“I’ve heard enough to reach a decision, counselor,” he says, leaning forward, impatiently pushing his heavy black robe away from his hand as he reaches towards his gavel. “Step back from the bench, all of you …” Unwillingly they trail off into silence, an uncomfortable state for any lawyer, trail off and slowly, resentfully drift away from the bench. If left to their own devices
they will carry on all day, into the night and on past the sunrise, animated by demons perhaps. “No, by their client’s money,” he thinks, leaning back, gavel in hand to survey his courtroom stretching out below him. Far and away back from the purposeful mountain of his edifice over the hills and valleys of the tables and chairs of counsel, back through the gates to the “sheep pens,” his words for the spectator and witness area, back to the dimly seen bailiffs against the walls. His gaze resting for a moment mid-kingdom, on the plaintiff, the girl at the table, her dress short, her legs long, almost as long as his attention on her.
**
He calls for a recess, and hurries off to chambers, walking awkwardly, for once grateful for his long robes, grateful for what they conceal, his stiffness an indignity to the majesty of his office, he thinks, recalling the words a friend used once. “An indignity to the majesty of my office,” his friend had said, laughing as they sat in the conference room at the back of the courthouse, the one reserved for members of the bench. They had laughed at that too, laughed at the double entendre. “I certainly had a stiff member that day,” his friend had said, “you remember, when I had to handle that obscenity case, the one with all the bizarre sex videos?” And he does remember, recalling the sounds through the thin courtroom walls, the high-pitched screams of feigned orgasm turning his court reporter’s face red. “The most prudish woman I’ve ever seen,” he thinks, “she can’t even type ‘fuck,’ and what kind of sex she has … I bet she even finds the missionary position exotic.” He shakes his head, his mind drifting back …
He remembers the sounds, first the identifiable ones of sex, of women reaching orgasm, but they didn’t last long; and soon, the entire courtroom was quiet as the rhythmic WHACK WHACK WHACK reverberated through the walls, through the
hallways, perhaps even down to the guard’s desk at the entrance. A strange sound at first, puzzled faces straining to place it, familiar, remembered in the dark dusty recesses of the mind.
WHACK WHACK WHACK, they all hear it, and suddenly, all at once it comes to him, to them – a spanking. That’s what it is, they suddenly hear her pleading, high pitched wail now, the sounds of a girl being punished suddenly clear. Juvenile pleas, “daddy I’m sorry,” no cessation of the rhythm as the actor – it must be an actor musn’t it? – continues to apply his hand to her
bare bottom.
He assumes it’s a hand, and that her bottom is bare. “That’s how I would do it,” he thinks, suddenly feeling himself stiffen as he imagines it, “her bottom bare, so that I can see … everything, between her legs, between her cheeks.” In fact she was mostly wearing panties, his friend told him later, disinterestedly, although at the end she had to stand up and pull them down. “How far,” he asks, choking the words out, but his friend had already turned away to other business, leaving him standing there, beet red and foolish.
“Hey, if you’re interested, go down to impound and see if they’ll give you a private screening,” the judge replies, chuckling to himself, and he watches him go, feeling silly, knowing he can’t do that, ashamed … and at the same time excited. Imagining himself doing it, the girl squirming as he lectures her, reading her the same riot act he has recited for hundreds of lawyers, in
his office, standing up from behind his desk while they cower in front of him.
**
He thought about it again the next day, when he found himself in chambers for an unscheduled conference with opposing counsel. “A new one,” he thinks, looking at her, young, fresh out of school perhaps, unwise about protocol and how far she can safely go with a judge. “That’s not fair your honor,” she begins, the moment he closes the door, but his mind flashes back to the sounds he heard, and he finds himself cutting her off with a curt, “be quiet … young lady.” She cowers as he lectures her, telling her about the respect that is his due, and the sanctions he can impose if she doesn’t obey his rules. As he talks he walks back and forth behind his desk, slapping his hand on the oak to emphasize each point, imagining the oak her bare skin, looking down at her legs, clad in thin white stockings. Imagining her bent over his desk, that thin expensive wool skirt pulled up over her waist, panties down her bottom red, as red as his stenographer’s face he thinks, when she heard the spanking. He finishes his lecture, letting his words trail off into silence – then, a pointed look at her and the command comes out of his mouth, unbidden, “get up and come here.” And she does, approaching him, and he finds himself moving to the side of the desk, standing there impotently, imagining her submissively bending now as he mutters some ineffectual parting remark and watches her behind swaying underneath her pencil-thin skirt as she walks unsteadily away from him. Out of his office and to freedom.
**
And he’s thinking about it now, staring at the attractive plaintiff shifting out there in his kingdom, short skirt, nice legs, “great ass,” he thinks, rolling the word around in his mouth. A word he never uses, incommensurate with his office, like so many other pleasures he’s set aside or cut himself off from altogether. “Her ass,” he mutters under his breath, “there’s a lot you could do with an ass like that …” And he’s slipping off into another erotic daydream, his head tilting up slightly as he’s carried away. His
stenographer, Miss Prude, looks up briefly and mistakes his expression for one of diligence. “Pondering the law,” she thinks, unable to comprehend a life beyond work. Her life is the courtroom, and the transcripts she works on at home to the exclusion of the world outside. She is going on a cruise with them, the judge and her friends from the court, her first venture outside the
small lifeless town where she lives. “I wonder if he’ll work there too,” she thinks, dreamily. She worships the judge, a fact he’s all too aware of, too many nights spent with her, alone in his chambers going over transcripts, aware of her pleasant body, pretty face … and cheap perfume. She sighs, swept away in her own dreams, hoping to be noticed by him as he slips further into his own thoughts, now completely oblivious to the routine instructions the court clerk is reading to the jury …
**
“There are some other tapes you might go see,” his friend told him later that afternoon, “they’re even wilder than the one you asked about.” His friend chuckles, mistaking his red face for prudishness. “You should have seen them,” he says, shaking his head. “Anal, how can anyone like that stuff? And not just anal, enemas for God’s sake!” His friend leans back and looks at him. “Your dad was a doctor wasn’t he? Did he ever say that that kind of thing was exciting, that anyone liked it?”
“No, of course not …” he begins, his face reddening as he recalls his childhood, recalls assisting at his dad’s practice when he was 16. Recalls the supply closet, medicines stretching up to the ceiling, how it was practically his second home, his first kingdom before his courtroom, “a smaller humbler territory,” he thinks to himself, “but one with its own riches, its own bounty
of delights.”
**
He remembers being sent there for supplies as well as drugs; he can still place their locations in his mind, arranged for convenience, accessibility determined by frequency of use. His father always was a practical man, he thinks. OB/Gyn supplies high up, full operating kits slightly lower, but still requiring a ladder, even given his size at 16. “How many operations like that
you think I get in a GP, boy,” he remembers his father asking? “Pregnancies, now more of those, but most of them go off to the hospital and don’t need me. I’m lucky, I get the ones with nothing major wrong.” And the closet bears him out, bandages and antiseptic at eye-level, burn kits … all the accoutrements for the minor stream of problems that his father and his lone nurse confront every day. And, he remembers, next to the burn kits … the thermometers, the child ones, the suppositories … and the enema bags.
He didn’t know what they were at first, thinking that they were another set of I.V. bags, so he moved them up to the top shelf with the major surgery supplies. He still remembers the afternoon a few days later when his dad’s nurse came looking for him, annoyance written clearly on her face. “Where’d you put the bags, boy,” she said, “your father sent me to get one in the
closet and they’re not there.” They always called him “boy,” he remembers, and being scolded in the same sentence only added to his embarrassment.
“The enema bags,” she said, reading the confusion on his face, “don’t you know what those are?” He shook his head from side to side, a dumb gesture that he’s seen a thousand times since in his years as a judge. She sighed and walked off to the closet, not looking back to see him dutifully trailing behind her, as obedient as a dog, he remembers with a little laugh. He followed her through the narrow white hallway towards the closet, past his father’s office, which also doubled as his examining room. He remembers the door open, his father with his back turned away from the doorway, talking to his patient. He feels his heart racing a bit, just as it did that day when he saw the girl sitting on the table. Her clothes folded up neatly in a pile on a chair next to her, her long pretty hair streaming down over the white gown, her face the same shade of white as she saw him, refusing to acknowledge his presence. His presence there as mute witness to her embarrassment and shame, for she has been told what they’re going to be doing, once the nurse comes back with the bag.
“Julie Coombs,” he thinks, “she was the prettiest one in high school, a senior, pretty enough to be a cheerleader if she’d wanted to be.” Which, he recalls, she hadn’t, preferring to spend her time quietly, out of the public eye. A shy girl, given to conservative clothing, never wearing a skirt above her knees, even though most of the other girls in the school did. He remembers seeing her once at the pool, wearing a bikini. “She got lots of stares, enough that she wore one-pieces after that,” he remembers, thinking about her body, staring at her behind when she turned, seeing the lower curves of her cheeks protruding from the suit, which had ridden up as she walked away. He had looked hungrily at Julie’s bottom, he recalls; it had been after the incident in his father’s office, and her behind had taken on a new meaning for him.
It had only been a glimpse of Julie there in the office, but it had been enough. He knew she was naked under the gown, apart from her panties, which he knew his father would have had her retain. “They keep on as much clothing as I let them,” his dad had said at dinner once, in response to a question he can no longer recall. “They usually keep on their underthings, that damn room is cold enough when you’re fully dressed.” He had thought it funny at the time, but the picture of Julie in her white cotton panties spun through his mind now, dispelling every thought but his aching desire. He found it hard to concentrate as the turned the corner of the hall and walked into the supply closet.
“There they are,” the nurse exclaimed, craning her head upwards, “why’d you put them on the top shelf when we use ‘em so often?” He tells her that he thought they were I.V. bags, and she laughs. “No, boy, look at the nozzle on this thing!” By this time she has pulled one down and, staring through the plastic wrapper he sees the large, molded cylinder at the end of the hose.
Hollow, as big around as two fingers laid on top of each other, it’s ribbed, he notes, the end large, smooth, pear shaped. “Green,” he thinks, for no good reason, realizing now that its become his favorite color, green, indelibly etched in his erotic memory.
“You think this monster goes in someone’s arm, boy?” She laughs, ripping open the wrapper and holding the nozzle up for him to see, waving it in his face, the hose dangling down from it to the clear plastic bag below. “Believe me, it goes somewhere entirely different.” She laughs again, but he doesn’t notice it, for his eyes are now focused on the nozzle, and for the first time he sees the holes in the side of the cylinder, sees that water will come out of them when the bag empties. Water, or whatever is in the bag.
“That girl in there, Julie, you know her?” Again he shakes his head dumbly. “Well, boy, let me tell you, she’s not going to be very happy in a few minutes.” The nurse shrugs and bends down to pick up a sealed packet that’s fallen out of the wrapper. “Only one dosing of soap now,” he hears her mutter, “well, he won’t like it but I guess he’ll just have to use Castile for her
second one. That’s what he gets for going with cheaper equipment.” He find himself staring at the woman’s behind, thinking of Julie in the other room, looking at the tight white pants straining over her bottom, seeing her panties showing through, imagining what Julie would look like in the same posture, her gown hanging open in back, her white panties all too visible to his gaze. The
nurse was only 25 or so, he realizes now, impossibly old for him then, but even so an impressive sight. “But nothing like what I saw after,” he reminds himself.
He remembers trailing the nurse out of the closet, standing next to her as she ran water in the sink outside, watching her methodically adjusting the temperature until she’s got it just right. He remembers her holding the bag under the faucet, letting it fill half way, then handing it to him while she rips open the soap packet and squeezes its contents into the bag. The water
turned milky he remembers, and stayed that way when she filled it up to the top. He held it again while she opened the clamp on the hose, watching in fascination as the solution streamed down the tube and shot out the end of the nozzle, as well as the holes in the sides of the cylinder. “Now you be a good boy and get me a tube of vaseline,” she told him and, when he had delivered it, she turned and walked off to his father’s office, holding the bag high, the dangling hose swinging as she walked.
**
“Now, it’s a funny thing,” he thinks, “that hole in the back of the closet, it’s the sort of thing that you’d see in a dirty movie or read about in a book.” He had known it was there of course, and had even used it once or twice, but most of his fathers patients didn’t interest him. Farmers from the surrounding community, with normal aches and pains. Housewives, mothers of his
friends, women he had no interest in, except to know whether they had baked a pie for the evening dinner.
This time was different though, and, as soon as the nurse had disappeared into his father’s office and shut the door, he rushed back to the closet. Flipping off the light switch, he carefully moved the containers in back, easing himself down to the ray of light coming in through the hole. “It was a bolt hole for the pegboard,” he reminds himself, “but the bolt had come out, leaving the perfect little opening.” Peeping through he sees his father’s back, the girl on the table, and the nurse coming towards her, bulging bag hanging down from her hand. She hooks the top of the bag to an I.V. pole, wheels the pole over to the side of the table, and looks to his father for guidance.
He sees his father dragging the chair out from behind his desk, the same sort of large oak desk he has now; the same sort of chair too, when he thinks about it. He watches his father pull it to the middle of the room and walk to it. He turns to Julie, motions quietly with his hand for her to come to him, which she does, slowly lowering herself off the table …
**
She comes to stand besides him, his father, and he sees himself as a teenager peering through the hole at her, at her face, at how her long hair hangs down. He is watching the nurse, who stands behind the girl, envious of the view she has, Julie’s behind visible to her through the gown, not yet bare, but vulnerable nonetheless. “You know what I have to do, Julie,” he hears his
father say. “Just come over here and stand by me now, and let my nurse open up the back of your gown.” Slowly the girl moves to obey. He remembers his excitement, and the growing bulge in his pants.
And now, his father is directing the girl to move to the other side of his chair, her bottom facing towards the peephole. The gown is open now, he watched the nurse do it, saw her standing behind the shivering girl slowly undoing the ties at the back. Her panties are still up, he notes, white cotton, virginal, exactly what he had expected she would wear. They are tight on her bottom, tight, taught fabric stretched over the erotic twin moons, and he clearly sees the deep crevice between them, the outline of the plunging indentation that he’s soon to see so clearly, when her panties come down.
His father sits down on the chair, pats his lap, and the girl goes slowly across his knees. As if in a dream he watches as his father puts his hand into the waistband of her panties and begins to draw them down. As he does so, his nurse slowly lubricates the nozzle with vaseline. He watches as his father pulls Julie’s cheeks apart, slowly, exposing her most intimate orifice to him,
watches as the nurse approaches the prone figure of the girl, places the thick greased pearhead of the nozzle against her intimate opening and slowly begins to push it in …
**
Back in his courtroom, staring down at the young woman before him, his mind is still locked on those events, many years earlier. He remembers her small moans as the water rushed in, how she shifted over his father’s knees. How she looked there, white bottom, smooth skin, thick nozzle between her parted cheeks, hose rising to the emptying bag above her.
He remembers her lying there, waiting for permission to get up and go to the bathroom, the small one just off the examining room, much like the bathroom he has in chambers, he realizes. He saw her rise, awkwardly, the hose still dangling down, saw her turn away and walk off, slowly, the thick green nozzle protruding from between her cheeks. He saw her the next day at school, smiled at her as she walked past, head bent in shame when she saw him. He turned to watch her go, his eyes fixed on her behind, tight white pants now, but in his mind he sees her walking away to the bathroom, gown open in back, the hose
hanging down. “She got two more when she came out,” he recalls, revisiting the images, “the second of Castile soap, same position, the third plain water with her up on the table, head down and bottom raised.” His father had put a glove on his hand after the second, he recalls, slid it into her while she bent over the end of the table, the examination to see if she was completely cleaned out,” as his father put it.
Thinking about it now he realizes that he can remember almost every event of that afternoon, the first of many he thinks. For there were others, some with Julie, others with different girls, older women. The procedure was always the same, the first two given over his father’s knee, then the examination and, if the diagnosis was good, a final cleaning on the table. A few times his father had given more, used stronger soap, or put in a suppository and had the patient retain it.
He remembers how much he looked forward to work after that, how every time the front door of the clinic opened he held his breath. And usually let it out with a sigh as some grizzled farmer fresh with shit from the fields came in, “back pains today, Doctor,” or some such complaint. But every so often they came, the angels of his teenage years, young pretty girls, embarrassed, walking by him quickly, escorted into the office. Door shut, voices overheard, then his nurse coming to the closet, taking down a bag, giving him a little smile – at least he swore afterwards that she did, swaggering her bottom slightly as she walked away from him, bag in hand. Feigning indifference as he watched her stand at the sink, filling it, adding the soap, letting the air run through the tubing. She leaves and he runs to shut off the light, crouching down, moving the boxes away from the hole; he stares through and watches the little drama inside unfold. Another girl over his father’s knees, the nozzle going into her bottom preparing to take her medicine.
**
Which is what the one in front of him needs, he realizes. She’s there for no good reason, wasting the court’s time, “My time,” he reminds himself. “And her own money too, on all those miserable lawyers.” A nuisance suit and nothing more, the kind of thing that would never have been allowed in court in an earlier, stricter age.
He thinks about that word, “strict.” He remembers his 20s, when the image of his father’s ministrations came back to him, over and over, reinforcing themselves in a kind of harmonic resonance. A string of girlfriends during law school, each one more difficult than the last; and he remembers himself becoming sterner and sterner with each. Tolerating less, demanding more, until
the day that he finally snapped and, thinking of Julie over his father’s knees, took his girlfriend of the time across his lap. “Not for that kind of treatment,” he laughs, “but an altogether different form of medicine.”
The sounds of the pornographic tape ring through his mind as he recalls that night, his hand descending on her red rump, slapping out his own rhythmic WHACK WHACK WHACK. The spanking, and then, afterwards, the girl now obedient,
kneeling before him taking him in elher mouth. With gusto. After that it became a regular thing with him, with many girlfriends in the same position, over his lap, bare, feeling his hand first, then, over time, his belt, a paddle, a hairbrush.
It wasn’t until later that he bought an enema bag, “the ultimate punishment,” he thought to himself. But he never used it, although he would swear now that more than a few of the women he knew deserved it. “Miss Priss, to say the least,” he thinks, staring down at his court clerk reporter. Finally, for some reason that he still can’t quite fathom, he took it to his office, putting it
in the bathroom of his chambers. Feeling, perhaps, some sort of closure, some spiritual connection with his father. Ready to perform the same ministrations his father had, although the when and how eluded him.
**
But now, staring down at the woman below him, looking at her short tight skirt and black stockings, an idea begins to form in his mind. He leans forward.
“Miss T,” he says to his reporter, his tone sugary, “tell the lawyers I want to adjourn for the day …” He pauses a moment, looks at the girl sitting, waiting, sees her smiling at him, feels her submissiveness, waiting to be released like so many others before her.
“Tell her,” he points to the girl, “that I want to see her in chambers.” His reporter looks at him, quizzically. “I want to discuss her suit with her, see if I can convince her to drop it.” She hurries off to do his bidding, and he watches her go, her shapely behind swinging as she scurries across the courtroom floor.
“She’s next,” he thinks, as he rises, turns, and, slowly and sedately walks out of the room, down the corridor to his chambers. To wait.
To wait for her to come, to be escorted there, his “victim,” homage to his father and the parade of girls that entered his office. He walks down the hall, sits down at his desk, touches the cool oak surface thinking of its twin, long ago, in his father’s office.
He sits there, behind his desk. Waiting to hear her hesitating footsteps in the hallway, waiting to hear her hand turning the doorknob, entering his office, for the medicine he will be giving her.
He sits there, waiting patiently for her to come.
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