Long Hot Summer Ch 09

O, love and summer. You are in the dreams and in me.

—Walt Whitman

, The Sleepers

Wednesday was the last day of my little lawn service business. It was like so many other days in that summer of 1979, hot and close, the air an atomized poison of car exhaust and dew steaming off roof shingles. I was nervous about seeing Eleanor Kaminski one more time, afraid it was going to be awkward. I had already begun to feel a certain amount of affection for her, and after her graciousness and understanding on Saturday night, that had only deepened. At the same time, I felt ashamed: ashamed that I had once dismissed her as some big, dumb, busty broad, a shallow cocktease—to use Sally's phrase, just another "Youngstown hump." She was more than that, despite her lot in life, and I couldn't help but think that she deserved better. I wondered if she would ever get it.

She didn't come out to greet me as she regularly did when I showed up in her back yard and started banging around in the garden shed, dragging out the mower and gas can. The milkweed in the beds against her back porch bloomed white, cloudy clusters so still in the breezeless humidity they seemed painted on the air. A stand of arbor vitae that separated and concealed the Kaminski's yard from the neighbor on their left was hectic with overlapping birdsong. I yanked the mower cord twice, three times; the machine coughed and belched and then rumbled to life.

Their yard was one of smallest and least strenuous to mow, and that was always a small mercy at the end of a long, drenching day of such business. When I finished and cut the engine, I expected her, hearing that, to finally appear bearing my little folded up ten-spot. But she didn't come out. I swept some grass clippings from the porch steps, then hauled all the equipment back into the shed.

She came into the shed almost immediately after me. She must have been watching, waiting. I turned and looked at her as the door banged shut behind her. She was wearing her denim cut-offs and that orange tank top, the outfit she'd worn the day she'd given me that flaunting, purposive show.

"Are you defiling my garden shed, young man," she said.

"No ma'am."

She pulled off the tank top. There was a tiny window in the shed so grimy that only the faintest amount of summer sunlight passed through, but even in that dimness her big, pale breasts seemed to almost glow. The top button of her cutoffs was already undone. Which meant I was undone.

"I'll just give you your money and go if you tell me to," she said.

I didn't say anything. I wasn't going to resist her because I didn't want to. Her forwardness and her physical beauty were riveting. Sexiness like static crackled around her.

I suppose a person of greater virtue would have reminded her that I was eighteen and she was a married woman. That these were issues of morality and self-control. That desire, lust, and temptation would confront us throughout our lives, and how we responded to them was a measure of our character. But I wasn't that person. Not on that day. And Eleanor Kaminski... She was a person of more quality than I, I'm convinced. But at that moment, all she wanted was a little more attention. And probably a couple of orgasms. And what was wrong with that?

She stepped toward me until we were toe to toe, and I immediately took her breasts in my hands and began to fondle them. She opened my pants and reached in.

"Isn't this what you thought about?" she said, stroking me to a quickened hardness. "You told me. Me letting you play with my big, soft tits while I jacked you off? This was what you fantasized about?"

"Yes," I said. "This," and bent to lick and suck one of her breasts as she continued to stroke me.

"Suck my big tits while I pump you," she said through clenched teeth. "Suck them."

But I couldn't content myself with only that. That undone button of her cutoffs was an erotic trigger for me. I lowered her zipper, theatrically slow, tooth by tooth. Then I slowly slipped my fingers inside.

"Oh my," she breathed.

We stroked each other. Eleanor Kaminski looked at me in the dim light of the shed and I looked straight back. She nipped a corner of her plump lower lip beneath her front teeth—that kittenish little heartbreaking tic. She pushed her free hand up under my sweat-soaked t-shirt and lightly raked the sharp tips of her fingernails down my chest. Then she dropped to her knees on the hard-packed dirt floor and took me into her mouth.

She worked my jeans down to below my knees and then took my ass in her hands as she sucked me. The whites of her eyes shone as she looked up at me while her lips moved along the length of my cock.

"I want to fuck you," I said.

At that she stood up. Her knees were black. She waggled her hips back and forth as she shimmied her cutoffs down far enough for them to fall to the ground on their own and stepped out of them. Then she turned around and got down on her hands and knees in the dirt, looked back over her shoulder at me. "Right here," she said. "Do it."

I knelt behind her and placed my cock beneath her upturned ass. The shed smelled of earth, gasoline, and fermenting grass clippings. But the shed was plainly where Eleanor Kaminski wanted this last assignation to happen, if it was going to happen. I drew the head of my cock through the dense thatch of her pubic hair until I felt folds of warm, wet flesh, and pushed myself inside her. She moaned and pitched forward slightly.

I clutched her hips, fingers sunk hard into her ample, yielding flesh, and pulled her back against me as I thrust forward. She gasped from the force as my abdomen thwacked against her ass.

I fucked Eleanor Kaminski. She knelt on the packed dirt floor of the shed, and I fucked her. She grunted and cursed. She told me to fuck her, to keep fucking her. She told me to pound her wet pussy, her wet whore pussy, repeating it. In the dimness, I could only just make out her big tits swaying heroically beneath her as I thrust in and out of her. The ends of her hair swept the dirt floor. I told her to take my hard cock, to take this hot, dirty fucking. I palmed the cheeks of her ass and spread them to get a better view of my cock drilling her cunt.

"Oh, yeah, spread me open and fuck me," she growled, keeping her voice pitched low.

"You're going to make me come," I said. "Where do you want it?"

"Oh fuck, in my ass."

I slowed down.

"Really? I've never done that before."

"Neither have I. Please?" she said. "Fuck me up the ass? Fuck my big ass. Come in it."

I withdrew slowly from her pussy and dragged my cock up between her ass cheeks. I may have never done it before, but I knew enough from the plentiful anal stories in Suzie Bowen's collection that more than a little slowness and care was in order. I pressed my slickened cockhead against the tight star of her asshole.

"That's it... that's it," she said. She looked back at me over her shoulder, then tossed her head to get the hair out of her eyes. I watched intently as her ass opened slowly and took me in. She squeezed her eyes shut and faced forward again, muttering something that I couldn't really understand; it sounded like she was saying "Stick it, stick it," but I couldn't tell for sure.

"This is so fucking tight," I said under my breath, but in the silence of the shed, she had to have heard me.

"

Uhhhh...

more," she said.

I pushed a little deeper, the head passing beyond her muscled ring.

"I'm so full," she gasped, and began rocking back and forth against my erection. I leaned forward over her sweat-slick back and reached under her belly to find her clit. She gave a tiny, high-pitched cry and her ass and legs began to tremble.

"I'm fucking your big, beautiful ass," I whispered into her tangle of hair and inhaled: some type of herbal shampoo, and just the faintest must of warm scalp that reminded me of the smell of the construction paper we would use in grade school, cutting out our Halloween pumpkins and Thanksgiving turkeys.

"Yes," she said, still in a tiny high voice. "Fuck it. Fill it."

I backed out a little, enough to feel her asshole clench at the head of my cock, and rocked in and out of her gently, using that hard friction to finish. After another minute or two of fucking her like this, I began to come.

"Oh,

fuck,"

I barked against the hard, half-strangled spasm of my spurting prick, and pumped my load in her ass. She grabbed at my hand stroking her pussy and pressed it hard against her mound, and started coming herself. Her own spasms forced my cock from her ass and my last spurts landed on her quivering bottom.

Sweat poured down my forehead and stung my eyes. I slumped over Eleanor Kaminski's back, breathing hard, and rose and fell along with her own attempts to catch her breath. After a minute or two, we gingerly peeled apart from one another. The inside of the shed was stifling, airless, the metal walls radiating a summer's-ful of heat. I helped her to her feet. She was completely naked; I still wore my sneakers, and a pair of dirty painter's pants shackled my ankles. Otherwise, we were both filthy. Our exertions and sweat had slow-churned the shed floor into mud, and our knees and hands and arms were caked with an earthy impasto. Eleanor Kaminski, being on the bottom, was much dirtier than me, which is why, examining herself once she'd given me the once-over, she grabbed me and wrapped her arms around me, and ran her mud-caked hands up and down my sweaty back and over my ass.

"That's better," she said.

We dressed, but only because we had to walk across the yard. Eleanor Kaminski led me to the laundry room off her kitchen where we stripped again, and she put our clothes in her avocado-green Kenmore washing machine. She found a pair of tube socks from a laundry basket and pulled them on over her muddy feet so she wouldn't track mud through the house, and led me upstairs to the shower.

I stepped beneath the shower spray and she came in right behind me. The tub bottom immediately filled with a dark slurry around our feet. Brown water streamed down our legs, spun into spirals like galaxies forming and then coming apart from the pull of the drain. Even her hair, from sweeping the shed floor, sent dark rivulets down her back and breasts when she stood under the spray. We took turns with the soap, washing ourselves and each other. She gave my balls and cock some long, leisurely attention until I was very clean and very stiff, though a little sore from fucking her ass. Then she knelt and took it between her lips. She gently sucked and licked and stroked me until I spilled a load in her warm mouth, which she received with a murmur of pleasure and effortlessly swallowed. Then, once we'd dried off, Eleanor Kaminski spread out on her bed and I ate her pussy. Even though I used only my tongue and licked her softly and slowly, she came quickly. I didn't stop, however, and after a somewhat longer and, ultimately, more animated spell—her hands clutching my head, my fingers buried in her cunt while I rimmed her squeaky-clean asshole—Eleanor Kaminski came for a second time: a protracted, mattress-thumping orgasm, and the last one I would ever give her. Though I like to think that I played some small part in future such occurrences.

I often wondered if Big Ed Kaminski experienced the benefits of his Eleanor's newfound adventurousness and sweet skills. If he felt a renewed sense of gratitude and appreciation for his charming, desperately sexy wife when, for the first time ever (if she'd told me the truth), she knelt before him one morning when he stepped from the shower and took his cock into her mouth, sucked and stroked him and bid him to come there, looked up at him with that kittenish gaze as he groaned and unleashed his torrent of cream that she—making the pretense of apprehension and some effort that accompanies a first oral load—swallows for him, telling him that she's always wanted to do that. Would he marvel at his good fortune when she takes charge one day and tells him she would be on top for a change, and rides him hot and hard, her big breasts in hypnotic motion, until he experiences the loud satisfaction of her orgasm? And—both a little drunk and horny some hot night—would she call his dirty-talk bluff and tell him to stop threatening to fuck her up the ass and just do it? Fuck her big, beautiful, Polish ass. Fuck it and come in it.

I really did hope so. He might be wary about how his wife had experienced such a transformation. But Eleanor Kaminski was a smart woman. A few strategically placed

Cosmopolitan

magazines left open to a certain kind of article would be enough to allay any of his suspicions. Maybe then he'd undergo his own transformation, and return to giving her the kind of attention that she deserved.

Before I left that afternoon, Eleanor Kaminski dropped five little folded up squares of ten dollar bills into my hand.

"Mrs. Kaminski," I said. "I can't take all this."

She took my hand in hers and closed it around the money.

"It's not like that," she said. "Don't think it's about... you know,

that.

You're going off to college. I planned on giving you a nice tip at the end of the summer no matter what. You're going to need the money. Just take it."

She opened her arms and we embraced on her back porch, her big soft breasts pressed to my chest.

"Just promise me one thing," she whispered.

"O-o-okay," I said. I wasn't sure what she was going to ask of me, but how I could refuse her anything at this point?

"Don't spend it on cigarettes," she said and patted my ass.

.:.

I spent the next few days packing up my meager belongings, waiting for the telephone to ring and hearing Sally Speaker's voice on the other end, but the call didn't come. The day before I was to move into my dorm room, I drove to Warren and cruised the streets for a while, hoping I might see her or her orange Vega. I stopped at a pay phone and looked through the local directory, but there were no Speakers listed. I just wanted to give her my new address, and maybe get hers, so I could at least write to her. I was going to college in Pittsburgh, just a little over an hour's drive, and it wouldn't be too much of a hardship to see her once in a while, on weekends. Or maybe have her swing into town in her rusty, smoky Vega; despite everything that happened to me that summer, the night we sat in the back of it swigging beer and smoking and talking was the night I would remember most fondly of them all.

.:.

At the beginning, I characterized 1979 as another time, but nearly four decades gone, we know that it was much more than that; it was another world. More precisely, it was the tag end of another world that was rapidly dying out. And with it, so many of the fixtures and iron certainties that marked my childhood and that I, as a child, simply believed would always be there, also disappeared.

When I started writing about this artlessly torrid and disreputable summer, the melancholy I felt tugging at my shirttails was not for the incidents of lust-soaked abandon. It was for the moments in-between, where I found myself regularly thinking about how complicated and messy life had become, how libido and the pull of sex continually clouded my judgment and overwhelmed my enthusiasms for so many other things. And how the time I really, really wanted to go back to, if I could, and live in again, was the time before puberty began its pitiless rampage. When my excitement reached its fever pitch on those summer mornings when, finally released from whatever chores my mother required of me, I wrestled my bike out the basement door and took off like mad for the playground, my baseball glove dangling from the handlebars, to play endless pick-up games with the kids in the neighborhood. Or spending all of the very hottest afternoons at the public pool with friends, making up different games and competitions, almost never leaving the water except to buy a bag of chips or a frozen Zero bar from the refreshment stand. When we spent every moment of those summer days that we could outdoors until we were required to be home for dinner, and then we were back out again, riding bikes around and around the neighborhoods to the very edge of dusk, until that quintessential small-town America parents' curfew: the street lights coming on.

.:.

September: the sky was a brilliant blue, that kind of pure, perfectly rinsed blue you see in early fall on cloudless days, the clear cobalt prelude to brassy October. I had just left my advanced composition course that I attended three days a week in the campus jewel, the Cathedral of Learning, a gothic landmark of startling vertical zoom. I cannot, with any certainty, characterize my mood or feelings leading up to that day, though generally those first few weeks seemed to be a cache of thrilling, confusing, anxious bits. I was living on the surface of things, just trying to take it all in; everything was bright, new, distracting, seductive.

But I do recall this particular day. I had just finished my last class of the week, and the world stretching out between me and Monday morning filled me with something like joy. I had nothing planned, and that was the beauty of it. I shouldered my boon companion, a black Caribou backpack stuffed with books and pens and spiral bounds. I had been trying not to smoke, but that morning—the smell of it when I left the dorm, and its promise of impending freedom—had given me that jazzed, indulgent feeling I always got when I thought the world to be a good place, and I'd stopped at a nearby newsstand on the way to my first class and bought a pack, knowing that I probably shouldn't, and wanting to all the more for knowing that.

I was going to find a sunny spot on the broad lawn that surrounded this great, old, gothic building where all my English classes were held and that I'd already come to love for its small pockets of warm light amidst a forest of shadows, vaulted chambers, booming echoes. I was going to smoke and read and soak up sunshine and watch the parade of a thousand college girls passing by. It all had that feeling like those long-gone childhood summer mornings.

I saw her before I'd even been fully disgorged from the building's massive revolving door. She was sitting on a stone parapet on the other side of the great granite porch, swinging her legs and smoking a cigarette while peering down into a Penguin paperback. There was a backpack like mine on the wall next to her. She was wearing a faded denim jacket with the sleeves pushed up, over a pale blue print dress, and a pair of mirrored aviators that, when she tipped her head back to let loose a plume of smoke, threw a burst of reflected sunshine like a camera flash. She dipped her head to look at me overtop the frames of her sunglasses. She smiled, took another drag of her cigarette, then went back to reading her book, shaking some ashes from the pages.

.:.

We lay on my narrow dormitory bed for a long time just kissing. She'd shed her jean jacket but that's all. Her pale cotton dress was as thin as a shift and as soft as her skin. I smoothed my hand over her back, her shoulders, down her arm, over the sharp but lightly draped curve of her hip. The window was open, letting in a light, warm breeze, and the sounds of the city outside: the hiss and thrush of cars mostly, and the voices and occasional shouts of students. I drew the tips of my fingers up the back of her thigh and under her dress, and gently pressed the gusset of her panties. She gave a little grunt and squirmed slightly.

"You can do that if you want," she whispered into my neck, her eyes closed. "But I don't want to have sex with you today."

"Okay," I said and withdrew my hand, rested it on her hip. I shifted, rolled onto my back, and she curled, fitted herself against me, and lay her head on my chest.