Chapter 3
Presently, Matt raised her to her feet and guided her in the direction of the car. "You kind of favor playing the role of Mother Superior no matter who's involved, don't you?" he commented snidely. He prodded her obscenely from behind, but she was too weary and shaken to protest. She entered the car and remained docilely seated, encouraging the numbness of her own senses.
Matt examined one of the tires that seemed to be losing air and announced that it looked to him like the wheel had a split rim, which was something that should be attended to before they went too far along the way. As he drove around the other side of the lake, he said to Estelle, "Keep your eyes open for some farmhouse or some place where I might be able to pick up another rim from some old heap."
The area seemed to be devoid of any habitation, but at the extreme southwest tip of the lake Estelle called attention to a large barn, and beyond that a neat gray frame house. As Matt swung around into its gravel road, a big, rawboned farm worker type in coveralls straining at his girth came in their direction. Matt stepped out to engage him in conversation, pointing to the wheel.
The man, tall and beefily broad, seemed to dwarf Matt by comparison. "Sure, I think I can fix you up with a rim," Evelyn heard him say, and then he insisted, "Why don't you come into the house and have yourself a drink first?" Matt nodded and opened the car door, motioning to Estelle and Evelyn to follow him. All three trailed after the heavyset field worker and went up the short flight of steps into the gray frame house.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, Evelyn recognized the young girl huddled on the couch in the corner as one of the girls in the rowboat, the second one that Matt had had sexual contact with. "This the fella?" the farmworker looked toward her questioningly. She nodded, her eyes darting uncertainly to Matt's face.
At once, the large man seemed transformed from his slow, idle-moving ways. He spun about with surprising quickness, and without warning raised a massive arm and clubbed Matt across the side of the face with his closed fist. Caught unexpectedly, Matt stumbled back and slammed against the wall behind him. Before he could recover, the farmer came up to him again and lashed at him with one fist and then the other, stunning him with the blows.
Blood trickled down from Matt's nose and the corner of his mouth. But he did not cry out or show evidence of pain or fear. And the unchanging, stony coldness of his expression remained. Then a strange thing occurred. Even as the larger man struck at him again, it was Matt who, his balance now recovered, was advancing in the face of the man's physical punishment. The unexpectedness of this action seemed to throw the larger man into a confusion that was immobilizing. He held his hands up but he appeared uncertain that his next move should be, and Matt stepped up to him and pumped piston like jabs into his lower gut, folding the man over until his full weight seemed to be held up by Matt. But the leaner man did not relent and maintained his punishing attack to the groin until a spray of gall poured from the man's lips.
Matt stepped aside and let him drop to his knees with the weight of a sodden sack. He pitched forward on his face, regurgitating in spasms and lying in his own swill. The girl who had been sitting on the couch ran up to Matt. "I didn't want him to do you no harm," she said. "He could see someone done me bad when I came in, and I was afraid to lie when he asked if it was you. But I ain't sore at you. I got over three hundred dollars and I'll give it to you if you'll take me with you, away from this old bastard."
Evelyn looked with eyes that could not fathom the events they had witnessed. Through this girl, flinging herself at Matt, inviting God knows what kind of debauchery and depravity, Evelyn saw her stepdaughter, Diane. The same mystifying moth like plunge into the flame. The same disregard of parent and family. She regarded the childlike submissiveness of Estelle and considered how right her father had been to raise her as he had, to destroy in her any vestige of desire for female bondage under the yoke of male domination. Matt searched about the room. "What do you want?" the girl asked him anxiously. "Just tell me what it is and I'll help you."
"Where are the keys to that Chevy alongside the house?"
The girl went to a hook on the wall, removed the keys, and handed them to Matt. He started out the door, nudging Estelle and Evelyn before him. The younger girl called after him. "Can I go along?"
"Some other time, kid," Matt said in a way of curt dismissal.
"I'll be better with this bleeding tomorrow, maybe even tonight," she said. "And then you can do me all over again, any time you want."
Matt got in the car and started up the engine, and as she held open the door he shoved her away with his hand and she fell back on the ground. The car swung around and started in the direction of the gravel road. She ran alongside, screaming and cursing. "I'll get you, you son of a bitch! I'll turn the cops on you for stealing the car and raping me."
Estelle laughed aloud. "I think we ought to get her pulled in for raping you," she said to Matt.
Matt was quietly serious. "That little squirt can spring the lid. She'll be on the phone before we're clear of this county."
"What are you going to do?"
Matt bypassed a paved road for a rock-strewn dirt cut-through. He drove on silently for a while until several miles farther on he realized it would be nonnegotiable and was forced to retrace his way to the paved road which he took with expressed misgivings. "This is a bad bit. This car is liable to be spotted for sure." He pulled up abruptly and ran the car off the side of the road into some concealing foliage. Then he got out and announced to the two, "We're going to get out and walk a ways. It shouldn't be too much farther into some little town around here. I'll get a better idea of which way to snake through. We can come back and pick up the car towards evening."
As they walked for a mile or two, Evelyn was forced to consider several alternates. Was this her opportunity to alert some bystanders when they came to the town proper? There were also other questions which required rationalization. For example, why hadn't she made an attempt to break away when he had parked and gone swimming and sunbathing along the lakeside? She told herself she had no idea of her surroundings and might easily have been lost in the woods. But how about when she entered the house of the farmer who had attacked Matt? Wasn't that another opportunity to effect her release? Perhaps, she told herself, that is exactly what would have happened if the latter man had overcome Matt. It was easy to consider in retrospect that her object in waiting around was an expectation of that outcome.
In the final analysis, there was always the thought that Matt was a dangerous and merciless man. An unsuccessful attempt to break free might so infuriate him that she would expose herself to fatal crippling, even death. Wasn't this what her husband would advise her to do? Not to try to strike out against irrationality, but simply to wait without provoking it until it went by? Nagging, ill-defined doubts cast a troubled pall over her nightmare circumstance, the delicate balancing upon a high wire that threatened to end in disaster at any instant. Even as she moved in cadence with her two unwanted companions, she had the strange sensation that she might awaken at any moment and discover all of what she had encountered as fragments of an outlandish dream.
As they approached the outskirts of the town, they came upon a busy cluster of many cars and milling people and the sounds of brassy hurdy-gurdy music in the background. Somewhat farther on they saw the reason for the crowd, a noisy, festive county fair. Matt nodded. "Okay," he said, "this is just what we need. Come on, we'll get lost in here and kill some time until dark. I should be able to get one of the cars bunched up back there started, and then we can take off."
Estelle seemed as gladdened by the presence of the fair as a kid playing truant for a special event. "I used to work as a carny that used to play hick spots like this," she said. "I never told you about that, did I, Matt?" Despite his lack of response, she maintained a running monologue, seeming mentally to provide his reactions. "But you don't want to hear about anything I ever done, do you? But it was a ball, really it was, Matt. The guy I worked for had five or six setups. We used to play different county fairs. It was like one of those striptease shows. Not any real burlesque. Just two girls, sometimes three, playing each fair. We had a pretty big tent all to ourselves and a stage right out in the middle of it, with a curtain just like in a theater. But there wasn't any seats. The people-just the gents was allowed-used to walk in and stand up and watch the show, and then we'd get another batch coming in and another. The money wasn't too bad 'cause we used to get five percent of the business we did on top of thirty bucks. But the real money was when the guy who did the barking and ticket-collecting used to fix us up with some of the local hicks after the show. You know, Matt, that one night, outside of Memphis, I laid over thirty guys in less than two hours. I swear."
The presence of all the sounds, talk and excitement seemed to act as a stimulus for Estelle, and she kept up her one-way stream of conversation as a droning background, to which neither Matt nor Evelyn, absorbed in their own thoughts, paid any attention.
Matt led them from one game concession to another, participating mechanically and joylessly. Only Estelle maintained her animation, avidly searching out associations with the past. She spotted, before one of the sideshow-type concessions, a young woman out front on one of the wooden stages, provocatively attired in a heavy jeweled girdle tightly constricting her hips to accentuate her bared waist and belly, which she undulated enticingly to a recording of Persian music. Estelle went up to her, ignoring the scowling, disapproving looks of the sideshow barker who kept up his running patter in an effort to induce some of the ogling males to pay the price of a dollar. She engaged the young woman billed as Princess Casmah, the Belly Dancer in avid conversation. When she returned to Matt she said, "Come on, I got something going. Like what I was telling you about. It's a tent set up at the other end of the field where they steer the boys looking for nooky."
Matt waved his hand and made a wry expression, but Estelle prevailed upon him. "Please, Matt, we're just killing time anyway." Matt shrugged and permitted himself to be led by Estelle, with Evelyn submissively in tow. Both women stumbled awkwardly in their heels over the uneven ground in the dim light before the outline of the tent in the distance indicated their objective. A hunched-over bear of a man, burly-looking, appraised them warily until Estelle mentioned the belly dancer and asked Matt to give him thirty, ten for each of them. Then he raised the flap of the tent and admitted them into a dimly lit, smoked-clogged area with thirty to forty raucously laughing and commenting men seated upon folding chairs before a large stand-up motion picture screen upon which a projector cast a one-reel pornographic film.
Matt felt Evelyn tense alongside him. The images on the screen showed three women kneeling before an equal number of men in a competitive exhibition. One of the female performers, all of them stripped and exposed in the immediate foreground, roused the clamorous audience to spasms of raucous laughter as she worked, manipulated, stroked and frantically mouthed her male partner in a zealous effort to outdo all competition. "Go get her, Blackie!"
"Come down the home stretch!"
"There's twenty that says the gal on the first big white pony comes in first."
The camera closed in as each male performer was brought to full satisfaction. The extreme close-up gave to the spectacle a strangely abstract aspect which struck Evelyn as that of coiled serpents spastically striking.
Evelyn, who had remained up to this point in a state of trancelike fixation which characterized her response to all the sexuality she had encountered from the moment of her captivity, and which afforded her a refuge from its threateningly disorienting effects, suddenly was bereft of her defenses. She buried her face in her hands as she thought, I must be going mad. What am I doing here? Why am I remaining so close to this insanity?
Spurred to action by this awakening, she thrust herself between several of the men standing behind her and burst through the tent opening into the cool night air. Which way to go did not matter-she simply wanted to get away, to step back over the moat from this hellish Dante an perversion into the sane, secure mold of her former existence. She started across the darkened field that separated the tent from the carnival area proper. But then she heard someone behind her and turned to see two men emerging from the tent, one of them pointing in her direction and the other calling to her.
Her first reaction was to go to them, explain that she was in need of help and ask that she be taken to the police. But their expressions, as they drew abreast of her, served to alarm her still further. The stocky man, the shorter of the two, immediately ran his hand down her back, feeling her body beneath the gray, tightly drawn shirt. "How about taking on the both of us for twenty?" he asked.
Evelyn pulled away. "No, you don't understand."
"Thirty," the lean, taller man offered with a lascivious leer. "We'll show you a good time." Evelyn broke away and began to run across the field. But when she realized they were after her, she turned in the direction of what appeared to be a large area of parked cars off to the right and perhaps fifty yards away, less than half the distance to the carnival area. Here she thought she might elude her pursuers by concealing herself behind a car or stepping into one and locking the doors. But her haste and the unevenness of the ground cause her to stumble and fall several times, and they were upon her even before she reached the parking area. As they took hold of her from either side, moving her in the direction of the cars, she pleaded with them and attempted to distinguish herself from the common prostitute type which they apparently assumed she was.
"Sure," one of them said sarcastically, "that's the kind of place for a lady to hang around in to get educated."
"And what about that brunette piece with you?"
They pulled open a car door and pressed her, head to waist, down on the seat with her legs hanging over the side and outside of the car. She tried to cry out, but a hand was forcing her down from behind, muffling her cries with her mouth into the upholstery. Frantic hands pulled her panties down. Strong hands had parted her ass-cheeks, baring her asshole, which had remained, until that time, inviolate. The sensation was that of an incising blade dividing her parts. She moaned, cried out, dug her nails into the leather of the car seat. The sensation was that of a displacement of her vitals as each lancing incision further extended the minute mark of the initial thrust. She felt the painful tear of the flesh as her assailant dug his dirty fingers into her sides in the throes of his shuddering experience.
Before she could recover in the instant of the suspension of his body weight, she was seized once again from this vantage point and forced to accept the assault of her second attacker. But he had no more than effected entry when he heard the hard edge of a familiar voice. Her assailant released her and turned to face Matt. Evidently discovering her absence, he had come out to find her. Evelyn raised herself, trembling, from the seat.
"You, buddies, go on and chase your tail," Matt said with a quiet, menacing authority. But the taller man suddenly pulled a knife and slashed Matt, catching him across the upper arm. Almost in the same action with his reflexive side step, he came up with his revolver and smashed the butt end directly into the face of the knife wielder. There was a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage and the hot spill of blood and teeth as the man struck the ground like a dead weight.
His stocky companion spun about at once and began to run across the field. Evelyn, steadying herself against the car door, suddenly dropped into Matt's arms, clutching him tightly, sobs racking her body. For an instant, they remained there unmoving, then his arms went up and held her with surprisingly comforting gentleness. "You-you'll be going back real soon," he said, the words coming out with quick awkwardness. And then catching himself, as if out of resentment at an uncharacteristic display of emotion, he drew abruptly away from her and began to lead her back to the tent. "You don't have to go inside," he said. "I'm just going to get Estelle."
Evelyn, still frightened by the surroundings and shakened by her experience, clung to his arm. Still she was upset by the sense of security his presence gave her. She knew she should detest him for the way he had, in this brief period of time, splintered the pattern of her life. Somehow, even then, she sensed that that was exactly what had happened. No matter what happened, she knew that these few days would not simply be expunged by time. Evelyn shuddered involuntarily as she clung to him; in some unseemly way, beyond the grossness of the sexual experience, she was aware that she had changed, but she was afraid to dwell on the thought any further or examine the nature of the change.
It was then that she felt the dampness of his arm and drew back in alarm when she noticed that his arm was bleeding where the knife had slashed him. She wanted to do something to help him, but the expression on his face precluded any such move on her part. It was something that he wished to disregard. She could see that. And he was not one who appreciated any undue attentiveness.
When they came to the tent, instead of waiting outside as she had intended, Evelyn went in after him to avoid being left alone and hazard any further undesirable encounters. The activities inside were even more openly orgiastic than before, and Estelle, who had gone out of control, was now bent over before a man in boots and jeans driving himself compulsively against her smooth, soft asshole, while at the same time she sucked at a dapper, carny type with too-sleek hair and an ornately checked suit jacket with her warm, moistened, heavily rouged lips.
Evelyn did not turn away now, and had the peculiar sensation that she had proceeded beyond some mental barrier that abstracted the shock value of sexual engagement. She saw Matt push through those around him, retrieving Estelle's dress and slip. These in hand, he walked up to her and pulled her away from those locked in the sucking and fucking. His action came so suddenly that it left the men interrupted in the midst of their passion in a state which provoked hilarity from the raucous audience. The man in the boots raised his hand threateningly against Matt but arrested the blow in mid-air at the sight of Matt's grim, dead-level expression and blood-smeared sleeve. Matt pressed the naked Estelle through the flap at the rear side of the tent, and Evelyn hastily exited from the front and went around to meet them. Even as Matt was helping Estelle pull her garments over her head, she remonstrated with him, "Please, Matt, help me out. Please don't turn it off for me." She repeated herself, pleading with all the way to the parking lot, where he tried one car and then another until he was able to get the engine in one to turn over. Then he slid out from under the wheel and asked Evelyn^, "Can you drive?"
"I can," she said, noting that he seemed pale and drained, a condition she attributed to his bleeding arm. She assumed, when he stepped into the rear seat of the car, that he was going to rest and attend to his arm.
"I'll direct you," he said to Evelyn as she started to pull the car out of the parking lot. "No, don't go out the way they all come in. Cut directly across the field ahead of you and turn left until you hit the road."
She crawled slowly, hardly able to make out the level of the ground ahead of her because he would permit her only the parking lights to guide her. But at last, after some considerable strain, she made the road with much relief and headed west as he instructed her. She realized that Matt's request to have her drive was for a purpose far different than what she had imagined. It was Estelle's fast, muffled breathing punctuated with intermittent gasps that drew her eyes to the rear-view mirror. There she saw Estelle straining to accept the hard, implacable impact of his determined thrusts. Evelyn's hands closed tighter around the steering wheel, her knuckles showing white. The same loathing which she had temporarily disavowed was now restored to its full intensity. She detested him for this display of carnal bestiality that rode roughshod over time, place and every human consideration.
In the back seat Matt squeezed the tip of Estelle's breast, making the nipple flatten. The thick fragance of the seeping cunt floated around the car. Then she sat up and leaned over him, kissing him tenderly around his cock, moistening the taut flesh with her saliva. Her hands groped everywhere, exploring, fondling. Then Evelyn heard the fleshy suckings, Estelle's mouth working it back and forth. Evelyn could not deny a shiver of pleasure just at the thought. She heard Estelle's breath rasping in her throat. Matt withdrew his prick from between the girl's lips.
"More," the girl groaned from deep in her throat, and in the rear-view mirror Evelyn could see his tongue teasing the tender lips and darting in and out of the panting pussy.
"Oh God!" Estelle squealed as the wet snake curled and forced its way into the opening, the flame of his tongue licking up through her in-sides. "Don't stop," she begged, but he already had, and then his stiff cock slid quickly into her again and she seized it with all her might, wrapping her legs up and around him.
"Oh, baby," she cooed in his ear as the first squirt of fire-hot fluid hit the flames of her dripping cunt, reaching a breathtaking climax herself.
Matt gripped his prick again and placed it against the sopping pussy. Then, putting his hands under her buttocks, he squirmed and wriggled forward, even deeper into her this time.
The warmth! The heat of this car! And the aromas of sex! Evelyn's brain began to swim in it all.
Estelle was moving back and forth on his stiff rod. "Oowww! Like it honey, like it!"
The rhythm of their bouncing bodies took on an even beat, Estelle's bare ass high in the back seat. Fucking. Grinding. And every once in a while, screaming.