Chapter 5
Troy woke up sometime during the night-something was wrong. He was sure that someone had been leaning over his sleeping form and he was almost sure that he heard someone walking stealthily away just before he woke up. He opened his eyes warily and listened intently. There was the even, monotonous snore of someone deep in relaxed sleep, and there were the distant night sounds that are normal in open country, but there was something else-near at hand-that made the short hair on the nape of his neck rise.
He concentrated on his listening and his skin tightened in gooseflesh as he heard the raspy sound of something dragging across the ground near at hand. His eyes worked with the faint flicker of the warming fire and then he saw the long slithering body of a snake.
Snakes didn't prowl the night, and he was sure that someone had put the reptile here. Troy knew enough about snakes not to panic, he was almost casual as he rolled away and came to his feet. It took him a few short minutes to find a stick, pin down the rattler's head, and then catch it up by the neck. He walked deep into the brush and threw the reptile as far as he could manage. He went back to his blanket but he napped uneasily the rest of the night.
He refused to speculate on the possibility that someone hated him enough to see him dead or incapacitated. It would take a lot of spite or a deranged person to attempt murder on such flimsy provocations as he had offered yesterday. He seriously doubted that Burns would have the necessary guts to do a thing like this. The bearded young hippie, Bart Coldridge was the only other one who might harbor a grudge, but Troy couldn't find it in him to judge further evidence.
He was glad when the sun came up in a drab dawn. He built up the fire and made the short trip to the spring to start heating water for morning coffee. Helene and Angela came to help him. He left them arguing about what to cook for breakfast and went to check on the fire.
The tawny-skinned Negro girl, Owney Lee, was the early-morning sentry, and she welcomed him with a wide grin.
"I don't think I've ever been so long alone in my life before. It's a helluva thing when a gal can't get a man to sit up with her."
She rose to her full height and stretched tired muscles in a gesture that was wholly feminine, and Troy knew that her pose was calculated to entice. There were hard lines around her young mouth, and her eyes measured him with knowing experience. She just might be all of seventeen or eighteen, but there was a hard world of knowledge in her.
Her Negro blood taunted at him when she broke her full lips in a crooked smile. "You all evah think about integratin'?"
The put-on drawl with its intentional lapse into typical Southern Negro speech was intended to shake him up. He refused her gauntlet and laughed with high good humor.
"My luck's running too good to take a chance on changing it. Come on, you don't want a white boy like me sniffing around. Let's go get some breakfast."
She broke down then and laughed with him.
"Don't be so damned sure about me, white boy. Hell, I like sex, even in the early morning. I don't know if you've noticed it or not, but there's a manpower shortage around here. And you ain't said so, but we ain't out of the woods yet, and I don't intend to die with my butt empty and achin."
"There's three other men around."
She laughed. "You'd be surprised how segregated some people can be."
Troy was honest with her. "Look, girl, you appeal to me just as much sexually as the other girls, but this isn't the time or place to argue about it."
He took her by the hand and led her back toward the camp. She leaned heavily against him in a dare to prove what he had said and he stopped to spin her around and hold her close for a long kiss. It told her that he didn't give a damn what her race or nationality was and it also told her that the vital spark was missing at this time. He let her go, and she laughed.
"Okay, man, let's go eat."
He caught her hand again, and they walked thigh to thigh all the way back to the camp. There were some raised eyebrows there that Troy ignored. He couldn't help watching Owney's natural grace and comparing it with some of the other girls' artificial manners.
Breakfast brought Troy face to face with gripes and complaints. It seemed that he had turned out to be the cause of the fire, the discomfort, the bad food, the cold night, and everything else that had gone wrong. He bore the pettiness with patience and knew that only a few passengers held him responsible. The fire was of main importance in his mind, and he finally cut short the gripe session to check on it.
He was out of sight from the camp when he found out that he was to have company on his tour of reconnoitering. The two mannish-looking girls in boots and leather miniskirts were following him. He waited for them to catch up, and he speculated about them as they unhurriedly strolled along. That they were lesbians was never in doubt, but the fact that they were both very masculine in manner was unusual. In Troy's experience lesbians generally paired off with one male and one very female. Two bulldykes on extremely friendly terms could mean trouble. They caught up, and the tallest one tried a grin that was meant to be ingratiating but didn't quite come off that way.
"Thought we'd go along for the excercise. Mind?"
"No, but you'll have to walk faster than that if you're going with me."
He set the pace and found that they matched him stride for stride. They came to a vantage point, and Troy stopped to evaluate the situation. The fire had crept closer, but the cold night had slowed its progress. It would present no problems until the sun's heat had time to raise the temperature. The air was still, but that could change on a moment's notice, and high winds were the general condition when the sun's warmth stirred up drafts along the mountain's sides. He was satisfied that they had a brief respite from danger.
The road back down was impassable for at least a day or two, and then it would be a lot of hard work to clear the downed timber for the bus to pass. A person on foot might get through, but it would be out of the question to take the whole group down that way. He turned to go back to camp and found himself being stared at by the two girls. Something in their fixed gaze made him very uncomfortable.
"Well, what's on your minds? Let's get it out and over with. More complaints?"
The tall girl took a single step forward and then stopped to try to stare him down. It didn't work. He held his ground and waited them out.
"We know that you've been fooling around with some of the girls back there, and we want you to stop it."
Troy grinned. So that was it! They wanted the whole field to themselves. If the real male competition was removed, they would have everything to themselves. He thought he knew now why two dykes would team up. They had worked out some arrangement between them to help each other in the search for girls to seduce, and he stood in their way.
"Sorry, gals, it's a free for all as far as I'm concerned."
They ganged up on him then, with the shorter girl trying to come up on his flank in a dual attack. He had no compunctions about lashing out with a closed fist when she tried to claw him into a position where both of them could work him over. His fist caught her high on the cheek, and she spun to the ground, stunned but still fully conscious. The tall one leaped at him in an effort to overwhelm him with her weight and out-flung limbs, and he stepped aside at the last split second to let her pass then helped her along with a solid, toe-jolting kick that must have put a dent in her right buttock.
The kick was strong enough to cause her to lose her balance, and he stood over them both in real anger. He was ready to beat or kick them to a pulp, and they knew it. The tall one cowered in fear and whimpered like a hurt animal. She would have been beautiful but for the hard lines of her face. Her long, seductive-looking legs were bared to the crotch, and Troy felt regret that there should be such waste."
"Okay, so you think because there's ten other women back at camp, you should take advantage of our isolation? Forget it. I'll personally knock hell out of both of you at the first sign of any trouble like that. Better keep an eye on each other, because I said both of you! Do I make myself clear?"
He got a reluctant nod from the tall girl and then a shrug of assent from the other one. He strode angrily away, his anger directed at himself. He shouldn't have let his feeling of disgust cause him to lose his temper so violently.
He was part way back to the camp when he remembered the episode with the snake. Maybe he had been careless letting the two lesbians off with a warning. He wheeled around and took to the brush to find out what they were up to. It took only a few minutes to circle back to do his spying.
He raised his head cautiously for a look, and then his face mirrored incredulity. The two lesbians were making love to one another! He watched for a few minutes and realized that their lovemaking was awkward to the point where it was grotesque.
They still wore their boots and leather miniskirts, but all else had been removed. The little one's full breasts, dangling in plain sight, looked obscene as they were intermingled with the tall girl's almost flat chest. Had the scene not been so pitiful, Troy would have laughed at the duo's clumsy attempts to achieve dominance over one another. It was a silly battle over who was to do the loving and who was to be loved.
The tall girl tried to place an intimate kiss between the other's thighs and her head was roughly jerked back to be cradled into the valley of the other's breasts. There was a. long minute when each had a hand buried in the other's groin, and then the writhing bodies came together in an embrace where pelvic bone beat at pelvic bone in a furious frenzy as orgasm ended the lewd show.
They hated each other at that instant, and they broke apart to ponder the emotions that had piled up to bring them to experiment with one another. There was some mutual antagonism as each sought out clothing and dressed again. The smaller one finished first and huffed off toward camp.
He was ready to begin a silent retreat, when the tall lesbian sat down to run a wondering hand along her leg. She stared intently at her fingers as they crept up her thigh to her plain cotton panties. A misty smile came over her face, and her eyes went blank with deep introspection as she tugged her panties down to her knees.
Troy felt his passion rise as he watched the girl begin a love affair with herself. She patted her long flanks and gently massaged the satiny skin of her thighs. Her hands crept ever nearer to her exposed crotch, and her chest heaved with pleasurable excitement. Finally one hand came to hold the lips of her vagina open while the index finger of the other hand teased at the top of the opening. She spread her legs wide, and her lips rose and fell with her every breath.
Troy was trying to tear himself away from the scene, when a touch on his arm scared hell out of him. He turned, to see the Mexican girl who was traveling with Owney Lee. Her eyes were wide in an ogling stare that centered on the lesbian. Her chest was heaving, and her breasts threatened to pop out of the peasant blouse that barely covered them. She rolled slightly to one side, placed Troy's hand palm up on the ground beside her, and then rolled back to cover it. Troy felt the muscles of her loins twitch as he tried to explore her, but her weight prevented any finger movement.
The Mexican girl sighed, and Troy looked up, to find that the lesbian was leaving. He turned back to the girl beside him and saw that her cheeks were hot with rushing blood.
She smiled, and the tip of her tongue raced across her lips. "It was a good show that she put on, no? But I could do better. Would you like to see?" She snorted and wrinkled her pretty little nose. "That one knows nothing about women and men, too."
Her hand stole along his thigh, and her fingers pulled down his zipper. She slipped her hand into the opening, and Troy tried to back away. She laughed again.
"Don't be foolish. The hot blood is awake in your veins, and this is hard with desire. See how it throbs to be touched? I, too, throb here inside me."
She moved her hips and ground the back of his hand into the dirt. She bared him and then broke into a delighted gasp as she saw the size of him. She freed his trapped hand and came to a sitting position beside him in one quick flirt of her legs. Her loose skirt billowed high on her genitals. His nostrils caught the heady scent of her heat, and he knew that it was only a matter of seconds before they would be joined.
Her hands stroked him gently and wonderingly as she delayed the inevitable in order to prolong and savor the anticipation.