Chapter 2
Clint Westwood hung over the rail of the cruise ship that was taking him and his sister, Shirley, to the island paradise of San Dozes. It was the last place on earth Clint wanted to go. Not that he knew anything about it. He just damn well didn't want to go anywhere, least of all with, or for, Shirley.
And he didn't like the set-up, either. Bunch of crooks, he thought, flicking his cigarette at a seagull which had been floating close to the stern of the ship. He'd wanted to post the dough for the trip in advance with the travel agency back in New York. But no, they had said, that wasn't the way things worked.
"After all," he remembered the pink-cheeked little tour-counselor saying, "this is the age of credit, Mr. Westwood. We simply don't know how much you and your companion will be spending on the island. Our plan is designed for everybody's convenience."
Yeah, sure, he thought. Everybody's convenience meant that he'd have to watch Shirley every moment of the day so she didn't walk off with the hotel bar, or more--likely, the bartender.
What a pain in the ass! Here he was, in his early thirties no career behind him, none ahead of him. A hack journalist with three muck-raking articles to his credit. Okay, so they had been good articles; everybody had praised him and talked of Pulitzer Prizes and all that crap. But he had hardly had time to squeeze those three articles out over the past few years, in between cleaning up Shirley's messes, much less work up a coordinated series of pieces which could have gotten him a good job and some kind of future. It was Shirley, always Shirley!
Bailing her out, sobering her up, getting her committed, getting her out, meeting her bills, heading off her pick-ups a lifetime of wet-nursing. When the hell would it end!
Maybe she'd slip and fall overboard and take up with a school of porpoises. Clint had heard they were a horny bunch!
And almost immediately he kicked himself for the thought! Nice talk, he thought, about his own sister. It wasn't her fault. Yeah, okay it wasn't her fault. So whose responsibility did that make her? Clint had been getting tired, damn tired, of tending to her all these years, trying to keep her out of trouble. What a hassle!
He remembered how it had all started when he and Shirley had been orphaned by that plane crash and how he had refused to let anybody back in Oak Woods take them in, how he had decided he would be the parents for both himself and Shirley and raise his younger sister in their house, where they belonged.
"Teenage Boy Takes Charge," the Oak Woods Gazette had headlined, and everybody had marveled at Clint's self-reliance, maturity, and devotion to his sister.
Well, that's where it was at his devotion to Shirley. He had finally allowed himself to face that fact, although it had been haunting him for years, demanding confrontation. But he had started to let himself remember how much he really had loved Shirley when they were both young. How he did anything for her, and how he was teased by his friends for being his kid sister's lackey.
And how she had humiliated him, even back then, when their parents were still living. Every day Clint would rise early to go and brush his sister's beautiful blonde hair fifteen minutes on each side while she sat in bed, still drowsing. And then he would run a bath for her and after breakfast, see her to school.
And be her butler in the afternoon, and do her homework in the evening while she watched TV or played. And on the weekends, clean her room, and build her things, like a playhouse or a see-saw.
And back in those days, he had loved it loved being bullied around and being subject to her every whim; loved loving his sister to whom he was so close, when they both were so distant from their parents; and loved, especially, his reward, when Shirley would draw his head down and thank him and give him a quick kiss.
So he was devoted to her and he damn sure wasn't going to let any outsiders break up things just because they were alone now in the world. Clint had welcomed the opportunity to run the house. He was sure that it would mean that he and Shirley would become even closer, and that the rest of the world and all those bratty kids on the outside would leave them alone.
But Shirley hadn't played the game, Clint thought, strolling up the promenade deck and looking absently at the bloated bodies that were stretched out in corpse-like rows on the deck chairs.
Whereas before, she had held up her end by staying clear of the other boys and girls in Oak Woods, now everything changed.
First, there was the girl friend stage. Shirley was coming into her teens, and Clint grew more in love with her every day as her face and body became fuller with the ripeness of young womanhood. Now he did more than brush her long hair in the morning, fix her breakfast, and work for them both after school. After Mrs. Greeley had come over to fix dinner for them and Clint had discussed the household bills and such matters with her, he devoted his evenings to his sister.
And after all the homework had been done and the house straightened and Shirley had gotten into bed, Clint would be allowed to approach her and give her a massage. This was something Shirley had spotted in a women's magazine, and she was determined that, starting then, she would have massages all her life, in order to last as well as Charlie Chaplin had.
So Clint, at her bidding, had gotten books on massage and even chiropractic. He had become an expert masseur, muscle-pummeler, flesh-firmer, and organ-prober. Every night, with nervous hands, he would pull the covers back and drink in the sight of his sister lying on her stomach, her nightgown pulled up around her neck and a towel arranged discreetly over her childish buttocks. For an hour, and maybe two, Clint would straddle her luscious young body, kneading and molding her firm flesh, while Shirley gurgled with pleasure and thumbed through movie magazines. Then she would announce she'd had enough, and Clint, dripping with sweat, and his head spinning with increased confusion and ambivalent emotions, would climb off her, get his goodnight kiss, and slink off to bed.
In spite of these slavish acts of devotion, Shirley had betrayed him. She had started having girl friends with whom to share the secrets of early teen-hood; with whom to go to movies and the drugstore; with whom to tattle confidences about her big brother whom all the town's adults admired so much, and all their children held in such contempt.
Clint had suffered in silence, and redoubled his devotion, hoping to win his sister back from her lightheaded, giddy young friends. But Shirley had persevered. And sharply rebuked him after he had sulked in front of a friend she had invited home.
It was all so clear, Clint thought now, climbing the ladder to the boat deck. If only he could have seen the pattern. If only somebody had shaken him hard and snapped him out of his trance. Because at that stage of the game, he was really the sick one of the pair.
Clint's shoulders tightened with disgust as his mind remorselessly kept flipping back through the pages of those days. Damn, but she had made a fool of him! It was really something of a miracle he was relatively sane today, and not a raving psychopath, when he considered where the pattern might have led.
For Shirley had really poured it on. Out of all her friends, Patty was the one Clint could tolerate most. In fact, he responded to Patty pretty much the way any older teen-age boy would respond to a cute high school girl with an already lush figure. He had even thought about dating Patty, and hoped, in some vague way, that her company might present some solutions to the pressures of young manhood that Shirley intensified so.
But Srrrley had seen it all coming. And so she had started inviting Patty over to the house something which had made Clint feel awkward. Shirley staked out her claim to Patty absolutely. And before Clint could rebel or wake up, had reasserted her authority over him.
Clint had come home one evening just as Shirley and Patty were finishing dinner and Mrs. Greeley was leaving. He had busied himself in the kitchen fixing his own dinner while the two girls occupied themselves in the living room. Or at least he had thought that's where they were.
But then Shirley had called to him from her bedroom upstairs, and when Clint came into her room, he was virtually stunned. For Patty was lying on Shirley's bed the way Shirley did for him. And, except for her panties, stretched tightly over her small behind, there was nothing to conceal her enticing body from Clint's amazed eyes.
This was the first time Clint had seen another girl undressed since he really didn't count the sight of Shirley, which was an image set on one of his private mental pedestals. The sight of Patty's curving back and long, shapely legs had really upset him, and both girls knew it.
"C'mon, silly," Shirley had said, "I've been telling Patty all about the delicious massages you give me. I knew you wouldn't mind doing one for her. C'mon, Clint, don't be such a sissy oaf!" she had chided, grabbing him by the hand and leading him to the bed.
"I'm not going to bite you, Clint," Patty had giggled, turning her head to wink at him and in the process exposing the soft beginning swell of one of her ripe breasts.
"Be a good brother," Shirley had urged. "Don't act so stupid."
Clint had nearly bolted for the door, but instead hesitated, and knew he was lost. With the awkwardness of a dancing bear, he removed his shoes and clambered up onto Shirley's bed. He knelt beside Patty.
"Clint!" reprimanded Shirley. "Do it right, now! Just the way you do me. Don't be such a silly prude!"
So Clint had cautiously straddled Patty's rump, noting how she curled her fingers in glee and clucked deep in her throat when he let his weight partially down on her. He wiped his moist hands on his trousers, steadying himself so that the beating of his heart wouldn't bounce him off the bed.
Then he leaned forward and grasped her shoulders, bearing down and in with his strong fingers. Immediately, Patty gave a deep sigh and flexed her body beneath him. Clint froze, electrified by the contact with this entirely new and different physical female presence.
"C'mon, big brother, do your stuff," said Shirley, her eyes shining with vicarious amusement.
Clint swallowed hard and felt the premature perspiration of his nervousness drip down the insides of his arms. He leaned forward again and, shutting his eyes, trying to blank out the sight and sound of Patty, went to work.
There was something unique about doing this to a girl he had actually been attracted to. It was hard to go into the disciplined dream world he entered when performing this nightly ritual for Shirley. For Patty felt new to him, and his fingers were apprehensive itching to be bold, to explore the contours of her lovely body, yet not daring to even seem more than impersonal.
Clint was breathing hard now, shifting down on the bed to work on the young girl's hind quarters. He felt a guilty surge of excitement as his hands began on the curving slopes which began and ended her buttocks.
Patty sighed long, dolorous sighs, squirming her body slightly from side to side. The sweat dripped from Clint's forehead as he manipulated her legs, feeling her muscles and tendons reacting with unpredictable spasms as he probed the fibers and nerves that lay compacted beneath her ivory skin.
"Isn't it marvelous?" Shirley asked Patty, getting an emphatic moan of pleasure for an answer. "Don't you wish Clint would go on forever and ever?"
"Mmmmm, yes," said the outstretched girl, widening her legs so that Clint, who was now half-kneeling on the bed, could shape and firm them.
Clint was feeling slightly dizzy. He had never before experienced the sensations which were just now pulsing through his body and kaleidoscoping through his fevered mind. He wanted to rip off the towel that protected Patty's nudity. More than that, he wanted to grasp her and roll her over, to see what a real girl looked like in the flesh how she would compare to the photographs he saw in the New York Times Magazine ads, how she would stack up against the forbidden visions of Shirley he tried to keep shut out of his mind. He wanted to stop this deliberate business of massaging and hammering at Patty's soft flesh. And instead run his hands softly over her bare legs, feeling the silkiness of her skin and making her jump when he brushed her sensitive places.
Somehow, he finished the cycle and drew himself erect with an aching back and drenched body. Then both girls giggled, and Clint turned and raced from the room, retreating to his own lair of darkness and confusion. There, that night, Clint experimented and learned the game of the frustrated male.
What he learned so startled him that he actually played even more into his sister's hands certain that the fault he found and the guilt he experienced in this and subsequent episodes were deficiencies of his own. He didn't recognize what was happening to Shirley; that, as her body expanded outward and grew to biological maturity, her mind shrank further inward, retreating to a world of child-like emotions and hostilities. And the more he enfolded her in the protective armor of his slavish devotion, the more she used him.
After that evening with Patty, Shirley escalated her game. Before long, she was having more of her girl friends over, making Clint alternately nervous and resentful. And then one Saturday night Clint walked in quite late and found the living room full of girls he vaguely knew from high school. With a shock he realized that they were all wearing nightgowns and pajamas. He turned, bewildered, to Shirley for an explanation.
"Brother, baby we've all been waiting for you," she exclaimed gleefully. "This is my very first slumber party and I knew it wouldn't be complete without you. Hey, kids! Who's going to be first?"
Clint's heart sank. He needed no explanation as Patty pushed through the small throng of giggling, arguing girls. Shirley had grabbed the three big cushions from the sofa and made a mattress of them on the floor. His heart pounding like a pile-driver, Clint saw Patty turn her back to him, pull off her nightie, and flop down on the cushions. His eyes shot around the room, and he realized from the expressions on the faces of the other girls that Shirley had built all their hopes up equally.
By the time he had started to work on Patty's succulent flesh, someone had turned the lights out, and it was only by the firelight that he could discern what his hands were doing to the audience which gathered round to watch the massage.
He wanted to appeal to Shirley by the time he had finished with Patty, but she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, another seductive body had shed its clothing and scrambled onto the cushions, wriggling in expectation. And as Clint was urged to renew his work, he was confronted with the added spectacle of Patty, who had not bothered to dress herself. She sat with her knees drawn up and her hands clasped around her ankles, her eyes boring into Clint, making a jelly out of him, even as he started manipulating the new flesh under his hands.
For a while, Clint really believed he was going to go crazy. His hands stopped tingling and went almost numb as they kneaded the firm body of the new candidate; his ears stopped hearing the giggles of the teenage audience and began a strange ringing. His eyes could no longer focus on what he really wanted to see in the nude bodies near and under him. Desire the confusion of emotions left him, and he began to grow almost homicidally angry.
Then suddenly he felt himself being tickled by a coy hand in the semi-darkness. Turning with a snarl, he lashed out, trying to connect a tensely knuckled fist with one of the mocking figures around him. And immediately he was jumped by several of the girls. With whoops of almost insane delight, they wrestled him to the ground and pinned him as he fought like a madman to free himself. His shirt was ripped away and several artful hands began tickling him, making his body leap all over and forcing screams of hysterical laughter and fury from his throat.
Only when he thought he was going to black out from desperation, as the thinly clad nymphets swarmed around him, when he thought his lungs would collapse from the strain of his struggles, when he feared his heart would burst from shame and ignominy, did a voice from the darkness Shirley's voice demand an end to the game.
But the price of freedom Shirley demanded of her brother, who was trembling and nearly broken in spirit, was that he remain with her friends throughout the night. And so for hours Clint waited on the young lovelies and was forced to come into closer contact with them, playing spin-the-bottle and other fiendish recreations which they devised, one after another, to drive him to the breaking point.
After that night, Clint had changed his schedule rarely coming close to the house except at night, and only when he had assured himself that no traps had been set. Still devoted to Shirley, still waiting on her in the same macabre fashion, Clint was different in that the mechanism of lust had been tightly and definitely wound in him. But still he didn't see the pattern.
It was quite a bit later, in another school year, and Clint had started to fuel his fantasies directly from his contact with Shirley, who grew more beautiful and more provocative with every day, although, to her brother, she was still untouchable.
Clint came into the house and, after calling for Shirley, assumed he had the place to himself until he went upstairs and saw a light coming from her room. But this time, when he walked in and saw a nude body on the bed, he wasn't quite so paralyzed.
"What are you doing here? Where's Shirley?" he demanded of Patty, who lay without moving, naked and gleaming in the light that came from the fixture at the head of the bed.
"She told me to tell you she'd be back. Come here, Clint," murmured the girl. "Do me the way you used to, please?"
Clint hesitated, tempted to turn his back on the girl, who was so obviously flaunting herself before him, trusting him, as all of Shirley's friends had learned to trust her brother. But when he paused, a change came over him. He no longer saw a female body belonging to one of his sister's friends. He saw an aggregation of feminine curves, the lines and contours of light and shadow on a naked, seductive body. He stepped forward, feeling Patty's half-closed, guileless eyes watching him. Then, a smile flitting across his lips, he clambered up onto the bed. For once, Clint decided, he was going to see the other half. All this time, all this teasing, all his fantasy and frustration, he was going to settle all that right now.
He reached out a hand. But instead of grasping Patty's flesh with the rough impersonality of a body builder, he let his fingers slide down her long back. He could feel her skin jump, like that of a horse when tickled. This was more like it, he thought, beginning to caress her, bringing his hand down over her buttocks, pausing just long enough to squeeze them ever so slightly.
He could feel Patty tense, and he knew this wasn't what she'd been expecting from Shirley's brother. His blood started racing through his veins as he looked, really looked, at Patty the soft curves of her rump, the tapering ivory columns of her legs. There were tap-hammers going against his temples as he deliberated for a few seconds, and then abruptly he did it.
He grabbed Patty and flung her over on her back before she could even draw a breath of surprise. That was more like it, he thought, as he drank in the extraordinary new sight of her exposed breasts, with their small strawberry tips. Much more like it! Patty lay there, her face almost expressionless as his eyes traveled down her body, devouring every inch of her ripe figure, boring through her at the most intimate junctures.
To Clint's great surprise, as he reached out a hand half to feel one of those succulent mounds, half to restrain her if she should try to escape Patty caught his hand and guided it to her. Scrutinizing her as much as his excited state would allow, he noted how she closed her eyes as his hand draped itself over one of her breasts. Automatically, he applied his other hand to her bulging endowment.
And then he was caressing her, squeezing and smoothing the twin fruits, feeling the strange satisfaction of their soft extremities growing rough and hard under his palms, catching them between his fingers and instinctively goading them to a further state of stimulation. And she was pulling him down toward her, at the same time working his shirt free from his torso. Clint saw her face loll to one side, the soft, moist mouth ready and open, and took the unmistakable cue, driving his lips against hers, roiling his tongue against the snake-like flickerings of her own.
Lust, and a satisfaction which bordered on revenge, and her rising desire, of which he was becoming animally aware, spurred him on. As her hands started caressing him, his began their wild peregrinations over the burning expanses of her body. His knee drove rudely between her naked thighs, which parted under the rough pressure. His hands pinched her and tormented her, probing at tingling nerves and tightening muscles. His mouth dropped to a breast, and then his head swam from one conical peak to the other.
Whimpering with what Clint at first thought was pain but soon recognized as utter delight, Patty grabbed his head and guided it back and forth, letting his slathering mouth nip and seize her sensitive flesh. The hands buried in his hair pushed him down with mounting urgency. And her voice became more agonized and desperate.
Not that he had ever conceived of how love was made. Or ever imagined what practice Patty was forcibly introducing him to. But Clint was no longer a thinking being. The frequency of his lust responded to the signals the writhing girl was giving him. With willingness he backed down the bed, greedily feeding off the banquet her body offered him, until he reached the goal that her every action and demand was insisting upon. The sudden pitch of her cries and spasmodic reflex of her body thrusting against him told Clint that he had arrived where she had meant him to go. And he drove at her relentlessly, and her fingers knotted in his hair, and she cried out in a voice that resonated through every fiber of his own swollen being.
And then, as she quieted and Clint slowed the pace of his furious labors, he felt his skin prickle in a different way from its already super-sensitive anxiety; felt suddenly as though he were exposed, instead of the exhausted form he knelt over; felt as though he were being bathed in the audacious glare of a spotlight; and suddenly knew why.
Rearing up and spinning around, Clint saw his sister standing not three feet from the bed. Her eyes shone with an unnatural, reptilian luster, as if they were mirrors in which not just he but the entire cinematic pageant of his lust was being reflected. He saw, in his shock, Shirley's arm, where it disappeared under her bathrobe, and saw that she didn't notice that he saw.
It was then, as his passion sank like a torpedoed tanker and a sickness oozed up from his ruptured soul and spread over him, that Clint really saw Shirley for the first time. It was that night when he recognized the pattern, that night, as he saw and understood the look of twisted pleasure in his voluptuous sister's eyes, that Clint's sense of devotion vanished.
If things were not established as he, Clint, had taken so much care to establish them, he could have been a free man from that night on. That trap she had set with Patty might have represented her ace in the hole. But Shirley had a hold over Clint in the very nature of the system he had worked out for them both. He couldn't leave and she wasn't going to. The only thing that changed was that she no longer needed to confuse Clint; all the time of her ripening years could be devoted to making his life a nightmare.
She started soon after that. Clint remembered the weekend nights, awakening to noises downstairs, and coming down to find some slob from school mauling Shirley as she lay wantonly on the porch swing or living room couch. Then, just about the time when he had finally driven off all her schoolmate victims, she was getting old enough to go out and start messing around with real men.
Clint lit a cigarette, facing into the warm wind that blew out of the Caribbean. His jaw tightened and the smoke churned within him as he remembered the first time he had heard the word applied to Shirley: nymphomaniac! He had flattened the friend who had offered it, and then gone through an entirely different, new sort of hell accepting the term.
And accepting responsibility for Shirley. Which meant that soon they had moved to New York, where Clint had tried every form of help available. Psychiatrists had tried to treat her and wound up fighting her off the couch. Ministers had tried to reach her and hurried away with scarlet faces and rumpled habits. Authorities had tried to commit her, and then explained to him helplessly that she became the most normal, intelligent and rational female in the world behind institutional walls. Friends had tried to get her jobs or help Clint oversee her activities.
And the years had gone by. One after the other, punctuated only by the more grotesque scenes as when Clint would arrive home to find three salesmen living in his apartment and claiming the naked girl in the bedroom had invited them; when he arrived home to find a sea of alcohol or traces of heroin on the kitchen table. One thing after another, and Shirley had kept withdrawing, growing at once more beautiful and more sickly.
Lately there had been no real horror shows. She had just been very quiet and moody. And one friend, an intern at Bellevue, who had stuck by Clint and was the only other human being to whom Shirley might respond, had suggested getting her out of the city. And another friend had suggested a Caribbean cruise. So Clint had arranged everything, scraped together some money, and after thumbing through the phone-book, signed them both up on a Time-of-Your-Life tour. Secretly, he hoped Shirley would meet someone insane enough to marry her; openly, he prayed that what so many doctors had hinted at would happen that something would come along to shock her into reality and into a sense of life.
God, how he hoped so! The ship's whistle sounded, a great vibrating blast that shuddered through his bones and rattled his teeth. Clint flicked his cigarette over the rail and started below to find his sister and their luggage. He waved to the pretty girl who smiled at him.