Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(40)
Taba moved to a sunnier spot, several feet away, and sat, her back to him. “How does the rest of that go?” She pulled her T-shirt over her head, undid her bra, and lay on her back again.
He tried. “‘Then, if ever, come perfect days . . .’” The rest was a blank. Hypnotized by those two bared mounds, he could only fumble for words. “I forget. I can do better.” He struggled to untie his tongue before racing through a line from a favourite Keats sonnet. “‘To one who has been long in city pent, ’tis very sweet to look into the fair and open face of heaven.’”
“What else have you got?”
Arthur had never forgetten the lines that moved him as a student of the classics, and he couldn’t resist showing off. He recited Milton’s “L’Allegro”: Such sights as youthful poets dream, on summer eves by haunted stream.
He got through it with only a few mental typos, and by the end of it had given up pretending not to see her, pretending not to feel aroused. “Not bad. I wrote a paper on it when I was nineteen.”
“Not bad?” She was looking at him raptly.
A distant engine hum. Arthur stood up and saw the Fargo below, on its return journey.
“Come here, Arthur.”
“That’s my truck.”
“Come down here with me.”
He took a hesitant step toward her, and she sat up and took his hand and pulled him down, easing him onto his back.
“In case you think my interest is only platonic, it’s not.” She rolled on top of him and kissed him with open mouth and tongue. He answered, and felt a rush of unalloyed pleasure as his hands found her breasts, her engorged nipples. He was shocked and thrilled to feel an erection building, a message she was receiving, her body answering.
When she sat up, his hands rose with her, continuing to heft her breasts while hers unsnapped his belt and reached under his shorts and found his thick, engorged cock.
Clothing was cast aside, boots, socks, and underwear. All shyness was dismissed, all resolve forgotten, and quickly he was on top and entering her with deep, hungry thrusts. He was amazed and proud that he so quickly found completion, and his exultant shout echoed off the hills.
PENNILESS IN PORCUPINE PLAIN
The hitchhiking had been beyond crappy, especially across the sparseness of Northern Ontario, all rock and lake and forest extending to infinity, and Lou had to resort to long, slow hops by bus, staying in cheap motels in scraggy, scrubby, nothing-happening towns on the old Trans-Canada highway, his wallet getting ever thinner.
It took him almost two weeks to get to Winnipeg, and by then his Amex was over the limit and he was down to flophouses and the Sally Ann. In Regina, he was rousted by the cops after trying to nap under a tree in Wascana Park.
Meanwhile, he was still battling his bank, long-distance on his phone, which was quickly running out of minutes, to recover the thirty-two grand stolen by the Mafia imposter Charles Bandolino. Somehow that shithole had hacked his password, password hints, and debit card number. The bank was looking into it. There were papers to be filled out. Affidavits. Please provide a mailing address. No, sir, it can’t be done online.
On the first day of summer, he landed in a burg called Porcupine Plain, somewhere, he guessed, in the hilly southwest of Saskatchewan, beyond the endless flatlands that his Greyhound buses had crawled across.
This is where his money ran out. This is where he was totally broke except for $16.55, less the cost of the all-day bacon and eggs that the Quill Café had just fried up for him.
Porcupine Plain was in a valley formed by a meandering creek and surrounded by grain fields spread beneath green hills where cattle grazed. Aside from its pastoral setting, the town had earned the right to be called plain, a main street called Main Street with a dozen storefronts, a paint-peeling two-storey hotel and tavern, a post office, a two-pump garage, a lumberyard, a credit union. A couple of church steeples. A curling rink. The dominant structure a grain elevator.
The Quill seemed the place to be, at least for lunch. All booths were taken, just a few stools available. A real old-fashioned diner, not one of those faux ones in the city, full of grizzled men in suspenders and tractor caps, with a fair number of middle-aged women, likely farmers themselves. Dust on their boots. Lingering over coffee, joking and gossiping, like he’d imagined they did in small towns instead of staring hypnotically at iPhones. Occasionally they looked him over, a nondescript little man with a big suitcase.
He was wishing he’d packed a tent. He had no idea where he was going to sleep tonight, maybe in a cattle pen.
He ate slowly, dipping toast into yolk, relishing each mouthful, his last square meal before he had to resort to the local soup kitchen, if there was one. There were only three jobs up on the community bulletin board outside the bus stop: a skilled mechanic, a licensed pilot for crop-dusting, and an assistant to the local veterinarian.
He wiped his plate clean with the last of his toast and waited for the bill, nursing his coffee, his third refill, eavesdropping on the two men in the booth behind him.
“The screen goes all wonky. And the colours ain’t right.”
“I heard if you turn it off and on again it resets.”
“I tried that twenty times.”
“You sure you ain’t got a battery issue?”
“Battery’s charged, according to the manual. See this here green light?”