Two-Tracks Town

He didn't answer Guy. The man probably thought that Ken didn't have a choice, so an answer wasn't required--he'd just take the demand and go with it. Guy wasn't interested in an answer right now, anyway. He sensed that Ken couldn't be put off much longer from climaxing, and he did as he usually did. He rose from the bed and stood beside it, turning Ken on his side, facing him, and forced his cock between Ken's lips for the young man to suck clean as Guy stroked the young man's cock to an ejaculation.

* * * *

Ken had biked across the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks to the distinctly nicer part of town, to East Glenview, several blocks of an avenue with trees on a grassy strip running between the lanes with the road ending near the banks of the Young Fork Creek. This was where some of the bigger Southern colonial houses that had been kept up by the richer people in town were strung out. The manager of the First Bank on East Court Street, Tom Maddox, a handsome black man, tall and ramrod straight, distinguished looking and quite fit at forty-eight, had offered to pay Ken to help him clean out his garage on a Saturday afternoon.

"The wife and kids are at the cottage on Lake James this weekend. That makes this a perfect time for this job," he said, giving Ken a smile, as the young man motored his bike up Guy's long driveway.

Of course they are and of course it was an ideal time to do this, Ken thought.

"Maybe we should go in the house and have something to drink before we tackle this," Maddox said.

Ken looked around at the garage. He could see there was little work to do to clean it up, and what there was out and strewn around looked like it had been dragged from where it had tidily been stowed to begin with. Maddox was a very tidy man. He was a good manager too, highly respected in town despite being black--although there were those who thought the blacks were moving up too fast in this town. And he was comparatively rich in a town that had been economically depressed since the bypass on Interstate 40 had been completed. He certainly was an impressively handsome man and was justifiably self-confident. Up and coming he was.

Ken well knew the man was "up." The man was hung and he made no attempt to hide that he went hard when Ken arrived.

"Sure, that would be nice," Ken said.

"Beer?" Maddox said, giving the young man a sly smile.

"Sure, why not?" Ken answered as Maddox put a hand on the young man's butt and guided him into the house. They'd gone through the "too young to drink beer" routine before. They didn't need to mention it again--certainly not with what else unmentionable went on between the two. He had been too young to have sex with Maddox once, as well.

Maddox fucked Ken in a guest room. He'd said before that he didn't want to do it in the same bed where he fucked the wife who'd given him four kids. Ken's shorts and T-shirt were on the floor beside the bed, entwined with Maddox's. Two crisp, just-from-the-bank hundred-dollar bills were tucked into a pocket of Ken's shorts.

As far as Ken knew--and he had some reason to know--Maddox had the biggest, longest cock in town. He certainly was a black bull. Ken didn't like Maddox much but he rather liked being stretched as much as the black man could do it. He knelt, on his knees, chest and cheek to the bedspread, arms stretched straight out from his body, sacrificially, his fists clutching gobs of the bedspread material, as Maddox crouched over his pelvis, saddled on the young man's hips, clutching Ken's thin waist between his hands; penetrated him thick and deep; and rode the young man's ass to a mutual nirvana.

Later they were putting the garage back in order when Maddox asked his question. Ken had known there was something the man wanted to say or ask about beyond wanting sex from him. He wondered if it was about Randy Brett. Randy, a nineteen-year-old friend of Ken's who was a mechanic at a local garage, had confided in Ken that Maddox was fucking him, but Ken hadn't said he was getting it too. Ken didn't really care one way or the other. He got experience with a black bull cock when he went under Maddox. Other than that, he didn't like the man much--especially that he was married and had kids and was still having it on with young men--but the money was good.

"Rumor has it that Jay Brackton is fucking you," Maddox said. "Is that true--or could it be true? Does he ask you for it or get it from you?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Maddox, I don't talk about the men in my life," Ken said. "You should be glad about that. It means I don't talk about you." It was meant as a "back off" warning, but Maddox was on a mission.

"I've heard too that you are off to Asheville--for college--in a week. So, it's no skin off your nose one way or the other. It would be good--would help me--if it were true that Brackton was fucking you, and that you let that be known before you leave. We'd make it worth your while. You could make some serious money off that."

Ken knew why Maddox was offering that. He was the one running against Brackton for mayor. He was just as ambitious to have the mayor's job as a stepping stone into state politics as Brackton was. Ken didn't have a chance to answer, though. They both looked up at the sound of a car horn.

Mrs. Maddox and the kids were home--unexpectedly--from the lake. As she pulled up in her Escalade SUV, she rolled the window down and said, "Tom Jr. got stung by a swarm of bees and Tania remembered she'd been invited to a sleepover tonight, so we came home."

There was a suspicious look in her eyes, though, like that this early return was planned all along. Like maybe she wanted to catch her husband at something. This was a small town. It was really, really hard to keep secrets here. That was a major reason Ken wanted to get away from it. He was the center of entirely too many secrets here.

"Ken and I were just straightening up the garage," Maddox said.

"I see that," Mrs. Maddox said, as she and the kids piled out of the car. "I hadn't realized it needed to be straightened up."

Maddox didn't have much of a chance to say anything else then. Ken was talking to his kids and getting on his bike. Maddox's mind was going to where the beer cans had wound up and whether he could get to the guest room and remake the bed before his wife saw it--and what convincing lie he could spin if she saw it before he could get there.

* * * *

Three days before he was to leave for Asheville for the university's late August startup, Ken took to his bike and crossed to the other side of both rail lines running through town--first the north-south Norfolk Southern line and then the east-west CSX line. He was as far "on the other side of the tracks" that he could get, in more ways than one. He biked across a dirt track through a field and then into a marshy area along the bank of the Young Fork Creek, where there was a derelict trailer court. Fewer than a fourth of the single-wide trailers were habitable, although a third of them were, in fact, occupied. He pulled up to one of the smallest ones nearly on the creek bank. Old Nolan came out to meet him, carrying a couple of cans of Mountain Dew and gesturing for the young man to come into the trailer.

When they'd done much of their business, Nolan, a half breed, like Ken, a black mother and white father, but nearly forty years Ken's senior, gaunt and world weary, built up to telling the young man good-bye. He had once been a handsome man and, in youth, as beautiful as Ken, but he'd come back from war a permanently wounded man and he couldn't take as guaranteed he'd be around the next time Ken came home from Asheville. He had been a kindred spirit to the young man, though, and it was to Nolan that Ken always came for an open welcome.

It was Old Nolan who had taught Ken to do what he did for men.

"So, you're going to escape Marion," Nolan said. "Brackton's coming across with the tuition, is he?"

"Yes. He wants me to sign up for the reserve officers' training program while I'm there so it will look like that's how tuition is being covered. I don't know about the military aspect of it, but I'll give it a try. And, yes, Mr. Brackton is paying. He says if I do well at UNC-Asheville, he'll pay for a transfer to Wake Forest. He wants me to go where he went--Wake Forest--but I have to improve my grades first."

"No less than he should," Nolan said.

Brackton had impregnated Davonne when she was fifteen the Thanksgiving and Christmas he was home after he'd returned from the Marines and before going to law school. He hadn't married her, but, in his defense, he hadn't known about the baby until he was finished with law school and had come back to Marion. By then he was married to Susan. Davonne wouldn't have him then. He'd volunteered to leave Susan, but Davonne said she'd be no part of breaking up a family. To his credit, he'd always kept up with his son, Ken, and had helped pay for his raising. He and Davonne just had kept the town in the dark on who Ken's father was. "You OK with leaving?"

"It's a good time. I'm being pressured by both sides in this coming election, but I don't want to be a pawn. Neither one of them knows all there is to know about me and them, and I'd be happy just to keep it that way."

"You have a favorite, though, I imagine. Or are you bitter? I suppose you have a right to be bitter."

"Sure. I want my dad to win. He's the better man. But Mr. Maddox--and George Guy too--are pushing me to set him up. I guess I could, but they have it wrong on how. What I'd like to do is expose Mr. Maddox, but I'm afraid my dad would be pulled in on that too."

"I could help you with that, if you wanted. And you'd be well away from it."

"You could? If I tell what I know about Maddox and Guy, more than that would come out."

"You're not the only young man Maddox is fucking, are you? We don't even have to bring Guy in on it. If your dad wins the election, he'll get rid of Guy himself, I'm sure. He knows what Guy's doing in trying to get rid of Billy Bond at the top of the sheriff's department. I think Maddox is doing Randy Brett too, isn't he?"

"Yes, I think so."

"I do Randy, and he says he's mad enough at Maddox to expose him. I still have lots of friends in town. Randy says he doesn't care of that brings him out to the town. He plans on leaving town anyway. You go on to Asheville, and it could become known that Randy Brett and Tom Maddox have a 'thing.' Randy's good with that. It can become pretty much known all over town by the election. If Maddox and Guy don't know that Brackton begat you on Davonne, I don't think they'll find that out before November."

"You'd do that for me?"

"You know I'd do anything for you, Ken. But right now... for old time sake... and as a good-bye, maybe--"

"Yeah, let's do it again," Ken said, turning on his side and raising his leg to let the old man--the man who had initiated him earlier that year and been his best and sympathetic friend for years before that--nuzzle in beyond him, get his cock into position, and take the young man to heaven one more time.