Chapter 8

He wasn't anywhere, she discovered, unless he was in Johnny's room. Nola put on the coffee pot and got out the rasher of bacon. Then she went through the house again. No Freddy. She peeked out the back door, then the front. The house seemed frightfully empty; even in a day or so, she had grown used to his big lumbering presence. She poured his dish full of dog food, then went to the door of Johnny's room. Ear to the panel, she tried to hear the big, even breathing, different than Johnny's. Then she knocked.

"Breakfast in ten minutes, Johnny," she called. "Let Freddy out so I can feed him."

There was a silence, then the door opened and her brother stood there, naked, disheveled and cold-faced.

"Freddy won't be needing any breakfast," he said.

"W-why not?"

"Because he's dead."

"Dead? Oh, Johnny! How-"

"I killed him last night. He turned out to not be just a dog."

Nola felt her senses reel and her muscles turned to water. She stared at her brother, trying to read his mind through the hard glaze over his eyes. How, she did not know, but he apparently knew everything. Nola dropped her eyes and turned away.

"I-I'm glad he isn't here, any more," she murmured.

"I don't happen to give a shit whether you're glad or not, you dog-loving slut!"

"Please, Johnny! I couldn't help it! He was so-so big, so overpowering!"

"He raped you?" he sneered.

She nodded. "I let him in-he was so restless. He raped me."

His laughter came like a crash of thunder. His hand came out and caught her throat, and she was jerked in, hard against his naked body. Her nailing hand touched his cock, now rigid. Helpless with fright, she did not even protest when he began to rip her robe and nightie away. She had never felt his fingers so hard and talon-like. His face, now drawn into a snarl of rage and hate, was ashen. When she was naked, he hurled her to the floor, bruising her hands and knees and toes with the fury of his strength. Head down, body quivering in anticipation, Nola waited. Then she screamed as the heel of his bare foot caught her between the cheeks of her ass. The kick lifted and rammed her forward, her head thumping the oak chair where his clothes were draped.

"Johnny, Johnny-"

"Shut up, you fucking bum," he snarled, then he was on her, his hands twisting and gripping and bringing her to him. She felt his cock at her anus then she screamed again as he forced it in with one flesh-splitting lunge. There was no evading the bludgeon. Her shriek of mortal agony went unheeded. Then he was holding her waist, squeezing so hard she could barely breathe, and his cock in her tortured rectum began to piston, almost as fast and ruthlessly as Freddy's prick had charged her cunt. There was not an iota of tenderness in Johnny's attack. He made no move to find her tits, no effort to ease her when she jerked. His prick made harsh thrashing sounds, driving her lacerated anus in, dragging it out in burning distension. Then with his cock buried so she could feel his hairy pelvic board against her nates, he twisted. She heard him slide his belt from the loops of his trousers. Only he didn't use the soft end, the first blow down over her back ended with a cutting agony as the belt buckle clanked with the force of his blow. Nola screamed, her shoulders coming up to arch her lower back away from the bitter pain. His hips hunched and she snapped back into a bowed position to escape the ram of his cock. Her body shook with strain. He seemed to find a rhythm, three long hard strokes with his massive cock was followed by another lash from the whistling belt, then he rammed three times more and struck again. Crushed with pain, Nola could only cry and gasp, and finally she could stand no more. Her arms gave way and her face went to the carpet. She wanted to fall but his cock was so deeply impaled, so unbendingly determined she could not unhang her ass from it. She tried to faint, but her mind was one great rolling image of Freddy's swollen cock and her brother's iron-jawed face. Her asshole was a ring of fire, now stretched and torn, lubricated by her shit. Her cunt was gripped to itself like a frantic fist, and her tits swung and flopped as if they were filled with lead.

Grief and pain mingled, she settled into a well of agony and waited.

The waiting seemed endless. Johnny's cock had turned to a club, not in passion but in rage. It swelled and thrust, reaching deeper and destructively deeper, and the fucking sounds grew wetter and more obscene with every undulation of his tireless hips. He was, she thought, going to fuck her to death, or into some crippled, ragged devastation. Numbed with pain, her mind began to seize on thoughts. To Nola, there was no mystery in her brother's fury. There was no doubt that he had loved Freddy with a pure manly feeling, intensified by his sojourn in loneliness. There was little doubt that Johnny loved her in his own peculiar way. In one fell swoop, he had been betrayed by his dog and his sister, and the brutal coursing of his prick in her battered bowel seemed proof of the fact that he had also lost faith in everything but violence. Weeping, she matched the stake in her asshole with her own jabbing conscience.

"Johnny, poor Johnny!" she husked through pain-slackened lips. Then she discovered the belt had ceased to stripe her back. His hands were again gripping her waist, and his strokes seemed erratic. His breath was inordinately fast, and the head of his prick seemed less ball-shaped. She tensed for the cum, the final bursting. She felt it strike, then Johnny fell over her back, his body a crushing weight before it slid sideways and collapsed to the floor. His cock, swiftly limp, lay in a foul half loop in his thigh.

"Johnny! My God, Johnny!"

He wasn't dead. She could see his chest and belly rising and falling, and his eyes were open, staring at nothing. Nola groped for his pulse. It was steady, if weak. She patted his cheek, but he did not respond. She called to him and there was no response. He seemed dead, but he was alive. Terror-stricken, Nola got to her feet and instantly, her bowel relieved itself, soiling down her thighs before she could reach the bathroom.

"A doctor, a doctor!" she repeated to herself, but before a doctor, the Herculean task of eradicating all signs of Johnny's fury.

Hobbling, waddling, ignoring the agony of her cut and welted back, Nola washed her brother's prick and his soiled crotch, and with strength born of desperation, she managed to get him onto his bed. Repairing herself was an equally arduous task. When the bedroom seemed in order, she again tested his pulse and his breathing, her fright having settled into trembling apprehension.

"Johnny? Johnny, it's Nola! Oh, Johnny, can you hear me?"

He nodded. His eyes blinked and he sucked in a huge breath.

"Sis?"

"I'm here, Johnny, I'm here! What happened, baby?"

"Don't know. Just balcked out, I guess."

"I know. Nearly an hour ago! Oh, Johnny, just be quiet there. I'll go get a doctor just as quick as I can, Johnny!"

"No," he said, with stronger breath. "No. I'll be okay. Just let me rest."

"But, Johnny-"

"Shut up. I'm okay, sis. You'll see. I'm okay, do you hear?"

"You listen," he said, pointing a finger between her eyes. "I spent all the goddamned time I'm ever going to spend in a hospital, with every asshole sawbones who's got a curiosity, punching and picking and fiddling with me. All right, so my legs don't work too good. But they didn't work at all eight months ago, and if I whipped it once, I can whip it again. No, sis. And if you get smart and write a secret letter to the VA, I'll break your back, understand?"

"But, Johnny, I'm sure you had some kind of a-a stroke! Maybe it wasn't bad, but you-we ought to know! I'm so sorry, Johnny. It was all my fault, too! I got your blood pressure up so high-"

"How about shutting your mouth for a change? Is there any beer? Come on, sis! It's been three days, and I'm doing fine."

She brought the beer, her wits still shaken from three days of nervous fluttering. It had been a bizarre three days, and she was exhausted, as much from nervousness as from waiting on Johnny hand and foot. His legs were sensitive, and he could move them on the bed, but they caved in when he tried to walk, the muscles seemingly detached from his will to use them. She had not dared leave him, and for even the hour it had taken to replenish their foodstuffs, she had worried herself half sick. And there had been some other times, neither pleasant in themselves nor promising.

He had made her fondle his cock, and suck it to orgasm the day following his collapse, just to prove that the failure in his legs had not affected his body. There had been no talk about Freddy, nor about the instant circumstances of his illness. She suffered his bursts of temper, his vile curses whenever something displeased him, and his pettishness about her being at his side except when he slept.

To Nola, he seemed in exactly the same condition he had been when she had first brought him home from Letterman Hospital-except that his old rages and temper tantrums were now edged with fresh bitterness.

She suspected that the strange paralysis was more extensive than he admitted. He moved oddly in bed, as if certain muscles in his hips and torso were slightly affected. But he was adamant about no doctor, either local or in any way connected with the government.

Despite his scoffing, she blamed herself. She had been so careful for so long, then with victory in sight, she had succumbed to the crawling, numbing spell of her own sensuousness and Freddy had tripped her into a situation beyond her apparent control. Sick with self-hate, she tried hard to regain a semblance of her earlier organization. Again, her own mind, her own body and her total intent were dedicated to her stricken brother's recovery.

"Johnny, what are we going to do?" she asked, as he sipped the ice-cold beer with a voluble smacking of his lips.

"Do? What do you mean?"

"Baby, we've only got so much money! I've been off work for three days now. We need my salary. I've got to go back to work, Johnny, but I can't leave you alone. Not for a while yet, at least!"

He grinned. "So get me a seventeen-year-old nurse with big tits."

"If I get you a day nurse, she'll be seventy and ugly as a cabbage," Nola said pettishly. "But, seriously, Johnny. Maybe we could get a day nurse, five days a week, for fifty dollars and board. It won't be for long, I'm sure, because your legs are going to be all right. That would leave thirty-five dollars of my salary, and with your check, we could make it until you can manage alone. Darn! I wish we had your old wheelchair!"

He closed his eyes and turned his face away. "Screw it. I said when I got out of that goddamned chair that I would never sit in one again. No wheelchair, sis, and that's that! Okay, if you can find a day nurse, maybe it's the best way out, at least for right now."

Her name was Monet and she was half white and half Nez Perce Indian. She was hardly five feet tall and sturdy, with a round, smiling face and her coal-black hair braided and coiled on top of her perky head. Monet had spent three years in practical nursing, and she would work eight hours a day for a dollar an hour and board. She was no reservation girl, and she was a high school graduate. Her white uniform was almost a mini-skirt, exposing her fat knees and smooth brown thighs three inches above the knee dimples.

Johnny promptly dubbed her Blanket-ass.

"Never had it on a blanket in my life," she told him merrily.

"Under, then?" he had demanded.

Monet had shrugged. "In the wintertime, I guess. You want some more coffee?"

"No. Give you a choice. Help me into the living room so I can watch TV or bring it in here."

"Squaw no movum furniture. Movum man."

Because Nola had helped him dress before Monet had arrived that morning, he swung his legs, draggingly, over the edge of the bed. Monet stooped and gave him her blocky shoulder. When he came to his feet, she was of small, string stature, considerably below his chin. His hand on her upper arm found solid flesh, not fat, and he could see the near-white of her scalp through her carefully combed and twisted hair. Looking down the neck of her uniform, he could see only the slightest bulge of her small tits. He leaned on her heavily, dragging one foot then the other. He didn't doubt that she could have picked up his two hundred pounds and carried him to the living room sofa. Finally there, she let him sit while she bunched the cushions to get his head up.

"Channel four," he said.

"Channel seven," she said. "As long as I have to sit here and watch it, too, I get a vote."

"Flip you for it, Blanket-ass."

"Deal. But we use my quarter, Mr. Banner!"

"Call me Johnny. Where's the quarter?"

She hiked her skirt up high enough to reveal her stocking top caught in a garterbelt snap. Tucked between her velvet skin and the stocking was a small, snap-top purse. This she opened and from it took a quarter.

"Some bank," Johnny remarked.

"Well, I have another one, but things get wet there. Call it!"

"Heads."

"Channel seven," she remarked and returned the quarter to the purse and the purse to her stocking top.

Johnny chuckled. "I thought Indians were supposed to say Ugh and be dumb."

"You and Custer," she quipped, turning on the television. "Your sister says you've had a mild stroke. She's sure pretty."

Staring at her back while she tuned the set to sharpness and fiddled with the volume, Johnny noted the strong back and the broad, fully rounded bottom, and for some reason, he liked it all. She had been warm and strong under his arm, and she was almost the same exotic shade of brown he had found he liked in Vietnam. Suddenly he wanted to fuck her but he didn't know how to start. He waited, surreptitiously watching her out of the corner of his eye as the morning program filled the room with lilting music and fast talk from the program guests.

He thought he knew exactly what had happened to him, that swift second as his cock had jerked in Nola's asshole. He had felt the pain in his head and the electricity streaking down his back. He'd had similar, smaller pains in his head for many, many months, and they had generally left him morose and somewhat weak. No doctor, he had spent many months in government hospitals, hearing, witnessing and secretly fearing. He had had a stroke and if Nola termed it mild, bully for her.

And he had not insisted that she suck his prick the next morning to test his middle segment. He had done it first to see if her experiences, with Freddy, and the day before with him, had left some emotional barrier, and his second purpose had been to see if orgasm and the strain of sex would kill him. Nola had shown no reticence, and his head had not ached at all.

Now he was sure that he was as good as ever, sans mobility of his scarred and susceptible legs. He looked again at Monet, and his cock jerked with inspiration. He could envision her body, short, almost plump, with skin as soft as silk and hot as sunburn, and her pussy shrouded with stiff, Indian hair. Her tits would be smooth, flatly conical pads with a black nipple pointing out and up. He knew she was twenty-six. She'd never had it on a blanket but maybe under one in cold weather, and her other bank got things wet. Johnny's nostrils flared. Not yet, but soon. He didn't want to scare her off and have Nola replace her with a nurse of seventy, "as ugly as a cabbage."

He wondered if she could guess how big his prick was. She certainly wouldn't know he had no balls; Nola would have failed to mention that, even though she had given the little Indian girl a reasonably accurate history of his past problems. He had a quick picture of what she would do and say when he skinned out a thick seven inches and aimed it up between her short fat thighs. By God, he mused, her smart mouth might not be so smart. He chuckled.

"I missed that. What's funny, Mr. Banner?" Monet demanded.

"I'm psychic," he replied. "I laugh at jokes that haven't even been told."

"I'm psychic too," she said. "That was a poolroom chuckle!"

'Sorry about that."

"Practical nurses get used to things. Indians get used to things. I guess women in general get used to things, Mr. Banner."

"I told you to call me Johnny."

"Do you like this program, Johnny?"

"Not particularly. Anyway, I've got to make the John."

Monet turned the television dial to channel four.

Then she got around to his side and started him up off the sofa. Once more she was a strong brown crutch under his arm, and they began the slow drag to the bathroom. There, he supported himself between the door casings.

"Okay? Can you manage, Johnny?"

"If I couldn't?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" she muttered and with adept fingers, unbelted his trouser and ran his zipper down. "If all you have to do is urinate, you'd better sit down anyway," she said. "Keep you from spraying all over with those unsteady feet."

"You could hold it for me," he said, grinning.

She giggled. "I bet I could, but you sound too anxious! Go ahead. Knock when you want me to come get you."

"Two minutes."

Clutching his failing pants with one hand while he used the other to crutch himself on the washbasin, Johnny slid his feet forward.

Certain that he could make it, Monet closed the door. She had been correct about sitting down, even to urinate. He sat there, his cock draining, his eyes staring at his deceptively strong-looking legs. Up and zipped, he moved laboriously to the door and knocked. The door almost opened under his knuckles, and the Indian girl was again under his arm.

"You were peeking," he accused her.

"Known in the trade as a preliminary survey. It isn't only important that a nurse keep her distance, it's important that she know just how much distance to keep?" At the sofa she again bunched his pillows and lifted his legs around into a comfortable resting position. "You are pretty badly chewed up, aren't you, Johnny?"

He nodded. "Tune the tube, you've got a ghost."

She fine-tuned the picture, then lowered the volume. "It was your dog, wasn't it, Johnny?" she queried, turning.

"What was my dog?"

"The one I read about in the paper-the one the caretaker found in the old Hemingsfer estate. With his head crushed and his testicles slashed off. Big black dog."

Johnny met her eyes, his surprise well in hand. "What makes you think he was my dog, Blanket-ass?"

"There are black dog hairs all over the rug. There's twenty pounds of dog food in the kitchen closet, and a big food dish. But there's no dog. It's none of my business, of course."

"Right."

She sat again on the hassock and watched the dull program. She didn't look apprehensive nor nervous; he wondered what she was really thinking about. He was sure she had put one of her big black eyes to the keyhole while he was pissing and getting put together again. Two minutes later, she had remarked about Freddy-and his missing testicles. The anger began in him again. He wanted to reach out and grab her, to hurl questions and wrench the answers from her. Then he remembered that she was a nurse, hired help while he was so completely helplesss. And she was a very interesting female despite her unprettiness. He held on to his temper, satisfying himself with half-formed promises.

Before the day was done he decided that he needed her very much. He couldn't even get to the kitchen for a drink of water or a beer. She served him a nice lunch and then gave him a hard time for three hours over gin rummy. He liked her smart mouth. Her quips and slightly acidic remarks were a constant challenge to his wits, and her laughter was quick, jolly and unreserved. At four-thirty she went into the kitchen and prepared some salad base and a pot of peeled potatoes so that when Nola came home at five, the first problems were solved. He hadn't even noticed that during the day she had kept the small house tidied, but Nola observed the neatness at once.

"Oh boy! I think I've got something going here!" she laughed, sliding her arm around Johnny's shoulders. "How'd he behave, Monet?"

"Ha! They'd have run him off the reservation for being a cream puff! Just fine, Miss Manner. I think we are going to get along just fine. Oh. Tomorrow I'll bring some snake oil my grandmother used for every ailment a buck could generate. I'll rub his legs down good. May I quit when he's able to chase me around the house?"

Laughter. Johnny narrowed his eyes. She was very, very quick.