The House Read online

  Sissy did most of the preludial attending, very gingerly touching and then stroking "Arnold's" sheathed penis. Eventually she was allowed to actually stroke the off-pink sheath back and forth over the penile bone (all male mammals possessed an actual bone in their penises which extended into the penile shaft when aroused. Primates were the only exceptions). Once the bone suitably filled the "erectile pass," that meant that the pig was gonna blow. "Snowdrop!" Sissy exclaimed. "Get the frying pan!"

  Leonard got down on his knees for the C.U. while Snowdrop stumbled back with the inexplicable Teflon I frying pan.

  A frying pan?

  The utensil served as the necessary collection device. Getting the pig to squirt directly into a shot glass, of course, would've been impossible, but with the frying pan—

  "Give me that, you stoner!" Sissy griped and took the pan from Snowdrop. Snowdrop, a moment later, sidled over and passed out on the floor.

  "Careful, careful," Leonard warned. His eye was pressed to the Canon's eyepiece. "You've got to get it all in the pan for the camera—"

  "He's getting ready, I think—"

  Sissy hunkered down, one hand still stroking Arnold's pig dick, the other holding the fry pan in the target area. The pig's dick, by the way—now that the skin-sheath was retracted—shone a bright glistening pink and looked...well, kind of corkscrewy, akin to its tail. Arnold's intermittent chortles staid just then; Sissy stroked faster and—

  "There he goes!"

  Leonard got it all in the shot: a spectacular pig ejaculation. It drizzled down rather wildly, and most of it was indeed caught by the frying pan.

  "Good, Arnold!" Sissy rewarded. "That's a good little pig!"

  Goddamn right, Leonard thought. The pig's overall reaction to climaxing was not profound. It merely stood there, came in the fry pan, and that was that. Then it belted out a few grunts and hurried away.

  "Okay," Leonard continued directing. He pulled the camera back, meticulous to keep the fry pan in frame continuously. If it disappeared for even a single frame, then the customer would dismiss it all as fake, and that was not allowed, no, not in Mafia animal movies. "You know what to do," Leonard croaked.

  Tragically, Sissy did. She sat on the floor with the fry pan in her naked lap, then carefully offered the camera a view of the contents. (Pig sperm, for those interested, was quite unlike the human variety. Pretty much just water with long infinitesimal white threads floating in it.) "Slowly now," Leonard instructed, pulling back a little more. "Don't spill any..."

  Sissy slowly poured the pig sperm from the frying pan into a shot glass. Leonard zoomed in. Focused now and followed the shot glass up to Sissy's face. Then she brought the glass to her lips and shot it back, and there they had it. The "shooter" scene.

  Leonard maintained the hold as Sissy swallowed it, licked her lips and opened her mouth as proof.

  Then she threw up on the floor.

  ««—»»

  The pig flick, now, was officially over. As promised, Leonard gave the girls one bag of heroin to split amongst them; they scampered to their room like gleeful cadavers, and Leonard suspected that they'd be out of his hair till morning.

  He was wrong.

  Just as he was tuning in GTB and preparing to process the last of the film, he was beckoned.

  "Leonard!"

  "Bad, bad pig!"

  Oh, man. What's wrong now? Leonard wondered.

  He tromped back to the girls' room, not calculating anything of serious note...until he heard—

  "What the hell's going on in there!" he bellowed and broke into a trot.

  The noise which issued from the back room came as a collision of outraged female shrieks, high-pitched pig squeals, and a steady clunking and thrashing. It sounded like a rumble in there.

  WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

  And what accompanied each WHACK was a gust of something part mewl, part shimmy, like someone impacting a dog toy with a stick.

  Only the sticks, in this case, were a couple of two-by-fours, and the dog toy...was the pig.

  Sissy and Snowdrop were beating "Arnold" with the two-by-fours.

  The sight held Leonard in a momentary stasis. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! He stood there and stared. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! His mouth hung open and his arms drooped at his sides. In only seconds the two naked 90-pound girls had successfully beaten the pig to the floor.

  "Motherfuckin' pig!" Snowdrop maniacally screamed.

  "Give it back!" Sissy shrieked.

  "Gonna send you to pig heaven, fucker!"

  "Bad, bad pig!"

  WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

  More incredulous staring on Leonard's part. He seemed frozen by this spectacle. Now the pig lay bloodied and quivering on the floor. A few futile chortles then, a few shivers. Then it threw up and died.

  Leonard snapped. "You assholes! You killed the pig!" He thunked immediately to his knees and uselessly applied his hands to the pig in some unknown gesture. He felt no heartbeat nor pulse. Nothing. Nothing but a plume of pig puke and a dead Chester pig.

  "It ate our smack!" Sissy defiantly yelled.

  "Yeah!" Snowdrop joined her. "The little fucker scarfed our skag."

  Leonard looked up, fire in his eyes. "You're telling me that the pig ate your heroin?"

  Sissy was trembling, her waxpaper-like skin glazed with the sweat of exertion. "Damn right, Leonard! We worked hard for that junk and the pig came in here and started biting us and he ate it."

  "The pig ate the heroin?!" Leonard bellowed again.

  Snowdrop countered, her tiny tit-flaps waving in her tirade: "We were about to fire up and the little fucker barges in here trying to eat us, and the bag of junk was on the floor and he ate it! He ate the candles too!"

  Leonard felt fit to cry. The pig ate the heroin. The girls killed the pig. Could anything've been more ludicrous? Leonard put his face in his hands.

  "Don't you girls realize that Rocco's coming back here on Friday? He's coming to pick up the movie. And you know what else he's coming to pick up? He's coming to pick up the pig. So what am I going to tell him? ‘Gee, Mr. Rocco, sorry. The girls beat the pig to death with two-by-fours'? That won't float! He'll kill us!"

  The tenor of Leonard's complaint, and the implication that came with it, had little effect. "We don't care, Leonard!" Sissy shrilled.

  "Yeah," Snowdrop added. "We need more junk!"

  "Give us our junk, Leonard!"

  "Yeah!"

  "That goddamn pig you made us fuck ate our bag, so give us more!"

  Leonard could only continue staring. They didn't care about living. They only cared about heroin. Fuck it, Leonard reasoned. He reached into his pocket and tossed the remaining bags of heroin at them. "Here. Shoot yourselves to Palookaville."

  The girls fell on the bags like a fumble drill, squealing exuberance. Leonard leaned over and began to drag the dead pig out of the room.

  ««—»»

  "It's 1977! I hope I go to heaven!" Joe Strummer gruffly belted out from the first Clash album. Zyra's show on WGTB started at 9 p.m. every Monday night—this new stuff called Punk Rock. Groups with what Leonard thought of as silly and pretentious names like the Adverts, the Vibrators, Johnny Mo-ped, the Stranglers, and some bunch of frivolous idiots called the Sex Pistols. Leonard didn't much care for it; it seemed to portend the future's end of music. Where's Phil Manzanera when I need him? But at least this new Punk stuff beat the Starland Vocal Band. X-Ray Specks broke into "Oh Bondage Up Yours" as Leonard dragged the pig across the living room floor.

  What I am gonna do now? he worried. What's Rocco going to say? Leonard supposed burying the pig was his only recourse. He could say it got away or something. Shit, he didn't know. To make matters worse, after the next tug of the pig's hind legs, its bowel voided, leaving curls of excrement on the floor, and it was at that very moment when—

  Oh, man!

  —there was a knock at the door.

  ««—»»

  "You're the girl in the�
�" but then Leonard cut it off quick. What could he say? When I was splicing the end title footage on Two Mules for Sister Snowdrop, I got a quick hold of your face in the b.g.

  "Can I come in?" his visitor hurried, looking over her shoulder. And, yes, there was no doubt. The same girl behind the hedge, Leonard couldn't deny. A spartan black ankle-dress, clunky black shoes, billowed sleeves with white cuffs, and the white tie-down bonnet with tendrils of blond hair escaping. Before Leonard could even think about inviting her in, she squeezed by him in the doorway as if fleeing killers.

  "Fuck," she said and sighed when he closed the door. "Thanks."

  "What's, uh— I mean—"

  "I'm Esther, I just snuck out of the compound and I think my fuckin' brother saw me."

  But Leonard was stunned. The compound? "You must be one of the...Epiphanites," he finally voiced. "Any relation to Rector Solomon?"

  The girl snorted as her gaze roved the dilapidated living room. "Yeah, he's my fuckin' grandfather, the old fuck. Hey, you got any booze or pot?"

  "Uh, no, I'm sorry," Leonard said. And I'm fresh out of Burmese heroin too, but I've got lots of dog food... Only now was he beginning to lineate his thoughts. An outsider was in the house—a Mafia safe house. He'd flopped the dead pig into the kitchen and closed the door, and Snowdrop and Sissy were comatose in back. But still, he had to be very careful.

  "I apologize for the smell," he said of the house's fetor. "I'm a...a dog breeder."

  "Oh, yeah? I saw the pens out back." She pulled an end of a tie string and off came the bonnet. Luxuriant honey-blond hair spilled out. She's beautiful, Leonard thought dumbly. Even in the austere apparel. An ample bosom filled the top of the dress, close to stretching against big, clunky, hand-sewn buttons.

  "Is there...something I can do for you?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, still letting her eyes roam. "Wow. Electric light, haven't seen that in a while. My mother escaped the compound when she was a teenager, went to Philly, got into drugs, you know the scene. By the time Solomon found her, I was 14, and he brought me back here. Fuck, that place is the pits, and I've been cooped up in my room all week 'cos we just had the Penitation."

  "The—"

  She waved a small callused hand. "It's part of the whole freak show he's got going down there. They're religious crackpots. Every other week they've got some fucked-up rite or celebration. The Epiphanites believe that the more hardship you suffer, the less seriously you'll be judged by God when you die. Bunch'a crap." She sat down on the flyblown couch and smiled, as though its rusted springs were a great luxury. "But the Penitation is the worst one 'cos nobody's allowed to talk or even leave their rooms for a week... Say, is that pig shit on the floor?"

  Oops. "Oh, sorry about that," Leonard murmured. "It's, uh, well, one of the dogs had an accident. I'll clean it up right now."

  The girl—Esther—tossed her head and laughed. "Don't bother. We're farmers down there—I see animal shit all the time."

  Leonard's eyes remained inadvertently fixed on her. "You were saying something about the compound?"

  She kicked off her clunky shoes and put two white-stocking'd feet up on the couch arm. "Yeah, and Solly's on a rampage now. The entire congregation's shitting bricks 'cos the pig got away."

  Something like a rock seemed to form in Leonard's throat. His eyes threatened to bug out. After a few moments, she looked up at him.

  "Are you okay?"

  Snap.

  "Oh, yes, yes," Leonard blundered. "But I don't understand. You said the pig got away?"

  Lounging prostrate on the couch, Esther sighed, closed her eyes as if fatigued. "It's part of the Penitence Festival—the pig, I mean. And it got away before the Seventh Night. That's why Solly's going apeshit down there; the Penitation can't officially end until the pig is slaughtered. It's actually kind of funny..." But her words seemed to slip off in some distraction, namely a tactile distraction because now, as she lay on the couch, her hands began to very slowly glide up and down her sides in a gesture of self-caressing. "...kind of funny, I mean, because my grandfather's all bent out of shape. To him this is like losing the Advent Wreath on the night before Christmas..." More errant touchings, her hands moving up and down the outsides of her thighs, then the insides, then up to her bosom. It seemed as though she did this without realizing its inappropriateness. After all, she was a guest, and guests don't generally walk into your living room, flop down on your couch, and begin feeling themselves up. (Well, maybe in California, but not most places.) Now her hands made no secret of cupping her breasts through the harsh black dress-top. "All the offertory celebrations are septenary—seven is the number of God so the Epiphanites acknowledge that number in hopes of being worthy of God. For six days we supplicate and confess, and on the seventh day we slaughter the transitory Host. It's a symbolic oblation to God based on Leviticus..."

  This sounded fairly interesting but what was taking place on the couch proved even more interesting. Fervid fingers unbuttoned the top, pulled it open, and bared large, plush, wobbly breasts. Esther's face looked misted and pink. "Shit, I can't help it," she whispered. "Whenever I get out of that hell-hole I just get...so...hot..."

  Leonard received the clear impression that she was not referring to the temperature of the room. Her nipples hardened up to big brown-pink bon-bons, and her breasts proved large enough that she could cup them upward and suckle herself. As she did so, her feet flexed and her legs squirmed on the couch. Oh, man, Leonard thought. She alternately sucked each nipple with a fervency that made Leonard wonder if she was trying to get milk. While doing so, she traversed her position slightly and soon her white-socked left foot was sliding up Leonard's leg as he stood watching. Up the leg, yes, then up to his crotch, where it kneaded him there as deftly as a hand.

  Uh-oh...

  Now, for the past ten months, Leonard had been consigned to a life of hopelessness and near starvation. Along with that, the only sexual images in his proximity were scenes of two women having sex with animals, and in most cases the animals were more attractive than the two women. Hence, Leonard had always believed his libidinal responses to be dead and buried. Not now, though, not as he watched this robust blond girl-women play with a set of absolutely stellar tits and attempt to jerk him off in his pants with her foot.

  She traversed some more, pointing both legs up at him.

  "Take my stockings off!" came a hot whisper.

  Leonard did so.

  "Take your cock out!"

  Leonard did that too.

  Now her pretty naked feet went to work. She looked up through slit eyes and a carnal grin. One foot settled under his monorchid scrotum, rubbing the testicle within. The other damn foot grabbed his penis like a hand and began to squeeze it. Each squeeze prompted a copious, jewel-like bead of pre-ejaculatory ooze which welled and then depended to the floor like a clear thread.

  Leonard's ball constricted, his knees began to quiver, and his mouth went dry. "I, uh, I think I'm going to—"

  "Not yet!" she exclaimed. She leaned up in a blur. "Let me have it!" Leonard looked down bulge-eyed as she very attentively jerked him off into her hand. It was an explosive, gushing orgasm which deposited a virtual palmful of sperm into her hand, and a sensation so precise and complete that Leonard collapsed to the floor when she was done. "I need it," she said. Now Leonard was looking up at her face through the V of her parted legs. The ankle dress had slid all the way back to her hips now to reveal her sex and an abundant topping of pubic hair the color of straw. And what she did next was downright impressive.

  What in God's name is she—

  Leonard needn't finish the thought. She drew her legs all the way back—all the way—until her knees were behind her shoulders and the backs of her calves were actually propping up her head! An Epiphanite and a contortionist. This feat of course afforded Leonard a most extreme view of her sex: it pushed it out like a fruit tart baked a bit too long, a crack forming to reveal the filling. The face on her craned neck shot him the
most wicked of grins, then, as she promptly rubbed that big handful of Leonard's semen into her vaginal opening.

  Leonard could not desist from asking: "What...are you...doing?"

  She massaged it in with her fingers, then scraped the rest off as one might scrape remnant icing off a rubber spatula. "I want your come in me," she replied, still grinning at him through the valley of her breasts. "I wanna get pregnant."

  "What!" Leonard jolted.

  "Solly would go completely nuts if I got knocked up. He'd think one of the congregation did it—the old fucker'd probably have a stroke!"

  "I see," Leonard said, though he really didn't.

  "Now come here," she said, her grin brighter and even more intent. Her finger curled at him between her legs. "Get me off now," she said. "Put your finger in me."

  Leonard crawled forward to the summons and inserted his index finger into the slick wide-open pink blossom. At once the slippery pass gripped him—her vagina was very adroitly sucking his finger!—and then she said more gustily, "Put another finger in..."

  In went Leonard's middle finger now, parallel to his index. He drew them in and out with deliberation. It was fascinating, and fascinating too the way the inside of her thighs were covered with fine blond hair. No wax job here, for sure. He stroked her legs with his other hand, reveling at the traceable down-like covering. Sericeous, he guessed the word was. An equally fascinating wisp traveled up to her navel.