Chapter 8

Jack had been furious.

He had stormed out of the house swearing never to come back. Before that he had threatened to shoot the dog, shoot the pony, carve me up into strips of bacon. His ultimatum before leaving was, no dog, no pony, and no sister. Until then, goodbye!

Out he went into the night.

Helen was speechless. She had not been able to get a word in edgewise while Jack was there and after he had gone could not find the words. I was at a loss as to how to console her.

There was no doubt that I was going to leave on Sunday. I had planned to be back on the job Monday morning. There was no doubt we were going to return the pony that morning. There remained the presence of Clyde.

"Has he ever done this before?" I had asked Helen.

"Yes," she had admitted. "When he does, he usually means it and stays away for one night, anyway. I try to think of it as just another business trip."

"Where does he go?"

"He has friends all over, drinking buddies, who knows?" She had thrown up her hands. "I guess I will have to give Clyde up, after all," she had said in resignation.

We had sat through dinner quietly, feeling the consciousness of Jack's absence. Helen had shut Clyde in the basement not to please an absent husband, but to remove from her sight the tangible evidence of their conflict.

After dinner I had begun to expect that John might telephone. Not that I had been anxious for him to call. It had just seemed a likely expectation. When the dishes had been done and the kitchen cleaned up, I had begun to feel it a certainty.

When the hour had reached eight-thirty or so and he had not called, my ego had been severely bruised. I had thought then of telephoning him, but wouldn't that have been playing his game? I had decided against it.

Helen had tried to escape her problem by watching television. That had never worked for me, and soon she had come back into the living room herself.

"I can't enjoy the thing unless I'm completely relaxed," she had said. She had sat down, and observed my own tension, thinking, probably guessing the truth, that I had had John on my mind, but guessing wrong what it was about John that had been bothering me.

"A girl like Pat, now, whom I'll probably never get to meet, what's the big difference between us?" I had asked Helen. "She paints, she willingly puts off her marriage to care for a sick mother, she leaves John on his own for six months. That's about all I know about her," I had said.

"It adds up to an unusual girl these days," Helen had remarked.

"I wish I had some time to look at those paintings. Some were his and some were hers, you know. You can tell from a painting how the artist sees things. The better his technique, the easier it is to see what he's left out. If John were to do a portrait of me, I could tell how he sees me by what he's discarded."

Helen had looked at me and smiled.

"It's true, Sis," I had insisted. "When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see an awful lot of junk. You think it's all important, down to the last hair out of place. You can't be selective about yourself, so you never really know how you see yourself."

The doorbell had rung then. Helen had jumped up, her lips forming the name Jack questioningly. She had gone to the door and I had heard the voice of a woman.

It had turned out to be a local friend of Helen's a Mary Parker.

Soon we had mixed some highballs and were gradually relaxing as the liquor began numbing our brains, pushing aside the problems- of the day.

Mary, a divorcee, had just returned from a trip to Acapulco, and had been anxious to tell all to my sister concerning her vacation.

"It's not the romantic place I used to think it was," she had said. "Every accountant from New York must have been there with his secretary, and the college bums, yi! Who needs it?"

I had argued that the water and the climate must still be unspoiled, and she had agreed.

"How's Clyde?" she had asked suddenly.

Helen had stolen a quick look at me. "My sister knows about Clyde, Mary," she had said.

"Really!" She had exclaimed, her face lighting up. "How groovy!" She had quivered her rear end in a jello-like shake on the seat, a little movement she was to repeat throughout her visit. "Let me tell you about this place in Mexico, then."

She had begun then to tell of a visit to a place outside Cuernavaca where she and the girl accompanying her on the trip had stayed overnight.

"We had reservations in Taxco, but couldn't make it because we had stayed too late in Cuernavaca. We decided to take the first thing that came alone, so," she had said, "we kept our eyes open for a likely looking hacienda or something."

"It started to get dark all of a sudden, and we sort of got that panicky feeling." She had giggled. "We didn't know what was going to happen if we had to sleep in the car. Finally we spotted something, a plain old two-storey adobe house, nothing more. I said to Jane, let's ask anyway, and she agreed. It turned out to be a private house, but they offered us a room downstairs in the back if we wanted it."

"Well, we took one look and guess what? It's like a combination stable and sleeping porch. Two cots along one wall separated by a short rail from a manger for burros. And there were burros in there, let me tell you, in spades. You know how everywhere you go outside the cities smells like tortilla flour. You get kind of used to it after a while. Well, this was different. We didn't know if we were going to be able to take it. All night, no less!"

"We finally said, screw it, and flopped down on those cots, smelly donkeys and all. We hadn't been in bed long when the old guy in the place, the grandfather I guess, comes padding in with a bottle of tequila and some limes."

"Ola, he says, Chiquitas, Mira, Mira! He gets out some glasses and pulls up a little table by the beds. He pours a little in each glass, cuts the limes, and passes the salt around. Well, you know me, Helen. I always think the guy wants to end up in bed with me, but I wasn't sure with this old abuelo. He sits there rattling off in Spanish, sipping his joy juice and sucking at his wrist. Jane keeps looking at me for cues like, what do you say to that, or what do I do now?"

"We relaxed after a while. The tequila we were drinking helped. I get to the point where I start glowing and I think well maybe the old guy in bed would be a novelty if he has any meat between his legs. But that's not what the old man is thinking. Turns out he just wanted somebody to drink with. Pretty soon he says Buenos notches and picks up his marbles.

Well, there we were, in bed with a tequila glow and no companeros. I'm pretty sure Jane feels the same way I do. What do we do now, she says to me. We just sat there, Helen, looking at all those burros, hotter than hell."

"All of a sudden one of those animals starts getting a hard- on. Have you ever seen a burro hard? The damn thing must be as long as from my elbow to my fingertips. And thick! Like a firehose! Jane and I just sat up on those cots and stared. There must have been three or four coming out in that herd anytime you cared to look. They would come out, wave around a bit, then whap! bang up against the belly and start shriveling up."

"Jane says, Do you think you could get one of them to go inside of you? I said I'd had a lot of meat shoved into me in my time, but that's stretching it a bit. She says, let's try it, anyway. We got out of bed and went over to the gate in the fence. Jane says, there's a good one, and sure enough I see the little guy beginning to come out in a big way. We coax him through the gate and pretty soon we have him all to ourselves."

"How shall we do this, I ask Jane, and she says try it doggy style. I said, here goes, and lifted up my nightie. I got down on the floor, and Jane walks the donkey over to me until I felt that thing popping at my pussy. You ever have a real big one go pom-pom at it?"

"I spread myself as wide as I could because I figured a boxing glove like that is going to want punching room. I said to Jane, you coax him forward while I move backward at the same time. She does and I did. Wow! I thought I was being split wide open. The head on that thing just about tore me up. After it cleared, though, the rest of it ran up in pretty fast without much strain. I thought it would never stop, as a matter of fact. I had been filled with a longie, I knew, but I couldn't see just how much of it I really had."

"Jane said, you'll have to raise your ass up and put your head down on the floor. She said, because of the angle, his meat was bending, and it didn't look like the rest of it could go in. I did what she suggested and felt the rest of it slip into me. Something heavy bumped my legs, almost pushing me forward. I asked Jane what it was and she says the donkey's balls just slammed against you. I knew then there couldn't possibly be any more left that hadn't gone in."

"What do we do now, Jane says. Get him to pump, I said. How, she asks. I don't know, I said. Give him a whiff of your pussy. All right, she says, and bends down in front of him, raising up her nightie.

I could see it all. The burro goes after it like a carrot. He lifts his front legs and tries to climb up Jane's back. In the meantime, I could feel him stretching out inside a little bit."

"Turn around, I yelled to Jane. Turn around and try to hold his front hooves off the ground. She does and the angle of the thing feels perfect inside me. He starts pumping then and I could feel the juices working in there. If Jane could hold him, he would do just fine. As for me, I was finally getting the big F. He dug down into me, jamming away at it. I could feel it swelling and stretching. That big head was deep in there reaming out those neglected, far away places. I knew it."

"All I could think of was a big sign they used to have on a water truck in my home town that said Filled to Capacity. That was me, Helen. For the first time in my life I really felt packed solid. Those testicles kept bumping my thighs like flour sacks. I figured on bruises there by next morning. I wasn't going to worry about it then, however. The burro began to bray compulsively and I thought, now, he's going to let go. I yelled to Jane to hold on, and waited for it to come. The animal shuddered violently and drove down into me hard, and then slowly tapered off."

"I felt that warm glow inside suddenly and the pressure building up. The load these animals expend must be prodigious. It had no place to go but out. It burst out around the sides in big, bubbly farting sounds, splattering all across my rear and running down my legs. I could feel the stuff forming pools in the little depressions behind my kneecaps."

"I came then myself, grabbing Jane's legs for support. It came over me in wrenching waves that convulsed me forward toward her. I moaned uncontrollably, unable to stem the tide of pleasure that was almost unbearable. I finally collapsed on the floor, limply. The last thing I felt was that organ slithering out of me."

"Gosh," Helen had said. "It sounds better than with the pony."

"Pony? You have a pony?" She had wanted to know.

Helen, of course, had told her everything then. She had been eager to know if we still had it, and where she might be able to get one for herself.

Before long they had brought the pony in from the yard and were getting undressed. Mary had been dying to try it since being told. Mary's story had left me exhausted and I had begged leave to retire early. Since the two of them had been good friends, I hadn't felt I was deserting.

I had gone back to my bedroom. I had felt very, very tired, and had fallen asleep very quickly.

I awoke with a feeling of disappointment inside me. I was aware of my surroundings as wrong, in error, and felt that if I waited a second or two, they would turn into the correct ones.

They remained the same.

I lay in bed thinking what had started out as a good prospect of companionship had been demolished by my own fear of commitment. I had to be myself, fears and all, in spite of what happened. That was the way it had always been with me.

I got up out of bed and walked over to the clothes closet. I took my robe off and stared at myself in the full length mirror. It isn't worth it, I thought. It isn't worth the hassle. Every time I had let myself fall, it was the same old story.

I decided I was not going to eat my heart out over anybody. Let somebody eat his heart out over me, if that's the way it had to be.

There were plenty of Hack Raver's around, and if I did not want it that way particularly, there was always Joe Cunningham, or maybe the answer was a good old comfortable collie like Clyde. Was I leaving something out?

I was still young, only twenty-eight, and what's more, I looked good. There was nothing to criticize about the reflection I saw in the mirror.

It wasn't the reflection that counted. It was what was inside my brain. What was in there that I could not see? What memories of dreams were stored in those cells that I had never been permitted to remember?

Once in New York City I had gone to see the ballet. A particular prima ballerina had done a dance so exquisitely well it had sent chills up and down my spine. I had turned my head at that moment and had noticed the person seated on my right, a young girl of about sixteen, had been similarly affected.

Our eyes had met at the same instant, and she had gasped. Her hand had suddenly hesitatingly reached over and touched mine for a few seconds.

We hadn't spoken then or later. In fact, our eyes had not met again, and after the performance, I never saw her again.

The color of her eyes had never been erased from my memory. A recurring dream I was to recall upon awakening had had to do with it.

I am standing on a diving board about to dive into a swimming pool. Around the pool are many people, some of whom I recognize, some whom I do not. They are both men and women. Some of the men stare at me with sober faces, other men are jeering at me.

Still other men, naked, are holding their penises and wagging them at me. All of the women are smiling at me warmly. I dive, finally. Suddenly the water changes to the color of the young girl's eyes, and I actually fall into one of her eyes.

I keep falling. The color is all around me. I begin to fear I am drowning and wake up.

Standing there in front of the mirror, I thought about the dream and its meaning. It occurred to me that the sadness that gripped at me periodically I had first felt at that performance. It occurred just as the young girl had finally passed from my view forever, during my last impression of her, from the rear, of the ponytail, the camel's hair coat, the lithe calves, the loafers.