(# 7 in a series of Skeeter Kitefly’s Titular Assets)
 

by P. S. Ehrlich

High on a hill in an Eldorado, late one summer in the Derelict Days of ’74, little Kelly Rebecca awaited her passage into conjugal womanhood.   Her heart was filled with romance, her lungs with demonweed, her stomach with partly-digested popcorn (she and Frid having gone to see Their Movie, Blazing Saddles, for the third time)—her ears with Roberta Flack on the Caddy stereo, and her haltertop with nothing at all as it dangled from the Caddy gearshift knob.

There being more Lovers Leaps than Lanes in Demortuis, they were parked atop a secluded knoll above a subdivided field at the end of a gravel path dubbed “Chancery Court” (by an unlettered realtor who thought it sounded upscale).

Honest-to-God moonlight streamed into the aged Cadillac, against whose vast leather backseat the stretched-out Kelly Rebecca looked very small and very rosy.   Not that she ever appeared any other size or shade, not at 4’11” and 98 pounds, with a disposition that if anything was oversanguine.   In short, she was the Compleat Peach:   trimly curvaceous, altogether edible, hardly needing the Revlon and Cover Girl applied to her facial bloom—or having her ripe round yabbos squashed out of recognition by basketbrawler Frid’s dribblehardened hands.   Not that this impeded Kelly Rebecca’s singing along with Karen Carpenter, reinterpreting “Superstar”:

LONG ago
and oh so FAR away
you felt me up ‘n’ through
my silky pantyhose;

and YOUR cigars
they smelled so sweet ‘n’ clear
‘cause they weren’t Dutch Masteeers—
but Tipparillos…

Actually what smelled was a half-spent joint in the Caddy ashtray.   Nor had Kelly Rebecca put on pantyhose tonight:   merely a pair of denim cutoffs that Frid was easing down her pretty little angel thighs, revealing bikini briefs that were demurely white except for the word Saturday embroidered upon them in suggestive crimson.   These followed the cutoffs by gradual degrees, Frid trying to prolong the moment and mutual anticipation to the uttermost possible length—

—a point already reached by Frid’s dingdong, straining its leash to such an extent that he expected it to rip his face off his skull when Kelly Rebecca at last lay fully exposed before him, with only tan lines, hoop earrings, and a macramé choker offsetting her radiant moonlit nudity.

“Ohhhhhhh, Skeeter,” groaned Frid.

“Ohhhhhhh, Punchy,” she giggled up at him.

*

Frid’s mother was as Icelandic as they come in the Great American Middle West; but in her farmer’s daughter’s heart she had always longed for a genteel British uppercrusting—high tea served in veddy refined drawing rooms—instead of being raised cornhuskily by calloused hand.

At least she was able to give her own children proper names:   Wendy and Peter and Alice and last of all Christopher Robin.   But all four grew up thick and blunt and dour, none of them inclined to pop by Buckingham Palace or the Second Star on the Right—least of all Christopher Robin, who started using his fists while still in his veddy refined bassinet.

All the Frid kids were truculent when they weren’t being belligerent; but by the age of 16, Christopher Robin’s attitude was to treat ‘em all rough—parents, siblings, teachers, classmates, guys on basketball courts, and girls on leather backseats—because even if they didn’t like it, he sure did.   Offcourt as well as on, he tended to foul out, though not before scoring first.

That is, until he encountered Skeeter Kitefly.

He’d been wrestling profanely with his sumbitching combination lock at the close of another sumbitching schoolday, when he realized he was being laughed at by some wimpy little pissant Q-ball nearby.   SUMBITCH!   He pivoted, ready to spit out the tried-and-true What’s so funny?? followed by Whudda YOU looking at?? directly into the wimpy little pissant Q-ball’s soon-to-be-punched-and/or-rammed-against-a-locker face.

But in fact the only words Frid got out of his mouth were “Uhhhh…” and “Wha’?”—provoking a fresh burst of laughter from the itsy-bitsy hotstuff babe beside him:   the top of whose cute blonde clownlike head barely came up to Frid’s armpits.   Which burst forth with coarse hot sweat to accompany his tying of tongue.

Thus she always affected him, Frid the Enforcer, who’d been cutting a heedless swath through the girls of Bonum High School for years (well, months) already.   But in Kelly Rebecca’s cartoon-chipmunk presence, both his ‘pits and tongue went haywire repeatedly—right up to the fraught point when she at last allowed herself to be unhaltered, uplifted, and depantsed for the very first time by anybody.   With Frid all the while sweltering and mumbling, staring as she called his name:

“Ohhhhhhh, Punchy!”

Some trace of the Proper English Lad his mother dreamt he might be kept Frid in painful check, held him back from savage ravishment punchinello-style—even with Skeeter’s most appetizing yummies on moonlit display.   This in spite of all his ferocity, his aggressiveness, his skill at setting picks and grabbing rebounds, his lethal Icelandic elbows that intimidated opponents near and far and made C. R. Frid the star varsity power forward he was—

—or ought to be, if his violent bristling temper didn’t relegate him to the JV squad again this season.

“Hey c’mon!” Skeeter was enthusing beneath him, “I wanna watch you put it on!”

Frid hadn’t known what she was talking about, at first, when she’d insisted he had to wear a thingee.   “What, you’re not on the Pill?”

“I’m 15!   Where’m I gonna get any Pill?”

“Well, don’t you got an older sister?”

“Sadie’s off backpacking through Portugal!   What’s she supposed to do, AIRMAIL me one?”

So Frid got as many thingees as he could afford from a vending machine at the truckstop and spent yesterday rehearsing what to do with them.   Were you supposed to inflate each one balloonlike before it could be wearable?

“I have done this before, y’know!” he informed the eagerly-beaming Skeeter.   “Just not so much with … one o’ these.   (Goddam! how’s it supposed to fit … oh.)”

Doing this under Skeeter’s bright blue gaze—or rather over it, Frid’s 6’3” jackknifed above her 4’11” on the Eldorado backseat, while the Eldorado radio kept reminding Rikki not to lose that number.   Don’t lose it: good advice for the nobler fraction of Frid’s brutish nature, not wanting to hurt Kelly Rebecca, she being so tiny and trusting and Compleatly Peachlike and all—

—Frid holding back so much for so long that the impatient Peach finally took him in hand and put him in place, scoring an immediate bull’s eye.

On then to the Doing of the Deed, with Skeeter’s demonweedy giggles escalating to guffaws and then to fullbellied shouts of joy that assaulted Frid’s left eardrum and made him dimly wonder just how far beyond Chancery Court she could be heard.

But even as they heaved and throbbed and plunged and squirmed together, Frid’s right eardrum kept hearing Don’t lose that number!   Frantically he turned his thoughts to basketball, himself at the freethrow line, a roaring adoring crowd on every side: making this one point will put Frid on the Bonum varsity squad—no, in the starting lineup for Marquette or UCLA—no, for the Bucks or the Lakers!—hence Skeeter’s blissful shouts of praise and affirmation—yet don’t lose it!   Keep cool calm and dry (despite the armpits) till it all feels just right and then he shoots! he scores! the crowd goes wild! and through the celebratory enveloping din they feel more than hear a distinct single fateful

—tssst—

as of latex losing its grip.

Skeeter hooked convulsive little feet into Frid’s matted ‘pits and vaulted him aloft.   “Oh JEEZ oh JEEZ oh JEEZ—” she went, capping this with the eternally pre-answered woman’s cry:   “What did you DO??”

A question already answered as a vast legacy of protoFrids made their presence felt below.

“The SEAT!” yelled Frid, swabbing away at both the Cadillac’s and Skeeter’s with the handiest scrap of fabric.

“Noooo!” Skeeter wailed, “I’ve gotta wear those home!”

“Oops!—sorry—”

“Well I’m not gonna put ‘em on now!   Why did you DO that?”

“This is my dad’s car!   He’s gonna kill me!”

“NO-ew!   I mean why—I mean, what’re we gonna DO?”

“Uhhhh … wha’?...”

Hysterics knocking at her door: “What’ll we name it, then?   ‘Punchy Junior?’”

“Shut UP!   Just shut UP!”

She resorted to tears then, partly from woe but also outrage at having been yelled at.

“I dunno!   I dunno what we’re gonna do!   Don’t push me!”

“Oh just take me home,” cried Skeeter, bleakly rehammocking her mammets in their Peter Max-colored haltertop.   “If you can managed to do that—Christopher Robin!!”

*

Frid did not make the varsity that season or any other, but labored on as a JV.   Far from boasting of his conquest to friends and teammates, he described Kelly Rebecca to one and all as a frigid lutefisk, belying all appearances and indications.   Word of this slander reaching Skeeter’s ears, she vowed to avenge her hotstuff honor.

Her apprehensions about Punchy Jr. were relieved naturally in a couple of weeks; but Skeeter spent the entire basketball season in Bonum’s home bleachers, wearing increasingly bulky sweatshirts, stroking and soothing and occasionally doubling gaspily over her padded midriff: as though bunny-in-the-oven had already developed a set of lethal elbows.   And with his thoughts and prayers too often elsewhere, Frid just as often sent his jump shots and hook shots and foul shots sailing clear over the backboard.

Hush! hush! whisper who dares—