H.L. Mencken, who lived from 1880 to 1956, was a virtual oracle to many people who followed his writings while he was alive, and many of his words remain valid today. The great Baltimore newspaper man, lexicographer and iconoclast was best known as editor of The American Mercury, a position he held for about ten years. According to The New York Times, from Mencken "flowed a great stream of literally millions of words of reporting, editorials, essays, commentary, articles and books, all of it bearing the unmistakable stamp of individuality possessed by a master craftsman who was also a man of honor, of intellectual curiosity, of humanity and of superb wit."
Mencken was at his best when attacking American provincialism and our popular delusions and absurdities. He was regarded as something of a major prophet by thousands of young men in colleges. Somewhat surprisingly, one of his best books was In Defense of Women. Published in 1918, it remains highly readable today, and ought to be more popular than it is.
"That it should still be necessary, at this late date in the history of the human race, to argue that women are gifted with an acute and valuable form of intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable superstitiousness and general dunderheadness of man," Mencken wrote. "One finds very few professed feminists approaching the thing as obvious; nearly all of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of gratuitous evidence to establish what should be an axiom. Even W. L. George, one of the most sapient of them, wastes a whole book upon the demonstration, and then, with an absurd air of uttering something new, gives it the humorless title of 'The Intelligence of Women.' As well devote a laborious volume to the lasciviousness of Puritans or the imbecilities of Congressmen.
"Women, in point of fact, are not only intelligent: they have almost a monopoly on certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true fundamentals of intelligence -in so far as they reveal a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion and hallucination, and a passion for bringing it forth- to that extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. 'Human creatures,' says George, borrowing from Weininger, 'are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.' Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him."
The question is debatable, and it could be argued that Mencken was making purely semantic distinctions. No scientist has ever demonstrated any significant difference between the basic brain structures of man and woman, for instance. Whatever differences one claims to discover are probably based more on training and circumstances than on inherited traits. Until actual facts prove otherwise, the novelist can probably contribute as much understanding as the scientist.
In this new Dansk novel, writer Dan Bradley makes, we think, a very valuable contribution. Starting with a situation that is far from being entirely new of starting, he tells a story that is full of new insights and perceptions. Evelyn, The Kidnapped Bride of the title, is a woman with considerable built-in resistance to sex. She is taken as hostage by a man who seems completely brutal and almost animalistic. But the male is the case definitely has a streak of what Mencken would call "feminine" intelligence, and Evelyn has a strong element of male strength in her own character. The result is constantly surprising as the story takes many unexpected twists and turns, and we guarantee that the final outcome is close to unpredictable.
This is a novel about real, living, vibrant people. Inescapably, they play out their masculine and feminine roles. Inescapably, too, they discover a great deal about each other-and about their own inner selves. The story is always entertaining, but it is also basically enlightening. We are proud to add it to the growing list of Dansk Blue Books which we are sure will survive as enduring classics.
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
The lovely brunette was on her knees, crouched between Matt's widespread legs, feasting with wild pleasure.
"That's it, Stell, show them how it's done," Matt said.
Estelle's mouth opened wide, her eyes gleaming with desire. She took a second to stare directly at Matt's huge, hardened cock, which arched up between his legs, swollen and swaying. Her hands lovingly caressed up and down his hairy legs. She smiled with lewd pleasure as she sipped gently at the pulsing tip of it with her loving tongue. Then she took the whole of it into the warm, moist circle of her red lips, clamping firmly and wetly around the throbbing head, nursing lovingly on it. As she sucked, her hands gripped his ass, pulling him up closer to her face, as her tongue made hot circles over the heated, smooth surface of the meat and she moaned into it, "Mmmmmmm."
Estelle's slender hands moved and slid teasingly around Matt's hairy thighs. Her fingers began to toy with his swollen balls. There was lust and pleasure and cruelty steaming out of her wide eyes.
"That's enough, baby. It's 'Lady' Evelyn's turn now," Matt said, smiling across the room at Evelyn.
Evelyn's eyes widened.
An inadvertent shudder ran the length of her body as she sat there in the armchair, in the languorous pose he had compelled her to assume -her skirt drawn high above the gartered expanse of thigh, her legs widespread to reveal her panties. Evelyn attempted to avoid his gaze, but despite herself, despite every ounce of will she could muster, she found herself returning to those scarcely perceptible glacial gray eyes veiled by the weary droop of heavy lids. Eyes as deep cleft in the granite face as those in a piece of Greek statuary of antiquity, the shadow of the brow obscuring all but the reflected gleam of light that made the pupils appear almost feverishly aware of every action, gesture, movement. She strained to bring her legs together, but she had earlier been forewarned by the demoniacal ruthlessness of his temper when he had pressed a bared blade against Harry's chest to compel him to have intercourse with the nymphomaniacal brunette who now sat observing the ritual with a glittering anticipation.
Harry had cautioned his wife, as soon as these two had burst into their attractive suburban household to take refuge from the pursuing police, "Just do as they say. They don't look very rational to me." And, again, when they were prepared, hours later, to leave, announcing that Evelyn would have to come along as a hostage until they cleared the environs to the town. "No mock heroics for the sake of virtue, Evelyn," he had said. There was an underlying implication of something deeper in their own relationship, and from the hint of the twisted lip of her captor, Evelyn realized he had not missed the nuance.
Matt, as the brunette called the captor, now arose from the edge of the bed, smoking one cigarette after another, and fixating his gaze between her legs. His step was toward Evelyn, and the gaudily made-up brunette, who was a theatrical stereotype of a stripper, leaned forward in her chair with an unconcealed relish. "Take her, Matt, take her," she said, with quickening excitement in her voice, but his sudden darting glance acted upon her as a physical blow, and she quickly fell silent. Evelyn could feel the thudding in her chest and the stab of fear that almost totally overcame her stinging mortification at her exposure.
Raised by grandparents in an atmosphere of aristocratic wealth and the most formal of proprieties, and later sent to a convent school, Evelyn had rationalized that part of her nature as a necessary evil and cast over her womanly attributes an aloof and patrician coldness. Before their marriage, Harry, a widower in his early forties with a teenage daughter, affectionately called Evelyn his swan. After marriage, the en clearing expression had become "my virtuous white swan." An inadvertent glimpse of cleavage in a decollete gown would bring the color to her face and the exposure of knees in exiting from cars or taxicabs brought her moments of obvious discomfiture. This man knows that. He sensed it from the first moment he saw me, Evelyn realized.
Now Matt had crowded his cock back into his pants. Then, loose-gaited and in his characteristic slouch, Matt positioned himself before her. He drew her up to a standing position with a gesture, and Evelyn wondered at her own permissiveness, attributing it as an afterthought to her resolve to maintain her composure at whatever cost, not to give him the satisfaction of a struggling, demeaning, pleading resistance. His hand reached over her shoulder and drew down the zipper in the back of her dress in one even downward stroke. Evelyn steeled herself for her ordeal, determined to show him unmistakably that she could be violated but not possessed. She felt a revulsion against the recollected phrase-Harry had used it-and she suddenly felt herself hating her husband for allowing the events to transpire without any show of resistance. "You don't strike at a lethal weapon and you don't reason with insanity," was his admonition. Evelyn wondered at her own sudden hostility. After all, these were the qualities she was attracted to and chose to live by in fulfilling the role of a young, patrician beauty to the manor born.
The hard ends of his fingers drew the dress down over her shoulders, and without bothering to disengage the hooks from the tightly fitting elastic of her brassiere, he pulled the garment down to reveal her breasts. He made no overt move to touch the finely contoured symmetry, but her skin, delicately white and flawless from three-times-weekly massage and sauna treatments, prickled at his expressionless gaze, her roseate nipples stiffening into deepening crimson darts. The dress dropped to the floor and the slip followed, and now his hands were scaling the panties down over her hips, leaving her before him in the pink garter belt holding to the sheen of nylon over her long, well-formed limbs of a hosiery mannequin, tapering to fashionable ankles and insteps encased in custom-fitted pumps with three-inch heels. Evelyn had once refused to return to the country club following an incident in which she had overheard a man pointedly refer to her, in an aside, as having "gorgeous legs with the get-up of a high-price call girl." Harry had only laughed and tried to dismiss the entire episode.
Matt stepped back slightly, his face still impassive. His fingers began to undo the tight black belt drawn through his trousers. Evelyn heard the sound of the undone zipper and forced herself to look away from the fumbling hands that were drawing out his prick. Now, she thought, now. After several stops in assorted hotels and motels along the way, in which he had perversely tormented her by forcing her to sit in exposing positions before him. Now it would happen.
Matt's cock, swelling again to monstrous size and fisted in his strong hand, nudged against her. She discovered that instead of fear she was beset with determination to demonstrate her invulnerability, even in the most intimate encounter. He removed his trousers and his jockey shorts. The nymphomaniacal brunette, now unable to contain herself, exposed herself to the waist and was thrusting her hand over her big nipples with quickening insistence. Evelyn felt the pressure of Matt's hands on her shoulders pressing her down and backward on the bed. She allowed herself to fall back unresistant, and she endured the stroking of his hands on the smooth globes of her buttocks as he raised her legs. Then she felt the hot impress of his body, the remotest contact of his masculinity at the threshold of her loins.
Evelyn tensed for the lancing thrust that was soon to come. He remained there for several seconds until her still averted gaze darted back to scan his face, an act he had obviously been awaiting. And with an unmasked contempt, he straightened up and allowed her legs to fall. With one hand, he seized her behind her neck, and in a gesture of brusque command began to bring her forward and down until she found herself kneeling on the floor for him at the level of his waist. Although she was twenty-seven years of age and had been married for four, the only mature, nude male she had seen was her own husband. "Give it one welcoming kiss before I fuck you with it," he demanded. Her lips barely touched it before he threw her on her back and wedged it into her cunt with one heavy, invading slide of meat-against-meat.
"Aggggg!" Evelyn grunted, half screaming in pain and terror-and strange pleasure-as Matt's cock surged into her. The walls of her vagina gave way and her pussy lips stretched wider than they ever had in the past to give entrance to his thick meat. He sucked his breath in sharply as his cock sank in to its hilt, his swollen balls coming to rest against the deep cleft of her buttocks.
"Oh ... ohhhh! Please, please ..." She groaned.
Matt thrilled to feel the walls of her cunt contracting around his peter as it drove all the way into her. She began to tremble and sob with pain and pleasure. Then a new and strange joy swept through her, and she surprisingly thrust her cunt at the meaty plunger and they began to move, undulate together, his cock sliding in and out, very very slowly, completing the rape of this proud and beautiful woman.
Evelyn's thighs were spread wide apart and her legs laced around his waist, as if she had no control of what they did, the heels of her feet kicking with passion at his back, not wanting to, but urging him on all the same. His sticky, hot probe began to tunnel deeper up into her cunt, then slid out again, teasing her.
"Hmmm, you're too much, so nice and warm and tight," he whispered to her as he slowly fucker her. "Is it that you're tight... or that I'm so much bigger than your husband, hmmm?"
She was wet and open. She had to stop herself from screaming with lurid delight. His cock began to skewer and rampage in and out of her throbbing pussy. Her fluttering eyes caught a glimpse of his mouth and a thought streaked through her mind like a hot wind; the suck of those lips and the lick of his tongue between her legs-OH! how that would feel!
Her dilated vagina accepted the assault of his giant prick. She couldn't stop herself from hugging him close and grinding her cunt up and down, meeting his thick meat stroke for stroke. She groaned and sobbed, hardly able to catch her breath. Her body was churning with his, matching the fast tempo of his fucking.
She clenched the muscles of her buttocks together and screwed her ass around and around as she heaved her lovely body at him, loving the raping feel of his flesh diggings deep in the tunnel of her oiling twat. She wanted to scream, "Fuck me! I love it! Ohhhh, you wonderful stud, fuck me harder, faster, faster!" but she didn't dare.
Her pussy melted like butter, warmly on his great scarlet cock, now so reddened and slick with her juices. His meat throbbed deep inside her belly, jumping in there, and she loved it! Her pussy lips were aflame with pain and delicious tingles, as his hands cupped her slick, gyrating buttocks, weighing them, finger-pressing them. His finger sought and found her anus. He thrust it into the tight, puckering tunnel, in up to the first finger-joint. Now his finger began to fuck her with the same rhythm as his cock was stabbing in and out of her flaming, clinging pussy. Her husband, Harry, had never done this! Their lovings had always been careful, matter-of-fact, and invariably under the deliberate cover of darkness which served as a shield to cast over the act an aura of impersonality which made contact only with her defensive outer self, Here, the light of the room was bright, garish, fluorescent, as Matt pulled out of her and, with his hand on top of her head, forced her down, his body like some massive independent plant sprouting its lurid, ripe fruits amid thick, matted foliage. The pungent, sweet-sweat man-smell acted like a soporific on her senses, and she imagined her head and face suddenly disembodied in this unbelievable encounter. Her mouth seemed like a raw, gaping wound. She gasped, pressed back by the weight of his body against the cushioning mattress. She lost all perspective now, all sense of present, engulfed somewhere in a cavernous pit between his large, straining thighs at the mercy of his hunger, threatening to asphyxiate her in its greed ...
Inundated by the blackness of her senses, momentarily cast backward in time to the point where three days before, that lean, grim, unshaven figure had stepped into their home with the showgirl brunette close behind him. Evelyn had just seated herself, and reaching over to turn on the reading lamp had found herself startlingly confronted by the intruder. There was little formidable about his seemingly modest frame and medium proportions, about five feet ten inches tall and deceptively slim, wearing nondescript dark trousers and his shirt open at the collar beneath the loose-fitting black leather jacket. When Harry, sitting at the opposite end of the room reading his newspaper, suddenly rose up at this unexpected presence, his large expansive figure seemed to tower above that of the night visitor. Evelyn's first reaction was that of annoyance at this sudden intrusion. Angered by Harry's puzzling inaction, she demanded angrily, "Get out of here or I'll call the police!"
Matt came up to her and, pressing his fingers against her chest, forced her back into the chair from which she had indignantly arisen. It was not until then that she noted his dead impassivity, the frigid opacity that admitted no sign of human emotion.
"What are you after?" Harry had asked, making no move to attack Matt for the crude physical gesture imposed on his wife.
"We're just going to hang around here for a couple of hours," Matt said in a rasping monotone.
"Until the cops..." Estelle began to interject until Matt's glowering rebuke cut her off.
"As long as everybody relaxes," Matt said, "we'll go like we come, with no problems. Is there anyone else-?" he started to say as Diane, their sixteen-year-old daughter by Harry's first marriage, came bounding into the room with her customarily brash and aggressive manner. Matt's hand moved with serpentilian swiftness, producing a snub-nosed revolver.
"Oh, look at him-Steve McQueen!" exclaimed Diane in a characteristically provocative air, and she continued approaching the center of the room even as Matt's armed hand bade her to hold her steps. With the same incredibly rapid motion, the sound of hand against flesh resounding before the awareness of the action, Matt had backhanded her across the face. She cried out and pitched backward against the wall. Harry still made no move against Matt but instead went to Diane and helped her to her feet, urging her at the same time to make no untoward moves or remarks.
"Check the rooms, Stell," Matt instructed his superabundantly developed female companion. Estelle started walking across the room and deliberately made a wide sweep to move past Harry with exaggerated hip swinging movements which threatened to dislodge the swelling mounds of her backside from the figure-hugging lines of her black jersey dress. She returned with a suggestive smile and stepped across the threshold into another room.
They had made their unannounced appearance at 9:20 P.M. Close to midnight, they remained in the same room, their positions hardly changed. Harry had attempted to engage Matt in conversation, an effort which had been not only ignored but even unacknowledged. Drawing up an armchair toward one of the corners of the room from which he could observe all of the occupants, Matt remained slouched down in it, the weapon loosely gripped in one of his hands and lying on his lap. He seemed thoughtfully withdrawn, but Evelyn noted that the slightest gesture from anyone in the room elicited from him an instant flicker of response.
Diane had remained sullen and indecisive for some time, following Matt's attack. Twice within the period of the passing hours she began to move about restlessly and appeared as if she were going to address Matt with her usual bravado, but her father had managed to dissuade her and return her, once again, quietly to her place. But now she leaped to her feet in unfeigned disgust. "Geez! I can't stand this morgue. Let's turn on the TV-do something!" She pulled from Harry's grasp and strode across the room to the television set, staring challengingly at Matt. He made no move as she turned on the set, and finding nothing on video of interest switched to a rock 'n' roll station on the FM. She stepped back, snapping her fingers and jerking her shoulders in a motion that drew attention to the unencumbered movements of her well-formed breasts not encased by any brassiere beneath a diaphanous peignoir.
"Diane!" her father said, curtly, as he came toward her. But she evaded him and whirled to face Matt brazenly.
"I'm not afraid of you and that cigar-store-Indian expression." She came directly up to him, hands on hips, her face twisted into a derisive smile, her position deliberately provocative. "If you're in trouble and the cops are after you," she shrugged, "I'm not on the cops' side. You can come and go and we won't give you a hard time. So why don't you just loosen up and we can talk and have some fun while you're waiting. Come on," she urged, extending her hands and picking up the beat of the music, "we can even dance."
Matt regarded her with no change of expression. Diane broke into a wild, frenetic twist, throwing her young, supple body into attitudes of abandon, her mocking eyes never leaving Matt's face. Evelyn leaped to her feet and shouted at Diane, in shocked dismay, "Come over here and sit down this very minute!"
Diane, without breaking the rhythmic beat, flung out her derision. "Come on, Mother Superior-join me and we'll give the sexy man some real entertainment." She whirled about, thrusting her hip out and kicking to the side to reveal a full expanse of exposed thigh and something more. Harry came up and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and brought her, struggling, back to her former position in the room. Angrily, as soon as he released her, she broke away from him again. "Don't try to treat me like Mother Superior," she said, and turning to Matt added, "I know what to do with a man-man, don't I, father dear?"
"Why don't you tell the wooden Indian here how I've been knocked up by a real man-man and had to have a little abortion to save the family and old Mother Superior here from a positively shattering scandal?" At which point, she suddenly dashed across the room toward Matt, peignoir high above her head, exposing herself in complete nudity. "Now, does that look like an itty-bitty girl who needs to be protected?"
Evelyn came at her and began struggling with her to pull her garment down and conceal her nakedness, but Diane tore and scratched at her until Harry came up again to lend his support. Matt stood up and the quiet command of his voice cut through the melee. "That'll be enough of this chicken shit. You can all play Peyton Place some other time." Diane, her peignoir ripped in shreds, took advantage of her release and flung herself against Matt, her arms about his neck. "Take me with you," she pleaded. "Just get me away from here-from her. You can do anything you want to me." And she ground her pelvis against him for emphasis.
Estelle, who had been smoking steadily while reclining drowsily on the couch, her skirt above her thighs, now underwent a dramatic transition. The sight of the lissome, shapely nymphet, stripped and urging herself against Matt, excited her to a state of intense arousal. She sat up quickly, the forgotten cigarette dropping from her fingers, as Matt pried the precociously developed teenager off him. Rejected, Diane lurched away from him and ran toward her room. Matt made no attempt to prevent her. The large brunette came up to him with a startling change in her movements, which were now extremely nervous and constrained. In the same action of backing up against him, she had raised her skirt above her hips to expose her nakedness from the waist down except for the black, theatrically tasseled garter belt. Her hand moving behind her, she reached for the zipper on Matt's trousers. He raised his knee and she stumbled awkwardly forward, falling upon her hands and momentarily exposing a lurid glimpse of her totally unshielded pussy. She raised herself to her feet, her face twisted in agitation. "Please, Matt-you know what it is for me when I get like this. Help me-"
"Knock it off, Stell," Matt said. There was an ominous edge to his voice that made her step back, and she stood there for a moment, indecisively, casting her eyes about the room. When she saw Harry, she went directly up to him. He was seated on the divan, and standing before him she revealed the lush mound of her damp cunt. Harry thrust his hand forward to fend her off as she attempted to plant her knees on either side of him. She struggled to maintain her position, tugging, at the same time, at his trousers, and she turned to Matt, this time her expression imploring. Unaccountable, he stood up, took several steps forward and raised his weapon in Harry's direction. His voice carried an unmistakable note of command. "Relax, buddy-just relax."
Harry blinked his eyes in puzzlement. He offered no further opposition as Estelle stroked him to arousal and leaned forward to bring the full weight of her plenteously endowed body against him. She joined with him quickly and enveloped him wholly with an anguished moan and a deep, submissive sigh. For a long instant after that, she made no movement, and then she began slow undulations like the awakening currents of a smooth sea stirred to a quickening stormy wrath. Harry felt himself engulfed, helplessly at the mercy of a driving, seething, twisting, heaving mound of insatiable flesh.
Stark disbelief rimmed Evelyn's eyes. A strange tumble of conflicting thoughts and emotions possessed her, and then she discovered Matt's eyes upon her. And even as this was taking place, she found herself reading Matt's expression with a troubled urgency. Was it scorn -or desire? No, something else, something subtle and evasive. Something, at that instant, that she had to know.
Estelle's shrill outcry suddenly broke off her thoughts. Evelyn saw the intruder's companion pummeling at Harry, crying out frustrated, and then pulling away, still feverishly aroused. Eyes glazed with desire, the girl cooed, "My, how full your poor balls are, lover. Hmmmm ... what my tight little pussy's gonna do to that fat cock of yours! It's going to fuck it crazy, that's what! You're gonna come like you've never come before."
She slowly began to lower herself down over him, legs straddled, her wet pussy brushing over the hard knob of his prick, teasing it fully awake, painfully hard. Harry shuddered and moaned. She laughed and sighed lewdly. She squeezed his balls with her fingers, making him groan. Her juice-slicked pussy brushed to and fro over the knobby head of his swollen organ. Harry breathed heavily, gasping at the sensuous contact of the oiled lips on his prick, feeling the hard head being rubbed by the open, dripping lips. He felt the maddening brush of her moistened slit, and his on-fire mind silently begged her to pull his cock in.
"I'm gonna give you one hell of a ride, Daddy."
She pressed down slightly. She rubbed her slit more determinedly and rapidly over the rubbery, blunt head, teasing him unmercifully. Slowly, slowly, she pushed her hairy mound down over his straining meat, and it began to disappear into the soft dark puff of hair between her thighs.
"Like the feel of that hot pussy, darling?" she whispered back over her shoulder, her cherry-tipped tits swaying.
She hovered over him, leering, a triumphant smile on her passion-twisted face. Then she began to slowly sink down on his hard pole.
The full, fleshy lips of her pussy parted as it lowered.
She hissed as she sank down over him. He felt himself sliding up into her, and he grunted. The lips and inner walls stretched to give him warm, tightly gripped entrance. Harry sobbed as he felt her inner muscles pulsating around his prick. Slowly and teasingly, she began to grind around and around over him, clenching him inside her like a hot glove. She began to move her hips up and down over his lap, plunging down, lifting up, pivoting, squirming. Greedily, her pussy lips sucked on his swollen flesh. The quivering cheeks of her young, firm buttocks slapped up and down on his thighs as she rode him. Her fists clenched, she began fucking him with greater and greater intensity.
She rocked over him now in an obscene world of uncontrolled lust, pounding her body over his without mercy. The crack of her buttocks was tightly clenched as her cunt tore at his cock. She tightened her moist grip on it and sucked it in deeper and deeper. He drove in and out with long, greased strokes as she rotated over him, her dark hair flying, her eyes closed with pleasure.
She churned over him, questing for more and still more thrills as she used him to her will. Her inner, lubricated muscles contracted tightly around the captive meat. She cried out, cursed him, still driving her ever-moving body over him with quick, rhythmic bendings and straightening of her spine. She arched her back and her breasts danced as she buffeted his body beneath her. She quickened the pace with mounting urgency as her climax approached.
"Fuck me! Fuck me-e-eee!" she screamed.
His aching prick, glistening with her juices, disappeared and reappeared in the clinging lips of her cunt. She squirmed heatedly over him, her eyes now wide and staring into space, unseeing of those that watched, engulfed in her rapture. She groaned as she hunched like a cat over him. A low, animal-like groan came from her moist parted lips.
The room was filled with wet, sucking sounds as her insides ate his cock avidly. Her hairy crotch ground and ground around and down on him, making him dig deeper.
She bucked and twisted, increasing the speed of the man-rape. Harry's neck thickened and reddened as she took him with wild lust. Her body wormed and lashed furiously over him. Her white legs scissored around him, almost grafting that cunt to his wedge, pivoting her hips, drawing on him with intense friction, frantic contractions, fantastic inner suckings.
She was wriggling over him, taking him in and out of her whirlpool of hot flesh, choking his cock upward, seizing and squeezing it, milking it in a tumultuous embrace, arching her back and lifting him up off the chair with him, her hips seeming to churn in a dozen maddening directions at once.
And then her shrill cry split the air as she came. Harry cried out hoarsely as he joined her in the orgasm. And with the flesh of her thighs and belly still quivering from the contact, Estelle reached down between her legs and began to writhe and twist upon her own hand. Matt came up against her from behind without warning and jackknifed her with a hard, downward thrust of his hand upon her back and effected a hard, forceful blow that almost up-ended her. Then, seizing her with one hand encompassing her wrist while with the other he maintained a firm grip upon the revolver pointed in the direction of those he wished to restrain, he commenced a steady, grinding, brutish flagellation. A whimpering outcry with each battering thrust cut through Evelyn with an indescribable agony. She wanted to cry out herself, to bury her head, but she found herself frozen in stupefaction, able only to follow the independent move of her own eyes which were upon Matt-as his, even as he drew the passion-obsessed Estelle to a rising, rousing, fiery climax which left her heaped upon the floor, were on Evelyn ...
Except for the moaning and soft sobbing of the woman who remained on the floor in a tangle of bared and twitching limbs, a stunned silence pervaded the room. Disbelief of the events which had transpired clearly marked the faces of Harry, the incredulous Evelyn, and Diane, who had dropped her feigned air of superciliousness and now remained, hand half raised to her mouth, her eyes wide with astonishment. There was a meaning beyond Matt's obscene exposure, his still distended male instrument, at the same time that his hand clutched the revolver, but its implication eluded her in the emotional rapids which swept over her. Evelyn was aware that in the interval of several hours of this grotesque intercession their lives a change had been wrought. But she did not understand in what way. The silence was sustained until Estelle, composing herself, adjusted her garments and seemed strangely restored, as if nothing untoward had occurred at all. "When are we going to get out of here, Matt?" she asked. "This place is a drag."
Matt shrugged and drew a deep breath. "Now's as good a time as any, I guess."
"Where are we going?" Estelle asked.
Matt's silence was characteristic as he reached for and slipped into his leather jacket. He looked up and said to Harry, "I'm going to have to take one of the women with me, just until we get clear of town." Matt turned in Diane's direction. Her eyes brightened and she leaped to her feet. Evelyn burst out, surprised by the boldness and rage of her own voice, "You won't leave this house with that child."
Matt turned about slowly to face her. "Well, I guess you'll have to come along."
Diane cried out, "No, I'm going! I'm going with him!" She ran toward Matt, and Harry grabbed her by the waist to restrain her. She kicked and flailed her arms and turned, in the full fury of her assault, to Evelyn, as Matt grabbed her by the arm and led her to the front door. "You bitch, you bitch, you mind your own damned business! No, you can't take her, take me-take me!" But the door closed behind them, as the three of them started for the car, and they could still hear the cries of Diane's outraged protest.
CHAPTER TWO
The sting of his hot spend snapped her back to the lurid and brutal reality of his demeaning assault. Evelyn discovered herself kneeling in humiliating abasement, the skin of her knees rubbed raw against the hard floor. The events of the past leading up to the circumstance of her ordeal as hostage had unreeled during the brief period of his crude molestation. Matt pulled away from her now, and Evelyn, staggered by her revulsion at an act in which she had never engaged, remained momentarily immobilized, the cascade of his warm fluid staining her like molten wax. Estelle came up to her and extended a towel. When Evelyn hesitated, Estelle helped her to her feet and began to wipe her face, her neck, her breasts with the dampened terrycloth towel.
"Come on, doll," she said, not unkindly.
"That ain't gonna do you no bad at all. My old lady used to say that a little juice waters the roses in a woman's cheeks." Then she inquired gently, with undisguised amazement, "You never done that before with no man?" Evelyn shook her head.
"The first time I did," Estelle said, "it was some old cat hound who was drilling my ma, and he got to me when she was all washed up and deep in the hay. I was seven years old, and I thought my eyeballs was gonna pop out." Estelle laughed. "But whatever he done, he straightened me out so I never had no trouble with no man, ever since."
Matt remained naked from the waist down, now seated on a sofa facing a television set. He took a deep swallow from a pocket flask and showed no interest in the conversation of the two women. Evelyn resisted the urge to look his way, and Estelle, as if divining her thoughts, said, "He's a lot of man, that one, ain't he?"
"That's not a man," Evelyn said, deliberately raising her voice so that he would overhear her, "he's a sick animal."
Estelle countered with surprise. Matt reached out to switch a channel, as if he had not heard. His pointed unresponsiveness infuriated Evelyn. To use her was bad enough, but to fail to acknowledge her presence any more than that of some inanimate object, a chair, a table, was insufferable. If she could at that moment, she would have gladly driven a blade into his flesh and ground it into the wound to intensify the agony.
"You had no right to do that," she screamed at him, suddenly unable to control herself. "No right to take a woman and drag her down to your slimy, filthy level." Driven by her unvented frustration, she reached out to rake his face with her bared fingernails, but he caught both her hands in his one, and held her there before him, still wordless but now appraising the full length of her stripped figure, the deep-cleft ravine between her breasts, the slight fleshy undulation of her belly.
Impelled by blind anger, Evelyn had forgotten the state of her undress. She now made a frantic effort to gain her release. That same infuriating downward turn of his mouth was followed by a gesture not only of her release, but a forward thrust that sent her stumbling backward against the bedside table and overturning the lamp.
She saw Estelle drawing a slip and flimsy dress over her head and then bearing down upon him across the sofa where he had reassumed his former position. His hand upon her back signified his acceptance of her overture. Evelyn sank down upon the bed, her face in her hands, too weary, too sick to make the gesture that would clothe her nakedness. The sounds of Estelle's groaning passions assailed her ears, no matter how hard she tried to shut them out.
Matt's face faded and was replaced by that of her father, handsomely aquiline in his graying refinement. How attractive a man he had been, right up until the end when a sudden fatal heart attack had put an end to their idyllic existence: herself and her dad in the magnificent, manorial home they had furnished to suit their impeccable taste in each detail of every corner. Her mother had passed away many years before, and she was the attended-to queen of the roost, considered far too precious by her father for exposure to the manners, habits and attitudes of other children her own age. "I'm raising you to recognize the wonder of your own individuality, to grow to develop and realize your full potential as a person, not merely as a female." Her father's words came back to her from the past. How often he had repeated them, and insisted, "You are not to be raised for the boorish sexual service of some inept ape or to slavishly wear yourself into a drudge by raising a brood of demanding, suckling brats."
No wonder she had been content to isolate herself from the world in the stage-set existence of books and music and the cultivation of the more rarefied social graces. It was not until her father's death that the emptiness of the huge house prompted her to offer her services as a volunteer librarian at the local university, where she had made the acquaintance of Harry, the architect who had designed it and returned, often with clients to show them the structure. Whatever his intent was originally, he had learned quickly to "respect her as a person first, not simply a female."
How bitterly ironic, Evelyn thought. What a cruel conspirator was fate. One moment her life was moving along the course of its long preconceived design, and the next, with the sudden open thrust of a door, the orderly pattern exploded into a wild and meaningless disarray. If her father could see her now, Evelyn thought.
She was roused by a sharp slap across her bare buttocks, and she jolted to a sitting position, attempting to conceal her nudity with her hands. "Okay, Mother Superior," Matt said, "get your dress on. We're getting out of here." Evelyn was puzzled. They had been driving for many hours and had engaged the motel room, she assumed, to get a full night's sleep. But they had remained there less than three or four hours, and it was still the deep part of the night.
"Where are we going?" Evelyn asked Estelle, in a hushed aside. "What was the sense of the motel if we aren't going to sleep?"
Estelle looked at her blankly. None of this had occurred to her. The faculty of judgment had been one which she had surrendered entirely to Matt. She followed him unquestioningly. Now, as Matt started up the car and turned onto the highway, he answered Evelyn's questions, which he had overheard. He addressed her directly for the first time. "Everything that people do is supposed to follow some kind of a plan. One and one has always got to make two, don't you know? If the cops are after you, they've got to make sense of what you're up to so they can track you down. They live by shifts, they stay awake and sleep by shifts, give chase by shifts." His chuckle sounded ironic. "People love by shifts, study, learn, marry and die by shifts. It all has to follow a plan. If someone is nuts and they go to some psychiatrist, he's got to first figure out just what plan, what pattern his nuttiness follows before he thinks he can help him out. But it's a big laugh on all of them, because tha't not the way it works at all. It goes on like a bunch of marbles that scatter where they fall. Every damn thing you do makes a lie out of everything that ever happened to you before."
After this uncharacteristically long discourse he took refuge once again in his customary silence. His remarks were doubly disturbing for Evelyn, not only because of their unexpected depth but because he had seemed to touch upon the same ideas which had occupied her in the motel moments before. Estelle, sitting between them in the front seat, remained entirely oblivious to the talk. Evelyn was taken aback to discover that what now occupied Estelle was her fingered manipulations, even as he continued driving. She turned to look out of the window at the blur of passing foliage and maintained her interest there, but casual side glances disclosed that Estelle had freed his member from the confines of his trousers and was rubbing it continuously, with some lubricant on her palm which made it glisten in its rigidity like some oddly inanimate porcelain form. She was seized by a terrible inner fear.
"When are you going to release me?" she cried out. "You were only going to hold me with you till you left our town." It was a question she had formed on her lips many times before but, held back for fear that it would not only provoke him but would not hasten his release of her one way or the other. But the circumstance of this simple but perverse gesture, and his casual response as though nothing untoward were occurring, made Evelyn feel that she had stumbled, by her captivity, into another sphere of existence, where every action was beheld in distortion, as if through a madhouse mirror. She was suddenly terrified that if she did not gain her release the sanity of her own vision might not be restored.
For a long moment, Matt said nothing. He seemed fully absorbed in the purely physical actions of driving and the pleasure sensations which he now assisted by shifting undulations of his hips, counter movements to Estelle's stroking ministrations. But at last Matt responded to Evelyn's question. He asked, "Why do you want to go back there for, anyway? They only hate your guts.
Evelyn's eyes flashed in anger. "Just exactly what are you talking about? What would you know about a normal, decent kind of life, the problems of marriage and raising children?"
Matt's voice was almost condescending. "You know all about it, don't you? That's why that kid would like to shove a shiv up your virgin can." He added sarcastically, "It is virgin, isn't it?"
Estelle was still maintaining a hold on his sex but now was also involved in manipulating her own, her skirt drawn unselfconsciously up to her hips. The incongruity of the situation overwhelmed Evelyn and rendered her speechless. I must be utterly mad to engage in any conversation about my personal life with him, and while all this is going on right in front of me, she thought to herself. But Matt continued his monologue. "I can see you're too young to have a kid that age, so that must be his kid. I'm glad he didn't realize when he married you that he was setting up a convent. He looks like a pretty regular Joe."
Evelyn brought her hands up to her ears to shut out his words that struck at her like stones flung at her most vulnerable parts. Everything about his man was offensive to her in a way that was infuriating-the grossness of his animal responses, his taunting, intimidating expressions, his presumptive interjection into her personal affairs. The car rumbled on, and the shattering reverberations from the wheels on the uneven back roads soon drew her into a wearying torpor, and Evelyn fell asleep.
When she awakened, it seemed to be mid-morning from the position of the sun. They were parked somewhere in thick foliage alongside what appeared to be a small lake in a remote backwoods area. Evelyn saw Estelle sitting half outside the back seat, the door thrust open, while with a wet towel she was washing her legs and thighs.
Estelle turned at the sound of Evelyn's movements and broke into a smile which, for all of her excessively theatrical makeup, was guileless and childlike. "Did you sleep good, doll?"' She noted Evelyn's puzzlement at Matt's absence. "He's down at the lake taking a swim for himself," she volunteered. "See, there-" she said, pointing for Evelyn to look out the side. Evelyn chose not to obey the urge to look, and Estelle offered her the towel. "Want to wash up?"
Evelyn accepted the towel, removed her shoes and walked over to the lakeside to dampen it, in time to see Matt stepping out of the water, stark naked. She whirled away quickly, the color rising in her face. She removed herself to a vantage point behind thick brush and began to attend to herself. She saw Matt stretch himself out on the grass at the lake's edge, facing the flooding warmth of the morning sun. She wanted to remove her clothes and wash herself thoroughly, but her nudity in the presence of that man, despite the fact that he was not aware of her place in the foliage behind him, was too disturbing a prospect. She applied herself to do the job as best as she could by raising and rearranging her garments.
It was then that she heard the sound of frivolous laughter from off to the side and looked to see two young girls, apparently of Diane's age, in a rowboat. As they came into view, they spotted Matt, who made no move to conceal himself or change his position of flagrant exposure, his legs widespread in the direction of the lake. One of the girls wore a bikini bathing suit with a life vest around her shoulders. She was standing and urging the girl applying herself to the oars to move closer to Matt's position. When they were approximately twenty-five yards off the shore and looking brazenly at Matt's bared body, the girl in the bikini shouted at him to get his attention, "Hey, Tarzan! Hey, Tarzan! Me Jane!" And they both burst into a fit of laughter.
Matt, who had been sunbathing with his eyes closed and face upturned to the sun, now rose slowly to his feet, facing the girls.
The girl in the bikini called out, "Do you want to go swinging together, Tarzan?" and she reached down and teasingly began to lower the swim-trunk portion of her abbreviated bathing suit. Matt stood there, facing them, his hands on his hips, his legs widespread, offering no encouragement and making no effort to conceal himself or reject them. The girl in the bikini accepted his casualness as a challenge to carry her boldness even further, and she suddenly pulled her bikini bottom down to her knees and then stepped out of it entirely. Her girlfriend, completely overcome by fits of laughter, slid down into the boat and gave up all her attempts at working the oars.
Matt now took several steps in the direction of the water. Then he raised his hand and beckoned the girl who afforded this unencumbered view. As he leaned forward to dive, the lithe white female body struck the crystalline surface with a resounding splash. Two naked figures, swimming toward each other, inexorably closed the distance until the water surged in the clash of their meeting, and they did in fact disappear momentarily, returning to the surface in the spinning, tumbling choreograph of mating.
Then Matt was holding her, stroking powerfully for the shore, to come up finally, her body clinging to him. He struck the ground, the full weight of his body straining against her, even as he was enveloped deep within her vitals.
Evelyn suspended all thought. All seemed totally subjugated to the magnetic fascination with the visual, the wild contortions of flesh that followed its furies with the single-mindedness of a brush fire gone wild. Nor did Evelyn's eye lose sight of the boat drawing closer to shore with its single occupant now stepping out and wriggling out of her jeans to reveal a compact figure developed far beyond her years.
The girl beneath Matt released a piercing cry of anguish that seemed to carry clear across the lake. Now she was weeping, as Matt drew away from her, and clutching her legs together and rolling agonizingly from side to side. Matt rolled off her, lying back.
The second girl stood over him, and he reached out with his hands to draw her down to him. From behind them, Evelyn saw his body as some fierce bird of prey, assaulting to conquer yet another nesting place. Youthfully small-proportioned, she could not first accept him. Matt clasped her to him, but her incapacity kept him poised at the threshold of her consummation. When Matt flipped her over on her back and applied his knee to her thighs, spread-eagling her to widen the mark of acceptance, a horrified Evelyn burst from her vantage point of concealment and flung herself at him, beating him with her fists. "Stop! Stop it, you fiend! You'll tear her apart."
Matt flung her to his side with his arm, and when she continued to kick and pummel him transferred his knee from the girl's thigh to Evelyn's chest to subdue her. "Run," Evelyn yelled to the girl. "Pull away from him." But the girl, instead of making an attempt to bolt, grabbed him with her hand and tortuously skewered herself, grinding the full span of it into her straining body.
Helpless, her chest painfully constricted, Evelyn was forced to remain in that position, inches away from the scene of the supreme erotic engagement. How much Evelyn detested this girl, detested womankind for the sordid drive to sexual self-debasement at the hands of the rapacious man. Pinned beneath his leg, Evelyn imagined such femininity as a greedy mouth, over-engorged and straining to the bursting point but unwilling to expel its prodigious burden.
The girl plunged headlong into the fucking as one falling over a precipice. Her leg flexed out, striking Evelyn against the side of the temple, sending her senses reeling. The girl's legs clamped tightly as she searched with her writhing hips. Then the soft meat of her inner thighs found him and gave a sudden lurch to enclose him in the tender, wet, meaty trap.
Matt shoved heatedly at the hot center of the girl's shimmering passion. She returned the attack with her supple thighs, giving unmistakable evidence that her need was even greater than his. With rapid thrusts, she received the huge, hard cock, drawing it suckingly into her enveloping hollow. Her whole body wormed and lashed furiously. Her legs scissored around his waist as she grafted the moist texture of her cunt over his plunging cock, squirming her hips with the inner feel of the scorching heat of it, while at the same time making miraculous friction deep inside her vagina with the frantic inner grabs of her muscles.
"Ohhh, God, you're great! Fuck it to me! Harder, harder!" the girl screeched.
She bucked under his cock furiously, pumping, slamming her voracious cunt up and down, down and up, stuffing the thick meat in and out of her belly, milking on it, nursing tightly on it.
Then a thrusting, thunderous tremor hit through both their bodies. The girl screamed and rammed her cunt hard up and down on Matt's spurting prick. Her eyes were feverish as her body was jolted into her own orgasm. She moaned insanely and her ecstatic overflow somehow seemed to open some subterranean spring which poured forth with an amazing superfluidity. In the mental ache of her confusion, it struck Evelyn with a sense of awe and wonder at a state which she had never personally experienced.
CHAPTER THREE
Presently, Matt raised her to her feet and guided her in the direction of the car. "You kind of favor playing the role of Mother Superior no matter who's involved, don't you?" he commented snidely. He prodded her obscenely from behind, but she was too weary and shaken to protest. She entered the car and remained docilely seated, encouraging the numbness of her own senses.
Matt examined one of the tires that seemed to be losing air and announced that it looked to him like the wheel had a split rim, which was something that should be attended to before they went too far along the way. As he drove around the other side of the lake, he said to Estelle, "Keep your eyes open for some farmhouse or some place where I might be able to pick up another rim from some old heap."
The area seemed to be devoid of any habitation, but at the extreme southwest tip of the lake Estelle called attention to a large barn, and beyond that a neat gray frame house. As Matt swung around into its gravel road, a big, rawboned farm worker type in coveralls straining at his girth came in their direction. Matt stepped out to engage him in conversation, pointing to the wheel.
The man, tall and beefily broad, seemed to dwarf Matt by comparison. "Sure, I think I can fix you up with a rim," Evelyn heard him say, and then he insisted, "Why don't you come into the house and have yourself a drink first?" Matt nodded and opened the car door, motioning to Estelle and Evelyn to follow him. All three trailed after the heavyset field worker and went up the short flight of steps into the gray frame house.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, Evelyn recognized the young girl huddled on the couch in the corner as one of the girls in the rowboat, the second one that Matt had had sexual contact with. "This the fella?" the farmworker looked toward her questioningly. She nodded, her eyes darting uncertainly to Matt's face.
At once, the large man seemed transformed from his slow, idle-moving ways. He spun about with surprising quickness, and without warning raised a massive arm and clubbed Matt across the side of the face with his closed fist. Caught unexpectedly, Matt stumbled back and slammed against the wall behind him. Before he could recover, the farmer came up to him again and lashed at him with one fist and then the other, stunning him with the blows.
Blood trickled down from Matt's nose and the corner of his mouth. But he did not cry out or show evidence of pain or fear. And the unchanging, stony coldness of his expression remained. Then a strange thing occurred. Even as the larger man struck at him again, it was Matt who, his balance now recovered, was advancing in the face of the man's physical punishment. The unexpectedness of this action seemed to throw the larger man into a confusion that was immobilizing. He held his hands up but he appeared uncertain that his next move should be, and Matt stepped up to him and pumped piston like jabs into his lower gut, folding the man over until his full weight seemed to be held up by Matt. But the leaner man did not relent and maintained his punishing attack to the groin until a spray of gall poured from the man's lips.
Matt stepped aside and let him drop to his knees with the weight of a sodden sack. He pitched forward on his face, regurgitating in spasms and lying in his own swill. The girl who had been sitting on the couch ran up to Matt. "I didn't want him to do you no harm," she said. "He could see someone done me bad when I came in, and I was afraid to lie when he asked if it was you. But I ain't sore at you. I got over three hundred dollars and I'll give it to you if you'll take me with you, away from this old bastard."
Evelyn looked with eyes that could not fathom the events they had witnessed. Through this girl, flinging herself at Matt, inviting God knows what kind of debauchery and depravity, Evelyn saw her stepdaughter, Diane. The same mystifying moth like plunge into the flame. The same disregard of parent and family. She regarded the childlike submissiveness of Estelle and considered how right her father had been to raise her as he had, to destroy in her any vestige of desire for female bondage under the yoke of male domination. Matt searched about the room. "What do you want?" the girl asked him anxiously. "Just tell me what it is and I'll help you."
"Where are the keys to that Chevy alongside the house?"
The girl went to a hook on the wall, removed the keys, and handed them to Matt. He started out the door, nudging Estelle and Evelyn before him. The younger girl called after him. "Can I go along?"
"Some other time, kid," Matt said in a way of curt dismissal.
"I'll be better with this bleeding tomorrow, maybe even tonight," she said. "And then you can do me all over again, any time you want."
Matt got in the car and started up the engine, and as she held open the door he shoved her away with his hand and she fell back on the ground. The car swung around and started in the direction of the gravel road. She ran alongside, screaming and cursing. "I'll get you, you son of a bitch! I'll turn the cops on you for stealing the car and raping me."
Estelle laughed aloud. "I think we ought to get her pulled in for raping you," she said to Matt.
Matt was quietly serious. "That little squirt can spring the lid. She'll be on the phone before we're clear of this county."
"What are you going to do?"
Matt bypassed a paved road for a rock-strewn dirt cut-through. He drove on silently for a while until several miles farther on he realized it would be nonnegotiable and was forced to retrace his way to the paved road which he took with expressed misgivings. "This is a bad bit. This car is liable to be spotted for sure." He pulled up abruptly and ran the car off the side of the road into some concealing foliage. Then he got out and announced to the two, "We're going to get out and walk a ways. It shouldn't be too much farther into some little town around here. I'll get a better idea of which way to snake through. We can come back and pick up the car towards evening."
As they walked for a mile or two, Evelyn was forced to consider several alternates. Was this her opportunity to alert some bystanders when they came to the town proper? There were also other questions which required rationalization. For example, why hadn't she made an attempt to break away when he had parked and gone swimming and sunbathing along the lakeside? She told herself she had no idea of her surroundings and might easily have been lost in the woods. But how about when she entered the house of the farmer who had attacked Matt? Wasn't that another opportunity to effect her release? Perhaps, she told herself, that is exactly what would have happened if the latter man had overcome Matt. It was easy to consider in retrospect that her object in waiting around was an expectation of that outcome.
In the final analysis, there was always the thought that Matt was a dangerous and merciless man. An unsuccessful attempt to break free might so infuriate him that she would expose herself to fatal crippling, even death. Wasn't this what her husband would advise her to do? Not to try to strike out against irrationality, but simply to wait without provoking it until it went by? Nagging, ill-defined doubts cast a troubled pall over her nightmare circumstance, the delicate balancing upon a high wire that threatened to end in disaster at any instant. Even as she moved in cadence with her two unwanted companions, she had the strange sensation that she might awaken at any moment and discover all of what she had encountered as fragments of an outlandish dream.
As they approached the outskirts of the town, they came upon a busy cluster of many cars and milling people and the sounds of brassy hurdy-gurdy music in the background. Somewhat farther on they saw the reason for the crowd, a noisy, festive county fair. Matt nodded. "Okay," he said, "this is just what we need. Come on, we'll get lost in here and kill some time until dark. I should be able to get one of the cars bunched up back there started, and then we can take off."
Estelle seemed as gladdened by the presence of the fair as a kid playing truant for a special event. "I used to work as a carny that used to play hick spots like this," she said. "I never told you about that, did I, Matt?" Despite his lack of response, she maintained a running monologue, seeming mentally to provide his reactions. "But you don't want to hear about anything I ever done, do you? But it was a ball, really it was, Matt. The guy I worked for had five or six setups. We used to play different county fairs. It was like one of those striptease shows. Not any real burlesque. Just two girls, sometimes three, playing each fair. We had a pretty big tent all to ourselves and a stage right out in the middle of it, with a curtain just like in a theater. But there wasn't any seats. The people-just the gents was allowed-used to walk in and stand up and watch the show, and then we'd get another batch coming in and another. The money wasn't too bad 'cause we used to get five percent of the business we did on top of thirty bucks. But the real money was when the guy who did the barking and ticket-collecting used to fix us up with some of the local hicks after the show. You know, Matt, that one night, outside of Memphis, I laid over thirty guys in less than two hours. I swear."
The presence of all the sounds, talk and excitement seemed to act as a stimulus for Estelle, and she kept up her one-way stream of conversation as a droning background, to which neither Matt nor Evelyn, absorbed in their own thoughts, paid any attention.
Matt led them from one game concession to another, participating mechanically and joylessly. Only Estelle maintained her animation, avidly searching out associations with the past. She spotted, before one of the sideshow-type concessions, a young woman out front on one of the wooden stages, provocatively attired in a heavy jeweled girdle tightly constricting her hips to accentuate her bared waist and belly, which she undulated enticingly to a recording of Persian music. Estelle went up to her, ignoring the scowling, disapproving looks of the sideshow barker who kept up his running patter in an effort to induce some of the ogling males to pay the price of a dollar. She engaged the young woman billed as Princess Casmah, the Belly Dancer in avid conversation. When she returned to Matt she said, "Come on, I got something going. Like what I was telling you about. It's a tent set up at the other end of the field where they steer the boys looking for nooky."
Matt waved his hand and made a wry expression, but Estelle prevailed upon him. "Please, Matt, we're just killing time anyway." Matt shrugged and permitted himself to be led by Estelle, with Evelyn submissively in tow. Both women stumbled awkwardly in their heels over the uneven ground in the dim light before the outline of the tent in the distance indicated their objective. A hunched-over bear of a man, burly-looking, appraised them warily until Estelle mentioned the belly dancer and asked Matt to give him thirty, ten for each of them. Then he raised the flap of the tent and admitted them into a dimly lit, smoked-clogged area with thirty to forty raucously laughing and commenting men seated upon folding chairs before a large stand-up motion picture screen upon which a projector cast a one-reel pornographic film.
Matt felt Evelyn tense alongside him. The images on the screen showed three women kneeling before an equal number of men in a competitive exhibition. One of the female performers, all of them stripped and exposed in the immediate foreground, roused the clamorous audience to spasms of raucous laughter as she worked, manipulated, stroked and frantically mouthed her male partner in a zealous effort to outdo all competition. "Go get her, Blackie!"
"Come down the home stretch!"
"There's twenty that says the gal on the first big white pony comes in first."
The camera closed in as each male performer was brought to full satisfaction. The extreme close-up gave to the spectacle a strangely abstract aspect which struck Evelyn as that of coiled serpents spastically striking.
Evelyn, who had remained up to this point in a state of trancelike fixation which characterized her response to all the sexuality she had encountered from the moment of her captivity, and which afforded her a refuge from its threateningly disorienting effects, suddenly was bereft of her defenses. She buried her face in her hands as she thought, I must be going mad. What am I doing here? Why am I remaining so close to this insanity?
Spurred to action by this awakening, she thrust herself between several of the men standing behind her and burst through the tent opening into the cool night air. Which way to go did not matter-she simply wanted to get away, to step back over the moat from this hellish Dante an perversion into the sane, secure mold of her former existence. She started across the darkened field that separated the tent from the carnival area proper. But then she heard someone behind her and turned to see two men emerging from the tent, one of them pointing in her direction and the other calling to her.
Her first reaction was to go to them, explain that she was in need of help and ask that she be taken to the police. But their expressions, as they drew abreast of her, served to alarm her still further. The stocky man, the shorter of the two, immediately ran his hand down her back, feeling her body beneath the gray, tightly drawn shirt. "How about taking on the both of us for twenty?" he asked.
Evelyn pulled away. "No, you don't understand."
"Thirty," the lean, taller man offered with a lascivious leer. "We'll show you a good time." Evelyn broke away and began to run across the field. But when she realized they were after her, she turned in the direction of what appeared to be a large area of parked cars off to the right and perhaps fifty yards away, less than half the distance to the carnival area. Here she thought she might elude her pursuers by concealing herself behind a car or stepping into one and locking the doors. But her haste and the unevenness of the ground cause her to stumble and fall several times, and they were upon her even before she reached the parking area. As they took hold of her from either side, moving her in the direction of the cars, she pleaded with them and attempted to distinguish herself from the common prostitute type which they apparently assumed she was.
"Sure," one of them said sarcastically, "that's the kind of place for a lady to hang around in to get educated."
"And what about that brunette piece with you?"
They pulled open a car door and pressed her, head to waist, down on the seat with her legs hanging over the side and outside of the car. She tried to cry out, but a hand was forcing her down from behind, muffling her cries with her mouth into the upholstery. Frantic hands pulled her panties down. Strong hands had parted her ass-cheeks, baring her asshole, which had remained, until that time, inviolate. The sensation was that of an incising blade dividing her parts. She moaned, cried out, dug her nails into the leather of the car seat. The sensation was that of a displacement of her vitals as each lancing incision further extended the minute mark of the initial thrust. She felt the painful tear of the flesh as her assailant dug his dirty fingers into her sides in the throes of his shuddering experience.
Before she could recover in the instant of the suspension of his body weight, she was seized once again from this vantage point and forced to accept the assault of her second attacker. But he had no more than effected entry when he heard the hard edge of a familiar voice. Her assailant released her and turned to face Matt. Evidently discovering her absence, he had come out to find her. Evelyn raised herself, trembling, from the seat.
"You, buddies, go on and chase your tail," Matt said with a quiet, menacing authority. But the taller man suddenly pulled a knife and slashed Matt, catching him across the upper arm. Almost in the same action with his reflexive side step, he came up with his revolver and smashed the butt end directly into the face of the knife wielder. There was a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage and the hot spill of blood and teeth as the man struck the ground like a dead weight.
His stocky companion spun about at once and began to run across the field. Evelyn, steadying herself against the car door, suddenly dropped into Matt's arms, clutching him tightly, sobs racking her body. For an instant, they remained there unmoving, then his arms went up and held her with surprisingly comforting gentleness. "You-you'll be going back real soon," he said, the words coming out with quick awkwardness. And then catching himself, as if out of resentment at an uncharacteristic display of emotion, he drew abruptly away from her and began to lead her back to the tent. "You don't have to go inside," he said. "I'm just going to get Estelle."
Evelyn, still frightened by the surroundings and shakened by her experience, clung to his arm. Still she was upset by the sense of security his presence gave her. She knew she should detest him for the way he had, in this brief period of time, splintered the pattern of her life. Somehow, even then, she sensed that that was exactly what had happened. No matter what happened, she knew that these few days would not simply be expunged by time. Evelyn shuddered involuntarily as she clung to him; in some unseemly way, beyond the grossness of the sexual experience, she was aware that she had changed, but she was afraid to dwell on the thought any further or examine the nature of the change.
It was then that she felt the dampness of his arm and drew back in alarm when she noticed that his arm was bleeding where the knife had slashed him. She wanted to do something to help him, but the expression on his face precluded any such move on her part. It was something that he wished to disregard. She could see that. And he was not one who appreciated any undue attentiveness.
When they came to the tent, instead of waiting outside as she had intended, Evelyn went in after him to avoid being left alone and hazard any further undesirable encounters. The activities inside were even more openly orgiastic than before, and Estelle, who had gone out of control, was now bent over before a man in boots and jeans driving himself compulsively against her smooth, soft asshole, while at the same time she sucked at a dapper, carny type with too-sleek hair and an ornately checked suit jacket with her warm, moistened, heavily rouged lips.
Evelyn did not turn away now, and had the peculiar sensation that she had proceeded beyond some mental barrier that abstracted the shock value of sexual engagement. She saw Matt push through those around him, retrieving Estelle's dress and slip. These in hand, he walked up to her and pulled her away from those locked in the sucking and fucking. His action came so suddenly that it left the men interrupted in the midst of their passion in a state which provoked hilarity from the raucous audience. The man in the boots raised his hand threateningly against Matt but arrested the blow in mid-air at the sight of Matt's grim, dead-level expression and blood-smeared sleeve. Matt pressed the naked Estelle through the flap at the rear side of the tent, and Evelyn hastily exited from the front and went around to meet them. Even as Matt was helping Estelle pull her garments over her head, she remonstrated with him, "Please, Matt, help me out. Please don't turn it off for me." She repeated herself, pleading with all the way to the parking lot, where he tried one car and then another until he was able to get the engine in one to turn over. Then he slid out from under the wheel and asked Evelyn^, "Can you drive?"
"I can," she said, noting that he seemed pale and drained, a condition she attributed to his bleeding arm. She assumed, when he stepped into the rear seat of the car, that he was going to rest and attend to his arm.
"I'll direct you," he said to Evelyn as she started to pull the car out of the parking lot. "No, don't go out the way they all come in. Cut directly across the field ahead of you and turn left until you hit the road."
She crawled slowly, hardly able to make out the level of the ground ahead of her because he would permit her only the parking lights to guide her. But at last, after some considerable strain, she made the road with much relief and headed west as he instructed her. She realized that Matt's request to have her drive was for a purpose far different than what she had imagined. It was Estelle's fast, muffled breathing punctuated with intermittent gasps that drew her eyes to the rear-view mirror. There she saw Estelle straining to accept the hard, implacable impact of his determined thrusts. Evelyn's hands closed tighter around the steering wheel, her knuckles showing white. The same loathing which she had temporarily disavowed was now restored to its full intensity. She detested him for this display of carnal bestiality that rode roughshod over time, place and every human consideration.
In the back seat Matt squeezed the tip of Estelle's breast, making the nipple flatten. The thick fragance of the seeping cunt floated around the car. Then she sat up and leaned over him, kissing him tenderly around his cock, moistening the taut flesh with her saliva. Her hands groped everywhere, exploring, fondling. Then Evelyn heard the fleshy suckings, Estelle's mouth working it back and forth. Evelyn could not deny a shiver of pleasure just at the thought. She heard Estelle's breath rasping in her throat. Matt withdrew his prick from between the girl's lips.
"More," the girl groaned from deep in her throat, and in the rear-view mirror Evelyn could see his tongue teasing the tender lips and darting in and out of the panting pussy.
"Oh God!" Estelle squealed as the wet snake curled and forced its way into the opening, the flame of his tongue licking up through her in-sides. "Don't stop," she begged, but he already had, and then his stiff cock slid quickly into her again and she seized it with all her might, wrapping her legs up and around him.
"Oh, baby," she cooed in his ear as the first squirt of fire-hot fluid hit the flames of her dripping cunt, reaching a breathtaking climax herself.
Matt gripped his prick again and placed it against the sopping pussy. Then, putting his hands under her buttocks, he squirmed and wriggled forward, even deeper into her this time.
The warmth! The heat of this car! And the aromas of sex! Evelyn's brain began to swim in it all.
Estelle was moving back and forth on his stiff rod. "Oowww! Like it honey, like it!"
The rhythm of their bouncing bodies took on an even beat, Estelle's bare ass high in the back seat. Fucking. Grinding. And every once in a while, screaming.
CHAPTER FOUR
Evelyn's nerves were drawn taut and pressed to the breaking point as the interval extended over a period of several hours and the tangled bodies in the rear seat still remained coiled in their terrible compulsive writhing. Intermittently, without pause or cessation in his erotic ministrations, Matt would raise his voice to give her directions to slow down, speed up, or switch to another road. When it seemed to her that another few moments would surely snap the last brittle thread of her reserve, Estelle cried out like a woman in labor and delivered herself in one horrendous upsurge, driving her feet in a kicking staccato up against the car ceiling, of the stifled burden of her passion. For a long time after that, she clung to Matt, weeping and grateful for the release of her enslaving desire. Presently she sat up, wiping her face, which now shone with a strange innocence like that of a well-scrubbed child's. She leaned over the seat back alongside Evelyn and smiled. "How you doing?"
Evelyn, still sullen, disdained an answer. Unperturbed, Estelle continued, "Gee, you were a doll to take over and let Matt do me like that. If he didn't I would just about have died. You know, nobody in my life has ever been able to get me come off except for Matt," she said. "I'll bet you can't believe that. I mean, I'll bet I've had at least five thousand guys work me over since I was a kid. Gee, I'll bet it was twice that. I've been jabbed ever since I was eight, and I'm twenty-four now."
Evelyn continued listening without response, but her interest was sharpened now by Estelle's surprising admission. Evelyn had never given any thought to her failure to achieve a climax in her previous sexual experience, which was limited entirely to her marital relations. These were of a casual, never intense, nature, the instances becoming increasingly fewer and farther between as she made evident her discomfiture to Harry at what she had always felt an undesirable personal invasion. But she had witnessed, since her abduction as a hostage, the wild desire and driving intensity of sexual need in others, the supreme ecstasy and the fertile profusiveness, and this gave her cause to consider her own responses comparatively.
Her father had always told her, even before puberty, that, "Some people are of a passionate physical nature which is really quite animalistic and vulgar and, I believe, a retardation in development. And some are of a more refined character with pious sensibilities, such as you, Evelyn, and myself. Sex and lust are signs of bestiality. Sexuality in a woman is vulgar and intolerable." The words, repeated so many times over the years, resounded in her inner ear. Even now, her father's presence at her elbow, long after he had died, prompted her always to keep her eyes shielded from the grosser side of human passions. That Estelle, apparently the most oversexed of creatures, was unable to satisfy her desires with the thousands of men whom she had known, except for Matt-one man among many thousands-struck her as strangely anomalous. She found herself wanting to learn more of this particular response or failure of response which they seemed to have in common. But Evelyn did not dare voice her interest in Matt's presence. She kept silent until Estelle remarked, "I'm glad he stretched out and went to sleep. He hurt himself back there somehow, you know, and he didn't look too good to me." It was then that Evelyn glanced back and saw that Matt was indeed outstretched and in a deep sleep.
"Why do you think that of all the men you've been with," Evelyn now ventured, "that he has been the only one to make you feel like that?"
"You mean, come loose?"
Evelyn nodded.
"Matt helped me figure that one out once," Estelle said. "Isn't it amazing how he knows just about every damn thing? I guess it's from all that reading he's always doing."
Evelyn registered surprise, and Estelle explained, "Not while we're on the road like this, I don't mean. I mean, that's when he gets some money together by knocking over some gas stations, supermarkets, out-of-the-way movie theaters, places like that. Then, we go somewhere and hole up for months. Last time, it was almost a whole year. We got a great place, a whole house. It was in Nova Scotia, right on the water. He practically filled that place up with books. That's about all he'd do-reading all the time and going for long walks or swimming a lot or boating. We got us a neat boat. We lived like that, just the three of us, until the money ran out."
"Three?"
"Oh, you wouldn't know about that. I mean, Ma, Matt's ma was with us. He always takes her along. That's where we'll be going now, to get her, before we find another place to hole up at. Then he'll start reading all them books again. But I don't mind. He treats me good and keeps me happy so I'm not going out of my head half the time like you've been seeing, when we move around like this."
The puzzling enigma that was Matt became even more mysterious in Estelle's ingenuous descriptions. "What did he explain to you about . . . making you come?" Evelyn returned to the same disturbing question.
"Oh, you would have to know something about that bastard of an old man who raised me up. There was six of us, six kids, my four brothers, Mike, Andy, Charlie and Steve. Steve was my oldest brother and the only decent one of the lot. There was two girls, my sister Rose and myself, but she was next to the oldest and I was the youngest. I was like a little kid compared to her. She really was a knockout. All the guys chasing her tail around the house as long as I can remember. And my old man like near busted a gut each time he'd catch her making out with any guy. Him and my brothers would gang up on him and like to kill him. That just about happened to Gus. He was running with my sister. Lots of times I would see them. I would push open the door a little bit and watch him, or sometimes I'd hide in the closet and get a good look. It made me real hot, and I used to rub myself like the dickens while watching them. Then my sister Rose got knocked up, and boy, what happened when my old man found out about that. You know, we come from Pennsy and I grew up in coal-mining towns. My father and brothers always worked the mines. That's where they'd be during the day when Rose and Gus were making out.
"Gus was a real sharp character. I mean, he was always up somebody's skirts, but he and Rose had something going together. Then this one night, my father had a look at her little belly, grabbed her and shook the hell out of her until she admitted that she was knocked up and that it was Gus that did it but that she wanted to have the baby.
"Well," Estelle said, grimly, compressing her lips, "you would of had to have seen my old man to believe it. When he lost his temper, he was like somebody out of his head. He just began slapping Rose until she fell down and then he was hollering that he wasn't going to have any bastards dropping in his house, and then he whipped the hell right out of her. And then while she was laying there, he kicked her right in the middle. She was bent over double, screaming, moaning and everything. I was just a kid and I remember how my ma went at him, cursing and beating at him and then trying to help Rose, but he wouldn't let her. He just slapped her around and blamed it all on her that Rose was so quick and easy.
"It was true that my ma would be cheating on him every time she got a chance. Especially when she did a lot of ginning herself, and then some trade people or insurance men or salesmen would come to the door. She'd be walking around half the time with one of them wraparounds that she was always wearing, with nothing underneath. I don't even remember her looking young or pretty, you know, in the face I mean. But she sure had a sexy shape with big boobs that weren't sloppy and real neat legs that she was always shaving and rubbing cold cream on. She'd do the nails on her feet some bright color and then put on those showy mules with spikes and then it was just a question of who happened to ring the doorbell first. She knew she had a gorgeous body. She couldn't wait to show it. She made a big thing out of standing there in front of whoever the guy was and just letting that wraparound drop off her. She'd stand there, watching their eyes pop.
"I remember one time that some salesman-I think he was one of those fellows who works in a crew selling magazine subscriptions, he was young, a college type. Well, he was in there jabbing Ma for maybe a half-hour, and after he left, he came back no more than fifteen minutes later. He had two other guys with him, and all he did was ask Ma to drop her wraparound so they could have a look. He told them what a great body she had and he just wanted them to see it for themselves. Ma, she was beaming like crazy, and turning this way and that way, showing herself like some model. That's all they did, believe it or not. For a long time after they left, Ma stood up in front of one of those full-length mirrors that was on the inside of her closet door, naked, and admiring herself. She didn't give a damn if I saw what was going on. She used to say that sex never ended up killing any woman. But many is the one who's gotten dried up as a stalk from not having those feelings. She used to tell me that the sooner I learned to do a man, the better off I was going to be and the more enjoyment out of life I would get. That's how come she would just carry on with my being around, and later on getting me to go down on them. By the time I was ten or eleven, I could do that so good that she used to brag about it and have me do it just to show them. When I got them all sticking up high enough to raise a flag, she'd take over."
Estelle raced on animatedly, with details of the past, bringing a wide diversity of expressions to her face-amusement, sadness, pained recollection. The emotions of her still young lifetime, flowing through her. "My ma sounds like a real pig in the trough, doesn't she? My old man used to call her that. But really, she was a great person. People liked her right off.
Women, old ladies, kids. And she wasn't lazy or anything like that. She kept the house clean and had meals on time, and that kind of thing, no matter how much she would ball around during the afternoon."
Estelle drew a deep sigh and considered the next comment thoughtfully. "Even with all of the things he said and the way he slugged her around, my old man had feelings for her. One day, he came in the house and caught her bouncing away on top of some guy in the bedroom, and he-he hit her in the head, I think it was with an ashtray he'd picked up from the table. She was never the same after that. She'd just go blank and sit there for hours, not moving or even seeing anything around her. Finally, he had to put her away. But like clockwork, every Saturday, he would go up to this institution to see her, sometimes bring her something. I don't think the old bastard ever got over it.
"But he was such a damned hypocrite. All the time he'd be using the word 'decent' and be screwing about whory women catting around. But it'd be okay for him to be going around ripping off panties and balling around every time he got the chance. Lots of times he and the boys, I mean my brothers, would go up to the cat house in town. Then they'd come back grinning and nudging each other like a bunch of butting goats. But to Rose and me, small as I was, that kind of doings was 'dragging yourselves straight down to hell.' And if any neighborhood gossip involved some girl getting herself a bellyful, it was 'the little bastard that was going to pollute her life.' It seemed we were never going to hear the end of it.
"But if I'd get to look like I was too shook up, my ma would step in and tell him to come around with his sermons when he was ready to follow his own preaching. Then he would turn on her right in front of us, calling her foul names. She would just stand up to him and say that she had to know she was still living and breathing in this world for some reason. It was only when he looked like he was going to blow his stack that she would just take me into the other room and close the door. All that talk about getting knocked up used to scare the hell out of me, but my ma told me there was ways of looking out for that. It was when I was almost twelve, about three months' short of it. I had started having my period when I was eleven. I was developed and all. I mean I had something to tuck in a bra. I muzzled around with the kids in the neighborhood and would let them stick their fingers up, but I was afraid to do any more. Of course, I knew what it was all about. I told you that my ma used to make a big show of me taking full-grown men, but always with my mouth.
"It was one day when I stayed home from school because I had a cold and my ma kept me in bed that it happened for the first time. Some kid, he was about nineteen but he was no kid to my ma, came to the door selling brushes and things like that. As soon as she brought him into the house, I looked out the bedroom door and saw that he was cute and everything. I kept on watching, hoping she would get him undressed and all. I wanted to see-well, you know what I mean," Estelle said, her eyes bright with desire, even as she recalled a sexual episode dating back to her childhood.
"It didn't take her long before she was standing in front of him all naked and taking his hands and putting them on her breasts and bringing them down. I wanted to go out into the room and show myself in the chance that she would start bragging to him about what an expert I was and all that, and get me to show him, just for kicks. But I didn't because she was usually ginned up to the gills when she'd get me to do that. But now she was sober. That's why I was surprised when she called my name and told me to come in the room. He was standing there in front of her and he had his clothes on, still, but you could see him standing there like it was going to bust through his pants. 'Pull your pajamas off, Estelle,' she said, 'and show this handsome boy how pretty you are everywhere.' I could see he was all nervous and tense and everything, not knowing what was going on. She had him so hot and bothered that she could have done anything to him. He had red-brown hair all combed nice and a real straight nose and a sharp suit.
"I didn't need any coaxing. I took the top of my pajamas off, just letting it slip off my shoulders, the way I'd often seem my ma do it. And then I pulled the strings of my pajama pants. They slid off my hips and down over my belly. He didn't try to stop her when she pulled his coat and the rest of his clothes off. I got real nervous when she began stroking him and took my hand and put it on his body. It was like she was leading us every step of the way. 'Isn't he handsome, Estelle?' she was saying. 'Isn't he just meant for pleasing the girls?' I bent down over him, expecting it to be like all the other times. But Ma said to me, 'No, Stell, not this time. Go over on the couch.' I sure wanted to do that, but I was terrified about getting a baby. But Ma, she knew that by the tense way I was acting. 'I'm going to show you how to pleasure yourself without having any fears of getting in trouble. It's only when the juices get mixed that a woman can get herself in a family way.'
"That's just the way she done it," Estelle said, somewhat wonderingly, "stroking him and talking all the while just like she was giving a lesson in school.
"She warned me how it was easy to get excited and forget about protecting yourself, and when my sister Rose got her belly, I figured that's what she and Gus had done. Anyway, what I started to tell you-my sister went to the hospital and she lost the baby. But she never come home after that. My pa, he blamed the whole thing on Gus, and he and the boys went out and they done him in. They beat him up something terrible and they did something worse than that, but I didn't know just what it was until a long time after, about two years, maybe three. I was sexy as hell by then. The boys in the street would whistle and stop and go the route when I'd go by shaking up my can, in skirts so tight you could see the line right down the middle. I used to put on a lot of clothes that Rose had left, black stockings and them nifty high spikes and blouses open down to where you could see my boobs bunching up.
"My ma was in the institution by then and so I used to have my fun during the day, banging away like sixty even though at night, when my old man was home, I had to do the chores, cook dinner and watch my step. But after my ma was sent away, I didn't have anything to do with grown men, just kid stuff around the neighborhood, until one day Gus got onto me. I was in the street and he came alongside me in one of them white convertibles with red plush upholstery. He was always a real sharp guy. He used to gamble a lot, and he'd always be winning money at cards even when he was going with Rose. But later on, he became sort of a professional, setting up games, poker, craps.
"He stopped the car alongside me and told me to get in. He wanted to talk to me. When he looked me up and down, he stuck his tongue out like wetting his lips. I laughed, like I felt real complimented, you know. You'd often see Gus around town with real gorgeous dolls, like real actresses and models. They weren't even from our town. He told me he wanted me to come up to his place for a little talk. Then when we got there, he poured me a big slug of Scotch and then sat down alongside me to tell me how gorgeous I was, just as sexy as Rose, even sexier, and he started unbuttoning my blouse as he kept on talking. 'Let's see if you got the nips that she had,' he said and reached out to unsnap my bra.
"I always wanted to grow up to be just as beautiful as Rose, and it meant a lot to me to hear him say things like that. He traced little circles with his fingers on the nipples of my boobs until they stuck out like two little corks about to pop off the top of me. Then he put his mouth on them, nibbling at them with just the slightest edge of his teeth, with his hand coming down my belly and slipping down under the elastic band on my silk panties at the same time. His fingers, like a lot of little dancing toes, pressed into my warm, moist folds, lingering there.
"I tried to unzip him, but he grabbed my hands hard, and I thought he wasn't going to go no further, but he did it by himself. I thought it was kind of crazy that he didn't take any of his clothes off, all dressed up and pumping away at me like that. I found out after that that was always his way. He never took his clothes off. Anyway, when we took a break to light up and finish our drinks, he went all sad and didn't say anything for a while. At first, I thought he was disappointed, but he said, 'You're every bit as good a lay, kid. It's just that, you know the way it was with me and Rose.' The muscles worked in his jaw, and then the words came out, 'We decided we really wanted to have that kid. Your old man--' His face darkened with anger. He turned around and never finished his thought. And he never talked to me about Rose or my old man after that first time, even though I began to see him all the time.
"That's when I found out the reason that he had those gorgeous dolls around him. He wasn't only gambling, but he was pimping too, and he told me that I was such a great piece that we could make out real good in a strictly business deal, fifty-fifty. He would fix me up with the guys. He said I could make myself easy a hundred and fifty bucks a week and I could get wild clothes, a car of my own, and have a ball at the same time.
"I wanted to do it all right, but the thing of it was that we didn't have that big a town. I was afraid that my old man would find out what I was doing and just about kill me. Gus told me that he wasn't about to have my old man on his back himself. 'I work four other towns in this county and I'll make sure I keep you balling in the right spots.'
"The way it was," Estelle said, "he really had a neat thing going. He had deals with all the clubs. Not the nightclubs and that kind of thing. Organizations-you know, men's clubs. He would arrange a gambling session and get a piece out of that and have several girls going on the side and go through the whole routine for twenty bucks. But for special membership events, when there were thirty, fifty, sometimes a hundred guys, Gus would work a deal called Blind Man's Bluff. He put a couple of us on cots in a room with the lights out and every guy got five minutes and the tab only five bucks. In that deal, the guys couldn't pick or choose or anything. In and out, that was the whole bit. But it worked out for five bucks because each girl could handle a dozen guys an hour, and these things would go two, three hours, sometimes four."
Estelle's voice dropped, softly saddened. "It was one of those Blind Man's Bluff deals that really loused me up, but good. I didn't know just how much Gus had it in for my old man. I shouldn't of been so stupid when one time I found out what my old man and brothers did to Gus. I told you that every time he came to me, he always wore his clothes. Well, this one time, after a big night at one of the clubs, he took me back to his place. He was half crocked at that point, and when we got to his apartment, he had about six or seven shots and he flaked out on the bed, dead to the world. I stripped down and crawled in beside him and began to feel him around. That's the way it was with me. Besides, now that he'd conked out, I had a chance to strip him down and I was curious, I guess, because he'd never let me.
"Well, I got his pants and jockey shorts down to his knees, and I saw something weird right off. He had some kind of contraption, made of black leather, that held up the rest of him. At least, that's what I thought when I first looked at it. I figured maybe he had some kind of rupture. But then, when I got a closer look, I could see that it wasn't holding up anything. It was just a couple of balls of leather hitched up with a few straps." Estelle gasped at the horrifying disclosure. "My old man and brothers had slashed them off. That was the last time in his life he was ever going to knock anybody up. I remember I-I got sick to my stomach and I went into the John and spilled out my guts. I pulled his pants back up and I never let him know what I had seen. I wondered after that that he didn't mention my old man out of hate for him. It seemed impossible to believe that it was the type of thing he could just put out of his mind.
"Well, as it turned out, he hadn't. When he picked me up and banged my pants, he was getting back at my old man. When he got me to agree to peddle, he was getting back at my old man. I think he planned the whole damn thing from the minute he spotted me. You see, what happened was this: one night, he told me he wanted me for Blind Man's Bluff deal at one of the clubs. Usually there was two, sometimes three girls, you know, that kind of routine. This time, he got me in the room, took my clothes when I stripped, and fixed me up on a cot and put the lights out. He told me the other girls he had booked had conked out on him and couldn't get another one, so I'd have to handle the whole bit. I didn't say anything because this way it wasn't bad since I'm make double take. I pulled a tube of jelly out of my purse and stretched out, ready to go. It didn't really make any difference, another twenty guys or so, if you kept yourself from drying up inside. It's only then that you get the soreness deep inside.
"So he started letting them into the dark room, one at a time. And then he yanked the door open in five minutes when it was time for one Joe to leave and another to jump in the saddle. I don't know how many I had. It seemed like a hell of a lot because it was a lousy cot and my can was getting awful sore from bouncing around. Then I got somebody going on me when, all of a sudden, the lights go on-and there is my old man. He looked at me as if somebody had jammed a shiv into his craw. He stumbled back, like he couldn't believe his own eyes. Then he let out this cry and went for Gus's throat. Gus shoved a gun into his belly and pulled the trigger. I saw my old man drop to his knees, blood spurting from his mouth and nose. The whole place went into an uproar. My brothers got into it, and there were more shots. I didn't wait to find out what had happened. I grabbed my clothes. I didn't even take time to put them on. I just went right out one of the back fire exits, chasing down those stairs like as naked as a jaybird. Downstairs, in one of the back alleys, I slipped into my things, hailed a cab out on the street and rode straight out of town. And I haven't been back since."
CHAPTER FIVE
It had begun to rain, and even with windshield wipers going, Evelyn found the visibility poor on the roads with which she was unfamiliar, and the driving hazardous. She slowed down and literally crawled along. Matt was still fast asleep on the rear seat, and Estelle continued to draw together the multiple threads of her past life with an almost obsessive need, now that she had started it, to relate to another person all that had brought her to this time, place and condition. And Evelyn, for her own purposes, was drawn to her every word.
"I didn't have a dime with me when I ran out. There was about twenty bucks in my purse, but in the excitement, I even left that behind. So I went down on the cab driver and I balled with the desk clerk at one of the hotels for a room. From that time on, I made whatever dough I needed the only way I knew how. I peddled my pod. I was sixteen. No, not even sixteen yet. But I was almost as big as I am now and I worked it every which way. Street hooker, bunk in a hotel room, and tie-ins with bellhops, on the road, in the carnies, and then the cat houses. It was in one of those joints in New Orleans that I met Matt.
"He had knocked over a couple of places and gone a long way, I don't know how far, and he came into the place all dragged out. He had a lot of money with him, and he stuck around, sleeping in this place three or four nights. He didn't go out for anything. He had meals and cigars and his liquor brought in. He wasn't paying attention to any of the girls, either. Then this one night, I think it was his third night there, we had a real blowout. There was some kind of convention in town, and I'm telling you, the woman that ran that joint also owned the hotel that booked the convention, and had the girls going in shifts till they were so flagged out I swear they couldn't stand up on their two feet or see straight. But I kept on taking everybody she could throw at me. But you know the way I am. I told you. The more I get, once I get all wound up like that, I feel like I'm going to go crazy once I stop. I just have to keep on feeling. So when it quiets down, Ruby Red-that's what they call this madam because she's fat as a house with her cheeks roughed so red you could see them like traffic lights a block away -takes me by the arm and leads me up to one of the rooms where Matt is. She starts bragging about me, about how many guys I took on and how I'm the greatest nymph she's ever had. Matt had given her several hundred dollars and hadn't used any of the girls, and now she had brought me upstairs as a favor. 'Go on, loosen up,' she said to him, 'and have yourself a good time.' Then she left me in the room with him. I was really on fire and I wanted him to take me. He could see what I was going through, like I was suffering. And that's what it's like, too. I could see at first that he wanted to get rid of me, and then he asked me to sit down. 'Relax,' he said, and shoved a bottle over to me. 'Take yourself a couple of drinks.' I did, but all I could do was keep my eyes fastened on him.
"To begin with, all I had on was this red garter belt with black lace, black stockings and blood-red shoes. That's what Ruby Red liked the girls to wear around the place. He tried to talk to me and I listened to him for about five minutes, but then I couldn't control myself any more. That's when he stood up, and real slow, he took his pants off, then his shorts. He doesn't have any great fantastic build, so when I found out what a man he was, it was a surprise. You know what I mean," Estelle said to Evelyn. 'You've seen it. And it wasn't just the look of him. He came at me nice and slow, not rushing anything. He held me for maybe a couple of minutes, not even moving. Then he began to move with me, with that same, slow, easy slide. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I started to get impatient with him and I began kicking at him and trying to get hold of his hips to buck against him. But he dug his fingers into my arms until I felt them just go dead at my sides. He was so damned strong. It wasn't until about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, after, of a steady buildup, when he began to get stronger with every stroke, that I realized I had me a stud, you know, one of those guys made a special way just to please a woman. And he kept me there for a couple of hours at least, raising me up, setting me on edge, each jolt like he was going to shake me loose in my insides." Estelle's eyes were closed now, a look of blissful distraction commanding her features at the erotic reminiscence. Evelyn's body tensed at the sudden piercing pulse between her legs, an unfamiliar lancing throb in her loins, terminating all other sensory response. It was the most intense sexual sensation she had ever experienced in her life, and it frightened her.
The momentary blinding glare of a truck's bright lights, coming from the other direction, startled them and snapped Estelle out of her ecstatic reverie. "Well, anyway, he stayed with me like that until I had quieted down a lot. I don't mean that I came off right then. It didn't happen like that. It took some time. But when Matt left, I went with him. He wasn't anxious to have me or anything. But he didn't try to stop me. He just said, 'Maybe for a while until you get clear of sewers like this.'
"I didn't know what he meant at first, but then he began to talk to me, a little more all the time, asking me about, you know, the kind of things I've been telling you. And he let me do about anything I wanted, I mean, like catting around or working over any of the guys I came into contact with even when I was like, you know, supposed to be his. Once I told him I was sorry for being like that, and he got real mad at me. He said I wasn't supposed to be sorry for the way I was. There was just nothing that I did that he considered, you know, bad or twisted up, like my old man was always saying. Then, for the first time in my life, I lost that tight feeling I always had inside me, just under my chest. Like a stone was lying there. It had to do with, you know, back home, what happened to my ma, what I did when I was just a kid, the way my old man kicked my sister Rose in the belly and the way-Gus blasted a hole in his gut .. . Things, I don't know-they just all of a sudden opened up and took me inside. It was then that the deep pleasure started coming. The first time, well, I just can't tell you in words. It's a feeling no other words can ever get near. One minute he was with me, and I lost track of where I ended and he began. Then the lid just blew off. It was an-an explosion inside me. From that time, it comes on every time he takes me. But no matter how I get wound up with anybody, with him I just break free and clear."
The rain had stopped now and Evelyn shut off the windshield wipers. A sudden, deep weariness seemed to course through her, as if she had herself experienced and lived through the horrendous ordeal of Estelle's. Only a matter of an hour or two before Estelle had begun to talk, she realized she had regarded her as some debauched freak of nature, and now the woman who leaned across the seat so close to her, the same woman who only hours before had given herself to an uncontrollable orgiastic revel seemed only frailly human and no more irreparably degraded by life than-herself.
"The way Matt explained it all to me, the reason I started to tell you all this-I couldn't have any real feeling because I had closed off a part of me. I needed to take and feel things I couldn't give back. Matt said that I had cut off the flow of my juices. Everything my old man said made me do that-all the warnings of getting knocked up, what happened to my own sister when she did. I had to stop the mixing of my juices with a man, and that's the way it went every time I would get laid, Matt said, all the times the juices gathered up inside me but never able to come out. And the more I got banged, the more they would build up and drive me nuts." Estelle drew a deep and relieved breath and looked up to Evelyn with a smile of unbelievably childlike innocence. "But with Matt, because to him I wasn't bad or sick or anything, no matter what I did, I could open up and give." She chuckled, now suggestive and mischievous. "Of course, you got to be lucky and find yourself a real stud who can stay with you all the way without folding like a mushroom."
Estelle continued in this vein but, by now, Evelyn had wandered in among the labyrinths of her own thoughts and was no longer listening. Evelyn was thinking about her growing up, the admonitions of her own father which would have prompted the holding back, the blockage of her own juices. Where Estelle had been able to reach for the feeling, go through the ritual of sensual sensation easily and with excitement, Evelyn realized that even that part had been turned off inside her. Of course, she considered that hers was a far different background and, indeed, a fortunate one. Her father was a wonderful person, a human being of delicate sensibilities. He was good, not evil. Not mean. His sole interest had been to keep her from groveling before the demanding evil of brutish, callous, self-centered men. He wished to protect her from a sensation that might take her with it, drag her after, with a total disregard for all other impulses and sense of reason. Evelyn's eyes flickered mistily. She wondered what such a sensation would be. Whether she could know it-and her eye glanced up at the rear-View mirror back to the figure lying, just now stirring on the seat. As he pushed himself drowsily to a seating position, all Evelyn's thoughts which seemed to her disturbingly forbidden dropped about her like shattered glass. Matt blinked his eyes open, looking about him in troubled consternation.
"How long have I been asleep?" he asked Estelle.
"Gee, honey, for hours."
He frowned. "You should have woke me." He winced and moaned inadvertently, as he moved his blood-encrusted arm with the knife wound.
"Gee, hon, that's bad," Estelle said. "How'd you get it?"
Matt grunted, fending off her question. "Got to get to some place where I can clean it up and get a good night's sleep. Let's keep an eye out for some place where we can spend the night." Now he addressed himself to Evelyn with a strained though noticeably softened tone. "I- thanks for spelling me at the wheel." The few v words of a commonplace-enough comment, and yet why did they stir her so much, bring on the strange thudding in her chest? Evelyn made a determined effort to seal off her thoughts. She nodded to acknowledge Matt's words. She felt the searching intentness of his eyes on her face through the rear-view mirror, and she fought to resist the temptation to meet his piercing look.
The occasional crude road signs in the densely wooded surroundings indicated that they were in a vacation area. The dismal, uninhabited look amid the absence of light or life was explained by the fact that it was several months out of season. When Matt caught sight of a group of summer-cottages-to-rent placards nailed up on a fence and pointing to a dirt road, he instructed Evelyn to stop and pull over to the side. He followed the dirt road on foot, a flashlight in his hand, and in about ten minutes returned to lead them on in with the car, guiding the way as they walked alongside.
There were several boarded-up cottages, and Matt managed to rip off enough of the nailed planks to gain entry to one of them through a rear door. Inside, he found a cast-iron stove with wood alongside it and started up a fire. Under the glow of the firelight, he located a kerosene lamp and a tin of fuel on the shelf. There was no evidence of internal plumbing, but Matt took up a large metal bucket alongside the stove and managed, after several minutes of scouting around outside, to locate a well pump.
Estelle began to remove her clothes, soiled and clammy with dampness. Evelyn proceeded to do the same. Presently, her abundant nakedness gleaming in the firelight, Estelle knelt beside the bucket and began to wash herself. Evelyn, retaining her brassiere and panties, followed suit. She caught Matt's derisive expression at the relative state of her semi-undress. On an impulse, she yanked off her panties with the pretext of setting about to wash her underthings, which she realized after the fact did require such attention. Then she turned to unfasten her brassiere, shakily aware that this was the first time in her adult life that she had removed all of her clothes in the presence of a man. Encounters with her husband occurred in the dark in a state of partial undress.
The effect of Matt's gaze was a physical one, tracing the intimate curvatures, the sensation of probing fingers. She could feel the throbbing and the erectile stiffening of her breasts, the electric tingling in the nestling auburn grove bordering the satiny smooth skin of her underbelly. When she felt her eyes draw with an irresistible tug to that part of Matt which now dangled in open exposure over his thighs, Evelyn drew in her breath and spun away from him. His chuckle was mocking and recalled to her his reaction when Diane had denounced her as "Mother Superior."
"Gosh, hon, that looks just terrible!" Estelle exclaimed at the sight of Matt's now uncovered wound. Her exclamation instantly fragmented the mood. Matt was making an awkward effort to remove the encrusted blood with a dampened handkerchief. Estelle's reaction was a shattering grimace, and she quickly turned away. Evelyn went up to Matt, took the dampened cloth from his hand, and soaked it well before reapplying it. She reapplied it several times, permitting the water to cut in and soften the wound's encrustation. Matt remained impassive and unresisting. She could feel, from his nakedness in such close proximity to her own, distinct emanations of bodily heat which struck at her with a dizzying giddiness. When her thigh inadvertently made contact with the course hairs of his leg, she literally leaped back. He turned his head away with an expression of cruel mockery, and Evelyn detested herself for her timidity of her reaction, as she wanted to fling back into his face those two humiliatingly intimidating words-"Mother Superior."
After the ritual of having his wound cleansed and bound, Matt restored the mattress from its upright position against the wall to its proper place over the bedsprings of the large brass bed. He immediately stretched himself out on one side to allow room for the others and turned over on his side. Estelle unhesitatingly did the same. -Evelyn's hesitance was overcome by a deep, bone-tired weariness, and she lay down alongside Estelle. Exhausted as she was, her consciousness of Matt's close-by nakedness was too unsettling for sleep. Unbidden images crept into her mind. Her lips tingled in recollection of the moment when he had put her head down between his legs. Evelyn's hand asserted an independent will and, moving over her thighs, searched out with its fingers that nub of excruciating desire. Surreptitious, fearful of creating movements that would make the others turn, Evelyn lulled herself to sleep.
Somehow, sleep had drawn her into its warm and torpid enclave. Nightmarish caverns of monstrous rock opened to admit her and closed around her. She ran through a passageway to flee and discovered its skin walls shuddering, pulsating, constricting around her, pressing her face into the flesh, engorging her eyes, her ears, her nostrils-her mouth. She jerked convulsively awake several times, once closing her eyes to discover herself in her dream assaulted again by the rapists in the fair's parking lot.
As she forced herself to close her eyes once again, suspended on this border of troubled consciousness, she became aware of an excruciatingly sweet and flowing warmth that pervaded her limbs and gradually suffused her whole body. The sweetness deepened and became more intense, and Evelyn moaned inwardly. Now the sensation was sharpening, centering itself, and she found herself undulating, coming up to receive it. She opened her eyes then and saw Estelle. She found that it required the gathering up of all the deepest resources of will to pull away.
Estelle looked up in puzzlement with an expression of shock. "What's the matter, sweetie? Doesn't it feel good? Don't you want me to love you?" Estelle said. Evelyn was about to kick her legs clear when she saw Matt drowsily looking on, his mouth twisted in disdain as if awaiting her answer to Estelle's questions. It was in that single instant that she was forced to examine the ambiguity of the situation. Did she like it? Did she want Estelle to continue?
The answer seemed to come somewhere from the agony of desire that still seized her body and whispered to her brain. "Yes-yes!" Evelyn closed her eyes and slowly sank back on the mattress, allowing her legs to go limp. She was unable to stifle her moan as Estelle re-engaged her innermost parts with passionate tongue-probing soul kisses. Evelyn's arms shot up to grasp Estelle's head and press her closer as her hips strained and rose off the bed. Evelyn did not open her eyes, but she imagined the sudden change on Matt's face, a triumphant satisfaction.
"The way you were twisting around in your sleep," Estelle said, between her passionate ministering, "I could see how bad you needed me."
"Yes, oh yes, please yes!" cried Evelyn. "I need, I need, I need, I need ..."
CHAPTER SIX
Estelle was already awake when Evelyn opened her eyes. Her face was marked with anxiety. "I can't wake him up," she said to Evelyn, indicating Matt's deeply slumbering figure. "I think there's something wrong with him."
Evelyn roused herself, got out of bed and went around to the other side, where she put her hand down on Matt's forehead. "He's running a fever," she said. Then she dampened a handkerchief in the water bucket and returned to press it to his face. Presently, his eyes blinked open and he strained to peer through a lingering haze of sleep. He made an effort to raise himself to his elbows, but upon making contact with the injured arm winced in pain and let himself fall back on the bed again.
Evelyn noted the increase in swelling and discoloration around the edges of the wound.
"It's infected," she said to Matt. "You're going to need the attentions of a doctor." Matt grabbed the brass bedstead and pulled himself to a sitting position. He examined the wound carefully and then he nodded in concurrence.
Estelle helped him on with his clothes and Evelyn, standing by, felt helplessly bereft until Matt said to her, "I'll have to depend on you to do the driving."
Evelyn, her energy strangely renewed, splashed water on her face and began to get into her clothes. As they passed through the outskirts of a modest-sized town, they kept their eyes open for signs hung in front of the houses denoting the presence of a physician. Evelyn spotted one and instantly drew the car up alongside the curb in front of it. All three got out, and Evelyn and Estelle assisted Matt as he made his way shakily up the flight of wooden steps out front.
They followed the instructions above the bell, Ring and enter, and found themselves confronted within a minute or two, in a small anteroom, by a stocky, florid, gray-haired man with a taciturn look. "My sister, my wife and myself were in a car accident yesterday," Matt said. "A broken window slashed my arm. I didn't realize how bad it was."
The man nodded and led him into an examination room. Estelle and Evelyn followed. Inside, the doctor examined the wound under a brilliant light and announced, "I'll have to lance and drain that and get some penicillin inside you." He reached into a linen closet and handed Matt what appeared to be a hospital type gown. "This is going to be kind of messy. So you better take your clothes off and put this on until I'm through." Then he stepped across the room and opened the door to an adjacent room. "Step in here and lie down on the table when you're through. That's where I'll work on you."
Matt removed his clothes and stepped into the other room, Estelle and Evelyn still with him. They waited for close to ten minutes. Matt looked distressed and told Estelle, "Take a peek out there and see what he's doing. I didn't like the way he looked at us. And he's taking a long time to get started."
Estelle had barely left the room when she rushed back in and closed the door behind her and made her announcement: "Matt, we've got to get out of here. There are cops snooping around the car downstairs, and one of them's coming up the steps."
Matt cursed at his own lack of caution and yanked open a window to the fire escape outside it on the side of the building. He pushed the girls through first and then started down himself. "This way, fast." Matt beckoned them and moved toward the backyard which connected an entire block of houses.
They stepped over several small picket fences, and Matt ducked into a garage at the end of a driveway adjacent to a large, gray wooden house with freshly painted blue shutters. There was a car inside it and Matt motioned to them to get into it. All three crouched down out of sight behind the seat. "I left my clothes and my wallet and my pants with all that dough." Matt let loose a string of expletives. "If I weren't so goddamned groggy, I would have been smart enough to know what the hell that bastard was up to. He probably called in the license plate on the car. They'd have a stolen car alarm on it by now."
"I've got about sixty-five dollars" Estelle said, reaching into her bra. "I got it from some of the boys back at that carny."
"That's good, Stell," Matt said. "Now, what I've got to do is this. First, get this car we're in started somehow. And then get some antibiotics from some druggist along the way. Now for clothes-" He raised his head and scanned the interior of the garage and presently, still crouching, stepped out of the car. He returned with a pair of grease-smeared overalls in place of the white surgical gown. He looked toward Evelyn who was still crouched in the rear seat. "Get in here behind the wheel. I'll get underneath the hood and get this thing going. Estelle and me will stay crouched down in the back. Just back her out nice and easy, just as if nothing's happened. Unless someone sticks his head out a window and starts hollering up a storm. Then hit it!"
Matt managed to get the car started, and Evelyn, sitting stiffly at the wheel without glancing right or left, concentrated on controlling the trembling of her hands on the steering wheel. But she backed out of the driveway slowly as instructed, without event, and drove down the street. "Get right into the main drag of the town as soon as possible," Matt said, and Evelyn cut across several intersections until she came to a wide thoroughfare and followed it in the direction of the town.
They drove on through and went about thirty miles until they reached the next town, where Evelyn parked before a drugstore in their quest for antibiotics. Matt told Estelle, "You go in and see if you can sweet-talk him into selling you some of the stuff over the counter without a prescription." When Estelle was unsuccessful at two attempts at different establishments, Evelyn took some money from her hand at the next stop and said, "You had better let me go in this time."
Evelyn entered the store as its sole customer was just leaving. The pharmacist was a large, hefty man with the loud-mouthed joviality of a road salesman. He eyed Evelyn's wrinkled and somewhat disarrayed state, obviously impressed by her stunning figure. Something in the elegance of her manner put him off until she dropped her voice and smiled with the obvious softening overture of someone requesting special favors. "My brother, he hurt himself the other day, and it's bothering him now. Nothing serious, and we'd like to save the time of visiting a doctor because we're traveling to meet my-"
"Hold it, beautiful. Relax now. I've been around for a while and you don't have to be afraid to level with me." He came around the counter to stand before her, grinning into her face. "I can see you're in some kind of trouble. But what kind isn't any of my business. If I can help out a cute little lady in distress, it's no skin off my teeth, now is it?" He rubbed his hands. "Now, tell me what you want."
Evelyn described Matt's condition and then requested the antibiotics. The druggist looked toward the door, and seeing no one in sight, raised his hand and pressed it against Evelyn's breasts. Instinctively she began to pull away, but then, arresting the action, forced herself to hold her ground, talking quickly and proffering the money for the antibiotics as he ran his hands along the length of her body. "Boy, you really got something there, haven't you?" he exclaimed, with ogling appreciation. He brought his hand to his chin musingly. "Now, you know that kind of an infection needs a lot of antibiotics if they're going to be taken orally. Now that's expensive," and as she extended the money, he added, "and you know, I'd be taking quite a chance letting you have them without a prescription."
Evelyn looked up anxiously, imploring. "Well now," he said, and he drew her by the wrist in the direction of the partition that blocked off the back of the store over which was hung the sign, Prescriptions. "Why don't you and I have a little private tete-a tete to see what we can do about this."
Once he had her in the back, he came up against her and encircled her with his arms. She could feel the stolid impress of him insinuating itself into her, against the promontory of her sex totally outlined beneath her skirt. His hand reached down to trace his finger along the line of her curvaceous buttocks. His breathing was heavy and quick. "Well, will you give me the antibiotics?" Evelyn was saying. "Will you?" She clung to the words, concentrating on them, trying to seal off her mind from the sensation of her thighs beneath the progressive raising of her skirt. She received the hot, impatient fingers coming up beneath her panties, which, with fumbling fingers, he awkwardly attempted to draw aside in order to effect the intimate entry.
"Yes, yes," he almost gasped the words. "I'll give you the antibiotics." Unable to gain his objective through his initial fumbling tactic, he jerked back and drew her panties down to below her knees, completely baring the desired target. But in his greedy haste, he began to spill his desire prematurely, and seizing her about the hips drew her against him so that his masculinity was pinned against the silken contours of her thighs, throbbing.
Several minutes later, an inordinately pale Evelyn opened the car door and resumed her position behind the wheel.
"Did you get the medicine?" Estelle blurted out hurriedly.
Evelyn nodded. She felt the pressure of Matt's fingers against her back, just for the slightest instant. "Thanks," he said. The impress of his fingers burned into Evelyn's skin for a long time after he had removed his hand.
Evelyn drove outside of the town and turned off the road where Matt told her to. Here, he took the bag of medicinals from the drugstore-Having minored in biology at the junior college which she'd attended, participating later on as a suburban housewife in Red Cross first aid courses, Evelyn knew what had to be done. She had prepared for it accordingly by taking the necessary bandages, antiseptic, and a razor blade in addition to the antibiotic capsules. Sitting in back alongside Matt, as he washed down the wound with alcohol, she made the fine incision along its festering border and kept up the pressure with her fingers to remove its putrescence. Then she bandaged the wound and gave Matt the first considerable starting dosage of the antibiotic. Matt maintained a stoic demeanor throughout, but when she was through, he allowed himself to sink back on the seat, exhausted by the ordeal. Within a matter of minutes after, he gave Evelyn road travel directions and sank back into a feverish sleep.
"I had to give that bastard at the drugstore thirty dollars," Evelyn said, surprised by her own uncharacteristic use of profanity. "That leaves us just about enough for a motel. I think that's what we'd better find right now so he can get a decent bed to sleep in. The traveling can come later."
Estelle's vigorous assent was admiring. "Gee, I'm sure glad you came along with us, Evelyn." Evelyn smiled for the first time since she had stepped across the threshold of her home, which seemed whole lifetimes ago.
Once settled in a small, twelve-unit motel, Matt undressed and got under the covers. Evelyn delimited the whole compass of her life to the single-minded purpose of nursing this man who was now inert and defenseless in her presence. There was no longer any way to rationalize her continued captivity. She looked up at the door. It was only a matter of a dozen footsteps and she could be out of his grasp. Even Estelle was gone, having vaguely muttered something about getting them some eating money. But even as he lay there on the pillow, his face aquiline, bonily handsome with a thick, blue-black stubble accentuating the prominence of the cheekbones and the bold, square-cut chin with the slightest suggestion of a cleft, Evelyn knew she was still his hostage. In some unfathomable way, he seemed to hold the key to some question her life she had never known previously existed, that demanded a solution before she could leave him. It was senseless and irrational to contemplate. The utter insipidity of her position appalled and angered her. She resolved that entirely with the thought that whatever he had been previously, he was now reduced to the role of a suffering human being and she could at least remain with him until his fever broke. Who was she to be his judge, anyway? In some obscure way, he seemed to be already receiving his punishment. Then, as always in those moments of crisis in her life, she thought of her father.
When she was fourteen years old, they were in their summer place near Apanacko Bay. Her father called her to tell her that he had hired a heavy, brutishly muscular man as a handyman on the grounds, and both his aspect and manner were frightening to Evelyn. When she found out from the housekeeper that this man was an ex-convict, Evelyn was even more disturbed and took her fears to her father. He quieted them and reassured her. But an incident occurred soon after which was terrifying.
Her father went out into the greenhouse one morning where the handyman was working alone and somehow they got into an altercation and he began beating her father. Evelyn heard her father's cries and ran out to see the handyman going after him. She screamed, but then she saw the man stumble and fall. He lay there on the ground, the prongs of a rake having pierced his ribcage, and he was bleeding profusely. Her father knelt to attend him, and she recalled distinctly with how much tenderness he managed to bring him back to the house, and when he passed out, how painstakingly he undressed him, removed every last garment from that massively muscular and hairy torso. How he washed him, stayed with him in the same room, administered to all his needs for the two weeks until the man was back on his feet. And when Evelyn asked how he could deal with him so after the man had virtually attempted to kill him, her father had said, "Oh, my dear, what he tried to do is past now. There is enough grief and meanness in this world without our contributing to it. It's just a matter now of someone sick and needing attendance and someone healthy and well who can help him. It's so little a thing to do. Would you have me deny him this?"
Evelyn having drawn her parallel, was now satisfied to blunder on in her dark and more complex quest. Through what other unforseen labyrinths it would lead her became evident when Estelle returned several hours later in the company of two men.
Both were well-groomed and expensively tailored. Although there was a difference of perhaps fifteen years in their ages, the older man, about fifty, was vigorous, bright-eyed and in as good a physical condition as the younger man. He carried himself with the stride of an athlete, and as Evelyn was to discover, he was, in fact, a professional golfer. The younger man was as strikingly handsome as a Hollywood actor. If anything, his appearance suffered from an over-perfection of features, a slightly feminine cast. "I met these gentlemen at the bar up the road," Estelle said, introducing them to Evelyn. "I told them to bring a bottle back here and maybe we could have a little fun," adding with a mischievous look of a naughty high school sophomore, "for a price. I told them my girl friend was real beautiful and they wanted to see for themselves."
Evelyn stiffened, taken aback at the implication. The older man came alongside her, his look undisguisedly admiring. "I certainly must agree with you. She's beautiful indeed."
"And quite chic," the younger man added.
Evelyn turned abruptly and walked into the bathroom. Estelle came up hastily behind her and managed to get in before she closed the door. Evelyn's annoyance was obvious.
"Gee, don't be mad at me, will you? You know, I think you're just terrific. I just thought we might have a little fun and get enough money to keep us going. You know, with Matt sick like that and all, we may be needing more medicine."
Evelyn remained unmollified. Estelle put her hand on her arm. "I'll tell you what. You know, I don't care what I do to help Matt. And to be honest, I'm just a hooker at heart. I love to do it. I'll take care of the both of them and get enough money for all of us. Just come in and like play along, have a couple of drinks, and talk. When it starts to get like, you know what, I'll just tell them you're sick." Estelle smiled guilelessly, as if she were struck with an inspiration, and she drew Evelyn by the arm. Despite her annoyance, Evelyn found herself returning her smile.
Both men had removed their jackets and were pouring themselves drinks. They were not in the least perturbed by the sleeping presence of Matt, and presently Evelyn discovered it was because Estelle had told them, "My brother's in there with us and he's so stoned, he won't wake up for a week." The older man offered Evelyn a drink and she had no desire to reject it because she felt the need for it to steady herself after the ordeal she had been through. The warming liquor coursing through her was comforting.
The alcohol dulled the knife-edge of tension and Evelyn accepted the drink offerings which followed as an anesthetizing relief from the stinging crossfire of doubt that assailed her in between the shifting events. Action, terrible as it was, seemed preferable to inaction and suspension as nerve-wracking as the last brief poise on a suicidal abyss. Movement, participation, brought with it a total absorption in the act of survival. Evelyn sighed deeply and leaned back in the heavily cushioned chair. The suggestive repartee about her passed by her ears as so much unintelligible murmuring. The setting and characters before her were as unreal as movie images. It was only when Estelle rose abruptly and stood up before both men, setting down her highball glass and beginning to sway lasciviously, that Evelyn found a focus of attentiveness. Still, she was like a spectator separated from but pressed to a self-conscious awareness of a filmed scene.
"Sure, I was a professional stripper, really I was," Estelle insisted. "I could do those grinds and bumps and move my-ah, muscles-" At this point she burst into laughter. "All over." She was raising her skirt now, inching it up to her thighs and swaying her body and hips. "This was the routine I had. I mean, it was sort of worked out just for me by one of the guys who booked strip shows."
Estelle, enjoying every moment of her inane performance, laughed as loud as the appreciative males of her audience who, despite their appearance of sophistication, were not a little taken aback by her complete state of exposure by the time she was through.
The younger one's excitement showed in a flushed face and glazed eyes, and he offered no resistance as Estelle carried her ridiculous games further. She knelt and unzipped his fly, and her teasing fingers traced his contours with a professional expertise that at once began to show results in throbbing, rosy rigidity and the restless movement of his hips.
Throughout this little byplay, the attention of the more mature man directed solely at Evelyn. She saw his eyes appraising her limbs, ankles, calves, knees, and then moving upward to envision tracings of the hidden contours. "I can see where you wouldn't need any kind of an act at all," he said, and reached out his hand to touch her thigh. Evelyn leaned forward as if to arise, but she caught Estelle's expression, frantic, pleading, casting her eyes over to Matt's inert form on the bed, recalling their little tete-a-tete in the John, and Estelle's assurance that she would handle the more crucial and ultimate details of the transaction.
Evelyn forced herself to lean back in her chair once again. Both the disinhibiting effect of the liquor and the blatant stare of arousal of the older man had a more exciting influence than Evelyn realized. The warmth of his hand sent an involuntary quiver through her thighs as he dipped under the skirt, moving it upward by slow degrees and the insinuating probings of his fingers. He made no hasty attempt to pry apart her knees. She felt the electric touch of his fingers stroking, stroking along the line of her tightly compressed thighs. Inching, impressing, gently downward, one finger in between, downward and then upward again, a little higher each time, a little closer to that pulsing part of her which now caused her to stir uneasily.
She sighed and let her lids drop, gradually slipping into the recollection of Estelle's lips, the moist dartings of fire. The last inner chords of tautness began slowly to go slack, accompanied by a deep exhalation. Almost imperceptibly, her knees parted and his hands moved all along the length of her inner thigh. There, the panting tug of his fingers caught her by surprise. The resistance was still there but slipping slightly out of reach.
"Don't worry, I'll take care of the both of them when it comes to that." Estelle's assurance sounded in her inner ear and permitted her to acquiesce just a little further. She moaned as her body absorbed the first reach of his searching fingers. Her loins, awakened now, were making their own demand, and Evelyn's hands were reaching out, tugging at his trousers, grasping at his naked hips and urging the full weight of his body forward-forward.
A cry was rent from her throat at the sudden prodding. She was losing her arms now and her lower limbs; her upper torso was dissolving. All was subordinated, all centered now on that volcanic femininity that undulated in its deepest recess from somewhere in the belly of the earth. And her motions and movements, her grinding contortions, were of the earth, the tidal waters and the enveloping rhythms of all the heavens. "Give it to me-give it to me-more- more-MORE!" The words lashed her own throat, whipped by the frenzy of the long-stifled and now fully awakened female need. She felt his shuddering jolt simultaneously with his hoarse outcry, and at the height of her aroused passion she experienced the cold shock of sudden withdrawal. Her eyes, startled, blinked open as she slipped down in the chair. Her legs upraised and parted, she writhed at the mercy of her womb fire.
Her erstwhile lover, fallen to the side, his hands pressing his groin, was frozen in the contorted grimace of his spending body. Just behind him and just to the left, Evelyn saw his companion standing, hips thrust forward, his distended manhood in Estelle's plying hands. Evelyn's hands beckoned to him, her back arching forward with the wild, jolting thrusts of her inflamed vitals. He came to her instantly. He seized her hips. She arched forward, then almost completely backward, receiving him with a swift succession of convulsive drives. He staggered under the fierce impact and lost his seat, fumblingly unable to regain it in the face of an unnerving experience. Evelyn bounded off the chair, her eyes ablaze and venomous contempt contorting her face. But before she could find words, she saw Matt sitting up in his bed, an alert witness, and she whirled and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door.
She remained there for some considerable time and then, some time later, opened the door slowly, tentatively. Her eyes caught Matt's. He was sitting up, reclining against the bedstead, smoking. "Come on out," he said evenly. "They're not here. I told Stell to take them to one of their rooms to finish the entertainment." Evelyn hesitated, suffering queasiness in her midsection, but his face was calmly noncommittal, and she moved forward into the room. Matt tossed a pack of cigarettes over toward the bed. "Here, have one. It'll do you good."
Evelyn felt an inward rush of relief. The simple gesture seemed to convey an underlying significance that Evelyn desperately sought for in this moment of deep confusion. She sat on the edge of the bed and shakily lit a cigarette. She inhaled deeply, keeping her eyes still downcast. She started, as she saw her own nakedness, to begin to rise with the objective of getting a garment, but his words kept her in her place. "Relax, will you? What's the point of that routine now? You know what you're like." He quickly added with a quietly, softened tone, "It's human. You're alive and you're a lot of woman. A lot of woman has got a lot of need. I saw you go through that whole bit with those guys, and you don't look any different to me. That Mother Superior bit is a fraud. You can't tell yourself any different now. And why should you, even if you could? Look at Estelle. She's had maybe five, ten thousand guys."
Evelyn raised her eyes to meet his. Tears welled, and she fought them back. "I'm not like Estelle," she said. "You don't understand. The way I was raised by my father-the beauty and the sensitivity that he poured into my life." Somewhere from the deepest recesses of her being, the words formed, coming up to bridge the years. Her earliest childhood, the home she grew up in, and the memorable episodes that bound together the threads of her life. She had to talk. She had to let him know, to know herself all that made her what she was, up to that day, that hour when he had stepped into her home out of the night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He sat there silently, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his eyes drawing out so much that was inside her, so much that no other human being in her entire life had ever heard. She had never had the desire or the need to tell it, until now. Not even to Harry. The only human being in her entire life that she had ever talked to on such intimate terms about her feelings had been her father. Here Matt sat, a thief, a rapist, an unconscionable man of violence, with a callousness that had terrified her-the complete antithesis of that most dear of all men, her father, and still she continued. Nor did she stop until all she had remembered had been said.
For some time after that, he remained silent, regarding the wisdom of voicing what seemed to him so obvious. Now he ground out the light of his cigarette and said to Evelyn, "You said before that you weren't Estelle when I mentioned all the guys she had-"
"I didn't mean that in a disparaging way against her," Evelyn interjected. "She's told me all about herself, and the kind of life I was reared for, prepared for, is so different. My father-"
Matt's face hardened, and the words slashed his lips like a blade. "Your father was a damned faggot!"
Evelyn blinked her eyes, startled at his vehemence, and uncomprehending because of her unfamiliarity with the word.
"A faggot. A fairy-a homosexual!" Matt said, shouting the words.
She recoiled against them as if struck with a whip. He continued the assault with a vitriolic outpouring, while she was too stunned, too numbed to react.
"What do you think all that horseshit was all about-that stuff about sensitivity and delicacy he stuffed down your craw? The vulgarity of a woman's sex with a man, the ugliness and the degradation of it, that image of untouchable purity that was supposed to save you, keep you like some kind of butterfly from dirtying your wings and getting sucked up in the mud. What a woman could give when she spread her legs, that was ugly and vulgar. He had to get you to forget what you had between your legs, to close them and keep them closed, because for the faggot every woman's snatch is a threat. You talk about Stell's old man," he said. "That old bastard was at least a man!"
Suddenly jolted from her transfixion, Evelyn lashed out and struck Matt across the face. Reflexively, he grabbed her arm. A taut muscle quivered in the hard set of his jaw. Then he relaxed and flung her away from him. Evelyn grabbed up her under things and her dress. Near the door, she pulled them on hastily and then slammed out into the night. Hatred and resentment was a bitter gall she could hardly contain.
She found herself walking quickly, stumbling, and then running, directionless, away from the motel, away from him. She was moving along a dimly lit, deserted road with no awareness of her surroundings, all of her thoughts still drawn inward by the immensely monstrous accusation. But even as she cursed him, unwanted images swam up from dark corridors of the past. Forgotten instances, disconnected episodes, were reordering themselves into comprehensible contexts. Her father's hand-holding affection with his friend Raymond Archer when they walked together around the grounds. The kissing when they greeted each other, and the point that her father had always made of praising the wonderful demonstrative affection of the Latin and the Slavic men with each other. Their open, outgoing kisses and embraces. The showers and the baths they would take together, scrubbing each other. The succession of swift images superimposed themselves on each other, and frantically, Evelyn quickened her pace as if to escape them. The time when her father was nursing the handyman who had attacked him and she had walked into the room to discover her father washing and fondling his sex organ.
How startled he was, and then, how he made a point of likening his gesture to that of Christ who found it not beneath him to wash the soiled feet of his disciples.
Evelyn cried out, a stabbing pain in her chest, and stood still, struggling to regain her breath. In that instant, the revelation was complete and irrefutable. There was that shrill, raging argument between her father and Raymond Archer, which her father had tried to dismiss as "a business argument." But she recalled the words, from inside the library, where they had shut themselves off. "Jealousy. You're jealous because he finds me attractive," Raymond Archer had said. And other words: "unfaithful", "embrace," and then the doors of the library were flung open with Raymond Archer angrily striding out, almost spitting the words, "You're too old physically, too old to love."
Evelyn stood in the middle of the road, grief draining away all anger and bringing the onset of deep fatigue. She felt for an instant as if she wanted to drop down on the road where she stood. She looked around and realized that she was in utter darkness and didn't know how far it might be before she arrived at a town. She began sobbing in despair. Then she turned around and started to retrace her steps in the direction of the motel. She thought, "I'll stay in the car. I'll rest there until morning, and then-"
Once inside the car, she let herself fall back on the seat. She lay there in the darkness, beginning to shudder in the coldness of the night air. Bitter tears continued to spill. She realized now that Matt had told her the truth. Recalling Estelle's earlier talk with her, she understood in some ways, despite all the differences in their backgrounds, they were quite alike. Estelle's father had closed off a part of her when he frightened her about having an illegitimate child that had crippled in her the capacity to experience orgasm, until Matt... Evelyn now understood the measure of the crime perpetrated upon her. Her father had not only crippled that capacity in her but virtually closed off the entire fount of her womanhood. He had avoided all contact with women, constantly referred to them as "females." In his own daughter, he could not tolerate female sexuality and tried to render her sexless.
She sat up. Wasn't that what Matt had tried to tell her? Cold, miserable, bewildered, she did not know what her next action should be. With all the past suddenly wrenched away from her like a mask, it seemed to her that her entire life, her home, her marriage, everything was part of a long deception. The recollection of her willing intimacy with the two strange men earlier, her yielding response to Estelle's perverse overture, her exposure to the most bizarre orgiastic behavior and her repeated violation since she was taken from her home dragged her down like a weighted stone. She felt suddenly that she could never rise again. Now, where would she go? It seemed that only the door ahead lay open to her, the door that led to Matt and Estelle.
The stark beam of light turned on her face was blinding. She leaped with a start and flung her hand up to shield her eyes. She heard the car door open and found herself staring into the face of a wizened man holding a flashlight, his skin drawn into leathery folds. "My missus told me she saw someone crawling into the back of one of the cars. You're one of the girls from number seven aren't you?" Evelyn nodded numbly, though not without relief to discover that it was the motel keeper, an elderly, hobbling man. "My missus knows the way you and your friend were carrying on with those two men," he said. "She's been after me to get the cops on you. We don't run no whorehouse around here. What kind of trouble are you up to, huddling up in the car like that?" He swung the car door wide open, beckoning for Evelyn to come out. "I think maybe she's right. We don't want no trouble around here."
"There's no trouble," Evelyn stammered. "I -I just had an argument with my-husband and decided to sleep in the car."
He grinned with uneven tobacco-stained teeth. "Husband, huh? Pimp's more like it, I'd say." Then, eyeing Evelyn as she stepped out into the open, he appeared surprised. "You're mighty pretty. Not one of them doggy prostitutes. If I could still get myself up, I'd have a go at you." He chuckled asthmatically. And quickly he made a half turn, squinted in the direction of the motel office, and then spun back to lean over against Evelyn with a conspiratorial tone.
"But if you show my brother Dib a good time, I'll forget all about the cops." He clutched her by the arm and glanced back again over his shoulder hastily. "If my old lady caught us, there'd be hell to pay. She hates Dib's guts anyway, always after me to get rid of him." He kept up a running patter and led Evelyn in the direction of the motel without awaiting her response. "I keep Dib in room ten; that's only three down from your own." In this way, happenstance seemed to have taken control and Evelyn allowed herself to be led.
Perhaps this is the way it was intended to be, Evelyn thought bitterly. "Now, Dib, he ain't right up here," the motel keeper continued, tapping his forehead with his finger. "He was in a construction accident seven years ago. A big plank almost knocked his head off. But he's harmless enough. It's just that my old missus hates him, says that he eats enough for three and scares the customers off. That's why I keep him in most of the time. It'd be nice for him to have a little real woman company. It might perk him up some." He chuckled, breaking into a hacking cough.
As he inserted a key into the lock and pushed the door open, Evelyn felt a sudden onrush of panic. She felt she had to go to Matt. The man felt the tug of her arm and looked up at Evelyn, his grin now threatening. "You want me to get the cops on the whole lot of you?" The door slammed behind her. She was in the motel room.
The figure, its back to them, seated on a chair amid a littered debris of empty beer cans, seemed immense. "Dib-Dib," the motel keeper repeated several times before the man stirred and stumbled to his feet. Evelyn stared awestruck. He was easily six feet in height, but it was his massive girth that gave him the fearsome aspect of a man swollen like a balloon to abnormal dimensions. His hands and feet, too, were inordinately large, even for his size.
"Look, Dib-look what I brung you. You ain't had yourself a woman since Fat Marie died."
The expression on the face of the one addressed as Dib was dull, apparently barely comprehending. Evelyn felt a bony hand on her back thrusting her forward before the massive form, easily exceeding four hundred pounds in weight. His head, normally proportioned, was oddly small for the rest of him, devoid of any of the bulges of fat elsewhere prominent and retaining a boyishness of indeterminate years. The old man shoved her suddenly, and Evelyn stumbled against the large man.
"Give it to her, Dib, the way you used to bomb old Fat Marie." His voice was shrill, trembling with excitement.
The large hands closing over her shoulders had the effect of piercing that translucent shield that Evelyn had imposed to dim her consciousness, and she burst into a sudden frantic kicking and struggling protest, which action, instead of warding off her offender, seemed to animate him and make his moves more purposeful. The largeness of his hands literally clamped her arms to her torso, and the weight of him made a farce of her resistance. The motel keeper rushed forward nervously at the sounds of her outcries and stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth, exclaiming, "I don't want Hilda to know what the dickens is going on here."
Evelyn was lifted easily and placed down on the edge of the bed, her legs upraised and pressed forcefully until her knees ground painfully into her breasts. Looking down in horror from this vantage point, she saw his incredible prodigiousness. He rubbed, stirred, pressed himself against her exposed buttocks (her undergarments having been hastily torn away) in frantic efforts to bring himself to a state of rigidity. Her flesh quivered against his huge body. Evelyn had turned her head away and shut her eyes in an attempt to seal off her mind, but the near-hysteric exclamation of the motel keeper drew her attention against her will. "Geesus, Dib, that is really something! You're still as good as a damned bull in heat." The sight that met Evelyn's eyes caused her whole body to recoil, with a wild desperation that made him lose his grasp on her, and she slid off the side of the bed against his legs. His body, like some huge quagmire of flesh, seemed to spout his manhood -thick as an arm-an independent, deeply veined limb dominating his total person. Evelyn scrambled at his feet, broke loose and darted for the door.
"Get her, Dib," the motel keeper shouted and ran up to block her way at the door. Evelyn kicked and scratched him, almost overcoming him before the hard, sinewed hands closed over her from behind and yanked her, this time with a fierce rage of suspended passion, and slammed her down on the bed, alongside which he stolidly implanted himself, one hand guiding himself to his mark on the threshold of her vitals. Evelyn leaped back, and he attempted to follow, those trunks of knees driving the mattress close to the floor. He grabbed her again, hands girding her shanks, and pulled her roughly back to the edge of the bed, where he wrapped one great arm under the small of her back and held her while he probed and pressed at the bank of that narrow, delicate, unyielding ravine. His entire face and character underwent a grotesque transformation. The dull features quivered to life. Teeth grinding, mouth and eyes straining, showing the dilation of blood vessels, he attempted to overcome with sheer force the barrier of unmatched proportions. In searing agony, Evelyn unleashed a piercing, blood-curdling scream. Her nails found his eyes, and as he recoiled she broke free again, screaming still, as she stumbled toward the door. Before she reached it, it burst open. The harridan face of the motel keeper's wife appeared. The woman was raging, hurling obscene oaths, and shaking her fists. Behind her were the horrified faces of two women, occupants of an adjacent room. And then-Estelle's face, and Matt's!
"Dib! Dib!" The motel keeper was now frantically attempting to control his monstrous brother, who had seized Evelyn again, raising her up against him as he stood, her legs spread-eagled. Matt, still pale and sallow from the enfeebling fever, flung himself into the room, knocking over the motel keeper's wildly gesticulating wife. He came up alongside Evelyn's attacker and axed the gargantuan hulk of a man across the exposed tendons of the neck with the side of his open hand. The released Evelyn struck the floor with the impact of a dead weight, but her assailant turned with a hoarse outcry and faced Matt. The leaner man shifted to the side of the bullying figure, drove an elbow into his windpipe, followed with a hard knee thrust to the groin. The massive hulk stumbled forward, smashing Matt against the wall. Momentarily dazed, he made an effort to drag himself clear of the massive arm which struck with a closed sledge of a fist. Matt's head snapped, and he felt a warm outpouring from his nose and mouth. As he rose to unsteady knees, another blow caught him across the side of the head and sent him tumbling backward. The room spun about him. Somewhere above, he made out multiple images of the hulking figure, a crushing leg upraised Matt fumbled in his trouser pocket, closed his palm over the hard wedge of steel, and squeezed off six shots.
The figure above him swayed, and stark red rivulets burst forth where the hot metal had punctured the ballooned flesh. All in the belly and below, they had struck. The formidable brute was now shreds of mutilated flesh and spilling entrails. His face met the floor squarely. He was dead before he hit the ground. Matt shook his head to clear it. In the milling chaos about him, the desiccated motel keeper flung himself to his knees beside the fallen man, wailing his despair and crying out his name to arouse him, while his wife tore at his back, lashing him still with shrill outcries. "He's dead. Good riddance. That pig-faced Mongoloid. Now get up, you bastard! Get up! And get the cops to lock up these whores."
Estelle was assisting Evelyn to her feet, and with a child's queasiness at the sight of blood averted her face from the flow between Evelyn's thighs.
"Come on, we've got to get the hell out of here," Matt said to them. And noting Evelyn's condition, he told Estelle, "Grab some towels and get the ice trays from the refrigerator in our room." He brandished his weapon to keep the motel keeper and his wife from leaving the room. Then he made an effort to lead Evelyn out of the room, but when she slumped against him, he lifted her and backed through the doorway. He deposited Evelyn in the front seat alongside him as he got in behind the wheel. He started up the ignition and called to Estelle- "Come on, Stell, shake your ass!" She came running out immediately, stumbling on her heels across the gravel roadbed, her arms burdened with the ice trays and towels. The vehicle was moving before Estelle slammed the back door, inside which she had settled herself. He floored the gas pedal, but at the first sign of a side dirt road, he turned off it, went several hundred yards and then killed the lights.
"Give me some of that ice and a towel, Estelle, and quick."
Then he flicked open the glove compartment and, working by this illumination, separated Evelyn's legs to examine the extent of the bleeding. Evelyn moaned and winced at his ministering fingers. She was hemorrhaging steadily, and it was not until he pressed the blood flow for a minute or two and then removed the pressure that he was able to determine her condition. It was a laceration in the outer lip; there was no indication of internal damage. "Nothing is going to happen to you," he said to Evelyn evenly. "You're going to be all right." Evelyn bound herself around the steady directness of his eyes and clung to it, as if it were the only light in the world. He told Estelle to come around to the front seat and then lifted Evelyn and settled her, full length, in the back of the car.
He started the car and continued at a snail's pace, with his parking lights, exploring somewhat farther the turn in the road he had taken. When he came to a hard-topped road, he turned right, following his general rule of going back in the direction of the area from which he had come, a useful tactic he had long ago discovered that seemed to befuddle or temporarily delay pursuit.
"They'll dragnet the county," he said aloud. "Homicide is no small deal out here in the sticks. It's their big chance to play cops and robbers." Matt knew that his immediate task was to switch vehicles. They would be out looking for a car of this description and they would have the license plate number. Matt forced himself to concentrate. His face and his head still ached from the mauling he had taken, and the dull, throbbing ache deep in the tissues of his arm informed him that he still had that infection to contend with.
"Matt-" He heard her voice calling him weakly, and he turned to Evelyn to ask what she wanted. "Nothing," she said. "Nothing."
A slight upward curve broke the straight line of his mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matt drove with his parking lights on and at a pace that was almost walking, watching for stake-outs at intersections and hopefully awaiting the sight of another passing vehicle. But since it was sometime after 3:00 A.M. and they were following a back road in a predominantly farming region, there were no encounters for a period of two and a half hours. During this time, periodically, he pulled over to the side and stopped to pack a fresh towel around the rapidly dwindling ice cubes to replace those soaking and encrimsoned between Evelyn's legs. Evelyn lay back, overcome by a draining giddiness that gave her a strangely euphoric feeling. To her, it seemed that time had magnified itself, become so vast that all inside it was suspended, pinned in its action like some museum piece awaiting the inspection of a spectator. Dream- awake, only Matt's face and occasionally his administering hands played a role in the movements about her. And he, too, seemed suspended.
"Matt, I hear a car!" Estelle said. "Listen-"
Somewhere up ahead the faint reverberations of an oncoming vehicle deepened as it approached. Matt quickly yanked the wheel and brought the car into a position across the road. He cut the engine, stepped outside and threw up the hood to establish the appearance that they were stalled. He went back to talk to Estelle through the partly open window as he remained poised in readiness for the approach of the car, which was still not in sight. He squinted up at the early streaks of dawn. "Just in time," he said. "As soon as it gets to be light, we'll be sticking out like a sore thumb. Let's just hope this car coming isn't some rattletrap, although it doesn't sound like it."
The driver, who was going at a fairly rapid clip, kicking up dust in the road, slammed on his brakes to slow his speed while still some fifty or sixty yards away and then rolled up slowly to the car barring his way. A large, raw-boned, rustic type, sandy-haired and obviously sodden with drink, stepped out to confront Matt. His store-bought, ill-fitting suit and the intoxicated laughter of the two men and a woman in the car gave testimony to a little shindig or a night on the town.
"Can't get started, huh?" he commented morosely. But as soon as Estelle stepped out of the car, his eyes brightened. She smoothed her wrinkled dress with a distracted intentness on tidiness, although the slow passage of her open, slightly cupped hands down over her breasts and over the hipline was unmistakably suggestive. Her appearance was not missed by the other two male occupants of the car, who presently materialized at his side, one short and exceedingly stocky and the other a remarkably close facsimile of the driver, evidently a brother. The driver, his eyes still fixed on Estelle, who flashed him an entirely unreticent smile, said, "Maybe we can straighten you out and push you down to our place, my brother Wendell's and mine. It's about four miles down the road."
His counterpart nodded dumbly in agreement and, under the influence of alcohol, continued nodding for some time as if his head had detached itself from the rest of him. Then a young woman, the remaining occupant of the car, in her early twenties, with a thin face made thinner by an immensely teased peroxide-blonde hairdo, swayed slightly and tittered at her companion's marathon nod. But her reaction to Estelle's pronouced curvaceousness was even more exaggerated than that of her friends. She ogled her with open admiration, and when the line of her vision descended to the flare of Estelle's hips, blurted out: "What I wouldn't give for a pair of steamrollers like that!" The comment brought uproariously, loud laughter with the nodder bent over double in a braying cacophony.
Matt, his right hand in his pocket, pressing the gun against his side, considered the alternates of an immediate or a delayed action. The car was a good one. But a chance to get off the road during the first zealous hours of the local law's search seemed like a good idea. Also, they all required a change of clothes and a substantial meal. He decided on the latter and returned to the car with Estelle. "We'll tell them we've been in an accident." He turned to Evelyn. "That will explain a lot of things." He added thoughtfully, "We won't start out again until dark. The local fuzz will figure we slipped through their dragnet last night."
Within about ten minutes, they made a turn-off, proceeded about a quarter of a mile, and then parked the vehicles before a large, neglected frame farmhouse, badly in need of paint and repair. When they were settled inside-Evelyn having been carried in by Matt and placed on a couch-their host, addressed as Clement by his friends, reached for the phone. "I'll see if I can get Frank at the gas station to have a look at your car."
Matt was quickly on his feet. "Never mind," he said. "I'm something of a car mechanic myself, and if you've got some tools around here and you don't mind our spending several hours until I fix her up ..." He caught the man's quickened look of interest in Estelle's direction.
"No, don't mind at all. Not at all. Just make yourselves right to home."
Estelle moved over to him in the loose-limbed, ambling gait of the professional prostitute. "Say, hon, you wouldn't have an extra dress hung in a closet somewhere that I could borrow for my sister-in-law, would you?"
Clement turned to face the thin blonde. "Do you have one to fix her up with?" he asked. He turned back to explain to Estelle, "This here is Bess, our new housekeeper."
"I got one for her okay," she said, and then addressed Estelle, "but I couldn't help you out any." She giggled. "Not unless we cut out great big holes-and you know where-to make it fit!"
Wendell, sitting on a kitchen chair alongside the smaller man and intently looking on, once again burst into loud guffaws to the accompanying claps of his heavy hand on the table. The contagion of his laughter was carried to the others, all of it turning off as abruptly as the flow of water from a stopped faucet when Estelle reached down and began pulling her dress over her head. "I don't need one," she said. "Show me where I can rinse out this one." Her active wiggles in removing the dress had unsettled the skimpy bra and one of her breasts escaped its meager confination. The dark, roseate nipple seemed to stare out at them with a large, coquettish eye, a detail which Estelle casually ignored. "If someone will hand me a large towel or something. And, if you don't mind, I'd like to rinse out my unmentionables while I'm at it."
The stocky little man leaped up as though ejected by a coiled spring and came back with a small towel. Clem, his brother Wendell, the thin blonde and the towel provider all remained, leaning forward in silence, attending Estelle's every move as if she were the star in a private floor show, an atmosphere she deliberately sought to establish. That she might have decorously retired to one of the other rooms apparently never occurred to her, nor were her spectators about to volunteer such a suggestion.
She tucked in the towel, busied herself with her hands, and unsnapped the bra. But as she bent forward to peel away the panties, the towel lost its hold and dropped away, leaving her with her lone undergarment somewhere over her thighs. As she bent down to retrieve it, the massive spectacle of her haunches rendered the men popeyed and speechless. "Oh, excuse me," Estelle said with a faint modesty that carried the entire charade to its most ridiculous extreme. "Here, give me a hand, will you, doll?" she asked Bess, who in contrast to the reticence of the others took no pains to conceal her excitement. She made herself instantly available. "I'll give you two hands," she tittered. "Just show me where you want them."
Matt ignored the travesty, taking advantage of their distraction to attend to Evelyn and his own physical condition. His arm had lost its swelling and the wound had hardened into an uninflamed scab. He washed up and found a razor with which to shave.
He signaled Estelle to continue her entertainments while he moved about unobtrusively to examine the rooms of the house and opened several drawers from which he scavenged a map of the area, two twenty-dollar bills, and from among the assorted boxes of cartridges on a closet shelf an entirely unused supply of the caliber he required. He returned to the room with the others, to find Evelyn asleep and Estelle now entirely disrobed except for the high heels which she customarily retained in all her erotic interludes. She placed the hands of the fluttery blonde, fingers extended, directly upon the nipples of her breasts. "Now watch me move just the tips of them, the way they trained me when I was a stripper, so I could twirl them little tassels without moving the rest of me."
"She's doing it! She's doing it!" the blonde squealed, and she removed her fingers, lost in admiration of the objects of Estelle's feat of theatrical muscle control. "They're so beautiful-more beautiful than any I've ever seen," she exclaimed. "I could just-kiss them!" The words, which came of their own volition and gave voice to her forbidden thoughts, surprised the blonde, and she seemed dismayed until Estelle, with a gay laugh, preferred her abundant prizes for the salute of eager lips.
The blonde's excitement was almost uncontainable and, oblivious to the gawking expressions of the room's other occupants, she gave herself over totally to the impulses of her desire. She kissed, tugged, mouthed the breasts with an undiminished ardor until Estelle, wearying of the awkwardness of her standing position, began to move backward in the direction of an unoccupied chair. The blonde, like some rabbit led haplessly on by a succulent carrot, trailed after her, not once losing her hold on her savory target. Estelle sank into the chair, the spare figure falling forward directly upon her and between her smooth thighs. Her quickened breathing now audible to all, the blonde extended the field of her avid affections-down to the smooth concavity of Estelle's waist and then over the urgently heaving, undulent line of the cushioning belly, and finally, with a moan which measured the full depths of her desire, in between the jellied curves of the most delicate and delectable of flesh. Estelle pulled her head back and raised her arms, sliding down in the chair, her legs widening, straining for the succor of the honeyed mouth. Without forewarning, the blonde withdrew and leaped to her feet.
Estelle remained in that same yielding position of total compromise, her eyes closed and the full widespread, incomparable garden showing all of its ripest and most ravishing blooms. But so stunned were the blonde's companions, having never previously witnessed the intimate engagement of two females, that they remained rooted to their chairs, anxiously awaiting the events to follow.
If they were dumbfounded by the circumstances up to that point, the appearance of the blonde brought stupefaction. Her nakedness was not, in itself, for them an occasion for any great surprise. But her slim boyish figure, the meager lily cups of breasts, suddenly assumed a bizarre and awesome an aspect.
"Holy cow!" the small man cried out, an exclamation which ruptured the silence.
"That sure ain't no cow," Clement hollered and immediately tumbled into his uncontrollable spasms.
Estelle's eyes blinked open and centered upon the approaching blonde with an awakening interest. She reached out at once to seize and to guide the girl to those most tempting of all gates. The blonde, almost beside herself with anticipatory pleasure, had difficulty applying pressure of sufficient directness, and Estelle seized her by the hips, came farther forward, and raised up those large, columnar thighs in an anxious effort. They writhed together, the moth and the flame, until Estelle cried out.
Estelle's powerful bucking thrusts sent the blonde into clumsy movements that threatened to throw her off her feet. She was herself engaged, at the same time, her hand pressed against the summit of her own mound of Venus, in a frenzy of rubbing contortions. With her legs jerking spasmodically, all of this gave her the comical aspect of a grasshopper caught up in the toils of some monstrous consuming plant. Her action, despite the state of arousal which the entire spectacle induced, drove the others to laughter and all manner of bawdy comments. "The cricket climbed over the mountain-" sang the little man.
"Stop twitching that little can so we can see what's going on," Clem remarked, and his brother stood up at once, crying out, "I'll pin the tail of that little donkey!" He went immediately to the blonde. He seized her from the rear, separating her cheeks, and closed within her, immediately finding the mark. She began beating at him, with her fists striking behind him, angered by this divided state of arousal. Her plyings with Estelle, the fingerings of her own hand, and her grinding rearward movements, each had an independent rhythm which upset all the others. The result was a complete confusion which Estelle, unwilling to endure, ended by wrenching away. The comments and laughter, intermingled, continued to the point of hysteria. Until Estelle, driven to the fever pitch of desire and unable to clear her passion's barrier, stood up. "Come on, you sons of bitches, rouse yourselves!" She swung her leg over and came down upon Clement, pressing her belly against him and accepting him as she would a lamb brought to pasture. She gyrated hotly, appearing from the rear to be performing all the most titillating moves of the stripper in the process of engaging her audience.
He held to the seat briefly and then, kicking up his legs under the stress of his oncoming ejaculation, threw the chair off balance and sent both of them rolling on the floor. She made short shrift of the smaller man. Driven now more by despair at her own plight than by disgust at their incapacity, Estelle ignored the last of the triumvirate, who was still heaving between the angular legs of the pinned but disaffected blonde. Estelle went to Matt, carrying to him, as usual, the fevered body drawn on the rack of an unremitting passion. His face showed annoyance and then signs of an inward rage as he shoved Estelle's head downward over the deep chair where the blonde had joined with her. A vicious stinging slap across her bare behind commanded her to drop knee-deep into the chair and present herself for ritual crucifixion. Silently, steadily, with the punishing infighting of a professional boxer, he plied himself, carrying her with him up to one plateau, and on to the next, each time setting himself more determinedly for the rise just ahead. Only the sound of the impact of their bodies could be heard. Perspiration gathered in rivulets that overflowed the nape of his neck, beneath his armpits, following the sharply etched continuous line of his hard-driving back. Now it poured out of him, cascading down and exploding into the air in droplets at each convulsive thrust.
Now, from somewhere deep inside her, the whimpering began, a sound between that of an aching woman and a little-girl-lost desolation. She was not so active as in her encounters before where all of her sexual cravings burst outward like the clamor of a drum, pounding, pounding, pounding. But her ultimate wave, rising up over all, burst with galvanic fury and broke the back of the tempest. She shuddered now, maintaining her crouching, crushing posture, as if in obeisance, as if prayer. Rivulets were flowing now, outward, one on top of the other, out of the path of her vitals, along the length of her arms and legs, and outward.
Matt withdrew as abruptly as he had entered and, retaining her position on the chair, she sank down as if the fire which had engaged her total being had been put out. Matt backed up slowly and then turned away, his manhood now deeply reddened in the aspect of a warrior's fierceness. It was then that he saw Evelyn, awakened, her eyes holding him fixedly in focus. He turned away and adjusted his trousers.
CHAPTER NINE
The remaining hours of their stay were surprisingly uneventful. Estelle's performance and their continued drinking had reduced the possible opposition to sodden heaps, slumped ineffectually on the couch and stairs and floor. Matt bound them hand and foot while they were in this state, and only the smaller man-and he, not until he was securely bound-drowsily awakened. Noting Estelle's presence, he seemed to consider it merely another phase in their orgiastic revels, and smiling quite unperturbedly he surrendered once again to an intoxicated slumber.
This time, with the advantage of having studied the roadmap of the region in detail, Matt was able to choose and seek out the subordinate roads with less uncertainty. It was dusk when they started out, and after an hour on the road the complete blackness typical of remote areas of inhabitation closed in. There was no sign of police activity, though Matt maintained the precaution of dousing his brights and approaching intersections at a slow-rolling rate, a tactic which presently proved itself. Edging around a bend in the road, Matt saw the unmistakable presence of a parked police vehicle at the intersection several hundred yards ahead, the identifying red light stabbing at the darkness. Matt instantly killed his lights.
"Quick, Stell, you get up here in front of the wheel. I'm going to duck into the woods off the road here with Evelyn." He had already hurdled the seat and was lifting Evelyn and opening the rear door. "They spotted my killing of the lights, and they'll be right here. Tell them the car's been conking out on you. We'll go along the border of the road in the woods and meet you half a mile past the roadblock. They'll be looking for three people, one of the women hurt. They won't suspect you."
He cautiously ducked into the bordering foliage, and within a matter of seconds the police car, approaching with a tentative caution, stopped alongside Estelle. She was pleased to discover that it was one police officer, and a youthful and attractive one at that. "What's wrong, lady?" he asked her.
"Oh, my car's been conking out on me all day like this. But after I give her several minutes, she just starts up again."
"Well," he volunteered, "if you can get it started again, Matero's garage is about six miles up if you make a left on 32B." And then, appraising her closely, he asked, "You're not from around this way, are you?"
"Not me," Estelle laughed. "I'm chasing my tail after a carney," she improvised. "I had an argument a couple of days ago and pulled out, and now I changed my mind and am trying to catch up with them." She anticipated his response of quickened interest. He toppled for the bait.
"What do you do with the carney?"
Estelle laughed. "Nothing any police officer would approve of-I'm a stripper."
He joined in her laughter. "Well, maybe not approve of-in the line of duty," was his retort.
"Say, what is a cute cop like you doing way out here in the middle of nowhere at this hour? Chasing a big-time bank robber just like in the movies?" Estelle kidded him.
He accepted it good-naturedly, adding wryly, "You're not so far off. Some guy and two women killed somebody at a motel, and I'm supposed to be part of a roadblock. A one-man roadblock tucked off in these back roads," he said derisively. "Can you imagine anyone who doesn't know back country like this trying to make a quick getaway on this Indian path?"
Estelle heard the rustling of the brush and immediately reached out her hand to hold his attention by fingering his police shield. She looked up into his face, screwing up her mouth and eyeing him from lowered lids. "I've always had a crush on uniforms and medals and badges and stuff. Especially when the right kind of people wear them."
"Now, what" he asked, with a chuckle, "is the right kind?"
"Oh, not the deadheads who take themselves too serious. They don't know how to unbend and have some fun when it comes their way."
"You're quite a teaser, aren't you? You must have picked it up at the carney, that come-on. Okay, lady, go ahead."
Estelle crossed the intersection, drove a while, and then began to slow down, straining her eyes in the darkness for fear that she would miss them. She almost did, for she had gone several yards past Matt and then caught sight of them in the corner of her eye, rushing into the road. She hit the brakes hard. Matt pulled open the door and then ran back into the woods for Evelyn. She came out, half stumbling and moaning. He lifted her, put her into position on the seat, and then exchanged positions with Estelle.
"She had to duck down and go on her own steam across the intersection area, and it opened her up again."
Matt hit the floorboard hard and when, in about ten minutes, they made it across the state line he began to look for a motel.
"Should we stop around here?" Estelle asked him, uncertainly. "We haven't actually covered too much ground."
The job of locating a motel was not a simple one, since they found themselves in an area of lavish estates. After cutting back and forth in various directions for several hours without success, Matt was disturbed about delaying treatment for Evelyn. The continuous jarring motions of the vehicle acted against the body's natural clotting powers as well.
In desperation, Matt pulled up alongside a small house, a rather decorative cottage, and knocked at the door. His objective was to borrow some ice and get specific information in regard to where they might stay; perhaps one of the large homes had boarding privileges, a dubious possibility but the only alternate to sleeping in the car, an eventuality which would be serious in Evelyn's condition.
The response to his knock was rather long delayed, and he was about to leave when someone opened the door. It was a graying man, slightly hunched over but seemingly quite vigorous with a quietly attentive face. When Matt mentioned something about his "wife being ill," the man at once opened the door wide and suggested that he bring her in. "There just isn't any such thing as a motel or any boarding or tourist accommodations around here," the man said. "Ordinances out this way wouldn't permit it. You have stumbled, young man, upon the feudal estates of the privileged class." He made the statement in obvious ridicule. He caught the nuance in Matt's questioning eyes and laughed. "Oh, this place, it's just the gardener's cottage. Come on and bring your wife, and we can do our talking after you attend to her."
"But I have my sister-in-law with me as well-"
The man waved his hand impatiently. "Bring them in. There's room enough. I live here alone."
His host introduced himself as George Ostrakhan, and it turned out that he was a most unusual man, with Matt and he hitting it off immediately. A native Greek, an Athenian, and a most cosmopolitan man, he had been a soldier and a socialist and "something of a man of letters" in his young years. After Matt had treated Evelyn and managed to staunch the flow of blood and get her to sleep with the aid of a sedative which the elderly man administered, Matt and he did quite a bit of talking.
George Ostrakhan sensed something of Matt's life-style and present difficulty, and Matt made no attempt to deny it. "What you ought to do is get yourself a place as a gardener on one of these estates. This way, you could occupy the cottage with your friends, attend to the woman who is ill, with no one the wiser. There's even some income and the meals generally are excellent, prepared by the main household chef."
He stood up, still lean, his arms exposed from beneath rolled shirtsleeves, hard and sinewy. He mused, half aloud, on the estates and some of the gardeners in the area, what changes had taken place and where Matt might apply. He dismissed several and then turned around suddenly with a knowing smile. "Yes, yes indeed. First thing in the morning where you want to go is to the Osterik estate. It was recently occupied by a Mrs. Ann Laurie Caldwell, a woman who was some years ago a theatrical figure of some prominence. She has been over this way several times, having admired the gardens. She thought I might be able to recommend someone. Actually, she was trying to get me to offer my own services. She tried to make the prospect appealing, momentarily, that is."
He smiled. "Not that she isn't attractive, because she is, very much so. But I'm afraid I'm no longer susceptible and don't feel particularly comfortable in the presence of 'unfulfilled women.' His laughter had a pleasant, human warmth. "But you-oh yes, she would be most susceptible to you. But then, of course, you know that. I was much like you physically in my younger years, and I know what that quality means. And, oh yes," it occurred to him, "don't give a thought to the lack of your gardening background. My recommendation will suffice, and besides, I will be able to give you any instructions you require along the way to maintain the place as long as you are inclined to stay."
Some time after 11:00 A.M. the following morning, Matt bathed, shaved, and refreshed following a substantial breakfast-left Evelyn and Estelle, at George Ostrakhan's suggestion, and drove up the long circular driveway before the magnificent Osterik mansion. He was presently admitted to the library. Soon after, Mrs. Caldwell, slim, brisk, and modishly groomed in a tailored garment ideally suited to her still exceptional figure, put in an appearance. Matt had his back to her, examining the mounted objects over the mantle, when she first entered, and her opening statement was most businesslike.
"May I see your credentials?" But as Matt turned around to face her, he caught the perceptible softening in her tone and manner. She extended her hand as they exchanged names, and she seemed to have forgotten her initial request. "I'm certain if Mr. Ostrakhan was kind enough to recommend you, you must be competent." She insisted upon escorting Matt around the grounds in order that he might "see the contour of the landscape." During the tour she became involved in a running monologue having no relationship to gardening, but dwelling entirely upon her career and celebrated appearances as a theatrical luminary.
When they came to the grounds adjacent to the left wing of the house, she stepped over the concrete border area to show Matt the facsimile of a moat of which she was particularly proud. However, there were several steep steps which, to negotiate, she needed Matt's assistance. But instead of taking her hand as she proffered it, he firmly grasped her about her upper arms and lifted her bodily to gently lower her down. Her unsettling loss of composure, after her woman-in-control-of-the-world performance, caused Matt to suppress a smile. The last step below was the steepest, several feet in height, and lowering her, Matt brought her directly up against him. He could feel the surprising firmness of her body, unencumbered by the special garments of support women in the matronly years have been perpetually dependent upon. He felt the breath go out of her and he sensed a sagging forward but an instant recovery and restoration of her coolly composed air.
The outdoors tour was followed by an exhibition of the mansion's luxurious interior, marked all over, on the walls along the way, by photo graphs and paintings of herself at various stages of her career. And after this, she suggested cocktails in the drawing room where they might "discuss specific details of the position," an intention which remained as unfulfilled as her previously stated purposes. Several hours had intervened since Matt's arrival, and nothing had transpired except for her interminable running monologue, accompanied by flourishes of the hand and strikingly posed positions to establish her charms.
Where at first Matt was annoyed, and then suddenly mocking and deliberately taunting with his suggestive closeness in order to secure the position and manipulate her toward his own ends, he now felt something akin to pity. She seemed so like a clenched fist, straining, balanced at the tips of her nerve ends. He was sitting immediately before her across a small, one-legged table upon which were poised the drinks. Without design now, he leaned forward, put his hand gently on her arm and said, "You're a very beautiful, very desirable woman. Why do you have to try so hard to prove it to yourself or anyone else?" She seemed stunned and hurt, as if struck across the face, until Matt added, "relax. I'd really like to talk to you. But let's skip the drawing-room social-butterfly tete-a-tete. As you can see, I'm not the type."
Without warning, she put her hands to her face and burst into deep, racking sobs. Matt put his arms around her, because at that moment he wanted to, and he held her for perhaps five minutes without speaking. Then as she slowly raised her face to look to him, her eyes tearstained, searching his for meaning, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was a long, deeply lingering, warmly passionate kiss. As her lips parted and her arms clutched him still, he said to her softly, "What's the great sin of needing a man? Why do you have to torture yourself? Why don't you just-reach out?"
She pressed herself against him, her fingers digging into his arms. Matt swept her up and carried her in the direction of the door, which he closed and locked while still he held her, and then toward the gilt-brocaded divan. He lowered her gently, her eyes still closed, biting her lip in anguish. He knelt down beside her and touched his lips to her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, her throat. Her breath was coming in trembling inhalations and exhalations. He parted her lips with his own and the deep, sweet probings of his caressing tongue.
Holding her thus, he took his hand and began to mold the contours of her ankles and calves, her thighs, all on the outside of her garments, and then both hands pressing, modeling, sculpting her breasts from the warm, round, outermost circle to the vital nub. She sighed, and her tautness unfolded like a morning flower.
Still kissing, still caressing her, he began to disrobe her. First her shoes, then, his hand moving up beneath her skirt, he disengaged her nylons and drew them off as smoothly as a second skin. And then his exploring hand journeyed upward farther, deeply dipping into the waistband of the laced panties and inching them down. His movements were passionate caresses at every stage of the unveiling, until, at last, he slipped past that most vital of all sensors. Then his hand knew her in the kiss of his fingers on the lips that had longed remained unkissed.
He felt her straining against him, grasping his finger in the deepest internal embrace. He held her so, plying her with a rhythm of flesh, as with his other hand he raised her dress over her head and removed her remaining garments. During all of this, and as he reached down to yank and pull away his own clothes, he did not withdraw his hand from the liquescence. Now he slipped his uninvolved hand, open-palmed, beneath the small of her back and then, lifting her gently, turned her over, face down, still without any digital surrender of that inner woman. It was only now, as he bore down upon her, pressed the full nakedness of his own body against her and introduced his searching, resonant manhood between the rotund cheeks of her hind quarters, that he gave up the place of his hand.
"God, you're driving me wild willlldddd!" she cried. And then, "Ummmmmmmmmmm ..." she sighed. The crack between her buttocks was warm and re=-laxed and open and tingling with excitement. She began to mew with pleasure. She was beginning to feel as if she were floating on a fleecy cloud which embraced every inch of her thrashing body, caressing it, teasing it.
His fingers spread the crack between the buttocks wide apart. He grinned obscenely. The cheeks of her ass were relaxed and ready for anything he had in mind. He dragged his tongue deeply, wetly along the deep crack.
"Ahhhhhhh," she cried, thrashing. "Uhh, ohhhh, gooood, soooo wild and goooooood ..." she sobbed.
And then, after tongue-lashing the crack between the juicy halves of her buttocks, he moved his face back down toward the crack in her pussy mound. He pressed his face forward and his open lips covered her pulsing slit with a wet kiss.
"Oh, God!" she screamed. "My pussy! You're killing it! Eat it, kiss it, love it, ohhhh!"
She squirmed heatedly, trying to shove her heated mound closer to his lips. And then she gasped as his long, wet tongue slid easily and suddenly into her crack, slid in, digging deeply and gently in between the lips of her cunt. She jerked her hips convulsively as she felt the hot contact of his lips and tongue on her slit. Her body was jolted with an involuntary spasm of shivering delight. She jammed her buttocks back against his face and ground her cunt against his lips, sobbing and crying out and cursing obscenely, no longer the calm, virginal lady that she seemed always to be.
She felt his tongue slide in between the pink folds of her cunt. She began to contract and open the lips of her cunt on the tongue as it moved with a long, smooth dart to sink deep inside of her vagina.
"Oh, darling!" she screamed. "Your lips! Your tongue! Ohhhhhhhhhh, darling, lover, eat me! Eat me alive!"
She was gasping and mewing and grunting and twisting about in ecstasy. Her cunt was impaled on his long, diving tongue. She felt his tongue, licking, curling, fluttering, curling deep inside of her pussy. His wet lips were wide open and sucking as his tongue speared in and out between the creaming lips of her cunt. He was sucking and licking noisily, greedily, driving her into a frenzy. Her buttocks were swaying over his face, out of control, as she ground her cunt against his mouth, thrilling to the contact of his sucking lips and his driving, fucking tongue.
"God, it's wonderful," she sobbed.
She had completely surrendered to the thrill of his licking and sucking of her cunt. His tongue plunged wildly and withdrew as he tasted the heat and juice of her steaming cunt.
She could hear the wet sucking noise as his tongue flicked wildly and wickedly, expertly in and out of her gaping pussy hole. The sound thrilled her lewdly. She began to moan constantly as his tongue lashed over her slit, caressed her hard clitoris bud, licked it, curled around it, driving her wild. His face was buried between her heaving thighs as he sucked and teased, using his lips and teeth and tongue avidly on her pussy. She writhed under his tormenting mouth, churning her buttocks, squirming her mound wildly.
"Ohhhhh ..." she sobbed, loving the delicious sucking and tonguing of her cunt.
He was getting a lewd satisfaction as he felt the lips of her pussy contract and relax, squeezing his tongue as it dove in and out of her mound. The cheeks of her ass were rotating and tightly clenched with passion.
To him, her tender and steaming cunt seemed like a flower, unfolding, opening, as he sucked on it. The lips of her pussy stretched open wider and wider to give greater access to his fucking tongue. He could feel the wetness of her pussy juice on his cheeks as he hungered between her thighs. Her thighs moved raggedly in rhythm with his sticking tongue which swirled between her pussy lips like a living snake.
"Oh, honey, I'm coming, I'm sure of it!" she screamed out loud.
He could feel the increasing abandon of the woman in the way her cunt was grinding with greater and greater tempo. And then she came.
"Agggggggg!" she screamed. She felt as if she were going to explode. Tremors gripped her pussy. Orgasm. Orgasm followed orgasm as come-juice flowed hotly in and from her cunt. He lapped it up and fucked on and on with his long tongue. She shivered all over as she came, and he continued to eat eagerly between her quaking thighs.
And then she fell back, limp, spent, satisfied as never before by a tongue in her cunt. But he wasn't through with her.
"Beautiful, sooo beautiful," she purred, gasping for breath.
He rolled her over onto her back, and she lay spread-eagled beneath him, panting, helpless to defend herself.
"What... whaa ... what are you ... going to do?" she panted.
"I'm going to make love to you," he said softly.
"Ohhhhhh, but your prick is so big. It'll ... tear me in two. It's sooooo big and hard."
"Hush. Relax. Enjoy yourself, darling," he whispered.
"Ohhhh, I can't stand any more. My cunt's tingling and aching from your wonderful lips ... and tongue ... it can't take any more. No-"
"Yes!"
"Ohhhh, nooo, please ... you'll kill me ... I can't take any more ... I'll die!"
"Hush."
He moved over her, covering her thrashing body with his. He prepared to mount her, to ram his huge hard cock into her creaming, vulnerable and soft cunt.
"Are ... you going to ... fuck me with that hard big cock of yours?" she asked in a little, panting voice.
"Yes, I am, darling, and you're going to love it," he grinned as he moved his body over her, fitting his body over her trembling, lovely form.
He began to rub the hard and knobby head of his prick over the creamy lips of her tingling cunt. She sobbed and sighed at the feel of his huge instrument, so thick and blunt, rubbing teasingly over the parted cunt lips. The wet lips of her pussy contracted and throbbed like a sucking mouth around the rubbing tip of his cock. He feasted his eyes on her naked, submissive beauty, savoring this moment before he took her completely.
His cock and testicles ached, swollen, ready to burst. Her trembling, lovely thighs yawned wide apart as she waited, panting, for the in-thrust of his huge cock. He probed his cock over the wet soft folds of her cunt, parting her pubic hair as he did, completely exposing her wet slit.
He sighed and took a good deep breath. She was so tender and still ladylike as she lay, sprawled beneath him, her hips worming involuntarily. He surged his hips forward. The wet warm flesh of her pussy lips cringed apart before the piercing drive of his giant cock. His cock smashed in between the cunt lips. She was wet and hot and tight down there and her pussy lips clung tightly to his surging cock as it drove in.
"Aggggg!" she grunted. "You'll rip me open!" she screamed in pain and terror ... and fierce pleasure.
His cock surged into her. The walls of her vagina gave way and her pussy lips stretched wider than they ever had in the past to give entrance to his peter. He gasped as his cock sank in to its hilt, his swollen balls coming to rest against the deep cleft of her buttocks.
"Oh, you're filling my burning pussy up to bursting!" she cried out.
He thrilled to feel the walls of her cunt contracting tightly around his cock as it drove all the way into her. She began to tremble and sob with pain and pleasure. Her joy at having his great cock deep inside her was unrestrained. She thrust her cunt at his cock and they began to move, undulate together, his cock sliding in and out, very, very slowly, completing the rape of this proud and beautiful woman.
Her thighs were spread wide apart and her legs laced around his waist, the heels of her feet kicking with passion at his back, urging him on. His cock began to tunnel up into her cunt, then slid back out again, teasing her.
"You're so lovely, so soft and nice and warm," he said. "And you're so tight ..." he whispered to her as he slowly fucked her.
"I'm not ... tight," she gasped. "You're sooooooo big!"
She was wet and open. She was squealing with lurid delight. His cock began to skewer and rampage in and out of her throbbing cunt. Her cunt was so hot and flowingly ready for this, so well prepared by the suck of his lips and the lick of his tongue.
"Fuck me, lover, kill me!" she cried.
Her dilated vagina accepted the assault of his giant prick. She loved the heavy weight of his body on her. She hugged him close and ground her cunt up and down, meeting his cock, stroke for stroke, her buttocks, slick and heaving, slapping up and down on the soft cushions of the couch. The heavy weight of his strong legs crushed her as he sank his cock deep inside her. She groaned and sobbed, hardly able to catch her breath. Her body was churning beneath his, matching the fast tempo of his fucking.
Her cunt was stretched as wide open as it was possible to be and it felt as if he had shoved a log in. She clenched the muscles of her buttocks tightly together and screwed her ass around and around as she heaved her lovely body beneath him. She loved the raping feel of his fleshy staff deep in the tunnel of her vagina.
"Fuck me!" she screamed. "I love it! Ohhhh, you wonderful lover, you wonderful stud! Fuck me, harder, faster, fuck me!" she cried lewdly.
Her cunt muscles clasped wetly and warmly on his battering cock. Her pussy melted like honey before the shove of his great scarlet cock, now reddened and slick from jamming in and out of her. She fucked him back, inspired, out of her mind with joy, and she was fast becoming the best fuck he had ever had.
She loved the throbbing of his cock inside of her. Her back began to hurt as she thrashed her hips up and down, meeting him, keeping tempo with him. Her hip joints were getting sore. Her cunt lips were aflame with pain and delicious tingles. As he fucked her wildly, he slipped his hands under her slick, gyrating buttocks, cupping them. Then his finger sought and found her anus. He thrust his finger deep into the opening of her tight anus. She screamed with pain, never before having been invaded in such a lewd way. His finger began to fuck in and out of her asshole in the same rhythm as his cock was stabbing in and out of her flaming, clinging pussy.
After a moment, she got used to the double impalement, and began to love it. She loved the intrusion of his blunt fingers deep in her anus.
"Fuck me in the ass and cunt, lover!" she screamed, nearly out of her mind with joy.
It was a double rape of the woman. The thick finger was jabbing in and out of her rectum as his cock jabbed in and out of her creaming, throbbing pussy. His cock circled round and round as it plunged in and out of her slit, and his finger did, too, in her back passageway. As he fucked her two ways at once he sucked avidly on her bouncing tits, diving in and out of her, nearly driving her to distraction. He took her with long, lunging strokes and she sobbed and cried out for more, loving the pleasure that the pain of the double fucking was giving her.
The moist sheath of her sucking, stretched pussy lips throbbed over the invading thickness of his prick. He was bending her to his will, making her his mistress, body and soul. He was establishing his control over her in the most basic way known to man.
In and out of her his cock stroked with power, while his finger jabbed in and out of her rectum at the same time. The wet smack of flesh against flesh filled the room; the wet suck of her creamy pussy lips on his cock joined the juicy sound of fucking. She screamed and moaned and bucked beneath him, nearing her end, knowing that he was nearing his, too.
"Take me, fuck me, I'm going to come soon!" she sobbed.
"Move it, honey! We'll make it together!"
"Yes, ohhhh, yesssss!"
Her buttocks rotated, following his rhythm. She ground and twisted her pussy on his hard-driving pole. Her cunt lips seemed wetly glued to his stabbing and rigidly controlled prick.
"Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, God!" she groaned, bucking wildly beneath him. His thick cock filled her completely, filled her cunt to the point where she was sure it would tear open. He lunged over her hard and she surged back at him joyfully, tears of ecstasy streaming down her flushed cheeks. His cock was like a monstrous raping pole. She loved it. Every bit of it. She had never had anything like it before. It was as if she were being fucked for her very first time.
He rammed over her with growing speed and abandon, sensing both of their ends were near now. He was taking her viciously now, as if he were raping her, and he was feeling sadistic glee in the taking of his beautiful proud actress.
Lust gleamed in her eyes. She was biting her lips with passion. His cock was cruelly hammering into her. His cock disappeared and reappeared between the wet lips of her excited pussy.
And then, all of a sudden, at the very same moment, they both came.
His fleshy instrument spat a huge load of creamy sperm deep into her vagina. At the same instant her orgasm dumped juice over the battering, ejaculating head of his cock. Hot thick liquid squirted into her. Her pussy lips sucked, holding his cock captive as it climaxed, the lips of her pussy contracting and relaxing, as if intent on squeezing every drop of come from his jetting cock. He was jabbing it into her mercilessly as he came, dumping a hot, spurting flow of come-juice into her. It filled her and she jerked her hips convulsively, raking her nails down over his back as she was jarred by her blinding orgasm.
He was buffeting her as if she were a helpless doll. She took everything he had to give. And they both shot their last bolts. With a scream of joy, she blacked completely out.
With his limp prick still buried deep inside of her juicy cunt, Matt stared down at her face with satisfaction. She was unconscious. He had fucked her so gloriously that she had fainted from pleasure. Her thighs were wet and lax. Come-juice drained out of her pussy soaking his balls, coating his cock, deflated, still sunk deep in her tingling vagina.
Her eyelashes fluttered open. She groaned, sighed, gurgling with fulfillment. She had never before been so completely and wonderfully used by anyone in her whole sexual life. She sighed and smiled up at him. She contracted the walls of her vagina around his now deflated cock.
"Ann-Ann!" The high-pitched, excited female voice from the other side of the door was accompanied by rapid tapping. The figure on the couch, coiled in its nakedness and still submerged in the hazes of bliss, leaped up at once, as if electrified. "Yes, yes, dear-I-I'm involved in a new landscape plan for the garden and can't be disturbed for just a little while!" At which point, she was already on her feet and, oblivious to the effect of her frantic and disordered behavior before Matt, grabbed for her articles of clothing. The voice on the other side of the door sounded annoyed. "I want to talk to you. Can't the damned gardening wait?"
"All right, dear. I'll be downstairs in just a little while. I'll make it very fast." She was already stepping into and pulling on her garments. She glanced at Matt's nakedness, showing extreme distress. "It's my daughter, Tina," she said.
Matt reached for his clothes. "It'll take me just a minute." There was a dressing room alcove, where she rapidly arranged her hair and reapplied her makeup. Then she literally ran across the room. At the doorway, she paused and said to him, her eyes imploring, "Please- please come down as if nothing-happened." And when minutes later Matt descended the long spiral staircase he saw Mrs. Caldwell with all of her former aplomb, talking with a tawny panther of a girl, with tight pants molded to her lithe figure and terminating in deep wine-colored boots with heels. She was continually in motion, tossing her head, waving her hands as she talked.
"-and we're going to go up to Lake Barth with the motorcycles. They're having some races up there, and Peter's entering. But he doesn't have the hundred-dollar entrance fee. These are real professional races," she was saying at a mile a minute.
"I'll give you the hundred dollars, dear, but don't you think you might go up to the lake by car instead of motorcycles? It is a hazard-"
"Ann, don't be such a drag. Every time I-" It was then she became aware of Matt, and she whirled about showily. Is this what you were busily engaged with on the discussion of landscaping?" She tossed her head back and laughed aloud, the wide, well-defined mouth and flashing teeth accentuating her vital young animal look. "What a waste."
"This is Mr. Matt Hurder, our new gardener. Mr. Ostrakhan recommended him."
Tina, her hands on her hips, moved around Matt, brazenly surveying him from every angle. Her movements were a series of restless, sudden stops and starts that kept the twin darts of her breasts underneath the tight sweater in constant motion.
"And he's going to be living in our gardener's cottage! Well," she said with mock formality, extending her hand to Matt, "as they say, we'll be very glad to be making your acquaintance." With that, she spun on her heels and dashed out of the room, calling out, "Have one of the maids bring the hundred dollars down to me near the garages. Pete's there, tuning up his bike."
Mrs. Caldwell immediately assumed her formal, pretentious manner and said to Matt, "You can be prepared to move into the cottage whenever you wish. You won't require anything because it's completely furnished and has all of the linens, kitchen equipment, table service, that sort of thing, and-" she went on, but then cut herself off in mid-sentence. Her gaze was steadier now and her voice softened and more quiet. "Tina," she began to explain.
"There's nothing you have to explain to me," Matt said gently.
She placed her hand on his arm. "But I want to," she said. Then she went on to tell him of her pride in her youthful independence and the subordination of all her emotional interests to her theatrical ambitions. She enjoyed the company of men so long as they were fawning, attentive and assuring her of her loveliness. As long as no one was presumptive enough to draw her out from her own private self. "I married one time, but I regretted it. It was very brief. I thought he wanted too much-part of myself." Her voice was sardonic. "Tina is my child by that marriage. But through the years, except for short visits, she never stayed with me. I purchased this house in the hopes that she would choose to live with me, instead of with her father."
CHAPTER TEN
For Evelyn, it was as if they had broken through a storm and come out upon a wide, peaceful sea. The estate was beautiful, with over two hundred acres of deep country foliage and winding brooks, rolling hills and stately trees. The cultivated gardens soon "became fetchingly bush rubbed and blooming. George Ostrakhan laid out the initial plans and instructions, though Matt soon began to contribute his own ideas, just for kicks, and no one was more intrigued with them than Ostrakhan himself. As for the manual labor, shrub cutting, the mowing of the great expanses of lawn, a labor crew which Ostrakhan employed intermittently began to perform the same service for Matt.
He occupied himself with some of the lighter gardening chores, plant trimming and bloom cutting, which Evelyn, who adored the gardens, assisted with. She daily began to do the flower arrangements for the main house, and she and Mrs. Caldwell became quite friendly. Matt found himself with a great deal of time and began to bring over great armfuls of books from George Ostrakhan's library.
The cottage was spacious, bright, and comfortable, with more than ample room. Evelyn soon discovered that Matt had dispatched a letter to his mother and received word that she would soon be joining their domicile. The incongruity of the circumstance, as well as all the others in her life, had been set aside in Evelyn's mind. It was as if she were experiencing a life within a life, and the inner reality was all-enveloping. Physically, she looked well, clear-eyed, her skin gold from the sun, and in that other way she was almost entirely healed. Matt, too, looked well. The hard extra pounds seemed to add dimension and stature. He was still silent and thoughtful for long periods, but he laughed more. Sometimes when they walked across the fields doing their gardening chores, quite absently they found their hands together. She felt they were ascending the same plateau together, but there were also knifing, signs of distress. The afternoon they were in the cottage, Matt reading and Evelyn quietly dozing, was one.
Mrs. Caldwell opened the door and entered the room. She had come in on several occasions, under some pretext, to talk to Matt, usually leaving with him to go back to the main house. Evelyn knew what was taking place, and what troubled her the most was his easy familiarity with her, an uncharacteristic warmth. There were even signs of tenderness. She came over to Matt who was seated on a rocking chair, his feet propped up on the couch bed in the corner. He let his book drop in his lap. Evelyn, who was diagonally across from them, slightly dozing in the big easy chair, heard Mrs. Caldwell, but she remained unstirring and chose to give no sign of it. "I'd like you to come out with me to the left wing and discuss what we might do with the moat," she said.
Matt's tone was bantering. "Whose moat?"
"Matt-" she gasped, her tone surprised, followed by a ripple of subdued laughter. "Don't. She's-" Evelyn knew the allusion was to her presence, but whatever reticence was offered seemed to be dwindling as Mrs. Caldwell's voice became hushed and breathless.
"Just let me hold it like-that," Matt was saying, and Evelyn understood the significance of the woman's sigh. She ventured a veiled glance and saw her standing before Matt, who still remained seated and had drawn up the front of her dress, his hand buried deep in its folds. Her body swayed as she put her hands on his shoulders for support. "No, please," she continued, her writhing body unheeding her protestations. Then Evelyn saw Matt's other hand unzipping his trousers. She could make out nothing else from her vantage point.
Mrs. Caldwell was more frantic now. "What are you doing? We can't-not here."
"Just look at it," Matt said. "Here, touch it. You don't have to do anything else."
Evelyn felt the pressure throb in her forehead. She shifted uneasily and found herself craning until she could see Matt, there between his legs, bared as he was, already risen. There it was, as she saw it now repeatedly in her deep night dreams and often visualized it through his clothes when they walked through the garden together. Her eyes reached out to fondle it and she felt an insistent, pulsing warmth again between her thighs. Her hand, now long familiar with the recess of her most intimate part, moved in to stroke the flameless fire.
Mrs. Caldwell was bared to the waist now with Matt seizing her by the raised and bunched-up garment and urging her toward him. Swept up in passion's tide, the woman moved to meet him. She parted her legs to bring her body forward across his, and seizing his manhood with one hand descended upon him, twisting and turning as if he were an inverted corkscrew clearing the narrow vessel's passage. Bent forward now, her arms around his neck, her upper torso stationary, she moved against him as her entire body was seized by frantic, grinding force, racing to accelerate his oscillating probes. She cried out, all restraint broken, and lurched forward against him, her legs coming up to bind themselves around his sides. There she hung, shuddering and trembling, and raining his face and neck with ardent kisses.
Estelle came lumbering drowsily from one of the other rooms, and Mrs. Caldwell backed off Matt and pulled her garment down. Estelle, by her passive reaction, either had not noticed or because of the commonness of the act in her experience did not consider it especially notable or untoward. Estelle was the only one who had not found their temporary new life-style exhilarating. The lack of exciting stress had somehow dulled her senses. She seemed heavier, more lethargic, almost cowlike in her slothfulness. She looked over at Matt. "When do we get something to eat?"
"The maid will be bringing your trays over in about half an hour," Mrs. Caldwell said, still red and flustered from the untimely interruption.
Evelyn took advantage of the distraction to remove herself surreptitiously from the room. She stepped through the door and entered the garden. She knew by her response to every gesture of Matt's that she was moving in the direction of a crisis in their relationship. But it was an impalpable thing. She did not know or recognize new self and avoided a direct and ultimate confrontation with this new image. Yet how could she hope to resolve these emotions with Matt? That this was a resolution she devoutly wished was the only certainty in her life.
In this state of distraction, Mrs. Caldwell, heading from the cottage to the main house, came upon her; stepping through the bordering brush, they almost collided. They began to exchange hasty apologies when Mrs. Caldwell put her hand on hers. "Forgive me," she said for what happened in there. I know you must have seen it all. I didn't want to be so blatant, but you know how compelling he is." They both remained silent for an awkward minute, then Mrs. Caldwell spoke again. "You-you're very fortunate. I envy you."
"You envy me!" Evelyn was astounded.
"Oh, yes," the older woman said. "He embraces me now and then to remind me that I am still a woman. But it's all in the way of service, out of compassion. I'm glad to say that at least it is that, that he doesn't regard me with lecherous laughter behind my back. But I believe that has to be the way with such truly passionate men. It's as if they were fashioned for that and nothing else." Then, hastening to clarify her remarks for fear she might be misunderstood, she said, "Not that I think that's anything to be demeaned. I'd be the last one in the world to say that after a lifetime of very bitter discovery. That's why I envy you. Because I can see that you don't come from his background and it's obvious you are caught up into something with both of them. But whatever you've been through, you've had enough courage to throw up everything, to allow that something which must have a central grip on every woman to dominate your life. It's not difficult to see that's why you are with him. I envy your courage and I envy you because he is in love with you."
Evelyn felt the hot rush of tears, and she whirled away from the woman, running down the footpath behind her. There, beside a tall hedge, she gave vent to her wracking sobs. How ironic it was. The woman had assumed that she and Matt were longtime lovers, that Evelyn lived and breathed for his embraces, found life in them to give her meaning and purpose. Yet she had never known him inside that woman's core of her being. Still, aggrieved as she was, those words muttered with such certainty by the woman remained hovering still in her deepest awareness. "... and I envy you because he is in love with you."
A hundred images of the weeks lately passed began to superimpose themselves. Matt's relaxed comfort when she was alongside him when he read. The easy way they walked along together in the gardens and out in the fields. Sometimes, when she turned unexpectedly, she did discover his eyes deeply intent on her and signs of an emotion he hastened to conceal. The warmth of his hands as they unconsciously found hers and held them as they walked. She felt the waning of despair. How could she not be aware of his sensitivity, the uncommon depth of his interests? The names and titles of the books that he ominvorously devoured attested to that. Evelyn brightened. Yes, there was much they had in common. Wherever they had strayed, they were somehow now moving in the same direction. Her step was firmer and she was almost gay as she re-entered the cottage.
It was then that she met Matt's mother. Estelle introduced her. Her bags were alongside, indicating that she had just arrived. Her appearance was a disturbing departure from the picture that Evelyn had conjured up of an elderly, illiterate woman, poorly attired and from some deprived circumstances where she had endured a great deal which would also explain much in Matt's character and behavior.
Instead, the woman was about sixty but fairly tall, about five feet seven, and although not attired according to the fashion, she was well-groomed and immaculate about her person. Her coloring, though graying, still retained identifying vestiges of Scandinavian heritage. Her features had something of Matt's aquilinity, though her mouth seemed less severe, more patiently forebearing. But the expression she turned on Evelyn was one of notable coolness.
"I'll help you unpack and put your things away," Evelyn volunteered. She made as if to raise one of the suitcases, but the woman reached down herself.
"Never mind. Estelle will take care of it."
The incident was disconcerting, nor did their close proximity over the passing weeks promise to thaw the unreceptive wall that Evelyn had encountered. On one hand, it came as some satisfaction to note that Matt himself was rather distant and unemotional with her. On the other, it served further to confuse the image she had previously constructed in her mind.
She saw Matt as a fiercely loyal and devoted son who was willing to risk considerable hazards to maintain his mother and attend to her welfare. True, there seemed to be a measure of that, at least in his action of having brought her to him to share the cottage. But he was often inattentive to the point of curtness as his mother went about arranging and managing the details of the household, though the presence of his mother had in no way diminished the signs of their own increasingly closer relationship.
Evelyn awakened one morning, suffused with the warm glow of the sun coming through the blinds. She sat up, stretching, feeling a glorious ripple of aliveness through her now totally restored body. The night before, she and Matt had gone out into the garden to see the blooms by moonlight, and there his arms had found her, his lips burning into her mouth. How avidly she clung to him, returning his kisses. While he pulled away suddenly, leaving her hanging there on the trembling note of promise, she was not dismayed. It was evident that he was as moved, as caught up in the emotional tug-of-war between them as she was.
She removed the covers and stepped out of the bed, which she shared with Estelle. She surveyed herself, nude, in the full-length mirror. Now she always slipped disrobed between the covers, her body tingling with aliveness. She was slimmer, more compact than before, but she noted with critically admiring eyes that her breasts were fuller and her hips as well. Her legs retained their long slimness, but there was no longer the concavity between her upper thighs. She wondered how much of this was a result of those warm flowing juices which came stirring inside her, which seemed to have come to the surface from a wellspring. She moved her hands over her breasts, allowed her fingers to linger on the nipples, and followed the curvaceous periphery which all led to that rich, dark mound poised over her source.
Her images were of Matt, confronting her in this same state and moving together to perfect bliss. It was with her hand entrapped between her thighs at that moment that Matt's mother walked in. Evelyn grabbed up her robe. The woman made no comment nor did she cast her eyes in her direction. She simply went about dusting and attending to her chores.
Evelyn tried not to dislike the woman and continued in the effort to be civil to her. But her presence was unfailingly disconcerting, even as the presence of one other on the estate. The other presence that was troubling to her was that of Mrs. Caldwell's daughter-Tina. Her brazen flirtatiousness with Matt was not all of it. She seemed endlessly inventive in ways of seeking out Matt in her attempt to be compromised. Evelyn was of the impression that it might have happened repeatedly between them until that early morning she decided to go down to the boathouse where she knew that Matt was planting flower beds. It was off season and she expected to find Matt alone, but as she came down the narrow footpath, she heard Matt talking to someone. "What are you doing out here in your bathing suit? This is no time to be swimming."
Evelyn heard a girlish, nasally affected voice, and as Evelyn broke into the clearing, she saw Tina advancing to Matt who was kneeling in the soil, literally pulling off the skimpy parts that comprised her bikini. She stood there about fifteen feet before him, hands on her hips, her legs widespread, boldly inviting his glance. Then she put her arms back and let herself fall with her naked haunches upon the moist soil. There she lay, her legs apart, head up and arms outraised, saying, "Take me, come on, take me." Evelyn stepped back into the concealing brush. She heard Tina's voice rising angrily, "Come on, for heaven's sakes! I can give you more in five minutes than that old bat can in a year." Evelyn heard footsteps coming in her direction, and she retreated farther into the brush. It was Matt, striding away from the lake.
Tina came running after him, naked, tearing at his clothes with her hands. "Don't you walk away from me, you son of a bitch. I'm not a kid, I've tumbled with more guys than you could count." Matt lifted her up, forcing her away from him, then shoved her so that she fell back on the ground. And there she remained, screaming at him at the top of her lungs, "You son of a bitch. By the time I'm through with you, you'll be kissing my pussy." Then she ran back, still muttering, to find her bathing suit.
It was the afternoon of the morning that Matt's mother had walked in on her while she was masturbating before the mirror that Matt announced that he was going horseback riding with Tina and some of her friends. He invited Evelyn to go along.
Tina had two girlfriends along, one a tall, slim brunette and the other of medium height, dark and striking and with an extraordinarily vulgar mouth. There were four young men, all several years and the girls' senior and all of a rather crude, rowdy sort that Evelyn identified with the motorcycle-gang type. She made this inevitable association because three of them were wearing leather jackets of the sort used by such groups. One of the young men, taller and with a swagger and perpetually cynical expression, was Tina's boyfriend, Pete.
He provided a large whiskey flask from which he took deep swallows and passed it along to his fellows at the beginning of the ride. He demonstrated an unconcealed rancor for Matt and seemed to resent Tina's invitation to him.
They rode for about an hour and a half, encircling the woodlands on the estate, and at one particular point Tina burst off into a gallop, disappearing in the brush. The darkly attractive girl with the foul mouth called to her and then snapped, "What the hell is little sniggle-ass up to now?"
"She's got a cuter ass than yours," Pete said, a retort that brought laughter from all but the dark-haired girl. "I can remember when you had the same opinion of mine."
They continued for a while, the comments getting more risque, until they broke into a large clearing, and there, directly in their path awaiting them, was Tina, completely nude on horseback, her tawny hair spread about her shoulders. "How's this for Lady Godiva?" she said. Her stunt was met with an appreciative response by all of her friends except for Pete.
He whirled angrily at Matt. "Turn your head around, damn you! I don't want you looking at her when she's like that." Matt remained seated in the saddle, unmoving. Pete leaped from his mount with a fury. "I told you to turn around," and with that, he reached up and grabbed hold of Matt, pulling him down from the saddle. Matt got up on his feet slowly.
"You're out of line, buddy," he said very quietly, and was met with Pete's fist directly on his mouth. Matt went back a step, arching his body to the side to avoid another blow, and hooked his fist with hard force into Pete's mid riff, folding him over. Then, with his opposite hand, he caught him on the side of the jaw and stretched him out backward, rendering him instantly unconscious.
The dark-haired girl said with a rippling laugh: "Do you do everything that hard?"
"He sure does," Estelle chimed in.
"And you have the scars to show for it," said the dark-haired girl snidely.
Estelle laughed, suddenly brightened and more animated by the excitement than she had been since her arrival at the estate. "If you had my scars, then he"-she indicated Pete, just coming to-"wouldn't be admiring her ass instead of yours."
Having been assaulted on sensitive ground, the dark-haired girl flew into an immediate fury. "I'll strip alongside you any day of the week, you banged-out tub."
Estelle continued laughing good-naturedly. "If you did, I'd just about gulp you up right between my legs."
With that, the dark-haired girl slipped the stirrups and leaped to the ground. She began undressing at once, the boys clapping their hands and encouraging her, until she displayed a nicely proportioned, rather diminutive body, not without charms. Estelle, still smiling, stepped down beside her. Happily in her element, she turned her back to all those who looked on and began the disrobing ritual which was to her by now a practiced perfection.
All the while, as she removed another article of clothing, she maintained the swaying, undulating motion of her hips, and skinning out of her panties to expose her great, unblemished mounds, she brought an audible gasp from Tina's friends. And then, completely naked, Estelle turned around to face them. There was no laughter, no hooting, howls, or any comments whatever. Estelle's appearance had an overwhelming sensual impact.
Evelyn realized, upon seeing her then, that all the woman possessed, all of her thoughts, actions, responses had been distilled into an essence of sexuality. With the rays of the setting sun cast upon her in the clearing, she seemed like some fructifying goddess descended to absorb in her vitals every earthly protuberance, man, mountain, skyscraper. Evelyn recalled that Estelle had referred to Matt as a "stud." She realized that Estelle was his opposite image. Sex incarnate.
Matt's interest in all of this was Evelyn, and so sensitive was he to all of this that he said to the others, "Okay, since some of you are undressed for it and the rest of you sound like you're in the mood, I'll show you a little Tartar trick on horseback."
With that, he began to unbuckle his belt and remove his pants. He pulled off his jockey shorts at the same time, and naked from the waist down he approached Estelle. He guided himself to her thighs and began drawing back and forth with a squirming assist from Estelle. Then, still manipulating her gently with his hand, he looked up at Tina, who was nude on the bareback mount, having removed the saddle to achieve the Godiva look.
"Move up forward," he said, "I'm coming up behind you." Tina made an effort at a gay laugh and a casual remark, but she was too excited to conclude it. Her mouth was taut and her nostrils wide with desire as she held her eyes fixed to Matt's rigid, encrimsoned organ. He put both hands upon the horse's shanks and leaped up, clearing the animal's hind quarters and landing behind Tina.
Pete, sitting up, was dazed and helpless. Tina began to bend her body backward to close the space between Matt and herself, but Matt told her, "Just stay where you are-me and the horse will do the rest." Constrained laughter broke from those around them. Now Matt took the reins and brought them over Tina's head, giving him control of the mount. He started the animal moving, first slowly and then in easy loping strides in a circle around the rest. The undulant fore-and-aft movements of the animal soon closed the gap between them. Now Matt encircled her waist with his arms with each loping stride of the animal. Fixing her rigidly against him, he burst into a gallop. Steady, hard, impactful, the cadence moved them in perfect rhythm-harder, faster, the circles widening, until at last he headed the mount into a swift run and a breakway gallop.
Tina's pealing outcries stirred the others to such a frenzy of erotic desire that they moved to each other, touching, grasping, embracing. Pete grabbed for Evelyn, wrestling her to the ground. She struggled with him, in between an unappeasable desire and an irrepressible rage at Matt. She pulled away from Pete, got to her feet and began to run across the field. She could see Matt, now toppling from the mount with Tina, rolling over the ground with her, straining against her aroused body with the rapidity of a pneumatic drill.
Pete caught Evelyn and flung her to the ground. He struggled to pry her knees apart. She screamed, tore at his face with her nails. "Leave me alone," she cried. "There's something wrong with me. Don't you understand?" Pete, frustrated by her resistance, on top of Tina's rejection, began to beat her about the face and head with his closed fists. She screamed, and within a matter of instants the body of her molester toppled to his side. Then she saw Matt dragging him off and striking him with a flurry of blows that drove him down to his knees.
Matt helped her up. "Are you all right?" he asked anxiously. "I mean, did he hurt you there again?"
Evelyn shook her head as she sobbed. He helped her up on her horse and, leaving the others behind, started back with her in the direction of the cottage.
They moved slowly and silently for some time until Evelyn regained her composure. She pulled up her reins and began to verbally assault him, all of the repressed anger, all of the unspoken thoughts choking her till they had to be ejected. "Why do you allow yourself to become involved in sick performances like that, turning yourself into some kind of a warped and hideous caricature of a person? Why do you have to live that way-stealing, running up back alleys, living with your hand gripped on a gun? It's a subhuman existence."
A sob burst from her throat. Evelyn held the choked sobs and tears, and her voice dropped as she fought for control. "You're not like that, Matt-you're not. There are other things inside you that you're denying. Feelings for beauty, the gardens, the country-the regard, the love you have for those magnificent books. I was raised to appreciate such things. We would have so much in common if you would come to realize this."
With every word of Evelyn's, recalled fury seemed to be building up in Matt. The tendons in his neck drew taut. His fists clenched and unclenched spasmodically with a pressure that made his knuckles show white. The voice that came out of him was as flat as a blade, its edge just as cutting. "The only thing we have in common is the air we breathe. Like you? Boy, are you ever wrong. There is nothing you see, nothing you are, nothing you represent that means a damn thing to me. What you were raised to appreciate, I hate. Do you understand that? I hate it. And most of all, those books. I read them to tear them to pieces, those grandiose ideas built on stupidity and self-deception, out of fear to grasp and hold on to something. Sentiments sick and sycophantic. The morals, the traditions, the ethics, words that should be flushed like feces down to a cesspool for all they mean in this real world that we live in, eat in, screw in, die in."
Evelyn recoiled, his words searing as a whiplash, and Matt slashed at her further with an obsessional need to cut her down, demolish her. "I'm supposed to be like you? That's a laugh.
We represent opposite sides, sides that never meet but to rape, to ravage and to kill. The violators and the violated. As if I need to tell you which one you are. How many times have I rescued you from getting your pants banged? The guys that blasted you at the carney? The big ape that you repulsed and innocently led to slaughter? This kid back here whose guts I pounded? Poor, pure immaculate Mother Superior with that fire burning deep. I saw it when I walked in the door of your house, that need to be grabbed, pummeled, pounded-but only as the violated. When I wanted to take that kid with me, you thought you wanted to go with me to save her. She doesn't need anyone saving her. You wanted to go, so what happened to you, without your so-called will or conscious desire? So I would force you. And that's why you stuck with me. That's why you went with me, no matter how many times you could have broken away, walked off. You were waiting-waiting until you were violated. You're what they call the eternal hostage.
"But I wasn't going to give you what you wanted most. Maybe just a little, maybe close to it so you could see what kind of a damned fraud you are. I could see the fever in your eyes everytime I pistoned my rod into some other piece instead of you. And I wanted to see you look on, eat your guts out, with a need. That's why I took you out riding today. That's why I had that kid. If you wanted me, you would have to come and get me. The violated would have to become the violator."
Matt looked down at her with cruel mockery on his face. He stepped down from the horse. "If you want me, get off the horse, but first, you're going to have to get down on your knees and kiss me." Matt, his eyes never wavering from her face, smiled his cruel smile. With a sob, Evelyn whirled her mount, heeled him into a gallop, headed for the cottage.
The trees, the foliage, the sky appeared a misty blur through her eyes. She swallowed, gulping back the salt of her tears. He had struck at the wound that had never healed, the wound he had opened the day he had walked into the house and taken her out with him into the night. His brutality had been punishing, but so was her own self-flagellation. Even after all he had said and he stood there before her and began to expose himself, Evelyn knew that she wanted to come down off that horse. She wanted to go to him, kneel on the floor if necessary ... How she hated herself for that. "Never," she muttered through still trembling lips, "never as long as I live will he ever drag me down to get me to go to him."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Evelyn entered the cottage and walked past Matt's mother, who was completely attired in coat and hat. She went immediately to the telephone and asked the operator to connect her with the local bus depot. "I can tell you when the buses are leaving," Matt's mother said to her. And Evelyn turned around to see two suitcases beside the woman. "I'm leaving," she said, "you don't have to go."
"I'm not leaving because of you," Evelyn said.
The deepening lines on the older woman's face showed a troubled weariness. "You shouldn't leave him. He loves you."
These words and the woman's entire attitude were totally incomprehensible to Evelyn, especially coming at this time. "You're mistaken," Evelyn said. "More so than you can possibly realize."
The woman shook her head. "I'm not mistaken. I knew that from the moment I received a letter from him, telling me to come to this place. He wrote me then that there was someone else with him, someone other than Estelle. And he said it was someone who was very fine and that it was someone he knew that I could become close to. How incredible a thing that was for him to say, only I know. In all of his life, he has never had such regard for a person or ever believed that human closeness was possible at all."
"But Estelle-" Evelyn began.
"No," Matt's mother said. "You don't understand. Estelle has just been someone to have in his presence. The way people keep pets, a cat, a dog, occasionally throwing it a bone of affection for the sake of some living presence." Now she averted her face in an effort to conceal her distress. "I never said anything to him about her. When there is nothing, the touch of another body has importance." She turned again and leaned forward anxiously, placing her hand on Evelyn's arm.
"He needed something, at least, so he would not exist as a child stillborn." For some reason or other, as the woman made reference to the sexuality of the body as a detached object, a needed service, a nourishment, an image of the brother who led her to the mentally retarded giant, as if he were taking her presence to him as a light in self-consuming darkness, came to her. Evelyn's hand returned the pressure of the older woman's. "But Matt hates me."
"No, it isn't you that he hates. He hates because he does not believe that anything else is possible." Now she pressed the fingers of her hand against her lips in despair. "How can I explain it to you? You see, he grew up very close to me as a child. We had a fine home and we never were at a loss for material things. My husband was a man very much involved in business. Quite successful, always arranging corporations, mergers, away from home weeks at a time. He was an attractive man and he had the faults of..."
She shrugged. "I suppose the essence of Man himself. Interests away from home, other women, drinking. But do not imagine that I am speaking of some kind of reprobate. My husband was very respected, highly regarded, in the church, in business. Of course, I wept, was hurt, complained. We argued, and when he was away I carried on as if I never wanted him to return.
"Matt saw, he heard all this. And as I said, he was very close to me. A brilliant boy, a remarkable student. Perhaps you find this difficult to believe. But this didn't last very long because there was hatred inside him for all the things that his father was and represented. This he received through me." The woman closed her eyes for a moment and drew her hand across her face. She looked up to Evelyn. "I remember one time that my husband was away for many weeks and he had brought home with him several men for some kind of a business conference. They were in the study, and Matt came in for a book on the shelf, I think it was. They were talking and they didn't notice him. And mention was made of a party they had arranged with prostitutes, I suppose to help inveigle some group into a business merger. Something like that.
"And Matt, who was perhaps thirteen years old, or fourteen at the most, turned upon them. All the stored-up rage and vehemence. I remember I even heard his voice from upstairs, and as I came running down, I heard his words. 'You're all a bunch of phonies. Hypocrites,' he was saying. 'Business-it's just like thievery and criminality. Drinking and being dirty with other women and then a lot of church-going to cover it all up. You stink. All of you stink. The whole damned world of people stinks.' I managed to get him out of the room. He wouldn't let my husband reason with him, talk to him, put a hand out to him.
"And it all grew 'way out of proportion with each passing year. He left school. He went out on his own. There was to be no normal life for him. To steal meant nothing. Only he wanted to keep apart from the sickness in the world he said existed around him. To plan was pointless. To live or die was of equal unimportance.
"You see, my dear." The older woman's voice softened. "He grew up to see the world through a woman's eyes, because of his closeness to me. A woman's sensitivity, a woman's heart, a woman's insight. He learned to hate what women hate in all men, but he wasn't a woman, so he could not lose his mind in his body, as a woman does with her loved one. Because what he could not understand was that for all of this, I loved my husband so deeply that when he passed away, I would have given my life just to have been possessed by him again ..."
Her voice trailed off into a deep sigh, before she began again. "I suppose it was a mother's resentment that I reacted as coldly as I did to you. I had never known him to feel like that about anyone, not even myself, and I wanted to find a way to talk to you. But when I saw how distant Matt had become, I felt, I suppose, that I had been replaced and I disliked you all the more. But I see how stupid it all is, that it can bring us only further unhappiness and, God knows, the world is full of that.
"So I've decided to go away. I have enough to take care of myself. My husband left more than enough, but Matt would never touch a penny of it." Matt's mother covered Evelyn's hands with her own. "Of course, I am saying all of this out of a mother's selfish interest. I have no right. For you to stay with him, the way he lives, could ruin your own life. But I want him to have something. To know at least why he is alive." With that, the woman drew back, lifted her two suitcases and walked out the door.
Evelyn was deeply shaken. She felt herself caught up in a buffeting, crushing storm that intermittently brought a lapse and a lull, allowing the hopeful beginning of a recovery, and then struck again with a more crippling force. But through it all, she fixed her mind on one thought-that single clue of Matt's mother, which had come to her as a revelation. It explained why, among all of the people in the world she had ever known, it was only Matt that she felt as close to as her father. Matt's mother had said, "He sees with the insight and sensitivity of a woman's mind."
The slamming door behind her wrenched her from her troubled musing. Matt had entered the cottage and now moved about in a hurried swirl of activity. He opened drawers and flung the contents down on chairs. "Your mother just left," Evelyn told him.
"I know," he said curtly without looking up. "Has Stell come back yet?"
"No," Evelyn started to say, and then was surprised to see Estelle stepping out of one of the rooms.
"Here I am, Matt. When you took off with her," she said, alluding to Evelyn, "I just had to head straight back for the cottage." The uncharacteristic coldness in her reference to Evelyn had taken Evelyn aback. Estelle had never shown any signs of jealousy before.
"I've had it up to here with this place. We're going to start moving again. Help me pack," he instructed Estelle. Her face immediately brightened and she fell to her chores with a zest, pausing only to ask Matt as an afterthought: "Is she coming with us?"
Evelyn stiffened expectantly. Matt did not acknowledge the question and Estelle persisted. "Is she?"
Matt showed annoyance. "Come on, Stell, shake your ass. We want to get out of here." She did as he bade, and then turned and made her way hurriedly to the door. She paused at the threshold. "I'm going up to the main house to get our laundry."
"To hell with it," Matt said.
"It'll only take me a minute," Estelle said. "I've got something there that I want." She went out and they heard the hurried click of her heels along the walk.
During the ten minutes of her absence, Matt and Evelyn maintained a pregnant silence. He moved now, packing and assembling things, as if driven by some internal holocaust. Evelyn noted with uneasiness the fluent ease of his hands as he examined and prepared for their taking, in quick succession, a rifle, a shotgun and two revolvers that she knew he had obtained from George Ostrakhan.
Estelle's heels clicked even more rapidly up the walk, and the door opened. "Matt, we've really got to move now. Her kid came back and she must of told her mother what you did to her out there on that horse. I heard her old lady calling the cops. You know, that kid's jailbait."
Matt abruptly terminated the efforts at packing. "Okay. Forget this crud. We'll pick up what we need when we get clear of this area."
Estelle was abnormally animated. "We'll be making a run for it, Matt, just like we used to, the two of us." She paused and then looked significantly at Evelyn again. "You can't take her now, with the cops on our tail. Besides, if they grab us with her, it's kidnapping, isn't it?"
Matt started for the door and snapped back at Estelle, tensely. "Whether she wants to stay or come along, that's up to her. Let's get out of here."
Estelle opened the door and went immediately after him, and Evelyn went through it before it closed.
Matt was gunning the motor now, swerving sharply around hairpin turns on roads dividing the various estates. Having studied the maps of the area in detail, he knew precisely where he was going. "We'll cut up north to the river," he said. "Then we'll dump the car and grab one of the launches or cruisers, anything with an outboard motor docked out that way, and head for the other side. But we'll continue along the coastline for about thirty miles. I know that region real good, and once we latch on to another car they can just whistle Dixie."
They were all sitting up front, with Estelle in between, now looking morose and unresponsive. As they crossed an intersection and sped past a gas station on their left, they heard the sound of police sirens. Matt made no comment, but Evelyn saw him glance over his shoulder and then heel the floorboard. By the sound of the wailing sirens, it became clear that he was outdistancing the police car. But then as they shot across another intersection, Evelyn cried out, "There's a police car coming down that road!"
Matt yelled, "Hold on!" and zigzagged between two cars ahead, cutting off a large gasoline truck which swerved and applied its emergencies with a shrieking of hot rubber. Matt looked back to see the massive vehicle darting across the road, blocking both lanes. "That'll give us a breather," he said grimly.
But within the space of several minutes, the siren sound came again within earshot, this time, gradually, relentlessly, rising in volume. Evelyn sat with her fingers tightly pressed into her thighs. Estelle whirled for a look. "They're closing in on us, Matt!"
"This lousy wagon," Matt muttered. "I'm giving her all she can take right now. All we have to do is make it to the river, and we're getting close now."
Several shots rang out. "Get down," Matt yelled. There was another volley, the ping of metal on the fenders. "They're going for our goddamned tires," he said. "Must have goddamned telescopic sights. They're too far away to shoot that accurately otherwise."
Matt cut the wheel at the next turnoff, and the car swerved, spun half about as if it were going to flip over, tilting up on the wheels of one side before it righted itself again. "We're coming to the waterfront area. Thought I'd better snake in and out of some of these side streets so they can't-" A shuddering of the vehicle cut him off.
"Son of a bitch! They plugged one of our tires back there." He pitched the car around another turn, but by now the tire was dragging, flopping on the naked rim. He swung off the road, flung open the doors, grabbed the weapons which were in reach and motioned to the others. "Come on, we'll cut in and around some of these buildings and try to make it into one of those waterfront warehouses. We can crawl in and out of those things till doomsday, and they'll never find us. We've got one break, at least it's Sunday, and the whole goddamned area is like a ghost town."
He led them through what appeared to be a vacant parking area, helping them clamber over a wire fence which both girls, wearing high heels, negotiated with difficulty. Estelle, the heavier and the less gracefully adept of the two, found the going rougher. They cut across a loading depot area, and Matt pushed through a gate boldly emblazoned with No Trespass signs. "Come on, come on," he urged them. "Quickly. We should be hitting the river area any time now."
All three were breathing heavily by now, Estelle breaking into spasmodic coughing gasps for air. The siren sound came up close behind them and fanned out in an immense wail, followed by screeching brakes. "They found our car," Matt said and cast about frantically for the likeliest refuge. Matt pointed to his left to a steep, diagonal concrete structure, just beyond a sheet-metal Quonset type building and rising at least seventy-five feet above it. "That's some kind of a coal or loading chute," Matt said. "There should be steps on the other side of it going right down to the river front."
He started running toward it and waved them after him. He paused before a concrete wall about five feet high and, flinging down his weapons, helped them clear it, each in turn. On the other side, there was a narrow, concrete, vehicle passageway, then a wrought-iron picket fence, with ornate, wickedly protruding bars.
He helped Evelyn clear it first. Then, getting behind Estelle, he put his hands under her dress, grabbing her under the buttocks and lifting her to secure a foothold, but her heels kept getting in the way. "Get rid of those goddamned spikes," Matt said, as she finally managed to pull herself up beside Evelyn. A narrow concrete wall bordered the wrought-iron fence. Matt grabbed up his weapons and started running along it in the direction of a rise of concrete steps that seemed to lead to the concrete structure. "I'll run ahead and get set up at one of the windows up there, where I can cover you if they head this way before you two can make the climb."
Matt cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted back to them as he started up the steps. "Steady on that wall. You've got those goddamned spikes alongside it!" Then, furiously, "Kick off those stupid heels!" Evelyn immediately removed her shoes, but Estelle refused to be parted from hers. "I don't want to take a chance on losing them," she said, and added insipidly, "Suppose I have to end up tangling with one of those dumb stupid cops to get them off our backs."
Evelyn made her way cautiously, with Estelle stumbling and cursing behind her. Matt was about three-quarters of the way, and Evelyn, less than ten feet from the concrete steps, heard Estelle trip and scramble for a hold. Evelyn turned to see her lose her balance and go off to the side. Her outcry, shrill and piercing, was cut off in mid-air as her body struck the fence.
The sequence of motions had occurred so rapidly that Evelyn had not, in that instant, comprehended the fatality of the mishap. And then she saw Estelle skewered, the black, crimsoned spike thrust completely through her chest. She was frozen, horrified, in to immobility. The impaled young woman jerked her hands and legs like a stricken insect, and her movements forced Evelyn back to her senses. She leaned over and extended her hand. "Stell-Stell. Give me your arm."
Stell's eyes fluttered grotesquely, and she did make an attempt to raise her arm but then dropped it weakly. She seemed at once to know that her injury was fatal. There wan an immense outpouring of blood. Looking up, she fixed her eyes glassily upon Evelyn's face. Her voice was a barely audible whisper. "I-I was the one-to call the cops. I... I... heard what Matt's ma said-about my being like a dog or a cat ... that he loves you. I thought if the cops-chasing us, he would leave you and be ..."
Her eyelids began to flutter, and the air rushed out of her in a deflating gasp. Evelyn knew from the waxen glaze of her open, unblinking eyes that she had expired. The identical look of her father's eyes on the day he died had never left her.
Matt's warning shout from above blared out, and she turned at once and began to run up the concrete steps. The unsteadiness of her trembling legs caused her to stop several times, despite Matt's continued urgent shouts. Struck by a sudden dizziness, and terrified that she might tumble down, she knelt and continued her ascent on hands and knees. It seemed for her an endless ordeal, and at one point she allowed herself to collapse, face against the cold concrete, trying to regain her breath.
Then she felt him lifting her up, and for the last fifteen or twenty steps he carried her into the shelter. When Matt set her down, she wanted to sink to the floor, but he held her up, shaking her. "Come on, now, snap out of it." He grabbed up his weapons and pointed one of them through the window overlooking the vantage point from which they had come. "We've got to find a way to get out of here now, down to the riverside. This is a break because this place is built up over a wall that's a dividing line running several miles along the waterfront. In order to get at us, they've got to circle all the way around."
Evelyn muttered brokenly, "Estelle-down there-" She felt the tight support of Matt's hands on her arms.
"I saw it happen," he said, small muscles working in his jaws. His eyes, gray and unwavering, held hers, steadying her. He took her arm and they moved to a doorway, where all light was shut out. "Stay where you are," Matt said. "I can't see a damn thing. Let me see where this leads."
For several minutes there was silence except for the sound of his shuffling footsteps in the darkness as he felt his way, probing ahead with his hands. From somewhere below, a voice, unnaturally amplified, thundered through the silence. The "police, chancing upon Estelle, easily identified the fugitives' sanctuary. "The other side is completely walled up. The only way down is right here, the way you came up. Do you hear me? You're cornered."
Matt came out of the darkness. She knew by the look on his face that it was true. "They must have abandoned this place and boarded it up." He walked back into the section of the structure they had first entered and stood again by the window. He looked down to see three police cars and a scattering of men, some uniformed, some not.
The amplified voice started again. "We know you're heavily armed and we know you've got a woman there with you. We don't want any unnecessary killing. There's no way for you to break out of here. So why don't you let her come out, and then throw your weapons out? I promise you no one on this end will get trigger-happy."
The prouncement of the voice, had a strange effect on Evelyn. It was like a summoning back to another sphere, another place in time, where someone with her face and her body had existed. The cold, inescapable reality rose up to repossess her. She was a married woman, the legal chattel of another man. She had shared with him, and they had lived together for four years, in the intimacy of man and wife. How could that be, she wondered, if, in all that time, he had entered her body but never reached her? She looked at Matt's hard-hewn profile as he maintained a steady ritual at the window. Here was a man, a stranger she hardly knew, who had never entered her, but had reached her.
For a period there was silence before the authoritarian voice boomed out again, contaminating an effort at reasoned persuasion with unctuousness. "We're not in any hurry. We've got food, hot coffee, a lot of police shifts to back us up. What have you got up there? Tell you what. We'll give you a half-hour to make up your mind. You don't really have any choice. And having that woman with you now doesn't do you any good one way or the other. So why don't you just let her walk through that door, back to husband and her daughter, where she belongs? You've tortured her enough."
Evelyn was on her feet. The door was no more than four feet behind her and wide open. Matt turned to look at her. He caught her side glance at the open doorway.
"If you keep her up there and we have to come in and get you, it'll only mean more blood on your hands. Why take it out on her and risk her life? Do a decent thing-" the voice continued to intone in the background.
Matt turned away from her, training his attention on the window. Evelyn understood the action as an unspoken gesture for her release, if she wanted it. She had but to take several steps, and possibly her passage from death to life was open.
She turned inadvertently, facing the open doorway, as these thoughts passed through her, and Matt, interpreting her position as an indication that she was actually going to walk out, spun about with a convulsive start. They faced each other now. The word remained unsaid, and nothing was expressed. They were there, only the two of them, perhaps for the last time. The last time! The words knifed into Evelyn's brain and she began to take a step in his direction, but Matt had already taken several. His arms closed around her with a painful fierceness. Her lips, her teeth, kissed, bit at him in a consuming need. Their hands searched, grasped, seized.
"I want you, Matt-I want you!" The full weight of his demand upon her was crushing. Her knees gave way, her body falling back beneath him. His mouth was a brand on her lips, her bare shoulders, her breasts! His hands reached out, fumbling for her skirt, and she slid down toward him to help him pull away the encumbering garment.
He thrust with the point of his tongue at the rubbing slit and tasted the warm cream of her pussy. He liked the taste. He licked and swallowed. She was aflame with passion as she tossed impulsively and drove her mound thrustingly over his mouth. His lips avidly sucked. He plunged dart after dart into the soft, warm depths of her pussy.
His hands clung to and cupped her grinding buttocks. She shoved her cunt down harder against his gaping mouth and impaling tongue. Her body lurched and her hips revolved. She swiveled violently, lunging down to receive the sharp thrusts of his tormenting tongue. He tightened the hold of his hands on her firm little buttocks and pulled her creaming slit down closer to his hungering mouth.
"Eat me. Stick your tongue in my pussy! Ohhhhh, that's the way!" she cried.
He was making spastic love to her cunt with his mouth and his driving tongue. His tongue drilling in and out between the creaming tips of her heaving pussy lips made her sob with emotion.
She tilted her hips, spreading her legs even wider apart as she sat on his face, offering her cunt to his worshipful lips. Her cunt shamelessly rolled over his mouth. He was digging his fingers into the round, fleshy cheeks of her buttocks. He was shuddering with emotion as his mouth licked and tongued. She was pressed so hard and intimately over his hungering mouth. He felt the pulsing climax of her, felt the restless press of her hot thighs and then the hard throbbing of her completion. His lips drove her into a frenzy of madness. Shudders of spasms hit her and she came, flooding his tongue and his lips and his face with a river of thick, hot cunt juice. He licked and swallowed it all as she came again and again.
She slammed her cunt down again and again to his face as his tongue drove in and out of her dripping, throbbing cunt lips. He was surrounded by her hot flesh and the matted tickle of her cunt hair.
And then she was through. She sat on his face, panting, his tongue still in her vagina, licking, laving, drinking her juice of completion. Her wicked face was smiling. She could not see him. His face was still buried under her cunt, trapped by her thighs. There was a glazed look of contentment in her dark eyes.
And then she crawled off his face. His face was flushed and covered with pussy juice. He licked it away from his lips.
And then she lay on her back and he fucked her, his huge young cock filling her, stretching her in-sides, pumping into her, out of her, driving her wild with the thick, meaty feel of it. Long, wonderful strokes in, slow teasing strokes out, until they both moaned and came, locked in each other's arms.
For a time he just smiled down into her face. He stood up, his movements strangely energized. He went quickly to the window, at the same time, drawing up and arranging his clothes. He seized two revolvers and thrust them in his pants pockets. Then he grabbed up the rifle. He leaned down over Evelyn on one knee and spoke, now with a swift urgency. "I'm going to try to get out of here now" he said. And at her show of alarm, he added with an undisguised tenderness, "You see, I've got to get out of here now-because I want to live. I want to be able to be with you."
She sat up quickly and grasped him by the shoulders. "But there is no way out of here. You said that yourself. They'll kill you, Matt- they'll kill you!"
The touch of his hand on her face calmed her. "No, they won't. I think there is another way out of here. A boarded-up coal chute I could probably snake my body down. But you'll have to stay here. Wait until they call for you to come out again. Then do it."
"No, Matt, I don't want to leave you."
"Listen, I'll get out of here. You go back where you came from. Maybe it'll take a month, a couple of months, but I'll work my way back there. That's one place they'll never expect me to show up. We'll go to Mexico-we'll go to South America, somewhere we can ..." He broke off and embraced her fiercely. "I love you, Evelyn. I love you!"
"Matt-Matt, my darling."
He pulled away from her abruptly and ran into the darkened, adjacent area. Though she called to him, he did not respond, but she heard the wrenching away of boards. In an instant he was back, and rushing over to the window. "It is a sealed-up chute and I'm going to go down the other end." He raised his rifle and poked it through one of the windows. "Don't be frightened," he said of her. "I'm going to let them have a few just to get a return of fire," and almost as quickly as he squeezed off two shots, it was followed by a hard, shattering fusillade from below. Then the voice from the megaphone. "We're ready to give it to you any way you want to take it. You still have five minutes."
Matt nodded to the mystified Evelyn. "Now I'm going back there to squeeze off a few shots into the chute just to make sure there's no one on the other side before I let go."
She heard the discharge of fire, and a moment later, no retort. And then his voice. "It's clear back here. I'm going, Evelyn. Take care of yourself-for me." Then he was gone. Evelyn sat in the center of the floor, drawing on her garments, trembling now from the damp coldness of the room. Then a shot rang out, and another shot- from somewhere behind. From somewhere where Matt had gone! Her hands clamped her mouth in horror for a suspended instant, and then the omnipresent voice rang out. "We've got him, lady. Don't worry now. You're all right. Just stay where you are and we'll come to get you. You're going home ..."
It was all a rain of tears after that, hands aiding assisting, solicitous voices proffering hot drinks and cigarettes, bundling her up in warm blankets, reclining her in the large vehicle. Some time before she dropped into a deep, sedatized sleep, she saw Harry's face and Diane's, and she was surprised at the tenderness and compassion of her feelings. So this, she thought, was the meaning of love.
It has been two years since Evelyn returned home. She applied for, and got, a divorce several months later. The last anyone heard from her, she was working as a social worker in a state home for boys. Perhaps looking for another Matt.
