Page 72 - Leather Blues

60 Jack Fritscher

In the light of the bright early evening, coming in through
the west windows of the abandoned farmhouse, he laid out
his gear. From his van he carried in chain, rope, metal clips,
leather thongs, a saddle, two cats-of-nine-tails, several belts,
a hanging harness, a fistfucking sling, a bullwhip, a box of
surgical needles, candles, and a drycell battery attached to a
metal catheter. He laid his tools out carefully, checking pad-
locks against keys, unknotting a piece of rawhide tangled yet
from last use, slicking every device of bondage and torture
into readiness. Moving his things, he moved his head into
place.
He tapped the high old parlor ceiling to find a heavy
beam. He rolled out an old wooden barrel and stood on it.
He screwed a large iron hook into the beam. A faint dust of
plaster powdered down on him. The veins in his hairy fore-
arm knotted large around his bulldog-cigar USMC tattoo
as he twisted the metal into the hard wood. He made the
last turns with a hammer claw and hitched the hammer into
the loops of his leather jeans. With both fists he grabbed the
hook, pulled down on it tentatively, then swung out surely
from the barrel, hanging and jerking from the beam for a
full minute to test its security. His body, swinging in the
dying sun, elongated. His hands and arms began to ache
carrying the weight of his body and boots. The iron hook cut
sweet into his fingers. A vision of a naked male body hanging
helpless from a pulley on the hook, upside down, made him
harden. He smiled. Satisfied. He dropped to the floor.
He was arranging the ropes on the pulley when the
first cycles roared down the lane and circled the farmhouse.
Chuck walked out onto the porch from which he had sent
Denny off the night before. The outlaw riders, single and
double on bikes, some in full leather, some shirtless in sleeve-
less Levi’s jackets shiny with studs, spewed dust and exhaust
circling around the farmhouse. One by one they jacked up
their bikes. They cuffed Chuck in greetings. He broke out

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