Body

Alphonse--called Fonse by everybody but his wife--Turnipseed, dressed in a JC Penney suit that was green and too tight, stood directly behind his son, Motor, who had both of his elbows on the registration desk, one on either side of the form he was filling out. From time to time, he briefly touched the point of the ballpoint pen to the tip of his tongue as he wrote.

Alphonse's wife, Earnestine, and her daughter, Earline, were wearing JC Penney "marked-down dress-ups"--red imitation-silk skirts and blouses with enormous pleated bows in back. They had spent a week rebuilding the garments to accommodate their girth, being as they were what Earnestine always referred to as "naturally stout women."

She stood with her daughter now sharing a bag of pork skins, both of them patiently chewing and shifting from foot to foot, causing the shiny red bows to undulate over their massive hips.

Motor looked up, ran his ink-stained tongue over his lips and slapped the pen down on the marble-topped desk. "That's it. She's done."

"And how will you be paying for this, sir?" asked the clerk.

"How's 'at?" said Alphonse.

"He thought to use money," said Motor.

Earnestine pushed forward and took the keys, then said to the clerk, "Honey, don't you worry about a thing. These are my men--nasty at times to them they don't know real good, and both of'm sometimes mean as snakes--but they mine. And I'm gone see they behave."

•

The way to the elevators led through the hotel's courtyard, complete with palm trees and swimming pool. All around them, in the pool, in chaise longues, were enormously muscled men, their bodies veined and hairless--and women without body fat, their skin diaphanous, their movements languid and deliberate, abdominal walls ridged with rows of muscle so sharply defined as to seem unreal, the mad imaginings of a mad artist. As Alphonse was trying to make out the window of the room they were trying to reach, an enormous, hairless, veined man diagonally across the pool from them dropped to one knee, placed his fists on his hips and went into a lat-spread pose. Slowly, great thick wings of muscle emerged from his hips to his armpits, and kept on emerging until it looked as though his upper body would explode. His eyes seemed glazed, distant, focused on something only he could see. First, veins rose and stood in his forehead, then in his neck, and finally in his shoulders and arms, the veins working like worms suddenly come alive. He did not appear to be breathing. Alphonse and his family stopped to watch him. They stood stock-still, the breath seeming to have gone out of them, too.

"What do you reckon he's doing?" Alphonse said.

Earline said, "I know what he's doing. He's having a fit is what he's doing. I seen it in movies when I was getting my degree in Problems in Living."

The bodybuilder's veins, starting to appear now in the abdominal wall, were as big as pencils.

"He needs help," said Earline. "He may be gone cataronic."

"Cataronic," said Motor. "Don't believe I know much about that."

Earline said, "In your basic cataronic state, you cain't or sometimes just won't move. And you can see he's starting to tremble. And if he's breathing, I shore cain't tell it. He may need mouth-to-mouth is what he may need.

"Look how red his face is. And it ain't nobody making a move to help. Probably ain't had no training like I have. One thing's for shore, he cain't last much longer like he is."

"Well, in that case," said Motor, "les jump that sucker and save his ass in the name of love for our fellow man."

•

Russell Morgan, the trainer of Shereel Dupont, nee Dorothy Turnipseed, who was a favorite to win the Cosmos contest, came storming into her room, his face flushed and a vein forking out above his nose and across his forehead. He dropped onto the couch beside her. From the way he was breathing, he could have just finished a two-mile run.

"What ails you?" Shereel asked.

"Oh, shit," said Russell, tearing away the blind from the window. "They've gone crazy down there."

The entire Turnipseed family was racing down the edge of the pool in a kind of flying wedge. The two women, Earnestine and Earline, moved surprisingly fast and light on their feet for women so heavy.

The bunch of them simultaneously hit the bodybuilder, still on his knees in the lat spread. So concentrated on his pose was he, so focused on his pumped and swelling body, Shereel knew that he probably never saw them coming and, like everybody else counting down the days to contest time, he was probably living on a six-and-a-half-ounce can of tuna fish with a fresh lemon squeezed on it, three stalks of celery and a vitamin packet a day, ripping the fat from the striated layers of muscle covering his body, getting cut up like a skinned squirrel.

So the Turnipseeds handled him like a baby. Motor sat on his chest. Earnestine had him by the hair of the head and Earline had the heel of her hand on his chin, trying to force his mouth open. Fonse stood above them, waving his arms, his mouth working around a cigarette, apparently shouting instructions.

"What the hell is she doing to Billy Bat?" said Russell.

"That's my sister, Earline."

"I didn't ask who it was, I asked what she's doing. My God, is she kissing him? Goddamn it, she is, she's kissing him."

"That's what it looks like."

Down below, they saw Earline pinch the bodybuilder's nose shut with her thumb and forefinger and clamp her mouth firmly on his.

"Oh, I see now," said Shereel. "She's just giving him C.P.R."

"C.P.R., for Christ's sake?"

"The kiss of life," said She reel. "When she was going to school studying the Problems of Living, she told me all about it. One of the courses she had to pass. Even practiced on me."

"That man's in better shape than all those Turnipseeds put together. He doesn't need the kiss of life."

"Apparently, Earline thinks he does. And when you see somebody might need it, that's no time to stand and think."

Russell said, "What I saw was a great bodybuilder--a world beater--doing a lat pose and intimidating everybody around him."

"That's not what Earline saw, not from the looks of things."

"Do you understand the shit, the heat that could come down behind this?" said Russell. "I want your family to stay the hell away from you, you hear? I'll call the manager to set them up. Anything they want. I'll pay for it if I have to, but I'm goddamn well keeping them out of your hair till this thing is over."

•

Earline was lying naked in her suite on the king-sized bed shaped like a heart, which she very nearly filled, and staring at herself in the heart-shaped mirror above her. She watched as her hand slid into her purse lying beside her. She withdrew a Colonel Sanders drumstick wrapped in a napkin that she had put there to eat later instead of throwing it away, because little children were starving in Ethiopia. Earline stuck the drumstick in her mouth, stripped the meat off it slowly as she carefully examined herself in the mirror above the bed. God, there was a lot of her. With her feet nearly a yard apart, her thighs still met all the way to her knees.

But her skin was pretty. Nobody could deny her that, she thought. Pretty and soft and whiter than milk and without blemish. She stared a long time at the slightly reddish triangle of hair where it grew thick and curling at the base of her belly. How lovely and silky it was. She could not remember when she had seen it last. The mirror was the only reason she was seeing it now, and--she realized--the mirror was what made it too embarrassing to touch. But she wanted to touch it. She did. Its silkiness made her want to feel it on the ends of her fingers. It made her feel pretty.

She raised her hand and touched her lips, lips covered with a slippery film of grease from the Colonel Sanders drumstick. She moved her fingers over her lips and little jolts of pleasure radiated out from her mouth and took her whole body, all the way to her feet, making her toes wiggle, because she was not feeling her finger tips on her lips but rather Bill Bateman's lips when he had been pinned underneath her, squirming.

She closed her eyes so that she could not see her hand as she buried her fingers in the silky triangle of her public hair and gave it a long, not very gentle jerk, first this way and then that, all the while feeling Bill Bateman's monstrously hard chest swelling against her, each muscle individually leaping there, finally buried deeply in her breasts, which had come alive from the heat of him.

And all the while that her singing nerve endings were sending splattered, indecipherable messages to her brain, she kept telling herself over and over that she was a professionally trained therapist in Problems in Living. And the first problem of living--it had been endlessly drummed into her--was breathing. She had been stamped, certified and approved as one to keep the lungs breathing, to keep the heart beating. Then why had Bill Bateman--universally called The Bat, she had learned later, at the same time she had learned his name--why had The Bat turned into a single devouring pair of lips? She knew it was his tongue, first erratically thrashing and then stroking rhythmically inside her own mouth, that had taken her mind off her professional obligations.

She took her hand out of her hair (continued on page 88)Body(continued from page 66) between her legs and opened her eyes and saw in the mirror above her that her breasts, snugly caught under her arms, had turned a bright red and that her nipples had hardened in an unseemly way.

She sat up on the side of the bed, with her hands caught under her stomach, which sat now squarely in her lap. She breathed deeply and slowly. From where she sat, everything she could see was heart-shaped and bright red, done in velour or velvet or maybe both. The thought came to her that no woman belonged in such rooms without a man, and that thought was scariest of all, because she had had so little contact with men in her life. She knew she was a pretty girl, but large, very large. Yes, she did have wonderful skin, but God, such a lot of it.

She padded nakedly across the bedroom to the door that led into the bathroom. She moved on the balls of her feet as though she were stealing through a place where she did not belong and, consequently, might at any minute be discovered, found out and confronted.

The bathroom was enormous, but it was not its size that brought the rush of rising blood in her. Not only was the sunken heart of the bathtub big enough for two people--a man and a woman, the thought screamed inside her head--but there were two toilets. Two! And not only were they shaped like hearts, they were close enough for two people sitting on them to hold hands. The possibility of two people doing such a thing made her feel faint.

She moved closer, still creeping quietly on the balls of her feet, to better see the two dainty little thrones, but before she even got close enough to verify what she already knew, it was obvious that one of them could only be a bidet. She knew what it was for and even knew the word, though she had no notion where she had ever learned the word bidet, and certainly she had never seen one. She crept closer and peered into it and entirely against her will, she not only imagined sitting on it but also imagined Bill "The Bat" Bateman sitting beside her. More than that, they were holding hands naturally and without shame. She clearly felt his thick, callused hand in hers and his hot and wonderful eyes locked on hers.

•

When she finally did hear the bell on the door of the Bridal Bower chiming out Here Comes the Bride, she had no notion at all how long it had been ringing. She turned on her heels and charged out of the bathroom, moving with surprising swiftness and lightness, because in spite of her size, she had a gait that was as smooth as glass.

"Minute," she called. "I'm coming just in a sec."

Over by the door lay her open suitcase, a blue packing-crate-size thing that she and her mother had once found on a trip to Jacksonville. Earline bent, her cheeks flaring open like a vast flower, and pulled out her print housecoat, the first thing that had come to hand in the suitcase.

She was still belting it around her middle as she opened the door, saying, "You old honey, I kept hollering I'd be just a sec," and found herself face to face not with a member of her family but looking, rather, dead into the face of Bill "The Bat" Bateman, who was wearing wraparound aviator sunglasses and the same posing briefs he had been wearing down by the pool when she had thrown him on his back and given him C.P.R.

They stood regarding each other until finally, Bill Bateman slowly dropped his hand from the bell and said, "Well, hi there again."

Earline's eyes followed his hand as he dropped it to his side and her eyes came to rest on the tiny red bikini briefs he was wearing, or, more precisely, on the ingenious way he had arranged his cock and balls behind the thin triangle of fabric, drawing his cock up and turning it in such a way that the head of it proposed itself to her like a tiny doorknob, a doorknob that for one totally insane instant she felt she might actually reach out and take into her hand. She was suddenly intensely aware of the globes of her breasts swinging loose under her thin print housecoat and she gathered it tightly at her throat with both hands and said, "I thought you was Motor or maybe Fonse." She spoke without raising her eyes, directly addressing the knob of his cock.

Bill Bateman's expression did not change and his voice was as light and quick as a young boy's. "Motor or Fonse, you say?"

The accent was Southern and Earline was glad for that, for the familiarity of it, and realized that in her confusion, she was very nearly strangling herself, so tightly did she squeeze the housecoat at her throat. She released her grip a bit and said, "Or maybe even my momma." She knew she was babbling but could not help it. At least, though, she had managed to raise her eyes from the posing briefs to the sunglasses he was wearing, which she thought were just the cutest things.

"Nosirree," he said. "I'm Bill Bateman, called The Bat by near 'bouts everybody since I been eighteen years old." As he spoke, his chest gradually swelled, the thick wings of muscle underneath his arms flaring, until Earline imagined he might be about to drop to one knee right there in the doorway and commence doing what he had done earlier down by the pool that had confused her into thinking he might be at death's door. But then as quickly as he swelled up, he deflated, his famed wings disappearing somewhere into his back. "And I just came by up here to say I was sorry about down there by the pool. I didn't understand exactly, you see, how...."

"Mercy me," said Earline. "I ought to be the one doing the apologizing, 'cause if anybody misunderstood, it had to be me and me alone, not even my family. They just went along with it 'cause I got the degree in Problems in Living, and I just told'm...."

"No need for nobody to apologize for nothing," said The Bat. "And that's how come I come by, to say that."

Which was a lie. He had come by to admire her fat. Bill Bateman was a secret connoisseur of fat, especially of fat women.

"I know your name," said Earline, "and I ain't even innerduced myself."

"Oh, I know all about you," said The Bat, "and you family, too." He leaned and stuck his blunt head through the door and quickly scanned the room.

"This here is the Bridal Bower," said Earline, "is how come it looks like it do."

The Bat snatched his head back into the hall and away from her ballooning breasts toward which he had been inclining. "Don't git me wrong," he said. "I didn't know you was in no Bridal Bower."

Earline blushed deeply but was enormously pleased, nonetheless. "Now, Mr. Bat, you ol' thing, it ain't nobody in here but me. I ain't got no use for a Bridal Bower. I thought to have me a career before I went on ahead and got myself married. A course, it is real hard this day and time for a girl like me to stay single very long."

Bill Bateman immediately leaned in toward her, his head specifically inclining toward her breasts, between which he thought, if given the opportunity, he could make his head disappear. "Now, I know that is right for a dead-solid fact, a pretty girl like you."

Earline thought she might swoon. "Ittas just the only one of these big ol' places they had left, but it is real nice, even if I do say so myself." She stopped and took a long, deep breath, because standing there in her nervous state in front of The Bat in nothing but a thin (continued on page 153)Body(continued from page 88) print housecoat, keenly aware of her nakedness underneath and aware, too, of The Bat's knoblike cock pointing toward her from under his little panties, standing there like that had caused her to speak without breathing. "But I ain't showing the manners my momma raised me to have," she said when she had her breath back. "Why don't you step in and visit a minute? That is, Mr. Bat, if you a mind to and got the time."

"I ain't got a thing if I ain't got time," said Bill Bateman.

And so quickly did he spring into the room that he would have surely run directly into her if she had not been light on her feet, side-stepping his charge, turning and bouncing back into the room, the unrestrained flesh of her hips undulating in wonderful waves under her robe.

"But you don't 'Mr. Bat' me," he said in a little gasp that he had meant to be a sort of witty chuckle. "You just call me The Bat or Billy Bat or Bill the Bat or Batey Batman just like everyone else."

He kept coming straight for her as he spoke and she twisted and turned before him in a kind of dance around the room. Her robe fluttered and her flesh flounced and she had unaccountably fallen into a soft, giggling little laugh that she couldn't stop and that she thought would surely make Billy Bat think her afflicted.

Earline stopped moving and watched him, her soft, inexplicable laughter turned gaspy in her throat from the exertion of outmaneuvering Billy Bat, by which name he was now firmly fixed in her mind. Billy Bat had a nice sound, one that she immediately realized reminded her of bonbons. She loved the sound of bonbons and she loved the sound of Billy Bat and already the two were linked and singing in her head: Billy Bonbon Bat Bon Billy Bat Bat Bon, becoming a little song because bonbons were at the center of her life.

"You light on you feet, Miss Earline," said Billy Bat, "light as the wind a-blowin'."

"Why, that's the sweetest thing," she said, and meant it. "That's potry, 'light as the wind a-blowin'' is."

"Nothing but the truth, Miss Earline."

"Now, you just call me Earline. You don't have to 'Miss' me."

Billy Bat's quick, savage little feet pawed the rug. "I hope I don't have to miss you, Miss Earline. I don't want to miss you."

"Now, Godamighty, that's potry," she said, "and I told you to leave off 'Miss Earlining' me. Earline is good enough."

"Don't know if I can do that, sweet girl like you. My ol' momma raised me to respect sweet young girls like yourself. Never mind what all went on down there by the pool--I respect you and I want you to know it, sweet young girl like you."

She felt the hot swoon grab at her heart again and the blood seemed to leave her brain and she was lightheaded with the last "sweet young girl" ringing somewhere just behind her hot and throbbing pelvis. Billy Bat had called her a sweet young girl more times in four minutes than she had heard out of everybody else's mouth put together the whole rest of her life.

And when her eyes cut this time to the suitcase, where she could clearly see the bulge of a box of bonbons under the top layer of clothes, when her eyes cut there this time, they stayed. Sweet baby Jesus, her whole body was a-ringing and a-singing and a-throbbing and a-pounding and if she didn't have a good big handful of bonbons to quiet her blood right soon, she couldn't be responsible for her actions, and she knew it, knew she was more than capable of flinging herself on Billy Bat and eating him like a bonbon if she didn't get a good big handful of the real things.

"You care for one of these?" she said, holding the box out toward him with both hands. She would have offered him anything, including a cup of her blood, which seemed to have gone crazy in her veins.

"Bonbons, Billy Bat!" she croaked in a voice unlike any she had ever heard come out of her throat.

"How's 'at?" he said in a startled voice.

"In the box," she said. "You care for one? They real good."

Billy Bat said, "Wouldn't know about that, you sweet girl. I never eat one of them bonbons."

"They real good," she said, unable to take her eyes off him.

"Cain't go eating candy and stuff like that," said Billy Bat. "I got the best back in the world."

But Billy Bat had first told a lie and then told the truth. It was the single biggest lie and the single biggest truth in his entire life. And putting them side by side like that made him go loose and weak all along his fantastic muscles. Billy Bat's enormous truth was that he did have the best back in the world. But his lie, equally enormous, was that he did go eating candy and stuff like that. He could eat ten pounds of bonbons in ten minutes. But he could also bring it back up in ten seconds in a spectacular display of puking.

He did not have the freedom to eat and hold down what people like Earline had the freedom to eat and hold. And for that reason, their fat-layered bodies had come to represent a kind of ultimate freedom to him, a freedom he would never have. And he looked upon Earline in that way now where she stood holding her box of bonbons in both hands, while the rolls and piles of her wonderful fat seemed to undulate in the most beautiful and inviting way, though she was standing utterly still.

"Go ahead on," he said. "Eat you one."

"Don't seem right to eat here in front of you, Billy Bat," she said, keenly aware of his cute little name, and aware, too, of the way it dropped sweetly from her lips. "Not if you cain't eat none you own self."

"You got your life, I got mine," he said. "You go ahead on and eat yourself one of them bonbons, you sweet girl."

"Well, I do think I might have one, on account of I ain't had nothing much to eat and I need a little snack of something to hold me over."

Without taking her eyes off him as she talked, she ripped the top off the box, jammed one hand inside, causing little empty brown-paper bonbon cups to flutter to the floor, found not one but two bonbons and popped them into her mouth. She closed her eyes and chewed slowly, feeling the syrupy sugar of the candy flood not only her mouth but her whole being with sweetness.

"Yes, you darling," she heard him say from behind her closed eyes. "Eat it. Eat it, you sweet honey."

She did.

"Suck on it," groaned Billy Bat. "Roll it around on your tongue and suck on it."

She did.

"More," he said in a voice gone strange. "Take more in your mouth."

She did, lost entirely now in the sweetness of the moment and his sweet voice talking to her sweetly. She sucked and chewed, her mouth full, the candy deep in her throat.

She heard a soft moan start in Billy Bat's throat and it was some time--whether short or long, she could not tell and did not care--before she realized the same moan was in her own throat, hers answering his. She felt herself suddenly start to rise, rise up and seem to open like a flower, and at the same time that she rose, she started to spin, turning and turning, until she was spent and dizzy and breathing hard. She opened her eyes and saw that Billy Bat had taken her up in his arms, simply scooped her up with one of his massive arms under her legs and the other under her shoulders, and was turning slowly round and round and round there in the Bridal Bower. Her face was close to his, so close she could see herself reflected in his aviator glasses. It was the first time she had been off her feet in a man's arms since she was ten, when her daddy had last lifted her.

"You light as a feather, you sweet girl," said Billy Bat. And she felt light, lighter than she had ever remembered feeling. She closed her eyes again and Billy Bat turned slowly and slowly turned.

•

"My largest organ?" Earline said, sitting very still, keeping her eyes averted but remembering the way the little knob of cock, somehow sweetly melancholic and terribly vulnerable, had looked behind the thin fabric of his posing briefs.

"Didn't know that, did you?"

"What?" she said, lost in the memory of the sweet melancholy and vulnerability.

"That you skin is you biggest organ."

"No," she said. "I didn't know that."

"Is, though," he said. "And the foundation to everything. Think about trying to live without you skin."

He waited, giving her time to think about it. But she did not think about her skin. She thought about his. Thought about how smooth and utterly hairless it was. Thought about the huge, leaping muscles under it.

"Cain't, can you?"

"What?" she said.

"Living without you skin," he said.

She felt indeterminate and weak, as though she had lost all the bones in her body. What was he talking about? Whatever it was, she had entirely lost it. All she knew was that she was prepared to believe anything he told her, do anything he told her to do, follow him anywhere.

"And you in luck," he said.

"I know I am," she said, and meant it. She felt like the luckiest person alive.

"What it is," he said, "is I'm a skin mechanic."

"Skin," she said, not following him.

"Mechanic," he said.

"Mechanic," she said.

"Skin mechanic," he said, "is what I am."

Once he said it, it sounded pretty wonderful, he said it again, "Skin mechanic."

"I don't believe I ever known one," she said.

"It ain't many of us around," he said.

"What does, uh, what does a skin mechanic do?"

"Tunes and tones."

"And me ... ? What would you do ... ?" She did not know how to finish, or rather was afraid of where finishing would take her.

He spread his thick, powerful hands, palm up, and looked at them. "Them hands hold the power."

"The power to ... to do what?"

"Tone and tune. Take you to the other side."

She watched him shyly, finally averting her eyes. His voice had taken the tone of a fundamentalist preacher. It was the voice of ultimate persuasion, filled as it was with equal measures of terror and love.

"You don't know what's on the other side, do you, child?"

"No, I don't."

"On the other side, you will know that you are a dear, sweet girl. And you will know that you are beautiful. And you will love the only body you ever have to love before you can love all other bodies. It is all body, you sweet girl, and body is all. Body. Think about it, you sweet girl. Body."

"Body?" she said, confused now, eyes still averted.

"Body," he said, and put his hand on her thick shoulder, thrilling at the depth of her fat. "What it is"--and he dropped naturally into the cadence of a preacher--"is I spent my life in search of body; no sacrifice was too gret to find body, to know body, to be touched by the gretness of body and...."

"Potry," she breathed.

"It's on account of my life spent in the search of the body that I am today a skin mechanic."

Earline almost said "Praise God" but caught herself in time, realizing that would not be appropriate, and said in a small, gasping voice, "You can take me on to the other side."

"Then you need to be buffed up, have you biggest organ stimulated."

For him to talk about her biggest organ made her feel faint but also filled her with a hot pleasure.

"Yes," she said.

"Yes?" he said, astonished at his luck.

"We both professionals," she said.

"We that, all right," he said, "you and me." She had told him at some length about her degree in Problems in Living. "For proper buffing up, stimulation of you biggest organ, we need wet heat."

"Wet heat," she said, the words impossibly erotic in her ears as well as on her tongue.

"We need that big ol' bathtub full of water hot as you can stand it, and you in it," he said. And then, as an afterthought, "You sweet girl."

"Let's do it," she said. "It ain't every day a girl meets a skin mechanic and gits a chance to be tuned and toned."

Billy Bat felt the whole inside of his chest lift. Not only was she buying it, she had bought it.

"Let me go on in there and fill me up that tub and git in," she said. "When I'm good and ready, I'll holler for you to come on and do it."

The thought of him coming on and doing it struck Billy Bat dumb. He stretched his mouth and smiled at her.

"That's fine," he said. "That's real fine. You gone feel like a different girl after you toned and tuned."

•

Billy Bat sat listening to the water running into the deep honeymoon tub, his mind filled to overflowing with food he could eat but never keep: strawberry pancakes swimming in butter and maple syrup, half a bushel of chocolate, greasedripping sausages laid over with a six-egg omelet filled with lethal cholesterol and covered with salt. His swollen hands ticked in his lap with such urgency that he could almost hear them.

A kind of lilting cry came finally from behind the closed bathroom door, which--if he had not been so distracted by images of food that floated not only in his eyes but in his blood stream--he would have recognized as a desperate cry filled with resignation. "Billlly Baaaaat! Oh, Billy! Come on if you comin'!"

"I'm coming, you sweet girl," he said, rising from the love seat on his champion, world-beating legs, gone now, turned entirely into a sickly weakness.

He could not feel his feet as he walked across the deep carpet, opened the bathroom door and walked into a solid sheet of steam that beaded on his naked arms and shoulders as he leaned toward the sound of water in violent motion slapping the sides of the tub. He moved closer and his gaze traveled down her wide creamy neck and shoulders to ... to what? Billy Bat strained to see through the thick, swirling steam and what he gradually saw and came to understand was that she was wearing her fucking bathing suit.

"See you got you one-piece on," Billy Bat said. And then, "You sweet girl."

"Well, Billllly!" she said, her voice still full of desperate resignation. "I couldn't ... we couldn't ... you wouldn't, not nekked."

His voice harsher than he meant it to be: "I'm a skin mechanic. And a skin mechanic is got to have skin. You wouldn't want me to work on the engine of you car without being able to git under the hood, would you?"

Her round, bright eyes disappeared under her long lashes and in the smallest of voices, she said, "No, I wouldn't." She submerged, even her head disappearing, and when she surfaced, her eyes still closed, her voice even smaller, she said, "You can git under anything you want to git under." And then, in a deep, grateful sigh, "Because we both professionals."

And so he knelt beside the tub with both hands draped by thick white washcloths with blue flamingos standing on one leg stitched into each of the corners and Earline in her one-piece, which squeezed her like the skin of a sausage. She had said he could get under it, but Billy Bat did not know exactly how to proceed. Billy Bat was by choice a virgin. He thought if a prize fighter could leave his fight in bed, surely a bodybuilder could leave his championship in the same place. He was not about to lose even an ounce of his world-beating back through the head of his dick.

He put both washcloth-covered hands on the wet smooth hump of her shoulders and rubbed in slow, easy circles.

"Mmmmm," she said. "Mmmmm."

Then he closed his fists, taking handfuls of fat off her back up into his cloth-covered hands, pulling ever so gently and finally twisting the fat more tightly. Earline gave a deep moan that had the edge of pain in it and turned her head to look up at him, her eyes open now.

"Billy," she said.

"Relax," he said. "Drift and go with it. You in good hands."

"That do smart some."

"No pain, no gain," he said.

"No pain, no gain," she repeated.

"It's the code we live by," he said. "Accept it. Go with it."

"You wouldn't hurt me," she said, her head still turned looking at him.

"I mean to take you where you need to go," he said, and thought, Where I need to go.

"I want you to relax. Roll your head on your neck. Breathe deep. You don't need to ask if I'd hurt you. You know the answer to that or my name's not Billy Bat."

"Billy Bat," she said, her eyes closed now, her head lolling on her neck, not breathing deeply, though--panting, rather. Her skin was growing hotter than the hot water she sat in.

"Breathe from the bottom of you lungs. Think about all that is beautiful and safe and natural."

His hands had gone lower on her back, gripping, lifting, probing deeply into her until she could feel the hard, brutally blunt tips of his fingers tracing her ribs under her shoulder blade. He had gone beneath her one-piece and, God, did it feel good and right. But it also hurt.

"I don't believe I know how to think about beautiful and safe and natural and hurt at the same time."

"I'm buffing you up now. It's only a matter of time."

He did not say what was only a matter of time, and she did not ask. The rough cloths over her skin were unlike anything she had ever felt. But it was not the washcloths she was feeling now. Billy Bat had long since dropped them. What she felt on her skin that was coming alive with the surfacing of tingling blood was ridges of calluses in Billy Bat's hands. She felt his hands come over her shoulders and slide beneath the gathered top of her one-piece, palm her breasts and lift them free. She allowed her sight to sift through her lashes and saw her breasts floating there in front of her, long and round and utterly white and, she thought, beautiful. Billy Bat's naked hands were rolling and squeezing them, using long strokes to milk the blood down toward her nipples. And her nipples amazed her. She had never seen them this way before, rigid, darkly engorged with blood, and more than the sight of them was a feeling--again, one she never had before known--as though mildly charged electric wire had been connected to both nipples and ran directly to the place between her legs. All she could see was his hands on her, the one-piece shoved down to her navel, his square beautiful hands lifting and holding her beet-red flesh.

Billy Bat's head lifted, his nostrils flared and caught scent of all that his life as a bodybuilder had denied him: pastry, pork chops, fried chicken, thick flaky biscuits awash in butter. Something in him knew that he could not possibly smell what he smelled, but another, deeper part of him knew the steaming air was filled with what he longed to smell most. And he hefted the slabs of her and gazed upon what was in his hands with love and longing.

She looked down and watched his hands on her rounded, deeply naveled belly--a belly she had hated since childhood--and found herself loving her belly, her belly now was beautiful because of the gentle, crooning sounds coming from Billy Bat. Without thinking, without knowing she was going to do it, she reached back and caught Billy Bat behind the neck, and with surprising strength--or perhaps the surprising movement had simply caught him off balance, leaning as he was over the bathtub behind her--jerked him over her shoulder and into the tub with her. He went entirely under in the deep tub and came up spitting water. They watched each other, he with the startled look of an awakened sleepwalker and she with the new, deeply felt confidence his painfully gentle hands and the crooning noises out of his mouth had given her.

"A skin mechanic don't, as a regular thing, work in the tub with the client," he said.

"Client, Billy Bat? Client?" Her eyebrows were arched and she caught the wet pink tip of her tongue between her teeth. She released the caught tongue and it ran out long and narrow at such length as to startle and amaze Billy Bat. "This one-piece is binding," she said. "You can go ahead and pull it off."

"Pull it off," said Billy Bat.

"You said a skin mechanic needed skin," she said. "A Turnipseed don't do nothing half measure."

He took hold of the suit and pulled. It was tight and it was a struggle, but he got it off and tossed it over on the floor. Her belly and thighs rounding and mounding above the surface of the water there in front of him made it difficult for Billy Bat to breathe.

Earline closed her eyes and said, "You can buff me up now. Tone me and tune me as you will."

He went at her with a vengeance, probing, lifting, squeezing, palming the slabs of her heft above the water, staring at it, his face drawing closer and closer to it until he finally touched a dimpled piece of it with his tongue. What he touched with his tougue was so low on her belly that his chin was into the deep V-nest of her pubic hair.

"Oh, goddamn," she said, but the curse sounded like she was crooning to a baby. And she lifted her hips to help him and felt his hard hands slide under her and bury themselves in the young, firm amplitude of her wide cheeks. She felt one of his fingers probing and she spread herself gratefully. But to her surprise and delight, the finger sank between her cheeks and pressed gently, then firmly, against the quilted winking eye of her asshole. She thought it the most loving caress she had ever known, easy and natural and full of caring, and finally without shame or ugliness. In her wildest dreams alone in her bed, she had never imagined it could be so.

She reached down and took his head in both hands and raised it from the place it was buried to the ears where no man had ever been. When he looked up over the wide expanse of her, her magnificent breasts floating on either side of her now, his eyes were glazed and unseeing, but his expression was beatific, as though he had just been told by Jesus himself that he was going to heaven after all.

She sat up, and as she did, she pushed him upright, too, so that he ended up sitting between her straddling legs. With his unfocused eyes, but with his blood focused and pounding to the point of bursting, he watched her hook her thumbs in his silk posing briefs and draw them down. And there was the tiny knob of his cock, the only one she had ever seen except for accidental glimpses of her brother's, its sweet and beautifully pink little head bobbing in the water in front of her. She took it in her open hand and it lay there, reaching not quite across the width of her palm. The two of them, their expressions like those of children examining a toy, looked down upon it.

She started to speak, started to tell him that maybe he could teach her to be a skin mechanic, but did not, because they were both watching, transfixed by the miracle happening in her hand. So slowly as to be barely perceptible, Billy Bat's sweet, beautiful pink little knob was growing, a great blue vein rising in the top of it, growing and still growing until Earline's eyes were wide and hot with moisture that felt like tears but was not, was rather the wonder that what she always heard would happen was happening before her amazed and gladdened heart. Billy Bat, his eyes fixed on his cock like a hunter's eyes fixed on game he meant to shoot, could only think over and over, A goddamn world beater! A goddamn world beater!

She drew him to her and in a skillful, delicate little movement, a movement that, when she made it, she felt as if she had been born knowing, she flared where he could find her and he dropped into her saddle. And the moment he lay upon her, he knew that this was the finest thing he had ever done, the finest moment he had ever had.

He would never have known when he entered her if her hands had not gripped his shoulders with surprising strength and urgency and a little shy cry had not burst from her lips, lips now swollen and the color of a bruised peach.

Billy Bat hesitated, but her hands moved from his shoulders to the small of his back and pressed with the same urgency they had on his shoulders, and she whispered, "Please."

And sometime while water was lapping violently, bright shards of it flying over the tiled bathroom, Billy Bat quieted and held her and said, "We fit like two spoons, you sweet girl."

She only smiled and concentrated on the moment she had dreamed of since she was a young girl but had finally come to believe would never happen.

And then, later, as she felt the tension building in him just as it was building in her, she said, "We married now."

He did not answer, but he knew it was true, and he knew that she knew it was true. He had always been married to body-building, but when he had entered her, he had gotten a divorce. And when he stiffened, howling like a dog, with Earline's secret face buried in his shoulder and smiling, the thought occurred to him in that single moment as serious and mysterious as death that he had just given Earline a few ounces of his world-beating back. And right behind that came the thought that she could have all of his world-beating back, because she did, in fact, truly have all of him.

"Everything was heart-shaped and bright red. No woman belonged in such rooms without a man."