Chapter 1
Clara lay on her back in the classic missionary position: knees flexed, thighs spread wide apart to receive him. She couldn't see his face but she knew it wasn't Harry. She could feel that. Whoever he was, he had it in, had bottomed out on his first stroke, and now he knelt poised between her thrumming thighs, the tip of his hot throbbing hammer barely parting her nether lips.
She heard him take a breath as he gathered forces for his first full-depth, uninterrupted plunge into the tunnel of love. It was going to be good. She knew it. Already her belly was twisting, passion winding up her insides like the rubber bands in a toy airplane, twisting her up slowly so she could let go with a joyous gut-wrenching whirrrr! Then without warning there was a sudden WHIRRRR! like the end of the world.
Clara gave a little shriek and jumped. She reached for the alarm and managed to knock the clock over. Muttering like an angry Druid, she finally got the incessant whirring to stop. She sighed and got up. Her cunt was sopping. She was putting on her shower cap when she realized it was Saturday. She didn't have to keep her. hair nice for the office. Today, she remembered, she was going to clean out the trailer.
She showered and shampooed her not-yet-graying auburn hair. Towelling off, she could not resist the temptation to wipe steam from the full-length mirror on the door. She was only thirty-nine, with a bust to match. Her waist was still small, her gently rounding belly unblemished by stretch marks. Why?
To hell with him. It had been nearly a year since he'd bugged off with another woman -- a woman with the same straight auburn hair, a woman no younger than Clara, and not half as good-looking!
She stood on tiptoe, studying the line of her legs and ass. Men still turned to look when she walked down the street. Everyone except that louse of a Harry. Why?
Actually, she reminded herself, after twelve years Harry had turned into something of a pain in the ass. He'd been passed over for promotion, was slowly turning into an alcoholic, and she had sadly come to the conclusion that she no longer loved him, that she would have to leave him -- and then without warning the son of a bitch had gone and left her! Why?
Why think about it? She didn't really want him back. She found an old, paint-stained pair of shorts and a halter and began making coffee. Which was another pain in the ass but Harry had had such a thing about hating instant coffee that even now she found herself making a potful of the real thing to go with her genuine margarine and plastic English muffin.
She looked out the back door. Somewhere the lawn mower was buried in all that grass. One of these days ... Christ! She needed a man around the place. She wondered what had ever happened to that card she had thumb tacked to the bulletin board in the friendly neighbourhood supermarket. Didn't boys cut grass for spending money any more? Stop complaining, she told herself. Sighing, she began ploughing a wake through the grass toward the trailer on the back of the lot. Her garage faced the street and Clara didn't get out into the backyard more than once a month. She wondered if the tires were still any good.
Actually, if she remembered right -- and how could she forget -- she and Harry had been out for a long weekend only a few days before she had come home from work one night and found a note instead of a husband. She had left it fairly clean. Shouldn't take more than a dusting and she could advertise it and maybe use the proceeds to go on a cruise and meet an unattached man and --
Well damn! Had Harry forgotten to lock it? Had it been open back here facing the alley for over a year? Why, anybody could have gotten into --
She was inside and had closed the door behind her before she realized it was not exactly a question of somebody could have gotten in. There were brimming ashtrays. The blankets had been taken from the closet and were on the bed. There were dirty dishes in the sink and empty cans in the trash bin.
With a growing sense of outrage, Clara gradually realized that this was not a one-night stand. Somebody had moved in and was living here-living in her backyard and in her trailer! She supposed she ought to have been frightened. After all, she might have come blundering in here and caught him -- caught him naked. She might have caught him doing anything.
There was an unmistakable male smell about the place. She opened the closet and found an often-washed shirt on a hanger. Crumpled in the bottom of the closet was a clean pair of Levis. She held them up to her waist. Not a very big man, she guessed. Hardly more than a boy.
She looked around for more evidence. Common sense could tell a great many things from a few clues. She already knew that if he had a girl, she had not been here for a long time. Pecker tracks on the sheet suggested that any young man who was having wet dreams was not being visited by any girl --perfumed or otherwise. Some drop-out, she supposed. She checked the butts in the overflowing ashtrays. Some were hand rolled, but Clara knew tobacco when she smelled it. He must be straight. If he was rolling his own out of tobacco, he had to be broke. She gave a grim laugh. Why else would he. be living this way?
Picking away at the back of her mind was another reason why a man might be living this way. He might be in hiding. He might be from the road camp a few miles out of town. He might be from the funny farm in the opposite direction. He might be ... He might be hiding in the bathroom waiting to grab me and rape me.
But Clara was not the kind of woman who turns to jelly at the thought of trouble. She got the butcher knife from next to the sink and opened the bathroom. Feeling foolish as she looked into the tiny cubicle, she turned and put the knife away. Had he gone for good?
The soup and bean cans were not all that old. There was half a loaf of bread not more than a day old. He'll be back, she knew. To hell with him. She was plowing through the tall grass, heading back toward the house and the phone to call the police when she changed her mind. Instead, she went back and found paper. With a back slanting feminine hand she wrote, "Clean everything up before you leave. The police will be around soon."
And then she went back once more toward the house. The son of a bitch had dirtied it up. Let's see if he cleaned up or if he just took off and left her to clean up the mess, like Harry. Halfway back to the house she stumbled over the lawn mower. Nursing a bruised shin, she snarled, "If I get my hands on him, he's going to mow the lawn too!"
Back in the house she sat and poured a second cup of coffee and tried to think calmly. Out this way on the edge of town she had neighbours, but they weren't all that close. The house on one side was a hundred yards away. The one on the opposite side was even farther. If he turned out to be big ... she remembered the size of the frayed Levis. If he turned out to be mean -- or strong, or if he had a gun or knife ...
Damn Harry! If it hadn't been for his crazy idea about raising chickens she'd have been living in a condominium somewhere in town, or at least somewhere closer to the base. She half smiled at the memory of how the chicken-raising venture had come to an abrupt end the day she had killed, scalded, plucked and gutted a chicken, then explained to Harry that from now on that was what he was going to do to every goddam chicken that didn't come from the supermarket wrapped in plastic.
But Harry had left her a few useful things when he bugged out with that other bitch. Somehow that didn't sound quite right. Anyway, Harry had left her some hardware. She went to her bedroom and took out the .45. It was loaded. Harry had taught her to use it. He had also explained to her that the nearly half-inch piece of lead had been designed especially to knock hard-to-stop men on their asses.
She would keep an eye on the trailer from here. Give whoever was in there an hour to clean up and if he wasn't out by then she'd see if a 1911 model Colt .45 calibre automatic pistol's noise was not sufficient to speed him on his way.
She rummaged through Harry's closet and sure enough, his binoculars were still there. She spread the slats on the venetian blind and checked the trailer. There was no sign of life.
I'll catch him and I'll make him undress and I'll be wearing my best shorts and halter and his thing'll come up and he'll be so embarrassed and I'll humiliate him and I'll let him get so close to me and I'll, lead him on and make him think I'm going to let him do it and just when he's helpless I'll --
Abruptly Clara snapped out of her reverie. What was wrong with her? Whoever that was out there in the trailer, it wasn't Harry. It had to be some poor luckless bum. Make him clean it up and send him on his way. She checked the trailer with binoculars again. Nothing.
She had lived in this house for almost three years and still knew nothing about her neighbours. It was not a healthy way of life for a single woman, she realized. She ought to get to know them. There might be a time when she would need a friendly hand. She turned the binoculars toward the nearest house a hundred yards away. From the kitchen window she could only see a comer. There were shadows in the only window she could see.
She finished her lukewarm coffee and padded off to her bedroom, still carrying the binoculars. Suddenly she realized she could see the whole house from this window. She worked the glasses between a couple of slats and focussed.
Well, how about that!
Had she managed to live here three years without discovering that her nearest neighbours were nudists? Even if she was gone all day working and often half the night too, she should have guessed something was odd -- that high fence and all.
Her split-level house was just high enough for her to see over the fence from her bedroom window. There was a young man and a young woman. They were naked. Then abruptly as the girl lay down on the bed Clara realized they were not necessarily nudists. No more than everyone was in his bedroom or under his clothes. But the girl was stretching out on the bed and the nude man was planning to do what nude men in bedrooms usually do to nude women -- when they have magnificently life sized erections.
Damn! she thought, is that stud ever hung! He moved past her field of vision and all she could see was a pair of hairy legs. Then abruptly a pair of slim, depilated legs flew skyward, waved joyously for a moment or two, and wrapped around the other legs. Clara sighed and went back to the kitchen. What business of hers was it what other people did in their bedrooms? But they might at least have sense enough to draw the blinds. ...
She checked the trailer again and -- Something was different! She squinted, trying to focus the binoculars better, trying to divine just what it was that was different. Was he there? She wondered if she ought to go out and check. Better not. She had told him to clean up and get out. Give him a chance first.
Squinting through the binoculars, she could not guess what it was that was different about the trailer. The windows were still partly opened as she had left them, to ventilate the male smell. The curtains were unchanged. The roof vent was open. What was it? After a minute she put down the glasses and studied the trailer in its proper perspective. Now what was different about it?
It was nearly a minute before she realized what was right there in plain sight for her to se. A shirt and a pair of Levis were spread out to dry on the bramble next to the trailer.
He's there! I can go out and give him hell, make him scrub every spot and speck away. Make him mow the grass. Make him take his clothes of and ... She put the binoculars down and suddenly realized she hadn't actually checked out the pistol for months. Remembering how the trailer door had been left open, she wondered how many other Freudian slips were lying about this house like banana peels, waiting for her to step on. It would be just like her to chase out there with an empty gun and create a scene and then find herself up against a man with a loaded gun a loaded gun a loaded gun a --
The Colt was clean, still well oiled when she squinted down the barrel, and the clip was full. She put it back together and, after a moment's hesitation, pulled back the slide and let it snap forward. Now all she had to do was thumb down the safety, pull the trigger, and she could put several pieces of lead into a man before he could fire a single burst from his -- what in Christ's name was wrong with her? Couldn't she think of any thing else today?
Then Clara realized what had set her off. She'd come awake halfway through that recurrent dream. It was natural, she supposed, that any healthy, well-built thirty-nine-year-old woman would dream about doing it -- about fucking, she mentally amended. Why mince words? And then she'd seen the couple next door getting ready to tear off a piece. She hadn't had a cock inside her since nearly a year ago, since that louse of a Harry had run off with another bitch -- damn it! Why did she have to keep saying it that way? Oh well, she philosophized. Once she sold the trailer she could go off on a cruise and find some widower or ...
There was a knock on the back door.