Sin Tryst

CHAPTER ONE   The people they worked with put up with this arrangement because some of them preferred to be able to get rid of each other on this basis too. It was easy to get rid of an unwanted s*x partner, man or woman but mostly the responsibility of support seemed to concern them, not the depraved arrangements. Earl Wyatt and the show workers were part of that unique society that travels the roads of the nation throughout the four seasons. Their customers would come to performances when the sun was shining or when me evening was clear. The show had to travel to keep abreast of the weather and to survive. This tight need to survive feeling could only lead to the members of the group being so insecure as to have to live with the least amount of responsibility for themselves and to each new acquaintance. Man to girl relations were on the house, and they all sort of knew it nad to be so. Some preferred marriage as their goal but money pushed them further from it, since they had none at hand. Earl and Valerie both were employed by Ben Hardwicke. Ben was an old wiery codger who was another of the victims of itinerant love. He ran the show with a warm human hand but his big mistake was trying to be good to a woman. He idolized a young lady named Laura Hall. He'd fathered a group of her kids, so the story went, but nobody really could tell. Laura had so many lovers on the side that old man Hardwicke was a patsy for her. His income supported her and she was sexy enough to get any guy hot and bothered at the drop of her hanky. Hardwicke enjoyed her favors nightly and for an old man, the performers kept saying he was really going some. Laura was known to be a dynamo. How long could the old man keep this up. He was bound to bring doom on himself and of course that meant trouble for Earl and the show. Earl Wyatt lay on the bed in the trailer next to the blonde and swore softly. The rain was coming down hard, almost harder than it had during the whole week of their last stop. "More rain," Valerie Talman said. He didn't look at the girl in the faint light of morning. He knew what she looked like. She was rounded in all the right places and she was naked and waiting. But then she was always naked and waiting and wanting as much as a man could give her. In his twenty five years he had never before met a girl like Valerie. "If this keeps up it could ruin Ben," he said. "We've had bad weather right from the start." The girl said nothing and he reached for a cigarette. Ben Hardwicke had owned The Show Value for more than twenty years, hitting the road every spring, and now he was close to ruin. Ben had never been one to save any money for an emergency and that daughter he had back home cost him plenty. Not only did the daughter cost him money but so did Laura Hall from the Big Revue show. Every year for the last three years Ben had given Laura a kid and he supported them. Earl didn't know how Ben could do everything that he had to do with a bad ticker but somehow he did it. He was on the stand every night and although Earl did some of his work for him, such as making sure that the rides were safe, he couldn't do much more than that and still do the master of ceremonies bit for the girlie show. Most of the customers were thinking that the girls were going to take off everything, but the men got cheated because the girls only go down to flesh colored vee patches. Since Laura was one of the girls Ben wouldn't let them go all the way and that hurt business. The first clear night in a town the play was usually good but after that it fell off. The word got around and the men wouldn't pay. "Hell," Valerie said stirring on the bed. "These Mondays kill me." The weekend was moving time and Monday was the day when the rides and the booths had to be set up. Even with the rain the men would have to work. If it cleared the money would start coming in that night but if it didn't clear there wouldn't be any. Monday meant a new town and new people to meet and new things to do. To his way of thinking there was something exciting in it but Valerie didn't feel that way. He had been sleeping with Valerie almost since spring and every Monday she seemed to be down in the dumps. As for himself he didn't have much to do. A couple of drunk punks would set up the girlie stage. Outside, facing the crowd, was another platform and the girls came out there to show themselves on Earl's trailer stage. "We need another girl. Two girls can't carry the show," she said. "Hardly.". He was naked, too, and she put her hand on his mid-section. "Wonder why the other girl left?" "How would I know?" But he did know. The girl had been a little stupid and the past Thursday night when Valerie had gone into town for a bottle he had her good and he had made her cry out when he had hurt her. The next morning she had been gone in a fit of anger and shame. "It would be different if we went all the way," Valerie said. "Two girls might be able to do it if they went down bare. The suckers pay for that and they've got it coming." Of course there were a lot of towns where a girl couldn't strip naked but in many towns they could. Earl had discussed this with Ben but Ben had been firm in not allowing it. Earl guessed that Ben didn't want any other man to see Laura Hall in the nude. That was a joke. When Ben sometimes went ahead of the snow on business, sounding out a new town, Laura was available to any man who felt in need of a woman. How Ben could be sure that Laura's kids belonged to him Earl didn't know. "Funny a guy like you being with a hootch outfit," Valerie said. "You've said that before kid." "Well, it is, education and all and you sounding off for a girlie strip. You must like it, huh?" "I was brought up in the circus," he told her. "Yet you went on through college after your folks died." "Sure, because dad left the insurance money for that." "You didn't learn much about a carnival at college." "I didn't learn anything about a carnival. I took hotel administration-don't ask me why-and I tried it after I got out. But the traveling life was there in my blood and when I had a chance to come with Ben I did. Except for the weather," he added. "The rain kills you and you can't fight it back, otherwise the life is good." She pushed toward him, one full breast against his chest. "There's something else you can't fight," she said. "What?" "What we've been doing. What we did last night and what we're going to do before we get out of bed again." She rubbed herself into him and her n*****s hardened to his male countenance. She was ready again. "You never quit, do you baby? "Is that what you want?" "One of these days you'll be looking those nine months square in the face." "I'm no Laura Hall. When I get a kid I'm going to be married." Her hands moved over him. A man couldn't ask for much better than Valerie and he didn't have to ask her to get what he wanted. She was only twenty but she had been with the trailer shows for a couple of years and he knew there had been other men for her. It hardly mattered for he wasn't going to marry her. A girl like Valerie lived for her s*x and if she didn't find it with him she would find it with somebody else. There were plenty of guys in the show who chased her. There was that one guy with the ho-karts who had offered her twenty five bucks and she had only laughed at him. 'We've got to do something about that girlie show," he said as he put out the cigarette. The fire gathered in his guts as he became terribly aware of her then. "I told you what we have to do Like the show I was in last year. We had three girls, just three, but when we told the suckers they would get a show they got a show. And we didn't have a girl who had stretch marks the way Laura had. If the light is bright they show and the men don't like that. They come inside to get their eyes knocked out and they don't want to look at some girl who is marked up." It was tough at this time of the year to get a good girl. Most of them who had any talent at all had their spots and they usually stayed until the end of the season. They wanted now naked girls up there on the platform, shaking it wild and hot and maybe letting the men touch them. "I'll talk to Ben again," he said. "If he doesn't want Laura to show herself off why doesn't he pull her out." "She likes to get out in front of the customers." "Maybe so." "And she wouldn't stop if he didn't control her. We talked it over, just the two of us, and we know what we ought to be doing. The first act we should go down to bras and panties and the next trip around they should come off too." "I guess that wouldn't bother you none, huh?" She leaned over far enough to kiss him on the mouth. She had warm lips, soft and wet, and when she kissed him she kept them moving, forcing his mouth open. The tip of her tongue became a sensual thing of desire on his. "There's only one thing that's bothering me right now, Earl." "Tell me about it then." "You know you bother me and I think you get a kick out of teasing, almost as much kick as you get the other way." "They say if you wait for something that it gets better and better while you expect it to happen." "If you don't wait too long maybe. I used to get with a boy once and he always waited too long." He knew what she meant. It had happened to him once. "Damn," he said as he turned toward Valerie. He could see her breasts rise and fall as she breathed, her hand still upon him and her lips curved in a smile. Her breasts were big. One night half drunk, he had measure them and they had come out an even thirty nine. Her flesh was firm, no sag to it at all. "Sometimes I want your baby," she said, moving in close to him. "Like now, tor instano honey." "You've got bricks in your head." "Why? Because I'd like to have something that's mine?" "Look at Laura. Three kids already and there's probably another one in the oven. She hasn't finished a season in the last couple of years." "Who says she isn't happy." "I don't know, ask her. She was knocked up not me." "She's happy." Valerie decided, pulling his hand to her breast. "And Ben hasn't let her down. You can say that for Ben. He doesn't deny his own family. He pays steady for what he starts." "He's a fool though." "What should he do, leave?" "No, I didn't say that." "Would you leave me if I got that way?" "You get that way and it'll be by somebody else." She didn't say anything but she pulled his head down and she started kissing him, pulling him in tight and hard, the moans deep in her throat and her mouth demanding. Her body started to gyrate a rhythm of desire. "Oh man, hey," he said thickly. "Oh man," she repeated, clinging to him, such a big boy." They merged, two bodies in one, and he knew it was wrong, terribly wrong, knew that anything could happen, knew that this was insanity. She didn't want him for an hour, just forever. There had been a lot of girls for him the past, some of them pretty good and some of them not so good, but Valerie was always good, sending a powerful surge of need through his loins. Again and again he squeezed into her, knew her as he had never known her before this night. "That was foolish," he said afterward as he lay beside her. "It was wonderful, Earl." "You won't think so if you blow up." "I trust you, you big bugger." Trust him? Should any girl trust him? He doubted it. He had slept with married women and he had slept with single girls and not once had he thought of his relationships with them in terms of marriage. Most of them had been working girls, girls with average jobs, and they had wanted to trade their freedom for an apartment or a house of their own. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the rain on the roof. If they got rained out here in Burnside it would be tough to move on. Most of the performers were discouraged and hardly any of them had enough money to move again. The. drivers had to be paid and fuel and repairs cost dough. You could go just so long and then you tell apart if it rained. Sleep came over him, the sleep of emotional exhaustion, and he had a dream. The show-the dream didn't tell him for what reason-and that left him as top dog, running things the way he wanted to run them. He had some girls for the show, real honeys-well, maybe Valerie was one of them-and they wore low cut gowns out front that were hard to keep up. There was one girl with a huge bust and she had a cleavage as deep as a valley between two mountains, a valley of flesh. The crowd was down below him, a big crowd, and the rain was gone. Overhead the stars were bright but you couldn't see much of them because of the lights on the midway. In the background there was some music, the kind of music to make love by, and the girls were swaying their bodies, the girl with the big breasts fighting to keep her gown in place-not fighting too hard, however-and the men were pushing in close. Just then the girls faded from his dream and he was awake. He wasn't dreaming any longer. He was sitting up and talking, more asleep than awake, and Laura Hall was there in the little room with them, her eyes wide and frightened and the words spilling out of her mouth. "He had it," she said. "Just now, Ben had it. A heart attack and he looks dead. You've got to come with me Earl. You've got to do something." He got up quickly. Now more awake than he had been. He reached for his shorts and T shirt. As he got into them he regarded her hair and how it fell around her face. He could tell that she wasn't paying any attention to him and he could see the tears that clouded her eyes. "You go on back with him," he said. "I'll be right along. And you'd better call a doctor. Get in touch with the police. They can always locate a doctor." "All right," she said as she turned away. "All right. But hurry. I've never seen anybody die." He heard the outer door close and he stepped into his pants. "I knew this was going to happen," Valerie said from the bed behind him. "How did you know?" She didn't say how. "I like Ben. I hope he'll be all right." The rain had began to stop when Earl left, and that was good for business. But Ben might be on his last leg and never see another sun set.