"I looked down through the opening and saw the thing up in me was definitely no imitation. There was a man lying on his back underneath."

"Was it Homer?" I asked.

"I couldn't see his face," she said. "I could just see that part of him that showed through the opening. It was a fat man," she added.

"Then if must have been," I concluded. "That slob. What a way to get a piece of ass!"

"I had no idea how long the thing was he had stuck in me." she continued. "When I looked down, all I could see was like a tree stump stuffed up between the lips. I had the feeling that plenty was in there, though. It was grand. It didn't seem as if he were going to get around to pushing it in and out," she continued.

"He probably couldn't," I suggested. "Not in that awkward position. Undoubtedly it took all his strength just to hold on."

"I couldn't take it," Helen went on, "not just sitting there stuffed like that with nothing happening. I started rotating my bottom, you know. Around the circle, then up, down. Around the circle, then up, down. I didn't know about him, but it was sure working on me."

"I started working that routine harder and faster, and pretty soon I came. I could feel it running down out of me. I noticed then that he was still working up into it as best he could. He hadn't come yet. Before I knew it, I felt a second orgasm building inside me. How many times does that ever happen? You know how the second one can really zap you, so I grit my teeth and hung on."

"When the warm flow of all his come gushed up into me, there was a wrenching spasm in my pelvis. I felt my back arching and my legs go straight. It felt so good I cried out. It must have frightened him because he pulled out suddenly before I had had a chance to come all the way down."

"That must have been when I arrived," I said. "You were still way up there. Too bad," I sympathized with her.

"Yes," she agreed. "Why do some men do that? Jack does that, Bea. You know it? Drop that load and get out fast. That's his motto."

"I wonder how often Homer pulls off that little trick," I chuckled.

We had reached the county road leading to Felt's place. Turning onto it we soon saw it was badly in need of repair. Whatever county funds were earmarked for paving roads must have always found priorities somewhere else. It didn't appear to have been patched in years.

Helen's car was fairly new, and each time a wheel ran into a chuck hole in the road I felt a twinge of guilt for having brought her car there.

"By day's end, you're going to have an old rattletrap for a car," I said rather apologetically.

"If it means finding my pooch, I don't care," she declared.

When it appeared we were close to the general area, I told Helen to slow down in order to read the numbers on the mailboxes. Some boxes carried the names of the tenants as well as the number. Perhaps we would be lucky and see Felt's name on one, I hoped.

Numbers had been placed on the mailboxes in many different ways. No two boxes seemed to use the same decals, paint or reflectors in posting the numbers.

To my delight, I saw Felt's name on a box up ahead. I told Helen to drive alongside the box to check the number just in case there was more than one Felt in the neighborhood. The number checked.

Felt's farm was evidently not close to the county road.

A long, dirt road went off across the fields at a right angle to the county road and must have continued for quite a distance for no buildings were visible on the immediate horizon.

Helen and I turned into the dirt road and bounced along for what seemed like miles before a clump of buildings came into view. As we pulled into the compound, we were surprised at the number of animals to be seen around us.

There were the usual barnyard animals running loose; chickens, ducks, geese, even pigs seemed to be roaming at will. Other animals, mostly dogs it appeared, were cooped up in cages placed in no visible pattern around the area. Several dogs were tied to stakes sunk into the ground. The din was terrible.

The main house was in a decrepit state. Shutters hung by one hinge where there were any left. Practically all the paint had peeled from the clapboard sides, and the roof showed many barren patches were shingles had been lost and never replaced. Shades were drawn over all the windows.

"You go see your friend," Helen proposed, jumping out of the car. "I'm going to look around."

We had parked next to several vehicles already there. One, a battered pickup, bore the name of a garage in Fort Worth. I stepped out of the car and watched Helen trudge up past some of the cages, then went up the steps to the porch and rang the doorbell.

When I had not had any response for some minutes, I knocked on the door thinking that the doorbell probably did not work.

The door opened quickly, and I beheld a man in the dimly lighted hallway inside. He was dressed in a crumpled suit and asked me to please come inside.

He led me into what must have been the parlor where he offered me a seat and a cup of coffee. I accepted both. He poured the coffee from a silver pot and asked me if I would like it braced with some cognac.

I declined the brandy but complimented him on his service.

"Thank you, Miss Starr," he returned. "I presume?"

I smiled acknowledgment and looked my host over. He was a slight man, graying, and probably in his late fifties. He evinced a delicacy that didn't seem to fit his surroundings.

"There are a million and one stories here for your magazine," he revealed. "Every animal has a story to tell, don't you agree?" he asked.

"Perhaps we mightn't keep them around if they could tell it," I suggested.

He glanced at my face oddly. "What a strange thought! Ah, but you're thinking about the ponies," it occurred to him quickly.

"Mr. Felt," I said, leaning forward in my chair, "Joe Cunningham has sworn to me he sold you four ponies over the past two years. If, as you say, you have only one pony now, I am curious about what happened to the others."

"My dear," he began, "curiosity in you is a virtue I admire. I do not have to tell you, you realize, what you want to know, but I can say at least that they have died."

"Died?" I asked. "All of them? How?"

"What does it matter how?" He inquired. "Death comes to everything sooner or later."

"It doesn't always have to come sooner," I commented.

"Perhaps," he said.

"Mr. Felt," I began a new tack, "You strike me somehow as out of place here. I understand you own a garage in the city, too. None of it fits as far as I can see."

"It's true," he admitted, "I'm no farmer. You can see that outside. The fields are rented out to those who like that sort of thing. As to the garage, it is operated on a lease basis by someone else. All of these things," he opened his palms, "are just an inheritance I haven't had the heart to sell."

"Then how do you explain that truck outside?" I inquired.

"A private matter, Miss Starr, a private matter," he asserted. "Nothing to do with the business of the garage, I assure you. But why should that be of concern to you?"

"Mr. Felt," I said, "do you know a Jack Smallwood?"

"Why, yes," he replied, becoming more and more disconcerted by my interrogation. "Only casually."

"I have. reason to believe Mr. Smallwood stole a valuable dog recently and that you have possession of that dog right at this moment." I had not minced my words.

His hands twisted in his lap. He appeared to become more agitated.

He stood up at once. "My dear girl, what are you saying?" He appeared flustered. "Come with me at once," he requested.

I followed him out of the room. He unlocked a door and led down a flight of stairs to another door at the bottom which he unlocked also. After that we entered a damp enclosure that was evidently a little used portion of the basement.

At one end of the damp area we entered what appeared to be a small arena or theater in the round. The seats were arranged around a small platform on which was a bed and an few straight-backed wooden chairs.

We passed through the theater area to another door that led to dressing rooms and a lounge. A man and two women were sitting around drinking and talking. The man stood up when he saw us come in.

"Elbie," Felt addressed the man. "Bring the collie out here."

The man put his drink down and walked back to a rear door. The two girls, who looked suspiciously like prostitutes, ogled me curiously. Moments later the man returned with a collie held by a leash. I recognized Clyde at once.

"Clyde!" I called.

His ears perked up and seeing me broke away from his holder and bounded in my direction.

"Clyde, you old rascal," I blurted out, hugging at him.

He licked at my face and started humping at my leg in the excitement. The man and the two women laughed abruptly.

"Maybe we can use her in the show, Felt?" the man suggested.

"I had no idea this dog was taken from anybody," Felt confessed to me. "Believe me." He seemed sincere. "I have private shows here in the evenings," he went on, "shows in which we use animals in, let us say, erotic situations with our actors."

The others seemed amused by Felt's choice of words.

"This collie was brought to me by Mr. Smallwood, who had heard about the entertainment I provide and thought I might be interested. He took no money for him. He told me he was his dog and that he could not take care of him anymore." He paused.

"What else did he tell you about him?" I asked.

"Else? Why he said the dog was a natural born actor," Felt hedged.

"What kind of an actor?" I insisted. "I want to know exactly what he said."

Felt looked embarrassed. "He said the dog liked to, uh, do it to girls."

"He does, too, lady," Elbie piped up. "He don't need drugs, either."

"Drugs?" I asked.

"Yes, does that surprise you?" Felt wanted to know.

"Do you drug the animals in your shows?" I wondered.

"Most of them will not perform unless they are drugged," Felt revealed. "This collie is a grand exception. One in a million."

As well I knew. I patted Clyde on his shoulder and thought about Helen.

"Drugs ain't good for them, He's lucky," Elbie chimed in again.

"Is that what happened to the ponies?" I asked Felt.

"It's a tough life for all of us, Miss Starr," he volunteered rather gratuitously.

"But what a way to go!" Elbie exclaimed.

The two girls giggled. One of them, who had been eyeing me during the conversation, winked. I had no explanation for it but the wink sent a hot flash through my body. Furious, I glared back at her.

"I must get my sister," I said. "She's outside waiting for me. I assume you are going to let me take the dog," I asked Felt.

"What can I say?" He smiled, throwing up his hands. "Come by some night and see the show, and bring your Clyde," he urged. "We invite audience participation at all times."

I left them laughing. Felt insisted on accompanying me back up through the house.

"Remember what I said," he reminded me at the door. "And no hard feelings?" he wanted to know.

My feelings are my own so I said: "Am I going to report the theft to the police? Is that what you want to know? The dog belongs to my sister. It was her husband who took it. Need I say more?"

He seemed astonished, and I left him in that condition.

I found Helen, or rather Clyde found Helen poking around inside a hen house looking for fresh eggs. She forgot about eggs when she saw Clyde and fell into him with joy.

"Oh, Clyde, honey," she cried deliriously, her eyes filled with tears. The dog was humping at her legs, but Helen paid no attention. "I'm so glad, so glad," she repeated burying her face in his fur. "My baby's back, my Clyde baby's back!"

Clyde kept humping at her excitedly, his pink organ inching its way out slowly. He licked at her face and began to whine.

"Oh, Bea," she pleaded. "I can't wait I'm so hot for him. Stand at the door, will you, honey?" Her eyes were all soft and moist. I could see the longing in them.

She stepped back into the chicken coop and put her purse on the floor. She pulled her pants down as best she could with Clyde clambering all over her and got down on her hands and knees in the straw.

Clyde mounted her insanely, humping at her rear end like a frenzied creature. The wet looking penis was way out and jabbed forward missing the right spot on every thrust. It poked, it slid off to the side, it almost bent in a right angle to itself when it struck one of her buttocks.

Suddenly it slapped into the right spot and dug in deep. Clyde changed his frenzied humping to a kind of close in ramming. He was humped up with his haunches as close as he could maneuver and in an effort to dig deeper lifted one rear leg off the floor, set it down, then lifted the other, rocking from side to side.

He was panting madly, the pants coming in short, tight huffs. They began to lower in register until they became almost inaudible. He was just about to come, I thought.

I heard a groan escape Helen's lips, and she pitched forward, the dog falling with her.

Clyde got up right away and stood alongside her, panting as though it were the hottest day of the year. I could see his meat bent clear around still anchored into her hole. It resembled an umbilical cord twisting out in that strange way.

The dog was too interested in getting its wind back to try breaking the union at once. Helen, too, was down in the hay, out of this world and into some seventh heaven. She relaxed abruptly, and I saw the twisted dong come grooving out.

Immediately behind it a big blob of white come welled up and blocked the entrance to her vagina. Helen shifted slightly, and the come slowly oozed back inside the hole. She turned and sat up.

"Where are my panties?" she inquired, the picture of contentment.

Clyde was over in a corner licking carefully at his member. I handed Helen's panties to her, and she stood up to put them back on.

"Got a Kleenex or something?" she asked me.

I searched through my bag and handed her a couple. She took them and folded them, then placed them down inside her underpants covering the vulva.

"If I don't do that, I'll drip all over the place," she averred.

She reached down for her purse and we walked out to the car, Clyde trotting after us.

"You drive, Bea," she said. "I'm just too up to think about driving. Do you mind?" she asked me.

I didn't mind at all and told her so. We were soon barreling down the dirt road homeward bound. Clyde kept poking his head forward over the front seat between us and demanding little pats of attention from Helen. She was only too willing to oblige him.

"We'll have to have it out with Jack tonight," Helen remarked. "I take it you found out he knows."

I told her about Felt's little theater group and Clyde's natural acting ability.

She hugged the dog's head affectionately. "I wonder how many times he performed in the last few days." She stared straight ahead out the windshield. "It's like Jack to have taken Clyde there. Don't you see the humor in it? He could have disposed of the dog anywhere, but he didn't."

She was milking something out of the situation that was flattering to her husband.

"He's going to wonder how in the hell we ever found that place," Helen said, laughing at the series of events that had found him out.

"Put the blame on me, if you want," I told her. "He will be only too glad to jump on me. We haven't had our usual blowoff this visit yet, anyway," I said.

She reached over and put her hand on my thigh. "Bea, I know how upset you were this morning. You wouldn't have said anything about Jack otherwise. I'm glad that you told me, though. I want you to know that. I want you to know, too, that I still love you better than anybody."

I took my right hand off the wheel and placed it on top of hers.


Chapter 8

Jack had been furious.

He had stormed out of the house swearing never to come back. Before that he had threatened to shoot the dog, shoot the pony, carve me up into strips of bacon. His ultimatum before leaving was, no dog, no pony, and no sister. Until then, goodbye!

Out he went into the night.

Helen was speechless. She had not been able to get a word in edgewise while Jack was there and after he had gone could not find the words. I was at a loss as to how to console her.

There was no doubt that I was going to leave on Sunday. I had planned to be back on the job Monday morning. There was no doubt we were going to return the pony that morning. There remained the presence of Clyde.

"Has he ever done this before?" I had asked Helen.

"Yes," she had admitted. "When he does, he usually means it and stays away for one night, anyway. I try to think of it as just another business trip."

"Where does he go?"

"He has friends all over, drinking buddies, who knows?" She had thrown up her hands. "I guess I will have to give Clyde up, after all," she had said in resignation.

We had sat through dinner quietly, feeling the consciousness of Jack's absence. Helen had shut Clyde in the basement not to please an absent husband, but to remove from her sight the tangible evidence of their conflict.

After dinner I had begun to expect that John might telephone. Not that I had been anxious for him to call. It had just seemed a likely expectation. When the dishes had been done and the kitchen cleaned up, I had begun to feel it a certainty.

When the hour had reached eight-thirty or so and he had not called, my ego had been severely bruised. I had thought then of telephoning him, but wouldn't that have been playing his game? I had decided against it.

Helen had tried to escape her problem by watching television. That had never worked for me, and soon she had come back into the living room herself.

"I can't enjoy the thing unless I'm completely relaxed," she had said. She had sat down, and observed my own tension, thinking, probably guessing the truth, that I had had John on my mind, but guessing wrong what it was about John that had been bothering me.

"A girl like Pat, now, whom I'll probably never get to meet, what's the big difference between us?" I had asked Helen. "She paints, she willingly puts off her marriage to care for a sick mother, she leaves John on his own for six months. That's about all I know about her," I had said.

"It adds up to an unusual girl these days," Helen had remarked.

"I wish I had some time to look at those paintings. Some were his and some were hers, you know. You can tell from a painting how the artist sees things. The better his technique, the easier it is to see what he's left out. If John were to do a portrait of me, I could tell how he sees me by what he's discarded."

Helen had looked at me and smiled.

"It's true, Sis," I had insisted. "When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see an awful lot of junk. You think it's all important, down to the last hair out of place. You can't be selective about yourself, so you never really know how you see yourself."

The doorbell had rung then. Helen had jumped up, her lips forming the name Jack questioningly. She had gone to the door and I had heard the voice of a woman.

It had turned out to be a local friend of Helen's a Mary Parker.

Soon we had mixed some highballs and were gradually relaxing as the liquor began numbing our brains, pushing aside the problems-of the day.

Mary, a divorcee, had just returned from a trip to Acapulco, and had been anxious to tell all to my sister concerning her vacation.

"It's not the romantic place I used to think it was," she had said. "Every accountant from New York must have been there with his secretary, and the college bums, yi! Who needs it?"

I had argued that the water and the climate must still be unspoiled, and she had agreed.

"How's Clyde?" she had asked suddenly.

Helen had stolen a quick look at me. "My sister knows about Clyde, Mary," she had said.

"Really!" She had exclaimed, her face lighting up. "How groovy!" She had quivered her rear end in a jello-like shake on the seat, a little movement she was to repeat throughout her visit. "Let me tell you about this place in Mexico, then."

She had begun then to tell of a visit to a place outside Cuernavaca where she and the girl accompanying her on the trip had stayed overnight.

"We had reservations in Taxco, but couldn't make it because we had stayed too late in Cuernavaca. We decided to take the first thing that came alone, so," she had said, "we kept our eyes open for a likely looking hacienda or something."

"It started to get dark all of a sudden, and we sort of got that panicky feeling." She had giggled. "We didn't know what was going to happen if we had to sleep in the car. Finally we spotted something, a plain old two-storey adobe house, nothing more. I said to Jane, let's ask anyway, and she agreed. It turned out to be a private house, but they offered us a room downstairs in the back if we wanted it."

"Well, we took one look and guess what? It's like a combination stable and sleeping porch. Two cots along one wall separated by a short rail from a manger for burros. And there were burros in there, let me tell you, in spades. You know how everywhere you go outside the cities smells like tortilla flour. You get kind of used to it after a while. Well, this was different. We didn't know if we were going to be able to take it. All night, no less!"

"We finally said, screw it, and flopped down on those cots, smelly donkeys and all. We hadn't been in bed long when the old guy in the place, the grandfather I guess, comes padding in with a bottle of tequila and some limes."

"Ola, he says, Chiquitas, Mira, Mira! He gets out some glasses and pulls up a little table by the beds. He pours a little in each glass, cuts the limes, and passes the salt around. Well, you know me, Helen. I always think the guy wants to end up in bed with me, but I wasn't sure with this old abuelo. He sits there rattling off in Spanish, sipping his joy juice and sucking at his wrist. Jane keeps looking at me for cues like, what do you say to that, or what do I do now?"

"We relaxed after a while. The tequila we were drinking helped. I get to the point where I start glowing and I think well maybe the old guy in bed would be a novelty if he has any meat between his legs. But that's not what the old man is thinking. Turns out he just wanted somebody to drink with. Pretty soon he says Buenos notches and picks up his marbles.