Hold Tight (21 page)

Eyes and fingers—it was suddenly too intimate. Hank lowered his head so he wouldn’t see Juke. His reflex to what was happening in his cock and hand brought his head down further and he took the boy’s cock in his mouth.

“Yes. That’s what I wanted to see you do. You’re not so manly after all.”

“What’re they doing? You’re not writing anything down,” said Sullivan.

The pad lay on Erich’s lap. His pencil was tapping a page that was blank except for the date and time of the suspect’s arrival.

“He seems…I think…He’s ordering Fayette to have sex with the houseboy.”

“The nigger? And he’s doing it?”

“Apparently.” But why should that be any worse than a man doing it with a man? “Maybe he has no choice.”

“Or he’s doing it to make us sick. Stop listening. I’m turning this off until they finish. We didn’t come here to listen to that.”

“No. Something might get said. We have to listen.” And afraid of what Sullivan might think of him, Erich added, “I can hardly hear anything, anyway.” Which was true. Only when the suspect spoke was there any suggestion of what might be happening. The rest of it was sighs and static and Erich’s imagination. All he could picture were their faces, Fayette’s sharper than the houseboy’s. Their bodies were abstract, the action imprecise, a covertly sexual dream where nothing was specific. Erich found himself falling into what he heard. It was all so disturbingly vague, general and sexless. Then the man spoke again—“You look like you’re eating tar, sailor”—and it became obscene again. It was the presence of the spy that made the act upstairs specific and obscene. Consciousness was obscene. And Erich realized his listening made him part of the obscenity. He was a Jew of consciousness here.

Hank was aware of the room in his mouth. He had room to move his tongue up and down the skinny bone, feel it and taste it, brush his lips against the skin and kinked hair at its base. The fingers on his cock seemed to open his mouth and mind to anything. Then the fingers let go of him, joined the other hand in his hair, and Hank’s mind closed up with thoughts. Such as the bad thing about boys being that they finished so quickly. Remembering that, Hank remembered Juke and thought about having a nigger come in his mouth. Then a voice said something about tar. Hank’s tongue worked harder, against the voice, while his mind told him he was only finishing the boy as quickly as possible so he could get the man to talk and prove he was a spy.

“Kiss him. I want to see you kiss him.”

Hands yanking his hair pulled Hank off the prick, pulled him up to Juke.

It was like Juke and the spy had done it together. But the spy sat five feet away, looking on in proud disgust, his hands still gripping the chair. Juke’s hands held Hank’s face over his face for a moment, as if he were afraid to kiss.

The boy’s eyes were yellowish brown and his brown lips were rimmed inside with pink. But the body beneath Hank’s was smooth and warm. Hank’s mouth suddenly felt terribly empty. All right, he thought, I’ll go to hell, and he was kissing Juke.

Full of tongues, Juke covered Hank with his hands. What he had intended wasn’t happening. Juke had expected it to be quick and thoughtless, a hurried fuck by Blondie that would get the cracker out of his head for good. A fuck like a dump. The only pleasure was going to be the bit of humiliation. But it felt painfully good to be with Hank like this for a few minutes, even if it was for someone else. Juke could finish anytime he wanted, but not yet, not even when Hank went down on him and it was like a mouthful of angels. He wanted another minute. He wasn’t going to give two whites the satisfaction of seeing him come first. He wanted to feel contemptuous of Hank for being such a mouth artist.

Hank kissed good, too, like he didn’t know kissing wasn’t manly. Touching the bulky shoulders, the broad back and tight white ass, Juke wondered if looks were deceiving and the man was just another queen. Proving that might cure him. Juke preferred men, for all their hypocrisy. He reached around from below and laid his hand behind Hank’s balls. The man’s legs parted, as if he wanted it. The circus queen watching them wanted to see a white man shame himself with dinge, and Juke was loath to give her an added thrill. But he wanted this for himself, and the muscular weight on top of him grew disturbingly attractive. His dick was good and slippery from the sucking. It bent like a spring when he pressed it against the hole, then popped right in, and Juke forgot his planned contempt.

The kissing went straight to Hank’s cock and anus. He had to use one of them. When he felt a hand and then a cock between his legs, his body responded. He let the cock in. He settled into it. It felt like only a thick, deep finger, until it began to move and touched all the right places. He dug his fingers into the pomaded hair and kissed the boy deeper. The conked hair beneath the pomade felt coarse and Hank knew again the boy was colored. There were the men downstairs, but they wouldn’t know
this
was happening. There was the spy five feet away, but Hank hated him and didn’t care what he thought. None of it mattered now, because the boy sure knew how to fuck.

It’s only making it worse, thought Juke, closing his eyes, moving with the body that now moved with his. But the man sure knew how to fuck.

It was remarkable what fifty dollars could do. The sailor lay on a picaninny and kissed him. Blair sat and watched, gloriously uninvolved and powerful. It was as satisfying as ordering an enemy to eat garbage. His mind was racing and he decided he was drunk after all, with strength if not with alcohol. Not even his proximity to the bed bothered him now. The sailor’s twisted masculinity did not intimidate him tonight as it had when Blair was alone with him. Tonight the sailor was fully involved with someone else, a nigger at that, proving that his sexuality had absolutely nothing in common with Blair’s. Blair disdainfully watched, as if at a barnyard.

Sitting this close, he did not have to see them whole. He hadn’t liked it when the sailor and houseboy stood on the other side of the room and undressed. There was nothing uglier than a naked male with an erection, like a statue with a nail driven into it, and a colored male was almost as grotesque. But sitting close and seeing them in parts made them less male, less human. When the sailor fellated the boy, it was like the unsettling gibberish that passed for modern painting: a cross-section of a machine covered with hair. But Blair knew what it meant and was satisfied by the idea. Kissing was familiar enough for him to enjoy seeing it: the white face profaned itself with a black one, a man with a man. He imagined colored spit to have the consistency of dog saliva.

The sailor grimaced, broke the kiss and gripped the boy’s skull. Blair thought he was going to kill the boy. Then the sailor regained control and resumed kissing, almost angrily it seemed. He had to be disgusted with himself for what he was doing. Blair felt it was only his money and watching that kept the sailor at it.

“Yes. Is that so bad? No worse than kissing your dog.”

From the corner of his eye, he caught a new movement to their bodies. The sailor’s bare buttocks still disturbed Blair. He thought about ordering the houseboy on top. Pictures of natives were so common there’d be nothing suggestive about
him.
Then Blair noticed the way the black hips and white buttocks rolled against each other, as if linked. He had to lean to the left to see if what he thought was happening was actually happening. The houseboy seemed to have his penis in the sailor’s rectum. Perfect. Disgusting, but perfect. And yet the sailor continued to kiss the boy, oblivious to this new humiliation.

“He has his dick in your asshole, sailor.” It was only Blair’s contempt that enabled him to use such words. “Did you know that? Did you know this nigger is fucking you like a woman?”

Erich heard the man through the headset and shifted in his seat, flexing his buttocks together.

“What’s happened now?” said Sullivan.

“Uh, an act of sodomy.”

“What! Isn’t that what they’ve been doing all along? What else is there for queers to do?”

Erich nervously shook his head. He wouldn’t tell Sullivan who was doing it to whom. Sullivan might renounce the whole enterprise if he knew their man was the pedicant. Without knowing why, Erich was disturbed to learn that himself, as if he expected something better from Fayette. As if he thought a man’s honor was in his ass. He didn’t like remembering that part of his body.

Their bodies were sweating and as slippery as tongues. Hank’s balls and cock rode against the warm, wet stomach like they were part of the cock that rode inside him. He was so deep into fucking that a moment passed before he realized the spy had said something. It was of no matter. The men in the cellar would catch it if it were anything important. And remembering the men, Hank had to choke back his urge to start moaning.

Juke kept going. It was a long, slow fuck, the kind he liked but rarely got. If only Hank could admit his pleasure with a little noise, then Juke could admit his. Their heavy breathing made it sound like work, but Juke wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence. Whores, they were both experts, he told himself. That’s all this was, and he raised his knees so he could use his legs to push deeper.

“Just like a woman,” Blair repeated, annoyed the insult was getting no response. “Is the Navy full of women? There are no women in Hitler’s navy.”

The blond queer—he was no longer a sailor or even a man—lifted his mouth from the houseboy’s mouth and looked at Blair. His eyes were half closed, his lips thick and dark. And he just looked at Blair while his body continued its slow, obscene squirm. The houseboy rolled his head over and looked at Blair through his heavy eyelids, shining black body rocking away.

It was suddenly disgusting, all of it. If one of them were hating it, if there were the suggestion one was violating the other, then Blair might be able to watch. But to have both of them shamelessly look out at him from their shared pleasure was sickening. They made
him
feel like the pervert.

“All right,” he said. “That’s enough. You can stop now.”

Erich drew a deep breath, relieved.

Juke went at it harder, to stop Hank from listening to the man.

Hank closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Stop it! I told you to stop!”

But Hank gritted his teeth and kept going. It wasn’t just the sex. It was his anger with the spy, with the men listening, even with Juke for being part of this that made Hank hold tight to the fucking. To hell with the others. This was his body, his pleasure. And he let loose with a deep, loud groan.

Juke responded with his own high, sweet sounds.

Erich heard two people killing each other.

Blair jumped up from his chair. “Stop or you won’t see that fifty bucks!” They made vile noises at him and he stepped forward, burning to slap the white’s face and bring him to his senses. Then he saw the white ass with black testicles. “You’re being fucked by a nigger! Good white hillbilly. What would your pappy say?”

Hank threw his hand out and grabbed the man’s necktie. With a flip of his arm, he whipped the tie twice around his hand and yanked the man’s face in. Gripping the tie, he turned back to Juke and violently kissed the boy.

Blair tried to pull back and his tie choked him. He tried to use both hands to undo the sailor’s grip, but the fingers were like a knot. The sailor’s other hand gripped the back of the boy’s neck. Blair was so close to their faces he felt their humid breaths and smelled their hot skin, saw the black tongue and was horrified the sailor would force Blair to kiss the boy.

Juke saw the red face straining at its necktie and was afraid Hank would kiss the man, pull him on the bed and make him part of this. Juke fucked harder, so they could finish alone. But Hank went at it harder, too, kissing, then biting, holding the man’s face a foot from theirs.

“Okay, mister.” Hank broke the kiss and spoke in gasps. “You wanna sneer? Sneer at this!” And he threw his head back and came, yanking at the tie and thrusting into Juke. He crowed like he was raping the spy, or raping Hitler and ending the war. It felt so strong it had to accomplish something.

Seeing Hank go, feeling the squeeze around his cock, Juke let go, loudly, closing his eyes and giving in, like it was a busted artery that could bleed him white of Hank.

They heaved and groaned like epileptics, faces clenched around their open mouths. Blair panicked. “Let go, you damn—” He pulled back so hard his necktie choked him and he couldn’t speak. He thought he would pass out. He squeezed his eyes shut and heard the accelerating breaths and moans of two animals being tortured to death. He wanted them to die.

Erich closed his eyes. He opened his mouth a little, as if that could help him picture what was happening. He knew they weren’t killing each other. The women in brothels in Vienna groaned like that. So did the barmaid he saw for a time in Cambridge. But one voice dropped out, then the other, and Erich remembered these were two men. Women went on much longer, although Erich had suspected they were pretending sometimes. He wondered if Fayette and the houseboy had been pretending. He hoped so, because it was difficult to condemn such passionate pleasure, no matter how unseemly or unnatural it was.

“They’ve finished,” he calmly announced.

“About time,” said Sullivan. “I hope for your sake the creep says something. Or you would’ve had to hear all that for nothing.”

Erich remembered the spy and wondered what Fayette had been doing to the man to upset him. He thought he should feel sorry for the spy—the two of them had something in common here—but, spy or not, he despised the man.

Blair opened his eyes. It had seemed to go on forever, like an instant when you think you’re drowning. The hand suddenly dropped from his tie. Blair stumbled back. The sailor lay on the boy like a corpse. The boy lay very still, breathing through his bared teeth. There was a harsh smell in the room like the stink of the ailanthus trees that were budding all over the city.

He could kill them both, if he had a gun or knife in his hand. He was humiliated. He had been a fool for thinking he could humiliate a degenerate, when such people were beneath shame or human feeling. He refused to let them know how ashamed he was of his helplessness. And there was his purpose in being here to consider. Blair had not forgotten that. He backed into the chair and sat down again.