From A B-17 To A 34C free porn video

FROM A B-17 TO A 34C Note: This was intended to be the 3rd of four stories of the Richards and the bewitching book. After writing the first installment, I quickly wrote most of this one and the next one but have had so much trouble with the 2nd part that I think I will just skip it. This story follows after my earlier story, Marquis to Marquise. But it's not necessary to have read that story to understand this one. ************************ I look back on the earlier part of my life, as I write this, with a sense of wonder. Was that really me? Did I really do that? I had the courage to do that? Time makes us strangers even to ourselves. But I cannot deny the events of my life even as they almost confound the very person to whom they occurred. Perhaps this retelling will have some value to another in the extraordinary circumstances in which I found myself. I have done my best to record my recollections of the events I describe below so that they have the same flavor to them as when I experienced them. I hope the reader will make allowances for the change in my perspective since those events occurred. I, Wesley Mitchell, was inducted into the United States Army Air Corps in 1942 as a 19 year old. I left my girlfriend Sue behind. I had had sex for the first time my last night before leaving, with her, as I found was the case for many of us when we fliers talked amongst ourselves. I half wished that she'd become pregnant as a result because this rich jerk named Frank Sylvester had tried to make time with her and would still be stateside, somehow. The prick's family had so much money they'd apparently bought him 4F status. He had half pursued my girl since just after we'd started going out. He was always trying to undercut me with her, it seemed. He used to derisively call me "bookmark", a reference to how super thin I was and that I was always in one book or another. While I was off at our wing's base in England, that louse was back home undoubtedly trying to step into my shoes and step out with Sue. Well, I had no choice of where to go, once in the service. I left and became navigator Wesley Mitchell and I trained for months to be part of a B-17 Flying Fortress crew before being assigned to a crew in the 8th air force. Our plane was The Surprising Lady. I'm not sure who came up with that name. I didn't think it was a very good one. That name was painted on the nose of the plane along with a hot ticket of a dame dropping a bomb from each hand, presumably down on the Krauts. Our crew was made up of mostly guys as young as me. Our pilot Willie was older. He was 25 and the co-pilot Steve was 24 but the rest of us were all 18, 19 and 20. Willie had been to college but I was the only other college guy in the group. They called me "Joe College" as much as "Wes" even though I'd only taken a year's classes before volunteering. Reading books in the barracks would get you that kind of monicker. And, not that many guys went to college in those days and if you did you were either rich or some kind of egghead. My family wasn't rich. My father died when I was just a kid and my mother had a hard time making ends meet for my sister and me even with the death benefit money. But, I was really good at school. I was a whiz at math and at english. Heck, I was a whiz at everything. Don't think that didn't create a lot of quite open resentment in those days. I got called "egghead" and "smarty pants" and "adding machine" and anything else the dopes at school could think of. The teachers didn't even try to stop it. It was almost as though they resented me, too. I got chased all the time by other boys mad that they couldn't answer a teacher's question and then I did when called on. I felt so isolated. It was really hard on a little fella. My sister was aces at school, too, but girls didn't get teased as much about that sort of thing, though I suppose boys didn't much want to date the smartest girl in her class, the self professed lawyer to be, either. There were some jewish boys who were pretty intellectual but they hung around together and really didn't let anyone else in their circle. I knew another boy, Hal Kressler, who was fascinated by books just like me. He moved to our neighborhood when I was 10. But he got polio when I was 11. By 12 he and his family had moved away. I was left alone to read by myself, to ponder every idea under the sun by myself. The other effect of what happened to poor Hal was that my mother got paranoid about my laying around reading. That was what parents thought in those days, that polio was somehow something you got from lazing around or that lazing around was a symptom of it. So, they wanted you on the go all the time. For me, activity was stickball in the street and running. I was a terrific runner for a super skinny kid. That had partly come, as I said, from being a smart fella, actually. I got chased after school so many times! At the beginning of every school year, about the time we had our first test, I'd always have kids chasing after me, mad at me because I'd gotten a 100 or an A+ on a test and they'd had trouble. I never bragged but those dopes hated me just the same. Like I say, at the beginning of each year, I'd get chased a few times with kids really intending to punch my lights out. But, as the year went on it was really more of a game. They'd chase me and I'd sprint away from 'em and even if I got caught, nothing would really happen. But things still stayed in those categories. I was never really one of the guys. It was pretty seldom that they ever caught me. I wasn't that good of a sprinter. One look at me and it wasn't hard to see why not. The track coach told me that I forgot to get in line when they were passing out backsides. I could be caught in the first 50 yards but if the kids chasing me didn't get me by then, I was gone. I could motor along on long strides down the sidewalks for miles if I had to. I was nearly six feet tall by the time I finished high school and I was on the track team. My best events were the steeplechase, the mile and the 400 meter hurdles because that combined a bit of jumping and a bit of endurance. I could jump a little and keep on jumping, in part, because I wasn't carrying much weight at all. I won some races, too. I thought maybe being on the track team would make me more one of the guys but I was still kind of isolated. I guess it was hard to get past the differences and my insecurities. For instance, I got real nervous in the locker rooms at big city wide track meets if I even noticed that a fella had a terrific body. I'd been called "sissy" so many times that I worried that even noticing another fella had a rear end like I wish I'd had was being a sissy. Some of those guys were like greek statues, just amazing physiques. I wish I'd had that kind of body but I just wasn't filled out like them. Still, I made the best of what I had. My one year of college, I ran track, there too. I thought that, at college, there wouldn't be any of that anti- intellectual stuff, but there still was. Only in college, they passed it off as just harmless hazing. The thing was, the guys that seemed to get it the worst freshman year were the fellas like me who were studying and getting the best grades. When I joined the Air Corps, I put my all into learning my stuff as a navigator. I didn't have any set idea of what I would do in the air corps when I joined. But once they found out I was a sort of a math whiz, they steered me into being a navigator. And I did my best at it. I learned all the books and tables they gave us till I could figure where we were in the air as well as anybody in the whole 8th air force. I could figure a position faster than any of the other navigators. When our squadron leader wanted to try a different course to a target or a course to an alternate target, they used to radio over to our plane to Willie and he'd call over the intercom "Joe College! Bremen! Get us Bremen!" or "Joe College! Dusseldorf's completely socked in, give us a route to Essen, pronto!" I loved that. I shouldn't have been happy for us to find that a target wasn't visible or that the tinfoil strips hadn't been dropped right to mess with their radar or that a big storm had come up. But it meant that I'd be the guy counted on more than anyone, that I could come through for everybody. It, well, it sort of made me one of the guys. Somehow, just like in school, I wasn't naturally. But by doing something for everyone I became at least an honorary one. Navigation wasn't the biggest challenge a few months later when we were part of a follow up raid on Schweinfurt. The Germans made ball bearings there that got used in just about every sort of machine, tank or truck they had. There'd been a big raid on the place months back and we'd lost something like a quarter of the planes involved. Despite the brass's press releases that it was worth it, the place had only been scratched a bit. At least that's what they told us in the briefings before our raid. We were told that it'd be the worst, the toughest fight we'd been into so far. It was. We were barely over the Rhine when we got hit by a ton of flak. It stopped for a bit and then it got much worse a little ways out from the target. There's nothing you can do about flak, or antiaircraft fire from cannons on the ground aimed almost vertically up at you. You can't dodge it and you can't defend against it. Despite the title, Flying Fortress, a B-17 was just as vulnerable to flak as any other bomber. We just had more machine gunners on board. And, by March 1944, the Germans had realized what the B-17's relative weak point was. Head on. As we got near the Schweinfurt ball bearing works, all of a sudden, we had a swarm of Messerschmitt 109's and 110's and Focke Wolf 190's flying straight for us. You see, if attacked from behind, the tail gunner, both waist gunners, the top gunner, and maybe the guy in the ball turret could fire at a fighter. Five different guys, everybody but the nose gunner and me. From the front only two or three guys could bring fire to bear. On the way in, we saw the plane right next to us collide with a Me 110 killing everyone. Bombers always kept formation. We didn't dodge or weave because a fighter was heading for us. It was up to the fighter to pick up or down. The guy attacking the plane next to us didn't pick in time. We saw other planes go down, too, but Willie got us to the target and Jack, our bombardier dropped our eggs. You could feel the plane lift as soon as all those bombs were out. We turned along with all the other planes and started to think we might just get out of there okay. It was about 10 minutes later that another wave of fighters came at us. I was at my seat in the middle of the plane when I heard the squawking from Gil in the nose turret and Tom at the top gun. Lots of bogies coming right at us. The next thing I heard was a whole series of shouts of pain and repeated hammering on the sheet metal of the plane, about 8 or 10 times in just a couple seconds with a couple small explosions. I looked over at Jack and he was in shock, his eyes bugged out and his mouth dropped open. I ran up to the front of the plane. I stopped for a moment in shock at the doorway. The cockpit was blasted open from 20 mm cannon shells and covered in blood. Some of the holes in the metal of the compartment still had smoke coming off their edges. Willie, the pilot had had his head and neck and some more blown off, just completely blown off! I almost vomited. What a horrible sight, a human being, a fun loving guy, our buddy just a minute before, our leader cut to pieces, nothing above his shoulders, just blood spurting up from his chest, the rest of him in a kind of convulsion. Steve, the co-pilot, was dead, too. He lay on the floor as I rushed in and gurgled one sound then was silent. Looking forward from the cockpit, with the wind whipping in through the holes, I didn't think I saw a nose gun anymore. Checking just back, I think they'd gotten the top gunner too. I probably would've been a goner too if I hadn't left my table up front and gone back to help (the bombardier) with one of the bomb bay door cranks. I wasn't thinking about it, though. I did my job. I took one deep breath and just did what I had to do to keep the rest of us alive. I pulled the remains of Willie out of his seat and away from the controls and tried to remember everything I knew about flying this thing. Jack and I were the only guys who had any idea of how to fly it once Willie and Steve were out of the picture. I pulled back on the controls and pulled us out of the mild dive we were in and back to level. With Jack shouting and hyperventilating over my shoulder I wiped blood off the controls and figured out just where we stood. Everything was okay except for one dial, the fuel guage. We should've had just under a half tank but, instead, the dials said we only had a quarter tank. I shouted for frantic Jack to shut the hell up and sent him to check to see if one of the fuel lines had been hit. A minute later he came back, still frantic and said that one of the tanks was so shot to hell that he didn't understand why it hadn't burned or exploded. I didn't think we could make the channel, never mind England with what we had and told Jack to tell the others we were going to make for France and hope to meet up with resistance fighters there. Jack went back and told the others. I would've radioed the squadron but the radio was shot to hell too. I'm still amazed, looking back, at how I was so calm throughout all this. I followed the rest of the formation into a cloud bank and then turned hard to port while they were all continuing straight and attracting attention from more Messerschmitts and Focke Wolf 190's. From there on, I just tried to stay in or among cloud banks. By a pure stroke of luck, the fighters didn't see us, so while the rest of the bombers headed back northwest toward England, we were flying west southwest toward the Alsace region of France. Somewhere near the Rhine, I had Jack gather parachutes for everyone. There were five of us left, me, Jack the bombardier, Mitch and Freddie the waist gunners and Luke the tail gunner. Mitch said a few words of prayer for our dead buddies and we bowed our heads as the wind whipped past us. We got as far as I thought we could get. The fuel gauge needle was almost brushing the empty mark when I tied the controls in place and we all made our way back to where Mitch and Freddie were. The guys patted me on the back for the job I'd done piloting the huge ship. It was real gratifying. As we pulled on our chutes, Luke joked, "Hey, who knows French here?" "Je connais un peu de francais!" I shouted as the wind whipped past us. "Anybody else know what the hell Wes just said?" asked Luke and seeing no hands he added, "I'm sticking close to Joe College here." We intended on all sticking close, but it's not an easy thing to parachute through heavy cloud cover to the same area. None of us ever saw Jack again after he jumped and pulled the rip cord. We never did. That's just how arbitrary things were in wartime. The rest of us were pretty lucky in that we all came down on the same farm somewhere in Alsace though a couple hundred yards apart. We frantically buried our chutes in a field and looked around from inside a hay stack. I'm embarassed to admit it but as I was floating down to earth most of my thoughts were of how this proved that I was a real man, that taking over and getting us to safety proved that I wasn't a sissy or a girl. It proved that I was a real man. And I took charge once we landed too. I wondered if any of the others noticed that my voice seemed deeper as I gave commands to them in that field. More a man than ever. There weren't any immediately approaching Germans but we decided to get the hell out of there right away just the same. We jogged alongside the road south from that farm till we got to a road intersection with some town names. Unfortunately, none of them were on my map. We kept going along the road that seemed to be heading south all through the night. Only twice did cars pass us. We ducked out of sight each time. The first seemed to be a pair of young lovers to judge by the way the young man and woman were looking at each other. The second was a German truck. We couldn't figure just what the truck was doing traveling a road like that in the middle of the night. It could have been troops searching for us. We couldn't tell. We didn't get a good look at it. We had to stay down till it was out of sight. At last we came to a small village ringed by field after field of nothing but flowers as dawn was breaking. I told the others that in tiny villages like that, just a collection of 8 or 10 houses, a collaborator would seem to be most unlikely. So, we picked one of those houses at the edge of the cluster of them and knocked on the door. In my best French I told the old man who answered that we were American and asked for help. "Resistance?" I asked hopefully. The old man called his wife to the door and I understood most of what he said to her. She looked fearful but kind of excited about the whole deal at the same time. They let us into their house. They gave us food and let us sleep. The old man told us that a man in the much larger town to the south might be able to help us. He drove his horse drawn wagon to the next town with the four of us laying down in the back and covered over with flowers. That was what the man did. He owned a couple of the fields and grew flowers. We apologized to him for tramping through them and he was magnanimous in forgiving us. After a very bumpy hour long ride, we came to a fairly substantial town. Peeking up from the back of the wagon, I could see some paved streets, a mill, a factory of sorts and some three story buildings. The old man drove in and parked the wagon near a two story yellow house on the edge of town. He made a big show of dropping off handfuls of flowers at the door and only re-emerged 5 minutes later. He didn't say a word and drove his cart around the back. "Hurry! Hurry! Get out!" whispered the old man and we did as we were told, the four of us rushing down the step of a bulkhead into the basement of the house. I caught a last glimpse of the old man and nodded a 'thank you' and said a soft, "Merci beaucoup, monsieur!" The owner of this house, Monsieur Beliveau, was a man in his early 40's. His english was terrible, though he tried to communicate, saying things like, "New York Yankees? New York Yankees?" repeatedly. I steered the conversation into French where we could communicate a bit. He told me that he knew a man he called "Captain Jacques" who would be able to help us get to Switzerland, Spain or to somewhere else where we could get back to England. He said he'd contact him and then set up a place to meet. I relayed this to the other guys and everybody let out a sigh of relief. It wasn't a lot of fun sitting there in that dark mildewy cellar all day but the prospect of freedom made the tension and tedium bearable. We spent a lot of the time talking about what we'd do on leave in London once we got back. That night, Beliveau returned and told us where we would meet. He said that the nazis were looking around for flyers and that our plane had crashed ten or so miles west. Beliveau gave us a map he'd made on a sheet of paper showing a certain house number on a certain rue or street and how to get there from his house. I was surprised he wasn't going to give us more help than that, but what did I know about these things. We were told to go there at night and that Captain Jacques would be there in the morning. He offered to disguise us. But what he offered were women's clothes. Dresses. We said no way! Mitch and Freddy said they'd rather be shot than wear his wife's big flower print dresses. So, at around 8 o'clock, the four of us, with dirt caked over our standard army issue khakis, but with new workman's coats over our own bomber jackets, left Beliveau's. We walked by a series of out of the way side streets to a very small house on the edge of town. The whole structure was one separate bedroom and a curtain that could be pulled to hide from view someone using the toilet or shower. Kitchen and living room were together on the one floor that there was. On top of that, when we tried to use the toilet, the damn thing overflowed. Ugh. What a mess. None of us could sleep anyway from the tension of the situation but that lousy smell didn't help. In the early morning, both Luke and I had to go. We couldn't use the toilet so we stepped off into the woods. But the area right by the house seemed to be in view of the nearest house so we went a little further. Just as we started to pee, two trucks came roaring up to the house. Luke and I stopped in mid stream. We ducked down behind some bushes. The trucks were unloading Krauts. Not just Germans but black coated Gestapo and they immediately surrounded the house. "We've gotta get the HELL out of here RIGHT now," I growled across a bush to Luke. "And quietly. Fast and quiet." I don't think I ever ran that fast before. I might have run even faster but held back a bit for Luke to stay with me. He was about the same height and a few pounds more than me but not nearly as good a runner. We ran through woods and, with our hearts pounding, right through a neighborhood of relatively cheap houses into another stretch of woods. We got atop a small hill and looked back to the house where Mitch and Freddy had been. It was hard to see but it looked like they were being led out in handcuffs to a car with Gestapo markings. Luke and I looked at each other and both gulped then both shook our heads in disgust. "Somebody sold us down the river to the fucking Gestapo," groaned Luke. "Beliveau or the guy we were supposed to go to, Captain fucking Jacques!" I suggested. We had no time to speculate. As we watched, the whole group of Germans in front of the house started looking around, obviously for me and Luke, the two who'd gotten away. "C'mon Luke," I said giving him a slap on the shoulder. "They'll be right here in ten minutes tops. We've gotta be two hills over by that time. How good a runner are you?" "I ken run distance but I cain't sprint. I ain't no nigger." That was Luke, the Louisiana tail gunner. I ignored the part about negroes and was just happy to find that Luke really could run distance. He had nothing over a certain speed and got tired fast if I ran him close to that pace but he did fine. I think we were 2 small hills over 10 minutes later. We gave it everything we had, only stopping for a few minutes here and there to gather ourselves, gulp water from streams and to piss. We made a conscious choice that between the options of concealment and flight, we were going to choose flight. We didn't know who, if anyone, we could trust if we stopped. Not at that point. So we ran all day. Almost literally all day. Luke and I kept working our way south through the woods into the night at which point we switched to running along dirt roads instead of through woods. The pure chance that resulted in our not being captured kept coming back to us. If not for both needing to go, we'd have been picked up with Mitch and Freddy. The poor bastards were probably getting beaten up and interrogated right now. Mitch wouldn't crack. Neither would Freddy, come to think of it. Hell, Freddy was quieter but there was a real strong will to that kid. But it probably didn't matter as far as Luke and I were concerned. Whoever that Captain Jacques guy really was, someone had told him there would be four of us. He'd turned two over to the Gestapo. There was no doubt that they'd keep looking for me and Luke. We kept moving, stumbling down dirt paths through the woods in the three quarter moon of a nearly clear night. I remember practicing it over and over in my mind, hoping I'd never have to be saying it, "Mitchell, Wesley, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Corps, 342630342034. Mitchell, Wesley, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Corps, 342630342034. Mitchell, Wesley, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Corps, 342630342034." They weren't going to get anything but that out of me. No sirree. We tried to figure out where the heck we were heading but I didn't know the area. It just wasn't near any of our target, not even alternate targets. At one point, we were running along a ways back of a filling station and Luke found some pieces of a map. He thought he could see a road sign in the distance by a street light. He looked down at the two disconnected pieces he'd joined and finally pronounced. "Okay, we're about to head into Ti...Tiresias." "What?" That didn't sound like a French name. It was some kind of greek name I think. But there wasn't time to try and recall my bullfinch's mythology. I pulled the two pieces from his hands and saw they didn't go together. "You made up a name, dummy!" I scolded him. We tried to piece together the various flaps of that map but couldn't find all the right ones. We gave up with a couple groans and just went back to running south. At last, come morning we paused, out of breath, at what must have been the front gates of a huge estate. A masonry wall, just over waist high, seemed to go on forever in a straight line over hill and dale in both directions. There was an impressive, black, wrought iron gate across a fifty foot gap in the wall that a paved road led to. Atop the gate in a huge arc was the name "R I C H A R D" spelled out in thicker pieces of iron than the rest of the frame. To the left of the gate, on the side near us, standing atop the wall was a nude statue, life sized, in light gray marble of a skinny but still terrifically athletic looking young guy holding a torch high with his right arm. At his feet, the marble of the base was raised in letters that said "The Son of Reason" in French. On the other side of the gate was a real hot tomato, a nude girl, maybe supposed to be the sister of the guy near us; their faces were so similar. She was also holding a torch aloft and I could see but not read lettering at her feet. "Veronica Lake," smirked Luke looking at the nude dame and licking his lips. "Yer crazy. Rita Hayworth!" I whispered. "Veronica Lake's just a little thing." "Well, look how skinny that girl is." "She's just enough of a girl. Juuuuuuust enough. Well, maybe a little more than the minimum with those boobs. But she sure isn't five two like your Veronica Lake. She must be five seven or so." Luke nodded as if to say okay. We were looking around, through gaps in the bushes, for the source of some wheel noise coming our way when we decided to duck back down into the bush and Luke turned to me giggling. "Hey'd you get a load of the pecker on her brother," he smirked. "They put a nigger's thing on a white boy. A nigger's ass, too!" I just shook my head in disgust but said nothing. Luke was a nice guy in most circumstances but he was such a jackass when it came to the subject of negroes. Besides which, we needed to be quiet. A cart pulled by a horse was approaching. Driving it was an old woman and a girl who might have been her granddaughter. It was one of those moments when you act without any great rational basis for what you do, especially after what'd already happened. I jumped out from the bushes to the side of the road. "Madame! Madame! Excusez moi. Je regrette. Mon ami," I pulled on Luke's sleeve and he then stood up out of the bushes, "et moi, nous sommes americains. Nous sommes..." I was trying to remember the word for airmen when the old woman nodded somberly. "Pou-pouvez vous nous aider?" I stammered asking her for help. She sighed deeply and nodded again. She said something to the girl beside her and the girl pulled a canvas off the back of the cart. "Vite! Vite!" she urged and Luke and I obeyed, jumping in amongst a tangle of sticks and wood apparently gathered for kindling. She pulled the tarp back over us and Luke and I had a bumpy and very uncomfortable ride for ten minutes or so. Finally, the cart seemed to slow and then the cart stopped. The girl pulled the tarp just a bit to the side. "Attendez. We must deescovair zat zere are no Germans or vichy ici. Then ze marquis will be told of you." Luke turned to me. "Ah-tawn-day?" "Wait. She told us to wait." After a few nervous minutes, the girl returned with the old woman. "Zee coast, eet is clear," she said probably imitating a Cagney movie she'd seen but gestured for us to stay in the back of the cart and it was slowly driven around the back of what I could see, peeking out from a gap in the tarp was a huge mansion. "Holy cow. Look at this place," I said to Luke. We both marveled at the huge brick structure. The brick was painted white and it had big elegant windows all festooned with marble fleurs-de- lis. I'd never seen anything like it. This mansion had to be more than a hundred wide and a hundred deep, and three stories with a high roof and a grand front entrance of granite and more marble. Biggest house I'd ever seen. I couldn't imagine how rich a guy would have to be to pay for a place like that. Even Frank Sylvester couldn't afford a mansion like that. Not even close. It was only another minute or so's ride but it seemed to take forever. The boss of this whole place, the Marquis was going to be take charge of the situation. I knew that a Marquis was a titled aristocrat, higher than a count and lower than a duke if I remembered right. I wasn't exactly a master of heraldry and all that kind of stuff. But I knew it was an impressive title. That seemed reassuring. Someone that high up would be noticed by a lot of people if he did flyers wrong and would have to watch out for his own people. I guessed that unknown little guys like that Beliveau, Mr. "New York Yankees, New York Yankees" felt like they could sneak around like that more easily. And I smirked to myself at the thought that, as a Giants fan, I should've known that a guy whose idea of americans is the yankees wasn't to be trusted. When the cart stopped, the old woman and the girl got off and walked away without saying a word to us. Luke and I waited a minute then stopped waiting for a word from them and pushed off the tarp. We were behind the mansion and not far from another large wooden structure, a sort of a barn that, at a glance, seemed to double as a garage. Luke and I jumped down from the cart. There was no one there. That seemed very bad. Fresh in our minds was being directed to an empty house as part of the double cross that got Mitch and Freddy captured by the Gestapo. Frantically we looked around till finally, we saw the girl, partly obscured by some elaborately manicured shrubs at the corner of the mansion. The landscaping budget of the place must've been enormous. She was talking to a tallish, skinny boy maybe 16, in a suit. She curtsied to him and the boy patted her shoulder and started briskly toward us. I couldn't figure the kid. Holy smokes, he was a real pretty boy, wavy chestnut brown hair, sharp features, especially cheekbones, and striking, very light blue eyes. He was dressed to the nines, too, in a dark, chalk striped three piece suit, dress shoes, dress shirt and a burgundy tie with an intricate pattern sewn into it. He came toward us with a spring in his step and an air of self assurance. "Daddy's little prince," sniffed Luke. "What a pretty boy," I sneered. We had him pegged. He stopped before us and offered each of us his hand, which we both shook a bit warily. What a crushing grip for a pretty boy. "You must tell me whence you have come," he asked in almost unaccented english and a surprisingly deep voice. "Whe-ence...?" Luke asked, making it into a two syllable word "wh-whadda you mean?" he asked through a squint. "From where did you come gentlemen?" "Oh. We been making our way through the woods for two straight days now, kid," began Luke. "We come from V~~~~~" he said butchering the name of the small town 20 miles away where Mitch and Freddy had been captured. He started to explain about the capture of our pals when I stepped forward and interrupted. I patted the boy on the head. "Look son. No offense to you. You may be a good kid but our friends are probably getting their heads beat in right now by the fucking Gestapo because we didn't know whom we were dealing with and somebody low on the totem pole betrayed us. Go get us the Marquis like the girl said you people would!" I reached forward under his coat, grabbed a belt loop, spun the surprised boy around and swatted his pretty boy ass hard, twice. WhackWhack!! "Go on!" The boy spun himself back around, pushing my arm away and stepped toward me with fire in his light blue eyes. "I will have to suffice, sir! You will get no one else!" he said raising his voice just a few inches from my face. "And we will get nowhere if you waste our time patting my head or my rear. Now tell me all you can about how you've come to be here." Pretty boy and I had a stare down. I wanted to belt him right there. I had anger left over for poor Freddy and Mitch. I wanted to sock somebody French for what'd happened to them. I wanted to sock him right in that skinny adonis face of his. But he wasn't Beliveau and the more I considered it, the more I sort of liked his reaction. I guessed that that's how he should react if he's legit. After a sigh, Luke and I explained everything, from Schweinfurt to that moment. Every single thing. He asked a few questions here and there. Good questions. He wasn't just an awed kid. He was smart. He even seemed to have some idea about how the Krauts worked. And staring eye to eye, ready to fight, I'd gotten a different opinion than that he was just a pretty boy. You see, fellas can be handsome in a weak way or a strong way. The strong cheekbones, the way his strong jaw had been set. The look in those eyes. He was one handsome fella but he was strong. It was there in his eyes as much as in his muscles. There was no doubt that he was strong. Just as well that I hadn't had to fight him. I probably only had him a hundred fifty five pounds to a hundred thirty five or forty. His english was impeccable, too, lots better than my French was and when we finished, he started right in with plans. "You cannot stay at the estate house. It is the easiest place for the Boche to look. You must come with me and my friend Victor to one of the lodges at the extreme ends of the property. You may be able to stay there for a little while till we can figure out how to affect your escape. We'll get someone to drag one of your shirts through the woods and leave something else to create the impression of your leaving in another direction." "You know people in the resistance?" I asked Pretty boy took an extra second before answering. He stared at me in a completely calculating way with those dazzling light blue eyes. I realized that he had to worry that we'd turn him in, too, if caught and interrogated. "I may be able to contact someone. But what you tell me makes me doubt all connections in this area. This 'Beliveau' who sent you to this 'Captain Jacques' may have no idea that he is betraying the poor souls he entrusts to him. We might be in a similar position. Even if I did know someone to whom to send you I would hesitate to do so right away." Luke and I didn't like that. We wanted to leave now. But it made sense. We were in the process of nodding to him when we saw a guy starting toward us from over by the garage building. "Ah, good, Victor," said pretty boy to us. Victor was the darkest skinned fella I'd ever seen and my family didn't live far from Harlem. He was black as coal, not brown skinned or honey or caramel colored or able to pass for white or anything like that. Obsidian. Jet black. "Oh god. A nigger," Luke groaned Pretty boy gave him a stern look. "You have what I believe is termed a southern accent, Luke?" asked pretty boy. Luke nodded. "Your accent is so thick that it almost sounds as though you mispronounce the word 'negro'. Victor is a negro. A simple identifying term with no indication of good or ill attached to it. I know you meant to say it that way. The nazis, who would kill you if they found you, regard all negroes as subhuman. I'm sure you don't want to accidentally seem to think like them, do you?" I couldn't help but smirk. I looked down at my shoes as Luke mumbled "Oh, uh, no, course not. Negro it is." Victor was sort of the negro version of pretty boy, sharp features and a strong jaw, tallish for a kid, I guessed, and skinny. Oh, and pretty boy's real name was Pierre. We heard Victor call him that as they greeted each other with a kiss on both cheeks. "Mon ami Pierre!" "Ah, mon ami Victor!" Luke rolled his eyes and I sighed. Two fellas kissing each other's cheeks! Two fellas! These French! Gosh, no wonder they got flattened by the Krauts! It seemed they were good friends but hadn't seen each other for two weeks. My French was a little rusty but I could catch that much. Luke leaned over toward me and whispered "Great. We gotta rely on two pretty boys who kiss each other, and one of 'em a ni- a negro!" Like I said, Victor was jet black and also about 16 or 17 years old, handsome and skinny like Pierre but in a bit plainer suit three piece suit. I didn't look on him like Luke did, but I have to admit that it was odd to see a face that dark. Pierre said a few sentences in rapid fire French, that I only partly got, to Victor who immediately ran off to the back door of the mansion and rushed inside. I watched Luke watching him, shaking his head in discomfort. "You dumb rebel," I snapped. "Think it through! Is there anyone less likely to be secretly working with the Krauts than a negro? Anyone?!" Luke brightened. "Hey! That's right! That's right," he said. "Ole Pierre here," he said patting Pierre's expensively suited shoulder. "Well, Pierre's dad's got all the money in the county and half the land. Pierre's dad might want to play ball with Jerry to keep his dough. Victor's got nuthin' and they'd sooner put a bullet in his black bee- hind than deal with him. No offense, Pierre." "I take no offense at your words, Luke. But, in point of fact, Victor has a fine house and 30 acres of land." "Oh," mumbled Luke with a sour, puzzled expression and I smirked again at his his having to deal with a negro having different status than they did back in Louisiana. Soon enough, Victor joined us with a backpack for each of us with a bottle of wine, bread, apples, some chicken wrapped in wax paper and a salami in each. The four of us hiked off away from the estate. It was going to be a long trek, Pierre explained. The lodge we were heading to was nearly 6 miles away. Luke whistled. "Damn! You mean your dad owns the land 6 miles away from your house?" I saw Victor and Pierre glance oddly at each other. "Luke, my family owns a very large estate. We once owned even more but my family has insisted on repaying in land those who have provided great service to us such as Victor." It was beautiful land that we hiked through at a brisk pace, Pierre and Victor in front of us. There were some lovely fields on gentle plateaus, orchards as manicured and pretty as possible and pine forests thick and green as could be. Everything was orderly and showed human design. Even the pine forests were all trees planted in row after row of a grid pattern about 20 feet apart. Besides the big plateaus, there were grand hills with incredible vistas. We came around one bend in a path and it seemed like we could see 20 miles away. There were snow capped mountains in the distance. It was fifty degrees in late March. "Switzerland!" gasped Luke. "No, Luke" said Pierre. "The peaks you see are part of France. If you stand on those distant peaks, the next ones most distant beyond them are Switzerland." "Hot diggity! We can just hike out, right?" Victor laughed. "You silly fool. Don't you think the Boche considered the same thing? On top of that, look again at those peaks. Do you see any paths through there?" Victor finished in another deep voiced laugh and I smiled at Luke's exasperation. He wasn't used to being told he was dumb by a negro. I'm sure that didn't happen in Louisiana no matter what Luke said back there. "Well, no, but, ah, couldn't we make one." Victor burst out laughing again. "Oh, sir!" said Victor patting Pierre's shoulder. "We're going to have a lot of work to do here. A lot of work. Ahahahahahaha!" Luke seethed as I smiled. "What Victor has not told you," explained Pierre, "is that even if you could, you would die in an avalanch. The Nazis have cannons that we French used to employ to cause minor avalanches that forestall the occurrence of a truly massive event. If they did not have a rifleman shoot you, they would lob cannon shells into the snow pack and have it cascade down upon you and kill you. There... there may have been such an incident last year. One story is that a very brave young Scottish flyer died from just such a gambit as you suggest, Luke." With the talk of another death, things became more somber and we continued hiking. A short while later, Pierre suddenly turned to me and Luke and asked, "Which of you is the faster?" "Um, I am," I told him. "Good, Wesley, then you run ahead with me. Try to keep up. We'll open the lodge and start the fire for Victor and Luke." With that he started into a full sprint. Keep up? I asked myself. Ha! I'll leave you in the dust pretty boy! I ran after him quite sure that I would catch him. As I said, I was a track star at school and this pretty boy in a three piece suit was an inch shorter than me and couldn't have topped a hundred forty pounds. We ran and ran following the gravel path through meadows and woods, up and down hills. I was sure I could either outlast skinny Pierre in his dress shoes or outsprint him or outsomething him. But it was the damndest thing. That pretty boy just kept motoring, his long legs pistoning away. I tried to sprint past him a couple times. He would see me over his shoulder, grin and speed up however much he had to to stay ahead of me. I was shocked. At some points, the path wound through the woods in a serpentine fashion and I tried to get ahead of Pierre by sprinting through the trees in a straight line, jumping over stone walls and fallen trees in an impromptu steeple chase. Skinny Pierre would grin and jump off the path and beat me even more easily at this. This is what I was best at, the hurdles, the steeplechase, but he was better. He was incredible. He could've been City champ back in New York. It was amazing how effortlessly he sprinted and then jumped over all sorts of obstacles without losing stride. He didn't even breathe hard or make loud steps in the process. Finally, he hurdled a series of fallen trees. I tried to follow suit but caught my foot jumping over the last one and went down hard. Pierre immediately rushed back to me and helped me up. "Are you okay, Wesley?" I nodded as I rubbed my sore elbow. "That's enough fun for us," said Pierre. "It would be inexcusable for one of us to be hurt having fun like a pair of schoolboys." I smiled and nodded my agreement and gave Pierre a pat on the rear as he swung about. "Lead the way, Marquis's son," I chirped and remember noting innocently to myself that, skinny as he was, Pierre sure filled out the seat of his pants pretty darn well. Several minutes later, we loped up to a cabin on a raised piece of ground surrounded by hardwoods. It seemed to me like an odd sort of cabin, with stone masonry walls up to the window sills and then wood frame above that. I asked Pierre about that and he said that it was because snows were so heavy in this area that it was feared that wood frame down low would mildew and rot prematurely. Pierre opened the door and we went inside. He lit some candles. There were huge ones at several places inside and they all put out a pleasant vanilla smell. The furnishings were surprisingly modern and high quality, a lot of stainless steel and varnished woods. There were only three rooms, a separate bedroom a separate bathroom and all the rest under the same high ceiling but I was impressed. It would've made a terrific little hunting lodge. My appreciation was cut short, though, by trying to keep up with Pierre. While I was looking around he'd immediately set about starting a fire after finishing with the candles. I tried to help but didn't do a quarter of the work. Pierre, the pretty boy, in his rich boy's suit was no shirker. I wanted to make up for being so condescending toward him back at the estate house. "This is quite the little hideaway your pop's got here," I said. "You ever take any mademoiselles up here?" I could tell right away that I'd missed but I wasn't sure how. He let out a slow sigh. "Wesley. I take no offense. You had no way of knowing... but my father is dead. He was killed in the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940. I am the Marquis." I cradled my drooping head in my hands. "Oh my god. I'm so sorry, Pierre. What a jerk I've been to you! I treat you like a little kid and- and I make all these references to your father when... Jeez, I'm real sorry, Pierre." He let me half hug him about the shoulders but remained ramrod straight the whole time. Then he took a seat by the fire and I followed suit. "In a way, it's a curiosity to me how I now accept his passing. I loved him so much. It was so difficult at first. He was an example to me of all that I should wish to be. I was just turned 14 when he was killed. Victor's father was with him. Victor's father was my father's... how do you say it... right hand man?" "Yeah, that's it." "They were in Holland on business. War had been declared 8 months before but nothing had really happened. And no one expected Holland to be attacked. Holland had been bypassed in World War I. It posed no threat to anyone. Certainly the city of Rotterdam posed no threat to anyone either. But the nazis bombed it almost as a warning of what they would do to the cities of anyone who opposed them." He ran one hand through his wavy hair and looked me right in the eye. "I was so furious at his passing, Wesley. I wanted to kill every single German. Every single one. But I was 14 years old. I could not join the army. All I could do was allow my hatred to fester and watch in anger as France fell while those who voted for Blum could scarcely have done less to defend her perhaps only if they completely collaborated." "Blum?" "The leader of the communists and not a dishonorable man himself, but, mon dieu, his followers! You see, France was and still is bitterly divided. And the communists showed no particular interest in fighting the Boche until June 22nd, nineteen forty one. This Captain Jacques to whom you refer may be one of them secretly sabotaging efforts of those of other parties in the resistance. Or he may be the opposite. Or he may have simply been co-opted by the Boche." "You keep saying that, Pierre. Who's the 'Boche'?" "The Boche means 'the German enemy'," he said, then sighed. "But I should be honest and admit all the humanity that I perceive, Wesley. I am not the 14 year old boy that I was when I first became Marquis. Since that time, I have had several encounters with German officers searching the property, insulting me or telling me that I must billet their troops on the estate. Sometimes, when a brutal and coarse nazi threatens me or belittles me for my age or rants and raves, one of the others present will roll his eyes, shake his head or have an expression as he looks at me clearly indicating that he disapproves of such behavior, almost an expression of apology. I cannot even wish the demise of all those in the same uniform as the ones who murdered my father." Somehow, Pierre and I were just able to speak openly to each other right from the start, we just felt at ease with each other. It was just one of those things. "I lost my pop when I was 9 years old, so I know what you went through," I told him. Pierre sighed. "I'm very sorry, Wesley," he said, offering his hand. "What about the rest of your family?" I asked. "My mother lives in the estate home and tries not to cry, more than three years later, at the mere thought of my father. It's not explicit policy that she has voiced at any time but my mother's well being requires that she hug me or squeeze my arm or touch her hand to my cheek when I return to the house from a trip of even the smallest duration. My brother and sister, Antoine and Nicole are two and three years younger than me. I had them flown out just before the Boche arrived in 1940. They are actually in Dakar on the west coast of Africa, or were. They may be at our home in Tunis now. I've been told that it has been vacated by Field Marshall Kesselring. I-I miss my brother and sister very much." "How did they deal with you becoming Marquis at, what did you say, 14? Were they jealous?" "Perhaps, though I didn't see it. They worried for me. They knew I would want to do as my father would have. And here, we had the most incredible circumstance, our France being overrun by a despotic regime of thugs." "What about all the other people on the estate? How'd they take a skinny 14 year old becoming their boss?" As I watched, he shook his head and sighed at the recollection. "Everyone worried for me. It was quite remarkable. I-I spent many nights awake pondering what would be the wise choice my father would have made in my stead. I sat in the chair behind the desk of his study feeling that all the hundreds of leather bound volumes of the collected wisdom of mankind on the shelves were mocking me that I could not produce a remedy for the situation of the estate. I was sure that I must not have thought of something. I must not be working hard enough to protect the estate and all the people on it. As I turned 15 years old, I had lost 10 pounds from my already slender frame and went about with dark circles under my eyes as well as a persistent cough. It got so bad that my mother had a doctor examine me. "After quite a bit of uncomfortable poking, prodding and measuring, he told me I was killing myself. Quelle Surprise. But I couldn't stop. I was being killed by my own will and my own concern. It seems so stupid, to be killing oneself in that way. But I could not stop myself. I couldn't. The terrible stress only eased when one of the oldest men still working on the estate approached without provocation and wrapped his arm around me before remarking to me that a large part of my father's good judgement lay in knowing that sometimes there is no good choice but only choices involving varying degrees of harm. In such a case, the only thing worth reproach is not choosing that of the least harm. "It must seem to you such a simple and obvious thing and me to have been a foolish kid but my father." He sighed and his eyes got a bit watery. "My father was so wise and always seemed to me to create benefits through his actions. Always. I was wrestling with quandaries having no possible happy outcome and I thought that there must be one. I thought I was, how do you say? letting my father down. My mother is convinced that I stopped growing from the toll my worries were taking. And she may be right. My shins positively ache as I go to sleep now, so I know I'm starting another growth spurt but I didn't gain height at all in my 15th year. "And the response to the situation from everyone on the estate was quite touching. Here were huntsmen, woodsmen, orchard workers, chefs, maids and others who, yes, could certainly have resented my ascending to the title, just a 14 year old boy. Yet, every hand on the estate seemed to reach out to pat my shoulders and console me. And everyone knew that I'd lost weight, even with the disguising cover of my suits because everyone hugged me and felt how my worries had stripped the flesh from me." He chuckled recalling, "It was quite ridiculous at dinner time, the chorus of voices imploring me to eat more. One after another, whoever passed by. Another portion, please Pierre. More Pierre more! No matter how much I ate, I was exhorted to eat more. Even had circumstances been normal, I was a 15 year old boy eating huge quantities of food, as it was, without gaining weight. And yet I did nothing but wither till the simple counsel of that old man pulled me out of my vicious cycle of worry." I leaned back in my chair and looked at him, in a whole different way. Holy smokes. This was a different perspective on life for a rich guy, an aristocrat. Everything was responsibility for him. I had never thought of things being like this for one of these guys, only the lifelong gravy train that guys like Frank Sylvester seemed to be riding. Unlike that coasting louse, this kid had been destroying himself worrying about whether he was doing right for everyone as his country was collapsing around him. "The people on the estate must think a lot of you, to know what the burden of doing right was doing to you," I said softly. Pierre shrugged. "Perhaps. I think a lot of them. And that is a pure double entendre," he laughed. "That old man, his name was Felix. He passed away earlier this year. I got word he was quite ill and rode a horse through deep snow to another lodge like this one in the opposite direction, where he lay. I was so happy to get there before he passed away. I got to sit beside him on the bed and tell him that he had saved my life with his words. It gave him a minute of happiness. It put a smile on his face even as his health was failing conclusively. And that, in turn, brought such warmth to me." He chuckled. "It's funny, Wesley, isn't it, the virtuous cycle that such things create?" I nodded. I had no idea what to say to this tremendous boy. Several more moments passed in silence beside the crackling fire before he spoke. "No one on the Richard estate will betray you or Luke. You may rest assured of that." Luke and Victor joined us a minute later. Victor had told Luke that Pierre was the Marquis on the way and Luke apologized to Pierre. Victor and Pierre helped us get set up in there and arranged a schedule for their checking in on us. Victor would be there the next morning. Pierre the next evening. Victor brought us more food the next morning though we hardly needed it. It was funny to watch Luke interacting with this sophisticated negro fella who owed him no special deference. Victor said that they were checking with all their contacts about the nazis' search for us. That evening, after a day of Luke and I sitting around and doing nothing, Pierre came to the lodge. He brought us news that the search for the two remaining flyers seemed to be getting closer to the estate but with no particular focus to it. Luke and I went to sleep that night, me in the bed, he on the couch as it was my turn, the two of us feeling pretty optimistic. But the next morning, instead of just Victor arriving at the lodge door, it was both Pierre and Victor visiting us. And they had bad news. Pierre said that they had a man who worked in a garage used by the nazis. This man had told them that three companies of soldiers, maybe more, would descend on the estate by afternoon, that half of them were already in place south of the estate. He'd estimated their number by the petrol requirements. Pierre explained that this was extremely bad. They'd endured two of these searches of the estate before and he didn't think there was a reliable place to hide. He said the nazis would fire bursts of machine gun fire into mere clumps of pine needles in the woods and made a mess of the estate house each time. "But you said nobody on the estate would betray us, Pierre!" I felt so let down. "I don't think anyone did, Wesley. One of the huntsmen reported hearing teams of dogs gradually nearing the estate. They must have tracked you two to the estate. And now, they'll search all the lodges and, indeed, every square foot of our property. It is not only those on the estate who know about these lodges. In times of peace we never tried to be secretive about the estate's features." Luke was frantic. "Well, what do we do? I ain't goin' down without taking out a few kraut fucking bastards with me. An' I ain't gonna be no punching bag fer no Gestapo!" "There's one other thing we can do," said Pierre and he handed me a small book with a tan leather cover to it. I inpected it closely and I shuddered. What was that leather? "What's this? A bible?" "No. It's-it's a book that will bring you good luck... an escape if you just read this page," said Pierre opening it to a page near the back. I looked him in the eye. "Are you kidding?" "No. It is good fortune to read that. Just-just read it, Wesley, and I'm sure you'll be able to escape." I shook my head. What the hell was going on here? I glanced at an equally surprised Luke. Had this incredibly hard working, logical guy gone loopy on us? He saw my expression and repeated his words. "Just read this Wesley. There's not much time." I sighed. Things must really be desperate. "Okay," I said through another head shake and scanned the page. The writing on the old weathered page was ornate, but I had no idea what the hell it said. What language was this? It wasn't French. It wasn't German. "Just read it aloud and then knock on the door when you're done," said Pierre and with that, he and Victor left the room and closed the door behind them. I looked at Luke with an eyebrow raised in question. He was shocked at Pierre's falling apart, too. He shrugged. "Maybe it's just some sort of French good luck thing," he said. Oh, what the hell, I thought. It's harmless. I sounded out all the words phonetically, running quickly through it in a monotone. I shook my head and sighed at this silliness then stepped toward the bedroom door when I suddenly felt an incredible chill pass through my spine. "G-gosh...!" I dropped to all fours on the floor and arched my back like a cat in heat offering herself to a tomcat as it passed through me. What the heck was this? I rose to my feet and immediately a wave of heat passed through me that couldn't have been exceeded by actual flames. From my knees I saw that Luke was in similar pain, gasping at the feeling of burning up, looking at his hands for actual flames. "Jayzus! Um on fahr!" he whispered. What the hell was going on?!?! I fell forward against the door and almost immediately it swung open. Pierre caught me and picked me up. "I'm sorry, Wesley. I'm very sorry. You'll escape but there will be repercussions." That was the last thing I remembered, Pierre saying that as he laid me down upon the bed. My dreams were so odd. I quickly forgot them not long after finally waking. I didn't know what to make of them. I think they included a lot of pretty boy Pierre and a surprising amount of handsome Harry Howland, another navigator with whom I'd gone through navigator school with and who was part of our wing. I barely knew Handsome Harry, the casanova of the base. Ugh. As I woke and the images of those two were slipping through the fingers of my consciousness, I became clearly aware of something else, discomfort. When I woke, I felt so out of sorts, all minor aches and pains from head to toe. I groaned. Where was I? Warm linen against my skin? I was in bed. I rubbed my eyes and yawned and heard something next to me or rather someone. I turned to my left across the pillow and saw a beautiful brunette. She was gorgeous! Had I died and gone to heaven? But it wasn't heaven. In the half light I could see that I was in the bed of the lodge bedroom. Oh my god. I gasped. I realized that my hand was-was on her-her breast. I quickly removed it. I looked up nervously at the ceiling apologizing feverishly in my head. I'm sorry miss. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Did-did she notice? I waited a suitable interval to see if she reacted but the only sound from her was the slight moan of pleasant sleeping. I tried to get my bearings. I'm in bed with a beautiful naked girl. Did- did I screw her? I-I couldn't remember a thing. But maybe I did. My butt sure felt sore, as though I'd been in like Flynn all night long. I wracked my brain and recalled that weird book and Pierre and then... nothing. Then this. I slowly turned toward her again. What a hot ticket! I watched her for a minute just lying there, a girl pretty enough to be in pictures. Was this supposed to be some kind of last reward before getting killed by the frigging Krauts, a beautiful girl? Is that what the French would do? I couldn't resist and slowly edged my arm closer to hers so that our skin touched. Gosh, it was electric just to be touching a girl like that. My skin all over my body felt tingly. This was amazing. And just then, she woke. The girl who should be in the movies right next to me woke. She groaned a few times and wiped her pretty eyes and then looked at me. What a look she gave me. No girl had ever looked at me with such excitement. Oh boy! "Hey sugar," she whispered enticingly then reached oddly for her throat. I couldn't resist. I didn't know who the girl was but I rolled over and climbed atop her and planted a big kiss on her lips. My head was spinning. At the same time as I felt sore and out of sorts all over, I felt terrific to be kissing a beautiful girl like that. But even kissing felt so... odd. My lips felt fat, well, perhaps not fat but full. There was so much of them between hers as we kissed and nibbled at each other. And my behind felt sore, well, not really sore but, I don't know. Heavy? Swollen? Yeah, swollen. Big. She kept rubbing it with her hands and I thought she must have the smallest hands ever because they made my flat little distance runner's rear end feel big somehow. I quickly forgot it as I became engrossed in kissing her and fondling her. I felt the most wonderful sensations kissing her and making out with her. My whole body was tingly. This was better than my only time with Sue. This girl must have been experienced to make a fella feel like that. Only an experienced girl would be reaching between my legs like that. I remember a fleeting thought again that maybe Pierre had set me up with this girl. It was hard to figure, but I was making time with a gorgeous dame who could be Rita Hayworth's sister. What was there to complain about? But then, those sensations started to feel even more wonderful but in places where I shouldn't have felt much. Why was the girl underneath me rubbing my chest like that and why did it feel so good? Why did my chest feel so big, so... flabby? "Hold on," I said as I sat up straddling her, but my voice came out weird. It sounded high, like a girl's. It sounded like Veronica Lake had said those words. I tried to clear my throat to say it again, but the girl who should be in pictures beneath me didn't hold on. As I stared down at her, I think I started to go into shock at the sight at the periphery of my vision, two big breasts not on her but on-on me, as she reached for my thing. Oh my gosh! What the heck's happening? Her hand disappeared into my crotch and I started to feel the most wonderful tingle through my whole body. I closed my eyes, perplexed but pleased. Wait a minute! How can my chest look like...? But, oh, was I pleased! I thought I was getting close to-to climaxing on the girl but suddenly realized I couldn't feel my-my... well, the part with which I would. I jumped off her and off the bed. "What the hell's going on here?" I demanded but it sounded, again, like a line that had been delivered by Veronica Lake. I looked down at myself. I looked like a hot tomato of a dame, like I WAS Rita Hayworth or what I expected she'd have looked like without her clothes. "What the hell's going on here?" I demanded less forcefully this time and reached for my throat. What had happened to my voice? Then I looked at my hands as I did. They were a girl's dainty little hands. NO!!! I stared at the long mirror on the closet