Intersection - 1. Intersection

Kyle disembarked from the bus, stepping out of the refrigerated air into the stifling humidity of the summer evening. The chill from his body quickly dissipated and replaced by a layer of moisture on his forehead and down his spine. It was already dark. The heat left him sighing for breath. Those sighs were also a sign of relief that he was almost home. He just had to cross the intersection and then a short walk to the front door of his apartment building. The state revoked his driver’s license years ago, as a condition of his parole, so he had to endure bouncing on torn seats whenever the bus hit a pothole and wide turns that slung him from side to side in wide arcs. Either that or walk.

Inside the bus, he avoided the gaze of other passengers, not that he felt their glances were accusatory; their sagging loose faces were simply meaningless and indifferent, and looks quickly fell back to the floor or out the windows. To them, all of them, he was just another specimen of broken down humanity, complacently waiting to return home, fill their hungry bellies, maybe a shower, and off to the beds. The stark lights inside the bus cast his reflection on the dark windows. Kyle too avoided his own gaze, not wanting to see how prison had aged him. A remnant of his boyish good looks remained. If seen from a distance, he was still that handsome blond with the big Adam's apple and bright blue eyes. Close up, the crow’s feet at his temples and the lines around his mouth were clearly visible. His eyes faded to gray; his chest and abdomen acquired a layer of sagging fat, and blue veins traced the backs of his hands. In prison, he felt his uniqueness stripped away. He went from a gray prison uniform to a gray work uniform and the uniformity crushed him.

After the bus sped away in a cloud of choking exhaust fumes, Kyle scrutinized the intersection before him, looking both ways up and down the dark street before crossing. Behind him, on the corner where he stood, was an empty parking lot, its spaces vacant for the night. On the other three corners, one showed the backside of a warehouse, another a greasy chicken joint with no late night customers, and directly across the street an abandoned lot strewn with piles of broken bricks and waste paper blown there by the wind. Next to the lot stood his shabby apartment building, its front door shrouded in darkness yet beckoning him to a comfortable bed despite signs of dilapidation. He needed only to cross this last intersection before he was home.

In the distance, a car sped toward him with its headlights shining in Kyle's eyes, so he couldn’t determine its make or model. He let it pass even though he could have crossed. As it made its way down the street, saw it was a silver coup. After several years in prison, he learned to be patient, how to live on someone else’s time. Waiting a few extra seconds wasn’t a big deal anymore. Then he lifted a small bag of groceries and started across.

In prison, he was a good boy. He kept his nose clean and his ass shut. It was minimum security, so most of his fellow inmates were fraudsters and embezzlers; many “attempted” but few completed. Those went to max security. Lots of petty stuff. He was the only one who achieved killing someone—accidentally, yes. He did his work; the warden gave him good behavior points, and the chaplain brought him back to Christ. Confession was good to cleanse the guilt that the cleric found in his soul. He washed dishes, spent time in the library—with spiritual fiction, and let himself become as gray as the painted walls and cell bars. When he finally walked through the last slamming gate, he was reformed and colorless, just how God (according to the chaplain) wanted him to be. Ready for a life of minimum wage jobs, gray uniforms, and God’s blessing on the humble and downtrodden.

After leaving prison, Kyle became over cautious at intersections, unnecessary hyper vigilance. The future direction of his young life had been defected because he was distracted by his passenger’s muscular hand massaging his groin. His soon to be victim. Stay with me now, this is where the tragedy of Kyle’s life begins. Yes, he misjudged the speed of the oncoming truck when he turned in front of it. It was his fault, but he was distracted, right? The collision disoriented him. At first, he didn’t comprehend what happened. The condition of his passenger jolted Kyle back to alertness.

The impact crushed the side door. The passenger's head slammed into the side window shattering it before falling to the left. The right side of his head was smashed into an oozing wound, covered with blood and broken glass matted into his skin and scattered about the floorboard. The hand that had been massaging his groin hung limply off the front edge of the seat.

Through the broken window, Kyle sighted the front of a dirty white truck, its grill crumpled into a nasty smile, as if about to spit through the gaps in the broken teeth of white trash. He heard a red neck drawl shout "fuck." The driver ground the gears of the truck into reverse and slammed the accelerator, speeding away.

Kyle searched his passenger for a pulse, checked to see if he was breathing, but he couldn’t tell. All the blood frightened him. Stupidly, Kyle panicked: "My parents can't find out about this. I have to hide the body!"

Back then Kyle was young and in his physical glory; his body simmered with sexual energy. His bodily tensions easily trounced any good judgment he might have had as a young man. Kyle craved to get his hands and mouth on this package of muscles he picked up for the night.

Kyle was new to the meat market, a novice at picking up men at the bar to satisfy his new found sexual urges. He didn’t have to work hard. His youthful good looks brought forth an abundance of potential partners who made themselves available, regaled him with drinks and caresses, bestowed on him gropes that stroked his ego (and his cock), and introduced him to party favors in the back rooms. His initial trips were anxiety laden, but his new sense of adventure (and the harden shaft in his groin) was out matched by any fear he might have had. Soon it became so easy.

The Truck Stop had stopped serving that function years ago. It had been bypassed by the new highway and had fallen into clandestine usages. By Kyle's time, The Truck Stop had transformed itself into a socially notorious but low-key gay bar, located on an infrequently used stretch of highway in the back woods of the county.

The bar consisted of two floors: upstairs was a series of sleeping rooms, intended for truckers in the past. They had been repurposed into hourly "rental space." Downstairs, all the windows were boarded up and painted black for increased security and secrecy. The sealed windows made the building look abandoned, but within half drunken men in leather filled the place. The bar tended to attract a biker crowd and the little punks that nourished then. Occasionally, a tranny spying for some rough trade, or bears with their cubs cuddled in their cubby holes could be spotted.

The gas pumps in the parking lot ran dry years ago and were abandoned to rust and bird droppings. The parking area cracked into a puzzle of busted asphalt and gravel. Only the stars and moon illuminated it at night.

The first time Kyle drove out there, his headlights caught sight of sad faced cows giving him a stern look from behind barbed-wire fences. The surrounding landscape was pastureland. The cows looked on coolly at the goings on in the boarded up truck stop. Those looks seemed particularly harsh the first night Kyle underwent degrading sex in the back seat of his car. He liked it that way.

He liked being bent over the seat, taking it bareback from some rough daddy. “You like that, boy,” whispered in his ear. Daddy pulled his legs further apart to thrust in deeper. Kyle loved it when Daddy’s callused hands rubbed his cock and squeezed his balls. “Fucken good boy, you are.” Kyle loved Daddy’s cum dripping out of his asshole and smeared between his ass cheeks. He liked being Daddy’s fuckin’ little bottom.

The faces of the cows, who witnessed Kyle’s good behavior, seemed to express the disdain of the Christian God he was defying, the one he thought so harsh and unrealistic.

However, free from the strict hands of his joyless parents, who equated the good life with efficient six o'clock dinners and bed-time by ten, missionary position sex, regularly scheduled prayers to Jesus and a respectable amount of donations in the prayer offering, Kyle blissfully sweated and panted through long sessions of anal penetration, sweeping away all those restrictive moral enactments. Kyle finally felt free to experience the animal prowess of his hardened cock and the oblivion of bestial pleasure.

Inside The Truck Stop, around wobbly tables, drunken men leered at each other from under brims of leather caps, eyeing leather vests and chains stretched over protruding pectoral and abdominal muscles, and spy on crotchless chaps over dirty jeans. They tweaked their punks (Kyle was definitely a punk) on the ass and rubbed gloved hands into available groins.

In addition to the usual complement of bar trolls, leather daddies, bears, and aged queens, there was a regular cast of jokers and the flamers they performed for. As the night wore on and the drunkenness deepened, the story telling became more careless and the jokes more inane. Years later, even though Kyle had long since forgotten the joker in question, he still remembered this one silly, illogical story, and how hysterically funny it seemed under the general warmth of bourbon shoots:

"A man met a genie who would give him one wish."

"Where did this genie come from? Out of a lamp?"

"No, out of a condom, it’s a sperm genie!" Laughter

"And the man said: 'I want a big giant pussy'." The joker threw his hands up in the air to show how big of a pussy the man wanted.

"So the genie turned him into one."

"Then the man complained that 'he wanted to fuck one not be one,' and the genie says: what does he know, he’s a gay genie."

"Who wants pussy anyway? Pussy is for dykes!" Laughter.

"So anyway, the genie said he could send him a big dick to fuck that pussy."

Kyle imagined a vagina the size of a man's chest, with a man’s head and little hands and feet sticking out.

"Then the man with the giant pussy hears off in the distance loud rumbling footsteps. It’s Paul Bunyan with a hard on!"

Kyle imagined Paul Bunyan dropping his pants, picking up the vagina man, and sinking his shaft all the way in, as the vagina man screams and flips his little hands and feet around. Kyle shoots some beer through his nose and shrieks with laughter as a leather daddy pats his ass.

"That's a stupid story. I bet you wish that pussy was your mouth!" yells some critic and everyone laughs hysterically.

One night, among those wobbly, beer splattered tables, a certain rough caught Kyle's eye. Plaid never looked so fucking sexy as it did on this lumberjack. After several minutes in a dark corner, with tongues in each others' mouth and ears, and hands groping asses and crotches, they slipped out into the dark night.

"I know someplace private where can go," said the hookup, "but you have to drive."

They left The Truck Stop behind, and its smoky recesses and cigarette butt littered floors, for some remote hideaway that promised complete submission to Kyle's new found anal pleasures. He was learning, thriving, at being a good bottom boy.

They never made it there.

That hand fondling his crotch drove Kyle into a frenzy. It blotted out the voices that spoke in his head: of his clinically self-righteous parents, his pastor who scrutinized the morals of his flock looking for flaws, his friends and family whose social reputations might be damaged. Those voices all came screaming back after the truck plowed into the side of him, after he saw all the blood and glass matted into the side of his hookup's face. Kyle's inner voice shouted back: "They can’t find out;" his first response was: "I must hide the body!"

His mother's voice shrieked: "how can you humiliate us like this?" His father's voice yelled: "we have to get him to a psychiatrist." His siblings began to disown him: "not our brother," his friends turned their back on him and denied they ever knew him: "not with that disgusting pervert." His pastor began to denounce him in Church: "he shall be judged for the error of his way," and called on him to repent of his "abominable sin" and return to Christ for forgiveness.

If Kyle had been thinking straight, he would have realized that he couldn’t hide the blood in the car, the glass shattered on the highway, or the twisted wreck that was his car. All he could think about was getting rid of the body.

The collision crushed the passenger side, so Kyle had to pull the body through the driver's side door. He pulled him from under his shoulders; the passenger's head bloodied Kyle's shirt. One foot became caught on the seat, tugging a shoe off. When the body was free of the door, its two feet thumped to the ground. The body remained limp and unresponsive.

A deep drainage ditch ran along the side of the highway flowing into a culvert that went under the access road. Kyle dragged the corpse off the roadway and rolled it down the embankment, sliding down after it. At the bottom, he hauled the body through the muddy bed to the pipe opening and tried to stuff in the body.

It all happened so fast. Before he could get the body stashed into the storm drain, he saw flashing lights from police vehicles overhead. Officers bounded down the steep slope with guns drawn, ordering him to stop and show his hands. They had him down on his stomach, his face in the grass, and cuffs on his hands in a matter of seconds.

What can we say about Kyle's dilemma? This wasn’t part of his illicit plans for the night. His testosterone driven frenzy and his inexperience drove him into a panic. His shame leads him to deceive. Should we blame him for his failure? Right then all Kyle could do was lie on his face, in his bloodstained shirt, and weep to God for forgiveness. Was that even the right response?

The paramedics soon arrived and tried to resuscitate the corpse. The passenger was taken to the Emergency Room in critical condition. He might have survived the night if Kyle hadn’t panicked.

The rest of the story is pretty straightforward. He stood before the judge pleading guilty to charge after charge. His family sat shame faced behind him facing their own martyrdom in the eyes of their peers. Kyle was remanded into custody and served his time in a minimum-security prison, where he found his way back to the Lord and disavowed the temptations and pleasures of his bowels.

So now, standing at the intersection after stepping off the bus, Kyle feels a slight hesitance to cross. He takes a deep breath, and with his groceries in hand, he makes it to the center line of the street. He tries to cross quickly with his eyes on the abandoned lot ahead; then he sees the crumbled bricks and stray litter suddenly illuminated. The light came from behind, from the direction of the warehouse. The driver doesn’t yield as he swings a careless left hand turn. It happens too quickly for Kyle to react.

The impact threw Kyle over the car. He landed on the pavement headfirst. A pool of blood quickly formed on the sidewalk. He was left lying on his stomach, his fingers clawing at the cement, and his legs arranged at odd angles to his body. His groceries landed somewhere among the bricks, spilling his milk and the few pieces of fruit he had picked up.

Kyle was vaguely conscious when he heard the car back up and two doors slam.

"God Damn it," he heard a male voice mutter.

"Shut up and grab the legs," another more gravelly voice croaked.

"He does have a nice ass; it would make a nice fuck," the first voice answered. Kyle felt his bottom being gently patted before his legs screamed out in greater pain, as they were pulled straight.

"Hurry up," the gravely voice whispered. Kyle felt himself being lifted.

He tried to call out, but could only moan. He felt his head lolling around on his neck, and the blood matted into his hair.

They paused for a moment. The one holding his legs fumbled for keys. Moments later he was tossed into darkness and the trunk lid slammed shut. Sinking into darkness, Kyle wondered why God was being so harsh to him, hadn’t he placated him enough, as the car sped away into the night.