              





BEYOND BREWSTER – BOOK III

THE Horatio Alger Story

T.C. EMERSON


BOOK III


              There was no sign reading; “Secret Campground for Illegal Behavior and Moral Variance”, or anything like that, but none was needed.  Yes, they arrived in good time, yes they made a breakfast that would last until dinner, and yes everyone was nervous as a school of minnows, especially the adult males, each of whom had apparently had a long talk with his daughter (or sister) on the overnight trip of some hundred and twenty miles.  They eyed each other with self-conscious grins, knowing what males know about high levels of character pitted against the extreme temptation of the breakdown lane, a jog of the steering wheel away.  While they were not at the walking-stiffly and slightly bent over stage, anyone who knew anything could tell it wouldn’t be long in coming.  (Sometimes it’s simply not worth the effort to write around an unintentional pun, and this is one of those times.)
              
              Nancy Fox introduced her thirteen year old brother, Gerald, a quiet, coltish boy with an intriguing trace of black hair on his upper lip.  The art teacher cum free-spirit mentor was even more a pixie than Neil had remembered from the open house.  Billie-Jo’s classmate, Meg Carver was with her tall, athletic father, Ned, and Sonja Bristol had no less than four handsome males,  her father, Vince, and three cute brothers, Chip, thirteen, Rob, fourteen, and Madden, seventeen, in avid tow.  All the campers settled comfortably against a sand dune as their hostess took the stage.
              
              “The fact you are all here,” she began – they felt welcome enough she didn’t have to dwell on it – “in a complicated and demanding world, braved a night of inching traffic through the barrens on the spur of the moment, in behalf of the young females in your lives is a neat summary of what our non-organization is all about.  The passion of the ancients, of some daughters and fathers for each other and some brothers and sisters for each other, with, yes, occasional homosexual relationships of close relatives, has not disappeared from human society, which, considering the hue and cry the subject engenders and the extremes of prejudice, both sanctioned by the legal system and expressed by less formal entities, shows that it must be worth something to someone.  An argument might even be made that with common household lifestyle rapidly deteriorating in an insanely calorie oriented and material oriented world, incest has never had more than a shadow of its importance today.  What else is going to hold the family together?  We move every four years, on average, so it’s unlikely to be the schools or community, we have who knows how many channels of television, so Ed Sullivan’s no longer relevant, and, in general we are beset on every side, from the relentlessly identical malls to the numbing display of grotesque excess in every supermarket, while our kids read less and less and even speak less and less unless it’s to grunt Alicia Silverstone trendytalk at one another. 
              
              They have, we have, nothing but each other.  The other day I was watching choral singing, and every woman in the choir was at least fifty pounds overweight.  We can do better, and, the cute part of it, the reason for us all to relax and take a deep breath, is that we can’t possibly do worse.  How deranged is it to say we’d do better at the present state of affairs to offer our children up as blood sacrifices?  Have it over and done with, rather than allowing them to grow in a society that becomes blander and engages less anything to do with the human spirit on a daily basis.  If three children are pictured in any form or take part in any story, one will be colored, while children of all colors have the bleakest outlook in all of human history; a dizzying everything that blunts the drive for anything.  Buy them an Xbox and twenty games, and the only response is a passion for the twenty-first, which is a good definition of the word transient.  It’s all very simple: there’s nothing else out there except literacy, with a strong emphasis on history, and sex in an affectionate and partially open environment, the former for the mind, for perspective, insight, and appreciation, and the big S as a reason to be nice and stay slim and fit, to say nothing of getting out of bed in the morning, or, of course, right time and right circumstances, staying in bed.
              
              “How secret is your membership, not that you have one, in this club with no name?  Let’s call it about ninety percent.  It’s not, at this juncture, something you’ll bring up as you might your last golf score – probably won’t be playing so much as you used to, guys – or you favorite restaurant, but, as time goes on, there may well be people you can tell.  ‘Susie and I have been very close this last year,’ or something like that.  I think you’ll all be pleasantly surprised at how much tolerance and acceptance there is.  In fact, the whole kibosh on incest is far more the product of yammering, brittle women, invariably fat, and disagreeable to everybody about everything, than any deeply held social conviction or convention.  This said, it should also be noted that as an organization we do have an abhorrence of public displays of excess affection between, especially, fathers and daughters.  We believe in reticence and dignity in all human behavior, and, in fact, in some of the doctrine of our moral opponents; we believe kids should do silly stuff and think silly thoughts; say silly things, that they should laugh and play and thrive in the sun, beaming back at anyone who gives them a friendly look.  We offer no universal answer and, in fact, set considerable store by the classic Victorians of the Jane Austen breed; salute the forty year old father who escorts his virgin daughter down the isle and hands her untouched to her new husband.  In fact, we’re empiricalists enough and cold blooded enough to rate this as between a one and a two on a ten scale.  Yes, it’s an ideal, and yes, in the scheme of things it hardly matters at all.  No sound male has ever rejected a female because she’s been close to her father or brothers and all will tolerate a continuation of any such relationship so long as it doesn’t interfere with the home life of the couple, and, should a man express doubt, all his girlfriend has to do is observe that one day before long he may have a daughter.  She doesn’t even need to wink.
              
              “So,”  the speaker went on, “that’s an overview.  Our underlying belief is that girls and boys, men and woman, involved in incestuous relationships should have ample opportunity to be with other partners, largely for the sensual gratification, and also because people who sleep together, especially adults and children, usually tend to talk together, and it’s hard for a kid to talk to too many adults.  In this vein, we encourage an active program of sleepovers between club members, and we join other clubs in the area at resorts and on cruise ships, because nothing encourages the home fires like occasional wanton excess.
              
              “Now, as to the practicalities, we have no set policies.  There are fifty square miles of dunes out here, and we suggest you use the noise of the surf to keep your bearings.  There’s a marker on the beach, a buried dory no one is likely to move, so, if you get lost, head to the beach, find the dory, then head directly inland for a quarter mile.  The main tent has been done up in Egyptian style; carpeting, pillows, and silks, and there are, as you see, three pup tents for privacy.  Any girl who finds herself in an uncomfortable situation knows she can come to me, and, in fact, one of the reasons of the enduring success of outfits like ours is that they give kids a means of getting the word out about something they do or do not want, without having to approach the concerned party one-on-one.
              
              “Now,” the young teacher concluded, “anyone who wants can gather in the Egyptian tent for strip poker, only we use a variation of bingo, because we think it’s witty to do so.  After last night, napping is permissible anytime, anywhere, and some of you are sure to doze off before midnight.  Although I doubt anyone will die of hunger before dinner, we do fire up the grill at noon if anyone wants a snack, and if anyone catches a bluefish or striper, that’s always good for a bed of coals. “
              
              “Is this the right place at the right time, or what?” Billie-Jo McAlester said squeezing her dad’s hand and hoisting him from the dune.  
              “I liked what she said about naps,” Neil allowed.
              “Well and good,” the pixie teased back, “but do you want to kid nap me in the dunes, by our lonesomes, in the warm comfort of the pup tent, or, with all eyes on us, in the big tent?”
              “How do you feel?” the young father asked.
              “Like the circus,” the girl said, “all stallions and stags and fillies and fawns.”
              “Anyone special you want to watch?” he asked.
              “I kind of picked out Nancy’s brother, Gerald,” the girl said with a pretty blush.”
              “We’re on the same page there,” the young man admitted, “he’s a beauty.  Would you like him to be the first, if he wants to?”
              “Would you mind?” the girl asked in response.
              “It would be my preference, though I don’t suppose I really have one,” Neil said, “but I should tell you straight up, I look at you, I look at him, and I can’t help thinking lawnmower.”
              “Oh, god, I thought you were going to say ‘lawsuit’,” the girl sputtered.  By accord, the various couples and groups gathered in individual groups on the dunes, every eye on the beautifully reproduced desert tent.  Nancy brought Gerald over to Neil and his daughter, and, responding to the obvious welcome in their eyes, the brother and sister roosted at their feet.
              
              
              “You’re bringing the world ahead, one nine year old at a time,” Neil said after shaking hands.
              “There’s a lot of poison out there,” Nancy responded, “so any antidote is worth a try.  All it takes, with an imperative like that, is an open-eyed view of history, with some good-old Judeo Christian filtering so we don’t have kids playing games in the corner while guests are at the table, vis-à-vis Margaret Mead’s accounts of some of the tribes she visited.  It’s not ‘anything goes’, it’s ‘a lot goes,’ with a healthy dose of ‘the best we can do.’”
              “Interesting blend of emotion and reason,” the young engineer said.
              “For me, perfect,” the young beauty noted, “pure emotion the first time and every time I felt one of my brothers tense in my arms, or my dad, and then liberal doses of reason so that we lived pleasantly and constructively together, all mature and pretty well insulated against the vagaries that beset large numbers of kids.”
              “Maybe that’s the reason for the strictures,” Neil observed, “a lifestyle so fulfilling and perfect it enervates and blunts motivation.”
              “It is weird,” Karen nodded, “if it was espoused, tolerated, and even promoted, it would remove a large amount of the essential panic that keeps the modern world modern.  It might be something like the opposite of keeping the working class to heel with lotteries, expensive pot, and quite a list of other options that forces them onto the factory floor.  And you know what?  It’s all hooey.  Applesauce.  Focused people contribute, no matter what happens between nine p.m. and midnight, unfocused people don’t.  The whole kit and caboodle of moralism paints bacchanals and orgies in every third house, decline and fall of this, the decadent decay of that, ignoring the plentiful exceptions to what is no rule, in the first place, and also ignoring a hundred other social influences from invasion to epidemic to heaven-knows-what.  Thin soup.  Not trace of reliable evidence, just something to catcall and throw brickbats over, and a class of intellectually inferior individuals who are nevertheless canny enough to turn a dollar while standing an hour a week to preach.  It’s bad broke an’ needs of fixin’,” she drawled.
              
              Meantime, it would have been difficult to tell whether Billie-Jo’s eyes were more tightly trained on Gerald, or vice versa.  “Son,” Neil said, “it might be an idea to ask her hand in marriage before you go any further.”
              “Okay,” the thirteen year old rasped, giving Neil to know that he’d hit on the only comment possible which would have broken the boy’s reverie.  His daughter merely nodded, thus diverting the fifty thousand or so needed for a modest wedding to other channels.  Nice kids.
              “Do you want to use one of the small tents?” Karen asked.
              The young couple seemed to understand, perhaps the immediacy of the suggestion appealed to them, and shook their heads, breaking their trance long enough to stare hotly at the young adults on the dune behind them.  The timing of the children was excellent, because a baited silence had descended over the group of eleven.  None had left for the privacy of the dunes, all eyes were on the big tent (at least part of the time), and, as the saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Nancy nodded to Neil and both rose, their kids latching on as they hadn’t since they were three.  They crossed the sand and entered the big tent.  “Wow,” Neil and Billie-Jo chorused as their eyes fell on the sumptuous interior.  “Where did it come from,” they asked in unison.
              “It’s kind of a movie thing,” Gerald answered, “mom introduced me to some people in the business, and they were using the dunes for some middle shots and close-ups of a desert war film; this was the sheiks hangout, and the company didn’t have any use for it.  I guess it’s a little complicated, but, anyway, they moved it and left it hidden here, so we could use it for surf casting, then mom had Billie-Jo, Sonja, and Meg in her art class, so all of a sudden she had the people she needed to start a club.  We got here last night to rake away the sand and set up the pup tents and the grill.”
              “Well,” Billie-Jo said, “it’s definitely worth even Taunton.”
              “I’m glad you like it,” the boy said as he nervously led the girl to a stack of silk-covered pillows on the center of the Persian carpet while the others filed in behind them, gathering around in a tight circle.  Nancy played hostess by passing out the ersatz bingo cards, reminding her ten companions that it was an honor game, with reversed scoring, as each winner lost something.  Since she’d picked bright-eyed and broadminded people for her organization, all readily agreed, and, after a minute while everyone settled with pencil a scorecard, she began reading off the numbers.
              
              “D-12.”
              “Bingo!”
              “Bingo!”
              “Bingo!”
              “Bingo!”  
              
              What, you were expecting maybe honor and fair play from such a crowd?  Predictable as the response was, the excited childish voices did a lot to ease tensions in the replica kasbah.  Hardly victims.
              “No problem,” Nancy laughed, “we’ll cut for firsties, then behave ourselves admirably.”
              
              Wink.
              Wink.
              Wink.
              Wink.
              
              “Please tell us you mean tomorrow!” Sonja Bristol wailed dramatically, perfectly mimicking the plaintive keen popularized by Audrey in the original “Vacation”.
              
              Giggle.
              Giggle.
              Giggle.
              Giggle.
              
              Well, the kids might not be dithering, but I am.  I’ve never written a scene with eleven participants, and, for sure, never written one between the likes of Neil and Nancy, who are that lead balloon of erotic lit., unrelated adults.
              
              “How to stop this?” Nancy Fox mused to herself.  She recognized her younger group as being on the verge of making the whole experience a naughty joke, kids loving stuff like that; kangarooing around giggling while playing this game here and that game there as if they were at a Halloween party.  At a glance, Billie-Jo recognized her beloved mentor’s plight, then her eyes returned to where they belonged and she nodded at Gerald, who, old married soul that he was, responded quickly to his beauty’s unspoken words.  The nine year old cleared her throat, rose on the center pillow, and displayed.  Gerald knelt close, apparently willing to help the girl make good the loss she’d won.  As his fingers went to the top button of her blouse the mood – cancel the watermelon seed fight – thickened as if by outright magic.  Immediately, Meg and Sonja sought the strong arms of their handsome males, Meg nipping her dad’s arm and Sonja making sure each of her four males had at least one hand on her chest.  The boy’s sister, Nancy, moved against the girl’s father, his arms going quickly to her high, full breasts.  They all stared, now as silent as a moment ago they’d been frivolous.  With the thirteen year old’s first touch  the game ended.  Gently he lay his little-girl bride back on a huge red pillow, performing only to the extent he moved slowly around her, giving all in the circle a view.  The group, in turn, cooperated by gathering more tightly on Neil and Nancy, and in a moment all was comfortable and still.  Gerald slowly unbuttoned the girl’s blouse.
              
              “Tomorrow,” Nancy whispered to her guests, “we’ll have music, costumes, dancing, romance, and foreplay, but for this morning, we’ll not overceremonialize:  Gerald will just take Billie-Jo.  This is only a thing that happens, it’s wonderful and all of that, and even worth an occasional trip through Taunton, but it’s physical, transient, though transient in special cases runs well into the decades, and, all things being equal, probably only a fraction as important as any other major family event.  Better to grow up with books and no sex than sex and no books, but best to grow with a healthy mix of both.
              “This is not to say we’re in any hurry.  The sea breeze will start in an hour and the tent will remain cool and comfortable all day.  I think I mentioned for the youngsters to be sure to use the bathroom, and we’re stuffed to the gills, so a few hours are at our disposal.  Nothing we can do will help make the experience memorable, that would be like helping Niagara with a teacup, but we don’t want anything that will intrude on what might happen if each girl was alone with her first partner.  By this, I mean that it’s common for free-spirit lovers to be very curious about each other, voyeuristic, in a word, and to tell each other true stories about their first experience, or any other extra special experience, and to fantasize, as long as it’s clearly identified, about what might happen with other partners.  This has,” the teacher went on, “the beneficial side-effect of making each girl remember especially well exactly what happened, and it’s exciting to the males because they know someday their daughter or sister will be in the arms of a strange male, telling her story in graphic detail, making them, vicariously, significant participants.  Growing up with a father and three excellent brothers, I have some insights into how males feel and fantasize, and, to be honest, I find it sexy, in very moderate doses, myself. 
              “So,” she concluded, “relax and be happy, for it is tomorrow that we dance.”
              
              Gerald’s gentle fingers kept at Billie-Jo McAlester.  The girl maintained her display pose, hands behind her head, as he found her last button, then spread her blouse open, exposing her training bra with the nine year old’s immature nipples bulging hard against the silk.  The boy’s eyes  then flicked for a moment to Neil, and with a nudge of approval from Nancy, the girl’s young father positioned himself behind the slim teen and stripped off his polo shirt, easing his hands behind his head in emulation of the posing girl.  By accord, Ned Carver stripped Meg, and the four Bristol males got Sonja naked, then shucked out of their own summer clothes.  The shuffling lasted less than a minute, then gave way to quiet whispers and gentle panting as the various couples and groups tried to recover from the shock of their new intimacy, not helped in the least by the fact they were watching a cute boy being openly molested by an athletic young adult as the girl in the tiny pink training bra gazed up at the males, wide-eyed and glowing.
              
              Storywise, the inventory was as follows.  Billie-Jo, Meg, and Sonja had relayed Nancy’s tales of her family to their respective males, and the three female students, and three of the underage males, didn’t have stories of their own.  Gerald had one story, since, present time, place, and company, a story was a story, and a story was not Neil’s or Ned’s or Vince’s conventional first time.
              
              “I was an easy-going, tolerant kid,” Gerald began, rapidly and completely engaging an audience most willing to be carried away so their interlude in prenuptial paradise could be extended – what good the golden ducat once it’s been used? “and this happened two years ago.”
              
              “You’re curious, too, Ger,” Mr. Forest said, “that’s a good combination; friendly, curious, and flexible.  And you pull it off; in another boy of eleven, it might be wishy-washy and unfocused; acceptance by virtue of indifference, but you’re more an activist; want to explore things rather than just reacting, yet not try to disassemble things, see at what point they break, also like many your age, but appreciate them for their worth or beauty and try to engage, find out more.”
              “Yes,” the boy said, “but what good does that do?  They only pay you for concrete this and ironclad that, hard stuff like insurance formulas and technical specifications..  Being sort of accommodating and interested in everything except fashion is something anyone can do.”
              “The answer,” the scout master said, “is that you’re pre-ordained to be a writer, and so by an instinct as feral as that of the hummingbird, you’re subjected to a backwater existence, and not for a year or two, for two or three decades.  It’s a dead tough row.  You’ll get to see your friends and classmates succeed in the material world, may even have one who does it on cash, while you languish and meander, slowly soaking like some exotic reef sponge in a vat of mellowing wine – decades.  During this time, you practice incessantly, that part will be easy because I see it in you; the absolute, always devotion to what you will one day be, in fact, it will be very difficult and frustrating for you not to practice, though practice may be entirely mental, without so much as a pencil and pad at hand.  You have to give up math, you simply can’t take the time for it; give up grades in everything, give up the respect of your parents and teachers, perhaps end up more or less the butt of your class, the meantime reading as obsessively as you will one day practice, but not practicing, and remaining utterly indifferent to what anyone thinks about anything.  You are headed where they never will go, and if you stop to explain it, you can hardly help coming across as a poltroon.  First, you have to be lucky enough to simply survive, because you have to live before you have anything to feed your talent, in your case, genius, and that means safety last, so many of you writer turtles, and most of the best ones, never make it off the sands of the beach.  Then, you have to wait until you are forty years old to try fiction.  In the meantime you must think of it as the monster that ate Stephen King.  He didn’t wait, and victimized himself by his impatience – to the extend if he did publish something good, at this juncture, it would be ignored, as he’s a bit way Abba.”
              
              “How can you be a ‘bit-way’ something?” the boy wanted to know.
              “All you have to want to do,” the twenty-four-year-old leader said, “is set a trap for bright eyes, you know, to see if you can catch any.”
              “And then what do you do?” Gerald asked.
              “First tell him that Abba is by far and away the greatest rock and roll band of all time, measured then and now, and in terms of both, and this is almost impossible, excellence and consistency.  Perhaps only “Married with Children” is as dud free over a long period of time.  Once you’re sure you understand that, you’re set to begin computing the conundrum of a society that uses the group as an icon of cluelessness.  That’s why you have to be forty before you can write fiction; before that, the absurdity seems merely comic and you don’t have any suggestions to make, plus, you may find yourself over-reacting, and what writing is all about is understatement.  Killing with kindness, when the killing’s warranted, in the first place. “
              
              “So what do I write about?” the eleven-year-old scout asked his scoutmaster.
              “There is a new venue,” Abe Forest replied, “on the Web.  That’s why I started this conversation by alluding to your tolerant and curious nature.  There are several major alternative sites who will publish you and grant you immense readership from day one, and you don’t have to write fiction – in fact, the most popular stories are written by outright amateurs who are just telling about what happened to themselves, or someone they know.  A,B,C, done, with just a few touches to the dialogue if you can’t remember every word actually spoken.  No plot, no mystery, no conflict and resolution, in most cases; probably more a typing exercise than any creative challenge, but something you actually can do at your age with little risk of aping your commercially successful masters and dooming yourself as an artist.”
              
              “How alternative?” the boy asked.
              “Well,” the older male mused, “in science fiction, pushing a Warp button would incinerate a real crew due to the extreme impact of their hitting the walls behind them, or bulkheads, if you prefer, so not that alternative.”
              “But there are no significant sci-fi story sites on the Web,” Gerald observed.
              “Martians built it not,” the teacher and scout leader agreed.
              “H’mm,” the boy responded, “you don’t want me to take math, and I don’t think algebra built the Net, in the first place.”
              “It’s a forest with many trees,” the elder male said, “and one mighty oak.  Why don’t you try barking up that puppy?”
              “Because I’m not old enough?” the boy asked, blushing though the conversation was more obviously going where he secretly wanted it to.
              
              “In the modern era,” Abe replied, “you will, in a very real sense, live to an age of several hundred years, based on both the inputs and experiences you’ll have beyond what was known to all of history, who thought stained glass was item one.  It would be difficult not to be old enough, but I suppose you could if you really wanted to.”
              “Sure,” the boy grinned, “I love knowing about one half of the first eighth of what’s going on.”
              “Well,” his teacher again mused, “they say wide-eyed innocence, but that’s only a point of view.  Who’s to say one’s eyes won’t get wider yet when they lose their innocence?
              “Do you think that’s a chance you’d be willing to take?  That you can experiment with intense feelings and not have something burn out so you end up with shorts and crossed wires?”
              “As long as it was you,” the boy replied. 
              “Do you know that’s why I asked you to spend the afternoon with me?  All day, Sunday, too, if you want?”
              “Not quite half,” the boy said, “and we could stick to books and writing and the computer and that would be fine with me.”
              “We are, or, rather, we will be,” Abe said, “by giving you something to write about, and nothing lightweight for popular culture, but acorns for more oaks – an unparalleled opportunity to contribute significantly, even at age eleven, in fact, if writing wasn’t so dependent on understatement, I’d be more emphatic, calling in hosts of angels to sing hallelujah, and waving a baton at a wall of tympani while trumpets flourished in a dazzling fanfare a thousand horns strong.”
              “Yes,” the boy agreed, “cartoons.  I knew there had to be some innocent explanation.  But I can’t…”
              “There is a good cartoon,” the teacher interrupted, “Eminem with a sensuous Haley hanging off his right hip, his mother’s dead head firmly grasped in his left hand, but they’re pretty rare, and, for sure, they didn’t build the Web and Net as we know them.”
              “Glad we’re off that page,” the boy sighed.
              “Best left to the Acme people,” his mentor nodded in agreement.
              “I wrote a sequence for that,” the boy responded, “before I knew I wasn’t meant to try fiction.”
              “I only advise being wary, seeing the trap others fall into,” Abe said, “so, if you despoiled yourself by writing it, might as well tell me.  Call it a pop quiz.”
              “Okay,” the boy said.  “The coyote gets a big parabolic mirror from the self-same Acme organization.  He sets the mirror high atop an east-facing crag with a long string attached to a peg holding the mirror up.  When the roadrunner comes, he pulls the string, the mirror drops, and it’s beam fries the bird, but he’s ordered the super-deluxe parabolic mirror, with foil wings, so all Wile gets is a mouthful of ash.”
              “Yes,” Abe said, nodding, “raw and concise.  Lots of activity and the loss of a venerable institution in a few dozen words.  In thirty years you’ll be able to do that long-ball; page after page, book after book, meantime, there are other things to try in the name of padding out your first times-we-live-in century; a contribution you can start making within a few hours, and, if you want to stay on Sunday, that could run to ten thousand words or more, depending on how fast you can type.”
              
              “My dad,” the boy replied, “in the name of edification, arranged a stringent dating program with Ms. Mavis Beacon over the summer between third and fourth grade.  If I’d been in your troop then, I would have typed my way clear of her clutches in a week, but it took me a month.”
              “How fast?” Abe asked.
              “I can draft at just over a hundred words a minute with maybe one error per line,” the boy said, “but I’ll never be any better at it than I am at spelling.  Like math, spending time to correct the deficiency ends up making you non-competitive in any field.”
              “Knowing what to put aside and leave behind is important in any field,” the man said, “but a writer is lucky; he gets to leave everything behind, because anything that won’t be left will probably add to his work.  You’ll suffer in a transient sense, but when you finally step to the plate, you won’t need the roar of any crowd, because the sensation of seeing that ball disappear without dropping an inch needs no celebration or acknowledgement.  It is entire of itself, and unapproachable.”
              “And here I am fiddling with strings and coyotes,” the boy murmured.
              “Brilliantly,” the teacher said, “the glowing first green shoot of the future tree.  The vintage is exceptional, and thus especially deserving of, a, gentle handling, and, b, sufficient aging.  Neither can be hurried, but both can begin..”
              “’Gentlemen, start your vines,’” quotth the child, sticking with half the slightly missed metaphor.
              “You should be the last published of anyone born before 2030,” his friend said, “lots of pruning, little growth, then you’ll end up like those four-thousand-year-old trees, immortal, in your own words.  Tough act to beat.”
              “Who’d want to?” the child said rhetorically.
              
              The couple had been sitting on the sofa in Abe’s comfortable bachelor apartment.  The host went into the kitchen to retrieve soft drinks and returned to the leather couch.
              “How do you feel about staying the night?” the man asked.
              “I want to,” Gerald replied.
              “Okay,” the scout leader said, “I guess I’ve hinted enough at what I want to happen between us to drive you off if you feel really uncomfortable or confused and to know that I’m not abusing your trusting and tolerant nature or trading on your friendly ways.  Hope I’m right in that.”
              
              “I’m just plain-old scared,” the boy said, “and I know it’s dumb, because loads of boys learn stuff with older males, and you can’t tell them from anybody else, but I guess I’m afraid I won’t do things right and you won’t want to teach me everything.”
              “That would be science fiction,” the man said, “or just plain-old warped, speaking of which, it so happens Jennifer, my nine-year-old sister is visiting, and not only visiting, which implies a passive characterization, but is avidly in pursuit of knowledge relevant to how much of a woman she can be despite her tender years.  She’s mature enough to know she can’t make these discoveries on her own, and tends to dismiss her dolls because they don’t really drink the tea she serves them, leaving her ample time to set her sights elsewhere.”  There.  More hints.  Would he disappear in a puff of smoke, cartoon like, after all, or sit fast like a bold young literary lion and  overall gender-perfect champion?
              “I guess I didn’t know what scared really was, after all,” the boy said with a shy smile.
              “Then start with your Roadrunner story,” Abe suggested, which shows us why he was so highly regarded a teacher.
              “What if she’s a vegetarian?” the boy asked.
              “Then use the ashes to fertilize a tree for a memorial garden,” quotth his older friend.
              “And then she’ll want to hug the tree,” the boy murmured.  
              “She’s but a child,” Abe noted, “one of an impatient breed and one who just might not be inclined to wait the odd two or three decades.”
              “We’re in the same grove there,” the boy announced.
              “Then it’s high time for some magic,” the scout leader said, “specifically, taking something as  prosaic as five minutes on the average clock and turning them into eternity.  Andy Rooney often did it with two, but he cheated by trying to make them funny, and, anyway, two is less than half of five.”
              “If it’s worse than five minutes of algebra,” the boy responded, “I might not live long enough to see how it ends.”
              “Yes,” his teacher allowed, “but you’re young enough to try, and nice enough to play along in the name of the benefit of the doubt.”
              “Okay,” the boy said.
              
              “What’s going to happen, starting very soon,” the teacher explained, “is that I’m going to kneel in front of you for said amount of time, five minutes, then begin sexually molesting you, in uniform, by touching your inner thighs and slowly running my fingers up inside your underpants.  To be assured my definition of eternity is undisputed, my attentions will be devoted to your right leg while my sister’s hands, learning from mine, will touch your left leg.  We’ve pacted not to race, so it will be a sensuous and lingering experience, thus enhancing the infinite duration of the slow-ticking clock.”
              “I think it’s already stopped,” the youth whispered.
              “A bad sign,” the older male mused, “ because Jennifer and I are going to be naked.  You’d better not dwell on that – I’m trying not to, at the moment, myself – as her breasts have just begun to grow and she’s never let a male, including me, see her bare chest. “
              “Running backwards, now,” the boy managed to whisper, nevertheless finding in his quaking loins the strength to stand in front of the sofa.  Jennifer, a pretty fourth grader, entered from the bedroom and stood  in front of her brother.  
              “The anticipation enhancement period will start,” Abe said, undoing the clasp at the neck of his sister’s elegant cocktail sheath, “when we kneel in front of you.”
              “Yes,” the pretty kid nodded, “and it will be just as hard on us as it is on you.  All my life I’ll regret not exploring your beauty at the first moment of opportunity, as well as the delay in fully exciting my loving brother for the first time.”
              “I’m just glad I can type pretty fast,” the boy whispered, “otherwise eternity would amount to time at the keyboard getting it all down properly.”
              “I know what you mean,” the girl whispered, standing a foot in front of the eleven year old, “but I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.  I know what’s going to happen, but I’ve never even seen a picture of an athletic young adult ejaculating freely on the chest of a child, boy or girl, and it doesn’t take much imagination to know that the feelings and sensations will be very intense, and therefore take a good deal of time to transcribe.  I mean,” she continued, “it would be sensational enough if I just whispered the details to you while we were alone together, but to actually have you watch, to have your beautiful eyes hot on my chest and his penis after he’s taught me to fully coax him, and I’m totally ready and eager for what happens, well, getting all that down, even with all the writer’s toys, will have to take a long time, don’t you think?”
              
              “But keep in mind, yourself,” the boy responded, “that in the modern era immortality is a single click of the Send button away.  Three of us, forever rendered, all in return for significant behavior and the time required to type it out.”
              “So he doesn’t know about the camera?” Jennifer asked her twenty-four-year-old brother.
              “We kind of got off on tangents,” Abe admitted, “guess I forgot.”
              “Maybe eternity isn’t a thing to be toyed with,” Gerald observed, sounding more wry than impatient.
              “Well,” the girl responded, “neither is our participation level on Kazaa, and to bolster that, we have to supply original art, because pictures get uploaded ten times more than stories do, and, if you publish on the alternative sites, and reference the photo files, we’ll have Supreme Being status in no time, which, in turn, will bolster our self-esteem, and everyone knows how important the community of credentialed behavioral scientists says that puppy is.”
              “But if it’s that important,” Gerald asked, “shouldn’t we try living without it for awhile, you know, so when we achieve it we’ll appreciate it?”
              
              Since O.J. and the Broward County leftist, ultra-inclusive-and-completely-confusing ballot, and the veep’s scavenging U-turn, it’s difficult to toy with logic in a lighter vein, as it might be difficult to write a skyscraper drama in the aftermath of Tough Times at the Twin Towers, yet, if society chooses to become perverse enough, the job becomes feasible, if in a backhanded way.  This is an awkward way of saying Thanks, folks, and it could hardly help  be taken but askance if I were to add: keep up the good work.   Society’s job is not to wind the clockwork of the cynic, or at least so one would suppose, but when it does such a dependable job isn’t it, in turn, incumbent on the maven of doom and gloom to reap the windfall?  Are not fools as entertaining as wits?  Correspondingly, should “foolish” be left to wither on the vine out of prejudice, especially at a time when folks need every laugh they can get?  Smokers have a quarter the suicide rate of their freer breathing colleagues, because they have something to look forward to on the worst days.  Doesn’t it then follow that something equally bad for you, laughing at your myriad deficiencies, instead of rectifying them, might have the same quality, lending a certain validity to the clown?  Remember the wondrous scene from “Empire of the Sun”:  “Try not to think, so much!”?  But you’re not thinking at all, and if the burden of having to do it all for you results in, shall we say, chafing, well, whose fault is that?  You can’t behave like children and expect to be spoken to as if you were grownups, thus all the kidding.  This is a subject that tends to overheat if warmed up at all, intruding on even the most sensitive scenes of the most elegantly wrought novel, heedless of the impatience of others, and hoisting the reader on his own petard   It frees the mail of checks, and the e-mail of f-mail, giving the author, in consequence, not only ample subject matter on which to strop his razor, but even greater amounts of time to devote to the edge.  This in turn, frees the writer of additional readers, complimenting the cycle, with the logically defective result that he becomes his sole audience, which, in case you were wondering, is perfectly just because he does all the thinking.  You have become a comedy with no dead ends.  The Tower of Venus with her forty million dollar endorsement deal while daddy sees racism in every star and prejudice in every stripe – nothing but funny.  Arie Fleischmann.  How many teacher’s had to look at that clever face –  every answer always perfect, spelling beyond the profound – without a moment’s grace or joy, which, of course, is only funny if you view teachers as test teaching morons ever on the lookout for the dreaded intrusion of artwork showing three white kids together.  Under these circumstances, the press secretary becometh amusing, proving, since people like a little proof in their sustenance, no dead ends.  See how it is as I say it is?  Glad we agree, because my objective is not to demonstrate that rampant inconsistency is the hobgoblin of a great mind, but that you are, individually and collectively, apt hobgoblins of any measurable mind.  Human nature, itself, falters at “keeping it light” under such circumstances, but I was born and bred a writer, and nothing else suits me quite as well, so, unable to sustain a charming repartee, I return us to the subject of photography.
              
              
              The tableaux evolved slowly.  Abe nodded in the direction of the camera hanging, cat proof, on a wall, but seemed loath to retrieve it.  Little Jennifer also looked, perhaps a little anxiously, but remained frozen in front of her brother, her only way to avoid melting into a quivery mound of jelly at the tall athlete’s feet.  Gerald was a guest, a stranger on his first visit, and didn’t wish to overdo the my-house-is-your-house thing.  Instead, the brother released the clasp on his sister’s party little-black-dress, disabling Gerald, even if he’d been a bolder boy, because the girl’s soft brown hair was up, she wore diamond earrings and a trace of pearls around her coltish neck, though why her petal delicate milk-white skin needed any gilding beyond the tracery of her blue veins was anybody’s guess.  Gerald stood, arms at his side, knowing Infinity had married Eternity and decided to honeymoon, forever.  Yes, he was a boy, and Jennifer was polite in not openly staring at him, but all boy, and, moreover, not only a scout, but a scout in full uniform.  Presence of mind, the little old lady at the curb, the oncoming bus – one didn’t rush in, but the situation called for intervention, and any bus was ephemeral and could be banished with a little mental discipline, especially under circumstances where the need was obvious and urgent.  And his greater-than-boy spirit became involved: how could one not share this beauty?  Maybe the little old lady could cross on her own steam, but the Internet?  What was to keep it going at the gigantic scale necessary for the preservation of advanced cultures, and all dependent cultures?  It needed content as does a railroad, and here was content going to waste, all because he lacked the ability to prioritize and was unable to sublimate reason to emotion, making him nothing more than a peasant.  “I think I can get it,” he murmured to Abe, looking at the camera hanging on a cup hook beside the mantel.   
              “Would you?” the teacher responded, his eyes momentarily warm with relief.
              
              “I’ll trade it for five minutes,” the boy said, blathering a little and realizing immediately that wit was not a thing of peasants, and he’d better get a grip before he tried another quip.  Blushing, he set about proving time and distance are indeed related, with the time it took to peel his eyes from the elegant sprite in front of him, glowing kid though she was, multiplied by the distance to the mantel – good, something to hang on to – neatly summed up as Emotion equaling time to mantel and distance to camera, squared.   The journey of a thousand steps begins with a mental mile, if you’re a very lucky eleven-year-old boy, and so nothing happened for the longest time.  Abe didn’t molest his kid sister, merely stood panting gently behind her, Jennifer stood, hands at her side, looking every age appropriate to a receptive female, and Gerald hung tight, wavering slightly on his shaking knees, but not succumbing to the sofa.  And the set-piece did finally change, the uniform, as uniforms will, took over, because, after all, if someone didn’t act responsibly, who would?  The Web would be served, the Net would be served, Kazaa would be served, and soon tens of thousands, and quickly hundreds of thousands, would serve themselves.  The electronic superhighway might sag to the strain, but if the fairy tale were to be realized beauty would win over the beast, spam would be legislated out of existence, people would continue to participate and upgrade, and all would be well.  Thus both burdened and inspired the steps of the boy, thus the execution of marching orders as old as history on clay.  Thus it came to pass, the instrument was not only obtained, but the boy returned to stand again in front of the beauty in her black wisp of silk.  And how do we really measure the hero?  By his distance from the action?  It wouldn’t seem plausible, but there’s no proof god does not assert himself  between this ground station and that satellite, and, in his mysterious way, make possible the unseemly.  In short, Gerald had to step back from Jennifer and Abe, in order to frame them properly in the viewfinder.  Three feet, four feet, that was about right.  If the boy demonstrated heroic behavior at the outset, and that could be nothing more than panic mixed with heedless bravado, the real test was of sterner stuff.  Abe had undone Jennifer’s cocktail dress and was gently stripping the right strap from her slender shoulder, easing it down toward her elbow as she stood panting openly to his touch.  Luckily for the survival of advanced culture (and, while dated, this term is easily defined: if you can set a clock with a remote, you are advanced, if you can’t, you’d better hope for a better afterlife), Gerald was an avid photographer, so he subconsciously thumbed on the camera, noted the speed of it’s first beep, a reliable indicator of battery life, and raised it to his right eye, held vertically.  Abe eased the strap ever lower, bent over his sister so he could train his eyes on one lovely square inch after another as he bared her chest for her young husband.  Gerald made an establishing exposure, then waited, maintaining his four feet of separation with all the discipline of a brownshirt.   The camera beeped, signally the strobe light was ready, and Abe eased the black silk from the nine year old’s swollen right nipple.  Digital cameras offer a real challenge.  Under all circumstances, the shutter release must be pressed half, and held at half until the camera has adjusted itself and is ready to receive an image.  This can take several seconds.  It gave Gerald pause.  If he spent a lifetime waiting for the red light to go out, what would his upcoming five minute time-out amount to?  Since he’d just made an exposure under identical lighting conditions, the camera, with its fresh batteries, responded quickly to its half-button, and the red light went out just as Jennifer’s nipple was fully revealed by her panting brother.   All scout now, the boy held the camera still as death, and eased the electronic button home.  The instrument clucked, converting a twentieth of a second to eternity, during which Jennifer’s hands raised to link around the back of her brother’s neck, and she raised up to her full height  under his chin, arching her back and craning her neck to stare up at the tall athlete towering over her own tall, slim body.  Gerald snapped her in full welcome display, wondering if the intensity on their handsome faces would conflict with the beauty of his strong hand just below her strawberry-size, pink nipple.  “If they happen to compliment each other,” the boy mused to himself, abstractly, “maybe someone will have the sense to roll Iridium’s eighty-three satellites into the Net so the whole thing doesn’t collapse in delirium.”  This was abstract in the sense, scout though he was, the boy didn’t have it in him to check his picture in the electronic camera instead of gazing at Jennifer as Abe made ready to totally bare her young chest.  Yes, no time to be wasted dwelling on the past, he must concentrate on the present.  The girl was on her tiptoes now, stretched like a ballerina, and Abe’s left hand was easing the remaining spaghetti strap from her slim, delicate shoulder.  How he hadn’t fully touched her, how he resisted her whimpering and restrained himself from fully molesting her, Gerald knew not, but if his leader could exhibit iron control of that magnitude, he could keep the camera still.  And he did.  There was her perfect, girlish nipple, there, the red light went out, the click, and humanity’s sigh, lost on the panting photographer whose thoughts tended to focus on his upcoming molestation.
              
              Jennifer’s eyes flicked from those of her handsome brother, to her pretty bare chest, to Gerald, and back up to the beauty huddled over her.  Now Abe did molest his sister, his hands roaming gently over her breasts, caressing, fondling, and pinching gently.  He also took time to peel her sheath ever lower, finding her panting belly and it’s tantalizing combination of silky, hot smoothness and boyish toughness as intoxicating as her swollen nipples.  Gerald began pacing his panting and when the silk dropped below the child’s pretty bellybutton, the youth was ready, camera to his eyes, still for half a dozen heartbeats, and wink, click, whirr, the soft sounds of a tangible god (or at least a highly useful one).
              
              Abe kept stripping the girl, getting her slowly more and more naked, finally skinning the dress carefully to the floor and helping her step out of it, then folding it neatly over an arm of the sofa.  Wearing just red silk panties, the child turned to the young adult and made quick work of his buttons and the belt and zipper of his shorts.  Gerald readied the camera, crouching to frame the picture, and was on the spot in capturing his scout leader’s huge adult penis as the girl freed it from his briefs.  
              Did Gerald stare or lose control?  Not this boy.  With a few deft pushes of the camera’s button, he’d enabled the video/sound mode, and, now on his knees, he zoomed in slightly as Jennifer’s tiny right hand found her massive brother.  “And to think you’re full of sperm,” she cooed breathlessly, “just like my beautiful husband.”  Gerald, realizing there were limits even to the most well-meaning of deeds, stopped the camera, wondering, to take his mind of the here and now for a moment, if the ambient light was sufficient to render a clear image.  It was not the time to replay the sequence and check because Jennifer now had Abe completely naked and was standing facing him, displaying, as he knelt, his erection jutting high between his rugged thighs, and removing everything from his sister save her diamond earrings and pearl necklace.
              
              “One family picture before we molest your husband,” Abe suggested to Jennifer’s nod.  He moved to the couch, and she sat in his lap, wriggling so his seven inch circumcised penis stood high between her slim thighs as she again arched her slim, young body, linking her fingers behind her brother’s neck and gazing up hotly into his eyes.  Abe removed his hands from the child’s swollen nipples and Gerald took their portrait.  Then the temporizing was over.  The ornate silver clock on the coffee table was quickly set to twelve, straight up, and the odd extra seconds were consumed by Gerald’s placing the camera beside the antique timepiece and standing, his legs slightly spread, his arms at his side.  Abe and the almost-naked nine year old knelt again a foot in front of the young teen, and the second hand ticked through the noon position.
              
              It has been said that the first day of eternity is the time it would take a single swallow to transfer all the sand of the Western Hemisphere to the Sahara desert.  To Gerald, it was more like perpetual anti-motion.  The clock made its normal ticking noises, the second hand marched to the escapement, but nothing happened.  The definition of time became something that would never pass, though, more realistically, it only stood absolutely still for absolute genius, and, since there’s not quite any such thing, did creep along with all the deliberation of a creeping continent   Ten seconds.  Another definition of time is that it always follows itself.  Ten more seconds.  This is a writer that hates counters in films, partly because they’re forever running backwards, which seems counter-productive, but mostly because they’re an author’s cop-out.  Saccharine, if not downright tedious suspense in a plastic box, with not even the anticipation of knowing when zero is finally reached, everybody will be blown away, thus preventing any more stupid-clock movies.  Inevitably, since I make no secret of the fact I think six or eight million Americans should be feeding the fish instead of clogging the works, there will be those glad I have painted myself into a corner, subjected to the very moment-by-ten-second moment I scorn in mortal writers.  This brings up a third definition of the subject at hand, and that is that it’s something that can be filled.
              
              
              Veteran readers will groan, I suppose; I’m always certain they read for the tawdry content and bemoan the essays, but it simply amounts to this: genius may never be absolute enough to stop the clock, but it’s fox clever when it comes to filling it.  Even the word weary and prattle hardened will have to admit it’s been a long time since there was any news of Samantha, Randy, Andrew, and other former frequent guest players.  All readers, new and old, can join in dismay over the news that there is no news.  Andrew’s up in San Jose, with Bev, recuperating from open-heart surgery, Randy is ever flaky, showing up from time to time, then vacating for days at a time, and Samantha remains a virgin, at least as far as I’m concerned, though living alone with Linden and Melissa, who are down from the city to chaperone in her mother’s absence, seems to have given a new interest in at least kissing.  She spends an hour or two a day as our better than perfect non-marriages moves quietly into its second year, and if anyone can fantasize a fuller life than dwelling softly in paradise with the ultimate in island girls while churning out reams of deathless fiction, write it down and sell it.
              
              Fleas.  There’s a mystery worthy of a mind.  I’ve lived much of my life in homes with multiple cats and dogs, and rarely even seen one of the critters, ditto, the last five years with up to eleven cats and kittens in residence.  Last week two sick-from-birth kittens (two months old) died on successive days, and suddenly the circus is not just in town, it’s in the living room.  The surprising thing is the four surviving cats, two with white chins, don’t show a sign of vermin one, while they pop magically on my feet the minute I sit down.  They’re of no particular bother and don’t seem to bite, but that could change, so I’ve taken on the role of the hunted turning hunter, rubbing them out the moment they land.  My version of Zen.  At one moment I’m showing how much value there is in extreme practice by outstripping my always lesser literary peers, and the next, I’m using the same diligence to slowly annihilate my population of mysterious hoppers, sans spray, fire, or ethnic cleansing in any gross form.  None of that, I just rub them out, one by one, occasionally, two by two, and lo, as I return the numbers inexorably decline.   
              
              I know what you’re thinking: this is a cheap writer’s trick to make you empathize with the time dragging with glacial ponderousness for our three characters (not to mention the denizens of the tent), but I would ask you this: who was it who taught you to become so entirely engaged in what you read?  Remember what they always say?  The oldest trick in the book?  Well, what if the whole book is trick?  Buffed, polished, and detailed to the last Payday peanut under the passenger’s seat?  This seems to emerge, over time, as the number one motivation, teaching many to read, to endure with patience the vicissitudes of the virtuoso, with faith that the payoff will be along in due time, and not only well worth the wait, but verily and forsooth enhanced by it. 
              
              The veterans know.  The longer I dither and puff around the top of my, well, barnyard hill, tempting David’s patience as well as yours (and he’s my publisher, editor, and critic, perhaps friend, if someone who contributes 1.15 million words to your archive can be called a friend), the hotter the incipient climax.  Maybe no other writer can use fleas to inspire his readers, but I have managed to do so so recently it would be pointless to deny it.  I earn my forays over yonder hill and down the dale to the east, or I wouldn’t be here.  Now, with everyone caught up, I’ll show you how.
              
              
              If time was infinite, what word was left for related voids, for example, for “worst”.  Had the first minute been the worst?  They said Tuesday was the worst of the five work days, how did that fit?  How about “subjects” as eternal fodder?  Subject, Jennifer’s pretty left breast, subject: Jennifer’s equally startling right nipple; subject: Abe’s huge erection probing from the trace of black hair trailing his athletic belly.  Wouldn’t a sensible version of the language have a group of super nouns?  Words or phrases you could use to halt a story in its tracks, without cheating the reader?  Preteen breast.  Adult erection.  Shouldn’t they, of and by themselves, conjure sufficient imagery to save the story teller much tedious detail?  Seminal fluid.  Well, there was so much of that it was a bit obvious for the subtle context necessary for special phrases to maintain their special allure, though one would not want to dismiss it entirely.  
              
              “Would it work on film?” he wondered, having at hand a lifetime to muse and reflect.  “A boy almost motionless in front of a naked adult brother and pixie sister, dressed in a neatly pressed scout uniform, just standing for five minutes?   Would the audience yawn or drool?  Andy Warhol had hoodwinked the leftist trendyites with an eight hour film of a man sleeping, but he conked his hair like fashion’s adz, so he could get away with stuff, begging the question of Was it art?  The film, “Addams Family Value”, had cautioned, effectively, he thought, against hand puppets, so they were out.  A soliloquy?   Mime?  Pretend he was doing the weather in the Southwest, where it was forever seasonal?  The only sensible thing the boy could think of was making like a ref and calling time out, but that brought UP time, and four remaining minutes of it.  
              
              How long would a congregation remain silent if the minister went into a trance at the pulpit?  Wouldn’t nervous coughing begin within half a minute, and the sexton appear from the wings in less than a full minute?  And that was god the almighty, buttressed by family, angels, saints, and centuries of faith.   Could the technique be used on criminals, make them run out the clock as he was doing, and thus forever still their perverted passions?  And how about as birth control?  Make newlyweds curb their appetites under similar circumstances, and what were the odds they’d get tired of each other and go their separate ways?  Try as he might he could find no silver lining in the situation, and, to give credit, he was a bit young to be cynical enough to pass the whole charade off as a writer’s exercise in slinging el bull, vamping, showing off, or all of the above.  What if Captain Ahab had stared over the gunwale of a longboat, just stared at Moby Dick for paragraphs?  Rhett and Scarlet, o’er the tall cotton?  Al and Peg Bundy pulled it off, but that was frivolous comedy, not sensual drama.  Romeo and Juliet?  If only they had held their tongues, left ladder, rail and rungs, turned glowing eye upon livid breast, peeped not peeping from their nest, their time they may have spent in jest, instead of conquering it with their lasts breaths.  Cartoons filled it with the babble and antics of morons.  The president left you wondering when he would arrive, now that the suit was here.  It made old people old, never stopping until every last one was dead (it had even killed Mozart).  It could be conquered with money, but it took time to earn the money.  It was the last friend of the condemned, the only thing keeping him alive.  It leaked into every bottle and infiltrated every jar.  It was no man’s friend, yet there was always more of it.  God’s Indian gift.  Special enemy of the liberal, showing his quick-fixes for what they are.  Silly, in a word: why didn’t it happen all at once and last forever?  Deadly when vehicles or large animals try to occupy a particular space without parsing it correctly.  Malleable only in the hands of a writer who may compress or expand it at will, at least for awhile.  An aspect of any discussion, is, of course, quality time, that which parents spend taking their offspring to play dates, and, in at least some families, the interval devoted to returning them to the fold.  The international edition of Time is so anemic one wonders if any commerce at all takes place, and, if time permits, wonders how an Anglo magazine titled: “Happy and Gung Ho” might fare, advertising-wise, in its place.  Time is ephemeral, abstract, controversial, subjective, conditional, and relative, but, vague or specific, it does posses a singular virtue, and that is that sooner or later it’s time to be moving on.  (Please time – pace – your elation so as not to hyperventilate.)

              The stuttering second had made it’s last sweep, half-sweep, quarter-sweep; five minutes became five seconds, and they could handle that.  Abe nodded to his pretty sister and the nine year old touched the Boy Scout between the top of his green knee sock and the hem of his shorts, using her left hand on his inner thigh.  Abe copied his sister, and both looked up at Gerald to see if he might want to indicate a sexual preference on his part.  No, the boy just stared back, eyes huge.  They responded to the welcome, shoulder to naked shoulder, easing their hands higher and under his shorts.  Yes, there were not underpants, Abe’s invitation had been explicit enough that it hadn’t taken fervent optimism to find a moment to shuck out of his Hanes while using the bathroom.
              
              “Abe,” Jennifer said, “show me how an adult male usually takes a young boy.”
              “From the back,” the athlete said, indicating that his sister should replace his hand on the scout’s leg win one of hers, “like this.”  He rose, and moved behind Gerald.  “It usually happens, the first time, in the shower.  The adult offers to wash the child’s hair, or, in many cases, the boy suggests this would be nice, so their first touch is like this.”  He mimed washing the eleven year old’s hair for a few moments.  “If it isn’t a shower scene, then, for example, a teacher might be guiding a student at the blackboard and touch his shoulders or neck.”  This, also, the brother demonstrated.
              “What does the boy do?” the girl wanted to know.
              “If he doesn’t like it, he’ll do anything from gently avoiding the touch to stringent verbalizing.  If you can’t make ‘em eat peas, how you gonna touch ‘em ‘tween belly and knees?  Most boys, and I’ve done this three times before Gerald, will stand still and pretend nothing’s happening, becoming inarticulate in a state in which confusion and hope create extreme excitement.  At this point, as the adult becomes slightly more overt in gripping the boy’s shoulders, and it could definitely be a young female, and rubbing his neck, he will say words to the effect that the boy should put a stop to anything that makes him feel uncomfortable, then he’ll free the child and move away, giving him an opportunity to change the subject or leave. “  Thus saying, Abe removed his hands from Gerald and sat on the armrest of the sofa.  The boy went nowhere, and whispered, “You’re beautiful” to Jennifer, not changing the subject.
              
              “This stage reached,” Abe said, returning to his position behind the standing boy, “the adult returns, again begins fondling the child’s neck and shoulders, and they might talk for a few minutes on general subjects, or, if in school, complete a few formulas on the blackboard.  Slowly, the adult male moves closer, being careful not to overdo.  It’s much like handling a kitten, a few seconds at a time, with the animal always sensing it’s free to go.  Tame cat.  Unmolested boy.  At some point,” the instructor continued, “it becomes yet more overt and incipiently sexual.  This happens when the man, his voice now husky and froggy, whispers for permission to stand closer to the boy.  The boy is unable to speak, but moves slightly backward, triggering a tripling of the adult’s heart rate as he, in turn, moves gently against the boy.  Whether naked or dressed,” he whispered, “this first contact is of the greatest intensity for both partners, and particularly so if the boy is inexperienced.  Contact is made and sustained for a few moments, until their can be nothing accidental about it, then the man quizzes the boy; asks him if another man has ever touched him, if he’s been active with boys or girls his age, and, in short, how experienced he is.  For both adult and child, this is a breathless moment.  If the boy is experienced, he may be willing to give graphic details of what has happened to him, before, especially the first time he was touched.  Some boys look on this as a chance to share their secrets with a compassionate partner, other’s think it’s weird and creepy, so, as with the first physical touch of the adult’s erection against the back of the child, it is an intensely exciting waypoint, with the younger partner knowing, by this time, he or she is in control.
              “If the child is willing – but not eager, an important distinction – to talk, then the adult will usually find a comfortable seat and have the child sit on his lap, usually face to face with the adult baring the youngster’s chest as the child tells the story.  If the younger partner is inexperienced, but seems curious, without being loquacious, the older partner might ask about his fantasies; who, for example, he’d like to touch him and teach him.  What media person he’d like to get stuck in a ski cabin with, how he’d respond to suggestive comments by said star, and whether he’d leave the bathroom door unlocked while he showered.  Stuff like that.  If the boy is completely unresponsive, most sensitive adults will bring the affair to an end, telling the boy, in a lighthearted manner, something like: “I guess we should learn to behave ourselves better,” while trying to ascertain whether the boy would prefer doing something quick and physical, or leave as he was.  Of course, this is largely theoretical, because by the time a mature male selects a boy, in the first place, he knows the child is intelligent and curious, and very likely to become a real friend, in and out of the shower.
              
              “If the boy has no long story to tell about things that have happened before, and likes whispering about what might happen in an isolated cabin, but appears not to want to dwell on it, the man moves his hands from the child’s neck and shoulder to low on his flanks, now pulling the youngster firmly against his penis.  Both remain standing.  If the boy has been successfully molested in the past, he may, at the touch of the man, reached back behind the man’s head, arch is back in welcome, and stand on his toes.  This tones the muscles of his belly, slightly enhancing the sensuality of his young body in the hands of his older partner.  The man then whispers for permission to pull the boy’s shirt free of his belt – in England pedophiles are called ‘shirt lifters’ – so he can fondle the child’s taut belly and developing chest.  With a boy in a crisp shirt, I, personally, would suggest taking it off, entirely, and hanging it neatly, as it’s a great time to be concentrating on things like laundry and ironing.
              
              It would be redundant to describe alterations in the tableau, so let’s proceed.
              
              “This stage can last up to half an hour,” Abe explained to his pretty schoolgirl sister in her beautifully swept up coiffeur, “as the adult fully absorbs the sensations of his hands running over silky, warm skin and sets a depth to the budding relationship by saying something like: ‘I have a really cute friend, nineteen, who likes to do this with young boys. Do you think, after we’ve been together for awhile, you might like to let me watch him do this with you?’   Needless to say, a positive response is highly stimulating to the child molester, and he immediately follows up, immediately being, under the circumstances, within two or three minutes, by asking the boy if he’d like to watch him, the adult, touch another young boy.  An affirmative response at this point leads to questions from the adult concerning other boys he, the boy, might know, and the boy, in response, usually asks how old a boy has to be, because I guess the passions of the adult are by now pretty obvious, setting the boy to thinking something along the line of: ’if I feel that good to him, won’t a seven year old feel just as good in my hands?’  In the age of computers, this line generally pans out.
              “Gerald?”
              “I guess there’s Billy Kidder,“ the eleven year old responded, “he’s eight.  He’s always making me laugh.”
              “If you were baby-sitting him,” Abe asked, “and he wanted you to get in the tub with him, do you think you’d be able to explain things or get out of the tub if he seemed excessively uncertain?”
              “Would that happen?” the boy asked over his shoulder, in return.
              “The thing you have to watch out for,” the adult advised, “is that he’s too eager.  That always spoils everything, except perhaps a transient experience or two.  For example, if he says: “swing that big slab of meat my way, pardner, and let the kid muckle onto it,’ well, from there on it would be just physical.  On the other hand, if he tells you a secret story about a friend of his who takes baths with a mature male, that would give you something in common on which to build your overall relationship.”
              “If it all makes so much sense, why the song and dance?” Gerald asked.
              
              “We’ve been indoctrinated to associate carnality with the bacchanal and charnel houses of panting lust dissipating and enervating the commonweal, which is an intellectual lie, because tolerant cultures of the past have often performed brilliantly, while their Puritanical  counterparts have enabled high levels of alternative behavior, such as obsessions with status, food, alcohol, gambling, sex, and other well-oiled, often-materialistic traps for the frustrated, specifically including the vast majority of religions.  The reason this happened, and happened to such an extreme, is that certain people of literary or theatrical talent, and usually the latter, found they could earn money by saying thou shalt  not, and, moreover, that they only had to stand an hour or two each week to say it.”  Veteran readers will know this ecclesiastical theory is always appended with a gracious note from the philosopher thanking the varies parties involved for making engrossing and intoxicating that which is just kids’ stuff in more liberal cultures.  Thanks again, because without your strictures and taboos to mock, deride, and violate, I’d be stuck writing about horses, boats, and airplane – unpublishable for a variety of reasons, chief amongst which is my status as an anti-Semite.  I don’t owe it all to god, I am god – how, speaking of personal liabilities – would that look on a dust jacket?  Premier artist, absolute monarch by iron-clad heritage and birth, and deity, and worthless for those very reasons.  Suits me to my populist core, just the knowledge of your delight, even in the abstract, in the fact that I’m not fit to tamper with you in any tangible way.  Yes, you are free, but are you free to last?  Yes, I’m free: of your present, your future, and your past.  Nowadays they call that win/win, and, for sure, it frees up time for storytelling.
              
              Gerald had lowered his arms as Abe removed his shirt, but was now again in full display, leaning back against the adult, his shorts dramatically tented from being openly molested in front of a pre-teen girl, as well as, perhaps, thoughts of babysitting his little friend.  Jennifer’s hands had made the discovery to do with his underpants (in his locker at school), and she whispered the news to her brother.
              “How would you feel,” the young man asked the boy, “if you found out Billy was naked under his shorts, you know, while you were getting him ready for his bath?”  By this time, Jennifer had her young boyfriend’s boner gently wrapped in the fingers of her creeping right hand, and was thus able to answer her brother in her lover’s stead.  “If Billy finds out,” she said, “he won’t even wear shorts.”
              “What’s very exciting for boys his age,” Abe added in a hoarse whisper, “is watching a boy near their age ejaculate, especially the first few times it happens.  Do you think Billy would like that, your seed showering on his bare skin like I’ll be cumming on Jennifer so she’s fully ready to take yours in her belly?”  It was a rhetorical series of questions, but Gerald nodded responsively.
              
              “Should we have a picture before I pull down his shorts?” the girl asked, receiving two nods in response.  It was nice the young boy was so accommodating, but Jennifer couldn’t help wondering whether it was herself, or immortality that overcame his normal modesty.  She blushed at the vanity of her thought, even as she realized her milky skin, flushing pink, was not likely to help the lad make up is mind, if he had mind enough left to make anything.  “What must it be like for a young male,” she wondered, “to enter a willing child?”  How, physically, must her wet, tight, heat feel on his hard, sensitive penis?  She’d get a hint when she ready to have his lips on her nipples, but that would be a couple of half-hearted inches, at best; he, bulging obscenely in his neatly pressed shorts, had to have a breast, in a perverted sense, five or six inches long, and he was only eleven year old.  And that was only the physical side; buck and fawn, stallion and filly; how about the psychological side?  The knowledge, fully human, of what was happening between them when he tensed rigidly in her arms, that one success would lead to another finally rendering her nothing more than a shapelier than average oven for his hot buns.  A girl could, where a deer couldn’t, think of the future, of showering with both of them until one of them was sure of her secret, maybe even before she knew it, herself.  Too bad the digital camera, for all it’s sublime qualities, couldn’t capture all of that, all of what he held for her in the ethereal sense, all of how he – they – made her glad she was a girl, made her legs shake and her belly quake, made her wholer than whole simply by letting her, at the right place and time, be wilder than wild.  “Maybe they don’t let girls my age be with mature males, “ she mused to herself, “because there’s no pill we can take to prevent practically fainting dead away at the mere thought of what will actually happen.”  Tightness and youth were a two way street, she realized, trying to banish such thoughts as she picked up the Mack truck of an Epson camera, and positioned herself to get a full frame image of her tall athletic brother molesting a dead-cute, preteen Boy Scout, still in his knee socks and uniform shoes.  She made several exposures, then returned the camera to the coffee table and knelt again in front of Gerald, quickly removing his shoes, but leaving the pea-green stretch socks, because, like him, they were dead-cute, then unbuckling him, and, as Abe watched over his shoulder, stripped him naked, taking a moment to place his missing shorts neatly over an arm of the sofa.  
              
              “Will it happen if I touch you?” the nine year old asked.
              “Yes,” the boy replied.
              “You’re too beautiful not to touch,” she sighed in response, but kept her hands at her side.  Then she asked, “could it happen accidentally?” 
              “I think so,” the boy whispered.
              “If you’re an accident waiting for a place to happen,” the girl whispered, “I want the place to be inside me.”
              “That’s what I want, too,” Gerald panted.
              “Way deep,” the girl added, “so they won’t be tired from swimming, and lots of them so they can kind of draft each other, like racing cars, in getting to the part of my body where they can do the most good.”
              “I’ll try to have a lot,” the boy allowed.
              “Can you feel more building up inside your body while you’re excited?” Jennifer wanted to know.
              “Definitely,” the boy whispered in answer.
              “Will that happen faster if I lie on my back on the sofa and you take some pictures of what happens when I make my brother cum on my breasts?” the excited child panted.
              “Maybe too fast,” the boy replied, “I think, you know, in olden times, kids just kind of did it, if they were going to, because, you know, they lived in caves and didn’t have much to talk about; no clocks, either, so, you know, it may be that boys are kind of built for that; doing it when the time is right, and not, you know, sort of talking and waiting.  That’s sophisticated for the mind, but we’ll have to wait a million years for our bodies to become as worldly.”
              “But that might make you jaded,” the girl countered, “so I think this way must be better, just subduing the physical side as much as you can.  After all, if you have an accident, it would still be exciting to watch, and some of your sperm would at least get on me, that would be better than nothing, plus, I don’t think it takes a boy your age long to recover from an accident, if it does happen: it’s not exactly blowing a tire and rolling half way down a mountain.”
              
              “Just the fire,” the boy whispered, “not all the crashing and crumpling.”
              “Well,” the girl responded, her tone not exactly playful, but perhaps less than perfectly serious, “what good’s that going to do me?  I’m on fire, too, my nipples and way up high between my legs.  If your sperm is hot, that might not be too cool.”
              “There’s only one solution,” Gerald said.
              Jennifer knew what it was, but he was a dear, and she played along by asking.
              “Fight fire with fire.”
              “Do you want to boil my eggs, or fertilize them?” she responded, again, not exactly playfully.
              “I think that’s why they call it experimenting,” the eleven year old said.
              “Maybe,” the pretty schoolgirl allowed,  “but I can’t help being a little skeptical.  NASA’s been experimenting for ages, and all they’ve proved is space is no place for any race, nor will it ever be, meaning, if by default, there must be other means of validation, and, in our case, in helping separating fact from feeling, and the fact is that all babies are runny, even from the most passionate couples: none come out hard-boiled.”
              
              “Thanks, I needed that,” Gerald said, and, indeed, his pulsing erection had seemed to ease slightly during his young bride’s abstruse musings. 
              “Anything to take your mind off inner-space,” the girl responded, and she was just barely old enough to sound a trifle coy without affectation.
              “Since you brought it up,” the boy rasped, far beyond intending a double-entendre, and releasing his hands from behind Abe’s neck, he jackknifed forward, grabbed the pretty kid by her waist, hauling powerfully into the air, hugged her quickly, half tossed her on the sofa, bore her pretty eyes with the dominate fire of his own, and left her gasping and spreading her legs wildly as he rolled between her knees, found her, and entered her in a single thrust, literally pushing her to the end of the leather couch as he conquered.  Abe, responding quickly to the sudden action by grabbing the camera, setting it to video and adjusting the lens to its widest angle, he held it at arm’s length, ready to roll, as he knelt beside the sofa at his young sister’s chest and began masturbating with his free right hand.
              
              Jennifer helped.  She wasn’t in a comfortable position to stroke him fully, so she wet his flaring glans again and again, fisting and messaging with her right hand as her left traced the flanks and chest of the young male rigidly above her on his obviously strong arms, and everly, everly deep inside her and high between her long, slim legs.  The three shifted slightly, becoming comfortable, Jennifer’s hand working avidly on her hugely swollen brother and holding him low on her belly so her eyes would be able to focus clearly when it started happening.  Abe jockeyed the camera to a strategic position, holding his finger gently against the Record button, glad for his sister’s pale chest in the ambient light of the living room, though realizing there might be more contrast, at the end, if she’d sported the deep tan of the who-knew era.  In their altered positions, Jennifer was able to take complete control of Abe, leaving the young adult’s right hand free to molest Gerald as they boy remained arms-locked and rigid over his child bride, gazing down at the mature male’s hotly swollen penis as the girl masturbated him fully and ardently, holding him to the middle of her heaving belly.
              
              “Make love on me,” the child whispered urgently to the young adult, “make incest while Gerald watches you”
              
              Eventually, time will work its will on Everest: soaring peak, lumpy gravel bed, potato field, lake, its Christmas tree ornamentation of dead bodies in bright bags reduced to common dust.  Time.  Bottom line?  It runs out.  But note, fair reader, in the present epoch Mt. Everest is rising fairly dramatically by geological standards, so it may be awhile.  
              
              “Try to let it happen with me, first,” the scout leader advised the ever tensing youth in his right arm.  For Gerald, every day and hour of his eleven years was but a half-seen flick of distant lightning.  Jennifer who, to the casual eye, seemed pinned motionlessly beneath her juvenile stag, was, in fact, coaxing his hot seed with subtle movements of her young hips against his.  Tempted to gasp “hurry,” the boy said nothing unmanly, merely whispering “yes” to the adult.
              “She’s being perfect with me,” Abe panted, “and I won’t be able to talk ‘till later.  When you hear the camera beep, that’s all the final warning.”  Unusual of him to garble his syntax, but Gerald and Jennifer both seemed to understand, nodding in unison.
              
              Wetter now, more slicked and glistening, Abe inspired a rage of passion in the girl; she doubled her grip, doubled her stroke, doubled, doubled, until the dam broke, freeing the torrent of wet, white smoke.  Yes, the camera had sounded two seconds before, yes, the young man held it steady as Jennifer held him steady (they were brother and sister), and yes, they, then in hours the world, would see perfectly recorded the first think, heavy spurt of adult seed across the tender, childish belly, and quickly a second, third and fourth, puddling semen thick and pearlescent, and gasp as the naked female child held the hot spurting male an inch from her swollen right nipple, obviously welcoming the hot, fast spurting that resulted.  One day millions,  many having nothing to do with law enforcement, would see for themselves a forbidden alternative acted out with affection, passion, dignity, and obvious pleasure.  Abe’s heavy release on his cooing, mewing little sister; the camera remaining as if in a vice while the girl, now with half a glacier of hot cum all over her belly and nipples, raised her hips in a deliberate and obvious gesture, the almost mortal strain in the preteen male, hear his feral groan, and in a few long moments, the sudden shock of a gush of sperm welling hot and fast from between their childish bellies, the female now shrieking incoherently in welcome and her first whole-body orgasm.
              
              Still shaken by what had happened, the wet children were nonetheless able to assist Abe as he edited a series of slides and the two video clips into a coherent whole, archived the color and sound production in his shared file, and logged on to Kazaa.  “We won’t download anything for twenty-four hours,” he explained; “by that time, we should have a participation rating that’s out of sight, and my little sis can see for herself what other girls are doing with their daddies and brothers.” 
              
              
              That was the end of Gerald Fox’s story.
              “Did she get a baby from you?” Billie-Jo wanted to know.
              “We tried,” the boy said, “but she said when she was alone with her brother, neither of them could help what kept happening, so it was his sperm that made Linda.  She was born last month, and we have a play date – I’m not kidding – on her fifth birthday, because Jennifer says she missed out on four years and nothing like that is going to happen to her little girl.”
              
              The boy’s statement brought a moment of silence from his companions as the adults, especially, digested the import of his words.  To deny a child.  To cross its wires so badly it would be soul-burned at an “improper” look, touch, or word?  What was the big idea?  Don’t touch, eat.  Was the hodgepodge of modern religion merely a by-product of the fast-food industry, Dominoes, KFC, and Dreary D’s?  (“If,” the reasoning of the agency went, “men find pubescent females, and males, irresistible, can’t we find agents to tamper with mores as the tobacco industry tampered with nicotine content, thus enabling ‘victims’ which conventional clowns and puppets can turn into superior customers?”)  Judging strictly by the results, with zero attention paid to cultural ramifications, it had been the most successful high-concept in history, not only fast to gain ground, but apparently with the potential to endure, not just to the end of time, but to actually define it.
              
              “What I think,” Billie-Jo whispered, breaking the reverie, “is that it’s cool loving a boy so much you’d be happy as his second wife, or any number, just so it happened.”
              “Be careful of what you wish for,” Gerald responded, “Jennifer’s way happy with Abe and I don’t have a date for the next fifty-eight months.”
              “No sensible wife would penalize her husband for not dating,” the girl said, “even if she had a vague notion that she’d like to see another pretty girl swell for her husband’s seed.”
              “I feel the same,” the thirteen year old said, “but maybe not so vague.  I’d love to watch you grow from your dad just like Jennifer did from Abe.  It’s almost more alluring than convention.”
              “I’m just glad I’m eleven,” the girl said, “so whichever way it happens, it happens soon.”
              
              Everyone, even the kids, tried to cope with that.  If at least nine months, and more likely a year or two, were “soon”, what would the next moments bring, and when?  Soon?  Was the English language merely a compendium of clever words created by academics, scholars, and poets in order that they might achieve some tangential immortality in the unabridged dictionary?  Did the tongue, in fact, make no sense?  Was it merely a toy?  Other languages could also build a rocket or computer, but to this utilitarian common-denominator, did it add anything, or did it just confuse?  Once again, it was hard to judge by the result, bringing up its own linguistic conundrum, because, there was nothing hard about seeing the result, if you didn’t find it, it would find you, but, rather, the result was hard on people.  Little chubbies, in the main, weren’t interesting to anyone, for any reason, and that had to be hard.  Big chubbies knew they were societies one truly lethal drug, and that had to be hard, too.  It wasn’t a communal thought, but it did cross a few minds:  how was the happiness, to use another word, of campers to be weighted in a world of escalating misery for an ever increasing materialistic majority?  It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but they had learned a lot from young Gerald’s story, and realized wet-blanket philosophizing could go a long way toward both enhancing and prolonging the happiness of their particular camping situation.  This wasn’t a big thing, no one was going to mention Tyne Daily and spoil the mood for the entire holiday weekend, more a subtle alternative to the wanton carnality thick and hanging though the sea breeze had now begun to ruffle the tent.
              
              Such a crowd.  So entranced with the art of their situation, the aesthetic ambience of red silk pillows, handsome young adults, and naked children still slightly sodden with the lust of the boy’s story, the images of Abe completing himself on the chest of his juvenile sister, two years younger than the eleven year olds; with visions of what must have happened later between the twenty four year old and Jennifer.  They lolled, legs spread, nipples swollen on their schoolgirl chests, slightly swollen, also, above their slim legs.  The males, all big and highly erect, toyed gently with the females, petting and stroking with their respective daughters and sister, Neil with Billie-Jo on the center pillow.  It could – this reverie so far outside the law it brought the sanity of the law into question – end in hot, frantic moments; grunts and squeals, shrieks and beating heels, done, each female well slicked on breast and belly, males lapping of each other to clean them.  And yes, my stories have a tendency to end just so, but I’m able to haul a lot out of the mine because I spent three decades widening the shaft, so haul I do, and it often has to do with, well, figure it out.
              
              Nancy cleared her throat, instantly taking the floor.  From somewhere she’d retrieved a thick sheaf of typing paper, and, without a preamble, she began to read from the photocopies.
              
              “In the matter of the congregation of First Parish Church, Brewster, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Sept. 11, 1855.  To wit: Rev. Horatio Alger of Revere, Massachusetts, Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, and for five year of this town, has been summoned before the elders of said First Parish in furtherance of investigating his ways in specific matters and his ways, overall.”
              
              “Hi, Eddy, is everything okay with you?  Funny way for the summer to end, eh?  I don’ know how much you’ve heard since you moved back to Cambridge, but steam and whispers have probably kept you a little up to date.  I guess they may have to invent a new word like ‘hoopla’ or something, maybe coin a phrase like ‘a mind is a terrible thing to go completely without’”
              
              “Charles, my dear friend, this finds me hoping you keep well, and find yourself not over occupied with preparation for the fifteenth inclement season which shall soon be on us both.  I’m writing to bring you up to date on happenings here on the Cape.”
              
              “Dearest darling Mary,  News, news, and more news.  Every head abuzz, every mouth a clatter / it’s just little old Brewster, whatever can be the matter?”
              
              “Matilda, sister of mine, yes, first, I wish you were with me at this time, oh, and how so.  The exe remains aloft, but held, I fear, by the merest thread.”
              
              “Daughter Ellen, my child, your mother takes pen in hand to guide and instruct you as is her right, and you must listen and abide as is your duty until you are of age, and thereafter until I rest and await.”
              
              “Reverend Alger, are you aware of and do you understand the reason for your presence?”
              “It is far from Christmas, gentlemen, presents, were, truthfully, the last thing on my mind; whatever the reason for the largess, I am humbled.”
              
              Two of the girls giggled and the whole congregation relaxed at notch or two, all the girls tidying themselves by bringing their young knees together.  Apparently this might be fun, and the thick sheaf paper said it damn well better be: there was vamping in an intriguing sense, and temporizing for its own sake, not good.  Nancy gently cleared her throat, perhaps giggling a bit along with her girls, and returned her attention to the script.
              
              “Would levity have suited on the Mount?”
              “It suited one, his very lightness of being is the reason for this church, or have I  misunderstood, apparently for the second time in rather short order?”
              “Do you enjoy sparring with your elders, your betters?.  Have you brought us here to make fools of us?”
              “I’ve come here to fire at close range between brisket and belly button, those who stand, will be shot, those who duck will have but a miserable story to tell on the morrow.  To save the char, who happens to be something of a friend, the duties inherent with cleaning gore, I shall use figurative and literary ball, on the chance blood would flow should I, instead, discharge one of these.”
              “We will have order.  Order!  And water.  Water, do you hear, first for Mrs. Berger!  Get on with it!”
              “A tumbler here, if you would, lad, big game is afoot and I want my whistle up to the slaughter.”
              “Under no circumstances is the youth to approach the subject of our inquiry, in fact he should leave the premises.”
              “You present fright in a raw and forthright manner, as all here would have guessed, but young Nickerson spent two years in Nebraska, and has taken human life three times in defense of his own, receiving a crippling slash on his last encounter, so it mayhaps your red face and gaping – for heavens sake, the harbor is nigh a mile off, do stop aping its inhabitants – mouth scare him on par with their ability to intimidate myself.”
              
              “Entirely without.  That about sums the matter as neatly as is possible.  It was something to see.  It seems impossible you’ve not heard about the pistols at this juncture, but the news is still, I hope fresh enough not to dull your wits for the academic grind.  I’d add something pertinent in Latin or Greek, but they have no word for pistol, except perhaps some version of small cannon.  Indeed, four of them, just as you have undoubtedly, it being the kind of thing that will clear the Boston wires until all details are on the street, the story undoubtedly undiminished by the fact that all four of the massive weapons were engraved by Paul Revere and presented to our recent pastor’s father by a syndicate of North Shore communities.”
              
              “You should have remained, yes, anyone would understand if you had, but that is, of course, acute hindsight.  The opening salvo was so nearly just that.  One and all, at least of the congregation, seemed to agree that without Al’s regard for my aunt, Ethel Waters, he would have blown fair holes in the tribunal instead of skewering them through the ears.”
              
              “Over beast we watch, against tiger, we guard / but over the reverend minister / on the sacred grounds of the church yard?  Yes, a coat he wore of a September morn / though the chill was vague and faint / and soon it was we found out why / he’s one hell of a preacher but  hardly a saint.”
              
              “Blast the telegraph, and someday they will learn to send voice over it, and blast that, too, dear sister, for the wires steal my thunder, however fleet my pen.  Yes, our own Al, how fine we felt when we were able to call him that, even with others listening, well, it was barbs and tussle from the opening gavel.  Deacon Wentworth, well, you’d think his head was too large to permit of easy movement, yet it was handed to him, probably more immediately than the papers can convey.  Instantly.  He, Al, stood for nothing.   And the famous pistols? yes, loaded and primed, according to the constable, they were a harmless diversion.”
              
              “Now it is your mother’s duty to remind you of what you saw, and what you will say.  Heed not the reports of excitement and untoward display at the opening gavel.  I only missed ten minutes of the proceedings, but I could have missed them all to no great detriment.”
              
              “Suppose you take a child and an apple.  Suppose you tell the child, from his earliest days of understanding, this about the apple, or that about the apple.  You have the power to make it poison; it is said members of primitive tribes wither and die if they come to find a hex or voodoo curse has been placed on them, hoeing happily, if hoeing is ever happy, the very minute before they receive the news, or pie.  You can say this to a child about that, and that about this, and other things about other things, and yes, the child will believe you and follow your lead, not just a little, a lot, not just sometimes, but all the time, and not just in good things, but in anything.  Cannibal children are taught the flesh at the back of the neck is most choice, and, by age six or seven, every single cannibal child believes it, though it always the chief who dines on the choicest morsel.  Some hundreds of miles west here, doctors have discovered a syndrome that has come to be called “Pennsylvania Babies.”  These are infants born to unwed mothers of autocratic, Germanic households.  To hide their disgrace, the girls give birth in a loft, burying the baby deep in the hay of the noisy barn,, and visiting it perhaps half an hour each day to keep it alive.  These babies, when discovered, though it may be but a few months since their birth, never exhibit any human characteristics or behavior, and, indeed, are beneath the rankest animal, who at least learns to stool in the best possible place.  They never do.  All the kings horses and every god-fearing servant can do naught but restrain them and cram food into their mouths, for they have not the wit to accomplish this, though they be in perfect physical health, for themselves.
              “Much of the reason I am before you has to do with power.  Power you say I exerted improperly.  We need to define this, draw it’s dimensions, plumb it’s latitude, if that isn’t offensive to the mariners amongst us this morning, and define it as absolute.  From less than beast to Mr. Emerson, of Concord, and hundreds of his friends, colleagues, and near equals.  On this field we play.  Infinite; from a nothing that makes us cringe with horror, just on the hearing of it, to a grandness which will grow relentlessly more powerful for all centuries we are able to survive.
       “On this infinite field are adults and children.”
              
              “’But not god,’ Edward, that’s what he went on to say. ‘God is too grand to care,’ was his direct quote.  God, in his words, is the driving force of art and invention.  He rewards curiosity with knowledge.  He is not here to play games with us, does not even exist for that purpose, only to lead the genius, who has nowhere else to look.  No wild theorizing, and no vague abstractions, but, addressing the jurors, as against the tribunal, he reprised his gentle ways.  I was reminded how well he came to know us before we sailed off over the horizon, and how many pecks of clams we dug before the rising tide and drop in the wind led us to anchor and swim.”
              
              “No blood was spilled, but imagine the torrent of ink.  It should affect the markets, if you still have your Peabody friend with an office at 199 Washington Street.  There should be many a laugh watching the industrial scribes write around what Al really said, and think of the vapors bound to ensue should he tell what he actually did.  
              
              “Mere show the spectacle / More heat than light / You have to know him / To take it right.  The brace, times two / Yes, four in all /  But powder unburnt  / And still the ball.  With such a beginning / What more to tell / Preacher of ours / So far from hell.  But of course there is more / Or I wouldn’t be writing / For behind our door / That’s what he’s fighting, for, for, for.”
              
              “That business done with, pray allow me to continue at length.  Others are writing too, indeed, in pencil during lulls allowed by the sputtering judges.  It helps keep one from laughing, outright.  
              “Mark is writing his friend Eddy, who’s taken up residence in Cambridge for the school year.  They were the first, weren’t they dear sister – do return soon – this is not an entertainment, was it for us? and it is beyond sensation. It goes to the core of everything, and I want you to be here to share it during the day, as our steed grapples with the catamounts tearing at his powerful back, and, seeming to find their attention less than respectable, to say nothing of admirable, simply rolls on his back, as it were, crushing them, leaving them bent and twisted, only the power of their ignorance, and their number, three assailing one, will win the day, as the day should be won.  He knows that, that normal family values should prevail; that girls such as the two of us should be knitting and playing with our dolls, helping with chores around the house.  He knows that, but, as we know, he feels there may be more to our brief relief from the void to which god wills each and every one of us to return, mayhaps in the most painful, costly, and degrading manner possible for all but a fortunate few.”
              
              
              “You are to tell all you saw, my daughter Ellen, and let not your tender years be the excuse for any reticence.  When the time comes, you will join your voice to mine and shy not from the most minute detail in your account, which shall be whole and specific, once again, your tender years notwithstanding.”
              
              
              “So who guides us on this field, on the plain of human existence?  Who?  Does he hide behind a cloud, does she lurk in the underbrush, do they tickle the soles of our feet, thus gaining access to the soul of our being?  Or do we guide ourselves?  Do we educate ourselves, read, travel while we’re young, be it on foot, explore and experiment?  I happen to rather think that is the answer, not every Bob and Jack out across mountain and valley the livelong day, summoned by an irresistible wanderlust, but something closer to hearth and home, something, in point of fact, a little extra, and, essentially, something that does not interfere with the realities, grim or otherwise, of wresting a living from a reluctant land, and raising a family on the contested ground.  Books give us more, though the vast majority, once you’ve read a hundred, give us more of the same, and friends give us more.  Friends give us more, yes, and, also, yes, it is our lesser friends who give us the more in enabling us to give to them.
              “Where in the bible does it say outright, or even allude to it’s being in any way evil for man to linger with boy, for adult to tarry with child?  Since the subject goes unmentioned, there is no evidence, whatever, that the inspiration of Jesus, far above all others, was not to take aside the youth and bestow himself upon the child, teach and guide the lamb, that the boy is not the reason for this very church, and all churches.  
              “With the religious life, with the dignified life, with the orderly and thoughtful life, yes, comes a productive harmony, but there is a distinction to made between harmony and the monotone of a droning Jew.  One is alive, intrigued by a lonely forest glade with its birds, creatures, and a willing student, the other, merely decades of the ‘quiet desperation’ Mr. Thoreau writes of; desperation, from my point of view, for something missing, something left out; something, yes, complex, but also essential, basic, and not to be ignored as our very sailors now know not to ignore onions and vegetables on pain of the that fiend of the tooth and flesh, scurvy.  
              
              “And think of this: if it happens that there are rules, who is punished for violating them?  Our travelers tell us in assemblage, though they are loath to write it, that free will exist in many cultures, some, for example, in India, overt, and others, more discreet, but common to all is the fact that these mortal sinners live as long as the Puritan, and enjoy the benefits and suffer the miseries of the human condition in common with us all, a thousand factors of existence more important than issues, how to say it politely? of the loins.  These other travelers adapt quickly to our ways in everything from bonnets to baccalaureates, some choosing to retain their so-called hedonistic ways, others adopting our own.  I am not here to say one is better, but rather, for those who chose freely, neither is the lesser.  There is simply too much to god for him to be seen as dictating arbitrary behavior in lesser matters.  If you don’t believe that, you are not religious, you are nothing more than idolaters.  In many ways we are required to fashion our own obedience; failure to do so leads to the open road and endless trouble with dogs.  We fashion it from raw material, primal needs, and get up with the sun, or move to shield ourselves from it with factory roofs.  We obey, socially, as do dogs and ants, so that’s assumed.  We obey academically, we obey laws and codes, spiritual and temporal, we respond to the dictates of fashion, and we come when we’re called to dinner, though the voice be a bell.  Leaving that which we do not obey.  An appetite that needs no bell.  And no, not a universal desire.  Full empathy for those of the dinner bell, but it is an outrage to  come after us, after me, based, not on the complaints of the participants, I challenge you to even determine who the so-called victims amongst you are, but on tattling.  The snide work, the knowing wink,  the superior smirk.  As it is possible to damn with faint praise, it is possible to say, ‘oh, I have nothing against Mr. Smith, but I’d never let my Joey or Paula spend time with him,’ no accusation stated, but a world implied.
              
              “And what does this amount to other than a firm grasp of the obvious?  Wars without end, because we don’t want Joey or Paula spending their time with the Madonna, with the circus, with laborers, if we’re of a certain class, nor with merchants, if of another.  How long do we keep this up before we are back in not only caves, but one cave for each of us?  How long has it been since our fires of Salem, hardly one hundred miles from Brewster? And what nature the fire which burns in a young heart, wanting, yearning, for what all healthy humans wish for, yet denied by this whisper of rumor or that tidbit of talk over the back fence?  The fervent dogmatist wastes with consumption, hardly out of his or her teens; the thief and scoundrel may pass quietly in his eightieth decade, and not one among us would bet a dollar which, the zealot or the rapscallion, enjoys the most of the lord’s banquet.
              
              “Our imperatives are productivity and organization, they keep wood on the hearth and the wolf from the door.  All we need to do is keep from hurting each other, and the die is cast; we survive, we stand every chance of having a happy day here, and, newly married, a happy year there.  Incidental contact, earth-shaking as it is while it is being anticipated, and while it happens, is, in the end, what?  At least for some, a supreme memory, a thing of life, a think of fulfillment, and, most especially, a thing that so when we come to die, as Mr. Thoreau lectures, we come to find we have not lived.  
              “You of the tribunal are ugly men.  Fat.  Hairy.  Repulsive.  Your wives must cringe before they weep, and weep until one of the two of you dies.  How can you sit on me, or any young person, detached from the green fiend, jealousy?  Influenced, beyond all, by what you missed when you were young and perhaps had a chance, hollow, in its absence, deranged for its want, and looking for any scapegoat.“
              
              
              “I think, Eddy, having forsworn cap and ball, he had undertaken a mission to pass them through the pearly gates by means of spell and apoplexy.  Why chose another weapon, when he had three such at hand?
              “But enough of such.  Take us, rather, back to that windless day…
              
              
              “Al, is it okay if I come back to where you are?”
              “Yes, Eddy, of course.”
              “Mark, do you want to go back to the stern, too, or do you want to swim around??”
              “Yes.”
              “Rev. Alger, Al, you’re very handsome.”
              “You boys cut fair figures, yourselves.”
              “I’ve always wanted to go berry picking with you in August so I could see you without a shirt.”
              “I feel the same, Eddy, and you’d be very welcome at any time.”
              “I had to hay this summer.”
              “It does come first, lad, but we bring home blueberries by the gallon, so indolence can not be counted amongst our sins.”
              “Is it a sin to stand close to you?”
              “Does it feel like one?”
              “No, but I can see the problem.  It feels very intense.  Anything so strong must raise more than eyebrows.  It would be remarkable if no one objected.”
              “Strong feelings equal strong holds; ask any heretic of older times.  In the pre-Christian era, Arabs found they could angle a sailboat into the wind by fashioning some sort of keel.  They were burned for performing magic.  The women in Salem didn’t even have to perform physical feats, their words were enough to earn them twig and faggot.  It’s a thousand stories told by a million voices, wives tales to the last one.”
              “So if we get closer to you, the water won’t boil leaving windrows of dead fish to scent the land for months to come?”
              “No, because the sea will part, and lo, the promised land.”
              “I’m not so sure, Eddy, the closer I get to him, the less safe all marine life in the area, or at least so it feels.”
              “Have you boys ever been together like this, with each other or others?”
              “No.”
              “No.”
              “Well, it’s very gentle, to get that out of the way.  The important thing is that it be complete.  Not half an experience, something furtive, panting in the dark, a heavy, slick, wetness, and the child confused and upset, very likely frustrated.  That can leave scars.  Things that happen fully, in light of day or candle, are fully understood.  They may be rejected; indeed, a child living a healthy life might have little time nor interest beyond an occasional experience, and that is fine.  Reject.  No scars. 
              “If you boys want to get in the boat with me, we’ll use the sail as both a bed and cover to keep off the sun, and spend an hour, maybe two, before we start poling for home, if the breeze yet fails.  Is that what you want?”
              “Yes.”
              “Yes.”
              “If I was feeling less intense, myself, I’d say welcome aboard.”
              “We’d laugh, under other circumstances.”
              
              “How much do you know about being boys?  Being males.?”
              “That girls won’t let us…”
              “Learn anything.”
              “That’s as it must be.  A female can become heavy with even the seed of younger boys than you, in a rush, in an instant, while almost fully dressed, in almost any position.  Do either of you feel like stopping?”
              “No.”
              “No.”
              “With girls it is more urgent, more feral.  Past a certain point, very easily reached, they will not just take the seed of an attractive male, they become adamant for his presence inside her, and for the heavy wetness his young body spills deep inside her.  That’s why the strict codes and arbitrary behavior.  One look, and it starts, minutes alone, and it fully develops, as does the young female, and young can be as young as twelve or thirteen years.  Any other way would be too extreme, for, as we all know, the sensations are overwhelming.  Any other way, and all girls would bear their first child in their young teens and continue to do so years longer than under our present system.  It is possible the other way would work, more children, more hands to every task, and perhaps that’s the way it should be; not rules, babies, babies between father and daughter, fathered by brothers in their sisters, from the first age that nature allows.  If these were standard behaviors, the norm, practiced by all, universally, it would be a challenge to come up with an essay of ten pages on how that would be bad, until you bring in god, then you get a bible on the subject, which, in supreme irony, hardly touches on the self-same subject.  This leaves the clergy who must-needs have something specific and immediate  to preach against.  No Commandment reads ‘Thou shalt not tarry with the boy after the toil of the day.’  ‘Thou shall not strain thy loins over thy sister,’  yet they are part of every liturgy.  As they fit, they should be obeyed, and as they do not fit, they should be carefully and discreetly ignored, always with sensitivity for the feelings of others.
              
              “It is not those who like you you need fear.  They will tolerate any civil behavior, and everyone in Brewster, feet to the fire, suspects this or that of this person or that person, and ignores it.  It’s the enemy, on other fronts, who is the danger; who ‘has something on you.’   What is so tolerated as to  be unmentionable in a friend, is a sharp weapon against an adversary, though the real issue in question might be the price of a pig.”
              
              
              “How do we get a girl wet?”
              “Yes, sir, please.”
              “Again, in a situation of casual levity, I’d say: ay, there’s the rub.’
              “But this time we wouldn’t know what to laugh at, assuming such a situation.”
              
              “Tell me about at night.  Lying in bed awake, before you sleep, have you felt some of the things you’re feeling, now?”
              “Yes.”
              “Yes.”
              “And do you sometimes touch your penises, fondle them, before you fall asleep?”
              “ “ “
              “ “ “
              
              “Try doing it here, only instead of just touching, rub, up and down.  Would you like me to show you?”
              
              “ “ “
              “ “ “
              
              “This is called masturbating.  I believe the bible has a single vague reference to spilling your seed on the ground.”
              “I always wanted to be a sailor, how about you Mark?”
              “Anchor’s away.”
              “Start slowly, at the top, make a circle like this, then show yourselves.”
              
              “Can I do it again?”
              “What if I said no?”
              “Please.”
              “Please.”
              “Try not to make me laugh.”
              
              “How do you stop?”
              “A boring sermon on ethics and morality might help.  Would you like me to begin?”
              “On Sunday.”
              “I don’t feel it’s going to last even…”
              “Slow down.  Let it happen with me first.  After it happens, you may feel cold and clammy for a few minutes.  That’s normal for beginners, especially younger boys.  Just ride it out, and you’ll be back to normal in a few minutes, then above normal in a few more.  If it happened with me while you were feeling cold and clammy, which isn’t exactly an elegant interpretation, you might be offended by my flood splashing on your stomachs and chests, perhaps even your shoulders and faces.  If it happens while lust and passion rule, you might like my sperm all over your naked bodies.  So go very easy.  It will happen with me very soon.”
              
              “How long before it can happen again?”
              “Don’t give us any bad news.”
              
              “If the underlying attachment is deep, one spend of your loins might lead almost directly to another.  If it’s purely physical, an interval of some minutes may occur.  And please, boys, remember it may not be to either of you what it is to others, in which case it might not happen again until you marry.”
              
              “Remember how you didn’t want us to make you laugh?”
              “How many drops will there be?  Will sperms go on each of us?”
              
              “The avidity of your curiosity, at any other time, would affect from me an answer of grace and length, however, because of the exceeding beauty of your arching young, barely-mature bodies, and the sound of your panting, and the rising tension I feel in each of your legs twined with mine, I am unable to devote my attention to answering your question, Eddy.”
              “Can’t you say anything?”
              “I’m cumming.”
              
              “How do you re-live that Eddy, in your room, reading off paper by light through the window or from a candle?  How sensing the mass nature of what was so near at hand, without being told, we both used our feet to push high the covering sail?  Just in time?  How his seed, even so, sprayed so hard against the canvas we could hear it?  How his throbbing, pulsing geyser continued, your belly and mine, both our faces, all over both our chests, and his final gift of slicking us both heavily, then holding the sail aloft as our hands, now wet, made you follow, in a similarly manly manner, in some seconds, and as you covered both of us, and subsided, my own spray started?
		“Why isn’t the bible about that?  It happened four more times in the time it took the sun to lower ten degrees toward the western horizon, then we bathed again for a few minutes, set the sail, and began poling until the breeze freshened, as if nothing had happened, yet both looking forward to the next time it did.  Where was the harm?  Where was the foul?  When we both have boys of our own, will we guard against the interest of an attractive young man?  If he is solvent and dependable, will we begrudge our daughters, or merely glory in early grandchildren?
		“These should be the questions of the age, but this approaching war blots all sane thinking.  How ironic, that solving the slavery issue in what will be the worst and most damaging way possible, we think we’re right as rain on this other great issue of tolerance.  Sometimes I think it’s madness to want to live, then I remember you, that, with fortunes favor, we will be together again at the holidays and sleeping together for the warmth it brings us.  Then, I want to live forever as I am forever your adoring cousin,  Mark.”


	“If, for example, Charles, he told our story…”


	The gig had run freely as far as Wellfleet, then broken a wheel because one of the boys had let enthusiasm outrun experience.  The young minister had scowled, but, veteran of a misadventure or two himself over the years, had held his tongue and helped move the damaged buggy to the side of a pine copse.  A stage would be along in an hour, they were prepared for a picnic, anyhow, and so they found a comfortable grotto in the wood and settled on the sand, backs to a fallen tree, a brook nearby.  It was too early to eat, so they talked, the handsome young minister and two of his parishioners, Charles Smith and Scrib Judd, fifteen year old friends from infancy.  

	The approaching war of course dominated their early talk, all agreeing that simply sitting down and hashing out a thirty year plan of freeing the slaves would fall victim to the exceedingly low quality of individual elected by ballot to office.  Gold in California, and Indian themes engaged the trio for some additional minutes, and a few more were spent reviewing local events, particularly the price of shellfish, and the slow growth of tourism.  

	One of the boys, Charles, asked the young minister, Al, to his friends, if he’d ever ridden bareback, nodding at the horse as he spoke.  The preacher laughed quietly and said that he’d, a time or two, ridden more than bareback.  This reply, not particularly cryptic, intrigued the slim young males, and they, in a friendly way, badgered the young adult for details.  Al, in turn, asked what they thought he meant, and tried to change the subject.  But the boys were not so easily deterred, quizzing their friend until he admitted that at certain times he’d ridden a secluded patch of forest sans any clothing other than a leather necklace with a carved amulet.

	More questions.  How old had he been?  Their age.  How often did he do it?  Twice a week, give or take.  Did he ever meet anyone?  No.  Did he ride alone?  No.  How many other horses?  None.  Double?  Yes.  With whom?  His sister.  Her age?  Nine.  Her dress?  An amulet.  Length of rides?  Two or three hours. Could they ask more questions?  Yes.  Wasn’t it a little hot in the woods?  Yes.  Was it okay if they…?  Yes.  Could he go first, they were inexperienced and kind of embarrassed?  Yes.

	The twenty eight year old stood and moved to the dobbin, both boys following closely.  Timid hands found his buttons, slowly exposing the tall athletic male’s boyish bare chest.  The man steadied himself against the grazing cob, lacing his fingers behind his neck, as the exploring children knelt to his shoes, then found his belt.  Nor did they stop there, for the instant their mature friend was standing naked but for a leather necklace with its Indian totem, they removed their own shoes, then slowly, under their minister’s watchful eyes, each others buttons and belts until two were completely naked and the third nearly so.

	Charles and Scrib asked many questions as the threesome resumed their positions leaning back against the base of the fallen tree, and soon were practically awash in the imagery of a well developed boy, much like themselves, alone with his adoring kid sister, her long, slim legs wrapped tightly around his trunk, her arms under his and around his back, as he took the rhythm of the stallion with her, grunting and panting to her mews and yips, until the motion of the two young bodies became a hot fury.  Charles moved in front of the young adult.  Al encircled the fifteen year old’s heaving chest with the strong arm of a swimmer, finding him with his right hand.  Scrib stood close in front of his panting young friend, legs spread (as were Charles’s), arching with hands behind his head, moving close so the adult’s right hand included his swollen six inch penis as well as that of his classmate.  In graphic detail, the minister described Rebecca’s crashing arrival into womanhood, her first orgasm rendering her a half-mad, screeching cat, his remaining with her as she calmed, then, after assuring himself she was still all right by virtue of a shy, embarrassed, almost shy smile, he found a tender, gentle, loving, brotherly pace, his body against hers, until after a lifetime compressed into something less than half an hour he went rigid and taut in her arms, listening to her soft coos repeating and short intervals, a dozen times, over a minute, “yes, my brother; yes, my brother.”

	The two fifteen year olds, shaken by the details of their older friend’s story, repositioned themselves against his powerful body.  They spread his legs wide, folded a pair of trousers to pad his rear as he leaned against the bark of the tree, and asked him many questions as each experimented with his uncircumcised eight-inch penis, often rubbing their own hard, teen boners against him and sharing with their hands the copious flow of seminal fluid that oozed from them almost equally.  At a certain point, Charles’s left arm around the athlete’s tall, lean body, his right hand working now with some experience on the adult, Scrib standing if full display less than a foot in front of the preacher, Al begged the boy not to stop.  This request excited both boys, and far from stopping, the teen on the mature male’s right worked his hand with new vigor, both boys now panting openly with excitement.  There was a garbled, half choked warning, then what had happened deep in the belly of Rebecca happened in the open air, the hot, white seed spurting fast and hard, again and again, slicking Scrib’s flat belly and boyish bare chest, spraying on his shoulders and face, and finally, as Charles held him lower, several final spurts, then a heavy flow which covered the younger (for he was by some months) boy’s thighs and swollen penis.  First Charles moved back in front of the still quaking adult, yielding fully to the man’s touch, and, excited by the slipperiness of his partner’s now wet hand, began his spray in less than a minute.  Scrib took his place, ejaculating hard and fast at a touch that was now wet with his classmate’s semen , then the leader knelt in front of the stripling, licking their still panting bodies and teaching them to kiss.  They in turn, fell to their knees licking him, and kept practicing.  This was repeated three times until sounds of  the approaching Truro/Brewster stage urged the trio back into their clothes and they returned to the world of horses and wheelwrights.   As the new passengers climbed aboard a voice whispered: “My dad will pay for the wheel, Al; I broke it on purpose.”  There was time for just a quick reply before the horses lunged against the traces: “Bless you, my son.”


	Veteran readers may one day, having far too much time on their hands, choose to measure “time (or words) between essays to see if this has been the longest relief ever offered by the writer.  Others may wonder at the long time between postings, because I usually publish at the rate of some hundreds of pages a week.  On the chance even one person cares, let’s take another patent divergence to see what’s going on.  To encourage and reward you, I’ll just post this short reminder: the next letter is to twelve year old Mary Hicks from her seventeen year old brother, Kyle.  Good, that takes care of that.

	Andrew is back safe and sound from San Jose.  They made a definite splash, and were feted at a banquet which raised two million dollars for the heart fund.  Andrew was beneficiary of a new procedure taking only three hours and made a quick recovery.  He brought a picture of himself sitting in a black Ferrari belonging to one of his doctors.  I haven’t yet found out if anything exciting happened on his trip.  Linden, camera thief extraordinaire, stopped by yesterday, and we patched things up without mentioning them.  He’s a nice boy in a minefield; I can’t bear looking, but some emerge alive and grow up normally.

	As to the long times between postings, well, truth to tell, I had a bit of a go at the Mainstream.  It wasn’t much fun, writing with that feeling someone’s looking over your shoulder (a la Marshall Eminem Mathers), but I completed the piece and find I can’t help being a little proud of it.  It’s a story of loyalty, savagery, and fatal flaws, much of it true, set in Vietnam during the hottest months of the war.  I know I have huge readership in Hollywood, and it will be interesting to see if a single agent or producer writes for a copy.  (Imagine having the courage to write these stories when most people won’t even admit they read them).  Anyone so writing can be assured no mention of ‘this side’ of my work will be mentioned.  (Tell anyone who asks it was a tip you heard in a bar which led to your writing.)  Obviously, this applies only to readers of the fresh posting (Summer, ’03), and, if there’s a single IQ over sixty in tinsel town, most of you will have seen “Poet of Phu Bai” in an IMAX theater.  To build audience frenzy, I will be posting a Nifty version of the script, formatted as a novella, in the next few weeks.  You might start licking your chops, now.

	Samantha remains doll of the universe, and a virgin.  With the expenses related to Andrew’s surgery reducing us to ten cents over penury, she has been a trouper over the money thing.  To my mild consternation, she grows more beautiful by the month – ludicrous overkill because I’d love her, as much as I can love anyone but myself, if she was a wizened squaw, such is her wit and every-growing charm.  A different coin in payment of my money-free success as a writer, but some of what glitters is worth more than gold so I accept, with thanks and all the humility I can muster.

	Kazaa remains the new thing under the sun.  The statistics prevail for a second and third month.  I upload a thousand kiddy porn images in a row, and still, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to upload a song or other file.  I found a sensational little video clip of a twelve year old boy, probably Asian, lying on his back with his seven year old brother on top.  Air that during the Superbowl and the national fixations on both pedophilia and incest would be changed forever during a single half-time.  We would emerge a kinder, gentler, slimmer, and happier nation.  And let me close the subject, for the time being, by putting it in context.  A, the user level does not seem to be rising, three and a half to four million on-line at any given time, and, more importantly, B, that this number represents something over one percent of the U.S. population, and a small fraction of one percent if world usership is counted.  Read this as it pleases you, but, to me, it’s affirmation that there aren’t all that many smart people running around loose.

	I hope you fledgling writers enjoyed the little lesson: sketching a scene in dialogue, followed by one using largely exposition (narrative).   After all these years I discovered Nifty has a “Rural” index listing a number of better stories.  A special nod to the author of “Cowboy Blues”.  The story parallels my relationship with Samantha, and, while the central characters abstain, there’s an excellent you-know-what scene during a thunderstorm.  Fine piece of work.

	There’s life in the tropics with and without a ceiling fan.  It can be summed up in a statement attributed to Mae West and others… “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and being rich is better.”

	Again, if you’re an agent or biz attorney, write for “Poet”.  You will probably be overwhelmingly glad you had the guts.  Put PoPB in the Subject line, because I tend to delete en-masse.

	And now let’s drop 153 years.

	
	“Sister so dear, sister so young, sister of such loving grace and charm, 
	How empty we’d be, how hollow our lives, but for that trip to the farm.
	How he, so tall and fair, hatless, sun streaking and glowing gold in his hair
	Took not from us our childhood, while teaching us so far beyond prayer…”

	What a minx you were, what an angel, what a spirit bold and fine and true
	As you pulled us like goats, not leading, to see what that loft would brew
       How your questions bubbled, how true your desire to learn and to know,
How you won him with your words; how his words made you shine; glow.

Think back, sister, love, how he guided two children, willing, but so scared
Your nascent breast, so tenderly revealed, my wonder finding it was paired.
The entrances to heaven they were, in my boyish and callow young state
Until our gentle fingers meted to your skirt your blouse and bra’s fine fate

Yes, I was next, proud, hot, and my love, so very full of your lover’s seed
You lay back on the golden straw, eyes wide, begging us the coming deed,
Hands behind your head, buried in the brown luxury of your wondrous hair,
Eyes the larger yet, as he stripped me high, then low, then completely bare.

Finally, in your eleventh year, and myself, what? five years your loving elder
We lay as we should have many years before, as if heated by a smithy welder.
Then, my darling, remember how the lesson of us proceeded to the next class
He stripped his country clothes, and knelt, legs spread on the dry, gold grass.

Recall my blush, my white skin pink with the glow of a fulsome, manly pride
As your eyes lingered on me, though true it was I stood on the smaller side.
How you found me, your delicate left hand, and reached over with your right
To find me, once again, to caress me, to touch and hold me hard and very tight.

Then it was, the three of us huddled together on that field of dry, gold straw
That he asked us in whispers a picture of our pasts for him to sketch and draw.
But we had no stories to tell, we were flowers of sun and soft April showers
And knew nothing of passions flame, or the heat warming wedding bowers.

Huddle we huddled, exploring, finger, lips, and the ecstasy of probing tongues,
Panting, glistening, mewing, wondering if the ladder would ever run out of rungs.
Then, like far off thunder booming its portent, he rose on his quaking knees
Spraying us hotly with his grouting seed as we moaned oh yes, o yes, o please.

You were amazed, as was I, struck as dumb as if an eel had done its own skinning,
To find, sister, now far from me, that the spray of his seed was only the beginning.
But we weren’t left in the dark for long, his strong right arm saw to the truth
Manhandling me between your lithe legs, and guiding me to heaven, forsooth.

How he tensed over us as I slowly shed my angel wings and became an older boy,
Your arms tight around me, and your legs equally, as your cried in welcoming joy. 
How he whispered to us, with on our bellies with his seed, his voice tense yet mild
Encouraging us to love each other fully, and for you to receive from me your child.


And now for The Only Writing School You’ll Ever Need conclusion:

And how does our angel grow, sister Mary, sister mine, how swell you with our baby?
Or will the infant be his?  A hat in the air for that!  For now, such a wondrous maybe.
And now, on that special note, I leave you for the moment, to read of our love’s trial,
Hoping the next time your eyes meet mine, you are short of the globe’s circumference
… by a single mile.  Your brother, Kyle.


	“It is all made up, dear Matilda, every bad word.  The only question, it seems to your sister, is whether or not it’s deliberate, or does indoctrination render one insensitive to anything other THAN  the pounded doctrine?  Personally, and certainly based on our experience with our Rev. Al, I think ten minutes of truth can flush a lifetime of propaganda out with the ebbing tide, never to return across the bar mouth.  How lucky we were than the truth lasted not ten minutes, but ten hours; two full candles between dusk and dawn…”


       “I’m a sick old woman, yes, it’s been these many months since I’ve known myself as I was for eighty years.  Not to last, that is my prayer now, having, Reverend Alger, Reverend Horatio Alger, dear family friend in Revere, and now here in Chatham, leaves on less stone unturned, and my darling great nieces, Matilda, thirteen, and a soft an winsome beauty, as is her red headed beauty of a sister, Gretchen.  I feared happiness for fear of losing it.”  The old woman sighed to end her speech and settled back on her pile of white pillows.
       
       “Grand Nan,” Matilda said, “we’d have to see you ten times worse than this to forget your beauty over the years, in deed and presence.  There were too many tears of laughter to spoil by your doing some silly old thing like growing all stiff and cold.”
       
       “Yes, my child,” the old woman, for the moment resting comfortably, replied, “and we did rather cut up, did we not?”
       “That’s the only time I’m jealous of my beautiful sister, Grand Nan,” the thirteen year old responded, “when I know she’s had two more years knowing you than I have.”
       “Yes,” the hawk faced old woman said, “but when it came to the most savage fun, I think both of you shared equally.”
       “Grand Nan,” Gretchen Green said, “Reverend Alger is here.”
       Old Nancy green sighed again and smiled.  “Our scandals echoed off his ears,” she said, “when you were playing with the best of us.  He knows all.”
       
       Gretchen was the first to react: “Is that the truth?” she asked, friendly but firm.
       “Yes.  Our pranks filled more than a letter or two, so, assuming he’s kept various missives from an old friend, there will be ample evidence in writing, should you doubt my word.”
       “It’s just a bit of a shock,” the fifteen year old replied, “and, on even the briefest reflection, not a bad one.”  She looked across the bed at the handsome man, hawk-faced, like the dying woman, but a hawk hot with youth and energy.  Were his eyes down for a reason?
       
       “How much do you really know, Al?” Matilda asked.
       “Oh,” Old Nancy said, “how wonderful to hear you call him that.”
       “Don’t interrupt, Grand Nan,” Gretchen chided gently.  “Answer the question, Al, if you would be so kind.”
       “Does the word oatmeal have any special meaning?” the twenty eight year old said.  The girls looked for a moment at their great aunt, then for long moments at each other, speechless.  “But that was everything,” the older sister said.  “If you know that, you really do know it all.  Shouldn’t you have told us?  We talked of everything else on the ride to Chatham.”
       
       “And spoil her fun?” Al said.  “Would you have rather had a long lecture on the propriety of your schemes last year?  It’s the other way around.  That I said nothing, means I approved, and merely wanted the perhaps juvenile pleasure of your reaction.
       “If I’ve offended…”
       “Gretchen,” Matilda said, “be fair.  We had to think like lightning, on our feet, every time we played.”
       “And you were often just a quarter beat ahead,” the older girl said, relaxing and smiling, “I guess because your brain is newer by two full year than the soft pudding I was blessed with.”
       “The way your aunt tells it,” Al said, “you were like two experts at the game of poker, one up one hand, another the next, and such a draw at the end, more games only served to prove the basic point.”
       “It’s nice to be able to talk about it,” Matilda observed.
       “No one else can,” Old Nancy chuckled.  “secrets more deeply held than those of Pharos tomb.”
       
       By now the new arrivals had doffed coats and traveling clothes and, dressed for early June, were comfortably seated on the old woman’s bed.  A servant entered and took orders for lemonade and strawberry ice, then departed, happy to see her mistress happy.  The rapid-fire chatter continued.
       
       “How naughty was it, Al?” Gretchen wanted to know.  “luring men into the parlor with it’s wall built by stage carpenters?”
       “It must have been a sight to behold,” the man said, “and I’ve certainly never heard of it from either of you church mice, so don’t be bashful.  The lord and his minions know when to stay away from a house.”
       “Well spoken, old friend,” the woman interjected, “that He may be of more use to others.”  They weren’t aggressively cynical so there was no snide, knowing laughter, but the distance was obvious.
       
       “Do you know how it began, Al?” Gretchen asked.
       “Now there you have me,” the man confessed, “and, in truth, your Grand Nan has sketched but outlines, perhaps testing my loyalty to an outward creed, so begin where it pleases you.”
       
       “We were of two minds,” the younger daughter began, her aunt taking her young hand in a warm claw, smooth as a baby’s, “because we thought the Victorian way, it’s absolute segregation of males and females, was overzealous and cynical, indeed, in assuming every cap and top hat adorned a wolf, yet, we also knew that our weaker sex needed protection.”
       Gretchen took over for her sister as the girls sat hand-in-hand across from the minister.  “We talked about it many an evening with Grand Nan, and finally she devised the plan.  Simplicity itself, anyway of you’re Grand Nan.  She had her chair built against the theatrical wall, on a turnstile.  One minute we’d be well chaperoned, the next we’d draw his attention to the flowers on the table, the turnstile would swing, and moments later, everything good and civil was figuratively out the window, and we were alone with a male.”
       
       
       “And it started because of Sadie Wentworth,” Matilda said.  “Because something did happen to her.  She would never say what, or who, but just: ‘it’s about a man,’ then cry.  She did get over it, but it took months.  When Grand Nan heard, more wheels than one started turning, and, as you know, she spent much of her life as an impresaria, so execution was the matter of a few telegraphs and a week of noise and inconvenience, rather minor, looking back on it.”
       Much of the detail was new to the young preacher, and he nodded for the girls to continue.

	“We narrowed it down to two dozen men, twenty-four, whom we though might have been Sadie’s assailant   One by one we lured them over, and one-by-one into the parlor.”
	Old Nancy coughed.  “Now you girls tell the truth,” she cautioned, “and the truth is most of the boys and young men were perfectly nicely behaved.  Most startled at suddenly and soundlessly being left alone, in total violation of every rule and code, with a young lady.  If any point was made by the first dozen or more, it was that Victorian values are rather absurd, that most young men would rather grapple with a rattlesnake than take liberties either verbal or physical.  They were startled and left, rather promptly, so confused that apparently they never mentioned their experiences, for yes, the men kept coming, two one week, perhaps one the next, until we got to…”   Here she nodded to Gretchen

	“Number seventeen,” the girl said, picking up the story.  “Not the minister, he’d passed with flying colors, but his twenty-year-old son.
	“Matilda was the bait that evening, so she should tell.”

	“I think I knew from his eyes,” the thirteen year old responded, “and if my sister had been in the room, I would have bet her after the first minute.”
	“As if I would have taken it,” the older girl laughed.  “We had him pegged up front, but went through the others so as to establish a pattern of normal behavior after an unexpected event.  Stretching it any further would have been a waste of time, and caused unnecessary embarrassment “
       	
       “Probably more to the point,” Matilda said, “was that the novelty had worn off after six weeks, plus there was some danger of him striking again.  So seventeen out of twenty-four, he was.”
       
       The girls, eyes flashing with new light, quickly concluded the adventure.  Mr. Snow had made his advances, not questioning the sudden disappearance of the chaperone.  Matilda, not a coy bone in her body, had improvised a few in the exigency of the moment, and, with half a wink and half a simper had lured forth the confession, then given the signal.  The tail of the plan was a simple as any of it.  It was winter, and, as he left, a man habitually thrust his hands deep in his pockets against the cold evening air.  On the signal, Gretchen had retrieved a ladle of boiling oatmeal from the kitchen, carefully depositing the hot contents in each overcoat pocket.  Sadie had tried to say: “oh, you shouldn’t have,” but had been unable to get the words out with a straight face.
       
       Good New England story.  Enjoyed, even in the retelling, by all.  Old Nancy held up a finger.  “Now it’s my turn,” she said, squeezing Matilda’s hand and fixing her eyes first on her nieces, then the handsome, athletic family friend.  “I’m too old, and a dozen times too wise,” she said, “to take the long way around Robin Hood’s barn, leave anything vague and half said,” Nancy advised, “ do you girls understand?”
       
       “Yes,” they both said.
       “And you’ve participated in enough pranks and alternative behaviors to realize that being a goody-two-shoes church mouse is nothing more than one of many styles of human behavior, am I correct?”
       “Yes,” they agreed.
       “And you trust me not to have Margaret feed you poison at my table, or hurt you in any way.  I’m almost sure of that.”  Both girls giggled and nodded.
       “Good,” the elderly lady nodded, “then we’ve made it around Mr. Hood’s barn while I still have breath in my body, something I feel you will be very glad of before the evening is over.”  She didn’t wait for the girls to nod, mystified though they were, before carrying on.
       
       “Look,” she said, holding up a single gnarled index finger.  “How many fingers do you see?”
       “One,” the girls said.
       “How many bedrooms do you think have been allotted to the three of you under my roof?” she asked.
       
       Long moments passed, as you might expect.  The girls, at first speechless, compounded their confusion by blushing, initially, quite prettily, then quite red.  They dropped their eyes, and were in part given away by the sudden whitening of their knuckles as they clasped each other’s hands.  
       
       “You are immature,” the old lady went on from under her bonnet, “fear not.  I have seen it in the theater with a number of ingénues; like children until they welcome a young actor.  His time with them forces their bloom, in a matter of speaking, so, by the time of their confinement, they are as ready to birth their child as the next woman, and from ages a year or two under your ages.  If I recall, Henny McNeil gave birth near her eleventh birthday, and to a healthy son.  The only fly in the ointment in such situations, is economic.  I have taken care of that in my will, for both of you.  At my age, I have one regret in life, and that is not welcoming a man I knew at the age of ten and having his child within a year or two; instead, even though I was associated with the pagan theater from my earliest memories, I waited until I was eighteen.  I wish that you not make the same mistake; that when you lie here, you know you have fulfilled yourselves in every way as early as it was possible to do so, for, for all you know, you may like here at age eighteen.  Life is that way, and death even more so.  So, under this roof there is one bedroom, right above me.  I sleep little and fitfully at my age; I expect not to sleep at all tonight, kept awake by the sounds of two beautiful and adorable young females receiving their first babies from a wonderful and athletic young male.”
       
       Again Old Nancy held up her right index finger.  “What do you suppose this represents?” she asked.
       “We don’t know,” Gretchen whispered, both females still flushed and a little slack jawed.
       “It represents,” the great aunt said, “the number of beds in the room upstairs.
       “Go now,” she whispered, settling back into her white pillow, so close to the color of her old skin,  “and see for yourselves.  Margaret’s been up to some deviltry or ‘tother, won’t treat me to a word, so you’ll have to report on her.  My wish is, and I hope it’s among my last, that you join me for breakfast at eight in the morning as flushed and beautiful as you are at this moment.”
       
       The large, wool carpeted bedroom was aglow with twenty or more long candles, the bed strewn with fresh wild flowers.  On the bed were three ornate silver hand mirrors and a small pair of silver scissors.  A beautifully handwritten note suggested the three guests snip lockets of their hair, plaiting them to make a short braid to be mounted under a small glass making up part of the silver handle.  Frankly, the three welcomed the diversion, tensions running at the palpable level as the two girls sat on either side of their handsome young stag twining the short lengths of hair the male clipped from each of their heads.  Gretchen broke a silence of some minutes.  “Ten years from now,” she whispered, “I hope it is my daughter looking in this mirror, and if she shifts it slightly, that it reflects the same image as it does this moment.”  Here she held the mirror up to the young adult sitting at her left.  In the modern era, we have mood rings, but there was a time they weren’t needed.
       
       Neatly folded on the bed, and the center of the flower heart, were two long, white, silk straps lying on two cuts of red silk.  They were there for a reason, and, clouded though their thinking was, all three guests quickly understood their function.  Not answering Gretchen, because he was unable to, Al rose, taking the older girl, first, and guiding her gently against one of the high posts at the foot of the bed.  Yes, there was a brass ring, and, running the silk sash through it, he carefully bound the fifteen year old, stretching her arms above her head and  securing her so her back was to the polished mahogany.  The red pane of silk he fitted over her had, for so it was fabricated, and it covered her front like a smock.  
       
       Two new dresses, hardly observed, hung in prominent display.  They, also, were there for a reason.  Nodding to Matilda, Al handed her the small scissors and the younger sister set carefully about the task of cutting away the seams of her sister’s dress, the male standing close behind her as she knelt to her labor, stripping out of his light traveling clothes.
       
       “Is she wearing a bra?” Al whispered to Matilda.
       “Yes,” the thirteen year old replied, “I was going to leave it for you.”
       “Are you wearing one?” he asked the child.
       “No,” the girl said, “maybe next year.”
       “Fine,” the minister said, “though, in my present state, to look forward to one more thing seems an almost humorous surfeit “  Both girls smiled shyly.
       
       Matilda carefully removed the disassembled dress from her sister’s feet, folding it neatly across a chair.  She positioned herself close beside her sister, raising her hands over her head.  Al fitted her hands to the white restraints and covered her with the smock, then kneeling and reaching under it, he ran the tiny scissors along many a mysterious seam until the girl was naked under her simple red covering.  As she had done, he carefully removed the fabric and folded it on top of Gretchen’s dress.  He placed the scissors in their place on a sewing table and stood in front of the two girls, lacing his fingers behind his neck and spreading his legs slightly as he arched in open display.  He moved to them, within a foot, then within inches.  Observing nothing but hot welcome in their wide eyes, he lowered his right hand and found his hard, eight-inch erection.  He was uncircumcised, and slowly pulled back his foreskin as the girls, now panting openly, stared down at him.  He toyed with his huge maleness for some moments, then, wordlessly, began to masturbate, soon reaching a full, lingering stroke.  Two minutes passed, the girls drooling until the sensation of saliva where it hadn’t been since they cut their teeth prompted them to lick their chins clean.  Their breathing intensified as the male in front of them began growing taut and ridged before their glazed eyes.  “Oh, sister,” Gretchen mewed, “he’s going to show us.”
       
       “Will it be like feathers and pixie dust?” the younger girl wondered in a return whisper.
       “I heard Becky Bridget say drops of pearl,” the fifteen year old said.
       “But Jeff’s younger than we are,” Matilda observed, “so it may be more than drops.”
       “Even if you’re wrong,” Gretchen responded, “two drops would look beautiful on the red silk.”
       “I’m glad Grand Nan spent her life in the theater,” the younger sister concurred.  
       
       The conversation of the two nymphs, however innocent, unnerved the tall, athletic male.  No longer was he able to remain steadily enough on his feet to display as he masturbated for them, and he had to brace himself with his left arm while he moved yet closer to the panting young females now hardly inches from his penis.  “I’m cumming,” he was able to whisper, and even in his semi-conscious, quaking state, he was able to respond to the hisses and mews of shock and surprised welcome as one heave spurt of his semen after another sprayed across the silk covering each pair of childish loins and tender little-girl bellies.  As his climax intensified, the male managed to released Matilda and the girl, now as feral as she was bright, jockeyed without delay to his right flank, her naked (under the silk) left against him.  Her slim young arm went tightly around his waist, squeezing with astonishing strength, and her right replaced his on his still heavily cumming penis.  The shock of her touch brought Al’s right hand to the bed post, where he was just able to hang on as the hard grip of the now half wild thirteen year old tore from semen in all likelihood intended for the following week.
       
       Meantime, Gretchen was spreading her legs and thrusting to him.  As her little sister guided the ejaculating male under the red silk, she screamed Yes, Now, and, in the exigencies of the moment, Matilda found her immediately, steadying the throbbing penis as the male, braced against the bed post, firmly entered the fifteen year old until Matilda was sure his belly was flat and hard against hers.  Then she hugged both of them tightly together and waited for the mating between their healthy and beautiful young bodies to conclude.
       
       The next ravishing, both girls now few of their stained smocks, took place half an hour later.  This time the shuddering, panting male spilled his seed deep inside the writing, lurching Matilda.  Their third time, Gretchen was first tied, and the minister guided Matilda to her, until the girl, crazed like an animal starved for salt, brought her sister to a screeching agony that released in an orgasm as wild and frantic as the seizure of a neural disorder.  He raped them repeatedly throughout the night, usually in the position of a husband taking his wife, with the girls sometimes lying in inert acceptance, though unable, even if almost asleep, to quell a hiss at the hard, bucking pulse from which they’ d take his child, and sometimes clawing him in frantic welcome.
       
       “Guess who slept from midnight until seven-thirty this morning?” someone asked at breakfast, and that very meal, served by the smiling Margaret, was a sensation.
       
       
       My theory is if you balance dialogue and narrative, poetry is a third wheel.
	Though it’s not a position I’m wont to maintain with any particular zeal.


	“Daughter Ellen, you are to begin with the looming storm, the thunder at such a distance as to cause concern, the lightning against the darkening sky.  I was natural for you to seek shelter in Brayer’s barn, and the fact you’d previously seen you William Cates and the fiend tarry there, previously, is of no concern.  It is a free country, and I should imagine that permits a girl to shelter, however remote the storm, where she will…”


	“It’s getting pretty dark, Al, can we spend a long time?” the freckled faced, redheaded school boy said as the door creaked open.

	“If that’s your wish,” the handsome minister said.
	“Do you think we’re alone?” the boy queried.
	“Yes,” the young man said, “I’ve had my eye on the barn for the last half hour; no one’s come, and the storm will prompt folks to stay where they are.”  To be on the safe side, the man spoke out, announcing their presence.  “There’s never been anyone here, before,” he concluded, “no animals to tend, just hay and straw for the coming winter.”
	“Will it be okay, then?” William asked.  “Will we have time?”
	“If it’s truly what you want, yes,” Reverend Alger said.
	“I do,” the tall, slim thirteen year old replied, nodding and smiling shyly.

	The two swung the heavy doors shut, shooting the wooden bolt.  That done, they moved opposite the half-loft, the child positioning himself next to a tightly packed mound of straw covered with a saddle blanket, the man close behind him.  “I built this this morning before school,” William said, “it should be about the right height, and I padded at its base with extra straw, so you’d be comfortable on your knees if it takes a long time.”
	“I’ve never done it before,” the man said softly to the boy, “experienced as I am with children your age.”
	“I like what you’re doing with me now, just as much,” the boy whispered hoarsely as the young adult’s hands crept inside his farm coveralls and found his bare chest and stomach, “but I’ve shared with Chester Richards and Fete Billings enough that I think I’m ready to be with an adult.”

	“Were you with them recently?” the minister asked.
	“That’s why I was a little late,” the boy replied, “we spent half an hour up in Chester’s bedroom.”
	“Was it complete?” the man wanted to know; “are you wet from them?”
	“Very,” William whispered.  “We haven’t been together for four days, and we never do anything by ourselves.”

	“Were they complete with you?” was the next whispered query.
	“No,” William said, “which I guess means this is part of a conspiracy.  Three against one, and I mean against in the sense you will be against me after you have molested me.”
	“If it’s as true and blue as the sky wide and ocean deep,” the preacher responded, “then I’ll have to say, yes, I’m against young boys.”
	“And in the not too distant future,” the boy said, “but, at least four days.”
	“I’ll count them off a minute at a time, day or night,” the man responded, leaning down to kiss the boy in his arm on his carrot hair.

	The molestation continued for half an hour.  Slowly the young males got each other naked, taking turns masturbating each other until a jerky response told them to stop so they could wait.  For ten minutes, the adult lay on his back on the clean straw-covered floor of the barn, the boy first lying, now completely naked, but for an amulet on a leather thong, on his back against the tall athlete’s chest as the man’s hands wandered over his body from face to knees, occasionally masturbating the astoundingly big erection probing up from between the child’s long, coltish legs, then rolling him gently so their bare chests and hard bellies were together as they kissed deeply and again and again.

	“When I was chaplain to the paper boys in Chicago,” Al said, “I learned which of the boys who sought privacy with me had been taken before by an adult by the size of their penises.  With a few exceptions, boys as well developed as you are, at age thirteen, had been complete with adult males many times before they stripped for my attention.  In fact, one boy, a year younger than you, was so endowed as to almost be classifiable as a freak, and, when I quizzed him, it turned out he had thee uncles who spent a great deal of time with him.  He wanted what you do, but I wasn’t close enough to him to share that; it was difficult: so many boys, so little time.”
	“Well,” William mused, smiling, “I guess that brings up an aspect of rural life unlikely to make the pages of “Harper’s”.

       “How you gonna coop  ‘em up in Paree,” the man quotth, “after they’ve loved on a farm?”
       “By keeping everything secret?” the boy whispered in response.
       “That sounds like a good place to start,” Al said.  “Do you want to keep what’s happened with you in the past secret?”
       “Isn’t a secret a lie you don’t tell?” the boy asked in return.
       “Good as any definition lying around,” the man noted.  But it was neither the time nor place to sustain clever verbal intercourse.  
       “I wanted to tell you before,” William said, rolling on his back so the adult could fondle his chest, belly, and thighs, “but I guess I still felt a little like we were strangers.”
       “What’s hard,” Al observed, “is keeping boys out – excluding them.  Limiting what happens to s few special and enduring partners and not responding to every invitation, or selecting only the most comely lads.  I feel far more guilt and confusion over boys like you, whom I have rejected by not fully accepting, than I feel over anything than has happened.  In my experience one boy in fifteen or twenty yearns to be alone with an active adult.  A sane world would happily accommodate them, as it does red-headed children, but we are hard set on a course to resolving the slavery issue in the worst and most damaging and destructive way imaginable, so sanity is in short supply.  All I can do with you, William, as I do with other youngsters, is encourage you to teach a few yearning boys, in your turn as a young adult, while putting the quality of the relationships a hundred times ahead of their quantity.”
       
       “Is quality knowing what’s happened in the past?” William wanted to know.
       “It adds to completeness,” the minister mused, “and that’s a synonym of quality, if not precisely the same thing.   Put it this way: completeness, full disclosure, can hardly help enhancing any underlying value.”
       “I’m beginning to feel organized,” William responded, “and that it actually does make as much sense as anything else.  I watched my fine and even saintly grandmother die to a scaling pitch of increasing agony, god, Christ, and Virgin not bestowing on her the least instant of relief, mind, soul or body, though her final travail lasted for weeks, and it has been easy, since, to utterly reject the pat nonsense of faith.  I read a lot, so I wasn’t left all hollow and searching for anything to fill the void, but I was still very glad when my uncle Stan showed up and was willing to help some friends and me dam up the stream on our east forty.”
       
       “He was your first teacher?” Al asked.
       “For all four of us,” the thirteen year old replied.
       “Did it happen in front of your friends, or did he take you off to a private place?” the Reverend said.
       “We were together,” William noted.
       
       
       I guess this is a good place for a break in the action.  On television it would be a commercial interval, but I found out Malcolm is a Jew, so once again we find ourselves in essayland.  Veteran readers know Malcolm Dale well enough and I won’t review more of his story than to say of late he’s impressed me by his profound contribution of nearly a thousand hours of classical piano sequenced (with Noteworthy) into tiny files than can be downloaded in a few seconds per Movement.  They play off your sound card, sound great, and include the written score with the playing notes flashing red.  Quite marvelous and a vast amount of work, possibly equaling my own, in contributing to the WWW.  Since 1979 we’ve spent a thousand hours or more chatting, me standing by the window of his kiosk where he sells lotto and scratch.  I suppose a dozen times over the years I’ve made some comment about Jews, and yesterday he bridled and said he was tired of my anti-Semitic nonsense; added that he was Jewish, both his parents were, as well as all four of his grandparents.  Well blow me down.  It wasn’t much of a friendship to begin with and I shan’t miss continuing it, but it does bring into relief what my anti-Semitism has cost me.  Specifically, any chance of ever being published by any major house under any circumstances.  (Interesting sidebar: has it cost me?  or you?)  So here, because of personal convictions, nothing to do with beliefs, is hands-down the finest writer of the era, and likely all eras, utterly denied access to the popular press.  And, as the veterans will know, I am profoundly grateful to American Jewry.  They have so utterly degraded and insidiously debased the American spirit, as I lived it through the first twenty or thirty years of my life, with the technicalities of twisted laws and pretzel logic, they have destroyed the country, rendered it a confused and hollowed husk, and taken, far more than Shakespeare, the sting from death.  No sane person could abide living in the future Jewish States of American, it is a fat, foul, and loathsome place, becoming more so exponentially as the grip of the python squeezes the last plastic dollar from a public awash in one sweeping tidal wave (tsunami) of misery after another, with the biggest mother fuckers still inbound. 
       
        It’s the screamingest, howlingest, knee-slappingest joke of all jokes, of all time, and it will kill you all, soon enough indeed, leaving me to croak, having earned large helpings of the best, knowing nothing but nothing is yet to come.  What a philosophical gift.  Thank you Jews of American.  Go for it.  Nitpick, hair-split, and quibble the place to death; enervate and dissemble the spirit of the law with the letter of the law.  Categorize and characterize everything in your neat little socialistic boxes.  Be not satisfied with one hundred million lawsuits on file, gird yourselves to double the number.  Rest not on the six thousand beautiful American home towns devastated unto death by malls and big boxes, get those last few remaining enclaves of the wealthy, educated WASP, with their charm and dignity, and spread overseas. 
       
       
          
       
       
       
       Sorry for the pause, I was out expressing my tribute and gratitude by dancing in the living room.  Yes, as “The Reader’s Digest” once said: “These wonderful people among us.”  You are so amazingly stupid, passive, and bovine, ah, yes, but politically correct.  You deserve a smiley face, but I never bothered to learn how to tap the keys to make one.  Sorry.  And will I die a happy king, or what?  No responses whatever to my essays, absolutely zero.  No hope.  No thinking, jeez, some of you are kind of cool and worthwhile, seem to even give a damn, I really should try to do something for my two hundred ninety million subjects.  But they don’t want me to.  Rejected to points right of the decimal.  Not one disciple of the some three million who, according to the download logs, have read my work to date (think of the multitude Swaggert would have borned-again, in His name, with my 1.15 million published words, and the heavy bread he would have made a-doin’ so “(I work hard in the name of the Lord.” – tee-hee).  
       
       My only responsibility is to kiss you good-bye, and I take that lightly enough, you may be sure.  Try to remember this.  God does not do things for you, he tells you things.  You need not fear his actions, hail, locusts, and the like, but you ignore my word at your own extreme and immediate peril.  As a culture, a society, you are near death from fattening yourselves to death.  That’s god’s word.  If diabetes doesn’t get you, your manic obsessive neurotic compulsive materialism will.  That of the Jew.  Our wondrous Jews. My anti-Semitism can be summed up as follows: say Lieberman, the liquor man’s son, won.  Okay, today we have this: question Jewish influence, and the knee-jerk reaction is: “Has there ever been a Jewish president?””  Now the liquor store boy, the same one who wastes one seventh of his time on earth on yahweh yammer,  makes it in as prexy.  What then the answer?   “Well, we’ve only had one.”  Say, by flukes to horrific to contemplate, we’d had twenty.  “That’s less than half.”  And all?  “Oy veh (goy go-way), so we like to be president.”  To me, each answer is totally insane, the logic exactly what you’d expect of those who scripted the deity who chose them, and the very definition of disingenuous, for who, better than our media Jews, knows the limits of the power and influence of the Clinton and Bush nonsense we waste so much time and treasure on.  This is why the pogroms.  If you can’t talk to it, it isn’t human, therefore you’d best get it out of your way.                                                                                                                                                                
       
       From the I Don’t Know it All Department:  how come so much money in the banks?  Is it the vast profits of the Nineties with no safe alternative to earn a return?  Or that no one has any need for borrowed money because there really isn’t much left in which to invest?
       
       Vis-à-vis Shakespeare, Dickens, and others  Occasionally they hit higher notes, but they also covered thousands of pages with boring filler.   Try to find any such in my work.
       
       
       Trying to limp the photography project off the ground with Linden, finally and probationally back in my good graces after stealing the camera, which, thanks to attempted repairs, is now beyond use.  Objective is to make small, four by three-inch, hi-res images that can be incorporated into craft items like framed mirrors, candle holders, lamps, and so on; also market boxed sets of the images, like playing cards, and  to burn perhaps a hundred fat (2-3 Meg.) images on CDs.  Pictures are tropic glimpses, often weathered board houses with foliage or laundry, very pretty.  Market: gift shops.  Customer: tourists.  Lin was blown away with some of the images I already have, so I guess that’s a good start.  Small investment: Epson camera, seven hundred, printer, four hundred, paper and ink, one thousand, and that’s enough to get started.  I don’t know what it would do to my ego to get my half-James Dean black sheep back in the fold, but I’m willing to find out.  Since you read this only for the stroke action and cum shots, you won’t care one way or the other, so let’s all stick our heads back in the sand.
       
       “How many of you boys love your mothers?” Stan Green wanted to know.  William, Jeffrey, Mike, and Samuel all raised their hands.  They’d just arrived at the narrow bottleneck of the bubbling brook and concurred on it being the place to erect a three foot stone barrier, were lying back on the mossy banks, catching their breaths after the walk in. 
       “Fine,” said the handsome young doctor, “because then I think you’ll all agree it would be unseemly for any of you to return home with wet and muddy clothes, undoubtedly with a tear or two needing an hour with the needle to patch.”
        
       The four boys saw the sense of their adult friend’s words and nodded their heads.  Did they then feel trapped?  “Fine,” the young doctor repeated, “but it does bring up the issue of embarrassment.  How many of you would like to suffer that as you work in your underpants, and how many of you would like to overcome it, even though doing so will be ten times as embarrassing for a few minutes?”  The trap now fairly sprung, the boys looked at each other, than back to the man kneeling on the moss before them.
       
       “Te reduce your discomfiture,” Dr. Green said, “I will simply go first.  I will strip.  I will do what some of you may practice already, and spill my seed as you watch.  You are under to obligation to watch, to stay, or to participate with me or with each other, merely invited.”  So saying, the young man did quickly shuck out of shoes and clothes, and posed in front of the boys, kneeling, legs spread, back arched, and hugely erect.  
       
       It would be ridiculous to say he had a point, because it seemed he was all point; phallic, swollen, flared, wet, and red.  As one, the four young teenagers stood, quickly stripped naked, and lay back down, lacing their fingers behind their necks and spreading their legs.  For some seconds, they did flush with embarrassment, though it could have been childish lust, but they quickly recovered their composures and merely lay panting and thrusting their hips.  
       
       “Let it happen with me, first,” Stan whispered, moving so his knees straddled the feet of the middle children.  He was masturbating openly before them, and his protégés were copying his movements, their penises becoming swollen and rock hard at their first carnal touch, their hands moving tentatively and experimentally as their breathing deepened and they began hissing and sweating.
       
       “Uncle Stan,” William whispered, “how long before we can do this again?”
       “Probably when we’re half through the job at hand,” the man replied, also in a hoarse and ragged whisper, “and if you want I’ll guide you into touching each other.”  Four heads nodded immediately.
       “What happens next,” the doctor explained, “is called ejaculation.  If you want to use other terms with each other, well and good, but please not around me.”  Again, four nods of agreement, Jeffrey, a particularly clever boy, asking: “is that related to the fact we’re doing this for our mothers?”
       
       (Knew I should have practiced those emoticons.)
       
       “More apropos, I think,” the sage doctor replied, “that it apply to anything you might one day wish to do with your sisters.”
       “Thank god he’s not that quick, physically,” young William mused to himself, fascinated to be openly masturbating with the tall, boyish stallion, mesmerized half to the point of fainting as he watched the young adult begin to tense as his breath dropped to a hot, shallow pant, and thinking with heady delirium of the months stretching ahead, Uncle Stan in residence as he established his practice in Brewster.  
       
       Another boy replied out loud.  “Paula wants to come the next time we come here to work on the wall or skinny-dip,” Samuel said.  “She’s only nine, but she loves to watch the horses and dogs, and she’s made me promise to teach her as soon as I learn anything.”  Since he’d said nothing to delay their approaching climaxes, the boys merely panted in response, thrusting their hips more wantonly, and thrilling openly to the new size and hardness of their huge erections.  Little doubt vision’s of Samuel’s pretty little mouse of a sister, brown-haired and brown-eyed, her brother peeling her lithe, childish body free of her dress, bloomers, and panties, her tiny bra, if she wore one at all, danced luridly in the overheated and active minds of the young boys, and even their more mature teacher.  They pictured their own taut young bodies plunging between her slim, outstretched legs, pictured each other tensing and mewing over her, pictured, most of all, their handsome adult guide, the slender arms around his powerful chest, the childish legs hard around his waist, and her cries of welcome as handsome six-foot doctor raced to freshen her with the hot gush of his pulsing adult seed.  Intellectually inclined, which is why they were friends in the first place, the went on to picture the sprite sneaking into her brother’s warm bed, late at night, and imagined the tender whispering between the young lovers as she again welcomed him with hot, quick kisses.
       
       The clever boy, Jeffrey, now spoke:  “Such goings on,” he managed to say in a hoarse, near-the-breaking-point whisper, “should, I believe, be brought to the attention of our minister, Reverend Alger, and Samuel and Paula should spend a number of nights at the rectory so he might fully counsel and advise them.”  (Hey, when I write ‘em smart, I write ‘em smart.)
       
       Then the youngest, twelve-year-old Mike, was heard from.  “My mother knits something extraordinary,” he said, “and if they spent some time with us, why, they couldn’t help benefit from the experience, especially during the coming winter.”
       
       “William,” Stan whispered, “you indeed have three of the most charming and winsome friends possible.  Their wit is more exciting than their beautiful young bodies, and their bodies are exciting enough to ejaculate all over.  Are they ready for my spill?”
       
       “Yes,” came four urgent whispers.
       “Each try to wait for the finish of the one before,” were his final whispered instructions.  The tall, powerful body leaned forward, bracing on the mossy bank. with it’s left hand as the right slowed and then tensed at the base of the long, hard penis.  It had pulled the generous foreskin back, and the boy’s mewed hotly as they slid half over each other in order to be as close as possible.  Two long moments passed, then the adult whispered: “I’m going to cum off on all of you.”  Another moment and the heavy shower of thick white semen spurted down on the naked children, splashing so heavily on their slim, smooth thighs and bellies that someone sitting, back-to, twenty feet away, would have heard the sizzle of the heavy spurting of the athletic adult.
       
       As the hot, fast pulsing subsided, the now slack jawed and wanton boys focused their attention on thirteen-year-old William, watching him strain, pant, sweat, arch, and finally tense until he was rigid.  Wet from his uncle, the boy came hard and fast, his watery, childish sperm splashing his chest and all over the wet, naked bodies of his coltish young friends.  Rigidly, they maintained the discipline, and only when the nephew’s spray diminished to a vague, pulsing stream of thin white fluid, did Jeffrey begin his release, his first hard spurt sure to jet over two feet straight up but for the hard chest of the panting athlete pinioned over his thighs.  Samuel and Mike also were able to hold themselves a half stroke from relief, and soon Stan’s powerful swimmer’s chest was dripping freely of the hot, mucusy seed of four stripling lads.
       
       Group hugs hadn’t been invented, but that seemed to bother no one as the doctor lowered himself to the slick, panting boys, and they spent some minutes licking each other and experimenting with kissing.  Minutes later, they were hard at stone and water, still a little embarrassed, but having learned to live with it.
       
       Now we have to remove and backtrack.  I don’t re-write for Nifty, so sometimes a little story patching is in order.  Yes, Ellen is in the barn, but not up in the loft.  Another mistake is that it went unmentioned that the young girl was an accomplished artist in both pencil and water colors.  She wasn’t in the loft, she was hidden in the straw mere feet from Al and William.  During the boy’s story, the girl quietly flipped open her pad and her pencil began racing over one page, then a second, and finally, a third.  This is what the fourteen year old girl drew:  
       
       First sketch.  Both males naked, the boy on his back on the pile of straw, holding his knees near his shoulders while the adult, hugely aroused, knelt close to the coltish child.  Not being a cartoonist, she was unable to get the man gently probing the boy, sliding his slippery, exposed glans firmly against the inner thighs (“so much liker her own,” she sighed to herself), and also active in probing the boy’s maleness.  While his motions against his willing partner were captured in a freeze frame, the intensity of his handsome face as he began the rape of the thirteen year old seemed to have a passionate and glowing furtherance, if not movement, to it.  It was a beautiful piece of work, even as a preliminary sketch.
       
       Second sketch.  The mounting of the child now under way.  Here the action was so gentle and slow as to amount to a tableau or still-life, with only the white semen of Jeffrey and his friends oozing copiously around the minister’s long, thick penis, in the form of silky drops, to add a sense of motion.
       
       Did the artist grow impatient over the forty minutes the man took to fully dominate the boy at his waist?  No.  Ever so quietly she retrieved her color box (she’d come to the barn to draw and paint a next of owls in a shaft of sunlight, but the storm had darkened the birds and she’d just been leaving when Al and William entered; had not, because of stories from her mother, acknowledged their halloo, but rather had crept into her safe little nest and held her breath.)  But, eventually, there was a third sketch.
       
       The man fully pressed against the welcoming young boy, his strong adult hands on the naked teen’s hips as he pulled the ninety pound boy too him bracing the long legs with his arms as William signed his submission by stretching his arms high above his heaving chest.  Ellen could only guess what was happening between their young, straining bodies, what the gasps and yips meant, how the gallop of an ejaculating male must feel deep inside the body of a thirteen year old, so she rendered the intensity in the two handsome faces and let her imagination flow the page in a garland of flowers strewn across William’s belly, just below his tiny navel, the blossoms festooned with tiny butterflies.  (It would be years before the resulting watercolor, titled: “Smiling Blooms” would be sold to a private collector for twenty thousand 1866 dollars, but that’s another story.)
       
       Slowly the tension between the openly panting males relinquished its grip.  The child’s arms went to the adult, and they lay together for half an hour.  Then they dressed slowly and left the barn, hand-in-hand to the door.  To complete the story, it need only be added that the approaching storm hit as Ellen was half way home, giving her a chill.  She recovered quickly, but during a feverish spell, her mother found her sketch book.
       
       
          [ I leave this book with a certain emotion akin to nostalgia and gratitude.  My own life, my own rise from a superficial glibness to premier literary artist, perhaps more than in my own mind,  is surely the Horatio Alger story of all time; perseverance and diligence, to say nothing of forty years of intensive practice.  (The only luck involved was simply living long enough to get in all that typing.)  

I know little of the life of Rev. Alger.  He was, in fact, exiled from Brewster for being a pedophile.  Whether he was anything like the character bearing his name in this story, a brute rapist, or an insidious creep, I have no idea (if he was either of the latter two, why would one parish send him on to another in an era when men were hanged for stealing a horse?).

What I do know is he went on to become the most important of American writers.  

I don’t recall ever reading one of his hundred books; I didn’t have to, as the “message” was ubiquitous and nearly the definition of axiomatic.  But that was in the Fifties and Sixties; in his own day, his work was inspirational in a practical sense that focused young lives by the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions.  Horatio Alger stories built the best of the country as we are privileged to know it.  In this day, never post James Dean, a/k/a Mr. Alienation, it’s is probable the writer (of no literary merit) is closer to a laughingstock (way retro) than anything to do with admirable  As we ignore him, rebel pointlessly, dither, and fatten in our perennial search for shortcuts, quick fixes, instant gratification, and ever more credit, he remains my hero, and I’ll bet he’d love my stories.  To you, H.A., and I hope you rest with a hand on a little piece.}


END OF BOOK III




















