Man of steel

Who steps up

I am W-09, the ranch number who steps up when a sentence needs serving. When a man earns a sentence he cannot hold, the Boss looks at the yard and asks who will take it for that man. I go to the Boss and tell him I will. The body holds: thick chest, thick legs, cock that still fills when the shock ring hits wrong. I can take it, gladly. That is why I step up.

The ranch rule is fixed: a man who serves another’s sentence does three days for every one of his. When a sentence comes due, soft men think about quitting. Sometimes they stare at me; sometimes I am already on my way to the Boss before they ask. I tell the Boss I am taking the three days. He hammers his fist into my crotch, playful, and says, “You again.” It is not kindness. It is usefulness, and the yard knows the difference.

This is not my first sentence. Some men won’t take a sentence; I will. The first one was not mine. A slim workmate on the same shift—same rows, half my weight—caught a sentence he could not hold. He was new, and scared. The Boss felt sorry for him, and his eyes found me. I was already the strong one on the line, and strong is only useful if it holds. I took his day; three of mine. He never asked; I never took anything back. That is how the step started.

I have never been punished for my own fault—every sentence I have served was another man’s. I am obedient. When the shock hits me, it is never for loafing; the Boss just sees me, and shocks me because he likes watching me take it. Sometimes he waits until I am halfway up the water tower, as if he wants to see whether I fall. There is a safety line, but it is tied to the nipple clamps. The Boss once said to me: “If you ever earned a sentence yourself, one day would not feel like a punishment to you. So we make a deal—if I ever catch you in trouble, nine days.” I agreed without a pause. That is the kind of number I am.

I never complain about what is done to me under a sentence, and I never make anyone pay it back. The man whose sentence I serve owes me nothing. The men who kick me and use me while I am under sentence owe me nothing either—I am there to be used, and they use me well. That is what a sentence is for. If I complained or kept score, they would stop coming, and some weaker number would catch the overflow. I would rather hold.

The Boss’s favorite

The Boss is not only strict. Strict would mean the same treatment for every number. Harlan likes choices. Soft loafing gets a warning. My number gets a sentence and a smile, like he found the good tool in the shed. “Don’t waste a soft number,” he says, “use the thick one.” I do not argue. I stand there and let him use me. When nobody moves he does not shout at the coward. He looks at me. You coming, or is he. That is casting. I already know my line.

He turns the punishment up while I am already under sentence. He half-expected me to complain, so he called me in and had me do the paperwork. I was about to agree on the spot. Before I could finish saying yes, he said it came with a pay raise. I asked him if turning it up further would mean another raise. He said he could always turn it up more—especially now that I had asked for it myself—but the pay could not go any higher. Then he showed me the gear, excited. He held up a big dumbbell—clearly new, and he could barely lift it one-handed. “You already agreed,” he said. “This goes on your bucket from now on.” He told me, with feeling, that he was turning the ice room colder and spraying more water over me, because it looks good. And that even though my other clothes were mostly confiscated, I could keep my last briefs—they photograph well.

I am not stupid about him. He enjoys the show, and I like my pay raise. I know exactly where my load goes: it should go to the production line at the milk barn, but mine is diverted straight to the Boss instead. At night, behind the locked door, he sniffs my briefs, drinks my load stirred into his drink, and asks me to fuck him. I do. He bends over for me, and I let him have his ways. When I am still hard for him, he says, “The day’s punishment clearly was not enough.” But then he says, “Seeing you this strong is how I know you will hold out. That is why I like you.” Of course he likes me. He enjoys my load from both ends.

Called to the office

Harlan calls me in at odd hours, for one thing or another, and he does not hide anything on his desk—the briefs he took off me are lying there in the open. Sometimes the whole reason for the call is that he wants the pair I am wearing. He hands me a new one, right there, even on days that are not sentence days. He trades my underwear the way a man changes a tool he likes using. The rest of it, the door locking after, is a running thing between us and I have never refused him. He likes it best on my sentence days—he says my cock and balls are heavier and fuller then, and it gives him the feeling that he is the one who pulled me off the punishment line for a moment, a little taste of hero, even though the thrusting itself is no relief: hefting a cock and balls that have been kicked all day and driving them in at a good pace hurts plenty on its own, and the second we are done he is putting me straight back into the pain. That part does not change.

After he has had his turn he usually hands me a few notes of cash. He calls it a tip. It is a small thing, and I do not ask for it, but the amount is a little more than a tip ought to be, every single time, as if he keeps setting the price of that hour himself and rounding it up to a number he likes looking at.

He has an ugly little habit of asking me, straight to my face, how the day’s punishments felt. He keeps a small notebook for it and writes down my answers—does it hurt, which one hurt more, in what order. He is drawing a chart, time on one axis, strength on another, pain on the third, and he wants enough points from me to draw a continuous curve out of them. He is collecting the data off my body the way he collects the rest.

Sometimes he is more direct. He asks how much more weight I can take, and for how long. Sometimes he just asks, point blank, how do you think we can make it worse for you—what would it take to make you cry out. He asks these questions right in front of my face, as if they are the most normal questions in the world. I answer him honestly, every time. He takes it all in, and most of the time the next sentence shows up wearing exactly what I told him.

Once he bought a battery—an electric car battery, the kind that powers a car for a few hundred kilometres. It was a strange thing, that he would buy the battery on its own, without having the car to put it in. He said it stored a lot of charge, and he made a challenge out of it: how much of the battery could I empty with my cock, and how fast. He had a transformer hooked to it, running through my balls and a probe worn up inside me. He sat me down and started the voltage. I am obedient enough that, if he asked, I would fit the gear myself and turn my own dial up—but that would rob him of the fun. He likes to shove the electrode into me with one hard shove so he can watch my face, and halfway through he works the little rod around, as if looking for an angle that conducts better. Then he keeps asking if I can take more. If I said yes he turned it up on the spot. If I said nothing, he took that as yes too—because otherwise, he said, the battery would not empty on schedule. He cared far more about that challenge than I did. Some mornings I came in and the battery read three or four percent more than when we had left it. I could see the charger on the wall myself, plugged in, and he told me that was just the natural drift of the reading, that a battery's charge reads differently at different times—nothing to do with him. After a while, when he judged I was not paying attention anymore, he got that last few percent down to nothing and then squeezed out an extra twenty-five, saying he had unlocked the hidden charge. He plainly wished he had sneaked more charge into it all along.

He has a game with the dial. The numbers sit on the dial, and he makes me call out a reading. If it says three and I say eight, he turns it half a turn up to eight. If it is already on eight and I call eight again, he turns it a full turn until the mark comes back around to eight—either way the knob never goes down. He says that was my doing, that I asked for it, that I wanted it. I cannot much argue with him, and I do not keep score of the numbers. He says a number and I give him a number. I am not the sort to find a loophole and work it. He likes that about me too. The loophole rule only runs one way, though. He is free to invent his own openings whenever he wants, and he will say I agreed to them—and most of the time I probably did. Sometimes I even provoke him on purpose, so he has his excuse to turn things up, and I let him take it. When the voltage is already high and he decides he cannot turn it up any further, he switches to asking how long I can hold it. He tells me to pick a number, one to five minutes, and he knows I will say five. If he makes it one to twenty, I will say twenty. I always take the top of the range he offers, and he knows it, which is why he keeps offering the range.

Another time, just sitting in his office, he told me to think of it as the old Greek gods. Prometheus up on his rock, a bird at his liver forever; Sisyphus heaving his stone up the same hill forever; Tantalus reaching for water and fruit that are always just out of reach forever. That, he said, is what a god is for—to take the punishment and never die, never cry, never fall. The tavern, he said, is my destiny: that is my rock, my hill, my fruit on the branch. Stand up there on the rack like one of them, let the men kick my balls for five thousand years, and show these mortals what a god looks like. Then he had me strip bare and hold a pose while he took photographs from a few angles, saying that when he had made some real money he would have a statue of David made of me, a tourist attraction for the whole valley, and that it would all rest on me. After the story he joked that when I had been kicked a million times, he would hand me a bonus. What I think and do not say is this: would Prometheus or Sisyphus or Tantalus still let the men keep fucking them the whole time they were up there? And I did not laugh at the bonus, because I had already started counting.

A day under sentence

The jobs are the same jobs, but under sentence they are all heavier, and the body pays for it all day. Nobody hides the pain from me, and I do not hide it from anyone. Harlan shows up at each station at least once, to watch me work.

The water tower is first. My bucket is full of water, and the new dumbbell rides on top of it now, so every step up makes the load swing. Arms burn, back burns, and the safety line that runs to the nipple clamps goes tight with each rung. The harness bound around my balls drags the bucket up with every step, tugging them down as I go, and I still climb to the top with a full bucket. Harlan keeps swapping my bucket for a bigger one. “The load is good for you,” he says. “It makes the balls grow bigger. I have tried it on you—a fine training routine. If you ever go in for bodybuilding, you will thank me.” Then he stands below pressing the shock button, waiting to see if I flinch. I do not.

The ball mill comes next, and the hopper holds spelt. The farm only mills spelt when I am on hand, and Harlan always schedules it for my sentence days. Spelt is hard and slow—it does not give up its flour easily. The harness is bound around my balls and hitched to the mill stone, and they make me walk the circle at double speed, so the harness drags the stone, turning it twice as fast. There is no soft circle for me, no cushion to ease the load off the pair. Sometimes the grain fights back—a stubborn batch that resists the stone. I push to keep the double pace, and my balls pull red under the harness. Harlan likes to add more spelt to the hopper at that moment. He could have let me do it, but he is probably afraid I would go easy on myself, even though I have assured him I would not. He says it is a health food, far better than ordinary wheat—as if I am healthier for milling it than milling anything else. “I will bake you a loaf of spelt bread,” he says. “But that means more grinding, or there will not be enough.” He throws in another big handful of spelt. He says one day he is going to throw a spelt bread festival for the whole farm, and I should be ready.

At the milking rack the climbing shock fires with every pull, and the quota is double cups. I empty once, then again, dry, with no soak after. Harlan weighs both cups himself and writes the numbers down. Sometimes he loses count of which cup he is on, so he makes me do one more. It was one of those times that I came until I blacked out there, strapped in, with faces at the glass—he had set down cup after cup and stopped counting altogether—far more than the two-cup quota already. The rack kept milking me while I was out; I woke to another orgasm finishing into the cup—still strapped, still emptying. Unconscious does not cancel inventory. Harlan knew before I said a word. He put that blackout cup—the load drawn while I was out—in a proper vessel, a fancy one, nothing like the tin, and named it “Sleeping Beauty.” Then he said that when this one is done, he may have to find some way to spend more time with me, to get a refill. “I regret that we only got one cup that time you blacked out,” he said. “Next time we milk you past blackout on purpose: empty you a few times until you go under, leave the machine running, and see how many cups we pull while you are out. Consider it a challenge.” He watched my cock harden as he said it, pointed at it, and said, “Look at that. The cock said yes.”

Under sentence an erection counts as loafing. The ring shocks it down, and it comes back up, and it shocks again. Harlan watches the loop and laughs every time. He says a cock that will not quit is the whole point of me. He is working on an auto mode for the ring, and he says it is going to feel wonderful for me. I once reported to him that when the ring shocks me, my cock gets harder instead of softer and just keeps taking the shocks. I told him it felt like reporting a fault. He considered it a feature—and said the problem was mine. “Does a higher voltage make it harder?” he asked. I said yes, honestly, and he was pleased. He immediately pressed the button on the remote in his hand, right in front of me, cranking the voltage up—as if I had been dying to watch him use that thing on me. My cock learns the schedule better than my mouth does.

The sentence has already eaten all my clothes. I own nothing but my number. The briefs I wear are on loan from Harlan—he keeps the ones he likes the look of and lends them back to me, and they go home with him each night, most likely to be sniffed. “Do not bother buying new clothes,” he says, his hand on my crotch. “This way is fine.” He says g-string thongs are lovely too, but they draw too much attention, and he wants cotton anyway—it soaks up the smell and the sweat better. Then he starts boxing my crotch. “Getting the flavor out of you,” he says. “Like smashing garlic.” I do not believe him, so I push my hips out and let him hit harder—to prove to him that it does not work. He keeps at it until my cock gets hard and tents the briefs. “Look at that,” he says. “It is fermenting.”

Shift’s end, last

Shift’s end—the end-of-shift bell—I wait last and bare while the clean workers peel. There is no set hour for it, but while I wait they are free to touch me as they please—eyes, finger-flicks on the sack—while the ring shocks my balls to keep me soft, and sometimes not. Harlan passes with his keys, looking me over like he is figuring out what to add.

The peel is two steps, and the key only covers the first. The Boss unlocks the metal with his key, but getting it off my body is my own work. For a clean worker it comes away with one pull, a sting and it is over. For a man under sentence, the nipple clamps are wound tighter than the standard pair, and the Boss smears glue on the clamp faces before he locks them on each morning. Now, at shift’s end, it is time to take them off. Half an hour of pulling on standard glue, arm burning, skin stretching with each pull. Harlan likes to watch that part—he says when I pull at my own nipples, all the muscle in my arms goes hard, and it looks very good to him.

One day I pulled past thirty minutes and the clamps still held. The shock ring bit as Harlan cranked the voltage from his desk—smirk on his face. “Hurry,” he said. “The hour runs out and you take the penalty.” Every pull sent a dull burn through my chest, and the metal tore free at last, sixty-something minutes in. “One extra day,” he said, then glanced at his clock. “Three. No—nine days.” The whole morning had been arranged for this, and the glue had done its job. I saw it then, sitting on his desk—a fresh tube of super glue, W-09 written across it in marker. Not the standard pot the other numbers got. Not what I had worn before. That was my morning’s glue.

The next morning he loaded the same tube, the marker still visible, and pressed the clamp faces together with his thumb like sealing a letter. Then, as if the seal might fail, he pulled the clamps slightly apart and spread another coat before locking them on. He whispered to me, “I robbed the glue shop,” as if that was supposed to break me. “If it takes you past the hour again today, that is another nine days.” But I felt something I had not felt under a sentence before: not fear, not pride, a quiet want to beat him at the game he had just set. All day I carried that want with me, waiting for the bell.

At shift’s end, when my turn finally came, he unlocked the metal with his key, unwilling, and then stood back smiling, watching me pull. He sat at the desk pressing the shock button openly, raising the voltage before each jolt, letting me see his finger on the button—performing it. At fifty-three minutes the clamps came free. I let them drop on the desk in front of him, chest heaving, nipples dark and swollen. A flicker of private annoyance crossed his face. “Let’s see if you’re still this sharp tomorrow.” Then he reached across the desk and pinched the swollen nipple between thumb and forefinger, hard, and waited. I let him. I had taken from him the nine days he had been looking forward to, and I figured he was owed some small thing for the show I had ruined.

I did not flinch. I looked straight at him, eyes level. The pinch felt like a consolation—the loser collects a small tax. He let go and laughed, one short sound, and said, “Your cock is still hard. You are the man of steel.” He was right. It was still hard. I know now I am his favorite, and I do not know what else he has saved for me. In the days after, I got better and better at the pull, until the glue stopped meaning anything. He kept smearing it on anyway, and kept pinching my nipples, and told me to build my chest bigger—more meat for the clamps to hold, he said, so they would not come loose so easily. As if it was my problem. He was still looking for an angle, a way to win back a few nine days. Whenever a man got himself in trouble, he did not even ask who wanted to take it—he called my name straight away, buying himself more time until he found a scheme that worked. That is how I ended up under sentence for a full month.

Every boot for me

Night class is the punishment set, and it comes first: hours of whip and cane. The whip works the back, the chest, the ass. The cane is for the whole ball area and the thighs. Together they cover the range that the day's labor, the sentence work, and the tavern later will not reach. Every stroke hurts. Holding still and holding your tongue is what the class is supposed to teach. Hold out, and the next stroke lands harder. I hold out anyway. That is where the brave ones prove themselves, and the yard knows it. A regular like me gets his own share of special treatment: an extra cane set after the count, worked slowly, and Harlan leaning in close to watch the skin go red and count the marks himself. The last of that special treatment is salt water—poured without warning over the body. Every place the whip and cane have already been lights up at once; the pain jumps huge across all the marks.

Only when night class is over do they call my name at the tavern. Sometimes I have to run to get there, because by the time night class is done the queue is already long, and I know the longer they wait, the more of their anger they will take out on me. The tavern keeper is called in by Harlan to sell drinks right along the queue, though Harlan tells the men not to get drunk—says the drink is to steady the nerve: courage so they kick bold. He has a mind for money, but it is a drunk man's boot that is coming for me. The line that forms is not polite—kick lane and fuck lane stacked past the porch light, places saved. They know I hold. They know there are no complaints the next morning. Thick and quiet is a feature. Harlan casts it. I allow it. That is the whole contract with the yard.

There is a skip-the-line rule. If your cock is already hard, or you have just come back from kicking the ball around and your foot still itches for another kind of ball, you do not have to wait. There is a price for skipping, and Harlan collects it himself. He even bought a credit card machine for it, and says men can either pay that way or have the fee taken out of their wages. Harlan calls it Premier Access. Money on the counter buys the next kick. The next fuck costs more. That is why he wants my queue full every night—two snakes, always fed.

On the nights I am up, Harlan waves off the other men’s tavern sentences. He hurries them out of the yard, as if a kick spent on one of them is a kick wasted that could have landed on me—he wants every boot for me. It is not like this when I am not there. Without me the tavern is quiet—a few close men tap a symbolic kick, pretend to fuck, because they have to work beside each other in the morning.

It is only on me that everyone lets the real thing out, full kicks and real fucks, like the chance will never come again. That is not true, and they know it—but a few of them came every single night of my month under sentence. They said they were addicted, that they had to get one fuck in, and that they spent their whole shifts thinking about it. The queue only ever grows longer through the night, because the men who have already had their turn walk right back to the end and line up again. Some of them tell me they had better-paying work elsewhere and stayed at the ranch just because they can play with W-09. Hearing that, I think I understand why Harlan runs the tavern nights at all.

Harlan designed a clever fixing so the two lines can work me at once, though the price is that my body has to hold a miserable position the whole time. To him the pain of being kicked and fucked is what matters, and the discomfort of the pose is a trifle you can ignore—at least, that is what he insists. Bag and cock open to the kick lane in front. Ass set back so a man can bury from behind without putting hips in the boot path—the geometry means the man fucking me never has to worry about taking a boot to his own balls. Harlan calls it his invention, his great work: two lines, one body, front and back at the same time. No one else will take the fixing. I am the only one who can hold it. You might ask how he got me to agree to that. He never asked. He does not ask—there are many surprises I do not know about until I am already in them. He also wants me to hold poses like the front double biceps while I am taking the worst of it—they look good, and they make the men kick harder. He is the boss, so I do it. It is genuinely hard, because the body is being pushed hard in two directions at once.

Boots land while someone is already in me. The long wait makes men greedy—run-ups from the porch, full force. I allow the run. Standing boot hurts; a run-up is another class—the sack goes white, the air leaves me, and my knees give out so far the strap that holds me takes the weight. I stay. They finish on dirt or wipe on my thigh.

The men who come every night, the ones who always queue again, are also the ones who kick hardest. A few of them look at me strangely, as if my staying on my feet and not begging is a deliberate insult to their training. I mean no such thing, but they are clearly riled by it—their taunts make that plain: “Is your cock big? Big or not? Lift it up where I can get a boot on it—then higher, come on, show me you can raise it higher still.”

I stay late. Queue dies slow. Harlan says I should thank him for setting a cutoff time on the queue—otherwise the night would never be long enough to clear it—and that every man who joined before the cutoff has to be served well and leave satisfied. A minute or two before the end, men have come out of the bar having paid, or come out of their bunks, just to catch the last round. When the straps come off I walk or crawl—often past his door first. Tavern dark behind. I am tired. I am not done being useful.

Ice house

The ice house is where I sleep, and it is cold on purpose. No blanket, no straw, just the boards and the timer spray that finds the cock first if I face wrong. A rest is supposed to warm a man. Mine is made to keep me cold.

Harlan makes sure of it. When it gets too cold for the other men, he hands them blankets, right in front of me, and tells me I do not get one. They keep a shirt or a pair of pants; my briefs may be taken from me too. The spray is his to control—sometimes it pours cold water straight at my cock and keeps pouring for a long time, and he notes that even cold water does not make it go down, as if the whole point of taking the briefs was to watch that. The rule of the house is that if a man cannot take it, he can beg and be let out, or get a blanket. I have never begged. Harlan is not discouraged.

Some nights he goes further. He lifts me whole into the ice tub and does not let me out, saying that with all my injuries the cold will help the swelling. He tells me the ice tub counts as aftercare, and that I am not supposed to get any—that he is bending the rules to give me one, and I should be grateful. If I really am grateful, he jokes, I should let him add a few more days to my sentence. Then he waits, as if expecting me to say something. I push my chest out and let the ice press against me, because he says that works best and tells me to keep still. When the ice melts he wants me to press the button to call him for more, and he makes me promise not to hold back and pretend I forgot. I am an honest man, so I do exactly as he says.

The cold is a kind of work, and I treat it as one more station on the day's list. It pulls the balls tight, wakes me every time the spray hits, and never quite lets me settle into sleep. I lie still and count the hours until the bell, thinking only that morning will come and I will be back at it. Some men would break under it. I do not, and that is what keeps me whole. In the morning I am geared, cock half-interested, head dark from the pulse, and I breathe soft and go to work.

Why the step stays mine

Quitting is always possible. Quitting ends the job. I want the wage roll, and I am not the only one—but the soft men cannot hold the heavier penalties, the run-up lane, the double window, the free touches at shift’s end, the long pull, the ice. I can. I have never been sentenced for my own fault; every sentence I serve is another man’s, and every time the Boss asks the yard, the eyes come to me and I walk over. That is not a medal. It is a habit that became the number the whole ranch reads.

I do not complain about any of it, and I do not make anyone pay it back. The men who kick me and use me know they will get no grudge in the morning, and that is why they keep coming, and why they line up again after their turn. Harlan keeps me close because I keep showing him I can take it, and he makes sure everyone knows I am his. The bottle under his desk knows the same man the whole yard knows.

So when the next soft man’s sentence comes due and the boots look at the dirt, they will look at W-09. They already know what I will do, and so does he. I step up and I tell him, and I stand. Not because I am beaten down into it—because I choose it. That is the whole trick of me: they can do all of this to me, and I still stand, and they know it.

And if I am being honest, I think of Harlan as a coach. He told me once that agreeing to the tortures that turn out to be really advanced—the hard ones—will keep your dick hard and make you a real man. I have always believed that. He is the only coach I have ever had who pays me a wage for the work, and the work keeps being this: he finds where my limit is, and then he makes me go a little past it. Over and over, season after season, I have broken limits I did not know I had. The pain is his method. The result is mine—a body that holds more than it did when I first came to the ranch, and a mind that does not flinch. Some men would call that being broken. I call it being trained.