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SARI AND THE EXPEDITION [ part 2 ] The boys regarded Sari with an intensity of superstitious awe peculiar to modern, computer-oriented kids. To them any phenomenon that did not originate in a digital program was ‘spooky’ and was to be left alone. They played games with images of lawless men and wild beasts and fabulous monsters, but the confrontation was legit only on the screen of a monitor; direct contact with raw nature, even at the city zoo, was for geeks. News of the cougar in the night had permeated the camp and crazy theories were being proposed as a possible explanation. "It was no hallucination, man!" protested Grossland angrily to Tom and Jerry. "We didn’t have no stuff like that! It was real, man! It was as close as you two are! Too close!" "And big! Too big!" the black nineteen year old assured the company. "It filled the tent, I can tell you!" Shalem Hoser smiled indulgently – he was familiar with this kind of overstatement; his father had recently exaggerated his love for his underage daughters by pinning them with chains to the wall of the cellar at home and was now spending some time in a federal pen. Tom and Jerry lifted their eyes to heaven. Louis pouted. He threatened to smash their faces to pulp for their disbelief. Bret Stack attempted to mediate. "I’d like to have seen any of you guys handle it. It was real wild! Like you see in the movies!" His tremor was no simulation. "Only this was no movie!" The conversation died as Sari Kinnis, looking immaculate, emerged from her tent. She had already been up and washed at first light to avoid any possible embarrassment. The New Yorkers and the boy from Chicago had expected her to be bloody or dishevelled, frightened shit scared at the very least. There was a definite, fearful drawing back as she approached the group. Carter was shaving; he watched from a distance, and grinned. "Yeah!" Tom remarked cynically to Jerry. "Looks like she’s been savaged by a wild beast!" Both boys sniggered. It broke the spell. "Waiting for breakfast?" enquired Sari. She smiled sweetly. "They say there was an animal in your tent last night," said Hoser. Alice was puzzled. "Was there?" She let her gaze flit from boy to boy. "Who says? Who are they? And how would they know?" Davis Carter approached
with his shaving kit wrapped in a towel. "You all right?" he
asked Sari. The girl nodded. The group of boys made to split up. "Wait!"
he called out. "Before you get today’s assignment, I want you
to appoint a leader." He looked amused. "One who can read and
write! Preferably!" There was no way the sarcasm could have been missed. "Now that is a surprise!" exclaimed the boy from Chicago. Tom and Jerry would go north, simply because they refused to be split up, and no-one else wanted to go with either anyway. Grossland and Stack would go east and the remaining two boys would go south. Carter frowned when he was told about it. He had misgivings about the eleven year old girl and the nineteen year old Jackson Joe Louis being out on their own for most of the day. He shrugged. Apart from either Tom or Jerry, he could not have trusted any of them alone with the girl. So why pick on Louis because he was black? "How far do you
think we’ve walked?" Louis looked back. The camp was out of
sight. The boy gasped. "Christ! And we’ve twelve to go?" "Only another four." Sari corrected him this time. "Mr. Carter talked about a diameter of twelve miles. That is, twelve miles across. We only have to do half of that. A radius of six miles!" "I was good at drawing," boasted Louis quite irrelevantly. He looked around to ensure that he and Sari were finally on their own. Sari attempted to establish a connection between distances and the boy’s artistic talents. She could find none. She decided to let it pass. They walked on until she judged they were more than half the distance to their goal – a saucer-shaped outcrop among the foothills of Colorado. Her companion let out his breath in a hiss of resignation and relief when she suggested that they could stop. "Drawing was the only thing I was any good at." He sat on a rock, and opened the buttons of his shirt. "I reckon I’m not very smart!" He fanned himself with a handkerchief that had been cleaner in its better days. "Never made much of school past fourth grade. Never went much to school, to be honest!" He visibly shook himself. He pointed at the girl, now seated on the ground at a safe distance. "Now, you!" He growled the words. "You have it made!" Sari sensed a dangerous hostility. "Your folks are rich. You’re smart." He rose aggressively. Sari also stood. "And you’re good looking." He moved forward. "You are a beautiful little bit of ….." "I’m also fast," interrupted Sari. "I can outrun you a million to one." She moved farther from the boy. "I could be back at the bus and on the phone to the authorities before you caught your second wind." She laughed gaily. But she was not entirely confident of her gut feeling that the boy would not dare seriously assault her. Jackson Joe Louis grinned. "All I want is to be nice to you." "You wanted to rape me," replied Sari. "That’s what all that cat business was about last night, wasn’t it?" She sniggered. "And those condom things and that tube of lubricant, not to mention the rope you dropped outside my tent." The reference appeared to have a sobering effect on the boy. His face clouded. "That was no pussy cat, last night!" He turned away. "Let’s move. Let’s get this drawing thing done and get back." He moved off; Sari followed a few paces behind. He looked back. "Come on," he urged. "I won’t rape you today. I promise!" When she was alongside him, he laid an arm across her shoulder. "We are in this thing together. We gotta be friends! Right?" Sari did not reply. "I really do want to be nice to you," he insisted. She remained silent. But there was a strange stirring in her groins. Two hours later Sari
examined the boy’s drawings. There was no denying the fact that
they were artistic in a childish way. But what were they intended to represent?
Jackson Joe Louis waited expectantly. The girl pursed her lips. A feeling
of pity for the boy welled up inside her as she gazed at his wide ingenuous
eyes. "What are these lines here?" Sari indicated the perfectly executed wave forms. "There is no water out there!" "Birds!" Jackson Joe Louis beamed, and the child’s heart melted. "There was lots of birds where I was!" "Oh, Lor!" thought Sari. "How do I tell him?" She thought about something her father had said when they were going walkabout in north-west Australia. "Your life may depend, one day, on being able to read a map properly and being able to give an accurate description of where you are at any given time." He had taught her to look for the salient features in a landscape and to ignore what was of little consequence. Louis, she guessed, had never been out of Harlem before. "Let’s have some lunch!" she said brightly. Again, she felt really sorry for the big coloured boy. "This is the life!" After their lunch Louis stretched. It had not been the standard hot dog or beefburger, but it had sufficed. He eyed the girl and again gave inner acquiescence to the fact that she was as beautiful a kid as he had ever seen, and several times sexier than most of the girls of her age he had come across. He licked his lips; it was his equivalent of Sari’s shoulder jerks. "You got a boyfriend?" he asked. When she nodded, he said, "He can’t think much of you to let you loose on planet earth." Sari was wary. She made to rise. Suddenly, Louis twisted round and pressed her back to the ground. He rolled on top of her and began systematically to feel her. She squirmed in his powerful grasp and tried to avert her face when he made to kiss her. He held her wrists behind her back in one of his huge hands. He took her by the throat and forced his tongue between her lips. "Jackson, you promised," she gasped as soon as she had breath enough. She was aware of her shoulder jerking frenetically. She was also conscious of a frothing turbulence in the region of her stomach and a decided wetness on her panties. "Promises were made to be broke!" The absurdity of the situation struck Sari; she wanted to correct his grammar. Louis had already been inside her blouse to maul her small breasts and was now under her skirt pulling at the waist elastic of her panties. "Please, Jackson! Don’t do it! It is ten to twelve years in prison for the rape of a minor in this state." Sari had read somewhere that such a penalty had been imposed on an escaped convict for the rape of a schoolchild; she could not recall the exact details – she believed it had been a homosexual assault in Kansas. But any defence in her present predicament was justified, she felt. And it seemed to work, for a minute or two. The boy eyed his prey. "Ten to twelve?" he echoed, then decided. "It would be worth it!" he hauled again at her panties and succeeded in getting them half-way down her legs. "Shit, Sari, you would be worth getting life for!" It was the oddest thing; the way he spoke her name, for the first time, excited her; there was an intimacy about it. She also felt flattered. That someone wanted her so much that he would spend a fair slice of his life in prison, was a new and quite bewildering experience. But she suspected the claim was rhetorical. She wriggled vigorously in his grasp and managed to kick him a couple of times. He thrust a huge fist under her nose and swore viciously. "Lie still, you ******* bitch! Or I’ll smash your ******* face!" The anger in his voice was real and it scared her. "You’re going to get what’s coming to you whatever happens," he snarled. "You’ve been begging for it!" In a final attempt to defend her virginity, Sari said, "Jackson, let me joggle you instead!" The boy stared at
her. "Joggle?" At least it had halted his assaults. The waistband
of her knickers had already been snapped. He played with the garment as
it clung loosely around her knees. He repeated the word as a question
demanding an answer. Sari explained, and Jerry Joe Louis laughed and fell
back but kept a grip of her. "Right, baby! Joggle will do for starters.
Let’s JOGGLE!" And he laughed heartily. "But you take
it out! And watch out for that zip; the teeth are razor sharp." His
laughter increased in volume. "Joggle!" He guided her hand to
his flies. "Let’s get joggling!" He held her in the crook of his arm. He caressed her face and fondled her breasts, and rubbed between her legs as she masturbated him. He crooned, "Oh, baby! You have a touch like velvet!" He kissed her face. Then ejaculated in an explosion of writhing and wrenching while retaining his close hold on the girl. He pulled the torn panties from her legs and wiped himself, then stuffed the flimsy strip of material into his pocket. "Did you screw
her?" Sari caught the words as she made for her tent immediately
on their return. She also noted the boys’ laughter when Louis replied,
"What do you think?" and produced the panties from his pocket.
The drift of the conversation around their tents was obvious. The laughter
intensified as the word ‘joggle’ was repeated several times.
Tears formed in her eyes. She felt betrayed and disgraced. "We really are sorry for what happened." "If you want we’ll sleep in your tent with you." "At least we can make a noise. I don’t suppose we’ll put up much of a fight against five of them!" "That’s kind of you, Philip," answered Sari, "but it won’t be necessary." The boy was happily surprised. "You know my real name!" he gazed at his companion. "I know the others call us Tom and Jerry. Henry and I don’t mind. We’ve been taking that kind of shit for most of our lives. Louis has already beaten me up and has threatened Henry a couple of times. But you are a guest in this country and deserve the traditional American respect and hospitality." "It is really all right!" insisted Sari. "I’ll be fine!" "These guys," said Henry, pointing to the other tents, "are planning on tying you up tonight." "And Louis is
planning to rape you again!" "He said you had given him a hand job," admitted Philip. "But he also said you had given him a blow job and that he had raped you twice – front and back," added Henry. "That’s how he got your panties…." "And tonight they are planning to gang-bang you!" "I take it,"
declared Sari when she re-emerged refreshed and re-dressed to join the
other boys, "that you people are not hungry." Tom and The sniggers died, the smirks vanished as Sari took her own supplies, spoke briefly with Davis Carter, and returned to her tent. Carter examined the maps. He shook his head in disdain. Of the eight, only Sari’s map made sense. The others showed roads, railways and rivers where none existed. The road was missing in the one sketch where it ought to have been. One had a coastline with rolling waves and a lighthouse and a ship in distress. Tom and Jerry had colluded to produce identical maps, but were completely featureless apart from a large X to indicate where they had been standing, some trees and arrows to indicate directions. He emitted a soft sigh as he transmitted the efforts over the videophone and was not surprised when he received in return a grading only for Sari’s sketch of the westlands. The rest of the team, Carter concluded, were clueless to the point of being a positive danger to themselves when left alone. Their attempts to make a meal for themselves were miserable. The fire resolutely refused to behave, what food they managed to prepare was virtually raw, utterly devoid of nutrition or taste, or burnt to a cinder, and Stack and Louis came to blows over the rations and had to be separated by Carter and threatened with ejection from the expedition. "That will be fine by me!" exclaimed the boy from the Windy City. "It’s been a waste of time anyway…" "And by me," declared the black boy from New York. Davis Carter smiled at his success in getting the two to agree. Breakfast was little better. Sari had slept in the bus with the doors locked while Carter occupied her tent. She was awake, washed and fed by first light, and listening to music on the radio by the time the boys appeared. After several unsuccessful attempts at making coffee, Carter took control of their efforts. He made a meal for them because, he decided, otherwise they would starve, and he was responsible for their survival. He concluded that something unsavoury had taken place between the girl and the black boy. He had made a couple of approaches, but was rewarded with neither information nor complaint from either. Then, as he had anticipated, there was a coup d’etat. It came late in the afternoon after another fruitless day of frustrating mayhem. Louis produced a string of invective. "If you think you can do any better, you do it!" "Tom and Jerry could do better," declared the seventeen year old from Chicago. "And I don’t mean these two ponsers!" he pointed to the gay boys. The others laughed. Louis fumed, but he had found his match in Stack in their previous confrontation. "I vote we let the little tit take over as leader!" And the others applauded. "And what if the little tit has had enough of you clowns?" demanded Sari. "And doesn’t want anything to do with you?" "Please!" It was Grossland, Stack and Hoser who made the appeal. "Please," they repeated. "We’ll do anything you ask!" "Please!" echoed Tom and Jerry. "Please," begged Davis Carter. "For the sake of my sanity!" |