarian Researches, a nineteenth-century book about Indian mound builders.
"Come on then," Royal said acidly, motioning me to follow her into one of the adjoining bedrooms. She stalked away, buttocks lusciously protuberant.
"I really think it'll be a good thing," said Canby, settling himself into his chair and pulling a lamp towards him.
I followed Royal dumbly, always a slave to my libido. But why not? It made me feel alive, well, living in the world. She slammed the bedroom door shut behind us, flopped on the bed and began tugging off her boots. She flung one boot across the room. The bed was covered with a quilt of sewn-together yellow-white sheepskins. The walls were hung with Frederic Remington prints of cowboys breaking broncos and Indians attacking cavalry patrols.
"Well, get your clothes off, and let's get it over with," she said angrily. Then she lifted herself to pull her corduroy jeans off her hips and peel them from her long legs. I began stripping as directed. Her thighs were together, showing only the top of the dense fur muff that protected her crotch. She pulled her sweater over her head and brushed her licorice black hair out of her eyes.
She yanked the bedcovers back and jumped under them, then drew them up to her chin. It was cold in the room. Naked, I quickly followed her. Her feet and hands were cold, and I shivered at her touch. Her icy fingers grasped my vitals. Uncomfortable, feeling faintly ridiculous, my dick was unable to inject any conviction into its performance. It just hung there limp. Intransigent. Truculent.
"Now don't tell me that after all this, you can't get with the program," she accused.
"Royal," I said testily, "I'm a victim of this as much as you are. So lay off a minute and let's see if things straighten themselves out."
"Okay, okay," she agreed. "Let's lie here under the covers and warm up."
We did that, but she didn't offer me her body by stretching out with me, instead, keeping her knees drawn up under her chin. I felt her nipples. They were hard, but with chill and not desire. I slipped a hand between her clapped together thighs. It was warm there and pleasant.
I moved my hand up the esplanade to the origin, and she opened her thighs slightly to allow me to explore. Cunt hair bundled like mesquite brush against the entrance of a secret and devious arroyo. I divided the lips to touch the damp inside. My prick remained shy and undemonstrative.
In the other room, Canby turned on a tape recording of one of his songs that had never found a market in New York. He was inspired by Australian themes and convinced that their time would come. This one had a kind of Bo Diddley beat, featuring an electronic didgeridoo and a throaty voice that would break into the music occasionally to growl.
"I'm a mee-yow kitty from mee-yow city unh-huh.
I'm a mee-yow kitty from mee-yow city unh-huh.
If you're ever in the city come see this kitty unh-huh."
"Look, Jack," Royal said. "I don't feel like spending all night with this. If you can't get it up, I'll just have to do it myself. Otherwise, Canby won't let up until we make another attempt."
I drew away embarrassed. Royal lay back in the bed, her head on the pillow, eyes closed. I could detect hand movement beneath the sheepskin and knew she was penetrating herself; reaching fingers inside her embrasure.
A smile widened her lips; a long sigh of pleasure trickled from her. "Mmmmmmm." She began to move her hips and shoulders; she opened her legs more widely. I could hear the slight squishing noise. Her motions shook the covers down and left her breasts revealed. Small domes with protruding nipples the size and hardness of bottle corks. Her mouth dropped open with pleasure and she began to openly groan, to approach a state of spiritual exaltation. The squishing noise continued.
I had never known a girl could enjoy masturbation so thoroughly. My response was the growth of an enormous hard-on. I reached to touch one of her breasts, but her body was writhing so ecstatically that I hesitated. She began a furious motion of her hand simultaneous with bouncing her rump up and down in the bed and emitting long, loud groans. In her gyrations, she kicked the covers from herself and rolled over onto her stomach, hard rump with one large dish of a dimple on each cheek tensed and jutting up in the air; both hands in her crotch-one holding the lips apart, the other jabbing two fingers in and out.
My mood turned to one of almost unbearable excitement. Unable to resist longer, I rolled across her, laying my shaft down between the crease of her buttocks. She abruptly stopped her movements.
"Goddammit!" she complained. "Don't you dare try to stuff that damn thing up my ass!"
Surprised, I rolled off her. Primed to mumble apologies for interrupting her pleasure.
"Every damn man who's ever gotten me undressed wants to cornhole me. How the hell would you like it if women kept trying to shove broomsticks up your asshole?"
I shrugged noncommittally.
She noticed the length of my new growth. "Well, at least we've achieved something," she said. "It goes to show you never can tell. Let's make use of it while it lasts. You've got to get it while you can."
She drew me down between her thighs, and as I entered her wetness, she emitted the same "Mmmmmmm" with which she had started on herself. Slowly, I drew it out of her and as slowly thrust it back in. Her eyes opened with a surprised pleasure in them. Her lips parted slightly.
"My god," she exclaimed. "That's nice."
I began to steadily pump her. Keeping the same stroke as an oarsman must do at Henley. Putting my back and thighs into it. Stepping up the cadence for a power-ten and the final sprint to the head of the river.
She transferred her former zeal to me, thighs locked around me, hands gripping my buttocks. She threw her head back and began releasing long groans of ecstasy that were surely audible above the music in the next room. I quickened the pace, and she began to hump and wrestle erratically with me, twisting us all over the bed and moaning the whole time. Criss-crossing her legs. Locking and releasing her ankles. Moving her body in a concertina motion.
She got us turned around, and braced her feet up against the wall, humping her pelvis against me, hips violently circuitous in their travels. I squirted my tour de force into her just as she convulsed with a seemingly unbearable spasm and emitted an empassioned cry of:
"BON TON ROULERM" French pop music talk for 'let the good times roll."
I rolled off of her and lay with my heart pounding, my muscles reduced to Silly Putty. Penis penitent.
All turbulence strangely calmed, Royal sat up and pulled on her jeans and sweater, leaving her panties on the floor. She sat breathing heavily for a salutary interval, then walked out of the room. As I lay listlessly, spiritually floating in a gondola on a lazy Venetian lagoon, I heard her say to Canby:
"There, are you satisfied now?"
* * *
After the ten o'clock lecture, I brushed off the bevy of young girls who always cluster around with off-the-wall questions and walked down the brick walk with the green sward of Donizetti Place on my right hand and the majestic columns of Roxburg Library in front.
Around me flowed the stream of college kids, fresh with airs of innocence as youths and maidens of Boccaccio. Nodding and saying 'hello' respectfully. Miss Lipscomb. Miss Pratt. You delicious artificers of delight and pleasure. With your uplift bras and Nice'n Easy Shampoo-in hair color from Clairol. Would I get mononucleosis if I only kissed your twats?
There's Bamberg, the toad-like creative writing professor. Fat dugs like a woman jiggling beneath his maroon turtleneck. With his books of vanity-published poetry and his reputation as a lecher. Never approach the coeds, Bamberg. Let them come to you. Good discipline. And it won't get you fired. This is a southern campus where not so long ago a foolhardy English instructor had acted out a scene from Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and caused a scandal among Bible-toting trustees. And the wretched man was told to leave posthaste. An object lesson to all would-be sensualists.
I was feeling reasonably pleased with myself over the lecture. The gasps of amazement when I had shown the color slide of the Etruscan terra-cotta priapus had been numerous and sincere. Playing to the libidos of college kids is traditionally the last resort of the assistant professor worried about his tenure prospects. And of course mine were no better than they had been two days before when old man Webley had pretty much laid down the law to me about cutting him in on the fame of the Phoenician discovery.
Just at the base of the thirty granite steps of the library, I heard my name called and turned to see a female form running after me. She caught up, panting slightly, a mild flush on her cheeks. It was the russet-haired Bess, dressed stylishly in Candies and a raw sienna hue dress slit up one thigh almost to her hip. She clutched two spiral notebooks and an Accounting II text to her ample bosom.
"Professor Spender," she puffed, still breathing heavily, but flashing an exuberant smile. "I'm so glad I ran into you." With one hand she played with the lapel on my Harris Tweed sport jacket and then fiddled with my necktie. A nice subtle shade of affectionate gesture. Recreational outlook fair and mild. A little warmer.
"Bess," I said. "You're looking very chic."
She smiled even more broadly. "Dr. Webley recommended that I begin dressing more decorously. She says it doesn't matter if you're hopeless in your business courses as long as you look tough and make your mistakes emphatically." Bess lifted a leg to exhibit a thigh through the slit on her dress. It was a motion that spoke eloquently of her intent.
"Do you think this appropriate?" she enquired. "For what purposes?"
She leaned forward and whispered, her lips but inches from my ear: "For taking you into the stacks of the library and giving you a blowjob."
Easy, Spender. Say thanks awfully but you're otherwise occupied. Self-abnegation, that's the stuff. You'll be caught by some old bat of a librarian. Flayed alive like the Satyr Marsyas for playing inferior music on the Pipes of Pan. Control that despotic muscle between your legs. Its moral turpitude is the author of all your misery.
"I should think it would do quite nicely," I said, amazed that the words had not come out quite as I intended.
She took my arm as we went up the steps of the library, past the crouching stone lions and through the front door. Any number of collegiate yahoos turned to stare at her. We squeezed into the tiny elevator and rode down to the fourth level. En route, I tried to weigh this outrageous exploit for plausibility and relevance, but she slid her tongue into my ear so I gave it up. Could it be argued that the reason for my persistent womanizing was the absence of any definite and satisfactory alternative? Her hair was a glorious roseate luminescence. It s me lied of mangoes.
We emerged and walked through the silent stacked shelves of books as though penetrating the bone dry corridors of the Grand Pyramid of Cheops. Seeking Isis. Or some demigod with the body of a man and the head of a jackal. While all about us silent history slept, waiting for the voice of profundity, the oracle of the cunt. If Bess had carried a lotus blossom it would be perfect. The holy flower of Egypt and India. The sign of Isis. The petals of such subtle grandeur. That were stuffed up the cunts of Nefertiti and Cleopatra when they were embalmed.
We selected a carrel and squeezed onto the narrow seat, putting Bess' books on the small desk in front of us. Bess posed her hand on my crotch which rose obligingly, a subterranean lava flow ready to burst forth.
"You were a Green Beret, weren't you?" she whispered.
Her breath smelled of Spearmint gum. Skin slightly of moisturizing cream formula. "Yes."
"Well, if we were in the jungle or somewhere and didn't want to be discovered, what would we do?"
"The main trick is to be quiet and listen."
"Okay," she whispered.
We sat silently for awhile. My prick hardened into a state resembling igneous rock.
"There doesn't seem to be anyone down here," she whispered. "I think we could even hear them breathe."
We waited some more. Then, very delicately, she unzipped my pants. She waited. Nothing stirred. She pulled out the prick and fondled it under the desk. Her hands were beautiful, with long, un-lined fingers. She wore a topaz ring that was cold when it touched my flesh.
"If anyone comes," she said, "you pinch my arm as a warning, and I'll cover your thing with one of my notebooks."
I nodded in acquiescence and felt of her breast through her dress. Her heart was beating rapidly with excitement. Lifting herself slightly up off the metal seat, she reached up under her dress and eased out of her panties. She drew them over her ankles and plopped them over my erect dick. There were pure pale blue silk with tiny filigree around the edges. Lapis lazuli. Freshly laundered. No stain in the crotch. Not even worth a sniff.
"Stick those inside your shirt," she whispered. "They may be useful for cleaning up afterwards. You men never carry pocket handkerchiefs these days."
She listened a bit more and then slid out of the seat and squatted on her haunches on the floor, one long thigh showing, her whole body relaxed as though it were an effortless position for her. Wooden spike heels supporting such nice slabs of meat.
I continued the auditory vigil as she wetly went down on me, harnessing her inner excitement to a rhythmic plunge. Her tongue moved in an academic manner but achieved all the desired basic results, carrying me into a swim of rarified sensations. Her gleamingly healthy hair hung over her shoulders like water going over rocks. A long strand tumbled across her eyes, was shaken back again.
From time to time, she would withdraw the shaft from her mouth and pump it assiduously with her hand, delicate fingers working at it as though with embroidery. But always shortly enfolding it again between her lips. Tireless. Uncomplaining at the slow progress. An apprentice absorbed in her work, aspiring to journey woman, mastercraftswoman.
Her green eyes opened wide and startled as I shot a squirting fusillade into her mouth, discharging the milk of my swollen balls. She swallowed without complaint the cloying stickiness, and then slid back into the seat beside me, draping one thigh over mine. I proffered her the panties, and she dabbed at her lips with them.
"How was that?" she asked brightly.
"Am I supposed to score you on performance?" I asked. "I mean that easily gets you an 'A' in my book, but is there some scale I have to put you on for April Webley?"
"Good heavens, I have no idea. Dr. Webley said she would train me for great things, but she doesn't give me any particular directions. I just do what comes naturally. Could I interest you in doing me?"
"Well...." I looked about warily. Then I slid my hand up her thigh which she opened wider to reveal the rift between them. I inserted first one finger into the deep and then joined it with another. Such depths. A major wonder of interior architecture reached by this nice casement, this window ledge. Does it require a super-plus tampon to fill such a wide vagina? I would with no hesitation shove a prick as wide as the haft on a flashlight up you if that would please you. Bring you with speed and rectitude to a hammering climax and then politely withdraw. But fingers are nice. And more feasible in this narrow catbird seat. One. Two. Three of them inside you. To give you pleasure and then leave behind only a fading memory of the mastery of my hand.
Her eyelids drooped. They were dusted with a blue-grey make-up. She leaned her head contentedly on my shoulder and sighed. A slow languor clinging to her parted lips.
"Oh, my that's nice," she murmured. Her appreciation was genuine.
"What kind of business are you thinking of going into, Bess?"
"Mmmmmm I don't know. Does it matter?" She lay her head on my shoulder and wrapped her right arm around my neck, nuzzling at me with her eyes closed. Her arm tightened as though she were holding in some tempestuous energy. Something which began to amount to a major sensation. Her breath quickened.
"No, I guess not," I said. "What does April Webley expect to get out of subjugating me? An article in a business journal? I mean despite the previously lucid nature of her writing, it doesn't really seem publishable."
"Oh god oh god ummmmmhhhhh. She says it's incumbent on faculty to advance knowledge in their field. (Gasp.) She thinks that your Phoenician treasure isn't genuine and you'll need her to get tenure. Unnh. That will put you completely under her control."
"How thoughtful of her."
The contractions seized her at that instant, and she climbed half way up my chest. Her scream echoed through the cavern. Ariadne's shriek in the labyrinth. Clutching my thigh, she flopped her breasts and head over on the desk moaning softly.
There was a tapping of running feet here and there and alarmed male voices calling:
"Jesus-tit I don't know! Where do you think it came from?"
"Christ, it sounded like somebody being chopped up with an axe." I had scored a dramatic triumph.
* * *
I turned off past the RFD postboxes on their cedar posts and drove up the half mile stretch of dirt road to where Canby's house sat with my humble dwelling a hundred yards beyond. Dead limbs lay here and there on the road. Canby liked that as it discouraged unwanted visitors. Luckily, I owned a Toyota Landcruiser which had no difficulty with the obstacles. Canby's principal vehicle was an old Ford pick-up circa 1956.
On either side of the road was dense mixed hardwood and pine forest until it opened up onto the pasture with its barn and barbed wire fence. The green sward was picturesquely decorated by some beehives, a lone oak, fifteen cows and three horses. A small fenced-in hole in the ground was the site of the Phoenician discovery.
I passed Canby's Old West style log house with its curl of smoke coming from a rock chimney and drove on down the rutted cow path that led to my house, which Canby always referred to as 'the line rider's shack'.
Actually, it was a Swiss chalet that some demented student from the architecture school had put up as a senior year project. It had windowboxes, gables, and a small ginger bread balcony. Bedroom and bath upstairs. Kitchen downstairs opening into a high ceilinged living room with a stone fireplace and Franklin wood stove. There was a rickety front porch and an L-shaped porch around the back kitchen with an overhang and cedar post supports. The rear faced a babbling rocky brook called Beaver Creek.
The Toyota banged over large rocks and fallen limbs that I felt certain Canby deliberately placed there in his efforts to eradicate all roads and isolate himself in another century. As I rounded the last bend, I saw in front of the house a low slung, dark green Alfa Romeo, a car of such value that naturally it was not mine. I reasonably deduced that I had a visitor.
The front door yawned open. I crossed the porch with its stack of firewood and went inside. The house sat vacant and silent. Shadows cloaking the interior cool. Behind me, on the far side of the pasture, there was a faint cawing of crows.
"Hello?" I said. There was no answer. The creek behind the house rushed noisily. I walked through into the kitchen and out the open door there that led to the L-shaped porch.
She was sitting on one of the wicker chairs. Her legs curled up under her. One elbow resting on the cedar rail. Dappled with afternoon sunlight.
An houri from a seraglio painting by Delacroix or Ingres. Delacroix from the coloring of her deep brown nearly black hair and olive flesh; Ingres from the purity of the lines in her arms and face. Well-managed light direction, pose, rhythm of color.
The houri image is not contrived. Her sumptuous clothes were inspired, if not an exact copy, of a period of the Ottoman Empire in Greece. Fanciful red slippers on her feet with turned-up, pointed toes. Long flowing skirts with petticoats of contrasting colors. An embroidered, plumcolored, velvet vest brass-buttoned tightly across her bos oms with no shirt beneath. Bare arms and throat circled by brass and gold bracelets and necklaces in profusion.
"I am Madame Ingomar," she said, extending a braceletcovered arm for me to kiss her hand.
I took the proffered hand and pressed my lips to it, pausing to look down the length of arm at her sultry face. Dark flashing brown eyes, vermilion mouth, aquiline nose. Age? Perhaps a few years younger than myself. 30? 31?
"You're a professor of languages, aren't you?" I asked lamely. Unable to think of any daring lines, let alone imitate the manner of John Barrymore that her Garboesque manner seemed to require.
"I hold a doctorate from the School of Oriental Languages in Paris," she replied. Her accent was foreign, Mediterranean, exotic. A 'ziss' and 'zat' pronunciation.
"You're Greek?"
"With a small dash of Albanian. My late husband was Maltese Greek. He had commercial interests in Egypt where he died tragically when I was only nineteen. I was a child bride, married to him at sixteen."
With a clank of a braceleted arm, she indicated a hammered, niello copper coffee set which she had laid out on a low table. I nodded my approval, and she poured out the thick, sticky sweet and tepid Turkish coffee esteemed in the eastern Mediterranean. I sipped it meditatively in the prescribed fashion.
"It is a most seductive house you have," she remarked. "With the woodlands and birds and the boisterous stream."
"Yes," I said.
A silence ensued. She studied me with her dark eyes. A yellow throat warbler sang among the trees. "How did you get the Alfa in over these roads?" I asked. "I drove very slowly."
Another long silence. We finished our coffee. She poured from a small flask a green liqueur into two thimble-like glasses. I sniffed it. The smell was familiar. Arack. I sipped the burning liquid. For the first time, Madame Ingomar unwound her legs from beneath her and extended them, stretching like a cat. Even seated, it was clear that she was quite tall. Very tall for a Greek. Perhaps a tribute to the dash of Albanian.
From the floor, she lifted a long pipe called a chibook. Slender cherry-wood stem perhaps four feet in length; small earthenware bowl; curled amber mouthpiece. I had seen them in nineteenth century prints and knew them to have once been a staple part of the Greek domestic scene. Men carried them with their muskets, wearing fezes and sashes stuffed with yataghans, scimitars and silver-chased pistols.
The chibook required a companion, as the stem was so long that the smoker could not light it unaided. The bowl was packed with a brown, shredded substance. I lifted a box of wooden matches from her copper tray, struck fire, and applied it as she breathed deeply through the amber.
A faint blue-grey line of smoke trickled from her nostrils and slightly parted lips. She handed me the pipe with a lovely, bare arm encircled with gold. I drew from it and inhaled. The effect was powerful even for Turkish tobacco. Was it laced with some foreign substance? Hemp perhaps? As if in answer, she recited a song in Greek and then translated. A manga song in praise of hashish:
"In the evening hookah reverence, cry the fishermen, Silence now! Be still!
See the mangos in their numbers
Breathing in the Turkish weed...."
We traded the pipe several times, after each draw cleansing our palates with small drops of arack. The world began to take on a dreamy quality. Time passed like a leaf drifting on water until her fingers began unbuttoning her vest, one slow button after the next; unmasking as at a costume ball.
I said nothing, only gaped in my drugged stupor.
As she reached the bottom, her bosoms tumbled out. She shucked the vest and pulled the band from her hair. She stood up and lifted her arms, slightly bent at the elbows, fists closed, biceps tensed as though lifting an invisible barbell.
The minimal sag to her bosoms vanished with the lift of the pectoral muscles, and they took on heroic proportions. But the over-all effect was self-evident. The layered ruffled skirt, the bare upper torso, the up-lifted movement of the arms and the hair in thick, whorled strands reaching to the waist. It was the image of the Mother Goddess from the Phoenician civilization. The oldest known deity of civilization; the Goddess worshipped around the Mediterranean as Tank or Aslitoroth or Astarte. The recognition was unstartling, serene, painless. But the hands were empty, clutching only air.
"Where are the snakes?" I mumbled sleepily, senses lulled, mood swerving from cloudy past to hypothetical future and back again.
Her voice was level, yet not solemn. "The snake is the oldest symbol of rebirth and regeneration. In shedding its skin annually, it symbolizes Spring planting, life after death, what you will."
"The male member," I added.
"That too, although for centuries, its symbol was sublimated by prudery so ancient that even the Hebrews perverted the true legend in their Garden of Eden story."
"Until a Jewish doctor named Freud unearthed the truth and shocked the world."
She smiled. "I knew you were worthy of trust."
"I know a few things," I said stupidly. "That the secret of procreation was hidden by priestesses from doltish men for thousands of years. That it was that very discovery which made possible male gods and male domination. The falling into desuetude of the old earth and com goddesses. Their replacement with sun and lightning gods. Zeus and Odin. Baal and Osiris."
She lowered her arms and lounged back against one of the roof supports, her arms behind her back, shoulders slightly forward, breasts out-thrust, deep rose nipples slowly gathering as her relish in the tale grew. I had imagined such breasts before, but only in indistinct visions, often clouded over or cast into shadow. I longed to press my lips to the apexes of those domes.
"I am most interested in your discovery here on this small farm." she said.
"Oh?" I was long past committing myself on the subject of the Phoenician artifact. Everyone was interested after all: scientists, archeologists, slavering dogs of the press, and common rubbernecks. But she had a knowing manner that made me cautious.
"A man of your learning is of course aware that all over America there are strange rock formations, burial mounds containing improbable objects unrelated to the native Indian culture."
"The stone elephant pipe bowls found in Minnesota and Iowa, you mean?"
"Yes, there are too many of these rock structures to have been made by European visitors. Presumably, some were piled by Indian imitators. But somewhere there must be evidence of the group of Phoenicians or Carthaginians who actually visited these shores."
"Do you think that what I have found is that evidence?"
Through the lime green of new Spring leaves, slanting sunlight glinted on the stream. She touched the tiny glass of arack to her lips and said:
"I am certain of it. The Indian artifacts belong to a period around 800 B.C. A soapstone oval basin-before the period of pottery. A stone weight used on an atlatl or spear thrower before the period of bows and arrows. Stemmed spear points-likewise before the triangular arrow points. A grooved axe with the groove running all around the head. Some clam shells brought up from the coast of course. A conch shell used for ceremonial purposes. These artifacts are very old indeed. Pre-dating the period of the historical tribes."
"Yes," I said.
"There was no copper, neither axes or beads, breastplates or ornaments. Yet we find a copper amphora engraved with the image of Astarte, the Phoenician Mother Goddess. The Phoenicians had copper and bronze in this period."
"What do you propose?" I asked.
"That you make me a partner in your venture."
"What's in it for me?" The smoke was slowly annihilating my normal brain patterns, and I thought I was being crafty. In fact, it was only vulgarity. I continued to puff at the pipe, and my glass was filled and refilled magically.
"I am a staunch admirer of your writing."
"You mean my three articles in the Journal of Art History?"
"I know of course that they are criticized as being unacademic. You refuse to modify your passion for beauty. You are a man with a natural feel for authenticity. You know instinctively what you found while the rest of the intellectual world in its cultivated ignorance remains doubtful and suspicious. You are also a man who desires a divine insight; wishes to encompass and comprehend the ebb and flow of history. There are secrets that I could impart to you. Deep mysteries that I could help you explore. You see, what I am offering you is more than a commercial joint venture. What the Greeks call Psychadelphosyne-a soul kinship."
She paused and touched her lips with a pointed tongue. "I would bestow particular favors on you. The strange taboos of the Phoenicians last even into modern times. The Catholic Church flying into an affrighted frenzy at the idea of small boys pulling their penises until the milky liquid comes free."
"An ancient racial memory?" I queried. "A tendency to conceal the male elixir that is the egg's catalyst and makes life spring into being?"
"Perhaps," she mused. "It was publicly taught in Phoenicia that running waters impregnated young girls. The truth was a secret known only to certain priestess cults. There was even a bogus water ritual in the Spring to conceal the effect of the sexual coupling that warm weather always brings out in people who dwell in poorly heated habitations."
"A water ritual?"
"Men were only observers," she said provocatively. "And it was required that they be naked for that and first chastised with bundles of birch rods."
I eagerly succumbed to the invitation, beginning to unbutton my shirt, reciting aloud from Euripedes' The Bacchae:
"Joyous is he who masters divine ritual, cleanses his soul and sets his being to god-like madness in the hills, delves the mysteries of the Great Mother, crowns himself with ivy in servitude to Dionysius."
She smiled knowingly and glided down the steps of the porch. "You need salvation in my form. We are inexorably bound." I followed, strewing clothes along the steep, eroded path that led down to the rock-strewn watercourse. The world had become a green and brown blur that did nothing to disturb the throbbing of my stiff rod persistently asserting its force. She seemed to fade and recede, and I ran faster. Stumbled and fell. Got up. Raced on. Burst into peals of hysterical and unreasonable laughter.
I awoke in the dark, shivering cold with the water running over my body in the shallow creek. Penis shrunk to a nonentity. Back aching and covered with thin, red weals. I stood up to my knees in the water wondering why I hadn't drowned.
My head seemed marvelously cleared. A horned moon and the Dog Star occupied the heavens. An owl gave its thin cry from the trees. My thoughts probed for memory like an amnesiac. The hauntingly seductive Madame Ingomar was gone of course.
* * *
Around seven o'clock on a Friday evening, Canby, Royal and I drove towards the University town in their old Ford pick-up with a load of amplifiers and other rock and roll gear in the back. I was going to help him set up in a club called Your Aunt's Underwear and disassemble when the night's performance was over. It seemed a reasonable price to pay for a night of free beer swilling and gaping at honeys while he played hard rock and roll. The evening was warm, and we drove in the gathering darkness with the windows down. Royal sat in the middle. She had been into uppers since four that afternoon and had been making little sense.
Canby sat with his left elbow out the window, driving with his right hand and occasionally swigging from a pint bottle of Old Granddad. He was wearing an old bowler hat, collarless striped shirt and yellow suspenders. The wind ruffled his beard and would occasionally catch a strand of the hair around his ears and buffet it.
"I've found something of interest," said Canby. For weeks now, he had been absorbed in studying the regional Indians, a continuous probe in the Southern Archives Collection in the library to ferret out clues on the artifacts we had un covered. He was convinced he would find clues to early explorers like the Phoenicians who had crossed the Atlantic. Canby would have made a terrific scholar except for his nonconformist attitudes. The purgatory I was going through trying to get tenure was something incomprehensible to him. Of course, having a big legacy from your grandmother always helps if you want to be a free-living crank.
"What's that?" I asked. I took the pint bottle he handed to me and swigged from it.
"I've been going at random through the newspapers from back centuries." He took the pint back and took a swig himself. It was like him to spend days before a microfiche viewer reading randomly, piling up obscure data.
"When I lived in Port Royal," interrupted Royal, "in the summers I would often walk along the rim of the cliffs at night putting fireflies in my hair."
We ignored her. It was part of her dream world. There were no cliffs in Port Royal. And whatever else she would tell you while on a Port Royal-jag was bogus as well. It was an invention of hers to have come from some Deep South decayed gentry background where everyone was terribly artistic and slightly mad.
"I've run across two things," said Canby. He stuck a Camel between his lips and struck a match. The flame glowed on his face as he cupped his hands around it. "A newspaper article from upstate New York. Finger Lakes district. January 9, 1836. An old Tuscarora Indian died. He had been the town drunk for ages and was reckoned to be as old as Methuselah. According to the Indian, name of Otwingo, he had been the last living survivor of the big trek out of the South back in the eighteenth century. You're familiar with that aren't you?"
"You mean how the Indians pulled up stakes and moved to New York after the Tuscarora War and joined the five nations of Iroquois? Becoming the sixth?"
"Yeh."
"Hell, that was back in the 1720's wasn't it? That would make him pretty old all right. So what's that have to do with the burial mound?"
"The war ran 1711-14. The Indians didn't really pull out until the 1760's. And Otwingo was a child at the time by his own admission, but you're right. That still makes him old. But I figure good whisky preserves a man." Canby took the cigarette from his mouth and drank from the pint again. A car's headlights glowed in our faces and then flashed past and vanished.
"Go cn," I said, impatiently taking the bottle back.
"Anyhow, among other crazy yarns about the old days, he had one about a forgotten dance they used to do. Wearing long horns on their heads. Seems at one time, some men from out of the sea came to their village and taught them the dance. They did it in the Spring and even had forgotten what it was for."
"Buffalo horns?"
"Well, we know the bison did still live east of the Appalachians at that time. But then there's that business you were telling me about the horns of Baal, the lord of the flies. The Phoenicians worshipped him as one of their earlier male gods."
"When the great Mother Goddess began to be pushed into the ground," I added. "But how can you say that shows the existence of the Phoenicians in Indian culture?"
"Research, Spender, research. I'm getting the facts together slowly." He shook his head with discouragement. "I don't know why I'm so worried about keeping you around. You're a royal pain in the ass."
I ignored him, the proverbial water off a duck's back. "Possibly. What's the other story?"
"Found the other in a diary of one William Anthony Bullward or Bolward-he spelled it both ways-dating to the Tuscarora War itself. He was a planter on Cape Fear and captain of the local militia. He had an account of an attack on the Indian town of Catechna. King Hancock's stockade. Seems that when they made the rush, they were met with a fusillade of sling stones and several of his men had their skulls cracked open, causing them to beat a retreat."
"Sling stones?"
"Right."
"I've never heard of Indians using slings."
"You haven't because they didn't. This description is unique. However, as you well know, Mediterranean type folks like the Phoenicians used them. David killed Goliath with one. Two and two equals four and all that."
"Rum stuff," I said.
"Rum indeed."
We drove in silence to the middle of the town and on Altamont Street parked the truck and humped the gear into the long cinderblock one-story building that served as a collegiate nightclub. A neon sign outlining a frilly pair of pink underpants marked the entrance. The kids were already packing in, swilling beer and listening to recorded music. When we had everything set up, I sat over in the corner next to Royal behind a mixer board which she managed in her chore of sound modulator. The maze of knobs and dials seemed to fascinate her and she smiled wanly at them.
I got six long-neck bottles of beer and set them up in a row on the table. When things got going, it would be impossible to get near the bar. Canby and the other four musicians of a band called the 'Fair-dinkum Swagmen' warmed up and began sending full blast sound through the amps. Curious Aussie theme music like all of Canby's music, but the crowd seemed to like it.
"Adelaide Adelaide
Got laid in the shade
Before I took her home to Momma."
I ignored the lyrics and let the heavy beat wash over me and carry me off into a visual world of daydreaming about the bodies on the little honeys who were dancing. Boobs flopping. Denim shirts unbuttoned and knotted at the waist. Tight shorts that gathered in the crease of the butt. As representative a Bacchanale as one could ever hope to witness in the modern world.
Royal's hand snaked out and took the beer from my grasp. She drank then paused, staring at the long neck of the bottle. She ran her hand up and down it. It seemed to remind her of something important. She turned and looked at me dreamfly.
"That was the best fuck I've had in years," she said. "You mean the other night?"
"Yeh. In fact, that was probably the best I've had since I was fifteen years old."
I regarded her warily and went back to watching the gyrations of the dancers.
"So what do you think?" she demanded. "That Canby is some kind of a turn-on with that peg leg and all? Always reading and drinking beer in bed. Christ, gimmie a break will ya?"
"Take it easy will you?" I replied. "So what happened when you were fifteen that was so special?"
She paused and tucked loose strands of black hair back behind her ears. She was awfully good looking. Her blouse was unbuttoned half way down, and I could see inside to her boyish bosoms set with pink rose nipples.
"The Beatles came to town," she said. "Well, they didn't really come to Port Royal, but they were on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought it was the most moving thing I had ever seen in my life. I shrieked along with the other girls in New York so loud that my mom left the trailer and went over to a neighbor's."
"And then what?"
"Well, anyhow, after it was over, I called up this guy I was dating at the time-Bubba Creech-he was a senior in high school and drove an old yellow Chevy convertible that everybody called a 'milk wagon'. Well I was so shaken by the experience of seeing the Beatles for the first time that when he started putting the moves on me I didn't fight it. I let him go all the way. We were out in his car up some sandy trail at the time."
"He was pretty good was he?"
"Him? No, he was awful. Shot off in nothing flat. Almost before he had gotten it in me. Or so it seemed. A lot of the 'come' got all over my tummy and underpants."
"Did it hurt?"
"No, I wasn't a virgin in that sense. I had already been busted sitting on his thumb and stuff."
"So what was so great about it?"
"Well, I got really pissed at him squirting all over me, and then I got to thinking how he hadn't even used a Trojan rubber or anything, and that made me ever madder. So I got to bitching at him, and he reached over in the back seat and pulled out this Wiffle ball bat and hit me over the head with it. Whap. Just like that."
"You mean one of those yellow plastic things?"
"Yeh, that're hollow in the middle. It doesn't really hurt or anything. In fact we cracked up laughing about it. Well anyhow, the design of the thing was pretty suggestive, and we got to speculating about whether it would fit inside of me."
"The large or the small end?"
"The large one."
"Did it?"
"You bet. The cunt's elastic-sided. Babies come out of it after all. Of course I had his 'come' inside me to grease the way. But I lay back on the seat, and he shoved the thing right into me and started moving back and forth. It was an incredible experience. I simply lost all control and started to flop around all over the car, and he kept pulling it out and shoving it back in, and finally when I had an orgasm, I started screaming uncontrollably. He figured he had busted something inside of me. Scared the living shit out of him."
"Now let me get this straight," I said. "You're comparing my dick to the business end of a Wiffle ball bat?"
"Well of course it's not as big or anything like that. There was just something about the way you applied it that brought the same spasms out of me. Made me feel like a comet falling through space."
"I suppose that is flattery of a high order."
"I want to be fucked again."
"Royal, I don't know. I mean I enjoyed it and all, but I don't claim to understand you and Canby, and I sure hate to mess around in an area that could grow to be a problem."
"Don't be such a bore, Jack. I've known you for thirteen years. Many's the time you've thought about screwing me. Don't think I haven't noticed you staring fixedly at my ass. And think about all those times in the summer when everyone would go swimming down in the deep end of Beaver Creek, and you and I would get into those drunken, screaming mud fights."
"Yeh? What about them?"
"What about them? Why it was your standard juvenile mannner of showing attraction to one another a la thirteen years old."
"You've been reading pop psychology again," I said, exasperated.
"Don't try to shit me, Jack. Everyone noticed."
"Royal, you and Canby are my friends."
"So what? Canby wants us to, in case you missed it. Anyhow, our marriage is over. Do you know I haven't been fucked properly once during eleven years of marriage?"
"Look, Royal...."
"I mean it, Jack," she interrupted, her voice hard and determined. "I want it, and I want it now."
"Now?" I said incredulously. "Now."
"The room is packed with people."
"They can't see us wedged in this comer behind all the equipment. We'll do it sitting up. I mean are we here to have a good time, or what?"
"I'm not going to do it," I said firmly.
Her voice became cajoling, but the threat overt. "Jack, let me put it in language that you can understand. You're going to fuck me now and any other time I want it. And do you know why you're going to do it?"
I stared at her edgily. "No, why?"
"Because if you don't I'll pull some stunt that will not only deny you tenure, but probably get you summarily fired without the customary one year's grace."
"What could you do?" I asked warily.
"Run naked through your classroom for starters. And allow myself to get caught by the campus police. Then tell them that you paid me to do it so as to shake your kids out of their bourgeois lethargy."
I laid my head against the mixer board and closed my eyes.
"Excuse me while I go winky-tink," she said cutely and stood up and headed for the restroom.
I rubbed my eyes. Royal was shot full of uncertain moods and passions. And a deep streak of madness. Put another way, Royal was plumb crazy. People had been saying it for years. You could see it in her eyes. I had known it for thirteen years. It was just that it seemed okay back when we were twenty years old and college juniors. Now I was trapped. There was no point in playing truant by fleeing the club. When she got vengeance in her mind, she carried it out. That was a known characteristic that any number of people could testify to. It reminded me of a pop psychology article I had once read. The irresistible urge to perform a repetitive, stereotyped act. Did that apply to fucking?
She reappeared and sat back down. "Ready?" she asked.
"I can't get it up," I argued. "You saw how I was under pressure back at your house."
"You were cold then, and besides, Canby was listening."
"I suppose it's different to have two hundred screaming college kids around?"
"I know you," she said. "Reach inside my blouse."
"What for?"
"Just shut up and do what I say will you? I don't know what's wrong with you. Christ, some people just can't seem to take the G-force of life."
I reached inside and fondled her small breasts. Her nipples were standing straight out. Her breasts so coy and reticent in contradistinction to the manifest sense of permanence about her rump. She leaned against me and nuzzled around my ear. She smelled of perfume; Lair du temps.
She nipped my ear lobe with her teeth and licked lightly along my jaw line with the point of her tongue. Impossible not to be provoked. My dick formed into a hard lump despite my attempt to remember just exactly how the binomial theorem worked.
She unzipped me and pulled it out, let it assume its personality. It was dark in our corner and arguably no one could see us. She unsnapped her jeans and hooked her thumbs in the top. Raising herself slightly, she slid them over her hips to just below her crotch. She was wearing no underwear. Instinctively, I looked at her purse on the floor and saw a tip of pink material and a scrap of lace peeking out. She had taken them off in the restroom.
She lifted one of my hands and guided it inside of her. The interior was greasy, as if with Vaseline. Or hearty desire.
"You see, it's going to work just fine."
She stood up, her body below her stomach even then hidden by the mixer board. She straddled my legs, and using a hand to hold my shaft steady, aimed and pegged herself in one sliding greasy motion. Warmth spread over me like a southern sea. She settled onto my lap, my hands steadying her hips.
"God that's cozy," she shouted above the noise of the band. They were playing a song designed to be rugged and down-under, yet hip and fuck-you-world. The refrain went:
"I got a fair hump
Castrating sheep
At the Alice Spring's Ball."
The dance floor was packed with boogying girls and boys, a polyglot crowd doing a fair imitation of El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal. I looked around Royal's shoulder and visually latched onto a particular familiar figure. It was the blonde girl, Connie Vaudrey. She was wearing a black onepiece bathing suit with Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans. The spaghetti straps left her upper torso bare, and as she danced, her breasts swayed and bounced, almost bursting from their fastenings. Her hair tossed in a flash of white gold, and occasionally a beam of light would glance from her teeth. I didn't even notice the lug she was dancing with, I was so obsessively intent on the lavish creation of her body.
Royal had her feet apart and was swaying and jerking with the music. Periodically, she would take a swig of beer, dribbling a bit of foam down the front of her blouse. I never mind admitting that I have a good eight inches extended, and she took it all inside of her without difficulty.
She calmed down a bit between songs, but resumed again as soon as the music started. I lived with a morbid dread that they were going to end the set and someone would come over to talk to us. But Connie Vaudrey couldn't stay off the dance floor, and in some respects it was the ultimate in voyeuristic experience to think of another girl's flailing body while you had your end riveted up Royal. Fantasy blended with reality.
Midway through a song called Slobbering Drunk in Sydney, Royal felt the first surge of the long rise, and she began to moan from down low in her throat. As it quickened to a fiery intensity, she began to shriek and yell, creating a strange mosaic of noise and gesture. It was a raucous crowd, and the noise level was pretty high anyway, but I leaned forward and turned the amps up to a thunderous velocity just to be on the safe side.
Royal clutched the table in front of us, and then the chair behind me. She clutched at my thighs and then at my head. I dragged her hands from my hair to prevent her tearing it out by the roots. She tore open her blouse and massaged her breasts furiously with her head thrown back over my shoulder and her hair lashing my back. At last she settled on pulling upwards on my legs so violently that the chair began to totter. As the final explosion shot through her, we toppled over with her bellowing:
"OH ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK!"
She lay prostrate on the floor, gasping and choking like someone pulled from the sea while drowning. Face down, rump trembling with her pleasured anguish. The rump that lived in fear of intrusion, yet would bare itself in public places.
* * *
On Monday, I ran into Canby on the campus, and he buttonholed me with some pertinent information. He had gone to the county seat in Wakeboro and searched the title to his farm back to pre-Revolutionary days. On a deed marked 1748, he had found the surveyor's direction "by the due North four chains from the old cairn also called Sacrifice Rock or Occaneechee Gravestone."
The Occaneechee were Eastern Sioux who lived in what is now Montrose County during the seventeenth-century. Canby was convinced that significant artifacts could be found on his property by studying the old plat maps and surveyor's descriptions.
He had also found a newspaper account from 1856 about a plowhorse falling into a field cave when a crust of earth gave way. The farmer found a rock lined cave which professors from the University looked at but could not connect with any known Indian group. The Indians did not work in stone.
"Where is the site?" I asked. "Over near Badger Dance."
"Is it still there?"
"Yep, a wall about four feet high, oh maybe sixty yards long. Farmer filled in the hole and used the rocks for a wall. A mute testimony to folks who passed this way."
"There were that many rocks in the cave?"
"Nope. He incorporated what there was with some others. I figure I can turn them all over inside of a week. Maybe find some trace of the Phoenician alphabet or symbols or something."
When I got home at two in the afternoon, I found the cows down at my end of the field staring across the fence at a forest green Lincoln Continental. I recognized it as April Webley's car. Very top executive. Much more aggressive and go-ahead than her husband's Volvo. I speculated as to how she had ever gotten the behemoth down the narrow path.
I stepped up onto the porch and entered the house. It was shadowy inside and cool from air circulating up from the creek. Soon insects of all varieties would begin nesting indoors and join the flying squirrels.
I called out, but no one answered, so I reasoned she was down at the creek. I went into the kitchen, nosed in the refrigerator, and got out a Blue Ribbon beer; popped the top on it and took a long draught. Then I thought about the bedroom and climbed the narrow staircase with beer in hand.
An artificial scent of apricots struck my nose. My bed had been stripped down except for the bottom fitted sheet. Stretched out on it was the long form of the girl Bess. Unabashedly, stark naked. Legs crossed at the ankles. Bush showing redly in the afternoon sun that filtered through the tree leaves and the dusty glass of the window. Breasts slightly slumped off center from her chest. Arms extended above her head and handcuffed to the brass railings.
I paused and took a sip of the beer. The cloying scent of apricots was stronger yet. Bess had drenched herself in it.
She turned her head, enveloped in the great lion's mane of hair and smiled at me.
"Well," I said. "Did you manage this all on your own? Or with assistance?"
She bent one leg at the knee and rubbed it along her other thigh, writhing slightly, giving a good imitation of a Celtic slave girl half-fearing, half-wanting to be brutally raped by her captor. "It wasn't hard to manage," she explained. She chewed a lip tentatively.
Miss Ogletree, you would drink grocery store wine and not know that it was vile. Eat pizza chicken bravo and feel continental. Tell your date that you liked spontaneity and think yourself original. Yet even drunk and impotent, I would wedge my limpid prick inside you with a yardstick.
"Am I expected to keep you chained here for days?" I asked. "I mean, did you swallow the key to the handcuffs or what?"
"I'm helpless," she said. "Every orifice of my body is open to you. You may do as you wish. But please ... "she paused almost believably-"Please be gentle."
"What am I supposed to feed you while you're here? Ambrosia and raw oysters? Or merely raw penis?"
The door to my wardrobe opened, and April Webley stepped out. "Oh for shit sake, Spender," she exclaimed. "No wonder you can't get into the swim with amateur acting like this. Bess, I'm going to send you back to kindergarten. I expected Broadway, and instead I get dinner theatre."
"I'm sorry, Dr. Webley," said Bess contritely.
I looked April up and down. She was wearing a pale blue georgette blouse with pleated front and ruffed collar and cuffs, the neck tied with a small bow. Bare legs. High heeled shoes called Candies. Her blouse hung at a length that liberally exposed her shapely legs, but made it impossible to ascertain if she was wearing panties.
"April, this is tacky," I said. "All you lack is black stocking and garter belts. And the cheap scent. I mean what am I? Some over-sixty pervert?"
"We all have our little well-springs of hidden desire," said April. "And I'm convinced I've found yours." She brandished a riding whip such as is used for polo or dressage. A button-like knob at one end and a long thin stem of wire at the core tightly wrapped in cord.
Yet such legs. April Webley, can it be true that vitamin nutritional supplements and stretching to exercise records did this for you? Bend. Together. Straighten. Apart. Together.
"April, I'll be happy to fuck the girl if that's what you want. You can even watch from inside the wardrobe. But you don't have to beat her."
At the mention of the word 'beat', Bess looked around and noticed the whip for the first time. She appeared genuinely worried.
"This little minx needs her bottom warmed," said April. "I'll bring out the natural actress in her and make her worthy of Hollywood. Now you take your clothes off and be ready to expand your plant and equipment."
"Dr. Webley," protested Bess. "You promised you wouldn't hurt me!"
"Put the whip up, April," I ordered.
She turned on me with an air of menace. "I can take the Galahad instinct out of you with one simple word," she said. "The real challenge is to make that hunk of meat between your legs into a supply-side growth model."
"One word?"
"Tenure," she sneered.
"Point taken," I said, feeling already a bit like a stud lot slave and priapic performer. I shucked my clothes and stood naked before them. My prick, unleashed in the open air, rose robustly at the sight of all their flesh. Tall as a minaret.
"Oooo that's nice," admired Bess. "Dr. Webley, couldn't he just fuck me? Wouldn't that serve the same purpose?"
"A little pain is a small price to pay for your emancipation, my dear," said April. She ran the point of the whip up the inside of Bess' thigh and fished in the thick texture of her red pubic hair.
Bess held her legs clamped together. Her eyes opened wide with fear. With a slight swish of the whip, April gave Bess the least pop along the edge of her thigh. Bess yelped and rolled onto her stomach, turning away from the pain with the instinct that an animal displays in biting at a wound. Coiling herself into the prenatal position. Uncoiling with a kick of the legs.
The handcuffs clanked against the brass of the bed. Her lovely rump revealed itself jutting high as she crushed her breasts into the bed. It was an irresistible opportunity. The whip came back in a blur and then swished down with a stinging crack.
"Oh Jesus!" Bess shrieked. "Please!"
A red line marked both cheeks of her posterior. The whip flashed twice more successively and the pops sounded nearly as one.
"Oh God stop!" screamed Bess. "Please you promised you wouldn't!" Tears choked her voice, and her body heaved with turbulent emotion. She flipped onto her back and scrubbed her rump into the bed trying to expel the pain.
April laid the whip up against the bed as though keeping it handy for any sudden impulse. She kicked off her shoes, thereby lowering herself three inches. Lovely bare petite feet with their weekly pedicure so the half moons showed on all the toenails.
Standing flat-footed on the floor, she slowly untied the bow at her throat. Unbuttoned her cuffs. The buttons down the front of her blouse. Her breasts stood up high and proud, making their maiden appearance in a novel and revealing frankness. Structures that could be over-praised, perhaps like the Alban hills or the Roman Colosseum. But still admirable.
Her nipples were taut and pointed with the fire that seemed to be flowing through her. All that clothed her body were panties so tiny as to be only a string on each hip. Tiny forest green patches fore and aft. Triangular. Nothing more than the prophecy of the 'V in her crotch. And the open pale blue blouse.
Without a word, April climbed onto the bed and rested on her hands and knees, poised over Bess' helpless body. Bess arched her back, humping her pelvis toward April. Offering herself. Her lovely vagina untenanted and desiring a tongue.
"Please take it! I won't resist like before! Please, I want you to have it!"
Bess drew her knees up and then extended her long legs, dividing them the very width of the bed. "Please take it! Can't you see how I want it? Touch it! I'm wet for you! Touch it!"
April ran a finger through the rusty pubic hair and held it up for me to admire like a measure of gauge of the interior length. It was glistening. April smiled knowingly. "Do you see how she longs for me? How the sting of the lash brings out the hidden desires in all of us? You should see the effect I get with the senior vice presidents at the sales meetings at the Humpback Ridge Motor Lodge in New Jersey."
She dipped her head and nuzzled the soft inside curve of Bess' thighs. Bess tensed her legs, making the muscles quiver. April paused. Waited. Then deftly plunged her tongue down into the russet bush.
Bess groaned aloud and drew her knees up. Her eyes were closed, and she writhed the upper part of her torso and shook her breasts about. April continued to apply her tongue with intervals in between each application, and Bess wept and shook with longing and desire. "Please give me yours! Let my hands free so I can touch you! So I can take your breasts in my hands!"
April reversed herself and backed over Bess, lowering her crotch so it was just over her face, holding it there patched in deep green just too far away. Tantalizing.
Bess groaned more and struggled against the handcuffs as April delved again with her tongue, this time dividing the lips of the cunt with a thumb and forefinger and then working her tongue in the open space. A prodigy of timing and skill.
Then April lowered herself so Bess could get at her. Bess nuzzled inside the tiny panties, forcing them aside with her nose and chin and sliding her tongue into the moist space. April gasped audibly, but conquered whatever urges she might have been feeling and lifted her face from Bess' crotch, making a gesture with her hand to offer it to me.
I crawled onto the bed, forming a triangle with our bodies; the classic menage a trois in geometric shapes. The actual split matching our tempera mental differences: April with her painstaking, scientific method simply ignoring Bess' frantic plundering of her and going slowly to preserve me the longest; I, impetuously pushing Bess to the immediate limits of her longing.
April took the head of my penis between her wet lips as I nuzzled close into the red bush. The aroma was a surprise. Not of apricots at all. I had expected her to have even douched with the cloying scent. Instead, it was more natural and thus all the more desirable.
I plunged my tongue into the recess. The taste was like a gigantic truffle, a bit mushroom-like, a bit like the wet floor of a forest. I was cheerfully gluttonous, but I had scarcely begun when Bess climaxed violently, punctuating it by throwing her head back and screaming the way she had in the library. I drew out to avoid having my head crushed in the nutcracker of her thighs and to admire the general effect of her expunged lust.
April leered at me with a disconcerting luster in her eyes. "Take the whip to her," she directed. "She'll rise with passion at each application. You can make her climax repeatedly until she faints with exhaustion."
It was a challenging suggestion, but April held a greater fascination. Call it the beast in me. To master the wife of the wretched Milquetoast man who held my tenure in his grasp. A proud unconquerable beauty. She was worthy to be married to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun.
And I had never seen her breasts before. Her nipples small, boyish, yet set in large firm breasts. Because of their small size, less than sensuous, yet a challenge to bring the longing pouring out of these milch-kine contraptions. Irresistible. And I have never been described as a pained, liberal humanist, drawing back from a thrill because of some moral judgment.
I slid an arm through April's and wrapped my hand through and over the back of her neck in a neat half nelson, forcing her face down into the mattress. Startled, she began to kick and struggle. Her indignant objections were muffled by the mattress. I put my knee into her back and kept her firmly down while I reached with my free hand in a drawer in the bedside table and brought out my stiletto. With a flick of the button, the wicked blade opened, six inches of gleaming steel.
"Let me dress you for success," I said. I slid the blade under the spaghetti strand that held her panties on her hips and clipped it like cutting the string on a package. It filled me with an exultant lust.
April's buttock's were bare now, pinching together and opening like a respirating animal. They seemed to be clamoring for attention. The excitement was on me, and I slashed open the back of her blouse, cutting the lacy garment from stem to stern. Then I chucked the knife back into the drawer and got out the long strand of blue ribbon that was in there. I flipped April over with the half nelson still on her and got my body parallel to hers. Free of the mattress, she began to abuse me.
"Goddam you! What the hell do you think you're doing? That blouse came from Saks!"
Once again, I flipped her onto her stomach and twisted both hands behind her back, tying them together with a clove hitch. Nice and tight so it would bite into her. Very nice. Trussed, bound and helpless with blue Christmas ribbon.
Then I got off of her and let her kick over onto her back. Daffodil yellow bush showing like a flag. Legs slightly apart. Panting for breath. Abdomen pressed forward by the arms bound behind her back.
"You can't do this to me!" she snarled. "I'll see to it that my wretched husband never gives you tenure! You and your stupid copper amphora! It's a goddam hoax and once it's exposed you'll be ruined!"
It was an ugly threat and almost made me lose my erection. To ensure that I didn't have to listen to it again, I got a roll of masking tape out of the drawer and taped her mouth shut. Muffled shrieks came from behind the tape, and her eyes rolled expressive of growing fear.
Then, thinking of the whip, I brandished it and caught her just on the calf of the leg. A muffled scream came from behind the tape. Bess watched with groggy, subdued awe as April turned over and vainly struggled to get off the bed and escape me. Smarting from the blow.
I caught her by her bound hands and lashed her three quick ones in succession across her nice rump. She writhed desperately and screamed again like a stricken soul at the bottom of the ocean. I gave her two more for good measure, and she fought to get over on her back like Bess, scrubbing her behind into the sheet, yelping like a barking fox. Like Bess, too, her legs were apart and offering themselves in wet rapture.
"Now," I announced. "Wrestle with this like a major budget and tax decision."
I plunged in up to the hilt. She tossed her head from side to side, tangling her hair across her face. I nuzzled her eyes and ears and she tossed her head violently again, nearly breaking my nose with her jaw. I settled for exploiting her from the neck down, sucking on a breast, drawing the nipple up until it had the consistency of a pink raisin, and thus melting the ice in her body.
I could feel April fighting against the pleasure that was growing in her. Struggling against the urge to climax. I took my time, rubbing the risen clitoris with slow piston strokes and then sucking at the nipple. Her sustained resistance made her all the more difficult to bring off.
Then her body convulsed, lifting me up as she raised her torso like a Chinese hump-backed bridge such as one sees on Willow Pattern porcelain. When she collapsed, she was weeping violently, tears rolling down her face, running the mascara of her eyes in dark rivulets. Leaving a trail like the mask of a mime.
I abruptly plunged back into Bess and began doing a shimmering duet with her as well. She seemed a bit uneasy with the stylized movements required of someone with their hands locked to a bed frame, but her face held an expression of dream-like ecstasy. I clung to her bottom-most roundings and applied a vigorous, direct style.
"Mmmmm," she said. "I'll have mine with cream and sugar."
April slid off the bed and fell heavily on the floor. She crawled into the corner, blouse hanging in tatters, mouth and hands bound, weeping in small, choking gulps. Her hair, wet by her tears, plastered in strands to her face.
I worked Bess into another frenzy. Such a luscious red lollipop of a girl. She groaned, twisted, gyrated. I shot into her just as she came in a convulsive spasm as well. It felt as though I had hosed gallons of the elixir into her. We lay there beside each other wet and spent, panting for breath and listening to April sob like a dripping water tap. As my prick subsided, diminished in its primitive power.
"The key to the handcuffs is in the side compartment of her pocketbook," Bess volunteered. I rummaged in the accumulated junk, found the key, and released her. Bess sat up in bed, rubbing her wrists, eyes gleaming with frank admiration.
"Gosh that was good," she said at last. "I wish you taught in the Business Department."
"Everyone needs a few art history electives," I said.
"Do you think we ought to untie Dr. Webley?"
I got up and gave April's ribbons a jerk, and the knots slipped loose. She tore off the masking tape, red lipstick adhering to the inside of it. April did not take the humbling of her pride at all well, simultaneously cursing and weeping bitterly. Bess had meantime begun to slip into her clothes. A one piece aquamarine bathing suit, railroad striped Levis, and Scholl sandals. No underwear of course.
"You cock sucker!" April railed at me. "You can't treat me like this! I'll have your balls!"
"Gosh, Dr. Webley," interjected Bess, "if this in any way is my fault, I'll certainly...."
April cut her off. "She was the one!" She screamed, gesturing at Bess. "I offered her to you! No one treats me like that! No one ties me up like that!" Her voice reached a hysterical pitch. "You and your goddam pernicious macho fantasies!"
"Find it a bit humiliating?" I said, perhaps a trifle too smugly. "No concept of turn and turn about?"
"You ... you faggot!" April yelled.
I didn't bother to point out how this set her schedule of liberation back or how her control unit seemed to take to the experiment a lot better than she did. April was too busy snatching up her clothes in her arms and rushing naked down the stairs. Bess smiled sheepishly at me, shrugged and followed her out. I heard two car doors slam and the engine start up with a roar.
I shambled down the stairs buck naked and stood in the front door just as April put the car in reverse, and with gravel spitting out from under the wheels and dust billowing, backed up against the house hitting the porch with a crack that sent a shiver through the entire structure. She spun the power steering, jerked the stick down into forward gear and lurched forward, cracking into a fence post and sending the watchful brown cows running back up the field with their tails in the air.
April threw the car into reverse once more and backed, her front bumper tangled in barbed wire and dragging the broken post. With a violent motion, she snatched it in forward again, and this time, the engine stalled out. She rested her head on the steering wheel crying uncontrollably.
Bess stroked her hair and said: "Dr. Webley, I'm not much good at driving big cars, but if you'd like me to try, perhaps I could get us out of this."
* * *
On Monday, I went into the Rare Book Room in the library and sat in the quiet upholstery reading Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of circa 21 B.C., the time of Julius Caesar. Diodorus described a land out in the deep off Libya with fruitful vegetation and navigable rivers. He claimed the Phoenicians had gone there to mine copper and had kept it a secret from the rest of the world. What was known as Libya in ancient times stretched to present day Morocco. Diodorus intimated that the land had been in the Atlantic Ocean. Could it have been America? If so, Canby might be right and the Phoenicians may have coexisted with the Indians making the burial mound authentic. And, adding to the whole scenario, there was the mystery of the ancient copper mines in Isle Royale in Lake Superior where tons of copper were removed centuries before the white man came. Far more copper than Indians would have used. But enough copper to make the bronze for the ancient world.
At two o'clock, I drove the Landcruiser back from town with a wooden crate of Franconian wine in the back that I had ordered especially from Europe. My muffler was busted and made a lot of noise, but I was intent on cracking into the wine.
Royal caught me just as I came by the ranch house, running out into the dirt track waving a silver cocktail shaker at me. Chickens and ducks scattered squawking and fluttering. I braked to a halt and watched her come towards me in the settling dust. Long stems in tight jeans, checkered shirt knotted at the waist, eyes strange and bright with her peculiar brand of insanity.
"Dulle Griet," I murmured, thinking of Breughel's painting of the madwoman who led Flemish housewives on a plundering raid into hell. "Mad Meg. Mad Margot. Muckle Mouth Meg the Edinburgh cannon. And what a muckle mouth for a blowjob."
"Hey, talking to yourself, huh?" she said. She put one foot on the small running board and poured me out a drink into the lid of the shaker.
"It passes the time," I said. I leaned out of the window and took a sip of the drink. It was a whisky sour, very nicely made. Two to one, bourbon to lemon juice, and just the right minimum of sugar.
She watched me drink it closely, sullen and purposeful in her stance. "Well, you know what they say."
"What's that?"
"If you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with."
"Bob Dylan. Right?"
"I think so. My memory's gone kaput lately. Aphasia or something."
"Are you trying to tell me Canby's not at home?"
She gave her head a shake so her black hair waved like a dark flag. "I'm going swimming down in the creek. I want you to go with me."
Behind my chalet, Beaver Creek ran shallow and swift over rocks with only a few pools that were deep enough to lie down in and be covered with water. But behind the ranch house, there was a muddy bottom where it flowed slow and deep and black among fallen trees and creeper vines. It was a favorite swimming hole, and the locale where Royal and I had thrown mud at one another the year before. An innocent enough act which she had interpreted as a sign of a much deeper affection.
"Look, Royal," I lied. "I've got to go make out my final exam. I figure on being occupied until evening. It's a tempting invitation, but thanks and no thanks."
Royal raised a saucy eyebrow. God knows how long she had been drinking whisky sours or what she had been taking with them. A strange smile played about her lips. The edge of my mouth started to twitch involuntarily. I glanced away to see the chickens and ducks returning around my wheels, pecking aimlessly at the ground.
"I think you better accept my invitation," Royal said simply. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." She ran a hand through her hair and admired the effect in my side view mirror.
"No," I said, trying to inject firmness into my voice. "I'm ... I'm busy. Like I said." A feeling of mal de mer crept into my stomach although we were a good 200 miles from the sea.
"Art History 269 meets at nine o'clock on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday," she said coyly. "If you want a frantic, naked maenad running down the aisles of the auditorium to hump against your trousered leg like some dog when the hot smell of bitch is in the air, then just balk me in my desires." Her eyes floated a long come-on look at me as she turned and strolled toward the house.
Fatalistically, I shut the engine of the Landcruiser and left it in the middle of the path. I got down and followed her into the house. Royal disappeared behind the bedroom door.
I looked about aimlessly. Took in the mounted steerhoms over the door frame, the framed nautical charts of the Yemassee Banks, armoire with a sheep skin draped over it. Stack of old Wall Street Journals with a couple of National Lampoons on top of that weighed down by a chunk of copper ore. On the mantle, a wood carving of a lounging sow with piglets at dug. A small bronze turtle. A statuette of Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach.
Canby had a childhood globe lying on the bentwood couch. It still had the British Empire marked in red, and green Vietnam was labeled Fr. Indo-China. Royal had left the cocktail shaker on a table, and I filled the shaker top again and took a long draught. The day was unusually hot for May, and the drink was needed irrigation.
"Is Canby not coming back soon?" I asked, raising my voice.
"Won't be back for hours. He's out in some damn hog farmer's field in Badger Dance turning over eight thousand rocks!" She yelled also, to be heard from behind the closed door. "Looking for shit about Phoenicians!"
"That's nice," I said, half under my breath.
"I mean Phoenicians!" she yelled with disgusted emphasis. "I mean what does that do for rock and roll? You know what I mean?"
I didn't have an answer for that. Purple murex dye. Mediterranean trade. An alphabet. They had contributed all that. But she was right. Nothing for rock and roll.
The door opened slowly and Royal stood there posed with her weight on one foot, other hip cocked with a hand on it. Blue espadrilles on her feet. One-piece black bathing suit with a low back and front; French-cut with bows which you could tighten and pucker the sides to draw up and reveal the flesh all the way over the hip bone like a Playboy bunny.
Long legs smooth and perfect in their curves. Faint ladder of breast bone above the bulge of her small bosom. She was humming a late Rolling Stone song, Beast of Burden.
She put both hands on her hips and ground her pelvis like a stripper and slinked towards me singing.
She nuzzled close, built-up heels of her espadrilles raising her to my height. She folded her arms around my neck and rubbed noses. Her lips soldered against mine, and her tongue rubbed and licked up inside my upper lip, massaging the gums and polishing the teeth. Her breath held the odor of a warm peach. She took her arms from my neck and tugged at my necktie as though it were a harness and drew me after her.
She slung an inflated black inner tube over one shoulder and picked up a canvas bag with Prell Concentrate Shampoo in it and a bath towel. I put my arm around her waist to keep from getting choked to death by my tie, and we half stumbled, half slid down the slope towards the creek in the sun-dappled leafy shade.
A murmuring watery river road of unreal green wound aimlessly before us. Honeysuckle vines clung to our legs and clothing, but we tore through it. Ferns, wood violets, white drifts of wild dogwood. We climbed over a rotting log and came to the dried red clay of what in rainy weather was a steep mud slide into the creek.
Royal stroked my jaw with a flick of her wrist and ordered: "Get undressed. I want you in the buff." Then she slid on her prominent, padded rear down the near-vertical dry clay to reach a small shelf against which green water lapped slightly.
I unbuttoned my shirt and peeled it off, keeping my eyes fixed on her long, slim back with the prominent sheaths of muscles that folded into her spine. Her shoulder blades stood out prominently beneath the spaghetti straps of the bathing suit. The back of the suit was cut so low that a slight soupcon of the crease in her haughty butt was visible. Obsidian black suit dusted with red clay like a blackboard. Then long legs as developed as any dancer's.
She stood there contemplating the drowsy glimmer of the water for just the barest instant, and then her muscles tensed visibly all down the length of her body, went taut as whipcord. Her body coiled, then uncoiled as she dove far out into the broad, slow-moving surface of the water.
A slight splash erupted as she cleanly cut through the surface and disappeared into the translucent green to reappear some five yards beyond. Treading water, hair flat against the contours of her skull and streaming down her back.
I took off the rest of my clothes and felt my way down the side of the embankment, shaft dangling limp between my legs in a starved and stunted condition. The sun was hot on my body, and the water felt bathtub tepid. I walked carefully out into the water, feeling my way in the muddy bottom. The water reached my waist, and I launched myself gently with a smooth breast stroke, moving towards Royal slowly with my head out of the water.
She turned on her back, and with eyes clouded with dreams, slowly drifted down stream with the quiet current. Toes dabbling occasionally out of the water that alternately blazed with bars of light and undulated in green and brown shadow. Strong legs occasionally opening and striking together again to propel her forward. Body showing in the murk.
A fallen tulip poplar that bridged the stream cast its shadow on her face. She paused in her slow drift, treaded water briefly, and then leaping up gleaming from the water, grabbed onto the smooth bark. She hung there, black suit glistening, white teeth smiling at me. I treaded water, taking in the spectacle. She dropped back into the water and disappeared with a splash for a time beneath the surface.
She rolled a somersault, flashing a bare bottom, then disappeared again. Reappeared, and hurled a black bundle towards the thick vines and trees of the shore. Her suit snagged on a dead limb.
She launched herself again, once more clinging to the trunk, this time revealing her unfettered breasts and two staring headlamps of nipples. A smooth taut abdomen, and just barely breaking the surface of the water, her black bush.
I let the current slowly wash me towards her, paused at her long, perfect length of thighs, and dividing them with my hand like cutting wedding cake, drifted in. My mouth was barely above the surface between their spread, white smoothness. The bush beckoned, and I slid my tongue into it. It tasted like a watery bouillabaisse. Royal groaned and the muscles of her thighs strained. She was having trouble hanging onto the tree trunk. I probed again, and she said, "Only the strong survive," and then slowly let go of her grip and slid into the water beside me.
She disappeared from view. A foot broke the surface as she swam back upstream. I followed her down into the glaucous, green twilight depths. Coming up for air, I found her carefully picking her way back up the submerged muddy incline towards the shelf of the shore. Her unblemished buttocks seemed to beckon, to speak the language of inducement.
I struggled after her and caught her in three inches of water. Forced her down into the mud and felt for the fissure of her twat; forced my erection inside of her even as she protested and fought against me. She tried to crawl forward, but I pulled her back by the thighs.
I probed inside her, first shallow and then more deeply as she screamed, "goddammit just barge in, you son of a bitch" and splashed violently in the muddy water with her clenched fists. Her head was thrown back, and her wet trail of hair slapped in my face. Slowly, she began to accept it, to acquiesce in it.
"Oh Christ Oh God that's good," she moaned, as the sensation built rapidly and elaborately in her.
I hovered over her protruding clenched rump, stroking her again and again as if in cadence. Reaching under her torso feeling for her hard nipples in the mud, running my hands down her muscled waist groping for her thighs. Her long fingers dug deep into the muck. She came in a liberal fifteen seconds, screaming out her pleasure.
"Oh shit crank it up!" she bellowed.
I withdrew, and she rolled onto her back in the mud and shallow water, faced speckled with brown, eyes closed in pleasure. Her chest heaved in counterpoint to the pounding of her heart.
"What a work-out," she gasped. "If you wonder whether women need sex, just consider that. I get it so seldom, I can come in a trice. Talk about an atomic blast."
I stood over her, covered in mud, erection shoving straight out, stiff and unexpended. Panting for breath. She propped herself on her elbows, reached up for my shaft like reaching for the branch of a tree. Then removed her hand and splashed my prick with water to wash it free of mud.
Once it was clean, she stroked it thoughtfully for a moment as though it were a rubbed-smooth worry stone or a Buddha's stomach. She was calm and passive. Thus easily is a ravishment repaired.
Then still sleepily, she reached for the shampoo, and pouring a dab into her hand, walked out into the clean flowing water of the creek. She stood there, clothed with green to her hips, lathering her hair into a formation like an Edwardian beauty. Her stomach was perfectly flat and her navel was shallow and round.
"You know life is shit," she said, matter-of-factly.
"How's that?" I asked, watching her small breasts rise and fall with the movement of her arms. Her breasts which began by attempting to be perfect domes ended with nipples like a bump on a lemon.
"Well look what's happened to rock and roll."
"You mean it just died?"
"Yeh. Hey, talk about a trip down memory lane. Funny you should remind me of that song. It's almost like the apotheosis of rock. I mean just consider the shlock rock groups out today. Styx. The Cars. REO Speedwagon. Dog shit!"
"Martha and the Vandellas is a hard act to follow."
Royal gave me an appraising look. The suds poured like thick cream down her body. She flicked a bit from her face, and it landed lightly on the water and floated slowly away. "Kids today don't know shit," she continued. "Into marijuana by the time they're eleven and twelve. I mean talk about cheapening something by giving it to the masses. It really gripes my butt."
"It began as bohemian and concluded as bourgeoios," I said in agreement.
"I mean we pioneered recreational drugs. But do we get any respect for it? Shit no. I mean I can remember when quaaludes were called 'soapers'."
"You're certainly dating yourself."
"You think I'm living too much in a world of nostalgia?" She ducked her head in the water to rinse it, rubbing vigorously at it with her hands. She came up streaming and wiping the water from her eyes, surrounded by a watery aureole of soap suds.
"It has occurred to me that you could develop some new interest in life."
"I have," she said. "You."
"Me?"
"Like I said."
"I have to fuck you whenever you want or you'll run naked through my classroom?"
"More than that. You have to marry me and take me back to Port Royal. We'll build a cedar-shake house on the bluffs and live there in quiet elegance. It's a world steeped in tradition. The sanctity of family lineage. Cherished heir looms. Social ritual." She stood gently massaging her long flanks. "You're only thirty-four aren't you? You've got another good ten years of screwing in you before your prostate gives out."
The nerve in my eyelid started to jump again. It was the utter insanity of the thing. The positive lack of bluffs in Port Royal. The wretched sprawl of mobile home parks swarming with Marine Corps wives and passels of grubby children with jam-covered mouths. Where would one build this dream mansion? And even worse possibilities.
"Uh ... I work for a living, in case you've forgotten," I said.
"That's okay. We'll strip Canby of his money. I know he doesn't have much, but in any divorce action I ought to get the ranch."
"Not to be too legalistic, but what possible grounds do you have for divorce?"
"His constant badgering me to fuck for you, of course. Have you forgotten that? I figure on hiring that lawyer who sued Lee Marvin. Ought to make the major news media. I can ask for all the money that Canby didn't earn by not becoming a general life insurance agent and caring for me properly the way he should have."
"I can't imagine that would work."
"Well what about the vase? If it turns out to be genuine some museum will pay millions for the Phoenician Columbus oil jar or whatever it is. New York will line up for blocks to see it. Any hack lawyer can clip Canby for his share of that."
I felt briefly as Pygmalion must have in admiring the perfect proportions of his sculpture-that an object that beautiful must have a soul. And yet there was none. "Canby's one of my oldest friends," I said lamely.
"What's that got to do with it?" Her dark eyes were blank with wonder, as if I had mentioned the price of eggs in China. She came out of the water again, bush dripping like a Van Dyke beard or the tuft of a turnip. With her legs together, knees slightly bent, she reached down for the inner tube; a leggy WWII pin-up. Her impertinent derriere jutted out. The wonderfully preposterous shape of the thing. Strong. Positive. Determined. Smooth, unblemished, ripe peach complexion. Idly I contemplated the shampoo and wondered if that would grease her sufficiently to bung her up the backside. She glided back into the water, ringing herself with the black doughnut balloon.
"Come on," she beckoned. "I want to get it on while drifting downstream."
"That's impossible," I protested. But the idea was intriguing. I followed her into the water and clung to the edge of the rubber tube. It was an Arcadian moment, redolent of Watteau's LEmbarquement pour la Cythere. Her legs scissored around me, clean and yummy as a sappy wood when you've stripped the bark from a deciduous tree branch.
We drifted, kicking and splashing, trying to position ourselves, to form an alliance. It was impossible, and around the bend, we washed against a bank and crawled out into the sun-smitten bed of weeds and wet moss at the wood's rim. She lay on her back, still inside the inner tube, lifting a leg to cover her crotch and then lowering it again.
I slid into the inner tube with her, and we locked together. She clutched at me, eyes wide open, staring in excited intensity. We began to couple in wild confusion, rolling about on the grass, first one on top, then the other. In one pas de deux, she wrenched my back so violently I wondered if I would end up under the care of a chiropractor.
The tube punctured with a loud bang and a fizzle, and she came at the same instant, screaming loudly and half yanking my hair out by the roots with her desperate passion. She lay there in the grass, eyes heavy as though with sleep, mouth open and gasping like a fish thrown up on shore, while I pumped her some more and at last expended myself in her. I lay beside her, tangled in the rubber, feeling as Shelley might have felt, drowned and washed upon the rocks of the Gulf of Spezia. Released.
"You know," she gasped, "my ass is at one and the same time my triumph and my ruin."
I laid my head on her chest and listened to the deep pounding of her heart. Like the thudding of some elemental drum. I nuzzled the nipples on the small mounds of her breasts. Hilltop villages in Provence. Earth red-hued like the landscape.
"With that over-developed piece of flesh, I can attract any man I want. But then they all want to fuck me up the asshole. I suppose you want to fuck me up the asshole too."
"The thought has crossed my mind," I murmured.
"I may let you some day. I'm saving it for the man I want to utterly dominate me. The man I want to debase myself with completely."
"You ought to have a chat with April Webley. You could compare a lot of notes." I propped myself on one elbow and idly slid three fingers of my other hand through her rustic arbor and in the greasy door of her twat. She smiled without showing her teeth and sighed deeply. Enjoying the renewed investiture.
* * *
On Thursday, I spent the afternoon in a faculty meeting dogfight over the wording of a resolution that condemned the pouring of paint from second story windows by rowdy studio art students. It didn't let out until five, at which time I ate a disgusting meal uptown of hamburger stroganoff, Spanish rice and iced tea.
Belching constantly, I walked back across the campus and went up the wide steps of Roxburg Library to see if Canby was at his accustomed staked-out table. The small brass lamps were turned on, and here and there, gnomish graduate types were poring over useless facts.
Canby wasn't there, but I briefly perused the stack of materials that he had built up in a small bunker. He had marked a map of the state with three locations where stone cairns of unknown origin had been found: Gum Grove, Red Hat, and near Deer Grass on the Wahatchee River.
On a separate map drawn by himself, he had shown the four roughly parallel rivers running nearly due South that traversed our region: Rondeau, Black Bottom, Rouge Coeur, and Issipee. The last named passed not thirty miles from the University. It flowed into the Bench Mark Sound which led to the Atlantic Ocean.
Canby also had a photocopy of a diary kept by John Lawson, a surveyor who in 1701 travelled the region. Lawson had visited a Keyaunee Indian town near the presentday Attleboro, reporting an exquisitely beautiful Indian princess and that the men wore mustaches and beards. Canby had made extensive notes on the Keyaunee, an Eastern Siouan people living between the Tuscarora and Algonquin to the East and Cherokee to the West. They merged with other Siouan tribes and were decimated by disease and the Tuscarora and Yemassee Wars. They moved to Kentucky and then disappeared, extinguished forever.
I could see the train of Canby's thought. A land traversed by rivers that drained into the sea, Attleboro was about fifty miles west of the University. The Phoenicians could have sailed up the navigable part of the rivers and then followed their path on foot exploring. They encountered Indians, left a party behind and then returned to the Mediterranean. Or perhaps they were shipwrecked on the coast and mixed in with the tribes of the interior. In any event, they had settled among the Indians.
I waited around for him a bit and then gave it up and got my Toyota and drove back out to the ranch. I left the vehicle up near the upper end of the pasture and crossed under the barbed wire fence to stroll home under the stars, something I often did when the weather was good.
How tender the southern stars. To think that I spent three dismal northern years at Yale inspired only by the life force of Greece and kept at study in the library by the bitter winter cold. The burden lightened only by the love of an English girl with breasts like melons and a Roedean voice.
Lovely English girl, let me spend a penny in your slot. And she said 'yes' and showed great talent at straight-on fucking but would never gnaw the na-na, saying it was dirty and for declasse dolly birds in back stalls of cinemas.
Yet one night I got her drunk on Haig & Haig, and greasing myself with margarine, put it straight up her bunghole, and she clutched the bed frame and squealed in what must have been delight.
Upon sobering up, she disclaimed all knowledge; disavowed the very event itself. Saying the soreness in her anal tract was related to constipation. And besides, it's anatomically impossible as well. She wore wire-rimmed spectacles and a serious mien, and later married a Scottish biologist and they live in the Scylly Isles.
I must cling to these southern stars and to this small chalet. I would not survive banishment to a wretched hick town college. Whole hours of precious life spent in fervent conversation over uncut fryers at the Bi-Lo for 490/lb. Bound volumes of Readers Digest in the library. Coeds who witness for Christ and long for marriage and a coordinated oak-look bathroom from Sears because You Can Count on Sears.
The grass swished beneath my feet. Nighthawks swooped in fast pursuit of insects. Night hung around the cabin like a soft pall, enveloping it utterly in a smooth velvet blackness that merged with the flat black of the trees and made it stand out in relief against the deep night blue of the sky where a crescent moon climbed in emptiness.
I walked across the cow pasture and slid under the barbed wire fence that Canby and I had set back up the day before. Night sounds bathed the air. The door to the cabin was slightly ajar.
I stepped up on the porch and paused, the hair on my neck roused. The old scent of danger was in my nostrils in a way I hadn't remembered since the war. The whiff of night marauders. My body tensed. An inner sense urged me to hit the deck.
"Bang you're dead," said a voice from inside.
There was a pinpoint of light that jiggled slightly. A cigarette. The voice was familiar. Staff sergeant Zac Reilly of my old Special Forces A-team. Also a 1969 University history graduate and former frat brother. I hadn't seen him since 1973.
"Rat-tat-tat," I said, kicking the door all the way open.
Zac stood up, the pinpoint of light holding steady where his teeth were. "Far-fucking-out," he said. We pummeled each other affectionately like old comrades out of a John Wayne movie.
Five foot ten. Still a trim and muscular 185 lbs. Close cropped hair. You dangerous swine Reilly. It's an ill omen that you've found me here. No good can come of this.
He was dressed like a swaggering mercenary in cut-off olive drab shorts and a fatigue shirt with slant patch pockets and epaulets and the sleeves rolled up. Vietcong rubber tire sandals. An automatic pistol on a web belt.
He had been smoking hash oil while waiting for me and was pretty well gone. There was a red cooler packed with Ba Muoi Ba beer. He was sipping one to cool his throat from the hot acrid smoke. I sat down and joined him without question, dipping the rolled paper into the little jar and relighting it with a Zippo with a map of Vietnam on it.
"You're probably wondering how I found you," Zac began.
"Yeh," I allowed.
"It wasn't hard. Except for the last 'click.'" He used the old army slang for kilometer.
"There's this tall girl in the house up there with a real Coupe de Ville ass on her." He gestured with his chin up the winding path towards Canby's ranchhouse. "And weird tits. Like those things on old houses."
"You mean cupolas?"
"Yeh. Anyhow, she was jacked up on pills listening to a Blondie album and swaying to the rhythm. It was weird. I got to talking with her about this and that. Mostly rock and roll. You know. And how we used to wear white dinner jackets and stand around on the lawn drunk in front of the frat house during Spring Germans and listen to the Hot Nuts. You remember? See that girl in the red blue jeans. She goes down like an et cetera. Well, you remember."
"Yeah," I said, taking a long drag. I held the burning paper away from me and it made a peculiar light path that seemed to linger in the air like the fading tail of a comet.
"Well anyhow I-God knows why-but I made the old Vietnamese fuck sign. You remember." Zac put his index and middle fingers together so that there was a gap between them and jiggled his tongue in and out of it.
"Yeh." I felt the first body rush from the hash. Warm. Deliquescent. Zac had a Glycine Airman watch on his wrist. The luminous dial seemed to hover in the dark.
"Well, she really dug that for some reason. So she opened an old lozenge tin and got out a pinch of white powder and put it in the hollow made by her collar bone. You know, right next to her throat."
"And you snorted it?"
"How'd you guess?"
"I don't know. Just psychic probably."
"And then she took her clothes off and I had to fuck her."
"You had no alternative?"
"Well, not really. It was instant infatuation. If you know what I mean."
"How was it?"
"Violent. She had a recoil on her like a damn mortar. Almost as violent as that night in the cathouse in Nan Phuc. You remember? With the pregnant gal?"
It wasn't very likely that I could forget. It ranked high in the pantheon of our glorious collaborations. Zac had developed a deep and abiding lust for pregnant women. He had finally found one who was willing, but she was so far gone that she went into labor midway through, and Zac was so excited that he wanted to keep on humping. Her family had rushed in and tried to drag him off, and I had gotten into a fight with them, and Zac had flailed at them with one hand while holding to the girl's swollen, copper-colored teats with the other. All the time pumping like a jackhammer.
"You gotten over your fetish?" I asked. "You mean for pregnant gals?"
"Check."
"Yeh, it wore off when I got back stateside. You know the whole thing just came over me in a rush when we saw Angkor Wat."
"You're kidding me," I exclaimed, suddenly interested.
"Sure. All those stone statues of women with bulging bellies and those placid smiles. Why for months afterwards I could get a hard-on just thinking about them."
My mind drifted and I could picture clearly the ancient lost palace of the Khmer god-kings. Great stone pyramids layered over with encroaching banyan vines. Pranced over by troops of black monkeys. Tree-strangled ruins with dark interiors flitting with bats. The wanly smiling head of bodhisattvas, men destined to be Buddhas. Great sandstone heads of saints who could teach men to find ultimate release, to reach nirvana.
Towers glimmering in the weed-choked moat with voluted columns and balustrades. Towers built in the shape of the lotus flower, symbol of the god Vishnu. Unmortared grey blocks covered with green and white lichen laced over and wrenched apart by lianas.
And the women depicted there. The celestial goddess Devata and all her priestesses. Bow-like lips in a half smile. Long, thin waists. Bare supple arms and breasts constrained and yet provocative. Spiral headresses wound about with tendrils of vines. Slender trunks of wild fig trees. Under brush. Multicolored birds. A subdued and mystic embodiment of one's life obsessions.
"Did it affect you in any way?" asked Zac.
"Got me into art history."
"You're kidding me! Jeez, I had no idea." Zac let out his breath respectfully. "I thought you were just one more of the sixties' generation that couldn't quite tear away from your college town. Angkor did that to you, huh? Well son of a bitch."
"You understand?" I asked doubtfully.
"Understand? Christ I goddam well ought to. I mean it almost got me killed in a half dozen whorehouses from Rangoon to Hong Kong. I mean those stone dames had me in their grip. They were goddesses or something weren't they?"
"Devidasis. Temple prostitutes who offered themselves to worshippers. The custom dates centuries before Angkor. To Babylonia and the very dawn of time. It spread east into Asia."
"Holy shit I should have known. I mean I think I was bewitched or something. It rode me like a monkey on my back for years. Worse than coming home with a drug habit."
"They are all carved in imitation of the first Queen-goddess of the Khmers. An artistic search for an ideal form. She was called the Willow Queen and ruled in an age of innocence when all the people went about naked. An Indian Brahmin fell in love with her and taught her to wear clothes. But just a piece of cloth wrapped about the hips and legs. He considered there to be nothing shameful about the breasts."
"Holy shit."
"What have you been doing since I knew you?" I asked, changing the subject.
"Second tour in Nam. Then got out of the army. Decided to go respectable like everyone else from the old frat. Got into branch banking. Jeez what a bust that was. Can you imagine?"
"You mean one of those little trailers with the two tellers and the guy who sits behind a desk all day grinning like an idiot? You were one of those guys?"
"It was awful. Every day listening to two perky little bitches talk brand names. Whirlpool Dishwashers. Time-aMatic lawn sprinklers. Tender Vitdes Cat Food. And Belks Bright Ideas for Living. And needlepoint. They were big on that. One of them was doing a picture of a small boy sitting on the potty. A weird damn cloacal obsession I thought.
"The crappy little box sat right across from a shopping mall. I lasted a whole year. Every day for a year I'd walk across that mile-wide parking lot to the mall and read books in the bookstore during my lunch hour. They had a copy of Jayne's Infantry Weapons. I must have memorized it. Read it every single day. It was all that kept me from going crazy."
"And then you quit?"
"I was fired. One of the little cunts who worked as a teller for me gave me the come-hither and after I porked her, she wanted marriage. I refused, so she told the district manager I had sexually harrassed her. They kicked my ass out. I mean what a way to treat America's returning veterans. Come home to find they've made dicking a bank teller into a crime. I know how those doughboys felt in 1918 getting smacked in the face with Prohibition."
"Was she a good lay?"
"God-awful. I mean she had a real Belvedere body. Or so it seemed at the time. And you have to remember how desperate I was. But she whined about it the whole time. I was always hurting her in some way or other. And she had a big mat of cunt hair. As thick as the Sargasso Sea. I suggested she shave it off, and you would have thought I'd asked her to cut off her tits."
"The modest sort, huh?"
"Talk about goddam antiseptic. She wore damn stain resistant panties that came up to her belly button."
"So then what?"
"Answered an ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Became a mercenary. The Congo. Angola. Rhodesia. The life was good, but pay was lousy if you got it at all."
"And now?"
"I'm going to get rich. Retire and eat pussy."
"That does seem to be the prevalent taste of the day. But how?"
"I'm glad you asked. You know all that dope trade that comes out of Colombia, South America into the marshes and creeks from Louisiana to South Carolina? Well, the Latin end's all controlled by certain honchos who are well known. That is, their names and addresses are known. You can send them a letter."
"You want to be a hired gun for them? What are you going to do? Send them your resume?"
"Nope." , "Then where do you fit in?"
"Piracy."
"Piracy?" I wasn't thinking very cleary. The hash had smoothed me into its familiar honey torpor. A woozy envelopment.
"Yeh, like the old Barbary Pirates. I wasn't a history major for nothing. Even if I did dog and flag most of my courses. You see I sink a few of their ships and after awhile they catch on and start paying tribute into a Swiss bank account. They've got old freighters and ocean-going shrimp trawlers. But nothing too big for a PT boat to sink."
"PT boat?"
"Yeh, Patrol Torpedo boat. Like from WW Deuce. I've bought one used from some dude in Panama City, Florida. Ordered some guns and torpedoes for it from a mail order place in Los Angeles. Fit that sucker out inside of three weeks and hire on a crew of desperadoes. Figure we sink three or four of them for starters just to let the Latin American boys know we're for real. Then we fire off a telegram giving them the bank account number and the terms and conditions under which they can operate unmolested. No balls, no bonanza, I always say."
"That's great," I said. "Where are you getting a crew?"
"That's a bit of a problem. You're my first recruit."
I sat staring at his shadowy form with my brain trying to work. "I'm really a bit busy at the moment," I said.
I have had enough of screaming death. Even now looking at you in the dark you are like the Ace of Spades paratroopers would put between the teeth of dead Viet Cong. With a grinning skull in the middle. And the words 'death from the sky'.
"Well, I can still let you in as a major investor. I figure we need to raise fifty grand to pay for the boat and stuff."
"Zac, I don't have any money. You see how I live."
"You may not now, but once that treasure trove you found is sold on the London market I figure you'll be rolling in it."
I paused thoughtfully with my tongue rubbing a back molar. "How did you hear about that?"
"It's all over the papers. Pictures of you and some skinny bald fucker with a peg leg holding up the loot. I knew right off you'd be needing serious investment advice and I was the boy to do it. So I came on the double."
"Zac, there's just one amphora. A vase. It'll go into a museum. Besides, it's half owned by Canby-the skinny bald fucker."
"That's too bad," Zac said grimly. He pulled the automatic pistol out of the holster and cocked the hammer. It was a Walther PPK .38 calibre. "Huh?" I said.
"Now you know the plans. I guess I'm going to have to waste you."
* * *
After a long conversation and more hash oil, Reilly relented and gave me a stay of execution, but he was still acting very proprietary about his project. Like I was going to steal the idea and sell it on Madison Avenue or something. He had no car or money and gave no indication of leaving. Said he had to stay and make a deal with Canby for financial backing. Canby didn't have fifty G's, but I figured I'd let him find that out for himself. Zac could get real violent if you sprung too many things on him all of a sudden.
I went to my classes the next day, somehow got through the lectures and chores, and in the afternoon, walked over to Darlan Hall.
When I was nineteen years old and an undergraduate, Darlan Hall had seemed a place of exotic mystery. Not that there was anything all that special about it. A colonial red brick building sitting at an angle next to the grey stone columned Administration Budding and facing the green sward called Donizetti Place after a forgotten Italian hero of the American Revolution-no relation to the composer.
Darlan was the budding for language studies. The professors had a foreign air with exotic, thick accents and continental manners. The glass front display case in the foyer held maps of France and Spain and advertisements for the University Junior Year Abroad program.
Even after the Army and Yale, I retained an affection for the place, a minor worshipful regard for the air castles of youth. And on that particular day I was in search of one of the continental mannered professors-Madame Ingomarthe very quintessence of what I had dreamed at age 19.
It was four o'clock, and the hallways were abandoned by students and sun-stained with a quiet glow. The faculty, doors to their cubbyhole offices open, were sitting about in small groups drinking tea or Cokes and gossiping about interdepart mental feuds. I took a left turn at a T-shaped intersection and came to a closed door with a name plaque that said Professor Ingomar.
She was a full professor? How exceedingly curious. And she hardly the woman to while away the dreary hours marking sophomore themes. She could charge the world's plutocrats big bucks just to let them nuzzle her underwear.
I rapped lightly on the door, and a husky voice invited me in. Or at least I assumed it was an invitation, as the voice spoke Greek.
The walls of the small room were entirely covered in sumptuous carpets of Turkestan. A large thick rug was also draped over the desk so that nothing of the common metal structure was visible. Subdued earth colors running with the warp and woof of it. A Judeo-Moorish office with just a dash of Tartary. For a professor, an almost insolent luxury.
There was a small ebony bookcase with crushed moroccon covered books. Mostly Latin works. Juvenal. Sallust. Petronius. Rutilius. Ambrosius. Sidonius Apollinaris. Then one or two cabalistic medical books in Hebrew, probably twelfth century.
On the desk, a cloisonne box open to cigarettes wrapped in mustard yellow paper and stamped with Arabic letters.
One book. Bound in faded calfskin. Flaubert's Salammbd.
Madame Ingomar sat smoking from a long ivory cigarette holder and regarding me closely. She was as remembered; aquiline nose chiseled at the nostrils, full lips slightly parted, enthralling amber eyes. Her hair was bound back in one great long pigtail, and she was dressed in an antique-looking lace blouse with a banded high neck and a supple chamois cloth skirt.
With a gesture of the cigarette holder, she indicated the other chair; silently, almost imperiously. The cigarette made swirling blue trails with the motion like skywriting. I sat down.
"Did your friend find you?" She lightly moved her beautiful long feline hands. "My friend?"
"From the war. Zachary, I believe his name was."
"Yes, he did. How did you meet him?"
"He came here inquiring about you. I told him where you lived. It seemed appropriate. Particularly since he said he might kill you if you wouldn't join him."
"How so appropriate?"
She smiled a voluptuous, one-sided smile. "If you are dead, I can lay claim to the Phoenician artifacts. If you survive, then you are all the more worthy."
"Worthy? Of what?"
"Of the secrets which will be revealed to you when you are adequately prepared."
I could find no words to speak further. No questions to probe the veil of mystery. O Madame Ingomar, let me brush my eyelids against the taut, mahogany red of your aroused nipples. Take you violently on some divan Japonais. Settle down and obstinately refuse to budge for months from your wet niche.
"Do you like Mirabelle?" she asked.
"Yes."
She opened a desk drawer and reached out a bottle of liqueur, a corkscrew, and two fragile glasses. She handed the corkscrew to me, and I struggled with it and finally extracted the cork with a desperate pop. I poured us each a glass of the white fire as she stubbed out her cigarette in an onyx ashtray.
"Santi," she said, touching her glass to mine and then bringing it to her lips. I sipped my own and felt the low flame sear my palate.
"What is there about you that's more than meets the eye?" I asked.
"The hot sulfur that flows just beneath my skin," she replied.
"What rituals are you teaching the girls of Alpha-Aleph?"
"Certain rites which are now called 'Sapphic' although they much pre-date that unfortunate poet. In essence, it is a com festival. Dances done during the full moon to ensure the richness of the earth. You may rest assured we will draw back from actual human sacrifice, although such was once an integral part of them."
"That's a relief," I said wryly. "But of what possible use are such things to coeds?"
"You surprise me, Dr. Spender." She smiled a mocking smile. "For you of all people to ask such a naive question. One would think I were speaking with a member of the physical education department."
"So I'm dumb," I said truculently.
"The weaving of olden dances is no more pointless and absurd than the rest of the little girl antics and chants that sororities do during rush; they mark the path to ancient knowledge, to a means of understanding the fructifying forces of the universe."
"Shades of the Iliad," I said. "Mine is a doltish attitude. Now how did I get selected for the attentions of these girls?" ioo
"You are interested in fathoming Phoenician culture are you not?"
"Check."
"Temple virgins-misnamed, of course, as they were in fact sacred harlots-were a vital part of the Phoenician religion. Their prime deity was a nature goddess called Tank. Otherwise known as Astarte, Aslitoreth or Semiramis. You found her symbol among the relics in the field. I intend that you should truly embrace Tank and all that she represents before I show you the rest."
"The rest of what?"
Her eyes strangely seemed to be caressing me. "Of what lies buried in the surrounding area."
I stared blankly. There was more under the ground? And she knew where it was located? It was either a colossal hoax as McAlister Webley feared, or it was the stupendous find of the century. Rivaling perhaps Schliemann's uncovering Troy.
Sidonians. Tyrians. Giblites. Called by the names of tlick cities. The Canaanites of the Bible. Dubbed collectively Phoenikes by the. Greeks meaning 'purple' for the dyes of tlick clothing. Founders of great cities throughout the Mediterranean. Voyagers who sailed down the coast of Africa. Brought tin from England. Long rumored to have reached America. Yet still, it seemed so preposterous. Until Canby Simmes turned up the copper jug whde planting. And now this woman telling me there was more underground. Proof positive.
Our glasses were empty, and she refilled them. I gazed dazzled. How could a surrealist painter have ever represented woman as a Saguaro cactus with uplifted limbs and woodpecker hole with tuft of bkd's nest for crotch? When before me sat such an ideal. With much meat behind the teats and such rich, black vegetation where the stems bifurcate. Surely the artist was a hydracephaloid.
"Would it be presumptuous of me," I asked, "to tell you I want your body?"
"No," she answered calmly. "Merely premature."
She paused and then went on. "But tell me, do you often frequent low dives and estaminets?"
"I've been known to. Yes."
"As for myself, I like to keep in occasional touch with popular culture. I manage perhaps once a month to go to one of the local beerhalls. This evening at eight o'clock, at the place known as Your Aunt's Underwear there is a oneman disco show appearing. It promises to be extraordinary. He is called Rod the Cream Dream. He plays old records."
"You recommend I be there?"
"More to the point, I suggest you take me there."
I drained my glass and stood up. "Agreed," I said.
"D'accord," she said, giving me an ambiguous look.
I sidled out of the room and closed the door behind me. Bess Ogletree was waiting in the hall clutching a Government Finance text.
"Hello, Dr. Spender," she said brightly. "I saw you come in here and waited."
Ah sweet Bess. How is it I can look at you and forget that you were sired by a Methodist minister and spent your youth with television, Kool-Aid and Hostess Twinkies? Why is your flamboyant red hair a never-ending illusion of a setting sun and perverse pleasures after dark?
Bess wore a linen skirt the color of onion skin and a silkscreened T-shirt that proclaimed "I love Picasso" and displayed two details of the Guernica painting, a grimacing horse's head and the bare lightbulb.
"You've developed an interest in art?" I asked.
"Strictly the commercial perspective," she replied. "Investment pools to purchase art as a hedge against inflation. Dr. Webley thoroughly approves. But of course I owe the inspiration to your guidance."
"I'm flattered."
Bess hesitated, then ventured shyly, "I have something to show you."
"Oh?"
She looked cautiously up and down the hall. No one was about. She lifted her skirt with the hand holding the textbook and pulled her oyster-white panties down with the other hand. There were three purple stripes marking her creamy, rose petal buttocks. Instinctively, I reached out and touched them lightly with my fingertips.
"Nice, huh?" she said with a glow of pleasure.
"As reasonable a design as any by Piet Mondrian."
"Do you really think so?"
"I'm not sure," I h-edged. "It's a bit unnerving that I find myself so aroused. So susceptible to its allure."
"You're right," she agreed, letting her panties snap back into place and dropping her skirt. "I've wondered about it all day. Whether I could really get into S & M and all that. I even checked out a book on the Marquis de Sade to see if it would give me any insights."
"Has it?"
"It's in French, so I really can't read it. Besides, I've been real busy. Doing linear projections. They're such a bore. I went to see some graduate instructor for help, and all he wanted to do was rub up against me. What a grossout. His breath stunk and everything."
"How's April Webley?"
"You mean Doctor Webley?" she asked, as though she couldn't conceive of someone of her stature having a first name other than an academic tide. "I'm not sure. She cried all the way back from your place and ran off the road twice. And when we got into town, people would stare at her when we stopped at stoplights. She hadn't put her clothes on, and she's quite a spectacle naked, you know."
"Are you going to Your Aunt's Underwear tonight?" I asked, changing an uncomfortable subject. 'To hear Rod the Cream Dream's disco?"
She grimaced. "Good grief, no. All he plays is music from the sixties. I can't relate to it at all. You'd have to be some kind of a fossil to like it."
"Yes," I said. "I suppose you would."
* * *
The grey interior of Your Aunt's Underwear was as drab as a tobacco warehouse, but it throbbed with life and the sound of Teen Angel. Rod the Cream Dream, with his hair done in the then-current New York male model style, wet and curled into the center like James Dean; silk silver jumpsuit unzipped to his navel; gold necklace and bracelets; playing the discs and juking all alone.
All around, the scrubbed undergrads so redolent of soap and free of herpes. A girl with overwashed, electrified hair, a dress like an Arab burnous and giant melons for breasts, not jiggling, but wallowing with her movements. She bumped against me, and I sneaked a feel. Beside me, Madame Ingomar didn't notice. Or pretended not to.
She didn't disco because she was over thirty, and perhaps not a fool such as would get orthodontic braces late in life or read Ms. Magazine. Even though she was clothed in trousers and belted top of dense black velvet that showed her olive decolletage to such advantage. Small feet with raspberry painted toenails snug in rope covered wedge platform-soled shoes.
She smoked from the ivory holder and let the fumes trickle out of her nose. Declining beer which I swilled with the fevered excitement and the suggestive nature of the long neck of the bottle. Just take a grip Mme. Ing and feel how hard. Now quick. What first pops into your mind? No cheating.
Rod was on an early rock kick, playing Teenager in Love by Dion and the Belmonts, Earth Angel by the Penguins, Speedo by the Cadillacs, and Oh What a Night, the original version by the Dells.
"Why have you brought me here?" I shouted above the din. "To censure the general slump of morals?"
She leaned close and spoke into my ear the words of Flaubert's sphinx: "I seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untasted."
I nodded knowingly, yet the intent remained a mystery. And then as if there were a spotlight playing upon her, I saw the blonde Connie Vaudrey. Green silk running shorts with contrast piping down the sides; cut in that strange premeditated way that clings to the crease of the butt and even manages to show the lower curve of the cheeks. And a 'Love a French Major' T-shirt stretched by her bouncing breasts as she ground and gyrated with a large lout in khakis and docksiders and a green Lacoste shirt.
I'd kiss your pretty legs for a quarter if you never did pay me. Or let you vomit in my shoes without even an apology afterwards.
Suddenly I had to pee, and excusing myself, pushed through the press to the boxed-in horror of urine reek and wet toilet paper in strands on the floor. Graffitti that said 'Fuck the Frats' and 'Jesus is the Way'.
Plus crude phallic drawings. Once it would have been Great Art. If done on the wall of a cave at Lascaux. The Toltecs erected massive phallic pillars in the Valley of Mexico. Phallic obelisks can still be found scattered through the lower Mississippi region. But the vitality of such symbolism is now vanished, decayed, regarded as smut and perversion. Preachers have conveniendy forgotten the lusty nature of Lot who slept with his own daughters and drank like a fish even if he did draw back from butt-fucking an angel in Sodom.
I drained my beer and pissed in a satisfying stream. Did Connie Vaudrey soil the underside of her thighs by sitting on this foul porcelain? Or did she politely drop her drawers and piss outside in the alley, steadying her balance by holding to her boyfriend's forearm?
Now don't watch now. I'm embarrassed. Aw shit, Connie. Don't be shy. Ever'body has to piss from time to time.
On impulse I dropped the bottle into the commode where it floated as if containing a desperate message. I pushed the lever using the toe of my shoe and water swirled down in a maelstrom rush. The bottle caught in the bottom with a clunk. Now some poor wretch must clean it up. Along with the rest. Fuck the masses. They have let the Church shame them out of their impulses. Putting their force and lust on lavatory walls instead of in church icons.
I emerged. Others pushed in. A voice said: "Hey, who shit a fucking bottle in here?" I pressed on, searching for the Madame, but she had disappeared. Fool that I am. I should have wet my pants. Or asked her to join me and hold the little hose in her hand because I felt so faint and feared to stain the trousers, or worse, decorate the ceiling should I collapse. Like a spouting whale.
"Professor Spender!"
I turned to find Connie smiling up at me. Expectantly. Flawless complexion, 22-karat gold earrings in the shape of flower petals.
"Miss Vaudrey. How surprising."
"Madame Ingomar told me to look for you. She had to leave. Left her regrets. She said you'd understand. I'm to give you a surprise."
"A surprise? How novel. Here or elsewhere?"
"We have to go back to my dorm room."
"With alacrity."
We moved towards the door through the crowd. A hand bumped against me. "Hey what's going on here?" a voice demanded. It was the blond lout. Jealous. I could whip about and put the flat of my hand in his throat and connect his esophagus with his spine like in the old days. And yet, it would be considered antisocial and punished with all the rigor of the law.
"I've got to go now, Bo," I heard Connie protest. "Don't be a bore."
"Who is the sumbitch? I got a right to know!"
I turned and drilled him with my auger gaze. He stood open-mouthed holding a Bud in each hand, one intended for Connie. At first no words emerged. And then: "Jeez. Professor Spender. Christ I had no idea."
And we were out the door and into the narrow alley where someone peed drunkenly, leaning against the wall with his shoulder as he did it. A couple groped furtively, boy with his hands down inside the girl's jeans fondling her ass. Hoping soon to occupy her untenanted cunt.
We crossed Main street and walked onto the shrub-lined paths past the darkened bulk of the Frasier Art Center, our pathetic gallery that yet exudes a whiff of some great European musee dart.
The white columned majesty of a frat house blared Got a Bad Case of Loving You from a hard-driving live band. Crouching in the dark were the ghastly free-form sculptures made by the Fine Arts Department, a crazy arrangement of railroad ties and fishing net. Delicately balanced. I leaned against it, and found that it moved. Pushed it over and let it fall with a crash.
"Garbage," I said. "Anarchy in the arts. Trash and rot made by men who have never touched woman's flesh. All bad art should die. And all bad artists."
Connie giggled and told me I was super fun. Really wild. Smiled with teeth white as moonlight. Snuggled against me with her arm around me and tugging out my shirt, feeling of the flesh of my back. Miss Vaudrey, are you sure this is totally proper? You are so very petite that my prick standing alone would tower over you. Could you take it all inside you or would you prefer to just gnaw it like a beaver with a felled log?
The old cast iron lamps gleamed ghostly, and the trees overreached the path with their branches. Lights inside the classic walls of the music building with its tastefully small and gracious auditorium. The great, green sward of McFarland Place with its bronze statue of McFarland who had helped found the University and urged that women never be admitted so it would remain free of salaciousness.
On and on through the maze of brick walks, dogwoods and old buildings that once formed the entire noble campus, but was now, like all things of beauty, just the core of a giant doughnut. Nibbled away at. Encircled by new encroaching concrete monstrosities. Tragically doomed.
Yet in its beseiged state having a cloistered air, made positively pagan by the miniature imitation of the first Greek temple built on the Acropolis by Ereclitheus, the serpent king, to mark the site where Athena fought Poseidon. With its six, graceful caryatids, it mocked McFarland's admonition. It was built by a dotty old professor who dreamed of classical glories and fauns gamboling on the lawns. The quintessential symbol of the University, even appearing on neckties. And as the University is perched upon twin hills with the small temple at the apex of one, it can be easily seen as the nipple on the Great Teat of Learning.
No need for talk. The beauty is so poignant. Yet why are you here Miss Vaudrey? With all your money and a Daddy with so many miUs you don't bother to count them. This is, after all, a state University.
Where do you find you own prep kind? Do your parents not fear a mesalliance? Or was that lout in the alligator shirt a frat boy who was bottom of his class at Deerfield and rejected by Yale? Surely you would not settle for such a one.
Your buttocks move so nicely when you walk. This elastic band about your waist. Would it offend you were I to slip my hand in like so? There, that's nice. I didn't think you'd mind. And I find you wear no underpants.
Shaftte Dorm, such a delightful nom de guerre for a home for young females. Do they lie awake in their fresh-sheeted beds and dream of shafts? Well-bred shafttes spelled with a double t and an e. Stroking their innards. Plunging deep into their anal complexes.
Up the front stairs and into the carpeted lounge. Piano, tacky prints of flowers in bowls, snuggling couples on couches. We attract only a few stares. After all, we could be perfectly innocent. A small tutorial. The return of a loaned book. Boys didn't go in girls' dorms when I was an undergrad. Professors in search of tenure don't go in them now.
In 1968, George Harrison of the Beatles spoke against the war in Vietnam and said that all a man need do to prove his manhood was to take a woman. That was before the feminist movement. Also before a dish like Connie ever offered herself to me. Which is why I went to war. That, and being drafted.
We climbed a stairway and entered a lime green hall. Connie raised her voice and it rang out:
"Man on the hall!"
Startled, I looked about and realized it was me. A few heads popped out of doorways to check out the male in question. No one seemed to know me. Grace a Dieu.
The door to 238 was unlocked, which was good, as Conno nie had no pockets in her running shorts for keys. She flipped on the light, ushered me in, and closed the door behind with an unmistakable click of the lock turning.
Two single beds. Two dressers. Two chairs. Two closets. Very typical and dull. Bedspreads matching which is what roommates would do, calling each other over the summer to coordinate.
On one desk, a gold framed picture of a guy who could only go to Agriculture College. He had that cow-college look about him; imbecile expression on his face, mechanical pencils in a plastic pocket guard in his breast pocket. Above the bed, a poster of a puffy faced Elvis in King Creole stuck up with masking tape. On the dresser, economy-sized Lavoris, acne cream, Avon toilet water, a stack of Us magazines, a Mademoiselle with a special summer slim-up issue.
On the other desk, books by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot that Connie couldn't possibly understand; also Verlaine, Baudelaire and Villiers de ITsle-Adam that she probably could. Above the bed, three framed prints by Rowlandson showing buxom wenches and squires disporting themselves in eighteenth century ribaldry. Tankards banging on tables. Dogs on the floor scurrying to keep away from flailing feet. Very tasteful.
On the dresser, silver-chased hair brush. Chanel No. 5 for the Bath. Exotic parfums from Paris: Heliotrope, Fougere Roy ale, Chypre d'Atkinson. Plus Chantilly Luxury Body Shampoo. Charles of the Ritz Gold Dust Highlighting Powder. And a suggestive blue Tampax box.
On the floor, a pair of Bean's Blucher moccasins and espadrilles. A canvas tote bag with a music score printed on it.
"My roommate's really yucky," said Connie. "Dates some hick who's into fertilizers at Agriculture School and listens to Elvis records. It's enough to make you barf. She goes home all the time to see her beau. They're both from the in same town. Quattlebaum Creek, if you can believe there's such a place."
"You may rest assured I can imagine such a place, Miss Vaudrey," I said grimly. "I know the location of every State Teachers College in the South. And their towns are as squalid as anything you could ever envision in a bad trip on blotter acid.
"Locales where all life is wasted. Frontier posts where professors' wives address envelopes at home to make extra money. Serve Mateus wine and spaghetti for formal dinners. Where public debate concerns the relative merits of the KMart push-model lawn mower for $169.88 versus the selfpropelled for $218.88."
Connie gave me a quizzical look. "Why do you even think of such gross things when you get to live here at the University?"
She lacked all understanding. I almost spilled my guts. Nearly told her all my fears. In hopes that her father was a significant alumnus and would protect me under his mantle, lend me his aegis. But her hair was cloth-of-gold, and her blue eyes went sultry.
Before I could blink, she had tugged her 'Love a French Major' T-shirt over her head, and her bosoms bounced down to stare at me. I stared back. She put her hands on her hips in an athletic stance.
"Do you like my breasts?" she asked.
"Yes. Very much." A certain constraint between us had been lifted. Reservations vanished, when confronting such a nice 36-C creamy mass.
"That awful Professor Bamberg in creative writing once whispered to me that my nipples were the color of the roses at Anne Hathaway's cottage door in Shottery, England. What a hoot. And he hadn't even seen them."
"Which? Your nipples or the roses?"
She giggled. "My nipples, silly. I don't know if he's seen Anne's roses or not. And I don't even care. He's such a letch. I mean it's like something mental with him. I mean talk about barf-city." She held her hand over her mouth and pantomimed vomiting. "What color do you think my nipples are?"
"Must I give an answer now?"
"I'd like for you to." She walked to her desk, breasts jiggling with her movement, fumbled with some books, and produced a notebook. "You have such a good eye for things. And I'm writing a dirty theme for Bamberg's class. Do you want to do some tuna? It's supposed to help sex. I don't really know."
"Why not?" Indeed if sex is in the offing and not just a peep show, then I would drink ditch water if required.
She opened the long drawer of the desk and produced a plastic bag filled with herb and lime-green wrapping paper. Began to roll the joint. "Come on, give me a break. What color?"
I leaned on the metal frame of the bed and thought. The subtleties and niceties of this intrigued me. "An educated guess old Bamberg made. I might have been a bit more specific. Might have guessed tuberoses."
"Tuberoses?" she said, crinkling her nose.
"A beautiful color and image ruined by a brand of snuff and a yokel's nasal twang. Admittedly." I switched on a goosenecked lamp and shone the beam on her bosom. Cadmium red. No, that's too bright a color. Even harsh. They're more pinky-red. "Flamingo," I said decidedly.
"Flamingo?"
"Flamingo."
"Jeez, that's tremendous. Let me write that down." She sat at her desk and wrote with a Bic pen. I tried to read what else was on the page but couldn't.
"That should curl old Bamberg's crotch hair," she said gleefully. With a note of vulgarity that I had not expected from her.
The joint was poorly rolled, and bits of herb hung out. She lit it with a kitchen match and puffed, coughing as she blew out the smoke. I took it and dragged deeply. Ye gads what fine materials your money can buy, Miss Vaudrey. The very best in stupefaction. As if your body were not stupefier enough.
We soon finished it, and a great languor crept over Connie. She moved lethargically as she lifted her knees up under her chin and slid out of her running shorts. Pulled off her shoes and terry sportsocks with little pom-poms at the back. Revealed a bush, wispy, and in color the near proximate of her hair. Pale, nearly daffodil-hued.
Her body was golden brown with white triangular patches where the briefest of bikinis hid her privates from the Bermuda sun during spring vacation. I drank her in, studied her as one would a Velasquez nude. Cunt, breasts, face. As perfect as a hierarchy of angels.
"Please get undressed," she said sweetly. "I feel like a doofus standing around with my tits hanging out with you dressed. Like that Dejeuner sur I'herbe painting by Manet. You know, with the clothed men eating lunch and the naked woman bathing in water."
You bet I do know such a picture, and I would not let a gilded girl like you feel a doofus. You are so very special with your rich odor of money. You who will never in your life give a thought to Corning Ware or Stovetop Stuffing Mix. Never hear kids whining for the Great American Popcorn Machine.
When I was only to my undershirt, she climbed with sinuous and curvaceous movement onto the bed, and putting her back to the wall, divided her legs to reveal the pink maw of her slit.
"What about cunts?" she asked.
"Shall I say 'what about them'?"
"I mean for description. There's not much to distinguish one from another if you know what I mean. Except the extent of pubic hair. All I can think of is geography, and that sounds trite. My cunt is a remote coral-bound atoll in the Pacific. My cunt is a Spice Island of the Sulu Sea. My cunt is a fragment of the Mato Grosso."
"I see your point."
"Professor Bamberg has asked us to describe our bodies to him in a prose piece. I want to really rock him."
So that's it. The dirty old lecher. Well rock him you shall with utter consternation. "The hair between your thighs is the color of the straw woven into the fiaschi of Chianti. And your cunt is-let's see now-your cunt is a stemma."
"A stemma? Explain, s'il vous plait."
I paused in my undressing. Shoes and socks off, shirt off, trousers on, waxing intellectual. "A stemma is a decorative device, an artifact of the Italian Renaissance. A stemma is a family coat-of-arms appearing over the doorway of a palatial home in Florence, Padua or Mantua. The sign of a great clan. Or in your case, the symbol of a rich merchant guild. That of burgeoning womanhood. And surrounding it, an oval wreath or garland. Morning glories. Olive branches. Lilies. Pine cones. Pubic hair."
"That's the most divine image I've ever heard," she sighed, her eyes welling with admiration, her legs relaxed, but still apart.
I slid out of my trousers and freed the erection to proudly proclaim itself. She let out a small gasp, more of recognition than of surprise.
"That was foolish of me," she apologized. "Like some sainted virgin screaming at the sight of her first dick. Shall I call it your 'dick'? That makes it sound common. How about...." She pondered with a forefinger on her pursed lips ... "your avant-garde?"
"Very apropos," I agreed.
She reached up boldly and touched it. "It's hard to believe it's not a vertebrate animal."
"Strictly invertebrate. Although I'm told the Vulpine fox is blessed with a bone there."
"It's a bit intimidating now that the moment has arrived. Now that I know it's going to go inside me."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't worry about me," she said with sudden insistence. "I'm not yielding reluctantly. Take me completely."
I moved forward, putting my head between those thighs. Rubbed a cheek along the dove-throat softness of the inner lines. Probed with my tongue into the pink Indian satin, the central medallion of her stemma.
She gasped in earnest and gripped my shoulders. Touch lightly with just the tip round the rim. Savor the slight whiff of feminine hygiene products. Use only as directed. Greaseless. Nonstaining. Easy to use. Yum. Doctor tested medication proven by over two-and-a-half million women. Soothe irritated membranes.
Now slide it in as deep as you can get. Then out. Then back in again. Then, while in deep, round widdikins. And if you find that a bit dull and conventional, go round counterclockwise and nuzzle your entire face with the surrounding furry garland.
A honey bee pigging out on nectar from the flower's mouth. Shall I hum inside your cave and make you vibrate like an aeolian harp?
How eloquent her writhing and her well-bred breaths of pleasure. All the fluency of one of Luca Delia Robbia's Madonnas coupling with some radiant ecstasy. Do rich girls learn such things in a secret comportment class? After lessons in riding to the hounds, platform tennis, dancing and the science of pouring China tea? Carpools of young pubescent girls convoyed to nunneries to learn on giant antique beds the appropriate manner of response when one's orifices are invaded by a man.
"Please show me how to suck it," she whispered.
"Oh no," I answered hypocritically. "You really needn't. Perhaps save it for another time."
"I insist." And she did insist. Her eyes showed it.
"Very well," I agreed with minor relief.
She shifted positions, took it in her hands. Not so bold as that day in my office. A bit timid and dewy-eyed like a civet deer.
"Tell me what to do," she whispered.
"There are two distinct schools of thought. That of Tantalus, to wit, licking around the edge of the head with your tongue. That of gluttony, to wit, sucking same as if candy."
"Which do you prefer?"
"To quote an economist I know, I'm on an indifference curve between the two."
She hesitated, flashed those blue eyes. Then tucked her head and engulfed it, doing a mix of both techniques. Go to it, Miss Vaudrey. Twist my Solomonic column. Let your tongue perambulate. Give yourself a foretaste of-dare I say-things to come.
She left off, lifting her head expectantly, awaiting criticism or praise. "Do you like that?"
"Yes."
"What would happen if I kept doing it?"
"After much effort, you would induce me to come in your mouth."
"I'd like that."
"So would I. Yet in a moment so shot-through with poetry as this, I prefer the very grip of the warp and woof of your body."
"Please do it. I'm ready. I don't want to be a virgin anymore."
I shifted upon the soft cushions of her flesh. Paused.
"It won't hurt will it?" she questioned. "I mean I know I've broken my hymen. But I have a really shallow vagina."
"Indeed?"
"Yes, the doctor told me so when I went to be fitted with an IUD. Madame Ingomar took me there. She said she wanted to personally supervise all arrangements. And your thing is so big. I'm almost frightened. Yet I know you wouldn't do anything to hurt me. I just wanted you to know. So perhaps you wouldn't be disappointed in me."
Miss Vaudrey, you would never disappoint such a licentious beast as I. You with your shallow vagina and your hymen mysteriously broken. Did some expensive jumping horse find your 14-year old virgin's blood on its saddle?
Ye gads but it feels exquisite to plunge into the wet of my saliva and the profuse flowering of your desire, my prick guided unerringly by instinct, pleasure and fascination. To feel you sigh with relief that the moment is here at last. To hear you groan as I draw it out and see your eyes open startled at the very volume of your noise as if you wonder whether it was you or not.
Pause at the very entrance to tantalize you, and then plunge in again. Feel you wrap your arms around me and hold so tight. While your eyes close and mouth opens and groans again, but this time more politely and subdued. As I keep a careful slow pace, intensifying the effect made by each entrance.
"Miss Vaudrey," I said, ending a stroke and coming in close again. "Where did you get hair so blonde that you appear like some naiad of Alpine lakes and forests?"
Surprised at the idea of conversation, she shifted her hips slightly under me and whispered: "My mother was Swiss. Daddy met her on a business trip to Basel."
I nuzzled her neck and hair which smelled so fine. Swiss indeed. And did she have a canton between her legs? But I would never breathe aloud such a crude joke and shatter your mood of delicate poetry as you lose your maidenhood.
In record-breaking short-order, she again opened surprised blue eyes and said 'O!' and then her muscles contracted, and she gripped my hip and thigh and said 'O!' four or five more times, the last one potentially a scream choked off by sinking her teeth in my shoulder and clutching me fiercely. So the other girls on the hall wouldn't hear.
Whereupon I determined to leave my calling card inside of her. Just once in my life inside a girl who got her first chinchilla coat at age ten.
I pumped her several good strokes while concentrating on ejaculation, and sure enough, shot the rich impasto into her. Collapsed onto her, breathing as though at a high altitude in the Andes. A succes d'estime.
She lay there in the trance-like stillness stroking my hair. Stunned by her first experience of multiple orgasm. Lisping in sophomore French 'petit chou' and 'cherie.' Took my head in her fine hands and kissed my lips tenderly. The sperm leaked out of her and dried on the inside of her thigh like crusted sugar.
"Professor Spender," she began hesitantly.
"Um?"
"I love you."
"That's very sweet of you to say, Miss Vaudrey."
More intensely now, with penetrating blue eyes fixed in mine: "I want to marry you."
"Miss Vaudrey, I don't know."
"Wasn't I good enough?"
"You were as near to perfection as possible."
"You couldn't get the whole thing in me could you? I could feel a good bit of it outside me."
"That only adds to the sense of male mastery."
"Then what's wrong?"
"Professors shouldn't marry their pupils. It smacks too much of a protige system. Of Pygmalion."
"It would work. I know it would. My family wouldn't disapprove. My brother Tuck wants to take over the mills. He wouldn't want a husband of mine trying to horn in on the business. And I have a trust fund that gives me an enormous income. We could buy one of those darling old houses out on Butte Road and spend our summers in Europe. We could make a baby. But we wouldn't have to change its diapers or anything. We'd have a nanny for that."
Miss Vaudrey, you are balm in Gilead. To lie here in this peaceful backwash of sex and listen to your intense desire for me. To put the horror of tenure and academic groveling behind me along with working for a living and sweating my bank balance. Dream of buying Monets at Sotheby's and staying at the Meurice in Paris with its malachite tables and Louis XV consoles. I would wear Brooks Bros, clothes with a nonchalant distinction. Make love to you in Venice on a bed draped in ancient velvet and afterwards we would walk in moonlight on the Lido.
You would pucker your lips in savoring and sucking my chef de brigade, and I would preside over your dining car as we took the express Train Bleu to Monte Carlo.
Perhaps beneath your beauty there even lurks a brain. And we could both be known as writers. I for aesthetics and you for belles lettres.
But pleasure often turns to sordid degradation. After some preparatory clicking of only a few seconds duration, the door swung open and a startled, homely girl in a $29.95 seersucker dress stood framed there saying:
"Connie, I came back early."
Then the double-take.
"Professor Spender! You're ... you're naked!"
* * *
"What goes in must come out," said Zac Reilly into the phone. "A cunt ain't a one-way street."
From my crumpled position in the kitchen corner I tried valiantly to tune in. The floor was littered with busted Budweiser bottles and Vietnamese beer cans. My mind began to slowly function. I had hitched a ride back to the cabin from campus in the dark. Because the car was in the muffler shop. But why had I been on campus at night? Madame Ingomar. And Connie Vaudrey in her room. The shameful episode of the roommate.
At the cabin, I had found Reilly drinking himself into an ugly stupor and listening to Bob Marley's Rastaman Vibration over and over again. Ultra-high-powered amps pumping a noise volume of 450 watts RMS through the speakerssomething equivalent to the afterburn of a space shuttlethreatening my eardrums with a terminal dose of reggae. Zac had convinced me to drop some four-way sunshine with him, and then things had turned ugly, and we had gotten into a brawl.
"Hey, I'm sorry if I'm no good," said Zac. "So what was I? A goddam English major?"
I tried to move my arm but found it a difficult task. There was light, so it had to be morning.
"Hey, there's some broad on the phone that wants you to describe a cunt for her!" yelled Zac. "She doesn't dig my prose!"
I struggled to my feet and supported myself against the wall with the phone jammed into the crook of my neck. I tried to move my right arm. It seemed to be glued to my body. Vaguely, I remembered Reilly slamming me with a Virginia cured ham. That and the words to Rastaman Vibration which wouldn't leave my head.
"This is Connie," said her cheery voice on the other end.
"Listen, Connie," I said. "About last night...."
"Don't worry," she reassured me. "My roommate won't dare tell anyone. I'd murder her if she did."
"I'm not sure we can rely on her silence."
"We have to. I feel very proprietary about your thing now. You know, your avant-garde." She giggled. "And Daddy is a big deal alumnus of the University. That's why I went to school here instead of up North somewhere. All he has to do is pick up the phone, and you have tenure.
"Anyhow, what I called about was that a couple of the girls in Alpha-Aleph are in my creative writing class, and they liked your idea of the stemma so much that they wondered if you could think up something neat for them too."
Zac was frying an enormous wad of bacon on the stove and giving me the eye at the same time. The left side of his face had a long, purple bruise where I had caught him with a full beer can. Thrown from a prone position on the floor from three yards off, it wasn't a half-bad shot.
"Let me try to think," I said. "How about an aticien regime image? Your cunt is the royal fleur de lys ringed by ermine."
"Oh, that's outstanding! Let me write it down. Any others?"
"Your cunt is like unto some spinney or fox covert in county England." . "Super. How about breasts?"
"Your breasts are as gorgeous as howdahs on the backs of a Maharaja's elephants."
"Fantastic. Any other ideas?"
"Listen, Connie, my brain isn't functioning too well. I really need to hang up."
"A man as well hung as you shouldn't hang it up," Connie giggled. "But I'll let you go. Okay if I write Mummy and Daddy and tell them I've found the big guy of my dreams?"
"Uh ... sure. Why not?" I may as well have one more reason for the University to can me summarily.
"Well, don't worry about my roommate. Jeez, do you know she wears nylon cire jackets? I mean just because Cheryl Tiegs does in those God-awful Sears ads? Can you believe that? Well, ciao now."
Zac and I ate a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs. Zac wanted to smoke hashish, but my stomach couldn't handle it.
"You really have a weird life-style," said Zac. "What do you mean?"
"Broads calling up to consult you on their cunts like you were a gynecologist or something. And that bitch up the road that you have to service. You should thank me for getting her off your back for awhile. Christ, she must keep your ass in a sling. Fucks so damn hard it's a wonder she doesn't set fire to the bed. Shit, I mean you know me. I can do fifty one-handed push-ups. But I can't get it up enough to satisfy her. She kept babbling about some guy with a Wiffle ball bat, so I went out and invested in one, and kept her satisfied yesterday. I'm just going to have to clear out of the house today. Avoid the animal. Besides, we need to pick up your Landcruiser from the muffler shop so I can drive it over and haul back the grenades."
"Zac," I said. "Where did you find someone to sell you hand grenades?"
His voice filled with enthusiasm. "Over in Dundee. You can buy anything from the gun dealers there. Fragmentation. Phosphorous. Tear gas. Even got a knock-down price on a couple of grenade launchers. You can pitch those suckers out a good hundred yards with one of them. You're missing the chance of a lifetime if you don't invest in my operation. No balls, no bullion, I always say."
We walked the two miles out the dirt road to the blacktop and hitched a ride into town. The dogwoods held their flower and the morning air was fresh and joyful.
Zac Reilly, I don't deserve to be cursed with you. I fought a clean war. Yes, I killed men with crossbows and once with piano wire. But I do not deserve the punishment of the return of old war buddies sponging off me and flirting with getting me put in the federal slammer for firearms violations. We did ugly things together. Sold all those sticky kilos of opium stolen from the CIA. But I put my money to good purpose. Learned a trade, however foolish and outto-lunch.
The muffler shop was crowded with cars and flying sparks from welding. A fat man in Madras Bermuda shorts and white socks was talking to another fat man in a double-knit suit:
"So the feller says, 'ice-cream that tastes like pussy? Invent pussy that tastes like ice-cream and then we'll be rich'!" They laughed uproariously at the joke.
I paid the hideous ninety-dollar bill and took my keys and went out to find my left rear fender crumpled in. I pointed this out to one of the mechanics, and he stared at it like he couldn't see any damage. He had long, black hair and a scruffy thin mustache; a dirty blue shirt that said 'Jake' on the pocket. He just stood there and stared, swigging out of a Nu-Grape with peanuts in it. Swigging and chewing.
"Well?" I said.
"Well what?"
"Well, I want to put in an insurance claim for what you did to my car."
"We dint do diet," he said flatly. "We couldn't uh done damage like diet." He fizzed up his drink and sucked the foam off the mouth of it.
"What do you mean couldn't have?"
"Jes' like I said. 'Sides, that's ole damage. Hell, that's got to be at least two mebbe three days old."
I tried to hold down my anger. "You some kind of Indian tracker that can read trail signs? You've done that to my car, and I want it repaired."
Jake went away. How easily we are ripped from the ivory tower. Reminded of life's harsh realities. Forced to grapple with the hoi polloi for precious pennies.
Jake came back with the manager; six feet of bearded, beergut thug slapping a wrench in his hand. His shirt had 'Buddy' on the pocket.
"M'man here says he dint do thet to yore car," said Buddy loudly.
"Well, I say he did."
Buddy turned to Jake. "This here man paid his bill?" Jake nodded. Then Buddy said to me: "Awright, then git the hail outta heah."
"I don't think so."
Jake sneered, squinting with one eye and putting his face up close to mine so I could smell the peanuts on his breath. "You some shit-ass college 'fessor or something ain't cha? Think you can shove folks around jes cause yew git tun fuck them little coeds."
For some reason they hadn't perceived that Zac was standing there; that the odds weren't quite as they had imagined.
Zac made his presence known by grasping Jake by the hair, giving it a jerk downwards and connecting Jake's face with Zac's knee. Jake let out a noise that signified pain and sat down on the ground holding a bloody mess that had been his nose.
Buddy swung the wrench, but Zac caught him right in the beergut with a blow that penetrated all the way through to his backbone.
"For shit sake, Zac!" I said desperately. "I have to live in this town!"
"Cheez," he said. T try to do you a favor...."
Reinforcements boiled out of the garage, and I had my hands full dodging the tools that were aimed at my skull. Zac piled into the Landcruiser, and yelling that he had pressing business in Dundee, roared out of the lot. I managed to deck two or three of them by the time the cops arrived. I surrendered, and they put me into the back of their cruiser in handcuffs.
The jail cell was dingy and smelled of urine; as depressing as a laundromat. A college boy was sleeping off a ferocious drunk waiting for his buddies to show up with bail money.
Go ahead, world. Proceed apace. At least I don't have to worry about feeding myself. Drag me down with stressrelated ailments. Wreck my endocrine system. I can gut it. It's no worse than being an insurance underwriter. Driving a Mercury Montego. Spending eight hours daily in a cement box with color-coded work modules. Fighting the 4:15 traffic to get home to the brick veneer house with patio torch lites and a redwood picnic table with tilt lawn umbrella. Pedestal Hibachi on wheels. Thirty-six position chaise lounge bought on special at K-Mart thereby saving $4.55.
Passing lunch hours in shopping malls pricing blacktop driveway sealer and Congoleum vinyl flooring. Even the jungles of the Mekong were gentler on the nerves. And I've experienced worse.
Once in the grey dead of a New Haven winter, waiting to know if my dissertation was approved, I lay on a plasticcovered couch in the t. v. room of a graduate dorm and drank an entire bottle of codeine-laced cough syrup. It was deadly boredom. Creeping vile paranoia. It felt like my head was growing into the couch. Not the sort of experience you would want twice.
The cell door swung open, and the warden jerked a thumb at me and ordered me out. They gave me back my belt and wallet. Showed me out the door to where Connie Vaudrey waited in a deep green Austin-Healey reading an aged Graduate Library copy of Leon Blum's On Marriage. A forgotten book that once outraged bourgeois Paris by advocating that young women sleep with their fiances.
"Want to drive?" she asked, dropping the book on the floor and sliding over into the passenger's seat. "Let's push off. I've bought us some road brew." She held up a sixpack of Miller. "I'm already zoned. Once we get out of town, I'll give you a blowjob. I practiced last night after you left with a tube of toothpaste, and I think I've improved my technique."
"That would be nice."
"Can I cook you a meal sometime? I won't say a 'gourmet' meal. That sounds so middle class. Like little couples in small apartments with their California white wine."
"And bright orange pottery dishes."
"Yeah, and tuna casseroles for six out of Ladies Home Journal."
"You have reassuring good taste, Miss Vaudrey."
"How about something with a creamy, white-wine sauce?" she said seductively.
"You're a well-conceived dish, Miss Vaudrey. I've always been partial to pork loin. Or alternatively, tenderloin slit and stuffed with prosciutto."
* * *
We met Canby and Royal driving in their Ford pick-up on a country road not a mile from their ranch. I pulled the Austin Healey over and stopped to talk with them from the car. They slowed and stopped as well. Royal was wearing chrome-covered sunglasses, and Canby was dressed in a white shirt with rolled sleeves and no collar. Grey cloth vest. Straw hat with a snap brim green sunvisor on the front.
"Get in the truck, Spender," Canby commanded, peremptory note in his voice. Yet friendly. Knowing that I should want to get in the buck. "We're going to Gum Grove."
"Why?" I queried.
"Phoenician coins," he replied. "Off the old State Highway, just west of here. We're going down there to have a look at them. You'll want to be present."
I eyed Connie inquisitively, torn between two projects, silently asking her permission. This was incredible. More traces of a Phoenician passage. Canby was like a bloodhound when he got after something. Connie might very well marry me and save me from academic degradation. But in the event it fell through it wouldn't hurt to verify our cow pasture find with other Phoenician artifacts and cinch up tenure.
"Take it to the max," Connie urged cheerfully. "I have a special tutorial with Madame Ingomar this afternoon anyway and couldn't go with you."
I relinquished the Austin-Healey and climbed into the cab of the truck. We waved goodbye and left. Connie later passed us on the way back to the University doing about seventy-five mph and waving gaily.
The back of the truck was loaded with gear. Sleeping bags. Tent. Six cases of Blue Ribbon beer. Fire axe. Bucket. Camp stools. Cowboy-style Winchester carbine hanging in the cab on a gun rack. Red cooler with ice and beer on the floor at our feet and a sealed bottle of Rebel Yell that Canby had yet to open. What restraint. And all this despite the fact that Gum Grove was not forty miles away.
Royal stared straight ahead, wrapped in her silver shades.
"Hi, Royal," I said.
She didn't answer.
"She's on acid," said Canby. "Windowpane."
"Oh," I said. "So tell me how you heard about these coins."
"Rock has died," Royal announced to no one in particular. "And nothing we can do will bring it back."
"Old newspaper article," said Canby, ignoring her. "They were found back in 1904. Farmer dug them up along with arrowheads and other stuff. Indian burial ground. Although the coins were inexplicable."
"Canby, your music sucks," said Royal. "You're a goddam organ grinder monkey in a little red hat."
"How do you know they're Phoenician?" I asked, talking around her.
"They've got the horse and palm tree on one side. The emblem of Carthage. And Tanit on the other. Their Mother Goddess."
"You're kidding me."
"I shit thee not. Pass the beer. Best I can tell from talking to a local Baptist minister over the phone, they're now owned by a fellow name of Bozart-something or somethingBozart."
I opened the cooler and got us each out a Blue Ribbon. The countryside passed steadily at fifty-five mph and sometimes slower when we went through small crossroads. An old railroad hotel in one small burg had a neon Chickenin-the-Rough sign with the rooster holding a broken golf club. A very picturesque bit of vanished Americana.
Somewhere short of Gum Grove we pulled over at a wide spot in the road with a country store on either side, the one on the far side being closed. There was a rundown corncrib and a latticed well house with a dead tree fallen over on top of it. Beside the closed store was a low pile of aluminum siding, scrap lumber and pieces of old billboards. Crates. Pallets. A rusted boiler.
We got out of the truck at the open store, leaving Royal in the cab staring up the road. A paving of old bottle caps crunched under our feet.
A flush-faced hulk of a man in bib overalls, no shirt and a red cap that said Southern States Feed and Fertilizer stood under the overhang. He was leaning up against a rusted kerosene pump sipping from a pint bottle of Old Setter and sweating all over. As we approached him, he began jigging up and down in a little dance and tunelessly singing:
"Never let your dingle-dangle dangle in the dirt, Always keep your dingle-dangle wrapped up in your shirt."
He was barefooted, and his feet scuffed in a dusty patch of yelldw dirt. We opened the faded Merita Bread screen door and went into the shadowy, musty interior. We could hear him outside still skipping around and singing:
"It's a long dong
Hang way down
Only weighs about a quarter of a pound."
The only person in the store was a fat woman in a faded print dress and plastic apron, her grey hair up in large pink curlers. Canby went over to the cold drink machine and got out a Dr. Pepper so as to put her at ease. The fat woman was busy talking into the phone and didn't particularly pay any attention.
"Yeh," she said. "Clayton flipped over his T-bird in the crick two nights ago when it was rainin' to beat the band." Pause.
"Yeh. He swore up one side and down t'other that he won't drinkin' but we all know he was on account of word got out his own momma had smelt of his soggy blue jeans the next day."
Pause.
Laughter. "Yeh, she said you could'a hare-lipped half'a Benbow County with the grain alcohol that was still in the pants cloth!"
She laughed again and said 'bye-now' and hung up the phone and turned to us with a "Nice day ain't it?"
"Too hot for comfort," said Canby. Then he added as an afterthought, "Too humid for relief."
The woman sized me up as an obvious outlander, but Canby seemed to intrigue her. You could see the wheels turning as she looked him over from head to toe fixing on the peg leg. Quietly scratching his crotch and swigging from the drink, he seemed to belong in the grubby little backwater place. I occupied my eyes by staring at a cardboard placard in the front window that advertised 'Eat at Erwin's BBQ Where the Pig and the Sauce Give Witness for Christ."
After an interminable silence, Canby spoke: "I don't suppose you know where a man named Bozart lives would you?"
"That'll be fifti-fi' cents," said the fat woman. "That includes the deposit because you look like the type who'd take his bottle with him when my back was turned."
Canby counted out the change and put it on the counter. The old woman considered him closely. "You mean old Bang-a-lang Bozart?"
"I reckon."
"You mean the one with all them dogs?"
"Yep," said Canby, leaning up against the cold drink machine and neatly snapping at the bait. I examined a Buford Plow & Implements Co. calendar for 1949.
"You mean Bang-a-lang Bozart with them Redbones?"
"Yeh," said Canby. "Redbones. And Blueticks too if I ain't mistaken."
The old woman fingered a large mole on the side of her nose. "Bang-a-lang Bozart with them Redbones and Blueticks," she mused.
Canby swigged casually from his drink, waiting.
"Bozart with them hounds. Shore now. Lessee. Go on up here to Gum Grove, then turn left and go down three, four miles 'til you get to a church, then turn back around, head back this way a mile and it'll be on your left."
Canby thought he heard an extra step in there somewhere, so he said: "Say what now?"
"Or," she said, "you could go another way. Go on up here to Gum Grove, rum left, don't go but about two miles or so and this time it'll be on your right."
She told it like Bozart had actually moved between the telling of the first and second directions. Canby nodded sagely, said 'thanks', and put his empty bottle in the drink crate without asking for his deposit money back. We shuffled towards the door.
"You won't find him home," said the fat woman.
We paused.
"Where is he?" asked Canby
"He goes out on service calls repairing freezers and incubators and manure spreaders and such like."
We stood there helpless. She busied herself under the counter and came up with a feed bag from which she drew a revolver and pointed it lazily at us. It was a Colt Python .357 Magnum. My eyesight was remarkably sharp at that moment.
"Now ain't that innerestin'," she sneered. "How Banga-lang Bozart ain't got no dawgs."
Canby froze with his tongue in his cheek as if wiping something difficult out of a molar. He kept his hands where the fat woman could see them.
"Now mebbe yew better state yore exact bi'ness and state it fast, Mister." It was a line out of an old Western.
"If there's one thing I know and know for sure," said Canby quietly, "it's that Bang-a-lang Bozart has got some old coins. And this man here"-he indicated me-"is interested in buying them."
The fat woman peered at me with one eye closed and thought awhile.
"Ain't nobody ast about them coins since back in New Deal days. Back when they first set up daylight savings time."
"Yeh," said Canby. "Well I'm asking about them now."
"That's Bozart out front there," said the fat woman, waving the gun vaguely in the direction of the red faced hulk in the bib overalls who was back to leaning up against the kerosene pump. "Go on out and talk to him if you got a mind. Course he don't often make much sense when he's drunk. And mind. I'll be keeping an eye on yew."
We shuffled out the door. When the hulk heard the screen door open, he started to do his jigging dance again and sang:
"Boo-ba-loo, Boo-ba-loo!
Boo-ba-loo-Go!
Run that ball!
Don't say no!"
Incredibly, it sounded like a college fight song. He stopped in the middle and smiled out of both comers of his mouth at once with the middle of his lips somehow put together.
"You're a couple of collich boys ain'tcha?"
"No," said Canby. "This man is a famous New York coin collector who's paid me to bring him out here to meet you."
Bozart shoved the cap back on his head and scratched meditatively at a bald skull with brown spots on it. He was as fine an example of rural Anglo-Saxon inbred degeneracy as one could hope to find. If anthropologists knew of his existence, they would probably swarm all over him with calipers measuring the pealien size of his brain cavity.
"Yew wants them coins dew yew?" he asked.
"We'd like to at least see them," I said.
"It'll cost yew," he said slyly.
"How much?" said Canby.
"Eight million dollah." He gave his leering grin again and began laughing in a snorting, snuffling sort of fashion like a hog rooting in slops.
"Will you accept a check?" said Canby coolly.
"Yup, and I wants some peanuts and a cole drank thrown in tew. I been drinking the hell outta this Setter all afternoon"-he held up his nearly empty bottle-"and I'm hotter'n shit."
"Okay, let's see the coins," said Canby. "Where are they? Back at your house?"
"I live inside the store," said Bozart. "How come yew dint know thet if this man paid yew to ride him out here?"
"Just dumb," said Canby, finally beginning to get a bit exasperated.
"Anyhow, I done change my mind. Yew want to see them coins, then I want to see that leetle putty gal's pussy." He waved his pint towards the truck. Canby pulled his beard thoughtfully. Bozart finished his pint and chucked the bottle out onto the blacktop so that it shattered into fragments.
"Hey Royal, c'mere a minute," said Canby. Royal stretched out her long legs and got down out of the truck to see what was going on. Tan Frye boots. Navy blue cord jeans. Denim shirt unbuttoned and knotted at the waist. Black hair tied back in a knot. She took off her sunglasses.
"Take your pants down and show this man your cunt," said Canby peremptorily.
"What the hell for?" demanded Royal, sounding thoroughly put out.
"Just do it and don't ask so many questions," Canby snapped back.
"Are you out of your fucking gourd?" said Royal, defensively folding her arms across her breasts.
"Come on, purty gal," purred Bozart. "Show me thet ole pussy o'yourn. I got a pecker on me a foot long. Yew'd like thet plenty."
"Christ, I think I'm going to be sick," said Royal.
"Look, Royal," said Canby persuasively, "if you don't do it, he won't show us the Phoenician coins, and the whole trip will have been a waste of time. Just take your pants down for a moment. We won't let him do anything to you."
"I must be having a nightmare," said Royal, unsnapping her jeans and sliding them down below her hips. She was hot and sweaty and the white cotton panties stuck to her and had to be peeled down separately. With effort, she divested herself down to that one eternal truth. Her glamorous, black bush showed majestically. An icon or symbol of womanhood. And yet in its own way as ordinary as a color slide of the Lincoln Memorial or the Smithsonian.
"Aw now I dew like thet," said Bozart. A lump appeared inside his overalls. It stood straight up on his stomach seeming as long as a cop's nightstick.
"Okay," said Canby. "A deal's a deal. Now show us the coins."
Bozart fished in his pockets and brought out various bits of rubbish. Fish hooks. Twine. Tampa Jewel cigar butt.
Matches. Loose change. And there glittering among the rest of the money were two large bits of yellow gold. Not quite round. The faces almost worn smooth. But distinctly visible the horse and palm tree. On the other side, the triangle mounted by a crosspiece and a round disc; a primitive figure of a woman. Tank to the Carthaginians.
Carthage was founded around 814 B.C. by the Phoenicians which would place our pasture discovery after that. Depending of course on what the Radiocarbon-14 tests showed, and they weren't due back for weeks yet.
"Holy shit," I said. 'That looks like the McCoy."
"I'll sell 'em to yuh cheap," smirked Bozart, doing his weird, snorting chuckle again.
"I don't have eight million dollars," I said.
"I know thet. I ain't jes some ole dumb hick that yew can fleece by telling me yew got lotsa money. But I do know whut yew got. And I wants it. Bad."
I knew what was coming next. I held my breath.
"I wants to fuck thet leede lady right there." He paused for dramatic emphasis. "Up the ice-hole."
"Oh shit! Here we go!" said Royal, rolling her eyes heavenward.
"Now look, Royal," said Canby. "It's not as if...."
She snapped at him furiously. "Don't you even dare mention it, you cocksucker!"
The screen door swung open and slammed against the outside wall. "Okay sugar britches," said the fat woman, pointing the gun. "Yew go throwing yore ass round in front o'my man, and yew gots to take what's coming to yew."
I gaped at her. She was wearing pink fuzzy bedroom slippers that matched the color of her hak curlers. Old darned nylons hung about her ankles.
"Any moment now I'm going to wake up," said Royal.
"You can't do this," I said lamely. The fat woman swivelled the revolver around on me and held it steady. She looked like she meant business.
"Can I do it up the ice-hole, Maybelle?" begged Bozart. "Lemme do it up the ice-hole!"
"Look...." I began, but the fat woman cut me off.
"Yew shut up, fart breath. If mah man wants to cornhole Miss Sugah-britches there, then diet's his bi'ness I reckon. Yew come out here nosing round in other folks bi'ness and yew got to take what's coming to yew."
"Spender, you shit-hook!" said Royal. "I thought you were supposed to be some kind of goddam commando! Don't let her intimidate you with that gun!"
In answer, Maybelle let off a single shot. It rang loudly and sent bottle caps near my feet spinning off. I flinched.
"I wouldn't mind pumping lead in them two buns o'yore hin'end, sugah britches," said Maybelle. "Shoot yore ass clear to Kingdom Come. Now yew lay up side o' the hood o' thet truck quick like."
"You bunch of ass-wipes," said Royal. She turned and draped her body over the hood of the truck and lifted her ramp slightly, proffering it, showing the porthole, the dimesized orifice.
Bozart peeled off the straps of his overalls and dropped them. A prick emerged, asserting its primitive strength. It was remarkably long. Uncircumcised. The hard shaft ending in a little twist of skin.
He spit on both of his hands as though getting ready to chop wood, and then rubbed the spittle all over his prick. Royal tensed as his shadow loomed over her. Her rump twitched slightly. Quivered in fear. The small circle contracting like the blowhole on some aquatic mammal.
Guiding it with a big freckled paw, Bozart planted it. Royal's eyes opened wide and black. "Ohhhh...." escaped from her lips.
Bozart took her slim hips in his huge paws and began to grant and groan as he tried to ram himself in up to the hilt.
Royal bit her lip and cursed in pain.
"Oh shit oh Christ fuck Jesus he's killing me!" Her fingers clutched at the hood of the truck. Bozart continued to shove and grunt. Canby watched Royal closely as though observing a scientific experiment.
"It'll be over in a minute," he said helpfully. "These kind of people are always premature ejaculators."
"Oh Christ God that's good," said Royal.
Surprised, I looked again at her face. Tears were running down her cheeks, but despite the grimace of pain, a measure of sheer, unadulterated pleasure seemed to be infusing her system. She began to groan and writhe, pressing her hips up against the hot metal of the hood and moving them in a circular motion. Bozart had his enormous prick buried half way in.
"Aw shit," he suddenly said. "I'm hung up!" A look of fear came over him.
"Don't be ridiculous," said Canby. "That only happens to dogs. It's physically impossible for a woman to enclose a man's dick and keep it trapped."
"Oh God don't stop!" groaned Royal.
Bozart put his hands flat up against Royal's back and pulled backwards as hard as he could. He seemed to be held fast. "Don't tell me thet shit!" he bellowed desperately. "I know it can happen! We'll get twisted around backerds and she'll stretch my pecker out as long and thin as baling wire!"
"Oh Christ I'm coming!" shrieked Royal, collapsing across the hood, going weakknead and slowly sliding down to embrace the front tire. With a tremendous exertion, Bozart popped free and fell hard onto his ass. He sat there blinking, looking dumbfounded. He lifted his cap and scratched at his head. Maybelle was dying laughing, slapping her thighs with the pistol.
"A deal's a deal," said Canby. "Now let's have those coins."
Bozart fished in his pocket again and handed them over. Canby neatly slid them in the watch pocket of his grey vest and shoved the limp Royal into the cab of the truck. I jumped in behind as he started the engine and roared out of the drive spewing bottle caps from his squealing tires.
Twenty-five yards down the road, he screeched to a halt and jerked the Winchester down from the gunrack.
"What the fuck...?" I said.
"You think I'm not going to protect my bride?" said Canby, flipping the lever to jack a shell into the chamber. He stepped down into the road and opened up with a blaze of gunfire. The gas pump went off with a loud BOOM of flame and smoke and Bozart and Maybelle scrambled clear, Bozart hopping on one leg trying to get his pants up. They hit the dirt behind the corncrib.
Fragments of board and metal rained down from the black oily pyre. Falling smithereens of destruction.
"Yew sunny bitch!" Maybelle screamed.
Royal slouched in the seat beside me, eyes half closed, lips murmuring:
"Don't know why you say good-bye, say hello."
* * *
"I simply can't abide it anymore," McAlister Webley moaned, his voice sounding on the verge of tears. He sat on the guest chair in my rubbish-filled office with both trembling delicate hands folded over a fancy silver head walking stick. Eyes puffy as if he had had no sleep the night before. Lemon colored linen suit wrinkled. Chardin tie poorly knotted. Long ringlets of hair that hung over his collar in back of his eggbald head, dirty and matted.
I had been reading a newspaper account of the mysterious explosion of a country store near Gum Grove. The owners had talked to the police only in monosyllables, and there was no indication of what had caused the blast. The sheriff had publicly stated that he figured they were hiding something as neighbors had reported hearing gunfire. Now that was worrisome, and it made it hard for me to give my full attention to what Webley was bellyaching about. With tenure hanging in the balance and the carbon-14 dating tests on the amphora not in yet, I couldn't survive a scandalous exposure of lurid rural butt-fucking and shoot-outs. I felt marked by fate for disaster.
Webley looked about my junky cubbyhole with mournful eyes. He had a spacious office, carpeted, furnished in Italian Renaissance furniture borrowed from the museum. The walls hung with panels by Raphael. A Chinese screen with a fruit tree in pale pink blossom.
My furniture was like the rest of the garbage issued by the University: discarded public school. And it was stacked high with old term papers, overdue library books and years of ungraded final exams. I never graded my finals, just assigning a grade based on the test trends. In the anonymity of my large lectures, none of the kids ever figured it out.
The only decorative touch was a framed color photo of a Greco-Roman vase painting depicting a Pan raping a buxom woman. The very nature of the room seemed to wound Webley; the cluttered disorder, the vulgar fantasy on the wall. He sought solace in stroking the head of his cane, molded in the form of a Mallard duck.
"Are you going to level with me or what, Dr. Webley?" I asked. "I can't offer much help for vague symptoms of having reached the end of your rope."
Besides, I hate you, Webley, you pedantic tyrant. Your entire head is a cancerous melanoma. You endlessly taunt me with your threats of banishment. I uncover an old copper jug in a cow pasture and you accuse me of fraud and try to use it to engineer my destruction. You have relentlessly hunted me until I dropped gasping in exhaustion, indifferent to the spectre of death. But I'll help you to suicide. Give you basic advice. When you shoot yourself be sure to put the gun inside your mouth. If you point it at your temple, it may glance off leaving you a vegetable. And in your case, no one would know the difference.
Webley's hands trembled spasmodically. He stroked his jaw and throat in a vain effort to still them. His hands were long and white and fine with faint blue veins standing out on them. Nails perfectly and professionally manicured.
I waited for him to reveal his secret. I had come back from Gum Grove with a drunk Canby and a dazed Royal to find the girls of Alpha-Aleph out digging in the cow pasture under the supervision of Madame Ingomar. They were beginning a fairly professional archeological excavation. Roped-off areas. Layering and sifting of the soil with trowels and sieves.
The girls were dusty and happy in blue jeans and old shirts and bandeau swim suit tops. Canby had brought out a camp chair and a pitcher of gin rickeys and sat down to watch enthralled. That was okay in and of itself, but when I woke up the following morning, there had been another crew of them out there at work wearing multicolored bathing suits. Catalina and Jantzen. Skimpy little two-piece affairs. They said they figured they might as well get a head start on their tans. And I supposed that was okay in and of itself.
Except I left Zac Reilly on the porch staring hungrily at them which made me uneasy. That along with Canby shooting up the country store and the astonishing mix of small arms that Zac was stockpiling in my cabin. Now all that had me on the ragged edge. Very worried. And along with the approaching tenure problem, the burden was becoming unbearable. Breaking me down physically. Itching. Dehydration. Tremors of the left eyelid.
"It's ... it's April," said McAlister finally. More overwrought than I was. Bewildered. Nearly contorted with his pain. A sob broke his voice, and he was unable to go on.
"I know she sometimes slips the ropes of her normal restraint," I said. "But what is it now?"
"She's ... she's ... Oh God this is so indelicate. You'll think it such a preposterous confabulation...." He pulled a mauve handkerchief out of his sleeve and mopped his forehead. "She's revealed her libido in all its horror. She's proven herself to be what I believe is called a nymphomaniac."
He broke off again and stared hard at his handmade Italian shoes. They were so polished you could actually see a faint reflection in them. As I watched, a tear dripped off the end of his nose and splashed on one of them. Glimmering along with the high gloss.
"Would you care to start at the beginning?"
"I'm not sure I can." He wiped his nose and sniffed. "You see my jaws ache so I can barely talk."
"Why is that, pray?" I found myself falling into his antique mannerisms of speech.
"April wanted me to copulate with her yestereve. Just as I was sitting down to reaffirm my vows with Rusk in's Stones of Venice. She had been out all day and cook had prepared me a very decent meal of white gazpacho, mushroom-stuffed Eggs Florentine, and sesame asparagus. I had supped and was feeling pleasantly satisfied. Even a trifle stimulated by the half-bottle of chilled Medoc. I had poured myself a large Napoleon brandy."
"And?"
"And then April appeared. Looking wild-eyed and ... and savage. Like a contemporary Whore of Babylon. She was wearing a London Fog raincoat with, as she quickly revealed, nothing underneath it. She initially wore shoes. I observed that because when she kicked them off, her toenails flashed quite cherry red."
"Did she say anything?"
"She announced that she was 'not satisfied'. And ... and told ... and told me ... "
"And told you what?"
"To disrobe and-as she put it in some peculiar idiomto 'get it up'."
"Did you?"
"I was somewhat frightened of her. I had witnessed such moods before, but usually it was close on the heels of a board of directors meeting in New York or New Jersey. On those occasions, she had not wanted sex. She was usually angry about being thwarted in some business objective.
"It would be all mixed up with talk of offer guidelines, loan rollovers and cash flow budgets. I've never understood those utilitarian things fully. The vehemence of her passion always struck me as a trifle ludicrous."
"What would happen on those occasions?"
"She would order me out of the house. Or else oblige me to wait on her in menial fashion like a servant. It was typically quite humiliating. But never have I experienced a bestial incident such as this. Never such obscene antics. Such vulgar twaddle."
"Did you get it up?"
Webley blushed and wiped at the corners of his eyes with the handkerchief. "It's quite impossible, you know. I've made sincere efforts on several occasions, but such puerile goals have never been mine for the reaching. I am a man of contemplation and aesthetics. To actually rut like a wild beast has scant appeal for me. True, I practice le vice solitaire, but not to any large extent. I normally eschew such gross behavior."
"Did you even try last evening?"
"I'm always intimidated by April when she's in one of her moods. Once she made me bathe her feet using buttermilk and a chamois cloth. It completely exhausted me, and I had to miss a week of classes. But I'm afraid to refuse what she wants. And this time, when she revealed herself stark naked, I must say, it gave me quite a start.
"I had seldom seen her totally naked before. On our wedding night, she wore a peach-colored cotton gown. With ecru lace. And an embroidered signature. I never really penetrated her. She revealed the nipple of a breast, and I confess, I became unconscionably panicked. It stirred deepseated memories of my mother. I tried to explain my motivations, but she turned a deaf ear and ever since we have maintained separate bedrooms."
I was becoming interested. "But you did try last night?"
"She wouldn't give me sufficient lee-way. She dragged me to the floor and commanded me to-again she put it in some vulgar lingo-to 'go down on her'."
"What did you do?"
"It panicked me. For a moment, confronted as I was by her wet genitals, I thought I was going to scream and be sick. I mastered my nausea, and playing for time, feigned that I did not comprehend her desires."
"And?"
"She ... she...." A look of sheer horror passed over Webley, and he blanched even whiter than his normally washedout shade. "She sat on my face."
Webley broke down and sobbed again. Crying uncontrollably. Shoulders heaving. Face in hands. "It was a nightmare. I could scarcely breathe. She forced me to lick her ... her ... to lick her-sob-lavatory. And all the while, she writhed and groaned and made the most ghastly noises, and if I for a moment let up, she would wrench my ears painfully and cover my nose so I couldn't catch my breath."
"Did she climax?"
"She seemed to do so repeatedly. While letting out an incredible torrent of barbaric words. Almost a peroration. Normally her vocabulary is so poverty-stricken, I had no idea it contained such a direct style.
"And all the while with me a prisoner there. You have no idea. The putrid taste. The nasty crinkly pubic hair in my mouth. At last"-Webley drew a deep breath to get the strength to go on-"at last, she rolled off of me and lay on the floor with her eyes closed. Moaning slightly. Rolling her hips from side to side. Her buttocks seemed to be striped with faint wounds, as if she had recently been whipped.
"It ... in spite of my nausea ... it excited me. It was remindful of certain recherche essays by the Due d'O. I found my penis showing an extraordinary vigor. Indeed, growing stiff between my legs. Such personal licentiousness came as an additional surprise. The return of an exiled talent. Ulysses rising ragged but proud from the Ionian Sea. And what with the bizarre nature of the moment, I did something I hadn't essayed since our wedding night."
"You shoved it in her?"
"Precisely. Made it an integral part of her, so to speak. A most extraordinary sensation. Although it failed to sustain itself for long. Suddenly, I felt this peculiar rising inside me. And I ejaculated. Almost like a sneeze really. You feel it coming and there's little or nothing you can do to stop it. It lends a somewhat pleasurable finale to things."
"Did April like it?"
"To the contrary, it made her furious. Troth, I scarcely expected it to elicit transports of admiration. Yet...." He shook his head slowly. "She went into a perfect rage and pursued me through the house. I flew from her, but with my trousers down about my ankles, it was exceeding difficult. I stumbled and fell. She called me a filthy eunuch and other pejorative terms and struck me with a piece of furniture."
Webley lifted up his trouser leg to show the wound. First revealing navy blue silk socks and absurd sock gaiters on his spindly, white, hairless legs. Then the bony knee. Then a large purple bruise on his smooth thigh. He dropped his trouser leg and threw up his hands in despair.
"I was paralyzed with the pain," he continued. "Fell to the floor screaming. She bore down on me again. This time it was even worse. She was simply dripping ... with ... my semen. I had to lick that." Webley gave a dry heave, and for a moment, I feared he was going to chuck his cookies all over my office.
"I was defenseless, and she was insatiable. It went on seeming for hours. At last I fainted. Fell into a merciful oblivion. When I awoke, it was morning. Birds were singing and the paperboy arrived. April was lying beside me on the floor asleep. Still naked. With a banana halfway protruding from her vagina. A common, garden variety banana. Tropical garden. Yellow it was. With a slight tinge of green. She must have selected it for its unripe turgor. Even as shaky as I was, fear drove me struggling to my feet. I locked myself in the bathroom."
"And then what?"
"My efforts awakened her, and she cursed at me and bashed on the door with an object of furniture. I learned later it was a Victorian muffin stand. She shattered it completely. A tragic loss of a beautiful object. And she called me a 'dick sucker' which I take to be some form of catamite. All the while, I sat upon the cold commode quaking with fear. At last she left the house, and I dressed hurriedly and came here."
"But why me? What can I do for you?"
He regarded me desperately. "Surely, man! Surely you can help me! Offer some suggestion! You're heterosexual. You must know the answer. It's not as if I could turn to anyone else in the department. They would faint at the mere description of my plight."
The phone rang abruptly, nearly sending Webley through the ceiling, his nerves being that shot. I picked it up and said 'hello."
"Spender," said April Webley on the other end.
"Uh ... yes, April," I said. Webley blanched and struggled to keep from heaving his guts with sheer fright.
"I want you, Spender," she growled in a hungry voice. "I just needed to verify that you were in your office." She hung up with a loud click.
"You wife's coming here," I said.
McAlister fell on the floor and began clutching at my knees, kissing my shoes. "Please, please," he sobbed. "Keep her away from me! I can't go through that again! I couldn't live with myself! The disgust. The pain. My very soul and memory are steeped in nausea. Don't let her effect her purposes of conquest! Please I'll give you anything!"
"Tenure?" I questioned sharply.
He lifted his wet, desperate face from my shoes and looked into my eyes. 'Tenure? Is that what you asked for?"
"That's right. And no more shit about the Phoenician treasure."
He clutched my legs again and pressed his face against my knees. "Yes yes anything! I mean it! Tenure! I can assure it! You'll have it! I swear!"
"I want it in writing," I said.
"Yes yes I'll do it!"
The door flung open, and April Webley stood there in one of her classic dress-for-success business suits. Spice brown skirt and jacket. Designer-weight dusky rose silk blouse. Eyes dancing with bright tongues of flame. She licked her lips and measured me up and down.
A look of abject dismay covered McAlister Webley's face. As we confronted April, she slowly lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed that she wore no panties. A blond bush showed between her legs. Flaunting its brave color, masking the deep recess between her thighs. A camouflaged tiger pit. Luring the unwary into that triangular entanglement.
McAlister shrieked at the sight of this boddy reality, abandoned his chair and crawled into the corner cowering and sucking his thumb. With his free hand, he picked loose papers up and let them shower over his head. A smell of urine filled the room as he wet his pants in fear. I shoved a yellow legal pad and a ball point pen in his direction and commanded: "Write, Webley!"
He pulled himself together feverishly and obeyed. April closed the door and locked it with an ominous click.
"I took on my entire Economics 201 seminar this morning," she announced. "We were discussing the Keynesian concept of Savings always being equal to Investment. As a physical proof, I made them invest inside me their savings pool from the collective sperm bank system. Injection of fresh lendable funds concept and all that. Should have been enlightening.
"But they couldn't handle it. Fourteen disgusting wimps. And do you realize that there are three football players in that class? They were even worse than the rest. Inadequate. Inept. Pathetic, premature ejaculators."
As she talked, she undid the zipper on the side of her skirt and worked the garment down from her waist to the wider curve of her hips. Then with a shaking movement it fell about her ankles. The jacket and shirttail hung down in irregular lengths. Leaving bare flesh beneath. Matchless legs. And the hint of blond coarse hair.
In one swift movement, she swept my desk of its years accumulation of papers. Lay down and stretched herself out, spreading her legs wide in a motion of crude urgency. "All right, big boy," she challenged me, voice infused with the omnipotent power of her desire. "Let's see what sort of stuff you're made of."
It was a dare straight out of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. The emotions of a matador facing the deadliest of bulls swept over me. Strangely, my body reacted positively. Prick stiffening its fibre. Firm and sure. I unzipped my trousers for verification, and it pointed straight out to an almost farfetched length, eliciting an approving 'mmmm' out of April.
She was heaving with anticipation and emotion, breasts rising and falling beneath her blouse. Something almost demonic seemed to have a grip on her. A torment of inner drama was building steadily.
"Please," she begged, stretching out her arms toward me. "Please hurry! I need it." Reaching to touch the paraphernalia needed for her pleasure. Radiating desire. Dissemi nating heat. "Hurt me. I don't care. Split me in two!"
I checked to verify that McAlister was performing his required chore. He was writing furiously. I watched him approvingly for a brief moment, and then initiated the desired contact.
Barely had I touched my end to her wet trap, when she wrapped her legs around my waist and drew me into depths which seemed to stretch into infinity. Her hands reached out for me, clawing my shirt out of my trousers and seizing onto handfuls of the flesh of my back. Simultaneously, she sat up and got onto me, clinging and humping. I toppled backwards. A stack of old senior essays broke my fall, and we wallowed in several years' work that I had never gotten around to grading.
She got me over onto my back and pumped at me violently at sight-blurring speed, in her movements seeming to defy the Law of Quantum Mechanics. My instinctive reaction was to reach up under her blouse and try to get a grip on her pendulous and swinging breasts. There was no bra to hold them in, and they flailed about wildly. She ground her hips into me with unbounded wantonness.
The enchantment was suddenly over. I was in for a ran for my money. It had been easy enough to imagine the wimp McAlister unable to sate her, but I was confronted by the possibility that she was more than Hercules unchained could handle. That even if I brought her off this time, there would be no breathing space before the ardor of a renewed attack. She was a fire heaped with its glowing coals able to bum through the night.
I struggled to roll her off of me, but she held me down like a pro wresder, filled with a fierce strength, wrought up to the highest possible pitch of excitement. Panting breath like steam heat. She ground her pelvis into me until I thought my own bones would break. The Galop Infernale. The Ride to the Abyss. Despite my best efforts, I could feel myself starting to reach a personal crescendo. There was only one solution, and it came in a flash.
Reaching up, I wrapped my hand in her hair and twisted it backwards until she cried out. Then breaking the intensity of her thrust, I jerked her off of me in a violent thud. She struck on her back, my prick slipping out of her. As if in some Biblical parable, my sperm spilled, poured out of me on the linoleum floor. Spattering an old exam blue book, bringing with its flow the death gasp, the perishing of the penis.
McAlister shrieked once again in morbid fear of the violence. April caught one side of my face with a lashing blow. Red nails like jungle claws. I flinched, smarting with the pain.
Crouching, I got my wooden straight edge out of the long drawer of the desk, and one-handed, twisted April's arm behind her back and into what wrestlers call a chicken wing. She screamed at me and kicked out viciously with her high heel shoes.
"Goddam you! Please! I want it!" Her screams alternated between a drill sergeant's orders and a slave's piteous plea.
Holding her firmly, I lined up the ruler for her creamy buttocks. Peach yogurt that I would make into raspberry. Still faintly visible were the stripes from her last lashing. Fading, like a half-forgotten dissipation.
WHACK! Down came the first stroke, stinging her like nettles. She howled bloody murder, and McAlister scrabbled among the fallen papers as if to bury himself. April struggled to escape, but only succeeded in offering me the other bun. WHACK! Down it came again. This time her scream was broken by a piteous sob of pain.
"Please don't! Please!" she begged.
Whack whack whack! Three more times in quick succession. She writhed desperately with the pain. I released her arm, and shecrawled on her belly through the mass of fallen papers across the floor. Buttocks flinching. Turning desperately this way and that in the continuous burning pain.
"Goddam you, you swine!" she snarled, her voice thick with tears and mucus. She backed into a corner and drew her knees up under her chin. Hugged them there, showing a blond wisp of cunt hair. "You swine! You motherfucking swine! How dare you!"
Something of the old April was beginning to return. McAlister perceived the altered tone of voice and paused in his groveling to gape at her. She regarded him with utter contempt. A worm on the pavement to be mushed. Her eyes were mean, but perfectly sane and cunning.
"You disgusting, sniveling eunuch," she snapped at him. "How dare you let this happen to me!" She turned to me. "Spender, you vile, low pervert! I'll have your balls cut off for this! Do you think to humiliate me? Did you assume that I would crawl on my hands and knees and suck your stinking, superating cock? Warm the girl's fanny and she'll crawl and beg for it! Oh, I can hear you and my disgusting husband now! She'll fuck like a dog if you paddle her pert little behind! Disgusting, gross lot of boors! I've got the goods on your Phoenician burial mound! It's all a fake and I can prove it!"
At one point those words would have been my death knell, but no more. Canby was onto it and, besides, I had Webley's letter, written in stark terror.
April struggled to her feet, furiously rubbing at her bottom. Sneering at me contemptuously, she grabbed up her skirt, stepped into it, and zipped it. There was that about her which had acquired an enormous respectability. As high and mighty as a Victorian home. Prominent breasts and buttocks as proper and strait-laced as mahogany furniture, tapestry-draped tables and Mooresque fire grates.
"You haven't heard the last of this!" she snarled at me. "Come on, you ridiculous wretch!" she directed to Mc Alister. "Wallowing in trash like some kind of a moron!"
McAlister followed her like a docile lap dog out of the room, she walking stiff as a plank, head high and haughty, he drooping, using his cane to limp along, leaving a small trail of dripping urine behind him.
I picked up the yellow legal pad that McAlister had left behind and found a totally incoherent letter-full of incomprehensible gibberish-that he had signed. I tore it up. It had certainly turned into a midnight dreary.
* * *
I didn't have much time to do anything but keep on Canby to continue with his research and try to speed up the carbon14 dating. Exams were drawing near, and I received the usual variety of sexual ploys from my female students. All were traps of one sort or another. The most innocent-seeming coeds could turn into ruthless blackmailers once they had the goods on you. I longed to fuck the unadulterated hell out of the little chippies, but ground my molars till they heated with friction and resisted.
A Miss Jackie Cameron came by my office and talked earnestly about how if she did not achieve a C-average that semester her parents would not let her go to Europe. All the while shifting sexily in her seat and revealing various lengths of thigh beneath her skirt.
Miss Dixie Cox sent me a cute note written in green, fine-point, felt-tip pen with little hearts and flowers on it. Explaining in verse that she needed at least a B and ending with a curious ditty about the size of a woman's nipples that must have come out of the joke column of Playboy.
A very hard yankee girl from Massachusetts came round to visit and flat-out proposed a delivered A in exchange for a night of-as she put it-'non-stop action between the sheets'. I hardened myself and ignored all of these.
But Bess Ogletree was a different matter altogether. When she sent me a note, I knew she was on the level: (a) She was not in one of my classes, and (b) she had already put out willingly. She would let me snatch her panties off and fuck her until her nose bled and never use it to gain untoward leverage.
It was a sad note, almost with a touch of desperation: "I don't know what's come over me. I need help. Please. I must meet you tonight in the Oedipus Theatre at 8 o'clock. I don't dare be seen out in daylight. Your Bess"
The Oedipus Theatre was one of those anachronisms that made the University so grand. A stone amphitheatre in the Greek fashion facing on a bucolic park of thick wild woods and meandering stream. Somehow it remained intact despite the depredations of the megaversity freaks and cement construction fanatics. It was a delicious spot for a tryst on a warm spring evening.
Had the note been from anyone else, I might have expected to encounter an ambush of fraternity thugs waiting to kidnap me and carry me hogtied out of the county. That had happened to Bamberg in creative writing once. Lured by the pert, daring poses of a black-haired minx and left hanging by his feet from a beech tree for ten hours before someone found him and cut him down. The blood had gone to his head, and he was raving deliriously when the fire department got to him. Babbling boastfully of Suzie Coeds clamoring to sit upon his prick like a flagpole. But Bess was different. I played a special role in her life.
At eight o'clock, the night insects were humming and bullfrogs croaked down in the creek. Behind me were the muted lights of some of the old dormitories. Crooked shapes of dogwood trees. And falling away at my feet the stone banks of seats of the amphitheatre. The white sandy stage seemed bare.
Cautiously, I walked down the center of the seats. Listening to my footfalls. Watching for movement in the shadows. I reached the sandy pit and clambered up the small three-foot retaining wall onto the stage.
The air was warm. Alluring. All animals except modem man have a season for their coition. Yet man was that way once. His genitals frozen most of the year by cold and hunger and fear. Waiting for the spring with the rivers full of fish. Trees laden with fruit. Grasses long and nights gentle. Then he would couple with his mate. Dance his fertility rites. On nights such as this.
Bess moved out of the shadows and stood hesitantly. Hugging her elbows. Shoulders slightly rounded. Red hair hanging down over one shoulder.
"Professor Spender?" she whispered.
"Yes," I replied, whispering likewise. Feeling a tiny chill of expectancy. I advanced two steps across the stage, one hand extended slightly forward. We approached like actors in a Greek tragedy.
She ran the last few yards and flung herself against me, still hugging her body, but burying her tear-soaked face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around her protectively. She shivered despite the warmth of the evening, and I clasped her and rubbed the bare skin of her back. While my chest devoured those noble strong breasts. So worthy of a figurehead carving on the prow of a ship.
She was dressed in a halter top and severely abbreviated khaki shorts with an elastic waist. And flip-flops. No more of the dress-for-success look d la April Webley. She continued to cry quietly.
"Oh Professor Spender," she said miserably, snuffling a bit. I offered her my handkerchief, and she sniffed into it daintily and dabbed at her eyes. I waited patiently for her to gather herself together.
"I don't understand what's happened," she said at last. "Dr. Webley has turned into some kind of an animal. I'm frightened. I'm thinking of dropping out of school and going back home. Maybe finishing up at a smaller school. Meredith or Sweetbriar. Or Agnes Scott."
"You mean the way she tied you up at my house?" I queried.
Her eyes glinted in the pale light as she looked up at me and fixed me with a serious gaze. "Oh no. That was part of an experiment. I knew about that more or less from the beginning and agreed to it. I mean I didn't realize she was going to beat me with that little whip, but it didn't hurt too much. Even felt good once I got into it. But it was...." Bess buried her face in my neck again. I felt her long strong body.
"But what, Bess?"
"It was the whole ... the whole lesbian aspect of the thing. I've always thought that was a sin. But when I saw her naked, I suddenly wanted her. And I did those ... those things to her! You saw me. At the time when you fucked me I felt so satisfied I didn't think about it. But afterwards it started coming into my mind at unexpected moments. And I found that I liked to think about it in bed at night. That it seemed soft and nice."
"I'm not sure that it's such a terrible thing, Bess," I said, stroking her soft hair. She slid her arms around my neck and held me close, whispering into my ear, caressing my neck with her lips lightly.
"But I'm a minister's daughter. If my parents knew, they'd murder me."
"College is a time for testing our old entrenched ideas against the challenge of the new," I said, feeling that it was a rather stupid comment even as I made it. Bess didn't seem to remark upon it though.
"But it isn't just them! I mean I don't have to tell them I suppose. But it's gotten worse."
"How so?"
"I went to Dr. Webley's office yesterday for my weekly tutorial. Normally we read passages from her book The Bitch in the Boardroom and discuss them afterwards. Or she gives me case studies from her experiences in the Wall Street world. Yesterday, though, she ... she grabbed me and smothered me with kisses. Tore my clothes from me and dragged me to the floor. It's a very fancy office with wallto-wall carpeting and there was plenty of room to stretch out."
"I'm familiar with it," I said, remembering its appointments vividly.
"I resisted at first. I know I look strong, and I suppose I am, but she attacked me in a frenzy. Beat me with her fists. A ring she was wearing left marks all over my body. You can't really see them in the dark, but they show up terribly in the daylight. It's so embarrassing. And if that weren't enough, she put hickeys all over my breasts. At least they don't show."
My interest was piqued. "Did you surrender?"
"Yes," Bess admitted. "I did. I found myself ... well, relishing the pain ... and I gave myself to her. Even worse, I wanted her as well. We lay in-you know-the sixty-nine position and did each other. It must have gone on for hours. People knocked on the door and then went away. We kept on. We were insatiable. We just couldn't get enough. We both came and came again. When she would come she'd scream into my cunt to muffle it and sink her nails into my bottom. I'm so ashamed now."
Bess began to cry softly again, dripping tears into the collar of my shirt. I ran my hand down inside her shorts and felt her hard rump.
"Professor?" she demurred. "I started our whole liaison for April and what she wanted to find out about that darned Phoenician stuff. But ... none of it's important now. Only that I tell you everything."
What care I for the predecessors in your twat when I long to lavish kisses on it? Taste its private amenities. Mingle my saliva with its russet fur tippet. Then surge furiously into it with all the hygienic, mythical violence of the Rape of Europa such as it was depicted by Paolo Veronese and can still be seen in the Doge's Palace in Venice. Invest it with the genius of the prick artist, and when we have both come-have tous les deux exulted in pleasure like Springtime-to die like Autumn. And tumble into a cocooned sleep wrapped in each others arms.
Curiously, some little-used sixth sense tensed me. My nose twitched to an old familiar smell of danger. Shadowy forms were moving into the upper reaches of the amphitheater. I counted them silently. Four. Five. Six. Big hulking brutes. Animal phantasms.
"Bess," I said. "Is there something else you're not telling me?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, sounding genuinely startled.
"Are there some guys following you?" Her hand went to her mouth in surprise and fear. She gave a small gasp. "Oh Lord, Professor Spender. I should have told you. There are ... some boys ... from the Zoo house ... who know that I've been fooling around with you. I mean it began as a business experiment. Sort of a Junior year project and all. So I didn't see too much harm in telling my roommate, and she told her boyfriend, and I guess the word just spread. Well I saw a boy from the Zoo house today in class, and he's always been jealous of you ever since the word sort of got around, and he'd gotten real mad at me once or twice about it. Says it's a waste of ... well, good pussy, is what he says."
"And what happened today?"
"Well, when he saw the bruises on me he thought you had done it. And I couldn't really tell him that Dr. Webley had done it. Why everyone would think I was some kind of a lesbo or something. So I just really didn't know what to say. And anyhow, he got all bent out of shape and said he was going to punch the shit out of you if he ever saw us together again."
"That's why we couldn't meet in daylight?"
"Well ... sort of."
They were coming down the stone seats, jumping from one row to the next in lithe bounds. Using well-oiled, nicely exercised muscles.
"Those guys are just real re-tards," said Bess angrily. "We've got to get out of here!"
O sweet Bess, why does my reason surrender around you? Open the portals and allow my animal urges to run riot? Why do I not make you go and negotiate with them? Explain that I am not the villain? Why do I have such an instinctive fright of the yahoo Galahad complex? And by nature flee from it instead of standing and stomping the dog-shit out of it as it so richly deserves?
We fled exit left out the stone backdrop and past the wooden picnic tables of the small park and into the dark sombre silence of the trees. Hearing behind us the ignorant surprised shouts of the redneck clods. "Hey! There the sumbitch go! Get his ass! Spread out! Get over on the right, Beaver! Cut left Bo'! Haul ass now!"
The leaves swished beneath our feet loudly, but our pursuers had no sense of sound nor ability to listen and track like beasts of prey. Miss Ogletree, you run so easily beside me even in your rubber flip-flops. Those long Amazonian legs. Can it be that you are a jogger? Your long flanks seem made for such strenuous exercise. To tone them up for the robust pleasures of the boudoir.
We dodged small boulders. Stumbled on the incline that led down towards the creek. Picked ourselves up clumsily and ran on holding to one another as Miss Ogletree finally began to breathe heavily through her mouth and finely trimmed nostrils. Further behind us, confused shouts as I realized that we could outrun them with ease, but that would draw us impossibly deep into the woods and besides, the exertion of effort was not worth it. So much easier to lie in the underbrush like skulking badgers and let the hunt pass us by.
At our feet suddenly the smooth rocks of the bubbling creek. The trickle and the babble. Here Bess, without a word follow my lead and get down behind this rock. That's right. Be guided by the pressure of my hands down into the water. It's cool in the summer heat and it covers us so perfectly. We may lie here in the shallows and be lost utterly from view and besides, the running water is such a sensual force on our bodies. Surely a vital creature such as yourself should appreciate that. While above us the stars glimmer through the enclosing mat of foliage.
"See there, Miss Ogletree," I whispered. "Those twentyeight majestic points of light that take the shape of a goat. That's Capricorn. Ancient peoples believed it to feed the King of Heaven with its goatly milk. It takes the same place in the sky each night. Don't shiver so, Miss Ogletree. You'll give our position away. Let me hold your marvelous tits. Steady us both. Calming influence. How I should enjoy taking sustenance from them."
"You're so poetic, Professor Spender. I'm a Capricorn. That's my sign. You know. Of the Zodiac. What are you?"
"Shhh. They're coming."
We heard the loud floundering and curses as our pursuers fell into the creek. "Gawdam' it's the fucking crick! Where the shit do you reckon they've got to?"
And so they passed us by in the pitch blackness, stumbling and swearing and damning me to eternity and at bliss in their angry animal passions. Utterly unable to comprehend how Bess could be with me and have no desire to be liberated. Rubes who assume that girls respect only the most basic cave-man brute force without any desire for finesse.
Their voices grew more distant and faint. I had no fear that they were clever enough to leave a member of the troupe behind to lurk and listen and try to draw us out of our den unsuspecting.
"God this water is nice once you get used to it," Bess whispered.
"Want to spend the night? Rolling in fallen leaves along the bank. Breathing the damp exhalations of the water like an aphrodisiac."
"I would, but you know they'll come back this way," Bess advised.
"To your left," I said, "is the hill that leads up out of the park to a narrow meandering drive below ritzy homes beyond."
We scrambled up the incline closely covered by rotting dead leaves that cracked yet did not give us away as our pursuers were so distant. They would become rapidly discouraged and even frightened of the dark and return, so we pressed, yet not overly.
In places, the incline was so steep that we pulled ourselves along by small saplings. Clambered over rotted logs and at last were standing on the narrow one lane road that twisted below other-century frame grandiloquent homes. All ghostly white clapboard with dark shutters and sometimes small columns on the front porch.
"My van's up here," said Bess. "I don't have a campus parking sticker for it, so I leave it near here. We can hide there from those spastic morons."
"How very convenient. I had no idea you were a van type girl."
"I'm not really. I got it for transporting paintings. You know. When I go into big-time art dealings. Look, it's down there."
We trotted down a short section of road and climbed through the back door into the carpeted interior. So very soft and warm after the chill of the creek. We found that we were shivering and hugged each other. Bess locked the doors with a clamp and twist of the handles. How welcoming this secure darkness. How nice to hear you breathe, to feel your faint stirrings. Then we lay in the anxious silence, hearing the voices coming back along the road.
"Shit, we only missed 'em by a cunt hair."
"That sum-bitch Spender. I'll get his ass good yet."
"Aw come on Randy. I mean what the hell does it matter anyhow?"
"It just ain't right. An old man like him getting all that poon-tang. I mean he's practically got one foot in the grave."
"He ain't that old is he?"
"Well, maybe not. But I bet he's a dam' ole queer or something. Showing all them slides in class of statues with big dicks and stuff. They say lots of queers will try to fuck women just to cover up that they're really faggots."
"Well if them gals want his damn ass then so what?"
"It just ain't right! And you can't expect no dumb-ass girl to know her mind. They're all carried away by all of them dirty slides he shows in class. They just ain't used to a real man nohow. Why if we beat the shit outta him, they'd prolly pull their damn step-ins down right on the spot."
Their footsteps passed, arguing voices faded and they were gone. Off to guzzle beer at the Hobby Horse and dream of pounding me senseless in front of an admiring Bess who would swoon at their manly exhibition. "But what are you doing, Bess? Why such concentrated wiggles?"
"I'm cold, Professor Spender. I've got to get out of these wet clothes. You ought to do the same. Don't worry. It's clean in my van. I scrubbed it out special. No cooties or social disease."
"Get out of your clothes? What a remarkable suggestion. Particularly when I have such fond remembrances of your . body."
"I don't want to drop out of school and go back home, Professor Spender. My father would probably make me go to Oral Roberts University or some Jesus college like that. He doesn't approve of the University. Thinks it's a sinful place."
"Indeed it is, Miss Ogletree. But by all means don't drop out."
"I mean our relationship has taken on a special meaning for me. Like the first boy I ever let fuck me was in high school. He wasn't much, but we worked on the school newspaper together and we would meet once a month at my house to lay out the front page and count headlines, and it just sort of grew into an attachment and when he put his hand up my skirt I just kind of let him go all the way.
"Please don't get me wrong, Professor Spender. I don't mean to compare you to him really. I'm just yacking. I know I talk too much. But I'm trying to explain how I feel. It's just that you started out as something like a term paper and now I just really want you. I mean without worrying about whether it'll get me an A in a course or not."
"I understand, Miss Ogletree. I'm fond of you too."
"Please, Professor Spender, it's more than just fond. You just seem to know everything about everything. I mean everything that's beautiful. Like showing me Capricorn in the sky. I've never in my life really known where Capricorn was. And knowing just makes me go all weak and dreamy."
"You've got a nice body, Miss Ogletree." May I slide my finger in like this? That feels so nice. These lips among the red fur. Like a terraced garden in flaming autumn. With the warmth from your body we could grow orchids in this van.
"Your pecker's all sweet and little. Is that from the cold? Here I'll warm it and bring it back to life with my hands. Oooo. I can feel it stir and begin to grow."
"Your mouth would be even more efficacious. But it's only a suggestion. Mmmm. That's perfect. Now in and out a bit. Yes. Don't be abstemious."
"Professor?" she queried, lifting her head.
"Hmmm?"
"I mean it when I say everything with you takes on a new meaning. Like even something as simple as taking off my panties. I used to just take them off without thinking about it much. But now even alone in my dorm room I feel like it's a special act. A treasure. This locked-up space between my legs. No, don't take your finger out. It feels so good. Do you want me to suck you some more? I don't know why I'm so talkative. I guess I'm nervous. Suddenly knowing I'm in love and everything. Does it feel funny to walk around with something hanging between your legs? I mean are you conscious of it or anything?"
"No, not at all. Just when it's hard."
"I guess I should have known that. I know I sound kinda dumb. But it's just having nothing between your legs all your life and suddenly becoming super aware of it, I just got to wondering. You know I once read a letter to the editor in a skin magazine where a woman claimed that just wearing tight rubber panties stimulated her clitoris and made her climax off and on all day. Do you think that's possible?"
"Sounds like a hoax to me."
"Mmmm. I like it when you kind of nuzzle me all over. You don't try to bite me like other boys do. Biting hurts. Unless you're gentle. You kind of hold the flesh between your teeth. Oooo that tickles. Your tongue in my belly button. Oh! Where are you going? Oh God! Oh yes! Do it there! God I love it there! Oh put your tongue in deep! Now out. Now in again."
"Miss Ogletree your thighs should be in a museum."
"Oh Christ, I love it! Ohhhh. Oo! What is that? Is that your finger? I mean up my ... up my behind? It slid in so easily. Is that because you've got saliva all over me? Careful. I feel like I might wee-wee when you do that to me. Oh God. Oh God. Oh do them both together like that. It makes me feel so filled up completely."
"Packed in separate units so to speak?"
"Yes. Yes. More. God stop! Stop! You'll make me come! I don't want to come yet!"
"Why preserve it, Miss Ogletree? When it's longing to get out? Besides, it's a renewable experience."
"Please. I don't want to come like that. It makes me think of Dr. Webley. She's the only one in the world who's ever done that to me. Except for you just now. I want to come with a stick of meat in me. There lie back. I want to get on top of you. I'm such a big girl. Everyone always called me a tomboy when I was a kid. That was before my breasts started to grow and just wouldn't stop. Then they were always staring at me in a funny way. Especially my Uncle Dwight. It made me real uneasy you can bet. He's such an old lecher. Mmm that's nice being on top of you. Your body is so hard. Oooo. There, it's inside me. Comfy?"
"Very."
"I want to make you come. Is this right? I mean pumping up and down like that? I feel like I'm on a bicycle. A girlfriend of mine in high school claimed she lost her cherry on a bicycle. I didn't believe it. I guess because I knew her boyfriend and he told all over town about how he had been into heavy petting with her. Oh God. That's nice. Yes please suck my breasts. Do they look silly with those hickeys all over them? I love it. Yes. Each one in turn. Oh Christ. Oh shit. Oh Jesus. God! I'm coming! Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh."
"Are you all right, Miss Ogletree? You feel so stiff."
"I'm paralyzed. I swear I can't feel anything in my hands. Am I too heavy on you? I'll roll over onto my back. I can't feel a thing. Please rub my hands. Yes. Please get between my thighs. Please do it. Please. Oh Jesus I love to feel you do it. Oh God are you coming? Oh I can feel it inside me. You are coming. I love it. Oh Professor Spender your heart is pounding so. Is mine beating as hard? It's so relaxing to do that. My muscles don't have a bit of tension in them now. Can we sleep here in the van? You will stay here with me won't you? It's so nice."
* * *
The gold hairpin lay on Canby's coffee table quietly glowing. Gold never tarnishes with age. It was flat, a blade coming to a point rather like a dagger, but lightweight enough to fit through a woman's coiffure. Definitely Phoenician in origin. The Alpha-Alephs had uncovered it the day before, and it had spurred them on to furious new efforts. I was elated. It was the third find, and powerful proof that ancient Phoenicians had landed in America centuries before Columbus. There was little possibility of a hoax now.
Canby's behavior had become utterly bizarre. He had been guarding the hairpin like a jealous troll with Rhine treasure. Sitting up nights in a rocker with his carbine across his lap and a buckshot-loaded shotgun nearby. Obsessed with the lost traces of Indians and Phoenicians who had vanished as thoroughly as the ancient Mediterranean wayfarers. Drinking whisky until he had a dry rasp to his voice and eating dried persimmons mixed with stone ground acorn flour to 'get inside the Injun's head.' He measured the whisky by the mouthful out of a quart bottle and into a bowl; the way Tuscarora Indians used to trade rum two centuries ago. That morning early he had driven into town and bought a handgun from a pawnshop: a Colt Peacemaker like Wild Bill Hickok might have carried.
"If word gets out about that gold," muttered Canby, "scavengers will be all over my property like buzzards on a dead horse." He peered out from behind the red checked cafe curtains like Gary Cooper surveying the main street a bit before High Noon.
"I haven't told a soul," I assured him. "The girls have been sworn to secrecy by Madame Ingomar, and she seems to have some special hold over them. As for Reilly, he lives in a world of weird plots that he never shares."
"I still don't like it. It's just too quiet out there."
"The girls are having a lunch break for Chrissakes. Of course it's quiet. Besides, there's no one else around for miles."
"You never can tell. The world's a jungle. Why do you figure I opted out of bourgeois life to spend the past decade squatting out here?"
"Because it's a jungle out there?"
"Right."
"Have another whisky," I said. "Your nerves are on edge. Anyhow, where has Royal been the last few days?"
"She lit out right after we got back from Gum Grove. I figure I may finally be rid of her."
"Why don't you just divorce her, Canby? Like a normal person."
"It's complicated," he replied enigmatically, pouring an amber drink out of the jar over cracked ice in a tin cup. "Good whisky," he added, taking a sip.
The phone rang. I was closest, so I picked it up and said, 'hello'. There was a strangely familiar snuffling laugh on the other end. Like a pig in slops.
"Guess who I got, butt-hole?" said an equally familiar drawl. Bang-a-lang Bozart's name came correcdy to mind.
"I didn't know you could dial a telephone, Bozart," I said.
T gots me a little purty gal. She come down here special jes a'lookin' fer ole Bang-a-lang and his foot-long pecker. She likes it real fine. Ses she's gonna stay fer a spell. Stay down here and fuck night and day. Jes wanted me to call you up and tell you whut a butt-hole yew were."
"Uh, I think you want to speak with Canby," I said.
"Ain't yew him?"
"No, I'm the other butt-hole."
"Canby, is that you?" said Royal, breaking in. She didn't wait for an answer. Just went on. "You son-of-a-bitch, I've got a real man now! This hulking redneck is fucking, and I mean literally fucking my eyeballs out! And I love it! He's ten times the man you ever were!"
By the time Candy took the phone, Bozart was back on snuffling again. "Yeah, uh-huh. Okay," said Canby. "So fuck her up the ice-hole. Big deal. She never let me fuck her up the ice ... I mean asshole. Things might have worked out differently if she had."
"Yeh. Yeh. Say listen, Bang-a-lang m'man. What with all the excitement down there in Gum Grove I never did get to ask you about how those coins were found.
"Uh-huh. Your Grand-pappy dug 'em plowing?
"Uh-huh. Well, was there anything else?
"No, Bang-a-lang, I don't have any more purty gals where that one came from. Just tell me if there was anything else.
"Uh-huh. Some Injun shit. Well what became of that?
"Uh-huh. It's just gone? I see. Well, listen Bang-a-lang, can you write?
"You can't? Well do you know anyone who can?
"The notary down the road to Gum Grove? Well I want you to go find him and get him to write down your story about how you came by those coins and have it sworn to and notarized. Get me?
"What for? It doesn't matter what for. Just do it.
"What do you mean what will I swap for it? I'll let you keep the purty gal.
"Yeah, for as long as you like. And no reprisals from the sheriff for what you're doing to her.
"Huh? I mean fucking her up the asshole. That's against the law in this state, Bang-a-lang. I swear to God it is. There's a specific butt-fuck statute that deals with it.
"Yeh, and sheep too.
"Uh-huh. You say you ain't a'scared of no High Sheriff? Why's that?
"Because the High Deputy is your third cousin. Well there's always the Highway Patrol, Bang-a-lang, and don't you forget it!"
Canby shoved the phone back at me. "It's Royal," he said. "She wants to speak with you."
"Hello, Royal? Royal, have you completely flipped out?"
"I love it down here, Spender," she gushed. "He keeps me in the corncrib with an old blanket to wrap up in at night. He's torn my clothes to shreds so I'm always naked. Fucks me continuously. I've climaxed four times since breakfast today, and it's only noon. I love it up the butt."
"We would have gone the dirt road with you, Royal, if we had known that was what you wanted. You were always so uncommon touchy about it."
"That's because you were a wimp. Just like Canby. You didn't know how to take what you wanted like a real man would. Like a man who's man enough to be known in three counties as 'Bang-a-Lang'."
"Royal, tell me you don't blow his dick!" I pleaded. "Christ the damn thing is uncircumcised! It must be filthy as shit!"
"So what if I do?" she snapped. "Is it any of your goddam business?"
"No. No, it's not. Sorry."
Royal when we were both nineteen, I thought you the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Your long stems. The small but succulent morsels of your breasts. The aromatic herb of your twat hair. Even now in my mind's eye you are bathing in forest pools among the rushes. Dancing silversandalled, drenched in dew in mountain meadows. Gliding smooth and slow as the moon's flight. You look at me with solemn, generous eyes, untangle your dark hair, and sigh without regret.
"Listen, Spender, what I wanted to talk to you about was my stereo and record collection. I need it desperately. All they do is listen to Willie Nelson over the radio. I'm going nuts for some real rock and roll. Can you bring the turntable and the amps down? And at least part of the records? Maybe just my Rolling Stones collection. And the Eric Burdon and the Animals albums. And say, the Yardbirds' Greatest Hits. Can you do that?"
"Yeh. Sure. I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks, Spender. You're a pal."
"Yeh. Sure. Say, Royal, what do you do for drugs?"
"I don't need any for the first time since I was eighteen. I'm high on life as they used to say. That and moonshine whisky. You should taste that shit. Like motor oil, but what a damn kick to it! Talk about enhancing sex. It makes Banga-lang's dick stand out a good two inches extra. He gives me all I can stand and then some."
"Well, nice talking to you, Royal."
"Sure. I'll be watching out for you coming in the truck."
"Okay," I said, stunned, and hung up.
Canby had poured himself yet another drink and was peeping out the curtains again. He had strapped on his Colt .43 as though expecting trouble in Durango Gulch.
"Listen, Canby," I said. "I think I'll go out and prowl around a bit. Kind of check on things."
He nodded. "Yeh, that's good. If there's anybody lurking out there, you might draw their fire, and I could pick them off."
I walked across the field towards the dig. The sky a seamless sheet of blue. Sun-smitten grass. Perhaps to the Phoenicians who wandered here in the inland forest depths some bit of meadow like this in summer might have reminded them of the sun-bleached Mediterranean.
Madame Ingomar was not around. But six outstandingly lovely, nubile young honeys with hair ranging from black to spun gold sat or squatted in a circle on the grass eating pate on crackers and drinking from a common jug.
What was most arresting was not their youthful, fresh, good looks, or that they were gathered in the middle of a cow pasture, but the simple fact of their unabashed nakedness. Like wood-nurtured nymphs in a forest glade. Splashed by golden sunlight and wrapped in breeze-murmuring greenness. Lacking only chaplets of daisies for their hair.
They were a tableau vwant representing the myth of Diana and her maidens. Or perhaps with the shallow spaded earth, Arcadian damsels digging for mandrake root to make them fertile.
Connie Vaudrey stood up smiling easy and unembarrassed to greet me. Hashing white and even teeth. Her body was as delightful as I remembered it from the dorm. Smudged here and there with dust. Glistening a bit with perspiration. Golden bush like a patch of rye or oats. She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes and said 'Hi'.
"Don't be bashful," she urged. "We aren't. Goodness, you're getting a hard-on. I can see it against your pants. That's very flattering. Or has one of my sisters got the sap flowing in you?"
The other girls smiled pleasantly and quiet-eyed in my direction. Sitting cross-legged on the ground. Showing cunts tricked out in their hairy finery. Light clinging to their bodies like ripening peaches.
By the code of sorority sisters, I belonged to Connie. For one of them to attempt to steal me away would be such a breach of etiquette as to invite total social ostracism-which for silver spoon girls is a form of living death.
Connie took my arm and steered me towards my chalet. "I wish I had time to join you for some heavy parallel parking action," she said matter-of-factly. "I haven't been able to get together with you since that night in the dorm, and I'm afraid you have some unpleasant memories of that. My zero of a roommate. What a cretin. She was so tacky about the whole thing. Threatening to report me to the dorm mother and all. Was I ever jacked out! I finally had to lend her my Pappagallos to wear on a date with her dorky boyfriend to buy her silence."
I rubbed my chin, listening to the faint rasp of beard stubble. "Uh, Connie, this is very stimulating and all, but is there any particular reason why all of you are naked?"
She shrugged and laughed easily, squeezing my arm. "It's just our go-for-it attitude," she said. "We started out in bathing suits to get a tan. And then Debbie went topless for a gag. Saying she had to get ready for the Riviera when the sorority does their Junior year abroad next year. Isn't she simply outrageous? Well, we got to daring one another to do the same, and one thing led to another. Madame Ingomar approves. She thinks going nude on the dig will help us to identify with the soil. Teach us the life principle of the earth."
"That's nice."
"Professor Spender, I'm blown away! I talked it over with Mummy and Daddy, and they were reserved about the whole thing, but they finally agreed that they had no serious objection to an egghead in the family. Like I said, there's plenty of dinero and you'd add a touch of class to the old dirt-bag clan." She hugged me around the waist and rubbed her face along my shoulder. "You belong to me body and soul. You and that nice living instrument between your legs."
"When do you think we ought to tie the knot?" I queried.
"June is a must. That's the month for major wedding action. It's just super that my sorority is doing so much to further your career. And Madame Ingomar thinks it's really excellent that I'm to marry you. I mean even if I won't be going to France with the rest of the sorority and all."
"She does?"
"Yes. She's planned a really key event for tomorrow night. For the full moon. A corn ritual. Authentic down to the last detail. We've all practiced it before. You should find it really intriguing. We'll be completely out of control."
My surprise grew. "You mean I'm invited?"
"Oh yes. You're my date. Sort of."
I rubbed my hand along her hips, tanned like baked succulent chicken. Nipples the redness of rose wine. Hair honey pale as a moon lying low on a hill. I longed to take her down to my chalet and pass the afternoon with her in the sack. Intertwined with her legs. Emptying my balls into her until they were drained dry and hard as chick peas.
Suddenly I loved the thought of marriage to her. Seeing her naked like Sheena of the Jungle. Hearing her casual talk of vast monies. Thinking of halcyon days on the Place Vendome in Paris. High tone restaurants with curving red leather banquettes where I would sit feeding my soul with nibbles of ambrosia. Connie, you are beautiful and afloat in seas of money, and there's more of it than any one man can carry.
"Listen, Connie," I cautioned. "I think it's fine that you scamper around in the buff. Very back to nature and all that. But I'd warn the girls about getting too close to my chalet. There's an old war buddy of mine staying down there, and his mind has snapped. There's no telling what he might do if confronted with such flesh."
"Wow. Too much. I'll spread the word among the girls."
So nice to watch your moving buttocks, Miss Vaudrey, as you walk to rejoin the girls. A treat seldom experienced outside the lie du Levant. A sight worthy of a savage tribe where the men hunt and the woman seek ripe berries and cure rank hides.
Come to me when the dusk is falling, Miss Connie. I will imagine that you are Rima of Green Mansions. We will roam the woods nude like Adam and Eve before the Fall. In some willow break along a quiet backwater, where the bob-white call to each other in the gathering dark, you will lie helpless on the ground. Your vagina, too long protracted, will take on new shapes. Flower like a night hyacinth. And I will let my cream flow heedlessly into you.
* * *
"You can go to jail for a long time for this, Spender," said April Webley. Her voice hit my name like a punching bag. Angry. Full of menace. "I hope you appreciate that simple fact."
She was hung up by her hands, tied with rope to one of the supports of my porch roof. Hands over her head, wrists corded to a stripped cedar beam. The heat of late afternoon had brought beads of sweat to her upper lip. Her armpits, always neatly shaved by an electric razor, also looked moist. Starting to wet through her blouse as though her white body were snow in the torrid south beginning to melt.
"Look, April, I had nothing to do with this," I argued. "I didn't ask you here, and I have no idea why Zac has seen fit to do this to you."
Zac sat in a straight chair, leaning back against the outside wall, dabbing a bit of Tiger Balm under his nose. Tiger Balm is an Oriental version of Vicks Vaporub that is used as a sort of nasal aphrodisiac. He screwed the cap back on the jar of balm, stuck it in a patch pocket of his khaki shirt, and reached down for his half-finished beer.
Vietcong sandals on his hard-soled feet; web belt with a short throwing knife in a canvas sheath; great hairy legs bare beneath his Rhodesian Light Infantry shorts except for a scarred area of skin on his calf where he had once taken a round while walking point.
"Just protecting the outpost here, Spender," he said, his voice sour with brooding violence. "Found her snooping around and figured it was best to detain her for interrogation."
"She's after the gold," accused Canby, leaning up against the door frame sampling the just Ba Muoi Ba beer of his drinking career. "They're all after the gold. Soon as word leaks out, they'll swarm over us like starving rats on a dog." He tugged his straw hat lower over his sombre eyes for emphasis.
Connie Vaudrey stared wide-eyed with wonder. She was dressed in Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans rolled half way up the calf and the top of a two-piece ochre bathing suit. She had walked down with me to the cabin when the girls were folding up shop for the day, and together, we discovered the problem.
"You're all in this together," said April firmly. "It's a joint felony."
"Don't have a hemorrhage, April," I said. "Let me get a knife and I'll cut you down."
"I reckon we first ought to get to the bottom of why she's here," said Canby grimly.
"I've been having a nice chat with our man Canby here," said Zac. "He's got some very sound ideas about setting up a defense perimeter in this sector. And I think we need a little heart-to-heart talk with this dame too. Do a little RotoRooter work on her. Maybe eat from her lunch box." He slipped the throwing knife out of his web belt and tested the blade on his thumb.
"Zac," I said sharply. "There was a time when I had no trouble taking a weapon away from you."
Zac gave a brisk nod. "Yeh, but you're getting old and rusty. No dick no drive I always say."
"For Chrissakes, I'm only 34! You're supposed to still be intimidated by me!"
"Don't bet your sweet ass on it."
"Don't, Professor Spender!" interjected Connie, grabbing my right arm with both of her hands. "Don't risk your life fighting with this yo-yo!"
"Connie, let go. We're likely to all go to jail." Filled with cowardly thoughts that I rationalized as prudence, I argued half-heartedly.
"It's okay. Daddy can take care of anything like that. How do you think I got you out of jail the other morning? Daddy called down and arranged everything. He even thought it was funny. He once did time himself in the federal penetentiary for anti-trust violations."
"I'm waiting to be set loose," said April impatiently. She tossed her head, swishing her hair from side to side. Still unintimidated. Her predicament only serving to draw out the stubbornness in her.
"Well you can just wait a spell longer," drawled Zac. He got slowly to his feet and kicked his chair over with a backward motion of his foot. The sound of it striking the porch made us all jump. He twisted the collar of her blouse inside out and read the label aloud.
"Saks Fifth Avenue. Well now ain't that nice." With the blade of his knife, he slit the blouse all the way to the waist with a tearing noise. Then with his hands, he ripped it off of her shoulders and down onto her arms, leaving it hanging in rags. "Glad I hung around here, Spender, old boy. Even if I didn't get your support."
"That blouse cost fifty dollars, you clown!" snapped April. A fine blue vein at the base of her throat pulsed slightly as she spoke.
"What's the bra cost?" Zac sneered, clipping the back strap with one outward moving knife motion. April's pendulous breasts hung free. Even with her arms lifted above her head, sagging enough to hold a pencil under them. But still so shapely and provocative. So full.
Connie stared at them, eyes of gentian blue wide with wonder. Canby's eyes were shaded beneath his hat brim, but he kept his face fixed in the direction of April's frontage.
Zac slit the skirt and cut it to the bottom so that it fell away leaving only tightly clinging pink panties stretched about her hips. And Spanish leather shoes on her feet tied with ribbons about her calves. Cross-gartered as it were like a Shakespearean actor. Muscles of her legs firm and tight, adding a tensity, an additional eloquence to the lines of her limbs.
April flinched. Her muscles bunched. Fearfully expectant. Or perhaps she was only angry.
Late afternoon sunlight through the leaves dappled her body like some Seraglio slave behind the lattice. Such sights Ottoman masters must have seen. The first lesson in obedience for the fair-haired Circassian slave girl. New-bought in the market. Still filled with unbending tribal pride despite her captivity. Her supple body to be deflowered of its mystery and taught humble submission.
"Awright, awright," she conceded. "I guess the ball's in my court. I was down here to see if it was true that you had discovered more Phoenician treasure. The rumor was out, and I wanted to verify it. So where does it get you to know that?"
"To the point where I have to fish or cut bait," said Zac, chucking the knife into the boards of the porch so that it struck by its quivering point. "Now we'll get down to the real nitty-gritty. Canby, ole buddy, lend me the temporary use of that belt of yours."
Canby unstrapped his belt. It was thick and broad with a double row of holes in it and a big brass buckle that depicted a stagecoach and said Wells Fargo. April's eyes went wide and her nostrils began to quiver like a nervous mare. The first tremors of fear had worked to the surface.
"What is it you want to know?" she said. "I shall answer your questions prompdy and precisely. Once you are satisifed, if you release me, I shall dismiss this incident without prejudice. That's a settlement we can all live with, isn't it?"
"You know," said Canby, "I'm always suspicious when someone's too anxious to spill the beans."
Zac eyed Canby with a certain awe. "That's sheer genius, buddy-row. Were you ever in 'Nam'?"
"Nope," allowed Canby.
Zac looked at him a moment longer and then began to chuckle. "Yeh. Heh. I get it. Course I wouldn't expect you to tell me about it anyhow. Worked for the Agency over there did you? Heh heh. Yeh, I get it. That wooden leg and all. I should have guessed before." He slapped the belt into the palm of a hand so that it cracked like a pistol shot. April gave a small start, and her voice took on an urgent tone.
"I said I'd tell you! Why can't you behave in a civilized manner? What is it you want to know? At first I thought it was a fraud and I was going to use it to humiliate Spender. But there's more, it must be real! There's money here! Big money!"
"Just what were you going to do with the treasure once you got your hands on it, April baby? Who were your contacts? Where did you intend to sell it? Hong Kong? Macao? Amsterdam? All that kind of data."
"It isn't worth squat broken up and sold separately to a fence!" said April. "Or at least not what it would bring as an entire collection to some big museum like the Metropolitan! This find could get more hype than King Tut's treasure! Spender can't see the possibilities all ded up in academic crap like he is! Just give me a broker's cut for flogging it in New York!"
"You're trying to convince me that my old war buddy is too dumb to see the advantage of that?" said Zac.
"Brains have never been his strong suit," April replied. "We are talking about the same Jack Spender aren't we?" Despite her predicament, still something of the civet cat about her.
"Yeh, you always were a mite slow on the up-take," Zac directed at me.
"Look, jerk-off," said Connie peevishly. "You're not so much upstairs you can call anyone dumb."
Zac moved his lower jaw in a rolling motion, and I could tell he was briefly considering whether to bust Connie's teeth in. He always got that look when he wanted to paste a woman. I had seen it a hundred times in Asia. I wondered what I would have to do should he carry through with it. It was not my idea of a high point in human relations.
After a brief silent debate, he thought better of it. "Well, that's as may be, Miss Priss. Right now, I've got business to take care of." He ran the fingertips of his left hand down the smooth spinal curve of April's back and directed his attention to her. As grim and evil as ancient Saturn. "You know, I could probably whip those little underpants right off you with this belt. How do you figure that would feel?"
"Damn you!" April said, her voice cracking slightly with the agony of apprehension. "I've told you what you want to know! What more do you want?"
Zac rared back slightly with the belt as if to get the range. "All you've given me is the initial benefit statement. What I want is the bottom line. And how about market share? How are you measuring that? Is there a high cost-to-weight ratio? Is it in a reasonable tariff category? Did you check with Commerce for the export duties? How about the Prentice-Hall looseleaf series 'Excise Taxes'?" He swung the belt to ascertain the play in it. It swished, cutting the air.
"Please," begged April, her rebellious will truly broken now. Green eyes so much bigger than normal. Nipples grown taut. How yummy to lean over and eat them like cherries on mounds of peach ice cream. Would her kidneys go lax in her fright? Become a major aquifer? Nice golden stream of urine coursing down her leg to complete her humiliation?
"Don't hurt me! I don't know the answers! I thought I had done my homework, but I overlooked that!" She turned those green eyes to me now, not with hauteur, but with despairing, dumb entreaty.
"Zac," I protested, "you're crazy if you hit her with that. You don't realize the effect it has on her. You're liable to create a nympho version of a Frankenstein monster. She'll fuck you till your balls turn blue."
"That sounds cute as a purple Easter chick," said Zac, laying into her with a full swing that landed with a ferocious crack. April screamed and yanked furiously at the cords that bound her hands. Danced up and down on her toes as though she had to go to the bathroom. Then as the first rush of pain dissipated, she settled down again. Ceased to struggle so against the degradation of her captivity.
She spread her legs and tightened the muscles, directing the tension downward to her feet, flat on the porch. Pressed her face and breasts against the flank of the cedar post. As predicted, the panties were torn and a flat red weal appeared across her buttocks and lapped slightly onto the small of her back.
Canby showed no emotion. Just watched taciturn as an Indian at a council fire. Connie dug her nails into my arm, but made no effort to shield her eyes from the almost poignant suffering. Just stared agog like me.
My mind was prompted to further Oriental fantasy. When we had tamed this silken-skinned odalisque, we would give her a multicolored turban and a jewel for her navel. She would become a sultana on a divan, a cat's-paw of my merest whim. Summoned to be admired in various postures like a piece of sculpture. Or slave-like and obedient, to hold my testicles in her mouth and hum tunes upon them. But first the savage lash. The knout to strip her of all authoritarian manner, to teach her the subordinate part she must play.
"Please don't hurt me anymore!" April implored piteously. Yet instead of trying to twist around the far side of the post, she seemed to be bending into it like a football player with a blocking dummy. Offering her buttocks to the leather in an almost preposterous attitude.
Zac sucked on the inside of his cheek a bit and then gave another hard swat. Again she shrieked. Another livid red weal appeared. The seat of the panties was reduced to rags hanging fluttering from the thin elastic that bound the hips and thighs. A defaced icon of the dishonored temple of her body. Tainted with sacrilege, her anus was visible in shameful detail. A fringe of blonde hair peeked from the trembling legs.
She was weeping now, pleading for him to stop through choking sobs. Except it suddenly wasn't a plea to stop. She was begging him to hit her again. "Please! I want it! Make it hurt!" The ice of her body was melted. The fury of the leather had penetrated deep into her unfeeling nature and borne forth its passion fruit.
A change came over Zac. He looked intrigued. He ran his fingertips down her spine once more and laid into her again. WHAP!
"Oh shit!" she screamed. "Oh God do it! Fuck me! I need it! I'm wet and ready! Please fuck me!" She writhed against the post, waggling her behind in strange contortions. Showing that rift that runs from buttocks through vagina as wet and delicious as a sliced open pomegranate. Urging that further ignominy be visited upon her.
Zac was not the sort who requires a second invitation for sexual congress. He slid a sound erection out of the loose leg of his baggy tropical shorts. It seemed an extension of his character. Rock hard. Professional. Ready to get down to business. Well chosen for the role it was about to play. The sacrifice. The vain endeavor to quench the fires of the bitch goddess.
He moved forward and without hesitation, plunged straight into her cunt as easily as entering an empty room. April groaned long and low. The noise carried across the pasture and brought one of the cows to the lower fence in curiosity. April begged further. "Please give me more! Fill me with it! Make it hurt! No one gives me all I need!"
Zac took her by the hips and began to move it in and out with a slight squishy, sucking noise from her viscous depths like a boot being raised out of a mucky swamp. With each forward stroke, he attained her utmost depths. Entrance and exit. Forward and reverse. Plunge and surface.
Canby picked up the fallen chair and turned it so he could rest his arms across the back sitting in it. He tilted his hat back onto his head and took in the spectacle with silent deliberation. Such intercourse was a travesty of an Olympian ideal, yet it cast its spell. Held its excitement like a purgatorial fire of lust that defied normal description. Satisfied a morbid craving that one seldom wishes to admit to.
I drew Connie away through the living room and into the kitchen. Don't look sweet Connie with your gentle upbringing. I'm not like these ruffians. They are ghouls with bloodstained lips and empty, staring eyesockets that come howling out of graveyards. They belong in a Goya etching. Some extravaganza masterwork of the grotesque. Rapine in Andalusia.
I am clean and wholesome like you. We should be painted by Tiepolo with tritons sounding conchs about our processional barge and Apollo reining his chariot still in its course to shine upon us. His Anthony and Cleopatra. When we are married, I'll take you to the Labia in Venice and show it to you. Don't tell your Daddy of this obscenity and have him cut me off from his feed bag. And don't breathe so heavily. You're giving me a fright. Are you going to faint?
Her eyes were wide and strange. Her breasts heaved, seeming to strain and force against the bathing suit top. She pressed her forehead against my chest and wrapped her arms about my waist, still breathing heavily. Almost panting. Hands clasped in my back.
"Oh God, give me more!" screamed April. "Don't stop just because you've come! Put your fist up me! Get that other guy over here! For God's sake, someone fuck me!"
With quick deft movements of her hands, Connie unzipped my trousers and pulled my prick out. It was hard, provoked into such a posture as much by her touch as by the erotic squeals and ululations from the porch. Connie fell to her knees and holding my shaft with both hands, began sucking it with her eyes closed. In and out of her open wet mouth. Soft as doeskin. In and out. Warm gorge engulfing. Small gold earringlets jiggling with her motion.
She took her hands away, and reaching behind her back, undid the bow that held her bathing suit top. It fell free revealing her heroic breasts. White patches now tanned a shade of cinnamon from total nudity in the sun. Flat nipples gathered in hard nubs.
Now sucking again greedily, she unzipped her jeans and worked them halfway down her hips. They clung briefly to her ripe curves. Then down below her rump, taking the pale blue panties with them. She drew me down onto her, turning onto her side as she did. Pulling at me with pathetic ea gemess to get me behind her. A delicious trembling of her buttocks.
"I want it too," she whispered hoarsely. "Like she's getting it. From behind."
"You mean like quadrupeds?"
"Yes, like dogs do it."
* * *
Dusk fell gently, bringing a quiet at the end of an insane day. Flattening sun deepening the trees' shadows. Dogwoods gone now. The green broken only by splotches of red flowers. Fire King. Double Bloody Warrior. Falkirk. All named so long ago by Ulster-Scots who first broke the earth and cleared the forest.
Zac had driven April like a cow up the trail to the ranch house. Hands bound behind her back. Stinging her legs with a switch to make her run. Yelping and giving a spurt of speed at each sharp blow.
Canby had remained behind, toasting me in beer, lauding the successful heading-off of what he considered a major threat to our antiquarian project. "That woman," he analyzed, "is a neuro-psychotic with foot-in-mouth tendencies. Good thing we've got her under lock and key."
He then shambled up the meandering trail to the ranch house looking from the rear very much like the dirt farmers that he emulated. It wasn't clear whether he had dug into April as well, but from the wet area around the crotch of his jeans, I somehow gathered that he had.
I hadn't seen of course, being occupied with Connie, mounting her from behind. Her on her hands and knees coming to a squealing and mewing desperate climax. Clutching the leg of a table. Clawing at the refrigerator. And at last collapsing on the floor panting and sobbing with emotion.
When she found that I had yet to come, she bade me save myself for the dark when she promised me more than I could handle. Then she kissed me tenderly goodbye, first standing on tiptoe to reach lips, then bending to gently buss my cherished prick. Regarding it as though some faultless invention made exclusively for her delectation. She went out the side door and into the woods, gold thread highlighting the deep blue of her designer jeans.
I opened a Vietnamese beer and drank a gulp of it, finding it still good after all those years. I added a nice slug of Old Crow just for good measure, and sat out on the chair on the front porch, leaning back against the house to watch the growing evening.
The moon rose early, a huge orange wheel that hung on the distant hill. The same old elegant moon and the same old tired earth that had both survived for milleniums while bestial man scrapped and killed and fucked himself into a persistent stupor. Occasionally looking up from the gory fray to pause and contemplate the distant gulfs of space. To feel humble and in need of worship.
In looking up, he noticed the regularity-a regularity in an otherwise chaotic whirl-of the lunar changes and woman's menstrual cycle. And so fell to his knees and worshipped her womb and birth and the annual growth of crops. Rain and hail and thunder and lightning were episodic, irregular, unpredictable. But spring buds and the squawling infant at the end of nine lunar months came like a primitive clock and became invested in their regularity with a deistic significance.
Man worshipfully began to scratch crude representations of this supreme wonder on the walls of his caves. Breasts, thighs, and the V of the crotch came to symbolize all that was eternal. Later this was expanded to a tree of life, a growing bit of greenery. The moon in two phases. A snake that shed its skin annually and seemed to simple minds a beast capable of regeneration and eternal life; a forever Methuselah among animals.
Man felt awe for the greenness of the earth, found spirits among trees and running water. And even in ancient Greece and Mesopotamia found the emotion of nostalgia. Imaginet a time when he was one with the green. A Golden Age. An Arcadian Age. A Garden of Eden.
It was all downhill from there. Inhibitions. Shame. Bedlam, Perfidy, and Lawsuits. Overgrazing and overcutting and overleaching the land. Bringing more and more complex problems and more and more complex gods to deal with them. Until we came to worship the fingerjoints of men called Saints and elevate whole classes of folk, dubbing them divine because they refrained from copulation and masturbation. Sainted them for denying their juices. When it would seem as sensible to worship them for never taking a piss.
Yet through it all, an unbroken thread of womb worship clung tenaciously to life. Mariolatry. The idolatry of the Virgin. The All-Mother now without her snakes and her sacred temple and garden. Yet her fecundity still bathed in mystery. Much as the Minoan Mother Goddess claimed a fabulous impregnation from flowing water, Mary would lay claim to the visit of an Angel to her womb. And men woulc worship. Feeling somehow cleaner and better that no human semen had swum upstream in her fallopian tubes.
Night settled inky black into the trees. An aureole glimmered about the moon, and bleached-out, faint stars fillec the void. Small yellow lights blinked in the distance just over the crest of the hill on the far side of the pasture.
Winking like fireflies, yet fireflies could never be seen at such a distance. Will-o'-the-wisps. Fairy lights.
The lights formed a line and moved out through the dark, bobbing up and down, drifting with a strange flowing rhythm. Music wafted on the warm night air. Strange and celestial music from ancient, near-forgotten instruments. Reed pipes like mirlitons. Tambourines struck lightly. Tight-skinned drams. Cymbals. Odd singing in a long dead language. Trilling laughter and shrieking. Gaiety. Nothing solemn. All joy and happiness.
They moved through the darkness down the pasture towards my chalet. Swinging in a sinuous chain like the sacred snake. Not touching, yet keeping a basic uniform distance. Twenty-five or thirty over-privileged little coeds who had fallen under the spell of the curious hieratic Madame Ingomar and sought to releam the lost secrets once whispered by the earth. Young womanhood in procession, carrying vines laden with bunches of grapes, and on a long pole, a papier machi phallus. Moving in a fluid choreographed poetry.
They lined the barbed wire fence giggling and beckoning to me with bare arms. Singing their strange ditty. Several mounted on the back of the old nag of a horse who seemed entranced by their manner. All in sheets girded at the waist. White as salt. Slit up each thigh to the top of the hips, cut in front and back with young, ripe fruit, swelling breasts peeking from a daring yet crude decolletage.
Mascaraed eyes. Hair plaited and wrapped with utmost care about their heads. Or worn with a coronet or headband with corkscrew ringlets tumbling in wild confusion over shoulders to reach the waist.
Golden armbands, bracelets, necklaces, anklets flashed or jingled with little bells. Wreaths of laurel and ivy leaves ringed their brows or draped their shoulders. They hurled the runners of ivy in my direction and called to me in lilting siren voices. Entreating me to sniff the myrrh of their loins.
"Professor Spender! Come join us! Come and find the fecundity of the earth! Madame Ingomar says we must give thanks and commune with our Phoenician ancestors since we have been digging among their belongings."
You luscious little bitches. What weird mischief is this? In my day, the Sigma Chi mud derby was the most daring thing ever dreamed of. Coeds with set hair and flower-print Bermuda shorts giggling like idiots as they carried eggs in spoons or played at tug-of-war over mud puddles. Have we become so advanced? Or is this as outre to the rest of the campus denizens as it seems to me?
A natural enthusiast for an orgy, I downed the last of my beer, stepped across the small yard and climbed through the fence. Their hands were all over me, lightly clutching, pulling. Stripping my clothes from me with peals of joyous laughter. A wine skin squirted a white stream into my eyes and mouth. I laughed and choked slightly. Wiped my eyes and looked at the girls closely. Their pupils were wide, drugged. The ivy and laurel: the ancient narcotic of the Bacchanale.
My shirt came free and disappeared. Soft hands rubbed olive oil on my chest and back. My trousers came down. Ivy leaves were thrust at me and I opened my mouth to receive them. Chewed. Washed them down with cool wine.
Dainty fingers caressed my prick, made it stand erect. A soft mouth enclosed it. A brown haired girl was on her hands and knees sucking me, holding it as gently in her mouth as a gun dog with a quail.
Connie Vaudrey, her toga shoved down to her waist, breasts flashing free, circled her arms around my neck and kissed me long and passionately. Eyes shining like jewels of Ophir. While the kneeling girl continued to work on me. I tore Connie's lips from mine to blurt a warning:
"Stop! I'm about to come!"
The brown-haired girl looked up smiling seductively. Her sisters giggled at me as though I were the victim of a private joke. Hands stroked my prick and I staggered as it spurted. Spewed its load into an earthen cup. A great milky wad, followed by small drips worked out by deft fingers.
The brown-haired girl stood up, brandishing the cup above her head to the approving light applause of her sisters. Connie squeezed me about the chest and kissed me a resounding smack on the cheek. Very proud. As if I had just invented sperm.
They squirted a stream of wine into the cup, stirring it with a finger with a long, red-painted nail. Sucking the finger with puckered lips. Tasting the potent brew and then passing it among them for communal delectation. Communion. The mystical rite of eating the godhead. Consuming eternal life.
You delightfully crazed little bints. What would your parents think? Safely curled up in their country club mansions in a dozen towns. Secure in the knowledge that a Thunderbird sits beside a Cadillac in the driveway. Cozy with their Lawrence Welk on the television and their bound volumes of Readers Digest. Thinking their daughters are down at the University dutifully going to class; members of the proper snob sorority where they will be lavaliered in their junior year by a boy from the right snob fraternity. Engaged their senior year by Christmas and by June safely married off and tucked up in a good starter home.
Would they refuse to accept the truth? Find it too farfetched and unreal? Or would they keel over in coronary arrest? Shitting in their drawers and gnawing the Karastan carpet.
"Elate," a low musical voice called. The Greek word for come.
The music began again, and the line formed. Candles flickering inside paper lanterns like elf lights. I danced across the grass with them, my wrist drawn by Connie who moved with a delicacy and grace that I had never suspected she contained.
In the distance, a bonfire flared with the flash of some ignited chemical. Flames leaped twenty feet in the air and then settled down to a nice solid five-foot blaze. It seemed to burn in a bronze pot.
The girls circled, moved from dancing, swaying measures to frolic, turned somersaults and springing handsprings. Light trilling laughter and singing swirled as I stood dumbfounded with them flashing around me. Their clothes came to be flung hither and yon, white patches lying abandoned on the ground. Bodies more and more scantily clad. Only golden jewelry sparkling and jangling on bronzed-sleek, fire-lit forms. No dimpled derrieres. Just the shallow dish on either buttock when flexed.
I ate more ivy that was thrust my way. Drank more wine. Found the music filling my senses. Felt my prick swelling again; shaping itself for its destined end.
A lone figure appeared on the crest of the hill, lit from behind by the hanging moon. A dark human form with the bottom of the moon's wheel cutting just below his waist. He wore goats' horns and his legs seemed bent in a peculiar manner. Furry. As if wrapped in the skin of some prehistoric mammoth.
A giant prick stood out straight from his lower regions. The girls, their attention riveted, shrieked with dulcimer joy. The expected satyr had arrived. The sacred Pan. The helpmeet of Dionysius. The priapic gymnast.
He raced on dainty prancing feet across the brow of the hill and ran towards us with mincing steps. Arms outstretched. Chest bare and hairy. Great prick wagging up and down like a dog's tail. As though made merry on asafoetida, so beloved by goats.
I stared entranced as he singled out a girl and chased after as she ran, stumbling, struggling, shrieking to escape. Her feet tangled in her gown, and he dragged her to earth, wrestled with her flailing limbs, wrenched apart her thighs and penetrated her with his massive erection, making himself her undisputed master. She screamed and groaned her pleasure to all the world, begging him to penetrate her ass as well. He grasped her buttocks, finger shoved up there, and pumped her steadily. Displaying no effort to delay her zenith. Making the fields fertile through animal procreation.
The flames danced on his bearded face, and I saw that it was Canby, a friend for over a decade yet still a man of mysterious parts. I had often enough seen his prick when he was drunk and pissing up against a wall, but never remarked its dimensions. Could it really be so long? Was it artificial? Or an illusion brought on by the heady narcotic of ivy and wine?
The girl was spasmodically clawing at the fur of his legs, tearing it off in great patches and flinging it skyward as she screamed out her violent climax. He withdrew. Paused, panting. Looked about for a fresh partner. Other girls danced before him. Feigning flight, yet prancing close, twitching their tight rumps, daring him to pursue.
With a lightning movement, he lunged, dove to earth, yet caught an ankle and brought the giddy girl tumbling down shrieking with delight. Tossing to and fro. Others piled onto him with a confusion of opening limbs and buttocks. Wrestling, locking, coupling, clawing one another to get at his giant rod, to offer their inner treasures to it. To gather him in with a rocking, lulling motion. Swathe the splendor of his great bolt with their innards of flesh.
Connie danced past me, tapping a tambourine next to her ear. Then back and circled round. She took me by the wrist again, and flinging her tambourine away in the air, drew me off into the deep shadows. We left the others rutting with the satyr in a great glut of flesh or dancing themselves into a wilder and wilder frenzy. Connie paused in long, sweet grass. Let me draw close. Girdle her waist with my hands. Nuzzle the red flamingoes in the center of each breast.
"Lie down," she murmured into my ear. 'Tonight I dictate the dance."
She undid her ceinture and let her billowing white skirt settle about her ankles. Stepped free of it, belled anklets ringing lightly with her movements. Strong bare legs showing their muscles. Arms hung with countless golden and silver bracelets that clacked together. She put her hands on her hips and laughed with happy, satisfied gaiety. A thin gold chain hung about her waist, just a bit slack below her navel.
She stood astride me and slowly squatted, spitting herself as easily as if greased with butter. She giggled with girlish mirth. Light and trilling. Eyes brimming over with starlight. I knew for a certainty as her warmth spread through me that I was experiencing the true bacchanal; the release of animal spirits; the ritual Springtime coupling of man and woman.
"Is it all the way in?" she asked.
"It is," I noted, somewhat surprised. I was sheathed to the hilt. "No more shallow vagina problems?"
"Madame Ingomar says that the full moon stretches out the vagina."
"Sounds like an old wives' tale to me. Yet there is empirical evidence right here on top of me."
She lifted herself on her haunches and pumped me several times. My shaft was wet and slippery. Had the ivy and wine brought her desire to such a gush? My shaft was dark, not ghostly pale in the moonlight like the rest of my flesh. Blood. The dark winey sauce of menstrual blood.
"Blood," I said with simple wonder, as the significance of the dance was suddenly revealed to me.
"The moon has brought on our periods," said Connie.
"Each of us began bleeding almost simultaneously around moon rise." She wiped her fingertips across my prick and dabbed the rich compost on her cheeks like some bloodied huntress after the death of the stag.
Around the dying fire, the dancing was frenzied. Nude forms rushing aimlessly, jewelry flashing, bodies blooddaubed. Buttocks, thighs, breasts dark with the rich fluid. Minds driven berserk by intoxication of ivy and the reek of their own vaginas. Reveling in their womanhood.
The satyr wove his way among them, tackling a victim here and there. A clean-limbed, dark-haired girl strapped on a large dildo and began an imitation of the satyr, dragging her sisters down and pleasuring them in the long grass. They squealed delightedly. As they sweated, their breasts gleamed like polished stones.
Connie continued to pump at me, grinding her pelvis into me on the downstroke.
"Does it feel good?" I asked stupidly, my senses starting to swim.
"Good?" laughed Connie almost hysterically. "It is Goodness Itself! We are released. We're free! Madame Ingomar has freed us from bourgeois ennui. From feminist prattle and feminine simpering. From the deadly boredom of Henry Mancini Muzak and sex by the calendar. From handy household hints on freezing holiday leftovers and washing a washable raincoat! From the horror of pantyhose, pre-holiday home appliance sales and decaffeinated husbands!"
She continued to pump frantically. Flecks of foamy saliva formed on her lips and long drools of spittle leaked from the corners of her mouth; down her wet, glistening bloody cheeks; over her jiggling, thrashing breasts; hanging in driblets on the taut cherry pits of nipples. Her eyes rolled back in her head as though she were in an ecstatic swound, yet still she humped violently, thigh muscles working with the profound spasmodic strength of an epileptic.
As I watched, the space between us would open and shut like some great clamping machine moving on a piston. A tool and die press running out of control. Open with the hard shaft between bisecting the flash of light. Clamp closed with enormous force. Open. Close. Flash. Clamp. Whap. Whap.
Faster and faster. While the breasts bounced and the abdomen strained. Bracelets dancing. Gold chain jumping about her concave, sucked-in midrift.
Without even thinking to try to stop it, I exploded inside of her with such a great blast that I wondered if my balls were intact. I had scant seconds to enjoy it, as with growing horror I realized she was still unsatisfied. She continued to hump and grind against my rapidly shrinking prick.
I wrestled her off of me and over onto her back; pinioned her arms, yet her pelvis still humped frantically. I shoved five fingers up her wet twat, then my hand, then made it into a fist, as her heretofore tight pussy expanded elastically to contain it. She wrestled with it, moving the lower part of her body as though filled with a giant phallus. Arching her back up so that her body formed a bridge supported by feet and elbows.
Although dazed, I became conscious of someone standing over me. A long white sheet. Toes beneath in the grass. I looked up to see a bare upper torso. Incomparable breasts with burgundy nipples. A golden dolphin on a chain between them. Madame Ingomar.
Her hair was done with a band about her forehead, coiffed in ringlets that tumbled down over her shoulders and back. She smiled with the corners of her mouth turned down. More of a smirk. Mocking my feeble efforts.
"Have your hands full, Professor Spender?"
I was unable to speak. My mouth tried to form words, but only gurgled. My fist seemed trapped by Connie's contortions, as though I were Prometheus chained to the rock.
Madame Ingomar stooped. Knelt in the grass. Cupped my sack and weak dribbling penis in her hands and gazed at it pityingly.
"Such a sad, exhausted little instrument. It seems spent. In ancient times, you would be sacrificed at this point. That is, when you were unable to go on. Stabbed to the heart with a bronze dagger or simply tom to shreds by the hands of the frenzied maenads. Fortunately for you, I am orchestrating a more liberal version of the ritual."
I gurgled again, staring glassy-eyed. Your hand is so warm. Do not let go. It is such a perfect pillow for my balls. If I could invent a jock strap like your hand I'd be a millionaire. Men in their legions would feel safer; less threatened by castration. Tension in the world immeasurably reduced. Laudatory praise in the world's parliaments and councils. Medals. Honors. Free champagne and pussy at night.
She rose gracefully to her feet again, and with both hands, unclasped the snake buckle on the golden girdle of her waist. Opened the white skirt. Showed me one final mystery. The V of her crotch. Decorated with a thick black bush. My prick sprang miraculously to life.
I wanted to slake my thirst there in her deep cistern. A long draught from the Well at the World's End. I would gladly pluck out an eye to drink of the knowledge there. My tongue lolled out of my mouth, slavering. I ejaculated, flinging sperm like spitballs.
"Poor dears," chided Madame Ingomar. "I fear you have both overindulged a bit with the ivy."
She clipped the snakes together again and moved away into the darkness. Hips moving seductively. I wrenched my fist free with a great sucking noise and struggled to my feet. Stumbling with uneven steps. Saliva dripping onto my shoulder where my head seemed to be twisted. Points of light danced before my eyes. Tiny meteors slashing the gloom.
Connie groaned on the ground. Groaned as though giving birth. Writhing and struggling towards me, both hands working furiously up her cunt, teeth champing grass like someone escaped from Bedlam. Unfulfilled. Desperate.
I took a step. Then another. Madame Ingomar blurred into the darkness, white, ever-rustling skirt growing fainter and fainter. Aphrodite Kalliglutes. The goddess with the fine formed rump. A wraith vanishing. I tried to run after her. Fell. Tried to get up. Only one of my arms seemed to work. I pressed myself from the ground with enormous strain. Striving to reach the unattainable. Fell again. Became lost in mist.
* * *
I had wandered with no memory of the passing landscape, vaguely conscious of feeling the need for an operation on the back of my brain to get an occluded artery cleaned out. Naked flesh torn by briars, and limbs bleeding as if I had been in a cat fight. I found myself on the main highway, obliged to walk home barefooted over the dirt road with memory and pain and a vast feeling of emptiness inside me.
The pasture loomed, and birds had begun to sing in the false dawn. Elysian ground. Sperm and blood smitten grass where white priestesses had exposed themselves fuming ripe for my becrazed passion.
I crawled through the fence and walked across the long grass towards the distant chalet. Safety and refuge. Where I could lick my wounds and recuperate in solitude. Where yet no sleep would be allowed the wicked. I would have to tank up on coffee and maybe dexedrine and face the awful day of atonement. At three o'clock in the afternoon, I would be the accused in the dock; the department would sit in final judgment of my plea for tenure. They had moved up the date deliberately, knowing the carbon-14 tests were not back yet to validate the discovery for sure. Nothing could save me.
Scattered on the grass were white garments. Pale naked bodies littered in positions from long erotic revels. Some in repose of love. Young girls asleep in one another's arms or with their heads between another's thighs. Mouths sated on honey, exhaled. Fallen grape vines. The papier mdchi phallus crushed under a dancing foot. All abandoned in the delirium of coition.
Canby, the mock rustic divinity lay passed out, fur clawed from his good leg and the wooden peg except for sparse patches. Strange buskin on his good foot. A high-heeled boot that made him prance so like the outlaw goat. Great long prick flaccid yet locked up the backside of some sweet young thing who lay with a Giaconda smile on her lips, breathing with a light snoring through her nostrils, feeling no shame for the sin of Sodom.
I bent and touched it; the great long thing; the blood sausage. Scarcely credible; almost Baroque; yet as real as real could be. Nothing artificial from the Last Days of Pompeii Sex Shop. Truth be told, Canby had a prick over a foot long when soft. Erect it would probably reach eighteen inches. A legendary prick that belonged in the Guiness Book of World Records. That matched the lies that Errol Flynn used to tell of his own. So passing strange.
I struggled on, fighting against my own fatigue. Crawled through the far fence and entered the cave-like darkness of the cabin. My small bolt-hole that retained its black cloak as the woods came to life around it, as torpid, crouching Nature stretched and yawned and scratched its armpits. A pinpoint of light moved in a small circle. Glowing red like a tiny hot-box. The smell of cannabis filled the airless room.
"Hey, this is really good shit," said Connie Vaudrey to no one in particular.
"That's nothing," said Zac. "Once in Morocco, I had some real Majoon. The genuine article. Blew my mind for three days. I didn't know whether I was dead or not. Kept having this dream about being on a jeep with two fifty calibres mounted on it. Blowing the shit out of everything that moved."
"Wow. Far out."
The household gods had fled before the violence of the debauchery. Furniture overturned; stereo speakers stomped in; the floor sticky with booze. They were both naked and lying on their backs with their legs intertwined. Quiet. Depleted. With one hand, Connie held the joint and with the other idly stroked Zac's drooping penis; nursing an invalid back to life. She lay her head on the side and tried to focus on me.
"Oh, hi, Jack," she said. She rolled heavily off of Zac. Lay with her legs spread. Blond tuft showing. The fountainhead of fancy exposed. She continued to toy with his perished penis. Her hair so blonde she must exist on a diet of honey.
I stood before them equally naked and nodded. 'Jack' she had said. No more of the worshipful 'Professor Spender.' Something bad was wrong. Sugar plum. Sugar almond. Delectable nougat of my fancy. You twice raised the imposing edifice of my prick upon the ancient ruins of my whipped-cur life; made it boast a sturdy defiance. Express its simple faith. Don't smash the harmony of small things that I have found once more.
"Hey, it's old fuck-face," said Zac. "Come in and have a toke, man."
"I guess we may as well tell him," said Connie. "I just hope he doesn't make some horrible scene. Break down and cry or something. He's terribly sensitive and always going on about flowers and shit."
"Don't tell me," I said. "Let me guess."
"There you go," said Connie, propping herself up on her elbows. "Getting sarcastic. That's what you always do when you're deprived of something you want. You must have been an only child. Please don't be sarcastic, Jack. I'm too happy to be able to live with sarcasm. Like something really big has happened. I really wanted you to be the first to know. What passed between us wasn't false or anything. It's just that I couldn't stand the confinement of marriage. I'm just not ready for it yet. I want to see the world first. Maybe I'll be ready to settle down later on."
"You're going to Florida with Zac," I said glumly. "And blow up marijuana freighters."
"Hey, man, don't get hostile," said Zac. "There's no call for that. Everything's cool."
Connie moved her hand from his penis to his chest as if to restrain him from tearing me to shreds. "Easy, Zac. He's just hurt. He has to work it out somehow.
"Daddy's got a boat down at Key Biscayne," she said to me. "I don't know what it is exactly, but it's a big one, and it's got a fast motor on it. Zac knows all about boats so he can drive it with no problem. Daddy doesn't care if I use it for a cruise. It's made to order. Surely you ought to understand that. I know you're so confined here in your little out-to-lunch college world, and probably it's for the best. At least you recognize your limitations."
"So how did you two come to hit it off so perfectly?"
"Hey, I found this El Dorado chick out on the road up near the ranch. Wandering around stark naked. Zonked. I was driving back from taking that April Webley home. I figured that damn bitch was neutralized and harmless, so I dumped her off at some frat house where she said she lived."
"April said she lived at a frat house?"
"Yeh, the Zoo House. I didn't realize women lived in frat houses, but you know how things have changed since we were students here. Those guys always were real douche bags anyhow. But who am I to tell you, hey? I mean like you live here. You should know."
"You dropped April Webley off at a frat house?"
"Yeah. What are you? Deaf?"
"Was she dressed?"
"Naw. She wouldn't put her clothes on. I was driving the Landcruiser, and she kept getting down on the floor shift which made it damned hard to drive. But when I got her there, she went right in. I figure nobody saw her naked if that's what's worrying you."
"Yeah, just about a hundred frats."
"Anyhow, when I got back, Connie here loomed up in my headlights. If I hadn't of slammed on brakes, I would have hit her. I could tell she was in a bad way from how she started humping the fender. There were a bunch of people prancing around in the field, but I had a bird in the hand, so to speak, so I didn't pay them any mind. Anyhow, Connie and I passed the last few hours here screwing our brains out."
"How did you manage to satisfy her?"
"The old Wiffle ball bat routine. It's become a standard part of my program. What do you feed these women around here? Mushrooms? Agave plants? I've never seen such a bunch for wanting to bang endlessly."
"So you two really got it on?"
"How could we fail to? I gave her what she needed. Which was something you had shirked. I always knew you were a chicken-shit bastard, Spender, but I never figured you for being scared of a woman's pussy. You don't have the balls of a damn tree toad. No guts, no goulash, I always say."
"I'm sorry, Jack," said Connie. "But it's for the best. You'll see that once you get over your hurt. You'll meet other girls who share your values."
I stumbled up the stairs and into my bedroom. The mattress was pulled onto the floor and splashed with menstrual blood. A victim of sexual havoc. I leaned out the open window, breathing the morning air and listening to the babble of the creek, the voice of sweet waters. Then I took a long contemplative piss out the window, letting it cascade satisfyingly on the dead, humid leaves below.
I could hear them below. He was fucking her. Doing an apt and vigorous job. By the sound of her unaffected groans, I guessed she was moving with him with a flowing and spontaneous ease. A brief magniloquent passage of squeals from her seemed to indicate a flurry of pumping on his part.
The sound of their passion excited my senses more than had the sight of Connie's nudity. Dictated form to my shaft. At that moment I would even have humiliated myself by sharing her. Dancing a pas de trois with mine in her mouth or up her bung-hole while he got the true possession. But they hadn't invited me even for such a humble role.
Thanks a bunch, Connie. You've just killed Spring. Banished the open love I had belatedly come to trust in. No more to savor the pink silken purse between your thighs so primed for tongue work. You've driven me out to drudgery. I shall stagger and drop. Be dragged by bailiffs to a court already bribed against me. nolo contendere. Your Honor. I forfeit all hope of divinity. Unleash the cannibals to devour my prick.
I leaned out the window and vomited my guts up.
* * *
When I came down, they were asleep, now sharply defined in the lemon morning light. I was wearing my one decent summer suit, a blue seersucker, with a club tie and a reasonably pressed white shirt.
Zac had his mouth open, slurping slightly. The gorgeous form of Connie lay supinely between his legs with his flaccid peristyle in her mouth like a pacifier. Offering a gentle shelter for that engine, that armament of tomorrow's immolation. Dried smears of menstrual blood were crusted on her legs and belly, nearly black against the hen's egg brown of her tan. Soon it would begin to attract flies.
The Landcruiser's gas tank was nearly empty, so I had to siphon gas from April Webley's Lincoln, in the process spilling it on me and impregnating my trousers with its noxious odor. Then the phone began to ring insistently.
I didn't want to answer it, but I needed to wash my hands, so I went back inside. I paused, looking at Connie with her mouth full of raw, limpid meat, and briefly considered kicking her in the jaw to see if she'd bite his prick off with her axle teeth.
Be not vengeful, Spender. It was all a pipe dream of gold and glory. The bubble would have burst if not here then with some other infatuation of the moment. Just swallow your gall and answer the goddam phone.
I walked across the room and found the phone behind an overturned table. For no known reason, the receiver was in place. Probably Zac had been making long distance calls to Johannesburg, South Africa to rally his howling commandos. It continued to ring. I picked it up and said 'hello'.
"Professor Spender! Thank goodness I've caught you before you left." It was Bess Ogletree.
"Bess," I said, putting on a brave tone. "What may I do for you on the day of my execution?"
"What?"
"I'm being turned down for tenure today."
"Oh, of course not, Professor Spender. Not a man as smart as you."
"Smarts has nothing to do with it, my dear. One must be a closet fag to blend with the intelligentsia, and I don't fit the bill."
"Well I can vouch for that. Their attitude sure sucks." 'True. Too true." There was a pause.
"Bess, is there something you wanted to tell me?"
"Yes ... I'm ... I'm not pregnant."
"Not pregnant?"
"That's right, I'm not pregnant."
"Was there some fear that you were?"
"No, not really. I just thought you might have worried about it or something. I started bleeding last night. I was looking out of my dorm window at the moon and suddenly I felt wet and sticky between my legs, and when I checked, my panties were soaked. I've never had a gusher like that before."
"Well, that's gratifying to hear. Is there any other news?"
"I cleared up that problem with Randy and the boys from the frat house. I told Randy yesterday that it was Dr. Webley who had put those marks on my flesh. He's off your case for good."
"Thanks, Bess. Was that enough to calm Randy down?"
"Oh, I gave him a handjob down in The Gardens. That seemed to satisfy him."
"Bess, you should never give a frat a handjob," I chided. "Go down for one and then cry afterwards, and he'll shower you with diamonds and proposals of marriage. But give him a handjob and you're dumped into the 'bad girl' category and your reputation will be tattled all over campus."
"Oh, it doesn't really matter." Her voice became sad. "I'm having to drop out of school."
"Why Bess? Not your father is it?"
"No, not really. You see many of my exam grades have been posted already, and I'm failing every course. My GPA was always sort of 'iffy', and this has pushed me out for good."
"I'm sorry, Bess," I said sincerely.
Her voice perked up. "That's okay. It's been a real experience. One I'll never forget. Boffing for you has changed my whole life."
"Thank you, Bess. Will I see you again?"
"Whenever you wish. Just drop me a line and we'll get together for a wild lost weekend. Get drunk and blow lunch."
"Good luck, Bess."
"Thanks," she said bravely. She made a kissing noise with her mouth and rang off. I picked my way through the rubble of the room and paused once more, my foot within inches of the tempting target of Connie's jaw.
Don't let me do it, conscience. I have sinned so mightily myself and yet never deserved gelding by the dentures of a dame.
Connie shifted in her sleep. Murmured. Slurped. As though in a hot, restless dream. I mastered the urge and got into the Landcruiser and drove off. The field was still littered with white, slumbering bodies. Nothing stirred.
* * *
Portentous, grey, El Greco clouds hung low, touching the horizon of rich pastures picturesquely roamed by Holstein cattle. The road was straight, and mine was the only car. In the distance, the twin rounded green humps of the University appeared. A water tower and a few box-like buildings rising above the shroud of trees. A magic town. A town neat and toy-like as though modeled for an H-O gauge railroad. A town full of dreams.
Were it anything else, it would be a nowheresville, a dead-end hick burg with nothing to do at night. But the University is chock full of youth, rampant with mischief, redolent with seminal longing. For four too-short years, the youth of the South and a sprinkling of Yankees cast off the dirt-bag, formative milieu of home and ache with their best longings, dream their best dreams, love their best and purest loves.
Tell me the faculty are addle-pated farts grasping after obscure emoluments, and I will show you men who have kept their dreams of Athens and Rome and Byzantium long after the rest of mankind has been lost in the mire of sweaty, cackling corruption.
Tell me it is a school for whores to rival Aspasia's college in ancient Athens, and I will show you mint-fresh virgins who barter their final surrender with all the prudent skill of seasoned Wall Street brokers. Honey dripping voices. Sweet pubescent gaze. Dark liquid deer's eyes. And such fine upholstery. Wondering behind unread books in the library when they will meet the special man-jack whose gristletender balls and fleshy shaft they will first fondle.
Point out the campus politico with his slimy grin, and I will show you the Machiavelli and Mephistopheles that lurks in the grasping soul of us all. Hungry for wealth and power. Thinking to buy the nooky that will never be given for free.
Speak of the simian jocks of Rhonda Dorm; hairy, mesomorphic oafs with prehensile toes who never wipe their asses. I will answer that they are the alter ego of Everyman. Each Adam after the Fall who dreams of afternoons in dark bars with bottles of cold beer beading perspiration; of the howling, cheering mob applauding his talent in head-bashing; of blowjobs from angelic cheerleaders who let themselves go in the heat of drunken Fiji parties.
Lecture me on power-mad, megaversity administrators who each year chop down fifteen more trees and build one more cement box horror. I will weep and show you the barbered lawns and old grape arbor and tree-shaded walks that remain. Yea, and I will take you aloft to survey an outside landscape overrun with K-Marts where life is even more obscene.
Mention the skinny, jug-eared freshman goon with 400 on his verbal SAT, and I will answer quintessential, gangly, dumb-ass youth. Horn-rimmed glasses fogged with steamy speculations on the young honey who sits in front of him in Eng. Lit. Wondering as to the extent or lack of her penis envy. Musing on her tender portions. Longing fervently to churn her butter. Each and every one of us at that desperate age of eighteen.
Tell me the University is a place that one outgrows, and I will reply only if one is Philistine crass. A Compleat Dullard who never ever loved life to begin with. Who never saw a world outside of Rubesville and never wanted to.
* * *
I stopped off at the Burger Bucket for coffee and sausage biscuits and was startled to see Royal getting into a beatup rusted-out pick-up. There were two bumper stickers on the back: Caution-Tobacco Chewer Inside, and Don't Let Your Meat Loaf, showing a personified hotdog lying in a lawnchair holding a cold drink.
Royal was wearing a knotted at the mid-rift denim shirt and cut-off levis that revealed the bottom curves of the cheeks of her ass. Bare feet black on the soles. The general appearance of Six-Pack Annie or some Grade-B trucking movie starlet. She waved at me with her chin as both hands were filled with coffee with little lids on them.
Bang-a-lang Bozart, shirtless, same Red Camel overalls, sat in the passenger seat with one huge forearm resting on the door. He laid his chin on his arm, revealing his new bass fishing cap. There was a foil sack of Redman chewing tobacco on the dashboard, a pack of Merit, a pint-sized football and a crushed Blue Ribbon can. Bozart gave his gurgling, snorting laugh and said: "Hey, dick-head."
"Always nice to see you, Bozart," I answered. "What are you doing back in town, Royal?"
"Oh we came down to raise a little hell before I go home to Canby," she said. "We got kicked out of the College Inn last night for trashing the room. Had to spend the night in the truck."
"When I get a good com-hole on her, she tears up half the room," said Bozart, gurgling proudly.
"You're going back to Canby?" I asked, half incredulous, half hopeful.
"Yeh, I've done my apprenticeship you might say."
"If I weren't a Christian," said Bozart, apropos nothing, "I'd get outta this truck and whup the shit outta yew."
I ignored him. "You're right to punish us, Royal," I said. "After what we put you through. But you didn't have to do it at the price of self-degradation."
She looked puzzled. "I don't get it."
"You ran off to Bozart to punish Canby and me didn't you? You slept with this degenerate hydrocephaloid to make us doubt our own manhood."
"I still don't follow you. In the manhood category, Canby don't lack for shit. I was plumb terrified of his dick our whole married life. Christ, the damn thing's a foot and a half long. I used to have nightmares about it coming all the way from my cunt up into my throat and choking me to death. I took up with old Bozart here because he's got the biggest dick I've seen on a man. Aside from Canby, I mean. When he poked it up my ass and it felt good, I figured what I needed was to be weaned by him. Then maybe I'd have the nerve to take on my husband."
"But I thought you liked ... liked making love with me?"
"Oh, sure far as it went. If you know what I mean? But let's face facts, Spender. Your dick is a pretty pathetic little object. On the menu of life, it might be listed as a Jumbo Shrimp Appetizer, but it's still a shrimp."
I stared at her vacuously. Baffled. Glassy-eyed.
"You never did show up with the stereo equipment, Spender," she continued. "I told you I expected you to follow my instructions to the T.' So I got even with you. Just so you understand me in the future."
She tossed me a copy of the Mercury Messenger, the student newspaper. Then she climbed into the driver's seat of the buck and backed it out with much backfiring and wheezing by the engine. As they drove off, I sat dumbly looking at the headlines.
"DUO STREAKS ART 269"
There was a picture showing Royal coming at the photographer full-on nude, and behind her, the hulking Bozart, also sprinting down the classroom aisle, but with his privates tastefully excised from the picture by a black piece of tape.
The article recounted how the Mercury staff had received an anonymous phone call priming them for the event, so they had been there with bells on. The streaking had caused a minor riot, in the course of which my exam had been forgotten by the 150 students. One coed suffered a broken leg and another swore she had been raped in the men's restroom. Her testimony was disputed by a University medical doctor who said he found no trace of human semen in her vagina.
An inside editorial discussed the event and compared it favorably with a streaking some years before through a student government meeting in which a dean had been smacked in the face with a cream pie. It went on to speculate that I had arranged the event in a desperate attempt to get a good student evaluation which was to be turned in with the exam blue book. An unnamed member of the faculty promotions committee noted mat my tenure was problematic.
I had missed it all, as my exams, once typed up and run off, are distributed by a graduate assistant. I had expected to pick them up for grading today. Dumbly, I perused the remainder of the front page.
"PROF HORS DE COMBAT' said another article. It went on to relate that Professor McAlister Webley had been pursued by six male students whom he was only able to identify as "fraternity louts." They had intended him grievous bodily harm, which he escaped by cowering in a toilet stall in the notorious "fag restroom" of the Roxburg Library and stomping their fingers when they attempted to crawl under to get at him. Obliged to remain there for over an hour, he emerged without physical injury but suffering a serious case of hives and other nervous disorders. He had been admitted to the neurosis clinic of the hospital.
Bess, you didn't tell them which Doctor Webley. And now my only supporter is beyond reach on the day of my doom. Suddenly I didn't feel much like breakfast. Instead, I went around in back of the dumpsters and threw up again.
* * *
I knocked on the door of Madame Ingomar's office, and a cool voice invited me in. I did so, closing the door behind me and flopping into a chair.
She was seated behind the desk wearing a white sundress tied at the shoulders with little pink strings. Bare arms and shoulders and upper chest. She was sipping retsina from a long-stemmed glass. A faint sound of typewriter tapping came through the wall from the office next door.
"I must know the truth," I groaned.
"How we should all like to know the truth about rite and dogma," she replied, wearing the mien of a Sibyl, the holder of all knowledge. Past. Present. Future. "So many ancient secrets lost by time. Imagine the two hundred thousand scrolls in the Alexandria Library that were burned by the Romans. What knowledge. Its loss held man back for a millenium. Knowledge that perhaps could even be of use to us today. Do you realize that the Egyptians made a medicine of Nile mud, and only in the twentieth century have we learned that the mud contained the antibiotic aureomycin?"
"Scintillating," I said. "But I have to know what your game is. I've come through your allegorical journey as far as I can stand. I'm Milton's Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond. I'm Papageno terrified of the temple snake. I'm besieged, beleagured, beaten senseless. Just give me knowledge. I thirst for it. I can't take this Masonic cauchemar any longer."
"How about a glass of retsina? A far better thing to thirst for. And perhaps it will fortify you through this afternoon. After all, we can't have you puking your guts up in front of the tenure committee."
She poured the yellow liquid into a clean, thin-stemmed glass. I gulped it greedily and held out the glass for more. It seemed to restore me in some peculiar way. To make me behave like the old horse in the knackers yard. Wanting desperately to rut. Driven by stark unreasoning fear into the most base of animal emotions.
"Can you taste the pungent sap that oozes out of the timber?" she asked, touching her moist lips with a pointed tongue.
"I want your body," I said. "I need it. Give it to me."
She smiled like a cunning vixen. An elegant, dishonest smile. Standing up from her desk, she provocatively lifted her dress in a remembered way, displaying her matrix. Showing me her black, semi-tropical verdure. A ripe bush of tea leaves on a hill in Ceylon. Then lowering the dress over it again like a curtain going down over an applauded impresario.
"I've done stuff for you," I nearly shouted. "I've been your tool. Your cat's-paw. Give it to me!" I began to wrench open my trousers to let out my growing erection.
"Really, Professor Spender, don't grovel so. Everything will-dare I say, come-in good time."
"Let me lick it then! Just let me lick it! Every woman likes to be eaten out when she doesn't have to do anything in return. Just lie back on the desk and enjoy it. Or in the carpet. Take your shoes off and scruff your toes in the carpet while I lick your cunt. Don't send me into the lion's den without some salvation."
"Professor, this slavery to your scrotum doesn't become you at all. Next you'll be asking me to masturbate myself in front of you." She laughed from inside her lissome throat. I gripped the seat of the chair, and my prick grudgingly subsided. Allowed me to stuff it back into my pants. "Be positive; all of this has been taken care of."
"In classical mythology," she continued, "the Greeks distinguished between fresh and salt water nymphs. Naiads and Nereids."
"I've always preferred Nereids," I mumbled despondendy. "Amphitrite. Calypso. Thetis, die mother of Achilles."
"Both kinds had amorous blood and gave their loins often to mortal men," she added, licking her lips again as though to mock me.
"True."
"So we may assume you are more drawn to the smell of Middle Sea foam and salt-fed kelp? You feel it would heighten your sexual satisfaction?"
"Who gives a shit," I wailed, getting up and walking out of the office. I closed the door as quietly as possible and trudged down the empty linoleum hall.
The storm broke just as I walked through Flag Court, and I raced across Fig Street to stand under the shelter of the small Greek temple while the initial drops stained the ground and spread rapidly into solid sheets of standing water. Filling the gutters with froth and running current.
It was an odd storm. Early for summer thundershowers. Late for the spring rains that drench the campus in warm wetness and send students wading in soaking joy. Playing innocence for the last time. Kissing. Lips meeting under dripping noses and streaming cheeks. Making a world of yellow rain slickers, green ponchos and blue rubber flops.
But now in late May, few people were about. A fat man ran out of the Admin. Building holding a newspaper over his head which was suddenly gusted from his grip in the rising wind. His suit turned from dove to iron grey in the pelting rain. The rain drove inside my open shelter, and I realized that it was no use to remain there longer. Besides, the hour was nigh.
I strolled down the streaming brick walks through the wet verdant green of McFarland Place. Past the ivy-covered nobility of Bernardo Hall with its bronze statue of Athena, a replica of Pheidias' chryselephantine original in Athens.
I paused there, feeling the wet sink into my clothes and skin thoroughly and contemplated the slate steps and thick boxwoods. There so many years ago when I was a callow undergraduate, I had kissed the 'stacked' Patricia as we sat, and I, babbling, out-lined the great course my life was to take. She had responded by letting me touch her breasts, and I had imagined that I was experiencing life.
I strolled on along the loose stone wall that lined the rear of the Episcopal Church and passed the music building. The campus was as grieved as I. Filled with a dim growing sadness as the masses of students departed.
Except for a few who were bound for Europe, summer vacation was not one of joy like Christmas or Easter. Rather it was a return to all those rube towns that they so longed to escape. Dismal summer jobs in cotton mills and J.C. Penneys and Western Auto. A loss not of love but of the dream of love. Of the living hope that throbbed in youth's breast of meeting someone special who would give without demanding greedily in return. The hope that could live as long as one were surrounded by all that exuberance at the University. Not in the dried-up Social Security grunginess of some sweltering cement mall city.
I was like them. Cain punished not for a murderous assault on Abel, but for the original sin in Eden. Banished to the desert of Nod.
I went into the Frazier Museum, dripping a long train of wetness behind me. Shoes squishing. To find the private room where fate hung in the balance. To open the door and see them already assembled. Silent. Strangely edgy. Uneasy with the wretched task of telling someone he was getting the axe.
"Won't you be seated?" said old Chamberlain, clearing his throat at least three times in that short sentence. He had an inordinate interest in Chinese porcelain. Could discourse on the subject for interminable boring hours. And looked as brittle and fragile as a Sung teacup.
Still dripping water, I sat down in a lyre-backed chair with no arms. Designed for the maximum discomfort. Unable to slouch. To lean on anything for the reassuring feel of wood or metal. I put my knees together and straightened my back. Like I had hemorrhoids as I knew fully half the committee did.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, or so Janis Joplin had once said. I wouldn't go to Eutawah State or Minisink or St. Enid's, I told myself firmly. I'd catch up with Zac in Florida and blow up freighters. Die a flaming death. Devil-may-care Spender retrieves his lost vitality. Determined to sow the earth with dragon's teeth.
They sat at a long banquet table, all facing me, their feet concealed by a vast drapery. A replica of the Bayeux Tapestry which was brought out only on such occasions as this for reasons of symbolism unknown. I found my eyes unable to focus on their faces, struggled to even remember their names.
Six crabbed tyrants. Bone dry scholiasts. Their genitals indifferent to the Tri Delta Thetas who filled their classrooms. All were old. Abhorrently old. Except for one who was smarmy and young. Willington. A popinjay product of Princeton. A notorious transvestite who crawled on hands and knees along the lower shelves of books in the library to peep through the stacked volumes and shine a flashlight beam on young men's crotches as they sat studying.
All of them sat in curious postures. Unaccustomed poses. Slouching. Turning at odd angles as though they had been in deliberation for hours and their butts were tired. It was the prevalence of hemorrhoids of course.
Old Chamberlain. White unruly hair like he had just crawled out of his deathbed. Parchment skin as yellow as nicotine. Cadaverous, sunken cheeks. I thought of his testes hanging dead between his legs. Like a creeping blight that strikes first the thing men love most.
Chamberlain adjusted his bifocals and peered at the yellow piece of legal paper on which Webley had written. Webley who was bedridden, hands swaddled to keep him from clawing his hives.
"We have read your submission from Dr. Webley of course," Chamberlain said, pausing to clear his throat and twist about in his seat. "We collectively find it passing strange that he should show a volte-face concerning you as he was your principal opponent heretofore. Albeit there were numerous others among us with grave reservations concerning your qualifications."
Chamberlain suddenly exploded into an awful coughing fit, hacking violently into a handkerchief like a terminal tubercular patient. He continued to gag and choke to the helpless consternation of the rest who made no effort to pound his back or offer him water from the pitcher.
My eye fixed on the pitcher. The pitcher of gilded copper from the Abbaye-au-Feret at Montbrison in France. Regarded almost like a grail, it was only brought out on special occasions like the tapestry.
Chamberlain waved a hand despondently, unable to go on. The others shifted in their seats uncomfortably as if reminded of the specter of age.
Proceed you blighted old toads. Kick my ass. Cast ordure on my head. Take pleasure in watching me weep my last tears in Arcady.
A low, deep-throated moan came from a man near the left end. A man in a toupee with a gullet that bulged under his suede waistcoat. He mopped his brow with the back of his sleeve. Rolled his eyes as though he were having hot flashes. Old Penorthy. English watercolors were his specialty. Connoisseur of port wines with a nearly priceless cellar of his own. An indolent gourmand so fat he couldn't look over his belly to see himself piss. Forever hopelessly constipated. A voluble afficionado of laxatives and enemas.
The rest shifted uncomfortably again, and a shrill, giddy yelp came from the one youth, Willington. He stopped his lips with a delicate hand tipped by unduly long fingernails for a man. Hot comb hairdo. Gold scarab pinky ring. Tapered body shirt and Yves St. Laurent necktie.
"We ... we don't want to drag this out," said old Aslimead. He belched slightly behind his hand. A specialist in old abbeys of France that had eluded the destruction of the Revolution. Rotten liver from a quart-a-day booze habit over the last fifteen years. The doctor had him on straight Vichy water now, and even so, didn't give him much life expectancy. A treacherous poltroon, Aslimead, who when three sheets to the wind imagined himself the mouthpiece of Orpheus. A human Delphic oracle. Wo to the poor grad student who ever dared to cross him.
"We know how unpleasant it must be for you," Aslimead went on. "We ... we find it distasteful as well ... distasteful as well, to sit in judgment of one of our fellows. Oh my God Christ ohhhhhhh."
He gripped the edge of the table, and suddenly leaning over, beat his head against its surface several times. At last he righted himself and by the exertion of great effort brought himself under control.
"What the learned Dr. Chamberlain was trying to say," Aslimead continued, "was that Dr. Webley's peevish opinions are not of high worth at this moment. His scrape with these students is suspect at best. And his ... um ... spouse ... has just this past evening created a scandal of such abhorrent proportions that we can only guess at its magnitude."
"You mean she let the entire Zoo House gang-bang her?" I let it blurt out rather than sit and suffer speechless. Perhaps knowing that I was a goner, that I was doomed when judged by these rheumy old fossils who struggled with their health problems even as they sat before me. Men the students regarded as having so much lead up their butts it was choking them.
"I cannot pwetend to interpwet your idiom," lisped Willington the fey youth. The one who most assuredly knew what a gang-bang was from having so often been boned up the ass. "And I feel it would be best if we did not bwoach this subject further. Unnnnhhhhhh." He released a sort of low moan and slouched in his chair until he was nearly out of sight under the table.
"We really want to welcome you as a permanent member of the faculty," said Penorthy. He spouted it rapidly, like a child who had memorized a poem and wanted to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
"Say what?" I queried.
"We're granting you tenure, dear boy," Penorthy said, sweat running down his face from beneath the toupee. "Unnnhh wuh ooooo."
I gaped astonished. A small 'thank you' came from somewhere inside me.
Penorthy adjusted his toupee. "There's ... there's just one thing I would like to ask you in parting, if you don't mind answering."
"Yes?"
"The rumors about your ... urn ... incredible prowess with the coeds. Can you substantiate them ... even in a minimal way?"
"I don't understand."
He patted his belly affectionately. "Everywhere I go I hear 'Spender gets it regular. Spender gets it regular.' Is this true?"
"I don't know really." I shook my head, confused. "Well, we don't want to keep you any longer than necessary. You may go now."
"I ... I'm sort of stunned. Do you think I might just sit here in this room quietly for awhile once you've left?"
"Um ... well I don't see why not. We ... we're all about finished up with things anyway aren't we, gentlemen?" He searched down the table to find nods of assent. They rustled with their papers stuffing them in their briefcases. Tugging down vests. Stuffing shirttails back in. Standing up and slowly shuffling out of the room. Looking very tired. Drained. Only Willington mincing a bit, twirling a mauve handkerchief.
They went out the door in a long file. Willington was the last to leave. He hung behind and swivelled his hips at me. Bikini underpants showing through his tight, fawn-colored trousers. Artificially built-up dick like a Renaissance codpiece to give him an abnormal bulge at the crotch. He shook his finger at me in scolding fashion.
"You do too get it wegular, you bitch, you. I'm completely au fait on the subject. Surtout your wittle frou-frou Apwil Webley. You mouse her cwanny and paddle her fanny just tewibbly wegular."
He giggled, covering his lips delicately and flashing his scarab pinky ring. "If you must know, she's"-he giggled again-"holed up in the Zoo House and wefuses to come out. Tried to fuck and suck her way through the tout ensemble last night. At first they were thwilled, but after awhile, her insatiable appetite began to tewwify them. Those wough, tough, masterful boy-o's have loins of clay after all."
"What's being done?"
"One of the deans is twying to talk her out of the house so they don't have to call the police."
"I see."
"Well, ta-ta for now." He gave his final giggle and pranced out to catch up with the others. Their voices slowly receded in the distance. I sat there in the silence staring at the copper pitcher and wondering that I had kept my grip on youth and life and my testicles. My credulity tried valiantly to mount, to accept what they had told me. My senses essayed to sniff the sweet rose of Good Fortune.
A shuffling came from under the table, and hands and legs and knees appeared. Small feet shod in Bean's rubber moccasins in deference to the rain. And Sperry top-siders, beat-up and taped together. Not the pristine kind that fakeprep honeys buy at the Mansion Mart on Main Street.
A-Line and jean skirts. Oxford cloth shirts with cuffs monogrammed. Six well-put-together young ladies. AlphaAlephs. Spawn of Madame Ingomar. Clandestine allies.
"That had to be positively the grossest experience I have ever been through," complained one.
"Mine kept sticking it in my ear!"
"Your ear? That's lucky. Chamberlain came right into my mouth. I mean talk about THROW UP! I nearly bit his dork off."
"Oh gross me out!"
"Talk about wimp-city! That awful Willington can't even get a hard-on. I'd always heard he was a screaming queen."
It didn't make any sense. But who was I to look too closely at good fortune.
* * *
I saw Madame Ingomar soon after daybreak squatting peacefully on her haunches in the pasture. She seemed to be naked. Or at best, scantily clad. Illusory. Unreal. But even at such a distance, hauntingly beautiful.
I drank a leisurely coffee while watching her from an upstairs window shielded partially by a leafy branch. She waited patiently. Remained absolutely still. As if time had no meaning for her. It intrigued me, and at last, I went down and out the front door. Stood on the porch. Sniffed the breath of morning.
She rose up, displaying her affirmative beauty. Her breasts were bare; nipples dark, almost livid against her olive skin. Her hair was braided in two long pigtails and decorated with a clutch of jay feathers stuck in one side. Between her loins was a long deerskin breech cloth suspended there by a rawhide thong that circled her hips. On her feet, moccasins. She was the picture of a dusky Indian maiden who might have danced naked in the moonlight about new planted corn and squash to make it fertile. A Minnehaha who could converse with birds and bears and suckle orphan wolf cubs from her paps.
Without a word, she headed towards the woods, her breasts swinging, her buttocks moving up and down, not side-to-side. Muscles tight and firm. Undimpled. With just the least pout to the belly that showed she was over thirty. But it made such a nice deep navel.
She crossed the wire smoothly, not marring her olive skin with the least scratch from the ugly barbs. I trotted up the path a ways to catch her, but she was already off among the trees. Into the dappled shade. Moving as quietly as an Indian. As quietly as those Phoenicians who once lived among them. Who came to merge with them and be forgotten in the days when bison still roamed the eastern forests.
Filled with keen anticipation, I trailed perhaps ten yards behind as she moved rapidly among the trees. Into the hardwood enchantment of gall-oaks and maples, ash and poplar. Down the incline. Skipping across stones in the running creek with a facile, easy grace. I wavered and plunged into the water up to my knees. Waded across. Then through ferns and willows. Clambered up the loose leaves of the far slope. She had disappeared.
I rushed on, uncertain of the trail, and at last, saw her. She crossed a narrow ravine choked with fallen trees, dead brush, brambles and sumac. I clawed my path behind.
On a small hilltop, she halted, forming a triangle with a figure bound to a tree and a small stone platform. The scene was enchanted. Spellbound.
I knew what the stonework was. A rounded beehive hut. Slab side, corbelled stone. Each flat stone overlapping the one beneath it until it formed a dome perhaps five feet high. Dirt and weeds and dead leaves nearly buried the structure, but the small entry hole was clear. Dark. Cool. Mysterious. It occurred to me that we were on the upward slope of the hill on the East side. Facing the rising sun.
The bound figure was tied face to the tree. Ash-blonde hair streaked with gold. A female smooth form. Swelling lyre of the hips. Full breasts mashed against the rough bark. Soft curve of the spine. Fair skin tanned a sultry bronze. A blonde Venus.
I approached, and she twisted her head about to look over her shoulder. Revealed herself as Connie Vaudrey. A petite captive creature.
"Jack," she implored in a tear-choked, pleading voice. "Professor Spender. Please!" She struggled against the ropes. Flexed her buttocks in her efforts. I saw the mark. A fresh brand. Bright red from the hot metal. Marking the left cheek of her rump with the symbol of Tanit. Of Astarte.
"She has been punished for her transgressions," announced Madame Ingomar, smiling musingly without showing her even white teeth. I noticed for the first time she was wearing a necklace with beads of shell, bone and clay. A bronze knife was bound in a sheath to her left bicep.
"She, like you, has progressed much in the last weeks. Has learned much of the ancient mysteries that still infuse our modern world."
"But what...?" I mumbled.
"Historians are all fools." She spoke serenely with no trace of bitterness. Yet her point was well taken. "They long ago forgot how to postulate, how to imagine, to suppose. And thus they cease to search. They just burrow deeper into that which is already known. The number seven was sacred to the Aztecs as well as to the Hebrews. The Indian offered quails to his gods. The Judaean gave turtledoves. Quetzalcoad had white skin and a long beard. Baal was a god of both the Maya and the Phoenician. But ignoramus historians mock and say there is no proof." She waved a hand towards the stonework. "You know what that is of course."
"Yes," I said. "A drystone chamber. There are many of them in the northeast of this country. Unexplained. Ignored by the timid scholars who fear ridicule."
"Within this stone cairn, you will find a man buried kneeling; not folded on his side in the Indian fashion. With him will be many worldly objects from around the period 900 B.C. Some Indian, some Phoenician. Bronze Age objects. They will make your career. You will study them. Write learned articles on them. You will be pressed by the covetous to sell them. The insolent will even urge you to make them a gift. But you will resist."
"To what end?"
"You will sell them for three million dollars to a man whom I shall later reveal to you. This lucre will give you a measure of independence. Not much, as your tastes will rise rapidly to meet your new income. But it will let you feather your nest in the top of an ivory tower. It will give you the courage to marry Connie Vaudrey for her opulent dowry."
"Connie?"
"Please," said Connie desperately, giving me supplicant looks. Longing to prove her obeisance. "Please marry me. I beg you! I'll give you everything. I'll prove it to you! Beat me if you wish. My back is bared for the whip. Or force me to my knees to give you an endless blowjob."
Madame Ingomar drew her bronze knife from the scabbard on her arm, and walking to Connie's tree, cut her dishonored body loose with slashing, sawing motions. Connie's limbs, exhausted from her long captivity, gave way. She collapsed whimpering onto the carpet of leaves. Lay among bilberries and toothwort.
"Please take me!" she cried. "Can't you see the mark? I am a cully of Astarte. Destined for you. Please take me!"
Madame Ingomar stood with her legs boldly apart, deerskin cloth hanging between them. She gave an all-knowing smile; enigmatic, very nearly tender. "You find me a sight such as must have quickened the blood of the first white men to these shores." She used her best come-to-me voice.
"Yes," I gasped. "I would clasp your fire even if it burns me fatally."
"And likewise the same creature that ignited the Roman wanderer when he touched Levantine soil. In taking me, you think you would have revealed the final mystery. You feel you would know ancient man utterly, would find the touchstone of all racial memory. Know through the sheer rapture of your loins what drove him, what soothed him, what made him leap and shout for joy. Here lost in these dim woods you could utterly block out the modern world and truly merge with the past. You as a man who loves art could do this. You love with your heart and soul and not with your head. You love beauty instead of dry books and newsprint. Even now, your sap rises at the spectacle of my breasts, my belly, my thighs. You long to squirt semen thick as calumny. To exult in such a triumph."
"Yes," I breathed.
"Strip yourself."
I obeyed. Taking my clothes off without losing sight of her as she walked to the beehive hut and sprang to the top of the flat roof stone. Standing with legs together and arms crossed, dagger pressed flat against one arm.
I stood without a stitch. My prick ached to where I thought I could scarcely stand the pain. A manifestation of its one throbbing impulse. As though it would ejaculate merely as a consequence of her smoldering gaze, without benefit of any human contact. Time held its baited breath in a windless silence.
With the dagger, she cut the rawhide thong, and the loincloth fell to the face of the stone. She displayed her tawny smoothness in brazen, shameless, full detail. Her nest of black hair was gone. Shaved smooth clean. Ungarnished. Bare. The small slit in her mound no longer darkly hid. A mound of Indian maize about to sprout.
I felt the jolt in my loins. Sagged as my knees went weak, as though masturbating in the shower. The white cream spattered lightly on dead leaves. I stumbled forward as her throaty laugh carried through the forest. I reached high, seeking to touch the space between her legs. The proscenium arch. To rub its smoothness. Or brush my fingertips across its stubble like a mowed field. She stepped back lightly. Out of reach.
I clutched at the lichen and moss covered stone, gathered up the soft deerskin. Sniffed the length that had passed between her legs. Sucked in the faint musk. Nearly wept with my frustrated desire.
When I looked up, she was springing like a deer through the forest. Weaving. Leaping dead logs. Braided hair floating behind her like the train of a comet. I was too dumbfounded to follow. Somewhere on a small road she had parked her Alfa-Romeo. Cached her clothes. She would vanish utterly like a shining divinity gone up to her cloud. And yet I knew I would see her again. When she brought the name of my purchaser. My unknown buyer. Then I would not be debarred from her loins.
I hugged the cool. Heard Connie drag herself across the soft leaves abjectly calling my name; begging me to submit; provoking my bottomless lust by her spirit of contrition.
She wallowed in the leaves on her back. I dropped to my knees beside her. Kissed down the inside of her superb thighs. Savored her once more, her spices mingling with leaves and mold and damp. She groaned and arched her back to welcome my tongue into the moist mother-of-pearl. Her twat was in full flower.
She grasped my prick and fed there like a fascist statue of Romulus suckling from the Roman Wolf. Breathing back into it an independent life. Renewed, filled with fresh vitality, I put myself in the V of her thighs, felt her circling arms.
"Oh God take me!" she urged. "Take me to a world without Polident and denture irritation and analgesic formulas for on-the-spot relief! Without Wishbone Italian dressing and cheese sandwich slices made with pure vegetable oil for 90% less cholesterol and 75% less saturated fat!"
She began to shift her hips, to move with me as though one single corporate body. Then twisting this way and that to create stresses and accents. I humped her violently, drove her into passionate contortions. She groaned and shrieked with pleasure. The thrill mounted. I delayed. It mounted again. Sweeping toward apotheosis.
"Oh mercy I can't live without this!" she screamed. "Ohhhhh. Oh shit god oh fuck me!"
She gave the standard warning cries. Then she came. And I soon after her. In an unchecked flow. Soaring in the empyrean and then gently wafting to earth. A subsidence into calm.
