“Did you go to church yesterday?” Gramps asked, and ran a string from one corner of the garage to the other.

“No,” Jason replied and shook his head. He then kicked his legs to loosen up. “I’m done.”

“Oh, and why is that?” Gramps worked at tying the string to the side of the garage door.

“You know I play the guitar. I love to play and to write songs. So I go to mom’s church…” Jason picked up the jump rope and started jumping, staying light on his feet. “…and I just want to play. I’m willing to work my butt off to play. I give the music leader some songs I wrote but got no response. In the meantime, some guy performs the most lackluster, droning song, some lame shit he wrote himself, and I’m going, ‘What the hell?’ So then I’m scheduled to play two Sundays ago, but nobody gives me any music, and when I play, they don’t have me miked at all—so it’s like I got a Special Olympics medal for music.”

Gramps now started tying a second line, running diagonally from the other corner of the garage, creating an ‘X’. “Reminds me of the time my grandpa took me to the fair—it was me, Papa and his second wife, Madeline. We’re seated for a show, when a guy asks Papa if he’ll join him. Papa says sure and goes backstage. When the show starts, Papa comes out in a colorful band uniform, playing the trumpet in the band. I was surprised; I had no idea my grandfather could play the trumpet. So each band member marches in a circle while playing, and stops, marching in place while playing, to have his picture taken. For the picture, Papa tucks his trumpet under his arm and stands at attention, but the trumpet is still playing! The crowd laughed, and everybody realized that Papa wasn’t really playing the trumpet, but it was a soundtrack.”

Jason still skipped rope, having found a comfortable rhythm. “At least you laughed. I was so damn embarrassed. I felt like a total loser, like they thought I was that stupid.”

“I really wanted that picture of my grandfather on the stage at the fair, in his band uniform, with the trumpet tucked under his arm.” Gramps smiled as he recalled the picture. “But after Papa died, my aunt went in without telling anyone and cleaned everything out. It’s gone forever.”

“Plus, at the church I’m hauling crates up, passing the plate, working my butt off early in the morning, when it’s cold. And what recognition do I get? Some guys are playing in the band, while I’m the pack mule, the fuckin’ jackass hauling shit up the cold, winding stairs.” Jason worked to calm himself, and focused on moving lightly while jumping rope, hopping forward and back. “Maybe I should be humbler, and not feel like I have to be on stage.”

“No, I know what you feel.” Gramps worked at tying off the last section of line. “Churches are often about propping up the pastor, and the same alpha males who are the leaders at work are going to be the leaders at church. They’re going to assign you some menial role, tell you that you have the gift of cleaning toilets. Funny, but Pastor Bigshot has the gift of preaching, earning tax-free money and getting free dinners, with members of the congregation buying him a new car and a TV. If you complain, they tell you to be humble, not to be so vain and greedy. I’ll clean toilets and wash dishes, just as soon as Pastor Bigshot joins me.”

“You know, Gramps, you’ve been helping me make something of myself, but nobody at the church was helping me, just using me for free labor.” Jason wished he had music to jump to, but he wanted to be able to talk to his grandfather, too.

“That’s the problem. When I was young, I thought the Bible and the church had all the answers. Don’t get me started on the prosperity gospel, or I’m going to have to start blasting the heavy bag here.” Gramps fired a quick straight at the heavy bag, making it bounce. “You give money to the church, ‘cause God is going to make you rich, but the only one getting rich is the pastor.”

Jason set down the jump rope. “Okay, what’s this, with two lines? I feel like the difficulty level just doubled.”

“The purpose of the double line is to teach you to pivot.” Gramps illustrated, performing the usual line drill, bobbing under the line and popping up on the other side to launch a combination, but when he reached the center of the ‘X’, he spun, coming up under the next line. “The pivot positions you to your opponent’s outside, toward his back.”

Jason tried it, moving down the line, then suddenly pivoting, moving out to his right.

“Try to make it faster,” Gramps urged him. “You want to whip around to your right, moving in an instant.”

For the next twenty minutes Jason practiced the new ‘X’ line, working to speed up his pivot so that he snapped to one side in one fast, smooth move, and was instantly firing punches from his new position. He got to where he could move from line to line to line, bobbing under one and instantly popping up beneath another.

“In boxing, there’s a saying, ‘Get off the tracks,’” Gramps explained. “As long as you stay right in front of your opponent, he can run over you, like a train. But when you move off to the side, take a new angle, you escape his forward pressure, and you’re at his back, where he’s weak.”

Jason was about to go inside the house for his abs work and stretching.

“Just a moment.” Gramps went to the corner and returned with a shillelagh. “In the game, Sister Mildred taught you the Irish way of using the walking stick, but there’s another way.”

“And what’s that?” Jason asked while doing side bends.

“Kabaroan, and the Bonafont method,” Gramps went to the bag, and like Sister Mildred, faced it as though it were an opponent. “There are two phases: one is you’re carrying the cane like a walking stick, and you find yourself under attack.”

“What’s the other?”

“You’re going to war.” Gramps switched to a two-handed grip, and began blasting the bag, making it bounce and sway, changing from a grip like a baseball bat to gripping it as though he were holding a rifle.

“Where’d you learn to use the shillelagh?” Jason asked.

“I studied the Filipino martial arts for years, specializing in the long stick. Then I came across an old Spanish manuscript written in 1930 by a guy named Bonafont, who fought with the gentleman’s cane.” Here Gramps demonstrated, holding the cane and taking a step as though he were an old-fashioned gentleman out on the town, with a fancy cane and a top hat. “I came to the idea of a knob cane for self-defense, the typical war club design common across many cultures. Eventually I realized I had come full circle to the shillelagh. Let me walk you through it, and you can use it in the game.”

* * *

Jason had done his five-mile run this morning, followed by a boxing workout to get ready for his boxing match this week. The 1920s was an era in which boxers often had more than a hundred fights, and some had more than two hundred, so the pace at which a boxer fought was much faster in the modern era, when a boxer might fight three or four times in a year, often less.

After lunch, Jason went to Dr. Steinman’s office for a session—he didn’t know what else to call it. He realized that if he was going to box, that the women he was meeting in secret might recognize him from the newspapers. When he arrived at the office, he wore the mayor-mandated anti-Mitral virus face mask for once, and kept his fedora pulled down low. After nodding to the receptionist, he went to the end of the hall, and removed a black cloth mask he constructed yesterday in the rectory. The mask covered his eyes and nose, but left his mouth and nostrils free, and tied at the back, sort of like Wesley in The Princess Bride or Iron Fist in the comics. He put on the mask, and stepped through the door to the mock bedroom, which he silently closed behind him.

To his surprise, the woman he was supposed to impregnate lay bent over the bed, lying on her stomach. She had pulled her skirt up over her back to expose her butt and slit, as well as a shapely pair of thighs and calves, which were taut from the fact that she stood in a pair of high heels. Save for the high-heeled shoes, she was naked from the waist down.

If the previous woman wanted to get intimate with him, kissing and caressing him, it seemed that this woman wanted nothing more than what was the absolute minimum necessary to become pregnant. The way she lay bent forward at the waist with her head on the pillow, Jason couldn’t even see her face. Well, if that was the way she wanted it, that was okay with Jason. Most likely, this woman was what they called a “canceled stamp” in the twenties, a woman who was introverted and shy. Or maybe she was more of a “flat tire,” a term for a dud, a woman who is a disappointment as a date.

Jason hung up his jacket at the coatrack near the door before approaching the bed, but the woman didn’t look up. He unfastened his belt and trousers, then unzipped himself so his pants fell down to his ankles. He pulled his briefs down to his ankles and whipped his penis against the woman’s buttocks, trying to get his fat hose to respond and fill with blood.

He heard a surprised gasp from the woman, more like a squawk, and she reached behind her to feel his thick sausage, running her hand over it to gauge its length and thickness. The feeling over her hand on his penis cause it to grow and tighten, while blue veins sprouted over its length. Steering himself to her slit, he positioned his knob at her lips, which elicited a whimper from her. He gradually pushed in but was surprised at how wet she was.

Jason drove into her, using her hips as handles. His hips moved of their own accord, sending his stiff rod plunging into her deeply and rapidly, and soon he lost control. It had been too long since he’d had real sex, had actually penetrated a woman and plumbed her depths. The need to ram this woman repeatedly lost out to any concern he might have felt, or perhaps should have felt, for a woman whose husband was impotent, and who was forced to come to a stranger out of desperation. His hips slammed into her, and his knob knocked at her womb. She tried to suppress a squeak each time his hips slammed into her, and his stiff tool stabbed her.

His balls swung up and slapped her thighs and slit, which was wet and glistening with her fluids. He made a point of rubbing his knob against the roof of her vagina, where her G spot was buried, in the shape of a bean that had become hardened from her arousal. She bit the pillow as her face slid back and forth, constantly shoved forward by Jason’s driving hips and ramrod. Against her will, she grew louder, grunting with every thrust that butted her. His fingers became talons clawing at the soft flesh at the creases of her thighs. He was close to his orgasm, and eager to unleash a flood of his warm seed.

She was no wallflower, no frigid woman who endured sex for the sake of the marriage, but a tigress fighting to conceal her animal lust. Jason struggled to hold back and keep from releasing the flood gates because he sensed that she was close to an orgasm. Despite the tightening he felt in his prostate, he fought to hold back, but he was driven, as she was, by needs that he couldn’t fully control. His scrotum had stopped slapping her because his balls had begun to climb up toward his body, a sign of his impending climax. He clenched his teeth, striving to hold back.

Suddenly he felt no friction at all in her channel and realized that she had climaxed and released a flood of juices. He followed, letting himself fall into an abyss of bliss. His rod began pumping, hosing her grotto with his thick seed. He kept spurting and shaking, and for a moment he forgot who or where he was, having become aware only of a sustained, rhythmic pulsing of his shaft shooting his semen into her. She moaned into the pillow and seemed to have a second orgasm. His hips were shaky as he thrust forward, several last times, trying to expel the last of his ejaculate into her.

He collapsed and fell forward onto her back, and his heart hammered against her body. He was exhausted but happy, with a deep sense of fulfillment. Neither of them had so much as spoken a single word.

Jason looked down but couldn’t even see her face for the wavy black hair that covered it. He was shocked to discover that he was still hard, and he resumed thrusting into her, making her mewl and whimper as he slid through his own soupy ejaculate, driving toward his second orgasm.

There was a knock, and something metallic struck the door. “Wanda, are you there?”

The woman shot up and spoke for the first time. “It’s my husband!”