Hot Valley

by James Lear

  “He sure did. And not just, like, mumbling on it, like some of those lads. I mean, he really seemed to—”

  “Enjoy it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s a fine cocksucker, my Billy.”

  “You mean he’s—”

  “Sucked me? Many times. And I’ve fucked his ass too. Which he loves.”

  “I bet he does, the little—”

  “Don’t worry, Captain,” I said. “You’re not stealing anything that’s mine. Billy’s a greedy boy. He’ll eat you and he’ll eat me and he’ll still want more.”

  “Never knew a man could be so…hungry for it.”

  “Perhaps you’ve never tasted it yourself.”

  “Well…”

  “It’s good,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I had finally figured out where this was leading, and I knew that within a minute the Captain would be down on his knees tasting his first (or he’d say it was his first) cock. Perhaps just his first of the day.

  “Oh yeah, man. You ain’t lived till you’ve sucked a big, hard, juicy dick.”

  “Mmm-hmm…”

  “Tasted it in your mouth, and felt it shooting off in your throat.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Say,” I said, as if the idea had only just occurred to me, “you can taste mine if you like. Nobody would know.”

  “Well…”

  “And besides, who’s going to believe me if I say that Captain Chester is a cocksucker?”

  “Good point.”

  I went and stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and took the cigar from his hand, stamping it out on the gravelly rooftop. He stood motionless, waiting for a clear lead from me—so I unbuttoned my pants and hauled out my cock, which was already half hard from our talk.

  “It’s so big,” he said, under his breath.

  “You can take it. Go ahead.”

  He squatted at my feet, unwilling, I suppose, to sully his trousers on the dusty theater roof—and his thigh muscles bulged impressively in the thin dark cloth. He took my prick in a firm grasp, feeling its girth and length, and moved his mouth toward it. I leaned back, my elbows on the wall, and pushed my hips forward.

  The first thing I felt was the Captain’s splendid brown moustache tickling my cockhead. I looked down and saw a drop of sticky juice smeared across his whiskers. He winked, opened wide, and went down.

  For all his acting, this was not the Captain’s first blow job—either that, or he was a natural. For the next 20 minutes, he fed on my cock, now fast, now slow, now sucking, now licking, now running his hands all over it. Finally he kept up a steady assault with his hands, and I hit the top. I had just time to warn him that I was about to come—and he opened his mouth and engulfed me. I shot a big load into the back of his throat.

  Afterward, he wiped his moustache with a clean white handkerchief, brushed down his trousers, and fished a couple of bills out of his wallet.

  “Now, that’s money well earned,” he said. “But don’t expect more where that came from. I’d be ruined within a month.”

  “Hey, Captain,” I said, stuffing my half-hard cock back into my pants, “you can have it for free anytime you want.”

  “You ain’t never going to get rich that way, Johnson. And there’s money in that dick. Lots of money.”

  And so I settle down to my new life in Richmond, a whore by day, servicing the gentlefolk of Richmond, or any who can afford it. By night I keep the riffraff out of the Alhambra, and accept drinks and dates from those who are interested in buying a little of my time.

  As I hit my straw mattress at six o’clock this morning, I realized that I had found just the right hiding place in which to wait out the war. And, as I drifted off to sleep, I found myself thinking of you, Jack, far away in Vermont, in a world that now seems impossibly remote, a fond, foolish dream. And so I picked up pen and paper and wrote you this letter that will never be posted. The old Aaron, as you see, is dead and gone. In his place is a creature of the war. How could I ever have thought that a man like me, for all my education and refined tastes, my politics, my belief in justice, my hopes for a better world, could make his way and lead a life that was both just and honorable? Goodbye, dream. Goodbye Jack, God bless you. And good night.

  Your friend,

  Aaron

  PART THREE:

  North and South

  VIII

  BENNETT YOUNG’S CAMP WAS CALLED HARMONY, AND FOR the first few weeks it seemed an apt name. It was positioned in a broad river valley south of Montreal, about five miles from the nearest town, with fresh water running nearby; well-drained soil that not only supported the huts and tents we slept in, but also sustained some small crops of fruit and vegetables, provided grass for the horses, and space for a few chickens and goats. It was sheltered from the wind, sunny in the mornings, and cool in the evenings. Nobody could approach it without being seen—there was a constant look-out at the head of the valley to warn of visitors—in short, it was the perfect location for a band of brothers to live out a modern version of Eden.

  Young’s merry band consisted of some 20 men, sometimes more, from all parts of the country. Some were Southerners, with broad, drawling accents and pleasure-loving temperaments. Others were from my part of the country, although none was from my class. They seemed, like Young, to be associated with the army, for they all sported some version of a uniform, and the camp was run along military lines. A bugle sounded at 6 A.M., although the tunes it played had more to do with the popular stage than with West Point. Before breakfast, there was drill on the “parade ground,” as Young rather fancifully called the area of flattened earth beyond the encampment. There was a quartermaster, a big jovial New Yorker called Hutchinson who somehow dished out excellent, plentiful meals three times a day. There was beef, pork, and chicken, fine fresh eggs, milk and butter, coffee, tea, and sugar; it never occurred to me to wonder how a bunch of “special” soldiers managed to acquire such good rations when their brothers in arms in both Union and Confederate camps were, the newspapers said, starving on bread and water. Meals were eaten around the campfire in the evenings, as we told stories and sang songs and passed the bottle until everyone was tired and fuzzy and ready for bed.

  We slept three or four to a hut, or two to a tent, depending on our billet. Young kept me to himself in the largest of the log cabins at first, letting it be known that I was his and his alone, and I was not displeased with the arrangement, as he was an untiring lover whose appetite for carnal indulgence matched mine. I quickly realized that not only did the men accept their leader’s predilections, they also shared them. Special friendships came and went, some endured. There was one pair, Caleb Wallace and George Scott, big hulking bears both of them, who were, Young informed me, like an “old married couple,” having joined their fortunes back in the ’50s and remained together, through thick and thin, ever since. I wondered just how “married” they really were, when I saw Caleb staring at me through the campfire flames one night, licking his lips—and more than once I saw younger members of the gang accompanying them to their hut at the close of the day. I dreamed of taking those two huge grizzlies up my ass—one day. For the time being, it was kept very busy with Young’s tongue, fingers, and dick.

  There was something to suit every taste at Harmony—and, seeing as my tastes seemed to run to just about every type, so long as it was masculine and not entirely hideous, I was delighted by the spectrum of shapes and shades offered there. Alamanda Bruce was a handsome brown-skinned man, tall and lithe with the kind of muscles that you could count individually through his skin, his right ear pierced with a gold hoop. Thomas Collins, on the other hand, was a stocky little Irishman with thick red hair and freckles on his hands. Jim Doty and Samuel Gregg were the two lanky blonds from Kentucky, friends from childhood, happiest when they were racing along the river, climbing trees or hunting for wild turkey like overgrown kids. Turner Teavis, or “Squire,” as he was known, was the oldest of the group, a gra
y-haired man in his 40s who wouldn’t have looked out of place behind a desk in a bank or a pulpit in a church.

  Whatever the difference in their backgrounds, all shared one thing, an almost fanatical devotion to Bennett Young. They called him “Boss,” they fetched and carried for him, and I am quite sure that they had all, in their various ways, satisfied his appetites. Young took their adoration as a matter of course, and spoke of them as a general might speak of his armies. He sent them off on missions, mostly, it seemed, concerned with the getting of food. He spent hours in conference with his trusted subordinates, planning “operations”—discussions to which I was not party. When he was not working, or fucking me, he would write in a large, leather-bound notebook which he kept closed with a padlock. “My memoirs,” he said, whenever I questioned him about them. “You’ll read them one day.”

  Details of “operations” were kept from me, and to tell the truth I was none too curious. I believed Young’s vague stories about “special assignments” from some mysterious power that was controlling the conflict, and I asked no questions. I was happy in my new life, fucking all night, sleeping for most of the afternoon, waking only for meals and exercise. Occasionally I was sent into town to buy provisions from the store, or to conduct business at the bank, accompanied by Squire Teavis or Caleb and George, who would ride with me and wait, with the horses, just outside town, as a kind of guard. “You got the kind of face and voice that people in these parts trust,” Squire Teavis said, when I asked why he didn’t simply conduct the business himself. “They hear a Southern accent up here, they think the worst. We don’t need to draw attention to ourselves.”

  Young himself never left the camp—or, if he did, it was at night, when I was sleeping. He certainly went nowhere near the town.

  Our honeymoon lasted for a couple of months, before Young announced one night that he and a small group of men would be going on a reconnaissance mission down into Vermont. I would not be joining him, he said, despite my protests.

  “I need you here, safe and sound, to wait for me,” he said. “It might be dangerous where we’re going.”

  My questions were all in vain, and the next morning Young departed with Thomas Collins and Alamanda Bruce, each equipped with a large leather satchel stuffed with food and clothing.

  That night, there was a festival atmosphere around the campfire. The men, for all that they revered Lieutenant Young, obviously enjoyed his absences as well, and intended to abandon discipline and drill and give themselves over to drink. I was alone in the hut, daydreaming about my various adventures and dimly wondering what had become of Aaron, of Mick, of my family, when the door opened and a grizzly head stuck in.

  “Hey, boy,” Caleb Wallace said, grinning through his thick beard. “You in the mood for a party tonight?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I dozed off, wondering what Young was up to in Vermont, and dreamed of the happy sunlit summers of my childhood. My sisters were in my dream, but Young was there too, and, inexplicably, Aaron. The girls disappeared, and I was stranded out in the middle of a large expanse of water, watching Aaron and Young fighting on the far shore…

  I was woken by the sound of shooting, and, assuming that the camp was under attack, I grabbed a gun (I had no idea how to use it) and peered cautiously out the window. Red firelight flickered around the camp, figures flitted between buildings—was this the end of Jack Edgerton? I tried to muster the courage to go out fighting, to make a good end protecting my comrades, but my hand froze on the door, and I felt sick. I sat down on the bed and swallowed the rising bile.

  A banging on the door made me jump—literally, I stood up and leaped about six inches in the air.

  “What you locked in there for? You takin’ a shit?” It was Jim Doty’s Kentucky drawl. Perhaps I was not about to die after all.

  “Er…yes.”

  “Well, hurry up! We can’t start without you.”

  Start what, I wondered, putting the gun back in its rack with a shaking hand.

  “Oh,” came Doty’s voice again, “and be sure to wash yourself.”

  It seemed an odd injunction, especially as I was a good deal more finicky about personal hygiene than some of my fellows. I had bathed in the river earlier in the day, and I knew that I was, as my mother would have put it, “nice.”

  Straightening my sleep-rumpled clothes, and trying to still my nerves, I took a deep breath and opened the door. How fear alters our perceptions! Whereas before I had assumed that the firelight and flitting figures betokened some kind of attack, now it was quite clear that there was nothing more dangerous than a party in the offing. It was not a party as we knew them in Vermont; there were no ladies in muslin dresses, no cloths spread on the ground, no bottles of lemonade cooling in the stream. There was one big bonfire crackling away on the parade ground, and groups of men in twos and three with bottles. From the cookhouse, as we rather grandly called the tin and wood structure where Hutchinson prepared his culinary miracles, came the smell of bacon and potatoes.

  Doty saw me descending the steps of the cabin, and whooped loudly. “Here he comes, boys, the guest of honor!” He was answered from around the camp by a series of yells and whistles, and soon I was escorted by some five or six men toward the bonfire.

  “Hey, young feller,” Caleb Wallace said, dressed only in pants and braces, his huge hairy barrel of a chest gleaming in the firelight, “come sit by me.”

  I did as I was bidden, and a bottle of beer was thrust into my hand. Caleb put his arm around me; it was heavy, and hairy, and warm.

  “The Boss said we’re to look after you while he’s gone, so me and the boys thought we’d throw a little party in your honor.”

  George Scott, Caleb’s equally hairy, equally ursine “husband,” stood by the fire massaging his crotch. “We’ve waited for this for a long time,” he said.

  I had a pretty clear idea what “this” was, but I played dumb, uncertain whether the party was sanctioned by Young or not.

  “Bennett said I was to wait for him,” I said, my voice sounding squeaky compared to the booming tones of Scott and Wallace.

  “Ain’t fair, the Boss having you all to himself.” This was the voice of Squire Teavis, whose regular conservative appearance had been completely abandoned as he toweled himself down after a recent dip in the river. “We share everything in this company. Food, clothing, liquor.”

  “And pussy.” Doty again, standing now with his arm around Sam Gregg, their unkempt blond hair mingling.

  “Take a drink, Jack,” Caleb said, pushing the bottle toward my mouth.

  “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Yeah, plenty,” he chuckled. “You hungry?”

  “He’s always hungry,” Scott said, still massaging the growing lump in his pants. “I’ve watched him and the Boss together.”

  This was news to me, although I was hardly surprised; when Young and I were together, the whole camp knew about it, so loud were we. The walls of Young’s cabin were full of knotholes—perhaps made, or assisted, by the men.

  By now the fire was encircled by all the men in the camp, at least 20 of them, most of them drunk and in a state of undress. I may be greedy, but this was more than even I thought I could take.

  “Git up, Jack,” Caleb said, taking the bottle from me. “We want to see you dance.”

  “Dance?” I could execute a reasonably proficient waltz, thanks to my upbringing in the salons of Bishopstown, but I didn’t think that was what they had in mind.

  “Yeah, like one of them Yankee whores in Boston and New York City,” Gregg said, swigging from a bottle of whiskey.

  Fortunately, I’d seen one or two such performances in the White Horse, where, occasionally, one of the local ladies would come in to entertain the more conventional-minded patrons. I knew the basic routine—bump, grind, wiggle, and pout—and thought I could pull off a reasonable imitation.

  I jumped to my feet,
my boldness returning, and grabbed the bottle from Gregg. “I’d better have a little inspiration, then,” I said, taking a long swig. The whiskey ran down my throat, set my stomach on fire, and burned away the last few inhibitions. I was ready to perform.

  “What would you gentlemen like to see?” I asked, thinking I sounded very seductive but probably just slurring.

  “Your ass!” chorused the reply.

  I started to dance, clumsily at first, tripping over my feet, but gaining in confidence and giving my audience a few of the moves that I’d seen down at the White Horse—vastly improved, I thought. I ground my hips in a figure-eight pattern. I squatted down on my haunches, as if lowering myself onto a big juicy prick, I bent over until my nose was almost touching the ground and wiggled my behind. The men responded with obscene encouragement; one or two of them, including Scott, had hauled their dicks out and were openly masturbating. Doty and Gregg whipped harmonicas out of their pockets and gave us a selection of battle songs popular with both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank. Hands drummed on thighs, on logs.

  A slow-hand clap and cries of “Get ’em off!” indicated that the audience was ready for some flesh, and I was more than ready to show it. The heat from the fire, the whiskey, and my own gyrations had got me sweating.

  I started off with my necktie, which I removed with a great deal of business and, I thought, a certain amount of artistry. This was obviously not what the men wanted. Caleb stepped up beside me, started grinding his hips in time with mine, and then, grabbing the front of my shirt with both hands, ripped it clean off my body. His efforts were rewarded with the loudest whoop of the night. Doty and Gregg increased the pace of their playing, the clapping accelerated, and more items of clothing were deposited on the ground.

  I realized that I had better get stripping if I didn’t want my entire wardrobe to be shredded, so I unbuckled my belt with the minimum of fuss and started lowering my pants. This is what they wanted to see; the hollering subsided, breaths were held, and the music hushed to an anticipatory hum. I turned and turned, inching down my waistband, until my ass was exposed to the burning eyes of the men and the heat of the fire.