Hot Valley (27 page)

“Pretty good.”

That was all the encouragement I needed, and I started to undress him. As each item of clothing came off, his body was revealed as even more magnificent than I had imagined;
he was a young man used to physical labor, a stranger to vanity, whose hard, dense, hairy body was made for pleasure. I could not help pitying Miss Emily Willison, who had forfeited her chance of a lifetime of making love to Howard Porter.

Finally I had him naked, his hard cock pointing straight up to his belly button, resting on a dense mat of hair. Black hair covered his body from the neckline downward, forming whorls over his nipples, tapering into a line down his stomach, then fanning out again over his groin and thighs. I could not resist, and I dived into one armpit, kissing and licking as I went. Howard's hips bucked, so I grabbed his thick cock and squeezed. He stuck his fingers into my hair and held on as my mouth explored his chest, his stomach, then further down…

“I want to feel your skin,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Stand up.”

I stood, and he undressed me as a valet undresses his master before bedtime. He unfastened my shirt, drew it over my head, and laid it neatly on the chair. He undid my belt, unbuttoned my fly, peeled down my pants. I kicked off my boots and allowed him to pull my pants over my feet; now I was as naked as him. He was kneeling, I was standing, and there was only one obvious course of events.

It happened. He kissed the tip of my cock, looking up at me for permission. I smiled, caressed his faced, and drew him toward me.

Howard Porter learned how to suck cock that day, how to take it without gagging and how to adjust his pace to suit me. He learned how to lie back and receive it as well, and, despite his initial aversion, he learned to enjoy the feeling of a tongue and a finger or two up his ass. I kept him going for as long as I could, but it was obvious that the boy needed to come—and I cradled him in my arms, kissing him passionately while I jerked his stiff cock to a messy climax. I don't think he'd come in a while; there was enough there to repopulate the Commonwealth of Virginia.

He took a while to come around from the slumber he'd fallen into—but he didn't run away as I'd feared he might. Instead he resumed sucking my cock, and by the time I was ready to come, he too was hard again.

“Go and get your things,” I told him. “You're staying with me from now on.”

He dressed reluctantly and kissed me for so long that I thought I'd never get him out. And tonight, Howard Porter, you're going to learn to take more than a finger up that hairy little ass of yours, I thought, as I watched him walking across the camp. He had a spring in his step.

 

With Howard as my companion, life in Company K was even sweeter than before. But, of course, it all came to an end soon enough. Captain Chester came into my tent one day with tears in his eyes and announced that Company K, and indeed the whole of the 4th Virginia Cavalry, was going into battle.

“Where are we going?”

“I don't know. South.” He was pale, his hands were shaking. He fumbled as he lit one of his foul cigars.

“Are you frightened, Captain Chester?”

“Frightened, boy? Not on your life.” His voice cracked a little, and he would not look me in the eye, but I admired his bravado.

Howard was lying naked on my blanket, picking twigs and blades of grass from his densely matted chest. (I'd just taken him for a “stroll” in the woods.) “I'm not frightened,” Howard said. “I joined up to fight. What else is war about?”

Captain Chester and I looked at each other. War, for both of us, had been about opportunity, about hiding from
reality, about turning a profit and getting our dicks sucked. War had been about young, normal men like Howard doing things that they would never have done in peacetime, and that they would deny for the rest of their lives, except perhaps in their solitary reveries. War had seen the world turned upside down—a Negro fighting for the slave owners, a boy like Billy acting like a woman, a Union sheriff transformed into a Confederate officer. Our camp was that crazy world in microcosm. I had found myself a lover, a companion both of my bed and of my heart, whom I was teaching to read and write and fuck and suck. Captain Chester had put his talents to good use, while Captain Jed Brown had worked his way through every young man in the camp, enjoying his authority and handing out a unique form of “discipline.” Billy was living almost full-time as a “woman” now, having been taken up by a visiting major who exempted him from active service—in the normal sense of the word—and kept him as other men would keep a mistress, showering him with gifts in return for sexual favors. There was only one crucial difference, Billy told me one night—and that was that the general enjoyed being fucked just as much as he enjoyed fucking. “He's got everything he needs in one package, he says,” Billy remarked. “Now he says he'll never need to cheat again.”

But, to the major's dismay, Billy folded up his finery on the day we were mobilized, locked his jewelry and his money in a case, packed a trunk with his skirts and wigs, and said, “And they won't come out again until the war is over.”

We paraded at dawn to receive our marching orders. Jed Brown was more impressive than ever; he may have been playing a role, but he played it well.

“Men of Company K. And ladies!”

This got a laugh and set us at our ease; all of us, at one time or another in the last few weeks, had taken the lady's part.

“We move out today, bound for the Shenandoah Valley. The Yankees are burning the corn, burning the houses, killing folk, killing the cattle. We must do all we can to stop them. We may not be many, we may not be strong, but we are all together, are we not?”

There was a faint cheer.

“We are brothers in arms. We have been together, here in this camp, for long enough now. We have worked together, trained together, fought together—”

“And fucked together!” This, of course, was Charlie.

“And fucked together, yes,” Jed Brown said, “and I know of no man who hasn't become a better soldier for learning to take it up the ass. Am I right?”

This time the cheer was anything but faint.

“So let's march with pride in our hearts and friends on either side. Who would dare to cross the men of Company K?”

There was much more in the same vein, and much cheering and whistling, much shaking of hands and kissing, much slapping of backs and asses. We marched out of town with the old Alhambra band at our head, playing “Dixie.” Our hearts were light though our packs were heavy. I had Howard at my side, and I told him that I would not let anything happen to him.

And so we set out for the Shenandoah Valley, each of us stifling in our hearts the fear that we might never return alive.

MY MEDICAL TRAINING WAS BASIC, TO SAY THE LEAST, AND was frequently interrupted by the attentions of Captain Healey, who regarded me as his personal property and fucked me whenever he liked. I was an unwilling and unresponsive lover, but I dared not refuse him in case he decided—as he frequently threatened—to turn me over to the police for my part in the St. Albans raid. He had a whole string of charges that, he said, would land me in a military prison for the rest of my life, if I didn't cooperate.

Under Healey's tutelage, I began to see how sex, which I had always regarded as a pleasant and harmless pastime, could become a form of abuse, an expression of corrupted power. At one time, not so very long ago, the idea of “corrupted power” would have excited me, particularly if it involved a brutally handsome, bald, muscular man in an officer's uniform who simply wanted to fuck my ass and mouth. It was the sort of thing I dreamed about back home in Bishopstown, jacking myself off to sleep with visions of domination just such as that which I was now experiencing. But the dream was very different from the reality. Healey didn't care if he hurt me, or if I wasn't in the mood to be fucked. He didn't even care if my ass was in no fit state to be fucked due to its more natural function as an egress for excrement. He reveled in my discomfort, and if I fouled his prick he used it as an excuse to degrade me even further. I was obliged to submit, and thankfully I was always able to perform efficiently enough to get the ordeal over with quickly, but I came to hate Healey and what he was doing to me as much as I have ever hated anyone in my life. I had ample opportunity to kill him, or to betray him to the authorities, but I knew that it would have made life worse for me. So I suffered in silence.

The one thing that sustained me during this time was my rapid advance in medical studies. As a medical orderly, I was expected to do little more than roll bandages, empty slop buckets, carry the wounded and sick, and occasionally hold down a soldier while his leg or arm was amputated. All of this I learned to do in the field hospital to which I was initially posted, down in Baltimore, which we reached after a three-week march from Vermont.

I did all my work without complaint, and it soon became apparent to the overstretched doctors and nurses that I was intelligent enough to do more than mop and carry. I was taken under the wing of a nurse named Jenny Wallace, a brave, strong-shouldered farm girl who had overcome no end of opposition to obtain work at the hospital. Most of the nursing was left to badly trained soldiers such as me, or to recovering patients with little idea of hygiene, let alone how to treat sickness or injury. Jenny had been training as a nurse before the war began, and decided to put her training to some use. “I thought my ugly face would be a protection against what Daddy called man's baser instincts,” she told me, “but I've realized that most men, even those who are near to dying, aren't too fussy about what a woman looks
like, as long as she's a woman.” Jenny was homely enough, it's true, but she had kind eyes and a beautiful smile which would have made any man of sense fall in love with her. She'd developed a wide range of techniques for thwarting unwanted attentions from the men, patients and doctors as well as men of other ranks; some of these techniques were purely verbal, while others involved a swift knee in the balls. I used a few myself to stave off unwanted suitors, and I wished I had the guts to kick Healey in the nuts the next time he started pawing me.

After a few weeks working alongside Jenny, I was a pretty proficient nurse myself. I could clean and bandage even quite serious wounds, and I found that I was not as squeamish as I feared. I could remove bullets or shards of metal from bleeding flesh, I could pack burns with soothing creams, I could hold down a screaming man while the doctors performed hideous but lifesaving operations on him. I quickly conquered my repugnance for blood, vomit, shit, and pus; I suppose my recent way of life had counteracted the delicacy of my upbringing. I learned the properties of various medicines and could prepare sedatives or antiseptic washes. I knew how to administer the drugs that would help a man in a fever, and for those who were beyond such help I learned the arts of making them comfortable as they awaited the inevitable end. I saw many young men die in that hospital, and consoled myself with the fact that I had eased their final moments. Many of them commissioned me to write letters home, or pressed into my hand tokens of loved ones, parents, friends. They allowed me intimacies that they were afraid of allowing to Nurse Jenny, so I often had to help wounded men go to the bathroom, or wash them if they had messed themselves. I didn't mind. I saw it as penance for a life almost entirely wasted in selfish folly.

For once in my life, I had no idle time in which to seek pleasure or trouble. I worked every hour I could, partly because the need around me was so great, partly because it kept me from the attentions of Captain Healey, who, despite his autocratic pretensions, could hardly remove a nurse from the wards just because he wanted to fuck him. I often worked for 16 hours at a stretch, which allowed me two hours for other military duties, two hours in which to submit to Healey's desires, and, if I was lucky, four hours in which to sleep. I lost weight, my muscles wasted away, and my skin took on the gray tone of exhaustion. My hair fell out even more rapidly; after a couple of months, I had a definite bald patch on top of my head. I was no longer the pretty boy who had turned heads in the White Horse.

When the call came for volunteers to proceed to the front in Virginia, I did not hesitate. Captain Healey tried to stop me from leaving—he had no desire to get his head blown off, he said, and he almost pleaded with me to change my mind. I suppose, in his way, he had grown fond of me, or had at least grown accustomed to the skills that I practiced on him. I had learned those skills in the heat of passion, even of love—now I reproduced them coldly, with hate in my heart. I did not want to associate those feelings of physical joy with anger, spite, and pain ever again, and if that meant losing my life in the service of the sick and dying, it didn't seem such a bad exchange. Healey tried appealing to my sentimental streak, which he rightly guessed was a mile wide, and he even told me that he loved me. I did not believe him. No man could do the things he had done—things I do not care to remember, much less write down—to someone he loved. When I told him this, he reverted to his true character and started threatening me again. I went straight to his superior officers and told them that I was eager to be released for active service. They signed my papers right away.

We were marching to the aid of Union forces that had been severely beaten by Confederate troops under General Early, at Kernstown, just south of Winchester. I knew
little of the tactics of the operation, and understood less; it seemed to me, from what I could glean, that both sides were swinging up and down the mountains and valleys of the area inflicting terrible losses on each other with no advantage to be gained in any direction. Mine, however, was not to reason why; mine was but to patch up the wounded and comfort the dying.