The blood was trickling down her finger as she went to her bathroom and grabbed a cloth to stop the bleeding. With her hands shaking, she managed to get down a headache powder, only to throw it up, gagging. She went and sat on the edge of the bed. She couldn’t cry. She had cried too much over Jack, so much that there were no tears left. She knew he was unfaithful to her, but this was the first time she had personally witnessed it. He hadn’t even cared that she would catch him.
What went wrong between them? she asked herself. She instinctively knew the question should have been, What was ever right? It hadn’t been right since the beginning. She blamed herself, her failures, her inadequacies, for Jack’s wandering.
They had met in Brighton in 1945 during a celebration of the news that Berlin had fallen. Jack was a sergeant in the army’s quartermaster corps and she was a nurse at an army hospital. She had been immediately taken by his brash, assertive personality, even by the undercurrent of aggression that she sensed lay just beneath the surface. She had been born and raised on the small farm her father maintained when he went into semiretirement. She considered herself more countrified than city-wise, as neither pretty nor ugly, as neither intelligent nor base stupid. At school she had not been brilliant, as her older half-brother, Nick’s father, had been, nor had she gathered many friends. Average was how she thought of herself, with little to offer a nice-looking, ambitious young man who intended to make something of himself after he got out of the army.
Like most girls her age, she thought sex was something that was supposed to come only after marriage. She had no knowledge of birth-control methods, although she heard the other nurses openly talk about the “rubbers” men used.
During the celebration dance, Jack had nearly gotten into a fight with another soldier after he and the man rudely bumped into each other on the dance floor, both a bit tipsy. Jack was quick to anger and the other man had backed down, but the military police officer asked Jack to leave. She left with him. He took her out back where a friend’s car was parked. They got into the backseat and Jack pulled out a whiskey flask. He took long swigs and gave it to her. She hated the taste, the burning sensation, but she had fallen for Jack and would have drunk plumber’s drain cleaner if he’d asked her.
They had started with kissing and then his hand went inside her blouse and pulled off her bra. Her breasts were full and firm and they were her one secret vanity. He told her they were “better than most I’ve seen” and that made her happy. His hand went up her dress and inside her drawers. It was the first time she had done any heavy petting, the first time a man had touched her between the legs. She was intoxicated with Jack and she surrendered herself to him as he found her love button. His touch put her on fire. She had no idea that a man’s fingers could create such desire in her.
Her good sense told her she should not permit it, but she didn’t resist as he pulled up her skirt and slipped off her panties. He pulled off his own pants and shorts and she stared at the sight of his erect penis. “Biggest cock in the unit,” he told her, grabbing it and wagging it. “Take it.” He forced her hand over it and she gripped it, feeling its masculine power. “Taste it,” he told her. He pushed her head down to it and she resisted, not knowing what she was supposed to do. His cock was red and swollen, almost purple in the dim light coming from a nearby street lamp. “Put it in your mouth,” he said, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, she was too frightened. She kissed the tip of it and pulled herself away.
He grabbed her by her bare legs and pulled her across the seat, forcing her down, clumsily getting on top of her. There wasn’t enough room across the backseat for them to stretch out and his knees were bent, his legs up, as he straddled atop her. She was wet, dripping from excitement, as he slid into her with surprising ease. His penis encountered her maidenhead and she cried out as he broke through.
The ecstasy was short. His cock exploded in her, pumping wildly. She spread her legs wider, enraptured by the sensation, but then he was spent. He pulled away from her and sat up, taking a swig from his whiskey flask, no concern for her own pleasure.
Two months later, when he returned from an assignment on the French coast, she broke the news to him that she was pregnant.
The fact that she was expecting had been worrisome and exciting to her. It turned into a horror when she saw his face as he got the news. “Fucking bitch,” he said. He raised his hand in a fist and she had staggered backwards, almost falling.
Fucking bitch. She heard the words over and over during the four years they had been married. He had done “the right thing,” as he put it, by marrying her. Her father had not been pleased by the news but had given her an advance on her modest inheritance as a wedding present. That advance was enough for them to come to the colony where Jack had a cousin who was running the plantation. He taught Jack how to grow and process sugarcane and then quickly returned to England.
Fucking bitch. How many times had he used that phrase when he was down or angry and blamed her for the failures in his life? She remembered the first time he hit her. They were newly married and she was five months pregnant when he found out that he’d lost part of the money her father gave them. He had foolishly trusted an army buddy who had a sure thing, selling used army tires to civilians desperate for anything with rubber still on that a car could ride on, but the friend ended up getting arrested because he was stealing the tires.
Jack had gotten drunk at the news. Liquor did something to him. Her father said he couldn’t hold his liquor. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it was obvious that alcohol seemed to have the effect of releasing his aggressions, of making him louder and angrier.
She came up from behind him as he sat on a stuffed chair and drank beer, putting her arms around his neck to soothe his hurt.
“Get away from me, you fucking bitch!” Without turning, he hit her with his fist, smacking her in the face. She was knocked backwards, hitting a table and falling over. Her nose bled and swelled.
It wasn’t until an hour later that she noticed the bleeding from between her legs. At the hospital, she told them she had tripped and fallen.
She lost the baby that night and spent four days in the hospital fighting an infection. When she got out of the hospital, carrying the news that she would never have a child, Jack was contrite, almost painfully remorseful.
She never said a word about the incident, about the loss of the child she carried or the ones she never would have. Neither of them ever spoke about it.
His repentance lasted three months before he got drunk and hit her again.
It soon became a cycle in their lives, a way of living. Anger would slowly build up in him, over a period of weeks, sometimes months; then he would hit her, lashing out at her, calling her names, blaming her for his failures, taunting her that he could have been somebody if she hadn’t tricked him into marrying her.
Afterwards he would hold her, sometimes even cry as he hugged her and told her how much he loved her and how sorry he was.
Her logical mind told her that she wasn’t at blame for the beatings, but she carried guilt for the pregnancy that forced him into marrying her, a voice inside her saying that she was a failure, that had she been a better wife, a better person, Jack would have treated her better, that she was only getting what she deserved.
Her head pounded. She went into the bathroom and took more of the headache powder, then took off her clothes and lay atop the bed with a cool wet cloth across her forehead, her eyes closed. In her mind she could still visualize Jack and the girl, his penis inside her, Jack pumping back and forth. She hated the scene, hated Jack for the humiliation, but in a strange way, she found herself getting aroused. Sex between her and Jack had never been as exciting as it was the first time in the backseat of a car. He always seemed to get aroused quickly and ejaculate fast. She had heard that some women had orgasms during sex, but she had never experienced one, although when Jack’s penis penetrated against her clitoris just right, she had at times beco
me extremely aroused.
But she never got that release, that electrifying sensation she had heard another woman describe to her. She had been terribly embarrassed by the woman’s bluntness over tea and biscuits, but the conversation seemed to come back to her at certain times of the month when she felt eager for a man’s touch.
She felt that same feeling of need for sexual release last night when she went to bed and Jack snored next to her, and again that morning when she awoke and he was already gone. She tried to get rid of the image of Jack fucking a girl who was probably no more than sixteen or seventeen, but it kept coming back to her, replaying in her mind. Ann was an attractive young woman, just the type to attract a philanderer like Jack, though she suspected Jack was easily attracted to almost anything feminine.
Jack must have seen her in the kitchen and chased her into the breezeway, Sarah thought, the girl giving just enough resistance to make it interesting. Caught in the breezeway, probably kissed her—no, that wasn’t like Jack, he probably first went for her breasts, he liked breasts, “I’m a breast man,” he said, the first time he petted hers. Sarah noticed the girl’s breasts when she peered at them from the kitchen; they were full and firm, just the kind Jack liked. The girl probably didn’t wear underwear, not all women did in the hot climate, and Jack liked that, too. He would often point out the ones that weren’t wearing anything under their dresses when they drove along the road or through town.
Replaying the scene in her mind again, she found that Jack was no longer in the picture—suddenly it was Nick. She saw him naked, glowing white against the satin ebony of the girl’s dark body, pulling his hips back and forth, his cock slipping back and forth in the girl’s vagina.
She had seen Nick naked one day when she carried a lunch for him out to the fields. A worker told her he’d gone down to the river to cool off. She arrived at the riverbank just as he came out of the water, unaware of her presence.
He was tall and slender, his skin almost hairless, his pubic hair golden. She noticed his penis had not been erect, but was full, unlike Jack’s unless he was aroused. She had seen the male genitals when she was a nurse but had had a clinical detachment for them. They looked like limp little white snails when they were down and an angry rhino horn when excited. Seeing Nick’s penis had aroused her more than she’d been aroused since the first time she and Jack had made love.
She realized that it wasn’t just seeing his male organ that day that got her excited. There was something about Nick that had stirred her womanhood. In a way, she supposed, it was the fact that she had admired his father so much. She had to admit to herself that when she was a young girl going through puberty, she even had fantasies about having sex with his father. She was aware that children raised in the same household generally were not sexually attracted to each other, but by the time she was a young girl, Peter was gone from the house, off to college and Europe.
From the moment she met Nick, she had felt sexual tension between them. Once she had even seen him get an erection when they were sitting close together, talking. It had excited her and she had gone to bed that night thinking about Nick and his naked body. Was it incest if he was only her half-nephew? She had gotten immediate guilt as the word incest ran through her head.
The image was in her mind now, about the full penis she’d seen getting erect, about him entering the girl her husband had been fucking.
As she lay on the bed, her hand went inside her panties and between her legs. She was already wet. The flow of sexual juices increased as she rubbed the lips of her vulva. Her fingers found her sensitive clitoris and she gently massaged it as she imagined herself lying on the bed as Nick stood by the bed, the girl bent over in front of him, his penis in her, stroking her, as Jack called it, “doggy style.”
As the girl bent over the bed, she leaned farther down, until her head hovered above Sarah’s. Sarah pushed her breast at the girl. Smiling, the girl took the breast between her full lips and wrapped her tongue around the nipple and sucked.
Sarah’s hands found the girl’s ripe breasts and fondled them, then pulled her down so Sarah could take the breasts in her mouth. Slowly the girl’s tongue moved down Sarah’s waist and thighs to the bushy mound of hair between her legs.
Nick withdrew from the girl and mounted Sarah, his stiff white cock thrusting between her legs, caressing her love button as he slid back and forth.…
30
Corozal, 1955
“It keeps your pecker stiff.”
That was my explanation to Suez for why Sarita Garcia’s rum was such a hit. We had just returned from a trip to Havana, Cuba, landing at a small “airfield”—basically a level pasture near his house—and had gotten out of his plane when I answered his question.
He had flown us to Havana and back in his two-seater Bulldog. I had been driven to letting him fly me to Havana by the Mother of All Necessities—money. My venture into the booze-distilling business had taken a queer sort of turn—no one gave a damn about my counterfeit-label vodka, no one gave a damn about my counterfeit-label rum, but the one product that I manufactured under my own brand name was a big hit.
We had a bumpy trip home, hitting updrafts and down-drafts and headwinds and tailwinds until I was ready to get out at ten thousand feet and walk.
“Chin up, lad,” Suez said, after we dropped five hundred feet in seconds and my stomach ended up between my teeth. “We’ll tough it up all right.”
“Fuck you and your good spirits. Just get me back to earth.”
“Hurricane weather,” Suez said. “I feel it in my bones.”
You didn’t need Sarita’s Garifuna magic or Suez’s weather-sensitive bones to know a blow was coming—it was September, the middle of the hurricane season. I was just glad to get my feet on the ground before the heavy winds and downpour started. I’d been through good blows every year during the six years I’d been in the colony, but for people who’d lived through one or two really devastating hurricanes, the same thought was always on their minds—was this year’s going to be another Big One?
“I don’t feel a thing when I drink the stuff,” I said, still answering his question about Sarita’s rum concoction, “but everyone I talk to claims it makes them horny. Men swear on the stuff and women have been buying it for their men.”
Garcia’s Widow was the name I had jokingly given the brand when Sarita insisted on brewing her own rum concoction. She was a lush, sensuous widow, and again, jokingly, I had used a picture of her in a black widow’s dress and red rose on the label. It wasn’t long until that label was becoming a name brand everywhere in the West Indies. I had gone to Havana to make peace with the cartel that controlled the region’s rum business, agreeing to stop counterfeiting labels and pushing my own brand with their help.
“It just goes to show you,” Suez said, “the honest path is always the best path.”
“Right.” Right, hell. “Honest” success had come to me purely by accident. And I didn’t know how really honest it was to sell booze as an aphrodisiac, anyway.
“I think we made it back just in time,” Suez said. “Can you feel it? It’s going to be a big one.”
We drove in silence for a moment before I spoke aloud a thought that had been nagging me since I left Havana. “I’m going to Havana.”
“You just got back from there.”
“I mean, I’m going to go there to live.” I had been really struck by the city, by its energy, beautiful women, exciting cafes and casinos. “I don’t see spending the rest of my life in the colony; there’s an exciting world out there.”
“You can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Par-ee,” Suez sang. “I’ve been expecting it. But what about the distilling business?”
“I’ll take it with me. Cuba produces more sugarcane than the colony does. Sarita won’t mind, I’ll buy her out. She’s been talking about going back down south, anyway. With the money she’s made, she’ll be Queen of the Garifuna.”
There was nothing hol
ding me in the colony. Suez and Sarita were friends, and I’d made other friends, but I had not permitted myself to become emotionally attached to anyone. The one exception was Sarah. I felt a strong connection with her. And pain for her. The years had not improved Jack’s temperament—or his philandering. My social relationship with him was limited to a brief nod and a muttered, “How you doing?”
“So the colony isn’t good enough for you, eh?” Suez said. “Would think New York or London would be more up your alley.”
“Too much gray concrete, car exhaust and people too stressed out by everyday life to be polite. They remind me of Leningrad.”
I was tired of jungle, dirt roads, sleepy villages and watching out for snakes in the sugarcane fields. Add to that outdoor loos with spiders and scorpions sleeping under the toilet lid—or even just stepping into vegetation to relieve one’s self and wondering what was going to take a bite out of your rear end when you squatted.
I wanted lights and action and women who sparkled with diamonds and slinky dresses and smelled of exotic perfumes.
“They’re all hiding,” Suez said.
“Who’s hiding?”
“The birds and bees and beasts of the forest. Notice how quiet it is? They’ve gone under cover. They can feel it in their bones, too, there’s a big blow coming. You know what happened in ’31 in Belize Town, don’t you?”
“Bunch of people got killed.”
“It was the way they got it that was insane. They were having some sort of festival, just like the Flower Celebration they’re having in Corozal today. People were literally caught out in the open when the storm suddenly struck, hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds, ten-foot waves swept across the town, thousands drowned.”
The Betrayers Page 17
