The Heavenly Table(30)
After a few clumsy, halfhearted caresses on his part, the maid quickly took over, displaying the same unbridled zeal for lovemaking that she had shown for eating. She forced his head between her thighs with her red, callused hands and ground her thickly thatched privates, the orange hair as rough as a wire brush, against his face. Five minutes of this and she exploded like a water balloon, squalling like a mashed cat and filling his mouth with what she referred to in a gasp as her “nectar.” Then she twisted around and pushed him back on the bed. She chewed on his knob and tickled his balls and tugged on his shaft until it was raw, but alas, he remained as soft as a sock in a laundry basket. Finally, after employing every trick she could think of—and it seemed to Bovard that the woman knew every dirty one in the book—she raised up and gave him a knowing look. “I could send a boy up, guvner, if that’s the problem,” she said. “Long as I still get me fifty, that is.”
“A boy!” Bovard yelled, frustrated beyond measure with his cock’s lack of response. “You dirty whore! What do you think I am?”
“I got no idy,” she said, rolling off the bed, “but a regular man you’re not. And who do you think you are anyway, callin’ me a whore? I got half a mind to send me old man up to kick the shit out of ye.”
“Oh, so your husband is hanging around here somewhere, is he? What, lurking in a closet? Hiding under some bed? What is he, your pimp?”
“No, he works the desk downstairs,” she said matter-of-factly.
Bovard stared at her for a second, a puzzled look on his face. “Him? The old fellow who brought up the cart?” Oh, God, he thought, could this frightful mess get any worse? What a mistake he’d made.
“Ol’ Taylor might not look like much,” she said, “but at least he knows what to do when the hinges is greased and the door’s ready for entry. Why, he’s like a young bull when it comes to—”
“Out!” Bovard screamed. “Get out!”
“Would ye like your sheets changed before I leave?”
“No, damn it to hell.”
“There’s a lad I know who—”
Bovard lurched from the bed with a look of insane fury on his face, and the maid grabbed her uniform off the floor and the money from the dresser and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. He stopped and stared into the mirror hanging over the mahogany dresser. There he stood, twenty-two years old and naked except for a crusty nightshirt, the sour taste of some scullery maid’s unwashed vagina in his mouth, his tongue blistered and quite possibly bleeding, his manhood shriveled with shame and defeat, his brain soaked with alcohol, at the end of his tether in a hotel room in the middle of Ohio, when he realized with a jolt the awful truth about himself. And the truth was that he, Vincent Claremont Bovard, had never had any more interest in the female body than a woodchuck has in learning the particulars of Latin verb conjugation. Feeling himself getting sick, he stumbled into the bathroom and retched up the sliver of chicken the maid had pushed down his gullet in a playful mood. Then he went back into the room and flopped down on the bed. How could he have been so blind? So ignorant and full of self-denial? After all, his revered Greeks and Romans had written so much about it. Buggery. Pederasty. Homosexuality. Tears began to run down his face. Thank God Elizabeth had called off their engagement. Cold chills ran over his body as he thought about the embarrassing fiasco the wedding night might have been. Then he leaned over and vomited again, this time on the braided rug, before falling into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.
The next afternoon, after deciding that leaving this world unsullied by lust was the more honorable thing to do after all, he looked by chance out the window and saw, down below on High Street, a military parade made up of Spanish American veterans showing their support for the war and carrying a banner advertising Liberty Bonds. He reached for a bottle and sat down to watch. Citizens of all ages were lined up on the sidewalk waving paper flags, tossing flowers and confetti. Though his head was fairly pounding, it was the most soul-stirring scene he had witnessed in ages, brimming over as it was with patriotism and excitement and the feeling that something world-changing was about to take place. Something much bigger and important than he, anyway.
It was that moment that he was thinking of now, as he sat on the porch smoking and looking out over the camp. To die on the Western Front, he had realized that day as he watched the old soldiers marching by, would be a far better way to leave this world than slitting his wrists in a tub of hot water. Once the procession passed and the crowd began to drift away, he had dozed off again and awakened the next morning filled with energy and purpose. After a bath and a shave, he packed his trunk and took a cab to the nearest armory. Though the draft hadn’t officially started yet, he was quickly sent, for no other reason than he had a college degree, to the Plattsburgh Barracks in New York for officer training. And now here he was, back in Ohio and on the verge of realizing his true destiny. War-ravaged Europe, with its inbred rulers and long-standing prejudices, was going to provide him, Lieutenant Vincent Bovard, with a death worth fighting for.
17
THANKS TO A beaten-down bank manager named Leonard Spindler who had actually been praying for the past several weeks that such an event might happen, Cane and his brothers took the Farleigh Savings & Trust without firing a single shot. For the past nine years, Leonard had been ensnared in an increasingly unhappy marriage to the daughter of Francis Gilbert, a moneyed and maniacal bully who also happened to own the bank, along with most everything else in the town and the surrounding area. Ironically, he even had a hold on the property of Thaddeus Tardweller, a despised second cousin from his mother’s side of the family. For Leonard, it wasn’t so much that Mirabelle was hard to get along with—from the first time he’d met her, he had found the poor girl as easy to manipulate as a cud-chewing cow—but that her father wouldn’t back off in his demand that they start turning out babies. However, no matter how many times a day they had intercourse, sometimes with Gilbert standing right outside the bedroom door urging them on with a snappy rhythm he beat on a snare drum, the results were nil. What had once looked like a golden opportunity for advancement—Leonard had grown up on a chicken farm out in the country, but had fled to Farleigh on his eighteenth birthday with aspirations of becoming a dandy—had slowly turned into an unremitting nightmare, and the bank manager’s nerves had become so overwrought that he now suffered from interminable crying jags that he had no control over. And the longer his father-in-law clamored for an offshoot, the worse the affliction became. Just that morning, standing in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and dabbing at his eyes with a dish towel while Mirabelle frantically did her fertility exercises in the parlor, he heard the man say loudly, “Girl, I realize anybody can make a mistake, but I still can’t understand why you hang on to that no-account fool. When in the hell is he ever going to plant his seed in ye? I can’t wait around forever for a grandson, though God only knows what kind of pinheaded cretin that might turn out to be with ol’ Bucket of Tears as the father. I’m tellin’ you, Mirabelle, honey, you’d be best to go ahead and cut your losses now before he saps all your youth. I know one or two men over in Atlanta who still ask about ye.”