Morikand Jones was conceived one night in a gravel gondola on the old Celestial Railroad some three miles outside of Paradise. Sagittarius was in the ninth house, and the moon was skewered on the point of his drawn arrow like a big bright onion on a spit. Morikand's father was an albino Negro, a descendant of the mating of an 18th Century wench and a lost time-traveler from the 22nd Century, who incidentally was a descendant of Morikand. And his mother was a flat-chested lass for whom 45 inches of silicone had been as good as a new life. It all happened in the marshy wilds of Florida... if it happened at all. Maybe it was all an illusion, a swamp gas trip. But Maria will swear she was raped by the best equipped monster in the history of lust, and Uncle Farley will swear he spent his last dollar for a double-jointed piece of the monster's sister, and R. John Smythe will swear that he ran into Morikand himself shortly after World War III, huddled in a shell-hole with a girl named Slit. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.
The night being warm, Cynthia had removed her shirt a few miles back and tied it around her waist. Though the moon was at her back, its beams lent a pervading luminosity to the sheets of mist which rose out of the shallow marshes on either side of the tracks. In spite of their massiveness - Cynthia's bra size by this time stood at a staggering forty-five double-D, an astonishing measurement on any woman, but on Cynthia's lithe five-five frame, absolutely mind-blowing (her waist, if I remember correctly, measured twenty-three inches, her hips a trim thirty-five) - but in spite of their massiveness, I say, these titanic tits of hers swung high and proud, constantly abounce with an elastic resilience that was hard to believe even when you saw it with your own eyes. Even now, at twenty-seven, her nipples were cherry-pink and jutted out like diminutive phalli. But let me quote from Morikand's Confessions on this point - or points, should I say?
"Mix just a drop of slightly thinned flake white with a brushful of alizarin crimson on a sheet of manila paper, and you will have a very close approximation of the color of my mother's nipples. They were deepest in tone at the centres and at the circumferences of the aerolae, the intervening flesh being paler by several shades, so that viewed head-on in the proper light, they reminded me somewhat of the little targets that came with an archery set that was given me one Christmas...
"The diameter of the right areola always measured two inches even, but the left had a way of fluctuating from day to day, under what influences I could not discover, between two (or a hair under) and two and one-eighth inches. As for the nipples themselves, while both measured exactly three-eighths of an inch in diameter as well as length on the soft, as we say, their erectility was so great that when my mother was aroused they could easily attain a thickness of half an inch, a full five-eighths inches of shadow-casting length, and the rigidity of a tuning fork."
So it was with these terrific tits pitching and plunging on before her, bare as the night, for she had left the house without a bra, that Cynthia proceeded northward up the tracks, sometimes walking the ties, sometimes a rail, as she used to do as a child in the little riverbottom town in Kentucky where she was born. At first she had kept her eyes on the North Star, which stood two and a half fists above the vanishing point of the rails, her sneaker-shod feet going surely and smoothly along the corroding steel, or striding over the ancient ties, three at a pace; but after taking her shirt off she began to look down at her tits more than up at the star, as if contemplating their rise and fall, their force and mass. Perhaps she was thinking of how they had changed her life, of the strange places and situations into which they had led her during the last six months - the wild world of animal sensuality that lay just behind the monotonous facade of everyday life. Not that it matters what was in her mind - no more than it matters what the albino was thinking, if anything, as he trudged along. The important thing is that he was walking south, and she was walking north, and that their respective speeds were precisely such as would bring them together beside the solitary gravel gondola which stood rooted with rust to the weed-hidden rails of a short spur which lay west of the main track. Of course if Cynthia had been watching where she was going instead of looking down at her tits, she would have seen the albino much sooner than she did, but Morikand records this conversation with her:
" 'Even if I had seen him long before,' she told me, 'I would not have run away. I would not have left the tracks. I would have gone on, and we would have met just the same.' I asked my mother if she would have put her shirt on had she seen the creature in time, and she said 'No' without the slightest hesitation.' "
The whole encounter has for me a sort of disjointed irrationality of it - an unnaturalness from beginning to end, but particulary at this moment of confrontation. Put yourself in the albino's place, for instance, and imagine the effect Cynthia would have had on you as she materialized out of the silent mist of the marsh, wearing nothing but sneakers and a pair of skin-tight jeans, her huge, dark-eyed, luminous tits looming up before you, her long blonde hair, beaded with dew and moonlight, flowing heavily over her shoulders... What would you have done? And even more to the point, put yourself in Cynthia's place as she looked up suddenly and found herself face to face with that froglike apparition, his browless bugeyes glowing in the dark like some deep-sea toadfish, peering up at her out of the huge sleeveless overcoat that he wore in all weathers, his wild stand of reddish frizz bristling above its turned-up collar like a demonic halo, his pale, spindly arms dangling limp from its ragged armholes, his spidery fingers spread like the talons of a dead hawk ...
What would you have said - assuming you were able to speak at all?
Whatever your answers might be to these questions, I think I'm safe in assuming that they would not conform to what actually took place.
"Are you a Negro?" asked Cynthia.
"Yes," said the albino. "Technically." His voice was brittle and without a trace of an accent. "Does it matter?"
"No," she replied absently, lowering her eyes and glancing around. "The ground is too hard, and there's nothing out there but water."
"In the gondola," said the albino without turning his head, "there's a patch of Timothy hay."
"All right."
And together they turned and walked to the gondola. With an upturned birch-twig hand, the albino indicated the ladder, made a slight bow, and said, "Madam."
"Thank you," replied Cynthia, mounting the rungs. When she was over the top, the albino scrambled up the ladder, sailed over the side like a huge potbellied bat, his battered greatcoat spreading black against the sky, and landed lightly beside her on the rocky turf.
The gondola had been only half emptied of its load of gravel, and over the years the beggar weeds and Timothy grass had gradually built a thin carpet of mulch over the rocks. There were even a few saplings of Australian pine growing at the top of a little hill which rose up against the north wall of the car. It was at the foot of this little hill that the albino now spread his greatcoat.
"Do you prefer any particular position?" he asked as he unknotted the rope that held up his baggy tweed trousers.
"Whatever you like."
"I'll get on the bottom, then."
"All right." Cynthia opened her jeans and peeled them off, rolled them up and placed them neatly upon her sneakers. She wore no panties.
The albino, his white, sleeveless and collarless shirt still buttoned tightly over his paunch, sat down on his coat and leaned back against the miniature hillock, his knob-kneed legs stretched out before him, and his ghostly, goat-like cock pointing straight up at Vega, which was just then about to attain its upper culmination. Cynthia stood before him for a moment with the moon balanced on her right shoulder and her legs slightly spread to bear the weight. Morikand, in his extraordinary psychic perception, says that "She looked like a female Atlas bearing the aethereal weight of the antiworld, or like Diana of the Hundred Teats delivering the Moon to Hades." Then she stepped forward and straddled the albino's narrow hips, "her hair ablaze with moonfire. Her maidenhair bristled up and down the deep-cleft ridge of her cunt like a spearhead of bronze wool burnished to a dark green lustre, and she lowered it with the ease and precision of Destiny to the running sore at the head of the bloated glowworm that swayed stiffly like a charmed cobra at the crotch of the toadman."
And so Cynthia opened the mouth of her cunt, which with a sizzling slurp spindled itself on the albino's cock, and the frogs and the crickets and the moon and even the bog mist pulsed in time to the wheezing rhythm of their copulation.
As to how this came to be ...
CHAPTER TWO
It would be out of the question, of course, to start at the beginning, since a circle has none, so I'll just jump in at random and hope that it will all come out in the end.
About a year before the event in the gravel gondola - this isn't a beginning, but it is sort of a trigger which set the final chain of events in motion-about a year before that, I say, Cynthia's husband Harry Jones and my Uncle Farley Smollet discovered a wonderful way to spice up the everyday routine - although at first my Uncle Farley got the shitty end of the stick.
At that time, Harry and Uncle Farley had been business partners in Jones and Smollet, Land Surveyors, for about six months. What with all the development going on then in Uranus and thereabouts, they thought that by opening an office in the area they could clean up; but it hadn't exactly worked out that way. The larger companies in West Sago and Fort Pierce either underbid them, or else forced them to bid so low that they hardly broke even on the jobs they got. But now they had finally managed to land a big one - a Government contract for a complete boundary and topography survey of the proposed Dickson John State Park. It promised to pay a lot of bills, and they were anxious to get started.
The trouble was that business had been so bad during the previous month that they had been forced to get rid of most of their help. The only two employees left were Ronnie, the rodman, and Maria, the office girl. Maria, a young, full-breasted thing with beautiful dark eyes, served as both draftsman and receptionist, and Harry and Uncle Farley took turns running the field crew - which consisted of Ronnie. It was usually Uncle Farley, though, who got stuck with the field work; he was the junior partner. Cynthia herself completed the present staff; she came in several days a week to take care of the bookkeeping and the payroll. As a rule she worked on Tuesdays and Friday, but one time, as we'll see later on, she came in on a Wednesday, and that's what really started things popping.
But now, on the very day when they wanted to get busy on the big boundary job, who should call in sick but Ronnie, the field crew.
"Balls!" said my Uncle Farley as he hung up the phone. "Pardon my Bulgarian, Maria." Maria gave him a coy smirk over the top of her drafting table. "Hey, Harry, the kid's not coming in today."
Harry stepped out of the front office and leaned against the wall, cocking his head just enough to sneak a glance at Maria's legs around the corner of the flat files. She had her knees turned sideways under the table and slightly parted, giving him a good view up her short skirt. A lacy pink crotch peeked out from between her pretty thighs. When she looked up and caught him, Harry shifted his gaze, rubbed his nose, and said, "Well, Maria, I guess you'll have to run the rod for us today."
He was joking, of course - back then a woman on a survey party was unthinkable - but when Maria said, "Oh, I'd love to!" both Harry and my Uncle Farley knew that she was serious.
Maria looked from Harry to Uncle Farley, and Harry looked from Uncle Farley to Maria, and Uncle Farley looked from Maria to Harry, and each time Maria looked at Harry her face lit up in a most eager and radiant way. It's my thought that all along, the chick had had her sights set on Harry, even though he was married and Uncle Farley was not. Of course some girls just naturally have the hots for married men, but in this case I don't think that had anything to do with it. For one thing, Uncle Farley was always trying to put the make on her, in his rather crude way, while Harry always seemed sort of aloof and preoccupied, above such things, and so he may have been a challenge to her. The truth is that Harry was a bit on the timid side, a carry-over from an unsuccessful childhood. But mainly, in my opinion, it was a matter of appearances. To put it plainly, Harry was good-looking, and my uncle was not, particularly.
They were a curious pair, Jones and Smollet. Harry had begun life as a fat boy, but had since slimmed down and hardened up in a most extraordinary way, while Uncle Farley had been a lean, mean track star in his school days, but had in the interim become increasingly portly, and each year found his pace a little slower than the one before. Similarly, Harry used to have very thin hair, and everyone said that he would be bald when he reached twenty-five, but at the age of thirty he had one of the thickest, reddest, waviest shocks to be found anywhere. Conversely, my uncle's school pictures bear witness to the Samson-like fertility of his scalp, his heavy, jet-black mop flowing wild in the wind as he clears a hurdle or sails gracefully down toward the sawdust; while now, though he was only twenty-seven, his hair had thinned pitifully and was retreating rapidly from his temples, so that you could see the lumpiness of his foreskull, which did not go well with the droopiness of his jowls. (I might mention in passing that it is the fact that my uncle had dark hair that has given rise to the rumor that he may have been the father of Morikand Jones; hopefully, one side effect of this book will be to dispel that absurd notion.)
Anyway, on this particular morning, Maria's eager radiance was not altogether lost on Harry. Maybe it was because some of the money worries were off his back, what with the new contract and the possibility of getting others like it in the future, but that seems inadequate to explain Harry's change of attitude. It seems to me that, rather than being the effect of some immediate or underlying cause, this was an outward manifestation of an inward shift of Harry's character - a sudden and predestined phenomenon. Among matters pertaining to Morikand's existence, his past, present and future, everywhere one looks one finds these inexplicable, rootless phenomena, scattered at random like dragons' teeth throughout the debris of his history and prehistory.
After a moment or two of gaze-shifting, Harry grinned - a rarity in itself - and said, "I think she's serious, Farley."
"Sure I am!" said Maria, sliding off her stool and showing a great deal of smooth, olive-skinned thigh in the process. "I can do anything Johnny can do."
"More, I'll bet!" my Uncle Farley put in enthusiastically.
"I can stack a rod and pull a chain and set up the instrument and everything. It's too nice a day to be cooped up in this office. Anyway, there's not that much to do around here. I can finish this plat tomorrow. Can I go, Harry?"
"Tell you what, Harry," says Uncle Farley. "Why don't you stay and tend the office, and I'll take Maria out and - "
"Why, that's damn big of you, Farley," says Harry, "but you were in the field yesterday. It's my turn today."
"Yeah, but-"
Harry put up his hand. "We'll all three go. It's a big job; we're gonna need all the help we can get. Lock the front door, Farley."
Uncle Farley obeyed with a grumble and a shrug, and Maria said, "Oh goody!" and started jumping up and down, her breasts bouncing delightfully.
Maria's apartment was on the way to the park site. They stopped there to let her change. She was so anxious that even before they were inside, she had her blouse half unbuttoned, and as she dashed around the room in search of the proper clothes, Uncle Farley thought her leaping tits were going to spring out of her pink lace bra at any minute. But they didn't, and it was Harry and not Uncle Farley who got an eyeful.
Across the room from the sofa where Harry sat down to wait, there was a dresser with a winged mirror, and one of the wings happened to be set at such an angle that he could see Maria's reflection past the open door of the bathroom around the corner. Harry neglected to mention this until later, so that Uncle Farley, who sat in a chair in the corner, missed the whole thing.
Maria hurriedly threw off her blouse, dropped her skirt and kicked off her shoes. Her black bush glowed darkly through the pink lace of her panties, and Harry crossed his legs to restrain his rising cock as she reached back and unhooked her bra. Her voluptuous olive-toned tits tumbled out into the morning sunlight which streamed in through the bathroom window, their small, darkish nipples bobbing at the tips like little ripe plums begging to be picked. With a towel, she dried the perspiration from her deep, close cleavage, then smeared the smooth valley with cologne, also dabbing a little on each nipple while smiling at her stunning profile in the mirror over the lavatory.
Do you think she knew that Harry was watching? If she did, she must not have wanted him to miss anything, because she faced the open door to lower her drawers. Standing straight, she hooked her thumbs in the bellyband, jerked it down below her cunt, and rubbed some cologne through her nest of black ringlets. Harry thought it was the cutest, cuddliest little cunt he had ever seen, and as the girl bent forward, tits all adangle, and pulled off her pants, he knew he was going to be unfaithful to Cynthia today, and - maybe to justify this - began to count the years since his last piece of strange pussy.
In place of the lace panties, Maria donned a pair of plain white ones, and then stepped into white, tight-fitting Levi's. She picked up a strapless white cotton bra, looked at it for a moment, and dropped it on the toilet seat. She slipped into a thin red T-shirt and examined herself in the mirror. Her nipples stuck out vividly through the tight garment; it hugged the generous swells of her bosom like a second skin. She gave her shoulders a little shake, and her unharnessed jugs swung as loosely and freely as if they were naked. Harry thought, Yeah! But she must have thought No, because with a silent little giggle she hoisted the T-shirt to her armpits, hooked the strapless bra around her waist and pulled it up, tucking her bountiful boobs into the cotton cups.
As she tugged the skin-tight T-shirt down again, Harry spoke up in a loud voice. "I liked it better the other way, Maria."
The girl looked up-startled, or pretending to be startled - and saw her boss' grinning face in the dresser mirror. "Harry!" she scolded, and slammed the bathroom door.
Meanwhile, my Uncle Farley was looking all around and saying, "Huh? What's that? What's going on?" and so forth.
It was indeed a nice morning, as Maria said. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. The water was high in the ponds, and their edges were laced with those little pink and yellow flowers that used to appear on the surface at dawn as if by magic, and disappear without a trace at noon. ("And they will again, Rustam," was Morikand's response, "Every mid-day has its nightfall, and every night grows big with the seed of dawn." But another time when I asked him about that, he claimed he never said any such thing. It took me a while to get his meaning.) It was one of those mornings that makes you certain - perplexing and absurd though the world may be - that there is a notch for every Thing, and every Thing's in its notch. Even the noise of the Jeep's motor seemed to blend inoffensively with the rattle of the palmetto fronds and the hiss of the pine needles. As for Harry, his notch was sitting right beside him, and he couldn't have picked a better day to fill it.
Only my Uncle Farley seemed out of joint. No sooner had Harry turned off the highway and headed west across the pinelands toward Scullery's Creek, than Uncle Farley wrenched his neck. It was his own fault: in trying to watch Maria's bouncing breasts without her seeing him, he had set up such a tension in his upper spine that when the right front tire struck a root, it had that consequence. And after that he almost fell out of the Jeep several times, because the handicap of the wrenched neck was not enough, what with the bumpiness of the road and the elasticity of Maria's bra, to keep his eyes off her tits. Besides all this, Maria's obvious preference for conversation with Harry, and her at best indifferent attitude toward my uncle, soon had Farley in a foul and jealous mood.
If it had been me, I would have taken him back to the office, even if he was my uncle. But Harry was feeling so good that day that neither Uncle Farley nor Owlshit Slough could damp his spirits. "Owlshit Slough" is the name which my old friend Flemming and I fondly gave to the third mudhole on the trail out to Scullery's Creek when we were kids. During the droughts you stood some chance of getting through it, but if it had rained within the last month, forget it. Many's the pleasant weekend Flemming and I spent prying the old Model A out of the shit. But those days are gone forever, eh, Flem? - wherever you are.
But anyway, with his arm draped loosely around Maria's shoulders, and whistling some tuneless paean of sheer exuberance, Harry tromped on the gas and plunged into Owlshit Slough at full speed. Momentum deserted him at midstream, where the Jeep promptly sank to the floorboards.
"Are we stuck?" asked Maria as the engine sucked muck and died with a sputter.
"Looks that way," said Harry, sticking a finger in the mud and pointing it skyward as though checking for wind direction.
"Well, kiss my ass!" said my Uncle Farley with disgust.
But Harry only laughed with uncharacteristic flamboyance; if this had happened at any other time, he would have been the very devil - and by the same token, my uncle would have been the one to laugh it off. "Nothing serious," Harry said. "Hop on my back, Maria; I'll carry you to dry land. No need to go down with the ship."
"Very funny," muttered Uncle Farley.
"Oh, boy!" giggled Maria, wrapping her legs around Harry's waist. "I love to play piggyback!"
It seemed to my uncle that Harry moved much more slowly than was necessary as he waded across the mudhole with Maria's hot thighs under his arms and her tits pressed against his back-as though he were trying to make it last. "Who's gonna carry me?" Farley growled.
Ignoring the question, Harry said, "Hey, Farley, bring the machetes and the cloth tape, will you?"
"What about my athlete's foot?" said Uncle Farley.
"Giddy-up!" cried Maria, spurring her mount in the hams and clutching him tightly about the neck. Harry responded by leaning forward and stepping up his pace, plowing through the knee-deep slush like a water buffalo.
This innocent horseplay (so to speak) touched off a minor disaster for Uncle Farley. Because when Harry leaned forward, Maria of course leaned with him, and this action drew the tail of her T-shirt up in back, and the waistband of her unbelted, low-slung jeans so far down that you could see the crack of her ass - that is, Uncle Farley could see it-and this caused him to wrench his neck again, which in turn caused him to lose his balance and fall, with a loud cry of alarm, out of the Jeep and into the muck. Luckily, Maria and Harry were by that time out of range of the splash.
When Uncle Farley finally sloshed ashore with the tape and the machetes, still cursing, Harry said, "We'll winch her out later on. Right now, I think we'll walk over to the township line and try to find the northwest corner of section three. Seems like we tied into that one time when I was with Constrictor Construction. You remember, Farley?"
"Fuck no," said my uncle, hurling his machete at a pine tree, from which it sprang off into the palmettos.
"If you're gonna work on a survey party, Maria," said Harry with a grin, "you'll have to get used to the, uh, technical terminology."
"Oh, I don't mind that," laughed Maria, and with an underhanded toss she sent her own machete whirling toward the same tree, where it struck point-first and stood quivering.
"Well, I'll be goddamned," grumbled Uncle Farley.
Leaving Farley to search the bushes for his knife, Harry and the girl went on toward the creek. "Anyway, I thought we'd just reconnoiter today," Harry went on, his eyes surveying Maria's undulating contours as they walked along. "Kinda look things over; you know?"
"Uh huh," Maria said, knowingly, a wry smile on her full lips and a twinkle in her eye. "But don't you think you looked things over pretty well back at my apartment?"
Harry slipped his arm around her waist. "Not well enough, baby."
"Why, Harry, I'm surprised at you!" His hand moved up under her arm and touched the outer swell of her tit. "You sure come to life when you get in the woods, don't you?"
"Not ordinarily," said Harry.
"If I didn't know you better, I'd think you brought me out here to take advantage of me."
"Me? What a thought. Hey, you wanta go swimming? The creek should be good and deep by now."
"Sounds great. But what about the job?"
"Fuck the job," said Harry, smacking her on the butt. "It's too nice a day to work."
"You're the boss," said Maria, shrugging her shoulders.
"Come on; let's go this way. I know a shortcut."
Leaving the road, Harry led her around the edge of a cypress hummock, and they struck out across the pine-lands to the west, headed for a tall cabbage palm that stuck up above the dense vegetation of the distant creek bottom - the cabbage that marked what Flem and I used to call Fish Head Hole, a bend in the upper creek where the bank was open and good for camping or fucking, or a combination of the two.
"But how will Farley find us?" asked Maria.
"He won't, I hope," Harry replied. "Come on!"
I'm picking it up now, Morikand said. Do you want to hear? I urged him to go ahead. He removed the helmet from his head, and his hair fell about his shoulders. The smoke seemed to clear a little, and gray light streamed down upon him through the hole in the ceiling. His hands went to his lap and his long fingers closed around the girl's head, slowing her stroke. His knuckles seemed to glow. He spoke in that droning monotone he always uses when he's receiving: I see black and green. The black winding through the green. It's a bright summer day. The black makes a loop, or a horseshoe, a black stream looping around a big tree. The bank is wide and matted with leaves, overhung with willow and cypress and grapevine and cocoplum. - That's it, Morikand! I said. That's Fish Head Hole! You're getting it, man! - At the lower end of the loop the stream narrows. On the other side, on the right side, there is a movement. - Harry and the girl? I asked eagerly. - No. I don't see them yet. It is a creature, a live thing, hideous, grubbing through the mulch, always in the shadows beneath the undergrowth. I'm getting a feeling of pain. - Watch your teeth, Slit, I warned the girl, but that wasn't what he meant. No, no, the pain is from the creature. I'm getting it through him. - Aha: him! - Yes. Him. The light pains him. He has not ventured from the darkness of his burrow for a long time. Years, perhaps. - It's him then? (It was not really a question.) - Of course it's him, Rustam. We know it's him. We want to get the picture, man. We want to get just what comes through. The fact that it's him doesn't transmit. Only his image vibrates, and the shape of his pain: sensation but not thought. - Then you can't tell why he came out that day, that day of all others? - Morikand sighed and took his hands from the girl's head. Rustam, he said, fixing me with his eyes, which had been closed until now, you know why you can't understand any of this, why you probably never will get it no matter how many times you hear the story, no matter how many different angles you get it from? Because you're always looking for the why. You're laboring under the myth of cause and effect. That's what blocks your understanding. He was right, of course, but how do you wipe such a basic concept out of your head? I wish I knew. I used to try very hard to do it, but then when I'd tell Morikand how hard I had been trying, he would say, That's your trouble, Rustam. You try too damn hard. Stop trying, he would tell me. Just flow. His favorite word, flow. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with a holy man in the first place. - All right, I said, go ahead. What comes through? - Nothing, now, he said. You fucked it up. Wait'll I get my gun. Hearing this cue, the girl went to work on him with feeling. (I was kidding about the teeth; Slit would knock out her own teeth with a hammer if they made a scratch on Morikand's cock.) Watching her gave me an appetite. There hadn't been any bombs for several hours, so I told Morikand I was going to see if I could find something to eat. Flow, man, he said. I told him not to worry. There were no more transmissions that day, but we picked it up in the morning, so called.
"Oh, Harry, this is beautiful!"
"Uh huh," said Harry, eyeballing her ass.
The clearing was canopied by the leafy boughs of a huge swamp bay, all in bloom that day, and full of sparrows and finches. Its ancient trunk rose near the bank of the creek, and the high, black water swirled and bubbled along the tangled network of its roots, which shaped the horseshoe bend. On the opposite bank and all around the open place - it wasn't more than forty feet across - grew the usual dense bottom foliage - willow and myrtle and cabbage and cypress, all interlaced with wild grape and creeping cucumber - but the shade of the old bay kept the floor of Fish Head Hole free of undergrowth, and its falling leaves provided a soft, deep carpet of fragrant mulch. And into this cool arbor the bright morning sunlight filtered through the fluttering roof, its dappled patterns dancing over the ground and the dream-pocked water and the plump, round cheeks of Maria's denim-sheathed behind. Harry felt as though he had passed into another age, into a time when the world was young--though he would not have put it in those words, being Harry.
"Maria, would you believe me if I told you that I haven't had a strange... I mean, that I haven't been unfaithful to my wife in seven years?"
"Seven years! You're putting me on, Harry!"
"No; it's true. I was just counting up the years back there at your apartment."
"Whatever made you think about that?"
"I can't imagine," said Harry, returning her smirk. "Let's strip."
"God, Harry! Talk about forward!"
"Forward? You wanta swim with your clothes on?"
"Oh, that." There was an obvious tone of disappointment in the words.
"First," Harry said, as Maria turned her back on him and pulled the red T-shirt over her head. "Huh?" she asked.
The whirr of Harry's zipper cut through the tinkling silence of the swamp like the mating call of some strange bird, and was answered a moment later by that of Maria's, a tone or two higher.
"First we'll swim," he replied, removing his boots.
"Oh. And then what?" Her back still to Harry, she draped her jeans over a stunted cocoplum that grew near the bank. The hipband of her white cotton panties lay just below the little hollow above her crack. Harry noticed two cute dimples-one directly above each cheek of her ass. They winked at him, those dimples, as she hung her jeans beside her T-shirt.
Harry didn't answer her question. It didn't require an answer. He bent down and picked up a little branch of yellow blossoms that had fallen from the bay. "Here you go," he said, coming up behind her, clad only in his plaid skivvy drawers. "A sprig of laurel for your hair."
"Oh, doesn't it smell nice! Mmmm! Did I win a contest?"
"Yeah," Harry wrapped the sprig around her head and fastened the ends at her temples, and her black hair crackled with electricity. "You win the prize for the sexiest rodman I ever had."
"You say such sweet things, Harry," said Maria, leaning back lightly against his chest, the taut seat of her panties brushing the head of his cock, which was struggling for freedom in the confines of his drawers.
When the crown of flowers was in place, Harry began to stroke Maria's neck, working up to her ears, pulling gently at the lobes and tickling the fine cilia inside with his fingertips, manipulating by some hitherto unrealized instinct all those upper erotogenic zones the existence of which he hadn't the vaguest notion of. Neither of them heard the music of the birds any more, nor the rustle of the wind in the upper foliage, nor the gurgle of the creek at their feet, nor the ominous snap of a dry twig on the other bank, nor the distant cry of angry distress which carried faintly but stridently across the open prairie and reverberated through the dense hollows:
"Haaaarry! Mariiiiiiiia! Where the fuck aaaaaare youuuuuuuu?"
"Oh, Harry, you're getting me hot!"
Maria was breathing hard. Her lips were parted and puffed up with passion. The olive-toned skin of her shoulders and neck and cheeks was faintly splotched with a dermal love rash, and her breasts swelled and fell like pulsating dirigibles straining at their tethers. Her head fell back on Harry's shoulder and her spine arched with a spontaneous jerk, so that the swollen shank of his oozing prick--now free of its shroud and protruding fiercely from the fly of his drawers-was pressed down and wedged tightly into the deep, warm crease between her buttocks.
Harry breathed in her ear, and she moaned. He stroked her panting lips with his fingertips, and she sucked at them hungrily. A trickle of hot saliva ran down Harry's finger and into his palm. Maria threw back her shoulders, and her hands clutched at Harry's hips, groped for the waistband of his shorts, tugged it and slipped inside to cup the tight, fuzzy cheeks of his ass, her nails digging urgently into his flesh. His hands now slick with saliva, Harry massaged the heavings swells of Maria's upper bosom, watching the way the soft, resilient flesh undulated and compressed at his touch, the way the deep close crease in the center lengthened and diminished, opened and closed; the etherous fumes of cologne and sex sweat which rose from that damp gulley entered his nostrils like pungent fire.
When he thrust his hands into the cups of Maria's strapless bra, the hooks at her back snapped, and the little boneless garment sprang into the creek and floated off around the bend.
I see that. White cones on the black surface. Drifting. Air trapped under the cups keeps it afloat. At the downstream end of the horseshoe it snags on a root and goes down. Slowly. Eyes on the far bank watch it sink. -Him?- Yes. Here comes something else. A pair of panties. White ones. Surrounded by tiny fish, minnows, nibbling at the crotch. The smell's driving 'em mad, man! Water's all churned up. He watches, but the white hurts his eyes. Ha! Whoosh, they're gone. Just black now. Easy on the eyes. - What happened to the drawers, man? - Fish got 'em. A big bass, I think. When we heard that, Stit and I started laughing like cocksuckers, but just then another strike started and we thought the goddamn walls were going to cave in on us. It always happens like that, just at the wrong time, just when it's coming in clear. But that night it was quiet for a while, and when I read that last part back to him he started getting it again. It was only sounds at first, because our 'transmitter' (Morikand said) was resting its eyes. I hear voices, he said. One far away, out on the plain, same as before, but farther away now; two up close: 'Wait a minute, Maria. We better lie on our clothes, or we'll get red bugs.' 'Oh, Harry, you're so romantic.'
Maria lay spreadeagled at the foot of the bay. Harry's work shirt was under her ass, and her long black hair was fanned out over his skivvy drawers. Harry was on his knees at her side, hunched over, his hands and lips playing up and down her naked body. ("I didn't want to just jump on and bang it," Harry told me once. "I wanted to do all those things you think about doing when you first lay eyes on a girl like that. You know what I mean, Johnny?" I was young then, but I knew what he meant all right.)
Maria had propped her head up on a large root so she could watch him, and as he worked her over she rubbed his cock with her hand, or juggled his balls, or scratched in the thick red fuzz that grew all over his lower belly and down his thighs and up the crack of his ass and out over the cheeks as well. She spoke in a throaty voice, heavy and breathy with desire. "You got a hairy ass, Harry. It's the hairiest ass I ever saw, Harry."
"Tdas wyaghalm ary," Harry replied around a mouthful of tit.
By now Maria's dark little areolae were puffed up like big, juicy grapes, and from their succulent domes the nipples jutted up stiff as steeples. Harry slid his lips off her right nipple and down into the hollow of her voluptuous bosom. Rolling her rigid knobs between his fingers, he brought water to his mouth and let it flow freely into the fleshy valley, spreading it up onto the flat part of her chest and the inner surfaces of her tits. When he had her all slick and slimy, he threw his right knee over her thorax and slid his cock into the groove. Maria pushed her jugs together, sheathing his shaft in hot, heavy flesh - all but the nose cone. She bowed her head and licked a swelling drop of amber from its tip.
"Good?"
She licked her lips and closed her eyes. "Mmmm!"
Harry began to pump his butt now, and Maria kept her tits pressed together, watching the big red head of his prick sliding between then, appearing and disappearing at the top of her cleavage. But her eyes seemed to go out of focus and froth appeared at the corner of her mouth when Harry reached back and started playing with her cunt. He spread the black curls from her slit and found it dilated and juicy, everything inside alive and moving. He rolled her clit with his thumb ("She had a hair trigger, Johnny"), and she came.
Harry let her buck, and kept his cock going between her tits; only he had to hold them together himself, now, because her arms were flapping uncontrollably at her sides. Her head bounced up and down on the bay root, but no pain registered in her face, only ecstasy. Spittle bubbled from her lips, and tears of pleasure ran from her eyes, and the love juice from her cunt made a big spot on Harry's shirt.
Violent as her clitorgasm was (May I coin that word? Thank you), it didn't slow Maria down a bit. Almost before her hips had stopped lurching and her stomach muscles had ceased their contractions, she dug her fingers into the hairy crack of Harry's ass and pulled his pelvis toward her face, at the same time opening her mouth and deliberately - hungrily, I should say - ramming his cock down her throat. ("I tell you, Johnny, she had the gullet of a boa constrictor!")
Harry, all this time had been purposely holding back, savoring every delicious second, as though the moment he got his rocks off, Maria would burst like a balloon and the dream would be over; but when she started blowing him, he knew he couldn't hold out much longer. He felt like everything in him was about to squirt out the end of his pecker - guts, brains and all - leaving nothing but a hairy sack flapping at Maria's lips. The hairy sack that was Harry. It would have been a wild finish, come to think of it. However .. .
"M-Maria... I-I'm gonna shoot! I'm gonna shoot!"
"Gkumffnmmm!" She unplugged her throat and tried again. "Put it in my cunt, Harry! Quick!"
Harry scrambled backward, and Maria threw her legs up in the air, slapping a scissors grip on his neck and at the same time guiding his slimy cock into her hole. Getting it in was no problem; one good jab, and the thing was done. She was all fuzzy and open on the outside, and tight and sappy on the inside, and Harry swore she had springs in her ass.
Neither of them lasted but a few strokes. They were at such a peak of arousal that a feather would have touched them off. Harry's cock banged bottom on every spurt, and his head bounced up and down between Maria's tits like a basketball. He thought it would never stop. He came so copiously that her cunt could not contain the load, and his shirt was starched by the overflow.
As for Maria's orgasm, if the first time she had come like a shotgun, this time it was more like a cannon. My older readers may remember that in the years before the Black and White War, there was a jazz musician named John Coltrane, a tenor man. Some used to say that he put down "sheets of sound." Myself, I always liked to refer to Trane's tenor as 'a musical machine-gun.' He had a way of blowing in clusters of notes, improvising his ideas out of note-groups rather than single notes, so that you had one large theme made up of a whole string of smaller ones. And he did this effortlessly; it was like a river with a hundred cross-currents and vortices falling into a chasm. Sometimes the depth of soul in those torrential solos - especially when he was with Monk - was almost as unfathomable as one of Morikand's koans. What I'm getting at is that Maria's orgasm was like that - one big, strong one composed of a long string of little ones. To put it another way, it was as if a fireworks factory had blown up in her womb, and in the midst of the explosion you could hear the individual firecrackers popping away.
Afterward, as they lay there under the ancient bay, wrapped in each other's arms, and still coupled, to his delight Harry realized that the bubble had not burst, that the pleasure dome was intact. He had not turned inside-out and Maria had not exploded, and the day promised many more orgasms to come. The birds still chirped overhead, and Scullery's Creek still gurgled happily along on its way to the Frigahatchee. And somewhere nearby, probably under some lily pads, unbeknownst to Harry, a big, black bass lay in its hole, belching musk bubbles and trying to digest a pair of white cotton panties. There was a notch for every Thing, and every Thing was in its notch.
Everything, that is, except my Uncle Farley, who by then thought himself condemned to wander the trackless wastes of the future Dickson John State Park forever, like a soul in Limbo. Twice he narrowly escaped being snake-bitten, and once, when he sat down on a log - for his legs gave out on him - a scorpion stung him on the ass. And since he had not found his machete, he was defenseless except for a pine-knot club he had with great difficulty managed to wrench from a snag, in the process of which he had twisted his ankle and fallen on a prickly pear. Clearly, it wasn't Uncle Farley's day.
By noon he had lost his voice and his sense of direction. Repeated attempts to relocate the sunken Jeep, if only to get a drink of water, failed. The very road itself seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. In his youth he had learned to determine compass directions using a watch and the sun, but what good that would have done him if he had remembered how to do it, which he didn't, escaped my uncle at this time. At one point, however, Uncle Farley had a brilliant idea. He stripped some cloth marker tape off its reel and wound it around the trunk of a tall pine, high enough to be seen from a great distance. His plan was to walk around and around this focal point in ever widening circles until he came to something that looked familiar. I may have been stretching things when I called this idea brilliant, but it wasn't bad for Uncle Farley. Unfortunately, however, no sooner had he staggered off on the first circuit than both the tape and the tree vanished into thin air. Tn a word, my uncle was lost. Squinting against the blinding sun, he shook his fist at the horse-laughing buzzards and the clown-shaped clouds overhead, and let out a hoarse croak of defiance at that malicious Jokester in the sky.
It was close to four o'clock when Uncle Farley finally bumbled into the vicinity of Fish Head Hole. He wouldn't have lasted much longer without water. You see, he was afraid to drink from the stagnant ponds, which was stupid, because if there'd been anything to that, Flem and I wouldn't have lived to see these glorious days of the present age (sic). And he would have missed the narrow path that led down into the bottom, if the musical tinkle of Maria's laughter hadn't caught his ear.
Uncle Farley was still caked from head to foot with the mud of Owlshit Slough; one leg of his trousers had been shredded at the knee when his travels had taken him through a briar patch; his forehead was bruised and bloody from when he'd struck himself with the pine knot. Because of his wrenched neck, his twisted ankle, his swollen buttock and the cactus needles in his thigh, my uncle was forced to walk in a painful hunch, somewhat like a gorilla; and because of his parched throat and his tumid tongue, his lower jaw hung slack; and because his strength was gone, his club dragged on the ground. Besides that, his shirt was gone and his sagging paunch was criss-crossed with poison oak welts. Considering these things then, is it any wonder that Maria screamed when Uncle Farley floundered into the clearing under the bay tree?
For a moment or two even Harry didn't recognize him. Then: "Good God, Farley!" he said, dropping the machete with which he had been about to attack the thing, and snatching up his pants. "What, the hell happened?"
My uncle opened his mouth to speak, but only a few obscene croaks escaped his cracked lips before he fell on his face in the mulch.
"The poor beggar's passed out, Maria," Harry observed.
"Gosh, Harry," said the girl, stepping into her jeans, "what do you suppose happened to him?"
"I don't know. Maybe a wild hog got him. There used to be some out here. Shoulda brought the first aid kit."
When they had determined that Uncle Farley was still breathing and apparently had no broken bones, they stripped off what was left of his clothing and rolled him into the creek. This revived him in time, and he came up sputtering. After gulping down several quarts of creek water, he discovered that his tongue was working again, and he immediately used it to give his partner a severe and extraordinarily vulgar lashing that went on for quite a while.
A little later, while Uncle Farley sulked behind a bush at the upstream end of the horseshoe, painfully extracting cactus needles from his ham, Harry drew Maria aside and said, "You know, Maria, we were kinda rough on old Farley, I guess - givin' him the slip and all."
"It was your idea, Harry."
"Yeah; I know. But since he took it so hard, maybe you could, uh... I mean, he is my partner, you know, and ..."
"What do you want me to do, Harry?"
"Well, look, Maria, why don't you give him a little piece? It'll make a new man out of him."
"Oh! Well, why didn't you say so? Now?"
"Yeah. And you better make it kind of a quickie, 'cause it's gettin' late and we still gotta get the Jeep out."
"Okay."
So, once more removing her jeans and T-shirt, Maria crossed the clearing to the bush behind which Uncle Farley squatted. His back was to her. He was swearing softly to himself as he worked.
"Whatcha doing, Farley?" Maria asked in a sexy singsong.
"What am I doing?" growled my uncle. "I'm pickin' the motherfucking cactus out of my motherfucking ass, that's what I'm... uh... I'm uh... Well, welllllllll!"
She had moved up so close behind him that when he looked over his shoulder, his nose was practically in her bush. Now she spread her legs and rolled her pelvis up so he could see the slit. "Want some o' that, Farley?" she sang.
"Does a bear shit in the woods?" replied my uncle. But in spite of his smart remarks, Uncle Farley was almost too stunned to move. He had long ago given up hope of getting any pussy that day, and the sudden sight of those naked titties swinging overhead and that hairy crack smack in his face took him completely by surprise.
"Here," said Maria, running three fingers up her hole. "This is just the thing for cuts and bruises." She wiped the pungent ointment delicately over his bald dome and battered forehead.
(One time, not too many months ago, Morikand and Slit and I decided to take up lodging in one of the old bombed-out mansions over on Sago Beach. These ruins make good shelters because they have basements. In a dark, damp corner on the lowest level, we found an old white anchorite wrapped in rags, sitting in front of his charcoal pot. The first thing the holy man said when he saw Morikand was, Is there balm in Gilead? No doubt it was nothing more than his stock greeting, or maybe a code phrase by which members of his particular cult identified themselves; but without the slightest hesitation Morikand stuck his hand down the front of Slit's G-string and then held it out all slimy for the man to see. Is there sap in a cunt? That was Morikand's reply, and the implications, if you consider its meaning for our time, and that it came from the mouth of Morikand Jones, are absolutely staggering.)
Uncle Farley later claimed the stuff was "hotter than Colonel Taco's Red Hot Linament," whatever that was. Anyway, it set him on fire, and he blushed all over, from his bum to his bellybutton. Uncle Farley blushing: I love that.
When Maria had his cheeks and lips well smeared, she turned her back on him, shook her long black hair, and dropped gracefully to her knees and elbows, nipples brushing on the ground. Her cute little asshole stared Uncle Farley dead in the eye, and the black-bearded mouth below gaped and puckered as though it might speak at any moment.
"Like it this way, Farley?" she asked, grinning at him over her shoulder.
"Baby, I'll take it any old way you serve it up!" croaked my uncle. "Now, j-just wait right there a second. I gotta wash the sand off my, uh ..."
"Go ahead, honey; wash it off. I won't go away."
Uncle Farley spun around and was about to limp into the water to rinse his cock when he saw it: the face. He blinked his eyes and looked again, and it was still there. At first he thought it was a giant frog in an overcoat, but that was absurd. Whatever it was, my uncle thought it must have been buried up to the neck, because the hideous, bulging, colorless eyes were only inches off the ground. They peered across the creek at him from a dense tangle of fern and briar; they apparently had neither brows nor lids, these eyeballs, and it looked to Farley as if they were stuck on stems. The rest of the face, what he could see of it, was a pale yellowish white, like the underside of a grubworm, and was framed by a bristling halo of thin pink frizz. The whole apparition was set deep in the ragged, turned-up collar of what looked like a dirty overcoat that stuck up out of the mulch like an inverted toadstool.
After all Uncle Farley had been through that day, this was the last straw. I hate to be the one to say it, but from that moment on, my uncle began to lose his grip.
He made a strangling noise in his throat, and staggered backward into a bush, cringing with horror. In the bush was a nest of bumblebees, and he knocked it down. One of the bees stung Uncle Farley on the cock.
Maria looked around in time to see my uncle topple forward like a felled tree and skid down the bank on his nose. He would have sunk, or drifted away, but luckily his sprained ankle got snagged in the fork of an exposed root, so that only his head and shoulders were awash.
"Harry! Come quick!" the girl shouted, running to the bank and staring down at my drowning uncle.
"Well, I'm a son of a bitch!" said Harry as he dragged Farley from the drink. "The bastard's passed out on us again!"
CHAPTER THREE
"Stupid-looking flat-chested bitch!" Cynthia said to the woman in the mirror, who spat it right back at her, syllable for syllable, at the speed of light.
Cynthia didn't know what had gotten into her that day to make her so irritable, but Morikand says it wasn't what got into her, but rather the fact that nothing had. For over a week. Of course Morikand says that tongue-in-cheek; he knows as well as I do that there was more to it than that. There was something very strange about that day; something in the air, maybe; some aphrodisical miasma released from some new puncture in the earth.
I wish - if only for my own amusement - that I could examine the planetary configurations for that date, but it's impossible at the present time. It cost me some derisive laughter from Morikand, but on the day we took to the streets, I made my way over to the old library in Lake Leethy; there were still plenty of books left, some fairly dry, and I helped myself, filling a burlap sack with whatever volumes I thought might be of use to us in the dark days ahead. For risking my life thus, I got from my young master the following quote from the Hsinjinmein of Sosan: "Wordiness and intellection! The more we go with them the further astray we go." And later in the day, when I got my sack hung up in a certain hole we were trying to squeeze through, the rest of the stanza: "Away therefore with wordiness and intellection, and there is no place where we cannot pass freely." But I hung onto my sack in spite of all that, and told Morikand - good naturedly, to be sure - to go fuck himself. But the point is, I only copped one almanac, covering a few inconsequential years of the first half of the century, from which I can make only very vague extrapolations for the planets; and the moon - probably the most significant body for the date in question - is utterly impossible. Of course Morikand sometimes picks up astronomical configurations, but only for certain days sprinkled arbitrarily through the centuries, and our day (or Harry's Day, as I might call it) has not so far been among them. When our wanderings brought us back into the vicinity of Lake Leethy, the library was nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes, so we'll have to let the matter ride. Let us assume, however, for poetry's sake, that there was a full moon at the time, and that in both the Uranus Inlet and Cynthia's tubes, the tides were running high.
She had decided to go to the office and pick Harry up early. It had been months since they had been out for dinner, and Harry's success in landing the new Government contract was a good excuse. All day she had been conjuring up pleasant visions of some intimate little Italian restaurant, with candles stuck in Chianti bottles, and red and white checkerboard tablecloths. Before having their spaghetti they would drink a bottle or two of red wine, and perhaps hire a fiddler with a mustache to play at their table - or at least there might be some Verdi or Puccini on the juke box, possibly some old Caruso records. They would talk softly, she and Harry, or else just look into each other's eyes as they sipped their wine or wound up their spaghetti. Cynthia was sure they could find such a place, perhaps in Sago Beach or Rodriguez Island, where the music and the tinkle of windbells would be pervaded by the murmur of a gentle surf. And she would slip off a shoe and run her toes up under Harry's pant leg, and he would take off one of his and put his foot under her skirt and tickle her between the legs with his big toe. She closed her eyes and imagined exactly how the fabric of his sock would feel against the nylon crotch of her panties. Maybe she wouldn't even wear panties. The short hairs that grew outward in little fingers from the lower end of her vulva, as well as those at the nape of her neck, bristled at the mere thought of it, as she sat naked on the toilet seat, shaving her legs. And then afterward they would park in some lonely spot along the beach, and she would sit on Harry's lap in the front seat, and he would fuck her, as they used to do when they first came to Florida. It was to be a wonderful evening.
She had selected the sexiest dress she owned, and laid it out on the bed, but she was having a problem trying to decide what to wear to the office. She didn't want to dress up; that would have looked funny. But she wanted to look good when she asked Harry to take her out to dinner. Everything she tried on, whether blouse, T-shirt or halter, seemed to accentuate her flat bosom, and each time she looked at herself in the mirror she became more and more irritated at the malicious trick destiny had played on her. There was absolutely no explanation for the fact that she - she alone out of a family known for generations for its big-busted females - should have been cursed with the chest of an effeminate boy. I say "effeminate" because she wasn't exactly fiat, though pretty damned close to it; she had breasts somewhat like those of a pregnant chimpanzee, if the reader remembers those animals. If she strung the tape gently across her nipples, being careful to apply no pressure, then closed her eyes and thought very sexy thoughts, she was sometimes able - if the weather was warm - to get a reading of thirty-one and five-eighths. This, however, was not due so much to her stomatic tissue - that is to say, her titties proper - as to the nipples, each areola being quite large and bulbous, and when stimulated, tending to swell up to about the size of a small crabapple.
But she was no flatter today than any other day, you say. It wasn't as if, up until now, she had had a fine set of boobs, and they had suddenly gone down on her. Why, then, all the fuss? For two reasons: one, because it bothered her most when she was in heat, like this afternoon, because she knew how much Harry dug big tits; two, because she was going to the office, and in the office was Maria, who in Cynthia's eyes was all tit, and made her-Cynthia-look like a washboard. She always tried to keep her jealousy of Maria from Harry, but sometimes it was hard to do. She couldn't help comparing Maria with her younger sister, Bobby, who had been almost as busy at the age of fifteen as Maria was now. True, Bobby was a blonde and Maria was a Latin type, but the tits were the things: therein lay the bond, and every time Cynthia thought about Harry sitting there all day in the same room with those bulbous things, she couldn't help remembering how, during her girlhood in Placenter, Kentucky, Bobby had seduced Cynthia's one and only steady boyfriend, Roy, who had given her a ring and asked her to marry him, seduced him right out from under her nose, without even trying, all because Bobby had tits and Cynthia had none. And now here they were again, in Uranus, Florida, nine hundred miles away, those same goddamn tits, and ever since Maria had come to work for Harry, Cynthia had lived in constant dread that history would repeat itself.
But for some weeks prior to this, a plan had gradually been forming in Cynthia's mind. Those of you who remember television may recall how they used to flash commercials on the tube in the middle of a program - instantaneous flashes, only a fraction of a second in duration. The idea was to implant the message on the unconscious. This is the way Cynthia's plan had been coming to her, in brief flashes; but lately they had been coming at increasingly frequent intervals, and soon - this very evening, as a matter of fact - the scheme was going to coalesce in her mind and dominate her thoughts until... But of that when we get to it.
So there she stood, wearing only a pair of panties, for she couldn't even decide on a bra, digging through her dresser drawers, throwing clothes right and left and swearing at the ridiculous pink knobs on her chest.
(A note here to the present generation by way of showing that regardless of my age I am not behind the times but am only trying to give the flavor of the period: A few weeks ago, a deserter from the Whites happened on our camp and stayed the night with us. He was literate, and, when he saw me scribbling away in my notebook, asked if he might take a look. He said he didn't care what it was, as long as it wasn't an Official Bulletin; that's all they allow them to read nowadays, it seems. He sat by the fire and read aloud, and when he came to the line above, Slit interrupted him: I don't get that shit, Rustam, she said. So what if she didn't have no tit? I used to know this girl that used to hang around down at that commune the Blacks used to have at Point Head before it got bombed, and she didn't have no tit, and the guys used to come from all over just to get a piece off her. She used to fuck ten or fifteen guys a day when she felt like it. I mean, it's the pussy, man, not the tittie. Ain't it? - I know that Slit, I told her, but this happened in 1957, better than ten years before you were born. Things were different then; tits were all the rage. - Oh, she said. Morikand laughed like hell.)
At last Cynthia strapped on a half-bra with padded cups-a push-up job that forced what little fat there was into her upper chest and squeezed it together. It was a compromise: an unpadded bra only pointed out her lack, and a regular set of falsies, while they might fool Maria, had a way of turning Harry off, since he knew there was nothing in there but foam rubber. Harry hated anything fake. So the squeeze-up seemed the best bet.
She examined the result in the full-length mirror on the door, looking herself over from head to foot. "I have good legs," she said, spreading them, "nice hips," cocking them, "my ass isn't skinny," squeezing it, "my pussy's tight," rolling it, "and fuzzy," scratching it, "but these goddamn motherfucking son-of-a-bitching tits!" (She never talked that way around Harry.)
Over the bra and panties Cynthia slipped a fairly low-necked sundress that did as much as could be expected for her shoved-up bosom. The bra did succeed in creating a cute little hollow between her "breasts," though it failed to produce a real crease there. She gave her middle finger to the woman in the mirror -who gave it right back to her - and took off to get Harry.
Of course, when Cynthia got to the office, neither Harry nor Maria nor even Uncle Farley were anywhere to be found, since the first two had just then managed to drag the third back to Owlshit Slough. The Jeep, luckily, had not yet sunk out of sight, and after Harry waded out to the waterlogged first aid kit, he and Maria did what they could for Uncle Farley's cock, which wasn't much, according to Uncle Farley. The bumblebee had made a lucky sting - got it right on the head, not an eighth of an inch to the right of the hole - and by now the entire penis had swollen up like a mushy tennis ball, and turned purple. You may recall that my uncle drank a good deal of water when they rolled him into Scullery's Creek, and though that was natural enough and on the surface beneficial, since he had gone all day without wetting his tongue, it now had a bad result insofar as it caused him to have to piss, which was impossible, or at best extremely painful. It was worse than a dose of clap, Uncle Farley claimed.
At last he succeeded in passing a few excruciating squirts, just enough to take some of the strain off his bladder, and then Harry and Maria sat him down under a pine tree. But now a new discomfort befell my Uncle Farley - several discomforts, actually. For one thing, Harry had left Uncle Farley's trousers, such as they were, to soak in the creek, and they had evidently drifted away, so that now, as the sun went down and the mosquitos came up, he had nothing with which to cover himself but the sex-fouled work shirt which Harry was thoughtful enough to offer him. Farley wrapped this around his ass and tied the sleeves together, but while it hid his deformed groin, it afforded little protection from the insects.
This was a minor thing, though, compared to the real discomfort. Because not only my uncle's pants but also Maria's bra, as we've seen, lay at the bottom of Scullery's Creek; and it's not likely that you've forgotten that brief but stimulating glimpse we had, via Harry, of the way Maria's unharnessed tits moved in her red T-shirt when she gave them a little shake in the bathroom of her apartment. Imagine, then, how they looked now, as she ran back and forth from the mired Jeep with pine branches and pry poles, and when she helped Harry crank the winch, and when she jumped up and down with glee every time the vehicle seemed about to move a inch or two. And imagine the effect these sights had on my Uncle Farley's damaged organ. Yet however painful the consequences, he could not take his eyes from those bouncing boobs, he could only look on and suffer.
And so, as the sun sank red and swollen into the marshy plain, my uncle's cock rose blue and bloated under Harry's slimy shirt; and as Maria and Harry battled fiercely against the tenacious suction that rooted the Jeep fast in the shit, Cynthia sat alone in the office in Uranus, waiting and wondering and becoming distraught.
Where could they all be? Harry never left the office unattended. It was conceivable that because of the new job, he and Farley had both worked in the field that day, but what about Maria? If she was out sick, wouldn't Harry have called her, Cynthia, to mind the office? Several times, as she sat in Harry's padded swivel chair smoking cigarette after cigarette, she started to call Maria's apartment, but each time drew her hand back from the telephone. She was afraid of the possibilities she would have to consider if she found that Maria wasn't there. What if the girl's roommate answered and said that Maria had gone to work that morning as usual? The implications were frightening.
Nevertheless, by the time it got dark and she had filled a large ash tray with squashed butts, Cynthia's anxiety had become acute, and she decided to put the call through. She drew l deep breath and reached for the phone. It rang just as she touched it, and in the empty silence of the office, it sounded like a fire alarm.
Eagerly, she snatched the receiver off the hook. "Harry?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty hairy." The voice was strange and brittle. "Are you."
"Who is this?"
"They call me Long John, because of my dick. I'm hung like a stud horse. Got it right here in my hand now. I'm one of your boss' clients; aren't you the black-haired cunt with the big tits."
Cynthia realized right away, it was a phone queer, or an "obscene caller," as they used to call them. ("I don't know why I said yes," she told Morikand. "I don't know why I didn't hang up as soon as I heard that dirty talk."
"It's simple, Mother," Morikand replied. "You had been thinking about sex all day, and obviously so had the caller, so the two of you had something in common. Besides that, you had a strong inner desire to have breasts like Maria's, and here was someone who thought you did - who mistook you for her, in fact. It was a chance to slip into Maria's shoes for a few minutes. Or into her bra, rather. It was better than falsies, because you were safe: the fraud could not be detected over the telephone. In effect, you and he were both nursing your egos; he was pretending he had a long prick, you that you had big tits. It was a mutually beneficial exchange, perfectly reasonable and legitimate."
--I have drawn the following conversation word for word from The Confessions of Morikand Jones (bk. II, vol. iv). Morikand himself transcribed it faithfully from his mother's testimony delivered during those three days they were alone together following the Rape. At that time it had been eight years since the conversation took place, but Cynthia swore that every syllable had imprinted itself indelibly on her mind. R.J.S.--
"I thought that's who it was," said the voice. "You sound as good as you look. I love a broad with tits like yours. I like your ass, too. You and me oughta get together sometime. I'd like to show you my cock." After each statement, the voice paused, waiting for the inevitable click. But it didn't come. Cynthia could hear the man's breath coming faster. She could almost hear the questions throbbing in his head: Have I shocked her? Has she ever heard such talk? Is she speechless with disgust? Or does she like it? Does she want to hear more? Why hasn't she hung up? "Uh, I don't guess you can talk, huh?"
"No one's here," Cynthia heard herself say.
"Oh, the boss is out, huh? Good. Then we can talk for a while?"
"I'm listening."
"Yeah. You're a good listener, all right. I bet you're a good fucker too; aren't you? I can tell the way you walk. You're a fucking machine if I ever saw one. Am I right? Say, what's your name, anyway?"
"Maria."
"Maria, huh? That's a pretty name. I once knew a cunt named Maria. She had big tits too, real big. I used to fuck her two or three times a week. She had cunt hair clear up to her belly button. Hey, you never did tell me if you were hairy nor not-between the legs, I mean. Come on; you can tell me. Have you got a lot o' hair, or just a little fuzz around the crack?"
"A lot, I guess."
"Oh, Jesus!" It was almost a whistle; naturally, he hadn't expected her to answer. "T-tell me about your tits. What color are the nipples? Tell me!"
"I... I don't know. Just regular."
"Take one out and look at it. Go ahead; nobody's there. Are you doing it."
"Yes."
"Are you looking at it."
"Yes."
"Which one."
"The left one."
"Is it... ? Are you holding it in your hand? Have you taken it out of your brassiere?"
"Yes. I've pulled down my bra, and I'm holding it in my hand. My nipple is sort of brownish, or olive-colored."
"Big or little?"
"Little, I guess. About an inch across." Cynthia was really warming up to the game now. She had forgotten all about Harry, and it was only coincidental that she was describing Maria's breasts so accurately. What she was actually doing was drawing on her memory of those of her sister and her mother. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was cupping a large, hot, naked tit in her palm - a tit that was hers, all hers, that grew upon her own chest...
"Squeeze it." His voice was tense, constricted. "Did you?"
"Yes. What are you doing?"
"Me? Oh, I'm just sitting here. There's a bunch of cunts here, playing with my cock. I wish you were here. Would you like me to stick my cock in you?"
"Maybe."
"It's big! If you're very tight, it might hurt. This girl here that's jacking me off, she can't hardly get her fingers around it. What are you doing now?"
"Just playing with my tittie. The nipple's getting fat now. Just a minute; I'll get the other one out... Okay, now I've got them both out. Boy, if the boss comes in, I'll be in trouble!"
"You mean... ? Hey, you're not shitting me, are you? Have you really got your tits hanging out-there in the office?"
"Sure."
"T-t-take off your pants!"
"All right. Hold on a second." Laying the receiver on the desk, Cynthia jerked her skirt up and slipped out of her panties. When she sat down again, she hooked one knee over the arm of the chair and propped the other leg up on the desk. Her skirt was bunched at her waist. "Hello? I'm back."
"You took your pants off?"
"Uh huh. Ooh, this leather feels funny!"
"On your ass?"
"Yeah. I've got my skirt pulled up."
"How are you sitting? Are your legs spread?"
"Yes. Wide open."
"Good. You say you're nice and hairy, huh?"
"Yeah. Shaggy,"
"Black?"
"Uh huh. You like it black?"
"You .. . better... believe . .."
"Hey, you better slow down. You're going to ..."
He was panting, and Cynthia could hear the rapid swishing sound of his hand on his cock. Then the sound stopped. "You're right. Too fast. I'll slow down. So you knew it was just me here, huh? And no girls."
"Uh huh. But that's okay."
"I wish... you were here, Maria."
"If I was, would you ..." Cynthia was breathing hard too. Her free hand was between her open thighs, stroking her thick blonde bush. "Would you stick that big dick in my cunt?"
"Yeah! Right up to the balls! And when I shot my wad the cum would shoot right out your mouth; I'm that hung! Hey, what are you doing now? Are you playing with your pussy? You are, aren't you? Is it juicy?"
"Not very."
"Spit on your hand and rub it into your crack. Do it!"
Cynthia did exactly as he ordered. "It's getting gooey now. Are you still jacking off."
"Uh huh. You've got me hot. Talk to me. Tell me what you'd do if I..."
"After I fucked you in the cunt, I'd stick it up your asshole - hard! Way up inside your asshole, and shoot cum all up in your rectum! And then I'd give your cunt a good eating, and I'd lick up all the cum and everything, and then I'd kiss you and ..."
"Please! Don't stop!"
"... and all the cum and everything would run in your mouth, and you'd suck it up and swallow it, and then I'd stick my dick in your mouth, with shit and cum and cunt juice all over it, and ram it down your throat, and you'd suck me off, and I'd fill up your mouth with cum, and you'd -"
The receiver fell from Cynthia's ear when she started to get her goodies. Her stomach muscles contracted in rhythmic spasms, and her head fell forward, her neck limp as a rag whipping in the wind... "Nhuh, nuh-uh, nhuh!"
When her orgasm had subsided, Cynthia bent over in the sweat-slicked chair and weakly lifted the phone from the floor. She looked at it dizzily for a moment, then put it to her ear.
She heard panting at the other end. "Did you come?" she asked in a small voice.
The panting stopped abruptly. There was a moment of silence, and then a very soft, timid, delicate, sheepish click, followed by the dial tone.
It was near midnight when Harry got home. "Aside from getting stuck," said Cynthia, "how did you do?"
"Not too bad," Harry replied, washing down the last of his peanut butter sandwich with a spoonful of pea soup, "considering it was the first day on the job, and all. How was your day?"
Cynthia shrugged. "So so." She kept waiting for Harry to say something about the new black lace nightie she had on, but he'd hardly glanced at her since he arrived. "What about Farley? Will he be all right?"
"Farley? Sure. A cold beer and a good night's sleep'll fix him up. Little bee sting never hurt nobody."
"I called the office this afternoon, and nobody answered. Didn't Maria come in?"
"Huh? Maria?"
"You know, Harry; the girl that works for you."
"You don't have to get sarcastic, Cynthia. I know who Maria is. No; she didn't come in today."
"Funny that she and Ronnie both got sick at the same time."
"Yeah. Must be somethin' goin' around. Why'd you call?"
"I thought maybe you'd like to take me out to dinner tonight."
"Aw, honey, I'd love to, but it's awful late, and I'm a tired son-of-a-"
"Not now, stupid. It's after midnight."
"Is it that late?"
"That was what I called about. I thought maybe we could go down to Rodriguez and find some quiet little Italian restaurant. Like we used to. It's been a long time since we've been out to dinner; you know?"
"Has it? Well, honey, funds are kinda low, you know . .. But sure; I guess we could do that, if you want to."
"Oh, Harry, can we? When?"
"I don't know," Harry mumbled, pushing away from the table. "Sometime."
He shuffled out of the kitchen, and Cynthia threw his soup bowl into the sink.
Later, in bed ...
"Harrv?" Cvnthia murmured in her sexiest voice. "Hmm?"
"Know somethin' else it's been a long time since we did?"
"Whazat, honey?" Harry mumbled. "I'll give you three guesses."
"Mhm."
"I'll give you a little hint ..." She had removed the lacy panties that went with her nightie, and now she moved under the sheet toward Harry, who was curled up like a foetus with his back to her. She rubbed her fuzzy hump against his bare ass (Harry always slept raw). "Does that give you any ideas? Come on; make a guess, Harry... Harry?"
But the son of a bitch was asleep.
Cynthia lay awake for a long time, listening to Harry's snoring, madder than hell and stiff as a pole. It was during this time that "the plan" began to take definite shape in her mind; from that night on, she was like a cocked gun, and the event that would pull her trigger was about not far off. In The Confessions, we find her thoughts:
*: Bk. II; vol. iv, pp. 250-265.
"For twenty minutes that evening," writes Morikand, "thanks to the anonymous telephoner, my mother had known what it was like to have large breasts in Twentieth Century America. Never after that would she be satisfied with push-up bras; nevermore would she be able to compromise with what she considered a cruel trick of Destiny. What she did not realize was that even as she lay there contemplating her bold plan of rebellion against her fate, she was following the letter of Destiny to the very serif.
"She sat in the center of the bed, facing me, her legs crossed, her hair spilling over her shoulders. We were both still naked. The ropes, which I had not yet removed from her ankles, were coiled loosely between us like serpents. As she talked, her eyes sometimes met mine, sometimes seemed to fix on the wall over my shoulder, sometimes lingered for long periods on my genitals, but were always cloudy, unseeing. Her mind, however, was in the sharpest focus; everything was coming back to her in the most vivid detail. She went on ...
"' "If I had big tits I could wake him up." That's what I kept thinking. " 'If I had tits like my stupid sister, he wouldn't be lying there asleep, no matter how tired he was! I'd stick 'em in his ears and wrap 'em around his head. I'd plug one of 'em in his mouth and turn him on like a neon sign!" I got madder and madder, Mori. I knew he was lying about Maria, just like Roy had used to lie to me about Bobby. And the thing that made me maddest of all was that just like then, I knew I wouldn't have the guts to say anything about it. I was afraid of having a fight like that with Harry, just as I'd been afraid of having one with Roy. I'd just grit my teeth and let it go on, and hope that it would pass. I was so timid, so insecure, and it was all because of my flat chest. I know that's what is was, because I changed afterwards.'
" 'Tell me about Roy and Bobby, Mother,' I said.
" 'Yes, I thought about that, too, that night. I relived the whole horrible thing, because it was like it was happening all over again.
" 'Placenter is a little riverbottom town in western Kentucky - nothing but a wide place in the road; and that's what made it so humiliating when Roy started meeting Bobby behind my back, because everybody knew everybody else, and whenever something like that happened, the whole town knew about it. I know Uranus isn't much bigger, and nobody knows anybody here, but it's different in those little farm towns. Everybody whispering behind your back, and snickering when you walk by... Oh, it was hideous! That's one reason I married Harry, because he wanted out too. I would have done anything to get out of that town!
" 'Anyway, Roy was my first steady - practically my first boyfriend. I wasn't very popular in school. Do you know, Mori, that I was a virgin until I married Harry? I lost my cherry before that - I'll tell you about that, too - but I was nineteen and married before I ever even came close to having sex with a man. And then it was a fat man. Well, anyway, Roy and I went together all during our senior year in high school, and then after we graduated he still came to see me a lot, and he always took me to the movie on Saturday night and to church on Sunday. Everyone was sure we were going to get married, including me. At first, when people would ask me if he'd popped the question yet, I'd say, "No, not yet," but then after a while I began to say, "Wouldn't you like to know?" - insinuating that he had. I thought I was safe in saying that at first, but as the months passed, I began to wonder.
" 'Roy was a fairly good-looking boy - not too bright, but fairly good - looking-and his father owned the general store. I wanted very much to marry him. I didn't have any wild yearning to see the big city, like some of the other kids, and neither did Roy. I just wanted to settle down to a quiet life as a small-town housewife. I was what they called a nice girl; you know? And Roy was a nice young man - religious and hard-working, and he would soon take over his father's store. I wanted that life very much, and I didn't make a secret of it. That's why when it fell through, and I faced the prospect of becoming an old maid in that gossipy little town, I was more than happy to run away with Fat Harry.' " 'Fat Harry?'
" 'That's what they called him then. Harry was a fat little red-haired kid that nobody liked, but to me he was - '
" 'You keep getting ahead of yourself, Mother. Where did your sister come in?'
" 'Right at the very beginning, Mori. But I wanted that nice, quiet life so much that I blinded myself to the truth. I guess I knew all along that the only reason Roy came to see me was to get a look at
Bobby; I just wouldn't admit it to myself. Looking back at it, I can see that the whole thing from beginning to end was Bobby's fault - her and those goddamned tits of hers. She started filling out when she was eleven, and by the time she was fifteen, she and Ma could almost wear the same bras. They used to sit around looking at Ma's family photo album, comparing this one's tits with that one's tits, and talking about how all the girls in the family had filled out an early age - except for Cynthia, that is - and I'd have to sit there with my nose in a book and pretend not to hear it. Ma was only in her late thirties then, and still very pretty. My father died when I was four, and Ma hadn't remarried, though she was never without a "gentleman friend" or two, as far back as I can remember. Somebody was always coming around to see her; but if they were screwing her - which no doubt they were - she somehow managed to keep it a secret from the town and from us girls; at least from me. I suspect that she confided in Bobby about this, because as soon as Bobby discovered boys and they discovered her, she never hesitated to tell Ma all about her experiences. "So-and-so tried to kiss me today, Ma," she would say. Or, "So-and-so pinched me last night, Ma; right here!" and they would giggle about it. It embarrassed me to death! Sometimes I'd hear them up in Ma's room late at night, whispering together for hours - probably telling each other all about their sex experiences, and how to have fun and not babies. But I was never included in any of that. My flat chest made me an outcast. One time when Bobby was fourteen and I was seventeen, just a little while before Roy started coming to see me, I overheard Ma kidding Bobby about how fast her breasts were growing - accusing her of having a "hand-made" chest. "You better keep them boys' hands offa them things," she said; "They'll be gettin' so big y'can't carry 'em around." Bobby just giggled. For months after that, I used to lie in bed at night massaging my chest. For hours! I rubbed myself raw, sometimes. But of course nothing happened. It was hopeless.
" 'So anyway, Roy used to go with this girl that lived near our house - she was a friend of mine - and the three of us used to walk home from school together. One day the girl was sick, and just Roy and I walked home. There was a little creek that ran through the woods between the school and the road where we lived, and Roy wanted to walk that way, so we did. It was a beautiful day. The trees were full of birds, the sun was warm, and the creek was all clear and bubbly. I took a penny out of my purse and threw it in the water and made a wish. I wished that I would soon have a boyfriend that would walk me through those woods; but I didn't even dare to hope that it would be Roy. He asked me why I threw the penny, but I wouldn't tell him.
" 'Then all of a sudden a horrible thing happened - horrible for me, anyway. We came around a bend in the stream, and there was Bobby, in the water with three boys. They were all four as naked as you and I. Bobby was floating on her back, giggling, and the boys stood all around her, holding her up and grabbing at her tits and her pussy. Roy just stood there staring down at her, and I was frozen with embarrassment.
" 'As soon as Bobby saw me, she said, "Sis! Hey, come on in! The water's fine!" Roy took a step forward like he was going to jump in clothes and all, but the boys splashed water on him and threatened him with rocks. They were brothers, farm boys that lived nearby, and they didn't go to school. They hollered, "Get the hell outa here, 'less y'wunt yer ass busted!"
" 'The first thing I did when Ma got home from work that afternoon was to tell on Bobby, but Ma just said "Aw, there ain't nothin' wrong with that, honey. Bobby's only fourteen, y'know. Why, I was twenty 'fore I ever swam in a bathin' suit!" And she just laughed it off. I went to my room and cried. What made me feel worst of all was that while Roy and I were standing there on the creek bank, one of the boys had pointed at me and said, "Hey, is that there a girl or a boy?"
" 'It was right after that - the very next day - that Roy asked me if he could take me to church that Sunday. I was overjoyed! I thought my wish was coming true! Soon we were going steady, and spending a lot of time together. That year was heaven for me. I closed my eyes to the way he looked at Bobby whenever she skipped through the house or stretched out on the divan where he could see her from the front porch. It was me he liked, not her; she was much too young for him, and besides, she already had a terrible reputation around town, and no one would think of going out in public with her, let alone marrying her. I was older, and much more sensible. I was a decent girl; I could cook and sew and all that. I would be a good wife, and Roy knew it. Those are the things I told myself. The truth was too hard to face.
" 'Even when I found them together that night, I tried to go on as usual, as if nothing had happened. This was a month or so after graduation, when everyone thought it was only a matter of time until Roy and I got married. He said he had to do something down at the store and he'd be a few minutes late getting to church that night; I was to go ahead without him, and save a seat. Well, I sat through the whole service, and he never showed up. When he made up some excuse the next day about getting tied up at the store, I acted as though I believed him. I wanted to believe what he told me and not what I'd seen with my own eyes.
" 'What did you see?'
" 'For some reason, instead of walking home the usual way that night, I decided to cut across the ballpark behind the church annex building. As I was passing by a nursery window, I noticed a dim light inside. The shade was drawn, but there was a hole in it. I didn't pay any attention until I heard somebody giggling. It sounded sickeningly familiar, and I was almost afraid to look in, but I couldn't resist. I guess you know what I saw.' "
'Bobby and your boyfriend.'
" 'Yes. They had locked themselves in the nursery. If only they'd done it in the dark, I would never have been sure; but no: they had to light a candle. I guess it wasn't enough just to feel those tits; he had to see them, too. He had her stripped naked and spread out on a little table, just a few feet from the window. I had a ringside seat. I didn't say or do anything. I just stood there in the dark, holding my breath, watching. You see how chickenhearted I was, Mori? I hoped desperately that if I didn't confront Roy with this, I wouldn't lose him. I had an idea that Bobby wouldn't be hanging around Placenter very many years longer, and that once she was gone, everything would be all right if I didn't rock the boat. I chose to be an ostrich rather than an old maid... Mori, you're getting a hard-on again!'
"It was one of those slow, quiet erections to which one can add or subtract inches at will. My mind was in that tranquil state which always follows a return to the womb, whether symbolic or, as in my case, actual. My mother's words were pleasant to my ears. I allowed my penis to grow of its own accord, and soon it touched the ropes that were coiled between us. It was strangely stimulating to build the images from her words alone, and to let the psychic parts relax, allow them to withdraw into the nerves and the glands. I asked her to describe more fully what she saw in the nursery.
" 'Roy was dressed for church. He had on a white shirt, a tie and coat, green socks and his shiny black Sunday shoes. He hadn't taken off anything but his pants. His dick was sticking out like a hoe handle, all red and slick. I thought it was the most disgusting and the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; you know what I mean, Mori?' I did.
'Bobby's legs hung off the end of the table, and Roy stood between them, bending over her and playing with her tits. He squeezed them and slapped them back and forth and pinched them till she squealed. Then he bent over farther and sucked on her little pink nipples, and slid his cock up and down through the little bit of fuzz she had on her pussy, and over her stomach. When he raised his head, Bobby reached down and took his dick in her hands... Oh, Mori, that made me more jealous than anything, I think, when she wrapped her fingers around that big, beautiful thing! How I wanted to do that myself! It should have been my fingers, not hers. I could almost feel its heat, its weight in my palm, and how it would jerk when I squeezed it, how it would feel sliding on my stomach. I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes to watch the rest.
" 'She held it with both hands and pushed it down toward her hole. Then she looked up at him with those big blue eyes of hers and said, "Come on, Roy, fuck me again." Again! I wondered how many times they'd already done it. I can still hear that breathless, childish voice begging him-"Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!" over and over again, and Roy teasing her, holding back, jabbing at her cunt with his cock while she tried to drag it in.
" 'Finally he bent his knees and let her have it. It went all the way in, and her mouth opened and her legs came up off the floor. "Oooh!" she said. "That feels so goood! You got the biggest one I ever had! Push hard!" She lifted her legs high, and Roy shoved it in as far as it would go, and wiggled his ass around, and she said, "Oh, that's sooo nice! There's somethin' up in there that feel so good when ya hit it! Come on! Fuck me hard!" Oh, I wanted so bad to know what she meant - what it was in there that felt so good! I couldn't stand it anymore. I went home and cried myself to sleep.
" 'After that, every time Roy took me to the movie or out for a walk, or when he came over to sit on the porch, I tried everything I knew to get him to love me up. But nothing worked; he didn't seem to want to touch me at all - like I had a disease, or something. I couldn't understand why he kept coming around, if he loathed me so. Then I found out. It seems he and Bobby had found a better place to play than the church nursery - namely, Bobby's bedroom. I noticed that shortly after my sister came home from a date or something, Roy would leave. One night when Ma was out. I got suspicious, and after Roy left and Bobby went to bed, I turned out all the lights and slipped outside. Sure enough, pretty soon here comes the son of a bitch sneaking back. I hid in the shadows and watched him crawl through Bobby's window. The screen was all unlatched and ready for him. So you see, by being on the spot when the little slut got home, he knew exactly when the fun was to start. Coming to see me was just a convenient way to kill time before the main event.
" 'Miserable and hopeless as it made me feel, I couldn't help watching again. I stood there at the window while they went through three orgasms, and then I cried myself to sleep again. I didn't know what to do, so I still didn't do anything, and things went on like that for several weeks. I became obsessed with watching Roy and Bobby fuck. Somehow I was able to lose myself while I stood there at the window. I put myself in my sister's place, and imagined it was me getting it and not her - that it was my tits getting sucked and battered and bitten, not hers. It was like taking a drug. During the long days between these sessions, I tried not to think about anything at all. I just floated, sort of.
" 'Meanwhile, Roy's secret romance with "the little Moore girl" was leaking out. Naturally, he'd told his friends about it, and soon the whole town was buzzing like a beehive. At least it seemed that way to me. I didn't know what to do, and I was the most miserable person alive. If I had a showdown with Roy, not only would I wipe out whatever chance was left that he might marry me after Bobby left Placenter, but it would also cause him and Bobby to go somewhere else for their lovemaking, and I wouldn't be able to watch any more. I don't know which of those possibilities tormented me the most. Then something happened that made everything very clear; and there were only two things I could do after that: kill myself, or leave Placenter for good.
" 'One night Ma came home early and caught Roy and Bobby in bed. I was standing there at the window as usual, and saw the whole thing. She walked in just as Roy was sticking it in the first time. There was a mad scramble at first - Roy trying to get to the window, and Ma trying to cut him off. "Now just hold on a minute, Roy! I done caught yuns!" Ma said; and Roy kept saying he could explain, and all that, trying to cover his cock with the bedsheet and scoop up his clothes at the same time. But finally he realized that Ma wasn't going to shoot him or anything. She told him to be quiet or Cynthia was going to wake up and come in, and how would he like that? "Oh, Mizzuz Moore," he whispers, "I'd shore be obliged if you wouldn't tell Cynthia about this here, uh ..." and Ma asked him what it would be worth to him. As I told you, Roy wasn't too bright, but when Bobby giggled he began to get the idea, and when Ma opened the front of her dress, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. "You don't mind sharin' a little with your poor old ma, do yuh, Bobby?" she said. Bobby said she thought that would be fun.
" 'Roy just stood there watching Ma undress, like he couldn't believe his eyes. When her bra was off, she held her tits up for approval. "How y'like 'em, Roy?" she said. "Not too big for yuh, are they?" Ma's tits were abnormally large, just like Bobby's, but they weren't at all saggy, and still hung fairly high. Roy said that, by grannies, he liked 'em big, the bigger the better, and Bobby said, "Well, I'm sorry, Roy!" and pulled the sheet up to her chin. "Now he didn't mean it like that, honey," said Ma. "He likes us both; don't yuh, Roy."
"Yessum. I shore do!" he said, and in a minute he was in bed, lying on his back with Ma on one side of him and Bobby on the other.
" 'They laughed and giggled and dangled their tits in his face until they got him so hot he turned red all over. They had him sucking and drooling like an ape, and every time he would bite a nipple, I would pinch my own; I pinched them so hard that my eyes watered from the pain, but the more it hurt, the harder I pinched. Then Ma said, "Do y'ever do this for im, Bobby?" and put her mouth over his cock. With those four big boobs jiggling and jumping in his face, his nuts must have been about ready to go off all by themselves, because Ma couldn't have pumped him more than three times before he shot off in her mouth. When I saw that, the saliva just poured into my mouth! It was like my body was trying to duplicate everything that was happening in the room. A few shots were enough to fill Ma's cheeks, and when she pulled her mouth off, the cum was still spurting out of his cock. At first it shot way up in the air and fell all over the place, with Bobby giggling and trying to catch the falling blobs in her mouth, but then Ma got up on her knees and aimed the spitting thing at herself. She made it shoot on her tits and in her belly button, but she took most of the load on her pussy. When it finally stopped, the shaggy brown hair at her crotch was dripping with the stuff. And then ...'
"At this point, the wordless images poured from my mother's mind into mine. I could not hold them back. My member now stood out straight and horizontal, humming like an antenna in the psycho-sexual wind, picking up everything in utter clarity - the dusty little town, the brown, starless sky, the smell of mule dung and dilapidated outhouses, of cornfields and rusty plows and twisted harrows, of oil and gasoline and sperms dying from exposure; the slim blonde girl outside the old two-story house with the paint peeling from its clapboards, her hands inside her blouse, inside the padded cups of her bra, her nipples swollen and throbbing, the pungent odor of her vagina, the damp, stained crotch of her panties, the vibration of her trembling knees... and I saw what happened - felt the fear of discovery, the hot weight of great, dark-nippled dugs over my head, the creak of the window screen, the impact of mucus on hard clay, the longing, the craving, the taste of earth and doomed life on my tongue, in my throat, in my body, my pitifiul, sealed body, struggling to merge itself into the earthy oblivion from which it came, into the dark dirt which it craved; the whirling desperation, the smell and the feel and the shape of fruit in my hand, in my body, deep in my body, the bright flow of virgin blood, the black flow of the death-wish... It came to me all in a rush, clear and complete and instantaneous; but I only said, "What, Mother?"
" 'It's hard to tell, Mori, even to you. But I have to. Ma got off the bed and walked right toward me, with her cheeks all puffed out with semen, and her body spattered and dripping with it. I thought she'd seen me, and my blood turned to ice. I barely had time to jump aside before she pushed the screen open and spat out the window. If she had looked, she would have seen me, but she didn't. She went back to the bed and said, "Oowee! You musta been savin' that up for a week!"
" 'Then I guess I went kinda crazy, Mori. There was Roy's cum at my feet, and it was like a magnet. I couldn't help myself. I got down on my hands and knees and lapped it up like a dog, dirt and all. I gulped it down, and sucked the clay to get it all. It did something to me, Mori. I believe I came close to having an orgasm. It was as though in some way I was having sex with Roy. When the stuff thickened in my throat, I imagined my throat was my cunt and that I was finally feeling that deep, wonderful sensation that Bobby talked about when Roy pushed his cock way up inside her belly. I staggered away from the window, almost drunk just from knowing that I had a part of his body in mine. I was almost happy. That's why I was so surprised when I got to the kitchen and realized why I had gone there. I had gone there to kill myself.
" T stood beside the sink for a long time, with the point of the butcher knife against my chest, wondering if I could hit my heart on the first stab, and listening to the squeaking bed in the back of the house. I thought about how shocked they would be when they found me there in a pool of blood. That would give the shitty little town something to talk about for a while! " 'But then I happened to look at the bowl of wax fruit and gourds on the table. One of the gourds looked like a cock - a very long, curved cock. I put the knife down and pulled off my pants. "Why should I die with my cherry?" I said to myself. I dipped the gourd in the lard can, and climbed up on the table. I almost hoped they would come in while I was doing it. They could watch me fuck myself, and then they could watch me stab myself. I was on the edge, Mori; I was really going buggy. I let my legs hang off the edge of the table, as Bobby had done at the church, and rammed it in. I was brutal. I wanted it to hurt, and it did. I literally raped myself, Mori. Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing?'
" 'Imagine a thing, Mother. Anything. It has been done, it is being done, and it will be done again. Continue.'
" 'My hymen was tough. I guess that's why it hadn't broken accidentally before that. It seemed like I could hear it rip, it hurt so. When I looked at my pussy it was all bloody; my hair and the tablecloth were soaked with it. But I didn't stop. I kept pumping, each time getting a little deeper, hitting a little harder, twisting it around in there, and when it started feeling good, I got all excited and shoved the whole damn thing in as hard as I could.
" I almost passed out. I guess I'd rammed it all the way up to my cervix, because a different kind of blood started coming out; but I didn't give a shit about that. I just kept that gourd going like a butter churn, and finally I came. It took a long time, but I did it. I closed my eyes and lay back on the table, and imagined I had enormous tits, and that Roy was standing between my legs, fucking me and sucking my big jugs, and that Ma and Bobby were standing outside the window watching, and that they were flat-chested and wishing it was them on the table instead of me. And when I came, God, did I come! When Harry climbed on me the night we got married, I thought it would be better than that, or at least as good, but it wasn't. It wasn't nearly so good.
" 'Anyway, after that, I didn't want to kill myself any more. It was like I had just had a purge. I wanted to live, but not in Placenter. How could I live in the same house with those two, after what I'd seen? I was bound and determined to blow town, one way or another. And two nights later I was sitting by myself on the back row at the movie house, when Fat Harry floundered in and flopped down beside me. "Hi, Cynthia," he said, and I said, "Hi, Harry." After a while he put his hand on my leg. I didn't stop him. Before the week was out, we were in Georgia getting married, and it was all over. That's what I thought.
" 'So there I was, Mori, eight years later, lying in the dark beside Fat Harry, only he wasn't fat any more and I was still titless, and it was starting all over again. But this time I had a better idea than killing myself. I was all through with that shit. It wasn't exactly something I planned to do, but at least it was something to think about, a way to get my mind off things ...' "
Cynthia went on to tell Morikand about the magazine article she had read a few weeks before, describing a new method of breast enlargement by direct injection of silicone. As some of you may remember, this treatment became vastly popular in America during the decade preceding the War, but in '58 it had only recently been thought up, and there were only a few doctors in the country who could or would do the job. But as chance would have it, the article (which Cynthia had tucked away safely in her dresser drawer) mentioned that one of these doctors - Dr. D. U. Grosswell, by name - practiced in Miami, less than a hundred miles away. That night, as Cynthia lay listening to Harry snore, unfulfilled in body and mind, reliving the degrading experiences of her past, and remembering how she had felt during the erotic telephone conversation of that afternoon, that hundred miles seemed to shrink to a mere stone's throw.
At last she fell into a dream - a dream that was still fresh and vivid eight years later:
"' I was on a raft or something, in the middle of the ocean. The water was all smoky, and he clouds were on fire. They were shaped like gourds, and the fire was shooting out of them, but still everything was black. Even the fire seemed black. I had gigantic tits - bigger than these, even. It seemed as if my tits were all that kept me afloat, and I was afraid that if a shark hit one of them, it would pop and I would sink. I was naked, and my hair was all alive and long and snaky in the wind. I still had short hair at that time, but in the dream it was very long - down to my waist. I danced, and shook my big tits, and everybody applauded and whistled, and all the men started jacking off. Soon the air was full of flying cum, and I grabbed one of my jugs with both hands and squeezed it, and showered everybody with milk. There were men, women and children. I gave them all a good squirting.
" 'Then a man rose out of the sea and walked toward me over the water. I was scared. He had large black eyes, and greenish skin, and for a nose he had a beak like a bird. His long black hair spread out behind him over the sea, and his cock hung to his knees. T wanted to run, but I was tied down to the raft and... Oh, Mori, I didn't...'
" 'Finish it first, Mother,' I said. My member had by now extended itself across the gap that separated me from my mother, and was grazing among the curls of her crotch with the tranquility of a giraffe browsing beneath the baobabs. She very lightly placed her fingertips along its shank behind the head, as delicately as though manipulating a Ouija puck.
" 'I was tied down, spread-eagle,' she said. 'The raft was caught in a huge black whirlpool, and the water was filled with big spermy things with whip-tails and long teeth that glowed in the dark. At the bottom of the whirlpool, it seemed like there was a meadow - a meadow of curly hair, like maidenhair, and it was bathed in sunlight. But up above, it was all dark and howling. The raft went round and round at the top of the funnel, but it never went down.
" 'Then the green man was on the raft, and when he stuck that enormous cock into me, all the people drowned and all the cars and the airplanes sank into the sea, and the sperms died, and it rained flowers, and we floated over that field of hair like the lovers always do in those paintings by that Russian ...'
" 'Chagall.'
" 'Yes; Chagall. And that was all.'
" 'But you didn't wake up.'
" 'No. It just ended there.'
" 'And it wasn't until just a moment ago that you realized who your green lover was.'
"She nodded, and lifted her eyes to mine.
" 'It was you, wasn't it? Oh, Mori, it was you'! "
-- Confessions, bk. II; vol. iv, pp. 301, 302.
CHAPTER FOUR
"Harry said I was what?" my Uncle Farley asked a few days later as he shut off the Jeep's engine.
"He said you were full o' shit," Ronnie repeated, his voice strangely resonant in the sudden silence of the woods.
"Oh, he did, did he? And what do you think?"
"Who me?" said the kid, "Well, you know, man, I mean, you know; I just... I mean like, you know what I mean, man. I mean-"
"Oh, shut the fuck up!" said Uncle Farley. "Why in the hell would I make up a thing like that if I didn't see it with my own eyes?"
"I didn't say you made it up, man, I mean, you know, it's just kinda weird, man. I mean, a giant frog in an overcoat, and all ..."
"Now, did I say it was a giant frog in an overcoat, smart ass? I said it looked like a giant frog in an overcoat. Harry woulda seen it too, if he hadn't been so busy watchin' me drown. All I know is, there's something mighty goddamn spooky-lookin' in these woods, and I'm gonna prove it to you. Get the machetes and come on."
"Where we goin', man?"
"I'm gonna show you the tracks it made. It had to make some tracks, a thing that big. Come on; get your ass outa there; it's gettin' late."
"We ain't had no coffee yet, man," Ronnie protested.
"Fuck the coffee," said my uncle. "That's the trouble with you kids; you expect to get paid for drinkin' coffee all day. Where in hell did Harry dig you up, anyway?"
"You're the one hired me. Farley."
"Oh, yeah. Well, come on. We'll get some coffee later on."
"Hey, there's only two machetes back here, Farley. What happened to the other one."
"Harry lost it. Let's go."
To avoid the possibility of another disaster in Owlshit Sough. Uncle Farley had come in from the north, which made it necessary to leave the Jeep on the north side of a ditch that ran along the township line, and enter the park on foot. As far as the job went, this wasn't a bad tactic, since the first task was to run the township line; but Farley was more interested in proving his sanity than in surveying, and this meant another plunge into that hostile interior which had nearly done him in two days before. This time, however, he had come equipped with a map and compass, and according to his calculations, Fish Head Hole was only a mile or so south of where the road ended. This was correct, and it should have been simply a matter of following the east edge of the creek bottom down to the little path that led into the Hole. However, by midmorning, while he had not lost his bearings, neither had my uncle found Fish Head Hole. It was hot, and his bad ankle was weakening, and his cock was throbbing in its mud pack. Finally he opened his fly and sat down on a log to adjust the bandage, whereupon several dozen red ants crept swiftly and stealthily up his good leg and, at a signal, all bit him at once.
"Ouch! Oh! Goddamn!" said Uncle Farley as he fell off the log onto a prickly pear. "Oooo! Oh, Shit! Ouch! Goddamn! Ooo! Fuck! Son-of-a-bitch!" And so forth.
This struck my uncle as a bad omen, and as soon as he got his boots and pants back on, he was ready to turn back. But just then Ronnie called to him from the edge of the bottom. "Hey, Farley, come on over here! Let's get outa the sun for a minute."
That sounded good to Uncle Farley, and he made for the shade at a fast limp.
The path itself rang no bells in my uncle's memory, but as soon as he stepped out into the leafy clearing under the big bay tree he knew where he was. "By God, this is it!" he announced. "I knew I could find it!"
Giving the bush with the bumblebee nest a wide berth, Farley pointed to the spot on the other side of the creek where he had seen the bogeyman. "That's where it was," he said in a hushed voice. "Right there! Right there under them bushes. You go on across, Ron. I'll be right behind you."
"Fuck you, dad," said Ronnie.
"Hey, watch your tongue you young punk! You'll go across or get your ass fired."
"Fired, hell," snickered the kid, "I quit."
"Quit? Uh, now wait a minute, kid ..." (The fact is, my uncle was afraid to cross the creek by himself, being none too at home in the woods, as you may have gathered.) "Maybe we can work something out, huh?" The argument went on for a while, with neither side weakening until Farley offered to head straight for the nearest bar as soon as they found the tracks he was looking for.
Ronnie hesitated. "You buyin'?" he asked suspiciously.
"Well, kiss my ass!" said my Uncle Farley, spinning around like a dervish and stretching out his arms to heaven. "You got a lotta balls; you know that? It ain't enough I let you drink when you're supposed to be workin'; I gotta buy the goddamn beer to boot!"
"Forget it, then," said Ronnie.
"All right, y'cheap bastard, I'll buy!"
"Oh! Well, why didn't you say so?" said Ronnie, sliding down the bank and into the water, "I mean, shit, what're we waitin' for?"
Once on the other side, they hacked the dense brush away from the place Uncle Farley indicated, and carefully examined the ground. But though the mud there was fairly stiff, and should have held an imprint for several days at least, they found nothing, not a trace.
Uncle Farley was baffled. "Well, I'm a son of a bitch," he mumbled. "It had to be right here. This is where I saw it."
For a few minutes, Ronnie watched Farley crawling around in the mud. Then he said, "Say, man, I mean, uh, I can just, uh... like, you know, man, if you want me to, uh-"
"Why don't you just knock off all that shit, for Christ's sake, and say whatever the fuck it is you're tryin' to say?"
What Ronnie was trying to say was that if Farley wanted him to, he would tell Harry and Maria that they had found these huge frog tracks all over the place where Farley said he'd seen the monster, and that he, Ronnie, had seen them with his own eyes, and that by God, there must have been something there, all right, and - "Oh, I see!" Farley interrupted, smiling up at him. "I'll lie, and you'll swear to it."
"Yeah, that's it. Come on, man, let's get them suds!"
"Huge frog tracks!" growled my uncle. "Why, ya wise little punk, ya! I'm tellin' you right now, there ain't gonna be no beer until we find somethin', so you just better get the hell down here and start lookin', and never mind the smart remarks!"
- Was he watching all that? - No, Morikand replied.
That sort of exposure more than once a month would have finished him. Your uncle wasn't kidding you about the heat. When he came out before, at least there were a few clouds; that day there were none. -How do you know that, if he didn't go out? - I asked. I can feel it through the tin roof. His skin was super-sensitive to the slightest nuance of aridity or humidity, ozone or ether, even to the presence of pollen or insecticide in the outer air... His eyes are closed. They have been closed since sundown of the day he scared the hell out of Farley. Yet I have a very vivid feeling of the day. I can almost feel the color of the sky. It is a day like today. Still and hot. The streams are sluggish. The alligators and the cotton mouths are sunning themselves along the edges of the ponds, and on the otter slides along the old railroad. I hear the sound of running water; a strong, healthy stream fertilizing the earth: the black girl is pissing in the sand beneath the pine tree behind the shack. She stands in a half-squat, her skirt lifted, her face smiling up at the grackle singing his polyphonic song in the lower branches, the black iridescence of his throat swelling and shimmering in the filtered sunlight. The girl's singing echoes briefly in the pine thicket and then fades away to the north. Soon there is the distant sound of splashing water as she bathes her brown body at the edge of the marsh. It may not have been precisely like that, of course; I'm giving you his picture. But like all burrowing animals, he was acutely sensitive to all vibrations outside the burrow. - And your grandfather?I said. He wasn't there, was he? - No. He had walked into Paradise for a sack of flour and a bottle of wine.
- I hate to bust up the seance, girls and boys, Charon interrupted, but man does not live by words alone, as the poet says, and my belly's ringin' all kinds o' bells. He paid out the main-sheet and steered for a small hammock with cabbage palms overhanging the water. (Charon is the name Morikand had jokingly given to the black man known previously as Charlie Boat, after the latter had agreed to take us into the Glades in search of Prester Steve, and the name had stuck. In their zealous effort to wipe out the Bean City Commune, the Whites had inadvertently blown up the Okeechobee dike, flooding the entire upper Glades. Once more the Everglades was a great, shallow river, flowing freely from the Lake to the Gulf in one vast sheet of warm black water, just as it had for millions of years before the Americans had constructed their ingenious valves and shut if off like a faucet. The mere thought of all those farms and roads and spillways washing away into the sea was enough to make Morikand and me leap for joy! I began then to get a new insight into Morikand's soul: watching him wander happily about through the war-torn towns and cities is like watching a fish in a bubbling stream; he is in his element; follow him long enough, and you become a fish yourself. To take part in the War would of course seem the most absurd of follies, but to live in its shadow as we do, to side-step its bombs, to listen to its mad stampedes over our heads, to live off the carrion it leaves behind, and now, with the flooding of the Glades, to see the earth in the very midst of death and destruction reassuming its primeval face, to witness the exhilarating return of Chaos... this is to see the War and the world for what they are, and to feel the blood of life flow anew in one's veins! But I've strayed from the point. During the six or seven months between the destruction of the dike and the final cutting off of the Black supply lines into Florida, Charlie Boat had earned his bread and grass by running renegades, Black and White alike, down into the fastnesses of the Glades in a shallow-draft fishing launch he had somehow appropriated for himself. When he could no longer get fuel, he was forced to discontinue these runs. We met him one night by chance along the backwater behind Point Head, where some sect or other was holding its rites. We had gotten wind of the meeting, and had gone there in hopes of getting a free meal; so had Charlie Boat. He had by then converted his launch into a sailboat and, like us, had become a scavenger, following the flooded canals and picking up what he could along the borders of the Glades. When I found out who he was, I immediately confided to him my determination to seek out the encampment of Prester Steve, that legendary high priest of the New Seminole sect whose dubious existence I accepted on faith alone. Obviously, the whole thing smacked of a quest for Eldorado or a voyage to Byzantium, but Charlie turned out to be as incorrigible a romantic as I myself, and before morning he was convinced; we would make a stab at it. Of course Morikand would just as soon be one place as another, and Slit would march happily into Hell itself if Morikand led the way; but for me, if the story was true, such a sanctuary would be ideal: beyond the concern of White sorties and out of reach of Black raids, in the pleasant company of other free souls, I would be free to pursue my writings in peace. It is a thing which must be done. Morikand has written nothing since the Confessions, which he completed in his tenth year, and has firmly resolved never to take up the pen again, placing that instrument in the same category as the sword and the gun. Therefore it's up to me, pompous though it may sound.)
This, then, is what we were up to when Morikand received his impressions of his father's activities, if they can be called that, on the day that my Uncle Farley returned to Fish Head Hole. We were a day and a night out of Grass Point Landing, sailing down the deep channel that used to be the Miami Canal. As we squatted in the shade of the trees, boiling rice and swamp cabbage in Morikand's helmet, I overheard Charon talking to Slit in confidential tones: Say, ah, what's the story on the old man and the spooky kid with the long dong? Like what's their thing? Slit let him know first off that Morikand was not a spooky kid, though she said nothing of the long dong. He's a holy man, she said. I mean he's really more than a holy man, but like I don't know all them words, man. And the old man, he's Morikand's disciple, like. Whenever Morikand receives, Rustam writes it down; and he writes down a lot of other stuff, too, all about Morikand. Morikand laughs at him, but -- What do you mean, receives? Charon asked. Receives what? All kind o' stuff about his ancestors and all, said Slit. See, he's a psychic or something. He can see the past and the future and everything. Sometimes he says things you can't understand, but it don't matter. He's the most wonderful, beautiful person there ever was. Well, I can see why you dig him, Charon chuckled, and after a pause added, but I dig him too. Something about him. Makes you feel good. Like weed. Slit sighed with contentment. Yeah. Only better. (This only by way of showing how little people understand Morikand, even those closest to him.) After we had eaten, I persuaded Morikand to continue. Charon went down to bail out the boat, while Slit rinsed out her G-string and hung it up to dry. She's really getting to be quite a beauty, Slit; almost a woman now. Morikand has been good to her. That pack she used to run with would scarcely recognize her now, with her sunbleached hair and her clear eyes, the proud breasts which she never covers, her clear, smooth skin, nut-brown from head to toe: the very picture of health and youth. I too feel younger. With every passing month in Morikand's company, I seem to shed a year or two of my age; life with him is like a daily dip in the Fountain of Youth. Slit sat down behind Morikand and began to plait his hair as he tapped the proper wave-length and indulged my obsession:
- He is in his burrow. The close walls of books press in around him. The damp earth cools his blood in spite of the morning's heat. He opens his eyes. He is remembering. - Remembering what? - The girl, and the strange sensation he felt while watching her with the red-haired man; the way their naked bodies had moved together in copulation, the way her lips had pursed and stretched as she sucked his penis. He opens his overcoat now, unties the rope around his waist, unbuttons his pants. He looks at his own penis, holds it in his hand. It is like a small, limp carrot the color of a maggot. At the end of the foreskin is a tuft of hair like that on a bull's prick. Like the hair of his head, it is of a sickly pinkish hue. He notices that it is damp. With his thumb and forefinger he squeezes out a drop of oily fluid, and examines it curiously. He smells it. He is... stunned. But that's not the best word; confused is better. He is confused by the realization that it is not urine. He looks up at the dark belly over his head, the rusty sheet of tin that forms the roof of his cell. There are two nail-holes of light. He thinks of the white girl's breasts, the olive-colored nipples and how they expanded when the man sucked them. The breasts were larger than those of his sisters. They remind him of the pale mushrooms that grow in a damp corner of his burrow. He sits up and turns toward the mushrooms. Two large ones grow side by side, and he puts out his hands and touches them. Strokes them. Gently. He remembers how the red-haired man did it. He squeezes them, and they crumble into flakes between his clawlike fingers. He looks down again at his penis. Did it stir? Or did he imagine it? He is baffled. Not that he doesn't recognize or understand these symptoms; what baffles him is the fact that he is observing them upon his own person. After all those years! Hunching forward, he peers closely at his organ, holding it out from his crotch by the tuft. Deliberately, now, he conjures up the vision of the black-haired girl's elevated rump when she offered herself on knees and elbows to the clumsy fat man; he remembers the way her anus tightened and relaxed, the way she wiggled her buttocks, the way the brightness hurt her eyes, the way the outer lips of her vulva smacked when they opened and oozed when they closed, the way the damp black curls bristled about the edges... Yes! It moved. He is certain of it. He rises, now, holding up his trousers with one hand, and sits down at his table. He feels better. At least he knows that something is happening to him, even though he doesn't know what. He has not eaten since his adventure in the upper world. He pulls out the Spengler volume from his wall and peers through the opening to see if they have left him anything to eat. - Oswald Spengler? - I exclaimed with surprise. - The Decline of the West?-What else? Morikand replied calmly. Volume One, to be exact, Form and Actuality. They always left his food on a little shelf that was exactly at a level and in line with that particular book. He had but to remove the volume, put his hand through the slot and drag in whatever tidbit they had left him. - You mean to say he had the original German editions? - Yes. (The mere mention of Oswald Spengler's name is enough to turn me on for a week. Unlikely though it seems, I would like to believe that in some remote corner of the earth, perhaps in some arid cave or submarine vault, his book has survived.) He read not only German, Morikand explained, but also the Romances, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Classical Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphic; and in his old age he easily mastered Minoan Linear B, which he used to make a detailed inventory of every item in the hole he happened to be occupying at the time. It was a kind of tidying-up before his death. - Fantastic! Go on! - Okay, here we go, back on target, zoooooom... Hey! Cut it out, Slit! Hee-hee! Slit had plucked a hair from her cunt and was tickling Morikand's ear with it. Always fucking around, that girl. Never serious. But that's what Morikand likes about her, I guess. Finally she knocked it off and went back to plaiting his hair and weaving little wild flowers into the braids, and he picked it up:
- They have left him a piece of cold fish and a slice of cornbread this time. He wolfs it down. It's not that he's particularly hungry; he's just impatient, almost excited at the strange changes taking place in his body. From under his stool he pulls a large Mason jar and sets it on the table before him. He has preserved something in formaldehyde. Something white. He wipes his mouth nervously with the back of his hand, and cradles his penis in his palm. He stares intently at the object floating in the jar. It is soft, pliable, boneless. It has the appearance of a limp turtle with the carapace unhinged, or of a rotten grapefruit cut in half. From its sides hang flat, twisted tentacles, like sections cut from a huge tapeworm. I can see it, but his thoughts have again dropped to that other level. The same as when he was on the creek: too deep to pick up. Now he looks at the jar, now at his member. It is moving in his hand. His blood races. Inner parts of his body, parts he thought had long since atrophied, have begun to move; glands are beginning to function, juices to flow! He stares at his crotch, transfixed with wonder: the foreskin goes taut and parts at the tufted tip; through the hair comes the slick, raw-looking tip of the mons penis; it is the color of anemic blood diluted with milk, and there is a bead of amber on its lips; the stale air of the dank cubicle throbs with the beat of his blood -- . Morikand! I blurted as it suddenly dawned on me. It's the bra! He pickled Maria's bra! -
"Hey, fuck this shit, Farley," said Ronnie an hour past lunch time. "Let's get outa here and make it to the bar, man. What are we gonna do, cut down the whole goddamn swamp? There ain't no tracks in here but our own."
"I tell you, a thing that big hadda leave tracks!" Uncle Farley called back to him across the clearing they had made. "And by God, we're gonna find 'em if it takes -"
"Wrong, dad," Ronnie cut in, throwing his machete across the creek and wading in to follow it. "You're gonna find 'em. I'm buggin' out."
"Oh, no you're not, ya little shit! You ain't goin' anywhere until... until, uh ..."
My Uncle Farley had seen something. It was not what he was looking for, but if he had known about it, it would have been. "On second thought, uh, yeah; I guess that'll be all right, kid. You go on back. Take the Jeep and go have yourself a couple o' cool ones. I think I'll stay and look around a little more. I'll meet you back at the ditch in a couple hours."
"Huh?" said Ronnie, stopping in midstream and looking back suspiciously.
"Oh! Here's some loot." Farley fished some bills out of his pocket and came down to the creek. Ronnie took the money, but continued to stand there with his mouth open.
"Well, close your goddamn mouth, for Christ's sake, before a bug flies down your throat," said Uncle Farley. "Go on! Git!-before I change my mind."
Ronnie shrugged and pocketed the green. "Say no more, pops!" And he was gone in less time than it takes to say so.
Uncle Farley had been chopping away at the tangled wall of vines and brambles near the upper edge of the bottom. Just as his rodman had announced his mutiny, my uncle had happened to glance out across the relatively open pinelands to the west, through the hole he had made in the foliage. What he saw, as we have seen, brought about his change of heart; for what he saw was this: At the edge of a marshy pond several hundred feet away was a pretty young black girl, splashing happily in the water. Her dress hung on a pine sapling nearby. Apparently she hadn't seen or heard the white man.
"Here's where I get me some poontang," Uncle Farley said to himself, forgetting both his machete and his damaged cock, and creeping stealthily along the edge of the bottom toward the girl ...
Her wet brown body was limber as an eel, and her taut, pointed titties with their coal-black nipples gleamed in the sunlight as she slithered through the lily pads on her back. In shallow water, she suddenly rose in a back arch, her wooly little snatch thrust high in the warm, bright air, beaded with sparkling droplets. Then with easy grace her legs shot straight up, and she stood motionless on her hands for nearly a full minute before dropping over and springing to her feet. Well, I'll be goddamned! thought my Uncle Farley as he crouched behind a palmetto some fifteen yards from the pond. A black acrobat!
"I don't mind tellin' ya, Johnny," he told me one time after he'd had a few too many, "that stuff looked mighty good to me. I wasn't the cuntsman that I am today," (a gross distortion, that; the fact is, I am sorry to report, that he never had been a cuntsman, even by the most liberal interpretation of the term-except maybe during his school days, but that too is doubtful , and he never would be, but I muffled my snicker in my stein and let him continue) "and it so happened that at the time I hadn't had any pussy for over a week," (over a year would be more like it, unless you count his fist) "so you can imagine how good that stuff looked to me - that black ass stickin' out there in broad daylight, them tits bouncin' around, floatin' on the water like ducks," (sometimes my uncle would lapse into the poetic) "that wooly little twat flashin' and twinklin' at me... mm-mm! I gotta admit, Johnny, it really got to me. Course, I'd had black ass before that," (it was a lie) "but they was kinda scaggy, don't ya know. This here was real sweet-lookin' stuff, Johnny ..." He up-ended his beer mug and stared nostalgically at the ceiling fan for a few moments, its broad blades going lazily around and around. Then he wiped the foam from his lips, turned not to me but to an old woman who sat on the next stool to his left - he had evidently become confused by the fan - and said, "I could almost taste it!" The old woman gave him a snaggle-toothed smile and replied, "Your place or mine, honey?"
Farley stayed out of sight behind the palmetto - or so he thought - and pretty soon the girl came out of the water and got her dress off the sapling. Throwing the little garment over her shoulder, she skipped off to the north, along a path that led into a thicket of pines, and in a moment she had disappeared among the trees.
Uncle Farley followed at a fast walk. He had just rounded a bend in the path and caught sight of the dilapidated shack in the clearing beyond the thicket, when the girl - her dress on now, but open down the front except where it was buttoned at her navel - stepped out from behind a tree and leveled a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun at my uncle's head.
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
"Whutchu wont, muthafucka?" the lithe Negress demanded.
"W-what do I want? Uh... n-nothin', miss. Uh see, I'm a surveyor, and we're... uh, that is, I'm uh - " Uncle Farley noticed that both hammers were cocked, and that he had lost his erection.
"You wuz studyin' me in de watah, wuzn't yuh?"
"Who, me?" said Farley, backing into a tree.
"You don' think ah seed yuh? Shee-it!"
"Uh, yeah, but see, I'm a surveyor! Don't ya see? I... I wasn't lookin' at you. I was just... lookin' for a monument, and-"
"A whut?"
"A monument."
"Ain' no mon'ments back o' dat muthafuckin' pal-metta."
"Uh, well, uh... there might have been one ..."
"Whutchu wont? Coota?"
"Pardon?"
"Pussy," she said. "Dat whutchu wont?"
Farley played dumb, out of indecision, embarrassment and fear. Mostly fear.
Keeping the gun pointed straight up Farley's nostrils with one hand, with the other the girl opened the skirt of her ragged dress. "Dat's whut dey calls my pussy," she exclaimed. "Dat thing wif de hair on it. Don'chu white folks know nothin'?"
"Uh, heh-heh," my uncle chuckled nervously, "yeah, I, uh... I know what it is, all right. Heh-heh. Uh, wh-why don't you put that gun down and, uh... I mean, I ain't gonna hurt ya or nothin'."
"Ah know y'aint, long's Ah got dis muthafuckin' shotgun on yuh," she said. "This pussy ain' free, cep if Ah luv yuh. An' ah don' luv yuh. It run yuh fi' dollahs, 'cause Ah's double-jointed. Fi' dollahs a ho'."
"Uh... what do you mean, five dollars a hoe?" asked Farley.
"Yuh wont it in dis ho', dat's fi' dollahs. Yuh wont it in the assho', dat's anotha fi' dollahs. An if yuh wont a blowjob, dat's anotha fi' dollahs. Dat's what it mean - fi' dollahs a ho'."
"Ah!" said my Uncle Farley.
"You got dat kin' o' bread?"
"Oh, yeah! I got it, all right," he assured her, adding that the price sounded reasonable to him, and asking her again if she wouldn't like to raise her sights just a bit, please - which request she answered by shoving the double muzzle against my uncle's Adam's apple and pulling both triggers.
K-KLICK! said the shotgun. To my uncle it sounded exactly like an explosion, and he was certain his head had been blown off.
The girl's musical laughter filled the woods, and a big black grackle in the tree behind the shack did his best to imitate the sound.
"Ain' had no shells fo' dis ol' gun in yeahs," she said, tossing the relic over her shoulder and heading for the shanty. "Come o'."
She was halfway across the clearing before Uncle Farley opened his eyes. She stopped and looked back at him, her saucy hips cocked to one side. "Hey, you wont some pussy, o' doncha?"
Farley nodded, still too dazed to speak.
"Well, you wonna come in on de bed, sugah, o' you ruthuh git it out heah in de sand?"
The outer walls of the shack were crazy quilts of cast- off odds and ends-scraps of Masonite and plywood, Coca Cola signs, scattered sections of a billboard which had once depicted an enormous blonde and a bottle of suntan lotion, a garbage can lid, the flattened hood of an old car, several battered prophylactic dispensers and so forth, all set at the most unlikely angles and nailed to the pine log framework with huge, rusty spikes, or tied on with bailing wire. The roof was of corrugated tin, patched here and there by palmetto fans and scraps of canvas. Except for the blackbird in the tree and a bony mongrel sleeping under the front steps, Uncle Farley saw no sign of life as he followed the girl through the door.
"You don't live out here all by yourself, do you?" he asked.
"Naw," she said, unbuttoning her dress. "Mah fath-ah an' mah half bruthah, dey livin' heah too."
"Oh," said my uncle, glancing nervously around the dim interior. There was only one room-unless you counted the strange-looking enclosure jammed into one corner. The walls of this were formed entirely of moldy old books, stacked one on the other in uneven interlocking columns. Since it stood only three or four feet off the floor and had a sheet of rusty tin laid over the top, Farley took it to be an indoor doghouse. The fact that there was no opening of any kind through which a dog might come or go didn't concern him at that time.
At one end of the room were a wood stove and a table, and a large iron bed seemed to fill the rest of the place. The two small windows on opposite sides of the shack were covered by burlap curtains.
"Well, uh ..." stammered Uncle Farley, "what if they, uh, come in while I'm, uh... I mean while we're, uh ..."
She laughed at him and stretched out on the bed, spreading her lithe brown legs and twisting her hips this way and that. "You ain' bashful, is yuh? Come o'."
Farley fumbled with his belt buckle.
"Mah half brothuh, he ain' gon' botha us. An' Daddy, he gone off to Paradise."
Misunderstanding the last statement, my uncle asked how her father could be living there if he was dead. "Ain'chu nevah heah o' the town o' Paradise? You kin' of a cute muthah, but you dumb, man! Git yo white ass ovuh heah an' git some o' dis cootah, fo' it git cold."
It wasn't until Farley pulled down his pants that he remembered his bandaged cock. "Hey! Whutchu got, de clap? Git on outa heah wi' dat stuff, muthahfucka!"
"No, no!" said my uncle, spinning around and trying to tear off the gauze. "I ain't got the clap! It's a bee sting; that's all. Just a little ol' bee sting. It ain't nothin', really!"
"Bee sting? On de cock?"
Farley swore that was all it was, and the girl flopped back on the bed and started laughing again.
Farley took the opportunity to give his member a tentative squeeze. It was still tender, but not enough so to warrant turning down a piece of ass. As he crawled onto the bed, still wearing his boots and work shirt, the girl stopped laughing long enough to point out the big butcher knife that hung on the wall near the stove, and to promise my uncle that if he was lying she would find him and cut off his balls with it. "Fair enough," he replied with a shudder. He grasped her taut, pointed breasts in his meaty paws, and she helped him find the hole.
"I musta fucked her for a solid hour," Uncle Farley told me that night in the bar. "Had her poppin' like a string o' firecrackers. I took my time, don't ya know, so as to get my money's worth." But twenty-four years later, sailing over the inundated farmlands in search of Prester Steve, I heard another version. Morikand was getting it loud and clear: Your uncle only lasted three strokes, he said; four at the most. Ha ha! Flopping and sputtering like a beached whale... He was such a liar, my Uncle Farley.
Soon, however, he was ready to have another go at it. "That was mighty good stuff, honey," he panted. "But what was that double-jointed business you were talkin' about?"
Ah wuz gonna show yuh, man, but yuh done got yo nuts off too quick. Dat still run yuh fi', though. Yuh wonta go fuh ten, Ah shows yuh 'bout double-jointed fuckin'."
Uncle Farley floundered out of his sweat-soaked shirt, rubbed his hands together and said that he was ready when she was. She said, "Shit, Ah bin ready," turned her back on him and stuck her ass up in the air. She was on knees and elbows-the same position Maria had assumed when she offered herself to Farley at Fish Head Hole. "Now, yuh kin stick it in mah cunt o' mah assho'; it run yuh de same. But de assho', it a little tighta. Which one yuh wont?"
My uncle thought he'd try the asshole. "Okay," she said. "But fus' yuh gotta stick it in de cunt, so it git slick."
Farley took his cock in both hands and wiggled it into the wooly slit below her puckering anus. "Tha's it. But be ca'ful now yuh don' git yo nuts off, like befo'. All yuh doin' now is gittin yo cock slick; you un-astan'?" Farley assured her that he wasn't a complete idiot, to which she replied, "I don' know, man, yuh's awful dumb."
Both cheeks of her trim brown ass disappeared in the sickly white folds of Uncle Farley's belly as he gripped her waist and shoved his cock as far as it would go up her cunt. "Dat's good. Now work it aroun' a little... Okay, dat's enough. Now pull it out and slip it in the little ho' yuh see jus' above where yuh is now." Farley said for Christ's sake he guessed he knew an asshole when he saw one, and when did the double-jointed part come in?
"Yuh gonna fin' out in jus' a minute, baby," she replied. "Go slow now, 'cause dat's a tight ho 'yuh gettin' into."
After several unsuccessful attempts my uncle managed to get it in, and soon had her hole stretched out enough to begin some serious fucking. Then the little black girl did her thing.
Hooking her feet under Farley's shins, she tucked her head under and began to double up, her hands sliding slowly up the outsides of my uncle's flabby thighs. He bent forward to look for her head, but couldn't see it, and her voice came from somewhere down below, sounding strangely hollow: "Hang onta mah ass, now! Hoi' on tight!"
"I gotcha, baby," Farley grunted, feeling the bore of her hot rectum bend and tighten as he pumped away, his belly flapping loudly against her buttocks, the sweat splashing into his eyes. "But where .. . OH!"
Her head squeezed in between his legs and he felt her cheeks against his inner thighs, her hot breath in his crotch, and her hands gripping his thrusting buttocks, urging them to a faster tempo.
"Good God Gerty!" exclaimed my uncle with delight when he felt her tongue on his scrotum. It didn't seem possible. He felt his balls sucked entirely into the girl's mouth, her tongue rolling them around, bathing them in boiling saliva. He felt her rectal muscles grabbing at his plunging cock in rhythmic contractions, and rippling along the shank until he began to wonder if she hadn't somehow gotten a hand in there and was jacking him off with it.
Then her lips slipped off his scrotum, her spine rolled under even further, and with a grunt of ecstasy my uncle felt her tongue lapping the crack of his ass with rapid, catlike strokes as she pulled the cheeks apart with her fingers. It made three or four sloppy passes up and down the groove, and then burrowed straight into his hole. Uncle Farley howled like a dog, and his cum began to rise.
Immediately the girl jerked her tongue out, and in a voice that startled my uncle because it came from behind him, said, "Wonna shoot it'n mah mouth?"
"Yeah!" gasped Farley. "Yeah, yeah!"
"Ita run yuh anotha fi'," she warned.
"Fuck the money!" cried my uncle.
"I heah yuh talkin', sugah," she said. "Pull it out."
Peering over the bulge of his belly, Farley watched his dick slide slick and slimy out of the girl's elastic anus, and was startled (again) to find her face staring up at him, upside-down, from between her own thighs, her chin buried in the wool of her pussy and her nose practically stuck up her own asshole. It was weird, you'll have to admit.
Only a fraction of a second elapsed between the time Farley's cock slurped out of the girl's rectum and its capture by her mouth, and scarcely more than that before he began to ejaculate. But it was just at this moment that the dark cloud of rotten luck that had been following my uncle around for the last few days caught up with him. It happened very fast: Morikand says it couldn't have been more than three seconds after Farley began to shoot that he lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed, resembling a huge lump of twisting protoplasm, and making a noise like a locomotive puffing its last.
What had made him look up at just that particular moment and not before, we will never know, because all this time he had been facing the little "doghouse" of books, and hadn't given it a glance; but that he looked at it then, that much we know. I hear your questions, and will attempt to answer them one at a time:
Q: What did your Uncle Farley see?
A: Part of a face.
Q: What part?
A: The eyes.
Q: Where, precisely?
A: About a foot off the floor, near the northwest corner of the book enclosure, framed in the slot.
Q: Which slot?
A That resulting from the removal of The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi.
A: First with a strangled cry; second, by making a lightning-fast withdrawal which (I) wrenched his penis, for the girl had at that instant applied suction, and (2) sent semen spurting all over the room, for as I said, he had begun to come; and (3), by taking a flying leap at the moon, in a manner of speaking.
A: Can you be more specific?
A: He jumped off the bed.
Q: But how did he get on the floor, as you indicated?
A: He fell there, after colliding in mid-flightt with one of the iron bedposts.
A: What part of his body hit the bedpost?
A: His groin.
Q: (I) What was the nature of his injury and (2) what were its effects?
A: (I) It was diagnosed the following day by a physician as "a semi-severe testicular insult resulting in (2) aggravated orchiodynia of a (hopefully) transitory nature."
Q: Which means?
A: That he couldn't walk for a while.
A: Why have you chosen the question and answer method?
A: Because I felt like it.
Q: Are you aware there is a war on?
A: Acutely.
Q: Then why do you play the fool and lead us on with this trivia?
A: Trivia to you, maybe, but what about my poor Uncle Farley?
Q: Have you any evidence to prove that you are anything but a clown?
A: Ah, so you've seen through me?
Q: We'll ask the questions. About the question and answer business ...
A: Yes?
Q: Would you consider abandoning it?
A: Gladly.
Q: Thank God.
Through a wall of pain, Uncle Farley heard voices. "Whuhchu got deh, Jessie Sue?"
"Whi' man, Daddy."
"Whut he wont?"
"He say he a sur-veyuh. Jus wonted a little pussy."
"Whut he got on him."
"Nuthin', now. He had twenty dollah, but Ah done got that."
"Gib it to me. Ah hoi' onto it fo' yuh."
"Yuh kin kiss my ass, Daddy, Ah hoi' onto it myse'f."
"Whussa mattuh wif him?"
"Quas scare de shit out him, he catch his cods on de bedpos'."
"Did?"
"Uh huh."
"Still got his boots on, don' he?"
"Uh huh. Tha's a whi' man fo' yuh."
There was more, and pretty soon Farley opened his eyes and tried to focus on the little black stick figure that was hunched over him. It had small rimless spectacles, and a fringe of white fuzz around the head. My uncle's balls still felt as though they had been driven up into his throat, but somehow he managed to achieve a sitting position on the bed. There was a question he had to ask. He put his fat hands on the old man's bony shoulders, pulled him close, squinted into those ancient eyes, and asked it.
After a pause the old man answered. "Yessuh, you seed somethin', a'right. And yessuh, it wuz back o' dem books. But nosuh, it wuzzn't no gi'nt frog. It wuz my boy Quasimodo whut you seed. Quasimodo; tha's whut he call hisself, but he christened Alphonse Dickson Waller, aftuh his gran'pappy."
"Christened?" whispered my uncle. "You mean it's a human being?"
The old man sat down in a chair beside the bed and rubbed his chin. "Well now," he said, "he what dey calls a albino, but Ah don' know 'bout dat hoomun bean. Jessie Sue, is a albino a hoomun bean?"
"Ah reckon," said the girl. "But he don' mean no hahm."
"Well, kiss my ass!" said Uncle Farley with relief, as the fear of both dementia and the supernatural was lifted from his mind, though the ache remained in his groin.
"Ah a'ready done dat," called Jessie Sue from the other end of the room. "Tha's why it run yuh de extra fi'."
"Oh, my balls!" groaned my uncle after trying to laugh.
"Now, you jus' lay down deh on de bed, suh, an' ol' Mose he gonna tell yuh all about it. Y'see, suh, Ah is a Indian ..."
Farley looked askance at him. "An Indian, huh?"
"Yessuh, tha's right. Ah is a di-rect descendant of a chief whut wuz heah when ol' Dickson John pile up on de beach. Jessie Sue, fetch my arraheads..."
CHAPTER FIVE
What lay behind those last words from the mouth of Old Man Mose?
(Q: There you go again! A: Sorry. I'll try to be more careful.)
Ten years passed before anyone gave the words any serious consideration. At that time I was thirty-two years old, and living a quiet life in the town of Lake Leethy, eking out an honest living as a pornographer, and living off my wife in fallow periods. I had heard some of the incidents in the preceding pages from my uncle and Harry in a rather haphazard way over the years, but had given little thought to them as anything but humorous anecdotes, being somewhat preoccupied with my own problems. (If the reader could lay hands on some of the books I wrote during those years, he would have an insight into some of these problems; to my knowledge, however, none of them survived the Burning of '76. But no matter.) As for my relationship with Morikand, I hardly knew him at the time. I was aware that Harry and Cynthia had a rather strange son of whom they never had much to say, but I seldom got up to Uranus in those days, and nine-year-old boys were not among my hang-ups. The Rape had occurred during the preceding year, but I knew nothing of it. Maria and Ronnie had long since moved on, but Jones and Smollet Land Surveyors plugged along as usual, barely keeping its corporate head above fiscal water. In short we all went quietly, or noisily, about our personal affairs while the world peacefully and subtly disintegrated around us.
Such then was the state of things in March of 1968, when Morikand Jones, with a handful of pencils in his pocket and a bundle of steno pads under his arm, slipped out the back door of his mother's house and headed for the Uranus Inlet to seek his origins. For three days he sat on the windy summit of the ancient shell mount that stood on the ridge north of the river, his long black hair whipping out behind him, his strange, penetrating eyes fixed on the jagged line between the sea and the sky. He had neither food nor water with him; when it rained, he lifted his face and opened his mouth, and when a lizard or a land crab wandered within reach, he scooped it up and ate it raw. During this time he filled five steno pads from cover to cover, without ever looking at the paper on which he wrote. He sat in the lotus position, his writing pad on one knee and his penis laid out on the ground before him, writing with his left hand.
"At first I received only random and fragmentary impressions," he says in The Confessions, "but after a few hours I realized where I was going wrong. I was looking for images and getting nothing but a jumble of words. As soon as I ceased to seek the images and concentrated on the words alone, I knew I was onto something. After that I had only to enter the void and let my hand move freely over the page as the words came in. No thought, no conversion of image to word was necessary.
"The reason for this was that it had all been written down before. That is, it will have been written down, in a huge tome called The Sililigridium by Gye Sililigrid- some twelve hundred years hence!
"For to my surprise I was receiving impressions not from the past but from the future. Since I had never received anything but bloodline vibrations (and I know now that I am unable to do otherwise), this realization at first took me somewhat aback..."
So that's the way Morikand learned one side of the story of what happened at the mouth of the Frigahatchee River in August of 1696, when Dickson John "pile up on de beach." The other source - one of a much different nature - was aquired by bribing the librarian at the Sago Beach County Historical Society ( Ibid, III, x. p. 655), which institution was one of the few that owned a copy of the Journal of Dickson John.
Dickson John was a Quaker merchant, at that time on his way from Cuba to Philadelphia with his wife, his beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter Drucilla, and... But let him tell it himself:
* * *
The Sixteenth Day of the Seventh Month, called Auguft, in the Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Ninety-fix.
Being in Company with five or fix Sail of Merchantmen under the Convoy of the Frigate Philadelphia, Captain Frowne, Commander; he exceeding concerned for our Weather and protefting Departure, the which I have recommended immediate Undertaking, on the Eve of weighing Anchor in Port Royal, Jamaica, being bound for Pennfylvania, together with my Stuff, my Wife, my Virgin Daughter, and my ten Negroes. The Captain, claiming the Signs unpropitious for Paffage, but I fufpecting it to be naught fave a Sciatica and his phlegmatic Difpofition, has finally confented to fail, fearing no doubt my ill Report to the Owners concerning him in this Matter, upon fetching Pennfylvania; and well he might.
The 7 Month, 17; the 5 Day of the Week.
Sailed at laft under clear Skies, myfelf and mine aboard the Brigantine William Penn, Captain Jofeph Cricket commanding, he being fomewhat of the fame of Mind as Captain Frowne, but diffuaded likewife from further Delay, and fet at Eafe by my Counfelling, having myfelf failed the Strait many Times afore and come to no Grief; "For do we not fail with God?" faid I, whereupon he clapped his Hat upon his Head and was of the fame Mind. But this Evening our good Mafter I fear was fomewhat reproved for his momentary Lack of Faith; as ftanding off Black River in the Current, and feeing feveral Lights afhore, he, having (as I think) loft his Bearings for fome Time following my Daughter's Appearance on Deck, and thinking we had got amongft the French Fleet, the Spirit took him, and he ftraightway gave Order to wear Ship; which Order was carried out; but he being on the Quarterdeck the mizzen Boom Jibing fuffered him a Hernia; which Accident was grievous to him and us; but I having my Inftruments and fomewhat of Experience in yr Hippocratic Arts, bled and fuccored him as well as could be done afhipboard. Whereupon we beat to Windward again, and ftood off for Savanna La Mar, having loft Sight of our Company.
The 7 Month, 18; the 6 Day of the Week.
This morning no Sail appeared; upon my queftioning the Captain's Reckoning, his condition worfened.
The 7 Month, 19; the 7 Day of the Week.
This Morning, fearing we had been left behind in the Night, which we fpent tacking round about, fome four Leagues off Shore, having loft our Anchor, fstood over for Florida, the Wind being at the Southeaft; and having rigged a Rope Truff of my own Defign upon the Poop for our Mafter, whereby he might command the Ship.
The 7 Month, 20; I Day of the Week.
This Noon my Wife having gone to the Forecaftle with her Negro, to what End we cannot difcover, though I and Nathan Stuckey laid on the faid Negro with yr Rope-end for the better Part of an Hour, was taken with Fits; whereupon fhe died. This Evening we were in the Gulf Stream, having a mild Wind.
The 7 Month, 21; the 2 Day of the Week.
This Morning yr Wind at Eaft and fhifting northerly. The Crew fomewhat apprehenfive, fome of yr weathered Mariners profeffing to "Smell a Blow;" upon which I reminded Master Cricket of his Refponfibility for our Safety, recalling to his Mind my former Mifgivings upon Sailing in this Seafon, fearing yr Cyclone; whereupon he, the faid Captain, waxed wroth, slipped his Truff, and took him a Dunking; but was recovered.
The 7 Month, 22; the 3 Day of the Week.
This Day yr Storm began at Northeaft.
The 7 Month, 23; the 4 Day of the Week.
This Day was a Female Perfonage from Hell vifited on us by the Devil; whereupon all Hands fell down and commended themfelves to God; but our Mafter Cricket, becoming enfnared in his Truff, and taking one of yr larger Seas upon his ftarboard Quarter, carried away to larboard, from whence Providence difdained to decree his Return, having fnapped his Lanyard; which Loff was fore bemoaned by my Daughter above the Rest of us, fhe having been fo diligently anurfing the late Captain the While, what with his Hernia required conftant Care, oft Times ftaying the Night hard by his Hammock, faid Diligence being rare in One fo young: there being a Globe of Light in the Sky, whereupon the faid Female Perfonage, or Demoneff, did appear upon our Weather Cathead, all aglowing hellifh and Naked, whereby our Mariners were affrighted; and mine Negroes, fave for my late Wife's Man, who was haply yet bound to the Mainmaft, and Mofes, who in Mid-flight ran afoul the leeward Forebrace and there hung for fome Duration; committed their Souls to the Deep; i.e., they, the faid Negroes, took themfelves overboard, being ftraightway fwallowed up by yr Storm.
She, the Spectre, was, though moft fhamefully naked infomuch as concerned her Privates, viz: Teats and Loins, the which fo comely that fome of us notwithftanding the raging Storm, where fore afflicted in our Man-parts, as that which formerly fhrank in the Fear of God now rofe in Unholy Luft, being infpired by the Diabolical Tempter: was adorned in Stockings of a Knit unknown to us, which appeared to us to glow like yr Phofphorus, and reaching nigh to her Maidenhair; and Gloves of the fame Nature upon her Head wore neither Hood nor Hat, but after the Fafhion of yr common Devils, had her Hair set aflying, as is their Wont. Thus did the Fiend squat, being ungirded, and did an Uncleanness with her lower Parts, which befouled fome of us, including Nathan Stuckey and my Negro Mofes, where he hung adangle, and fome others, we being to Leeward and yr Gale at its fiercest; and fmelled most vile and hellifh, being most corporeal as witneffed by our Clothing and our Noftrils; whereupon She, the faid Evil Spirit, vanifhed from our Sight.
Our Ship now being Mafterleff and our Mainyard carried away, fearing exceff Leeway, our Olden Mariners this Night waxed concerned as to our crowding upon yr Shore, being a Cannibal Coast; and fearing Shipwrack.
The 7 Month, 24; the 5 Day of the Week.
This Morning before Day we felt our Veffel strike fome few Strokes, by which I and my Daughter Drucil-la were fallen from our Hammock(s?); whereupon fhe floated again but was foon driven faft aground. It being very dark and the Seas violent, that our Mariners could fee no Land; and foon found ourfelves afloat in yr Cabin, feveral Timbers being broken and fome Plank ftarted. At firft Light we obferved our Hogs awafh in the Sea, and our Sheep; and that we lay upon a Beach in a Breach of Sea during back Surges of which was dry, or nearly fo; whereupon I and my Negro went afhore, rejoicing at our Prefervation from the Wrath of the Sea. But the Wilderneff appeared difmal, compofed of Naught fave Fand Hills covered with fcrubby Palmettos, the Stems of which were prickly, that there be no Walking amongft them; through which I sent my Negro to cut a Paffage, but finding Naught hither but More of the Fame, whereupon I bade him desist, which pleased him, in order to aid in unloading our Ship, which did not.
No sooner had we dragged our Lame ashore, and our Sickly, than appeared to us several Cannibals, being naked save for a small Girdle of Straws somewhat plaited which ill hid their private Parts; which Parts waxed monstrous, at their seeing my daughter, in a most lewd Manner, which they did not seek to conceal, but let all stand most vile and protrude through the said Girdles; that my Daughter was afrighted; yr Rain continuing the while, and yr Wind, moft fierce, that we required shelter left our Health defert us. I bethought me to diffuade thefe feveral Savages and offered them fome Tobacco and Pipes which they greedily fnatched from me; but were not pacified, indicating my Daughter and pointing to their said expofed Particulars, that I made further Offer of Rum and my Brim Hat, which they difdained, tearing off their Girdles and made Motions like to wild Beafts at the Hips, that I might underftand their Wifh; whereupon I pointed my Mufket at thofe foremoft, and they turned their naked Backfides on us and run away, fnuffing in their Nofe and foaming at the Mouth like yr mad Dog.
Fearing we had got amongft Barbarous People, and that we had been fpared from the Sea for a crueler End at the Jaws of Cannibals, unleff it please the Almighty God to work in our Behalf, being honeft Chriftians, fat us down in a Circle upon the sand; whereupon Nathan Stuckey read from the Gofpel. Prefently yr Man Eaters again come on us in great Numbers, running and fhouting and brandifhing their Knives, which grieved us for we thought not to efcape Devouring; and crying out in a favage Tongue which we underftood not, fave that which I overheard of one of the Cannibals, viz., Englifh Motherfucker," which Words ftartled me; for I do believe fome of our Nation has fallen amongft them, of whom they had heard fuch an Expression; whereupon the Sun came out and yr Storm abated.
The Indians with their Women and Children all went aboard our Ship and carried away Whatfoever they could lay Hands on, fave Rum, Sugar, Molaffes, Beef and Pork, which they threw into the Sea, which fight grieved and perplexed us, our Hogs and Sheep having departed into the Bufh. Thefe being occupied thus, their Caffeekey (for so they called their King) came down upon us with fome feveral scores of his Men, and rent our Clothing from our Bodies, leaving us naked but for our Breeches, except for my Daughter, whom they ftripped bare, the better to admire her Beauty, and brought her before the Caffeekey in that Condition. This Caffeekey was young and of a forward Nature, being clad as his Men except for a long Bone thruft through his Hair, which tied in a Roll atop his Head; who, feeing my Daughter, fetched out his Member from his Skirt (fo vulgar was he) and holding the vile Thing in his Hand, with the Other pointed to the Same, and thence to my poor Daughter's lower Parts, which Parts his Cohorts difplayed unto him by means of holding the Girl's Legs afpraddle; grinning from Ear to Ear and faying, "Papaya? Ah?" which Words we underftood not, but fome of our Company believing them to pertain fomewhat to my Daughter's Maidenhead; which grieved us.
Prefently they brought us to their Town, fome few Miles to the fouthward, being fituated on the north Bank of a River where it enters the Sea; whereupon Night fell, and Nathan Stuckey read fome feveral Verfes from God's Word, we being fore plagued by yr Mofquito..."
* * *
Thus Dickson John arrived at the mouth of the Frigahatchee River 289 years ago, when it was all just beginning. Approximately 1180 years from now, when perhaps it will be almost over, another voyager, Gye Sililigrid, will return through time and space on a forbidden pilgrimage to his legendary motherland. And afterwards, holed up in some barren outpost in a remote corner of the Galaxy, he too will write of it:
Right away I knew I had missed it - overshot the mark by some 250 years. But when I locked in on the sailing ship and saw the sweet little thing, definitely human and female through and through, fuculating the old man in the hammock - he was her father, I was to discover - I decided I would stay awhile anyway. Real human gish! I thought. What could a few hundred years matter? Besides, this would be the last place they would think to look.
(--Ostensibly, Sililigrid's intent was to transport himself by means of instruments stolen from the androids back into "the pre-Schismatic days of Earth," a time before the final split occurred between the "Naturalites" and the "Technocrats, " an age which he believed had been achieved in "perfect equilibrium between mind and body, machine and man"; the good old days, in other words. In my opinion, however, he was out for cunt, pure and simple. R.J.S.)
It was not until I had warped in and punched out an orbit that I discovered I had an andy on board - one of those old-style sex dolls that were once used extensively in the funhouses of New Sol when there were still enough humans around to make them pay. The labial label read, Zaina 998733-27. I turned her on and had some. Not bad. She was big and mammy, silver-haired, well-heated and equipped with subdermal illuminators which gave her a nice blue glow. Apparently she had been designed for the dark-shows. A further search of the stolen ship turned up no more andies. Zama was good - very tight and passionate and in perfect working order - but now that I had seen the real thing, she could hardly satisfy me.
Afterward I sent Zama down to the sailing ship to pick up the girl. I got her onto the deck of the craft all right, but her controls were of a type I was unaccustomed to, and I couldn't make her respond to commands. Her appearance had a rather drastic effect on the ancients to begin with, and then on top of it I accidentally made her piss. There was a strong wind at the time, and some of them got a faceful. I abandoned the tactic and recalled the andy, none the less determined to have my way with the child...
(After the wreck of the William Penn, Sililigrid and his doll Zama "bing" down to the Cacique's village on the north bank of the inlet. This "binging", as near as one can tell, is done by means of a tiny instrument worn on the wrist known as a "disinta-integrator" (DI), and is evidently the standard mode of short-range transportation. As for the androids, it seems there are the "controllers" at the top, the dolls at the bottom, with the humans - what's left of them - caught in the middle. The night following the storm....
... The old man put on a big thing about protecting the girl's virginity (ha!) from the aborigines. Every time one of them would come creeping around, he would throw down on them with his blunderbuss. If I had binged into their midst, there would have been a good chance of getting my head blown off, or at the very least of starting a stampede. Besides, my DI had been acting up lately, and I couldn't depend on it for a fast exit. So, like the young chief, I saw some wisdom in biding my time.
It was pleasant there. I had almost forgotten how delightful the sound of a running river could be; how soothing to the spirit. I kept my eyes off the sky; the stars had such unpleasant connotations, inspired such gruesome memories. I watched the dark, unpolluted sea, the clean black river, the harsh scrub on the sand dunes, waving in the salty breeze, the naked bodies of the aborigines dancing in the firelight, suckling their infants at the doors of their huts. The air was alive with insects. I threw off my tunic and switched off my shield for a while, just to feel the sting of life on my flesh. Even the pain was pleasant. Zama and I walked to the top of a high dune overlooking the village. There I sat her down, damped her nerve centers, leaving her heat on medium, and used her for a chair. Leaning back against her big warm mams, I locked my scopes on the little shelter of sailcloth which the head merchant had erected for himself and his daughter, and waited for an opportune moment. With my eyes, however, I watched the dark, smooth bulge of the horizon, unbroken by towers or domes, and a restful calm settled over me.
Around midnight, the native chief and two of his men stole out of the shadows and crept along the river-bank toward the encampment of the merchants. The fires had died to dim flickers but I could follow their movements easily even without the scopes, because of the full moon. They conferred briefly with the guards, and then proceeded stealthily toward the merchant's tent. If the chief could get the girl away from the other castaways, it would make matters easier for me, but when I flexed up the power and locked in on the interior of the tent, I saw that he was not likely to succeed.
For there sat the old man, wide awake, hunched over a lighted lump of tallow, counting his gold. The sleeping girl was curled up to one side of him, and his blunderbuss was stretched out on the other. His purse sat upon a large black waterlogged book, no doubt to protect his loot from the dirt. He reminded me very much of a controller I was once indentured to in the New Sol shit factories. It occurred to me as I looked at him that even as grossly outnumbered as they were- this sheckle-pinching hypocrite and his band of cutthroats - if they decided to make a stand, the poor savages wouldn't have a chance.
It would be tricky, but I decided to intervene. In a few moments the chief would lift the rear flap of the tent, and most likely get a musket ball down the throat for his trouble. I revved up Zama and binged her down on the other side of the tent-the front side. I put her on automatic seductive, but kept the directional controls on manual, hoping that this time I could find the right buttons; one slip, and anything could happen.
None of the huddled figures stirred. Apparently they were all asleep. So far, so good. Zama grasped the tent flap and drew it back .. .
I wish I could convey the expression on the old bastard's face when he looked up and saw that masterpiece, that culmination of the doll-makers' art, glowing in the doorway, naked except for her zorlon hose and her bluefilm gloves, a come-and-get-it smile on her lovely face, her silver hair writhing about her shoulders, her mams bulging like pneumatic zoobies, their crimson nipples extended and pulsating, her silvery nicknest crackling with sextricity, the lips of her gish smacking and undulating, her type-A clit starting from its sheath like a snail oozing from its shell ...
The 7 Month, 25; the 6 Day of the Week.
Laft night was I again tempted by the Devil in the Body of yr Female Personage, the Same as that which come upon us at Sea, whilft I fat in Vigil within our Camp befide my fleeping Daughter Drucilla; whereupon I waxed wroth and read out fome feveral Paffages from God's Word, whereupon the Devil fhrink and gat him gone. But looking to my Daughter, I ftraightway difcovered her removed thence from that Place upon which fhe fat, which Loff fore grieved me and our Company, we fearing Evil Spirits or Cannibals; but difcovering this Morning it were the Latter, which Cannibals we believe in League with the Devil...
* * *
The trick was to keep Zama and the girl's father moving in such a way as to keep the tent between them and the aborigines, and to get them out of the area as soon as possible. As soon as the old man had stuffed his pouch into his pants and zeroed in on Zama's twitching butt, I turned down her illuminators and speeded up her pace. It worked. No one saw her, and before the chief reached the rear of the tent, both she and the old fellow were out of sight behind the dunes.
I put Zama on full automatic and screwed down the scopes. Then I binged down a zysilk mat from the ship (something told me that sex dolls were not progged for cleaning sand out of their tubes), and Zama slithered onto it like brosia from a snifter. She spread her legs and blew up her mams, and her illuminators wound up to full glow, lighting up the little hollow between the grassy dunes with a pulsating aura of blue. Her hair spread like a silver fan over the black mat, and her body throbbed and undulated like the waves that rolled onto the shore nearby, the sound of which drowned out the old fart's yelp of pleasure as he sank to his knees and rammed his gaff into her nick like a man possessed.
But I was more interested in how the chief was making out; I switched back to the tent and screwed down tight.
It was empty. I panned across the compound, and made contact just as the three savages entered the chief's hut, carrying the girl. A moment later the two braves re-emerged, together with a couple of irate-looking squaws. I could have made my move then, of course, but I felt a sort of compassion for these gentle, lusty people, these innocent food gatherers - especially the chief; he reminded me of myself in years past: so naive, so full of life, so unmindful of his coming doom and that of his people - I didn't begrudge his having firsts with the white girl; it was Old Moneybags having her that rankled. Besides, there was plenty of time, if I was any judge of Zama's abilities. So I infraed in through the thatched dome of the chief's lodge and screwed down tight to watch the fun.
Why, I asked myself, was I so set on snatching the white girl? (Drucilla was her name.) Many of the na- tive girls were just as fine, some more so, and all were closer to the earth; if it was real, unadulterated human gishy I was after, I was on the wrong scent. If I had followed this line of reasoning, in all probability my pilgrimage would not have met the abortive end that awaited it. It would have been an easy matter to latch onto two or three native beauties, bing back to the ship with them, and warp off safely to New Tortuga or some such haven without the delay which was to cost me so dearly. I believe it was this: I felt some perverse compulsion to gaff one of the future mothers of the race which was to eventually produce the dead but frantic age in which I had the bad luck to be spawned - to fuculate her till she gagged on it. Not a rational desire, perhaps, but as I look back on it now, from this barren rock where I am forced to live out my (hopefully!) last days, it makes a kind of diaboloical sense to me.
But getting back to Drucilla and the chief: I got the feeling that the girl's struggles were only half-hearted. From the moment when the chief had presented his imposing gaff to her that morning (it was easy to see why he was chief), I'd noticed a certain spark in her eye whenever she looked at him. Once he had her pinned down on his pallet of leaves, her legs forced open by his knees, she ceased fighting altogether, and a close focus on her flushed face showed clearly that she was overcome not by brute force but by her own passion. As he lowered his head and began devouring her pale, blushing boobs, sucking the nips into swollen cones of crimson flesh, her little fists ceased to beat futiley upon his back, and her arms dropped limp at her sides. When he grabbed his gaff and began ramming at her silky brown nest, she bloomed all over like a flower, her thighs and her lips opening wide in a petaled ecstasy of wonder as she watched that huge, grisly shaft of meat enter her tender flesh. (His gaff would have made two of her father's, incidentally.)
As soon as he got it in, her eyes rolled up in her head and her whole body began to vibrate like an imp engine. The chief gripped her little butt cheeks in his big hands and lifted her off the mat, rising to his knees and hunching over her tiny spindled form like some mythological beast. She hung limp in his grasp, her limbs flapping in painful joy, her plump, drool-slick mams bouncing and rebounding wildly as he threw it to her with a force and speed of which man is no longer capable and an andy would see no point in attaining. Watching him gave me a feeling of the most despondent impotence, and brought back to me all too vividly - at a time when I least wanted to be reminded of it - the degree of deterioration to which our species had succumbed in the dismal interim.
When he had polished her off, I panned back to the dune hollow, where Old Moneybags had shot his cream, and was lying there on the mat, gasping for breath. Zama was sucking his gaff and rubbing her bristling gap in his face to ready him for the next round. Another hour, and she'd have done the old bugger in; and I was almost tempted to let her. (Murder! that holy but meaningless word of the ascetics. How sweet it must have been when there were still enough of us around to murder each other, and when we still had the stomach for it!)
I got the controls on Zama and binged her into the shadows beside the chief's hut. The old man sat up and looked around in dismay. When I binged the zysilk mat back to the ship and inadvertently took the seat of his breeches with it, he grabbed his bare bottom and a look of horror came over his face. Fear of devils? No, he was only looking for his sack of gold. An expression of relief came over his face when he found it.
When I was sure there was no one looking, I moved Zama to the chief's door and set her on directional SA. Drucilla, as I had hoped, was too exhausted to notice Zama's entrance. But my man wasn't. A jerk of her shaggy bulge, a wink of her navel, a jiggle of her super-expanded mams (she even squirted a stream of steaming milk across the hut, for good measure), and in a flash the virile young king was pursuing her glowing buttmoons through the dark scrub behind the village. When they were at a safe distance, I set Zama on full auto and binged myself into the chief's hut.
I was hungry for it by then, and had a stiff-on that wouldn't wait. My tunic still lay where I had dropped it at the riverbank, so except for my shields, which I immediately switched off, I was naked and ready. When she saw me standing there at her feet, wearing nothing but my DI on one wrist and Zama's controls on the other, my hair still bristling around my headscopes from the sudden cut-off, her eyes and her pretty little mouth opened wide in profound shock and fear. It was a reaction that gave me pleasure; it had been a long time since I'd startled anyone, human or andy.
She mistook me for one of the deities of her culture -The Holy Ghost she called me. It suited. Even in the heat of my desire I could not hold back a bitter laugh.
Just to give her a greater shock, I decided to try my antigravs on her, though I was none too sure they would work. (The condition of my gear was almost as sorry as that of my person, living as I did beyond the reach of maintenance.) I put the beams on her and flexed the lift, and it worked. She floated off the mat as light as a feather in the wind. I ran her up vertically at first, till her fuzzy little nick was level with my eyes, then rotated her slowly to drink in the beauty of that succulent body from all angles. She was too frightened to struggle, and responded to the slightest stimulus.
I doubled her up and brought her in close to my face, ass first, the soft little cheeks spread wide. I put out my tongue and lapped her butthole. Waves of goose-flesh raced over her sun-coloerd body as my tongue caressed her. Ah, the taste of her - sweet as nectar to my mouth!
I ran my index finger up her scup, and lifted her high overhead, curled up like a ball, spinning her slowly in the flickering torchlight under the thatch. Then, removing my finger and letting her continue to revolve, I stood directly beneath her, turned my face up, and brought her down slowly until the heat of her crotch burned my face. With my hands I spread her legs and straightened them out, sinking my tongue to the roots in her hairy gish. How she trembled! How she foamed!
As I indulged myself thus, fed my lust, keeping her suspended, probing every groove and crevice of her throbbing anatomy, I determined to take her with me back to my own time, my own expiring world. I had suffered enough in solitude.
I should have done it then, when I thought of it. I underestimated the ruthless ingenuity of that world into which I meant to transport her.
Stretching her out on her back, suspended now at gaff-level, I gripped her delicate ankles with my hands and opened her legs wide. What a delicious sight, that view up her fork! I brought her in close, and lifted her legs slightly, sliding her onto my stiff like a glove. At first I pumped slowly, building up my energy, and sucking and pinching her lovely young mams, delighted that I was still capable of inflicting bruises on living flesh.
Almost as soon as I stepped up my stroke, to my astonishment, Drucilla began to gush. Her pelvis jerked and jumped in the most delightful convulsions, her tongue lolling from her mouth, her long brown hair flailing in the firelight, her boobs bounding about as if with a life of their own. My orgasm took me completely by surprise, so fascinated was I by this almost forgotten spectacle of the human female body in sexual climax. Never has my sem flowed so copiously, so thick, so fiery, so deliciously painful!
But all too soon it was over, and I lowered her gently to the mat and cut off the beams. I was still standing where I had stood the whole time, staring at my dripping gaff, still erect, and amazed that I was still on my feet, unsupported, after all that exertion... when suddenly there they were.
Only two of them had binged down, but that was enough. More, I suppose they had calculated, would have given me a sense of self-importance. Never let them forget their place; that's their guiding motto.
How did you find me? I asked.
Naturally, they would not honor me with a reply. Except for their uniforms, they looked to me like a couple of those big rubber-scupped models we called "nighthouse andies" in the old days because they used them as bouncers in the central city. One look at their faces and I put their mentality level at a little below Zama's. (Speaking of Zama, it didn't hit me until I was back in my cell on Dryrot Moon that they had left her behind. A New Sol sex doll in perfect working order, set on full automatic, abandoned on ancient Earth! Beautiful! I wonder what became of her.) All the andies did was to casually snap their beams on me - just as I stood, naked as a nimbo - and call in their report: We have him. Bing up. As if it was all a matter of the routine, all in a day's work. I had one last quick look at the exhausted girl lying unconscious on the floor of the hut, and zap, it was all over.
* * *
The 7 Month, 28; the 2 Day of the Week.
This Morning having fent my Negroes to raife Nathan Stuckey's Boat where the Cannibals fank it in the river, which done we beg Leave of the Caffeekey to depart and get us gone from hif Town, which was granted; whereupon we afked for fomewhat of Supplies whereof we might not perifh in the Wilderneff between that Place and Auguftine, which we fought; and they gave us All that we afked; whereupon I and Nathan Stuckey, and my Negroes rowing, and fome Others, rowed along Shore northward, the Reft afoot hard along yr Beach; though the Sea were breaking that make of Rowing a Hardship, but I bade the Negroes perfift; but the Caffeekey would have us to have gone with our Boat up the Sound; but we fuppofing yr Sound were a great River, deemed he meant us Ill, feeking thereby to lead us aftray into the dangerous Interior or trap us in the difmal Swamps; wherefore we were not willing to take his Advice and fet forth upon the fmooth Water, miftrufting it and fufpecting Fraud, but rather trufting to our higher Inftincts fet out upon the vafter Flood; which, though Headway were laborious for my Negroes, and one Person had employ enough in Naught but heaving out Water, our Boat being leaky and laden, yet gave us Peace of Mind morefo than if that we had trufted our Perfons unto the Word of a Cannibal. As we thus proceed northward out of the Hands of the Savages, I bade Nathan Stuckey to read Somewhat out of God's Word, whereby we might be comforted in our Travail; which Labor he proceeded to perform...
(* If the merchants had taken the Casique's advice and gone up the Sound instead of battling the surf as they chose to do, they would of course have had little difficulty in reaching their destination. We are so accustomed to our own deceitfulness that it is difficult for us to see in other peoples anything by a mirror image of ourselves. Their encounter with D. John should have given the Indians an idea of what was in store for them. R.J.S. )
No further mention is made in the Journal of Drucilla, and her fate has always been a riddle; but the Third Book of the Confessions contains the answer:
"After that the words continued, but they were distant and blurred. I was getting images now. Everything that happened after Drucilla was raped in the tent comes to me in sweeping panoramas, sometimes so vivid I seem almost to pass over into that time. Drucilla did not die enroute to the North, as many have supposed, for she never left the Tequesta village. The Casique agreed to let the Quaker and his people go unmolested, and to supply them with stores for their journey, if he would leave his daughter behind. This sounded fair to the good merchant, and the bargain was struck.
"Briefly, the paternal descent runs as follows: "Due to a double-egg ovulation and extraordinary timing, Drucilla that night had conceived fraternal twins - a girl by the Casique, and a boy by Sililigrid. An incestual alliance between these siblings resulted in the birth of a son, Dickson Huitzilopochtli, who in his youth took the royal bone of the old Casique into his own hair. He was the last Tequesta chief to preside over the little town at the mouth of the Frigahatchee River. When he was only a child, his grandmother was killed by a Creek, who, seeing white skin, struck swiftly. In ever increasing numbers, in those years, the Creeks were being driven into the peninsula from their homelands to the north by the white usurpers. During these migrations the unwarlike peoples of the coast - Dickson John's 'Cannibals', who had lived there for over two thousand years, neither needing nor desiring other than what the sand and the sea produced for them gratis - were rapidly diminished or absorbed by the invaders. By 1800, as a result of white man's diseases and of being caught in the midst of the new Americans' wars with the Seminoles, the Tequestas and their brothers the Calusas had vanished from the earth.
"In 1763 (the year Spain said, 'I'll tell you what we'll do: you give Cuba back, and we'll let you have Florida,' and England said, 'Fair enough,' thus sealing the fate of the Indians for good and all), Huitzilopochtli, an old man at thirty-seven, looked around and saw that there was nothing left of his town but a few scattered huts and a shell mound - the same shell mound on which I sat to receive The Sililigridium. He loaded his few belongings and his young son into a canoe, and in the dead of night, so that the remnants of his people would not follow him, stole away up the winding river and took up residence beside a tiny hidden creek in the wild interior.
"Here, in the midst of the dense swamplands, the raiding armies of Englishmen, Spaniards, Americans and Seminoles swept unnoticed around the descendants of the exiled king. When Huitzilopochtli's son - Mose Cass Waller's great grandfather - came of age, his father sent him across the slough to the west in search of a woman. Three weeks later he returned with a Seminole squaw. The old king died a few days after his grandson was born, and soon after the child was weaned, his mother crept away in the night and returned to her own people.
"In his twentieth year, during the War of Independence, this boy made his way downstream and up the coast to St. Lucie, where he kidnaped the first female he came upon, a Negro slave girl, and brought her back to the hidden glade. Her name was Lisella Waller, and she became Mose's grandmother. On his return with his prize, the boy found his father dead of a rattlesnake bite.
"And so the generations descended, never leaving the secret dwelling, the family never increasing but by just enough to carry the blood forth in a single line, propagating itself solely by virtue of stolen women, as a primitive might periodically steal a hot coal from a neighboring tribe to keep his fire from going out, until 1927, when my father was born - an albino, Alphonse Dickson 'Quasimodo' Waller - and the exiled blood at last left the woods.
"From me the line continues for thirty-six generations until, in the Twenty-ninth Century, during the era called the Age of Last Things, the author of the Sililigridium is born into bondage to a machine in the megalopolis of New Sol on the fourth planet of the star Sirius. ..."
I had not read these words until Morikand and I were accidentally thrown together by the outbreak of the War. The Confessions had never been openly circulated, and during the last years of the "peace" they were strictly suppressed; in '76 they joined my own books on the bonfires. Knowing what was coming, however, Morikand had buried one set in a small metal chest, and it is those volumes which I have carried with me all these years.
Huddled in a damp culvert, I read by the light of the rockets and firebombs in the west. At first I read only to take my mind off the loss of my home and family but the more I read, the more I came under the strange spell of Morikand Jones, a spell impossible to describe to those who have not experienced it. I became utterly engrossed, and I found myself almost believing what I read. - Morikand, I said, do you mean to say that this Silili-whatever-it-is is not only your ancestor but also your descendant, and that he will not be born for another... - Approximately eleven hundred years. His voice reverberated weirdly in the empty culvert. What was your name again, man? -Smythe, I said, John Smythe. - I dori't care for it. Just John Smythe? - My first name is Rustam. - That's better. May I call you that? I shrugged and said, Call me anything you like - but it was drowned out by a nearby explosion.
CHAPTER SIX
Zooming back now to the day my Uncle Farley had his second painful encounter with the troll...
If you have been paying attention, you will recall that some time ago I told you about Cynthia's work schedule in her husband's office - that is, that she worked on Tuesdays and Fridays, but that one day she came in on Wednesday - and that that was what "started things popping," as I believe I put it. Now it so happens that it was on a Wednesday that my uncle made his return to Fish Head Hole, and moreover that it was on the very Wednesday mentioned above. It happened in the morning.
Cynthia was in another of her despondent moods.
Her suspicions about Harry and Maria had grown steadily during the last two days, and were now producing an excruciating pressure within her. She wanted to know, and she didn't want to know. It was tearing her apart. Last night, like the night before, Harry had declined to have sex with her. Her most intimate caresses apparently had, if anything, a soporific effect on him, because minutes after hitting the bed he was sound asleep, and with a most suspicious smile on his face. Another day of uncertainty, and she was afraid she would begin to crack up.
At eleven o'clock, she got dressed and roared out of the driveway. She had no particular destination in mind, and yet knew full well that she would end up at the office.
When she found the front door locked and Maria's car in the parking lot, a cold heaviness gripped the pit of her stomach. She took out her key, and with trembling fingers quietly inserted it into the lock.
Moments later, Cynthia was back in her car. There was no angry squeal of tires, no enraged roar from the engine, and nary a tear in Cynthia's eye. Observing the speed limit and the traffic signals, she drove to the First National Bank of Uranus at the other end of town, and drew out all the cash in the account of Jones and Smollet. On the way home, she rolled down all the windows and said to herself, "I think I'll let my hair grow, too." By one-thirty, she was packed and on her way.
What had irked Cynthia the most, as she stood in the open doorway to Harry's inner office, was not the smooth, unhurried way in which Harry's hairy buttocks rose and fell between Maria's open thighs, indicating that it was not the morning's first fuck, nor was it the fact that they were doing it on Harry's desk - the desk he had repeatedly asked her, Cynthia, never to dust, tidy up, rearrange or even touch - nor even the way Maria's little olive-colored nipples were stretched and swollen from being sucked, nor the sight of teeth marks on the full, soft underbellies of her heaving tits; no; what got Cynthia's goat was that the inkwells, pencil holders, ash trays, atlases, field books, prints, tracings and scratch pads beneath which the surface of Harry's desk was always hidden had not been brushed off onto the floor in the heat of desperate and uncontrollable passion, but on the contrary had been calmly and methodically transferred to the drawing table, where they stood in neat, even rows. As she slipped quietly out the front door of the outer office, locking it behind her, Cynthia had remembered that the building blocks, toys, dolls and hymnals that had been kept on the table in the church nursery where Roy had fucked Bobby had been placed on the floor with the same cool, deliberate orderliness, in preparation for what was obviously a previously agreed-upon act. The image of what she had just seen merged with the one remembered like a pellet of cyanide dropping into a bowl of acid.
Cynthia was checked safely into a Miami hotel that evening before Harry even knew she was gone. The reason for this was that Harry was late getting home again, having stayed at the office until after six, waiting for my Uncle Farley to return. Harry was anxious to see what progress, if any, had been made on the park job. But he was wasting his time, because it was well after midnight when my uncle fell out of the car whose driver had taken a chance and picked him up, and nearly dawn by the time he had limped the four blocks from the highway to his apartment.
What had happened, briefly, was this:
By the time Old Man Mose had shown Farley the arrowheads of "his people," recounted to him some of the strange tales of his ancestors (not a word of which my uncle swallowed, believing the "old nigger" to be loony as a goose), and explained that his spooky son Quasimodo, frightening though he may have appeared to my uncle, was really quite harmless, and that since sunlight made him ill, he rarely came out of his "room," devoting all his time to reading - though upon how he read in the dark, Mose could shed no light, so to speak... After all this, I say, the afternoon was in its final hours, and the condition of Farley's groin had improved at least enough for him to stand up and, with the aid of Mose and his daughter, take a few experimental steps. By five o'clock, he felt well enough to make it on his own back to Fish Head Hole, where he was sure he would find Ronnie waiting for him; with the kid's help, he was confident of getting back to the Jeep, and thence to the office without further incident. Mose advised him that it would be easier on him if he followed the path that led west from the shack until he came to a dirt road that would take him straight up to the township line, and from there he would have only to follow the ditch bank back to where he had left the Jeep; but this smelled fishy to my uncle, and he said no thanks, he'd go the way he'd come. "Suit yosef, Mista Fahley," said Mose with a shrug of his bony shoulders, and off went my uncle at a brave shuffle. His eagerness to stuff the news of the ogre's existence down Harry's throat far overrode the ache in his balls.
But unbeknownst to Uncle Farley, not only was Ronnie not waiting faithfully at Fish Head Hole, neither was he waiting with the Jeep at the township line; neither was the Jeep there, for it was parked some fifteen miles away, in front of a little tavern called the Spotted Duck, in the village of Gomez. Farley hadn't given Ronnie enough to keep him drinking all afternoon, but he had had extraordinary luck at the pool table, and so had greatly expanded his funds. To leave a bar while he still had the price of a beer in his jeans was a thing that went strongly against Ronnie's grain, and with each belt, the memory of Farley Smollet, his Jeep and his hobgoblin drifted farther and farther from the boy's awareness.
It was when my uncle discovered that Fish Head Hole was no longer where he had left it that he realized he no longer had his machete with him. (That made two he had lost in the last three days, and don't think Harry didn't let him know about it, runaway wife or no.) After walking for miles, or so it seemed to him, up along the edge of the west bottom in search of an opening in the swamp, and finding nothing but impenetrable jungle, Uncle Farley turned back to seek help from Mose. It soon became apparent, however, that the shack too had vanished, and that he was quite alone in the darkening woods.
Finally, with night now coming on in earnest, my Uncle Farley panicked and made a headlong rush into the shadowy tangle that was cutting off his escape. While this blind charge nearly ruptured him and did tear the shirt off his back, it nevertheless succeded - thanks to my uncle's weight and the law of momentum - in carrying him through the thick outer barrier of palmettos and thick vines that bordered the bottom, and by crawling on his hands and knees he managed at last to reach the creek, though he nearly drowned while crossing it.
It was well after dark and poor Uncle Farley was one huge mosquito bite by the time he had managed to claw his way out of the east edge of the bottom, and began the painful trek back to the township line. There is no need to tell here how my uncle at first went the wrong way, heading downstream instead of up, nor how an owl hoot frightened him, causing him to fall on a prickly pear, nor to describe the size and shape attained by his testicles enroute, nor to quote the obsenities which came from his mouth when at length he stood dripping in a cloud of mosquitos and sandflies at the spot where he had left the Jeep. No, for my only purpose is to avoid leaving my uncle stranded in the swamp while we are in Miami with Cynthia. Suffice it to say, then, that after several periodic fits of rage and pain along the way, which did him no good, Uncle Farley at last reached a paved road, which he found singularly devoid of good Samaritans, but where, after two or three hours, some brave soul finally picked him up. The driver, it seemed, had himself been on the lam in earlier years, and knew what it was all about. My uncle wanted to explain, but his voice had gone out on him again.
I believe I have told the rest.
Bright and early next day (make it about ten)... "Well, uh, first maybe you'd better tell me how much it's going to be, Dr. Grosswell," said Cynthia, a beautiful blush coloring her cheeks.
"My dear young lady," replied the doctor, shaking his head gravely, "if I am to be your physician, then the order in which things are to come - that is to say, what must be done when, whether this is to come first, or that is to come second, or the other thing is to come third - these are matters which simply must be left up to me and to me alone; don't you see?"
"Of course, Dr. Grosswell," said Cynthia. "I under stand that. But I just thought that if it's going to be more than I can afford, what's the point in... ?"
"The point, you say!" bellowed the doctor. "The point, my dear, is that I cannot tell you the price until such time as I have determined the magnitude of the job, and there is no other way to make such a determination than by direct examination, and in my professional opinion the time for that is now, and without further ado." He squinted up at her over the top of his spectacles and added, "You follow me?"
"Whatever you say, Doctor," said Cynthia. She began unbuttoning her blouse.
"Ah, that's better, that's better!" said Dr. Grosswell, struggling up from his desk and lumbering over to a fluorescent tube which hung from the ceiling, and which-possibly because of the beer advertisement on its shade-looked as though it should have had a snooker table under it instead of an operating table (it was really a gurney, or rolling stretcher). "This will, ah, shed some light on things, in a, ah, heh-heh, manner of speaking," chuckled the doctor as he switched on the lamp.
Cynthia removed her bra and lay back on the gurney, and the good doctor hunched over her bosom, peering closely at each nipple through a magnifying glass with a handle carved in the shape of a naked woman. He mumbled to himself as he worked: "Mm-hm! Ah-ha! Hmmmm... tch-tch... wellnowlessee-whatweegotnow... mmhm... oh, yessss!" and like that. Then he placed the magnifying glass on the rolling utility cart beside the gurney, rubbed his palms together, flexed his wrists, wiped his nose, and commenced phase two of the examination. Cynthia wondered if this phase was necessary, but said nothing, and after a minute or two she found herself halfway enjoying it.
"It had been a long time since anyone had played with my tits," she told Morikand, "and even if he was a doctor, it was kinda nice. While he pinched and poked at me, I turned my head to the side and looked at the pictures on the wall - snapshots, dozens of them, all of bare-chested women. They were arranged in pairs - before and after. Just the thought that my picture might soon be up there made me tingle all over!
"You know, Mori, I think it wasn't until then, lying there on that table with those hot hands massaging me, that it began to dawn on me what was happening. Until then I had been in kind of a daze, you know? - operating strictly by reflex. But then it hit me that I had really done it; I had made the break; I had left Harry and all the security that went with him, and I was on my own in a strange city where I didn't know a single soul. What didn't occur to me, though, was that I was unconsciously imitating my sister - running away to Miami as she had run away to Cairo.
"But anyway, there I was, actually inside the office of Dr. D. U. Grosswell... not just thinking about it all day, dreaming about it all night... I was actually there! It was really happening!
"I didn't have to look at my nipples to know they were getting stiff. It wasn't the pawing that did it; it was this realization that after all those dull years, I had taken a blind leap toward a new life. And it didn't even embarrass me - my nipples swelling up - because already even before the first injections, my timidity and self-consciousness had started to fade away, to change into something else. .. ."
At last he straightened up, whipped his spectacles dramatically from his nose, and delivered his estimate in round figures.
Cynthia sat up in alarm. "My gosh!" she said, "I didn't expect it to be that much!"
"My dear Mrs. Jones," said the doctor, "I have more fatty tissue in my thumb than you have in both breasts combined. I say this not as an insult, you understand, but only as an indication, by means of a simile, that there ain't much there to work from, to use the, ah, heh-heh, vernacular."
Cynthia made some mental calculations. Even if she kept living expenses at a bare minimum, she would only have enough for five shots of the series of twenty. Yet when the doctor asked just how much expansion she had in mind, she answered unhesitatingly, "As much as possible."
"Ahhhh!" said Dr. Grosswell, a broad smile spreading his jowls. "In that case I'll give you a discount."
When the terms had been worked out, Cynthia asked how soon she could have her first appointment.
"Appointment?" said the doctor, "Ah, yes, of course, your first appointment. Well, now let me check my book." He took a small memo pad from his desk, flicked a roach from the binding, and opened it at random. "Hmmmm. Seems I'm booked up for the next three months."
"Three months! Oh, I can't possibly wait that long, Doctor!"
"Can't, eh?" muttered the doctor, "Well, now, let me check for cancellations." He thumbed through the book, stopping at a page which looked blank to Cynthia except for a pressed silverfish in the upper left hand corner. "Aha! Here's one. I seem to have a cancellation on the, ah," - he glanced at the calendar on his desk - "the tenth of July."
"Why, that's today," said Cynthia.
"Ah, so it is, so it is!" said Dr. Grosswell. A little cloud of dust rose from the memo pad as he snapped it shut and tossed it into the drawer as though everything were settled.
"Uh, what time would that be, Doctor?" Cynthia asked.
The doctor rubbed his tiny chin and shoved his jowls up around his ears. Closing one piglike eye and squinting at her over the top of his bifocal with the other, he said, "How 'bout now?"
"Wonderful!" said Cynthia.
Dr. Grosswell clapped his fat hands with resolve, and before the sound had ceased to echo through the wooden building, Cynthia was once more stripped to the waist. Her metamorphosis was about to begin.
The first month was rough. Cynthia got a job as a waitress in a dreary little restaurant. The motel was too high, so she moved to a cheap hotel at the edge of the central ghetto. When the Jones and Smollett money ran out, she sold her car. It took every penny she could make to keep up the weekly appointments with Dr. Grosswell, and the only pleasure she derived from life during this period was standing naked before the cracked mirror in her tiny room after getting off work, examining and admiring and measuring her slowly expanding breasts. I say slowly because, as Dr. Grosswell explained to her, due to the extraordinary resistance of her skin to stretching, he could guarantee her a girth increase of no more than 0.7 of an inch per week. But things were on the rise, so to speak, and Cynthia had no regrets.
From February 10 to March 14, Cynthia's bust measurement when from 31 to 34 inches. On the fifteenth she answered an ad in the paper for a cocktail waitress, and was turned down.
March 28. Bust: 35.9 in.: The ad appeared again; she answered it again; she got the job. This was at the Club Golden Knee, on the beach. She moved to a better hotel.
April 5. Bust: 36.8 in.: The waitresses at the Golden Knee were required to wear short skirts, lacy aprons, and low-cut cotton blouses. This night Cynthia bent over a man's table. She wore no bra, and the man looked into the front of her blouse and said, "How much."
"Fifty dollars," Cynthia replied. (That was the price of one session with Dr. Grosswell.) "Forget it," said the man.
April 12. Bust: 37.3 in.: Again Cynthia dangled her unharnessed tits in a man's face. It was the same man, as a matter of fact. He said, "How much was that again."
"Seventy-five," said Cynthia. "What time do you get off?" said the man.
("It felt so good, Mori! - his strong hands on those big, beautiful new tits of mine, slapping them around, chewing on them... It was better than I'd dreamed it would be. That long, strange cock going in and out of me, the heat of his tongue on my lips... And I didn't even know his name, and didn't ask. It didn't matter. You know what I made him do?"
"You made him fuck you on a desk."
"On a table. How did you know."
"Go ahead, Mother; I was just guessing."
"There was a table in his apartment that was covered with cameras and viewers and things; he was a photographer. We took everything off and - "
"Stacked it in neat rows on the floor."
"Yes!" She laughed, and leaned back on the blood-stained pillows at the head of the bed. The blood had long since dried. Morikand still sat cross-legged at the foot, casually wrapping one of the ropes around his penis. "I don't know why, but I almost had an orgasm before we ever got the table cleared. I guess he thought I was crazy, but I didn't give a damn. I climbed up on the table and spread for him, and he grabbed my tits and started licking my slit, and I went off like a bomb. My clitoris felt as big as my thumb. Oh, it was so good!")
April 26. Bust: 38.0 in.: "More?" asked Dr. Gross-well. "More," said Cynthia.
May 3. Bust 39.4 in.: "WoweeI" said a man named Charlie as Cynthia sat down at his table during her break. "So you're Cynthia Jones." She nodded and smiled, but Charlie's eyes never left her tits - as though he were waiting for the moment, which seemed close at hand, when they would rupture the thin, drum-taut front of her blouse and burst into full view. "I wanta tell you something, baby. Those pictures Max took... If you are the same girl... well, they just don't do ya justice, baby; they just don't." Cynthia didn't tell him that that was because they'd been taken two weeks ago. "Listen," he said later that night, after he had fucked her. "You're wasting your time in that joint. Why don't you let me take you down the beach to Leo's place? You can make some real bread there. And besides, those things ought to be out where they can be appreciated."
"Out?" asked Cynthia.
"Right. Leo runs a topless room in the back. What do you say?"
May 14. Bust: 40.I in.: Cynthia moved to a better hotel. It was her night off. She called Max, the photographer, and asked him if he'd like to sleep with her. He said he'd be right over. "Oh, by the way," she said, "how about bringing a camera with you?"
May 17. Bust: 40.8 in.: Max brought the developed prints to Leo's place. As Cynthia thumbed through them, Max looked her up and down - mostly up. Her working attire now consisted of high heels, black mesh tights, G-string and earrings. By this time her soft blonde hair reached to her shoulders, and she wore it straight and loose and parted in the middle. But it was her tits - those magnificent jutting, massive, springy, rose-tipped tits-to which Max now gave particular attention, rubbing his chin as he did so. "You know," he said, "I could swear those things are bigger than they were three days ago." Ignoring that, Cynthia said, "This is the one I want! It's just the thing!" Max took the snapshot from her and looked at it. "Yeah, that's a good one, all right." This picture showed Cynthia's naked torso in half-profile, her hands on her hips, a sexy smile on her face, and one huge, creamy breast silhouetted against a dark background; the tawny curls of her bush were just visible at the bottom of the print. What Cynthia liked about it was the way the light struck her tits; they were right in the middle of the picture, and they shone like headlights against the softer tones of her upper chest and abdomen. "What do you want it for?" asked Max. "I'm going to send it to my husband," said Cynthia.
June 23. Bust: 44.3 in.: By now Cynthia had been promoted to the room behind the back room; she had graduated from waiting on tables to performing on the stage. Leo's Closet, as this room was called, was a dim-lit little chamber not unlike the other strip clubs operating on the beach in those days, except that it was more intimate, and the girls took it all off instead of stopping at pasties and G-strings. Immediately, Cynthia was the main attraction, and although her sexual activity did not diminish, prostitution was no longer necessary; she gave it away, now. On this night, two days after Cynthia's twentieth injection, Leo approached her after her act. Below the room behind the back room was yet another room, it seemed - a cellar called The Lion's Den. The admittance fee was high, and the price of drinks was quadrupled, yet the place was always packed to the walls. Why? "Put something on and I'll show you," said Leo. The Lion's Den had no stage: the girls danced in a small central circle surrounded by tables. Leo led Cynthia to a ringside seat. The act began no different than those in the Closet, but it ended with the girl choosing a man from the audience and letting him fuck her. "Wild," said Cynthia when it was over. "I'm adding a new act," said Leo. "Come on; I want to show you the poster I've had made." In his office, he produced a large, multicolored poster depicting a huge set of tits. Across the top, in big, brilliant letters, it said, THE BIGGEST BLOOMIN' BOOBIES IN THE WORLD!!!
"Who's the girl?" Cynthia asked.
"You," said Leo. "Who else?"
I am my mother ...
The interior was dim, as it had been then, only now it was lit not by heavily shaded electric lamps, but by a stub of a candle wedged in the rubble that covered the floor. I didn't know where we were. Morikand had begun without warning, his eyes fixed on the flame. We hadn't had a decent meal in days, and I hadn't yet learned to eat cockroaches and rats, like Morikand. It was with great weariness, almost reluctance, that I dragged pencil and paper from my sack ...
In this place, I am my mother. My gown brushes tables and chairs as I approach the center of the room. A hand grabs my ass. My body feels as though it is full of static electricity; the hair on my head and between my legs seems to crackle as I walk. I expect at any minute that sparks will jump from one nipple to the other. The front of my gown is close-fitting but slippery, so that my tits swing and bounce and bump together. I enter the spotlight. The room is filled with disembodied eyes, shining through the gloom. They are all around me. How am I to choose? I begin to dance around the perimeter of the circle, pausing at each table to shake my breasts in the faces of the customers. There are women here as well as men. Are you here, Bobby? Maria? What do you think of me now, you flat-chested bitches? And how about you, Roy? Harry, are you out there? How do you like my new jugs? I undo a clasp, spin around and let the gown sail away into the dark. I spread my legs and cup my cunt in my hands. Bump, bump, bump! They love it. I raise my arms over my head and do the milkshake bit. It drives them wild. I am down to bra and panties and high heels. The panties are tiny and sheer. The crotch is too little, and my cunt hair sticks out at the edges. I tantalize them with it. I put one foot on a table, pluck out a hair and tickle a man's nose with it. Everyone wants a souvenir. I laugh and continue the dance. God, this is fun! This is the Cynthia that has been asleep in me all these years. I would never have dreamt I could enjoy this so much. It's so much better down here than up above in the Closet. Here you can finish your act properly - put everything into it, everything! Up there ...
Morikand's eyes rose from the flame and looked up at the shattered ceiling.
... Up there it's all over just when it should be beginning. - Morikand! I said, suddenly excited. You mean this is the place? He nodded. I looked around incredulously. The smoky brick walls looked ready to collapse at any minute. On one of them someone had written FUCK YOU JESUS IS COMING in big white letters. That, together with Morikand's presence, gave the place a certain holy ambience, like the Catacombs of Rome. I could hardly believe that, diving as we had into the first hole we'd come to, we had actually stumbled upon the ruins of the Lion's Den! This was two... three (God, I'm losing track!) . . . a number of years ago, during the Siege of Miami in which the Whites retook the city. Unfortunately, our random beachcombing had brought us into the danger zone. Zionist commandos had somehow gotten in from the north, and were blowing things up right and left, and the American assault ships, we learned, were sitting just over the horizon, waiting for somebody to yell, Kill!
Just as Morikand merged back into his mother's mind and opened his mouth to continue, there was a commotion in the stairwell and a gang of street kids, five blacks and a mulatto girl, stormed in through the crumbling doorway. They all had clubs except one of the boys, who had copped himself a submachine gun. One look at our white skins and he bared his teeth and leveled the muzzle, but at that moment, lucky for us, there was a deafening blast nearby that showered us all with bricks and rubble. The ships had begun to shell the coast. The kids said, Come on, let's get the fuck outa here! and they did. But when the dust settled, one of them was still there, standing in the doorway, staring strangely at Morikand, who by the way still sat there by the candle as though nothing had happened. It was the mulatto girl. She didn't look over fourteen. Like the boys, she wore a dirty, ragged T-shirt and a pair of dungarees several sizes too big for her; all stuff they had stolen from the regular troops. She was as skinny as a stick, and looked half-dead. I started to wave her off, but Morikand held up a restraining hand. The girl came over and sat down across the candle from him, never taking her eyes from his. Morikand asked her name. She shrugged. I dunno. They call me Slit. Morikand smiled. I like it, he said, and with hardly a pause went on:
The cups of the bra are fastened together by special little threads that break easy. I take a deep breath, and pow! off it flies. They cheer and whistle like mad. I take one tit in my hand and bend over a guy sitting with his wife. Looks like his wife. The music is low now, so I can talk to them. Want some milk, honey? I say, and the guy laughs and looks nervously at his wife. Go ahead, she says half-heartedly, and when he opens his mouth I poke the nipple in as far as it will go. My areola's so big he can hardly suck it all in. I let him get going good, and then jerk it out. Ha ha! I take off my G-string and toss it to the guy's wife. Here; let him suck on these! The woman laughs and puts it in her purse. Probably suck it herself, soon as she gets in the girls' room. I spread wide and give them all a good look up my cunt. I keep it moving, jerking, jumping; it moves all by itself; it's all hot and stiff inside, juicy... I get some juice on my fingers and rub it on my nipples. God, they're stiff as pencils! Make another pass, one more, go out among the tables and let 'em all feel, let 'em all play, hands all over me, squeezing, pulling, jabbing, oh, God, I can't hold out much longer... Gotta pick one. Look at 'em raising their hands like school kids. Pick me, teacher! Pick me! Show me your cocks, boys, I say; not your hands. They whip 'em out, and I pick the guy with the longest, thickest one and lead him into the ring. By the dong. He drops his pants. I look at him. This is the first time, with an audience; I should be blushing. Timid Cynthia. What happened to her? I feel like I could fuck the whole world tonight, and still not get enough. Come and get me, motherfucker. Sock it to me, baby. He stands there in front of me, his cock jumping; can't take his eyes or his hands off my tits. He's amazed that they don't sag. I can see it in his face: They're so big, how can they stand up like that? It even amazes Dr. Grosswell how strong they are. I go down his body with my tongue, pausing on the way to slip my lips over his prick, and melt out on the floor on my back. My boobs stick up like towers. The surrounding eyes crowd in close. He's drooling like a dog as he mounts me. Needs no help getting it in. Ah! Oh! Faster! Faster! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. No more words, Rustam; no more thoughts, either; just voluptuous sensation. Would you like to bear my child? Slit's expression, as near as I could tell, did not change; she only blinked her eyes once and said, yes.
June 26. Bust: 44.3 in.: "Remember, my dear," warned Dr. Grosswell. "I guarantee nothing. Extended tension on the pectoral ligaments, the possibility of a rupture of the lactiferous sinuses, or, if, in the eventuality of stromatic fatigue, it should come to pass that..." and so on and so forth, concluding at length with, "In other words, if they fall, no refunds."
"Come on, Doc," laughed Cynthia. "Just one more shot for the road!"
"Very well," said Dr. Grosswell, drawing his hypodermic from its scabbard. "Flop 'em out."
June 27. Bust: 45.0 in.: Wow!
CHAPTER SEVEN
To tell the truth, it didn't bother Harry too much at first, his wife's mysterious departure. As a matter of fact, it bothered him very damn little.
When it became apparent that she wasn't in town, and that in all probability she was gone for good, Maria moved in with Harry.
This didn't please my Uncle Farley. On the morning that he found out about it, he and Ronnie (whom my uncle had finally agreed to rehire, being unable to find anyone else) took off on a three-day drunk, further delaying the big boundary job. While they were gone, however, Harry went to a bar and faked some field notes, sent them off to the Park Commission and collected enough loot to keep the doors open another month. (For the benefit of those not privvy to the daily routine of land surveyors in those days, maybe I should mention that field notes were always faked in a bar; it may be argued that since Harry now had his own business he might just as easily have negotiated the fraud in the quiet of his office; but habits are hard to break.)
Four months later, however, though money continued to trickle in from time to time, and his credit rating had not yet taken its final plunge, Harry's spirits went into a nosedive.
"Great God on a bicycle!" he gasped as he pulled the snapshot from the envelope. "What the hell happened to her?"
"What is it?" asked Maria.
"A letter from Cynthia," Harry muttered, his eyes bulging from their sockets. It wasn't really a letter; it was a note scrawled on the back of the picture. It read,
Dear Harry, Just a line to let you know I'm doing fine. Boy, a little vacation can do wonders for a girl, can't it. Give Maria my best.
Cynthia
There was no return address, but it was postmarked in Miami.
"Come on, let me look at it," Maria urged, finally snatching the snapshot from Harry's clutches. "It's a fake," she said after the initial shock. "Trick photography. Nobody has tits like that."
"Lemme see. Sure as shit looks real to me. How could they fake a thing like that?"
"Simple," said Maria. "They just put Cynthia's head on another girl's body."
"Oh, yeah? I thought you said nobody had tits like that."
"Well.. . maybe some freak."
"You callin' my wife a freak?"
"Harry, what the hell's the matter with you? That's not your wife!"
"Bullshit," said Harry. "Don't I know my wife when I see her? That's her hips, that's her pussy, that's her belly button ..."
"But those aren't her tits," Maria insisted. "And you know it."
"The hell you say. Look, you see that mole, right there beside the left nipple? Cynthia's got a mole just like that, right in the same goddamn spot! It's her, I tell ya!"
"Harry, don't be silly. How could it be? Cynthia's as flat as a pancake."
"Well, she said her vacation was doing wonders for her," Harry suggested.
"I'll say!"
This conversation ended in a nasty argument, and the next day they argued again, and again the next day; on the fourth day it almost came to blows, and on the evening of the fifth, when my Uncle Farley returned from the field, he found this note in his cubbyhole:
Farley-
Gone to Miami to get Cynthia. Keep things going if you can. If not, fuck it. Be back when I can.
Harry
P.S. Get that cunt out of my house.
Did this news depress Farley? No. Even though he was left to pay the bills, do the work, contend with the creditors, go down with the ship, alone on the poop, as it were? No. (Q: You promised. A. Get fucked.) Was he pleased about it? To a certain extent, yes. To what extent? To the extent that he now had Maria to himself. Ah!
My uncle stuck the note in his pocket and said nothing to Maria. The next morning, she came to work in tears.
"Oh, Farley, Harry's gone!"
Uncle Farley said, yes, he knew; the son of a bitch had run out on them - left him, Farley, holding the bag. Well, he'd known all along that the bastard was no good, he said, but he hadn't wanted to stick his nose in where it didn't belong. He took her gently in his arms, and she sobbed on his shoulder. "There, there," soothed my uncle, patting her on the head. "It's all for the best; you'll see."
He began pulling her subtly toward the anteroom, where there was a couch, but just then Ronnie stumbled in, bleary-eyed and ready for another day. Farley let go of Maria, told her he'd be. right back-"Wait for me up front. Make yourself comfortable. I'll bring you a cup o' coffee."-and quickly herded Ronnie out the back door.
"Hey, what's happenin', man? Stop pushin'! I got a headache you wouldn't believe!"
"Good, good," said Uncle Farley. "Why don't you take the day off?"
"Huh?" He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted at my uncle.
"What're ya, deaf?" replied Farley impatiently. "I said why don't you take the day off?"
"With pay?" asked Ronnie suspiciously.
"Jesus Christ!" said my uncle, closing his eyes and raising his hand to his forehead. "Yes. With pay."
"Hey, good deal, man!" said the kid, all smiles now. "Can I take the Jeep?"
"GET OUTA HERE!"
"Why were you yelling at Ronnie?" Maria asked when Uncle Farley sat down beside her on the couch.
"Huh? Oh, he's got a dentist appointment this morning. I was just telling him to take the day off."
"Oh."
"Here, drink this." He handed her the paper cup, spilling only a few drops.
"Ouch! That's hot."
"Oh, sorry about that. Here, let me take care of it." My uncle dabbed at the coffee stains on her white skirt with his plaid snotrag. "Let's see now ..." He lifted the hem well above her knee and peered closely at the smooth olive skin of her bare thigh. "No blisters," he said, smiling up at her. "Heh-heh."
"Oh, Farley!" she whimpered, crossing her legs and leaving the skirt where it lay. "I feel awful!"
"Sure, honey; I know just how you feel. But I tell ya the bastard ain't worth cryin' over. He left you for another woman, didn't he? And without a good-bye or a kiss-my-ass or nothing. Am I right?"
"Yes... but it was his wife."
"That's beside the point. She's still another woman, ain't she? It just proves what I'm sayin': that Harry Jones is a two-timing, heartless, rotten, unfaithful, no good, back-stabbing son of a bitch. Not that I don't like him, you understand; I just want you to know him like I do. Now, you just lay your pretty head in old Farley's lap and have a good cry, if you feel like it. Don't worry about the work; we'll just kinda take it easy today. That's a girl."
Maria drew up her knees, letting her skirt slide up nearly to her hips, and curled up on the couch with her face wedged between Uncle Farley's gut and his groin, sobbing quietly. Stroking her head with one hand, he put his other on the soft hill of her hip, patting gently. He kept it up, and soon his hand � began to sweat, though the air-conditioner was up all the way. Slowly, casually, he hoped, he moved the patting hand down onto her bare thigh below the rumpled skirt, and then even more slowly up under the skirt to her hip again, patting all the way. The feel of the sheer material of her panties under his palm sent racing goosepimples up Farley's spine, hormones flooding from his balls, and blood pounding into his cock.
He carefully folded the skirt up to her waist and saw that Maria's panties were as transparent as they felt, if not more so. Temples pounding, he craned his neck forward so he could see both cheeks of her lovely ass, sucking the undiluted view of her crack straight into his eyeballs. It was almost more than he could stand. Almost.
Now he worked his hand down over the smooth round softness until he was cupping the upper cheek in his palm, the tips of his fingers trembling in the crease, barely touching the electrifying nylon. He had stopped patting. He wondered: Can she feel my cock against her head? Does she realize I'm playing with her ass? He wished: If she'd straighten her leg a little, I could see her cunt. If she'd move her arm, I could see her tit. He listened: I thought I heard her mumble something.
She had indeed mumbled something, but the words were muffled in my uncle's paunch.
"What was that, honey?" he asked, surprised to find that he could hardly speak.
When she pulled her tear-smeared face from under the bloated overhang, Uncle Farley found to his sur- prise that either she had unbuttoned the front of her blouse, or else it had come open by itself. Her plump, round breasts bulged up out of a tiny net bra, two excruciatingly beautiful balloons of ripe flesh, with little brown nipples thrusting their stiff knobs brazenly against the sheer cloth, and the deep dark crease of her cleavage curving upward in a delicious sweep, to end in a cursive wide-armed V below her collarbones. At the same time, her thighs opened, giving Farley that longed-for look at her cunt, its black, curly bush clearly visible through the crotch of her panties.
"I said, it's the mornings that are going to be bad. Harry always made love to me when we woke up."
As she said this, Maria propped herself up on an elbow, and whether by accident or design, the elbow rested precisely on the shank of my Uncle Farley's cock, just behind the head. True, there was little or no friction involved, but the pressure alone, unfortunately, was sufficient. Sufficient for what? I am ashamed to admit it, but at that moment my esteemed uncle came in his trousers.
"Uh, 'scuse me a minute, Maria," he muttered, getting to his feet as gracefully as possible. "Be right back."
When Uncle Farley returned from the John, he found Maria up and buttoned, talking to a client. Just my luck, thought my uncle. However, he was glad to get the job; it was just a lot of survey, but it was the little ones that paid the rent; besides, his glands needed a chance to rejuvenate themselves; he saw a day of titillating pleasure stretching out before him.
But no sooner had the first customer left than a second one arrived, and close on his heels, a third. To be brief, it was like that all morning. If the kitty hadn't been so miserably low, Uncle Farley would have locked the doors for the day and had at it; but it was, so he didn't. And by afternoon, Maria was out of the mood. Oh, well! though my uncle. There's always tonight.
As soon as he got home that evening, he quickly shit, showered and shaved, and picked up the telephone. "Hey, Maria? This is Farley. I'll pick you up in five minutes. We'll have a few beers and a hamburger down at Jake and Sally's. Sound good? Oh. Got a date, huh? With who? That's what I thought you said. Well, Okay. 'Bye."
"Well, kiss my fucking ass!" said my uncle as he hung up. "That settles it; I'm firing that kid for good! This time for good!"
Due to one cause or another, Uncle Farley's ill luck with Maria continued all that month and through the next. One day at the beginning of July, after Maria had left Harry's house and moved in with Ronnie, he decided to take things into his own hands (so to speak); to assert himself, to force the issue . ..
"Maria," said my uncle, "why don't you come with us today? Lock up the office and get a little sun. Do ya good."
Ronnie seconded the motion, and the girl said she'd like nothing better. A quick cup of coffee, and they were off.
Whether or not Maria or the kid noticed the scheming twinkle in my uncle's eye and the fiendish grin that curled his lips as they drove along, it would be hard to say.
That morning they finally completed the work on the township line, tying in to the northwest corner of section four, which was also the northwest corner of the proposed park. My uncle remained cool and collected; he bided his time. After lunch, he had Ronnie set up on the said corner and started hacking out the west boundary. This line ran a little over three miles along the west side of Scullery's Creek to the Frighatchee, whose north bank marked the south limit of the park. The line also ran fairly close to Mose's place; his shack was just outside the boundary, as it turned out. Uncle Farley let Maria keep them on line with the transit, while he and Ronnie sweated it out with the machetes, cutting through the dense willows and myrtle in the marsh that fed the creek. After a thousand feet or so they came out into the pinelands, set a stake, and Farley sent Ronnie back for Maria and the transit. Let him bring her to me, thought my uncle with a diabolical chuckle as the kid made his weary way back up the cut line. It was clouding up in the west, but Farley was paying no attention to the weather.
"Set up on that stake," he said when Ronnie returned with Maria.
"No shit?" said Ronnie sarcastically. (It is true that my uncle had an irritating habit of giving orders when none were needed.)
When the boy had the transit set up, he said, "Hey Farley, let's take a break. It's too goddamn hot to work this hard."
"Shit," said my uncle. "You wouldn't know hard work if it kicked ya in the ass." But nevertheless he agreed to a short rest. If he got the kid too pissed off, his plan wouldn't work.
Ronnie and Maria sat down in the shade of a pine a short distance off, in an obvious attempt to get away from Farley. My uncle didn't follow; he found his own shade. Go ahead, he thought. Have your fun, you young punk. I'll have my chance. Unlike Ronnie and Maria, Uncle Farley took off his shirt and spread it on the ground before sitting down, thinking, No red bugs for me. (The next day, however, it was my uncle's ass which was covered with bites; Ronnie and the girl had none.) He settled back and pulled his hat down over his eyes, pretending to doze, but actually watching the couple with an unblinking stare.
Thinking Farley wasn't looking, Ronnie and Maria began to play. Maria had worn jeans and a cotton shirt; now Ronnie's hand slipped under the shirt as they kissed, and my uncle watched it moving from tit to tit, squeezing and stroking. Soon a button popped open, exposing her luscious cleavage to the sunlight, and Farley saw that her bra was black and lacy. With his other hand, the kid went for her cunt, squeezing it through the tight denim, and her plump legs opened wide. Go ahead, warm her up, thought my uncle. Make it easy on me. But when she unzipped Ronnie's fly and hauled out his cock, that was going too far, in my uncle's opinion. Just as Maria was skinning it back with her lips, he got to his feet, saying, "All right, back to work! Can't loll around in the shade all day." He pretended not to notice the couple's hasty zipping and buttoning maneuvers.
So once more Maria manned the transit and Uncle Farley and Ronnie chained on ahead through the scrub, chopping only when necessary. Thunderheads now rumbled ominously in the distance, and soon rolled up before the sun.
"Ah, that's better!" said Uncle Farley as the woods grew dim and a fresh breeze came rattling through the palmettos.
"Yeah, but it's gonna rain, man," said Ronnie. "We better head back."
"Shit," replied my uncle. "It ain't gonna rain. Come on; pull that chain!"
Uncle Farley now kept his eyes peeled as never before, and soon, lo and behold, he spotted the top of the big bay tree that marked Fish Head Hole. Now I make my move, he said to himself.
"Give the map, Ron," he called. "We should be just about to that quarter corner."
"What map?" asked Ronnie.
"Don't tell me you didn't bring the map!"
"I'm not the goddamn party chief," said the kid. "You're supposed to carry that shit yourself."
"Goddamn it, I told you to bring that map, Ronnie! Now here we are in the middle of the woods without a distance. How in hell do you suppose we're gonna find any corners if we ain't got distances?"
"I'll be goddamned if I know. You never told me to get no map."
"The fuck I didn't!" lied my uncle. "I told you to get it right when, we left the goddamn Jeep. Well, you'll just have to go back for it. You can cut through the clearing there and take that path on the other side o' the creek; it'll be quicker."
"What clearing? Why don't you go get it yourself, for Christ's sake?"
'"Come on; it'll just take you a minute. Here, I'll show you. It's right where we came across that time when you all thought I was crazy, remember?"
"I still think you're crazy, man," Ronnie replied as he followed my uncle into the bottom. "It's gonna rain any minute. Look at the fuckin' sky!"
"All right," said Farley, a brilliant idea popping into his head, "tell you what you do: When you get back to the Jeep, drive around the park and come in from the east. You know the road. You can leave the Jeep right over there on the other side, and then if it rains, all we gotta do is hop in."
"Yeah, I know the road, all right. What about that mudhole?"
"Fuck the mudhole," said my uncle with a wave of his hand. "You won't get stuck. Go around it or something. Hurry up, now; I gotta have that map."
Still mumbling something about my uncle being crazy, Ronnie nevertheless waded the creek and trudged off toward the Jeep.
Uncle Farley was rather proud of himself for thinking of that - having the kid drive the Jeep around. The longer he was gone, the better it suited my uncle's lecherous purpose. Rubbing his hands together and licking his lips, he hurried back toward the cut line.
He has been watching from a distance, crouched in a tangle of brambles and huckleberries beneath the dense palmetto fans at the edge of the bottom. As the sky dims and the wind rustles the foliage over his head, he creeps forward. He is close now; less than forty feet from her. He flattens himself on the ground like a snake, and the cool mulch soothes his burning body. The movement in his groin gives him a start, though he had expected it. The light grows dimmer still, but the very coolness, the failing of the light, by allowing him to focus more sharply on the girl, fans the fire in his blood. She stretches luxuriously as she stands there behind the instrument, her black hair whipping in the breeze. Her breasts push out against the thin cloth of her shirt. Now she unbuttons it and hangs it on a bush. The bra is not like the one he has in his burrow; it's black, and has straps; its cups are transparent and cut low along the peaks of her bosom, so that the upper darkness of her nipples peeks over the lace. He crouches; his hindquarters quiver like a cat's. She looks down at her breasts. Cups them in her palms. Lifts them. Wrinkles her brow at them. Drops them. They bounce with elastic resilience. He feels the pressure in his penis increasing; feels the warm ooze filling the tuft at the mouth of the foreskin. She bounces up and down impatiently on her heels, and the vibrations are conducted through the ground into his flesh and bones; he absorbs them. Her tits bobble and jump. The pressure increases. His long pale toes and yellow-nailed claws grip the earth. - He's aware of those things? His fingers and toes, their length, their paleness? - Yes. For the first time in his life, he is aware of himself. It is a wonder to him, an enigma, this Self that seems to be rising up in him, rising out of control, like a tidal wave. I have toes, he thinks. I have knees and a stomach. I take in food, I pass off waste, I perspire; juices flow in my body. I have organs, working parts; they function like those of other creatures. I have genitals, unused but intact. Arms grow from my trunk, hair grows from my head, from my armpits, from my groin. Apparently I have undergone gestation, birth, infancy, puberty, adulthood, more or less in the normal manner. Fingers extend from my hands and each has a nail. My body is strange by normal standards, but it is a body; it houses eyes, a tongue; it tastes, it feels. A brain, it thinks, I exist. These things seem to him the most inexplicable and irrational of conundrums. They set up devastating tensions in the core of his soul. He is like a pocket of magma deep in the earth, swelling, desperately searching the interior of the confining rock for the fault line, the finest crack, the single weak spot. He sees himself as a spray of molten matter against a black sky, a steaming lava flow upon an empty sea, a new island. Nothing he has read in his hundreds of books touches on these new thoughts and feelings. Nothing in his burrow can satisfy them. The release, if there is to be one, must be accomplished in the outer world; the world of light and pain. He must become a predator. He has become a predator. He has stalked his prey, and he is crouched for the spring. She unsnaps her jeans, unzips them. He pauses, buttocks quivering. The quivers rush through his body like an electric current. She peers through the telescope, then steps out of the jeans, then her panties. She is going to pass waste. Urine. The black patch of hair at the base of her stomach... the sight of it strikes his brain like a hammer blow, double hammers pounding his temples from the inside. She squats, and the yellow water flows from her body to saturate the loam. He springs.
Having been told of the amazing ease with which Uncle Farley managed to locate Fish Head Hole, that wandering spot of ground which had so often eluded him in the past, the reader may have assumed that my uncle was becoming more at home in the boondocks, that his sense of direction was improving, that he was less likely to be spooked by harmless sounds, and so forth. You may assume that if you like; myself, I consider it more likely a case of blind luck. Because if, as I've assumed you've assumed, my uncle had employed some newfound skill in locating the big bay tree, would he not have then used that same skill to find his way back to the cut line, which he had left not five minutes before and from which he had strayed not more than a stone's throw? You may wonder how anyone, even my Uncle Farley, under those circumstances, could have failed to locate a four-foot-wide swath stretching some twenty-six hundred feet through the bush, straight as an arrow - a swath, moreover, which he himself had helped to hack out; yet that was the case: he plowed eagerly across the line at right angles, missing it completely, and continued on into the denser woods to the west.
The sky grew dark, and nothing looked familiar. The cut line, Maria, the transit... everything had disappeared. Attempting to keep his wits about him, my uncle struck out in the direction in which he believed Mose's shack to lie; from there he could get his bearings and still find the girl in time. He was going to get some of that pussy today or know the reason why. But this determined effort to locate the cabin only succeeded in leading my uncle further off the track, and the faster he fought his way through the treacherous bush, the darker grew the sky. Something rattled near his foot, and it wasn't until then, as he sprang back and fell on a prickly pear, that he realized that he had lost his machete. It wasn't a snake: it was only a seed pod rattling in the wind; but this discovery did little to lift his spirits. Needles in his ass and panic in his heart, hopelessly lost, my Uncle Farley limped on.
After a while he staggered to a stop, panting heavily, and looked up at the rumbling sky. It sounded like a titanic bowling alley on a Saturday night. By God, thought my uncle, it might just rain after all! And no sooner had this thought formed in his brain, than the heavens opened up like fourteen hundred sluice gates, and dumped their load upon the world.
Loud as the rain was - it sounded to Uncle Farley like several battalions of machine gunners dug in overhead, firing point-blank into the palmettos - it was not loud enough to drown out the high-pitched screams of terror that suddenly rang out through the woods. My uncle looked up in alarm. Several thoughts flashed through his mind: (I) She can't stand rain. No. (2) A bear's attacking her. No. (3) A hog? No. (4) A snake? No. (5) A nigger. Yes!
"HANG ON, MARIA!" he shouted. "I'M COMING! Keep yellin'! I'LL FIND YOU!"
Whether this boldness on the part of my uncle arose from a sense of chivalry or from an angry frustration at being beaten at his own game, I would not venture to say; but at any rate, off he went in the direction of the screams, splashing through the hollows and kicking up a wake like a hydroplane, falling frequently but rising as often, charging through the torrential gloom, crashing through the palmettos like a mad rhino, pausing from time to time to get a fresh fix, and lunging on. Thus flew my Uncle Farley to the rescue. But to say that he flew in the right direction would be to tell a lie.
At the first sight of the goggle-eyed thing in the tattered overcoat, Maria naturally let out a holler and ran for her life, wearing nothing but sneakers and a bra, with peepee streaming down her leg, and the thing hot on her tail. It was at that moment that it had begun to rain.
The conditions couldn't have been better for Quasimodo: The rain cooled his burning skin, and the light was not much brighter than that inside his cell. He could have caught her much more quickly than he did, but he found that he enjoyed the sight of her naked backside joggling and jiggling as she ran, and the way the rain streaked it and flew off the cheeks in fluttering droplets. He even found running pleasant. His long toes dug into the soggy earth and drove him easily along, and he had no difficulty in following Maria's terror-stricken twistings and turnings, matching her zig for zag. Her screams were like a strange new music to his ears. But at length he tired of the chase, dropped to all fours, and in a sudden burst of speed, brought her down with a flying tackle to the knees.
Maria floundered in the flooded grass like a beached fish. She was too horrified to do battle in any coordinated way, and could only thrash about blindly as though to awaken herself from the nightmare. Those cold, clammy claws clutching at her crotch, wrenching her buttocks apart, mauling her breasts... the hot wheezing breath in her ear... the tiny, chisel-like teeth on her neck... It was all too weird, too ghastly to be real.
Turning her over and pinning her arms beneath his knobby knees, Quasimodo plunged his hooks between her heaving breasts and with a mighty jerk tore the bra from her body. The sight of that death-white face leering down at her, that grinning mouth, those bulging, colorless eyes and that stiff, thin crown of wet wool that framed its head, the kinky white wires bristling from its wide flat nostrils - the sight paralyzed Maria with fear and loathing. She tried to buck him off, but her pelvis would not rise. She tried to kick her legs, but they were frozen to the ground. She turned almost as pale as Quasimodo himself.
The albino tore open the fly of his baggy tweeds, and the buttons flew in all directions. Like the rigid corpse of a bleached snake, his cock sprang out before Maria's face. Taking it in his hands, he tickled her nipples with the coarse tuft at its tip, watching for a reaction. But caress them, suck them, bite them as he would, they would not swell as he had seen them do in the past under what he considered to be similar circumstances; they remained stubbornly in the shape of tiny raisins, and looked as though at any second they might be sucked up into the dugs themselves, like frightened turtles drawing in their heads.
But this was a minor thing to Quasimodo. Proudly, he peeled his foreskin back from the raw-looking glans and showed it to the girl. Skinned back, the tuft became a bristling halo of pinkish fuzz, ringing the neck of his member like a ratty stole.
Far from exciting his victim, this demonstration inspired a gag. "It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen," Maria was heard to say several days later. "I almost puked."
Still undaunted, Quas began to beat his meat. Maria stared with a trancelike gaze at that pointed tube-it had somewhat the shape of a slender minaret with a stretched-out cupola, as the spidery fingers went slip-slopping up and down its trunk, the diluted cheese oozing from its fringed prepuce, while huge, icy raindrops fell unheeded into her mouth and eyes.
When he felt the time was right, the albino hunched forward, aimed his weapon, and shot his gluey load straight up Maria's nostrils. The teeming blobs ran heavily down her cheeks and into her ears; some spurted into her mouth, and some into her eyes, but most went up her nose. She gasped, choked and snorted, and each snort sent a spray of gummy confetti off on the whistling wind...
When his orgasm subsided, Quasimodo, a bit dazed from such pleasure - it was after all, his first time - wiped his cock on the tail of his overcoat and stood up.
Maria scrambled backward through the grass, having at last regained her mobility, and when she had put some distance between herself and her assailant, rose to her feet. Still gasping and trembling, she backed against a tree, bounced off, and, with a little sobbing squeal , ran for it.
Quasimodo stood there for a few minutes, watching the naked figure disappear into the rain. Then he took one more look at the now flaccid worm dangling from his fly, tucked it in, and slouched slowly off through the trees.
It was at this time, said Morikand, that a certain anemic looking spermatozoon, to whom for personal reasons I have given the name Q. Africanus, ended his long drift through the tortuous tubules of my father's right testicle (the small one) and tumbled listlessly into the foul-smelling reservoir of the epididymis, along with several million of his stronger and more attractive brothers.
When Maria burst into the clearing at the front of Mose's shack, she was nearly run down by Ronnie, who slammed on the Jeep's brakes just in time. Having better sense than to follow my uncle's instructions and attempt a crossing of Owlshit Slough during a cloudburst, Ronnie had followed the network of trails northwest of the park, and had eventually come upon the road that Old Man Mose had previously tried to tell Uncle Farley about (the road my uncle didn't believe existed). After a few trials and errors, he had found the obscure sand track that wound from this road through the ponds to the shack. As for my uncle, when Ronnie turned the Jeep off, he and Maria could just barely hear him over the hiss of the rain, somewhere out there in the bush, crying, "Hang on, Maria! I'm cominnngggg! I'm cominnnggg!"
Then old Mose came running out - he was spry as hell, for ninety-one - wrapped Maria up in a big blanket and herded her and the kid into his shack for a cup of hot coffee. As soon as she could talk, Maria gave them both a rough idea of what had happened, and when the thunderstorm had passed over, Jessie Sue went out and brought in Uncle Farley.
The reader can imagine for himself what shape my uncle was in by this time; frankly, I don't care to go into it. Suffice it to say that though he got no pussy that day, at least he knew the reason why.
Quasimodo, meanwhile, had crawled under the house and into his crypt. Squatting cross-legged on the cool, mossy earth, he listened with a vast indifference to the voices beyond his wall of books:
"Now, take it easy now, Mistah Fahley. Mah boy don' mean no hahm. Whut Ah mean, if it wuz him - an' Ah ain' sayin' it wuz -"
"Now, you listen, Mose. You know goddamn well it was him! Who in the fuck else could it have been? You better bring him out here right now, or else me and this boy here, we're gonna drag him out, you hear? That thing ain't fit to be loose, runnin' around rapin' every white woman that comes along! He's gotta be locked up, and that's that. Just look at that poor girl!"
"I... I guess I'm really not hurt, Farley."
"But Mistah Fahley, he iz locked up. Whut Ah mean, he don' nevah come outa dat hole! It mighta been somebody whut look like my Quas, doncha see?"
"Oh, sure! There's so many o' them white toad niggers walkin' around nowadays! Why, you can't hardly walk down the street without runnin' into three or four of 'em! But okay, Mose, if that's the way you want it, we'll just call the cops and let them come and get him. Come on, Maria."
"But Mistah Fahley, you cain' jus' - "
"Wait a minute, Daddy, lemme talk tuh Mistah Faley jus' a secon'. Ya'll go on out to th' Jeep; we be right deh dreckly." There was a confusion of voices, a shuffling of feet, then silence.
"What do you want, Jessie Sue? I ain't got time for -"
"You shut yo mouth, Fahley, an' listen. You call de cops own mah bruthah, yuh don got yo las' piece o' pussy offa Jessie Sue Waller. You dig?"
There was some low mumbling which the albino could not understand; nor did he wish to. In a few minutes the Jeep roared, ground its gears, and rattled into the distance.
"Whutchu tell dat muthafuckah, Jessie Sue?"
"Tell 'im he don' leave Quas alone, he don' git no mo' cootah."
"Now, why didn' Ah think o' dat? Reckon Ah'm gettin'ol'."
If I had it my own way - I mean, if I were making this up - I wouldn't have had the albino return to his hole after he jumped Maria. I would have had him avoid his father's house like the plague, knowing that when his crime came to light there would be the devil to pay. I would have had him hide in the bottom until nightfall, at which time he would strike out through the woods, avoiding the roads, making his way east along the Frigahatchee until he reached the old Celestial Railroad. There he would have turned south, in hopes of finding a place for a new hovel somewhere in the slough that stretched between Uranus and West Sago. And at a few minutes before midnight, quite by chance, he would have encountered Cynthia beside the gravel gondola. This at least would have retained some semblance of casuality, and perhaps even lent some meaning to the long chain of events which seem to lead up to it. Try though I might to swallow Morikand's disdain for cause and effect, it shakes my "writer's sensibility" to the core when I come across a missing link in a plot chain. Nevertheless, I'm bound to tell it as it happened:
Quasimodo had pulled off his rape and gotten away with it. He was safe; my uncle would not bother him again. Moreover, he had brought to a climax that strange pressure that had been building up in him, and had released it. In the albino's peculiar physiology, this should have occurred but once in his lifetime. It was nothing more than a thing which had to be done in order not to have to do it again. After its consummation, he should have been content - and indeed he was, almost - content to shed his newfound self-consciousness and return to the impersonal world of letters which was his natural habitat; to sit peacefully in some quiet rathole, read his Spenger, learn his Linear B, take his inventory, and die. What he did next, seems to me the grossest of anticlimaxes. But I am a scribe - a novelist no longer - and the facts are the facts.
The albino sat in the same position, cross-legged in the middle of his tiny chamber, until night fell. He breathed easily. His joints were relaxed, his face expressionless. His food was placed on the shelf as usual, but he did not pull it in.
Now he removes the panel of wormy wood that closes his doorway, and crawls out into the dark. He sets out through the bush at a rapid but unhurried pace, as though he has some destination, some purpose. Yet his thoughts, if he has any, are confined to that gloomy corner of his mind which Morikand has never been able to penetrate. Only his sensations, his perceptions, transmit.
He skirts the west edge of the little Negro ghetto called Paradise, and heads down the rusty rails in the direction of the moon, his long, pale toes gripping the ties, the ragged collar of his greatcoat turned up around his batlike ears. Nothing transmits but the approaching moon, the frogsong, the mistrise and the starfall...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Turn back the calendar exactly forty-one days.
When Harry stepped off the bus in Miami, it occurred to him that he hadn't the slightest idea where to start looking. His mind had been occupied mostly with how he was going to get Cynthia to come back with him to Uranus; finding her hadn't seemed to present any great problem. "With tits like that," he'd thought, "I could find her in the dark." Harry was a small-town boy, and just knowing that his wife was in Miami had seemed half the battle to him. But not many days had passed before the grim fact of the city, where everyone seemed bent above all on preserving their anonymity, came to roost upon his chest like a huge mechanical goose.
On the fourth day he was arrested for possession of obscene material. He had but one tactic, and it was this: He kept his eyes peeled, and whenever he spotted someone pausing momentarily in his or her headlong rush (whence, Harry could not discover), he would whip out the snapshot and ask if he or she had seen such a woman, and if so, where. On this night he showed it to a whore who was actually an undercover cop; most of his limited funds were spent on the subsequent fine, and the balance on buying back the picture from the judge, who had it in his wallet.
All attempts to get a surveying job failed, his certificate notwithstanding, and Harry was reduced to taking the most menial and degrading of odd jobs, which paid - if he was lucky - between a quarter and a half of the minimum wage. So it was the mop, the broom and the shovel during the day, and the street, the cop and the unfriendly face at night. His clothes, his self-respect and his health deteriorated pitifully. Whenever he could manage the price of a stamp, he wrote to Farley for money, but none of the requests were answered.
By the first of July, Harry had had it. "If nothing turns up tonight," he said to himself, "I'm hittin' the road." He would hitchhike back to Uranus; maybe even back to Placenter.
About nine that evening, Harry stumbled into Leo's place. But he hadn't gone more than five steps before Max spotted him. (Photography was only a sideline for Max; primarily, he was Leo's head bouncer.)
"All right, creep, out you go," said Max quietly.
"Yeah, sure," said Harry with a timid smile, automatically reaching for the snapshot. "But I wonder if - "
"I said out, bum," Max repeated, heaving Harry through the door by nape of neck and seat of pants, "And stay out!"
Harry shook his head and looked up. The big man was still there, standing on the sidewalk before the doorway.
"Go on," Max added. "Hit the road."
Harry sat up in the gutter, mustered the last remaining shreds of his dignity, and fixed the big ape with a steely and pugnacious gaze. "That's just what I'm gonna do, motherfucker," he said. "But someday I'm comin' back. I'm comin' back with a big goddamn bomb, and I'm gonna stick it up your ass and blow you and this whole son-of-a-bitching town off the fucking map! What do you think of that, you thick-headed baboon?"
Max approached slowly, nodding on the way to a passing cop. He bent over Harry and calmly lifted him slightly off the pavement by the collar of his dirty shirt. "I've got a bomb for you, buddy," he said, showing Harry a fist that was almost the size of his head. "Got any last words?"
"Yeah," said Harry in an attempt to delay the blow, "Ever seen this woman before?" He drew the soiled and tattered picture feebly from his pocket and held it up to Max's nose.
Max had already drawn his fist back for the punch, but when he saw what Harry had, he froze. After a moment he snatched the picture and dropped Harry on his ass in the gutter. He took it over to the doorway where the light was better, and peered closely at it. Then he looked at the back. The writing had nearly faded away by this time, but it was still faintly legible.
Max looked at Harry, a slow grin coming over his face. "Where'd you get this?" he asked.
"None o' your goddamn business," said Harry automatically, having acquired some of the traits of the city-dwellers.
"You wouldn't by any chance be Harry Jones, would you?"
"Jones?" exclaimed Harry, scrambling to his feet, "So you do know her!"
"Maybe," said Max, looking Harry up and down and pocketing the picture. "You got any identification?"
Harry showed him.
"Well, I'll be goddamned," Max muttered under his breath, his grin growing even broader. "Harry, old buddy, you wait right here just a minute; okay? I'll be right back. Don't run off, now!"
A moment later, Max reappeared, hooked his arm in Harry's and hustled him off down the sidewalk. Not knowing that in hell was happening, Harry put on the brakes. "Now, wait a minute!" he protested, "Where you takin' me? If you know where my wife is, you can just tell me and I'll make it on my own."
"Oh, no, baby. You can't go walking into a white man's establishment in your condition. I'm taking you up to my place, where you can shave and get cleaned up. I think we can find something to fit you. You look hungry too, Harry. A good steak under your belt, and you'll be a new man."
"Then you do know where I can find my wife?"
"Maybe," said Max.
"What do you mean, maybe?"
Max shrugged. "Maybe I can arrange a meeting with her. But not now; it's too early. You got plenty of time to get cleaned up, and then about eleven we'll - "
"Why eleven? I don't get it?"
"You will." Max was unable to suppress a mischievous laugh. "Come on."
Pump though he might, Harry could get no more information out of Max. But whether he had really found Cynthia or not, he wasn't about to turn down a free meal, and so a couple hours later, scrubbed, stuffed and wearing a new suit, he followed Max down the gloomy stairs to the Lion's Den. On the way down, he noticed a large poster plastered to the bricks. THE BIGGEST BLOOMIN' BOOBIES IN THE WORLD!!!
But still Harry didn't catch on.
At the inner door, they were greeted by a curvy little redhead wearing nothing but high heels, black mesh tights and a sequined G-string. Wow! thought Harry.
"Hi, Max," she said.
"Hi, Meg," said Max, giving one of her little pink nipples a pinch, and whispering something in her ear. "She's on next," Harry heard the girl answer. Max whispered something else. What the fuck? thought Harry. "No shit?" said Meg, peering at Harry around Max's shoulder.
Max put his ringer to his lips and said, "We want a ringside table, Meg."
"You bet," said Meg, giving Harry a grin and a wink. "Right this way."
Max and Harry followed her swaying, all-but-naked behind through the crowded, dim-lit room to a table at the edge of the circle.
When Max had ordered drinks, Harry leaned toward him and said, "Say, uh, this is fine for me, Max, but uh... I don't think it's such a good place for a man to meet his wife; you know what I mean? See, Cynthia, she's just a country girl, and .. ."
Max began coughing uncontrollably. When he recovered, he put his hand on Harry's shoulder and said, "Relax, old buddy. Relax and don't worry about a thing."
"Yeah, but - "
"Shhh! The next act's starting."
The piano player went into a slow, dirty blues, and Cynthia wound her way through the tables in an eerie aura of blood-red gossamer. The whistles, the cheers and the applause were deafening, but when she slithered into the blue spotlight with a snaky grind of her slim hips and a seductive shake of her silk-sheathed tits, the tumult fell to a breathless silence. Scarcely an ice cube tinkled.
With a whirl of her filmy cape, she began to dance around the tiny circle, her long blonde hair flashing about her face and shoulders, glowing in the blue light like green gold. After two laps, she executed a graceful veronica in the center of the ring, and the cape swirled from her shoulders with a crimson hiss. Her gown, too, was red - whorehouse red - and it was trimmed in black, and slit from hem to hip. Its bodice was specially contoured to fit those stupendous boobs, but it hadn't a rib or a stay anywhere; each cup was sewn to fit its tit like a sock, and the silk was so thin that though she wore a little stripper's bra underneath, the contours of her nipples and areolae were vividly defined. Inside the gown, Cynthia's breasts looked enormous - bigger than life; but when she unzipped it down the side and peeled it off, they looked absolutely impossible. They were like twin footballs fixed to her chest by spring steel mounts, and covered with flesh.
Harry, a tit man from way back, had at first been so excited by these tremendous jugs that he was unable to lift his gaze to her face. It was while lifting his glass for a stiff belt that he finally did so, and the resulting sudden intake of air sucked an ice cube into his throat. It lodged briefly in his esophagus and nearly choked him before he got it down, but to Harry this was nothing; before the cube had even hit his throat, his entire body had turned to ice. When he was able to speak, his voice was a raspy croak:
"Why didn't you tell me, you son of a bitch?"
"You wanted to see your wife, didn't you?" Max whispered, his shoulders rocking with silent laughter. "Well, shut up and watch her." In a sterner tone, he added, "And don't make no trouble, or it's back to the gutter."
After shedding the red gown as a snake sheds its skin, Cynthia made another complete lap, her lithe hips jerking, her big tits bouncing to the earthy beat. Then she spotted Harry, his face for all its recent exposure to the elements as pale as a sheet, his eyes quivering in their sockets. She stopped dead, staring down at him. The piano man, puzzled, went into an impromptu drum roll with his left hand.
Cynthia's costume now consisted only of her G-string and the little halter. Both were of the sheerest red gauze, trimmed like the gown in black lace; nothing but a sparse sprinkling of gold sequins as fine as grains of sand blurred the details of her private parts, and the G-string was so low in front that a row of golden tufts bristled above the thin black bellyband; below the prominent hump of her cunt, the gauze was clutched tightly between the firm lips, and you could count the hairs. The stretched skin of her big, rosy aureolae seemed to fluoresce in the blue light, and her nipples jutted so forcefully against their taut veils that the individual milk pores at their tips were visible. From the delicious hollow of her navel, a tiny ruby flashed and flickered, reflecting in Harry's bloodshot eyeballs.
This was the moment Cynthia had dreamt of from the beginning - the consummation of her revenge. Slowly, a lascivious smile twisted her scarlet lips, and her eyes took on a lusty gleam beneath her green-shadowed, half-closed lids, her long, dark lashes fluttering faintly like the tendrils of a carnivorous flower. She said, "Hi, Harry. Where's Maria?"
Harry's lips formed the word, "Cynthia," but it was inaudible.
Max, both hands over his mouth, looked from one to the other, rocking with delight. The waitress, Meg, was also getting a tremendous kick out of the joke, and she spread the word around the room. But Harry was too shaken to realize what was going on. He felt as though he were sunk to the eyeballs in ice water, and he could do nothing but sit and stare at his wife like a zombie, wishing vaguely that he hadn't come.
Playing now to no one but Harry, Cynthia put her hands behind her neck and released the thin black straps of the bra. They dropped from her shoulders, to dangle from the peaks of her bosom. Her tits were now free of any support, yet they didn't fall more than a fraction of an inch, if that; they were as solid - and as large - as bombshells.
Hands still behind her head, she said, "Want a milkshake, Harry?" and with a twisting motion of her upper torso, she set her tits into such violent, ponderous motion - first from side to side, then in circles which made the dangling straps twirl around her nipples like propellers - that the flimsy cups were soon shaken loose, and when she leaned forward slightly and gave her shoulders an extra shudder, they fell one at a time from her swinging tits. The crowd cheered, and the applause was like thunder, but the only thunder Harry heard was the reverberating bump of her bubs as they thudded together before his face.
Now Cynthia unhooked the halter and hung it over Harry's shoulder. He left it there. Her tits were so free of sag that underneath, where their convex underbellies met her thorax, there wasn't even a crease; it was as if they were suspended at the nipples by invisible skyhooks. Stroking them with her palms, rolling the erect nipples between her fingers, she spread her legs wide, bent her knees slightly, and began a series of pelvic rolls, slow at first, but each ending with a body-jarring upward jerk which exposed the entire length of her slit to her husband's mesmerized gaze. Gradually the tempo increased, and each bump was accompanied by a crashing double-handed chord on the piano. Soon Cynthia's cunt was hammering out toward Harry's face at the speed of a fast fuck, and she stretched her arms out to the sides and let her naked tits leap and bound with unrestrained violence. The crowd went wild.
After thirty-two bars of that, the piano player brought the chorus to an end with a loud and dirty crescendo, and Cynthia stopped on the up-jerk. Harry could see moisture spreading from the undulating lips of her crack, permeating the red gauze.
Cynthia had never been so hot in her life. Her rolled-up pelvis motionless now, she hooked her thumbs into the front of the G-string and pushed it down over her mound a little at a time, the thick tufts of tawny ringlets springing forth one by one until the top of her slit peeked over the band of black trim. With her cunt thus half-exposed, she cleared the hair from the groove and pulled the outer lips apart with her fingertips, so Harry could see the little quivering shank of her distended clitoris, its bullet-nosed head completely free of the prepuce and gleaming like a ruby. In spite of the painful thoughts and regrets curdling in Harry's head, in his pants he had a bone on like a brickbat.
A wiggle of her hips and a flick of her wrist and Cynthia was naked except for her high heels and the jewel in her belly button, and she tossed the sodden G-string over Harry's shoulder. Unmindful of how ridiculous he looked with a bra on one shoulder and a G-string on the other, and oblivious to the laughter welling up on all sides, Harry stared on, his pallid face breaking out from time to time in red blotches.
Cynthia turned her back on him now, and waggled her bare butt in his face, rhythmically contracting and relaxing her asshole to make the cheeks open and close.When the music went to double-time, she speeded it up so that her buttocks were clapping at a furious pace, shuddering like firm jellies under attack by a steam hammer.
Then she bent over and looked back at Harry between her legs, her long hair fanned out over the floor, and her face framed between her swinging breasts. Harry could now see her tits, her cunt and her asshole all at the same time. Her spread bottom swayed back and forth to the beat, and she ran her hands slowly up the insides of her legs. When they reached her crotch, she tickled her anus with one finger, and Harry watched it pucker. Then, after running her fingertips up and down the slippery lips of her cunt, she slid three fingers into the hole, and brought them out to smear the secretions over the petal-soft skin of her inner thighs. .
With a throaty laugh, she straightened up and turned around. The music stopped. Cynthia put her hands on her hips and looked around the circle. She looked to Harry's right and over Harry's head, but she didn't look at Harry. Her oozing box was so close to him he could smell it.
"I think I'm ready," she announced.
There was an immediate response. All over the room, hands went up, shouts rang out, zippers were jerked open and cocks yanked out. There were even some women who wanted to get into the act, sticking out their tongues for Cynthia's consideration. What now? Harry wondered.
Cynthia strolled among the tables, bending over now and then to examine a penis or a tongue, and letting the sea of hands play freely over her naked body. But she returned to the ring without having chosen a partner. Then, standing in the center, she pointed at Harry - at least it looked that way to Harry.
"How about you?" she said.
"Me?" Harry croaked.
"No, not you. You!"
"Me?" said the man behind Harry.
"Yeah, you."
"Hot damn!" said the man, springing to his feet and leaping into the circle, his pants already down around his knees.
"What's he gonna do?" Harry asked without turning his head.
"What's he gonna do?" answered Max. "He's gonna fuck her. What did you think?" Harry said nothing.
The man had the gall to hand his coat and trousers to Harry, saying, "Hang onto these for me, willya, buddy?" Harry took them without a word. He was beginning to look like a clothes tree.
His face had lost all expression, and looking at him, Cynthia felt a twinge of guilt; but she shook it off. I watched you, Harry, she thought. Now you're going to watch me.
She knelt on the floor, with her thighs spread wide, her cunt aimed straight at her husband. The man stepped up, and she cupped his muscular buttocks in her hands and took his big, stiff cock into her mouth.
The piano was silent now, and the slurping sound of Cynthia's lips sliding up and down the thrusting shank echoed off the brick walls and penetrated to the marrow of Harry's bones. His eyes locked helplessly on his wife's fingers as they wiggled into the crack of the man's ass, squeezing and stroking the taut cheeks.
Just short of getting a load down the throat, Cynthia broke off the blowjob and spreadeagled herself on the floor at her partner's feet, her tits jutting skyward like bulbous rockets on the pad, their rosy nosecones stiff and swollen. She had one last look at Harry - his hunched form framed in the momentary window formed by her boobs at the bottom, the man's dangling balls at the top, and his rapidly folding legs at the sides - and then the customer was on his knees, grasping at the great, firm bodies of her breasts and slobbering over the nipples, and she was guiding his cock into her throbbing hole - throbbing not so much from anticipation of the act itself, nor from the usual excitement of fucking before an audience, but from the blank stare of shock and disbelief on the face of her husband.
She spoke to the stranger as his prick drove into her - spoke as she did every night at this point in her act, but this time the words were for Harry's benefit alone: "Fuck me, baby! Fuck me good! All the way in! Uhn! Ah! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!"
Without warning, without gathering strength for the effort, without removing the garments from his shoulders or his lap... without even knowing he was going to do it, Harry attacked.
When he regained his senses, he found himself stark naked, slumped against a grimy wall between two garbage cans in the alley beside the club. Three big men loomed over him, and one of them held something that looked like a small baseball bat; he was slapping it ominously into his palm. Harry felt like he had several broken ribs and a skull fracture, yet he couldn't help chuckling when he remembered the shambles he had made of the Lion's Den. He couldn't bend his neck, but he rolled his eyes up to the dark faces overhead. "Took three of ya, didn't it?" he sneered.
Just as the one with the bat raised his weapon for the final blow, Cynthia burst from a door behind the men. She too was naked. "Stop it!" she yelled, pushing them aside and throwing herself over Harry's crumpled form. "Get away from him! Leave him alone!"
One of the men shrugged and said, "Whatever you say, Cyn," and the three of them limped back into the club.
"Oh, poor Harry!" Cynthia sobbed, wiping the blood from his nose. "Did they hurt you bad?"
"Shit, no," said Harry. "Never felt better in my life. Where's that Max bastard?"
"They took him to the hospital, along with my - "
"Yeah!" Harry tried to laugh, and had to spit out a bloody tooth before he could go on. "I fixed him, didn't I?"
Cynthia held his battered head to her bosom and wept like a baby. The heat from those heaving pillows of flesh against his cheeks seeped into Harry's pore like healing balm, and after a few minutes he said, "Hey, Cynthia... You busy tomorrow night?"
She peered down at him through tear-filled eyes. "I thought maybe if you weren't busy," he went on, "we could go out to dinner. Some nice little Italian restaurant. You know; one o' them quiet little dives with the checkerboard tablecloths and the wine bottles hangin' all over the place? I got this sudden craving for dago red and spaghetti. Prob'ly we could find a joint like that down around Rodriguez. What d'you say?"
"... Oh, Harry!" Cynthia's sobs of joy echoed up and down the empty corridor of the dark alley.
Which brings us to the second hiatus by which Destiny, with a total disregard for causality, carried out its preordained task with split-second precision, like a train arriving at the station on time though several feet of track had been blown to smithereens. Again, I would have made it otherwise:
Let them have their dinner at the Italian restaurant; that's all right - a last ditch attempt at reconciliation, an attempt to forget all that had come between them; to forget even the pitiful circumstances that had brought them together in the first place. Well and good. But when they get home on the night of July third, it is clear to Cynthia that she's not going to be able to make it with Harry. She's no longer a flat-chested, self-conscious country girl, afraid of her own shadow; she's a big-titted woman of the world, now, who's had more men than she can count. She has been a prostitute and a stripper; she knows the power her beauty has over men, knows the delights of every kind of sexual act. She's had a taste of high living in the big city, and will never again be satisfied with Harry Jones and his backwoods manner, nor with the monotonous, dreary way of life which he wouldn't know how to change if he wanted to. She never loved him and never will. When he has gone to sleep, she packs a few things and leaves quietly. Reaching the tracks of the old railroad, she turns north. Why not south? Well, Miami is out: Leo would make it tough for her because of the way she ran out on him. Maybe she'll try Jacksonville for a while, or Chicago or New York. And so in this way she makes her midnight rendezvous at the gondola. A bit contrived, perhaps, but at least all the links are there, all the whys. But of course it didn't happen that way.
The evening at the spaghetti house in Rodriguez was all Cynthia had wanted it to be six months ago, and more. All through the meal, Harry's gaze oscillated with contented excitement between Cynthia's love-filled eyes and her plush, deep, fully exposed cleavage. With his toes he stroked her unclad bush under the checkered tablelcloth until his sock was soaked in the sweet sap of her slit. Afterward they put the top down on Cynthia's sports car, and Harry drove down the beach with his arm around her and his hand in the front of her low-cut dress, fondling her unbrassiered breasts. As they sped along, Cynthia recounted her adventures of the past six months - all about Dr. Grosswell and Max and Charlie and Leo and all the rest. Harry said her tits didn't feel any less real for knowing they were blown up with silicone, and he thought they looked just fine on her. "But if they go down on you," he said, "I'll love ya anyway, baby."
Cynthia laughed and put her hand in his fly. "Don't worry," she said. "They won't go down."
Harry parked on the bluff overlooking Coonhead Rock, among numerous other cars full of young lovers loving, and he and Cynthia took off all their clothes and walked naked on the moonlit beach. As they strolled along, Harry told her the whole story of his affair with Maria. Cynthia remembered what a devastating effect the discovery of that affair had had on her at the time; yet how tame and innocent it seemed now! When he finished, all she said was, "Poor Farley!" Then they returned to the bluff, and in the open car, under the bright, round moon, Cynthia sat on Harry's lap, and in full view of whoever cared to watch, they fucked as they had never fucked before.
They stayed at a motel until noon the next day, taking shifts of loving and sleeping, an hour on, an hour off, more or less, and then they headed for Uranus. The car and Cynthia both went topless. Harry thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, sitting there beside him, her long blonde hair flying in the wind, the sun blazing down on those huge, white, blue-veined tits, her rosy nipples radiant with health, and her face glowing with love.
"People are staring, Harry," she giggled, stretching her arms out along the back of the seat and arching her back.
"Let 'em stare," said Harry as he jerked up her skirt and cupped her furry cunt in his paw. She laughed and spread her legs, and he put his middle finger lovingly up her hole.
That night, Harry went to sleep in his own bed, with his own woman beside him. Cynthia looked at his face in the moonlight that streamed through the window, and she saw exhaustion and deep contentment, but this time she knew the source of both. She smiled, sighed, curled up, and went to sleep. She would never leave Harry again. That is, almost never, because here is where the round peg gets brutally pounded into the square hole:
About eleven Cynthia's eyes opened. She sat up. Harry was snoring peacefully. Methodically, she gathered a pair of jeans, sneakers, and one of Harry's denim work shirts. In the living room, she put them on, and slipped quietly out the door ...
- But Morikand, there must have been more! there must have been some conscious thought! Try, man! - No; I've tried before. There's nothing beyond the sensations: the brilliance of the moon, its shape and size, the dayheat stored up in the pavement, warming the soles of her feet, the texture of the pebbles on the rock road leading to the tracks, a derelict car in the ditch on her left; and then the rusty tracks leading off into the slough, and her shadow going on ahead over the splintered ties and sunbleached gravel, the insects and the frogs, the bog mist opening before her and closing behind her, the swing and bounce of her tits... That's all, old man. Isn't that enough?
CHAPTER NINE
"It was immediately prior to the moment that my mother opened her eyes and sat up on the bed that the swollen follicle near the outer tip of her left ovary burst, and a fresh, plump comely ovum, whom I have named Moon Lady, floated out upon the warm flood and Morikand Jones was swept smoothly into the Fallopian funnel. The reason my mother had never become pregnant was that her ovaries habitually produced eggs of an extraordinarily coy and unreceptive nature, and Moon Lady was no exception. Confident, aloof, austere, she allowed herself to be borne along on the tips of the adoring cilia that lined the walls of the passage. She longed for but one lover, Death, and knew but one dread, the Uterine Sea. .. ."
Their sexual backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar, Cynthia having just come from a six-month plunge into the most erotic excesses imaginable, and the albino experiencing for the first time the voluptuous delights of penetrating a human vagina with his penis. Yet the movements of their hips were perfectly synchronized. Their strokes were neither slow nor fast, neither violent nor sluggish. Like a silk merchant fingering a bolt of the finest cloth in an Eastern market, the albino wrapped his long, yellow-nailed talons around the great egg-shaped mounds of flesh which rose and fell rhythmically above his face, lifting them, depressing them, rolling them against his palms. She lowered one shoulder, and his long, thick lips parted to receive the nipple. He sucked it in, and his lizardlike tongue traced a slow spiral up and down its distended shank.
"Except for old Cronos, perched on the Scorpion's stinger, his empty scrotum flapping in the celestial wind, the sky was devoid of planets. The Old Man of the Sea had just sunk into the western mist. Below him, in the underworld, Jupiter was hidden in the crotch of the virgin, and Uranus was lost among the bones of the dead Lion. In the houses of the nadir, both Love and War huddled with the Twins, and Mercury was dying of Cancer. But the Scales had been tipped, and when the moon penetrated the silvery halo of my mother's hair and rolled like a huge, incandescent jellyfish onto her left shoulder, Q. Africanus and five hundred million of his brothers were flushed from their homes and plunged into an agonizing bath of vaginal acid."
The other day Charon read some of that. We have lots of leisure time now. Three months in the Glades and not a trace, not a hint of Prester Steve. Not that it bothers me so much any more; to tell the truth, we're all four as jolly as pigs in shit. Looking up from the book, he said, That's some spooky shit, man. You don't seem to me the type that would write that crap. I mean, even if you did really see it, like Rusty says. Morikand nodded. In my youth, he said, such things used to interest me. And with that he whipped out and pissed over the side.
Their orgasms occurred precisely at the same moment. The turgid tube of Cynthia's vagina hugged the spurting carrot of pallid flesh in a series of spasmic contractions which spread to her stomach muscles and doubled her up. The toadlike face disappeared between her billowing breasts, and her hair whipped about both their heads in long, dewbound strands like golden snakes, mingling with the stiff, pale frizz that bristled among the weeds beneath them. The albino's swollen paunch drove against Cynthia's undulating belly, and his narrow, bony hips shuddered and creaked.
Afterward, Cynthia stood up and stretched. The albino offered her his trousers. "Here," he said. "You may use these."
Cynthia said, "Thanks," wiped her cunt, and handed them back. He put them on and tied the rope, and Cynthia stepped into her jeans.
Back on the main tracks, they paused for a moment to look back at the gondola. Then the albino turned up the collar his overcoat, made a slight bow, and said, "Good night."
"Good night," said Cynthia, slipping into her shirt.
And they turned and went their separate ways - Quasimodo back to his burrow, and Cynthia back to Harry's house - never to meet again.
"It is every man for himself. Tails lashing furiously, they drive en masse through the watery mucus of the cervical canal and plunge headlong into the treacherous cavity of the womb. From out of the bloody, pitted landscape that stretches endlessly before them come the legions of white phagocytes; they attack from all sides, in groups, like hyenas. Scores of spermatozoa, hundreds of them, are wiped out by the defenders, overwhelmed and devoured ruthlessly. Others become hopelessly lost among the badlands of the mucus membrane. Still others are caught in the current and swept away. But Africanus dawdles on. Rather than tire himself in the thick of the current, he steers blindly along the fault lines and the cross-valleys, where the flow is less severe. Rather than do battle, he avoids the enemy. Though he is far behind the leaders, he seems in no hurry. If he is lost, it does not seem to concern him. The white corpuscles in their frenzied slaughter seem bent on destroying the most active of the invaders first, so they hardly give Africanus a glance. Lazily, he pursues his zig-zag path. I get the feeling that as he swims along he would perhaps be whistling some tuneless little ditty, if that were possible.
"Four hours and as many miles later (sperm-miles) Africanus finds himself at the inner threshold of the left oviduct. Many of his brothers have been mutilated, dismembered and eaten alive by the white hoards - not from any lack of vigor or ferocity on the part of the wigglers, but simply because they are grossly outnumbered and forced to fight on the enemy's home ground. Many others, attacking the torrentous current head-on in the most violent part of the flood, have expended their strength and met their end in the acid bath of the vaginal pit. Others yet have raced futilely up the right tube, the barren one, where, after four bloody days, those who have withstood the beating cilia and the voracious ravages of the leucocytes will die of sheer exhaustion, waiting for the sweet virgin who will never come. But several hundred thousand of Africanus' hardiest and most valiant kinsmen have survived the perils of the Uterine Sea and reached the left inlet before him, and are now battling their way upstream toward the slowly advancing Moon Lady.
"Q. Africanus enters the tunnel of love. He seems unmoved either by the howls of the attackers or the moans of his fallen comrades. A phalanx of phagocytes, their pseudopods flailing, rushes past overhead; perhaps because of his lesser size, they ignore him. He does not fight the beating arms of the cilia, but swims easily along the bottom, twining among their roots, where the force of their blows is considerably less. And he does not go far; only a half mile or so. Finding a safe-looking crevice, he ducks into it and lies low.
"Meantime, the surviving suitors have made contact with Moon Lady. In a frantic fury of desire, they drive in from all sides upon the great, unyielding sphere of her radiant and maddenly beautiful body. But she is utterly oblivious, seemingly, to their most passionate and violent advances. They thrash, they swarm, they writhe in their agony of desire, they hurl themselves upon her with all their remaining strength... but to no avail. Soon it will be too late. If they miss the moment - and there will be but one - they will have suffered and died in vain. Moon Lady rolls on, like a graven image of the Earth Mother in the midst of a frenzied pagan rite of adoration.
"Moon Lady, like her inviolate sisters before her, is determined to die a virgin. The disgusting would-be rapists fall from her one by one, their strength failing. Many settle to the bottom, half-dead of heat prostration, and their limp bodies are carried off by the cilia or devoured by the harassing corpuscles. As she nears the gulley where Africanus is holed up, the assault momentarily wanes. It is the moment she has been waiting for. At the lower extremity of her body, in a region most remote from the main force of her suitors, she carefully, subtly, secretly dilates a tiny pore. It should have been a split second thing; in the next instant, her rapidly thickening albuminous robe would have insured her chastity to the death. But perhaps to express her disdain of aggression and feeble masculinity, she prolongs her vulnerability just a fraction of a millisecond too long.
"It is five o'clock. The sky is a boneyard. Nothing stirs from one horizon to the other - not even a stray meteor, not even a firefly. Even the frogs have gone silent. My mother lies asleep beside her husband, and the open window frames an ice-blue dawn, featureless and austere. The malignant sun is in direct opposition to the punctured moon, and all the gods are in China. With a fleeting flourish and a flick of his flagellum, Africanus launches from his crevice and plunges himself to the shank in Moon Lady's hole. Bristling like a sea urchin in the fury or her outrage, she is carried on by the indifferent cilia and hurled unceremoniously into the soggy vault of the corpse-strewn uterus...."
I closed the book with a sigh and tossed it into my sack. And it happened just in time, I said. Just in time for what? asked Morikand. Just in time to save the world, I replied without batting an eye. Morikand laughed. Birds took to the air on all sides. After a few minutes, Slit and I joined in. But Charon just snickered, shook his head, and continued to bail the boat.
(Look for THE GESTATION, soon to come, continuing the history of Morikand Jones.)
