Jerry was drunk the first time he told me the story. In fact, he’s been drunk every time he’s retold it, but the first time still lingers for me in my mind. He was drunk that night, too, that night in the summer of 1944. Mickey Mouse was still selling War Bonds and the Allies were moving deeper into France after D-Day. Jerry was a nineteen-year-old farm boy and on his way to join them. He was finished with his short basic training and would climb on the troop train for New York the next day. His friends called it a going away party.

It was a summer night in the rural American Midwest. The sky was clear; the ground flat and covered with miles and miles of corn. The partying group started out large and dwindled to just a few around midnight.

At this point in the story, Jerry always pushed his wheelchair a little closer to the table and raised his glass to drink and smile before he went on. When he did, he always laughed and swore that Harry Connick Jr. is an alien. He has to be, Jerry would say, because it was his voice I remember that night. He was singing songs on the radio and we were lying there listening in the wet grass. And the stars, he would say, the stars were like I’d never seen them.

They were on Rudy’s father’s farm with Jerry’s car parked in the grass, the doors open, Harry Connick Jr., the alien, singing on the radio, and Glenda lying close to Jerry on a blanket.

Glenda and Jerry were both drunk, Jerry would admit when he told the story, but they were both young and in love and wondering what would become of them with her on the farm and him somewhere in France. Over the last year, they had kissed and played and fumbled with words, but neither of them wanted to face this last night together. Jerry would say she understood it better than he did, because he always pointed out that it was her to took his hand and pulled him up off the blanket and led him into the corn.

She pulled him to her and hugged him before kissing him as they stood there hidden in the field. No one could see them, no one was involved but them. Glenda told him then in a whisper, she told him she wanted to touch him, to feel him, to know what it was like. She unzipped him there in the cornfield and took his cock in her hand.

He was already hard, Jerry would say in a lowered voice. He had been almost all night around her. She stroked him almost as if she was milking him, and he stood there letting her, wanting her to do it, kissing her from time to time but still wanting to watch her hand do what it was doing to him. It didn’t take him long before he knew he was going to come. He told her through a kiss and she smiled and stroked faster, pulling it from him, pulling him closer and pushing him over the brink.

Jerry would usually finish his drink and order another before telling how it finished. He’d smile for effect and describe how he had splattered old man Johnson’s corn that night. Everywhere, he’d say, there was cum everywhere.

And he’d tell how Glenda kissed him and put him back in his pants and led him out of the corn.

It was the only time, he would finally say. It was the only time a woman had ever touched him like that. The sniper’s bullet ruined his spine and left him to a life in a wheelchair with nothing happening below his rib cage. But there was that one time, he’d smile into his drink, that one time.

God bless her, he’d mumble, God bless her.

“Splashing Corn” by J.D. Coltrane, Copyright © 2001. All rights reserved.