Chapter 10

"What's so funny?"

"What?" Rod came to with a start and realized he must have been grinning at the Levi clad creature underneath all that straight blond hair. "Oh," he improvised. "Just remembering something. You know how old men's minds wander."

"No I don't," the girl -- what the hell was her name -- said. "And besides, you don't look like no old man to me."

Rod sighed. "Perhaps I'm not," he conceded. "But there's no getting away from the calendar and it's been thirty years since I was your age. I don't know how old you look," he added. "Do you have a face somewhere under all that hair?"

She shook her head and the straight blond hair spun outward like a coolie's hat. She parted it with a hand and a face emerged. It was a remarkably pretty little face, Rod suddenly realized. Beneath the face he could see two remarkably pretty little bumps in the front of her sleeveless blouse. When, he wondered, would girls ever learn. Men have been known on occasion to hide their lights under a bushel. Women invariably tend to hide theirs beneath something as inappropriate as a long sleeved high-necked blouse or, in this girl's case, beneath a cascade of all-concealing hair.

She could be anything, he guessed. Thirteen to sixteen -- even a year or two younger or older. With modern diets you never knew about girls.

She raised her arms again to struggle with her hair and abruptly he realized he was staring into an armpit which had yet to feel its first nick from a razor. And this child had wanted to sleep in his bed! She couldn't have meant it that way, he realized. She had just assumed with the egocentricity innate in any only child that he was going to move his tired old bones out onto the couch or the floor or anywhere, so long as she got the bed. Fuck her!

Or more correctly, keep his cotton picking hands off her!

"Needs washing," she was saying.

"Huh?"

"You don't ever listen, do you?"

"About as often as you're willing to listen to good sound advice," Rod admitted. "What were you saying?"

"My hair's all greasy. I spent two days on a bus and then before I could even get a shower Aunt Rose packed me off here. Do you have any shampoo?"

Rod did. He showed her the bathroom, the shampoo, and the towels. Then, remembering the size of that Alitalia bag the girl had brought, he rummaged around and found a clean terrycloth robe. It came to his knees. On this tiny girl it would drag the floor.

"Have you eaten?" he asked. The girl shook her head.

"Do you want to eat first or afterward?"

The girl gave him a startled glance and Rod suddenly remembered the day thirty years ago when his mind had tricked that same startled look from him when Myrt had asked the same question.

"Before or after you wash your hair," he explained.

"Oh! Afterwards, I guess." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. As the water started running he went into his tiny kitchen and surveyed the contents of his refrigerator, trying for some correlation between what he had and what a fifteen-year-old girl might want to eat.

Caviar? That was out. Yoghurt? Mentally he could already hear her 'yuch!' There was a three week old package of some totally indigestible 'breakfast squares' which one of his ladies had brought. There was a quart of milk left over from the last time he had made cafe au fait. He still had half a dozen eggs and some bacon. He shrugged and turned on the stove.

He was being unfair, he knew. Any other day in her life this might be a charming and well mannered little girl. How would he feel after two days on a bus and then a fast shuffle off to a stranger before he could even rinse off the grime? Suddenly he realized she really did need the bed. After two days on a bus the poor child must be exhausted. And he had been snapping at her. He would have to watch himself; turn on some of the charm that always brought the older women tumbling into his arms and eager to wrap their turgid tissues around his love muscle.

He heard the water stop running in the shower just as he was hooking bacon from the skillet. Thank god she wasn't going to spend three hours in there like some girls. He stuffed breakfast squares into the toaster and waited for the bathroom door to open before he started frying eggs. To his surprise it opened almost immediately and the girl emerged, head wrapped in a terrycloth turban, her just sprouting body enveloped from neck to ankle -- and considerably below the wrists -- in his terrycloth robe. "Smells good," she said as she sat at the table.

She ate ravenously, without complaining or picking at her food. "Got any coffee already made?" she asked.

Rod poured it and to his surprise the girl drank it black and without sugar. "Aaaaahhh!" she said. Abruptly he was reminded of happy, fuckloving Vera who must have looked rather like this girl, say, some twelve years ago.

"You must be pooped after two days on a bus," Rod ventured.

"I am."

He sighed. "Well, to tell the truth, I'm exhausted too. Had a busy morning. So if you don't mind perhaps we can both sleep." While the girl finished eating he found a pillow and a sheet and blankets and made up a place for her on the divan. "If you need anything just let me know," he said. "I'm going to bed too." The girl nodded and went on eating.

In his room, Rod began undressing. He supposed he ought to wear pajamas but he couldn't remember where they were since he never wore them when he was alone. What the hell? He had been imagining things. She was just a tired and, cranky little girl and she wanted to sleep and she would know better than to come barging into his room unannounced. He slipped out of his pants and pull-over and into bed. Drifting off to sleep he finally managed to remember the little blonde's name. It was Ellie.

Though no two of them can agree on exactly how it's done, most modern psychologists seem to think that dreaming is part of the mental process that sorts out each day's events and decides which are worthy of storage in the permanent memory bank and which go down the spout along with all the other short term projects like managing to remember a looked-up phone number long enough to dial it. Such being the putative processes of dreaming, it is not surprising that Rod's sleep was, immediately spiced by subjective and inaccurate re-runs of his morning's adventures.

There was a kaleidoscopic montage of women carefully peeling off pantyhose, followed by superimposed images of a thin, athletic Vera bouncing joyously up and down his greased pole while his Rambling Rose managed to violate Euclidean geometry by getting her busy mouth and tongue into the same space as Vera's affable ass. Meanwhile Rod was busy holding his breath while he nuzzled tits and belly of his Lady of the Lake. Behind it all loomed a darker image of some ancient and pre-logical medullar dream girl.

Slowly Rod drifted into half wakefulness and realized that in spite of being gray haired and forty-five, in spite of having fired one long hoarded load into the sheets in pursuit of that faceless, half grown female who haunted his psyche; and another parting shot down Rose's deep throat -- with a gentle bemusement and still only half awake, he discovered that there was a reason for the slight ache and throb in his crotch. Flat on his back in the darkened room, he was sleeping in a tent whose principal structural member was formed by a cock he would have sworn to be limber for at least two weeks.

Still half asleep, he wondered about that faceless sex symbol that haunted his subconscious, supplanting all the live, throbbing, fucking women who had filled his life for the last thirty years since that first time with Myrt, his impossibly plebian' yclept Lady of the Lake. A neighbour girl? A babysitter? Had some lovely unsung Lolita hovered over his crib and implanted her half-developed body into his subconscious as permanently as death and Texas jokes? There was something evocative about her blond headed immaturity. He had gone to see a bestseller spook raising movie about the improbable adventures of some Jesuit and felt a sudden frisson -- not of horror elicited by special effects photography, but rather by the tugging at some secret string in his psyche by a twelve-year-old blonde actress whose twelve year old hairdo managed to cover most of her face. It had been his Rambling Rose who had managed him into taking her to that movie -- who had been happily mystified at the way he had afterward fucked her to within an inch of her sorely gained self-possession. What, he wondered, would Rambling Rose have thought if she could read his mind and see the tousled twelve year old face superimposed on hers -- a face already blending into a still older image of his dream girl?

Floating halfway between sleep and wakefulness, Rod tried to structure his dream. It was useless after thirty years of failure to conjure a face onto his dream girl's lovely, just-budding body. But rather than welter in a sea of formless eroticism while his tired old cock still played Omar the Tentmaker, he struggled to recapture the events of that ineffable August day at the lake.

After giving him an underwater preview of possibilities, Myrt had walked home with him, had instructed him when and where to come for the second act in their erotic scenario. Rod had gone home and, to conceal his excitement and to keep his mother from dosing him with castor oil and chicken soup, had split wood and mowed the lawn. Not surprisingly all this exercise had put him to sleep.

Crimenentlies! Suddenly wide awake in the sweltering darkness, he knew from the total lack of cooling and cracking in the ancient frame house that it had to be past midnight. Myrt had told him to come at ten. Jesus, was she ever going to be mad! He wondered what time it was but Momma was a light sleeper and if he were to strike a match to check on the grandfather clock that ticked away in the downstairs hall she would be instantly downstairs with a rolled up newspaper to assault any prowler.

Probably, Myrt would have given up in disgust and gone to bed and to sleep hours ago. Criminy! What could he say to her tomorrow? What would a girl say if he told the truth, that he had found the prospect of her naked body so uninteresting that he had gone to sleep? It was unbelievable. Tonight of all nights in his fifteen years on this planet how could he have slept?

He knew better than to sit up in the sagging springed cot. Silently, he oozed out over the foot and crawled around the edge of the room past the squeaky boards and captured his pants. Moments later he was out the dormer window and down the drainpipe, hoofing his silent and barefoot way the block and a half down the alley to the backyard of Elton's store.

Once years ago Mr. and Mrs. Elton had kept an eighty pound English bulldog in the back yard. But Beans had gone on to bite that great Tramp's Ass in the Sky so now the store's backyard was unsupervised. Silently, Rod skinned over the fence and into what his bare feet told him must be a grown-over asparagus patch. He squatted in the darkness, trying to see something. The darkness was total. No matter how long he waited and squinted, he could see nothing.

Walking carefully, he stepped his cautious way through the asparagus until his bare feet found a pathway. Suddenly clouds blew away from the stars and he could see the upstairs window of the store's living quarters. But which window was Myrt's? The last thing he needed was to wake up old Mrs. Elton with her querulous voice and her endless ability to concern herself in what was none of her business. Nor, he decided on mature reflection, did he need old Mr. Elton prowling around the back yard with his twelve gauge, double barreled burglar-exerciser.

He squinted and tried to decide. Meanwhile another scud of cloud closed the moonless sky and he was bereft even of starlight. He sighed and began walking cautiously dawn the path toward the back of the store. He hadn't gone two steps before he bumped his knees into a wheel-barrow or some goddam thing left in the middle of the path. A hand came from the wheelbarrow and grabbed his leg.

Rod came as close as ever in his life to fainting. When his heart had settled down to a race again and he could breathe halfway normally he realized that the 'wheelbarrow' must be a folding cot. In those dear dead pre-air-conditioning days Myrt had beat the heat by sleeping under the stars in the back yard. Later, when he had his wits about him, plus enough experience in such matters to see the more obvious problems, Rod would come to appreciate the virtues of a folding canvas cot which, having no springs, does not lend itself to the rhythmic squeaking which tended to emanate from bedrooms in those days of the bare spring and unsprung mattress.

All of which had nothing to do with the situation of the moment: Creeping down the pathway in search of her room, he had encountered his Lady of the Lake on a cot in the backyard. She had grabbed him by the leg. Slowly, her hand was moving up his Levi-clad leg toward his cock.

Ruefully, Rod reflected that twelve hours ago he would not have believed such a thing -- would have been paralyzed and totally at a loss for what to do if a woman had grabbed his cock. But Rod was a quick learner. Distrusting the cot, he hopped around in the darkness shedding his Levis. Finally he had them off. He shucked his shirt and knelt in the grass beside the cot. It was still pitch dark but in less time than it takes to recount, Rod's busy hands had reconnoitered and evaluated the situation. His Lady of the Lake lay naked (he still didn't know the meaning of nude), stretched supine on a canvas cot. There was a sheet beneath her. There was nothing but clouds and starlight above her plump body.

Moving carefully, she edged over on the narrow cot, lying on her side, and made room for Rod and his rod. He scooted up beside her and discovered that a canvas cot, like a hammock, tends to dump everything into its central and lowest point. He lay on his side facing Myrt, his bare body pressed against hers, his hard throbbing cock digging at the threecomered fissure where two thighs become one belly. Jesus, did it ever feel good!

The memory of how good it had felt finally, after all the alarums and excursions, to stretch out in bed with Myrt of the jiggly tits and serene smile -- Myrt whose volcanic profile he had worshipped all that long hot summer -- the memory of a warm womanly body against his was suddenly so strong that Rod felt himself slipping out of his dream-awake half world as his reverie became unstructured. Suddenly he was wide awake, forty-five years old and gray haired. He was not alone.

There was somebody in bed with him!