The Victor and the Vanquished

Chapter 2

Chapter 2As we sped south on the blacktop, I lay on some of our things in the back of the pickup and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Not even Junie’s cute tricks could get me out of my blue funk. I kept thinking of James back at the store. Of course, I’d heard the stories about him. How he didn’t like sports or hunting or roughhousing. And how he looked at guys in a way that made them queasy.

He used to hang around our place all the time, but lately my mom didn’t even try to hide the way she felt about him. When my old man, Woodrow—his friends and drinking buddies called him Woodie—came home, he’d chase James off by shouting curses and slinging rocks at him. James wouldn’t show his face if the pickup was parked beside the house.

We pulled off into a roadside park sometime before nightfall and ate some of the bread and lunch meat we’d brought with us. Actually, with the potato chips and pickles and sodas and things, it was probably a better meal than we’d had in a while. I always liked baloney. Liked the way it smelled and how it felt on my tongue. And the taste too, of course.

My brother’d done most of the driving because the old man was suffering from a hangover, and that was a dangerous time for everyone. It was all right if he passed out, but if he was conscious, he made sure everyone shared his pain. Mom wasn’t doing too good either. I couldn’t tell if it was a dry drunk or her way of isolating herself from the rest of us. Anyway, it was up to me to make sure Nola and little Junie were tucked into their blankets in the bed of the truck that night.

I had trouble sleeping even though I was tired. I kept thinking of James and what he’d said. And about the things he wanted to do with me. My thing got hard again, and I put my hand down on it, but with the girls in the truck with me, all I could do was turn over on my side and try to ignore it. It took an awful lot of ignoring.

I remembered another camp-out with James on the Beaver a few years back. We weren’t more than fifteen, and that was before they started saying things about him. After we’d eaten scraps of fried beef slapped between slices of light bread, we sat around our little campfire and talked in the dark. We’d opened up and revealed things we probably wouldn’t have in another time or place. I told him some of the bad stuff my dad had done and how I felt about things.

He’d let me know how it was with him and his mom. His dad and both his brothers were gone, lost in a bad wreck that took them all at one time. Two uncles and a cousin died in the same accident. James Longhunter was one of the few kids on the rez who didn’t have a male relative he could look up to. Unless you counted me, that is. Mine was living and breathing, but he was dead to me. That night, like it was bound to happen, the subject had turned to girls.

“You like them?” James had asked.

“Sure. You?”

“They’re all right. But I ain’t sure they’re worth all the trouble.”

I thought that one over. My dad put my mom through all kinds of hell, but she gave it back to him sometimes when she had a hangover or didn’t like the way things were going. Matthew was always sniffing around one girl or the other. So I tried to act grown up about it.

“Piece of ass is worth a little trouble.”

“You know that for fact?”

I hadn’t expected him to call me on it.

“You ever had any?” he pressed.

“I guess not.” I admitted.

“You guess not? Seems like that’s something you oughta know for sure.”

“Mary Pilgrim felt my thing in the coat closet at school.”

“Mary feels all the boys’ pricks.”

“She ever feel you up?”

“Tried it.”

“You ever…you know, done it to a girl.”

He shook his head. “Uh-uh.” Then he got real quiet for a second, and I was scared about what he was going to say next. “Don’t know if I want to.”

“Why not? Man’s gotta get a little relief,” That sounded more like Matthew than me.

“There’s other ways to take care of that.”

“Like what?” Right away I wished I could call those words back.

“Like doing it to yourself or with a good friend. You know, a special friend.”

I’d been guilty of the first, so I scooted over to the second and started babbling. “With a friend? A friend’s not built like a girl. Well…uh…unless the friend was a girl. But then she’d be a girl, and that’s not what you meant.” I ground to a halt and shut up. I was glad it was dark so he couldn’t see me blushing.

Suddenly uncomfortable around my best friend, I stood up and stretched. That wasn’t the smartest thing to do because my c**k had got hard, and by the firelight, I could see where he was looking. Ashamed, I rolled up in my blankets with my back to him. After that, he went off to take a piss or something and didn’t come back for a long time. When he did, he spread his bedroll on the other side of the fire.

Had he been thinking those things about me way back then? Inside my head I heard his voice. “I love you, Wilum.”

I shivered in the dark night. Nobody’d ever said that to me before—except little Junie.

* * * *

Matthew had been right; it was New Mexico. Three days after we left the reservation, we ended up in Albuquerque. Dad moved us in with somebody he knew in a little apartment in what they called the Southeast Heights. There are lots of nice neighborhoods in the Southeast Heights, but ours was nothing but apartments and more apartments in a place called the War Zone. And that pretty well described it. People moved in and out all the time. You went to bed with one neighbor, and woke up the next morning with a different one. Lots of drinking and stealing and trouble of all kinds. It was a rough place for raising two girls.

The apartment was in a red brick duplex that looked good from the outside but was pretty beat-up on the inside. The Tolliver family, that was Dad’s friends, lived in the place’s one bedroom, and we crowded into the living room, sleeping on blankets on the floor. After a month of this, Tolliver’d had enough, so my dad found us an even more rundown apartment in an even worse area a little to the south.

If the place we left was the War Zone, this was the Combat Area. We didn’t have any furniture to take with us except for what we could borrow or what we found stacked beside the overflowing dumpsters. That was where everybody abandoned junk too big to fit in the metal containers. Sometimes the areas around them looked like a tornado had ripped away a house and left broken furniture scattered all over the place.

Mom got on food stamps and some kind of welfare, but even so, things were worse than on the reservation. I didn’t dare go anywhere because of fear for the girls. But now it wasn’t just Mom and Dad I had to worry about; it was the neighbors too.

When school started, I about fretted myself sick over little Junie being home alone with Mom. At noontime, I’d run all the way to the apartment to make sure she had something to eat. Then at last bell, I’d rush back again, because by that time Nola was home from school, and she was getting big enough to attract boys. And there were lots of them around, swaggering like they were something special, wearing their pants so low on the hips their ass cheeks showed through the underwear. Trying to look and sound meaner than the next guy seemed to be a way of life around there.

* * * *

My nineteenth birthday passed without anybody taking notice except Nola and little Junie. They did the best they could without money to spend on presents, but the little bag they made of denim from a worn-out pair of jeans was exactly what I needed to hold my whittling knives. At least they cared.

Then a week later, Matthew surprised me by showing up on the schoolyard one afternoon and claiming he needed my help with something. He’d already checked up on the girls and they were okay. After he said it wouldn’t take but a few minutes, I went with him.

He took me to a place about four blocks from our apartment, which was where his latest girlfriend, Myra Henderson, lived. There was another girl there too. One a little younger than Myra. Maybe even younger than me. She was kinda pretty in a hard sort of way. Anyway, Matthew said happy birthday, put my hand in hers, and shoved us toward the bedroom.

“You didn’t tell me he’s so cute.” The girl giggled and pushed me through the door. “My name’s Lottie.”

“William.” I automatically fed her my name. “What…what—”

“Isn’t that sweet. Matt took you by surprise.”

“Matt? Oh, you mean Matthew. Uh…yeah…surprise.”

“Me too, ‘cause you’re way better looking than what he said. Sorta sexy too.” She threw her arms loosely around my shoulders and put her round little forehead right between my eyes. “I’m your birthday present, Billie Boy.”

“Uh…my name’s William. What do you mean?”

“I mean what do you like, honey?” One thin arm snaked its way to my chest, paused, and then wandered south. In a second, her fingers were on my thing, massaging it through my britches. I glanced over at the door and was relieved to see she’d closed it.

“Feels interesting.” She giggled again.

After the shock wore off, my c**k began to grow. The rest of me froze up, but that thing crawled around like it was looking for a way out. Lottie rubbed a little more, then she pulled my shirt out of my pants and inserted her little hand. After she did that, it grew a lot faster.

Before I knew it she had my shirt off and my pants down around my ankles. Then she pushed me over on the bed and knelt on my legs. By then, my thing was as hard as it was ever going to get. She played with me a little, bending over to kiss the tip and lick it once or twice. Then she stripped off her own clothes. She had little pointed t**s that didn’t turn me on, but she was cute in the face, if you could get around all the paint she wore. And her hips were nice and round.

Lottie made such a big deal out of fitting a rubber over my thing that I about lost it. When it was the way she wanted, she raised her ass and sat down on me. She had a little trouble getting it all in, not that I was so big, but she hadn’t put on any lubrication to grease things up. When I was finally inside her, she raised up on me once and sat back down. And I came.

“Ungggggh,” I moaned, giving a couple of pathetic little wiggles with my hips.

“Did Willie come already? Must have been a long time since your last piece.”

That was all the sympathy she had, apparently, because she got right up, swiped herself with a tissue, and started dressing. That’s when it came to me Matthew had paid good money for me to get a piece of ass, and I’d messed it up something terrible.

I was lying there on my back wearing only socks—two on my feet and one on my shriveled-up thing—when she reached for the doorknob.

“Wait! Let me get dressed first.” I stood up and started to tug on my pants when she walked up behind me and ran her hands over my back and buttocks.

“You know, you really are sexy. It’s not fair you coming so quick and all. Get on the bed and let Lottie work on you some more.”

That was absolutely the last thing I wanted—except for Matthew knowing he’d wasted his money. Since I didn’t know how to stop the second without doing the first, I lay back and let Lottie go to work.

And this time, she had to work. My old thing had just performed, and no matter how miserable a showing, it wasn’t interested in tackling the chore again. But she sucked around on my t**s and my navel and kissed me all over, and finally the reluctant warrior came alive.

She got over on her back and pulled me on top of her. That felt a whole lot better, and I think maybe I got her to pop her nuts—or whatever girls have—at least once before I spilled out into my rubber again.

Getting dressed was awkward. Embarrassing, I guess you could say. No, more like mortifying. But it was all worth it on seeing Matthew’s s**t-eating grin when I came out of the bedroom.

“How was it, bro?”

“Prime!” I gave Lottie’s thin shoulders a squeeze. “Thanks, honey,” I pecked her on the cheek.

“Anytime, good looking.” She played the game for me. “That was goo-od. You can do it for me anytime.”

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And I knew for damned sure I wasn’t going to do that for her again anytime soon. Like never. The only thing that made it worth doing in the first place was Matthew thought enough of his little brother to fix him up.

* * * *

Life settled into a routine of sorts. Albuquerque was an okay place once you got away from the War Zone. It was spread out a lot, so it looked bigger than it was. The main drag was this really long street called Central Avenue that ran from the foothills on the east down through the Rio Grande Valley, where it hooked up with I-40 and scooted on up Nine Mile Hill to the mesa on the west.

A big mountain called Sandia Crest sat right at the eastern edge of town, and some smaller ones called the Manzanos lay directly south of it. Somebody told me Sandia meant watermelon, and Manzano was Mexican for apple. The names sorta fit.

The oldest part of town was down in the valley where some families came south from a place called Bernalillo—they pronounce it with a “yo,” even though there wasn’t a “y” in it—and established the Villa—another “y” when there wasn’t one—de Albuquerque. I guess they made a mistake in the spelling, because there’s one less “r” in the name now. They called that part “Old Town.” Those original settlers were Spanish people, and there were still a lot of them here. I’d never met any of them before I came to Albuquerque, and they sorta made me understand how the white folks felt about a lot of us Indians running around Mapleton.

They took some getting used to, but I learned some everyday words in Spanish and got along with them okay. In fact, I liked them. They didn’t always think like white folks, which they call Anglos around here, and that was refreshing.

* * * *

I came home after school one day and found Nola trying to get my mom into bed. She’d passed out from drinking, and the two girls had managed to drag her into the bedroom. I lifted her up on the bed, feeling how thin and bony she was. The old man came in right about then, yelling for Cora. Cora’s my mom.

I met him in the living room. “She’s asleep right now.”

“Passed out, you mean. Where is she?” He elbowed me aside without waiting for an answer. My father’s darker than I am, sort of a nutmeg color, but you could see he’d been a good-looking man at one time. That was before the drinking bloated him and put a hard cast to his features. Matthew and I called him the “old man,” but he was only thirty-eight or so. He married my mom when he was seventeen because she was pregnant with Matthew.

When he discovered Mom was in the bedroom, he marched in there and stripped off his shirt before closing the door behind him. “Wake up, Cora!” he roared. “Wake up, you damn cunt.”

I heard him trying to slap her awake. I sure wished Matthew was here. Dad was around two hundred and had me by fifty pounds. Not only that, he was a brawler. My brother was more his size. One day, I’d have to take him on, but right now my sisters needed my protection more than Mom. I grabbed some things for a sandwich and got my whittling knives, telling them we were going on a picnic. We were almost out of sight before my old man came to the front door, dressed in his shorts and yelling for Nola to come back.

I pushed her ahead of me down the sidewalk and went straight to the neighborhood park where there’d be some people around. It took a few minutes for the girls to loosen up and pretend they were having a good time. Junie wanted to go to the public swimming pool about a quarter mile up the street, but we didn’t have any suits. Of course, she was a baby and could have played in the water in her underwear if she hadn’t had a big tear in the ass-end of her panties.

After I spent some time pushing them in the swings and weighing down one end of the teeter-totter, they settled down. I did some carving while Junie took a nap in Nola’s arms. I whittled each of them a beaver, wishing I had some paint to do them up right.

After two hours, I risked going back to the apartment. The girls stood outside on the sidewalk while I went in to check things out. The front screen door squeaked like a cat with his tail in a rocker, but the old man was passed out naked on one side of the bed. Mom was still out of it on the other side. He had undressed her, and it looked like dried c*m was smeared all over her. Ashamed, I covered her with a sheet and stood looking down at the helpless man sprawled on the bed before me. I wanted to take after him with my carving knives; instead, I closed the bedroom door and brought the girls inside.

From long, painful experience, they knew enough to go about their business without making noise. I found something to patch Junie’s underwear and spent an hour trying to sew it on so it wouldn’t fall off the first time she put them on. Then Nola and I went through the drawer they shared in the old bureau in the corner and patched every other piece of clothing that needed it.