Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

by Ray Garton

  She wasn't.

  In the middle of our third week together, Jayne went into the kitchen to make lemonade when I arrived. I spotted her cushion on a chair against the wall and, knowing that her firm, round ass squirmed on that cushion during church services each week, I couldn't resist sitting on it myself. I gulped the cry of pain that came from my mouth as I bounded off the chair. What felt like hundreds of tiny needles had punctured my ass. It was made of heavy brown corduroy and was flat and hard on the bottom. But it was not cushiony.

  I carefully touched it, picked it up and examined it. The cushion was stuffed with tacks.

  When I heard her coming, I dropped the cushion, spun around and tried to return her smile. She leaned forward to put the tray of lemonade on the coffee table and I stared at her ass, thinking of how she always kept it covered when we fucked, realizing that perhaps it wasn't as smooth and touchable as I'd thought.

  For a while, my thoughts were on that cushion and the questions it raised. But as we began to fuck—and that's what we did; I preferred to think at the time, in a naive first-love way, that we were MAKING LOVE, but that simply wasn't the case—she started calling out again and I listened carefully to her words.

  "I'm sorry...punish me...I'm so sorry I made you hard...puh-punish me, Daddy, punish me!"

  I stopped when the words registered, but she reached back and clutched my thigh, dug her nails in, and cried, "Don't stop!"

  I think she tried to hide her words after that, but I knew what she was saying. I know now—and probably knew then, to some extent, although I didn't admit it to myself—that I should have seen that something was very wrong with quiet, timid Miss Potter and I should have stopped seeing her immediately. But she was my first lover and my first addiction. I never allowed myself to consider ending our relationship; I knew I couldn't. But her cries for punishment—from her father!—stayed with me and echoed in my dreams.

  Jayne told me to return on Sunday, three days later. It was our longest separation yet and made me see just how attached I had become to our visits. To her.

  I fidgeted a lot as I watched her in church that Saturday. After the service, there was a potluck lunch and I went to the car to help Mom carry in the food she'd brought. I asked her what she knew about Miss Potter, but she obviously didn't want to talk about her, so I dropped it. After lunch, as Dad and I were bringing the freshly washed dishes back to the car, he said, "Your mother said you asked about Miss Potter. How come? You hear something?"

  I got more nervous than usual. "No," I said. "I just wondered...well, she's so involved in the church but has no friends, no family. Just wondered, that's all."

  "Well, I'll tell you. Get in." We got in the front seat and he chewed on a toothpick as he spoke, moving it from side to side with his tongue. "Miss Potter's a good woman. She's devoted to the church but gets no thanks for it. Your mom doesn't like talking about her because...well, she just doesn't think it's right. There's a lot of people in this church could take a lesson from your mom. Anyway, when Miss Potter was a little girl, her father, Hudson Potter, was pastor of this church. One night when she was nine or ten, Jayne left her house, walked to the police station and said her daddy was...molesting her. Sexually." He cocked a brow. "Know what I mean?"

  I nodded, feeling a chill coming on.

  "There was a big scandal. Pastor Potter was suspended for nearly a year. Stopped coming to church and just stayed in their little house by the grammar school. Nothing was done, really. It was all hushed up. One Sabbath about eighteen months later, Jayne asked to speak before the congregation. Said she'd made it all up after having an argument with her daddy. The evil had taken hold of her, but now the Holy Spirit was moving her to make amends. Everyone nodded and clicked their tongues like they'd suspected as much all along and offered to return Potter to the pulpit. But by then he'd become a recluse. Most said his daughter had broken him. Ruined him with her cruel lies. He died at home about a year later. Jayne's never been forgiven, even though most of the people here don't even know what happened."

  "Do ... do you think she was telling the truth?"

  He chewed on the toothpick a moment. "That's between her and God, son."

  It was another warning I should have heeded but didn't. Five deadly words occurred to me after hearing Dad's story: Maybe I can help her.

  After sex the next day, when Jayne once again refused to let me touch her, I said, "But I want to. You...you do things to me that feel so good, but...you won't let me touch you. I want to make you feel good, too."

  "That's what you want?" she whispered, smiling.

  "Yes."

  "You'll do anything I want?"

  I smiled. "Of course."

  God, I was such a babe in the woods.

  "Then come back on Tuesday at three and you can."

  My next warning came Tuesday morning when I went grocery shopping for Mom. As I left the store hugging two brown bags, I saw Gary leaning against the car. He looked horribly pale and thin in the bright sunlight. Before I could greet him, Gary said, "I saw you leaving her place, Paul. Twice."

  "What're you—"

  "You know. Stay away from her. She's sick." He stared at me silently for a long moment, whispered, "She'll make you do bad things," then hurried away, leaving me with my groceries.

  It bothered me, yes. I gave it careful thought, yes. But did I do what he said?

  No.

  Jayne had the bed open when I arrived and immediately began to undress me, whispering, "You promised...anything I ask...anything that will make me feel good." She had me lie on my back, reached under the bed for something, then put it on the bed beside me. Hiking the robe up only slightly, she turned her back to me, straddled me, and sighed as I entered. She moved on me slowly for a moment, then pointed to the object on the bed, rasping, "Take that."

  I did. It was a three-foot-long whip with three strips of braided leather sprouting from the handle, each knotted at the end.

  "Now, whip me!" she hissed.

  When I stuttered for a moment, she repeated the order firmly. My first strike was weak and uncertain, and she cried, "Harder!" I brought the whip down again—"Harder!"—and again—"Har-derrr!"— until it was smacking loudly against the taut terrycloth on her back. "Yes!" she cried, bucking furiously on me. "Punish me! I'm sorry I made you hard, Daddy, sorry I told, sorry, sorry, sorrysorrySORRY! Punish me!" Her laughter was breathy and high, void of humor but so full of joy. I think that's what did it to me, what shattered my initial fear of and disdain for the act: her joy. She loved it.

  We were both out of breath afterward and neither of us spoke. As she lay panting on the bed, moaning with each exhalation, I slowly dressed, then left.

  At home, I went to my bed in a daze, thinking of everything—my household chores, a phone call I had to make, maybe driving down to Napa tomorrow—except what I had just done.

  My visits to Jayne's trailer became a blur after that. The whip always awaited me on the bed. She never removed her robe. We fucked in various positions, and with each blow of the whip she cried out with delight. After a while, so did I. Although I never admitted it to myself then, I came to enjoy those whippings. Part of it was the pleasure she derived from her pain. But there was something else, something I couldn't have identified back then if I'd tried or wanted to, something within me that remained hidden and dormant until I took the whip in my hand. Then it crawled form its lair, suddenly in command, and swelled with pleasure with each strike. While most of those visits are hazy memories, even after only ten years, I vividly remember the day she finally took me to her bedroom.

  It was a small trailer, so I assumed she slept on the sofa bed. Not so. Jayne had simply been preparing me for her bedroom.

  In the living room, she opened my pants, knelt down and began licking my cock. "This is our secret," she whispered, attacking my erection voraciously with lips, tongue and hands. "I'm sharing it with you because you're...so...good to me." She brought me t
o the edge quickly and when she saw how I was trembling, she mumbled, "Come. Come on my face." I did and she laughed, rubbing my semen over her face and neck. She stood and kissed me tenderly. I was startled by the realization that it was our first kiss. Staring intensely into my eyes, she breathed, "I...know...you'll be so...good...to me." Then she led me to the back of the trailer.

  Just as a church is a house of God, Jayne's little bedroom was a house of pain. The window was blackened and dim light bled through the red shade of the room's single tiny lamp. It was a garden of chains and straps and pulleys all tediously connected and threaded through eyelets in the walls and ceiling. There in the dark, it made no sense visually. One wall was covered with whips of various lengths and designs. Paddles and manacles and small insect-like clamps hung from hooks. Mounted above them was a long, barbed, harpoon-like object. I wanted to be horrified by it all, and perhaps I pretended to be at first. But as that creature inside me began to awaken, teasingly flicking its black tongue, I shivered with anticipation.

  Then I saw the oddest, most incongruous thing of all hanging on the wall just above the head of the bed: A large framed photograph of a man with thick black-and-silver hair, narrow glistening eyes that seemed to bore into my head, and a craggy face as cold as steel. Pastor Hudson Potter, I was certain.

  As I began to undress, Jayne dropped her robe and quickly turned off the light. But in that instant, I saw the scars and calluses on her body. All over her body.

  She lit a candle and took some of the accoutrements from the wall: a short whip, manacles, clamps, spherical weights on thin chains...and that barbed rod. She attached the clamps to her labia, then the weights to the clamps, groaning through clenched teeth. The tender flesh of her pussy hung impossibly low, like the flabby, sinking skin of a very old woman. Climbing onto the bed, she put the manacles on her wrists and ankles and had me attach them to the chains hanging from the ceiling. At her request, I turned the crank on the wall and she slowly rose a few feet above the bed, weights dangling from her rubbery labia. I was trembling as I flipped the latch that locked the crank.

  "Now," she whispered, "whip me. Punish me."

  I started slowly, like the first time, whipping her legs and sides as I knelt on the bed.

  "No, no! My cunt! Whip my filthy, sinful, evil cunt!"

  "Juh-Jayne, I can't—"

  "Do it!"

  I did.

  She writhed and laughed and cried obscene apologies, her head hanging back so she could look at her father's icy face. The weights bobbed and she began to bleed as the teeth of the clamps bit into her flesh.

  That was when I began to laugh and whip her harder. My cock was rigid and I began to stroke it with my free hand, breathing faster.

  "Now, Paul, now! Put it in me!"

  I stopped, confused. "What—"

  "The rod!" she growled. "Stick it in me. All the way in. Fuck me with it. Punish me."

  I hesitantly lifted the pointed rod from the bed. Barbs curved like small evil grins. Something happened to me then. A clean bright light inside me went out and a ragged hot flame spat up in its place. I think I smiled as I slid the rod into Jayne.

  "Fuck me with it Daddy Daddy I'm sorry fuck me—"

  A bit deeper.

  "—Daddy sorry I told sorry I made you hard sorry Daddy punish me fuck meee!"

  Until the first barb was touching her vagina. I think it was the blood that stopped me. One of the weights plopped onto the bed taking a piece of flesh with it and I caught some blood on my face. I realized what I was about to do and gasped, pulled out the rod, dropped it and ran to the bathroom to vomit. It wasn't because I was horrified or disgusted by what I was doing, but because I suddenly knew how badly I wanted to do it.

  Jayne screamed obscenities at me as I lowered her to the bed, unhooked the manacles, then dressed. As I left her for the last time, I heard her crying, "I'm sorry, Daddy, so sorry. I need to be punished. Punished."

  Gary Sigman committed suicide two years later. Had Jayne done that long before, things would have been very different for us all, especially for the boy who finally did what she wanted. But suicide, of course, is an unpardonable sin.

  Despite my parents' disapproval, I drifted away from the church. Instead of attending an Adventist college, as they wanted, I went to UCLA. There I met Roz, a beautiful business major. One night while we were making love, I began to pound the mattress with my fist, lost in passion. When I finally heard her screams, I realized it wasn't the mattress I was pounding. I expected her to press charges, but she didn't. I paid her dental bill and never saw her again.

  I tried prostitutes for a while, but they weren't safe. One night I left a motel room in Hollywood and met the girl's pimp in the parking lot. When he saw the blood on my hand and shirt, he beat me senseless. When he hurried in to check on his girl, I limped to my car and left, certain he would kill me if I didn't.

  I remained parked before the boy's house in Manning for two hours, watching the reporters surrounding the front yard.

  I considered visiting my parents, but they would want me to stay a while and I couldn't. I had to get back to my pet, Clarissa. Sometimes, if left alone too long, she stops eating, just out of spite. Sometimes I have to force feed her.

  I found her on Sunset Boulevard. In the right light, she even looks a bit like Jayne. She's about seventeen or so and says she has no family. I keep her in a box in the spare bedroom.

  I finally started the car, drove away from the house, and left Manning.

  Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, short stories, and essays for more than 30 years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, suspense, and even comedy. His titles include Live Girls, Ravenous, The Loveliest Dead, Sex and Violence in Hollywood, Meds, and many others. His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and have been collected in books like Methods of Madness, Pieces of Hate, and Slivers of Bone. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and at the 2006 World Horror Convention he received the Grand Master of Horror Award. He lives in northern California with his wife, where he is currently at work on several projects, including a new novel. Visit his website at http://www.raygartononline.com.