Chapter 11
A moment later, Al Park came up the stairs, his mind occupied intently on some thoughts so that he didn't see the group in the hall until he reached the top.
"Are we having a convention?" he asked, "or is this the welcoming committee?" Then, without waiting for anyone to answer him, "Hi, P.T.! This is the moment I've been waiting for all week."
"Hello, Al," Perry answered. "I want you to meet Marty Brandon. Marty, this is Al Park."
They shook, hands, while Margaret and Jamie stood by.
"Well," Al said, "which apartment are we going into? Mine or yours?"
No one answered the question, and Perry wondered how much of a worse situation they were about to get into.
"Is this some new kind of guessing game?" Al wanted to know.
"Your place is locked from the inside," Margaret offered, "and there's a bit of an upset in mine."
Al turned to his door. "Who locked it?" He looked down at the white mat. "Vicky?"
"I guess so," Margaret answered.
"Why, for God's sake? Just because she's got Joe in there?" Al's tone was simple annoyance, nothing else.
"We don't know."
Al knocked on the door. "Vicky? This is Al. Would you mind opening the door?"
In spite of Al's nonchalant attitude, Perry felt himself tense.
A moment later, the door swung open.
"Hello, Al," Vicky said. "Why don't you all come in?"
She was fully dressed, in another neat outfit. As they walked into the white room, Perry could see Joe stretched out on one of the couches along the side. He was wearing a pullover knit sport shirt and neat plaid Bermuda shorts, looking as cool and unrumpled as
Vicky.
Was it just possible that they had done nothing? As Al had just said, maybe this was some new kind of game: Let Everyone Use Their Imaginations, and Picture Whatever Their Dirty Minds Could Come Up With As Having Taken Place Behind the Locked Door.
It had certainly convinced Olivia, and Perry, and likely the twins and Jamie, too. They hadn't appeared to be acting in their reactions. There was something sick about it, if it were a joke. Sicker than if they had actually been balling themselves silly. Worse than sick. It had a vicious quality.
Vicky had said that Olivia hated her. Was it possible that she had trumped up this situation just to get back at her? It made a kind of twisted sense that way, but what was Joe's part in the bargain? What kind of promises had Vicky made to him?
The more he learned about some of these people, the less Perry thought of them. Perhaps, his mistake was in thinking that because they were friends of Al, they had the same depth of character and purpose; the same aims, the same qualities of easy humanity. Al was the only reason he had come back here, and Perry was going to make damn sure he got to spend most of the evening talking with him.
"Come on, Al," he said, after they had all left their shoes outside. "Let's go off in a corner. I've got some things I want to get off my chest. I think now I'm ready to do it."
Al led the way to the front corner of the room, asked Vicky to bring them beers, and settled himself next to Perry. Marty followed them.
"You sound like you're the one who needs to do the talking," he said, "so go ahead."
It was like plunging into cold water.
"I don't know how you do it, Al, but you are able to read me like an open book. You knew right off last week that something was bothering me. Maybe, if I hadn't pooped out so soon, I would have been able to tell you about it then. Maybe I just wasn't able to tell anyone."
"But you are now."
"Yes. Else I wouldn't be here." He marshaled his thoughts. "In high school, I always felt safer when you were around. You know now, and you knew then, that it was tougher for any black guy in ah integrated school. You also knew how to make it easier for me. I appreciated that quality in you more than anything else during those years.
"But, once I left high school, I didn't have that protection any more. At first, I thought I wouldn't need it. You come across so strong with me, I took it for granted that the rest of the world was full of Al Parks, too. It came as an awful shock to me in college to find out that wasn't even partially true.
"If I had gone to a college in Alabama, I couldn't have run smack into more hard-core prejudice than I did in that Ohio institution.
The worse part about it, Al, is that it was disguised prejudice. Everyone who hated you acted so damn gentlemanly about it. I almost expected some of them to say, 'Gee, Perry, I'm really so sorry you're not white. It's not your fault, and it's not mine; but of course, we know the rules, and no matter how much we don't like you, we'll never say so openly.
"And, on top of that, there were a few of the professional blacks among the students. The ones who cry loudest about equal opportunity, but spend most of their time and energy trying to create a separate black college inside the white one with Black Studies, Negro History, and African traditions. I don't fit with that either.
"So I left the school, and that was about the best thing I ever did for myself. It was rotten to the core on both sides of the race question, absolutely polluted."
Al nodded his assent, and launched into a digression on the need for equality to be living and free rather than in statutes in some law book. Perry drifted from the speech. As much as he liked Al, his anger at the memories his talking had stirred in him made him recall all the bitterness he had when he stepped onto that train for the ride home. He had taken a sleeper for the night journey, a luxury he hoped would help sooth the anger that teemed in his heart--.
Before he went to bed he decided to have a snack, and he headed for the section of the train where he had last seen the vendor whose prices were three times what he would pay on the street. But he was hungry, and cost did not matter.
On the way back to his roomette he bumped into a woman who was slightly older than him. The smile on her face let him know she did not mind his doing that, and when she pressed her hand into his own he knew she wanted to do more than talk to him. His cock rose in his pants, and he asked her if she wanted to visit him in his room.
"Mine might be better," she said. "Why don't you come down and see."
"All right," he acquiesced. He followed her to the car where she was for the night. When she opened the door he saw she had a full room and all the trimmings, that her furnishings were much better than his. Where had a black woman gotten the money for a deal like this?
He did not ask her. That might be out of line, for she might want to keep it quiet. Anyway, she had asked him there herself, so he knew she would not charge. She just liked him. After a few drinks she loosened up. She sat close to him, rubbing her body against his, making him well aware that he was a man alone in a room with a delicious young woman who wanted his cock.
He kissed her passionately, grabbing her and pulling her to himself while he wiped his tongue across her outer lips and thrilled her with his succulent caresses. The sheer pleasure she got from that registered in her body with jerking and squeals that he loved to notice.
She was a real woman. When he undressed her he stared at her fantastic tits. They were the biggest things he ever had seen, bulging from her chest like black smooth melons topped with dark bing cherries of delight. When she moved, all the massed flesh in her boobs shook eagerly from side to side.
Her body line was curved along the shape he liked to see. Her waist was trim and narrow and her ass stuck out behind her like a little child's does. Her hips were broad, encompassing all his view as he stared at her. The fragile lines of her face drew his attention; also, and he knew she was something special.
But the best thing about her was her cunt, that hairy doored passage that beckoned his cock to come on in and enjoy itself. She was a real whore in the sense of the word that he had once heard someone educated use it, a woman who liked to fuck, not for the money, not for the gain, but for the sheer pleasure she could get from it, and she cared little about whose cock was giving her her glory.
He was naked, too, and he noticed she took in his flesh with her eyes as he was doing to hers. She said no more than he did about her thoughts, which was nothing, but when he pounced on her and began kissing her with the raging desire that bubbled in him, he knew he was with a woman who liked what she was.
Her kisses rained pleasure across his face. She caressed his lips with her oral member, smoothing its fleshy warmth along his lines, thrilling him with the delightful pleasures that gave to him.
His fingers found her clit. He worked with all his skill at that member, twirling it between his digits, rubbing it back and forth while she shook in pleasure, wiggling it playfully from side to side, and drawing it slightly upwards while he held it closely in his grasp.
She screamed with delight, and he worried she was going to attract someone, but no one ever came. If she was heard, her screams were ignored completely. He was glad for once that people might not care.
His touches to her clit soon moved to farther inside her snatch, wiping against her walls, thrilling her to endless pleasure while he plunged his fingers farther into the sweltering caverns of her delight.
His touch at her walls drove her mad. He knew she wanted more and more pleasure for herself, so he slid his body along hers until his mouth was in her crotch. His nose was so close to her cunt that the odors from its juices drifted into his nostrils with each breath that he took.
His face pressed closer to her seat of pleasure. The smell from her passages soaked into his brain, filling him with more and more desire to screw her. He lapped at her cunt with his tongue, sending it far past the hairy door, tasting the delicious juices she gave to him when he did that. Over and over he rammed his oral member into her warm walls, rejoicing in the taste of her lubricants that ran fast and hard from her walls.
His teeth caught in her cunt hairs, sometimes breaking off the tips of the more fragile ones. There was in his mind a feeling of strength and manliness to be there with her fucking her like he was doing. The wonderful smell from her cuntal walls still lingered in the air trapped between her cunt and his face, and it drove him to minister to her with more lust than before.
His tongue swirled along her passages, seeking out the places where she loved best to be touched, lingering there while she shook and arched her back with pleasure. The wild feeling of her membranes against his tongue made him aware that he was with a true woman, a woman whose cunt was a cunt that liked to be used.
Over and over he whipped his tongue from his parted teeth and played at her cuntal walls. Her thrashing about added to the rocking motion of the train to give him a feeling almost like he was floating rather than riding in a line of cars. His tongue went from her cunt to her clit, there wiping up against her fold of skin innumerable times.
Where before she had felt pleasure, she now felt supreme delight, for he had a touch with his tongue that drove her clit to distraction.
His caresses there had her back permanently arched, and her breathing was hard, almost non-existent, though, when a really big jolt of pleasure hit her frame.
With unceasing devotion he lapped at her clit. He was so good that she came from that alone, creaming her luscious fluids into his face where they were lapped up quickly by his well-trained tongue. His taste buds were soothed by the many delicious flavors that combined to make her own brand of come.
He sucked her pussy dry of all her come before he returned to her face, kissing her passionately, getting his cock in position to blast into her cunt. The sheer delight he felt at being with her naked flesh rambled like wildfire through his body.
He smashed his cock against her well lubricated walls, sending it all the way to the hilt on the first stroke. The wonderful feelings that rippled through him plunged him into a realm of salacious titillations. His huge cock thrust into that honey hole she carried between her legs in exact rhythm to the contractions and expansions of her serpentine walls.
Unbelievable pleasure ran through him while he damned the opening to her channels with his massive dick. This was a great fuck, and he savored all the traces of it that fled to other parts of his body.
When he came, his ass bucked forward in a single lurch that held him tight against her hips while he poured his hit gism into her pussy. She could feel the blasts that hit her walls, for after each one she grunted in sensual pleasure.
He spurted his ball juice from the tiny hole in the tip of his prick until there was not a drop left inside him. She came a few seconds after he finished, and he witnessed the delight that she suffered at his hands another time.
They fucked the rest of the night, and he was filled with all the pleasures he could imagine. She bid good-bye to him before he reached New York, but he never forgot the fun he had with her.
Perry came out of his remembrances. He heard Marty talking to Al, Marty, who could hold a thing inside him until it was about to burst, then he had to spit it out. Perry recognized the story. He had lived it with Marty, and he was none too proud of what had happened.
"There were anti-personnel explosives," Marty said as he talked on. "They would be strung in sets between two trees, across likely paths of patrols, but always in high undergrowth or grass."
They were made and set up in a way which meant they would explode if someone broke the thin, tough vine cord used to mount them. Because of the height at which they were placed, they had earned a couple of names which are rather brutally descriptive. We called them 'Christine Jorgensens' or 'Fuck-Offs.' They were aimed directly at a soldier's crotch, and those that didn't die from having their genitals smashed to hell probably wished they had They were tiny, almost impossible to see, and deadly.
"But, their use was confined almost entirely to one strip on the map, most likely the work of one VC moving back and forth in an area of jungle he knew well. We were stationed right at one end of that strip, and every one of our patrols were trained in techniques for avoiding these booby traps, and possibly exploding them at a safe distance. Once the connective cord was broken, all the little mines attached to it would go off at the same time.
"On one of our daylight patrols, we found the Charlie who was stringing up these rotten little gadgets. We didn't know who we had come across at first. We had found a young native woman who was apparently lost trying to make her way from one local village to the next.
"We damn near let her go, except the Vietnamese interpreter got suspicious of something she said in answering one of his questions. He said he thought we should search her, just to be sure.
"They don't wear very much in that climate, so we told her to strip down, and went through what she was wearing almost stitch by stitch. We took our time at it because she looked a hell of a lot better in the raw, and it had been some time since any of us had been within shouting distance of a woman.
"It was our horniness which exposed her, Marty bit his lips, "and a lot more. One of the guys could speak enough of the language to ask her if she would like to make some American dollars by taking on a few of the guys before she headed home. She went into a irage, and tried to run off. Two of the guys caught her easily. She looked as if she were trying to cover her snatch, with her hand to protect herself, but one of them saw her drop something down between her feet. It was one of the tiny mines. There were more of them up inside of her.
"I have never seen men change so completely in just a matter of minutes. They surrounded her like a pack of hunting animals. The interpreter began his questioning, but he couldn't get anything from her that made sense. Where did she get the explosives? Who did she report to? What village did she live in? How many others did she work with? She just stood there, stark naked and defiant, making idiotic answers in a mocking way that the Orientals must have invented. The interpreter said he thought it would be best to take her back to the headquarters, and turn her over for interrogation.
"One of the guys said, 'I've got a better idea. Let's fuck the information out of her.'
" "The hell with the information,' another joined in, 'let's just get the screwing.' But the first man was serious. Deadly serious, I suppose I should say. 'Let's give it back to her right where she's been giving it to the guys. Right in the crotch. Let's give her a hundred strokes for every guy she's killed, and a thousand for every one she's ruined for the rest of his life. Let's teach her to appreciate what a precious thing a man's dick is.'
"When the sergeant said, 'Why not,' it began-
"There were ten of us Marines, and the Vietnamese interpreter. At first, two or three guys at a time held her down, while the others took turns getting into her and getting their rocks off. I had never seen a gang-bang before, and I found the idea of it kind of exciting.
"By the time all of us had it once, the one who had made the suggestion was up there ready for another round. But, now, they tied her down, which gave everyone more freedom.
"It took longer for most of the guys to get their loads off the second time, and it was during that time I began to sense the strange mood which was developing out there in the jungle. One or two of the guys had completely stripped off their uniforms, working themselves up into a fury of sex and anger. As each guy remounted the girl, the rest of them became some kind of insane cheering section, urging him on to an ever-more violent tempo.
"Although we were all aware of the blood all over her legs, the scratches and bruises on her body, and her hysterical moaning, not one of us hesitated to take his place in the strict descending order of military rank to fuck her more brutally than the man before.
"When she finally did begin to talk, we had to pull the guy out of her who was in the saddle at the moment, and shake him up a bit to bring him around to something approaching normality. The interpreter, who had only gone one time, was jabbering away, getting the information she had to give, mingled with pleas to let her go.
"During this time, the rest of us were trying to make ourselves back into soldiers and human beings. We suddenly realized we were on patrol in enemy territory. Every one of us could have been shot to hell if a VC patrol had come along in the two hours or so we had been there. We may have resumed the role of soldiers, but I, for one, have never really felt like a whole human being since. I lost my pride that day, Al. I got down to the lowest level. I took the basic creative urges of sex and love, and turned them into the crudest kind of weapon.
"You don't fight fire with fire, without destroying more than you save. Something inside of me burned out during those two hours. I'm not sure, any more, what I'm supposed to be. Not a machine to kill people. And, certainly not with my dick."
"She didn't die from it, did she?" Al asked.
"In a way, yes. We let her get dressed, and we weren't quite sure what would happen back at headquarters when they saw the condition she was in. And, while we were standing around, waiting for the sergeant to make up his mind what to do, Charlie let go with a few mortar rounds.
"We all ducked for cover, except for the girl, who started heading for the hills. A shell hit her direct. None of us looked too closely after the firing had stopped, but, there wasn't enough of her in one piece to even bother with."
Perry felt drained and empty. Reliving the story had taken all the strength out of him. He finally looked around the room and realized the others were gone. They had not come past him and Al and Marty to the front door, so they must all have moved into the black room. Good. He was glad Marty would be able to make out. It would give his buddy a base of operations for the rest of his few days in New York, and Perry could go back to Harlem and Cora.
If he were going to find any sanity during his furlough, that was the most likely place.
"Let's go into the black room with the others," Al said.
"I don't think so, Al," Perry answered. "They've got an uneven number in there now. Three more fellows will only make the combinations more difficult."
"They're not in there for sex, P.T. They may be later, but at the moment, they're all smoking. I recommend it for you. Particularly for the state your mind is in right now."
"I think eight hours sleep would be better for me."
"When's the last time you smoked pot?"
He had to think back. Way back. "Twice while I was at college. Once near LeJeune. And, yes, the last time in California, just before we took off for Vietnam. A little over a year."
"Did it relax you?"
"I can't say it really did. But I didn't expect it to. To tell you the truth, I was always afraid of it. Coming down was a bad experience each time."
"Will you be afraid of it here?" Al wanted to know.
He had to think about it. "At the moment, I don't think I am afraid of anything. I've descended to a new low point in my life. There seems to be only one way to go. Up. I just have to decide how to get started in that direction."
"For the time being, you don't have too many choices. Not until you get out of service."
"Unless I don't go back."
Al's eyes raised slowly to look into Perry's. There was a slow-motion quality to the action which made Perry feel he had ahead y taken a couple of drags of extra-strong grass.
"That is quite a decision to make." Al's voice was soft, controlled, careful.
"I know."
"Would you just not go back? Stay here in New York? They would come to get you."
"I suppose so," Perry said, almost dreamily. Now that it had been expressed, it had lost its quality of terrifying threat.
"Then, you really haven't thought it out? Haven't decided how to do it?"
"No. It's as though I'm just letting things happen the way they will. Perhaps the decision will come about without my doing anything one way or the other to influence it."
"I don't suggest that," Al said. "Too much of your problem is not being able to control the world around you. It would be much more important and meaningful for you to be the master of your future, instead of it's pawn. You have to look inside yourself for reasons and purposes and methods. You have to be in charge of yourself first, before you can start putting the world around you into order."
"I understand the need," Perry answered. "How do I start?"
"The easiest way to look into yourself, right now, is with marijuana. You are ready to let it open up your mind. You are at the juncture of decision where you can let the smoke take you where you want to go. Draw out the road map for you to follow so that not one step of the journey will be wasted; not one mile of travel will be in a false direction."
"All right, Al," he said, standing up, "I'm ready to take my first step."
The door of the apartment swung open. Maryann and Olivia came in, the former smiling, the latter seeming fully composed. No trace of the jealous hysteria showed on Olivia's face.
"Hello, Al," Olivia nodded in his direction. "Hello, Perry," she said more softly, not quite looking at him.
"We're about to go for a long smoke," Al told them, getting to his feet. "Care to join us and the rest of the group?"
"Sure thing."
"Wonderful."
They crossed the long white room, and Al opened the door just enough so they could go in. The odor of marijuana was strong in Perry's nostrils, but somehow it seemed much sweeter than when he had smelled it last week.
When the door was closed again, he saw that the bathroom door had been left ajar so that the green glow washed across the room. The four nude figures, seated near the middle of the room in a partial circle, were green ghosts of the people he had seen earlier. The only motion was the drifting of the smoke.
He got out of his clothes quickly, pushing them in a rough pile against the wall. When he turned back to the others, the circle had been completed.
He looked again in the confusing green light, trying to find the space where he could fit into. He walked up to the outside of the circle, recognizing each face. They were: Vicky, Marty, Joe, Maryann, Margaret, Jamie, Al and Olivia.
Was he to be excluded again? Was he always to find himself stranded on the outside of every human situation? He paced all the way around once more, but there was no opening, no place for him. A sense of panic began to rise in him. How could he make a journey for himself, if he could not take the first step?
And, then, he saw the beginning of the solution-Perry stepped into the center of the circle, seated himself, and reached out his hand for one of the cigarettes.