Tail in the South Pacific

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Training in the fine art of passion and male bonding.
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sr71plt
sr71plt
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(Note to reader: For a fuller context for this story, read the "Wolf Creek" novella series and "The Photograph 1: John" and "The Photograph 2: Jamie.")

Joe knew his unit shouldn't have entered the Scharzwald this close to dusk. The doughboys had been picked off one by one by the huns, hidden in the trees. But Joe knew someone must get through and warn the big brass. He was the last one alive. He had to press on; he could not fail. This could be the turning point. The Yanks and all of their loved ones across the sea who depended on them to prevail over Old Fritz could be saved if the warning of the impending German troop movements got to the American lines in time.

They saw each other at the same moment as Joe splashed out of a shallow creek; the German soldier was as surprised to see Joe as Joe was to see him. A moment of shock during which it registered with Joe that the German was just a boy, a young and scared boy. Could he possibly be an enemy? He was shaking like a leaf. Could Joe possibly take advantage of that? Was he sent here to hunt young, vulnerable boys? Could that ever be the right thing to do? In the moment of indecision, the boy raised his ancient two-barreled pistol and sent a bullet whizzing through the material of Joe's uniform sleeve.

An overload of sensations: surprise, slight pain from the bullet nicking his arm, the sound of the misfiring click of the second chamber of the youth's pistol, and a new, ominous sound—harsh snuffling and snorting and thrashing about in the underbrush beside the creek. A huge wolf, a magnificent creature, really, broke into the small clearing Joe had been caught in and stood, menacingly between the American doughboy and the young German hun, his great muzzle turning from one to the other, trying to decide which direction to pounce. With a little cry, the trembling German youth slipped from his precarious perch in the tree and fell to the ground. The wolf was upon him in a flash. Awakened from his paralysis by this new, more worthy, better-defined foe, Joe whipped a long-bladed knife from the sheath at his thigh and fell upon the wolf, slicing and stabbing the beast relentlessly—man against the natural elements, a suddenly clear-cut understanding of the point of the struggle of man.

The battle was furious but short, and once more man was triumphant. With a mighty heave, Joe thrust the carcass of the magnificent wolf aside. The German youth was gashed and his clothes lay on his bruised and trembling body in tatters—but he still breathed and his eyes were filled with panic and fear as they looked up at the panting American doughboy standing over him with raised and bloody knife. Joe . . .

"Jules! Jules! Jules Kincaid, where have you crept off to? Oh there you are. Come in this instant and go to your room. You can see what time it is."

Yeah, right, Jules thought. Time for one of those men to come and start playing hide the sausage with you. With a sigh, Jules left off writing his story, closed his tablet, and slid back into the shabby little Kincaid living room from the Chicago tenement fire escape. The fire escape and his stories were Jules's escape from the sordid world he and his mother had been propelled into by the death of his father the previous summer.

"Jules, hurry up now and go to your room. It's almost eight o'clock." Jessica Kincaid sounded more weary than angry. This wasn't the life she'd planned for either of them. At least Jules had his stories to escape into. All she had was her low-paying receptionist job by day and what she had to do by night to bring in enough to keep the two of them going. All because of Joe. All because of his bravado—and because he'd never learned how to swim.

"Step to, Jules. In your room now. And finish up your homework, or you'll never graduate with your class. Don't be spending all of your time on those adventure stories of yours, do ya' hear?"

Jules heard all right. He heard that hated name, Jules, pounding at him. He certainly heard that. The first thing he was going to do come July and his eighteenth birthday, in the year he'd had his eye on for a decade, 1917, was to get rid of that name, have it legally changed if he could. Reduce it to nothing more than an initial if he couldn't. But as far as hearing, he could do that better than his mother seemed to think. And he had two good eyes too. Who did she think she was fooling?

There wasn't a thing wrong with either his hearing or his eyesight an hour later, when, shortly after hearing the knock on the apartment door, he opened the door to his bedroom a crack and saw them doing it on the couch. His mother was on her butt on the sofa, sideways, with her back arched and her shoulders digging into the sofa arm. And her legs were splayed wide. And some big bruiser of a guy was kneeling between her legs with his knees buried in the sofa cushions and that big fat dick of his buried in Jules's mother. The guy was gruntin' and groanin', and Jules heard his mother making all sort of moaning sounds with her mouth. But from where he stood, he could see her eyes. And her eyes were dead and focused on someplace far, far away. This wouldn't have been happening if those Krauts hadn't swarmed over his dad—his war hero dad—and gotten the best of him finally after he'd killed hundreds of them. His dad would put a stop to this if he were here. Jules himself was almost eighteen, and he'd learned a thing or two about fighting, but he somehow knew that his mother didn't want him to intercede. She apparently was doing what she wanted to do. But she sure wouldn't be doing it if his father were still alive.

Jules's attention was arrested by the working of the man's dick inside his mother, the rhythm of the movement as it pushed in and pulled out in concert with the man's grunts and his mother's moans. It was almost poetic and was arousing—or would be if it weren't his own mother who was being worked. But then Jules had the most guilty feeling, and he saw now that his mother had seen him watching and that her eyes had become even more dead than before and were brimming over with tears as her mouth formed a silent, wounded scream.

The inevitable confrontation between mother and son the next morning didn't take the direction that either had envisioned.

Jules caused the floodgates to open by trying to deal with the tension between them—and the reason behind it—indirectly by extolling the war hero exploits and high moral character of his dead father—assuming his mother would get the message without forcing them to talk about what he'd seen. But Jessica was having none of that, although she took her reaction to a place she'd carefully never taken it before. And she surely would not have taken it now if her world hadn't been shattered by the undeniable truth of what her son had seen the previously night, a truth that had been there for some time but that she could, until now, pretend wasn't real because it wasn't acknowledged.

"God, will you stop this about your father, Jules. Joe wasn't a war hero. He didn't even make it to France. His ship sank and he drowned. We aren't still fighting because some quirk stopped him from saving the world. He died a useless death—and he left you and me with nothing."

"He loved and protected us and went to France to make the world safe for us," Jules responded stubbornly, refusing to hear the truth. "He . . ."

"The only one he loved was himself, Jules. He wanted me until he had me and then I was just another one of his possessions. And it was the same with you. He . . ." She couldn't go on; she recoiled in horror at what she'd said. She'd never spoken of her husband to her son like this. Even though she had spoken the truth. She might have said something before now, knowing that Jules was sinking ever deeper into his misconceptions, but Jules was growing up to be so much like his father. She didn't want to plant any more of Joe's self-possession and disregard for others in Jules's brain than was naturally there.

Both sat there, staring each other down. Jules still worshipped his father. What he was hearing now wasn't the warning that his mother intended; it was more like a blueprint.

At length, Jessica changed tack. "It isn't about last night. I was going to tell you anyway, but now it's just as well that I did it."

"Did what?" Jules asked belligerently.

"Last week I was informed that you won the school system's citywide writing competition. I was going to tell you then, but something else came with the contest win, and I've been struggling with it ever since. I think now, though, that it's the best thing that could happen—for you, certainly."

Jules was interested now. He actually knew he'd won the contest. And he knew what his mother hadn't told him. He had been agonizing for days that she would say no, that he would be trapped in this tenement with her and in this sordid life forever. He'd already decided he would enlist and go off to the waning fighting in France and Germany if she didn't agree to the what came with the contest win.

"The novelist, Arthur Brolin, has agreed to take you on as a personal student," Jessica said. "But he's leaving for a year's sabbatical in the South Pacific in late June. If you want to apprentice to him to learn what he can teach you about writing, you'll have to be gone for a year. You'll have to leave Chicago. And I can't come with you."

Jessica had voiced these stipulations like they were negatives. But they were honey to Jules's ears. Each and every stipulation. He was free. He was going far, far away from Chicago and his mother, and he was going to study under the novelist, Arthur Brolin!

* * *

"It's good, of course," Arthur Brolin said as he handed the typewritten pages back to his pupil, Jules Kincaid. But he wasn't looking at the young man and he offered no further comment.

Jules followed his teacher's gaze out onto the white-sand beach beyond the palm tree line. Sid—their Sumatran houseboy, Sidharto—wearing a gaily colored sarong pulled up and tucked into his waistband to escape the foam of the waves, was casting his net into the turquoise-blue surf of the perfect beach. For his year of writing sabbatical, accompanied by his young protégé, Brolin had settled on this beach paradise, just up the coast from the coastal town of Bengkulu, yet so isolated that few came this way. Here, Arthur Brolin was like a king in his domain—and few knew or cared how what he did in his domain.

Brolin sighed, still gazing intently on the rippling muscles of the lithe, diminutive, yet perfectly formed houseboy, who was focused on catching their dinner. Jules knew what that sigh was about. He'd heard Brolin fucking the houseboy in the dark of the night in their thatch-covered sprawling hut. Jules had no illusions why Brolin had come this far from the American Midwest for his year's sabbatical of writing. And, now, he also had no illusions about why Brolin had volunteered to bring him along and to mix his own writing with developing the young escapee of the Chicago tenements.

"It's good . . . but?" Jules said, waving the pages of his latest attempt at a short story near enough to Brolin's line of sight to break the man's concentration on the fishing houseboy.

"It's good. It's very good . . . ," Brolin answered again, absentmindedly.

"But what?" Jules persisted. Brolin was usually much more communicative than this. But Jules had been writing story after story for two months now in this Dutch colony paradise, and he still hadn't won anything more than lukewarm comments from Brolin.

"But . . . we've discussed this before, Jules," Brolin said as he gave his handsome, eighteen-year-old student his full, undivided attention now. "It's good in a mechanical sense, but it has no passion."

"No passion?" Jules asked. Brolin had put his hand, that hand with the long sensuous fingers, on Jules's wrist and hadn't taken it away. Jules shuddered at the touch, but not wanting Brolin to feel his trembling and misconstrue it, he let the words tumble out.

"What is this about no passion? I write adventure stories. I write of men struggling against the elements and eventually winning out over nature or the cruelties men force on other men, like war. War stories, like the one we just went through. Situations where people like my father struggle against impossible odds. I pour out everything inside me on these. But you say they have no passion?"

"Your writing is very good . . . no, extremely good, Jules, as I said. And there's nothing wrong in the themes you pursue. But they are missing something nonetheless. And I think what they are missing is passion. I'm sure you put everything inside you into your writing. But clearly the problem seems to be that you don't have nearly enough passion inside you to give to your stories—to make them sing with passion, to put them above what any other young writer is producing. I didn't invite you out here to make a competent writer of you. I brought you out here to make an internationally acclaimed writer of you. And I think you have that in you."

Jules had lowered his head and was trying his best to drink in what Brolin was saying to him. But all he could think of were those searing fingers on his wrist, feeling his pulse, no doubt searching for the passion inside him.

"I do. I do feel very passionate about what I'm writing," Jules stammered out in his defense. "I feel . . ."

"You only feel within the limits of your experience, Jules," Brolin said softly. "And your experience is limited. You can't really feel passion as a writer until you've experienced passion. That's what the best writers do. They let themselves go and they experience it all. And it comes out in their writing. You are young, so young. You've experienced . . . nothing . . . really, before now. I could . . ."

"You showed me this picture, this picture of an elk," Jules rushed on, not wanting to hear what Brolin wanted to say to him. You told me to write a story about it, about a majestic animal, about the relations between all that the elk is and my protagonist, Joe. And I did that. I wrote of Joe and an Indian warrior coming upon each other in the wilds of Wyoming and how they fought each other, meaning to do so to the death. And how the appearance of an elk stag on the mountain ridge above them made them both stop and realize how futile their fighting was and then separate and go their own way. I wrote that with passion. Man against the elements, the majesty of nature, the bonding of men in dire straits."

"That wasn't the bonding of men," Brolin said in a voice both soft and full of steel. "Those men fell away from each other when confronted with the majesty of nature, as represented in the elk, Jules. Don't you see? Nature won. That didn't show the strength of your protagonist; it showed his weakness. What I see inside you, what I think you have to give in your writing is showing the ascendance of your protagonist over nature and over other men. The passion in the protagonist's relationship with nature, as symbolized by that elk stag, is not in accommodating or respecting the elk, but in mastering and possessing it. And the same can be said of the man, the Indian warrior."

Brolin's voice had become insistent; he was flooding Jules's mind with the power of his smooth, honey-toned voice and the strength of his storytelling. Jules felt almost as if he was going into a trance. He could feel the pressure of Brolin's grip on his wrist, and now he could feel the palm of Brolin's other hand on his thigh. Jules felt his chest heaving, and, looking at Brolin, he could see that his mentor was similarly affected. They were both bare-chested and in colorful sarongs, just as Sid was. They had gone completely native. Jules felt what was coming next, but the mesmerizing effect of Brolin's voice and Jules's aching need to produce the writing that Brolin wanted, to become the writer that Brolin said he was capable of becoming, possessed the young man, and he made no move to stop his mentor.

"Bonding is important to a writer, Jules," Brolin was saying. "Experiencing bonding and letting the passion of that build and pour down to your fingertips as your fingers sit on the keys of the typewriter, and imbuing your writing with a full, mature knowledge of passion through experience . . ." His eyes were fully intent on Jules now, although Jules was still unable to look up at him, and his hand on Jules's thigh had slipped into a fold in the sarong and rested on the warm, smooth skin inside Jules's thigh, high up. He was lightly stroking the inside of Jules's thigh with his index finger and a thumb, sending ripples of electricity through Jules's body.

"You need to acquire a much deeper and richer experience to even begin to know what the passion is, Jules. Bonding. Bonding. I could . . ."

"Kiai Brolin. Kiai Brolin! Venerable teacher! Look what I've caught." The chestnut brown houseboy, Sid, full of life and laughter and with a smile as broad as his handsome face, was running up the beach toward Jules and Brolin, a big fat fish in his hand. "We eat well tonight, Kiai Brolin. The god's are good to us."

Brolin joined the infectious laughter of his houseboy and also joined in the rejoicing over the catch. When he turned back to Jules, though, his young apprentice was gone and only the scattered sheets of his "only very good" short story and the picture of the majestic elk stag remained where he had been sitting on the pillows beside the low table at the palm-treed verge of the white-sand beach.

Hours later, unable to sleep, burning with the implications of what Brolin had told him, knowing now, instinctively and irrevocably, that Brolin was right—that he would never be able to write with the necessary passion until he had allowed himself to experience passion—Jules crept out of his room in one wing of the thatched hut and quietly moved to the doorway of Brolin's room in the other wing.

They were there. The little Sumatran houseboy was flat on his belly on Brolin's bed, his legs tight together and his hands firmly gripping the brass rods of the headboard above him for dear life as Brolin, nude and crouched above him, encasing the pelvis of the smaller man with his strong thighs, his sensuous fingers wrapped around the Sumatran's wrists, plunged a thick and long cock between the houseboy's pert butt cheeks again and again and again. Sid was whimpering and Brolin was panting hard. Jules stood, transfixed, and moaning slightly to himself as his hand went to his own rising cock and the passion of the moment flooded into him. This, more than anything Brolin had been telling him earlier, demonstrated the majesty and monstrousness of what full, passionate possession meant. Jules's mind started to race and all sorts of sensations and images flooded in. He withdrew from the doorway.

A pen and some paper; he had to find a pen and some paper. He had to write. Now!

* * *

Jules wrote far into the night, feverishly. He knew the writing was better than he had ever accomplished before. But he also knew that it wasn't good enough. His mentor had been right. The experience of the passion was what was missing. What he had seen earlier had transmitted to him in some degree, but that wasn't enough. He knew now what he had to do. He had to have the passion; he had to become the writer he wanted to be.

He was focused so intently on his work that he hadn't noticed the sounds until they had become insistent, close by. Drums and shots and screams.

Jules jumped up from his desk and ran to the window and pushed aside the palm frond matting. The sky was aglow over Bengkulu, lighting up the beach and the pounding surf of the Indian Ocean. Bengkulu was burning. It seemed as if the whole sky to the west was ablaze. A shot rang out nearby, and Jules instinctively fell away from the window.

sr71plt
sr71plt
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