Salvation

by Jeff Mann

  “You’ll break him over your knee, just as you would have George, given the chance. This Yank was pretty big-built, but knowing you, yes, you’d leave him a whimpering wreck, just as you did that big Brutus back in Eagle Rock. For my part,” I add, shaking my head, “I hope we never run into them again. And watch your language. Mrs. Pendleton might toss us out if she hears you cussing so fierce. Speaking of the sweet lodging luck has found for us,” I say, gesturing at a clock on the mantelpiece, “it’s only eight, but…”

  “But it’s time you and I were heading upstairs?” Drew’s foot nudges mine.

  “Yes indeed.”

  We rise, pulling on our jackets and caps. By the hearth, Drew empties his pipe, while I flip my cigar butt into the coals. “Good night, valiance!” says a lady seated near the bar. At the door, we turn, exchange smiles and nods with our room of admirers, then step into the chilly entrance hall and climb the stairs, ready for a soft bed and the largesse of each other’s nakedness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ours is a corner room, one of four located in the front of the building on the third floor. To the right are a pot-bellied coal stove, its flue penetrating the outer wall, and, nearer the entrance, an open closet, in which our hosts’ son has set our blanket rolls, muskets, and other impedimenta. To the left, flush with the inner wall, is the bed, its footboard facing the door, its headboard set against the far wall. Directly ahead, a gas lamp flickers on a low dresser. Above that dresser is a window. When I part the curtains, through the frost-painted glass I can see flurries gusting about in the dark street below.

  Drew locks the door, then opens his arms. I fall into them, pressing my face against his breast. We stand there, thankfully soaking in the silence, the sense of safety, and the warmth. Then each of us uses the chamber pot, takes advantage of the water pitcher and bowl on the washstand, and wordlessly strips. Drew, fetching isinglass and bandages from my haversack, tenderly bandages my cheek and my struggle-bloodied wrists. Then I take off my spectacles and snuff the lamp’s flame, and we climb into the high, narrow bed, pulling the coverings to our chins. The sheets are soft, the blankets heavy and plentiful. Everything smells clean, wonderfully free of the damp, dirty odors of unwashed, long-used army blankets we’re both accustomed to.

  Drew lies on his back; I curl on my side, snuggling against him. Wind batters the walls; bars of red light fall from the stove’s grate across the carpeted floor, faintly illumining the room.

  “Oh, this is heaven,” I groan.

  “Lord, yes. And I got you naked at last,” Drew mutters with weary triumph. “But I’m too tired to do anything about it.”

  “Don’t you fret about that. I’m equally bone-tired. If everything goes the way I have planned, we’ll have many a naked night together in future.” I ruffle the hair on his belly and finger his navel. “After last night’s terrors, we both need sleep badly, I know. Lovemaking we’ll get to another time. Besides,” I say, surveying the room in the dim fire-glow, “those pine-board walls look thin. I think I can hear someone snoring in the next room.”

  “So you’re wanting to spare them the carnal cries of unnatural sodomites?” Drew snickers, stroking my beard. “The loathsome groans of one sinner using another in an indecent manner?”

  “You’ve got down the preachers’ diction right well. Devout Mrs. Pendleton downstairs, gracious hostess that she is, probably hears that sort of talk in church…if her minister ever brings such a distasteful topic up. Most folks never think of us, our…kind. Most folks don’t even know we exist.”

  “That’s probably a real good thing, that ignorance. We’re both lucky to have escaped such pious influence. That poisonous kind of religion.” Drew shivers. “Otherwise…”

  I kiss a big nipple, running my fingers through the fur surrounding it. “Otherwise, yes, we’d be convinced our desire for each other makes us immoral monsters. Rampant sinners. Et cetera. ‘Hell-bound,’ that’s the phrase George was fond of. God, think of the poor bastards out there—there must be many of them—who desire other men the way we do but who believe they’re damned to hell for those desires. Terrible. I think that was why George hated you so. Because he thought you were beautiful.” I knead the thick muscles of Drew’s chest and nuzzle his armpit. “As I do. Because he envied and admired your body’s power. As I do. Because he wanted you the way I do, and he hated himself for wanting you. I told him as much in a tavern in Buchanan, the morning of the day we escaped. It enraged him. I think that’s why he searched my tent, found the supplies I was stealing, and alerted Sarge.”

  “I think you’re right, Ian. About why George was so cruel to me. I dreamed about him the other night. In the woodshed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He had me tied to a tree. He was beating and cutting me. Then he…prepared to castrate me. That’s when I woke. He scared me so badly, there in camp, so many times, that I can’t seem to get him out of my head. It’s as if he’s following us. As if I can’t escape him.”

  “Yes, I feel the same about my uncle, though that’s less about fear than guilt. George was a miserable bastard indeed. Yet, despite all he did to make us suffer, and despite how passionately I hated him, in retrospect I almost pity him. It’s as if his religion made his heart a hell. All that supposed piety, yet he was one of the most brutal men I’ve ever known. I’ve read enough of the Bible to know what Christ would have thought of him.”

  My hand moves to Drew’s beard now, playing with the soft density of it. “Here’s the burning bush,” I sigh, kissing his chin. “Burning flames of gold. Flames I can stroke and adore without being burnt. Exodus… Thanks to my parents, I’ve read the Bible often and know it tolerably well, but my Aunt Alicia and her Cherokee beliefs…she gave me a different angle of vision, I suppose. She surely helped spare me from many a guilt-spawning illusion that might have made me hate myself and twisted me into a soul-maimed cripple like George. How did you—? Why are you so free of shame?”

  “Ah, my mother grew up in the Church of the Brethren—German ancestry, y’know—but my father was a heretic, as Ma used to joke, from way back. Like your family, we all read the Bible often, sometimes all together by the fire, during long winter evenings, but Father, he left the church in his youth, and my mother did soon after they married, which caused quite an uproar in the community. Father used to say religion was meant to be a comfort, to help folks through the hard times life brings, but instead it made most people not compassionate but mean.”

  Drew yawns, tugs the blankets higher, and hugs me closer. “Lord, this bed feels good. Well, to continue, Father’s father was devout…and mean as a rattlesnake. The two of ’em—my father and his father—they didn’t have much to say to each other all through my childhood, and when they did, they were always arguing about questions of faith, and then Granddaddy died when I was eleven, and my father never—never!—speaks of him. So that’s where religion, or quarreling about it, got my family. By the time I was wrestling with Rob, that big fellow I told you about before, and kissing on him in the barn, I was well clean of any sense of a judgmental God. Being mastered by Rob in a wrestling match—it reminded me of Jacob wrestling with the angel—and enjoying his mastery—enjoying it so much my member ached—well, I know that some might find that desire, that will to surrender, womanly or weak, but…”

  “It’s manly, and you know it. You’re so manly, Drew, so valiant and so strong. So everything you do, from conquering to submitting, is manly too.”

  “Yeah? Well, submitting to you…carnally…makes me feel like more of a man than anything I’ve ever done.” Drew reaches for my exhaustion-flaccid sex and fondles it.

  “I had problems myself, for a while, thinking I was some sort of monster,” I admit, fondling his soft cock in turn. “Especially when my desire for men was complicated by…”

  “The pleasure you take in seeing a big guy bound up and suffering?” Drew curls his thumb and forefinger about the base of my cockhead and squeezes.

&nbs
p; “Yes. If I weren’t so tired…if these walls weren’t so thin…I’d…”

  “It’s a good ways till morning, little man,” Drew whispers, giving my sex another squeeze before releasing it. “I ain’t going nowhere. And you got practiced methods to keep me quiet, after all our furtive nights together in your tent, back in your Rebel camp. I can think of several sweet ways you might wake me in the heart of this Craig County dark.” Drew rolls onto his side and curls up, taking his customary position, with his wide back pressed against my bare chest.

  “Sounds like a challenge to me,” I say, wrapping an arm around him and nestling closer.

  Drew laughs softly. “Yep. Yes, sir. And one last thing about religion…”

  “Yes?” I nuzzle his thick hair, cherishing its scent.

  “Most things Christ says make sense. I don’t think much of the Old Testament…but the New…” My boy sounds so tired he’s liable to fall asleep mid-sentence. “Christ, didn’t he say, ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love’? So God’s right here with us, isn’t He? Between us, inside us, inside the way…we love each other.”

  “Yes, Yank. Yes. There’s a faith that’s credible indeed.” I kiss a bandaged shoulder blade. Drew grips my hand and falls quiet. Soon, he’s snoring softly; in another second, I too fall into one of life’s most precious pleasures: deep sleep in a soft bed after long days of travel and travail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Drew’s movement wakes me as he slips out of bed. A hard stream of piss sounds in the chamber pot. Coal’s chucked into the stove and stirred around. The grate’s red light waxes, diluting the dark. The bed frame creaks and the mattress dips as my big Yank clambers back beneath the blankets. I rub my loins against him, growing half-hard, and cup his balls before, too sleepy to continue, I close my eyes.

  The window’s still black with mountain night when I wake again. It’s my turn to rise and noisily relieve my bladder in the chamber pot, my turn to add coal to the stove. Drew slumbers on. Other sleepers through the thin walls snore away. Otherwise, the building is utterly silent.

  I stand by the bed, studying my lover in the dim light of the coal fire. His long golden hair veils his face; his bruised lips are parted. One muscular arm is thrown over his head, exposing a thick patch of armpit hair; the blankets have slipped down, revealing his left pectoral and a big pink nipple. Love swells my heart; desire swells my sex. “I can think of several sweet ways you might wake me,” Drew said last night before we both collapsed. Yes indeed. Grinning, I head for the closet and rummage through my haversack, fetching what I need.

  Drew’s so deep in sleep that he doesn’t wake as I pull his arms before him and loosely bind his wrists together, then raise his arms above his head and fasten his hands to the bed frame. He snores on as I unknot the bandana around his neck. It’s when I stuff the balled-up rag in his mouth that his blue eyes flicker open; it’s when I secure the cloth in place with a few lengths of rope threaded between his teeth that a big grin spreads across his handsome face.

  Bending over him, I kiss him on the nose. “You just keep quiet, Yank. Looks like you’re my prisoner again,” I whisper.

  Drew gives me a momentary and entirely titillating show of creasing his forehead with mock-surprise and fighting his bonds before falling still and winking at me.

  “Oh, you know exactly how to madden me, don’t you, boy? You going to do as you’re told?”

  He nods. Beneath the blanket his crotch is swelling, making a miniature army tent. When I rub it, he thrusts against my hand.

  “On your belly.”

  Drew rolls over.

  “Up on your elbows and knees.”

  Drew obeys. His head’s down, his buttocks raised. The submission of his posture makes my cock so hard it hurts. I slip off the bed, find a cloth in a drawer of the washstand, soap and rinse his ass-cleft, then gently dry him off.

  “There you go. Nice and clean. All ready for me.” Climbing back onto the bed, I brush my beard across his ass-cheeks.

  Drew whimpers as I kneel behind him. “Uhh?” His gagged grunt rises with inquisitive inflection.

  “No, big man. You know how badly I want to ride you, but the walls are much too thin here. Just relax. I know what I’m doing.”

  Spreading a palm over each butt-cheek, I knead them, tugging tenderly at the fine hair coating them, then the lush fuzz in the cleft between. Bending, I kiss each cheek before running my tongue over first one and then the other. Now I glide my tongue along the butt-cleft from bottom to top. When my tongue flickers over his tiny pink hole, he jolts and groans.

  “Quiet, boy,” I urge. “You keep quiet, or else I shan’t continue. And lie still, else the creaking of the bed frame will rouse folks.”

  Drew nods. I continue my loving ministrations, lapping his fuzzy crack, spreading his cheeks wider, finally giving over to my desire completely, burying my face between his buttocks, the hair there brushing my nose and lips, my tongue burrowing into him. I pull at his crevice-fur with my teeth, then push my tongue-tip in again, the musky, soapy smell filling my nose. When I reach beneath him, I find his cock pulsing and stiff, the tip dripping love’s juice. Against his gag, he’s emitting muted whimpers and sobs, tiny sounds of rapture and surrender that make my chest fain to burst.

  Painfully aware of the proximity of other patrons in this thin-walled inn, I indulge in my adoration of his ass for only another minute or so before shifting position. Lying on my back between his legs, I slip my head beneath his loins, grip his hips, and take his great cock into my mouth. He shudders, gives a long exhalation, followed by one sharp sob, and fucks my face with pumping eagerness. The bed’s creaking worries me—always, with every expression of our love, the pressing need for concealment—but I tighten my lips nonetheless, run my tongue along his shaft, and squeeze his balls. He impales my throat, his hips bucking against my jaw, a rapt rhythm that soon crests as he spends, flooding my mouth with the rich taste of him, and then dwindles as he lapses into drowsy contentment. I hold his sap in my mouth for a good minute, relishing its taste, before swallowing.

  By the time I’ve gathered my ardor-scattered wits—my bare ass chilly and goose-pimpled now, despite the stove—and climbed back beneath the blankets, Drew, despite his bound hands and well-stuffed mouth, is asleep again. No one seems to have been disturbed by our brief but energetic telltale bed-creaking, for the building’s still swathed in silence.

  I lie back, for long, sweet minutes studying my burly companion—his tousled hair, the rope tied between his lips, his bushy blond beard, his bound wrists, his pale biceps, the honey hair upon his breast. Beautiful, beautiful man. Oh, every lover since time began has composed poems of praise, reverential litanies listing his beloved’s beauties. For a time, it’s my turn to be young and so passionately in love, and so fortunate to find that unlikely and eccentric love returned. One day, I’ll be nothing but a body under the sod, but this morning I am Ian Campbell, former soldier of the Confederate States of America, this chilly March morning in the year 1865, in a tiny hotel room in the tiny town of New Castle, Virginia, curled up beside Drew Conrad, former soldier of the United States of America, both of us determined to sleep as late as we can.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  What brings me to consciousness is a soft nuzzling. I open my eyes to find Drew straddling my hips beneath the blankets, his beard brushing my face. The window’s illumined with the faintest gray of dawn. About us, the building’s creaking in a hard wind that rattles the window and reverberates in the stove’s flue.

  “I got loose, Reb,” he says. “Now it’s my turn. Got to get me some of that thick Confederate seed.” He lavishes my lips with wet kisses, then bends to my chest, nibbling and lapping. His teeth on my nipples make me moan. “Quiet now,” he whispers, pressing a hand over my mouth. I nod, flooded with pleasure, sex stiffening fast. Pulling the blankets down to my thighs, he scoots lower, cupping my testicles. Then, his heavy hand releasing my mouth, he pushes the blankets
farther down, rolls me onto my side, my back against the wall, wraps his arms around my waist, rubs my cockhead with his bushy beard, and takes my swelling prick into his mouth.

  I lie back, gasping, gripping his shaggy golden head, as his lips tighten about me and begin a sweet sliding. The windowpane rattles; wind thunders in the flue. His carnal attentions grow faster, my pleasure is gathering, gathering, I clench my eyes shut, emit a suppressed gasp, bend to watch my flesh thrusting in and out of his red lips, his blond-bewhiskered mouth, and then there’s a metallic clicking I can’t place. Before I can recognize that minute sound as a key in a lock, the door has swung open and Mrs. Pendleton has stepped into the room.

  “Gentlemen!” she says. “Rouse yourselves! Those Yanks are—”

  Speech dies on her lips. Her mouth gapes open and her hands fly to her cheeks at the same moment that I jerk upright and Drew’s mouth releases me with a sloppy pop. Eyes wide, he jolts away from me so violently that he rolls off the side of the bed, his sheet-tangled feet taking the bedclothes with him. He hits the floor with a gasp and a thump.

  “Mrs. Pendleton! Ma’am, we—we just—” I exclaim, mind racing for plausible explanations and finding absolutely none. We’re two adult men, one sprawled on the bed, one sprawled on the floor, both stark naked, both with rampant erections. Our crime, as she surely sees it, couldn’t be clearer.

  With a pillow, I cover my rigid member. With a corner of a quilt, Drew hides his own prodigious erection, which is shrinking fast, but not fast enough.

  Scarlet spreads over her face. Her eyes widen further. One hand clenches the cross around her neck.

  “We, w-we’re so sorry, ma’am, w-we…” I make another attempt at speech, only to lapse into the habitual stutter that stress evokes in me.

  For a split-second there’s no sound but wind rattling the windowpanes. The scene could be a ludicrous excerpt from some obscene French farce, except for what I know, with nauseous certainty, is coming next.