“Wow . . .” was about all that Bobby could manage to say. “It’s like . . . it’s like another planet!”
Ed Carpenter laughed good-naturedly. “Sure is something, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s the lowest piece of land on this planet, Bob, and hotter in the summer than the devil’s backside.” He pointed to a distant peak in the high craggy mountains on the other side of the Valley, where Bobby thought he could make out an actual frosting of snow near the top. “And yet there you have Mount Whitney,” Ed said, “which is the highest point in the continental US of A!”
“You’re right,” Bobby said softly, “this is a sight I’ll never forget, and I’ll never forget you folks for showing it to me, either.” And meant it.
The Carpenters were going to stay at Scotty’s Inn, which, Ed told him, was a tiny hotel where you had to book weeks in advance, and “something of an old folks’ home, Bob, you wouldn’t like it anyway.” The Dry Wells Dome was where the young folks went, lots of rooms he could afford, and it would be the best place to get a hitch to LA in the morning.
So they drove him down to the Fuller Dome in the center of the valley floor, and said good-bye in the air-conditioned car in the parking lot outside.
“Well, it was pleasant meeting you, young man,” Wilma said. “Good luck to you in your studies.”
“And don’t you let those Reds in UCLA pull the wool over your eyes, you hear?” Ed Carpenter said as they shook hands.
“I won’t, Ed,” Bobby told him. “Traveling with you folks has sure been an education.”
He meant it too, and not entirely sarcastically, either, for the Carpenters had taught him an important lesson. Which was that people could believe the foulest things and still be good folks at heart. A lot of the people who had thrown blood and shit on the American Embassy in Paris were probably just as sweet on a personal level as Ed and Wilma Carpenter.
“Politique politicienne!” he could hear his father saying, and for the first time, he thought he really understood what Dad meant.
Then he got out of the air-conditioned car and was nearly bowled over by the wall of heat. Talk about another planet! This was like stepping out of a spaceship air lock onto the surface of Venus. The cruel sun seared his unprotected eyes. He could feel it frying his skin. He could actually see the heat waves coming off the hot metal of the parked cars.
He stood there for a few moments, taking in the incredible experience and waving a last good-bye to Ed and Wilma as they drove off, and then trotted quickly to the Dome’s main entrance.
The Dry Wells Dome was air-conditioned, of course, but they kept it at a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit to simulate an attenuated desert experience, and there were palm trees and desert succulents, as well as a big swimming pool fashioned out of some clever synthetic that mimicked frozen dunes of sand. There were rude cabins scattered among the trees, and a kind of main street reminiscent of Disney World, half a dozen restaurants, a drugstore, a liquor store, boutiques, a saloon, a small hotel, all done up like a brand-new mining town out of the Old West.
It was crowded inside the Dome, mostly with people in their teens and twenties, most of them with deeply bronzed skin and showing plenty of it, the men in bathing trunks or brief bikinis, the women parading around bare-breasted, Midi-style.
Bobby went over to the hotel to rent a room, but the guy at the desk, ludicrous in a tightly tailored cowboy suit and ten-gallon hat, told him that nothing was available.
“What am I supposed to do?” Bobby moaned.
The ersatz cowboy looked him up and down. “Wal,” he drawled, “ya can stow your gear with me, partner, till you find yourself some pussy, good-lookin’ young kid like you shouldn’t have no trouble finding someone with an empty bed around here.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Are you kidding me, partner? What else does anyone come to Dirty Death for?”
For want of anything better to do, Bobby checked his pack and wandered over to the saloon. There were certainly plenty of girls around here who looked unattached, but there were plenty of guys who looked like they were on the make, and back in Paris, Bobby had not exactly been a lady-killer. He wasn’t a virgin, but he wouldn’t have to take off his shoes to count on his digits how many times he had gotten laid, either. Of course it was warm enough in here to sleep out under the trees if he could find a place where no one would roust him. . . .
The saloon was done up like an Old West bar, more or less. Rustic walls, and a wooden floor sprinkled with sawdust. A long wood-and-brass bar with stools in front and a mirror behind it, staffed by three bartenders dressed to look as if they had just stepped out of a cowboy movie. Round wooden tables. A big crystal chandelier.
The bar was full of bronzed young men and bare-breasted young women, eyeing each other, nuzzling each other, drinking together, slow-dancing naked breast to naked chest. Bobby felt like a boob in his jeans and Dodgers jacket, like Holden Caulfield with a hard-on walking down the beach at St.-Tropez.
Nervously, Bobby took a seat near one end of the bar, an empty stool on either side of him, and ordered a beer. The bartender gave him a funny look, but mercifully did not ask him to produce an identity card. Bobby sat there nursing a tasteless and watery American lager, stealing oblique glances at all the tantalizing naked flesh, and miserably contemplating a night of sleeping on the ground.
He was staring down into the diminishing yellow depths of his glass when he heard a female voice beside him say “A kir.”
A kir? He hadn’t heard the word or seen the drink since he left Paris.
“A what?” the bartender said.
“A kir, don’t be so jingo, gringo!”
There was a girl leaning over the empty stool next to him, her bare breasts dangling delicious centimeters from his forearm. She had long, sun-bleached blond hair flowing over her tanned shoulders, good average looks, she seemed to be about his age, and she was close enough for him to smell the bright sunny musk of her.
“How the hell am I supposed to make that?” the bartender demanded.
“Glass of white wine and a splash of crème de cassis,” Bobby ventured.
The girl looked over at Bobby and flashed him a radiant smile. “Dorky!” she exclaimed. “A man of the world in a Dodgers jacket out here in the depths of gringoville!”
“I’ve . . . uh . . . spent some time in France,” some instinct made Bobby say.
“You’ve been to Europe?” the girl practically squealed, sitting down on the stool next to him. “Make that two,” she told the bartender. “One for me, and one for . . . monsieur in the Dodgers jacket.”
“Bob,” Bobby said.
“Eileen. God, Bobby, how did you ever manage to get to Europe, what with the exit-visa restrictions, and all?”
Bobby hesitated. This was the first time since he had gotten off the plane that anyone had expressed anything but loathing for things European. Well, what the hell, it had gotten him this far, now hadn’t it?
“I was born there,” he told her. “In Paris.”
“Paris!” she cried, leaning closer, her eyes practically sparkling. “Oh yar! I never thought I’d get to fuck a Frenchman!”
“Uh . . . I’m not exactly a Frenchman . . . ,” Bobby stammered. “I mean, my father is an American, and I don’t exactly have American citizenship, but I do have an American passport, and—”
“Oh you’ll do!” Eileen declared, brushing his forearm with her hard bare nipples. “Well, come on, Bobby, tell me all about Paris!”
And over three kirs, he more or less did, leaving out the parts about his Russian mother, and his sister going to Yuri Gagarin, and precisely why his father had left the country, and building up the parts about Paris nightlife, and trips to the Côte d’Azur, and his nearly nonexistent experience with sophisticated French girls.
“So what are you doing in boring old California, then?” Eileen asked. By this time they had crowded together on the adjacent bar-stools and she had one bare arm flung around his shoulder, and her cheek almos
t pressed against his.
“I’m going to college in the States,” he told her. “UCLA or Berkeley, I haven’t decided which.”
“Fuck a Russian duck!” Eileen exclaimed. “I’m going to Berkeley! Forget UCLA! I grew up in LA, in fact I’ve been spending the summer at home with my parents, and I’ve been dating UCLA men. What a gang of gringos! You’d hate it there!”
“Well—”
“Hey, you want to buy me dinner and let me tell you about me?” Eileen said.
“Sure,” Bobby said.
“Great!” Eileen told him. “And here’s something to prove I’m gonna be worth it.” And she took his head in both hands, pressed her lips against his, pried his mouth open, and suddenly plunged her warm wriggling tongue deep, deep, into his mouth.
They went to a nearby Chinese restaurant, and, over moo shu pork, lobster in black bean sauce, and egg foo yung, Eileen did most of the talking, with one hand pressed against his thigh under the table as she used her chopsticks expertly with the other.
Her name was Eileen Sparrow. Her father was a real estate agent and her parents had a house in Beverly Hills, in the lowlands below Wilshire, admittedly, but Daddy had taken a second mortgage to buy up this land in Baja, and soon enough they’d probably be rich enough to move up into the Glen, or even Bel-Air. Which was not to say that she herself was some kind of gringo, you understand, you couldn’t choose your own parents, unfortunately, now could you? Not that she hadn’t been the perfect little spacebrain jingo till she started at Berkeley last year, where she was majoring in English at the moment, and gotten in with the Reds, who weren’t at all fooled by this crazed gringo jingo, and they’ll just love a real Frenchman from Paris, especially if he’s some kind of American too, I’m driving back up to Berkeley next Monday, you can stay in Tod’s room till then, he’s in the Army, can you believe it, we’ll have to tell Mommy and Daddy that you’re a classmate from school, they wouldn’t like the idea of me bringing home some guy I picked up in Dirty Death, and for chrissakes don’t tell them you’ve ever even been to Europe, Daddy hates the Peens, you just be sure to wear the Dodgers jacket, he just loves the Dodgers, what a mucho macho ducko schmuck . . .
“Okay,” she said, over the almond cookies, “now you pay the bill so we can get out of here and go back to my room and fuck.”
The room itself wasn’t much—just a TV set, a bureau, two nightstands, and a water bed—but Bobby wasn’t paying much attention to the decor. He was quite dazed, his cock was chafing impatiently against the zipper of his jeans, and his balls felt like they were about to explode.
The moment she closed the door, Eileen threw herself into his arms, thrust her tongue deep into his mouth again, and tumbled them onto the bed, where they rolled around groping and feeling each other until Bobby felt he was about to come in his pants.
At just this strategic point, Eileen disengaged herself, sprang up off the bed, leaned back up against the wall, and thrust her hand deep into her shorts. “Take off your clothes,” she said huskily, running her tongue slowly around her lips, wriggling her ass against the wall, and working her hand inside her pants. “Do it nice and slow.”
Bobby, in a red-hot trance, slowly undressed himself on the bed, while she stared straight into his eyes, rolling her head, wriggling against the wall, licking her wet lips, and masturbating herself.
“Stand up,” she told him when he was finally naked. Bobby stood up.
“Lean back against the wall.”
“Lean back against the wall?”
Eileen nodded, and sucked languidly on her own tongue. “This is really an important moment for me,” she said. “I’m about to suck my first French cock.”
I’m not really a Frenchman, Bobby was about to stammer, but he never got the words out, for suddenly she was kneeling on the floor before him, and her hands grabbed him by the buttocks, and her mouth slid all the way down his prick, and before he knew quite what was happening, he was getting the first blowjob of his life.
It was delicious, it was wonderful, it was better than anything he had ever imagined, and he wanted to make it last forever. But under the circumstances, it was a lost cause, and in no more than a couple of minutes, he exploded into a release that left him languid, and tingly, and quite limp, and more than a little embarrassed.
“Not bad,” Eileen said, rising to her feet, licking her lips. “Kinda quick come, but not bad.” She looked at him expectantly. “Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Well, now I’ve Frenched you, aren’t you gonna French me?”
“Huh?”
“Huh? What kind of Frenchman are you?”
“I told you, I’m not exactly a Frenchman . . . ,” Bobby stammered in embarrassed perplexity.
“Yeah, I know, but you’re not gonna tell me you never . . . you know . . .”
“Know what?”
“Jeez, sucked a cunt!” Eileen exclaimed in exasperation.
Bobby felt that he must be flushing scarlet. Eileen goggled at him for a moment, then a broad smile creased her moist lips. “You never have, have you?” she said softly. “This is going to be your first time. Oh yar! Too much! What luck!”
She pushed him back onto the bed on his back, and before Bobby quite knew what was happening, she was sitting astride his face, with her thighs clamped tightly around his head, and one hand in his hair, and the hairy quick of her pressed against his mouth.
Bobby had seen a certain amount of porn, and read a few cunnilingus scenes in novels, and had some vague notion of this most intimate feminine anatomy, but he had never been in this position before. Legend had led him to expect a certain odeur du poisson and a bad taste, but there was none of that, to his pleasant surprise; however, he did have a certain amount of trouble finding the target.
But Eileen Sparrow was a willing teacher—“Further down . . . no, a little higher . . . deeper . . . ah, that’s it! Use the tip of your tongue! Harder! Faster!”—and once he started to figure out what he was doing, he found he quite enjoyed it, especially when she started moaning in pleasure, and reached behind her, and began stroking his cock in time to the rhythm of his tongue.
By the time she came in his mouth with a loud scream, Bobby’s nervousness and trepidation were quite gone, and he felt relaxed, and manly, and confident, and ready for more.
He rolled her over onto her back and did it in the old traditional missionary position. This time she came long before he neared the top again, and he was able to give her yet a third orgasm before he spent himself.
Afterward, as they lay there side by side, he felt dreamily content, and proud, and macho, a man of the world at last indeed. Nevertheless, he found himself laughing.
“Hey, what’s so funny, Bobby?”
“I was just thinking,” Bobby said, “in Paris, all I wanted to do was come to the States and learn how to be a real American. And now here I am, and what do I learn? How to be un vrai Français!”
“Oooh, you’re so cute!” Eileen squealed, hugging him convulsively. “They’re just gonna love you in Berkeley, my little gringo froggie!”
* * *
Billy Allen: “I don’t get it, Senator—”
Representative Carson: “Not yet, Billy, the people of the great State of Texas don’t get to elect me till November.”
Billy Allen: “Well, Congressman, or soon-to-be Senator-elect, or whatever—Harry—why did we buy up a load of Mexican debt that everyone knows isn’t worth its weight in toilet paper? How can you support such a crazy move, especially in an election year?”
Representative Carson: “It’s bailed out a lot of banks and private investors who could have gotten into deep trouble otherwise, many of them in Texas.”
Billy Allen: “At the taxpayers’ expense! A lot of people think it’s pretty outrageous to help out the same country that’s harassing American citizens in Baja. A lot of people think the Mexicans will just default, leaving us holding the bag. I mean, didn’t we just—”
&nbs
p; Representative Carson: “We’re not Common Europe, and Mexico’s not the United States. If they can’t come up with the cash, well, we can always take it out in trade . . . real estate, for example.”
Billy Allen: “You mean invade Baja California?”
Representative Carson: “Oh, I wouldn’t call it invasion, Billy. After all, if you hold the mortgage on a piece of property and the owners can’t meet the payments, what else can you do to protect your investment but foreclose?”
—Newspeak, with Billy Allen
* * *
XIV
Eileen was appalled to learn that Bobby had no driver’s license, not even a European one, which might not exactly be in his favor if they got chipped while he was driving, but which would at least make her legal. “Nosey-josey,” she declared when he offered to take the chance and drive anyway, “that’s a thousand-dollar fine and a three-month suspension, and Daddy would have me executed!”
So they drove up out of Death Valley with Eileen at the wheel of her snappy little two-seat Chevy electrosport, Bobby’s hand in her crotch on the empty stretch of road running through the dry high desert, and she actually had him bring her off at 120 kph just before the road met the main freeway.
The six-lane freeway ran up over the San Bernardino Mountains toward the Los Angeles Basin through more arid empty desert country, at least for the first hour or so, but Bobby felt as if he had suddenly crossed an invisible frontier as soon as they hit it.
The traffic thickened, cars cut in and out aggressively, big heavy-duty long haulers rumbled along in the right-hand lane, many of them carrying ominous-looking loads concealed under khaki and Air Force–blue tarps, highway patrol helicopters buzzed overhead like angry dragonflies, and military aircraft cracked through the air high above at supersonic speed.
About forty minutes out of San Bernardino, the billboards started, and then the endless sprawl of low tract houses, industrial parks surrounded by wire fences, shopping malls surrounded by immense parking lots, and finally a heavy miasma of smog, dirty brown in the distance, sparkly blue-gray up close, washing out the landscape.
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