Summer of '69 // Chapter 2

Rebecca’s nails roamed. She was scratching his shaft, her clawed hand hovering over the tip of his dick sticking straight up out of his thatch of pubic hair and dragging her nails quickly up his length in lazy repetition. Then she let them go down lower and she tickled her nails all over his shrunken scrotum, watched it tighten right up like half an avocado.

“Oh, man, can’t tell you how, ah . . .” He had to put a forearm over his eyes, the pleasure was so intense. His breath caught in his throat and pleasure bloomed in phosphorescent flowers behind his eyes.

Now Rebecca slipped out of the hammock and stood in front of him. She unbuttoned the straps of her floral dress. It had two big buttons at the front where the shoulder straps swept from the back and clasped to the chest. She undid one and let it fall—he was aroused just seeing her bare slim shoulder. She did the other and the whole shebang fell right to the floor, her dress so light and so airy it didn’t even make a sound. She stood between his naked knees, and he admired what she had. He’d made love to her a thousand times but still couldn’t get enough. He wanted to watch every move she made from now until forever. She was tall and long, but she had the perfect swell of a woman through her hips dropping down from her narrow waist, and a flat stomach. She had perfect pendulous breasts with small rosy-brown nipples—even standing still he could see them sway with the momentum of their own weight. He was face-to-face with her furry sex. He leaned forward and buried his mouth and nose in her luxurious muff, and Rebecca palmed the back of his head. His stinging cock grew.

There was a familiar rattle outside and she stopped. Rebecca giggled.

It was the rattle of a fender on an old bicycle as it came up their rocky, pitted drive. They knew the bike—a decades-old Schwinn, rusted and creaky but still worked hard every day. It had a red and white split seat, worn almost down to the core, and twin headlights that still worked for late-night rides. It was Oro. They heard him give the horn attached to his handlebar a quick and friendly quadruple honk.

“Zip your fella up,” she whispered, gathering her dress from the floor and kissing his forehead.

Ari tucked his pecker away—now it felt like pure fire—and watched Rebecca walk to the open window on squeaky-clean bare feet, the dress in her hand. She looked through the netting out to the clearing in front of their shack. Ari came up close behind her, limping and scratching, then put his hands on her soft naked behind and coddled her cheeks.

Oro was a very young man, a Garifuna—a Black Carib, his Nigerian ancestors had survived a sinking Spanish slave ship and then mingled with the native Indian people, as Columbus would have referred to them. He was tall, about the same height as Ari, but he had a young, solid and strong, masculine build, with long legs and almost caramel-colored skin. They watched him swing the kickstand out with his bare foot and he left his bike standing while he took a bundled towel out of his basket and tucked it under his arm. He had a pole over his shoulder and there was a shining catfish swinging on a hand-line from the end of it that had to be fifteen pounds.

Oro and his family lived in a hut just about half an hour by bike down their access road. He had three brothers and two sisters, and his mom’s sister lived with his parents too. From what they could tell Oro’s dad had a farm of his own but they’d been displaced by a corporate plantation and they’d moved here and were essentially subsistence farmers now, trying to grow what they could just to eat for themselves. Oro was always shirtless and shoeless and he wore the same threadbare cut-off jean shorts every time they saw him. And he always smiled.

It was getting a little dark now, the fading light getting a nice purple quality, the setting sun zipping orange light along the edges of the metal things parked in their yard. Oro called out to them and waved his fish as he headed to their front door. A symphony of cicadas answered him.

Ari whispered in his wife’s ear, “You might want to put on some clothes.”

“You don’t want him seeing everything I’ve got?”

“It’s just the heat making you crazy, sunshine,” he whispered and lightly slapped a bare ass cheek. “He’s not ready to see what you’ve got. You could kill him walking out like that.”

* * *

Ari was out at the butcher block in the yard outside the front of their shack. It was just a slab of old mahogany, once the top of an old table, and Ari had fixed it to the top of a metal drum. He was gutting the catfish and cutting it up into fillets for their dinner.

Rebecca still had their stew bubbling, had turned it down to low. Oro was opening out his folded up tea towel. It was a big cotton square with red-and-white checks. Inside he had more than half a dozen sheets of cassava bread. Rebecca’s face lit up. He’d brought it for her before and she loved it. It was hard to make, he’d told her. His mom and auntie did it once a week but it was a long process. Made from a tuber, like a potato, the root of the cassava, the Manihot esculenta. It was really toxic with cyanide, but they mashed it, pressed it through curled palm fronds, sun-dried it and ground it to a flour, then flat circular loaves were baked in a stone oven and it made this very crispy, wonderfully smoky and delicious unleavened bread.

“Just for you, Rebecca,” he said, but he couldn’t look her in the eye. Oro had great English but still chose to speak with his comfortable and easygoing Nigerian pidgin/Carib drawl. You almost always knew what he was saying, and the more she knew him, the more she heard it, the easier it got.

“Oh my gosh, Oro, thanks so much. Really,” she said. “And thank your mom and auntie, too. Ari and I appreciate it so much.” They stood side by side at the small kitchen counter, and she turned at the waist and put her arms around his hot, bare shoulders to hug him.

Then she stepped back saying, “You know what I’ve got for you?”

Oro held his eyes on her mouth, too timid to meet her gaze still though she knew he wanted to. “No, Rebecca,” he said. His eyes were darting, struggling not to take her body in.

“Oro,” she said, smiling, touching his chin and guiding him to look at her. “You know what I’ve got for you.”

Oro met her eyes and smiled, shaking his head at his own custom of averting his gaze from her. She’d been teaching him she welcomed it, and that to some western women, it was super cool.

“Hold on,” she said, and made her way to the end of the living room and opened the metal door that led out to their pantry, just a 10 x 10 corrugated tin room. One wall was lined with beige angle-iron metal shelving units. They were lined with canned stews, vegetables, batteries, hurricane lamps and flashlights . . . Then, on the right side, stacked on wooden pallets, were fabric bags of rice, oatmeal, porridge, and milk powder. There was a chest too, pressed against the inner wall, an old cooler, rusted and faded from humid exposure. She opened it and grabbed an armful of Cokes. They were Oro’s most loved thing ever.

“Oh no, no,” Oro was waving both hands at her, rejecting her kindness with a smile.

“No, no, to you, Oro,” she said. “I’ll brain you if you don’t take these,” she said. She put the small glass bottles down on the palette table and Oro rubbed his hands over his short afro, worried she’d thought he’d given her the bread to get some Cokes.

She laughed, said, “I want to thank you for thinking of me. Make sure everyone gets some. Even your sister.”

Oro looked up at her, eyebrows raised in the middle, smiling. She put her hand on his bare back.

Oro submitted, allowing her the gesture, wagging his head as if fighting the final vestiges of his polite refusal. “You too much, too nice to me, Rebecca.”

She said, “You’re nice to me, I’m nice to you,” looking right into his eyes while she said it. Then she left him, grabbed two more Cokes from the pantry and used the opener to pop the tops off. She handed him his bottle. They were warm, but fuck it, you just weren’t going to get anything cold in the jungle. She took hers and clinked the neck against his.

They both took a big drink, and she said, “Now let’s go give Ari a hand.”

* * *

Oro had opened a coconut, cut the flesh into thin wafers, and Rebecca toasted it on the cooktop before she grilled the fish. They covered the whole thing with a bit of salt and brown sugar and then grated some ginger and squeezed a few lemons over it. The fish was fantastic and the stew paled in comparison, but they ate it anyway. They were all hungry. After that, Ari did the cleanup and Rebecca got out her workbook and tutored Oro in math. Oro lacked an advanced education but had the knack for mathematics, and loved to learn. He’d come by three or four nights a week, sometimes announced, sometimes unannounced like tonight. He was always welcome.

Now Ari sat slumped in a folding aluminum lawn chair feeling really good despite the hard edges of the redwood slats pressing into his lean back. He’d had a cushion but he gave it to Rebecca so she could lay her head on it. She looked about as high as he felt. Her eyes were almost closed but her eyebrows were right up as she listened to Oro tell her how he caught the fish this afternoon. Oro already told him while Rebecca was cooking so he was content to lay here inside a body wonderfully poisoned with spicy Caribbean rum and some pretty decent reefer.

Oro wasn’t even really fishing, he was telling Rebecca, well not seriously anyway. He’d just gone out for a nap. It was too hot to work anymore so he was going to take an inner tube out onto the river. There was a spool of line laying in the rocks at shore and he grabbed it on a whim, thinking he might practice jigging. His auntie was slaughtering chickens along by the river and he tied some entrails to the hand-line and set off into the water, sitting in the centre of his inner tube, eyes closed.

Rebecca was sinking low down in a chair like Ari’s, side by side with Oro while he talked. He was turned sideways in his chair, one leg tucked underneath him, his back to Ari while he recounted his story. He was smiling and motioning a lot with his big hands while he talked and Rebecca tracked them as they moved.

“Then the next thing,” he said, laughing, using his whole arm to show how his rod had bent with the catfish’s pull, and Rebecca laughed as well and covered her mouth. Oro mimed how he’d woken and looked shocked, and continued, “Bang, I lean forward and the rod snapped up and hit me in me forehead—I thought what got my line it escape, but naw, the rod pull down again.”

Rebecca said, “Then what?”

“Big fight,” Oro said, leaning back again in the chair, arms on the rests. He popped his palms up and showed her the scars.

Rebecca scooted forward, taking his hands in hers and examining them. “You need a proper fishing pole, Oro. The lines cut your hands?”

“Strong mister fish,” he said, then rubbed his flat stomach to show how he’d won the fight in the end.

Rebecca still held the other hand, running her fingertips over the scars. “You’re lucky you have such tough hands. You didn’t even bleed?”

Oro shook his head, smiling, assuring Ari’s pretty wife he was a tough nut. Rebecca stood, pulling on the hand she held saying to Ari, “Can you get the genny up?”

Oro rose and went with Rebecca, knowing what she wanted, hitching up his jean shorts with his free hand.

“On it,” Ari said and lifted his peaceful weight from his chair, head full of cotton, heading into the dark behind their original hut where the generator hooked up. It was a rapidly aging Onan 4-cylinder diesel gen-set that had been really reliable and generally very good to them. One time it had been a dark British racing green but now it was rusted at the base and all the badging had faded away under the tropical elements. One pull though and she started right up.

By the time he returned out where Oro and Rebecca were, Rebecca had their suitcase phonograph opened up and plugged in. Small lights in colorful plastic lanterns around their raised deck joined in with the oil hurricane lamps and turned their eating area into a glowing amber oasis. She set the record player up on the ledge of the window so their dancing wouldn’t shake the deck and make the record skip, slipped out Oro’s favorite record and set in on the turntable. She’d gone to the center of the deck before the music began, and Ari sipped rum, went to their records they kept in an old milk crate and flicked through them.

Above him, the hissing of needle on vinyl opened up to the jangling question mark strains of Dave and the Stone Hearts, then the drums kicked in and the one-two sock-hop fast beat got going on the song “Slow Down.” It’d been a record his second-year roommate gave to him, his roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s record he didn’t even want near him anymore, and Ari took it back to New York over spring break and somehow it ended up all the way down south in British Honduras five years later. And now it was Oro’s favorite song of all time.

When he stood with the next 45, he watched with great amusement as Oro and Rebecca danced together, facing each other, bouncing two beats on each foot, Rebecca showing Oro all the New York City dance moves from their high school days: The Swim, The Hitchhiker, The Watusi, The Hully Gully, The Madison, and his favorite for wife-watching, The Pony. He could watch Rebecca dance for hours. He wasn’t a dancer at all, so he never got the fun of it, doing it with her, though she’d always try to teach him when he was enough in the mood to give it a try. Almost fell off the deck one time, not here, but back at her parent’s place.

As “Slow Down” wrapped up, he lifted the needle and got the next platter spinning, the two bare foot dancers laughing, Rebecca adjusting the straps of her dress, her skin glistening. Oro’s skin glistened too, a real high-tone gleam on all his long, lean muscle. Then the next number began, Eddie Cochran’s emphatic humming on top of some jazz drums, a song named “Sweetie Pie,” then the guitar coming in and both of them laughing and getting back into it, doing more Watusi, drawing V fingers across their eyes, leaning in close and their legs jumping all over the place. Rebecca’s calves flexed, her clean feet dug and twisted and kicked on the beaten deck boards, her luscious hair bobbed around her shoulders, left and right and up and down. And Oro was a better dancer than Rebecca even, all perfect timing and occasional improv and limber masculine ability.

Then when the guitar chorus kicked in, Rebecca went to town on a suggestive and aggressive Hully Gully—way too aggressive. His wife—with no bra—got her perfect tits bouncing around so much, her shoulders doing all the motion, side to side, making those globes go in circles, and one of her titties made a full peekaboo, an aroused nipple bouncing high over the bustier’s edge to get a look at the handsome and athletic man she danced with. Rebecca made an embarrassed whoopsie face and tucked her big girl back into place and returned the strap over her shoulder. Oro pretended not to notice, turning his back for her privacy, still dancing, hands over his head, and that friendly, honest smile.

Something about the whole thing got a funny arousal stirring in Ari’s belly, and his itchy mosquito-bitten penis grew again, going to full hardness in his old khaki cut-offs. Why the fuck did mosquitoes go up his shorts?

He snapped his fingers and smiled with sudden glee, then launched into his own casual Chubby Checker sideways shuffle to the record player again. While Oro and Rebecca continued to boogie around, he slipped a hand inside the satin storage pouch sewn to the inside of the suitcase lid and found what he’d just remembered. A velvet whisky-bottle bag with a drawstring top, and inside a whole half-ounce of more reefer. He held it up so Rebecca could see and she bit her lower lip and shot him a sexy, sultry stare, luring him to her dance floor with arm motions like Oro pulling in his fish today.

***

Now, I couldn't find a single link for the Dave & the Stone Hearts doing "Slow Down," but here is a punk-ish version of the same song by The Jam. (Never saw The Jam in concert, but I did see Paul Weller, and he was magnificent!).The Jam's version of the Larry Williams song is closer to the Dave & the Stone Heart's version than the original or The Beatles' cover.

https://youtu.be/tht-FoB6d8Q

And some "Sweetie Pie":

https://youtu.be/g1EXNicCokI

And a high school style Pony:

https://youtu.be/JyaxcvHSyZY