When Tibbit-Noyse answered, it was with the voice of a child who weeps in the dark, alone.
The witch stepped back from the gurney, hands hanging at her sides, her face drawn with weariness but still serene.
“Ask,” she said. “He will answer.”
The general jerked his head, a marionette’s parody of his usual brisk nod, and moved a step forward. He took a breath and then covered his mouth to catch a cough, the kind of cough that announces severe nausea. Carefully, he swallowed, and said, “Alfred Reginald Tibbit-Noyse. Do you hear me?”
A pause. “Y-ye-yes.”
“Did you betray your country in a time of war?”
A pause. “Yes.”
Graham could see the dead greyish lungs work inside the ribcage, the greyish tongue inside the mouth.
“How did you betray your country?”
A pause. “I sent my men.” Pause. “To steal the dead.” Pause. “Behind enemy lines.”
The general sagged back on his heels. “That is a lie. Those men were sent out on my orders. How did you betray your country?”
A pause. “I sent my men.” Pause. “To die.” There was no emotion in the childish voice. It added calmly, “They were their mothers’ sons.”
“How did you know they were going to die?”
“. . . How could they.” Pause. “Not be doomed.”
“Did you send them into a trap?”
“. . . No.”
“Did you betray their movements to the enemy?”
“. . . No.”
“Then why did you kill yourself?” Against the dead man’s calm, the general’s frustration was strident.
“. . . I thought this war.” Pause. “Would swallow us all.” Pause. “I see now I was wrong.”
Healy raised a hand to his eyes and whispered a curse. The general’s shoulders bunched.
“Did you betray military secrets to the enemy?”
“. . . No.”
“To whom did you betray military secrets?”
“. . . No one.”
“Don’t you lie to me!” the general bellowed at the riddled corpse.
“He cannot lie,” the witch told him. Her voice was quietly reproachful. “He is dead.”
“. . . I do not lie.”
The general, heeding neither the live woman nor the dead man, continued to rap out questions. Graham could bear no more. He brushed past Healy to slip through the door. In the clean hot light of noon he vomited spit and bile and sank down to sit with his back against the wall. After a minute, the general’s driver climbed out of the staff car and offered him the last cigarette from a crumpled pack.
The battle became a part of history. The tide of the enemy’s forces was turned before it swamped the city; a new frontline was drawn. The scattered squads of the Special Desert Reconnaissance Group returned in good time, missing no more men than most units who had fought in the desert sands and carrying their bounty of enemy dead. Graham was given a medal for bravery on a recommendation by the late Colonel Tibbit-Noyse, and a new command: twelve recruits from other units, men with stomachs already toughened by war. He led them out on a routine mission, by a stroke of luck found and recovered the withered husk of a major whose insignia promised useful intelligence, and on the morning of the scheduled resurrection, the second morning of his fourday leave, he went to the hotel bar where he had learned of Tibbit-Noyse’s death and ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer.
He drank them, and several others like them, but the heat pressed the alcohol from his tissues before it could stupefy his mind. He gave up, paid his tab, and left. By this time the sunlight had thickened to the sticky amber of late afternoon. The ubiquitous flies made the only movement on the street. Graham settled his peaked cap on his head and blinked to accustom his eyes to the light, and when he looked again she was there.
She wore the yellow cotton dress. Her clean hair was soft about her face. Her eyes were wounded.
She said his name.
“Hello,” he said after an awkward minute. “How are you?”
“My superiors have sent an official protest to the War Office.”
“A protest?”
She looked down. “Because of the colonel’s resurrection. It has made things . . . a little more difficult than usual.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You have not –” She broke off, then raised her eyes to his. “You have not come to see me.”
“I’m sorry.” The alcohol seemed to be having a delayed effect on him now. The street teetered sluggishly beneath his feet. His throat closed on a bubble of air.
“It was hard,” she said. “It was the hardest I’ve ever had to do.”
Her dark eyes grew darker, and then there were tears on her face. “Please, John, I don’t want to do this any more. I don’t think I can do this any more. Please, help me; help me break free.”
She reached for him, and he knew what she meant. He remembered their nights together, his body remembered to the roots of his hair the night he almost took her completely. He also remembered the scratch her nails had left by his eye, and, more than anything, he remembered her gruesome infidelity with Tibbit-Noyse – with all the other dead men – and he flinched away.
She froze, still reaching.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She drew her arms across herself, clasped her elbows in her palms. “I understand.”
He opened his mouth, then realized he had nothing more to say. He touched his cap and walked away. The street was uneasy beneath his feet, the sun a furnace burn against his face, and he was blind with the image he carried with him: the look of relief that had flickered in the virgin’s eyes.
Blues in the Night
Sage Vivant
His penis beat against his palm as if it were his heart. Every pulse left him quaking and hornier but that didn’t slow the rhythm of his hand up and down, up and down, tugging his shaft the way he imagined she might.
He’d beaten off to girls before but this was different. He’d randomly pick classmates to fantasize about when the urge to masturbate overtook him. Now, however, it was the fantasizing about Carla that inspired the spanking of the monkey.
Anybody who knew about this fixation (and nobody did) would have called it a crush and told him he’d outgrow it. Maybe they’d be right but before that elusive level of maturity descended upon him, he wanted to revel in his hard-ons and linger on his fantasies. He wanted to recall Carla’s ethnic beauty gyrating above him on stage until his mind short-circuited from the repetition.
And what irony that his own parents were ultimately responsible for his rampant lust. On his eighteenth birthday last month, his father had given him tickets to Blues in the Night at the Rialto on opening night.
“I know how much you like opening nights,” his father smiled, handing him the ticket.
“And Leslie Uggams,” his mother added with a wink.
His playwright aspirations were no secret in the family, but the fact that he was drawn to comedy, not necessarily musicals, seemed to have escaped his parents. To them, one play was like any other – expensive.
He stroked himself now as he remembered that night in June, sitting in the front row, watching the dancers strut to “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” and being completely mesmerized by the dark-haired beauty with legs so perfect, he’d forgotten to breathe. He paid attention to the play only when she wasn’t on stage. When she was present, his mind slipped into his crotch and concentration was a hopeless undertaking. His hand now gripped his tumescent appreciation and fueled his memory: the way her sculpted legs flexed and stretched as she moved, the sheen of her wild curls, the look on her face that suggested so much . . . experience.
She danced like some people spoke – effortlessly and concisely. Her movements were bold and confident and as the gap between her legs opened and closed with the music’s rhythm, he pictured himself under her, watching the view from a much closer vantage point. Arms length, say.
/> He’d been with other women. Well, just one but he’d gotten into the pants of two others. So he knew how things could vary among women once you got past the clothing. Some were very hot and unbelievably wet. Others were willing enough but somehow lacking in heat and moisture. There was no doubt in his mind that not only did Carla have an abundance of both but she’d be happy to demonstrate how best to handle it.
He held on to the side of the sink as visions of her sensuous body undulated in his brain. With his free hand, he coaxed his desire from deep inside his balls until it slashed a gooey stripe against the tiled wall.
With his very limited income, he took in two more performances of Blues in the Night before the Fourth of July. He couldn’t afford front row seats but his aunt let him borrow her opera glasses, so even from the second balcony, he could focus fairly effectively on the hot little vixen who shimmied her way into his heart.
After the third performance, he could think only about how he could get her to shimmy into his shorts.
He waited by the exit marked “stage door” one night after the show but soon discovered that it was more of an historical designation than a functioning door. So, the next night, he hung around the theater’s front doors after the crowds poured out. No luck then, either. He looked up her name in the phone book and found no Carla Capozzi but a few “C Capozzi”s. When he dialed them, all three numbers were answered by men. He hung up at the sound of their voices.
His obsession had grown to the point where if he didn’t have an erection, he was in the process of getting one. His pants were constantly tight and his mood irritable. His mother noticed only his demeanor and commented on it with aggravating regularity.
“Why don’t you go to a play? You’ll feel better,” she’d say dismissively as she folded clothes or dried dishes. He wanted to yell that if she had a cock as raring to go as his, the last thing she’d recommend was more exposure to Carla.
One day she sent him to Bloomingdale’s to find something for his father’s upcoming birthday. Glad to have an excuse to get out of the house, he took the train into the city. As he walked west on East 60th Street, he saw the object of his affection walk by him on 3rd Avenue. She, too, was headed for Bloomingdale’s.
Fighting his instinct to run away in abject terror, he followed her at what he believed was a safe distance. She browsed the cosmetic counters with a certain aimless quality he found endearing. He would have figured her for a more directed kind of shopper.
He knew he had to act quickly. He knew there would be no second chance.
“Aren’t you Carla Capozzi?” He cocked his head in a gesture he’d seen among adults. It implied a nice mix of confusion and recollection, he’d always thought.
Her big brown eyes appraised him slowly, thoroughly. Even without her stage make-up, her dramatic features and coloring were striking. She read his face too well, for her mouth slipped into a wicked grin that made him feel naked.
“Yes,” she drawled. “Did you maybe go to school with me?” Mischief sparked her gaze because both of them were well aware that a good ten years separated their ages.
He blushed and decided not to try to hide it. “No, no,” he laughed. “I recognize you from Blues in the Night.”
“Well, you’re probably the only one,” she commented. “The show’s going to close next week. But thanks, anyway.” She extended her hand. “And you are?”
“Donald Marron,” he said distinctly in an attempt to keep from sputtering. His sweaty hand clasped her soft one, weakening his knees. Closing? How would he see her once that happened? The pressure to turn this meeting into something meaningful made his dick hard. Harder.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” he continued. “Will you be in something new?”
“As a matter of fact, it looks like I will. It’s called Cats. Andrew Lloyd Weber.”
He’d read all about it. “I’d love to hear more about it. Would you like to have coffee?” His heartbeat threatened to drown out his words. He’d never asked a girl – a woman – out before and prayed he wasn’t too eager.
The expression on her face wasn’t promising and his heart began to climb up his throat. In the brief pause that hung between them, the pause that would determine so much of his future, some small morsel of curiosity, some tiny grain of intrigue must have lodged itself in her psyche and she smiled. “Sure. Why not?”
She told him about her career as a dancer. Blues in the Night had been her first Broadway gig. Prior to that, she’d done only community theater and off-Broadway productions. She also sang and hoped to find a role that showcased that talent. He told her about his dreams of being a screenwriter or playwright.
As she spoke, his eyes were as active as his ears. He took her in wholly, from her thick, Italian locks to her dark eyes flecked with amber, to her luscious lips. The Danskin top (or was it a bodysuit?) she wore plunged low enough to reveal the elegant contours of her modest cleavage.
“How’d you like to see what happens backstage at a Broadway show?” she asked.
“I’d love it! When?”
“No time like the present.”
* * *
She whisked him off to the Winter Garden Theater, where the cast and crew of Cats scurried about with what seemed to be the most urgent of business. Half-built sets hung from the ceiling as whiskered men and women held impromptu conferences laced with song. Behind this cacophony were the remnants of an ice cream feast that had obviously been a crowd pleaser.
“Ice cream makes a great coffee chaser, don’t you think?” Carla winked as she handed him a tub of what looked like strawberry ice cream. She picked up a can of whipped cream and a squeeze bottle of chocolate, then took his hand and led him toward the dressing rooms.
He expected the rooms to be buzzing with people but the one he entered with Carla was empty. She locked the door behind them and breezed into the room, placing the sweet condiments on the counter that served as a long vanity table before the mirror-lined wall.
“Do you have spoons?” He ventured, peering into the tub of soft, nearly liquid ice cream and wondering how they would eat it.
She shot him another one of those wonderfully crooked grins. “You’re a creative person, Donald. Surely you can think of some way we could enjoy that ice cream.”
If her remark didn’t render him speechless, her peeling off her spandex top did the trick. She exposed her pretty breasts first, then slid the sleeves down her arms until they were off.
As his cock shot upward, a torrent of Catholic guilt showered down, engulfing him in a cloak of hot indecision. He knew what he wanted to do but the cloak, temporarily heavier than his lust, kept him immobile. She took the squeeze bottle and squirted chocolate lines across her pert breasts.
“Let me know when I look good enough to eat,” she smirked.
Now! Now! his inner altar boy shouted. As she stood smiling at him with an enticing mixture of challenge and unabashed fun, he stepped toward her. Though he had no notion of what he would do next, she didn’t seem put off by his confusion. Her steady gaze was fishing line to his flounder.
The closer he got to her, the more he realized his own power. His six foot one inch frame towering over her five foot six inch one notwithstanding, there was something in her eyes that communicated not just invitation but surrender. A silent, subtle shift occurred in his mind. Suddenly, gratefully, he knew how to proceed.
He grabbed the can of whipped cream and dotted her nipples with two air blasts of puffy white sweetness. She giggled and he laughed. Who knew going backstage would make him this happy?
He bent slightly toward her chest and traced the chocolate swirls with his tongue, savoring the slow infusion of cocoa and skin as it blended on his taste buds. He followed the swell of her breast until he reached the nipple and lapped like a kitten at the whipped cream until it was gone. He was beyond nervousness, beyond trembling. Everything in his brain and body was hard and compelling, propelling him into action without thought.
He unzipped his fly. She immediately dropped to her knees. It was she, not he, who whipped out his rock hardness and the sight as well as the heft of it shocked him. Had he ever been this excited before? No, never.
The familiar sputtering sound from the whipped cream can interrupted his penile fascination. The chilly cream nearly sizzled on his hot member but before he could register a real temperature change, her big brown eyes looked up at him boldly as his tip disappeared between her beautiful, full lips. She took the length of him down her throat – his head tickled the back of her throat. Her hands squeezed his ass cheeks while his own flailed for a place to land. Her head? The nearby table? The choice became moot as he erupted into her mouth in spurts of ecstasy that seemed to come from several cocks, for just when one stream stopped, another one began. Several rounds of gushing joy sent the room spinning. As if sensing his compromised balance, she held him firmly upright as she swallowed his satisfaction.
When he stopped calling out, he realized he’d been making too much noise. There he stood with his pants at his ankles, his still-hard cock bobbing near her face, and having possibly drawn unwanted attention to their little love nest. He felt himself blush.
“I’m sorry. I hope I wasn’t too loud,” he stammered, not nearly as contrite as he was euphoric.
She smiled, eyes still dancing but now glistening with something he couldn’t identify. “Don’t worry about it,” she chuckled, getting to her feet. “There’s so much going on out there, they can’t even hear themselves think.” She leaned her body, still sticky from the chocolate and cream, into his shirt. “Besides, I think you had fun.” She kissed him with unexpected tenderness.
“God, yes! But I’m afraid I had more fun than you did.”
“That may be true, but having you come like that was pretty damn fun for me, too. Anyway, who says we’re finished?”
Someone tried to open the door. Encountering the lock, they knocked. Donald turned to Carla, panic-stricken.
“I’m sure it’s just someone who needs to use the room. Zip up,” she patted his cock affectionately. As he complied, she admitted a pretty young blonde woman into the room.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 7 Page 56
