"I'm as sorry as you are, honey, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Some of the other guys checked with the front office and they said the same thing… Red's the last word on who gets laid off. Until business picks up again after the energy crunch, I'm just out of luck!"
Don Willard had tried to break it to his wife Diane as easily as he could, but there just wasn't any way to camouflage the truth… he was going to be out of a job in thirteen days. The company had suffered from the gas shortage and they were taking the easy way out. Like most businesses, they were laying off people who needed their jobs the most. None of the executives were feeling the pinch, nor the foremen like Red Collins; they were all cozy and secure in their homes out in Forest Acres, not over here on the east side of town worried about where the rent money was going to come from.
He had thought about not telling her, taking the time that the company owed him for leave to look for something else. But what was there in this one-company town? Nothing.
Diane kept a stiff upper lip until Don had finished with the bad news and gone on to work; then, and only then, did she allow herself the luxury of a good cry.
Why now? Oh, God, why now? she sobbed woefully, her pillow already stained with tears. And tonight was supposed to be my big surprise… I was going to tell him I might be pregnant! Pregnant and without a job. Some surprise!
Through sheer force of will, she managed to clean the house and do the laundry and be at the warehouse dock when Don got off at four. He had a ride in the morning, but in the afternoons she always came for him in their five-year-old Chevy. Sometimes they would stop for dinner at one of the town's five eating places. They weren't classy enough to be called restaurants, but the two of them had figured it out that they could eat about as cheaply as cooking at home, as long as they stayed dear of the expensive meats and stuck with chicken and pork.
She was a little early arriving at the dock and Red was outside at the tiny podiumlike desk that he kept, checking over the day's worksheets and manifests.
Red was a coarse looking man, the kind of man, she imagined, that would be a tough sergeant in the Marines. With his short-sleeve shirt on, she could see the Korean War vintage tattoos on his muscled, upper arms. He even wore his hair like they did then, in an antiquated crew-cut that everyone laughed about – behind his back, of course, for Red wasn't the kind of man to take kidding. He lived alone since his wife had left him three years before. Some of the old-timers said that she ran away with a salesman from up north, anxious for a shot at a better life somewhere away from this forgotten, decaying town in the Carolina coastal plain.
Evansboro was, no different from a thousand other towns just like it. Once thriving and on the junction of two rail lines, with its own railway passenger station, it bore the promise of growth and prosperity. That is, until both lines cut out their passenger traffic and, finally, pared their shipping along this spur line to the bone. Talk of a boom-town faded quickly, and the younger people started moving west or north, anywhere that offered the hope of a good-paying job and a better life.
The textile products company that Don worked for was the one shot in the arm, the last hope for Evansboro, though most of the optimists had even given up now and were just fighting to keep the tiny town alive. The railway station was gone, burned down by unknown vandals on a wintry night. Four service stations had closed for good, leaving just Pop's Independent Self-Service, which was something of a local joke since it only had gas about one out of a dozen days. Most everyone, Don included, drove five miles to the nearest real town to buy from the stations that thrived there on the Interstate highway, another thing that passed Evansboro by.
"Hi, Diane, you're a little early, aren't you?" Red asked, climbing down from the loading dock. He walked over to her window, close enough to touch her if he had dared. Diane was the prettiest girl in town, almost everyone agreed, and though some of the older citizens whispered about her cut-off short jeans and miniskirts and sun-back halters that she wore during the warmer months, hardly anyone would deny that she was naturally beautiful, one of those clear, sparkling country girls born with earthy good looks that were the root of a hundred traveling-salesmen jokes.
"Yeah, I guess I am… but it doesn't matter. I won't be coming much longer, will I? Not after next week."
Red looked down, averting his eyes from hers. "So Don told you. I'm sorry, Diane, for your sake, but it couldn't be helped. He had the least seniority of anyone on the dock and…"
"But how about the year before that? The year he spent inside at the looms?"
He ran his fingers nervously through his short-cropped hair, his face flushed. "Sorry, Diane… but I have to call it as I see it. Nothing personal, Diane, 'cause you know how I've always felt about you."
"Please, Red, let's not start that again," she pouted, not at all anxious to have old memories, especially painful ones, rekindled. She had gone out with Red a couple of times when they were growing up here; of course, he was a lot older, much too old to be dating girls in high school like she was at the time. But Diane was always a bit of a rebel, too high strung for this tiny town. Some of the folks who went to the Baptist church called her a "flirt" and a "man-teaser", but those kinds of words just rolled off her back because she knew what she was like inside. And that none of those rumors about her were true.
The rumors were the part that hurt, at least in the beginning. And on more than one night Diane lay awake, tears on her cheeks, painfully wondering how anyone could start such stories when none of them were true. Sure, she had gone out often enough, and sometimes with older men, college men and occasionally a local boy who had gone off to the Army, but she never let them go all the way, not ever. But none of them had ever believed it until he tried his luck, and most of her Saturday nights were spent practicing the art of self-defense, often in the back seat of an old car out at the Highway 64 Drive In.
Red had been one of the non-believers, cocksure and confident that if anybody got in her pants, it would have to be him. And it almost took the police to stop him…!
Diane knew almost immediately that coming to this juke-joint with Red was a mistake. The place was on a lonely county unpaved road, hardly more than four shaky walls and a sawdust floor littered with cigarette butts and spilled beer. Whiskey was the drawing card, though, illicit whiskey from a backwoods still and served in Dixie cups at a dollar for a shot that would make a big city barman blanch. Most of the men drank it straight, while the women poured half into a cup sloshing with Coke and mixed it until they could get it down without choking.
Sal's had a reputation for trouble – women scratching each other half-to-death over a man. Men shooting it out for the favors of some country gal with sporting blood. But even with all that, Diane wanted to see what it was like. The element of chance, the taunting thrill of the forbidden, was always her downfall… or nearly so.
And this time, once she was inside and her eyes adjusted to the acrid haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, she knew that she had seen all of Sal's that she needed to see. There was a kind of stage made from upended cola crates and a sheet of plywood that looked as though it would scarcely support its own weight, much less anyone else's. But there, on what passed for a stage, was a woman in her late thirties or early forties, obviously fast-approaching unconsciousness from too much of Sal's homemade corn… and she was stripping!
Diane turned to leave, but Red caught her with his huge forearm. "C'mon, honey… you've seen naked women before. This is just part of the fun!"
"Well, I don't want any part of it… I'm going home!" she said.
Red smiled confidently. "Okay, baby… go right ahead. There's eight miles of dirt track and swamp between here and the highway, and if you make it that far, there's only another five miles into town. There ought to be a lot of Marines on the highway tonight, heading back to the base down at Cherry Point. I'm sure a carload of 'em would be delighted to give you a lift!"
Diane shuddered at the possibilities and her stomach turned as she realized that Red was right; he had the car keys and she knew no one else in this foul-smelling place who would give a damn whether she got home or wound up gang-raped in some sleazy motel.
They made their way to a dirty, drink-stained table and Red wiped it clean with a soiled napkin that he found on the floor.
"Here… just like one of them big city strip joints. Maybe not as fancy, but a lot more action!" he boasted.
Diane nearly laughed until she realized, with growing fascination and disgust, that he was serious. He really was proud to be a regular in this awful dump!
Diane tried not to look at the woman who was taking her clothes off as the club's seedy patrons cheered her on, but there was nothing else in the ramshackle place to keep her attention and her eyes kept wandering back to the pathetic stripper.
She was down to her brassiere and panties and she tried futilely to manage a sexy bump and grind, but when she did it, the sensuous movements took on an air of the grotesque, her heavy body undulating and twisting as if she were having convulsions.
Diane watched as she took off her brassiere and her enormous breasts sprang from the too tight cups like freed savage animals, shivering and shaking in great rippling shudders as she writhed to the music from the country jukebox.
"Take it all off!" Red shouted in chorus with the others. "Drop those drawers, Mama!"
Diane couldn't help herself – like a sightseer at a car wreck, she found herself watching even though her stomach churned at the sight of the pathetic woman degrading herself in front of these people.
She finished her strip, pulling her wrinkled panties down and wriggling her bare buttocks to the audience Diane had been so engrossed that she failed to notice Red's arm moving to the back of her chair. When she felt it there finally, she did nothing, for it wasn't exactly a gesture to become alarmed about, but when his hand slipped down her upper arm a few minutes later and his fingers hotly groped for her breast, she sprang out of her chair in a flash and turned to face him indignantly.
"Just what 'ya think you're doing, Red? You keep your hands off me… keep your hands off my boobs!" she blurted before she realized that most of the patrons had turned their attention to her now that the performance was over.
They all began to laugh and some of the men hooted derisively at Red.
"Hey, Red, you heard her! Keep your hands of them boobs, buddy!"
"Yeah, ol' Red's been grabbing aroun' in the wrong places, ladies and gentlemen! Yes, sir!"
Red blushed and his lips trembled, but not in embarrassment. Diane knew immediately what was going through his mind, for she had seen him tear a taunting rich-boy apart at a basketball game one night when he made fun of Red's bulky physique. The uppermost thought in her mind was escape… she had to get away from Red, she didn't know what he was capable of in this kind of ugly mood!
"That was a mistake, Diane… a big mistake!" he hissed through gritted teeth, pushing his sleeves up his thick muscled arms. Suddenly he lashed out at her and caught her shoulder in one huge, powerful hand.
"Aaawww!" she winced. "You're hurting me, you big bully!"
"Naw, I ain't hurting you. Not like I might if you talk back to me again, woman!"
"P-please, Red, I didn't mean anything… I didn't!" she cried as he moved her backward with a cruel vicious pressure on her shoulder.
She grimaced in pain, expecting fully to hear and feel the anguish of her collarbone crushing under his meaty grip. Only when the backs of her legs bumped against the makeshift stage did she dare to think the unthinkable; it was only the faintest glimmer of a possibility at that moment, but still her blood ran cold in her veins at the very thought.
"Atta' boy, Red… let's get her on the stage! This joint could use a new act!" someone shouted drunkenly, and a cacophony of hoots and derisive taunts chorused their encouragement.
"C'mon, honey, give us a show! Let's-see them titties you don't want big Red to play with! Shit, they must be made of gold!"
"Hoo-ee… I ain't never seen no gold titties a'fore… let's git on with it!" a burly redneck in coveralls howled, his voice rising as he yelled until it sounded like a hound dog baying at a full moon.
Diane's heart froze in her breast and her mind refused, in a kind of last-ditch defense against the inevitable, to believe the words that she was hearing. It had to be some kind of awful nightmare, it had to be!
"Get your pretty ass up on that stage and give the good folks a show, Diane," Red snarled, his lips quivering in rage and his cheeks reddened with hot coursing blood. "You think you're somethin' special… too good for the folks down here in the hollow. Well, let's see what you got that nobody else ain't… c'mon, let's see that gold-plated tail o'yours!" He pushed her roughly and she fell backward onto the stage, sprawled humiliatingly as the crowd of revelers moved in for the show. There was a solid wall of men and women, most of them in blue jeans and work shirts or faded gingham dresses, and they pressed in tight around the stage, blocking her slightest chance of escape.
"Here you go, baby… have a drink!" a weaving farmboy leered, extending a paper cup full of whiskey in her direction. Diane shook her head instinctively, for she disliked the taste of straight liquor, but then she changed her mind.
"Yes, yes… give it here!" I'll need it. I'll have to have it to live through this nightmare!
She gulped the hundred proof moonshine down as though it were a chilled beer from a mug, and her throat and stomach mutely screamed their horror as the burning liquid seared its way into her belly. She gagged and choked and someone slapped her on the back as the others laughed and taunted her mercilessly.
"Let's see that bod, honey! C'mon, hurry up!"
"Shit, baby, I'm getting tired o'waiting… move it, doll!" a bleached blonde woman shrilly demanded, her arm around a man's waist and her fingers deftly wriggling into his fly as they stood close to the stage, pressed against it in the surge of anxious onlookers.
Diane looked around nervously, eyes fluttering, in a futile search for a way out, but it was growingly apparent that there was only one… to do as they said! To strip naked and let them see her parading around nude like some harlot!
She tried to stall, hoping that the momentum would ease and perhaps they would find someone else to vent their lusts upon, but it was hopeless… they wanted her! She was new here, she was young and from a better side of the tracks… and they wanted her stripped bare, down to the naked flesh!
"Honey, maybe you need some help," one husky, bare-chested country boy suggested, licking his lips as he tried to climb drunkenly onto the stage. Diane gasped… God, no, anything would be better than having him touch her, anything!
"N-no… no, p-please! I'll do it, just don't touch me! I'll do it alone!" she tearfully sobbed. Her fingers trembled as they sought the metallic zipper that ran along her spine and when it opened, the onlookers cheered and raised their cups of whiskey and Coke into the air, sloshing each other and the stage in a rain of cheap liquor.
"That's the way, baby… take it off! Take it off!" The words were like a shot of adrenaline to the crowd and they took up the rhythmic cheer, chanting and screaming until it seemed that the roof would blow off the run-down shack…
Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!
The night air was chill and foreboding as she eased the zipper down her back slowly, shakily, but she was finding some semblance of solace in the fast-rushing effects of the whiskey that she had gulped down. It didn't ease the pain, nor did it make this nightmare end, but it blurred the others and this lewd act into a drunken melange of unreal shapes and features.
With a deafening roar, the demanding chant continued, accompanied now by foot-stomping and clapping as the crowd of drunks and half-drunks worked themselves into a lusting blood-frenzy!
When she pushed the dress from her right shoulder, she felt her bare skin tingle with goosebumps, and then, when the other shoulder was down and the dress fell down her bare arms, the frenzied crowd seemed on the verge of storming the stage.
"That's the stuff, baby!… Get them gold titties out here!"
"Ya-hooo! Man, that's some nice looking stuff! Take it off, take it all off, baby!"
Her dress had fallen down to her waist and she wore only a bra from the waist up, the white flowered cups barely concealing the full womanly mounds of her high proud breasts. Over the top of each cup was the teasing hint of pink nipple… and the men watched with bulging eyes as her hands nervously worked the tiny metallic clasps of her brassiere. Suddenly, it was free and she let it slide down her arms, her eyes closed in sickening shame and despair as a chorus of hoots and catcalls rose up spontaneously.
"Hey, Red… they ain't gold but they sure are nice!" the bare-chested man who had offered to help her strip exclaimed.
"Shit, what a pair of boobs!"
Diane never fully knew what happened next. She was staring down at the floor, her vision blurred by the stinging tears of utter despair that trickled wetly down her cheeks. Suddenly there was someone with her on the shaky stage, then another… and still another.
She looked up just as one of the drunken Saturday-night revelers grabbed for her breasts; a scream lodged in her throat but it was drowned in the deafening roar of wanton arousal that cheered him on as he hotly fondled her naked breasts.
"Man, they're soft like a couple of kittens!" he drawled, his eyes wide with lust and glazed with the hope of something more than a feel… he wanted all of it, he wanted his cock in her tight little pussy, the stuck-up bitch!
He was a complete stranger to her, not even a face that she remembered seeing in the time that she had been at Sal's, but he was known to the others and they called him by name and urged him on.
"C'mon, Leroy… show the little lady what a country boy special looks like!" a busty blonde with teased and frosted hair shouted shrilly, her eyes flickered with the ecstasy of some forbidden memory.
He grinned back at her and tipped his sweat-stained cowboy Stetson at her politely, then zipped down his blue jeans and wriggled his half-erect cock from inside.
A few of the men shouted their approval, and a couple of the women looked away – the ones with their husbands too close to risk a furtive peek. But even those women, managed a quick glance before modestly looking aside.
One bosomy brunette with curly hair and thick makeup whistled like a drugstore cowboy leering at a pretty pair of legs.
Diane watched numbly, unable to comprehend what was happening, until he started to move closer with the thick, blood-heated pole of his cock gripped in his two fists like a medieval weapon.
"No, no!" she screamed hysterically. "Please!" And as if some divine benevolence had intervened, the stage suddenly heaved drunkenly like the bow of a small boat in a squall and the whole makeshift affair tumbled sideways onto the saw dust floor, knocking people and drinks and tables in a dozen different directions at once.
Diane sensed rather than saw an opening… her unconsciousness running wildly on the surge of adrenalin that poured into her frightened body. She darted like a rabbit before the hounds, furtively, desperately, in a head-long rush for the door before the confusion deprived her of her only chance.
"Get her! Don't let her out!"
"Grab her somebody! Grab her!"
Her body was slippery from the misted sheen of fearful perspiration that her plight had brought to her flesh and she slid from their hands like a greased pig at a county fair, her dress flapping from her waist and her discarded shoes left behind on the collapsed stage, a casualty of the fall. She tumbled and dodged and ran sideways in a pell-mell dash for the outside… and what passed as safety in her frightened mind.
A callused hand grabbed crushingly at her breast and a leering, drink-soaked pair of lips hotly kissed her there and yellowed teeth bit at her naked pink nipple, but she was too desperate to feel the pain.
One last man stood between her and the door, an especially sodden farmhand of indeterminate years and he rushed at her clumsily, his arms wide, and managed to grab her from sheer luck as she darted to avoid a younger man who seemed the more immediate danger. The old man shoved his hand up between her thighs, hooting with laughter through the fleshy opening of his mouth, and his fingers, toughened with years of manual labor, tore her panties in half as easily as a sheet of finest tissue and she moaned as he crudely poked between her trembling labial lips. She struggled desperately, kicking at his coveralled shins and scratching at his face, but he seemed impervious, his mind numbed to anything but the warm moist softness of her pussy!
"Aaawww! No, noooo!" she whimpered as his callus-hard middle finger stiffened like a man's cock, suddenly poked between her cuntal lips and into the tight grip of her twat!
Only the impatient lust of the other men saved her, for they grabbed her roughly away from the old man, anxious to be the first themselves, and a fight broke out that afforded her the precious last few seconds that she needed to escape.
Before she could breathe again, she was outside in the cellar-black night, running blindly along a dirt rut toward the distant twinkle of the highway, miles across the piney Carolina coastal plain. There was no moon, but enough starlight to show her the roadway, and she ran until her heart pounded in her naked breast like a trip-hammer.
She heard them behind her, then they returned for their cars and she glanced back over her bare shoulders to see the beams of headlights slicing the night like searchlight beacons as they bounced along the potholed dirt road, closing in on her. She knew that there was no hope unless she could get off the road, so she ran headlong into the pine forest, charging through the underbrush that bordered the road and into the relative clearness of the woods itself.
On and on she ran, oblivious of time or distance, just step after painful step as the limbs tore at her young nakedness and the forest floor ripped at the soles of her bare feet.
She remembered the snake hunts that her father had talked about in this part of the county, the nights they had gone out with flashlights and rifles after rattlesnakes and moccasins, and more than once she was certain that she heard the clicking sound of a rattler within striking distance. And every branch or fallen limb larger than a pencil beneath her bare soles seemed to move and coil, a slithering monster ready to sink its poison fangs in her naked flesh!
When at last she reached the highway, she was barely able to stand, and her mind, as minds will in the shock of desperation could dwell on nothing but the morning's papers… DIANE RAYNOR ESCAPES FROM GANG-RAPE! LOCAL GIRL FORCED TO STRIP AT BACKWOODS JUKE JOINT!
And the cops with their snide remarks and off-color questioning, the neighbors who would always look at her questioningly and whisper behind her back of what really happened that night!
She knew that she couldn't face it, that this awful nightmare had to be her secret, to share with no one! This small town was not like the big city, where a girl could escape her past… she had to pretend that this never happened. She had to try and forget those awful people at Sal's, the ones who had forced her into this wicked and despicable perversion… for they had won! She was defeated… there was no way for her to strike back!
Even today, years and years later, when she sat waiting for her husband, a full woman of twenty six, she felt her pulse quicken and her blood run cold as she remembered that night, how she had cleaned herself as best she could in a closed service station, using the leftover water in the hose. How she had pieced her dress back together with a pair of hairpins from her long blonde hair and hitched a ride into town with a college boy returning home from up at Chapel Hill.
She hated Red Collins with the kind of festering hatred that only intensifies with age, strengthening like a corked bottle of pepper sauce, but it was her private hatred… not one that she dared to share with even Don.
The shift-change whistle sounded deep in the bowels of the huge brick building and Diane heard the anxious shuffling of hundreds of feet as production workers, executives and foremen, and the dozens of miscellaneous workers like her husband Don began to leave.
Red started to leave, putting his hat back on and covering the bald spot on the top of his close-cropped head. "Maybe we could talk about it, Diane. I mean, about… well, about the job and all," he stammered, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. "Tomorrow night, maybe… that is, if…"
"You know Don has Army Reserve meetings that night… he does every week."
Red managed a thin smile, though his lips threatened to twist into a leer. "Yeah, I know… I kinda' thought you could come, anyway. We could talk about it over a couple of beers."
Diane's face reddened and she would have said a lot more if she hadn't seen Don coming off the platform and moving quickly toward the car. "You… you must be crazy, Red Collins! You must be nuts to even think such a thing!"
He glanced up and saw Don approaching, a look of distrusting concern on his ruggedly handsome face. "Well, I'll be seeing you, Diane. Don, how's everything?… I was just shootin' the breeze with your wife. I hope you don't mind," he said without a trace of sincerity.
"No, I don't mind… but after next week, you'll have to find somebody else, 'cause she won't be picking me up, remember?"
Red scratched himself and looked up at the platform as if he hoped that something would happen. "Yeah, I guess you're right about that."
"Well, I'll be seeing you," he said to no one in particular and ambled off in his peculiar kind of limp, a left-over from the Korean War that brought him a disability check every month from Uncle Sam, though there wasn't a man within ten miles who would chance a fight with him unless he had a big stick and a head-start.
"What the hell did he want?" Don spat angrily as he got in and lit himself a cigarette, switching on the radio. "Trying to rub it in a little?"
"No, nothin' like that," Diane smiled, passing her hand over her husband's muscled thigh. "Just passing time, that's all… we were talking about some people who used to live in town, just gossiping."
"Well, who gives a shit," he grumbled, slinking down in the seat and resting his head on the back as she drove out of the crowded parking lot. "Who gives a shit about him… or this fuckin' one-horse town?"
"Aw, Don honey, you shouldn't talk like that. This town's been pretty good to us up 'til now. This is the first rotten break that's been dealt us, so we can't really complain."
Don snorted. "The hell I can't complain. I'm getting the shaft, baby, and that's something to complain about!"
"Is it that bad, Don? I mean, it's really final, huh?"
"Of course… that's what I was trying to tell you."
"Can't you find something else? There must be…"
"Oh, sure… just run downtown and pick up a job, is that the way? Honey, there can't be more than one or two jobs open in this whole God-forsaken dump… and there'll be more than twenty guys out of work. What'ya think the chances are? Some of these guys have uncles and brothers and cousins all over town… Me, I'm still an outsider. No, there ain't a chance in hell… We'll just have to look somewhere else, I reckon."
"Leave Evansboro? Oh, honey, you can't mean it!" Diane blurted, taking her eyes off the road and stirring a cloud of dust as the wheels edged onto the shoulder.
"Look where you're driving! Yeah, I mean it… you're damn right I mean it. I'll leave first chance after next week and go up north and look for something. You'll just have to stay on here and wait for me to send some money."
Diane sobbed softly, keeping her head turned away from her husband so that he wouldn't see her crying. Maybe he wasn't emotionally tied to this town, but she certainly was… it was her birthplace, the town where she had grown up. Where her mom and dad had lived happily until their deaths… and now he wanted her to just pack up and leave? For what? Some cheap tenement housing in a northern town? A place where she had no friends? Where she wouldn't be able to leave the apartment for fear of being mugged or raped?
Even now, the faintest glimmer of an idea sparkled almost unnoticed in the back of her mind. It was nothing now, not even an idea… that was yet to come. But Diane knew that she had to do something – anything! – to turn this whole mess around.
She had to!