Ann’s distracted eyes. He smiled, and ran his tongue up the swollen hump. He began to stroke one thigh, which if his eyes were closed would have been indistinguishable in itself from Betty Ann’s. A bit more curiosity took hold of him, and he moved the heavy thigh aside. Nestled between the parasite’s legs, which were always cocked to one side in such a way that the public was protected from the view, was a small patch of knotty black hair.
“Hmm, what do you have here?” he teased quietly, and traced the tip of his forefinger along the folded crease at the center of that kinky hair. He smiled again at Betty Ann, who smiled back at him shyly, and he returned his attention to the slit he caressed. He wet the tip of his finger in his mouth, then rubbed the seam some more.
After a minute or so of this, he was surprised to find his fingertip could slip between the secret lips, to a warm and moistening interior. He pressed his finger in deeper, worked it until he could insert two fingers. Shifting his position, growing hard, he inserted two fingers of his other hand inside Betty Ann herself.
He couldn’t take this very long. With his fingers still inside Sally, his cock so hard that its solidity ached, he penetrated Betty Ann and began to rock his hips madly.
And after a minute or so of this, Walt slipped out of Betty Ann, took his cock in hand, and rubbed its end against Sally’s dampened slit. With just a little resistance from tighter muscles, a more restricted channel, he was inside, snugly sheathed. Propping himself up over the twin so as not to lie directly atop its bony limbs, he resumed his passionate thrusting. The slick sloshing noise of his movements within the underdeveloped body excited him to further heights, and he cried out loudly as he burst fiery inside it, holding tightly onto one leg at the joint of its knee.
Afterwards, they lay heavy and hot, again listening to the ocean wind. Walt was running his hand over Betty Ann’s belly, but she had stopped running her hand over his short bristling hair.
* * *
Walt was going down on Betty Ann. It was something men didn’t boast about to each other, for fear of coming across as sick, dirty, perverted. Years ago, an older female cousin had introduced Walt to the forbidden pleasure.
After pressing his nose and lips against Betty Ann’s dark mound, Walt slipped sideways to Sally. Spread her legs that never moved on their own, the hand that never moved on its own jutting in the air like the insensate claw of a gargoyle grown from the body of a cathedral. Walt pressed his nose and his lips to the dark mound of the headless sister that dangled from the belly of his lover, hooking each of her thighs around his ears. He moaned softly against the slick flesh, his penis hard between his belly and the mattress, which was as damp as the floor of a jungle.
Betty Ann’s hands did not touch him, her fists coiled around the bars of her metal headboard. Christmas music crooned half-heard from the radio, crackling as if the falling snow interfered with its reception. And Walt thought he heard one soft, whispery sob…but when he lifted his slippery, hungry face to look, Betty Ann’s face was turned to the gloomy shadows of her little apartment.
* * *
On Christmas eve, Walt arrived at the Five-In-One with bundles in his arms, snow on his fedora’s brim. He even had presents for the fat lady, the dwarf, the sword swallower and Ed/Edna (a bottle of women’s perfume and a bottle of men’s cologne lashed together with a thick rubber band).
But when he got there, the police had arrived ahead of him. Real police, not private dicks like himself.
Leaving his bundles in the hall, Walt charged up the stairs. Her door was open. He shoved half way in past a cop before the man got a hold of him and stopped him. But he could see enough from where he stood.
Betty Ann’s body lay on the worn carpet, in front of the sofa where he had first made love to her. He didn’t know where she had acquired the shotgun that lay beside her like a spent lover. Betty Ann’s body was unmarked. Soft. Lovely. But the thing that had been Sally was burst like a strange fruit from the blast, rent horribly down the middle and its limbs even more askew.
Betty Ann’s eyes and mouth were half open. Her surgery had been unsuccessful. And she had bled. Bled so badly…her lustrous chestnut skin now grayish.
Walt sagged against the cop, no longer fought him. A sob was wrenched painfully up from his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m sorry…”
And a window rattled with a sharp, harsh gust of winter wind, like an agonized ghost aching to break through the pane—but trapped outside of it.
Hapi Birthday
Vultures wheeled in the sky, high and distant, an unsettling sight for an Easterner like myself. I don’t know why it should have bothered me, though. I’d been to many stranger places on the globe than Southern California… had just returned from such a place, in fact. But there was nevertheless an alien feeling to this day. The seemingly endless orange groves we had navigated to reach my friend’s remote house had seemed a great bleak expanse to me, despite their fecundity. And the house, when at last we arrived, was modern and odd-angled.
It had been built to the tastes of my friend, Ronald Montgomery, who had the wealth to indulge in all his tastes, and the imagination for those tastes to be unique. Perhaps it was the availability of everything money could buy that had turned his tastes more…unorthodox…over the years. That money makes us jaded, makes us lose our perspectives, is no new observation.
We had gone to school together; it was there, in fact, that I came under the thrall of his undeniable charisma. When I married, my wife gradually helped me break that hold. She had never liked Monty. I felt glad actually, relieved, when I began to assert my independence from him. He had moved to the west coast. But then came his visit, a brief stay. Now here I was…returning from a long trip to the Egypt I had always ached to visit. A trip sponsored by my friend, Ronald Montgomery.
Four strong men lowered the crate down from the truck and struggled it inside as Monty came out to embrace me. His arm around my shoulders, he gestured at the sweaty workers. “Like slaves moving one of the blocks at Giza, huh? Your timing couldn’t be better, Tim…did you remember that tomorrow is my birthday?”
Monty walked behind the men, craning his neck to observe their passage. He turned to me again and grinned. “Who would have thought the Valley of the Kings had any surprises left, huh, Tim?”
I nodded. “Who’d have thought that there was a tunnel so deep under Thebes? The deepest chamber recorded in the valley…”
“No one would have thought to look for it before, in the monkey cemetery of all places. But you see, Tim? You got me my treasure and I got you in the history books. Hey, I think you still owe me.”
I must confess I winced inside. I wanted to meet my obligation and escape back to my own life. “Well, they weren’t that happy to have the mummy taken. And
“The authorities weren’t too unhappy to take my money, and I have more of that than
“But this one was so…big. For a baboon. And its coffin.” I wagged my head.
“I don’t suppose any amount of money could have made them part with that, hm? Solid gold, like Tut-ankh- Amen’s inner coffin…”
“For a baboon! I know they were sacred, and high-ranking baboons received better burials than lower grade baboons, but Christ, you’ve seen the pictures! All they can say is that this monkey must have been a symbolic representation of the god Hapi.”
“Selected, no doubt, for its unusual size, as you’ve pointed out. Hey, gentlemen, easy there!”
* * *
Monty had been walking fine when I arrived, but by the time we had the mummy unpacked and on the table he had prepared for it, he was using his cane to support himself. When he was excited or upset, I knew, his equilibrium seemed to falter. It was his worsening MS that had kept him from joining me at the excavation; in the past, we had been a team on some of his expeditions, his adventures. And on many he had gone without me. The relics—no, the
“Hey,” I said half-jokingly, “I’m a little jet-lagged, Monty. You’re not really going to start unwrapping your
