Shaw laughed. “Oh, I get it. Like what you was talking about them folks had run judgment on themselves and stepped into a situation where you had to kill ‘em. Well, no, I don’t speculate on them kind of matters for one second. I’ll never let you be my executioner because I feel guilty, Custis.”
Longarm smiled. “You done proved that. Now we better get along. It’s getting late and we ain’t spotted that cabin yet.” Shaw said, “Damn, I am nearly dying for a woman. How about you, Custis?
Could you stand a little?”
Longarm’s thoughts immediately flew to the image of Molly Dowd. He said quickly, “Dammit, don’t start talking like that with us out in the middle of the desert. Just save that talk for another time.”
“You going to let me get to a woman before you turn me in, Custis?”
“Dammit, shut up, I said. I been out in this country as long as you have. So save that talk until it will do some good.”
Shaw laughed. “Aw, hell, Longarm, I’m serious. Who is the best woman you ever knowed?”
“My mother,” Longarm said shortly. “Now shut the hell up.”
“Now Custis, they has got to be one woman that has stood out for you over the years. I know I’ve had two I ain’t ever going to forget.”
“Well, do us both a favor and forget ‘em for the time being.”
“Just tell me if you generally favor darker women—you know, Mexican and such—or do you like ‘em light skinned and blond?”
Longarm rode his horse a little out to the left. “Mostly I like them handy if there is any of this kind of talking to be done. Do you take my point?”
“Well, what was the best you ever had? Can you remember that? I mean, I’ve had a piece off a woman was the best I thought it could get. Then I’ve gone back to that same woman and it wasn’t shucks. How do you explain that?”
Longarm was silent, refusing to be drawn into the debate.
Shaw sighed. “Seems like at times like this the best you ever had was the last one. That’s what I feel right now. I wish to hell I was in bed with them two Mexican women of mine right now.”
Longarm was forced to speak. He could not help himself. “You take ‘em on two at a time?”
“Well, sometimes. You want to hear about it?”
“No,” Longarm said firmly. “It ain’t good manners to talk about women. Now shut your trap. We got to make some miles.”
Chapter 7
He wished to hell Jack Shaw had kept his mouth shut about women. The minute he’d mentioned the subject, Molly Dowd had jumped into Longarm’s mind, and in trying to force her out of his senses Lily Gail had somehow horned in, and you couldn’t get Lily Gail out of your mind, not that easily, not without something else to think about besides the blank prairie and the blazing sun that left you about half light-headed, and not if you’d been without as long as Longarm had.
Lily Gail. She’d had several last names in the short time Longarm had known her. She was always claiming to have just been married, which was why her last name had changed, but her husbands seemed to have recently gotten killed. One of the reasons for that was that she seemed to pick her husbands out of the Gallagher gang, which had terrorized Oklahoma Territory and eastern Arkansas for a good ten years. Longarm had first met Lily Gail when she’d been used as bait to lure him into a trap, and a well-baited trap it was.
Lily Gail was a smallish woman in her mid-twenties, though there was still a lot of the girl about her. She had golden, butter-colored hair that she wore just to her shoulders, usually with a little bow up front. The surprising thing about her hair was that her pubic thatch was just as golden, but it seemed to have an interweaving of strawberry color running through it. Longarm had studied that silken little patch at very close quarters. It grew out of the notch where her white and, oh, so smooth inner thighs met, spreading upward and outward to form an arrowhead as if it were pointing the direction to where the treasure lay, which it was. Then, with her legs up, you could see as the little threads of fuzzy silk ran down and around her vagina on both sides, sort of framing what lay between. It seemed as if the careless little hairs grew more golden red as they came closer to that little pink nest that they were protecting. All Longarm knew was that it made the most exciting maze of colors when you took both of your thumbs and opened up her vagina, seeing it go all pink and seeing the inner lips rise and come toward you, already glistening with moisture and seeming to have an inner pulse that you could feel as you lowered your lips to meet them.
Lily Gail had a vagina like none he’d ever found on any other woman.
She could seem to open it so you almost felt you could get your head inside. But then she could constrict it so that she could close down on your member and rhythmically milk it and massage it while you wanted to go out of your mind with a pleasure that was so intense it was almost painful.
For a small girl she had surprisingly big breasts. But they didn’t droop. Instead they stood firm and erect, her nipples big as cherries almost pointing upward. She liked those sucked. She liked to hold your head in her hands and move you back and forth from one to the other, all the time moaning and jerking her hips. Then she liked to take your head and move you down her stomach, down through the forest of golden hair that carpeted the fat, little mound at the bottom of her belly, down through that to where she could suddenly drop your head with her hands and, so quick it seemed they’d already been there, swing her little legs up and catch you in a grip and hold you there. Then she would thrust at your mouth and tongue, thrust and writhe and gasp and pull at your hair.
Longarm never talked about his women. And he knew that, even if he did, he could never talk about Lily Gail because he didn’t have the words to describe her. He didn’t know how to say, “She never gets enough,” with sufficient impact so his listener would understand that he was saying, “I mean, SHE NEVER GETS ENOUGH!” So he had never tried.
He had simply run Lily Gail through his mind in slow sequences the way you sometimes saw things so clearly and so easily in a gunfight. The other man is reaching for his gun and you can see it, almost to where the blue is worn off around the cylinders, can see it as he has the gun half out of the holster, can see it as the revolver keeps on being drawn. But you are not worried because you know that you are still comfortably ahead of the man, know that you have already cleared leather and are starting to bring your gun up while he is not yet clear. You can see him now starting up, but you know he is too late.
You almost feel sorry for the man, do in fact have the time to feel sorry for him, for your arm is already out and you are pointing where you are looking and squeezing the trigger and dust is suddenly popping out of his shirt where the bullet has hit and the man is going backwards even as he is still trying to bring his revolver up.
Longarm could see Lily Gail like that, but he couldn’t describe it. He couldn’t describe her mouth, for instance, which was constantly kissing or sucking or licking. Once she got close enough, she fastened onto you with that mouth, perhaps onto your own mouth, and after that she had some part of you in it, even if it was just a finger or your knee, whatever she could reach.
She seemed to almost melt into you, seeming somehow to get inside you and at the same time wrap herself around you. She had a thin little layer of what Longarm thought of as baby fat, and maybe that was what made her feel so soft and pliable, so enterable. He could remember the first time, when he’d been chained to a post in the barn, waiting for the Gallaghers to come and kill him, and she’d come out in the late night and, by lantern light, had teased him as she’d taken off her clothes. Then she’d gotten on her hands and knees and backed toward him, with that beautiful round moon of what seemed like a single buttock except it was slashed with the pink ribbon through the middle. She had backed up to him as he’d waited on his knees, with orders not to move his hands off his head, and she had somehow, without his hands or hers as guides, reached up and pulled him into her, and then kept backing and backing until he could not believe he was so deep inside her, and still she kept backing until he almost felt like she was inside him.