Chapter 40

(COUNCIL BLUFFS)

Riding on the brand-spanking new locomotive sent to Promontory Summit specifically for the joining celebration, I stretched out in the first class compartment and inhaled the scent from the mostly female passenger company surrounding me with waves of chattering conversation.

This luxury travel boat was a self-contained delight of soothing comfort designed to pamper the passengers with the sort of surroundings that tended to put a person at ease and acted like a stimulant to thoughts of a usually nocturnal nature.

The two ladies directly across from me were similar in almost every respect except for maturity. I got the distinct impression they were doing their best to present as sisters despite every indication that they were mother and daughter traveling without the impediment of manly control. It was a contradiction of sorts that was more suited to a less civilized environment like roughing it on the frontier than sheltered presence in the confines of modern society. It was a truism of sorts that authentic ladies of quality traveled well insulated from the rigors of public intercourse generally required for social approval.

The combination of the luxurious décor and the passenger pampering rail-beds constructed for smoother travel made me anxious about the contrast between the rudimentary construction of the railroad line on points west of Salt Lake City, Utah and the superior quality of the construction on points east of the joining location in Promontory Summit. I knew it was a boon for the posteriors of female passengers although males tended to disregard such niceties unless they were afflicted with some sort of lower back problem that prompted softer underpinnings.

This part of the transcontinental adventure was in the vicinity of a thousand miles and with an average speed of twenty miles an hour, we should be able to reach our terminus at Council Bluffs all the way back in Iowa just across the Missouri River and the booming, beautiful Omaha, Nebraska in about forty-eight hours without stopping for more than water and fuel. These necessities were spaced for maximum effectiveness and were placed with the added design of maintaining our hourly speed without loss of time.

I could not help but contemplate the fact that travel on a train was sort of a cessation of passage of time and I wondered if the initial start of my time travel was due to that cosmic relationship rather than the result of some other worldly magical intervention unable to be explained in logical terms.

My brain was taking in these serious thoughts at the same time that I was doing my best to insinuate my corporal body closer to both mother and daughter with absolutely no preference as to age or beauty. My perception was that they both had sort of beauty that existed without any consideration of the passage of time and that each on had attributes that excited my senses regardless of conventional acceptance that youth was preferable under almost all circumstances.

I had discovered in my journeys that a female’s age is a matter of little concern where pleasure is concerned. It is far more important to partner up with a feminine animal with deep-rooted and bottomless passion in matters of carnal interaction. All the other considerations paled in comparison when grading the performance of a female companion on the other side of a close up and personal experience. If my suspicions ran true to form, I could probably expect equal if not superior results from the mother rather than the daughter. The older I became, the more I understood that age was not the primary factor that determined the success of a physical union. It was more related to that comfortable feeling when the dirty deed was done and over with that really counted.

The daughter was lacking in confidence and in all honesty I found that a bit appealing because her hint of shyness hardened my resolve to show her the way to true joy.

On the other hand, the mother was a trifle jaded from years with a man that made his living as a parasite on the Mormon Church generosity trading on their dislike for the dirty work of finding non-Mormon folks to organize the Indian workers and recently freed black populace into work gangs to facilitate the building of wagons for the Mormon wagon trains that constantly flowed out of Council Bluff across the Missouri River and up the Mormon Trail all the way to California and even up to Oregon in the Pacific Northwest. The eventual concentration of Mormon settlers into the headquarters around Salt Lake City was a predictor of future development around that central point rather than the originally planned Kingdom that would stretch from the Mexican border to Oregon and from the Pacific Coast all the way back to Utah and Colorado.

In a way the steady exodus of Mormons from Iowa and Nebraska westward to the far frontier was an integral part of the Great Migration or what was termed “Manifest Destiny” by historians of note.

The mother’s name was Agatha and she insisted I call her “Aggie” like her closest friends. Her daughter Alice seemed both bored and ashamed like she had heard it all before and she was aghast at the impropriety of her mama’s almost pushing her pretty bottom in my direction and offering her daughter’s as a bonus for my attentions. I sensed that the daughter was not truly against the program to ease the boredom of the long train ride, but that she was underneath it all actually far shyer that she pretended to the outside world. I wondered exactly how much experience she had actually had in the secluded world back in Council Bluffs and what her true opinion was of the Mormons and their experiment in multiple wives for the men to create an extended family of several females to tend to nocturnal duties and share the chores of home tending and child raising as sister-brides of the control-driven Mormon husbands.

Both women were seated on the bench with me in the middle.

I tentatively extended my fingers along the outside flanks of both women at the same time noting that it was impossible to judge age or beauty from the simple touch of yielding flesh under multiple layers of feminine clothing.