Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 14:42:57 -0500
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: STONINGTON STORIES- CONCLUSION

STONINGTON STORIED -- CONCLUSION
by R. Forbes Emerson
(bi-ped. inc., rom.)


	  Pant, pant, pant.
	  The guidebooks even back in 1960, to say nothing of 1860, went on
and on about whispering pines, the cry of coastal seagulls (which I live in
the Caribbean to escape), and the lush mellow reverberations of a foghorn
or mysterious clang of an obscure bell buoy.  (Salivating isn't mentioned
one way or the other, outside the context of a warm, steamy restaurant
where lobsters come green and go red.)  But just because the guidebooks
overlook something, doesn't mean it fails to exist.  Just because
Stonington wasn't portrayed as a slobbering, panting, salivating hotbed of
anticipation and drooling expectancy doesn't mean there was anything normal
about the town.  Guidebooks are written by transients who have one of the
world's toughest jobs.  If you want the lowdown, fully realized; even
embellished and gratuitously enhanced, check with a local.
	  For four years I was a local.  I saw some of it, heard about the
rest, and, yes, made up a fantastic amount on my own.
	  Have you met the mailman?  It's a challenge publishing in serial
installments because regular readers don't want excess re-hashing while new
readers would like to know what's going on.
	  Maybe we'd do better starting with the world's four hundred and
seventeenth longest suspension bridge.  That's how you get from the
mainland onto Deer Isle.  Apparently someone at one time thought a ship
might want to transverse Deer Island Thoroughfare, because the bridge is
really high, with a hump in the center thanks, legend has it, to a cup of
spilled Ovaltine in the drafting studios of a city architect.  It's a
little cruel, I suppose.  Surely by the time one reaches the bridge he or
she has had a genteel sufficiency of coastal Maine, and the green structure
vaulting hundreds of yards, and even thousands of feet out into the ocean,
would seem to offer new vistas.  Sorry.  More granite, seagulls, and
mudflats surrounded by pine trees.  There's the causeway.  At high tide a
half mile of car as boat, or so it seems looking out the side windows.  At
low tide, car as vehicle on alien turf, though the smell is actually
intoxicating and sleep inducing.
	  After the causeway, it's routine miles; why, you might as well be
driving from Blue Hill to Ellsworth.  This is probably a good thing, when
one thinks on it carefully.  If Deer Isle was particularly beautiful, it
might mesmerize the wayfarer, and the perils of negotiating an island in a
trance cannot fail to be obvious.

	  If there were any waypoints, highlights, or points of interest or
significance they'd appear right here.
	Guess that says it all.  Of course, if you make it all the way down
island, and reach Stonington, and turn left to Oceanville, and cross the
bridge, and proceed a mile or so to the Union Hall, and turn right, you'll
pass in back of my house.  It's an unmarked dead end, or at least it was in
1960.  (Unmarked, that is.  It will always be a dead end unless totally
unsurvivable geological changes occur.)  Someday the Emerson salt-water
farm will be top of the pops on the tourist hit parade, but that'll take
years.  I'm frivolous, half-ludicrous, prurient and so festooned with
liabilities they total a millstone more than adequate for grinding
cathedrals into grave dust.  Since I've been carrying this old hummer
around since the age of three, I seem to be a survivor, so one day the
house will be, if not a cultural center and C-SPAN stop, at least more than
another tidewater b&b.  (The view is actually ugly.  Fields sweeping over
granite to the bay, a few miles across to Sunshine (where the nudist art
camp is), which is lovely, but Mt. Cadillac sticks up in the middle of it,
just prominent enough to be an eyesore -- so schedule your visit for a
foggy day.)

	  We were rarely visited in Stonington, in spite of being part of
an immense family.  You can see why.  I always feel that the reason New
England produced the majority of great writers was that it took immense
dedication, skill, practice, talent and luck to make the place sound
habitable in the first place.  This iconoclastic viewpoint spills over to
my pobrecito efforts at describing my gulag -- I do it well, but
unwillingly.

	  Is that all there is to it?  Not particularly beautiful, notable
only for the granite hauled down to the cities, and that was a long time
ago; no widely known favorite sons in spite of most sons leaving early on
the mornings of their eighteenth birthdays, no reason for the bridge being
high enough for ships that never have come and never will, no this, less
that, practically none of any of the other, and never even heard of
whatsyamacallit.

	  Does it all sound a little woebegone?  Whittling?  Cracker
barrel?  Even spittoon?  Are you checking your file, Buffy?  Seeing if the
story really came from Nifty?  Not to worry.  Stonington, Maine, may not be
the last word in glamour, history, politics, influence or commerce, but, by
gorry, it has a dump.

	  We opened with salacious panting and did so with due diligence.
As you can't judge a book by its cover, you'd be something of a fool to
judge an apparent wasteland by it's narrow, humpy bridge.  For all you
know, the neatest houses shelter the darkest secrets, the trimmest
dooryards are groomed by the most wandering hands, the cleanest laundry is
strung out to dry by the most philandering lady of the house, the sharpest
car is driven by the most incorrigible pedophile, and the fastest boat is
piloted by a land-dwelling monster.  Any of these could be true.  What you
have to do to enjoy our time together on Deer Isle is take it as an article
of faith that they're all true.

	  Again, old readers are veterans of what passes for entertainment
in a backwater in back of a backwater, and you newcomers don't know quite
what to expect.  A real killer would be if you're a newcomer to Nifty, as
well as my work.  If that's the case, you've clicked your way onto a new
planet and you'd do well to check your seatbelt -- the more particularly as
it's likely to be the only belt... well, you'll figure that out for
yourself.  When?  The old hands will sigh.  Yes, sometimes it seems to take
forever to get there.  Nobody's perfect.  I saunter, I dither, I lay on
plentiful whupass, I'm a prince and I know it; so on, and so forth, so,
when we finally do make it, half the pleasure is akin to that you get when
you stop banging your head against a wall, while the other half is the
result of an offhand virtuosity unmatched in artistic history.  An
extraordinary combination.  I envy you.  All the pleasure, none of the
work.  What a world, even though it may, at times, seem as if you're
plowing a long furrow behind a cranky mule to get to the pot of gold.

	  Gold?  This is Brooklyn, already?  Last I knew, we were headed
for the town dump -- and you know what -- whisper, whisper -- we were not
alone.

	  It had never quite reached the scale of a theater of the absurd
before.  Sure, on occasions when a particularly comely young lass got a
Black Spot moments of comedy ensued as townsfolk pretended either outrage
or indifference, then had to avoid each others' eyes on Saturday
morning. That was then, this was now, and at present we're getting ahead of
ourselves.

	  It occurs to me -- and this happens fairly often -- that I look
on incest and pedophilia with rose-colored glasses.  That I abrogate the
creed of the novelist -- truth at any cost -- out of a genuine liking for
people and a deeply held belief that life can be both fun and funny.  A
little one size fits all, as I'm sure veterans will agree.  In fact, if
anyone takes any lumps in my fiction, it's the reader.  My characters
almost invariably get along beautifully with each other; like, love and
respect themselves, their partners, and humanity at large.  If they don't
behave well, I'm hair trigger and short-tempered when it comes to blaming
the church, the politicians, the legal system, the educational system, and
everybody but Mrs. O'Leary and her freaking cow for crummy officiating, and
not my characters for their beliefs and acts.  If I were my own critic I'd
have pithy words to say on Mr. Emerson's intense commitment to
rationalization and adroit expediency.  I'd call him too original and
eclectic.  Attempt demolishing him with a lyric passion.  Of course, since
I'm me, and the only writer with the skill set to even make a dent, I sail
on unchallenged, unmolested, in full command, and under the stewardship of
one Alfred E. Newman whose credo is the legendary: "What me worry?"

	  All this is well and good; me, as usual, but what if I took
myself seriously?  Admitted that writing friendly folk getting it on
together, no how brilliantly rendered, left me, bottom line, a day late and
a dollar short as a novelist?

	  W. Somerset Maugham was pretty much the curmudgeon of last
century's novelists, nor did Oliver Goldsmith spare the rod to spoil his
literary children, yet both drift their major works off the end of the
final pier and land everybody aboard a comfy ferryboat instead of a
freezing millrace.  D.H. Lawrence tries for a little grit in the
aftertaste, but he's so over-the-top enroute one is just glad to be
finished whether everyone lives happily ever after or ends up starving and
freezing in Bedlam.

	  Critics aside, it could well be I'm deathly afraid of my own
power.  I seem barely able to control the ocean of crude flying a thousand
feet up from the wellhead when I distill it into soft elixirs and mild
perfumes.  If I were to try an accelerant how hot the blaze and when and
where would the fire end?  I feel all the reader can stand is the
occasional footnote or tangential reference to life as it is for Earth's
vast majority.  To bore in with desolation as a central theme?  To abandon,
for a chapter, Audrey, Larry, Jeannie, Jack, Dickie, Doreen, Gary, George,
Tip and Margaret, to name a few major characters, in favor of The Old Doe?
To shack you up with her for fifteen thousand words?  Where previously I
alluded to knowing how Beethoven felt, even thinking along negative lines
puts me into a frame of mind originated by Mssrs. Oppenheimer, Fermi, and
their colleagues and associates.  They were almost sure their bomb wouldn't
crack the planet in half as I'm almost sure you'd survive the half-plate of
cold, greasy beans that made up The Old Doe's food for a particular day and
constituted the best part of that day.

	  Why the fear on my part?  I trace it to the fact that even the
reader who wrote that sex with minors should be left to minors is wrong;
that no minor should ever have anything whatever to do with sex, just as
church and court say.  This draws the double-edge sword from its scabbard.
First, free of taboo sex at any age between partners of any gender and
relationship, who like each other, is psychologically harmless and need be
feared only from the standpoints of physical incompatibility, disease, or
inappropriate pregnancy, and, second, a whole lot of shakin' is going on no
matter what anyone says, preaches, yells, screams or hollers.

	  Accentuate the positive as the old song says.  That's me.  That's
Nifty.  But I'm not meant to be me.  I'm meant to be a novelist, and they
can't be anybody.  It's not in the script.  The detachment is germane.  The
writer places himself in a drawer of his desk and locks it until his
workday is finished.  Only Truth sits at the keyboard.

	  For any of you at home suffering under the delusion that my bark
is worse than my bite, her name was Grassy.  If you have more brains than
an ant you will not want to know how a tomboy with stains on her britches
ends up a roadside hag and the target for debris tossed from passing school
buses.  The brilliant spinner of sea yarns, Captain Marrayatt, became irate
when readers wrote of the bland and affable ending of one of his novels.
In his next book he corrected this oversight.  No one has written to me in
a similar vain, but why take chances?

	  Her real name was Grace Knowlton
	  His real name was Emery Davis.  I killed Emery Davis when I was
sixteen.  Too late.  When I was fourteen, in 1960, I threw paper wads, and
once a gum eraser at The Old Doe.  That was a crime.

	  Everett and Mary Knowlton moved onto Deer Isle before the bridge
was built.  Everett had taken advantage of a, a fine mind, b, an enriched
environment both economically and academically, and, c, a simpler time to
qualify himself as both a lawyer and physician -- specifically so he could
live in an isolated community and still do well by his family.  He'd been
slightly aghast when Margaret Chase Smith used her seniority in the US
Senate to hatch a coastal boondoggle in her district, but ballots were the
way of democracy -- and the majority often lost to some fiddling swindle
that would swing an election.
	  Everett and Mary could have moved on to Monhegan, no one was
going to bridge that puppy in a big hurry, but in the end they decided to
stay put and let progress wash over them.  The opening of the bridge
occurred on their daughter, Grace's, tenth birthday, and they all attended
the ribbon cutting.  (It was hoped a ship would sail under the new
structure to show why it had to be so high and mighty, but a dockworker's
strike spoiled the plan and no ship ever did steam miles out of its way so
someone could snap a picture of several million pork barrels painted green
and riveted together for the senator's office wall.)

	  "Grassy, you're going to end up Tarry if you keep playing on the
new road," Everett chided his little girl.
	  "I though I was going to be Greasy because I like to work under
the car," the girl shot back, her long braids flouncing and her big, blue
eyes sparkling.  About her only feminine characteristic was parking her
bike neatly alongside the porch steps, and this she did, running up for a
hug or two and even more kisses from her tall, handsome dad.
	  Mary was attracted by the commotion and came out on the porch.
Gazing at her daughter she allowed has how they were going to take her to
Georgia on their next vacation and sell her to a plantation owner.  It was
the late Forties and a touch of ethnicity was still considered inoffensive
when one was kidding around.  (Sambo's silly story was just fun, it could
have as easily been "Little White Rambo": is there one left among you who
understands?)

	  Mary made a scrubbing motion with her hands while looking at the
tall, slim eleven year old with the freckles and straw-colored hair.
	  "Come on, Dad," Grassy giggled, let's save some hot water
together.
	  "I might have known," Mary sighed, "you probably peddled half way
across the island to find the most dirt in the least time.  You're too old
to be bathing with your father."
	  "I'm not," the girl replied with irreducible logic, "we save hot
water together."
	  "Yes," Mary replied, "and with your logic three can shower as
cheaply as one, which is going to be the case one of these days."  As
always she was amazed at herself for her tolerance of her daughter's
apparently endless infatuation with her husband.  She'd nearly died
bringing the child into the world, and the doctor in Blue Hill had
mater-of-factly tied her off saying if no one else cared (and of course,
they did), he, for one, was never going through anything like that again if
modern medicine could possibly prevent it.
	  As their only child had matured a vague and ethereal notion had
crossed, her pillow to her husband's, his back to her's.  It was a what-if
with about three `f's'.  Grassy's early-onset and ongoing devotion to her
attractive, soft-spoken father had prevented the death of a subject that
had no right to life in the first place, and, spontaneously, without the
slightest insinuation or provocation from either parent, the girl had
recently begun musing on the possibility of more than a sister, quizzing
her plain talking father on the medical aspects as they related to both her
age and to the health of and outlook for family babies.

	  In the days before television, and only vague radio reception
from Bangor, the subject has given them a common bond which had become
slowly more invoked as a subject for dinner conversations.  All three
participants realized it might not have developed in another community,
been regarded as not a fit topic for any kind of society, polite or
otherwise, but Stonington had Tip McCorison, an elemental force when it
came to making the unmentionable not only mentionable but rendering most
any other topic unmentionable as not being of sufficient interest to merit
the time of day.

	  Now the girl was eleven years old.  Still too young especially
because of her slim build, but at the same time eager.  Mary didn't blame
her.  Even with the ongoing burdens of medical then law school, often with
the two disciplines overlapping, he'd never failed -- even begun to fail --
to love her fully and nightly.  She'd glowed undiminished through finals,
the bar exam and medical boards; was still glowing at a beautiful, big-eyed
thirty as she had as a new mother at twenty.  Ev was responsible,
alternating quirkily between tender, adoring supplicant at the altar of her
charms and detached, take what he could get while it was hot barbarian.
Truth to tell, the young wife had no idea in the world how her husband and
daughter had kept their mitts off each other for as long as they had.  In
eleven years they'd only made it to the proverbial Second Base, and that
far only while showering.  She'd never yet woken in the night to find him
missing from his place beside her; he'd never inveigled time alone with the
girl under any pretext; if they were playing chess together there was never
a sudden cut in the conversation when she entered the room.  Con free,
wheedle free, it was a nice way to live and Mary wondered if she was still
kicking out a kid every year or two if she'd feel any differently about her
husband and daughter.  (But she didn't wonder much.)

	  "If it's three on your mind lass," Everett said, "why don't you
make it so?"
	  No.  Even with Tip as the fox amongst the hens, that was a bridge
Mary had no interest in crossing.  Blame it on him, she supposed, but any
female, even her own beauty of a daughter, held no special interest.  (Nor
had any other male, for that matter.)  It was all so nice.  So friendly.
So real.  So stable.  So permanent.

	  Emery Davis turned the valve on the hydraulic jack.  With a
hissing gurgle his truck settled to the dirt of his dooryard.  Using a
single almost offhand motion, he grabbed the steel handle and pivoting on
his left foot he wheeled the fifty-pound mechanism from the ground,
releasing it to land with a crash in the bed of the pickup.  Shocked, his
paw lacerated and half pulverized, Kitten, Emery's big shepherd leaped from
his nest on a rusty chain with a wild yelp.
	  The man caught the dog in mid-air, thudding his right boot into
the animal's ribs and catapulting it back into the bed of the old vehicle.
	  Tire and wheel followed the jack into the back of the truck.
Kitten held his tongue and maneuvered on his battered legs and broken paw
as best he could to avoid being killed outright.
	  The engine roared, the clutched burned, the tires spun, and Emery
Davis gained the public highway.  "Flag puppy," he swore to himself apropos
of some two hundred dollars he owed the Internal Revenue Service and his
lawyer's advice that the money indeed was due Uncle Sam and he'd best fork
over.  "If you can't sue it and can't screw it, the only thing left is to
do it."  Emery had been taught there was nothing to smile about early in
life, but neither was he frowning as he stroked the handle of the Bowie
knife in his belt before horsing the truck into third gear.

	  "It's been two weeks, Dad," Grassy whispered, "I'm really
beginning to change."
	  "But I don't want you to," Dr. Knowlton pretended to whine.
"You're perfect just as you are."
	  "You always say that," the sweetie giggled.
	  "And I'm always right," the young father rejoined.
	  "If you were, I'd still be wearing diapers," the girl observed.
	  "And I'd still be able to get up in the middle of the night and
spend an hour with you," her father observed right back.
	  "Isn't that where we're headed?"
	  "What do you think?"
	  "Ask me what I pray."
	  "What we pray, I guess," the man acknowledged.
	  "Mom, too," she observed and he nodded.

	  It had been a couple of weeks.  No special reason.  They'd never
made a particular thing out of what ensued between them.  It might happened
three days in a row, then the vagaries of schedules and activities might
keep them apart for days without a thought on the matter by either the girl
or the man.  Two weeks, though, and at this stage of her life.  He'd never
gawked at her before, but that was then and this was now.
	  They were in the big upstairs bathroom, door closed but not
locked.  As was their custom they'd stripped in their own rooms and wrapped
in towels before joining for the shower.
	  "Can you tell?" she asked, still in her terrycloth.
	  Now that she mentioned it.
	  Ev was perched against the edge of the sink.  His daughter looked
down.  "Yes," she whispered, her eyes glowing at the huge spike she'd never
seen before until they were naked and saving hot water together.  She had a
quick mind and in seconds had figured out a way to save yet more water.
	  "I'm not that dirty," she said.
	  "I guess I'm not, either," her father seconded.
	  "Can we skip the water show?"
	  "One of us has to tell your mother so she'll know we haven't died
in each others' arms."

	  "I will," Grassy said.
	  "Okay," her father rasped, his voice another dimension to what it
had ever been in her younger days.
	  "Can it be on my bed?" she asked.
	  "Yes, darling," her father answered.
	  "I'll be right back."
	  "I love you."
	  "I'm just saving water."
	  "Ha, ha."

	  "What did she say?"
	  "She kissed me on the lips."
	  "Oh, sexy."
	  "I know you are, but how `bout me?"
	  "If there's romance in conservation I guess you're going to have
to teach me."
	  "You're already a doctor and a lawyer, are you sure..."
	  "I'm also a father," he whispered, "and that makes me very, very
sure."
	  "Take it off so you can see," she whispered, seating him on her
bed and standing between his legs, trying not to stare solely at the
massive bulge in his wrap.
	  His fingers found her forehead, her cheeks; her eyes, ears, nose
and long, swanlike neck.  Her shoulders.  Her chest.  Her towel.
	  His lips followed his fingers
	  Her shoulders.  Her chest.  Her towel.
	  "That's like kissing a chicken," she said in the voice of a very
young woman, and dropped the terrycloth, taking his face in her palms.
	  He was stunned by her.  Almost overnight her pretty raspberries
had grown into big strawberries surrounded by real teacup mounds.  Even
allowing for her state of obvious and extreme arousal she was big and
fabulously like her beautiful mother.

	  "No protection," was all she whispered as she approached and used
her fingers on his towel.  Then she was on his lap, partly on her knees
until she found him, then, eyes burning into his, down a million slow,
soft, wet, warm miles while she panted and mewed and cooed, often into his
mouth.
	  His arms went around her half romantically and half to reassure
himself he wasn't dreaming.  Wordlessly, she started her motion against
him, managing to gyrate slowly while rising and falling, arms bent double
in front of her, with her hands on his shoulders to help in her swaying
dance.
	  Minutes passed in the quiet house.  The bed set up a soft
squeaking and neither Grace nor her father would have bet they didn't hear
some sound from the loose floorboard in the upstairs hall.
	  "Will I know or will you have to tell me?" Grassy asked after a
quarter hour.
	  "I'm not sure," Ev managed to whisper.
	  "Do you have to tell Mom?" she queried.
	  "If we're still, no," he said.
	  "How often is it like that?" the hot girl wanted to know.
	  "About half the time, I guess," Ev said.
	  "I couldn't stand more often than that," Grassy said.
	  "It is best to survive," her father agreed.
	  "If I have a daughter, and you make her wait until she's eleven,
we're going to have a bone to pick," the girl observed.
	  "Maybe she'll come up on Tip's list so we can have smooth
sailing," the man said, half because he loved his little girl, and half
because every second insider her was years of heaven -- a simple case of
the more the better.
	  Diversions helped but the ending was inevitable.  Her eyes got
bigger and glazed over as her head lolled.  "Oh, Dad, finally,
thank... god," she whispered freezing tightly against him and mewing
incoherently as he ejaculated wildly deep in her virgin belly.

	  "I saw them leaving as I got here," the note read.  "I found them
in the house like they are.  I think they have the girl.  I'm going after
them.  Heading for the bridge.  I checked to see if they were alive but
they're not.  The girl is because she was screaming.  They're driving a
black Ford.  Two of them Dressed like hunters.  Never saw the car.  I've
got to go."

	  No one believed it, not from Emery Davis, but nothing could be
proved.  He was covered with blood, but so were the police, the coroner and
even the man who took the pictures.  No apparent motive beyond a minor tax
matter Everett was looking into.  The black Ford was Maine's most common
car.  Everyone dressed like a hunter, nine months of the year.  Emery would
whittle whenever he launched into his detailed chronology of arriving at
the Knowlton residence, in case his listener was slow on the uptake.
Although Deer Isle was far from limitless, it would have taken half an army
months to scour every thicket, backwater and alder thicket.

	  One day The Old Doe wasn't there.  The next day she was.  There.
Everywhere.  No where.  Some of the island's rough trade took their turns
and she became a fixture.  No solid connection could be made after twenty
years but no islander would have bet a nickel that two and two didn't add
up to four.  The only thing she ever said was: "He ate all three of them.".

	  Killing Emery diverted my from my writing for about a month
spread out over two years, and I was probably lucky to get off without a
greater investment of my time.
	  No frontal assault was realistic because there was always half a
zoo of bad tempered shepherds lurking on his property.  (I've never much
cared for dogs since I lived in Stonington.)  Persistent but very subtle
questioning did eventually bring up the stalker's nirvana, which is a
routine in the habits of the intended victim.  I might have guessed; a
Saturday night bottle.  Off island.  That meant waiting until I had my
license, fabricating a girlfriend in Blue Hill, making up a little here and
inventing a little there.  My grades were so horrific that was all my
parents noticed so inch-by-inch and week-by-week I wove my scheme and
hatched my plot.

	  I'm not bragging.  As a writer, I caught three specific breaks
without which I wouldn't have published a word.  (One was the modern word
processor, the second was an adequate private income and the third was
Nifty, ASSTR and ASSGM.)  In murdering Emery Davis I lucked out because he
had a died in the wool Saturday night routine, he owned a common variety
vehicle, and he and his snoot full piled on back to the island like hell's
own hound.  The finishing touch I found in Sedgwick.  A T intersection
dynamited from the local granite, with the route to Stonington coming up
the stem of the T, and a right turn at the cross-hatch.  (I've never turned
left at this intersection, so, if my descriptions of the area don't
impress, maybe you'd want to try a left when you visit.)  The local
embankments rise three or four feet over the level of the roadbed, adequate
for my plan.

	  The tricky part was informing Emery.  A simple lights-out would
have defeated the whole plot: his life was so miserable, even before he
killed and raped his way out of every heart and mind in town, that letting
him pump along was very close to an ultimate punishment.  It was said Mary
and Everett had been tied for hours; she raped, he sodomized, and silence
on the fate of the willowy tomboy, so justice cried out.  He had to, a,
suffer immensely, and, b, know the whys and wherefores of said tortuous and
hopeless end.  Since I was pretty much the prototypical lightweight in my
early teens, interested in such instant gratifications as photography, hot
cars, big outboards and the like, I was able to wish and want for a tape
recorder without anyone twigging.  I was always tinkering with radios
without ever burdening myself with Morse code so I could get a license, so
my interest in mercury switches, timers and the like was passed off as
typically superficial.  I'd worked in a Marine Biology lab for two summers
and saved a few hundred dollars, so small orders to Radio Shack, which was
then largely a catalogue outlet, were a matter of routine.
	  By April of 1962 my methodically assembled package was complete,
and I needed but a Saturday midnight dreary.  April in Maine?  Waiting for
a dreary night is like waiting for low tide; you will be soon rewarded.

	  It was actually raining.  The dog in the back of the truck was so
soaked and miserable it probably wouldn't have roused itself for a bitch or
a bear.  Emery took his bottle with a widow lady at the end of a lane.  I
was able to slip under his truck with my shielded flashlight and tamper to
my heart's content.  First the little tape recorder; wired, not taped in
place.  Then the brake line.  Standard junk yard part, only I'd subjected
it to several hours of modification in order to make it look as if it had
been half-crushed through misadventure.  (I've always had a soft spot for
Dremel tools since.)

	  Two hours with rag-muted wrenches, wire cutters, putty, a hand
drill, a hacksaw blade and a clutch of other tools brought the clock to
elevenish.  The real challenge was the damn dog.  In the end, I was able to
befriend it with Oscar Myer wieners (thanks Mom) and I fabricate a plywood
ramp from the bed of the truck to the roof of the cab so the freaking beast
would be ejected and go scaling out through the alders at the crucial
moment.

	  A dilemma.  Stay or go?  Stay and be first on the scene; a
certain poetic justice, added to the biblical kind; tempting.  Go, and be
home in bed, innocent beyond innocence.
	  Someone as mean as Emery Davis wouldn't think of locking a
vehicle, so I slipped a cardboard box of sundry electrical and radio parts
under the front passenger seat to confound the authorities and made my way
in the family Rambler to a certain venue in the hamlet of Sedgwick where,
yes, I parked in an obscure spot to await developments.

	  The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes work like perfect
machinery.  Emery Davis did not come all-a-hammerin' on the slick roads,
but rather at a moderately dangerous forty mile-per-hour.  I actually
heard, through the open window of the Rambler, the pop of the steel brake
line.  Did he scream for five or ten seconds as the last hundred feet
passed?  I just have to hope so, you know, to warm him up for what was to
come, like a singer preparing for a rowdy matinee audience.

	  Not the proverbial grinding crash of sensational fiction, but
closer akin to the satisfying crunch one gets when he or she slaps a
mosquito on the cheek.  Enough to bust the putty, spill the gas, and
stupefy the driver.  Start the little wheels of the tape machine with its
voice of Christmases past.  Grassy's ghost.

	  Since I greatly respect the work of Ed McBaine, and since he's a
disciple of literary understatement, I see no need to go into exquisite
detail pertaining to the next five minutes in Sedgwick.  I was satisfied
that a fair percentage of what The Old Doe's family had experienced was
repaid, and let it go at that.  (Captain Marrayatt might view me as a
pantywaist but he's been dead so long he may not have noticed.)

	  Indeed, I was the first on the smoldering scene.  Nothing I could
do was of any help.  The weak point in my plan, my alibi for being on the
road at that time, was never examined.  As a tangential participant I
naturally had my fifteen minutes of fame in my adopted home town, and if
anyone noticed that I invariably retrieved a penknife and piece of stick
from my pockets and whittled away while I told my story, they never spoke
of it.

	  If you'll take a moment to recall Clint Eastwood blowing softly
across the muzzle of the most powerful handgun in the world, and visualize
me blowing in the same manner across my keyboard we'll have made a special
author/reader connection and I'll be able to return us to the central
narrative with all the bells and all the whistles verified, critic-proof
for forever and a day.

	  Pant, pant, pant.
	  Ten o'clock on Thursday morning meant forty-eight hours and no
minutes or seconds.  It had been bad before, the evasive glances so
inappropriate in a rustic environment (what would the guidebooks say?); the
grins when, hey, it was just Thursday.  This time, though, it was Margaret.
This time it might, not to put too fine a point on it, go off-island.  The
times they were a-changing.  Citizen's Band radio had made an embryonic
appearance.  More people, local and touring, came and went.  Regional
delicacies attracted writers tasked with satiating ever escalating tastes
for alternatives to the increasingly bland reality of two chickens in every
pot.  Never satisfy the popular masses because they'll like it and insist
on more.  But it took a wise head to know this, and a suicidal editor to
promote it.  No.  "Yankee Magazine" and a host of others turned stones and
rolled logs for the novel, the bizarre, the untold and the noteworthy.  The
laws of delicacy were subjective, relative and conditional; could be
stretched a country mile.

	  Would this be the last encounter?  Could such a deeply held and
long-lived secret, so much dirty laundry, so many skeletons in various
closets, be sustained?  Should it be?  Wasn't there a salient argument that
said we had our fun, ayah, and a time it was, but now it's time to move on.

	  Sponsors of restraint were no less than the heroic parties of the
last part, Tip McCorison and Margaret Weed, themselves.  Neither espoused
anything rash with an ax or power saw, rather a substantive curtailment
with two or even three years between episodes (wags suggested every four
years, like the Olympic Games).  This might mean, depending on Tip's
Methuselahistic qualities, a bare handful of Spots over the coming ten or
fifteen years, with no decisive line indicating an ending any more than
there had been such a line in the beginning.

	  Well and good.  Sober and mature.  Sure, any day now.  Meantime,
everybody was panting, everybody was salivating, everybody was tossing and
turning.  Where in the past it might have been said that between a third
and a half of the island's residents were to a degree involved, now the
figure was between two-thirds and three-quarters.  Subtract the aged,
subtract the infants, and perhaps one in ten was in the dark.

	  "If we do it, they will come," Tip said to Margaret on one of
their nightly phone calls.  She teased him on his spelling (assumed,
because even this smarty pants couldn't see how a word was spelled over the
phone), but had to agree with the basic premise.  It may be that the couple
didn't invent phone sex, no one will ever know, but recordings made by the
switchboard operator were never played in Sunday School, or, officially, at
any school, for that matter.

	  Speaking of sex, how many sexy people were there in Stonington?
The population was 1,200 when I lived there.  I knew every viable person in
town in a matter of weeks.  In my mind, the only really sexy person was
Audrey Robinson.  Jeanie Maguire was a raving beauty, but would only have
been beautiful as a partner if she was ardent and energetic.  As to boys, I
had every doubt about myself, and all the others missed by a mile.  Chris
Robbins and George and Dickie Dunham were handsome, but not sexy.  It is a
very rare quality.  I've watched half a zillion films, and only two
actresses appeal to me as women: the female lead in "The Gods Must Be
Crazy", and Mavis Multurd (character) in "Are You Being Served Again?"
That's two out of the many hundreds that are familiar to me, with Mariel
Hemingway getting honorable mention.  As far as guys go, I think Patrick
Swayze, in his twenties, is the only actor I've ever seen that I'd like to
share a shower with.  Dropping six or eight years off the legal age hardly
widens the field, either.  Simon and Ruth in "7th Heaven" make the grade.
The boy in "Jungle 2 Jungle" might be, like Swayze, an interesting
showermate if he were enthusiastic.
	  Rare.  Did I mention rare?

	  Real life, mercifully, is far richer than the silver screen.
Jose Armando de Lira Varela, my long-term friend in Torreon, was the
sexiest male I've ever seen.  He was a nominal lover, but magnetic in raw
appeal.  Laura Facey, likewise, was just there when the door was closed,
but beautiful from across the room of a palace.

	  I'm holding forth because of the mysterious nature of the
subject.  Sexy as against sexual.  Very separate tables.  Coming off a
month of hardball classics did little to help in getting to the bottom of
things.  My own work just adds confusion because I have no trouble going on
for hundreds of pages using models that I would have no interest in skinny
dipping with, much less sleeping with.  My best female partners, by far,
were both moderately attractive, though very young, prostitutes, and I've
only had one outstanding male partner, a common-looking eleven-year-old
urchin.

	  This should make you, the reader, feel better.  One adult in
several hundred is interesting from a carnal viewpoint; one slim child in a
dozen is intriguing.  If you want a real chill check your "Word" thesaurus
for `sexy' synonyms.  Would you believe No Suggestions?  Ditto, `carnal'.
It's all hype, smoke, and mirrors -- and you heard it here, first.

	  At this point, for the third time in my life, I'm living entirely
without partner(s) -- old or young, male or female.  Samantha has drifted
so far off I may never even see her again.  My two little Hispanic cuties,
Karen and Jocelyn, show no interest, and interest of the child in the adult
is the best definition possible of the word `essential'.  I've grown tired
of my one persistent catamite; we're still friends, but that's it.  Zero.
Zilch.  For what, over a month?  It's great.  I bounced back from the
Samantha Blues faster than a teen changes fads, and my interest in
replacing her hovers at around five percent.  Indeed, I'm more interested
in a new relationship so as to have something to write about than from any
personal need or want.  Michelangelo thought the whole sex trip was vastly
overrated so I must be on the right track.  Download a ton of stuff from
Nifty.  Cut them a check for a hundred bucks.  Be happy.  It is entirely
possible a grass roots sexual apathy is settling in, part and parcel of the
finale of the Industrial Revolution with its incessant newness culminating
in the last century and gone like the wind in this.  The only antidote is a
return to absolute monarch, probably not a very good idea because there is
a certain appeal to just withering away and dying out.  Any major shift
toward what might intellectually appear to be a better paradigm would be so
fraught with the perils of unintended consequences as to be simply another
way of ensuring overall destruction.  In other words, we've had our cake,
and we've eaten it.

	  At this time there was a silly song on the charts titled: "The
Last Blast of the Blasted Bugler".  As the bugler sounds off his horn is
hit by bullet after bullet until it hardly squeaks.  Not for Stonington.
Who knew?  If this was going to be it, by gorry, let it be it.
	  "Yawanna?"  It wasn't great English but it got the message
across.  In context, it was the invitation to Saturday morning's occasion.
No answer was expected, the non-RSVP event of the season, unless you wanted
to attend with the inviter, in which case a murmured "Ya" filled the bill.
	  The biggest thrill I ever had in Stonington, including certain
doings up to Sedgwick, was finding Audrey at the drug store and having her
match my opening "Ya..." with her own.  (I still have that erection,
believe it or not.)  Since our relationship had more depth than was typical
I asked her if Jack wanted to come and was as thrilled with her quiet smile
-- what a ten year old! -- as with her acceptance of my invitation.  (Come
to think of it, her "Ya" was so instantaneous she might have been inviting
me.)

	  And here a brief interruption to welcome Samantha back.  Welcome,
doll!  Again the emphasis on the child voting with her feet.  I joked with
her about coming over to her house and snatching her away, and she thought
it was a great idea.  It is a reversal, because custom declares the male
the pursuer -- an old saying is that the female resists the male's advances
until she cuts off his retreat -- but any man who goes after an underage
girl (or boy) deserves time aplenty in the four by six hotel.  This applies
equally to use of lures, whether cash, candy or Canadian Club -- the reason
S. drifted off, in the first place, was my adamant refusal to cross her
palm with much of anything.  Anyway, she's back and it's nice to think I'll
have a place to park the half million bucks when I kick the buck-et.  Nice
image; her beauty, mercurial charm, thirty-five or so and loaded.  There's
a lucky guy out there somewhere, probably still in diapers.  I guess the
chance of that coming to pass is about equal to the American economy
holding together for twenty more years.  (Always with the jokes.)

	  Having brought Audrey back into the story, I know I can dither
and prevaricate to my heart's content.  My most intense reader mail ever
was on her chapter at the beginning of this epic.  I haven't totaled up the
various files, but suppose they equal a modest novel at this point, so
she's earned her place in history as one of the great literary inspirations
of all time.
	  I do go on I suppose about artists as gods and certainly the
ability not only to immortalize one's self, but others, has to have
supernatural aspects.  Can you do it, other than by buying a headstone,
that is, to join the hundreds of millions of others?  Andrew Wyeth did it
with Christina, yet she's just an image.  We don't know a word, a thought,
and only a single expression -- like the Mona Lisa more mysterious than
enlightening.  Audrey, Kelsey, Larry, George, Dickie, the late Emery Davis
and the others will be with us until the end of time; vivid - real, because
they are real.  Drive the streets of Oceanville and Stonington, and you are
driving their streets.  The harbor, frequently displayed on The Travel
Channel and other cable documentary outlets, is their harbor; Russ Island,
just off Stonington, is very much their island; the fog is their fog.  In
fact, the only things that aren't theirs are the activities in my stories
which are generally fictitious.  In the story of Peyton Place there's a
line about there being no such thing as a cheap liability suit.  My defense
is the precedent of art through the ages; the use and interpretation of
living models.  Why it is essential, especially in this day of Search and
Replace features on word processors, is a mystery, but essential it is.
Real people, fictitious events, real art, and with my skyrocketing
readership, and my stories spreading from site to site and archive to
archive, a very real immortality.  Food of a god, and for each and every
recipient one thing is undeniable, and that is that the price is right.
All right, your turn for a joke: don't picture me as Clint with his giant
pistol, but Bob Barker with his giant wheel.  Good, I'm lol.

	  Now that I've got my doll back, I'm feeling a heebie-jeebie or
two about carrying on with Audrey.  I have a bit of luck in that Samantha
reads at a second-grade level, in spite of being a high-school freshman,
but what if she asks me to read my story aloud?  Ronald Reagan was able to
broadcast phony innings when there were interruptions in the telegraphic
accounts of baseball games, so maybe ad-libbing is the answer.  A bridge
we'll cross when we come to it.  I do picture myself as unsuitable for the
average American girl, which brings up two situations.  Awhile ago I wrote
my father, and joked about dreaming of an air-conditioner because if I
ended up marrying Samantha we'd need more than a fan.  Later I wrote we
were on the splits, to which he replied he was glad to hear I'd decided not
to get married -- misunderstanding the joke about the air-conditioner, and
revealing what probably are his feelings about me marrying anybody.  The
irony here is that Ted, my first younger brother, whom he adores, raised
three out of three on Ritalin, in all likelihood segregated his
environmentally cranked oddballs from any future you'd wish on a dog; was
and is every inch the parent from hell precisely as he was the kid brother
from hell.  In fact, my father's advice, from way-back-when, to the
present, is almost bad enough to serve as reliable guidance: short of
getting childish about it, simply do the opposite.

	  The other situation was pretty funny.  I was sitting in the
telephone office when a California babe of the first magnitude walked in.
She needed to check her e-mail so we got to talking.  I had time to kill
before making a second call, so I invited Laura to the Starlight for a
Coke.  She teaches -- duh'uh -- yoga in the Bay Area.  During our
conversation I alluded to the fact I'd apparently been dumped by my girl,
and was on the make.  She responded that she didn't go out with older guys.
I didn't have the heart to tell Laura that Samantha was fourteen, and, in
her young twenties, I viewed her as an older woman.  This was the truth; as
she made her comment I was trying to determine whether or not she was too
old even for a one-night-stand.  We parted on friendly terms, so there's
something to be said for keeping one's trap shut, but it was pretty funny.

	  And wouldn't you know it?  Jocelyn just hipped me as we passed on
the stairs.  Her dad calls her Indian.  She's a ravishing Hispanic twelve
year old.  Samantha's back, Jocelyn's making kittenish.  When it freaking
rains it freaking pours, which, seeing as how many slips there are `twixt
cup and lip, means I'm probably in for another long draught when it comes
to cutie pies.  This would probably be a good thing, because, truth to
tell, I have no interest in bringing my Stonington saga to a close.  I'm
sorry I don't have the talent to write Mainstream copy about my two years
in the local school system; to give Audrey, Larry and the gang a place in
American fiction so honorable and prosaic that they can pass on a tidy
volume to their grandchildren.  Artists play the hands they're dealt just
as we all do.  Truth to tell, I didn't like my time there; Jeanie dumped me
in my first few months in residence and I had to spend the next four years
(I want to boarding school as a Junior and Senior) not only not getting to
know her, but knowing she'd chosen a witless, unread pretty boy in my place
-- in no uncertain terms.  I'm just glad now, at long last, to get
something out of those years, as I'm glad, in Santa Fe Stories, to have
gotten, at last, something out of the four years I committed to marriage.
Writers tend to go through hell, but they must be god's chosen, whatever
our Hebrew friends say, because from hell verily do they harvest.

	  Springs, gears, small motors; what do they care?  Whatever the
psychic overburden, there was not a single unusual case of a clock or watch
actually failing those last two days.  As you can make a comedy out of ten
or twelve people all opening hotel doors along a hallway at the same
instant, so Stonington's four blocks of Main Street presented frequent
vignettes of groups of shoppers spontaneously holding time pieces to their
ears.  (In those days wristwatches ticked audibly; hold one to your ear and
if you were in quiet surroundings you could tell if it was running.)  In
other words, time only seemed to stand still -- and this can be said:
whatever moral pros and cons might be hashed out here and there in town,
there was no argument that almost every viable citizen got as much out of
each minute as they normally got out of every hour; as much out of every
hour as they once got out of an entire day.  Just think of what you're
getting out of the time you're spending merely reading about it. The very
best episodes of "e.r.", "Law & Order" and "NYPD Blue" are this way.
You've been watching and watching; a whole lot has happened, and it's only
sixteen minutes past the hour.  Know why?  Because you're benefiting from
the vast amount of time the various writers invested, a, in their skill
sets, and, b, in the individual scripts. The standard of impressionist art
is Mr. Seurat whose paintings consist of hundreds of thousands of dots.
Pointillism One of his canvases is worth two or three million
scythe-`n'-slash Picassos, assuming of course, you IQ is higher than Jackie
O's seventy-seven.  Remember, according to today's popular lore both god
and the devil are in the details.  In Stonington these details superceded
the day-to-day, the run-of-the-mill, and everyday ordinary old meat and
potatoes: took on an obsessive, compulsive life of their own, vastly
greater than the sum of any parts that could be listed or otherwise
quantified when a Spot was in play mail and Tip was on the prowl.

	  Elsewhere the tarantula has been mentioned.  An Eastern European
dance that legend has it occasionally generated a frenzy such that entire
villages danced until most of the men, women and children died of
exhaustion.  Was Stonington as isolated as a valley in Romania?
Interestingly, it wasn't quite.  Do to it's position fairly far out to sea,
AM radio waves from Boston skip along the coast and provide daytime
reception as clear as in Boston, itself.  Even in the `50s and `60s, a few
tourists visited.  Children left and wrote or telephoned home.  Oddly
enough, the town looks to its history, a hundred or more years ago, when
steamers stopped and even supported an eighth-grand opera house, for any
residual sophistication and worldliness that might be found.  No, the place
was not likely to dance itself to death.

	  But could it survive Tip and Margaret?  There were days when,
honestly, I wondered.  She was so small; hardly more than an elf; he, a
lumbering giant, craggy and massive.  It was all beauty and the beast
personified, hold the kid's stuff.  A rotten business said some as they
checked and double checked their picnic baskets, their thermos bottles, and
their "Let's Make a Deal" costumes so they could secrete themselves
strategically amongst the trash and treasure of the landfill.  Little
things: the fire department made several careful inspections as the dump,
like all dumps, occasionally flared up due to spontaneous combustion.
Likewise, the sanitation department took extra pains to segregate offensive
garbage and place it south of The Old Doe's mattress.

	  My research at the time gave me to feel that much of the s-eatin'
grinning and awkward carrying-on, in general, was less do to what was going
to happen on that particular Saturday morning, and more to do with what
folks were just plain up to with each other.  A case in point was Larry
Billings and his sister, Becky.  They were less than a year apart in age,
and, as is very often, or perhaps even usually the case, they just didn't
click; didn't like each other.  Larry and Susan, that was different, but
Larry and Becky, no.  But now it was hold the phone.  She sat next to him
on the bus; she laughed at his jokes and comments.  As of Monday, she
walked the hundred yards from the bus stop in front of the Union Hall to
their house, shoulder to shoulder.

	  Hmm.  They were both fourteen during that early fall week.  Up to
then, if I'd been forced to describe Becky the only adjective I'd have been
able to come up with would have been a very unflattering `utilitarian'.
Now she was up to something and it was working.  She was still no Audrey,
but then no one was; just a whole lot better a Becky and a whole lot closer
to Susan, her three-years-younger sister, and something of an incipient
dish as has been mentioned elsewhere in this chronicle.

	  I was about to track Larry down -- eager-beaver journalist that I
was -- but he showed up in our dooryard on his own, rifle over his
shoulder, and so off we went, countdown at about forty hours -- that's how
I remember it -- which would have made it Thursday at say six in the
evening.  (We were rich and didn't eat dinner until eight in the evening,
they were poor and ate at five-thirty.)

	  "You were able to tear yourself away, I see," I commented as we
headed down Mrs. Semple's drive, where we'd hook a right and head into an
old-growth grove of trees known for its population of destructive red
squirrels.
	  "Do you want to hunt?" he asked.
	  "No," I replied.  If animals we're submariners they'd sound the
all-clear the moment we stepped into the woods.  We were a lot of things, I
suppose, but dangerous to the denizens of the forest was not one of them.
	  We found our favorite giant tree, stashed our arms, and settled
onto the bank at its trunk.
	  "I never thought I'd see you and Becky getting along so well," I
said to open the conversation.
	  "Tell me about it," Larry replied.
	  Suddenly I knew what was up.  It seemed so unlikely I almost
laughed aloud, yet so obvious I could have kicked myself for pure
doltishness.
	  "Saturday?" I asked.
	  "Saturday."  Larry admitted, adding: "Audrey?"
	  "Audrey," I affirmed.
	  "Guess we lucked out," he observed.
	  "And how," I agreed.
	  There was a long pause as we looked at each other.  The sun was
well down; the grove was darkening in the still lingering twilight of late
summer.  The sounds of nature were all around: chirp, squeak, caw, click,
whirr, buzz; chirp, squeak, caw, click, whirr, buzz; chirp, squeak, caw,
click, whirr, buzz... (Honestly, I don't think there is an organism on
earth higher up the scale than an amoeba that they won't put to sleep
sooner or later.)

	  "Audrey and Jack," I said, interrupting the symphony.
	  "Jumpin'!" Larry exclaimed.

	  We were a microcosm and we knew it.  By Sunday morning Stonington
would be just another dot on the long and jagged coast between Kittery and
Eastport.  Ho would rule the days and Hum, the nights.  Radio up from
Boston during the day, television down from Bangor.  It was the kind of
place that actually thought the putz Berle was funny, so there'd be a drop
of this and a dram of that to live for.  A giant wet blanket as thick and
dense as the proverbial fog was headed our way.  Forty hours left.  What
was everyone else up to?

	  Jimmy Nelson was hitchhiking, that's what he was up to.  Peter
Banks was touring, looking for scenic vantage points -- that's what he was
up to.  Jimmy was thirteen and already five feet nine inches tall, weighing
nearly a hundred pounds.  Peter Banks was twenty eight years old and six
feet three inches tall.  He weighed a tight and well-knot one hundred
eighty pounds.  Jimmy Nelson was hitching because the walls were closing
in.  Peter Banks was touring because he'd just purchased a new Linhoff and
he wanted to experiment with the perspective of 4 X 5 sheet film, a format
that took considerable getting used to if one came from the worlds of 35mm
and 120 roll film.

	  Jimmy Nelson lived in Little Deer Isle and Peter Banks came off
island, down to Portland, or, in the vernacular of old salts of wind and
water, up to Portland -- (as it was more or less against the prevailing
northwesterly winds.  Until the modern era, one generally went down east,
or, if they were especially bright, stayed home.)
	  "I've seen you on television," Jimmy said as he got into the
Buick.
	  "I tell them not to turn the camera on when I'm standing there,"
Peter said, "but they pay no attention.  It isn't very flattering."
	  "'Banks for the Memories'," the boy recited.  "Channel Four.  You
take pictures and tell about them."
	  "It's sort of like construction," the young man said, "you know,
little boys play with cranes and steamrollers and dump trucks, and when
they grow up, next thing you know they're building houses and offices and
factories.  With me it was show and tell.  Once I held up my shoelaces and
tried to make a story about how important they were.  The kids laughed.
When my shoes fell off on the way back to my desk, the teacher laughed."
	  "It's a good show," Jimmy said.

	  "Thank you," the young man said, "but it's only good because
people watch it."
	  "That's easy to do," Jimmy observed.
	  "Do you know Deer Isle well?" Peter Banks asked the boy.
	  "Kind of, I guess," Jimmy replied.
	  "I'm looking for a place to catch the sunset," the photographer
explained.
	  "It sets everywhere," the boy explained, but he couldn't quite
pull it off deadpan -- thirteen's that kind of an age -- and he choked on a
giggle.
	  "I can see a duo in the two of us, already," Peter said as he
eased the car from the roadside and picked up speed.  "Let's call ourselves
`The Clicker and the Snicker'."
	  "That's so good it makes me shutter," the boy observed.
	  "Lens call it a day, then," the young man concluded.

	  Neither made an attempt at `see what develops', thus developing a
lingering rapport.  Jimmy guided Peter along this road and down that one --
the choices were limited -- and Peter was thrilled when they turned off on
a dirt track, scratched the Buick a little, and emerged on a bluff over No
Herring Bay, with the "Victory Chimes" anchored pretty as a picture a
hundred yards from shore and her dory circling along the rocky
outcroppings, under oars, towing a troll line.

	  "Nice work, Snicker," Peter said as he switched off the car.
	  "Lucky," Jimmy replied, "I didn't know she was here."
	  "Nothing like a three-master, I'll admit," Peter said, "but it's
a great spot, anyhow."

	  Peter proffered a five dollar bill.  Jimmy refused it.  Together
they retrieved two tripods and a couple of bags of paraphernalia from the
back seat of the car and set off to seek a vantage point.
	  Peter planted one tripod after a few minutes, and aligned the
second beside it.  Amongst his gear was a pruning hook on a long shaft and
a machete.
	  "I killed a fisher with this," he said, brandishing the two-foot
blade.  "I wanted to photograph the miserable thing, and I did.  The snick
of the shutter set it off.  Fortunately my father was a big outdoorsman --
he'd warned me about wolverines, mink, badgers and other ill-tempered
woodland folk.  Double luck was that I was something of a ball-handler in
my school days.  I sliced it in two in mid air, and it still ripped me up
to the tune of forty-four stitches and enough injections to pickle a dairy
herd."
	  He rolled his shirt up to show a dramatic scar.
	  "You never told that on television," Jimmy observed.
	  "Oh, it was just a traffic accident," the man said; "a lightning
strike.  I don't want to scare people out of the woods.  The only real
danger is getting lost, that's serious, especially in flat country in
cloudy weather.  Other hazards are getting shot by your gun or a buddies,
or being attacked by a wounded buck -- even there you get just a fatality
or two every few years, out of hundreds of thousands of hikers and
hunters."

	  "I'm from the city," Jimmy said; "we just moved here a year ago.
My dad's an accountant; not too much into firepower and ballistics."
	  "Do you like it here?" Peter asked.
	  "Everybody's known each other since they were little kids," the
boy responded, "so it's hard to break in, especially as we live on an old
farm at the end of a dirt road."
	  "So you read?"
	  "Yeah."
	  "Secret to an awful lot of good stuff when you get older.  As I
recall it took you something under ten seconds to win me over."
	  "You set yourself up, so you get half the credit," Jimmy
observed.
	  "Just stick with what you've got," the young man suggested and
the boy smiled back at him.
	  "Is photography tough?"  Jimmy asked.
	  "It's mostly a hustle," Peter said.  "The high-art thing doesn't
pay so's you notice even if you get shown and published.  The guy with ten
percent talent and ninety percent energy will waltz right past the guy with
ninety percent talent and ten percent energy."
	  "Is art meant to pay?" the boy asked.
	  "Jefferson said that he was a soldier so his son could be a
farmer, and his son, a poet."
	  "If that was a widespread eventuality it could hardly help work
itself in reverse," Jimmy noted.  "Poet's would starve, so their sons would
have to farm, which would enhance the value of the land until it required
defending."
	  Peter laughed. "I have little doubt that no one in history ever
worked the equation quite like that," he said.
	  "Certainly not the Romans," the child agreed.
	  "Well," Peter said, "scale aside for the moment, you've got a
point about art and money.  There should be a constitutional separation.
It's the one thing the communists have over us; if you're good at
something, the State becomes the patron of first resort, feeling that
starving is a better option for peasants than artists.  Fortunately, I'm a
picture postcard journeyman so it's all academic."  [It's academic for me,
too, because of family funding (not patronage).  The combination of freedom
from want, and Nifty, et al, is the reason I'm able to publish.  The irony
is, I showed no special promise in my early years, so picking young artists
who are likely to mature into greatness is a daunting task, or, would be,
except for the super polygraph mentioned frequently elsewhere.  There is
every chance this device could be utilized to separate the wheat from the
artistic chaff, possibly at very early ages.  It certainly would be a
worthy experiment.]
	  "Some of your work is pretty special," the boy noted.
	  "Not my doing," Peter said, "because the real art in black &
white work is in the lab.  That's why I'm experimenting with the big
camera.  Each sheet of film can be processed individually; pushed or held
back depending on contrast range and other factors."
	  "You don't do your own processing?" Jimmy asked.
	  "No," Peter said, "I run around climbing trees and pruning
distracting brush out of foregrounds and backgrounds.  Every once in awhile
I develop and print a duplicate roll to one I send to New York, just to see
if I'm getting better, but I'm not.  Printing is a world unto itself and
there's no reason a photographer would be good at it any more than you'd
expect a great actor to be a great playwright or a great trainer to be a
great jockey."
	  "I think a photographer who can chop a charging polecat in half
is a good combination -- sort of Renaissance," Jimmy noted.
	  "Subtract forty-four stitches from that one," the young man
advised.

	  As they talked, Peter Banks had moved methodically around his two
tripods tinkering with both cameras, while constantly glancing at the
schooner swinging on her anchor and up at the passing clouds.  Jimmy looked
on, intrigued.  Peter's dismissal of himself as a tree-climbing brush
cutter seemed to have left out a thing or two.  Responding to the boy's
interest, the photographer explained what he was doing.
	  "This locks up the mirror on the Leica," he explained, pointing
to a tiny silver lever mounted into the face of the camera.  "When you make
an exposure, the mirror swings out of the way so the light can reach the
film, then immediately back so you can frame and focus the next picture.
This causes a tiny amount of vibration.  Locking up the mirror, which is
okay for a still-life, eliminates it.  The aperture, or lens opening, is
always set to f-stop 22 for maximum dept of field.  This often means a slow
shutter speed of one-fifth of a second or longer.  Thus the heavy-duty
tripod, and I also use a cable release so there will be no camera movement
caused by my hand pushing the shutter release.  The lens on the 35mm body
is a 70mm which gives a slight telephoto effect.  It's the only lens you
ever use, except for a 24mm on a 35mm camera body, which is essential for
interior work and arty photos of rainy streets and reflected light.
	  "And that's about it," the young professional continued, "as far
as the mechanics go.  You use a spot light meter to determine how many
zones of contrast are present -- this can be from one to twelve -- and note
your readings for the lab.  After that it's waiting for the right density
of cloud to partially filter the sun, and, in this case, for the boat to
swing to a quartering, bow on view, and the dory to assume a dynamic
position in relationship to the larger vessel.  When all that comes
together, and I should hedge my bet by saying `if', I make several quick
exposures.  A couple with each camera in black & white, and several in
color a half an f-stop apart because of the narrow latitude of the
emulsion.  That's pretty much it."
	  "No telephoto lens?" Jimmy asked.
	  "They're only for assassinations," Peter replied.  "The long
lenses have so many elements it's impossible to get crystalline results,
plus, the slightest camera movement is greatly magnified, which also kills
sharpness.  Added to that, they have minute depth-of-field, which means
sharp focus becomes all but impossible.
	  "Luckily for the manufacturers, they're phallic and impressive,
so amateurs buy them by the carload -- even zoom lenses which magnify the
absurdity a hundred ways.  Big waste of money.  If you're doing nature
photography, you set up a remote camera position, and use a 24mm lens.  If
you're doing sports, you use a 4X5 Speed Graphic and enlarge the crucial
action.  The only usable telephoto is the 70mm which duplicates the
perspective of the human eye, especially in portraiture.
	  "The only lens I haven't mentioned is the 50mm on a 35mm camera
body.  It comes with most cameras and is excellent for snapshots."

	  Jimmy had the grace to shudder, further bonding him to the
visiting (reluctant) artist.

	  The "Victory Chimes" swung, the dory maneuvered, the clouds
rolled over, the sun sank.  Stonington won the Class S basketball
championship in 1960, Jimmy had thought the finals, up to Bangor, where you
could get a pine tree float at the Pine Tree Restaurant (toothpick in a
glass of water), and thought the last game against Jonesport had been
fair-to-middlin' exciting.  Nothing on this, though.  The light, the
cameras, the measured pace of the action; it was almost enough to fossilize
a body.

	  Peter, the old hand, tried to be cool, but Jimmy could tell he
was totally engaged in each passing minute and the stimulation was
contagious.

	  A break in the suspense occurred when the "Chimes" swung her
broad stern to the camera.  No thanks, not for this shot.  Peter took the
opportunity to make conversation.
	  "Tell me, Jimmy," he said, "what kind of special events do you
have in this part of the world?  There must be a wreath ceremony as a
memorial to the lost fishermen, and a queen of the bay, and some kind of
blueberry fest...
	  "Did I say something?" Peter wondered to himself.  Suddenly his
new friend seemed disassociated; all lost and at sea when minutes before
he'd been astonishingly engaged and aware.  Had he lost a loved one?  Been
poisoned by a bad berry?  What was going on?  He was about to apologized
for he knew not what when the boy returned to the present time and present
place.  Drew in a long breath.

	  "What are you doing on Saturday?" he asked.

	  Ernest Hutchins, a tall, slim redhead, thirteen, and a quasi
orphan lived with Bill Muir, a renowned sculptor and Stonington's only
celebrity.  was sixty and looked maybe forty.  He worked in entire logs,
focusing so exquisitely on the twines and twists of wood grain you wondered
how anyone had the temerity to build houses out of the stuff, much less
heat them with it.

	  Bill was a world traveler, spending much of each year amongst the
primitive tribes of Africa and South America.  His idea of a perfect
vacation was to spend a few months with this or that aboriginal group as
they built a sixty-foot canoe from a single prodigious log.  Totems,
effigies, tikis; if they were created with ax, adz, chisel and gouge they
were worth the trip anywhere on the planet.  Emily Muir, a painter and very
much her husband's equal in the art world, maintained the home fires and
played hostess when various swimming groups used the Muir's natural salt
water pool for water safety courses.  (There is no such thing as enough
atmospheric heat to make the water on the coast of Maine tolerable for
wading, much less swimming.  The only possible exceptions were the bridge
to Oceanville where the high-tide water warmed a bit over a mile of
mudflats on either side, and the Muir's dammed up cove, where the water
could warm for a day or two -- and both venues were still c-o-l-d.  (Ask
the man who swam there.))

	  Ernest loved watching Bill work.  His job was nominal; keep the
splinters and shavings from underfoot; in cold weather, stoke the studio
stove with them; otherwise, bag and store them, for it's never warm for
long down east.  The boy was also affected by Emily's oils.  She often
accompanied Billon his anthropological wanderings and would paint the
children of a village while he worked with the men.  The nude boys, ages
eight to twelve, held a special fascination for the young teenager and he
found a special dream world in lying at one end of a ten-foot log while
Bill hewed the other end and wondering about edged tools, biceps, the
stroking mallet and his young body.  In the beginning he'd worn street
clothes for these forays into his imperfectly understood but strongly
intuitive world.  These had given way to gym shorts and T-shirt, first with
underpants, then without.  Bill said nothing, but his gaze tended to linger
on the freckly, lithe boy and their hours together yielded a new subtlety
in the modeling of the intricate twists and turns of cord and sinew drawn
from the wood with knives, rasps and planes.  A quiet magnetism developed
and intensified keeping them in the studio ever later.  Emily too would
linger the longer after dropping by with a nominal plate of milk, coffee
and cookies.  It wasn't every night that the trio finally doused the
lights, half in tears, hours after midnight, but it happened.

	  Nineteen sixty has been a year of truncated travel for Emily and
Bill.  Age.  Been there, done that.  Ernest Hutchins.  All three factors
had kept them in Stonington until Emily had turned up one afternoon in a
brand new jet black Chevrolet Corvair Spyder convertible with a huge chrome
exhaust pipe because it had the 180 horsepower turbocharged engine.  The
threesome took off for Mexico with Ernest often feeling he was the one
responsible, level-headed member of the crew.  They stacked twenty thousand
delirious miles on the red-topped car from the last day of school until
late, late in the summer, arriving back on Deer Isle on Wednesday.

	  One thing about Stonington.  One cop.  If you knew where he was,
you knew where he wasn't.  Ernest's quiet influence in the studio and his
gently, friendly behavior on their epic road trip demonstrated a maturity
well beyond that of the average thirteen year old.  On late night enduros
Bill and Emily had found they could trust the boy to take the wheel of the
Chevy demon and not feel he had to pass every single last autobus as they
motored from, say, Tampico across to Acapulco.  The result was that they
bought him a ninety horsepower motorcycle that would turn zero to sixty in
five seconds flat.  A phone call or two would peg Ken Dunham, the lawman,
and thus Ernest could motor about a bit without embarrassing encounters.
Needless to say, the Wednesday of their arrival back in town was a red
letter day for the kid and he made short work of catching up on his
friends.

	  Circles within circles.  By Thursday things in the Muir household
were back to normal.  Emily complained of a little too much of everything,
plus a headache, and turned in a five-thirty in the afternoon. The next
time Bill looked up at Ernest, the boy had stripped off his T-shirt and was
lying bare chested in his gym shorts, hands laced behind his neck, on his
end of a twelve-foot section of log.

	  You know what comes next.  (Not a question, you do.)  What Ernest
said to Bill Muir after catching up with down-home gossip: "What are you
doing on Saturday?"

	  Larry yawned.  I yawned.  What we didn't know we could sense.
What we couldn't sense wasn't happening.  What wasn't happening has no
place in this epic.  Circles within circles.

	  In the end it almost caught by surprise.  A gust of breeze swung
the schooner, the drifting cumulous parted, opening an aperture for waning
sunlight filtered through a shallow deck of high cirrus clouds; the dory
made a quick turn replicating the angle of the larger vessel.  Peter became
a one-man-band as he released the shutters on both cameras, then exchanged
black & white emulsions for film holders and a camera back with Kodachrome,
and cocking and firing both cameras several times.  Jimmy stayed well clear
and by the time he'd figured out what was going on, the session was over
and Peter was clapping him on the back.

	  "Those should be the best I've done in years, maybe ever," the
photographer enthused.  "Usually you get the heavy oranges just as the sun
actually sinks below the horizon; it looks great to the human eye, but the
light is very magenta and doesn't focus the same as daylight, so the images
are soft -- colors beside the point.  Big disappointment when you see the
slides.  But this time, the colors are in high cumulous and cirrus; more
greens and blues; not so gaudy, but sharp as a tack.  With the seascape in
the background, the images should really amount to something."

	  They sure looked good to Jimmy Nelson.  How good?  For ten, count
them, minutes, his attention had been distracted.  Elsewhere I've related
the account of the fellow with bad dentures who went scuba diving.  A moray
eel grabbed him by the hand and a shark grabbed him by the foot.  That was
the only time he forgot his bad teeth.  The superb sunset, the reflection
of the ancient sailing ship lying across the water of the cove, the dory
with its oars flashing in the slanting light; all the wide-angle
kaleidoscope, subtle and grand, had combined to take his mind off Saturday
morning, off the dump.  Far from being chagrinned at the lapse, he felt
quite manly; felt he actually possessed a mind and soul of his own and was
capable of independent thought and feelings -- was somehow greater than a
slavering automaton -- an agent of his own existence and future.  He was
about to pontificate on destiny when all his temporary grandeur collapsed
like a house of cards, and he was Jimmy Nelson, thirteen, son of an
accountant who lived in Stonington on Deer Isle, Maine.  (Thank god.)

	  "Saturday."  He and Peter said it simultaneously.  Both forbore
the `great minds' cliché as they had any cute commentary on `develop'.
Even their mutual grins had a reluctant quality as if to say words to the
effect that they almost regretted things would go so quickly between them,
so deeply so rapidly, when, as characters in a well-wrought drama their
dance would linger over days, weeks, and seasons with requisite steps and
missteps, possible brief changes of partners, and time to sit out a number
or two.

	  Saturday.

	  It was hasp, bolt and lock.  Rivet, nail and screw.  All of
everything; something like finally purchasing a long cherished item and
receiving more in change than the cost of the article.  Bigger than life,
grander than reality, beyond imagination, and a dump.

	  Wordlessly Jimmy and Peter returned to the car.  Wordlessly they
parted with the Linhoff and fitted a 24mm wide-angle lens to the Leica.
Silently they again crossed the hillside, this time to an outcropping of
ledge.  Peter let the boy arrange the camera and tripod -- this was
instinctive behavior like aiming a hose at the base of a flame rather than
squirting the water uselessly through the flames, you either had the brains
for it or you didn't -- and answered his questions about the controls.
	  "I don't think this roll will go to New York," the older male
quipped as he slipped out of his shirt and trousers.
	  "Clayton Gross has a lab here on the island," the boy responded.
"I'm sure he'd rent it to you or even let you borrow it."
	  "If he's like most photographers, he'd rent it to me for a week
for one picture of you."
	  Jimmy Nelson laughed.  "He wants me to pose for him, but he's fat
and weird.  Too much stigma attached."
	  "Freedom of choice is a good thing," Peter concurred.

	  Jimmy peered through the viewfinder of the Leica.  "It's bright,"
he said.
	  "A waste, really," Peter answered, "with a 24mm set at f-22 focus
and framing are non-issues.  It's the ultimate point and shoot combination,
except we'll be working with very long exposures which means no camera
movement, or subject movement, for that matter."
	  "It's hard to believe it's that simple." Jimmy said.
	  "Tri-X Professional is a sacred medium," Peter replied.  "Lay a
good image washed in good light on it, and verily will your socks be
knocked off when you pull your print out of the fixative."

	  Both realized the tech session was over; caught each other's eyes
in a lingering glance that caused them both to redden.  "No locks on the
door," the elder male said and slipped out of his shoes and socks, then his
briefs."
	  "I've never seen a man like that," Jimmy whispered, adding, "or a
boy, either, for that matter."
	  "What do you think?" Peter asked, somewhat at a loss for words.
He tried to stand openly in front of the child, casual-like, but the
experience was new to him, as well, so he wasn't able to pull it off with a
world of aplomb.
	  "Saturday makes a lot more sense now," Jimmy said.  Misery isn't
the only thing that likes company in the world.  The boy's fingers were
just starting at his top button when Peter came to him.  Jimmy immediately
dropped his hands to his sides, his blue eyes huge and glowing.  "I'll bet
if I live to be a hundred, the best thing in my whole life will be that I
was out hitchhiking on a particular Thursday morning," the boy said moments
before any shadow of a doubt he might have had was put to rest as his lips
met Peter's and the athletic young photographer took over on the buttons of
his shirt.

	  It wasn't so much they were disciplined, and their moral stature
played a scant role, if any, but they did manage to drag themselves away
from each other, as much as ten feet at a time, in response to the fading
light and the siren call of their art.
	  Peter showed Jimmy how to lock up the mirror and set the
self-timer in place of using the cable release.  They found shafts of light
coming through the trees and splashing on the granite boulders; played with
these as Peter stripped the child naked and they slowly worked through the
twenty exposures on the roll of TX-P.
	  "Definitely not for New York," Jimmy had whispered as Peter eased
him back over a mossy boulder, posing him, back arched, circumcised
erection huge, with his slim arms stretched full-length over his head.
They'd reversed their artist/model roles repeatedly and mid way through the
roll of film, Jimmy had sought permission with his huge blue eyes and
initiated the first focused touching.
	  After that they'd taken turns gently masturbating each other,
and, artists to the core, put their carnal urges aside in order to set the
self-timer and then use very slow strokes with each other so the
half-second and longer exposures would result in motion-blurred images of a
strategic nature.

	  "Tomorrow we can put the Polaroid back on the Linhoff," Peter
Banks said, "and see the results of our handiwork."  Jimmy would have
laughed at the trashy pun but he was so thrilled at the word `tomorrow` he
wanted to cry instead.  Love has a mind of its own but human intervention
can help it along.
	  "Would you like to go all the way?" Peter asked the boy as the
counter indicated the last two frames.
	  "Yes," the boy answered.

	  "I do, too," the photographer said, setting a new definition for
understatement.  This notwithstanding, he also stuck to his guns,
artistically, reaching into his kit bag and pulling forth a small plastic
cube with a clear lens.
	  "This is a strobe light," he said.  "It's a prototype from Japan;
the latest thing.  It fires a burst of light that lasts one-thousandths of
a second... enough to freeze any motion."
	  Jimmy looked at the innocuous plastic cube.  It had a single wire
lead with a connector molded into its trailing end; a trap door for two
batteries.  Seemed it was almost nothing.  Peter flicked a little switch
and the unit came alive with a delicate whistling sound.  In a few seconds
a little neon tube blinked, and the whistle became an intermittent beep.
	  There were other treasures in Peter's magic spell outfit.  A long
tube with a plunger at one end and a rubber bulb at the other.  An
extension cord for the strobe light, and, finally, a small tripod.

	  "This is your graduate project," he said to his young assistant.
"You have to set up the camera for a wide shot from my head to my foot,
then arrange the flash at my waist, and plug it into the camera.  Then you
have to screw the prong on the cable release into the matching threaded
receptacle on the top of the camera.  Then you have to do what we've been
doing together, only don't stop.  When I cum, that is when my sperm starts
spraying, you squeeze the rubber bulb.  That will fire the flash and open
the shutter.  If you time it just right the results will replicate the most
complex industrial photography you'll be likely to come across for many
years.  Then we'll reverse our positions and have a picture your friend,
Clayton, will trade for his darkroom lock, stock and barrel."
	  "Does that mean you might move here?" Jimmy asked.
	  "Did I forget to mention it?" Peter said, "I made that decision
at least an hour ago."
	  "Thanks for telling me," the boy intoned.
	  "You distract me so much it's a wonder I can think at all," the
young man replied.  "But yes, tender years duly noted, you're the one for
me."
	  "I'll forgive your age, too," the boy smiled.

	  Having settled the next fifty or sixty years to their mutual
satisfaction, the naked males set about taking advantage of the last of the
waning twilight.  In a quarter hour the camera and strobe light were set
and Jimmy had Peter stretched over a mossy old fallen timber in an
uncompromisingly erotic pose.
	  "It must be really exciting when you don't stop," he commented.
	  "I'll take your word for it," the young man replied.
	  "Should we practice a little?" the boy asked.
	  "Under the circumstances it would be impossible to practice a
lot," Peter said, amazed he could still speak.

	  Sure, it sounds absurd, but as I would find in later years with
my writing it is indubitably (never knew that was a real word) practice
which yields perfection, if perfection is possible in the first place.  How
did they practice?  You've been warned, absurdly.  Jimmy masturbated
Peter's thick, circumcised penis for some minutes.  Peter grunted: "I'm
cumming."  An instant or two later, he flipped his hand at his waist,
tossing a twig in the air.  Jimmy jammed his thumb on the rubber bulb and
the strobe light popped as the shutter clockwork hissed for part of a
second then clicked as the shutter snapped shut.  After half a dozen
practice sessions they had the routine down pat and Peter tossed the twig
away.  (Jimmy would have none of this, retrieving it from the pine needles
and pocketing it as a souvenirs.  Boys will be boys.)

	  Peter showed Jimmy how to re-engage the film advance on the
expensive camera (I hope this story, if it doesn't get the reader
interested in serious photography, at least convinces him that most of the
buttons and levers on a camera do, in fact, have a reason for being other
than driving up the price.), and then wound a fresh frame behind the lens.
The light was beginning to fade seriously, as it will of an evening, and
Peter pulled two neatly folded white bedsheets from his kit bag, along with
several clothes pins.  These he and Jimmy arranged around their bower to
augment the natural light and Peter pointed out to his understudy how the
reflected light softened the shadows.  "Next time you watch a move," he
said, "notice how you can tell how long and important a scene is going to
be by the amount of light.  When Elvis drives up in front of a diner or
onto a pier, and suddenly it's high noon in Arizona, you just know he's
going to sing."

	  Jimmy laughed, and the two took first positions for their own
little scene.
	  "Did I tell you I love you?" the young man as Jimmy knelt at his
waist.
	  "Oh," the boy deadpanned, "I thought you were moving up here to
avail yourself of a slave worker."
	  "Normally, the apprentice pays the master," Peter observed.
	  "Ain't that a bitch," the boy responded and they damn near lost
the last of their daylight for sake of making out with each other.
	  "Do you want a picture of yourself cumming off?" Peter whispered.
	  "Yes," the boy said.
	  "Okay," the young man said, "then get some of my semen on your
boner.  As soon as my ejaculation is over, go and advance the film to the
last frame.  Move slowly and carefully, and by the time you get back to the
log, I should be ready to masturbate you.
	  "Do you need to practice with a twig?" Peter asked.  The boy
allowed as how he didn't think that would be necessary.
	  "Okay," the older male whispered, his voice by now a ragged
imitation of itself, "I'm ready.  I may not be able to say anything about
cumming, so if I'm too far gone to speak, try judging it for yourself.  My
first sperm will probably be in the air for almost a second, so you don't
have to be absolutely split-second like a bullet going through a balloon,
or anything."

	  That was nice to know.

	  During their final preparations, Peter had taken the lid of a
coffee can from his utility bag.  This he placed half way between himself
and the camera, instructing Jimmy to look at it.  The silver surface would
highlight his eyes, and the lid, itself, would serve as a focal point so
the child's big eyes would be focused half way between Peter's erection and
the lens of the Leica.  Details.  How many of us remember who lives there?
Both god and the devil, right?

	  If he'd been able to speak, himself, Jimmy would have wondered
aloud at Peter's new swelling.  Everything was different.  In moments he
was sheened with perspiration, his breath became a ragged pant, his eyes
glazed and his head lolled from side to side.  His swollen purple glans
exuded half a gush of seminal fluid, clear as thick water and as slick as
water on warm ice.  Jimmy laved his lover with it; spreading it, stroking
it all over him, panting, himself, with excitement at the hair-trigger
response of the young athlete to every touch and ministration.  If curing
cancer or arthritis was considered by the fundamentalist wackos as a result
of laying on of hands, what would they make of this?

	  And what would the ending be like?  Jimmy had had two wet dreams
in his life, so he knew a little something, but now he was with a tall,
athletic adult.  As he masturbated Peter the boy tried to remember
everything.  To get himself wet, to look at the silver disk four feet in
front of him, to listen for Peter's warning, to be ready to activate the
camera in a timely fashion.

	  The final championship victory, by four points, over Jonesport
had been exciting; the "Victory Chimes" under her break in the clouds had
been even more exciting; but this?  Jimmy had read of whalers in the
Antarctic and oil wildcatters at Spindletop; the gold at Sutter's Mill; of
Archimedes, of Bell calling for Watson and Nelson at Trafalgar: Wellington
at Waterloo... Grant at Appomattox.  There was Bernadette at Lourdes,
Second Comings, apocalypses, floods, burning bushes and eternal salvation.
Lists, registers, inventories and chronicles of what others thought was
noteworthy or exciting from Fleming's mold to NASA's Apollo tantalized and
entertained the world at large.  Why?  That's what Jimmy wanted to know.
What of them?  Peter was huffing, gurgling, gasping, mewing and the boy was
sure he'd have roared like a lion if he'd been able to catch his breath.
He was shaking all over, half having a seizure and half pitching a fit.
Bucking his hips.  Grunting with the feral abandon of a wild animal.
Breathtaking.  Sure, it would be neat to see them blow off an A-bomb, by
why waste the trip?  Five minutes, then ten.  Peter couldn't live much
longer, no way.  It had to be... had to... had...  WAS WAS WAS

	  From somewhere inside him he scraped a warning together.  "I'm
cumming."  Then that's all he did.

	  Instinct and intelligence guided Jimmy's right arm and love
conducted his hand.  No sooner had he become used to the jetting sperm than
he wet himself on his slim, bare chest, on his hand, and didn't shy away as
the hard white spray found his face in salvo after salvo.  Nor was his
instinct solely devoted to the carnality of the moment, for, believe it or
not, he held his fire.  Peter's first bolting cum was so dramatic he
realized the athlete had just begun.  Not panicking, he held off, held off
and held off, until his instincts told him not to overdo it.  When he
finally squeezed the shutter release, he was covered, thighs, penis, chest,
shoulders and face with a dozen long ropes of Peter's semen.  No, in coming
years his affinity for lens and shutter, which all agreed was more than
beginners luck, wouldn't be enough to get the photograph into Mainstream
galleries, but that hardly means that no one ever saw the image if the
lithe, big-eyed thirteen year old and his tall, young athletic partner's
last heroic ejaculate.

	  Now they were definitely losing the light, yet it was soo hard to
hurry.  In half a trance Jimmy more than half stumbled to the Leica.  His
wet fingers slipped and fumbled but managed, nonetheless, to wind the film
and re-cock the shutter.  By this time Peter was showing actual signs of
animation, and the boy was flattered that his dedication outweighed what
must have been several tons of lethargy.  With a welcoming smile and soft,
wet kiss, he layed the child back across the mossy log and positioned
himself and the boy's slim waist.  He picked up the rubber squeeze bulb for
the remote cable release and wetting his hand thoroughly with his own
copiously available semen, fondled and molested Jimmy until his hips were
rising urgently and rhythmically, then began to masturbate him with strong,
deliberate strokes.
	  "Let it cum," he whispered, not wanting his young friend to be
disappointed my a murky underexposed image.
	  "As if I have a choice," the thirteen year old thought to
himself.  He was panting too hard to say anything coherent but he knew
Peter would be able to tell from the say his young body was shaking all
over that his orgasm was approaching like a roaring locomotive.  Like a
rocket.  Like an avalanche.  Like a tidal wave.  Like a sonic boom.  Like
like like.  Like nothing in his life.  Like everything in his life.  Like
his life was over forever.  Nothing before.  Nothing now.  Nothing after.
And he was spraying for Peter.  It was cumming.  Again.  More.  Again.
Hot.  Hard.  Wet.  More.  The strobe light fired.  Relief.  Now he could
just be a boy, not a model.  It seemed to make no difference.  More sperm.
Still flying all over Peter's pumping hand.  Still flying over the
athlete's arm and shoulder.  So much on his handsome face.  What had he
gone and done?  Wow.  He might not be a man but he sure was a hell of a
boy.

	  They lay poleaxed, stupefied, mesmerized and half comatose.  They
twined.  They kissed.  Peter licked the spilled seed and kissed Jimmy on
the lips.  The boy joined, and licked right back until they were making out
like teens in a car, wondering at the salty tang of each other, glorying in
the hot slick wetness they swallowed in such amounts it slicked their vocal
cords and fucked up their voices when they tried to speak.

	  Like zombies they retrieved their clothes, disassembled and
stowed the expensive camera and its accessories; regained the car, the
road, and made their way to the Nelson household where Jimmy's stories and
chatter continued until late in the night with his nice new friend who
occupied the second bed in Jimmy's room for part of the long, delirious
night.


	  "Has anything happened with you before?" Bill asked Ernest.  The
famous sculptor had worked his project as far toward the boy as he could
without touching him, and kept working.  He broke the palpable tension with
a game or two of "This Little Piggy Went to Market," sort of juvenile for a
child just in entering his teens, but Ernest was grown-up about it and
laughed as politely and naturally as his straining breath and pounding
heart allowed.
	  "I saw something," the thirteen year old said.
	  "Well," Bill said, "things like that are usually pretty private,
but sometimes they're exciting to share as long as it's the truth and
nothing made up."
	  "That's like your work," Ernest observed.  "nothing phony,
nothing fake.  It's real as salt, so real you want to live inside it."
	  Bill Muir blushed with pleasure.  "From the mouthes of babes," he
thought to himself, looking at the child stretched along the timber lying
on a folded beach towel with his hands behind his neck and wearing only his
gym shorts, obviously without any underpants.  His legs were splayed wide
and draped off either side of the tree trunk.  At Bill's first touch of his
right leg he'd raised it so the man could play with his foot,
simultaneously getting a boner which was almost shockingly big for a boy of
his tender years and slight frame.
	  "I'm pretty old to be with you this way," Bill commented.
	  "If you were fat, that would be gross," the boy responded, "but
I'll bet you'll still look good by the pool even twenty years from now."
	  "Being married to Emily is part of it," Bill said, "but having
you around this last year has kept an extra five pounds off."
	  "Do you like having me live with you?" Ernest asked.
	  "We adore it," Bill responded immediately.  "If we'd had half a
dozen children of our own we couldn't love all of them together as much as
we do you."
	  "How about seven?" Ernest asked.
	  "That would have been half the pain in the butt you are," Bill
replied.
	  "That's what I saw at the hotel in Mexico," Ernest said, "a man
go inside a boy.  You and Emily had gone dancing.  It was in Guadalajara.
Out in the garden.  I'd climbed a tree because some parrots had a nest and
I though they might be sleeping.  They came out.  The boy was named Sven.
They were from Norway; him and three teachers from his school.  They looked
like a tribe of Vikings; tall and wiry with blond hair -- there was plenty
of light from some torches -- and really high cheek bones."
	  "Sure," Bill recalled, "we sat near them at dinner."
	  "That's them," Ernest affirmed.  "There were a bunch of kids in
the group, and like six teachers.  Most of them went to a John Wayne movie,
but Sven stayed at the hotel with Arnote and Ruben and Carlson.  They came
out in the garden and sat on a bench right under my tree.  Mostly they
spoke English, because that's the school rule, even in Mexico.  I was going
to hail them and drop onto the ground, but there was something funny about
their voices, so I stayed hidden even though they were only a few feet
underneath my branch."

	  As he spoke Ernest had brought his legs together on the surface
of the totem and was deliberately thrusting his hips aloft.  The motion
lacked wantonness, urgency or any aspect of teasing, but rather Bill found
it frank, friendly and therefore the more massively erotic.  For the first
time Bill really touched the slim redhead, tracing around his belly button
with his right index finger.  This had the effect of making the boy rise
the more to him.
	  "The garden was really private," the boy continued, "because
there was only one path and you could see anyone approaching before they
even got close."

	  He had no idea it would be so exciting to talk about stuff.  As
he'd toured his favored haunts on the bike, sure, it had been interesting
to listen in on the latest news, but the stories had been not that much
more engaging than if they'd been of hunting or someone running a lobster
boat up on a rock.  Certainly they hadn't made his breath go all funny, or
make him get so big.  In fact, telling Bill about what he'd seen was almost
-- almost -- more exciting than actually watching from his secret hiding
place.  What did he mean, `almost'?  Now Bill's hands were at his waist, at
the stretch-band of his shorts.  The man was looking into his eyes.  For
permission?  Ernest nodded, raising his hips anew and staring beck into the
artist's handsome, rugged face.
	  "Will you get naked too?" he whispered to the man.
	  "If you want me to, but I don't have to," Bill whispered back.
	  "I want you to," Ernest said.

	  Bill stopped molesting the child for a few moments.  He shucked
his shirt, slipped out of his sandals, and without ado removed his
L.L. Bean hiking shorts, his condescension to looking like an artist ought
to look, and his boxers.
	  Ernest stared up from his impromptu bunk "I hope I look half as
good as you when I'm forty," he said.  Bill reminded the boy of his true
age and the kid just shook his head.  "You're a pet, and that's a fact," he
said, returning to the supine boy and placing his left hand on the juvenile
chest and his right high on the boy's right thigh.  Ernest moved his right
hand from behind his neck and reached to Bill, showing the man what he
wanted.  Bill responded by slowly slipping his right hand up under the
child's gym shorts and finding him with his warm palm an gentle fingers.
	  "Did the men at the hotel touch Sven before they pulled his
underpants down?" Bill asked.
	  "Yes," the boy whispered.  "They did it like this under his
shorts."  As he explained, he gently stroked the mature male.
	  "Were they talking with him, or was it secretive?"
	  "Sven was talking about his uncle, Nord," Ernest replied, "he was
telling his teachers he'd been in the sauna a couple of time with him, and
they both got boners, but nothing had happened.  He wanted to experiment,
but was embarrassed, and he thought Nord wanted to, also, so if he knew
what to do, next time he was with his uncle, something might happen."

	  By now the males were openly masturbating each other.
	  "Can I be naked too?" Ernest asked.
	  "Yes," Bill whispered, and left off stroking the youth long
enough to strip down his shorts.
	  "It feels nice," Ernest said.
	  "It looks nice too," Bill Muir said, thinking he'd half to work a
lifetime on the length of timber to achieve anything half so wondrous as
the naked boy with his left leg cocked on the log and his right leg hanging
to the side, his penis jutting almost six inches, thick, hard as wood, and
circumcised, from his slim, lightly freckled waist.
	  "Fill a space with cats and naked boys," the artist mused as he
began to again molest the tawny, slim body, "and render all the efforts of
all the artists of history as nothing very special, not when you get right
down to it."  Would not a libertine paradigm, boys raised until age
fourteen, then those without talent or worth painlessly extracted from the
living, struggling process, achieve a utopia for all but the cleric class
who counted on rattling tithes from the laborers until the last breath
rattled from the lungs of the supplicants?  Hmm.  Maybe thirteen or even
twelve would be better; more tender, succulent even, for couldn't such boys
be eaten?  Girls?  The best could be allowed extra years as breeding stock
and to raise the children until they were eight or nine years old.  The god
of sandflies, floods, fat, famine, the Video Professor and cystic fibrosis
was nothing to write home about -- look at whom the blithering idiot had
Chosen -- so it was appealing to dwell on alternatives.  Of course Bill was
being supercilious, sake of he had himself a keeper, a companion who'd wear
well over the decades, and it would be displeasing to have to leave Ernest
off at some kind of Solyent Green institute at an arbitrary age.  He was
coping out ten years before the term was coined, but he chalked it up to
being human -- a failing from which artists were not excluded -- and went
back to molesting the young boy lying on the totem.

	  "They'd talked a couple of times before," Ernest continued,
"that's why there were three teacher with Sven; so he could learn the three
things, beside kissing, that his uncle might want to do with him when he
got back to Norway."
	  "Sounds like a pretty grand case of being in the right place at
the right time," Bill observed.
	  "I wish you'd been up in the tree with me," the boy responded,
"that would have been something."
	  "We'd have toppled," Bill said.
	  "You're right," Ernest managed to respond with a panting grin,
"and Sven and his teachers were sitting on a marble bench, so it would have
hurt."

	  For long minutes the two males stroked each other.  Bill was well
ahead in his work, as was invariably the case with a dedicated artist;
Ernest was an honor student, a year ahead in school, and at the end of his
summer vacation, to boot, so neither was in any hurry.  They gauged each
other perfectly, finding something near the edge but at the same time
largely free of excessive lingering torment, then backing off to a mildly
stimulating whiling away of the passing time as Ernest went on with his
tale of Guadalajara.

	  "Do you know what the three non-kissing events are?"

	  "Hertog, venap and worstle," Sven replied shyly, using what
Ernest understood as Norwegian words for hand, mouth and behind.
	  "Most boys like to start with the hands," Ruben said.  He
appeared to be the eldest of the teachers, perhaps twenty five.  Sven was
tall, lanky and coltish; very blond with big blue eyes that retained some
of their Scandinavian coloring even in the torchlight.  Ernest took him to
be slightly younger than himself, eleven or twelve.  All three teachers had
the look of swimmers, and indeed the group had spent much of the day
cavorting in the El Presidente's Olympic pool, mixing hard laps in with
general horseplay.
	  "Do the other ways hurt?" the boy asked.
	  "It doesn't hurt when it happens in your mouth," Carlson
explained, unless you're dealing rough trade or rough trade is dealing you.
On the other hand, it can be very shocking if you don't know what to
expect.  As far as the third technique goes, yes, it plain old hurts the
first few times.  If you're with a gentle partner it's bearable, but if you
misadventure with the wrong guy, you're for it, as the Brits say."
	  "Stay out of jail," the third teacher, Arnote, suggested.
Although as athletic as his colleagues, he was of a slighter and more
boyish build, and, instincts being instincts, Ernest took little time in
pegging him as the last participant in what was about to happen.
	  "Did you sit in your uncle's lap?" Carlson asked.
	  "Just beside him," the boy said.
	  "Okay," the middle teacher continued, "next time either ask, or
just do it.  I seriously doubt you'll get thrown through the door.  Men are
very tolerant of precocious boys even if they'd rather not engage in
experimenting with them."
	  "Okay," Sven said.
	  "Why don't you start with Ruben?" Carlson suggested, "then I'll
do something with you and before we got back to the room you can be with
Arnote for awhile."
	  "Okay," the youngster repeated, standing up and moving in front
of the senior instructor.
	  "Kissing is actually more intimate than anything else," Ruben
explained to the boy.  "Most prostitutes will do pretty much anything with
a John, other than allow him to kiss her, so don't feel any obligation on
that score."
	  "Do you want to try it?" the boy asked.
	  "Yes," said the teacher.
	  "I do too."
	  Ruben spread his legs and the boy moved close.  For long moments
they looked into each others' eyes, then moved together.  Just before
touching, Sven stopped.  "Can I save it for Uncle Nord?" he asked.
	  "Yes," the teacher said, "but in the future try to make up your
mind, one way or the other, a little earlier."
	  "I'm sorry," Sven said.
	  "Shy is sexier than bold," the teacher explained, "but it can be
overdone."

	  "I think he's shy too," the boy said.
	  "Probably," the teacher acknowledged.
	  "Lucky for me," Sven grinned, half-abashed.  His companions
joined in and chuckled, flattered to have been selected by such a handsome
and engaging creature, and feeling pretty lucky, when one got right down to
it, themselves.

	  "How big a role does skill play?" Sven asked once he was seated
in Ruben's lap and the senior teacher was unbuttoning his shirt.
	  "A big role," the man said.  "A plain partner who parks his or
her lover on the far side of the moon for two or three hours a week will
likely keep their lover longer than a glamorous partner who participates
with minimal enthusiasm."
	  "Is two or three hours a week a good amount?" the boy asked.
	  "After awhile," Ruben said and his colleagues nodded in
agreement.  "At first, it might be that amount of time each night, but as a
year-in, year-out thing, a few hours a week is on the way high side of
average."
	  "If it's so important to be, you know, good at it," Sven asked,
"then why don't they teach it in school?"
	  "You've got us there, son," Carlson said.  "Most couples these
days learn in the back seat of a car with the girl scared to death and the
boy half a basket case.  I guess it's church clobber that's responsible,
same as for most wars, at least half of overpopulation, and civic
pestilence in a variety of shades and hues."
	  "But it may change," Arnote interjected.  "One of these days the
Industrial Revolution will be over, leaving us with ever fewer new toys and
gadgets to look forward to, we might get serious about a sexual revolution,
wherein making love actually is taught under safe and sane circumstances."
	  "Yeah," added Ruben, unintentionally demonstrating the degree of
his mastery of American English, "if you take the ludicrous Muslim fetish
over virginity, and reverse it, there's a good chance you'd end up on the
right track."

	  "How old should kids be to learn?" the boy asked.
	  "Between six and eight would probably suit most," Arnote said.
"A few precocious individuals might start a little younger under structured
circumstances, and, by the same token, a certain percentage should be
older, and a percentage of them might well be happier never indulging in
any carnal experience.  It's individualistic, but only to a degree.  If
society condoned and even sanctioned it, the vast majority of healthy kids
would like to be active by age eight."

	  The three teachers nodded in agreement.  Ernest was dying to yelp
his concurrence, but Ruben really had Sven's shirt wide open, and the boy
was becoming comfortable enough to return the favor, so he held his tongue
and the sturdy branch.

	  "Does it feel sinful?" the teacher asked as he began molesting
the twelve year old.
	  "Not exactly," the boy whispered.  Carlson and Arnote were now
standing close in front of him, stripping their own shirts and unbuckling
the belts of their shorts.
	  "Your uncle's very lucky," Ruben said as the three removed the
boy's shirt completely and began fondling his young chest, shoulders and
neck.  Looking down at the slim twelve year old surrounded by three tall
athletes, Ernest couldn't help thinking that luck was a knife that cut both
ways.

	  The men stood the boy on the marble bench and soon all four were
naked but for their shorts.  Sven dropped to the ground, and choosing Ruben
as his first partner, stood at the senior teacher's right hip and placed
his right hand on his hairless belly, slowly working it to his belt.  This
he unfastened, following slowly with the snap and buttons as he worked
himself ever lower over the big, hard bulge of the intensely excited male.
Arnote and Carlson both stood close to the pair, fondling Sven as the boy
continued with the discoveries of his experimenting.  All four were by now
sweating in the tropical heat and their breaths made a ragged symphony of
rising lust and incipient passion.  Ernest watched in awe and could only
imagine what his counterpart, Sven, was feeling as his right hand explored
further and further into his athletic partner's shorts and briefs.
Carefully, so as to avoid discovery, though he felt if the worst happened,
it wouldn't be much of a bad thing, the young tourist freed himself from
his own underpants, guiding the biggest boner of his life out through the
leg of his shorts.

	  By now Sven was really with the six-three Ruben.  His hand was
deep in the teacher's shorts and Ernest could plainly see he'd taken up a
deliberate rhythm with the older male, stroking him with a pumping motion
as if he'd found the very well of life, itself, and was determined to have
of it.  The two junior teachers remained close at hand and busied their
hands with belts and fastenings so that, as if dancing, shorts and sandals
were all piled at one end of the garden bench.

	  "Are you ready to be naked with us?" Ruben asked Sven.
	  "Yes," the boy whispered hoarsely.
	  "Okay," said his teacher, "we want that to. Don't be afraid to
speak up," he added.  "You can say things while this is happening with your
uncle.  Tell him you want to be naked with him, tell him how you feel, tell
him about being here with us.  You'll be able to judge from his response if
he likes having you whisper things, or not, then play it by ear.  Part of
being a good lover is sharing your experiences, especially the first times
you're together.  That cuts through secrecy barriers and allows you to
share your experiences as well as reliving them.  Chances are, he's not
exactly a total virgin, and he'll be just as excited telling you about
things he's done as he will be hearing about what's happened with you.
Just be sure anything you say is the truth, because made-up stories are
unconvincing and hollow and more a damper on things than a stimulant."

	  If he hadn't known it already, Ernest would by now have been
convinced that Ruben was a teacher.  He pegged the profession for his own
future, excited almost as much by the lucid flow of truth from one mind to
another as by the fact, well, not quite, that the most youthful of the
adults, Arnote, had stripped out of his underwear and was now standing
naked with the group.

	  "You, too, please," the boy whispered urgently to Ruben, "I want
to see you."  Ah, lesson learned, but no one stood around awarding
diplomas.
	  "Do it for me, if you want," the senior teacher said to the boy.
	  "I want," Sven said, and quickly fitted action to his words by
pulling his teacher's shorts to his knees, then stooping to get them down
over the young man's ankles.
	  "Hold me against your chest while you do it," Ruben whispered,
and Sven quickly complied, holding the thick, eight-inch circumcised
erection tightly to him as he stroked and experimented with the swollen,
purple-tipped organ.
	  "It's slippery," he noted, fingering Ruben's copious flow of
seminal fluid with his left hand as he masturbated the athlete steadily
with his right.
	  "Do you know what reiterate means?" Ruben asked in a ragged,
husky voice.
	  "I think so," Sven replied, his own voice merely a rasp of its
former bell-clear self.
	  "I want to reiterate how lucky your uncle is," the teacher said.
	  "Does that mean that it's good with me?" Sven asked.
	  "Do you know what understatement means?" the teacher said before
lapsing into an apparent standing, shaking, sweating coma.

	  The three adults were now naked, circled tightly against the
child's chest and belly, their penises probing that of their senior
colleague.  From overhead, Ernest gaped in untrammeled awe.  He couldn't
wait to be back in Stonington, back once again with Bill as they worked
late into the night.  He recalled what the teachers had said about talking
about the secret things that could happen, and wondered if he'd have the
courage to bring up the subject.  The three teachers in their twenties were
handsome and sexy; their erections were big and really amazing, but even
though they were young and good looking, he knew who he wanted something to
happen with, especially when it was new and he was learning.  They still
had weeks of touring to go before they returned to the States, so he'd have
lots of time to digest what he was watching, figure it out, and dream of
what might happen when they were once again set to spend a long evening
together turning a timber into a treasure.

	  "We need to talk," Ruben managed to gasp, gently slowing the
boy's hands with his own and easing away from him; sitting on the bench and
easing Sven onto his lap.
	  "First," he whispered, "I want to say that you are doing a
perfect job, if `job' is the right word, which it isn't.  Anyway, what's
happening is flawless, faultless, and a perfect combination of wantonness
and aggressiveness without any aspect of impatience, showing off, or
overkill, all of which are fatal to making love.
	  "Second," the senior teacher went on, "I want to tell you that in
a few minutes it will be over for me, and I don't know how much you know
about what happens when a mature male reaches his ending, which is called,
in English, either a climax or an orgasm."
	  "I don't know," Sven answered.
	  "Okay," the teacher gasped, still shaking and sweating, "I'm glad
we stopped.  Not very glad, mind you, but under the circumstances, glad
enough."
	  Ernest could tell by Sven's expression he wasn't, but nonetheless
he sat attentively on his teacher's lap, seeming to realize that the
interruption would be a short one.
	  "Pretty soon I'm going to cum," Ruben explained gently.  Since
that hasn't happened to me, what with all the travel and running around,
for over a week, it's going to be, well, a little on the messy side.
	  "I just wanted you to know," the teacher continued, "because
sometimes young lovers like what's happening until the man climaxes, then
they're shocked and disgusted; sometimes they even think the man's peed on
them, or they've done something wrong and hurt the man.
	  "Understand?"
	  "I think so," the boy replied.  "What should I do?"
	  "When my sperm starts cumming, that's what Americans call it:
`cuming', keep masturbating me.  Don't stop.  It won't hurt to get my cum
on you, even on your face, and if some splashes on your lips, that won't
hurt anything, either; so just keep masturbating me until it stops
spurting.  If you want to lick it off your hands and arms, that's fine;
most boys love to, once they get used to it."

	  Ernest was just wondering what it might taste like when Sven
asked.  "Salty and maybe a little, tiny bit fishy," Ruben said, adding that
if the boy felt he would like to try to take some of Carlson's semen in his
mouth it might be a good idea for him to get used to the experience by
licking what he could reach off his, Sven's, body as well as his, Ruben's.
	  Sven nodded.
	  "Okay," Ruben said, "this time just keep doing exactly what you
were.  Don't be shocked because the same thing will happen with your uncle,
and even a little bit with you, later on after you've been with Arnote."

	  Again, the stood.  The two younger teachers braced Sven and Ruben
between them, and the boy returned to the mature male, cupping him in his
small left hand, and stroking with his right which he continued to wet in
the flow of his teacher's seminal fluid.
	  Several minutes passed.  Ernest liked this part; no talking, no
teaching, just the panting and natural tempo, slowly increasing, slowly
getting more and more exciting, slowly going on until suddenly it wasn't
slow but grunting, groaning, wheezing, hot, lewd and very fast.
	  "I'm cumming," Ruben hissed.

	  Ernest didn't know exactly what he was expecting, just that the
reality was like a fire hose compared to an anticipated garden hose.  The
pulsing spray of sperm splashed and flew all over all four males.  The
young spy grunted aloud at the sight, his involuntary exclamation masked by
the feral outcries of the males six feet below.  And it went on so.  What
was god thinking?  It took one sperm to make a baby, he knew that from
school; so what was with these zillions and zillions flying all over the
place in big, spurting streams, splatting in the foliage, and wetting
everyone again and again.  Crazy, crazy world to think this was bad, this
was sin; that preventing it was virtue.  I mean, sure, if faggots sloughed
off all responsibility and refused to contribute or participate, that would
be negative, but, as the teacher had said, three or four hours -- a week --
once the novelty of first love was muted.  Crazy, crazy world.

	  The thoughts whirling through Ernest's mind were at first
interrupted and then augmented by the realization that Sven and he might as
well be identical twins.  Bill and Emily would have to stay a day or two
more at the El Presidente so he could get to know the young Norwegian.  The
reason was that the boy did exactly what he would have done in the same
situation.  After seven or eight big sprays of Ruben's sperm had rocketed
all over the place, Sven bent at the waist, leaned down, and took the tip
of the man's penis in his mouth.  Ernest could tell from Ruben's expression
that he was still ejaculating; that he was cumming in his student's mouth.
Wow and wow again.  Viva Mexico.  The Garden of Eden definitely had the
world's coolest snakes.  Yea Adam, yea, Eve.  And to think, earlier that
very day he'd been looking forward to a chemistry set for Christmas and
maybe a motor bike in a couple of years.  Dumb kid.

	  Pivoting slowly and sitting on the bench as Ruben spasmed his
last breathless lurches, Sven reached for Carlson and drew the second
teacher in place of the first.  In moments he had the second seven inch,
circumcised erection against his lips and was tonguing and lapping it,
teasing with his lips and nibbling gently as he slowly engulfed the thick,
plum size and plum colored glans.  Carlson's hands went to the boy's face
and his two companions braced their fellow teacher so that if he should
pass out, or even die in place, the boy would have his full learning
experience.

	  Sven could only take some of the adult so he used his left hand
down low, cupping and instinctively forming a tight sphincter with his
index finger and thumb while he stroked the mid-shaft with his right hand.
Carlson shook like a leaf and bucked like a mounted stag; wheezed, panted,
gasped and hissed as the frenzy of what was happening escalated moment by
moment and finally second by second until he uttered a stifled cry and
froze against the boy as if he were in the process of being electrocuted.

	  Ernest's angle of view was perfect and he could see Sven's cheeks
and throat working in powerful, rhythmic contractions coinciding with what
he'd seen from Ruben ten minutes previously.  Then there was a spill from
the child's lips, a dripping and a white froth matching the milky color of
Ruben's endless climax.  As one of the men had said earlier, it was a bit
of a messy business, but Ernest had no reason to believe it would be neater
and tidier with a female.  Maybe he'd find out when he was a big boy.  If
there was one Emily in the world, there had to be someone almost as nice as
she was, and almost would suit him just fine.  But, oh, wow, meantime, look
at all of this!  Look once, twice; keep looking.

	  Arnote was guided to the bench by his two friends.  Sven kept
after him, shifting to follow his sinking partner.  Somewhere, presumably
running around loose in the half-artic country of Norway was the world's
luckiest man, though he perhaps knew it not.  Baring food poisoning or
aviation misadventure, it was a lead pipe cinch he'd be finding out before
another month had passed.

	  Eventually, it was over for Arnote.  Sven did release him.  "It's
very sexy to kiss a male with your mouth the way it is," he whispered,
still fingering the boy's handsome Nordic face and gazing into the big blue
eyes.  Not one of the three men tried to cash in on what Ernest was sure
must be the world's most exotic experience, and it was such a demonstration
of respect the boy in the tree made a point of reminding himself to be sure
to get the name of the school (obviously their English program was in a
class by itself) from Sven the following morning.  Leaving Bill and Emily
would be unthinkable, but Ernest had been through a time or two of it on
his way to age thirteen, and knew options were important.

	  "Worstle."
	  The word floated up into the overhanging tree.  Familiar.  Wasn't
Spanish.  Where had he...?  Ding-dong! the bell went off.  The other two
(hertog and venap) the boy had plumb forgotten, but `worstle'?  Allowing
for kissing being First Base, worstle was Home Plate.  One way of looking
at it, and Ernest had heard this in a locker room, was that neither a boy
or girl could go any further.

	  And sure enough.  Where Ruben and Carlson stallioned out at over
seven thick inches, Arnote was a more modest and slim six.  At first blush,
well, um, jeez, but no, on second thought, Ernest remembered a certain
routine function that had on one memorable occasion been sidetracked for
three days, and the result had been, not to put to fine a point on it, of a
substantiveness rivaling or perhaps exceeding the bulk of that which he saw
below him.

	  If his friends had been gentle with his introductory experiences,
they were positively fawning now.

	  "I'll bet they were," Bill Muir said.
	  "It must be hard being a sculptor," Ernest observed; "if you're a
writer, you can save the best for last -- build up as you go along, then
shebang with the lollapalooza at the end or almost at the end.  But a
painter, or a sculptor, everything you have to say is out there for the
first glance; you can't hide, or hold back, or foreshadow, or manipulate,
or tease: boom, you win, or boom, you lose."

	  It was nice the boy wasn't a mindless horndog.  Bill smiled to
himself at what the Norwegian group had, thinking the world was entirely
theirs, missed out on; so near and yet so far.  The boy's comments on art
were trenchant.  Galleries in rows in every major city; art colonies from
Eastport to San Ysidro and Key West to Vancouver; probably even in
Centralia, Kansas.  Writers?  The New York Times Review of Books catered to
wannabes by the ton and by the score, but the truth was a novel was very
long innings of very hard ball; very, very precious few could pull one off.
Years would go by, and, while dozens and ever hundreds would be published,
they were overwhelmingly commercial products, turned out of hand to keep
the presses spinning and the reviewers reviewing.  The heart and soul, grab
the reader by the hair of the head and haul him off the hill novelist was
the world's rarest human creation.  The graphic artist, whatever his
medium, interpreted an existing god whereas the literary artist was stuck
with the daunting task of creating his own.  Since this was the worn path
of theologians of a million variations over a hundred thousand years, the
chances of the scrivener were similar to those of a camel anticipating an
unruffled passage through the eye of a needle.  The interesting aspect was
almost metaphysical: just because no one ever had written a great novel,
did it follow no one ever would?  And what if a man did?  Was it not likely
that having read it, one would never want to read anything else?  How would
the markets hold after the last of pages became a common denominator?  What
would be the outcome if railroad conductors could no longer bear the dated,
stale prose of their paddles; pilots, their humorless approach plates or
the postman the insipid banality of his envelope and package label?  How
long before an ultimate talent became the ultimate evil?  Was any toxin so
lethal as the truth?  As an old engine was half held together by the sludge
and varnish of long usage, wasn't the universal power plant kept
functioning by the crud and debris of faith and worship?  If a cleaner came
to clean, wouldn't he find dirt and grime everywhere and in the end scour
all as unclean?

	  Bill Muir shook his head and gazed fondly at the hand tools of
his craft.  A million of them would not equal a pencil.  He was thankful.
A million pencils would not equal Ernest.  Again, he was thankful, while at
the same time feeling a vague premonition along the line that it might be a
good idea to keep the boy away from tablets and the like.  There was
already one precocious literary aspirant on Deer Isle, a half-nincompoop,
all smarty-pants who lived out in Oceanville.  Hmm.  What was the name of
that school in Norway?

	  Meantime, Ernest was doing something that wouldn't be identified
as a commonplace juvenile behavior pattern for several decades: he was
acting out.  He'd slipped from his position on the length of timber,
without even a hint of guidance from Bill, and draped himself over the
totem.  It wasn't a suggestive action, because `suggestive' suggests other
interpretations or readings of the deed might have been options.  No, it
was pretty obvious that the naked thirteen year old had added two and two
with great success; that he knew what he wanted and whom he wanted it with.
That left only why, where and when.  `Why' was a good one.  Half the answer
was in the obvious pleasure not only Arnote but his two colleagues had
displayed as Sven had draped himself over the marble bench in that far-off
Mexican garden, and presenting Bill Muir, the miracle entity in his young
life, with a similar experience, while the other half had been the
chortling, warbling thrill and pleasure Sven had vociferously evidenced
once a few grunting minutes had passed and Arnote had taken a gentle rhythm
against his young body.  In the end the `why' of the thing amounted to a
variation of the Golden Rule, and if it was an aspect that wasn't a part of
the Sunday School curriculum, though it was often taught in private study
sessions on an individual teacher/student basis, perhaps it ought to be.
As far as the where and when were concerned, the studio was warm and, as
usual, lighted by a dozen kerosene lamps (the artist, a conservative
environmentalist, found the expenditure of petroleum resources in this
manner of illumination a useful goad when it came to sticking to business
and getting the most out of every hour); the half-worked sculpt was a
comfortable height off the carpeted floor (Bill liked working barefoot),
and the door was locked so even if Emily did take a notion to show up with
milk, coffee or tea, and a plate of cookies, they'd have ample time to
dress and resume a façade of innocence.  Who, what, why and where.
Align them properly, and when would take care of itself, or at least it
would as soon as Bill excused himself for a moment to retrieve a bottle of
baby oil from one of the studio's tool cabinets.

	  A thousand bags of chips not eaten, and then a thousand more; a
thousand tubs of dip not dipped, and then a thousand more; a thousand Macs
grilled for Joe, a thousand more for Jeff; none of these thousands grilled
for Bill, so what did he have left?  Something precise, or at least that's
how he viewed it.  Ninety pounds he didn't scale; why? -- because they
belonged to someone else.  If the lord worked in mysterious ways wasn't
there a chance he'd get it right once in awhile?  Forget Tyne Daley, forget
Cloris Leachman; it will challenge you, but even forget Mr. My Product, The
Video Professor, because these horrors, and they cover this in Logic 101,
do not preclude accidental brilliance or the random, fickle master stroke.
It was backhanded, it was out of Left Field, it was the exception that
proved the rule, but, the main thing was that it was and that was equaled a
secular heaven of four distinct parts.  Part one was to forge talent with
work and practice until one became a virtuoso, part two was to have an
impossibly young lover, and parts three and four amounted simply to having
the money and health to enjoy parts one and two.  To Bill Muir, and to
myself, that it was earned was the main thing: that it was the product, in
the case of a sculptor, of tens of thousands of hours of obscure toil, and
in my case, as a writer, of well in excess of one hundred thousand hours,
over thirty and more years, of anonymous labor.  These are the reasons for
the young lovers.  No adult partner can view you as normal for the stone
simple reason that you are not normal.  You are not even nearly normal.
You don't have a normal thought, idea, plan or intuition in an entire month
beyond those necessary for coping with the prosaics and mundanities of
maintaining roof, larder, utilities and your significant junior, who, by
the mercies rendered unto the young, does not understand you and out of raw
ignorance and immaturity, accepts you as human simply because you look
human and often act human.

	  In my case, I'm dismissed out of hand by, say, Lorelei, a
fifty-something Canadian Anglo who works at The Price is Right market by
the bridge foot.  She's seen me shopping with Samantha a couple of times
and I guess it was enough to put me on her spitting list as prince of the
pariahs. Maria, the taxi driver, pretends to be friendly because I spend a
hundred dollars in a good month with her drivers, but has called on the
social welfare gals to investigate Bev, Samantha, and myself.  I guess
there are fellow travelers, because only The Shadow knows what lurks in the
hearts of man, but they all get the same short shrift.  Mr. R. Kelly may
sing nicely indeed about being the world's greatest, but I'm the real deal
-- and don't I just know it; not only the greatest, but the most prolific
and productive; the most salient and useful; the most friendly and
unabashed; the most human and involved.  If I want a fourteen year old
girlfriend, I'll bloody well have one and consider her the luckiest lass in
Belize into the bargain simply because that's exactly what she is.  For
fifteen years and more I was abused to the exact limit of human endurance
and if vengeance is the lord's I nonetheless mean to have my ersatz version
by living well.  It's like the cute office sign that reads I'm having a
nervous breakdown: I've worked for it, I've earned it, I deserve it, and no
one is going to deprive me of it.  I'm going to live in my tropic paradise
with my 150-watt radio and fourteen year old charmer and write the greatest
fiction and essays in the history of the world, and, guess what, it's too
late to stop me even if you were crazy enough to want to.


	  It was also too late to stop Arnote.  At many points this might
have been possible, but Sven needed to be wetted and to Ernest's initial
amazement this was done by Ruben and Carlson, who took turns behind the
child, masturbating and cuming within a minute each.  On reflection, the
scene was of such a nature, and what was about to happen was so enthralling
and paralyzingly exciting, that it was hardly surprising that healthy,
young athletic males could so quickly climax a second time.  Ernest
thought, with the childish logic that is often so infuriating to adults,
that indeed there might have been less sperm than the first time, but the
boy realized he was but a child and it might be several years before he
understood such things fully.  In any event, there was not more cum, he was
sure of that, and he decided to let the matter rest, partly because
quibbling and nitpicking were not part of his character, and partly because
he had a perfect view looking down between Sven's back and Arnote's front
as Ruben and Carlson guided the elder male to the young boy.

	  It took a long time.  Sven would whisper "Yes" when the right
spot on his body was found, then Arnote would thrust very gently in and
out, moving his hips almost imperceptibly in a rapid, dog-like motion for a
minute or two before pulling free and checking to see if the boy was okay;
allowing him to relax.  Ruben and Carlson were both rock hard again and
thrusting between the young man and the boy, their penises wet with ropes
of semen, their breaths as ragged as on their first contact with the
handsome child.  Sven was very much the leader, whispering encouragement
and endearments, urging Arnote to enter him more fully.  It was all a bit
After you my dear Alfonso, but sweet, sensitive and accommodating in its
own way -- and, Ernest couldn't help realizing, far superior to any
contrary eventuality in which the boy would be victimized and his young
body used with wanton aggression.  From his vantage point the young spy
could see that the efforts were not in vain, that progress was being made;
that, inch-by-inch their will was being consummated.
	  In modern times we say it isn't over `till it's over, progress,
in the word's of the long-time GE slogan, being our most important product.
In 1960 Kennedy had been elected, form replaced function, rhetoric replaced
reality, media replaced method and the medium became the message, the
schmoes became god instead of just inventing the cretin, and the spiral had
begun.  The victory that staggered the eastern beast and bled it to the
ground would be deemed a loss and the only modern leader fit for an opera
would become the dinner of cheesy hounds.  A single wild genius would
arise, and give us a miracle decade and a half, but we were who we were and
doomed to vote ourselves out of existence, and the world with us.  All this
was ahead for Ernest, all these reasons were reasons for being as he was,
wanting what he wanted, and doing what he did.  They were his luck.  His
different path that was viable, not of its own right, but because the
important product of progress had been so distorted and trivialized that
the nominal path wound around and back on itself in a hopeless tangle that
vanquished sanity, itself, and rendered unthinkable alternatives the only
show in town.  Ovum, novum, sanctus covum.  Means nothing to me, but what
it means to you is that love and marriage, which once went together like a
horse and carriage, have been rendered the trap and trappings of agonizing,
not over yourself, but over those you breed.  Exceedingly bad news.  And
the only chance of avoiding the worst of the worst is to forget to beget.
Ernest didn't know this, though his vaulting intelligence and wide
experience perhaps tickled him with an inkling or two; Bill Muir and his
wife were more sentient, but successful artists are great ones for creating
their own spheres of optimism since they will be the first among survivors
if anyone survives, so, in the end, the man and boy were guided less by an
intelligent and aware grasping of something than by a vague and uneasy
avoidance of anything, all symbolized by a liquor mick's son in the oval
office.  Ah, poetic insight, how keen is thy blade, with its double,
allegoric perspective, as fulsome in blooding the ignorant.  It's perhaps
regrettable that freeing such a blade from its scabbard on the floor of the
public dance renders one a wallflower, but, as Ms. Elliot reminds us,
talent does what it can; genius what it must, and there's no denying that
the blade is best sharpened against the bone of the bonehead. So there it
is, half funny, half awesome and terrible, with this salient codicil: you
have to be awfully rich for it to be very funny.
	  Yes, yes, a little great writing.  I puddle along under vast
breeding and strictures and consciousness enough to squash a giant into a
thimble, but every once in awhile I get to feeling stifled and
claustrophobic, and at the same time Power Mix, our local FM station, plays
Sir Dube, so I ignore the mailman and his dreary envelope to stand up, not
to prove I'm the best by a thousand times, but simply so you can see for
yourself.  The point is to remake your life from the ground up, but I don't
know how to do that -- have a feeling it's up to you -- so I have to
content myself, since I'm not of the Chosen, with providing odd moments of
diversion and winsome entertainment.  My gift to you is to make you happy,
thus showing you that you can be happy.  Your gift to yourself is to
extrapolate this, now that you know about it, into your daily life; to
consciously love each moment of your work, each mile of your commute, each
hour of your leisure, each dollar of your income, each drink at your bar,
and everything from each eyelet that holds your shoe laces to each hair on
your head.  Separate them, focus on them -- the more absurdly small and
humble, the better - and love the juice right out of them.  The smaller the
things you chose, the more there will be.  And the opposite is true.  If
you pick something huge and grand, like god or Christ, you'll soon enough
tire of it or him, and end up simply going through the motions with a big
empty feeling inside, whereas, if you pick your toenails, and each slice of
olive on your next pizza, you can go on, forever, and save ten percent of
your income into the bargain.  A good starting point for my cheap
non-religion is Nifty with its fifty thousand stories.  Prove it for
yourself.  Read ten pages by my fellow writers, then ten pages from the
bible.  Happiness is a conscious, active, dynamic thing, very much like the
bubbles in a glass of champagne.  Be it and you'll be it; live it and
you'll live it, but don't get carried away, because unless you're sad and
blue some of the time, you wouldn't know what bliss was if it hit you over
the head, yes, meaning you should be happy at being unhappy and take a
rational joy in misery.  It's like my cats.  I feed them once a day.  This
means they're a bit hungry when three p.m. comes along, and get a real
thrill out of their sardines and cat chow.  If their bowl was always full,
they'd miss out on 365 significant moments a year.  To extend the analogy,
my five felines, who seem to get the crap beaten out of them by larger
tropical fauna if I leave them outside, relieve themselves under my bed.
I, the majestic artist and ethereal poet, start each day with a spatula, a
plastic bowl, a damp washcloth, and enough stinking protein to wake the
dead.  The upshot of this ritualistic travail is twenty three hours and
fifty eight minutes each day that I'm very happily not engaged in this
particular dance macabre.  Parenthetically, even at the worst moments of
this routine, I'm happy that my floor is covered with linoleum, not
carpeting; further happy that I'm not wasting money on cat litter or time
from the keyboard bringing up sand from the yard, thence to return it.

	  Enough with the felosophy.  My cats happen to be particularly
beautiful or I'd off with their heads for none is a whit smarter than an
imbecile, and all scratch persistently at the linoleum every time they
stool.  (If you're so miserable you think cats will help, maybe god's an
idea.)

	  Ideas were something Bill and Ernest were running flat out of.
The boy's chronology had Arnote now completely joined with Sven and lying
against the child's back so he could not longer see exactly what was
happening between the two young males.  To the young artist's assistant
this had, even at the time, seemed less than ideal, and, on reflection, he
knew there had to be a better way.  I sometimes involve readers in my
stories by asking them to guess things.  In this instance, I'd like to ask
you to guess what the better way was.  Offhand, I can't remember what the
topic was when last we played this engaging little game, but I do remember
the conundrum was easy.  This one's easy, too.  The better way that Ernest
had devised, when it came to being with Bill, was simply (drum roll)
to... come on, try!... lie on his back.

	  A simple thing, but the sculptor thought it was wildly fantastic
and said he'd have never thought of it in ten years.  He wet the child
thoroughly with the oil, reminding himself to clean up thoroughly so as to
disperse the characteristic scent, and positioned himself against the
thirteen year old boy.  Ernest eagerly splayed his legs and then rested
them on his lover's shoulders.  The males looked hotly into each other's
eyes, and Bill alternated leaning against the slim body, and assuming the
push-up position so he could drink in the sight of the slim, willing
creature beneath him.  Ernest lay with his finger laced behind his neck,
utterly vulnerable and trusting.

	  Arnote was motionless against Sven for long minutes, cautious
almost to the point of being annoying.  Ernest was almost sharing his
contemporary's mild frustration vicariously, when he saw the boy's hands
reach behind his body and grasp his mature partner by his buttocks, urging
him forward, then coaxing him gently to the rear.  The twenty-two year old
was gentle, not stupid, and he quickly got the message and took up a soft
rhythm than slowly increased in tempo and intensity at the hissed urgings
of the young boy.

	  For that matter, Bill and the Norwegian teacher could have been
twins.  Every so gently the sculptor found the child, and ever so gently he
began, his body breaking into a sweat, gleaming in the lamp light, his
breath becoming a ragged pant; all changes coinciding with his first
partial penetration of the tall, slim male beneath him.

	  "Kill me," Ernest whispered, and Bill did.
	  "That was a long wait," he observed, adding that it could easily
have been much longer.

	  Ernest removed his hands from behind his neck and held Bill by
the flanks of his trim, athletic, body, fondling and coaxing him,
whispering to him, and staring into his eyes.

	  Arnote was with Sven for ten minutes.  Ruben and Carlson thrust
hotly and deeply between the sweating bodies, freezing in grunting agony
every few minutes as they were in turn wracked by successive orgasms.  The
tempo and pitch increased; the mewing and hissing gave way to orgiastic,
feral grunting, and yet the pace rose like a blast furnace thermometer
until Sven's fingers were raking Arnote and the teacher was pounding
against the boy with half-frenzied deliberation; with an urgency that
indicated an ending was soon to come.

	  It came in silence.  No warning whispers, no cautionary grunts,
just four young, athletic bodies suddenly staggering to a frozen tableau,
holding each other rigidly for moment after endless moment, for all intents
and purposes oblivious to what was so obviously happening between them.
Over?  And yet it was not over.  A full frozen minute.  Half another.  Then
a delicate dance of four partners until the young boy was lying on his
back, Arnote still deep inside him, and Carlson was cupping him while
Ruben, his first, masturbated the child, using the puddles of semen
slicking the boy's thighs to wet the palm and fingers of his right hand.

	  The past is prologue, so the saying goes -- it's a little Jesuit
for my taste, but in this case, the adage fit.  Everything Ernest had seen
was but foreplay to what was happening to the twelve year old lying on the
young man who was lying on the marble bench.  The wanton molestation of the
slim young body, the carnal usage of the boy's swollen penis, the
child-like tone of his hissing and gasping; the hard, fast bucking of the
slim young hips, and his final cry joining him with the other males.  His
fast, hard spurting of his watery pubescent semen all over himself and the
two males at his side, some even arcing onto Arnote's face and hair, that,
and only that was a climax and that and only that had triggered Ernest's
own emission; his own agonizingly long, hard cum on the tree branch with
his sperm falling and mixing unnoticed with the semen of the boy beneath.

	  Now it was half kissing, half story telling, and half sex with
Bill, and if three halves made over a whole, both males felt enough less
than wholesome to reorient the equation.  Shame and taboo; ignominy and
infamy: how did they end up playing such a role?  What would there feelings
have been if their behavior were standard?  No more than jacking off in the
shower.  Slam/bam, thank-you sir.  Was that the whole purport of everything
to do with religion and morality?  To vastly enhance the thrill of those
with the courage of defiance?  Seemed a long way around Robin Hood's barn,
but, on the other hand, what were the alternatives.  Wasn't it about the
definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Bad, bad, bad equaling
wowee-zowee?  If there were merely two aphrodisiacs, love and taboo, surely
that was better than if there were none.  Be that as it may, it hardly
answered any questions concerning the combination of the two.  The paradox
of forbidden love went to the very cave, else why all those drawings of
deer and antelope?  Yet, in the end, perhaps the only answer was that the
subject was so complex as to be, like god, absurd; far beyond mortal
comprehension much less understanding.  That's what I say, and not only
that: I call anyone who thinks they know more than I do a charlatan, plain
and simple.  If my stature -- ever so hardly won -- yet not hardly won, but
greatly won -- as the greatest of artists and thus closest to god is to be
challenged it must be challenged by he who writes better than I do.  Thus
cloaking myself in utter invincibility, I pronounce, and let anyone
disbelieve at his monumental peril.  When you stop and consider how much
I'd love to have my bluff called; to read and thrill to my better, you will
know of the lonely sorrow of my icy, stratospheric mountain peak.  If you
think it's fun looking down on Mozart, you have the mind of a fool and the
soul of a hairball.  In my whole life I'd like to breathe one normal breath
of normal elevator air; converse with but a single individual as an equal.
Yes, yes, poor little rich virtuoso; wasa-wasa.  Shit, first my mother,
then my wife goes to a lawyer named Tom Cruise for her babies, then the
cats, now this.  If I can be happy it should be a piece of cake for you,
and that's the name of that tune.

	  This gets Bill and Ernest beyond their hang-ups; beyond their
guilt feelings; beyond, far beyond anything and everything but each other.
Him inside him.  Him within him.  Him panting.  Him sweating.  Him mewing.
Him groaning.  Him almost.  Him nearly.  Him fully.  Him howling.  Him
crying.  Him cumming.  Him cumming.  Him ending.  Him ending.  Him. Him.
Beginning.  New.  Himhim



	  "It's a good thing we don't have a flashlight," Larry said, "or
we might get picked up on suspicion of jacking deer."
	  The sun had disappeared but a big, hard moon had quickly followed
lighting the sparse stands of Mrs. Semple's trees, so we'd stayed on
telling Stonington stories until I'd missed dinner and it was almost nine
o'clock.
	  "Wanna stay a little longer?" Larry half-whispered.
	  "Sure," I said.
	  We were too immature to say anything at first, but Larry took his
glasses off as he had the first time, and that said it all.  We stripped
modestly, each behind a different tree, and returned to each other, arms at
our sides, hugely swollen.  Slowly we approached until we were barely
touching.  Larry used his hand just to pull down his foreskin, so we were
able to really touch, and we both gasped gently at the feeling of his new
nakedness against mine.
	  "What have you been doing with Becky?" I was finally able to
whisper.
	  "Just something under her bra," he replied in a low, husky voice.
"She won't let me take it off yet, too much church, I guess, plus she
thinks she's not that special to look at."
	  "I think sometimes little things are more exciting than big
things," I said, bushing in the half dark and the unintended
double-entendre.  Larry took it as I meant it, which excited me because
when I'd first known him he'd have been all over the slip of the tongue.
"They make good steps," he agreed.
	  "Where'd it happen?" I asked.
	  "In my bed," he whispered.
	  "Was it dark?"
	  "She let me light a candle," he said, but she kept her pajamas
on; just opened the top so I could get to her."
	  "Did she look at you?"

	  If there's anything more exciting than talking about sex with a
cute fourteen-year-old boy while you stand naked together gently rubbing
the tips of your penises together I want to know so I can write a book
about it.  Assuming I'm on safe ground, I'll go ahead and finish this one,
for now.

	  "She pretended she didn't want to, but she made me move around
quite a bit, and I had to close my eyes some of the time, so I think she
was peeking."

	  "Dastardly," I bespoke myself, and said I bespoke myself, because
I thought things like that were funny.  Neither Larry nor I knew what it
meant, but we both laughed, possibly to break the tension, but more likely
because giggling made us shake a little and stimulated us in the way we
were touching.

	  We weren't kids, and, in point of fact, I had only two years
growth left in me, for I would confound medical and psychiatric science by
having my development permanently and irrevocably arrested at age sixteen,
partly because even by fourteen I saw, like Peter Pan, little point in
adulthood, but in the main because doing so was the best way avenge myself
for my mother's unrelenting terrorism.  (I believe this worked quite well.
A concerted pattern of acting loopy and immature orchestrated over three
decades, during which I always knew exactly what I was doing, made the
woman fully aware of the breadth and depth of her faults and deficiencies
-- to the point she died of lymphoma at sixty eight, while her mother, a
normal person, lived to the age of one hundred two.  I may not be
indictable for murder, but I sure as hell hope I'm guilty of it.  As time
goes on my work will be read by ever more young women.  Be severely warned.
If hatred is your meat, revulsion your potatoes, and a vast flaring temper
the pride of your life, do not even think of having children.  The chance
of their making lemonade out of your lemons and becoming literary comets is
one one-millionth the chance of their becoming ax murderers and the odds
are overwhelming they'll end up disheartened losers, defeatist failures and
despairing drudges.  Again, you have been warned.  Remember, if you are to
survive it is under my stewardship as your monarch -- all other options are
merely a laugh, as you are probably beginning to realize -- and in my
world, matricide is punishable by a fifty cent fine.)

	  There's a pretty sight.  Pack of smokes and a lighter sitting on
top of the radio.  Deliberate decision.  Smoke-free for sixty odd days.
Minimal to no cravings.  More an intellectual void; something awfully nice,
smooth and tasty -- missing.  Ganja, too.  Didn't miss it nearly as much as
I'm overjoyed to have it back.  If two joints and fifteen cigarettes
constitute the road to perdition, set my feet free.  Besides doing anything
in a boat with my nephew, Murray, the only thing I fear is growing ancient.
Based on considerable experience, oddly enough, with two people who happily
made great age (94 and 102).  But how, how rare.  I have the luck not to be
an addictive or compulsive tobacco, booze or weed fiend; that would be a
bummer, so I figure the devil's mixtures will take fifteen years off my
familial norm, leaving me outta here at age 77.  Perfect.  Of course, if
the markets hold to averages of the last fifty years, in thirty years I'll
be worth two or three million.  Something to think about, and if I could
see anything but the remotest, one in five thousand, chance of being
impotent, gaga, and happy I'd go for the big H.  The truth is I've had so
many breaks at this stage; independent income, two superb grandmothers as
mentors, surviving Viet Nam, that it would take a congressional act of
greed to want or expect more.

	  Bev's off to Belize City tomorrow to read the Social Welfare
department the riot act over their investigations of Samantha, vis a vee,
me.  I suppose it's inevitable we're bound to get someone's goat,
Mr. October and Miss February.  I've been investigated, what, five times --
it comes with the territory.  Bachelor interested in children.  Hmm.  At
St. Peter's gate there's likely a scale on which one places meals supplied,
ten thousand, and years of school provided, thirty, and that's just the
eight years I've been back in Dangriga, and doesn't count hundreds of other
useful and timely gifts and exercises of assistance, on one balance plate
and the number of children one has abused, zero, on the other balance
plate.  Of course, being as how it's god, one wouldn't want to go around
all cock-sure, but so far the dude, for all my vitriolic rhetoric, has,
since age twenty or so, treated me pretty well, maybe he'll read the scale
in a fair and just manner.  As for the social welfare people in Belize
City, I'll just have to hope that they are in some way in tune with common
sense and that in the future Samantha and I can walk about and do our
shopping without danger.  But danger there is.  Mania, hyperbole,
fanaticism, and those are just headings on the outline.  I think I've
mentioned the Little Rascals daycare center in this book; some ninety
people indicted because the owner of the facility slapped a kid's face.
The difficulty, from a personal level, is this: at heart, I agree with the
watchdogs.  Am one myself.  Remember Jose Schmosey? I caught him in the act
and drove him off by screaming at the top of my lungs -- thanks Mom -- for
ten full minutes.  I still see him after little Karen, so I'm going to
report him to the spies who are so interested in Samantha and me.  Yes,
it's a game, and yes it has strict rules stated many times on these pages
and always worth repeating.  A willing child and a long-term relationship
with many positive, non-sexual, aspects.  There's really no choice here.
If, for example, you used the German super-polygraph, also mentioned
repeatedly, to categorize `sex offenders' society couldn't stand the loss
of manpower, even if they could be eliminated at zero cost.  We number in
the very high tens of millions in the U.S., alone.  It is the very kids who
grow up with low self esteem who find refuge in books and libraries, in the
gentle hands of a tender mentor, and who, at a far higher than
statistically expected rate, become the questioning, inventing, totally
essential core of a society worth living in.  If you don't like it there's
not a thing on earth you can do about it, so use due diligence in coming to
any conclusions.  For the umpteenth time, it the taboo, not the act that
usually does the damage.  And be grown-up here; yes, rapists should be
landed on with both feet and a poker.  Jose Schmosey is a rapist; will use
Karen as he gets the chance, and abandon her for another; and in the
meantime is doing nothing for her, or Marie, her mother, beyond gifts of
candy.  His ass is grass and I'm a lawnmower.

	  My life is a freaking novel.  Perhaps the most significant
insight to be gained by a book-aholic youth is learning how writers lived
their lives.  A specific example is my orientation toward the tropics which
simply overwhelm literature.  As much as I detest Bearded Ernest, he led a
writer's life and so did most of my favorites.  There are exceptions, of
course.  John Buchan, author of "The 39 Step" and other fine novels, lived
an exemplary personal life, and, in fact, ended up as the Governor General
of Canada and thus played an essential role in the war.  Nevil Shute, also
a wonderful storyteller, spent his life as a productive and respected
aeronautical engineer.  W. Clark Russell, a favorite and author of
fifty-seven maritime novels, spent his life as a ship's officer and retired
to write his books and make real inroads in the treatment of England's and
the world's sailors.  My hat's off to all of them, and I have not the
slightest doubt that all of them, and the dozens of literary greats like
them, had wonderful mothers and/or quality and even happy childhoods.
`Nuff said.  The bottom line is you have to live it before you write it.
No banging, no thrashing, no prose.  The killer is that it still takes vast
reading in your early years and decades of incessant practice (with a bit
of a silver lining in that to a degree you can live and practice at the
same time).  Another silver lining is that you don't have to be all that
good.  Writing is like photography; ten percent talent and ninety percent
hustle.  But if you want to capitalize Writing in the middle of a sentence,
sorry, no shortcuts.

	  Larry and I were out of sentences.  His story of a gentle
scratching at his door, an almost inaudible, psst, psst, and Becky's mewing
came in phrases and hacked up narrative.  Since he had used his hand to
pull down his foreskin, I figured it was my turn, and used mine to bring us
close.  Ordinarily, that probably would have silenced him, but Becky had
come crawling through his door at one o'clock that very morning and the
story was fresh in his mind.

	  We stood in the half-darkness under a seventy foot pine, leaning
against each other, foreheads touching, Greek to the bone, but hardly able
to speak.

	  She'd entered rubbing against him like a cat, then led the way up
on the bed.  She'd allowed no more light than a candle; rural life has
power outages so rural bedrooms usually have alternative lighting.  Once on
the bed, she unbuttoned her pajama top.  "Next time I won't wear this," she
whispered as she guided Larry, who was straddled above her with his head
against the wall, to her heaving stomach, up along her panting, sweaty
chest, and inside the bra covering her large left breast.
	  "It's okay," Larry managed to whisper.  He felt the ridges of
fabric seams along the sensitive top of his glans was much more than okay,
but was beyond going into great detail.
	  "Is it good if I just hold you?" Becky asked.  "I can rub if you
want me to."
	  Larry was composing an answer when his sister's left hand found
him down low.  "Uh," he gasped, amazed at his coherence.  Becky froze at
the feral note in her brother's voice and Larry set up a secretive motion
against her clenched fingers.

	  We didn't say: "Awesome dude!" in this days, but I think "Outta
sight!" had just come in.  Of course, there was always "Jumpin'!," and that
may well have served as an exclamative.
	  "Like you're doing it now?" I whispered.
	  "Yeah," he responded, his hips universal as he thrust against my
solid palm.
	  "How long?" the nascent writer in me asked.
	  "Ten minutes.  Then she wanted to be on top and take over more,
so we pulled down the sheets and I closed my eyes and she tackled me the
way she wanted."
	  Remember that part about living being elemental to writing?  Not
always talking, and not always interviewing and asking questions.
Sometimes just being still and living.  It really was up there close to
Audrey in the classic-thrills department.  The Greek way.  No adventuring
for its own sake, but intense verbal and breath communication, and we were
getting awfully near kissing, while doing what we were doing, not for a
frenzied few minutes, but on into the strangely warm evening.
	  There, rookies, is your final foreshadowing for this novel.
Strangely warm.  Remember, this has been written as a series of short
stories and novellas; every word counts, no red herrings, no unanswered
drifts afar for the sake of tone and texture.  If I say strangely warm, you
mind should be buzzing, instantly.  The ultimate thrill in reading is to
fox the writer; not just in whodunits, but in a wider and greater sense.
If there isn't a thrill in predicting "Of Human Bondage" chapter by chapter
and scene by scene, then there are no thrills.  Well, ahem, aside from
writing better novels, that is.  Late summer.  Strangely warm at past nine
p.m.  The scroller on the right side of your screen getting ever so close
to the bottom.  No more than cursory mention of The Dump.  The chapter
clearly marked as Conclusion.  You may have missed on George's cheerleader
and Sven's back, but you've got to get this one.  You who've read a number
of my stories will have an advantage in knowing I invariably bring the
reader as tenderly and gently back to his or her world as it is possible to
do.  Add all the clues and see if you can come up with my plot device for
ending this outing.  Since the tent is silk, it warrants careful folding.

	  "How did you keep from reaching the end?" I whispered.
	  "You," Larry whispered cryptically.

	  When you're fourteen things can hit pretty hard, but I think I'd
have been as nonplussed if I'd reached sixteen and my majority.  "Me?"
	  "'Tom makes it last.'"  That's what she whispered.

	  Wrong.  I've never in my life thought of sex as it.  I told Larry
this in the kindest imaginable language and he responded by pointing out
that I knew what he meant.

	  "Anyway," he continued, "we lasted almost an hour, even going
down on the floor with my arms folded on the side of the bed.  She kept
easing off at just the right time, but the way she was whispering I knew
she wouldn't tease me.  She wanted to see what it was like.  To go into the
bathroom and turn on the light so she could see what had happened.  She was
just making the most of her first time."

	  "Didn't she get satisfied?" I asked, using a word perilously
close to `it' but unable to think of more poetic phrasing at the moment.
	  "She said she knew how to do that herself so we'd have to wait
quite awhile to try it, plus she thought it was more something she'd want
to do with a boyfriend than her brother."
	  Greek, forever.  Listening to Larry was more exotic and erotic
than anything he could have done with mouth, hands, or drugs.  Pity the
sexually reticent, they know not of what they speak not.
	  "Where did it end?" I asked.
	  "Back on the bed, in the first position we took with each other."

	  For long moments my young friend surged gently against me, his
hands fondling my still childish flanks.
	  "Tell me," I whispered.
	  "I will," he assured me.
	  "Did you tell Becky?" I asked.
	  "Yes," he whispered.
	  "How long ahead?" I quizzed.
	  "I made mistakes twice," Larry replied in a rapidly deteriorating
voice, "but the last time it started about a minute after I said it would."
	  "How did she feel about it?" was my next question.
	  "She was really patient.  She had never done anything, but she'd
heard a lot, so she was just more eager and more excited the longer I was
against her."
	  "Could she feel it happening, or did you have to tell her?"
	  "She was holding me really tightly against her nipple, so she
felt it the same time I did."
	  "What did she say?" I whispered in a voice as sick as Larry's.
	  "Oh, babe, oh babe.  After a couple of minutes, it was "more
babe, more babe."

	  "Did she stay after it was over?" I asked.
	  "For a few minutes.  She kissed me and we made another date.  She
only left because she wanted to turn on a light.  Next time she wants to
stay for an hour so we can talk."
	  Why did that sound like the best part?  Sentimental young fool.
But it was cool.
	  "I don't think there's any mistake this time," Larry grunted, his
forehead hot and hard against mine.
	  I was so thrilled by him I began to cum immediately, and when it
happened, half a minute later, he was slick, hot and wet from me.


	  Bill Muir was feeling a trace of discomfiture.  He and Ernest
were back in their shorts, back at work, but the boy, lo and behold, was
talking about writing, already.  Apparently he thought he'd lived a great
deal and might as well begin learning the tricks of setting down (of which
there are zero in number).  The joke was, in Bill's mind, if anyone could
do it at his age, Ernest was the boy.  Buy him a nice old office machine
and five pounds of paper.  It was a thought.
	  "Some day I'll write it as a story," Ernest elaborated, a trace
of a smile on his lips.  "Maybe I could title it: `How Not to Find a
Sleeping Parrot'."

	  Larry and I didn't last two minutes, but he was still oozing
white into my hand after a full minute had passed.  He was wet all over
from me, and I had one tendril of semen from my chin to my flat belly, and
half a dozen more all over my chest.  I couldn't help wondering what Becky
had done with her young teen bra.  Hmm.  Audrey would know.  And that was
my final carnal though of the evening.  We licked each other clean,
wondering if Becky had licked her cup, wiped up the last with our
underpants and said we'd see each other in the morning.  The squirrels,
long asleep, stirred not as we retrieved our rifles and headed home.

	  Friday morning.  Seven o'clock.  Twenty-seven hours.  But...
	  Rain!
	  Tropic waves are rare in Maine, but hardly unknown.  This one
lasted three days and some hours.  Two to three inches a day.  Saturday
morning, an inch between nine and eleven a.m.


	  And so it ended, and so we come to our final heartbeats.  World's
toughest question: Was it worth thousands of years of slavery to deliver
unto the world a Lucky Dube?  He and Jackie Chan are here for the bow along
with Celine, Samantha, and, of course, Audrey.  (Mom's hanging around
somewhere.)  In conclusion:

	  A second date was never made.  It had been great, it had been
ethereal, it would occupy and inspire, occasionally outrage and disgust,
for a hundred years to come.  And who's to say the sun shone less brightly,
the lobsters got smaller or scarcer, the winters stayed longer, the summer
passed faster?  No one.  Life went on and for every iota of lost excitement
there was precisely the same enhancement of dignity.  That's how it was,
Stonington, Maine, Summer, 1960.  I was fourteen.

					THE END

Posted by Thomas@btl.net

xxx