Chapter 8
Matt drove with his parking lights on and at a pace that was almost walking, watching for stake-outs at intersections and hopefully awaiting the sight of another passing vehicle. But since it was sometime after 3:00 A.M. and they were following a back road in a predominantly farming region, there were no encounters for a period of two and a half hours. During this time, periodically, he pulled over to the side and stopped to pack a fresh towel around the rapidly dwindling ice cubes to replace those soaking and encrimsoned between Evelyn's legs. Evelyn lay back, overcome by a draining giddiness that gave her a strangely euphoric feeling. To her, it seemed that time had magnified itself, become so vast that all inside it was suspended, pinned in its action like some museum piece awaiting the inspection of a spectator. Dream- awake, only Matt's face and occasionally his administering hands played a role in the movements about her. And he, too, seemed suspended.
"Matt, I hear a car!" Estelle said. "Listen-"
Somewhere up ahead the faint reverberations of an oncoming vehicle deepened as it approached. Matt quickly yanked the wheel and brought the car into a position across the road. He cut the engine, stepped outside and threw up the hood to establish the appearance that they were stalled. He went back to talk to Estelle through the partly open window as he remained poised in readiness for the approach of the car, which was still not in sight. He squinted up at the early streaks of dawn. "Just in time," he said. "As soon as it gets to be light, we'll be sticking out like a sore thumb. Let's just hope this car coming isn't some rattletrap, although it doesn't sound like it."
The driver, who was going at a fairly rapid clip, kicking up dust in the road, slammed on his brakes to slow his speed while still some fifty or sixty yards away and then rolled up slowly to the car barring his way. A large, raw-boned, rustic type, sandy-haired and obviously sodden with drink, stepped out to confront Matt. His store-bought, ill-fitting suit and the intoxicated laughter of the two men and a woman in the car gave testimony to a little shindig or a night on the town.
"Can't get started, huh?" he commented morosely. But as soon as Estelle stepped out of the car, his eyes brightened. She smoothed her wrinkled dress with a distracted intentness on tidiness, although the slow passage of her open, slightly cupped hands down over her breasts and over the hipline was unmistakably suggestive. Her appearance was not missed by the other two male occupants of the car, who presently materialized at his side, one short and exceedingly stocky and the other a remarkably close facsimile of the driver, evidently a brother. The driver, his eyes still fixed on Estelle, who flashed him an entirely unreticent smile, said, "Maybe we can straighten you out and push you down to our place, my brother Wendell's and mine. It's about four miles down the road."
His counterpart nodded dumbly in agreement and, under the influence of alcohol, continued nodding for some time as if his head had detached itself from the rest of him. Then a young woman, the remaining occupant of the car, in her early twenties, with a thin face made thinner by an immensely teased peroxide-blonde hairdo, swayed slightly and tittered at her companion's marathon nod. But her reaction to Estelle's pronouced curvaceousness was even more exaggerated than that of her friends. She ogled her with open admiration, and when the line of her vision descended to the flare of Estelle's hips, blurted out: "What I wouldn't give for a pair of steamrollers like that!" The comment brought uproariously, loud laughter with the nodder bent over double in a braying cacophony.
Matt, his right hand in his pocket, pressing the gun against his side, considered the alternates of an immediate or a delayed action. The car was a good one. But a chance to get off the road during the first zealous hours of the local law's search seemed like a good idea. Also, they all required a change of clothes and a substantial meal. He decided on the latter and returned to the car with Estelle. "We'll tell them we've been in an accident." He turned to Evelyn. "That will explain a lot of things." He added thoughtfully, "We won't start out again until dark. The local fuzz will figure we slipped through their dragnet last night."
Within about ten minutes, they made a turn-off, proceeded about a quarter of a mile, and then parked the vehicles before a large, neglected frame farmhouse, badly in need of paint and repair. When they were settled inside-Evelyn having been carried in by Matt and placed on a couch-their host, addressed as Clement by his friends, reached for the phone. "I'll see if I can get Frank at the gas station to have a look at your car."
Matt was quickly on his feet. "Never mind," he said. "I'm something of a car mechanic myself, and if you've got some tools around here and you don't mind our spending several hours until I fix her up ..." He caught the man's quickened look of interest in Estelle's direction.
"No, don't mind at all. Not at all. Just make yourselves right to home."
Estelle moved over to him in the loose-limbed, ambling gait of the professional prostitute. "Say, hon, you wouldn't have an extra dress hung in a closet somewhere that I could borrow for my sister-in-law, would you?"
Clement turned to face the thin blonde. "Do you have one to fix her up with?" he asked. He turned back to explain to Estelle, "This here is Bess, our new housekeeper."
"I got one for her okay," she said, and then addressed Estelle, "but I couldn't help you out any." She giggled. "Not unless we cut out great big holes-and you know where-to make it fit!"
Wendell, sitting on a kitchen chair alongside the smaller man and intently looking on, once again burst into loud guffaws to the accompanying claps of his heavy hand on the table. The contagion of his laughter was carried to the others, all of it turning off as abruptly as the flow of water from a stopped faucet when Estelle reached down and began pulling her dress over her head. "I don't need one," she said. "Show me where I can rinse out this one." Her active wiggles in removing the dress had unsettled the skimpy bra and one of her breasts escaped its meager confination. The dark, roseate nipple seemed to stare out at them with a large, coquettish eye, a detail which Estelle casually ignored. "If someone will hand me a large towel or something. And, if you don't mind, I'd like to rinse out my unmentionables while I'm at it."
The stocky little man leaped up as though ejected by a coiled spring and came back with a small towel. Clem, his brother Wendell, the thin blonde and the towel provider all remained, leaning forward in silence, attending Estelle's every move as if she were the star in a private floor show, an atmosphere she deliberately sought to establish. That she might have decorously retired to one of the other rooms apparently never occurred to her, nor were her spectators about to volunteer such a suggestion.
She tucked in the towel, busied herself with her hands, and unsnapped the bra. But as she bent forward to peel away the panties, the towel lost its hold and dropped away, leaving her with her lone undergarment somewhere over her thighs. As she bent down to retrieve it, the massive spectacle of her haunches rendered the men popeyed and speechless. "Oh, excuse me," Estelle said with a faint modesty that carried the entire charade to its most ridiculous extreme. "Here, give me a hand, will you, doll?" she asked Bess, who in contrast to the reticence of the others took no pains to conceal her excitement. She made herself instantly available. "I'll give you two hands," she tittered. "Just show me where you want them."
Matt ignored the travesty, taking advantage of their distraction to attend to Evelyn and his own physical condition. His arm had lost its swelling and the wound had hardened into an uninflamed scab. He washed up and found a razor with which to shave.
He signaled Estelle to continue her entertainments while he moved about unobtrusively to examine the rooms of the house and opened several drawers from which he scavenged a map of the area, two twenty-dollar bills, and from among the assorted boxes of cartridges on a closet shelf an entirely unused supply of the caliber he required. He returned to the room with the others, to find Evelyn asleep and Estelle now entirely disrobed except for the high heels which she customarily retained in all her erotic interludes. She placed the hands of the fluttery blonde, fingers extended, directly upon the nipples of her breasts. "Now watch me move just the tips of them, the way they trained me when I was a stripper, so I could twirl them little tassels without moving the rest of me."
"She's doing it! She's doing it!" the blonde squealed, and she removed her fingers, lost in admiration of the objects of Estelle's feat of theatrical muscle control. "They're so beautiful-more beautiful than any I've ever seen," she exclaimed. "I could just-kiss them!" The words, which came of their own volition and gave voice to her forbidden thoughts, surprised the blonde, and she seemed dismayed until Estelle, with a gay laugh, preferred her abundant prizes for the salute of eager lips.
The blonde's excitement was almost uncontainable and, oblivious to the gawking expressions of the room's other occupants, she gave herself over totally to the impulses of her desire. She kissed, tugged, mouthed the breasts with an undiminished ardor until Estelle, wearying of the awkwardness of her standing position, began to move backward in the direction of an unoccupied chair. The blonde, like some rabbit led haplessly on by a succulent carrot, trailed after her, not once losing her hold on her savory target. Estelle sank into the chair, the spare figure falling forward directly upon her and between her smooth thighs. Her quickened breathing now audible to all, the blonde extended the field of her avid affections-down to the smooth concavity of Estelle's waist and then over the urgently heaving, undulent line of the cushioning belly, and finally, with a moan which measured the full depths of her desire, in between the jellied curves of the most delicate and delectable of flesh. Estelle pulled her head back and raised her arms, sliding down in the chair, her legs widening, straining for the succor of the honeyed mouth. Without forewarning, the blonde withdrew and leaped to her feet.
Estelle remained in that same yielding position of total compromise, her eyes closed and the full widespread, incomparable garden showing all of its ripest and most ravishing blooms. But so stunned were the blonde's companions, having never previously witnessed the intimate engagement of two females, that they remained rooted to their chairs, anxiously awaiting the events to follow.
If they were dumbfounded by the circumstances up to that point, the appearance of the blonde brought stupefaction. Her nakedness was not, in itself, for them an occasion for any great surprise. But her slim boyish figure, the meager lily cups of breasts, suddenly assumed a bizarre and awesome an aspect.
"Holy cow!" the small man cried out, an exclamation which ruptured the silence.
"That sure ain't no cow," Clement hollered and immediately tumbled into his uncontrollable spasms.
Estelle's eyes blinked open and centered upon the approaching blonde with an awakening interest. She reached out at once to seize and to guide the girl to those most tempting of all gates. The blonde, almost beside herself with anticipatory pleasure, had difficulty applying pressure of sufficient directness, and Estelle seized her by the hips, came farther forward, and raised up those large, columnar thighs in an anxious effort. They writhed together, the moth and the flame, until Estelle cried out.
Estelle's powerful bucking thrusts sent the blonde into clumsy movements that threatened to throw her off her feet. She was herself engaged, at the same time, her hand pressed against the summit of her own mound of Venus, in a frenzy of rubbing contortions. With her legs jerking spasmodically, all of this gave her the comical aspect of a grasshopper caught up in the toils of some monstrous consuming plant. Her action, despite the state of arousal which the entire spectacle induced, drove the others to laughter and all manner of bawdy comments. "The cricket climbed over the mountain-" sang the little man.
"Stop twitching that little can so we can see what's going on," Clem remarked, and his brother stood up at once, crying out, "I'll pin the tail of that little donkey!" He went immediately to the blonde. He seized her from the rear, separating her cheeks, and closed within her, immediately finding the mark. She began beating at him, with her fists striking behind him, angered by this divided state of arousal. Her plyings with Estelle, the fingerings of her own hand, and her grinding rearward movements, each had an independent rhythm which upset all the others. The result was a complete confusion which Estelle, unwilling to endure, ended by wrenching away. The comments and laughter, intermingled, continued to the point of hysteria. Until Estelle, driven to the fever pitch of desire and unable to clear her passion's barrier, stood up. "Come on, you sons of bitches, rouse yourselves!" She swung her leg over and came down upon Clement, pressing her belly against him and accepting him as she would a lamb brought to pasture. She gyrated hotly, appearing from the rear to be performing all the most titillating moves of the stripper in the process of engaging her audience.
He held to the seat briefly and then, kicking up his legs under the stress of his oncoming ejaculation, threw the chair off balance and sent both of them rolling on the floor. She made short shrift of the smaller man. Driven now more by despair at her own plight than by disgust at their incapacity, Estelle ignored the last of the triumvirate, who was still heaving between the angular legs of the pinned but disaffected blonde. Estelle went to Matt, carrying to him, as usual, the fevered body drawn on the rack of an unremitting passion. His face showed annoyance and then signs of an inward rage as he shoved Estelle's head downward over the deep chair where the blonde had joined with her. A vicious stinging slap across her bare behind commanded her to drop knee-deep into the chair and present herself for ritual crucifixion. Silently, steadily, with the punishing infighting of a professional boxer, he plied himself, carrying her with him up to one plateau, and on to the next, each time setting himself more determinedly for the rise just ahead. Only the sound of the impact of their bodies could be heard. Perspiration gathered in rivulets that overflowed the nape of his neck, beneath his armpits, following the sharply etched continuous line of his hard-driving back. Now it poured out of him, cascading down and exploding into the air in droplets at each convulsive thrust.
Now, from somewhere deep inside her, the whimpering began, a sound between that of an aching woman and a little-girl-lost desolation. She was not so active as in her encounters before where all of her sexual cravings burst outward like the clamor of a drum, pounding, pounding, pounding. But her ultimate wave, rising up over all, burst with galvanic fury and broke the back of the tempest. She shuddered now, maintaining her crouching, crushing posture, as if in obeisance, as if prayer. Rivulets were flowing now, outward, one on top of the other, out of the path of her vitals, along the length of her arms and legs, and outward.
Matt withdrew as abruptly as he had entered and, retaining her position on the chair, she sank down as if the fire which had engaged her total being had been put out. Matt backed up slowly and then turned away, his manhood now deeply reddened in the aspect of a warrior's fierceness. It was then that he saw Evelyn, awakened, her eyes holding him fixedly in focus. He turned away and adjusted his trousers.