Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

school, Patti decides to take a walk downtown to get a milk shake. Every Babbingtonian she passes pauses to watch her go by, and in her wake they sigh, and they spend the rest of the day in wishful thinking. She sits at the counter in the malt shop and drinks a chocolate shake.

Old Eben Flood, just a week shy of eighty-six, finds that he has developed an almost uncontrollable urge to lick the chocolate from Patti’s lower lip, and to keep himself from licking her he begins whistling “The Happy Wanderer.” He knows that he looks like an old fool, but he doesn’t dare stop.

Mrs. Dorothy Inskip, a respectable matron, president of the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society, finds that she can’t stop staring at the beautiful buttocks of this girl so pertly perched on a counter stool. To prevent herself from giving in to a desire to touch what she admires, she rushes from the shop; outside, she collides with Harrison Barker, the president of the First National Bank of Babbington, an old flame, a flame that hasn’t flickered since she was Patti’s age, but a flame rekindled on the spot, a flame that will bring to the seven quiet and wrinkled years that Harry and Dotty still have ahead of them a warmth greater and more perdurable than either of them could possibly have imagined when first that flame was lit.

When Patti pays the soda jerk, young Frederick Lawson Stillwell, his hand shakes, and his lips move in a silent prayer that he manage somehow not to surrender to the vast catalogue of impure thoughts inspired by the salacious way she chews her gum, that he not be led into temptation by the wanton way her little hips swing, and that he not be made to turn from the straight path and follow her out the door and wherever on earth she might choose to lead him. By dropping to his knees as soon as she’s out the door he manages to keep himself from following her, but he discovers in another minute to his horror that he’s praying that she’ll come back, so to purge himself of this devilish perversion he whips out the pocket-size discipline he carries to keep impure thoughts at bay and spends a few satisfying moments mortifying his flagitious flesh. Years later, when he has finally given up trying to fight the fire that burns within him, he will found the Little Church of Perpetual Passion at the southernmost end of Bolotomy Road, in a building that was once a clamdigger’s shack, and on “Flagellation Fridays,” his disciples will join him in exploring the erotic potential of the lash, flailing at themselves and one another.

Patti, meanwhile, has left the shop and stands in the sunlight at the corner of Bolotomy and Main. It’s such a nice day! Who wants to be indoors? Instead of heading directly for home as she had intended, she spends the rest of the afternoon strolling willy-nilly, wherever fancy takes her, here and there, all over our little town. By nightfall, the town can scarcely think of anything but her. We are all drunk on Patti Fiorenza. Some of us are leaning against our porch posts, smoking, yearning for her, others lying in our bedrooms, sweating, with Patti on our minds and our hands between our legs.

As the night comes on, all Babbington falls into one great orgy of desire for her. All over town, we pet and paw one another, or toy with ourselves, while visions of Patti dance in our heads. We take our pleasure from her, and in our collective fantasy we enjoy her every which way that night, every one of us who saw her walk by, the men and the women, the old and the young, the fit and the feeble, all of us pushing and pulling and thrusting and slipping and sliding our way toward a rippling wave of pleasure that shudders through us all, trembles from one end of town to the other, a shudder strong enough for Patti to feel it at home, in her bed, where she lies alone, and mistakes the tremor of our pleasure for her own, for she has succumbed to her own sweet charms. She soughs, and stretches, and sleeps, and dreams. So, at last, do we, and we dream of her, every sort of sexual pleasure in one handy package, oooh-oooh-oooh, oooh-oooh-oooh, sha-boo-bee-doo-wahhh.

Chapter 7

A Bubble Bursts

NATURE had assigned Patti a sexy part, and she played it. She dressed the part. She looked the part. She cultivated a knowing wink and a provocative pout. Soon she had a reputation. People assumed that she was the sexual adventurer she seemed to be, and many claimed to have explored the territory with her. Since I was both a cynic and a dreamer, I told myself that the claims I heard were certainly exaggerated and probably untrue, and I managed to convince myself that, in all likelihood, Patti was a virgin — a very sexy virgin, to be sure, but still a virgin — and I tried to hold on to that conviction, but it wasn’t easy, given the sheer number of claims to the contrary. Some I could easily dismiss, because the claimants were no likelier sexual partners for Patti than I was myself, but others were more convincing, none more so than the claim I heard Nicky Furman make one afternoon when I was sitting in the school auditorium during a study hall.

Patti had just come into the room, late. I watched her walk down the aisle, watched her hand a note, an excuse for her tardiness, to Mr. Cantrell, an English teacher who affected bright silk squares in the handkerchief pockets of his threadbare jackets, watched her stand, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, canting her hips while her note was read, watched her idly look around the room to see who among the assembled scholars might interest her, and blushed