Oh, that hurts! Glory’s eyes filled with tears. But her body filled with the lust of pleasure-pain! She thrust her stiffened tongue all the way up Wilma and moved it in and out. . . . She’s going to come! Glory thought. And so am I!
Fuck me with your tongue, you slut! That’s it! And I’ll suck the juice out of you! You’re coming now, aren’t you? Yes-yes-yes! And me too! Wilma, almost smothering Glory, yelled aloud. “Fuck . . . Suck . . . I’m coming! . . . Suck! Suck! Fuck! . . .”
Thus, when the moment of ecstasy came, it came for both of them, a wild, pulsing, drawn-out moment which seemed as though it would never end. . . .
This perverse merging of bodies, caught in the new moonlight, unseen—or was it? -- oblivious to the world around it, as oblivious as the world around it was to the happenings in this motel room. But this world would not be able to remain innocent of this room and of the moment of death approaching there. The room would be forced on the world, forced with an awful violence, and the world would intrude on the room, shaken, shocked, disbelieving what it had to believe.
It wasn’t much of a world. It wasn’t cosmopolitan, or even metropolitan. It wasn’t a small-city world, or a suburban world. It was strictly a rural world, small-town perhaps, but really more a world of dying farmlands.
It had a name, this world. It was called Glenville, town and county alike. It sprawled somewhere between the South and Midwest, a place of dust-dried acres and scraggly crops.
It was a place to be born in and to get away from as quickly as possible. No population explosion here. Its population exploded out over the rest of the country, which is why the populace of Glenville itself had grown sparser and sparser in numbers over the years.
As to the kind of people they were, with the best of them constantly leaving, those left behind were mostly the dregs of humanity. Glenville might once have been rightly called a poverty pocket. If so, the farmers of the area were the lint of the pocket. As such, they were fair game for the merchants of Glenville who reached into the pocket to squeeze out any spare pennies which might somehow have lodged there.
For the past three years, these pennies had been more available. The reason for this was the factory opened on the outskirts of Glenville by the Continental Ball Bearing Company. Many of the dirt farmers in the county had sold their land and moved closer to town in order to go to work in the factory. For this reason the factory was very important to the townspeople and, one way or another, to everybody in the county. But the beginnings of industrialization in Glenville had little effect on the basic nature of the people. Farmers, merchants, and factory workers alike, were as narrow a flock of rural Reubens as might be found.
The last liberal political ideology to touch them had been the Populist movement of the 1890s1 . Since then they’d lapsed into rock-ribbed conservatism. Their religion was fundamentalist, as was the code of morals they espoused. It was not necessarily a code they lived by.
The men took off their hats when William Jennings Bryan2 was mentioned. The women voted in accordance with their husband’s instructions. The kids, brought up on myths involving storks, watched the animals mating in the farmyards, and winked at each other.
Sex came early. So did marriage, but rarely to the same youngsters who had experimented with sex together. Thus every man thought his wife was pure and snickered over some adolescent experience with the next fellow’s wife. The women were smarter. To them, no matter what they’d done out in the woods, or in the back of a parked car, or maybe even in the front parlor, it had never happened. And they brought their daughters up to be decent women like themselves.
They did this even when they were practicing adultery, which was by no means infrequent in Glenville. Appearances were the important thing; appearances were their morality; immorality was equated with getting caught. And yet there were certain rules applied to this erotic netherworld, rules which were agreed upon by the prudish and promiscuous alike. These rules served to stratify their sex-world. Marital sex was acceptable for procreation. Marital sex aside from such purposes was a matter of lewd winks among the men and blushes of denial among the women. Extramarital sex—provided by the town’s one rundown bordello—was clucked over, but privately understood. Extramarital affairs were viewed tolerantly enough—so long as there was no scandal -- particularly by those engaging in them. Masturbation was frowned upon; the boys were told it would make them crazy; the girls were told nothing since it was inconceivable that they might indulge in such a practice; both sexes masturbated freely; the boys kept their sanity and the girls usually had little realization of just what it was they were doing.
But there were three taboos, beyond the pale for even the lustiest males and most nymphomaniacal females of Glenville. These were intercourse with animals, oral intercourse, and any form of homosexuality -- male, or female. The first taboo had been broken a few times by various farm folk over the years, but nobody knew about it. Even those who had perpetrated the sin were convinced they would roast in Hell for the bestiality. What the animals involved may have thought, only they know.
The second taboo had been broken even less frequently than the first. One fellow got his wife drunk and they defied it in the privacy of their bedroom. Sober, his wife punished her husband and herself by refusing to ever let him touch her in bed again. A passing prostitute had once obliged a local merchant in this fashion; he showed his appreciation by reporting her to the sheriff who had her run out of town. The third case involved a farmer who gave in to his wife’s urgings to satisfy her this way; once having done so, it was the only kind of lovemaking his spouse allowed him; tortured by shame and self-disgust, the farmer blew his brains out with a shotgun. With the exception of these three cases, the town of Glenville kept its mouth shut.
As to the third taboo, it had never happened. This isn’t too say there weren’t homosexuals in Glenville. One only had to observe the men horsing around at an American Legion meeting, or the women fitting one another at a dressmaking session, to realize the latent possibilities of the populace. But, overtly, nothing happened. One reason was that those so inclined realized early in the game that a homosexual life in Glenville could lead only to frustration and moved on to greener pastures with less inhibited colts—or mares, as the case may be.
Thus the affair between Wilma and Glory was the exception. More than that, it was the beaver nibbling away at the brace supporting the very foundation upon which the morality of Glenville rested. Now, lying side by side on their bed of perversion, the passion-drained pair tottered unknowingly on the very brink of the quicksand of personal disaster into which the town would soon be sucked.
It was close in the room. The air hung heavy with summer—and with silent hatred and unvoiced regrets. Twin cigarettes glowed in the dark. Starshine sneaked in the window and played peekaboo with the two nude bodies stretched out on the bed. Neither girl spoke; both were busy with their own thoughts.
Glory: Why did I do it? Why did I make love to her, let her make love to me? Why was I so disgustingly weak? Will any man ever be able to satisfy me this way? Another woman? Would another woman make me feel as Wilma does? Will it always be women, never men now? Is this what she’s done to me? Or maybe more. Maybe she’s spoiled me for everybody—male and female -- except herself. But why? I don’t love her. I hate her! I could kill her! Yes, now that I’ve had my sex, I could kill her! And I should kill her before I sink to doing it again. Yes, I should really kill Wilma. Nobody would have to know. She’s no good. She deserves to die! The world would be better off without her. I should kill her! I should kill Wilma!