Louis Shalako: Heaven Is Too Far Away, Chapter Thirteen. Louis Shalako.

Chapter Thirteen

High Performance Aircraft

Betty loaded me up with a dozen books on engines. She was sensible enough to ask a few relevant questions, no doubt in order to serve me better.

“What are you doing?” She asked. “What are you working on?”

“Um, er, high-performance aircraft.” I admitted sheepishly.

This was supposed to be a top-secret operation, and here I was in the library.

“Maybe you should talk to someone who races aeroplanes, or automobiles, or even motorcycles.” She suggested. “What’s in the books may be only what someone is willing to tell you.”

She thought for a moment.

“Speedboats?” She wondered.

Good girl. Smart girl. High-performance engines would be strategic information.

The auto builders were all in competition with each other. So were aircraft builders. This was one aspect of the problem I hadn’t seriously thought through. This was probably one good reason for the existence of the Royal Aircraft Factory. It was a government establishment. Sharing information for the benefit of all. Should have put that in my little presentation. I’ve noticed that. One always thinks of one more thing, something truly brilliant, to add on just a little too late.

“Where would be a good place to go to talk to someone?” I asked her. “Brooklands?”

“Why don’t we look in the telephone directory?” She suggested. “We could look up motor sales, engineers, mechanics, motor-cycle shops. It’s just a matter of some creative thinking.”

“Huh.”

“We’ll soon knock up a list of names for you.”

She was right. There they were. All over the greater London metropolitan area.

“Here we go. Mr. Throckmorton. He has a little three-wheeler which did a very good test a few years ago. He holds an eighty-something mile per hour record at Brooklands.” She reported. “I think it was a seven-hundred-fifty-cc engine.”

“It’s too bad they don’t let women into the Corps.” I said to the girl. “I have rarely met a man as sensible as you are.”

“I know.” She sighed. “I know.”

And then we were both laughing into each other’s eyes.

***

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

When I said Betty was a ‘big’ girl, I don’t mean to give the impression that she was a big, fat, sloppy thing. She was three sizes bigger than the classic, yet modernistic idea of what a woman should be, and she had strong-looking shoulders to boot.

Her face was maybe a little rounder, her hair a little shorter, her lips a little too full, her eyes a little too small. She had thick, wavy brown hair with a lot of curl to it. Nice pointy breasts, and nice legs. She wore a black dress, ending just above the ankle, and a white blouse, done up to the neck with a black ribbon tie.

She looked like a librarian, oddly enough.

When she asked me to go with her to the park for lunch, I did raise one objection. I hadn’t brought anything to eat. She told me not to worry. She would show me where to get a sandwich, ‘quite quickly,’ as she kind of read my mind. I sometimes skipped a meal in London, rather than get in a lineup early and stand there for hours waiting for a seat. As a single man, alone, I was always sitting tucked onto the end of someone else’s booth.

I threw the books into the case and went with her.

She led me to a sunny little spot. We sat and ate sandwiches and drank our coffees.

Then she had her way with me.

I can’t honestly say how I let that happen. I was telling her about France, and mentioned someone’s name. She knew the name. She’d met him. He was a friend of someone she knew, and when she told me their name, I knew of them. In fact, Jerry spoke of them often. It was a very small world, we concluded. She was laughing at the conclusion of my story. And upon throwing her head back, I couldn’t help but notice she had very fine skin, very smooth looking, at her throat and under her chin, and it was just the way she looked at me.

It made me realize that while not the love of my life, whom I probably couldn’t have anyway, Betty was a very attractive woman.

Just then she said. “Whatever happened to old Jerry?”

She waited, very still, intent on my face.

Jerry was the guy who figured so humorously in the tale.

“Oh, he got killed,” I had to tell her. “He got shot down at Bapaume. The plane caught fire…”

The memory of that plane, Jerry and Albert, his observer, falling in flames into the cloud-tops just made me kind of lock up real tight inside.

It was the look on her face that did it. I wished I hadn’t said that. She had a weird look on her face, with the shock of it. She must have missed the notice in The Times, but they never went into details either. She looked down and away. I had hurt her.

Something funny happened. A dam burst. Water began flowing from my eyes and it wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t see. All the sounds of the city around us just dropped away. I realized that I was making a scene, yet nothing mattered except the pain, and the grief. There was a pounding in my ears, and snot poured from my nose.

All my fallen comrades, all those young innocents. All those victims.

I fell forward, and if she hadn’t been more alert and right on top of things, I probably would have smacked face-first into the dirt.

I beat myself about the head, gnashed my teeth, and growled like a bear. I howled in pain and anguish.

She held me tight.

“There, there.” She said. “Shush, shush.”

She stroked my hair, and my head, rocking me back and forth on the grass beside the bench. Incoherent words. My story, Jerry’s story, gushed out of me like a torrent of guilt and shame and agony. She held me in her arms and I told her all about it.

“It’s going to be all right.” She said in a small voice. “It’s all right.”

She held me for twenty minutes or so, until I simmered down, and then she took me home. It took a while to get a grip on myself, after that one. She led me into her flat. She closed and locked the door. She told me to take off my shoes and I did. She made me sit on the couch. I sat there, numb. She was in the kitchen. A drawer opened, a door slammed. She brought me water. I blew my nose on my red bandana, something I habitually carried. She kicked off her shoes and took off her coat.

“I am so sorry.” I said sheepishly. “I really don’t know what came over me. I’m just tired out from all the stress and strain.”

Body’s all aching, wracked, and wracked with pain.

She began to undo her dress. She stood there, staring into my eyes with the strangest look. Her skirt fell to the ground. Then she stepped out of it, and I gaped. It suddenly started to sink in.

She shrugged out of her blouse.

She smelled like a woman, and she stepped forward.

“Let’s get you undressed and into the bath.” She instructed, and I didn’t resist.

I was putty in her hands, at that point. She obviously realized it, for she turned away and went down a corridor, and soon there was water running in the distance.

Now was my chance, if I wanted to leave.

There, it has been said.

I did not leave.

She returned, and dropping to her knees in front of me, she removed my socks just as a mother would remove the socks of a child. No sexy lasciviousness, no eye-ball flirting, just a gentle, almost businesslike touch. A no-nonsense touch. She tossed them aside, stood up and told me to remove my jacket. I stood up to do so. Clumsily, I tried to grab onto her and hug her and kiss her on the lips.

She was so demure, yet totally in control of what happened next. Cleverly anticipating what was a pretty likely tactic, she pushed me back down on the couch. She was avoiding my eyes…ignoring eye contact in the most frustrating way.

I was agape at all this. She was in no mood for explanation.

“Belt.” She ordered.

I undid it, pulled it out and handed it to her.

“Up.” She said brightly, like a nurse to a patient.

I lifted my bum up and she pulled my pants off. Turning away, she expertly folded them and placed them neatly over the back of a convenient chair. She bent to pick up my socks. The view from where I was sitting was enough to take my breath away. It was more frightening than the first day I ever went up in the air. I had at least read a few books on aircraft and flying, but there are no really good books on women…at least I don’t think so.

She wore black, lacy stockings and a garter belt, and panties with little flowers and an elasticized band. The fit wasn’t too tight, but just right. She shrugged out of her bra, and reaching out, put it on my head like a double dunce hat. She wore little pearl earrings, and a bracelet, and perfume, and she was unbuttoning my shirt, so I quickly shrugged out of it. Her bra fell aside on the floor.

“You need to forget.” She told me gently, in a low and slightly husky voice.

I stared at her tummy, her hips, her legs, her breasts, the whole package. I was no virgin, but up till now, my sexual maneuverings weren’t…so explicit…so visible.

I was afraid to even touch her, if the reader can believe it.

Sneaking a peek at Mary-Ann Smedlowzitz through the gap in their bathroom curtains while she stood nude in front of the mirror, was nothing as compared to this. Any other sexual knowledge I might have had was about the same level of sophistication. Groping around with Sally, that one time in the back of the barn, on a hot summer’s day, when I got her top off, things like that. And the first time, at a house in Exeter, where there was, ‘a very nice lady, very clean, and it only costs a pound….’

“Make sure you wear your prophylactic, and be back on base by ten…Anyone gets the dose, that man will be put on report. K.P duty for a week…Good luck, soldier.”

“Hey Stan, I’ll go if you will…”

That kind of thing. Speaking purely objectively, I was about sixteen, and it was a fleeting sort of experience. More like a quick twenty push-ups and then off you go to the shower, lads.

“You need to rest, and have a bath, and let me take care of things.” She crooned, then tenderly bending down, she kissed the socket-like, puckered-up scars on my legs.

She pulled my undershirt off over my head, and taking my hand, led me in to the bathroom.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.” I thought.

Quickly and shyly pulling off my shorts, I stepped right smartly into the frothy water, which was quite hot, by the way. I sat down slowly and gently, feeling the heat seep into my lower back. My knee ached as usual. She picked up a sponge and began soaking me down. She washed me thoroughly all over, soaping in between my toes, behind my ears, doing my neck, and all.

Finally I dunked down into the water and held my breath, listening to the tinkling and gurgly watery sounds. I tried to think it all out while underwater, but wasn’t having much luck. Sitting up again, she toweled my eyes and then washed my hair. The wall-paper had cheerful yellow roses on a sky-blue background. The memory is quite clear after all these years.

“There we go.” She said. “All done.”

She motioned to get up and I stepped out onto the little rug so she could dry me off. I was ‘fully erect,’ but we just ignored it as I stood there in anticipation. Then she gently pushed me out of the room.

“Haven’t we got, um, a dressing gown or something?” I asked in trepidation.

Luckily the sun was beating in through the windows, but I still felt a little shiver of something.

She grabbed my hands, mischievously.

“Oh, no. No, no, no. No. No, no.”

“I want to see everything.” She added, and led me into the bedroom.

She put me on the bed, and I lay on top of the bedspread. Stark naked, with my thing standing up for all the world to see. She slowly took out the pins from her hair. Creeping onto the monstrous bed, on her hands and knees, I could not believe what she did next.

Something I had heard about, but never experienced.

She was performing what they call ‘fellatio,’ in Latin.

“Whoa. Stop.” I gasped.

I never believed this would happen to me, never.

Not in my wildest dreams.

“Slow down. What are you doing?” I said, holding onto her hair, her head, trying to push her back, but she just kept plunging up and down.

And I was about to get out of control.

Finally she came up for air, sensing that I was squirming around quite a bit.

“What’s wrong with that?” She gasped with a glint of something wild and desperate in her eyes.

“Nothing.” I replied. “At least let me return the favour. There’s something I’ve been meaning to try.”

She readily agreed, and was soon happily ensconced on my face. Finally, after some time, she turned about. Gazing deeply into my eyes, she slowly impaled herself on me, as I stared, pretty wild-eyed by now I should think.

Stroking her breasts, milky white and oh, so soft, sucking her nipples, holding onto her bum as she slid up and down.

“See, that’s all we need, a little tender loving care.”

You need to forget.

“Love me, love me,” She suddenly squealed, and then she was out of control, the sight of which drove me into the same near-frenzied state.

Finally she subsided, moaning, and I thrashed around a little more, then collapsed back on the bed. We lay in a pool of warm sweat, and clung to each other.

“Holy smokes,” I said, and shuddered several more times.

Is that what sex is really like? All of the time?

If only I had known. No wonder people talk about it so much.

END