Hold Tight

by Christopher Bram

  The sailor stood very still, wheels turning inside his head. He suddenly leaned over the bannister and hollered, “Juke! Hey, Juke! We need you!” He turned back to Blair. “He mighta gone out.”

  “Call again.”

  The sailor did. There were footsteps down below and the boy’s black hair and white eyes appeared in the narrow slit of the telescoped stairwell. Blair thought the boy’s straight hair made him look like a monkey wearing a toupee.

  “Oh. It’s you,” the boy answered.

  “Can you come up a minute, Juke? There’s something we have to ask you. Please?”

  “Oh, yeah? What could you want from me?” But the boy started up the stairs.

  “We’ll go to your room,” said Blair. “This kind of business should be transacted in private, don’t you think?” The humiliation that had already begun with “please” would be even sharper when observed in close quarters.

  The sailor resumed his walk up the stairs, then stopped and said, “No. We can ask him here.”

  “Oh, no. People might hear us. I have my reputation to think of.” As if he cared what these lowlife degenerates thought of him. “Come along. You don’t want to make me cross and lose your fifty dollars, do you?”

  That fifty dollars actually seemed to give Blair complete power over the sailor, because, disgusted as the man was, he nodded and trudged on up the stairs.

  “Come along, boy,” Blair called down. “Time is money.”

  The sailor opened the door to his room and nodded Blair inside. He hesitated a moment, then entered, whistling as soon as he stepped into the room, walking into a corner and out again, whistling to himself as if terrified.

  Downstairs, Erich was thinking about the celibacy of Brahms when he heard the tuneless whistling just below his ear. He pulled the headset on, adjusted the hard earphone and listened.

  Sullivan looked up from his gun, now laid out in pieces on the cloth at his feet. “Our good fairy’s got a customer?”

  “No. I mean, yes,” said Erich. “But not just any customer. He gave the signal.”

  “Damn.” Sullivan stared at the pieces of his gun. He began to screw things back together. “Well?”

  “Nobody’s talking.” Erich heard footsteps, then a straining chair, then another string of whistled notes.

  “Maybe there isn’t anybody,” said Sullivan. “What if your fairy’s up there alone and he does different voices. Maybe he’s up there with Charlie McCarthy.”

  Erich raised his hand to silence Sullivan. Someone else had come into the room. Someone began to speak.

  “Uh, close the door, will ya. Juke? I told him what you were gonna say, but this man here wants to ask you anyway.”

  Erich recognized Fayette’s voice, edged with static like a news broadcast from across the ocean. What was the houseboy doing up there?

  “Yeah? What didja want to ask me?”

  The boy sounded as sassy as ever, but, without seeing his face, Erich didn’t think he sounded especially Negro, at least not like Negroes on the radio.

  “It’s not my responsibility to ask. That’s your prerogative, sailor.”

  The third voice was cool and measured, as precise as an Englishman’s, but with the faintly nasal flatness of Americans. It did not sound like the voice of a spy. All Erich could picture was the kind of overaged young man you saw portraying youths on the New York stage.

  Nobody spoke for a moment, then the houseboy said, “Been getting piss-elegant, Blondie? Oh, but darling, that paper lantern doesn’t do a thing for this room. You have to turn off the light and turn on the one in the lantern.”

  Erich went pale.

  “They’re queering off already?” said Sullivan. “You’re gonna make yourself sick if you listen to everything. It’s gonna make me sick watching you listen.”

  Erich pressed the cup of the earphone hard over his ear, as if listening could stop the boy from giving them away.

  12

  JUKE STOOD UNDER THE Chinese lantern, fingering the cord and looking for a switch. He seemed to have gone to it only to prove his indifference to the tension in the room.

  Hank had to blurt out the proposition, just to get the boy away from the microphone: “This man wants to watch. Us.”

  There. As soon as Hank said it, humiliating himself and Juke, he wanted to kill the man. Ever since he saw him tonight and remembered the man’s contempt, Hank had been hating him, disguising his hatred with all the friendliness he could fake. Now he wanted to break the man’s neck. But there were the men in the cellar to think of, listening to every word, and his country. The man should die for being a traitor, and not because of something personal.

  Juke stood as still as an eight-ball, eyeing Hank. He had to be insulted. He was already angry with Hank and the idea that Hank and the man wanted to use him should make Juke furious, Hank thought.

  The boy slowly turned to the well-dressed man already sitting in the chair. “Did I hear right? Not me watching you and him, but you watching him and me?”

  “That is correct,” said the man, narrowing his eyes and smiling at Hank, holding the seat of his chair with both hands.

  “I told him you’d say no,” said Hank.

  “Yeah? You told him that?”

  The boy’s surprise sounded sarcastic. Hank hoped Juke would spit spiders at both of them, even if it meant driving the spy away.

  Instead, the boy said, “How much you paying?”

  “I’m paying your friend enough to make it worth his while,” said the man. “It’s up to him what kind of arrangement he wants to make with you.”

  “So, Blondie. What’s a man have to pay to make you lay with me?”

  “You don’t have to do it, Juke. We don’t need his money,” Hank insisted.

  “Fifty dollars,” the man announced, relishing his ability to make trouble. “And if you don’t do it, I’m leaving and neither of you will see a cent.” He lowered his voice and snidely added, “Offer the boy a dollar. That should be enough.”

  And Juke began to grin at Hank, first with the right side of his mouth, then the left, the grin growing more shark-like as it stretched to its limit. “Okay. I’ll give you a dollar. Boy.”

  “That ain’t what he meant,” said Hank.

  “I know what he meant. And I’m offering you a buck. Or are you worth that?”

  “Beautiful,” said the man. “Perfect.”

  Juke and Hank stared into each other’s eyes, Juke viciously grinning, Hank stunned by the boy’s craziness. Juke flared his nostrils as he took a deep breath.

  “I don’t want to put you through this,” Hank whispered.

  “Baby, I want to,” Juke whispered back. “I’m gonna flush you down the toilet and out the sewer. And you’re gonna be the cheapest piece of ass I ever had.”

  “No whispering,” said the man. “I pay to hear everything. What’re you saying?”

  “Nothing,” said Hank, staring differently at the boy.

  Juke answered the look by thrusting his chin up and yanking his yellow necktie open. Then he stepped back and began to unbutton his fancy red shirt.

  “You, too, sailor. Off with your clothes.”

  Hank glanced at the man—he sat there smiling bitterly, his jaw clenched—then at the paper lantern. The men downstairs were going to think him an idiot for letting this happen, and sick for doing it, but Hank didn’t know what else could keep the man here long enough to start talking. He drew his blouse up over his head, wondering what he had done to make Juke hate him so much.

  Juke was quickly undressing, coolly at first, with a steely look at Hank as he shook his shirt off his shoulders. But he stopped looking when he jerked his two-tone shoes off and threw them at the floor, then pulled at his belt as if he wanted to cinch himself in two. Undressing angered him and his anger confused Hank. If Juke wanted sex, if he was horny for Hank, Hank could understand that, queer as it was having a colored hot for you. Coloreds preferred coloreds, and found whites lousy lays. Juke said so
himself. But Juke seemed to be doing this out of hatred.

  Juke dropped his striped cotton trousers and kicked his feet out of them. He wore white boxer shorts that made him look blacker than ever. Then he bent over, yanked the shorts down and stepped out of them. When he stood straight again, he was a dark skinny kid with slicked hair, squashed nose and a prick that stuck out like a spike.

  “Ah,” went the man. “They’re right about coloreds being…born ready.”

  Juke looked at Hank, but with less fight in his eyes. He looked almost resentful, or hurt, lips parted as if to tell Hank this was his fault.

  Hank turned away to take off his pants. It embarrassed him to see Juke like this. Juke naked and hard wasn’t quite Juke anymore. But seeing any hard cock was enough to work Hank up. Looking down at himself, he turned back to Juke, his cock becoming more like Juke’s. Neither of them were cut. Two country boys, they stood there looking at their own and each other’s bones.

  “But it must be a myth about size.”

  The man’s voice broke the trance. Juke glared at him, turned and shook his hips at the man, wagging his stick at him as if it were up for his benefit. And shook his black bottom at Hank.

  “No! Get that thing away from me, nigger! Get on the bed. I don’t want either of you closer to me than the bed.” The man shooed Juke away with the back of one hand, his other hand still gripping the seat of the chair.

  “I sure the hell don’t want to touch you,” said Juke, backing up to the bed, then stretching out on it.

  “Now you. Get on the bed,” the man ordered Hank. “Touch him. Touch the nigger.”

  If they were alone, Hank could forget who and what Juke was, forget everything but the sex, just as he always did, no matter how old or fat or ugly they were. But with the man insisting how vile this was, with Juke watching Hank and waiting to see what he could do, with the men somewhere inside the paper lantern, like God looking over your shoulder, Hank remained painfully conscious of everything.

  He sat on the bed. He was naked but he still felt dressed, he was of so many minds. Touching another cock usually erased everything. He took hold of the cock in front of him. It felt like any boy’s bone, a roundness with something square about it, like an end splice in a piece of half-inch rope, more slender and tense than a man’s bone, as springy as a jew’s harp. It was the best thing about sex with boys, although Hank preferred men. He drew the skin back and there was a sweet moan.

  Juke was watching him. His pinched smile looked like a sneer, but there was still a pinch of hurt or something personal to his eyes. Then he reached out and grabbed Hank’s cock.

  Eyes and fingers—it was suddenly too intimate. Hank lowered his head so he wouldn’t see Juke. His reflex to what was happening in his cock and hand brought his head down further and he took the boy’s cock in his mouth.

  “Yes. That’s what I wanted to see you do. You’re not so manly after all.”

  “What’re they doing? You’re not writing anything down,” said Sullivan.

  The pad lay on Erich’s lap. His pencil was tapping a page that was blank except for the date and time of the suspect’s arrival.

  “He seems…I think…He’s ordering Fayette to have sex with the houseboy.”

  “The nigger? And he’s doing it?”

  “Apparently.” But why should that be any worse than a man doing it with a man? “Maybe he has no choice.”

  “Or he’s doing it to make us sick. Stop listening. I’m turning this off until they finish. We didn’t come here to listen to that.”

  “No. Something might get said. We have to listen.” And afraid of what Sullivan might think of him, Erich added, “I can hardly hear anything, anyway.” Which was true. Only when the suspect spoke was there any suggestion of what might be happening. The rest of it was sighs and static and Erich’s imagination. All he could picture were their faces, Fayette’s sharper than the houseboy’s. Their bodies were abstract, the action imprecise, a covertly sexual dream where nothing was specific. Erich found himself falling into what he heard. It was all so disturbingly vague, general and sexless. Then the man spoke again—“You look like you’re eating tar, sailor”—and it became obscene again. It was the presence of the spy that made the act upstairs specific and obscene. Consciousness was obscene. And Erich realized his listening made him part of the obscenity. He was a Jew of consciousness here.

  Hank was aware of the room in his mouth. He had room to move his tongue up and down the skinny bone, feel it and taste it, brush his lips against the skin and kinked hair at its base. The fingers on his cock seemed to open his mouth and mind to anything. Then the fingers let go of him, joined the other hand in his hair, and Hank’s mind closed up with thoughts. Such as the bad thing about boys being that they finished so quickly. Remembering that, Hank remembered Juke and thought about having a nigger come in his mouth. Then a voice said something about tar. Hank’s tongue worked harder, against the voice, while his mind told him he was only finishing the boy as quickly as possible so he could get the man to talk and prove he was a spy.

  “Kiss him. I want to see you kiss him.”

  Hands yanking his hair pulled Hank off the prick, pulled him up to Juke.

  It was like Juke and the spy had done it together. But the spy sat five feet away, looking on in proud disgust, his hands still gripping the chair. Juke’s hands held Hank’s face over his face for a moment, as if he were afraid to kiss.

  The boy’s eyes were yellowish brown and his brown lips were rimmed inside with pink. But the body beneath Hank’s was smooth and warm. Hank’s mouth suddenly felt terribly empty. All right, he thought, I’ll go to hell, and he was kissing Juke.

  Full of tongues, Juke covered Hank with his hands. What he had intended wasn’t happening. Juke had expected it to be quick and thoughtless, a hurried fuck by Blondie that would get the cracker out of his head for good. A fuck like a dump. The only pleasure was going to be the bit of humiliation. But it felt painfully good to be with Hank like this for a few minutes, even if it was for someone else. Juke could finish anytime he wanted, but not yet, not even when Hank went down on him and it was like a mouthful of angels. He wanted another minute. He wasn’t going to give two whites the satisfaction of seeing him come first. He wanted to feel contemptuous of Hank for being such a mouth artist.

  Hank kissed good, too, like he didn’t know kissing wasn’t manly. Touching the bulky shoulders, the broad back and tight white ass, Juke wondered if looks were deceiving and the man was just another queen. Proving that might cure him. Juke preferred men, for all their hypocrisy. He reached around from below and laid his hand behind Hank’s balls. The man’s legs parted, as if he wanted it. The circus queen watching them wanted to see a white man shame himself with dinge, and Juke was loath to give her an added thrill. But he wanted this for himself, and the muscular weight on top of him grew disturbingly attractive. His dick was good and slippery from the sucking. It bent like a spring when he pressed it against the hole, then popped right in, and Juke forgot his planned contempt.

  The kissing went straight to Hank’s cock and anus. He had to use one of them. When he felt a hand and then a cock between his legs, his body responded. He let the cock in. He settled into it. It felt like only a thick, deep finger, until it began to move and touched all the right places. He dug his fingers into the pomaded hair and kissed the boy deeper. The conked hair beneath the pomade felt coarse and Hank knew again the boy was colored. There were the men downstairs, but they wouldn’t know this was happening. There was the spy five feet away, but Hank hated him and didn’t care what he thought. None of it mattered now, because the boy sure knew how to fuck.

  It’s only making it worse, thought Juke, closing his eyes, moving with the body that now moved with his. But the man sure knew how to fuck.

  It was remarkable what fifty dollars could do. The sailor lay on a picaninny and kissed him. Blair sat and watched, gloriously uninvolved and powerful. It was as satisfying as ordering an enemy to eat gar
bage. His mind was racing and he decided he was drunk after all, with strength if not with alcohol. Not even his proximity to the bed bothered him now. The sailor’s twisted masculinity did not intimidate him tonight as it had when Blair was alone with him. Tonight the sailor was fully involved with someone else, a nigger at that, proving that his sexuality had absolutely nothing in common with Blair’s. Blair disdainfully watched, as if at a barnyard.

  Sitting this close, he did not have to see them whole. He hadn’t liked it when the sailor and houseboy stood on the other side of the room and undressed. There was nothing uglier than a naked male with an erection, like a statue with a nail driven into it, and a colored male was almost as grotesque. But sitting close and seeing them in parts made them less male, less human. When the sailor fellated the boy, it was like the unsettling gibberish that passed for modern painting: a cross-section of a machine covered with hair. But Blair knew what it meant and was satisfied by the idea. Kissing was familiar enough for him to enjoy seeing it: the white face profaned itself with a black one, a man with a man. He imagined colored spit to have the consistency of dog saliva.

  The sailor grimaced, broke the kiss and gripped the boy’s skull. Blair thought he was going to kill the boy. Then the sailor regained control and resumed kissing, almost angrily it seemed. He had to be disgusted with himself for what he was doing. Blair felt it was only his money and watching that kept the sailor at it.

  “Yes. Is that so bad? No worse than kissing your dog.”

  From the corner of his eye, he caught a new movement to their bodies. The sailor’s bare buttocks still disturbed Blair. He thought about ordering the houseboy on top. Pictures of natives were so common there’d be nothing suggestive about him. Then Blair noticed the way the black hips and white buttocks rolled against each other, as if linked. He had to lean to the left to see if what he thought was happening was actually happening. The houseboy seemed to have his penis in the sailor’s rectum. Perfect. Disgusting, but perfect. And yet the sailor continued to kiss the boy, oblivious to this new humiliation.