Chapter 3
About eighteen miles south of Joliet, the little town of Keston quartered on its northeastern boundary the newest branch of the state reformatory for girls and women. It had been in existence only two years, and it was located in a little farm town of about eighteen hundred inhabitants. There was a main street, one movie house, a drug store, a department store, a farm equipment and supply shop, a gasoline station and mechanics facility, and a grocery store. Not that all this would have mattered to the occupants of the Keston Women's Reformatory, for they did not see the outside of the walled-in penal institution to which they were committed.
There were, at the present time, two hundred and sixty-five occupants, ranging in age from seventeen to the oldest, who was forty-one, a perennial thief whose last offense had been a charge of transporting stolen goods in which some marijuana was found.
She herself was awaiting transfer to the Women's State Penitentiary and would have to go back to court to face a charge which would alter her status and lengthen her imprisonment.
But as she was a dowdy, hard-faced and unattractive creature, her loss would mean nothing to Alma Burbage, the superintendent of Keston. For Alma, who was the cousin of a state representative in Springfield-which was one reason she had got the job-was a notorious Lesbian and sadist.
Alma Burbage was thirty-six, black-haired, stern-faced and about five feet eight inches in height, with a svelte, rather athletic body. She had tawny skin, small but beautifully formed orange-like titties, and a boyishly compact bottom still quite firm and resilient. Her best features were her long, shapely thighs and the smooth, satiny quality of her bare skin. Her "pets" were made to appreciate these features, for Alma liked nothing better than to be gamahuched by an exceptionally pretty young girl-especially one who had never done anything like that before and was forced to it by a threat of a week of solitary confinement and being strung up by the thumbs and given a taste of the blacksnake whip by Matron Flossie Durkin.
Alma Burbage and Flossie Durkin were two of a kind; indeed, they had gone to the same high school in Galena. Flossie was thirty-eight, and her hair was the color of wheat, curly and unruly. She was stocky but attractive all the same, with big, jutting titties, a splendidly Amazonian behind which was still firm and could go without a corset or a girdle, and an exceptionally pale white skin which for her age was quite remarkable. But her face was cold and cruel, and her gray-green eyes could make a young girl shudder when they fixed lingeringly on her.
Both women had this one thing in common: they hated men, because each of them had been jilted by a lover they had trusted. They had given their cherries to two different men, and each of those man had betrayed them, made a laughing stock of of them, and then flaunted their replacements in their face. Alma, when she was twenty, a trusting virgin, keeping house for her ailing mother and dying father. A traveling salesman had come to sell her a vacuum cleaner which Alma was going to buy anyway, and he had been so fascinating and thoughtful and considerate, that Alma, starved for affection and cooped up in the house with her elderly parents, had fallen madly in love with him.
He had taught her how to French him, he had fucked her, he had undressed her and talked poetry to her while he got her naked, then while she was half-fainting with desire and shame, he had licked her cunt and tickled her thighs and bottom until she heard herself begging him to give it to her. And he had done just that.
A couple of weeks of fucking, and Alma Burbage had believed that she and Mack Radimer were going to be married and live the happiest life that any passionately devoted couple ever could.
She had a false alarm of pregnancy, and told him on his next trip in town, for his headquarters were in East St. Louis. To her horror and dismay, he had laughed in her face and said, "Now look, Alma baby, let's be sensible. You fuck like a mink, and I'm not here to see whom you're sleeping with every day. Probably it's not my brat anyhow. Besides, I've got news for you. They're going to transfer me to the Ozarks starting next week, and I've already got me a cute little gal. Fact is, I think I'm going to marry her. I want you to meet her. She's about seventeen, a real sweet kid and nice as they come."
She had fainted at that shocking news, and a week later she had had a letter from her treacherous lover, enclosing a picture of his fiancee with a body-doll face and a voluptuous young Venus-like body. As it turned out, Mack Radimer didn't marry that girl either, but the effect was the same on poor Alma Burbage. She became sour and hard and stern. When her parents died two years later, she took what money she had and went to school to learn about sociology and to do penal work. She had one burning obsession in life, and that was to punish all the wicked young bitches who would lure men away from their rightful mates. And eventually she got to work as a guard, helped quell a mutiny, so when the new addition to the state reformatory was built, her distant cousin in Springfield proposed her name before his colleagues, and she was voted in without one dissenting vote.
In her two years of reign over Keston, Alma Burbage was vindictively enjoying her newly acquired power. Every girl whom she had confined to solitary and turned over to Flossie Durkin for a whipping, every girl she punished herself and forced under the strap or paddle or the hairbrush to crawl between her legs and gamahuch her represented that innocent fiancee of Mack Radimer's.
As for Flossie Durkin, when she was twenty-five, she had fallen madly in love with a married man who had conned her, practical and hard-minded though she was. He was going to divorce his wife and marry her, he told her. And because Flossie had a brutal stepfather and an ailing mother-nothing like Alma's-she had to stay home until she was past her early twenties, because she didn't want to trust her mother to that bastard. Several times he had tried to fuck her, and several times he had taken the strap to her until she had wanted to kill him.
So when John Colton came along and told her she was beautiful and desirable and had an exotic quality to her that made him want to give up everything in the world and be with her, Flossie Durkin swallowed it hook, line and sinker. She gave him her cherry, too, though she was really somewhat reluctant about intimacy between a man and a woman. She had seen her stepfather fuck her mother before and mother got sick, and the brutal, animal-like way he had done it had sickened her.
But John Colton was such an expert lover, using his lips and fingers and tongue, not hurrying, not forcing, and Flossie had been lulled into yielding and had actually experienced bliss after the initial pain of losing her cherry.
After six months she had timidly asked John Colton when they could be married, and he had gently told her that things had gone from bad to worse and his wife refused to give him a divorce. She made an anonymous phone call one evening, and she discovered that John Colton's wife didn't even know that he was in the middle of an affair and was deeply in love with him. Agitated, Flossie hung up. It didn't do her very much good to read in the newspaper a few weeks later that Mrs. John Colton was suing her husband for infidelity. By then she was sick of men.
She drifted from one job to another after her mother died, about six months after that, until finally Alma Burbage, in her new job, hired her away from a tough nightclub where she was a hostess fending off men and already starting to give the eye to pretty young girls and handsome young matrons who wanted to rub pussy and gam in turn. And as head matron of Keston, Flossie Durkin was able to vent her own vindictive spleen on attractive girls and women and to make them love her, and to make up for perfidious John Colton's treachery.
Thus there was a fearful bond of sadistic and Lesbian lust between these two strange women whose only amatory experience with the opposite sex had been so ironically flawed. And the two of them also were destined to alter the life of innocent Beth Calhoun.