Robert Devereaux
BABY’S FIRST BOOK OF SERIOUSLY FUCKED-UP SHIT
SHOWDOWN AT STINKING SPRINGS
Tiffany knocked. She heard someone—her subject, she guessed, though the step seemed too spry—approach the door and snap open the locks. The ornate brass doorknob eased about.
Kyle Hardwick’s weather-beaten face caught Tiffany by surprise, it glowed so with life. More like a horny teenager’s, those eyes of his, than a man about to celebrate his hundred and twentieth year. His skin was cracked and scored like old parchment. Some boyhood disfigurement had marked the flesh from his nose to the shell-curve of his ears, as if a shockwave of some sort had blasted it.
“By my reckoning, you’d be the lovely Miss Walker, oral historian extraordinaire,” he said in tones rich with the sounds of sagebrush and rawhide.
His eyes danced like campfires, his voice as thick and downhome as hickory smoke. Kyle’s face, she thought, might even be considered handsome in a perverse geriatric way. A thrill coursed through her. If his memories and the telling of them lived up to this preamble, she might come away with not just something for her archives but an honest-to-God spoken-word recording. She might even spark the interest of a documentarian, a pro like Chip Kendall, whom she had met and bedded in Waco at a conference the summer before.
“I like your apartment, Mr. Hardwick.”
He dismissed it with a gesture. “It serves. Live long enough, one apartment’s like the next. Won’t you kindly take a seat here by the window? Gives you a choice view of the traffic down below. You can set your player on this footstool.
Outlet’s over yonder.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hardwick.”
“Welcome. And call me Kyle. All my woman friends do.
Got lots of ’em, I do, sweet Tiffany, but there’s always room for another. Particularly one with a saucy rump like yours, thighs just made for a man’s caress, and a bosom anyone’d be proud to tongue to two stiff blushing points.”
Tiffany, taken aback, was more amused than shocked. She put on mock-anger. “Why, sir, you’d best mind your manners.”
“Sense of humor. I like that.” His eyes twinkled. “Us old codgers, we’re as cute and cuddly as snug buttons. Don’t go denying it. It lets us get away with talking like that, ‘cause we don’t have time to waste skirting around the truth. The truth is, I want you Tiffany Walker, and I mean to have you.”
She laughed at the audacity of it. Even so, she felt a rush overwhelm her womanhood, moisten it, make it swell in a way she thought absurd. “Well, Kyle, let’s get to the business at hand, shall we? You promised”—(here she pressed Record)—“as the sole survivor of the fire that destroyed the town of Stinking Springs, New Mexico, summer of 1882, to relate exactly what happened that day.”
“That I did.”
He gave Tiffany a wry wink, leaned forward on the sofa, gnarled hands knuckled between his knees, and launched into his narrative.
Everyone, began Kyle, has heard of Paul Bunyan, who scooped out the Great Lakes to quench the thirst of Babe, his big blue ox. And they’ve heard of Pecos Bill, raised by coyotes, a fellow they say threw fistfuls of fishhooks into his liquor to give it that extra zing.
But few know anything about Hefty Jake Gentry, the hardest-humping, biggest-balled, thickest-dicked darling of all of Western womanhood at the time whereof I speak.
And fewer still have heard of Lily Mae Dalton, captured while yet a virgin by a band of Mimbres Apache warriors gone dishonorable, compelled thereafter into a savage love of manflesh, but freed by her own burgeoning appetites. Those braves could break the wildest mustang that bucked and weaved beneath them, but they were no match for Lily Mae when she threw off the shackles of civilized behavior and let free the fire in her belly. To speak plain, she fucked those boys to death she did. When the dust had cleared and Lily gentled her sweat-soaked body down from the heights of orgasm, she was amazed and dismayed to find dead red corpses sprawled everywhere, young and muscular and grinning to beat the band, but dead as dead could be. What was worse to Lily, not yet quite fulfilled, was that their dark dicks hung limp between their thighs, never to stiffen nor thrust again.
From the latter part of the ’70s up to their demise on the main street of Stinking Springs in ’82, Hefty Jake Gentry and Lily Mae Dalton proved the bane of tiny towns struggling to poke their heads above soil and sprout into bigger ones.
Hefty Jake would ride into town, his pecker as proud and tall as a flagpole behind his saddlehorn, and all the womenfolk’d swarm into the streets, their fingers flying this way and that, tearing off dresses and underthings and flinging themselves down, open and ready, onto billows of muslin and calico. A great keening would fly up into the sky from scores of needy mouths. White arms were flung wide to welcome him in, and whiter thighs as well. The menfolk? They just stood by drained and helpless while virile Jake strode and poked, stroked and sucked, tilled and plowed and Johnny-Appleseeded his way up and down the street. The foolhardy soul who dared go for his gun took one bullet betwixt the eyes and another through the groin for his pains, but Hefty Jake never missed a stroke as he gunned those crazy cockwielders down. Trouble was, the ladies ended up being sated a lifetime’s worth. And the men?
They were unable to get their dicks up thereafter no matter what the temptation, so demoralizing had it been to watch Jake please their women.
Lily Mae had much the same effect. She went through lovers like a thresher through wheat. And when Lily Mae spent a man, his balls shriveled up tight as two sun-dried peas and stayed that way. His dicktip—though he had to lift the limp thing to see it—wore a thin smile, but it was a smile that said,
“I am finished. Wiped out. Done. Fucked and richly paid,” not
“That was heavenly. Now find me some other woman, cause I’m stiff and ready to slide on home again.”
It’s a fact of life: Towns die if folks don’t fuck new babies into the world.
Towns died then. Lots of them.
Men lost their oomph. Homesteads went undefended, cattle roamed unherded, women were carried off or got fed up at the cockless ways of the demoralized scruffbuckets around them and left. The men sat in saloons listening to off-key piano music and staring at beer. Their minds did nothing but replay memories of Lily Mae straddling them, her wild-honey sex hair swirling up and whipping about like a rage of flame betwixt their belly and hers.
“Seems to be a sheen of perspiration on your brow, Tiffany darling,” came Kyle’s leathery voice, full of kindness and caring. “Highly becoming of course. Makes your lovely face glow. But maybe you could do with some iced tea or a cool sip of cream soda.”
Tiffany blinked in confusion, then pulled herself together.
“Um… iced tea sounds good.” She reached out, hit Pause, and swept a strand of hair into place. Her hands wandered to her lapels. “Do you mind if I—”
“Remove your suit-jacket? Be my guest. You’ll be cooler.
More comfortable. Besides, it’ll give old Kyle a better view of those lovely breasts of yours.”
Before Tiffany could reply, he was gone. The bounce in his step astounded her, a man his age. And she could scarcely believe how moist she had grown. It felt good, very good.
But ridiculous too. She never went for old men, even ones that came on to her. But Kyle wasn’t like them. He was kind and sweet and gentle, despite the frank language of his recollections. His voice was rich and vigorous and, she had to admit it, downright seductive. His hands moved as he spoke, molding his tale as a potter molds clay. The sight of them thrilled her. Those hands had been places, secret places on a woman’s body, and they knew how to make those places sing.