Ring of Fire — Phil Andros

The book I had been reading half-slipped from my fingers, and I wakened with a start, looking at the woven wire-springs of the bunk above me, at the rough hewn log walls of the bunkhouse, and out of the window where a pale blue line of mountain ridge mingled almost invisibly with the pale summer sky.

I yawned and stretched, feeling the rough male kiss of the blanket beneath me, against my back, and wondering just what the hell a male whore was doing as a line-man in Eldorado National forest in California, waiting for a fire to break out. I was a city-boy, used to the hard street ways, and San Francisco–a coupla hundred miles away–was full of summer tourists with pockets of green stuff, all eager to have something satiny and steel-cored stuck into them.

But the truth was that the City had palled on me, or that I had grown tired of gasoline fumes and dirt. When I heard about the three-month sign-up to be a fire fighter, it had seemed like the best chance to get away from it all for a while. So here I was–at an all-male camp, two bunkhouses and a small commissary, a ranger station, a mess hall–and about a hundred tough young hombres being paid six hundred bucks a month to sit on their asses and wait for the summer fines to start. The camp was only about sixty crow-flight miles from Lake Tahoe, but up and down the mountains more like three hundred.

Down in the clearing outside the bunkhouse some of the guys were playing their endless game of baseball, but there were only two of us snoozing in the dorm–myself and Buck, in the bed next to mine.

I turned my head and looked at him. He was a handsome stud, blond and Nordic as I was dark and Greek. He was flat on his back, one of his great-columned legs drawn up a little, shining with the soft light of the golden hairs that covered it. He wore only our standard jockstrap, as I did; when we went out on a fire-fight, we had in add an aluminum guard to protect our balls. The golden hair on his massive chest was heavy, and down the latticed muscles of his belly you saw the darker, smoky gold of the hair of his crotch, and then the rounded bulge of his armament spreading the thin-ribbed silky cloth of his jockstrap.

Sex wasn’t much of a problem in camp. Everyone jacked off, night and day. No one laughed at you for beatin’ it, and even the counsellor had nothing to say. I liked Buck and wanted him, but so far all the gay ones in camp had kept the closet door care fully shut. I had watched Buck beat his meat five or six limes, and he had watched me almost as many, The first time I’d caught him, he’d been embarrassed, but after that he would just grin and look at me, his right leg quivering uncontrollably while he caught his gism in a paper towel.

I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it I before I made a dive for him.

I turned half on my side and doubled my arm under my head, watching him through eyelids, just a slit open. He swallowed once and then wakened, angling his head to look at me. When he saw that I seemed asleep, he slowly raised his ass and with one hand on each side slid his jockstrap down a little. And then he reached with one gold-haired arm to take a firm grip on his sleep-hardened cock, cupping the other big square hand under his balls. And started slowly to move his hips and hand.

“Seems like such a waste,” I murmured.

He nearly jumped off the bed. “You bastard,” he said, grinning, “Got any better ideas?

“We could take a shower,” I said.

“You can’t lock the door.”

I unhooked my wrist watch and laid it on the shelf above my bed. “There’s a doorknob,” I said, “and a plank that’ll fit under it from the inside.”

A faint scowl appeared on his classic face. “I ain’t gay,” he said.

I waggled my hand at him. “I ain’t either,” I said. “So you blow me and I’ll blow you and that way we won’t snitch on each other. Or maybe you’d rather swap cans.”

His scowl vanished, and his smile was like sunlight. “Whatever,” he said. “Che sera.”

You never saw two studs disappear faster behind the green door. I grabbed the plank and braced it under the knob while he turned on the water, got it to the right temperature, and then—grinning—held out the bar of soap to me. I took it, lathered my crotch, and he bent over with his hands on his knees, his tight-muscled ass directly in the stream of warm water. I soaped my cock and soaped my hands, and then pulling his ass a little out of the direct flow, laid some lather in the crack of it.

Man, he was hotter than a pistol! My own cock was rockhard and I touched the end of it against t he celestial gate in front of me, all set to push. But he beat me to it. He backed up strong against old Betsy, and I felt an unbelievable heat around my cock-head as I entered the ring of fire. Buck gasped a little, straddling his legs farther apart to relieve the tension. I went in slowly, but he seemed impatient—backing up again, hard, until we were both under the hot water. I started to fuck him, long slow lazy strokes at first, but then, conscious of the danger of discovery, I stepped up the tempo until my groin was banging against his ass, and he was letting out small muffled yelps of pleasure. I bent farther over him and slid one hand around his thigh to grab his cock steely as my own, and began to jack him off.

Lord knows it didn’t lake either of us long. I felt the little tire flowers begin to unfold in my groin and then circle up toward the base of my neck, increase in power, and then slowly move down the ladder of my spine. Buck’s panting told me he was in the same state.

“Faster!” he muttered, and then in a kind of moaning chant; “Oh. Fuckmefuckmefuckme!” and I did, until suddenly my tight squeezed eyelids filled themselves with gold and silver stars and I exploded deep inside him. He came at the same moment, seven or eight spurts of gism splashing on the tiled floor, the muscles of his ass clamping me so tight it almost hurt.

He straightened and half-turned his body with my cock still inside him, raised one of those weightlifter’s arms to put around my neck, and kissed me full on the lips, his mouth wide and hot and tasting the way clover smells.

I suppose there were guys in the fire-camp who noticed how Buck and I went off every day for the next two weeks to be by ourselves, but neither of us cared a damn about it. For the first time in my life I began to feel a kind of contentment; I was still afraid to call it love. But whatever it was, it found expression in our daily screwing. We did everything—everywhere: on grass banks blowing each other, bodies interlocked in a Gordian knot; standing against the redwood trunks; even taking off our fire-fightin’ boots and plunging fully clothed into the cold water of the Rubicon (its real name!) and acting like a coupla kids in a swimming pool—and then afterwards heating our water-chilled pricks with the warmth of our mouths. Or, sex-sated temporarily, we lay on the forest loam and talked, watching the slow-moving path of the misty shafts of sunlight across our naked bodies.

But the idyll was not to last. On a Wednesday in mid-August we were awakened by a blast from the ranger s intercom. “All personnel,” it boomed, “will remain within a hundred meters of camp today. Barometer falling rapidly. Critical fire conditions on all points.”

One look out the window was a confirmation. The sky was dull and leaden, and there was no sun. The humidity was zero. Above Pyramid Peak a vast black thunderhead rose nearly to the zenith, and the wind was picking up. So far we’d been lucky with only a coupla brush fires during a hot dry July. But that seemed about to change.

The intercom went on blatting instructions about having our pants tops tucked inside the fire boots, hard hats to be worn, asbestos body-protectors laid out, picks and shovels kept ready. I turned to Buck. “Looks like the real thing today.”

“Yeah,” he said. He seemed a little nervous. “This may be really big. ”

“Nothin’s happened yet,” I said. “It may blow over. ” I watched him lace his tall black boots, muscle answering muscle, flickering into rapid or indolent life. His lowered face was godlike, and he looked up at me from under the sweep of his golden hair, bleached by the summer sun until the end points seemed tipped with silver, his eyes half-smiling. His massive tawny shoulders tapered down the incredible terrain of his torso to his slender waist, and below that the great rounded bulge that contained the part of him that was mine.

It wasn’t only his body that got me. I liked his mind, his personality, the explicit and expressive maleness of him. In all my busy sexual years I had never been so trapped, and I wondered how much of it depended on my weariness with the hustler’s life I’d led, and how much on our isolation in a fire-camp, and how much of it was a purity of affection, a genuine love.

The day grew darker and darker, and the lights came on about one in the afternoon. About two the storm broke—a brief wildness of water and rain and wind, and then from the thunderhead which had now expanded to fill the whole sky, there came the lightning—the hard vicious crackling bolts that spread terror everywhere.

The rain stopped suddenly, and we went outside to have a look. Just at that moment, the biggest by-damn thunderbolt I ever saw zigzagged out of the black cloud, and splat! hit a giant redwood about a quarter-mile away. I saw the top of the tree burst into a flower of flame, and a moment later heard the crack as the entire length of the great tree split and toppled, flames running from one end of it to the other.

None of us needed the shouted instructions over the public address system to be told what to do. Buck and I were on the same truck; it pulled out two minutes after the tree fell.

“Well, you were right,” I said grimly, and he nodded. The truck dropped us on the windward side of the blaze which was already turning the dark sky ruddy. And the work on the firebreak began.

We dug and shovelled and pitched like madmen—and the day lengthened into a nightmare of aching muscles, sore backs, and blistered hands. Then the helicopters arrived with their water-loads, and the planes with their borate-bombings, and still other planes with smoke-jumpers who parachuted down on the far side of the fire, inaccessible to us. But the wind sprang up and our first firebreak was breached, the flames eating their hot and noisy way into the virgin timber—not by any means wet enough from the brief rainstorm to stop the scarlet beast. Occasionally a wayward shift of wind would blow the scorching breath of the fire across us, dropping red-hot cinders and smoking ashes on our naked backs, for we had all shed our shirts. And still we dug, and swore, and prayed for rain… which never came.

The day wore on and my watch said eight o’clock, but the fire colored the night and kept it almost as bright as the dull day had been. Buck and I got separated—by now you couldn’t identify anyone; you saw only the black silhouettes of half-naked men bending over pick and shovel, or running, crouched, away from the flames. The heat, when it flowed over us, cracked and dried the very fibre of our lungs and left our nostrils raw.

I was shoveling as fast as I could, thinking that I was close to the rest of my gang, when suddenly a blast of scorching air made me stop to look around. I almost panicked. Ahead of me was a solid wall of flame at least thirty feet high, and behind me, rapidly advancing, another about half as high. I could not see my buddies anywhere.

I dropped my shovel and ran as hard as I could, towards the only narrow opening that I could see in the hungry circle of fire—and made it! but smelled the scorched hair on my chest and arms as I broke through the closing gap in the flame-wall into a slanted clearing. The wind seemed to be carrying the fire up the hill at that point, and a few tree silhouettes, not yet burning, stood between me and the flames,

I heard the racket of a helicopter above the open space where I stood, and then suddenly I heard another dark rush above me and looked up. Full in the face came a load of water from the copter—dropped too soon. It hit me like a sledge-hammer and tumbled me downhill, gasping, choking, rolling over and over in the red clay mud, clawing at weeds and stones, until I came to rest doubled up like a fetus in a flat pool of water and slick red clay.

I tried to get the damned stuff out of my eyes—it was slick and sticky—and then I heard a moan. There, about ten feet away, lay a doubled-up figure.

“Hey!” I called, crawling through the thick, wet, red clay toward him.

“H-help m-me,” I heard.

“What gives?” I said, spitting mud out of my mouth. It was Buck. He was clutching his ankle.

“Ph-Phil?” he said weakly.

“Yeah, man, it’s me. What’s the matter?”

He groaned again. “I think… my ankle’s… broken,” he said.

“Let’s see,” I said, I took hold of his muddy boot and moved it a little. He cried out. “Hurt much?” I asked.

“N-not too much,” he said, “but I can’t walk on it.”

“The boot keeps it in place,” I said. “I’ll have to carry you out. Fireman’s lift.” I bent over him and started to raise him into position. But he stopped me with his hand on my arm.

“Phil,” he said. “I know it’s broken. The summer’s over for me. I’ll have to go to the hospital.”

“Yeah, man, I know,” I said. “But no ankle’s broken forever.” I started again to lift him.

“Ph-Phil,” he said. “Don’t. Not yet. Please…”

“Why not?” I said, puzzled.

“Phil… just once more, huh? Please.”

“Goddlemighty,” I muttered. “You mean here?”

“Yeah,” he said. He fumbled with his belt buckle, raising himself with a grimace, and pulled his pants down. The light of the flames flickered savagely on the clear white skin of his buttocks as he turned over. The rest of us was covered with the red slippery mud.

“Damn,” I muttered, I dipped my hand in the red wet clay and stuck some in the crack of his ass.

And there, surrounded by flames like the ring of fire of the Valkyrie, with cock slickened by its coating of red clay and water, I lay upon my handsome Siegfried and left my seed inside.

Locked into the fire camp until October by my contract, there was nothing I could do. But when I was free of the job, I hopped the bus for Placerville, and the neat small hospital there. Yes, a Roger Williams had been there; the state had paid his bill: and he had left two weeks before—on crutches. No, they had no address for him.

I tried to find him, using the small hints he’d dropped from time to time, but there are one hell of a lot of Williamses in California—and none that I could find on crutches.

Sometimes friends wonder, aloud, about an odd liking I seem to have for the great crashing chords that attend the death of Brunnhilde on her pyre and the fiery destruction of Valhalla at the end of the Ring cycle. And they find even stranger my urge to take off boots and socks and walk through red clay mud.

But we are all a part of all that we have met, and Love is a bridge that leads, hopefully, to what we want to be and what we want to have.