In moonless black, on the second floor of the building’s far side, were Mike’s kitchen and two rooms. Eric glanced up, walking beside the zombie gray the neighborhood’s nightlights had rendered Mr. Condotti’s pale green aluminum siding. (Behind him the garage was dark olive.) He came out under the street’s wide maples, its tall hickories.
Among telephone wires at the block’s end, crows cawed.
Between the houses east, Eric saw faint orange, with violet above it and black above that. Half the houses on Montoya were green. The other half were gray or blue. In the west, beyond the trestle, three stars still tacked up the dark. Heading toward the next streetlight, as he’d done every second or third morning all summer (often five or six days in a row), Eric turned toward the Verizon sign, back under the highway, behind which various homeless guys camped out among the saplings.
As he neared the corner, a breeze moved over the trees, so that, under the corner lamp, a branch swung down and up, down and up, putting the street sign’s white letters on the green panel in and out of the light: Montoya…Montoya…Montoya…
Eric started across to the elevated causeway.
You could pretend it was the middle of the night. The street was empty. (He dug. He sucked.) Christ, Eric thought, I hope I get something quick.
Helped with some spit, the KY in him would get Eric through three homeless hillbilly fucks (Okay — I’m done. Now, get on, son) if they were seven inches or under. Men with significant meat — eight, nine, ten — used the stuff up faster. The tube in his pocket was in case things got complicated.
Eric preferred it complicated.
For the last ten days, “complicated” had been two homeless black guys, one of whom, Big Frack, was well into his forties and had the largest cock Eric had ever seen or, until Frack had turned up sleeping on the old mattress back there, imagined. Scott had told him that super big men had trouble getting hard. Not Frack. Soft, it was clearly more than — and hard, it was easily four inches over — a foot! His own cock was pretty much all Frack talked about, to the point where, after four times with it, Eric had wondered if Frack’s obsession with what this nigger bitch or that white cocksucker had done for him back in Frisco or down in Houston or up in Denver to get a hold of it hadn’t caused his homelessness. After half an hour, as a topic of conversation (monologue…?), it was…well, boring. When Frack sat cross-legged on the mattress, shirt and pants gaping, jerking at it absently and rambling on, the hooded head before his sunken chest rose higher than his teats’ black knobs — which, either side of his in-sloped breast bone, practically faced one another, like crossed eyes, or the decayed nodules on fruit.
Besides his cock, Frack had no other prepossessing features. He was not smart. With his caved-in chest, he was built like a six-foot-seven bowling pin, with no incisors, upper or lower, the teeth either side long, stained, and slanted inward. Fortunately those barrel thighs were hard. But that’s not what you saw first: Frack shambled about like a towering black Shmoo. Still, it was fun to watch him play with himself inside his pocket — Frack had ripped out the bottom and could make it stick four inches from the frayed pocket rim; he would walk around like that because, he explained, with the skin forward, people didn’t know what it was and thought it was a piece of black pipe; displaying it like that kept it hard — or rubbing on it through the outside of his threadbare jeans, which he did nonstop: I’m ’bout half-hard all da time — an’ I’m pretty much jerkin’ off on it — at least half ways — all da time, too. An’ you love to watch dis mule-dicked nigger play wid it, doncha, white boy? And so do da ol’ fart. The “ol’ fart” was Joe. On the far side of fifty, Frack’s partner Joe had a good seven incher — the same as Eric’s — and was able to put up with Frack’s phallocentric filibuster. The two took turns fucking Eric a couple of times in tandem, each morning he showed up, or letting Eric see how far he could take them down his throat.
Come on, Frack. Sometime there you gotta let da cocksucker breathe!
Eric was getting good at relaxing his neck muscles and killing his gag reflex.
Don’t worry. I’ll back off if I see ’im ’bout to pass out.
Joe would smile, having heard it before — Eric figured.
Frack had no trouble coming in Eric’s mouth or ass, even when Eric only got in the first ten or so inches. Joe had to work up a sweat to get off in Eric’s mouth. (In Eric’s butt he did better.) And he always had a pocket full of condoms.
When Eric suggested Frack use one too, Frack chuckled. Where? On mah li’l finger? Frack’s hands were big. Don’t worry — ain’t nothin’ been up mah hole this month ’ceptin’ your mother fuckin’ white boy tongue.
Both men were really into “tongue-wrastlin’ wid dis fine white bitch,” which Eric had gotten used to and even liked, teeth or no teeth.
For Eric, the Fourth’s real fireworks had come mostly before seven in the morning.
Over the last week-and-a-half a bow-legged black kid, twenty-two or twenty-three, kind of simple and good natured, called Pickle, who’d told them all how he’d started out in a Wyoming orphanage, would turn up every other day and hang around to watch, then get a blowjob from Eric when he’d finished with Joe and Frack.
When Pickle got excited about anything or even laughed hard, he peed his pants.
He didn’t mind Eric feeling it, though, through the sopping denim. He was nice looking in a kind of goofy way. He’d got his name because someone had said he smelled like the inside of an old pickle barrel. Actually, the smell was old piss: he only changed his pants, he said, when someone, sorry for him, gave him new ones. At the beginning Eric had brought him a pair of his own and gotten a grateful grin, as Pickle put them on right there, then vigorously tore apart the discarded one’s he’d been wearing and threw them out on the sidewalk; but when, two days later, Pickle was back and Eric smelled him, he realized replacing Pickle’s jeans would be an endless job.
If Joe had a coffee, he’d let Eric — even Pickle — have a swallow or two, though Frack would say, Don’t let dem drink out dat cup, nigger! Day gonna give us some damned diseases or somethin’. If my ol’ gift o’ God start’ dribblin’ dat gonorrhea shit an’ I gotta get my black ass stuck full o’ needles again, or I come down wid dat HIV, I’m go’n’ bus’ some white an’ black ass both wid sumpin’ ’sides my dick!
Joe would chuckle and say, If de scumbags got diseases, Frack, we’re a little late for dat now, and pass Pickle or Eric the blue cardboard container, printed with white columns, which smelled so good and tasted so bitter under the sweetness — while Frack humphed.