One Fish at a Time

ONE FISH AT A TIME

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

This picks up the story from Temp. File End 12/30/02

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"Jose's cumming in me," Tina whispered.

Lord, who could blame him for that? She was a ten-year-old pixie, he a rangy, athletic seventeen year old. They'd been together for an almost impossible hour, his hard, young-adult body like a healthy oak between her long, slim legs as she told her roundabout story of settling a family debt. I could feel nothing, so I changed from half lying over their hot, young bodies so I could look.

"It almost hurts," the girl panted, and I could see she wasn't exaggerating. A strong, pulsing gush of heavy, white semen flowed from their joining, down over her little-girl bubble bottom, pooling thickly on the top sheet of my bed. Usually in my hand, sometimes in my mouth, my young male friend had always been copious and full, ejaculating calmly, but like a well-mannered stag of eight or ten times his weight. With Tina, bless him, he was outdoing himself, and, little doubt, every other male in the vast country of Mexico. He was soaking her and flooding her, ravishing her in his gentle grip of iron, and having her as she was mewing in response to having him. It didn't last forever, only seemed to; it wasn't death and heaven, only seemed to be, and, for sure, it wasn't over until it was over.

Finally, the taut muscles did slacken, the handsome, black-haired head dropped to the pillow beside the panting child, and Jose eased from Tina. The ten year old's hand found my right arm and pulled me firmly between her legs. Jose, resilient farm boy that he was, roused sufficiently to guide me, then took my former position, lying half on my back as I entered Tina's hot, tight young body, my penis tingling from her slick, salty wetness. Her small hands found my back, she wriggled and bucked gently, then sighed, her head lolling, as I entered fully, holding her cradled in my arms as if she was a little wife.

"What happened last night?" I whispered, sensing she was still building toward an orgasm and wanted to hold off as long as possible so the experience could be as full for her as it had been for young Mr. de Lira Varela whose hot cum was still tingling.

"Francisco had a friend," she whispered in response, her hands now in my hair and her legs relaxing to splay widely and comfortably beneath me, "and he watched what happened between Raul and me."

"Did you like Raul?" I quizzed.

"Very much," she answered, her voice low and comfortable-sounding, "he's cute and nice, even funny."

So, again, we journeyed back in her young life, this time, not to Canada and the year before, but to a bungalow a mile away, and the previous night.

"Pulease, no pinatas," the girls said a few moments after entering the expensively furnished house.

"Outgrown them, already?" Francisco asked as he introduced the girl to Raul Cortez, his tall, athletic pool boy, age eighteen.

"No," the girl replied with a smile, "it's just that every place Mom takes me, they think I've been waiting my entire life to hit a burro with a stick, and I'm o.d.'d, for the time being."

"Well," Francisco responded, "you've come to the right place, and Tina," the sixty-year-old executive continued, "I want you to know that I've already transferred the money for the wool shop to your mother. Juan and I would like to have you stay, but you don't have to. I'm glad to be able to help you under any circumstances -- have a feeling you're worth it -- and you're free to go back to your hotel, no strings attached."

"Mom said I didn't have to come, in the first place," the ten year old replied, "and I'm definitely here, body whole, mind at ease, and spirits soaring -- you guys ever seen Mexican television?"

Both males laughed at the precocious imp, and both nearly fainted with relief as she let her small suitcase drop to the floor and found a place on the sofa, neither plumping herself down peremptorily, nor alighting all nervous and flighty, like a chickadee in a cattery. Nor did she say anything cute, like, "Let's roll, dudes, "the party girl's here, so where's the party?", "last one in's a rotten egg, "apples, anyone?", "treat or treat?", "deck the halls with clothes of dolly," or, "who's on first?" She just sat, knees together, tiny feet just reaching the floor, glowing in a blue and white checked summer dress. One could quite easily tell this about her: when she came to die she wasn't going to toss and turn over having been asleep for the trip.

For some minutes the three sat talking about the trip down through the States, news of the Torreon area, the furniture business, and the weather.

"You're a present for Raul," Francisco said, at last, "he's had some experience with young males, but he's never been with a female. He and I are friends, only. Is all that okay?"

A writer naturally has to think of the sarcastic things a character might say in a given set of circumstances, "I only teach, I don't insuct," would be an example. Like huge mountains of other detritus, this doesn't get included, because, while fishing shouldn't be called "catching", writing should be called "deleting". Hard to believe, I know, I know, but a tremendous amount ends up on the copyroom floor, all of it bad, you'll be relieved to learn. While I've repeated attributed this nothing-but-the-best criteria to laziness, there is also a benevolent side in my grace at leaving some material for other writers. This puts me in mind of the corn scene in the book, "Andersonville," so it would be a good idea to look at the leavings and not concern yourself as to where they may have dropped from.

Another essay so soon, it's only New Year's Day, but you'll have to forebear. I've been off fiction for two weeks and more, and so am relearning how hard it actually is. I need to ease back in, particularly because I gave the reinmuses free rein, and getting Prancer back behind Dancer, and Comet next to Cupid, requires time and patience. If it takes awhile, well, it's a long way up to my particular literary throne, nor am I helped by quiet holidays with everyone behaving ever so nicely. So many people are absolute monarchs of lousy lives, no better off in three and a half thousand square feet than the cantina oberero is on his single square foot.

Malcolm pulled a classic stunt, costing me twelve hours in getting the last post out, the butthead. I go over, immediately after work, but he's already working on someone else's machine, and doesn't want to plug mine in because the Lotto is up to $150.000 Belize dollars and he's had a busy day sitting on his stool and raking in half the loot in town. When his bike was stolen from under my old house, he had a brand new one the next day, and I'm for sure the only person in town who would have done more than say Sorry `bout that. I even bought Sloggo from him, brand new. I dwell on it, not out of spite, at least, entirely, but because it so precisely emblematic of why the British both conquered and lost, and will keep losing until the meteor flag has the impact of a Botswanian tribal shield.

The next day I found another shop who gladly let me plug in, so I know where I'll get my next machine when this one's rusted to dust. I might even buy one I don't need, because I doubt there's a stress factor much higher than 233,000 words sitting on a postage stamp of magnetic media which needs ten million transistors to function. The Outbox got balky, but Dean, my hero, knew its tricks, and everything went to New York in something like half an hour. Probably the happiest day of my life, with Samantha along for moral support. Finally ended up in bed, flat as a fritter, and let myself start recovering from 72 sleepless hour, thanks to the flu. I was at the keyboard at six this morning, relief palpable, almost to the extent of making me want to slack for the day, but no, haltingly, hesitantly I lay fingers to plastic, waiting for the tribe to get back in harness, and happy to be alive. Updating my computer-related adventures, my trusty old Proview monitor, four year veteran of you-name-it died on the Second, complete with immolation. It had been suffering from a cold solder joint for a couple of years, a malady I'd managed to fix with toothpicks several times, but the end was the end, smoke and flame defining `end' when it comes to computer monitors. Fortunately, the quarterly meager as it turned out to be, was enough to cover a new seventeen inch model, with which I am most pleased. I'm mentioning all this because I do have a significant criticism. Monitor controls. For home-use models, there should be none other then the on/off button. The extra circuitry is a, expensive, and, b, based on personal experience, likely to cause its own problems. No use of the controls improves the image quality, and, should you or some kid decide to experiment, it's unlikely you will ever get back the pixel-perfect, color perfect display set by the manufacturer. Let the small segment of the market who need sophisticated user access have it in expensive, brand name machines, but let the rest of us save money and have the most reliable product possible. Another note is the price. About $225 U.S., taxes and delivery included, here in the ultimate backwater (well, next to Mongolia, I guess). Terrific bargain, and the new one features .27mm dot pitch, a noticeable improvement over my .28 15" model. Also got a new keyboard, brand-name, ta-da; very crisp and quiet. Love it, and fear not, my old one is carefully stored awaiting its place in the Smithsonian.

Dean says he gets 150 spams a day. Add the telemarketers, and thus is your First Amendment as interpreted by liberals. I think I'll just get off the Net, entirely. We pay by the hour and who in the world wants to spend several dollars a day just to learn about Low Mortgage Rates, assuming it isn't some virus, in the first place. Spammers should be caned Telemarketing, except by local concerns in their area of business, should be forbidden. These are basic, common-sense issues, and your ignoring of them, a, makes your life a living hell, and, b, portends nothing but nothing, with ever less the farther ahead you look. Or course, in a country that can't even get rid of the penny, because of the free speech issues of a special-interest splinter from southern Illinois, I guess anything to do with sense is fantasy, however it's sliced and diced. All that's left for you to do is cut capers, which is why I'm a humorist. Nice fit. If the shoe pinches, bear it.

Lost my taste for tea. Where did that go? With the flu, I guess. Reminds me of entering the Army; I had some kind of low-grade infection that made milk taste metallic, all through basic. Talk about compounding a drag, but I still came in first on everything, including p.t. out of the whole training company (about 400 guys). I carried Metcalf in the last five miles returning from bivouac, then passed out the next day while we were cleaning our rifles. The clinic said walking pneumonia, but the drill still booted me as squad leader, though my poor replacement didn't have the nerve in his whole family to take over my bunk at the head of the stairs. Classic Army. Do a dozen good things -- for example, I wrote everything above the fold for my entire year as a journalist -- but forget to wear your steel pot to the field, even though you go in your private Huey, and they'll try to mess you up like a pack of yipping mongrels. They have mass Ivy League encounter sessions trying to figure out why every single last recruit detests everything to do with o.d. from their first week in the service, and no one will even mention the blistering nuisance of G.I-ing the mess hall. This occurs at 2:30 in the afternoon, and lasts for a deliberately arduous full hour. You've been on and working steadily since five, won't get off for six more hours, and they think it good for you to waste hundreds of gallons of water and pounds of soap in driving the poor cooks nuts by scrubbing an already spotless floor. Every day. The weird things of it was, I liked K.P., though I only had it twice, so, once again, they took a good kid and turned him bad, apparently, like my mother, just for the fun of bullying. The essential mystery is how so many people can waste so much time and energy, to say nothing of money, learning so little. The way I see it, they better change, hard and fast, because coming immediately down the road is a civic base so fat and out of shape, only one eighteen year old in twenty will be fit to serve, and half of them will have compatibility issues. Go Army. Literally. All an enemy has to do at this point is wait for us to defeat ourselves, and one can hardly help picturing the Chinese looking at our soldiers more as something to eat than someone to fight. On that yummy note I think we might do well to get Tina back on her feet. No more essays for a week, that's a promise, but all bets are off if I see Tyne Daley voyaging on the streets of Dangriga.

"I think you're very handsome, Raul," the girl said as she crossed to stand in front of the cute teen. She sat between the boy and the man, looking up at the eighteen year old. He looked back down into her pretty brown eyes.

"Thanks," he whispered, his accent soft American.

"It's nice to tell stories when you first get to know each other," Tina suggested kindly.

"It's kinda embarrassing," the boy replied in perfect English, with a shy smile.

"What it really is, is complicated," the girl observed. "There are the boringly chaste whose only virtue is fidelity, and the round-heeled bimbo, who's about as interesting as the average sack of rice, so my dad, say. In between, there are all manner of fish, fowl, and folks, with only one practical way to make more. My mom and dad have both hired me out, and, though the first time it ended well, and this time is going to end well, that hardly covers the rest of my life, or even much of my childhood, come to think of it. So what do I think? Well, for openers, I don't have much interest in becoming a featured attraction in Boy's Town, your zona roja, nor do I want to spend all my time chasing paper-mache donkeys with a broomstick. The thought of lying still like a dutiful wife while my macho beer hound does it for three or four minutes, is least appealing of all. But somewhere there is a big, sane, middle ground where an educated and aware girl such as yours truly can share a few hours a week with the same kind of person she'd be happy dating for dinner and dancing. My challenge is to choose a handful of guys well enough that I'll never have to reject any of them. If I end up married to one, the others will still be close friends, and yes, as long as it totally does not interfere with my marriage, I will spend time alone with them, probably letting them father my kids if they want to. Flexible, but not loose, with one big caveat, and that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Not dwelling on it and going into voyeuristic details, necessarily, but not keeping secrets and refusing to share under some privacy code that has more to do with bathroom functions than bedroom activities. And the sharing starts on the first time, with the boy telling the girl every last tiny detail of his first time."

"I was wearing brown shoelaces," Raul said.

"Complicated, she what I mean?" the girl replied, "I'm bought for you, more or less by the hour, and come sit beside you with friendly feelings, but mostly glad mom will be able to get her shop, and we'll have stability during the times we live here in Mexico, then, boom, you turn out to be funny as well a cute."

"You started it," Raul said, again with the shy smile.

"Lord, I suppose I did at that," the ten year old sighed.

"You set the tone," the boy elaborated, "just like you said, not sassy, but no odor of mothballs, either; it made me feel comfortable, or at least as much as I can be under the circumstances."

"How did you feel your first time?" she asked, matching Raul's shy delivery.

"Complicated would be a fit," the boy said.

"Wouldn't it be gross if it weren't?" the girl said, "I mean, if you just went up to someone and said, `you look cool,' then found a bedroom?"

"I guess it's like opera," the eighteen year old allowed, "wouldn't be much too it if some fat ladies just came out and sang for six or eight hours."

"Adding a plot and scenery doesn't help much, as far as I can see, perhaps on account of my age," Tina replied, "but I'll have to admit it's better that a choral society, so observation accepted. A few trappings, a little pizzazz, moral highlights along with the tale, I suppose it all adds, but, still, it's hard to beat the nerves of a first performance."

"I'm getting two," the boy remarked.

"Lucky thing about that," the girl observed, "I mean, what if it was a sliding scale, each individual a little different than the other. There could, for example, be a waypoint with a sixty-forty, then a sixty-two / thirty-eight, and so on, for years of nerves, jitters, and psychic stress."

"High adventure in low places," the boy affirmed, nodding at the pretty face looking up from his right side.

"The opposite of mountain climbing, which is low adventure in high places."

"It must fit low IQs," the boy mused.

"That's probably the crucial factor to living a little outside the lines without scribbling all over the page," Tina said, "just plain being smart. Trouble is, half the people in jail think they're pretty smart, so I guess there's thinking smart and acting smart."

"At least it's not a subject that has much to do with smarty pants," the Hispanic wit observed.

"You're filling up half my list all by yourself, Raul," the girl said, "I came down here thinking I might have, you know, six or eight special friends. That seemed about right; bold and invigorating, without being everyman's toy; now you turn out to be worth about four normal guys, so my horizons are closing in and I'm getting all claustrophobic." She sighed with a nice little touch of feminine drama, wiping her brow as if fatigued by great mental exertion. "What's a girl to do?"

"Why not write a handbook?" the teen suggested. "Call it `The Toy of Sex', base it on situations rather than positions."

"You're not going to take up my whole lest, I'm not going to let you," the girl responded, rolling her pretty brown eyes. "I promised myself when I was twenty-five, if I wanted something sensational to read, I'd be like the lady in he play and turn to my diary. One boy, no matter how cute, no matter how smart, and no matter how literate is going to change that. I won't be petulant about anything else, but I will have my diary, I will, I will, I will." And yes, she stamped a small foot prettily, all of it, that is, that could reach the floor.

"I meant diary when I said `handbook,'" Raul said.

"His and Her chapters," Tina said, "with gentlemen allowing ladies to go second."

"I was pretty young," the funny boy said, "so maybe we should think about a children's edition."

His guests seemed to be getting acquainted without prompting, so Francisco took orders for lemonade and Coke, and adjourned to the kitchen, where, because it was Mexico, he made do with limes. He knew better than to ever, under any circumstances, substitute lemon for lime in a gin and tonic, the results are fatal to both drink and drinker, but in a cold drink with sugar and ice one was about the same as the other. Yes, he was grasping at mental straws, but the eighteen year old and the ten year old were a dizzying couple, and any temporary distraction from thinking about them together over the evening was welcome. Limeade and a Coke had they said?

"How old?" Tina asked.

"Just before my ninth birthday," Raul replied.

"I'd just turned ten," the girl said, and they nodded to each other in acceptance. "Was it with one man, or more than one?"

"Three," the boy said. They were sixteen. A cousin and two of his friends."

"Were you alone with them for long?" the girl wanted to know.

"Yes," the boy said, his honey-gold Latino skin coloring gently.

"Did you know something was going to happen when they got you by yourself?"

"They were talking about a place they used to ride their bikes. It was a grove of olive trees. They'd park and hide in the trees, then truck drivers would park there to sleep or eat. They kind of told me some of the things they saw were pretty mature, and I might not be interested, but I said I was, and they told my if I was sure, I could come with them into the woods because they were going to talk about it more where they were going to have privacy."

"Did someone want an olive in their martini?" Francisco asked as he entered the living room with a tray of drinks. He half shook himself, then looked at the boy and girl on the wide leather sofa, "oops, sorry," he added, "my mind's been wandering this afternoon."

"He was starting a story about an olive grove," Tina supplied, helpfully.

"Then I haven't gone completely around the bend, after all," the older man mused, shaking his head with palpable relief.

The kids sipped their drinks, and Francisco, finding he'd forgotten to serve himself, returned to the kitchen and fetched a beer.

The boys had come together as English speakers, Armando, Raul's cousin meeting Angel and Juan at school, where their various American backgrounds had given them much in common. Added to this was the swim team, where all competed graciously, though, as they soon found out, they'd rather spend time in the library than churning laps and bubbles for the old alma matter. Their first ride to the roadside grove had left them tongue-tied and embarrassed, but the instant one of them had suggested returning, the other two had immediately signed on. The second venture had left them as the first had, and it was now Friday evening with a third trip planned for Saturday, mid-day. The subject of Raul had come up, Armando had supported his younger cousin, and by accord they agreed to include him if he was interested, figuring first to include him in the afternoon discussion they were planning so as to get the most out of their Saturday. None of them knew anything was going to happen, but the three older boys felt it, as did the nine year old the minute they entered the arroyo in back of their colonia. They walked for half a mile, branched onto a smaller dry river, and proceeded another hundred yards coming to rest at a growth of roots jutting from the bank of the arroyo.

"Is this okay, Raul?" Armando asked, solicitous of his little cousin as Mexican children usually are of their younger colleagues, preferring, for some reason, mild friendliness over the ruthless cruelty their American cousins choose with its endless squabbling and adversarialism.

"If god gets mad at you guys for teaching me stuff, and sends the rain, it might not be the best place," the nine year old observed, eyes sparkling with excitement.

"I think we're in trouble, then," Angel said, "because if the great skyboy isn't pissed, he'll be weeping tears of joy."

"Damned if we do and damned if we don't," Armando observed, smiling shyly at his own nonsense.

Juan was the smallest and youngest of the sixteen year olds. "It didn't rain in the olive grove," he noted, and they all found his perspective helpful.

"That means it must be safe even if we don't build a god-dam," Armando quipped. Whatever happened, it was going to be friendly, and, having settled the issue of divine inundation as best they could, they perched on the tangle of heavy roots and made themselves comfortable.

There's a song with the phrase, "A kind of a hush...", so I don't like using it without attributing in, but, anyway, a kind of hush fell over Raul and the young teens. It continued for some minutes, toes in sandals circling in the sand of the dry riverbed.

"Is this what they did?" Raul asked, rhetorically, every nerve of his young body clearly signaling that he knew better. His older friends giggled, shyly, and looked at him gratefully for breaking the ice.

"They brought blankets into the grove," Juan said, "then the driver and the boy would lie down on them and they'd talk."

"Were the kids nervous?" Raul asked.

Armando looked at Angel and Juan who nodded in response. "It was the first time for one boy," he explained, "he was with his uncle, and they talked for quite awhile, while the man made sure the boy was ready, but Julio, he was eleven, was still pretty nervous when it started happening. The other boys were more excited than nervous, because everything they did was pretty simple, so there's not much to be nervous about, like there is in algebra, once you know about it." Again, two of the teens nodded at the words of the third.

"How excited did the other boys get?" the young boy wanted to know.

"One boy named Octavo took his shirt off before they even got into the grove," Angel replied, "then he piggybacked on the man he was with, and as soon as Diego, the man, lay him on the blanket, he started undoing his belt."

"I know that feeling," Raul bespoke himself, shattering the marginal composure of his older friends into a fit of hiccupping giggles. "He wasn't going to pee," Armando managed to choke, careful that his tone, or what was left of it, didn't embarrass his little cousin, "he wanted to do big-boy stuff."

"Oh," the tyke said.

"That's okay," Juan responded, "a couple of times the boys did pee with the men, but Octavo was experienced, so he was taking his pants off to do mature things with Diego."

"How about the boy who was really nervous?" Raul asked, "did he?"

"Julio," Armando said, "with his uncle, Pius, yes, that's how they started."

"Tell me about them, first," Raul suggested.

"Okay," his older cousin said, as the four shifted positions to huddle more closely, "they came into the grove and Pius spread out a quilt.

"You gotta go to the bathroom," the handsome twenty-four-year-old drivers asked his slim, eleven-year-old nephew.

"Yes," Julio said, "just pee."

"I do, too," the older male said, "you can go behind that tree or come behind this one, with me."

"I want to come with you," the boy said, falling in step at his uncle's left flank for the short walk.

"Do you have to go right away, or would you like to talk a little, first?" the man asked.

"I can wait," the boy responded.

"Okay," his uncle whispered softly, "because there's some things I need to tell you about life on the road. You may have figured some of it out on your own, but I want to be sure, okay?"

"Yes," the boy whispered.

"Because I don't even want to do this with you, take a leak, unless you know what's happening, because it's not the kind of thing all boys are interested in, and I don't want you to feel any pressure if you aren't interested. It's okay to be just two guys driving together, but it's a lot better if the man and the boy are special friends as well as being partners in the truck, so I want you to at least try, unless you're really against it."

"I want to try, too," the boy said, his pre-teen voice low and husky.

"Good," his uncle said, "then the first step might be to pee while we're naked; that gets the embarrassing part over doing what guys often do together."

"Okay," the boy whispered, nodding his head, shyly.

"Go under that tree and take off your clothes," the driver whispered, "you can stand close to the trunk if you're embarrassed, that way I won't see you until you're ready; plus, you can leave your underpants on, if you want."

"Okay," the boy whispered back as his uncle took him gently by his slim shoulders and guided him close under a fifty-foot tree.

"I won't peek," Diego said, "so tell me when you're ready, and I'll come and get you."

"Will you be in your briefs, too?" Julio asked.

"No," the man said.

"Good," the boy replied, nervously, and they separated.

"I've got my eyes closed, so tell me where you are," Diego said.

"Still here under the tree," the boy replied.

"I'm coming up behind you," the man said, "still with my eyes shut."

"I'm still here," Julio said, his voice becoming a shaky whisper as he sensed the nearly naked young man close behind him.

As the boys stared down from the thick tree, the young driver found his nephew, tracing his fingers down through the youth's shiny black hair to his long, honey-brown neck. "Still have my eyes closed," he whispered, "are you wearing your underpants?"

"No," Julio husked.

"I'm naked, too," the young man said, "so, when you're ready, you can push back against me. That way you can tell if you want to share the sleeper with me tonight without giving away any secrets."

"I want to share it," the boy whispered raggedly.

"I want that, too, very much," Diego said, pulling the naked child gently to him as he ran his fingers gently down the graceful neck and slowly out along the childish, undeveloped shoulders of the eleven year old.

Slowly they came fully together, the tall, athletic male standing behind the slim, light brown boy, his big, strong hands softly roaming the boy's now-panting chest as he nuzzled his handsome nephew's neck. Julio, acting instinctively, both loving and trusting his young uncle, arched to the man's touch, spreading his legs while he slowly reached up behind him with both arms, linking his fingers behind Diego's neck.

"Has this happened with you, before?" the uncle asked.

"Keddy Renaldo has some pictures of a man teaching a boy," Julio replied, "this is how they were in the first picture that had them both naked."

"Did you like looking at them?" the young man asked.

"Yes," the boy said, "but we only got one chance. Keddy said if I went driving with you, maybe you'd teach me, so that's when I sent you the telegram."

"How does it feel, compared to how you thought it would feel from looking at the pictures?" the older male wanted to know.

"It's much more intense," the boy said in response, "more like lightning than something glowing and soft, like a candle."

"I feels very intense, to me, too," Diego said, "you have a beautiful body and your skin is the softest thing I've ever felt in my whole life."

"Have you done this with other boys?" Julio asked.

"I've been waiting for you. Glad it was only a year. There's a lot of nice kids acting as co-drivers, cute ones, too, but I though there might be something really special between us, so it was worth taking a chance and waiting until you were old enough."

"Did a man every do it with you when you were my age?" Julio said.

"I missed out," Diego answered, "about half of boys have experiences like this, the other half learn with their girlfriends."

"Is that better?" Julio asked.

"On the whole, yes," the driver replied, "because, for example, I don't remember any men from being your age who I'd have wanted to teach me, and I sure knew plenty, I mean, they might have been nice, and all, that I didn't want to teach me, or do anything with beyond fooling around in a swimming pool. But I was just unlucky in that department, never happening to meet the right one; other boys did, and were very happy with what happened, and went on to have girlfriends, if they wanted, just like the boys like me, who never had anything happen."

"Is like loving part of it?" the young reader asked.

"No," Diego said, "not in a relationship like this. That is to say, you can enjoy it without loving your partner, or, you can have a partner you love, but don't want to do what we're doing with him, or anything in between. It's independent of love for male couples, and most mixed couples, too, but that isn't to say if two people happen to love each other, and happen to like what we're starting to do, that that isn't the best of all worlds."

"It's kept the church alive for two thousand years," Julio observed.

"Well spoken," his uncle responded, "and, cute as that group is, they switched Love onto the Madonna siding, so it wouldn't become an issue as the priests harvested among the parish cuties."

"Well, Jesuits can't talk all the time," the boy remarked, "they have to scheme in the real world, once in awhile, otherwise, who'd pay attention to them?"

"The sleek bodies of young boys have sustained enterprises from the church, to the world's best navies, to AOL," Diego said, "so it's understandable that considerable cleverness has come into play over the centuries, and, not only that, but the holding of our type of relationship as somehow deviant or profane, cripples any culture so bold in their ignorance. They get fat and die out, due to lack of interest."

"Not overnight, I hope," the boy said, with a sagacious nod to the north.

"Oh, no," Diego responded, "if a country's rich enough, it can live for a long time on nothing."

"They have the perfect leadership for that," the boy said.

"Their leadership is adamant when it comes to reporting its excellence, that has to be admitted," Diego added.

"In the picture," Julio said, "the man had his hands lower down on the boy's belly."

Nice change of subject.

"Like this," the young drivers said, letting both hands caress the boy beneath his belly button.

"Even more," Julio whispered.

"You mean he was touching the boy the way a molester does?" Diego whispered.

"Yes," the boy acknowledged, spreading his long, coltish legs more widely and thrusting his hips to meet the big hands of his tall, athletic uncle.

Diego tightened the grip of his strong, left arm, finding the boy with his right hand, fondling him, to the child's hisses of welcome, then gently stroking back the eleven year old's foreskin, exposing his swollen, pink glans.

"Are you looking at me?" Raul asked.

"Not yet," his older partner whispered, "are you ready for me to open my eyes?"

"Yes," the boy replied, "and I want to open mine, too. You feel really big and hot against my back," he added, "and I want to feel you against my stomach."

Julio brought his hands down from behind his uncle's neck, turning toward him, eyes still shut, backing against the smooth trunk of the tree. He placed his hands up on Diego's powerful shoulders, and opened his eyes looking into the now open eyes of the young man towering a foot over him. "Hi," the both whispered softly, then looked down, hands now on each other's flanks as the boy pulled himself against his uncle's large adult penis.

"It teaches you you can feel better than think," the boy said after some moments. "The more intense I think it's going to actually feel, the more wrong I am, because it feels ten times more than anything I could imagine."

"That's because we're taking it slowly," the man responded, "that's the entire secret. Rushing diminishes everything to the point it's only super, a poor trade for beyond the ecstatic and ethereal "

"Way beyond," the boy whispered in agreement, as the males slowly brought their penises together, thrusting gently to be sure they hadn't jumped to conclusions.

"Will we do this a lot in the sleeper bunk?" the child asked.

"I'm having a hard time imagining not doing it," the young teacher said.

"Me, too," Julio whispered.

"Do you want to try the quilt?" Diego asked.

"Can I touch you, first?" the boy said.

"Yes," the man husked, dropping his hands to his side as he spread his legs and thrust to the boy who was braced against the olive tree. Julio encircled the huge, jutting, circumcised shaft just under its purple, swollen head with the finger of his left hand and toyed with the bulging tip with his right hand, palming seminal fluid freely and rubbing experimentally, especially with his index finger against the momentarily anterior portion of the athlete's log-like, circumcised boner. The eleven year old experimented with stroking the man, transferring some of the slick seminal fluid to his left hand, and using both in a series of experiments.

"We better change positions so I can lean against the tree," Diego managed to whisper, his chest heaving and his breath rasping from the young male's boyish touch. The child was neither aggressive nor hesitant, just perfect, and, though malice was the last thing he bore toward his nephew, he still wasn't going to stand for it.

"Okay," he whispered up into the handsome face looking down at him, "I want to keep doing it." Slowly they turned, and, the instant the tall male's back was against the solid tree trunk, he spread his legs widely, again thrusting encouragingly to Julio. The man laced his fingers behind his neck, arched, and gave himself entirely to the beautiful, coltish pre-teen. Julio leaned to his uncle, his forehead against the heaving chest of the young man. He used both his hands with some surety now, setting up a firm, slow stroking as he stared down with huge brown eyes. "That's perfect," Diego whispered, "just don't stop when it starts happening."

"What's going to happen?" Julio asked.

"I'm going to cum," the teacher said, "I haven't done it for awhile so there will be a lot of thick, white fluid -- semen -- and if you hold me the way you are now it will get all over your face and chest when it starts happening."

"If I was a girl it would go inside me, right?" the boy asked.

"Girls do it the way we are, too," Diego replied, "they like to get it on their breasts, but usually, yes, the girl takes the seed inside her."

"One of the pictures showed the little boy down on his knees taking the man in his mouth," Julio said.

"That's a very popular way to do it, but it takes getting used to," Diego managed to whisper, his entire body now shaking at the instinctive touch of the boy leaning against his panting chest.

"Can I try it with you tonight when we're in the sleeper?" Julio asked.

"Yes, darling," the young man whispered, "I won't have so much sperm then, if you don't like having it on your tongue."

"I think I'll like having it in my mouth," the boy whispered, shyly.

"The best way to find out is to hold me against the tip of your tongue and your lips when I tell you I'm going to cum," the teacher explained, "then you'll see what it's like, and it will be easy to spit it all out if you don't like the feeling."

"Okay," Julio said, fantasizing over the big, adult penis in his hands and what it would feel like surging gently in his mouth. Even as his thoughts turned carnal, Diego grew larger and hotter in a matter of seconds. His breathing became a hard pant and his whole body quaked as he spread his legs wide and thrust himself with short, fast strokes into the hands of the coltish boy who met him avidly with a hurried flurry of strong counterstrokes.

"I'm cumming," Diego managed to whisper. Julio slowed his pace, instinctively using both hands hard and low on the stag, holding him tight against his slim, sweating chest so he could see everything. A thick pulse of heavy cum dashed against his neck. "Don't stop," the young man reminded the boy in a faltering whisper, and Julio kept his hands low and used them hard. More sperm came in a few moments, then there was a leaping torrent and hot stream after stream spread across the child's shoulders, slim chest, and tiny, golden nipples.

"Oh, yes," the boy breathed, "oh, uncle."

"It's really started now," the shaken man rasped, "you made it the best in the world."

Nor was he kidding. He settled into a fast, hard rhythm in the child's gripping fists, covering him with his long, powerful climax. After nearly a minute, the boy detected the approaching end and settled on his long legs to his slightly knobby knees, finding the man with his lips and tongue, experimenting for a moment with the first hard pulse against his delicate orifice, then took the swollen, hot glans deeply and fully, moaning with the intensity of what was happening, but still vigorous in the use of his hands on the hard, long shaft of the young man.

"Julio, I'm cumming," the adult warned a second time, his hands lowering to guide the boy free of the shattering climax building in the ruins of his loins. This just made the pre-teen use his hands and mouth more vigorously, so the young man gave up and just cradled the boy's sweet, Hispanic face in his hard, strong hands. Absently, on the verge of consciousness, Diego found the boy's long, slender throat with his finger tips, and was electrified to feel the hard contractions of the delicate muscles that followed each long, hard pulse of the fresh climax now spilling hotly into the soft, welcoming mouth as the boy hummed avidly with the intensity of a throat washed repeatedly by gush after gush of thick, salty sperm.

Diego's second climax did not last as long as his first, and in half a minute Julio sensed the ebb of what was happening. He milked with his hands, licked with his tongue, and when the torrent has subsided, stood, leaning against his uncle's naked chest, staring up into his eyes. The adult lowered slowly to the boy, and they shared their first hot, salty kiss, thus extending the older male's ejaculation by ten minutes or more.

"Love must have something to do with it being like that," Diego admitted as the couple regained their breaths, "but it's hard to tell. You're such a beauty and so good at touching, I can't imagine it being any other way with you, even if I'd met you ten minutes ago."

"If the kissing was best, that might mean love, right?" the boy asked.

"The kissing was great because it went on so long," Diego said, adding: "that makes it a calculus problem, and probably one way to demonstrate love is not to go there."

"I would love it if you didn't," the boy agreed, and a moment later they were again kissing as if it were the last day on earth, slick naked body pressed to slick, naked body. Then Diego was gently breaking from the boy's hot, salty mouth and turning the coltish youth in his arms. He leaned whispering over Julio's right shoulder, encircling the boy's slim, wet chest with his left arm. "Spread you legs," he said, bracing against the tree so he could support the boy's weight. Julio complied, spreading wide, and the young teacher wet his right palm on the child's slick belly and began masturbating the pre-teen with a slow, steady rhythm.

"Try to hold back and make it last;" Diego coached, "think about overbearingly matronic television actresses."

"Mary Tyler Moore?" the boy whispered, raggedly, unable to keep himself from pumping his slim hips into the stroking, wet fist of the man behind him.

"She's a dander queen when she wants to be," the teacher said in acknowledgement; "high-dudgeon, personified, but there is one who is worse; one with supernatural powers to rattle a young male at a hundred yards."

"You mean so righteous she's worse than Rosie O'Donnell?" the boy asked.

"To a young boy, maybe ten percent worse," Diego said.

"Then I know who you mean," Julio responded.

"Is it helping?" the young man asked.

"Quite a bit," the boy said.

"Good," his uncle whispered into his right ear, "because I really want this to last for you. This is where trust comes in, letting something immediate go, because it will be better for the waiting, far better."

"I trust you, and trying not to think of her really works."

"Can you feel your sperm?" Diego whispered, hoarsely.

"It's getting really hot," the boy responded, nodding in his captor's arms.

"Okay, pretend you've just torched one and your mother, played by a leading lady of the little screen, pounds through your door. Make up dialogue. Think of life in prison from slaying against living with the dragon. Whether you'd try to flee, or fake it out by pretending to be remorseful."

"What if there was a lot of blood?" the boy asked.

"That's the spirit," his uncle encouraged, "saw-tooth freezer knife, or keen steak blade, that kind of thing. Head first, or start with the limbs?"

"Yes, yes," the boy seconded, "and what to do with the head. Pike the puppy on the front lawn, you know, go for insanity, or keep it fresh in the freezer for the forensic pathologist, you know, the next time they get together for darts."

"To paint or not to paint," Diego added, "perhaps a discreet bull's-eye on the forehead."

"Couldn't improve the eyes, though," the boy mused, happily.

"About a half a toothpick under each lid before she goes in the plastic bag, that oughtta do the trick."

"How long do you think she'd have to thaw before the darts would stick?" Julio asked.

"Twenty minutes might work," the teacher suggested, loving the feeling of the giggling boy in his left arm as much as he did the more intense hotness of the child's long, hard penis in his massaging right hand.

"Do you like the feeling of my cum on you?" Diego whispered.

"Yes," the boy rasped back, stiffening with a jolt in the man's right hand.

"I had an older boy's sperm on me the first time it happened," the teacher said, "and it made it really hard to stay in control."

"It's hard for me, too," the boy affirmed.

"You've got to try to think of other things besides spilling your seed," the uncle coaxed, "for example," he went on, "if I bend way over you, like this, and hold my left hand, palm up, like this, under your glans, and rub you gently, like this, you have to try not to think about what my palm will look like if you cum off on it. Understand?"

"Am I meant to forget what happened on my chest, too?" the shaking boy asked.

"Precisely," his uncle agreed, "as well as what might happen on your bare chest the first time you spend some time alone with your friend, Keddy."

"So I shouldn't pretend it's his left hand cupped under me, like you are?" the boy wanted to know.

"Yes," Diego agreed, "and if he was whispering to you, and kissing your beautiful shoulders, and urging you to cum, you'd have to just ignore all of it."

"You've got to teach me how," Julio said.

"Trust," the man responded, "trust a man for hours. Have faith that he wants your climax just as much as you do, that he won't leave you or let you down, that in his own way, in his own time, he'll go all the way with you, and that you'll cum in his hands or in his mouth."

"I trust you," the child whispered.

"Then go ahead," Diego whispered, "let it happen, and it will happen again after we've had lunch and a nap, okay?"

"Yes," the boy whispered in panting, ragged response. The males remained huddled, man over boy, for long moments as Diego masturbated the pre-teen with his right hand, cupping his left at the boy's swollen tip. "I'm cumming," the coltish youth finally whispered, staring down at his waist. Diego shifted so he could see everything, freezing his right hand at the boy's rigid base, holding him almost still against his ready left hand. The boy shuddered, hissed and gasped for half a minute, whispering, "oh, god," just as the first spray of his long climax filled his uncles hand. He kept looking down and kept ejaculating for almost a minute, filling the big worker's hand of his scholarly uncle until his thin, watery semen overflowed and sheeted down over his long, hairless legs.

The males sank to the ground at the base of the tree. "You okay?" Diego whispered.

"I think so," the boy said.

"I mean psychologically," the man said, "sometimes you feel disassociated after you ejaculate; you know, cold and detached; maybe even angry or guilty."

"I just can't believe it was so intense," the boy said, still panting but regaining his breath quickly.

"I want to spread your sperm on your chest," Diego said, "but I don't have to if you're not ready for it."

"I want to feel it," the boy whispered.

"It will delay lunch," the man observed.

"The food will keep," the boy said, and that answered that.

"Let's tell the next one in our underpants, okay?" Armando suggested, looking at his young cousin, who nodded alertly. That was a good enough signal, and the boys stood up from their nest of thick roots and self-consciously disrobed, hanging their jerseys and shorts out of the way. They turned slowly to face each other, heads bent as they stared down at the big, openly displayed bulges in their white cotton briefs. Nervously, Armando brought Raul to his lap, Angel on his right, leg touching, as was Juan's, who perched at his left hip.

"Octavo and Pius," the attentive nine year old whispered, inspiring the next story, greatly enhanced by watching Armando begin to molest the little boy in his underpants. Last seen, Octavo had dropped onto the quilt carried into the grove by his uncle. Already bare-chested, the handsome, slightly pudgy twelve year old was arching his back and unbuckling the belt of his shorts. Pius, a six-four, rangy giant, age twenty-five, quickly stripped naked, tossing his clothes on a branch, then standing at the boy's feet, his long athletic legs slightly spread, display for the boy on the quilt by arching his back and placing his hands behind his neck.

The man's uncircumcised penis jutted nearly seven hot, hard inches from his powerful trunk of a waist. Like the boy staring up at him, he was a few scant pounds overweight, but the excess went well with his matted-hair physique, and to the boys in the tree as well as the boys on the ground, he looked like a stunning great male animal on the verge of taking total satisfaction.

Although half-stupefied by the sight above him, Octavo's hands remained busy at his waist, and he finally managed buckle, snap, and zipper as Pius sand to his knees between the boy's now widely spread legs. The driver bent to his young helper, finding his lips and kissing him gently.

"Have you been with lot of men?" the driver asked.

"Yes," the boy said.

"Are you going to stay with me on the truck?" the man asked.

"Yes," the boy grinned, "I love it. It's perfect, noisy, but perfect, and I think you're awesome, even when you have your clothes on. Do you want me to stay?"

"Yes," the man replied, immediately, "and I'm glad you're experienced, as long as you don't overdo it while we're meant to be out making money together."

"It was all with one group of men," Octavo said, "I'm not attracted to the average guy in average circumstances, just once in awhile, and no one like you, ever. I'll be there when you need me. We had six tom cats when I was growing up, and they all wandered off to die of passion. Not my idea of a good time."

"Good," Pius said, "because I want this to happen for you with others, but keeping everything ahead of the game on the road requires diligence in handling things before you have to cope with them, and sometimes that doesn't fit too well with down time."

"Rubber, road, rest," the boy said, happily.

"The first two are always most of the game, and rest, in terms of sleep, is pretty much the rest of the game, but, every few days, there's likely to be a few hours when everything's kosher and it's time to be together."

"I can't say I'm on the same page," Octavo said, "because I don't know, from two days, all that's on it, but I like it and I'll try. `Glass, glass, and glass, no one rides for free, because there's bugs, bugs, bugs, and the driver has to see."

"Well," the man chuckled, "with you riding shotgun, I hardly think I'll be looking out through all those sparkling clean windows, but it's a nice thought."

Pius rose to his knees, his long Indian braids trailing over his shoulders like a brave in an expensive Western. His hard, Bronsonesque face softened as his long, strong arms found Octavo's soft waist and he gently skinned down the boy's shorts and underpants, exposing the twelve year old's fully adult, circumcised penis with its faint ridge of dusty-blond growth. The man looked wonderingly into the child's eyes. "I think it's from being with so many adult males at the pool," he whispered. "One of them was a doctor, and he said this might be the result of being mature with them."

"You're beautiful," the man whispered, "I'd have been happy if you hadn't developed at all, you're cute enough to get away with pulling a stunt like that, but you're like an eighteen year old. It's very sexy."

"Thanks," the boy said, with a shy smile, "but it would probably be embarrassing if I was still in school."

"You'd be invited for overnights by half the kids in the gym class," the man said, "and they'd get you pretty used to letting them look at you. And that's not even allowing for what would happen when the girls found out."

"I'm glad I left," Octavo said, "they interfered something wicked with my reading."

"That's the one thing you can do in the cab of a truck," Pius said, "knit or read. You can sit over there and have a law degree, if you want, before you're old enough to drive the witless truck."

"I guess that's how we chose each other," the boy mused, softly, "I saw your library, and you saw me looking at it."

"I recognized the hunger, yes," Pius said, "was overbearingly affected by it when I was your age."

"I've been reading so much since you hired me, I never thought to even ask," the boy said, "wipe the glass, follow along on the map, check the tires, and read while we're cruising. Wasn't put here for anything else, so no reason not to."

"You're lucky you don't get motion sickness," Pius observed.

"I do a little, but before I was too embarrassed to talk," the boy said, so I just let my eyes drift, or looked around a little. I was really scared you'd find out I'd been with the men on the water polo team and think I was a freak; also, that you wouldn't want to touch me, even though I know most of the drivers touch the boys they're with."

"Two bridges crossed, then," the man whispered as his fingers trailed to the eraser-size nipples of the boy.

"I would have been happy even if this hadn't happened," the boy said, "but I'm glad it is."

"Same here," the man agreed. "In fact, I liked it that you were so quiet. It's nice to talk, but you can always judge a relationship on how you feel when there's nothing to say for the moment; how you feel just being close. That's either positive or negative, and all the talk there is won't change it."

"I'd just look over to be sure you were still there, as if I couldn't believe it, then go back to feeling very positive," Octavo said.

"As in happy?" the man quizzed, with a smile.

"At least a thousand clams worth," the boy responded, "and that was then. They all had kids, so by now it's ten thousand, and, when you put your hands really low on me, - like that - , its really, really more."

"Nice, salty clams," Pius whispered, "having juicy young babies by the thousands and thousands."

"Then how come they want to go?" the boy asked.

"Because they know I love you and they want to show off," Pius whispered to the happy kid.

"Do they ever," the twelve year old agreed.

"And they will, even more, later," the young man said, moving his hands back up over the boy's soft, smooth belly, then falling to his left on the quilt, molesting they boy with his right hand as he kissed the child's right ear and whispered to him.

"Were you shocked the first time?" he asked.

"Kinda," the boy replied.

"Most men like to quiz boys about their experiences," the driver said, "but if it's private, that's cool, too."

"I just didn't know how much there'd be," Octavo said, "I though sperm was like a few drops. Wrong."

"Athletes probably have more than most guys," Pius observed.

"It turned out they'd all been not doing anything for a few days before we got together."

"You knew something was going to happen?" Pius asked his young assistant.

"Brado was the team captain," the youth explained, "he said they wanted me for a towel boy, but he said the guys on the team liked to do mature stuff in the locker room after everyone else had gone, and some boys didn't like that kind of thing."

"How did that make you feel?" Pius asked.

"Really scared, but I knew lots of boys are scared, even if they learn with their girlfriends, so I said I wanted to learn stuff, and I liked them, and wanted to be part of the polo team, even if it was only helping out. I mean, I guess that's pretty obvious; that I wasn't going to become lead scorer or defensive star."

Pius laughed at the boy. "How did they ever let you go?" he asked.

"It was too many to be one-on-one with," the boy said, "I mean, it wasn't like a game, they were nice, and they were serious, but something was missing. None of them liked to read, and to me that was everything. Anyway, it was all buddies and no lovers, if that makes any sense, and it doesn't, because I don't want a man for a lover, that's almost gross, with so many girls running around, but I wanted more than scores and bets, so I found a boy who the other kids said was jealous of me, then I talked to him and kind of hinted at what happened, and he stopped being jealous in no seconds and was suddenly the best friend I ever had in my whole life, and his whole live, his name's Alfonso, and I introduced him to Brado, and he stayed after with us one night, and they said he could take my place, and they threw a banquet for me, and I retired from polo, age, eleven, to seek my fortune on the open roads of Mexico, with ten thousand U.S. dollars sewed into my clothes, and about six phone number to call if things went wrong."

"Are you having fun, yet?" the man asked with a twinkle in his eyes.

"Seventh Heaven is yesterday's news," the boy chortled, nuzzling into the rugged neck of the tall man who was holding him in his left arm and molesting him openly with the fingers of his right hand.

For long moments neither spoke as they experimented with kissing. "It's my first time for this," the boy whispered, "I let the polo players cum on me, and in my mouth a few times, but I've never been kissed before."

"Did you like it?" Pius quizzed, his voice a hoarse, throaty whisper.

"Yes," the boy responded, "which was lucky, because they had me on the massage table for a long time."

"And there was a lot of cum?"

"They all knelt between my legs while other players held them apart, and they put some gel on my right hand and taught me how to hold an adult, and what to do with my left hand while I was jerking him off. I guess I did it okay, that's why they got me so wet."

"Did you get sperm in your mouth?" the man rasped.

"All over my face and neck," the boy replied, "everywhere."

"Did it stay exciting, or did you start to get bored," Pius asked the child purring happily in his arms.

"I stayed exciting because Brado was really good using his wet hand on me. He kept me excited, but it probably would have been even if he hadn't been doing what he was with me."

"Hmm," the driver mused, "I've never met anyone who had quite such a dramatic first experience, and I was just wondering like how much of that kind of thing would be too much, turn a kid off."

"Much more would have," the boy remarked. "There were fourteen of them, counting reserve players and coaches. One or two more might have been okay, but you're right, it could have been a drag if much more went on."

"Not mentioning the happy fact you might have drowned," Pius said, with a soft laugh.

"I came a lot closer to that when you kissed me," the bright-eyed child said.

"It was barely survivable, so it must have made us a lot stronger," the man replied.

"Speaking of surviving," the boy said, "there's something I want to tell you."

"You have five diseases plus you're a leper," Pius quipped, "I knew this was to good to ask. At least I'll die happy."

"I want you inside me," the boy whispered, changing the tone of the conversation dramatically.

"Not me," the tall athlete said, "I want to love you, not damage you."

"Then use self-control," the boy suggested, "because I really want it to happen that way, no matter what."

"Have you ever had a male inside you?" Pius asked.

"Brado thought it would be a good idea in case I was ever with a man who wanted to rape me, so I'd be a little used to it, so he helped Alfredo mount me from in back, but he wore a condom so it wouldn't really be my first time."

"Was it okay?" Pius wanted to know.

"I liked him, Alfredo, a lot better, afterwards," the boy replied, "he was really gentle and made it feel nice after I got used to it."

"How many times did he take you that way?" the man asked.

"Six times, so that it was comfortable. That's when I left the team," the boy said.

"How big was Alfonso?" Pius queried.

"I was afraid you'd ask," the boy said, his laughter getting shier and more personal as he let himself be captivated by his tall, strong new partner.

"Sorry," the man said.

"No," the boy responded, quickly, "it's okay. He was big for his age, but not the size of a man; I just didn't want the fact he wasn't adult size to make you think I was some delicate virgin. I'm not, exactly, and I know it will hurt at first, and I know we can't do it more than once a month, that way, because of what the doctor on the team told me, but I still want it to happen. I'm not into girl stuff, by and large, but I do want to have that experience. To know once in awhile your seed is swimming in me, even if its not exactly Mother Nature's plan A."

"I think it would be better to find an older boy and I can hold the two of your bodies together, the way Brado did, and we can kiss and you can fantasize a little to fill in the gaps."

"I dunno," the boy whispered.

"If you were wet from him, it would be easier for both of us," the man explained.

"And I'd go around starry-eyed from almost half a billion sperm wiggling in me," the boy giggled.

"Not for long, I hope" the driver observed.

"Don't worry," the boy replied softly and contentedly, "I won't be showing up in frilly blouses and purple hair."

"Actually," the man mused, "we could play games like that once in awhile; I'd love to ravish you as a knock-kneed schoolgirl, say, two or three times a year."

"I like the sound of `year'," the boy responded.

"So do I," the man said, "as well as a companion who walks without limping from strained anal muscles, or has to wear diapers because he's lost muscle tone where a boy doesn't want to lose it."

"Dr. Palacio told me about that," Octavo said, "but he also said boys are pretty resilient, so that once in awhile wouldn't have any permanent effect."

"I still like my way, just to be on the safe side," the man said, "and there are plenty of clean boys out there who would be happy to be part of us being together."

"Have you molested other boys who drove with you?" Octavo asked.

"Yes," Pius said, "I've had three assistants in six years. They're all teenagers now, and they've all gone back to school because they weren't especially hot on reading, so they needed maths grades."

"Sometimes I think I like to read just so I won't have to take algebra," the boy said.

"Then we're peas in a pod," the man laughed, "I was too lazy to strain my brain in pursuit of `X', myself."

"I'll bet it takes lots of equations to equal one chapter of a good book," the boy responded.

"Maths are for the outer life," the adult said, "reading, your real, what-you-are inner life. If you want to be rich, master every number in symbol you can get your hands on, however atrociously they teach it, if you want to be happy, leave the math to your better endowed schoolmates, and read until you're half blind. You can still be a janitor, a watchman, or a trucker; cook, something menial that doesn't interfere with your mind."

"What about journalist?" the boy asked.

"Last on the list," Pius replied, "if you want to write, keep your pencil in your pocket until you're forty years old, then write fiction. If you dabble in journalism along the way, a, who cares, if you don't write it, the guy at the next desk will, and, b, you'll bleed off your talent, should it happen that you have any, and end up with writer's block. You have, so to speak, build a huge reservoir and fill it right to the top before you go tampering with any of the shiny valves."

"Your basic long-haul," the boy mused.

"And how," the man affirmed, "but when you get there, you're able to do something only a handful of artists on the entire planet are able to do. Write snortin' good fiction. I've got fifteen years to go, myself, but I wouldn't care if it was fifty, well, twenty. I know someday I'll write at least a good story, maybe even a good book. If there's a higher reward than that in the world, I'd like to know about it."

"But what if you do?" the boy asked. "I mean, there's that saying about what happens if you catch what you wish for."

"It may turn out to be the dog cornering the tiger," the man said with a nod, "but what's the alternative? Grind away to raise a family? In this day and age, when half the kids turn out to be loutish American-style pizza hounds? I think not, and, besides, plenty of people seem to be thus engaged, last time I looked. Better the artist's alternative for at least some of us. Remember we, as wanna-be writers, are like the little sea turtles hatched on the beach; it takes a thousand to yield one. Nature's particularly tough that way, and if you survive that mother, there are the publishers in New York. No one has toyed with them from the time of Guttenberg."

"Someone has to take socialism seriously or it would be smothered by its own kindergarten inanity," the boy said.

"We are going to get along fiercely well," Pius said, then found the willing mouth of the naked twelve year old. For half an hour they lay side by side, nose to nose, kissing and whispering inaudibly. The boys looking down from the tree didn't get bored, both the young males were too huge and swollen to engender anything other than near-panic excitement. From their first experience, the week before, they'd learned to carry canteens on their spy missions and quietly passed one between themselves as they waited for the second act on the clean, blue quilt beneath them.

Great artists produce huge amounts of work, but they are not always completely reliable. For example, I promised a week until my next essay, and it's only been a day. Well, I'm just coming off the flue, plus, I'm after the final inch on my diet, plus writing fiction is -- all together -- no walk in the park, so, no week. It's sort of like shifting into third gear, assuming four to start with, going up a long hill. Slower pace, less strain, let that big, throbbing mill cool down, and, if worse comes to worse, suggest to the reader that he could probably use a drink of water, too, and let it go at that.

It's been a long time since I apologized for typos and the like. I've reached the point where I don't edit my work, at all. This helps in lots of ways but does mean a blotted copybook. I'm probably being defeatist. I realized, before I was accepted, I'd never make it through college because I couldn't spell with any special fervor, and they knocked off a letter grade for every alphanumeric blunder. Instead of trying harder, I bought a very used bike called a Honda Dream, like a Harley on whatever the opposite of steroids are, and toured the southeaster Iowa countryside instead of having long, intimate sessions with my dictionary. This freedom was greatly enhanced by the fact there was no way I was going to get through maths-course one, so the degree was a lost cause from my first day in a beanie. I violated my own rule on journalism and wrote for the paper, did all the photography on campus, worked in the library, rode my bike ceaselessly, and copped an A+ [knew I'd use that nuisance key once in my life] in an English seminar, and split for home half way through my fourth semester. I don't remember what happened to the bike, just that I got my $150 worth out of it. And yes, I was very lucky to survive, but any writer is lucky to survive. Where do they tell you that? If you're going to have anything to write about, you have to do what the others in the elevator don't do, and it can be fatal in more ways than one. Turtles on the wide, sandy beach, and it's a long swim to the dangerous waters surrounding Manhattan Island, assuming you survive the boring reaches of Long Island Sound, in the first place. And yes, for you geographers, one could approach from the southeast, but at what peril? The coast of New Jersey. Trump and the gang. Better to swim around Orient and Montauk points and risk the barge traffic and Hell's Gate. After all, it's not as if I was swimming to warm shores and friendly climes. They should not be toyed with, but I'm a king and toy with whomsoever I wish. Of course, this assumes freedom of speech relative to their being able to toy back. Good, that's why the whole process was invented, in the first place.

I spanked a child last week, I'd almost say for the first time in my life. I think her name's Naneen. She's two, and quite likeable, but this is one gray wolf you whine around at peril to your bottom, and she whined. Whining, squabbling with her brother, or abusing the cats all get immediate, hard spankings, or, actually, for the English among us, spank. Lots of tears, then she sat in Samantha's lap saying, without a trace of whine, "I don't want to come here," repeatedly until the subject lost interest. She's been back twice, cute through and through, but, at her tender age, a refresher is probably in the future if she keeps visiting. That the idiotic reality of spanking. Do it once, and children respect and respond to an edge in your voice. The replacement under trendy liberalism is counting, either up or down, then nothing happens. The kids do not respect you, run amok, and, if you're human, there's a pretty good chance you'll end up mauling them out of pure frustration. Spankings are for whining, squabbling, or bad acting out, especially with pets. A slap, with all the strength you have, is for spitting, throwing sand, cursing, or other grossly egregious behavior. Neither should be followed immediately by any form of hug or modifying behavior. It hurts to be bad. The message is entire unto itself. I don't like liberals, at all, so it's not perverse of me to delight in the misery the bring down on their heads with counting and meaningful dialogues, leaving the old-fashioned spanking to the trogs and knuckle draggers of ages gone by. Do it early, do it hard, and chances are you'll rarely, if ever, have to do it again. The dividend is a responsive, not a subservient, child, and one you can take a hundred places you can't take an odorous horror show (the library, for example).

It's becoming pretty obvious to me that I must be about the number one word-processor user in the world over the last three years, having published some million words and written twice that many, in addition. I constantly give the machine credit for everything I am in the writing department, but I do have a suggestion. The word processor should come with a Writer's option on the keyboard settings. This would reverse the hyphen and plus-sign key (+=) which a writer rarely uses but constantly hits instead of the oft'-used hyphen. Also, the F10 key should be disabled, as it frequently gets hit by mistake. The insert key should be muted; I've never used it in my life, but am constantly changing modes accidentally, and the Windows key under the right shift key is also a problem. Finally, my new keyboard has a key just left of the enter key, a vertical and front slash, that should defiantly be elsewhere, with the quote key next to the return. I suppose a tiny program would do the trick, but it would take a year to learn how to apply it, then I'd have to learn to write code. I'd rather date Tyne Daley.

Moving along, I've lost my second big male cat, a beautiful, coal black beast half-again as big as the average feline. They just wander off. You'd think they'd turn up to eat, but I guess the tropics are crawling with food. Maybe things would be different if I could afford Tender Vitals for every meal, but I doubt it. I premium Purina doesn't fill the bill, they they'll have to take their board elsewhere, as it's a sin to have pets in a hungry country, in the first place.

For the first time in years, I'm without a single remote. I gave my stereo to Samantha because she's been such a trouper over Daisy's gang moving in, and I seem have less desire to know what's going on in Israel with each passing week, so no television in the offing, and not a blessed remote, good batteries or bad, in the whole six-bedroom palace. Cool, or what. No telephone, no cable, I'll have my million words half in the bag by my birthday on March first. I wish I missed some of it. I mean, go figure, so many years so totally middle-American, and now I might as well be living on a remote island off Fiji, one with electricity, that is. In fact, my cup runneth over now that I no longer have to deal with Malcolm to upload, though, to be fair he's apologized for turning me away every time I've seen him. Hmm.

Samantha is meant to turn up this (Sunday) afternoon to make chicken and mushroom soup. I tried yesterday, but learned you do not keep chicken three days in the fridge, so Queenie bought a new bird, and now her royal rock-and-roller is meant to steam the bird, pick the meat, and watch me do everything else. Two p.m., and I'm hungry. Not only am I hungry, but the last inch is gone, gone, gone. I have to push my stomach out to get to thirty-two inches, where I used to pull it in. Time to eat.

Bill Anderson wrote to say he thought a recent attack of shingles suffered by my father was caused by my relationship with the little black girl, aka, Samantha. I hope so. My father made sure I toured every ring of hell as a boy, and if his prejudice gives him hives, heebie-jeebies, and a case of the freaking fits, well and good. I did my best to off my mother in vengeance for her extremes of derogatory behavior toward me, if there's any justice in the world, my wife is getting her comeuppance, along with the fee snapper for whom she ditched both her career, and me; my sister and next oldest brother surely deserve to have their dirty linen aired as publicly as possible, and, if my father's getting his turn, again, there are lots of forms of justice out there, and he deserves several of them. A writer leads a hard life. He must be compliant, or even wishy-washy; a sponge, absorbing, rather than a man fighting back. As a writer you can't stand up for this, or believe absolutely in that. I mean you might pull it off if you have a talent for commercial fiction, and can stomach dealing with New York, but you'll never be an artist of he written word, you have too much to learn, and you learn very little being boss and big shot, and micro-managing things so they happen the way you want. You sit there and absorb it all, realize how much of it is bad, shrug your shoulders at the notion of how long it's going to take to find enough good, and another day dawns, times about thirty years. The wine stays in the barrel until its time, it doesn't go running around being beer. If my parents had wanted me to have a healthy career in the mid social strata, which is what they said, they should have provided the extras, and all I ever got was endless bouts of seasickness, which meant I couldn't read, in a noisy, smelly fiberglass boat. My father, the opposite of a scholar, was placed on the front door of, a, The Fenn School, b, Concord Academy, which took boys in his era, and, c, Belmont Hill, with his brothers attending, having been placed on the front steps, d, Harvard, while he was set on the doorstep of Mass. Maritime. I didn't even get to go to the Northport schools, but was bussed, literally, across the tracks to East Northport, where my clever New England ways went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Yes, it all combined to make me a sensational writer, but it was less fun than you can possibly imagine. I saved a number of lives by developing a savage sense of humor, the blacker the better, and abiding. Pretty funny, eh? Of course, such parental and spousal indifference also licensed me to write pornography, and I don't take that as an incidental gift. Indeed, the very thought of a cute seven year old jumping in my lap and saying, "What are you writing, Daddy," is enough to chill my blood. Of course, I probably could have used my skills to turn out a precious children's book, or two, with a smiling wife at my side to illustrate them, but she went land-mad and dumped me for the lawyer's income potential, which is nothing if not ironic, because I could take my pick of several New England homesteads to settle into, and I don't mean tract-house cob jobs with loud, drinking neighbors. So is the life of a sponge, and all he can hope for is gathering in enough water to rain on a few parades under the assumption that those who rained on his must favor this particular behavior model. Of course, I could be wrong, they might not like receiving what they so generously supplied, which is, I suppose, why the phrase, "Tough luck," came into popular usage. And it doesn't take much embellishment to hold society, at large, responsible, either. You can't do calculus, therefore you can't teach history. That was their moronic message, and, to this day, I'm not qualified to teach fourth grade in any school in the U.S.A. Because I couldn't spell like a clever Jew, I was deemed an intellectual zero, not worth a degree of any kind from any where. Then they put me on K.P., assuming, with a logic that would be terrifying in the hands of a military mind, that it was a good place for a sponge.

You know something? In my entire fifty-six years, no one has ever asked my how many books I've read. Doesn't that about say it all, vis-a-vis the intellectual climate in the post J.D. Salinger era? I was a fish in a sea of morons; yes, I found them distasteful, but I ate, anyway, kidded around so no one would end up toe-tagged, and, again, abided, not a drop of beer in my veins, just blue Yankee blood, aged and distilled to perfection. Somewhere along the line, the gods get involved, but they're all tripping on their egos to such a degree an end-run is just logging a few miles around them, rather than tampering with them on their well-packed turf.

Samantha's in the kitchen in a devastating pair of dark-mustard colored short shorts and white girl's tee top. She's chopping an onion about as fast as a whale circles the earth, good, I'll buy her a bushel. My father's been hound-dogging a girl thirty years his junior for years; a poundage queen, to my eye, but she plays the harp. My mother tolerated it with the good nature only indifference can bring to such a situation, so, all in all, I don't toss guiltily at night over my relationship. The man has two point seven-five million, not counting land, personal accounts, and who knows what in the way of tractors and machinery; his eldest son is the greatest artist of all time; he stays fit and has enjoyed pretty darn good health, and he's worried about dip of the tar brush. Good. That's what bigots should do, fret until their skin falls off. You have to be smart to be happy, and you have to read to be smart, and the fact that opulent times have muted this imperative does nothing to detract from its essential truth.

Learned something about reading instructions, yesterday. I have a sleep switch on my new keyboard and I was trying it out. It shuts the new monitor down, but it comes back on. I fiddled with it a few times, then read the instructions. They say do not degauss the display more frequently than every twenty minutes, and that it degausses automatically every time it's turned on or comes back to display mode from sleep mode. Oops. Doesn't seem to have done any time. Also a minor annoyance, in that it has a bright green light that flashes aggressively when the unit is in sleep mode. It seems to me the main reason you put a monitor to sleep, in the first place, is so it won't distract you, and a flashing green neon light is nothing but distracting.

As much as an art as it is, it surprised me how much craft is involved in writing. The right keyboard and display make a world of difference, at least to me; back lighted, no glares, every T' crossed and I' dotted in the comfort and convenience department, and it's ten thousand words a day. If anything's awry, the production can easily fall to zero. Fellow writers take note, the muses are vague and illusive creatures, and only play happily all day and half the night if everything is in apple-pie order, weed, cigarettes, lighter, cats fed and watered, kitchen clean, food in the fridge for the gang, toilet clean, and enough on the B-list to provide a dozen excuses not to sit still and wait for the furballs from lit. land to cast their magic spell.

My big black cat is back after being AWOL for three days. Seems to be in perfect shape. Again, I'll try to keep him in, but, in my considerable experience, when a cat really wants to get out, out it gets. I should name him Tom, because he wanders around the house talking to himself, as I'm prone to do. Why he leaves, with three obviously receptive young females after his body most of the time, is one of those mysteries of the wild kingdom. Of course, I like to wander around in the tropics, too, so maybe it's as simple as that.

No sex for weeks. I go for my share of laughs at the expense of my subjects, king that I am, but I do so always aware that a porn master who's not getting any has to be worth a laugh or two, himself. On the other hand, I'm seeing more of Randy who's just leaving the twinkie stage, and he seems to like being alone with me and stretching out on the bed to play pool, so that's on the back burner. Samantha's become such a freaking friend and buddy, I hardly dare touch her, anymore, but she gives every sign that when she's ready, she'll be ever-so ready, and it would be hard to ask for more than that. I do not consider myself bisexual, because I wouldn't want to sleep with Randy, Daryl, or any male cutie more than two or three times, while I'd like to sleep with Samantha all night, every night. I like to play sex games with young males, and think it ever so cool when they share the desire, but that's it; no p.d.a., no romantic Erasmus (if I got that right) stuff of any kind, and my catamite friend turns me off because I turn him on. I'd rather chase a poof down the street with a stick, than be one, so I don't know where I fit. IQs of four-hundred live in their own separate world, and it's kind of scary, because if I can't figure it out, for sure, no one else is going to. Guess I'm a macho-half-macho man, or, more to my liking, a macho-and-a-half man. The Greeks had it about right. Why do we keep their ludicrous concepts of democracy and republicanism, and get all derisive about their mores? Could it be because we're becoming a real, fat, dumb, ugly, ignorant culture?

The chicken soup, with which Samantha helped by chopping two onions and two potatoes, turned out nicely. In the past I've used the juice from the canned mushrooms and vegetables, but these seem too harsh, so now it's just milk, margarine, and flour for the base, with skimmed chicken stock, just because I have it. Lighter flavor, better aftertaste, but it's still missing something, possibly msg, which does enhance flavor, or garlic, which the girls say they don't like. Delicious but not quite delectable. Something to work on for the new year, as if finishing this million-word colossus won't be enough to keep my little fingers up to plenty of mischief.

As do most egomaniacs, I carry on fantasy interviews with myself, and a question that always comes up is consistency. Other artists have achieved great moments, and, in "The Gods Must be Crazy," Jamie Uys sustains a genius level through most of the film, but, overall, it's the rarest thing, and so many high-fliers have turned out -- and published -- trunk-quality pap. Irving Berlin would be a perfect example. How, if you can achieve something great, can you ever do less? Or at least allow `less' to be published? Sure the typos and other errors creep in, but nothing I post is less than screaming, top of the list, absolute, A-plus, quality. I've attributed this to laziness, elsewhere, but can the answer be that simple? I thought I was being at least partly facetious, and figured my readers took me for just plain nuts. Yet, there it is, page after page, one huge chapter after another, one huge novel after another, half of them written with me typing flat out, never blocking, but sometimes choking. No one else even comes close, and most have gaps in it least some of their work, you could drive a truck through. Why, I'll admit, arguably, did all the literary talent on earth go to one individual? Yes, I worked and suffered for it, yes, it's been the very definition of an obsessive compulsion since Gran read me "Out Jumped Boo", when I was probably a year or two old, but that still doesn't count for it. Many have had several times my alleged enrichment, and most can't write at all, however they may wish the idyllic lifestyle, and, if the gods are with you, immortality. Of course being a king and killing out the gods had to help, but that kind of stuff only appears in the essays. The novels stand by themselves, and would suffer not a whit if every non-fiction word were removed. The essays, standing alone, would require a finer mood of the reader, but, of and by themselves, expand and open the art of saying simple things so beautifully the reader finds added beauty in his or her simple things. It's so hard to do, it's actually impossible, but it's impossible for a bumble-bee to fly, or for a lizard to jump onto a ceiling, chasing a housefly who's landed upside-down, so I guess it boils down to gods having their definition of impossible, kings having another, and the human race defining it for themselves.

Van Gogh wrote voluminously to his brother in Paris, but he apparently doesn't shed much light, or any beyond the turmoil of his clouds, which would seem to make the letters unnecessary. I'm not heavily into the biographies of other artists; naturally, I assume there are not other artists, rather, lucky craftsmen, and a very few women, who caught a lucky break and fit a public fancy. To be an artist means to never publish anything inferior, one freaking inch beneath your best. Most of Oscar Wilde isn't played. Most of Mozart isn't played. None of me will never not be played. From Jimmy and Frogger to chapter seventeen of the present epic, it is, with the possible exception of some of "Michelle's First Secret" and "Michelle's Second Secret", all alpha A-list with not a pound of cereal in a hundred pounds of premium, aged beef. Yes, the technical quality improves to a small degree, but I'm probably the only one who notices; other than that, there's not a flat note in the symphony, but the joke is, they amount to a hundred symphonies; a million words, probably five-hundred of which I'd delete or re-cast, had I the inclination.

But, in the end, my self-imposed question seems to have no answer. Einstein did nothing but dither the last thirty-three years of his life. A hundred writers are famous for one book, maybe two. (Margaret Mitchell, Stephen Crane, Eric Segal, and Peter Benchley, to name just four, with Ken Kesey added for good measure.) If there is an answer, it's deficient preparation and falling into the trap of saying things because you say them well without the depth to know what to say, or, in some cases, finding such depths no one can understand your message. Intellectually, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, and the only answer that's worked for me is practice on a scale that has not the remotest parallel in the world of art. If Dostoyevsky had practiced instead of drinking and gambling, he would have written a shelf of "Brothers Karamazovs" and laughed at the original as the scratching of a buffoon parading as a novelist. But others have practiced, too, granted, not for eighteen hours a day for thirty years, but plenty enough to get on the high road, and it's done them little good. You do not practice to be a writer, but it takes enormous practice; the distinction is not subtle.

I was just thinking of the scene in "Ground Hog Day" when John Murray takes piano lessons. I was force-fed a diet of eighty-eight keys at ages ten and eleven. All I can remember is whispering `dammit' about twenty times a minute, and that was just the scales. But what a kick to go back wanting to learn, and happy to practice two or three hours every day. Imagine seeing a piano teacher smile. You guys get me on your throne where I belong, obey me so stringently I'm able to keep my nose out of your business, and that will leave me the free times, and, presumably, the funding to study music. Best deal you'll get this century, and, brother, is it going to be a long century.

My old-time readers are beginning to tense up about now. They know how smashingly they will be rewarded for allowing me my little non-fiction holiday. I become guilt-ridden, and, so practiced am I at existing under this mantel, I end a long essay with a series of drop-dead scenes, therefore, I'm taking this little minute to advise you that such a treat is in store you'll quickly be joining those who tense reflexively at the long-winded diatribe. It may not be scientific, but it's as Pavlovian as it gets. Just wait and see, you'll be praying for Emerson the essayist (hmm, that has a ring to it).

Well, if I'm going to be pulling any rabbits out of hats around here, I'd better get back to the novel, back to Octavo and Pius who seem to have fallen half asleep in the shade of the olive tree.

"How did it start at the pool?" Pius asked.

"Brado asked me some questions to be sure I knew what he meant by mature things, you know, that were going to happen after the door to the locker room was locked. I told him I'd heard stories around school, but that was just kids talking so I didn't know how much was true. He asked if anyone had ever touched me, and I told him that hadn't happened. He said some of the players might want to while they were fooling around together, and asked if I thought that would get me uptight. My voice got all squeaky, but I think I said it would be okay. Then he asked me if I'd like to do something with him, in private, in the office, while the team was practicing."

"Was his voice funny?" the young driver asked.

"Yeah," the boy whispered, "and he yawned a lot. I was so nervous and excited, already, I almost fainted, then, when he sounded all husky like he had the flu, I knew he was going to do sick stuff with me, and I was powerful glad, to quote the American Westerns, I was healthy enough to find out what that stuff was."

"The well-read psyche is a durable thing," Pius allowed, nodding.

"Brado was more a physical kind of guy," Octavo giggled, "matter-of-fact and brusque more than sensitive and introspective. He had no issues in the self-esteem department. In a way it was kind of sexy, but only for a date. Egos aren't much fun under any circumstances, you know, unless you write a great novel or start a billion-dollar business from the ground up, you're pretty much doing what everyone else does, so why fuss about the small stuff? and an athletic ego is the most pathetic of all for the simple reason that two B guys can defeat an A guy and a ninety-seven-pound weakling can pop a guy like Tyson with the cheapest gun on the market. So much for beefcake, but, allowing for all that, at that time and in that situation, it was kinda comforting to be mastered by a six-two powerhouse, whom I thought, until I met you, was pretty manly in the manly department."

"You know that part I told you about waiting until you're forty to write?" Pius intoned, "I think you might do well to forget it; in fact, instinct tells me it would be an idea for you to start as soon as possible."

"Early stuff is just talent," the child responded, "glib and facile, like frosting on a cake or beating an empty tin pan. You were right about waiting, just like I love you because you're the opposite of the athletic quick study."

"Did he take you as soon as he got you in the office?" the driver asked.

"He was really nervous, at first," the boy said, "that was while he had is clothes on. He asked me if I'd ever seen an adult male naked, because there was a boy's changing room I always used before, and I told him I hadn't. He said he had a boner and asked if that would embarrass me. I was pretty embarrassed and nervous so I didn't say anything, just shook my head. He said I should face the wall and he'd tell be when to turn around, so I did. I heard him undress and put his clothes on his desk, then he told be to turn around. He had his hands behind his neck, like you did to show me, and his legs were spread and he was leaning back against the wall."

"What did you think when you saw him?" Pius asked.

"He made me think of sperm," the boy said with a shy laugh, "we'd just had it in biology, you know, with pictures and stuff, so I knew it came from males and what it was for, but that was all vague and academic. I knew he must have had it and the way he was posing, I knew he wanted to show it to me and teach me about it."

"We picked you because the boy we had said you were the most mature ten year old he knew," Brado Carvell said to the boy standing in front of him. The doc says that's because you have more hormones, and that means you'll like the things that happen after we lock the door better than other boys might."

"Oh," Octavo said, nodding nervously.

"It's okay to be scared," the six-two nineteen-year-old team captain said, "because it's a cave and some kids get hurt in it, but you won't; we'll be gentle with you, and the door is always open from the inside, no one's going to try to stop you if you want to leave, and Jorge says you have almost a teen-size penis, so there's nothing for you to be self-conscious about in that department."

"Okay," the tall, slightly pudgy boy responded.

"Would you like me to strip you?" the man asked, his penis bulging and his voice rasping.

"Okay," Octavo whispered.

"It's all going to be gentle," the coach said, crossing the carpet, standing for a moment in front of the child, arms at his side, then lowering to his knees as he pulled Octavo's jersey from his shorts. The boy shyly raised his hands over his head, and the tall athlete stood, pulling the shirt up and off, then tossing it on his desk. He stood close to the bare-chested child. "Want to feel me against you?" he whispered.

"Yes," the boy said.

Brado pulled the ten year old gently against his straining penis, nuzzling the boy's immature chest by surging his hips gently to the youth. "Is it okay?" he asked.

"Yes," the boy whispered back.

"All the players want to do this with you, but you'll be lying down and they'll be kneeling over you, is that okay?"

"Yes," the boy said.

"Do you want to ask any questions before I get you naked?" the teen asked.

"Just if there'll be any of the stuff we studied in school," the boy said, reddening, "you know..."

"Semen," the coach said, "that's what the doc calls it. Guys call it cum, but on the team we call it what they did in the book, Jorge had the same one when he was ten, and that is `sperm'. So, to answer your question, yes, you'll get to see it, and the guys will want to get it on your body, especially on your face and your chest and your upper legs. In fact," he went on, "we haven't been doing stuff guys usually do so we'd be extra intense when it came to welcoming you to the polo club. That's meant to make it more exciting for you, but only you can decide that."

"It's pretty exciting, already," Octavo observed.

"Do you like looking at my body?" the man asked, still kneeling in front of the boy.

"Yes," the boy said.

"Will you like it when I take your underpants off and look at you?" the man whispered.

"I want to do it with you, in private, before the others come in, is that okay?" Octavo replied.

"Yes," the man said, "steady yourself on my shoulders." The boy did so and the coach unbuckled his belt and pulled down his shorts, leaving the child in his white, cotton underpants. "Let me do it from behind you before I get you naked," he said, standing and pulling the boy's back against him. "Put your hands behind my neck, like I had mine when you saw me," the coach said. Octavo stretched up on his tiptoes and reached up behind him.

"Like this?" he asked.

"Yes," the man hissed, fully taking the arching boy with his hands. "This is where most of the sperm will be," he said, fondling the boy's nipples and slightly soft belly, "but there will be a lot on your face, too. It depends how you hold the man, so that's what I can teach you if you're ready to be naked with me."

"Okay," Octavo said.

"Let me do this a little more," Brado said, "it feels really good. You have a beautiful body, and the bulge in your underpants would look good on a fifteen year old."

"Thanks," the boy whispered.

"We'll put your underpants back on after you've had your lesson with me," the coach explained, "because all the guys will want to have a turn with you this way, only you don't have to put your arms up if you don't want to."

"I like the feeling of it this way," the child said.

"There's thirteen more," the man reminded him, "so anytime you've had enough of anything you don't have to make excuses or anything, just say something and do what you want to do. With a man and boy, the boy is always in charge of what happens behind a locked door. Nowhere else, but in private, yes. Understand?"

"I think so," the boy said.

"Well," Brado said, "so far you've responded beautifully. With your physical maturity, your extreme good looks as far as being sexy goes, and a little experience, you will be a super lover and you'll like the things that happen just as much as the man does."

"You're a good teacher," the boy said.

"Any of the guys would be the same," Brado said, "they all like you, and they're all experienced at having sex with a child because of Jorge, plus some of them have juvenile partners outside the club."

"I'm still glad it's you," the boy responded.

"Me, too," the coach agreed, turning the boy in his arms, hugging the soft young belly firmly to him for a minute, then dropping to his knees to pull off the ten year old's underpants. "You are one very beautiful young male animal," he whispered, foundling the naked child and gently pulling down the foreskin of his slim five-inch erection.

"It feels nice when you touch me," Octavo whispered.

"I'll to this while the players are spilling on you," the man said, "it's called jerking off, but we call it masturbating in the club, like we call cum, sperm.|

"Can I do it with you?" Octavo asked.

"That's up to you," the athlete said, "I'd love to share your first time in private on my sofa, but if you want to wait for the team, that would be cool, too."

"I'd like it to be in private," Octavo said.

"Okay," the naked nineteen year old said. He led Octavo to the sofa and lay him back, spreading the boy's long legs wide and then kneeling between his slightly pudgy thighs and huddling over the ninety-pound body beneath him. "This is how they'll mount you," he whispered, "then you take the adult's penis in your hands and masturbate him He'll start ejaculating in a minute or two, and you can hunch up or down underneath him to get the sperm where you want. If you make him spray on your belly or your thighs, you'll be able to see it coming out of his penis; if you want the sperm on your face, you want be able to see what happens as well, but Jorge liked that, so I thought I'd tell you."

"Okay," the boy whispered.

"Are you ready for it to happen?" Brado asked.

"Yes," Octavo replied.

"Okay," the man husked, "I'm ready, too. I'll get some gel and teach you how to masturbate an adult, okay?"

"Yes," the boy panted.

Brado found the gel in a drawer of his desk and returned to kneel between the naked boy's widely spread legs. "This is just for the first time," he explained, "after that, you're hand will be wet with semen, and you won't need any other lubricant."

"Is it slippery?" the ten year old asked.

"At first, then sticky," the man explained, yawning.

"So I'll need to keep getting more on my hand?" he asked, rhetorically.

"There will be lots," the coach assured the neophyte.

"Isn't it just a few drops?" Octavo asked, "I mean, at school it's all under a microscope so it's hard to tell."

"We'll let that be a mystery for the moment," Brado said, with a laugh, "and I'll teach you how to solve it."

"Good," the boy said.

"Okay," the teen said, "this is what I'm going to be doing with you while the other players mount, just stroking you a little because I don't want you to spray until all the adults have been with you, okay?"

"It feels nice," the boy said.

"It will feel very intense after awhile," Brado cautioned, "so try not to get impatient. Trust me. There's no way I'll leave you hanging, unsatisfied; you'll have a full cum in my hand as soon as Gill's ejaculated on you, he's the youngest, eighteen, so he'll be your final orgy partner, then I'll masturbate so all of us can watch you cum."

"How long?" the boy whispered.

"With Jorge the first orgy took half an hour, but we kind of lingered over the second one, so it took longer."

"When did the second one happen?" the boy wanted to know.

"An hour after the first one. We went out for pizza, then came back here."

"Wow," the boy said.

"Very intense, bucko," the athlete said, "men with young boys become very good lovers, and, since most of them were molested when they were children, they know how to please a young male better than most females, plus, they're ugly and stupid, so they try a lot harder."

Octavo giggled as his coach straddled his waist, guiding the boy's hands to their proper positions on his hard penis. "Use the hand with the gel like this, he whispered, "and cup me with your left hand, squeezing pretty tight with your index finger, right here, so you can feel when the orgasm starts. Good. That's perfect. Now practice scooting underneath me, I'll get down over you, so you can either see my sperm or take it on your neck and face. Your nipples are about as far up as you'll be able to see what happens, so think what you want and practice positioning me against your body. It will be easier on the message table, and the guys will be there to steady you and the adult mounted over you. Jorge was able to get it right in just a few minutes, then he was able to relax and just let it happen with man after man until Umberto, the former head coach, he's a pro, now, made him ejaculate they way I'm going to make you. Any questions?"

"I'd better not, I like the answers too much," the boy giggled.

"Well," the young team leader said, "we won't sodomize you, that means enter you from the back, and there won't be any rough stuff or bondage, like you see in the porn magazines, and it will only happen here in our office or in the locker room, nothing goes on outside, they guys won't be fighting to date you and stuff like that. When we went on road trips with Jorge, we used to bring candles and mount him on a quilt with a towel over it and be extra quiet so nothing was obvious, so the rules are kind of strict even though its hypocritical. The team elected you because they felt you were mature enough to distinguish the difference between statutory rape and coloring between the lines, elsewhere; one big sin being paid for by many small virtues, or something like that."

"I'll keep it secret," the boy promised.

"You don't have to do that," the coach responded, "you can tell the right people at the right time, and, to be honest, you probably should tell any other potential partner. Privacy is usually, nine-to-one odds, secrecy, and, while it's one thing to keep a mistress secret from his wife, to spare her feelings, those rules don't apply to homosexual relationships unless you want to live as an overt gay, in which case everything gives you a case of the jitters. The players like to talk while things are happening, but it can easily be overdone, so if you want to know how they started doing things like this, it's definitely okay to ask. During practice, there's not much to do, so if you want to be alone with one of us, just display and you can come in here with him and lock the door. As long as it doesn't interfere with a smooth practice, you're on your own. Okay?"

"Yes," the boy said, as Brado lowered himself over the boy.

"Where do you want me to cum?" he asked, panting to the boy's now experienced use of his two hands on his huge, hard erection.

"On me," Octavo whispered, maneuvering under the adult so he was able to masturbate him on his own swollen penis.

"Do you want to look down, or look into my eyes?" the teen panted.

"Down, the first time, is that okay?" the boy said, gazing into the face of the handsome athlete half-crouched over him.

"Yes," Brado croaked, "I'll tell you when to look. I'm getting really close to cumming on you."

"Cum on me," the boy squeaked, his hands working avidly as the tall athlete spread his legs more widely and thrust his hips to the boy's hands in a series of short, fast strokes. "I am," the shaking athlete managed to gasp. Octavo looked down and stared for half a minute, then gasped as a hot jet of sperm splashed hard off the soft skin of his heaving young belly. Vaguely remembering the young man's instructions, he gripped him hard. "I feel more," he gasped, and in half a second the hard, swollen glans of the young adult sent a second hot snake to its water grave on the sweating child's now-heaving belly. "I'm cumming," the coach groaned down to the boy, and then pulses again and again in Octavo's strong, young hands.

"On my face," the boy hissed, sliding wetly under the male as the teen surged forward. He'd just steadied the big penis against his chin when a torrent of semen spurted over his lips and cheeks, then several more, and the athlete collapsed gently to the side of the boy beneath him. "Don't wipe it," he whispered, "let's take you out to the pool like you are, and put an end to the athletic stuff, quick time."

"Wow," the boy sighed, "when you said intense, you really meant it."

"It is kinda," the captain allowed, "and it will be more so when I'm kneeling by your right hip and masturbating you."

"Will you do it a little, now?" the boy askd.

"Yes, babe," the athlete whispered, rising from the couch. "This is how they guy's will take you if you shower with them," he explained, standing behind the boy in the classic stance, "just spread your legs as wide as you can to show you welcome what's happening to you."

"Okay," Octavo said, as Brado demonstrated what would happen my masturbating the boy carefully and gently for a minute. He left off, gently, and brought Octavo to his right hip, guiding the boy's left arm around his waist. "This is how the boy masturbates the man," he coached, guiding the child's right hand to his still huge, wet erection, and teaching him. "Just like when we were on the sofa, only it's almost better this way because your legs are tense from standing, and that makes cumming feel hotter."

"I like it standing, too," the boy noted.

"Just don't turn the water on when I guy takes you into the shower, wastes hot water, and, if it's running, you won't see anything in the spray."

"Okay," Octavo said as Brado gently removed his hand from his penis and led the ten year old mascot through the door leading to the pool.

"And it happened with all of them?" Pius asked.

"Yes," the boy said, "but some of the younger guys couldn't wait so they stood beside the table and masturbated each other on my shoulders and face while I was making another player spray on my belly or my chest."

"Did you like what Brado was doing with you?" the driver asked.

"His hand was soaked, it felt really slippery on me," the boy whispered in his breaking, adolescent voice.

"Were you able to stay under control?" Pius quizzed.

"He was experienced with Jorge," the boy said, "so he knew how to keep getting me more excited until the first time was over and all the team was huddled around, then two of the players held my legs really wide apart and he knelt between my legs and used both his wet hands and I couldn't control any more and I had my first cum while they all watched me."

"Did you have any sperm?" the coach quizzed.

"I just got really wet, then I closed my eyes, but it felt like two times I did what the older boys did," the boy said.

"What happened when you first went up to the pool," Pius asked.

"The scrimmage stopped, a whistle blew, but it kinda faded out. The guys all stripped out of their suits while they were still in the water, then Brado held me in front of the ladder and each player got out so I could watch him get a boner, then, when they were all dried, they took me into the gym and lay be back on the table, and it started happening right away."

"Did you have a favorite, besides Brado?" the young man wanted to know.

"Fargo Dante," the boy said, "he was the first one I went in the shower with after we came back from pizza."

"Were you alone with him a lot?" Pius quizzed.

"I broke the rules and dated him," the boy said, " and I stayed over with him twice when his roommate was out of town."

"Did you like being with him all night?" the teen asked.

"Not so much," the boy said, "I liked the physical part, but we didn't have much to talk about, and, after awhile he wanted to kiss me, but luckily that was just when Julio replaced me so we were able to at least stay friends."

"It's cool things were as mild-mannered as that," Pius observed.

"I'd never want to be part of a team again," the boy said, "but they were totally cool almost all the time; it's just that I'm pretty caught up in myself and only have time for men who like to talk about books and politics and the news, not just sports and girls till they're coming out your ears. Maths whizzes get all the breaks, which is how it should be, so we bookworms have to work doubly hard and be doubly careful who we spend our free time with. You can be good at maths and get by, but you have to be a great writer to even be noticed."

"We come from the same glob of clay," Pius added, "I don't think two peas were ever more alike."

"That's why I want you at least a little bit inside me," the boy said, "even if it makes me walk stiffly for a few days; I'll say I slipped getting out of the truck, if anyone asks, which I don't see why they would."

"They'll know at the truck stops," the driver observed, "you'll get a few winks, but probably more pats on the head than anything else. If you meet anyone special, tell me and we'll try to arrange a meeting, but there will be ships that pass in the night, it's the way of the world"

"I'm happy with the ship that stopped for me," the boy said, "but writers have to build colossal egos, so, maybe, once in awhile I'll come to you with a bright idea."

"The better we take care of business most of the time, the more time we'll have to ourselves when we want it, another way of the world."

"Let's at least try it," the now twelve-year-old boy whispered, separating from the adult and rolling on his back, spreading his long legs widely and grabbing his knees to pull them against his panting chest. Pius looked down into his eyes for a long moment, then positioned himself between the child's legs, bent far over the boy who now had his feet against the driver's rugged shoulders, and probed against him. Octave let go of his leg with his right hand and guided the young man to him, arching so his belly was hard against the man's stomach, and then urging Pius forward with glowing eyes and the movements of his young body against that of the mature male.

"Relax as much as you can," the older male coaxed. The boy's head sand back against the blue quilt and he sighed softly. >From the tree, Armando and his friends could see the faint rippling of the muscles of Pius' lower back as the man thrust in short, quick stabs against the immature body beneath his own powerful, athletic frame.

After a minute or two, the man went rigid against the boy, letting him rest and get used to what was happening. "It definitely feels like rape," the child gasped.

"Do you want me to get off you?" the young man asked solicitously.

"Before we go back to the truck," the boy giggled, "we don't want to be causing any accidents."

"Does it hurt?" the man asked.

"Small time," the young writer-in-training allowed, "but when I get used to you, I have a feeling it's going to feel really nice."

"We can probably be together a few times, since it seems to be good for you," the man said, "but after that, once a month. Making you a boty-boy freak is not something I want any part of."

"I'm ready for you, more," the boy said.

"Okay," the man said, his muscles again taking up the exploratory rhythm as the boy toyed with his heaving, sweating chest, lightly pinching his swollen, light-brown nipples.

"I'm glad this is happening," the boy grunted after another few minutes, "it'll make me more careful about taking any chances with some guy who might really rape me."

"They're out there," the man grunted back, "very few females are like an inexperienced young boy, so you want to watch it, and, if it does happen, the fact we've been together a few times will make it easier on you.

"Of course," he added, "that's not even mentioning diseases; another pretty big reason not to take chances."

"Have you ever mounted a kid like this before?" the boy asked.

"No," the drivers said, "we stuck to classic Greek activities, and they actually frowned on what we're doing. They liked to masturbate each other, heads on each others shoulders, so they could talk and coax each other. That's always seemed civilized enough to fill the bill."

"How about in their mouths," Octavo asked.

"That happened, too," the man acknowledged, "once a week or so, when we had extra time, but usually in the sleeper we'd just lie facing each other and talk, cumming on each other a couple of times before we went to sleep."

"Every night?" the student asked.

"More like every second or third night, after the first couple of weeks," Pius said, "and sometimes five or six days would slip by with scheduling hassles and breakdowns. That made it like the first time all over again."

"It got better with Brado, Fargo and the team," the boy commented, "do you think it will with us?"

"Yes," the man said, "I'm too scared of hurting you to really feel what's happening between us."

"And I hurt to much to feel everything," the boy panted in response, "but I'd still want you with me this way if the pain was three times worse."

"It's very hard to hold still," the man groaned.

"I love it when you do," the boy said, but the lively movement of his pre-teen body under the man above him showed he also loved pleasing the half-giant now in his arms as he pulled the man too him, wrapping his long, naked legs around the athlete's straining thighs and pulling hard.

More minutes passed. Hissing sighs and choked groans drifted softly from the couple. Pius sometimes rose on rigid arms so they could look down between their bodies, then fell, exhausted, back on top of the twelve year old underneath him to hold him still, kissing his head and listening careful to his young partners moans. Half an hour passed and the gentle struggle continued like long, slow waves advancing, thrusting up on the beach, and withdrawing for long moments before the cycle was repeated.

"You're getting really deep in me," the boy rasped.

"I know, I feel it too," the man whispered, "do you want me to go up so you can look?"

"Yes," the boy hissed.

"Just a minute, then," the man said, gasping and shaking, but rising on his arms in half the promised time. "Over half," the boy said, "it looks so amazing."

"It's definitely big on the porn circuit," the man acknowledged.

"Big bear inside a frisky little lamb," the boy managed to giggle.

"Big bear inside bare-bottom boy, no kinky stuff," the driver huffed.

"I feel like a lamb and a girl," Octavo said, then his eyes jolted open in shock. "My god," he whispered, "you're cumming."

The response was inarticulate and unnecessary. A heavy gush of slick, white semen gouted from between the boy's widely spread legs, and the man, with a feral bellow, entered wildly and fully in a single plunging stroke. Wet, the boy accepted him with a harsh whispered, "Yes, yes." Their young bodies froze, the man still on his powerful arms, both males staring wide-eyed down at the continuous heavy flow coming from their successful mating.

Another long, panting, straining minute and it was half over. Pius rested over the boy catching his breath, then rose to his knees, pulling Octavo gently to him so the boy lay with his calves splayed to either side of the athlete's waist. Wetting his hand from between their sweating bodies, he took the arching, panting youth's long, slim penis in both hands and masturbated him gently and slowly, while still embedded to the hilt in his willing young partner.

"Oh, they could never do it quite right," the boy sighed, his arms now at his side so he could thrust into the tight hands on his iron-hard penis.

"Spread your legs more and put your hands behind your neck," the driver suggested. Octavo complied, arching his smooth, boyish chest and splaying wantonly as the man deep inside him wet his hand and began stroking his five-inch circumcised penis with long, hard strokes.

"Yes," the boy whispered repeated, "don't stop."

"Are you getting close?" his partner asked.

"Yes," the boy said, and repeated the word again. A minute passed as the man slowly intensified his stroking and fondling, then Octavo whispered, "I'm cumming."

Pius froze his hand hard, low on the twelve year old, and the boy repeated his warning, then started spray high, straight up in the air. "I'm cumming," he repeated again, and then lost control, spurting hot and wildly in the man's big, solid hands, half dazed, half conscious of his sperm covering his partner's face and neck, and finally conscious of nothing but lying back exhausted as he pulsed to an ebb, his nerves jangling as Pius gave him a few gentle strokes to complete him fully.

Now it's a rare novelist that intrudes, in the first place, with editorial this and journalistic that, and I think you'd have to read a whole million books to find even one where the author not only intrudes with an essay, but uses it to foreshadow. In any event, I claim it as a literary first, not just because when I write a novel, I want it to be novel, but just because I thought of it, like everything else. Also, it's been many a page since I asked for direct reader involvement in the form of playing literary heavy hitter for a few moments to see if you can guess what comes next. I'll be quick about setting the stage, and say that Angel has just finished the story of Pius and Octavo, the four boys are sitting on the roots, circling their toes in the sand, and awkward silence reigning. Then a voice speaks up and it asks a question. Who talks, and what does he ask? Those are the questions on the quiz. Try to remember you've strongly foreshadowed this, not just mentioned it, in passing. In a sense, you've got one swing at home plate in Yankee Stadium, your entire career on the line. In other words, I've painted myself into such a corner, only a grand-slam will get me out of it, and no, I'm not going back in the script and writing this, it's coming out in real time. Whole career, all the marbles, all you have to do is have one character ask one question, and either ignominy or blistering triumph are yours forever. Think. Take your time. The four boys are Raul, Armando, Angel and Juan. Only one of them breaks the tensely excited silence in the remote arroyo. I'm getting ready to cue, not wanting to irritate less playful readers, so this is kind of your last chance to stand at the plate, trying to hear the hush of the straining crowd. You know the drill, wind-up, pitch, clenched jaw... swing:

Raul's voice broke the silence, so half our little mystery is solved. What did he say? Just nine simple words.

"Did any of the drivers ever bring a girl?"

However you came out on our little quiz, you now know what major league is all about, and, sure, now New York needs a new premier ball park, but New York needs a lot of things, so a damaged stadium in just an item on a list. Sorry, I tried to warn you, but you're dealing with good old Yankee blue, and in its purest form, it's incomprehensible, and not always because of simplemindedness.

A grunt came spontaneously from Armando and his friends. By accord, the three older boys stood, pulled their shorts and briefs to the ground, then straightened, standing with their huge erections almost touching as Raul stared at them in awe. "Yes," Armando said as he knelt in front of his nine-year-old nephew, and stripped the child naked. "You better sit in my lap while I tell you, okay?"

"Yes," the boy said, happily, as the trio resumed their perches, now sitting close enough so their legs and naked torsos touched.

"Her name was Ravella Consuelo," Armando began as his young cousin settled contentedly back against his young, naked body, his circumcised penis jutting high between the little boy's soft, honey-brown legs, "and she was ten."

"I'm not really tired, Daddy, I just wanted to talk to you without you having to look in mirrors all the time."

It was nearing noon, and the grove was quiet and still between occasional passing trucks and the soft, distant swish of those light vehicles with mufflers. The girl was a seventy-pound beauty, tall and slim with a mop of short, shiny black hair framing a pixie face with big brown eyes. She was obviously but lightly Hispanic, her skin honey colored and flawless. Her father was a craggy, lanky thirty year old, tall and a shade or two darker than the girl with him. Ravella wore a simple cotton-print summer dress, its hem inches above her slightly knobby knees. Heraldo was carrying a blanket which he spread at the base of the olive tree and his daughter wore a small backpack that tinkled of refresco bottles. The man spread the blanket and the girl pushed him gently off his feet, then lay with her head in his lap, gazing up into his handsome, hawkish face.

"Have you figured out that I'm in love with you?" Ravella began, her voice not impatient, but her mind obviously on cutting to the chase.

"I thought it might be leukemia or some horrible degenerative disease," the man said, "because you've been acting a little out of it, but you didn't seem sick or anything."

"Fevered, but not clinical," the girl replied, "and I don't think it has anything to do with white cells or mucus accumulations."

"That's very good news," Heraldo said.

"It's half the news," the girl observed, but not tartly, "the other half is that I get every cold shiver and hot flash in the book when you're near me, and three kinds of heartsickness, small, medium, and large, when you're not."

"Doctor, I have the same symptoms you just described, what can it mean?" the man asked.

"Maybe we're related to each other," the young practitioner suggested.

"Yes," the man mused, "go right ahead and bring tragedy onto the field; love unrequited, wholesome and unspoken."

"None of the above," the sharp-witted creature responded, "that's all flat earth stuff. Six days-and-a-nap stuff. Virgin birth, vocal angels, wandering stars, and jack-in-the-box resurrection stuff. Since none of the rest of it is true, however poignant they may be as stories and legends, why should the part about fathers and daughters loving each other only at arm's length and in the abstract be true? Answer me that."

"Custom," the young father responded, "civic cohesion, social structure, guiding values, and there are probably a few more on the list."

"But custom to what end?" the girl asked, "how are we better off because we don't love each other openly when we're in private, assuming you don't give me a disease or get me pregnant before I'm old enough to have a baby? How? It seems to me we're a hundred times worse off, just getting by when each day should start with a thrilling sun and end with a thrilling moon, or at least lots of days."

"Daughters who are impatient to be with their fathers often lose their mothers, as the man involved loses his wife; it can make family life awkward in the extreme," the male replied, "ask any lawyer or clinical psychologist."

"Mom knew you'd say that," the girl giggled, "she bet me but I wouldn't bet against the world's dearest daddy-o, which is exactly half of what you are, a mustang clattering down out of the mountains on sparking iron shoes, being the best I can do to describe my favorite half. One half is for yesterday and piñatas and tea parties, and the other is for now and tomorrow, no tea, no donkeys."

"Your mother knows we're having this talk?" the man asked.

"Yes," the girl said. "She figured out what was wrong with me on Friday morning, so we talked last night. At first I was scared and embarrassed to say anything about how I felt, thanks to our mother, the church, then, suddenly, I grew up and started listening to what she said, and she said she didn't blame me, and that she'd think I was a witless turnip if I didn't feel something passionate for you, seeing as how you're so far above Frank the Average Father, partly because you keep in shape, and partly because you're just super nice to live with and hang out with; ask any single girl in my school, or ask all of them"

"Sweetheart," Heraldo said, "if everyone got to write their own ticket, what kind of world would it be?"

"An endless line at Mickey D's?" the pixie asked with a grin.

"They're going to have a hard time making a Jesuit out of you," the father said, "why, I don't think you'd even care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

"It never rises above high-school level superstition," the girl responded, "in fact, the further and deeper you look, the shallower and more transparent every trick, device, and artifice becomes until there's nothing, no truth, at all. A few interesting character studies, and the play's over."

"Lot and his daughters?" the father grinned.

"Exigent circumstances," the girl noted, "and guess what, that's just what we have, a male and female who don't fit anyone's mold, who read more in a week than the rest do in a year, not to mention, in most cases, their lives, who go to plays, stomach foreign films, hit the symphony ten times a year, and ride dirt bikes together. We're about as out of it as Lot, himself, left to each other if not made for each other, and I think we were made for each other a long time ago."

"I guess I've suspected since you were six or seven. Whatever year it was you decided to use "Green Eggs and Ham" for target practice."

"Only because you wouldn't let me build a pipe bomb," the girl said.

"I remember my lack of enthusiasm, now that you mention it," Heraldo responded.

"At least it was a shotgun," the girl sighed.

"A double-barrel twelve gauge is all shotgun, at that," the man agreed.

"I learned about letting emotion get the better of one -- I really hated that book -- when I pulled both triggers at the same time."

"Effectively rendering the weapon a six gauge," the father recalled.

"And a noisy one, at that," the girl added.

"That which doesn't kill you makes you blacker and bluer."

"Only once," the girl said.

"Once was all it took for the cat who sold out," Heraldo remarked.

"He shouldn't have done that," Ravella said, shaking her pretty, school-girl head as she gazed happily up from her young, athletic father's lap.

"Tell me about it," the man laughed.

"And I gave my Barbies to my friends without a drop of battery acid on them," the girl said.

"They did survive you," the thirty year old admitted.

"So I'm not like that girl who gets hit by lightning at the end of the dock at the end of that old movie, right?" the girl wanted to know.

"I don't know why you're so smug about it," Heraldo said, "what's a father to dwell on in the twilight of his days if he doesn't have a bad-seed daughter?"

"Boring grandchildren," the girl replied, "unless he was an artist or a major-league entrepreneur, did something no one else could do, those would be good."

"So it's be a poet or raise a hellion for halcyon days in retirement heaven?"

"Something like that," the girl giggled, "what's your choice."

"There was an angel by a tree, who sat awhile and talked with me; she said bright things, and smiled a lot, and by her talk she set me free."

"And there was a lass, the age of ten, who talked with her mom, then talked, again. She loved her dad, like a big girl would, and waited patiently for him to make a pass."

"Teaching you to read was a mistake," Heraldo noted, "but, then, I suppose teaching you anything would have been."

"Just be glad you gave me so much to misuse," the girl said, "otherwise, I'd be out looking for my first gang-banger with the bold and rebellious of the training-bra set."

"By twelve you'll be stalking your first full professor," the man said.

"You'll be stalking him for me," the girl responded, "Mom almost promised. She says you and me being together and being lovers is great, but if girls are with their dads, they should be with other men, too, so they don't become fixated. Since I'm already nine-tenths fixated, it seemed like a good idea, and who better to find a girl a professor than her father, the dean?"

"Your mom's turning out to be quite a hero," Heraldo observed.

"She's the best," the girl agreed. "I was so scared because of the way I felt about you, then she told me her secret and said I was lucky to have such a keeper for a dad, and that she wanted us to spend a lot of time together, and that I should bring you here, to this grove of trees because her secrets started here, twenty years ago, and that other girls bring their dads here, so they can start having secret lives together, too. She wants everything to be more open with us, now that she knows how I feel about you. She wants me to tell you her secret, and, when she gets home from visiting Uncle Fredrico, that your bedroom door will be open at night and I can come in and be with you when I want to, even stay all night, if you want me to."

"You do have a lot to say, don't you," the man said, tussling the pixie's shiny black hair as he looked down into her big, brown eyes.

"Yes," the girl whispered up to him, "that's what makes the difference in a relationship, having something to say, don't you think?"

"I don't know," Haroldo replied, "campesinos have plenty of kids, and they talk about the weather."

"Good," the girl giggled up at her father, "then I'll drop out of school, come and actually set up housekeeping in your bedroom, and we'll live happily ever after teaching the kids, mom's and mine, to say rain and wind."

"Back to Eden, hold the figs and pass the apples," quoth the girl's father.

"Better than leafing things all confused and worrisome," the girl said.

"Are you confused and worried, now?" Heraldo asked.

"No," the girl said, "no time, or maybe I'm just too lazy."

"If you're lazy," the young man said, "how will you be able to hold onto a thought, and you should hold that one, don't you think?"

"But it wasn't a thought," the girl sputtered, "it was not being confused, that isn't a thought, and how can I hold on to what isn't a thought, in the first place, whether I'm lazy or not?"

"Complicating it so that it gets all tangled up in your mind might work," the thirty year old suggested.

"But it was all tangled up, before, thinking I had to stay away from you, that I couldn't touch you, that's you'd never touch me except the way you touch the dogs, and that made me feel sick, especially because I didn't know if there'd ever be any end to it. You taught me to read when I was four, I was reading "Time" when I was six, who was I ever going to find to be friends with amongst the Barbies on parade and Spiderman wannabes? On top of that, I was reading about spinsters, old maids, and distorted women of a hundred stripes who lived in the second-rate world of the feminine mind as total pains in the ass to themselves and everyone around them. Dreary. Then mom twigged yesterday morning, hauled me out of school without so much as a by-your-leave, and the next thing I knew she was buying me my first bra, we were having a long talk over lunch, she was getting her ticket to visit Uncle Fredrico, then, when we got home, she told me about the olive grove, and what happened to her the day her mother bought her her first bra, and then she gave me a sleeping pill so I wouldn't pull some kid's stunt like dying of excitement, and, next thing I knew, it was Saturday morning, and we were scheduled to take a drive somewhere and have lunch, just like the books about quality time say we should, so then I lied about studying late and being tired to get you out here with a blanket, and less confusing than that it couldn't get in a million years, unless, of course, you're confused."

"Too lazy, like the princess beauty said," her dad grinned.

"Too lazy to hear Mom's secret?" the cutie asked.

"Too uncomfortable," her father replied, "let me stretch out, then you can share what's obviously pretty big news."

"Whatever you had, you're recovering," the girl noted, happily, pulling the young man to the blanket, rolling him on his back, then lying on him, her head at his chin, facing the blue sky peeping through the dense, mysterious tree above, and bringing his hands to her slender waist. "This is where their secret started," she whispered, using his hands to rub her stomach, "right at her belly button, only she was wearing a bikini, so there was no tiresome old cloth between his hands and her skin."

"Oh," Heraldo said.

"After she looked at herself in the dressing room while she way trying on the training bra," the girl explained, "she wanted to try looking at herself in a bathing suit. Fredrico had driven her to the store, so she asked him if she could buy one, and he said it was okay, so she found a dark orange one that went with her red hair, and she said as soon as she looked at herself in the mirror everything changed, and her nice older brother, whom she had always liked, suddenly became what he really was, which was a tall, handsome athlete, and on the way home she told him she wanted to show him her new suit, and the kids at school had told her about coming here, because it's a slight hill so you can see anyone coming through the trees, which makes it private, and at first he didn't want to, but she talked him into it, and they turned around and came back, and walked up here to this same tree at the back of the orchard, and she went behind the tree and put on her new bikini, and came out so he could look at her. She'd brought the blanket, saying she wanted to pretend she was at the beach, like on television, so she made Fredrico lie on his back, and she lay on top of him, with her back to his chest, and put her hands on her bare tummy, and that's how the secret started."

"Nothing confusing there," Heraldo said.

"How do you feel?" the daughter asked.

"Like I've been run over by a butterfly," the man said into the little girl's pixie right ear.

"Do you want to feel my bare skin?" Ravella asked.

"For the rest of my life," the dean whispered.

"Unbutton me," the girl whispered softly in response, releasing her father's hands and sitting partially upright.

"Yes, baby," the handsome athlete whispered back, "yes." His hands went to her, and in a moment he was slipping the straps of her frock off her slender shoulders and bundling the dress down to her slim waist. "All the way off," the girl coaxed, lying back and raising her hips. Heraldo stripped the garment from her long, slender legs and laid it neatly beside their blanket, then he lay back and the ten year old lay comfortably on his chest, again guiding his hands to her belly.

"Dad, you feel really big against me," she whispered, wriggling gently.

"Your mother had a beautiful daughter," the man replied.

"And she's going to have another one," the girl said, "that's part of the secret. It's going to be a girl, too, because they can do that now. From her brother, because she promised him under this very tree that her second baby would come from his seed.

"Dad," the girl continued, "I'm promising you the same thing, even though you're my dad and not my ten-year-older brother. I'm going to have your love child after I've had one with my husband, and she says I don't have to wait until I'm eighteen, that I'll probably be able to do it when I'm twelve or thirteen, and that a secret marriage to a promising grad student or young, or old, professor in the English department will count as a real marriage, so we get two perhaps somewhat mysterious trips to Sweden, a year or two apart, and settle in with our two cute little girls while you come to visit, overnight, frequently, and I come to stay with my dad, overnight, frequently, and if you even think of making those sweet little girls wait until they're a rickety and over-the-hill ten, then I may as well be talking to the olives in the tree, understand?"

"How long will they have to wait?" Heraldo asked.

"I remembering wanting to take a bath with you so you could show me things when I was three," Ravella replied, "so that would probably be right for his daughter and your daughter. The only thing I want is for their first time to be special and complete; no flirting and touching and one thing leading to another, without a real beginning and a real end, if you'd call it an `end'. Into the tub you both go, and I expect to get back a very sleepy baby."

"There is a certain logic to it," Heraldo allowed.

"There's all the logic in the world to it," the girl said, "that it's any other way is grass-roots proof that, a, there is no god of any kind, or, b, he or she's a nitwit. If I have two girls by the time I'm thirteen, then I can go ten or twelve years without any thoughts along those lines, any distractions other than two nice kids, shared with several adults, and get the big fur ball of life rolling, assuming I don't get squashed by a bus, and end up with a family that has some basis in romance, not just diapers and tissues. Then, when I'm twenty-something, I'll move in and settle in with the man I hope is my secret husband, legal like, and voila, maybe two or three more girls, with adoring older sisters to watch over them, providing ever more and ever more reasons for the beautiful husband and spectacular father to stay home and keep the slim, boyish mother happier than happy can be happy, with, yes, some outside activity, including swinging with other couples of a free-spirit mentality. That's my life in a nutshell. Any questions?"

"No," the man replied, "but I've got your grad student. Stuyvesant Rodriguez. He just transferred in from Paris, but he's not European in the least."

"Tall, dark, and handsome?" the girl asked.

"Smart, witty, and low-key," the man said, "I'm your tall, dark and handsome mate, remember?"

"No, I was confused," the girl giggled.

"Well, he's tall but not dark, and sexy but not handsome. If I were a girl of any age he could hog-tie me for a year with an inch of dental floss."

"Dad?" the girl whispered, "is he sexy to you. If you were alone with him, and nobody would ever know, would you want to touch him like you're touching me?"

"I guess I would, darling," Heraldo said.

"There's a girl I want to touch the way we're doing it, too," the girl said.

"If you can handle that, and it sounds so if it's just one girl, then your confusion issues are probably gone for good."

"I'm just glad once in awhile another male interests you. Once in awhile, one interests me, too, and I can't build a mind picture of not being interested, like, can't others see what I do? am I weird, or something? so it's nice to know. Just thought I'd tell you that."

"How many interesting males do you see?" Heraldo quizzed.

"I've never seen one," the pixie giggled, "I made that part up, but there's an older girl, sixteen, I see at the pool, and we kind of look at each other a lot, but we can't think of much to say."

"Have you seen her bare chested?" the father asked in a whisper.

"No," the girl replied, beginning to pant slightly in her father's powerful arms, "she goes home without using the locker room."

"How do you feel about seeing the girls who do use it?" the professor asked.

"Just curious. I think girls are pretty when they start getting older, but I've never wanted to really look for a long time, or touch, just the girls who goes home, and I don't even knew her name."

"It's pretty much the same with me," the father said, "Stuyvesant is the only male I'd like to take a shower with, and even that's more incidental than passionate in the heart's desire column."

"I'm not pining for my mystery girl, either," Ravella said, "but it sure would be nice to have her for a sleepover."

"So let it be written, so let it be done," the young father intoned, "and, if she's sixteen, Stuyvesant can date her in the open, and, boom, without become sluts or bar-stool bimbos, we have just the group to keep your gorgeously developed mind on mind on adopted language until they get to diagramming sentences, at which time you'll be old enough to bear the daughters of your male lovers, with, by then, a nineteen year old girl along to help out, and, as you just pointed out, resume your academic life free of distractions like hobby dating and face painting, first to leave the party, last to leave the library, and always happy to spend a couple of hour in the nursery "

"Sounds so bad it's good," the girl responded, causing her father to wonder why it would be a good idea to keep her in school long enough to outline grammar, in the first place. They'd have to see about that. Looking at it from her point of view, he'd already cheated her out of seven years of play in the bathtub, and presumably, the shower, so was there any point in not having her stay home and live in the master bedroom if she wanted? It was hard to think of any bad reasons, much less good ones. Take a few years off, she read like wolf, anyway, then she could re-enter, ace herself some scholarships, and by that time Stuyvesant would be teaching full time and living with his legal wife, who'd, in turn, delay her academic plans a few years, often a good idea, and by the time things worked out, they'd be as contiguous and well set up as is possible, everyone getting a greater share of everything than they could following the byways of convention with its penchant for isolation of kids in daycare, elders in nursing homes, and the frantic search for enough money to pay for it all. Two trips to Europe. They'd sail. Buy an old fishing drudge in Tampico, fix it up, and sail east. It would be less expensive than living on land, and they'd make money selling it when they returned. Two trips, then settle back in at the university knowing they hadn't missed trick-one on the way to the happy hunting ground. In the era of electronic toys and solar and wind power sources, it wasn't just doable, it would be a gas.

"What are you thinking about, Dad?" the girl asked.

"How much money we'll save if we don't use condoms when we're together," he whispered.

"Seriously," the girl said.

"I mean it," her father responded, "I think you've got the answer to making something of us. A decade of respecting the rules, but altering them to suit the needs of our family, then see how things stand. All things being equal, we should come out way, way ahead, and that's almost a little frightening, because things are pretty good the way they are."

"You and mom make plenty to have a girl come in and help with the babies if my mystery girl doesn't pan out; and that's all that's necessary. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, just find it a better track."

"No matter what happens," Heraldo said, "I want you to have at least six hours a day to yourself, even if you do decide to stay home instead of going to school; no kids, no parents, no pressure."

"And don't forget two hours with you," she said, "our code word can be `physical fitness', not that it's a game or a sport or entertainment, but just that we're young and healthy and it would be nice to stay that way, and if we can do so by making a baby or two, that's as good a way to kill two birds with one stone as I ever heard of."

"Yes," the man agreed, "and I doubt our ability to converse will take a hit, either."

"I won't be able to talk at all, pretty soon," the girl agreed, "so that's another bird for the stone."

"Darling?" the young father said.

"Yes, Dad," she answered.

"How do you feel about spending some time with your uncle. Maybe spending a week with him after your mom gets home."

"Do you think I should?" the girl countered.

"Yes," Heraldo said, "I think if you're going to have one adult partner, you should have three or four, not counting who we might meet on swinging nights. Stuyvesant might make a second, and your mom's older brother could make a third. You could even have one or two more without going off the deep end."

"I'd like to visit him," the girl said, "I do want to grow up feeling a little like trash once in awhile, just like Marie Antoinette liked to milk cows and clean stalls. Too much the academic princess is hardly the right background for anything but Romance writers, and so many others have been there and done that, I just don't have the heart for it."

"The snow along their path is colored," the young dean admitted, "and wet and slushy underfoot."

"This is what needs to be written about. Mom and her brother. You and your daughter. V.C. Andrews tried, but she mixed in madness and stuffed her flowers in the attic, so her work counts only for titillation and entertainment. No one else does anything but propagandize for the miserable churches. John D. MacDonald has a scene where the hero catches a man and a boy together, and if they'd been maiming babies on an assembly line, it would be hard to imagine them earning a more derisive or complete dismissal. As if. And I don't mean stories where a socially unacceptable couple starts doing stuff in the second act, it takes more skill than that. In "Man Without a Face" we don't want to follow the teacher behind a rock with the boy, but we do want to know that something did happen between them, and that somehow they managed to survive, giving at least a bone of hope to the twenty or thirty million odd kids who are caught up, for better or worse, in some alternative to "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm".

"I think an interesting aspect of it is the line from the traditional wedding ceremony that goes: speak now, or forever hold your peace,'" Heraldo responded. "That stricture is a testament to tolerance -- something may have happened, but unless it's of abiding concern to someone, probably specifically including an unknown-to-the-groom marriage and children, it's of no interest to anyone -- and yet that tolerance is completely missing where it's needed the most, and anyone can foul up a bonobo couple based on an anonymous telephone call or letter, which is almost invariably inspired by antipathy for an individual rather than what that person is up to, which is usually behavior that would be tolerated with a wink in a friend. How we're meant to live in all this without confusion is surely an A-list mystery, so it's hard for me to tell you how glad I am my beloved daughter is Miss Sherlilock Holmes."

"Mom was wicked smart to marry you," the girl laughed happily.

"It was wicked bright of her," Heraldo agreed, "and she seems to be getting smarter as she goes." He wiggled the seventy-pound female by shaking her naked tummy, but it didn't stop her laughter. He knew something that would.

"Did you ever think," he asked, "about the Catholic church's real role in history?"

"Trouble for the many, wrought by the few, over inconsequential trivia, half of it made up on the spot; you mean that history?" the girl replied.

"If you're reincarnated as a man," Heraldo responded, "and ever have an absolutely delicious ten year old giggling and wriggling, half-naked, on your stomach, and, well, legs, you'll know why I asked that question."

"Temporizing," the girl noted with a nod, "funny, I just read it yesterday."

"Well," Heraldo laughed, "you're getting the full definition. Delaying. That's all I'm thinking about now, staying here forever with you, just like this, and that means no wriggling against me."

"But you get bigger and harder when I do, and I like the feeling," Ravella said.

"I like it, too," the young father whispered, "but it could make things come to a fast end, and you deserve a slow one, not getting left high and dry, which is what happens to most girls at first."

"I'll lie still and imagine, then," the girl said.

"Can I ask you a question?" the man whispered.

"Yes," his daughter said.

"When you see your friend at the pool, does anything happen to you on top? Do you feel it in your chest?"

"Yes," the girl whispered, suddenly panting in all seriousness.

"Do you swell up?" he husked.

"Yes," the girl said, "she does, too. A lot. I can see it through her bathing suit."

"Then it's not surprising you get tongue tied," Heraldo said, "so the easiest thing would be just to invite her over, that way you don't have to think of any small talk. I'll conveniently disappear for a couple of hours, although I wouldn't mind if you remembered a few details. That way, I give you things to talk about with her, and with me, which is why a clever copywriter somewhere come up with the `win-win' concept."

"I want to tell her about the first time you look at me, you know, with it off," the girl said, now panting openly.

"Yes, darling," the man coaxed, "it's worse than wriggling, but more exciting because Stuyvesant will want to know, and so will your uncle if you want to visit him."

"Dad?" the girl said.

"Yes," sweetie," the man whispered.

"You know, when you were talking about temporizing, I just thought of something that might help."

"What's that, darling," the innocent young male asked. Experienced readers will quake in their boots, recognizing in the vaguest foreshadowing the possibility of an immediate change of motif, a change so extreme that verily does it take us from the land of fiction to that of non-fiction, i.e., the "innocent young male" line is setting up another essay, if in a backhanded manner. I was going to make this a happy experience, and have a neat trick in mind to pull it off. Remember, the objective of the exercise is to make you happy for an interlude during which you'll thrill to the news of my new microwave and celebrate the return of the Huge Black Cat. More, can you believe it?

So how does one go about doing this? Raining on such a lusty parade while the readers dance for joy. Let's try a few more lines of dialogue, and remember, this little skit is for you veterans of two or three other stories, at least.

"Daddy," Ravella said, "what if we told stories. Make them up. I could call the girl at the pool Annette, because she's Italian, and a little boyish looking like Annette on television. I could tell you about our first sleepover, then you could tell me about bringing Stuyvesant home to meet me, but Mom and I were away for a couple of hours to pick up Aunt Tillie at the airport, and, you know, you both needed a shower. Would stories like that be temporizing if we told them to each other?"

Yes, another layer, Word Count, having already demolished morality and decency from almost all contemporary viewpoints, now challenging common sense. If you're saying to yourself, here comes another dose of egomania on a stick, consider this. The quarter-million mark passed, completely unheralded by the so-call egomaniotic author, just over ten-thousand words ago. Not even a smiley face. One a slightly more serious note, we are far into record territory. I didn't write down the statistics on "Creative Camp", reigning long-ball masterwork on the Net, which I capitalize, instead of "god", but I remember it ended up as 1,303,000 some characters with spaces. Now we're over one-point-four million, so that calls for a round. (Make yours a .44 magnum hollow point? Not while I'm tending bar, now that mixologists are held responsible for the health of their patrons)

It is like sitting on a bench along the path of the park. Catching your breath. You look back at how far you've come and are glad you're smart enough to take a break.

No more ketchup. I hereby join chefs of the world in banishing it from my kitchen. My chicken a la king just needed to marinate. It's a treat, and there's Queenie, adding water to the last of the ketchup in a last-ditch effort to spread a few drops of this vinegar based horror all over my best effort yet, with no less than ten dollar in the local currency worth of mushrooms. The other day she put some on her rice, then fried it. For hours, I couldn't smell cat one. About a quarter cup to a tub of beans is excellent, but one drop more, and all you taste is vinegar, which is great in its proper place, and overcooked tomatoes. Great on fries, good on baked beans, otherwise, can it. Weaning babes from the bottle, but at least Queenie is a babe.

A further note on word processors. Why, oh why, do the keys repeat? Did no consumer engineer ever own a cat or dog, have kids around, live in the real world? Three times, I've come back to my machine to find dozens of pages filled with a single character, and I was lucky it wasn't hundreds. Has the machine no mind, at all? Does anyone ever want a hundred-thousand k's, however neat the rows? The only key that should repeat is the hyphen, for making up menus. No typist I'm aware of is skillful enough to hold down the s' key long enough to double, but not triple the letter. At the very least, the default should be off'. My Commodore 64 used to crash if the RAM filled, though, with 196 megabytes, you'd probably just get some odd thousand pages to delete without freezing the system. Machines sold to consumers should be as close to bullet-proof as they can be made. Less features, greater resilience, more foolproof. Message complete.

What kind of American buys his first microwave oven at age fifty-six? But then, I've never even seen a Starbuck's, so I guess the answer is self-evident. The thing is nice. I've used them a lot at work, but just for Hot Pockets and the like. Going from pot to freezer to the electronic oven is definitely better than heating leftovers in a frying pan; hard to tell from fresh cooked, or better because of marinating. One-fifty U.S. I'd think it would cost half that much just to ship it from Korea to a splinter market like this. With four kids plus two adults eating out of the kitchen, it's the cat's meow, and I'm thinking up Newburg recipes, now that I can make large quantities, and freeze part of it, preserving something really delicious.

Windy gray weather goes on and on. I ran into Capt. Buck yesterday at The Price is Right market and the guy looked like he'd aged ten year since I saw him a few months ago. As noted previously, the Caribbean can be a bitch mistress, all it takes is a little cool, gray wind.

I gave my stereo to Samantha as a belated Christmas present. I go through sort of half-year periods of liking music, then I get tired of it, classical or contemporary, for a few years, then it's time for another jag. I'm very glad I can live without it and feel sorry for musicians who have to perform, when they get tired of it, especially vocalists. I don't even like to talk when I'm not in the mood. I would not encourage musical talent in a child, I'd hand him a thick book on papal atrocities committed in Spain between May first and May seventh, 1494, for the elucidation of his mind and the enlightenment of his soul.

I've been splurging on real mile, locally called cow milk. Nice. Usually we use Klim, a very satisfactory four-percent powdered milk, but the real thing is twice as good. I don't think they sell any powdered milk in the States other than the Carnation skimmed stuff, which is god-awful; too bad, because it's pretty good if made with ice water, and needs no refrigeration. My guess is the liquid milk costs about twice what the powdered does, but I haven't made a direct comparison. They sell the new non-refrigerated cartons, once in awhile, but the spies say the milk still has a slight burned flavor.

I've been dabbling in the Encarta encyclopedia, and spent some of the day reading the history of France. I was going to give Ravella a line about the irony of the rise of the Roman church to glittering splendor at a time when fourteen-thousand French nobles were killed in duels each year, but decided it would maker her sound like a cynical know-it-all, a burden I shoulder well enough all by myself. The article renewed my belief that no definition of insanity excluded those who ruled, with Nappy Bone king cluck of the clucks, at least until the preposterous DeGaulle, the only man in history who actually managed to be as boring as Israel, came along. Oops, almost forgot Weirdy Beardy, so it should read "one of only two men who actually..."

Some of the good reformers in the country's history alienated the existing conservative monarchists (etc.) to the extent their reforms were neglected. I want to point out the fact that you have no choice. I'm free to alienate you at will, a, because I was born and bred on the adversarial, served up with aplomb and generosity, b, because you deserve the rough edge of someone's tongue, and, c, because you're doing a marvelous job of eliminating all other options. My generous helping helped mold me as the artist I am, unquestionably, so, if I express optimism at your fate, I'm not being exactly one-hundred percent cynical. Many fine minds of all ages have considered democracy childish and American liberals have proved the concept unworkable even in a climate of absurd prosperity. The fatter you get, the more you want, and if someone doesn't say no, and box your moronic ears, you'll die, all of you, fat, thin, and even perfect mediums like me. Of course, I don't really mean it. You're a great people, read any scale in the land, it's just that we're journeying to the center of the literary earth and I methunk to myself that such a convoluted trip might be the more palatable if contrasted with editorial cage rattling. For all you know, Annette and Stuyvesant are going to have their own stories to tell, and where will that leave us? Artistic perpetual motion? With over 700,000 words to go, I'll take any hand offered -- physicists welcome. Maybe I can teach them how it's done. What a thing that would be, to break into the popular consciousness via the pages of "Scientific American", possibly in an article delineating how the harmonics of a self-reinforcing and amplifying literary style can be modified and adapted to reduce the operating costs of waste treatment facilities. I was told a thousand times as an eight year old I'd end up on the back of a garbage truck -- something about reading all the time instead of doing my homework -- so the element of self-fulfilling prophesy is not to be ignored. Of course, these are all god-like concepts, and humans are a skeptical species when they aren't quaffing leftist bucketfuls, so it's the kind of thing that needs to be proved over and over again, bringing us neatly enough, and in relatively jig time -- I'm beginning to get the hang of these novels -- back to our story.

"I'd really like to, thanks," the sixteen year old said with a shy smile, "I'll call my dad and he can pick me up at your house."

"Or my dad can take you home," Ravella said, "either way."

"You're dad's really cute," the pretty Italian girl said.

"You're lucky, too," the ten year old responded.

"Yeah," Annette agreed, "it's cool to have a great dad."

"You know if you want, we could walk to my place through the woods. There's a tree house some kids built half way, we could hang out there for awhile, and still be home for dinner."

"That sounds great," the older girl said. I'll call, then we can go."

The girls changed at opposite ends of the locker room, studiously avoiding looking in each other's direction, then left the park dressed in white blouses and khaki cargo shorts and sandals. They entered the forest and Ravella led down a broad path, then turned off on a faint trail that soon broke into an open wood. "They used to come out here a lot," she explained, "but now they stay home and instant message each other, so it doesn't get used as much."

"Chat, chat, oh drat, my body's getting all big and fat," Annette said.

"My dad's going to love you," the ten year old said with a laugh, "big time."

"Do you want to talk about stuff like that?" the older girl said, her voice lowering to a husky whisper.

"Yes," Ravella said, and the young girls instinctively joined hands.

"Do you think that's why we like each other?" the Italian beauty asked.

"I dreamed about looking at you," the younger female answered, "and it was mixed up with a dream about my dad, so it must be something like that."

"I really want to look at you, too," Annette said, "do you want to take stuff off while we walk?"

"It's pretty private here, so it would be okay," the younger girl said. They stopped under an old oak tree and the ninety-pound girl looked down at her new friend, then moved to her. "Unbutton me," she whispered softly. Ravella's hands shook, but she fumbled the buttons open and the older girl shrugged out of her blouse, hanging it on a branch, then unbuttoned Ravella and removed her blouse. "You look pretty without a bra," Annette whispered, reaching back to unfasten her's. "Let me," the younger girl said, reaching up to touch the girl's face and run her fingers down her neck and out along her athletic shoulders.

"Have you ever seen an older girl, you know, not in the locker room, but in private?"

"No," Ravella whispered, "I'm pretty innocent, I guess."

"That's kind of a state of mind," the older girl said, "I still feel that way with my dad, but he's been looking at me since I was your age and started getting bigger. I even feel that way with his friends when they take me skiing, like I'm on a first date."

"That's cool," Ravella said.

"It's how you get started that counts," the sixteen year old said, "if it's affectionate and gentle and with someone you love, you keep feeling that way, at least until you're sixteen; that being with someone is really special, not just arm wrestling, the most special thing of all, except maybe getting a horse for your birthday."

"That's how I felt the first time I saw you," the graceful Hispanic girl responded, "like special in a whole way I didn't understand, but not a new way, because I feel it whenever I'm close to my dad, but stronger, because somehow I knew you were the one to teach me."

"Same here," Annette said. The younger girl was fondling her chest, slowly teasing the bra off her adult breasts.

"Are you ready for me to see your nipples?" the pixie asked.

"Yes," she whispered.

Slowly the girl uncovered her new friend. "You're totally beautiful," she whispered, placing the bra on the tree branch.

"I'm big because of my dad," the girl whispered, "I'm going to have a baby."

"Wow!" the younger girl exclaimed.

"No kidding," Annette said, "we're going to Russia to adopt a baby, and guess what, we'll come home with two."

"How long has it been growing in you?" Ravella wanted to know.

"Almost two months," the girl said, "her name's Caroline. We went to a clinic where they know how to deal genders off the bottom of the deck, or something like that, so I can have a daughter for him, and granddaughter, though I think he's a bit young for that kind of thing."

"Can I touch you?" Ravella asked.

"Yes," Annette whispered, reaching for her friend's hands and guiding her fingers to her high, firm breasts, "I've never done this with a female before, but I want it with you, very much." She lowered her hands to her friends slim waste, staring down into her brown eyes as Ravella found her strawberry-size honey-colored nipples and explored with feather touches. "I hope I'm like you when I get older," she said.

"You're beautiful now," the older girl said, "just lovely. Do you want me to touch you?"

"In just a minute," Ravella whispered, "I want to feel you and look at you this way until I start getting used to it."

"You won't," the older girl promised, "I've spent three nights with dad's friend, Raymondo, and when he touches me like you are, I feel like a school kid seeing a boy with his shirt off for the first time."

"Are you in love with him?" the younger girl asked, now moving in to kiss her friend. Annette hissed at the touch of her little-girl lips on her wildly swollen nipples. "Just crushes, except my dad," she whispered, "I'm madly in love with him, but with Raymondo, Sean and Pierre I act and pretend, which is easy, because they're really nice and fun to be with, so getting all romantic and passionate just happens. But we let it go back to being buddies most of the time."

"I don't want to go to the tree house, after all," the younger girl said, "can we just go off the trail and find a comfortable place to lie together?"

"Yes," Annette said. "Do you want me take you're shorts off? We both could, and walk around in our panties for a few minutes getting used to each other."

"I don't think that would happen if we walked to Canada," the ten year old observed.

"That's why if it happens, you should have it happen a lot, ergo, fathers and brothers are a great choice."

"Do you have a brother?" Ravella asked.

"Twins," the girl said, "they're five years older than I am. They're computer geeks for NASCAR, so they spend a lot of time in the States."

"Did you do things with them like you do with your dad?" Ravella queried.

"Yes," the girl said, pointing to a bed of moss between two boulders. Ravella nodded, and leaned against the rock as Annette knelt and removed her sandals, then pulled down her shorts. The girls reversed positions, and in a moment were standing side by side in their lacy panties, holding hands and looking at the comfortable bed in front of them. "Let's walk around and talk more, first, okay?" Annette suggestion. They turned and carefully checked their bearings, then headed deeper into the spacious, well-groomed forest, Annette holding Ravella's right hand. After some minutes walking in silence, the older girl spotted a specimen tree, and the girls approached it. Annette leaned against the trunk, and coaxed the younger girl gently close in front of her. "Let me take you from behind," she whispered, "that's how it happened with me."

"Okay," the ten year old said, guiding her friend's hands around her waist. "Do you want me to pretend I'm you and you can be your dad?" the pixie asked.

"Oh, yes, Annette," the older girl whispered softly, pulling the child gently to her, then fondling delicately up the immature chest to the hard, swollen buds of her young nipples.

"Oh, daddy," the younger girl said, playing along, "your hands are really warm."

"Annette, are you sure?" Annette whispered.

"Daddy," the girl replied, "we're not the only father and daughter that want to be together. You taught me to read, you should know. The only reason it isn't a little sin is you don't feel little at all against my back, not the kind of thing a girl is likely to complain about., by the way."

"Annette," the pretend father said, "I've got to tell you something before I take your panties off, okay?"

"Yes, daddy," the younger girl responded.

"It may come to an end for me before I want it to. In other words, I may start ejaculating while I'm touching you and get you all wet. Sometimes that happens, and I don't want you to be frightened or grossed out."

"Dad," Ravella said, patiently, "I eat candy worms in cupcakes."

"Oh, darling, you're growing up so fast," Annette said, now absolutely, positively sure she'd fallen in love.

"I know it's called sperm, daddy," the little girl played on, "I've even seen it."

"You have, darling?" Annette said.

"On Carrie Berger's blouse," Ravella answered, "her brother got a new car and picked her up at lunch. They were almost late getting back for class, and I was walking by when she got out of his car. When she turned to close the door, I saw it on the back of her neck, and across her right shoulder, down over her red blouse."

"What did you do?" the older girl asked her pretend daughter.

"I pulled out a hankie and went up behind her and said, "These birds are getting worse every year." I looked at it up close for a second, then wiped her off."

Absolutely, positively.

"Did you know what it was?" Annette deadpanned, even though Ravella could feel her shaking perfectly easily.

"When she blushed, suddenly I did," the younger girl said. "I thought it was wickedly amazing, but I didn't say anything but See ya, and went to class. Then I started wondering how it got on her back, and why there was so much of it; you know, things like that."

"She masturbated him," the older girl said, breaking character. "If you let me pull your panties down, I can show you how females do it."

"Yes," the dean's daughter hissed. Annette pulled hers down, standing in front of the girl and letting her look for a minute, then she dropped to her knees, and as the child gently fondled her swollen nipples, she stripped her naked and dropped her panties on top of her own. "Now get back in front of me, and spread your legs as wide as you can, comfortably, while I lean back against the tree and support you. Then I'll do what Dad did when he started teaching me, and we can go on with the play."

"Yes, daddy," the girl whispered, and in a moment she was in Annette's left arm, legs spread, and gently thrusting her slender hips to the older girl's first tentative touch.

"Annette," the older girl whispered softly in the child's ear, "do you want me to tell you how the semen got on Carrie's back?"

"Yes, daddy," the girl whispered back.

"Because she did what I'm doing with you, she masturbated him with her hand. How much do you know about sperm, darling?"

"Just from pictures through a microscope," the ten year old replied, "and seeing Carrie."

"Well," the older girl said as she began to stroke her little friend slowly and deliberately, "you do it like this with a male, only you're holding his penis in your hand. The male gets big and hard and you do it a little harder and faster if he wants, then he cums and what you saw on Carrie spurts out of his penis. Boys are different, and some have a lot more sperm than others, and it sprays out all over everything, especially if they really like the girl, or the boy, `cause a boy can do it with another male just like a girl does, and just like we're doing it as females." Here the older girl again broke character, bringing down the curtain on their playtime.

"Did your dad do what you're doing with me a lot?" Ravella whispered.

"For half an hour," the older girl replied.

"Where did it happen?" Ravella asked Annette.

"In front of the mirror in my bedroom," the girl replied as the child began trembling and panting in her arms.

"Did you get as wet as I am?" Ravella rasped.

"Yes, darling," the girl said, "I submitted entirely and let him do this." She spread the ten year old's wetness over her straining young thighs. "He got me all slick and hot, even my belly, and I kept doing what you're doing and letting him do it, then he started doing this again while he was bending over me, and we both looked at each other in the mirror, and he made me cum with his fingers while he held me tight in his left arm."

It was a minute before the panting younger girl could speak. "Like that?" she finally asked.

"Yes," her friend said, nuzzling her pageboy mop of now lank black hair. "And it happened again a little later, only it was even harder."

"He must have been strong to hold you up," the younger girl observed.

"It was different the second time," Annette said, "we were on my bed."

"Oh," the girl said, here big eyes widening. She looked pensive for a moment, then asked, "before he made it happen for you on the bed, did you make it happen for him?"

"Yes," the older girl replied, "do you want me to show you how?"

"Yes."

"Okay," Annette said, "let's find a stick and I'll hold it between my legs, you know, because of gender issues, then you can be me again, and I'll show you what he taught me."

The two naked girls rummaged in the area for a stick, then Annette placed it between her thighs and leaned back against the tree. "He was much bigger than this," the older girl advised as she showed Ravella how to position her hands."

"So his height was worse than his bark?" the ten year old quipped nervously as she experimented with stroking the ersatz penis jutting up at a forty-five-degree angle from her friend's smooth belly.

"If you say it really fast," the girl replied, "'the pen is mightier than the sword'."

"I get it," the younger girl giggled.

"Do you want me to show you what a man and boy do together?" Annette asked.

"Yes," Ravella whispered.

The girl removed the demonstration penis from between her legs, and reaching over Ravella, inserted the thick end gently between the girl's tightly clamped young thighs, then she held the child as she had before and simulated massaging the phallus. "Like this," she said, "only the boy usually spreads his legs the way you did when I was touching you."

"A boy can't do it that way with a man, though..." the bright child said.

"No," the older female agree, "when a boy takes a man, he stands like this..." She brought Ravella to her right hip, retrieving the stick and placing it again between her legs. He puts his left arm around the adult, assuming he, the boy, is right handed, and massages him with his right hand. If he wants to get the cum on his body, he steps in front of the adult when he knows he's about to start spraying, otherwise the sperm goes on the floor or on the ground."

"Can I try it with you, you know, without pretending you're a male?" the girl asked.

"Yes," Annette panted, spreading her legs wide as the younger girl's fingers found her. "Yes," she repeated, thrusting her hips to the virgin.

"Are you sure the baby's your dad's?" Ravella asked, holding the beautiful sixteen year old close, and masturbating her openly.

"Yes," the girl panted in response, "we were really careful. It's half science these days, so we did temperatures and strips while we were alone together for a week. It worked."

"You could have had one when you were younger, couldn't you?" Ravella asked.

"Probably when I was twelve," the older girl agreed, "and I wish I had, but this is okay, too."

"I'm glad you said that," Ravella whispered, "I want to blow my dad to smithereens if he objects to anything, and there's nothing like a contemporary case history to set perspective."

"He'll be willing," the older girl said, "my dad was over the moon when the clinic gave thumbs up, and agrees we shouldn't have waited. He can clue your dad in, and I know a super way to hook your father."

"How?" the younger girl asked.

"It's pretty graphic," Annette cautioned, "and clinical."

"I'm the one who eats candy worms, remember?" the child asked, playfully.

"There's other ways to make a male have an orgasm," the Italian beauty said, her breath at a steady pant and her hips thrusting rhythmically to the ten year old's hand, "and one of the ways is to get his sperm in your mouth. It tastes salty, okay?"

"Yes," the younger girl said.

"Girl's -- lesbians -- also use their mouths on each other, mostly their tongues, okay?"

"Yes," Ravella said again.

"Okay," the older girl panted, "Dad and I were together in the car just before he left me at the pool. When you invited me over, I was just getting there, not leaving; are you with me?"

"Yes," the younger girl panted in her own ragged voice, "I was, too, I thought I'd missed almost missed you."

"Okay, we got that straight," Annette said, "so it happened in the parking lot. He went all the way with me, then, just a few minutes later, you invited me over, do you follow?"

"I think so," the younger girl mused.

"I'm fresh from him," Annette whispered, softly, "not even half an hour ago. If you want to do what lesbians do with me, you'll taste his semen, then you can tell your dad you've had another male's seed on your tongue. It's a little devious, maybe, like a kiloton bomb instead of the megaton model, but I don't think you'll have much difference of opinion on carnal issues once he knows."

"You know what I want to tell him?" Ravella said, lowering to her knees and pulling the taller female gently to her side, then rolling her on her back.

"What," Annette asked as her young friend stared down at her beautiful adult breasts.

Ravella spread her friend's legs wide and knelt between her splayed knees. Bending to meet her lover's rising hips, she whispered, "The truth."

"Darling, stop just a minute," the mature female panted after a minute, gently easing Ravella from between her thighs.

"What?" the girl whispered in a pant.

"Can you taste him?" she asked.

"Yes," the girl replied, "and see, too, just like Carrie's back, only wetter."

"Remember to tell your dad," Annette whispered, easing the girl's eager mouth back to her, then raising her harms above her head, spreading more widely, and thrusting again to the willing child kneeling, bent over, between her knees.

"I'm cumming," Stuyvesant whispered, but there was a knock at the door, and he collapsed in Heraldo's arms with a shudder, murmuring, "I'm sorry."

"Daddy?" a voice came through the bathroom door.

"His, sweetheart," her father called back.

"I brought a friend over," the childish voice came back, "come down and meet her when you're finished."

"Okay, tell her hello," the young man said as his ten-year-old daughter's footsteps retreated down the hall."

"I'm sorry," the boy whispered again, "I shouldn't have started anything."

The two naked males slipped into their shorts and tee shirts, then left the upstairs bathroom. "If you hadn't, I would have," Heraldo whispered to the boy as they approached the stairs, "we can ease in by saying you had something in your eye."

"Cool," said the seventeen year old, and they descended into the living room. Ravella introduced Annette Carlota and Heraldo introduced Stuyvesant Rodriguez. The father went to make limeade as the kids sat and talked.

"Annette's brothers work for NASCAR, they do software for the races," the young hostess said. The immediately engaged the underage graduate student, and Ravella beamed on happily, surreptitiously licking her young chops over an older brother of her own. She'd bring this off or her name wasn't Ravella Villarreal. A big, beautiful, black-eyed brother, what was he, six-feet? and, just like her dad, not an extra pound. And if he were her brother, not really, of course, she could tag along on dates with Annette, should they ever want a change from the comfortable confines of their own house, that is.

"What do you know about boats?" Heraldo asked as he came into the living room with three tall, frosty beers and a limeade for the tyke. "Just one," he said, as he held the tray in front of their guest, "and you can have two," he added to Stuyvesant. "You can have the foam off mine," he told his daughter, and they sat back, Ravella scrambling into her handsome dad's lap, and wriggling against him, pretending to be interested in his glass.

"My dad taught in Cancun," the teen said, "and we had an old fishing sloop."

"You're kidding," the older male said.

"Nope," the boy grinned back.

"We need to talk, then," Heraldo said, "meantime, I've showed you around, so if the sugar and spice set here on my lap approves, you can move in."

"I approve," the girl chirped, "but only if I can call you Brother and you call me Sister."

"I already have one of those," Stuyvesant laughed, rolling his eyes, "an eight-year-old wonderchild, not unlike yourself, Sister."

"What does she call you," the young hostess wanted to know.

"'Santy'," the maths major said, "except once a year she takes off the y' and substitutes an a', for obvious reasons."

"I can't wait, Bother Claus" the pixie grinned.

"You'll have to, Sister Elf," Stuyvesant replied, "or you'll go on the list as trivial and inconsequential, even if you don't make the dreaded `naughty'."

"I don't want to make it, "the girl said, "I want to define it, and a tall, handsome brother who can date my new best-friend-I-ever-had fits in my plans, and how!"

"It's nice to feel welcome," the handsome young man said with a slight blush, "but boats are a pretty powerful addiction, and you might not be able to get a word in edgewise once the men-folk start yarning about all the adventuring to be found between wind and water."

"Two captains and two mates. I like it," the girl rejoined, winking at Annette who smiled back, apparently not averse to the salty drift of the conversation.

"We'll obey all lawful commands," Santy promised, "and you won't be needing to lash us to a hatch cover when it comes time to play the cat."

"I'm sure that goes for Captain Annette, though her shoulders be broad, and her arm fair, without your saying so," the girl intoned.

"Maybe just a wee string at the wrists," Santy allowed, "you know mu'um, nothing more than a sign of respect."

They seemed made for each other, but then, Harold mused, people who read often are, and if they are, are more so (and yes, if they aren't, less so). With the chain of command set in stone, the group chatted about other topics. "Are you really close to your little sister?" Ravella asked Santy, "Annette is with her older brothers."

"Yes," the new member of the family said, "we spent a lot of time together before I came to the university."

"You must miss her," Ravella said.

"A lot," the boy admitted.

"Then she should come and visit soon, right Dad?" the girl said.

"It would be good for you and Annette to have someone to fuss over," the father concurred.

"Could she?" the pixie asked her brand new brother.

"Sure," the seventeen year old replied, "she'd fit in like soap fits in water."

"Then we'll call her Bubbles," the youngest chirped, "Captain Sty and Bubbles will entertain, following a word from our sponsor. That's to impress her when she gets here, meantime, the girls are the captains."

"Joanie will be impressed," her brother agreed. "I've tried to make her aware of feminist issues, and you guys can take over where I've failed."

"As long as she's young enough to pretend," the girl noted, nodding her head.

"I'd think you'd be more concerned with her ability to swim," the young man deadpanned, seeming to know how to bond with the best of them, either that, or, for the moment, exceedingly motivated.

"Moving on," the girl giggled, I think we need to play a spy game. See if the girls can find out secret things about the boy, and tell each other, you know, without being silly or anything."

She looked over her shoulder up at her dad, then at the two in arm chairs. They also nodded.

"Okay," she said, nodding herself, "to have a level playing field, Annette, you have to sit in Brother's lap, otherwise it won't be fair."

The boy stood as the girl did. "You can pretend and sit on the arm of the chair," he said.

"If you want me to," the girl replied, sweetly demure and shy.

"No," the boy whispered.

Santy returned to the chair and guided the beauty into his lap, pulling her gently back.

"Spying," the ten year old began, "is, as the world knows, a nerve-wracking position in life. Delving into the secrets of others, then sharing them for personal gain or ideology. At every turn, peril, at every other turn, deception; they highways are double cross, the byways, triple cross. There are moles and sky divers. Are they out there having fun? Not exactly. They are serious professionals, and they tell what they know, and the oldest goes first, because that's the rule."

I know, I know, I should have called it "One Layer at a Time". Yes, back toward the center of the earth. Personally, I'd count myself lucky if I were you. I'm the one who has to go back and gather up the man and boy in the golf shelter, return to Castseed Island, to find out how things are going with Rick and his cast and crew, and, along with all those loose ends, don't we have a father and daughter at a futurist recreation park near Baltimore? None of these are even related to my interlude with Jose, which led to Tina, who's telling the story of Raul, whom she met the previous night, and who, in his turn, is telling of his first experience with his cousin, Armando, sixteen, when he, Raul, was nine years old, as the boys sit, naked, on a tangle of heavy roots growing from the bank of a dry river. If there's more, I've forgotten it, but so far into record territory, it probably doesn't matter.

I've been trying to compare this to "The Pirates of Rickety Pier", my first novel, which ran to 1,103 pages of double-spaced type, I think twelve point, or whatever the dot-matrix (remember that slideruler?) machines of the day printed. Anyway, probably something on the order of 300,000 words, so for me, as well as the Web, it's new territory coming up. Out where I've never been before, but with a fresh keyboard, and a new monitor, so who knows? What I do know is that it's absolutely hard to sustain at this level, so rest stops become more than a luxury or extravagance. I don't wind-down well; if I stop in mid-fiction, I can't get to sleep, and I doubt most readers would have better luck than I do, so it's nice to stretch and yawn, yet keep typing so the batteries become fully discharged before being plugged into the wall outlet. This would be more of a relief if it wasn't for your abysmal behavior, which seems to need on-the-spot correcting, and interferes with lilting pastorals on life in the tropics, island girls, reggae music, Rasta boys, Samantha, Queenie, five cats, five dogs, and a microwave. My wife made me a pornographer, and you lot make me glad I'm into the extreme alternative erotic just out of perversity. You don't deserve better, and, in plain truth, you don't deserve me, but what else am I going to do, stand around polishing the long barrel of the big cannon, and never get to pull the trigger? Not shoot you? Where would the fun be in that? Besides, the new novel is meant to be just what this one is: conflict free and epic in length. Conflict breeds stress, and stress shortens life. As the man said, "The medium is the message."

A short-wave radio. That's the next thing on my list. They have a couple in town, but they're chintzy off-brands from China, country of origin of flashlights with cardboard liners, fans that last a month, and razors that don't last a single shave. They're improving, but it still stings to get stung. I had a short-wave for awhile, and it was better than cable, especially Radio Netherlands and some programming of the BBC. In a way it's kind of fun being almost one-hundred percent out of touch, but I have a feeling that's just optimism that if I ever get reconnected to the cable there'll be something new on it, parading as fun.

Parading as more than fun is Samantha. In the oddest way, we've become, in six months, like an old married couple with four or five kids. She bops over for an hour after school, we cook and chat and feed the kids, then she heads home at six o'clock to do her homework, very routine, and awfully close to absolutely perfect. She becomes more affectionate with time, but we do less fooling around and making out, though it is far more intense when it does happen. We haven't begun to go all the way, probably due to my instance that she spend the night, not engaging in puppy love, in the carnal sense, if that isn't a gross misusage. She looks better all the time, missing the pretty/cute stage many girls go through in their early teens, but headed for far above average as she matures. She actually knows the Four Times table, but as her four times eight, and she has to start at the beginning, and it takes a minute or two. Luckily, she's cute enough not to cause consternation to those behind her should she, bless her heart, ever end up in the line at the bank. It's ironic that what should be lyrical and romantic has turned out to be Germanic and practical; two souls marching in step, not dancing; going somewhere, not circling; cumming sometime, not waltzing the last dance forever. Cool, eh?

Huge Black Cat has been under stringent house arrest for the last couple of days, not even allowed near the doors. I think house lions like to be yelled at, it makes them feel big and included. HBC, probably better named Pantherito, talks, mostly a low warble, more than all twenty or so of my other animals, past and present, combined, but is otherwise totally lacking in personality. He's a beautiful, shiny jet black, calm animal, and I hope he sticks around.

Got my own back at Queenie by using the last couple of tablespoons of ketchup in a fresh pot of beans. Yes, just a little is great, but now the trick is to figure out where to hide a bottle, if I buy one. Write enough fiction, and your mind will be seeking tangents, too; practically anything, just let it be true.

I'm always interested in learning about portents of fate in biographical material. Napoleon and Hitler are the standout examples, but there are many other, almost to the point of saying all great men, in quotes, had this sense of impending greatness to a high or extreme degree. I have it, probably about as extreme as it gets, fully realizing that half the inmates in the asylums may have greater senses of destiny than I can even imagine. Nonetheless, it is there, always, with me the rube, because half the so-called great men of history never had an inkling of what they caused or prevented. By this I mean that, incommunicado as I am, I may already be a.g.m. How would I know? My expectation is a knock on the door from the babylon, not the Nobel committee, or a fiendish device, I mean, look who my enemies are. These don't make any difference, with a million words on probably some million or more hard drives, well, the die is caste, and living to see any result is neither likely nor unlikely. I do wonder how much greater I'll be than other historic notables and pin it roughly as my exceeding them as I exceed other writers, and all due to the keenest imaginable hook, which, in the main, says that if you obey and behave, I'll keep writing stories, and if you don't, I'll come after you, so no more stories. If you think I'm kidding, try another twenty years of someone else's plan and see where that gets you, which is a pretty stupid thing to say in a land where urban socialists scuttle plans like tradeunionists scuttle scabs. Your tough luck is that my mother tried the scuttling routine on me and I just reflected back her frenetic fire until it cooked her goose. Of course, your goose is cooked without me, so try not to get carried away with slavish obedience to what you perceive as logic. Using the same wits, don't waste your time looking for profound philosophical insights or erudite analysis of past pontificating penmen. I love them, they do entertain, but Churchill liked them, and that pretty well closes the case as far as I'm concerned. Remember the previously cited example of Teddy Roosevelt, the bull moose, roughriding, big stick guy who'd read it all and broke down like an aged peasant grandmother at the death of his son, whom he hoped would only be wounded in the name of family glory and political fortune. All the Greeks and all the Germans couldn't put Teddy together again, and he died. I think philosophy is entertainment with insight, mostly the former with a little of the latter. My personal credo is Extensionism, which is about right for a sixteen year old [see "Stonington Stories", and other works, for many details concerning the author's arrested development], and simply means a firm grasp of the obvious allowing the disciple to measure a value by doubling or halving it. What if everybody did this or that? What if nobody did? For example, if there are eight-ounce bottles of packaged water, would we be better off if there were seven ounce bottles, or filling a glass from the tap. If there are three kinds of Nestles Quik, in three sizes, would we be better off with six kinds in six sized, or with the old cardboard and tin container, in one size? If one weighs three hundred pounds, would he or she be better off at six hundred, or one-fifty? In a way, it's a doctrine in reverse -- by default -- inapplicable as not worth the effort in a healthy society, while serving as a grim harbinger in an unhealthy culture. An example is airline safety. At the turn of the new century, the entire U.S. went nearly two years without a single commercial airline fatality. This translates badly because it means we are spending far too much on safety, with a resulting numbing effect on society at large. We should have about fifteen-hundred fatalities a year, a hard thing to measure because as ticket prices come down and more are able to avail themselves of what ought to be a significant freedom -- cheap, rapid travel -- more people will utilize the system, causing more accidents, so the five year waypoint should be about two-thousand fatalities. In the end it's the tail wagging the dog, a measure of our deviance from what would be normal and healthy as against what's neurotic and obsessive. If we allow twenty unsolicited phone calls to reach a private residence in a twelve hour day, shouldn't we, if the underlying doctrine is sane, allow forty or sixty, or an unlimited number, or should we cut the number, through enforced legislation that a six your old could understand, reduce the number to two or three, from local business, a week? If we allow almost fifty years to pay off a charge on a plastic card, would it not be better to get the grandchildren involved by making it one hundred years, or might there be obscure and tangential benefits to limiting repayment to three years for durable goods and one year for restaurant meals, event tickets, and what might be generally called frivolous purchases. In a democracy, these are your decisions, in a despotic monarchy, they become mine. I'm smarter than you I and will make better decisions for my surviving subjects than they would be able to make for themselves, precisely as the intelligent, responsible father is likely to make better decisions for his children than they are able to make for themselves. In a sane society, Extensionism becomes silly, while in a defective society it acts as a seismograph. A related subject is the blotting-the-copybook syndrome, or thinking versus spelling. This amounts to over-enthusiasm for the trivial while ignoring the essential. One example I've used before, and I repeat the same examples from time to time, rather providing new ones, because those I chose are the most salient, is rigid insulation codes in home construction, then allowing a small number of people to occupy any size home they think they can afford. Dithering over minutia while ignoring the basic issue. Another example is grading at the college level where a letter grade is taken off for each spelling error. It's not called spelling, it's called writing. Spelling is an adjunct, relatively unimportant, like the insulation around a light switch, yet minor discrepancies can have disastrous consequences. Again, we measure by the opposite. What are we meant to do, promote and publish people who have a talent for the flawless construction of their written words? To emphasis, these are examples from a king who holds little liking for legislation based on this tragedy or that misfortune rather than on what is sensible and what it defective, in general, spelling errors more or less ignored. We're facing death by age, pensioner and the redundant, avid voters and activists, undoubtedly excellent spellers, burdening us to the point of extinction. What do we do about it? Sketch scenes of busloads of elders trying choruses of "Ninety-nine Bottle of Beer on the Wall" on their way to the extermination centers, or ignore the imagery because they've generally had a full and fair share and it is someone else's turn? There was a time when all this was simply known as reason, and, vigorously spurred by Anglo Saxon invention, it modified excess while allowing the freedom to progress. As the media became dominated by a mentally inferior, non-creative subculture, the emphasis turned from reason to an adversarial climate of nitpicking and hairsplitting on a selective, pro-socialist, basis that allowed Johnson to amass a personal fortune at the public till and castigated Nixon for minor wink-wink nonsense commonly practiced by -- and often necessary to -- high officials throughout all recorded history. Reason has so far left us, we've reached a point of picking the worst of any dozen options, in fact, have become flawless in dubious execution. The O.J. case was an example, as was the election of 2000, and the expensive, disruptive, and pointless exercises conducted and continuing after September Eleventh. These all place unprecedented burdens on your Anglo Saxon ruling class, and, while others may think they know how to run what we built, they don't, they simply like to argue and they don't like to work. To the subhuman mentality the debate is everything because you can do it while sitting down, and resolution of any issue means someone is going to have to stand up and get something done. Finding any entertainment value in this mode of living is a creates great stress in the artistic community, and this deficiency is exacerbated by the fact that the sub humans are addicted from early childhood to the meaningless repetition of yammer, and thus far more greatly immunized against the colossus of monotony than free-thinking, free-acting Anglo Saxons. It really is hard to be funny about all this, but your black-hearted clown does his best, and, through diligent effort is sometimes able to find a lighter side to the descent of socialist darkness. He is not always successful, by any means. For example, where is the lighter side of Ford paying more in pension than it pays for steel? It doesn't take much in the way of Extensionism to paint the company as eliminating the production of automobiles and trucks in the name of worker safety, while tuning itself exclusively to the welfare of its employees. Nor is there humor to be found as the various governors of Massachusetts try to figure out how they're going to pay all those sand hogs $240 a day, plus overtime. A million hours of gubernatorial meetings with maybe ten or twelve jokes. A satirist might manage to eek a little material out of all this, but, historically, this breed of humorist is naught but an exaggerating, sarcastic fool, Swift and Voltaire being the archetypes, and, of course, I didn't really mean a million hours of meetings, I was using poetic license to foreshadow, which, on the street, is known as pulling your chain.

I'm spending more time in the encyclopedia. It's better than cable, but, now that domestic tranquility is in temporary flood, there is an hour or two a day in which to review all the stuff you guys have done over the millennia by way of entertaining me and for my edification, both temporal and spiritual. Really, you shouldn't have gone to such excesses. I'm a writer. Anglo Saxon. I can make stuff up, no need for all the wars, inquisitions, and executions. If there were a religious god, his church would be ordained, if there isn't, no such universal institution would exist and a hodgepodge of ideals and beliefs would reign as this and that group yielded its free will to the indoctrination of this or that charismatic charlatan.

You know what experience teaches a writer? Not to use `duh'uh' after a statement such as the preceding. Restraint, maturity, understatement, they all come with decades of intense practice, unless you're boring, in which case no amount of practice will undo them. (You get boring by not reading, you're not born that way as long as you were not born in Ohio.). And I'm not veering from the subject, because, after all, wouldn't such unlimited practice be the prerequisite for a charlatan of virtuoso stature? Again, experience kicks in and you are spared a smiley face made with punctuation marks.

I love my intriguing little literary dances as much as Mozart loved his riffs of melody. They are great fun and remind me of writing fiction.

Exceeding myself is the ongoing central conundrum at this point. Didn't Mozart write too many notes? The emperor thought so and his ministers agreed. By setting up one glassy fandango after another, isn't the writer dooming himself to a day when such a high level of magic has to stop? No more notes? It would seem self-evident, yet getting this far is already impossible, so what is there to measure by? I feed Dancer well, I've never whipped Blitzen, and Cupid and Comet have boots for their hooves Doesn't seem like any more than any reasonable person would do for his animals, so why the sled-dog mentality? Climbing above everything, and charging flat-out, resting mere hours, then high and off again? It doesn't make sense. I'm not loveable, one day my wife may take the opportunity to assure the world on that point, and how can I be sexy to a reindeer? It beats me, honest injun, but, if I write it all down, maybe someone else can figure it out for me, which, come to think of it, would amount to a full-employment act for behavioral analysts as well as those of both lay and institutional backgrounds obsessed with the imperfections of their betters. Full-employment for journalists, too, I should imagine. An entire cash economy built on perceived deviances from convoluted ideals by a single individual, and I don't have to sign paycheck one. This conveniently doubles when a contingent arises espousing the idea that it's actually contemporary culture that's deviant, and I'm the only straight arrow left in the fort. Marketing bumper stickers expressing disinterest in the posturing of either side should be a multi-million-dollar business of and by itself. In short, and that'll be the day, on the way to becoming the literary colossus of all ages I seem to have set the foundation for a publishing and economic empire. Did I mention the fact that I come from the Elbe, that I'm an Anglo Saxon? I hear so much about other cultures I have to be sure to plug my own. Since so many others seem to want to plug it, too, it might be fair-eyed of me to remind you midgets and minor buffoons that you are dealing with the earth's most dangerous tribe. Churchill was one of us, and he killed fifty-five million. This isn't quite so much an overt threat, although there is certainly that aspect to it, as a caveat that you carefully determine how rough your enemy is capable of getting before you start rough stuff with him. We've dropped two nuclear bombs, we've tested thousands, and we have tens of thousands. There are mass cultures and distinct minor cultures the world would be better off without, and we have the means to kill all of them. All the clever psychotics need provide is the will, and I guess it's pretty obvious that in my book they've provided plenty. Yes, a man in search of a button, that's fair. It's a search for quality over resilience. Quality can only come with cooperation, because the adversarial system, in politics, if not in law, simply means one side infects the other with that which it decries, then hunts it down, also meaning the toughest, meanest, and most aggressive are the most likely to survive. Bobby Kennedy was a good example, but a graceful act of fate intervened, which actually might be a bad thing, because he'd have made more clear the defects of his kind if he'd been around much longer. Democracy is the playground of the thug and bully, and they shouldn't even be allowed on the property. (That's what Newfoundland is for.) And it gets worse. The tough urban crowd puts forth buffoons of a political nature, known as poltroons, so you end up with camerable morons backed by reticent thugs. And I'm not whistling Dixie here, because it's Yankee Boston with its Tip O'Neills and Joe Moakleys and Ted Kennedys that is providing the fine points for those interested in the study of the lunacy of democracy in any liberal sense of the word. In this situation the philosopher has the advantage over the literary artist because the latter is faced with the task of writing it all down, and there is so much to write. The intellectual grinds his teeth, but the writer has to make you grind yours. Both are easy, but the latter requires large, some might say excessive, amounts of typing.

This, of course, is a reversal of the system just described. Instead of the aggressive thug, you get the guy who's happy lying in bed all day, clicking keys. Instead of "Workers of the World, Unite!" you get a million words, some of them devoted to what happens when the workers do unite. Arm this catfish with a nuclear arsenal and warmongering will be relegated to the history books freeing resources to untangle the knot left by the leftists, while said liberals are reduced in stature to leftists, as in left-out, and as in the nose of the camel being guided out of the tent.

Randy stopped by for lunch by himself. It turns out he's a bit of a hustler, which would be perfect. Anecdotally, it seems quite common for boys here to exchange sexual favors for money or gifts; talk of boty-boys' and boty-men' is common when the kids are hacking around. Since I'm mega-passive when it comes to such things, I have little frame of reference, but the boy sat close and closer while I was showing him how to use the keyboard for the Pac Man demo, and responded quickly and willingly when I kissed him. As he left he asked for five dollars on top of the ten I'd already promised him to buy art supplies. It would be cool to keep it on a cash basis, because that gives me a good excuse to say no if it becomes more than once a week, or so, plus, more importantly, it frames anything that happens as business, not emotional involvement, which can lead to fagism. We've been casual friends for six or seven years, and that's unlikely to change one way or the other. I'd like to say our relationship will last as long as Samantha and I are celibate, but I know too much history and so know such triangles have been tolerated in a wide enough variety of cultures to make them acceptable to me. If I knew it all, I might have a different viewpoint, but that's undoubtedly a universal truth, and too abstract to be relevant when a twelve year old's skin is so unbelievably silky and warm. So who is seducing who? How long will it take, assuming it happens at all? Is he old enough to cum? Will he like what happens enough to make me cum? Stay overnight? Will it last? Will he tell me his secrets? Ask me about mine? Help me with my essays by rendering them more palatable to the reader? Draw attention from the underlying novel, so I'll start using fiction as my park bench? Blackmail me? Tell the babylon? Or what? My guess is things will progress slowly, we'll have sex and remain friends, I'll help him with school stuff, as I have all along, Samantha won't care much one way or the other, in the event she finds out in the first place, and that, yes, the editorial content will become more interesting without intruding on the novel other than by boosting the word count. Plato interferes and reduces the number of sacred words. That should tell you a thing or two about metaphysics, based on the assumption a real philosopher would know it all and rarely be of a mind to allow the pursuit of additional knowledge to come between himself and his disciples. If it should happen conversely, if the philosopher does in fact not know it all, then he never will know anything and will have to substitute a glib writing style and the ability to entertain for insight and context. Since there is a market there is a product, so that you have an example of the glib set right before you, and perpetual motion is achieved when you begin to wonder why there is a market, and how there could possibly be no market, an offshoot of the basic philosophical tenet which is that the one concept impossible to grasp is that of nothing. Gods, morals, ethics, conduct and attitude are child's play compared to pondering over how we could not exist when only our comprehension defines existence in the first place. It gets worse. Religion enters the picture, and all bets are off. Essences of mysticism sold with theater and the rule of the performer. As an adjunct, wouldn't it be a good idea to separate stage and state as we attempt separating church and state? It would play hell with Trent Lott and Orin Hatch's careers, which certainly seems to validate the point. The ancients believed in verbal debate over writing, so the balance of power went to the fastest tongue, not the finest mind. The scribes wrote it down, and that added a marketing aspect, so the formulae ends up reading superstition plus theater plus cash equal philosophy. Making something neat and conclusive of this has done just what I was afraid it would and taken away the bench, leaving me standing by the path in the park. Yonder, however, is another bench. My mistake, it turns out, on approach, to be a coffee table, in fact the very coffee table in front of the Villarreal sofa where the older ensemble has finished their beer and the pixie is finishing off her limeade. Shall we sit a spell?

"Daddy," Ravella said, "Annette and I took a short nap in the woods on the way over here and I was wondering if we could go up to my room and take another one, and if you and Brother would come up and tuck us in? If you do, we'll tell you a bedtime story instead of you telling us one, how's that for a deal?"

"It's good for spies to lie low as much as they can," Heraldo agreed, "but that said, Stuyvesant and I have a story to tell, too, so you busy beavers may want to chill and tell your story later, how does that sound?"

The younger girl looked at the older girl who nodded shyly.

"Okay," the young father said, "why don't you issue your final report, pay off your mates, and run on upstairs."

"Our final report is too exciting for words," Ravella said, "and it would be very hard to present it without them, no matter what code you used." This left nothing more to be said, so the males boosted the females to their feet, and the girls headed for the stairs, holding hands.

"That's half an hour I'll remember for awhile," Santy observed.

"It added to the family dynamic," Heraldo agreed.

"Yeah," the boy responded, "even before Bubbles gets here."

Again, the males were interrupted by Ravella. "Daddy," she called from the head of the stairs, "I turned off the air conditioner and Annette and I are too tired to turn it back on, so it's going to get kind of warm up here, and you know how mom is about extra laundry, so I just thought I'd tell you before we go lie under the sheet waiting to be tucked in."

"Darling," the young father replied, "why don't you close your curtains to keep the heat out, and we'll bring up candles for story time, would that be okay?"

"Yes, daddy," the girl said, and disappeared down the hallway.

"In the name of domestic tranquility, why don't we strip in the laundry room and jump start our new household paradigm?" Heraldo said. Santy nodded and the two found their way to the washer and dryer. "Keep your briefs on, if you'd be more comfortable," the older male suggested, but the seventeen year old said it would be okay, and stripped. The naked males loaded the machine carefully and measured out detergent and bleach, the tall athlete standing behind the slim teen as the boy figured out the controls and set the washer to the proper cycle. He'd be a good houseguest.

"This is how it started with my sister," Santy whispered as Heraldo began molesting him openly, pressing close to the naked teen.

"While you were doing laundry?" the older male whispered.

"While I was teaching her which buttons did what. She kept making mistakes and giggling. Since she can beat most of the other kids in the neighborhood at most of the arcade games, I suddenly knew something was going on."

"What did she say?" the professor asked.

"She asked me which button to push for the clothes we had on," the boy responded.

"I know a ten-year-old-girl who would think that was funny," Heraldo responded.

"I hope she has a friend," the graduate student remarked as they turned out the light and walked through the house to the kitchen where the host spent a minute lighting candles.

Heraldo lay at Ravella's right shoulder and Santy at Annette's left. Both girls thought Bubbles would make a fine addition to their family, and the student explained that their mother was a consulting engineer who traveled a lot and would be delighted to find a safe and stable domestic alternative for extended periods of time. Heraldo also filled in details about Ravella's mother, allowing that she wouldn't have much choice but to accept a highly convenient and sensible merging of families on technical grounds. Annette, queried closely by both Villarreals, seemed to have one string attached, or, rather, a pair, her twin brothers who might drop in from time to time. She and her mother were looking for a new apartment, anyway, so they could relocate to the Villarreal neighborhood, and she could continue living half at home. All agreed that that was it, an extended family consisting of one adult and one teen male; one adult woman, Christa Villarreal; three girls, Annette, Ravella, and Bubbles, with open house extended to Annette's brothers. Others would be guests, and they'd be kept to a gracious minimum. Television and alcohol, other than a rare beer, would be absent, rather, they would read, surf the Internet, converse, and devote only convenient and non-intrusive time to wanton behavior. They agreed Annette's child would be added as it seemed sensible and that the sixteen year old could continue dating her father and his three tennis partners, having them, one at a time, as overnight guests as she chose. They agreed on four parties a year with a limit of twenty weekend guests in addition to members of the household. Annette and Santy both said their parents would be able to contribute significantly to the household budget, and that concluded their first family meeting.

"Tell the girls about doing laundry with Bubbles," Heraldo suggested. The girls had a fit over the tyke's so neatly hooking her tall, handsome brother, and prompted the brother to supply a tapestry rich in texture and detail, Heraldo interrupted for a minute to remind them all that privacy and secrecy were less important than honesty and titillation, and they seventeen year old began his story.

"You are kidding, aren't you?" he asked he nine year old, his sixteen year old voice breaking nervously.

"I knew you felt the same as I did," the girl replied in a whisper, "I can hear it in your voice. That's how Nina Fox says her brother sounds when he wants to be mature with her."

"I don't know what I feel," the boy murmured, "I just know it changed all of a sudden."

"You've never seen me bare chested since I was a kid. You know I'm starting to grow and that mom bought me a bra last week, so that's why you're nervous, because you want to look at me, and I'm your sister, and so you shouldn't want to, but you're a boy, so you want to, which is no big news, because girls like to look at each other, too. That's the explanation, don't you think?"

"I guess so," Santy admitted, shyly.

"And you know what they don't tell you, ever, even if you get your doctorate when you're twenty?" the girl asked.

"What?" the boy replied.

"That girls are just as excited about looking at cute boys as the boys are about looking at the girls' chests."

"They act like they'd run away," the sixteen year old said.

"Act and girl are not an oxymoron," Bubbles explained, "why would you chase them unless they run?"

"I'm behind in that kind of thing," the boy admitted.

"Well," the girl observed, "I can't exactly imagine your being challenged by something that can be learned in a few minutes, and that's mostly physical, like dancing or skateboarding; you don't have that kind of mind."

"And you really want to wash what we're wearing?" the boy said, his voice a little better but still that of a nervous child. .

"And stay here with you until they're dry," the girl whispered.

"Do you want me to take, you know, be like a gentleman and take mine off, first?" he whispered.

"Yes, and I want to sit on the laundry basked and watch, would that be okay, then you can watch me?"

"Then just use the regular `wash' button, the first one I showed you," the boy said, stripping quickly and lifting the lid of the machine. Bubbles rose from her basket and stood in front of the machine. "It should be romantic with a girl," she noted, "so you get to unbutton me if you want to."

Santy moved the basket close and reached to his young sister's face. She stared down at the huge adult erection jutting from between his childishly smooth thighs and high against his flat, athletic belly. "You're a beautiful animal," she whispered as his fingers found her lips and then the top button of her white blouse. "You are, too," he whispered back, exposing her young body to the waist of her uniform skirt, and pulling the thin fabric from her shoulders. As she unfastened the cuffs of her blouse, her older brother reached gently behind her. "It's a slide catch, not a snap," she whispered, freeing her cuffs and slipping the blouse into the open tub behind her. She stood looking into Sanity's eyes, arms hanging demurely at her side, as he let her training bra drop to the floor. "Very beautiful," he added in a whisper, then let her guide his hands to the buckle of her skirt belt. He loosened it and the buttons at her hip, and handed the garment to the girl, along with her bra. She dropped them in the tub and turned back to face the teen sitting a foot from her, instinctively spreading her legs as his fingers slowly approached her thighs. "Okay," he whispered before he touched her, looking into her eyes. She nodded, and the male began the rape of the child by tracing from her slightly knobby knees, she'd grown two inches in the last few months, up her long legs to the inner hem of her panties. He found her waist with both his strong hands, and, as the girl brought her legs together, slid them down over her hips, removing them so she could start the machine. As she bent to touch the controls, the tall male bent gently over his naked sister, squatting slightly so he could ease his swollen penis up between her legs. The nine year old spread herself widely at his touched and hissed in welcome as he found her wetness and began thrusting slowly and tentatively up and against her, his hands on her now heaving flanks. The washer hummed and began warming as it filled with hot water. The girl bent over the top, placing her hands under her chin so her athletic brother could run his fingers freely from her waist to her upper chest, then to her swollen nipples as he continued his slow, careful entry into her wet, young body.

Sandy kissed the girls head, neck and shoulders, whispering to her and listening as she whispered back.

"Have any other boys been inside you?" he asked, "because it may hurt if I'm the first one."

"You are," the girl said, panting, and I've never experimented with, you know, doing stuff to myself, so try to be really gentle if you can."

"I will," the athletically built scholar whispered, tenderly, "I'll be very gentle. I love you."

"Am I your first girl?" the nine year old whispered, loving her brother's husky voice almost as much as she loved his tender, careful entry ever deeper into her belly.

"Remember when I was fourteen and got into Stoicism and wanted to go off and camp by myself for a week?" the teen asked his sister.

"Yes," Bubbles replied.

"Something happened while I was hiking home," he said, "but it was out in the woods and the girl was younger than you, only seven."

"Can you tell me about it?" the sister whispered, "I've got to have something to take my mind off of what's happening with us or I'll jump out of my skin."

"Yes," the boy whispered, "I'll tell you, but I want to lie you on some towels, on your back, so you'll be more comfortable, and so I can look into your eyes."

"There still some dirty ones left in the hamper," the girl said back over her shoulder, "we can use them in case there's any blood."

"Okay," the boy said, holding the girl gently by her slender waist as he slowly withdrew his penis. They found candles, doused the lights, and spread towels on a carpeted portion of the floor. Bubbles lay back, arms at her side, and spread her slim legs widely, thrusting her hips to her teenage brother as he lowered to his knees and positioned himself. "Let's be clinical, not romantic, because I want to feel everything and not have it lost in passion," the pixie said.

"I'll try not to touch you at all," the boy responded, planting his hands inches from her shoulder and supporting himself on his knees between her splayed legs. He squatted slightly and she thrust to him, so he found her quickly as she lay inert beneath him. "This is my Catholic phase," she whispered, "just letting you do it because you're a male and need it, or to get me pregnant."

"It's nice this way, too," Santy said, carefully avoiding any contact with the child beneath him as he again began thrusting carefully between her widely spread thighs.

"Were you with the girl in the woods like this?" Bubbles asked.

"Her father was holding me so I wouldn't hurt her," the boy explained, "but Zollie was on her back the way you are."

"Did she touch you, you know, put her arms around you?" the girl asked.

"She mostly held onto her father," the boy whispered huskily, "but when she felt me really taking her, she used her hand on my leg to pull me inside her."

"Were you against her chest or looking down at her, like you are with me."

"Her father had his arm around my chest," the boy said, "and his right hand on me so I wouldn't lose control and hurt her."

"Did you like the feeling of his hand on you?" the girl quizzed.

"Yes," her brother whispered, "that's how it started, while Zollie was starting the fire, we went out to get wood. We found blackberries, so we went out again, that's when we started talking."

Literary revolution. Hasn't been one, at least that I'm aware of, for years. Actually, a reader revolution would be more apt. Readers telling each other that all he does is add layer after layer, and he calls it a novel, and seeking scythes and pitchforks. One guy named Igor and I'm chopped liver. Kidding aside, never, writing at this level is exhausting, and if I can't wind down the way I choose I wouldn't have it in me to start in the first place.

Samantha looked ravishing this afternoon. Bev's in the hospital so her neighbor came over to fix her hair with pig tails and berets, showing that the girl may turn out to be an absolute beauty, surpassing even Queenie. Also, she finally got her black short shorts, which fit like skin. She's still a pipsqueak, Venus de Milo body notwithstanding, and what she may look like when she grows more and gets leggy is not safe to imagine. Her face varies like the sea, always different, from slightly clownish to almost shocking radiant beauty, with an average school girl appearance at most times. Her personality exceeds her looks. For example, she uses just a trace of spice on her food, and is especially modest in her application of ketchup, even eliminating it entirely when it comes to dishes the gray wolf cooks. We talk more in a day than most couples I'm familiar with say in a week, and her mind is more fun the a dozen debs and all their cousins. She is immediate and primal as well as dedicated and scheming, able to happily make long sets of plans for ten dollars and modify them to fit two dollars. There is nothing insidious or residual about her, she neither digs for imperfections nor holds grudges. Fundamentally, she is quiet and passive, and, when loquacious, she sticks to one subject so our conversations can evolve in a linear rather than a random manner. She's the most intriguing human I've ever known, but then in some sense I have raised her, and have certainly been a verbal influence, so I guess it's no wonder. Pygmalion.

Browsing in Encarta causes me, rather naturally, I think, to wonder how my article will look. "Thomas C. Emerson's difficult childhood began March first, 1946 in his ancestral home of Concord, Massachusetts. He claimed little memory of his first months on earth, but psychologists and historians generally agree these were a formative time with the shock of his mother cooing and playing with him confusing the infant and distorting, a, the world around him, or, b, his perception of that world. "If such a horrible person liked me, be it for the briefest of times in the far distant past, I'm going to have esteem issues until my ninetieth birthday," he once said. Most would argue today, a hundred year after his death, that Emerson knew what he was talking about."

"The Years of the Sleeping Giant, as they are popularly known, were, in fact more than four decades. Emerson did little and wrote less until he reached his forties. At this time, primitive word processors made it possible for a lazy body to respond efficiently to an active mind, and in the mid Eighties the author began writing seriously instead of lying around reading all the time. His first efforts are largely lost to posterity but his monumental first novel, "The Pirates of Rickety Pier" outsold all books on all best seller lists for approximately seventy years. After it's completion, the writer backed away from his aft and lived modestly in Central America, Mexico, Los Angeles, and Iowa, always with a goal of understanding how little there was to common people above and beyond their ability to build houses, roads, and rudimentary schools. In his view, all advances in the society of his day were the result of inventive genius and lucky breaks - serendipity -- with academic, political and religious institutions contributing little and, at the turn of the century, these `parasites' were blocking not just most things that were innovative and worthwhile, but blocking them all. The free music file-sharing site, Napster, epitomized his view of a country mortally tangled in the web of spiders of the bar. He drank hemlock in protest, but merely earned the enmity of environmental groups of the day for the callous attitude toward tree and forest displayed by this symbolic act. He confounded these groups by not drinking much and living on for decades"

"Maturity turned out to be devastating to the writer, a specter that haunted him into his sixties, when he's alleged to have conformed to cultural norms to the extent of purchasing a pair of shoes. Indeed, he never wanted to grow up, and as an artist he was able to delay the aging process materially."

"The latter Emerson held to no recognized philosophy, but nevertheless was able to irritate his followers, not by saying, "I think, therefore I am," but rather, "I laugh, therefore you're ridiculous." Readers were known to take his diatribes personally, a fact which present day environmentalists credit with the preservation of as much as ten percent of the forests of the time, versus that which forests of his day would have suffered had he been more popular. When one considers that the vast majority of his writing was distributed electronically, it provides a point of reference to the popularity of his work."

"As much as he held no distinct philosophy, nor created one, the writer was precise in the instruction set provided his readers. Underlying human affairs, he believed, was an almost atavistic struggle for survival, and he once wrote, "As the lion hunts, so the broker hunts." He was aware that female lions do the hunting, and male brokers do the trading, and here the writer did turn to the wisdom of the ages when he pointed out the fact that of the top one-hundred philosophers, none were women. He was positive no hint of the mystic, from faith to fakery, has ever or will ever exist, or amount to anything other than a sales tool of the lazy, the egocentric, the terminally theatrical, and the mentally inferior. Spiritualism he divided into two classes. The incomprehensible forces of creation, and the ideal that genius as an artist or inventor is the only earthly manifestation of anything to do with the ecclesiastical."

"The writer's instructions to his readers, richly and sometimes smoothly layered into his fiction, are based on highly conservative principles of discipline and self reliance, but differ significantly from other proponents of these austere mores in that he espouses occasional wanton excess, believing if the human isn't lopsided he'll merely roll perpetually. But he is a difficult writer, if for no other reason than for everything he gives the reader, he takes five things away, beginning with food."

"Emerson's humor is rarely satirical or sarcastic, but much harder to categorize. He was not a gag writer, and few of his quips or witticisms are viable if quoted out of context. Since `context', in Emerson's case, amounts to some millions of published words, it is left to the individual to search for that which tickles and amuses him. In what came to be called Sudden Infantile Death Syndrome, tens of thousands of medically challenged readers died as a result, legend has it, of trying not to laugh at him."

"Slow to begin, because he wrote to the individual rather than the market, the writer's political contributions, between the years 2005 and 2025, totally changed the American and world scape. His tenure as monarch began with savage reprisals against insidious alien cultures, and, although none were deliberately killed, a quarter of a million principal leftists were deported to Newfoundland, and some fifteen million urban subversives were returned to their lands of origin. King Thomas made frequent use of the hydrogen bomb in the first year of his reign, so pacifying the world through the elimination of historically troublesome zealots of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, he was able to save some few million elders otherwise booked to be sacrificed in order to fund the various planks of his political organization, The Projects Party. He welded his nation to that of the Chinese, encouraging the immigration of an estimated three-hundred-million citizens from that country, and displaying endless patience and tolerance as this giant, fully protected by the Emersonian nuclear umbrella, lumbered and then galloped into the modern age. `Ah-ha,' he is quoted as saying."

"Thomas C. Emerson is little read today, in the main because his political ideas worked and need no further explanation, but also because his stories are so widely disseminated to children by means of oral tradition, reading the actual manuscripts is no longer necessary. Emerson died in 2030 and has a street named after him in the hamlet of LaMotte, Iowa, in tribute to his introducing limes (for gin and tonics) into the community in the years 1991 and 1992. He is buried in his adopted home town of Dangriga, Belize, where as many as twenty-million pilgrims a year visit the grave site in search of surety as to his demise. To others he was a good king, not a great one, and founded, in Emersonia, a good nation, not a great one. His tomb is engraved: `Are there a lot of Jews down here, or what?'"

Somewhere along the way, I did part of a page in biblical rhetoric, so the above may be the final feather in my cap. Novelist, essayist, humorist, military journalist, civilian journalist, copywriter, poet, song writer, scenarist, playwright, short story artist, divine scribe, reviewer, and author of letters, limericks, and an encyclopedic article. I believe I even composed my own epitaph, which happens not to be: "Just Kidding!" On the other hand, I've never written a cookie fortune or a Hallmark card Let's see, "Big climbs may lead to great falls," and, "Two cups of wine dear, two glasses full, for me it's been the best of years, and you were the push and pull." That, since I'm so all-fired hot on innovation, is a New Year's card. You read it here, first, but don't ask me to write another.

I've never edited anything, feeling such residual awe for those of my classmates with the diligence to learn the science of diagramming sentences I fear their very turf. I make half-hearted efforts to review my own copy, generally finding it's quicker and easier to render it perfectly in the first place. My editorial input amounts to combing most paragraphs before they disappear off the top of the screen, but I'm capable of missing or misusing this opportunity and blaming it on the rigors of a five-thousand-word day. I do give extra attention to the essay content, because it's uncool to pull someone's chain and type it c-h-i -n. Also, the essays are neurotic finger exercises, and if it's hard to edit English, in the first place, excesses in convoluted syntax are double trouble. This is fairly new. Well into this very book, I re-read and re-wrote extensively, making numerous minor changes, but rarely adding anything, and virtually never deleting so much as a sentence. I've quoted the phrase: "Writing is re-writing," but, if you make enough money, you pay no FICA on your last paychecks of the year, and, by the same token, if you practice your craft enough, you no longer have to edit, proving logic can be just as convoluted as linguistic structure.

Long before the days of road kill, Plato surmised what we perceive is but a poor image of a far greater depth, fidelity, purity, timbre, resonance, character, and texture belonging to an intellectually pure, god-given, Form, with Form One being god, himself. It would be interesting to watch a music video in this context. Anyway, where does all this leave the ultimate writer? As not existing, because he inhabits a higher-than-is-perceivable plane? And I thought reindeer were a stretch.

In partial summary, any belief, whatever, in any form, concrete, abstract, or metaphysical, of any form of deity, or the maintaining of any but common faith in common things, is utterly false, has not a gram of truth in it, and reduces the philosopher to the role of entertainer. Reversing this logic yields the entertainer as a philosopher, and there you have it in a nutshell.

I knew it, dammit, I just knew it, the law of massive reprisal has to come and rain on my parade. No, it's not the police at the door, it's standing. No benches. The essays now equal the fiction in difficulty and what experienced authors know as That draining quality. Where they were conceived as an interlude, they now want to dominate as willfully as my fictional characters. Who knew? Aren't there meant to be limits, somewhere? Einstein never figured out what he wanted, his irreducible and universal formulae, and Teddy Roosevelt only build the Panama Canal, not a bridge to Japan. Most writers are terribly limited. John Hughes created the vivid masterpiece, "National Lampoon's Vacation," and went on to write one run-of-the-mill script after another. The Cohens wrote "Fargo", then the strange "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?" The Odekirks created the dazzling Pet Detective films, then put some Harry-High-School nonsense on television that was cancelled in a few weeks. Has the writer of "Ground Hog Day" reappeared? The "Back to the Future" trilogy? "Addams' Family Values"? It's probably inaccurate to say now writer has ever created three great films, but it's a close thing. Much of Shakespeare is, for all practical purposes, unreadable. Dickens is also most variable, from "The Pickwick Papers" to "Martin Chuzzlewit", granted that in a pre-media age his descriptive skills and commentary were of great interest. In the end, though, David Copperfield is a moron and the Artful Dodger should have hanged. Yes, that makes things pretty lonely. Upton Sinclair published over forty books (as Stephen King has), but none rise an inch above the level of commercial product. Much of Agatha Christie depends solely on her early work, though she is often a master at contrasting the noble butler with the topsy-turvy peer. John D. MacDonald, John Irving, Larry McMurtry, and Stephen Birmingham all get high marks for consistency, but they are a rare breed. John O'Hara is a good case in point, because his short stories are the extreme essence of writing while his novels are undistinguished. Trevanian can be masterful, and dead funny, but he seems to have produced few books. All adding up to how come me? Have the reindeer been whipped? Have I slipped out at night, donned a tiger skin, stalked them in their paddock, and beaten them about the face and ears, insisting on primo el primo, or else? Things like that leave muddy footprints to ponder over in the morning, so I think the chance of it having happened is small (besides, did you ever see the antlers on a reindeer?).

No hints, no guideposts, no blaze marks on the trail, just a heapin' helpin' of the way it seems to be. And now in the essays. My sanctuary invaded, my idyll disturbed, my motivation rent and warped, no place to sit, no place to rest, no retreat, no respite, and no place to hide. How's that for a payoff for diligence and fortitude. It's like god's joke, you worked for it, my son, and I just happen to have on hand all the talent designated for your planet -- don't let the door whup your butt on the way out. And you wonder why I'm an atheist.

Give me a pressure cooker and a microwave and I will feed your army. Add a freezer, which I've had all along, and the diet is going to be challenged. I'm honing in on a universal recipe which results in two plastic tubs of rice, and one of sauce. The sauce is kept in the freezer, the rice in the refrigerator, so it all fits. I try to avoid being finicky, but I've got this dish dialed in to where I'm going to end up blanching each vegetable separately before adding them to the sauce. This time, I tried adding the sauce to the rice immediately after the rice was cooked, and keeping the chicken separately in the freezer. Next time I want to try one tub for the rice and blanched vegetables, another for the sauce, and the diced chicken meat in the freezer. Other meats, eggs, or seafood can be substituted for the chicken, and the rice, vegetables, and sauce mix is delicious by itself. I think the missing ingredient turns out to be a cup or so of white wine, and a cheese topping wouldn't hurt. Family cooking should be one well-done meal over and over, not a hodgepodge of lasagna and pot pies. If my mother had served her exquisite goulash (American chop suey) six nights a week she would have cut her work load dramatically and had happier kids. Use expensive ingredients as an enabler to keep portions modest. Bon appetite. Speaking of which, Julie Childs is the closest person to "my set" to be seen in the media; George Plympton, who looks remarkably like Ralph Waldo Emerson, takes the male role, and, if you want to know how I'll look, and how ticked off I'll be at nearly everything, in a few years, watch Mr. Plympton do his turn against the seventh-of-a-ton detective. Please note that I'm a watered-down version of both these personalities, so it's an extra good thing that I can write.

Mortality intrudes. Bev's off to the Belize City hospital. Loosing her, if that's how it turns out, will be inspiration to come after you fatsos hammer and freaking tongs. She's a dynamic, active woman, and should live to a good age, as her mother has, in spite of being heavy, but she's over three hundred pounds, and there's not much the docs can do about that. To give you an example of how tough she is, she once began delivery of a thirteen-pound four-ounce baby, was in delivery for days, then rushed over unspeakable roads a hundred miles to the hospital, where the doctors had to surgically remove the fetus. She was on "drips" for days, yet fully recovered and went on to have four children. Yet even such a constitution is no defense against fat. Beverly Kelly inhabits fifty to a hundred pages of "The Pirates of Rickety Pier", and, all things being equal, will end up one of the most famous women ever to live. I hope she lives to see the day. As adults, we do not get along particularly well, but as thirty something and ten something we were about in as single a groove as two people can be. She is a prime example of many of my thoughts on relationships, and her eating disorder should be acutely noted by every reader. This said, it should be noted her sisters are extremely heavy, as is her mother. Her father drank himself to death in front of her eyes when she was eight, so there's further complication. She was sold to Cuz on the cayes when she was nine, and that actually went quite smoothly for several years, and she finally left more to get back to her family and friends in town than to get away from him. Too a large extent, she's the author of her own situation, because she wouldn't marry Noel, who became mayor of Hopkins, because he was Carib and she's a Creole. This has cost me a pretty penny, but much of my income over the years has been unearned, so most of it was going to somebody, anyway. I guess Samantha is some kind of payoff, leaving virtue out in the cold when it comes to being a reward. Of course, if Bev's really down for the count, I may lose her in some kind of family shuffle, so, as ever, the plot thickens.

Did I make fun of myself for editorial/narrative transitions? I'd have to go back and look, and, as you know, I no longer do that. I have a theory on the subject, and it goes something like this: if hunger is the best sauce, won't long essays whet the appetite for fiction of any quality? It seems to follow, and it seems like advice, so perhaps I'd be wise to follow the advice.

"Tell me how it started with him," Bubbles whispered.

"I need to get all the way inside you," her brother said, "so I can concentrate."

"Okay," the girl agreed, and for a minute the powerful male's body surged gently and slowly between the slim legs of his nine-year-old sister. "This is the part that hurts," he whispered, violating their anti-romantic pact by kissing her sweating forehead as he spammed his hips to her yelp of pain. Her brown eyes watered and he whispered endearments as he licked away her tears, then when she whispered again to him, rose fully on his arms, and, .looking down at her now content face, he resumed his act of rape. Bubbles gazed down over her stomach wondering at the taboo associated with such a fundamentally aesthetic act as a mature male taking a little girl. "It feels so natural," she whispered.

"Do you think you'll want me inside you again?" the boy asked.

"Yes," the girl said.

"I want it to happen with us a lot," the male responded.

"How many times did it happen with Zollie?" the girl wanted to know.

"Six," the boy said, now responding to his sister's welcoming thrusts more vigorously and purposefully. "But it started with Navarro, her father, so I guess it was seven."

"Was he gentle with you like you're being with me?" Bubbles asked.

"Very," the boy said, "especially because he wanted me to be gentle with Zollie."

For awhile they didn't speak, both looking down between their young bodies as Santy's long, slim teen penis slowly entered to the hilt. "Oh, babe," the female whispered, "oh, babe, we did it."

"You've got to stay still if you want to hear the story," her brother whispered, "if you move at all you'll make it happen."

"I want to heat everything," the girl responded, relaxing passively but raising her hands high over her head to better display her swollen nipples to the beautiful male panting gently above her.

"We started at opposite ends of the bush," Santy said, "but it was a kind of magnetism. I felt it as soon as I met them on the trail and we started hiking together, then, as soon as we started our campsite, I changed into a cut-off tee shirt."

"I love it when you wear those," Bubbles said.

"I didn't even know why," the boy went on, "just, suddenly, I kind of wanted to show myself to him a little. He was half Arab, very tall and slim with black eyes and a hawk face. I kind of sensed Zollie felt the same way, and she changed into a yellow bikini while I was putting on my cut-off. It was cool because I knew we were going to have the whole evening together, and then the night, so I got kind of a little excited, not like with you when it happened all at once while you were playing with the buttons on the new washer.

"Navarro gave me a long look when I came out of my tent, and I think his eyes were pretty hot because they looked fiery, but he didn't say anything, just looked at me, than we went out and got the firewood. That didn't take very long, but we found the berries, especially one fat bush.

"If you want we could pick these together," the man said, standing close behind his new camping companion, "or Zollie could come out with me."

"I'd like to," the boy said.

"I'd like that too," the architect said, "and there'd be no hurry. We could be together here for an hour or so. Zollie's mad for some new writer, so she'll be happy, and there are some personal things I'd like to talk to you about. They're kind of mature, so if you're not interested I'll understand."

"I'd like to come out here," the boy repeated as they headed back to the campsite.

"Have you ever talked about mature things with a man before?" Navarro asked as they struggled with their loads of wood.

"Mostly I study and read," the scholar replied.

"Well," the thirty year old said, "different boys react differently. A lot think it's perverted and twisted to talk about things, even though they might like doing them, and other boys find it exciting, that it adds to anything physical that happens to ask personal question, tell secrets, and describe things in graphic detail."

"In other words," the boy responded, "a humanistic approach rather than an atavistic nonalliance with someone equally wild and wooly." The architect nodded and they reached the camp where Zollie had the fire well started and was lying on a sleeping bag with another serving as a support for her head. "I wish this was called "'Breath on the Pillows,' she said, "not `Wind in the Willows'."

The men deposited the firewood and Navarro asked his daughter if she wished to pick berries. "No, thanks," the girl replied, "if I'm ever going to be able to read big-girl books, I've got to get through this kids' stuff, otherwise I'll grow up warped and distorted." The men left her to her book, unearthed plastic bags for their harvest, and headed back into the woods. For half an hour they worked from the ends to the bush toward its middle, finally ending up a foot apart, the boy on the man's left, as they filled the last of their bags.

"I really like your tee shirt," Navarro said, "you look good in it."

"I think you're very attractive, too," the boy replied, his voice dropping to a husky whisper, as had that of the mature male."

"What I wanted to talk to you about," the man went on, "is Zollie. She's bound and determined to sleep with me tonight, and I'm kind of over endowed in the graphic department, and she's only seven, so I agreed to give into her wishes if we could find a younger male, a boy, to be with her first. She rejected several, we have a secret signal, then we met you and the signals changed, shall I say, on the spot."

"I thought she had in insect in her eyes," Santy said.

"I've got an elevator problem on the tenth floor of my latest project," the man responded, "so she was just being sure I was focused."

"Oh," the teen said.

"Actually," the man laughed, "I'd solved it as we were walking, and I was fully engaged; the slightest wink of her right eye, and I would have invited you to join us."

"I felt something really different when I me you, too," the boy acknowledged.

"When you changed into that shirt, I was really flattered," Navarro responded, "I always wear a jock strap when I know I'm going to be alone with Zollie, and it's a good thing I had it on when you came out of your tent."

"That's why I left these heavy shorts on," the boy said, "because it would have been really embarrassing if I'd changed into my swim trunks."

"Are you that way now?" the man whispered softly to the boy at his left shoulder. They'd stored their berries in the shade and were both nervously fingering the shrubbery in front of them.

"Yes," Santy whispered back.

"I would be do, if I wasn't wearing the supporter," Navarro said.

"I like feeling this way," the boy said.

"Have you read anything in abnormal psychology?" the architect asked.

"Just a book at the library," the child said.

"I just wanted to be sure you had a frame of reference," the man said, "so you'd know talking like this, about you being with Zollie, is abnormal. I don't want you to get the impression other people do it, because they don't. Only one girl in five has a relationship with her father or older brother, and only one boy in six or seven learns with an adult male."

"It's confusing," Santy acknowledged. "If you go seventy-five where the speed limit is sixty-five, you are far more likely to have an accident, far more likely to involve other vehicles, and create far more damage, all around, but they only give you a ticket. If you step behind me and put your hands on my waist, the way I want you to, you could go to jail for years, and I'd end up either some kind of freak, or in a facility, or both."

"It's more tolerant than that in the real world, " the man said, stepping behind the child and moving close to him, "but essentially, you're right, and getting caught can be bad news."

"If someone like you, they'd say, `Excuse me,' and if they didn't, they'd call the cops," Santy noted.

"But the cops know that," the man said, his hands moving to the shoulders of the willowy, coltish boy in front of him. "The danger is a troublemaking witness and either a rookie cop, or one needing to come up to quota, or one bucking for promotion; same with the prosecutors; the old pros, with no ex to grind, will tell everyone involved to get a life, and dismiss everything, where the gung-ho empire builder will paint you as Torquemada and Manson, rolled into one."

"That kind of makes it more exciting," the boy noted.

"They also serve who dither with the law," the man agreed, "and you're right, because it wouldn't be much of a world if everyone went around hauling each other's underwear off at the drop of a hat."

"Life above the rooster, thanks to the moralists amongst us," Santy summarized.

"Better than cock-will-do-will-do," his mature friend added, "more subtle and distinct; perhaps even fulfilling and character-building."

"Feels more like the upside of the roller-coaster," the boy said, beginning to pant softly.

"Santy," the man whispered, his hand now encircling the boy's slim waist, "this is the smallest hill on the ride. When we get to the monster incline, and that's Zollie, of course, we have to stay in control or we might hurt her, as she's just barely big enough to be with males, in the first place, therefore, and I don't know how much you know about the physical side of abnormal psychology, we should go all the way together before we go back to camp and she comes in the big tent with us.

"Are you willing to go that far with me?"

"I want to," the boy replied.

"And you know I'm going to sexually molest you, that we're not just experimenting a little or playing some kind of a game, right?"

"Yes," the boy said, nodding and panting at the feeling of the young man's hands on his belly and now up under the front of his cut-off tee. "Are we going to get naked before it happens?" he asked.

"Yes," the adult whispered, "and we can walk back to camp that way, if you want."

"It's weird no one gets it," the boy mused as he raised his arms for Navarro to remove his tee, "I mean they've rejected the tradition of women running around in ten yards of fabric, and swimming in two yards, and of women not riding bikes and riding horses side-saddle, and all that stuff, so now girls wear halters and short-shorts and swim in handkerchiefs, but if a boy wants a man to teach him, it's Oscar Wilde time."

"Man only excels at building houses, not living in them," the tall male observed, quickly peeling off his own shirt and bringing the young teen's bare back against his lightly matted chest, then unbuckling the boy's cargo shorts as Santy kicked off his sandals, "while, on the other hand, no one will ever ask you, here, in the States, anyplace, for any reason, if you were ever molested when you were a boy, if you ever touched another boy, or anything, so it ends up kind of half-baked, like all philosophy; rationalizations here, so you wouldn't get your head chopped off by the local bishop, and compromises there, so the inquisitors would think you a righteous chap; emphasizing this, and glossing over that, in a kind of psycho-intellectual two-step, with many of the dancers light-footed gazelles, but also with the odd number of bison under whose hooves you don't want your bare feet."

The man's hands now fully on him, his shorts hung on a branch, his underpants wildly tented, the youth panted a non-committal response as he yielded fully to the adult by reaching up behind him and linking his fingers behind the tall male's long, slim neck. "Let me get you naked," Navarro said, "then you can spread your legs."

"Okay," the boy panted in response, and his lover released him, turning the child to face him, and bidding him go first. Santy pulled down the man's shorts then stood back, looking down at the huge bulge in his jock strap. "Go ahead," Navarro coaxed, and the boy came to him, shyly, head bent, and placed his hands on the tall athlete's slim waist. "Go ahead," the man again encouraged, and Santy dropped slowly to his knees, pulling the strap down. The adult's hugely swollen erection, thick, circumcised, and bent to the left slapped against the trace of hair running from his navel to his groin. He let the boy, now standing very close, look for a minute, then dropped to his knees and pulled down the fifteen year old's briefs, gasping involuntarily at the teen's full, adult size. "You're not the one for Zollie, after all," he said, his eyes twinkling, "but we'll have to make do."

"I'll be really careful," the boy whispered softly as he reached out to touch the big, thick penis inches from his slim belly.

"I'll have to hold you while it's happening," the man said, his voice fading noticeably as the boy's gentle fingers found and explored him, experimenting with the thick flow of seminal fluid oozing copiously down the adult's long, erect shaft.

"In the name of the innocent," Santy murmured distractedly, now using both hands as he experimented more aggressively with fondling and stroking the older male's hot, pulsing penis.

"In the name of her being able to walk in the morning," Navarro said, taking the child by his slim waist and turning him gently so as to bring the boy's naked back again to him. As their bodies made contact, the tall adult squatted and gently thrust between the soft thighs of the teen. Instinctively, Santy drew his legs tightly together, somewhat resisting the efforts of the adult. Navarro hissed his approval and placed his hands on the boy's hips, using short gentle strokes to thoroughly wet his young partner as he thrust between his long, slim legs. With a grunt he pulled the willing child to himself, and the instant Santy saw the swollen purple glans of the adult emerge, his hands went to the man and he began masturbating him. As the sensation of the hard, hot penis between his thighs faded, the boy spread his legs widely, the man steadying him, and, fumbling slightly, the two were soon stroking each other with strong, steady rhythms.

"Do you do this by yourself?" the adult asked the boy.

"Is that possible?" the bookworm asked.

"Try it, just for a minute," Navarro suggested, removing his hands from the boy's big erection. Santy experimented, then reached for his partner's hands. "It feels better with you," he whispered.

"So you've never seen sperm?" the man quizzed.

"No," the teen replied, "will you let me see yours?"

"Yes," the man said, "you're doing it perfectly. I'll cum in a minute, just don't stop when you see it starting, and don't be afraid if some gets on your body, it won't hurt."

"I feel like something's going to happen," the boy panted, his hips now thrusting wantonly to the man as he stroked his adult partner hard and fast, his palm wet and slippery over the slick glans of the young father.

"It will be more exciting for you if you let it happen with me, first," Navarro coached, "so try to hold back as much as you can."

"Okay," the boy panted, renewing his efforts with the huge phallus probing high between his widely spread legs.

For and endless minute they tensed against each other, their breathing deteriorating rapidly to a ragged panting. "I'm ready to see it happen," the intelligent student coaxed, hoarsely. "I'm cumming," the adult responded, and as the boy bowed his head to stare down at the big penis in his hand, the man began spurting far into the bushes with surge after grunting surge of hot, white semen pumping through the child's tight, stroking hand. He bore the sight until the excitement of the feral drama overwhelmed him, tensing him like steel in the man's arms. "I'm cumming," he whispered, and looked down to see his own hot teen seed spurt two feet into the bushes, splashing with the heavy spill left by the adult.

Spent, the males dropped to the ground, retrieved their bags of berries, and fed each other a few before gathering their clothes and helping each other to their feet for the walk back to the camp and the seven-year-old female who awaited their return.

"Oh, Daddy," Zollie hissed as she saw her naked father and Santy approach the tents, each still hugely swollen. She skinned out of her bikini in a few seconds, and lay back on the sleeping bag, naked. She retrieved the second bag to use as a pillow beneath her boyish hips, and spread her legs as widely as she could. The father knelt beside his little girl, and eased the handsome teen between the girl's long legs, reaching around with his right and to find the boy and guide him to the already wantonly panting girl beneath him. The man's left arm cradled the sweating youth and his right protected his fragile child from his man-sized erection. Slowly he allowed the children come together, realizing from his gentle way with the little girl that he could have trusted this boy to mate with his daughter in private. Her eyes filled with tears at the sting of the male's entry, and Santy froze in her father's arms, letting the young beauty get used to how deep he was inside her "Daddy, he's beautiful," the girl whispered, her eyes glowing up at the handsome half-Arab holding the boy.

"We were lucky," Navarro agreed in a hoarse whisper, coaxing the teenager to begin thrusting again now that he sensed the girl getting over the pain of her torn hymen. Again, Santy was gentle with the young child, in spite of the fact that with her bottom on the lump of the sleeping bag her body was perfectly positioned against his own. Gradually, the man released the boy entirely, running his hand up along the young male's chest and down over his belly as he began thrusting more deliberately in response to the welcoming mews of the female. "Oh, Daddy," the girl whispered again, her hands clinging to her lean father's left shoulder and her face buried against his straining bicep. The fifteen year old had become complete with his daughter, and again the boy remained rigidly mounted as the girl became used to the fire of sensation burning high between her smooth young legs.

For several long moments the tableau remained static, the boy's arms planted at the girl's shoulders, the girl clinging to her athletic father, her legs spread wide and lying nearly flat on the soft groundcover. "Can I look?" the girl finally asked, her breathing now almost back to normal. "Yes, darling," the man said, bringing his right arm from between their sweating young bodies so the girl could gaze up at her propped hips and see what the boy was doing with her. As her eyes found him, Santy withdrew and then slowly re-entered the girl so she could watch him make love to her. "It feels extra when you do that with me," she whispered to the teen. "You feel extra to me, too," he said, hardly able to speak as he repeated and repeated his display for her eager eyes. Quickly his gentle, experimental way with the seven year old gave way to a deliberate effort to excite them both. Navarro now helped support the boy's weight with his left arm, and gently massaged the tense muscles of his inner thighs as the children became wanton with each other.

"This is the bad word he's doing with me now, isn't it, Daddy?" the girl mewed as the boy now took full stride between her legs.

"Do you want to say it?" the man asked.

"I don't like it," she replied, "but can I, just once?"

"Yes," darling the man said, gazing into her pretty eyes.

"Daddy, Santy's fucking me."

"Oh, baby," the man whispered softly, kissing her hair and forehead as she clung to him mewing and moaning.

"It just changed!" the girl yelped, "Daddy?" The man felt the boy again go rigid against the child, this time tensing almost savagely. "He's cumming in you darling, can you feel him?" her father whispered.

Her eyes looked puzzled for a few seconds, then she whispered, "I thought so, yes, it's like hammering, but gentler."

"Males spurt when they cum," the father whispered, "again and again."

"That's what it feels like," she affirmed, "every few seconds it happens again."

"Yes, love," Navarro panted, "that's his sperm."

"Can I look again?" she asked.

Both males immediately granted her wish, positioning themselves to the now slack-eyed child could gaze down over her sweating torso at the hot, watery semen slicking her inner thighs and lower belly. "Oh, Daddy," the girl whispered once again, then found her father's lips with her own kissing him passionately as the hot, urgent pulsing inside her gradually diminished leaving her sighing into her dad's mouth.

"I can feel it, too," Bubbles whispered to her seventeen-year-old brother.

Posted by Thomas@btl.net.

xxx