Panthology 2
Author: Coltsfoot Press
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: PANTHOLOGY TWO, another collection of imaginative writing about men and boys loving one another. We make no claim to establishing a new “boy-love aesthetic”, although we would put up the work of Hakim beside the best erotic boy poetry written anywhere today. We do feel that the stories are honest, and hope that they please as well.

Table of Contents
Introduction
The Stake
Fishing
Dragons
Dennis
Dragonfly & Other Texts
Grown Up for 13
Theban Patrol
High Doh
Summer Games
Lonely Roamer & Foolish Child

Verses in the manner of Strato's Musa Puerilis

Three by Casimir
Anton
The Unexpected Legacy of Uncle Edward

Panthology
2
a collection of
boy-love stories

Spartacus, Amsterdam

Spartacus, P. O. Box 3496

1001 AG Amsterdam, The Netherlands

First published by the Coltsfoot Press, Spartacus December, 1982

Copyright by Spartacus, 1982

Jacket paintings and design by Mario de Graaf

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio or television review, no part of this book, including cover illustrations, may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in The Netherlands by Reproka bv, Amersfoort

ISBN 90 70154 21 2

Introduction

It is almost exactly a year since we published our first boy-love book, PANTHOLOGY ONE. We then felt quite nervous about how it would be received, but we were impelled by one conviction: the boy-lover needed something for his less militant moments. Visual representations of boys were being progressively denied him; scrutiny by Big Brother was increasingly restricting even his most unerotic contacts with young people. But stories, tasteful, erotic stories, were still legal, and we determined to supply them to the best of our ability.

The response to PANTHOLOGY ONE was interesting. The British and American gay press, of course, totally ignored the book, and so, for the most part, did the boy-love periodicals. NAMBLA panned it; The Body Politic at least liked the cover.

The reaction of our readers, however, was quite different. Not only was the first printing sold out in a few months but we received hundreds of letters thanking us for the book – and hoping there would soon be a successor.

So this is it, PANTHOLOGY TWO, another collection of imaginative writing about men and boys loving one another. We make no claim to establishing a new “boy-love aesthetic”, although we would put up the work of Hakim beside the best erotic boy poetry written anywhere today. We do feel that the stories are honest, and hope that they please as well.

One new writer needs a bit of explanation. Louis Colantuono grew up with twin social liabilities: he was a boy-lover and he was severely dyslexic. Even by the time he was a young man he couldn't really read and was able to write little more than his own name. He did have an ability to work with difficult boys, however, and established a household in California at last consisting of a wife, step-daughter and “family” of lover-boys. He became an independent long-distance trucker. How he brought together all these strands of an unusual life can be read in the longest story of this book, the auto-biographical Lonely Roamer and Foolish Child. Later cast into prison for his love with boys, Colantuono taught himself there to type (by covering all those confusing letters on the keys with adhesive tape) and – obviously – how to tell a tale. Colantuono is still in prison, yet his sense of optimism and his faith in the power of love remains undiminished.

It is with the same faith, and optimism in the ultimate realization by society that boy-love is a great good thing, that we face the next years of conflict.

The Stake
by Alan Edward

His hands trembling so he could hardly hold the taper, the old innkeeper lit seven candles and placed them in the points of the tall Gothic windows, then murmured a Hail Mary and crossed himself.

“Return, Mr. Parker,” he said earnestly, “Return – before it is too late.”

“I'm awfully sorry, I can't do that,” said the young man, “At least, not until Thursday. It's a five-day ticket, you see; there's the reduction.”

The old man crossed himself again, lit another three candles, hung a crucifix and a rosemary wreath over the door, and stuck a sprig of garlic behind each ear.

“Listen – what's that?” asked the young man.

“The coach – the coach!” cried the innkeeper. He started tugging at the young man's arm; “Pray, Mr, Parker, be seated in the circle with your head pointing to the east and your feet to the south and recite five Paternosters while tracing the square within the circle with the third toe of your left foot. This will protect you.”

“No, but I say, though.” The young man pulled back a shutter and peered out. “I mean, how jolly convenient. Is there a request stop outside, by any chance, or do I just stand by the side of the road and wave?”

“But it is doom, doom and disaster to all who travel in it!” sobbed the innkeeper.

“My dear fellow, you speak to one who has traveled daily on the eight-fifteen from Epping. Don't worry about me.”

But the old man was kneeling in the circle with his eyes closed, his arms crossed, and an illuminated version of the Apostles' Creed balanced on his head, so Parker drew the heavy bolts, opened the door, and stepped out into the inn forecourt.

Now he could hear the hooves clearly and could see the coach-lamps swaying in the darkness, growing nearer, their light flickering along the tall tree-trunks on either side of the road. Then, at a shout, the horses were drawn up and the coachman, an indistinct figure above the circle of lamplight, cried out, “Who would travel in this coach?”

“It is I, Jonathan Parker.”

“We have been expecting you, Mr. Parker. Please enter.”

“Thanks.” Parker got in. “All the way, please.”

A shriek of maniacal laughter, the chime of harness, a rattle of hooves and the coach swept off into the night, leaving behind the lights of the village and the inn; the voice of the old man, raised in fervent prayer, faded rapidly. Onward, upward, the road narrowing until two great pillars were passed, then the road grew steeper and more twisted until at last the horses' hooves clattered on to cobbles, slowed, and stopped. Parker, peering through the glass, could see the form of a vast building, lamps lit on either side of a deeply recessed doorway. He picked up his bags and dismounted; instantly the coachman cracked the reins and the coach sped off around the angle of the building and out of sight. Parker shrugged, went up the steps and pulled the bell. Soon a faint light shone through the keyhole, and he heard what might have been the rattle of a bolt from some distance away, but again there followed silence; he put down his bags, filled his pipe, and lit it. At last the door creaked and swung inwards.

“My lord?”

Parker stood quite still; his pipe slid from his mouth and shattered on the step.

“Allow me, please . . . Alas, my lord, it is broke.”

“Broken,” said Parker, “The pipe is broken. But thanks very much, anyway. It's just that – well, one expects an aged harridan of fearful aspect, or a one-eyed dwarf, perhaps. It's the shock, you see.”

“I'm sorry, my lord.”

“Oh pray don't apologize. You a page or something?”

“I am not ‘something’”, came the dignified reply. “I am Mikhail, page to the Count, at your service, my lord. Please come in.”

“Thanks very much.” Parker picked up his luggage.

“It's decent of the Count to let me stay; shall I see him now?”

“The Count sends his regrets, my lord,” said the boy, pausing in the wide hall; he cast a glimpse toward the windows from where moonlight flooded the staircase and the landings. “Tonight my Master the Count is abroad.”

“Oh dear. Well, can't be helped, I suppose. So many people on holiday around this time of the year, eh?”

“Ah, though you are sad that you do not see the Count yet you make the joke. This is the stiff upper English lip, yes?”

“Perhaps,” said Parker, “You speak remarkably good English, if I may say so.”

“An Englishman stayed here once. He taught me . . . many things,” said the boy, lowering his eyes.

“Where is he now?”

“He is no longer with us, alas. Shall I show you upstairs?”

“Yes, please. You are young, are you not, to be the Count's page? And to be almost alone in this whopping great place?”

“I am alone,” said the boy, “But I am aged thirteen years and one moon. You must now ask no more questions. Follow.”

The boy turned again at the top of the staircase. “You would prefer dinner first, my lord? I will show you to your room afterwards.”

It may have been fatigue, or the red wine Parker had tasted too liberally at the inn, but as dinner progressed everything in the heavily-curtained room grew strangely unreal, detaching and distancing from ordinary time and locality, something perhaps diffused around the storybook child in the velvet suit moving to and fro about among the rich oak furnishings, his slim fingers noiselessly handling the silver, the moon at the tall windows touching the ends of his long fair hair and reflecting from the highly polished buckles of his shoes.

“Wine, my lord?”

The boy turned to the sideboard, presenting a pair of neat, tightly-clad hips; then he turned with the decanter, his limpid eyes met Parker's and he smiled. “Shall I pour, my lord?”

Parker swallowed and nodded, then he hastily gulped down most of the glass and the boy refilled it. But the boy did not speak again; at further questions from Parker he merely smiled and shook his head.

“Follow,” he said when Parker had finished. They went up another flight of stairs and then Parker was shown into a dim, tapestried room, its windows slightly open, the long curtains lifting a little in the breeze from the dark outside. The boy lit a candle, placed it by the side of the great four-poster bed and withdrew to the door.

“I hope you sleep well, my lord. Will there be anything else?”

Parker moved across to the door as well and partly blocked the boy's exit. He cleared his throat and colored a little. “I – I say . . .”

“Yes, Mr. Parker? I remind you of your fag at Eton, is that it?”

“By George!” stammered Parker, his eyes wide, “How did you guess?”

“The other Englishman always began that way,” said the boy, moving swiftly round Parker and through the doorway. He slid off into the dark and his voice came again from a distance. “Tonight I may call on you, Mr. Parker, or I may not – who can say? Leave the window open, Mr. Parker, leave the window open.”

Echoing, the words faded; Parker shrugged and closed the door. “Cloak and dagger stuff,” he grumbled, going across to the window. He shut it, then after a moment's thought pushed it open again. “But he's wrong about one thing,” he mused aloud, “He's not like my fag at Eton; he's prettier. I wouldn't have believed it possible.” He undressed and blew out the candle. “You won't sleep tonight, Parker,” he said, “Not a blessed wink.”

But the wine had been good and Parker must have slept for some hours, because when he woke the moon stood high over the castle and the light had contracted to a narrow bar under the sill.

“Mr. Parker?”

Startled, he half sat up. On the end of the bed was perched Mikhail, clad in a long nightgown; he swung his legs round, knelt upright, and smiled broadly. “I have been here for some time, my lord. You sleep deeply.”

His eyes sparkled; his complexion glowed even more radiantly with youthful health and vitality than on the previous night. His cheeks were slightly flushed; he laughed again. “Am I not welcome, my lord?”

Parker struggled very slowly to a sitting position; he felt oddly weak and it took him a few moments. The boy leaned forward a little and brushed Parker's cheek with his fingers. “‘Wakey-wakey!’ says the English Mr. Sergeant Major, yes?” he said, his strangely mischievous manner contrasting peculiarly with his dignified bearing of the evening before.

“I seem to have had a – little too much wine, perhaps,” said Parker, his voice a little slurred, “Or to have . . . I say, that's odd.”

He put a finger to the side of his neck; he withdrew it, looked at it, turned to the boy with slowly widening eyes, then was at once awake and had leapt out of bed, away from the boy, and stood with his back to the far wall, glaring at him.

“Why, you little beast!” he said. He took a handkerchief and dabbed tenderly at his neck. “I mean, this is too much, it really is! Of the Count one might expect it, but of you . . . For heaven's sake, how many of you are there?”

The boy shook his head, smiled, then slid off the bed and came towards him.

“Keep away from me!” said Parker, edging along the wall.

“No, my lord, I am young and require no more tonight, I swear it. I have had what I want, and now it is your turn, my lord.”

He reached out and took Parker's hand; Parker had stopped where he was, prevented from retreating any further by the angle of the wall. Then he said indignantly, “My turn? I am not one of you, make no mistake about that.”

“You misunderstand.” The boy, running on the tips of his toes, his arms spread, returned to the window and then, turning to face Parker, he swiftly grasped the hem of his nightshirt and pulled it high above his waist, his gaze still fixed on the man opposite him. Then, with a quick movement, he pulled it over his head and threw it on the carpet. Eyes again mischievously alight, he jumped up and down on his toes, laughing, palms gently slapping his bare hips. “Look, Mr. Parker, look! Do I look like your Eton boy now? Do I, do I? Did he come to your room naked too? Did he? Did he?”

Parker stumbled forward and reached towards the boy, but he ran round the man and jumped on to the bed, leaping up and down on the springy surface. “Answer, answer!”

“No, I shan't. Come down!” Parker made another rush, but the boy flitted effortlessly on to the bedside table, then on to a chair. “Try again, Mr. Parker. Follow, follow!”

“No – I give up.” Parker suddenly sat down.

“Then I win. Stand up, hold your arms out, and catch me,” said the boy imperiously.

Parker did as requested; the boy leaped again and Parker caught his light weight easily, holding him for a moment before lowering him on to the broad counterpane. The boy's arms had twined themselves round Parker's neck; he slowly pulled the man's head downwards, though this time not towards his lips, and this time Parker was unresisting.

Now the moon had slid further out of the trees but the wind was rising again and the shadows of leaves and branches flitted hither and thither across the room, across the bed, half blending with the dark locks of the man, quivering and leaping with the slim nude form of the boy, fragments of light at intervals catching a pair of spinning legs, feet pedaling the air, then the swift jack-knife flexion of the boy's knees and hips that came with his soft shuddering cry, and then the legs and body dropping until at last both figures were still, the shapes of the leaves moving across them as lazily as before, the light on the carpet once more diffuse and unbroken.

Parker gradually rose to a sitting position; the boy opened his eyes and grinned at him. “Honor is satisfied, Mr. Parker? The quid pro quo, as they say on the playing fields of Eton?”

“I doubt it; perhaps your friend was an Harrovian,” said Parker darkly. “I say, how long have you been in this game?”

The boy looked up towards the ceiling and considered. “Not so long,” he said, “Just over two hundred years, I should say. And it's not a game.”

“What is it, then?” Parker asked, “And excuse me if I sit some little distance away.”

“Certainly, Mr. Parker. We of the Undead are most accommodating. Indeed my Master the Count was once esteemed as a great and good man; he was a Bishop of the Church and Superior of a great monastery. It was to this monastery, my lord, that I had come as a pupil and it was there where I would soon take the vows; but it came about that the Count – it would not be for me to say why – became much attached to me, and I to him. By night we made love, but all was soon discovered and the Count was disgraced and put to death, but he had already become one of the Undead, and it was not long before he visited me again and made me, too, one of their number. Thus even in our living death we are not separated; by day we lie side by side in the cool vaults of the castle, traveling only by night on our separate ways.”

“Ugh!” Parker rubbed his neck again. “You really are a pair of rotters. But what gets me is that one of – one of your lot should look like you do. Dammit, a young devil shouldn't go around looking as if he'd just escaped from the other place; it oughtn't to be allowed.”

The boy giggled. “That's what they said at the monastery; they said that to have me around was a temptation to the monks. You know, they used to fight to hear my confession, because after hearing it they could give me my penance, meaning that they were allowed to undress me and whip my bottom. I used to wonder why no-one liked me; I was innocent in those days. Ah, the penalties of being pretty!”

“You're not only a beastly little vampire, you're vain,” said Parker.

“No, I'm not. Anyway, after they killed the Count they were going to lock me in a tower away from the monks' eyes, or even kill me – but I didn't mind, because I knew that my Master would soon come. But it will be light in an hour, and I can't go back like this. Throw me my shroud across, will you?”

The priest rose at last, drew the shutters and turned up the lamp. “You tell a strange tale, my son,” he said, “Yet much is, I think, untold.”

Parker remained silent.

“Truth to tell, I had half expected that you might visit my humble presbytery today,” the old man went on. “Strangers stay at the castle but rarely; those that do often find themselves in need of. . . spiritual counsel. Shall you stay longer?”

“I don't know,” said Parker. “I really can't decide.”

“Pray, tell me more about this creature of the . . . of the Undead, my son,” said the priest in a low voice. He crossed himself. “What manner of being is it, how did it appear to you?”

Parker looked down and shook his head. “I'd really rather not,” he said, “If you don't mind.”

“I understand, my son. How, then, may I be of help to you?”

Parker spoke hesitantly. “You see, padre, I find it very difficult to believe that any being can be completely evil, completely – well, depraved, especially when the appearance of that being – well, conveys absolutely the opposite impression. If you see what I mean.”

“You talk in riddles, my son,” said the priest, smiling, “Yet perhaps I do see a little. Perhaps this is one of the oldest tales of all, that of the beautiful maiden who has been desired and loved by a vampire and who is now herself of the Undead. Would I be correct, my son, in assuming that this . . . visitant is indeed young, is beautiful perhaps?”

Parker swallowed. “Absolutely, padre.”

The old man poured some brandy into a balloon glass; he peered into the depth of the pale golden fluid as if seeking to know the wisdom of the ages, then he drank it.

“And, my son – correct me if I am mistaken – perhaps you would now know if this creature is for ever lost and beyond all hope, or may yet be redeemed?”

Parker nodded eagerly. “Yes, that's just it.”

“The vampire legend, my son, is embedded in an ages-old cosmology that none can now fully comprehend; glimpses, scraps and symbols only remain – the moon for the goddess of night, the mirror void of a soul, the garlic, the rosemary. You, too, will have some brandy?”

“Thanks.”

“Now it is said that the tale of the vampire is closely entwined with that of the succubus, the demonic female who comes to a man at night and who is – forgive me, my son – penetrated by him. And it is further said that if the vampire is to be redeemed by the legendary pointed stake, it is not the heart that the stake must penetrate, and that the stake is not that which has been fashioned from wood. Soda, my son?”

“Thanks. Decent of you.”

“Think about it, my son.”

Time passed. The old man trimmed the lamp and toyed a little sadly, yet merrily, with his scapulars. Then Parker turned bright red and choked on his brandy.

“Ah, you do understand me, perhaps?”

“Yes, by George, I believe I do!” Parker rose in a state of some excitement, then sat down again. “Yes, but . . .”

“Yes, my son?”

“Nothing. I'll give it some thought, that's all.”

The priest rose and accompanied Parker to the door; he put a hand on the young man's shoulder. “Always remember, my son – in life there is death, yet in death there is life. God is distant, yet he is very near. Through the teardrops of our repentance the world appears small, far away, and faintly plum-colored. This is everything, yet it is nothing. Would you like to borrow a book on the subject?”

“But, padre, just supposing that . . .?”

“Yes, my son?”

“I think I would like to borrow the book.”

“There, my son. Remember, you were indeed fortunate. If the creature is young you may survive one visit, but as for the second . . . Well, God go with you.”

The last cloud moved from in front of the moon and cold light streamed in at the open window; the curtains that had been blowing into the room in the night breeze swung gradually backwards, then hung still; the whispering of the leaves died, the calls of the shy creatures of the woodland faded, and then all of the great forest was silent. Soon ivy rustled and, an instant later, a lithe white figure dropped on to the carpet.

“Got you, by George!” Parker had risen from concealment, had pounced, and now pinned the wriggling form to the carpet. “Ha!” he cried in triumph, “You did not suspect that I would keep myself awake by sitting upright on the stone ledge drinking black coffee and reading Panthology One, did you?”

“Ah, the cunning of you English!” said the boy in a muffled voice, “Very well, my lord, let me up; I shall not try to get away.”

“I'll see that you don't, you young devil,” Parker said with grim satisfaction. The boy sat up slowly and rubbed his nose; he looked doubtfully at Parker, who still held his arms tightly.

“This – this tackle you learn on the playing-fields of Eton too, yes?”

“Yes – and more. So I think you'll agree that tonight it's my turn first, eh?”

The boy nodded. He looked tired and a little pallid. “Very well, Mr. Parker.”

Parker helped the boy to his feet.

“This, what you call the rugby tackle, you will teach me, yes?”

“Some day.” Parker took hold of the boy's long garment; the boy raised his arms and it was pulled off and dropped on the floor.

“The same again, my lord?”

Parker shook his head; he fiddled uneasily with a small jar he had picked up, then he leaned forward and whispered in the boy's ear. The boy turned his soft eyes up to meet Parker's and nodded. Parker took both the boy's hands and led him across to the bed, where he paused and lit the candle. Its rays fell on the boy's pale body; Parker looked down and smiled faintly. “Ah, I can see that my request pleases you,” he said.

The boy nodded again. “Maybe, my lord, you will do something for little Mikhail too?” he said shyly.

“Well, let's see what can be managed; a chap always likes to do the decent thing,” said Parker. “Come over here.”

Soon the boy lay prone on the wide bed, the single candle still flickering alongside. Through the stake cometh redemption. Miserere, miserere. Yet it entered the young body almost without effort, sliding as between the exquisite softness of a maiden's breasts, then nestling further inwards, lightly gripped in the warm dark. The body moved only slightly, squirming as though more readily to accept its penance, then rising a little to accommodate the hand slid below, then moving a little more, lifting, dropping, until at last the moon was rising again, growing steadily brighter until the room was awash in waves of blinding white pulsing ever higher until it exploded into a million fragments and the smaller hips underneath were also thrown vigorously upwards by their own inner detonation as pillow-muffled treble sounds escaped into the room again and again. Then the slivers of broken light went spinning away into the dark, one after another, and it then was silent and the moon was once again hidden.

After a long time the boy asked, “It was good, my lord?”

“It was super.”

“And for me too it was . . . super,” said the boy quietly. Parker had rolled over onto his back; the boy knelt upright on the bed and looked down at him; he smiled. “Now, I think it really is my turn, Mr. Parker.”

“Eh?” For a moment or two Parker had some trouble in focusing; he saw the boy's eyes fixed on him, growing bigger, his outlines shimmering, becoming indistinct; he blinked and the boy's form grew a little clearer, but his limbs felt heavy, he had grown oddly powerless. Through a light visual haze he saw the boy's lips part, then saw the razor-sharp tips of his long incisors protrude, unmistakable at last. He tried to struggle, but even under the boy's light weight it was impossible for him to move.

“But – the priest . . . the book . . .” he said weakly, “He – he told me, he promised . . .”

The boy smiled again. “My Master the Count is a fine actor,” he said, “But such a liar! Yes, Mr. Parker, it was good while it lasted. But we have a saying in the country that, if you're going to have a party, someone has to provide the drinks.”

Fishing
by Ian Anderson

Twelve, going on twelve and a quarter. Sitting on the bank, inexpertly flicking line into river. Thick, light brown hair hanging low over his eyes; dark tee-shirt; faded jeans round long, slim legs. Alone and stomach-kickingly beautiful. I swing off the bike and push it casually nearer – and make out the writing on his front:

IF YOU CAN'T READ THIS, YOU AREN'T CLOSE ENOUGH

Hmm. I cast round for an opening line. “Does it work?” I ask.

He looks up, startled. I've broken his concentration.

“What?”

I point helpfully.

“Oh!” Chin tucks down to chest as he follows the direction of my finger, to come back up immediately, his lips widening into a smile. He laughs.

“Not often,” but, eyebrows rising, doing a Frankie Howard, “Who knows.”

From the bottom of my eyes I follow blue-jeaned legs down to trainered feet. New Balance, huh! Expensive tastes – or a proud father, perhaps, recognizing the future athlete in him; obvious, already, to me, a connoisseur of budding Seb Coes.

“Caught anything yet?” I lay the bike down against a nearby tree-stump, near enough to signal friendship but not so near as to encroach on any territorial imperatives. Or to remind him of parental warnings.

“Caught anything – you must be joking. A two-pound boot, is all. Won't get into the Guinness Book of Records with that!”

Oh-ho. A wit. To boot. Perhaps a half-volley back? “I wouldn't carp at that, myself.”

He groans in mock dismay – but smiling and with another look.

I sit down and pick a blade of grass to chew – as a good non-smoking smoker. And watch for a minute or two as he goes on fishing, his concentration back, but with no improvement in technique. Until the itch to help has to be scratched.

“Look. Do you mind if I . . .?” and I gesture towards the rod.

“What?” A touch of suspicion in the frown. I quickly explain.

“Sure.” The smile's back.

I show him, return the rod and coax, oh so carefully and, of course, enjoyably, a slower, lighter touch from slim boy arms. No slouch, him; a quick learner who is soon dropping his line more or less on target.

“Hey, that's pretty good, em . . . What is your name, by the way?”

“John. What's yours?” Much happier, now – relaxed.

“Tim.”

“Hi.”

“Hi. How long you been fishing, then?”

“My dad gave me this for my birthday three weeks ago.”

Going on twelve and a twelfth.

“Ah.” Pause. “How do you like it?”

“It's O.K. I just wish I could bloody catch something, that's all. He sighs with exasperation, and I'm thinking, Stupid bloody fish! What's wrong with them, passing up such an attractive lure?

I lie down on my stomach and watch for another minute or two and he casts line, I cast looks which he notices and, sometimes, returns, with, finally, another smile. A bite? Which suddenly, explosively, is reflected by reality and he is on his feet, reeling in a jumping, flashing bar of silver. A brief flurry of activity and it's lying there, wriggling almost as much as John.

“Look! I got one! Look! Geez, a whopper!”

What indeed. Cross my heart. 4/5 pounder.

“Hey! I'll bet there are lots more. I bet I get another one soon.” He re-baits his hook as I watch with bated breath.

And so on; until passing time calms excited small boy nerves and we start chatting again. John lives in Ashburnham Grove, goes to Mountjoy, likes it, supports West Ham (aren't they just, though!), has a best friend called Tommy (No, he doesn't – fish, that is), hates Jammy (maths), once got over 75,000 on Space Invaders, is going to Sète in July, camping (holiday plans mentally rearranged) and has seen all the Bond films. On his dad's video. Yeah?

“You want to come round some time and see some?”

“I'd love to.”

But not right now. Later.

For now I want to do something else. Very much so. So I gently place my right hand on John's left thigh. Warm, soft/hard. Nice: But what's this? A sudden silence. The one that got away? Wait – his left hand edges towards his trouser pocket, just above my hand. He straightens his legs and the hand slips into the pocket. Which movement leaves me, breathless, heart beating, with mine resting at the apex of those long, slim, terrifying legs.

Until suddenly he laughs and, under my fingers I feel the first, faint stirrings of interest. And he is putting down his rod and turning to me, eyes wide and bright, resting on his left elbow.

My voice is hollow. “What happened?”

A giggle. “You'll never believe it, but I thought you were trying to pick my pocket. I've got me bus fare home there!”

“You're nice,” he says, later, “I like you.” We had a great time at Sète, too.

Dragons
by Nathaniel Pitt

Ballet is beautiful and I have found where it's taught there are just as beautiful young male apprentices striking uninhibited aerial poses with a fluid delicacy that is downright sensuous. To ensure their audience's lust they costume in colored tracing paper. Understudying Juliets, with some sense of modesty, camouflage their non-moving graces with a wad of party lace. But not our growing Romeos. Usually bare-chested, they cover their lower extremities with a highly elastic form of onion skin. This ensures the onlookers an accurate knowledge of their developing virility: there is strong evidence they like it this way; their compact approach to theatrical attire occasionally rubs them the right way, and in those outfits you can tell when it does. If one had the chance he could develop an advanced addiction to peeling airmail stationery off male ballerinas. Ballet has another major advantage in that you can lustfully view these sexy kids in mixed company without fear of arousing unwanted attention.

Alas, these pleasures are a bit limited in my home town. There are not many ballet productions in Jacksonville, Florida. As a matter of fact there are no ballet productions of any kind. The main entertainment, aside from the occasional Dolphin football game, in this city of sun and water, is glimpsing the juveniles purloin your neighbor’s boat propeller while trying to “poke” his daughter on the back seat without the use of any digits. This is done without grace or artistic talent. I doubt, however, that any of our local daughters would know Grace if she seduced them.

If one is not a daughter he is subject to being pillaged, plundered and robbed by these same roving performers. Wanting to perform my own protective encore, I took up the one of Martial Arts, for even if available, ballet wouldn't offer much protection: I started to attend a late evening Shotokan, Karate class. It proved to be more than a ballet-watcher's substitute, and a principal component in the transformation of my existence.

I should tell a bit about the dojo studio itself, and the people I found there. The walls were covered with a veil of bamboo weave broken only by a Japanese flag and two framed photographs of elderly oriental men sitting cross-legged.

The Gi (pronounced “gee”, with a hard “g”, traditional uniform of Karate) worn by the students milling about the studio, resembled a loose-fitting, arm-length white canvas shower robe fitted with string-tied, equally loose pants. It was the colored belts, I learned, wrapped twice around the hips and knotted in the front, that set the different students and instructors apart. The beginners wore white belts. Advancing up the rank structure came yellow, green, blue, brown and finally the coveted black belt. The colored belts represent “boy” grades; “man” starts with black belt level one and proceeds through ten, the tenth “Dan” being reserved for the founder. My naive instructor hoped I was not offended to be considered a “boy”. I assured him it was my treat.

He explained that his Master, Sense (pronounced “sin- zee”) Hansel, born in Florida of Scandinavian parents, had trained in Japan for many years and earned the high honor or Fifth Dan - 5th level Black Belt. The Sense himself, a well-formed, blond, blue-eyed Swede, conducted the opening exercises of this Far Eastern Martial Art. Art it was. The advanced students, aged 10 through 41, stepped forward on the meager multi-matted flooring, barefoot, and like Oriental dancers began to perform their graceful aerial acrobatics. They had balance, timing, efficiency – all due, as in ballet, to tight control over well-developed, thin swimming-type muscles.

Then it was my turn. Even with my bit of instruction I quickly learned that I couldn't stand, walk or even move my hands correctly – embarrassing enough when watching people half your age do all these things with the utmost ease, but especially so when you are being scrutinized by a handsome twelve-year-old blue belt.

Turn-about is fair play, and toward the end of the class all the students, including us Tyros, sat cross-legged in the circle around the center mats to study the more advanced blue through black belts “spar”, or free fight. I should explain that it's bad technique to actually hit your partner. You just “touch” vital spots with the same speed and force that would destroy him if you extend the blow another two millimeters. As with ballet I could now lustfully survey pubescent striplings engaging in their not infrequent sensual displays without fear of discovery: we were all sitting in a circle, looking at the lads, weren't we?

One's imagination has greater room to expand when it can unwrap young male beauty clothed in bulky white butcher paper rather than tight ballet tissue. I did it to at least three combatants, between the ages of 11 and 15. Such a brain game doesn't require all that effort of slowly pulling down sprayed-on toilet tissue to reveal a fragile boy: you just mentally tug on a single co loured ribbon, twirling open a sweaty youth in an athletic supporter. Quite the treat!

The boys went at each other with envious energy. High kicks, spinning kicks – and hand movements of such speed that you knew, when alone, they could finish what had to be done in sixty seconds flat, without going blind.

I was sitting next to the dressing-room door, in an erotic daze, when all my senses jumped to full alert. Across from me, through the main entrance to the dojo practice room, appeared a stunning Levi- and T-shirt-clad dragon of the younger set. He seemed tall: 5 foot six inches, could not have been more than thirteen, button nose, light brown hair and a matching tan that made his blue eyes scream for attention. If there ever was a young stallion deserving of see-through apparel it was he. The boy bowed to Sense, Master, Hansel and received only a nod toward the shower room. He quickly shuffled by me and vanished into the dressing room, where the art of stripping was not merely tolerated but encouraged. Only through my intense oriental discipline, received from 45 minutes of Shotokan training, did I not pursue him into that den of humidity and offer to hold his clothes or whatever else he needed holding. Actually my intertwined legs were fast asleep and in any attempt to get up and follow I would have come off as an inebriated fool. Remaining seated kept the truth hidden.

For five minutes I watched two older blue belts roar and dance around each other, then the Levi mini-dragon made his appearance, outfitted in his Gi, and stood next to me. At a silent signal from Master Hansel, he sauntered to the center of the mats and I saw that the support around his lean waist was dark brown and the three thin white bands spanning the tip of one end indicated he was a coming Black Belt (which could be very entertaining out of context). This little Ganymede knew how to fight!

Little Dragon was being paired with a smug 19-year-old black belt at least 4 inches and 50 pounds the bigger. I took an instant dislike to him, not for fighting my new pin-up but because he seemed to share less the humility of the other combatants than the airs of our local daughter-ravaging delinquents who would, without a thought and in the name of Society, reduce me to pulverized venison were they to know my affections toward young beardless males.

After a modest bow to the Master, and a terse one to each other, the warriors struck their formidable fighting stances, turning sideways to expose only the less assailable areas, fists slightly extended at mid-body. Nothing happened for an eternity, roughly four seconds. Then, with deep-chested growls, and a bit of a squeak from Little Dragon, they moved. I was awed by the blinding motion of their appendages. In a lightning swirl of twisting and over-lapping kicks, shifts, punches and blocks, the adversaries pressed inwards, each giving no ground to his rival. An instant after the first movement it was over.

“Point, Tres,” Sense called. “Front punch, left kidney. Edwards nil, Tres one.” So that was his name. Little Dragon was Tres, and his last front punch had not been sufficiently thwarted. Turning away from the center mat, Sense Hansel repeated his judgment to the scorekeeper. A win requires two out of three points.

Tres, the dragon cub, was happy with the score but unsure of his assailant, and with good reason. Although Edwards was not physically wounded he was staring at Tres seething with hatred. There was blood in Edwards’ eye which was unbecoming in a Black Belt. How I hoped, and probably everyone else in the class hoped, Tres would be victorious over such an ego!

But the next encounter wasn't encouraging. Before Sense's “start” was completed, Edwards flashed forward with a lightning high side kick of unchecked force, directed at Tres's face. It nearly overwhelmed his shorter competitor. The combination of a blazing right forearm block and a body-shift to the left, of mere inches, saved Little Dragon from an excruciating ruin. The brute force of the kick was absorbed by Tres's fending forearm, and as the pain and recognition of Edwards' malicious intentions sank in, the smaller boy's eyes widened: he now would be struggling to stave off serious injury.

Edwards followed his advantage with a deft combination of vigorous fist and knife hand techniques, driving Tres back towards me on the mats.

Sense Hansel made no move to stop the match. Managing a recovery, and with a coagulating howl, Tres unfurled a burst of fierce bellicose kicking attacks, effectively stunning Edwards. Then he spun completely around to the right to take an advantage of a new opening and thrust forward with a well placed palm-strike “touching” the bridge of Edwards' nose, thus clinching his victory.

But Edwards was beyond the rules, now. With dazzling speed, he snapped a front kick deep into Little Dragon's stomach. Tres folded around the foot and lapsed to the tarpaulin, unable to cry out.

“Point Edwards. Front kick to the stomach. Edwards one, Tres one.” Evidently he had missed the earlier palm-strike by Little Dragon. Once again Sense turned and repeated his decision to the scorekeeper, but this time, as he did, Edwards sneaked a sharp heel jab to the lower back of the defenseless form at his feet, extracting a reluctant, silent tear.

“Foul!” I cried, attracting the shocked attention of everyone in the room. “What type of honor does a black belt obtain hurting a fellow Shodakoner? Or in striking him after he is down?” I staggered to my comatose legs. “Tres should have won. He struck the first blow before this foul . . .” - pointing to Edwards - “. . . person deliberately injured him!”

Sense Hansel was furious. All the students were gaping at me in disbelief. Edwards glared venomously. Help!

“Is any of this true?” asked Sense, looking around at the pupils and to Edwards.

Silence.

I could hear the accelerated loathing build up around me – or was it my heart?

“You have turned my class into a circus with your accusations.” Hansel's voice firmed. “Tarnishing my school, my black belts, Edwards and my son Tres by attempting to exploit an accident. Why?”

Stunned! Tres his son? He did not see, he did not know? I was trapped between what I knew was right and a judge worried about his image and a jury blind to the evidence. I stood as tall as my floundering legs would allow, ready to go down supporting my ship as long as Tres was on it.

“Your son has been misjudged,” I responded, scuttling any chance of social escape, “and your honored black belt has the integrity of a common vandal.”

I bowed, left the room before I was requested to leave, sought the shower, dressed and departed. No one made so bold as to acknowledge my existence.

Once I was safely in the parking lot I leaned across the roof of my Porsche – and let the emotions rebound through my torso: hatred of Edwards for hurting Tres, Hansel for letting down his son, love for the Little Dragon I would never see again (could it be love so soon”). There was also my own embarrassment for having looked the fool . . .

“My father is only protecting the school,” said a delicate voice from over my right shoulder.

Straightening, I turned to see the thin figure of Tres, clad again in T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes standing in the dark near the rear of my car, a ribbon of light from a street lamp cutting across his face.

“Tres, Jesus, you all right?” I smiled.

“Sure.” He smiled back, stretching his mouth wide and flashing an even line of teeth. “I'm a brown belt, you know. Anyway, thanks for stickin' up for me in there.”

“Edwards was after your hide, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. He got it, too.”

“Not an accident?”

“No accident.”

“Father know?”

“Don't think so,” Tres said, frowning. “When it comes to me he don't care much.”

“Want to talk?” I ventured, watching his eyes. Did they twinkle for just a second?

Little Dragon searched my soul for a moment with those marvelous blue eyes, neither of us speaking. Then he crossed to the opposite door of my Porsche and tried to open it.

“We can walk,” I suggested. “My house is two blocks from here.”

On the way, I suppose, there were the usual streets, a few cars, a scattering of road lanterns, but they were relegated to a sort of dreamy obscurity, for beside me walked Tres. And sooner than seemed possible we were sitting next to each other, on my couch, chaperoning a fresh blaze in the fireplace.

I put a hand on Tres's shoulder and pulled. He resisted at first, then stole into my arms, back to my chest, throwing his sneaker-clad feet across the couch arm.

“Do you think my Dad likes me?” Tres asked, squirming around for more comfort.

“I don't know him, but I'll bet he loves you, in his own way.” I placed my arms under his and settled my hands on his stomach. “Does it hurt much where he kicked you?”

“Nah, just aches a little inside.”

His stomach muscles were tight. Fanning my fingers, I rubbed the Dragon's belly through his shirt, with my right hand.

“Fathers usually lose track of their sons about your age,” I went on. “As you get older you'll both come closer together.”

Sprawling further and resting his head on my shoulder, Tres closed his eyes. “That don't help me much now, does it?”

At last he relaxed, possibly for the first time in months. No words needed speaking. I advanced the area of my circular massage to let a few fingers slip from time to time under his beltless denims; with each pass they slipped a centimeter further under the trouser edge. I soon contacted a pair of Jockey shorts; to get beyond required a more permanent effort, so that now my rotating hand had to take up homesteading inside the denim. At last my index finger brushed, oh so very lightly, against the tip of a boyish trinket and, continuing my movements, I lapsed into mental bliss.

“Is this right?” Dragon breathed suddenly, sending shock waves through my nervous system.

“Is what right?” I recovered, and continued my massage.

“You know. Rubbing my stomach.”

“Do you like it?”

“No one has rubbed my stomach before.”

“Do you like it?” I asked again, making a daring stroke inside and taking matters fully in hand.

After an initial hesitation, the Dragon answered with deft flicks of his wrist opening every button down the Levi covering of his treasures. Then he asked, with touching worry, “Does this make me queer?”

“No,” I quickly assured him, “it doesn't make you anything.”

“Sure?”

“It just makes you feel good and more aware of what you can do with your body. The girls around here will have to watch out. I bet you'll know ten times more about what to do with them than any boy in town.”

Tres leaned his head back, looking up into my face, as I maneuvered my thumbs along his hips and clasped his breeches and briefs together on both sides.

“Yeah!” he boasted, raising his rear and allowing me to glide my snared hands to his knees.

I was resolved to make this the Dragon's night.

Whatever new thrills he could and wanted to explore we would. And we did. Before we finished he breathed fire.

Afterwards we lay together watching the flames play over the collapsing coals in my hearth.

“I don't think we should have done it,” Tres whispered at length.

“What?”

“It's wrong.”

“Tres, because something feels good doesn't make it a sin. What you did was as natural as growing up.”

“I'll have to think about it. I'll have to think real hard,” he went on. Then, “Why did you let me do it?”

There was panic, and it was beginning to rise. “Tres, I love you. I did it to express that love, to try to please . . .”

But I never finished, for the boy leaped to his feet, grabbed his Levis and pulled them on in what seemed like one single motion. Then he bolted out the door, but not before he hurled back at me the furious accusation: “Fag! You're a lousy fag!”

For an hour I didn't move. I was too stunned, at first, and then overwhelmed by depression. At last I glanced at the clock above the inglenook: eleven-thirty. Better recover my Porsche.

The street lamps near the dojo were out, except for the one by the approach to the parking area: its beam was haloed in the mist. Droplets were forming on my car. Tree frogs and crickets were singing their usual nighttime chorus.

But the chorus trailed off as I approached my vehicle. There was a rustling in the shrubbery; someone was lurking in the darkness.

“Tres?” My heart started beating as though it wanted to jump clean out of my chest. “Listen Tres, can we talk this out?”

“No we can't!”

It wasn't Tres, but Edwards, advancing into the light and towards me, hooking his thumbs in the front of his denims. He wore them cuffed at his hiking boots; the top five buttons of his shirt were loose.

“I been waiting for you to come back for your wheels. Thought you'd forgot about them.”

He pushed me hard up against my auto and continued, “People don't do to me what you tried to do. We don't need toads like you here. Get the message?” And he drove a fist into my abdomen.

Air, I needed air. I doubled over, gasping, sightless from tears. I reached out to steady myself, to find the car.

“Keep your hands to yourself!” Edwards shouted, and chopped me on the side of my head, staggering me to my knees.

Please God, I thought, don't let this happen. Not now . . . not for this!

Edwards stood over me, laughing.

“You're not so hot one to one, are you?” he mocked. “You know, you'd look good as a hamburger.”

I heard a click; a switchblade opened in his hand, gleaming surfaces catching the rays of the street lamp and breaking them into cold little stars.

I had to get up and get away. I tried to rise. WHAM! He pounded me back to the ground with a whip-like kick to the chest.

“I'm going to like doing this,” he said. Then there was a hoarse scream and he struck with his knife across my right cheek.

I didn't feel the slice. My body was numb. Reaching to cover the wound, I found there was no blood.

The scream I'd heard was not from my assassin but from Little Dragon as he landed a flying kick to Edward's shoulder, preserving my face from destruction.

But the black belt rolled with the attack and was on his feet quickly. Windmilling a leg from behind he slammed a hiking boot into The Dragon's side. Tres went down. Edwards sprang on Tres with a murderous kick to the base of his ribcage.

But Little Dragon miraculously bounded up and backwards and avoided the assault. Edwards, however, suddenly landed a roundhouse kick to his arm, putting Tres down again.

But from there Tres slammed a punch to Edwards's right kidney. There was a scream of pain. Jumping to his feet again, Tres struck, again and again, with punch after punch and at last Edwards fell screeching and holding his sides.

“Get up and fight!” Tres yelled, magnificent in his fury. Edwards's reply was a slash with the switch-blade across his right shin. Tres stumbled in pain. Edwards climbed to his knees and drove the knife deep into the Dragon's left shoulder. I bled with Tres as he screamed.

Edwards left the blade plunged in his prey, staggered to his feet, bringing up a large stone with him. He stepped toward Tres, raised the rock over his head. I pushed my right leg, with both hands, across the killer's path, and he tripped, went down, and Tres kicked, with all the force of a wounded beast, landing his heel in our attacker's groin. Then, tightening his muscles into granite, Little Dragon again fired his foot, this time at his chest, and Goliath jerked once and lay, unable to move any more, breathing heavily.

I crawled to Tres and drew the steel from his shoulder but I don't remember much else. There was a black haze, penetrated, as from a great distance, by sirens and lights. Then nothing.

I regained my senses in a hospital, needless to say; in a semi-private with an empty bed beside me – and, as I looked around, with a big bowl of flowers and a note. I rang for the nurse.

“What's that?” I pointed.

The note read:

My deepest apologies for doubting you, and my most heartfelt gratitude for saving the life of my son. Don't worry about costs: my insurance will cover everything. Recover, get strong, and I look forward to welcoming you to my home as an honored guest. - Tor Hansel.

So Tres was alive. And so, I discovered, was Edwards, which information didn't affect me much one way or the other – I doubted, in any case, we would be having trouble from him, since he was recovering in police custody.

I lay back and slept some more, and then, about noon I was awakened by a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes to see a kindly middle-aged face looking down at me and saying, “I am Dr. Perkins. We hope you don't mind, but you're going to gain a persistent roommate. As a matter of fact he's been pestering us for hours to be put with you.” He stepped aside and the nurse wheeled in a bed with a smiling but well-bandaged Dragon.

“Tres!” I exclaimed. “Am 1 glad to see you!”

“Me, too.” He grinned impishly. “You look O.K.”

“You're not so bad yourself, except for that mountain of dressings.” There was heavy gauze around both arms, hands and right leg.

“You can't do nothin' with your hands tied up. I can't wait till it comes off, but that won't be for a couple of weeks.”

Then alone, finally, we relived “the heroic battle”, as the newspaper were calling it, every tiny maneuver.

“I'd never thought I could of done it,” Little Dragon admitted. “I was so mad when I saw him kick you I just attacked.”

“Why didn't you call the police?”

“I had to protect my friend first.”

“Friend, am I, now? The way you evacuated my apartment, well, I thought you hated me.”

Tres shook his head. He was suddenly serious. “Things were happening too fast. Things you showed me and things you said. I was mixed up.”

I gambled: “What about?”

Tres looked away. “That you love me, and all.”

“I'm afraid I do,” I said, hoping not to provoke another outburst.

“Yeah, 1 know.” There was boyish affection in his voice. Understanding swept through my veins like fire as he continued: “Why don't you get up and lock the door. My hands are out of use . . .” Then, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he added, “and rub my stomach.”

Dennis
by John Bishop

“Hell! Another damn love affair!”

The two causes of this irritation were strolling blissfully through the garden. A youngish pale European, perspiring in the fierce heat, hand-in-hand with a slim early-adolescent youth in T-shirt and tight white shorts that might have been sprayed on were it not for the perceptible lightening of his coppery skin where he had outgrown them. The shorts were almost indecent, but Dennis refused to surrender them, knowing their effect when combined with his long straight legs and lighter than average coloring.

The exclamation brought the cook-and-man-of-all-evil, as his employer was wont to call him, hurrying to that gentleman's side. Together their eyes followed the slow progress of the couple through the garden. Surely they didn't come along the road like that! Dave wondered, not for the first time, whether it had really been such a good idea to take in paying guests of a sympathetic kind when the official hostelries in this Third World backwater had started to impose restrictions on a guest's visitors – and not infrequently to report them unless handsomely bribed. Money, though, there's the rub, Dave thought. It was a commodity of which he stood permanently in urgent need.

“Any other boy, I'd say no, but with Dennis you can't be sure,” his cook replied sadly.

Damn love affairs. Damn Dennis.

Dave-Uncle, as he was called by the boys, though known by a different and quite accurately obscene name behind his back, waited for Dennis to appear in the kitchen. His knowledge of adolescent imperative need for sustenance was as shrewd as his incredible grasp of their psychology, and had been honed by years of exposure to the nature and habits of those strange creatures. Impelled by the tyranny of his stomach, Dennis duly appeared in the kitchen, and proceeded to offer extravagant violence to a loaf of bread. There was a certain shiftiness about him.

“Dennis, why were you holding hands in the road?”

“That's not my fault! Anyway, only from the gate, Dave-Uncle, not in the road. I know it's no good to go in the road like that.”

Too cold to spread, the butter was applied in thick slices. The cook winced.

“This man seems to be very fond of you. I hope you are not going to bring trouble here for him.”

“Oh no. I tell him everything like you say, Dave-Uncle, always carefully.” He rummaged in the refrigerator like a large bird scrabbling through undergrowth.

“Trouble for us means trouble for you,” Dave said ominously.

“I never bring trouble. Can I have a drink?”

“There's only Coca-cola.” A tomato and marmalade sandwich made its uneasy debut. Dave waited while it disappeared, thankfully in less time than it had taken to contrive.

“Don't worry, Dave-Uncle, I specially look after this man like my own father.”

Dave knew Dennis's own father. The man had tried to throw Dennis out after he had sold the roofing sheets off the single-room structure that was home to a family of six. Dennis was then almost thirteen. Only about half the sheets could be recovered, and for months the family slept under the half of the house that had a roof, while tropical storms flooded in through the rafters. There was an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Dave to take Dennis as a houseboy, but the difficulty of getting him to go to school seemed insurmountable, so he had him shipped off to various aunts and uncles in turn, returning from each after a few weeks. From time to time he lived at Dave's house, when nobody would take him in, and had to be locked out when there was no one to supervise him. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three months; none knew where, nor cared to ask. Once, a year or so back, he had returned with new clothes, a watch, money; once in an old torn shirt, ragged shorts, and an unmistakable prison haircut. His explanations stretched the credulity of his listeners beyond the breaking point.

Over the last year he had calmed down in the maturity of his middle teens, and Dave had felt spontaneous friendship and warmth in him, born, he assumed, of their long association. He had grown beautiful. His body had a more finished look about it, an elegant economy of line and form; his skin had kept its lighter shades, and its childlike silkiness. Sexuality burst upon him; insistent, adventurous, insatiable. Dave had allowed him more often around the house, and inside it. This roof is tiles, he thought – he can't drag them away in a wheelbarrow.

Later Dave spoke to his guest.

“I hope Dennis is looking after you properly.”

“Marvelously. You know, it's incredible, in just these few weeks little Dennis seems to have fallen completely in love with me. I'd never expected anything like it. It's amazing, really.”

“Incredible, yes.”

“Of course, it's nothing unusual here. Dennis told me boys often have these romantic friendships – well, they do everywhere, of course. Boys are so romantic. Haven't you found that?”

Teenage boys are often romantic, Dave thought, and it expresses itself in sudden and strange ways, but holding hands in the street is not one of them.

“Actually, things aren't so different here, in some respects anyway. In public, for instance. People may think it's a little odd, holding hands.”

“Well, nobody said anything. Dennis so wanted to do it, he knew it would please me. It's so nice. And the people all smiled.”

I bet they did. Lucky for you you don't understand the language.

“Dennis says he always walked like that with his father, before he died.”

“He died?”

“Yes, a shipwreck. Very tragic. He was a fisherman. Now there's no one to look after Dennis. The worst of it is, he was doing so well at school. He wanted to be a doctor.”

“Oh? Dennis?”

“Yes. I'm going to help him, after all he is helping me. I don't know whether you realize it, but most of the youngsters who come here are thieves. Dennis hasn't a good word to say for any of them. He's so careful about me, and even jealous, but that's a compliment, I suppose.”

“You are going to help with his schooling?”

“It will be expensive, of course, but bound to be worth it. He's sure to do well, he's so clever.”

“He is that. How expensive is it going to be, exactly?”

“Well, the fees, of course. He wants to take lots of subjects, that's another good thing. He needs a uniform, three actually. Bus fare, though he says it's cheaper to get a bicycle. Books, pens, the usual things. Do you think he needs a watch? – he says so. Food, lodging, all sorts of expenses. I honestly think he sees me as his father. It's rather touching.”

“This is a very heavy investment to make in a boy,” Dave said cautiously. “Wouldn't it be better to wait a little, and get to know him?”

“There's hardly the time. The school term starts soon after I go back. Anyway, when a boy falls for you, you can't go on telling him to wait, and be patient, and I'll do it later. His whole future is at stake. I wanted to arrange something today, but after the funeral there wasn't enough time.”

“The funeral?”

“His grandmother. That's partly what decided me. His whole family are disappearing one after the other. If I don't help him, who else is going to?”

Smitten, Dave thought. Another one bites the dust, or will do shortly. It's their problem. Let the kid make his killing. They see what they want to see; a boy, a hallucination. They hear what they want to hear; lying truths, truthful lies. Who wouldn't be taken with Dennis, taken by Dennis? Perhaps for a very long ride indeed. Maybe the first boy; charming, complete, sensual, above all present in the flesh, not a dream. This may work out an expensive nightmare, but then wisdom was never bought cheaply where the subject is boys. Dave put out the light, and prepared to sleep.

A soft knock at the door. He waited. The door opened for a young shape.

“Dave-Uncle?” Dennis closed the door and sat on the bed. “He's sleeping nicely, he's very tired.”

“After the funeral.”

Dennis clambered across the bed. He arched his back to slip off his gaudy underpants with a deft, fluid boy's movement that momentarily brought his knees to his chin, then dove under the sheet. Dave extended his left arm, knowing that Dennis would only be comfortable with his head on a shoulder, and with one smooth arm and leg across whoever was next to him. When this had been arranged, including the careful placing of Dave's hands on his waist and thigh, Dennis relaxed.

“You talked to him today. I know.”

“Yes, Doctor Dennis, I did.”

“What did you tell him about me?”

“Nothing. He talked. I listened.”

A pause. Then Dennis turned his head upwards and kissed Dave lightly on his cheek.

“I didn't tell him anything because he didn't ask. You told him a lot of lies. Your poor dead fisherman father. Those good school reports. How is your father?”

“He's alright.”

“And how many grandmothers have you got? Whose funeral did you take him to?

“Some village lady. I don't know her name.”

“Dennis, Dennis, Dennis.”

Dave pondered the awesome potential for mischief of the slim little bundle wrapped around him. The great thing about boys, he thought, is that they are never boring. Dennis idly stroked his chest.

“Dave-Uncle, let me get this money. He wants to give it to me. He's going to send it every month! Please, Dave-Uncle, don't say anything about me. I'll never tell any more lies. I'll stay here and do everything you want.”

“Heaven forbid! You already do everything I want, and a lot of things I don't. We can make a deal, though. Don't lie to this man any more. Don't walk in the road holding hands, scandalizing the neighborhood. Don't take him to any more funerals. Is that a deal?”

“Promise!” Dennis agreed. “And you promise not to say anything about me.”

“I promise not to tell the dreadful truth, unless you force me to.”

“Thank you, Dave-Uncle.”

Dennis shifted his position, his gently wandering hands adding their own subtle testimony to his gratitude.

In the morning the cook-and-man-of-all-evil called Dave into the kitchen. Two boys were breakfasting riotously off what seemed to be a dozen raw eggs, pepper and chilli powder.

“They're very hungry,” the cook explained miserably, “you said to give them breakfast.”

“Less eggs, more bread,” Dave said. “What did you want?”

The cook drew him aside conspiratorially. “Dennis went out today with a big parcel. I asked him to show me what's in it, like you said. There was a lot of that man's clothing in there. Dennis said he was going to the laundry with them. He took it and went, I couldn't stop him.”

“Only clothes? If Dennis wanted to steal he wouldn't just take clothes. Furniture, the roof, that's more his line. I think Dennis is going to behave himself better from now on.”

“Dennis behave himself?” asked the cook, stunned.

“I spoke to him,” said Dave airily. “You'll see – he'll be good now.”

The cook looked at Dave as though he might be still asleep, or hallucinating. “I didn't think to look in his pockets,” he said thoughtfully.

The boys finished their breakfast, and wanted a shower. It was a school holiday, one of the hundreds of National Holidays that helped to reduce still further the innate unproductiveness of the local work force. The local schoolboys, however, were apt to use the time in the most productive way they could devise. The boys stripped off quickly, and invaded the bathroom with the usual joyous noise of youngsters in water. Dave marveled again at their lack of morbid modesty, so characteristic of schoolboys in his own cold country. It was a small difference, but one that gladdened the heart and eye, and something profoundly to be grateful for in a world rapidly flattening out to a grim bleak uniformity. One of his worst fears was that he might awake someday to find his youngsters as shy and maidenly as those of the liberated West. Leaving the boys to enjoy their shower in a profusion of soap bubbles and flashing brown limbs, he returned to the kitchen in time to catch Dennis further depleting the egg stock. At least he hasn't stolen anything, Dave thought.

As the days and weeks went by, Dennis stayed on his best behavior, to the complete confusion of the cook and everyone else. There were lapses, small ones, noticed only by Dave. The 'pregnant older sister' ploy briefly appeared, requiring urgent taxi-fare to a distant hospital, and Dennis's benefactor was calmly plundered of enough money to send a hundred pregnant sisters on a guided tour of the country. Dave found out about it, and Dennis cornered him in the kitchen before he could say anything, thrusting a wad of currency at him, promising never to do it again; pleading, whining, hugging for forgiveness.

“You just couldn't resist it, could you?” Dave said, holding the boy away from him.

“I never, never try again, Dave-Uncle. Don't tell. Take the money, please.”

“Give it to your family. I won't tell on you. Now let me go.”

“I'll be very very good, Dave-Uncle, I promise. I don't want the money.”

Dennis offered it again, and it was refused, so he offered it to the cook, who had been watching open-mouthed at this astonishingly un-Dennis-like performance. The cook took it without hesitation, a reflex action between his eyes and hands and the money, seemingly with no reference to his brain. It is the sort of reflex that only cooks can develop. He had understood nothing of the scene that had taken place in his kitchen, except that it had suddenly enriched him by a sum he was too superstitious to discover. He thrust it in a pocket, and spent the rest of the day warily expecting someone to demand it back. But no one did.

In one respect, Dennis was quite determined and ruthless. No other boys got within winking distance of his new friend. He variously slandered them as thieves and rogues, and hinted that they were suffering from an assortment of weird tropical diseases, with ill-effects as colorful as they were unpleasant. The only common factor was their apparently highly infectious nature – so much so, in fact, that even looking too long at a boy so afflicted could transmit the disease which would probably be quite incurable for a foreigner even though the boys somehow survived. To dampen the other boys' interest, Dennis spread dark stories about his new friend's tastes and habits. Dave had formed the impression of a quiet, gentle and considerate man, undoubtedly energetic but hardly dangerous, and these lurid tales gave him a momentary unease until he realized their origin and purpose. After a few blatant attempts to separate Dennis from his friend the other boys gave up, receiving in return an assurance that they would share in any good fortune that came Dennis' way, without specifically knowing what that might be.

The days passed. Dennis started to carry school books conspicuously around the house, and had a school uniform made. At least it was uniform shape and material, but so stylishly cut, with shorts so tight and revealing, that any school principal would have felt obliged to object. The visual effect was, of course, stunning and as there was no chance of Dennis' pert little bottom ever gracing a school bench, or his long and shapely legs ever hiding their glory under a desk, it hardly mattered that this particular uniform was destined never to see the inside of a school.

All seemed fair on Dennis' horizon. His friend was happy, and Dave had kept his promise. The boy glowed with anticipation. He volunteered help in the kitchen, to the great surprise and suspicion of the cook, who nevertheless accepted. His laughter rang in the garden. He made a kite, a glorious affair of colored paper on a bamboo frame, humming to himself busily with scissors and glue and paintbrushes. At times his eyes shone with happiness.

A new beauty radiated from him, illuminating his perfection from within: caught in a tangle of long limbs, glowing in the hollows of neck and elbows and knees, flashing brilliant in dark opal eyes. Dave suspected a strange drug, but it was only youth and joy and contentment, that strangest intoxicant of all, and the only one not confined to the user in its effects. His sometimes sly and cunning nature seemed to recede, to retreat, almost, before this new Dennis of laughter, and song, and sudden warmth.

It couldn't last. After a long trip to visit a famous temple, during which, Dave discovered, there had been a reckless consumption of wayside foods, Dennis' friend fell ill. The boys were always unreliable guides in this respect, knowing nothing of the likely effects on foreigners of local delicacies. A doctor was called, though Dave felt sure that nature would take its course in the usual way, with or without medication. The doctor, perhaps unsure of any differences between foreign and local digestions, played for safety, and prescribed a bewildering array of pills and capsules to deal with any contingency – and also, Dave suspected, to produce a significant swelling and contusion in the region of his bill. Dennis hovered wretchedly in attendance, and, as the patient was in no mood or condition to absorb the instruction for this cornucopia of medicine, assumed control of both patient and potions. His dismay was unfeigned, however, and he jealously guarded his responsibility and took care that the doctor's instructions were followed to the last pill.

Dave noticed that where another boy might have quietly made himself scarce during his friend's confinement, Dennis displayed genuine concern and care, reluctant even to leave his friend's side for a moment. Dave almost had to fight his way into the bedroom to check on his guest's condition which was improving slowly, as he had expected it would. It was unfortunate, he felt, that this uncomfortable affliction should have occurred so close to the time of his guest's departure, but advice was advice, and he had given it, and could hardly be blamed if it was ignored.

However, far from bemoaning his sad condition, his guest seemed quite at peace with his new immobility. “I shall soon be alright,” he told his host, “with Dennis looking after me.” This was no misplaced confidence, Dave had to admit. Dennis attended to every tiny detail. The ripest and freshest fruit was peremptorily commandeered for the sickroom; despite the cook's testy assurances, every drop of drinking water was boiled again before it left the kitchen, and thrown away after a couple of hours, in case it had mysteriously become contaminated. Dennis traveled into town to buy magazines and newspapers, and even fresh flowers. A bowl of them appeared suddenly on the dining table, reminding Dave how much he enjoyed them, and how easily he had forgotten to provide them in this all-male household.

Dennis paid another nocturnal visit to Dave's bedroom during this time. Dave gradually became aware that he was being carefully woken up, and was not surprised to find the boy by his side. He raised his arm to allow Dennis access to his shoulder.

“What do you want?” His voice and mind were furry with sleep.

“Nothing.”

There was a pause, while Dave considered this unlikely answer from various perspectives to try and discover its meaning.

Eventually Dennis continued, “Everything was good, and then I made him eat those things. Is he going to die?”

“No. He would have eaten them sometime anyway, probably.”

“Not unless I told him to. I don't want him to die.”

“He is not going to die. Not here. Not just yet, anyway.”

“I don't want him to die anytime. He says I am being a very good doctor.”

Dave felt himself drifting off to sleep again. The boy had only wanted reassurance, and a shoulder to sleep on. Invalids should be allowed to sleep unencumbered with boys, however much they may enjoy them at other times. It made sense. Dennis never slept alone if he could avoid it.

“How long does it take to be a doctor?”

“Oh, a long time.”

He felt the boy's hand move on his chest, a gentle ripple of breath across his shoulder, the sharp musky adolescent tang of his raven-black hair, and succumbed to the deep shades of sleep tugging at the edges of his mind.

No sooner than his guest recovered, it seemed, it was time for him to leave. A new lightweight racing bicycle occupied the boys' attention in the garden. In a few months he'll sell it, Dave thought ruefully, and then there will be lies and recriminations, as usual with these love affairs.

“Have you got everything?” Dave asked.

“Yes, I think so. I'm leaving Dennis my watch, so he can get to school on time.”

“Oh, yes.” Some hope of that!

“I'm so pleased about Dennis. I never expected it. Well, you know how it is.”

Do I? Thought Dave.

“I really am going to support him. It may be foolish, but I think it might be the best thing – might turn out to be the best thing.” An awkward pause. “I really want to do it.”

“Sometimes it's hard for a boy to keep all his promises,” Dave cautioned as gently and blandly as he could. “There are pressures on them. With the best of intentions, they don't always realize the problems. You will have to make allowances if he doesn't get it all right the first time.”

“Oh, he'll manage. I'm sure he'll manage. I really know Dennis.”

“Let's hope you're right,” Dave muttered, more to himself, and without a great deal of conviction.

Dennis secured his bicycle, and dragged himself away from it. He would accompany his friend to the last possible point, despite Dave's warnings about over-emotional farewells in public places.

Three months went by before Dennis returned to the house. Dave was surprised to notice that he still had the bicycle and the watch. Still as beautiful as ever. Dennis had apparently given up the skin-tight shorts, in public at least.

“Can't wear them to school, Dave-Uncle,” he laughed, when Dave wryly commented on his respectable appearance. “Next time I come I'll wear them for you, seeing as you so much like my legs.”

“School? You?”

“Yes, today is a holiday, remember. I knew you wouldn't believe me, so I brought my books.”

The evidence was overwhelming. He really is going to school, Dave thought. I'll be damned! Aloud he asked, “How about your Uncle? Is he pleased?”

“He is very pleased. He asked me to come and see you.

He is coming next month, when the big holiday starts. He wants to stay here. Is that alright?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. Thank you, Dave-Uncle. Another thing. You know he is like my Uncle, and brother, and friend all in one? Well, I have to look after him, don't I? To see that nobody robs him, and things like that. Yes?”

“Naturally. So what?”

“I told him, seeing that we met here, with you and everything, I told him you will be very happy to let him stay for half-price. Goodby Dave-Uncle. See you next month.”

“Half-price! Dennis, come back here. Dennis!” Half-price!' Damn love affairs! Damn Dennis!

Dragonfly & Other Texts
by Hakim

1. Dragonfly (for Sydney Smith)

A cast iron stove, patterned with oxidation like fungus or moss – outside the window black icicles hang from the rusted chimney – in the farmhouse parlor with its Persian rugs & brown flowered furniture – images accumulate in layers of winter fat.

Like frog eggs under the ice, words wait for a thaw to get out. Ice-mud-buried crocus bulbs expect to expose themselves to the next convenient warmth, unbutton their yellow velvet flys to groping insects.

Or the archeology of glaciers: paleolithic quickfrozen reptiles biding the millennia till some cosmic ray uncrystallizes them to blunder through city streets, cars honk & crash, crowds run in panic, scientists ponder prophylactic counter-catastrophes – crash, crash, eek. Bricks scatter onto the asphalt, windows splinter into slow arcing prisms, dragonflys skimming the bright mirror of a different season.

The pond unlocks cell by cell, a plasmic cloud of algous hormones vaporises, intricate slimes & worts cook in the sunlight, salamanders browse on a sluggish tide of gel & larva.

Meanwhile all the desires have also awakened from their fetid masturbatory hibernation, the woods & pond are like an open mouth waiting to be filled, a huge carved renaissance marble monster's jaws, gaping between trees, a lichen tinted doorway into the hillside where forty years pass in a night of dancing.

Here winter's already cracking up, melting from inside out – in the pond of the poem, hillbilly children are playing, children who live in trailers & tarpaper shacks, eat possum stew & grits, sleep with their sisters, eat cornbread & redeye gravy, greens & fatback – towheaded boys with bad genes, pretty Kallikaks with pale blue eyes: they wade in muddy shallows till their overalls are stained green, they swim in the soupy water, strands of weed stick to white skin stretched over bone. On the surface their hair floats back like the halos of pond creatures, amphibian revenants haunting forests which are hot as sweat. Playing like bad dogs, wrestling in the mud.

They lie in the sun, which evaporates the brackish drops from their skin back into the dense air – the sun which chafes like dry fingers on their cocks – their cocks which are like cool pale reptiles, stiffening their heads toward the sun, flickering with electricity like invisible two-pronged snake tongues.

Lazy white boy jacking off under the Spanish moss – pirates might wander through this lagoon, capture him & tie him up naked – spits on his cock & works it around the loose foreskin, pink as a shiny bruise – his wet hair hangs over his forehead like strands of cornsilk – spit drools down onto his fist, pumping with a squelching sound, some creature of the swamp – protoplasm spurts onto his belly, he lies back rubbing his groin – his eyes close, he drowses.

He feels a quick vibration near his genitals, he looks up: a last drop of sperm has drawn a dragonfly, hovering near, looking for something to eat.

Next to the victorian woodstove, smoking hemp rolled in cornhusks, I am turning into an iguana. My basilisk eyes are like snow in the moonlight. Unpleasant shamanic healing techniques are suspended within me like goldfish wintering beneath the ice of an ornamental fountain.

I'm conjuring on the crude level, staring at a crystal hung in the window, half paralyzed by upstate January, the twofaced month – living on welfare in a green painted trailer out on the road to the quarry – 1950's photos of naked boys with hardons – a collection of old rusted cars in the back yard, mantled in snow – the firewood, fragrant as an alternate state of consciousness.

I pretend to doze, my two-foot-long tongue flicks and curls around the dragonfly, then reels it back into the cavity of my brain.

2. Remittance Man

Somewhere a town with one rotting wharf, a post office, a few bars, lots of palmtrees, perhaps one item of mildly historical interest (say the wreck of an 18th century colonial-baroque church or a dusty museum of ex-votos and memorabilia of forgotten rebellions), one Chinese restaurant and a few Syrian shopkeepers, a beach. Who needs Europe, I mean like all this culture and history, what's in it for me? I can get it out of books, right? I can make it up myself. These dead stones, those black princes and contessas, not even decadent anymore, glued to the television probably, nothing happening, stuck in the past. So why not someplace in Latin America where there's not only nothing happening but nothing ever happened? (Well maybe some Indios got iced, some general with an Irish name, bad equestrian statue in the central plaza) and for preference a nice corrupt rightwing government, tontons in dark glasses with scrambled eggs all over their chests – but far away, in the capitol – no leftwing shit here, no guerillas (at least not in this province) – Ah, senor, we are tolerant of the eccentric expatriate here, as long as he contreebutes to the local economy if you see what I mean senor. Right, these people are as American as you or me, let's hear it for hemispheric consciousness and tropicalismo – I pay my respects to the local santeros, I'm learning Spanish, I buy a few bottles of wine for the local priest who spent five years in Miami and likes to discuss theology – I'm discreet, the boys come and go by the back door – there's a little fountain in the cracked courtyard of the villa, it jingles in the afternoon, the ceiling fan stirs the mosquito netting, the boy moans and clutches the sheets, spasms out of control, three little drops of spunk on my tongue, falls asleep just as the parrots come out hunting the evening insects or to mate in the flowering trees, I light up a big corn paper of the local weed, meditate on the brown body glowing in the fading light. Come, only in such a place, which means nothing to us, where there are no ideas built into the very fabric of the walls, will we be free to see nothing but the power which indwells all palpable things and makes them simply present. Haven't you noticed in the past few years a sort of pall gathering to shroud the world, as if history had built up such a stupid din that no one can concentrate, as if it's all been tried and found at best inadequate, as if even the spending of unearned money on art and pleasure would do little more to alleviate the sour taste of experience than one breathmint will do for a man with rotting teeth? Now, this town I'm thinking of, it's not that one will regain one's innocence there (et tant mieux, d'ailleurs) but rather that one might vampirize the innocence of this half-forgotten corner, almost time-warped back to the 19th century or at least say 1911, yes, grow rosy on the aura of a primeval boredom, repose of the spirit against a backdrop of painted palms, trombones and guitars, a rumba perhaps or some song once popular in Havana in 1949, so perfectly meaningless, a fat moon about which not a single good poem has yet been written, too bright, too vulgar, too New World to have inspired anything but the most banal love lyrics written in the most inelegant Spanish, rendered occult by the Dahomean counterrhythms and the scent of jaguars not far away in the jungle, just beyond the banana plantations, a culture defined by United Fruit and the ghosts of the shamans, empty now of all but the figure of the sleeping boy, his cock growing stiff again with dreams.

3. The Wolf and his Boy

At a bend in the river, a scattering of wood frame houses, not so much a village as a torn net, made with strings of mist: a white clapboard church, a bait & tackle shop, an old airstream trailer, a few dead cars & toothed upended farm machines. Love spells are inversions: the power of desire is mirrored back as the power of attraction, a homeopathic philtre, passed seven times through the glass of distillation

A black floorlength cape frogged with silk knots, a velvet collar, declassifies the overly slender longfingered adolescent, makes uncanny the soft beast-eyes behind the sockets of his venetian half-mask (framed above by straight cut brown bangs), its jet ribbon tied over the shaved nape of his neck: alone & speaking to no one

Tracks cross the river on a spindly iron bridge: below it a hobo jungle, a few tarpaper shacks half hidden in the rain streaked woods. A gray farmhouse: in his cold attic room the boy studies himself in an age-yellowed mirror, slipping the black broadcloth cape aside to show his skinny white legs, his goosepimpled flank

On the wooden table he lights a candle in front of the mail order pamphlet on Marie Laveau, its cover an old engraving of her tomb. In a coffee can he burns a clump of Indian grass for incense. Into a cracked saucer he pours seven drops of stolen perfume over a scrap of paper with his name & the name of the man he thinks about. Then he pisses into a dirty milk bottle, & measures out seven drops of it with a teaspoon, steaming slightly in the candlelight

He cuts his finger with a penknife & squeezes out a drop of blood, mixed with a long opalwhite dribble of saliva, into the brew; then pulls back the flap of his foreskin & jerks till the bulb grows pink & spits a stream of thin seminal fluid over his fingers, drooling into the saucer; stirs it with a twig & mixes in a spoonful of sugar. (A bottle of coke or cup of strong black coffee will mask the flavor)

A car whirrs past in the rain outside like a soft owl. Somewhere nearby is a man who will burn for this pallid 14-year old in the carnival mask, now sprawled on the edge of his creaking brass bed. The people driving past don't know it, but fever will consume this man till he comes & tells the melancholy boy what to do, to spread his white legs & be licked by a wolf's rough tongue.

– Halloween, 1982

4. Abandoned Camp

green thoughts! Even nature itself becomes the back-cloth of your libidinous tropes! Adirondack pine, grouse brush & woodcock brambles along the dirtroad to the marsh, blackberries & raspberries, goldenrod & cardinal's-flower

slip into a sunlight-mushroom-scented copse, an orphic bower: eleven-year-old camper on your lap, Ceder Lodge Mowhawk Scout short pants down around his bare ankles, sparking him off while you inhale his blond voltage

the balsam of his ludic sweat & bruises. The Camp Musical Director gives piano lessons in a roughhewn stone octagonal gazebo on the lake, a secluded corner hidden by trees. One morning I passed by & heard as usual the childish haphazard plink-plunking, the man's voice hectoring “no! no! start again!” etc

but why the curtains drawn? I paused to eavesdrop, suddenly in the middle of a scale heard a treble moan & giggle. Edging spy-wise round to the back of the little pavilion, up to my socks in lakeside mud, I found one curtain a quarter inch askew

but what's this? The piano lesson going on? 'All right, let's see you take it at a faster tempo now . . . plunk plunkety-plunk . . .' - Ah! On the sill of one window a tape-recorder, playing the sound-track of yesterday's lesson

on the tatty couch a ten-year-old camper with straight wheatgold hair to his shoulders: sprawled out, wearing only a pair of dirty sneakers, the rest of his clothes scattered about the room, underpants draped over the piano keys, music master kneeling on a worn Chinese carpet, the child's skinny brown legs wrapped around the tutor's neck

and the canoe trip up the brook, lazy fishing weather, selfborn lotus stars on the tea-brown water, the great blue heron, ospreys lofting over the marsh – the orgoneblue air stiffens you and you think of drifting here with a thirteen-year-old camper drowsing in the bow, fumbling his naked knees, undoing his fly, the sweet unseeded jissom popping out, splashing into the cool water, scattering the waterwalking bugs, a gapemouth perch gobbling it up

the old boathouse, shingles rotting off, the upstairs sunroom with windows facing the lake, on firefly nights the boys visit you there, smoke cornsilk on the unmade bed, get naked together, I spied on you maybe from a rowboat with binoculars, you never think to draw the shades, the whole camp whispers about those candles, those damp jackstains on the sheets

there can be no compromise with law, they'll never trace the bum checks to this backwater town in Boondock County, not even a grocery store for twenty-three miles, retired trout fisherman living in Airstream trailers, lake-front property for sale, the desolate pines

already the first leaves begin to turn, the mists rise toward the lovecraftian stars, some days it rains, the cool late August damp makes me goatstiff – I saw you one night at the campfire, you were in the shadows with that little towhead, took his shoe off & made him press his toes into your crotch till you clenched your teeth to hold back the sweet wet pain

Autumn manifests itself, the children return to their parents the misers of love the real world school oppression television boredom lonely jacking off over the math homework

amanita, fly agaric pushes through the fallen leaves like bright rainy dogcocks. Nature becomes Cupid's mirror, swells to the bundle of Pan's reeds. Sunlight rubs against your musty clothes, the day is like boy's flesh, you spend into the azure void

5. Eclogue

Invocation:

Daygear shifts a notch, the world locks into its shadowless moment, never mind how many times before. Two youthful “shepherds” enter the glade, as usual. The effect of sitting immersed to the neck in the catalytic spring, with a small waterfall crashing over the head: from a mesmeric silver pipe they smoke crushed amythystine crystals which cause them to salivate and grow vivid. Syrinxpanic congests the local cretaceous limestone but its humors do not disturb the shepherds in the least – indeed, for them it is a kind of repose – after all, from a certain point of view they are haunts themselves.

No shadows. Insects collide through shafts of light in random molecular paths, giving away the key to patterns of drowsy chaos. I am standing in the glade, a man with a beard, wearing a woman's dress or hierophant's robe – tented & split by a foot-long erection – tutelary guardian, anointing my bronze yard from a phial of silvery unguent – perhaps this ritual self-abuse brings on the seasons, quickens the bud as I turn green with verdigris in the rain, in the somber and unkempt glade, sweet noble rot of leaves around my pedestal.

One of the seasons is dressed in soft leather boots that become tight leggings, revealing diamonds of flesh between the many buttons, flaring away at the thighs as if blown by the wind, swooping up over the back as a cape till it clasps with a jewel at the throat – but the whole torso is left bare, the nipples, the navel, the hairless groin. On his curly head a mushroomshaped cap. In his hands he carries symbolic attributes, I'm looking right at them but somehow I can't tell what they are.

Purplish smoke spirals up from the shepherd's pipe, forming a bridge toward absolute noon, a kite with cut strings & tail of violet haze, drifting into the cobalt sky. Each shepherd has brought with him a sort of alien lyrelute, lacquered black as crowswings. From a chrome thermos one shepherd pours smoked tea into camping cups, the kind that are made of tin & unfold like accordions. In the leafy bower they loosen their robes and rub their groins under the thin striped cloth, the sun cools them like reptiles.

Lament:

“Cosmic dualism doesn't bother me, the world wasn't created by a demon, I'm too intoxicated to fall for that. The fumes from this cup of tea, inhaled in the right frame of mind. The number of shades of green!

“The fear of death is always present, no matter what eschatological fancies one believes or does not believe – a susurrous of piping dread – but let's be honest, fear of death is the sap of pastoral, it gives an exciting undertaste of bitter Time to the idyll, a striking counterpoint to what otherwise might seem too plush, too Arcadian a melody. The true gentleman does not worry, indeed there is nothing to be worried about; he offers hospitality (lentils, bread, leeks, oil, cheese, wine, black fruit); he is not misled by conflicting reports on the nature of palpable things.

“What then needs to be lamented? For even though it passes through me as a cloud before this classical sun, some darkness still touches the goathorned day, some astral dirge, some complaint of separation.”

The other shepherd replied, “Lament is a sort of masturbation: Harmodius & Bion the shepherd boys are absent; without their testimony even this landscape seems to fade into anxious insubstantiality, as if the cells of day had lost the biomorphism of the light.

“The County School Board – the STATE (that stupefying monolith which concretizes every fiber of self-imprisoning abstract thought into a paralytic gem of nausea) has stolen them away from our shamanic devices, from the yearning of these enchanted trees, these ethereal dryads who long to see them here again, bathing naked in the pool, playing their simple pipes, fingering their reeds of flesh, the sweet white snakeheads between their summergilt thighs.

“Memory, like a flower, is always at the peak of its invisible perfume. Even chaste friendship is a gift for which no panegyrics suffice to thank the gods. But to have known the taste of their saliva, their authentic bodies in our hands, the valid silk snouts of their pricks against our teeth, pubescent flavors on our tongues as evidence…

“At least we can celebrate the loss, & see which of our elegant wounds can distill a purer style, a more effective elixir of masturbatory remembrance.

“Let this glade-guardian, this corroded bronze with his perpetual orgasm, let this idol's spirit judge between our stroking lamentations, the goldgreen light of our rival songs.”

Song Contest:

First Shepherd: “Harmodius: his hair hangs in tangled black strands to his shoulders, sometimes caught with burrs or fragments of leaf – a dirty bucolic boy with black fingernails, touch of goat in his hairless armpits, the green eyes of a rural thief. His skin is like new brown sunlight, bruised or thornscratched from running naked; his feet are grass-stained but shapely; he wears a torn kilt of soft hide held up by a belt of knotted leather, a necklace of little bones & feathers, lost beads, a silver key; he plays pipes as if he had goat's ears. While the herd browses he sprawls in the shadow of an overhanging rock, forgetting his duties & rubbing & yanking at himself, letting the hot noon fondle his bare legs; then eases open his breechclout & displays himself to the unseen spirits & to his curious dog-companion, panting in the shade; the landscape sighs, the air takes the shape of a giant invisible mouth as Harmodius spits on himself & closes his crystal eyes . . .”

Second Shepherd: “Bion's hair is colored like a late afternoon in autumn, darkly translucent as the cities of the bees; unkempt and hyacynthine, it gathers in rivulets on his bird-delicate shoulders, & for this alone my song deserves the laurel. But his eyes glint so dark & feral & wideset that I seem always to be staring-down a metamorphic halfling, untamed, slender as a newly-weaned kid, lying there with nothing on but a pair of black socks, caressing himself on a tangled blanket under a tall tree, his cutoff jeans & polo shirt scattered on the grass, thin ankles crossed, using thumb and finger on his little white bone, dreaming away the naked minutes of the forest's day till a clutch of sunlight splatters in his lungs & nipples & curls the slanting rays into a strung bow, then a sleep like the coagulation of gold into a sheer pane of glass, a window open on this landscape, this precise landscape which we are studying . . .”

First Shepherd: “Love of Harmodius skewers my spine, like an ox to be roasted over a pit of shadowless light; I am like an adolescent girl when I see his groin, with its almost invisible 'emerald dust', and the electric wand that will gag the back of my throat. He swims into my arms in the pool, he kneels on the bank, clinging to the overhanging bows of a tree, I taste the water that runs over & between his buttocks . . .”

Second Shepherd: “The love of the gods is dangerous. You might see Bion riding a white stag in the forest, its antlers bedecked with golden chains. If it were not for my rustic poverty I would buy gold chains for Bion's throat & wrists – that would be true religion! Kneel at this hidden altar in the backwoods, this tabernacle with its little white mushroom, growing stiff & showing its stalk etched with blue veins, its bluebrown cap peeling open, its pale wet head. The oracles are boyish games; all around us, the trees, the limpid spring with its beard of cress, all is exactly what it appears to be – and yet without their shadows things are suddenly naked to the very nerves & veins, voyeuristic, numinous, aroused, already wet with semenlight at the tip of every atom where it unfolds itself into green nothingness, swelling, turgid with subterranean essence . . .”

Judgment:

The two shepherds unsash their robes & stand before the statue, rotting away in its green corner – their crooks in their hands, slippery as peeled grapes & purple with venom – they pinch their own nipples & squeeze their dark orchid sacks. The vegetation god faces them, its coppery stamen tipped like a pomegranate's teat.

So much for the contest – soon they'll spurt on my ancient brass beard & my ithyphallus, green as a churchspire – volts of mercuric sputum, melted beeswax alabaster all over the corroded jade velvet of my robe – I who stand in jasper golden pain, stiff for all four seasons, I will receive the benefit of their desire, the seeded musk of their idyll.

6 Blurb for a Lurid Paperback

So fresh, so innocent in their blue school blazers, someone's handsome children – or so you think! But little do you know, o normal happy people, grown-up, adult – how these blond greeneyed creatures are possessed by an unimaginably ancient evil, returned from its cloacal Kadath-long dream of subterranean vastness once again to terrorize the bright-lit vulgar day of parents & teachers & responsible fullygrown materialists – sickening wickedness from out of a dim & buried past, sunk deep in your stopped-up septic cerebella! Your own subconspicuous soidisant consciousness! Frauds! Drooling pinheads!

The children: playing happily, so pretty, so strangely . . . desirable. Some demons must have possessed them, or else why would you feel those hormonal surges emanating from their icy blue eyes, so penetrating, so strangely . . . knowing? Unspeakable possession must have awakened those sludge-slime-sucking primal screeches that rend the midnight of your goodhearted heterosexual well-deserved half-hour of bedtime reading.

What are the kids up to in the attic? The cellar? The old treehouse? The sickeningly green swamp, alive with spermshaped reptiles & wriggling vulval fish? Are they telepathic kids? Demonseed sown from passing saucers? So blond, so soft-limbed, their classical red lips seem so strangely . . . sensual. They're conspiring against you, you clot, you shit, they're plotting like prepubescent Masons, whispering in corners: Let's carve up an adult or two! IO PAN! Evoi!

Evil children, so smooth, so warm in bed, so filthy, not yet human, perhaps not human at all – demonic rituals in bed, beneath the sheets, in the memory-haunted attic, barbaric rites, skulls of small animals hanging from silver chains around their naked necks. They're out to get you, schmuck, and $3.95 will tell you why . . . and how!!! in breathless strokebook prose.

Little boys in the Halloween basement, dressed in lurid ghastly costumes, bones painted on black silk, leering red masks & tails with points hanging between their rounded devilsilked buttocks, scheming to take over the world with ESP, calling up turgid brimstone elementals, worshiping forgotten Baals of Canaan , carving pumpkins & masturbating under their ghost sheets. Just a childish game . . .? But then . . . why are the adults disappearing one by one? Flicking out like so many interrupted TV programs? You, the responsible dying reader, will be the sacrificial goat of their fiendish erotic red-meat vengeance, their pearl-skinned electrifying eldritch shenanigans & switchblade demonism. Twelve-year-olds smoking necromatic dope! Abysmal spine freezing horror of paperback children!

And who am I, that I dare to address you so? Ah, you must have heard of me... read of me . . . how there are always renegade adults who fall under the spell of the evil children, who do their bidding & serve their cause, initiate them into foul rites & age-old forbidden lusts, set up front organizations & secretly worship the blond hyacinthine-locked cold-eyed beautiful children who plot & conjure & steam & pulse with unnatural stiffenings & gobblinesque malpractices? That's me: the slave of the possessed ones, the aliens, the little invaders of your bland FDA-regulated universe, purple-stamped like government-approved meat, “Unutterably Dull”. I do their bidding, I lurk around playgrounds, recruiting fresh new innocent faces with hearts of aeon-old decadent laziness & pristine sabre-toothed mischief. Yes, I am virtually one of them, by virtue of my ancient calling, shaman-charlatan, crook, pervert, drunken maledictory bard. Come, I've the key to the attic, & a candle to watch them by, the children, so innocent, sweeter than faith or law or morality or sanity: evil lover of evil children. Beware, beware: in this book, we win!

Grown Up for 13

By Nathaniel Pitt

“What d'ya mean, 'What does it look like'?”

“You know. Is it big, small, long, thin, wide or what?”

“Well, it's big.”

“How big?”

“Big enough to work.”

“Come on, how big?”

“About 26 rooms. Actually for a bedroom it's really neat, four rooms in all.”

“Four?”

“Yeah, a room with my bed, my study room, and then there's my dressing room and my bathroom.”

“You have more bedroom at 13 years old than I have apartment, here, at 35.”

“My parents have a little money.”

“A little?”

“If you grow up with it, it's not much.”

“If you have so much as a kid, why do you do this?”

“What? Sex for money?”

“Basically. You know you're a Knock Out with those hazel eyes and wavy blond hair?”

“You really like it?”

“I wouldn't kid you. A cute boy, entering adulthood, with fair skin, bobbed nose and bubbly energy, has the same punch for me a Playboy bunny's got for most men.”

“Really? I never think anyone I 'play' with really likes me. Hey, I'm not entering anything, I am grown up.”

“O.K. I believe you. Maybe a little thin and short. What, about five feet four inches? You're no steel worker.”

“Yick, I'd never work like that!”

“What will you do when you – ah – start working?”

“I am working! I do a lot of things for my father. Together we do everything.”

“Everything?”

“Not that. I do that away from home – things that make me feel good – like you're doing.”

“Do you like this?”

“Does President Reagan ride Horse One?”

“How can you talk while we're doing 'it' to each other?”

“You're not Mr. Silence you know. I'm sure we'll both stop talk'n soon.”

“Soon, hell. Jimmy, it's time we went for the money.”

“You talk too much!” - with a pause. “Do you only like my face?”

The early afternoon sun broke through the window but was never noticed through the resonance of pleasures. “Face” was the last word spoken for some time. Only the initiated boy-lover could possibly decipher the sounds that followed, breath for breath, giggle for giggle. It can be assured all were happy.

“I wouldn't be acting like a little boy if I said 'thanks, I liked it'?”

“No, Jimmy, it would be nice.”

“O.K. I said it.”

“Why do you wear those gray flannels and blue blazer?”

“Cause it goes with the white shirt and red tie?”

“Come on, you know what I mean. It's too grown up for a wild young 'un like you.”

“It's my school uniform. We're quite respectable, you know. Ha, ha-ha, God, if they could see me here.”

“Well, I think you're respectable.”

“Adults! Oh, I like them so. Ha, ha, e-e-e, God what a flip.”

“You're sure happy!”

“Is that what it is? I thought I was 'high'. High on fun. I really do well for my age, even if I say so myself. Gee-e-e, I love it.”

“And me, Jimmy?”

“You'll do in a pinch. Ha, ha, giggle. No really, you're number one with me.”

“Great, you know it's time to go?”

“Oh how sad – money.”

“The name of the game.”

“It makes it seem different, but I like it anyway.”

“You handle it well. You're quite grown up for 13.”

“As my Pop would say, 'Money can help in more than business'.”

“Smart Pop you've got.”

“Not smart enough to know I'm here. O-O-O, I love it. O.K. I'll pay you the usual. Can I come by after I get out of school tomorrow? Don't think I'll have any homework.”

“I think I can find time.”

“Then it's a deal. Bis bald.”

Theban Patrol
by K. I. Bard

“You mean they all lost their money, all of them, even the Adult Leaders?”

“Yep, that's what it looks like. The whole bunch is broke.”

“Those darn fools. Sounds just like them. You'd think they could see a fleece job coming. They always talk so big and smart. Serves em right.”

“Yeah, I don't see why we have to suffer because of them. It's their funeral.”

“Well, we're in this together, boys. We came on the same bus, so it's our problem, too.”

“I say screw them anyway.”

“Now you're talking. I've had my eyes on a few of those guys and . . .”

“Sure, Mark, we know what you'd think. You're no surprise.”

“You're welcome to em, Mark. If you want one-way action, they'll give it to you and laugh at you after they've had their fun.”

“Let's stay on the subject, fellas.”

“Which one? Who to screw, Mark's sex drive, or what we do now that our brother Scouts got rolled and are broke?”

“You know which one. We can't get home without money.”

“Well, I think they're jerks. Let's let them sweat it for a while. Keep em wondering. Maybe they'll appreciate us more.”

“Yeah, let's give them a taste of what they give us.”

“Like I said, screw them. But this time no comments out of Mark.”

That's how it sounded when we got the word. I'm Brad, the Patrol Scribe, so it's my job to keep a record of the interesting stuff that happens. Most of the time there's nothing much to write down, but this time it's different. It sure is!

Our big Troop program for the summer was this trip to Canada – from Milwaukee; we're from Milwaukee. The Troop has a bus, and it was loaded with camping gear in the back and boys and Adult Leaders up front. Two fishing boats go on top of the bus. Behind the bus we hauled a trailer with eight canoes. Inside the bus was like a rolling hurricane of bored boys and irritated Leaders.

It took us a whole weekend to get to Pakwash, which is way hell and gone past Kenora. But being penned up in the bus all that time was worth it. Pakwash was a great park! We had a super area for camping in a bunch of tall pines that smelled lazy when the afternoon sun warmed up the ground. We were practically on the lake, too, so it was easy to go swimming or take out a boat or canoe. Heck, even I caught a few fish, and I hardly even tried.

Well, the week was super, but then came what happened Wednesday night. Kind of a bummer.

This will all make more sense if I explain a little about our Troop. It's not exactly your typical Scout group. No, that's not true. Most of them are pretty typical. They get into the rah-rah Boy Scout stuff pretty heavy. The bugle blares and the flag goes up with ceremony every morning in their part of the camp. It's my Patrol, The Thebans, that's unusual. We're part of the Troop but we run a separate show.

There are four Patrols in the Troop. Three of them were camped close around the bus, where two of the Adult Leaders slept. That was the 'regular' part of the Troop. Must have been about twenty guys camped over there, but I'm not sure. I didn't keep that close a count on them. Didn't want to, either.

We Thebans had set up our camp outside the circle. We'd see them moving around under the trees, hear their Patrol Leaders shout and blow whistles, but we were just far enough away to not be part of it. They stayed out of our area, and we didn't have much reason to go over there. (Except for Mark, who kept trying to scare up fresh action.)

There are really seven guys in my Patrol, but only five came on this trip. Simm is our Leader, our Patrol Dad. He had a small tent for himself and, well, guests. We set up one big, old tent for us. It's the only big tent left in the Troop, and it's ours. We were all in our part of camp Wednesday night, and that's why we didn't know what was going on in the other part of camp.

(A note to myself. I'll have to get more of the history of the Patrol from Simm. He was in it as a boy so he knows the story. If it wasn't for him there likely wouldn't be a Theban Patrol.)

When it started to get dark Wednesday night Pauly and Jay were fixing our late-night snack. They were working on a peach cobbler in the Dutch oven and setting lots of water to boil for cocoa and doing the dishes later. I was sitting at the picnic table trying to read and swat mosquitoes at the same time – they get pretty thick up here around dusk. The three of us had changed into long pants and shirts or jackets because of the bugs. Mark hadn't done that. He was 'posturing' in skin-tight tank trunks and a muscle shirt. Mark likes to pose and act sexy. Myself, I don't think watching someone slap mosquitoes is very sexy, so I tried to ignore him.

I don't know what Phil and Simm were wearing. They'd gone into Simm's tent maybe an hour before for a 'talk'. See, it's kind of a tradition for each new guy joining the Patrol to spend a fair amount of time with Simm. He makes sure that each new guy is 'right' for us and he clues them in on the rules, such as keeping your mouth shut about personal matters. Simm keeps us on the level. Phil is twelve, a year younger than me, so he needs a steady hand. I was a little over eleven when I joined, and Simm sure helped me adjust and settle down.

From Simm's tent Phil called out, “When's the cobbler going to be ready?”

Jay answered, “Maybe five, ten minutes. Better move it or lose it. You're supposed to help with clean-up, anyway.”

I could hear Phil scrambling to get ready to come out. He's not the kind of guy to skip dessert. As I remember, a 'talk' with Simm can get a guy's hunger going. It wasn't long before Phil came bursting out of the tent so he wouldn't miss his share. Simm wasn't far behind. Poor Simm. For him an hour 'talk' is just like saying hello, so he got cheated. He sure puts up with a lot from us.

Pauly and Jay were dishing up dessert. Mark came back from our tent wearing long pants and a shirt, so the bugs wouldn't bother his eating. It was a pretty typical evening for the Theban Patrol. We talked, ate and drank cocoa. Cocoa is great at night up there because the air feels so cold. It warms you up, even if you do have to get up in the night to get rid of it.

We were just about done when we heard a vehicle start up and leave from the other part of our camp.

“What's that?” Simm asked, peering. “It looks like a pickup camper.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “I think it's been there a couple of hours.”

“With our crowd?”

I nodded.

“Where the heck was I when it came in?”

“Getting firewood, maybe?”

“Well, I better go check.”

Roy and Tom, the other adult leaders, had asked Simm to keep an eye on their show while they visited the resort. But everything had been pretty quiet over there – and for a good reason, as we found out later.

Anyhow, Simm took his flashlight, wandered over, found everything blissfully calm, came back and informed us that there was something about the way the boys were acting that seemed a little fishy and he'd better stay there until the other Adult Leaders returned. “Phil, maybe you should sleep in the big tent tonight,” he added as he left.

We watched Simm's flashlight weave in and out of the trees like he was some huge lightning bug. Then we washed up and were ready for the sack. Of course, Mark hadn't shut the net right, so the tent was full of mosquitoes. While we hunted them down we decided on doing a Sneak.

I guess I should explain what a Sneak is. Each guy lays his sleeping bag out and then sits on top of it. When we're ready all flashlights are turned off. It's pitch black in that old canvas tent. You're supposed to be as quiet as you can while you undress. Then you Sneak. The idea is to crawl quietly and slowly until you find someone. Then you explore him, all over, and can't talk. It's a real panic with seven of us, and it's pretty good fun with five. Lots of times you can't tell who you're with so you got to try and figure it out. Mark is easy to tell 'cause he's so frantic. He goes at it like he wants to pull it off. At least that's how it feels. He's also big on heavy breathing.

It wasn't too long before I found someone in the dark. I was pretty sure it was either Pauly or Jay. I figured Mark would head toward Phil for all he was worth: Mark likes 'fresh meat'. It was going good, with me and my partner sort of teasing with our hands, when in another part of the tent I heard a voice that sounded like Phil go “Ouch!” and then Mark started his heavy breathing routine. That explained where he was.

After that I paid more attention to the guy I was with. He was so good at keeping me hanging that at times I lost track of what I was doing to him. He didn't seem to mind, though. By now I was pretty sure it was Pauly. Pauly really knows his stuff – once he starts he's absolutely dedicated.

We stayed at it for a couple of times, then we shared a bag and I was soon asleep. I didn't hear any noise from the other part of camp, and I didn't hear Simm return. Before dawn I had to grab a flashlight and go out and get rid of my cocoa. I did it quick because of the mosquitoes. They sure know when it's chow time, and a naked guy trying to take a leak is a feast.

Back inside, after slaughtering the mosquitoes that came in with me, I took a look to see who I'd been Sneaking and sleeping with. It was Pauly all right. Mark had Phil and Jay on either side of him down at the other end of the tent in sort of a crowded tangle of exposed legs and arms and a couple of bags. I felt sorry for Jay 'cause he must have hardly stood a chance with Mark hogging all the action.

My light woke Jay: he sat up, saw it was me, dropped back down, smiled weakly, said “Hi, Brad,” and was asleep again. I decided, then, to pair off with Jay the next night, to sort of help make it up for him.

I crawled in next to Pauly and put out my light. He didn't wake up. I thought of waking him but I let it pass. It could wait for morning. In a little while I was asleep again.

Even in that heavy old tent you can tell when the sun's about to get up. There's a kind of twilight or something that happens. It's a green twilight, though. Just before dawn the birds chirp and twitter like they've been saving it up all year, and then the tent gets that light inside.

Pauly was a little awake; he'd move around once in a while, anyway. After it got warmer I uncovered both of us. Then I laid there and watched him sleep. Sounds dumb, maybe. Well, there's all these neat shadows and bright areas on a body in that light. It's also different or something to watch someone asleep. My gut gets kind of hollow, and it's like my mind is talking to them and I'm saying things I'd never really say. I'm not romantic except at times like that. Then my head is full of all sorts of mushy stuff.

I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit to watching one part of Pauly more than the others. Every once in a while there'd be a twitch, and it'd be up in an instant. Other times it would happen slow and then topple back to normal. When that happens it's like there's some little creature that sticks its head up to look around. First it looks one way, then it swings to look the other way, then it looks with its neck stretched out. That stuff keeps my mind busy, too. It's exciting. When Pauly did wake up he didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what I was thinking. He didn't mind, either. Might have had the same thoughts himself.

We had some time to ourselves, then we started dressing and woke the others up. Outside it was late enough so the mosquito rush-hour was over. We made breakfast, then slowly eased ourselves into what we thought would be a normal day at Pakwash.

And it was, until after lunch when a kid from one of the other Patrols ran over and asked Simm to high-tail it back to the Troop bus with him on the double. That's when the story started to come out.

“Roy and Tom had all the Troop money with them last night when they hiked to the resort,” Simm told us when he returned. “Seems they met two ladies, had a few beers – well, I don't have to tell you what happened from there. Just before lunch today Tom looked in his wallet and there was nothing in it but his driver's license and things. And then Roy did the same, and he was flat, too. So they ran back to the resort and, of course, the ladies had disappeared – in their motor home!”

“Wait a minute,” Mark said. “There was a motor home here yesterday evening.”

“Exactly. And when the kids started checking their wallets they found that nearly everyone of them was missing his cash.”

That, of course, started us diving in our pockets.

“I'm OK,” I said. “Me too,” said Pauly.

“I got all my money,” said Mark.

Jay and Phil were also unrobbed. Then Simm said, “That's good. I've still got mine, too. So it's just them that got hit.”

“What the hell happened, Simm? Tell us,” I said.

“Well, looks like the two ladies that shacked up with Roy and Tom sent their friends over in the camper to check out the boys. Checked em out pretty good, I'd say. Cleaned the whole bunch out.”

Simm wouldn't tell us much more, besides he had to put his head together at the bus with the other Adult Leaders. Meantime we got more and more curious. Not that we cared that much about Roy and Tom, but some of the guys in the other Patrols would be worth knowing about. It would be delicious to have something to use against them.

And that's where Mark came in. Mark likes to brag, so other guys brag back to him. Maybe those ripped-off Scouts had done something they could brag about. We sent Mark over to float around the other patrols and pick up tidbits for us. He was good at it. He does have his uses after all.

“I don't know if you guys are going to believe all of this,” he said when he returned, “but I think I got the story.”

“Jesus, Mark, cut the crap and tell us!”

“Don't get hostile. The long and short of it is that last night, in that camper, our fellow Scouts almost all got laid.”

“Laid?”

“Them?”

“Yep. The ranks of the virgins took a sharp dive yesterday between approximately eight and ten-thirty. Take a guess who was the first batter up, who led off the virgin parade? Bet you wouldn't suspect our star boy leader, Dave.”

“Dave!”

“You're kidding!”

“Come on, man: Dave?”

“He was the first. The Pride of the Troop led the way. He even told me that himself. First time he ever talked to me, like he was at least concerned with being honest.”

“So, how did it get started?”

“As soon as the women pulled up in their camper they asked for Dave by name and actually told the kids their Scoutmaster had sent them, which means Roy or Tom must have mentioned Dave somehow or talked about the Troop. Anyway, they knew who to ask for.

“So the camper gets parked and the women take Dave inside with them. One of them crawls up into the cab-over bunk while the other flatters hell out of Dave and starts taking off his shirt; moving on him real fast.”

“Just like Dave to stand there and not know what the hell to do.”

“The one who's undressing Dave says his Scoutmasters sent them and he's supposed to have this experience, see? What he told me, he was confused and didn't want to do anything, that is until she got to his belt and reached inside. At that point he figured 'Why not?' She undressed him and shoved him up to the other woman, the one in the cab-over bunk, who carried on a lot with moans and stuff, then told him how wonderful it had been and said to tell the other boys.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“You mean he actually fell for it, Mark?”

“Yes and no. While he was putting his clothes back on the women said he was good to be done so quick. She said real men were always fast. Dave claims the whole thing actually turned him off, he didn't even 'ejaculate' – that's the word he used. But he still thought Roy and Tom had planned this to happen and he was supposed to tell the other guys, like it was his duty or something.”

“No kidding!”

“So he clues in some of the bigger guys and they start hanging around. One by one they go in. The woman inside calls each boy 'honey' and gets him stripped to his shorts in no time, then the one in the bunk takes over and wham-bang it's time for the next one.”

“That's crazy, Mark. They're putting you on.”

“God you guys are skeptical. Just shut up and let me finish. Well, the word spreads fast: the ones who've had the treatment are talking up how great it was, how good they did – you know. Pretty soon all the guys have either been through or are waiting in line. They're so excited and proud that they don't catch on.”

“To what?”

“The woman who does the undressing empties each wallet while the boy is up in the bunk. Those dummies were so stunned to finally get some action they didn't realize it was rotten action.”

“And nobody noticed!” Jay said full of wonder.

“So when did it dawn on them?”

“Not till this noon. Each kid had between $10 and $20 on him, so those broads picked up over $200 for an hour and a half of acting. The other two got about $400 from Roy and Tom, so the whole operation came to $600-$700 easy. Not bad wages for tricking a bunch of dumb kids.”

“Hey, that's good!”

“How come none of them let us in on the action, Mark?”

“That is a dumb question. Share real action with the Thebans? You gotta be kidding.”

“And the women are gone?”

“The guy who runs the resort told Roy and Tom he thought they were hookers from Winnipeg, wherever that is. The other Patrols know the whole story, pretty much, except they've been told to keep quiet about it. Some of the guys looked scared. Hell, when I was leaving to come back here Dave and that skinny Patrol leader, Pete, followed me half way and wanted to talk. They actually confided in me and trusted me. It's got em thinking.”

My Patrol really got off on the topic. We laughed like crazy at the jerks and were mad at them, too, for being such suckers, a bunch of hypocrites who looked down on us but weren't one bit better come the crunch. After what must have been a couple of hours we decided to pool our own cash and give it to the 'cause'. Even so, we only had about a third of what we'd need to get back home, if we wanted to buy gas and eat, too.

We told Simm what we learned. He didn't say much. His thing is not to talk about people if he can help it. He didn't care that we knew, but he didn't want us spreading it around.

“I hope this doesn't put an end to the Troop,” he told us that night. “A few of those kids might react badly once we get home. If they spill their guts out of guilt it'll be hard to keep the Troop and it will sure end Roy and Tom's role. But first we've got to get home. I don't know how we'll do that on our new budget.”

Simm and Phil turned in before the rest of us. Mark told us he had to go over and meet with Dave for a while – Dave had a tent to himself. It surprised me to think that Mark had something going with Dave. Mark's fourteen and Dave's a year older, but in a way they're a lot alike. It's hard to explain. It's like both of them have two personalitites. Maybe it's their age.

Three of us were left for the big tent. Jay said, “This is the night of the thirteens.” Because he, Pauly and I were all thirteen. We ended up in a three-way, and I'm sure we hit thirteen before we were done. I had my wish of making things better for Jay. I got as good as I gave, too. We all did. I don't even remember falling asleep. Talk about being wiped out!

The next day we loaded up the old bus and limped out of Pakwash on a breakfast of cocoa and emergency rations. By evening we were in a campground in Minnesota that was so crowded with fishermen we had a hard time finding spots for our tents. Luckily, the Thebans ended up a long ways from the other Patrols, right next to a pickup camper. No, not that camper, another one with a lone guy in it.

Supper was awful. What the Troop had the most of was hot cereal and dry soup mix. And peanut butter but no bread. Eating peanut butter off a spoon isn't what I call dessert.

Jay and I had clean-up that night. Pauly hung around and helped. Phil and Simm went for a walk. Mark took off to go talk with Dave. Well, it makes sense if you think about it.

One thing I have to tell you about Pauly is that he's a good looking kid. He's thin, but he didn't turn out spidery. His hair is sandy brown and his eyes are light brown. He's got the kind of face that's soft with enough hard angles to make it interesting. When he smiles at you the smile comes from inside. He's got charm, or something. I've seen him naked often enough to know that if he'd been around in ancient times the Greeks would have made lots of Pauly statues: the museums would be full of them.

Pauly knows he's attractive, not that it's gone to his head. He just cooperates with it. On him, the Scout uniform looks good. He knows how to wear it. Scout shorts come long, but he rolls them up just right. It looks sharp. He gets noticed.

And the lone guy with the camper was noticing. I wasn't paying attention, but Pauly was; this sort of grin came over his face. I learned then that Pauly's got guts. He up and walked over to the guy and said, “I'm available.”

“What do you mean, kid?” said the fellow, who I guessed was about 35 and not too bad looking.

“Just that I'm available, like if you need some help or would like to show me your camper.”

“What makes you think I'm interested?”

“The way you were looking at me. That's OK. I'm not objecting. In fact, I need money. The Troop needs money. The cash we had to get home on got stolen. So . . . I'm available.”

I couldn't believe it. Pauly made a deal in no time. He picked up $100 just like that. So then I found out, from Pauly, about his business. All last year he'd been showing up around conventions and stuff in Milwaukee. He says there's lots of men who will pay, so why not get paid?

You could say that Pauly and the guy in the camper hit it off: Pauly went over there to spend the night. In the morning he brought back another $150. That gave the Troop enough cash to reach Milwaukee without anyone having to make a distress call home and risk the story getting out. Pauly solved the whole problem – and flaked out most of the day in the back of the bus on the bedrolls. Hell, we could even stop and pig-out on burgers along the road!

So, Pauly wasn't in the big tent when we hit the sack. Neither was Mark – he went over to Dave's. (Mark is acting more and more like a Scout. He's thinking of becoming Dave's assistant. Your guess is as good as mine.) That left Jay and me. We had the whole tent to ourselves.

I think we got to thirteen that night, too, but, man, was it a lot nicer! We just did things we'd both done before, but we did them like we meant them. Does that make sense? Well, we were by ourselves, and we got into it real good, and then fell asleep – I think Jay was actually on top of me at that point, both of us having just come down after number whatever-it-was.

And then in the morning there was the green twilight in which I could watch him as he slept, and see him stir and twitch and breathe and his whatchamacallit get hard and soft like those things always do if you watch them at that time. Then Jay gradually came awake, his eyes squinting open and after a moment he smiled and reached for me to hug me (we were still both stark, raving naked, of course) and start things going again. Would you believe we even kissed? 'Cause things were sort of changed now: Jay'd become something really special – my best friend and my best bunk buddy, too!

Well, that's pretty much it. So we got back to Milwaukee fine. The story never 'broke'. Dave and the other boy leaders kept a lid on it; Mark had a part in that. The adults played it cool. It worked out better than I thought.

And Pauly got the address of the man in the camper. From what Pauly says he's a real decent guy and they're going to get together again and go back-packing and fishing. Like me, Pauly's happy. He says it's better if you like the person. Money isn't the main thing, but it's nice to have: we'd all agree on that.

Brad Williams, Scribe

Theban Patrol

On second thought, I guess maybe I'd better not put this report in the record book – it kind of got out of hand right from the start as I was writing it, telling the truth and all. I'll make up something 'decent' for the files.

High Doh

By Alan Edward

Rattenbury-Swinge sent for me precisely five seconds after I'd arrived. The usual. Welcome to the staff, fine team, great traditions. I looked out of the window, tried not to drum my fingers. R-S was a worried man. Seventeenth Century endowments didn't keep a show like that running with twelve per cent inflation; he'd had to take in his first consignment of paying pupils last year. Les nouveaux riches; how he must have hated it. I'd taken a look at the place, hedged my bets, then taken a look at the kids, and accepted. He was lucky; in the ordinary way I wouldn't have touched it, not with the proverbial, not at that salary.

Subtly, his tone altered. My gaze flicked back from the mock Gothic; he had my attention again.

“Our duties, Hudson, are many, going in a number of respects beyond what would be expected of a mere teacher, an instructor. We are guides, 'Preceptors, nursemaids. I believe I have explained the main part of your duties to you. However...”

He got up, then sat down again. I could see a small muscle under his left eye tighten, quiver. Now he was nervous, jumpy.

“The difficulty arises principally with your form, the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds whose time in a choir school is naturally coming to an end and who we expect to be going to Public Schools next year. You see, Hudson, the school has certain standards. Old-fashioned, perhaps, but still...”

The phone rang; he dealt with it, then rose and paced a little. I waited, silent.

“In effect, Hudson, it is a question of what boys of that age will or will not be expected to do every night, or nearly every night – if you follow me – and of whether this is indeed something they should be encouraged to do themselves, or whether, in contradistinction, a member of staff should perform this office for them. I incline personally to the latter view. Therefore, the admittedly somewhat repetitious duty which I would like you to undertake with respect to your form – ”

The door was knocked and Matron came in; some conversation about laundry followed. I didn't listen. Soon she was dismissed; she left.

“Now, where was I? Anyhow, I believe I've made myself clear. If you think the job perhaps too menial one could – er – ask Matron, perhaps. Are there any questions?”

Oh yes, there were questions. But I wouldn't be asking them.

“Good. Just before they go to sleep is best. Shouldn't take you too long. Twelve to twenty – er – strokes each should do it.”

Now, there I could have asked how he knew. But I simply rose, murmured dutifully, Thank you, Headmaster. End of conversation.

This is one duty I would begin right away. Tonight. I called in young Chris Teale, Head Chorister, incidentally the sort of thirteen-year-old whose looks grab you in the guts, turn your knees and stomach to water. Ten minutes, give or take, we chatted of this and that; then I stopped, cleared my throat, surprising myself; I was as nervous as King Rat had been.

“Now, just about the – the last thing at night. You know, what I believe my predecessor's last evening – er – duty was.”

The boy shook his head. “Oh, I couldn't say, sir. We've all just come up from the form below, you know.”

Of course. God. Now I'd have to explain. I did, but it wasn't easy, not with those stunning blue eyes on me, wide and puzzled until he understood. Then, to my relief, the eyes lit, and a gorgeous smile just about sent me sideways.

“Oh, now I see! For a moment I thought you were talking about extra singing lessons! Gosh, sir, it's going to be super being in the top year, what with extra football, and now this! What time shall I have them ready?”

“Just after they get undressed for bed, about nine. How many of you are there?”

“Twelve.” He caught my expression, grinned. “There are good parallel bars in the gym, sir. Fine exercise for the wrists!”

I entered into the thing. “Or I'll play you a game of squash,” I quipped back, “even better!”

“Several!” said the kid.

Bedtime came a century later. Nine o'clock I went into the dorm, heart thumping like the 6:15 from Paddington. I couldn't but ask myself would they all want it, but no problem. All were ready, on their beds, all with pajama bottoms off. I began at the end bed. No difficulty here, a hard little pencil, a quick dozen, aaah! He tightens and jerks on the bed, a little dampness, then thank you, sir, goodnight. Problem one, a few others not quite so ready, but a little movement of the deft Hudson fingers here and there and ... end of that problem. Each kid took it differently, no two the same. Some absolutely silent, eyes closed, the only sign that your task was over a little tightening of the muscles, mouth opens silently, a little ooh! perhaps. Others more vocal, ah-ah-ah-ing all the way through, then shouting out at the end. One or two simply quivering a little, but others bouncing up and down, small behinds thumping on the bed, then finally just about taking off, body jack-knifing, knees snapping up at some risk to yours truly, if he wasn't careful. Chris, who saw fit to lie in my lap – and I wasn't complaining – was one of the bouncers, and noisier than them all. Problem two, a little stickiness here and there, partially solved by Chris making them take off their pj's altogether, setting the example himself.

End of the first week, Chris came to see me. A simple request; could he have his afterwards, away from the others. My room, to be exact. He'd enjoy it more, he said. I understood; a Head Chorister's precious dignity.

“Okay, I'll take you back with me when I've finished with the others. Still better than singing lessons, eh?”

He grinned. “Well, you do make me sing, don't you – every night. Hadn't you noticed?”

Rattenbury-Swinge sent for me the same day. His tone warm to begin with. Congratulations on settling in so well, duties all performed to his satisfaction. He coughed again, changing key. Except . . .

“Simply that little duty I referred to last of all. There I'm not so happy, Hudson.”

Christ – where were you, in the wardrobe?

“I really think,” I said, “that I have done my –”

He held up his hand. “There I'm afraid I can't agree. I do look around very carefully at morning chapel and, as I said, we do have our standards, Hudson.”

Now he had lost me.

“On reflection, I have decided it is probably not appropriate to ask you to brush the boys' hair at night, and I have therefore asked Matron to perform this duty instead. Yes, Hudson?”

“I didn't speak,” I said after a moment.

Just as well.

“One other thing. Christopher Teale is waiting to see you. About extra singing lessons, he said; I'm glad he's taking an interest. That will be all, Hudson.”

Summer Games

By Kevin Esser

1. A Bird in Hand

I sit, as every day, in a posture of feigned nonchalance, waiting for Willie to arrive with his satchel of newspapers. Then (ask, and it shall be given to you) he appears.

“Seen any good birds today?” he asks in his cheerfully piping voice, approaching from across the lawn.

I smile lamely and hold up the binoculars strapped around my neck. “Not much today,” I reply, then cast a token glance at the patch of woods across the road.

“You really like birds, hah?” the boy asks. He poses before me in yellow T-shirt, red shorts and dirty sneakers, a baseball cap turned backwards on his curly mop of blond hair.

“They're beautiful, some of them,” I say, still smiling. I let the binoculars drop back against my chest. “I like beautiful things.”

“That's neat,” Willie says. He moves closer – walking with a jaunty, slightly pigeon-toed strut – and hands me my newspaper. His nose, small and upturned and reddened by the sun, wrinkles in a smile. “That looks good,” he says, pointing to my lap – and, I realize after a flustered moment, to the beer can resting there. “Wish I had some of that.”

“I'd say you're a bit young,” I point out.

“Almost thirteen!” he protests, raising his spunky little-boy hackles.

“Well, you do look hot.” I stand up, trying to control my breath. (Don't blow it, old boy, I think to myself – then, smiling, wish that I could.) “I have some soda inside. You want some?”

“Sounds dynamite!” the boy says. His cheeks dimple in an excited grin.

“Come on, then . . . come inside. See what kind you like.”

Willie nods, sets down his sack, and steps past me into the house. I follow him, my heart beating a tachycardic tom-tom in my chest. His T-shirt is wet with perspiration, and clinging to his back. I breathe in the sweet tang of his sweat, savoring every pungent whiff of young BOY. “Take your pick,” I say and pull open the refrigerator door. “Cola, orange, ginger ale.”

Willie bends over as he makes his selection, presenting me (considerate lad!) with a fetching view of red shorts stretched tight over very firm little. . . . Then he straightens up, cola in hand. “This'll be OK,” he says.

I watch him wander with a lazy grace to the table, where he sits, slouches, sprawls out his legs. His knees are dirty, his left shin nicked with a tiny scratch. “My cat got me,” he remarks, and I realize I've been staring too intently. I look up at his face – still damp with sweat, ruddy with sunburn, lit by a gleeful smile. “Cats eat birds,” he says.

“True enough.”

“I always wanted to be a cat,” he goes on, taking a sip of his cola, then setting down the can. “Cats are cool, man. They look so great!” He stands up – moving to some sort of odd, feline rhythm – and begins a slow shimmy around the kitchen. I gaze, enthralled, as he dances past me, gliding with languid undulations of his head, shoulders, hips. Then he stops, turns, looks at me with his dimpled grin. “I gotta go,” he says, eyes asparkle.

I try to speak, clear my throat, try again: “What about your cola?”

“Gotta go,” he repeats, not to be swayed, already bustling past me out the door. “I got more papers to deliver. See you!” He grabs his sack and rushes off, striding away across the lawn like a sprightly little colt.

I hoist my binoculars and watch him disappear through the maze of houses, then turn away with a sigh, feeling a bit – I suppose – like Napoleon after a hard day at Waterloo.

I content myself, as the afternoon dismally passes, with the recollected image of Willie performing his Cat Dance. I sit at the kitchen table with eyes closed, recalling the sight and sound and smell of him, conjuring him, it seems, by sheer power of imagination – for he stands suddenly outside the screen door, rapping it with his knuckles.

“Willie?” I murmur. I can't quite trust the reality of this delightful apparition.

“I done my route,” the boy announces, sounding very real indeed. “You got any more soda?”

“I suppose I do.”

Sweatier than before – but no less cheerful – Willie lets himself in and sits down in a charming sprawl of sun-browned arms and legs.

“What about your soda?”

“Maybe later,” he says.

“Later?”

“I'm too hot to drink anything right now.”

“You'll get cramps?” I offer vaguely.

He shrugs. “Somethin' like that.” He kicks off one sneaker, then the other. “That's better,” he smiles, wiggling ten very pink toes.

“Mi cas a es su casa,” I chuckle.

“Say what?”

“It means – roughly, mind you – make yourself comfortable.”

“Thanks,” Willie says, and, taking the Spanish proverb very much to heart, removes his baseball cap and tugs off the sweaty yellow T-shirt. Then he flips the cap back onto his curly head and stands up. “Feels better.”

I pick up my binoculars in a supremely incongruous gesture.

“Gonna watch birds?” the boy inquires. A bead of sweat trickles down his glistening chest. “What kinda birds d'you like best?”

“All kinds.”

“Little ones?”

“Little ones are nice – my favorites, in fact.”

“I figured,” Willie says, roaming about the kitchen. He slides a finger beneath the elastic band of his shorts and pulls in and out, in and out, giving himself air. The kitchen becomes fragrant with his rich, sweaty scent.

Quickly his manipulations produce an unexpected – and wholly delightful – side effect, which he unabashedly notes with a downward glance and wrinkly-nosed grin. In my excitement, I raise the binoculars halfway to my eyes before stopping short.

“I'm still hot,” Willie says, the front of his snug red shorts poking out now in eloquent confirmation.

“Su cas a es mi casa,” I erroneously drone, remembering the proverb's earlier effect, and chanting it as a sort of incantation.

“That means . . .?”

“Make yourself comfortable.”

“Yeah, right,” the boy smiles. He faces me from the middle of the kitchen. “That's what I thought.” He hooks his thumbs into his shorts and peels them down to his knees, then lets them fall to the floor and steps free. “Now I'm raw!” he giggles. He runs his hands slowly up and down his ribs.

“. . . as a jaybird,” I interject in a joyful mixing of our metaphors.

Wearing nothing but his baseball cap, his dimples, and a devilish little grin, Willie saunters across the room and steps in front of me. “You won't need these anymore,” he informs me, and takes the binoculars from around my neck. “You only gotta watch one little bird from now on.”

“I think I can handle that,” I smile.

And – to Willie's husky giggles of delight – I do. . . .

2. Gito

Back woods on a lazy Saturday. Fishing pole, a can of worms, the basso staccato of bullfrogs and the chirring of cicadas from hot sun-speckled weeds.

I lift a branch, brushing aside cobwebs . . . and there he is, where I hoped he would be. Bright orange T-shirt, blue jeans, sneakers. Seated on a log near the creek. The high sun casting his shadow black and stunted at his feet. He turns and faces me with a wild tousle of jet-black curls. Cocoa-brown skin. Eyes dark, squinting in a smile.

“Gito!” I call out, savoring the soft “g” on my tongue. The sharp “t”. Letting my boy's name linger like an agreeable taste…

His teeth flash fine and white.

I step closer. “Hot today.”

The boy nods, wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand, shoos gnats with the other. “Even worse than last week.”

A fish flops somewhere, unseen, with a soft splash. I put down the can of worms and sit on the log as Gito makes room by scooting left into a brighter pool of sun. Beads of sweat sparkle on his slender brown neck as he glances down at his reel, then up again at his line resting slack in the water. With one hand he shields his eyes against the glass-slick glare.

“You're burning up.” I reach out and run my fingers across his slippery neck. He shrugs, bravely. His tongue darts out and licks away a drop of sweat glittering on his top lip.

A breeze teases the black hair curled over his ears.

“I've been waitin' all morning . . .” Voice boyishly husky. He smiles, still peering at the water. “. . . for a bite, I mean.”

A lopsided grin as he casts an impish glance in my direction. Cocoa cheeks dimpled.

A dragonfly thrums between us. Its wings glint silver as it hovers in the sunlight. Gito waves his hand. The dragonfly darts higher, just out of reach, taunting the boy. Then shimmering like a jewel it swoops to the water and hangs above the surface, suspending time…

A woodpecker hammered sharply somewhere deep in the woods as I approached the stream, aware suddenly of an odd noise through the trees: someone's breath, deep and even. Trapper-quiet, I pushed aside a low branch and discovered him turned towards me, straddling a log, glancing now and then at his line but more interested at the moment in his right hand . . . cupped between his legs and sliding easy, slow, round and round. Mouth open. Shoulders hunched forward as his breath quickened . . . then. Still staring down he unfastened his jeans and yanked them underpants and all down his hips. A sharp hiss of breath as his penis sprang up free, eager for the hand grabbing it, pumping it in quick strokes between cocoa-brown legs spreading wider and wider, writhing slowly in delicious anticipation until the boy jerked with a grunt and spent himself in ribbons of pearl spewing onto the green between his feet . . .

I pull a candy bar from the pocket of my shirt. “One week ago today . . .” I smile.

Gito takes the candy. His fingers brush my palm. He grins, tears away the paper, sinks white teeth slowly into chocolate, caramel, coconut going soft and sticky.

“Yeah, I know,” he chuckles. “I was scared maybe you wouldn't come back.” A bit of chocolate glistens at the corner of his mouth. I wipe it away gently with my thumb. His bottom lip is moist; his skin soft, dark as honey.

He bites off another chunk. “That was the neatest birthday I ever had. Glad I came fishin' here that day!”

“We were both lucky . . .”

He pops the last bit of candy into his mouth. Body rocking slightly as he smiles and chews. His hand is smeared brown. I grab it and lick slowly finger by finger, as he watches, giggling. Warm chocolate mingled with boy-sweat, sweet and salty. I take his thumb between my lips. He wiggles it in my mouth, sliding it in slow circles against my tongue. Then he pulls it free and stands up.

“I shoulda worn my shorts!” He peels the soggy orange T-shirt over his head, baring lean brown belly, chest, shoulders all smooth and glazed with sweat. The pungent scent of him hangs in the air. “Sometimes I get really sick of clothes, you know?”

I glance up and down the stream. “Nobody's here . . . Go ahead.”

Gito nods, already unzipping his pants with a soft rasp – then turns and scurries off towards the trees behind us. “But I gotta pee first,” he calls back over his shoulder as he steps beside an oak and stands splashing against its trunk, whistling between his teeth and peering down until, finished, he steps back shirtless into the sun. He makes no attempt to zip up his jeans, which remain agape showing white underpants beneath. His belly is flat, so flat it appears sucked-in, ridged on either side with fine, hard muscle . . . A fly lights on his shoulder and crawls tiny and black down his breast, glistening brown. Gito gazes down, lips parted, chin resting against his chest as the fly circles his little nipple, stops . . . then buzzes away before the boy can grab it with his hand.

“Almost,” I laugh.

Gito looks up, shrugs, steps closer. “I caught one before.” A smile wrinkles his fine little nose. “I think they like the way I smell. 'Cause I get so sweaty.” He gives his face a swipe, then shakes his head and sends perspiration flying in a mist from black hair plastered slick over his ears and neck.

“They have good taste.” I reach out and unbuckle his belt, undo the little copper button at his waist. His jeans flap open loose about his slender hips.

“It's OK, huh?” he wonders.

“Oh, sure!” I nod. “Nobody comes here . . . except us.”

“It's just that it's kinda weird undressin' out in the woods.” A shimmy of his behind sends the pants sagging to his knees. He kicks off his dirty sneakers, tugs the jeans over his feet, throws them across the log.

“Not much left,” he grins.

Looks down at himself, snaps the elastic band of his skimpy white underpants.

“That feels a lot cooler!”

A bit of milkweed seed from somewhere up-breeze floats soft and white as a snowflake near his head and catches in his mane of black curls.

I wave him closer. He turns and sits down beside me on the log. I pluck the bit of fluff from his hair, slide my hand down to stroke the fuzz on his neck.

“I'm sure glad you came back,” he murmurs. My hand roams farther down the sweat-slick skin, between sharp shoulder blades. “I thought maybe you'd forget all about me.”

“No chance! Not my birthday boy.”

“And it's really OK?” More earnest now. “Us . . . messin' around together again, like this?” He shivers as my fingers wriggle slowly into the back of his tight underpants.

“Sure. I think it's terrific.”

He smiles. “Well . . . so do I!”

His shorts bulge slowly at the crotch . . . poking out farther and farther as my fingers tease between his warm buttocks. “I can see that.”

“OK then, here goes!” He lets out a throaty giggle, reaches down, begins playing inside his own underpants, stretching them in and out to the eager rhythm of his pumping hand.

I give the elastic a tug. His hips raise as I drag the white shorts down over brown legs, past the knees, over his bare feet. He leans back against one elbow, every naked inch of him glistening dark with sun and sweat, the sharp muskiness of him stronger now as he spreads his thighs and fondles himself with easy, languorous strokes.

“God, this feels so great!” The marvel of it . . . not quite new – but he's only fourteen and a week. A sudden breeze stirs the glossy black hair curled soft beneath his belly.

Kneeling now in front of him, resting my hands on his thighs . . . a tightening of young flesh . . . lean cords of muscle flexing visibly beneath tawny skin.

“I'd been holdin' back all morning . . . hoping . . .” He grins wider. “wondering . . .” His breath catches. “Come on . . . do it now . . . I'm gonna bust!”

His hips lift with a slow upward squirm as the salt taste cuts sharp on the top of my tongue, the rich sweatiness of him inhaled through damp, tangled hairs . . . then hands coming to my neck, nervous, strong.

“And you gotta come back again . . . next Saturday, and the Saturday after that . . .”

Bright slash of sunlight across copper-smooth belly as he whimpers, jerks half-upright with a gasp and trembles there until his eyes droop shut and he collapses slowly against the log, smiling as if drifting through a dream, thanking me with the last warm spurts against the back of my throat . . .

3. Jeremy's Games

I was late today arriving at the bar, where Bob – my long-suffering friend – awaited me with a pitcher of beer and a weary shake of his head. I had been to the school-yard again (a pilgrim at his shrine) watching the boys playing soccer. One team in lemon; the other in lime. Both of them scampering and darting about the grassy field as vivid in the bright sunlight as a flock of canaries.

But no sooner had I parked my car than the game ended in a flurry of whoops and handclaps and exuberant slapping of young rumps, the milling boys quickly splitting up and going their separate ways. I watched as one of them sauntered in my direction: a husky lad with sturdy hips and strong sloped shoulders rolling slowly as he walked, his hair glowing like burnished copper, now gold, now red, now gold again as he glanced casually this way and that with eyes blue as the June sky brilliant above him.

He stopped very close to me and stood with arms crossed, tapping his sneakered foot, gazing away up the street. A breeze ruffled his hair still glowing a ruddy gold stirring it feathery about his ears and sweaty sunburnt neck. Offhandedly he glanced around and noticed me standing beside him.

“The asshole's late,” he remarked as if I should have been familiar with the asshole in question.

I nodded and smiled, not sure how to respond, gazing at the boy as he turned away again and resumed his impatient vigil with one hip lolled to the side, opposite knee bent, his legs and arms bronzed lustrous with sweat and sun.

“You need a ride?” is what I finally asked.

An eyebrow raised, surprised, supercilious; I was a house pet that had performed a sudden difficult trick. A smile curled his parted lips on one side as his hair caught another breeze and tossed softly, prompting his hand freckled across the back to reach up lazily and brush it away from his eyes.

(I tell Bob at the bar that I've met a boy named Jeremy and never seen eyes so blue or hair so bright like a new penny.

He shrugs. “I'm straight, remember? I don't, in other words, dig guys. Anyway, how old d'you say he is?”

“Fifteen going on sixteen. Next month is his birthday. There's something about him that almost frightens me. An insolent beauty. And, my God, that hair!”

“So you drove him home?” and he sips his beer from a mug frosted almost white leaving a ring of water on the table as it's lifted.

“Yeah. His chauffeur was late. Can you imagine? I've never met anyone before with a chauffeur. So I took him home, across town, nice house with a swimming pool but not as big as I'd expected.”)

I parked outside the front door in the crescent asphalt driveway and watched as Jeremy climbed from the car, the back of his yellow jersey stained with a blade of sweat down the middle, his bare thighs scarlet from pressing on the seat. He slammed the door shut then stooped to peer through the rolled-down window, his eyes squinting, nose slightly wrinkled.

“You want to come inside?”

Of course I did and was out of the car as if ejected. The front door was unlocked because, I discovered upon entering, a Swedish housekeeper roamed within, prowling the premises like a watch dog, greeting me with a silent nod and a smile as we passed her heading upstairs.

“This is my room,” Jeremy informed me over his shoulder. Nodding I gazed around turning myself in a circle, inspecting the bedroom: rather typical really, with bed of course, desk, chairs, wallpaper of Revolutionary soldiers and cannons and sailing ships, a pair of jeans and T-shirts and knee socks all discarded on the floor crumpled smelling of boy.

“So your parents are out of town?” I asked, already knowing they were but nervously needful of making small talk, wondering exactly why I had been invited in, why I was here.

Jeremy nodded and went about his business ducking in and out of the adjacent bathroom. “Yeah, they come and go all the time,” shrugging, disappearing again into the bathroom to turn on the water in the tub which I could then hear splashing splashing as it deepened. “They're at some damned condo in Palm Springs with some assholes they know,” pulling off his shoes, his socks, his jersey. “But I'm glad, man! I like it when they're gone.” His torso was well-muscled and pale, only his arms and neck tanned coppery up to the biceps down to the shoulders, giving him the look of a farmer boy who toils shirted all day beneath the hot sun. He started for the bathroom then turned, recalling suddenly his duty as lord of the manor. “You want a beer or something or some food? Go downstairs and help yourself if you do,” not waiting for my reply, “and don't mind Hilda, she's OK.” Turning quickly he padded barefoot into the bathroom already pulling down his yellow shorts, baring half-moons smooth and cream-white before stepping out of view behind the door.

(”Hilda give you any problem?” Bob asks, chewing his popcorn, reaching for another handful from the basket in the middle of the table.

“No, she's a friendly old bird. Just gave me a smile as I passed her going to and from the kitchen.” I pause, laughing softly. “I didn't even take anything to eat or drink, but I needed to move around and get a hold of myself. That glimpse of Jeremy's behind had me pretty worked up. And I didn't know what the kid had in mind. The way he behaved, taking my presence for granted, even ignoring me altogether at times, had me totally stumped. I'd never met anyone like him before. Never.”)

I could hear Jeremy splashing in the tub when I returned to the bedroom. He heard me open and close the door and beckoned me with a shout to join him in the bathroom, where I found him reclining in the soapy water, his chest flecked with lather, his knees bent glistening above the surface.

“You caught me,” he chuckled grinning, and I noticed that his right arm was moving up and down rocking the water in the tub to its languid rhythm.

I remained near the door staring at the boy as he pleasured himself, evidently for my amusement, his hand and what it held indistinct beneath the cloudy water.

“I didn't know you were coming back so fast,” he lied, still grinning, his hand just visible moving up down up down faster now as he slumped lower in the water, mouth open, eyes nearly shut. And then with a shudder and a sudden startled gasp he ejaculated, the semen coiling white to the surface, floating in milky strands.

Leaving Jeremy sprawled in exhausted bliss I returned to the bedroom and sat at his desk, which was strewn with magazines about cars, baseball, tennis, weight lifting – and girls. I leafed through one, tossed it aside, tried another, then heard the boy rising and stepping from the tub with a great cascading splash. He busied himself behind me, dressing, whistling a vaguely familiar rock tune as I feigned interest in an article about the clean-and-jerk, refusing in a fit of pique to humor him by looking around.

(”The kid was a real tease, hah?”

I nod, but, “Well, not really. He didn't seem to be teasing me so much as . . . well, putting up with me. Or gracing me with an occasional display of his splendor. . . .”

“You're losing me, bud,” Bob says shaking his head, refilling his mug from the sweaty pitcher on the table.

“I know, I know. But you have to understand Jeremy. The young prince of his castle. Arrogant beyond caring about teasing someone as lowly as me, though I was angry at first, I admit. But that was my mistake. I was taking his behavior personally, which was wrong.”

“And when, old buddy, did you realize all this?”

“Later, after he finished dressing, when we went down to the pool.”)

Jeremy was wearing nothing but a pair of denim cutoffs faded powdery blue almost white at the rump as he led me through the living room and sliding glass doors to the swimming pool shimmering faceted like a sapphire beneath afternoon sun. I followed gingerly walking barefoot on the hot cement, tugging at the elastic of the swimming trunks given to me upstairs by Jeremy from his parents' bedroom.

“Let's go!” the boy whooped, breaking into a sprint and diving into the pool slicing the water clean without a splash. He resurfaced near the center with hair slick and dark as amber hanging straight over his ears and forehead. “Come on!” he waved, water flying jeweled from his hand. “Dive in!”

I ventured forward as if striding on broken glass and climbed into the shallow end of the pool, trudging in deeper and deeper until the water lapped against my stomach. Jeremy, ignoring me now, was floating on his back treading lazily with arms outspread, his white belly ridged with muscle poking above the surface. I watched him as I waded aimlessly about splashing at the water with my fingers.

“You don't swim too often, do you?” I called to him from across the pool.

“Hah?” was his reply, turning his head.

“Only your arms and legs are tanned.”

“We just filled the pool last week,” Jeremy said, flinging me this scrap of information with a blasé mumble. Then righting himself in the water he reached beneath the surface with one hand, paddling with the other to keep himself afloat. “This is how I usually swim,” he grinned, his shoulders hunched as he pulled off his shorts and lifted them dripping from the water waving them like a flag. “Dig it, man. Bare-assed is best!”

He side-stroked to the edge of the pool, tossed his wet shorts with a plop onto the cement then propelled himself out twisting in midair and landed gently on his butt. Smiling he sat with water dribbling from his arms, palms flat beside him, head tilted slightly back as he peered from beneath drenched hair nearly covering his eyes.

I waded to the side of the pool and stood next to him hanging on to the edge. “What about Hilda?” I asked trying to keep my gaze from dropping.

“What about her?”

“Well, I mean,” gesturing vaguely, “aren't you afraid she'll see you?”

He chuckled his insolent chuckle and said, “Shoot! Just watch this.” He grabbed his shorts and stood up, still glistening from head to foot, and waved me after him as I climbed from the water. “Come on, I'll show you.”

(“Now wait a minute!” Bob says swallowing as he shakes his head. “This kid sounds more and more like an unbearable little snot all the time, like he needs a good kick in the ass.”

“Probably, yeah, but that's not my problem.”

“So he gives old Hilda a little flash, hah? I can't stand this kid!”And he laughs, still shaking his head, taking another sip of beer.

“It isn't so little, really. I mean he's no stallion, but he is, shall we say, a very healthy boy.”

“Please, old buddy, no details! I get the picture. So what did Hilda do?”)

I followed Jeremy through the glass doors into the living room, watching his buttocks still beaded with water flexing white and plump as he swaggered across the thick carpet. He glanced around, holding the shorts dripping over his crotch like Adam hightailing it out of Eden, waiting for Hilda to stumble unawares into his trap, which she soon did, appearing from the kitchen clutching a broom.

The boy smiled, facing her. “Hey, Hilda, when's dinner going to be ready?”

The old woman pushed back a strand of gray hair and returned his smile. “Same time as always, Jerry, you know that. Six o'clock sharp as it's been for years.”

Jeremy let his hand drop to his side in a gesture as nonchalant as a yawn, leaving himself jaybird-naked in the middle of the room. “I'm awfully hungry tonight,” he said, still flashing a saucy smile and scratching himself below.

“Well, you'll just have to wait!” Hilda scolded fondly with a brief wag of her finger.

The boy glanced down at himself and giggled as if becoming suddenly aware of his own nudity. “You don't mind seeing my bare butt, do you Hilda?”

“Well, I should hope not, after all these years starting with diapers!”

Then, still scratching, “And you don't mind lookin' at my little kuk, do you?” being unduly modest.

“Lord, Jerry,” Hilda laughed, “I've watched you grow from just a tiny little rascal into such a fine young boy, and so handsome, so I should say not!”

This display of his power concluded, Jeremy turned and led me upstairs to his room, his behind working in muscled rhythm before my eyes as we climbed the steps.

“I take it that's Swedish,” I said. “Did you bully those words out of your poor housekeeper?”

“They're the ones you always learn first.” He flopped down on his bed with one leg stretched out straight, the other bent at the knee lolling to the side.

“I'm really wiped out, man,” he sighed. He held one hand behind his head and pawed gently with the other at the hair curled golden around his kuk which stirred now and bobbed at a droopy angle between thighs as white as polished ivory.

“Tired, you mean?” I inquired in a voice enfeebled by the desire clutching at my chest, tightening my throat.

“Sure, tired . . . what else? I played soccer for three hours, man! Boy, am I bushed.” He giggled at this expression, then glanced at me. “Did you see Hilda? She loves my kuk!”

“She's nice,” I said moving closer. “You shouldn't tease her. It's very rude.”

“It's not rude! She loves looking at it. And she likes it even better like this.” And as if to illustrate he started what he'd earlier been busy at in the tub.

“I gotta do it again!” he said, and then stroking slowly he dismissed me with a flip of his head: “You can go.”

But I'd had enough. I pulled off my loaner trunks and stepped toward him shaking my head. “I can't go yet.”

He looked at me, a captain eyeing a mutinous member of his crew. “It's OK,” he nodded, not quite understanding, “you can go now,” then continued staring as I stepped beside him and grabbed his wrists playing his game now. “Hey, what're you doing?”

“You have to thank me first,” is all I said, flipping him with my greater strength onto this stomach and holding his arms behind his back pulling until he raised his butt to my entry, squirming as I pushed slowly, slowly shoving deeper, leaning forward resting my cheek against Jeremy's sweaty back, hearing the thump of his heart, the rasp of his breath, then giving up the battle against postponement, letting go in the stroke and counter-stroke until, for Jeremy as well as for me, it was over. Collapsing with a whimper I released the boy's wrists and lay panting on top of him, then pulled free and rose to my knees rolling him into his back reaching down to touch what glistened white on his belly…

(”Well, Bob sighs with a shrug, “you shouldn't have done that, old buddy! You can get your tail tossed into jail real fast messin' around with kids that young.”

“I know, I know . . .”

“Especially when they don't want it!”

“Well, that's what I thought . . . at first.”

“You mean good old Jeremy wasn't mad?”

“On the contrary,” I say, swirling the foam in my glass. “He seemed delighted to have someone telling him what to do for a change. Positively thrilled. In fact, he has another soccer game tomorrow, and he wants me to come.” I took a sip, then set my glass down and smiled. “I pick him up at noon . . .”)

Lonely Roamer & Foolish Child
by Louis A. Colantuono

I first talked to Jerry when he was a fifth grade student in my daughter's class. He just stood close to me at the Valentine's Day party, letting me fill his punch cup over and over again.

I am room parent; for the party I'd brought all the goodies – the heart-shaped boxes filled with little heart candies that have loving things written on them; punch, cookies, chocolate kisses, cupcakes, and the big heart-shaped cake I got from the bakery. This is just part of the job of room parent – the nice part of the job is serving it all to the children who smile sweetly with their sincere thank-you's, their eyes gleaming with instant love.

Jerry walked away for a moment, giving my pouring arm a brief respite. In no time at all he was back.

“Mr. Colantuono,” – a cute smile that said lots more than my name – “this is for you.”

It was one of those Valentine cards that say nothing and yet when you get them from the right person they say everything at the same time.

Blue, blue intense eyes staring with open innocence, showing his affection: Jerry had done this same thing to me at the Halloween and Christmas parties – but I'd had nothing but longing looks from him then, and no matter where I looked there he was staring at me.

He was a rough-featured but good-looking boy. I had to put him out of my mind because his constant staring was beginning to affect the front of my pants. So I wasn't unhappy when one of the girls came over to talk to me. “Mr. C.,” she said, “I, on behalf of our class, wish to thank you for this lovely Valentine's Day party. We are very glad that Di has a parent like you.”

“Thank you, everybody,” I said. “You know how much joy all these special days bring me.” My eyes met Jerry's eyes. I stammered a little. “It really is my pleasure to be here.”

My daughter made a face at me as usual. She hates me to come to her class, even though I'm all they can get for room parent. When the party was over and the children had run out of the classroom with their little party treasures, I kept her back to help clean up the mess. Jerry stayed too.

“Dad,” Di said sarcastically, “Jerry said he was going to give you a Valentine's card.”

“And he did.” I took it out of my sweaty shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Isn't it a nice little card?”

“Huh. It says he loves you.”

“Hell, I'm glad somebody does. I know you don't love me, because you think I steal all of your friends.”

“That's right, you do. Every time I have my friends over and you're home they end up visiting you and not me.” She put her hands on her hips and scolded me just like grown-up women do in the soap operas. “I sure wish you would stop playing sick and go back to work.”

I wasn't playing sick. I'd had a jumper jump into my truck off a freeway overpass and he'd died. I'd been having nightmares and stomach problems ever since. I was only doing 55 but it was heavy Sunday traffic and I couldn't swerve or even try to stop my 36-ton five-axle truck.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll go to work again and then when you need me in all your little projects I won't be here, that's all. I was only going to take off until next fall when you get into junior high.”

“Sure you were! You've just got lazy not working your truck.”

The next day I started to clean up the shop and get my truck back in working order. It was a baby-blue Freightliner I called 'Daddy's Playhouse'. It had taken me two years to build it, custom right down to a chromed frame and chrome rear ends. It had an eight-foot square sleeper (sacrificed payload for playload) and a lot of other custom things, like TV and video-cassette player, a couple of eight-track stereos, a mini-reefer refrigerator. For the work I hired a helper. He was one of my lover-boys and his name was Jimmy. My wife complained about me starting my driving too soon. I ignored her.

“Jimmy,” I said, hiding out from the women in my own greasy sanctuary, “I'll need a kid to take care of the yard and stuff when I'm on the road.”

“Hire my brother. He's 12 but big for his age, and he works hard.”

“Didn't know you had a brother.”

“Well, Jerry knows you. He even gave you a Valentine's card.”

My knees just about buckled under me from the shock. I'd been making it with Jimmy for a long time – recently just on the side now and then because he is a girl-chasing closet case. If something goes wrong Jimmy runs to me to hug and kiss him and 'treat him like a girl'.

Jimmy made me sit down. He ran to the house to get my pills. My wife came out.

“You're two hours late taking your medicine, Louie,” she reminded me. “I don't think you should drive your truck alone.”

“I won't. Jimmy will go with me and his brother Jerry will take care of things like run your errands and cut the grass.”

She went into the house happy. I stayed in the chair.

Jimmy smiled at me – his smile of expectation. He knew he'd get a workout in more ways than just loading and unloading my truck.

“Now look, Jimmy, you'll have to work. I won't tolerate drinking in my truck. If just one beer can is found by the fuzz on the floor of that cab, I could lose my I.C.C. status – and I don't even drink.”

“I promise, I promise. I've quit drinking anyway.”

“I know – 'cause you can't afford to buy any more!”

It took us a week of hard work to get my rig ready for the road. I could only do it a few hours at a time, then I had to rest. Jimmy and Jerry changed the oil and put in new oil filters; Jerry cut the lawn and cleaned up leaves until Jimmy needed his help with the truck again.

I was resting one day and playing around with my citizens' band radio base beside my bed.

“Yeah,” The Copper Head was saying, “So you're gonna truck out again the first of the week, huh Roamer? I'll warn everyone you're back on the road. 'Specially them freckle-faced boys. A-four.”

“You got it,” I came back. I get a lot of teasing about my morals, but no one pays any attention to it, like it's all one big joke.

The big Super Cummings twin-turbo 550 h.p. diesel started without one bit of trouble. I sat there in the cab, letting it build up air pressure to check out the hoses for leaks. They were all fine.

“Come on, boys,” I told Jimmy and Jerry, “Let's go get the trailer. That's next.”

We pulled out onto the road. Jimmy sat on the right-hand seat. He kept trying to get Jerry onto his lap and Jerry kept pulling away: he wanted to stay on the engine-cover out of his brother's reach.

“Leave Jerry alone,” I said. “You're distracting my driving. Besides that, you're upsetting my tummy. If you behave, Jimmy, I'll let you sit on my lap again.”

Jerry laughed. Jimmy is over six feet tall. I'm five foot four – and Jerry is five foot four, too. “I'll sit on your lap,” Jerry said, “or anyways beside you.” And he ran around behind and squeezed himself onto my seat while Jimmy gave me a look that could kill.

All we had to do to the trailer was add a little air to three of the eight tires. When we got it home Jimmy went to work greasing it. We had the freon checked in the refrigeration unit: it was good.

That Sunday night I pulled out with the other trucks. Jimmy didn't mind riding with me. He talked on the C.B. for a long time to Tommy, who was one of my other little loves and still had his room in our house, who grew up and became a trucker himself, had a girl friend or six and was still loving to me if he and I were home at the same time (if not, I don't see him for weeks at a time). Seems I'm always raising my loves to leave me for other more interesting interests.

“How about a break on the I-9 for that Lonely Roamer. This is The Long Hauler looking.”

“Go ahead, Long Hauler,” I said.

“God, Dad, they said you was mobile again. That true?”

“It's true, old son,” I told him affectionately. “Thanks for the phone call. We're on the side.”

The first week went quickly, and well, but by the end of the second Jimmy started getting hard to handle. He had more money than he knew what to do with. He wanted to see his friends, buy them a beer and just be wild. I decided to take my finger off of him and let him have a night of fun. That was a mistake.

The phone rang at 4 in the morning. Jimmy'd got busted driving his friend's car drunk. He would have to appear in court Monday and I had to pull out Sunday night. It was only three weeks until school was out. I talked Di into going on one trip with me.

She hated the truck, hated the trip and hated the idea that I slept raw with her in the same sleeper cab.

“You're just nasty,” she told me. “You run around the house naked and you even sleep in this truck naked.” This started another argument between us. I tried to explain – her mother'd even tried to explain – that I was a nudist and didn't think of naked bodies as anything but natural and sexily beautiful to look at.

She wouldn't be convinced. She ranted and raved about my immodest behavior. Naked in my own peek-proof truck!

“Listen Di, I don't demand that you do anything but wash dishes for your mother. What I do is my affair. If I run around the house naked or sleep in my truck naked you can look the other way, it's your business.”

That ended the matter, but it did get me at odds with my wife when we got home. After all this I was ready to have another live-in lover. I went off to my room and picked up the phone and dialed The Phantom.

“Hello, you big hunk of man,” I said. “I need to find me a swapper for the next couple of months. Do you know of any I can trust with me and my new truck?”

“Not really, Roamer. I'll let Eddy ride with you for a week until you find one. I heard you're still sick and driving.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “I got chased out of the house for being lazy.”

“Whoever told you that, old Dad, had their head in their butt. I saw you pulled over on Five last week. You're still on malts, huh?”

“Yes. About five a day. I'll be down to get Eddy, then.”

“No, Lou,” Eddy broke in on their extension, “you rest up. My dad'll bring me to you.”

They were there in a couple of hours.

“I thought you had that tall Jim fellow swapping for you,” Eddy said. “Where is he now?”

“He got caught drunk driving. That means he'll never get a truck license.”

“Wow,” said The Phantom. “With all of the things you did for him, too. That is a shame.”

It was too – and I hadn't seen Jerry since his brother'd been picked up.

I spent the next nine days in sexual bliss, as I always did when Eddy rode with me. Four years ago Eddy had been just one big problem. I'd met them when his father's truck broke down in New York state. The Phantom stayed behind to get it fixed but I took Eddy with me back to California. He was mean and hateful then, and he'd just been expelled from school. But I didn't have trouble making friends with the boy – and after that he didn't actually seduce me – he raped me instead!

Later his father caught him having it off with another kid. Eddy called me. I drove down to the valley where they lived and rescued him from punishment. From then on sex was something The Phantom just left up to his son, and from then on things started going right for Eddy. He'd been riding with me on and off ever since.

At the end of those happy nine days Eddy had to return home – and I needed my neighborhood swapper back. I picked up the phone.

“Hello, is Jimmy there?” I asked his mother. “This is me, Louie.”

“No. Is it anything Jerry can do for you instead?”

“I have a trip to San Francisco in a couple of hours and I wanted Jimmy to come along and do his job.”

“Huh. Jimmy!” She sounded disgusted. “I wash my hands of that boy. He told me you were a queer, then he said you were doing things with Jerry and he said if you called to say he quit . . . I don't believe a word he told me. If you want to take Jerry then you can come right over here and pick him up, Louie.”

“Thanks. Jimmy's right: I am queer. But I was only queer with Jimmy. I haven't touched Jerry.”

“You can still come over and get Jerry,” she said. “I trust you, Louie. You have done a lot for my children, or tried to.” She paused. “Besides, Jerry is old enough to say no when he wants to.”

She hung up. I had to phone her back to tell her to leave Jerry asleep: I would carry him out to my truck and he would wake up in it in the morning.

So I drove over and got a permission letter from his mother and brought out a big brown paper bag with Jerry's things in it to the truck, and, finally, the sleeping boy himself. I tucked him sound asleep into the sleeper cab. Then I roared off into the night.

The only way you can survive as an independent is to break the 55 mile-an-hour speed laws all to hell – and keep a sharp lookout for the Smokeys. It takes just as much fuel per mile to drive 55 in 10th gear as it does 70 in 13th, and the time you save is your profit. To compete with the companies you have to cover a thousand plus miles a day on a long haul.

For four hours I barreled along the freeways, then, when the sun came up, slowed down to sixty. Now Jerry woke up, thoroughly befuddled at the way his bed was bouncing around beneath him.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” I yelled. I was looking at him in my rear-view 'peekie' mirror I'd installed just to watch my lover boys play when I had more than one of them riding with me. “Who kissed you awake?”

“Where are we? I thought I was dreaming.”

“Almost into San Jose, hon. Maybe you really were dreaming. I phoned up to get Jimmy, 'and your mother let me take you instead.”

“Really?” He was coming alive, now. “Even after Jimmy told all those lies on me and said you and me was having sex? After he told Mother you were a queer?”

“Your mother said you were twelve years old and if you didn't know how to say no to something now you never would – or you'd better learn. I think she trusts you to do your own thing.”

He was hard and he slipped it out of his shorts and started rubbing it, showing off for me in the mirror. It wasn't a very big thing to show off yet, but it was nice and cute and he was real proud of it, and if I'm a size queen it's the other way around.

“Do you see this, Louie?” Jerry yelled over the roar of the motor working to climb a hill. “I am doing my own thing.” He laughed and so did I.

I reached back to playfully slap his hands and slip his unders back up to cover himself, but he rolled away from me, then got on his knees out of my reach and flag-waved.

“You know, Jimmy had no right calling you a queer,” Jerry shouted. “He's the one's that queer. I have to go to the bathroom. How do I do it?”

I showed him how to get to the little toilet behind the passenger's seat. I told him he would have to sit, because of all the bouncing of the cab.

“Hey, I got a pointer, not a sitter, to pee with. What do you think I am, a girl?”

I asked him why he'd taken his underwear off.

He looked a bit sheepish. “Uh, I think I had a wet dream. Did you ever have a wet dream, Louie?”

“Yeah, I sure did. I had to help it every stroke of the way, too.”

Jerry dived across the cab at me, completely naked and smelling of sleep. “You're nasty. Di is right, you're just plain nasty,” he giggled.

I caught him under the arms and sat him on the seat with me. I had to reach both hands around him to work my two shifting sticks. When I brought my left hand back to the wheel my sleeve brushed Jerry's hard, although I didn't know it at the time.

“Louie, what did you do that for?” he asked me.

“Do what for, hon? You mean shift the truck?”

“No, when you shifted me on the way back from shifting the truck.” He looked up into my face and smiled with complete and happy trust. He really was in a good humor for just having waked up.

“Well, let me shift it right next time.”

He arched up to push himself out. “That's to give you a bigger shifter. Otherwise you can only get two fingertips on me.”

I had to shift the rig again. When I went to pull my hand back Jerry grabbed it and put it on his own lever. “Now, shift me, too.”

He smiled when I shifted him.

“Do you know, I really love you a lot, Louie.” He looked back at me with his big blue eyes. “I think I have loved you ever since I was eleven.”

“That's pretty serious, hon.”

“I'm a pretty serious person when it comes to who I want to love,” he said very evenly. “Jimmy forced me to do things with him, and with his friends, too. I know you don't force anyone. I talked to Tommy.”

“What did Tommy tell you?”

“That if you're worth his love then you're worth my love, too.”

A station-wagon passed full of kids pulling their arms up and down to get me to give them a blast on the big air horn. I grabbed the blue horn wire and gave them a four- trumpet toot. They jumped on their seats and laughed and waved at us. That's one thing I love about running these highways: sending love from a simple thing like a toot of my big horns, or the nine musical ones mounted like a horseshoe on the back of my cab. I gave the kids a short tune.

“How'd you do that?” Jerry asked, looking at the buttons.

“By pressing these.” And I played the first bit of Way Down Upon the Swanee River.

“That's cool!”

“Heck, Jerry, you just don't have any idea how horny I can get.”

“How horny can you get?” Jerry asked quite seriously.

“Well, now, let's see how horny I can get.” I honked the city horn, then blasted the air horns, a door bell and a set of chimes. I stepped on a plunger that activated my illegal Bermuda Bell, too. “That horny enough for you?” I asked when I was all though.

“No. You forgot to ding my dong.”

I checked the mirrors. It was clear of the Bears so I let Jerry try the musical horns.

The C.B. speakers burst into life. “You sound a little out of tune today, Roamer.” It was a woman's voice. “Or are you just out of practice from being out of commission for so long, Lou?”

I fishtailed the trailer so I could see who was on my donkey. It was the two-tone blue Ford C.L. Nine-thousand that belonged to the Boobie Sisters.

“Negatory lady. I have a child here wants to know everything on this truck and how to drive it, too.”

“Does that child have a handle, Roamer?”

“Affirmative, lady trucker. Most of the boys I know got 'em built-in. A big ten-four. But he don't got no C.B. Handle yet, lady.”

“Well, you sure helped me give him one. You tell that child if he's foolish enough to drive with you, he is a very foolish child. That's a good handle for him – Lonely Roamer and Foolish Child. What is your little friend's name?”

“Jerry, his name's Jerry.” Then I turned to Jerry to ask, “That handle won't make you mad will it hon?”

“No, it won't,” Jerry smiled. “Does Di have a C.B. handle too?”

“Yeah. She's the Cloud Princess, because she fancies herself some kind of debutante, a beautiful debutante.”

Jerry didn't know what a debutante was but he did guess the handle meant Di was stuck on herself. I tossed him my bag of M & M candies, then I told him to get his clothes on because we would stop here for his eaties and my malt.

“Hey!” I said into the mike, “are you Boobie Sisters going to spring for the eats?”

“We had to change our handles from Big Boobs and Little Boobs to Biggie and Smaller, Lou,” Smaller said. “We got censored by the moralists that won't let a couple of dyke sisters tell the world that Biggie's got 'em big and I'm flat as a flap-jack. A-four.”

“A-four, Smaller. They can't talk our talk or do our thing, but they sure got their long noses in our business.”

“Affirmative. They should learn to live up to their own morals before they can say anyone else's are wrong.”

Now Biggie wheeled her rig around me, because I was still in the rocking chair watching the beautiful boy that loved me tugging on his clothes.

“Hey, Jerry, where are your unders?”

“I left them off for fast undresses. When we come back from eating I want to be naked in the sleeper again. That's if it's alright with you.”

“Sure hon. This is a liberated truck. You do whatever turns you on.”

Jerry struggled into his pants, then looked out my little smoked glass bubble heart-shaped interlocked windows. Then he turned on the TV set. Then the eight-track. This was the first time he'd been back in the sleeper awake and he had' to see if everything worked.

“A truck with a bathroom, TV, two eight tracks with dirty tapes,” he said in my ear from over my shoulder. “This truck is class!”

In Oakland we went to the bulk mail house. There I dropped my trailer and pulled the tractor out to the waiting line. It would be half a day wait until they got the magazines out.

“What do we do now, Louie?”

“We get to sack out until two. I'm going to undress and get in the sleeper.”

“Don't you shut off the motor?”

“No, hon. The air cooler shuts down with the motor – it'd get awful hot in here.”

As soon as I had my clothes off and was lying on the bed Jerry dived into my arms and started hugging and cuddling me.

“I love you,” I told him between kisses. “I don't know why anyone should love someone as funny looking as you are. But I love you anyway.”

He nestled himself deeper into my arms, his smile showing me he knew I was teasing him about being funny looking. “Louie, no one's ever said they loved me before. What they always have done to me before is throw me face down on the bed, do me fast and then forget I'm even there.”

“Jerry,” I told him, with more kisses, “I will never forget you're there.”

I woke up later, my alarm clock ringing fiercely in the cab, blond sweet-smelling head on my shoulder, light breath on my cheek. I carefully untangled myself from the sleeping boy, pulled on my pants, shoes and then went to get the trailer.

I'd been on the road for a good hour when I felt hands come around the seat from behind me.

“Hello, Daddy,” Jerry whispered into my ear. “I love you so much.” Then, annoyed, “Why didn't you wake me when you hooked up the unit? That's naughty. That's why I'm here – to help you.”

He meant every word. He came around the seat. Pulling his naked bottom onto my left knee, I brought the truck, which had wandered a bit, back into the center of the lane, then kissed him. “I just wanted you to sleep, hon. If there was really anything to do, I would of woke you. Hell, a man should never be asked to go any place without his lover-boy.”

Jerry smiled at me. He liked that. “How about if his lover-boy thinks he's a girl, like Jimmy does? Then should he go every place with the man, too?”

I didn't quite understand his question, but there was one matter I wanted to settle right then. “Jerry, you're not a girl. You're all funny-looking, rugged little boy.”

“I'm not little,” Jerry said. “I'm as big as you are, only you're fatter.”

We were laughing, driving down the super slab at a flat seventy, tickling and horsing around on the same seat, when I spotted a cop up the down side of the on-ramp.

“Quick, get in the sleeper and put on some clothes!” I told him, pushing him off my lap while I tried to slow to sixty without leaving a tell-tail puff of smoke. “Hurry son. That Bear is on the roll.”

The cop and I hit the foot of the ramp at the same time. I was just slowed to a hair under sixty. I hit the blinkers and cut out one lane with a courtesy flash of my headlights to let him in front of me.

Now my truck blocked the view of the cop's car completely from the traffic coming up behind me. Along came an XKE Jaguar slamming by us at seventy. The cop car lit up like a Christmas tree and off he went. I got out into the next lane, staying at my under-sixty, then passed them as the cop pulled the XKE over.

“Gosh Daddy, how'd you do that?”

“Takes practice, hon,” I teased. “But what's with this Daddy thing?”

“Don't you like being called Daddy?”

“I love it,” I smiled. “I just don't have too many of my lover-boys calling me Daddy. They tell other people I am their dad; that explains any show of affection that's seen between us.”

“But I'm practicing,” Jerry cut in. “I want to stay with you forever.”

“Forever is a long time. You're twelve. You are going to grow up and find new interests. Forever could end tomorrow for us.”

“No!” Jerry was upset. “It can't!” He looked at me eye to eye, and to do so he pulled off my Suncensor sunglasses.

I grabbed them back. “Hey, don't you ever do that again. I can't see without these things.”

“I don't care! It just can't end. . . . ever.”

I kissed him, and slipped my shades back on, and told him that he was getting upset over nothing. We would live one day at a time and we would love each other one day at a time, too. He finally agreed that we would love one day at a time, forever.

When we got home Tommy's truck was in the yard. And I'd almost forgot about the class party for Di and Jerry at the end of the year. Tommy hadn't. “What do you think we should get as a nicie?” he asked.

I went on with ideas I suddenly had – frisbies and a new fishing game with blind-folds I'd been mulling over. By now we were in my bedroom. “I forget, Dad, you're a perpetual child,” Tommy said. He was teasing, but I could see by the way his green eyes got brighter (they always did when he was serious) that he meant it, too.

“That's right. When you're as old as me I will still only be as old as Jerry.”

Tommy lay on the bed kissing me, a big husky boy, now, a half-foot taller than me, until Di came in without knocking.

“Oh,” she said, very judgmentally, “why are you gaying off with Tommy? I thought you would be trying to gay off with Jerry – since he loves you so much.” She slammed the door with no chance to get a reply.

When Jerry came back he jumped on the bed, all wiggling and excited.

“Daddy,” he asked sweetly, “can I spend the night?”

“Sure. If your mother says it's alright, it's alright.”

Jerry spent the night. And we had a lovely party at school for his class. I also got a small sample of Di's thoughts:

“Yes, Julie, Jerry spent the night in Tommy's room. Uggie. I hate Jerry.” She hated all of my boys. She hated everybody but herself. This wouldn't have been, except that I didn't have her for the first seven years of her life, before I married her mother.

Jerry spent every night at my house. He went home every day to pick up a little bag full of clothes, then he took over the other twin bed in Tommy's room, along with half of Tommy's dresser.

“Daddy,” Tommy told me when he got back from a trip to Arizona, “did you know that Jerry is moving in a pair of sox and a T-shirt at a time?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” I told Tommy. “Have you ever seen me tell anyone what to do? Besides, have you ever seen anyone do what I tell them to do?”

“No!” Tommy laughed and tackled me and we fell on the bed and he kissed me like it was going out of style.

Jerry woke me up the next morning by snuggling into my tummy. “What would you like to do with me today?” I asked him.

“Nothing. I want you to do things with me today.”

He pulled me out of bed, helped me get dressed. Then we went fishing in the San Gabriel Wilderness. And we stayed out later than we should, so I phoned my wife. “Did you forget you have to make a run to New York tomorrow night?”

“I thought Tommy was going to take that.”

“Tommy left this morning for Portland.”

“New York!” Jerry had been listening. “Can I go to New York with you, Daddy?”

“Hon, will you phone up Jerry's mother and ask her if Jerry can go along?”

“I already did that. She just said Jerry lives with us now, it's okay. There your boy's honey. I don't know how you do it, but what can I say?”

I hung up before the complaints started. Yes, my wife knows about my attraction to boys. She should. I married her the day I got off parole. She got told about me by my parole officer, my prison psychologist and the Department of Corrections therapist. We have a good understanding. I collect my boys and she tries to discourage them from having relationships with me, but not very successfully. This is a little different, but it's worked out for both of us. She takes care of the house and the bills. I take care of making the money, and making it with my loves.

That night Jerry crawled in bed with me. My wife came in. She asked him to sleep in his own bed. The hurt look Jerry gave me made me defend what we were doing. She shrugged and walked out.

“She's funny,” Jerry said. “Here we are laying here with both our poles in the air and she didn't even act like she noticed.”

“She noticed, but she won't talk about it.” We fell asleep cuddled together.

At four the next afternoon the trailer was ready at the yard, loaded with 24 tons of Oxnard strawberries. Chuck had done that for me and now he was standing in the kitchen while I made him some coffee and started a grilled cheese for Jerry's snack. Chuck wanted to talk.

Chuck is my little run-away. He was the first boy I found when I got out of prison to love me. He loved me for nine years. Darn, I thought, while I told him to talk away, how the years passed! He'd been 13 back in '73 when I found him starving on the side of the road. He'd had the room Tommy later got, and where Tommy now felt he was being crowded out by Jerry a sock and a T-shirt at a time.

“Louie . . .” Chuck wouldn't call me Daddy any more, except on the C.B. Or in private. “I'm going back to Oklahoma. My brother wants me to help him start his own trucking company.”

“Great.” I tried not to let the sadness be heard in my voice. “What can I do to help you, hon?”

He wouldn't come right out and ask. I knew what was on his mind because he loved my old rig, the one we used before I'd saved enough to buy 'Daddy's Playhouse', and still used when my own rig was up for repairs. He loved that old truck more than he'd loved me in the past few years – and he'd loved me a lot.

“Well,” Chuck said, “I was thinking . . .”

“You were thinking of your rig.”

“Yeah. I was.” He grinned sheepishly. “I want to buy it from you. I already found out what it's worth.”

I got up from the table, where Chuck was swirling the coffee in his cup around in circles, and went to the stove, because the grilled cheese needed turning and I could feel my eyes were already starting to leak a few tears. You get used to someone in your life, and then he tells you he's going to move a thousand miles away and wants you to help him do it.

“You just take your old rig,” I told him. “I want a third of your net.”

Chuck jumped up and hugged me and kissed me. “Where do you want the trailer? I have it dropped in the field back of my place, now.”

“You better take that trailer, too,” I told him. “It is matched with the truck.” A tear snuck out and rolled down my cheek. I didn't have my Suncensors on and he saw it.

“Oh, don't cry, Daddy!” He squeezed me tight. “I'll always love you. Besides, I'll see you on the road.” Now we even had Jerry crying, and the two of them had never even seen each other before. “If you're Daddy's new love,” he told Jerry, “take care of him.” Then Chuck let me go and rushed out of the room, before one of us changed our minds.

“Poor Daddy,” Jerry said, running to me with his mouth half full grilled cheese. “Don't get upset or you'll throw up again.” He was right. I did.

I decided to drive the southern route through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. It was hotter but a bit shorter.

“Maybe I should have talked Chuck into taking this rig,” I told Jerry, who was sitting beside me as we pulled up into the pass beyond San Bernardino. “Then I could have traded his in and customized another for me.”

“He wouldn't of went for that, Daddy. He got his truck and he wants to make his own life.”

“How old are you anyway?” I teased him. “Who said he would not want me to help him?”

“He did. You weren't listening. I'm here to help you listen.”

Now we were out of L.A. smog and into the desert. We sped with the sun going down behind us. I figured to drive the worst of the hot spots at night, not wanting to blow the tires to shreds from the heat of the road at noon.

Jerry sat on my lap talking into the C.B. “You got the Foolish Child in the playhouse here.”

“Yeah,” came an unrecognizable voice over the speakers. “Be a beaver driver, ma'am?”

“N . . . o,” Jerry stammered, stuck for words.

“Tell him you're a beaver with a kick stand, hon.”

“I am a beaver with a kick stand,” Jerry said into the mike.

“You sure the hell must fall over a lot.”

I took over. “Come back to the Lonely Roamer on your smart remarks there, son. My little friend here is all boy and he has enough of a kick stand to park you with.”

“Hell, I'm sorry Roamer. This be The Dirty Old Man out of Needles. It's been a long time since you were motoring on this one. So how are you, Tommy?”

“He's not Tommy. He's Jerry, one of my younger sons.”

“Damn, Roamer,” he laughed, “how many rug rats ya got anyway?”

“I'll never tell. How many do you know about?”

“Let's see. There's that Indian boy, the Marlboro kid, that darling little blonde girl, Tommy, Jerry you said is this one's name. There's that boy Robin. I guess I met about eight of your children altogether.”

“You forgot me,” a familiar voice broke in on the C.B. “Eddy The Phantom's son.” He laughed. “Hello, Daddy Lou.” Another laugh. “Gosh, I was so excited when I heard you talking just now. How is your stomach?”

We chatted for a while. I talked and kissed with Jerry, and then I accidentally ran over a rattlesnake. I looked in the rear views. I could not see the damn thing behind us. I would be very careful getting out at Ehrenberg: that's the pay-through point between Arizona and California.

I kept a sharper watch on the road, hoping the dumb snake would drop off, but it wouldn't, and it was getting dark, now. I hoped Jerry wasn't a snake phobic like me. I'm even afraid of dead ones, forget the possibility of a live one hanging under my truck.

“Jerry, hon, did you see that big rattler that we passed over?”

“Yeah,” he answered with his eyes as big as pies. Oh hell, he was a phobic. “What about it, Daddy. It can't get us in here.”

I picked up the mike. “Hey, Phantom, I may have a live one under my rig. Are you going through at Ehrenberg?”

“I sure am, Louie. Me and Ed'll take care of it for you.”

“Can it get in here, Daddy,” Jerry asked. “If it's under the truck, can it crawl up into this part with us?”

“No. I have all new shifter boots that he can't get through.” Jerry felt better, but I was keeping my eye on the vents and boots just in case.

In Ehrenberg Eddy and The Phantom flagged me over. They had three other trucks jackknifed around so their headlights would shine up underneath the chassis of the trailer and truck.

“There it is, Dad.” Eddy had spotted it first. “It's all wrapped around the front axle, and it looks plenty dead.”

I coaxed Jerry out of the cab. I didn't want to sit in there looking too sissyish, nor did I want my lover-boy to look as bad. The way Jerry clung to me with fright made me look pretty brave.

Eddy joined us in the scales rest room. He kissed and hugged me, then he washed up, then he kissed and hugged Jerry. They seemed to like each other immediately. While The Phantom and I did our paperwork with the Customs the two boys went back to the truck, to talk about me, I figured. I let my boys have their secrets, but I try and never have any secrets from my boys.

When I got back to the truck they were in the sleeper with the modesty curtain drawn giggling and laughing, and it sounded so much fun I was tempted to peek. But then The Phantom came and sat on the other seat. He brought me a soft drink.

“You can lead out, Louie,” he said. “I guess I'll be right on your taillights. Those two are playing 'show me' back there.” He had peaked through the curtain at them. “I turn off in Amarillo where I'm going to nap for a few hours.” In other words, I had to get Eddy back to him in Amarillo, and if I wanted to, or had the time, I could enjoy a little three-way loving.

It was still about a hundred out in that hot Arizona night – and back in the sleeper it sounded as though Eddy and Jerry had worked the temperature up to twice that as I pulled out onto the highway. About a half hour later the boys slid the curtains aside. They both lay on their elbows half out of the sleeper into the dog house to talk to me.

I was just climbing up the big hill east of the Colorado River when my headlights picked up a pair of white pants that looked like they were walking along alone.

“What the hell,” I said to the boys. “Why would anyone in their right mind be out here in the middle of the night?”

I pulled over, a little angry at having to stop on an up- hill, rolled down the window and shouted at the white pants, “Where the hell you from, fella?” The white pants turned out to belong to a wide-eyed boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen. “Get in. Don't you know better than to be out here hitching in a hundred and two degrees with a big full moon out?”

“No, sir,” he said. From his talk we could tell he was from the Deep South. “I just sat for hours back there at that police place and I finally figured I would not of gotten nowhere if I didn't walk.”

I glanced in the rear view as we started off again up the hill. The boys' eyes were dancing with suppressed laughter.

“Why did you say I shouldn't be out here in this heat?” the southern boy asked.

“Because of the night-hunting predators. What would you have done if you'd walked into a big diamond-back laying on the side of the road?”

“I would of screamed so loud the whole world would of heard me.” Jerry and Eddy couldn't repress their laughter any longer. “And I mean scream, too.”

“Are you a queer?” Jerry asked.

“No.” The southern boy turned around and looked at the two kids in the sleeper. “The word is gay. And, yes, I'm gay.”

“Good,” Jerry said. “Now Daddy's got someone to blow on him to keep him awake. Come on, Eddy, let's go back to bed.” They zipped up the curtain.

The southern boy looked at me real hard, little wrinkles of perplexity rippling his forehead. “My name's Jeffrey,” he said at last. “I'm on my way home to Georgia.”

“What puts you but here afoot, son?”

“I had a misfortune. I was picked up 'n offered a ride and a date, but my ride beat me up 'n robbed me.”

I turned on the intercom to the sleeper. I asked Eddy where his dad was going. Florida was the answer. “Yes, Daddy Lou, we'll take him to Florida. I can always use someone to play with me, too.”

Jeff laughed. “I think you're a little young for me. I like men, older men.”

They teased each other back and forth over the intercom, and then they teased him into lying down over the engine cover to feel me.

“You're hard,” he said. And by way of thanks for the ride he did a nice mouth number on me which the boys in the sleeper unzipped the curtain again to watch. Then I let Jeff climb back there and told my two lover-boys to leave him alone because he was really tired.

The sun came up, right into my eyes, as we came up the Salt River Valley towards Phoenix. I woke the three boys up to get breakfast at a truck stop in Buckeye. I had to smile watching Jeff dress – the boys, had told him he couldn't sleep in there with them unless he was naked. Jerry told me in the rest room that Jeff didn't wear any unders and that he smelled like a girl.

“Jeff is a queen,” I told the boys. “He is very girlish, he is happy with himself and he is very well-adjusted. In other words, he knows what he wants to be, and is.”

We went back to the counter where Jeff and The Phantom were getting to know each other.

“I think you better let Jeff sleep in your truck until I give you Eddy back in Amarillo,” I said to The Phantom. “Eddy's been hitting on him all night.”

“Sure, Lou. Be glad to.” I knew Eddy's dad wouldn't especially go for the 'sissy-boy', as Jerry had called him, but there aren't too many truckers I know who would turn down what is offered in that bouncing and sometimes boring cab of the rig.

Then in through the door came the Boobie Sisters.

“Hello, Roamer, Foolish Child, Eddy, Phantom and . . .”

“Jeffrey.”

“Jeffrey. Which one of you's got our sister load to New York?”

“What you hauling?”

“Oxnard strawberries.”

“Then you get to follow me,” I said.

“No, Roamer,” Biggie said. “You're going to stop and play around so we'll wait for you in New York.”

“Who said I'm going to play around?”

“You got two boys, at least, and boys with toys play around . . .” – they laughed – “with them.”

“You won't beat us by five minutes,” I said.

Back on the road again Jerry sat on my lap to C.B. talk and Eddy sat next to me on the engine cover.

“Brake I-9,” Jerry said. “We need a west-bounder for a Smokey report.”

“Clean and green, little girl,” the speakers blared. “Do you sound like a sweet young thing – come back.”

“Suck a grape,” Jerry said. “I'm a boy. My voice hasn't changed yet.”

The trucker apologized. “Are you in a road rig, sonny? And if you are, what kind of a road rig are you in?”

“That depends, driver, because it's this way. When my daddy drives this truck it's called a Freightliner. When I drive it it's called a Frightliner 'cause I scare hell out of all the little cars. And when my brother drives it it's called a Fruitliner because my brother is The Pink Pansy.”

Jerry was catching on.

In`Amarillo I parked and crawled back into the sleeper with the boys for two hours of loving and a little dozing in between before I took Eddy back to his father's truck. Eddy was always emotional when he left me – big hugs, kisses, hugs again. And then we parted: they to Florida and Jerry and me to New York.

For a while Jerry talked to Eddy on the C.B., then, when they faded out, to the Boobie Sisters, who were right ahead of us. Finally we switched back to the right channel to catch news of the road conditions and Jerry snuggled into me.

“I love you, Daddy,” he said. “You're about the greatest person I know.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, you let me eat anything as much as I want. You let me meet people and talk C.B. on this radio. You let me do what I mostly want to do. I just love you.” I bit lightly and nuzzled him on the back of his neck. “I love that, too. I like the way you give me a tongue bath. Besides that, Daddy, you take me everywhere you go.”

Jerry was turning out to be one of the most delightfully different boys I'd ever had the pleasure of knowing. I was finding this true minute after minute and mile after mile. Just when I thought I was too tired to keep up the pace he'd do something to ease the strain. Whatever Jerry did he did humorously and right.

We were in Missouri, now, driving on a drizzly day, the Boobie Sisters right in front of us. With Jerry trying to sit on my lap to drive all the time I was getting extremely uncomfortable. I had to piss. I moved him more onto a knee.

“What's wrong, Daddy? Am I too heavy for you?”

“No, hon, you're fine. The girls up there, they got a bathroom in their truck, but they aren't even thinking I'm driving alone.”

“You're not alone. I'm here to help you. Now, what can I do for you?”

I roared with laughter.

Jerry turned in my lap to look at me. “Maybe whatever it is I can steer and you can do it.”

“I gotta leak. Can you do that for me?”

“I sure can,” Jerry said, taking an empty milk carton out of the trash holder. “Here. I'll do it all. You just keep your hands on the wheel – and let 'em rip!”

It worked, and at the end he gave me a real friendly squeeze before he tucked it away.

“See that, Daddy? That's why I'm here.”

I kissed him. Then kissed him again. “The only thing you forgot is to zip me up.”

“No, I didn't forget anything.” Jerry jumped over me to get into the sleeper. “Wait a minute. Leave them pants alone, otherwise you'll ruin my surprise.”

He zipped shut the modesty screen. A minute later he popped out with his jeans on backwards.

“See this, Daddy?” He laughed. “Now we are a perfect match for me to sit on your lap.” He thought a minute. “No. That idea stinks, because you could get zipped up between the zippers.”

So he did a slow strip-show for me on the passenger side of the truck, and when he came back naked to sit on my lap we were still a perfect match.

Then, without warning, the girls ahead of me hit their brakes. I whipped out and passed them in a twinkling. When I looked in my rear-views they were far behind shifting to catch up.

“What the hell you do that for, Biggie?” I asked into the mike.

“I almost nodded off. I looked up and all I could see was that house trailer.”

“Wake up your sister.”

“It's not her turn to drive for another half hour.”

“Wake her up anyway.”

She did; they switched, and I let them pass me again.

Jerry rolled down the window a little to wave at them. Then he was jabbing me with his elbow: “Daddy, their tire's wobbly. Look!”

I grabbed the mike. “Pull over and park it, Smaller. You got a broken wheel. Easy. Don't step on the brake remember how I taught you. Just coast it to a stop.”

She did.

Jerry rushed into his clothes. I zipped, buttoned and belted my pants and climbed out of the cab to see what could be done.

Both wheels were broke. The only thing preventing an Oxnard strawberry disaster was a bound edge on a bud. I called Road Service. That meant four hours of sitting on the side of the road right across from a year-round fire-works stand, which Jerry, of course, made a bee line for.

“It isn't Fourth of July time yet,” Jerry said, puzzled.

“Here it don't have to be.”

Jerry was very surprised at what you could get: firecrackers by the brick, cherry bombs, sparklers, bottle- and sky-rockets.

He ran me out of twenty-five dollars in five minutes, and then another twenty-five an hour later.

“If I'd known you were going to do all this to me,” I said, “I'd of bought you your own damn truck to haul it away in.”

He was very pleased with his loot. It was more fireworks than he'd ever had in his life. We put them in one of the cubby-holes and then I locked it securely. It's illegal to haul fireworks, but we all do it one time or another.

“How much did he make you spend on him, Lou?” Biggie asked me.

“Not much,” I told her. Then she took Jerry across the road to get him some more. “Where'm I gonna put it all?” I said when they got back.

“I'll haul it, you old weight miser,” Biggie yelled back at me. “We got empty cubby-holes, too.”

I was going to tell her she sure did, but I didn't want to get my face slapped again.

The girls didn't dare touch their rig before there was a jack under the rear, so they sat in my cab listening to music and smoking and drinking soda from my mini-reefer. I crawled back in the sleeper with Jerry and snuggled with him a little. “How come you didn't tell me you taught Biggie and Smaller to drive?” he whispered. “And another thing I found out is they're not sisters. They're lovers just like us.”

Jerry liked to know about everything and everybody. Then he liked to tell me about it in private. He went on and on, about the fireworks and the busted wheels. I just agreed with him, until he ran down.

“Jerry, I like what you just said.”

“What that I just said? Setting off the rockets?”

“No, hon.” I kissed his nose. “I like the way you said they were lovers just like us.”

He smiled real big. “They are, Daddy. They told me that.”

We fueled in Cleveland. Jerry had been sleeping; I woke him up so we could get us some food and a bath. I took him into one of the stall showers with me because he didn't want to strip down with all the people watching and do it alone. In there I washed his face and his neck and his back. He kissed my face soapy from the suds on him. Then our bodies were slippery and he was squirming on me, and pretty soon we were oblivious of the hurry and scurry of the other busy truckers on all sides of us, the intensity of the love between us blossoming there under that Vibromassage shower head. It ended all too quickly with a climactic finish and a slight disturbance.

“Has anyone seen The Lonely Roamer?” a boy's voice asked.

“Yes,” I shouted. “I'm right here in number four.”

He was about thirteen, freckled and cute and he did a double-take when he saw Jerry come out of the shower with me. The girls had asked him to tell me they were all ready to roll.

It took a few extra kisses to cool us down so we could dress. “You get more loving every time,” I told Jerry. “I love everything about you, hon.”

The boy who had called us waved when we passed through the drivers' lounge. He was watching cartoons on the TV. Drivers tolerate a lot of things as long as the little sucker belongs to a trucker.…

We reached New York in ten hours with the Boobie Sisters right in front of us and got an old friend to guard the rig while they unloaded it at the market and I took Jerry for a whirlwind tour of the sights: the World Trade Center Towers, Statue of Liberty, even Greenwich Village and the gay section, where we got a lot of mixed looks.

“Where we gonna sleep?” Jerry wanted to know. “Not in the truck again, are we?”

“Yes. We can't leave a hundred-thousand dollar rig in the street by itself in this town.”

So after supper we went back on the turnpike and parked in the country at a special place I knew where there was the ruins of an old factory and a stream rushing by and nobody else around. That's where we spent the night, in combinations of sleeping and making love, until, in the wee hours, we just had to stop kissing and hugging and telling each other things and fell asleep in a nice warm tangle, all mixed up.

I slept through my alarm. Jerry woke me up only to have me fall back to sleep on him again.

“Wake up, Daddy, or I'll bite a chunk out of this bottom,” he said, patting me there.

But it didn't work. So he got a cube of ice out of the mini-reefer and rubbed it all over me. That's an awful way to come alive in the morning after loving it up all the night before.

We drove back to the city market and hooked under the trailer which they were loading for the return trip to L.A. The long drive and lack of sleep was getting to my stomach. I didn't say anything about it to Jerry but he sort of knew. I could see he was keeping an eye on me a little closer than usual. But when you're twelve, being with a sick man is no fun.

“I wish you had a game or a toy in this truck,” he said with his cute smile. “I just like to do more than sit.”

I'd already thought of that. I looked into his intense blue eyes, his darling little pencil points of dimples, his strong firm little chin, his blond, blond hair, his eyebrows so blond that they stood out saltily against his tanned forehead.

“If you want to sit on the other seat over there,” I told him, “and be out of my reach for five minutes, hon, then I can arrange something that might appeal to you.”

“Can't I let it appeal to me here? Why don't we just lay in the sleeper and hug?”

I had already pulled the box out from under my seat. He canceled the sleeper request when he saw what was in it.

“A real slot car set! You can't plug that into a truck, can you, Daddy?”

You could, in the cigarette lighter. He had it running in minutes on top of the engine cover. And as we left New York and pulled back onto the turnpike with our new load he was sitting on my lap so he could steer the rig and drive the slot cars, both at the same time.

I told him we'd spend a night in Las Vegas on the way back, in one of those big hotels.

“Wow!” he said. “Can I gamble?”

“Not legally, hon. But there's not too much I do that is legal.”

“I can see that. You're doing almost 80 now.” He wrinkled his nose and put a finger in his ear to itch it. “But you only speed. You don't do anything else illegal, do you?”

“Love you,” I answered.

“That's not illegal,” Jerry reasoned, “because I love you too.”

I didn't want to tell him how illegal our love really was. As far as he was concerned our love was as alright as it ever could be. My love for him and my other boys, this was something he considered great, like his loving it up with Eddy or anyone else he wanted to love with.

I got a bad stomach cramp as we were cruising along the Lake Erie shore just after leaving New York State.

“Daddy, you gotta stop driving for a while,” he told me. “Look, here's a park area. I'll sit here and play with these slot cars and watch you rest.”

I was feeling too weak to argue. I rested there, lying up in the sleeper. I watched his profile while he sat sideways on the seat running both of the cars around the track. His concentration showed in the way his face was always changing. I liked how his nose reshaped itself when he bit his lower lip because his favorite car was getting beat by his unfavorite car, the continuous smoothing out and corrugating of his forehead while he watched the two cars to cheer on his winner.

We spent the night near Chicago in a motel with a swimming pool. He didn't have a bathing suit, so I gave him a pair of nylon bikinis in black to wear.

“Are these swim trunks?” he asked.

“Do they look like swim trunks?”

“Yeah, they do.” Jerry inspected himself, twisting around, in the full-length door mirror. “They fit me great, too.”

“Come on, hon. Stop posing so sexy or we'll have to cancel our swim.”

Jerry came over with a big 'I dare you' grin. I caught him in my arms, then ran my tongue from his belly button right up to his throat. He pulled away, quickly ran for the door, where he paused, looked over his shoulder and shot back, “You'll have to catch me first!” then leapt right over the railing. I ran to the balcony, terrified. When I saw him waving at me with a big grin from the middle of the pool below I had to run back into the room and throw up in the toilet. This time there was blood.

I lay down on the bed. A few minutes later Jerry was back dripping and his blond head seeming smaller with his hair wet.

“Gee, Daddy, you look awful!”

“I guess I'm not up to swimming with you after all,” I said.

The manager came by to tell me a lady on the porch across the court had asked him to see if Jerry's bikini was really a proper bathing suit. I thought it was and the manager thought it was, too.

“She must be funny,” Jerry said after the manager had left. “I guess she has never seen a weenie before.”

“Only in hot dogs,” I joked. “That's if she opened the buns.”

It took me two days of resting often to get from Chicago to Las Vegas. In those two days Jerry and I got even closer. He almost became a part of me, as though I'd opened my mouth and he'd moved right into my body with me. I'd had this same feeling for Chuck and then for Tommy. Now that Chuck was gone Jerry was doing his best to fill that emptiness that a man has from the loss of one love even though he has two others.

It was a hard feeling to examine, and I didn't want to examine anything that took my mind off trying to get my load into California.

We sent cards from everywhere, to my wife and Di, to Tommy, to Eddy, to Chuck at his brother's home outside Tulsa, to Jerry's mother: Mississippi paddle wheel boats from St. Louis, mountain peaks from Denver, the Mormon Church from Salt Lake City. In Las Vegas I drove straight to Circus-Circus and got us a room for the night. Jerry checked out the hotel while I rested up for a while. It seemed like I slept for hours and I woke up feeling a bit better. After showering I went in search of my little love. I found him playing space invaders with another boy around his own age. I stood by the juice bar to watch them where I couldn't be easily seen. I didn't want Jerry to feel he had to lose his entire youth because of what he and I had between us.

I ordered a malt and sat at one of the little candy-striped tables. I watched them for a long time, until Jerry said something to the other boy and turned and saw me.

“Hey, there's my dad,” he said loudly, and dragged his friend over by the hand. “That's what he looks like dressed.”

They both laughed. The other boy was dark blond, a little shorter than Jerry. We shook hands.

“This is Joey,” Jerry said. “We came up to see how you were doing an hour ago and you were sleeping.”

“Hello, Joey. Where do you live?”

“I live in Los Angeles,” he said shyly.

This was one of those one question, one answer boys that can warm up to you real quick if he trusts you.

“Did Jerry tell you that the rig's fine, the driver is what got broke down?” I said. “Or has he just got my keys so he could show you the truck?”

Joey's face turned beet-red. Jerry had done a lot more than show him the TV and the eight-track and the musical horns. I gave my lover-boy an 'okay' wink.

A few minutes later Joey's dad came over and introduced himself and we spent a pleasant, but early, evening driving about Vegas. The main thing, at night, are the lights. They advertise places all stacked too close together for me, but I like the lights and the crowds as long as I don't have to be out and on the street. Looking at it all from Joey's dad's car was just perfect.

At the end of the evening we snuck the boys into the edge of one of the casinos and let them try a couple of the one-armed bandits. The machines spun their dials and made their clicks – and swallowed up the silver dollars they'd been fed. But the boys acted like just pulling on those levers had been the real thrill, so we went away happy.

It was arranged with his dad that Joey would spend the night with us – his mother had a headache or something and was glad to be alone with her husband. When I came out from showering in my room the two boys were lying in the bed I'd used.

“Right here is where you got to sleep, Daddy.” Jerry patted the space between them. His big, wide-toothed grin said the rest.

“Right up the middle, huh?”

“Yep,” Jerry said. “Joey is ready, too. We both got middles.” They did. Hard middles. Jerry had been telling Joey a lot about me.

“Jerry . . .” – I hugged him – “Joey . . .” – and I hugged him – “I just don't know what to say.”

“Then shut up and be sexy,” Jerry said. So we were.

Morning found me accidentally tickling my own foot to wake them, they were all so tangled up with me. I made Joey do some nice trampoline work on the other bed to make it messy, and we were safe in our unders when his father knocked on the door.

All shyness had gone out of Joey at the breakfast table. “Mom, guess what happened when the elephant saw me in the shower last night?”

I shuddered.

“It said, 'How can you breathe through that thing?'”

“With such a mouth,” his dad laughed, “you better ride with Louie and Jerry, and then wash it out with soap before you come home.”

The trip home was all down hill. With Jerry's permission, Joey got to sit in my lap and steer the big rig, because Jerry set himself down on the motor cover with his feet on the side of my chair, his knees bumping my elbow as he gave his new friend advice on how to drive.

“With you and Jerry,” Joey told us, “I think my folks would let me go to the moon and back. I am in heaven right here.” He squeezed my knee.

We dropped him off, a few miles from where I lived, and then we pulled up in my drive. Tommy and Eddy ran out of the side door in their unders, and then all was confusion as I sat leaning over my wheel feeling sad and dizzy and ready to be sick again. It was part the long drive and not enough sleep, part coming back and knowing the old rig Chuck had grown up in would be in Tulsa now, and Chuck wouldn't be there to help Tommy go unload, or drop by that evening, or next week, even. Jerry was acting with the two older boys like he was Daddy driver, giving orders for his fireworks to be handled gently, for my clothes to be thrown into the wash, and then telling them how sick I'd been all the way back from New York. My wife and Di were hanging in the door just sort of watching it all.

“That little fire's sure consuming Dad,” Tommy teased. Then, to me, “You'd better let me sleep with you tonight.”

I couldn't think up anything to say.

“See that, Eddy? The little sucker done got to the old man.” Then Tommy opened the door and lifted me down from the cab like I lift Jerry, and like he was twenty-six rather than sixteen. “You lost five pounds from playing games, huh?”

“No, I gained a hundred and thirty pounds because you stopped loving me.”

“Aw,” teased Eddy, “I still love you. Tommy don't.” They didn't know what they said wrong, but I just sort of slithered into the house and lay down on my bed. The boys must have had a conference because later all three of them came in. They didn't tease me or taunt me.

“Dad,” Tommy said, “I am sorry you lost Chuck. We will try to sort of all take his place.”

“I'll come up from the valley whenever I can,” said Eddy.

Jerry said with a big hug, “And I am here to love you forever.”

Verses in the manner of Strato's Musa Puerilis
by J. Darling

I

The body of Ioladas

Is smooth and supple as fresh clay

Just turned on the potter's wheel,

Before the fire bakes it into shape.

II

When your father asked me

To teach you poetry, Philoxenos,

It was not his hoard of gold

That brought back my Muse,

But the gold of your hair.

III

Broad as golden Darics

Are Hermiones' nipples,

And Hermiones is no miser.

IV

Twelve years is enough

For Samian wine, I say,

So fourteen for a Knidian

That is, when we talk of boys.

V

Do not play the 'father' too long,

Onesimos,

Lest your Philon think your kisses

That which they are not

– Respectable!

VI

Like rowing

On the lake of Latmos

Is boy-loving;

The one pushes forward,

The other back.

VII

You waste your time, Antistius,

Lying at the front door.

All beautiful Evenus' friends

Enter by the back.

VIII

When I saw Uliades

Helping with the olive harvest,

I reached to gather two

The others had missed.

IX

In the palaestra

The beautiful Meriones,

Being thrown,

Lay laughing in the sand

And denied defeat:

For one part of the boy,

At least,

Still stood erect.

X

If you open an oyster

Sometimes there is a pearl.

When you open a Rhodian boy,

You will find two.

XI

Many will call a boy's love

Too simple by far,

But I would rather eat the yolk

Than crunch the shell.

XII

Passing through the stoa

On my way to dine with his father

I caught sight of Astyanax

With the other boys in the palaestra.

Grey-haired Myron, my host,

Did not know,

When I reached his house,

I had already consumed his dinner,

Though not the one he offered.

XIII

Ascending to Delphi, seeking Apollo's aid,

I found a lad with golden hair

Sweeping there the temple colonnade.

'Where bides the long-bearded priest of this place?

'Gone upon Parnassos,

'Watching for eagles and the Future Time,'

Said he with sparkling eye.

'Then the present must be mine,'

Cried I;

So bending low that head of flame

I my libations poured;

At the same invoking the divine name,

At the same receiving due reward.

XIV

Smooth as the brazen krater

Is Therinos' breast;

His lips sweet

As the kylix cup, full of wine.

But it is hair that is golden

Like gifts at Delphi

Which brings me greatest joy.

XV

Dark-haired and bright-eyed boy

Passing by me,

Bearing for Athene Parthenos

A coronet of flowers,

Smiled

And placed it upon my head.

XVI

When, Asander, you go ranging upon high Hymettos

In search of quail,

And with the other boys don

The traveler’s hat wide-brimmed,

Do not think you may hide from me;

For even from afar

You tempt Apollo with your curls,

Though your smile be shaded.

XVII

Playful among the dolphins, and as smooth,

He swims the Sporades, isle to isle.

Though upon the wave-tops Triton seeks him,

For me alone Perimedes, the beautiful,

Saves his halcyon kisses.

XVIII

Richest in autumn

Are the vine-leaf curls

Of a boy, of lovely Timarion.

But harvester stay your hook:

Too soon winter devours the fruit

Of all my summer's toil.

XIX

As the oak to the flame

Came I to Diophantos:

He warmed his hands and left.

Next morning he returned

And with a thorn brush

Swept away the ashes,

Though they were glowing still.

Three by Casimir
by Casimir Dukahz

1. The Irresistible Impossible

If I could recall when and where I first happened on Tip Peterson (peter's son, forsooth!) I would do my damnedest to forget it and him as that sweet Suck gave me a monstrously hard time in every sense of the adjective. Alas, boy-love is its own punishment and in the Western World most boyeurs perforce become masochists though ever hoping that at least the seductive succulents they seek will not be too sadistically inclined.

Tantalizing Tip could make the Marquis de Sade hang his head in shame but transex Trilby I am caught in the trap of his Junior Svengali power because he is so pure-dee pulchritudinous! In years he's on the shady side of eleven or the sunny side of 12 but delightfully can already deliver delicious dairy products: rich thick boy-cream and piquant head-cheese – most tasty on crisp crackers or ingested au naturel. This alluring kidlet is cuddly-small and slim in size with flesh the tint of rose-ivory, the satiny skin you love to smooch; sunshine hair in lovely contrast to his dark soulful eyes, brows and lashes – though if temerarious Tip has a soul, it is so infinitesimal that a microdot is a basketball in comparison.

When I first laid eyes on this too-personable puer, I was attracted by his gamin-angel face and the plump promise of his crotch, boldly outlined in his ultra-tight fade-blue jeans, and when I finally inveigled him home to my povertied pad, using a ten-buck bill as bait (too much, too much but hubris had me!) and was permitted to pleasure his velvety verticality and tongue various enticing anatomical apertures (Tip's trim taut butt is as beauteous as a full-blown moonbean!) Paradise suffused my bedroom and I thought I had found a Treasure beyond the wildest dreams of Aladdin or Crœsus.

Little did I know! for soon I discovered that I had a pubescent panther by the tail. Truth to tell, charmeur Peter's Son is as false as tits on a bull and as fickle as a tomcat: solemnly he will swear that I am his One and Only but the very next day I find his too-public privates smeared with lavender lipstick, no doubt deposited there by some slobbering, screaming queen of either sex – but the Awful Urchin airily declares he applied the lipstick himself, just to tease me.

The conscienceless kiddy is also cupidinous as compounded Scrooge: on Sunday he will call me up to say that he can't come over that afternoon as he faithfully promised. When he arrives on the following day, he immediately duns me for the 10 cents he spent phoning me yesterday! He's not a thief or a vandal or on drugs, for which blessings I suppose I should go down on my knees and . . . uh, thank God! but pretty Tippy is rapacious as the most vulturous buzzard. He will demand his exorbitant sex-fee upon entering my humble habitat, then when he is about to leave he will bald-face, bold-face declare that I haven't paid him yet but I circumvent that wily ruse by memorizing the letter and first three numbers of the bills I gave him and which even now are reposing in his shirt pocket – but the unblushful young embezzler merely laughs loudly at being caught and says, “Well, that trick didn't work, did it?! But you better watch out, Duke, 'cause I got a whole bagful of neat tricks!” (That he has, friends, that he has!)

Somehow, somewhere this mesmeric minor has got the idea that, despite my living in a noisome slum, I really am rolling in greenbacks, richer than the U. S. Mint or Fort Knox – and at times when he is with me he seems to be listening for the rustle of new banknotes or the chink of high-denomination gold coins in my mattress or underneath a loose floorboard. Often when he arrives he will cupboard-lovingly hug me and I will feel his hot little hands patting the left back-pocket of my pants, palpating the possible plumpness of my pocketbook – but when I try to convince him that I have neither checkbook nor bankbook nor hidden assets and just barely manage to exist on my measly Social Insecurity payments, Doubting Thomas Tip will yelp: “Oh, Duke, don't gimme that kinda crap – you got more money than God!” (If I have, then God must be on Welfare and Food Stamps.)

Then one crucial PM pestiferous, too perfect-plus, too persuasive Peterson fils comes to see me covered with slimy grime from tip to toe. “What happened to you?!” I goggle. “Have you been wallowing in a mud-puddle with the other pigs?”

“Don't gimme no hard time, Duke,” the boy sheepishly replies, “cause the fact is, I just fell into a hole.” (Oh, Jesus, has he got a girl-friend now?! Yet he gives off no stench of fish!)

“Well, less said, soonest mended,” I sigh, divesting him of his filthy T-shirt, jeans, brief-briefs and green-and-once-white sneakers and putting them into the kitchen laundry-tub to soak. Then I give the boy a thorough tub-bath since my depression-domicile doesn't boast a shower, rinse him two and one-half times, dry him (no passes, but Tantalus-tempting!) and carry him to bed where he lolls in luxurious ease on my Beautyrest mattress which I'm still paying a dollar-a-week for to P. U. Shylock's Bargain Basement Emporium. While sybarite Tip noisily chomps his way through a huge bowl of Caramel Corn (his favorite bit-tit . . . uh, titbit, I mean – pardon the Freudian error!) and reads Penthouse or Peghouse or suchlike elevating literature, I toil over the hot washboard in the hotter kitchen, cleansing the kid's soiled apparel and hanging same to dry in front of the open door of the gas oven, turned on full blast. (What my gas-bill will be this month, I shudder to think – but it's all in a good cause . . . or is it?!)

At length I too take a bath and wearily repair to my nuptial couch – only to be Olympianly surprised for unpredictable Tip enfolds me into his sticky Caramel Corn embrace and is so spontaneously, uninhibitedly affectionate that at once I sense something is amiss: there's a rat in the woodwork, there's something rotten in Denmark, something is decidedly not Kosher here! From long experience I resignedly, fatalistically, fearsomely await developments.

When the kid and I are both idyllically exhausted from our bed-antics and are engaged in restful pillow-talk, Tippy says: “Duke, you like me a lot, don't you!”

“Hell, dear heart,” I say as I shouldn't say, “I love every fractional inch of you – but now, knowing I'm at your feet and at your mercy, you'll doubtless scheme and plot and plan to moraless rip me off in one cruel way or another!”

“Oh, man, nothing like that!” the boy coos reassuringly. “But, see, if you really love me then you'd wanta buy me something I've needed for months and months, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, of course, if it was within my means,” I say cautiously. The thought strikes me that he probably ardently desires a 10-speed bicycle which I might obtain for him if it was second-hand on the installment-plan and I got a senior-citizen discount and skipped lunch for a couple of weeks.

“So,” the lad lilts, “I'd like you to buy me an Express II Honda motorbike which is on special sale for only $398.00.”

I sit bolt upright in bed. “Kiddy,” I expostulate, “let me clue you in to a most important Fact of Life! At the moment I don't have enough dollars and sense to buy you even one handle-bar of your coveted Honda so just forget the whole schmear, OK?!”

At once little greedy-guts flies into a towering tantrum, into Alpine-high dudgeon and he leaps from my arms and bed, dashes to the kitchen, hurls on his half-dry attire and bangs out the front door to the accompaniment of dire threats of reprisals, vengeance and revenge.

I sink back on my pillow and reflect that boys will be boys – but some masculine lads are more primitively Neanderthal than others and these you have to deal with as best you may. Meanwhile I bask in the present soothing Peace and Quiet in welcome contrast to the Piece and Pandemonium of a few minutes ago – though between you and me and the bed-post, I prefer the latter!

For three lonely days and nights I hear nothing from tumultuous Tip – no visit, no phone-call, no sweet hide nor hair of him and I resign myself to having lost a prime puer simply because I didn't have the dinero to delight him. On the fourth day I receive a registered letter from one F. X. Schwanzenellenbogen, LLD, Attorney-at-Law (an arrant, redolent shyster if I ever smelt one!), informing me that Master Tip Peterson, Esquire, is suing me for one million dollars in compensatory punitive damages for inverse alimony, perverse palimony and reverseboyimony! (Socrates, good buddy, gimme a hefty swig from your cup of hemlock and we'll kick the bucket together – if I don't change my mind!)

2. The Sweet Squealer Who Didn't

Chicago is the place where, in the Roaring Twenties, the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre became a sort of local Holiday of Rejoicing and 'Scarface' Al Capone was the de facto Mayor for too many years but now was on his last syphilitic legs – brought down not by bullets but by the Infernal Revenue Service. 'Tis said that every mad dog has his day and Al's day was long overdue.

The town is popularly, accurately known as the Windy City and if you ever visit there and walk along Lake Shore Drive in winter-time, don't leap up into the air in elation or in consternation for the constant fiendish gales will more often than not blow you feet-first into Lake Michigan – and that's not the kind of blowing I'm partial to!

Chicago is within an extensive Midwest area where not only the purest, clearest American-English is spoken but is indubitably the locale wherein reside the most desirable lads in the entire Fifty States, United or not. Deep South younglings are frequently swooningly sexy but in the Mid-west the delightful, delicious corn-fed kids are largely hubrisly sexy and mostly of the rare innocenti type which I don't need to tell you is a decidedly added allure. (Who else would inform you of all these essential facts?!)

And recently it was in the Windy City – all on a summer's day – that I literally stumbled into/onto prized, priceless Galen! I was crossing crowded North State Street when I lost my bumble-footing and to save myself from falling flat on my stupid face I clutched the person in front of me. When we both staggered onto the opposite sidewalk and comparative safety, this somewhat small personage turned to me and there – well, there was the boyling of my present dreams and yearning: the smooth oval impelling face of a blond Botticelli page at the court of some Renaissance-kind, kiddy-inclined king! Finally catching my breath, I gasp, “Thank you, my boy – you saved me from a nasty fall!”

The youngster smiles at me – fetching dimples in his sun-tanned cheeks – and chirps: “Oh, that's all right, sir! I'm a Cub Scout and we're taught to help old people across the street and like that.” (Shades of Norman Rockwell's depiction of ideal times between Youth and Age – I thought they were extinct!) Grateful to this unique Little One for his Good Samaritan assistance and it being about noon, I invite him to have lunch with me where I learn his name, Galen Kelly, and that he's 10 years old and a bit – though later it develops that he has a 15-year-old's astounding sexuality! Also he tells me that he lives just four blocks from me on the fringe of the black section of South Chicago. (As a rule, blacks don't like whites moving in or near their territory as it ruins the neighborhood but I can understand how they feel for I'm a rabid racist myself – I eat only white-shelled hens' eggs, never brown ones.)

After Galen has hungrily downed two pineapple malted milks and a Sooper-Dooper Cheeseburger (I have tea and toast!), he somewhat shyly accompanies me home and more than somewhat bashfully permits me to denude him, bed him and partake of his milksome delights, savoring his slim silken limbs and satiny adjuncts. He is new to the Great Game of Boy-Love in experience though not in theory for he has heard other Cub Scouts and schoolmates snickeringly talk about it, and doing it!

“Did you like it?” I anxiously inquire during our ensuing recuperative pillow-talk.

“Oh, yes, Duke, it's grand! I'd like to do this every day!” the boy exclaims, cerulean eyes asparkle.

“And so you shall,” I vow, my own eyes agleam with renewed desire. And thus, in the gloriously unnatural course of events, it came to pass.

Alas, peerless boy-beauty tends to destroy one's common sense and nullifies one's self-protective instincts – and since boy-lovers in particular ever rush in where even hetero fools fear to tread, one afternoon in late August when I know Galen will be away on a weekend Cub Scout camping-trip, I rashly decide to go visit his parents, curious to know the background of my budding young blossom and passing myself off as the boy's Student Counselor in the approaching school-September.

Frankly, citizens, the kid's home is a dump – even poorer than my own impecunious abode, though clean. One small dingy, shabby room with tiny bath and micro-mini kitchenette adjoining, the room containing an open-out sofa-bed for Ma and Pa Kelly and an Army cot in a curtained-off corner for sweet Galen, a 1952 TV, a derelict but comfortable armchair for Pa, a rickety table plus three wobbly chairs – and not much else to speak of.

As a long-time baby-sitter (I began when I was six tender years and needed a baby-sitter my own self!), I speedily size up these so-called parents just by looking at them and hearing what they guardedly tell me. They're on Welfare and Pa (who is a rough, tough hefty six-footer-plus who could make two of me) spends most of his time lolling in his armchair and drinking cheap beer while he looks at violent contact-sports on the idiot-box. Ma Kelly (a wispy, faded, nondescript 40) spends most of her time at Mass, Wednesday Evening Bible Class and Saturday Night Bingo – and it strikes me anew that the wonders of genetics, and that old hag Mother Nature, are manifold to behold for here is this hulking skunk-cabbage who has somehow sired on a shrinking eggplant a resplendent pink-and-white rosebud! I don't get it but on bended knee I thank Eros for it!

However, everything between Galen and me continues to be sweetness and delight until one Sunday in early October when Pa Kelly bursts into my unlocked front door, smoke coming out of his ears, and brandishing his meaty fists in my face, he thunders that his son has told him all about the filthy things I did to the boy and if I don't get out of town in 24 hours or less, Pa K. is going to tear me into little bits and send the remains to the Public Morals Division!

Well, it's not that I'm afraid, you understand – I'm scared to death for I don't want to become hors d'amour over the Crime of Love without a rat's chance to fight back so forthwith I flee out of South Chicago into North Chicago – so far north, in fact, that I'm practically in the State of Wisconsin, boyless, joyless and existing only on fond memories of Galen and other puers past. Then late the following November, I'm downtown in the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store goggling at the arousing display of domestic and imported boys' briefs and shorts, wistfully wishing they were all full filled with warm vibrant young flesh when suddenly someone leaps upon my back, a pair of slim arms encircle my neck in a strangling bear-hug and a boyish voice cries: “Duke! Duke!!”

It is Galen, cocky with youth and health and comeliness – but I hold the eager, smiling lad at arm's length. “You squealer!” I say reproachfully. “You ratted on me to your father!”

“I didn't, Duke – I didn't!”

“Your father said you told him all about what I did to you!”

The boy shuffles his feet in confusion. “Well, I did tell him but I didn't – I mean I didn't mean to.”

“You're talking in riddles, Galen!”

“Well, Duke, it's like this. My parents sleep on an open-out sofa-bed which is right next to my bed and separated just by a thin curtain – and my Dad often has insomnia.”

“This is all clear as mud, so far – but go on.”

“Oh, Duke, don't you see?!” Galen cries, blushing a little with embarrassment. “Sometimes I talk in my sleep!”

3. Peekaboo

I have good reasons to little note nor long remember that engaging young turd, Fritzl, and I disremember now if I unluckily met up with him in Massa Chusetts or Rode Island but he was something to behold, forsooth! In fact, you couldn't look at him too long at a time or your eyeballs began to steam with ocular lust for he was a sweet butter-blond with orbs as blue as cloudless October skies and a felicity of face and form I've not seen since I threw dice with Zeus to see who would win fairest Ganymede (I lost – but woke up with a hard-on).

So naturally as Night follows Day I pursued and woo'd peerless Fritzl – and to no avail! Oh, he would come to my maxi-mini inefficiency apartment and plop his ambrosia ass on my Louis Seventeenth love-seat (which would immediately open up into a lush lit d'amour for two if the Awful Urchin would only drop his pants or even just unzip his fly!) and with deafening gusto he would gobble down the costly comestibles and drinkables I supplied but when at long last I suggested that he would find it highly exciting, pelfable and pleasurable if he would permit me to fellate him, at once he masks his eyes with his hands and says: “Peekaboo! I can't see you 'cause I ain't here! I'm somewhere else.”

A tad miffed, I say bitterly, “Oh, sure! You're in a padded cell in a booby-hatch in West Woonsocket!”

The youngster drops his hands from his face and barks, “Don't look now but I'm saner than you are!” (And that, Hell knows, is God's truth!)

But as long as there's a smidgen of hope, my life-long motto has been: 'never say Die! - even when the Undertaker is undertaking to underground you!', so doggedly I persist and persevere with this mesmeric puer. Alas, it's a wild gosling chase, a yearning after an unobtainable chimera for the kiddy is a confirmed and hopeless hetero – as I learn from the Gay Grapevine which informs me that last night fickle Fritzl played Peekaboo and then Peeping Tom and then exposed himself to a gaggle of giggling young girls at a slumber-party on South Fishe Street!

Anton
by Bill Underhill

“Couldn't we get something to eat?” he asked as we walked to my car.

“Sure. There's a diner . . .”

“Oh, I wouldn't want you to spend any more money on me!”

Incredible! How many kids that you meet in a video games arcade are likely to tell you that? I looked at my young companion with added respect.

“Well, we could go over to my place,” I suggested warily, “I've got fresh ground beef and . . .”

“Great!”

I opened the door for him. “Uh, when do you have to be home?”

“No special time.”

Even more incredible. I climbed in beside him, knocking on hypothetical wood that my luck would hold. A Saturday morning at the arcade almost always resulted in my getting to know one or two youngsters, and sometimes after spending a pocketful of quarters I would leave in the company of a friendly fledgeling to see a movie or watch a football game.

Ever since I was old enough to know the difference between lads and lassies I've preferred the company of boys to that of almost anyone else. Surprisingly, quite a few kids of ten or twelve or fourteen have found my company not altogether vexatious and like 'hangin' around' with me on weekends. Their free and easy camaraderie proves a degree of trust and affection that I find pleasantly flattering. Not all adults are taken into the confidences of those high-strung, high-spirited creatures.

And, sometimes, there are a few who intimate – some shyly and obliquely, some frankly and with impudent grins – that they know how to play the Great Game (which, Kipling notwithstanding, has nothing whatsoever to do with espionage), and would be happy to spend an hour or six in its ecstatic give-and-take. Memorable was the twelve-year-old scion of a libertarian household who arrived at my door one Saturday morning and departed late the following Sunday afternoon, not having gotten, I'm afraid, much sleep in the interval.

Enter, then, Anton, whose last name I hadn't asked and which he hadn't chosen to volunteer, a tall, slim youth of perhaps thirteen years, wearing faded denims cut off exquisitely close to the crotch and an old football jersey that ceased its downfield march just at the level of the xiphoid, leaving the admirer an enticing view of tanned abdomen and deliciously semi-protuberant umbilicus. A string of tiny Tiki beads encircled his throat, and soft brown hair, shaggy and sweet-smelling, half-hid his ears.

At the arcade he had been content to deal me defeat after humiliating defeat, distracting me each time my turn came by pressing his scantily-clad body to mine, an unconcerned arm around my waist, his movements against my side timed superbly to coincide with those critical moments in which millimeters stood between my survival and electronic extinction.

Whenever I'd returned the favor, standing close behind him with my arms 'round his tummy, the intensity of his attention and skill of his play had only seemed to increase.

At last my supply of coins had run out; he had gently vetoed my proposal of an afternoon at the cinema. Now I was more than content to let reflexes conditioned by years of suburban driving guide us homeward while the boy and I exchanged pleasant small talk. He spoke with a faint but maddeningly unplaceable accent. And put off my queries about school, family and friends with charming evasions.

After the usual struggle with three different kinds of locks and a burglar alarm we entered my unkempt bachelor's flat.

“Make yourself homely,” I said, pointing to the armchair.

“What?”

“I mean, sit down. I'll start the hamburgers.”

I cleared a pile of papers and my typewriter from the table.

“What do you do?” the boy asked.

“I'm a writer.”

“For the newspapers?”

“Great Ghu, no, I write science fiction.”

“Ever met anybody from another world?”

“Not yet,” I smiled, and went to the kitchen to busy myself with the hamburgers. When I turned a minute later to ask him what he wanted to drink I found the armchair empty but for a scrap of cloth recognizable as the boy's football jersey.

Craning my head a little, I spotted the faded blue heap of his shorts in the hall leading to the bedroom, and at the entrance thereunto a pair of briefs, carelessly discarded. I dried my hands and went to the bedroom, and there on the broad expanse of my bed was Anton himself lying supine on the coverlet with his ankles crossed, his hands behind his head and a smile on his face. The Tiki beads were still around his neck, I observed as I began to unbutton my shirt. I noticed that the depth of his tan continued uniform over the length of his body.

Warm in the pleasant glow that follows mutual satisfaction, we rested on the rumpled bed, I on my back and Anton nestled in the hollow of my arm, one leg drawn up over my body, his thigh rising and falling on the tide of my breathing.

With one meditative finger the boy began drawing small, slow circles in the dark nimbus of hair clouding my chest.

“That was nice,” he sighed, pressing his nose into the sweaty folds of skin under my arm.

I bent to kiss the top of his head. “I thought so too.”

Suddenly he lifted his face, clear gray eyes glowing with curiosity. “Why,” he asked, “didn't you go inside me?”

For a moment I was too flustered to speak. Then, “I suppose it was because I didn't want to hurt you.”

A look of disbelief.

“You see,” I continued, “I'm a little bit bigger than most men. . . .” Anton flattered me with a grin and a nod of agreement. “Maybe too big. Most kids your age get scared when I ask them about it. A few have let me try, but . . . Well, I could see how much it hurt, no matter how gentle I tried to be.” I brushed a wayward strand of hair away from his eyes. “So I'd always stop, and we'd do other things.”

“Did they ask you to stop?”

“Some of them.”

“And the others?”

I sighed. “They'd say something like, 'Go ahead, I can take it!' but I just couldn't!” I gave him a gentle hug. “I didn't want to hurt them, and they looked so little and so helpless.” I let my fingertips stray through the fine golden down adorning the sleek thigh that pressed against my belly.

He shifted slightly, reaching down with one hand. I could feel myself quickening. His supple body bent almost double as he intensified his attentions.

Now he was staring down at me through a cloud of tangled hair, straddling my supine body, rocking his hips downward with deliberation and clear intent. There was pressure, slowly building, then I felt him open to me.

“There!” he exclaimed with soft exultation. “Would you like to try it now?”

There was nothing I could say. Smiling and flushed with triumph, he let himself be drawn against my chest in tight embrace, our bodies joining in the gentle pulse of passion.

We remained for a while in that misty realm that succeeds consummation, exchanging caresses and murmuring small words of endearment. It took a soft and very prosaic growl of hunger from Anton's bare belly to dispel the haze that enfolded us. I grinned at him; he giggled in return.

“I think it's time for lunch,” I said. I rolled a reluctant Anton onto his back, kissed him, and stood up, my knees more than a little wobbly, to make my way into the kitchen.

Quick work followed with chopping board and knife, ingredients and spices, and soon I was able to heap two plates with french fries and hamburgers with all the trimmings. As I set them on the table Anton entered.

He'd found a hairbrush and worked his wayward locks to a luster like beaten bronze. He hadn't seen fit to resume his clothing, nor had I. Now we fell to and commenced an act of demolition on the hamburgers that did credit to the healthy appetites we'd both worked so hard to build.

When the dishes had been washed and returned to their cupboards, we dried our hands on the same towel – and each of us caught the other looking at him speculatively.

Anton was the first to laugh. “I'll bet I know what you're thinking”

“Guilty,” I pleaded. “Shall we try it again?”

He took my hand and led me back to the bedroom.

A happy time later I lay beside my sleeping little guest, stroking idly with my fingertips from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine, wondering at the strength that inhabited the deceptively delicate form of this lovely manchild.

How casually he conquered! How easily he'd brushed aside my reticence to pierce through my defenses and fill the darkest corners of my soul with a light I'd thought gone from the world with the memories of Eden!

Bending lower to kiss one ear, I closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet scent of his hair. In his sleep Anton made small sounds of contentment and snuggled closer.

I can't say precisely when it was that I began to realize something very curious was happening, something entirely unrelated to Anton's warm presence in my arms or the cloud of contentment surrounding us both.

It was an odd stimulus, just barely perceptible at first, then recognized as a faint, pervasive drone that filled the room.

Looking up I could see a pale glimmering in the far corner, a patch of opalescent radiance that grew in size and intensity as the sound deepened in pitch. Now each object in of my room was picked out by its flickering brilliance, as by a strobe light, making the homely clutter seem stark and alien.

I suppose I should have been terrified. The fact is, I wasn't. Caught up as a boy in the wave of discovery that had carried mankind outward into space and inward through the realms of quark and chromosome, I had long ago fallen in love with the physical universe. I was a child of an era when it had become taken for granted that “all that the mind of man can imagine, the hand of man can realize”.

I had filled my waking hours with every bit of scientific literature I could handle and all the science fiction I could buy. I learned how to plunder the lands of the known and the knowable for the stuff to spin dreams of the possible and the might-have-been…

So perhaps this lifelong eagerness to grapple with the unknown was what saved my sanity at that moment, and accounted for the uncanny calm I felt when I realized – without knowing how I realized it – that this ghostly intrusion was some kind of door, the terminus of some sort of passageway into my bedroom from . . .

From where?

The hum grew sharply louder and suddenly deeper, until it was less a sound than a shuddering in the marrow of my bones. The light flared brighter to burn itself with icey whiteness through my tight-shut eyelids.

And sensation, so profound as to transcend pain, then...

Gone.

In place of the light there stood a man, tall and fair. He was dressed in dark brown clothing, a tunic and kilt of apparently military cut, with knit stockings on his ankles and caligulae on his feet. He wore a narrow-peaked cap picked out with the same chrome green that piped his tunic collar and sleeves. A buttoned-down holster belted at his right side confirmed my impression. A soldier.

He spoke then, in no language I could recognize, his tone affectionate and admonishing. I felt the boy by my side rise from his slumber with a start, and realized the man had been addressing Anton rather than me. The lad smiled shyly, as boys will when caught in some minor mischief. He replied in his own tongue, as apologetic as the man had been chiding.

The discussion continued for a few moments before the man turned to me and, in flawless English, begged forgiveness for his trespassing.

“You see,” he explained, “Anton was supposed to have returned to Center over three hours ago. When the chief technician told me that he'd gone overdue on this line . . .” – His face became grim – “I set the portal controls myself, homing in on his locator . . .” – He indicated the youngster's necklace – “and came charging through without bothering even to change out of my uniform. You can't imagine how glad I am to find him safe with one of our agents. I was more than half expecting him to have gotten beaten to a pulp trying to seduce one of these manic locals.”

“Oh, they're not that bad,” put in Anton, the devil in his eye.

“Youngling, you've not been here more than twice before. We,” he said, indicating me with his hand, “have been studying this sorry mess of a world for more than a year. If someone from the Commonwealth hadn't found you and worked the starch out of your sheets, you might've wound up in the hands of a gang of toughs, bound, beaten and burrowed.”

The boy chuckled and ground his belly against the bed lasciviously. “Sounds like that might've been fun!”

His would-be rescuer made an exasperated sound. He turned to me in appeal: “Do you see what I'm up against?” He glanced back at Anton, smiling fondly. “I've been his Guardian ever since the day he came to me, lying about his age, and demanding to be broken in. And still I haven't quite learned that, for Anton, even too much isn't enough.”

He sat down at the foot of the bed, reached over to muss the lad's already disordered hair. Anton laughed, grabbed the extended hand and turned it over to plant a kiss on the palm – whereupon he proceeded to deal the man's thumb a painful bite.

Snatching back the injured member, the man looked, mock-ruefully, at the impudently grinning boy. I remember looking within myself for a trace of jealousy over this easy intimacy and being surprised to find none – only warmth. And gratitude that I'd been permitted to witness a tenderness outlawed by the society in which I'd been raised.

“And what section,” the man continued, addressing me, “are you with? I'd like to contact your team leader and commend you to him, if you don't mind.”

“Uh, you really needn't bother,” I began.

“Nonsense. It took a sharp eye to pick out this one youngster in a crowd of boys, and a quick wit to persuade a lad like Anton here to go to ground.” He frowned. “You really should have signaled Center as soon as you'd found him, though. The chief technician told me he'd alerted all the survey teams on this line immediately after Anton failed to return via the prearranged rendezvous. You might have saved me a deal of embarrassment – and the chief a thorough chewing-out.” Then he looked back at Anton, his frown softening to a smile, and nodded at the rumpled bedclothes and our mutual undress. “I can see, however, that you might have found yourself much too pleasantly preoccupied to remember policy and procedure.”

“You mean you don't mind that Anton and I, uh . . .?” I let it trail off uneasily.

“Mind? Stars, no!” He drew the lad close, the boy graciously allowing his Guardian to pillow his young head upon one kilted thigh. Anton sighed contentedly as a big hand – slightly worse for wear by one bitten thumb – slipped down across chest and belly to gently cup and caress. “Who better than I should know Anton and his ways? He spends himself where he pleases, and with whoever pleases him, and knows himself far better than most grown folk do.”

“Give credit to my Guardian, Peder.” The boy sent his left hand up to stroke the man's cheek. “He's the one who taught me that pleasure spent is pleasure multiplied.”

The man chuckled and glanced at me with a grin. “So you needn't fear any anger of mine, my friend. Anton chooses his lovers as he likes, and I'm not a great enough fool to think that any Guardian owns the lad he loves. Besides,” he continued, looking at Anton again, “the only way to keep him in one place for any length of time is to wear him out completely.”

“Peder,” said the boy demurely, “are you sure I'm completely worn out?”

“Eh?” Peder glanced downward, then raised his eyebrows in feigned surprise. “Well, we must do something about this, mustn't we?”

“Yes,” agreed Anton, sliding his right hand gracefully up inside Peder's kilt. “We certainly must, though I think I should tell you something first.”

“And that is?”

“I'm afraid that my friend here isn't one of our agents.”

The hand upon Anton's body ceased its gentle motion and began to draw deliberately toward the holstered sidearm. A pair of eyes gone suddenly cold were locked on mine and I quickly came to the conclusion that any sort of sudden move would be exceedingly unwise.

I think I was just as startled as Peder when I heard him give a sharp gasp, astonishment appearing on his face. He looked down, his left hand holding the boy's wrist through the material of his kilt.

“Anton!” he said in a wounded voice. “You wouldn't!”

The youngster shrugged. “I might. I don't want you to shoot my friend. Besides, you'd always have the other one.”

Peder let his right hand drop to the coverlet. “All right, Little Longlegs, use your head as well as your hand. What will we do about him?” He nodded in my direction. “Regulations . . .”

“Oh, Peder! Every time you put on that uniform you think you're the Commonwealth Legate-General. Regulations are guidelines. Quote: an operative has to be able to use his initiative in any unusual situation he might encounter, unquote Peder Chelka my Guardian!”

“Well,” Peder said slowly, “this certainly seems to qualify as 'unusual'.” He looked at me. “Where do we begin?”

“Why not start,” the boy suggested, “by answering each other's questions?”

In the discussion that followed I learned that Peder was an officer in the Intelligence Section of the Commonwealth Service. The Commonwealth itself…

There was a notion fit to take one's breath away!

“I suppose you're familiar with the parallel universe concept?” he asked.

“Well, there's been some speculation here about worlds co-existing with our own on different lines of probability. It's something of a stock device in science fiction.”

The gist of Peder's explanation was that some of my colleagues' blue-sky maunderings were fairly close to the mark. There were alternate worlds, in numbers that staggered the imagination, existing each on its own line of events and distinguished from its “neighbors” by virtue of different outcomes of certain critical occurrences.

“Consider, for example, the extinction of the dinosaurs that took place on your line as well as my own. On some the thecodonts survived cataclysmic environmental changes to go on and evolve intelligence. On a few lines the cetaceans – the whales – became the dominant species, while hominids evolved into that niche on many more.”

Even those alternate earths where humanity had developed intelligence could differ radically from our own. Some were sparsely populated by ruthless and anarchic individualists who spurned cooperative effort, while others had the equally ruthless democracy of the termite mold, with populations and individual liberties to match.

A number of cultures were matriarchal, others male-dominated – Peder and Anton's world, Phelenia, was something of an extreme example of the latter. Females were simply breeders, not, properly speaking, intelligent creatures at all. They were kept in preserves and artificially inseminated. Genetic engineering with carefully selected spermatozoa ensured healthy, intelligent – and 90% male – offspring.

Philenian boys were brought up either by their natural fathers or in creches during their infancy. At the age of seven or eight each boy was expected to select an adult as a Guardian whose responsibility it would be to provide for the education of his charge and the lad's guidance into manhood.

The sexual side of the relationship was quite important, for all that Peder and Anton seemed to take it for granted. It seemed to be a bond strong enough to last a lifetime yet flexible enough to permit considerable sexual freedom for each participant.

I permitted myself a small smile at the thought of certain moral crusaders' reactions to that little bit of information. Then . . .

“What if a boy decides he wants another man as his Guardian?” I asked.

“He packs his clothes, kisses his old Guardian goodbye and moves into the new Guardian's home,” replied Anton.

It wasn't uncommon for a boy to change, especially when he wanted to establish himself in a career radically different from that of his old Guardian. Anton and Peder were together primarily because of the love that had grown up between them over the years – but Anton had originally sought out Peder Chelka because of his interest in Commonwealth Service and the exploration of new worlds.

And there were a lot of them. A loose confederation of more than a thousand of these alternate worlds formed the Commonwealth. Bound by ties of material and intellectual commerce, the Commonwealth was forever examining newly discovered worlds as prospects for membership – or candidates for quarantine, “in which case we place the line in a sort of purdah,” Peder explained.

“The Service intercepts portal transits to the line,” said Anton, “and any attempts to get in or out are stopped.”

I thought about that for a moment. It implied an organization with tremendous technical and material resources. “That's a lot of power,” I said.

“There's almost never a need to interfere on the subject line.” Peder said. “And, with an almost infinite number of other lines to open up and exploit, no reason to engage in conquest. The Commonwealth was formed to prevent warfare from crossing the lines of probability. It's a mutual assistance league, not an empire.”

“What chance do you give us – our world, I mean? Membership or purdah?”

“It's too early to tell. There's a great deal of potential here, but . . . All this warfare; how can we be sure it won't burst out, into our Commonwealth? And then there's the matter of these strange cults of yours, obsessed with pain and death, proscribing almost everything loving and living. You fill prisons with men who sin by giving boys the same affection we do in Phelenia, and let the batterers of babies walk free to torture and kill.”

There was something bleak in his eyes. “It's as baffling as it is repulsive, and altogether terrifying. If such a sickness were to spread into the civilized worlds . . .” Then he regarded the boy, his expression softening.

“And – though I can't for the life of me understand it – my Anton seems quite taken with the place.”

“I like the video arcades,” the boy murmured.

“And some other things besides.” Peder nodded at me.

“Aren't you afraid he might get into trouble?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Of course. Any sane man recognizes the risks – but Anton's had at least as much training as any of our junior agents. Once he'd been briefed on the customs and hazards of your line, I left it more or less up to him to decide when and where he went.”

“You trust him that much?”

“Anton is a free – a very free – person. I love him enough to let him go.”

“And I love you enough to come back,” the boy said, delivering a long, passionate kiss to his lips, at the same time reaching down to fumble with Peder's belt.

“Anton!” the man said with surprise. “Here?”

“That damned uniform!” the lad muttered. He yanked something and it gave. Faced with the prospect of losing either his holster or his dignity, Peder tried to save both at the same time, resulting in the loss of not only gun belt and kilt but cap as well.

He glanced at me with a mute, halfhearted appeal for aid. I shook my head and sat back, smiling, to watch Anton struggle with the buttons of his Guardian's tunic.

Peder Chelka out of uniform was as impressive a figure of a man as he'd been when weighted with the dignity of Commonwealth livery. His powerful body was covered with a crisscrossing array of scars, evidence of a career which brought him frequently into conflict with hostile and violently-inclined creatures. Obviously his opponents had consistently come off second-best.

I recall thinking, as Anton settled one of us on either side, that risking an attack on my present bed mate would have been one of the most foolish – and final – acts of a lifetime.

Then there was a small hand sliding down my belly, and Anton turning his possessive smile from Peder to me and back again, and then there was no energy to be spared for such silly exercises as rational thought.

Only in lovemaking does the wisdom of the flesh find its fullest expression, kindling the needs of separate souls and then drawing them together to flame brighter and higher until they burst out in a flare of fulfillment, clean and pure.

En menage, almost as one body, one presence, we built our blaze, centering it around Anton's brilliant spark and piling sensation upon sensation. Soon it became impossible to contain, impossible to hold at the peak any longer, and we surrendered ourselves to the blissful inferno of exultation.

“I've been thinking . . .” I said after a long time, speaking softly to Peder over the head of the contentedly sleeping youngster who lay between us.

“Yes?” Peder rolled over onto his right side, head propped on one hand to face me.

“When you first came through the portal you thought I was one of your agents.”

He nodded. “So I did. I saw you and Anton together, here in bed . . .”

“And concluded – correctly – that we'd been making love. Why did that suggest I was from the Commonwealth?”

Peder shrugged one muscular shoulder. “The way your society treats the matter of boy-love, I couldn't conceive of Anton ever finding a man bold enough to risk trysting with him. I'd forgotten that Anton has boldness enough for a whole battalion.” He smiled, bent and kissed the shoulder blade nearest to him. “Besides, you showed very little surprise when the portal appeared.”

I laughed. “As a writer, that sort of thing is my stock in trade. But what I was getting at . . . I assume that your survey here is still proceeding?”

Peder nodded. “For at least another five or six years.”

“Could you use a new recruit?”

Anton opened one eye and looked at me long and hard.

“What are you getting at?” Peder asked.

“Oh Peder!” Anton rolled over on his back. “Are you being dense deliberately? He wants to join the Service.”

The man's eyebrows rose. “Him? Impossible! I mean . . .”

“You mean 'certainly', don't you?”

“Only Commonwealth citizens can be accepted into the Service.”

“Which is understaffed.” Anton snorted disdainfully. “Think about it for a moment. He has everything we need in an agent – an open mind, caution, the willingness to learn. What's more, he's really much smarter than most of the people on this line: he's not stupid, just uneducated.”

“You forgot to mention that I'm good-looking,” I added.

“That, too,” replied the youngster. “And sexy besides.”

“But, Anton, the problems . . .”

“'Problems exist to be solved.'” The boy grinned.

“Any guesses as to whom I'm quoting?”

Peder paused for a moment, reflecting, then raised his eyes to me. “It's possible,” he said, half to himself. “We're so damned short of good people, I could swear you were my long-lost brother and they'd at least pretend to believe me.”

“He might even be your brother,” Anton mused. “He does some things just the same way you do. For instance . . .”

“Enough!” Peder sat up abruptly to turn the boy belly- down across his lap. He fetched the lad a few light swats to his bottom cheeks, heightening their tone. “Please allow us ageing cripples to retain at least the remnants of our pride!”

He let the laughing youngster roll onto the bed and stood up, searching among the disordered pile of his clothing until, grunting with satisfaction, he held up a palm-sized device and triggered it with a brisk twist of the wrist.

“Time to go,” he said. “If the duty technician's gotten over the scorching I gave him he should have a portal here in a few minutes. Where's my other sock?”

Anton was making no move to dress. He pressed, instead, one warm foot against my chest. “Can't we stay a little longer?” he pleaded, drawing his toes downward to tangle them in the curly hair below my navel.

I gently removed the boy's big toe from my belly-button and sat up to draw him close.

“You,” I informed him softly, “are absolutely insatiable.” Then I kissed him. “But all good things must come to an end. If Peder says it's time, then it's time.”

Anton gave a good natured shrug, sprang off the bed and knelt to buckle his Guardian's caligulae. By the time he'd finished the familiar hum was again reverberating through the room, the faint, unearthly light glittering in the air between the closet and my color TV.

Peder finished buttoning his tunic and turned to face the appearing portal. Suddenly his hands went to his waist and a stricken look appeared on his face. He said something quickly to Anton, who chuckled and lunged gracefully under the bed to emerge a moment later in dusty triumph with Peder's gun belt and holster.

“If the answer is 'yes' I'll be back in a few days,” Peder called above the increasing hum. The pitch dropped suddenly to the same bone-shuddering level I'd felt before, the light of the portal nearly blinding me with its brilliance.

But the light couldn't become bright enough to hide Anton's bare beauty, nor prevent me from seeing him take the Tiki beads from around his neck and toss them onto the bed, and from hearing his voice, clear in my mind: “Keep them close to you. And I'll be back, too!”

Peder stepped forward to vanish within the portal and Anton paused to give me one last smile of farewell before he turned to follow his Guardian through the circle of light to the Commonwealth and his home-world.

They say all writers are at least a little mad, caught up in the worlds they create, entangled in the yarns they spin. Sometimes I think they're right. Confronted constantly with the commonplace, I half-believe I've imagined everything – the Commonwealth, Peder Chelka, the Service in which I've just completed my basic training. . .

And Anton. Have there really been nights when I've been awakened by the moonlight visitations of a supple young incubus, his warm body sliding silk-smooth between the sheets and beside me, gray eyes agleam in the shadows, all hunger and eagerness? Have I dreamed it all?

But then I still have Anton's necklace, the locator. By accident I've discovered that the little beads emit a subtle glow, perceptible in the darkness or in dim light, to warn of a portal opening nearby.

Yes, I might even convince myself that I've become a candidate for psychotherapy, except . . .

Except that Anton's necklace lies on the desk beside me as I write this.

And it's glowing…

The Unexpected Legacy
of Uncle Edward
by Keith Spence

Every boy should have a bachelor uncle. He should be provided automatically by a caring state, like free dental treatment and basic schooling. It should be his pleasure and duty to give you unsuitable presents, to take you on wild, imaginative outings which get you back late for bedtime, and to answer all those questions which make your parents look shocked and change the subject. One of my friends at school had an uncle who took him all round the world on a cruise – and another, after binding me with a blood-curdling oath of secrecy, told me that he often spent weekends with his uncle, and slept in his bed: and he described all the illicit and delightful things they did together, crucifying my pre-pubertal emotions between shock (which I knew I was meant to feel) and jealousy (which predominated). Whether any of my other friends who came to each new term with tales of uncles' generosity did the same sort of things, I never dared ask. I think some of them must have done. Certainly those lucky enough to have uncles accorded them a love and a trust quite different from that which they gave their parents. After all, parents fed you and clothed you, but uncles took you to Cup Finals and let you steer their cars and got you into X films when you were still four years too young. There was no question who was the more important. Uncles were adored by their nephews, and any boy without one deserved to be regarded with pity.

I had an uncle. I hated him like hell.

Uncle Edward was my mother's only brother, and about ten years older than her. He was long and thin with a red, raw face, a nose like a parrot's beak, and a mouth clenched as tightly as his heart. Whenever he came to visit us he had a cold – it seemed to be a permanent feature of his personality – and he used to swallow bottlefuls of pills and potions, in between blowing his nose repulsively on a series of evil handkerchiefs which my mother then had to boil clean. I remember him as always dressed in the same clothes – black jacket, gray waistcoat, and gray flannel trousers that flapped forlornly around his spindly legs. He 'touched up' his prematurely gray hair with some disgusting dye which left it in irregular black streaks, and his eyes watered, and his hands were cold and dead. All in all, he was about as affectionate as a mortuary slab. He was, however, a brilliant scholar and an internationally recognised authority on a variety of abstruse academic subjects, and my mother worshiped him with total devotion. What my father thought he never said, although as I grew older I discerned an aloofness behind his impeccable good manners which told its own story.

But my father's work often took him away from home, and my uncle's whim often brought him to visit us, so I grew up in the shadow of his clammy personality. When he was at our house he ignored me, and so did my mother. When he was away, my mother talked about him constantly. Any small victory I won, any discovery I made and took to her, merely prompted yet another story of what Uncle Edward had achieved by the time he was my age. If I passed an exam, Uncle Edward had passed it higher. If I got a good report, Uncle Edward had got a better. And even if occasionally I was able to surpass him – like when I was picked for the school swimming team – it was only to be informed that of course Uncle Edward hadn't thought such things important. By the time I was 20, I had been told so often that I was inferior to him in every way that I had started believing it in spite of myself.

Maybe that feeling of inferiority was the reason I fought so hard to be a success: if I couldn't prove to my family that I was someone to be reckoned with, at least I could prove it to everybody else. The success came hard, but it came. By 26 I was assistant manager in a firm that manufactured computer software. At 28 I started my own business in the same field. And nine years later, I was employing six hundred staff, and taking orders from 27 countries. Despite my mother's contention that I was simply exploiting the creative ideas of other people – such as my Uncle Edward – I felt fairly good about what I had achieved. Nevertheless, I won't deny that there was a price to pay. Long, irregular hours; difficult decisions; heavy responsibility. I was young and strong, and there was no question of my nerves not being up to the strain. But social life and leisure-time became non-existent. At 37 I had no friends outside my work, and I hadn't taken a holiday for twelve years.

It was at that point that Uncle Edward finally, brutally and irrevocably altered the course of my entire life. He died.

It happened in early September, and on the day of the funeral – a gray, drizzle day – I picked up my mother in London, and drove her to Papworth Everard, the village in Cambridgeshire where he had lived so as to be close to the university. We were the only family present in the church; indeed, the only family he had, my father having long since died. A few academic friends, and some neighbors, dutifully attended the service and stood around with us for a few moments afterwards before drifting away about their more urgent concerns. We went to the crematorium alone. But as we emerged from that macabre charade into the gray drizzle, an elegant young man presented himself to us as Uncle Edward's lawyer. The will was quite simple. Some books and manuscripts to his Cambridge college library. The rest of his estate came to me.

“I don't want it!” I protested to my mother.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she snapped. “Your Uncle Edward had some beautiful things. Beautiful. Lovely furniture. Pictures. Not that you'd appreciate them.”

“What the hell can I do with them? Even if I auction them. . . .”

“You'll do no such thing! How dare you think of selling them! They were precious to your Uncle Edward. Things he cherished. Auction indeed! I never heard of such ingratitude. You'll drive me to London, then you'll come back here, stay at his house, and take a look at your inheritance. And be grateful, if you know how!”

I sighed inwardly – I knew that tone. But she was right. There was a lot to be done filling in forms, notifying the various bureaucracies, putting the house on the market and so forth, and nobody else was going to do it. It would take me a good week. Time enough to consider how to get rid of his late-Victorian junk. For once the business would have to cope without me.

So I ferried her to London, stopped to pick up a few basic supplies, and then drove morosely back to Cambridgeshire. Dusk was falling as I parked outside Uncle Edward's dingy little semi and let myself in with the yale the lawyer had given me.

My inheritance. It was what I had expected. Heavy, dark furniture, bees-waxed and over-ornate. Stolid still-life studies in oak frames. Books everywhere. And papers everywhere, too – I pulled out a few drawers at random, and they were all bulging with manuscripts and correspondence: it looked as if my uncle had kept every letter he had ever received. Bloody old man. It would all have to be gone through. I left the bottle of scotch I had brought ready on the desk and went upstairs. Two bedrooms – my uncle's, cold and dark and still smelling of old age, and a comparatively civilized spare room with a double bed. I threw my overnight bag in there and, depression deepening at every step, trudged down to the antiquated kitchen to knock up an early supper. The tinned, instant chile-con-carne (“the authentic tang of the Great Outdoors”) did absolutely nothing to raise my spirits. I washed up morosely and then, having nothing better to do, took myself back to the study and the scotch, switched on the desk light, and began the Herculean task of reducing my uncle's chaotic affairs to some sort of order.

I worked through the top two desk drawers, heaping the papers into piles of bills, receipts, correspondence and personal affairs. The light outside dwindled, the level in the scotch bottle got lower, and the dank house seemed to close broodingly around me. I promised myself that tomorrow night I'd go out into the village – perhaps even into Cambridge. Have a decent meal, maybe go to the theater or a concert if there was one on. Something I hadn't done for years. With a sigh I started on the third drawer.

“What are you doing here? Are you a thief?”

My head jerked up as if I'd been kicked, and my mouth fell open. I must have look ridiculous. At any rate, he obviously thought so.

“Sorry,” he laughed. “Did I make you jump? I didn't mean to. I saw the light on through the window. I knew the professor was – you know – dead. I thought it might be a ghost. Or burglars. You aren't angry are you?”

I discovered that my mouth was still open, and closed it. “No, I'm not angry. But I'm afraid I'm not a burglar or a ghost. How did you get in.?”

“The door was on the latch. You have to give it an extra pull to shut it properly, otherwise it sticks.”

“You seem to know a lot about it?”

He moved easily into the room. How old? 12? 13? I hadn't noticed children for so long that I had no idea about guessing ages.

“I've been coming here twice a week for . . .” – he grimaced – “extra tuition. I'm always bottom at school. My ma arranged for me to come.”

He spoke with the Cambridgeshire burr – a soft country accent, totally different from the metallic whine of the city. His voice was alto. Soon, I supposed, it would be starting to break. I waved at a chair.

He smiled and shook his head. “I'd best be getting back. Ma'll be worried.”

“Stay for a few minutes,” I said, surprising myself. The emptiness of the house had obviously effected me more than I'd realized. “I'll make a cup of tea. I'm afraid there's nothing else, except this – ” I tapped the bottle of scotch.

“No, I'd best be going,” he repeated. “She's an awful worriter, our ma. I only came in 'coz I saw the light. I'll pull the door for you so's it shuts properly.” At the threshold of the room he turned. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Yes. And most of the week.”

“P'rhaps I'll come and see you again, then.”

And with that he was gone. For no reason at all, the house seemed even bleaker and more dismal. It was with an unexpected pang of loss that I realized I didn't know his name.

He didn't turn up the next morning. I finished sorting through Uncle Edward's desk, burnt seven-eighths of what I'd found in the heavy iron fireplace, and at 1.00 walked down to the local pub for lunch. Calling myself a fool, I took two cans of coke back with me. And left the door on the latch. Then I started in on the chest of drawers under the window, which if anything contained even older and more confusing documents than the desk had done. There were also dozens of loose photos, showing blurred groups of middle-aged or elderly academics peering self-consciously at the lens. None of them were labeled.

He came at 3.00. This time, being near the window, I heard the snick of the gate catch, and looked up in time to see him wheel his bike in and lock it against the railings. He saw my face and waved, grinning – then pushed his way inside as if he knew that the door would be unlocked, and bounced into the study.

“Hi,” he said. “I told Ma about you. She says you must be one of the professor's family. Are you?”

“He was my uncle.”

“Was I cheeky last night? I told Ma I wasn't, but she says she bets I was. I'm sorry if you're unhappy about him being dead. Ma said I could come and help you if I didn't get in the way.”

“You weren't cheeky at all, and I'm very glad to see you.” I grasped my opportunity. “What's your name, anyway?”

“Danny. What's yours?”

“William.”

“Shouldn't I call you Mr. Something?”

“What on earth for?”

He looked at me assessingly, then nodded. “OK. But William's boring. Willie?” – He burst into a fit of giggles – “Oh, no, I can't call you that, can I? I'll call you Bill. Is there anything you want me to help you with?”

The speed with which he switched subjects was beginning to confuse me, so I put him to work clearing out some of the cupboards in the hall and stacking what he found on the kitchen table. We shouted conversation between us as we worked, and by the time we stopped for tea, I'd found out that he lived on a farm a couple of miles outside the village, had a sister he hated and a baby brother he adored, and that he had few expectations or ambitions beyond leaving school and eventually taking over the farm, although he did sometimes think he might be a racing driver instead. In return, I'd told him about London, which he'd never seen, and about my business – especially about how computers could be applied to farming, which intrigued him a lot. Bottom of his class he may have been, but he had a deft grasp of basic principles and a flair for spotting possibilities which were more valuable than any book-learning. When we took our break I told him so. He blushed slightly, and took a swallow of Coke to hide his embarrassment.

“Oh, I'm thick. All my teachers say so. That's why Ma sent me to the professor. He was really clever. Are you as clever as him?”

I felt the old stab of resentment. “Not in the same ways,” I said. “Like I told you, there are different ways of being clever. Uncle Edward was good at having ideas. I'm good at making things work.” Then, as he nodded thoughtfully, I asked, “Did you like him?”

“He was all right.” He looked at me with innocence as transparent as gossamer. “He used to take me out to the pictures, sometimes.”

“That sounds remarkably like a hint.”

“They've got Invaders Out Of Time on in Cambridge.

I told myself that this was one thing at which Uncle Edward was not going to outdo me. “OK,” I said, “I tell you what. You come and help me again tomorrow morning and we'll go tomorrow afternoon.”

His face fell. “I can't come in the morning – I've got things to do on the farm. Can't I come and work in the afternoon, and then we can go in the evening?”

“Sure – but won't your Mum and Dad mind your getting home so late?”

“That's OK,” he said. “You can write them a note saying I'm going to sleep here. That's what the professor used to do whenever he took me. You don't mind, do you?”

“Don't – don't be ridiculous!” I managed after the third attempt. “They've never even met me. How do they know I wouldn't – er – ”

“Wouldn't what?”

“Well. . . .”

“They won't mind, honest. I've slept away lots of times, with mates and things. And here with the professor. Or don't you want me to?”

“Well, yes – it's just. . . .”

“Write the letter, then.”

I wrote the letter.

And after he had taken himself and it off home, I sat in the gathering dusk, in communion with the remains of the whiskey, astonishingly confronting a gibbering riot of ideas and emotions which had suddenly, impossibly, sprouted all over my nice uncluttered brain.

It wasn't so much his confident suggestion that he should spend the night – for all I knew, kids did that sort of thing every day. It was more the bacchanalia of memories that his casual proposal had needled out of my subconscious. I hadn't thought about boys in a sexual way for nearly 20 years – in fact, I suppose I hadn't thought about them at all. Somehow it had been expected that after leaving school, one's sexual energies should be directed towards women, and I had – conformed, I suppose: although it must be admitted, without very much enthusiasm, and certainly without any permanent liaisons. Now Danny's innocent remarks had reached across the years and abruptly brought back to me the words of my school-friend, describing his weekends with his uncle. And brought back too, in a flood, the remembrance of the exquisitely intense pleasure I had found at school in the beds and the arms of younger boys. God knows why I had buried the memories for so long. Now they tumbled home to me, with echoes of breathless laughter and images of soft, warm bodies thrusting against each other. And suddenly I realized with a shock that the image which stood out above all the others was that of Danny himself.

And hard on the heels of that uncomfortable revelation came the inevitable, undodgeable question.

Had Danny . . . and Uncle Edward . . .?

No, of course they hadn't. The idea was preposterous. I was reading far too much into the boy's innocent remarks. And even if he was that sort of kid, he couldn't possibly have been attracted to Uncle Edward, with his colds and his clammy hands…

Could he?

And Uncle Edward certainly hadn't been that type of man! He'd always said that his work came before everything.

Yet Danny had often spent the night here. And Uncle Edward had never married.

But then, he'd never tried anything with me when I was a boy.

Perhaps he hadn't liked me. Or had thought it was too risky.

As, of course, it was. Far too risky. I wasn't sure what happened to men who got caught having relationships with boys, but I had an idea that they put them in prison and threw away the key.

And on that salutary reflection I took myself off to bed.

The cause of all my confusion breezed in at noon the next day with a self-satisfied grin, a carrier-bag of overnight things, and a gift of a dozen eggs from his mother. Awareness heightened by the unresolved questions ricocheting around inside my skull, I found myself watching him while he worked. There was no denying his attractiveness. Though he was still small, his body was sturdy and compact, and he moved with the easy confidence of one who is used to hard work. Laboring on the farm had given him a late-summer tan, which stretched away inside his open-necked shirt and showed up the bleached, preadolescent down along his forearms. His hair was sun-bleached, too, streaking into shades that ranged from straw-ocher to nearly white. He wore it long and ragged, and had a habit of pushing it brusquely away from his eyes which delighted me with its blend of childish petulance and adult practicality. His face wasn't beautiful – it wasn't delicate enough for that – but the soft line of his jaw and the broad, firm mouth gave hints of strength to come. He was freckled across the nose and under the eyes, and his skin glowed with health. In fact his whole body radiated a clean, outdoor energy which cut through the gloom of my uncle's house like a shaft of pure summer. Occasionally, as we worked and chatted, he would glance up and catch me looking at him: and then his eyes sparkled into a grin of something remarkably akin to complicity – almost as if he knew what I was thinking. . . .

And what I was thinking, I finally had to admit, was that Danny was certainly the sexiest young animal I had encountered for – well, far too long: and that more than anything else just then, I wanted to put my arms round him and hug him hard.

Just contemplating which, I reminded myself, was probably enough to have me put away for life, besides being self-deluding, impractical, corrupt, reckless to a lunatic degree, and liable to frighten the horses.

The day seemed to rush past. We made good progress with Uncle Edward's affairs: indeed, by the time we stopped, the worst was done. But instead of delighting me as it would have done 48 hours earlier, I found myself cast into gloom at the thought of leaving, and perhaps not seeing Danny again. We had got to know each other still better that afternoon, and he had opened out even further about himself and his life, nudging past the normal bounds of conversation as though trying to shock me, or see how far he could trust me, or I wasn't sure what. He told me in detail about taking one of his father's mares to be covered at the local stud; and a few minutes later informed me that he had started masturbating some weeks ago, and did I think it was “wrong or anything?” For my part, I found myself making excuses to touch him – lifting him into the attic-space, steadying him on ladders, even, once, sitting him on my shoulders to investigate some boxes on top of a cupboard. His skin was warm and silky, and I could feel the soft flow of muscle under the thin material of his shirt. Lowering him to the floor again when the jobs were finished, and stepping away from him, needed all the willpower I could muster.

Question as I would, however, I could not discover what kind of a relationship Danny had had with my uncle. The possibility that here, as in everything else, Uncle Edward had achieved what I had not, scarified me with jealousy. The alternative – that Danny was as naive as he pretended – was safer but infinitely frustrating. Merely looking at the boy made me so hard that I was certain he would eventually notice it.

At 6.00 we gave up the work, washed, and transferred to my Jaguar Convertible. It was still warm enough to have the hood down, and Danny was thrilled by the thrusting sleekness of the car as I pushed the needle up towards 100 on the A.45 into Cambridge. The film began at 7.40, so I took him to a steak bar, and then we queued for Invaders Out Of Time – just like father and son, I couldn't help thinking, and wondered if the same thought (grandfather and grandson?) had ever crossed Uncle Edward's mind. The film itself was tremendous. I hadn't been to the cinema in years, so hadn't realized what progress had been made in special effects and trick photography. The monsters were revolting, the heroes handsome and daring, the battles noisy, and the 25th century hardware utterly convincing. I don't know who was the more spellbound, Danny or me, and we drove back through the velvet evening pretending to be astro-cruisers, power-zapping imaginary alien sniper craft and then warping out of trouble into a different time-zone.

Until suddenly we were home; it was 11.00; the door had been given its extra pull to make sure that the lock clicked; and I couldn't put off the decision any longer.

There was the spare room; and there was Uncle Edward's room. I was sleeping in the spare room, so if Danny usually slept in there he'd have to change to Uncle Edward's room: whereas if he usually slept with Uncle Edward, he might automatically go to the bedroom he was used to, or he might expect to be asked to mine. Or he might assume I was sleeping in Uncle Edward's room, and go into the spare room because he'd think it would be free, or . . .

I gave up trying to work out the permutations, and led the way upstairs. Danny followed silently, even shyly. At the top he faced me.

“Where are you sleeping?”

My nerve failed me. “In there. The spare room. I'll make you up a bed in the other bedroom.”

“Is that where you want me to sleep?”

My heart jolted with something between disbelief and joy, and I fell back on aggression to cover my desperate hope. “You can sleep in the bath for all I care. Or on top of the wardrobe.”

He laughed, then looked away.

“When I came to stay with the professor,” he mumbled, addressing his left shoe, “I slept with him.”

Silence ghosted between us like smoke.

My bloody uncle. Alright, then. If he hadn't been afraid of the risks, I was damned if I was going to be.

“Would you like to sleep with me, too?” I asked. Adding, incongruously, “Please?”

His face lit up as he grinned at me. Yes, it had been a grin of complicity.

“Wow – for a moment I thought I'd got you wrong!” he said. “Come on!”

Any shyness I might have imagined in him earlier certainly hadn't lasted long. Inside the bedroom he thrust himself into my arms and hugged me, moving his hips so that his pelvis rubbed against the top of my legs. And now I could feel, through the coarse material of his jeans, the hard shape of his erection. I pushed my hand down between us to rub it, and he laughed up into my face.

“It's been like that all afternoon.” he said. “All the time we were talking about wanking and things. And when I was sitting on your shoulders. I was sure you'd notice! I just couldn't make it go down!”

“I was as well,” I told him. And then I slid my hand up to loosen his belt, and pulled his jeans down around his knees, so that I could stroke between his legs, across his thighs and over the strong cheeks of his buttocks.

Abruptly he pushed me away, and hurriedly kicked off his shoes and socks, wriggled out of his jeans and pants and pulled his shirt over his head. Then he leapt onto the bed and lay there in tense anticipation. Stripped, the young strength of his body was apparent in his shoulders, chest, and the firm muscles of his legs. He must have worked practically naked throughout the summer, because only the briefest triangle of white around his crotch interrupted the honey tan of his skin.

He leaned across and pulled at the waist-band of my trousers.

“Come on!” he demanded urgently.

I fumbled out of my clothes, leaving them muddled with Danny's on the floor, and joined him on the bed. To be honest, I was still a little unsure as to how to go about things, but Danny knew what he wanted. As I stretched out beside him he pulled me over on top of him, hugging me around the waist, tilting his hips up and straining his legs wide apart. I could feel him rubbing frantically against my stomach – and around that ecstatic epicenter, less acute but still deliciously perceptible, I was aware of the smoothness and warmth of his body, of the smell of his hair in my face, like grass in summer, and the excited panting of his breath in my ear. I slid my hands under his back and down to his buttocks, straining him harder to me, and his grip squeezed tighter in return – then I felt him pushing me sideways; so I rolled over, bringing him on top of me, and rubbed at his back as he pushed and writhed wildly against me, pressing the length of his body down on mine, his skin sliding over me like living velvet. His urgency mounted quickly, the movement of his hips and pelvis transposing into a deep rhythmical thrust which grew fuller and more frenzied every minute until at last, with a shuddering gasp of pleasure, he went rigid in my arms, strained in quivering ecstasy for long moments, and then sighed and sank voluptuously and damply onto my stomach.

I lay and stroked him softly, kissing his cheek, until at last he raised his head and looked down at me, his eyes sleepy and contented. I kissed his lips, and he allowed it, giggling; then he eased backwards and took me in his hands.

“Now you.”

I was already so intensely aroused that I had been on the verge of culmination several times, and he didn't have much to do. Pressing me between his hands and the soft skin of his belly, he rubbed himself along it until everything went beyond control, and I pulled him back on top of me. Then finally we lay quiet, making little movements of pleasure against each other, in a drifting nimbus of security and peace.

“Is this what you did with Uncle Edward?” I murmured.

“Mmmm. Sometimes.”

The security and peace wavered as a jagged shaft of jealousy clawed at them.

“It's better with you, though.”

The jealousy went away.

Soon after that I heard his breathing slow and deepen, and when I whispered his name he didn't answer; so I eased him off me, pulled the sheet over us, and turned on my side and cuddled him against me again. Then I, too, slept.

It was 8.00 when I woke, and Danny was still sleeping. He had turned over during the night, and was lying with his back against me, his buttocks pressed against my groin. By raising myself on an elbow I was able to look down into his face. He appeared impossibly young, all the passion of the night before smoothed away in the innocence of sleep. I let my hand stroke down his body, exploring gently, so as not to wake him, his firm chest, his flanks, and the silky skin of his stomach rising and falling with his sleeping breath. He was flaccid; but as my fingers fondled him he started to tumesce and soon, although he hadn't awakened, he was stiff under my touch. I rubbed him gently until, with a sigh, he rolled over and nuzzled warmly against me. I lay and stroked him while he gradually woke, and mumbled something in my ear.

“What was that?” I asked, startled, sure that I had misheard him.

He put his arms round my neck and hugged closer to me.

“Your uncle,” he whispered, “used to . . .”

I hadn't misheard. Uncle Edward, I forced myself to admit, had been quite an operator.

That sort of thing had never figured in my school-days experiments: we had been too naive, I suppose. But if Uncle Edward had done it, I was damned if I would refuse: and anyway, it would give Danny pleasure, which just then was something I wanted to do very much indeed.

So I kicked the bedclothes off us and went down on him, taking him gently in my mouth. Like most boys of his age, he had hair-trigger sexuality, and within seconds I found, as I had the night before, that in fact I needed to do very little. Danny's own movements served his own needs, sometimes pushing deeply and luxuriously right to the hilt, sometimes rubbing just the tip rapidly across my tongue and teeth. He was making noises, too: tiny grunts and whimpers of delight – and as my hands stroked over and across his body, I found his legs and shoulders trembling.

And for myself . . . Well, I suppose I had realized that kissing, say, could be an erotic experience in a purely oral sense – but nothing had prepared me for the incredible intensity of excitement I now felt. I found my whole awareness telescoped down to that one area of sensation. I don't know whether it is scientifically possible to have an oral climax: I do know that there is no other way to describe what I was feeling.

Then Danny was on the move again. Hardly daring to believe it, I felt him swivel round on me so that he was still in my mouth but his knees were either side of my head. Seconds later, there was a nudging between my legs, and then a delicious sensation of warmth and tightness as his lips closed around me, and that was without any question the single most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me in my life. Soon my body was moving as urgently as his, and my excitement must have communicated itself, for now we were racing each other toward the finish.

He won. I suddenly felt him kick and swell in my mouth, and throb six or seven times, while his body tensed rigidly against me. The taste was sweet and slightly salty – there were only a few drops as yet. Slowly he relaxed, rubbing himself with infinitesimal movements back and forth between my lips, clinging to the last ecstatic moments. At the same time I realized my end was approaching. I tried to pull out of him, but he held me there insistently, caressing me with his tongue, until he took all that was in me, and swallowed convulsively. Then, gasping, we let go of each other and rolled apart.

He scrambled around and came up with his head on the pillow beside me. I put an arm round him and stroked his hair.

“That was – incredible,” I told him.

“Mmm. Smashing.”

“I've never done that before.”

“Haven't you? Oh, I have. Heaps of times. With the professor and people.”

“Christ! Is there anything else you used to do with my uncle?”

He looked at me enigmatically. “Well – not on the same day . . .” he said.

For breakfast we cooked some of the eggs he had brought – much better than the supermarket variety I had been getting all my life. Then, the washing-up done, I looked at him regretfully.

“I suppose I've got to take you home, Danny.”

He nodded. “I'd better be getting back. But I'll come again tomorrow. I'll come every day, if I can; though it can't be for so long when I'm back at school.”

“I'll be in London by then, anyway.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I'll have to be back at my job soon. I'm only here for as long as it takes to put this house up for sale. . . .”

“He interrupted me, his face stricken. “But – but I thought – you were going to come and live here!”

“Danny, I can't. I've got a business to run.”

“Won't I ever see you again, then?”

“Don't be daft. I'll come up whenever I can. Weekends. Perhaps your Mum and Dad might let you come down to London some time.”

He looked mollified. “Wow – I thought you meant you were just going to go away and never come back.”

“After last night? Christ, no!”

He grinned. “Well, you didn't ought to sell this place then, did you? Then, when you come up to see me, we'll have somewhere to do it.”

“I haven't got the money to keep it on.”

“Why can't you sell your house in London?”

“I've got to be near my work. And now,” I said in what I hoped was a decisive voice, “I'm taking you home. You're getting far too inclined to organize my affairs.”

He'd come in by bus the day before, having more than usual to carry, so I had said I'd take him home in the car. Privately, I quite wanted to meet his parents and make my mark with them. If, as I hoped, I was going to see more of Danny, I needed their approval and blessing.

Half-way to his farm, as we were just leaving the village, he again produced the words I was coming to welcome and to dread:

“When I was out with the professor . . .”

I sighed. “Yes?”

“Well, there's an old airfield close to here where nobody ever goes. He sometimes let me drive his car.”

“Did he indeed!” I said in some surprise. “How good are you?”

“Dad's taught me a bit, too. On the farm.”

“OK,” I agreed. “But only if you promise to do exactly as I say.”

The way his face lit up made even the risk to my beloved Jaguar worthwhile. And when, five minutes later, he climbed into the driving seat, he was literally quivering with excitement. Not many boys get a chance to handle an XK150. That, at least, I told myself smugly, was something Uncle Edward had not been able to give him.

Indeed, as far as teaching him to drive went, neither Uncle Edward nor his father seemed to have got very far. We stayed mostly in second gear, and got away to some very jerky starts. Nevertheless, when I called a halt half an hour later, he'd grasped the rudiments of the art. We changed places again, and he lay back in his seat, tired from the concentration, his eyes closed. I looked with pleasure at the smoothness of his cheek and the damp hair falling across his forehead, and wished it was 11 o'clock the night before.

“Danny,” I said gently, “I'm afraid you've just gone and given the game away.”

He jerked his head around, startled. “What do you mean?”

“You've never driven before.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Maybe a bit with your dad. But with Uncle Edward?”

“Well – not every time, actually. Only three or four times. . . .”

“Danny, Uncle Edward hated cars. He never went in one if he could possibly help it. He never learned to drive. And he certainly never owned a car in his life.”

I saw guilt flood into his eyes, color mount into his face. He looked away.

“It's all right. Really I'm not angry. But I'd have let you drive my car anyway. I don't understand why you wanted to lie about Uncle Edward.”

He made a small noise. I put out my hand and turned his face to me, concerned that he was crying. I should have known better. He was trying to stifle a fit of giggles.

I laughed too. “All right,” I said. “So tell me the joke.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, you see – you know when I asked you to take me to the cinema – when I said the professor always used to?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I didn't really mean it. I mean, I didn't actually think you truly would take me. But you did. And I thought it was probably because of me saying that the professor had done it.”

“And he didn't.”

“Danny rocked with another explosion of giggles. “The professor? In a cinema? He'd have flipped! Anyway . . . when you did take me, I figured I could make you do things just by saying the professor had done them.”

The boy's grasp of elementary psychology was uncanny.

Then the implications of what he was saying hit me. “You mean my uncle never . . .?”

He laughed up into my face. “Well, it worked, didn't it?”

“But – I mean – did you even know my uncle?”

“Oh, I used to go to him for lessons – like I told you the first time I saw you. But I thought he was really mean. And he never asked me to stay or anything. And I wouldn't have wanted to even if he had.”

“But – last night – Danny, you've done all that before. It wasn't the first time. You were – too good at it.”

“It was, honest . . . with a grown-up, anyway. I've wanted to for ages. I've got this mate at school called Billy – you'll like him – anyway, me and Billy muck around together – you know. But last term Billy met this man at the amusements in Cambridge, and the man took him into Midsummer Common and did it to him – sucked him and everything – and Billy said it was really great. He's gone back lots of times, but he's never seen the bloke again. Ever since I've really wanted to do it with a man.”

“You and Billy . . .?”

“Oh, yes. And we pretend I'm the man and I pick him up. But it's not as good – and anyway, I don't want to do everything with him and he doesn't want to do it with me. I never thought I'd want to do all of it with you, actually. But when I found out how good it felt I wanted you to feel it as well. And it's fun, really, once you've started, isn't it?”

I nodded, feeling the inadequacy of such a simple agreement. One thing troubled me, however: “How in hell did you know that I was . . . well . . . interested?”

“I didn't. Not at first. But you kept looking at me – you know – and asking me to come round, so I sort of hoped you were. And you were, so that was all right.”

“But – if you never used to stay with Uncle Edward, how the hell did you get your mother to let you spend last night?” I thought of my note to her and shuddered at the risk I had run.

He shrugged. “It took a bit of talking. But she knew the professor – and I s'pose she thought anyone that moldy'd have to have boring, safe old relatives. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “p'rhaps you'd better come in and see her when we get back.”

“Yes, p'rhaps I had,” I said grimly as I put the car into gear and moved off.

“Then when she's met you she won't mind if I come over to your house every day.”

“Danny, it's not my house! Get it into your head that it's got to be sold! I can't afford two houses! I promise I'll come and see you – often – but living in Cambridge is out!”

It's nearly a year, now, since I sold my London house and moved to Papworth Everard. It's not as difficult as I had feared, running the business from outside London: and to tell the truth, I'm not doing as much as I used to – I've promoted a couple of my executives to full partners, and they've taken on a lot of the donkey-work. I sometimes go a whole week without visiting London at all.

Ten o'clock: and we have just shown the last of the kids out of the door, latched it securely on them but not on their cheerfulness, which always lingers long after they have left. The redecorating of Uncle Edward's old, dark Victorian rooms was done almost entirely with volunteer boy-labor and, having worked so hard on it, they quite rightly consider my house partly their own, to come and go in as they please. Danny himself lords it over them, and views me mainly as his property, although he graciously lends me out from time to time.

I switch off the lights, and we walk towards the stairs together. Except during the busy times on the farm, he usually stays with me: it's more convenient for his school – of which, to his intense disgust, I have recently become a governor.

On the landing at the head of the stairs, in the place of honor, hangs a portrait of my uncle Edward. My mother came to stay last week, and was suitably impressed.

“I am glad to see, William, that you are paying your Uncle proper respect!” she said – and I'll swear she did a little bob in front of it, as if genuflecting at a shrine.

“But of course, Mother,” I told her, straight-faced. “He was so generous, leaving me all his property. I honestly do appreciate it. I don't think he realized how valuable some of his legacy was.”

“Edward always had a very good sense of values,” she said smugly.

The house is dark, except for the light shining from the bedroom. Danny sighs luxuriously.

“Mmm. Saturday. No school.”

“What do you want to do?”

“What do you think?”

“Billy's coming round at nine o'clock . . .”

“So what? He can let himself in. And – er – join us.”

“I thought we might all drive over to Alton Towers?” I suggest. “You know – that amusement park that was on TV.”

“What, where they've got those bob-sleighs? Could we? That'd be brill!” He looks up mischievously. “Afterwards.”

I ruffle his hair. “Don't you ever think of anything else ?”

“Course I do. Lots of things. But – er . . .”

“But what?”

The front of his jeans is noticeably fuller than it was a few minutes ago. He drops one hand to rub it as he pulls me towards the bedroom.

“Well – Christ – it's nearly midnight. I mean, what else am I supposed to think about? Come on. Hurry!”