Smith's Monthly #11

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  And they had to get the gold mine deed from him.

  The closer they had gotten to California and the gold fields of Northern Nevada and the Sierra Mountains, the more they had talked about finding gold and striking it rich. It was great campfire talk almost every night now.

  As they crossed over the ridge outside of Virginia City, Jimmy wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it sure wasn’t the large booming town that faced them.

  Virginia City seemed almost as large as Independence, and covered a wide hillside as well as stretching down into two valleys. There were mine tailings in giant piles in dozens of locations among the buildings, and there wasn’t a tree to be seen anywhere near the town.

  Dust from horses and wagons drifted over the town like smoke.

  The place looked very hot, and very alive. Even from a mile out, they could hear the piano music from the saloons, and occasional gunshots echoed off the mountains behind the town.

  “We need to find a place to camp,” Jimmy said as they all sat on the ridge staring at the town.

  “Most of the mining claims are down the valley to the south,” Josh said.

  “And right in the middle and under the city itself,” C.J. said. “If we go west, beyond the town, and over those low ridges, we should find fresher water and a place to camp.”

  They talked for a minute about how they should go into town.

  Long felt that it might be asking for trouble if he went right into town without first seeing how the residents of Virginia City treated Indians.

  Jimmy didn’t like that, but after Long insisted, he went along.

  Long and Truitt turned west, leading the packhorse. The two of them would go around the large city, while Jimmy, Zach, C.J, and Josh rode into town. They would all meet near dusk a few miles outside of town on the Carson City wagon road that connected the two towns.

  Twenty minutes later, the four of them rode into the center of Virginia City, Nevada, the most dangerous town that existed west of the Mississippi, looking for a deadly killer.

  To be continued next issue…

  At science fiction conventions, lots of very, very strange things happen. And considering that over the years, I’ve gone to hundreds and hundreds of conventions, I have my share of stories I would be glad to tell over a drink some evening.

  Buckey the Space Pirate started life in a story called “The Sexual Voyage of the Starship Shirley” which ended up in OUI Magazine. That story was about an event at a science fiction convention, just as this story.

  However, I want to be clear. I have never been on the Starship Shirley or been to a Cucumber Party. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  CUCUMBER PARTY

  A Buckey the Space Pirate story

  I WAS DRESSED in my Buckey the Space Pirate costume sitting in the hallway with about twenty other people in costumes, my back against the wall in front of room 1212, when she handed me the cucumber.

  “Pass it on,” she said in a husky whisper.

  Then she winked at me. She had the edge of her eyes taped back and black cotton glued to her eyelids in typical alien-cat fashion. The wink made her look as if she was closing her eyes from a bad migraine.

  “Hell, thanks a lot,” I said.

  “Hopefully, it will be myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy pleasure.”

  She tried to make the “my” sound like a purr, but it came out more like she was gargling.

  Then, with one more migraine wink, she headed off down the hall with her tail with a big black fur ball on the end whacking people who sat along the walls.

  “I can’t believe it,” my best friend Alex said. “You’ve been invited to a cucumber party.”

  I held the warm green cucumber up in front of me and studied it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know where it had been or how it had gotten so warm.

  “It is kind of hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  I’d heard of cucumber parties before. Hell, who hadn’t? They were the latest “in” things at science fiction conventions.

  The first time I’d heard of one had been two conventions ago at Biggerthanlife Con.

  And at Biggerthanyours Con last week, there had been rumors that people were actually thrown out of the hotel for participating in one.

  I stared at the cucumber in my hand. Now I was invited. Me, Buckey, a simple space pirate, at a cucumber party.

  The very idea of it made my stomach churn and my mouth water from excitement.

  And it was only Friday night. The convention was just getting going. This was going to be one damn good convention.

  “Can I go with you?” Alex asked and reached to fondle the cucumber.

  “Look, Alex. I don’t—”

  “It’s Hoover,” Alex said, demanding he be called by his costume character name. “And I don’t see why I can’t go.”

  I looked at the cucumber and then at Alex. He looked damn stupid in his Hoover, the Jovian Fur Merchant costume. He’d tacked two of his mother’s old fur coats together and it smelled of mothballs something awful. No girl in her right mind would get within ten feet of him, let alone join him in a cucumber party.

  But what the hell. This was a science fiction convention. Stranger things had happened. He just might get lucky.

  “All right,” I said. “You can come along.”

  Alex brightened right up and smiled a I’m-better-than-you smile at the guy dressed like Darth Vader sitting across the hall from him.

  The guy just breathed a little louder.

  “You got any idea how we can find the party?” I asked.

  I twisted the cucumber in my hands. “There doesn’t seem to be a room number here anywhere.”

  Alex’s smile dropped into a frown as he thought about trying to find the party. In a hotel that had over fifteen hundred rooms, if you didn’t know exactly where the party was, which wing, which floor, the only thing you were going to get was sore feet.

  Alex shrugged, so I held the cucumber up for the other dozen people sitting along the hall to see. “Anybody know where the cucumbers are meeting tonight?”

  All the people in the hall shook their heads and looked envious, except a young girl dressed as a flat-chested elf in green tights. “There’s usually a map on the cucumber,” she said. “At least that’s how I found it last night.”

  All the envious faces immediately turned toward her like they were all on the same string.

  I looked at her a little closer. She looked tired. For some reason, I took that to be a good sign.

  Alex took the cucumber from my hand and studied it. “It doesn’t seem to be a map of the hotel,” he said.

  “Of course not,” the tit-less elf said and looked disgusted. “If you can’t figure it out, then you don’t belong at the party.”

  I took the cucumber back from Alex and held it up so I could see it better in the hall light. Its skin looked more like the back of a frog. Sure enough, there etched in very fine lines was a map. Or what someone might call a map. It didn’t look so much like a map as a spider web made by a half-drunk spider.

  Definitely not a map of the hotel.

  Great. Just great.

  “Come on, Alex,” I said and stood. “I know where it’s at.”

  I set off down the hall in the direction of the elevators, letting Alex scramble after me. I really didn’t know where I was going, but I sure didn’t want to sit there and admit it to that no-tit elf and the heavy-breathing Vader.

  We took the cucumber back to my room and took turns trying to figure out what the map meant.

  After an hour, I had a headache and no real good ideas.

  Alex figured the entire map was a code for a room number in some alien language. Maybe Martian sanskrit or Antarian stone drawing.

  Fat lot of good that was going to do us, but Alex figured it was either room 816, 927, or 1419. He wouldn’t tell me how he came up with those numbers and I couldn’t come up with any at all, even holding the map up to the mirror.

  I figured if he wa
s wrong, we could always just walk the halls until we saw someone else with a cucumber.

  Room 816 did end up having a party going on in it. A two-person party in which the man, dressed like a Doc Smith Lensman, Lens and all, didn’t like being disturbed.

  No one was home in 927.

  At room 1419, Alex knocked. “This is the place,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  I just shrugged. If it wasn’t, I was going to need to go to the convention suite to get a Diet Coke and some cookies. No wonder the no-tit elf looked tired. She couldn’t find the party either.

  A woman with only a towel wrapped around her answered the door. She had green eyes, light blonde hair, and toenails painted bright orange. I was in love at first sight.

  I pushed Alex aside, took off my white-plumed hat and bowed slightly. “Excuse us. We seem to be having some—”

  “Midge,” the girl said, shouting back into the room. “They’re here.”

  “Well, let them in,” a voice said from deep in the room.

  The girl stepped back and let the door swing completely open.

  Alex nudged me. “I told you,” he whispered, and pushed past me into the room, leaving a smelly trail of mothballs.

  “Oh, God,” Alex said as he got past the bathroom door and entered the main part of the room.

  Orange Toenails motioned for me to come in, then closed the door behind me and let her towel drop to the floor.

  I don’t think I’ve ever had my mouth go so dry so suddenly as it did at that moment. I felt like the planet Dune had been transported to the top of my tongue.

  Orange Toenails had a great body. Medium sized boobs with huge brown nipples, light colored pubic hair, and a small butterfly tattoo on the inside of her right thigh.

  I must have kept walking as I stared at Orange Toenails, because I bumped into Alex who had stopped just inside the room.

  “Oh God,” he said, again.

  I glanced around to see what he was oh-Goding, even though I didn’t want to stop staring at the beautiful body of Orange Toenails and that butterfly tattoo in a place I so wanted to explore.

  On the closest of the room’s two beds was a long-haired woman without a stitch of clothes on. She had her legs slightly apart and I could see just a hint of Never-Never Land no one was going to have to fly to get to.

  “Oh God,” I think I said.

  Or Alex said it. I wasn’t really sure at that point.

  All I know is that my Buckey the Space Pirate costume was suddenly very tight in the crotch.

  Buckey Junior wanted out real bad.

  “You’re still dressed,” the woman on the bed said softly to Alex and me.

  Somehow I closed my mouth.

  Swallowing was out of the question.

  Orange Toenails reached for my belt and started pulling me toward the empty bed. “I’m so honored,” she said. “I’ve never made it with a famous writer.”

  I started unbuttoning my shirt as she worked on my pants.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Alex already had his mother’s fur coats off and was climbing on the bed.

  “I’ve read all your books,” Orange Toenails said.

  She helped me out of my pants.

  Buckey Junior saluted her.

  Right about then I certainly didn’t want to ask her just what the hell she was talking about. Hell, I hadn’t written any books. I could barely write a term paper when I was in school.

  But if this was the reception a writer got at these conventions, I was sure willing to learn.

  She had my pants off and pulled me down on the bed with her. “Just let me do all the work,” she said, kissing her way past my neck and heading down my chest.

  I think Buckey Junior waved hello as she got closer.

  “My pleasure,” I think I managed to choke out.

  On the other bed Alex was saying “Oh God.”

  Over and over again as the long-haired woman rode his mid section like she was riding a bull in a rodeo.

  I hoped for Alex’s sake she didn’t have spurs.

  Miss Orange Toenails swung her leg up over my chest and took Buckey Junior in her mouth at the very same moment she sat down on my face.

  She tasted of a cross between hotel soap and Oolong tea.

  I loved it.

  I might become a tea fan after this.

  She ran Buckey Junior in and out of her mouth with vacuum pump skill while at the same time moving her hips on my nose in a slight circular fashion.

  I tried to concentrate on letting my tongue explore the strange new world and kept thinking about going for a five-year mission, but with the excitement of the moment, Buckey Junior just couldn’t hold on.

  She worked at draining him dry, not letting one drop escape while I managed to find a world I had never explored with my tongue.

  Then she turned suddenly around and cuddled against my chest, pressing her boobs against my side and pressing her crotch into my leg.

  “That was really nice,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to stop the light fixture on the room from spinning. “That it was.”

  On the other bed, Alex let out one last “OH GOD” that they must have heard two floors up, the long-haired women threw her head back, and from my viewpoint, they crossed the line in a photo finish.

  “Would you sign one of your books for me?” Orange Toenails said, looking up at me and fluttering her big green eyes.

  “I’d love to,” I said, “but—”

  “Oh, nifty-keen,” she said.

  Nifty-keen? Who said that?

  She jumped from the bed, grabbed a stack of books off the dresser, and set them down beside me on the bed.

  Then she sat down cross-legged on the bed facing me. I could see all of the strange new world my nose and tongue had just explored.

  Buckey Junior twitched enviously at the sight.

  I forced myself to look down at the pile of books.

  The top one was “The Edge of Planet Ten” by Aaron Frost, Jr.

  Oh, no, she thought I was Aaron Frost. That’s why the reception. Alex had been wrong. This wasn’t the cucumber party. Now what the hell were we going to do?

  I flipped the book over. On the back jacket was a picture of Aaron Frost.

  I had to admit, he did look a little like me. Only a bunch older.

  What happened if he suddenly knocked at the door? Obviously he had been expected. That meant he was still on the way. The best thing Alex and I could do was hit the road quick.

  “Look,” I said, clearing my throat. “Since you both have been so nice to me, I’ve got a very special limited edition of this very book in my room.”

  I tapped the top book.

  “You do?” Alex asked. He didn’t understand what had happened, so I tried to give him the sign to be quiet.

  “I do,” I said. “And after this wonderful reception, I would love for both of you to have a copy, personally autographed by me. We’ll just run and get those and be right back.”

  “You’d do that for us?” she asked, looking almost in tears.

  “After this wonderful encounter, which I shall always remember, it’s the least I can do. Then I can sign all of these and maybe we can have a rematch. All right?”

  That sounded so weak, I couldn’t believe she’d fall for it.

  “Ohhhh…. That would be great,” Orange Toenails said.

  She bought it. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Why don’t I just stay right here?” Alex said.

  “No,” I said. “I need you with me. To help me find the books. We’ll be right back, ladies.” I jumped off the bed, grabbed Alex’s clothes, tossed them at him, then started putting mine back on. All the time I kept expecting to hear a knock at the door and it would be the real Aaron Frost with BIG friends.

  I would be dead for messing with his date for the night. I had this clear image in my mind of me being stoned by Aaron Frost fans with his books as I ran naked down the hall.

&nb
sp; “You promise you’ll come back?” Orange Toenails asked.

  I looked at where she was sitting cross-legged on the bed with all her charms exposed. “Of course,” I lied.

  Buckey Junior wanted me to take the chance and just stay for a second round. But somehow, I got my pants back on, Buckey Junior tucked safely away, and Alex out the door.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Alex asked as I halfway pushed him down the hall toward the elevators.

  “Wrong party,” I said.

  “You mean that wasn’t a cucumber party?”

  “Nope,” I said. “They thought I was Aaron Frost.”

  “The Aaron Frost?” Alex asked, then shook his head. “No wonder. The lady I was with said she had a story she wanted me to give to you to read. Lucky I didn’t ask her why like I was going to.”

  In the elevator, I punched the floor number for the bar. Damn, I needed a drink.

  Two floors down, two large-chested women dressed in harem girl costumes got on. Both looked really, really nice.

  Alex had grabbed the cucumber on the way out the door, so I handed it to the shortest of the two just before the bar floor.

  “Room 410,” I said, giving her the number of my room. “Midnight. Just the two of you.”

  She looked startled, then happy. “Thanks,” she said and waved as I pulled Alex off the elevator before he could ask me what I was doing and spoil everything.

  We’d be waiting for them with our own special cucumber party. And if this worked, I’d bring my own cucumbers to the next convention.

  Maybe a dozen of them.

  Maps and all.

  PATIENCE

  Patience comes

  To those who wait

  and wait

  and wait

  and wait

  and wait.

  But not necessarily

  lunch, good service,

  or sex.

  And not necessarily

  in that order.

  What came before in…

  THE ADVENTURES OF HAWK