The Big Broad Jump

by Troy Conway

  “Then don’t say No,” she challenged. “Where’s your hotel?”

  “The Betchnika. Are there others?”

  “A couple more. That’s no worse than the rest of them. Tell me. Are you really just a spy, Rod? Man like you. Bet you’re something real special.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Your flashlight is showing and I never met any man who stuck out the way you do.” Laughing, she jabbed me in the ribs playfully and went tripping ahead of me to wait at the door while I paid the bill. Grinning to myself, and a little red-faced, I coughed as I fumbled for some change. Didn’t I tell you I was hurting? Normally, I can exercise great control, but Christina Ketch had imposed a starvation diet on me and I was as loose as a goose and twice as ready for plucking.

  Katrina Walsky took my arm on the sidewalk and smiled up at me. That was another thing I liked about her. She was more like five feet five, instead of an Amazon. But there wasn’t a small thing on her. She exuded radiance and sex appeal by the yard.

  “You like to screw, Rod?” She said it softly, almost reverently. Again, my kind of girl.

  “You said it.”

  “That’s nice,” she murmured and snuggled up next to me, her head lolling against my shoulder as we strolled back to the hotel. I wondered how she would react to sight of Christina Ketch. That damn female brought out the worst in everybody.

  Still, even on such short notice, I would bet my money on Katrina Walsky.

  Katie.

  She had rock and she had roll.

  I intended to put both talents to great use.

  Christina Ketch was still slumbering peacefully in the bathroom when we slunk in. Some four hours had elapsed of the eight-hour grace period for the duration of the Mickey Finn. Nothing had changed. Ketch hadn’t moved a muscle. Her large breasts slumped placidly in the cold bathwater, bobbing like toy balloons. The sleepy downstairs clerk hadn’t batted an orb when I marched in with Katrina Walsky. Nor even heard Katie singing a soft and low rock and roll number. The girl was happy, for some reason other than being young, alive and full of beans. I guess she really liked me.

  But she didn’t like Christina Ketch.

  No sooner had she stopped to stare down at the sleeping Amazon in the tub than her face fell again, lost color and something fierce and guttural like the Czechoslovakian version of “Drop Dead!” shot out of her. Worse than that, though, and far more baffling, Katie’s face froze into a mask of hatred, she took a step forward and spit into the tub. A real oyster. I grabbed her by the arm.

  “Jealous, already? Hold on. She doesn’t mean a thing to me but bad news.”

  “You dummy!” Katie roared, whirling on me, jabbing me savagely in the chest with her forefinger. “That’s your partner? Her? Him! You poor sap—that’s Chris!”

  “Sure it is. Christina Ketch. She was sicked onto me by my employers as a fellow agent. She is no pal, though. What do you mean—him?”

  A great light went on in my brain.

  Katie was close to tears. “Rod, Rod. That’s the MVD executioner! The one who killed the old men. Don’t you see?”

  I stood there, baffled.

  Angrily, defiantly, Katie bent down and pulled the stopper out of the tub. The water gurgled and began to flow out Slowly, and then very rapidly. I blinked and all the time Katie was blurting out the news of the day. For a second, I just couldn’t think straight. It was all happening too fast.

  “Chris is a top executioner, Rod. A man, not a woman. Never mind those breasts. That’s silicone treatments. All padding. Same for the hips and rump. You’ll see when the water goes down. This is a pretty boy who can go drag now and then for reasons of espionage but she’s— he’s a man, all the same. Probably wants to be one more than anything. Look—for the love of Betchnika—see for yourself now!”

  I saw all right. The glory mound was there. All scraggly from the bath now and clinging. But it couldn’t hide the penis, no bigger than a peanut, nestling among the foliage. Chris, or Christina Ketch, or whoever the hell he or she was, just hadn’t had the rubles to go to Denmark for the Jorgenson special yet. Ouch. I felt sick. I sat down on the john seat and shook my head.

  Katie was breathing funny.

  “Look at him. He put the ropes around those poor old necks and sprung the traps. All by himself. What an awful person! He’s better off dead. We should kill joyfully—”

  She didn’t sound like a rollicking young woman who wanted to go to Hollywood anymore. She sounded like a dedicated executioner.

  “His name is Chris—?” It was all I could say just then. I was thinking about a lot of things.

  “Yes. Just Chris. Probably a short version of Chrisofsky or something. I don’t blame you for not knowing it was a man. Look at the face. It does belong on a woman. Those cheekbones, that mouth—”

  She rambled on, low-voiced and angry, and I was still thinking of all the things that had confused and hurt me the last three days.

  Like losing at Indian hand wrestling.

  Like getting pushed around in my own bed.

  Like not being wanted by Christina Ketch, who had the guts to dare sleep naked with me in the dark.

  Who didn’t mind my seeing her backside when she undressed. What a laugh. A man all the time.

  Also, some other vital things.

  Like the people of Betchnika running and hiding every time they saw us coming. They must have recognized him—her after a time and that was too much for them. There wasn’t anything they could do about Chris’s return to the scene of the crime but they didn’t have to like it. They hadn’t.

  It was easy to my male ego and pride to tell myself that Christina Ketch had Lesbian tendencies or was a cold fish—that part I could have believed—but to have her turn out a man was too much. I should have known. I should have guessed. Me, Rod Damon, who could recognize fifty different women in total darkness.

  Obviously there were still some avenues of sexology I still had to research. Chris couldn’t be that good an actor to totally disguise his masculine origin, no matter what the odds. I had slipped up somewhere. In my vanity, I hadn’t even sensed the basic difference in the genders that should have told me that Chris was a man and not a woman. That was an error totally inconsistent with my training and experience. I was ashamed of myself.

  I went into the bedroom, dug Chris’s wicker suitcase out of the closet and ransacked it. The feminine finery was a mockery now. But there was nothing in the suitcase to hook the man-woman in the tub up with MVD or anything subversive. There wasn’t even a weapon of any kind.

  Katie had followed me from the bathroom.

  “What are you going to do about Chris?”

  “The smartest thing I ever did was looking you up, Katie. I think our MVD character would have fooled me until he killed me.”

  “Well, he can’t do that now.” I had explained to her on the way to the hotel about the Mickey and the suspicions I had. “At least you suspected something. That says a lot.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If you’re in doubt, just remember this bastard killed twenty-five old men. Without batting an eye—same way you ordered your coffee in that ice cream parlor.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Also he’s the enemy. One of them. We don’t do something about it, we may never get another chance like this.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You reading me right, Rod?”

  “I am.” I smiled at her. “Where did you say that barn was?”

  She threw her arms around my neck, hugged me, planted a big kiss on my mouth and gyrated her hips to show me how real she was. She ground her chest into me. Her eyes misted.

  “Don’t worry about me. I'm female, all right. Too much so, maybe. But right now, you follow me. We’ll unload Chris and then come back here. Okay?”

  “Deal. I want to reaffirm my faith in womankind.”

  She nodded and skipped back into the bathroom, taking the measure of the sleeping killer in the tub. It was
still so hard to believe. Every woman should be built the way this executioner was!

  “God, he’s a big one! But we can manage somehow—”

  Darkness was coming on so that made things a lot easier. The sleepy clerk downstairs hardly saw us as we bundled Chris out to the Renault. Katie drove and I kept Chris under wraps in the back seat. I had redressed him-her, in the sloppy trenchcoat, and that was all. He-she was still sleeping off the drug. It was just as well. I’m not that cold-blooded even if the punishment was going to fit the crime.

  Katie was a wild, reckless driver, but somehow she managed to get us out to the famous barn in less than half an hour. It was somewhere in the forest beyond town. A great, rambling, empty, dilapidated structure where you could still hear the rats scurrying around. There was a wide, thick central beam that ran across the very heart of the place. We had lashed Chris’s hands behind him and found a rickety chair in the barn. It had probably served the same purpose before. I stood Chris on this while Katie looped a clothesline around his neck and slung it over the central beam. The ghosts of twenty-five old geezers might have been chuckling, the way the evening breezes whipped through the barren, rickety barn. I retied Chris’s hands in the front.

  When we had Chris dangling so that his feet still rested on the chair, I arranged the chair so that the slightest struggle on his part would kick the thing over and all of his great weight would drop down, suspended a good two feet from the floor. Just enough to break his murderous neck and hang him. Same way he had done the old men.

  We had found the clothesline still in the barn. That too was somehow poetic justice. I had no qualms about arranging an MVD man’s death. He had it coming all right, and as Katie said, it was him-her or us.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to pen the few lines that would tell the world and Betchnika exactly why an MVD man had taken his own life in the very same barn where he had executed so many nice old guys.

  FOR WHAT I DID TO THE OLD

  MEN OF BETCHNIKA, I AM TRULY

  SORRY. GOD SAVE ME.

  CHRIS.

  Katie wrote the suicide note, with all the glee and fervor she might have felt writing a fan letter to Frank Sinatra. That girl was all heart.

  Finally the deed was done.

  We drove back to the hotel in the Renault. More slowly this time. Katie was smiling with grim satisfaction.

  “What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.

  “That barn. I wish we could have waited around until he woke up, kicked the chair over and got his neck stretched. What a sight to see—”

  “I can skip it, thank you.” The night was cold and never in my life have I so much wanted to hop into bed with a good woman. Katie was in for it, whether she wanted it or not.

  “Rod.”

  “Yes?”

  “Still want me, like you said?”

  I laughed. “Katie, you try to chicken out on me now, I swear you’ll wind up with two broken legs and no teeth. That answer your question?”

  “Yipppeeeee!” she yelled. “Tonight’s the night!” The Renault shot forward like a lightning bolt. I smiled to myself. I wouldn’t take any bets but I smelled a virgin again. Maybe she talked tough and jazzy, but I detected another green olive in my vicinity.

  I didn’t mind.

  Dealey was high on virgins when he was alive and I told you what I think of them. They are still the experience of any man’s lifetime, if he handles it right. So help me, Jalal al-Din al-Siyuti!

  And girls are something I have always known how to handle. All kinds of girls. Queers like Christina Ketch-Chris are something else again. They give me the creeps.

  The Katies of this world are more in my province.

  You can take the spy racket. And world peace and silver pills and all that gook.

  Without a dame, it doesn’t mean a row of petunias.

  We got back to the Hotel Betchnika in fifteen minutes flat. Night had shut down the town. The fireflies were glowing again.

  We got upstairs and undressed in another five.

  Five minutes later, Katie came to me.

  I came to her.

  And after that, we just came and went all night.

  She was a virgin, all right, but the kind of virgin of your wildest fancies.

  Ready, willing and able to try anything.

  And as trusting as a young woman can be.

  For the first time in three days, I was doing what came naturally for Rod Damon. I’m not ashamed to admit I went whole hog. I had a lot of catching up to do.

  Pardon me while I indulge myself with a blow-by-blow account of the oldest ball game in the universe.

  I had grown horns where I never had them before. The steam was charging out of my nostrils; I was pawing the ground like a horse in the mating season; I was huffing and puffing for all I was worth.

  And I had Katie. Dear little Katrina Walsky.

  What a far cry from Ice Cold Christina!

  She was only a commissar’s daughter, but she didn’t need any commissaring.

  Czech and double-Czech!

  I was going to make her forget all about Roland’s Right-hand Men. I had a combo she had never come up against before. She couldn’t have. She might not know the lyrics, but all I had to do was hum a few bars and she’d be toddlin’ along with Rod.

  I have that Hit Parade all to myself and the Top Ten would take a backseat to me.

  Damon and Double-Damon!

  CHAPTER NINE

  I stripped.

  She stripped.

  Then we approached each other from both sides of the bed. Warily, taking each other’s measure. Her’s were fine. About 36x22x36, all packed on that five-foot-five frame of delectable flesh. She was a finely different kind of virgin. Not at all scared, no stammers, no gulps. She knew what she wanted and she was going to get it.

  She took my measure too. I’d left a small lamp burning by the bed, so she could find her way to all the important things. Her blue eyes goggled, but she didn’t retreat. In fact, she couldn’t take her eyes off it once she saw it. Even as she lay down on the big soft bed waiting for me to deliver the bacon, she was mesmerized at the sight. Her mouth moistened, her breasts tautened into live things and her arched hips moved sinuously on the coverlet. Hollywood! She must have seen all the sex movies that were ever made. She had a wiggle and a slither right out of an avant garde film.

  I got on the bed and straddled her, standing above her and looking down. I’d decided to skip all the expertise, the foreign erotica, the age-old customs and mores. This called for straight-on-tactics, a real drop-and-plunge hell-for-leather bang. I intended to be gentle. But I’d had the Great Stone Ache for days now and I needed ash-hauling badly. She could see I did. I looked like I was mooring the Hindenburg.

  “Oh, Rod,” she said huskily, looking up at me and mine. “Are you for real? Or do you wind that thing with a crank from the side?”

  “No jokes, please. You like it?”

  “Silly man.” She reached up, got two handholds and wriggled her fingers. “Do we choose up sides?”

  “Not necessary. I know whose side you’re on.” I stared down at the fulsome convex of her thighs. She was prime. Real tenderloin. Even her pubic garden looked fresh and untouched by human hands. I began to lower myself. Now, she did gasp and her hands fanned out, palming my undercarriage and jiggling the two wheels. Her eyes rolled and closed like shutters.

  “I knew this day would come,” she breathed low. “I wanted to pick the spot—I picked you. Now you pick a spot and go, man, go! The suspense is killing me. Can I be able to take a thing that size?”

  “You’d be surprised. First, two questions. No, three.”

  Her eyes popped up and open. She looked disappointed.

  “Questions? You’re kidding—”

  “No, I am not. Now, do you consider this a rude object?”

  “Only if you don’t slam it into me first chance you get!”

  “Good. Now, do you think it is a disgusting appendage?�
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  “No, no—it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I swear on all my rock and roll records. Including my Tom Jones albums.”

  “Last but not least—am I a freak?”

  “Vive la freaks—” she muttered weakly, biting her lip, beginning to shake with expectation. I nodded happily. She had told me all I wanted to know. I tell you—that Ketch broad had gotten under my skin.

  So I lowered away.

  Slowly, just letting about two inches of hot steel touch Katie. She moaned, caught her breath and with a wisdom beyond her experience, simply widened the V of her cream-colored thighs. Then she began to rock and roll. Gently, not wildly. Her own desires and natural lubricity began to widen the orifice. For me, she was the balm of the ages. I felt anointed with oils. I slipped in another inch or so. She parted the gates of Eden and kept on widening. With slow, careful precision until it was very easy for me to drop the rest of the way. Not the Damon Drop—it was far too early for that. I would have ruined her forever. Nay, I merely slid all the way home without pushing too hard and in no time at all she had locked me in her furry prison and thrown the key away. I had sized her up correctly. An impatient virgin, a bold one, and certainly not the kind to bleat at the first twinges of pain. But Katie knew herself better than I did. Very soon, she had wrapped herself around the joystick and me with all the fervor and yearning of a woman who has waited. Once she had me tight, she never let go.

  All I had to do was man the pumps.

  Her deflowering was exquisite. It lasted a helluva lot longer than many another First Time. Katie knew how to give and take. The best combination in the world for a woman getting her boots laced and her ribbons pulled.

  We rolled, writhed and copulated with stunning ease. The bed was large and roomy, and for each cold night I had endured with Christina Ketch, I redoubled my stroke. But finally, inevitably, Katie weakly had to call for Time. There wasn’t a patch of her warm flesh that wasn’t wet. Her splendid mammaries were as hard as coconuts now and the muscles of her thighs and hips curled and arched with trembling release. Speaking for myself, I was ten pounds lighter, fit as a bull fiddle and ready for more. But the first necessary madness had been excellently served and now I could finesse the rest of the night away. Katie wasn’t going anyplace.