Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

by Robert Devereaux

  If you’ve ever seen a skilled artisan daub paint on canvas or turn a pot on a wheel, that’ll give you an idea what it was like watching these two legendary lovers have at each other.

  Foreplay and fondlement at once tender and rough, full of fire and ice, imbued with all the love one sex is capable of feeling for the other and all the scorn as well—that’s what blessed my eyes. Like an apprentice doing his level best to ape his master’s nimble movements, I tried to mirror Jake’s dancing fingers. After a fumble or two, it was clear from the way Annie moaned and groaned that my efforts were paying off.

  During this segment of Kyle’s narrative, Dawn and Felicity had passed through the living room to the hall at Tiffany’s back, on their way to the bedroom, she supposed. Dawn lingered to stare at Kyle, listening rapt and tapping an index finger against her lips. But Felicity coaxed her out of the room and glanced an apology at Tiffany, who waved it off good-naturedly and wondered when Kyle would finish so she could jump his bones.

  Now a door opened behind her and the voices of Kyle’s two fuckmates danced in her ear.

  “Dawn, can’t you wait? They won’t be long.”

  “It’s okay. We can do him while he talks.”

  Kyle stroked his chin and sighed at Tiffany. He radiated a patriarch’s wisdom, she thought, and the sweet sensuality of youth. “You don’t mind, do you,” he said, “if I indulge their whims? They’re used to being taken care of the instant they get home.”

  When she had first entered Kyle’s apartment, the very idea would have outraged her, made her march right back out again.

  But she was deep in Kyle’s world now, deep in the magic of his voice, deep in what felt, as incredible as it seemed, like love. What he now proposed sounded as natural as breathing.

  “Yes… yes, that’s fine.”

  “Come on in, girls.” Then, to her: “Tiffany, would you kindly remove your skirt and blouse?”

  She rose to obey as Dawn and Felicity swirled over to the sofa and eased down on either side of Kyle. Felicity looked statuesque in her black bodybriefer, lace with a see-through mesh front. Dawn’s aroused nipples pressed forward into a red charmeuse tank top. She had left the panties off and her creamy thighs scissored smooth and lovely as she walked.

  Laughing, they stripped Kyle where he sat. Then, kneeling on the sofa to either side of him, they bent to mouth him.

  Tiffany, in bra and panties—plain cotton underthings she now felt mildly ashamed of—sat down, woozy from the turn-on and finding it hard to swallow. Kyle’s gorgeous cock, bowing this way and that like a polite courtier as the women tongued its knobby head, made her cunt muscles flex with hunger. Her idle fingers, gentling along the outlines of her furrow, touched damp cotton.

  Kyle reached toward the tape recorder. “One more bit left to my story, Tiffany. Then you can join us.”

  “Yes, Kyle. I’d like that. Hurry, please. Please hurry.”

  * * *

  Well sir, Jake and Lily Mae grappled with one another that day in the dusty street. And somehow, even though the winds whipped up again and got worse, much worse, I could see them going at it plain as day. Free-swinging signs banged about like blasts of thunder. When Jake shoved a few fingers inside Lily Mae, the sign for Phelps’ Feed & Grain tore clean off its hinges and crashed to the planking below, nearly shattering the toebones of my old schoolmarm Miss Pritchard.

  And when Lily Mae took a good long suck on Jake’s dick, the buckboard belonging to the sheriff burst into flame and that flame whooshed onto the tail of the old swayback that pulled it. Poor doomed nag galloped hellbent out of town like a stud in heat.

  Tearing off like that more’n likely prolonged the beast’s life a tiny bit, because just then Jake and his nemesis joined up genitals, sweet as you please. When that happened, the earth gaped open right in front of the bank and swallowed a whole row of horses tethered to the hitching post. One moment they were standing there, dumb as clothesracks, on solid ground.

  The next, down they slid into a chasm, legs flailing, necks straining, their eyes wide with terror, their tethers snapping from the dropped weight of them. The earth whomped shut, crushing a terrible waste of good horseflesh in one thin vertical grave, a grave that gushed thick ribbons of blood and lay shut then beneath a shimmering puddle of red.

  Despite the quaking of the building we were in, I kept on mimicking Jake, and Annie was lost in shudders of joy at what I was doing. Then, twin telltale groans rose up from the street, getting-ready huffings and puffings that issued from both their throats. At each rising moan, the wind racheted upward a few notches. Chickens went fluttering by the window; small dogs; a babe out of arms. Skirts flared up, handkerchiefs flew to faces, but still the townsfolk squinted through their dust-battered eyelids at the copulating desperadoes.

  Then orgasm hit the onlookers. Orgasm hit me and Annie. Hell, orgasm hit the whole godforsaken town. Tops of buildings burst open and geysered their contents into the sky. Bank over yonder became one great spurt of paper money mixed with spangles of gold coin, like tight sperm spinning its way through seminal fluid. But no one had a chance to scoop up any of that money, because just when it reached its high point, the fireball hit. I was watching Jake—I was one with Jake doing Lily Mae—so I know where that fireball originated.

  The two of them were gripping each other hard. Their heads swelled up reddish purple trying to keep from being the first one over the edge. Then they reached that divine inflection point together, eye to eye at last. But it was too late to let it out, because their bodies burst asunder and the fire of their passion flew in all directions. Townsfolk were incinerated like bugs under a blowtorch. A great wave of flame washed up against the buildings like the pounding shudder of a hundred-foot breaker at the beach. Orange engulfment raced up toward us. At the last moment, I closed my eyes and held my breath.

  It hurt bad. Real bad. But I managed, half-blind, to drag myself and Annie down the burning stairs. She was dead. I didn’t know that at the time. Me, I came within a hair of dying.

  Stagecoach drove into town the day after and found me. Raced me to the hospital in Santa Fe.

  And that’s how Stinking Springs met its end.

  “That’s also how a young whelp of eighteen learned what pleases women and gained his blessed longevity by regularly practicing what Hefty Jake Gentry had preached on main street,” said Kyle, his caring hands massaging his lovers’ open secrets.

  Tiffany’s panties were sopping. She rose to remove them, unhooking and discarding her bra as she stood.

  “Jake somehow straddled that whomp of flame. ’Twas almost as though his spirit rode straight into me. He gave me staying power, a pleasing technique (or so they tell me), and an abiding love for all womankind, for the mystery of them and for their magic. Your magic, my dear Tiffany. That’s right. You don’t need those panties anymore. They profane your sacred flesh.”

  Tiffany felt the yield of tufted carpet beneath her feet as she walked to Kyle, stood before him, reached both hands beneath her belly and kneaded herself. “Do you like the way I look, Kyle?” From the adoration in his eyes and the way his manhood strained at its seams in triple blush, she already knew the answer. But she wanted to hear him say it in that rich baritone of his.

  “I love the way you look, dear heart. I love you, Miss Tiffany Walker. I love the fuck out of you. And if you don’t spindle your lovely cunt on my ramrod of a cock this instant, you’re going to make dear old Kyle Hardwick a very miserable old man indeed.”

  Tiffany spared him that fate.

  CLAP IF YOU BELIEVE

  I understand her parents’ wariness. A woman like my Tinkerbell is bound to attract the amorous attentions of the wrong sort now and again. So when they open the door and appraise me like a suspect gem, not smiling, not yet inviting me in, I understand and forbear. “Good evening,” I say, and let the silence float like untroubled webs of gossamer between us.

  After a time, Mr. Jones turns to his wife and says, “What do you
think?”

  “The eyes look reasonably sane,” she replies, to his nod,

  “though that’s not always an airtight indicator these days and there is a worrisome edge to them.”

  I look down, stifling the urge to defend myself, and am gratified to hear Mr. Jones say, “Man with his hobbies and profession is bound to have sharp eyes. I say we give him the benefit and let him in.”

  She sighs. “Oh, all right. Come in out of the heat, young man. Put your shoes there.” A serried rank of them faces the wall like naughty students: practical ones for Mr. and Mrs.

  Jones, scuffed high-tops for twelve-year-old Melissa, and, looking more like shed leaves than footwear, Tinkerbell’s familiar green-felt slippers. I unknot and loosen my buffed black Florsheims and set them beside my beloved’s footwear, thinking what a marvel her tiny feet are and how delightful it is—ensconced alone in her cozy apartment after a date—to take her legs, right up to the thighs, into my mouth and lightly tongue those feet, her tiny soles, the barely perceptible curve of her insteps, the sheer white-corn delicacy of her ten tiny toes. How ecstatically my darling pixie writhes and wriggles in my hand, her silver-sheened wings fluttering against my palm!

  “Hi, Alex.” I look up and there’s Melissa standing by an archway that leads to the dining room.

  “Hi, Melissa,” I say, wiggling my fingers at her like Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie. The zoo is only four blocks from their house and we’ve begun, Melissa and Tink and I, to make a regular thing of meeting there Saturday afternoons.

  Once, over snow cones, Melissa told me that Tink had been miserable for a long time, “but now that you’ve come into her life, Alex,” this from a twelve-year-old, “she flits about like a host of hummingbirds when she drops in for Sunday dinner and makes loads of happy words twinkle in my head, in all of our heads.” Hearing Melissa say that made me glad, and I told her so.

  Melissa giggles at my finger-waggling and says, “Come on in and sit down.”

  I look a question at the Joneses. Mrs. Jones gives an unreadably flat lip-line to me. Mr. Jones, instead of seconding Melissa’s invitation, comes up like an old pal, leans in to me, and says, “You and me, after dinner, over cigars in my study.”

  I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but I feel as if he’s somehow taken me into his confidence. I say, “That’s fine, sir,” and that seems to satisfy him because he steps back like film reversed and stands beside his wife.

  A familiar trill rises in my brain. The others turn their heads, as do I, to the stairs, its sweeping mahogany banister soaring into the warm glow upstairs. And down flies my beloved Tinkerbell, trailing behind her a silent burst of stars. Her lovely face hovers before me, the tip of her wand describing figure-eights in the air. “Hello, Alex my lovely,” she hums into my head. Then she flits to my cheek, the perfect red bow of her lips burning cinnamon kisses there. Recalling the sear of those kisses on other parts of my anatomy, I feel a blush rising.

  “Tinkerbell,” I say, using her full name, “perhaps we should—”

  “Yes, daughter,” Mrs. Jones breaks in, clearly not at all amused, “your young man is correct. Dinner’s on the table.”

  She glares at me and turns to lead the party into the dining room. Melissa comes and takes my hand, while Tink flits happily about my right shoulder, singing into my head her gladness at seeing me. When she holds still long enough for me to fix a discerning eye on her, I’m relieved to see that she’s not yet showing.

  Once dinner is under way, the ice thins considerably and in fact Tink’s mother rushes past her more cautious husband to become my closest ally. Maybe her change of heart is brought on by my praise for her rainbow trout amandine—which praise I genuinely mean. Or maybe it’s brought on by the dinner conversation, which focuses on me half the time, on Tink the other half. Mrs. Jones asks surprisingly insightful questions about my practice as a microsurgeon, pleasantly coaxing me into more detail than the average non-medico cares to know about the handling of microsutures and the use of interchangeable oculars on a headborne surgical microscope. I’m happy to oblige as I watch Tinkerbell hover over her dinner, levitating bits of it with her wand—nothing flamboyant, merely functional— and bringing it home to her mouth.

  After some perfunctory questions about my butterfly collection (I’ve sold it since meeting their daughter, as it disquiets her) and my basement full of miniature homes and the precisely detailed furniture that goes with them (I met Tinkerbell at a show for just such items), the talk turns to their daughter. It’s a little embarrassing, what with Melissa beaming at me, and Tinkerbell singing into me her bemusement at her mother, and her father looking ever more resigned, and his wife going on and on about her tiny daughter, giving me a mom’s-eye view of her life history as if Tinkerbell herself weren’t sitting at the table with us. Mrs. Jones is in the midst of telling how easy it was to give birth to a pixie and how hard to live with the fact thereafter when I suddenly laugh, quickly disguising it as a choke—water went down the wrong way, no problem, really I’m all right. Tink has made me a lewd and lovely proposition, one which has brought to mind the heartaching image of her as last I enjoyed her, looking so vulnerable with her glade-green costume and her slim wand set aside, arching back on her spun-silver wings, her perfect breasts thrust up like twin peaks on a relief map, her ultra-fine fingers kneading the ruddy pucker of her vulva, awaiting the tickle and swirl of my ultra-fine horsehair brush, the hot monstrosity of my tonguetip, and the perfect twin-kiss of my cock-slit, as we began our careful coitus.

  I give Tink a quick stare of admonition—a joke and not a joke. She beams, melts me, and goes back to her meal. The entire scene suddenly amuses me greatly, this whole silly ritual of meeting the parents, getting their approval for the inevitable, most of which—in particular the essential proof of the rightness of shared intimacy— has already come to pass.

  But I contain my laughter. I act the good son-in-law-to-be and show these kind narrow people, under whose love and tutelage my fiancée grew to maturity, the esteem and good manners they expect.

  “Alex, would you please pass the peas?” says Melissa when her mother pauses to inhale. Mrs. Jones has launched into yet another diatribe against an educational system too unfeeling, too inflexible for special students like her Tinkerbell. Already under fire have come the lack of appropriate gymnastic equipment, the unfeeling cretinism of a certain driver-ed instructor, and Tinkerbell’s unmet needs for special testing conditions in all her academic subjects. As I pass the peas, the head drama coach falls into the hopper of Mrs. Jones’

  tirade for refusing even to consider mounting a production of Peter Pan and giving Tink a chance to perform the character they’ve named her after, a casting inspiration Mrs. Jones is certain would have brought her daughter out of the cocoon of adolescent shyness years earlier than had been the case.

  “But the worst of it, Alex,” she says, and I thank God that she’s spoken my name for the first time (and that it dropped so casually into the conversation), “is that no one in all those years has had the slightest clue how to teach Tink—or even how to discover—the uses of her wand, other than as an odd utensil and for occasional cleaning tricks. It might have kept this family solvent—”

  “Emma,” warns Mr. Jones, defensive.

  “—well, more solvent than it was. It might have saved peoples’ lives, cured disease, made world leaders see reason through their cages of insanity, brought all kinds of happiness flowing into peoples’ hearts the world over.” She asks me point blank to help her tiny daughter discover the full potential of her wand, and I promise I will. I don’t mention of course that we’ve already found one amazing use for it in our lovemaking, a use that makes me feel incredibly good, incredibly potent, and incredibly loving toward Tinkerbell. It occurs to me at that moment, listening to Mrs. Jones’ spirited harangue, that the wand might indeed have other uses and that perhaps one of them, a healing use, might reduce the failures and increase the triumphs I witness every
day in the operating room. I get excited by this, nod more, stoke food into my mouth faster than is strictly polite. We’re bonding, Mrs. Jones and I. She can feel it, I can feel it, Melissa is grinning like an idiot, and Tink is humming snatches of Lohengrin into my head. “I love you, Alex,” she wind-chimes, “I love you and the horse you rode in on.” Looking aside, I watch her playing with her food, wanding a slow reversed meander of mashed potatoes into her mouth, biting it off in ribbons of white mush. Her unshod feet are planted apart on the damask and her wings, thin curved planes of iridescence, lie still against her back.

  After dinner, Mrs. Jones is ready to usher me into the parlor for more bonding. But her husband holds up his hand to cut her off, saying, “It’s time, Emma.” “Oh,” she says. He’s got some bit of gristle in his craw, some one thing that’s holding back his approval of me.

  “Ah, the study,” I say. “The cigars.”

  “Just so,” he says in a way that suggests man-talk, and pretty serious man-talk at that. I follow him out of the dining room. Mrs. Jones and Melissa have odd looks on their faces.

  Even Tink’s hum is edged with anxiety.

  The study is dark and small, green-tinged and woodsy.

  There’s a rolltop desk, now closed, and the rich smell of rolled tobacco and old ledgers pervades the air. He fits a green eyeshade around his head, offers me one. I accept but feel foolish in it, as if I’m at Disney World wearing a Donald Duck hat, bright yellow bill as brim.

  Mr. Jones sits in a rosewood swivel chair and motions me to a three-legged ebony piano stool in front of him. I have to look up a good six inches to meet his eyes. “You smoke cigars?” he asks.

  “Not unless you count one White Owl in my teens.”

  He chuckles once, then drops it. With a soft clatter of wood slats, he scrolls up the rolltop and opens a huge box of cigars.

  He lifts out two of them, big long thick cylinders of brown leaf with the smell of sin about them and the crisp feel of currency in their wrappings. I take what he offers and follow his lead in preparing, lighting, and puffing on the damned thing. I’m careful to control my intake, not wanting to lose face in a fit of coughing. The cigar tastes peculiarly pleasant, sweet, not bitter, and the back of my head feels like it’s ballooning.