by Stan Hayes
Now that the heat of the moment that had spawned the idea had cooled for a day or two, she allowed herself a wry smile at her own expense. How, she thought, do ideas like this worm their way into my head? Guess Daddy’s been right all of those times when he’d tell me, wagging his head gently from side to side, “Child, you take way too much after your mother.” God knows she loved dicks, having died for one, after all. Well, we all die for some damn thing or other; at least on this one we have solid precedent from the Greeks. Speak to me of Priapus, you big veiny fucker; your new likeness’s gettin’ harder by the minute.
She turned her attention, with the enthusiasm of the condemned, to her current work in progress. Conceiving the penis project made getting back into intersecting ellipses, looking more and more to her like tangled Amazonian bangle bracelets, more of a challenge than she’d imagined. Then her mother sprang unbidden, as she did from time to time, from her subconscious, speaking to her breathlessly of the urge to break free of male dominance that she’d passed, dementia and all, along to her; congratulating Serena on her own applications of that obsession, that could, like this graven dick, sometimes be even crazier than her own. Turning her scraper against the moist clay, she thought of the decision, somewhere shy of turning fourteen, she’d made to wrest the upper hand from certain fifteen and sixteen year-old boys who’d managed to get her alone after Sunday night church, during dance intermissions and on the dates on which her parents, with less misgivings than they should’ve had, had let her go. The bulging crotches that rubbed against her would soon, she was convinced, present themselves as a real threat to her freedom. She called the tactic “jack-off blackmail.”
It was simple, in the light of Miz Rose’s frequent sex briefings, that were always closed with the proclamation that “getting pregnant by anyone within a hundred miles of Bisque will be a quick end to your ambitions.” She’d just take their initiative away by eliminating the problem at its source. Simple, amazingly so early on, when just circling a boy’s erection with her hand was likely to trigger an ejaculation. Once they’d squirted, they were as docile, and grateful, as a house dog fresh off a tummy-scratching. And when the next incident of dry-humping broke out, she’d just say something like “Come on, let’s go take care of this.” If pressed her to go farther, she’d shut the offender down with a terse “Do you want to come, or not? Because this is all I’m doing. And if you tell anybody, I’ll never do it again.” And for a long time she shared her secret with no one, except her handful of beneficiaries. All she needed to keep her knickers intact, it seemed, was Jergens lotion and a handkerchief or two in her pocketbook.
Except for one thing. She hadn’t counted on what she’d be feeling as she propelled her beaus over the brink. The more expert she became, the hotter she got. Putting the bit in the mouths of these would-be stallions was itself a powerful aphrodisiac, and the pure sensation of herding a pulsing dick over the peak and down through the valley was getting her wetter with each episode. At first, she just fingered herself with her free hand as she went about the jack-off du jour. Later, alone in her bedroom, she’d recall favorite moments and come herself. Humanity being what it is, however, she came to want more. Reciprocity seemed only fair; she knew, however, that touching her pussy would drive her chosen co-masturbator even crazier than she had before. She’d have to pick just one boy to trust; having someone say that you’d jacked them off was one thing, but pussy-touching was a much more powerful secret. She didn’t ponder her options long before deciding on Ted Foster. Sweet, tender Teddy, whom she was certain she could control. He was always so appreciative, and had never pressed her for more. And so it was that he became the custodian of her crotch, fingers caressing, first at her direction but soon with added touches of his own, the prominent clitoris that neither of them would recognize as remarkable, as it was the only one either of them had ever seen.
They’d gone steady for just a few weeks when her father called her and her brothers downstairs early that hot August morning to tell her that her mother was dead. For a long time after that, her insides were frozen. She couldn’t even think about a penis, let alone look at one. Poor Ted. As nice as he was about everything, not just about the sudden disappearance of her willingness to embrace life below the waist, he became afterwards, for no good reason, the target of her ill-concealed malice. He took it, and came back for more, with understanding and insight that, as she looked back, would have been phenomenal for anyone, let alone a boy his age. She still had, somewhere she was sure, the poems he’d written her during that arctic winter of her crippled adolescence. Yet, at the end of high school, he was left, along with the rest of Bisque, adrift in the wake of her departure for Columbia University and ex-Bisque sex, as her mother had wished. And when she felt her body reawakening, her memory of his loving kindness was quickly flushed away by the immediacy of Larry and, soon after, the fact of Jack.
And now Mose, who’d punctured Bisque’s determined dreariness like a Marlin on the prowl. Combining moments of Ted-like tenderness with quick humor and a dick worthy of its imminent homage in bronze, he complicated the execution of her master plan to show everyone, dead or alive, that hers was a soul to be reckoned with. Where their respective hungers might take them she could only guess, but she’d told him what she intended to do, and that wouldn’t change. She thought, as she often did, of the quotation from Oscar Wilde, rendered in gilt on the door of Hap’s gallery: “It is through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” The truth of that had become the cornerstone of her existence, and the devil, among others, take the hindmost.
Closing the door to the roof behind her with a bang, Serena moved quickly to the cabinet next to her workstand. She’d had an idea, but the hotel had been full all week, and that plus a spur-of-the-moment trip to Augusta had kept her from spending any time at all on the roof, so the cast of Moses’ penis remained in its mold. She set the smallish cardboard box that she’d brought with her on the stand and pulled the bowl of rice from the cabinet, setting it beside the box. Removing the red cucumber-like mass from its rice bed, she stood it on its flat end, pointing to the sky, and contemplated her work thus far. Reminds me, she thought, of that song Miz Rose would sing now and then, but mostly hummed, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Only this one’s red. She picked it up, hefted it for a brief moment, then squeezed it between vise of her knees and began peeling the rubber skin away.
A little over an hour later, she replaced the cast on the workstand, now rotated ninety degrees so that its length was parallel to the stand’s surface. One end of a steel dowel was screwed into a hole that she’d carefully drilled in the middle of its belly; the other end was attached to a six-inch-square metal plate, anchoring the plaster penis for visual reference, its protecting coat of shellac drying in the night air. Serena retrieved the box from the stand, sat back in the tall director’s chair with her heels hooked over the footrest, and pulled open one of the end flaps. Extracting the contents, she peeled apart the paper envelope that protected the chrome-plated surfaces of a brand-new hood ornament for a 1947 Buick Roadmaster.
Since she’d taken a good look at the one on Moses’ Estate Wagon when they were in Augusta, she’d thought about making a certain alteration to it. Turning it over and over, she noted the length that the torpedo-like center element extended in front of and behind the circular piece that surrounded it. Its underside revealed the set screw that clamped the three pieces- the torpedo, the circle and the vertical stanchion that connected them- together. The two threaded holes on either side received the larger screws that fastened the assembly to the hood. Good, she thought, all I have to make is the new “Torpeter.”
She thought about the shape of the cast as she’d reinterpret it. First of all, it’d have to be completely straight; arrow-like, the same as the torpedo it replaces, but with a different balance. The tail’s extreme taper could, no must- be replaced
by a set of smoothly tapered testicles, faired into the Torpeter’s cylindrical mass. They would continue the streamlining that she’d already imagined for the circumcised head, slit removed, piercing the airstream with a smooth, streamlined surface, sweeping back and down, retaining the elegant sweep of the glans. A second look, and only a second look, would reveal the new prickness of Moses’ hood. That was crux of the joke; how long he’d drive around town preceded by his prick before anyone noticed. She took a pair of pliers in each hand; be interesting, she thought as she bent wire for the Torpeter’s armature, to see what he does then.
Hands on either side of the Estate Wagon’s big steering wheel, she pushed herself back in the driver’s seat, arms locked at their full length, and screamed in triumph as she drove up US 1 to Augusta. It had been so easy; all she’d had to do was to ask Moses to swap cars with her for the day, saying that she needed the wagon’s extra cargo capacity to take a new sculpture to the foundry. She was foundry-bound, true enough, but the cargo bay, devoid of cargo, served today solely as an echo chamber for her scream. Awaiting her at the foundry was the finished Torpeter.
In point of fact, the Pro-Tour Services foundry wasn’t up to casting pieces anywhere near the size that the wagon, with its seats folded flat, could carry. Their principal business was the design and production of custom-made sets of golf irons, and club heads were pretty much all they cast. Up to now, Serena had given PTS, as they referred to themselves, her business because they were nearby, and her work up to now hadn’t been that large. The big bonus for her where the Torpeter was concerned was that they did their plating in-house.
As she walked in she saw the top of Mark Stubbs’ blond head at the back of the building. Stubbs, one of the two partners in PTS, was bent over one of the furnaces. She whistled; looking up, he greeted her with a wave, looking over her shoulder through the window at the Buick. “Hey, Miz Mason! Be right up. What’d you do, trade cars?”
“Hi, Mark. Nope, just tryin’ it out.” She stepped into the small office, impatience devouring her, and sat down. Stubbs followed her through the door in a couple of minutes, rubbing a silver cylinder with a polishing cloth. Cradling it in the cloth, he presented her with the finished product of her inspiration. She took it from his hand, rotating its surface in the autumn sunlight streaming through the office window, her face lit in its satiny reflected glow. She turned her face to him. “It’s beautiful, Mark. More so than I’d dared to hope. Thanks for rushing it.”
“It’s my pleasure, Miz Mason. What kinda world would it be if fellow sculptors didn’t help each other out?” And what kinda world is it, he wondered, that has a classy woman like this craftin’ a chrome-plated dick, and me shovin’ pre-sold work back in the schedule to put the shine on it for her?
“I promise you more warning on the next piece,” she said, tearing a check from her checkbook and handing it to him.
No warning necessary, he thought, if a piece of you would be involved. “We’ll look forward to it,” he said. “Would you by any chance have time for lunch before you head back?”
She smiled at him, green eyes turned to half-strength. “Wish I could; give me a rain check?”
“Done,” he said, hoping his lust wasn’t showing. “Next time, for sure. Just say when.”
She sped to the Rutherfords’ house, her eyes switching constantly between the road and the rear-view mirror. Pulling into the garage, she pulled the Buick’s hood release and flipped the light switch on the kitchen door-facing. She plugged the trouble light that she’d brought with her, along with a small assortment of hand tools, into one of the receptacles over the workbench. Positioning the light to direct its beam onto the inside of the hood, she switched it off and unwrapped the new Roadmaster hood ornament.
In less than an hour, tapping, drilling and screwing complete, she packed her tools and went inside the house. Taking a Miller High Life from the refrigerator, she popped the cap, locked up and left. Switching on the car’s radio, she headed for the highway, left foot tapping to the wail of hillbilly fiddle, lips parted by an autoconspirator’s grin, savoring the curve of the Torpeter’s testicular bulge.
Chapter XII. A License to Steal
The icy chill of the kitchen sink’s porcelain snapped at Serena’s belly; her robe had fallen open as she leaned to look through Moses’ frosty kitchen window, down the slope of frozen grass to the edge of the pond, gray-green opacity reflecting a sullen morning sky. She backed away a little, still looking outside, waiting for the percolator’s final spasm. Moving to close the robe, her hand drifted to her still-wet crotch. Bringing her fingers up to her nose, she sniffed them, then put two in her mouth for a moment before wiping them on a dish towel. Our juices taste good mixed together, she thought. She took two crockery mugs down from the cabinet, filled them and walked back down the long hall to the master bedroom. “Hey, Bub!” she barked at the motionless lump under the covers. “Roll over and get yer heart started.”
“No more,” came a guttural whisper from the lump. “No more.”
“Hush. Sit up, drink this coffee and get me some breakfast. Then we can play some more.”
Moses rolled over, grinning as he went up on one elbow to take the coffee. “Deal. Bloody Marys, Smithfield ham omelet, runny-ass grits and a side of sodomy. Nice to know we’ve got all day.”
She eased into the bed beside him, inhaling deeply, savoring the coffee smell, leaning over to blow lightly into his ear. “Yeh-baw-ey… ah, shit! You’ve got me doing it now!”
He chuckled, putting his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close to him to get his fingertips inside her robe and tweak her nipple. “What’s so bad about that? Authentic Bisque patois; at least I never heard it anywhere else. It’s such a perfect thing to say when you’re pleased. I love it, particularly when you say it.”
“Enjoy it while you can, because I don’t share your fascination. Patois, patooey! Hifalutin yankee label for a plain old redneck expletive. Stick that in your patois.”
“Didn’t mean to get esoteric; I just have to take any available opportunity to show show off m’hard-won larnin’.”
“The dipso librarian. She did manage to cram quite a bit into that hard head of yours. Ever wonder about how she’s doing? Or do you know?”
“I have no idea, and no desire to get one. What a question.”
“Sorry- just a minor jealousy twitch. After all, she did have you for quite awhile. And you yourself said that you owed her a lot for gettin’ you started readin’ sump’m besides the newspaper.”
“You’re right, I did say that. I’m a lot different from what I woulda been if I hadn’t haunted that library. For one reason or another, the first thing she handed me was Requiem for a Nun. I’d felt a lot like Popeye, without knowin’ who the hell he was, for a long time; still did when I got here, but now I’m getting to understand Flem Snopes. But I also stumbled across Epicurus.”
“Epicurus.”
“Um-hm. One of the few people endorsed by my old man’s all-time favorite, Nietzsche: ‘wisdom hasn’t come a step farther since Epicurus, but has often gone many thousands of steps backwards.’ Epicurus of Samos, three hundred-sump’m BC. The old Greek crowd-pleaser; not that popular a guy since then, what with most people’s rejection of pleasure as a good thing. Good morally, I mean. And not in society’s list of admirable human traits- humility, charity, compassion, wisdom, honor, justice- they’re all just fine, but pleasure? Of the first-string philosophers, Epicurus, as far as I know, was the only one for whom living an upright life meant pursuing pleasure.”
“I can see why he’d appeal to you. What’s the difference between that and Hedonism?”
“I guess they’re in the same ballpark, but there’s a major difference.”
“What?”
“Ataraxia. The experience of optimal, enduring pleasure. That’s what the Epicurean shoots for, not just maximum sensation.”
“And all this time I had you pegged,” she said, as a definite maximum-sensatio
nalist.”
“You do me grievous wrong, babydoll. Maybe neoepicurean, epifuckincurean… your choice. But don’t let’s beat it to death; I owe Sarah plenty, but that debt, without goin’ into it, has been paid. At least to my satisfaction. Living with an alcoholic’s its own special kinda purgatory.”
“There are people who’d say that we’re alcoholics,” she said.
“What most people around here call an alcoholic,” Moses said as he moved to get out of the bed, “is anybody who has two beers back-to-back before lunch. And you only have to do it once to be consigned to the ranks of Bisque Bizarre.”
“Bisque Bazaar? Where’s that?”
“It’s not a place, it’s a status. Bi-zarre. It’s a Websterism.”
“Oh,” she said warily. “What’s it mean?”
“He classifies Bisquites as Bisque Bourgeois, Bisque Ordinaire and Bisque Bizarre. Bizarros can come from either the Bourgeois or the Ordinaire classes, earning their entry by, naturally, behavior of the bizarre persuasion. You are, for example, as much as you’ll hate it, Bourgeois/Bizarre, while I, the quintessential plebeian, am Ordinaire/Bizarre. According to Webster.”
