by Gene Curry
“Good night, Miss Claggett,” I said.
I was glad when the train settled down for the night. It stood on an elevation in the prairie. From where I was I could see the lights of the town. Then, one by one, the lights winked out, and all around me there was nothing but the darkness and the night wind. The wind smelled of grass and cows and women. I noticed the woman smells more than the others.
I could have bunked in with Iversen and Culligan, but it would have taken a blizzard to make me do that. The guard had already been set for the night, so I could sleep. When I finally felt like it, I took my blankets and settled into a grassy hollow some distance from the camp. The sky was dusted with stars. It was quiet except for the movement of the cattle in the pens. I lay on my back, staring up at the sky.
Then I heard her coming, her bare feet rustling in the grass as she made her way from the wagon she shared with Maggie O’Hara. She moved in the starlight with slender grace, a bottle in her hand, but I wouldn’t have minded if she’d brought only herself. But to have Flaxie Cole and a bottle of whiskey and soft grass under us—what more could a man ask for?
Flaxie’s Louisiana voice was as smooth as the bourbon in the bottle. I flipped back the blanket and made a place for her, then covered us again. I tell you, it was nice under that blanket, with the night breeze blowing and us warm as a basket of kittens, the bottle passing back and forth between us.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, it’s good to be with a man again!” Flaxie said, blowing her bourbon breath in my ear. “I’m so sick of women I could scream. I could scream fit to bust my brisket.”
“Don’t do it,” I said. “You’d wake the padre, and I like your brisket just the way it is.”
My hand was on her crotch as I said it. She was wet, and I was hard. She had long, lovely slender legs. I loved their smoothness. I cupped my hands under her young, rounded, almost boyish backside and let her do the work. It was like Culligan and his wagon wheels. I never interfere with people who know their work. And Flaxie certainly did.
She couldn’t have been a parlor-house girl for very long, because she was small and strong and tight down below. She didn’t push me in with a single thrust. She worked me in little by little, inch by inch.
“Oh, my God, isn’t there any end to it?” she gasped happily. We were happy and a little drunk and didn’t do anything for a while except lie there, my length inside her and her muscles contracting and letting go. Then we began to move, and oh what a sweet fuck that was! My face was buried in her long black hair. When we began to move faster, she wrapped her legs around my back. When she did that, our pace quickened and our crotches grinded together. My cock was sweet and slippery as warm honey.
She came, and then she came again. It felt good to feel her coming with me stiff and hard inside her. She was a gentle girl, and I liked her very much. She needed me as much as I needed her. It had been a long time since I had been with a girl I liked as much as this one. The wind blew colder as our fucking went on, but under the blanket we were moist and warm.
We were out under the stars, but we were as comfortable as if we were in a big, soft bed. The grass smelled sweet under us. It was a chilly night, but it was cozy with the blanket on top of us. We lay side by side, her left hand playing with my cock, my right hand playing with her cunt. Her beaver was sweet and soft and moist and she groaned when my middle finger probed into her. Her entire body seemed to vibrate when my finger put gentle pressure on her clit. Here was a beautiful girl who loved sex in all its variations. She touched my hand and said, “Down there—would you. Please do that to me.”
I didn’t need to be told what she wanted. I moved down under the blanket and buried my face in her muff. She smelled as sweet as the grass. My tongue went into her and she drummed her heels on the ground. The wagon train was only a short distance away, but Flaxie and I were in our own private world. I tongued her and she kept begging for more, and I gave it to her.
My tongue excited her so much that she began to cry out and, much as I hated to do it, I had to shush her. We were in a hollow and that made her cries seem louder than they were. I suspected that Reverend Claggett, the old jailbird, was a light sleeper and I didn’t want to find him standing over us with a gun in his hand. We were breaking his principal rule—no sex—and he would be breathing hell and damnation if he found us together. And what I was doing to Flaxie would make him even madder than if he found us just having ordinary sex.
Flaxie was quieter after I shushed her. There was no more crying out—she groaned but not loud enough to be heard by anybody. The joy juice flowed out of her as she came over and over. I kept tonguing her through her orgasms and she grabbed my hair so hard I thought she was going to tear it out. Finally, she used both hands to raise my head from where it was. She pulled me up beside her. My mouth was wet and she kissed it, tasting herself. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I’ve been wanting that from a man for such a long time.”
“It’s a long way to California,” I said. “We’ll have lots of nights like this. This is just the beginning. It will get better and better as we go along.”
“Yes it will,” she said, but I sensed a note of hesitation in her soft voice. At the time, I failed to understand what her reluctance meant, but I let it go. We were having too good a time to spoil it with doubts and questions. When she was ready for it, I rolled her over and took her from behind, my cock pushing between her legs, burying itself in her cunt. I love doing it like that. You have the woman’s soft ass under you like a cushion. I spread her legs a little so I could get in all the way. I think it was the angle that made it so pleasurable. My cock brushed against her clit as I pumped in and out. My hands were around her breasts, squeezing them gently. She groaned as my fingers rolled her nipples between them. She raised her ass as I pumped harder and faster. She came before I did and the way she shuddered under me made my cock swell so large that I was afraid I couldn’t go on without hurting her. But her come had made her so wet she was dripping and my cock slid in and out as easily as before. I wanted this fuck to last all night, but finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and I shot my load into her. She gave a loud cry before I could stop her. Then she remembered where we were—the dangerous situation we were in—and she was quiet.
I rolled off her and we lay together under the blanket, looking up at the stars. It was colder now. We had been there for the best part of two hours, but though the blanket was thin and old, we were very comfortable.
“This is very nice,” Flaxie murmured, as if it needed saying. “You know, I haven’t done it out of doors since I was fourteen, in Louisiana. My cousin was the same age and we did it in a meadow under a tree. You don’t mind me telling you that?”
“Not a bit,” I said honestly. “Your cousin was a lucky boy. To be so young and have such a lovely girl.”
“I am a good fuck, don’t you think?”
“None better. I wish we had a wagon of our own. We could fuck all the way to California.”
“The jolting of the wagon would probably make it better,” Flaxie said. “We’ll be together as often as we can, but we have to be careful.”
“Yes. Claggett is a big problem.”
“Claggett isn’t the only problem, but I don’t want to talk about that. It would spoil what we have.”
With everything drained out of us, we lay in each other’s arms and slept for a while.
Chapter Five
I don’t know how long she had been gone when I woke up. But I didn’t feel or hear a thing until that razor-sharp knife nicked my throat. It was the bourbon plus my sweet fucking with Flaxie that had put me out. Along with cold steel and a warm trickle of blood, there was the strong, soap smell of Maggie O’Hara. Maybe the time in jail had made her fussy about staying clean; I had noticed how nice she smelled the first time we met.
There was nothing I could do about that knife; with her kind of background, she’d know how to use it. Still fogged with bourbon and pleasantly worn out from Flaxie, I preferred t
o think it was all a mistake. I didn’t get the smallest chance to say that. The knife point drew a little more blood. One thrust or slash and I’d be finished.
“Don’t talk, just listen,” Maggie warned me.
It smelled now like she’d been into the bourbon bottle like the rest of us. Looked like I had fallen in with a bunch of hard-drinking women.
“You don’t have to nod or do anything,” Maggie said. “What I’m going to tell you will not be repeated.”
Just like the snake oil salesmen say. Except that Maggie O’Hara wasn’t selling anything but instant death. I didn’t want to buy that, so I held still.
“Stay away from Flaxie, and that means tonight and every night and forever,” Maggie said, holding the knife where it was.
If she meant to kill me for sure, I would have tried to take it away from her. The chances of doing that weren’t good, though, no matter how desperate I was. I didn’t know how much bourbon she had taken aboard. I guessed a lot. The knife was one of those things with the blade edged on both sides. It came to a needle point at the end, and it wasn’t made for anything other than killing. Some tough women carry razors, but this one had a man-killing knife. For sure, she was good and mad.
“Flaxie belongs to me,” she said, this beautiful tough girl who had done time in one of the toughest prisons in the world. “Touch her again, and I’ll kill you. One way or another, I’ll kill you. I killed one man, so killing another won’t be any harder. If I can’t use a knife or a gun, I’ll poison you. I’ll grind up glass so fine you’ll never feel it in your grits. You hear me, shit-kicker?”
At least I was breathing through my mouth and not through a hole in my throat. She held the knife back about a quarter of an inch. “I didn’t know she belonged to you,” I said truthfully, my mind flashing back to all that hugging and snuggling when they took sides during the argument earlier in the night.
I had run into a few women like Maggie in my time. Some liked to enjoy sex with women like it was the most natural thing in the world. Others learned it along the way. Maybe the time in jail had done it to Maggie; or could be it had been the year working in the parlor house. I began to get the feeling that the killing of the man with the champagne bottle had been no accident, after all. But it wasn’t the time or the place to ask questions.
“I’d kill you right now, if we didn’t need you,” she said. “If it wasn’t for that, you’d be dead. Who’d know, who’d care?”
“I’d care,” I said.
“You wouldn’t know,” she said. “But we do need you, so I’ll let you live. Look at Flaxie again, though, and you’re a dead man, whether we need you or not. I had her coming along just fine, and you had to show up. You and your smooth talk, filling that poor kid’s head with lies. She’s still too young to know what men are like. But she’ll learn. You feed that kid one more drink, and I’ll dig your grave. That’s a promise, shit-kicker.”
I made a feeble effort to defend myself. “Flaxie brought the bottle,” I said.
I felt the prick of the knife again. “That’s right,” Maggie said in a deadly whisper. “Put the blame on her. I’ll bet you cooked up the whole thing with her. Got her to get me drunk so I’d be sleeping sound when you sneak off to fuck with her. I thought there was something funny when she suggested that we have a few drinks. I thought it was because she was so happy we were finally heading West. Just the two of us out there, making a new life. Answer me, bastard!”
“I didn’t know. Honest Injun, I didn’t,” I said, not sure that a sudden surge of anger wouldn’t drive that knife into my throat. Once again I wondered if I could grab the knife before she drove it all the way to the hilt.
But in spite of the knife, I felt a sudden longing for her. Call that crazy, if you like. They say a man shoots his wad when he’s hanged; maybe what I felt for her then was something close to that.
“You know it now,” Maggie said. “Flaxie is mine, every soft inch of her belongs to me. Those last few months in Sing Sing, I used to dream about a girl like Flaxie. There were plenty of cunts there and I’m human ... but it was always someone like Flaxie I dreamed about. I’m telling you all this so you know I mean it about killing you. Crazy! I even knew what she looked like. I knew her so well I drew a picture of her on the wall of my cell. The bastards made me wash it off, but they couldn’t wash it out of my mind. I could pleasure myself with just her picture in my mind. When it looked like I’d never get out, I made a knife from a piece of hoop iron and planned to finger myself one last time and then put the knife through my heart. But I got out the night I was going to do it.”
The bourbon was wearing off. There was a note of sadness in her voice. “She’s all I’ve got. If I don’t have her, I don’t have anything. You couldn’t understand feeling like that about a woman.”
I didn’t know what to say. Any answer might be the wrong answer.
“’Course you couldn’t,” Maggie answered for me. “All men see women as something soft with a furry hole in the crotch.” Anger replaced the sadness in her voice. “I don’t care what you do to the rest of these cunts in the train. Fuck yourself blind, for all I care. Just leave my girl alone. It’ll be the death of you, if you don’t. Keep your distance, and we’ll manage to get along fine.”
Maggie stood up. I reached for my gun and found it wasn’t there. She pointed to where it lay glinting dully in the moonlight. “I emptied the shells, too,” she said. “Want to make a try for it?”
I didn’t. Then she surprised me by reaching into the pocket of her skirt and producing a half-full bottle of bourbon. “That’s what’s left of the whiskey Flaxie fed me. It’s all yours, you son-of-a-bitch. Funny, isn’t it? Me giving you something instead of taking something away.”
I figured the whiskey wasn’t poisoned, so I uncorked the bottle and took a deep swallow. If I didn’t watch myself, I was going to turn into a drunkard, all these ladies feeding me whiskey. But I sure as hell needed that drink.
I looked up at her. “What did you come to take away?” I asked.
“Your cock!” she answered.
I finished what was in the bottle and went back to sleep. Yes sir, I would have been better off in Kansas.
No other visitors came to call during the night.
In the morning only the nick in my throat remained to prove that the whole thing hadn’t been a nightmare. First light was breaking over the wagon train, and people were stirring, eager to start, but apprehensive about what lay ahead of them. I can hardly be called the rooted, home-building type, yet the sight of a wagon train about to move always stirs my blood. Others had crossed the plains and the mountains, but no crossing is ever the same.
At first there was some fog. But it soon blew away and the sky became vast and blue and cloudless. On this first morning of the great journey there was no dawdling over breakfast. A few miles away the town of Independence was white in the morning sun. I noticed that some of the women looked at it in a lingering way, and for some their courage faltered as they thought of the life they were leaving forever.
I hitched the bandanna higher around my throat to hide the small knife wound. I wasn’t likely to forget the woman who had put it there. There had to be some sort of reckoning with Maggie O’Hara. I didn’t know when or where it would come. Nonetheless, there would be trouble with her, if not for me, then for someone else. At that moment, I had no idea what I was going to do about her.
After the morning meal was over and the cook fires covered with dirt, we waited for Reverend Claggett’s command to move out. Surprisingly, he hadn’t done that much preaching, as if he had worn himself out with his exhortations of the night before. Me, I wanted to be gone as quickly as possible, because once on the trail, there would be plenty of work to do. I was more concerned about the water barrels than anything else. Winter was over, and the warm spring wind would blow the Plains bone dry. At the moment there was plenty of meat, but salted meat sours in the stomach before long. Part of my job was to put fresh meat in
the cook pot or in the skillet.
Contrary to what some people thought, we weren’t about to journey into the garden of plenty. Far out on the Plains the buffalo hunters had thinned out the herds, taking only the hides, leaving the meat to rot. The Indians often slaughtered more than they needed, to keep the encroaching whites and enemy tribes hungry. People still talked of wild turkeys, but it had been years since I’d seen one. So I would have to hunt what I could find; the ladies would eat it and like it, or go hungry.
Culligan climbed down from his wagon with Iversen behind him. The Irishman looked no angrier than usual, which meant that his hate was for the world and for no one particular person. I had seen him checking the wagon wheels the day before. Now, sullen or not, he walked the length of the train doing it again. He was a man you couldn’t like but could respect. I had no way of knowing how good a fighting man he was; time would tell that, too, for there is no crossing of the Plains without its share of fights. Looking at his bristly red face with its bull-calf brow and pugnacious jaw, I guessed Culligan wouldn’t back down when the going got tough. Thomas Iversen, though, was an unanswered question. A man good at some things is no good at others. I think he saw himself as one hell of a fine fellow. Maybe he was, in some ways; the long journey would decide his merit.
What none of them were counting on was the distance they had yet to travel. I’d been across and it was still hard to say what it was like. It often feels as if the Plains have no end. There seems to be no boundary to the country out there, no place where you can say for sure it will stop. And then, for much of the crossing, there is the sameness to be faced day after day. Of course, there are landmarks, but mostly there is monotony. In the end, it gets so you welcome any change at all, anything that stands out above the sea of grass. Maps don’t seem to mean anything; distance loses meaning. You travel for days and nothing changes.
As I watched the preacher walk back from the head of the train, I wondered if any of them, other than Culligan, knew what they were in for. Their greatest enemy would be loneliness, which may not sound right with so many people traveling together. Yet it’s true: the endless journey forces people in upon themselves. They wonder what they’re doing, where they are, and what’s going to happen to them. Far from home, the poverty or misery of home begins to seem not so bad after all.