days and this is the first time I've ever told anyone. I didn't feel anything for that stranger in that box. I mean it looked like my darling, and I missed my darling, but I knew my darling was gone and I just wanted to get rid of that... thing before it started to go bad. I think a lot of the others were putting on a big act there too. I don't think any normal person is thrilled or excited by death.'
They headed back to the house as Longarm quietly observed he'd been on some battlefields he'd found more depressing than thrilling. He said, 'The only thing you feel that some might find comforting is how tall you seem with all those others spread out flat. Mayhaps the mad-dog killers amongst us kill to feel taller. A cuss growing up with a low opinion of himself might feel he could make a higher place for himself by shooting everyone else down. They are wrong, of course, but sometimes it takes a man with a badge and his own gun to convince 'em.'
She was suddenly all over him, sobbing, 'No, Custis, don't go in to meet that crazy man at midnight! I couldn't stand to see you in a casket like a thing, with everyone saying you just looked as if you were asleep.'
He had to hang on to her lest they wind up falling down her back steps together. He gently moved her so her denim-clad rump was braced on the edge of the kitchen table as he said, 'I wasn't aiming to wind up dead at midnight, Miss Cora. There was this younger pest over by Fort Sill, saying he was fixing to shoot it out with me on sight. Only, somehow he never got around to it when I offered. I just told you Attila Homagy has to know it wasn't me or even Zoltan Kun his wife ran off with, and...'
She wasn't listening. She was clinging to him like a limpet from the waist up while she moved everything below her waist with a skill few happily married women or determined whores could have matched. She'd intimated she hadn't had any for a spell, and as she felt him rising to the occasion through the faded denim between their fevered groins, she husked, 'Don't tease me like this, Custis. Do it! Do it here and now!'
So he rolled her back across the table, and since he saw when she raised both knees she wore nothing under that loose smock but her natural fuzz, he just shucked out of the shoulder straps to let his bib overalls fall around his booted ankles as he spread her thighs wide with his hands and stepped right up to join her. She gasped, 'Oh, Kee-rist!' as he literally walked his aroused old organ-grinder through the moist part in her black pubic hair.
He paused halfway out to assure her he meant no harm. That was when she locked her own booted ankles in the small of his bare back to haul him in farther than he'd meant to go at first.
She gasped, 'Yes! I want you to hit bottom with every stroke, and please don't go back to town tonight, darling!'
He just kept thrusting until he'd made her come, she said, for the first time in years. Like most folks, she likely didn't count jerking off. He could tell she'd been keeping that swell plumbing in working order some fool way, for just such a time as this.
CHAPTER 23
It was even nicer, once they'd wound up in her four-poster bed with Cora on top, literally sucking it for him with her warm, wet, love-hungry crotch. He never wanted to stop either, but by sundown they were too spent to do much more than cuddle and smoke as, from time to time, she'd grab his limp dong again and beg him not to get it killed on her.
He promised nothing either way. He knew he had to be there when Attila Homagy came in out of the dark. But sometimes well-screwed ladies fell sound asleep after going this crazy with a man, and he'd cross that bridge when he got to it.
The crickets were starting up outside now. It sounded nice until they suddenly stopped in mid-chirp, along about nine-thirty.
Cora asked what was wrong as Longarm rolled his bare feet to her bedroom rug and reached for the six-gun he'd brought in from that laundry after their first fun in the kitchen.
He said, 'There's something spooking them bugs outside. I wish you had a yard dog, honey. Dogs are more certain about intruders than old crickets.'
She sighed and said, 'We just lost a good old redbone hound to coyotes. He busted his chain, the poor thing, to go chasing off into the dark after a coyote bitch in heat.'
Longarm eased over to the front window, gun in hand, as he nodded and said, 'Lots of dogs get killed that way out here. Nobody knows for certain whether it's assassination or a crime of passion. Anything canine will flirt with anything canine of the opposite sex. But any dog that meets up with a pack of coyotes on the prairie is in a whole heap of trouble!'
He could make out moving shapes across the road, thanks to the full moon. But he waited until the moonlight bounced his way from a pair of spooky eyes before he decided, 'Your hound's old sweetheart seems to be looking for him tonight with her big brothers. I make it four, no, five coyotes all told.'
From the bed, Cora said, 'Damn. I told Leroy to make certain he planted that calf deep!'
She went on to explain how they disposed of stillborn calves on a dairy farm. There seemed to be a small bovine graveyard across the way. She sold off her live veal, of course, once giving birth had the cow letting down her milk again.
Longarm observed coyotes had been known to dig up dead folks from graves dug too shallow. As he came back to bed he said, 'That's how come they say six feet down. Albeit coyotes will seldom dig more than four. Takes a good sniffer to smell dead meat through even a yard of dirt.'
She said she didn't want to think about death, and so he put the gun aside and they got lively as hell for a short sweet spell.
He had her coming dog-style when a distant rumble tingled the air all around them and she murmured, 'Goody! It's fixing to rain again, and you won't find anyone waiting for you on the streets of Trinidad at midnight after all!'
He started to point out that the moon still shone outside from a cloudless sky. He decided it might be smarter to just screw her to sleep. So he did. He almost knocked himself out in the process, but unlike Cora, he knew he had something more important to do before the clock struck twelve.
He had her snoring softly with a contented smile on her moonlit face before eleven. She only murmured another man's name in her sleep as he rolled out of bed, gathered everything up, and got dressed in the kitchen to sneak out across the barnyard.
He might or might not have heard a woman wailing after him on the night winds as he loped into town, anxious to get set up before that Amarillo night train pulled in.
