Andrew Jackson High

Squirrel

Andrew Jackson High 3

by George Gauthier

1. A Swinger of Birches

I first took to the trees as a young boy of eight to escape school yard bullies and an abusive foster father. I do not mean sexual abuse, whatever Walt's faults were, that was not one of them. No, I mean the kind of abuse a grown man delivers with a strap or a switch to the bare rump of a pre-pubescent boy.

I was the designated scapegoat for whatever went wrong in that benighted household, whether a lost job or a kiss off from the latest live-in girlfriend. One time, I was outside in the back yard attending to chores when I heard the crash of broken china.

"Brandon O'Rourke!" came the angry call. "This is your fault for not stacking the dishes properly. Drop your shorts and bend over!"

Since my shorts were all I had on that fine summer day, I had to take my punishment naked, stripping everything off and bending over with my hands braced on my knees. Walt said the welts on my butt were a good reminder of my latest infraction. So he was not a child molester, but he was a mean cuss.

One day I just ran off rather than be switched yet again on some trumped up charge by my drunken foster father. I had long ago learned that trying to talk my way out of trouble only made things worse. Walt took any attempt at explanation, justification, or mitigation as so sass. In his mind, any boy who dared sass his elders deserved to be punished on principle, for that alone, regardless of the underlying low crimes and misdemeanors.

That day Walt had taken me into the tool shed and ripped my only garment, a pair of charity drive cutoffs off my hips and bent me over a saw horse, positioning me for at least ten whacks with the switch, and that was just for starters, for the sass, not what had happened, or he thought had happened before that.

Before he could get the first slash in I took off, right then and there, ducking under his upraised arm, and streaking into the woods. I stayed away all that afternoon and overnight, driven up a tree at dusk by the arrival of mosquitos. Mosquitos fly close to the ground which is why primitives build houses in trees on on stilts. I stayed there long past dawn, knowing I would face new charges when I returned to Walt's care. Indeed that morning Walt called the school to report me for truancy. In time a truant officer tracked me down in my leafy refuge.

"Come down from that damn tree you little squirrel," the exasperated truant officer shouted at me, the young miscreant perched high above on a live oak. If I have to call the fire department, it will go worse for you.

"The fire department? They rescue lost cats stuck up a tree. Do I look like a kitty cat?"

"Damn your bare hide, youngster, for dragging me all the way out here in this heat. I am just mad enough to ask Animal Control to put a narcotic dart in that bare rump of yours and let you fall to earth. The drop is only about thirty feet and the ground is spongy. It's right up their alley too, removing nuisances like a chittering red squirrel such as yourself."

Well I do have red or rather auburn hair. And I am quick and nimble as a squirrel. I have a real talent for climbing which is what later led me to the sport of parkour. Anyway, from that day forward my nickname was Squirrel. Only my teachers and my foster father called me Brandon. More than once I lived up to my nickname, and sought refuge in the trees, often leaving all clothing behind in a symbolic cutting of ties with the situation I was fleeing. And anyway, I have always really liked to get naked.

A precocious lad, I had learned the facts of life sooner than most and soon thereafter the practice thereof. Increasingly dissatisfied with foster care, I thought about running away and living on the streets. It might well have happened that way, we me turned rent boy to support myself, the only work available to a thirteen year old boy. That would have been the start of a short spiral to hell.

Then I got lucky. The fostering agency found a taker for a difficult kid few folks wanted in their homes. He was an older man and lived alone, a widower. This was Pierre Lyautey, a decent man of modest means, from Cajun country originally, now resident in South Florida. He knew me for what I was and wanted very much for me turn aside from mischief and to lead a good life. In other words, to become a decent human being, and that was regardless of the direction my newly awakened sexuality pointed me toward. Somehow this good man he saw in me a better boy than the one I thought I was.

Though not particularly religious, he was a living embodiment of the Serenity Prayer. He had the serenity to accept the things he could not change, the courage to change the things he could, and most important of all, the wisdom to know the difference. He changed my life. No. Make that, he saved my life by giving it a new direction. He got turned me around. He made me want to step off the downward path that lead first to the streets, then to delinquency, and on to a life of petty crime. I will always be grateful to this fine human being.

When I enrolled at Andrew Jackson High, I realized that many of the most popular boys had cute nicknames like mine including the towel boy for the swim team Alex Conlon, the one they call Squirt who is also a student journalist, and the budding botanist who goes by the name of Sprout, a.k.a. William Pierpoint Tagliaferro IV, which is a real mouthful. Collectively Sprout and another boy named Zach are known as the Nature Boys for their predilection for running around naked as much as they can get away with. Boys after my own heart! No wonder I fell in with them so readily.

Things were going well for me at home and at school. I had little trouble fitting in or making friends with Sprout and his lover Zach. I joined them at swim meets to ogle the impossibly cute and well endowed towel boy. Too bad swim team practice was closed to outsiders. It was only in the locker room that I caught glimpses of Squirt's humongous tallywhacker which looked even bigger on his petite and glabrous physique.

I am built much the same as Sprout and Squirt, though nearly two inches shorter, call it five foot zero, rounding off to the nearest inch. So this is me, all of 60.3 inches (152 cm) and one hundred pounds even (45 kg). Sweat out too much on a long run, and I become, at least temporarily, that ninety-eight pound weakling who gets sand kicked in his face. Actually mine is a wiry physique with a well-defined musculature that brings to mind the phrase "hard body" rather than "wimp" or "weakling". I have a surpassingly strong upper storey and large hands which help me when I brachiate through the trees.

As the poet said, now I have become a swinger of birches, though birches are in short supply this far south.

And now I am into parkour, a new sport imported from France. The name is a variant spelling for the French word for obstacle course, parcours. Only we do not run purpose built courses. We treat our whole environment as an obstacle course. The idea is to move from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as you can, using the innate abilities of the human body to run, climb, jump, fall, swing, slide, and tumble. All without ropes, hooks, or grapnels or other aids.

Normally I wear just a pair of abbreviated bicycle shorts -- very low rise and with a short inseam. They are made of an airy, lightweight, porous, and nearly sheer tan-thru fabric. Colorful patterns printed on the fabric fool the eye into focussing on its surface rather than looking through the flimsy cloth to see the boy beneath. After a run, when I finally get the chance to strip the garment off, I am always surprised at how tiny a ball of cloth it can be rolled up into. There was practically nothing to the exiguous garment but air and color. Shorts and low-top canvas shoes, that's it. Not even gloves.

I imagine these techniques would be good for escape and evasion. I mean, I can run straight at a wall, leap and push my lead foot against the rough surface, getting enough of a shove off to reach the edge of the roof above and swing myself up and out of reach of pursuit. Then it is easy enough to escape across the rooftops, leaping between building and across alleys, clambering over construction scaffolding, trellises and arcades, climbing or sliding down drainpipes, dropping onto awnings, my agility and light weight making it easy to leave lumbering pursuers behind. From that point of view parkour is a form of applied acrobatics and excellent survival training in escape and evasion.

The sport gives me a chance to test my nimbleness and strength not so much against others but against the limits of my own body as I overcame obstacles like walls, fences, buildings, towers, trees, and ditches. I always feel exuberant after a good scramble, it appeals to the boy in me, and what boy does not like to climb trees?

Parkour is not a competitive team sport yet at Andrew Jackson High, but we do have an officially sanctioned parkour club, of which I am, ahem, the vice-president.

Just recently and thanks to Sprout and Zach I have invented a new variant of the sport: Naked Parkour. Call me an exhibitionist if you must, but taking all my clothes off makes me feel terribly naughty and sexy. Just like my friends. So I often join them over at a nature preserve and stash my clothing, skimpy enough to start with, and take to the trees like, oh with whom should I compare myself?

Not Tarzan, too old and too many muscles. Like Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, I don't like a man with too many muscles. Not Mowgli either, a pre-pubescent kid. I am more Bomba the Jungle Boy, like in those cheap B&W B-pictures from the 1950s. Closer to him in age, though the actor who portrayed him made his dozen Bomba pictures when he was between 18 and 24. Of course his Bomba wore a generous loincloth and was bigger and more muscular by far. I always thought Johnny Sheffield had a homely face, but the producers didn't go looking for better when they cast Sheffield in the role. He had been Boy to Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan in the movies.

Anyway, the three of us, Sprout, Zach, and I go on safari, as we jokingly call it, as often as we can in hot weather. I take the high road and they take the low. And yes, I join them in their extracurricular activities. That's right. Just like those two super-cute twinks I am gay. Or as Sprout puts it, gay, fey, and more than okay. We have a lot of fun with each other's bodies, but I am in no way a part of their union.

As to what I look like, I have been remiss in not providing details earlier. As I said, I am a little guy with a slight but wiry physique. Like many boys these days I had treatments with those new depilatories that render the hair follicles permanently quiescent. Hence no beard or body hair anywhere, not even at the fork of my legs. Which is fine, it makes my manly parts more prominent and gets rid of that unsightly tangled triangle we males were traditionally saddled with.

My face is probably too pretty for a male, though a chiseled jawline and strong chin keep me from looking totally androgynous. I have spiky red hair cut short at the sides with narrow sideburns reaching below the ear lobe. They help frame a cute face with a high forehead, straight eyebrows with almost no curve to them, sky blue eyes, and a perky nose slightly turned up at the end in keeping with my Irish heritage.

Down there, my ball sac is small and smooth, its corrugations understated, the whole of it pulled close to my groin. That makes my cock look longer, a smooth tube that emerges seamlessly from my abdomen, its shaft unmarked by angry veins like with so many other guys. The foreskin hugs most of the knob, offering just a peek of the glans.

If I waited so long to describe myself it was not from any sense of modesty, believe me. Boys who like to run around naked in nature preserves or go swimming and sunbathing at the nudie beach beyond the jetty, are not bothered by nudity taboos. By now we expect cameras to be pointed our way, capturing our youthful beauty for posterity, or maybe for a stroke session that evening.

I do not mind in the least. As far as I am concerned I have no private parts. I proudly let it all hang out for my adoring public. Actually all of us boys (four including Squirt) are proud of the taut and trim bodies we have so recently grown into. And just from their faces, most of our onlookers appreciate the chance to look us over, some actually for aesthetic reasons. We really are worth looking at, a lot more so than so many celebrated nudes on display in museums.

I make an exception for mythological subjects like Ganymede, Leander, Narcissus, Hippolytus, Hyacinth, Telemakos, and Hylas, all of them beardless boys you could fantasize going to bed with. You can keep your Herakles, Theseus, Odysseus, and Zeus himself, for that matter, anyone one, god or mortal with a beard and an overdeveloped body.

That goes double for Michaelangelo's Adam in the Sistene Chapel, the worst male nude I ever saw, with that grotesque weightlifter physique and tiny infantile genitals, likely due to too many steroids, whether through God's mistake or Adam's own. (I offer this hypothesis as my very own theological discovery, the real original sin.) How those tiny organs managed to engender the human race, I will never know. It would have taken a miracle for Adam to impregnate Eve. With God on hand to supply it, maybe there is no mystery after all.

1. Halloween

Then came the big Halloween party where a group of alumni was offering prizes for best costume in several categories: historical, mythological, action heroes, and several more. We intended to compete but not against each other. Each would take a category. One thing we did agree, we needed a unique approach to costuming. Nothing off-the-shelf would do. Squirt heard us talking about it one day and said he had a great idea, only we must include him in the competition, making four of us going non-competitively after prizes.

"All right Squirt, care to share your brainstorm with us?"

He nodded, a sly smile on his cute face that soon broadened into a wide grin.

"You boys are gonna love this, though maybe not right off, since it is so original. So hold off on your first reaction and think it through. Agreed?"

"Fine." we chorused in reply. "Get on with it, you little imp. The suspense is killing us."

With his eyes dancing with merriment, Squirt landed his idea on us, then sat back to let us ponder it.

"Body paint! Our costumes will be made of body paint and absolutely nothing else."

After a moment of stunned disbelief, Zach asked:

"You mean we go to the school gymnasium to attend the officially sponsored AJHS Halloween party, girls, boys, and teachers, all of us stark naked except for a dab of body paint?"

"Exactly! the imp replied and awaited our further cogitation.

At first the notion was so outrageous we were stunned, but then the wheels turned. It would give us the advantage of originality. Anyone could dress up as Darth Vader or the Count of Monte Christo. Finally Sprout asked Squirt:

"Isn't your boyfriend Paul Hansen an amateur painter, a watercolorist if I remember rightly. What do they call him, Acid?"

"Sometimes, though he is not particularly fond of that nickname, and I never use it. Still he is just the man for the job, real genius with a paintbrush, though as yet unrecognized."

Sprout frowned, the gears finally turning over. "Acid? What kind of a nickname is that. Does Paul do acid?"

Squirt rolled his eyes. "Small p plus capital H. Get it? Potential of Hydrogen if you remember your Chemistry, the measure of acidity and alkalinity. pH is spelled with a small p, not all capitals like Paul Hansen. I called him PH, all capitals, when I don't just call him Paul."

Needless to say we were the hit of the Halloween party, arriving on a school bus Sprout hired for the occasion so we could ride over standing up and not spoil our costumes. Spontaneous laughter, guffaws from the boys, nervous titters from the girls, followed by thunderous applause and stomping feet greeted our grand entrance. Paul used a handheld electric megaphone to announce us one by one, as if he were the majordomo at the court of a king. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was clothed in a real costume and very much looked the part. The whole grand entrance was his idea and a fine one it was too.

Principal Degnan rushed over and tried to get us to leave. We stood our ground while Paul's father, a lawyer who had come along in support, stated our case. There was nothing in the rules to bar such an unorthodox approach to costuming. Nothing in school rules generally either, excepting about going bare, and we were not that. The principal was frustrated, but he had to concede our right to be at the event and to compete for prizes.

Degnan did tell us that he intended to an eye on us for the remainder of our school careers. Glaring at the imp's humongous tallywhacker and then sweeping his glare at the rest of our virile members, he held up a finger in warning, he added:

"No erections!" then stalked off. At that the crowd started laughing so hard, some of them holding their sides in pain. From that point on we were shoo-ins. All four of us took first place in our respective categories.

Squirt was awesome as the Tree of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from Genesis. His arms were mostly unpainted, the bare skin and the protruding veins in his arms acknowledging the role that the urgings of the flesh played in the psycho-drama enacted in the Garden of Eden. The right side of his body formed the brown trunk of the tree with a crown of green foliage starting just under his pectorals and covering his shoulders, with a large red apple centered on his left tit. The rest of his left side was mostly background, blue sky and fluffy white clouds, except for two small branches of the tree extending from the trunk to his left side, both passing between navel and groin.

What really brought the house down was the serpent depicted with alternating bands of light and dark green, its lower body curled around the trunk of the tree, with the front end of his body dangling from the lower branch. The last section of the serpent was formed by Squirt's cock, painted with the same alternating bands. The head of the boy's cock was painted like the head of the snake, with two dark eyes and a smile across the piss slit and beyond.

The poor principal was speechless as Squirt's member plumped up just enough to stand out at an angle from his groin, emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the composition, as Paul explained poker faced, as if giving a lecture on art appreciation. His delivery was a devastating imitation of the school's art teacher, a man who took himself and his subject far too seriously in the minds of most folks.

Next up was Zach, his blue-black hair making him a perfect model for Superboy. Most of his body was painted an even pale blue, actually a shade much lighter than the Kryptonian really wears, but it was the correct shade for his costume, doing less to conceal his body than a dark blue would have. Zach had a large S shield on his chest the top curving across his pectorals, the point at his navel. Starting at the shoulders a deep red color covered much of his back though cutting off cleanly at the knees to represent the hem of his cape. Though his hands were left bare, the lower half of his calves and his feet were the same deep red to represent boots. And yes he had the familiar bathing costume, or is it just underwear worn inside out, a yellow belt and red Speedos, his manly parts painted red to match.

That left Sprout and myself. Sprout went as a Harlequin, his limbs painted solid colors, the legs from Adam's girdle to foot, with the left leg a bright red, the right leg white. His upper limbs were just the opposite, right arm red, left arm white. Right hand and left foot were white, the other appendages left bare. His chest and belly were like a jerkin, decorated with an argyle pattern of six rows of diamond shaped lozenges, alternating red and white, with a faux pointed collar starting at the collar bones. He wore a red and white mask around the eyes above red and white lips. His genitals were also solid white. It was a stunning costume.

My own costume was simpler, with much of my skin left unpainted though not any great expanse. I went as a work of primitive art, yet almost abstractly modern in style as well, a design in red and blue with my nude body as the canvas. Its short stripes and curves and whorls and lines of red dots along my flanks vaguely suggested Australian petroglyphs. I particularly liked the red whorls on my buttocks and the red stripes on my collar bones. My face, and hands were bare. The artist had centered a curvy triangle of blue on my navel. My balls were red and my cock blue though with a ring of black half way along the shaft. I never thought I would one day be strutting my stuff in a packed school gymnasium.

Squirt, as the Tree and Serpent, had the most original costume, Zach the best match of subject and model. Zach's body is exactly like that of the original Superboy in the comics, standing five foot nine and weighing 125. Sprout's Harlequin was the best executed design, and my abstract art the most revealing of the nude boy that formed the painter's canvas. The others looked like bright costumes with a nude boy underneath. I looked like a nude boy with daubs of paint on an otherwise bare skin, but my blatant sexuality wasn't threatening even up close because of my diminutive size and pretty boy features.

We lined up with Zach the tallest at 5/9 on our right, Sprout and Squirt in the middle at 5/2, and me at five foot zero. Two blonds in the middle bookended by raven-haired Zach and me, the red-head. Since we were all juniors, it was not surprising that we were so close in age, only two months apart at the extremes.

Paul Hansen had done us all proud, working at a furious pace to get us all finished and working entirely alone. As we went on stage to collect our prizes we dragged him along with us to present him to the crowd as our resident artistic genius. He later told us that he appreciated the applause from the student body more than any praise he had won on the athletic field.

As we stood there close together on stage, with everyone looking on, Paul reached down and cupped my genitals, tsk-tsking and shaking his head. In a voice amplified by the PA system he mused:

"I got your crown jewels all wrong, Squirrel. Both the scepter and the orbs. It should be your balls that are blue and your cock red, instead of the other way around."

Lots of laughter.

I blushed furiously, which only lead to another quip shouted from the crowd.

"Yes a cock as red as that pretty face of his has turned just now."

"Pretty red back here too," quipped another. "I think this is one of those full body blushes you read about but are never able to witness, what with clothing getting in the way, and all."

"No such problem here. My oh my, and would you look at those buns of steel!"

Actually a couple of guys took the opportunity to touch my aforementioned buns. What could I do but be a good sport about it? Actually one pair of hands on my buns had been real strong and had delved into my cleavage briefly. I wonder which student that hand belonged to.

We circulated in the crowd, dancing with each other and then other partners. My dance card included some slow dances which allowed my dance partners a good many chances to feel me up. I am afraid that like Squirt I rose to the occasion. By popular demand I reprised one of my break dance routines, another outlet for my acrobatic abilities. I whirled and twirled and tumbled and slid across the polished wood floor, a wild display of the human body in furious motion, including my cock flip flopping in every direction. Fortunately there was no real damage to my paint job.

At that Halloween party, we were sensational. The photos and videos from countless phones plus the official photographer went viral in no time. Even the principal relented and showed he had a sense of humor when he allowed the party organizers to put up several pictures of the five of us on the school's web site with a link to a site with candid shots of us at the nudie beach so everyone could see what we looked like under the body paint. Thus were we immortalized in the history of AJHS.

Actually the notoriety from the party lead to an engagement with a legitimate photographer whose oeuvre included a line of artistic photographs of young nude males. That gig lead to others of the same sort.

The money comes in handy, since my foster father, M. Lyautey, is only a mail handler at the post office. Our circumstances are comfortable though far from luxurious. Both Zach's and Sprout's families are well off, and Sprout in his own right, is a millionaire several times over thanks to his lawsuit against the leather master who enslaved him some months ago.

Anyway the photographers posed us singly, in pairs, or as a trio in a great variety of poses, virtually all of them with us in the nude, maybe wearing a prop necktie, bracelet, or a knit cap pushed back on the head. I once wore nothing but a flower lei around my waist. My foster father didn't mind any of this though he did raise an eyebrow at a close up of my cleavage and the brown whorl that lay within. I shrugged it off with some comment about how we all have one, so it's no big deal.

I never mentioned to that good man that a couple of the photographers wanted something more than visual access to the orifice in question. Setting his camera on automatic, a big German fellow picked me up bodily and crushed me to his chest. I wrapped my legs around him as his cock sought my orifice. Slipping inside surprisingly easily for so large an endowment, he had me do most of the work, lifting my body, letting it fall back, basically fucking myself on his cock, until, in the fullness of time I started to ejaculate, my jism splashing onto our chests. My orgasm set off his own as the muscles of my quim contracted spasmodically, squeezing his cock and sending him into orgasm as well.

The Frenchman, not surprisingly, was more subtle, courting me in the grand manner, whispering sweet nothings in my ears. I was his petit choupinou, his bomec, his gamin. He laid me gently on a couch and got between my legs, lifting them onto his shoulders. Like the German he preferred to make love face to face. Although not so forceful a lover he was vigorous enough to earn a coveted two stars in my personal Green Guide of lovers I have known.

Both men assured me that these candid shots of love in the afternoon would remain in their private collections. Later on, after all the notoriety I drew for what happened the following spring, they shopped their wares to anyone interested in splash shots from a boy's cock or onto a boy's upturned face, as well as professionally composed glossies of a super cute twink with his face twisted in an ecstatic grimace with a big one clearly visible sliding into his quim.

Much later, someone actually asked me if I weren't going to give up clothing entirely since I had nothing to hide, nothing that hadn't been seen and communicate around the world, and anyway, wasn't I a shameless slut anyway. Brazenly I retorted:

"Okay, I'll go naked 24/7 365 but for that I'll want blanket immunity from both prosecution and lawsuits at all levels. Throw in a million dollars, and it's a deal. Make that three million."

And I wasn't kidding entirely. The exhibitionist in me wasn't kidding at all.

Soon all of us, and later me a little more, had a growing following including quite a few of our fellow students at AJHS. Inevitably that brought us a collective nickname, the Bare-Bottomed Boys, which at least has the virtue of alliteration, though it never really caught on.

The more artistically minded among them referred to us as a Triptych of Young Nudes, which I though way too highbrow for a nickname, and anyway there were four of us, not three. But what else can you expect from the artsy crowd. I could only shake my head at all their chatter about the aesthetics of our pictures. None seemed willing to come right out with it and admit that a large part of our appeal is that our nude bodies aroused prurient interest from all genders. I mean really, what else would they expect about Pretty Boys Naked, my personal candidate for a collective nickname, which has not caught on either.

We have all of us just passed our seventeenth birthdays. I like the sound of that number, but I will always be fond of my sweet sixteen, when I met such swell guys as the Squirt and PH and the Nature Boys, Sprout and Zach at AJHS.

1. Escape and Evasion

One Sunday afternoon the following spring, with the weather finally warm enough for it, I was stretched out on my belly on the grass in the back yard, nude and getting some sun, as a head start on my tan. Actually my peaches and cream complexion does not tan all that well, but I can build up a protective tan if I take it in easy stages, avoiding sunburn.

My foster father M. Lyautey was back in Cajun country, on vacation, visiting. I had to stay home and go to school.

Suddenly a moving shadow made me realize that I was no longer alone. A fellow student from AJHS stood there looming over me, staring hungrily at my bared bum.

Carlos Saragossa was a big fellow, several inches over six feet. Strongly built and crudely handsome, he had a single bushy brow across his forehead, something I always found a real turn off. His dress was casually elegant, a designer polo shirt with one of those silly insignia, cargo shorts down to the knees. The ones with those silly straps were back in fashion, plus leather sandals with stockings. An overly large gold neck chain and a Rolex watch completed his ensemble.

Carlos came from real money. Originally mob money though the family had gone halfway legit a couple of generations back. They ran one of the big sugar cane operations in South Florida. Just another racket really, if a legal one. They bribed politicians to block imports of foreign sugar so as to keep the price of domestic sugar high. The cane growers were in cahoots with the sugar beet interests too.

"Can I help you?" I asked turning to look up at my visitor.

Carlos kept silent for a minute, then abruptly said: "I want you."

"You want me?"

"Yes Squirrel ever since that Halloween party months ago I haven't been able to get you out of my thoughts, out of my dreams, out of my mind. You are my wet dreams come to life. I even have copies of all your photo spreads and videos. Now I have come here to make you my own. I must make love to that exquisite body of yours."

"Whoa there, Carlos. I don't recall holding tryouts for the job of official boyfriend. And I never sent you a personal invitation to drop by any time you felt like it. What do you mean coming here onto private property and coming on to me like that? And just so you know, you are not my type: too big, too hairy, and too many muscles."

"Don't you see, little one, you must yield yourself to me, regardless of your own tastes. It is only my own desires that really count in thi. I am warning you. The consequences of refusal would be serious. My father is a man of means and has many friends, some of whom you would not care to meet."

I stood up and glared at the big guy my fists on my hips.

"Don't try that wise guy stuff on me. And does your gangster pops know that his eldest lusts after girly boys like me?"

"He knows. He doesn't care. This is the twenty-first century. Gay gangsters don't bother the mob any more."

"Maybe so, but what is your dad gonna do anyway. Send that big goon I always see him with to, what is the phrase, make me an offer I can't refuse."

"No, it wouldn't be that guy. He's my father's bodyguard. A hit man as well, but he is never sent after civilians. I once heard him justify his occupation by saying that he never killed anyone who was an innocent party. They were all gangsters. So don't look for him to come around with a message. Maybe my dad will just have the bank foreclose on your foster dad's underwater mortgage. Or maybe have his legs broken. Wouldn't like that would you? Seeing you and that nice mailman in the hospital or thrown out onto the streets."

Carlos grabbed for me and kissed me forcibly and tried to wrestle me to the ground where he could use his weight to pin me in place while he raped me. I was powerless in the grip of someone fifteen inches taller and more than twice my mass. It was one of the few times in my young life when I really wished I were a big guy instead of the short slight twink that I am.

Suddenly a voice called out.

"Hey, what's going on down there? You, big fella, let that kid go or I am calling the police."

It was a lineman for the phone company perched atop a telephone pole fixing something or other.

Carlos let me go and stalked off, warning me.

"This isn't over you little squirrel."

The lineman watched the teenage gangster climb into his car and drive away.

"He is gone, youngling. You should be safe now."

"Thanks for the help, and say, would you care for cold lemonade on a warm day like this?"

"Don't rightly mind if I do."

We had a couple of glasses each, seated around the patio table. I asked him.

"Weren't you surprised to see me lying out on the lawn bare ass naked? I mean I didn't even have a pair of shorts handy I could grab. I walked right out the back door without a stitch on, casual as you please."

He chuckled.

"Son, if I told you a fraction of what I have seen on this job over the past two decades, it would burn your ears, and likely grow hair on your chest too."

He paused, frowned, looked me up and down, seeing how smooth-skinned and glabrous I am, without a feather anywhere, not on my chest not at the fork of my legs.

"On second thought, in your case maybe not. No offense."

He finished his lemonade then went on to the next job.

I mentioned the incident to my friends and to M. Lyautey. My friends said they would keep an eye peeled for the big guy. My foster father surprised me with the vehemence of his reaction.

"That boy would use his father to do those things to us? Rape you and injure or ruin me? I spit on him and his hit man. I am Cajun. We take care of our own. If either of them, father or son, carries out those threats or does worse, my people will exact retribution."

"As insurance, I will phone my cousins tonight and explain the situation. If anything happens to us, thirty men with shotguns and AK-47s will surround their house, move in, and kill both of them and anyone else who gets in their way. That is our law. Cajun law."

Wow! I looked at my foster father with even greater respect and love. What a good man he was, and so forceful under that mild exterior. Hidden depths. Or maybe not so hidden. I had seen the Silver Star he had won as an eighteen year old infantryman at the tail end of our war in Vietnam.

That night I watched as he cleaned and oiled the AR-15 he kept locked in a gun cabinet.

"Prepping my varmint rifle, just in case." He explained blandly.

Things finally came to a head a couple of weeks later, and not with guns. All it took was a rock to kill Carlos Saragossa. It was an accident, but who would believe me. My foster father and friends did. Maybe the police and the DA, maybe not. It could go either way.

Old man Saragossa wouldn't care how it happened, just that his son was dead and he had been with me when it happened. I would be a target for the hit men he sent against me. I would also put the lives of everyone around me in danger. I wouldn't be safe even in jail, whether as a suspect, a material witness, or in protective custody. Mobsters have no trouble ordering killings in jails and prisons. The victims and perps are already locked in together.

I called Paul Hansen and got his father to come to the scene of the accident. The scene of the crime as well, the crime of attempted rape or aggravated sexual assault. Carlos had tried to choke me into submission, tie me up, and rape me. I pointed to the bruise marks on my throat made by his large hands. He had also brought a half-dozen condoms with him, so he must have been expecting to take me again and again.

I realized that he had followed me on one of my parkour adventures. I went to a derelict construction site, some project left half built when the funding ran out. Just perfect for a parkour run. He cornered me in the hole that had been dug for a sub cellar, not yet paved.

What can I say. He snuck up on me and hit me hard, stunning me. I dropped to the floor, allowing him to strip off my shorts and shoes. As he unlaced my shoes, intending to bind me with my own shoelaces, I scrambled away, on my belly like a lizard at first. Then I got to my feet and took off. The big man pursued. As Carlos reached me, I slipped on mud. My legs went out from under me, and I pitched forward. He slipped too on the same muddy patch but pitched backwards, clunking his head on a rock the size of a cauliflower. A dumb accident though it likely saved my life. I think he would have killed me after raping me, to ensure my silence.

Paul's father shook his head. Sorry son, but you are a dead man or as good as. And you too Paul if you are anywhere near this boy when they come for him. Legally Brandon, you could make a good case for death by misadventure, though a smart prosecutor, just maybe a bribed prosecutor, could twist the facts enough to convict you of manslaughter anyway. That is, if you live long enough to go on trial, which you probably won't."

"So what does Squirrel do, Dad?"

"Damn if I know. This is one mess a lawyer cannot fix."

"I'll go to ground, that's what I'll do. Stay out of jail and away from the friends whose lives I would put in danger. Wait for some opportunity to clear myself. Maybe forge a new identity."

Mr. Hansen scoffed.

"What do you know about being a fugitive, on the run from the law, because that is what you will become if you don't turn yourself in. In the movies everyone finds it easy to get false ID, but I myself wouldn't know where to begin. I am a general practice attorney not a criminal attorney."

"Listen both of you. I am going to need help to pull this off. I need you, Mr. Hansen, to give me a head start, hold off on calling the cops for a few hours, anyway. Paul, I need you to bring Sprout and Zach in on this, to take supplies to the locations I designate.

And I will need your artistry to provide me with the camouflage I will need to stay hidden. What I want from you is another body paint job only this time with long lasting paints, which won't wear off, but also won't harm my skin or block perspiration. It must not make it easy for a dog to track my smell or the paint smell either. Can you do it, Paul. Can you turn me into Tree-Frog?"

"Tree-Frog!" he asked, thinking back to a classic of children's literature in which a troubled boy finally takes to the woods stark naked, his entire body painted green.

It took some doing, but I brought both of them around. Six hours later, I was deep in the woods, supplies cached in three different locations, out of sight, and out of reach of wild animals. I resolved to stick to the trees whenever I could. Over time I might create aerial pathways with vines and interlocking branches. I would become a squirrel indeed.

Mr. Hansen filled in my foster father about the plan, calming him down and pointing out that trying to get me to a refuge in Cajun country, nearly a thousand miles by road, would be impossible. Besides I was better hiding in country I knew, which was mostly forest and not unfamiliar bayous and swamps.

And did I look like a sight in camouflage. Paul left my hair alone. Its natural auburn color would not stand out, not like blond hair would. That left my face and body. Paul chose an old fashioned camouflage pattern, not one of those overly busy digital patterns the military favors. He relied on the age old principles of camouflage, disrupt shapes, lighten what was naturally dark and darken what was naturally light. His own theory was that brown was a better basic color for camouflage than green.

"What? But everything in the forest is green: trees, bushes, grasses. The entire background you want to lose yourself in."

"If green is so great why doesn't Mother Nature use it herself? I am not talking lizards and frogs but mammals. Bear, deer, otters, woodchucks, badgers, you name it. Brown. Even the Florida panther is a light brown."

But he went with green and black because that is what I wanted. He disguised my body with green paint interrupted with long swathes of black to break up my outline. One large irregularly shaped stripe ran from my right hip across my chest and over my shoulder. Another slanted across my upper thighs and groin, leaving my manly parts half green and half black. I thought Paul spent more time on that region than was strictly necessary, lifting and swinging the tube of my cock, skinning back my foreskin so that the head would be the same color green as everything else when it emerged, using a tiny brush to get down into the corrugations of my scrotum. He even painted a small brown stripe twisting around my cock and disappearing into the piss slit, reaching in more than a quarter inch with the bristles.

My arms were whirls of black and green. Even the soles of my feet were painted solid black. And I had black around my eyes and even on my eyelids, making me look like a demented raccoon. Or like Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian. But even though every inch of me was covered, I was really stark naked, letting it all hang out. Like Tree-Frog.

"Now squirrel, you can expect your body paint camouflage to reduce your thermal signature some as long as you are still or haven't just exerted yourself. Also it discourages bugs, though you should make it a habit as dusk approaches to take to the trees and stay above the skitters."

Yes, I could have worn some clothing. But here was a chance to live out a fantasy in a way that did not work against my long term interests. Why shouldn't I run around the woods naked as I had been doing for so long. Since I was an eight year old, going around naked always made me feel safe and close to nature. I would really be living up to my nickname this time.

Squirrel.

1. Resolution

I spent three months as a hunted fugitive. I cannot say the pursuit never came close, but when they did they never realized it. The camouflage worked better than I could have hoped, bless Paul. I also knew the importance of freezing in place when I knew or thought think an observer might be around. Like a fawn separated from its mother I held still. One time I even crawled into brambles, getting pricked and bitten by ants to boot, though thankfully not fire ants. Still when those tiny mandibles bite your belly or worse, your cock or scrotum or anywhere around your butt hole, it takes all your self-control not to jump up and swat at yourself to dislodge them.

Once I hid in a dense patch of poison ivy. It cost me dear, but the county cops did not care to beat around in it themselves and passed on by. Another time I came face to face with a Florida panther. Startled at first, we both resorted to our own best strategies. She snarled and turned sideways trying to look bigger and more dangerous. (I should explain that cougars do not have the right vocal cords for a proper roar.) I could and did roar, arms raised overhead, stomping the ground in a lurching gait, basically channeling the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas for all I was worth. The panther jumped back and took off, just as my bladder let go.

I lived off MREs and trail rations, supplemented by what I could gather. At first I spent all my time in the trees, like a human squirrel. Later I ventured to the ground to supplement my prepared rations with fish and frogs from the ponds and mushrooms, wild tubers, fruits and even fat grubs I gathered. I even killed a few rabbits with my sling with which I soon became proficient. So that was my life, or better my existence, that of a hunter-gatherer of old. The technical term is usufructian. Think cave man but up in the trees.

I avoided dogs and even set out decoys by snaring rabbits and other critters, rubbing their bodies over mine and staining them with my piss or semen. The hounds were baffled. All too often the spoor they tracked led to some animal burrow. My pursuers quickly realized they could not depend on their dogs.

Lucky for me they could not get access to the very best military technology. That was barred by the Posse Comitatus Act which dates back to the end of the Reconstruction Era. The South wanted no more of blue bellies enforcing the law. Especially since more than half the occupation forces after the Civil War had been U.S. Colored Troops, which really stuck in their craw.

Using their restored representation in Congress they passed a law to block the use of the Federal military to enforce the State laws. The trumped-up charges against me were all based on State statutes.

I later learned young gay males like me are very hard to track by scent. It seems the depilatories we use not only suppress the growth of body hair, they turn off the activity of the sebaceous glands. The oils secreted by these glands, especially at the groin and armpits, are what turns rancid from bacterial activity giving us body odor. All our sweat glands produced is salty water. What a great thought that is. We, the gay youth of today, are the first generation that smells genuinely sweet. Maybe there is a god after all.

One surprising problem staying undetected was the disposition of solid waste. You might think that was an easy enough task. Bombs away.

Wrong. Our human poop has a particularly strong smell which is quite distinct. The law could bring in dogs or uses sophisticated people sniffer tech. I mostly resorted to deep cat-hole latrines being careful to remove all sign that the ground had been disturbed. Stinky herbs and leaves disguised the smell too.

I was also bored out of my mind. Remember, I am a brainy kid and like to read and learn. However in hiding as I was, I took no electronics with me lest they be traced. I had nothing to read, no entertainment except playing with myself, and no one to talk to. Believe me, for an incessant chatterbox like me, that alone was an ordeal.

In time I came to appreciate the old adage that goes "Adventures are dangerous and uncomfortable and they don't always serve meals on-time."

As Mr. Hansen had feared, a corrupt prosecutor had convinced a grand jury to indict me. Old Man Saragossa put a public bounty on my head of $100,000. He also put out a hit, a contract of a million dollars, with me preferably alive so he could torture me himself.

My friends were sometimes followed as they went their rounds. Good thing I never asked for a rendezvous or re-supply. Squirt and Paul, Sprout and Zach were at their wit's ends over what to do to help me. Zach was the one who came up with ways for both Sprout and Squirt to help out.

He pointed out that as a writer and editor on the school paper, Squirt could keep my case in the public eye. Let Squirt write a series of articles questioning the basis for the charges against me, pointing out how weak a case it really was, that the evidence was just as consistent with an accident as foul play, maybe more so given our difference in size and strength. Sauirt even suggested that the DA might have an ulterior motive.

Without naming names, Squirt had reported that:

"A certain organized crime figure, one well-known to the authorities in South Florida, has reportedly placed a bounty on the head of a teenage boy wanted in connection with the unexplained death of his son, despite serious problems with the prosecutor's theory of the flimsy case. Oh and congratulations Mr. Prosecutor on that nifty speed boat you just recently acquired, though isn't driving one of those a young man's game? Mid-life crisis, perhaps?"

Can he turn of phrase or what? But then Squirt is a fine wordsmith with an inordinate love of wordplay and and an excessive fondness for puns.

The school paper has only a small circulation itself, but the media picked up the story of the perhaps unjustly accused teenager and his loyal friend, the plucky high school journalist who had put himself on the line for the sake of that friendship. The insinuation that a public official might have mob ties added spice to the mix.

Despite not so subtle pressure, Principal Degnan stood up for freedom of the press and academic freedom and told all those clamoring for censorship to go to hell. Good for him. I was too harsh on the man earlier.

Zach's suggestion for Sprout was more audacious still. He told him to act as a decoy to draw trackers off the scent. Sprout dyed his hair auburn then went on a series of botanizing safaris across three counties. No one but ourselves knew about my camouflage. Everyone was looking for an auburn-haired boy very much Sprout's size, nicely tanned, running around stark naked in the nature preserves. Sprout gave them himself to track down, changing his hair color with a temporary dye then washing it out when he wanted to resume his proper identity.

In his role as decoy fugitive Sprout made a show of avoiding contact with other people in the woods, with the excuse that they would only trample his botanical specimens. But he also made sure to be seen in circumstance that would not anyone get close to him. As to his change of hair color back and forth, no ulterior motive there. It was for the sake of fashion and maybe just a sign of solidarity with his good friend Squirrel, unjustly accused to a crime of which he was not only innocent but was at worst only a bystander in an accident. The cops arrested Sprout for obstruction of justice twice but soon let him go.

Mr. Hansen was not in criminal practice, but he took Sprout on as a client for the fee of one dollar. He pointed out to the authorities that coloring one's hair was no crime nor even something unusual for a cute gay boy like his client, William Pierpoint Tagliaferro IV, aka Sprout. What could be more reasonable for a boy who was habitually naked than to change the color of his hair as a fashion statement. It was not like he could change his clothes, now could he?

While this argument fooled no one, it was also unassailable. The cops were stymied. In the end, my friends decided to wait for my play, ready to lend what support they could. Saragossa never struck at any of them.

Sargossa did send four men to Pierre Lyautey to make him tell them what he knew about my whereabouts and to kill him afterwards. My foster father did not talk to them except maybe to curse in Cajun French. Though he died in the shootout, he took two thugs out with his trusty varmint gun. He was a tough old bird alright. And he died for my sake.

What happened next was just as that wily old Cajun had predicted. Thirty men with shotguns and AK-47s drove all the way from Cajun country. In small groups, and by different routes the avengers converged on Casa Saragossa, surrounded the house, made sure the old man was inside with his bodyguards and that the servants had left for the day, and moved in, guns blazing. They killed everyone one and everything including the guard dogs, but spared mama cat and her kittens. That was their way. That was their law. Cajun law.

The best part is that they got away clean. The cops have little hope of tracking them down. Their efforts to solve the death of a mobster universally hated and feared have been perfunctory at best. Their attitude is Good Riddance to Bad Company.

The prosecutor no longer had a reason to pursue a case against me and dropped all charges. That cut the ground out from under the legal bounty hunters too. Anyone who grabbed me now would be committing a kidnap. With the old man dead, there was no one to pay off the murder contract. In his eagerness to get me, Saragossa had not put the bounty into escrow, where he might have had his revenge even from the grave.

I returned to classes at good old Andrew Jackson High and quickly made up for my absence. Most of my time on the lam had been over the summer break anyway.

Meanwhile I am in the process of telling my story both in print and in a movie. Despite my publisher's preferences for an audio tape debriefing with his ghost writer, I started by writing an account in my own words as best I remember them. I think better when I write and can reflect and go back and rewrite as needed.

As for the movie, we are waiting for permission to film in the nature preserves on the actual sites of my adventure. With so little dialog and so hard a role to cast, I will portray myself though I will have to join the Screen Actors Guild. Not many actors fit my physical profile, have my epicene look, and can convincingly portray seventeen on the screen or care for a role that has them stark naked for 95 percent of their screen time. I had it written into the contract that there would be no bowdlerization. I would be naked on screen just as I had been naked in reality, starting with the attempted rape in my backyard. No cute camera angles either just to avoid the full monty.

Already seventeen and a half, I was cut loose by the state foster care agency, becoming an emancipated minor. Although I was without a steady income. I had the money Pierre Lyautey had left me, life insurance, the balance in his 401k style retirement fund, and the cash value of his unused vacation time. That would tide me over for a good while. But what to do afterwards. Ideally I should hang on to what I had as a nest egg and emergency fund, not just fritter it away on day to day expenses.

That was when Sprout and his pops. Mr Sprout, as I came to call him jocularly, stepped forward and offered me a place in their home and a job as their house boy. Their cleaning lady had quit recently, upset with two teenagers, Sprout and Zach, running around naked all the time. Also, both Sprouts were tired of takeout and microwave cuisine, and their own efforts in the kitchen were pitiful. I was a pretty fair cook by that time, having cooked for M. Lyautey for three years, though just a cook, as I reminded them, not a chef, so they should not expect cordon bleu meals. As to quarters, there was a disused room in back with a half shower which would serve admirably.

For walking around money, Mr. Tagliaferro put me on the same allowance he gave his own son, explaining that blood ties did not change his estimate of how much a seventeen year old boy living at home ought to have at his disposal. I was deeply moved by his generosity.

Also I am moving ahead with my YouTube project. We are all in it together, and what a cast of characters it is: Squirrel, Sprout, Squirt, and Zach as the "talent" and Paul Hansen as artistic director. It is early days yet, but we have high hopes.

Not long ago I had a visit from one of Pierre Lyautey's cousins, a certain Louis Lyautey. Forty years old with a lined face that suggested several more decades of life experience, he told me that the old man had told the clan elders that he considered me to be the son he never had. He asked that if anything happened to him, the clan should adopt me as a member, letting me take his name.

I am afraid my reaction wasn't very manly. I burst into tears and relived the sorrow of my loss. Louis comforted me till I regained my composure. Louis knew I had studied French and taught me a phrase in Cajun French that would identify me as to fellow Cajuns as a member of the clan. I thereby reconciled myself to the death of that good man, Pierre Lyautey, realizing how lucky I had been when the old Cajun had come into my life and made me a much better person than I had been before.

First chance I had, I changed my legal name to Brandon O'Rourke de Lyautey. Though all my friends still call me Squirrel.

Author's Note

If you have enjoyed this story and others like it, I hope you will consider making a donation to the Nifty Archive. It is so easy. They take credit cards.

This tale was inspired by my recent story 'Squirt' and is the third in an emerging series set in and around a fictitious Andrew Jackson High School in South Florida. All the stories will have similar titles.

Meanwhile, good news for readers disappointed at how few stories I have published of late. Folks, help is on the way. I am writing my first novel-length story, which is already at 110 thousand words. Mostly I publish novelettes of 10 -15 thousand words.

The novel is in the genre called heroic fantasy. Like so many stories in that genre it is set on an imaginary world in an imaginary universe where wizards and druids and others work real magic, a world populated by several sentient races including humans, elves, giants, and dwarves. Unlike most such worlds, this one has an awful lot of cute young guys running around in the skimpiest of costumes or even nothing at all, and taking every opportunity to hop into bed with each other and to switch partners.

Sorry, no dragons, but I bet you never read a tale that featured a naked teenage druid leading the charge of a herd of brontotheres against an army of Amazons. What is a brontothere? Look it up, but not in the dictionary. Try the Wikipedia instead.

Look for publication of my very first novel this summer on most of these same stations.

Readers who like this story might want to try my two series 'Daphne Boy' and 'Naked Prey' in the Gay/Historical section of the Archive or my 'Jungle Boy' series of Hollywood tales, posted in the Gay/Authoritarian section. Also available are my older 'Track and Field' stories in Gay/College and my 'Mer-Boy' stories in Gay/Beginnings. For links to my stories, look on the list of Prolific Authors on the Archive.

Comments and feedback welcome.