How often has it been said that "the love of money is the root of all evil." This latest novel by Morgan Savage, appropriately titled Gold Fever, is a fictionalized demonstration of this Biblical dictum. Jack Shepherd, the hero of this story, has devoted his life to a search for gold. Along the way, he meets a beautiful girl, Merle Tanner; she is a girl who has everything going for her only she is consumed by an overwhelming greed for money. It is her greed which ultimately destroys her. And the same thing happens to Pete Darran, a none-too-scrupulous helicopter pilot, and the two renegades, Taffy and Ben.
To Jack Shepherd, a timid gentleman, the search for gold is not so much a lust for money as it is a challenge, a search for adventure, and in truth a search to discover some meaning for his life. In this exciting account of adventure and greed, author Morgan Savage gradually leads Jack through a series of crises which, each time he meets and solves them, strengthens him, until in the end he emerges far different from the man he was.
Along with the theme of greed, the author has incorporated the theme of lust and sexuality. Taffy and Ben regard sexuality as an animal need which can be satisfied by any female and she is merely the momentary object of their gross demands. Pete Darran has only a slightly higher regard for women. And Merle Tanner is willing to give her body to whoever happens to be handy especially if they can be useful in satisfying her greed for gold. All of them are intent on using each other's bodies and in using each other's help to satisfy their greed.
Only Jack Shepherd, again, has any interest in sharing rather than in using or hoarding. And, finally, he shares willingly with the only people in his experience who have been honest and gentle to him. In short, this is a moral tale in a contemporary idiom.
-The Publishers
PROLOGUE
Who can say with certainty what ingredients go into the making of a legend. Legends are, by definition, a person or event that inspires myths...thus, we are dealing from the start with indefinites.
There are those who would say that the time for legends has passed that now man has walked upon the moon, and there can be nothing further on this earth to create the necessary elements for legend.
But that statement is false. For there are vast untouched regions of the human mind and heart still to be explored.
And when a man a frail white man who has nothing to go on but heart, guts and hope enters a forbidden land in search of gold, then legend is born.
This then, is the legend. A story, if you will, about a man who made a promise...and kept his word, even though the greatest temptations of all were put before him gold and sex...a legend about a man who called down the birds....
CHAPTER ONE
They were making love on the floor because the girl said the couch was uncomfortable, too springy, and he kept slipping out. She wanted a cushion under her buttocks; she said she was in the right mood for it, and for God's sake why did he have to watch television at the same time? In her opinion, she was the best bit of tail in the entire state of Ohio, so why did he have to watch the goddamn box like a square-eyed freak?
The more she complained the less Jack Shepherd felt like being the great lover she expected of him. It hadn't even been his idea to go back to his apartment when he had asked Jenny to have coffee with him after work; it was her suggestion, and when he had tried to back out, it was her insistence that he should show her over his drab little apartment. Sure, he had flirted with the stenographer, and they had dated a couple of times before, but he had never felt an irresistible urge to lay her despite her lissome body, lightly tanned all over except for the two most desirable areas sometimes covered by a bikini.
Undressing her had been really something, especially when she came down to his height when she kicked off her high platform-soled shoes, and he didn't feel exaggeratedly short and thin. As he pulled her dress down from her shoulders, she let down her long wavy hair which hung in soft bouncing curls over her full creamy breasts, and she straightened her back to thrust the soft orbs of flesh up to his eagerly licking tongue, holding one breast cupped in her hand so that his mouth could suck in its erecting nipple.
Jenny had wondered many times during the months she had worked in the same office room whether Jack really had the fire in his belly that his lecherous glances suggested, whether he would really give her itching cunt the satisfaction it craved. She had actually daydreamed about a situation like this in the young geologist's apartment, away from the distractions of assay reports and all the other humdrum business of a big mining company's office, where relationships were usually only on a nine-to-five basis, a society forced on them during office hours. She had daydreamed too of perhaps being married to the bespectacled, shortish geologist who obviously needed a strong woman to push him ahead. Christ! Didn't she have to push him just to get him to take her to his bare little pad?
She reached down to feel his cock while he filled his mouth with her firm mounds and found she had to unzip his pants to get hold of his hotly throbbing member, consciously remembering how in the office she had watched it swelling along the left side of his pants when she deliberately parted her legs under her short skirt as she typed at her desk a few feet away, facing his. A sexual curiosity had dampened her panties then; now the first touch of her excitedly trembling fingers as they grasped his warm pulsing shaft had the juices of desire heating in the hair-covered crevice of her cock-hungry pussy. For the time being, she could overlook the meanness of the apartment that certainly gave no encouragement to a husband-hunting girl or any indication that Jack's obsession for gold was paying dividends. All that, she would leave until later things like what he did with his high salary, whether he could afford a more civilized place to live in, and so on.
First things first, like getting the swelling head of his long hard cock deep inside her aching cunt.
The young geologist was equally interested in investigating the enticing little pussy glimpsed under the narrow patch of nylon panties at the office, a few brown pubic curls showing on the side when Jenny provocatively opened her legs as she typed. On their other dates, he had felt smothered by her at times, as if she had been molded into the complete image of the overpowering, materialistic American girl her pretty face already hardening into an expression of male-dominating, smug, self-satisfied femininity fully conscious of the sex appeal of her body which, Jack believed, was merely a husband-trap.
He was disinterested in her as a person, for she had little to offer as a personality, nor had she shown any interest in his various theories of undiscovered gold, but he was interested, lustfully interested, in that inviting patch of hair-covered pussy lying up between those long shapely legs. With his outstretched middle finger dug into the wetly heated lips of her pussy, and with her hand gripping his rock-hard cock, he had led her to the couch, switching on the TV set before pushing her down on her back. She had asked him why he wanted the box turned on. He couldn't be bothered to explain that there was something he thought he should watch on television just in case and he shoved his long hard cock into her salivating mouth, both to shut her up and to have the stenographer's lips sucking on him while she tongued up under the glans of his throbbing shaft. For a while she worked at him, then impatiently, she pulled him down to lie over her as she opened her legs wide and guided his saliva-wet penis into her hotly quivering pussy.
The couch sagged in the middle, and Jack was just as pleased as Jenny when she rolled to the floor and raised her buttocks up on a cushion, her vaginal mound a prominent hillock above the flat plane of her belly. The glistening lips of her vagina parted so invitingly that he went down on the panting brunette to suck at her cherry-ripe clitoris bud. But nothing seemed to satisfy her for very long except having his lust-hardened cock inside the tight little hole that, to his flicking tongue, had the wondrous texture of warm slippery oysters. Sliding his rigid thickness into her, he felt her wetly pulsating cunt come alive as it clamped down on every inch of his penis. He put aside his impression of her as a person, and kissing her open mouth rammed his cock hard into her quivering pussy passage until his balls slapped into her eagerly upraised ass-cheeks
She might be a dominating, matriarchal bitch of a girl, Jack thought, but she sure was hot for sex almost reaching a climax in the first few seconds. Her rippling vaginal muscles were bringing his pulsing shaft to such a blood-swollen hardness that her cunt seemed to shrink rather than get looser. He rode higher on her and heard the wantonly writhing girl moan as her clitoris was scraped each time he fucked his long, thick cock in and out of her tight little pussy. They were both perspiring in the stuffy little room, their sweat giving a greater intimacy to their naked flesh rubbing together. To the rhythm of his fucking, she ground up her buttocks and darted her tongue into his clamping mouth.
She had wanted music, she liked to fuck to slow-beat music. She put the sound of the TV out of her mind as she encouraged him to speed up the tempo, she was so near to cumming....
Instead, the geologist slowed to a stop, his hardened cock rammed stiffly into Jenny's raised cunt while he lifted his sweating chest from her warmly throbbing breasts. He had begun to feel the first electric pulsations of orgasm stirring in his balls and tingling below the flange of his cock-head when he was suddenly alerted to the words of the documentary on TV.
Earlier, he had half-listened, half-aggravatedly ignored the sound of the narrator....
...and in this series of News Cameramen of the Second World War, we now present the dramatic scoop of 1944 in the Southwest Pacific...the rescue of the stranded crew of a crashed DC-3 Dakota transport...three airmen and a WAC stranded in a deep jungle-clad valley in the highlands of New Guinea.. .
Holding his penis deeply embedded inside the office stenographer's belly, Jack turned his head to watch the screen. There was the hatless WAC in khaki shirt and long pants standing by a glider while the crew of the downed DC-3 rigged up a rope between two tall poles, ready for the dramatic snatch by a trailing hook from a Mitchell bomber that would fly in low and slow to jerk the glider and its passengers, two at a time, into the air.
...the war correspondent cameraman, Alex
Cann, parachuted into this valley which he calls Shangri-La to film the first rescue ever made by a glider.. . no other way to get the Americans out of the valley unless they trekked through almost impenetrable, disease-ridden jungle past stone-age cannibals.. .
Jenny was groaning in anguish and digging her fingers into his motionless buttocks in a futile effort to pull his loins down onto her hungrily squirming pubic mound.
What caused Jack to stop, his long hard penis frozen in her hotly clasping cunt, was the next shot made by the cameraman. The lens moved beyond the glider, now filled with the WAC and another passenger, to show the depth of the valley from where they would be rescued in the precarious lift-off. For a moment, the camera hesitated on a shot of a curious double waterfall made by the river spilling down onto an outcrop of rocks before plunging down in another cascade of spray. In those few seconds of viewing, the gold-obsessed geologist's brain flicked back to one certain book from his extensive studies of gold discovery. Jack had quartered and segmented the earth's gold-producing areas, screening from all the literature ever published the by-passed clues that would lead him to an overlooked Eldorado. Now, in an instant of recognition, he saw a film of a geological feature he had seen once before a faded old pen-and-ink drawing of a similar waterfall described in a book written a hundred years ago a book on gold exploration in Papua-New Guinea.
"Jack...what the hell are you doing? You're spoiling everything...I...I was cumming!" the brunette under him groaned desperately, writhing her naked body beneath him to emphasize her urgent need for his cock to go back into action. He yelled at her, "Shut up! I'm trying to listen, you stupid bitch!"
Jenny lay still, shocked and confused. How dare the little bastard talk like that to me! In her sudden fury, she was tempted to push him off her.
Jack ignored her, concentrating on the narrator's voice -
...exchange gift for a pack of American cigarettes, the native chieftain gave him an earthenware bowl flecked with gold. . .
It came over loud and clear to the geologist who had leaned over to turn up the volume. He felt as if he had suddenly shed all his cares. He was lighthearted; for an old puzzle about the whereabouts of that valley now had the missing pieces fitting snugly into place the book, the waterfall with its swirling mist, and the gold. He silently praised the penmanship of that unknown, long-dead artist-illustrator. All he had to do was go through military archives to find the map reference given to the rescue crews, and he would have himself a gold field! He was smiling to himself when he was suddenly slapped hard across the mouth.
Stunned from the shock of the stinging blow, the young geologist was momentarily immobilized as his elation at solving the amazingly complex riddle changed to anger. He was momentarily confused by the fact that the girl he was in the middle of fucking should suddenly become a wildcat, for no reason at all as far as he could fathom. While he hesitated over her nakedly squirming body, she kicked her legs violently to knee him away from her, his still-erect penis sucking sloppily out of her wet cunt.
"Don't you call me a bitch, you seedy little bastard!" she screamed, slapping him again across the face. The brunette's expression showed the rage that convulsed her features into an ugly snarling hatred.
Jack never could remember exactly what happened next; dumbfounded by the stenographer's lack of understanding of his gold obsession, blindly angered by her physical attack, he supposed he must have slapped her back, hard. What he did remember was that they fought, wrestled and scratched on the floor, their sweating bodies locked together with such intensity of hatred and murderous intent, he wondered if he really would have taken her by the neck and shaken her and squeezed her senseless. He had never hit a woman before. Apart from sparring in the gym at college, he had never hit a man either, yet there he was, jerking back on the long hair of this naked girl who was trying to sink her teeth into his face. Jack knew that after the first slap he gave her, he was on the defensive, fighting back in their crazy rolling wrestling match on the floor to prevent the yelling, screeching bitch from tearing with her long fingernails at his balls or adding more long streaks of bleeding scratch-marks to his face and chest.
Another thing he was to remember later when he sat in the economy-class cabin of a jumbo jet flying to Australia, was that he felt strangely exhilarated by the bizarre fight in his little apartment, as if he had released a whole lifetime of pent-up resentment against bossing, demanding women. More outstanding in his mind was the gradual change from savage fighting back to a growing, overpowering lust for the brunette, and how as Jenny felt his member growing hard as it pressed into her body she grew weaker and weaker until she stopped fighting to lie as if exhausted on the floor. She reached down with a clawed hand, fingers curled to scratch; instead she closed her fingers around Jack's hotly pulsating shaft, pumped up and down along the sweating flesh while she gripped his buttocks with her free hand to pull him in again between her widely opened legs. There was no need to guide the rampantly probing weapon. Jack lunged forward, the swollen head of his penis sliding straight into the wide-open target of her wetly excited vagina.
"Oh, Jack! Oh...hurt me! Hurt me, Jack!
Fuck me as hard as you can! Oh, please, fuck me...AAaaahhh...." Jenny placed a hand around his head to suck at his willing mouth, both of them tonguing each other with a furious abandon as they frenziedly fucked.
Jack responded with long, hard and deep thrusts of his member into the heated tunnel of her convulsing young cunt with as much determination now to ram into her as he had earlier to beat the shit out of her. He hoped it hurt her. She loved it! She wanted more, and he gave it to her more than she'd ever had before slamming in long strokes from an almost withdrawn position, his penis sliding swiftly along the tight velvet passage of her vagina until his loins crashed against hers, their sweating bodies momentarily joined in a grinding of curling pubic hair, before he pulled back to slam into her again and again. He had never felt so horny, never bitten and sucked at a girl's neck so passionately or dug his fingers so cruelly into a girl's buttocks. He possessed her completely and she writhed in lewd delight, grinding her hot little cunt up for more, moaning and mewling into his mouth in hunger and appreciation.
And they exploded together on the floor, a naked-bodied orgasm that shot through them instantaneously, his final blood-filled thrust bringing his cock-head bulging up against her cervix where it jerked wildly as his sperm-laden balls released the white-hot fluid of his spurting cum to mingle with hers. She wanted to cry out, I'M CUMMING! but their mouths were locked suckingly together, her moans muffled into his mouth as he groaned into hers, her nakedly uplifted breasts heaving against his blood-streaked chest.
As the fire of their lust subsided, Jenny's eyes glowed with admiration and respect. Jack slowly rolled off her satiated body, conscious that he was happy, smiling, and had accomplished something that was entirely new to him. Lying flat on his back, he watched with a bemused air as the girl who had cock-teased him for so long in the office lowered her long brunette hair over his belly, took his slackening, cunt-wet cock in her mouth and sucked away between her soft lips to drink down the remains of his orgasmic juices while tasting the remains of her own.
The geologist leaned over to switch off the TV, noting the channel. When the girl finished her attentions to his deflated member and playfully sucked at his balls, he got up to dress.
"Wh...where are you going, Jack? Couldn't we...." she began in wonderment. Surely she had him right in the palm of her hand now...surely he must have enjoyed that!
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he interrupted her, glancing over the long legs, her sun-bronzed torso, the patches of white over her breasts and groin, the blood-streaked sweat imprinted from his own clawed body.
"Well, where?" she mewled.
He hesitated a moment, caution inspiring a new secrecy to be kept from the world but she wouldn't have caught on to a thing, he decided.
"New Guinea," he said flatly, pulling on his jacket to go out to a public telephone where he could speak privately to the TV station.
CHAPTER TWO
Knowing that Papua-New Guinea the eastern half of the world's second-largest island was administered by Australia, the young geologist stopped off in Sydney for two days to get his permit to enter the country and to complete his search for records of claims in the "Territory", the name he discovered most people there used when referring to New Guinea. The western half of the island, once Dutch, was now called West Irian, part of Indonesia. Satisfied that there were no claims staked anywhere in the general area of the "Shangri-La" valley, according to the records in Sydney, Jack Shepherd continued his long journey, flying north to the capital of New Guinea, the old Second-World-War base of Port Moresby. It was from there, he recalled, that Australian soldiers and airmen had stopped the Japanese thrust across the Pacific and, having stemmed the tide, fought a campaign that destroyed 200,000 of the enemy.
Now, Port Moresby was a bustling commercial town, the center of New Guinea administration. In strange contrast with the inland areas, the port was a dry, dusty area in summer before the monsoons brought heavy rains. A bus from the airport delivered Jack to a moderately comfortable though expensive hotel where, although it was a weekday, the bar was full of men drinking beer from large glass tumblers. Here and there among the drinkers were Papuan and New Guinea natives dressed like the whites in shorts and shirt, obviously educated men of the administration. Inland, Jack knew, in the jungle-clad mountains, there were isolated tribal villages where few white men had ever been seen, and there were several villages where none had ever been; and there were headhunters still. All of them, town whites and blacks, white prospectors, plantation owners, warring tribes and peaceful missionaries, knew that the yellow metal was now worth over a hundred dollars an ounce. Even the old men of the remote villages could remember when they first saw a white man and how, hoping to gain his magic powers, they stole and ate his shit: they would have eaten his liver instead if they had been able to cope with his "stick shootin' stone", as they called his rife, in pidgin, the lingua franca which allowed the natives with their numerous different languages to communicate with other tribes and with the administrators, prospectors, farmers and businessmen.
Jack thought pidgin, which sounded like a comic form of English, would be easy to learn until he heard it spoken, the words running so quickly together he realized it really was a different language. "Man, mary and monkey", he was surprised to learn, was accepted everywhere as pidgin for "man, woman and child", and he was amused to learn that "bagarap" from "bugger-up" meant disaster, while a big disaster like the burning of a village or a famine was "wanpela, bigpela bagarap" which translates as "one-fellow, big-fellow bugger-up".
Learning a few necessary words and phrases would not be too difficult for the geologist but it would take a few weeks' practice to be able to converse fluently, a necessary aid to his search for gold. Thinking of how he would be possibly alone while prospecting, he carefully observed the brown Melanesians whose faces and stocky build were so different from any other peoples he had ever seen. Their foreheads were higher than he expected, they had wide, thinning nostrils, bloodshot eyes, and, while their mouths were wide their lips were average, nowhere near as full as a Negro's. Quenching his thirst in the bar, Jack listened to conversations about the local politics, and how the mountain tribes were planning to seek independence from the coastal tribes when New Guinea was given independence. Also, he heard news of the latest tribal war between villages, which apparently went on interminably across the highlands, giving the Australian Patrol Officers constant work as peacemakers and magistrates.
That afternoon, the gold-fevered geologist walked down the main street to the local agency of the Australian Government Department of Mines to check on whether or not any mining rights had been granted prospectors in the "Shangri-La" valley area. This was where he had to show a lot of caution, knowing how clerks in such departments were in the pay of other prospectors and the larger mining outfits. The secure way was to examine the maps with the claims marked on them. He already had his mining right, picked up in Sydney, and he was not bound to disclose where he intended to search. Expecting a bespectacled official to handle his inquiries, he was pleasantly surprised when a girl in a silken mini-skirt, showing the length of her smooth tanned legs up to her panties, even when she was standing, asked him if she could help him.
Merle Tanner was a local, born in New Guinea; a beautiful ash blonde whose tanned skin accented the almost white color of her long silken hair. After being educated in Brisbane she had returned to Moresby to work in the Government department, equally stricken with man's oldest disease, gold fever. Her prospecting, however, was through the files bound with red tape, and over drinks with miners down from the gold fields. She was no ordinary golddigger, although half the male population, brown and white, would have given a month's salary to prospect up into the pussy at the top of those delightful legs. Merle had her sights set on bigger dividends, without owning shares in Rio Tinto's operations on the Bulolo field to get them. She planned to do it her way, through her job as a clerk at the Department of Mines.
When she went up to speak to the young American she thought he was only a clerk from one of the mining interests that had their headquarters in the town. He certainly looked like a clerk, she decided, a clerk who rarely saw the sun or ever used his undeveloped muscles. She knew exactly why he was staring at her his eyes moving slowly up from her legs to her face and back down again.
"You'll know me next time," she said, stopping the stare.
"Er...I must apologize...I.. . er...didn't expect to find a New Guinea beauty queen working in a government office," Jack replied, embarrassed that he might have annoyed the attractive blonde. Her breasts were just right, perfect for her figure...and those legs! He wanted to tell her so right away, how just looking at her aroused him. He was also pleased that the clerk was a girl, who probably had no interest in where he wanted to go or what he hoped to find. Noting a trace of American accent when the blonde spoke, he asked her which part of the States she hailed from. Merle explained that her parents were American, from New Jersey, who had set up a hardware business in Port Moresby after the war before she was born, twenty years ago. She added that she hoped to go to New York to live before very long. While she pulled maps from large drawers to show him, he noticed that her earlier cool manner had changed to an outright friendliness that had the geologist's mind wandering from the purpose of his visit.
Merle was supremely efficient with her maps, quickly and accurately following his map reference to the "Shangri-La" valley area, the exact location of the large map being only a small part of it. She was aware of his lewdly fixed gaze over her body and knew exactly what he could see when she bent over to open the map drawers, particularly aware that her mini-skirt would ride up above the scanty panties to show off the full moons of her buttocks and the shadow of the enticing crease between. When she displayed the maps on the wide counter, she leaned forward so that her full cream-colored breasts swelled softly up to the top of her flowered dress. She had no desire for the scrawny young American geologist, but she nevertheless got a lascivious kick out of letting him see as much of her healthy young body as she could in public. The very act of what she did caused her nipples to rise and to press out in little points under the silk cloth.
Jack was thrown off guard, carelessly explaining when she asked that he was not the representative of one of the big mining companies, but that he intended to prospect for himself. Her eyes lit up when he unconsciously tried to impress her by telling her that he was a geologist, telling her who he had worked for in the States which also gave her a lead as to how much knowledge he would have about the world's gold-bearing areas and how he had saved every cent for this one gamble. He did not see the light in her eyes, nor did he notice how she forced an innocent expression when she asked him where he hoped to find his once-in-a-lifetime gold field.
The question ended his lecherous daydreaming, and he suddenly realized he was intently studying one portion of the map, although, because of the scale of the map, his focal point could have been anywhere within an area of several hundred square miles.
Merle had already learned a lot about the young man; he was an expert; he was moderately rich, and he intended to prospect somewhere in the Kukukuku tribe country. She pronounced it "Cook-u-cook-u" when she asked him casually if he had heard of the tribe.
"Why, no. Can't say I have. Any reason why I should. Miss...er...." Christ, he must find out her name, he thought.. . she'd go well with a bank account filled to overflowing.
"Merle," she said with a cute smile into his eyes. "Merle Tanner. About the Kukukuku, well, it's just that they're rather famous in these parts, at least up in the mountains where they live. About the wildest natives in Papua-New
Guinea."
She could see that he had not done his homework on the indigenous people of the island.
"Well," she added. "You know my name. What's yours?"
The way she asked made his heart skip a beat; it was as if she was inviting him to ask her out. He wondered how a beautiful young girl could possibly be available in a town like Port Moresby where there seemed to be more men than women. And wasn't there something about tropical heat making the girls keener for sex? Jack was just conceited enough to believe that she was attracted to him and with the way Jenny had flattered him after that wild fuck at home, his ego was somewhat over-stimulated. Women were able to discern sex appeal in men, he decided, and sex appeal was not confined to the tall dark and handsome; it was also shared among the short, thin, dark and handsome like himself. He felt encouraged enough to try to date her.
"I understand how you must feel," she said sympathetically, "a stranger in a very strange town. I usually dine every night with my parents, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind if I told them that a fellow countryman was lonesome and that he was a real gentleman." She could see that he believed her Christ, the silly sop might even be thinking that she was a virgin!
Fumbling nervously, he paid for two lithographed maps to take away and pore over in his hotel bedroom.
* * *
The restaurant was set on a promontory overlooking the wide bay from where a cool breeze wafted over the diners seated on the terrace. Normally Jack would have resented parting with any of his hoarded savings simply to have a meal, but this night was different. He was falling in love for the first time, a state of mind that allowed him to spend recklessly on French champagne costing ten times as much in Port Moresby as it did in New York. Unlike Jenny, the ash blonde Merle was interested in gold and the work that went into discovering and working the precious metal. He was amazed that she actually became more interested in the subject the more he talked about, and although he could tell from her innocent questions that she knew next to nothing about it, she was obviously quite keen to learn. Curious, he asked her if she hadn't talked about gold to other men. Her reply made him feel on top of the world....
"I...I've never met a man like you before, Jack," she whispered huskily across the table. "I guess I'm interested in anything you do." The beautiful young blonde lowered her eyes bashfully and changed the subject. "Don't you adore the scent of frangipani? They grow wild in New Guinea, but I don't think I've really been aware of how romantically wonderful, how kind of sensuous their scent is...until tonight."
"Yeah. They sure do have a lovely scent," the young man agreed, feeling his cock restlessly stirring in his pants. He was slightly drunk, he knew, and judging by the three bottles of champagne they had drained, she must be too. Drunk or not, no girl would have said these words unless she meant them, he reasoned. There was no doubt about it. The gorgeous creature sitting bare legged at the table with him the luckiest guy in New Guinea was falling for him. No goddamn doubt about it. And he wouldn't have to play games for a ball-aching week or two before he could take her; she was ready for him now. He was so sure of that he took one of the frangipani flowers from the shallow bowl and pushed it down between her breasts, and he kept his hand there for long seconds, fingering her hard little nipples, before she slowly lifted his hand out, saying, "Not here, Jack...people might see you."
There was only one meaning to that statement "not here," but somewhere else. He gambled only a little that he wouldn't frighten her off when he suggested that, instead of having coffee there, they should go to his hotel and have coffee and cognac in his room. She agreed, saying that the breeze from the bay was a little chilly, that perhaps she should just this once break her rule never to be alone with a man in his hotel bedroom.
All the way in the taxi the blonde expected Jack to kiss her, but instead, he talked half-drunkenly about the "sure thing" he was gambling on. The champagne had worked on Merle, too, inducing a lush feeling in her loins; she was naked under a heavy silk dress, her skin sensuously alive to the expectancy of having a man's body pressed over hers, her full round breasts firming, her nipples stiffly jutting. She let him see that her defenses were down, that she was his for the taking, so as to encourage him, and when they went to his bedroom, she acted as if she couldn't help herself.
"You're irresistible, Jack! I can't keep myself from wanting you.. . it must be the champagne...I...I've never felt like this with anyone in my life before." The blonde talked in a softly husky voice, letting him lift the dress over her head. He hadn't bothered to order cognac and coffee or even to ask if it could be sent up to his room in that second-rate hotel.
To Jack, Merle was a vision of sheer beauty, the kind of girl he always imagined he would have as a wife some day. Yet the suddenness of his conquest dulled his ardor; as much as he had fallen for the gorgeous young girl, and while the champagne had it seemed to him allowed her to bare her soul and body to him, the drink had also dulled his senses. Dropping her dress to the floor, he was more awe-struck than sexually aroused, gazing at her voluptuous nakedness. Her breasts were fully developed and perfectly uptilted; her rose-colored nipples, small and pointed, were invitingly lickable; her neck, breasts and narrow waist were in perfect harmony, the rhythm of her lyrical torso continuing down over slim boyish hips and along shapely legs that she crossed, one in front of the other like a model. As he stared at the sparse tuft of golden pubic curls over her pussy, she squeezed her legs together, grinding her buttocks while the lips of her vagina titillated her clitoris.
She seemed almost afraid to look down at his erected penis when he dropped his pants and kicked off his shoes. She placed her arms over his shoulders, drew his head close to hers and kissed him softly, virginally, on the mouth. Jack felt the heat of her naked belly as she slowly ground her quivering cuntal furrow in hard against his thick, rigid penis. Slipping his hands down her back, he felt over the smoothly rounded moons of her ass-cheeks large, soft, firm and inviting play there, too, he thought as he tauntingly rubbed his cock in the wet crevice up between her slightly spread legs.
Even while he felt all over the blonde's sensational body and eased her down on the bed, the geologist remembered the conversation in the taxi, how she had said that she would like to travel with him, to go along and encourage him and to suffer with him the same hardships and all possible disappointments. She could translate pidgin, and she could cook in the jungle, she said temptingly offering herself as a practical partner as well as someone who would make his nights marvelous under a mosquito net. Jack was on the verge of saying right then in the taxi that it would be great if she went with him, but the old caution returned, and he said that the going would be too rough for her, maybe even too much for himself. Over dinner, he remembered, she had told him about how she knew where to hire transport native carriers, trucks or aircraft. Altogether, he decided, he had found a lot more than just a prospective bride, he was also getting valuable information and advice.
"Do it, Jack darling. I don't care what you do to me. I feel like really letting my hair down...gosh, I'm wild about you!" she said mewlingly, at the same time pushing his shoulders away from her and down, so that he naturally bent down over her body, kissing and tonguing at her breasts and nipples, down over her belly, into her navel, until her eagerly raised pussy mound was under his mouth, her soft thighs parted, ready to receive his tongue in her wetly inflamed cunt.
To Jack, Merle was an innocent young girl, and the way she maneuvered him down between her legs, she could only have been a normal, nice girl being carried away by a sudden lustful urge beyond her control. Egotistically, the short, thin man reasoned that it was more his sex appeal than the bubbly wine that made the girl want him to lick her pussy on their first date.
Merle sucked in her breath with a sharp gasp when she felt the American's thumbs pressing apart the soft hair-covered lips of her moistened vagina and when she experienced the hotness of his breath against her pussy-passage. She loved the way he brought her to a higher state of arousal as his tongue flicked forward, its tip teasingly caressing the heated bud of her clitoris, bringing it to an even greater throbbing hardness. His fingers spread the opening of her uncontrollably quivering cunt wider apart, and she moaned in lewd delight as his tongue dropped lower to thrust deep up into her wetly clasping cuntal passage.
"Oooooohhh...Jack! Wh...what are you doing?" she moaned, as if in surprise.
"You said I could do anything I wanted...remember?" he grunted.
"Yes, my darling, irresistible man...anything, anything! It's so wonderful. I've never done this before...." Merle groaned, grinding her pussy hungrily up into his face as he was licking her most sensitive flesh.
Jack resisted an impulse to turn his body around in an invitation to the passionate girl to suck his cock while he was orally fucking her. Some girls, he knew, were averse to going down on a man, and the shock might bring the beautiful blonde out of her alcoholically induced abandon, if she was one of those who thought the act obscene. So, rather than risk offending what he assumed to be an inexperienced young girl, he satisfied the growing need in his throbbing penis by sliding it into the moist hole where his tongue had prepared the way.
Merle was momentarily frustrated, wanting so frantically to have him continue his wildly exciting licking a while longer before he actually entered her. She recovered herself by kissing him furiously and tonguing back at the young man who was just a fraction too short for comfort. Every movement she made indicated to Jack that she was considering him first, that her body was for his pleasure, that whatever he did to her was the most exciting thing that ever happened to her in bed or anywhere. No sooner had he thrown his naked body over hers and pushed the blood-swollen head of his pulsating cock between her open vaginal lips than the writhing blonde gasped out that she was having the most wonderful sensation throughout her entire body.
"Are you cumming, Merle, baby?" the young geologist asked, amazed that he could bring her on so quickly.
"What's that? What's 'cumming'? " she asked, in a voice loaded with naivety.
"Having an orgasm you must know that?" he responded, smiling benignly down into her large blue eyes as if at a child.
"It's never happened before," she murmured, closing her eyes and moaning as he pistoned his long thick cock in and out of her eagerly clasping cunt.
Thinking he had interrupted her orgasm, Jack fucked his hardened penis faster into her wetly clasping pussy, although he felt none of the rising satisfaction he had felt with Jenny, and he was ffcwarded as the blonde gratifyingly began to moan into his mouth.
"I'm orgasming.. . I'm cu-cumming, Jack!
You wonderful lover.. .Oh Jack! I'm CUMMING! Ohhhh...Aaaaahhh...." Merle rolled her head from side to side, tearing her mouth from his, and he believed he had sent her sky high with his fantastic lovemaking. Then she lay placidly slack, her arms dropping from around his back to limply cover her face with her hands.
"Did you...er...cum, too, darling?" she asked innocently.
Deciding that, for some reason probably too much champagne he simply couldn't make it with her then, he nonetheless said yes, and he told her that it was the most wonderful feeling he had ever experienced.
"Me, too, darling," she moaned, grimacing slightly as he withdrew his still hard cock, wet from her cuntal juices, telling him hesitantly that the size of his penis had made her sore, and she hoped that he wouldn't want to stick it up into her cunt again.
Jack was completely unsatisfied; he wanted to play over her naked young body with his hands, to bring her on again, and perhaps this time it would be better. She was breathtakingly beautiful in her nakedness, a graceful, sensuous creature whom he knew he could ravishingly enjoy, eventually. He was prepared to spend all night enjoying her, but he was helpless when she got off the bed to slip on her dress. He asked her why she wore no underclothes, no bra or panties, and she replied that she just couldn't bear to wear anything tight against her skin, it was so sensitive.
On an impulse and the thought stirred by the sight of the blonde's beautiful body being slowly covered as she slipped into her silk dress, Jack announced that he had thought it all out. He wanted her to accompany him on the prospecting of a valley in the highlands.
"Will you come with me, Merle, baby?" he asked, suddenly excited at the thought of having her body and her lovely face in bed with him every night. Apart from the practical benefits of having a cook and interpreter along, he could think of no reason why she shouldn't go along with him. After all, she was his girl now, and it would be tempting fate to leave a glamorous girl bursting with sex appeal in a town as girl-scarce as Port Moresby. "It's going to be rough, Merle, and there may not be any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You'll be gambling too, though you can probably get your job back if I'm mistaken, and all the leads prove wrong. What do you say? Will you take a gamble with me?"
"Oh, Jack! I was hoping you'd change your mind and ask me," Merle exclaimed, squeezing his naked body against her and kissing him lightly on the mouth. "I'm sure we'll find gold. I'll bring you luck, you'll see. Gee, I'm so happy. First thing in the morning, I'll help you find all the things we'll need. Oh darling, what a wonderful life we'll have together!"
CHAPTER THREE
The black hairs curling above Pete Damn's cock-shaft stub glistened with a mixture of sweat and saliva as Merle's moistly ovaled lips slid up and down his vein-ridged member; and as she expertly sucked with long drawn-out movements of her ash-blonde head, the naked girl fingered her pussy while Pete, gripping her seductively rounded buttocks, kept his middle finger jammed all the way up inside her anus. This was one of her favorite positions, he knew one of the kinky variations she liked to enjoy when she felt in need of a prolonged round of fucking in different ways. He guessed it was because she'd had such a frustrating evening with the geologist she had been telling him about.
Pete Darran was one of numerous Americans who had gone to the South Pacific in search of adventure and fortune, and he was doing as well as the average, running a one-man helicopter service for prospectors, the Government, or anyone who was prepared to pay him a hundred dollars an hour for his chopper. Typically, he maintained a permanent lookout for a big chance to clean up and, while leasing land from the natives to sell the timber off to Japanese businessmen was always a paying proposition, Pete concentrated his efforts to ally himself to mineral prospectors. He had long ago decided that the gold had practically run out, that the whole island had been tested, for there were very rare strikes of new fields and they weren't very productive. Then tonight, after he had gone to bed, the fuck-happy blonde Merle came knocking on his door and burst into his room half-drunk on champagne and the rest of the way drunk with excitement at having found a lodestar.
The helicopter pilot tried to get her story straight but she was stripping off her dress and flinging open the flap of the mosquito net before he was fully awake. Then down she went on his limp sleepy member, taking it loosely into her soft warm mouth, playing around the head of it with her tongue, around and around in her mouth until he felt tight muscle-flexing from his sperm-laden balls to his anus, engendering a hardness into his cock. There was no other girl in Port Moresby, he knew from buying cunt and having it given to him free, who could suck a man off like Merle, the pretty kid from the Department of Mines. It was common knowledge that Merle was no ordinary gold-digger, that her gold hang-up was for real, a prospector who did her prospecting in town in bars and under the sweating bodies of miners and investors down from the highlands. She was a nice kid, whose father was always drunk, and who now worked for the company that bought out his hardware store. Pete knew she was at the same time as whorish as any fulltime hooker. She was getting lazy, scraping her teeth over his cock....
"Cut it out, you crazy bitch!" he yelled. "Don't you know you're biting my cock!" He grabbed a fistful of her long ash-blonde hair and jerked her head away, making her wince with pain.
"I...I'm sorry Pete, truly I am. I...."
"Just lick for awhile, whore. Lick up from my balls," the pilot crudely growled at the young girl, roughly pushing her head back down to his loins. That was another of Merle's kinks: she liked to be called a whore, a reaction to her strict convent upbringing and her puritanical mother.
Between long tantalizing tonguings up the length of Pete's throbbing shaft to linger suckingly at his glans, Merle told him more about Jack Shepherd.
"He's on to something good, Pete...I can arrange it...take .him up to the mountains...trouble is...it's either in or...on the edge of...Kukukuku country...don't know exactly where...he's a real sucker...." The lusty blonde had one hand supporting herself on the bed as she knelt over the naked pilot and continued to finger herself with her other hand. Pete lewdly forced her hand from the bed to work under his buttocks, to finger into his excitedly puckering anus while he worked his finger into hers.
"Are you sure he's just not some kind of nut?" he queried. "This town's full of them, all of them bloody sure they are on to something big."
"He's an expert...Pete...a geologist...he's putting up...his life's savings...a few thousand dollars maybe...." The lissome blonde stopped talking and started to suck his lust-stiffened cock again as she began moaning into orgasm, her ecstatic young cunt bouncing up and down in quick short jerks against her rubbing fingers while Pete's outstretched middle finger embedded in her rectum sent nerve-thrills back and forth between her anus and her wetly palpitating cunt.
The swarthily tanned pilot waited patiently for the young blonde to enjoy her orgasm, the sight of her fingering herself while going down on his glistening erection caused his penis to swell thicker and thicker. When her satisfied moaning subsided, he made her change position, to lie flat on her stomach while he mounted her from behind, kicking her shapely legs apart and, gripping her full sensuous breasts, he ground his pelvis down onto the soft upraised mound of her fleshy buttocks. Shoving the bulbous head of his hardened cock into her clasping vaginal passage he felt the convulsions of her inner muscles as her orgasm continued to wrack her body. He felt the movement at her clitoris where she continued to finger herself, her hand disappearing under her belly.
"Now you can speak a little clearer. You're starting to interest me, kid, but first of all," he said, grunting as he stabbed his long thick penis all the way up into her cunt, ramming hard, careless of whether she wanted it that way or not. She did: she whimpered with pleasure each time the brutal thrust ended with his balls slapping down on her working fingers.
"First of all tell me how in Jesus' name we're gonna find out exactly where he believes he'll strike it rich?"
"I haven't had time to tell you, Pete. I'm going with him! He's mad about me. Thinks I'm a lady! I tell you, Pete, he's a number-one sucker." Her orgasm went on and on, maintained by her fingers and stimulated by his plunging rod to such increasing satisfaction, Merle found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. "Fuck me harder, darling...oh, Pete, fuck me harder. I think he wants to marry me when we find the gold. Ooooohhhhhh...that's wonderful...more, Pete, harder, more...Aaaaaahhhhhhh! I'm cumming still.. . I'm cumming again.. . Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!"
Pete pushed up from her nakedly writhing body, unsticking his sweating, black-haired chest from the girl's back and gripping her narrow waist, he fucked maniacally while his throbbing hardness was clenched and unclenched by the moaning girl's quivering cuntal passage.
Merle, in an enthralled ecstasy of subsided cumming, couldn't resist an urge to have his hotly throbbing cock again in her mouth. He was close to climaxing; she knew it.
"Let me turn over, Pete. I want it in my mouth," she mewled lewdly.
"For Christ's sake!" he groaned impatiently. "Then hurry up and turn around." He withdrew his thick, pulsating rod of flesh while she slipped over on her back, and he crawled forward, straddling her naked body, sliding his penis up along her belly and between her sweat-streaked breasts, which she pressed tightly together over her wet shaft. While he fucked into the softness of her mounds she dropped her chin down to suck at the dribbling cock-head, moist with the musky juices of her own cunt.
She had sucked for a few moments before he cried out, "Suck it! Suck it! I'm cumming, you raunchy little whore! Suck it in your mouth."
She needed no urging. The hungrily sucking girl moaned aloud, delirious with the passion of her insatiable lust, and she gulped the jerking spurts of his white-hot semen back into her throat as she bobbed her head up and down and pressed her breasts tightly around the swollen blood-filled shaft. Her mouth bulged with the pressure of his squirting passion, unable to swallow quickly enough, with his wildly jerking penis jammed into her throat. White streams of his cum slipped out of the corners of her mouth, and the underside of her breasts was reddened from the rough scraping of his hairy balls. She held his loins close to her face as the spasm of his cumming died down, slipping her fingers around to his buttocks to finger once again into his anus. When she opened her eyes she looked up at his black bush of pubic hairs and the long sweaty streak of hairs up his flat belly. Continuing to finger lingeringly on her hypersensitive clitoris, the blonde idly wondered how it would be if she could suck one hard cock while another fucked into her pussy. Perhaps, she thought, she could take both Pete and the geologist, once they were up in the New Guinea highlands together; that is, if Jack were to stay around long enough....
After her cuntal juices and his semen were sucked off and swallowed hotly down into her belly, she reluctantly released her rounded lips from Pete's cock.
"Didn't feel my teeth that time, did you Pete?" she asked smugly.
"And I better not feel them next time, you little bitch, or I'll knock 'em down your throat," the swarthy pilot growled, sitting up to open a can of beer.
"Say, kid," Pete exclaimed, taking a swig of beer and lighting a cigarette, "why do we have to take the sucker anywhere? He's got a map. Let's take it away from him he's sure to have it marked to work out how he'll get there."
"He wouldn't let me see the exact location," Merle replied, leaning her naked body against his and lightly caressing his balls and penis.
Pete drained the can of beer, frowning as he thought hard. Gotta keep an eye on that geologist, and I don't trust Miss Golddigger.
"Say, kid. I got it. Remember those two Australian renegades who skipped bail in Rabaul? You must have read about 'em in the newspaper. Ben and Taffy, their names were. Killed some native kid a boy, up in the mountains somewhere and they're broke." Pete looked at the girl to see if she was catching on to what he was insinuating.
Merle caught on. "Simple, just simple, darling. I know the two you mean. I've met them both with you in a bar, remember? Why don't you ask them to get the maps the geologist took two from the Department, so he's sure to have one of them marked."
Cunning bitch! She wants me to make the deal with those two louts. The pilot slowly shook his head.
"No, Merle. I gotta stay out of that side of the business, just in case they talked and the geologist wants a chopper. You contact them tomorrow, okay? I'll find out where they're living and tell you, so get on to them bright and early. Or do you have a conscience about what they might do to your prospective husband?" he sneered.
"I'll do it, Pete. I'll ask them, but first of all send fifty dollars to them with a note to say they'll get another fifty dollars when they deliver the maps." Merle had lost interest in Pete's cock when it failed to rise to her caresses, and she lay back on the bed, one hand flitting over her erect pink nipples, the other moving down between her legs.
"Right. We're on! Only you put up the first fifty, and I'll pay the second. This, baby, is a fifty-fifty deal all the way through. Right?" Pete lay back beside the girl, smoking and looking up into the top of the mosquito net as he began to visualize the next operation flying into a pin-pointed gold-find that someone else had used brains, time and money to discover for him, and staking out his claim, all of it in his own name.
"Right," the girl echoed, rolling over on her side to sleep. "Cuddle my back, Pete, and shove your cock between my ass...I sleep better that way...."
* * *
Down by the waterfront in the slide area of Port Moresby, Taffy and Ben, long-haired, bearded and dressed in dirty shorts, sat in the bedroom of a sleazy hotel drinking rum and Coke. For a week they had been celebrating their skipping bail on a charge of shooting down a fourteen year old boy in cold blood a boy from the Kukukuku tribe. With pressures from the highland natives to become independent from the rest of New Guinea, and with pressure from the new politicians of the Papua-New Guinea government to have more say in affairs of administration, they knew they had little chance of avoiding a long sentence in a prison shared by native criminals. They skipped to Port Moresby, and now they were desperate to find a way out, and even more desperate to satisfy their immediate needs for money. They were getting ready to punch up a drunk for some money when a delivery boy brought an envelope containing fifty dollars and a note offering them another fifty if they carried out a "small job". The note was unsigned. Taffy had suggested they should piss off with the fifty, but Ben told him to keep his cool until the call came that would give them an idea of what risks they would have to take to earn the rest of the money.
"If it's to meet a boat along the coast and bring in some smuggled dope, why not be in it?" suggested Ben.
"Take the bloody lot, ya mean? Shoot through with the dough and the goods?" Taffy showed his broken teeth, grinning at the idea, bolstering his bravado with more rum.
"Why not? No one could come at us if we did he'd only be asking for trouble, wouldn't he?" explained Ben, taking a swig at his drink. "No probs, Taffy. Wait and see what happens next."
They were almost never completely sober, these two "larrikins", as the magistrate referred to them reluctant to give bail although they had never actually been caught in a criminal act before because they were well known as con-men. As a type they were obvious, a remarkable feature being the veiled eyes changed expression whether their faces were confidently smiling or grimly twisted in anger. Viciously anti-social, the two renegades believed in taking any shortcut to satisfy their greed for money or women; if their conning failed to work, they were quick to use violence. They reveled in fighting and fucking, and would almost rather fight than fuck. This was one of their boasts when they drank in low dives around the islands, often proving their point by picking a fight with some man alone with his girl or wife, beating him up and raping his woman.
It was a similar situation that occurred in Rabaul, capital of the island of New Britain, As part of the policy of educating New Guinea natives in the ways of other tribes, young men are invited to work out of their own area the reason why the Kukukuku boy was there with his family. Late one night when Ben and Taffy were staggering home, drunk and quarrelsome, they pushed their way into a grass hut looking for something to eat. They found a young girl asleep, tried to rape her and, when her young brother tried to stop the whites from assaulting her, they hit him with an iron pot, killing him.
For awhile, the renegades escaped detection but they were caught after an intense investigation by top police officials brought in because of serious repercussions the killing inspired among the Kukukuku in New Guinea. Following age-old tradition, the boy's tribe exacted revenge killing called "payback" in pidgin and speared to death a native from New Britain. The authorities were worried that something bigger than a tribal war could result, and the tracing of the crime to Ben and Taffy pacified both sides.
But then they had been released on bail.. .
The two Australians were bored as hell, holed up in their rough hotel, waiting for an opportunity to slip out of the country on a fishing boat, and eager for a chance to make some quick money. They had leaked the word out to the criminal element in the town that they were ready and willing for anything as long as the job paid well and was away from where they could be identified by the police.
The Chinese proprietor of the establishment banged on their door and yelled, "Telephone call," meaning either or both of them.
"I'll take it," Ben said, lifting his glass at his friend and winking. "Probably me dear old uncle."
Unexpectedly, the voice at the other end was that of a girl, asking who she was speaking to. Ben told her, never mind who he was she could be a police agent.
"Did you receive fifty dollars this morning?" Merle asked.
"What if I did? You can have me for nothing, sweetheart," he replied, horny for a bit of cunt.
"Shut up and listen," the girl said, her voice hardening. "This is the deal: we want a couple of maps a certain Mister Shepherd has in his hotel bedroom. We don't care how you get them, but get them, and you get the other fifty. Are you interested?"
"Sounds all right. Is this Shepherd a local? Is he well known hereabouts? And is he important?" Ben was collecting his rum-soaked wits together. Not a smuggling job. Not a revenge job like smashing a shop or beating up someone. Nothing ordinary just filching a couple of maps.
"He's no one, a nobody, an American new in town, and dumb. And he's staying at Simpson's pub you know, the noisiest pub in town." Merle could hear the renegade's heavy breathing as his alcoholic lungs labored for oxygen. He sounded revolting, she thought. But his reputation was such that he was just the man they needed.
"What's your name, sweetheart? Gotta know who I'm workin' for, don't I?" Ben knew she wouldn't be telling him that, but he was very surprised when she told him, "You'll be working for me. Deliver the maps to Pete Darran's place after the job, okay? And keep your mouth shut around Pete. He's just a friend." The blonde was covering for herself, knowing that if anything went wrong the map thieves might possibly recognize her voice, or Jack might even add two and two and name her. There weren't many girls in Port Moresby who spoke with an American accent.
"Okay," agreed Ben. "I know who Pete Darran is and where he lives. And I know how to get into Simpson's the back way. When?"
"Tonight, late. He's in room 8. It's a deal then?"
"Yeah, it's a deal. And what about you and me, sweetheart? Tomorrow night, down by the fishing wharf.. . " The phone clicked dead in Ben's ear.
Upstairs, Taffy asked him about the deal. "A bloody Yank Sheila. Sounded as if she might be a good root. Tried to talk me into giving her one up the ass...." Ben announced leeringly all the while thinking maybe he should do the job alone, collect the fifty and desert his mate.
"Cut the bullshit, ya bastard. It must have been about the job," Taffy said, pretty sure of what his friend was thinking.
"Only jokin', mate. Yeah, you're right," Ben said, pouring himself a drink. "Piece 'o cake. All we gotta do is go to Simpson's and pick up a couple of maps."
"Is that all? For a hundred dollars, we're messenger boys?" Taffy laughed disbelievingly.
"There's a joker there too, and I don't think the bastard would want us to take the maps, by the sound of things. So we gotta earn the dough and take the maps whether he likes it or not. Somethin' odd about it," Ben added, gazing slyly at Taffy.
"What's that?" quizzed Taffy.
"Well, the guy's a Yank and so is the Sheila who made the call. And so is the guy we deliver the maps to the chopper pilot, Pete Darran. I wonder why she gave me his name?" mused Ben, frowning.
Taffy stared into his glass for awhile, then with a smirk on his face offered his explanation. "The bird sounds like a twister, Ben. She knows fuckin' well that we'd have somethin' on her if we identified her and could take her for more than another fifty."
"Yeah," agreed Ben. "She's a real shit, if you ask me. But don't forget, mate, she knows who we are and that we're in Port Moresby. One word to the cops and every white and black in the Territory would be on the lookout for us. I think we'd better concentrate on one job."
"You're not wrong, sport," his friend agreed.
It was late, two hours after midnight, when the renegades pushed open the back door of Simpson's pub and tiptoed barefoot in through the deserted kitchen. Up front the joint was jumping with late night drinkers, jukebox music and drunken chatter. The pub was built on one floor at ground level, a rambling timbered structure with two diagonal hallways dimly lighted, the numbers painted in large numerals on the old varnished doors.
Listening outside number 8, Ben and Taffy couldn't hear a sound because of the noises coming from the rooms on either side: in one a man and a woman were yelling drunkenly at each other; in the other a party, equally drunken, was in progress. Merle had chosen Saturday night as the ideal time, since Saturday night was the booziest night of the week in Port Moresby.
The door of number 8 was unlocked.
They entered quietly, Ben carrying a flashlight, hoping the entry could be made quickly, without fuss. The danger was that if anyone saw them, their descriptions would alert the gendarmes that the hunted criminals were in this area.
Jack Shepherd had gone to bed early, his new girlfriend saying when he called her that her mother was ill and much as she wanted to see him she couldn't leave her mother's side. Jack was disappointed but admired the girl for her filial devotion. It was what he expected of such a well brought up kid, and he decided to catch up on his sleep. He slept until the party next door started, and then lay staring into the night, cursing them and the couple bickering in the other adjoining room. He was awake but it wasn't until he saw Ben's flashlight that he realized he wasn't alone in his room.
"Hey. You've got the wrong room," he called out angrily.
"Yeah?" replied Ben, turning the light on the man in the bed. "Isn't this number 8?" He flicked the light around the room searching for the maps. They were on a table under the window.
Holding the beam on the table he muttered, "Get 'em, Taffy!" And then he turned the light full into the American's eyes.
Jack sat watching the brazen performance with amazement, taking a few seconds for it to register that the approach by the intruder holding the flashlight was meant to confuse him long enough for his accomplice to snatch his maps. Leaping out of bed, he knocked the flashlight out of the intruder's hands, hearing it clatter to the floor as it went out, and flung himself at the man taking his maps. He managed to get his hands on both maps, but almost immediately he got a bare foot in his stomach, causing him to fling his arms up in the air, scattering the maps.
"I'm being robbed!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Help...hel.. . " A fist drove hard into his face, crunching against his nose and loosening his upper teeth. "...Aaggghhh...." His yell faded out into a grunt of pain as a knee came savagely up into his groin.
A passing drunk in the hallway pushed open the door. "Where's the party?" he asked, turning on the bedroom light to see two unshaven, long-haired men in shorts punching into a face-bloodied man in undershorts.
"Fuck off, if you don't want some of the same," Taffy yelled at the drunk, while Ben, taking advantage of the light, grabbed a map from the floor. Turning off the light while the drunk staggered against the door, Taffy heard a voice next door calling out that someone was being beaten up.
"Let's vamoose, quick. This fuckin' drunk's drawin' the crabs, the rotten bastard," Taffy growled. He heard Ben thump his fist hard into the American's face, flattening him to the floor, and in a gesture of spiteful anger, he sank his own fist into the drunk's belly.
As they ran from the room they left the drunk vomiting over the prostrate form of the battered geologist. Bedroom doors were opening and people were yelling in confusion, trying to sort out exactly where the fight was taking place, unaware of the robbery, and hoping to see what they imagined were a couple of drunks brawling. A stout, inquisitive woman pushed her way into the geologist's bedroom, saw his blood-spattered face, and screamed. No one heard the back door of the pub shut as the two men ran off into the lane at the rear, sheltered by the black tropical night.
"Did you get them?" Taffy asked, slowing to a fast walk down a side street lined with bungalows set well back in large, palm edged gardens, silent and black.
"Only one, ya mug bastard. Why did ya have to turn off the fuckin' light?" Ben snarled.
"Don't call me a mug or I'll drop ya, ya bastard," Taffy replied, offended that his buddy was trying to blame him for his own stupidity. "What else could I do ask everyone in to see what we was doin'? " he whined. "Anyhow, we got one map. That should keep Pete the pilot happy."
"We'll see when we get there. He'll pay up, or else...."
"Yeah," agreed Taffy, "or else he'll get it shoved up his ass-hole."
* * *
Pete Darran expected to see Merle when he opened the door of his apartment in answer to long persistent knocking, and he stared in amazement at the two unwashed renegades, one of them grinning behind his beard as he held up a large survey map, saying, "Well, cobber, we got it!"
"I don't know what you're talking about.. . who the hell are you?" the pilot asked, wondering how in hell they knew who wanted the maps.
"Don't come the raw prawn, cobber old sport," Ben said, smiling. "Your Yankee girlfriend told us to bring it to you, din't she, Taffy?"
"That's right, Ben. Told us to deliver what we found straight to you for a fifty-dollar tip -that is, if you're still Pete Darran." Taffy said, pushing his way past the pilot into the room. "Better talk inside, hey?"
Pete let them both in and shut the door.
"She said what?" he asked, staring at the single map.
"You heard, sport. Don't worry about us. We won't tell a soul." Ben dropped the map on a table and looked around for a drink.
"That bitch!" The dazed pilot cursed. "That bloody conning slut!"
"Aw, I wouldn't know about that. Mind if I help meself?" Ben was already pouring himself a large whiskey.
"There should have been two maps. That was the deal, so where's the other one?" Pete was accepting his position; it was all he could do.
"What other one? We could only find one, couldn't we, Taffy? I mean, we couldn't stay there all night casing the joint with all those people about."
Ben explained that the pub was alive with drunks, in adjoining rooms, in the bar, in the hallways. He had to clobber the American, he said, the bastard being awake. Pete spread the map open on the table, looking for marked locations. There was no mark anywhere. He stood up from his crouching scrutiny, walked casually over to a desk and turned around with an automatic pistol in his hand.
Ben raised his hands in a play of outraged innocence. "Take me money and leave me jew-ells," he said, and Taffy sat laughing in a chair.
"You've bungled the job. This is the wrong map. And now get out, both of you, or I'll call the cops." The pilot saw that the renegades had no intention of moving.
Ben, the usual spokesman for the two, suggested that if the pilot and his girlfriend didn't want to be involved in the robbery and what happened to the American geologist, he should start thinking about paying the money over and put his toy away. "You'll only get one of us, if you're lucky," he pointed out, "and even a wounded man can fight for awhile. Besides, we can be of help, cobber."
The situation soon became obvious to the pilot. He might kill them both, claiming they were intruders, robbers, who had already robbed that night and who were wanted by the police. But then again, he could use them. As marked men they could work for him in the highlands, perhaps keep an eye on the geologist and the bitch, for he realized that now he would have to go along with Jack and Merle into the mountains, to let them lead him to the find. If it existed. If it didn't, he could leave them all up there to rot.
"There might be something you could do, if you're interested...."
"About the money...." Ben interjected.
'The money will be okay, but seeing how you fucked up the job tonight you don't get a cent until you start the other job, and if you don't fuck that up you'll get two hundred. What's more I'll fly you anywhere within range of the chopper West Irian, over to the north coast, anywhere. If you're interested." The flight out, Pete knew, would be the clincher.
"Bloody beaut!" Taffy yelled, jumping up from his chair to shake the pilot's hand. Pete ignored the hand, and he carefully locked the pistol away in the desk drawer.
"No deal," Ben said, drinking straight out of the whiskey bottle.
Taffy stared in disbelief at his renegade friend, but Pete had expected some bargaining, in fact he hoped there would be, it made the proposition seem more on the level. They drank and argued for an hour before the deal was finally closed. The renegades were to get four hundred dollars and a flight to a safer place than Port Moresby. Meanwhile, they were to stay holed up in their hotel until he sent for them to meet him at a helicopter pad outside of town. They protested that they owed their "publican" more than the fifty they had already received, and Pete gave them twenty dollars and they went staggering drunk out into the night. He realized he was already entangled with the criminals because of Merle's scheming or stupidity. Now everything depended on the blonde persuading the geologist to hire his chopper, otherwise Ben and Taffy could cause him a mighty lot of trouble. He might even be thrown out of the Territory simply for associating with thugs like those two.
"That bloody conning slut," he muttered to himself as he crawled back into bed.
CHAPTER FOUR
The helicopter lifted off on the first of two flights it was to make that day to Wamba Creek, high up in the mountainous watershed. The geologist sat beside the pilot, confident that he had chosen a suitable area to be dropped so that the pilot would not be able to pinpoint the real area of his objective. Instead of trudging for weeks through jungle and paying native bearers to carry his camping and prospecting gear, Jack was satisfied to pay three hundred dollars for the hire of a chopper that would make the journey in only a couple of hours. The price, Merle assured him, was cheaper than a cross-country hike and cheaper than any other helicopter service.
The blonde, dressed in long slacks and long-sleeved shirt to protect her against the insects, sat behind Jack and Pete, among the large pile of gear. Whenever she spoke to Pete she called him Mister Darran. When she had introduced the geologist, Merle had bargained with the pilot to reduce his price for a fellow countryman and he eventually came down fifty dollars, "as a special favor". The geologist suspected nothing and fell for the act, pleased to get away from Port Moresby as quickly as possible. The bashing he had received in the pub undermined his confidence in doing the job alone. He was grateful for the fact that not only did he have Merle to accompany him to Wamba village, where he planned to establish his main camp, but also because he was being flown in by a man who knew the chief of the small Wamba tribe personally.
Of the trio being lifted high up into the jungle-clad mountains where misty clouds hung in the highest valleys, the only one not exactly pleased was the pilot. After five days, the geologist was still sore all over, his nose suffering a suspected fractured so the doctor at the hospital informed him and his balls ached from a kick from one of the robbers, but he was leaving his worries behind, whereas Pete was not at all sure about Merle.
On the morning after the robbery Merle had called Pete to find out how they should pay the renegades and collect the maps, heatedly denying that she had told the men that they would be working for the pilot or that he had anything to do with the scheme. It had slipped out, she had said, because she was frightened, and they confused her. She said maybe Pete should call it all off, get out of the mess before it got too big to handle. Eventually she had convinced him she thought that she was innocent of deliberately getting him involved. Then, when he told her that the renegades had stolen only one map, the wrong one, and that he was hiring them to keep an eye on the geologist while he prospected, she said that it had all turned out for the best.
Merle suspected that Ben and Taffy would be keeping an eye on her, too, reporting back to Pete, so she set about winning them over to her side.
Pete was sure of his two men, though, because, first of all, they would need him to fly them out; and, secondly, once they found they would be in a village not far from revengeful Kukukukus, they would want to make certain that the chopper was available to them in case of emergency.
With some confidence, Merle believed she could manipulate either man if one of them ended up with the gold strike, while secretly hoping that she would get it all to herself. Pete was still nigglingly suspicious despite some spectacular sex she had shown him during the few days when Jack was too sick to leave his hotel. She had helped nurse him and did all the purchasing of his gear, and she brought him fresh fruit from her "sick" mother. Jack had daydreamed of a wedding in Port Moresby with a reception at the "large country residence" of Merle's parents. Merle, in contrast, had no dream of marriage; instead she had quickly put a fleeting thought of the geologist's funeral from her mind, shuddering off a twinge of guilt.
She had agreed with Pete that it was a good plan to have the renegades camp out of the village somewhere while she and Jack established themselves. They had poured together over the map, when Jack had shown them where he wanted to be dropped, recommending the village of Wamba, and Jack agreed that it might be suitable as a base knowing it was connected by a stream to the site of his real objective. What he didn't realize was that it was also very close to the border of the Kukukukus, a point that worried both Pete and Merle. There was always the chance however that a Patrol Officer would be in that area or there would be a "police boy" posted in the village, one who could get Pete through to mark his claim. Merle had pointed out that she was taking all the risks, and she had paid out the fifty dollars, while all Pete risked was a tankful of kerosene for his jet-chopper and a mere twenty dollars for a prize that could be worth hundreds of thousands.
And now, below her, the green jungle passed, and she saw the village which was to be their home for the next few weeks...or at least until Jack showed her where the gold was located....
* * *
Every day the young geologist exercised his bruised body by taking long hikes along the river and its tributaries; and slowly his muscles began to harden. Before the week was up, when supplies of fresh food were to be brought in, he had learned all he wanted to know about the country below where he hoped to make the strike. A police boy had called once, but as he was on a patrol he was not permitted to take time off to help the prospectors find their way about. Thus Jack planned his own expedition deeper inland.
Merle, restless and unhappy with the humid heat, was irritated by the boredom, and she savagely nagged the geologist when he complained of being sore or tired from his work, too tired and sore to make love to her. The friendly villagers had taken at once to the young American geologist because he was obviously interested in their way of life. As the friendship grew, they even offered him and his "mary" a grass hut to sleep in, instead of their tent. And the natives helped Jack by describing the countryside beyond their tribal borders. They also passed along information, all of which went through Merle before reaching Jack.
Near the end of the first week, a native told Merle in pidgin that "twofella camp along bush belong Wamba", that these men had a hut where they sat and drank all day, and they had tried to buy a young girl but the chief had threatened to tell the police boy. Jack asked her to translate.
Knowing he probably had caught the words "police boy" in the fast-spoken pidgin, she truthfully said that a police boy would be patrolling through the area that day. In pidgin, she asked the village chief to keep a watch on the two white men who wore "pants belong boy" shorts and also asked him if he could make contact with the Kukukuku. The chief stared at her for awhile, his bloodshot eyes widening with fear as the translator mentioned the dreaded headhunters. Yes, he said, there was one man from the village who had traded with them and was allowed into their country. This information she kept to herself.
Jack made allowances for Merle's outbursts of temper, blaming the intense heat, the myriad insects that plagued them day and night, and the fact that they enjoyed no vestiges of civilization. He also blamed the heat for her lustful approaches when he returned from washing dirt all day, sympathetically pretending to sleep at night while she fingered herself to orgasm after orgasm. Soon, he knew, he would make it right between them, especially once he strengthened his body and his bruises were gone. Soon, she would get as much loving as she wanted....
* * *
Shortly after Pete had dropped Ben and Taffy up from the village, and dumped their load of rum and Coke beside them in the cleared patch of kunai grass, boredom set in with them also. Boredom, the isolation of the insect infested jungle and their need for a woman was beginning to drive them crazy. Natives from the village, who maintained vegetable gardens near where they had bought a hut for a few dollars, kept them informed of the movement of the geologist and the girl. They also heard how beautiful the white girl was, how tall and slim, with "white" hair and blue eyes.
"A blonde!" Taffy exclaimed, rubbing his hand down his cock. "Jeez. Ben, I know these boongs think all white women are bloody bonza, but ya never know, the Yank Sheila might be a good-looker and a raver."
"I think we better take a look, eh Taffy? You know what one of them black monkeys told me? She goes swimmin' in the big pool about half a mile downstream from the village. Naked. Stark bloody-ass naked. Asking for trouble with all these horny black bucks around the place. I think we oughta protect the little lady." Ben wanted a brown native girl bad, but part of the deal with Pete Darran was not to interfere with the natives, to await orders from him only, and to wear long pants and shirts to stay healthy. They had ignored the health advice and remained barefooted, shirtless and covered their loins with their ragged old shorts.
"Yeah, cobber," Taffy said. "The Yank pilot never said anythin' about not looking at or touchin' his bird. Or is she the Yank prospector's bird? Bein' a fishy sort o' deal, I don't think anyone's goin' to worry us too much if we just take a peep at her. She's a sort of business partner, ain't she? I mean, she shouldn't have anything to hide from us like her body, for example. She can look all over mine any time she likes. Up me date, too, if she wants." He rolled back on the bamboo floor of the hut, laughing drunkenly and spilling rum and Coke over his gingery beard.
The next day, having learned that the geologist was panning upstream, the renegades waited in the jungle near the big pool but the blonde didn't turn up. The following morning, however, she did, walking along a native path in her long khaki pants and shirt, large hiking boots on her feet. Directly opposite where the two white men hid, she quickly stripped off her clothes and dived into the pool.
Ben and Taffy blinked exaggeratedly at each other.
"Phew!" they chorused. "A bloody beauty!"
"Let's go swimmin', " Taffy whispered. Both their shorts bulged with their hardening cocks as they drooled over Merle's tanned naked body making silvery splashes through the pool.
"Christ! I can't bear it. I can't fuckin' well bear it!" groaned Ben. "Look at the bitch! Gettin' out of the water legs right up to her cunt, beautiful bloody long legs going right up to that blonde cunt. I.. . I'd give me left testicle to have that all to meself! And look at them tits! Holy Mother of Jesus! I'm goin' in...."
Taffy grabbed him.
"Wait, Ben...hold on. There! Over there on the other side behind that rock where a vine's growin' over the top. A bloody boong! Watchin' her, the dirty peepin' Tom bastard. Looks like Tomu, don't it? The boong who told us about her swimmin'...you know, the one what speaks pidgin."
Ben pulled up his dropped shorts to cover his huge throbbing penis jutting out from his unwashed body like a log of wood.
"I'll kill the rotten peepin' black bastard, so help me, I'll kill 'im!" Ben muttered angrily. "I'm fed up with this set-up. No women, not even a mary...."
"Me too," agreed Taffy, gripping his hard erection under his shorts.
They continued to watch the girl and the native until she climbed out onto the river bank, stood drying herself in the hot sun for a few minutes then tantalizingly bent her buttocks towards the two whites to step into her pants.
"Jeez!" Taffy whispered hoarsely. "Look at that date! And that patch of cunt hair showing beneath it!"
"Aahhh; Jeez!" drooled Ben.
They talked about the blonde all night and all the next day, working themselves up into a drunken state of lascivious desire, until in desperation they agreed to risk everything Pete's promise to get them away from New Guinea, the possibility of a Patrol Officer calling in and the trouble they might cause in the village. They wanted cunt. Merle's magnetically luscious cunt.
Fortified with rum they moved into the village late that night, going straight past shadowy huts to the one, on the outskirts of the village, which they knew the girl shared with the American geologist. Peeping through the reed-covered doorway they saw her under a mosquito net, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. She had the covers down and was naked, her ash blonde hair hanging down around her shoulders.
Taffy looked at Ben, who nodded, then led the way up the short ladder of the hut built on stilts, pushed aside the reeds and dived on the sleeping geologist, taking with him the mosquito net.
Jack thought he was being attacked by a horde of savages, raiders from another tribe who mistook them for native villagers. In a flash he saw that the lamp was still alight, then he was covered with the next and someone began beating him up. He tried to disentangle himself, to free his arms. A bare foot kicked him hard in his solar plexus, doubling him up with pain. At the same time Merle was yelling beside him and she wrestled with a man. She screamed out, "You double-crossing bastard, Taffy, you...." Her voice was muffled.
They must be white men, Jack realized. Natives weren't called "Taffy". He freed one arm, hitting blindly out in a wild upward swing that connected with the side of his attacher's face. The man yelped and fell back. Jack was wearing his shorts, a necessary precaution when Merle was in her angry moods and wanted to tear at his penis; now he wished he still wore his bush knife strapped to his belt. He struggled free of the net, ready for the charge Ben made across the hut. Jack went forward to meet him, the Australian stepped aside to deliver a rabbit-killer blow against the American's temple that knocked him, semi-conscious, to the bamboo floor.
Ben casually turned his back on his victim to look at the prize Taffy struggled with, his hand still clamped over her mouth.
"Let her scream," he advised his mate. "The natives tell me she screams every night. A real shrew, they say, only they call it wildcat."
Merle stopped struggling, looked at where Jack lay slumped on the floor, with startled eyes staring angrily at the two bearded, half-naked white men. Suddenly, she bit hard at the filthy hand over her mouth, bringing a yell of pain and a string of foul curses from Taffy.
"What about a fuck, what's-ya-name?" Ben said, smiling lewdly at the blonde. "You gotta share it around, you know. Cunt's scarce up here."
"I'll fix you two renegade bastards," Merle said coldly. "You'll hang for rape in New Guinea. If Pete doesn't shoot you both first." Ben moved toward her, grinning evilly, while Taffy examined his bleeding fingers. She screamed, and screamed again, before Ben slapped her a stinging blow across the face.
"Go on, scream again, bitch," he said, still smiling. "The boongs are used to it, but I ain't. Too loud. Too fuckin' loud. Do it again and I'll slap you every time. Get it? Every goddamn time you scream, I hit."
She screamed again and Taffy hit her across the face this time.
"My turn," said the ginger-haired renegade by way of explanation.
The terrified blonde stifled the next scream, letting it die away to a moan of helplessness. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jack crouching up slowly and when she saw he was ready to spring with his knife in his hand, she screamed once more to divert their attention from Jack to herself.
Ben was swinging his arm to give her an open-hander across her reddened face when Taffy dived across the space between them, grabbing for Jack's knife. He hit the geologist's arm, diverting the blow enough for his friend to receive only a long flesh wound on the side of his chest. It was the last thing Jack remembered for several minutes.
Ben left the geologist to Taffy. Either one of them could hold his own in a rough and tumble street fight with anyone, anywhere, and Ben didn't even bother to watch while he squatted behind the shaking, naked blonde, one arm around her neck, the other gripping her pubic hairs in his calloused fist. The top of his shorts had burst open in the struggles, and as he got his obscene grip on the girl, he let his shorts slip down so he could press his large rampant penis against her back.
Jack slammed into the wall of the hut, and Taffy bunched his fist and hit him between the eyes, following the blow with a knee in the groin, another knee in his face as the American doubled over, then a haymaker uppercut to the jaw with his left. Down and out, Jack never felt until later the pain of the Australian's kick in his kidneys.
"Watch him for a while, Taffy mate?" Ben asked, hoping he wouldn't have to fight his friend for first go at the blonde. They had fought over women before and afterwards been as friendly as ever. Ben watched him cautiously, smiling, his eyes narrowed. He thought to himself what a bastard Taffy was in a fight a real dirty fighter.
"Okay, mate. You're in first. Gotta get me breath back."
Merle was in a squatting position on the mattress on the floor, one leg tucked under the other which stuck out long and straight, as rigid as she held her body, her eyes popping with fear and burning with hatred. She knew Pete would kill these two men. Christ, even the dumb geologist had the guts to try! If nobody killed them she would try to do it herself somehow. She saw them as filthy, slimy rats of men who'd crawled out of sewers to parasitically gnaw at the riches honest men worked hard to get, forgetting her own role in the game.
Taffy sat down at the end of the mattress, watching the stricken American. As soon as Merle screamed, "NO!! ", he idly reached out his hand to hold her ankle, and as she jerked wildly in Ben's arms he caught her other ankle as her leg flayed out, pinning both feet down on the mattress. Then he eased them slowly apart, forcing her long shapely legs away from each other, and gradually the sleek golden flesh of her inner thighs parted. He stretched his arms as wide as they would go, then looked up gleefully to peer into her helplessly exposed blonde-haired vaginal lips. Swinging around, the ginger-bearded renegade pushed his big toe against her pink cuntal furrow, wiggling her pussy lips apart.
"There you are, mate, she's all set to take you. Ain't you, little sweetheart?"
"Thanks," said Ben. "You're a real pal. Hold her steady down that end, Taffy, and I'll do the same for you!"
Ben's thinning brown hair ended in greasy curls around his neck, and his deeply tanned body was streaked with dirt and sweat, mixed on the right side of his chest with blood from the shallow knife wound. He contrasted sharply with the lushly naked body he held in his arms, a body that was perfection personified in its voluptuous femininity. When he had first seen her naked in the pool he had realized that never not once in his life had he ever fucked a woman half as beautiful, half as desirable! And here she was all his. Defenseless! Jesus! He could do anything he wanted to her. Anything.
Merle moaned pleadingly for them to let her go. She offered them non-existent thousands of dollars shares in an undiscovered gold mine and she thrashingly fought to deny them the only thing they wanted.
"A bit of spirit, this one," Taffy said, grinning. Hell, a bit of tail wasn't worth having unless you got it through brute strength. Ben's rigidly throbbing penis pressed like a red-hot poker against her spine. His cock-head was already wet from his excitement. That, together with the vileness of his stale rum breath, made her want to retch. The physical contact with the balding older man, Ben, was to the pinioned blonde a thousand times more revolting than the filthy foot-probing of his saliva-drooling friend.
Not for one moment did the young girl show any signs of sympathy or concern for the young geologist groaning in the corner of the hut. Deep down in her cold heart, she had wanted to do the same thing to him that the degenerate Australian had done so cruelly, so viciously.
"Aaaaahhhhh...Eeeeeee!" Her piercing scream filled the hut and sounded through the nearby village as Ben roughly hoisted Taffy's toes out of the way so that he could slip his outstretched middle finger into her tight little cunt himself. He slid his body down along her back and paused to relish a moment of rubbing his eagerly pulsing cock shaft up and down the crease of her naked ass-cheeks, and he left snail marks of pre-ejaculate along her flesh.
This was not sex, to her. Much as she lusted after a cock, this was a violation of her body, an attack without sex sensation, a ravaging and plundering without her feeling anything but pain and revulsion. When Ben flung Taffy's foot away from her fearfully cringing cunt, the ginger-bearded man momentarily released one of her feet, and quick as a flash she lashed out with a kick into his neck. She immediately regretted her action when he moved to the top of the bed, leaving her free to lash out helplessly with both legs as he grabbed her light blonde hair and brutally yanked her face up against his loins.
"Aaaaaggghhh," she groaned in revulsion and turned her head, only to have his warmly pulsating cock follow her.
It was as if the scene had been enacted by the renegades before, with other helpless victims, for Ben quickly left the controlling of her arms to his friend while he flung his naked body over hers, savagely kneeing her flailing legs apart while worming his fingers into her defenseless little cuntal slit, digging painfully deep to work the heated moisture from her vagina around her cuntal lips.
Impatiently, Ben pressed the bulbous head of his long thick penis into the hair-lined opening of Merle's cunt before it was properly lubricated, and held it there against all the efforts the trapped girl made to reject him.
"Don't do it.. . it's hurting me! It won't go in...I won't let you...Aaaaahaaaahhhhaaa...." She had stopped men before from forcing her, by clamping her thighs together: but now the filthy renegade's huge pulsating hardness was sliding into her almost dry pussy passage, rubbing coarsely and painfully against her sensitive flesh as he hammered his cock deep up into her belly. She screamed again, a long mournful cry that didn't end until Ben had shoved his cunt-hungry cock up into her tightly resisting pussy as far as it would go.
Laughing crudely, Taffy shifted around so that he could watch, cradling the back of Merle's head in his lap; his long thick penis stuck up like a fleshy sword through her blonde hair alongside her neck.
Ben blinked at the pulsating shaft, then growled, "Take your monster away from me face, or I'll bite the head off."
"Don't do that, mate," chortled Taffy. "I'm giving me old tossle to blondie's cunt to eat, for afters. A sausage pudding, ain't I, love?" he said, painfully twisting the naked girl's bunched hair.
"Okay, Taffy, let her go. I'm in the saddle and I'm gonna break in this filly. If she bucks or bites, just kick her in the ribs." The balding renegade, his brown matted hair parting over his dirty neck as he covered the golden tanned body of the nakedly struggling girl, had her pinioned at her loins by his thick impaling cock and used his hands to hold down her arms. He attempted to kiss her pale pink lips but she twisted her head from side to side to avoid his mouth. When he bit hungrily at her long neck she desperately sank her teeth into his ear and immediately opened her mouth to emit a loud groan as Taffy kicked her hard in her ribs, his calloused foot feeling as tough as an old boot.
Merle was helpless and she knew it. The fire of defiance died in her eyes which glazed with tears of hate, pain and anger.
Dry cunt or not, Ben began his vile rape, driving deep up into her tight little cunt with long strokes of his lust-swollen penis, its blood-filled head expanding under the pressure of erotic stimulation. He ignored the moans coming from the girl's chest, her tears of pain from the kick in her ribs and her pitiful body jerks each time he thrust his thickly stiffened cock, now becoming moist along its shaft, in cruel jabs against the barrier of her cervix.
Merle could not see the geologist slowly pushing himself into a sitting position in the corner of the hut. All she saw as she moaningly twisted her head from side to side were the brown bamboo and palm-leaf walls and roof, a glimpse of the ginger-bearded Taffy gloatingly watching and the foul smelling long matt of hair below her face where her ravisher worked suckingly over her breasts. She cursed herself for being caught in such an obvious trap, then cursed her traitorous body for it was beginning to send undeniable sensations of lustful satisfaction from her tightening breasts and excited nipples down into her belly and loins.
The inside of her ravished young cunt was growing slippery with her own juices and from the exuding lubricating fluid of the hotly throbbing penis that was pistoning in and out of her vagina. She moaned as Taffy sensing her growing excitement began sucking on her tingling breasts like a maniac and then tonguing into her ears, nibbling with his teeth, all the time holding her arms pressed flat over her head. The rhythmic stroking of his long hard cock speeded suddenly, going even deeper up into her wetly heated pussy, and as it did the agony of the violation began to disappear, being replaced in the whole of her cuntal passage, by erotic pleasure. In spite of her desire not to give in to these gruff rapists, she felt the excitement she experienced when Pete fucked her. It was unbelievable that such a feeling could even slightly form in her violated pussy yet Merle knew her body was wanting sex even from a foul monster like this. She fought the feeling, clenching her fists, shutting tight her eyes, to cast it off.
She had avoided the pitfall of giving in to lust, she believed, when the ugly-bearded creature raping her shuddered his body to a motionless position with his hotly pulsing shaft buried deep up inside her cunt. She felt his penis swelling, then begin a wild jerking. Taffy groaned into her neck as his heavy balls forced out their searing stream of accumulated sperm, spraying sharp jets into her defenseless vaginal passage. She wanted to scream again as she lay terror-stricken, as if she had been raped by a wild animal, and felt so numb in all her senses that she didn't hear the light thump as Taffy pushed Jack back down on the floor when he attempted to stagger to his feet a pushover as easy as toppling a bale of straw.
From the corner of the hut Jack was aware of his injuries although he was not yet feeling the pain through the numbness of shock, and he could see through puffed eyes the nakedly pumping buttocks of the renegade rising and falling between the girl's outspread legs. He heard the over-confident guardian obscenely demanding "some quim for his doodle".
"Ya shot ya bolt, Ben; now get off the bitch and give me a go at her," the gingery renegade complained.
"Nah. I ain't cum yet. Just takin' a breather," Ben lied, soaking his still-stiff cock in the moistly heated confines of Merle's cunt. "I'm still as hard as a blacksmith's hammer," he explained, "and she's just starting to heat up. She'll be nicely broken for ya, Taffy, so wait a jiffy till I empty me balls up her crack. Better keep your eye on that little squirt in case he tries to run."
It had been months years since Ben had fucked a good-looking and sexily shaped young white girl, the pent-up need causing his penis to feel as if it would take a week's fucking to satisfy. Already some of the horny pressure was out of him, but unlike the times he had fucked young but ugly native Melanesian marys, there was not the slightest after-fuck soreness around the flange of his cock-head. And when the American girl ceased shaking her head so he could clamp his mouth over her resisting lips, little spasms of his erection-nerves shot underneath his anus to bring his slightly slackened penis back again to a throbbing hardness.
Whimperingly, Merle had hoped for a miracle, that the renegade Australian would get off her that someone from the village would enter the hut to find out what was happening and scare the intruders away, so she could avoid the fate of suffering the attentions of the other man. For the first time in her life she felt degraded, reduced from proud confidence in the supreme power of her beautiful body to attract only those men she wanted, reduced down to the status of native town-whores who sold their brown-skinned bodies for a dollar or two. Hers was the most desirable body in the Territory. Why, even the girls at the convent in Brisbane used to ask her to strip down just to get an illicit thrill from admiring her forming breasts and the pretty blonde down around her pussy. She could have been a beauty queen, a model, a film star...if she hadn't been obsessed with gold and riches. All that, all the admiration, the self-knowledge of her carnally glowing body, lost to the vile plundering of a filthy Australian-gone-native in the New Guinea jungle!
Even as these fleeting thoughts rushed through her mind, she suffered the further humiliation of knowing that her animalistically pandered limbs, breasts and loins, were reacting to the disgusting renegade's impaling weapon, the most revolting cock she could ever have imagined. Her trembling buttocks lost their flaccid roundness and hollowed in the first automatic flexing of her cuntal muscles. Bitterly, she felt the Australian begin to flex his ass-cheeks in reply, causing his warmly pulsing hardness to jerk in her cunt and sending an erotic thrill into her pussy followed by her own buttocks tightening again. The thick penis inside her throbbed at the end of its upward thrust; her vagina tightened around it then relaxed as the fleshy hardness partially withdrew, stopping with the lust-swollen cock-head near her opening, then thrusting upwards again into her belly as her vaginal muscles tightened around it again.
"For fuck's sake kiss me, sweetheart, or me pal Taffy'll kick you in the guts," Ben growled, hungry for the feel of a giving, tender mouth.
Closing her tearful eyes, Merle parted her lips to receive his hairy mouth as he increased the rhythm of his fucking. He stank, his body reeked with stale sweat growing stronger as the humidity of the place made their nakedly entwined bodies stick together; she murderously hated him, but her feverishly palpitating pussy was working in a whorishly excited hunger, loving the movement of his fucking into her. Impossibly, implausibly, her buttocks clamped hungrily around his lust-hardened thickness, and she began to wonder dimly if her body was thrilling to the sensuous experience because it was so animalistically different from any sex situation she had ever imagined. And the more her hotly fucking pussy wanted his cock, the looser became her mouth, letting the ravisher's tongue dart into her lips, against her tongue and around the inside of her cheeks.
She could no longer resist her shamelessly aroused body's deceitful response, in spite of her feeling of revulsion and hate. Suddenly she clamped her long shapely legs around the man's hairy buttocks to squeeze down on his loins in a possessive grip. She tongued wantonly back into his mouth in return, their salivating darts crisscrossing furiously as if they had a passionate love between them. She crushed her breasts up against his sweaty nakedness, so that he would respond there too, moving his hairy, muscled chest against the soft sensitive flesh of her breasts, her hard jutting nipples fully erect and tingling to the coarse caress.
Taffy watched with amazed lewdness at the sudden change in the blonde's reaction, and he was as surprised as Ben when she broke away from the sucking kiss to arch back her neck to inhale deeply and exhale in a long, drawn out sigh.
"Fuck me, you bastard, fuck me...harder, harder!" she moaned, pulling the greasy head of her ravager savagely back to her mouth.
"Well bugger me! Look at that Sheila go!" Taffy gasped at the stunned geologist. "She must 'ave near killed ya every night, ya lucky little runt!"
As if in an incredible nightmare, Jack Shepherd had not been able to tear his eyes away from the scene of debauchery. All the time his girl was being raped into submission he had felt only a deep compassion for her suffering. Now she was asking the murderous Australian basher to give her more. She was demanding to be fucked! And while she gave herself willingly, shamelessly like any nymphomaniac slut, the other robber, the one who had just beaten him almost to a pulp, stood hand on hip with his cock stiffly erected and emitting drops of fluid from its tip. That foul weapon would also ravish the lovely pussy of the girl he hoped to marry, the girl for whom he held so much respect...despite the heat-induced rages he had withstood from her during the past few days. Now his pity changed to loathing and despair, as he watched Merle clawing wantonly at the Australian's thick back.
The shocked and numbed geologist was to be more disenchanted when Ben exploded his balls again, flushing in white hot spurts of semen into the young blonde's already cum-soaked pussy. The Australian's yell of ecstasy and his subsiding groans of satiated animal lust abruptly ended when Taffy forcibly rolled him off her nakedly writhing body. Ben knew how horny his mate must be, and he uncomplainingly allowed himself to be pushed aside and his rapidly deflating cock pulled out of its hot little hole by his buddy. The geologist expected Merle to at least try to escape, to make some kind of protest, but instead she just lay there, slowly grinding her legs together, waiting.
"Fuck me!" she said vulgarly as Taffy pushed her knees apart and slipped his cock into her wetly pulsating pussy. "Fuck me good! Don't stop!"
"Yeah, I'll do that for you all right. That Ben, he's like a boy can't hold up," he said, grinning down at her while he rammed his lust-stiffened penis all the way in and lowered his chest down over her nakedly quivering breasts. She bucked her hips up impatiently as he penetrated her cunt, eager to satisfy the overwhelming craving of her clitoris and cock-starved cunt.
Jack was not the only witness to the debauch of the girl with the two Australians.
In the black night outside, a brown figure had been peeping through a slit in the bamboo and palm-leaf walls of the hut ever since he was awakened by the series of the white girl's screams. He had moved stealthily so that none of the villagers might see him if they too had looked out of their huts, wondering what the gold hunter could be doing to his "mary" to make her scream so much more than she did on other nights. The native women all supposed the young white man had a colossal cock, too big to enter her; and the men simply thought he was giving her the good healthy beating she obviously deserved. The only one who would know was the brown man standing naked outside the foreigners' hut massaging his penis. He was Tomu, the only native in the village who had a good command of the pidgin language and who understood several of the local dialects. He was respected for being a linguist as well as for owning a large vegetable garden and several valuable pigs. Most noteworthy of all his attributes was the hollow bamboo which he wore over his penis an affectation adult male members of the tribe were addicted to for ceremony; his bamboo was the thickest in the village. As silent as a cat, he slowly pumped his cock while he stared entranced at the unusual love rituals of white men.
Taffy's pride in his prowess suffered a setback when he came explosively only a few seconds after sliding his over-excited member into
Merle's hotly milking cunt. Worse, his cock went slack despite his desperate willing of it to stay hard like Ben's, to fuck her again. His buddy coarsely told him to "let a man have a go", but Taffy snapped back at him to shut his mouth and take his turn watching the "smart Yank bastard".
"Suck me, bitch, or I'll smash your goddamn stupid face," he ordered. Merle did. Willingly! While he knelt she squatted on her knees, took his slack, cum-glistening cock into her soft warm mouth and sucked with all the experienced know-how she had gained from sucking Pete and unnamed others in her past. As Taffy's penis reacted homily to the sensations of her tongue and lips around his glans, the still unsatisfied blonde reached down to where Ben lay casually observing the scene while watching for any movement from the American geologist. Without taking her face from the loins of the renegade she was sucking to erection, she felt for and encircled her fingers around Ben's semi-stiffened cock. A second later she began squeezing and relaxing her fingers until his penis became harder and thicker. Satisfied, she wet her palm and fingers from the cum seeping down the insides of her thighs from her pussy and started pumping his hard fleshy cock. When she knew he was fully aroused and ready, she twisted her naked body sideways and offered her smoothly rounded buttocks to him like a cat in heat.
Watching with sneaky eyes for any sign that Ben might try to take the girl away from him, and confident again now that he was erected and fucking the girl's mouth, Taffy said with off-hand generosity, "Okay, Ben. You can ride steerage!"
"Thanks, cobber. That's right where I'm gonna ride," the balding man replied, sliding his fingers down the blonde's ass-cheeks to press against the tightly puckered pink hole of her anus before pushing on down to her slippery cunt. He carefully guided his thick pulsating shaft to her wetly gaping opening and then slowly thrust forward, feeling his cock sliding deep up into her hot cuntal flesh.
"Listen Yank." Ben growled at the battered gold prospector, "one move out of you and we'll both drop this here beaut root an' have ya guts before you've taken the first step. So stay there an' enjoy the entertainment. It's free. Like Miss what's-her-name." He looked down along the full rounded buttocks he had lusted after at the pool. What the hell was her name?
"By the way, sweetheart, what's ya monniker? Ya name what's ya bloody name?" he asked, loving the way she spread her thighs to make it easier for his thick throbbing member to glide up into her heated vaginal passage.
With Taffy's cock in her mouth she mumbled her name.
"What? Didn't yer Maim teach ya better manners? Don't speak with ya mouth full," he slapped her on the buttocks and guffawed.
Merle took Taffy's wetly glistening penis out of her mouth.
"Merle." She quickly uttered the word and then immediately ovaled her lips again to take Taffy's long hard penis back into the wet warmth of her mouth. Momentarily, she thought about using her teeth against its tender skin. But if Pete would slap her for inadvertent biting, these creeps, she thought, would beat hell out of her. The nakedly writhing blonde wanted to ask Ben to keep ducking his cock in her this time until she had an orgasm a big one but she knew she could "talk" to him with her ass, and besides she was getting a strange satisfaction out of sucking Taffy's warmly throbbing cock in her mouth.
"Merle the pearl!" she heard Ben say with a sneering laugh. "You've got a pearl right up your oyster now, Merle sweetheart, no doubt about it, hey, Taffy? And a bit of hot sausage in ya gob," he added, making her grunt as he pulled the lust-swollen head of his cock out until it was lodged just inside her inflamed cuntal lips and then drove his shaft up into her belly all the way to the hilt.
"Does she like it this way, Yank?" Taffy teased the helpless man in the corner of the hut.
Jack lowered his head to stare at the floor, one puffed eye turning blue-black and almost closed. He suffered more insults from the renegades while they disgustingly ravished Merle at both ends as she knelt subserviently on all fours on the mattress.
Merle was deaf to whatever they were saying as her hotly aroused body took control of the action, one hand going up and around the sweaty buttocks of the man she was sucking off to hold him into her rhythmic lunges backward on the stiffened member fucking her cunt from the rear. To keep her from falling sideways, Ben held her slender waist in hands that squeezed so tightly that the tips of his fingers touched in front of her belly. Her body, wantonly out of all control from the hateful resentment and revulsion lingering at the back of her mind, wanted a triple bang an orgiastic climax, the three of them together. Sensationally, she was rewarded.
The bulging tip of Taffy's cock in her mouth swelled until it felt as if its pulsating hardness would unhinge her jaws. Simultaneously, Ben speeded up his body-jolting thrusts up into her cunt, ramming so deep in her bent-over position that his penis seemed to go through her belly all the way to her throat. She was completely reveling in the exquisite pain, nerves running hotly afire throughout her body as her cunt palpitated with an onrush of orgasm. Moaning into the cock bulging out her cheeks, the sounds from her chest broadcast her cumming, bringing the two fucking Australians to climax together. She moaned again as her hotly quivering cunt burst into cumming, and her body shook with the spasm of wildly vibrating nerves from her belly to her clitoris and around to her anus where the rough pubic curls of Ben's loins pressed into her sensitive anal crack. Her mewls of rapture increased as she felt even above her own orgasm the two blood-engorged, hotly throbbing cocks gushing their heated load of semen into her hungrily sucking mouth and vaginal passage.
Jack could not keep from watching, and the blood-shot eyes of the excited Melanesian outside the hut were also riveted on the rare spectacle of the white girl, her ash-blonde head bobbing madly over one cock, her moon-round buttocks jerking into another cock, shaking uncontrollably in sexual climax while her mouth filled and overflowed, sending white streams of cum from its corners. Her cunt, spread wide open to take the last inch of the other man's thick penis, could actually be seen working around the hardened shaft as she sought to draw jet after jet of white hot sperm up into her belly.
The frenzy of the triple orgasm brought mewling moans of satisfaction from the naked young blonde as she lingeringly sucked and swallowed the ginger-haired renegade's gushing sperm. Behind her, Ben kept his cock rammed far up in her belly even as it grew slack, enjoying the continuing palpitations he could feel in her tightly clasping vagina still hot from the friction of their merging flesh.
"I think we'd better make a return visit someday soon to your hairy little home. Merle the pearl," Ben said, raising his eyebrows at his mate. Taffy felt his contracting, still-sucked cock move as the girl nodded her head up and down in consent.
"Well, I think we'd better be goin'. Me old Marm always said I mustn't overstay me welcome," said Ben, his limp slippery cock forced out of Merle's cunt as she tried to grip hold of it with a muscle contraction.
"Yeah," agreed Taffy, lifting the blonde head from his loins and giving her lips a final tonguing kiss to which she warmly responded.
Merle sank down on the mattress as the two Australians pulled up their filthy shorts.
Taffy walked nonchalantly over to the geologist huddled, fearful of another bashing, in the corner where he had remained all the time while they ravished his girl. When Taffy leaned over him he cringed back, waiting for a fist to slam into him. and covered his face with his crossed arms. The Australian wasn't interested in wasting any energy on the defeated geologist. He grabbed hold of the short man's pants and ripped open his fly.
"Look at his little tossle!" He announced to Ben. "No wonder the lady wanted some real cock!"
The two unkempt, bearded white men climbed down the short ladder without glancing back nor did they see in the weak light of the false dawn a brown figure sneaking away into the nearby jungle.
CHAPTER FIVE
Swimming the following morning in the deep, clear pool, Merle washed her naked body, aware of the watching native hiding behind a large rock where he usually hid to peep at her. She was used to him now, knowing he wouldn't try anything, and she deliberately adopted lewd postures for his benefit, especially turning over in the water to dive down, kicking her legs apart with her hair-lined pussy facing the bank where the rock stood.
The cool mountain stream freshened her mind as well as her battered body. At last she could think properly, sort out the confusing possibilities that arose during the night and early in the morning, when she had to face the truth of herself as far as Jack Shepherd was concerned. There was little doubt that, because of her stupid inability to resist enjoying the rape inflicted on her by the renegades the men she had actually employed Jack would probably tell Pete all about what happened in the hut.
One thing was clear; Jack was no kind of proposition for her; he was bad news in every way except that he knew where to look for gold. Also, as far as he was concerned, she was finished. Ever since Taffy and Ben left the hut, he had talked to her like a preacher and then switched to calling her all the sluttish names he could think of. Okay, she liked sex; men admired her body, and she was eager to be naked with them; so what?
Another thing about Jack. He'd never make it alone, she decided. He wasn't tough enough. Splashing water over her wetly gleaming breasts, she giggled at the memory of Taffy, ginger-bearded with long hair, looking like a caricature of a hippy in tattered short pants, exposing Jack's slack little cock. To be honest with herself, she remembered that the geologist's cock was as normal as anyone else's; it was just that in comparison with the hugely satisfying erections she had taken in her pussy and her mouth, his cock had seemed ridiculously shrunken in its flaccid state, and without any sex appeal at all. After the two Australians left, he sat hunched in the corner there for an hour. She couldn't sleep because of the baleful glare in his ugly puffed eyes, afraid too that he might become violent.
When he did speak, he said, "Now I really know you. Merle. All you want is cock and lots of it. And you've been using me." She could see that talking caused him pain, and she thought, serves the weak little shit right for being such a coward.
She had turned her back on him feigning sleep, turning off from his complaints and accusations. She thought of brazening it out, explaining that she agreed to see the renegades again simply to get rid of them, that she probably saved him from a further beating up by giving in to their demands and probably saved her own life. It would have been a hopeless attempt to convince him. He had seen how wantonly she had invited Ben to fuck her from behind. And when the sap had finally stretched out on a mat to sleep, she ran down to the river to swim and to wash the smell of sex from her sweat and cum-streaked body.
Her worry now was mainly what she should say to Pete when he arrived the following day. If she told him that their spies had raped her he would call up a police helicopter on his radio and have them taken within hours...or woulc he risk them involving him in the map robbery? She could say she invited them into her hut and that they defended her when Jack tried to fuck her no, he knew damn well she intended to sleep with the geologist as part of the act, and therefore Pete wouldn't care whether the Australians fucked her or not. The complication was that now those two were in the open. She cursed herself for being such a fool as to establish a willing intimacy with them though the little orgy had been wildly satisfying.
Why not make a deal with them? This was an angle worth pursuing. They were tough, they knew how to get about the jungle, and once they found the gold they would have to get out of the country anyhow, leaving her to handle the registration of the claim and the selling or working of the field. Drying her naked body in the sun as she sat on the grassy bank of the river, she reasoned that this was the best solution if the operation of her plan could be worked out.
The blonde girl stepped into her pants and was hitching them up when she was startled by wild yells and splashes as Ben and Taffy dived into the pool from the opposite bank. Their appearance was so unexpected she stood transfixed, the fly of her pants undone, exposing her softly curling blonde pussy hair, her lushly ripened breasts naked. When they began swimming across she quickly finished dressing and waited for them to climb out of the pool in their dripping shorts. The quick swim cleaned some of their dirt-encrusted bodies although their greasy hair retained the rancid look of wild natives.
"Looks like we're too late to join ya in the water, Merle the pearl. Ever had a fuck while treadin' water?" Ben reached out to grab her but she stood aside from him, without however showing any of the distaste for them she had felt the night before. Their arrival was opportune but she didn't want to be seduced there, in daylight and with the native watching. An idea came to her suddenly.
"I have a guardian with me," she said, nodding towards the rock and calling out in pidgin for the native to walk over to them. "But
I'd like to talk business with you two."
"Go ahead, spill ya problems...hold on, Taffy, keep ya mits off the lady...if there's a dollar or two in it we'll talk business with anyone." Ben grabbed Taffy who was trying to rip down Merle's pants to eat the blonde pussy. "Best breakfast in the world!" he'd declared.
"Hey," exclaimed Ben as the native emerged from behind the rock and walked towards them, his face devoid of any expression, "it's Tomu. He's the one who told us about what a good swimmer y'are, Merle. He speaks pidgin like a native," he added, laughing at his own humorless joke.
"I know," said Merle, noticing how Tomu's cotton skirt his lap-lap bulged below his belly.
"What's the deal, you wonderful little cocksucker?" asked Taffy.
"Drop the bedroom talk, ya crude cunt d'ya wanta frighten the tits off the Sheila?" Ben growled at his friend. "Must apologize for me mate, Merle. The silly bugger don't know how to behave in polite society. Anyway what is the deal?"
Before introducing the subject she asked Tomu in pidgin if he spoke English. No, he said, feeling down inside his lap-lap to scratch his crotch. He was a little taller than average, the blonde noticed, thick-set and with typical wide mouth and nostrils, his skin brown, his hips wider than a European male and his dark hair had a brown glint in it from the use of dyes or mud. The fact that he wore a lap-lap suggested that he could have been a police boy or had been associated in some official way with the administration.
"You must have some idea of why we're here," the young girl said, ignoring Taffy stripping his shorts off to wash in the stream and averting her eyes from his half-hard cock hanging down between his legs as he squatted on the river bank.
"If it's not gold, I'll eat Tomu's lap-lap," Ben said, thinking to himself, what a conniving hitch: she's up to something that stinks of a double-cross.
"I may as well tell you. Pete and I don't think we'll make it with Jack you know, the one I'm here with anyway, we er I think that we, I mean...I would rather do a deal with you two boys," she said, not noticing that Tomu's eyes had shown more of the reddened whites of his eyes at the mention of the word "gold". Now, he suddenly looked very sour.
"SO?" Ben pushed his face close to Merle's, grunting out his query.
"So, if we can find where Jack thinks he'll find it we claim it and split whatever's there."
Taffy looked up with a cunning smile. "Ya mean we split three ways. Like last night?"
"Yeah," Ben chimed in. "Three ways?"
"That suits me," Merle agreed. "But what about Jack and Pete. What happens to them?"
What a real bitch! Ben began to admire her now, as well as wanting to slip his long hard cock up into her tight little cunt as often as he could. "Leave that to us. First of all we gotta find the pay dirt. We'll talk about it tonight, at our hut. We got some rum...."
"Don't be a fool," she interjected. "Plenty of time for that, later." She started to move off along the track. "I'll keep in touch through Tomu," she said over her shoulder. "Better put something on that cut in your chest before it gets infected."
"Aw, don't go, sweetheart," begged Taffy, his cock stiffening at the mere sight of her ripe young buttocks swaying under her tight khaki pants.
As she and Tomu approached the village the blonde asked him why he always followed her to the pool. He stayed silent. She told him that Jack was sick "massa im sick belongguts" and he replied that he knew. She asked him if he could find gold for her, and was amazed at the way he spat on the ground at the mention of the word, wondering if the precious metal was a local taboo. Knowing that he probably lusted after her she was confident she could get it out of him; this strange attitude must have a reason behind it.
"Please tell me," she cajoled, and slowly he explained that gold to him meant trouble, it would bring in lots of white men if he told them where to find it.. .
"Then there Is gold near here and you do know where to find it?" she asked in pidgin.
Sourly he nodded, adding that everywhere white men went, they upset village life, they wanted their women and made the men work hard doing things they shouldn't do, like digging all day and carrying loads on their backs. Besides, he said, the gold was in the country of the Kukukuku tribe.
Could he enter their land? she asked. Yes, he said, he could trade with them, but if a white man went there they would eat him because they did not fear the Patrol Officer, and they could hide very easily in their rough jungle mountains. They had already eaten prospectors in the old days, before the "Japanman" came. They ate many Japanman, too.
The native expected the next question: would he bring her some of the yellow metal? Without a trace of subservience showing in his expression or demeanor, he surveyed her body from head to foot, the obvious lewdness in his manner sending shivers of excited fear down Merle's spine.
Yes, for her alone he would trade with the Kukukukus and bring her some gold. Not for the white men, Ben and Taffy, or for the sick man in the hut, or for the man who came in the bird without wings. The gold would be a present from Tomu to the beautiful white girl.
Merle allowed him to reach out his hand and gently touch her face; gritting her teeth she managed to restrain her temper and revulsion when he lightly let his fingers trail down her neck to touch the top of her breasts showing above her partly unbuttoned shirt. Then the native dropped his hand and walked away into the village leaving her wondering when he would bring her the evidence of gold, and where he would deliver it to her. She decided that she would have to give up swimming alone in the future. Reaching her hut, the blonde was surprised to find Jack had gone out to prospect, sick and bruised as he was when she left him. She felt no sympathy for him; she only despised him for working so futilely in the wrong stretch of river. She brazenly admitted to herself that she preferred the company of Ben even Taffy to the weak-kneed geologist who would rather tire himself out testing the riverbed than give her what she wanted on their bed in the hut. It was as though he didn't appreciate her beauty, her very desirable body.
* * *
Jack was at the village, after deciding to give up any further testing in the area, when the chopper chuffed down to the pad on a cleared patch on the outskirts. The forlorn young man greeted Pete, as he cut the motor and jumped down, with a curt nod of his head.
Christ! The fool has been in trouble with the natives. Pete thought. "What happened and where's Merle?" he asked, looking at the battered face of the geologist.
"She's in the hut. Your friends beat me up or are they her friends? The way she entertained them the night before last I reckon you two brought those Australians up here to make a claim jump," said Jack, scowling.
"Wait a minute! I don't know what you're talking about. That girl friend of yours.. . "
"Listen to me," Jack broke in. "I happen to know that there is such a thing as a police force in this country, and by Christ if you don't use your radio to call them up, right now, you'll be admitting you're in this claim jump right up to your neck."
The pilot stared at the smaller man, thinking fast. "Let me talk to that girl. I'll get the truth out of her."
"Talk later, after you call up the cops."
"Right!" the pilot exclaimed, climbing up into the chopper's cockpit and fixing the radio earphones over his head. He switched on the set, called up a code number and pretended to speak to a police radio base. Jack listened, pacified when he heard the pilot inform the "base" that the men wanted in Rabaul were, he believed, in the area of Wamba village and thought they must have arrived there from Taron village where there was a regular airmail service that also carried a couple of passengers. Jack couldn't hear any sound of replies because of the earphones being clamped to the pilot's ears. Nevertheless the act was convincing enough for the geologist to relax.
"Look Pete, I've found nothing around here to indicate that there is gold upstream, and if there is, it must be away from the river possibly a lode that doesn't wash into the valley, if it exists. I've got a location marked on this map," he said, unfolding a map he carried in his pocket. "Right here, where I've marked it."
"Jeez! Kukukuku land...." Pete muttered slowly, almost inaudibly to himself.
"What did you say?" asked Jack.
"Oh, er, just that I know that area. Sure, I can drop you right there. When do you want to go?" The pilot could barely hide his excitement at discovering the secret, or conceal the evil light in his eyes as he silently predicted the "mysterious disappearance" as the newspapers would report it of another prospector in the New Guinea highlands.
Jack felt an unexplained uneasiness at the change in manner of the pilot. But his obsession drove him on, to do the job alone, if need be. As far as natives were concerned, he had only known friendliness at the Wamba, and knew that the Patrol organization kept its eyes on things in these wild parts of the country.
"My gear's all packed outside the hut. I think you'd better fly the girl back to Moresby when you return. We're through."
The previous night they hadn't spoken a word to one another although at breakfast, when they ate mangoes because she refused to cook anything, he said he was sending her home when the chopper called.
"Do you trust Pete?" was all she said, the few words that started him thinking that he was the sucker in the middle of a dirty deal. Did he trust Pete? Christ, he'd had no cause not to trust him. Then he realized that it was she who had introduced him to the pilot and his suspicions snowballed, connecting Merle with Pete, Merle with Ben and Taffy....
Jack walked over to his hut and started carrying gear while Pete climbed into the hut to talk with Merle. The geologist heard him asking what she was doing, mixing with criminals, and heard him snarling at her until he walked with a load to the chopper and out of earshot.
"Listen you silly bitch, you've fucked it all up. Now he wants you out, and I'm to take him to the real thing," he said quickly, lowering his voice. "I'm dropping him into the Kukukukus and they'll eat him. We can stake the claim when we go back, so keep your bloody mouth shut and stay away from those renegades. You and me are through, Merle, but I'm still dealing you in as far as the claim is concerned."
The blonde put on a crestfallen expression, half-sincere because she would miss nights in his bed, really miss them.
"How long will you be?" she asked, "how long will it take to fly him there and fly back?"
"About an hour, allowing for dodging around mountains and finding somewhere to drop off the mug." Seeing Jack walking back for the rest of his gear, Pete jumped down from the hut.
"Here, let me help you with those panning dishes, Jack. You look a bit done in," said the pilot.
"Take the lot, if you don't mind. I want to say good-bye to some friends." He walked into the village, shook hands with the chief and several other natives who sat in the shade of a large palm.
"You are always welcome with my people," the chief said in labored pidgin. "We hope you will visit us again."
In spite of himself, Jack felt a flush of pleasure, and he told the chief, haltingly, that he planned to return in the near future; but even as he said it, he found himself wondering if he ever would see these gentle people again.
On the way back to the plane, Jack passed his old hut.
"I hope the Kukukukus stew you, sucker!" the blonde called out to him, unable to resist a spiteful last word. She was worrying on another tack now, thinking perhaps that Jack might make a deal with Pete, cutting him in for services rendered, or, if the cannibals killed the geologist, all Pete had to do was register the claim for himself. In which case he would have to get rid of her and the two Australians.. . unless they got rid of him first.
And if that happened? she asked herself, how would they find the gold field without the map unless they dealt with the Kukukukus through Tomu. Yeh! That was it! Fix Pete somehow, and use Tomu! At least, the very least, Tomu would discover where Jack would be killed, with the gold at the end of his rainbow.
She was so lost in her plans for a double cross that she didn't even notice the chopper as its rotor spun lifting the pilot and the young geologist into the air. The craft hovered there for a second, then changed its nose and swung halfway around to disappear in the direction of the headhunter's territory....
* * *
Merle had an hour in which to find out where the renegades lived, explain the set-up and get back to the village before Pete. It took her several minutes trying to get through to the chief of the village that she wanted Tomu, and the chief gestured into the wild jungle, indicating that he had gone "walkabout" on a journey. Holding her impatience in check she managed to communicate to the tribal elder that she sought the white men, so he called a boy to lead her to them. After a twenty minute walk along a jungle-covered path she found their hut, an old richety structure on stilts, and heard their drunken laughter, which sent the boy scurrying back to the village. For awhile it looked impossible, Taffy dropping his shorts as soon as he saw her standing outside, his penis lewdly hanging out as it grew to erection in a matter of seconds; then Ben finally caught on to the fact that time was short if she were to be back in the village to meet the chopper.
"Stick it up a log, Taffy," the older man said to his weapon-wielding mate. "This is a real business call, ain't it sweetheart?"
Merle said that unless Pete suffered an "accident" there would be a police patrol helicopter coming for them before they could walk five miles which ever way they ran, or beat their way through jungle. Pete didn't need them any longer because he was dropping the geologist off into Kukukuku country literally dropping him from about 1500 feet once he found the gold location.
Ben asked her what she thought they should do.
"I leave that to you. Make up your own minds but do it quickly." Having said that, she gave Taffy's loins a look of wanton desire which made the ginger-haired man all the more horny. She ran back along the path, sweating profusely in the steaming heat, and beating from her head swarms of insects that zeroed in on any human or animal exposed to their attacks. Hating the high humidity of the place and the pervading stench of rotting vegetation, the mundane ugliness of the native people's features and lack of attention by presentable white men, Merle would have gone back to Port Moresby in Pete's chopper, she decided, if the prospect of finding gold were as remote as it was a couple of days before. Now, she would suffer the hell of Wamba a little longer to see what Tomu brought her from up-river. If it really was the heavy, yellow metal and not iron pyrite-fool's gold that Tomu knew could be scooped out of the earth, then another week or month in the unbearable conditions would be worth every hellish minute.
CHAPTER SIX
Up in the cool air where the chopper flew high to climb over mountain ridges, Jack was amazed by the beauty below him, a jungle-clad mountain range with occasional expanses of tall kunai grass where bushfires had long ago burned out the trees and undergrowth, or they had been cleared laboriously by the natives' ancestors who grazed livestock. For longer than men remembered the most sought after animal protein was pig, the kunai grazing land now left unused, and because a pig equaled the value of an average wife before the peculiar prosperity of recent years, not many natives could afford a change from their staple vegetable diet, providing one of the many theories that attempted to explain why cannibalism had been widely practiced: to satisfy a craving for meat, possibly cannibalism was incorporated into the rites laid down by witch doctors who were still powerful in villages, where leadership went to the strongest men. It was much the same in his own world, Jack thought, where men used the power of money and sometimes the power of physical strength or bullets to achieve their positions of leadership or domination.
The geologist knew enough about women to realize that Merle's spitefully bitchy remark, that she hoped the Kukukukus would eat him, had a foundation of factual knowledge of the tribe. When he saw the remains of a rotting Japanese "Betty" twin-engined bomber from the last war lying half-submerged in a swamp, he scared himself by associating the wreck with something he would normally shrug off: a bad omen. Instinctively he distrusted Pete; the pilot's demeanor had become brusque and aggressive, and he seemed to be showing signs of nervousness as they flew towards their destination. In this harsh lonely land. Jack was beginning to rely on instinct, and he felt a sense of being tricked and abandoned, and in extreme danger, a feeling intensified by his bodily pains and the disenchantment of discovering to what depths Merle had sunk, how incredibly deceitful and degenerate the sweet, "family-loving" girl had become. He was beginning to lose all hope, a mood of desperation supplanting his former optimism, until the chopper sank down toward a deep ravine and suddenly he could see that this was the "Shangri-La" of the wartime rescue. He stiffened with excitement when he made out the strange double waterfall, its misty spray rising up exactly as he had seen in the old prospector's drawing, exactly as he had seen in the warm cameraman's film shown on TV at home.
The chopper sank lower and lower towards a patch of cleared ground not far from the falls and at the edge of thick trees overlaying a dense undergrowth. As they approached the earth the heat in the chopper's cockpit rose higher and higher.
"Jump out while I hover," Pete yelled at the geologist.
"Why? How am I to get my gear out?" Jack yelled back over the engine noise.
"I want you to test the ground," Pete yelled, holding the machine a few feet over what looked to Jack like a perfectly hard and safe pad.
Jack shook his head. "Put her down, or fly back," he said, his body sweating with fear and heat. He had slid the Perspex door to inspect the ground and when he turned to speak to the pilot he found a pistol pointing at his head, the pilot's face grim.
"Get out sucker," Pete yelled. "Yes, I hired those thugs and now I know exactly where the gold is, you sap!"
Slicing his clenched fist up from the safety grip in front of the cockpit, Jack lashed out in blind rage to knock the pistol out of the surprised pilot's hand then swung his other arm up to grab Pete's throat.
"You bastard!" he screamed as he attacked, trying to choke Pete to death, careless of the sideways lurch of the chopper and the pilot's frantic efforts to control the machine while he tried to defend himself with one arm. But the chopper was tilted to starboard, and while it could have been straightened and lifted away, there was too much momentum in its sideways drift. The trees were too close to avoid a crash: the rotor blades smashed against unyielding tree trunks, the fuselage swung wildly on impact and as it crashed the few feet to the ground both men were flung out onto the grass.
For a moment they were both dazed. Pete was first on his feet, ready to run if the chopper burst into flames but he stood, dumbfounded, looking at the wreckage, his immediate thoughts on whether his insurance policy was paid up or not, and how he would be able to get out of the valley to reach a police post. The machine's radio he could see lying smashed in the wreckage, and near the radio he saw the barrel of his pistol poking out from a clump of grass. The sight of it reminded him that he was in Kukukuku country, the most dangerous area in New Guinea, and he reached to pick up the weapon when Jack scrambled past him, intent on getting it himself. They dived together and were fighting before either could grab the pistol, Pete yelling at him that they were mad to fight in that area.
Jack remained silent. To him, the pilot represented the agent of everything bad that had happened to him; he blamed him for originating the robbery in Port Moresby, for the two bashings he had received at the hands of the renegades, for the traitorous double-cross by Merle. The pilot represented the death of all his hopes, all his hard work, all his savings, and even if it meant being killed he intended to fight to the finish. He was still sore from his beatings, and though he knew little about dirty fighting, he was strengthened by his almost insane desire for revenge, and his muscles had been hardened from long days of prospecting.
Neither man saw bright feathers showing low in the undergrowth or heard the slight rattle of bamboo spears, the excited muttering of brown men camouflaged in the jungle.
Pete saw that the geologist was half-crazy. Abruptly he knew that he would have to kill the geologist to save his own skin. If he did, there was an added benefit in the location of the claim being his own secret knowledge, and if there was gold somewhere about it would all be his. He had two good reasons for killing Jack Shepherd and only one for not killing him: together, they would have a much better chance of getting out, of finding a canoe or taking turns to stand guard, armed with the pistol, until a search plane found them. He forgot that no one knew exactly where they were, and had no time to think of such details as he kicked and clawed, punched and twisted in the desperate fight. He was over-confident at first, believing he could easily crunch the smaller man. Now he fought for his life as they rolled, locked in mortal combat toward the stony river bank.
Snarling like a wounded animal, Jack fought in the only way he instinctively felt toward getting his hands around the pilot's neck and strangling him. This left him open to Pete's roughhouse tactics of kneeing him in the groin, punching his bruised face and body with a fist while his free hand fended off the attacks towards his neck. As they rolled closer to the water, Pete's heavier weight and cooler approach to the fight won him the upper hand and it was now his turn to use a stranglehold which he intended to be fatal for the geologist. Jack released his adversary so that he could shove him off his body and free himself from the gripping fingers digging into his throat. His breathing stopped, he felt blood pounding in his head, he Hung out his arm to try and lever himself from under the pilot and his hand pressed down on a round stone.
Jack could barely remember how the fight had gone until that moment. The feel of the stone smashing into the pilot's head was the moment of his salvation, more important than the repeated crashing down with all his force, again and again, until the head was a lifeless bloodied pulp of bone and flesh. Then he staggered into the river, sat in it to let the cool water wash away the blood from his scratches. He was still there, dazed, almost vomiting at the realization of what he had done, unable to look at the dead man and uncaring about what would happen to him as a result of the accident and the killing, when he heard jabbering voices on the river bank.
Eight young natives, tall and armed with spears, were staring at him and Steve's body, pointing at him and nodding, pointing at the body and shaking their heads. They asked him questions in their own language which Jack didn't understand. He tried a few words in pidgin that he had picked up from Merle, but they were as meaningless to them as their tongue was to him. He stood up to walk out of the river and fell into it; he scrambled out, staggering from a weakening of his body reacting to the maniacal way in which he had expended his strength. Turning away from the macabre sight of the natives dragging Pete's body to the bank like dragging an animal's carcass, he thought -he looked for the pistol, but couldn't find it, so he began collecting his gear from the wreckage of the helicopter. Wearily he shrugged his shoulders when he saw the young natives remove item by item everything he placed in a heap, and gave up trying to plan what he should do, when a native laughed in his face as he tried to retrieve one of his panning dishes. His plastic American Express credit card, which must have somehow fallen from his wallet during the fight, he now saw dangling under the wide nostrils of one of the young warriors, who had fixed it as a permanent nose "ring." Just before the geologist collapsed in an exhausted faint at the feet of the Credit Card man, as he was to think of him in future, Jack smiled back at a grinning native whose Bird of Paradise feathers in his brown frizzy hair looked comically incongruous above the dead pilot's earphones salvaged from the wreck, and worn back to front around the natives neck, the radio lead and plug tucked into his rope belt.
* * *
Three people waited nervously all through the day for the helicopter's jet engine to whine its approach; the renegades at the edge of the jungle, the blonde conspirator in her hut, lying naked under a mosquito net, trying to cool herself with a fan. All three suspected that Pete had joined up with Jack in a plan to stake the claim and fly direct to Port Moresby, abandoning them.
By late afternoon an angry Ben was convinced that they had been cheated. "Let's go back to the hut, Taffy and finish off the rum. We gotta get out of here somehow fast," he said. His friend grunted agreement.
"What about the blonde we may as well take her with us, wherever we go, don't ya think, Ben?"
"Yeah, you're right! She'll be nice to have around. We'll call on her tonight," the older man replied.
From their position at the edge of the jungle near where the chopper would have landed they were unable to see across the village to Merle's hut, nor did they see the brown native wearing a lap-lap rapping his knuckles on the ladder.
"Who's there," the American girl called out, repeating the question in pidgin.
"Me, Tomu," the native replied.
"You wait," she called out, hurriedly drawing on her long pants and shirt. "Now come in."
Tomu climbed the ladder, silently on his wide bare feet, carrying a small earthenware pot and an old beer bottle filled with liquid.
"You gottim gold?" Merle asked in pidgin, her eyes fixed on the small bowl.
"Tomu gottim, white mary," he replied, staring at her bare ankles and feet as he placed the bowl on the floor so that she could see the mixture of earth and glittering yellow gold, small pebbles of the precious metal that could not possibly be pyrites. He watched her as she lifted the bowl cupped in her hands, testing the weight of its contents.
"Yes, by God, this is gold!" she exclaimed, her hands beginning to shake in excitement.
"Where, Tomu? Where did you find it? Can you take me to it?" she asked, lapsing into English. He shook his head, and she repeated her question in pidgin, shaking his thickly muscled arm with her eagerness.
Again he shook his head, this time indicating that he refused to tell her. Gold was evil. This was a present for her, he said, and so was the bottle of liquid which he had cooled in the river for her to drink. He gave her the presents because he liked her if she wanted more gold he might bring her some when he built her a new hut. He offered her the bottle.
"What is in it? What water that? Me no likim." Merle was annoyed that the native was sidetracking her with his second gift. Where did the ugly bastard find the gold? I suppose I'll offend him if I don't drink, she thought, amazed that he should be so attentive. Pouring some of the liquid into a tin cup she sipped a mouthful and realized it was fermented cocoanut juice which natives in Port Moresby brewed, a legacy from experiments made by Australian soldiers during the war. At least it was cool and not unpleasant, she realized, and Tomu was pleased that she accepted his other gift.
He told her that he had bad news. The Kukukuku had caught her man. They would eat him, he said.
Merle forgot the gold. How did he know? Did the helicopter land with her man? She spoke so rapidly and excitedly Tomu couldn't follow what she was saying, and eventually she was compelled to wait patiently while he told her the whole story. He had traded an axe with the Kukukuku for the gold after walking many miles and waiting for hours at a certain place for them to bring the bowl to him, and when they did they described how they had heard the news which he now passed on to Merle. The "wingless bird" had fallen "all bagarap" as it tried to sit in a tree; the two white men fell out of its belly and they must have wanted to eat "long pig" human flesh because they fought a battle. One man was killed but the other man was too sick to eat him and so the Kukukuku took the body for themselves to eat. Also, because the winner must have such a powerful liver they would eat it too when the time was right. It depended on the chief and the witch doctor.
"Pete dead?" Merle wondered, aloud. She asked Tomu if her man was alive. "Yes," he said, he had told her that before. Then Pete was dead, killed in a fight with Jack! It was too bizarre, too unbelievable that the chopper should crash and that Pete and Jack would fight to the death. She looked at the gold, and suddenly it had a new meaning an association with death more than the exciting, vibrant life it could buy. Her hand shook as she poured herself another cupful of "jungle juice" and drank it down, its rawness burning her guts, the strength of the alcohol numbing the shock of Tomu's news. She began to feel dizzy and crazily exhilarated at the same time.
"I've beaten the bastards! I know there's gold and I know where! And they're dead or as good as dead, both of them!" she yelled at Tomu.
The native nodded, sensing the meaning of her words and slyly pouring more of the liquid from the bottle into her cup.
She flung the cup to the floor. "No more of that poison, you black bastard," she spat at him. "You want to get me drunk?" She bent down to pull on her boots and would have fallen if the native hadn't caught her. She pushed him away and sat on the bed. Tomu knelt down to pull on her boots like an abject slave and she let him, aware that if she drove him away she might never discover the site before a search party from Port Moresby found the wrecked helicopter, or a police boy on patrol reported the accident to his post.
The blonde could hardly think straight, feeling drunk and confused. "Must go to Ben and Taffy. They can help," she muttered. When she stood up, holding the bowl of earth and gold, she staggered. She asked the native to help her down the bamboo ladder and together they set off in the gathering dusk to the renegades' bush hut, the white girl alternatively cursing the native for holding her arm or cursing him for not holding on to her when she stumbled over roots crossing the path.
"Look who's here!" yelled Taffy, leaning out of a bamboo-shuttered window of their hut. "It's our lovely Yankee sweetheart Merle the fucking pearl!"
"Whacko! You bloody beaut!" echoed Ben, joining him at the window to watch their blonde visitor swaying along the path in the dim evening light while Tomu brushed insects away from her head with a bunch of ferns. Laughing drunkenly at each other, the two men dropped their shorts and stepped out of the hut, naked, to meet her.
Tomu knew enough about white men's habits to know that the two bearded men were breaking a taboo by appearing naked like that. He also knew enough about foreigners to discriminate between the good and the evil ones among them. As for Ben and Taffy, the whole village of Wamba had decided they were definitely bad, evil men. His reddened eyes glowered with hate and anger; his frustrated feelings for the white girl were enough to stir his jealousy and envy to burning hatred, and when Taffy told him to "bugger off" he controlled his anger with difficulty.
"Wait, Tomu," Merle said, nervously. "Look here, look at this pot of gold," she added, knocking Taffy's hand away from her crotch.
"Jeez! Look, Ben. It's the real thing all right! Hey we're rich!"
Ben gouged his fingers into the pot, rubbing the tiny pebbles between his fingers, and asked all the same questions Merle had asked Tomu.
"Tomu brought it to me. He knows where it is, so lay off him, will you? Without him we'll miss out." Then remembering the other news Tomu brought her she hesitated before telling the two whites whose lewdly naked loins were already reacting to her presence. She felt there was nothing else she could do but tell them.
"The chopper crashed, Pete's dead and the cannibals have got Jack," she announced flatly, trying unsuccessfully to shake off Ben's strong hand as he guided her up the steps of the hut.
"Jesus Christ! Hear that, Taffy? The kite's gone in and the boongs are eatin' boiled Yank for supper."
"Yeah, I heard. Looks like we got ourselves a gold mine or somethin'. Dunno how we're gonna make anythin' out of it unless we play along with our friends here," replied Taffy, climbing behind the girl and clasping her khaki-clad buttocks in his hands.
"That's right, mate. Ask Tomu in for a drink. Say, Merle, have you been drinkin'? Bit staggery, I'd say." Ben had wondered why she was swaying along the path, thinking perhaps she was fatigued from running away from a horny boong.
"When I heard the news I had to drink something, it was so awful.. . and Tomu had some jungle juice. Not used to it. Now, I came here to plan what to do, the three of us...not much time.. . " She felt weak now, and frightened, although her pussy under her tight-fitting pants was beginning to twitch in a strangely satisfying way.
Squatting by the door, Tomu refused a proffered cup of rum. He would need all his wits about him while in the hut of these two wild men who eyes changed to slits when they laughed and glinted with meanings that were not of humor. They asked him more about the exact whereabouts of the crash and he told them again what the Kukukukus had passed on to him. The news of the fight and the fact that the gold arrived by being passed from hand to hand so that Tomu could not say exactly where the machine crashed, except that it was near a waterfall and there were many waterfalls in that part of the mountains. Tomu was also shrewdly aware that if the white's knew how to find the gold they would have no further use for him. The men would treat him the way they treated all natives like animals. And the girl would never let him as near to her as he had been that evening, touching her arm, her feet, her hands. She despised him as a lower form of human. He knew that, and he knew that most whites thought Melanesians were ugly, when it was really the other way round, in most cases.
He had first thought that the white girl was ugly because she was so tall and her hair was almost like the native albinos he had heard about, but when he watched her perform the sex rite with the two whites he discovered that she was more skilled than any native girl in New Guinea. From then on he planned to make her his mary. Listening to their talk he knew they spoke of gold and did not mourn, as was proper, the loss of the two men. He had expected the girl at least to ask the chief for a runner to go to the nearest police post, days away by foot, whereas the gold was working its evil spell on them as it did on all white people. The "drunk-water" he gave to Merle was intended to incite her for a sex rite with him, but she had tasted it and thrown it away and was now drinking some offered to her by the bearded white men who couldn't control their genitals.
He glared at them vengefully.
Subconsciously Merle had known from the time she set out from the village that she would have to submit sexually to the two Australians, unless they had decided to respect her to get a share of the gold. Ben soon made their intentions as explicit as their nakedness and their hard erections. She wondered if they suspected that she would have Tomu kill them both once her claim was lodged in Port Moresby.
"In our house, Merle, you gotta follow the house rules: no drinkin' with ya clothes on," he said, and with one quick movement of his hand, he ripped the buttons from her shirt and pulled it aside to expose one of her ripely up-thrust breasts. She made a gesture of wanting to hit him, of wanting to leave, but she was trapped by her greed for gold; they were the only people who could help her, and if they were to go into Kukukuku country, they could defend her. So she drained her glass of rum, allowed Taffy to stand her upright while Ben stripped her naked; boots off first, then her pants and her shirt, all the while their four hands were feeling intimately over her body.
"Take that native outside, I can't bear to see him, sitting there with his lap-lap flapping up and down," Merle said drunkenly referring to Tonu's excited cock.
"I'll take him outside...wanna have a quick word with him," said Ben. He hauled Tomu up by his arm and pointed outside, leaving Taffy who had gone down on his knees to ease apart the long legs of the standing, swaying blonde. He gripped her naked buttocks, buried his face in her pubic mound and began to lick her warmly perfumed cuntal furrow.
Tomu's eyes widened as he looked behind him at the lewd scene before going down to the steps, and he wondered why Ben followed him. Apprehensively he kept well away from the white man who led him out of earshot from the hut. Ben talked to him in fluent pidgin, asking him how interested he was in getting himself a white mary, and if he was, could he offer anything in exchange. Everyone bartered in the territory, especially in the old days when coin was valueless to the natives, so the first barter trading was knives for gold.
Tomu soon caught on to what was in the Australian's mind: if he had something to barter, the girl might be bartered in exchange, and the something, of course, must be gold or money. Yes, Tomu said, he knew exactly where the gold was. How could he be sure that he would get the girl and be able to keep her?
"I'll tell you exactly what to do," Ben said in English, forgetting for an instant that the native could only speak pidgin and "boong talk." He had been lying, knowing that there was no way of making sure the girl could be trapped into being Tomu's mary without her consent and the consent of the chief, and it was only then, when he forgot to speak in pidgin, that he found the answer to the problem.
"You makim tok-tok along headman bilong you," he said, telling the astounded native that there was a sure way of effecting the barter if he played it cool and did a little double-crossing of his own. Tomu was to tell the chief that the white girl was in love with him and wanted to be married, tribal fashion; then he would be asked to bring the girl along for the chief to question her, and as the only person who could translate the local language to pidgin was Tomu himself. "Well," Ben said, "everythin's hunky-dory, ain't it?" Lapsing into broad Australian.
Tomu was very confused by the naked white man's reasoning, and it took several repetitious explanations of the plan before it sank into his head. When it did dawn on him that he really could get the girl, the beautiful white-haired girl with the fair hair around her cunt and breasts that stayed uptilted instead of flapping down like razor straps, as happened to the breasts of native women when they got older Tomu knew that he could easily convince the chief that, because her man was dead and because she wanted him, Tomu. The chief would have to pronounce them married when they both agreed.
The gold: Tomu knew where the gold came from, had known of the location for years, but he saw the metal as an evil omen, blaming the warlike nature of the Kukukukus on the fact that they traded in the metal. If the girl had gold she would become as evil as they were, and if the two wild Australians possessed it, they would be more dangerous than ever, and they would cheat him by taking his white woman away. While the white man watched him intently he couldn't concentrate his thoughts and stood, shuffling his large flat feet on the ground.
Seeing Tomu struggling with thought, Ben told him to go straight away to the chief. If he announced his marriage now, he said, the chief would have made up his mind what to do, and tomorrow morning he could question the girl. As soon as he spoke to the chief, why, he could come back and take the girl home, if he gave Ben the true location, the exact place and a proper description of the lode area. Otherwise, he warned, he and his friend would cut his balls off and shove them down his throat.
Tomu understood all of this, nodded his head and ran jogging along the track towards the village.
"I'll give her one in the jacksie for ya while yer away, sort of get ya bride ready with some good old white man's meat," Ben yelled after him.
Tomu couldn't understand the words but the meaning of the Australian's tone brought curses of jealous anger from his throat. He thought of returning with his spears, thought of how the chief would turn him over to the police boy or a patrol officer when he called at the village, and thought of the sex-rite he would make that night. No, he must be very careful.
Ben expected to find the wildcat blonde fighting the ginger-bearded man, knowing how she hated him, when he ran up the steps into the hut. There was enough twilight left for him to see the girl's back humped on top of Taffy: Christ! She was fucking him! Her ass was going up and down over his piston-cock which he bucked up into her eagerly pumping cunt, working as if they were cumming, both of them, only it went on and on, the blonde's hands down on his chest to control her movement. Taffy was grunting from the effort to keep up with her action, for she was rising high up, forcing him to buck as if a snake had its teeth in his balls, so that his wet tool didn't slip out. And on her downstroke. Merle squeezed her buttocks together, tightening her cuntal muscles as she slid her rapturous pussy down hard on the man's long thick penis, thumping Taffy's buttocks onto the reed mat that served as his bed.
"Ride him, cowgirl!" Ben yelled, laughing raucously. "Ya'll break him in an' then ya can ride him over to the goldmine." He tried to straddle Taffy's head so that the lusting blonde could suck his erected cock, avoiding a blow aimed at his sperm-laden balls when Taffy told him to get out of the way.
Then the older man stood behind Merle, placed his hands under her ripely swaying breasts and lifted her clean off his friend, so quickly that Taffy's throbbing penis, wet from Merle's cunt, sucked sloppily out of her cunt and bucked up into empty air. Ben told him not to try anything he was merely turning her round to be done on the other side.
"Now, sweetheart," he said to the bewildered girl, "sink your hot little twat down again on me mate's cock," and she obediently squatted down, her back to Taffy, looking down to guide the hot, slippery weapon back up into her cunt while Taffy remained lying flat on his back, his legs jutting out from under her kneeling position. "That's right, Merle the pearl, now lean forward and take me ol' tossle into that cute little mouth of yours, an' we'll all be gettin' a bit.. . ah, that's lovely, ahhhhh, Jeez, she sure knows her stuff, eh, Taffy?"
"Yeah," Taffy grunted. He held the girl's waist with one hand as her hotly clasping cunt slowly rose and fell over his fleshy shaft, forcing her to adjust herself to the position. Then he idly wet his middle finger and, without warning, forced it into her anus.
Merle butted forward, and she gagged as Ben's large blood-filled penis plunged into the back of her throat. She was just beginning to appreciate the clitoris-thrilling position as she ravenously took a cock into each end of her body, but Taffy's brutally thrust finger into her painfully stretched rectum caused a spasm of agony to dart through her belly. She reached around and frantically tried to remove the sadistically stuck digit, but she was unable to fight the strength of Taffy's hand. For agonizing seconds she was unable to move or suck until her defensively puckering anus accepted the finger that began to move in and out, slowly revolving to stretch her tight little opening wider. Gradually the ripping pain receded, and she suddenly found herself settling back against the skewering finger.
"Take ya hand away and finger yerself now, sweetheart," called Taffy.
She shook her blonde hair, unable to reply with Ben's determined efforts to get all of his long, thick cock into her mouth and using both her hands around the butt of his shaft to control him. Each time he pulled out from her obscenely bulging cheeks she slid her hands along his cock to massage it in quick jerks. Her mind was blank except for her concentration on getting every inch of satisfaction from the animalistically pumping men, the mixture of rum and jungle juice in her system providing not only a mind-blowing drug, but also stirring her wanton lust for sex to an unbearably sensuous state of desire. She felt her orgasm building up like a fire kindling and burning from her eagerly quivering cunt to her anus, along the thousands of nerves and she felt as if every pore in her skin was vibrating. Any moment now, she would feel the deliciously satisfying hot explosion that would wrack her body as she came.
Suddenly she crashed to the floor from a mercilessly cruel blow across the side of her face, Ben's cock slipping out of her mouth while Taffy yelled in anger as she painfully forced his cock out, sideways and forward, making him sit up.
"Why'd ya bash her, Ben?" Taffy asked, staring at the older man as if he had never seen such a crazy act.
"She got her teeth along me old fella, that's why, ya mug." Ben said, examining his saliva wet penis. "Looks okay," he admitted when Taffy told him the blonde never hurt him with her teeth.
"Ah, shit!" exploded Ben. "I don't go for the gamma that much. Let's do her standin' me in fron an' you up her dingering-doo!"
"Anythin' ya say, but for Christ's sake don't go gettin' athletic again almost twisted me cock off when she went sideways."
Quivering with fear and frustration, Merle lay weeping on the floor, unable to believe that such insensitive, mindless people existed in the world. As Ben leaned down to pick her up, she cringed away from him so piteously he told her he was sorry, it might have been his own fault for scraping his cock across her molars.
"Give us a kiss an' make up," he asked her as he hoisted her roughly on to her feet, steadying her nakedly swaying body by shoving his long rigid cock between her legs.
"No you're nothing but animals.. . " she blurted out, but suddenly her mouth was forced hard against Ben's, his teeth biting her lips so roughly she thought in wild panic that she was bleeding. She felt Taffy's hands slide around to grasp tightly at the sensitive flesh of her breasts, his burly body pressing against her from behind. "Wh...what are you doing?" she whimpered.
"Tell ya what I'm doin' I'm stickin' me cock up ya cunt, sweetheart, so open ya legs an' help me in," Ben told her, sweatily bending his knees slightly to lower his loins so that he could work his probing erection up into her wetly gaping pussy. He wormed his bulging cock-head into her, past the warmly inviting entrance to her vagina and, forcing it gratifyingly hard up her, he was able to stand erect again with their naked bellies pressed together.
Merle responded to the relative satisfaction of the more likeable man being in her and in front of her; she responded as quickly to his kissing as her pussy did to the return of rampant flesh inside its warmly wet passage. Although she was tall, the blonde was compelled to rise up on her toes each time Ben fucked up into her with Taffy's hard cock sliding up and down the sweat-dampened crevice between her ass-cheeks. She felt a return of fearful tension building up quickly in her stomach when Taffy said. "An' now I go in, the back way."
"Give me a drink, please...I.. . I can't do that," the girl begged, impaled from in front. Taffy moved away from rubbing his sweating body and cock against her back and buttocks, poured a large rum into a tin mug and held it to her lips to drink. The raw alcoholic drink burned all the way down her gullet and, she knew, could have helped her bear the perversely disgusting attack in her anus, but the impatient ginger-bearded man was already spreading apart the trembling cheeks of her silken buttocks and thumbing open her anus for his cockhead to penetrate. He deposited a gob of spittle on her anal crack, watched it slowly slither past her puckering little anus, then thrust his hardened cock forward.
"Eeeee...aaaaahhhh! What are you doing? You're hurting me!" she screamed, her body rising and falling as Ben fucked away in front, not bothering to stop while his friend slowly pushed into her from behind.
"Shut up," the older man growled, not caring that the half-demented girl had dug her nails into his back as she fought back a desire to tear Taffy's eyes right out of their sockets. Then he had an idea: he lifted the girl's legs up around his waist, so that as she sat there on his hot throbbing member he could sink deeper into her cunt, at the same time giving his friend a better access to her anus.
"Say, what a terrific position!" Taffy exclaimed, finding the girl's futilely squirming buttocks more accessible as he screwed his thick, lust-swollen cock into her pain-wracked anus. With every inch of his long hard penis's intrusion into her anal passage, the girl convulsively jerked forward against Ben, whose clammy mouth on hers stifled her agonized cries. Each time Taffy stabbed his hardened rod of flesh a little further in, the more it seemed to swell as though the heat of her tight rear passage and his perverse act stimulated him. He found he was using all his brute force to ram his pulsating shaft all the way into her tight rectal opening, but, once in, with girl's voluptuous body nakedly jerking up and down to the movement of Ben's cunt-fucking, he found her rear orifice moistening up from his own excitedly oozing penis, and then he was able to concentrate on sodomizing the moaning girl while he assisted Ben in holding her up in the air off the floor.
Merle swayed in the middle of the sex sandwich when the men eased their grip around her torso, and although she was being furiously buffeted between them, her fiercely excited genitals were aflame with a lewd pleasure. The moaning blonde, her eyes closed in wanton abandon, was impaled by the twin swords of hotly throbbing male flesh. Ben held her under her knees which were bent up around his waist. She leaned her back against Taffy's chest. And when she gave herself in with completely relaxed, sluttish abandonment, with her eyes closed and her mouth lewdly agape, living only for the fantastic thrills of the double fuck, she would sway to one side and another and was only prevented from rolling onto the floor by Taffy who grabbed greedily at her soft, resilient breasts to steady her.
It was a fuck she would remember all her life, Merle knew, because her mind and body were obsessed with the solid pistoning penises thumping up into her rectum and her cunt; when they fucked up alternatively, her body shook convulsively to the thrill of the two hard, fleshy pistons shoving her up and forward in front, then up and forward under her buttocks, starting a rhythm that wobbled her head and shook her ripely swaying breasts up and down. It was like fucking in outer space, she thought, feeling a sense of lightness without the weight of a man's body on her.
But then, both lust-stiffened cocks broke the timing and fucked up under her together, and her own weight brought her down too jerkily hard; then she dropped her legs from around Ben's waist, pointed her legs straight down to the floor where her toes barely touched the mat. It was then that she began to enjoy another variation of the double fuck sensation, for Ben and Taffy pressed in with their bodies, one tight against her breasts and belly, the other tight against her back and buttocks. In that position she knew they must feel the presence of each other's throbbing erections inside her, the thought of it sparked the utterly satisfying feeling of her cunt flooding with her liquid passion. The reality of the world dissolved...the constant, exquisitely maddening feeling of her cumming formed the only fact of her existence.
To her now, Ben and Taffy were not personalities. In her state of euphoric and feverish cunt-greedy contentment, the wantonly fucking girl was aware only of their sweating, sliding nakedness, their beards, long hair and grunting chests heaving in front and behind her, their magnificently hardened cocks working in unison in and out of her twin openings. She came...faltered in exhaustion and bliss...then came again! With each climactic cumming each one more explosive, more maddeningly delicious and therefore more encouraging to achieve more and more she gratefully kissed the man in front and twisted her head to suck at the other man's tongue licking at her ears and neck. Her body was bruised from the fierce clutch of their work-coarsened hands, yet she welcomed their lustfulness, for she was more alive than she had ever believed possible experiencing more sensual pleasure than ever before.
Ben grunted, then came first, yelling out with animalistic passion as the insanely writhing girl came yet again, more intensely, as though his hot throbbing penis demanded it of her wetly convulsing pussy. Jet after jet of his heated semen spurted deep up into her womb, causing her belly to ripple in lewd delight against his; she tongued into his mouth, expressing her wanton happiness, and her hands pulled him tighter to her nakedness, holding him until he grunted in his final semen-jerking spasm. As Ben pulled his deflating penis out of her tightly clasping cunt, Merle slid her feet down to the floor and eagerly bent forward to suck at his slackening flesh, finding the new position allowed Taffy's long hard cock an even deeper penetration into her wildly puckering anus.
Only Ben was aware of the fact that Tomu had arrived back in the hut as Taffy reached his climax over the bent-forward naked blonde.
"Ahhhhhhhhh! Jeez, you sweet bitch! I'm cummin' in ya luscious ass!" the ginger-bearded man cried out, his legs shaking, knees bent, as he rammed his madly jerking member as far as it could go into the hot buttery depths of her rectum until his hairy pelvis thumped to a stop against her smooth rounded buttocks. He closed his eyes and trembled in lewd delight as his thick burgeoning cock released its flood of spurting cum deep up into her belly. Then he let his hands drop from their grip around her soft warm breasts and Merle fell forward to the reed mat on the floor, Ben's cock slipping out of her panting, drooling mouth. They left her lying there on her belly, smirking salaciously when they saw her hand go under her belly to slide down in an effort to finger her clitoris.
"Me fetchem drunk-water!" the native said, holding up a bottle of jungle juice.
"Christ! What's the boong doin' here, Ben? Has he been watchin' the bitch gettin' it in both holes?" Taffy could barely see the native in the darkened hut lit only by the light from stars and a quarter moon.
"Cool it, Taffy. I think we got somethin' to celebrate. Our boong friend here from the land of the fuzzy-wuzzies is doin' a bit of business with you and me. A barter arrangement," he explained. Taffy grabbed the bottle from Tomu and tilted it up in his mouth. "Shee-it! Real hundred percent fire-water. Tastes like sugary piss!" he spluttered. "Not a bad drop at all. What do ya mean, Ben, about the barterin'? What do we barter and for what?"
Ben nodded towards the prone naked form of the blonde writhing insatiably on the floor, her buttocks quivering and gently rising as she fingered and teased her clitoris.
Taffy caught on that they could trade the American girl for something.
"And?" he asked, lighting a cigarette and holding the match to look at Tomu, who was transfixed, staring at the beautiful, naked white girl, and he looked almost like a carved wooden idol. Taffy saw too that the native was wearing festive paint, bright red lines under his eyes and a streak down his nose, his bottom Up a ghostly white, painted with a chalky mixture. "Christ, look at Tomu!" Taffy exclaimed. "He's all done up like a Christmas tree!"
He looked quizzically at Ben.
"Well," said the older man. "A certain boong in this hut is gonna tell us where we can look to make our fortune."
"Ya mean to tell me Tomu knows where the gold is, after all? An' that if he tells us, we give him Merle the Pearl to keep?" blurted out Taffy, careless of the problems that Merle would cause when she knew.
The lewdly writhing girl heard the words, but their meaning didn't sink in for a few seconds. Then when they did, she sat up abruptly, screaming.
Taffy stood over her and slapped her hard across the face. "Shut up, ya bitch, or I'll kick ya teeth out," he growled.
"Lay off her, Taffy. Ya gotta bash every Sheila ya meet? Besides, she's valuable worth her weight in gold, aren't ya, sweetheart?" Ben's sarcasm amused the younger renegade.
"Can ya trust this bastard boong?" he asked, striking another match to look at the native with his courting colors on.
"What else? What have we got to lose?" Ben took a swig of the jungle juice, shuddered and swigged again, passed the bottle to Taffy and lit himself a cigarette. As soon as the match flickered out, they both saw the girl dart out through the hut entrance, leap down to the ground, and then she was lost to their sight as they and Tomu crashed together at the bamboo doorway.
"Catch the bitch she won't go far naked," growled Ben.
In the struggle to sort themselves out, Ben elbowing his way to get out first, Tomu slipped down under their legs and leaped down over the steps ahead of them.
Ben saw that he could lose both the girl and the vital information, so he yelled to Taffy to concentrate on holding the native. Taffy ran, dived in, in an easy Rugby tackle to hold Tomu by the legs while Ben ran up to them and sat on the downed native's shoulders. Peering into the moon cast shadows and the small section of track that disappeared into the overhanging jungle, neither man could see any sign of the naked girl. She had completely disappeared.
They lifted the native up to his feet. "Right, Tomu, you'll tell us all we want to know," Ben said, repeating his request in pidgin. Walking back to the hut, Tomu said that the reason he ran was to get the girl back to make the deal formally with the white man. Being a very honorable man, he would stick to his bargain.
Inside the hut the renegades passed the bottle of jungle juice to each other without offering a drink to Tomu. The more they sipped at the raw coconut beverage, the more its sugary taste seemed to increase their shirts and the less their guts burned.
Tomu convinced them that he did know exactly where to find the alluvial gold when he offered to take the renegades there himself. He had friends among the Kukukuku, he said, and could arrange trade with them which would allow the white men to establish a camp and stake a claim. And Ben convinced Tomu that, if he was lying, he and Taffy would return to Wamba village, cut his balls out, take his white woman and burn down the whole fucking place. In the weak moonlight, the renegades saw fear in the native's eyes as they made their threats. Ben picked up the small clay pot of gold-flecked earth. When they had a thousand of such pots filled with gold, he said, he and his friend would have another white woman sent up from Port Moresby for Tomu.
"Tell him to go an' find his mary," laughed Taffy. "The black bastard's stinkin' the hut out, an' I'm feelin' a bit wonky from drinkin' an' fuckin' more from the bloody booze. Shit! I'm feelin' bloody crook all of a sudden."
"No wonder, mixin' rum and that piss -don't feel so great meself," said Ben, yawning as the native cautiously climbed down the steps and padded off along the track.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Merle lost count of the number of times she fell as she fled along the muddy path, scratching her naked body against vines that hung out in the darkness like live, vengeful thorny whips. She reached the village in terror that the natives would suddenly grab her. Mud spattered, bleeding from a multitude of scratches and bumps rising all over her body from insect bites, she staggered into the silent square of the village, seeking the hut of the chief. She had never seen him except when he was sitting under his favorite palm tree and had never bothered to discover where he actually lived, but she decided that the only remarkable structure a tall bamboo and palm leaf hut, high gabled with a kind of crudely carved wooden totem standing outside must be his hut.
Semi-delirious from drinking Tomu's gift of jungle juice and from her bruises, bites and scratches fear-stricken and with hate in her heart, she climbed the steps to the large hut, pushed aside the hanging leaf curtain and stepped inside. Hearing a human grunt near her in the blackness, she cried out, "Help me please help me," in a pitifully weak moan.
The voice that replied in an incomprehensible native language was male and so was the hand that reached out to touch her, feeling her nakedness, touching her breasts and feeling down over her belly to her muskily odorous pussy. Then she heard other male voices muttering as she asked to speak with the chief, careful to use pidgin. The voices sounded angry, the man touching her the angriest of all, his voice rising to a yell as he gripped her by the arm. No one replied to her in pidgin, and she suddenly remember that only Tomu spoke that language among all of the villagers.
Another hand touched her, and another, hands that felt over every intimate part of her face and defenseless body, running their fingers through her hair, feeling the thickness of her thighs, her calves and her arms. A silence fell throughout the large hut when one of the men yelled an order and, in a quick change of tone, said something to which the voices grunted assent.
In the silence, the handling of her body continued. Her legs were spread apart as she stood, and someone stood behind her, pinning her arms.
The stricken girl, still hopeful that someone would light a lamp and bring her before the chief, screamed and buckled at the knees when she felt the large rubbery head of a native's erect penis jam itself at her pussy and slip underneath between her thighs; it felt like an enormous slithering snake. And then, mercilessly, she was being fucked....
The rest of the night she could not remember, either because she was unconscious most of the time or that any remembrance of her ordeal might have driven her out of her mind. She did remember that her body reacted whorishly to every man who fucked her in the hut. There were only nine of them, including eight young warriors whose sacred privilege it was to sleep in the "long hut" that night, guarding the idols from being stolen by night-raiding parties from nearby tribes who might hope to take them to their own sacred "long hut," to add prestige and power to their own gods.
The large brown male who first fucked her as she lay semi-conscious on the floor was the only old man present. He was the village witch doctor, a cunning and powerful man who adroitly convinced the young bachelors sharing his vigil that a sex rite was an essential part of ridding the "long hut" from the evils associated with the sacrilegious intrusion by a female. He knew she was the white girl that Tomu always followed to the river, and he, too, had heard the news of her man's capture by the feared Kukukuku tribe. The white man would never return, the witch doctor knew. He also realized that he himself would win popularity by giving such an obtainable young white girl to the bachelors after he had satisfied the demands of his own stirring balls.
And so they all fucked the wantonly moaning girl. When one man came, the old witch doctor merely rolled the naked blonde toward the next young man. After she had been rolled completely around the hut, the young warriors talked about her among themselves, each describing how extraordinarily agile her cunt had been, as if it were filled with small slippery snakes. To them, her body odor was offensively different from their own, but as they remarked to each other it was worth putting up with to have such an exceptional cunt for practicing the sex rite. The witch doctor exorcised his evil spirit again through the injection of his thickly rigid penis that managed to spurt still more semen into her already sloppily flooded womb before sending her rolling on the next round of grunting, sweating intercourse. A couple of young cynics asked how many times it would take to fuck the evil spirits away and so cleanse the contaminated hut. Until she could no longer react to the sex rite, the witch doctor replied, counting the sound of orgasms so that he could again prepare himself for her. For the next round, he thought, the young man should perform the sex rite in the white girl's anus just in case one of the idols was still offended and cast an evil over the witch doctor's large vegetable garden and pen of six pigs....
Merle recovered consciousness to the sounds of angry women screaming and screeching at her in their ugly guttural language. Tomu was defending himself against their flailing arms as he splashed her face with water. He stayed long enough to tell her that she had offended the whole tribe by going into the men's club the sacred "long hut" where women were forbidden to enter or even to discover the nature of the idols inside. He added that he was sorry for what the women would do to her. but it was a custom that no one could interfere with, not even the Patrol Officer.
Then he was gone, leaving Merle to the enraged women who attacked her willingly and fearsomely, slapping her with open hands across her face and body, pinching her bruised breasts and holding her while a large fat woman squatted down and urinated over her loins. They dragged the screaming girl to a mud puddle and threw her roughly into the center of it as they churned the water and mud into a slimy paste. The same fat woman, who appeared to be the leader of the revengeful pack, held Merle's long blonde hair up in her fat fists, jerking the girl's head back. The woman then jabbered to the others who began dumping pig manure from baskets into the slime and stirred it about.
Merle never saw the rusty old scissors, but she screamed piercingly as she felt and heard the clip, clip of the blades slicing with cruel jabs close to her head.
"Don't oh don't!" she begged. "Why do you want to hurt me? I've not done anything wrong. Why must you cut off my hair my beautiful hair!"
When the cutting was finished, she was bald!
They spat at her when she spoke, hating more from jealousy of her beautifully developed young body and the fact that she was not of their color than from anger at her desecration of their equivalent of a church. The fat woman yelled back at her, her wobbling brown jowls close to Merle's face, and although neither woman understood the other, both had a good idea of what the other was saying. When the painful ordeal of the hair clipping was over, the woman held Merle's long ash-blonde tresses high in the air for the villagers to see, then dangled them aggravatingly in front of the white girl sitting in the middle of the stinking mud-hole.
Slop! The first scooped handful of the foul mixture sprayed over her shorn head, quickly followed by others as all the women joined in plastering her from head to foot while Merle vomited into the puddle. The angry women completed their "purifying" of the girl by rolling her around in the muck, then they took her to the corner post of a hut where they tied her.
Tomu later told her when he brought fruit and water to her guarded hut that, according to old custom, it was essential that the purification should continue for a long time, and that whenever she washed off the dried dung and mud atonement decoration, she would be forcibly plastered with it again; also, each time she was re-plastered, her hair would be cut if it had grown, so if she wanted to grow her hair and be accepted by the tribe, she would be well-advised not to bathe. Anyway, Tomu said, she would not need a mosquito net while she "wore dung."
When the sun dried the dung-cake into her tufted hair and over her naked body, the women led her before the chief who sat as usual under his palm tree. Tomu was by his side, wearing his lap-lap and with his face in ceremonial paint.
The wizened old chief asked Tomu if he really wanted to marry this disgusting white creature who stank like a pig pen. Yes, he wanted her as his mary, he said.
Merle asked Tomu to tell the chief that she hadn't meant to go into the "long hut" she thought it was the chiefs house.
Tomu translated what she said as the white girl begs to be allowed to become my mary.
The chief asked Merle if she wanted to be Tomu's mary, and Tomu translated the question to her was she sincerely sorry for having desecrated the sacred hut?
Merle nodded her head of brown mud-dung and tried to force a smile for the chief. He shook his head in wonderment. In his experience, no well-to-do young man like Tomu would look twice at a disgraced woman, even if as the witch doctor informed him the woman was cleverly satisfying in the sex rites.
Merle replied to the chiefs question, saying that she was very sorry indeed and wouldn't blame the chief for what happened to her when she saw the authorities in Port Moresby.
Tomu translated this as yes, she had wanted to be Tomu's mary ever since the day she met him, and one day she would take him to Port Moresby to meet her parents.
The chief stood up, placed his hands on the bride and groom and announced to the gawking villagers that henceforth the white woman was Tomu's mary. The crowd reacted with such giggling and belly-grabbing laughter that Tomu rattled his brain to think of a suitable translation.
"What's all that about?" Merle asked Tomu in pidgin.
"The chief," said Tomu, "has ordered that I must be the only one to visit you while you are under guard in your hut.. . you are to be guarded," (he stumbled, thinking hard) "until the police boy comes.. . I will guard you at night...the women will beat you if you object, because that is the custom of the village...."
"What are they all laughing about?" she asked, unable to understand why she should be guarded.
"Because," said Tomu, "they are happy that the chief has decreed that the young warriors from the "long hut" cannot spear you to death as they were promised by the old witch doctor. The chief makes sure everyone knows he is supreme boss, you see, and the people are happy."
Under the patches of flaking dried dung and mud, Merle's cheeks paled. So, she was not to be speared to death, only because of politics! The nightmarish scene continued. As Tomu led her away, holding onto her arm in case she fainted from her ordeals, the small crowd of villagers parted and laughed gaily at her as she walked towards her hut, and the ugly women with long razor-strop tits and the fat woman gave her garlands of sweet-smelling frangipani to hang around her dung-caked neck.
My God! It can't be real! I'm in a madhouse in the middle of a jungle full of stone-age maniacs! Merle thought. Christ! Won't these bastards get a shock when Ben and Taffy come here and wreck their fucking sacred hut! Then disillusionment struck her as she remembered how she had gone to the hut; Ben and Taffy had wanted to exchange her for the secret of the gold field! Tears of helpless self-pity coursed down her cheeks while Tom gently helped her climb up the ladder of her hut, her muscle-tired long legs cracking the mud and dung plaster.
* * *
The deaths of Ben and Taffy were as much the fault of Merle's sex appeal as of her lust for gold as well as having tempted fate themselves once too often. Had they lived, Tomu might have explained to them that they had not only offended his dignity, they had also endangered the ordered tribal life of his village by their offensive attitudes and their plan to corrupt with gold, the most evil of all. He would never, however, have admitted that he doctored the jungle juice he gave them with an essence distilled from a pretty pink flower, or described how the essence could kill painlessly after it sent a man to sleep.
Tomu salved his conscience by blaming the girl for the way she seemed to manipulate all these weak men. First the gold prospector man, who was like a woman in her presence, then the pilot who died because she made him take her man into Kukukuku country, and now he had to explain to the chief how the two Australians living in the hut in the jungle died from drinking more rum and jungle juice than all the villagers would consume in a year.
A man out hunting had scented the dead bodies three days after they died, and because the chief would have to make a report to a police boy or Patrol Officer, he had to suffer the disagreeable sight of the rotting, fly-blown corpses and order the hut to be burned to the ground. Tomu waited until after his evening sex rite with Merle that night before telling her that Ben and Taffy were dead, and their bodies were buried deeply in the ground as a precaution against possible disease infection.
What had they died from? the girl absent-mindedly asked while she drank jungle juice from a dirty tin cup and picked away at pieces of dung in her tufted hair.
"Fever," answered Tomu, a word which to his people meant either the fever of sickness or the fever of greed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jack Shepherd at first thought he was back in his hut as he looked up to see a palm-leaf roof above his head and felt someone messing around with his cock.
"Merle?" he grunted. Gradually he realized that his hands were tied to a post behind him, that he was lying naked on the ground, the roof was an overhanging lean-to, and that the person playing with his penis was a small native girl who scurried away when he spoke, running to a group of natives a few yards away. One of them, a young warrior wearing brilliant red Bird of Paradise feathers in his hair, a headband of white feathers, and Jack's broken, lensless spectacles tied round his neck, walked over to study him. Jack could see the native more clearly than he could see objects at a distance, clearly enough to see that the spear the native carried was pointed with a sharp barbed head.
"You speakim pidgin?" the geologist asked, racking his brains for the right words. The native shook his head, walked away and returned with two other natives also head-dressed with feathers and neck decoration. One of them who wore a woman's pink brassiere around his muscled chest smiled at him as he bent down to feel Jack's arm, testing its strength.
More natives arrived to examine the geologist who was given water to drink before his bonds were untied and he was led before what he understood to be the chief of the tribe. During the first few minutes of regaining consciousness, Jack had flashes of memory of the crash, the awful bitterness he felt towards Merle, and the sight of Pete's smashed skull. "I hope the Kukukukus eat you," Merle had said. The natives holding him now couldn't be anybody else but members of that tribe. Jack knew that he was an irrevocably changed man; in fact, looking back at the way he felt and lived back home he realized how innocent of the world he had been, how unaware of the ways in which the vital essence of a man could be expressed in his endeavors to achieve his objectives. He sincerely regretted that Pete or any man should have to die because of his mad obsession for gold. He wondered if he could ever again cope with people like that, or if he could face death at the hands of these stone-age people without collapsing in terror. One thing was sure: nobody was going to push him around once he was out of this mess if he got out.
"Kallu!" a native behind him grunted, hitting Jack in the back of his head to make him bow to the chief.
Jack turned quickly as his newfound temper blazed up, and he thumped the native in the guts with his fist, doubling him up with pain. Three yelling warriors rushed at him, then stopped in their act of raising their spears when the chief barked out an order. Jack stared at the chief they called Kallu, who stared back at him for a few moments before turning his back, growling a few words at the men, and walked back into his hut.
Amazed that he was still alive. Jack decided that a more elaborate punishment was to be offered him when they led him to a hut and stationed a warrior armed with a spear outside. Judging by the sun it was about nine in the morning an incredible length of time to have been unconscious. His body was one mass of aching pains, bruised and battered, scratched and here and there caked with dried blood. His chances of being rescued by a patrol or a searching plane were about a million to one, he thought as he called out through the doorway that he wanted to "tok-tok" with someone.
Around noon an old wizened man arrived at the hut carrying some cooked yams and a mango which he offered the prisoner. While Jack ate, the old man began to converse in rapid pidgin. Jack shook his head, indicating that he couldn't follow him but if he spoke slowly he might be able to understand.
Was Jack bringing cargo in the flightless bird? the old man asked.
Why, did they expect him to be carrying some cargo or something? Jack asked, thinking the man was crazy.
But he had been referring to another kind of cargo, Jack realized, as the old man rambled on about how he knew the founder of the Cargo Cult after the war, and had been to Townsville and Brisbane with him, looking at all the Cargo the big birds would bring in their fat bellies, like in the war when they would shit out bundles of wonderful merchandise. He had seen the houses in Australia near filled to bursting with Cargo, and his Cult leader knew why: they placed a cloth on a table with a bowl full of flowers in the middle of it, and this enticed the big cargo birds.
They also saw white "monkeys" playing with replica birds. When they arrived back in New Guinea, the leader and himself had made all the people in their village build tables and place cloth and bowls of flowers on them, they built a huge bamboo bird to entice the cargo birds to their village and he grinned salaciously as he said it they decreed that all the women must be free to any man just like the girls were with soldiers in Brisbane.
Christ Almighty! Jack whistled in amazement. He had heard of the Cargo Cult and how the Government had banned it when natives refused to work, expecting every day to be showered with goods from the sky.
Was his wingless bird male or female? the old man asked. Female, Jack replied, a real female bitch of a bird. He then asked the old man if all the villagers here were believers in the Cargo Cult.
Not many, he replied. There was himself, and Kallu, of course, and Maluk, and Krimi, and...he couldn't recall all their names. Why did the white man ask?
Because, said Jack tensely alert with inspiration he, Jack, could make the birds come. He knew how to feed them, what to feed them and how to tame them; he had called the wingless bird which was, unfortunately, too old and sick, and anyhow the evil white man whom Jack fought had poisoned the bird.
Was that why you killed him? the wizened one asked, or did you want to eat him?
Yes, I killed him because he destroyed my bird, Jack replied sadly, thinking of Merle. He sat up with a jerk. God! Surely it's not true about these people eating human flesh!
Carefully he broached the subject as delicately as possible, wary of tripping into a taboo.
Do you eat meat here? he asked in pidgin. The old man looked at him blankly. "Bullamacow" he remembered was the word for beef, either because of the soldiers' tins of "bully beer' or because of the confusions of bull and cow, although a cow was called "bullamacow man". What a hokey language, he thought.
He learned that they very rarely "caught" beef, only pig and sometimes "long pig" from one of the neighboring villages. The message was clear: they ate humans.
He asked if the white man he killed was buried.
Abruptly the old man went deaf, got up to leave, and as he shambled out of the hut he turned and asked Jack if he really could call up the big Cargo birds.
Very sure, the geologist said, but he had to find the right feed the yellow heavy metal he knew Kallu could find before they would drop their precious shit.
Gold, too, was just shit, the young man thought, yellow shit that brought misery and death to people who wanted to hoard it.
* * *
Midway through the steaming hot afternoon while Jack was fretfully dozing in his prison, the entire village began stirring to life. Men and women wearing their finest feathers and thickest face paint, their bodies arrayed with multicolored shells or pieces of shaped metal swung from their necks and wrists, or poked through noses and ears, were leaving their huts to congregate in the main square. Naked children danced squealingly around their parents and after awhile, when one of the older warriors yelled something to them, they all looked toward Jack's prison hut.
The old man calling his name awakened the geologist whose heart suddenly hammered at the sight of so many natives gathering outside. The old man beckoned him to come out. I may as well face the music now as later. Jack thought grimly, stepping out of the hut to follow the old man while two spear-carrying warriors walked on either side, taking him up to the chiefs hut where Kallu sat on a carved wooden stool.
Expressionless, the chief grunted something to the old man who told Jack he must tell Kallu everything he knew about the Cargo birds, and how he could call them. Jack went through the whole pretense again, and as he spoke, he realized he actually would like to bring useful cargo to these primitive people, by-passed in the world's progress towards civilization.
When he finished speaking, the naked young white man who was becoming used to women and children staring at his genitals and could brazen out the occasional handling of his cock by over-inquisitive maidens asked the chief why he was treated like a prisoner, why wasn't he allowed to leave? Kallu stared fixedly at him as if he hadn't heard, or suddenly was unable to understand Jack's elementary pidgin. Apparently, the chief merely wanted the information regarding Cargo Planes confirmed, otherwise Jack was still a despised white man whose fate was in the balance.
The chief pointed towards a hill outside the village, and immediately there was laughter and excited cheering all around him as the villagers started to rush towards the hill. Jack, puzzled, was led in the same direction, still guarded, by the old man.
Why hadn't the chief replied to his questions? he asked. Because, said the old man. Jack would have to prove that he was a real man before he could be trusted. It was the sacred custom of their tribe, he said, that no male was acceptable until he proved his manhood by passing the four Kukukuku tests. "You, he added, have passed one already."
"What was that?" the geologist asked, thinking how the tribe was well named.
The first test of bravery, the pleased old man said, smiling at him: you killed your enemy in equal combat. That is why Kallu wanted your liver it must be a very good liver from such a brave man. When Jack asked him if Kallu still wanted his liver, the old man explained impatiently that, of course, he did, every warrior did, but if he was a real man and could pass the second test of bravery and the other two tests, they would trust him to call the birds.
"Holy Jesus!" Jack exclaimed. And what were these tests? He would find out before the next dawn, the old man told him, slowly nodding his head and looking at Jack as if he hadn't a hope in hell of passing any one of them. Look! he said, as they approached the top of the hill while all the villagers scattered around the sides.
Jack looked, as he walked towards the summit. He saw the top of a bamboo structure tied together with ropes made from vines and, on reaching the top of the hill, he looked down to see that the structure was a tall bamboo tower, the top leaning forward, out towards the crowd of natives gathered in a semi-circle around the base. A long woven vine rope, twisted and old, hung down from the pointed top of the tower to a few feet from the ground, its springiness causing it to move up and down as young native boys jumped up to grab the end of it. Kallu stood aloof from the crowd on his special mound right in front of the base of the strange tower.
"You climb when the rope is pulled up," said the aged Cargo Cultist, as though Jack knew all about the ceremony.
"Why?" he asked, spreading his hands.
The old man raised his eyebrows. "Why? Because when Kallu lifts his arm, you must dive to the ground, and if the rope knows that you are a true man he will hold you and your face will stop that far from the earth," he explained, holding two fingers apart to show how far the springy rope would stop his head, after diving eighty feet down from the tower, keeping him from smashing into the ground by the space of about one and a half inches. Jack saw the slim margin of safety gauged by eye as the man tied the end of the rope to Jack's ankles, gauging at the same time the amount of "give" in the old, eighty-foot long, springy vine rope!
He wanted to ask the old man what madman would decide his fate, but the answer arrived in the form of the local masked witch doctor who, he learned, was also a keen Cargo Cultist. That, at least, was in his favor, he hoped, as the witch doctor measured his height with a stick. Then he was taken to the base of the tower, forced to climb up a few feet, attended by several warriors whose weight already made the top of the tower sway, where he was handed the bottom of the vine to tie around his waist and so do the work of hauling it up to the top.
All the way during the arduous climb, the geologist unsuccessfully attempted to understand the engineering principles involved. A greater mystery was that apparently every adult male in the village had gone through the test, and lived. How many had failed? Who was the genius who could predict the amount of bend in the bamboo structure and the amount of give in the rope when a man's body, dropping at a velocity of about sixty-eight miles an hour? perhaps more, he couldn't calculate it at all, then, dropping eighty feet in a free fall, to be jerked to a sudden halt by the rope tied to his ankles? Jack asked the old man who said that he didn't know but the custom was introduced many years ago by a witch doctor who had lived in the New Hebrides islands.
It took a strenuous half-hour's climb for Jack to reach the top of the tower where the witch doctor was waiting for him. The masked native took the end of the rope, examined it minutely for certain marks, grunted, felt Jack's head, then tied his ankles together with the rope. The rest of the twisted vine had been hauled up into what seemed like a tangled heap behind Jack who was made to stand on the tiny platform that swayed hair-raisingly out two or three feet from the perpendicular. The people below looked small from where he stood. His heart pounded and he felt like praying for forgiveness, to explain to his God that he deserved his death because of his greed for gold.
He was trying to remember how to pray when the witch doctor pushed the naked geologist into space.
To hell with the crazy bastards! The thought flashed into his mind that he should show them a real dive! Inhaling deeply, he puffed out his chest, spread his arms wide and dived to earth in a spectacular swan dive. The ground rushed up at incredible speed, he kept his arms stiffly outstretched, and when the vine rope straightened out under the tensioning of his weight, he closed his eyes for the expected crashing face-first into the earth. The jolt of his sudden stop blacked him out momentarily. Then, miraculously, he knew he was alive when he heard the crowd cheer, and felt the springing rebound of the vine bounce his upside-down body above the hard, foot-compressed "landing ground".
He had made it, alive! He felt like cheering himself and dancing around with the joy of being alive.
He would have been even happier if he had known how the chief was impressed with the way he dived, for when Kallu watched the naked white man falling with his arms outstretched, he became convinced that Jack could work power over the Cargo birds. Didn't he fly down himself like a bird? The white man must certainly understand the birds and be able to talk to them, to make them obey him.
When Jack was released back to his warrior guardians he looked at the chief for approval, seeking some kind of expression in his face that would make him feel that he would not be killed. Kallu stared back with the same distrustful, stony expression he showed before the high diving ceremony. He still wants my liver! the geologist thought, his heart sinking.
* * *
As dusk fell, fewer people hung about Jack's prison hut to stare at the first white man they had ever heard of making the manhood ceremonial dive, who had received the awesome respect of the knowing vine. Some of the girls had brought him water, fruit and the inevitable frangipani flowers whose sweet smell brought immediate memories of his first date with Merle.
He could smell roast pig cooking on fires around the village, tantalizing his taste buds and reminding him that he had hardly eaten anything for days. He was hungry now, and when the old pidgin-speaking man called for him he was as pleased as a child going to a party when he told him that he must join the chief at a feast. This, he knew, was an honor, pigs being so valuable and so rarely eaten. Most of the pigs he had seen at Wamba, so the villagers there informed him, were raised for trade and only very rich men could afford to eat pork. Again the geologist was led out by the old man and escorted by the warriors who had discarded their spears, the first real sign that he might be trusted.
The feast was in the chiefs hut lit by tallow lamps. The cookhouse, if there was one, Jack decided, must have been outside at the rear, for when the food was brought in it was already cooked and served on palm leaves. They squatted on the bamboo floor of the stilt-raised hut decorated inside with painted wooden shields and many spears. There was even a large, raised wooden bed and a low table which was also carved in crude swirls. Jack guessed it would be a party for the family heads as well, but he saw there were only the witch doctor, the old man who interpreted needlessly for the chief, several warriors of the chief's age, and two naked young girls with pink flowers in their hair. The girls, who could have been about fourteen or fifteen, had firm young breasts and, Jack thought, were quite attractive. Finding that they squatted near him all the time and offered him fermented coconut juice to drink from a bowl, he guessed this was the way a Kukukuku host made his victim or whatever Jack might be feel at home. He welcomed both the pleasant sight of the young chocolate-brown girls and the fiery drink, wishing at the same time that the chief would drop his cold reserve and talk to him direct instead of through the old interpreter.
Jack found their eating custom to be most peculiar. He knew pig was scarce and costly, but when the serving began it was as though the champion pig of New Guinea had been slaughtered, and as if Kallu had never tasted pork before. The eating was done in sequence, beginning with Kallu whose "dish" served on a palm leaf caused a stir when it was brought in by a male servant.
The two young girls turned their heads away, gasping, the old Cargo Cultist stood up to stare at the roast meat in the palm leaf, and the warriors all made sounds like they were gargling. And when Kallu picked up the meat and bit savagely into it, Jack was so entranced watching the faces of the guests that he missed seeing the chiefs eyes stare blazingly around the assembly. Everyone except Jack was goggle-eyed at the spectacle of their chief ripping into his food. Perhaps, he thought, this too was part of the traditional ceremony when the chief ate his dinner or perhaps the chief had bred the animal and therefore it was something special.
When his own turn came, towards the end of the meal, to accept his portion of roast pork, he was stared at almost as fixedly and strangely as they had stared at the chief, only now the chief too was staring along with them. He apparently had to be well-mannered also, and "ooh" and "ahh" while Jack chewed and swallowed the over-salted pork. He ate what he reckoned to be about half a pound of tender meat, washed down with a good half-bottle of fermented coconut juice. He wanted to joke about the "wine" but who would understand? After eating so well and being slightly drunk he smiling tried to coax a pleasant response from Kallu, but the same old coldly suspicious glare was the only indication that he was aware of the white man's presence.
The wizened old man, who seemingly held a special position in the tribe got up from where he was sitting next to the chief and came over to squat next to Jack.
Now, Kallu says you must take the two young marys to the bed and make a good sex-rite with them, he said.
Jack laughed in the old man's face. Fuck those two young girls? Christ! What next?
"Is this one of the manhood tests?" he asked.
The old man nodded. "The easiest one if the girls like you. If they don't and if they say they have not been fully satisfied whether they have or not there is always doubt in Kallu's mind. Sometimes he has to beat the girls to find out if they are telling the truth, and then, if they still say they are not satisfied, he gives them to our strongest warriors to find out if the girls would ever be satisfied. If they can't, they are killed, but no girl has ever been unsatisfied by a warrior."
Jack smiled tipsily at the young girls who shyly lowered their eyes and giggled. His smile died on his face when he thought of what would happen if.. . My God! Supposing he couldn't get a hard-on....
Kallu yelled an order, making Jack jump at the harsh sound of his voice. As he expected, it was an order for the girls to lead Jack to the bed to start the ceremony.
It was a great honor for them, the two virgins whom the chief called Nahl and Dunni, to be chosen for a manhood sex-rite. Normally the girls would have lost their virginity after choosing a man or being chosen at a meeting one night between all the eligible males and females, most of'them young, a few of them older men who could afford a second or third wife. In the highlands this was called the "turnim head" ceremony, a literal description of how they sat together in a long row, girl, man, girl, man, and when the mating signs were right each couple began rolling their heads against each other, rolling from their ears to their foreheads and back again, for hours on end. It was a timeless tradition, an exhausting yet to the natives a satisfying form of public courtship which ended in sexual fulfillment for both man and girl.
"Turnim head", ordered the chief, once the young maidens positioned Jack between them on the raised, palm-leaf matted bed, squatting with their backs to the wall. They held their hands tenderly against Jack's head while they began turning their own against him, rolling slowly around to bring their foreheads, one after the other, flat against his. Neither girl touched his penis where it hung loosely between his crossed legs, and although the two well-formed virgins had a strange and peculiar native body odor, he began to feel aroused by their sensuous closeness and by the perverse situation of being made love to by two naked girls while he sat between them. He found the audience inhibiting, though not as much as he would have been if they were white men.
He thirsted for a drink, not daring to ask or break the continuing "turnim head" that went on and on for an hour the geologist thought -before there was any action, and that happened because he started kissing each girl in turn as her head brought her face round to his during the forehead rolling bit. He wanted to kiss them, liking the looks of their mouths, and they kissed him back although kissing was never a part of
"turnim head" or even a custom among their people. They liked it, each girl kissing longer and longer, experimenting with their lips and speeding up the rolling to get their mouths back to the white man's lips. "Jackie", as they called him, was no handsome warrior, nor did he wear beads or shells or feathers, but he could make a sex-rite sensation just by pressing his lips against theirs and doing interesting things with his tongue.
Their large brown eyes were sneaking looks of anticipation at the American's steadily rising penis, the thought of having the pale white shaft and its purply-pink head inside their virginal cunts added to their erotic privilege to help in this part of the manhood initiation. They would be the envy of all the village virgins, especially when they explained to them how to cause exciting thrills in their cunts by joining lips.
Gradually, Nahl stretched out her legs and Dunni did the same, then they pushed at Jack's knees so he would straighten his legs too, enabling them to start turning their bodies close on either side of him. Writhing with increasing pressure, they worked their thighs up in their rolling until their naked milk-chocolate flesh touched his blood-pounding cock which stood contrastingly pink and white against them. Then, as if the girls had secretly made a signal to each other, they started in sucking all around the throbbing member, from his balls to the tip of his cock-head, emitting a high-pitched moan from deep in their throats while the young white man fondled their small, pointed breasts.
Jack was aroused more than he had ever dreamed possible before. Perhaps it was because he had never known the high eroticism that two naked girls sucking together at a man's cock could inspire in him that, and the feel of two young, smoothly silken-skinned girls' breasts and bellies, thighs and buttocks squirming under his hands. Now they weren't rolling against him, they were rolling over him in turns, and he started rolling with them until the three of them were writhing and rolling together on the wide bed, kissing, cocksucking, and, when their nakedly entwined bodies gave the young American the opportunity, cunt-licking.
How he happened to drive his throbbing cock into Nahl first he would never know unless it was because when he knew he must stick it in someone soon it was her moist young pussy that was in the right position to receive it. There was no yell of pain or distress from the laughing girl or from Dunni when it was her turn for the ritual taking of her maidenhead but a long drawn out sigh that sounded more of pleasure than pain when his driving, stiffened member drove forcefully in and past her thinly virginal membrane. And while he fucked the wildly writhing native maiden, her friend Dunni worked her tongue wantonly into his anus, darting with wet thrusts when he bucked his buttocks up while fucking Nahl into a quick, high-screaming orgasm.
For a moment the scream worried him and took some of his own orgasmical build-up down a few degrees. However, he soon understood that this was their way of expressing their thrill of cumming.
Dunni screamed too, when she came, and she had the instinct to comfort him with a Western style kiss when he shot his heated sperm to mix with her running juices. The young man's nervousness at Nahl's orgasmic scream had, he realized, saved him from cumming in her, and therefore ensured his continuing erection to satisfy Dunni, but he was surprised at his inexplicable virility when his long hard cock remained as throbbingly erect as before...just as if he had not cum at all. Turning to Nahl again, he guaranteed his future, set his seal on a deal with Kallu, by not only getting another cum-squeal out of her but also Dunni, then Nahl once more. He filled their hot little cunts with his virile sperm and stopped only to let the girls rest.
"If that wasn't a satisfactory manhood love-rite test," Jack said loudly to the chief, "then I'll do it all over again!"
None of the audience understood a word, yet they were smiling at him, the chief wearing the biggest smile of them all. For the first time, he addressed the geologist and spoke in clear pidgin.
"You have passed all the tests, my friend.
You are now our official guest, and tomorrow we shall speak of Cargo. Now go to your hut. You will not be guarded because we trust you, because now you are a man and one of us." Kallu took from his neck a string of shells which he offered to Jack.
The American was suddenly touched by the warmth of friendship in the man's voice. He had understood why they should be suspicious of him, as indeed they should be suspicious of all white men after their experiences of the past fifty years, but his emotion was influenced more by his change from fear for his life to being welcomed as a brother, and this change, from a hell to a weird form of heaven, brought tears to his eyes.
The old man led him out of the chiefs hut, trying to send the girls away only to be accused by Jack of being old fashioned. Jack held their bodies close to him as he walked back to his ex-prison; after all, he said to the old man, these are the last two tests of manhood and I've passed them, according to how Kallu reacted.
Oh, no, the wizened old man exclaimed. The girls were one test, the test of virility, which was the fourth test. The third test, which I did not explain to you beforehand because I am very interested in the Cargo birds was the eating of flesh from your defeated enemy, the man you killed in combat! Kallu, of course, ate the liver and....
Jack stopped dead in his tracks, gagging.
"You mean, you bastard, that what.. . I ate...in the chiefs hut.. . was that.. . ?
Nahl and Dunni held an arm each while the young white man retched his guts out, and continued to retch until one of them fetched a woman who prepared a herb tea to stop his stomach contractions and send him drowsily to sleep in the arms of his two sex-rite lovers. Before he closed his eyes to fall into an abyss of unconsciousness. Jack mumbled to the nubile young girls, "Always found that pilot bastard hard to take!"
* * *
During the weeks that followed, Jack was accepted as a member of the village. The two milk-chocolate colored teenagers were referred to as his "maris", although he had strenuously endeavored to explain that in his country he was allowed only one wife. But Kallu was adamant. He had gone to a lot of trouble persuading their fathers to give the girls to the white man without payment of cash or goods. The wizened old man had been very impressed by the chiefs generosity to a stranger who almost ended up roasted, as he pointed out to the American, adding that each of the fourteen year olds was worth two pigs! Jack suggested that he send them to Port Moresby to be educated, but Kallu adamantly refused to agree to that arrangement, being suspicious of all white men, except Jack.
One point, that Jack proposed, the chief agreed to: that he would allow the geologist to build a school for the village and pay the salaries of teachers, Melanesian teachers. When the Kukukuku chief and his new friend finalized their deal regarding Cargo and the yellow metal, Jack insisted that as well as sending goods to the village the whole population must have a share in the gold field, knowing that a new generation would, he hoped, be able to utilize the profits to raise their standard of living.
The finding of the rich outcrop was an anti-climax to all the hellish dramas Jack had endured. Young warriors led him a couple of miles to a small tree-covered plateau and there they pointed to a hole dug in the ground, about six feet deep and showing the lode as clear as crystal.
The deal with Kallu was simple and uncomplicated. For six bowls of yellow dust and pebbles, the bird he would send would shit its Cargo sewing machines, cloth, pigs for breeding, dairy cattle, farming implements and a long list of goods the geologist thought would be useful and not destructive to their way of life. Once a month when the moon was full the bird would fly to a certain high piece of ground which was cleared under his supervision. The Cargo would drop down first in a parachute drop, then the bird would fly in low, drop a hook, pick up a rope strung between two poles and so lift away several pounds of gold. Once the operations worked smoothly, Jack would return to visit his marys and his village friends.
His departure from the village was the occasion of a festive dressing up, like the day Jack made his spectacular swallow-dive, only this time he was their friend, not their despised enemy. A feathered warrior was ordered to accompany him in the canoe until he was safely past areas where Kukukuku enemies might try to waylay him, and, as a sign of good faith, the chief gave him permission to take away with him two large bowls full of gold. In three days he would arrive at a village by the river where there was a police post and an airfield where a plane landed every fortnight, but before then, on the second day, the canoe would pass by Wamba village where his other mary, Kallu informed him, was still waiting for him although she had become the mary of another man, a native called Tomu.
That piece of news, Jack knew, was twisted gossip. Merle would be back home in Port Moresby by now, golddigging in bars.
Nahl and Dunni farewelled their man as if he were merely going away for a day, not weeks or months. They lived for the day, for the hour, and tomorrow was a long way away, too distant in time to bother about. Looking back at the crowd by the river bank. Jack waved to the girls until the canoe disappeared around a bend of the fast flowing river.
They knew nothing of the world where he was going and were happy to stay in their village, two local beauties who were worth more than two pigs each now that they were the marys of a friend of chief Kallu.
The following day, as the canoe headed toward the Wamba village where Jack intended to land so that he could learn what had happened to Merle and the two Australians, he remembered Kallu's final words as he helped push the canoe into the stream: "Beware of your own people as you were wary of us," he said in his clear pidgin, "and remember what I have said when you look at your white mary, because she was more dangerous to you than my warriors."
* * *
It can't be true! Jesus! It just cannot be true! Jack gaped at the incredibly strange woman who had called his name when he and the Kukukuku warrior dragged the canoe ashore at Wamba. It was her voice all right, but Christ! She looked like a freak from a medieval scene. He felt pity for the girl whose thickened figure was more that of an older woman, she was so fat uneven tufts of her blonde hair were growing out straight above and around her head, and she was filthy, as though she had rolled in slimy cesspool at some time or another and allowed the slime to dry on her.
"Take me back, take me with you," she yelled, running towards him when she was sure that the unshaven, bronzed and semi-naked man was actually Jack.
"You belong to this tribe here. I understand. I cannot interfere, you know that.. . I'm sorry. Merle...." He could almost forgive her. One time, not so long ago when he had not proven to himself as well as to a tribe of stone-age natives who were now his only friends that he was as tough and as virile as any other man, he would have meekly forgiven her. And he would have hated her; now he saw her as a pitifully selfish person whom he despised.
"I'M A UNITED STATES CITIZEN!" she screamed.
"No you're not," he replied coldly. "You were born in New Guinea. If you belong anywhere, it's here, in this country, and according to the laws of the land the man holding your arm is your legal husband."
"Yes! Mari bilong Tomu?" the native asserted, nodding his head as he warily watched the Kukukuku warrior scattering fearful villagers as he walked among them.
"Jack, I.....I'm sorry, Jack. The authorities won't help me, please. Jack. Oh God, you've got to help me...." Merle beggingly whimpered as Tomu led her away, her obscenely naked body struggling against his strong arms. "They're force feeding me, Jack. They want me fat. Jack...Jack...."
Jack called his warrior companion to help him push the canoe back into the water. He knew it would be like rubbing salt into a wound but Christ, the bitch deserved to see evidence of his success, he decided. "Hey," he called out to the plump wife of Tomu, her belly now showing a swelling that was not all lazy fat. "Hey Merle, by the way, I found the gold!"
He lifted a handful of sparkling yellow pebbles from a bowl and let them dribble from his fingers in a cascade of glitter while she stopped to look back at him.
She screamed her curses at him!
"When I hit Port Moresby I'll drink a bottle of champagne to your future happiness!" Really, he thought, as he watched her reaction, Tomu shouldn't beat a pregnant woman like, that simply because she was insulting a village guest. But he guessed she'd learn...in time.
Jack and the Kukukuku warrior pushed the canoe into the stream and floated out into the main current. There was no point in staying there any longer, and who cared what had happened to the renegades, or the shrilly screaming, double-crossing bitch he'd left behind. Jack Shepherd man and warrior, brother of cannibals couldn't care less.. .
End
EPILOGUE
And so it came to pass that on the night of the full moon, the tribe and all its children gathered in the clearing. They waited patiently no one doubting that their adopted white brother would return.
The old witch doctor heard it first, a low, far-off murmur that rapidly rose in volume until the night was filled with thunder. They saw the silhouette of the huge bird swooping across the face of the moon, and several of them fell to their knees in fear as the god-bird opened its two eyes along its wings and made day of the jungle night. It passed over them, swung in a tight circle and came back.
They saw its belly opening...and then the bird was shitting! Pigs, tools, medicines, a milk cow heavy with calf, materials for a school, presents for everyone, and machinery whose functions they could only guess at.
And last of all, they saw their brother, floating down on a white cloud, coming back to his maris and his adopted people.
Laughing like children filled with wonder, they ran forward to meet him this man who had called down the birds....
