(Michael Thomas here, the real author of the Dewey Lynne stories, I would like to add a few warnings before you jump into this much requested story. First and most important, no matter how real these characters may seem, they and the situations and events in which they act and are acted upon are purely 100% fictional. I put them in the town where I grew up, but they are not real. Second, this story goes well past the "Ardell reading length." On a standard page, it is 20+ pages, but the story is pretty intense, and I think you will want to read it in one setting. Finally, Dewey Lynne warns about this too, this story is about relationships, and some of parts of those relationships happen to be sexual. This tale here is really for mature audiences only. I'm not kidding neither.
The picture with this story is of a lone morning glory that I saw on a hillside on Kellie and my morning walk.)
Aunt Charlotte’s Crib
By Dewey Lynne Bugler
Howdy, y’all! Grab a cup, a glass, a tumbler, a bottle, a jug, a snifter, or whatever drinking device is appropriate to your liquid predilections, your age, and the time and place that you are reading this with me, pull up a chair, turn on whichever infernal device it is that you read on, and let’s have a little chat. Come to think of it, since I mention an age, it might be fair to warn all of you that some might find this particular revelation is for mature audiences only. You can make up your own mind about who is mature.
Anyhow, back in the middle of the story about Uncle Boog and the dogfight, I admitted that I always struggle to predict what it is that my reading audience might want to know about the details and finer points of stories as I am telling them. I have always found myself to be an excellent judge of character, especially when it comes to honesty and integrity or the lack of those things in people, but I never could quite ascertain how people feel in a given moment in particular situations nor what people think is important for me to explain in a story so that they can understand what I was thinking or what influenced me to make the actions that I did. Well, let me tell you, Bob! I am right! It may be the one thing in the world that I am sure about, but I nailed it. I had absolutely no clue how deep the ditch was between what I thought my gentle friends and readers are interested in and what I presumed they would be curious about until I asked them. Boy! Howdy! I found out that my ignorance about folks’ inquisitiveness into my life is as bold, blustery, and black as a summer thunderstorm hammering away at a soft blue sky. Let me explain.
At the end of the explanation that I wrote a couple weeks ago about the meeting with my ghost writer at the sale barn and why my writing had stopped being presented to the public, I asked my readers and friends to drop me lines through the submission box and let me know which of my life experiences they would like to hear about next so that I could start working on that project for them. Hell, I already know everything that happened to me, and it swirls in my head like plastic Walmart sacks in a dust devil, so I have no reason to care in which order I put my life experiences down on paper—or electronic screens. I figured most of my readers and new and old acquaintances would be interested in knowing how a seemingly nice, even-keeled, community-minded citizen like me ended up in prison. I reckoned that at least a few might want to know how my short stint in prison affected my life mentally, emotionally, and criminally. I set it up at the end of the tale about Uncle Boog and the dogfight so that my stories would continue to show how Uncle Boog’s words, “Make the bad shit work in your favor, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,” led me down a path that I wish I could go back and make a U-turn on. I sure would love the opportunity to try another fork in that path and take a trail that really good, worthwhile, kind, and useful people have traveled on. I really did believe that a few people who knew my daddy would want to read the real story about how and why I think he died and not what the foolish official pronouncement of the coroner was. Truthfully, I had in my mind about a dozen ideas of what my next writing project would be as I waited to hear from a handful of my faithful friends and readers. And, they responded. And, they DID NOT mention any of the ideas that I had been thinking of! Every single reader who sent me a note through the Internet or who I saw and conversed with at the sale barn or grocery store here in town wanted to know the same gawddamned thing-EVERY ONE of them! Here it is.
What ever happened between you and Aunt Charlotte? They all asked. Every one of them.
Oh, my goodness and glory! Whatcha gonna do?
I guess that what I aim to do, since so many have practically demanded it as the most important tale to tell, is to let all you readers and friends know for absolute certainty what happened between me and Aunt Charlotte. And I am not gonna hold back and make you wait. I am gonna tell you right now, and I am gonna tell you exactly what I told you before, so it ain’t no bombshell.
Nothing! Nothing ever happened between me and Aunt Charlotte.
In the story of Uncle Boog and the dogfight, I done already told you nothing happened between us, and nothing did. Nothing happened then, nothing has happened since, and nothing is gonna happen in the future. I hope that you are not overly disappointed, but I have not purposely lied to anyone so far in my writing projects, and I have no intention of starting. Now, I will gladly admit that I might misinform my readers a bit by adding certain details that I might be completely ignorant of, but that is simply to make the story more readable and relatable. I will not out-and-out lie! However, because so many readers seem to be so very intrigued about my relationship with Aunt Charlotte, I am willing to explain to you, my friends and readers, the one and only reason that some people started saying some nasty things about me and Aunt Charlotte back thirty-five years ago. Some folks, I suppose, still choose to believe those old rotten-potato-smelling rumors to be true. Well, they ain’t, but I do know how they got started, and the whole thing was completely as innocent as angels, at least between me and Aunt Charlotte. The rest, well, I don’t know how people will want to judge actions that happened so long ago in different times and a different world. But, they will nonetheless.
Since you all seem so all-fired interested about the details of our relationship, I am also willing to tell you about the one time that Aunt Charlotte and I came awfully close to hooking up even though we didn’t, and that incident contains some pretty sufficient hints as to why we never did get together in a carnal sense and why we never will. I do not speak out of turn about anybody’s sexual preferences when it is none of my damn business, so I am just gonna tell you what was seen with my eyes and heard with my ears. You can make out the rest on your own, for I do not care to be guessing. Or, you can go ask Aunt Charlotte yourself. I can’t say if you will find her in a lucid mental state, but you can try.
Finally, I will tell you all that I know about Aunt Charlotte between those days of our youth and now--and what our relationship has become in our late middle ages. I have to warn you that there are some huge gaps in time when neither of us had knowledge of the other and that most of what I know is second-hand information. Hand-me-down news seldom makes for a good story. Anyhow, anybody willing to look, read, and listen, please do, and I swear that you can know the truth. I can’t guarantee that it will set your free or even make you feel better. Truth has a nasty habit of not being very comforting.
Anyway, I’ve already told you that Uncle Boog and I started chasing scents down different trails during my senior year in high school after the summer of the dogfight. I didn’t give any particulars because it wasn’t any part of that story, but the main cause of me and Uncle Boog drifting apart was that I fell madly, head-over-heels, in love with a girl who had moved into our town during that fatefully important summer in my life. She is probably living out there in the United States of America somewhere with a husband and grown kids right now, so I am not gonna use her real name in case people of her acquaintance run across this story. My intention in telling the intimate specifics of my life is not to embarrass anyone who played a small role in the private and confidential particulars, so I am going to give her a fake name and limit my physical description to vague and ambiguous generalities. I think I’ll call her “Lilly White” after a character I ran across in a different story about our town by a feller named Asa Kwestyon. Please do not go and try and guess who she is or might have been. Some of you will know instantly, but she doesn’t deserve the ill-informed judgment you may want to pass on her. I, however, will accept all of your ignorant opinions. You can’t put a stain on a heart as black as a dry walnut shell, you know.
Anyhow, this here Lilly White was awfully exciting for me. Like I said, I am not going to give away the features of her looks because that would encourage people to remember back to high school and the girls that I dated, but I can give some clues as to why she set my heart on fire. She wasn’t a classic beauty like Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett, or Madonna, but she was pretty. Her figure wasn’t buxom like the wicked Felina, Salma Hayek, or Pamela Anderson, but she wasn’t skinny. Her body was athletic and tight. Her skin was warm to the touch wherever you touched her, and when she touched me, tingles of pleasure tickled me like an electric cattle prod set on low. She was smart as a whip too. She was big city and sophisticated. She had come from somewhere around Denver, Colorado (Yeah, I am making that up!) where she was planning to be a Rocky Mountain debutante (Again, made up!), but her parents got involved in some land swindling deal, and while they were working out the legal details with squads of attorneys and the federal government, she came and lived with her aunt, her mother’s sister, in Stone County, Arkansas.
Most appealing to me was that she wasn’t a simple country girl. She thought about things in her life beyond who she was going to marry, where she was gonna live, how big her house would be, and how many kids her and her Prince Charming were gonna have. She didn’t know the names of the replacement cousins on The Dukes of Hazzard, and she couldn’t sing the words to one Hank Williams Jr. song. Yes, sir, that lack of knowledge made her pretty sophisticated to me. Now, she also didn’t seem to know a whole lot about sex, which country girls often do, a positive trait much in their favor, but she was quick to learn and approached our clueless teenage exploration of sex with an appealing attitude and fervent enthusiasm. Best of all for me about Ms. Lilly White, she didn’t have a clue about the reputation of the Bugler family, and that gave me a chance for a fresh start and a different type of relationship with her than with every other girl I had ever known in my young life. Whatcha gonna do?
Well, being a football and baseball star at the high school, a fairly good-looking young man, and a relatively well-liked sort of feller by folks of all walks of life, I had my opportunity to be paraded in front of Ms. Lilly shortly after she had been introduced into the Senior Class of Mountain View High School, and I probably did more preening, plucking, and strutting for her than I had ever done for a female of the species then or since. I knew nothing about charm, but I played at being sweet, kind, and attentive for a few weeks for her, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. I wrote her a love note or two with some sappy poems that bared my soul, made eyes at her during the Sunday service like she could save me from the tortures of hell just as easy as Jesus, and acted like I had read some important and popular novel of the day that offered an existential philosophy that she thought she wanted to live by. I can’t recall what that novel was, for I never even looked at the cover of it, but I was willing to agree with what it said if saying I believed in it got me closer to her. And, it did.
Lilly White and I started getting closer and closer in our relationship, and we went through the normal stages of a young and budding romance. We held hands in the school hall ways, we pecked each other chastely on the lips in the parking lot before we got in our separate cars to drive home from school, especially if teachers or administrators might be watching, and, when we could sneak off behind a building or briefly and secretly lock the door of a room, we would do some heavy tongue-to-tongue kissing. Weekends, every young person in Stone County, and some of the weird older folks, went out on dates of cruising the Main Street, eating at Marie’s Dairy Crème or The Krispy House, and going to the movies. Now, Stone County didn’t have a sitting-in theater during the last few years of high school for me, so everybody went to the Stone County Drive-in. Sitting in a car in the dark without the prying eyes of adults nearby meant lots of opportunities for heavy make-out sessions that led to sexual encounters, and Ms. Lilly and I went through all those points too. We kissed, sucked, and slobbered on one another’s lips, ears, and necks while our clothes stayed on and our hands stayed above the clothes for a couple of weeks. Then, we progressed to dry humping and rubbing, again with the clothes on, but now our hands were starting to sneak up under shirts, unbuttoning brassieres, and unzipping jeans. This phase culminated in her showing me and telling me how I could “finish the job” for her with my fingers about as easily and quickly as she could finish the job for me with her hand, and then, when we had lent one another a hand a few times, we were both primed and pumped to move on to the next level. The next phase was the go-all-the-way phase, and I feel a little bit unmanly for admitting so, but I was not ready to jump to that stage with her, at least not at a drive-in movie and not in the backseat of a car or the cab of a pick up truck. It seemed like she deserved something nicer and better. No doubt, a country girl like Mabel Vines could have her pants pulled down around her ankles and be taken from behind in a stranger’s tent at Blanchard Springs campground and be thrilled about the whole experience. I mean, girls like Mabel always seemed to come back for more, so they must have liked it that way. But, there was something special about Lilly White. There was something about her that demanded that she could only fully give herself away inside a permanent structure that was fastened to the ground and on a piece of furniture that had real legs holding it up off the floor. I don’t even know how to explain it, or why a motel room wouldn’t have worked except I couldn’t rent a motel room in town because everybody who owned motels knew me and knew about how old I was. Anyhow, I’m just thinking out loud about a past that I can’t change, so I will move on.
Moving on… Lilly White and I had reached the phase in our relationship when we were ready to have coitus. That word, “coitus,” doesn’t sound like what you do at all, does it? And, I really wanted us to be able to do it somewhere besides in a moving vehicle that was sitting still, so, one day, I saw Aunt Charlotte in the Piggly Wiggly, and I don’t remember how I screwed up the courage, but I asked Aunt Charlotte if she minded if I brought a girl out to her house to sit on her big new sectional couch and watch movies on the satellite. Obviously, she said “yes,” and she even told me that if we went out there of a Saturday night, we could be alone because she generally went into town every Saturday afternoon to see her mother. After that, she usually went a dancing at the Hootenanny until midnight, and then she would get a cup of coffee with friends before she drove the ten or twelve miles home, mostly on rough gravel roads that a person didn’t drive over 20 mph on. And therefore, Aunt Charlotte’s trailer could be mine and Ms. Lilly’s little love nest until about one o’clock in the morning. Since Lilly’s curfew was midnight, we didn’t need the late time in the early morning, so we never did cross paths with Aunt Charlotte at her house, and Aunt Charlotte was never once there when we were. In fact, I cannot swear for or against the idea that she ever saw Ms. Lilly White. That is a weird thing to think about after all these years. That is to think how wrong it was that Aunt Charlotte’s reputation was smeared because she agreed to let me use her home to have sex with a girl that she never knew. Funny how rumors and reputation are built on such airy and false premises.
Anyhow, whether Aunt Charlotte and Ms. Lilly ever saw one another is something that is far, far outside the circle of clear places in my memory, but I do remember very clearly the two rules Aunt Charlotte presented to me then that she said would NOT be broken or I would no longer be welcome in nor have access to her home: RULE #1- No other boys or men were to enter that house with me under any circumstances-No males, period--besides me. RULE #2-The trailer was to be left exactly as I found it. Beer replaced/messes cleaned--no matter what the mess was.
Before we go on to other whys and wherefores, some of you might recall that in the story of Uncle Boog and the dogfight I had called Uncle Boog and Aunt Charlotte’s trailer a junk pile, junky, or some other word like “junk.” Well, it was on the outside. Uncle Boog’s rock throwing had dented up the whole front and busted all the windows out on that side. All three or four of them had cardboard and plastic stapled or taped over them in some manner. His banging with his fists and forearms on the aluminum front door had bent it up so much that it wouldn’t stay closed unless bolted from the inside with a sliding bolt lock. The front porch was a couple of oak pallets nailed together and balanced on some flat rocks. Yep, on the outside from the side nearest the gravel road, it barely looked livable. However, on the inside, the trailer was sparsely furnished but immaculate. Aunt Charlotte might never have worked away from her house, but her house was spotless. When you walked into the front door of the one-bedroom trailer, straight across an open area between the dining area and the living room where the floor was covered with white linoleum decorated with gold fleur de lis was a sliding glass door that opened onto a treated wood deck where Aunt Charlotte kept a beach lounge chair, a small round table, and a standing ash tray. She never allowed cigarette smoking in her house, ever. Standing at the front door to the right was the living area. This area had thick brown shag carpet and a huge stressed leather sectional that was mostly couch and big, fluffy pillows. Straight in front of it and covering one of the busted windows so that you couldn’t even tell there was a window was a real hardwood entertainment center, six-foot-tall or better, with doors that opened and slid back into the cabinet. Inside this entertainment center was a big TV, a satellite receiver, a VCR player, and a kick-ass Kenwood stereo that would shake the whole trailer if you turned it up halfway. That was all of the living room.
The kitchen/dining area had a small two burner electric stove and an even smaller oven in the cabinet above the stove. Aunt Charlotte had a round café style table with matching metal chairs for a dining room table. There was a refrigerator up under the cabinet too, brown or red. I don’t really remember which. It had a few pictures hanging on it and a picture and article cut out of a newspaper taped to it. On the right side leading out of the dining area to the back of the house was a hallway that led to the bathroom and bedroom. A wooden sliding door could be pulled across this hallway from a thick partition behind the refrigerator. Past the partition in the hallway on the left was a washer and dryer with cabinets above them. After that was a closet with rolling doors that hung on tracks. It was the only clothes closet in the whole house. Past the closet, on the left was the bathroom, and it was tiny. It had a small vanity with a tiny sink on the right side of the room. The toilet sat on the left and faced the vanity, and less than a foot from either and taking up the whole exterior wall was a shower/tub combo with a sliding wavy glass door and a small rectangular window to the outside. It wasn’t much of a bathroom, but I guess it had all the necessary parts. At the end of the hallway, sharing a wall with the bathroom and taking up the rest of the trailer was the master bedroom. All that Aunt Charlotte had in that bedroom was a four poster queen size bed with a matching dresser. She had a lamp and a clock on the dresser, but I couldn’t tell you about either since I was never in that room in the light. I do know that the room had no closet, and I seem to recall it had this light tan faux wood paneling. I can’t remember what was on the wall in the rest of the house, but I remember that paneling. Yes, I do. I don’t know why. If there were any pictures or decorations hanging on the walls anywhere in the house, I have no recollection. I have no idea why I have chosen to give you so many details about Aunt Charlotte’s trailer. It doesn’t exactly help prove my point, which is…
For a couple of months or so, Lilly and I spent every Saturday night at Aunt Charlotte’s, so folks who say they saw my truck, which was actually Daddy’s, sitting at Aunt Charlotte’s are not wrong. They just need to admit that when my truck was there Aunt Charlotte’s little blue Geo Tracker was not. She always parked that Tracker right by that oak pallet front porch, and it was never there when my truck was. It is time for those who know the truth of this to come out and say so. You know who you are.
And that explains the rumors. That is all there is to it. Lilly and I would grab a burger, fries, and soda at the Krispy House or Marie’s, depending on where most of our friends were. Then, we would head out to Aunt Charlotte’s. Generally, we would turn the satellite TV on and try to watch some recently released movies, but our sexual tickers were always wound up by the time we got there after riding seven miles down the bumpy Signal Hill road, and it was never very long before we were back in the dark bedroom naked and going at it. I was pretty adventurous, and she was willing to go wherever I led, so it was exciting times. I would be willing to bet that if we could of spent all of our time making love in that bedroom with no other outside worries busting in on us, Lilly and I would still be together. At least, I would still be with her. I don’t recall ever feeling so good in my whole life…to this day.
But even in the midst of it all as we lay there side-by-side with sweat glistening on our bodies glowing pink, I knew that the bliss of our carefree lust would not last long, when after an especially long bout of athletic lovemaking, she rolled over onto her side on one elbow with her head propped on her hand, moved her face real close to mine in the almost near blackness of the bedroom and asked me, “Dewey Lynne, what you are going to do with your life?”
Sure enough, that is what she asked me maybe the third or fourth Saturday night as we lay on Aunt Charlotte’s bed in the dark room that smelled of sex. What are you going to do with your life? What kind of question is that? Having never even thought of the question, much less the answer, my only recourse was to repeat her question back to her, so I asked her what she was gonna do with her life, and she told me. She would go to college and become a Doctor. She was thinking psychiatry or psychiatric nursing, whatever the hell that is. She said that she wanted to live near a big city so that she could experience arts and culture whenever she wanted to, but far enough away that she did not feel the hustle-and-bustle and dog-eat-dog of big city life. She wanted to be a world traveler and see things like Rome, Machu Picchu, and Angkor Wat. She would take a safari on the Serengeti plains in Africa, and on and on. She would love to have kids but thought she might wait until later, after she had done her traveling. The talk of kids did cause a question to pop into my head that I probably should have asked earlier, but I didn’t, and when I did ask her that question, her answer was the following:
“Of course, you think I’d want to have accidental kids with a dumb ol’ country boy like you?”
She said it jokingly and ran her fingers up the inside of my naked thigh as she said it, but I don’t recall ever feeling a pain so exquisite as the twisting pain those words made in my heart.
I remember the night when she asked me the question as the end of our relationship though we carried on for a few more weeks, maybe a month, maybe two. The sex was pretty extraordinary when I wasn’t made to think about anything else. Besides that, I probably loved her more than I can ever love anyone again, but, regardless of how deep my love might have been, I could not have answered the question that seemed so very important to her that she just kept on asking it. I can easily answer what I am going to do with my life now, but that fact does neither of us any good. I hope Lilly is happy wherever she might be.
Now, having laid it all out there for you as the gods’ honest truth, all of you know for sure how it is that the rumors got started about me hanging around out at Aunt Charlotte’s trailer. The fact is I WAS at her house every Saturday night for a while—just not with her. It never was a secret to anyone. Now, everyone knows the truth, and the gossip and rumors should be put to rest where they belong and those who want to keep carryin’ them can haul them all to hell as they’re going that way anyhow. That’s how I feel about it.
But…while I am at it, I reckon I’m a gonna go ahead like I promised and inform you about the time that Aunt Charlotte and I came awfully close to “doing the do.” At least, I thought that was what gonna happen. I’m not sure that it would have, but it surely did seem so. I will give you the details as best I can, and you see if you can figure it out. I might want to give a little warning here. These details are not for the prudish or puritanical. There is just no way around it if you want to know the facts. Whatcha gonna do?
Anyway, Ms. Lilly and I had parted ways, and the Mountain View Yellowjackets football team on which I started on both offense and defense had just lost their eighth or ninth game of the season. Life for me sucked, and my heart, soul, and body were broken and scattered in places where I could not find any of the pieces. It was Friday night right after we lost a close game to the Marshall Bobcats, and me and Bobby, Todd, and somebody else, probably Rusty or Jim, were out driving backroads. The other boys were slamming cold beers to get drunk as fast as possible, but I was nursing my first cold beer and generally feeling glum and kind of sick about everything in the world when somebody announced that there were only four cold beers left, and a run to the county line to the liquor store was imminent. I damned sure didn’t want to make that sixty-mile two-way trip with a truck cab full of loud and obnoxious slobbering drunk idiots, and I noticed that, in our purposeless driving of backroads, we had ended up near Aunt Charlotte’s house. Suddenly, a thought floated across my mind like a solitary, enlightened white cloud. If she was home and the lights were on, maybe I could stay with her for the night.
Well, sure enough, we got close to her trailer, driving along real slow so as to keep the dust down, and I could see light seeping out around the cracks of the bent front door, so I asked whoever was driving to stop. I told the boys that I wasn’t feeling so good, and that I thought I might just crash here at Aunt Charlotte’s. Oh, they hooted and hollered and said all kinds of crude, rude, and downright ugly and incestuous sexual things, but they were drunk and not likely to remember what they had said, so I let them go on with their idiocy and get a good laugh out of it. They didn’t even pull out of the road as I opened the door and bailed out with the truck still rolling at a pretty good clip. I hollered out to them as the momentum caused me to have to jog to a stop and watched the red taillights disappear in a cloud of red dust blackened by the darkness of the night.
“Y’all come back and get me in the morning, and we’ll go out to Beech Fork and float down to the lake. Get some beer. Lots of beer.”
I hoped that they had heard my hollering though I didn’t deem it likely, but it turned out at least one of the group did hear and followed my instructions, or this could be a whole lotta of a different story.
Anyhow, I walked up to Aunt Charlotte’s door slowly, listening for any kind of sound coming from the house. I heard what seemed like two women talking, but clearly the voices I heard were coming from speakers, so I was sure that Aunt Charlotte was still awake and probably watching TV. I stepped up onto the pallet porch, knocked on the locked aluminum door, and called loudly.
“Aunt Charlotte, it’s Dewey Lynne. You mind if I come in?”
I could hear a bit of shuffling around and something like “Give me a minute.” So, I waited there on the porch until she opened the door and stuck her head and left shoulder out.
“What are you doin’ here, Dewey Lynne?”
“I was riding around drinking with the boys, and I started feeling not too good. I thought maybe I could stay here and get some sleep rather than spend the night riding around with a bunch of rowdy drunks.”
“You’re not drunk are you?”
“No, ma’am. I never even finished the first cold beer.”
“All right. Well, I’m only half dressed, so let me go on back to my room, and you can come in and crash on the couch. There’s a throw blanket on the back of the couch and plenty of pillows. You know how to operate the TV, so take care of yourself. I’m a goin’ on to bed. Make yourself at home. Gimme three seconds to get outta sight down the hall.”
Aunt Charlotte let go of the door, and it didn’t give her three seconds before it swung open and allowed me a full view of her trotting across the dining/kitchen area into the hallway. She was in a t-shirt that came down about halfway on her ass, and she wore white panties that did little to contain her ample round cheeks that wiggled and bunched with each step and seemed to glisten beneath the bare bulb of the kitchen light. Diamond in the rough, no doubt. That rump was sparkling.
Anyhow, I stepped inside the door, turned, and locked it up tight with the sliding bolt. I walked over to the sectional couch and arranged the throw blanket and a pillow that were on it for sleeping, went back to the light switch next to the door, turned the kitchen light off, felt my way with my hands back to the couch, and seemed to have fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep before my head even hit the pillow.
Sounds exciting, right! No? ...Well, it is about to get that way. This next part is tough to tell because I do not have any practice at writing about this type of thing without it coming off sounded like pornography. I don’t intend it to be that way, and I swear I will only tell what happened. I am not sure how well I will do it but bear with me. Whether I do a good job or not and whether it seems pornographic or not, we’ll just have to see. What I do know for sure is that it is the honest-to-gawd truth.
I woke up the next morning feeling well rested and not the least bit fuzzy headed because I had not drunk even the one cold beer that I had opened the night before. The room was dim as if the sun had only just started to come up or maybe it was cloudy outside. I couldn’t tell. From where I lay on the couch, I could see straight down the hallway to Aunt Charlotte’s bedroom door. It was dark in the hallway, and her door was closed. I sat up on the couch and found the remotes for the TV and the satellite sitting on the back of the couch on top of a wide cushion. I turned them both on, making sure that the sound was off so that I didn’t make a big sudden noise and wake up Aunt Charlotte. There was a movie on about pilots being trained and flying out over the desert. I didn’t care to watch it because it starred this guy named Tom Cruise who I never could stand as an actor. I flipped down a channel on the satellite, and there were a couple of guys talking about odds of baseball games, boxing, and horse racing. You know how I feel about gambling on competitive sports if you read about Uncle Boog and the dogfight, so you know why I flipped down again. Wow! Lo! And Behold! A scene came up on the TV that was truly like nothing else that I had seen before in my life at that time. Man, it stirred some feelings.
The setting was a large room with wall-size big windows covered with silky white curtains, walls with dark oak wainscoting and intricately painted patterns that seemed very suited to Victorian times. A woman was lying in a canopy bed propped up on some pillows. She was red-headed and had pale skin with lots of freckles and huge breasts with pointy pink nipples clearly visible through the sheer nightgown that she wore. She was supposed to be sleeping, I think, but acting was clearly not in this well-endowed woman’s wheelhouse at all because clearly she wasn’t asleep. Then, I realized that her eyes were closed because she was pleasuring herself, and she was probably thinking about a scene that had happened earlier in the movie. I could see her hand moving down under the sheet that loosely covered her lower parts, and it was clear what parts her hands were touching. Suddenly, on the screen, a maid came in, a black woman in a French maid’s outfit that barely covered her round brown booty. This woman was carrying a silver tray that could have had anything on it, but I wasn’t looking at that. Turns out it was various types of fruit that could be used as sex toys. This gal was as well-endowed up top as she was on the bottom, and her skimpy outfit barely contained either end. I didn’t have the sound on, so I don’t know what was said, but after she set the tray of fruit over the pale woman’s lap, something caused them to start kissing one another on the lips and caressing one another’s ample breasts. Their hands were going where hands will naturally go when this sort of action is taking place, and watching it close up, even with the sound off, I have to admit that I was getting pretty excited myself.
As they carried on, my jeans got tighter and more constrictive in the groin area, but I couldn’t just pull out my junk there on the couch and start rubbing one out with Aunt Charlotte in the other room, so I got this idea that I would go help myself to the shower where I could finish off the excitement produced by the movie. The maid was now sitting on top of the other woman, planting her big ol’ boobs right on the other gal’s pink lips and freckled face. Yep! I had to act—and fast.
I turned off the TV with the remote, ran back to the bathroom, leaving my shirt, boots, and socks on the floor where I had piled them the night before, closed the door as quickly and quietly as I could, practically jumped out of my jeans and underwear, stepped into the shower and turned the water all the way to hot. The first squirt of the water from the showerhead was ice cold, but it didn’t cool me down any. I was buffing away already and looking for something to slick up with. I think I grabbed some hair conditioner. It really didn’t matter at this point. Anyway, the water’s running, getting hotter and hotter, and I’m a thumping away with my eyes closed, picturing those two ladies going at it when all of sudden Aunt Charlotte bangs on the door.
“Dewey Lynne, I gotta pee—BAD!”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
“I can’t wait. Turn around and face the wall.”
Well, she just walked right in. I’m fumbling around in the shower with a full erection, still with my conditioner lathered hand gripping it, and she comes over right up to the wavy glass shower door, turns to face the vanity, pulls down her panties, and sits on the toilet. Now, I can’t see nothing clearly through the wavy glass of the shower door, and I’m pretty sure that she can’t see nothing because the glass is not only wavy but fogged over at this point. Still, I was about to come, and she is sitting right there not more than two or three feet from me. I had quit stroking it. For ten or fifteen awkward seconds, I was kind of hunched over it like I was looking for a tick on my ball sack. I couldn’t even move. My face and front of my body were turned toward the wall so that the hot water that I had never adjusted was burning my left shoulder and left side of my back. She wasn’t there long, she never said a word, and I never heard so much as a tinkle of her peeing because of the shower going, but I turned to watch the outline of her figure as she walked out of the room whenever I heard the toilet flush. She closed the door when she stepped into the hallway. My dick was stiff in my hand, but the magic moment of release had been lost, and I turned, adjusted the water to a bearable temperature, and finished a regular shower feeling like a kid who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Maybe, that is not a good metaphor considering where my hands were and what they were doing. But, I thought, I have no reason to feel bad because there is no way she could have had any idea what I was doing in the shower before she barged in. No way, no how. By the time I was dried off and putting my pants back on, I had convinced myself that my secret sexual actions were more than likely still as secret as had been intended. Well…maybe not!
I hadn’t brought my shirt, socks, and boots along with me to the bathroom. They were still in a neat pile beside the end of the big sectional couch. I walked down the hall clothed only in my underwear and jeans, and in the vague light of the living room, I could see that Aunt Charlotte was sitting up in the corner of the sectional. She was wearing a white t-shirt, and, from what I could see, nothing else. As I got closer, I could see that she also had on the same white panties as the night before, but they were riding high up on her bare tanned hips. She had her left leg stretched out straight against the back of the couch cushions with her painted toes pointed toward the TV, and her right leg was bent up at the knee so that I could not see what she was doing with her right hand that was down in her lap. I couldn’t see her hand, but I could see it was moving. I could also tell that she didn’t have a bra on, for I could see her boobs wiggle beneath the t-shirt as her body shook from the movements of the unseen hand. I was probably gawking at her as I walked through the dining area, but I didn’t need to avert my gaze because she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at the TV. When I got where I could see what she was looking at, it was like a shock of electricity went through me from head-to-toe. I hadn’t changed the channel before I turned the TV off, and the pale, red-headed, freckled Victorian woman and her round brown French maid were really going at it now. The red-head had her face down in the maid’s crotch and a strawberry, shaped remarkably like a large penis head, in her hand. She was flicking the maid’s nub with her tongue while she worked the strawberry slowly in and out of the gal’s pink, wet snatch. I mean the camera was right there showing exactly what she was doing with her tongue and that strawberry, things I’d surely never thought that I would ever see, especially with my Aunt Charlotte in the room and mostly undressed.
“Does watching two women get you excited, Dewey Lynne?”
I immediately looked at the floor, trying to turn my head and body as far as I could away from Aunt Charlotte and the TV. My cheeks felt hot, my whole head felt hot, and, damn it, Old Faithful was starting to push at the zipper of my jeans already.
“Cat got your tongue, Dewey Lynne?”
“Yeah, that…um… yeah, that is some pretty exciting stuff.”
I sat on the couch as far as possible from Aunt Charlotte and made like I was putting my socks and boots on, trying not to look at the TV but failing, and trying not to look at Aunt Charlotte, but my eyes kept sneaking back over there. I couldn’t help it. I doubt any red-blooded, straight American male could have. Aunt Charlotte had thrown her head back against top of the couch cushion and lowered her body down on the couch a bit. Her eyes were mostly closed though she was looking at the TV. I could see as far down as her wrist on her right arm. It was covered by the top band of her panties, and she was doing some quick stroking with her hand. She moaned a little bit.
“I really, really like it. I’d like to find someone who could make me feel like their makin’ one another feel.”
The women on the TV had squirmed around into a 69 position, each with a piece of penis-shaped fruit in one hand. I think it was probably that day at that exact time, watching those two women go at it, that I figured out exactly where the little nub is that a feller is supposed to find he give his woman pleasure with his tongue or fingers. Yeah, the camera was pretty close up to the action, and with them a moaning on the TV and Aunt Charlotte sighing and a wiggling on the couch, I got a pretty good idea of how all those mysterious puzzles pieces fit together. It is not impossible, guys. It just takes little time and practice.
Anyway, I was trying my best to appear to be getting dressed. I actually had one sock on when Aunt Charlotte patted the couch by her side and called to me in a low and disturbed voice.
“Come over and sit by me.”
I stood and walked like I was in a dream over to the inside corner of the sectional couch. To get beside her where she was, I had to get on my knees and crawl across the soft leather. As I got close to her, much to my surprise, she kicked her right leg up and over my head and shoulders, grabbed the long, wet, blonde hair on the back of my head, and pulled my face down toward her crotch. I remember her bright white panties had two hearts pierced with arrows on them in the front and center, but she had pulled them to the side, and I could see she her pink lips, swollen and glistening, surrounded by black, tightly curled pubic hairs. Only a few seconds before, I had learned what I needed to do, what she probably wanted me to do, and I had every intention of doing everything to her that those women on the TV were doing, minus the fruit.
Suddenly, a horn started blaring out in the front yard like a gawd-damned goose parade. I hadn’t even heard a vehicle come down the road. That’s how far I had gotten out my senses, but now I was drawn back to them as if somebody had tied a rope around my waist and was pulling me backwards with a four-wheel drive truck. I jumped up off the sectional couch in one motion like a cat springing for a flying bird. I had on only one sock and my pants, but I bent over and grabbed my other clothes and boots and headed toward the door. I was about to unlock the bolt when Aunt Charlotte called out.
“Dewey Lynne, you come back whenever you want to. I’d like to finish this…some time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Dewey Lynne, if you know of a girl who might like to join in with us, watching a movie like this, well, you can bring her too.”
“I sure will, Aunt Charlotte.”
You can imagine the hooting and hollering that went on as I walked out to the truck half-clothed and half-socked. Those boys, my good friends, really let me have it as green as their cheeks and bloodshot as their eyes were from hangover. And though the drinking of cold beer started almost immediately and I wasn’t sober for long nor for many minutes of later that day or the following night, that early November Saturday was a day of a lot of thinking for me. I couldn’t tell you now all the thoughts that ran through my mind, for it was like a herd of wild mustangs in the form of notions kicking up the wind and dust in my brain so that I really couldn’t see any one of them clearly. You probably know how that goes if you’ve ever been in a situation like I had been with Aunt Charlotte where one little accident of fate might have changed everything in your whole life, and you don’t know whether that change would have been for the better or for the worse, and you kind of want to know, but then you also very much don’t want to know because of all the bad consequences the change might of set into motion. Anyway, I am still confused and contradicted about how I feel even when I think about it today. The one positive aspect of the events that occurred was that I did have new sexual fantasies to work out when I had some time by myself, and I’ll not say no more about that.
…Which brings us closer to the present, but not quite yet. I didn’t see Aunt Charlotte again after that early Saturday morning in 198- for a long, long time. She was one of the few people that I consider like family who wrote me a letter while I was in prison. She wrote just the one, and I don’t have it, but I wish I’d a kept it because I don’t remember much of the gist of it. Mostly, she was sorry to hear how things turned out for me, and she wished she had stayed in school instead of marrying Uncle Boog, and she wondered if we might have ever been boyfriend and girlfriend if she had stayed in school, but I had other romantic interests at the time and was trying to look forward instead of looking back, so I didn’t pay much mind to her letter, and I didn’t keep it. I like to think I answered it, but I don’t recall that either.
During the whole time that I was serving my sentence, I was plotting what I was gonna do to build an empire once I got out. When I got out of prison, I was a man on a mission, and that mission kept me away from Stone County and Signal Hill. When I did visit around Mountain View, I mostly looked in on Mama and one or the other of my brothers. Chance and opportunity never came together and gave me a good reason to be out Aunt Charlotte’s way, so it didn’t happen. By the time I was able to come back to town and settle into a normal kind of life, it was fifteen year later or even more, and Aunt Charlotte was in a bad way.
This is part where all I can do is distribute second hand information because talking with Aunt Charlotte is like talking to the mad hatter and March hare at a tea party. You never know what she is gonna say. What I have gathered from other folks is that sometime, in the late ‘90’s or early 2000’s, Aunt Charlotte developed breast cancer. Because she had no financial means to afford proper medical care and yearly checkups, she didn’t know that she had the cancer until she was in severe pain, and it was too late to save either of her breasts. She had to have a double mastectomy just to save her life. Now, no person who knows Aunt Charlotte would ever say that Aunt Charlotte was a vain woman, but she always kept herself in good shape, and she was a full-figured sexy gal, and that was kind of her thing. She had always had that special sexual “it,” and since she had gotten her freedom from the Apostolic lifestyle by marrying Uncle Boog, she liked to show “it.” With the loss of a set of her most attractive assets, I imagine she felt like she lost “it,” and she fell off into a mire of a funk pretty quickly.
I don’t know if it was for physical pain or the emotional pain of believing that she had lost her physical attractiveness, but folks say that she started smoking pot pretty regular. Well, I guess I shouldn’t sugar coat it. Most folks say she stays high all the time and has stayed high for no telling how many years.
Anyhow, one day a few years back, Aunt Charlotte’s neighbors up on Signal Hill had a pie auction at the new fire station to help pay for her medical bills. I read about the benefit event in the online newspaper and told Flo I was gonna go, so she wrote the time and day on the big calendar hanging in the kitchen and reminded me to look at the calendar on the day of. I dressed up like I was a going to the sale barn, got in my old beat-around farm truck, and I drove the fifteen miles out to the auction.
It took me a while to pick Aunt Charlotte out of the crowd because she looked like a shell of herself. Her face had thinned up almost to a skeleton, and she had lines around her mouth from all the smoking. She had cut off or lost most of her long brown hair, and she had what hair was left, if any, tucked up into a blue bandanna that was tied around her head. She wore a shoulderless blue dress that was tight around the top, which seemed to be done purposely to accent what she no longer had. The skirt flowed loosely out from her hips like a ballroom dress that might of been taken off a 1970 model hippie chick. I never saw her feet, but I figure she was either barefoot or wearing sandals even though the parking lot and fire station yard were dusty and gravelly. She weaved in and around and through the crowd like a non-corporeal spirit, not seeming to recognize anyone but nodding and smiling sheepishly at everyone as if she were surprised that they could see her. Who knows, maybe she wasn’t there. Maybe, I was the only one who saw her. I didn’t want her to see me, and I didn’t want to talk to her with all the other people around the way she was acting all ghost-like, so I went up to one of the Gill sisters who still lives out at their daddy’s place and who seemed to be running the benefit auction, and I handed her a check for the entire $13,579.92 of medical bills that I had written right after reading the newspaper article about how much Aunt Charlotte owed. The young lady looked at the check, shook her head, and with a mouth sort of drooped into an “O” asked me the following question.
“You want to take all them pies, Mr. Bugler?”
“No, missy, you just go ahead and auction the pies. Maybe, Aunt Charlotte can use the extra money.”
“That sure is mighty kind of you, Mr. Bugler.”
We both stood uncomfortably as if we might have something more to say. I couldn’t find any words, but Ms. Gill finally did.
“You know, she ain’t got nothin’ but that junky old trailer and that run down Geo Tracker.”
“She still drive it?”
“When she gets out. That ain’t much. Different people bring her groceries. I think she’d starve if she had to get her own.”
“I’m gonna talk to her about that…just not here.”
The Gill girl smiled and nodded, and I walked away, got it my truck, and drove down the road to Aunt Charlotte’s trailer.
It was about two miles from the fire station to Aunt Charlotte’s on the red clay and gravel road from Signal Hill back toward town. The road was mostly dust on this August evening. I believe it was August, might of been in September. Even though I drove slowly, my truck kicked up a cloud of red dust behind it. When I got close to Aunt Charlotte’s yard, I slowed to a crawl so that I wouldn’t drag all the cloud of powder behind my truck into the yard with me. I knew she wasn’t there and not likely to be there any time soon, so I had a chance to look around and see if I could decipher whether anything could be done for her.
Nothing much had changed around the place except somebody had made her a real front porch out of treated lumber, and this had a ramp. I suppose at some time during her cancer treatments, she was probably wheeled around in a wheelchair by whom I do not know. I walked up to the trailer and put my hands on the metal that might have once been gray, cream-colored, or tan, feeling the dents and holes made by the rocks that were flung at it so many years ago by Uncle Boog. The metal still held every crevice and crack and was faded to bone white, but you could only see that where I wiped the red dust away with my hands. The busted out living room, kitchen, and bath windows that had been covered with either cardboard or plastic all had pieces of pressboard fitted into the window frames with thick sheet plastic stapled to them. I don’t know why they never put real windows back in them. In other words, no light was getting into that trailer from the front. When I stepped up onto the porch, the same old banged up front door hung open five or six inches. Apparently, it still wouldn’t hold shut without being bolted from the inside. A breeze would have blown it completely open, but there was not bit of wind stirring the air though I was hit with a hurricane of remembrance when I stepped into the house. Everything in that trailer was exactly as I remembered it being the morning so long ago when Aunt Charlotte and I had almost become lovers of a sort that I had no idea about. The couch was still the same and looked to be in the same condition. The hardwood entertainment center still covered the window. The doors on it were closed so I couldn’t see the TV or whether she still had the Kenwood stereo and the satellite set up. Is there such a thing as a satellite set up that’s not Dish or Direct TV? I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter.
Anyhow, there is no need to talk about the details because they were the same as they had been forever, and the whole house, despite the open front door, was still just as immaculately kept and swept as it always had been except for a line of red dust on the white linoleum where the front door had been cracked open. I walked back to Aunt Charlotte’s bedroom, feeling my way down the dark hall with my hands on either wall. When I came to a closed door at the end, I first listened to the hum of a window air condition unit that I couldn’t figure out what it was. When I figured out what the sound was, I opened the door, reached inside to the wall on the left, and found and flipped on the light switch. When I did, I immediately thought of Miss Lilly White, and those memories put an unpleasant twist right in the center of my heart. I pulled the door closed and quickly strode back down the hall. I opened the refrigerator, and for the first time in my life looked closely at the forty-year-old newspaper clipping that had always hung there. It wasn’t much faded since I had first seen it. “Corporal Robert James Perkins completes Army jump school” beneath a picture of a young man who did not seem to share many of Aunt Charlotte’s facial features. I didn’t know if it was her brother, uncle, or even father, and I never have asked. I opened the fridge, and there were five brand name cold beers sitting in the side panel. I hadn’t had a cold beer in five or six years, but I thought, what the heck, and I opened one, grabbed one of the metal dining room chairs, carried it outside to the new treated wood front porch, and sat, drinking beer and waiting on Aunt Charlotte.
I was sipping on my third cold beer when Aunt Charlotte finally pulled into the yard in her Geo Tracker. She hadn’t slowed down as she came down the road, and, though it was too dark to see, I felt the cloud of dust that she carried into the yard. The Tracker coughed and chugged when she turned off the key, and then the motor whined to a stop. She got out of the car stumbling and mumbling as if she was drunk. I didn’t think she had noticed me in her headlights as she had pulled into the driveway, and I was sitting in the dark, so I was surprised when she called out.
“What are you doing here, Dewey Lynne?”
“Waiting on you, Aunt Charlotte.”
I held the door open for her, and she brushed past me kind of leaning in to me but not really touching me.
“You want to sit on the back porch and talk? I’m gonna smoke. You still smoke?”
“No, I had to quit many years ago. I’d still like to though just, you know, not good for if you want to live a long time.”
She seemed to ignore my comment as she swayed over to the entertainment center, took down a metal tin from the top shelf, and fiddled around in it for a minute out of my sight.
“You still drink beer.”
“Yeah, um…I’ve had three of yours. I don’t have any with me to replace it.”
“You know the rules, Dewey Lynne.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll have you some in the next few days.”
“Let’s go sit on the back porch.”
She had a beach lounge chair on the back porch that might have been different from the original, but the ashtray and little round table were still the same. I had grabbed the last two cold beers from the fridge. I opened one for her and set it on the table. I took mine and sat on the one step down to the weedy back yard. I opened it and took a big slug. She lit her cigarette that definitely was not tobacco. A rich and delicately skunky aroma filled the air all around.
“How come we never hooked up, Dewey Lynne?”
I was not expecting that line of questioning, but it was an easy prompt for a quick response.
“We almost did once, remember?”
I turned to look at her face bathed in a thin streak of light that shined through the sliding glass door from a bare bulb kitchen fixture, but I didn’t see a bit of recognition in her watery eyes that she knew what I was talking about.
“We’re the same age, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am. I do know that.”
“Your Uncle Boog, he never scared me. He changed me, he made me do things I had no choice in that I wouldna done, but he never scared me.”
“I’ve never talked to him about you.”
That was a damned dumb thing to say, I thought to myself.
When I looked back up at her, she had the glowing red stub of the marijuana cigarette up close to her face. I thought maybe she was gonna burn herself.
“You know, Dewey Lynne, I never had sex with another man after him. Not even one. I never even considered it.”
“That is none of my business, Aunt Charlotte, but I had no idea.”
“Nobody knows that, but now you know. You can tell anybody you want. I don’t care.”
“It’s a secret between you and me as far as I’m concerned.”
“Okay.”
There was a long pause in which I listened to the hum of the tree frogs calling for rain, the crickets grinding out the temperature on their back legs, and the whippoorwills calling out their romantic advice. I could hear Aunt Charlotte’s deep inhalation and the rheumy cough when she let out her held breath. I noticed she hadn’t even touched the heavily sweating can of cold beer.
“How come we never hooked up, Dewey Lynne?”
She’d asked that question twice at this point, but I figured I would be answering the questions many more times. I was right.
“I guess fate never wanted us to.”
“Were you afraid of your Uncle Boog? I never was scared of him. He changed me though, but he never scared me.”
“Maybe I was afraid of him a bit when I was a kid, but he wouldn’t mess with me because of Daddy, so it wasn’t really a thing. Can I ask you something, Aunt Charlotte?”
“Sure.”
“If I was able to help you out with groceries and medical stuff, you know, money wise, would that be okay with you?”
“I hear you have quite a spread.”
“Yeah, your welcome to come visit any time.”
“Why would you want to help me, Dewey Lynne? What am I to you? I haven’t been your real aunt in forty years. I don’t need pity.”
“Oh, it’s not pity, Aunt Charlotte. All those years ago, you did me a huge favor letting me bring my girlfriend out here while you were at the Hootenanny. I had the time of my life with that gal here in your house and in your bedroom. You didn’t have to let me do that. I guess I would like to return the favor.”
“Do you remember what her name was? I can’t recall.”
“Lilly White.”
“Lilly White? I don’t believe I ever met her.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Dewey Lynne?”
“Yes?”
“How come me and you never hooked up?”
Since the night of the benefit auction at least once a week, either me or Flo carries a bag full of groceries out to Aunt Charlotte. I never know if she eats them or not, but I never see them again. When I go out, I pick up a six pack of brand name beer and put it in her fridge. I drink one with her every once and a while, sitting out on the back porch while she smokes a joint. Flo’s hearing or reading this for the first time, and she won’t like it, but what’s one beer a week, Flo? When I go out for the weekly visit, I try to reconnect to the woman that I thought I knew pretty well as a youth, but all we ever have are broken, disremembered conversations that go pretty much the same every time as I’ve laid out in the dialogue above. Physically, Aunt Charlotte will probably be able to survive for a very long time. Mentally and emotionally, she’s about had it. You see, Aunt Charlotte has made a choice to try and live what’s left of her life in the past, a past that she doesn’t remember, a past that is a foreign and strange world of decisions she does not know how to make differently, and a past that she has rationalized as a past that she doesn’t regret, but I know better. She would change everything about her life, starting when she met Uncle Boog if she could. I am sure of that.
Anyway, here I am writing about Uncle Boog again, and I damned sure don’t feel like doing that. Whatcha gonna do?
Y’all need to tell me what part of my life you want to hear about next. I’m not even gonna pretend to have an idea.
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