by Len Levinson
“I don’t think I should,” he said, a stutter in his voice.
“Why not?”
“Well,” he confessed, “I don’t feel at ease with you because you don’t really like me and you’re only doing it for the money.”
“I see,” she said softly.
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “If that’s the way you feel— that’s the way you feel. But we can still be friends, can’t we?”
“Sure.”
“We can still talk with each other like normal human beings, can’t we?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you’re wrong, you know. I do like you.”
He shook his head angrily. “You’re just saying that.”
“No I’m not. Why do you think I don’t like you?”
“Because you don’t know me.”
“I know you,” she said. “You’re a very nice young man. And you have helped to liberate Paris. You’re rather handsome too.”
“You don’t mean that,” he told her.
“Yes I do mean that,” she insisted. “I really do like you, and moreover I know that you like me too.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“May I come closer?”
“If you want to,” he said weakly.
She arose, walked toward him, and got on her knees on the floor beside him. Then, in a sudden movement, she reached underneath his robe and grabbed his big stiff dick.
“This is how I know you like me!” she said triumphantly.
She squeezed his dick, and shivers ran up and down his spine.
“Please don’t,” he whimpered.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked, opening his robe so she could see it.
He closed his eyes. “No.”
“Does this hurt?” she asked, reaching forward and licking the head of his dick.
The sensation made him curl his toes. “No,” he squeaked.
“How about this?”
She opened her mouth and placed the head of his dick inside, giving it a healthy suck. Then she licked it again and removed her mouth.
“You didn’t like that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
She sighed, stood up, and smoothed the front of her skirt. “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t like. I guess I’ll just leave and I suppose I’ll have to tell your friend that you don’t like women.”
Cranepool sat upright in the chair. “NO!”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s the truth isn’t it.”
“No, it’s not the truth!”
“I think it is.”
She spun around and walked toward the door. Cranepool leapt out of his chair and ran after her, grabbing her shoulders from behind.
“Wait a minute!” he said.
“Please let me go,” she said coldly.
“Um ... but I’ve changed my mind!” he blurted. “I want you to stay!”
She pouted. “No you don’t.”
“Yes I do!”
“You didn’t like it when I put my tongue on your thing.”
“Yes I did!”
She turned around and smiled. “Then why didn’t you let me keep doing it?”
“Because you don’t care about me at all,” he said. “You’re just doing it for the cigarettes.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders, raised herself on her tiptoes, and kissed his lips. “But I’m a poor girl, sweetheart. I need cigarettes to exchange for food. I can’t help that.”
He tried to get away from her, but he didn’t try too hard because her body felt warm and soft against him. “That’s all right—you can have the cigarettes. I don’t want anybody to go to bed with me unless they love me.”
“But I do love you,” she murmured, brushing her lips against his. “Can’t you see that?” She kissed his cheek and stuck her tongue in his ear. “What do I have to do to prove it to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I sucked your little dicky a few moments ago over there. Didn’t that mean anything to you?”
He nodded.
“Then why don’t you lie down on the bed and relax; because if you don’t, I’m going to walk down the hall and tell your sergeant that you refused to make love with me, and it’ll be the truth.”
He pinched his lips together and tried to think of a decent solution to the problem. “Okay,” he said, “but I don’t want you to do anything you really don’t want to do, do you understand?”
“I understand perfectly,” she cooed, running her hands down his body. “Now lie down on the bed over there and stop being such a pain in the neck.”
Feeling gawky and ill at ease, Cranepool shuffled to the bed, sat on it, and stretched out. His dick rose straight up in the air under his robe, and he folded his hands on top of it so it wouldn’t show.
He chewed his lips as he watched her disrobe at the foot of the bed. First she took off her green blouse, and she didn’t have a bra underneath it. Her breasts bobbed up and down as she moved, and he felt guilty about wanting to chew on them. He remembered his girlfriend Betsy from Ottumwa, Iowa, who’d send him a Dear John letter back in June; she’d had breasts like that. She had been the first girl he’d ever screwed and it had been for love, unlike the squalid business proposition he now thought he was in.
She dropped her skirt, and she didn’t have anything on underneath it either.
“Don’t you wear underwear?” Cranepool asked, horrified.
“It’s too warm,” she replied, getting onto the bed.
She walked on her knees across the bed toward him and stopped beside him, placing her hands on her waist. “Look at you—you’re scared to death!” she said.
“Who me?” he asked.
“I don’t think you can screw me. I think I’m going to have to screw you.”
He wagged his finger in the air. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Oh shut up,” she said, grabbing his joint. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing that. You’re acting like a child.”
She flung his robe open and looked at his tall slender body. “Not bad at all,” she said, running the palm of her hand along his thigh.
He dug his fingernails into the sheets. “You think I’m built okay?”
“You’re built fine, but I’m not too sure about your mind.”
Abruptly, she bent over and kissed his cock. She ran her tongue around the head and then sucked it into her mouth. Cranepool exhaled, his eyes wide as saucers. Slowly she lowered her head on his cock until it was deep in her throat. Cranepool’s spine turned to jelly. He’d been blown before and every time it happened he thought it was the most exquisitely wonderful sensation in the world.
He thought it weird to be in bed with her, a beautiful young woman and total stranger with whom he could do anything he liked. Reaching underneath her, he prodded his forefinger into her breast, which was soft as marshmallow. He ran his fingers over her nipple, and it was hard as a pebble. Her head worked up and down slowly on his cock, and he felt as though he was falling into a dream.
She raised her head and looked at him. “You like that?”
“It was very nice,” he said with a smile.
“Are you still afraid of me?” she asked, moving her head to one side and smiling mischievously.
“I’ve never been afraid of you.”
“Liar.”
She straddled him, and he looked between her legs. She had no hair there, and he could see that she’s shaved it away. This was the first time he’d ever seen a shaved pussy, and he stared at it with more than routine interest. It looked like a mouth with a bit of its tongue sticking out.
She took his dick in hand, pointed it in the air, and slowly lowered herself to it. She moved his dick back and forth against her slit so that it would make her juicy. Cranepool’s brain was steaming with sexual madness due to the intense pleasure she wa
s providing him, and he was losing his reason. Grabbing her tightly by the waist, he pulled her down around his dick and it pierced her all the way to the hilt.
“Well,” she said with a smile, bending over and kissing his lips, “I see that you’ve finally woken up.”
Cranepool worked his hips up and down. “Come on,” he whispered.
Slowly she raised herself. “Like this?”
“Uh-huh.”
And slowly she lowered herself again. “This too?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
She moved up and down rhythmically, and he met her stroke for stroke. She wagged her ass from side to side and made little circles with it, and Cranepool reached up, cupping her breasts in his hands and squeezing them.
“Harder,” she said, gritting her teeth and looking down at him.
He squeezed her breasts harder, and she closed her eyes, lost in joy. They humped each other like that until Cranepool felt himself going insane. He wanted to move more and do strange things. Arching his back, he pushed her to the side and she lost her balance, dropping to the bedspread. Cranepool twisted loose and was on her like a great raging beast. He spread her legs and took his dick in hand and plunged it between her legs.
“Oh my God!’ she screamed.
He grabbed her ass and began pumping. She wrapped her legs around his waist and wiggled like a hootchy-kootchy girl.
He fastened his lips on hers and jammed his tongue into her mouth. She circled it with her own tongue and then sucked it hard. Cranepool thought his head would burst. He felt as though his spine already had become unraveled. But still he kept fucking her. Even if a gun had been held to his head, he could not have stopped.
And then he felt himself coming. He was only twenty-two years old and did not yet know how to control himself. The two steam engines ran up his legs, crashed inside his scrotum, and exploded out his dick.
“Yaaahhhhh!” he screamed, arching his back.
The hot milk spurted out of him. When she felt it enter her she became so excited that she, a whore, came in spite of herself. She dug her fingernails deep into his shoulders and drew little pools of blood, but it felt glorious to him. His body was itchy and scratchy all over and someone was pulling a silken strand out of his dick. He screamed like a wild coyote and went into weird sexual convulsions, while Monique held on for dear life, coming again and again and thinking that she must never let this young sex maniac get away from her.
They continued fucking until he collapsed exhausted on her, and they lay panting in each other’s arms—while on the other side of town, General de Gaulle stood in front of the Arc de Triomphe and laid a wreath of red gladiola before the tomb of France’s unknown soldier.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The next morning Mahoney and Cranepool checked out of the hotel. Wearing their washed and starched uniforms, they went out in search of the Hammerhead Division.
The streets of Paris were still in a state of pandemonium as people continued to celebrate their liberation from the hated Boche. Mahoney and Cranepool saw six women with their heads shaved being marched along the Boulevard Saint Germain by an angry hooting crowd. On the next corner they ran into a group of drunken American soldiers wearing the insignia of the Hammerhead Division on their shoulders. The soldiers were sprawled all around a table at a sidewalk cafe, their uniforms disheveled and their eyes bloodshot.
“Hey,” Mahoney said to them, “do any of you know where the 15th Regiment is?”
They shook their heads.
“I don’t even know where I am,” one of them muttered drunkenly.
“What a fucking mess,” Mahoney told Cranepool as they walked away.
Farther down the street they saw a group of Moroccan spahis wearing their bright red garrison caps. At the corner of the Boulevards Saint Germain and Saint Michel, they came to a barricade of paving stones six feet thick, the scene of intense fighting two days ago.
On the next block they found two Hammerhead Division M.P.s strolling along, twirling their billy clubs and looking as though they were constipated. Mahoney and Cranepool walked up to them, and the M.P.s scrutinized them suspiciously.
“Hi,” Mahoney said, “do you know where the 15th Regiment is?”
One M.P. looked at the other. “Isn’t the 15th over on the Boulevard day lah Republic?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks boys,” Mahoney said with a tip of his helmet. “Which direction is that?”
One of the M.P.s pointed. “Thataway.”
Mahoney and Cranepool headed in that direction. A few blocks later they came to a huge commotion. Swarms of French people jeered and booed at a group of German prisoners being marched through the city. The French people threw stones and waved their fists in the air, shouting insults at the Germans.
Mahoney and Cranepool got close so they could look. The Germans passed by looking exhausted and terrified, their hands behind their heads. Among them were officers who tried to maintain their soldierly bearing while people were spitting in their faces. Then suddenly a woman broke from the crowd and ran at an SS colonel. He turned to look at her, and her fist shot forward. The colonel screamed and cupped his right eye, dropping to his knees on the cobblestones. A trickle of blood flowed down his cheek and the woman turned around, waving a wicked-looking hatpin in the air.
“I got him!” she yelled.
The crowd cheered, and Mahoney walked away, followed by Cranepool. Both of them had been sickened by what they saw, but they figured that if the colonel was in the SS he probably deserved what had happened to him.
They turned the corner and came upon some soldiers from the Regiment of Chad wearing their jaunty black berets. Children ran through the streets like happy little animals, and everybody was smiling. At the next intersection a party was taking place around a French tank that had VERDUN stenciled in white letters on its turret.
The festive atmosphere filled Mahoney’s heart with joy. He was well rested, had enjoyed a hearty breakfast, and had been laid, re-laid, and parlayed by Veronique. The nastiness and cruelty that the war brought out of him was in abatement, and he was assailed by feelings of love and brotherhood. He even put his arm around Cranepool’s shoulders, much to Cranepool’s astonishment, as they made their way across Paris. When Mahoney saw girls in flimsy summer dresses he could appreciate them aesthetically, and even wish them a polite good morning, for all his lust was gone for the time being.
They turned a corner and saw before them a big old Catholic church. Mahoney stopped suddenly and stared at it, his soul stirring. He had been raised a Catholic, and although he’d managed to break, at one time or another, nearly every precept of that religion, he still considered himself a Catholic and deep down he still believed in God.
“Hey Cranepool,” Mahoney said. “I think I’m gonna go into that church.”
“What for, Sarge?”
“To pray, you asshole.”
“Aw Sarge, how can you believe in all that Catholic stuff?”
Mahoney didn’t know how to explain it, so he said, “Shaddup!”
They crossed the street and approached the church. Cranepool sat on the steps and took out a cigarette while Mahoney climbed the steps and went inside. He passed through the vestibule and entered the church proper. The church had looked big from the street, but inside it was enormous. The altar seemed miles away and people were sprinkled throughout the vast area of pews. Mahoney dipped his fingers into the white marble bowl and crossed himself with holy water then walked down an aisle toward the altar. On both sides of the pews were statues of the saints with candles burning in front of them and people praying. Mahoney looked at all the hunched shoulders and clasped hands, moved by the intensity of the devotion around him. He thought of the contrast between him and the people there, for he was a sinner with only a little bit of faith while the people there really believed.
Sunlight shone against the stained-glass windows, but the church was dark and gloomy. Mahoney came to a pew near the alt
ar, genuflected, sidestepped in, and dropped to his knees on the pad. He crossed himself again, clasped his hands together, and closed his eyes.
“Oh Lord,” he whispered, “I’m so bad.” He was overcome by guilt and remorse, thinking of how cruel he was to Cranepool, his closest friend—who’d actually saved his life a few times. He thought there must be something wrong with him for being so mean, but there was a war on and it was no time to be lovey-dovey with people. You had to push them hard and keep them on their toes, and also he realized that fatigue and the constant tension of war had worn his nerves thin and made him more cranky than he would have been under normal circumstances.
“I know you forgive me, Lord,” he whispered. The one thing he remembered from all his Sunday school classes was that God was compassionate and He had the infinite capacity to forgive. “I’m not that bad, am I?” He thought about Veronique and couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about that. After all, he hadn’t raped her, and when it was over she’d kissed him and told him she’d had a good time. That wasn’t so sinful, was it?
He thought that he should stop cursing so much and taking the Lord’s name in vain all the time, but the war was making him crazy and he couldn’t keep himself under control. He’d done the same thing back in New York before he’d joined the army, but the Depression had been on then and he had to wait in line four hours to get a goddamn orange. There was always something. Maybe I’m just a dyed-in-the-wool scumbag and nothing can be done for me.
Kneeling in the pew, feeling unworthy and loathsome, he thought of all the terrible things he’d done recently. He thought of the way he always insulted Cranepool, of the time he’d whacked poor Corporal Rossi in the mouth just because he’d fallen asleep, and of the nasty racial remark he’d made about Pfc Leroy Washington when he said that all Negroes wanted were white girls. What a rotten bastard I am, he thought. I don’t have anything good to say about anybody.
He remembered the Bible that had saved his life. He’d taken it from a dead lieutenant and then, in the Battle of the Hedgerows, he’d been shot in the gut, but the Bible had been under his shirt and it saved his life. He swore afterwards that he’d never go anywhere without that Bible again, and now he didn’t even know where it was.
