Chapter 5
"It's hard to tell," said Ellie. "It's hard to talk about."
"Tell me," said Doc Reynolds. He looked at the fishing rod in the corner, thinking wistfully of the large trout in Fall Creek that were so easy to catch if you only knew how. But they would wait for him.
"I have a brother, four - no, five years older than me. I haven't seen him in years. He was eighteen when I saw him last, just out of high school. A little bit wild, always getting into some kind of trouble. Jud was a big kid, very strong, and he was a good athlete. On the basketball team he was a forward and set the school record for scoring. I think he scored about twenty-five points a game - something like that. And that wasn't the only way he scored. Jud was handsome. Oh, he was handsome. He played on the football team, played quarterback. All the boys admired him and all the girls loved him. All the girls.
Including me. I guess that was why it all happened."
Jud Brighton, eighteen years old, was standing in the bathroom that day, combing his hair.
He slicked it back with water and admired the way each hair stayed in place, slick and smooth and blond. Then he looked anxiously at his face, where the stubble was still irregular. A few more months, maybe, and he would be able to grow a beard.
He looked at himself and admired the smooth hardness of his muscles, the tanned skin, the broad shoulders. Naked, just out of the shower, he felt healthy and virile and intensely sexual. If there was only a woman present, he thought. For three days he hadn't been into a woman; the last was Kitty Carson, a thirty-year-old divorcee who had him over all the time so that they could spend the evening just fucking dreamily, doing it every way they could, anything went with Kitty. But Kitty was out of town now, on her vacation, and Jud's body was screaming for some action. He refused absolutely to masturbate; that was for fourteen-year-olds; but if he didn't get it before long he was going to go out on the street and hump the first girl he saw.
He looked down and saw his long, smooth, heavy cock rising at the very suggestion of sex, the head flaring, turning dark, almost purple, feeling as if it was going to burst. There was no one in the house, no one at all. His parents were away for the weekend, and Ellie, his good-natured (though very young) sister, was at the beach.
That was why - because no one was home - that Jud decided to go out to the pool and lie around in the sun for a while, growing warm and comfortable and adding to his tan. In a little while, when Marcia got home from work, he would call her and have her come over, and they would fuck like dogs out in the yard, by the pool, where no one could see them.
He ambled out into the hallway, his mind full of a sweet recollection from the past semester, his last in high school, when he had had to give a report in a psychology class.
Standing in front of the class he discovered that he could look up Sherry Knudsen's brief skirt and see the beige panties that she wore. He stumbled through the first part of his speech. Then Sherry got up and excused herself, walking erectly out of the room, carrying her young breasts proudly before her. Jud was crushed. He felt as if she was leaving in order to get out of the way of his eager stare. But in fact Sherry was going to the restroom, where she hiked up her skirt and slipped off her panties. She tucked her panties into her purse, closed it, and went back to the classroom. There she let her legs open wider and wider, until finally Jud, stumbling clumsily through his talk, could see the fragrant lips of her vagina and the curling, moist hair around them.
That night they were together, up in the hills, and her young, taut body bent with his. They breathed together, moved together, had one intense orgasm after another, making love dreamily, becoming very messy together, like children.
The recollection was intense and left Jud shaken. His cock had risen and grown hard, and he fondled it in spite of his resolve not to. El-lie's door was open. He went toward it, already feeling guilty because he knew that he "would indulge in one of his vices, taking up her soiled panties and smelling them in the crotch, for there, in spite of her thirteen years, Ellie had the scent of a full-blooded woman. But he did not find any of her panties.
He found something else instead. Ellie had not gone to the beach at all, she had stayed home and taken a nap, after showering, and she lay in the bright sunlight that filtered through the window - lay on the clean sheets of her bed, stark naked, her young body voluptuous and yet taut, the body of a girl two or three years older than she actually was.
When Jud saw her there something went very wrong with him. He felt the blood pounding through his body, felt his hard cock growing ever more turgid. He let out a sound that was half whimper, half moan. Ellie was lying on her belly, her golden hair all in a tangle around her head. He saw her breasts squashed out to either side of her, her taut, hard buttocks, dimpled, with the slightest down that caught the light from the window and held it against her.
Jud thought that he was just going to look at her from behind; that he was just going to sneak a look at her delicate vagina. For a few moments that was all he did. He moved forward quietly, in a fever of excitement, feeling his cock grow painfully hard. Then, stopping behind Ellie, he brought his face down to where he could see everything. Her legs were parted; the delicate lips of her vagina lay half open in a curl of moist pubic hair, almost the same shade of yellow gold as her hair. In the lip was a bead of moisture, of rich, clear liquid, the secretion of a woman who is hot. Jud wondered what Ellie was dreaming about. He knew she had a youthful crush on him - something their parents, strict as they were, discouraged. But until this moment he had never even looked at Ellie as a girl, let alone as a woman.
Then it happened. Something in Jud's mind blacked out; somehow he was able to overcome the fact that this woman, this naked woman, her vagina beading with the liquid of sex, of lust, was his little sister, a mere child, innocent and fetching. With a loud groan, an almost pained sound, he came down on her, thrusting his cock up between her legs.
Ellie awakened' and screamed. She screamed with sheer terror. Held tight by a man she didn't even recognize, she screamed and thrashed about and tried to get out from under her brother. But Jud, groaning, held her and thrust his heavy cock brutally up between her legs until it mashed against her small vagina. There it settled, stopped for a moment, while Jud gathered himself up, legs flexing, and kept his eyes shut - unaware, hardly realizing that he was trying to make love to a girl, let alone that that girl was his little sister.
Then he jerked forward spasmodically. His cock, twitching and swelling, leaped up against the delicate lips of Ellie's vagina, stopped there for a moment, straining at the fragile skin, then burst through with what seemed to Ellie an audible tearing sound.
She gasped. Her tissues torn, her body broken through by Jud's heavy cock, for just a moment she lay there, eyes wide open, clutching him, only now realizing that this was Jud, her brother, who was attacking her in this way and doing things to her that she didn't even have the knowledge to understand, let alone the experience to accept. Then, mercifully, she fainted.
Jud's body curled briefly, sprang straight again, and spurted hot jism into his sister, boiling it forth deep into her.
He lay there, gasping. After a moment the feeling wore away, the twinges of intense, spasmodic sexual excitement. "Oh, God, what did I do - " He lay there on her, still not able to get up. But then he pulled away. His cock was red with Ellie's blood, white with his own jism. He felt terrible, seeing her lying there, naked, sprawled out, her tender body white and fragile. Groaning, he got up and stumbled to the nearby bathroom, where he washed off and stared into the mirror to see if he was the same person, if he hadn't had to change radically to become someone who would rape his little sister. But the face was the same.
It was the same except that it looked drawn, the eyes puffed and bleary - no longer confident.
"Oh, God." He sat down on the edge of the tub and remembered in spite of himself the sight of Ellie lying there under him, helpless, cowering, unable to prevent him from doing as he liked with her. He sat there for a long time, just remembering and feeling the pain.
"Jud was all broken up, I felt sorry for him," said Ellie. "He went into the army right after that, and I guess he felt pretty bad about what he'd done, because he used to send me presents from Vietnam. Necklaces and things. Once he sent me a watch. I wrote to him once in a while - friendly letters, to show him that I didn't hold it against him. And I didn't. I knew he wouldn't have done something like that to me if he hadn't had to. I mean, if it hadn't been pretty hard for him to stop himself. So I forgave him. I really did, I just stopped thinking about the whole thing. It was over. Done with. That part of my life was just past."
"But it still bothers you," said Doc Reynolds. He was staring into his coffee cup and spoke very quietly.
"Not really. I don't think it does, anyway. Maybe subconsciously."
"Did your parents ever learn about it?"
"I guess I'll never know that. They knew that something had happened. Daddy always had a sixth sense where any kind of 'sin' was concerned. He figured out just by looking at you that you'd done something wrong. When Jud went into the army, I think he had a little encouragement from my parents. I think they wanted to get him away from me, into a different environment. They had some idea that he'd settle down if he was in the army. But he didn't, of course. He just stayed as wild as ever, got thrown in jail a few times, got into fights. He's doing okay now, though. Has a wife and kids, earns a good living as a sales representative, and seems to be in pretty good shape."
"What about you?"
"I don't know. I think that - well, my parents knew something had happened, like I said, and they had a pretty good idea that it had to do with sex. So from then on they kept watch over me. I'd go to school at nine in the morning and come back at three. If I was late, there was my mother on the porch, her arms crossed, staring up and down the street, waiting for me. And if I didn't show up on time, then my father would whip me. In the evening about all I could do was study at home or read. My girl friends came by and visited with me, but I wasn't allowed to date boys. Not at all. I missed the senior prom, all the dances, everything. When my parents made it clear that I was to go on living that way after graduation, that I wasn't going to go to college, couldn't get a job - that was when I got all my courage together and left home."
"How did your parents react?"
"They were pretty upset. My father wanted to whip me, and I told him that I was too old for that sort of thing. He would have done it anyway, only I ran out of the house. I never did go back; they wouldn't let me. They wouldn't let me even get my clothes. I stayed at a girl friend's until I could get a job and earn enough money to take an apartment."
"Have you seen them since?"
"No. Not at all. I called once or twice. Once to invite them over for dinner. But my father answered the phone, and when he heard my voice he hung up." She was silent for a moment. "I guess I shouldn't feel sorry for myself; there are people with worse problems.
But Doc, I don't know how to be with people. With men. I get along okay with girls, I have a lot of girl friends. But with men it's different. I don't know how to speak to them, what to say. It seems sometimes as if it's all a matter of formulas. You say one thing and the man is supposed to say something else. Then you say something meaningless that he knows how to answer. I just don't know all the formulas. When I get to know a man I'm always saying the wrong thing. And I'm afraid of them, when they touch me. So after a while they stop seeing me, stop trying to date me. I'm really afraid to let them get near me, especially when we're alone. I'm afraid something will happen. Something like what happened with Jud. Something like - " She stopped; she didn't want to mention Burt, the scene at Spindler Creek.
Doc Reynolds looked up inquiringly. "Yes?"
"Nothing," said Ellie. "That's all there is. I don't want to be different, to be strange. I just want to be like other girls, to have fun, and I don't know how."
There was silence for a long time. Doc Reynolds drank from his coffee cup. Then he finally spoke. "Ellie, there are good men around. Men who'll be kind to a woman, who won't hurt her. Your experience with your brother may have soured you, and your parents didn't help any. But you have your whole life in front of you, you can't let something like this ruin everything for you. Oh, I know I'm giving you cliches, but it's all true, Ellie. You must believe me, you have to. You've just got to believe in yourself, to believe that you can face the world, that you can get along with people. Then you'll start meeting men, you'll learn how to get along with them."
"Sure. Sure, Doc," said Ellie. But her voice lacked conviction.