Chapter 10
A bell was ringing somewhere, an annoying bell that would not stop. Robin opened her eyes. Alice lay cuddled up to her, an arm lying across Robin's belly, and her face pressed against Robin's left breast. The air was heavy with the sour smells of sweaty bodies and stale cunt juice. The bell still rang in staccato bursts of metallic harassment. Robin reached out to lift the receiver, the movement waking Alice.
"Hello?"
"Robin? Good morning!"
"Hello, Bob!"
Alice sat up, asking sleepily, "Who is it?"
Robin clamped her hand over the mouthpiece. "Damn you!" she growled, "shut up!" She spoke into the phone. "No, Bob, no one's with me. That was the radio in my room. I just shut it off."
"I told you I'd call about the possibility of spending the weekend at the cabin... "
"So?" The stench of stale cunt juice rose in her nostrils.
"I can't make it, honey. I have to keep that business appointment. It's a potential big deal your dad and I've been working on for months. I'm sorry!"
Robin turned the mouthpiece of the phone up to avoid the backlash of her own foul breath. "I understand, Bob."
"I have to spend the day with this guy and his partner, then take them out to dinner. I should be free tomorrow. I'll call you early, okay?"
"Right!"
"I love you, darling!"
Robin paused, sniffing back a tear... and with it another taste of cunt juice. "Me too! Good-bye!" She fumbled the receiver onto its cradle.
"That was... HIM?" Alice asked softly.
Robin nodded.
"What time is it?"
"A quarter to ten," Robin replied.
"Ye gods!" Alice cried, scrambling out of bed. "I was supposed to pick up Dorothy at her house at nine-thirty. I'm sorry, honey, but I gotta run."
"Who's Dorothy?"
Alice turned at the bathroom door, cocked her head. "I told you last night, honey. She's my little fourteen-year-old girl friend. I have to hurry. I don't want to miss her. She's spending the weekend with me."
Robin propped both pillows behind her. In a few minutes, Alice came out of the bathroom fully dressed. "Didn't you even wash your face?"
"I splashed a few drops on it," Alice replied. Her eyes glittered with a feverish excitement. "I'll take a shower soon as I get Dorothy home with me." She paused uncertainly like an actor who has forgotten his exit line. "Well, Robin... "
"Run along. I'll be seeing you."
Robin burst into tears as Alice banged the front door after her. Her asshole felt like a tired old rubber band, her pussy, like a chewed-over toy, and her mouth and nose were filled with the sour taste and the sickening stench of a woman's stale sexual juice.
'I must go back to where this all started,' she thought, 'if I'm ever going to understand myself.' Half an hour later, dressed in a white blouse and blue slacks, she was on her way to Dresden.
There was a new subdivision on the southern edge of town, attractive ranch houses with well-kept lawns and neatly trimmed hedges. Two new shopping centers were visible a few blocks off the main street. A tightening in her chest occurred as Robin turned onto the street on which she had lived six years ago. She drove slowly past Wilson Junior High. The buildings were freshly painted, and the lawns richly green and short-cropped, but further down the street, decay seemed to have taken hold. The houses all needed paint, lawns once well-tended were nothing but patches of weeds and dry crabgrass, and Mexican and Negro children played noisily in the streets. She pulled up at the curb in front of the home she had lived in for more than twelve years. Most of the shrubbery her father had carefully tended was gone. The front yard was overgrown with weeds. Robin got out of the car. A Mexican woman with a child on her hip came out on the front porch. The woman stepped off the porch, shielding her eyes from the bright sun, and padded forward on large, flat feet. Her body was heavy with child. Three children came out on the porch to watch.
"Buenos dias, senorita!" A flood of Spanish sounds flowed from her mouth.
"Buenos dias." Robin searched her mind for the few Spanish words she knew. "No comprerido." She smiled apologetically, and pointed to the house. "Esta... la mia casa... seis anos... " Unable to come up with the word she needed, Robin repeated "seis anos," and tossed her head to indicate the past behind her.
"Si, si, si!" The woman grinned, and motioned toward the front door, then beckoned Robin to follow. The three children scattered as Robin walked up to the front porch. She remembered her father painting the exterior of the house ten years ago. A light fresh gray then, it was dark and grimy and flaking badly now. The woman opened the screen door, bowed, smiled, and gestured for Robin to enter. Evidently proud of her home, the woman chattered in Spanish as she led Robin from room to room. The house was neat and clean, but scantily furnished and the walls were in need of paint and repair. She stood at last in the back bedroom, closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the sight of the heavy Mexican-style double bed and the crib in the corner, and to visualize her parents' brightly polished mahogany headboard and the tufted green coverlet. Though four years old at the time, Robin would never forget it. She could even recall the yeasty scent of Tommy's infant flesh.
"La sua rec mara?" The woman pointed at Robin, then gestured to include the whole room.
"No. La mia... madre."
"Ah, si!"
In her old bedroom, Venetian blinds sagged in a lopsided pattern. Three small beds stood against the wall. The bare floor was scratch ed and marred. Robin shivered as she recalled the number of times she had played sex games with her young brother in this room. Here it was he had sucked her into her first full-blown orgasm a week after she had menstruated the first time. Turning to the woman, Robin smiled, and said, "Questa... la mia... " She put the back of her hand to her cheek and tilted her head.
"Si, si, si!"
At the door, Robin extended her hand to the woman.
"Muchas gracias!"
"De nada! Hasta la vista!"
As she drove away, Robin turned to look at the home where lust had spawned in her, now as shabby to her as the house itself. She turned into the parking lot of Wilson Junior High. No one was about. Turning off the ignition, she got out of the car, and walked across the playground to the woods. Several paths led through the brush and brambles to the small clearing. Rusty tin cans, broken bottles, and faded newspapers were scattered over the area. Piles of dried human excrement lay like sick reminders of man's shitty nature, she thought, and shook her head. Even Tommy Brockman's cock would not have appealed to her in these circumstances.
She had one more place to go, Robin thought as she got back into her car. She remembered the way, and the place, as she drove slowly past Goggins' house, catching a glimpse of it through the break in the tall bushes that formed the driveway. Shadowed by the tall trees in the front yard, the house had a ghostly and chilling look about it. With the old man indicted on morals charges as Shure had told her, Robin knew it would be foolish to risk visiting him, but the urge to see the depraved old man who had brought to full flower the evil seeds earlier implanted in her was irresistible. She need have no fear of him, and if need be, could easily get away from him. This would be a fitting climax to the journey into the past on which she had set out this morning. Perhaps she would find, here, the key she sought. Turning the car around at the first crossroad, Robin drove back, and turned the car into the driveway. She parked before the front entrance, and ascended the three rotted steps to the porch. On the fourth turn of the knob of the bell mounted in the center of the carved oak door, Robin heard the pad of feet over the bare floor of the entrance hall. The door opened a crack.
"What do you want?" The words were dry and raspy. Robin could see little of his features through the slight crack in the door.
"Are you Mister Goggins?"
"Yeah!" After a slight pause, he asked, "You another one of those little bitches the police been sending out to trap me?"
"No, Mister Goggins. I'm Robin Cane."
"WHO?" He put his ear to the crack.
"ROBIN CANE! YOU REMEMBER...
The door swung open. Goggins stood, his gnarled hands clutching a flannel robe about his stooped figure. His rheumy eyes lighted up as he smiled. "Well, damn me! Robin Cane! Come in."
Robin stepped into the darkened house. "I was just passing through, and I... "
"Come in, come in. My study's right here. You remember... " He chuckled. "How could you forget, eh girl?" He opened the door, and Robin stepped past him. Nothing in the room changed - nothing but the old man himself. He was old, toothless, and stooped. Only a very slight fringe of gray hair remained around his bald pate. "Sit down! Sit down!" He motioned toward a straight chair, the same one, placed in the same spot next to his desk, the one she had sat in that first day when she had watched the movies of her sucking off Tommy Brockman. "None of my little girls ever come back to see me any more."
Robin sat in the straight chair. Goggins placed a hand on the corner of his glass-topped desk. His fingers were horribly twisted with arthritis. Robin shuddered, recalling the feel of her bare ass on the smooth cold surface of the glass as he had fucked her cuntal slit, spewing his semen out behind her.
"I heard you got in some trouble with the law, Mister Goggins."
"Eh?" He leaned over cocking his ear, and loosed a loud vibratory fart that rattled the windows. "What did you say? I don't hear so good... "
"So I noticed," Robin said, leaning away from him. "I HEARD YOU WERE IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW."
"Oh that!" He tugged his robe about him and tried to square his shoulders. "She was a little bitch!" He moved away from her, and from his own foul stench. "Robin! You know I never forced a young girl." He talked as he paced back and forth. "Now you take yourself. You were a hot and horny little girl. You loved me to put my cock between your legs, remember?"
Robin flinched.
"Hell, you were an expert cocksucker before I ever knew you. Those movies I made of you... when the police came, they searched the house... " Robin caught at her throat. "Migod! Did they... " She started over. "DID THEY FIND... " Goggins slapped his paunchy belly. "They found one reel-oh no! Not one of you! An old one. Nobody even recognized the woman-she'd moved away years ago. Say! Wait!" He left the room and was gone a few minutes, returning with a handful of small cardboard boxes. He handed her one. "Read the title!"
Robin read aloud. "Robin, My Lovebird!"
He placed the others on the table. "How would you like to have them?"
"Please, Mister Goggins, I'd love to have them. How much do you want for them?"
"Well, you have grown up!" His lips-twisted in an unpleasant smile. "The price is right, Robin." He flung his robe open. Robin stared at his paunchy belly and his bulky mass of flaccid cockflesh. "I can't get a hard-on any more, but I still love having my cock sucked. You're welcome to the films afterward, and they're all there, Robin. But you have to strip naked."
Robin looked at the wasted flesh of his thighs, and the lifeless mass of his genitals, then glanced at the stack of movie reels. Her left hand moved up to unbutton her blouse.