Title	Ride the Man Down #1 in A New World Shaman series
Author	William Maltese
ISBN#	978-1-60820-030-6 (print)
	978-1-60820-031-3 (ebook)
Release Date	July 2009
Cover Artist	Deana C. Jamroz
Paperback:	174 pages
Sexual Content:	Rated Explicit
Available At:	MlrBooks (ebook) Amazon–coming soon B&N -coming soon

The Ridgemonts are wealthy and influential New Mexico Territory landowners. Their status purportedly is purchased by seemingly inexhaustible capital provided by their reputed Deadmen Hills’ gold mine. It’s only human nature that others want to share in their bounty. That these others have to die has less to do with keeping the “mine” location a secret than with concealing other mysteries bequeathed by the long-lived and elusive native-American shaman Calenza. Secrets even the Ridgemonts can likely never fully comprehend.

************************************

Brendon and Eduardo

“Damn, but I love your funky young cowboy ass,” Brendon Ridgemont said to Eduardo Rivera.

The two teenagers were stark naked. Eduardo’s head rested on his forearms that rested atop a fence railing. Brendon squatted behind; his tongue provided another long and leisurely lap from the rear hang of Eduardo’s hairy scrotum to the small of the young Latino’s back.

Nearby, just to one side of a large boulder, two horses, reins dragging the ground, munched what none-too-succulent scrub was immediately available.

“And I love your big cowboy cock, too.” Brendon’s right hand reached around and took hold of Eduardo’s impressively stiff dick to provide a couple of quick but firm up-and-down strokes. “Or, are you tired of hearing how much your body turns me on?”

“Since I so love your studly body, it’s always nice to hear that mine is loved in return,” Eduardo said. His ass provided a small circular movement that rubbed its firm cheeks against Brendon’s face. All the while, Brendon’s tongue flicked, like a frog catching flies, and left dabs of accumulated shiny spit at the puckered entrance of Eduardo’s tight-tight little asshole.

“Actually, I love more of you than just your sexy body, though, don’t I?” Brendon said.

“Do you?”

“Love your radiant personality. Love the way you kiss. Love the way you hug. Love the way you laugh. Love the way you cry. Love the way you smile. Love the way you sigh, especially when I’m eating out your ass, good and proper, like now.” He provided a punctuating long and lengthy lick. “Love the way you grunt and groan, especially when I’ve my cock buried so deeply inside of you that my cockhead feels your heartbeat. I’m just full of love and lust and hot spunk every damned time I’m anywhere near you.”

“The same back to you, buddy,” Eduardo responded in kind. His ass provided another rotation. In pendulum motion, his scrotum slapped the inside of one thigh and then the other. His nuts were so large, and swung with such momentum, that whacking sounds were audible.

“I do so love to fuck your ass,” Brendon said and came to his feet. A step forward placed his stick of a dick vertically within the bun-like embrace of Latino asscheeks. “Love it so much that I can’t keep my cock from it much longer. Not here; not now. Like, if I don’t fuck it soon, I’ll go stark raving mad. My father or Galin will have to take me out and shoot me, because I’ll be no good to anyone, or for anything, having all of this love and lust and hot spunk cooped up inside of me with no place to go. We wouldn’t want that to happen, now, would we, cowboy?”

“Batty Brendon we’d have to call you, before pulling the trigger to put you out of your misery, now, wouldn’t we?” Eduardo asked. His ass thrust back and hard-pinned the back of Brendon’s big stiff dick between Latino buttocks and gringo hard belly. An oozing of clear sticky pre-cum beaded Brendon’s cockmouth, ruptured, and drooled. “Stories to be told of poor Brendon Ridgemont, one day gone loco because one hot Friday afternoon, his cock never made it up his lover’s tight-tight asshole?”

“Everyone knows that you make me crazy,” Brendon said. “Crazy for you. Crazy for your asshole. Crazy for your dick. Crazy for your sweet kisses. Hell, even our daddies know, don’t they? My daddy once just as smitten by yours who was just as good looking, just as desirable, and just as good a fuck in his day, as you are in yours.”

“Try if you can, once again, to picture those two fucking up a storm,” Eduardo said. He shook his head in his own disbelief and ground his ass tighter against Brendon’s belly.

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. It hasn’t been all that long since I ate lunch.”

“Think we’ll really have children one day wondering how you and I ever managed to get it on, and kept it on, for hours on end?”

“Sure we will, even if neither of us remain as keen as our fathers for our dicks to slot pussy long enough to do some baby-making. All this need-heirs mantra continues to be the burrs beneath our daddies’ saddles, not ours, right? Still, we’ll give them what they want and, after that … hey … you and I know theywon’t give flying fucks whether or not we put our hard dicks in our wives ever again.”

“I heard a helluva lot less about empire-building when dad was gambling so much. Hell, everyone — as you well know — thought for sure he was going to lose the ranch in a poker game. At the time, I actually sometimes hoped that he would lose it, too, so I’d never have to worry about getting married and plugging some cunt for a baby.”

Brendon provided Eduardo’s erection with several additional sensuous pumps to stop his best friend and cowboy lover from talking nonsense. “There’s been a Rivera Ranchero, headed by a Rivera honcho, for longer than there’s been a Ridgemont spread,” he reminded.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Eduardo said. “No matter how good anything ever is, even a good fuck, it’s eventually over and done — no matter how long anyone or everyone might want to prolong it.”

“You better let me screw some sense into you, cowboy,” Brendon said. “Your daddy hears that kind of talk coming out of your sweet cock-sucking mouth, and there’s going to be shit hitting the fence post — if not his fist hitting your face.”

“Feel free to try your best to fuck me into thinking otherwise,” Eduardo said. “I’d be deeply grateful if, in fact, you can manage to do just that. Life would be so much easier, or at least seem so, at least for me, if I could better accept that one day, probably sooner than later, my presently perfect sex life with you is going to be tainted by something other than just your cock up my ass, my cock up your ass, and all the variations we manage so well in between.”

“All you’ll have to do is shut your eyes while screwing pussy and imagine you’re deep-sixing my asshole with that big dick of yours,” Brendon said. “Visions of me riding you to another climax will certainly be what get me off inside any bride of mine enough times to get her pregnant. If we’re lucky, we can do all that necessary seeding in the first few tries. After that, it’ll be just you and me back to fucking and sucking up a storm with each other.”

“You really think so?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Maybe you would, if you actually thought that was how it’s going to work out, even if it isn’t.”

“That’s how it’s going to be, cowboy, so quit worrying about it. Once our wives are knocked up, courtesy of some minimal fucking by us, they’ll have so much to do they won’t even want us pestering them in bed, or out. Until then, let’s stop worrying about what’s coming tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, and get down to what’s coming, very soon, this very day; namely, the shooting of our hot and creamy cum from our hard, fucking dicks.”

“Just, maybe, I can manage that,” Eduardo said. His lower body swung slightly forward to let Brendon’s dickhead drop along Latino asscrack from top almost to butt pucker. Despite the weight of Brendon’s heavy dick, it was too stiff to manage the extra inch of fall necessary to align its bulbous head on the target area. Brendon’s left hand provided the extra bit of necessary downward pressure. His pre-cum wet cockcorona nudged Eduardo’s asspucker. The tan anal rosebud was tacky from spit Brendon’s flicking and licking tongue had put there.

“Knock, knock,” Brendon said. His hips pushed forward. His handhold on Eduardo’s thick cockneck slid loose skin over hard inner core as far as the Latino’s big balls and pressed farther to bring Eduardo’s lower body more fully back, up and over, Brendon’s entering erection.

“Santa Maria!” Eduardo responded. His ass didn’t stop its slide, though, but rolled slightly to twist entering cock inches in a corkscrew motion against the fucked teen’s sensitive walnut-size prostate. “Oh, gringo stud, drive that dick of yours home!”

Brendon did exactly as instructed. Not that he needed instruction, or any other kind of incentive to do the deed. There was very little on God’s green earth that could prevent him from burying his cock to his balls once his dick began its long and steady slide into that well-recognized lusciously tight and sensuously cramped asshole.

“Oh, that feels so good,” Brendon admitted. He was always surprised, considering how many times he had fucked this butt, just how good it was every next time he fucked it.

“I can tell you one thing,” Eduardo said and turned his face into his forearm to bite down, hard, as Brendon’s last inches of bulky prick completed their journey, “you’re never going to find any cunt that’ll make you feel as good as my asshole can, does, and always will.”

“Don’t I know it, cowboy,” Brendon said. His cock now shoved in to his balls, his belly ground to put his dick even deeper. Eduardo’s asscheeks, hard as they were, still flattened slightly beneath the pressure of Brendon’s belly.

Brendon’s body spooned Eduardo’s from behind. Brendon’s lap couched Latino ass like peel hugged the sensuous curve of a peach. Brendon’s belly and chest molded Eduardo’s back. His taut nipples pressed little indents into Eduardo’s wondrously tan and naturally dark-complexioned skin.

Brendon’s head came up and over Eduardo’s left shoulder. Lips moved in close to Eduardo’s ear. Brendon’s breathing was hard and deep and fast — getting harder, deeper, and faster.

“You’re damned right, cowboy,” Brendon said. “No other asshole but yours — forget cunt — can ever give me the kind of pleasure I’m feeling now, this fuck’s hardly begun.” He was one with his lover. He was complete where he never felt anywhere near this way whenever his penile sword was slotted elsewhere than within this specific anal scabbard.

Eduardo jiggled his ass to accommodate more readily Brendon’s submerged manhood.

Brendon drew his prick out a few inches and then reinserted it. With commenced swift in-and-out thrusts, his cock began giving Latino asshole a really good workout. His young balls slapped as audibly against his lover’s hard ass as Latino nuts still noisily slapped Eduardo’s inner thighs.

Brendon’s awareness increased as his thick inches pumped in and out, in and out, between Eduardo’s parenthesizing buttocks, of how intense the resulting vibrations of anal muscles were around and against whatever inches of Brendon’s thick dick that were inserted at any one time.

Brendon’s muscled belly sweated against Eduardo’s ass. His pectorals against Eduardo’s back. His cheek, chin, and forehead sweated against Eduardo’s neck and shoulder.

Brendon concentrated on providing Eduardo’s butthole with every last fraction of fucking cock on each in-slide, with removing his prick all of the way to its flare on each follow-up withdrawal.

“Oh, buddy, you fuck me so damned good,” Eduardo muttered. “Oh, Jesus, but you make it so sweet.”

Hard-gripped by Brendon’s pumping right fist, Eduardo’s dick leaked juice. Each time Brendon’s prick rammed Eduardo’s prostate, the Latino teenager’s dick expelled another gush of pre-cum to slick his cockshaft all the more and make Brendon’s pumping wet fingers all the wetter.

As their sweat-soaked bodies continued to touch and separate, cock sliding in and sliding out, there were accompanying muted smacking sounds. There were other noises, too, from both participants: groans of passion, and sighs of ecstasy.

As Eduardo’s dick leaked into and over Brendon’s masturbating hand, Brendon’s cock basted Eduardo’s anal cavity with natural lubricant that made the slip and slide of butt-fucking erection easier, faster, and smoother.

Suddenly removed, though, from the combined cacophony were those once contributed by four swinging nuts in two flaccid scrota. Ball sacs were no longer loose and limp, like gunnysacks dangling rocky contents. They were compacted and hefted like hay bales lifted high by ropes and pulleys into high barn lofts.

Eduardo indecipherably mumbled into his spit-soaked right forearm. His hands took firmer grips of the railing. Between his belly and the fence, his cock increased its momentum in fucking Brendon’s fist and expanded larger with each ensuing moment his climax approached closer and closer. The taut centers of his nipples were well-defined mountains arisen from their surrounding aureoles and from supporting lower-lying well-delineated pectorals.

Brendon really got into the fuck. Each pull of his dick out to its cockhead saw his knees bend. Each push of his dick in to his balls saw his legs straightened to push his prick inside and made a harder and louder contact of Brendon’s belly with Eduardo’s thoroughly stuffed ass.

The Latino teenager’s asspucker caved inward each time Brendon’s cock pressed home through it; it moued each time the cock slid free from it.

Both young men shared a shrinking world of increasing sensuousness that more and more separated them from everything and anything else. Their bodies performed a well-coordinated dance to the rhythmic cadence of flesh against flesh, heavy breathing, gasps for air, grunts of pleasure, fence posts and railing squeaking in protest as more and more force and weight were thrust upon and against them

How marvelous for Brendon and Eduardo each to feel literally a part of the other!

More sweat beaded foreheads, dribbled in little rivers down the sides of noses. Some of it burned eyes. Black hair went damper with it and stuck in even more wet ringlets to cheeks and foreheads.

Hard cock continued in and out … in and out … in and out … of tight asshole. Hard cock continued in and out … in and out … in and out … of tightly gripping fist.

Climax for both young men wasn’t far away. Brendon and Eduardo were nothing more or less than bundles of taut sinews, tense muscles, and raw-edged nerves. They were charged with electrical energy soon destined for overload and, if they were lucky, wondrously simultaneous eruptions.

“I can’t hold off much longer,” Brendon said in a low grunt-accompanied whisper. He further punctuated his sentence by biting Eduardo’s ear.

Eduardo stopped even trying to hold off ejaculation. “I’m coming! Oh, sweet Jesus, I am!”

Brendon’s hips slammed forward, hard and fast, to a dead-stop against Eduardo’s solid buttocks.

Although suddenly deprived of the friction from movement within the asshole, Brendon’s prick didn’t need any additional stimulus to achieve ejaculation. “Take it! Take it … cowboy … take it … take it … take it … all!”

Spunk coated the inside of Eduardo’s asshole while pearly streamers of similar virile-young-man cream went airborne between the naked Latino and the fence.

Neither Brendon nor Eduardo was recovered from his shared cataclysmic sexual event when Cal Braddey said, “What part of wait-for-Cal don’t the two of you ever seem to understand?”

Title	Conspiracy of Ravens
Author	William Maltese
ISBN#	978-1-60820-061-0 (ebook)
Release Date	June 2009
Cover Artist	Deana C. Jamroz
Paperback:	174 pages
Sexual Content:	Rated Explicit
Available At:	MlrBooks (ebook)

Inside the grounds of the infamous Tower of London. Patrick whose Irish lover, Ian, was killed by an English homicidal butcher behind the wheel of a speeding car. Tad whose American parents have sent their erring son to live with Brit relatives, one of whom is a Tower yeoman. Six Tower Ravens, the subjects of legend that predicts-they gone, the British Empire soon to follow. A man and five Tower Ravens murdered. One man determined to see the sixth bird dead, no matter the consequences.

*****************************

Title	SS Mann Hunt
Author	William Maltese
ISBN#	978-1-60820-060-3 (ebook)
Release Date	June 2009
Cover Artist	Deana C. Jamroz
Paperback:	174 pages
Available At:	MlrBooks (ebook)

FATHER. FIEND? SCIENTIST. BUTCHER? PATRIOT. NAZI?

Sebastian S. Mann, prominent member of post-WWII U.S. rocket development, has gone missing with other expedition members supposedly caving in South America. Having done so just days before revelations that he may have been responsible for the deaths of over two-hundred thousand gays, Jews, gypsies, and Romanian freedom fighters.

Years later, the male heirs of three missing members of Mann’s lost expedition meet up in deep Brazilian jungle to explore evidence finally turned up of their fathers’ possibly last campsite.

Brad Lexly and Kurt Mann, childhood friends and lovers, rekindle their previous passionate relationship but know its success, beyond the isolating jungle environment, depends upon an acceptable explanation for Sebastian Mann’s disappearance. More dangerous people than they, though, seek answers, too, and also provide definite possibilities for this expedition ending up just as missing as the one gone before it.

********************************

Chapter One

Concern dilates my blue eyes as I glimpse snag-like treetops perilously close. Absentmindedly, I run my fingers through the unruly strands of my short-cropped, sweat-saturated blond hair. I swallow hard, and my mind flashes visions of horrendous disaster; no matter Jim Kenner has already proven his worth at the controls of this small single-engine plane. My stomach churns, giving rise to the nausea I’ve barely controlled throughout most of this wild roller-coaster-like ride through the turbulence percolating upward from the horizon-to-horizon South American jungle, and from the up-thrusts of ragged stone amongst all the greenery below us.

“Jim’s landings here are always a bit hairy,” Kurt Mann confesses, nervously chewing his lower lip. His violet eyes, purple against the mahogany tan of his face, are dark with concern, and the deep dimple in his right cheek isn’t punched there by amusement. Anxiously, he runs his large and well-formed fingers through his thatch-short curly black hair and, in doing so, contributes to the tousle of interlocking strands.

Within the suffocating cramped and super-heated confinement of the small plane, I can still see much of the boy I remember within the man Kurt has become.

“There!” Kurt points through the bug-splattered windscreen. The clearing, thus identified amidst all those crags and flora, isn’t reassuring. It looks too small for its intended purpose. If I were in a helicopter, or in any other aircraft capable of a vertical descent, I just might, give odds for a successful set down. Unfortunately, I spot Kurt’s white knuckles instead.

“Jim hasn’t skewered me on these treetops, or creamed me on these cliffs, yet,” Kurt encourages, and he releases his death grip on his seat long enough to give me a playful punch to one biceps.

His brief and boyish body contact is spontaneous consolation from one nervous flier to someone … moi … who gives all outward appearance of being yet another. It is as spontaneous as our sex in Septiaola last night.

My mother would all-around disapprove, and not because I’m anywhere close to being a mama’s boy. The specter of my mother’s disapproval, all the while with me, was given birth the moment I even half-jokingly considered joining this expedition. Mom has already lost a husband, not only to this same jungle but to the father of this very same Kurt Mann, and she insists she won’t survive losing me, her only son, in a similar manner.

Nevertheless, here I am, driven by my own demons and, as my mother sees it, consorting with the enemy. Though, until I better dissect the ramifications of Kurt and his boner even momentary back in my life (and vice versa), it’s imperative I don’t take too seriously any physicality between us.

The plane banks sharply, and the continuing precariousness of the landing-in-progress makes me wonder, and not for the first time, if my mother isn’t right. Have Jim, Kurt and I deluded ourselves into believing we’re going to make any kind of difference here, so many years after the disastrous fact?

Jim’s blond, tanned, green-eyed, and coolly confident demeanor at the controls should reassure me of, at least, a safe touchdown; the plane’s by-now familiarly erratic engine noises should do the same. However, like a drowning man, I occupy myself with segments from my past: my childhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Sebastian, Elsa, and Kurt Mann next door; Sebastian, Kurt, my father and I, in the caves of Mesa Juanita; my father mailing postcards from cave explorations in France, Colorado, New Guinea, Tahiti, and finally, lastly, tragically, Brazil. Flashes of my more immediate past include last night’s sex with Kurt in Septiaola.

Obviously, Kurt and I figured, from the get-go, to renew our sexual relationship. Why else bring a gross of condoms, each, into Septiaola, prepared to lug them every step of the way? Certainly, I never seriously contemplated fucking some local Indian, although that was always a viable alternative.

It was the “when” of Kurt and my sex that kept me guessing. So much mental baggage loaded on board our lives, since our last romps in the hay, I envisioned painful detours wherein we tried to talk “this” thorough, or “that” over, before we actually felt comfortable enough at least to … if not get back to where we’d left off … indulge some hot and heavy breathing and exchange of body fluids in prelude to reality rearing its ugly head. The odds very much against our having any kind of happy-ever-after ending.

Little did I imagine, though, that we, in that deteriorating hotel in Septiaola, would so simply and naturally, no-fuss quickly, jump-start our relationship. Bypassing all possibility of our getting bogged down in psycho-babble by shuffling such “stuff” to one side as if it didn’t exist, or if it did exist as if neither of us had a clue.

We dropped Jim off at his room and shut him safely away inside. We identified Kurt’s assigned door as the next nearest, opened it, entered through it. Not even waiting for an invite, I slammed the door shut behind us. We proceeded blindly, with animal-in-rut haste, insensitivity and fury, to tear off each other’s clothes and plunge into each other’s sensuous nakedness with no other purpose than fucking and sucking our brains out for as long and as often as we could before morning.

Conversation focused entirely on the sexual or sensual: “God, you’re handsome!” … “God, your cock is bigger than I remember!” … “Let me wrap my mouth around that sausage!” … “Get down on your hands and knees and let me see that puckered asshole!” … “Jesus, what a studly butt!” … “Oh, hot damn, your asshole is tight. But then, I remember it always was just this tight, just this snug, just this fucking lovely … lovely … lovely!”

He came at me, missionary fashion, after I’d fucked him dog-style and blasted enough of my cummy deluge to scare Noah into building another Ark.

My legs lifted and parted. They parenthesized his torso, from his handsome face to his monstrously thick dick, including his well-delineated chest and stomach muscles, his body hair on chest, belly, and around his knotted navel. His balls, fuzzy-scrotum contained, impressively hung the base of his stiff dick.

The back of my knees locked his shoulders. His weight accordianed my legs, and he came down so close that I could lick his lips and did. His mouth was salty, more so as he touched it firmly to mine, opened, put his tongue to my tongue, put his cockhead to my small-puckered anus.

We weren’t into slow and easy fucks. He speared my asshole no more nor less forcefully than I’d poked his when I’d driven my nine-plus inches up his rectum with a force that sent him to his forearms on the dirty rug.

His dick in me, from its head to its base, the forceful shove rammed his hard belly into my uplifted butt, and my back slid the floor.

I groaned long and loud into his mouth. He took full advantage to probe his tongue even deeper. It was easy to imagine the flick of his tongue making contact with the head of his cock, the latter powerfully fed through my deep-fucked body to meet it.

His chest hair tickled my chest. His belly hair tickled my belly. His cock tickled my prostate.

My penis, never soft since the beginning, went even harder. I reached for it, fisted it, let it fuck my hand. I enjoyed the steeliness of it, the steeliness of Kurt’s erection as it proceeded into its rhythmic out and in … out and in … each bumping into, over, and against, to milk my sensitive prostate of viscous goo that all too quickly oozed the pouted mouth of my hand-pumped prick. My fingers grew sticky with my preseminal lubricant. The friction of my beating hand whipped my leakage into a frothy egg-white consistency that frosted the whole of my dick. I burned, inside and out. My body sweated an attractive gloss, all velvety.

A rill of perspiration ran the length of Kurt’s pleasure-striated neck. Beads of wet clung to and among the whorls of hair matting his chest and belly. There were loud sounds each time his sopped stomach whacked my cock-accepting ass.

“Fucking … sexy … stud!” he said, his breath hot, wet, sweet, upon my face.

“Fuck me harder, bastard!” I commanded. “Fuck me deeper!” As if it were humanly possible for him to fuck any harder or deeper or faster, or …

The momentum of the screw continued to move us along the floor. We left a seeming slug trail along the cheap carpet.

“I’m going to hump you until you squeal!” he said, his dick once again rammed inside me to his compacting balls. A torque of his hips, and his pestle-in-mortar boner pirouetted against my prostate.

I squealed. Long and hard. I begged for more of the same.

He gave me more of the same. He gave me variations thereof. He gave me more than I could have dreamed possible, proof-positive that he, like I, had come a long way, by way of accumulating sexual expertise, since our first naïve fumblings so many years before.

“I come!” he said and slotted his thick prick one final time deep … deep … deep.

His eyes went wide and then squeezed to little slits. Every last muscle within his exquisitely sculptured body went taut. His cock pulsed a staccato drumbeat against the Saran-wrapping walls of my anus.

His spunk let go, even as my sperm squirted my latest mess onto my belly, onto my chest, onto my neck, onto my face.

The lowering of wing flaps sends vibrations through the plane and through us, and I’m jarred back to the here and now. I prefer the escape of reverie. Our steep descent is into dangerous trees whose serrated edges extend in open invitation to impaling. Jagged, knifelike hunks of rock accompany with similar invitations, and I taste the danger.

“I loathe airplanes, especially small ones, particularly this one,” Kurt says.

I’m reading his lips: the squealing, squeaking competition from straining metal makes normal conversation impossible. I do find his confession charming, if not at all calming.

A battering-ram branch comes so close to one window that I jerk back in fear of it coming through. I will myself to become part of the cracked and weathered cushions of my seat. I’m further jolted by landing gear that touches and then trips over rough ground. I manage a silent prayer and complete it as a wall of rock and shrubbery rears directly in front of us. At the moment before impact, the plane tilts nose-downward and converts the last of its momentum into a surprisingly graceful half-pirouette. I’m left breathless and with a dull headache

“Well, if we’ve the Jell-O out of our legs, shall we disembark?” Jim cheerfully suggests after the plane becomes silent. He’s in an obviously good mood, the least affected of us. He isn’t transplanted from Phoenix, where I now live, or from Portland, like Kurt; instead, he was born and raised here in Brazil, and he’s acclimatized.

If I expect a reprieve from the heat and the humidity I endure in the aircraft, I’m disappointed upon stepping outside. Mugginess greets me with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The impact takes away what little breath I have left. At the same time, I smell a musty, rancid earthiness that’s more reminiscent of dying vegetation than freshly plowed fields. The complete trapping of sunlight by bordering strands of towering trees and by rocky crags only magnifies the overall sepulchral effect.

My first impression is one of something out there: a thousand-beady-eyed enemy whose attention is focused entirely on me. At the same time, the already narrow perimeter of the clearing seems to close in: warrior plants on the march to refill the momentary gap in their ranks as quickly as air jealously rushes to fill a vacuum, or as totally as darkness greedily swallows any hint of light after a Kansas sunset.

I literally shiver, despite the surrounding, engulfing heat.

“What?” Kurt asks intuitively from close behind; I suspect his empathy is a holdover from our shared youth.

“Remember when I got stuck in that crawlway in the Mesa Juanita caves?” I reference something we long ago shared.

“Of course,” Kurt mildly chides. “Possible flash floods from unexpected squalls in the desert; rangers bellowing for us to get the hell out or chance drowning like proverbial rats.”

“I was scared shitless,” I remind.

“We all were,” Kurt is unwilling to grant me a monopoly on the emotion.

“Cold, pain, wet, fear,” I reiterate. “Mainly the fear. A mile below ground, a girdle of solid stone anchoring me to the spot, and I never once imagined the walls and ceilings were closing in. All the caves I’ve been in since, all the tight spaces I’ve maneuvered, and I’ve never known an abnormal dread of confinement … until now.”

This bracketing of shadow-filled trees jails me. So what did I expect? A picnic? My mother warned me, not only of Kurt but also of the Amazon. In Mom’s opinion, neither is a fit companion for man or beast.

“The claustrophobia will pass,” Kurt promises and smiles encouragement and sympathy. It’s a pleasant smile that further deepens the attractive dimple always evident in his right cheek, and it crinkles the laugh lines at the corners of his clear violet eyes. “You want to know my first impression of this place?” His smile converts to a self-mocking one. “Some thing, or somebody, out there watching me.”

The invisible hair along my arms begins to stand on end. I want to ask Kurt if his initial paranoia has passed, tell him my first impression is exactly the same, but we’re interrupted.

“Ah, here they come!” Jim says. He has just secured the plane with block and tackle. He points toward two young Indians, each in Khaki shorts and shirt, who materialize from the underbrush and head in our direction.

The encampment is off the runway, reached by a short path through towering trees whose continuing undefined menace enhances my sense of ill-being.

The main tent is straight out of The Arabian Nights. It’s a white conglomeration of canvas with three graceful arches that branch off from a large central dome. “Man by the name of James Rommel designs and manufactures these in Israel,” Jim says. “They look great, are easily set up, and are functional to boot.”

The interior is spacious, the atrium a communal area, while the three smaller offshoots act as sleeping quarters. “Unfortunately,” Jim reminds, during our short tour, “we’ve only a short time to enjoy these amenities before Captain Fortuna-Mata checks in with our final go-ahead from the Brazilian government. After that, it’s the great outdoors and hammocks hung from trees. You are still up to it, Brad?” Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like a dig. What it does sound like is an honest query from a man who figures I, city boy that I am, know my own capabilities; Jim willing to take my word for it.

“Ask me again later,” I parry tiredly. After what I’ve gone through to get this far, I just want to enjoy the luxurious accommodations that, at least for the moment, shield me from jungle heat, jungle oppressiveness, and jungle eyes.

“A drink?” Jim suggests. “After which I’ll lead the stampede to our bathing facilities.”

Kurt collapses in one camp chair, I in another.

“Unfortunately, it’s a very limited bar,” Jim apologizes. “Gin and tonic; gin or tonic.”

I find it inexplicably difficult to focus for long on what Jim says or does with Kurt around. Growing up, Kurt had been important in my life, and Jim is a new acquaintance. Now Kurt and I are going through the uncertainties of resuming a one-time relationship that went beyond friendship. Not that Jim hasn’t always been part of the total picture that brings us all together in the Amazon for this hook-up. Jim’s father, Daniel Kenner, was the initial impetus behind the first ill-fated Kenner-Mann-Lexly expedition, and Jim is the one to suggest this one of the heirs apparent. As the sons of the three missing men, we’re undeniably interested in fitting together the pieces, old and new, that accompany the mysterious disappearances of our fathers. Almost everyone else has lost interest or is dead, except for the reporters who wrote the brief flurry of news articles to accompany the recent discovery of the ill-fated first expedition’s assumed-final campsite, all of these years later.

My mother has little, good or bad, to say about Jim Kenner or about Jim’s father. That’s because my mother knows neither. Daniel Kenner left Brazil only infrequently. Although, he had been on hand for the opening of the Nitches Cave Complex in southeastern France, and he’d met and befriended Sebastian Mann while conducting an exploratory survey of the deTwip Cave Complex in New Zealand. That was all before the Manns met us Lexlys by becoming our neighbors in Santa Fe; before Sebastian Mann converted my father and me to cave exploration, or, as those in the know call it, “to spelunking”.

Although Jim is Daniel Kenner’s son, I would have guessed him of Teutonic heritage, Kurt of Brazilian, not the vice-versa reality. Jim’s blond hair is only a few shades darker than mine. Its deep leftward-sweeping bangs keep it perpetually hanging boyishly over his green eyes. Jim’s tan is the kind most blonds, in general, and I, in particular, would die for. There isn’t a peeling strip of dead skin, a burn spot, or even a splotch of unsightly heat rash; I, if I follow true to form, will progress from lobster pinks to variegated reds, culminating in an unflattering peel. Jim’s hands are as callused as expected on someone who spends long hours examining his extensive coffee and cacao holdings. Kurt chairs several space-technology conglomerates, and his hands are just beginning to heal and harden as a result of his recent time spent in helping to clear the jungle airstrip. I became acutely aware of Kurt’s new calluses during our previous night of hot and heavy sex.

My attention, back on Kurt, is met by Kurt’s smile in response. “Excuse my staring,” I apologize. “I’m afraid I’m daydreaming.”

“I was wondering if I’d sprouted a horrendous wart on the end of my nose,” Kurt says with a good-natured grin. While I find him amusing, charming, and thoroughly attractive, I have to be extremely careful of my emotions for all the reasons my mother would all too willingly list for me.

“Whatever ails any of us can be cured by a nice, leisurely skinny-dip,” Jim diagnoses after he’s drained the last of his drink.

I locate a fresh change of clothing in my pack that has been brought from the plane by one of the two young Indians who’d been there to greet us. Jim is ready with towels.

The stream isn’t all that far from camp, although I’d never have guessed, what with its extreme screening by thick greenery. Once reached, the running water holds out enticing invitation for welcome relief from the sticky heat by offering several deep pools, one at the base of each in a series of separate cascades.

“Piranha?” I ask, although already answered by the swiftness with which Jim strips to his tanned, muscled skin and to his large uncircumcised cock.

“Too many high leaps required from downstream for them to get this far,” Jim says and pauses long enough to use both palms to squeegee rills of sweat from his impressive torso. His pectorals are square, pretty much hairless, and mirror one another across his ravine-like cleavage. His belly is a stereotypical washboarding. “Thank God, they’re not salmon.”

Despite Jim’s admittedly Greco-Roman perfection, I can handle that, just as I’ve handled, on more than one occasion, showering with well-muscled jocks in any number of shower-room situations, never having been embarrassed by sprouting even the semblance of an I-like-men boner. There is, however, something about Kurt’s turn-on strip, revealing his chest and belly fanned with attractive whorls of blue-black hair, that makes my cock swell, even before he drops his underpants to reveal his cock still far bigger than I remember from my teenager days of experimentation with it.

“Going down!” Jim informs. It sounds disturbingly sexual to my ears, but it only notifies he positions himself on the first available stone slide that provides swiftest access to the pool a few feet below.

No denying I’m relieved when Kurt quickly follows Jim, thereby leaving me momentarily to gather my senses and try to get my threatening-to-run-rampant libido under better control. Even though, some things Jim has said throughout the course of the day leads me to suspect he not only knows of Kurt and my attraction for one another but also knows we’ve already acted upon it.

“Shy Brad, are you going to join us?” Kurt calls, after a minute. His voice, above the sounds of cascading water, gives my cock additional incentive to bulk up even more. If I wait for my dick to go completely soft, I’ll never join them.

“Coming down!” I announce, brought up short by sudden movement among a bit of greenery near the summit of the high elevation that rises on the far side of the stream.

My blue eyes dilate to discern the blacker black within black that better defines the contents of one particular shadow. Is it merely the way one tall bush combines with those of others to provide the semblance of a man?

My reflexes swirl me into a quick about-face, the result of sudden suspicions I’ve been set up for a surprise attack from the rear.

There’s no denying the man who stands there, even if his short black hair and flawless olive-skin complexion make him look more boy than man.

“I startled you,” he understates in beautifully articulated English.

“Yes.” With a hurried glance over my shoulder, I check the cliff top and sense that whomever was there – if anyone … is there no longer. I turn back to the possibly closer threat who says:

“I’m expected, no?” His slight build and short stature add to the illusion of youth.

How can he figure himself expected out here in the middle of nowhere?

“Captain Garcia Fortuna-Mata,” he introduces. Has he actually clicked his heels? Yes. Heels on the pair of scuffed English riding boots that are but part of a uniform that comes complete with the gold captain collar insignias that add credence to his being who he says.

“Yes,” I say, my mind blessedly coming out of its mad tumble. “You’re the local government representative.” My identification of him is verified by my vague recollection that Jim mentioned just such a captain being due.

“Exactly,” he confirms. He reaches for my towel and extends it in my direction.

I take what he offers and use it to hide my not-quite erection (closing the barn door after the horse is gone). I shake the captain’s hand with my free hand.

“I’m Brad Lexly,” I say, hopeful that, what with the ongoing distractions, the still swollen state of my dick doesn’t make the captain disconcerted.

“I know you’re Brad Lexly,” the captain says. Of course he knows. It’s his business to know. Then again, not even he’s privy to everything, because he asks: “Is there something the matter, Brad Lexly? Aside from the fact that you shouldn’t be overly embarrassed by the state of your cock; this jungle heat keeps my prick in constant erection.”

What do I say to that? I quickly run through my possibilities. As a city boy plopped down, quite literally, in the middle of a jungle, I have no real basis of comparison by which to tell whether or not anything I experience … including my swollen cock … is more than a result of alien territory.

My gut-instincts tells me I’d detected someone in the shadow, across the stream, as real as Captain Fortuna-Mata on this side.

“Yes, I’m afraid there might be something,” I reluctantly admit. The captain, like Kurt, has a dimple even when he doesn’t smile. “Something quite aside from the partial erection of my dick.”

This second title in a new gay mystery series is a fast-paced tale that melds mystery and erotica. When a lingerie manufacturer goes to Thailand on business, he gets far more than he bargained for. While innocently shopping for silk and taking in the sights of Bangkok, Stud Draqual finds himself being stalked by a mercenary — one who’s been implicated in the murder of a male prostitute.

*******************************

Prologue

Whoever slit Rhee Dulouk’s throat should never have let the victim, second mouth still bubbling blood, reach Jeff Billing. Billing would have been gone in another day … or two … or three. As he’d left the Philippines, Borneo, Bali. As he’d left Australia, Cambodia, Burma. As he’d left Spain, France, Germany.

For Billing, Thailand was just another stopover on the way to … he never knew to where … just somewhere.

Rhee Dulouk wasn’t even a great lay. He wasn’t even Billing’s type. He was just another wham-bam-thank-you-man someone. One of many. A diversion. An exotic. Another notch on Billing’s belt. One more fuck in Billing’s ongoing fuck of the world. A keeper, beyond the first fuck, only because of pillow-talk that interested Billing who knew a little something about Far-East antiquities. But not likely to keep Billing’s interest for long.

Therefore, Rhee Dulouk dead on someone else’s doorstep would have been one thing. After all, there had been plenty of other bodies in Billing’s life … in the deserts of the Gulf, in the mountains of Iraq, in the back alleys of Afghanistan. Bodies left behind. Throwaways. Job-product.

Rhee Dulouk dead on Billing’s doorstep, though … somehow … made the death personal. Not only to Billing but to me.

Though I sure as hell didn’t know it at the time.

Chapter One

I’m used to being followed. That’s been especially true since the New York City Slip to Die for murders. Then I was stalked by policemen, SEC agents, reporters, photographers, curiosity seekers, celebrity groupies, and the various human flotsam and jetsam found within the aftermath of any well-publicized crime.

Even before the Slip to Die for murders, though, I was often encircled by persons fascinated by a man prominent in ladies’ lingerie. That category separate from the stalkers not only fascinated by my reported sexual ambiguity but anxious to put better definition to it.

As a man who has had more than my share of being cruised by attractive gay guys (by some definitely ugly ones, too), I figured I had Jeff Billing pegged from first sighting. It only took a couple discreet inquiries to put his name to his admittedly handsome face and to his exquisitely hard body. Not to mention achieve confirmation of his sexual preference. Last, but not least, to receive word of his involvement in the recent death of Rhee Dulouk, young male Thai prostitute. He’d found the body bleeding out on his Bangkok doorway.

Therefore, I was confused at having so obviously misread all the assumed clues when I heard him shout at Roxanne Whyte, only minutes after I’d left her: “Whatever the skeletons you have buried, you can bet your sweet ass I’m going to get at them after what you’ve done!”

I’d spent years bitching and moaning as to how I was cruised by every queer that ever there was, only to feel … feel what? … because it turned out Billing had followed me only to get access to a woman. Whatever I felt, I was convinced it had more to do with my having been duped into playing Judas Goat, and leading him to Roxanne, than it had to do with me bypassed as a sex object. If it were ever assumed I’d aided and abetted him in any confrontation with Roxanne, I risked all kinds of complications in my life, personal and business.

Roxanne, who had made it as far as her limousine at the curb, was assisted by her well-muscled Swiss chauffeur, Nikolas, who ran excellent interference and soon had her locked on the inside.

At least Billing had done me the courtesy of confronting Roxanne after I’d left the immediate area. Thereby – hopefully – he’d left her entirely ignorant as to whom he’d followed to his prey.

Having already decided to make my way back to my hotel by foot, but interrupted by the outburst on the sidewalk behind me, I quickly made a further attempt to meld into the crowd. I needed only a few steps to become completely engulfed within a concealing maze of goods and services, plus the people who bought and sold them.

I sidestepped piles of exotic durians, jackfruits, and other succulent edibles. I threaded my way through a labyrinth of beggars, shopkeepers, raggedy children, and well-dressed Thais. I hoped I blended in but, as an obvious American, I knew I didn’t.

I was genuinely startled when brought to an abrupt halt by a hand exerting pressure to my left arm from behind.

“Hold up, handsome. It’s time I gave you my official hello.”

I was less than pleased to find it was Billing, and my expression must have relayed that. He immediately removed his grip, if not the sensation it created.

Buffeted by the continuing swift flow of pedestrian traffic was as good a place as any to set Billing straight (if setting any gay “straight” were really possible). As an aesthetic who appreciated good looks and a good body, whether male or female, I refused to be won over by Billing’s rugged attractiveness, even if it was enhanced by the faint pursing of his lips. A certain disconcerting something in his brown eyes reminded me of a once-favored polo pony who seemed uncertain as to why I’d whacked a riding crop to its sweaty flank.

“Deny you’ve been following me to get to Roxanne Whyte, Mr. Billing!”

“Ah, you already know me! Then, why not call me Jeff?” He blinked mink-colored eyelashes so thick and so long that more than one of my female models would have died for them. Hell, I wouldn’t have turned them down myself. “I’ll call you Stud, right?”

“You’ll call me Stud, wrong! Even Mr. Draqual borders on too informal.”

I recommenced walking.

Despite my none-too-subtle hint, he joined me in my zigzag within the unending mixture of people and goods-for-sale. I flashed him a sideways glance and compared his obviously well-conditioned handsomeness with New York Inspector O’Reilly’s gone-too-pot look. The Inspector is someone I got to know because of the Slip to Die for murders.

Why, these days, did I compare every man to O’Reilly?

John O’Reilly, in his early forties, is a man obviously ravaged by police work. His square jaw, cleft chin, and vertically carved left cheek, come together in a way that says (and says it loudly): One drink too many. Strike one! Two drinks too many. Strike two! Three drinks too many. You’re out!

John O’Reilly is a man who has been on the edge too long, and he’s too far into his free-fall to be pulled back to rescue. He has seen it all, done it all, been made deadly tired and jaded by it all. New York City is full to the brim with the likes of him.

And, yet, that afternoon, when he grabbed me from behind in that alleyway, mistakenly thinking I was out to spoil a police takedown, there had been a certain … what? … about the muscled hardness of his chest, his belly, his arms (yes, even his cock).

At the time, I’d felt thoroughly put-upon. What did I feel later? What did Dr. Melissa, my shrink, pull out of me (“Draqual, this is harder than pulling teeth!”)? In a word: nothing. Because I didn’t want to go there. I still don’t.

In contrast to O’Reilly’s more down to-earth good looks, Jeff Billing’s handsomeness fit right in with Bangkok’s colors too vibrant; noises too loud; weather too hot; rain, when it came, too abundant; and food too spicy, to sweet, or too sour.

I was headed toward the distant Chao Phraya River where I hoped for quick transport to my hotel.

An unanticipated surge of oncoming foot traffic squeezed me off the narrow sidewalk. It was just my perverse luck to have Billing keep me from losing my balance and falling in the path of an oncoming tuk tuk.

“Thanks,” I begrudgingly conceded. Granted, a tuk tuk wasn’t a two-ton truck, merely a three-wheeled tricycle that pulls passengers rickshaw-fashion through traffic-clogged streets, but …. I tried my best not to appear ungrateful but shrugged free.

“How about we decelerate to a slow trot?” he suggested. “Or, is one of us going to a fire?”

“I don’t know about you, Billing …”

“Jeff,” he insisted, for not the first time.

“I don’t know about you, Billing,” I persisted, “but I came to Bangkok on very important business. Which I still have every hope of successfully completing before I head home.”

“All work and no play …,” he said, and left me to complete his utter triteness. “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted just to come on over and say hello. I’ve this gut-felling you and I could really hit it off. How about we officially jump-start our off-to-a-bad-start beginning with a friendly lunch? It’ll be on me: the least I can do for whatever trouble I may have caused you.”

“‘May’ have caused me?” I stopped walking.

“You refer, I suppose, to potential problems with Roxanne Whyte?” he divined. “I tried to wait until you’d disappeared down the road, buddy, to put you completely out of the picture, but she was just too fast to her car. Still, you may well be overreacting. I can’t imagine how she’d ever guess your unwitting part in all of this.”

“Exactly what kind of skeletons do you seem to think are buried in Roxanne’s closet?” I asked and immediately regretted my natural nosiness. (Dr. Melissa would be cackling: “Told you so!”).

Melissa J. (for Janling) DoLittle is a shrink. She’s my shrink. She’s old enough to retire. She would like to retire. She will retire as soon as she can wean those few of us fuck-ups she has left on her roster. Whereafter, she’ll comfortably nestle in among her expensive gewgaws acquired from her few million billed-at-$250 an hour. Dr. Melissa (“It’s Dr. DoLittle, Draqual!”) isn’t one to sit back and not ante-up her five-cents’ worth as regards life in general, as regards my life in specific.

She didn’t want to take me on. She didn’t want to take on anyone new. My father, who could be really persuasive when he wanted, wanted her – for me (hell, I’m his only son!) – as soon as he heard she was the best New York City had to offer. Daddy had two advantages over any other poor schmuck out to reel in Dr. Melissa. Dad was CEO of Draqual Fashion, haute couture silk ladies’ underwear; Dr. Melissa is a sucker for silk. Dad was the only source, world-wide, of Draqualian silk … a very special silk, spun by very special silkworms, who eat very special mulberry leaves, to make very special cocoons pre-dyed, in Technicolor digestive tracts, to a very special perfection. I got Dr. Melissa; Dr. Melissa got a very expensive Draqualian silk teddy; I think nowadays she thinks she got the shortest straw.

Jeff Billing’s pregnant pause told me he wasn’t about to explain any skeletons in Roxanne’s closet.

“I’m not going to spread unsubstantiated rumors behind Miss Whyte’s back,” he said finally and sounded insulted I’d ever assumed he might.

I almost laughed in his face. “Well, excuse me! But you were hardly being all that discreet a few minutes ago.”

“I can’t be responsible for eavesdroppers.”

“Eavesdroppers? For Christ’s sake! I was nearly a block away at the time.”

“Okay, I got a bit carried away. All I wanted was a meet. I’ve been trying to set one up for ages.”

“Are you researching some kind of book?” The last thing I needed, after the Slip to Die for murders, was another author in my life.

“Christ no!”

“Just what is it you do for a living?” I was about to add, “… besides find bodies on your doorstep?”, but I bit my tongue.

“Things.” How vague could he get?

“I, too, have to do things to make my income happen,” I said. “I can’t do those things nearly as well by alienating one of my chief silk suppliers. So, if you’ll excuse me … as interesting as all of this might very well be.”

My business with Roxanne Whyte, waiting somewhere in the wings, was only one of the things that made me see Jeff Billing as persona non grata. Another was his reputed ties, however tenuous, to the recent murder. I’d had enough of murders and the people who committed them.

“Hey, stud Stud, it’s not as if I arrived in Bangkok with any advance notion of enlisting your help in getting me to Roxanne,” Billing argued. “You and I at the same hotel, I merely heard you were seeing her regularly, on personal- and business-related matters, and I decided to take advantage to track her down. She’s an extremely hard lady to run to ground if you don’t have access to the good graces of her social secretary.”

Whyte Silk Consortium was founded by Roxanne’s late uncle. Everyone in the silk business knows of the key role Powell Whyte played in revitalizing the Thai silk industry after World War II. While the company isn’t the only wholesale outlet for silk in Thailand, it provides the irrefutable guarantees of workmanship and quality that I, and my customers, expect and demand. I have my own silk-producing facilities in the States, but all of that output is very special, very expensive silk. It’s never enough, especially not with my proposed expansion into men’s ties.

“It’s always been my belief that the rich people of the world, possibly you included,” he continued, “often exist according to self-made rules and regulations that have nothing whatsoever to do with the laws of the land. I’m continually appalled by how some people can get away with literal murder …” (a reference to the recent homicide?) “… while friends and relatives rally round to keep the skeletons from tumbling pell-mell out of guilt-littered closets. When people start pointing fingers and screaming about my being a no-good sonofabitch out to blacken a good name, there’s usually a cover-up.”

“Roxanne Whyte is a genuinely nice person,” I said as someone who had come to consider her a friend as well as a business associate.

Whatever business Billing had with Roxanne, or thought he had with her, the less I knew about it the better.

“Well,” he interrupted my train of thought, “shall we share the Chao Phraya Express, a water taxi, car taxi, tuk tuk, mini-bus, public bus, or do we walk the distance to our hotel?”

At least, I’d diverted him from any notion of a shared lunch.

I proceeded southwest on Ratchawong Road, Billing in tow. The chocolate-brown Chao Phraya River was straight ahead.

The Ratchawong Pier was right there, too, from which the Chao Phraya Express provided regular service every ten to twenty minutes. Suddenly, though, the Chao Phraya Express seemed entirely too commodious. I wanted a water taxi small enough to accommodate just a helmsman and me, Billing removed from the transportation equation.

I detoured around the pier and headed for the river.

I performed the prerequisite ritual of arm-waving, shouting, and sign language to hail a boat I figured to be just the right size. However, of the three boats that raced toward shore in response, it was a sizable dugout, with a low-power outboard, that took the lead.

“It looks a little small,” I lied, as the boat came nearer. “Maybe you’d prefer waving down something for yourself that’ll prove a little less cramped for the both of us?”

“It’s plenty big,” he said and winked.

The dugout captain was stripped to his waist and wore a pair of pants so spotlessly white they could blind from a distance. He angled his winning boat for a landing.

“Yes?” he called and almost maneuvered to where I could conveniently board without getting a foot wet. “Americans?”

“Right!” Billing confirmed.

The boatman was younger than I’d originally thought. Or, maybe he was older than he looked, which was more likely in a country where old people could look like teenagers. Whoever found a way to bottle their secret would make a fortune. If and when Stud Draqual Fashions ever makes the giant leap into cosmetics …

The Thai captain steadied his boat while I came aboard. Billing closely followed my suddenly-feeling-very-vulnerable behind.

The wake from a passing launch caused our water taxi to rock precariously on the resulting swells. Wood splintered only a few short inches from my left hand. Reflexively – in that I was far more familiar with bullets, these days – I dropped off the seat into the shallow well of the boat. The dugout went into a genuinely raucous dance upon the waves.

Our skipper went overboard. Billing came down on top of me, sandwiching me between him and the boat bottom. Gasping with surprise and the impact of his muscled weight, I inhaled a combination of dead fish, fetid water, and Billing’s citrusy cologne. My face smashed damp and spongy wood.

There was a dull thud, like distant thunder.

Unabashedly borrowing from the literary precedents set by John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Slovakian Boy is a kaleidoscopic account of handsome young Pavel as seen through the eyes of interested — sometimes too interested — parties of family, friends, and fans. William Maltese’s narrative of a boy’s determined reinvention of himself as a porn god is a sexy romp through a rarely explored realm.

********************************

“Who said—and when did he or she say— that Czechoslovakia, of which Slovakia was then a part, was ‘a faraway country, populated by a people of whom we know nothing’? Want to give it a try, Drahoslav?”

“Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister, 1939.”

“Very good. Although it was actually 1938. And why is Chamberlain, otherwise, so infamous, Andrea?”

“He signed the Munich Agreement which allowed Nazi Germany to appropriate a large part of Czechoslovakia.”

“Yes, he did. And after the Nazis, the Russians. The end of Communism, called what? And why? Bohuslava?”

“‘Velvet Revolution,’ because of its remarkable lack of violence.”

The buzzer sounds.

“Pavel.” I can’t help myself. “Will you remain a few minutes?”

“Yes, Mr. Professor Vodni.”

I’m turned-on by his good looks. There’s something about his dark hair and exquisitely shaped eyebrows—something about his blue eyes, his thick and sooty eyelashes. Not to mention each iris with its own intoxicating black halo.

I’m captivated by his good humor, his air of naïveté.

No matter that he’s probably straight as a stick. He dated Berta Hukvaldy, probably regularly fucked her, until her father got that promotion to Bratislava. I hear the teenage pussy forever whispering what a catch Pavel is. How he’s such a gentleman. All true. I’ve never known him to raise his voice. I’ve never seen him in bad humor.

A very pleasant young man, in superb physical condition because of all that hiking, caving, and varsity ice hockey. I can’t think of anything bad I’ve heard about him, from the faculty or from his peers.

Granted, the kid’s no rocket scientist, but who says everyone has to be? He’ll be the first to tell you he’s not one. He wants a job in forestry, or some other profession that will keep him out of doors, in fresh air and sunlight. Although he knows enough about cars to get a position in some garage, if there were one offered.

I suspect sunlight tans him all over, though I’m not his gymnasium teacher and have never seen him naked. I wouldn’t want to see him naked, either, because I immediately recognize the worrisome prospect of his offering up too much temptation.

He’s my student, I’m his teacher. All sorts of legal and moral complications and implications in that.

I’ve my job to think about. I’ve bills to pay. I’ve a wife to support. I’ve two kids to feed, to house, to send to university. Sex with a student isn’t possible. It’s better to indulge mere fantasies.

It’s because of my fantasies that I’ve asked Pavel to stay after. It’s so I can play sponge and soak up even more details of how he looks, close-up, for total recall later. For when my wife moans and groans and begs me to fill her bottomless pit with passion-cooling cum, and I need a little help to oblige. Or, for when I next perform solo.

I’ll be alone this evening. Mainly here, correcting paperwork, writing the next exam.

My cock is hardening, although I always wear baggy pants to keep hidden all evidence of my cock, hard or soft.

“I thought baggy pants went out of style,” said Mrs. Professor Pribor, who has visually checked out every male basket within a two-hundred kilometer radius and would like a better look at mine.

It’s unlikely Pavel knows or cares what goes on in my trousers. Now or ever.

When the call first went out for perspective authors to contribute to an MLR Press anthology RED, I admit to having passed on the invitation. At the time, I just didn’t see how I could possibly manage the time and effort to write something within parameters that needed each contribution to include within its story-line not only a reference to red (the color and emotion), but to a drink of ice-cold water, a cricket, a pebble, and the scent of blood oranges. While usually as up to a challenge as the next person, I had other things to do, and I moved on to do them.

Awhile ago, while chatting on-line with Deana Jamroz, the graphic artist genius who does all of the MLR Press covers, as well as a generous contributor to my ARTISTS “DO” author WILLIAM MALTESE art collection, she provided me with a peek of two of her favorite covers which hadn’t yet seen publication; one of which was initially meant to accompany the anthology RED by-passed by so many other authors, besides me, that it had been shelved. My comment to Deana was that had I only known that the cover was going to be so damned spectacular, I would have signed on as a contributor in a New York minute. Decidedly visually oriented, and having bought more than one book for its cover, I likely wouldn’t have passed up buying RED, just for its cover, if and when I’d ever spotted it on any book shelf.

Luck being the unpredictable lady she is, it was only a week or so later than MLR Press decided to attempt a resurrection of the RED anthology, and out went another call soliciting writers to try their hand. This time, as I’d told Deana I would, I jumped on the bandwagon and launched immediately into my writing of “Ludus Scaenicus Mortis Rubrae”, my take-off on and homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Red Masque of Death.”

For those of you familiar with the Poe story, you know that it takes place in Prince Prospero’s castellated-abbey. This locale soon had my chief protagonists wandering through those candle-lit abbey halls, corridors, rooms, galleries, and chambers. This, in turn, immediately had me thinking of candle-artisan Jfay who I’ve called upon so often, recently, to whip up real candles to duplicate those I’ve fantasized in my fiction (See the SUCKS! FIRST OF THE DRAQUAL VAMPYRE CHRONICLES Candle and SNAKES Candle below).

Also, Jfay is my partner in the free twice-a-week serialization, on MySpace, pre-publication 2010, of my teen-angst vampire, werewolf, warlock, witch, demon, dragon, chimera, shape-shifter, tree spirit, shadow person, candle-reader novel FLICKER: TEEN-WARRIOR SAGA.

In fact, I’ve been so taken by her work that she’s devoted a whole MySpace site to a Maltese Candle Gallery.

The final result of Jfay’s latest artistic efforts, RED Candle, on my behalf, seen at the beginning of this blog, is so stunning in its pairing with Deana’s cover graphic for RED, the anthology,(likewise seen at the beginning of this blog), that Jfay and I came to the mutual conclusion that while the candle should specifically be used in promoting my individual story, it could, also, be used to promote the anthology as a whole. Whereupon, Jfay immediately launched the pre-publication promotional of RED on all of her web-sites, blogs, and message boards, as I did on mine.

As soon as RED officially hits the book stands, Jfay and I are prepared, to launch a similar post-publication blitzkrieg.

All of which proves that sometimes unconventional means can be used to get a book’s name out there and in front of the potential buying (often more-visually oriented than text-oriented) public. In this case by means of an eye-catching Jfay candle.