Chapter 13

While she ran something blurred past her and reached the pickup just as the engine roared into life. The pickup tore across the yard and she saw the accomplice dangling from the door of the small truck. Then the truck skidded crazily and came to a stop. Ella was nearly out of breath but she hurried on. The blur was her beardless lover. He held a knife at the throat of the tire thief. There was a trickle of blood where he had held it close enough to encourage the man to make a full and complete stop.

Ella dithered. Finally she made herself get into the right hand door. She pulled her steak knife from her pocket. "Let's see whether you can get them all back on before we start carving!" she said, her voice grating shrill with excitement. The long-haired freckle-faced man in the driver's seat stared at her dumbly.

The boy took his knife from the man's throat. Very carefully, he began sawing at an ear. "That's just to get your attention," he said in a voice as silky as the lining to Satan's cloak. Still the man didn't move.

Ella knew what she ought to do. Could she? She grasped her steak knife carefully so that not more than the tip of the blade would go in. Then she pushed it into his ribs. "We're in something of a hurry," she said, "But not so much that you can't drive back slowly and carefully."

Blood was streaming from his side by the time the thief had replaced the first tire. He was looking gray and frightened. Ella wondered if she had dug the knife in too deep. She wished she had been less impetuous. By now half the diners in the restaurant had come out to watch the thief put the tires back on. She wondered if any of them had bothered to call the police.

"No way, lady," the giant who had warned her said. "We been losin' tires around here for a while. Once he's put yours back on we're gonna get a few thousand dollars' use out of that bastard before the law gets him."

In spite of herself Ella felt sorry for the gray-faced man. But not sorry enough, she decided, to let him go before he had finished zapping down the last lug bolt with his air wrench. Finally, stumbling with terror and fatigue, the thief dropped the heavy air wrench. A knot of ripped-off drivers formed around him and began moving toward the Jack pines at the edge of the parking plaza. Ella shuddered.

Everything had been so nice. She and the boy were going to have a nice quiet time with plenty of hot water and a nice wide bed. Now everybody was crowding around to congratulate her and the boy who was obviously wishing he could attract less attention.

Shit! Now what was she going to do? She couldn't walk into the motel room with this boy-not with everybody standing here watching.

She felt like crying. Everybody was watching her and the boy. Probably they thought he was her son. But what would they think when the two of them went into that motel room and locked the door?

It was funny. There were a million simple solutions and she was too disappointed and too confused to think of one. The boy was not. I'll sleep in the truck, Ma," he said, loud enough for everybody to hear. "If you want anything just flash your lights." He gestured toward the waiting motel room.

Ella gave a little inner sigh of relief and nodded. She went into' the motel room and collapsed in a chair. It was several minutes before she realized she still held the steak knife in her clenched fist. The boy's gesture had been practical, she knew-even if she had never been a "ma." And-it made sense for him to sleep in the truck if tire thieves were that rampant around here. There was only one thing wrong with the proposition! Ella didn't want to sleep alone in here. She wanted the boy in here, too.

What the hell time was it? Her watch had stopped. She searched the room and found a phone. She dialed the motel operator and asked the time.

"Five-thirty," a prim voice told her.

"Thanks. Could you call me at six?" Ella asked.

She wondered where the day had gone. She'd slept a good part of it away-and fucked away the rest. So why was she so sleepy? Maybe, she guessed, because she hadn't been sleeping worth a damn since old Fred died. Today was the first real rest she'd gotten despite the storm and all the driving. She wondered how tired the boy was. It would be just like that maddening lovely boy to go to sleep and actually spend the whole night in the truck.

And the funny thing was, Ella didn't really care. She was so tired, so sleepy. She was reminded of a bumper sticker she had seen one day on the road: SEX RELIEVES TENSION. Sighing, she began to undress. Then she realized she hadn't brought all that many clothes with her for this run. She filled the basin with water and rinsed out her things. With bra and panties festooned over chair backs and mirrors, she finally finished undressing. Naked, she slipped into the king-sized bed. Her head had hardly touched the pillow before she was asleep. Falling asleep, she wondered if she had left the door unlocked for the boy-whatever was his name? But she was too sleepy to get up and check.

It has been bruited about by those who are supposed to know that dreaming is the brain's way of processing the day's experiences for orderly filing in the memory bank. Which may be true if one is a practicing psychologist and awake. It is definitely not true if one happens to be a female truck driver who is asleep and who has just spent a large part of the previous day getting fucked in various positions.

Ella dreamed many and increasingly weird dreams of studs who came at her from all angles: studs with tire clubs for cocks; stiff-pricked young men who could put it into her so far she could feel it almost coming out of her mouth; strange young visions of male eroticism with eggbeater heads on their hammers. She dreamed of being fucked by tire thieves. She even dreamed of being fucked by balding, red-faced Al who had sent her on this run. She owed him thanks for that, she guessed. Well-meaning Al had done her a bigger favor than-he could ever guess. Meanwhile Ella dreamed once more of being hosed for a solid hour by old Fred. Then inexplicably she was his other wife at the other end of the line and she was also getting hosed by a man who had two cocks and a woman on each side of him.

Even in her dream she began to wonder if it were not possible to dream of something besides fucking. But her subconscious could find no subject more all-absorbing than the feel of something hard and male going into something soft and feminine.

Slowly, her dreams began to regress to her childhood, to a dimly proto-sexual era when conversations with adults were filled largely with sudden reticences and unexplained amusements.

It was as if there had never been a time in her life when every thought did not revolve around men-a man, and how she could maneuver him between her legs. Simple straightforward memory said she had been a virgin until she married old Fred. But in the toils and coils of her involuted subconscious Ella knew perfectly well that, despite Christian dogma, there are degrees of virginity-that it is not quite the on-or-off, yes-or-no that renders absurd such expressions as "a little bit pregnant."

In a strict sense it was true that old Fred's was the first cock up her pussy. He had broken her maidenhead, which had given him eighteen years of material for cocktail party bragging. But to be first down the golden road to romance does not of necessity imply that the possessor of an unbroken hymen had had no prior sexual experience. She remembered when she was twelve, and the superb forty-twos that were to adorn her adult body were mere buds which gave a delightfully new shape to the tee-shirt abandoned by a distant male relation in the navy.

He must have been a small man for the tee-shirt did not fit all that loosely on twelve-year-old Ella-which fact was remarked upon by her uncle George in those dear dead days before the clothing industry had stumbled on such absurdities as the "training bra" to increase their already swollen revenues.

"Another six months and you'll be ready for one," Uncle George had remarked one day while he had been pitching hay down into the mangers of the stud farm.

"Ready for what?" Ella had asked. She didn't get out to the stud farm all that often and at age twelve the great sweaty smelling, hairy animals had suddenly become fascinating in ways she could not quite understand.

"A boobie trap," George had explained.

Ella's wide-eyed mystification had elicited a sudden glint from Uncle George's roving eye. He was an odd, silent man who seldom went to town and always seemed more at home in the stable than the house, which was presided over by Aunt Jane whose sexuality had all been sublimated into the sublime creations of another crypto sex symbol. Ella had often wondered in later life if Aunt Jane had physically resembled Betty Crocker.

But at age twelve with a just budding pair of jugs she was more concerned with extracting some meaning from Uncle George's sometimes elliptical conversation.

Not unkindly, the balding man who indulged her every whim around the horses explained in simple words what a boobie trap was.

"Oh," Ella had observed. "But golly, I don't need a bra yet."

"That's a matter of opinion," Uncle George had replied sagely.

"Well, gee," Ella had said despairingly, "How can I tell when?"

Smiling a peculiarly forced and wooden smile, her uncle had replied, "Well, there is a secret way and if you promise never to tell anybody I'll tell you what it is."

"Why do I have to promise?"

"It's something only grownups are supposed to know. If anybody knew I'd told a little girl I'd get in trouble."

Uncle George was a nice man so Ella didn't want that to happen. "I promise," she said.

"Cross your heart and hope to die?"

Ella crossed her heart and the motion brought out clearly the outline of one pouting breast bud, its perky nipple in rampant erection from rubbing against the tee-shirt. Uncle George's face was reddening and he seemed about to have one of his asthma attacks. "How can I know when I need a bra?" she had pressed.

Licking his lips and choosing his words with a solemnity to fit the occasion, her uncle had replied, "Whenever they're too big for a man's hand."

Ella had had not the slightest idea of what he was leading up to. "I don't get it," she said.

Uncle George extended his palms. "Are they this big?" he asked.

"Golly no," Ella said truthfully.

Uncle George was doubtful. Ella put her twelve-year-old hands over her twelve-year-old tits. "See?" she asked.

Uncle George's trousers were giving him trouble. He hitched at his belt and twisted and stuffed his hand deep down the front of his pants to untangle his shirt tail. "Uh-I'm afraid it doesn't work that way," he explained.

"Well how?" she asked with a rising note of despair in her voice.

"I said a man's hands."

"Oh."

Before she could reach a decision Uncle George had put down his pitchfork and moved around behind her. Since she had sat on his lap for as long as she could remember there was nothing especially startling about his arms encircling her from behind.

She felt his callused palms and fingers cup her budding breasts.

He spent some time apparently trying to decide whether they were yet big enough for a bra. Clearing his throat, he finally said, "Hard to tell with this teeshirt in the way."

Once more the decision was taken from Ella's hands. She was wearing the oversized tee-shirt loose over a too-tight pair of short shorts her mother had been trying to give away for nearly a year. The teeshirt hung so low on her slight form that at first glance it seemed as if she wore nothing else.

Uncle George's" enterprising hands lifted its hem, slipped up the smooth, still slightly bony front of her twelve-year-old body, and then he was cupping her jutting little jugs without the interference of a layer of cloth. He ran his horny hands over her nipples, rock-hard from this unaccustomed exercise. He ran questing fingertips over the perfectly symmetrical cones of her immature breasts, still totally non-sagging-tiny twin volcanoes imbued with the firmness of youth, still swelling, still growing, still amazingly tender behind their unblemished, newly stretched skin.

Ella felt a sudden warm glow of something she would someday learn to call sensuality steal over her growing body. She felt like turning around and making Uncle George sit down on a milking stool so she could sit on his lap, straddle him, face him, and rock back and forth. Suddenly she felt a frantic need to open her legs and scoot back and forth along the rough denim of his overalls.

But Uncle George still grasped her from behind. She could feel the front of his pants against the tiny roundnesses of her twelve-year-old ass-could feel an inexplicable bulge in the front of his trousers as if the stem of his corncob pipe were rubbing against her. His hands roved over the front of her body, taking inventory of her twelve-year-old treasures. The silence between them was growing prolonged. "Are they big enough?" she finally asked.

"Can't tell yet," Uncle George said in a strained voice. "Give me another minute."

Which did not strike Ella as unreasonable, though she did wish she could turn around and sit astraddle his lap. She wondered what he would say if she were to voice this request.