Chapter 7

The reason I let Phil unmask me is simple. Say that somehow a rumor got started that that babe Bob kept running around with was actually his mother, but that was all. If somebody then braced me about that it would go something like this:

In my experience, about fifty percent of people would believe my denial. Another twenty-five would not, and the remainder would wonder about it.

On the other hand, if Phil described doing that, it might be presented in a whole different kind of way:

Presto, because Phil believes it, others will believe it, too. It’s not me defending myself, which people can suspect is for self interest. Phil has no reason to lie about it, and no agenda, other than to embarrass me. That agenda is well understood among people like that, who form tight bonds. One of the ways you form a tight bond is making fun of each other, and then not letting that bother the relationship.

And it worked pretty well, except for a couple of people who looked to me like they weren’t so sure about this whole thing.

But nobody made any waves and, other than getting a lot of ribbing about it, things settled down. My mother was pretty embarrassed too, whether on my behalf or her own, I wasn’t sure. She didn’t go to Kelsey’s after that. If she and Maureen wanted to go for drinks, they went somewhere else.

Life calmed down for us. She posed on Friday nights and we did have hot, torrid sex after that. But still, during the week, we restricted ourselves to mutual masturbation, or cunnilingus or fellatio.

We were only two weeks shy of graduation when all of California seemed to catch fire. Even though we weren’t certified, yet, the whole class got sent to Modesto, which was a staging area for the wildland fire service. Because we weren’t certified, they didn’t send us into the active areas. Instead we got shuttled around to make sure areas that had already burned were fully out. We found hot spots and extinguished them, raked through smoldering piles of this or that, stuff like that. It was dirty, smoky, smelly work, and our living quarters was an Army tent, with no shower facilities. There were port-a-potties around, but that was it. I learned how to take a whore’s bath and wash clothes by hand in a tub. It was baptism by fire, almost literally. The niceties of men and women being crammed together were handled with a sheet, hung up between the guys’ cots and the women’s area, where there were four of them. Somebody had run an extension cord for lights, but there was no entertainment. It was difficult for that many people to keep their phones charged, too. Usually that didn’t matter. None of us stayed up late. We were all dog-tired when we finally got back to the tent, and usually fell onto our cots fully dressed.

We stayed a month. It convinced most of us that wildland fire fighting wasn’t our cup of tea. I have a lot of respect for the folks who do that. It was heart-breaking to see where structures had been reduced to ashes and lumps of metal. It was all that was left of people’s lives, and it made us all think of home and appreciate what we had.

When we got back, the college had decided that it didn’t make a lot of sense to re-convene our course of instruction for two weeks. We had to take all the tests, but that wasn’t really a huge difficulty. They gave us time to rest and study, and then gave us a late graduation ceremony after we passed the tests.

My mother didn’t give me any rest at all. She’d worried a lot about me and after I got back, she wanted to spend as much time with me as possible. The night I got back was a Wednesday, and our only-on-Friday-night rule went straight out the wide-open window. We spent most of the night making love. Or would have, if I hadn’t fallen asleep. We slept together Thursday night as well. And Friday night.

While we’d been gone the regular semester had ended, which meant that art lab had also ended for the semester. So Mom wasn’t posing any longer. I got to see a few of the portraits people had done. Some of them were pretty good. Maureen said that five got submitted to the contest, but none of them won a prize. She did get a call from some guy who wanted to know who the model was, because he might have work for her. Maureen said her internal alarms went off and she told the guy she’d find out and call him back. She didn’t intend to actually call him back, and never did.

Mom wasn’t sure about posing again. The next art lab wasn’t going to be a figure study, so she wouldn’t have to make up her mind for quite a while, but Maureen said she’d get hired any time she wanted to.

Mom cried at graduation. I asked her why, but she just pushed me away and told me to go say goodbye to my friends. We were scattering like fall leaves on a windy day. The placement office had worked out for three-quarters of the class and all those guys were off to start a new career. I know of two who, after California, had re-thought the whole firefighter thing and were looking at other options. A fire science degree can be a stepping stone to specialization, such as inspection programs, safety officers, hazardous materials response and all sorts of things. One girl who California had disappointed said she was looking at expanding on our medical training and becoming an EMT.

The placement office hadn’t worked out for me. There had been some starting positions in really small towns available, but not only was the pay low, it was unlikely there was the potential for promotion. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was thinking about going on to get a bachelors in engineering when my mother sold a house to a retired master sergeant in the Army. In the process she mentioned my situation, and he suggested I keep an eye on the Civilian Personnel Office website. He said the fire fighters on military bases were all civilians, and that it looked like a pretty good job.

So I did. I filled out applications. There were a ton of bases on the west coast, but we had worked alongside soldiers who were drafted, like us, to do support work, so I passed those up. I had to take a bunch of tests that had nothing whatsoever to do with fighting fires. I’m told I got lucky, because I got called in for an interview at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. I was competing with two other candidates. I don’t know about any luck, but the month I’d spent in California (and the instructor evaluation of my work, that I hadn’t even known was in my school records) spoke volumes, and I’m pretty sure that’s what got me the job.

I had to have a full background check to confirm eligibility to have a security clearance. The clearance for the position was only Secret, which is pretty low, but since I might go into classified areas and see classified stuff, I had to have the clearance. They interviewed my mom and I found out later that two DOD investigators showed up at the law firm and interrogated my biological father. He tried to deny paternity and kick them out of his office, but was warned that if a DNA match proved he was my father, that he could be prosecuted for making false official statements. He was fully aware of this on a professional level, and finally caved and admitted, officially, that he knew he could be my father. Somebody told me years later that the only reasons DOD even cared was because they didn’t want any little secrets out there, which might be used to bribe or blackmail me.

So I got the job and moved to Leavenworth, which is basically a big suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. It’s an interesting place. The US Army disciplinary barracks (translation: prison) is there, as well as the Army Command and General Staff College. The Foreign Military Studies Office is there, too, which means there are hundreds of foreign nationals from other countries’ armed forces running around.

The post was built in 1827, and is the oldest active Army post west of Washington DC. It’s also the oldest permanent settlement in Kansas, so it’s steeped in history. Like it’s where, in 1866, the 10th Cavalry Regiment was formed, consisting of black soldiers led by white officers. You might have heard them called Buffalo Soldiers, which name was awarded by the native Americans they interacted with.

My normal tour of duty was 57 hours a week, on a rotating shift basis. If weekends or holidays fell during a shift, that was just tough cookies. Among my duties were: providing fire protection, rescue operations, hazardous material response, and confined space rescue. The facilities I might encounter had a variety of hazardous potentialities, such as fuel and ammo dumps, burning aircraft (helicopters), chemical storage and the like. I could end up going to a house, an industrial building, a motor pool, or a brush fire.

And for the privilege of doing all this, I got paid $12.57 per hour.

That sounds pretty dismal, but there were some perks. For one, during my fifty-seven hours, all meals were on the house. They gave me all my uniforms and the benefits package was to die for. If there weren’t any emergencies, we could sleep when we needed to and get paid for it. Another plus was that anything over 40 hours was paid at time-and-a-half, unless it was a holiday, which was double-time. Not only that, there was a retirement plan. And I wouldn’t be stuck at twelve-fifty forever. They gave raises every year and I could be promoted into a higher paying position, if an opening happened. It was true I had to maintain an apartment, off post, but that wasn’t so bad. Leavenworth is far enough from Kansas City proper that the cost of living is quite a bit less.

Besides, it gave Mom a place to stay when she came to visit.

When she did that we rarely went out for the first day or two, staying in bed most of the time. But Kansas City offered a lot of entertainment options, so we went places together. We got a few stares, as we walked, hand in hand. But I had grown a beard, which made me look a little older, and she looked younger than she was, so most people took us at face value.

We were lying in bed one night, making out, after I had soaked her with my spend, when I thought of something.

“You can sell real estate anywhere, right?”

“If you’re licensed,” she said.

“You could sell real estate here ... right?” I said.

She stared at me.

“Bobby, Honey. We’ve been lucky so far. I love what we have. I wouldn’t change what happened for anything. But we can’t make this last forever. And I want grandchildren.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I love you.”

“You can love another woman, too.”

“I don’t want to love another woman.”

“You need to love another woman,” she sighed.

“So you don’t want to keep letting me love you,” I said. I admit I was a little petulant about it.

“You know better,” she said, poking me with a very sharp fingernail. “But we have to be realistic.”

I decided to kiss her some more, instead of continuing the ‘conversation.’

Like a lot of people, I tried to ignore a problem and just hoped it would go away. She was just as addicted to me as I was to her, so she kept coming to visit.

Then one night, while I had her pinned to the bed, she gasped, “You need to pull out tonight. This would be a bad time to get sperm in me.”

“You’re fertile?” I panted.

“Very,” she huffed.

I think it was then that I went a little crazy.

“Good,” I said.

I kept going.

“Bobby!” she whined. She wasn’t stupid.

“I love you,” I grunted.

“Then don’t get me pregnant,” she groaned.

“But I want to get you pregnant,” I growled.

“You can’t,” she moaned.

“I’m not sorry,” I huffed, speeding up. I could feel it coming and I wanted to get there fast.

“It’s not your body that will swell up and look like a beached whale,” she barked.

A little sanity penetrated to my brain. I went in and stopped. The urge to cum slowly abated. I started rubbing. It’s possible I was trying to give her an orgasm as a way of apologizing for what I’d almost done.