Chapter 5
It had begun to rain, and even with windshield wipers going, Evelyn found the visibility poor on the roads with which she was unfamiliar, and the driving hazardous. She slowed down and literally crawled along. Matt was still fast asleep on the rear seat, and Estelle continued to draw together the multiple threads of her past life with an almost obsessive need, now that she had started it, to relate to another person all that had brought her to this time, place and condition. And Evelyn, for her own purposes, was drawn to her every word.
"I didn't have a dime with me when I ran out. There was about twenty bucks in my purse, but in the excitement, I even left that behind. So I went down on the cab driver and I balled with the desk clerk at one of the hotels for a room. From that time on, I made whatever dough I needed the only way I knew how. I peddled my pod. I was sixteen. No, not even sixteen yet. But I was almost as big as I am now and I worked it every which way. Street hooker, bunk in a hotel room, and tie-ins with bellhops, on the road, in the carnies, and then the cat houses. It was in one of those joints in New Orleans that I met Matt.
"He had knocked over a couple of places and gone a long way, I don't know how far, and he came into the place all dragged out. He had a lot of money with him, and he stuck around, sleeping in this place three or four nights. He didn't go out for anything. He had meals and cigars and his liquor brought in. He wasn't paying attention to any of the girls, either. Then this one night, I think it was his third night there, we had a real blowout. There was some kind of convention in town, and I'm telling you, the woman that ran that joint also owned the hotel that booked the convention, and had the girls going in shifts till they were so flagged out I swear they couldn't stand up on their two feet or see straight. But I kept on taking everybody she could throw at me. But you know the way I am. I told you. The more I get, once I get all wound up like that, I feel like I'm going to go crazy once I stop. I just have to keep on feeling. So when it quiets down, Ruby Red-that's what they call this madam because she's fat as a house with her cheeks roughed so red you could see them like traffic lights a block away -takes me by the arm and leads me up to one of the rooms where Matt is. She starts bragging about me, about how many guys I took on and how I'm the greatest nymph she's ever had. Matt had given her several hundred dollars and hadn't used any of the girls, and now she had brought me upstairs as a favor. 'Go on, loosen up,' she said to him, 'and have yourself a good time.' Then she left me in the room with him. I was really on fire and I wanted him to take me. He could see what I was going through, like I was suffering. And that's what it's like, too. I could see at first that he wanted to get rid of me, and then he asked me to sit down. 'Relax,' he said, and shoved a bottle over to me. 'Take yourself a couple of drinks.' I did, but all I could do was keep my eyes fastened on him.
"To begin with, all I had on was this red garter belt with black lace, black stockings and blood-red shoes. That's what Ruby Red liked the girls to wear around the place. He tried to talk to me and I listened to him for about five minutes, but then I couldn't control myself any more. That's when he stood up, and real slow, he took his pants off, then his shorts. He doesn't have any great fantastic build, so when I found out what a man he was, it was a surprise. You know what I mean," Estelle said to Evelyn. 'You've seen it. And it wasn't just the look of him. He came at me nice and slow, not rushing anything. He held me for maybe a couple of minutes, not even moving. Then he began to move with me, with that same, slow, easy slide. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I started to get impatient with him and I began kicking at him and trying to get hold of his hips to buck against him. But he dug his fingers into my arms until I felt them just go dead at my sides. He was so damned strong. It wasn't until about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, after, of a steady buildup, when he began to get stronger with every stroke, that I realized I had me a stud, you know, one of those guys made a special way just to please a woman. And he kept me there for a couple of hours at least, raising me up, setting me on edge, each jolt like he was going to shake me loose in my insides." Estelle's eyes were closed now, a look of blissful distraction commanding her features at the erotic reminiscence. Evelyn's body tensed at the sudden piercing pulse between her legs, an unfamiliar lancing throb in her loins, terminating all other sensory response. It was the most intense sexual sensation she had ever experienced in her life, and it frightened her.
The momentary blinding glare of a truck's bright lights, coming from the other direction, startled them and snapped Estelle out of her ecstatic reverie. "Well, anyway, he stayed with me like that until I had quieted down a lot. I don't mean that I came off right then. It didn't happen like that. It took some time. But when Matt left, I went with him. He wasn't anxious to have me or anything. But he didn't try to stop me. He just said, 'Maybe for a while until you get clear of sewers like this.'
"I didn't know what he meant at first, but then he began to talk to me, a little more all the time, asking me about, you know, the kind of things I've been telling you. And he let me do about anything I wanted, I mean, like catting around or working over any of the guys I came into contact with even when I was like, you know, supposed to be his. Once I told him I was sorry for being like that, and he got real mad at me. He said I wasn't supposed to be sorry for the way I was. There was just nothing that I did that he considered, you know, bad or twisted up, like my old man was always saying. Then, for the first time in my life, I lost that tight feeling I always had inside me, just under my chest. Like a stone was lying there. It had to do with, you know, back home, what happened to my ma, what I did when I was just a kid, the way my old man kicked my sister Rose in the belly and the way-Gus blasted a hole in his gut .. . Things, I don't know-they just all of a sudden opened up and took me inside. It was then that the deep pleasure started coming. The first time, well, I just can't tell you in words. It's a feeling no other words can ever get near. One minute he was with me, and I lost track of where I ended and he began. Then the lid just blew off. It was an-an explosion inside me. From that time, it comes on every time he takes me. But no matter how I get wound up with anybody, with him I just break free and clear."
The rain had stopped now and Evelyn shut off the windshield wipers. A sudden, deep weariness seemed to course through her, as if she had herself experienced and lived through the horrendous ordeal of Estelle's. Only a matter of an hour or two before Estelle had begun to talk, she realized she had regarded her as some debauched freak of nature, and now the woman who leaned across the seat so close to her, the same woman who only hours before had given herself to an uncontrollable orgiastic revel seemed only frailly human and no more irreparably degraded by life than-herself.
"The way Matt explained it all to me, the reason I started to tell you all this-I couldn't have any real feeling because I had closed off a part of me. I needed to take and feel things I couldn't give back. Matt said that I had cut off the flow of my juices. Everything my old man said made me do that-all the warnings of getting knocked up, what happened to my own sister when she did. I had to stop the mixing of my juices with a man, and that's the way it went every time I would get laid, Matt said, all the times the juices gathered up inside me but never able to come out. And the more I got banged, the more they would build up and drive me nuts." Estelle drew a deep and relieved breath and looked up to Evelyn with a smile of unbelievably childlike innocence. "But with Matt, because to him I wasn't bad or sick or anything, no matter what I did, I could open up and give." She chuckled, now suggestive and mischievous. "Of course, you got to be lucky and find yourself a real stud who can stay with you all the way without folding like a mushroom."
Estelle continued in this vein but, by now, Evelyn had wandered in among the labyrinths of her own thoughts and was no longer listening. Evelyn was thinking about her growing up, the admonitions of her own father which would have prompted the holding back, the blockage of her own juices. Where Estelle had been able to reach for the feeling, go through the ritual of sensual sensation easily and with excitement, Evelyn realized that even that part had been turned off inside her. Of course, she considered that hers was a far different background and, indeed, a fortunate one. Her father was a wonderful person, a human being of delicate sensibilities. He was good, not evil. Not mean. His sole interest had been to keep her from groveling before the demanding evil of brutish, callous, self-centered men. He wished to protect her from a sensation that might take her with it, drag her after, with a total disregard for all other impulses and sense of reason. Evelyn's eyes flickered mistily. She wondered what such a sensation would be. Whether she could know it-and her eye glanced up at the rear-View mirror back to the figure lying, just now stirring on the seat. As he pushed himself drowsily to a seating position, all Evelyn's thoughts which seemed to her disturbingly forbidden dropped about her like shattered glass. Matt blinked his eyes open, looking about him in troubled consternation.
"How long have I been asleep?" he asked Estelle.
"Gee, honey, for hours."
He frowned. "You should have woke me." He winced and moaned inadvertently, as he moved his blood-encrusted arm with the knife wound.
"Gee, hon, that's bad," Estelle said. "How'd you get it?"
Matt grunted, fending off her question. "Got to get to some place where I can clean it up and get a good night's sleep. Let's keep an eye out for some place where we can spend the night." Now he addressed himself to Evelyn with a strained though noticeably softened tone. "I- thanks for spelling me at the wheel." The few v words of a commonplace-enough comment, and yet why did they stir her so much, bring on the strange thudding in her chest? Evelyn made a determined effort to seal off her thoughts. She nodded to acknowledge Matt's words. She felt the searching intentness of his eyes on her face through the rear-view mirror, and she fought to resist the temptation to meet his piercing look.
The occasional crude road signs in the densely wooded surroundings indicated that they were in a vacation area. The dismal, uninhabited look amid the absence of light or life was explained by the fact that it was several months out of season. When Matt caught sight of a group of summer-cottages-to-rent placards nailed up on a fence and pointing to a dirt road, he instructed Evelyn to stop and pull over to the side. He followed the dirt road on foot, a flashlight in his hand, and in about ten minutes returned to lead them on in with the car, guiding the way as they walked alongside.
There were several boarded-up cottages, and Matt managed to rip off enough of the nailed planks to gain entry to one of them through a rear door. Inside, he found a cast-iron stove with wood alongside it and started up a fire. Under the glow of the firelight, he located a kerosene lamp and a tin of fuel on the shelf. There was no evidence of internal plumbing, but Matt took up a large metal bucket alongside the stove and managed, after several minutes of scouting around outside, to locate a well pump.
Estelle began to remove her clothes, soiled and clammy with dampness. Evelyn proceeded to do the same. Presently, her abundant nakedness gleaming in the firelight, Estelle knelt beside the bucket and began to wash herself. Evelyn, retaining her brassiere and panties, followed suit. She caught Matt's derisive expression at the relative state of her semi-undress. On an impulse, she yanked off her panties with the pretext of setting about to wash her underthings, which she realized after the fact did require such attention. Then she turned to unfasten her brassiere, shakily aware that this was the first time in her adult life that she had removed all of her clothes in the presence of a man. Encounters with her husband occurred in the dark in a state of partial undress.
The effect of Matt's gaze was a physical one, tracing the intimate curvatures, the sensation of probing fingers. She could feel the throbbing and the erectile stiffening of her breasts, the electric tingling in the nestling auburn grove bordering the satiny smooth skin of her underbelly. When she felt her eyes draw with an irresistible tug to that part of Matt which now dangled in open exposure over his thighs, Evelyn drew in her breath and spun away from him. His chuckle was mocking and recalled to her his reaction when Diane had denounced her as "Mother Superior."
"Gosh, hon, that looks just terrible!" Estelle exclaimed at the sight of Matt's now uncovered wound. Her exclamation instantly fragmented the mood. Matt was making an awkward effort to remove the encrusted blood with a dampened handkerchief. Estelle's reaction was a shattering grimace, and she quickly turned away. Evelyn went up to Matt, took the dampened cloth from his hand, and soaked it well before reapplying it. She reapplied it several times, permitting the water to cut in and soften the wound's encrustation. Matt remained impassive and unresisting. She could feel, from his nakedness in such close proximity to her own, distinct emanations of bodily heat which struck at her with a dizzying giddiness. When her thigh inadvertently made contact with the course hairs of his leg, she literally leaped back. He turned his head away with an expression of cruel mockery, and Evelyn detested herself for her timidity of her reaction, as she wanted to fling back into his face those two humiliatingly intimidating words-"Mother Superior."
After the ritual of having his wound cleansed and bound, Matt restored the mattress from its upright position against the wall to its proper place over the bedsprings of the large brass bed. He immediately stretched himself out on one side to allow room for the others and turned over on his side. Estelle unhesitatingly did the same. -Evelyn's hesitance was overcome by a deep, bone-tired weariness, and she lay down alongside Estelle. Exhausted as she was, her consciousness of Matt's close-by nakedness was too unsettling for sleep. Unbidden images crept into her mind. Her lips tingled in recollection of the moment when he had put her head down between his legs. Evelyn's hand asserted an independent will and, moving over her thighs, searched out with its fingers that nub of excruciating desire. Surreptitious, fearful of creating movements that would make the others turn, Evelyn lulled herself to sleep.
Somehow, sleep had drawn her into its warm and torpid enclave. Nightmarish caverns of monstrous rock opened to admit her and closed around her. She ran through a passageway to flee and discovered its skin walls shuddering, pulsating, constricting around her, pressing her face into the flesh, engorging her eyes, her ears, her nostrils-her mouth. She jerked convulsively awake several times, once closing her eyes to discover herself in her dream assaulted again by the rapists in the fair's parking lot.
As she forced herself to close her eyes once again, suspended on this border of troubled consciousness, she became aware of an excruciatingly sweet and flowing warmth that pervaded her limbs and gradually suffused her whole body. The sweetness deepened and became more intense, and Evelyn moaned inwardly. Now the sensation was sharpening, centering itself, and she found herself undulating, coming up to receive it. She opened her eyes then and saw Estelle. She found that it required the gathering up of all the deepest resources of will to pull away.
Estelle looked up in puzzlement with an expression of shock. "What's the matter, sweetie? Doesn't it feel good? Don't you want me to love you?" Estelle said. Evelyn was about to kick her legs clear when she saw Matt drowsily looking on, his mouth twisted in disdain as if awaiting her answer to Estelle's questions. It was in that single instant that she was forced to examine the ambiguity of the situation. Did she like it? Did she want Estelle to continue?
The answer seemed to come somewhere from the agony of desire that still seized her body and whispered to her brain. "Yes-yes!" Evelyn closed her eyes and slowly sank back on the mattress, allowing her legs to go limp. She was unable to stifle her moan as Estelle re-engaged her innermost parts with passionate tongue-probing soul kisses. Evelyn's arms shot up to grasp Estelle's head and press her closer as her hips strained and rose off the bed. Evelyn did not open her eyes, but she imagined the sudden change on Matt's face, a triumphant satisfaction.
"The way you were twisting around in your sleep," Estelle said, between her passionate ministering, "I could see how bad you needed me."
"Yes, oh yes, please yes!" cried Evelyn. "I need, I need, I need, I need ..."