Three Days in New Mexico
June 4th
When the car drove up, they were all stretched out naked on the chicken house roof. The four-year-old Corvair looked as if it had been repainted by hand with blue floor enamel. Thin and thick spots all over. On the driver’s side door was a poorly executed painting of the head of a pink pig holding a blue rose in its mouth.
Sioux Sue leapt to her feet when she saw the vehicle, and especially the driver. She waved both arms over her head at the extraordinarily large and hairy man struggling to extricate himself from the small car. The others on the roof mostly just raised their heads in mild curiosity.
“Hey, look you guys,” she said. “Charlie’s back from Juarez.” Sioux Sue was thin and dark with long, straight black hair and breasts that were oversized for her frame. She wasn’t actually Sioux, but her father had been Southern Ute and her mother Italian. She thought that the Lakota Sioux were much more spiritual than the Utes or Italians. She had a small tattoo of a medicine wheel on her back, just north of the cheeks of her ass.
Sioux Sue loved Charlie, who in turn irritated everyone in the commune with his insistence that they call him only Charlie, his given name, and not a non-bourgeois nickname like everyone else. Sue told herself that she loved everyone equally, but she really loved Charlie more. Sometimes she wondered if it was because he was never around.
“Susie, Susie––sunshine of my life. I’ve missed you.” Charlie scooped her into his trunk-like arms, and boosting her up, hugged her naked boobs to his thickly bearded chin.
The two of them rushed into the main house, but only made it as far as the kitchen where Charlie opened a refrigerator and peered inside. He frowned. “We’re out of beer?”
“No beer, hon. Sorry,” Sue said. “Wiccaman led a revolt a month ago and everyone banned alcohol.”
“Bummer,” said Charlie, rummaging around in both the communal kitchen’s two refrigerators, finally pouring himself a glass of tea and taking a long swallow.
“Aaak! What the fuck is this?”
“It’s herbal,” she explained.
“Figured that,” Charlie said, ”but this tastes like somebody washed a dog’s ass with it.”
“It’s a special formula. Wiccaman ... ”
“Oh fuck! Don’t tell me its got acid in it.” Charlie hastily emptied the remainder of the glass down the sink.
“No. No acid. Well, some mushroom extract.” Sue grinned.
“Got anything else that hasn’t changed for the weird since I’ve been gone,” Charlie inquired. “Take you and I––we’re still ... ”
“Of course.” Sue pressed her bare body against him, tipping her face up for a kiss. He stroked her hair while his left hand swooped down, seized her buttocks in its massive span and squeezed.
“So ya missed me?
“Oh yes.”
“How much?”
“Oh, about this much.” With a well-practiced motion she undid his belt, let his pants drop, and cupped his cock and balls through his red boxers. She could feel him filling out quickly. Charlie smelled like Ivory soap and patchouli.
“Stayed last night at the motel in Aztec,” Charlie said, as if he could read her mind. “Wanted to come in fresh.”
”For me?” The boxers were thrust downwards, to his knees.
“Of course.”
She leaned forward and touched her lips to the tip of his gloriously resurrected prick. A noisy, exaggerated kiss. “I’ve missed you,” she said again and took him into her mouth. He groaned as he leaned back against a refrigerator door.
Charlie was fucking Sue on the butcher-block table with the castors locked when Sage came in to make a sandwich. She was a long blonde wearing only a pair of cut-off jeans and a necklace made of snake vertebrae.
“Charlie’s back,” Sue told her.
“Yeah right. Jesus, you two! This is sooooo inappropriate.” Sage opened the second refrigerator. She giggled.
“Whatcha having?” Charlie asked without slowing his rhythm.
“Looks like we’re down to falafel spread on homemade bread,” Sage said.
“Got any mayonnaise? I’ll take one with plenty of mayo,” Charlie said.
“That’s an animal product.”
“So?”
“Wiccaman and the others have decided that meat and animal products, and shit like that, are exploitive.” Sage piled some plastic containers out onto the counter and quickly made a sandwich.
Charlie made a face and increased his pounding of Sue’s pussy. “Exploitive! Jesus fuck. I leave for a few months for a simple pharmaceutical negotiation and acquisition run. I come back, and the whole place has gone vegan gaga.”
The fact that Charlie could fuck and rant at the same time was a turn-on for Sue. She gripped both sides of the butcher block and shoved her small body back onto his massive one. She squeezed her internal muscles around his pistoning dick.
“Buddha and Zoroaster––I dig you doing that babe,” Charlie said and looked down at her flushed face. “We used to have goat roasts here. Remember those?”
“The chickens are gone too. Want a bite?” Sage asked, holding the sandwich down to Sue’s mouth. She took a small neat bite and chewed in time with Charlie’s strokes. Something about watching this must have pushed Charlie over the edge because he chose that moment to come with a massively vocalized roar.
“The falafel’s not bad,” Sue said as she zipped him back up.
“You hear that Andy Warhol got shot?” Charlie said as they walked, arms linked, on through the house and out into the kitchen garden. Looking for Wiccaman.
“Andy Warhol got shot?”
“Yeah, yesterday afternoon. One of his groupies or something. They don’t know if he’ll live. I heard it on the radio station from Santa Fe’ this morning.”
“Shit ... ” She wondered if she should feel bad. If Charlie wanted her to feel bad? “After Martin Luther King I don’t know. It seems ... ” She remembered how everyone at the commune had fasted for a week when they had heard about the King assassination.
“So minor? Like a joke? Why the fuck would anyone want to shoot Andy Warhol?” Charlie laughed. “For making stupid, boring movies? For wearing a bad wig?” Sue didn’t think anyone at Tierra Llana would do a fast for Andy Warhol if he died.
“There he is,” she said.
Wiccaman was down on his knees weeding and thinning carrots by hand. He was tall, nearly as tall as Charlie, lean and bony with a shaven head and round steel framed glasses. He didn’t look up as they approached. Sue thought it was just like Wicca to be working while the others took a siesta on top of the chickenhouse. Personal martyrdom was his power base.
“Hello Charlie. How was the shopping trip? That was a long two weeks,” Wiccaman said. Charlie had been gone to Mexico since March.
“You know Andy Warhol got shot?” Charlie asked.
“That’s outsider’s business. It has nothing to do with us.”
“Just making small talk.”
“Got the peyote?”
“Yeah. Half a pound. Good deal.”
“And it took you the whole three months for that?” Wiccaman shuffled on his knees down the row of carrots.
“I took some time off to establish some business relationships,” Charlie said. “Made a run down the coast. Met some people. Drank some beer. Swam with some whales. Like that. I understand you’ve made some changes.”
“Not me,” Wiccaman said. “It was a consensus. That’s how things flow here.”
“It was a motivated consensus,” Sue told Charlie. “Wicca got Desert Woman and Eybo to go along, and since they, or I guess their parents, provide most of the operational bread right now with you gone, everyone else went along.”
“That sounds sort of capitalist itself,” Charlie said.
“Political maybe,” Wiccaman admitted. He raised his head to look at Sue in what she knew was disapproval. When Charlie left again she would pay for this. She held his gaze and tried not to blink.
Charlie and Wiccaman had been rivals from the beginning. Charlie, being the more worldly and hedonistic, always said that if doing a commune wasn’t a good time, then it wasn’t worth doing. He was a big, wooly, happy freak. Wicca on the other hand, in Sue’s estimation, was all about political control. He was always scheming, lobbying and forming coalitions within the fluid Llano Tierra membership of about three dozen. He never seemed happy.
That night Sue and Charlie crept out of the main house and made love in the hayloft of the old barn. They spread out a double layer of sleeping bags over a nest of straw and lay upon them naked, listening to the old building creaking in the light nighttime breezes or from the turning of the Earth itself. Or the gravitational pull of the full moon. The barn sounded like an old man mumbling and groaning in his sleep.
Sue loved to mount Charlie from above like a big wooly buffalo. It wasn’t just the comfort of being able to control the penetration, although Charlie tended to throw his whole self into the fucking, whether on top or below, or the fact that Charlie’s endowment matched his massive bulk. It was the fact that he enjoyed the position so much too.
“Babe, you’re like my little Tinkerbelle up there. A beautiful little winged nymph on my cock,” Charlie occasionally rumbled. Compared to Charlie, she did feel fairylike. The thumbs and index fingers of his huge hands touched as they encircled her thighs just above her spread knees.
“What are you going to do about Wiccaman?” Sue asked, hands enmeshed in the thick mat of his chest hair, and the head of his prick held just inside of her.
“Why do I need to do anything?” Charlie groaned and tried by gentle finger pressure, to encourage her to lower herself further onto him.
“He scares me a little.” Flexing her knees, she brought his penis inside her until she felt it bump up against her cervix. She rose slowly like playing a long sweet note on a cello and squeezed. “He’s too serious.”
Charlie laughed. “That he is. But I can always drive into Mariposa for beer or a steak.” He was lifting and lowering her onto him now. He was careful and she let him do it. Loved him doing it. She felt weightless. “But I am getting a little tired of the ––whole thing.”
“Which thing?”
“This hiding out in New Mexico thing. The digging a hole and letting the rest of the world go to hell thing.” Charlie’s eyes were closed and his big white teeth showed as his lips moved back. “I’m thinking it’s time for us to head west. Back to the world. Check back in. Get political.”
“Now you’re getting serious. You’ve never been political,” Sue said. Then a pause, as she realized what else he had said. “Us?” She reached back and cupped his balls with one small hand.
“Yeah, babe. Us. You and me. Let’s go to LA or Frisco and get into trouble,” Charlie said. “Let’s go get political.”
“What would we do?” Sue could feel herself getting close. Charlie’s hands moved from her hips to her breasts, fingers and thumbs gripping her nipples.
“I’ve got the two spare tires in the car packed with pot. It’ll give us a start,” Frank said. His mouth opened wide and his eyes closed.
“Okay.” Sue smiled as she rode Charlie towards the horizon of desire.
June 5th
It was Sage that brought everyone the news at breakfast the next morning that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. She had been listening to the radio. It didn’t sound good. She was crying.
“It seems like if there is a ray of hope in the world anywhere, someone has to stomp on it,” she said.
“We’re talking about a Kennedy, not Jesus,” Wiccaman told them. “He was a bourgeois scammer just like all of them.”
All day long, the talk of the commune was about the shooting of Kennedy. Remembering Martin Luther King. Even the shooting of Andy Warhol seemed to be part of it. And the war. It was the accumulation of everything that was happening. It hadn’t been a good year in the world. The worst that anyone could remember. Wiccaman tried to get them to shut off the radios but couldn’t get a consensus.
Sometime in late afternoon, almost everyone took peyote, which maybe had something to do with what happened the next morning. Charlie started talking around midnight just as everyone was coming down. He had an idea. Wiccaman argued against it, but Charlie persisted.
June 6th
Charlie, Sue, Sage, and four others, two men and two women, arrived at the county courthouse in Mariposa just as the sun was coming up. As the VW bus pulled in and parked in front of the Catholic Church, the small square was empty except for a large white dog who was pawing through the contents of a trash barrel it had tipped over. The century old courthouse, on the north side was made of sandstone blocks and had wide steps in the front that topped out at a twelve by eight foot landing. A perfect stage.
“Okay Goat, you stay in the bus,” Charlie instructed a longhaired man with a tattoo of a spider on his left cheek. “If you see us coming back over this way in a hurry, fire it up.”
All of them had worn clothing that could be taken off with minimal fuss. Simple dresses, loose trousers and t-shirts. The six of them moved across the square and up the steps, turning to face the empty square and the rising sun. Charlie and Sue carried a car battery wired to an eight-track player and two stereo speakers. Charlie sat the battery down on the top step and help Sue place the speakers. The sound of Simon and Garfunkel’s new song America echoed off of the stone and adobe walls of Mariposa. Charlie turned up the volume and took off his clothes. The others did the same and waited. Arms extended, they linked hands in a single line.
Sue saw a young man come from an alleyway into the square. He looked at the line of her naked friends. America finished and then started again from the beginning. She waved at him. The man retreated back into the alley. He returned in a couple of minutes with a woman and two older men.
Once a couple of dozen people had gathered, Charlie turned down the tape player and raised the bullhorn. “I guess you heard that Bobby Kennedy was shot night before last,” His amplified voice boomed out across the square and town. Even from a distance Sue saw people’s faces show confusion. Who was Bobby Kennedy? Some Anglo... “He’ll probably die, they say.” More people were walking into the square, then stopping to stare at the sight of six naked people on the courthouse steps. A gigantic naked man with a full beard and a bullhorn. A uniformed Sheriff‘s deputy made his way through the crowd but reaching the groups near edge, stopped and stood with his arms crossed. His dark mustache and mirrored sunglasses made Sue uneasy. He seemed to be waiting. For someone? To see what they were going to do?
“We’re going to do something for you. Something you may not like, but it is important because you will remember it,” Charlie said, and his words acquired a slight delay and an echo. “It is the only sane response to hatred and death. Love. Joy. Life.” He put down the bullhorn and turned to embrace Sue. She put her arms around his neck and swung onto his naked body. He was erect and laughing. He met her lips with an open-mouthed kiss.
The people in the square, who had been restless, moving, talking, were suddenly quiet. Sue’s squeal of honest pleasure, as Charlie’s cock entered her, sounded in her own ears like the first note of an overture. An older woman stepped forward and whispered something into the uniformed deputy’s ear. A protest? A demand for action? He shook his head and turned back to observe.
Sue saw Sage and the other two women converge on Eybo, who with his fair hair and beard, made a striking figure. One of the women knelt and took his cock into her mouth while Sage and Desert Woman, a small pale girl with very short hair nestled under his out-spread arms, nibbling and kissing his smooth chest and neck.
Sue hugged herself to Charlie, letting him hold her hips as he fucked her with a huge grin on his face. An instant later the morning sun topped the ragged line of the distant Sangre de Christo Mountains to the east and swept over Mariposa. Everything, including Sue and her six naked friends, were suddenly golden.
Sue had come once and was building towards a second, floating in Charlie’s hands as his hips and feet moved with the same rhythm as he rotated their connected bodies in a tight circle. Then a gun went off somewhere. Charlie dropped Sue onto her feet and lay down on landing. The sound reverberated off of the buildings and the low hills outside of town. It was impossible for Sue to tell where the shot had come from. Maybe from the far edges of the square. Maybe just nearby.
Then, at least two more gunshots in quick succession were heard. Sue hadn’t seen anyone in the crowd with a gun except the Sheriff‘s deputy and his was still holstered. Several women in the small crowd screamed. Sue recovered her dress, got back up and turned to run. The others had the same idea and had grabbed up any and all clothing. The five were already sprinting across the square to where Goat had the mini-bus going, side door open. “Time to go Charlie.” Sue turned to find Charlie lying on his back with open sightless eyes staring up at the cobalt blue New Mexico sky.
“Shit. Fuck!” she screamed. Kneeling beside him she desperately searched for a wound so that she could staunch the flow of blood. She found nothing and lay down across his body with her mind filled with red light.
“Maam? I’m a medical technician. Can I have a look?” It was the uniformed deputy squatting beside her, speaking with a soft Spanish accent. She couldn’t say anything, but she did sit up, hugging the dress to the front of her body. The deputy picked up one of Charlie’s wrists and then leaned over and put his ear to the giant hairy chest. He sat back up.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
A woman came up the steps and helped Sue get her dress back on. “Your friends left,” she said.
After a while a real doctor arrived and told Sue again that Charlie was dead. A heart attack, most likely. Had he taken any drugs recently? She lied and said no. An old station wagon that had been made into an ambulance came. Four local men carried Charlie’s corpse down the steps and put it onto a wheeled gurney.
She was only partly aware of the deputy and an official seeming woman leading her to a nearby brick building. The Sheriff’s department. She told them Charlie’s last name. Smith. “Really,” she said. And she gave them the address of his parents in Vermont. No, she didn’t know their phone number. No, they hadn’t been married. He was just a friend. A good friend. The woman said that the gunshots had come from a farm on the edge of town, two blocks from the square. Shooting at a fox.
Everyone was very nice. They let her talk on the phone to Charlie’s parents who seemed calm. Resigned even. They hadn’t known where he was or even if he had been alive. At least they didn’t have to worry about him any more. The woman hugged her before she left. The deputy drove Sue back to Tierra Llana where they asked her what had happened. She told them as she packed her few possessions into the Corvair. Desert Woman said she was sorry and gave her two hundred dollars for gas. Wiccaman tried to get her to give it back but she wouldn‘t.
The Next Day
Sue heard on the car’s radio that Bobby Kennedy had died about two o’clock in the morning of the day before. Her jaw tightened and the Corvair’s odometer crept past seventy. The car trembled a little, but not too badly. She hoped she wouldn’t get a flat tire. A sign announcing the Nevada state line flashed past.
“It’s time to get fucking political babe,” she said as her right hand caressed the empty seat beside her.
By the time Sue reached LA it had been announced that it looked like Andy Warhol might pull through okay.
Copyright © 2007 by Elazarus. All rights reserved.
Elazarus Wills is a Colorado journalist, artist and used bookstore owner (and recovering hippie) who only began writing erotica in 2006. Since then, his work has appeared on Ruthie’s Club, Clean Sheets, and with Torquere Press. He once published a commune networking newsletter, owned a Corvair, and had hair down to his ass. Some of the details for this story were recovered from brain cells that were thought to be lost in the mid 1970’s.
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