- Text Size +
Story Notes:

Trying a shorter piece, for a change. I'd like to write a sequel (or another chapter), but I think this can also stand alone. 

1.
The day he met her, it was late afternoon, midwinter, in a little town along the border. A dusty breeze blew through the bat-wing doors of the saloon where he drank alone with the barman. Minutes passed, minutes that only the slow arms of the clocks registered, tick by tick. They took no notice of the time, and waited there for evening, two old night birds just before the fall of night. Then the doors flapped open, and a girl swept in and asked for a drink at the bar. 

“Señorita,” he said. “Venga, siéntate con nosotros,” the barman spread out his hands. She sat down.
“Qué novedades ahora, muchacha?” he asked. The girl shook her head, smiled, and said nothing.
The other man looked her over out of the corner of his eye. She was dressed like a cowpuncher, with high, spurred boots, a long gray dress, and a wool coat with buttons over a cotton shift.  Her hair was brown, and her eyes were dark brown. Half-mexican, maybe. The barman poured a whisky and slid it to her over the tabletop. Evidently she wasn’t unknown there. “Hay una historia allá.” He decided to engage her in conversation, and to that end tipped his hat.
“Howdy.”
“Hi there,” she said. “Where you headed?”
“I’ve been here two days from the city, ma’am. That dun at the hitching rail outside—he’s been tied up two days. Looking for work. De dónde viene?”
“Qué piensa?” She looked at the barman, who was cleaning glasses off by the window.
“From out of town, I’d guess—although he seems to know you.”
The girl nodded, and agreed with either one part or both parts of the man's answer. 
“Adónde va, jovencita?”
“Las montanas.” She tossed her head back, west to the Guadalupes.
“What are you doing out there?”
She gulped down her drink, and she set the glass down hard on the cedarwood counter. The barman poured her another “por el camino,” he said. She drank again. He waited for the answer.
“Soy gitana,” she said. “I’m a gypsy.”
“You don’t look like a gypsy to me, miss.”
She grinned, and switched to English. “Do you have any money?”
“Money? Yeah I have money. Why?”
“Because I have cards. I have to leave in five minutes, and I want to tromp someone before I go. How much you got?”
“Lady, I don’t have time for this.”
“You want a job?”
He paused for a second. “Sure.”
“Then how much you got?”
“I’ve got two hundred dollars. That enough?”
“Claro.”
“Qué gano?”
“You win my money. And a job.” She matched his two hundred with another two hundred. He was nervous, and a little buzzed from the alcohol, but decided to go for it. She was only a girl, he thought, and besides, he figured he could back out and welch her if he ever felt the need, or wanted to. After getting up from his seat, he looked over at the window for the barman, but he was no longer there. He’d left the room.
“Okay. I accept.” They found a table. If you were there, all you would have heard in that room would have been the ticking of the clock, and the melodious riffling of cards. The street outside was deserted, and the wind blew dust against the glass. Sunlight was falling, and the gaslamps began to flicker. The wicks of the candlestubs, in their porcelain plates, burned blue against the melted wax. She split her deck and dealt.

The game went on for about an hour, and before long the man was down to his last ten, with nothing in the bank. She’d raked him clean, whether fairly or through fraud he didn’t know, and—more to the point—couldn’t prove. He was forced to step away from the game.
“Where are you going?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know how, but you’ve won this. I’m done—con su permiso.”
“Por supuesto, of course.” He left the table, and was about to mount the stairs. She let him go. As he went up, he saw her scoop the cards and money into her pouch with the palm of her hand. Resentment burned and flared in his throat, and something as heavy and hot as an iron plunked down and scarred up his ice-cold heart with its heat. He resolved not to let a couple of hundreds just evaporate like that, when a person might have been—almost surely was—working with a stacked deck. So when he got to his room, he jumped to one of the sidepanels there and grabbed his revolver. 

Gleaming with sweat, drink, and gunmetal, he stepped carefully down the hallway, and eyed the shadowy light in the general room from the top of the stairs. There was movement down there, whether the girl’s or the barman’s he didn’t know, and didn’t wait to find out. Racing and leaping down the steps and into the room, there she was, facing him, a dead scowl across her face. He pointed the gun at her midwaist and fired. He heard it go, and then darkness blanketed the world like a warm ocean wave.

2.
When he woke up it was night, and it seemed like the whole earth was aflame. The heat from the fire licked his face, and he recoiled from it, and turned his face toward the night. There were no stars when he looked up, and when he looked down, instead of the desert sand and brush he saw mammoth wooden planks. Huge, twenty foot wide planks, like the floorboards of a great, high-ceilinged hall. He didn’t know where he was. He was dizzy, and tripped and fell.

About a hundred feet off to the left, the swish of water reached his ears. A tank, or cistern, played water around its edges, and the firelight blinked prettily against the waves. And above this, he heard a woman’s voice, singing some Mexican ballad, as though she were high up on an echoing cliff, or speaking on the stage of an amphitheater. He slowly approached the tank, and realized, little by little, that something was moving along inside of it. Huge hands, pushing something—like a woman washing her laundry beside a river. Then it all stopped. A huge, feminine voice echoed like thunder from some corner of the sky, “You’re awake. Good.”

Then the room itself came into focus, and when he saw who was speaking, he staggered backwards in shock.
“It’s you!” he shouted, as she approached the fire. “Who are you? What is this? Am I dead?”
“Como?” Somewhere up there, he felt her smile, and then she crossed the last few dozen feet and took a seat by the fire. “You’re not dead. Do you want a drink?”
He did want a drink, but didn’t say so.
“No le gusta el whiskey?”
“Yeah I like whiskey.”
She got up and rifled through a satchel, and picked out some whiskey. She propped up his chin with her little finger, and poured something down his throat, straight from the bottle. He coughed and choked.
“You wanted a job, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got one.”
“What do you mean?”
“With me. You’ve got a job,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what I’m playing for, though.”
“You tried to kill me. You’re playing for that.”
“I’m sorry for that, ma’am. I am. I was out of my head. You skinned me alive. You would have done the same.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re playing for that.”
“How do you mean?”
“For a week I will call you slave, esclavo, and you will go with me with back to the mountains.”
The man's jaw dropped. “See, I can’t be that, I can’t be a slave, ma’am. That won’t go, and I don’t have half that time. I have family waiting for me in Brownsville. I’m expected next week, and have to ride tomorrow. Look, I have money in San Antonio. Five thousand. I’ll give you two, and we’ll settle it that way.”
“I’ll settle it that way, Señor Esclavo, but how do you hope to be large again?”
“Four thousand, then.”
“No. You will be my slave for one week. In one week we will discuss this again.” She stood up and repacked the whiskey in the satchel, and then crouched over the laundry, and started singing again. The water sloshed back and forth in the deep cistern, and the fire’s glow sparkled over the waves like starlight over a lake. He slept for a long time.

3.
Hours later, he woke up again. A thick, honeyed discharge covered his face and body. There was a dense, gaseous, womanly smell here. He first tried to stand up, and then found that his limbs were immobile. His legs were stuck in some slimy, odorous pit. Without any luck, he tried to pull himself out, and grabbed on to a handful of firm, curly, wiry hairs. She was holding him inside her. 

The girl rolled over onto her side, and he with her. Under the half-transparent sheets, there, a glimmer of white sunlight passed through, and reached his eyes. Far above him, she yawned. Moving her left hand down to her crotch, she rubbed and tousled his hair for a little, and curled her legs up against her backside. He wondered if this was what she meant, when she said he would become her slave.

Fortunately he was asleep while the big action happened, but all the same he expected something much worse, something that perhaps reminded him of awful, ancient words like “vengeance” and “retribution.” The morning light began to spread across the room, and it seemed that, who knew, he would be able to get through this for a week. Sleepily, she stretched out her arms, and swung her legs around the side of the bed. Her hair was untidy, and cute. She had bedhead, and smiled lazily down at him, before sliding him out of her cunt and bringing him all the way up to her face. What happened next gave him a great surprise. She stuck out her tongue and tasted him a few times. Her breath was rancid, and he tried to get away, struggling vainly against her fingers. But she held him firmly, and then dunked him down into her mouth, soaking and sucking him in her saliva. It was like his second baptism—and this time into slavery.

4.
But that morning turned out to be the only time the man spent with her, throughout that week. The señorita was on the trail, riding, most of the time, and so she made him, almost exclusively, her foot slave.

After that kiss she gave him, she washed him off in the laundry bucket, and had some breakfast. He had a tablespoon of coffee, and a portion of biscuits, bacon, and whiskey. After finishing, she flipped him up in one hand, kissed him goodbye with the other, and stuck him into one of those boots she was wearing the day before (or however long ago it was) when she strutted into the saloon and stopped for a drink. Her ice-cold bare foot followed, and then she sealed him in. Inside, he stoically wondered whether that day would be the day of his death. Maybe, he thought, it already had been.

When the first pressure came, he started to scream. A terrible, piercing scream that was muffled and near-inaudible in the close, leathery confines of her boot. There was no echo. When his screams died down, they immediately started again, with new power. Suddenly, she slammed her foot into the floor-planks, with such force to knock the wind out of him. Her (now warm) toes then curled up over him and pushed his tiny body up underneath them, from the sole to the front of the boot. He was effectively, permanently silenced—and with that done, she walked out. The heat and the smell began to build up, and the man found himself falling asleep again.

5.
Any seasoned traveler knows that one of the most important rules of the trail is to keep one’s feet in good condition. So, whenever the señorita vaquera was in need of a new slave, she would ride down to one of the outlying towns and scout the place out for lonely, out-of-work, or horny cowboys, and play them with her cold deck of cards. Invariably they lost, and almost invariably she would pick up the tab in her own way before leaving again. As a result of her efforts, the place was cleared of drifters, outlaws, roughs, drunks, curly wolves, and other hard-cases, aside from the obvious advantages she received from it: money and good health.

The girl had washed her stockings and other articles the night before, by the hearthfire, but she wanted to save them for the road. After years of practice, she had learned that the quickest, the most efficient way to enslave a man was to, first, overwhelm them from the beginning with her own special and particular sights, sounds, and smells. And two, to whittle them down, memory after memory, until they could focus on, understand, or live with nothing else but those very sights, sounds, and smells. 

When the girl stopped for the night, twenty miles outside the town, she built a fire, made some dinner, and took off her boots. She reached inside and peeled the man off the sweaty insole, and drew him up to her face.

“Tenemos ganador!” she said. The man joggled about a bit in the wind, like a damp bathtowel, but by and by he came to.
“Se murio,” she pouted. “Oiga, hombre!” He finally opened his eyes. “Bueno.” She clapped her other hand against her knees, and a thin-lipped grin appeared—for a second, in the flame of the fire—between her red cheeks.
“Es un engaño?” she asked. He nodded.
“Y quién soy?”
“No sabe.”
“Bien dicho.” She dropped him into her lap, and fed him some food and drink.

Later that night, she asked him to tell her how she was.
“How are you?”
“My feet, esclavo. How are my feet.”
“Cold and then warm…But the smell! The smell! That can’t be described.”
“It’s the smell of the road, esclavo. It’s the smell of your life.” She rolled him over with her foot, and he struggled stupidly against her toes. “You already love that smell."
“Oh, señorita, no, no. I don't think so.” 
“Es verdad.” And it was.

The next day the señorita put him back in her boot, and fed him nothing between morning and evening. By the end of the third day on the trail, he begged her to feed him while he was inside the boot. She wasn’t surprised. Something in his brain had clicked (or cracked) and he was her slave, and could never again be anything else. All he knew or cared of life, from that day forward, was the bottom of her foot. That night she slept with him in her stockings, and kept them on her feet the next day, and the day after. She explained to him that his life, that day forward, would be given over to keeping her feet and shoes in good working order, and that this would not be easy, since a vaquera’s life is an active life. Her feet were to be kept dry, clean, and free of any harmful blisters or disabling knots and calluses. She knew some cowgirls whose careers, to say nothing of their lives, were ended after some such accident. The man slowly nodded his head, as though to say, “I wouldn't do anything less.”

The fateful week soon passed, and as the señorita got more and more used to the man’s company, and his devotion, she had begun to treat him like an animal. She gave him no more water, and when he came out in the evenings, she fed him some pre-chewed gruel of rice and vegetables.
“If you’re a slave, you have to learn to eat like a slave,” she told him.

He was uncertain at first, but took it, and never refused again. He soon forgot that he had ever eaten anything else. While she ate, she stretched her legs out in front of the fire to warm them, and kept him underneath them, with orders to soften out the hard places of her feet with his teeth and hands, while licking, smelling, and massaging. The best slaves know one thing very, very well, and the señorita wanted her man to love and live for nothing else but her feet. She would have him forget there was ever anything more desirable or difficult in the world than the lifelong task he had in front of him. He knew that those boots, that the girl and her feet would probably outlive him, and he took this to heart. “I am engaged in a kind of work that is larger than I am, and that will probably outlive me.”

She knew she would succeed, and she did. She made sure that the man, almost from the very beginning of his enslavement, would become intoxicated with his new life. El camino, the road he was on would be her road, and hers alone.

Conclusion.
On the tenth day, they found the path into the sierras where the girl was born, and where her family lived in a little shack on the mountainside. She took the horse up to the door, hitched it, and walked across the threshold to greet her family: her mother, father, and sister. They welcomed her, and she ate that night as she hadn’t in weeks. When she got to bed, her stockings on and the man still broiling and slick under her foot, she had an idea. She would get married to this man. A plan mapped itself out in her mind: he would come up from the city, in two days, and she would introduce him to her family. They would head down the side and get their papers in the nearest village, and then she would have not only his life, but his dollars. He would fall out of the picture, once again, and she would be free of her strenuous work, and build a house of her own, somewhere in the mountains, under the open sky.

Accordingly, two days later, she arranged that the man should walk a mile in to her parents’ house, at ten o’clock in the morning, and greet them as her novio, her intended. The night before, she cleaned him up and informed him, told him what to say and what to do. When he agreed, she restored his size, gave him clothes, and pushed him out the window.
“Esclavo,” she hissed.
He merely turned around and waited. Had he so quickly forgotten how to speak?! She was suddenly nervous.
“Be careful! Remember what I said! Ten o’clock! Then we leave!” She lifted up her boot, which got his attention, and then shooed him away. He ran, down the hill, into the dark woods. The owls hooted, and a few coyotes yawled mournfully at the moonrise. Then the rest of the night passed in silence.

The next morning the man appeared on schedule at the señorita’s house, and greeted her parents at the door. But he wouldn’t speak. Her parents spoke Spanish to him. He didn’t know Spanish. They spoke English to him. He failed to speak in that language. Her father chose to interpret the man’s silence as an affront and an insult, and stormed from the room. The daughter was stunned. The mother glared at the man uneasily, and then, when she saw the girl’s face, decided she needed comfort. The man observed all this with a strange eye, and then ran from the room, out the door, through the forest, down the mountain. He was gone.

The girl found him again, two days later, wandering aimlessly about the town, begging for food and lodging. She told him that she had run from home to meet him there, and wanted things to be as they were. He said nothing, but listened to her story. Her family had disowned her, and the cattle drive of which she was a member would, in one week, move on to Montana. She needed his assistance, or she would wait, and there would be no steady work for the next two years. “We could still get married,” she said. “You are still my novio.” And of course he agreed. At the bank in San Antonio they signed the marriage papers, against the wishes of her family, and without their knowledge, and there the man effectively handed over his inheritance to the vaquera, his wife.

For a time, of course, the señorita was without a friend in the world and, aside from the trail, had no place to call her own. She decided, also, that the man, the esclavo, she married was now unfit to be in the world, or to hold any job, and that this was primarily her doing. Twenty miles out of San Antonio, she returned the favor, and that night, around the fire, they returned to their old order. “Yo no soy un hombre del camino,” he said in his dreams, that night. “I am not a man of the road.” She curled her stockinged toes around him in her sleep, and when she finally stopped fidgeting, he breathed her in deeply. It would be a long road to Montana, and she would need him with her the whole way.

You must login (register) to review.