Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 16:20:04 -0500
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: TARZAN MUSHROOM HUNTERS - BOOK III

THE TARZAN MUSHROOM HUNTERS

by R. Forbes Emerson

(Bi-ped, inc., rom.)


BOOK III


                  Bunny Cotton and her grandfather, Drew Kalivada paused on
the trail to have a go at their canteens.  He was sixty-two and his
granddaughter had just turned eleven.
                  "Hastings should be called Camelburg," Bunny said.  Her
christened name was Diane, but with Cotton as a surname, what else could be
expected.
                  "It's out here by itself, definite nomad country," Drew
agreed as both looked down off the beak to the town twenty miles away.

                  They slipped their water bottles back into their holders
and resumed their way.
                  "Hello," came from behind a bush moments after the couple
resumed their hike.  It was followed by first one boy, then several more.
In moments they were surrounded by six boys and two girls, most aged around
twelve.  The intruders grinned happily, and, standing at a respectful
distance, slow pitched pine cones at the bewildered man and his
granddaughter.

                  It could have been most confusing but for one thing.  The
boys and girls suddenly appearing from the sides of the trail were dressed
in designer imitations of jungle suits, further, they were sleek, limber
and bright eyed.  It was not your father's troop of scouts.
                  A pattern developed.  In turn a boy or girl would pitch
their pine cone, then peel off into the woods, reappearing directly to take
a place at the end of the short line, and repeat the process.

                  The man and girl had been on the Appalachian Trail for
four days and three nights.  They'd pitched separate tents, and, amid what
seemed to be growing tension, turned in, each to his own, at ten each
evening.  Why had he suddenly reviewed that aspect of their hike?  The
newcomers weren't acting salacious; they weren't gesturing or displaying by
wiggling their hips.  Yet how unmistakable could something be?

                  The apparently impromptu performance went on for some
minutes.  And suddenly her hand was in his, not passively, not out of
fright, but signaling.  Kane Sherman, the oldest of the boys present, at
fourteen, triggered a response from Bunny each time his turn came.  Each
squeeze got harder.  Susan Usher, exactly Bunny's age, triggered the same
responses as the somewhat lanky and coltish young male.

                  From not knowing what to do, Drew Kalivada passed quickly
into a state wherein he knew what was expected, but seemed temporarily
powerless to act.  Finally Kane pitched a pine cone from so close, and with
such precision, it all but caught itself, and the man was able to muster
the presence of mind to close his finger on the missile.  At the same time,
Bunny seemed to come to life and the girl was able to actually field a
slightly off-target pitch from Susan.

                  Having solved half the puzzle, simultaneous brainstorms
occurred, and the couple tossed their cones back to Kane and Susan.
Transaction complete.

                  "We've got Kool-Aid so cold it will give you a headache,"
Kane said.  "Just two minutes down the side of the ridge."  Yes, they'd
both just refreshed themselves, yes they had miles to go before they slept,
and yes, it was hard for anyone of any age to pass a lithe and winsome
child in simple sash-and-thong attire.  Two of them?  Shooting fish in a
barrel.  Kane and Susan led, dropping a hundred feet down the precipitous
trail, then looking back, smiling, until Drew and Bunny caught up with
them.  In a few hundred yards the group reached a plateau formed by the top
of a ridge.

                  "Wow!" both grandfather and granddaughter exclaimed as
they rounded a boulder and entered the hunters' alpha camp.
                  Lean-tos are common enough in rural areas, but rarely if
ever are they constructed from waxed and polished logs.  Picnic tables are
a dime a dozen, but rarely, if ever, are they of waxed and polished timber.

                  "We brought the ice up this morning," Kane said as he
guided the group to a table.
                  "Cool," Bunny said, looking down on Andrews, ten miles
below, and Hastings, another ten miles down the valley as the fourteen year
old grinned stupidly at her.

                  It was good to sit and not say much more for a few
minutes.  Take in the scene, or at least try.  It took Drew awhile to come
up with a proper name for the campground, but the result would have sent
the copy kiddies at the agency into another of their patent dithers.
Purists, Incorporated.  Yes, understatement, that was the ticket.  For
example, few of the gold nuggets surrounding the wildflower centerpiece on
his table would have sent a miner of yore scrambling for the nearest
saloon.  The fact that there were dozens of such gold-rich pebbles could be
underplayed, and, if the audience for the product was especially urban,
neglected entirely.  Ah, the finest idea of his career: to so understate
the campground and the campers as to say nothing about them.

                  But where to start?  Kane or Susan?  Forest life is
largely sun-free so they were both milk skinned, the boy with raven black
hair and just a tantalizing hint of peach fuzz on his upper lip, or the
bushy carrot top who was obviously thrilled Susan had picked her to
accompany her grandfather's choice.  "In fact," Drew mused, "if the girl is
understating her feelings for Kane, it may not serve as a literary motif,
after all."

                  The four chatted for some minutes.  Kane retrieving a
beautifully drawn map of the area and a basket of sample mushrooms and
outlined their harvest zone which was a thousand-acre parcel twelve miles
distant; Camp Kneecap West.  The name seemed odd, but just until Drew
realize that camps Toe East and Toe West were about twenty-five miles off
and there were Waist One, Two and Three at eight to ten miles from Andrews,
which was obviously Head Camp.  Indeed, the hunting range extended down
both sides of the long valley something like a pair of legs, a body, and
even arms which looped over ridges and paralleled the valleys on their far
sides, thus making the anatomical names practical.
                  Kane sketched their route to K-W, pointing out a
prominent ridge four miles down the valley and explaining they'd zigzag,
hunting, the final miles into camp, arriving at around three in the
afternoon.  It sounded like a plan, and on a nod from Bunny, the deal was
sealed and Kane brought out a camera and registration kits which included
fingerprints and cheek swabs.  "We have very few rules, once you leave
Alpha," he explained, "therefore we're a little picky as to who plays by
them."  He wasn't kidding.  The application form was comprehensive and,
with apologies for procedure, licenses and other identification were
collected and photographed.  At first the polygraph seemed a bit much to
Drew, but the questions were about sexual contacts and potential diseases,
so, understatement once again raised its friendly head.  They did not ask
either he or his granddaughter if they were ax murderers, also a nice
sub-dramatic touch.

                  The Kool-Aid hit the spot, another couple, an uncle and
nephew arrived, and then Kane and Susan retrieved a pair of exquisite
Indian baskets from a wall of the lean-to, presenting them to Drew and
Bunny, and they were off.

                  "We'll skip Head Camp for now," Kane said as they gained
the quiet of the sloping forest, "and stop at Bicep West; that's pretty
typical.  They'll be out hunting, but it'll give you a chance to see what
you're in for at K-W.  First day, we could even hang out there for an hour
or two, get to our camp at four or even five.  It doesn't really matter, so
your speed is our speed."

                  For half an hour they zipped along the trail, the three
youngsters cavorting in friendly competitions as they leaped pretend
caverns and jumped fallen beanstalks.  Your basic outing/walk-in-the-park.
                  From time to time Kane and Susan cautioned the newcomers
to play within themselves, and dashed on ahead like springboks, leaving the
hikers long minutes of privacy while they caught up.
                  At first Drew and Bunny found it difficult to speak.
Kool-Aid or not Kool-Aid, their hearts were pounding, their mouths were
tissue dry, and they yawned frequently as they unconsciously dawdled their
pace so as to give themselves more time to think of something to say before
the rejoined the hunters.
                  This cycle was repeated twice over the first half hour.
They'd meet the kids, go back to their various competitions, then, ten
minutes later, Kane and Susan would again sprint off.  By the third
go-`round, Drew recognized the same pattern the kids had used with the pine
cones; we're free, you're free, but, in case you change your minds, here we
are, back again.  Momentarily the thought passed through the advertising
executive's head that you could probably index the trail with icons
representing when bright, normal, or slow people caught the rhythm and
responded to it.

                  With the pine cones, this responding thing had been taken
out of his hands by the over actions of Kane.  No such support system, now.
He was walking side by side with the prettiest eleven year old in her
school of eight hundred kids. Bunny was an image of the daughter in
"Mrs. Doubtfire", light brown hair silkier than silk with tendrils at her
temples, big brown eyes, downy soft skin, glistening, as the English say,
with the effort of her backpack.  Normally they'd chat casually, naming
plants and birds, speculating on the weather, talking about lunch and
dinner.  None of that came to mind.  Nothing did.  It was an
out-of-the-blue death march, one foot in front of the other, no thinking
allowed.

                  In eras of rapid social change, the role of parent and
child or senior and junior are reversed, for the kids are up to date and
everyone else becomes quickly antiquated.  Thus it was that Bunny broke the
silence as Kane and Susan disappeared over a ridge shortly after their
third meeting.

                  "Grandpa," she said.  (He'd insisted on her calling him
that though she'd wanted to call him Drew since she was ten.  "Like
Popeye," he'd growl, "I yam what I yam, and I yam your grand-father, which
happens to be the best news in my life."  Since he made about a million
dollars a month flogging the mercantile system with toyful advertising,
Bunny was highly flattered to even be noticed.)
                  "What, honey," he responded.
                  "There was a lot about sex on the forms we filled out."
                  "I know," Drew said.
                  "Do you think they're really smart and knew that if they
presented us with a lot of questions about it that that would get us to
talk about it?"
                  "Seeing as they don't work on Madison Avenue," the
executive replied, "they must be smarter than anyone on Madison Avenue, and
Madison Avenue makes the word go `round."
                  "'What's in your wallet?'" the girl trilled.  It was
their joke.  The mighty ship of advertising wrecked on a phrase which
encouraged people to yet again enrich their indebtedness.  Evil genius.
Drew was not a high-horse personality and being with Bunny was a good way
to vanquish thought of riding any figurative horse, at all.

                  That was his break.
                  "I mean, there were a lot of questions about it, weren't
there?" the eleven-year-old beauty asked, re-focusing.
                  "Well," Drew responded, "however many there were, they
seem to be working."

                  This is going to be a fun scene to write.  Samantha was
over this morning in her tenth or twelfth most provocative dress.  I get my
eighteen hour days by virtue of working in bed, and have a chair at my left
shoulder.  She sits in and starts pulling my eyelids open.  "Oh, Tom, he
look old."  Then, a little later the same theatrics, only "Oh, Tom, he look
like ghost, favor spirit."  The point is, she's utterly open, and, yes, one
could read tactless; such a far cry from the Lolita type constantly trying
to convince Sugar Daddy that he's as buff and macho as a pool boy.  Indeed,
I go from old, to ghost, to "Tom, he look dead," followed by a long kiss
from those laden-galleon lips.  Why do I bother to wake up?  You tell me.
Anyway, writing a sixty-something with a pre-teen is writing from the
heart.

                  "So far they seem to be clamming up the Old Clam," Bunny
giggled.  "You really are a trip, you know," she went on.  "What if we were
scallops, you know, with a thousand eyes, and I winked at you with one of
mine.  I'll be you'd close your shell on all one thousand of yours."
                  "Since your eyes are very big, very brown, and very
bright, it might be the best course." Drew intoned.
                  "The best course for a shellfish," the girl agreed.

                  They walked another minute.

                  "Grandpa," the girl said, "think about it.  A polygraph,
even.  And their costumes.  And the questions.  I'll bet your were the same
as mine, and some of mine were about incest."

                  "Yes," Drew said softly, "some of mine were, too."
                  "And you must have answered them positively or they
wouldn't have invited us to Kneecap City.  Didn't you get that idea?"

                  "I guess I must have, at that," the executive said.

                  Remember the one that read Family relationships have
approximately what chance of success, and it was scaled from zero to one
hundred percent?  Where did you mark the graph?"
                  "My hand was shaking," Drew said.
                  "Clams don't have hands," the girl reminded her
grandfather.
                  "That's right," the man agreed, "I didn't mark it at all.
No hands."
                  "We wouldn't be following Kane and Susan if you hadn't
marked it," the girl observed.
                  "Yes, there's that, too," the man acknowledged to the
girl's mock squeal of agitation.  From the bushes along the trail, sharp
mountain eyes observed two hands come together, the knuckles of the larger
whitening as it squeezed the smaller.  The hunters then slithered on,
smiling to one another.

                  "I didn't bring you out here for this," Drew said.
                  "I know, Grandpa," Bunny replied.  "You'd live in the
same room with me and sleep in the same bed with me for five years and
never make a suggestive remark.  And not from being a clam, but from being
what you think is a good person.  What society teaches us is a good person.
But what if it's all wrong?" the girl continued.  "What if all the fat
people and all the What's in your wallet people really are evidence that
the basic system of right and wrong, good and evil, and checks and balances
is not essentially correct, but rather has been skewed by the development
of our culture in a hothouse environment during the height of the most
ripping prosperity in human history?  They all could be wrong.  Prayer
breakfasts, faith-based organizations, One nation under God, in whom we
trust, all of it both wrong and without merit, finally, destructive.  Then
what?  Then we continue to be grandfather and granddaughter and go to the
zoo and go hiking on the A trail, sleeping in our separate tents because
Schuller says this and Graham says that and the Baptists say the third
thing and the Catholics the fourth, and the lot of them are nothing but a
basket of greedy puppies to begin with, not fit, excuse my french, to lead
a bitch to her kennel."

                  "Philip is my favorite," Drew mused aloud.  "He converted
shiploads of New World gold into armadas for the mud of the English Channel
rather than established Spain as the eternal colossus.  We owe the guy."

                  "I didn't say there was no brilliance in religion," Bunny
rejoined, "I only say it's wrong when I love you and you love me and I
sleep in my tent and you sleep in your tent and I don't care if you're a
hundred and I'm two, though, to be honest, if I were a hundred and you were
two it would be a different kettle of fish."

                  "Leaving only stupidity as eternal," Drew sighed, a
denuded and impoverished Spain of some hundreds of years proof of his
pudding.  Pudding brought up the malls with their ceaseless parade of
Jell-O on the swollen hoof.  The man's knuckles once again whitened and
Bunny squeezed him back harder yet.

                  "Bicep-West," quoth Kane as the couple entered their
first hunter's camp and froze in their tracks.
                  "Looks like they shitcanned the Understatement guy," Drew
murmured to himself.  He was amazed at the thought, that he could compose
anything in his brain after bumping into his granddaughter, who'd been the
first to stop.

                  Why had she stopped?  Well, that gets into description,
something I've elaborated on previously.  Yesterday's technique.  I spoke
too soon.  Furthermore, you'll have to overlook my flexing the blade a
little, as it's an unused tool.  If you're imaginative you'll sympathize
with my trepidation at unlimbering this antique device, in the first place.
Is it a wise man who plays with the blunderbuss in the attic?  I think not.

                  First of all, it couldn't be filmed, which is the reason
I'm stuck with the quill and inkwell act.  Mirrors.  Any camera would so
intrude on its art so as to render it unbelievable, ironic, because the
suspension of belief is essential in theater. A sixty-thousand dollar
camera staring back off the screen, however it may be unbelievable,
regrettably, spoils that other essential quality, illusion, and so can't
really be part of the program, so let's wet the nib and get to work.

                  Gold.  Mounted between oaks whose limbs had been twined
as saplings, growing finally together about eight feet off the ground.  The
focal panel was seven feet in height and looked to be four feet wide.  It
was ganged with four lesser panels mounted at angles to their chief.  Nor
was it gold leaf, hammered and stretched; rather, it had been poured in
place (against stainless steel backing), an eighth-inch thick, and never
polished or covered.
                  Kane and Susan laughed.  "It stops everyone," they said.
                  "Do tell," Drew was about to quip, when he reviewed again
the long miles between Manhattan Island and this remote section of the
Appalachian Trail.  That he could still think again intruded on his
thoughts.  "And old nag in the traces I must be," he mused to himself, "if
anything diverts my attention from, a, this young girl at my waist, and, b,
the feast of our own images reflected back at us from ten feet away."

                  Kane and Susan busied themselves removing their guests'
backpacks and setting them in the corner of the lean-to.  Drew and Bunny,
unaware of anything around them, moved slowly in lockstep closer and
closer.  A simple wooden bench stood three feet from the central mirror.
Instinctively, Drew took his granddaughter by the waist and she raised her
feet to pass over the polished wood.  When the girl regained her feet, her
hands were locked over Drew's, holding him against her.  If someone cut the
cable on his sixtieth floor elevator, he'd need a seat as he needed one
now, so, steadying himself on Bunny, he stepped over the bench and sank to
the seat, his granddaughter cooing happily at herself in the mirror as she
dropped into his.
                  Was it the gold?
                  Thunderclap!
                  Had man torn himself asunder repeatedly in pursuit of the
metal simply because it reflected gods instead of humans?  Transformed a
couple mis-matched by half a century into shimmering images made in heaven
only for each other?  Wasn't it enough that the Internet was built by
pedophiles, did they have to be in at the dawn of the modern world, too,
scouring the planet and inventing every conceivable device, then attacking
the inconceivable with gusto, all based on gold, gold, and more gold.  And
here, five times repeated, was the answer.  Images impossibly clear on the
molten-looking surface.  Color shifts that transcended vision.  If you
poor, it was impossible to be in two places at the same time; if you had
enough to buy a gold mirror, all you had to do is sit in front of it an you
could be in two places all the time.

                  "It's okay to wave," Kane said.  "While you're with us,"
he went on, "it's a good idea to get used to doing what everyone else does,
like when you stopped as you entered camp.  Everybody waves, so feel free
to because the cost of independence is the unhappiest deathbed scene
imaginable."

                  That was one way of putting it.  Conformity.  But it was
okay, as the boy said: the urge to wave at their crystal-clear doubles was
irresistible.  Everybody had to do it.  Then off to the left and right with
their fresh angles on the tableau of man and girl.

                  "Has anyone ever moved from here?" Drew asked after some
minutes.
                  "Not willingly," Susan admitted, "but we're very focused
during the season, so most of the heavy gazing goes on after sundown by the
light of the camp fires."

                  It figured, Drew supposed.  A richly textured, carefully
orchestrated advertising campaign actually did have almost a shock value to
an outfit's bottom line, so, it stood to reason that if one was going to
create maximum paradises with golden mirrors one would illuminate them with
the soft glow of flickering firelight.  A thoughtful, widely versed man,
Drew gave thanks that no draught restrictions were in place for Hastings
County and surrounding areas, realizing, for the third time, such thoughts
were, considering the circumstances, signs of good-old age.  Since he
wasn't very old, they didn't last very long.

                  "We'd like to stay with you," Kane said.  Susan, standing
beside him, nodded her head.
                  "That would be so awesome," Bunny whispered, again
assuming the leadership role granted the younger partner in a skewed
relationship.  This time it was Drew's turn to nod, and he did so.
                  "We have costume's in your sizes in the lean-to," Kane
said.

                  "This is derivative of James Dickey's "Deliverance," Drew
just knew it.  They were both to be killed at Camp Bicep, their body parts
hidden in boxes of mushrooms and shipped around the world.  Surviving Bunny
in a bikini would be a challenge, but, with a defibrillator handy and a
slick operator, he might pull through; in a Tarzan costume, her right
breast bare, why waste the battery?  Change clothes, die, carve, and be
done with it.

                  "Grandpa," Bunny asked, "do you think there has ever been
a legitimate hundred-year spread between a man and a girl?"

                  Hmm.  That was interesting.  Three times in his life Drew
had seen with his own eyes tykes, aged three years, passionately embracing
mature males.  Men, not boys.  That, from his own experience, but the
minimum age at three, and there was just the odd assortment of
hundred-somethings still in decent physical shape.

                  "It's a stretch, darling," Drew said, "but yes.  If I had
to guess, I'd say there are a few dozen effective couples who are a hundred
years apart."
                  "And no gold mirrors?"
                  "Highly doubtful," Drew affirmed.

                  Her she let the subject drop for the sake of having
raised it and dropped it.  Kane and Susan were obviously glad of the break
in conversation, and they joined the couple on the wooden bench.  "If Bunny
wants, she can go with Susan to select a costume," Kane said.

                  Investment.  The cruel parting with money in hopes of it
coming back as yet more money.  The cruel parting with Bunny in hopes of
her coming back as Jane.  Numbly, from the half trance which was the least
trance he'd been in since running into his granddaughter, Drew nodded.
Kane nodded and Susan held out her hand to lead the girl to never, never,
never, never land.  "I can bring yours out here," the fourteen year old
suggested.
                  Was he meant to nod or otherwise affirm?  Where, in a
related question, was the freaking planet Earth?  He'd trod that puppy
hours ago, talking about horses, drinking from a canteen, moseying along
with his granddaughter.  It wasn't even ten yet.  What had happened?
Kool-Aid, there was a memory.  They'd talked about tents, he and she.  What
was he trying to forget as he looked at Kane's image in the mirror?  The
paperboy?  Boy?  Why hadn't he been able to catch pine cones tossed gently
at point blank range, until one actually landed in his hand?  Because
they'd been pitched by a boy?


                  Kane re-appeared with the adult-size sash and thong
skirt.  He dropped to his knees in front of Drew, leaving the latter to
stare into the golden image of the fourteen year old's bowed back and
shoulders as his sandals were detached.  Then the -- boy -- was at the top
button of his shirt, shining black hair against the hiker's nose.

                  "If I look half as good as you when I'm fifty I won't cry
to anybody," Kane said.
                  "Bunny calls me a clam," Drew replied, "and they age
well."
                  "She'll be happy when she's older," the boy advised.
"Guys who pursue make out like shit, guys who like kids for who they are
and let them take the driver's seat have relationships no one else can even
imagine."
                  "That's how it used to be," Drew said as Kane pulled free
his shirt, "but with the prevalence of AIDS and other diseases, it now
becomes incumbent for the male to pursue, because waiting for things to
happen and a commitment to be formed, takes too much time.  By that time,
the girl will be in the middle of a minefield as dangerous as anything on
the Korean border."
                  "I never thought of it that way," Kane said.
                  "Guys my age may be a step behind keeping up with
trends," Drew said, "but we're hell on wheels when it comes to predicting
them.  The trends against conventional teen romance are like big trucks on
small roads.  Dodging them means violating both law and custom, and
violating them very aggressively.  If they aren't change, we're about to
lose a major part of another generation.  Age should be eliminated from all
laws governing romantic behavior.  Girls should be encouraged from their
earliest years to see middle aged men as their only safe option.  If the
State wants to keep secret the fact that older men are ten times better
mates, friends, partners, companions, and, especially, lovers, that may be
legitimate.  Otherwise, it is guilty of mass murder on a Nazi scale by
forbidding the only safe and realistic option to tens of millions of
girls."

                  "Good-bye Mary Lou, hello Aunt Sue," the boy whispered,
now working at Drew's belt as the tall man stood to allow access.
                  "It is the way it is," Drew said.  "The question of whom
do the teen boys date, while their female peers are living with men my age
is simply irrelevant.  Nobody.  Abstinence.  Professional girls or
boys. Sick boys or girls.  It won't be the middle of the Sahara.  If you
come through, guess what?  You'll have a fabulous selection of still-young
women with money.  Meantime, at your age, you should be sticking the
conservative trail, because, take it from me, the fun doesn't even begin
until you're forty years old.  Everything before that is mashed potatoes
with maybe a slice of butter, if you're lucky.  Personally, I've just been
offered my first steak, and I'm sixty-two."

                  "I know," Kane said, "I saw your form."

                  A new feeling of dizziness washed over Drew.  Kane was so
magnetic it was some moments before his head cleared and he realized Susan
was definitely taking her time helping Bunny with her Tarzan costume.  The
realization added twenty beats a minute to his heart.  What Kane was doing
at his waist added twenty more.  As the child stood, he shrugged the sash
from his shoulder and his tunic joined Drew's shorts and boxers on the moss
of the forest floor.  The two embraced lightly, the man's hands massaging
the fourteen year old's alabaster waist, the boy's hands to the light pelt
of tight gray curls covering the senior athlete's pecks.  "I've never been
bare-chested against anyone like you," Kane whispered, pulling himself the
last few inches, and, after the shock of first contact, which lasted half a
minute, he added: "Bunny is a lucky girl."

                  Gently they eased apart coming to rest forehead to
forehead and staring down at each other.  "I can say that again," Kane
said, looking at and feeling hot against his young teenage belly the older
male's seven-inch circumcised phallus.
                  "Look whose talking," Drew whispered back, because a
fourteen year old with a penis jutting over six inches up from his childish
waist was the principal image of the universe.  Colt as stallion.

                  "Sometimes nothing happens when we hunters are out with a
hiker," Kane said.  "Nothing happened with Mark.  He was nice and he found
a hundred pounds a day, but some guys really are heterosexual."
                  "That's sex's most intriguing number," Drew agreed.  They
were absolutely headed toward their first kiss, it was absolutely difficult
to imagine what Bunny and Susan were doing, thus it more than adequately
good to take a break and get to know each other as their bodies slowly got
used to the reverberating shock of their nakedness one against the other.
                  "To what degree is the male population, a, bisexual, and,
b, pedophiliac.  How many men in a private setting with an attractive,
personable, experienced boy of any age would stoically resist becoming
sexually active with the child?  I say one in seventeen; what say you?"

                  "The trouble is," the boy answered after a pause, "is
that one in seventeen would be bound to have something else wrong with
them, you know, from hidden disease to psychological problems to religious
paranoia."

                  The boy remained thoughtful for another minute, his hands
working ever lower on the man, who, unlike boys and young men, got sexier
as the molestation proceeded.  That was worth noting.  The hot first touch
of a youth did cool, no matter how enduring the relationship.  The rather
cooler touch of the mature male, both given and received, was the opposite.
It was feeling better being bare against the powerful, slightly hair chest,
the hands at his waist were bringing forth rather than soothing.  He was
going to forget what he had to say, so he said it:

                  "I think you're right.  Take away abnormalities and
dysfunction, out of a hundred men, eighty three would take the boy's
underpants off and seventeen wouldn't.
                  "You know what?" the boy added, suddenly brightly, "it'll
be in the book at Head Camp.  We can circle through Andrew tomorrow and
look it up.  They've been keeping records and statistics from antebellum
days.  How many hikers go with hunters just to be friends and pick
mushrooms?
                  "Anyway," the boy interrupted himself, "we spent four
night together instead of the usual two or three, and nothing happened..."
                  Drew clearly remember being a teen, and sympathized.
That his heart rate was now at a thousand beats to the minute was
comforting because it was apparent he was going to need all the circulation
he could get.
                  "You look like a boy having his first one," Kane
observed, his eyes glued to where he and the man were together at the
waist..
                  "Bull's-eye," quoth Drew.  His long drawn out wit,
Madison Avenue will do it to you, toyed tiredly with a variation on the
adage From the mouths of babes, obviously rendering it along the lines of
Into the mouths of babes.

                  "I don't know if the girls are missing me," Kane
whispered, a wisp of his black hair crunching slightly between his forehead
and his partner's, "but it's not even a duh'uh to know they're missing
you."

                  World's rarest rhetorical question: Isn't it nice a teen
has a mouth?  And here was an irony for you.  As he spoke he called for
action which would curtail further speech.  Bummer.
                  Standing again brought the shock of the mirrors.
Pivoting Kane gently and holding him in the classic molester's stance
should have varied the very circumstances of light, but no, there he was,
three feet away, feet now on the bench, legs widely spread, glowing.  Hawk
and dove.  Drew's visage, gray eyes flinted by the certainty of his talent
separating the men from the boys at the highest levels of commerce,
contrasted awesomely with mild countenance of the razor sharp young boy.
Albatross and egret might be closer, especially if Drew could retain
consciousness long enough to fondle the fourteen year old's hard-muscled
thighs.  Bunny was long-legged, too.  They say you can take the man out of
Madison Avenue, but you can't take the genius out of the man.  Since
beginning his sabbatical, Drew had been casting around for a storyline.  A
popular little epoch so he could let it hang out for more than the
thirty-second and one-minute scripts that were his stock in trade.  He
laughed at himself as the prototypical ad exec brimming with a great novel,
one of these days, but he did keep looking.  And, by George, here it was,
lock, stock, and barrel.

                  "Alucard," because the name swam up on the beach along
with the gimmick.  Alucard was Dracula spelled backwards, alucard, the
beast, kept his victims alive and kicking by pumping blood INTO them.  ("A
heart big enough for two," flickered as a subtitle, but short-fused wit
bulbs with their slogans and tag lines were safely roped off by the Hudson
River, and that was a good thing.  Strictly power hitting for the next
couple of years, then he'd go back to bunts, think-hitting, and scrapple
ball if he couldn't get the spruce and the hide to collide.)

                  Meantime, where was the dude with the transfusion?  Sure,
the two of them would have four legs, but it was fifty feet to the lean-to
if it was an inch.  Then salvation arrived, not as a leering cellar dweller
but rather closer to Shakelton's factory whistle.  "Don't you want your
grandpa to take them off, he's cute, I would," came not as a clarion over a
far southern mountain ridge, but in the form of Susan's childish voice.
Whatever the source, the result was the same.  In the case of the exhausted
Antarctic party, the explorers were energized for a final push to safety,
in the case of Drew and Kane, it reduced the fifty feet across the
courtyard to human scale, allowing them to cross the mossy forest floor on
all fours.

                  Just in time.  Susan was naked on an ebony black bearskin
quilt and at Bunny's right waist, holding the hiker's hands which were at
the waistband of her panties.
                  "O, I give up," she giggled, being the first to sight the
males as they entered.  The eleven year old released the hands of her new
friend, and Bunny zipped her panties to her ankles, where the other girl
took them.  Moving a little to the side allowed Bunny to see her
grandfather.  Her eyes blazed and grew huge.  "Yes," she hissed, extending
her arms.  Nor did Kane look half bad, and Susan also extended her arms.

                  "Secrets boy, secrets boy, see the secrets, how they
whirl," Drew intoned.  Great, he'd just saved Amalgamated Pincushion and
Thimble from the jaws of its creditors by fast-jacking their sales six
percent based on ten or a dozen words.  A writer was a rat in the jaws of a
cat, infinitely at the mercy of his talent.  It could and did bounce him
off floor or wall with indifference, and, if it tossed him hard enough to
splat against the ceiling, seemed to have the wit to move out of the way of
the falling victim, least it be hurt and unable to toss its toy the more.
Here experiences were crashing through experiences like the epic finale of
a Celine Dion ballad, and he was composing doggerel as if he were selling
dog food.  Meantime, the eleven year old girl beckoning him looked composed
as a mother wolf and happy as a clam.  Bother she not, she not, never not,
bother she, bother she, bother she.  Not.  Too hot.  A lot, a lot, a lot.
See what he meant?
                  Do you think I write copy like this without being
absolutely petrified?  If something so unknown is capable of lurking so
closely, and I live in the tropics, what adventure may accompany my next
sojourn in my sock drawer?  Yes, long-term readers will know I went through
about as much adventure as a human can stand with my mother, but,
realistically, there's venom and there's venom.  Anyway, the giant inside,
if he were even a mosquito, is one scary dude.  He's represented by no
union.  Doctors and attorneys would laugh him out of their offices.  His
boss man denies him heroine, cocaine, opium; even codeine and alcohol.
Restricts him to a single girl.  Keeps him at his post eighteen hours a
day, seven days a week, and takes him to town three hours a week.  How long
can he perform under those slave-like conditions?  Did his master, over an
intense thirty year period, build enough of a reservoir that the valve can
be left wide open for years at a time, assuring the monster his mud?  Why,
in the random fiddle of life, did the biggest cat choose this mouse?  When
will she tire of play?  What will be left when she does?  I've actually
seen little lizards shed their tails (to my cats) several times; will I be
left the flickering decoy or the head and body safe back in the grass?  And
how about the present?  What's that all about?  I wander around town my two
or three hours a week looking cute enough for my age, I suppose, but very
much one of everyone.  There was a prepossessing Yankee looking guy behind
me in line at the bank the other day.  I had difficulty resisting an
impulse of accosting him in a friendly enough way and asking if there was
anything about my appearance that would indicate that I am a, the most
prolific of Internet artists, and, b, the greatest artist who ever lived.
Much like the scene in which Salerie tries to spot Mozart during a palace
gala.  Does it show, at all, to anybody, genius like this?  I think it
might if I were a bolder brand of artist; an actor or a painter.  (At least
if I were one of these I could entertain at parties.)  But writers are
different; they don't entertain at parties, they sit as wall sponges
soaking everything in, and, truth to tell, can be a bit prickly if intruded
upon; they don't excel at anything prosaic (though they may be competent
enough), because their dread is being treated in any way differently than
everyone else is treated.  Losing the common touch, in other words.  Having
a trophy model on the arm, would be an example, rather than a fourteen year
old nitwit.  (Dangriga has see-and-say rather than phonics as its primary
academic model, so I don't have to worry about Samantha sounding out words
she isn't meant to know about.)  Another example is cleaning up for the
eternal cats (or going real slob real fast).

                  The confusion at this point arises from being by so far
the best.  Ms. Dion is hands-down, the best vocalist of all time.  But Joan
Baez, Brenda Lee, Madonna, and others are at least near her league, in her
ballpark.  Since new writers under the urban socialists dominating our
media are nonexistent, my competition ends up being Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
Faulkner, O'Neill, Salinger, Golding, Nabakov, Vonnegut and a dismal list
of their ilk; not fit competition, not that it is really any kind of
competition, per se, for my dog.  The best chapters of all of them,
combined, equals not even half a page of my work.  Never has, does not
today, and never will.  Their talent was the inverse of their egos, and
their ability to work was a subset of the product, which was zero, leaving
this collection of dolts, morons and poltroons far less than zero in that,
far from encouraging people to read, they sicken them of the very sight of
ink on paper or pixels on glass.  As far less than zero as the plumb may be
lowered.  If I were to invite them to a dance, the affair would be rustic,
with iron coat hooks mounted between five and a half and six and a half
feet off the floor.  I'd take the greatest pleasure in waltzing each
literary guest against the wall, thus making their heads useful for hanging
them, `displaying' might be a choicer word, until their neck sinew rotted
to the parting point and they piled to the dance floor, which would at
least render the skulls useful for something (making room for more dancers,
for example).  It's circling so high, so lonely, above.  That's the
mystery.  One million horsepower when Ford and Prolux maybe muster a few
thousand on their best days.  Endless throttle response.  Endless fuel
supply.  Push the lever and go faster.  Push in again; faster still.  Yank
back the stick and no G-forces, no muss, no fuss, the earth simply plummets
like a rock dropped down a well.  Around the moon so there'll be light to
read by (probably C. S. Forester), and back to our blue sphere.  If Larry
King's still alive it's automatically time for another trip, and so it
goes: better living through horsepower and sanity.

                  Drew Kalivada.  Sanity.  He, for one, wouldn't have said
they were in the same place at the same time, but for the evidence.  Bunny
plainly loved what he was doing just as Susan's gaze was locked on Kane.
The males were kneeling on the foot of the rug, legs spread and
overlapping, stroking gently over the young girls.  Both males had survived
a whispered conference in which they baldly testified that any attempt at
entering the females' bodies would result in extreme prematureness, and,
since they'd both been celibate for days, the most exciting option was for
the girls to lie back on the bearskin, hands behind their necks, legs
linked at the knees, and watch.

                  "It'll give us something to remember when we're old and
getting chemo," Susan enthused.

                  So it was happening.  Yes, there was a gold mirror
strategically placed over the beautifully finished rustic bed.  They looked
like gods, surely they would touch like gods, and, god, was it going to be
nice to find out.  Instinct drove hard, and the girls responded by raising
their hips in rhythm with their males, yearning for them yet fascinated by
their growing lust and the carnality and wanton abandon of their
masturbating.
                  Throwing their heads back, Drew and Kane stared into the
mirror above them, apparently like what they saw to they turned to each
other, slowed, and very gently brought their hot, wet glans with an inch of
each other.  Gently, panting and hissing, they touched, the tip of the man
laving the already wet boy, they mated that way, exploring each other,
grunting aloud from the shocks they were capable of giving and receiving,
while the girls watched round eyed and fascinated, the nipples of their
pubescent breasts so swollen they spent half their time looking at
themselves and each other.

                  The males returned to the females.  Their masculine
display had broken what traces remained of anything to do with barriers.
Their legs untwined from each other, found their boys, and wrapped around
their muscular legs, drawing them, drawing them.

                  "Hunters lead," Kane hissed.  It was obvious to the boy
Drew wanted to cum on him, wetting him thickly, giving the slickest of
gifts a boy can take from a man (don't I just know it), but that was not
how it was to be, not seeing as how Bunny was a virgin.  Vaguely the
fourteen year old supposed this might represent a tentacle of prostitution.
He wanted Drew's sperm on him, thick, white, and dripping, while he was
still wildly aroused.  But Hunters led with most Hikers giving hard chase.
Other hunters.  He wouldn't, he knew it in his heart, he wouldn't if it
weren't for her.  He'd let Drew be a man to him the way Alex had been.
Stare on in disbelief at what a boylover shares with a child, feeling his
need to return the share rise like a giant hammer in a forge to come on the
white hot steel.  To be sprayed on, then, to the adult's molesting touch,
to spray off himself.  All that sacrificed because Bunny's swollen nipples
on their half-teacup-size breast were the most beautiful of possible
beauties, and he wanted to share on them what Alex has shared on his own
bare chest.

                  "Hunters lead," me managed to gasp, his voice with just
enough of an edge of authority that Drew calmed slightly, letting him.
                  And he did.  Very fully.
                  "I'm cumming," he grunted, holding the tip of his phallus
low on Bunny while Susan reached up to steady his shaking young body.  His
right hand froze at the base of him, his left arm now wrapped around the
powerful male at his side.  For long second he held his penis against the
child's silken belly, then his sperm came in a gush, streaking across the
girl's heaving, sweating chest, just grazing her childish left nipple.

                  "O, Grandpa," she moaned, "that's what you're going to do
inside me."
                  As if it were a stage cue, the girl's words triggered the
boy.  He tackled Drew, positioning the man so he was propped on his right
arm, then finding him with his right hand and guiding him to his
granddaughter.
                  Loose, his penis spurted all over Bunny and he might of
missed cumming off fully on her little girl nipples if Susan hadn't guided
him while he guided Drew to the eleven year old.

                  While he definitely hoped to look like the iron gray
almost military man he was guiding, Kane even more hoped he'd grow up to
have the man's self control.  In spite of the fact that an attractive young
teen was fully ejaculating all over his granddaughter's chest, Drew took
her as tenderly and gently as a sacred bride.  He entered her just more
than an inch, half freezing and half probing with short, intimate strokes.
Bunny had frozen at the sight of what Kane was doing on her, allowing Drew
to continue penetrating the child with patient deliberation, her still
thighs the wet, soft, perfect partner to his intimacy.

                  Susan had been patient with Kane, watching him, even
helping him ejaculate on the beautiful female hiker.  The boy realized
this, and, half spent, jockeyed the eleven year old against his waist,
entering her to the panting of her welcome.  By now Drew had fully found
Bunny, so the couples began to have sex lying side by side on the bearskin,
the females staring at their males both in the flesh and as wild golden
images doing really filthy things on top of their young bodies with slender
legs extending out from under the hips of their assailants and seducers, if
the lore that gave us the massive mall mamas was to be believed.

                  Kane was developing a rhythm with Susan.  Drew could see
the girl had taken him fully, then she held him with arms and legs for a
long minute and was now mewing to him, coaxing him.  In response, the
black-haired teen rose on his strong arms and thrust his hips forward so
the girl, craning her neck slightly, could look down between their bodies
and see.  When Drew emulated the boy, Bunny looked up dazed with happiness.
"I want to see, too," she whispered by way of thanks, also raising her head
to witness her man.

                  Drew was fully against the eleven year old's hymen.  He'd
even begun being just a little bit rough against her, getting her used to
what would soon happen between them as they lost control with each other.

                  "I know it's going to sting, Grandpa," the girl
whispered.
                  "I'm sorry, love," the man gasped, and took his
granddaughter as her fingers gripped his taut flanks just above his hips
and pulled him roughly.  For an instant the man collapsed on the child,
holding her as she whimpered, but it was Bunny who in mere moments was
urging him back on his extended arms so she could watch him make love to
her for the first time.

                  Kane had taken a steady lover's rhythm with Susan.  At
times he'd me mounted with his arms extended, his teen muscles rippling and
the young girl stared at the beauty of mating, then he'd be tight in her
arms again, his lips at her ears and mouth as they kissed and whispered,
both of them practically giggling with the joy of his having just cum and
thus being steady and adult with her, rather than frenzied and juvenile.

                  "I'm ready to be raped," Bunny whispered, the sting
receding quickly.  Drew almost flinched at the word, but in advertising a
new turk would arise from time to time, writing copy which called a spade a
spade.  For sure and for certain he was raping Bunny.  Every cop, every
court, every judge, every jury would agree.  If they were even half right,
why the escalating social disaster of the country they ruled?  Why, huh?
They knew a little bible tripe and scroll trash and were oblivious to the
disaster of a woman looking down on the body of a hippopotamus every time
she took a nap.  They needed to be savagely attacked because they were
absolutely wrong.  So wrong, they said Drew was raping Bunny.  Of course,
she'd just said it, herself, but that was because she like the hot sound of
the word, to say nothing of adding it to the fiery taboo of taking from a
male seed that would grow in her as her daughter and great granddaughter.
Indeed, she like the word so, she coaxed her rapist with it, whimpering to
be raped more deeply until she felt her grandfather's hardness gently
entering her cervix and womb, then the growth of his iron hair against her
most intimate bare skin.

                  "Look," Bunny whispered to Susan.  Kane let the girl up
so she could peer down between Drew and his young lover.  The child almost
giggled because suddenly the tall, powerful, crew-cut athlete looked like a
girl.  The only sign of his manhood was the way his beautiful young
granddaughter surged and wriggled her thighs tightly against him.
                  Kane, for his part, was trying to imagine how Drew must
feel.  He'd spent three days the previous summer with a seven year old, and
entering her childish body had been a kaleidoscope of steam hammer run by
kittens; every sensation short of electrocution as he glans had moved
repeatedly through the child's body and finally into her very center.  So
beautifully were there bodies made for each other that although he came
wildly and copiously, when he gently left her, only drops of his sperm
remained, not the usual milky flow and pooling.  Drew, mating with the
eleven year old must feel the same, he must be entirely in her, and if he
ejaculated while holding her he also might leave little sign of what had
happened between them.

                  The girls, for their part, wanted the men to look.  They
signaled by whispering and guiding touches, slowly, not separating in any
way, rolling themselves on top of their tough, male lovers.  Again the
Understatement guy was absent.  Their own golden bodies, sweating, chests
heaving, and their females, hair now lank and stringy, shoulders
glistening, heads bowed and lolling, all framed in the hanging mirror.
Rape?

                  Their eyes met, first in their burnished images, then
with the clarity of staring at each other.  Their hands joined.  Bunny's
signaled.  Her eyes signaled along with her hands.  They registered
awareness, anticipation, fright, then shock as her first orgasm spread from
the base of her spine, rapidly invaded her sweating young loins, then took
her to her fingertips, shaking her and half beating her as Drew calmed her
with his husky voice and held her in his powerful hands.

                  Kane remembered Jenny, the seven year old.  She'd cum
while astride him and he'd lost control in less than half a minute.  Was
Drew cuming in her?  He couldn't tell.  "Is it happening with him?" Susan
whispered.  Kane repeated what he didn't know.  The young couple stared
between the hiker couple.  Blood, but no sign of sperm.

                  "I'll bet he isn't," Kane whispered.
                  "Same bet as me," Susan replied.

                  They'd know in a few minutes.  Meantime, Bunny was
regaining strength and once again was able to sit upright.  This delighted
Drew because he could again fondle her developing breast which clearly
displayed her continued arousal.
                  "I guess that's why it's in all the magazines," Bunny
whispered, a shy smile hinting.
                  "I'm in advertising, not editorial," her grandfather
said, thrilling Kane and Susan because his lively response meant he had not
yet cum inside the girl.

                  "I wouldn't think they'd need much advertising in
heaven," the girl sighed, looking at once in the mirror, then down into his
eyes, "and that's where I am."

                  Her face grew soft and serious.  "Did you cum?" she
asked.
                  "No darling," he replied.
                  "O, wow," was her whispered response.

                  Neither had Kane climaxed inside Susan.  But they had a
reasons.  He'd just masturbated, they'd dated during the winter and
escorted two groups of hikers; control, while it wasn't easy, due to their
status of lovers, was possible.  Long minutes they'd been together, and she
was still fresh in his arms.  But Drew?  That was another story.  Maybe
there was something in this age thing, after all.  All the men in their
fifties and sixties had been unabashedly glad of their ages.  He'd half
listened.  But what kind of proof was this?  The sixty two year old had
just held a pre-teen beauty through a long, ragged, and violent orgasm, and
he was lying there, smiling gently back at her, very, very ready to turn
her again into a moaning, clawing half-wild animal.  Most boys his age
would be half way through their second cigarette by now, and he was still
fondling her like he was feeling her up on their first date.

                  Then there was a change.  It was in her eyes.  From
curious fawn the youngest imaginable deer emerged.  Not a woman, but a
real, real, real girl.  A girl that lay slowly on her side holding her mate
against her, until she was once again spread widely beneath his powerful
body, her hands cradling him as she looked into his eyes.

                  "No protection, ever," she whispered, "I want it to
happen with you, from you, and by you so you can take our daughter camping
when she's in kindergarten, do you hear me? none of this waiting because
you're afraid of raping someone.  I though so before, now I know so, and
how."

                  Drew's thoughts were along a more literary line.  They
had to be.  If he listened to her sweet, urgent voice he'd cum.  Of course,
he was not so far afield as to be musing on fine points of Byron or obtruse
facets of Joyce, he was wondering where the dude with the extra blood was.
Alucard.  He needed a pint if not a quart.  Holding his shaking
granddaughter through the long minutes of her first orgasm had drained him
like hot teens would drain a bathtub.  And for what?  Now she was beneath
him, her pert nipples burning his chest, her long, boyish legs wrapped
tightly, pulling him, the thick head of his penis free in her womb even as
her cervix half throttled his thick, swollen shaft.

                  No guy with no blood.  He sighed.  Such an idea, back in
New York, would meet with some reward, even if it was just an excited
client asking to see What's next.  Here, nothing.  Or wait.  Those big,
brown, bedroom eyes.  The look of shock came swiftly this time.  Her hands
moved from his face to his heaving flanks.  "I'm sorry," she whispered,
longing to stay with him, then her eyes rolled, she hissed, mewed,
trembled, and finally lost herself, crying out wildly as she clawed and
beat at him with her hands and legs.

                  Minutes passed, then the desperate limbs relaxed and the
hissing pant gave way to mews of endearment and gurgles of contentment.
"Still in advertising?" she whispered when she was able.
                  Drew nodded.
                  "No one would believe you, in any magazine, so it's just
as well," she observed, her voice still thick and ragged.  "Nobody would
believe me, either, so it looks like we're stuck with each other."

                  "Mmm," he hummed to her, now raised, now looking into her
endless eyes.  They grew round.  "Mmm," she sighed in response.  That was
all.  Her hand found his upper arms and held him, kneading and coaxing
gently.  Her legs were equally gentle, though Kane noted her bringing her
thighs higher on the stallion's waist.  He pinched Susan and her eyes
followed his.  Neither child intruded on the couple, but, however private
and subtle the couple beside them, there was no doubt in their minds that
Drew was cumming in Bunny.  It was Susan's turn for a happy, "Mmm."  Kane
was a big, powerful teen, so it was in the realm of fantasizing to imagine
how an even more mature male must feel to Bunny; the hard rhythm of the
throbbing pulses as she lay tightly holding him, the perfection of their
stillness with each other, his very breaths as he inseminated her
repeatedly over endless moments that ended as over a full minute hard
sharing before the pulse calmed.

                  Gently the stallion lowered to the filly's tender, sperm
slicked breasts.  Gradually their breathing returned to normal.  Gradually
the fullness of what had happened intruded, causing them to try not to grin
out loud.

                  "One thing's really handy, Grandpa, do you know what it
is?"
                  "What," the man asked, toying with a string of lank hair
across her forehead.
                  "I don't have to lie on my back for half an hour.  If
you'd spermed in my vagina, that's what I'd have to do, so it would go
inside me, like they showed on The Discovery Channel.  But you sprayed it
in my womb, and it will swim there for three days even if I do cartwheels."
                  "You're lucky," Susan sighed happily, "Kane and I are
practicing for mommy and daddy; he makes me lie still for an hour.  Of
course, he doesn't abandon me exactly."

                  Indeed, the teen had not abandon the girl at all.  He was
lying at her right hip, head propped on an elbow, as he masturbated her
quickly beyond the ability to speak.
                  Mid morning was no time for all-nighters.  Drew gently
left Bunny, and, sure enough, she was free of the clotting semen so obvious
on Susan.  They didn't rush about in embarrassed haste but slowly dressed,
chatting the while, and in ten minutes were off to find out if Patella, as
Kneecap was often called, was as nice as the camp they'd borrowed for an
hour.

                  "The rule sort of goes that when our baskets are full
it's okay if something happens," Susan said to Drew.  Same in his business,
the executive mused, when the client's store was full, the L.A. guys called
Heidi.  There were differences, too, of course; no matter how strapping and
tight an athlete was, it was unlikely he'd be admitted to Elaine's in a
Tarzan costume irregardless of whether he had a similarly attired eleven
year old girl with him or not.  Too bad.  The mercantile wheels and cogs
could be on the grim side and a little dish on the side could bring at
least one smile a year to Manhattan Island, he was a pro, he'd bet on it.
How far did you have to go beyond current definitions of extreme and
excessive to pair up young girls and mature men in a million venues?  As a
norm, wouldn't it take the fun out of war?  Who'd go if they had a Susan
Usher by their side ever day or a Bunny Cotton maybe even a little grouchy
at seven in the morning?  Would there be any time for catch if one was
partnered with Kane Sherman?  It could be a better world.  Potential fat
mamas put on hardball notice from age three, one meal a day and no chips
and dips or you'll be washing your sheets in a single scoop of Tide per
month.  That would be no threat to the boys, but maybe somebody at the
agency could think up something.

                  Meantime, it was mountain goat time.  Susan led and Drew
followed.  Both were equipped with sticks to probe for snakes and large
woven baskets, worn backpack style, for the catch of the day.  High noon
was approaching and Drew was having difficulty even outlining the day that
had begun scant hours before with a conventional couple in a conventional
campsite.  Now here he was miles from the trail, leaping along the ridges
and trying to keep his eyes peeled as he tried not to fantasize about Bunny
and Kane and two full baskets.

                  A kid, eh?  Patterned responses were the stuff of
wallpaper; the agency tried to modify them without capsizing the boat.
He'd fallen into the trap with Bunny.  Kid?  No way...

                  "And why not, pray tell?" he asked himself.  Bunny and
his daughter-in-law lived alone.  Gretchen was a fair twenty percent earth
mother with enough insurance money to raise a village and three outlying
farms. Medical tech was such and such, presumably could paste Bunny into a
database and produce an accurate risk factor.  There must be clinics in
Europe who dealt in underage pregnancies; probably any discreet spa would
have an OBGYN consulting.  A few months away, and, presto, look who
Gretchen adopted.  As good a way to pick up French or Spanish as he could
think of.  And if the baby was Kane's?  He wouldn't care if the father was
a Dickens' rat catcher as long as she was the mother.  In fact, having the
boy tangentially involved in their new family might be half a thrill unto
itself.  They had, after all, taken swabs; presumably the Hunters had
theirs on file.  For sure, it would make an interesting topic for a
fireside chant.

                  Susan was finding Drew keener by the moment.  He was,
first time out, nearly matching her find.  He was bold and aggressive on
the slopes, without causing avalanches and tearing up the delicate terrain.
She learned quickly to guard her eyes, because if she focused, he'd be off
faster than she would, laughing as he dropped the fungus into her basket.
She got him back a few times, and the hours passed.

                  Typically, `full' to a hunter meant it was impossible to
add another mushroom without it rolling off.  Then a handkerchief was tied
over the mouth of the basket and it was deemed officially full.
Interesting needlework on the handkerchief, Such and such a design in such
and such a style following such and such a motif.  It was either study blue
fabric or look up into the blue eyes which were also pretending to examine
such and such.

                  "We did well and it's only twenty minutes back to K-W so
we have lots of time," Susan said softly.
                  "As the mountain goat drops?" Drew asked.
                  "As only the fittest crows fly it," the girl responded.

                  And another tendril of prostitution.  "How did you get
here?"  That kind of question, so normal on a train or plane, so staggered
under the burden of a skimpy costume and naked right breast.  Okay.  Think
like an executive.  If the question's harder to ask, how might that relate
to the value of the answer?  Fancy thinking, but what if she asked?
Politeatudes.  Oh, Cleveland, how interesting...  Instead she asked what
kind of jerk in all of creation wrote the Robin Leach "Whatever" line as
well as the same line when it was used in cat litter commercials.  Why
would any respectable corporation use, and use inappropriately, at that, a
punk, throwaway word like `whatever'.

                  It was nice to know they were watching, people with IQs
higher than their cats, that is.  He named the writers, learned a lesson,
and felt loaded for bear in respect to his next very high to very low memo.
                  "Someone cloned one of us into the other," Susan said.
"Do you think it was Bunny first, and me second, or vice-versa?"
                  Once trained to the yoke, trained to the yoke one
remains.  And what did an executive, even a creative one, live and breathe?
Paperwork!  In as close to deadpan as he could manage, Drew suggested Susan
check the Hunters' files against his granddaughters application.  He was
just kidding.  It was obvious the girls were rapacious copies of each
others, god knew, they'd probably spent the identical amount of time in the
library for the last five years, had the same number of heartthrob
teachers, male and female, drop everything in their behalf, and figured
out, somewhere along the line, that if a bullet passed six inches over
their shoulders it should mess up more than a do on the same hour of the
same day.  They looked so much alike it was half frightening, then there
were the identical budding breasts if you had the heart for them.

                  She liked a lot of ads.  The first Stewart and the first
Steven.  The diabolical Englishman of several years gone by.  Her favorite
of all time, and his, was the story of dragging an early aircraft engine to
the summit of Pike's Peak to test the new supercharger.  The final scene is
from an airliner looking twenty-thousand feet down on Pike's Peak.
(General Electric.)  They also locked horns, to bond, not fight, over the
last episode of "Victory at Sea", with its mesmerizing score, as the finest
media and work of art of all time.

                  But what if it had been otherwise, a youze-guyz gum
snapper transported by fate to the ridges of Hastings county?  From the
stunning impact of the first mirror display, the executive had figured he
was in pretty safe company, but Susan?  Were there more like her?  And
Kane?  One for every day of the year?  Liberals were so frightened of the
slippery slope they'd likely die out of that fright, alone.  Yet, here
their lack of doctrine might apply.  Susan, then; this year, then; tonight,
then; now, then.  Libertine.  Profligate.  Philanderer.  Sport.  It would
almost seem so much company would allow one to tackle any slope, slippery
or not, but, since none of them had any worthy answer, they'd make useless
company.  Fidelity.  Trap of traps.  And the answer was simple.  Some was
okay.  Not some fidelity, a massive amount, but some flexibility, also.  It
was another catastrophic argument for February/October matches.  An older
male will let a young mate play, arrange and encourage it; support any
resulting child as his own, and within moderate latitude.  A young partner
will make mountains out of mole hills, return home to stir up a tempest in
the teapot, and destroy something that is probably not damaged one iota by
a limited amount of adultery.  The ritualization, I've gotta have one,
paradigms of the Open Marriage were likely false; it was far to variable a
subject to categorize effectively, but, still, there were attractive
options.

                  I write this from the standpoint of having been the
second man in three relationships, two with girls with long-term
boyfriends, and once with a married woman.  In none of these fairly
long-term relationships was I the weight of a feather if the basic
relationship was a locomotive.  All three males had far more to fear from
lightning than they did from me.  In other works I've alluded to Anne's
affair with my brother, which made no iota of difference in our marriage
that I am aware of.  It can't, probably, happen two nights a week or even
much more than half that amount, but there is some latitude.  Personally,
if both partners are intelligent and reasonable people, I think sharing
even the most intimate details, when one's partner is tuned in to hearing
them, banishes secrets and enriches the original relationship.  Not all the
time, sometimes.  God may have given you a brain but it seems to me it's up
to me to teach you how to use it, because surer than snow in Alaska, no one
else seems to be teaching you squat.  Keep your weight down, have sex with
your children, and swing modestly with a small local group of partners and
an occasional hedonistic vacation.  Very occasional.  If you want other
advice, read another writer.

                  By now they'd found a comfortable log, dropped their
tunics to the forest floor, and seated themselves facing each other.

                  "How long have you been with Robb & Robb?" Susan asked.

                  What a difference a little conversation can make.  At an
earlier point, the nominal question might well have been asked by an
uncomfortable girl trying not to appear bored or surely.
                  "Long enough to be known by the payroll department," he
replied to her friendly giggle.
                  "Is it hard writing for money?"
                  "And that's a fact," he replied.  "You become a corporate
entity.  If you don't type it out, about a hundred people don't have
anything to do that day.  They twist the knife by reminding you they have
kids to feed.  It's like Elmer Fudd with Bugs and Daffy sighting in on his
eardrums with cartoon-size shotguns."
                  "So what happens to talent under all that pressure?" the
pixie asked.
                  "The stuff loves an audience," Drew explained, "so it
comes out and dances a jig.  I didn't split because I had too little, but
because I had too much.  I was always thinking up literary riffs, five
words here, fifty there.  Like fire bells in a burning city.  That made
things lopsided.  If I skew the whole agency to me, then drop dead, there'd
be hell to pay, so its other hands on the door to the conference room..."
                  "While you...?"

                  Well, the embarrassing part had to come.  They were going
to be spending at least two more days together, maybe more; probably more,
he would say, so it was inevitable.

                  "Write a novel," Drew replied, trying to neither groan
nor sigh.
                  "What's the first scene?" the eleven year old asked.



                  The flashes were a mystery, snapping in the darkness like
the clack of a wolf's jaw and gone as fast as they snapped.  "Well,"
Kasanov said to himself, "I've never caught a coach at night, so what do I
know?"  Plus it was pretty, the sudden flares, some fizzling as a point
while others arced for a split second.
                  With the lightning the thunder.  Kasanov knew it would
sound louder at night.  The prince's letter had said do not take fright,
stand your ground.
                  What was that all about?  He was from Burbank, what could
frighten a sixteen year old after that?  Or was he kidding himself?  Two
librarians and a department head had read the letter, shaken their heads
and said words to the effect that if the check cleared, he might as well
go.  Being a college Junior at sixteen did open up the old options box.
But Pednostrangia?  Who'd ever heard of the burg?  The Black Sea, the
Caucus, Mongolia, and after that it was all Out there somewhere; Eastern
Europe, Central Asia, who knew where, who wanted to?
                  The check had cleared.  An empty map, or Burbank?
Choices like that had engendered religion with its saints to intercede.
But actually empty instead of apparently empty, what would that be like?
Maybe he could slow down and catch up with himself.

                  Now the thunder was directly overhead as the coach
traversed the penultimate switchback, at the distance of a hundred yards
appearing as half a comet with sparks flying from the hoofs of the
jingling, snorting team as well as the iron shod wheels.

                  "If he harkeneth with haste, come to know ye dread,
laddie, for he leaves god so far behind," the bar keep at the inn had
whispered over his ancient counter. "Probably suffered in translation,"
Kasanov thought to himself, dismissing the grammar, yet being West Coast
enough not to view the fellow as a total moron.

                  On the other hand, a voice did rise even over the rising
thunder as the coach slewed through the final turn and began the final
charge to the courtyard.  "Do not take fright, stand your ground!" it
wailed, every syllable eerily distinct even though the conveyance was
bearing down full tilt, seeming to plow forward cresting an ocean of
sparks.

                  The rear wheels locked which was kind of cool and made
the sparks really fly.  Six pairs of black stallions surged into the dim
lamplight of the inn, slowing in front of Kasanov, until the dragging coach
screeched to a stop on the flint cobble.  Again the coachman bespoke
himself about taking fright and whatever.  "You may have twelve horses,"
the boy replied, "but my dirt bike has twice as many.  Twenty four
horsepower."
                  This didn't seem to make any difference to anybody.  The
horses pawed, the door of the coach opened, and Kasanov, in boarding, took
the last step of his mortal life.

                  "I though you were meant to leave your audience wondering
what happened next," Susan said, her eyes round as she suppressed a giggle.
                  "She would want to know," Drew sighed to himself, clearly
reading the comment as a tease.  "And under these circumstances."  Being a
novelist is a terrible thing reeking of stigma.  No author can ever
dillydally over any chance, no matter how unique, of proving his skill at
lore.  We can't soft shoe at parties, rag in the ship's piano, or sing to
the billion stars, but, ask us to tell a story and pull up a chair.
                  So, what happened next?

                  Kasanov saw himself.  Startled, he looked up.  There he
was again.

                  "O, you thief," Susan squealed pinching Drew.  While it
was undoubtedly nice, once one was set up and about his craft, to have
avidly engaged readers, those who wish to jump ahead in the story can be a
plain old nuisance.  Very gently, because the kid was a sweetheart, he
stood her from the fallen log, and, finding a perfect eight on the inclined
timber, bent her just as gently over it.  He came slowly around behind her,
waited for a second as she clawed her legs apart by walking her feet away
from each other, and let him lie against her back.  His hands circled her
to protect her nipples from the texture of the bark, and he found her in
minutes, probing so tenderly she half hoped she'd remain hidden for an
hour.  His entry was tentative and boyish; halting and shy.  It was minutes
before she felt solidly and uncompromisingly against her what Bunny had
felt earlier in the day.  And then he just held her, still as if a bear and
cubs were passing.  "Whatever kind of storyteller he turns out to be,"
Susan mused to herself, "he has a way of stifling the peanut gallery.  Of
course, if he started ejaculating in her, that would be another story and
she'd undoubtedly mew like a kitten.

                  The door slammed behind Kasanov as the coach lurched
forward.  He did a neat somersault, landing in a squat so close to his
image it frightened him.  If he'd known what was going on he'd have doffed
the contraption on his head and saluted a fine young beast, indeed.
Rather, he needed a set of bearings, so he looked around.  It didn't help.
Sure, he might be five thousand miles from Burbank and off any known map,
but that was extreme orientation compared to the gleanings of his search
for the familiar and normal.

                  The children were eleven.  Twins, but for being boy and
girl.  Infinitely delicate, skin pale as the moon, oval faces framed by
lacy tendrils of jet black hair.  Familiar.  First the gold mirrors, well,
duh'uh, they'd shown a familiar face, but these children in their freaking
costumes of a century before yesteryear, that was something else.  If they
weren't him now, they were him a few years ago.  And add a female him, to
boot.

                  While the two on the rear seat vastly escalated the
feeling of perdido, of being lost, the disorientation was becoming more
frightening with each clearing of Kasanov's spinning head simply because
there was someone in the front seat.  The world was sane, the world was
balanced, most of it, most of the time, therefore if such ethereal and
delicate, orchid-like, beauties made part of the passenger list, who was
likely to complete it?  The boy wondered if Baskin and Robbins had a secret
ultra freezer for ice cream for their executive fleet.  If he spent a week
in such a freezer would he be less capable of movement than he was now?
What options were there, though.  Mary the girl, arm wrestle with the boy,
and never turn around and look to the front?  Sounded like a good place to
start.

                  The floor of the coach was thickly carpeted.  A valise
stored in the corner worked as an impromptu backrest. He couldn't live his
whole life this way, but, considering the alternative, it was a start.
And, yes, he could definitely live his `whole life' seated on the floor of
the spacious carriage and looking at his own juvenile images.

                  "I'm not into ye olde English," Kasanov said, pulling a
notebook from the pocket of his cargo shorts, "but this is rip-snortin',
and nothing else."
                  "If you'll think back at the precision with which the
innkeeper addressed you," the girl said, "you may respect someone of my
station pointing out to you the fact that `rip-snortin', as you say, will
soon amount to ludicrous understatement and you will look at your notes
thinking What was I thinking?"
                  "I'm just glad to know I'll be looking at my notes,"
Kasanov rejoined.  Not a far-fetched thought for a boy afraid to look over
his very left shoulder.

                  "Yes," said the girl, "it is your eyes which will see
everything you write as we journey through the night."

                  "In other words, Welcome to Pednostrangia," the sixteen
year old intoned.

                  "We are unable to welcome you home," the boy on the seat
said, "and, since it is over your land we ride, we may not welcome you as a
stranger."
                  "I like it," Kasanov said.  "When the bar tender said
`harkeneth', he really meant it.  If it should turn out he's my bartender,
I'd be most pleased."
                  "Yes, that's good," the boy on the seat said, "find joy
where you can.  Why the very sparks thrown from hooves and wheels are a
delight upon occasion."

                  "Gosh," Kasanov said, "you can't get much friendlier than
that."  He'd over-reacted to a jolt from his road, which might be due for
some maintenance, and, as he caught his balance, slipped his right hand
into the pocket of his jacket.

                  Again feigning awkwardness in the pitching coach, the boy
half-rolled and sprang.  He grabbed the male by the collar, clicked his
knife open four inches in front of his eyes, and buried the tip an eighth
of an inch `twixt ear and neck.  His eyes locked on those of the girl.  "If
you move," he hissed, "I'll stab HIM so hard the knife will cut YOU in
half."

                  The pair froze.
                  "That's good," the American teen said, "now, as to the
bozo behind me, whatever it is, it better bathe in a recipe of one-third
water, one-third rock salt, and one-third ice or his legs or crawlers or
whatever they are going to be bathed in the most beautiful blood east of
the Pecos.

                  Apparently one didn't speak to it, whatever it was, but
it was apparent the message had made its way around the coach.  Kasanov
shut his knife and resumed his ersatz seat, still, absolutely definitely,
not wanting to look over his shoulder.

                  "Now what is all this?" Kasanov asked.  "Why the letter.
Why am I here.  Where are we going.  What's the mutant squid an back of me
doing so far from the ocean?  Why the mirrors?  Why the hundred thousand US
dollars?
                  "That's half the A-list."

                  "I am Hildon," the boy said, "this is Raquel.  Rapinsky.
And no, we're not cousins.  Your mother took a sabbatical in 1991.  It is
now August of 2002, making us eleven years old, my fraternal twin and
myself.

                  Mom had been gone.  She'd left just after Christmas and
returned just before the Fourth of July.  He remembered.

                  "So who dropped you off the map?" Kasanov asked.
                  "Pednostrangia sent not a single dove, put a pair of
doves to the 1938 Olympic Games, so jests as to our size and global stature
are wasted," Hildon said.
                  "But Hildon," his sister said, "we have imported, at the
greatest inconvenience and cost, an American specifically for his
wisecracking nonchalance.  We must respond by saying tee-hee and pretending
to giggle.  Encourage him."

                  "But if you say that right in front of him, Raquel," the
boy said, "you will tend to quash the very spontaneous levity you wish
displayed."

                  "Our parents wouldn't have spent sixteen years in Burbank
to produce a quashible brother," Raquel countered.

                  The path had smoothed.  The blaze and crackle of
forty-eight steel shod hooves on rock and stone now muted to a dull,
turf-like rumble.
                  "Ah," Kasanov said, "finally we make our journey over the
bodies of my peasants.  I must remember to send out cards of thanks."

                  "I rest my case," Raquel sighed.
                  "Yes," Hildon agreed with his sister, "irrepressible to a
fault."
                  "Since we apparently share a mother," the wayfarer said,
"you'll be aware of the necessity of clinging to any straws the lighter
side of life offers."
                  "You speak of Burbank," Hildon said.
                  "You mean it's worse where we're going?" the boy asked.
                  "You see in us the lighter side of our destination,"
Raquel explained.
                  Destination was nice to hear.


                  "Yes," the girl's brother added, "as your eyes may one
day read your notes, so your feet may alight from this coach."
                  "And meantime, I'm the one with the knife, though, all
cards face up, the zombie in the front seat may level the playing field."

                  "What kind of field is that," both fraternal twins asked
as one.

                  "Drew?" Susan asked.
                  "Yes, darling?" the man said.
                  "It's sort of when I was eight my dad and I would study
tide pools together like you're together with me.  The thing is, if he
overdid it on the funny stuff he'd make me giggle.  I guess you can figure
the rest out for yourself.  Anyway, he made me giggle a lot which is why
I'm not a marine biologist."
                  "You're eleven," the man reminded the child, "what kind
of marine biologist could you be?"
                  "I guess you've got a point," the girl said.
                  "Well, I get yours.  I'll try to ixnay the funny play."
                  "If it happens anyway, start telling again as soon as you
can."
                  "How long was it before your father could speak?" Drew
asked.
                  "Ages.  But I was only eight.  I think it takes longer to
recover from a second grader."
                  "He recovered?" Drew wondered strictly to himself.  Trip
hard enough on a root of wit, and he'd end their coupling like an oafish
teen.  Hmm.  No, no, she really did like the story and it was his moment.
"Snap no gum at me, young lady, and see what happens," he said to himself,
enjoying the fast ride on rough trail and a game with no penalty strokes
because, and of this he was certain, no stokes would be needed.  She was
right.  The slightest movement other than his fingers caressing her nubile
breasts and again he would be spilling his seed deep in the womb of a
child.

                  His body might make the ride, but his mind was losing its
grip.  "Do you know anything about play?" he asked the twins.  "Fun?
Jokes?  Comedy?  Laughs, laughing, laughter?"

                  "We know if you say a word three times it sounds
ridiculous," Hildon said.

                  Here the reality of the sin of his father arose, more
frightening than the apparition he could not even sense in the front seat
of the carriage.  Half the reason he knew it was there was that the mirrors
actually shielded the seat.  If he looked straight up, he could see only
himself on the floor and the twins on their wide seat.  If truth is
stranger than fiction, it is also more frightening.  So the evil specter
had a twin.  He was going to reply to the childish taunt of his brother by
saying he came from Burbank, and it wasn't ridiculous.  How childish would
that have been?  On the other hand, maybe so sad a joke would make them
laugh.

                  "No more kidding myself on that subject," he mused to
himself a moment later.  It wasn't that his spanking new siblings were
expressionless, they looked most engaging, as a matter of fact.  It was
just that their minds seemed to be entirely elsewhere.  Yet they'd hoisted
him out of Los Angeles, zipped him a third of the way around the world,
stuffed his treasure chest, and seemed to be running a dozen horses half to
death.  If they didn't want him funny, maybe they'd like him dangerous, but
he'd already tried that and they'd responded with some mumbo jumbo about
his eyes seeing this and his feet doing that.  Creepy.

                  "Are you equating our serious natures with deficiency?"
Raquel asked.
                  "Letterman's rarely even on the funny farm, much less in
the barn, and he's epically deficient, so I have my reasons," Kasanov
observed.

                  "We would guess that humor is hard to teach," Hildon
said.
                  "Mothers teach their eldest sons," the sixteen year old
said.  "That's about it."
                  "I regret I was not the eldest so I might proceed light
of tongue and glib of reference," Hildon said.  "Me, too," the older boy
agreed.

                  Just as their beauty meant there had to be, somewhere, a
balancing ogre or two, so their prosaic attitude toward the light fantastic
meant, and he was sure enough of this to make him nervous, there must be a
compensating characteristic.  His eyes were doomed, also, but who knew just
when? his feet.  It would be nice to get to the bottom of things before he
was walking on his hands navigating by smell.

                  "You are here," Hilton began, after they'd ridden some
minutes in silence, "in response to our National Experiment."
                  "No, no," Kasanov interrupted, "for national experiments
you want someone from Minnesota or Iowa; someone who has walked amongst
corn, not just popped in a microwave."

                  "'Microwave,' did you hear my brother," Raquel said,
addressing Hildon on the seat beside her.
                  "I did," the boy replied, "and how odd, coming so
recently from so far, he'd know of the Pednostrangian salute to our uncle
the king."

                  Apparently there were bigger fish in the pan, because the
anomaly was dropped.

                  "Our experiment does not need," Hildon said, "one who is
of the earth.  Indeed, someone boasting your range of funnyness might call
our project doggone dirty, so the cleaner the boy on day one, the better."

                  "If I'm to start at the bottom, digging graves for my
people, I hope mine is the last in the row," Kasanov said.
                  "Already he talks of promotion," Hildon said to Raquel.
                  "The last time I encouraged him with hope and praised him
for finding joy, you argued with me," Raquel said.
                  "You were right," Hildon said softly, "it is okay.  He's
not smart enough, seeing as how his entire mental capacity is taxed to the
limit in the name of his quips, his wry commentary, and his arch
observation, to realize you are verbalizing fantasy, and it may lighten,
may ease.  Just try not to make small things into real things and I'll try
not to criticize in the future."

                  They seemed to be getting along well.  Burbank had
legions of kids who were nothing but skateboarders, so why not a brother
and sister who were like totally zoned?  And if he were to be the butt of
their jokes, well, he had a home address proving he was born with
inch-thick armor.

                  But that was for ribbing.  For "Price is Right" jokes.
What kind of armor did he wear against the horses.  Yes, the ride has
smoothed, even eerily, but it had been long minutes and the animals were
still running wildly.

                  "If you don't have an SPCA here," he said to both twins,
"I hereby found one, and if you don't call the driver and tell him to slow
the fuck down I'm going to jab my knife up through his seat.  Hard."

                  "He says he saw a driver," Hildon said, poking his sister
in the ribs with his elbow.
                  "To think that our child may be able to laugh at a notion
like that one day," Raquel sighed happily.

                  "Very funny," Kasanov thought.  His hosts, siblings, or
whatever they were, better be.  Kidding, right?

                  Hildon backtracked to the still rushing animals, and,
sure, the click of the switchblade helped.
                  "You've heard of spirited horses, I'm sure," he said,
letting the subject trail off as asked and answered.

                  "Don't be very afraid," the American boy quoted to
himself.  At this point, even the crack of a whip would be reassuring, some
contact with the possible.  The next pincushion he met caging bucks outside
a back-home Denny's he hail as a fellow well met.  Would there be next the
baying of the hounds of hell?

                  It appeared not.  They appeared not, `they' being eyes.
Four of them, now, as the speeding coach seemed yet again to a, smooth,
and, b, accelerate, growing softer and wider.

                  "We are well inside your border now, our brother," Raquel
said, removing her old fashioned bonnet and letting her raven hair spill to
her shoulders.  She tossed the headpiece past his left shoulder, and, it
seemed to Kasanov, the garment made just about the noise it should as it
landed on the seat.  That was a little freaky.  He was sixteen, not exactly
the age boys are into monsters, but there were limits.  Tireless horses.
Empty seats.  His eyes.  His feet.  Her hair, and now his, as Hildon
followed his twin's example and tossed his ancient-style hat beside her's.

                  Aw, why did they have to go and shake their heads, now
looking out from under fluffy bangs.  Puppy girl and puppy boy and he'd
pulled and knife on them?  It was a `forsooth' kind of setting so he
muttered the word to himself.

                  "Do babies make themselves in Burbank?" Raquel asked.

                  Careful, tedious review was Kasanov Rapinsky's so-called
secret to being four academic years ahead of his contemporaries.  He sat
reviewing now, unconsciously reaching for his notebook as if there were
time for it, a, and enough data to fill half a page, b.  They weren't into
social conviviality and verbal charm, but they were full and dynamic
children, so they had to be into something.  Of course, as princes, they'd
have conventional demands on their time, crypt openings, parties for
pathologists and their colleagues in forensic medicine, writing, for they
were obviously bright enough, catchy copy for funeral homes and ambulance
services.  Anything with animals?  A road-kill usage society to fund or
chair?  Sure, all of that an probably things he wasn't in any position to
imagine, but there was something more.  Some fetish, obsession, addiction
or common-garden-variety hang-up.  Tracking that down, that was the thing.
The flying horses could wait, the strange arrangement of mirrors, the sound
of hats landing on a seat, and yes, there'd probably be more examples
before the night was out; all of them relegated to the B-list.

                  "You do know how to say `baby', don't you?" Raquel asked.
"You just put your lips together and blow."

                  "That's what the driver's meant to be doing for the
horses," Kasanov said, "whistling to them, not driving them, singing to
them, telling them fairy tales, just not driving them."

                  "Think of Bob Eubanks," Hildon said, "he's gone on
forever, and each stallion outweighs him by eight or ten times."

                  That was close to home.  He was on the verge of letting
the issue go as being doubly asked and answered when he caught a flicker of
fire in Raquel's eye.  Now there was just what he didn't need.  Something
was lurking behind him, that was bad enough and probably even worse than
the incessant chopper patrols over every neighborhood in town, and he
didn't need a beautiful young sister talking about babies, fielding every
feeble attempt at a blooper to the lighter side of the diamond, and then
sitting there with a mysterious fire in her eyes that he, for the life of
him, felt she had tried to hide.

                  Derisive commentary about his home town came in waves.
Burbank this and Burbank that (why won't three Burbankians change a light
bulb?  Duh'uh!) all over the place, then an interlude until the following
wave.  Between the waves residents sort of went into a waiting mode.  Good
practice.  He sat propped comfortably against the valise, his right knee
resting against the mirror which reached from the carpeting to the
overhead, and waited for another dip.  It was not long in coming.

                  "Our national experiment," Hildon said, "could not
succeed unless my twin and I take our appropriate roles as guides and
leaders."

                  "And," his sister added, "three guesses to determine
which resident of Burbank, California, is the real third party in the
experiment."
                  "Aren't you glad she didn't ask the real Third Party to
please stand up," Hildon said.
                  Frightening, because his total absence of humor must be
matched by a corresponding excess somewhere along the line.  Hard to find
much good news in a situation like that, which is precisely why we are
guarded when it comes to letting SoCal teens run things.  They don't know
it all.  (They only think they're big.)
                  Good news?  Was he in the market for some?

                  "Have you listened to a word I said?" Raquel asked
Kasanov.

                  "Party?" Kasanov replied.
                  "A choice encounter of the THIRD party," Hildon added,
helpfully.
                  It was nice to see him lightening up, even if it was to
muddy that which already seemed opaque.  He was meant to put his lips
together and blow.  Tee-hee.  And what was the line about kids in Burbank?

                  "Have you ever done anything with anybody?" Raquel asked.
Did he note a trace of impatience in her voice?
                  Was she trying to be funny?  Was he not getting her
drift, coming off as dense and un-cool?  He'd had a lifetime of that.  "Yo,
dude, where ya from?"  End of conversation.  Luckily, the burg did have a
library, and, since he was there, already, such questions were unlikely,
and would have been even if there were ever someone else in the reading
room to ask them.

                  Silence.

                  "I'm beginning to worry about the underlying validity of
the national experiment," Hildon said to Raquel.  "I mean in a lab, it's
not fair to tamper with the natural ways of whatever organism it is you are
studying.  Sure, you can hint a little, but grabbing him by the scruff of
the neck would not be true to the accepted path of empirical
enlightenment."

                  "Still," Raquel answered, "it might be fun, for all of
that, especially seeing as how he's armed."
                  Hildon stared down at the teen sitting at his feet.

                  "Hey," Kasanov said, "you can't fail if you don't try."

                  "Always easy to tell an outsider," the boy remarked to
his twin.
                  "We shouldn't be surprised, though," Raquel answered,
"after all, Pednostrangia is built on the secretive and clandestine.  If a
boy comes from the States and knows not our ways, is it fair of us to blame
him, solely, for his ignorance?"
                  "Not with a mother like ours," Hildon said while the girl
nodded.

                  This was a dream.  Any moment he'd wake up and find The
Comedy Club had burned down, and his parents were providing temp housing
for a few of the wait staff.  He wasn't off the planet and out of reach, he
was being served breakfast with a smile.  No eggs, no bacon, no juice,
milk, or coffee.  How long had it been since there was any good news?

                  "Should we start at square one?" Raquel asked, "I
remembered the book."
                  Book?  Kasanov recalled the John Wayne joke.  "I gave
John a book for Christmas."  "But he already has one."  Dare he even ask?

                  Hildon seemed to be becoming more helpful as their
journey progressed.  "It's on abnormal psychology," he explained to
Kasanov, and paused for a significant moment before completing his thought:
"or so they say."

                  Helpful was a tricky word.  If someone helps you with the
spadework on your grave, is he in fact helping you at all?  And the term
was androgynous.  Would assistance with the spoon of opiate, getting it
steadily to the lips so none was spilled, be helpful?  And if you were in
the last pint of an emphysemial fill-up?  Boy, it might be an idea to think
along different lines.

                  "The strangest thing is," Raquel said, "that he seems, at
least on the outside, literate.  I mean there are a lot of countries in the
world, by some counts nearly two hundred, but, methinks, none so fairly
named as our own, whatever it may lack in other worldly attributes."
                  "Just the fact it's listed nowhere by anybody should be
enough of a heads up to alert any intelligent person," Hildon added.
                  "Well sink me for a scholar," Kasanov thought to himself.
"At this rate I won't have my Bachelor's until I'm nineteen."

                  Living to nineteen was a nice thought, and, unless he was
mistaken, the soft glow in Raquel's eyes was there because she'd detected
in his expression a ray of hope.  Was it pity or acceptance?  Whatever it
was, it didn't last long, and, as he watched, was replaced by a boring gaze
of the drilling kind.

                  "We," the girl whispered, "you total nimrod and most
patented dolt since creation, are talking about sex.  Ped.  Pederast.
Pedophile.  Ped.  Pednostrangia."

                  "A half-time's coming up?" Kasanov wondered aloud,
Burbank born and Burbank bred.  "How can it be?  This buggy doesn't even
have a set."

                  "I think," Raquel said, "we'd have better luck feeding a
guinea pig to a snake, then using it in our national experiment, than we're
going to have with our California brother."
                  "To fail before our people," Hildon replied gently,
taking his twin's left hand in his right hand, "is not an option.  There
must be, a, due diligence, and, b, execution.  If, after that, the dud is
still a dud he can pack himself back..."

                  Kasanov wondered how long it took Stephen King to come up
with a dread line.  One that sent cold chills out in search of colder
chills.  And Hildon's look at misspeaking himself?  Embarrassment or pity?
"Of course," he rationalized in silent soliloquy , "what is life but a
search for destination and final truth."  Nah.  The malls wouldn't
obliterate the last vestiges of human commerce in his native city for
months.  He still had things to live for.  (Not that it meant anything.)

                  "Have you ever even dated?" Raquel asked her new brother.
                  "Yeah," Kasanov replied, an edge of fear in his voice,
"I'm a Junior in the math department at UCLA Westwood because I spend a lot
of time at the union copping chicks."

                  "Well, do you know what the chicks are for?" Hildon
asked, seeming not able to help being helpful.

                  "For after I graduate," the boy rejoined.
                  "Guess again," Hildon intoned.

                  "After my Master's thesis? the new boy guessed, adding:
                  "I'm planning to display algorithms related to crop
development using politically incorrect fertilizer.  Quite interesting,
really, and out mother's dead keen on it."

                  "How about before you leave this carriage?  Is that clear
enough to get through the smog?"
                  "Smog's actually quite rare," quoth Kasanov.  "Nine times
out of ten, it's just smoke.  If it happens to mix with excessive water
vapor, then you have s-m-o-g.

                  "Is he trying to be s-m-u-g?" Rachel asked Hildon, "or
have we allied ourselves with the most lopsided head since The Elephant
Man?"

                  "Don't blame me," Kasanov squealed in anguish.  "Do you
know how they show Beach Blanket movies?  And it makes you think county
beaches are nice?  They're not.  They're horrible.  Bulldozed sand and
brown/black scum, cloudy almost always, albeit, with no smog because the
Westerlies blow away the smoke, but cold, windy air, and cold, gray water.
So you morons think SoCal beaches are to dream of dreams, while Cape Cod
beaches with clear water and tide pools are a hundred times more
interesting.  Even that little beach from the movie, "From Here to
Eternity".  It's surrounded with slimy rocks and the water is cold, gray,
and dirty.  The only people who use it are movie crews.  And surfing?  It's
nothing to drive from Malibu to Palace Verde Estates and see maybe fifty,
even in pretty nice weather, out of a population base of twenty million.
What you're talking about, too.  It may seem like a hot body wonderland,
but that's no more real than the horse was on the old Marlboro billboard on
The Strip.  Balloons and cotton candy.  Splish, splash, jump to the next
bath."

                  "Have we seen too many movies?" Raquel asked Hildon.
                  "I'll ask," he responded.

                  "So," the boy said, clearing his throat, "you've never,
say, for example, lingered away the afternoon with a tutor.  You know,
celebrated a good quiz grade, and taken a little break, and maybe he asked
you if you had a girlfriend, and you got talking."

                  "You mean during halftime?" Kasanov asked.

                  "We're going to make you drink, you know," Hildon said.
"If leading you up and down the trough by your halter doesn't work, don't
think you've gotten away with anything.  Keep this in mind.  Lead a thirsty
horse to water, and he will always drink.  Lead a freedom loving American
numbskull back and forth by the trough, and then imprison him until the
scent of coffee wafts where it will do some good."

                  "Cripes, there goes my nose," Kasanov muttered to
himself.

                  "Patience," Raquel cooed to her brother.  "There is
always Plan B."
                  "But wouldn't it be better if we could find a trace of
wit, first.  I don't like the idea of shocks and surprises and a scientific
endeavor."
                  "It's bad science," Raquel agreed, "but we have to ask
ourselves: isn't bad research better than none?"
                  "We could learn what not to do in the future from it,"
Hildon said, nodding at his bright twin sister.
                  "So Plan B?"
                  "He's brought it on himself.  Plan B it is."

                  "We were going to try a different tack," Raquel said to
Kasanov as if talking to an imbecile, "but there has been a little failure
to communicate.  We wanted to whisper the secrets of Pednostrangia as we
rode along.  By this time we assumed you would be sitting between us as we
indoctrinate you, our biological full brother, into the forbidden ways of
your land on no map."

                  "Maybe the peasants under the carriage wheels satisfied
my curiosity," Kasanov said.
                  "Yes," Hildon replied, "but we only use the particularly
dense ones, and then only on the rocky stretch of road that insulates your
border.  There is more to us than that."

                  "That's what I'm afraid of," quoth Kasanov.
                  "Well don't get uptight and enjoin it," the younger
brother said, earning Kasanov's attention with the dazzling play on words.
"Now you're talking," he said.

                  And so it was that the curtain was finally lifted and we
mustn't begrudge Kasanov his lollygagging, after all, he could have been
from Pasadena.

                  As we're musing over our young hero, he's having a
thought or two of his own.  Born again.  The nation's most hideous phrase.
Born-again Christian.  Not for him.  But born-again heathen?  Ah, where to
start?  Not with infidelity, because he had no one to be faithful to, but
he could try, eh, without being the first person from Burbank to try faking
stuff?

                  "Are you with us?" Raquel asked.
                  "I think so," Kasanov stammered.  What if he was wrong,
now?  Thinking what he was beginning to think and feeling what he was
definitely beginning to feel.  She was his sister.  And a brother.  (Here
the visitor caught a lucky break.  Where he was from, so little was known,
in a general sense, that aberrations and exotic variations were entirely
unknown.)

                  "Good," Hildon said, "just don't, for god's sake, look
behind you."
                  "Look at me, instead," Raquel said.  Funny, before it had
always been Hildon the Helpful.

                  The eleven-year-old twins, seemingly by accord, exchanged
places, with Raquel settling to her knees on the carpeted deck of the
coach, directly in front of her sixteen-year-old brother.
                  "It's my first time, too," she whispered back over an
ivory shoulder almost hidden in a cloud of raven hair.
                  Hildon sat in his new seat having nothing to say, but,
Kasanov surmised, missing little.  His silence was half a shame because in
spite of not being the eldest son, the boy seemed capable of an embryonic
archness and understated cynicism that, who knew? might yield a personality
over the long haul.
                  And it was not that he blamed the eleven year old.  His
mouth was dry enough to catch on fire, too.  Feeling loquacious, he was
not.  It was the buttons.  Twelve of them.  Where had that number popped
up?  Numb was right.  He was too numb to count to a dozen, had to count to
six, twice.  And after four, there were ridges in the pale green silk of
her old-fashioned bodice.  They could only mean one thing.  She was wearing
a bra.  Oh, if she were just a flat-chested kiddo this all might be
survivable, but, if she was developed, just starting, as she must be, well,
it was going to be eyes, feet, and hands to the cause, whatever the cause
turned out to be.  And if her skin were not quite so white that one touch
would seem to be all that should be allowed for even a virtuous lifetime,
that would make survival more than an abstract fantasy.  Even Hildon not
looking on would have helped, but the boy was focused on his twin as if she
were a treasure chest and he was the pirate with the key, and he was as
enchanting as his female twin, any day of the week.

                  Two versions of his younger self.  One thing was for
sure, once he cleared his math requirements for graduate school, he was,
for double sure, going to take a year of solid English so one day he could
write this all down.  He'd even stumbled across his first literary trick.
The trip into the foreign land would be at night, as this one was, so he
wouldn't have to waste time thinking up passing scenery.  Who needed
dogwood glades and pastoral stone bridges when one's traveling companions
were rapidly turning into the breath, food, and water of life?

                  Raquel wasn't looking at him now, and he missed her eyes
brightening with encouragement should an optimistic notion wend its way
into his train of thought.  (If it was condescending, it was still better
than nothing.)

                  Steadying herself with her left hand against the gentle
motions of the coach, Raquel reached back with her right to sweep her hair
aside.  Her gown, of gracious modesty in front, did plunge a bit at the
back.  It was like hint, hint, hint hitting you on the head with hammer,
hammer, hammer.  Even nakedness equal to the area of a common playing card
froze Kasanov's blood.  Or was it steam?  Vapor lock?  What?  This
inability to move.  To sit, staring, like a zombie, and a pretty damn
uncouth one, at that, at that long slim neck as it molded into the
shoulders of a child.  If skin looked so smooth and soft, why would one
touch it?  Surely it couldn't be improved by fingering or caress, by
kissing or fondling or any kind of stroking or petting Kasanov could
imagine.  On the other hand, he did come from a visual background, so close
to Hollywood, so far from god, so, maybe, if there was more of her to
see...?

                  "The fabric is old; antique, even," Raquel coaxed, "but I
still don't think you should kneel behind me and wait for it to
disintegrate."

                  Getting on his knees was an idea and bracing himself on
her as he shifted his legs actually seemed a feasible place to start.
Would it help to look up at the mirror so carefully installed as not to
reflect the front seat of the coach?  No.  Her milk white skin now
appeared, and the effect was magnified by the half dozen candles in crafted
glass chimneys that lighted the interior, ethereal in its softer, richer
glowing reflection.  Then again, so did his hands.  That did help.  His
hands for her, gold for gold.

                  "Hildon," Raquel whispered, "it feels better than I
thought it would."
                  "He's being really gentle," the younger brother said.
                  "Take your shirt off and kneel beside me," the girl
prompted.

                  Was Hildon going to be helpful once again?  Well, it sure
appeared as if he were going to try.  He caught Kasanov's eye and was
almost dismayed to see a soft look of acquiescence and inclusiveness.  Two
of them, almost identical to each other as they were identical to him at
age eleven.  The boy accepted his now gentle stare shyly, and his fingers
paused at the top button of his silk shirt as he awaited Kasanov.  "Now I'm
responsible for two of us," the sixteen year old mused as his once again
white hands found his sister's white skin and eased open the first button.

                  Nothing to do with planet Earth, now.  No one had ever
knelt behind a raven-haired beauty, unbuttoned her while watching her twin
bare his chest, and, with a tilt of the head, seen the whole scene rendered
as if in a prized painting in the personal collection of god.

                  Carson had trashed his town for thirty-something years.
Other comics joined in the fun.  Now who was getting the last laugh?  Who
was the wet behind the ears neophyte green-horn half as innocent as the day
he was born unbuttoning a ravishing pre-teen beauty in a gently swaying
coach with the long night before him?

                  Second button, looking into the boy's now hot, black
eyes.  Hildon hitched closer to his sister as she leaned against the seat,
closer to what in four years would be himself, then undid his second
button.
                  Which was more frightening for a tenderfoot, the child
with the bra or the beauty in underpants?  Would nerves bred in the Burbank
alternative turn out to be exquisitely sensitive or fatally so?  Could the
human body go from nearly zero to way the hell over a hundred in the space
of an hour?  Two hundred?  With the mirrors, four hundred, and, since he
wasn't at all bad looking in gold, add another hundred.  Stull survivable?
He rather thought not.  His mouth was dry, he was yawning with some kind of
sick paranoia, rumors of such which having penetrated the borders of his
burg, his heart was racing like a goldfish in a teacup of adrenalin, he was
panting, he was shaking, he was sweating, his neck was stiffening from
looking up, down, and half up and slightly to the left.  "I must look like
a chicken eating and drinking," he thought.

                  If so, neither Hildon nor Raquel seemed to notice.  The
boy was staring from his eyes to his hands, and, like himself, up at the
mirror.  The girl was silent and nearly motionless yet still clearly
communicated total welcome.  For each her button, a him button, for each
long, hot look, one in return, the boy's as good as his twin's during the
interval her back was to him.  Sure would be nice to get that over with.

                  "Tear them, and don't forget yours," Raquel moaned, and
she would long remember the instant response of ripping fabric and
ricocheting buttons.  Nor did it stop there.  Kasanov manhandled Raquel's
dress to her waist and tore off his own shirt, ditching his hat in the
process.  Hildon was naked to the waist, his slim chest heaving, as he
tossed his rent garment onto the forward seat where it was soon covered
with Kasanov's shirt.
                  The bare-chested young males looked at each other
longingly for a few moments, then the younger boy nodded and Kasanov bent
over his sister's almost naked back, his arms going gently around her waist
as he pressed her into the rear seat of the coach and tossed his head so
the eleven-year-old boy would kneel beside him.

                  "Have you seen her?" Kasanov asked, as scared of the sick
husk of his voice as he had been by anything to do with driving stallions
or goose bumps at the base of his neck..
                  "Not since we were five or six," the bare chested male
said.

                  Now that brought up a hell of a point.  How much did he
know, nothing.  Where had these guys grown up?  He'd survived, although
indubitably his sense of humor had suffered, because Mother Rapinsky
whirled off frequently and for extended periods of time, her one endearing
trait.  Half the answer was undoubtedly sitting on the rear seat of the
gently swaying coach, but that still left half.  Now there was a game to
play, because holding her against him felt heavenly and it would be nice to
stay awhile, necessitating tangential trains of thought along tracks that
offered at least glimpses, should it turn out survival was out of the
question.  So, a game.  Where had they been raised.  With tutors and
correspondence courses, the world was theirs.  Years ago, it would
undoubtedly been Beirut for it's reputation as an elegant and livable city.
But where, today?  No traces of accent, well, duh'uh, cable was everywhere.
No seemingly regional habits or figures of speech; no spot of tea had been
offered, but, then, surely, it wouldn't be, in a coach, would it now?
Australia, but no, the land had been convict city for so long an annoying
bluffness would have infused such tender-aged youngsters, fair enough?

                  Raquel purred to her brother's touches, and lay into the
rear seat of the carriage, moving her elbows well forward on the seat so
Kasanov would know how welcome he was.  The teen did not disappoint her,
and after some very private moments, move slightly to his right so her twin
could lie with her, also.

                  Kasanov realized it would be foolish to change the
subject because there was not subject as of yet.  Yet Raquel was a subject,
leaving the teen with the feeling he was interrupting himself by speaking,
even though it was in a whisper.

                  "Where did you guys grow up?" he asked, fondling Raquel
just under her right breast and guiding his brother to her left.
                  "Encino," the boy said, "but only until we were eight.
We've been in a border principality since 1999, loring it up, you might
say."
                  "And the sudden interest in me?"
                  "The master plan, I guess," Hildon whispered.  "With an
alternative of leaving you in Burbank, any option was fair game.  Then our
uncle got into the act.  Ten thousand peasants were set to work repairing
the border road, Raquel and I were drafted and your letter went out.  The
horses dragged the carriage over the new road, we picked you up, and you
died.  I mean you...  You know, things aren't really the same, are they?"

                  Man, when this pair wanted to get creepy it seemed like a
snap.  The question was, were they seeking it, out looking for it, then
passing it on as part of an elaborate charade, or, and it was better not to
go here, were they fending it off?  Was an infinity of despicable miasma
beyond the doors of the coach, and here, in this driving carriage, the
twins were somehow resisting?  Yeah, better not to go there, what with
short-attention-span disorder at epidemic levels.

                  "Are you boys ready for me naked?" Raquel asked.
                  "Can you leave your bra on for awhile?" Kasanov whispered
in response.
                  "Yes," the girl answered.

                  Both males gently peeled their sister's dress down over
he slim hips and long legs.  Then it was slips and petticoats, crinolines,
knickers and bloomers.  Only her panties were of the present age, and Na
was especially relieved because gently tossing the loose garments onto the
forward seat of the coach brought the same normal crinkle as their hats
had.  All he knew about the seat was that it faced to the rear, and that's
all he wanted to know.

                  In the end, Raquel had opted for her panties as well as
her bra, so, as the boys lay bare chested against her porcelain back, they
worked on each others' belts and buttons, finally excusing themselves to
each other so they could remove their shoes and socks and other clothing in
the somewhat cramped circumstances.  In a minute, they were both back on
their sister's back, dressed as she was, minus bra.

                  "We'll have to do this with her one at a time if she lies
on her back for us," Hildon whispered to his brother.  He was right.  She'd
have to lie on her back, and only one of them could lie across her to feel
her breasts against their young chests at a time.

                  For long minutes the coach ghosted quietly along, and
then it began to slow.  Inside, the brothers were leading each other in
turn up under the cups of their sister's training bra.  When finally they
were both molesting her as fully as they could while her panties were still
on, they panted wildly, stared into each others' eyes, and were
magnetically drawn into their first kiss.

                  Now the need for each other was becoming palpable, led
off by the need to be naked together.  The boys stripped their little
sister, first, then were gently, coaxingly, after each other, displaying
for one another with shy murmurs and tentative, careful touching.  Once
naked, they lay back on the girl who hissed and mewed at the feeling of
their penises.

                  Now the coach was not only slowing, but appeared to be
stopping.  And so it did, to a distant snorting of the animals and jingles
from the tack.

                  "We'll need some of the candles," Hildon said, opening
the door.  Now there was an idea.

                  The breeze must have been from the south; balmy with no
hint of dew.  Kasanov, at six feet, the tallest, reached to the rear
corners of the cabin and retrieved four candles, then joined his siblings
as they all backed slowly out the door and over the landing step, to a
slight creaking of the vehicles suspension, and found themselves on
luxuriant grass.

                  "Not here," Raquel whispered, crawling diagonally away
from the front of the carriage and soon reaching a steep bank.  The boys
unfastened her bra as she made her way slowly it seemed about half way up
the six foot incline, then she paused so they could pass the straps over
her arms and free her from her last garment.

                  Naked, she settled to the grass and rolled slowly on her
back.  Kasanov positioned himself a the child's right hip and her brother
attended her from her left waist.  Both young males, still panting and
sweating in spite of being in the open air, molested her openly.  They
played gently with the taut nipples on her budding mounds, and Kasanov
moved his right hand softly down over her belly, and, as she spread her
legs, found her and explored.  Raquel hissed, her head lolling, and Hildon
stared.  Both boys occasionally rose on their knees, laced their fingers
behind their necks, and arched their backs.  The teen was fully man-sized;
nearly eight inches, thick, circumcised, and bent slightly to the left.
Hildon was slim, but arrow straight and nearly as long as his brother.
Discovering she was very wet, Kasanov reached a hand across to Hildon,
intending to guide the beautiful, slim, younger edition of himself fully to
her.  This didn't happen.

                  There was a gentle snorting followed by a faint whinny
softly echoed by others.  They could feel more than hear the ground being
pawed very near by.  Granted, it would take a lot to distract Kasanov as he
guided the coltish eleven year old with the raven-black Greek curls to the
slim girl with her beautifully erect nipples, but, a dozen stallions is a
lot in anybody's book.

                  "Hildon," Raquel whispered, instinctively addressing her
more familiar brother, "it's James Bond."

                  "Who wrote this script?" Kasanov was about to query out
loud when he was advised that J.B. was their lead stallion.

                  James Bond was not alone as he entered the circle of
light glowing from the chimneyed candles.  His mouth was on the ear of the
team's youngest horse, a rookie who turned out to be named Jimmy Olsen.
                  The animals were respectful, Jim-O prancing half between
shy and bold.  J.B. led him on as the human males freed Raquel and again
knelt at her waist.

                  Nothing happened for some minutes while the rookie animal
explored the raven-haired waif lying naked on the grassy bank, her legs
spread widely.  J.B. mentored the two-year-old, letting go of his ear as
soon as it was obvious the young animal did not regard the girl as food.

                  Fifty years of making whoopee had dulled Burbank to the
comfortable side of oblivion, only the sprawl of studios among the body
shops and sweat shops keeping the name alive.  If Oakland had No there,
there, Kasanov's city had no anywhere.  This outline is necessary because
otherwise it isn't exactly realistic to have Kasanov kneeling at his little
sister's waist, wondering what is going on.  Yes, from dearth come mirth,
as good a nomination for a city slogan as I'm likely to come up with if
this novel turns into a one-thousand page long ball.

                  And it took awhile for the light to dawn.  Jim-O acted
less silly by the minute, becoming fully mature as his elegant Arabian lips
found the swollen cherries on Raquel's slim, boyish chest.  J.B. nuzzled
his protégé gently, positioning the tremendous animal between the
male humans and directly over the obviously receptive female.  Kasanov and
Hildon bowed their heads and gazed at each other under the beast's now
heaving chest.  Now there was one for the books.  The steed had run
tirelessly for twenty miles or more, and now it was beginning to blow
heavily.  (Who said horses don't have brains?)

                  "Is something going to happen?" the new boy asked the
veteran of three years in Eastern Europe.
                  "Animals are important in your country," Hildon replied,
"we treat them well."

                  "I take it that's a Yes," the sixteen year old murmured
aloud, distracted for the moment by his own size.  Looking down from the
face of the curly-haired black-eyed beauty scant feet away, Kasanov saw he
was also longer.  He sensed the eleven year old catching his eye and
looking down at him.  The hot eyes made him bigger yet.  "Nine inches and
less than an inch from being a freak," the boy mused in wonder.  Thicker,
too, as was Hildon who now looked really huge and adult as he knelt in the
thick grass.  Only one thing could have distracted the children from
staring at each other, and that was the animal between them.  Oddly, he
didn't have the standard equestrian build, rather his penis was more human
in the way it stood hard against his muscular belly.  Nor was the stallion
as gigantic as was the wont of his kind, probably not more than two feet,
and slim.  Only at his base did it seem the animal was fully developed to
the standards of his breed.

                  There was movement.  Jim-O laved a few tender parting
licks on Raquel's glistening taut breasts and raised his chiseled head.
J.B. again took the youngster by the ear, guiding him a pace and a half
forward.  There the animal, foze.  The boys, powerless in the abstract,
were capable enough when it came to easing their naked sister further up
the grassy incline.  More nudges from an attentive J.B. and the younger
stallion was not only fully over the human female, but spreading his
powerful rear legs and lowering himself to her soft, white belly.

                  Since one thing was impossible both boys realized
simultaneously another thing was necessary.  What they'd wanted to do with
each other after baring their chests, they now did with the young animal.
Hildon, on the left, butted his head solidly against the animal to help it
maintain its footing.  The tall, athletic Kasanov reached under from the
right side and found the male with his strong right hand.  Although not a
team player, Kasanov was a devotee of skip-rope, and now both his strength
and endurance were called on.

                  Jim-O now had his forelegs over the crest of the
embankment, and, by squatting, had brought himself with a foot of the
arching female beneath him.  Ample room for both boys.

                  By stretching his right arm, Hildon was able to massage
the base of the now-sweating steed while Kasanov thoroughly wet the
animal's silky glans with his seminal fluid.  Some he drew across Raquel's
belly causing her to grunt passionately and leaving a slick trail, and the
rest he returned to the stallion, using it as a hot lubricant to thoroughly
masturbate him.

                  Realizing Jim-O was a virgin, and having a
bred-from-birth sensitivity to the status, Kasanov handled the animal
almost shyly and tenderly, cupping him, fingering him, and toying with the
slit of his penis.  The animal shook and huffed in response, grunting
especially when the boy at his right flank would begin a series of long,
smooth, rhythmic strokes.

                  Raquel looked on, half-conscious.  The grade of the bank
positioned the animal straining above her so she could comfortably see
everything her sixteen year old bother was doing.  If she grew to be a
great Amazon of a woman, she might one day take such and Pednostrangia
breed in her belly, unlikely, meantime, she knew she held the magic of the
panting male's release, and so linked her fingers behind her neck so she
could fully display her arching young body to her handsome brothers.

                  The animal's breathing began deepening.  Five minutes of
experimenting and stroking had tensed the horse so that his muscles bowed
and tendons strung hard.  Suddenly the panting stopped.  Jim-O held his
massive breath.  Raquel responded to his need immediately, lashing her
hand's against the satiny black chest and digging in with her strong
fingers until her knuckles whitened.  They might have expected a great roar
or a shrieking whinny, audible for two miles, but they would have been
wrong.  Rather, the stallion gently lowered his muzzle to the girl he
straddled, taking her black hair in his sensitive lips.  He pulled
delicately but firmly, the girl's hands gripped him like steel, and he
began ejaculating.

                  Burbank or no Burbank, Kasanov realized something special
was happening.  It was as if an angry child had suddenly dashed a glass of
milk across his sister's arching, heaving belly.  In a long instant, sperm
was all over the child, sprayed from her throat, between her pubescent
breasts, and to a great puddle already forming on her lowest belly.
                  It happened again.
                  The third time, Kasanov was ready and directed the gush
over his sister's right nipple.  And then the left.
                  As the second stallion took his position, Kasanov had
learned just how to hold an out-of-control animal so the gushing semen
didn't cover his sister's face, instinctively he knew this would be over
the top, nor her vagina, which he could also sense the girl did not want.

                  The remaining beasts, half crazed by the sight of their
reward, took their positions, lowered themselves to Kasanov, and released
their cup full of hot, equine seed in a minute or two.  James Bond came to
her last, nickered softly, and tugged her hair with his lips.  No one
doubted at some place and at some time the girl would choose this animal
for a long, private ride.

                  As the horses moved to a discreet distance in the gloam,
Kasanov again found his brother, and together they lay with their bellies
against hers, careful to keep their erections clear of the animal seed
slicking Raquel's chest and belly.  Satiating themselves on the feeling of
the soaked girl was an impossibility, but trying was ethereal.  Then
Kasanov again found his brother with his right arm, held him tenderly at
his slim waist, and drew him lower on Raquel's virgin body.  Low enough, he
guided the lad watching to see if his eyes were locked on his beautiful
twin, then finding her for him, and leaving him to massage the girl's
soaking breasts.

                  Hildon's motion was gentle, tentative, even friendly.
Raquel rose timidly against him. eyes full of fire, full of him.  Kasanov
left Raquel's breasts to the bare chest of her twin and cradled both his
young siblings as his sister's right hand gripped his shoulder as she'd
gripped the stallions who raged quietly above her.


                  For long moments the beautiful young bodies carefully
joined.  Kasanov alternated between staring into their hot eyes and looking
down over his sister's. flat belly where Hildon was becoming intimate with
her.  When he'd look back to their sweating faces, the younger boy would
lower fully to the girl, breaking his stare to kiss her, then pushing up
again so his brother could watch how he was mastering his first female.

                  Almost everywhere the basic clinical material is covered
in the classroom, so Kasanov knew from the tensing of the bodies in his
arms that the boy was against the girl hymen.  His thrusts became ever more
gentle, his movements waning to the almost imperceptible as he tried not to
hurt the beloved creature.  When he rose, he could plainly seen Hildon's
long, slim shaft thrusting perhaps two inches into Raquel, then withdrawing
half in inch to delicately probe her again.

                  How the eleven year old, with just a shadow of fuzzy
pubic hair in a crescent above his wildly distended organ, matching a
similar harbinger of maturity on the girl, could retain control was beyond
the teen's comprehension.  Just when he was sure the boy had the same
supernatural quality as the horses, his brother began shaking violently.
He rose on his arms and whimpered, "I'm being premature with her."

                  For a moment or two Kasanov thought the boy had said he
was going to be mature with her, and held his breath waiting for the single
hard thrust against Raquel, then there was a gush of white from between
their sweating, panting young bodies.  Another followed in a few seconds,
and then it went on and on with the girl mewing and frozen, the eleven year
old grunting and frozen, and a torrent of seed cascading from her inner
thighs onto the deep grass.

                  Several times on the short journey Kasanov had felt as if
he were losing it in the Southern California sense of the phrase.  Each
time, he'd regrouped and stood the challenges offered, even the first touch
of her cherry blossom breast.  Now it was different.  Losing it was no
longer a metaphor for a certain level of excitement or stress, losing it
was losing live, itself.  Watching his younger brother cum off with his
long, slim penis still so shallow in the girl his sperm actually spurted
out from between their bodies was draining his life.  His brother kept
cumming, but he couldn't last forever.  Then what?  It was plain from her
grip on his should what Raquel wanted.  Him.  Fully.  And it wasn't going
to happen.  The trip to Europe and miles beyond, the interlude in the
thundering carriage, the smoothing of the road and their conversation,
peeling the top of her dress down over her slim back, the slowing coach
stopping, the horses, and now his brother cumming again and again as if he
to were a stallion.  Who could survive all that? the Californian wondered
as actual waves of dizziness and nausea began to take hold of his slender
body.

                  Get bitten by venomous snakes often enough and the
antivenin build up to the extent of instilling partial immunity.  But no,
the reason for Kasanov's dramatic physical decline was not his home town,
in other words, being bitten for the first time.  It was where he was.
Miles, if you wanted to measure it that way, inside the borders of the
planets only undocumented nowhere.  Where horses galloped for an hour, and
where a pubescent eleven year old wraith of a coltish boy had been
ejaculating hard and fast for minutes on end.  They obviously had something
he did not.

                  Hildon's frantic flow did finally ease, then, reduced to
an occasional pulse of his white semen, died away entirely.
Simultaneously, Raquel's grip tightened the more.  He must.  Hildon had
enthralled her, reduced her to mewing and cooling and hissing while she
lolled her head and her mouth grew slack, but that was all.  And there was
meant to be more for her.  There was meant to be him for her, not a tender
twin, but a tall, powerful athlete.  Yet by now even the thought was
slipping out of his reach.  Hildon gently left, and there the child lay,
partially covered by James Bond's team, golden in the candle light from her
twin, surely the most beautiful sight ever beheld on the live-long planet,
and here he was reduced to hardly a respectable crawl to her.  Hildon
seemed immediately aware, and was there to help.  Raquel used both her arms
to coax and guide.  Yes, they did it, yes now he was near her and wetting
himself on the young boy's cum, and, yes, he was even slightly inside her
and against her hymen.

                  First of all, he wanted to push up on his arms so he
could look down on her beloved face, read for himself the look of wonder
and welcome in her eyes.  Then to lunge against her while he licked away
the tears the moment they started.  Then for it to be full for both of
them, then give her a choice of holding him tight so she could feel what
was happening in a private and intimate way, or being free and wild with
her, and letting it happen that way.  And now both choices were fantasies.
Even something so primal as his erection seemed to be melting in a wash of
anemia.

                  "I'm sorry," the stricken teen whispered, his siblings
hands comforting, their faces against his withering shoulders.

                  So still had they become, so quiet the horses, that it
was audible.  One cricket would have drowned it out, but there was no
cricket; a breeze would have been enough to provide cover, but there was a
lull.  A soft creak.  Silence.

                  Alucard froze, his twin hearts skipping a beat.  The
leather slings suspending the carriage made no further outcry, and the boy
still lay atop the splayed girl, his ribs yet moving with life.  Time to
take care of that.  He moved closer, hovered, and settled.  How often had
he served tea to the twins?  How often had their cups passed briefly to his
lips as he'd `kissed the brew' in the custom of the old folk?  But the new
one?  The sixteen year old from across the great water?  For his lanky,
muscled body not the subtle taste building month after month but the entire
meal as a serving.  Not the distilled essence of his blood, but his blood
raw and whole.

                  Somewhere something had gone wrong.  It was not his to
criticize, but the set of circumstances rendering his close cousins blood
suckers was most unfortunate.  And opposed all logic.  Wouldn't a vampire
wish to make his partners stronger?  To use his extraordinary powers to so
enhance his own well being he now had excess to share with those in need?
Some-lack-of-body had gotten up on the wrong side bed one morning, turned
left instead of right, worn red instead of blue, who knew? but look at the
freaking mess stretching back to Vlad and casting blood suckers with
leaches, lepers and that of the rotting log.

                  Mmm, even in extremis, the boy's flank was taught and
muscular, when his sister rode him high for her seed her girlish thighs
would grip him right here and left here.  Yes, very nice.  Heart and lungs,
not so nice.  It wouldn't do to let him fade too far, the girl's yearning
was palpable, and, along with two hearts came a niceness and every
heart-born wish to be, and we've heard it before, helpful.

                  Gently, silently the vampire landed fully.  "I am
Alucard," he whispered, "and you have not begun to die."  The nearly
comatose youth flinched and bucked as the fangs pierced, then sank in inch
at the base of his neck.  Hot nutrients and refined drugs passed from the
spectral mouth.  Kasanov felt in almost instantly, and, for sure, not in
his neck.

                  "Oh, sis, I'm so sorry he whispered," his eyes clearing
so he could stare alertly into her almost black orbs now wide with delight.

                  Neither had to say more.  Neither could.  He knew she
wanted to watch, though, so he pushed up.  She did stare down at him,
bringing her hands to a position high on his hips.  Hildon had recovered
quickly and now rested on the grass with his right cheek on his sister's
left shoulder.  As Kasanov awakened the female with a series of gentle
probes he could see the white of his semen on his brother shaft and he got
a boner.  Then she cried out his name, her hands gripped, and the sixteen
year old athlete surged against the girl, immediately joining his brother
who had rushed in to lick away the tears from her huge eyes.

                  After that he was firm and manly with her, taking her
fully, holding her, then, as she loosed her grip, taking a rhythm just as
his brother had, but now full.  Formerly deadly, the hot stallion sperm
between their young bodies not inflamed.  The rose quickly together, amazed
with themselves and each other, and he only had a second to murmer softly
before he started to cum.  He might have been crushing a chips bag with a
boot so dramatically did his first hard spray effect Rachel.  She came
immediately, crying out and shaking, then lying shattered and panting as he
emulated his brother by flooding her on and on.

                  The scene now stilled.  Slowly the drowsy horses reformed
in front of the coach, settled to the ground, and slept.  The candles
around the two brothers and their sister guttered and went out.  A few
final voices were heard.  "Do you really think it will work?"  "I don't see
why not."  "So, if it's a funny baby, it's his, and if not, it's yours."
"That's the basis of the whole experiment, if we import kids, will we
become more humorous and light hearted so our subjects will leave each
other alone when the grass is deep and the south wind blows."

                  Kasanov listened but he was too dead to respond for the
moment.  His mind wandered with his old life's leaving.  Let the living go
on as they may, he was free.  From now on they wouldn't have him to kick
around, so they'd be teasing Burbank.  Good.

                  Yes, Susan giggled at the silly ending.  "Mmm, daddy,"
she cooed.

                  The peace of their surroundings, the lull of the opening
scene of Drew's book, his six foot plus size over her childish.  All
combined.  It went on for a long time between them and minutes later when
he eased tenderly from her just the barest tendril of semen stretched for a
moment to the glans of his still erect penis.

                  "That was a fabulous story," the girl sighed, shocked to
look down and see the two full baskets of mushrooms.
                  "It's just a sketch for an opening," Drew scoffed.
Personally, he thought is was a mite over the top, but one wrote for an
audience, not necessarily one's self, so who knew?
                  The girl was tumbling cartwheels across the forest floor
and ended with an extended flip.  She ran up to him bringing both their
costumes.  Standing for a moment before him she took his right hand and
touched it gently to her.  "See," she whispered, "almost dry.  No laundry.
Like they say, size counts, but, unlike they say, it's the size of the girl
that really counts."

                  Giggling was bad news with this couple, so their
departure for K-W was delayed until once again the cry "Oh, Daddy," rang
clear and loud.