Forceful Justice (148 page)

But make no mistake, even though he was gay, he was still male. From the start, he had had a preferred type of guy, which he preferred above all others—a strong, hairless cowboy with blonde hair and brown eyes. He could never understand where a preference so specific and rare came from; perhaps it had imprinted itself on his imagination as a baby. Cowboys generally attracted him; their remoteness, quietness, and way of dealing with their problems by doing something, rather than thinking about it, turned him on.

Carter, being gay, surprised himself, and likely family members and friends should they have known his secret, because he began having sex with men very early in his life, at the ripe old age of 18. Even though he was living during an intolerant time in American history, Carter was an independent, fearless young mind, a quality which didn't necessarily become apparent until later in his life. Perhaps, despite his circumstances, his experiences living as a carney gave him a breadth of understanding uncommon for someone his age. By 17, over his travels through the nation, he had seen the homeless lying along the 17th street in Los Angeles, the quiet coldness of Montana winters, the beauty of the smokey mountains, and the exciting adventures 20-somethings have on Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Maddox continued pumping away, naked as the day he was born, and Carter pulled his blonde hair closer to his own face. Maddox's cheeks were without a doubt the softest part of his body, as the rest of him was hardened by the pulling and nagging he had learned from his teens on the oil fields. Carter kissed him softly right as he was about to come.

"I just came," Carter said into his ear.

"OK, wait for me. I'm almost there."

Maddox thrust his hips into Carter faster and faster, grunting with each push, and within a few seconds Carter could feel hot, wet lubrication inside him as Maddox slowed his rhythm to completion.

In the soft warm glow of the street lamps, Carter could see Maddox's dark brown eyes lighten in the light.

"We almost got caught," Carter said. They laughed.

"I know."

They stood there in the darkness, as the sound of the carnival around them sliding into a momentary silence. Just then, a loud scream came from outside the funhouse. Something was wrong.

II

Stetson Carthswaite was a man of few words, almost none in fact. He trusted very few people and belonging to groups gave him the shivers. He put his black cowboy hat on and stepped out of his rugged blue Ford F-150, in the direction of a pizza parlor.

"Just wait your turn!" a brunette woman said. The girl had a Minnie Mouse bow sitting on top of her head, as she carried in two separate hands a giant pile of dishes to the back. That girl was Stetson's fiancee, the only girl he'd ever loved, whom he met in high school. She had been the cheerleader all the football guys wanted, and Stetson was the lonely cowboy who won all the awards at Future Farmers of America conventions. They'd spoken for the first time at 18 when he won first of many trophies for a rodeo tournament. But that day Stetson had stormed off the podium when they tried to give him his award, because when he looked in the audience for his dad, Stetson couldn't find him. That was the whole reason he'd done the damn thing in the first place, to please his dad. And the son of a bitch hadn't even bothered to show up. On top of that, Stetson hated crowds and talking to strangers.

Out in the parking lot that night, he spoke to his girl for the first time. He got into his brand new truck, propped his feet up on the dashboard, and loaded chewing tobacco into his mouth.

In the darkness of that cold night, he heard a small petite voice from outside his window.

"What ya doin' there cowboy?"

Stetson looked over at her but didn't say anything.

"Why weren't you interested in getting that trophy. You deserved it and all."

He spit in his cup. "Hate crowds."

"Well I wanted to congratulate you on your big win. Don't you know who I am? We go to the same high school together."

"Nah."

But he was lying. Stetson knew the girl from thirteenth day of August of his freshman year. Lee Ann Finley was her name, and he'd loved her from the moment he'd laid eyes on her. To say Stetson loved someone wasn't an easy thing; his love wasn't something he gave quickly or cheaply. There were now only two people on earth he loved, his father and Lee Ann Finley.

"Well I know you. I know you don't think I'm the type to hang around here and all, but I've been wanting to meet you."

"I ain't your kind."

"Let me decide that for myself thank you very much," she said. She jumped in the cab of the truck, the point at which Stetson realized he'd forgotten to lock it. A little annoyed, but more than anything excited that his future fiancée was doing all the communicating for him, he could feel for a single second this alien warmth seep from the cracks in his heart; it was a feeling he'd long forgotten he was capable of.

"You know there's much more to me than just being a cheerleader." Stetson kept his gaze ahead of him, refusing to lock eyes with her.

"Let's see. I like sewing. I like making pizza for my little cousins. One of them, Drew, he's the funniest. He hates sausage so I always try to hide a little piece in each slice he gets, because he's so funny when he's mad."

Stetson continued staring ahead of him.

"This one time, I put one of those little plastic babies Cajuns use in a birthday cake. I put it in Drew's slice and he bit the head off. He started screaming and told everyone he ate the skeleton of a rat or mole." At this point, Lee Ann was laughing in between each word.

Stetson spit in his cup, silent the whole time.

"Well I thought it was funny." She calmed down a bit and looked around the now near-empty parking lot. "You know, it's very cold out here. Who are you waiting for?"

He didn't answer.

"I mean, you can't be living in your car or anything. What gives? Is it another girl? I'm going to be so angry if it is. You're mine, dammit." She waited for an answer.

Stetson turned in her direction and looked her in the eye.

"Is that right?"

—

That was fifteen years ago, when both he and Lee Ann were 17. Stetson was now 33 and many things had happened. His only parent had passed away from lung cancer, and he would be all alone in the world, if it wasn't for Lee Ann. She herself had plenty of family. Her dad and grandfather owned a car lot next to that same parking lot where they'd met all those years ago; in fact, that's how Lee Ann got her first Volkswagen Beetle. She even put fake eye lashes on the headlights, which impressed all her preppy friends at school.

Lee Ann had this friend named Brock around lately, whom she said she met through her sister's bridal shower. Given that he tried as much as possible to stay away from people when he could manage it, he forced himself to let her go long enough to hang out with her high school friends. He loved the girl and figured he could trust her, even though he didn't trust Brock. In fact, with every greeting Brock gave Stetson, he wanted to beat the shit out of him with every passing second. Never before had he wanted to hurt someone so much; but he nevertheless tolerated the guy because was curiously close to Stetson's woman.

"Hey babe. You're early." Lee Ann seemed a little surprised and scared that Stetson had come to pick her up at 2 PM instead of 7 PM, when she'd told him she would be off. For the past few years, Lee Ann had been working as a waitress at this pizza parlour in order to appease her father, who kept reminded her that times had changes, and it was important for a young woman to have some skills in the workplace. So being a pizza server was the compromise they'd made.

"Why not leave early?"

"Because Babe I wanted to see a movie with Stephanie and Brock."

"No. Let's go."

"I guess we'll just see him later this weekend at the cabin."

"Yep." Stetson spit in his dip cup.

"God that's gross. Honey you're really going to have to quit that soon. It causes cancer."

"We all gotta go sometime."

"Ugh, let me get my things." She walked back into the kitchen, leaving him standing in the middle of a busy restaurant, awkward as ever. Stetson noticed a 19-year old girl walk past him, who was wearing a short mini skirt that just barely revealed her butt cheeks. His brain immediately sent a spark of life to his penis, which immediately began growing in his underwear. He thought of his fiancée and what he planned to do to her that night under the covers—well, really every night over the next weekend.

And indeed he did fuck her brains out that night. She stepped out of the bathroom in a black lingerie piece. "It's new. Do you like it?"

"You ain't going to be wearing it long, girlie."

"Oh you are such a horndog," she said, laughing as just jumped onto the bed and straddled him. He ran his massive hands along her soft legs. The piece she'd bought was a little silk dress with white lacing along the edge. He flipped up the material to reveal her bare pussy and he instantly got a hard-on. She reached down from behind her and stroked his cock through his Wrangler jeans.

"Let's get you out of these clothes, cowboy."

He rolled off the bed and pulled off his jeans and underwear at the same time, revealing his 9-inch member dangling like a hungry dragon over his equally massive balls. Stetson was never the athletic type, but his body was built like a brick-shit house. Lee Ann commented all the time on how well he measured up to the other guys she'd slept with in high school, especially the football players.

"Come here big boy," she said, as she pulled her dress over her head to reveal her naked body. Stetson practically tackled her, and she let out a passionate sigh as he did it. He wrapped her legs around him and began cupping her soft nipples in his mouth. She moaned. He then blew softly along her navel and caressed her supple waist. He then tasted her thighs while making eye contact as she looked down at him. He started licking her pink folds; he could see the anticipation in her eyes.

He rolled over on his back and began stroking his cock. She crawled around and started rubbing her petite hands along his hairless body. His skin was a warm pink with fleshy yellow overtones, utterly perfect, despite his job as a construction worker. He did have callouses on his hands from bending wire and hammering sheetrock 70 hours a week. The moments he had with Lee Ann were growing more sparse, and Stetson could feel that strange loneliness which had consumed him during his teen years enveloping him again. His time with Lee Ann, however brief, was something which brought relief from that feeling.

She crawled on top of him and he slid his cock into her. She rode him cowgirl style, pushing her body up and down in a rhythmic motion by placing her hands on his chest to brace herself. Her brown hair dangled over his face, tickling the bridge of his nose, and he could smell the scent of her expensive shampoo she always bought. One thing about Lee Ann was that her scents always changed.

She moaned as he rubbed the tip of his cock along the walls of her canal. He put his finger over her clit and began massaging her button as she rode him faster and faster.

"Oh God," she said as they came together.

III

The Nash-Gibson gang haunted Baggs, Wyoming because its members believed that they had a right through posterity to running the town. The lead member of the gang had a history with the Klu Klux Klan and was outraged through the Civil Rights Movement that the “niggers had the gall to disobey the whites.” Maddox had told Carter about them once, because he knew the lead member, Jaidon Marsh. Jaidon and Maddox went to high school together, and the two had befriended each other briefly before Maddox had matured. Originally, maybe because he had been essentially raised by wolves, Maddox had absorbed the white hot hate which radiated down on him since childhood; it was an indiscriminate hate to all things foreign or strange, born of ignorance and fear. Maddox and Jaidon got along initially because they both claimed, “All faggots should burn at the stake.” But gays weren't just the target; blacks, freaks, the dumb and disabled all were rounded into the same unacceptable, undesirable group of people. Maddox matured because he came to terms with his own homosexuality around the age of 17. It was the sole part of him that was not exactly the same as the people he'd been surrounded with since childhood. Like them, he was good at sports, hypermasculine, interested from an early age in machines and guns, extremely competitive, and honestly unable to relate to anyone who wasn't like him. This quirk, then, of his nature sent him through a kind of metamorphosis in his identity, because prior attempts to disavow himself of being gay just didn't do anything but make things worse. Jaidon, on the other hand, was pure bred country—and full of hate for everyone who wasn't. Jaidon and Maddox stopped speaking two weeks after high school graduation.

The screams Carter heard just ten feet from the metal building where he and Maddox were fucking was the sound of a woman being punched. Jaidon Marsh was the culprit.

Maddox jumped up instinctively. “What was that?”

“Hurry, put on your clothes before they turn on the lights. These doors don't lock,” Carter said. Both boys put on their pants and shoes and shirts just as they heard another scream from the same lady.