Big Sky Country

Looking back on it, Frank Doyle could have kicked himself for asking Gabe if he’d like to go along on the delivery of sacks of feed supplements to the Brighton Ranch. He’d had no idea that they were filming a movie there and he had no idea who was involved in the movie or that the ranch’s manager, Sterling Fisher, had been one of Gabe’s clients at the Lone Star Diner in Guthrie.

They were at one of the barns, within sight of the huge, rambling, weather-beaten wood Victorian main house that stood out on the flat arid land like some sort of alien spaceship plunked down in a desert. They were unloading feed bags from the back of Frank’s pickup truck and wondering what all of the activity and unusual equipment surrounding the house, with its incongruous patch of grass lawn out front, was about when Frank went stiff. Gabe turned to see what Frank was looking at, taking a few seconds to understand why Frank looked so shocked and concerned.

There was a fancy convertible sitting in front of the ranch house—not really a ranch house; more a displaced Victorian mansion. It was a 1954 Ford Sunliner convertible, two-tone yellow and white. Perched on the top of the driver’s seat was a young sunny blonde woman in a frilly yellow dress with white trimmings. And standing on the ground beside her, with an arm around her waist and all trimmed out in black leather faux cowboy apparel was . . . Collin Chisholm, Gabe’s motorcycle lover from the Lone Star Diner. Three photographers were circling them, taking still shots.

“Isn’t that—?” Frank started to ask.

“Yes,” Gabe said, and then after taking a moment to absorb what he was seeing, he added, “I wonder what’s going on.”

Further speculation was short circuited when a small, emaciated woman with owl eyes and owl eyeglasses dominating her face, showed up, holding a clipboard, and said, “All of the extras are gathering over there near the horse corral.”

“We’re not extra, Ma’am,” Frank said, with a smile, tipping his cowboy hat at the woman. “We’re here to make a feed delivery. But can you tell us what’s going on over at the house?”

“Filming a movie. Big Sky Country,” she said, a cigarette wagging at the corner of her mouth. “An A movie. Epic. A Texas family goes from dirt ranching to millionaires in two generations and very nearly to pot after that. Those are publicity shots. Most of the ‘before’ part has already been filmed. The oil wells go in next week—that’s the millionaire part. We’re about to go on hiatus from the house remodeling.”

“And those people—the girl in the convertible and the cowpoke?” Frank followed up.

“Pamela Barker. Surprised you don’t recognize her. This year’s ingénue bombshell. The daughter of the family. The young man is Collin Chisholm, up and coming heartthrob. On the porch, talking to who I don’t know is Jay Jones, box office cash register and heartthrob of two decades ago. Jones is playing the family patriarch. Susan Tyler, leading lady, just flies in for her scenes and then flies back to California. The production had to lease a plane just for her. You sure you two aren’t here to play extras? You’re both perfect for it.”

“The other man on the porch is Sterling Fisher,” Frank said. “He lives in that house. But, no, Ma’am, I’m just here to deliver feed. Maybe Gabe here, though . . .”

He turned and looked at Gabe and his heart flipped up into his throat. The suggestion was the very last thing he should have said, he immediately recognized. Gabe had the star-struck look in his eyes and his gaze was fixed on Collin Chisholm, who had now seen them and was walking toward them, his eyes on Gabe.

“What’s entailed in being an extra in this movie?” Gabe asked.

Gabe was so taken with exchanging looks with Collin that he didn’t notice that the men on the porch—the ranch manager and major stockholder, Sterling Fisher, and the handsome, mature leading actor, Jay Jones, were now also looking at him. Fisher was talking, and Jones was smiling.

* * * *

“No, it’s fine if you stay here until they don’t need you any more for filming,” Frank said, his voice sounding enthusiastic but the look he was giving Gabriel didn’t match that. Gabriel, who had gotten the name upgrade when the casting woman decided that’s what she’d write on her clipboard because it sounded better as a movie name, was starry eyed and looking at the activity going on around him, his gaze constantly going back to Collin Chisholm, rather than to Frank.

“There’s probably room in the bunkhouse,” the casting woman said, her cigarette wagging at the corner of her mouth, although she sounded a bit dubious. “Never can tell when we need the extras to form up, so it would be best if you were here when you were needed.”

“He can bunk in my trailer,” Collin Chisholm chimed in, with a smile. This made Frank’s brow knit a little deeper, but the casting woman seemed to be cheered by the offer, completely indifferent to the dynamics that were playing out.

“Terrific. See costuming over there in that barn,” she said, turning to the newly minted Gabriel, the housing issue being solved as far as she was concerned. “They’ll have the last word on what you wear in the scenes where you’re background, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide you are perfect just the way you are—maybe even with the shirt off.”

“Yeah, I think he’s perfect just the way he is,” Collin said, giving Gabriel the eye.

Turning toward the truck, Frank said, “I’ll bring your stuff back when I deliver the next load of feed later this afternoon.” It wasn’t clear whether either Gabriel or Collin heard him, though, as Collin had a hand on Gabriel’s forearm and was already moving out to show him to the actor’s trailer.

As the male heartthrob second lead in the motion picture, Collin rated one of the bigger trailers. There were three compartments—the central compartment included the living area off to one side and a kitchenette and L-shaped bench, with a dining table, off to the other side. A short hallway, with a closet on one side, and a small bathroom, with shower on the other, led from the kitchen/dining space to a bedroom at the back of the trailer that was dominated by a double bed. Up front, off the living area, a small compartment accommodated two bunk beds and a built-in armoire.

Gabriel was shown the bunk beds after Collin had bent him over the dining table and fucked him doggie style, but later Gabriel was fucked on Collin’s double bed at the other end of the trailer, with the new movie extra on his back, grasping the rungs of the headboard over his head, legs spread and bent and pelvis thrusting up to receive Collin’s downward thrusts of his cock. Collin hovered over Gabriel’s body, his fists buried in the mattress on either side of the young man’s shoulders, and pumped and pumped and pumped.

Gabriel allowed as how the accommodations and hospitality attention would be just fine with him.

* * * *

As it turned out, extras, including Gabe, weren’t going to be needed for much longer. Filming of the early-years phase of the movie was coming to a close. Before they could move to the “years later” phase, the house needed to be completely redone and the husks of oil well pumpjacks had to be dotted over the nearby landscape. The scenes already in the can had been filmed piecemeal, with an eye to the ongoing project needs of the actors, and all but one of Collin’s scenes were finished already. Collin was actually in the “years later” portion of the film, as his own character’s son, but he had another movie to go to and the magic of film editing would change his backgrounds. After this, there would just be this or that short take filmed of the early phase. Gabriel had learned this as soon as Collin took him to his trailer. Collin was already stripping off his shirt as they entered.

“Get comfortable, which means strip down, while I get a couple of beers,” he said. “Then I want you to suck me off and I’ll do you.”

“Just like that?” Gabriel asked—with a smile, though, because he had no objection to Collin fucking him. He’d missed Collin. “No showing me where I’m to bunk or anything?”

“You bunk through that door there, and you can put your clothes there now, if you want, but for the short time I’m here, you’ll probably be under me on my bed, which is that direction. Here’s your beer. You aren’t naked yet. Get a move on, lad. Time is short.”

“Time is short?”

“Yeah. My last scene films this afternoon. Another day or two and I’m back in Hollywood. Just have to make arrangements on the shipping of my Harley.”

“The movie is folding up?”

“My part of it is, but there will be time for you to be filmed. Some of the background stuff is still to be shot. What we don’t have much time to do is fuck, and I’ve been thinking of you. On your knees. Give me good head.”

Gabriel dutifully went on his knees between Collin’s spread thighs as the actor sprawled on the built-in sofa. Gabriel gave him head while Collin swigged his beer and told Gabriel what he liked from the suck and what he liked more. When Collin was good and stiff, he just bent Gabriel over the table between the kitchenette and the bench, worked his cock inside Gabriel’s ass, grasped the young man’s hips with his hands, and started pumping him. This obviously was fine with Gabriel, who went completely docile as Collin spiked him and extended his arms straight out from his sides in a cruciform position and grasped the edge of the table top to hold himself steady under the rhythm of the fuck.

A couple of hours later they were out next to the corral, where the breakup scene of the second part of the movie was filmed between Collin’s character and that of the young blonde character being played by Pamela Barker. At the beginning of the scene the two characters were in an embrace, leaning on the fender of the Barker character’s yellow convertible and watching a horse being exercised in the corral. Gabriel, in jeans and boots, but shirtless, with a bandana around his neck, was the cowpoke exercising the horse, and he was grateful that he’d been cowpoking on the Sunshine Ranch long enough to learn how to exercise a horse like this.

The scene drifted into a heated conversation between the two leaning against the convertible, as Gabriel continued calmly exercising the horse in the ring. The argument got so heated that the Collin character jumped into the convertible and roared off. In the movie, down the road, he would wrap himself around a pole and disappear from the movie two-thirds of the way to the film’s end. Back at the corral, the brazen little blonde, pretending that it was good riddance for the Collin character, would come to the railing of the corral and give the cowpoke exercising the horse a come-hither look. It would already have been established that the young woman was a vixen who opened her legs to any man she fancied. The scene would end with Gabriel’s character meeting her gaze and walking toward her. This was 1955, so there wouldn’t be more to the scene than that, but the audience would understand that the two went off and fucked. They wouldn’t learn until years in the film later, though, that she was already pregnant with the Collins character’s son.

It was a short, straightforward scene, but they did so many takes of it that Gabriel wasn’t all that enthused about working in movies when the director was finally satisfied that they had what they could use. Pamela Barker, though, was impressed enough to give him the come-hither looks off camera that she’d given him on camera. He was polite but there was no way he was going to give her a toss in the hay when Collin was fucking him as well as he was.

Collin drove the yellow convertible back for the last time and switched over to his motorcycle, saying that he had to ride it in to Lubbock to turn over to the shipping company and would see Gabriel after dinner—that they’d both been invited up to the big house for a party that evening.

“I’ll go back to the trailer for a shower and a nap, then,” Gabriel said. “I think that horse kicked up half of Texas on me while we were going through all of those takes.”

“I guess I can take the Harley back a little later then,” Collin said, with a smile and a wink. “A shower sounds good to me too.”

Unless she was really a dumb blonde, Pamela Barker got the lay of the land with Gabriel as she watched the two men strut off toward Collin’s trailer, with Collin pulled in close to Gabriel and guiding the young man with a hand on the small of his bare back.

The shower in the trailer was small, but the two men managed in there together just fine, Gabriel’s back against the wall under the shower head, his arms flung around Collin’s neck and his legs hooked on Collin’s hips, as the actor moved Gabriel’s body up and down on the wall with the thrusts of his cock.

* * * *

Gabriel stood on the front porch for quite some time waiting for Collin to show up to take him into the main house at the Brighton Ranch. It had been Collin who had told him there was to be a party here and that they were invited. But Collin hadn’t shown up yet and no one else had passed Gabriel to go into the house for the party. Maybe he’d gotten the message wrong, he thought. It had been OK as he stood at the porch railing and watched the sun go down, but now he was just standing there—in the dark. He was skittish about coming to the house, because Sterling Fisher lived here and he’d been one of Gabriel’s regular clients upstairs at the Lone Star Diner in Guthrie. And Fisher had been a rough and vigorous fucker. Most important, he knew that Gabriel was a rent-boy.

He was about to give up on Collin and go back to the trailer, thinking that Collin must have had some problem about the shipping company in Lubbock taking his motorcycle, when the front door opened and Sterling Fisher, a tall and big man, loomed inside the doorframe, highlighted by the light spilling out from the large foyer back by a massive staircase.

“How long you been out here . . . Gabe, isn’t it?” Fisher asked a gruff voice. He was wearing a silk bathrobe—just that—and had a can of Bud beer in his hand. “Where’s Collin?”

Looking past Fisher, it looked like everything in the downstairs of the house was dark. The man was in his robe. Obviously, Gabriel had gotten the timing of the party wrong.

“Sorry, Mr. Fisher, I think I got it wrong. You look like you are about to go to bed. I thought there was a party here tonight. Collin said he’d meet me here, but he’s not here.”

“Well, we can go on without Collin,” Fisher said. “You got the party right. Come on in. Here.” He extended the beer can toward Gabriel and Gabriel took it. “There’s more where that came from. Come on in.” He stood aside so that Gabriel could slip past him and into the house. But still Gabriel hesitated.

“You look like you’re about to go to bed.”

“We’ll get around to the bed. But I’m so keyed up I’ll fuck you on the floor first—on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, just like in the movies.” And then when Gabriel gave him a blank stare, Fisher laughed and said, “You mean Collin didn’t tell you that you were the entertainment for this intimate party? I know men fuck you. I’ve fucked you myself and am in the mood to do it again. Get your tail in here, strip off those clothes, and let’s get to it. I know the price you go for. You’ll get paid.” He opened the sash to his robe, which parted to show that he was in massive erection.

Gabriel got fucked doggie style on a bearskin rug in front of a fire in a massive stone fireplace in the mansion’s living room—just as promised. Fisher was as hung and rough and vigorous and long lasting as he had been on Gabe’s squeaking bed on the second floor of the Lone Star Diner in Guthrie.

The young man’s tail was high in the air, supported on his knees, his chest was flat on the bearskin rug, his arms were extended over his head, and his cheek were pressed into the fur, his mouth open in a silent scream and his eyes gazing into the burning logs. The older man was long and thick and in superb condition. Gabe knew it would be a long, taxing ride. And he knew that he had no choice but to endure it. This was Fisher’s ranch, Fisher’s money was on the table in front of the sofa, and they both knew that Gabriel went with men for money.

Fisher was the sort of man who was going to take Gabriel if he wanted to whether or not Gabriel wanted it. It just prevented it being an ordeal if Gabriel went with the flow.

Fisher rode him high, like he was a jockey on a racehorse, standing in a crouch hovering over his back. The similarity to a jockey was pronounced at first as he had a hand whip and laid into Gabriel’s back and buttocks as he was building up speed of the thrust. Quickly, though, he’d tossed the whip aside—before he had raised much in the way of welts—and covered Gabriel close from above, his fists clutching Gabriel’s wrists, his teeth latching onto the back of Gabriel’s neck, and his pelvis thrusting a mile a minute until Gabriel groaned and came. A full two minutes of riding later, Fisher jerked, creamed Gabriel’s channel deep, and pulled out of him. He pushed the young man over on his side, back to the fireplace, and sat, wide-stanced, cock hanging low, on a footstool beside Gabriel, and took a deep swig from a can of Bud.

“That was as good as I remembered—better because this room is a big step up from the one you have at the Lone Star—and we’ll do that again real soon,” Fisher said in a low voice, “but that’s not what this party is about.”

Gabriel just lay there, staring at the man, unkinking his limbs, thinking about whether anyone had been deeper inside him before than this man could reach.

“I need to know if you can be totally discreet if the money is right.”

“I never told nobody you came for me at the diner,” Gabriel answered.

“It’s not about me. It’s about someone else who’s seen you and wants you—but that it can’t be known he likes men. You get taken care of right, can you keep it a secret?”

“Nobody’s had a reason to say otherwise,” Gabriel answered. “But . . .”

“He’s upstairs. He’s the one who wanted this party. He’ll give you $200 for the night and your silence. You blab and he’ll ruin your life and you’ll be giving up the opportunity for more good money. Understand? If he likes laying you, there will be more times and more money.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“You’ll accept and keep your yap buttoned about it?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, starting to rise from the rug.

“I didn’t say you could get up. I said I’d do you again real soon. Real soon is now. First crawl over here and clean my cock. Then I want you to shower and I’ll send you up to him.”

Gabriel rose on his knees between Fisher’s spread legs and took the cock in his mouth. Then he took the cock in his ass again, sitting on it, facing Fisher and arched back, palms reversed on the floor, as Fisher grasped his hips and pulled him on off his cock to their mutual second ejaculation.

* * * *

Jay Jones, the leading man of the movie being filmed, Big Sky Country, was an experienced and attentive lover. It was quite clear that he had had many men before. He wasn’t fully hard bodied and he was older than he filmed as or even as he looked stretched out on the bed with his cock in his hand. He probably was pushing hard toward fifty, but he looked to be in his early forties, and, though his body was mature, it was toned and had not gone to fat. He was muscular enough to manipulate Gabriel’s smaller, lithe body easily and expertly, and he was well tanned, the whiter tone of his bathing suit lines accentuating his Zeus-form musculature. He was uncommonly—almost plastically—handsome, in keeping with being a leading man movie star, with wavy black hair on his head, curling around his pecks, and descending in a thin line into his trimmed pubes—and then curling on his thighs as well.

The secrecy was that his box office appeal was on being a leading man for big-name actresses in A-level movies. Knowing he was gay would collapse one whole side of a major Hollywood studio.

“Just relax and let me take care of everything,” he had said, “we have all night.” And when Gabe had given in to that, all had gone smoothly and Gabe’s needs had all been taken care of—repeatedly, through the night. This was not a quickie fuck, and Jones knew exactly what to do with a young submissive.

Jones’s cock wasn’t noticeably long, although it filled out nicely when hard and remained hard until it had exhausted Gabriel. He may have been on some sort of enhancement drug to maintain his erection. The shaft was thick, and Jones knew what to do with it to make Gabriel pant and moan and beg for more of it. His balls were plump and full of cum, which he slowly doled out to Gabriel all night on the big bed in a bedroom outfitted like a scarlet-decorated Victorian bordello.

He worked Gabriel’s body for three-quarters of an hour before fucking him, fondling the young man to a heavy pant, kissing and tonguing him everywhere, and getting four fingers inside him and working his prostate until with a groan and a cry for mercy Gabriel released his cum and rolled over onto his belly in exhaustion. Then and only then did Jones cover the younger man’s body closely from above, grasp Gabriel’s wrists with his hands, bury his face in the hollow of the young man’s throat, enter him slowly and deeply, and slow-pump him to an ejaculation, to Gabe’s gasps and their mutual groans and moans. When Jones came the first time, both men were lying perfectly still except for rise and fall of Jones’s hips and the almost imperceptible rise of Gabriel’s pelvis to meet the slow thrusts.

Jones took him a second time in a missionary and a third time in a side split, and before the light of dawn began to filter through the cracks in the scarlet velvet draperies on the tall windows, Gabriel coaxed the older man onto his back and slowly rode his cock in a cowboy, ending with Jones pulling him back onto his torso, trapping his arms in a full nelson, weaving his legs through Gabriel’s, and fucking up into his ass, ending in yet another prodigious coming by the actor and Gabriel splashing his cum up onto his belly. As far as Gabriel could figure out, the actor remained in erection the entire time.

They went to sleep like that, with Gabe lying on top of Jones’s stretched-out body and Jones’s at last flaccid cock inside Gabe’s channel.

The sun had breached the horizon when they both woke to pounding on the front door downstairs and to the sound of Sterling Fisher going down to answer the door.

When he came upstairs, he tapped on the bedroom door and opened it before either Jones or Gabriel could answer. He, of course, saw the two men plastered together on top of sheets that were all entangled, but he gave this no reaction. It wasn’t anything less than he expected to find.

“There’s a reason Collin didn’t come to the party last night,” he said, his voice flat and ominous. “On the way into Lubbock yesterday, he rammed a telephone pole head on with his motorcycle and killed himself.”

Gabriel gave a sob, rolled off Jones’s body, and sat on the side of the bed, his body sunk in on itself.

“I guess it’s good that his last scene was shot yesterday,” Fisher added. “Someone can be found looking close enough to be his son in the later scenes.”

Gabriel sobbed again and hiccupped. Jones hissed a, “That’s enough of that, Sterling,” to Fisher, who shrugged, withdrew, and closed the door behind him.

Jones rolled over to the side of the bed and came in close behind Gabriel, encasing the young man’s thighs between his and embracing Gabriel’s torso in his arms. He kissed the shocked young man on the neck and shoulders and rocked him back and forth.

“Go ahead, let it out,” he whispered, and Gabriel did so for a few minutes.

When the shudders and sobs subsided a bit, Jones whispered, in his best calming stage voice, “It’s terrible that Collin is gone. But he went doing what he wanted—riding with the wind on his motorcycle. He’s gone, but you are here and so am I. You are young and supple, at the height of your desirability. You have so much to live for and so much more to enjoy in life. I want you to come to Hollywood with me. We’ll take Collin back and put him to rest in Forest Lawn. I will be good to you. We’ll have to keep it quiet, but I’ve managed that before. I want to be good to you. I want to be good to you now. Grasp life. Let me have you again. Now. It will comfort you to affirm life like this. Move up and come down on me—take me inside you. I will be good to you.” He was a consummate actor. He knew just how to pitch his voice in a soothing, encouraging tone.

With a stifled sob, Gabriel rose enough on his feet, planted on the floor, to let Jones put his erect cock, which had engorged while they’d been rocking their bodies against each other, in position. With a sigh Gabriel descended on the cock and then, with Jones embracing him from behind, he turned his head for their faces to meet in a kiss and began to rise and fall on the buried shaft.

Jay Jones cooed in soft tones to the young man and stroked the curves of his body as he fucked him again. Jones was getting what he wanted from the young man, and Gabriel, young, naïve, and awed at coupling with a famous actor, submitted fully to him.

* * * *

The next afternoon, after Collin Chisholm’s coffin had been loaded onto the production’s Douglas DC-5 aircraft at the Lubbock airport and they’d taken off, Gabriel sat at a window and looked down at the out-of-place Victorian mansion on the Brighton Ranch, as the aircraft circled to head West.

“How long will we be in Hollywood before we come back here?” he turned and asked Jay Jones, who was sitting in the aisle seat on the other side of the plane and looking over a script.

“Oh, we won’t be back for months,” Jones said. “They have to modernize the house, paint it all up, and add gardens and a pool for the latter years section of the movie. It’s what the ranch gets done to let us film there. That will take months.”

“Months? We’ll be gone for months? Not just a week or so to get Collin buried?”

“No. Months. We have scenes we can shoot at Studio City, and I’m in discussions on a movie down in Mexico I could get started on. If that doesn’t pan out, there is plenty of publicity work to do. Don’t worry. You’ll be with me. I’ll take very good care of you. The studio will sign you on as a production assistant and you’ll be paid through them. We’ll be careful about this.”

Gabriel turned back to the window and looked down to see if he could pick out Frank Doyle’s Sunshine Ranch. He hadn’t had time to tell Frank he was going back to Hollywood with Collin’s body to see him buried. He felt someone slip into the aisle seat beside him and turned to see a dark-haired man of thirty-five or so. Not bad looking but a little on the pudgy side. He remembered having seen him at the ranch but didn’t know what his job was on the movie.

Jay Jones told him. “This is Sam Lutz, Gabe. He’s an assistant producer on the picture. Keeps track of the filming schedules.”

Then he told Gabriel why Sam Lutz was smiling at him. “He asked about you. Heard you gave twenty-five-dollar blow jobs. I figured you could use the money. You can do it right there, or if you’d like more privacy, I think the last row in the cabin is free.” Then he turned his attention back to reading the script in his lap.

It went beyond a blow job. Eventually, Gabriel’s bare legs were raised, spread, and waving out over the top of the row of seats in front of him, with Lutz crouched between them, fucking Gabriel. No one on the plane seemed to notice, or, if they did, to care. It did take much for Gabriel to be clear what function he was to perform in the film production entourage.