Country Boys, page 3
And then, of course, their farm would have to be clear on the other side of town from the clubhouse. And so Kenny always ended up bicycling across town as fast as he could, shooting down Caldwell Street then across Seventeenth Street and then across the railroad tracks and around behind the grain elevators on the west side of town. Invariably he arrived out of breath at their secret clubhouse: a shack in the woods behind the junkyard.
He dropped his bike on the ground and dashed inside, where he found Ross and Alan already sitting on the only furniture they had: a red bench seat from an old Pontiac. They were having one of their intellectual discussions.
“See,” Ross said, “I don’t think we’re significant enough to be a major body part like the armpit. We’re so crappy that we need to be something more like the pimple on the nose of the universe.”
“I still think,” Alan countered, “that ‘asshole of the universe’ would be perfectly acceptable.”
“Nonsense! Kenny, what do you say? Resolved: That Goodland, Kansas, is such a disgusting and boring place to live that it is best described as the blank of the universe.”
“Toe-jam,” Kenny offered. Ross and Alan laughed and slapped their legs like this was the funniest thing, even though the response was predictable. Toe-jam was Kenny’s favorite word, except maybe for booger.
“Toe-jam it is!” Ross intoned. “Goodland, Kansas, shall henceforth be known as the toe-jam of the universe!”
They all whooped some more with delight at this remarkable witticism. As they calmed down, Ross announced that it was time for the day’s reading. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a glossy magazine, which he held up for inspection.
The cover showed two naked men in lurid, full color. At least, they looked naked, but it was difficult to be certain. One was holding a frying pan and bending over a stove. The other was standing right behind the first, real close to him. Their naked butts were both facing the camera. Strictly speaking, one was not entirely naked: he wore a tall, white chef’s hat.
Alan read the title, “Sausage and Eggs.” It was a change from their usual big-tit- and fat-assed-women magazines.
“Where do you get these?” Alan asked.
Ross answered with worldly insouciance. “From my dad’s desk. He confiscates them in raids and keeps them there where he thinks they’re safe and no one knows. Deputy Connor looks at them when Dad’s out of the office—we pretend it’s our little secret. My dad never notices.”
The three sat in silence for a minute and contemplated the possible meaning of “Sausage and Eggs.”
“But what are they doing?” Kenny asked at last.
“They’re doing it,” Alan explained.
“But they’re guys.” Kenny sounded confused.
“Sure, guys can do it too. Here, look.” Ross flipped toward the back of the magazine. “See, you can see Mr. Chef’s bone going right into the other guy’s butt.”
“Eeeuw! That’s gross. What else do they do?”
Ross turned back to the beginning and proceeded more slowly through the pages. For the first time, they saw men kissing—with tongues in each other’s mouth!—men licking each other’s nipples, one man with his face buried up to his nose in another man’s hairy ass, enormous hard-ons, men licking enormous hard-ons, enormous hard-ons in mouths, and enormous hard-ons in assholes displayed in several unusually athletic positions. All told, it was quite an educational experience.
Ross tossed the magazine toward his backpack, and slapped his hands on his legs. “Well,” he said, “now it’s time for the Sacred Ritual.” As if on cue, all three stood, opened their belts, dropped their shorts, and sat back on the bench seat.
Kenny regarded his own hard-on critically, then compared it visually to those of his companions, noting that Ross’s bush—he had been the first to grow pubic hair—was getting noticeably thicker. “Do you think they’ll ever get bigger, like the ones in the magazine?”
“I’m sure they will, Kenny,” Ross said, “except maybe for yours, which will probably always be two inches long.”
Kenny scowled and Alan poked Ross in the ribs with his elbow. Enough talk. On with the Sacred Ritual.
Ross had shown both the others basic jerk-off technique toward the end of seventh grade but in the few months since, they had each adopted personal methods. Ross preferred to make his hand slick with spit and rub his dick vigorously. Kenny used his thumb and two fingers just under the head of his dick. Alan liked to touch himself lightly first, inside his thighs and on his balls, and then use slow, steady strokes.
Regardless, none took very long to reach a dry climax. Mostly dry, that is. Sometime since the beginning of the current school year Ross had begun producing a few drops of cum. It would ooze from the slit in his dick, then he would touch it with his index finger and lift his hand slowly, seeing how far he could stretch the thread of semen before it broke. Alan and Kenny watched with focused attention and not a little envy. Today it must have stretched to nearly three inches.
Ross then said, in an overloud voice, “Now, the Sacred Flame. Kenny, do you have the torch?”
Kenny reached forward, rummaged in his shorts, and produced a butane lighter.
“Good,” Ross said. “We can proceed.” He stood up, turned smartly to face the bench seat, then squatted on it with his knees and leaned against the back.
“Ready the torch!” Kenny reached behind Ross’s butt, flicked the lighter, and held the flame close to Ross’s asshole.
“Here it—comes.” Ross clenched his asshole tight so that his fart came out with a long, high-pitched whistle.
The fart ignited into a fine jet of flame shooting straight out of Ross’s butt. It whistled down in pitch, then the flame died.
“Over five seconds, and it must have been at least twelve inches!” Alan said with evident delight.
Ross jumped off the bench, his still-hard dick bouncing in front of him, and clapped his hands. “Excellent! Our meeting is now adjourned.”
O’Rourke’s Diner is an institution in Goodland. Granny O’Rourke has served breakfast daily to all the men who sit at the long table just inside the front door for about as long as any of them can remember.
Breakfast is served from six to nine. After that, Maeve O’Rourke, Granny O’Rourke’s daughter-in-law, comes in to get ready for lunch, which starts at eleven. Betweentimes you can have coffee—in bottomless cups!—and a slice of pie if you’re hungry. The justifiably famous pies are made by Maeve’s sister Rose. Coconut cream is her specialty, but there is certainly nothing wrong with her apple pie. Her strawberry-rhubarb pie is seasonal and disappears fast.
When Donny got to the diner at a little past ten, he found Alan already in a booth toward the back. Two mugs of coffee and two slices of coconut cream pie were on the table.
“I went ahead and ordered the coconut cream. I hope that’s okay with you.”
“Always been my favorite. Thanks.”
They sat silently for a bit while Donny was busy with putting creamer and sugar in his coffee, stirring it thoroughly, and taking a couple of appreciative bites of his pie.
“Well,” Donny started hesitantly. “I know it’s a bit weird making a date at a funeral….”
“Oh! This is a date then? Finally!”
“Finally?”
“You wouldn’t believe the number of times I dreamed about having a date with the only other homo in town, trying to imagine what it would be like.”
“And what did you imagine?”
“Oh, I don’t think I know you well enough yet to reveal some of those intimate secrets. However, most were a bit more torrid than coffee and pie at O’Rourke’s, that’s for sure.”
Donny was embarrassed so he changed the subject. “You’d known Ross for a long time, hadn’t you?”
“Ever since third grade, when his family moved to town and Ross’s father was made police chief.”
“Did you know that everyone in the high school called you ‘Friends of Dorothy’?”
“Really?”
Donny nodded. “Kenny was ‘Scarecrow,’ or just ‘Crow.’ ”
“No doubt because he’d started growing and was so lanky. I imagine Ross was ‘Tin Man.’ ”
“Right, and you were ‘Dandy’…”
“…for ‘Dandy Lion.’ How prophetic.”
“It was thought very clever at the time. I think it was because you three seemed to have something really special going.”
“We did, I guess. Ninth grade was a great time, and the summer after was even better. We were inseparable and spent all our time together at the pool. I don’t think we were ever as close again as we felt then. It was our endless summer and it seemed like we’d be best friends forever.”
Goodland viewed its municipal swimming pool with understandable civic pride. It was built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration. The pool had a capacity of 385,037 gallons, making it 37 gallons larger than the WPA pool built the same year in Holton, Kansas.
That same year Goodland built a new post office on Eleventh Street and a WPA artist named Kenneth Adams painted a mural he called Rural Delivery. Nineteen thirty-six was a good year for civic pride in Goodland.
When Ross and Alan and Kenny moved up to ninth grade at Goodland High School (Go Cowboys! Go Cowgirls!), Ross had already been swimming competitively for three years and winning trophies for the Goodland Municipal Pool Torpedoes. So it was no surprise when, that summer after ninth grade, Ross became an assistant pool manager. He pretty much ran the place. The next summer, after he turned sixteen, Ross would become a lifeguard, too. Consequently, the three friends spent virtually all their time together at the pool, working on their tan lines.
Ross’s athleticism was already shaping his growing body; you could see the evidence in his broad shoulders, tapered torso, and strong, muscular legs. Sun and chlorine at the pool bleached his red hair to an appealing strawberry blond. He looked really good in the nylon racing suit he preferred to wear while he worked. Secretly, Alan admired the way Ross’s ass looked in the suit.
Kenny was living up to his Scarecrow image—he seemed all arms and legs then, and his head looked a little small for his body. It would still be a few years before his Black Irish heritage filled out his body and covered it with soft, black hair. Around the pool he wore long surfer jams. Contrary to his hope, they only made his long, skinny legs look longer and skinnier.
Alan was a chubby child and a husky adolescent. He would end up a chunky adult once all his curves got sorted out. His body hair was already sprouting in some profusion. He was self-conscious about it but, in fact, because he was a dark blond, his hirsuteness wasn’t very evident, although it did tend to highlight his curves in a flattering way. His favorite swimming suit was a spandex square-cut, which he thought made his ass look as good as Ross’s. It didn’t. However, it did make his package look the largest of the three, even though Kenny’s was actually the largest.
The Fourth of July was a big party holiday in Goodland, the only excuse for a civic get-together between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Since everyone would be in his backyard or at the park grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, the pool closed early. Fireworks were at nine up at Renner Field, so the airport closed early, too.
Ross was closing things down for the evening. Alan and Kenny were the only other ones left, and they were already in the men’s locker room. They had already stripped off their suits and were busily checking and comparing progress on their tan lines when Ross finished clearing the women’s locker room and joined them.
They all got a small exhibitionistic frisson from being naked in the locker room that, by design, had no roof but was open to the sky; it was almost like being naked outside. Benches and lockers occupied the middle of the room, behind the wall that blocked visibility from the entrance. Toilets were at one end, the showers at the other end behind another dividing wall. The floor was smooth concrete except in the shower where it was a black-and-white checkerboard of one-inch tiles.
With everyone else gone, there was plenty of hot water available for showers. Ross took his accustomed position at the middle showerhead; Alan was on his right and Kenny on his left, their unvarying positions. At this age, custom and ritual were important.
Also by custom, the usually talkative trio said little during their showers. There seemed fewer topics for conversation when they were naked together, although they did enjoy each other’s companionship.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a new ritual had suddenly been established: Ross had asked Alan to wash his back. He’d sounded casual enough about it, and though Alan thought it was less casual than Ross made it sound, he certainly wasn’t going to question being given an excuse to run his hands across Ross’s broad shoulders and down his tapered waist.
Today Ross made his request with just a glance and raised eyebrows in Alan’s direction. Perhaps Ross thought the low-key approach kept Kenny from noticing. Kenny, of course, noticed but didn’t much care one way or the other what Ross and Alan got up to, so long as he was part of the threesome.
Ross stood still and relaxed as Alan soaped his shoulders, then worked his way down along Ross’s spine slowly and with more attention than needed. While most of Alan’s concentration was devoted to Ross’s back, he made certain that he didn’t stand so close that his hard-on risked touching Ross’s buttcheeks.
Soon, though, his soapy hands were caressing the firm curves of Ross’s ass. Ross didn’t stop him. Quite the contrary, in fact. When Alan’s slippery hands moved down his asscrack, Ross spread his legs just a bit to draw Alan’s hands further along. Alan’s hand easily slipped under Ross, where he lightly fingered Ross’s balls.
Ross may have moaned, but if he did the sound of the showers covered it up. He and Alan both enjoyed their separate sensations for what seemed like minutes before Ross broke the spell.
“Time for the long-jump event,” Ross announced.
They all reacted with gusto. Each one grabbed his stiff dick and started beating off with individual technique that hadn’t changed much in the last two years. What had changed is that each had begun to ejaculate with youthful vigor and volume.
Ross was always the speediest with his full-bore hand technique. He leaned his butt against the wall of the shower, yelled something incoherent, and shot one thick stream of cum that spattered across the tiles.
Alan was the silent one with his more sensual technique. Slow rhythmic strokes brought him to his climax after delicious anticipation. He, too, pressed his back against the shower wall as he shot his load.
Kenny had surprised and amazed the other two when he developed a method of clamping his fingers tightly around the head of his dick just as he reached his orgasm, jerking his hand down his dick and shooting off powerful spurts of cum with each stroke, managing several shots each time he beat off.
Ross was the first to count the number of tiles from the wall he had leaned against and the first splat of his semen on the floor. “A new personal best: twenty-seven inches!”
Alan counted next. “As usual, twenty-one inches.”
Kenny counted last. His face showed a mixture of pride and embarrassment when he said, rather quietly, “Thirty-three inches.”
Ross made no response. Alan smiled to himself with some satisfaction at Ross’s comeuppance.
“That summer was an awakening for me,” Alan told Donny. “Spending so much time at the pool with Ross and Kenny, I got to see lots of naked men with man-sized dicks, chlorine became my aphrodisiac of choice, and I developed a near fetish for locker rooms.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t run into you then,” Donny said. “I spent quite a bit of time at the pool that summer, too. Probably for the same reasons.”
“Were you as hairy then as you are now? I always noticed the hairy men, especially ones with mustaches.”
“Not so much, I guess, although it was starting to grow in pretty thick by then. It made me very self-conscious in eleventh grade.”
“Really? I always envied Ross so much when he started growing hair on his chest and then when his mustache started to come in. It made him so kissable.”
“Did you ever?”
“What? Kiss him? No. I think he would have found it too queer.”
“Really! So you two never had a relationship?”
“Not really. We were solid JO partners, but he never seemed to want to go beyond that.”
Summer arrived early in Goodland the year the Friends of Dorothy were nearing the end of tenth grade. But then, Goodland was known for its extreme weather. When it was cold in Kansas, it was coldest in Goodland; when it was hot elsewhere, it was hottest in Goodland. Droughts lasted longer, snow drifted deeper, and tornadoes blew stronger. Residents took it as a challenge.
The threesome had come to feel that they were now too old for pajama parties or sleepovers, but camping out was a viable grown-up option. They used a small tent pitched in the generous backyard of Ross’s house. There was no room behind the trailer where Alan lived with his mom. It would have been fun to camp out at the farm where Kenny lived, but his Uncle John didn’t really approve of such adolescent frivolity.
Besides, Ross’s mom always made treats for the events. The guys were a little old for cupcakes decorated with clown faces, but they were highly amused to the point of giggles when Mrs. O’Brien told Ross to take the tray of “goodies for his little friends” outside with them. The warm air was still and alive with the sound of crickets, and there was the occasional rumble from a distant thunderstorm, too far away to worry about.
Ross was stretched out on his sleeping bag in shorts and a T-shirt, hands behind his head, anticipating his new responsibilities as a lifeguard at the pool. Alan also looked forward to the summer at the pool and the chances it afforded him to look at naked men in general and Ross in particular. Kenny, tuckered out from a full school day and his chores at the farm, was already snoring softly.
