Phoenix Rising

by Anais Ninja

  “I’ll miss you, too.” I kissed her on the cheek and rubbed her back through her nightie. “Can I ask a favor, Dana?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to borrow a skirt. Is that okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But won’t it be small on you?”

  “That’s sort of the idea,” I said. “I want to give Daddy a little treat and wear one of your school skirts for him.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, smiling. “My red plaid one has elastic on the waist.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Thanks.” We hugged again and I went to take a shower. The moisturizer had soothed my dry skin, and I knew that I wouldn’t have another chance to take a shower until we returned the next day. Even so, I kept it short, and used lukewarm water, reapplying more lotion after I dried myself. I returned to Dana’s room and packed some clothes, a pair of jeans, a couple of sweaters in case it got too cold, my white peasant blouse, and some underwear and socks.

  I tried on Dana’s pleated skirt and Mia’s boots. The skirt was a little tight around my waist but not uncomfortable. The hem was tantalizingly short, too. Mia’s boots were just a little loose, so I changed into a thicker pair of socks. I folded the skirt and put it in my backpack, slipping on a pair of cutoff shorts and a sweatshirt, and hefting the bag on to my shoulders. Not too heavy, though I knew after a couple of miles it would feel like it was filled with bricks. I double checked the side compartment, making sure I had my diaphragm and jelly, as well as my toothbrush and hair brush.

  My father was waiting in the front hallway, an assortment of camping gear on the floor at his feet. He had a large backpack and a couple of sleeping bags.

  “Aren’t we going to bring a tent?” I asked him.

  “We won’t need one,” he said. “There’s an old shack where we’ll be camping.”

  My father strapped one of the sleeping bags to my pack, making it feel even heavier as it sagged on my shoulders, but he helped me tighten the padded straps, making the weight more manageable. He carried his pack and bag into the garage and we threw them into the back of Mia’s Jeep. This was the car my father had sold her when she was still in college, and it had just over 10,000 miles on the odometer, even though it was a few years old. Then he opened the garage door and backed his Cadillac into the street, parking it by the curb before easing the Jeep out of the garage. I waited in the passenger seat while he drove his Caddy back into the driveway, and then we were off, heading downtown.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “I’ve go to stop off at the office and pick something up, then we need to stop at the store for food and water,” he said. “No restaurants where we’re going.”

  We parked in front of his office building and he went inside, returning with a bulging manila envelope that he stuffed into his backpack.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Just a little gift from Krys,” he said, putting the car in gear. “Something to make our camp out special.”

  We stopped off at a grocery store next, picking up cans of chili, pork and beans, bottles of water, instant coffee, some beef jerky, dried fruit, chocolate and granola bars, “camping food” my father called it. He put the heaviest stuff in his pack and let me carry the lighter items, like the jerky and the dried fruit. I noticed that he’d bought a couple of pints of Cuervo Gold, slipping them into the side compartment of his backpack.

  On our way out of town, we ate a quick breakfast at that truck stop where we’d eaten the day my father brought me into his office for a visit. Madge, that buxom waitress who knew his name wasn’t working, but an equally stacked woman with a name tag that said “MARY LOU” on it served us.

  After breakfast and coffee, we got back in the Jeep and drove out of town, an hour on the highway and another hour on back roads, some of them unpaved ruts in the dirt. It was just after noon when we reached the trailhead, a patch of asphalt crisscrossed by dusty tire prints at the entrance of a shallow canyon. We parked in the shade of a stunted tree and shouldered our packs, walking past a faded “NO TRESSPASSING” sign and heading into the wilderness.

  The path we followed took us along the banks of a dry river, its bed a network of cracks and ruts. After about an hour of hiking, my pack began to feel like a boulder, so we stopped under a rocky ledge and took a breather.

  “Drink,” my father said, handing me one of the water bottles.

  “How far are we going?” I asked him, taking a big gulp from the plastic bottle.

  “It’s about four or five more miles,” he said. “Couple more hours, with a bit of a climb at the end. You gonna make it?”

  “I’m fine, Daddy,” I said.

  “Let’s get going before our legs start cramping,” he said. “We’ll stop again at Shell Rock. That’s not far from here.

  “Not far from here” turned out to be about forty-five minutes, the half- way point according to my father. We climbed up the shallow sides of the canyon, slipping on rocks and gravel as we tried to get a foothold in the rocky soil. Finally, we reached an outcropping of stone near the rim. I looked around, seeing the rest of the terrain for the first time since we’d parked at the trailhead, a hilly wasteland scarred by sharp depressions, the paths of other ancient rivers. Ahead of us was a range of purple hills and orange mesas.

  “Here it is,” my father said. “This is Shell Rock, Annie.”

  “Wow.” It was a jagged boulder with a nearly flat surface on the side, upon which were the fossilized impressions of ancient shellfish, scallops and whorls and cones, preserved for millions of years in stone. I ran my fingers over the shallow indentations, tracing the edges with my fingers.

  “You’ve been here before?” I asked him.

  “My father used to take us here,” he said. “Me and my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother, Daddy.”

  “He died when we were still kids,” my father replied. “Leukemia.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for his hand.

  “Let’s get going,” he said, squeezing my hand. “I want to get a fire going before it gets dark.”

  We walked on for another hour, reaching a footpath that wound up the side of a low mesa. That was an excuse for another break, more water and a granola bar for energy, and then we started up the steep and narrow path. After about twenty minutes of walking, climbing, and crawling, we reached a plateau, about half as high as the nearest hill, maybe a couple of hundred feet in diameter. There was a tiny wooden shack among the boulders and dead trees, its windows broken, the front door hanging on one hinge.

  “Here we are,” my father said, dropping his pack in the shade of the shack.

  “What is this place?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “My dad said it had been built some time in the Thirties. Never knew why.”

  I looked inside the shack. There was a hole in the roof, the only illumination. A pair of wooden bunks was built into one wall, the only furnishing save for the splintered table and chair that sat in a corner, broken up for firewood. The floor was littered with dusty beer cans, the old kind that didn’t have a pull-tab, just the bent triangular holes of an opener. There was a straw broom leaning against the corner, half of the handle missing. While I started gathering the cans and sweeping the floor, my father collected dead twigs and branches from the mesa for the fire. By the time I’d gotten the shack as clean as it was ever going to be, the sun had started to set. I stepped outside and watched as my father got the fire going with kindling and a cigarette lighter.

  As the sun fell below the hills, the sky began to change from blue to a deep purple, the clouds in the western sky lighting up as if they were great tongues of fire, red and orange and yellow. It was the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen in my life. I stood at the edge of the mesa and stared at the changing skyscape, and as the twilight faded into night time, the stars began to come out, more than I’d ever seen on the clearest night in Maine.

  The hills chang
ed color as well, a more subtle performance than the sky, a spectrum of rusty hues that ranged from the bright orange of a fresh streak on the hull of a boat to the color of dried blood. As a lone cricket began to chirp, I walked back to the shack, the fire, my father.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, taking a swig from one of the pints of tequila and offering it to me.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said, taking a small sip.

  “Hungry?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” Despite a quick snack of jerky and dried fruit after I’d cleaned the shack, I was starving.

  “I’ll get dinner going,” he said. My father pulled some of the stones that surrounded the campfire with a stick, arranging them in a small circle. He pulled a couple of cans from his pack, opened them, and placed them between the hot stones. A half hour later we were eating warm chili and baked beans off of aluminum plates with plastic spoons. He opened another couple of cans and we had second helpings, my father showing me how to use sand to clean a plate after we’d finished.

  We sat next to the fire and my father broke out the tequila again. He reached into the pack for the envelope that Krystle had given him, opening the metal clasp and fishing inside, pulling out a joint. He lit it with a twig he’d held in the fire, touching the glowing tip to the end of the joint.

  “I didn’t know you smoked, Daddy,” I said, as he handed me the joint.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not so much since Mia got pregnant.”

  “Are you happy about the baby, Daddy?”

  “Yes, yes I am,” he said. “Why would you think I wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy. I just have this feeling,” I said, moving closer to him. “You’ve been drinking a lot, I guess...”

  “No more than usual...,” my father said, “...but maybe you’re right. I’ve been thinking about how hard it’s going to be to make ends meet. I’ve been short of my sales quota for the last three months. Sometimes I think that if Krystle didn’t like my cock so much I’d be back selling cars about now.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “Don’t be, kitten,” he said, putting his arm around me. “We really want this baby. I’m hoping business picks up this spring, when Mia’s due and the bills really start rolling in.”

  “I hope so too, Daddy,” I said. He wrapped both of his arms around me and kissed me. We sat by the fire for a while, listening to the twigs and branches crackle as they burned, drinking tequila, smoking another joint. There was a chorus of crickets now, filling the night with their chirps and trills.

  “I’ve got a treat for you,” I said. “Close your eyes.” I ran into the shack and changed from my shorts and sweatshirt into Dana’s plaid skirt and my loose white peasant blouse, slipping on knee socks and tying my hair into pigtails. The hiking boots looked a bit out of place, but I hadn’t brought any other shoes. I snuck up behind my father and plopped myself in his lap. He opened his eyes and smiled.

  “Damn, you look so cute,” my father said. “Let me take some pictures.” I got up from his lap and he went to get his camera from the backpack, snapping photos of me, some with a flash, some by the light of the campfire. I pushed the cap sleeves of my blouse down, exposing my shoulders, lifted my skirt to flash my panties for the camera. I’d worn the undies that Jack had given me, the ones that belonged to Amber, even though the crotch was still stained with his semen. My father laughed when I hoisted the back of Dana’s little skirt, exposing my bare cheeks and the thin strip of cotton that ran between them. He went through a whole roll of film and then put the camera away for later.

  “You look so pretty I could eat you up,” he said, taking me in his arms. As we kissed, I felt his hands slipping under the skirt, squeezing my bare bottom as I pressed against the hardness in his trousers. I led him into the shack and kneeled on one of the rolled-up sleeping bags, unbuckling his belt and tugging on the zipper of his jeans. He took off his windbreaker and unbuttoned his shirt, letting it hang open as I pulled his boxers down his thighs. His erection popped out, quivering just an inch from my face.

  “You’re so hard, Daddy,” I cooed, wrapping my fingers around his thick shaft and kissing the tip of his cock, where a pearl of precum had formed. I didn’t take him in my mouth right away, preferring to lick the length of his penis, bathing the meaty ridge that ran along the underside with my tongue. I nuzzled the base of his tool, feeling his pubic hair tickle my nose. He gasped when I licked the fleshy rim of his glans and swirled my tongue over the tip, finding his most sensitive spot, along the bottom, just below his cockhead.

  When I finally wrapped my lips around his cock, he sighed and stroked my hair, fingering my long pigtails as he began to rock his hips. My father’s penis began to slide back and forth over my lips, and I ravished his hard meat with my busy tongue.

  “Fuck, yeah...suck it...suck that cock, kitten,” he murmured. I moaned like a porn star as I gobbled his tool, stroking his shaft and fondling his hairy balls as my head bobbed back and forth. My father grabbed my pigtails and began to move his hips faster, fucking my face with his penis. I put my hands on his butt and squeezed his cheeks with every stroke, tightening my lips around his throbbing cock.

  “Here it comes, sweetheart,” my father said. Of course, I knew he was about to come from the way his cock twitched in my mouth and his buttocks began to tense. I felt him stiffen between my lips, seemingly growing even larger than before, and then he erupted, filling my mouth with a gush of cum. I swallowed twice before the flow began to wane, feeling a warm drip of semen escape down the corner of my mouth. As he softened, I used my tongue to clean him, swirling it over the tip of his cockhead. Then I released him from my mouth, pulling down my blouse and using his wet glans to paint circles on my nipples, feeling them stiffen as they cooled in the chilly night air.

  “I gotta sit down,” he muttered, parking himself on one of the sleeping bags. He pulled me into his lap and kissed me on the lips, tasting the lingering traces of his sweet offering.

  “I love to suck you, Daddy,” I whispered.

  “You do it so well, princess,” he said, wrapping me in his arms and holding me close. I put my arms around his shoulders and hugged him, feeling closer to him than I’d ever been. “Just like your mother used to.”

  “Tell me about her, Daddy,” I said. “Tell me about how you met her. Tell me about what it was like growing up here. I want to know. I want to know you.”

  “Okay, kitten,” he said. “Let’s unroll the bags first and lay down together, okay?” We unfurled the bags and laid them on the floor of the shack. My father lit another of Krystle’s joints and broke out the tequila again, and we stretched out on the sleeping bags, passing the joint and the bottle back and forth. Illuminated by the glow of a battery-powered lamp, he began to speak

  “My father sold feed and grain,” he said. “There were more farms here back then, more cattle, the city was a fraction of the size it is now. He did a pretty brisk business. We had a nice house, a nice car, took long motor trips to the Grand Canyon, to Los Angeles, to the Rocky Mountains. Then my brother died, and a year later my mother, too. Freddy’s death just broke her heart.”

  “Freddy was your brother?”

  “Yes. My kid brother. He was only twelve.” My father took another swig from the bottle, a sadness in his eyes. “After that it was as if my father just gave up. Like a light went out in his heart. His business went to hell, he was about to lose the house, and one day I came home from high school and found him in his bedroom, hanging from a noose he’d tied to the closet door.”

  “Daddy...” I’d never heard about this, not even from my mother, and so far as I had known his parents were alive, living in California, though we never visited them, never heard from them, not a phone call, not even a card at Christmas. Now I knew why. He was ashamed about this, his father’s suicide, even his mother’s broken heart, a family torn apart by the death of their child.

  “After that I quit school and joined the Air Force. T
he Korean War had been over for a couple of years, but they were still drafting people into the Army. I figured hanging around an air base with a wrench in my hand was better than a thirty mile march with a rifle and a pack.”

  “Wow, Robby is in the Air Force,” I said.

  “Robby?”

  “A guy I met on the plane coming over.”

  “Cute guy?”

  “Very,” I said. “Go on, Daddy.” I was laying on my side next to him, my hand under his shirt, tracing lazy circles on his back with a fingertip.

  “Where was I?” he said. “Oh, yeah. Air Force. They sent me all over the place, Missouri, California, Alaska, Guam, Maine...”

  “Maine?”

  “Middle of the fucking woods. Did I mention Alaska? Florida, too, probably the nicest place of all, and that wasn’t saying much. I’ll tell you, if you ever need to find a place that’s a hundred miles from anything, go to an air base. Anyway, I got out three years later. I’d had enough. There was nothing keeping me here in Phoenix, so I took a bus to Florida. I liked the weather there, and I liked being near all that water. The ocean was a nice change of pace from the desert.”

  “Is that when you met Mommy?”

  “Yeah, right after I got a place in Miami. I had some money saved up, what I hadn’t lost in card games while I was in the service. It took me a while to find a job I liked, so I lived off of my savings for about a year. I met your mom at the bank. She was a teller back then. I’d come in every Monday to withdraw some cash for the week and I kept ending up at her window. We got to talking, and I asked her out on a date. She introduced me to this man who had an account at the bank, who owned a used car lot, and I got a job there. He was ex-Air Force, too, took a liking to me. I think she dated him once, but she never would tell me.”

  “And then you got married?”

  “After we dated for a couple of years. Her parents didn’t like the idea of her dating a high-school dropout, but they got to know me a little better. We drove all the way up to Chicago to see them for Christmas one year, and I proposed to her on New Year’s Eve.”