Chapter 5

In a week, Lena had made over $300. Her act was a big hit. Even Consuela was impressed. Sunday she went to the house of the woman named Gina to have her pregnancy aborted. She was terrified.

She was too afraid to ask the woman if women could bear the fetus of an animal. She felt awkward at the idea of having to explain about Red Beauty and Black Pride. Other people wouldn't understand. They would think it weird, strange, and abnormal, for a young girl to have made love with horses.

Gina was a buxom, middle-aged woman with a red wig. Not your typical mid-wife. But she was efficient and businesslike, and in no time she had Lena off the table with the good news that she was pregnant no longer.

"What was it?" Lena asked, fearfully.

"What?" called Gina from the next room. "You just lie there and rest for a while. A couple of hours if you need to. Try not to talk."

"But, I mean, the baby, what was it?"

"It wasn't much, honey. I don't want to upset you, but it wasn't a healthy normal fetus. It's just as well it didn't come into the world."

"What do you mean?" called Lena trying to get up. An incredible pain seared her thighs as she did so, and she immediately lay back down on the bed.

"Just you rest. I'll be back in a while with something for you to drink that will help you heal," Gina said, and she went away.

While she lay there, Lena had a lot to think about. What would she do next, for example. Would she stay here in Iowa City? What would she do when her money ran out again? Could she possibly go back home, and take up that existence of swinging between being raped by her father and making it with his horses?

She wondered if he would ever find out how she had gotten her revenge on him, right under his nose. She thought for a moment too about Brad King. She wondered if she'd ever see him again. Did he ever think about her? She didn't know.

Life certainly was confusing. There was no clear path to follow, as there was in her mother's day.

Lena thought about her mother, giving birth to all those babies, and then watching them die, or grow up and leave home. Had her father gone back to abusing and beating her mother now that Lena had left home? Had he made any attempt to look for her? She was surprised every morning when she woke up in Bill's nice big double bed in the room streaming with sunlight that it hadn't all disappeared in the night and that she wasn't home again, having to get up to feed the chickens and pigs, and dread the sound of her father's footsteps.

She spent a couple of days taking it easy. She bought herself some clothes with the remaining money she had and took herself out to a nice restaurant where she resolutely turned down the offers of admiring men. Her money ran down and she had to go back to Consuela and the donkey act.

Consuela explained that she was only going to be in town another week. After that she was moving on south.

Lena's performance was greeted with enthusiasm by the audiences at the Black Pussycat, as before, and she made some more money--enough to open a modest bank account with. She felt very proud of herself.

On the last night of her act, Lena was startled by a familiar face in the crowd. It was the face of Ret, her older brother. He was sitting in the front row at a little private table and he had a woman with him.

She was sure Ret hadn't recognized Lena as his own sister. She wore a lot of makeup, and Ret thought she was back at home on the farm after all.

She had a note sent to him, asking him to be sure that he stayed for a few moments after the act because there was a lady who wanted to see him.

She watched him receive the note and look around the room for the silent lady and she saw the lady beside looking annoyed. After that, Lena didn't notice much else. She had to get it on with Pepe. Pepe was ornery that night, as donkeys will sometimes be. She had added a little costume for him to the act. He wore a straw hat with holes cut out for ears, and a little pair of boxer shorts and a tie, so that when she called him her husband it drew more laughs from the crowd.

Tonight Pepe's dick got bigger than it ever had before. Pepe was growing, or learning or both! Lena thought, as she crawled under him, being sure to lift the filmy black negligee she wore high so that it revealed her tits, which were as big as her thighs. She opened her legs for Pepe. He shoved his cock in her, and this time it felt as big as Bill's thumb.

The audience gasped. They had never seen a woman make it with an animal before, most of them. And that a woman would do it voluntarily, for money, in front of others, was incredible.

"Pepe, I like your dick," Lena crooned, going up and down on it. "My little husband, why did you come home so late from work today? Have you been seeing other women?" she asked him indignantly as she plunged on top of him, and the donkey brayed, and the audience laughed.

After the donkey came, his white donkey semen dripping on the floor beneath her, to the audience's additional gasps, Lena went backstage for a moment to clean herself. Then she came out again and went down into the pit to collect her tips.

Often the men would like to put the bills on the corner of a table and make her pick up the money between her legs with her thighs. She thought this was very silly, but they insisted so she did it.

She still wore the costume from her act: the black nightie that came to her navel, the black see-through briefs with the slit at the cunt, and black high pumps. She had forgotten about the presence of her brother and was feeling good tonight A black man put out a bill on the corner of his table. She couldn't tell whose picture was on the bill, but the man was very good-looking and very well dressed. He looked quite wealthy and he had a very fancy dame sitting beside him, so Lena went all out.

Each time she approached the table with her open thighs, to catch the money, he moved the money farther back. Each time he moved it back, everyone laughed.

Finally, Lena put one foot high on their table. Her black stockinged leg caused quite a sensation, as did the slit of the panties she wore. With her leg lifted, all could see quite clearly, and from close up, the pink slit of her own, that lay between the black slit of the panties. Someone put a coin in the jukebox, and slow sexy music began. Lena began to gyrate, with her leg raised, in time to the music. It would be good for tips, she figured.

The black man let her have the bill--it turned out to be a $100.00, and she moved on to the other tables. Many of the men wanted to reach out and touch her pussy with their fingers--just touch it, and she let them. The little timid fingers reaching out to her just vaguely tickled the outside of her cunt, and she had to part her labia with her own fingers, and dip her own fingers in her honeypot and make her own clit and labia painful with desire and lust, in order to give the men the kind of sight they wanted to see: a cunt that was wet and inviting, as if it were just waiting to be penetrated by one of their dicks, many of which we're hard under the tables of the little joint. Finally to a last drumbeat, and a last bump and grind, Lena hurried to the dressing room in back to change and make her appointment with her brother. She hoped he was still waiting.

He was. She walked up to his table and said, "Excuse me, I am the lady who sent you that note. May I join you?"

The woman sitting next to Ret gave a cold look but Ret said, "Please do."

"You don't know who I am," Lena said.

"No," he gave a quizzical look at the woman.

"I'm your sister, Lena." she said. Ret almost fell off his chair backwards.

"Good God," he said. "It is Lena."

She still had on her makeup from the act, but she was wearing street clothes now. Still, the last time he had seen her was when she was seven and still a little girl. Now, at almost thirteen, she had changed much, she guessed.

"This is my wife, Carol," Ret introduced the two women. Carol was very silent and not too friendly.

"Where are you staying? What are you doing in Iowa City?" Ret asked.

Lena said "Let's go somewhere else where we can talk."

They went back to Ret and Carol's place. Ret and Carol lived in a trailer in a park outside of town. They had a Ford station wagon.

Inside the trailer they offered Lena a drink. She accepted and then sat down happily. She felt at home. She started to ask Ret and Carol how long they had been married and what they did for a living and how they liked Iowa City and how long they had been there, and had they heard from their parents lately?

But Ret and Carol plied her with questions without answering any of the ones directed at them. Lena, under the influence of the drinks, spoke quite freely with them. She even cried a few times in recounting her story of the last year.

"Ret, you know how father always abused Mother? How we would often hear her screaming in the middle of the night? I know you remember because I know that's partly what drove you away when you were fifteen. That, and there being no future on that farm. Well, I'm only thirteen myself but I had to get out too. On my own."

"Ret, Daddy, well, he came to me as if I were a woman he met in one of his places. You understand what I'm saying? He raped me. Many times. He was making it a way of life. I had to get out. So I came here. They don't know where I am, and I don't know what I'm going to do, but all I know is, it's so good to have found you brother, and you too, Carol. Now I feel as if I have a real family.

They put Lena to bed in the living room for that night. Ret and Carol retired to their own end of the trailer.

They stayed up late talking. Mr. Hanson had put up a reward for Lena's return and they knew of it. He was offering $700 for any information leading to the return of his daughter. Ret and Carol needed some money--badly.

In the years since Ret had left home, he had done many different things to make a buck, but mostly he had drifted. He'd been a used car salesman, a door-to-door brush salesman, he'd sold encyclopedias and drugs. He'd even made his way for a while on the strength of his poker game, and he'd let one or two girls support him with what lay between their legs.

He'd been with Carol now for about a year. They were pretty tight. Carol was a lot older than she looked. She was 45, and her red hair was a wig. She wore lots of makeup and had a petite figure, so that people often did not realize her age while she sat beside the youthful Ret.

Ret liked Carol. Perhaps he found in her the mother he'd never had in his own mother. Mara Hanson had been no less able to defend or protect her son from her husband than she had been able to protect Lena. And Roland Hanson had not been easy on his son either. He had worked him hard, giving him no money, and often let him feel the lash of his riding crop or the rock of his fists.

Unfortunately, Ret had not become a kind, understanding, compassionate person after all his suffering. He had instead his father's brute-like nature.

Unlike his father _ forced into by circumstances. At least that was how he looked at it now. He did not like to have to plot, as he did in bed now with Carol, against his own baby sister. But he needed money.

In the morning, Carol made them all breakfast: powdered scrambled eggs and instant coffee and grits. It was in the morning that Lena realized Carol was not as young as Lena had originally thought. She saw that Carol's red hair was a wig. She saw the lines beneath Carol's thick make-up. But the couple was very friendly to her and insisted that she go back into town and get all her things and come and stay with them.

Ret drove her to Bill's house where she picked up her clothes. He took her out to lunch at a nice place where she had beer and wiener schnitzel. They went back to the trailer where Carol was waiting for them. Carol had gone out that day and bought some rope.

Ret had to run into his bedroom in the back where he broke down crying. Carol had followed him in. She held him in her arms and spoke to him lovingly.

"Honey, I know she's your sister, but it's dog eat dog in this world, and it's either us or her. You know how we could use those seven hundred smackers baby," she said.

"I know," he sobbed into her tits.

"We could take that little trip out west we been talking about for so long. To the Yellowstone Park. You know how much I want to see that geyser I been hearing about all my life since I was a little girl. And the Grand Canyon? And you could meet up with that big poker game that happens in September. Honey, it could mean our whole future," she dried his eyes.

They plied Lena with liquor and talk that night, and she fell asleep intoxicated on the couch again. When she woke up in the morning she was tied and bound to the sofa.

"What? What's going on here?" she immediately began to yell.

Ret and Carol awoke to her screams. It was only seven o'clock in the morning.

"Oh jiminy, the kid's screaming," said Carol.

"Honey, what are we going to do? I can't go out there and look her in the face," said Ret.

"I'll take care of it," said Carol. She slipped a torn bathrobe over her body, covering up her sagging breasts, and went out into the living room. She surveyed the pathetic creature on the couch.

Lena was beautiful, as beautiful as Carol had once been, many years before. Lena's lips were a rosy red as she awoke in confusion, and the passion of her fear flushed her cheeks. Her body spoke for itself, all curves and young firm flesh as she twisted in her bonds. Carol had tied her well the night before, securing her hands behind her back and tying her feet together, and then tying the whole to one of the legs of the couch.

She gave Lena a glass of water to quench her thirst, and said, "Honey, the stiller you lie, the better it will be for you. Now we're only doing what's best for you. You know your brother would never harm you. Just trust his judgment."

But as Lena continued to squirm and holler, Carol was forced to gag her with a dishtowel from the sink. Then she went back to Ret's bed.