Stark thought a lot of things on that warm night. He had to keep his mind occupied so that he wouldn’t think too much about the fact that his hands were filled with Elaine Parker’s bare tits and that his dick was way up her pussy and she was riding him as if she were galloping toward the finish line in the Kentucky Derby and he was fucking the girl he loved, who just happened to be the head cheerleader, and he was fucking her like there was no tomorrow, which in fact there might not be, but Stark didn’t want to think about that, either, so he looked at the moon and thought about how far you could hit a baseball on it, and then she cried out and he was coming, too, wrapping his arms around her and holding her so tightly, so close, moving so deeply inside her it seemed they were no longer two organisms but one instead.
It was the best feeling John Howard Stark had experienced in a little more than eighteen years of life.
Elaine gave a last little shudder as her orgasm faded. Still holding her tightly to him, Stark lay back on the thick pile of blankets in the back of the pickup and cuddled her on his chest. The clean scent of her thick blond hair filled his nostrils. He reached up with one hand and stroked it softly.
Both of them were breathless. Elaine’s bare breasts were flattened against his chest now. He felt the rapid flutter of her heart.
She had unbuttoned her blouse and somehow gotten her bra off without removing the blouse. That seemed a little like magic to Stark. He’d wanted to say “Shazam!” when he saw her do it the first time, but she would have thought he was crazy. Anyway, he was too impressed by those firm globes of flesh with their large brown nipples to be thinking about comic book wizards or Gomer Pyle, either one.
They had been dating for eight months, since not long after senior year started, and Stark had seen her breasts plenty of times before. She had let him fondle them through her clothes on their fifth date and he’d been under her bra after a few more dates. She’d started that trick with taking the bra off after yet a few more dates. It was a natural progression. As the months passed they did a little more and a little more, and he felt the smooth cotton of her panties and then a few weeks later he slipped a finger under the edge of them and for the first time touched the mysterious wet heat that constantly occupied the thoughts of John Howard Stark and most other teenage boys on the planet.
Elaine was a more than willing participant. It wasn’t long before she was grabbing his hand and pulling it between her legs so that he could slip a finger or two inside her as they sat in his pickup under the stars after their dates. Nor was Stark the only one doing the caressing. After a little initial hesitation, Elaine grew quite bold about freeing his penis from the confining blue jeans he wore and stroking it until he groaned and spent in her soft palm. She even leaned over and took it in her mouth a few times, to Stark’s amazement. He didn’t think nice girls were supposed to do that, or even know that such a thing was possible, and he had a few bad moments when he wondered if she was really a whore, even though he had known her for years and years and had never heard anything remotely like that said about her. She was awkward enough at it, though, that he realized she was just as new to all this as he was, and when he finally, delicately, broached the subject, she had just smiled that shy, pretty smile of hers and said, “I thought you might like it, John Howard.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ve heard that boys like it a lot.”
Stark could have laughed and hugged her and said that oh yeah, did they! but instead he kissed her, softly and tenderly, and he knew that he was in love with this girl.
It hadn’t all been about sex, of course. They had done a lot of other things. It took a while for new movies to reach Del Rio, but eventually they saw The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde like everybody else. They went out to dinner and they crossed to Acuna and wandered around the big public market there, where Stark bought turquoise and hammered silver jewelry for Elaine and she bought him a big, goofy-looking sombrero that he wore anyway, and wore proudly because she got it for him. They saw each other at football, basketball, and baseball games, since Stark was a three-letter man and Elaine was, after all, the head cheerleader. They spent quite a few evenings at her house, helping each other with their homework or just watching TV. Elaine was a Methodist and Stark a Baptist, but somehow they managed to span the vast denominational differences between Sprinklers and Dunkers and often went to church together. Stark held her hand as they sat side by side on one of the hard pews, and he felt like the worst kind of hypocrite because there they were in church on Sunday morning when on Saturday night they’d been in his pickup masturbating each other for all they were worth. But they couldn’t help it, and Stark could only hope that the Almighty was understanding about the fierce passions that burned within them. There was an old joke about how God must love poor people because he made so many of ’em. Stark fervently hoped the same thing was true when it came to horny teenagers.
But there was never any doubt in Stark’s mind that he loved Elaine and she loved him. Earlier tonight, when she had whispered, “I want to do it. I want to go all the way with you, John Howard,” he had nodded and asked her only if she was sure. She was.
So here they were, and although people said that the first time was sometimes awkward and even unsatisfying, with them it had been wonderful, glorious, better even than Stark had dreamed it would be . . . and he had dreamed about it plenty of times!
The only problem was, the timing wasn’t all that good since he was leaving soon and didn’t even know if he would ever see her again once he was gone.
Elaine lifted her head from his chest and reached up to kiss him. Her lips tasted as sweet as ever. She smiled down at him, and he wondered, as he often did, how she could look so wholesome and clean and innocent and yet be so damned sexy at the same time. She was close to the perfect woman. No, not close to it, he corrected himself. She was the perfect woman. Perfect for him, anyway.
So why was he even thinking about leaving her?
Honor. Duty. Love of country.
But those were just words, a part of him insisted. Words that didn’t mean anything, especially when they were contrasted with the soft, warm, sleek reality of the young woman he held in his hands. What they had between them was the only thing that really mattered.
If he truly believed that, it would sure make things simpler, Stark thought. But he knew that the words did mean something. They were part of him, road signs on the map of his heart and soul, his conscience. He couldn’t turn his back on them, no matter how much it was going to hurt when he left her.
“Elaine,” he said as she looked down at him, “I’m joining the marines.”
At first she didn’t comprehend what he was telling her. He could tell that by the way she continued to smile. But then the smile began to go away, and a line appeared between her perfectly arched eyebrows, a line that turned into a frown.
“What?” she said as if she hadn’t quite heard him.
“I’m joining the marines,” he repeated. “I’m going next week to sign the enlistment papers.”
“The . . . marines? But . . . you can’t. You’re not—”
She stopped short, and he knew she had been about to say that he wasn’t old enough. He was, though. His eighteenth birthday had been two weeks earlier. In the past they had discussed what they would do if he was drafted, but no mention had been made of him enlisting voluntarily.
“I know this is a lousy time to bring it up—” he began.
“Yes,” she broke in. “Yes, it is! My God, John Howard, we just . . . we just made love!” Tears welled from her eyes and began to roll down her cheeks. A couple of them fell on his face.
Stark tried again. “That isn’t fair—”
“No, what isn’t fair is that I love you, and you’re talking about going away!” She pushed herself up into a sitting position beside him and turned her head away from him.
Stark sat up, too, and tried to touch her shoulder, but she flinched away. Without putting her bra on, she started buttoning her shirt
.
“Well,” Stark said, “that’s not really what I expected of you.”
She turned sharply toward him. “What you expected of me? Don’t you dare act like I’m the one being unreasonable here, John Howard Stark! We talked about the war. We said if you were drafted, you’d have to go, no matter how much we’d hate being apart. You’re no . . . no draft dodger, and I wouldn’t love you if you were a coward! But to enlist . . . to put yourself in harm’s way like that on purpose . . . I just don’t understand it.”
In harm’s way . . . They had seen the movie of that title not long before. Stark never missed a John Wayne movie. That picture had been about a different war than the one now being fought in Southeast Asia, but still it had vividly demonstrated the bloody human toll that was paid whenever men took up arms against each other.
Stark said, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot—”
“Not enough!”
He pushed on doggedly. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and the reasons I could never dodge the draft are the same reasons I have to enlist. I love my country. We’re trying to stop the spread of communism. That’s important, Elaine.”
“You’re not convinced we’re doing the right thing in Vietnam. You’ve said so yourself, John Howard.”
“I’m not convinced we’re fighting the war the right way. The politicians are too mixed up in it, and it seems like they don’t even care whether we win or not. And those protesters!” A bitter anger came into his voice. “It’s like they want us to lose! Their own country! Good Lord, what can they be thinking? Don’t they know that the leaders in Hanoi and Peking and Moscow just love it when they see news footage of all the marching in the streets and waving signs? Why would they want to reach any kind of settlement with us when they know we’ve got this cancer growing inside us? They know that eventually the protesters and the politicians will win the war for them!”
Elaine looked at him coolly and asked, “So why are you so determined to throw your life away in what you think is a lost cause?”
He stared at her for a long moment, blinked a couple of times, and said, “Sometimes lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.”
She hauled off and hit him, punched him hard in the chest. “Damn you!” she cried. “Don’t you go quoting Jimmy Stewart to me! This isn’t Mr. Smith Goes to Washington! It’s Mr. Stark Goes to Saigon!”
Then she gave a little hiccupping sound that was half sob and half laugh, and she slumped forward into Stark’s embrace and continued crying and laughing at the same time, and he held her and patted her back and knew exactly how she felt because he recognized the ludicrous tragedy of the situation, too. But that didn’t change anything. He loved this young woman and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He loved his country and had to do right by it. Those two emotions were at odds, and there was no way to reconcile them.
“Look, there’s no guarantee I’ll be sent to Vietnam,” he said. “I may wind up staying stateside for my whole hitch. Remember when we saw George Gobel on The Tonight Show and he was telling Johnny Carson about how he spent World War Two stationed in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah. He said . . .” Elaine straightened and wiped away some tears. “He said not one Japanese airplane ever made it past Tulsa.”
“Maybe it’ll be the same way with me.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“Why not? There’s no way of knowing.”
She reached up and touched his face lightly with her fingertips. “You’re determined to do this?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Then you have to promise me something.”
“Anything,” Stark said.
“Promise me that you’ll come back alive and whole and that you’ll marry me and we’ll have a house full of children and live a long and happy life together.”
“You’re proposing to me?”
“No,” she said as if she were trying to explain something simple to a particularly backward child. “You’ll do that when you get back. Now, are you going to promise me or not?”
“I promise,” Stark whispered.
“There’s one more thing. . . .”
“Name it.”
“You said you go to sign the papers next week?”
“That’s right, and it’ll be another week or so after that before I report for duty.”
“Then we have about two weeks. Can you make love to me a hundred times between now and then?”
Stark felt a smile on his face. “I can try.”
He had tried, too. Done his damnedest, in fact. But there just wasn’t time. They managed to do it only sixty-two more times before he went off to that crazy little war.
He had wondered briefly at the time if she was trying to get pregnant, so that if he did wind up in Vietnam and was killed over there, she would have at least a part of him still with her in the form of a child. He never asked her if that had been her goal or not. But she wasn’t pregnant when he left Del Rio. That part of it had to wait until he came back, alive and whole as promised, and began to fulfill the rest of his pledge to her. They were married, and while two sons didn’t exactly constitute a house full of children, they were so loud and rambunctious and overflowing with life that sometimes they seemed like a houseful all by themselves. They were the only children John Howard and Elaine were blessed with, and it was fine. The long happy life together that she had demanded and that he had promised her had come about, the years flowing by, not by any means without bumps in the road, the small trials and tragedies that came to any family, luckily more than offset by the successes and the proud moments and most of all the love that was still there between them, strong and steady. Stark still loved Elaine as much as he ever had, the abiding love that was composed of friendship, trust, years of companionship and laughter and tears; and passion, oh yes, the passion was still there, and it flowed from Stark into her and from her back to him as they made love in the shower with the hot water pounding down on them and streaming over their bodies.
Funny thing. He didn’t hurt at all anymore.
Fourteen
Newton Stark was up early, well before the sun, as usual. He had his own apartment in the bunkhouse with a little kitchen. While he was waiting for his coffee to brew he sat at the table and smoked the first cigarette of what would be two packs of filterless Camels before the day was over. He’d been smoking them for over sixty-five years and figured it was too late to quit now. Since he was well on the shady side of eighty, it appeared that they hadn’t harmed him too much. Nor had the quart of bourbon he drank every day, starting with a healthy slug in his coffee. Folks on the television liked to pontificate about all the things that were bad for you. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, and you’ll live longer. Stay out of the sun or you’ll get skin cancer. Avoid red meat and fatty food and save your heart. Newt had been smoking and drinking and working outdoors for damn near seven decades, and he loved a thick steak burned black on the outside and still bleeding in the center, and he was still as spry as ever. Well, almost.
He was damned if he was gonna be put out to pasture. Give him a good mount, especially that ol’ Biscuit horse of his, and he could still chouse cows out of the brush as well as anybody. Better’n most of the kids who passed for ranch hands these days, in fact. He was sure glad that John Howard was running things here on the ranch. The thought of doing a bunch of book work and dealing with cattle buyers and feed dealers and county agents and such-like just made shivers go through Newt’s body. He wasn’t made for that. He was made for riding the range, taking care of the stock in blistering heat and bone-numbing cold, working from can to can’t, being the last to quit a chore and the first to buy the beer, as that LeDoux boy sang about in one of his songs. Fella was one of the few decent country-and-western singers left. The rest were a bunch o’ sissified Nashville hat acts who’d probably never stepped in a pile o’ cow shit in their whole damned lives. Newt took a deep drag on the Camel between his lips and got up to check the cof
fee.
Sometimes, when he was out riding a few miles north of the ranch house near a narrow draw that fed into the Devil’s River, he would nudge ol’ Biscuit into a gallop and race across the mostly flat landscape toward that draw. The first time he’d done that when Chaco was with him, the Mexican had thought he’d lost his mind and had galloped after him, yelling for him to stop. Newt never drew rein, though. He just reached up and jammed his high-crowned hat down tighter on his head so that it wouldn’t blow off and let out a high-pitched cackle of laughter as he and Biscuit swept toward the draw, never slackening their pace.
Then at the last moment Biscuit would bunch his muscles and gather himself and launch out into the open air above that draw, sailing clear over it to land on the other side, his hooves throwing up a cloud of dust and grit. Newt was an old bachelor, but he had known women in his life, and that instant when he and Biscuit were suspended there, seemingly almost weightless, well, that was almost as good as Newt remembered sex being. As close as he was ever gonna come to it again, that was for damned sure.
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