Nowhere Railcar Diner

Sue’s 1962 red Impala convertible had a pillow in the backseat, which Eddie Perry found quite convenient to place under her lower back so she could comfortably recline in the back corner of the seat behind the driver’s position. She was maneuvered so that she could spread and bend her legs to enable him, naked, to take most of his weight on his knees, between her thighs, and the rest by pressing the heels of his hands into the sidewall behind her head. He worked his cock inside her after having knelt between her legs and worked her clit and cunt with his tongue and teeth. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist, her panties were on the back floor of the car, and her blouse was unbuttoned and open.

Eddie was fucking Sue.

He already had worshipped her breasts with his hands and lips, and she’d begged for the rest. Eddie had been the dreamboat of Mineral County High School, and Sue deemed herself lucky that he’d gotten around to her. She’d enticed him by showing up in the nowhere bungalow on Highway 95 Eddie lived in in Mina, Nevada, and offering him a ride to “wherever” in her dad’s Impala convertible. She did everything she could to signal that he could fuck her, dwelling on the various meanings of “ride.”

This is what high school graduates in Nevada between Las Vegas and Reno did after graduating and while waiting for a steady job or the army recruiter to show up—they drove out into the desert and fucked in the backseat of cars.

The other nineteen-year-old, Charlie Tecopa, a Piaute half caste from the Walker River Indian Reservation, was hanging over the back of the front passenger seat, watching Eddie and Sue getting settled into the fuck and biding his time until he could join them.

The three knew each other from the high school in the desert county in west-central Nevada, where they had graduated the previous spring. The three were listed among the beautiful people at the high school, but they’d been in entirely different social sets, with definite cultural barriers. Susan’s father, Ted Henderson, was the civilian manager of the Hawthorne Army Depot, with Hawthorne being the county seat and where the Mineral County High School was located. The depot was the major employer in the county, so Susan was pretty much the county princess. She, of course, had been homecoming queen at the school that year.

Eddie, living in the smudge of Mina, southwest of Hawthorne, with its 155 residents, straddling U.S. 95 between Las Vegas and Reno, came from white trash, although being a blond hunk and the star of the high school football team, such as it was, and, of course, homecoming king, had given him status. He had lived in an old Airstream trailer in Mina with his single-parent mother until near high school graduation when the trailer had burned and been gutted and his mother had taken a walk—without Eddie.

“You’re of age now, Eddie, so you’re on your own, just like I was as soon as I got out of high school,” she’d said as she was walking out.

Not long after that he moved in with the owner and waitress of the Railcar diner. Up until then sex had consisted of casual lays for Eddie. Now he was expected to plow a woman on a regular basis—a woman older than he was.

Charlie, whose father was a full Piaute and mother was a social worker from California, lived on the Walker River Indian Reservation to the northwest of Hawthorne. That put him, despite being a beautiful young man, in the lower depths of the social strata both at the high school and in the county. He was a silent fringe walker in whatever social circle of young people was lean and hungry at any given moment.

Being rebels and experimenters all, the three had come together to cross social lines after they’d been freed from peer influence in school. For the past five months they’d met whenever they could to go wild and fuck. The one beautiful thing these three could do in life was to tangle their bodies together and fuck.

Susan had picked Charlie up from his job at the army depot and driven him to Mina, where they’d gathered Eddie up at the Railcar Diner, and then had turned off U.S. 95, west, just north of Mina, and driven a dirt road into what was the rimmed crater of either a large meteorite hit or the remnants of a volcano from eons ago. There was a disagreement in the region which was what. Nobody much came to see it, so it didn’t really matter what it was. Features like it were so common in this area that this one hadn’t attracted any scientific interest. The Impala fit between a rock outcropping and a small pond in desert-like surroundings, out of sight of anyone not looking for concealment for some purpose of their own.

They’d done this before. Even in this spot. Eddie was handsome, blond, tanned, muscular, and hung. Susan, auburn-haired, “perky,” busty, and with full hips, had clutched his buttocks with her hands, arched her back, and was rocking against him as he pumped her. She liked being filled and stretched by a man’s cock. She’d done it for the school’s football coach and vice principal—there wasn’t much else to do out here in nowhere—so age didn’t matter much, although she like it best with young guys.

They were young and fearless, living in the sticks, and they’d started this the night of the homecoming dance, as all of the students had expected. There were more fatherless children here—and had been forever—then there were two-parent families. Single parents here were barely thirty-five when they were attending their own children’s high school graduations. Thus, they hadn’t even considered protection. When they had set up a good rhythm, Dark, slim, wiry Charlie came over the seat into the back, saddled up behind Eddie, mounted his ass, penetrated him, and fucked Eddie while Eddie fucked Susan.

There really wasn’t much else to do for a thrill in Mineral County, Nevada, if you were young, beautiful, adventuresome, and horny. And if you wanted to flip off the world.

* * * *

Mina, Nevada, couldn’t even claim to be a town. Technically, it was a “census-designated” spot on U.S. 95 between Las Vegas to the south and Reno, via Carson City, to the north. It was laid out as a town, with numbered streets from 1st Street on the north down to 13th at the south end, crossing east-to-west across the portion of U.S. 95 named Frontier Street. This was an overly ambitious undertaking, though, as all of the blocks from 1st Street down to 5th Street were empty lots. The Railcar Diner, one of two restaurants in the settlement, sat on the western corner of Frontier and 5th.

It was called the Railcar Diner because that was what it was built to resemble, an abandoned railcar, when it was built in the late forties. More recently it looked more abandoned than a railcar. It was larger than a railcar, a bit longer and twice as wide, to accommodate a long lunch counter and booths around the front and side walls. The building continued, narrower, off the back, with, first a kitchen area, and then a living-dining room, two bedrooms, and a bath, which was where the owner of the diner, Maggie Bell, a tarty, top-heavy blonde in her late forties, lived, and where Eddie dutifully fucked Maggie at least twice a week to cover his room and board.

The Railcar Diner was one of the fanciful building designs that were scattered along lonely stretches of U.S. highways on the long, dull journeys through the badlands to the West Coast in the first half of the twentieth century. The landscapes through Nevada, Utah, and Arizona were actually spectacular—for about fifteen minutes, and then they began to dull the senses. Nearly all of the residents of Mina had been there well over fifteen minutes.

The people living along the routes west and wanting travelers to stop and buy what they were selling constructed fanciful buildings to entice them: a wigwam here an “old woman’s shoe” there. Thus, Mina had its railcar for a diner and, further up the road toward Hawthorne, there was a lighthouse just off the road in the desert that served as a motel, restaurant, and men’s club. That would be men on men, not a straight guy’s brothel.

Maggie ran the diner restaurant adequately with a minimum crew. You didn’t serve many diners in a Nowhere not-even-a-town like Mina at a basic-offer, All-American food diner like the Railcar Diner when there was a better-known burger restaurant, S’Sorcorro’s, on the south side of the settlement. Only the diner served breakfast, though, so a profitable day was established before noon. There were two shifts, the breakfast-through-lunch shift, running from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., with Maggie serving as hostess and overflow waitress; Amy Cagley, a thin waif of a young woman not long out of high school as waitress; and Maggie’s older sister, Mary, in the kitchen. Maggie usually didn’t drag in until a bit after 7:00, but she stayed on to clean the place and do the paperwork after 2:00. The restaurant opened up for supper again from 5:30 to 8:00, p.m., with Eddie Perry taking the orders and old Stan Fowler, the former owner of the diner, in the kitchen. If someone was sick, the others usually somehow managed to adjust, and there were former diner workers still in town who were always interested in making an extra buck. If push came to shove, they just switched the “Open” sign on the front glass door to “Close” and did what they had to do.

Amy Cagley lived with her widowed mother-in-law, who took in boarders, over at the corner of 8th and A Streets, within walking distance of the diner, not that everything in Mina wasn’t in walking distance of everywhere else. She had been a child bride, pregnant, of Jerry Cagley, four years her senior, who was in the army in Afghanistan and had been gone most of the time. She’d lost the baby before having a chance to give it birth and after Jerry had left for army training. She brought in some extra money by laying under various men in town. She had her favorites, though. She didn’t charge Eddie Perry, for instance.

Maggie Bell’s cook sister, Mary, lived in a two-room shack a few feet off to the side of the living quarters off the back of the Railcar Diner. She got along well enough with her sister, who had taken her in from prison, where she’d been for some years after slicing up her husband, who had deserved it. The sister was employed at the diner more because Mary was a great cook than that she was Maggie’s sister and it was hard coming out of prison and finding a job, but they worked together, if mostly silently, well. Everyone else in Mina was more silent with Mary than her sister was, but they came to the diner for Mary’s cooking during the day and Stan’s at night, not because of the railcar ambiance but because either one of them delivered a better meal than anyone else in town, including the burger chef at the better-known S’Socorro’s down the street.

Eddie had only worked at the diner for six months, but he already was a regular member of the family, punctuated by now laying his head on Maggie Bell’s pillow in the living quarters behind the diner. He hadn’t gone from working in the diner to working in Maggie’s bed; the progression had been the other way around. When his mother’s Airstream had been gutted by fire and she left Mina without him during his final year in high school, the Andersons, who owned a chicken farm over on Doolittle Street, had taken him in. As part of Eddie’s duties there, he had delivered chickens and eggs to the diner. Not long before Eddie graduated high school and he turned nineteen, Maggie paid him to lay her between shifts when the diner was closed for the day, and when her dinner shift waitress ran off with a construction worker from Hawthorne, she hired Eddie to replace her.

“You can just move into my bed as well as part of your compensation,” she’d said. Maggie still thought of herself as a catch. At the same time, she said she might as well give a man a chance in the job. All the women she’d hired had run off with some out-of-town bastard sooner rather than later.

Maggie was not the jealous type. She knew that Eddie, the best-looking and performing young hunk for miles around Mina, serviced other women, so when she drew up to the front windows of the Railcar Diner on the afternoon of the day Eddie, Susan Henderson, and Charlie Tecopa had been sporting in Susan’s red Impala convertible in the hills west of Mina and cursed at the arrival of the Impala in the parking lot in front of the diner, she was expressing more concern for her staffing than for her bed warming.

“What set that off?” Bud Cassidy looked up from stirring his coffee in his customary booth by the window and asked. Bud was a fixture at the diner. He owned the car repair garage in Mina, but his son, Butch, had that in hand considering the low volume of the business, and Bud, a grizzled, but once quite handsome fifty-five-year-old, had his territory staked out so well at the Railcar that he was sitting in his booth, drinking his coffee from his cup, even though the diner had closed for the breakfast and lunch period an hour earlier and wouldn’t open again for dinner for another two and a half hours.

“It’s that high-falutin’ girl from Hawthorne again,” Maggie spat out. “She’s gonna lead Eddie a merry chase.” Maggie didn’t even register that Charlie Tecopa was with him. He was from the Indian reservation. Maggie refused to call it the Native American reservation or acknowledge his existence unless he was ordering from the menu.

“She’s his age, Maggie. And he’s no priest. You gotta expect him to be plowing the more tender fields.”

“There’s nothing tender about that girl. But it’s her bein’ from Hawthorne that riles me. I lost the last two waitresses to bastards from Hawthorne. I didn’t think I’d have that trouble with Eddie.”

“Oh, I see. It has nothing to do with him not being back there in bed with you now.”

“Not at all.” She was about to say something else, but Eddie had waved Susan and Charlie off and was coming toward the door, and Maggie suddenly decided that the lunch counter needed another wipe off. When Eddie entered, Maggie was all aflutter and primping behind the lunch counter, forgetting all about Eddie’s arrival in Susan’s dad’s red convertible, not to mention their kiss in parting and Eddie’s patting of Susan on the butt. Maggie was focusing only on Eddie being back and there being a good two hours of alone time before the diner had to open again.

Eddie and Bud passed each other, with a tip of their cowboy hats, a slight smile, and an exchanged “Eddie” and “Bud.” When Bud was gone, it was just the two of them, Maggie and Eddie, standing there, looking at each other, with Maggie’s eyes all aglitter and her running her hands down her broad hips to smooth her skirt down.

“I’m glad you’re back early, baby,” Maggie said. “It gives us some time.”

“Yes, I guess it does,” Eddie said, with a resigned sigh. He needed this job and he needed this place to bed down—at least until he could get his shit together to figure out what he wanted to do in life. The one thing Eddie knew was that he didn’t want to do it here in Nowhere Mina, or in this Nowhere Railway Diner. It wasn’t Maggie’s fault he was at loose ends. She was a good sort and had taken him in. And she was good in the sack—if the light was dim. She wasn’t all the way past it quite yet and she had big tits and full hips—and experience. Girls like Susan and Amy were candy for the eyes, but they were too thin. Maggie was a big handful of woman. Maggie had puffy labia, and Eddie like a handful of cunt when he was working a woman.

“I thought we might go back to the bedroom for a while before opening up again,” Maggie said.

“Sure, why not?” Eddie said, proceeding on ahead of the blonde handful, to the bedroom, where the first thing he did was to close the blinds on the two windows to dim the light in the room.

* * * *

She was holding his head, trying to keep him kneeling between her thighs and pleasuring her with his tongue, but Eddie wasn’t having any of that as much as he liked playing with her puffy wings. He’d give her a bit of clit work, but not as much as she wanted and needed. After having fucked Susan, he wasn’t all that much in the mood for Maggie. That was where BJ had always been so much better. He’d worked her until she’d exploded once and then, if he’d gone soft too soon, he’d be back between her legs making sure she was having a good time. Not Eddie, though, at least not with her. Amy had said he was really good to her, but Maggie didn’t get all she wanted from him at the beginning.

But then when he was hard and thick inside her and she could run her hands over his young, hard, beautiful body while he pumped her . . .

Not bad for a woman her age—not bad having a young, beautiful man like this between her legs and inside her, big and hard.

She gave him good head before he turned her on her back and went down on his knees. Why couldn’t he do the same for her? Why couldn’t he do her as good as BJ had done for her.

But then Eddie was rising and crouching over her, positioning his cockhead and entering her as she spasmed and jerked and clutched at his butt cheeks with her claws to pull him inside her and hold him close. His face nuzzled her breasts, burying itself in the cleft. He moved inside her and his face turned and he took her right nipple in his teeth. In the dimness of the room, all she could see when she looked down was curly blond hair on his head. But she felt his hard muscles with her roaming hands and the hard, filling steelness of him inside her and his hot breath and rough tongue on her nipples, first one and then the other.

This was why it was him and not BJ. He was young, and hard, and virile, and he was guaranteed to stay hard inside her, moving, as long as she needed. BJ was great, but sometimes . . . “Oh, fuck. Oh, shit, baby!”

His hands went to her wide hips, the fingers pressing into the meat of her buttocks, squeezing and separating. He was in deep. He pulled almost all the way out and then thrust in; out and in. She gasped and jerked to the thrusts. And then, as he began to pump hard and fast, she cried out, “Oh, my god! Fuck me, baby!”

And there, in the dim light of their bedroom, in their shared bed, they were fucking. This was as good as she’d ever gotten it—except maybe from BJ . . . most of the time.

Afterward, she lay there in the near dark, on her back, with Eddie, her personal fuck toy, less than half her age, curled against her, his head on her belly. She was running her fingers in his hair and he was fingering her cunt, playing with the folds, rubbing her clit, and running his fingers inside her. For some reason, he liked to play with her cunt more after sex and before. She sighed, telling him that was nice, aching for him to move his head down, to do with his lips, teeth, and tongue what he was doing with his fingers—working her like BJ used to do.

But he didn’t fulfill her longing.

“Eddie,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I think you know what. It would be so much nicer if we were married. You know I worry about what will happen to the diner—who will get it. And I want it to be settled. And for things to be more stable. And people talk.”

“Fuck the people talking. And Mary deserves to get the restaurant. Not that she’s not going to outlive me—or even that I necessarily will outlive you.” The phrase “tough old bird” came to Eddie’s mind, but he was too smart to say that out loud. Nor would he say that he had no intention of winding up in Mina—or permanently in any old woman’s bed, for that matter. And he had no fucking interest at all in winding up running a rundown diner.

“They like you. Business has been good in the evenings since you started waiting the tables. They’re scared of Mary. They’d stop coming in if she owned the place.”

“Everyone’s scared of Mary. But people can’t eat gourmet hamburgers and nothing else. They’ll continue coming here as long as this is the only full-menu diner in town and the only place to get breakfast.”

“But you’ll think about it. We’re good together.” Not that they couldn’t be better together, she couldn’t help but think. “I’d like it to be more permanent . . . oh, fuckin’ shit. Oh, god. Oh, shit. Yes, YES! FUCK ME!”

Eddie had cut off what he took as an unsatisfactory, threatening discussion by rolling over on top of Maggie, pushing his knees between her thighs and under her buttocks, and thrusting inside her. He started to pump again. Rocking back and forth against him and digging her fingernails into his shoulder blades, she positioned herself to give him the best thrust angle. He was such a stud.

All Maggie could then think of was what Eddie had that BJ didn’t—he could get it up again quickly and he was young and vigorous—a god of the fuck.

She was the luckiest woman in Mina. She didn’t even think of the irony of that—how small Mina was and how lacking in fit men—men worthy enough to fuck her.

* * * *

Maggie Bell had one vice she didn’t let anyone, including Eddie—or, previously, BJ—mess with. Two weekends a month she either drove down to Las Vegas or up to Reno to gamble and not return until Sunday evening. She always said that this was why she’d bought the Railcar Diner in Mina—because it was halfway between the two gambling meccas, but far enough away from either that she had to make a special trip to indulge her itch. So, she took her time off from the diner during the weekends. A former waitress, Peggy Tanner, took Maggie’s place on Saturday and Sunday breakfast and lunch services—and filled in for sick and vacation leaves on other days. The diner was closed on Sunday evenings.

Maggie’s “no deviation” schedule left Eddie to indulge in his vice every other Saturday night too, after he’d closed down the diner. And, with Maggie traveling back on Sunday afternoon, he could safely stay out all Saturday night and, with no Sunday evening service, he could recover before Monday. It enabled him to make good money to put to his “getaway” plans.

Eddie liked fucking women well enough, but it was nothing like being fucked by a man. He was only half satisfied at first that Friday afternoon that he was on top of Susan Henderson in the backseat of her father’s red Impala convertible in the meteor (or volcano) crater to the west of Mina. He hadn’t felt fulfilled until Charlie Tecopa saddled up behind him and thrust inside him. Charlie had been the premier high school top, known for having the biggest cock in school. Eddie and Susan had partied the night of homecoming, but it had been Charlie who had fucked Eddie the night before.

Eddie’s vice, not comprehended in any way by Maggie, although there were signs, which she was avoiding and hints from Bud Cassidy during his all-day vigils at the diner front window that she was ignoring, was not played out in Mina proper but several miles up the road at the Lighthouse Restaurant, Motel, Gym, and Club. Despite being even more in the middle of Nowhere than Mina was, the Lighthouse, another fanciful building complex on a monotonous stretch of highway in the same surprise thematic vein as the Railcar Diner, was probably the most popular spot in west-central Nevada. It was the only full-service gay men’s support facility in western Nevada between Las Vegas and Reno.

It might look like it was in Nowhere, but its offerings pulled in men from Nellis Airbase to the south, Yosemite National Park to the west, and Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot and the Walker River Indian Reservation—and even as far as Lake Tahoe—to the north. The restaurant-club-gym had motel rooms and rent-boys who performed in the club and the motel rooms. Some guys made a weekend of it. Every other Saturday night, some of them made it with Eddie Perry, who, because of his youth and looks, and limited availability, was a favorite. Eddie danced and lay under men semiregularly at the Lighthouse. His nights at the Lighthouse were about as exciting as his life got.

Eddie had the restaurant closed up by 8:15 that Saturday night, ushering Bud Cassidy out to one of the benches outside the diner entrance to finish his coffee. A car was already there, waiting for him, and Bud gave Eddie a knowing look when Eddie got into the car driven by Chris Drew, one of the rent-boys at the Lighthouse club, who had been sent to bring Eddie into the club for the evening—and, if his time was bought, for the night.

The Lighthouse was quite a complex. In the center, facing Highway 95, was the restaurant. Chris Drew and two other rent-boys, Carlos Sanchez and Jacob Grimes, were waiters at the restaurant by day and served drinks and themselves in the club behind the restaurant by night. A motel ran off toward the south of the restaurant. There were a few rooms here to be let to transient tourists, but most of the rooms were dedicated to being a male-on-male brothel. A gym for guys who wanted to let off physical steam before letting off sexual steam was in the wing to the north of the restaurant. It was run by a former army sergeant, Ian Hogan. The owners were a couple who’d been in the army with Hogan, Andy Marsden, a former sergeant, who ran the kitchen and the financial side of the business, and Collin Greene, who was the restaurant host, the main club dancer, and the premier club prostitute.

It was Collin Greene who had seen Eddie in Mina, recognized the potential in him, showed him pole dancing moves, and was impressed with how Eddie could move—and use—his body. And it was Collin Greene who, after pounding Eddie’s ass himself for hours one Saturday night, had hired Eddie to dance and take tricks on any Saturday night he could show up.

It was Collin who met Eddie when the car arrived at the Lighthouse and gave him a rundown on the schedule for the evening, the information that no one had booked ahead for Eddie’s time after his time on the pole, and passed on the key for the motel room that Eddie would have for the night, if he needed it. Having left the Railcar Diner, under the knowing gaze of Bud Cassidy, by 9:00 p.m. Eddie was stripped down to a G-string and weaving around on a pole to music on the small stage of the Lighthouse back-room club. The stage was big enough that Eddie couldn’t be reached from any of the four sides while he was on the pole, if he wanted to be out of reach, but that, if he leaned toward a side, to, for instance, make his G-string accessible for hooking money bills on the waistband or copping a feel, that could be accommodated.

Eddie mostly stayed centered on the pole, but he couldn’t resist jutting his pelvis toward a side during his routine, where a beefy, rather mean-looking, but movie-star handsome guy in black leathers and arm tattoos stood close to the stage, his eyes concentrating on Eddie’s moves, and a hundred-dollar bill folded in his hand. The guy was the definition of dark and handsome and had a sexy stubble of a black beard and unruly black hair, with a curl dangling down over his forehead just as Eddie liked it. As Eddie leaned in to him, smiled, and winked, one of the big bruiser’s hands tucked the bill into Eddie’s waistband and the other copped a feel of Eddie’s basket.

The leather guy’s name was Tony Skalari. At 9:45 p.m. he was in motel room 5, on top of Eddie, pinning the young blond to the bed, feeling him up, and giving him tongue in a deep kiss. Both men were naked; both men had beautiful, cut bodies. At 9:55 Tony was straddling Eddie’s chest, Eddie on his back on the bed, with his arms thrust out from his shoulders and Tony’s fists gripping Eddie upper arms, pinning them to the bed, while Tony fed his thick, long, hard cock down Eddie’s throat.

Stopping by the operations office to monitor the cameras in the motel rooms, Collin Greene whistled his pleasure and called his partner, Andy Marsden, in. The two settled down to watch the leather stud royally fuck the barely legal blond. They were able to see five hundred-dollar bills on the nightstand beside the bed, so they were prepared to give the motorcycle stud quite a bit of leeway in his performance.

This also might be a lucrative scene for another reason. The sex was being filmed from several different angles in the room. If the fuck was good enough—and Collin could see that it already was good enough—they’d offer Tony a performance fee to permit the film to be shown on a subscription Internet site. Eddie was already signed up for the service. He’d be paid a hefty fee for letting the stud fuck him on film broadcast to the Web.

At 10:11 Eddie was panting and moaning, with Tony still hovering over him, raised on a knee planted next to the young blond’s waist, one of Tony’s hands holding Eddie’s head pressed to the bed with a fist choke hold on the young man’s throat while he worked four heavily lubed fingers of the other hand up to the knuckles into Eddie’s channel. Eddie was gurgling and his eyes were bugging out, but he had his heels dug into the mattress and his pelvis lifted and he was rocking up and down on the half-buried hand. Collin and Andy laid a bet, Collin no and Andy yes, on whether the leather stud would fist fuck Eddie and whether Eddie could take it. Collin won, though. At 10:20 p.m. Tony was stretched over Eddie with Eddie’s ankles on Tony’s shoulders and Tony doing deep-fuck pushups on Eddie’s body. Eddie’s arms were raised over his head, his hands fisting the rail of the headboard, his heels dug into the mattress, his mouth crying out, “Yes, yes, fuck me hard!” and his pelvis in rhythm with Tony’s thrusts. Eddie’s face was turned to one of the cameras he knew was filming this, and he was showing the taxing and the pleasure in his facial responses.

At 10:40 Tony was still stretched out on Eddie’s body, but he was snoring. At 11:05 they were awake again, with Eddie on all fours and Tony mounted on his ass, taking him in a doggie. Fuckings were repeated, separated by dozing, at 12:13 and 3:05 a.m. When Eddie woke up at 7:55, on his back, an arm flung across his eyes, groaning, and with his legs spread and bent and used condoms dotting the floor between the bed and the bathroom, he was all alone.

Tony had been cruel and rough and had done a total job of Eddie—more than once. Eddie had never been fucked by a man like that before. Eddie was in ninth heaven. Collin and Andy were happy too. Tony had agreed, after getting much more back than he’d shelled out, to have his performance shown on the subscription service.

A hundred-dollar bill had been added to the five-hundred-dollar bills Tony had put on the nightstand earlier. With the initial hundred dollars while he was dancing the pole and what he’d gotten from other man while he was on the pole, Eddie had earned almost nine hundred dollars that night. Half would have to go to the house, but that would be his biggest profit night at the Lighthouse. Eddie hadn’t made half that much a night before this. In fact, Eddie hadn’t had a john on top of him all night before, nor been he been fucked that many times in one session before. And by a god. Eddie wished he knew who Tony Skalari was—if that was his real name—where he had come from and where he had gone.

Collin and Andy had broken off watching at 10:35 the previous night and gone on to other activities swirling around on a busy Saturday night at the club. They were back the next morning in time to scan the tapes and then to sign Tony up for the subscription service. They’d indulge in the pleasure of watching and editing the film of the entire night later. They’d get more than one subscription film off this.

* * * *

It was just after 10:00 a.m. Monday morning and Maggie Bell was hovering over Buddy Jim Cassidy’s table at the front window of the Railcar Diner, pouring him another cup of coffee and telling him of her weekend trip to Las Vegas, when she saw a motorcycle pull off Highway 95 onto the parking strip in front of a restaurant.

She whistled and said, “Now that’s a nice piece of equipment,” tipping the coffee pot back up but not pulling it away. The tracking of Bud’s eyes went with hers to take in the new arrival.

“You speakin’ of the motorcycle or the guy on it?” he said.

“Both,” Maggie said, with a laugh. “But the hunk looks particularly good. Couldn’t be from too far away to be on a bike and not buried in road dust.”

“That’s Tony Skalari, from over in Hawthorne.”

“You know him?”

“I know of him. He works in his father’s garage. A mechanic. Real good with motorcycles, I hear. Real good with his hands and other parts of him too, if you know what I mean.”

Maggie knew what Bud meant. “Nice,” she said.

“They’re Italian,” Bud continued. “They’s a bunch of them over there in Hawthorne. Each of the boys a hellraiser and a stud. A close-knit group.”

“Vavavoom, he looks delicious.” Tony had remained straddling his motorcycle, his black-leather clad tight pants and his black-leather boots extending to the ground. He was wearing a black-leather jacket too, but it was open and he was bare-chested under it, his torso covered with colorful tattoos in a professional-looking swirl pattern. He took his helmet off, putting it under his arm, and shook out his curly black hair. His beard was what was likely a close-cropped, permanent five-o’clock shadow.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Bud said, dryly “. . . if you catch what I mean.”

Maggie did. She and Bud had been on the same beam for some years. “Pity that. What a waste of . . .” But then she stopped, which had Bud looking out the window again after having taken a gulp of his coffee.

They both watched as Eddie came into view from around the side of the building. He was carrying a duffel bag, which quite likely carried everything he’d brought to the rooms off the back of the restaurant. Maggie’s hold on the coffee pot wavered as she saw Eddie walk over to the motorcycle, Tony cup the back of Eddie’s head to bring their faces together, and the two of them kiss.

“Careful there, Kiddo,” Bud said, taking the pot out of her hand and lowering it to the tabletop.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Maggie said as she collapsed into the bench across the table from Bud. She turned her face from the window so she couldn’t see Eddie get on the bike behind Tony and wrap an arm around him as Tony kicked the motorcycle into gear and turned it north, toward Hawthorne.

“Sorry, babe, I thought you knew. Eddie goes out to the Lighthouse and performs and services the weekends you’re gone. I just thought you knew and didn’t care.”

“Damn that Hawthorne. It steals my best workers.”

“I guess Hawthorne is the big city compared to a Nowhere place like Mina,” Bud said. “But I kind a like it here. You’re here, for instance.”

“I’m just an old foolish woman,” she whimpered. “Gettin’ too old for anything.”

“Not too old. You’re still sexy as hell,” he said.

“You really think so, BJ?” Maggie asked. “After I was so foolish as to take a young boy like that over you?”

“You’ve had a rough life of it, babe. You seemed to like your young boy toy. I didn’t begrudge you that.”

“That was good of you, BJ, but you know what I was thinking each time I was with Eddie?”

“No, what?”

“That he was good, but at some things you were a whole lot better. Some important things.”

“Like what things?”

“I’m not sure I can tell you. I could probably show you. Come on back to the apartment.”

“What? Now?”

“It ain’t busy in here now. Amy can hold down the fort,” she said as she rose from the booth and took BJ Cassidy’s hand, pulling him up as well.

“Well, all righty then,” he said, grinning, as she led him away. Sometimes, he was thinking, when you wait for it all polite like it comes around again.