Joanne had cause to wonder what she was doing on a cut-rate tour of South America. It wasn't what she'd imagined it would be when she fled the States and her understanding boy friend with her virginity still intact. The strange way the part-Indian tour guide, Martin Tuesta, looked at her sent shivers up her spine. Her maidenhead was a burden which she couldn't set down, and perhaps it would take a thief like Martin to steal it. But it was going against Joanne's whole life and values. It took violence in the jungle to make Joanne understand, finally, her purpose!
CHAPTER ONE
"Joanne ... don't go. Or wait until the semester's over, and I'll go with you."
Joanne looked at Ken a moment and then averted her eyes from his. She studied the wisp of fine, yellow hair angled across his broad forehead and shifted her attention to the soft lips, slightly feminine, outlining his wide, generous mouth, which was always so ready to smile. It wasn't smiling now.
"I don't want to wait, Ken," she said finally. "I need to get away now."
"You're only running. You can't run away from yourself."
She forced a laugh. "No, I'm not," she objected. "I told you, I just need a vacation."
"What about your courses, honey? You'll flunk the whole semester if you go now."
Joanne shrugged lightly, feeling her shoulders lift the waves of her golden hair and slide it silkily down her back. She knew everything about her was sagging and depressed. She could feel the lines of her face droop with weariness. She straightened her whole body, lifting her fine chin, revealing the slender length of her neck, arching her spine so that her high breasts tipped up inside her blouse with forced enthusiasm. She turned a bright smile on Ken that went all the way up into the green pools of her eyes.
"I'm not going to flunk," she said. "I'll withdraw. There's still time. I know if I stay on the way I'm doing, then I'll really flunk."
"Honey, what's the matter? Isn't there something I can do?"
"Yes. Quit making a big thing out of something that isn't. I need a vacation, that's all. I just need to get away for a while."
"But on a tour of South America?"
"Why not?" she laughed. "I think it sounds exciting, don't you?"
He passed his fingers through his hair and wrinkled his forehead. "Yeah-but I was hoping maybe we could do it together."
"You don't have time, Ken. You won't have time for years. Besides, right now the most important thing for you to do is to get through medical school."
"We would have time if you'd marry me. We could make time. There'd be a way to work it in."
She looked away quickly and glanced around the interior of his small apartment, at the neat rows of books around it, the pile of papers stacked in orderly array on the desk, the bed in the corner with its geometric-figured spread adjusted just so. It was the kind of room she envied, because everything looked so tidy and arranged and simple. It indicated a life that would be the same way-not like hers, not all botched up and smudged and circular. She knew he could find the way and the time for them to go together.
"Ken, you've wanted me to make a decision for a long time-a firm, concrete decision about something, anything-remember? Well, I've made one. I'm leaving tomorrow, because I need to get away. Now, why are you trying to take my hard-won decision from me?"
"Because I think it's a mistake, Joanne," he said earnestly.
"Everything I do is a mistake, according to you!"
"Come on, Honey-you know that isn't true."
Joanne felt his arms fold around her and pull her slim body against his. She fought for a moment, then let him engulf her. His strength gave her a feeling of security. She listened to the strong beat of his heart and inhaled the warm fragrance coming from his chest. She stared along the line of Ken's shirt buttons to the rise of material in his lap and wondered what he would do if she were to voluntarily reach down and cup his genitals in her hand to demonstrate how much she really did want him.
A tightness constricted her throat, and she felt her eyes burn. It would be so simple, so easy and decisionless for her to give in and stop fighting him, to let him gather her up in his strong arms and lay her out on his precise bed and fix her middle with the spear of his prick once and for all. Then it would be done. The torment would be over. She would have been caught and deflowered and made love to by a real man-one as good and kind as she remembered her father having been. Even if it meant she would have to trust her life to him, it would be so easy.
"Ken...." she whispered.
"Oh, Honey," he said gently, rocking her. "Why do we have to go around and around all the time like this? Why can't you say you'll marry me? Why won't you let me take care of you and love you the way we both want, instead of trying to run?"
Because I don't trust you! she wanted to cry.
"Maybe when I get back, Ken," she said instead. "Maybe then I'll know. That's one reason I want to go. I need to get away."
"From me?"
"You know I didn't mean that." Joanne lifted her head from his firm chest and looked at Ken. She punched him with weak-hearted playfulness and made herself smile again. Would I have hung around for nearly two years if I'd wanted to get away from you?"
He smiled for the first time. It was a bright, winning smile that lit up his whole face and always filled her with happiness. It was the kind of smile that she could lose herself in and could allow herself a moment's escape in from the never-ending pressure of self-doubt and indecision that formed the core of her life.
"No," he said. "I guess you have a point there. But don't you think that's a long enough time to be acquainted, as they used to say?"
She cocked her head in a half-teasing way. "Why have you put up with me so long, Ken? Do you really want my cherry that much?"
"Honey, that isn't fair," he protested. "You know it's because I love you."
"Oh? Then you don't want it?"
"Of course I want it, Joanne. Honey...."
"What if I said you could have it right now?
What if I fell into your arms and begged you to stuff me full and tear my insides to shreds with all that meat down there? Then would you leave me alone? Would you go away and stop pestering me to marry you?"
"You teasing devil," he laughed, his voice going shaky. "I'd only fall more deliriously in love with you than I am already."
"What about your schooling, Ken? You wouldn't have the time or the money to put up with a wife, would you?"
"We could work it out...."
"Like some of our friends have done, you mean?"
The smile went off his face. She felt cruel for having said it, but she couldn't help herself. They both knew she was referring to some couples who had lived together, married or not, the woman working to support him long enough for the man to finish his school and outgrow her before he left her.
"Do you really think that of me?" Ken asked, his voice low.
She turned away. "I didn't mean to say that. I'm sorry."
"How many times do I have to promise that I won't leave you?"
"I said I was sorry."
He forced her to turn around. "Look at me, Joanne-look at me and listen hard. I love you. I won't leave you. I'm sorry your father ran out on you and your mother, but you can't regard every man as having that potential in mind. It isn't fair."
"It wasn't fair of him," she said.
"You've heard only one side of it, Joanne. How your mother could have stayed bitter for so long, I can't understand. But it was her personal misfortune, not yours. You have your own life to live, and I want you to live it with me. Can't you understand that?"
"Ken, don't," she said. "Don't spoil my last night with you like this."
"You make it sound permanent."
She rumpled his hair. "It's only two weeks."
He sighed heavily. "Now I'm sorry." He smiled again. "All right, what shall we do?"
She faced him again and imagined the sparkle of brightness the stinging at the backs of her eyes had caused. She felt a rush of emotion go through her and make her breasts throb. The longing that had been boiling inside her for nearly twenty years welled up in a strong wave, making her suddenly want to love and be loved in return, freely, without the fear her mother had instilled in her so well. It made her realize again that she would have to decide some day or grow as withered and drawn and cynical as her mother.
She began unbuttoning her blouse while the feeling was still strong. She watched Ken's face while she removed the garment and reached behind her back for the catch of her bra. Her high, smooth breasts stood free and gleamed with the depth of color that came from her creamy skin. Her nipples inflated and grew red, and she licked her lips with the desire that was in her.
"What are you doing, Joanne?" Ken whispered huskily.
She unfastened her short skirt and slipped the material over her smooth hips, standing close to him in thin, blue panties. The golden thatch of her pelt showed through and made wrinkles in the material around the thin line of her slit.
"Any fool can see what I'm doing, Ken," she answered. "I'm offering myself to you."
"Do you mean it this time-really mean it?"
"Here I am." She smiled prettily and pushed her hips forward, more confident and sure than she'd ever been.
"Are you certain this time?"
"You talk too much. You always talk too much."
His big hands held the sides of her hips. He leaned forward and pressed the side of his face against her abdomen, feeling the slick material of her panties, inhaling the honeyed aroma from her virginal well.
He stood after a moment and encircled her with his arms again. Joanne thrilled to the strength in them and allowed her body to mold itself to his broad, firm contours. She felt her nipples dig into his shirt and become warmed by his body heat. His belt buckle pressed coolly against her naked flesh. She shivered as the wide spread of his hand covered her back and slid down her spine to cup her round, trembling cheeks in his palm.
"Ken, hurry," she whispered. "Before I change my mind."
He picked her up easily and carried her to the bed. It barely sagged under her weight. As she watched him unbutton his shirt and work at his pants, the doubts begin creeping back in again to make her thighs tremble against opening for him.
It wasn't the first time Joanne had done this. It wasn't the first time she'd decided to make the choice and go through with giving herself up to his goodness. But if it happened this time, all the way, it would be the first act of defiance toward her mother, the first break in the strangling hold her mother had. If it happened this time, she would tip over the edge and immerse herself in Ken's life, canceling the trip, marrying him, trusting him totally in the way she'd been taught was stupid and wrong.
His penis speared forth from his thighs. Its thickened length pulsed and swelled with pent-up desire. His testicles drew up with readiness and became as firm as young limes between the fine tendrilr of his pubes.
Ken knelt beside her, and his expression was full of love. Joanne could feel it radiating from him, and she couldn't understand how she'd been so cruel to him for so long, averting his desire to make a woman of her. Always before, she froze up with her fears, and they finished by masturbating each other like children. It was only in the past few months that she'd allowed them to progress beyond that to more satisfying methods of release. Joanne looked at the wide swell of his penile head and swallowed with a reflexive spasm.
"Joanne...."
She lifted her hips. Ken's fingers gently took hold of the elastic tops of her panties. He pulled them down, and she rocked her pelvis back and forth to allow the nylon to pass over the round, full swells of her buttocks.
Ken stared tenderly down on her golden pelt. His eyes traveled over the silken cleft. His hands held the sides of her hips, and his thumbs reached for the puffy lips of her cunt to pull them aside and reveal the pinkness of the gap between them. His head dipped, and his soft lips pursed outward. Joanne's thighs trembled apart and admitted his kiss.
Sensation seared through her body, and she arched her back and moaned. Her hands sought her breasts and squeezed them as she tried to infuse so much passion into her body that she wouldn't be able to think. If she couldn't think, then she couldn't resist. And it would be done and over before she knew what had happened.
"Ken-hurry!" she whimpered.
He covered her with his weight. His lips found hers and kissed them heatedly, smearing the aromatic oils from her pussy over her face so that she could taste herself.
His prick slid along the inner flesh of her thighs, reaching, straining for the satiny entrance to her virginal well. Fluid seeped from the end of him and mixed with the slippery flow from her cunt. Oil-covered velvet, warmed by passion, touched her pussy's lips. She trembled and quaked under the contact and whimpered against his probing tongue. Her pelvis lifted and rocked back to accept his thrust, as if it were begging for the plunge that would rupture her and fix her middle to the firm bed.
She imagined the delicate tissue of her flower being torn, being run through with the thick pin of his prick, like some kind of specimen he was tacking to his gelatin tray for dissection and display, like a conquest hard fought for and finally won, like an object of gloating pride. She knew the image was unfair, the motive not Ken's. But she couldn't stop it from coming.
"Ken...." she cried. "Ken, no...."
"Joanne, don't fight. Let it happen, darling! God, let me love you and take care of you!"
She twisted her head aside and shook it back and forth under his lips. She clamped her thighs together, making the spear of his prick ride up the inside of her slit and bump along the ball of her clit to stab into the soft flesh of her belly. His balls pushed heavily into her crotch, and she rolled her hips to the side.
"I can't do it, Ken!" she sobbed.
"It's all right, darling, it's all right." He spoke quickly, reassuring her, smoothing his palm over her forehead.
She wanted to cry out that it wasn't all right-none of it-that he should go ahead and ram himself into her and make her bleed and yell and scream for more. But she knew Ken would never do that to her, because then it would all be over for them both.
Instead, she twisted on the bed and reached for his hips, sliding her head under his belly, wrapping her fingers around his strong, pounding stem. She felt him lift up slightly. His silky hair fell between her thighs as his head dipped and his lips smothered her pussy with passionate heat. His tongue laved her slit up and down its length, and she opened her mouth to take his swollen hardness into it.
She sucked fiercely on him, milking his length with her tongue, drawing frantically on his tube of passion to make his juices flow into her. She sobbed and sucked and pressed her breasts up into his abdominal flesh and prayed he would understand how sorry she was. She tasted his seeping discharge of oil, and she wrapped her fingers around his buttocks to pull his middle tightly to her face, begging him to release himself with a flow so copious it would choke her and burn her throat in punishment for having failed him again.
"Joanne...." he cried, spearing his tongue into her depths. The point of it flicked against the tissue barricading her womb and the rest of herself from his love.
Joanne felt him raise her pelvis up. His fingers dug into the flesh of her ass with only a trace of pain-not enough, not enough. She wrapped her thighs around his head and squeezed hard, hoping to hurt him so that he would hurt her back and give her the punishment she deserved. She quavered with joy when his thumb slid into her rectum and made a burning sensation whip through her bottom. Then she came hard and gobbled at his face with her ravenous pussy. Her labia and vaginal walls spasmed shamelessly around his tongue in the only kind of giving she knew. Her throat opened to accept the pulsing rush of his semen-warm, slippery, heady, as good and clean as the rest of him.
"Oh, Ken," she sobbed finally, hugging his hips, her voice muffled against his thigh. "I'm sorry, darling, I'm sorry."
He straightened around and held her tightly, and she could smell her fragrance all over his face.
"I know you love me, Joanne," he said. "You couldn't do-what we do and not love me. Why can't...."
"I nearly did it, Ken! I nearly let you do it. I need more time. I don't know why, darling, but I do. I know it's crazy to be able to make love to you in every way but the right one. But I just can't. Maybe when I get back ... Ken, don't give up on me. I need you not to give up."
They looked at each other and understood the meaning of what she'd said-the way her plea for time was a test.
"I won't give up on you," he smiled. "You know that."
"You'll still be here when I get back?"
"I don't know if I will or not," he joked. "Don't tease me, Ken."
"I'm not. I might get so lonely I'll jump on the first plane and follow you." He smiled and made her laugh and snuggle against him with contentment.
"If you do that, then the whole purpose of the trip will be foiled. Besides, you'll mess up your classes, too."
"Uh-huh," he chuckled. "So you are trying to get away from me, aren't you?"
"Not you, Ken," she said quickly, unable to look him in the eye. "Just away. From everything."
"What secret lover is paying your way, darling? You haven't told me a thing about it, you know, except that suddenly you're going."
"You know you're my only lover," she laughed. "With the condition I'm in, who else but you could stand to put up with me?"
"If that was a compliment, it had a peculiar flavor." He kissed the tip of her nose. "Did your mother give you the money?"
"No. I wouldn't take her money. I saved it."
"I'll bet she's glad you're going, though, isn't she?"
"Why do you say that?"
"You know why."
She ran a fingertip along the line of his boyish chin. "You shouldn't take Mother personally, Ken. She would act the same way about any man she thought I was interested in-or she thought was interested in me."
Ken gazed into her green eyes for a long moment and ran his hand up her back, massaging her spine. He cupped her head and pulled her down to kiss her again.
"You're coming back, aren't you?" he asked.
She hesitated a moment too long, then smiled too quickly. "Well, I hadn't thought of that," she laughed, struggling to get up. "Maybe I'll just get lost in the Amazon or something and live with the Indians. Being a headhunter shouldn't be too far out of my line."
"Yeah," he said. "Or maybe you'll fall madly into bed with some hot Latin stud who won't take no for an answer."
If I did, Joanne thought, he wouldn't want me to marry him. I wouldn't have to worry about an empty future the way I do with you, darling.
"Maybe," she said teasingly. "Would that make you angry?"
He looked at her. His fine hair looped in odd directions over his head. "I don't know," he said seriously. "If it would solve whatever's bothering you, I might give him a medal."
"Do you really want me that much, darling?" she asked with a trace of surprise. "Even without the cherry you've been waiting so long to get?"
He shrugged his broad shoulders in answer and watched her step into her panties. She pulled the material over her swelling cheeks until it was snug and patted the crotch. Her firm breasts moved pertly on her chest, the tips peeping through silky strands of her golden hair. She tossed her hair back over her shoulders and slipped into her bra.
"What if I did the same thing while you were gone?" he asked finally. "Would that make you angry?"
"You've already had other girls, Ken."
"Only at the beginning-before I came to love you so much."
She turned to face him. "How could I be angry, darling? We're not married, you know. I don't have any claim on you."
"The hell you don't."
"Maybe it would be a good thing, even-for both of us to get away from each other and...."
"Is that what you want?" he asked softly.
She buttoned her blouse slowly, watching her fingers work. "You're always willing to accommodate me, aren't you, Ken?" she stated.
"You mean, I'm too willing? Would you rather I get tough and throw you around a little?" He laughed quietly. "You'd take that just about as well as I could do it, and you know it."
"I have to go home now," she said, turning from him.
"Hey, wait a minute," he said, jumping off the bed. He approached her with his penis dangling between his legs and saw her avert her eyes. It was always that way. As soon as the moment of passion was over, they were supposed to stop having genitals. Everything was supposed to be neutered and neutral. He quickly slipped into his pants and stood in front of her by the door. "You haven't even told me the name of the travel outfit, where you'll be, or anything."
"I know," she said. "I don't want you following me. I don't even want to give you the chance."
"What if something happens-to your mother, maybe?"
"It won't. She's too mean to have anything happen to her."
"Well, hell! Does she know where you'll be? Maybe something will happen to me. Or maybe you don't care. Maybe that would solve all your problems, huh?"
"Ken-please don't give me a bad send-off. Let's leave it the way it's been. It's been good tonight. I nearly did it, darling. Think about how I nearly let you capture me, while I'm gone."
"All right," he said tightly. "I'll think of how good it nearly felt to sink my prick into a woman's body again. Then maybe I'll do more than just think about it."
Joanne watched him a moment and then lifted her mouth up to kiss him quickly, coolly, as if she were saying goodbye to an old friend. She hurried out the door and down the hallway, knowing what her mother would say if she could have heard him just now: Just like a bastard, Joanne. Didn't I tell you?
But by the time Joanne was at the bottom of the stairs and walking out into the warm, Florida night, she didn't care what her mother would have said. She wanted to run back upstairs and throw herself into Ken's arms and tell him how good he was, how gentle and kind, and how much she loved him. But she hurried through the lot to her car because she'd made her decision, and she drove toward home.
"Well-you been with him again?"
The voice grated out of the darkness of the living room. Joanne sighed heavily and turned on the light. Her mother sat in the greasy chair and sucked angrily on a cigarette, blowing smoke through her nostrils like a medieval dragon. She had her hair piled on top of her head in an artful set that was calculated to look casual.
She was a redhead tonight. Cheap earrings dangled from pierced lobes, and rhinestones glinted with too many colors from around her neck and wrist. She wore a black sheath so short her panty hose showed between her thighs as she sat there. She had no panties on, and the lips of her pussy were flattened by the nylon mesh into a ludicrous sneer. The light hit her at an angle that made Joanne conscious of having inherited her mother's green eyes, pert nose, and high cheeks. But her wide mouth and soft chin had come from her father, because her mother's mouth was pinched and tight, her chin sharp enough to stab with.
"Why are you sitting in the dark, Mother?" Joanne asked.
"I wanted to."
"Were you waiting up for me?"
"No. I have to go out again."
The two women eyed each other in silence. Joanne didn't need to ask where her mother was going. She'd been "going out" more and more, lately. She started toward her room.
"You didn't answer me, Joanne," her mother said sharply.
"Yes, Mother," she said finally, turning around. "I've been out with Ken again."
"Come over here, baby," she said, patting the arm of the dirty chair. "Come sit by your mother a minute."
Joanne hesitated, sighed, then walked across the room. She rested her hip against the chair and felt her mother's arm go around her waist to hug her briefly.
"I might not be up in time to see you off tomorrow, baby," she said. "That's all right, Mother."
"No, it isn't. I wanted to see my baby off. Any good mother would, and that's what I've tried to be, haven't I-a good mother to you? And a father?"
"Of course you have, Mother."
"I've raised you the best I could. Put clothes on your back and food in your mouth. Now your schooling. It hasn't been easy. In fact, it's been a perfect bitch. But I'm glad one of us is going away for a while. You need a vacation too. Don't worry about the tuition going down the hole. Grades and learning are more important than that, and you've got to have a clear mind to make good grades. It's the only way you can be independent of the bastards."
"Yes, Mother."
"Do you good to get away from him for a while, too." She looked straight into Joanne's eyes. "You haven't let him catch you yet, have you? You haven't gone and given him your cherry like a sap, have you?"
"No, Mother."
The arm hugged her waist again. "That's my baby, my girl. I'm proud of you. Ken's a man, Honey. All men are bastards. He'd just pluck it and run like any other bastard. Your father was the best of all the bastards I've met, and he still left us flat, without a cent, without even a damn goodbye. Sooner or later they all do it. They just plow around in your pussy until you can't stand it any more, and then they leave you flat. Ken'll do the same thing to you. He's just another bastard underneath-just like the kind I have to go out with. All they're good for is getting money from them, but you can't get it from one you're married to. Speaking of money, I wish you'd let me give you some for your trip, baby."
"I have plenty, Mother."
"Where'd you get it?" she snapped.
"I told you. I saved it from my job."
"It's a good thing, that job. It's tough, going to school and working, but it's good for you. Prepares you for what you're going to have to do later so you can stay independent of the bastards. I'm not picking on Ken, Joanne, you know that. But he's a man, and you know what that means, too. You should by now."
"I know," she said hollowly, her mind wandering back through the endless years of listening to this same speech.
"Did you pack your toy?"
"What?"
"Good God, Joanne-haven't you been using it?"
"Oh ... yes, Mother. Of course I've been using it."
"Jesus, you had me scared there for a minute. Thought maybe you weren't quite normal. That, or you're lying about you and Ken."
"I haven't been lying. I'm still a virgin, Mother. Do you want to check again, before I go?"
"Oh, come on," her mother said gruffly. "Don't get sassy. I believe you. Listen, Honey, we haven't had a private talk like this in a long time, but I want you to feel free about using it. You can't ever forget that, because it's the only way to stay independent without losing your marbles at the same time. That's why I gave it to you when I could tell you were growing up and getting the urge. The urge is normal, Baby. It's the way you take care of it that counts. You don't want to start thinking with your pants. That's how you get caught. So, it's all right to use your toy. It's good.
Use it on your pussy all you want. I do. This crap IVe been doing lately leaves me frigid-don't get a thing out of it. Anyway, it's different for me. I lost mine a long time ago. I wish to hell I'd had a toy when I was young, and I'd never have married a bastard for it. Baby, promise me you won't ever give in, no matter how much you want to, or I'll guarantee you'll wind up just like me. Promise?"
The grip tightened around her waist again. "I promise, Mother," Joanne said softly.
"That's my baby. We'll teach the bastards a thing or two about respecting a woman." She glanced at her watch. "I've got to go, Baby. Take me some time to walk there."
"Isn't he picking you up?"
Her mother snorted derisively. "Are you kidding? In the first place, I don't want the bastard to know where we live. Second place, we wouldn't want the bastard's poor wife trailing him here and having to find out what a heel he is, would we? Baby, I wish I could see you off tomorrow, but I know I'll be dogged."
"It's all right, Mother. You go ahead and sleep in."
"You've got the right idea, honey-just take off for a while. I'm going to do that some day, you watch. I'll take a trip that would take that bastard father of yours and make his eyeballs spin around. Better get fresh batteries for your toy. They might not have any down in South America, and you wouldn't want it to run down on a nice trip."
"That's a good idea, Mother."
Joanne felt the tight, puckered lips press against her cheek. She inhaled the dizzying cloud of cheap perfume, like orange blossoms and gardenias trying to overpower swamp gas, that wafted up from between her mother's breasts. Joanne watched her mother walk to the door with a swinging motion to her heart-shaped rear, and she wondered how many ways there were of doing it besides the normal way. She had the feeling her mother would know them all.
When Joanne went to her room and saw that her packed suitcase had been gone through, she understood why her mother had brought up the toy. She took the toy from her night table drawer and removed it from its box to look at it. There was something about the flesh-colored plastic she hated. Yet she knew if it hadn't been for the electric sensations the vibrator had given her, she would have gone mad years ago with desire.
She stripped off her clothing and lay in bed nude. In the stillness, she heard the solitary cry of a loon flying overhead, trying to find his way to the Everglades in the night.
An image of white cypress trunks standing silently in dark water appeared behind her closed eyes. Curtains of gray-green Spanish moss hung from the tree limbs to deepen the shade and cast a hush of stillness over the pool. Towering clumps of sawgrass reared up in the distance, and an alligator fishtailed with deadly silence through the black water, rippling its surface.
Joanne's father slipped into her mind, his face ruddy and leathered by the sun, his eyes set deep into the redness like a pair of gleaming, dark sapphires, full of life and wonder. She remembered the way his teeth shone like pearls in the sunlight whenever he tipped his head back to laugh with the sheer animal joy of being alive.
She could recall fishing with him, the way he held her pole and jerked on it at the right time, then the lusty whoops of pleasure as her young fingers worked clumsily with the reel. She remembered the way he took the wriggling fish off her hook with quick, sure movements and the peals of childish laughter she gave him as she watched him kiss it to make it well before he tossed it back into the water. Then he would hug her, and they watched the water together until they saw the fish swim away.
Her father used to hold her suddenly and whisper in her ear for her to be quiet. His voice would be charged, and his finger would be pointing toward the thick tangle of mangroves until she looked carefully enough to see the delicate pink tint of a roseate spoonbill wading through the intertwined roots, swinging its head back and forth in search of fish. Joanne remembered crouching silently with him, feeling the joy of life in his hands, until the bird took flight, its lifting wings making a small fire of color in the blue sky, and she'd cry with glee.
Joanne opened her eyes and blinked rapidly as if to dispel the only memories of her father she had. She didn't like to think of him after she'd been talking to her mother and listening to her call him a bastard. They were good memories, ones she'd never shared with her mother-just as she'd never told her anything about Ken.
Joanne suddenly realized for the first time how ljke her father Ken was. He had the same happy smile, the same coloring, the same gentleness and love in him, the same patience with her.
She rolled over in bed and felt a strange emotion go through her, a tickling feeling that passed all up and down her body. She got it whenever she thought of those times with her father, because they were the only times of her life she could remember that weren't filled with the dreary, complaining bitterness her mother had made every aspect of it contain.
She knew she could stop it all. She could get up and phone Ken and tell him she wanted him, and it would be like being with her father again.
But there was something stopping her, something she couldn't determine ... or couldn't remember.
She shook her head and got up from the bed, forcing herself not to think about it tonight. The thought that there was something her mother knew and that she couldn't remember about her father had bothered her before. She had struggled and struggled with it in the past, but had come up with nothing.
She found herself staring at the toy on the night table as if her eyes had been drawn to it, as if it were beckoning to her to come fit it against her silken flesh and turn it on. It made a silent promise to ease her troubles, to make her forget and sleep soundly as it had so many times in the past.
She went over and picked it up. She slid the loop over her middle finger and felt the familiar weight of it in her palm. She ran her eyes over the knobbed surface and saw the oval shape the small protrusions made. They were like little tits at the top and bottom of the oval and down the edges. There was one short, fat one just below center. She rubbed her fingertip around the curved, knobby edges and then around the fat bump that was shaped like a truncated prick.
The tingling sensation passed through her again, and she hated herself for experiencing it. She suddenly despised the toy and the fact that her mother had given it to her. The thought of using it on her pussy any more made her feel degraded. Yet there was a deliciousness in that feeling that wouldn't be stilled. Ken hadn't punished her enough.
She lay down in bed again and fitted the toy to her palm. She let it touch the surface of her belly. Her breathing quickened as she anticipated the thrills of sensation the toy could bring.
With a cry of despair, Joanne opened her thighs and cupped the toy against her pussy, moving her hand and her hips until the oval of knobs was situated right, inside the lips of her twat. She felt the short fat knob open the mouth of her vagina and fit inside, just far enough for her muscles to grip it but not so far that it would rupture her. She pressed with her hand, trying to shove the frustrating knob deeper into her body, knowing that the insidious toy had been designed by a sadistic bastard of a man. A small indentation cupped her tumescent clit, and she felt the tiny organ swell into the hollow as if in fond remembrance. The small knobs pushed against the tender flesh of her inner lips all over her vulva, and she whimpered in anticipation of what was going to happen.
"Oh, God," she moaned. "Damn her, damn her!"
Joanne squeezed her breast with her other hand, as if trying to find something to hang onto, then flipped the small switch with her thumb and clamped her thighs tightly around her toy-cupping palm. The vibrator buzzed with a sinister sound and sent shock after shock of sensation through her body. The little knobs beat angrily against her tumid flesh and stimulated her clit into a raging, frantic organ. Her juices flowed from inside her virginal tunnel, thick and slippery, and smeared over the pink, swollen flesh of her gap, making the knobs all the more effective.
Her pussy clamped in spasmodic waves around the virginity-preserving knob, trying to draw it more deeply inside. She pressed her hand tightly against her twat until she felt pain-good pain, clean pain, degrading, humiliating, well-deserved pain.
She opened her mouth and rolled on the bed and exploded violently, shuddering again and again, until her buttocks were sore from clenching so hard. She mashed her face into the pillow and cried ragged sounds, seeing the huge, inflated stem of Ken's prick in her mind, thinking that it would feel as terrifyingly glorious as this when she finally let him cram it into her hole.
Her thumb hit the switch again, and she quivered into an exhausted heap. After a long time, Joanne removed her hand from between her thighs and rolled onto her back. She raised her arm and looked at the toy, despising it and herself once again. She took it from her finger and stood up. She slipped into her robe and carried the toy in her hand with unshakeable determination.
She went out to the carport in the warm night, raised her arm high, and dashed the instrument to the cement floor. It shattered into a million pieces, some of which stung her feet as they flew. The batteries rolled to a stop against the abutting house, their zinc casings bent.
With the broom Joanne swept the flesh-colored plastic into a dustpan. She watched the pieces slide over the edge into the depths of the garbage container. She replaced the lid and went back to her room. She saw the box where she'd left it, closed it up, and put it back in the drawer. Her mother would see the box, but the toy would be gone. She would smile with satisfaction and never know.
Joanne crawled back into bed and put her hands over her face and sobbed into them for a long time. The act had taken much strength, but she knew one link in the tethering chain had been broken, now, and she felt impelled on a course that would finally cut the rest.
CHAPTER TWO
It was Ken chasing her.
The dream was disjointed and confusing. It changed scene and shifted mood with alarming suddenness, but there was no doubt that the man chasing Joanne through the meadow was Ken.
She knew it by the breadth of the shoulders that swung and dipped as he ran after her. She recognized the fine, yellow hair that tossed back from his forehead in shimmering strands and his blue eyes and his wide, boyish mouth, spread in ready laughter as he loped behind her through the lush field of grass.
Joanne saw and felt herself running from him as if she were both inside her body and outside it at the same time. She experienced the sensation of the grass brushing its soft, tender shoots high up her thighs, their tips grazing her tingling flesh like feathers right at the line of her skirt. The meadow rippled and sparkled like an emerald sea around her as the reaching tendrils bowed and dipped in iridescent undulations before the light breeze.
On one side, the meadow's shore was lined with a forest of huge, old live oaks. Their arms were spread wide to make leafy hangers for the gossamer-like curtains of Spanish moss that flowed toward the ground in gray-green sheets. Underneath the ancient boughs, the shade was deep. It beckoned to her, cool and clean.
On the other flank of the meadow, a grove of orange trees stretched endlessly in a side-by-side march with stunted limes. The plump, ripe fruits peppered the trees with ornamental balls of orange and green, throwing the sunlight off their oily skins in warm bursts of color.
At the end of the meadow was a pond of clear water, stretching to where the land rose and the orange-dotted trees marched down in files to meet its sparkling shore. The pond took the blue of the sky, deepened it, and tossed it back, adding the brilliance of a million diamonds that were dancing on its surface. Its banks were splashed with the brilliant reds and yellows and whites from the lush profusion of tropical flowers growing wild there.
Joanne saw the scene of her dream in an objective way and knew that it was both strange and disturbingly familiar at the same time. She felt that it was a good place, full of beauty and life, and a youthful excitement danced through her. She saw herself glancing happily back at Ken and then running forward through the grass, laughing m joyful song.
Her full lips opened, and her golden hair streamed behind her in the sun. Her breath was warm and fragrant from her lungs, and her thighs rippled with the clean, muscular strides of girlish health and freedom. Her skin became flushed with the pinkness of her excitement and animal energy, and she laughed until her fine, high breasts felt ready to burst with the swelling joy in them, until her eyes were shining as bright and green as the grass. She ran and danced through the sunlit beauty of her dream, and yet, because Ken was chasing her-because he was in the dream with her-she was frightened.
The dream changed quality abruptly, as if a dark cloud had passed over the face of the sun. The change was startling, ominous. She glanced back again and saw a sinister, leering quality spread over Ken's face.
He wasn't loping with teasing strides behind her any more. He was coming head-on, low and fast, like a predatory beast running its prey to the ground. His muscles knotted and surged with power under his skin. He was suddenly nude. She saw his testicles whipping about his thighs like bloated, aboriginal weapons with which he would down her and beat her into submission. His penis speared through the blades of grass, parting them like the horn of a rushing animal that sought to gore her flesh.
Fear built inside Joanne and made her run faster from him. Her legs pumped up and down, and her breath grew ragged, but she seemed to be moving more slowly than ever. The happiness and laughter were gone from her lips, replaced by desperate mewlings of terror.
The heavy scent of orange blossoms filled her lungs and choked her. The full fruits were gone from the groves. Instead, there were flowers at the ends of the limbs, violent red and slippery inside. They worked open and closed like hungry, consuming mouths. Flesh-colored, knobby-looking bees buzzed angrily about them, and their humming set Joanne's nerves on edge. There was an angry, twisted quality about the limbs, and they weaved open and closed as if reaching out to snare her should she try to escape through the narrow lanes between the trees.
She turned and ran the other way, toward the oaks. The huge trees waved their branches at her, and the cascades of moss took on ghostly, moving shapes, like haunted shrouds from the grave.
She ran from one sight to the next in total fright, seeking escape from the sea of grass, which had come alive and was clutching at her, threatening to pull her down and drown her with its reaching blades.
Coral snakes darted in rainbows of deadly color, strange sticks of children's candy someone had thrown away. A blue heron flew over her head with an alarmed cry, urging her to hurry, to run, to flee. She cried out to it for help, then watched in dismay as it wheeled up and away on frantic, beating wings. A flurry of egrets charged into the sky from the edge of the pond and sent a shower of drifting feathers back to the ground, blanketing it like snow. The butterflies that had been dancing in the grass like dainty gems spiraled high and turned to black, ugly dots, marring the sky.
At the edge of the pond in front of her, an alligator rose up through the dark water like a monster from the past. Its corrugated hide glistened wetly, and its cavernous jaws flew open like the gates of Hell. She stopped in front of the beast, her path blocked, and felt the ground shake under her feet with the first gut-deep bellow from its throat. She stared at the crooked rows of long, sharp teeth, glinting from the mucoid folds of flesh in its gaping mouth. The animal roared again and crashed its deadly, heavy tail through the grass like a blunt scythe, crushing the blades to the ground. It lunged forward toward her, its log-like body startlingly mobile atop the small legs.
Joanne screamed and looked back to see Ken swiftly closing the distance behind her. She turned forward again and heard the alligator hiss with the same primeval sound that had echoed through Carboniferous swamps, and she knew there was no escape.
By some strength of her mind, the dream changed again. The alligator was back by the edge of the pond, now, and it seemed to be watching her in a friendly way. It was hissing and grunting gently at her, trying to tell her to slow down, telling her to go ahead and be caught.
She suddenly wanted to be caught. The idea came easily to her as being just what she wanted to have happen. She looked back at the man chasing her, far behind her again, and she began running in slow motion. Her legs rose from caressing blades of grass, stepped high and free, and sank gently down again. She was suddenly nude too, and her thighs and breasts flashed under the bright sun with her change in spirit. Mockingbirds sang in riotous song from the moss-draped oaks, and a group of pink flamingoes stood on reedy legs at the edge of the pond and twined their necks with love.
Ken was still coming for her. His expression was changed once more. It wasn't happy and good and laughing, as before, but not devilish, either. It was somewhere in between. Determined, perhaps.
She saw something in back of him that hadn't been there before. Over his shoulder, she could see her mother, watching from the kitchen porch of a house that had suddenly materialized in front of the stand of oaks.
Joanne didn't recognize the house, exactly, yet there was something familiar about it. She couldn't remember having seen her mother dressed in the baggy jeans and ill-fitting, checkered shirt, wringing work roughened hands, her face drawn and pinched with fatigue and misery. Yet she had seen someone dressed that way, looking that way.
The house was dilapidated-grayed and warped with age, its siding buckled away from the frame and twisted and dried out. Joanne couldn't place the house as any she'd ever seen. Nor could she recognize the man who came out of it and tried to pull her mother back inside. He was thick and rough, his hands big, his face gnarled with whiskery stubble and base disposition, reddened from cheap whisky and desire. She'd never seen him that she knew of, but the man knew her mother, because he put his hands on her in a coarse, familiar way.
Joanne watched what he was doing. But the only meaningful thing she saw was the look in her mother's eye-the stern, warning, cynical look that told her not to be caught by Ken, lest the same dreary fate befall her, too.
Joanne spun around and around in confusion. Sunlight and blue water and orange-and-green lights dotted her vision and made her dizzy. The alligator hissed and coughed and slithered toward her on knobby legs, not friendly any more. Ken's approaching image grew large, and his phallus took on monstrous size, looming hugely from between his legs as thick as the alligator's warty, dark-hided, writhing tail.
She felt herself going down and down into the grass as the montage of emotions and sights spun in her mind. The cool, green shoots prickled her skin, poked into the flesh of her naked buttocks, thrust between the tender lips of her pussy to scratch the delicate tissues there with a curious mixture of excitement and pain. She smelled the sweet, loam scented earth under her and felt secure and hidden for a moment. But then the black butterfly-dots in the sky came closer, grew larger, and changed to spread-winged vultures, circling overhead to point her out.
A huge shadow crossed her belly and blotted out the sun, and she saw Ken standing over her. His hands were balled on his powerful hips, and his nostrils flared with passion. He tipped his head back to roar with victory, and she could see his throat and chest working but could hear no sound.
The thick, trunk-like stem of his prick weaved above her like an uprooted tree, whose branches coiled about his thighs in curls of yellow bark and bore the bloated, overripe fruits of its growth.
The alligator drew alongside her, and she choked as the scent of its sexual musk mixed with the heavy fragrance of orange blossoms and gardenias. She watched its broad, blunt snout shadow over her body as it began rubbing the underside of its leathery chin across her breasts and belly in the sign of reptilian seduction. It hissed with hypnotic sounds and thrashed its thick tail with lust.
Ken's body lowered and merged with that of the beast. He covered her unplucked flesh, adjusted his hips, and prepared himself for the violent, rending thrust into the unspoiled softness 'of her body, biting the side of her neck with his crooked rows of teeth.
Joanne cried out for help and looked once more toward her mother. But she saw the man dragging her back into the house while she struggled in his grasp and warned Joanne with her cold eyes to flee, to fight, not to give in and be caught by the beastly bastard of a man mounting her now.
Powerful emotions conflicted and tore through her, and when she looked at the figure above her again, one more mercurial change had taken place. She saw Ken's sweet, happy face smiling down with love. She felt his naked flesh against hers in a satin touch that thrilled her and made her want to yield to his embrace. She sensed the thrilling strength of his prick between her thighs as its smooth, velvety tip sought the entrance to her willing cunt.
She spread her thighs wide and lifted her pussy up to meet his plunges just at the moment her mother cried out from the bowels of the house in abject despair with a cry for her to run.
Fear clamped around Joanne like a vise, squeezing tightly, filling her with a dread of such magnitude that she couldn't dispel it again. She shook her head back and forth and tried to make the dream change once more. She tried to make everything in it back up to the beginning, where she was running with happiness through the grass, only without Ken this time, without the tormenting need for decision his presence always caused.
The dream wouldn't budge. Its emotion froze on the brink of rapture. His penis neither advanced nor withdrew. The pressure to yield stayed. The pressure to flee from him stayed. Nothing was resolved in her dream, and the agonizing torment of both wanting and fearing stayed frozen in a stricken tableau until she was crying out for something to give and release her from the interminable expectations twisting through her very soul.
"Joanne-wake up! Hey, snap out of it, Honey!"
Joanne's eyes flew open. She looked with a startled expression at the girl sitting beside her. She still heard the alligator's hiss, and she saw that the origin of the sound was a small air nozzle in the panel overhead. She became conscious of the thin, strong hand shaking her shoulder and the clamminess-she was bathed with sweat inside her blouse. Her heart pounded under her breast as if the running had been real.
"Are you all right?" the girl asked.
Joanne looked into the dark, almond-shaped eyes and finally completed the transition from dream to reality.
"Yes ... I'm all right now. Thanks, Alva."
"For what? All I did was wake you up. I let you whimper and toss around a little, but the way you were yelling just now, it seemed like the right time. That must have been one hell of a dream."
"It was," she said firmly, still breathing hard. The cabin seemed stuffy, as if there weren't enough oxygen in the thin air.
Alva laughed lightly and settled into the high-backed seat with the sleek grace of a jungle cat. The supple curving of spine and neck and the athletic movement of muscles in fine tone gave Joanne the odd impression that if she'd possessed Alva's lithe power just now, her dream would have ended differently.
"We should land in another hour or so," Alva said, glancing at the expensive watch adorning her slim wrist. "First time to Colombia?"
"Yes," she said softly. Her breathing came more easily now, as if Alva's presence had the power to calm her.
Joanne studied the angular face next to her again, wondering what there had been about it that had drawn her to the Peruvian girl a short time ago. Out of all the empty seats on the jet when she'd boarded in Miami, she'd chosen the one next to Alva, making straight for it as if compelled-as if drawn there by some mysterious power behind the dark eyes that had picked her out of the crowd in the aisle.
Joanne saw the texture and color of Alva's skin again. It was creamy and smooth, its beauty heightened by the merest hint of admixture with Indian blood. She saw the straight, black, glossy hair, enriched by a fine sheen, like a wild animal's pelt. She noticed the lips that were a little too thin to be soft, the sharp nose and chin, the angular planes of high cheeks and long jaw.
She decided the face wasn't especially pretty-not in the doll-like sense of rosy cheeks and round innocence. It was a striking face, intense-magnetic, even. And behind it, giving it vibrant power, was the strange inner fire that had made Joanne respond at first sight on a startlingly elemental level, as if the flames might erupt at any moment and consume her in a blaze of raw passion.
When Alva became aware of Joanne's appraisal, she returned it, and the fire burned more brightly behind the dark eyes, until Joanne slid her gaze away to the small window and the cloudless expanse of eerie, blue-black sky outside.
"You still look shaken, Honey," she said finally. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Joanne smiled, feeling a disquieting vulnerability and self-consciousness before her. She brushed gold strands from her face and noticed that her fingers trembled.
"I'm sure," she said.
"Tell me about it," Alva urged. "You shouldn't keep a nightmare like that to yourself."
Joanne felt strange under her forceful gaze. "Oh ... it wasn't ... really, I couldn't."
"I want to hear."
Her eyes were luminous, commanding. Joanne looked into them and felt lost in their depths. They were like the pools of black water where her father had taken her fishing in the cypress swamps, full of mystery and the secrets of life, which only now and then would flash to the surface to be revealed.
Alva's presence was compellingly intimate. Her teeth gleamed white and strong between her lips, and there was that exciting sense of sexuality radiating from her again-that primitive rawness that made her more magnetic than her looks alone would merit, as if she were about to unveil some of those secrets that Joanne needed to see.
She watched Alva twist her torso around to face her, moving in a completely uninhibited way so that her small, impertinent breasts pushed forth with an eagerness to be cupped. She saw the short skirt rise high on the creamy thighs as if there were no consciousness or care that the shadowy folds of her naked pussy showed.
Joanne was shocked by the unexpected sight at first. She was unable to keep from glancing back and forth rapidly several times before she realized that for Alva to hide the source of her passion with the nylon cover of panties would be a bit of false modesty entirely out of agreement with the open invitation in her liquid eyes. Joanne stared under the shaded awning of Alva's skirt into the dark grotto of coiling pubes and fixed her sight on the mysterious slit there as if it were a door, swollen shut by soft flesh, beyond which, in the slippery recesses of the dark tunnel it concealed, would lie the answers Joanne sought.
She felt Alva's slim hand cover hers again and squeeze firmly. The fingers were warm and slender, and the animal excitement racing through her body spilled over into Joanne's and infused her with a disturbing sensation. It was like a reawakening for her, a rebirth. The touch and the sight had the effect of taking her back through the years to the time when she had been happy and free-spirited-as she'd been with her father and at the beginning of her dream. She had the feeling that if Alva could go on touching her this way and sharing the animal power that ran through her, then everything in her life would become good again, and the troubles tormenting her mind would sink into the blackwater depths and vanish forever. She felt there was something in the sleek, sexual, animal grace of Alva that had been snuffed out of her own life just at the time of its budding-the something her father had been trying to place there when she was a girl and that she needed now to face Ken.
Joanne stared into the dark eyes and felt herself being drawn deeply into them, falling more under whatever spell of magic Alva was working on her, and she didn't know whether to be frightened or not. The words seemed to swim up from inside her against her will, as if the magnetic power of Alva's presence left her no choice.
"Everything was confused," she began haltingly, hearing her voice come hollowly, as if from a distance. "Real and yet not-as if valid memories and sights had been taken from my childhood, tossed into a barrel, and spilled out, all blown out of proportion."
"Go on," Alva urged, leaning closer. Her soft eyes wrapped Joanne in a dark, magic cloth that was warm.
Joanne recounted the dream, knowing that she'd seen all the elements of it before somewhere, but not in one place-all but the farmhouse and the man in the dream who had dragged her mother into it. She'd never seen such a man before.
"Are you certain, Joanne?"
She closed her eyes, trying to remember. She couldn't even recall the man's face, and she knew he'd been no specific man-only a conglomerate of impressions her mother had beaten into her young mind day in and day out for years. A balled mixture of notions and parts that had sprouted arms and legs in her dream and become her mother's kind of man-all bad.
"And there was the alligator, Alva," she whispered tensely. "God, it was trying to mount me-trying to seduce me by rubbing its snout over my breasts and belly and thighs, trying to burrow between them, hissing and grunting all the while, biting the side of my neck and trying to get me to roll up to meet him. Then Ken-while I lay there waiting for the horrible beast to thrust itself into me and lock with me in that long intertwining of legs and tails-it turned into Ken. Or maybe Ken turned into it, I don't know. Then my mother screamed and ... oh, God," she cried, covering her face with her hands.
Alva's arm went about her shoulders, and she felt herself yielding to the slim strength of the girl until she was calm again.
"Have you watched alligators mate before?" Alva asked with curiosity.
"I don't know," Joanne said hollowly. "I don't think so."
"Then how would you know what they do?"
"Alva, I can't remember! The musk-that thick, male stench of musk they spray to attract the female-it was so strong it nearly choked me. I must have smelled it before somewhere...." She looked up intently. "Alva, why can't I accept Ken? Why did my dream confuse him with that hideous beast?"
"I don't know, Joanne. I wish we could talk about it more. I wish we could be together longer, and I'd show you how to conquer your fear of men." She gave a sensual laugh. "If I taught you the things I know, you'd never be afraid of them again. I'd teach you how to take their pricks into your body and make them give you the pleasure they always want for themselves. I'd show you how to make your virginal pussy so ravenous for meat that the men would be afraid of you for a change. I would teach you all about sex if I were staying with you longer."
Joanne looked at Alva, unable to keep from glancing into the shadowy area between her thighs again. She saw that the puffy doors of Alva's slit were swelling open, as if the gleaming tissues of the pussy behind them were getting ready to reveal the tantalizing secrets she sought. She suddenly wanted to stay with Alva and be guided by her sexual strength until all the mysteries and fears were gone.
"But we will be together, won't we-for the next two weeks?"
Alva looked at her in question. "I don't see how. You're stopping off in Bogota, and I'm going on."
"No, I'm on the tour. We stop there for a day and go on to Quito and ... aren't you on the tour?"
Alva laughed suddenly and smiled. "My God," she said. "I thought I was the only one on board doing that-the Inca thing?"
"Ye . but ... I thought everybody...." She gestured with her arm to indicate the rest of the passengers in the cabin.
"Oh, no," Alva said. "Honey, this is only a normal flight from Miami to Bogota. The tour really starts there, and everything will be different. Did you really expect this kind of luxury all the way for the price you paid?"
"It did seem awfully cheap," Joanne admitted. "But the brochure didn't say anything about...."
"You didn't read the small print. I didn't either, but it's probably full of clever wording that made you think the tour had legal recognition in the States. It doesn't. I've seen these outfits come and go like the ice cubes at a party. You can be sure we'll take off tomorrow in some milk bucket with wings and flap all the way to Lima, which is where I'm getting off. If they don't run out of hotel money and if the pilot they've pulled out of whatever long-dead rubber town in the jungle they found him in doesn't go on a drunk, then you might make it across to the east coast and up again. It depends on how many passengers and crates of God knows what they can pick up along the way. A friend of mine has already tried it, and that's the way it goes. His planeload of Yankees crashed into a mountain in Bolivia, and the jungle swallowed it up."
"You're kidding!" Joanne exclaimed. She felt stunned. But for some reason, she believed Alva-or wanted to believe her. Then the prospect of an uncertain journey through South America began to seem adventurous instead of bad. She had felt already that two weeks away from Ken wouldn't be long enough. Now, if there was a chance to be stranded down here anyway, then she should be with Alva. She thought recklessly of leaving the tour just to accomplish that.
"Don't let it worry you, honey," Alva said. "If anything happens before we get to Lima, I'll take good care of you."
"But I don't understand, Alva-why would you take a tour like this, living here already, knowing what it's like, knowing that you might not get to Lima. Why didn't you take a regular flight?"
Alva laughed again, and her hand tightened on Joanne's. "Because I planned it this way," she said. "The later the better. It was the longest trip I could find to get home without being too obvious about taking my time and without wasting the extra money on some other slow way. I got a wire, you see ... I've been at one school or another in the States for the last five years, learning how to become an educated lady the way my father wants me to be, and I got a wire telling me to fly home for the first time because my father has had a stroke, and he may be dying. They sent me lots of money to come by jet, first class, so I took this stinking Inca special, which ... who knows? Maybe it will get me to Lima sometime this week." She smiled oddly, lifting her shoulders. "Maybe not at all."
"Alva, that doesn't make any sense," Joanne cried. "If your father might be dying, then why are you doing this?"
She laughed sharply. Her lips thinned out, and the angles of her face grew sharper. Her eyes glinted with a brittle light.
"He never worries about me," she said. "He sends me away to get rid of me because he doesn't like what I do with his men. All he thinks about is his money, his businesses. Why should I worry about him when he hasn't let me come home in five years? Do you know what my father's big business is that made him get so rich? It's guano. Do you know what that is? It's shit-acres and acres of birdshit that he pays handsome men cheap wages to scoop into bags for sale. Would you think a man could be so rich from selling shit?" She laughed strangely. "Well, my father is. My father can do anything when it comes to making money, because that's all he ever thinks about. Now he has cattle and tin and maybe some other things since the last time he let me come home."
She twisted in her seat and put her face close to Joanne's. Her eyes were bright with an inner fever that was nearly orgasmic in its intensity.
"Now he's going to think about something else for once. Now he's going to think about me. The last time he thought about me was when he found me lying on my back on his precious bags of shit getting a white-crusted prick stuffed into me by one of his shovelers. But did that really make him notice me? Oh, no-it made him send me away so that he wouldn't have to be bothered with me any more except when he chose. So now he's going to think about me again-where I am, what's taking me so long to get to his bedside to watch him die. When my father beckons with his little finger, everybody runs to see what he wants. He'll be mad because I didn't run with the rest of them. He'll be so mad he won't die until I get there, even if it takes a month. That's the way my father is. Now we'll be even. Now he'll know what it feels like to need me, instead of the other way around."
She bit off the words and clutched Joanne's hand tightly as if in the midst of sexual release. Her breathing finally slowed, and her eyes lost their brittle shine.
"Besides," she said, "I was running out of money again. It gave me a pain to think of spending all they sent me on jet tickets, so I spent the rest left over from this tour. Nobody will know the difference, and if they do, to hell with them. Money is to be spent, isn't it? Besides, what good will all his money do me when he's dead, and he gives it all to my mother and his foreman and his stupid brother? He won't give me any of it. He wouldn't remember to think of me, and if he did, it wouldn't be with the thought of giving me his precious, stinking money."
She looked at Joanne. "I bet you think I'm crazy now, huh? You think I'm sick? Maybe I am. Maybe that's why we should stick together, because we're both sick in different ways, and together we'll be well. What do you say to that?"
"I don't know what to say," Joanne stammered.
Alva laughed again. "Now I've shocked you," she said. "You love your father, and you can't understand how I can hate mine, is that it?"
"I don't see how you could really hate him. I think...."
"Yes, I know what you think already," Alva said, making a sharp gesture. "How many times have I heard that? I go to bed and fuck with anything that walks, and things that don't walk, because I want his attention. I want him to discover me and get angry and fuck me himself. That's all crap. Why can't anyone believe I have real contempt for him? You don't know him, or you would see. He's like the man in your dream, only the woman who was your mother is a bag of money he's dragging inside to make love to. I wish the bag were me," she said, her eyes focusing far into the distance. "I would show my sniveling mother how to take care of him right. I would show her how a man like him needs to be fucked. Just as I will show you how to take care of your Ken." She looked straight at Joanne, and her face radiated the strong, primitive vibrations of lust. "Perhaps I will even fuck with you. Would you like that, Joanne?"
Joanne gasped. She was shocked at the thought. Yet a strange thrill shot through her at the same time and made the tips of her breasts throb.
Alva laughed again. "You've never thought of that, huh? You've never thought if you don't like a man, then maybe you would like a woman."
"I think I've heard about all I want to, Alva," Joanne said.
"No, you haven't heard anything yet! You stay with me. We will become very close friends, and then you will be able to go back to your Ken and marry him and love him to pieces. I'll put the spark of life back in you. I will show you the jungle and let you feel the power of life that surges under your feet. Your Everglades are nothing to the Amazon-a mere dot in the sea of the great jungle."
"Alva...."
"Fuck the tour," Alva said. "Well go over the mountains ourselves. I've decided you must learn what life is. You don't know what it is until you've been in the vast womb of the jungle. The jungle reaches always toward the god of the sun, in crowning majesty over your head. It reaches and blooms without pause and strives again, layer upon layer, three canopies, five ... it teems with life that is a billion times more plentiful than the stars at night. It is green, like your eyes, like life itself. The sun bursts through with the color of your hair and makes clear pools dance with the color of your eyes. You are like the jungle. You are like life itself. Only you are afraid of life, and the jungle is not. I'm not. I want to show it to you and let you feel it grow inside you and make you swell."
Joanne felt her blood pounding through her with excitement. She couldn't resist the compelling tone of voice, the soft eyes, the sexual power of Alva's movements. In spite of the bad things she'd thought about Alva, she saw with sudden clarity that the girl held the key to the answers she sought. She knew that the things Alva spoke of were the things she'd wanted to find again-that Alva would give her the reason for taking the tour in the first place.
She felt the thrill of anticipation make her vagina swell and grow soft and moist. She felt the warm, fluid sensation of her honey gathering in the soft folds and pockets of her pussy. She felt the surge of vibrance and yearning that had been dead in her for so long come alive, and she knew that, with Alva, she would be born again.
"Yes ... yes!" she cried.
"I will show you the cities we stop in, too-the native markets where you can see all the beautiful flowers the Amazon has to offer. We will walk down the streets and sample the granadillas and other fruits of the passion flower, and the delicate little oritas, which are bananas the size of your thumb but which taste nothing like the yellow things you eat at home. I will show you the animals and the exotic birds of the jungle and emeralds as big and green as your eyes. You stay with me, Joanne, and I will show you life! And you-you, my sweet virgin-perhaps you will show me love!"
CHAPTER THREE
While Joanne stood in the Customs line, holding a place until Alva could locate the rest of her luggage, the man whom she'd seen in the low-rent, one-room travel offices of Inca Econo-Tours in Miami came up beside her and eyed her with open intentness.
"Ah, I was hoping I would catch you before you got away for the night," he said, his voice soft, having a pleased sound to it.
His eyes were dark and moist, with wild, unconcealed recklessness in them. His face was broad, seemingly open, with the Mongolian roundness through his forehead and cheeks of pronounced Indian blood. His skin had the golden, coppery color of a deep tan. His black hair was straight and long and shiny, combed at the front and sides, but falling over his shoulders in back in a thick style that was nearly hippie. His mouth was wide, and it should have been soft. But she remembered a set to it at unguarded moments that showed the brooding tension of constant thought over big plans.
Joanne had seen that expression on him in Miami when he'd come into the office, looked at the passenger list on the girl's desk there, then stared moodily through the window. He'd hit the side of his hip with his fist in a gesture of self-flagellation, then left without comment and without acknowledging Joanne's presence, as if something had gone awry.
He looked at her now in an entirely different way. His smile was sensual and engaging, and he made an open challenge to her with his eyes in a way she would have thought him incapable a few days ago. His whole manner, in fact, had been transformed into that of a sexual animal on the prowl, and she was stunned by her response to him. She felt a surge of primitive desire for his lithe body shoot through her womb, and her knees grew suddenly weak. She held onto the railing next to her and wished Alva would hurry and get back.
She didn't know whether her reaction was from her own state of mind, because of her discussion with Alva, or whether it was the man, but she remembered Ken's joking comment about her falling into bed with some hot Latin stud who wouldn't take no for an answer. The possibility that the man in front of her would be the one made another thrill pass through her.
"You're Mr. Tosta, aren't you?" she asked, smiling back, feeling her lips quiver uncontrollably.
"Tuesta," he corrected. "Martin Tuesta. How did you know that?"
"You came into the office while I was there, then went out again."
"And I didn't notice you?" His eyes caressed her breasts and the curving lines of her waist, hips, and buttocks with undisguised heat. "That would be impossible."
"You were preoccupied-with the passenger list, it seemed."
A peculiarly tense expression flitted across his face. "Well, maybe I was," he said, smiling again. "I didn't get as many people signed up as I needed."
"Needed?"
"What I meant," he said quickly, "was that we've just started the tour. This is the first one, and...."
"It'll get better. You shouldn't worry. I'm anxious to see the hotel and the sights that have been arranged."
"That's why I wanted to catch you before you left the airport," he said, all smiles again. "I heard you and your friend talking about the tour, making light of it. Naturally, you can't expect everything to be first class on an economy tour, but I want to try to make up for that by showing you around Bogota tonight. As for the hotel-it's nothing. There's a lot more to see here than a second-rate hotel. What do you say-we'll let the others fend for themselves and go have an exciting time tonight."
Joanne didn't know what to say. She felt frightened and excited at the same time. From the corner of her eye, she saw Alva coming toward them, and she breathed a sigh of relief. But it didn't stop her from trembling.
"Well, I see you're learning fast," Alva commented, rolling her hips and torso with lithe grace. Her eyes were fixed on Martin, and Joanne could see them boldly appraising the man's body and the crotch of his tight pants. She sent off her own challenge in a way that made the inner fires flare into brilliance. "Who's this-the local escort service? We don't need any, mister-I found her first."
Martin regarded her in a way that gave Joanne the disquieting sensation that she was witnessing two combatants squaring off, as if two animals of the same kind had found each other in the midst of the jungle and were ready to see which one could outdo the other in the only form of battle they knew.
"I overheard you trying to frighten Joanne about the shoddy nature of the tour," he said, ignoring her insult for the moment. "I was offering to show her around to make up for whatever might be lacking in other respects."
"I've already offered that."
"I have a friend," he said.
She eyed him boldly. "You had me fooled. I'd thought you were my kind of man-that maybe you could help me out after all. But now you're ready to call for help yourself."
"I don't need any help," he said. "I thought maybe one of you might be a little shy, that's all."
Alva laughed with a low, exciting sound. "Nobody here is shy anything," she said with double meaning. "Except me. I've been lacking that for so long you were still sucking your mother's tit when it happened."
Tuesta's eyes flared with sudden heat. He glanced at Joanne again and licked his lips, his eyes dropping to the swell of her abdomen and the area just underneath. Then he laughed slightly, as if a joke had been played on him.
"She's too beautiful. I don't believe you," he said.
"Then call your friend and let him tell you about it in the morning," Alva countered. "We're wasting time here. Airplanes always make me anxious. It must be the going up and coming down again that does it, do you think?"
"The hell with my friend," Tuesta said, swallowing suddenly.
"Do you think you're man enough to handle us both?"
There was a charged atmosphere between them, and he smiled with sudden lust. "Try me," he said. "We intend to."
Joanne swiveled her head from one to the other of them, savoring each word, each challenge met and returned. The whole of her insides grew warm and fluid with excitement and anticipation of the night to follow. She knew Alva was setting it up, firing his lust, pricking his ego until he would be a raging bull. She knew her virginity had been flapped at him like a cape, tossed out as a piece of tantalizing bait to snare him in the trap of Alva's insatiable lust. The realization that everything would happen at last seemed unreal. Then it began growing slowly, gaining intensity, making her whole body sing with increasing passion.
She felt her panties grow damp from the honey forming with readiness inside her virginal well and leaking through the swelling gates of her slit. She felt her pussy walls spasm and send a jolt of sensation through her, like a small orgasm, that made her breasts throb.
She ran her eyes up and down Martin's body again and again, as if trying to picture him nude, as if trying to see his gold-copper penis spearing forth from the tangle of black pubes like some artful Incan treasure, worked into shape with sure hands.
She felt thrill after thrill chase through her as her mind and body came alive and responded to the blatant taunts being hurled between them. She was being lifted out of the morass of her dreary, frightened life and thrust into the midst of the teeming stream of Amazonian power that Alva had talked about.
She wished it could be Ken the first time. But, with Ken, there would have to be a commitment or a withdrawal from his life. The decisions would still have to be made. With Martin Tuesta, there would be no agonizing choices other than the one she'd made last night When she'd smashed her toy to bits. With Martin, there would be only raw, pure, elemental sex, vibrant and devastating at the same time. And Alva would be there to help her and give her the strength she lacked.
She shivered uncontrollably with the anticipation of it all and felt Alva pry her fingers from the railing she clutched.
"Let go, Joanne-let go," Alva said.
"I will-I promise I will!" she cried.
Alva laughed with a triumphant sound. "I meant the railing, Honey. The line has moved up."
Joanne's mind spun with impatience. She watched the lights flash by as the taxi sped through the cool thin air of Bogota's high plateau. The city seemed to stretch out upon it forever. When the taxi finally stopped, just as the brilliant glow of sunset was fading from the sky, she thought the time had come. But she saw the sumptuous exterior of a restaurant instead of the hotel she'd been expecting.
They passed through an area draped with ferns, through which bubbling falls of water splashed over mossy rocks. Scarlet and blue macaws flapped their showy wings and called raucously, observing the passing people with cocked heads and big eyes.
Inside, they sat in a small, intimate alcove. The rug and thick folds of draperies, the velvet chairs and the big table napkins were a dark, wine red, nearly the color of rich blood, splashed with accents of black and gold. The room seemed ready to burst into flames of passion, it was so warm. The table was covered with tray after tray of tasty morsels-bits of fish and turtle and sweet, strange-flavored meats whose identity Joanne wasn't sure she wanted to know. All of it was garnished with sections of fruits with colors and tastes that overwhelmed her.
"There's plenty of time, Tuesta," Alva said, her gaze smothering Joanne with sexual warmth. "We have to eat first and build our strength-thick steaks and wine and these aphrodisiacal fruits from the womb of the jungle. You're in too big a rush. Give her more wine to drink. Soften her up a little. God, do I have to show you everything?"
"Just show me your black-haired cunt," he said in a low, charged voice. "I'll know what to do with it. I know what to do with the hot, drooling pussies of women like you."
"Talk. That's all I hear from you. We're not talking about mine, you fool. Give her some more wine."
Martin's hand touched Joanne's as he filled her glass. She glanced at him, sitting between them, and saw the fire raging in his dark eyes as if he had no more patience for all this stalling.
She was tingling all over, watching them, listening to them. She had to force herself to eat.
The thought that she was going to go with them to a room and lie on a big bed next to Alva and spread her thighs wide for whatever they wanted to do to her had built to an intolerable degree of anticipation in her.
She imagined her legs as limbs that she would open to the piercing shaft of life. She would let her golden-downed pussy flower before their eyes. She would let it expand and swell open and bloom like the trees of the jungle that reached upward toward the covering canopy. Her perfumes would fill the air as if coming from a yellow-filamented blossom nestled in the hollow of her thighs. They would taste of the sweet meat in its center, just as they had tasted of the morsels on the table.
She shivered again and experienced a small orgasm that she couldn't hide from them--one that made her gasp with several tiny yelps of delirious pleasure.
"We're wasting time, I tell you," Tuesta said impatiently, watching her come. His eyes grew bright, and he licked his lips. "The poor girl is going to be worn out before we even get her to the hotel."
"I know what I'm doing," Alva snapped. "If you don't like the way I'm handling this, then go find your friend and fuck him."
"His ass would be tighter than yours, I'll bet."
"But he wouldn't suck as well."
"Now listen to who's doing the talking."
"Maybe you should get your friend after all," she said sharply, taunting him. "We'll take him along and leave you here to sit and think about what a superior lover you are while he's doing it." She laughed cruelly. "Maybe I made a mistake with you. The more I listen to your impatience the more I think maybe you fuck like a paca-hard and fast and all at once-just to satisfy yourself, just to show everybody what a conqueror you are, a master of the conquest whose sole aim is to inflate his ego to hide his insecurity. Is that the kind of man you are, huh?"
Tuesta's eyes blazed with a new fury. He gripped the base of the wine bottle in a way that frightened Joanne. She saw his mouth set into the same worried lines that it had had in Miami when he'd been staring moodily out of the window and hitting himself in the hip. She thought it very odd that the insult to his virility would elicit the same expression as the paucity of names on his passenger list. She began to wonder if there wasn't something very strange about Martin Tuesta.
Doubts and fears took hold of her again, and there was a moment of clarity when she remembered snatches of many things: Her mother's admonition not to think with her pants, which she was doing right now; Alva's suggestion that the tour would founder and leave her stranded with these two clashing, oversexed, hot-blooded Latins, both of whom wanted to ravish her body for themselves and pluck her cherried prize; and the burning need in her to have it happen one way or another so that she could go back to Ken and trust his love.
She felt ready to jump out of her skin and scream at them to stop fighting over her because neither one of them was going to have her. But the lights dimmed suddenly, and a band drowned out all sound in the room.
She started and turned in time to see a group of dancers swirl out onto the floor. They clicked castinets and clattered their flamenco boots loudly against the hard wood. At the same time, two waiters hurriedly wheeled carts up to the table, with mumbled apologies for being late, and swiftly placed their steaks in front of them. The platters sizzled, adding to the noise.
Joanne saw Martin's face smooth out and his rage subside as quickly as it had flared. In a moment, he and Alva were eating and clapping in time with the hot flamenco beat and smiling at each other as if it was good to be back home again.
Joanne's own edginess left, and she watched the dancers. They were new and exciting to her. One man in particular caught her eye. He wore tight, white pants that were meant to reveal the bulge of his genitals. His body was lithe and sinuous, and he weaved around one of the women in tighter and tighter circles, finally taunting her into responding with a dance of her own.
The others faded back, and the tempo of the beat grew terribly sensual and intimate. The movements of the couple became openly suggestive. Joanne found herself watching in fascination and felt her pulse quicken again with the slowly increasing tempo of the music.
The dancers' bodies drew close. They bent and twisted around each other only inches apart, never touching. It was a dance of love that made Joanne's passion soar again. The sight reminded her of the ritual of pink flamingoes, the courtship of blue herons, the dance of snowy egrets. There was even a reptilian quality about the dancers that infused her with the heat of their movements and made her juices flow.
The dance ended with the strumming of passionate, powerful minor chords, and she became aware that Martin had slipped his arm around her shoulders so that his hand rested lightly against the tip of her breast. He squeezed the soft mound firmly just as the chords sounded, and she nearly came again. She leaned into the hollow of his shoulder and gasped and knew without question that to try to fight them off any more was useless. She felt a strange sense of being doomed and caught at last.
"Let's eat, Joanne-fast," Alva said, watching them with a hunger in her face food wouldn't satisfy.
Joanne cut into the steak and watched the pink fluid bubble from between the lips of the slit her knife had made. She felt a sharp stab at the mouth of her vagina and was certain that the same color fluid was trickling from inside her and staining her thighs. When she put the moist, pink flesh to her mouth and bit into it, juice ran down her throat in a hot, salty wave that made her choke and look at Martin with a lust she couldn't hide any longer.
"All right," she said. "You've done it. I can't wait. I don't want to eat. Let's go-oh, let's go now!" She sounded insane to herself, but she didn't care any more.
Alva stood up quickly. "Now, Tuesta," she said triumphantly.
They gathered her up, one on either side, and walked her though the room. She felt dizzy and not sure she could walk by herself.
"Alva...." she panted, feeling everything go around.
Tuesta's voice growled beside her, strangely like that of the alligator. "It's too much wine at this high altitude. You'll be all right."
She knew he was glowering at Alva, but she didn't care. She leaned against him and smelled the powerful musk odor of sex. She heard the hypnotic hiss of sibilant breath in her ear and felt the corrugated scales of his buckle against the side of her hip. She waited for the feel of leathery skin to crawl over her body and smother it under reptilian weight.
The harsh cries of macaws jarred her senses and lent realism to what she was feeling. There was a long, cuddly ride through the town again while she sat between them and allowed their hands to stroke heat into her body.
She moaned and rolled her head in the darkness and felt her thighs parted by one of their hands. Then a warm palm was cupping the damp, fragrant mouth of her pussy in a way that made her hips lift up shamelessly toward the brink of orgasm. But the hand went away just as she was ready to come, and she was left suspended, highly charged. It happened again and again until she felt ready to explode into a starburst of colors when the taxi finally stopped.
She felt herself being laid out on a bed. Both of them were in the room. There was arguing. Her short skirt was jerked above her waist, and hands roughly pulled at her panties, baring her pussy to them.
"Not like that, you bastard," Alva swore, making her think for a moment her mother was in the room. "You bastard of a paca!"
Joanne looked up and saw the swimming image of Martin's gold-copper body above her. He stood by the edge of the bed with his prick in his hand. It angled upward toward the sky like a thick trunk of bronzed wood with curling, black roots.
"I'll stick it in her and fuck her before she knows what's going on," he growled.
"You don't want to give, you bastard-big ego-weak prick! You only want to take. You only want to satisfy yourself. Here, big man, take your lust out on me so that I can see if you're worthy of being the one to break her. Let's see how much of what you say is just talk."
Joanne saw Alva lifting the hem of her skirt. Her naked pussy bushed into view, and she stood with her legs parted, her hand over her belly, holding her skirt up. Her thighs were slim and firm and creamy smooth. The gates of her cunt were puffing open to reveal the mystery inside. Her eyes were big and burning with inner fires and she stood with a challenge on her face that couldn't be ignored.
"You black-haired demon," Tuesta growled. "You've insulted me enough tonight."
"That's right, big man. Come squirt your balls into my pocket. I dare you to stick it in here. You won't last a full minute when I put the squeeze on your shaft."
She pried the lips of her pussy open to show him the gleaming dampness of her pink meat. She bumped her hips at him and ran her fingertip up and down her slit, exciting herself and him. She reached behind her back and worked at the fastenings of her dress. It slithered to the floor and left her small, impudent breasts thrusting toward him like teacups with nipples, made of exquisitely creamy china.
"You stinking pure blood bitch," he snarled. "You think you're so superior. You think Indios can't fuck you right. Well, here's one who can. I'll show you who is better. I'll make you beg for more until you're weak, and then I'll shoot it down your stinking throat until you choke and learn to talk with respect."
Alva laughed at him with a vicious challenge. "That's all you've done tonight is stand around and tell us how good you are. Come prove it, Indio."
Tuesta hesitated and licked his lips. He glanced at the prostrate form of Joanne, his eyes running over the pink flesh of her twat and the golden curls covering it.
"Don't look at her," Alva snapped. "She'll still be there when I make you finish emptying your balls. Or are you afraid if you don't take her now, there'll be nothing left for later when I have finished with you?" She laughed again. "No wonder you wanted to call on your friend for help."
"Enough," he growled. "You've said enough! There are too many in the world who think they can trifle with Martin Tuesta, but I will show you all!"
"Big man-conquer the world later. Right now I doubt that you can conquer me."
Martin made a grab for her in anger, but she eluded him. He crouched and watched her hide behind a chair, taunting him into a state of nearly brittle rigidity.
Joanne watched his flanks bunch and move under his skin. She saw the primitive expression of lust in his eyes, and she thought for a moment that they were in the jungle and that he was a naked savage, stalking Alva. She rolled her head on the bed and felt her mind clearing as she watched them jump and run about the room. When Alva had him to the state she wanted him, she leaped upon the wide bed and lay beside Joanne with her legs flung open, taunting him with sharp barbs.
"Now I'll show you who can fuck!" he growled.
"Right here-right in my wet cunt, senor paca! I give you less than a minute before you lose control and blow your balls empty."
Martin growled again and covered Alva's body. His prick speared into the firm flesh of her creamy thigh and left a wet smear on her flesh. She twisted her hips to avoid him and taunt him further. Joanne watched them grappling beside her, and her breath pumped in and out of her lungs at the sight.
The bed shook. Her body was bumped by one and then the other of them. Martin's hips pumped up and down in an effort to drive his penis into her middle and conquer her, while Alva twisted and evaded him until she wanted to join with him.
Joanne watched her roll back onto the small of her spine. Her firm buttocks lifted off the bed, and her gleaming pussy lifted high. Tuesta grunted and hissed uncontrollably, and his nostrils flared. His prick found her hole and stabbed deeply into it.
"Aiee," he said, pausing. "What a wet, sloppy cunt this is. You couldn't make a llama come in here, it's so big."
Martin laughed victoriously and pumped his hips up and down, twisting them, making his prick dig into one wall and then the other. Joanne watched and listened to the sucking sounds and smelled the sharp odor of Alva's perfume. She saw the stiff penis driving in and out of her hole, pushing forward to mash the puffy lips flat, then withdrawing to exhibit the stainy shine of fluid. Joanne cupped her pussy with her palm and moaned, wishing she had her toy right now instead of only her finger.
"It isn't my pussy that's big," Alva said. "It's that little Indio prick that can't fill me up. So I have to make the adjustment for your small size."
"What adjustment, you cow? You think you can squeeze this slack meat around my cock? Go ahead and try it. Maybe it would feel better than this."
They stopped moving and glared at each other with sparking challenge. Then Tuesta's face began to change. Where victory and confidence had been, the look of defeat began to take over. His eyes widened with surprise. His face seemed to grow rounder, and that peculiar set came to his mouth again.
Joanne glanced from one to the other of them and felt herself growing unbearably hot. She knew Alva was doing something inside-something with her pussy that was changing everything. She felt a burning need to know. She wanted to learn how to do it herself, whatever it was. She watched Alva's face glow with sexual power.
"Thirty seconds now, Indio" Alva gloated. "And I can feel it drooling out the end of your prick. You're not going to make it. I'm only squeezing right now. In another second or two, I'm going to start making my pussy milk your cock dry so that you won't be able to hold back no matter how much you want to. Are you ready, big man?"
Tuesta's face wrinkled with defeat. His eyes burned brightly, and a soft moan came from his throat. Joanne watched him, recognizing the signs that he was about to come. She'd never thought about it before, but it struck her as odd that two different men such as Ken and Martin would show the same signs when they were ready.
Tuesta's fist hit the bed. "Bitch! Demon!" he cried. He tried to pull back out of her to stop himself, but she wouldn't let him go. Her hands came around and clamped onto his buttocks until her fingers indented the flesh of them in deep, bloodless grooves.
Tuesta half-collapsed and began shuddering violently, mashing his hips firmly against Alva's, writhing his chest across her breasts. His breath panted from his lungs, and his eyes grew wild with something more than sexual release. It was the humiliation of another defeat.
Alva cackled with glee, lifting her pussy up to drink in his load. Joanne could see her lips sucking and pulling along the root of Tuesta's shaft, and she could only imagine what was going on inside the slippery tunnel.
"Ah-hg!" Tuesta grunted.
"Come, big man! You stinking paca! I knew you fucked like a rodent. You do everything like a rodent, huh? Like an angry mouse? You work up passengers to come on this stinking tour the same way you fuck-with only half your ass. How many did you get, Tuesta? Are they all women that you think you can take care of for two weeks at thirty seconds each?"
Tuesta reared back with an insane growl and slapped her face hard. Joanne flinched from the sound of it. She expected to see Alva doubled up out cold, but instead, she heard the taunting cackle again as Alva moved her hips up and down under him.
"That was good, paca-you can hit like a man, anyway. Come on, let's have the rest of it. Show me how you can make me come!"
"Pig! I wouldn't give you the pleasure of an orgasm," he cried, jerking his penis from her depths. "You're not a woman, you're a witch! It's time npw for me to make love to a woman."
He shifted his body and rolled off Alva's. He looked at Joanne and moved toward her. His penis was only half-erect, and it drooled from the tip. His semen slithered from between Alva's labia in an opalescent stream.
Joanne looked up at him and saw the wildness in his eyes. There was nothing soft about them any more. The expression in them was mad. His mouth was set in a cruel twist. His weight on her was crushing, and she felt indignant over the way he treated her dress and her person, as if his only goal was her rupture-as if taking her virginity would somehow restore his bruised virility.
"Get off her," Alva commanded harshly. "You aren't good enough for her. She needs something besides a thirty-second paca to break her cherry."
"Go to hell!" he bellowed. "She's not getting broken by you!"
"Martin," Joanne cried. "My dress! You're ruining my dress-and you're heavy!"
There wasn't any question left in Joanne about what she wanted. She wanted Martin off. Any desire she'd felt for him was gone now. She knew suddenly that this whole idea had been an insane error.
"No!" she cried, twisting and pushing up at his weight.."Ken-Alva!" she screamed. She tossed her head back and forth, avoiding his seeking mouth.
She heard Alva slap his buttocks and shout at him in her coldest voice. But his hips pumped up and down on top of her. She closed her thighs tightly and felt his prick spear between them, searching for her virginal well. The slime on it made it impossible for her to shut him out completely, and her teeth clenched in fright when she felt the oily nose work between the folds of her slit and press hard just above her vaginal hole.
Her buttocks drove into the mattress in her attempt to back away from him. His hands squeezed her breasts harshly, soiling her blouse, making her bra rasp painfully over her flesh.
"Off-off!" Alva shouted at Martin, pushing at the side of his hip, rocking him.
His penis slid upwards in the pocket of Joanne's cleft and bruised her clit, stretching her labia painfully. Joanne whimpered and worked with Alva until Martin lost his balance and rolled free.
His face was wild with the need to accomplish his job. It wasn't from lust. It was from trying to salvage what was left of his sense of masculinity. His hands groped in the air to right himself, and a thick stream of Spanish poured from his mouth.
. Joanne scuttled out of the way and then was shocked to see Alva's head drop between Tuesta's thighs. Her mouth opened, and her lips puckered out more softly than Joanne had thought possible. She fed his prick between them with her slim fingers and seemed to swallow it whole. Her sharp nose dropped into the tangle of his black pubes, and her slim throat bulged.
"Aiee, no!" Tuesta cried.
His hips bucked up with the sensation Alva was causing him, but his fist clubbed the side of her head several times. She wouldn't budge from his lap. She sucked and sucked on the prick in her throat.
Joanne sat back on the other side of the bed and watched. She didn't know why Alva was doing that. She'd thought they would both escape from the room while they had the chance. She felt her tunnel spasm with the strangeness of it all, and she swallowed several times reflexively, thinking of Ken.
Tuesta's fist flattened out, and he quit clubbing her. His fingers tangled in the dark, glossy hair. His big palms covered her head and pushed it farther down over his shaft. Then an expression of agony came over his face, and he growled like a primitive beast.
He shot into Alva immediately and hard. When he was finished, he lay limply on the bed with his head to the side. He looked ready to cry, as if everything were going against him that possibly could.
Alva drew her mouth off his stem and spat on his belly. His prick fell limply to the side and was terribly red.
"You even taste like a rodent!" she snapped, spitting again. She gripped his balls in her hand and shook them up and down until he cried out. "Get out of here, IndioV she shouted. "You fuck like the men who shovel my father's shit, and your semen tastes like guano fresh from the bird. Get out-get out and go conquer the world, you impotent juvenile!"
She pushed hard at him and rolled him off the bed. He nearly was able to catch himself with his arms and break his fall, but he wasn't quite graceful enough. He landed with a humiliating thud that left him winded. Alva cackled while he clambered to an upright position and acquired a look of such intense wildness that Joanne swore he was mentally unbalanced.
"I'm going to tear your lips from your pussy," he growled thickly.
Alva stood her ground. She machine-gunned him with a burst of Spanish that made his face go white. He snatched up his clothes and ran from the room, slamming the door behind him. The sound banged against Alva's merry laughter.
"What did you say to him!" Joanne cried. "I've never seen anything like it before!"
Alva went over to the sink and ran the water until it was warm. "I told him how I was going to make a fairy out of him," she said. "I think he is more afraid for his masculine ego than for anything. "
Joanne watched while Alva lifted one leg up over the edge of the sink. She tilted her pelvis forward until it looked as if she would pee in the basin. Instead, she splashed the warm water up into her crotch and washed it clean. Her arms pressed her breasts together and made them appear larger and softer. Her buttocks tightened handsomely from the tension they were under, and the line of her split thighs was smooth. When she put her leg back on the floor and turned around, her pussy gleamed. Shiny droplets of water clung to her pubes and sparkled. Her eyes grew soft and big and magnetic again.
"Now it is time for real love," she said, patting herself dry with a soft towel. "I am all clean and sweet inside after him."
"Alva ... no," Joanne objected, backing up to the edge of the bed. She put her skirt back down over her lap and wished she had her panties on.
"Don't be frightened of me, Joanne. I won't harm you. I won't make fun of you the way I did to him."
"Yes," Joanne said, wanting to keep her talking. "That was mean, what you did to Martin. Why did you do that to him? Poor Martin."
"That's what I do to all pacas like Tuesta," Alva said, still coming toward the bed. Her hips swung with perfect balance and grace, like the haunches of a cat stalking game. "I thought maybe he would be the man for you, but after listening to his impatience, I saw that he was not. He would have ruptured you and made you bleed and then shot his stinking load into you and left you hanging up there in pain. You would give all and get nothing in return, because bastards like him have nothing to give. He is sick, that one. There is something that troubles him and makes him want to devour the world."
"What do you mean? I didn't see anything like that about him."
Alva laughed lightly and put one knee on the bed. She rolled onto her back and lay with her arms behind her head. Her small breasts stood straight up toward the ceiling. Her thighs were opened slightly, and her creamy skin dipped in fine shadows between them. She was no longer menacing. She reminded Joanne of a sweet flower-the kind that draws insects nearby with her colors and beauty until they can smell the perfumed center of her. When they go to investigate, they become ensnared in the sticky trap, which closes over them and dissolves them.
Even knowing Alva was like this, Joanne scooted closer to her on the bed. She felt a need to be able to see into the shadows between Alva's thighs, to see what kind of syrupy snare dwelled there that had such power it could do what it did to Tuesta's prick.
She lifted one arm lazily and caressed the side of Joanne's face with her hand. "Let us forget about Tuesta right now," she said softly. "We will see too much of him as it is. Come, my sweet virgin-come closer. I know that you want to."
"Alva ... really, we should go to bed. To sleep, I mean. There's going to be so much to see tomorrow. I don't want to miss any of it before we have to leave."
Alva looked at her fully. Her eyes grew dark and soft again, drawing Joanne into them against her will.
"Come, Joanne. Let me show you life. Let me unravel the mysteries of your own body for you by showing you the secrets of mine. You want to see, to touch, to taste of me. I saw you on the plane. You couldn't keep your eyes from my pussy. Now there is nothing hidden. Look all you want to now-see everything. I want you to."
Her voice was hypnotic. Joanne couldn't stop herself from moving her eyes from the dark pools, over the sharp nose, the talking mouth, the slim neck and pointed breasts, down the expanse of cream-covered belly to the tangled grotto of fur at Alva's mound. Alva's thighs widened the gap for her gaze. She twisted her buttocks around on the bed to place her pussy more directly under Joanne's view.
"Go ahead-touch me," Alva said softly, urging Joanne.
The hand brushing Joanne's face stroked fire into her body. The sexual excitement ran from Alva's fingertips into her very blood. Her breath came shallowly. Her hand moved outward and hesitated.
"This is wrong, Alva," she whispered fearfully.
"Tuesta was wrong, Joanne. What you have been suffering is wrong. Why is this more wrong than those?"
Alva's other hand touched Joanne's, guiding it. The creamy flesh came under Joanne's fingertips, soft and slick as satin. Joanne felt the fine tremors rippling over Alva's thighs and flanks and the softness of her belly. The strands of pubes were like blades of grass and the silky flesh in their wiry midst was both sticky and slick at the same time.
Joanne's breath gasped from her lips as she delved into the fleshy trap, and she felt her own center open and leak warm fluid from its depths. Alva twisted on the bed some more, and her hand urged Joanne to kneel between her creamy thighs.
"Ah, your touch is maddeningly soft, my sweet. God, you know just where and how to touch me. No--no, keep your fingers there. I want them there. I want you to make me come. You watch me come. Feel me, explore inside my body. Do the job he couldn't do, and then I will show you what it's like."
"Oh, Alva ..." Joanne gasped.
Her eyes were glued to the satin folds. Her fingers delved and twisted gently, almost with an automatic sense of what to do. They pried the fleshy gates apart to reveal the gleaming tissues, drenched with honey. She inhaled the sweet-sharp perfume rising in waves from the slippery, ravenous mouth before her, and her mind went back to her dream. She stared into its depths and saw the fine ripples that passed along the surface of her vagina.
"Take your dress off, Joanne," she whispered. "Let me see your beauty again. Let me feast my eyes upon it. Oh, you've played with yourself many times, haven't you? You know just what to do."
"Yes," Joanne admitted, feeling a childlike thrill of discovery and confession tingle through her. She reached for the fastenings of her dress and pulled the garment over her head. Her high, fine breasts spilled free of her bra, and Joanne felt them swell and reach outward with heat. She glanced down and saw her golden pelt shine with the fluids of her passion.
"Beautiful!" Alva cried. "As radiant as the sun itself! Ah, Joanne, search my depths with your fingers. Pry me open and look inside and see if you can discover what's there that makes me swell inside this way."
Joanne's fingers busied themselves. She couldn't stop them. Alva's knees lifted and fell wide apart. Her feet were planted firmly on Joanne's flanks, and her pussy lifted up to exhibit her grasping hole, the pocket of flesh below, and the shiny stretch of sensitive skin looping under her trunk to her anus.
Joanne saw it all. The entirety of Alva's sex gleamed and beckoned to her with the beauty of an unknown flower. It pulsed under her fingers, as vibrant as life itself. It drew her closer, captivated her, made her want to smell its fragrance and sample its sweetness as well as merely touch. Alva must have read her thoughts.
"Go ahead, Joanne," she urged in her compelling voice. "Do what you want-anything you feel like doing. It will all be good, and you will make me come. Touch me-dive into my depths and let me enfold you with the softness of my living cunt."
Joanne heard a mewling sound, which she recognized as coming from herself. She dipped down and stared with awe into the woman's pussy in front of her. Her fringers pried and parted and moved over every particle of the slippery flesh, then retraced their paths and did it again.
"Put your finger in me, Joanne. Let me show you what I can do in there to a man's prick. Then you will know what to do with one too."
Joanne swallowed hard. She couldn't stop herself. She extended her middle finger and slid it softly into the slippery hole. She felt the convolutions inside Alva's vagina. The barrier was missing, and she could sink it deep. She heard the soft moan that came from Alva's lips, and she felt the way her pelvis began to move.
It went up and down gently, around in circles. Joanne held her finger still and felt the soft walls close down around it and pull inward while Alva fucked her middle around its stiff length. She felt her own pussy throb and move from the intense passion that had been built into it in the past hours, and she couldn't stop herself-from bringing her other hand down and cupping the seeping mouth.
"Do it," Alva said, her eyes bright with passion. "Play with yourself while I watch and fuck your finger."
"Oh ... oh...." Joanne gasped. "I couldn't...."
Alva moved her hand. Her fingertip rested against the top of her cleft. She began rolling the shiny red ball of her clit with it and gasped.
"I'm doing it. You're watching me do it to myself. There is nothing to hide, Joanne-nothing."
Joanne drew in her breath with a ragged sound. She watched the tumid ball of nerves swell toward the tickling finger without shame, without hesitation. She parted her thighs as much as she could and laid one finger along the length of her own slit. She began moving it up and down in the drenched folds of her golden cleft.
"I wish I had my toy," she gasped suddenly.
Alva's hips swiveled in a small circle, and her muscles pulled inward. "You have a toy? I've had toys. The toys are no good. They don't last. I fuck them until I wear them down, and then I'm disgusted with them."
"I broke mine," Joanne confessed. "I threw it to the ground and watched it smash. I hated it because my mother gave it to me. She should have let me be free to find a man."
"Ah! Ah!" Alva gasped. "I wish my father had given me a toy to fuck. I would have lain with it seven times a day and pretended it was him. Joanne, stop playing with yourself. I'm going to come. I want you to watch me come. Spank me when I come. Slap my tits and my ass and make me explode."
"Alva...." Joanne gasped.
"Do it! I'm being bad! You've found me fucking on a bag of shit! Punish me! I'm bad-no good! Ah...."
Joanne was astounded by the powerful suction along the length of her finger. She felt as if the blood in it were being vacuumed to the tip, that the end would burst and spray Alva's insides.
Alva's pelvis quaked. Her fingers pinched her clit and made it red. She slapped her own tits until Joanne lifted her hand and brought it smartly against her flank. Then she exploded in the way she promised she would, pressing her feet firmly into Joanne's hips with each rocking spasm.
Joanne heard Alva's cries for punishment, and she was reminded of her own desires the night before. She had begged for Ken to hurt her. She had mashed the toy into her sensitive flesh for the pain it gave as much as for the pleasure. She felt odd, hearing the same wishes come from Alva, but she didn't have time to explore the feeling. Alva was lifting up from the bed, and her eyes were blazing with heat.
"Joanne, Joanne," she whispered softly. "My lovely virgin, the time has come for you."
"Alva, I...." Joanne protested.
"Hush-lie back. You have given me more pleasure than the last five men put together. You've made me want to give for once-I mean really give. You can't deprive me of that."
Joanne had no choice. She wasn't sure she wanted a choice. Her body was so aflame she could barely think straight. She went down on her back at Alva's insistence, and she moaned when the slim fingers pried her thighs apart.
"Ah," Alva breathed. "It is the pink and gold of sunset. I see the tremors of the jungle swelling through your flesh. I smell the fragrance of the passion flower, and I will taste of its sweet fruit."
She dipped her head. Joanne watched the inky gloss of Alva's hair shimmer over her thighs and belly, and she felt its satin touch. She couldn't stop the moan of delight that rose in her throat when she felt Alva's tongue whisper through the golden forest of her pubes, teasing each tendril into a writhing coil of passionate growth, as if she'd endowed them all with independent life.
"Alva, no...." she whimpered.
But she didn't really mean for Alva to stop. She tried to pretend that it was Ken who was between her thighs, that it was his tongue lapping up the inner surfaces of her dewy lips and his breath bathing her tumid flesh with warmth. But Ken didn't have long hair that tickled her thighs and belly. His lips weren't as soft, either. And his tongue tip didn't search out the thrillingly sensitive areas the way the tongue at her pussy was doing.
She couldn't sustain the illusion. In a moment, she didn't know why she bothered to try. She reached down and tangled her fingers in Alva's shiny hair and moaned fervently for the sensations to continue no matter who was causing them.
She waited for the feelings of guilt, but they didn't come. She waited for the first sharp stab of pain to spear through her and make her want more. It didn't come either. She realized suddenly that there was no need for punishment this time. She hadn't offended anyone; she hadn't put anyone off. She hadn't had to stop Alva from making love to her in another way, because there really wasn't another way.
A wave of relaxation passed through Joanne and made her spread out fully on her back. Her thighs went wider apart, and her pelvis tipped up with a natural sway. She felt her vaginal muscles release their tension and yield softly to the delightful warmth of excited nerves. Alva's tongue lapped up her oozing slit again, and she rolled her head and moaned.
"That's it, Joanne-relax. Enjoy it, my sweet. Let yourself swell and grow inside like a ripening bud. When the time comes, you will burst open too and bloom with beauty."
"Oh, Alva...."
"Yes, yes! Let the power of the jungle feed you and give you life, Joanne! Ah, what a sweet, delectable morsel-how dainty and fresh is your pussy against my tongue! Now to taste the sourch of such perfume, of such honeyed nectar...."
Alva's head wedged firmly between Joanne's thighs and her tongue rolled into a tube. She inserted it into the tight, virginal mouth of Joanne's yearning well and began to unfurl it, applying exquisite pressure to the muscular ring and causing it to quiver with tiny spasms of delight.
"Oh! Oh!" Joanne gasped. The whole world was dissolving about her. She felt totally fluid, as if half of her might flow off the edge of the bed and puddle on the floor. None of it previously, not even the abominable toy, had ever felt like this.
She closed her eyes. The world turned to a bright, warm, yellow-green hue as if she were standing under the jungle canopy watching the sun burst through in liquid drops of gold. Bright colors splashed and spiraled across her vision like the feathers of exotic birds.
As if pausing before her flight into the canopied realms, she glanced around inside her world to be certain there were no reptilian beasts lurking about to snatch her into their cruel jaws. She heard no grunts, no roars, no hissing sounds. There was no drawn, pinched-mouthed woman with cold eyes staring between the leaves. There was nothing to hold her back. She felt truly free to sear to heights unknown before, and she gathered herself for the joyous leap.
A dizzying burst of colors accompanied her flight. She charged into the sky on herons' wings and saw blossoms burst into bloom as she soared past them. Birds trumpeted their songs as if heralding her release. She broke through the canopy into a world of intense light that was blinding in its radiance and then gently began to descend.
"You've seen it, my sweet virgin-you've seen the joys of life."
"Yes! Oh, yes, Alva!"
CHAPTER FOUR
The guilt came with the rain.
Joanne sat at a small table in the cafe of the hotel and realized she was having trouble looking at Alva. She would steal a glance now and then at the dark eyes that had trapped her and the red lips that had sprung the trigger.
There was guilt now because she remembered crying out for Alva to promise not to leave her. For Joanne, that was equivalent to saying that she loved Alva, that she was committed to her in the way she should be committed to a man. But Alva was obviously not a man-which meant that last night she had fallen in love with another woman-and that was wrong. It was made more wrong by the appearance of Clara Foster.
"Pardon me," Clara said politely, coming up to the table. "But would you two girls happen to be on the Inca Economy tour?"
Joanne looked at her. She looked to be in her early thirties, but there were telltale marks about her eyes and neck that made her perhaps ten years older than that.
She was an attractive woman, reserved, but with a bubbling sense of youth underneath. She had auburn hair that shone with red highlights, a good figure that was still firm, and an engaging quality about her mouth and eyes that Joanne liked immediately. She saw that the woman had addressed her rather than Alva, probably because she sought kinship with another American.
"Yes, we are," Joanne said, feeling a sense of relief that she'd interrupted the troublesome thoughts. "Sit down, please."
"I don't want to barge in on anything," she apologized, taking the seat, "but I haven't yet found out how many people are on the tour, and that Mr. Tuesta doesn't seem to be around to ask today. I was hoping there'd be another woman my age that I could chum with."
"To tell the truth, Mrs. Foster, we don't know how many people are on the tour either," Joanne smiled.
"Oh, call me Clara, please. That other makes me sound like an older widow than I am." She accepted a cup of coffee from the waitress with a pretty smile. "I've managed to find two couples on the tour, but they're younger and seem awfully close and ... rather rowdy."
"You say you're a widow?" Alva asked. "You don't look old enough to be that already. What are you doing on a tour like this crazy thing?"
Clara smiled and sipped from her cup. Her blue eyes took on a faraway look for a moment. "My husband had promised me a tour for many years," she said. "It was one of our honeymoon dreams to come to South America. He was ill for a long time, and he made me promise to take it by myself; so ... here I am," she laughed. She glanced out the window at the quiet mist of water. "I hope it doesn't rain all the way after I've waited this long to come."
"I hope rain isn't your only problem," Alva said.
"Alva!" Joanne said with reproval.
Clara's hand touched hers. "That's all right, Joanne. I'm not exactly blind. This tour seems awfully unorganized so far. I should probably have taken another one, but I couldn't resist the price. Perhaps," she admitted candidly, "I was hoping I might meet someone nice on this one-someone more my age than generally take the other kind."
"You're looking for a man?" Alva asked bluntly.
Clara's face colored. "Well ... it has been ten years since Howard died. I'm not all that old yet. And I've been faithful to his memory every day. It ... it seems like it's time for a change, don't you think?"
Alva made a peculiar face as if she couldn't comprehend how any woman could go ten years without a prick, regardless of her age.
"Well, you and Joanne should get along together just fine," Alva laughed. "She hasn't had a man in twenty."
"Alva, stop it," Joanne said.
"All right," Alva said, getting up, still smiling. "I'll leave you two to talk and see if I can't find that paca, Tuesta. It would be like his kind to leave us sitting here in Bogota while the plane takes off for Quito, especially after what we did to him last night. I'll see you later, Joanne."
They watched her go with the light, smooth roll of her hips. "She's a very sensual girl," Clara said softly, turning back.
"Yes, she is," Joanne admitted, feeling a wave of guilt sweep over her.
"She makes me wish I had my youth back. The last ten years, at least." Clara stared oddly into her coffee. "Sometimes I wonder if I should have done what I did. Then, when I do, I begin to feel guilty for thinking it. Howard was such a good man." She smiled weakly and looked up. "I'm sorry if I prattle a little. I'm sure you don't understand what I'm talking about."
"No," Joanne said. "That's all right. It's ... it's a relief to hear a woman say good things about a man for once. I'd thought there wasn't anything good about them."
Clara looked at her directly. The blue eyes were thoughtful. They took in Joanne's pretty face, her blonde hair, the slim, youthful shape of her body. She glanced back in the direction Alva had gone, and she thought some more.
"Have you known Alva long?" she asked finally, a hint of wariness in her voice.
"We met on the plane yesterday," Joanne said guardedly, reading the suspicion in her face. "I didn't ... I know what you're thinking, Clara," she said finally.
The eyes became kind. "I'm not thinking anything, Joanne. Each person must choose for herself. However, you're making a dreadful mistake if you don't try ... I'm sorry. Never mind."
"No, tell me," Joanne insisted. Her voice held a pleading quality. She felt a need to be absolved of the guilty act she committed last night with Alva.
"You're a lovely girl," Clara said softly. "Surely, you could have your pick of a number of fine men. You shouldn't need to-depend on Alva. For anything. Haven't you a boy friend at home?"
"Yes," Joanne admitted.
"And you're still a virgin? I'm sorry, it's none of my business, I know, but I thought I was the last of that breed of women who hold chastity as some sort of ideal."
"It isn't that, Clara," Joanne said emotionally. "Sometimes I hate my virginity, and I'd do anything to get rid of it."
"That's good, Joanne. I'm glad of that. Because, as a veteran of ten years' worth, I can tell you that such an ideal leads to a lonely and frustrating life. I've gained nothing in the last ten years. I woke up one morning and could see that I was growing older and crankier and more frustrated by the day, and there was no end in sight." She laughed prettily. "I'd hate to give you the wrong idea about myself, but I can tell you, I'm ready for anything right now. I thought that a trip to the fabled territory of Latin lovers would help me over my hump and allow me to open up again."
"That's about the same reason I came," Joanne said, feeling a strong, open bond growing between them.
"I had the memory of a good husband for my excuse, at least. What is yours?"
"My mother, I guess."
"Oh?"
"She's very bitter. All men are bastards, according to her. She's preached that to me for as long as I can remember."
"Oh, I'm sorry for you," Clara said sincerely. "And now you're afraid of men?"
"I guess I don't trust them. My father ... he left my mother when I was young. She's never stopped damning all men since then."
"What were the circumstances? Perhaps he had good reason to leave her, had you thought of that?"
"No," Joanne said, startled. "I never had. Isn't that odd?"
"Not really. You've been indoctrinated thoroughly, I presume, to believe your mother was the wronged party. But still, I can assure you that she's quite wrong about one thing-my Howard was no bastard, as you put it." She changed her expression. "Darling, you have to remember that men are people, just like women. There are good ones and bad ones of both sexes. You have to choose the person, not the sex. Your boy friend back home...."
"Ken," Joanne said.
"Is Ken a good person?"
Joanne sighed. "Almost too good. He frightens me sometimes. I want to trust him and love him, but I can't because of my fears."
"So you have chosen Alva as your means of breaking out?"
Joanne looked up sharply. "How...."
"Please forgive me," Clara said. "The walls are pretty thin here. I ... I couldn't help hearing you in the next room."
"Oh, God!" Joanne gasped, the whole episode flashing across her mind in a blaze of sordidness.
Clara touched her arm firmly. "Don't be ashamed," she said. "I tried it once myself. Perhaps, in one way or another, we all have. I think none the less of you for it, and I can assure you that your secret is safe with me. I don't condemn what you did in the slightest. Please don't condemn yourself and be guilty for the rest of your life about it."
"I feel ... awful," Joanne said. "Cheap."
"No you don't," Clara countered firmly. "You feel confused. Don't put any labels on it. It seemed delightfully good at the time it was happening, didn't it?"
Joanne made a sound that was half laughter and half sobbing. "Yes," she admitted. "I felt free."
"You would. She wasn't a man. I went through a similar stage in my life, too, and I remember how it felt. There's no use in pretending it wasn't perfectly marvelous, because it was, and we both know it, don't we?"
"Yes," Joanne laughed, feeling a tightness in her throat as if a big sob of guilt were trying to bubble up out of her at the same time. She wished this woman had been her mother and felt sad for all the wasted, worried years.
"I'm glad, at least," Clara went on softly, earnestly, "that you managed to get rid of that Tuesta fellow-even if the method sounded rather rough. He seems quite unstable to me-hardly the right kind of person to put your trust in and let ... deflower you."
"I have Alva to thank for that," she said. "I don't know what I would have done if she hadn't been there to get rid of him."
"I suspect you wouldn't have been in that fix in the first place, would you?"
Joanne laughed. "I don't know. I'm as ready as you say you are."
"Then South America had better watch out," Clara blurted, "because there're a couple of hot boxes ready to invade...." She clapped her hand over her mouth with an astonished look. "Oh dear-listen to my language, will you! I'm positively giddy with excitement. I might even have to borrow your Alva for a little while, would you mind?"
Joanne looked up and saw Alva standing beside them as if she'd materialized out of thin air.
"That sounds delightfully interesting, Clara," she said in her low voice.
"Oh, my," Clara said with embarrassment. "Now I have shot off my big mouth, haven't I?"
Alva studied her face and body with that hungry, intimate look. "Maybe it was a good thing. We could all have interesting times together. I would even suggest it now, but we've only half an hour to get ready to leave."
"Leave?" Joanne questioned. "I thought we weren't supposed to go on until later tonight."
Alva shrugged and sat down. "A change of plans. Tuesta is at the airport right now."
"How did you find that out?"
"I asked around and called him. I have the feeling whatever pilot he had found didn't show up, and he's been scrambling around for another."
"Oh, I can't understand that man," Clara said. "Joanne and I were just talking about him."
Alva grinned oddly. "That wasn't quite what I heard. Anyway, what do you know about him?"
"Alva," Joanne said quietly. "Clara was in the room next to ours last night. She heard-every thing."
Alva's eyes took on a new luster, and she appraised the line of Clara's full breasts again. "You two must have had an exciting talk while I was gone. Are you trying to trade me off already, Joanne?"
"Alva!"
"After what I showed you last night?"
"No, of course not!"
"Listen, Clara-if you want to join, that's one thing. But don't horn in on me."
"I've no intention of doing either," Clara said stiffly. "You've obviously received the impression I was serious in what I said about you. Rest assured, my dear, I'm not."
"Please, both of you," Joanne interceded, remembering how the sharpness of Alva's tongue had already shredded the ego of one person. She didn't want to see Clara suffer the same fate. "Alva, what about the others? Do they know?"
"They're upstairs getting ready. The hotel has a limousine waiting for us."
"Well, I'd better excuse myself and gather up my things," Clara said. She smiled in a friendly way, wanting to forget any hard feelings. "I'll see you girls in a little while."
Alva waited until she was gone. "What's going on with her?" she demanded.
"Nothing," Joanne said. "What do you mean?"
"You must have had a hell of a talk."
Joanne avoided the dark, liquid eyes, afraid they would ensnare her again. "She's a nice woman," she said. "I like her. And not in the way you're thinking, either."
"That's good, my sweet. I would hate to think that you were running out on me so soon. Then you would be just like the men you don't trust, wouldn't you?"
Joanne stood quickly. "We'd better get ready too." She didn't look back to see if Alva was following her.
The other two couples, George and Emily Pulver and Fred and Joan something-Joanne didn't quite get the last name-tracked jokes and laughed all the way to the airport. They seemed half drunk or high on pot and had a grand time, despite the fact that the mist of rain had increased to a drizzle that was cold and didn't seem anxious to leave.
Both couples were young, late twenties, and made allusions to swapping. George, who was on the beefy side but good looking in spite of it, leaned over toward Joanne at one point in the ride and whispered into her ear.
"Why don't you ditch your girl friend and come with us, baby? We're out for fun. Joan likes your looks. You two ought to get on as close as your names."
"Oh, I'm not sure it would end with Joan," Joanne said, teasing him. "I think you and Fred have ulterior motives."
"Maybe we do," he grinned. "Better yet, bring her along. She looks like a hot one."
"Too hot for you," Joanne laughed.
"Is it a deal?" He nearly panted in her ear.
"Maybe," she said.
George leaned back with a satisfied grin on his face. He made a sign to his wife, Emily, who looked at Joanne with renewed interest and a peculiar smile.
In spite of the fact that she wasn't too pretty, having a nose that was too big and a neck too long, big breasts and no butt, Joanne felt a sensual thrill go through her at the thought of all of them joining together in a sexual orgy. She knew she could never do such a thing-at least not yet-but she thought about it and felt her excitement mount.
Martin was waiting for them at the airport, and when Joanne saw him standing there, she began to feel sorry for the way Alva had treated him last night. Not only Alva, but herself.
"Hello, Martin," she said, trying to be as friendly as she could.
He looked at her a moment. His eyes held a feverish look she couldn't define. He didn't speak to her but to all of them.
"Everybody back in," he said. "We have to go to the last building." He got in with them.
"What the hell is this?" George demanded. "Another foul-up?"
"No, sir," Tuesta said. "We leave from another building, that's all. Everything has been arranged. We depart for Quito shortly."
The limousine rolled through the drizzle. There was no canopy, and they all ran for the front door of the private terminal. Inside, waiting for them, was a man who struck Joanne as being a walking conflict of characteristics.
Externally, his appearance was lean and hard. His eyes were a piercing blue around the pupils but shot with red through the whites, as if he were a man with a dream of glory and the determination to achieve it, but was sustaining the dream on cheap rum instead of his will.
His nose was strong, but it showed the weakness of having been broken, most likely in a drunken brawl. His shoulders and arms weren't big, yet they concealed iron strength. His mouth had a firmness to it, but the lips were soft. He wore cheap, faded, dark pants and a yellow shirt that looked brand new. Over it, was a scratched, dirt and sweat stained leather flight jacket, which had long ago lost its original dye and was now a dirty buff. A well-worn Panama, in a cowboy style better suited to a rancher, perched on the crown of his head so that a tuft of sandy hair poked out from under the dirty brim in a disarray that covered his forehead.
He scrutinized each of them minutely as they came in, doing it in one quick glance, and then pushed himself away from the counter. He stuck out his hand and shook with the men, and Joanne watched George and Fred wince from his grip. But he was very gentle and soft with the women-especially, Joanne noticed, with Clara.
"You the Inca tour people?" he asked. His voice was scratchy yet resonant.
"Yeah," George said, puffing himself up slightly. "Who're you?"
"Winston Sharp. I'm your pilot from here out. Isn't there a Mr. Tuesta with you?"
"He's out in the rain, I'm afraid," Clara spoke up, eyeing him with interest. "He's bringing our luggage in. I do think one of you men should help him," she suggested.
George and Fred weren't interested. They stood by the door and watched Tuesta argue the driver out into the rain. They slogged through puddles under the burden and stamped their feet once they were inside. Tuesta gave the driver some money, who puffed back out and drove away. Then he looked at Winston Sharp and put on a flashy grin.
"Martin Tuesta," he said, sticking out his hand.
There was an obvious, cold reaction. Sharp made no move toward the offered hand. His eyes pierced through the space between them and took in the long hair, hanging shabbily now because of the rain, and the slick, glib appearance of Tuesta. Joanne could sense the immediate dislike Sharp held. There was a slight withdrawing, a slight curling of the lip, a sudden bumping of skin and lifting of hackles, as if the dislike were on a primitive level none of them would have been able to analyze.
"We'd better get moving," Sharp said. "There's a front coming in we can miss if we don't dawdle around here. My co-pilot will take care of the luggage. Tuesta, come on in here a minute."
He turned sharply and walked with a sturdy stride toward an office. Joanne noticed the boots for the first time. She looked at Martin. Hatred was thick in his eyes, but he followed Winston into the office. The co-pilot came in and brushed water off his neck. He looked at them, said nothing, and began picking up the suitcases with a surly look on his face. He was small, with black, curly hair and a pocked face.
"Good God!" George swore, no longer amused by any of it. "What the hell are we getting into now? Come on, Fred, let's see what the hell we're flying in."
Fred, who was tall and skinny, dark haired, and with an expression that would become a spaniel's in a few years, followed George to the door the co-pilot had gone out of. Joanne went with them. She saw a relic DC-3 sitting on the field, badly in need of washing. Oil stains were heavy around the engine.
"Christ, I'm not flying in that thing with that hayseed," George boomed heavily.
"You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, Mr. Pulver," Clara said, coming up behind them. "After all, an airplane flies by mechanical soundness, not on the way it looks. And personally, I feel quite confident of Captain Sharp's ability."
"Shit," George said. "How would you know anything about a bush-pilot like him? I've seen his kind before. They hang around the docks and the rail yards and the oil towns and cattle pens looking for a buck to buy a bottle of crap with and will do anything to get it. No thanks," he said firmly.
Clara was undaunted. "It's in the eyes, Mr. Pulver. You can always read a man by his eyes. I like what's in Captain Sharp's eyes, and I'll trust him."
George looked at Fred, then Joanne, then shook his head. "Women are crazy," he muttered, going back into the room. The door to the office opened just then, and Tuesta came out looking visibly upset and harried. Winston stood just inside with his hands on his hips in a solid, no-nonsense stance, his hat still perched on the back of his head. His eyes had a steely look to them. He rubbed his palms on his pants and came out, trying to change his attitude for the sake of the others.
"Everything's settled," he said. "We'd better go, or we won't beat that front."
George confronted him in a blustery way. "That plane doesn't look capable of beating a turtle, Sharp," he said. "And you make the damnedest-looking pilot I've ever seen. I want to see your license. Do they license pilots down here?"
Winston glared at him, sighed heavily, and whipped out his wallet. George read a card and another and a third one and then went a little red.
"Let me tell you something, Pulver," he said in a low voice, putting his wallet back. "That plane's older than you are, probably, but I'll guarantee you it's in better shape. It might look like hell right now, and maybe the inside won't be the first-class kind of stuff you're used to, but that's because I live in that plane. I've just finished an exploration job with one of the oil companies back home, and if you want credentials, you can call the president of it. He's flown with me. Not just him, but other big wheels scouting the Basin for oil-oil and lumber and tin and any other damned resource you can think of that some geologist has said might be there.
"That plane is my best buddy, my wife, and my kids to me, and I treat it like that. I flew France and Germany during the war when you were still in diapers. I flew in Africa for a while until Korea broke out, and then I chased MIGs with MacArthur. I've flown for PanAm and Brasilia and a hundred you've never heard of until I got tired of taking orders. Then I bought that heap out there with all the sweat I've sweated over one thing and another in that jungle on the other side, and I hire out wherever and whenever I can-and this just happens to be one of those times. Now, if you don't like the way I'm dressed, Pulver, you can stuff it, while I twist. And if you don't like the way my plane looks, then you can walk across this goddamn continent, I don't care. But if you want to come along, then we'd better get moving. I guarantee I can fly by the seat of my pants when I have to, but not in all weather, got me?"
"Bravo, Captain Sharp," Clara cheered, clapping her hands a few times. "I knew you were that kind of man. I'll fly with you anywhere."
"Thank you," he said, giving her a small, warm smile.
George shuffled his feet and looked down at them, seeing Sharp's boots at the same time, as though none of it were real.
"Sorry, Sharp," he said.
"Let me tell you something else, Pulver," he said, lowering his voice, his eyes looking askance at Tuesta. "You want something to worry about, it isn't me or my plane. It's that son of a bitch over there. I don't know what the hell you people are into, but you'd better get out of it in Quito or sooner."
"What do you mean?" Joanne asked. "What is it about Martin? Nobody seems to like him."
Winston looked at her with obvious appreciation for her beauty and a kind of sadness in his face that made her feel child-like-nearly as if he were her father, wanting to explain something she wasn't quite old enough to understand. It disconcerted her and made her like him at the same time.
"Well, I shouldn't get anybody upset," he hedged.
"Winston, tell us," Clara insisted. She looked up into his face as if he were the only one in the room with her. He scratched his scalp, debating, then readjusted the hat to the same ridiculous angle.
"Somebody called me," he said. "Put on a big act over the phone, but I could hear he was in a bind, you know what I mean? We haggled over a fee for this tour thing, and he said Tuesta would show up with it. I know damn well it was that longhair punk over there who called, and he hasn't got the money, either. It's in Quito, he says. Maybe so. I was headed for Guayaquil anyway, and it doesn't much matter to me whether I fly empty or with you people, except in principle. But that's not exactly the point. This whole thing seems so shabbily run I can't believe it. He's got you by the short ones down here, so you can kiss whatever money you paid him goodbye if he folds on you. I'll do what I can if any kind of trouble comes up, though."
"Are you expecting it?" Clara asked.
He looked at her. His eyes went soft for a moment. "I don't know, Clara. Call it the hunch of an old hard-nosed, seat-of-the-pants kind of cynic I am, but I don't trust any son of a bitch with long hair these days. I had to scratch and dig to make my way through this world. Nobody gave a damn whether I made it, either, and I didn't look for any free handouts along the way. But these longhair bastards today expect a pass through life. Give it to them, and they throw a bomb in your face, because it wasn't good enough, free or not. It's as bad down here as at home-even worse. I've seen too many of them who've got it made, if they'd only see they have, running around stirring up trouble, playing Che in their twenties the way we used to play Superman in short pants. As for Tuesta, I don't like the way he looks, talks, walks, makes deals, or anything else about him."
"Or the wildness in his eyes?"
"That especially," he said.
"See, Mr. Pulver?" Clara chided him.
"Wait a minute, Clara," Winston said. "I might be all wet, you know. I said it was just a feeling. He might be perfectly legit-worried about making his company go, and all that. He says there's another passenger boarding in Quito tomorrow-somebody flying down from the States to join on." He shrugged. "I don't know."
"If you feel this way, Captain," Alva said, coming up to the small group, "then why are you accepting this job?"
"The money, lady," he said bluntly. "A few more quickies like this, and I can fly this baby back home. I've about had it here. It's all gone to hell, and nothing's the way it used to be. They're bulldozing down the jungle everywhere you look, plowing under the mystery and wonder of it. The Indians are getting too civilized to live in the jungle any more, and they're too primitive to fit into our world. They've lost their pride and spirit and are confused. Then guys like Guevara come along and try to stir them up against something they don't even understand, and they turn against him because they're stirred up enough already." He shook his head. "It's all gone to hell, and I've stood here and watched it." His co-pilot came in again and gave him a signal. "All right," he said. "Let's go."
"Winston," Clara said, stopping him, waiting until the others were going toward the plane. "Could it be that you've done the changing? Could it be that maybe you're just ready to settle down now?" Her face flushed with the boldness of her approach, and Joanne could see the bright shine in her eyes.
Sharp studied her a moment. His eyes went softly .over her hair and her face and stopped at her breasts.
"Maybe," he smiled. He put his arm around her shoulder to move her along, and Joanne saw the tiny shiver that passed through Clara's starved body.
CHAPTER FIVE
They dipped down, early in the evening, into the high bowl between the ranges where Quito lay winking at the drizzling sky. The flight had been rough and gloomy down the corridor, and the towering, snow-capped, volcanic peaks loomed between breaks in the shrouding mists with frightening nearness.
The old plane leaked cold air and rattled in a disturbing way, but the engines had a powerful, clean sound that was reassuring. The cockpit was open to the back so that Sharp could talk with his passengers on scouting missions, and he had been carrying on a long conversation with Clara most of the way. Joanne couldn't hear most of it, but what she did hear and the look in Clara's eyes made her feel oddly homesick for Ken. Because of the seating arrangement-only a few rows in front, with room for twelve, the back having been cleared for cargo-she'd been obliged to sit with Alva. But they had spoken very little until now.
"I have made arrangements for us to go with George and Fred and their wives tonight," Alva said, leaning close. "They are free and open with sex. You will learn tonight, my sweet virgin." Her big, dark eyes sparked with heat.
Joanne looked into them. She found she could now without being overwhelmed by them, and she wondered why. It gave her a good feeling.
"You shouldn't have done that, Alva, because I'm not going," she said firmly.
Alva looked startled and then smiled. "You must be joking."
"No."
"Then I won't go either. To hell with them. I'll stay with you tonight. We'll show each other the way to life and beauty. There are still many things I haven't shown you."
Joanne felt her breath catch in her throat. She nearly assented. Her fingers gripped the arm rest, and she had to force herself to say what she felt.
"I don't want that tonight," she said firmly.
"What's the matter with you?" Alva demanded. "Are you turning me down? Last night you were begging to have me with you. It's that woman, isn't it? I shouldn't have left you together this afternoon."
"Don't be ridiculous, Alva. She's very nice, but that's all I feel for her. Besides, look at her-she's fallen like a tall tree for Winston. And she's not that kind that she'd look at me."
"Then what is it?" Alva asked.
"I ... I don't know, Alva. I just don't want to. Not tonight. Maybe later-some other time."
"I saw you making eyes at that paca sitting alone over there. You want a rodent to fuck you instead of a man or me?"
"I was only trying to be nice to him. Nobody else is."
Alva studied her. "You are lonely for your Ken, is that it? Yes-I think that's it. Your watching that woman and the pilot has made you lonely for him." She laughed with a hint of cruelty. "Well, he's not here. You're going to have to take Tuesta or the co-pilot or me, my sweet. Or maybe I will buy you a big snake in Quito, the kind Indian women use when their men are killed, with no fangs. They squirm their heads into your pussy and flick their tongues until you go mad with delight. An Indio maid told me about them once. I'll buy one for you."
She laughed again, and Joanne couldn't suppress a shivering thrill from the thought. She felt Alva's hand crawling along her thigh, reaching under the hem of her skirt.
"I'll be the snake right now," she whispered. "We're in the back. Nobody can see us. Spread your pussy open and let my finger snake into your tunnel and make you come."
"Alva, stop it," Joanne gasped.
She didn't want to do it, but she couldn't stop herself. Excitement raged through her. She tried to tell herself that she was conditioned to this kind of touch because of Ken-to the point where she flared up automatically, like a doll whose button has been pressed.
It was partly that. It was partly because of her open discussion with Clara, her thoughts about swapping with the other couples, the sudden flare of memory of her father and Ken that Captain Sharp caused. But it was also because of her terrifying need to be set free-and because of Alva's silken touch against her moist cleft.
"Oh, don't...." she pleaded weakly. But her thighs parted and her buttocks slid forward to the edge of the seat. She felt Alva's fingertip work inside the legband of her panties and worm between her spreading, oozing lips. The tip slipped up and down her cleft and teased her tumid clit, and she moaned in the back of her throat, glad, at least, for the darkness outside and the droning noise of the engines.
The engines caused the seat to vibrate her bottom. It was nearly the same feeling her toy used to give. Only Alva's finger was more satisfying than the blunt, plastic prick on the toy. It went in deeper. It wormed around inside her pussy and made her walls spasm. She rolled her pelvis up and down and around in circles, fucking her finger shamelessly. She smelled the heated perfume of her honeyed fluids wafting up her nostrils. She felt the plane dip and rise as it went down through turbulence, causing her passion to soar.
The novelty of having her pussy fingered in public this way was too much for her. She reached the point where she couldn't possibly hold back any longer and had to come. Alva's finger was deep inside her, beyond her virginal barrier, and her thumb was rolling over the fiery knob of her clit.
She felt her fingers gripping the arm rests. She felt her buttocks rolling around on the seat, wanting that finger to go deeper still, wanting it to rupture her with one harsh movement so that that much would be done. She gasped and bit her lower lip and felt Alva's cheek rubbing over her breasts, massaging them.
"Yes....oh, yes!" she cried softly, feeling the final explosion approach. She tensed up and waited for its crushing shudders.
"That's enough for now," Alva whispered sharply. She jerked her finger away and wiped it on Joanne's thigh, leaving her stunned and hanging breathlessly for the final burst of sensation. "You just hold it right there, sweetie, and as soon as we land, I'll come up to your room and finish you off in a way I know you'll love."
"Alva ... no...." Joanne choked. She squirmed in the seat and made a frantic grab for Alva's hand. When she couldn't get it, she tried to put her own between her legs to finish herself off, but Alva stopped her.
"For God's sake!" Joanne cried, frustrated to the point of tears.
Alva laughed with a low sound. "You want me to come to your room tonight, don't you, sweet virgin?"
"Ye ... God!"
"Don't you!"
"Yes, Alva-yes!"
The plane swooped down and landed smoothly and rolled to a halt. She felt the cold rain in her face, then the warmth of the terminal. She saw Clara speaking to her, asking them to join her and Winston Sharp for the night. She heard Alva decline and watched Clara step lightly beside her hard-looking, warm-hearted Captain into the night, looking up into his face, laughing, loving once again.
A tear rolled down the side of her face. "Ken!" she cried.
Alva stretched out on the bed beside her and nuzzled her naked breast with soft lips.
"Ken isn't here, sweetie. But I am. Suck my little woman's prick and pretend it is your lover's."
She felt Alva's weight on her chest. Soft buttocks flattened her high breasts. The smell of musk was strong. She opened her eyes and saw the dark, pink-slitted grotto of passion in which she could lose herself for the night. Pubes tickled her face like a wet paintbrush, and soft, silken flesh slid around her nose and lips, saturating her senses with the honeyed scent of lust.
"Open your mouth, my lovely. Wash my slit with your tongue. Feel what my pussy can do with anything that is put inside it."
She obeyed the commands. She didn't have the will to resist. Her lips flattened softly against slippery, puffy lips that were slanted the wrong direction. Her tongue came out and felt a hollow satin tunnel of incredible warmth. Soft muscles played with her tongue, drawing it deeper into the bottomless recess. Thick juice ran down the center into her mouth. She savored the taste, then swallowed, feeling a gradually increasing urge for more.
Her hands went up and cupped firm pillows of flesh without receiving the permission of her mind. She felt the weight on her chest rise higher, the wet softness spread wider around her mouth and chin. Her nose burrowed into the pillowing cleft and puffed air at it.
"Ah, suck me-that's it, my jungle beauty! More of your tongue! Deeper! Ah, you're learning fast, my sweet!"
A nipple-like protuberance teased at her lips. Joanne pursed them and took it between them and sucked as if she were a baby. Her chin was enveloped by the lubricious warmth of softly squeezing tissues. The back of her head was raised. She felt her lips and tongue working harder, faster as the heated breathing above her grew more ragged and sharp. She sucked and sucked, wanting something to happen.
"Joanne! Ah, my God! I'm coming! What a beautiful cuntsucker! Hit me! Slap my tits! Daddy, look what I'm doing to your maid!"
Alva exploded violently, wrenching her small breasts with her hands, mashing Joanne's face into her crotch until sharp teeth scraped over the flaming ball of her clit and sent her juices gushing over Joanne's chin and neck.
Joanne licked the inside of her mouth and swallowed several times. She felt her thighs being pried apart and glossy hair tickling her pussy again. One lick of Alva's tongue sent her hips leaping upward shamelessly for more.
"Yes!" she cried. "Oh, Ken, yes!"
Alva's tongue lashed her pussy, dug into the soft folds, and washed the whole bottom of her crotch. Joanne moaned and rolled her head on the bed in ecstatic agony. She burst into a dizzying world once, but the sensations didn't stop. Alva kept licking as if she were mad for the flavor inside Joanne's well.
Joanne came again, so hard her stomach cramped. She gasped for breath and felt Alva turning her over. Her breasts pushed into the sheet, and her mouth was squashed open so that saliva ran out of it. Her eyes stared into the room, unseeing.
She felt her buttocks being pried apart, and she whimpered. Something struggled to break free in her mind. She heard Alva saying a word over and over, chuckling it with sadistic glee. Platano.
Something oily smeared over her anus and made her whimper again. She jerked her hips, trying to get away. An image of two alligators mating came to her mind. They were locked together for an interminable length of time. She could hear their grunts of passion-or were they her own?
"This is only a green banana-a plantain," Alva said. "But you will feel how wonderful a man's prick is in your ass. I won't put it in your pussy. We'll save that for the best of all-a real man."
"No...." Joanne muttered. "Oh, no, don't...."
Her anus burned. It stretched to an impossible width. She felt the long, green, curving, bone-hard fruit running into her insides. Her buttocks trembled, and her belly spasmed with a sustained, violent orgasm. The image of alligators changed. There was a man ... some man. She struggled for recognition, but it wouldn't come.
"Ken!" she cried. "Ken, help! Daddy, daddy!"
A great whiteness flashed over her mind, blotting out the answer, and she sobbed with the violence of the orgasms shaking her slim, beautiful body until she couldn't stand any more.
"You came! You came hard! Oh, God-it was so beautiful! Do it to me, Joanne, do it to me!"
Joanne sat up and sobbed, full of pain. She felt the club-like heft in her hand and spied the upturned, creamy-smooth hillocks of flesh. She stabbed unmercifully, again and again, watching with morbid fascination as the fruit disappeared into Alva's depths and came out again. The puckered mouth ate it angrily, always asking for more. Joanne ran her arm back and forth until it ached with fatigue. Alva beat the bed with her fists and sobbed in perverted delight, begging, always begging, for more.
Winston Sharp looked at them from the other side of the long table. His forehead wrinkled, and his hat tipped farther back on his head. He wrapped his hand around the coffee cup and watched steam curl up out of it. Clara sat quietly by his side, a happy expression on her face-a look of satisfied emotions and contentment. She favored him with admiring glances now and again. Outside, cold wind drove the rain into the window glass with increasing fury, changing the morning light into an early-evening gloom.
"The best I can get," he said, "is that this junk we picked up in Bogota is coming in from all sides now. I'm afraid it's going to coalesce into one big weather system that's going to squat all up and down the corridor and spill over the edges and raise pure hell."
"Oh, no," Joanne said. "You mean we'll have to sit here and watch it do this? That's no vacation." She had another reason. She couldn't wait to get to Lima, where Alva would leave. The thought of staying under her destructive influence in Quito made her shiver suddenly in the worsening cold.
Sharp smiled at her. "The commercial boys are starting to talk about grounding themselves already, Joanne. They're bigger than I am. I'm sorry."
"We can't stay here!" Tuesta fairly shouted, jumping up from his chair. "You have your money, Sharp. You're under contract to fly this tour now!"
"Not when it's dangerous, I don't," he bristled, the hairs rising on him again.
"We must!" Tuesta ranted. "It's imperative we get at least to Cuenca today!"
Sharp looked at him from under his brows. "What's so damned imperative that you want to risk lives, Tuesta?" he asked coldly.
"There's ... I have ... I insist, Sharp. If you're not flying, then I demand the money back."
Winston hesitated. His gaze faltered. Joanne saw the frown on Clara's face, and she could see how much the money meant to him-to them both.
"Now wait a minute, you longhair punk," Sharp growled, rising up from his seat. Clara put him back down with a touch of her hand.
"Typical American," Tuesta gloated, twisting the knife a little more. "Money makes you hesitate. Well, I think also it's more than money. I think you're afraid of a little weather. You've made such an issue on how well you fly, I want you to show us. Prove you can really do it, Mr. Sharp," he said insolently, "or are you all wind like the other old-timers grubbing a living out of the jungle."
"Shut up, Tuesta."
"It isn't that dangerous yet, and you know it. You also know it probably won't be dangerous later. Everything could blow over, isn't that right? I've lived here many years too. I know. Are you trying to give Mrs. Foster a thrill?"
"You stinking...."
"Winston!" Clara said sharply. "Don't let him bully you, darling."
"Shit! I've had tougher times in my backyard than he's had in his whole life! Are you kidding? Him bully me?"
"Let's take a vote," Tuesta suggested. "Isn't that your method in America? Everything by majority rule?"
"The others aren't here," Sharp said. "The others have left the tour," Tuesta grinned triumphantly. "They found some other-stimulating couples in Quito, and they've decided to stay. Alva, you seem to be the only one who hasn't said anything."
She moved her shoulders lithely. "I don't care," she said. "It might be exciting. Perhaps I will never make it home. I'm willing to go."
"That makes three to two, Captain. I assume Mrs. Foster will do whatever the mighty one says."
"You can't force me into this kind of crap, Tuesta," Sharp raged.
"The money then, Captain."
There was a strained silence. The door flew open, and cold rain whipped in around a harried-looking American businessman and a blowzy blonde, whom he dragged by the hand.
"One of you Winston Sharp?" he demanded, out of breath.
"Yeah."
"A fellow said you were flying to Cuenca. The commercial line won't fly. I've got to get there this afternoon with some papers."
"No dice," Sharp said.
"Christ, I've got to! It's a ten-million-dollar signature I've got in here!" he said wildly, waving an attache case. The blonde hugged his arm and grinned toothily, basking in the spotlight of his importance. She had plump cheeks and breasts and hips and small eyes that were hard as flint when she wasn't watching herself.
"Who's the woman?" Sharp asked.
"Wendy Prather, my secretary. I'm Robert L. Grovebank, Third, representing American Minerals out of Tucson. Surely, you've heard of us."
Sharp shook his head and looked at them. The man was in his early thirties, wearing heavy, black-framed glasses with lenses so thick they reduced his eyes to startled dots. His face was puffy, round, thick-lipped, and had a greasy appearance, as did his black hair. His body moved as if his skin were filled with water. He had the look of a fledgling lawyer whose specialty was finding loopholes, and he came around the table with the girl in tow.
She was no secretary. She looked younger than he, physically, but her eyes had the age of two granite marbles that had crystallized from a primeval hunger for money and power at any price. At the moment, the price was Robert L. Grovebank III, and she wasn't letting go of him.
"Never heard of it," Sharp said deflatingly. "And I'm not going."
Grovebank lowered his voice. "Get me there, and it's worth two thousand bucks, U.S. Here," he said, flipping open a long, black wallet and taking all the bills out. "This is in advance-all I've got. Seven hundred and ... the hell with it, here. The rest in in Cuenca, I swear." He quit trying to count them and shoved the bills into Sharp's hand.
"There you are, Captain," Tuesta gloated. "Your dream comes closer every minute. You can't afford to pass up that kind of money."
"God, no, man," Grovebank agreed dramatically. "And it's tin, Sharp. You don't know how your country needs tin!"
"What do you need with it?" Sharp asked.
"Bobby gets a bonus," the girl said in a sugary voice. "A big bonus. Big enough to give you more, if you'll take us. Isn't that right, Bobby?"
Grovebank twisted her hand painfully in silent command for her to shut her big mouth before she offered him the two per cent option besides. Her eyes sparked with hatred, then smiled again. Sharp fondled the bills.
"What about your other passenger, Tuesta?"
"To hell with him. He makes it, or he misses it. Don't stall until it's too late on his account. It's five against two now, Captain. You should be flattered we all have such faith in your ability to fly. We hope you haven't lost faith in yourself. That happens with age and decrepitude, I hear."
Winston folded the bills and stuffed them into his new-shirt pocket with a crisp motion, standing up quickly. "I'm going to make you eat shit when this is over, Tuesta," he said threateningly. He marched to another part of the room and stuck his head in a doorway where his co-pilot was talking to some other men. "Get it gassed up, Rico, we're pulling out."
Rico appeared in the doorway. His naturally surly look was embellished with incredulousness. "You're going by yourself, Sharp," he said defiantly. "I ain't gonna fly in that slop."
"I'm going to fly," Sharp said between his teeth. "You'll ride."
"No!"
"You goddamn punk kid! No-guts wonder of the new generation-kiss off! I'll take it up myself. You aren't any damn good anyway. You'll never get out of this hell-hole because you haven't any guts! No pride! Well, this is my chance, and I'm taking it, see? Now haul your ass out there and gas it up!"
"In that rain? Go to hell!"
Sharp struck with lightning speed. The flat of his hand slapped across the surly face and knocked Rico off balance.
"Winston!" Clara said sharply.
He came out of his crouch and walked toward her when Rico slunk back into the room. "I'm sorry, Clara, but I've got my pride. I've got that and my record and a willingness to take a chance. That isn't much, but it's more than these diaper-panted, insolent-mouthed kids have. They'd bitch and throw a bomb because God didn't make it quit raining for them. These infants want the whole world paved over for them, and then they'll bitch because there isn't any scenery left. I'm giving the tower a flight plan. I'll be back in a minute."
"Now why would you do that, Captain?" Tuesta goaded. "You aren't afraid of getting lost, are you?"
"I might have guts, Tuesta," he growled, standing close. "But I'm not stupid. If I go down, somebody's going to have an idea where I am."
He slammed out a door and left a charged silence in the room. Just as he came back, the outside door whipped open, and' a broad-shouldered, yellow-haired man came into the room and made Joanne gasp with total astonishment.
"Ken!" she cried. "What are you doing here! You can't be here!"
"Now that's a hell of a greeting," he said. "After all the damn work I went to to find you." He smiled and went toward her. "Hi, baby," he said. "I just couldn't stay away."
Sharp paused in his march through the room. "Who the hell are you?"
"Ken Bast," he said amicably. "Are you Mr. Tuesta? I'm joining the tour here. Your office was supposed to send word to Bogota."
Winston lost his antagonism. He took Ken's hand and shook it curtly, his eyes running over the big blond with approval. "I'm the pilot," he said. "Tuesta's over there. How'd you come in?"
"Roughly," Ken laughed. "It's getting bumpy out there."
"Does that give you cold feet?"
Ken looked at him openly. "No," he said. "I figure the pilot doesn't want to go down any more than I do."
"Then we're taking off. The sooner the better." He paused, his eyes appraising Tuesta and Bobby III with a sweep. "Glad to have you aboard with me, Ken."
Gusts swept sheets of rain across the runway. Inside, they were drenched and cold. The plane rocked in the wind while the engines warmed up. Clara sat beside Winston in the cockpit and smiled bravely, but her eyes grew wider as he fed gas and snaked down the runway. The plane tipped eerily to the side a couple of times, and his face beaded with sweat. The plane jerked up, shuddered, went down for a jarring bounce, and lifted again.
"We're up," he said tightly. A determined grin from the old days crept over his face. The engines roared powerfully, and the propellers bit into the thin air. He couldn't see the tip of the wing, and he edited the instrument readings with the instinctive kinetic senses he'd developed over many years. He headed down the corridor, clawing his way between the crooked-toothed rows of jutting volcanic peaks. Only then did he take one hand off the wheel to inspect the bump on the side of his head. He felt the sticky wetness of blood and guessed it was the door brace the wind had slammed him into.
"Winston, you're hurt," Clara said, staring at the red tips of his fingers.
He smiled at her reassuringly. "Just a bump," he said. The plane dipped and twisted in huge sweeps, making him feel a dizziness he'd never had before.
"For God's sake, Joanne," Ken said earnestly. "What are you sore about? I thought you'd be happy to see me."
"I told you I didn't want you following me, Ken. I told you I wanted to get away from you for a chance to think. Now you've-you've messed everything up, damn you! How in God's name did you find me?"
"It wasn't easy. I searched through every damn-listen, Joanne, we've got to get off at Quito. I brought my savings that I was going to use...."
"What, to fly me back home! How dare you, damn it!"
"No, listen to me. I want you to finish the tour. I'd like to come along with you so we can enjoy it together, but on a different one."
"I like this one," she said stubbornly, wondering why she argued with him, wanting to open her arms and hug him into them tightly and kiss his handsome, wonderful face all over. He'd come just when she'd needed him, but she was too stubborn to let him know.
"But this thing's a front, Joanne," he whispered urgently.
"What are you talking about? Ken, don't be melodramatic."
"I'm not. This Tuesta has been mixed up with a student radical group with connections to one of Castro's cells in Miami."
"Oh, God, Ken!" she said sharply.
"I didn't think you'd believe me," he said. He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a clipping. "This was in this morning's paper."
She took it from him and read it. It gave a description of how the back of a Hialeah office was ransacked and burned. Cuban exile groups braggingly took the credit as part of a retaliatory action. The front of the office had housed a travel agency, Inca Econo-Tours.
"I found the place and made reservations the day you left," Ken said. "This happened last night, and I flew out as soon as I could this morning. Honey, have you been all right? I don't know what they're up to. Who's this guy Sharp?"
Joanne stared across the aisle at Martin Tuesta, and her face went white. Everything came clearly to her now-his mercurial changes, the wild look in his eyes, his hunger for conquering women and goading men like Winston Sharp. It explained the captain's instinctive wariness and dislike for the kind of person he regarded as the enemy of his hard-bitten ideals.
She glanced at Alva, sitting in the seat behind Tuesta, and found herself distrusting the girl, too. Alva caught her eye at that moment. She gave Ken an animalistic smile and a flash from her sexually charged eyes that was an open invitation into her world of carnal depravity. She let Joanne know with one supple thrust of her breasts that she would take Ken from her, that she would lure him away from the virginal coward with pretty blonde hair and show him what a real, living, fiery woman was like. There was nothing political in the look. It was one of pure, raw sex.
Alva unfastened her seat belt and lurched against the sway of the plane to where they were sitting. She held to the back of Ken's seat and leaned against the arm so that her thighs pressed heavily against his hand and her lithe hips weaved in front of his face.
"So you are the man who is tormenting Joanne," she said, her eyes running over him suggestively, lingering in his lap. "I can see why she is tormented. You would torment me-but I would love it and would welcome such agony instead of fighting it. Your Joanne fights too much, even when she is in such need."
Ken looked at her, dumfounded.
"Alva, shut up!" Joanne said desperately.
Alva tipped her head back and laughed throatily. "What's the matter, my jungle blossom? Are you ashamed of our little secret? I think Ken would like to hear what a passionate woman he has for a girl. Perhaps he would even like to watch your passion bloom. You can't deprive him of such a thrill as that, can you?"
Joanne couldn't answer. The solid bang from the cockpit startled them all. She looked up to see Tuesta with a gun in his hand. There was a hole in the radio box, and Clara was screaming with terror. The plane pitched, tossing Alva across Ken's lap, preventing him from getting up. Tuesta held on tightly and shoved the barrel of the pistol into the back of Winston's neck and grinned with maniacal triumph.
"Don't anybody move, or I blow the back of this gringo's neck off!" he shouted. Smoke came out of the barrel and curled lazily up the side of Winston's head.
Out of fury, Ken grabbed Alva's arm and twisted it until she cried out in pain. Frustration colored his face. "Good timing, sister," he growled. "But now you're my prisoner." He shouted to Tuesta. "It's a standoff, Tuesta! I've got the girl, and I'll break her neck!"
Tuesta curled his lip and laughed. "You do that, Bast."
"No!" Alva squeaked. "I'm not in with him! I'm not in anything with a fucking paca like him! Stupid Indio! He wants you to break my neck already! Joanne, make him stop!"
Ken looked at her. She swallowed hard with confusion. "I ... I don't think she's with him, Ken, really."
He relaxed the scissored grip around her neck. Tuesta laughed again. "Aw, I thought you were going to do it for me, Bast."
"All right, Tuesta," Sharp said. "Either say what you want or get that goddamn iron out of my neck."
"Now that's the way I like to hear a gringo talk," he grinned. "You have been very abusive with me. You've all been very abusive with me. But now I have the power, no?"
"Get away from him, damn you!" Clara shouted with a shrill tone.
"Clara, don't rile him," Sharp said.
"Yes, Clara, don't make me nervous, or your jungle bum lover might be hurt."
"Spit it out, Tuesta-what do you want?"
"I want you to change course, Captain. I want you to fly east through Ataxamba Pass."
"Into the Basin?"
"Only a short way, Captain. There's a camp on the other side near the headwaters of the Caymano where a strip has been cleared for you to land in. We weren't going to have such a big plane, but our other pilot had an unavoidable problem. You can do it though. You're the best goddamn pilot there is, remember?"
"I'm not good enough to see through this weather, Tuesta. You're crazy as hell. We'll be doing good to get to Cuenca without plowing into these mountains. How the hell am I supposed to pick my way through a pass I can't see?"
"Then go over the Andes, I don't care. The weather will stop on the other side."
"You're nuts!" Sharp exploded. "I need twenty thousand at least to clear them, and there's no oxygen!"
"I don't think we'll suffer too much. We're all young and healthy. We can stand it for a few minutes. Can't you? Are you that old?"
"You son of a bitch," he cried with frustration. "What you're asking is impossible. I can't even find the pass to begin with."
"I've provided you with the charts. Look in your case and see. And you'd better do it right, or some people are going to be hurt." He shifted to the other side of the cockpit suddenly and held the gun on Clara. "I will start with her."
Sharp gritted his teeth. He glanced at Clara and saw that she was taking it well. He opened his chart case and found extra maps that hadn't been there last night.
"According to my elementary calculations," Tuesta said, "we'll be over Ambato in five minutes. Fifteen after that, you will change course the way I want you to."
"Are you hijacking us?" Clara asked. "Why? What do you want?"
"Because he's a longhair punk," Sharp said viciously.
Clara cried out and held her hand to her face.
"Every time you talk to me that way, Captain, I'm going to slap your piece of pussy in the face," Tuesta said cruelly. "Is that clear?"
"You rotten...."
Clara cried out again and began to sob quietly. "All right, Tuesta," Sharp said. "You win for now."
"No he doesn't!" Grovebank said from behind them. He wallowed out into the aisle and was thrown around so badly he sat down again. "Tuesta, listen. I've got to get to Cuenca. Let him land there. I'll give you the two thousand-five, ten! Name your price! You can't do this!"
"I am doing it, and I will name my price. And how convenient for me that you came along. You'll make the ransom worth much more."
"Ransom!" he squeaked.
"From your stinking government. We need money to finance our operations, Grovebank. What better way than to kidnap Americans and hold them for ransom?"
"You fucking paca Indio bastard!" Alva spat. "I'm not American!"
"Ah, but your father is rich. Or won't he pay for you either?" He laughed insanely. "I wouldn't blame him!"
"That's right, Captain-Jivaro, Caymano, and Umpani. They are all fierce warriors when they have something to fight about. We have given them something. Our first objective will be the Shell Oil outpost on the Corrientes. This will give us even more power. We will gain Indian support and then spread through the Amazon and into the capitols and topple the juntas your country supports under the lying name of democracy. And I, Martin Tuesta, will have been instrumental in it. We are making history this very moment!"
"You stupid, idealistic, dreaming bastard. Che blew it. What makes you better than him, huh?"
Clara screamed harshly again, and tears ran down her cheeks. Sharp clamped his jaws tight with fury and saw Tuesta calmly, coldly, look at his watch.
"Start changing, Sharp."
Winston spread the charts out and checked compass heading. He made some calculations and saw that Tuesta was off by a quarter of a mile. It was too close for a rough guess. He knew where he was going. The plane veered east toward the towering range that lay somewhere through the thick blanket of vapor and wind. He saw Tuesta was checking him, and his shoulders slumped.
"You've got to do it, Winston," Clara said.
"Yes, Sharp, you've got to. It's part of your ethic to be concerned for all the lives on board. I'll remind you it's not part of mine. Not even my own life is important compared with the needs of our cause. You fly the plane, Captain. I have need of a woman right now. It always happens when I have succeeded." He grinned with madness sparking from his eyes. "Don't try anything, Sharp, or someone will be dead." He tugged at Clara's arm. "Get up, old bitch. I want to see what kind of woman our glorious captain finds worth fucking and fighting for."
"God damn you Tuesta...." Sharp began. But he stopped when he saw Clara's face twist in silent pain.
"It's all right, Winston," she said bravely. "You can't do anything, darling. Don't try. Don't risk it-for the others. I don't care what happens to me as long as you and the others are safe."
Tuesta laughed with a cruel, high sound and twisted her arm behind her back. The gun barrel pressed into her spine. He made his way cautiously down the aisle to where there were no seats.
"I have a touchy ringer, senor," he said to Ken as he drew within reach.
"Go on by, Tuesta. I won't do anything."
"I will, you stinking bag of shit!" Alva spat. "Come near me, you fucking Indio, and I will tear your rodent's prick from your belly!"
"You'll have your chance, you sharp-tongued witch. I will save you for the last when it will take me a long time to come. I will fuck your big, sloppy pussy until it bleeds!"
"Tuesta, listen," Grovebank whispered insistently. "God, you've got to listen! Let him go to Cuenca, man-I'll pay anything. Anything!"
"You American pigs make me sick!" he spat. "You think your stinking money buys anything. It does not buy Martin Tuesta!" He slammed Grovebank a dizzying blow on the side of the head, timing it, making it quick, so there was no chance to make a grab for him. Bobby III wailed like a kicked hound and dove for the protection of Wendy's plump body. She pushed him away and swore at him, watching Tuesta go the rest of the way to the back. Her eyes studied him thoughtfully as she reassessed the sudden change in the power structure aboard the plane.
"Let's see it," Tuesta commanded Clara. "Ah, are those the tits your wonderful captain sucked last night? They're big and firm. I like to squeeze them, like this."
Clara lay nude on her back on the hard aisle. Tuesta mounted her, keeping the gun pointed to her head and one eye on the others watching him. He twisted her breasts cruelly, making the nipples go red and big. He mauled her body with his free hand and dug into the auburn-downed meat of her cunt. He jammed his finger into her and made her wince with pain, but she didn't cry out. He made her spread her thighs wide and stared into her crotch. He pushed the barrel of the gun into her pussy and fucked it in and out, laughing all the while. Then his prick speared from his pants. He teased her with it, rubbing the head up and down her slit until he laughed with glee.
"She's growing wet for me, Captain," he crowed. "Your woman can't resist the charms of her Latin lover! Ah, you should come back and see how her pussy flows for the meat of a youthful cock! And the fragrance, Sharp, the perfume! I must give you credit-you have a nice prize here. You should learn to share your good fortune with others without being forced! Ah, her pussy is shaking with impatience. It's too bad you have to fly the plane. But I will fuck her enough for both of us."
"Do it, you vile beast," Clara swore. "Do it and get it over with. Stop torturing him."
"It's you I'm torturing. You like my finger? You'll like my big prick much better. There-ah, yes, your face tells me you like the feel of my prick inside you."
Tuesta lowered his hips and sank into Clara, screwing her slowly, rolling his hips around, teasing her, fingering her clit at the same time. Clara tried to make her mind go blank. She put up a good fight, but Joanne could see she wasn't going to win. It had been too long for her. She flung her arm over her face in humility and whimpered into it as her hips rose up to meet his degrading plunges. Her nipples swelled outward into his cupping palm, and her soft buttocks rolled under him against her will.
"You should see her face now, Sharp," he gloated. "She likes a young prick in her. It's too much for her to resist. She's about to come, Sharp. Listen-listen carefully. Watch her!"
Clara rolled her head back and forth. The scent of her oils pierced the cabin. His rod plunged in and out of her crotch with wet sounds. She gasped once and then made a keening sound in the back of her throat. Her hips lifted and took him all the way in, and her arms went reflexively around his back, holding his body tightly to her. Her thighs tangled with his, and she rocked back and came with glorious shudders of pent-up passion. Tuesta gloated and sank into her and shot his load, his buttocks jerking with pump after pump of semen jetting into her pussy.
Clara rolled her head to the side and sobbed in shame when it was over. Tuesta pulled out, and his penis was stiff and wet. The glory of conquest was on his face.
"That was good, Sharp, good. I commend you on your taste, but she didn't satisfy me." His eyes swept over Joanne and Alva and Wendy with a reptilian quality, dragging out the drama of the moment and filling his ego with it. "Joanne, of course," he smiled wickedly. "The sweet virgin of our midst. I have a taste for blood, unless that Peruvian witch has cheated me of it with her fucking tongue."
"You're going to have to take me first," Ken said, crouching in the aisle, ready to spring. His face was black with emotion.
Tuesta regarded him contemptuously and twisted Clara's tit until she screamed in pain and sobbed.
"Sit down, hero. You are as stupid over a woman as Sharp. What is it with you gringos that you can't let your women get fucked without wanting to become dead?" He twisted again.
"Ken, for God's sake, sit down!" Joanne cried, covering her ears to blot out Clara's pain. "Can't you see he's mad? You can't stop him. He'll kill you. He'll kill all of us if he has to." She cupped his face in her hands, and spoke softly. "Ken, I've been a fool, darling-such a fool. I wasn't mad at you for coming. I wanted you to. Oh, darling, I wish I'd let you be the first the other night, but it's too late for that now. It has to happen sometime, Ken."
"Joanne, you can't!" he cried. "Oh, God, not this way!"
She kissed him hard and then pushed him away. She felt brave. She would have preferred it another way, but it didn't matter now. At least this much of her agony would be behind her. She thought of how close it had been in Bogota with Martin, and her fear diminished. She walked toward him and stood over him with her legs spread for balance, letting him look up at her pantied crotch.
"Let her go, Martin, you've made her suffer enough."
Clara rolled to her knees. His evidence leaked from her gap and smeared at her thighs. She looked at Joanne, and there was pity in her eyes-pity that she couldn't do more for Tuesta so that none of the rest of them would have to suffer it. Joanne wanted to cry for her goodness.
"Go to Winston, Clara," she said gently. "Go to your man. He will still love you."
Clara gathered her clothes. She walked up the aisle, carrying them. It-didn't matter that she was naked. Not after what the others had watched her shamelessly do. She paused and then nearly cried when Winston hugged her tightly the way Howard used to do.
Joanne lay down on the floor and slid her panties over her hips. She knew Ken was watching her with distress, and she felt a perverse thrill go through her. She knew she shouldn't feel that way. She knew she shouldn't be punishing Ken but some other man, someone who ... She stared at Tuesta's glistening prick and nearly saw him again in the back of her mind. She reached for the image but couldn't grasp it.
"Now you'll pay for the other night," Tuesta was saying, crawling over her body. His penis speared into her belly, and his fingers played in the flesh of her silken cunt. "It's still there! I'm going to take it! I'm going to fuck a virgin and be the first! The most important!" He cackled with a strange sound and fingered her hymen.
Joanne lay passively beneath him. She heard an eerie growling in her mind, and a luminous strand of her old fears twisted through her. It snaked and broadened and brought her an image of a wavering cypress trunk-the white, stalk-like reflection of one against dark water. She struggled to augment the image and remembered waves-small ripples over the surface of the water that broke the image of the standing trunk, as of something thrashing in the black depths near her. The thick smell of musk came to her in choking waves, and she knew it was the alligators again. And there was a man, some man....
'Wo.'" she cried harshly. "No, no, it hurts'." She twisted and fought, flailing her arms wildly.
She felt the tip of Tuesta's penis at her pussy mouth and thrashed her legs, rolling her hips and fighting hysterically to keep his invasion out.
"You gringa bitch!" he shouted, slapping her hard.
It didn't stop her. She kept on and on, finding strength and will from the depths of her memories to resist him, even when he was using all his strength to keep her down.
"Get back! Sit down!" Tuesta was shouting.
Joanne stopped struggling at the release of force, and she looked up, fearing that Ken was coming at Tuesta to be killed. But it was Wendy. She was peeling out of her blouse, revealing big, plump breasts. Grovebank whined for her to come back with him.
"Wendy, what are you doing! You're offering yourself to him!"
She looked at him with contempt. "I follow the winners, Bobby," she sneered. "Right now you're nothing but a fat, ugly dud. Mr. Tuesta has the power now, and he'll soon have your money. You're worth absolutely nothing to me right now."
"But you love me!"
She cackled viciously. "Shit!" she said. "Just shit! Go look in a mirror, you slob! I don't know how I stood your greasy pawing as long as I did!" She dismissed him when he began to whimper and smiled at Tuesta, making a proposition as obvious and old as her eyes. "Let her up, Martin. She doesn't want it. I do. I want you. I'll be yours completely now. You won't be sorry. I can fuck any way you want me to and love it." She stripped out of the rest of her clothes, revealing plump hips and thighs and meaty labia. She spread them for him with her fingers and showed him the red gash of her cunt. "It's tight in there, Martin. So tight you'll think I'm a virgin every time. But I know what I'm doing. I know how to make you squirt your cock like it was the first time for both of us every time. Let her up, and I'll show you."
Tuesta hesitated. He looked at the pale pubes, nearly invisible around her meat, and he licked his lips. She wasn't slim and frail but solid. She had the plumpness he could pound his hips against. And she was a gringa bitch that would put him in favor with Manolo when he shared her around in the guerilla camp with the others.
Joanne watched the subtle play of expressions over his face as if she could read the thoughts that produced them. She inched her way from under him hopefully.
"All right, stinking virgin-out! I'll see what kind of woman this is who approaches Martin! Tuesta so bravely."
He reached for Wendy, and they coupled immediately. The gun at Wendy's head didn't bother her. She wallowed under Tuesta and sucked his prick into her corpulent middle greedily, doing things inside her knowledgeable cunt that made him whine in startled passion and explode in her twice.
Joanne crawled back to Ken and felt his arms go about her with love. She cuddled against him and felt transported back in time to when her father had cuddled her this way. She closed her eyes and cried silently.
Winston Sharp strained to see through the gray-white vapor of thick clouds swirling past the windshield. He felt the vertical drafts of air that threatened to suck the plane into the mountains and blow it over the top at alternate moments. The clouds thinned for a moment, and he saw a dark shape loom frighteningly in front of him. He made an instinctive swerve to the right and pulled the nose up steeply, feeding power to the engines. He watched the hulk veer away from his window and felt sweat tickle his armpit.
It was no go. He couldn't fly through that. He'd have to go over it, oxygen or not. He circled back and gained altitude, trying to shake the increasing dizziness from his head. He couldn't understand what was happening to him. He'd been this high before-even higher-in the Hindu Kush. The Inca and the Quechua lived their lives at this altitude. Smythe spent three nights at twenty-seven thousand on Everest. Surely, he could stand twenty for a few minutes.
When the altimeter read eighteen thousand, the side of his head began to pound with streaks of pain. The area around the knotted bump began to throb. He felt a need to pant and gripped the wheel. He knew it was ridiculous. Had to get hold of himself. Had to make it. Had to show the longhair punk that he was still tougher by far, despite his age. Had to keep from going down.
At twenty thousand feet, he headed east again, knowing he would clear the range. The turbulence stopped. The cloud cover broke, and the sun blazed strongly at him from an indigo sky like a great white light from space. He locked in the autopilot with tingling fingers and then sat back. The whiteness engulfed him and slowly faded to blackness as perceptions drifted from his mind.
CHAPTER SIX
"Stupid bastard! Weak old man! Wake up, damn you, wake up!"
Tuesta was leaning over him slapping his face again and again, bringing fire to his cheeks. Sharp labored for breath and came swimming up out of the blackness to look into the enraged, twisted face and receive another stinging blow.
Something was different. He could hear the lack of beat in the engines. The air had a thickness in his lungs it hadn't before. He roused himself groggily and saw the altimeter at fourteen thousand and falling slowly. He glanced out his window and saw the propeller frozen motionless.
Tuesta was ranting at him, having run forward as soon as the engine sputtered to a halt. Sharp saw both fuel gauges registering empty and remembered that Rico hadn't gassed the plane. He swore at the surly punk and then at himself for not remembering to do it. The heavy, sinking knowledge that he had botched things to Hell weighted down on him and made him want to slide back into sleep. But Tuesta wouldn't let him go. And Clara was shouting and wrestling with Tuesta. From somewhere in the back of his mind came a heavy, clumping sound, as of a man running forward. Then Ken Bast was wrestling with Tuesta, cracking the Indian's wrist on the dashboard so that the pistol flew out of his hand. A few quick, hard punches and ... Bast was a good man-a good Md. One of the good ones. The layer of clouds below looked soft and fluffy, like an endless bed of cotton a man could stretch out on and sleep forever.
"Come on, Winston, wake up," Ken was saying. He looked over the controls, recognizing the functions of some of them, baffled by most of them. "You're going to have to fly it, skipper, it's too complicated for me. Come on, wake up."
Sharp clawed his way up again. The first few puffs were floating past them, and then they were in the cloud layer. His head cleared, and he took the wheel. He cut back power and cut out the automatic system and took it down below the clouds. The Basin was far below them, stretching out in' an unending ocean of green. To the north, he spotted a dark, meandering cut in the sea of jungle and headed for it.
"I'm all right now," he said to Ken. "Thanks."
"I've been waiting for the chance. You got something to tie him with?"
"In back-cargo rope. I'm heading for the river; it's our only chance."
"Do you know where we are?"
Sharp laughed without humor. "In the Amazon, friend, that's all I can tell you. I don't know where I came over or how long I was out. There aren't any landmarks, as you can see, except the river-and that could be one of a hundred. Doesn't matter anyway. There's no gas."
Joanne brought the rope up, and Tuesta moaned, coming to. "Stupid old man," he swore. "You screwed it all up."
Ken pulled tightly on the knots, surprised by how docile Tuesta was in defeat. "Yeah," he said. "You botched it too, Tuesta. Did you know your boys back in Miami got burned out? I wonder what they'd do to you down there if we could drop you into your camp. Think they'd give you a medal? A big red star?" He picked up the pistol from the floor and gave it to Clara. "Shoot him if he acts stupid again, Clara," he said.
Tuesta looked at her fearfully and saw the hatred in her eyes. She was a soft gringa bitch before. Why would she look at him like this now?
"Everybody get settled and hang on," Sharp said curtly. The engine coughed, caught, ran roughly, and stopped. They glided silently and fell, racing over the greenness for the river. "We hit in those trees, and we've had it," Sharp said tightly. "Might be three hundred feet up, depending on how many canopies there are. Might break through and might not. The tops are woven together with lianas like a basket. The plane will be torn to hell in any case."
Sweat beaded his forehead. He curved around until he was over the river and snaked along over it, hoping. They dipped below tree level just before a broad bend, and it was like sinking between the walls of a green canyon. He headed into the curve, trying not to slip too much and lose altitude. Another curve showed ahead of them, and the sandbar he'd been hoping for stuck out of the slow water like a brown spine.
"Hang on!" he shouted. He dipped quickly, then lifted, and the tail hit the water first. The belly flattened out slowly and gently the way he'd planned it and then bumped up onto the long bar. The plane slid sideways and rocked, one wing and then the other skipping off the surface of the water on either side. Then the plane spun lazily and shoved the left wing into the sand and mud ahead of them, plowing it up and crumpling like a big shock absorber. They all hung tightly to whatever they could grip until motion stopped. Then a thick, eerie silence fell around them.
"Darling, you did it," Clara said softly.
Sharp glanced at the look of love in her eyes and felt a piercing need to hold her. "We can't stay here," he said, struggling out of his seat. "By the time those rains come down the eastern slope, this bar will be ten feet under."
"How long will that be?" Ken asked.
"Maybe ten hours, depending how far into the Basin we are. That means we'll have to go inland a little way and spend the night there. We'll need all the daylight we have left. Who wants to take charge of this prick?" he asked, putting his toe into Tuesta's hip.
"I'll do it," Grovebank said with an unaccustomed snarl at Wendy.
Winston stuffed the gun into his belt and made his way toward the tail of the plane. Water gurgled around the edge of the door, which was wedged shut. Sharp heaved himself at it, then Ken did. It gave under Grovebank's bulk, and he tumbled out into the river with a cry of surprise. He stood in the water up to his waist and grinned foolishly. Then he helped the others along the slanted stairs and into the sluggish current to the sandbar. As he was pushing Tuesta ahead of him, Tuesta suddenly screamed and hopped around in the water.
"Get out of there fast!" Sharp yelled at them.
Grovebank waddled as fast as he could go, leaving Tuesta to make his own way the best he could. They watched him stumble onto the sand with his leg curled under him, sobbing boyishly with pain and fright.
"What happened to him?" Joanne cried.
Sharp spread Tuesta out and rolled his calf into view. There was a dollar-sized nip out of his pants and flesh that was clean enough to have been done with a razor. Winston wrapped the wound tightly with his handkerchief and watched the cloth turn bright red with blood.
"Piranhas," he said hollowly. "God damn it, I was afraid of this." He looked at the nearest shore, which was a good two hundred yards away and walled up with thick jungle growth. The other bank was farther, but a mud bank sloped into the rippling, shallow water.
"That's no good," Ken said, inspecting Tuesta's wound. "Grovebank, give me a couple of cigarettes."
"Let the son of a bitch bleed," Bobby III snarled with surprising viciousness. But he gave them to Ken and watched him strip the paper off and stuff the tobacco tightly into the wound. Tuesta howled with pain and cursed him. Alva came over and straddled his head, hiked her skirt up to her naked pussy, and watered his face copiously, making him sputter.
"That's what I think of you, Indio," she spat. She laughed crazily and looked at Wendy. "Go kiss your fucking lover now, fat pig!"
Grovebank laughed with Alva, and the two of them went under the nose of the plane in search of shade and privacy. Wendy watched them.
"What about me, Bobby?" she whimpered.
"Go to hell," he said.
"Aw, let her come," Alva said. "She has such soft lips, and my pretty pussy needs wiping." She hiked her skirt again and thrust her bush forward. "On your knees," she commanded.
Ken saw their shadows on the sand. He watched that of Wendy go down quickly. Arms came up and held Alva's buttocks. Face merged with pelvis, and the Peruvian's head tipped back with a moan. Then the water-filled form of Bobby got behind Wendy's broad ass, and the shadows coupled like a pair of dogs. Moans came from behind the plane while water swirled about its tail. He got up and went to where Sharp was assessing the best way to get across the river.
"That's the best I can do with Tuesta," he said. "The tobacco will act as an astringent and disinfectant. What now, Skipper?"
Winston nodded toward a cluster of alligator-like reptiles coming back to sun themselves on the bank now that the noise of the crash was over.
"We've got to wait for one of those caymen to get in the water," he said quietly, "then hope I can shoot straight. Wish to hell I could get back inside without getting my legs chewed up to the kneecaps."
They sat and waited. Joanne and Clara came up and stared at the reptilian beasts. Joanne shivered. They were smaller and lighter than Florida alligators, but that didn't lessen their effect on her.
"Water's coming up already," Winston said.
"Your foot's in it now."
He moved his wet shoe just as Joanne held his arm and pointed to a monkey swinging out over the water to look at them.
"Everybody quiet," Sharp said, holding his arm out. He moved around and bellied down on the sand, holding the pistol with both hands. One of the caymen saw a possible dinner and slid without a ripple into the slow current. It maneuvered under the drooping branch and opened its cavernous jaws, waiting. Sharp took careful aim at the long snout. The gun jumped in his hand, and there was an outburst of roaring and thrashing in the shallow water. The other caymen ran toward their wounded friend and began to devour him. In a moment, the water boiled with a new kind of savagery as it danced with snapping, silver fish, and the river ran red downstream.
"All right, run!" Sharp shouted.
The four took off hand in hand, splashing through the shallow water. They looked back to see Alva, Wendy, and Grovebank follow as fast as they could, Bobby holding his pants to his waist, his hard prick sticking out of the fly. Everybody made it onto the bank but Tuesta.
"We can't leave him there," Ken said. "Damn it, he could have run."
"He doesn't want to," Sharp said. "He's failed miserably, and he can't face it. He's a coward before himself. Bast-where the hell are you going!"
"I can't leave him. Not even him," Ken said, charging back through the water with long, high strides. Joanne watched it spray around him, and she remembered the way he'd run in her dream-like that. She felt her throat tighten with fear for his safety, and she knew if he couldn't leave Tuesta behind, then he could never leave her either.
"Ken, be careful!" she cried suddenly.
They watched him argue with Tuesta, knock him cold again, then heave the dead weight to his broad shoulders. The water was quiet downstream again, the silvery work done. Ken started out, and they could see the water was rising fast, licking hungrily around the wrecked plane now. They held their breaths until he walked up the bank and dropped Tuesta. Joanne ran to him and hugged him tightly.
"Ken, I love you," she sobbed. He hugged her and made fun of her tears.
Sharp put his hands on his hips and looked at the silver wreckage of his plane. Already, the current was tugging at the tail, making the body shift sideways. Clara stood by him and touched his arm.
"There it goes," he said. "My whole life. Everything I've sweated for and dreamed with. The only thing in the world that was mine."
Clara watched his face silently. He sighed heavily and shook his head with sadness.
"Well, hell, there's work to be done," he said finally. "We're not out of here by a long way. We must be closer to the slope than I figured, the way the water's coming up. Maybe we're not far from Tuesta's buddies." He prodded the awakening form with his toe. "Would you like that, punk? Would you like us to take you in all bundled up and with a hole in your leg? Come on, fella, smile. Your life's just beginning. Yours and mine both. We're on equal footing again; shall we see who gets built back first?"
He flung his arm around Clara and laughed with an odd sound. "You're not on equal footing, darling," she said, smiling radiantly at him. "You have me to help you."
"I like the sound of that, Clara," he said. "I think I like the sound of that just fine." He hugged her briefly. "But we've got a raft to build. This river's the only road we have out of here. It has to lead into the Amazon some place-probably the Maranon first. We'll certainly get to Iquitos. But there will be villages and trading posts and guardia stations before then. The big problem is making the raft. What kinds of tools do we have?"
"Looks like three pocket knives is it, Skipper," Ken said. He looked at the tall, thick trees reaching toward the sky. "I don't relish carving down one of those babies."
"Here's a sharp rock," Alva offered, digging it out of the mud.
"I'm getting hungry," Wendy said. "What about food?"
Tuesta laughed bitterly from where he sat in the mud. "You should have stayed on the sandbar with me, hero man. You'll never make it through this stinking jungle. You are all brave wind and lightning with no storm behind them." He laughed again, slapping his heel in the mud like an idiot, slopping it all over himself.
"I'll make it, Tuesta," Sharp said. "One way or another, I'll make it out of here, because I don't quit like you when it gets a little rough. If Ken wants to carry you with us, that's his business. I sure as hell won't." He turned to the others. "Let's scout around for a fallen log. Maybe we can burn it out and lash an outrigger to it. We've got all the rope we need with these lianas. Maybe there's a stand of bamboo just inside or a balsa tree. Hell, we're not licked by a long way. Come on, let's fan out and take stock."
"Winston," Clara said breathlessly, stopping him. "Winston, look."
She stared into the jungle, and he followed her gaze. Three painted bodies stood there with spears, watching them silently. Four others filtered out of the dense foliage. One carried a twelve-foot blowgun and a small quiver. A pouch of kapok was around his waist for the darts. Their bodies were red-gold and painted with bold red and blue paint. They wore strings of cayman teeth around their necks, and each had a stylized figure of a belligerent cayman painted on his chest in green, the jaws agape, the tail poised for a vicious blow.
"There you are, Tuesta," Sharp said in a low voice. "There are your Caymanos. Looks like we landed pretty close to where you wanted us to after all, doesn't it?"
Tuesta looked startled. He cowered from the Indians at first, but on having them identified for him by Sharp, he began to grin. Then he laughed. Then he crowed mercilessly and stood up, hobbling up the bank toward them, jabbering in Spanish, grinning slickly, gesturing toward Sharp and Ken with faces designed to cast aspersion on them. He fell to his knees in the mud and struggled up again, laughing like a maniac.
The Caymano with the blowgun had twisted a fluffy ball of kapok around the end of a dart and removed the palm leaf covering from around the tip. The bamboo was stained dark brown. He placed the dart in the tube, raised it and propelled the sliver with a puff of breath across the hundred yards separating them.
Tuesta clapped his hand to his shoulder. The barbed sliver broke off as quickly as his laughter. He stared around dumbly at Sharp.
"So long, buddy," Winston said.
Tuesta stumbled to his knees again. He looked back at the Indians in startled terror. "Why, Sharp, why?" he cried.
"I guess your buddies got too pushy. I guess because they don't want your kind bothering them any more. Can you feel it yet? They say you don't until the spasms hit."
"Winston-oh, God, what's happened?" Clara silently cried, clutching him tightly.
"Curare, Clara."
"Do something!"
"He's already had it." He squeezed her tightly. "Don't look frightened," he said, meaning all of them. "I don't think they're after us, because we're white. We're not their enemies today, but Tuesta is."
Tuesta sprawled on the ground. His arms gave way from under him, and his legs flopped. His mouth fell open, and he labored for breath. In a moment, he was relaxed to death, and his eyes stared sightlessly.
"Oh, God!" Joanne cried, turning her head away.
"Look at him!" Sharp commanded. "Smile! Show them you're glad he's dead! The piss is running down my legs too, damn it, but smile anyway!"
The Indians advanced. The group held its ground and watched them. One of the Indians picked up Tuesta's body, spat on it, and threw it into the river, swirling, now, higher up the bank. The body floated downstream a way in the growing current and then disappeared in a froth of boiling red water and silver flashes. In five minutes, his white bones were rolling along the bottom of the river toward the sea, joining countless others of man and animal fallen victim to the slashing teeth.
One of the Indians spoke. It was a curious sound, almost entirely without consonants. Winston spoke back. The Indians looked at each other, and their faces took on an amused look. They all jabbered at once and made motions with their spears for the group to go into the jungle.
"What the hell'd you say?" Ken asked.
"I demanded to see their chief," he grinned, seeing the Hollywood aspects of it. "I knew some Jivaro a long time ago I learned from a guy who worked for a pharmaceutical company. I flew him upriver in a Catalina. He was looking for the components of curare for medicinal use and some other stuff. I've damn near forgotten it all."
"Did they understand Jivaro?"
Winston shrugged. "I think they recognized the tongue. If what Tuesta said back on the plane is true, there should be one of them in their village who understands it. These Caymanos have never welcomed outsidersless than the Jivaro, even. All I know about them is that they worship caymen."
"Do you think they shrink heads too?"
"I don't know, friend. I hope not." He spoke to Alva. "For Christ's sake, don't talk Spanish to them. You saw what it got Tuesta."
They were led through the jungle at a rapid pace. They twisted around monstrous trees, climbed a fair-sized hill, then descended into a low area where everything was different. Giant trees towered above them. In places, they could see two and three canopies arching high overhead. There was a shaded gloom in the jungle that was slightly yellow-green in hue and emotionally warm, despite the lack of sunshine.
The walking was fairly easy because of a partial lack of undergrowth. What didn't reach the sun died or didn't grow, and Joanne could see that the only direction of struggle was up-ever up-to reach it.
She felt awed by the majesty and timelessness of the jungle. In spite of her immediate fear of the Indians, she could notice the monkeys that followed overhead and chattered at them. Bright macaws flashed by in flight, displaying plumage of strident greens and reds and yellows. A group of toucans flew off with a raucous sound and then stopped to eye their passing from behind monstrous, multicolored bills.
A tapir crashed away from the column in fright and stirred up a fawn-spotted animal, which hid under a huge leaf with magenta veins. A giant butterfly, pale blue and gold and easily seven inches across, dipped and lifted into the cool, verdant heights. When she looked up, Joanne saw airplants of breathtaking delicacy spilling their feathery tendrils from the crotches of tree limbs. Orchid vines looped in flowering strands like blossomed webs.
The jungle was quiet and yet full of sound. There were buzzes and rustles and whistles, all punctuated with raucous cries and melodious songs. It seemed stagnant, but she could feel it surging with living power just the way Alva had described it. Even the silent leaves under her feet weren't still. In a short time, they would change to food for the trees and give form to more leaves in the timeless recycling of life. Joanne felt the endless power of the jungle infuse her body with strength and desire, and she remembered other times in the Everglades long ago.
She watched the Indians ahead of them. Their backs and naked buttocks were painted in a way that seemed free and spirited, rather than war-like. She saw the free, healthy swing of genitals between their rippling thighs, and she had an overwhelming desire to strip naked and run through the jungle with Ken the way she had in her dream.
They came to a steep bank and followed along its rocky edge. A crystal stream gurgled beneath them and formed a clear pool at the bottom of a hill. There was a small clearing with a circular group of thatched huts. The Indians led them to the center of the clearing, where the villagers stopped the busy work they were doing and looked at them.
The first thing Joanne noticed was how beautiful the people were. Their faces were round and open, and their eyes sparkled with an inner joy. The men were naked and slender, with good builds and shiny hair styled long. The women were surprisingly narrow waisted, with smooth hips and high, tilted breasts. They too were naked, and their bodies gleamed with a vibrant, golden hue. They crowded around the group with curiosity, laughing and pointing in a friendly way. Their pubic hair was sparse, concealing their soft labia less than heightening the beauty of their shapely bodies.
One of the warriors motioned for Winston to go into a hut that was decorated with scarlet feathers. While he was gone, one of the young girls brought a bowl of something for the group to drink.
"Everybody take some," Alva said. "To refuse would be bad manners."
The drink had a sweet taste, something like citrus, and there was a mild alcoholic warmth to it. Joanne noticed one of the girls eyeing Ken, and she pointed her out to him.
"You have an admirer, darling," she said. "I think I'm jealous."
Ken flustered a little. "She's really pretty, isn't she?"
"Mmm," Alva said boldly. "I would suck that gorgeous pussy for her. Look how soft, how tempting it is. I wonder if they do that here."
"You don't need to do any more of that stuff," Grovebank said sternly.
Alva laughed in her throat with a challenging sound. "The big man comes of age at last," she taunted. But she looked at him oddly and licked her lips.
"Bobby, what about me?" Wendy asked. "Don't you love me any more?"
He looked at her with total disdain and said nothing.
After some time, Winston came out of the hut. He was accompanied by an extremely handsome Indian who wore nothing but a string of cayman teeth around his neck, centered by a marble-sized emerald. Even uncut, the gem caught the sunlight and fired it back at them in a dazzling display of soft color.
"Look at that hunk of rock!" Wendy exclaimed, her eyes glittering.
"To hell with the rock," Alva said. "Look at the man wearing it. Mmm, I would like to take him home to my father. He makes my pussy swell."
"What's up, Skipper?" Ken asked. "Do we go into the pot for dinner?"
"Not a bit. It seems they're in the midst of a celebration. It took a while to get over the language problem, but from what I can tell, the Indians Tuesta's buddies were trying to indoctrinate got fed up and butchered the whole lot of them. The tribes went back into the jungle feeling humbled for not having listened to their witches."
"Their what?"
"Medicine men. The old boy's in there now having visions. The chief here, his name is Yambiki, said Umpati saw us coming through the sky on silver wings-in his mind, I mean. But he was confused. We were good and bad at the same time. So he sent soire of his men out to find us and kill the bad spirit. That was Tuesta. I assured him that Tuesta was a very bad spirit, and that we were glad he was dead. I told Yambiki we wanted to leave them in peace, and he promised us a canoe tomorrow." He shuffled his boots. "I might have overdone the good spirit a little, Joanne, and gotten you in a bind. Sorry about it."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
Sharp hedged around a minute and then came out with it. "Well, I played up your virginity to them to assure them we were all good spirits. Umpati took another drink from the soul vine and hallucinated some more to see what all that meant."
"The what?"
"It's a variety of liana. The juice in it contains a hallucinogen. Lots of witches use it to see things with."
"Winston, tell me," Joanne said impatiently.
Sharp sighed heavily. "We're going to have an orgy tonight," he said bluntly, "and you're to be the star attraction. I tried to get out of it, but they started getting hostile. If we came and went without protection from the cayman spirit, we would die on the river and bring death to the village. It's their custom, and we're stuck with it. I'm sorry."
"Oh, God," Joanne whispered softly. "What's going to happen to me?"
"The old boy gets the honors. Sorry, Ken."
"Can't we run off somewhere?"
Sharp laughed humorlessly. "Impossible." He turned to Clara. "Honey, I don't want you to fight this, but Yambiki has chosen you." He smiled wanly. "You might as well enjoy it while you have the chance."
Her eyes appraised the handsome, youthful body. "All right, Winston," she said. Her eyes danced. "Would you be angry if I enjoyed myself thoroughly?" She colored slightly. "He is a beautiful man."
"You go right ahead, because the rest of us will be enjoying ourselves, too. Ken, you're already tagged by that bashful one giving you the eye."
"Who do I get?" Alva asked, licking her lips.
Winston tipped his hat back. "You get the snake treatment."
"Aiee," she gasped. "The snake! Ah-my God! Yes! My pussy is twitching for it already!" She cupped her hand over her crotch and let her eyes smoulder with lust.
"Bob, you get the widow and her daughter over there, and Wendy has to take on two of the warriors." He laughed slightly. "That's because there's so much of you to go around."
A runner came out of the hut and said something to Yambiki. He grinned hugely and spoke to Winston, then to the villagers. They laughed and cheered and went busily back to work getting the celebration ready.
"What's that?" Ken asked.
"Umpati's impatient," Sharp said. He looked at Joanne warmly. "I can't say that I blame him."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Torches of resinous wood lit up the village clearing against the darkness of night and gave off a perfumed fragrance. Birds called through the trees as if questioning the interruption of their sleep. The sumptuous feasting and drinking of the celebration was over. The jokes had been told, the trinkets traded, and the dances of erotic openness had been danced.
Joanne now lay in the center of the clearing, her wrists and ankles loosely tied to stakes in the ground. Her head was light from some kind of drink, and she could look around the circle of faces and laugh without embarrassment.
They were happy faces, faces with love in them. It didn't seem to matter to her any more that she was nude. Her breasts hummed with a buzzing tingle. Her thighs yearned to enfold Ken between them. She saw him sitting in the circle with the others, his body broad-shouldered and lean, his penis spearing from his lap from the affection being given it by the lovely girl beside him. She could see him playing with her breasts and making her laugh.
She looked down the length of her body and saw the scarlet petals of the flower covering her pussy. Its stem was up inside her, slowly leaking a kind of sap that made her tissues tremble with need. It was the ornamental flower the women wore for ceremonies, and its power made her writhe with impatience and longing to be fucked.
There was nothing holding her back this time. She had no fears. All inhibitions had been cleared from her mind by the gentle jungle drugs and the erotic sights about her. She could feel her vaginal walls contracting tightly about the flower's stem as if she were too impatient to wait. She closed her eyes and moaned with sizzling passion, waiting for Umpati to make an appearance. If he was as beautiful as Yambiki, she knew she would devour him with her ready cunt.
Alva had already been first. The sight of the fangless snake writhing into Alva's pussy had nearly driven her to orgasm. The Peruvian had seemed to go mad with delight, rolling and twisting, her hands wrapping around the wide, solid body of the snake and pushing it deeper into her shaking cunt. There was no counting how many times Alva had come. She seemed to be writhing under the effects of one continual orgasm, sustained for an impossibly long time. She'd been carried into one of the huts by a man and a woman, hungry for more delights.
Then Yambiki had shown his prowess as chief, working Clara up to an incredible pitch before sliding his shaft into her auburn-matted slit and making her cry out with joy again and again.
Winston had watched and then taken his nubile girl with astonishing virility, matching Clara's orgasms with his own in a kind of parallel contest to see which of them could outlast the other. At the last, they had held hands and smiled into each other's eyes and come one more time under the expert, freespirited sensuality of their partners.
The villagers had fondled each other and not bothered to go into privacy but, rather, fucked where they sat, where they lay, where they stood. Sex was not a mystery to them, not a thing to hide or be ashamed of. Joanne saw that their enjoyment of each other's bodies did not imply a lasting commitment, the way her mother had taught her. Envy, as well as desire, swelled inside her and made her pussy run. Once, she had tried to finger herself off in desperation, but one of the women stopped her with a smile, pointing to her golden pussy and saying, "Umpati, Umpati," in indication that her passion was to be expended on the witch.
Joanne heard a small commotion and knew that her time had finally come. She writhed against her bonds with impatience, straining to get a glimpse of the powerful medicine man.
Umpati leaped into the cleared space with a roar. He held his legs braced apart in a crouch and hissed harshly. Joanne stared at the image before her and nearly passed out with terror. Her mouth worked, but she couldn't utter a sound.
Umpati was covered with the green-brown hide of a cayman. His head showed from the depths of the gaping, jagged-toothed jaws. His arms and legs were inside the scaly skin, and the claws on the ends gleamed in the night. He switched his hips and made the heavy, plated tail thrash back and forth with deadly realism. He hissed again and dropped to all fours and approached Joanne with the unforgettable crocodilian waddle.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to break loose and flee into the night and let the jungle swallow her up. But her bonds were tight, and all she could do was writhe before Umpati's advance as if she were in the height of passion.
She tried to make her mind go blank so that she wouldn't have to suffer the reptilian fate coming toward her, but it wouldn't obey her will. Whatever they had given her to drink only heightened the realism of the moment and made her acutely aware of it all.
Umpati circled her body, hissing and grunting, digging the cayman claws into the ground, swishing the heavy tail. Someone had thrown something into the fire, and the air was suddenly filled with musk. She lay there petrified with an astonishing mixture of fear and desire and watched Umpati draw closer. The scales on his back shone. The rows of three-inch teeth gleamed. If she had closed her eyes, his sounds would have convinced her that a live saurian beast was only inches from her body.
She felt the leathery snout caress her side, and her throat choked with a silent scream. She saw the head inside clearly for the first time and was stunned by the beauty of the old man's face inside the hideous jaws.
A claw scraped gently over her belly. The underside of the snout brushed over her breasts and slithered down her stomach. Somehow, the jaws hovered over her pussy, tilted sideways, and plucked the flower out of her cunt. She could feel the stem withdrawing from inside her, and she whimpered with the ecstatic sensation it caused her. She rolled sideways, not wanting to but unable to help herself. She felt the leathery weight covering her body, and she heard the hypnotic hisses that were beginning to fog her mind.
Shamelessly, her hips rose up, and her being cried out for penetration by the beast over her. She felt its penis slide wetly along her spread thighs. She felt it touch the lips of her burning cunt and go between them. She felt the long, reptilian slide of cock into her body, and a brilliance unknown to her before flared in her mind.
She screamed throatily as her virginity burst. The sound erupted from her throat as the prick broke into her body. And with the explosion of sound, as with the injection of life, all the dark images from her past burst forth in a spray of colors. Her hips rose to meet and accept the most horrifying invasion she could ever dream. Musk and hisses filled her senses and caused the spray of colors in her mind to etch the scenery there as it had been so many years ago.
It was all plainly before her now. The answers were there, ruptured up into her consciousness as they had been stamped there as a girl, no longer hiding in the dark depths of her memory.
She saw the cypress swamps. She remembered crouching with her father to watch a pair of alligators court and hiss. She could see the long, pointed spear of the bull's cock thrust into the cow's vagina. She remembered a sound behind her, a choked off cry of surprise and pain before her little body was thrust into the mud, face down. Her panties were torn from her butt while the alligators fucked in silent rapture. Brutal hands pushed her face into the odorous marl, nearly choking off her breath forever. A giant, hard, slippery-knobbed cock had forced its way between the tender globes of her cheeks and burned into the depths of her ass.
She had screamed for her father, over and over, and when he didn't answer, the terrible conviction came to her that he was the one causing her such pain. His cock tore back and forth in her tight, child's anus and then exploded there, driving her hips painfully into the swampy dankness. Warm fluid had rushed into her body as he ground down and flattened her tiny cheeks and filled her mind to bursting with pain. She remembered the alligators bellowing and roaring and thrashing about in the black water with the disturbance, shattering the reflected calm of the cypress trees.
Then there had been darkness and pain. Her father shaking her shoulder, telling her to wake up, it was time to go home. She remembered looking at him and seeing his red face and thinking that he was mean for hurting her so-thinking how she was going to tell her mother what he had done to her.
Everything came back to Joanne as if it were all happening again at this moment, only now there was a difference. Now she knew the truth. She realized now that her father had not left but that he'd been accused by her and had fled from her mother's rage.
It was the cry she had forgotten-the one uttered by her good, kind father when he'd been hit on the head by the other man, the one unseen, who plagued her dreams.
Her hips rose upward again and again, deriving pleasure from the pain of Umpati's prick, as if it were a stick he was wielding to castigate her with for all the years of being wrong.
"Daddy!" she cried. "I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry!"
The bonds at her wrists worked loose, and she threw her arms around the plated back and hugged the cayman to her with delirious joy. She rocked upward and exploded in a violent burst of emotion, propelling herself from the depths of her remorse and guilt toward the sun, reaching for its beauty like a flowering vine, twisting through the jungle of her dark fears and barriers to tower above them.
She felt Umpati's seed burst into her womb to implant the freedom of his spirit there, and she came again. He lay on her a moment while the onlookers were silent, then slowly withdrew. He stood in the light with his cock spearing from the belly of the hide. The thin pinkness of her purity was plainly on it. He raised his claw-tipped arms and hissed and roared. He danced around in a circle and then toppled over. He thrashed on his belly and then rolled over onto his side with a dying growl. The onlookers cheered and began a wild spree of carnal delight. Ken rushed up to Joanne and knelt over her.
"Honey-oh, God, Joanne, are you all right? Darling-oh, I'm so sorry for you!"
"Ken," she cried. "Ken, I love you! It all came back to me, darling, all of it! Oh, God-don't leave me! Don't let me leave you ever again! I'm well-I'm cured! For God's sake, Ken, fuck me!"
She pulled hard at him, astounded by the strength her passion had given her. She spread her thighs wide and cupped his loins. She guided his cock into her crotch and moaned with unabashed bliss. Ken hesitated, not understanding quite what had happened, then didn't care. He was in her at last. She was giving herself to him at last-with love.
They shuddered together in one dizzying burst of love after another. She pumped up and down under him and drew his source of life deeply into her vibrant tunnel. She felt his seed pour into her, and she tipped back to drink it up, sobbing with happiness for the first time in too many wasted years.
"Oh, you sweet angel, Joanne," Clara said softly. She knelt beside her and rocked her back and forth. "Oh, I thought he was killing you, the way you screamed."
"Clara-Clara, he gave me life! Now I can be a woman!"
"I'm happy for you, darling-so happy."
Joanne looked into Winston's happy face and watched him gently hug Clara. "You stole the show, Honey," Winston said. "The old man fell down and thrashed around better than he ever had before, showing everybody how strong your good spirit was. It knocked the old cayman devil for a loop, and they're still going crazy."
Joanne lifted her head and looked around. The villagers were still coupled everywhere. "Where are the others?" she asked.
"Wendy's over in Yambiki's hut. She's proved herself quite a fucker. I don't know-I think she's trying to make a play for the chief. She likes that rock around his neck, you know. He seems to like her plump body and blonde hair for a change. She might not be going with us in the morning. I heard her and Bob talking over some of their problems. He's finished with her. Giving Alva pure hell, too."
"He's what?" Joanne laughed.
Sharp scratched his head and winked at Ken. "I don't know-something's gotten into him. It's as if he became a man or something. He's bossing Alva around, shoving her down, spanking her-she seems to like it."
"She would," Joanne said, thinking back to a night that seemed long ago.
Ken touched her arm. "Honey, tell me something. What Alva was saying on the plane-did you and she ... do anything together?"
Joanne couldn't help but glance at Clara. The blue eyes twinkled with merriment, and her smile was warm.
"Yes," Joanne admitted. "Does that bother you now?"
"Of course not," Clara burst in. "Ken's a big boy and he understands, don't you, Ken?"
Ken looked blank for a moment under her gaze, then broke into a slow, happy smile. "Sure," he said, keeping his eyes on Clara. "Of course I understand. You had to find yourself. Is that right, Clara?"
She laughed warmly. "Joanne, you'd better marry this big kid or I'll do it myself."
"Hey, what about me?" Sharp said.
"You can marry Joanne. In fact, I think we ought to see how that might work out while the night's still young." She moved smoothly over to Ken and took his youthful prick in her hand, looking warmly into his eyes. "Oh, aren't I just terrible, Joanne? I told you they'd better watch out for us."
Joanne cupped Winston's hard-soft face in her hand. "Clara, you're like a twenty-year-old nympho again," she said. She lay back, pulling him with her. She smiled at Ken and watched his prick slide smoothly into Clara's body. "Well, come on, Skipper. Aren't you going to fuck the bride? It's an old jungle custom I've just discovered."
Winston smiled and covered her. She closed her eyes and felt his penis fill her body. She reached out and clutched Ken's hand tightly, gripping it as she soared with him into a new world of life.