“Now, wait a minute, Wilma! What you gonna do?”
“Teach you not to play with matches for one thing. And for another, i’m going to get even with you for what you did to me right up there in that haystack.”
“Hell, Wilma, I thought you liked’ It same as me. Come on now, admit it. It were a right snazzy ding-a-ling, weren’t it?”
“Right snazzy! And now you’re going to get some idea of how it felt. Back up against that wall there, Rafe, and drop your pants.”
Slowly, fearfully, Rafe did as he was told.
“Now your drawers.”
Rafe slid his jockey shorts over his hips and let them drop to the floor.
“Good. Now put your hands up over your head.”
Rafe clasped his hands on top of his head. His eyes grew big as Wilma balanced the shotgun in the crook of one arm and picked up a pitchfork. “What you gonna do?” It was a wail of fear.
“Turn around and bend over.” Wilma watched as he obeyed. Then she raised the pitchfork and gently stabbed at his posterior with the sharp prongs. Rafe screamed, but she continued until his backside was dotted with perhaps two dozen blood-trickling perforations.
It was only the beginning. Wilma paused for breath, then raised the pitchfork over her shoulder, aimed carefully and thrust one of the prongs hard between the cheeks of his back-side. Rafe’s scream reached a new pitch and then broke in the middle as he fell forward and crumpled to the floor, unconscious from the sudden agony.
Calmly, Wilma lifted a bucket of water from one of the pig stalls and dumped it over his face. She slapped him a few times and then dumped another bucket of slops over him. When he came to, she stepped back and leveled the shotgun at him again.
“No more,” Rafe begged. “Please, Wilma, no more!”
“What’s the matter, Rafe? Don’t you like my new sex game? It is a sex game you know. Sex and pain often go together. You demonstrated that very clearly that day up there in the hayloft. I figured a fellow like you with all your inventiveness and offbeat tastes when it comes to sex would really appreciate the game we’ve been playing. No? Well, I’ll tell you what then, Rafe, we’ll play a new game instead. I just know you’re going to love this one.”
Wilma approached him cautiously, still with the shotgun aimed at his stomach. She kept her finger on the trigger and pressed the nozzle against the side of his head as she bent over his prostrate body. He looked at her pleadingly, but it was no use. Wilma was enjoying herself too much to stop.
She dropped to her knees between his legs and propped the shotgun under his jaw so that his head was forced backwards. Then, her finger still stroking the trigger, she took his penis out of his pants and took it in her mouth. She licked the shaft, kissed his testicles, sucked the hole at the head of the organ. Despite the pain which had been inflicted in him, despite the fear which filled him even as Wilma worked him over with her tongue and lips, Rafe began to respond.
Just at the point when it was about to explode, Wilma stopped abruptly. She stood up, still pointing the gun at Rafe. “Stand up,” she commanded.
He got to his feet.
“Over here.” She indicated where she wanted him to go with a gesture of her head.
He obeyed.
“That’s it. Stand right there.”
Rafe stood directly in front of a hip-high chopping block her father had once used to slaughter chickens. Wilma reached across the block, grasped his erect penis and set it on the block. Before Rafe realized what she was doing, she quickly raised the rifle and brought the butt down viciously on the long erection stretched out on the block.
Blood spurted. Rafe screamed and fainted. Wilma laughed.
She left him lying there. She told herself it would be a long time before he tried burning any more barns. And it would be an even longer time before he cornholed some other girl. Wilma laughed to herself again at the thought of the bloody mess she’d left lying behind her on the floor of the barn.
She laughed and she laughed, dizzy with exhilaration. Her blood was pounding with excitement as she entered her father’s house. Her very throat was choked with the frantic desire aroused by what she’d done. And, best of all, she’d done it for her father!
That’s what she told herself as, half-mad with passion, she climbed the steps to her father’s bedroom. She’d do anything for her father because she loved him. And he loved her! She was sure he did! He was the only man who could give her what she wanted! And he would! He must!
Slowly, brimming over with desire, Wilma opened the door to her father’s bedroom. . . .
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Glory Dawes had no idea that there were people who wanted to kill her. She didn’t know that her father cursed himself for having sired an “unnatural monster” and that he was filled with rage to the point of wishing his child dead. She didn’t know that her ex-fiance, his manhood affronted first by her cheating on him with another man and then by her preference for a woman over him, had likewise reached the point where his desire to destroy her was not under control. She didn’t know about the others; she didn’t know them; she had no idea that they knew her, let alone that they might have reason to kill her.
Glory didn’t know about the secret meeting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Beauregard Barker. Looking around her front parlor at the men who had slipped into the house so furtively, one by one, Mrs. Barker shuddered with distaste. As the acknowledged leader of society in Glenville, she was unused to having what she considered to be the riffraff of the town in her home.
Mrs. Barker was a skinny, dried-out woman in her late thirties. She was her husband’s willing chattel every place but in the bedroom. Once the cold sheets were pulled over her colder body, she controlled Beauregard Barker with an iron pelvis. Only rarely did she allow his fatness to envelop her in a hurried sex act, and when she did, she always extracted payment from Beau. This payment, made to the cashier beneath the surface of her obedience, added up to her getting her own way in almost all matters save those relating to business. However, on the surface, she remained the most obedient of wives.
So when Beau asked her to leave while the men discussed the matter at hand, Mrs. Barker went into the next room. Of course she left the door ever so slightly ajar so that she could hear what was transpiring. She was very curious as to why Beau had summoned such a motley group to their home. Of those who had come, Joe Ambler was the only one who had ever been a guest in the Barker home before. As the owner of the general store, his merchant status was close enough to the Barkers to label him acceptable. Also, he and Beau Barker served together as deacons of the church.
But what was a man like Luke Partridge doing here? A common red neck, a sharecropper turned laborer? He was the sort of man Beau Barker usually didn’t even take the trouble to bother noticing.
And Harvey Henshaw? A common servant? Why had he been asked to the Barker home? Or Mr. Birdwell, the ex-teacher they’d pensioned off with a school board job? Or Angus Morton, who was rumored to be involved in all kinds of shady doings in the Glenville area? Or Rafe Proctor, that lout who couldn’t hold a steady job?
Why had her husband assembled these people here? Mrs. Barker listened and learned the answers from her husband’s lips as he talked to the group.
“I’ve asked you all here,” he began smoothly, ”because I believe that along with myself you represent the feelings of different segments of the community of Glenville. Mr. Ambler knows how his fellow merchants feel about things. Mr. Birdwell can speak for the educational community, for the teachers and parents of Glennville. Mr. Partridge, as head of the factory union, knows the feelings of our laboring men. There are few servants in Glenville, but I felt they should be represented in the problem which faces us, and I think you’ll agree that they couldn’t be represented any better than by Harvey Henshaw. Our shrinking farm community is represented by Rafe Proctor, who comes from a farming family, was once a farmer himself, and is currently employed as a farmhand. Mr. Morton can speak for those concerned with the image Glenville presents to tourists. And I believe I may give voice to the feelings of Glenville’s more fortunate and affluent citizens.