I prefaced my previous story, the one about my Uncle John, with the statement that he was a little different and I think that it was a pretty accurate assessment of the guy. The pressure and politics of being an official castrator for the Argentine government would make anyone a little strange, and the knowledge that he himself would likely one day be neutered or assassinated would likely drive most people to the edge of insanity. The very fact that he escaped the country with both his life and his balls made the guy even more remarkable. John wasn’t the only member of my somewhat dysfunctional family that was different; If John was just a little different, then my Uncle Tommy was flat out fucking weird.

Mom was eighteen when her youngest brother Tom was born, which made him only two years older than me. I did the math a few years ago, and concluded that Granddad must have cast his dice on the night of his daughter’s wedding. They lived on the East coast, but we made the pilgrimage to Virginia once a year, or sometimes they came out West, so we played together a lot as kids. He was too young to be your typical father-figure protective uncle, but that was okay by me; I had a father, what I needed and wanted was a brother and Uncle Tommy fit that role nicely. He took his pesky young nephew with good humor, and we rarely even squabbled.

His parents eventually got a little too old to enjoy cross-country traveling, so as soon as he was old enough to travel alone they sent him out every summer to stay with us for a month or more. We lived out of town and had plenty of room to romp around. We weren’t farmers; Dad worked as a carpenter, leaving us alone or with only Mom for supervision, so Tom and I had a pretty good time. I had earned the right to carry a single shot .22 rifle around, and dad checked Tom out on it and he became a pretty good shot.

“Watch me shoot the nuts off of that squirrel,” he said one day while we were in the woods.

“Huh?” I was just a hairless little fart then and the only thing I knew about squirrel’s nuts were that they collected them and buried them for the winter. Tom was fourteen and starting to feel his balls. His voice had deepened since last summer, and he was obviously a lot bigger. He has been making quite a few casual and even some very pointed remarks about things sexual in nature, but I didn’t know about that stuff and didn’t care; those urges and interests wouldn’t assault me for at least another year, and I was more interested in baseball. Maybe Tommy could see something about the squirrel that I couldn’t, but either way he couldn’t hit it. It was too far away and he wasn’t that good of shot. “No way!” I answered.

“Fuck!” Tommy said after shooting, as the squirrel fled uninjured into the treetops. “I’ll bet I scared the shit out of him, anyway.”

Later we were getting ready for bed when Tommy happened to say that wished that he’d hit the squirrel in the balls, just so he could watch him run around nutless.

“The way you shoot you couldn’t hit an elephant in the balls.” I had finally figured out what he had been shooting at, although I didn’t have a clue why he wanted to shoot an animal in the balls.

“I can outshoot you any day,” he challenged defensively, “Besides, I’ll bet I only missed him by a half an inch. I’ll bet I could easily shoot your nuts off from fifty yards”

“Bullshit,” I responded, using some of his profanity that had been rubbing off on me, “You couldn’t even hit me in the balls from fifty yards.

“I could hit your balls a hell of a lot easier than you could hit mine,” he responded, shedding his underwear and cupping his balls to display their size, “and mine are a lot bigger target than yours.” He had never seen me naked and was guessing at the size of his target, but I had seen a lot of Tommy’s balls that summer. They were definitely bigger than mine, as was his pecker, and he had some hair down there like the older guys in PE class, and he took every opportunity to show it all off.

Here,” he handed me a drawing pad and pencil, “You draw my balls, full size, and then I’ll draw yours, and we’ll shoot at the drawings tomorrow.” He then turned around, bent over, and spread his legs, dangling his scrotum in front of me.

I finished my sketch and handed him the pad, then turned away and mooned him so he could draw me. He shaded in the approximate location of each testicle on the drawings of our scrotums, thus denoting the scoring areas. It was easily apparent that I had a much bigger target to shoot at than he did, and that my target also included the inch or so of his cock that hung below his balls.

He put the drawings in his pants pocket then pulled his skivvies back on, retrieved a sock from the laundry hamper, and ascended the ladder to the top bunk. I didn’t know what when on up there but later in the night the bunk would shake a little and the sock would be on the floor the next morning.

We went to a secluded spot in the woods the next morning, paced off fifty yards, and set up the targets. We would each take three shots then check the targets. A hole in each testicle was needed to win, and the contest would go on until a winner was produced. Tommy shot first, standing or offhand, as it is called, which was the only way he knew about. He was bigger and stronger than I, and therefore steadier, and was a better shot in that position. I didn’t even need to check the target to see that he hadn’t scored. He had placed one shot in each of my butt cheeks and the other almost up my asshole. No Score.

I reloaded the little rifle then stretched out prone on the ground, just like Dad had shown me.

“Hey, no fair!” Tommy protested.

“Bullshit,” we didn’t say anything what position we could use,” I replied, defending my position.

“Okay, cheater, go ahead,” he conceded, “You’ll miss anyway.”

The prone position turns the body into a naturally stabile tripod, and makes the rifle extremely steady. I carefully squeezed off my three shots then confidently approached the target with Tommy at my side. I had drilled each of his nuts, and for good measure had also shot the end off of his cock.

“Okay, you win,” Tommy said, stating the obvious, but I didn’t have a clue what I had won until he dropped his pants and knelt face down on the ground with his legs spread wide. “One squeeze, hard as you want, for as long as you can hold your breath. No twisting or pulling.”

I had never touched another guy like that, although I had, in the course of roughhousing, taken and given a few bops to the balls. I knew it was wrong, but I couched behind him and placed my hand around his testicles. They seemed really warm and they completely filled my hand. I knew that guy’s balls got bigger when they got older, and I also assumed they got more sensitive, judging by the theatrics they went through when they got popped in them, and I wasn’t surprised when Tommy flinched at my touch. I increased the pressure, and then abruptly bore down about half as hard as I could have.

“Stop!” Tommy practically screamed. “I’ll do anything!”

I released him, and his hands flew to his crotch and he lay curled up on the ground, panting. I rose and suddenly felt the urge to piss, so I walked to a nearby bush and opened my fly. I couldn’t pee. My prick was too stiff. It was the first time I had ever been that way.

That night just before I went to sleep Tommy said, “If I would have won and had you by the balls do you know what I would have made you do?”

I didn’t even replay, because I didn’t intend to give him the opportunity to get me in that predicament.

“I would have make you suck my cock,” Tommy said, before starting in on his nighttime workout.

He spent the rest of his stay trying to lure me into another contest, either shooting or several others that he dreamed up, saying that I owed him a chance to get even, but I refused to bite. He finally did show me what his nighttime workout consisted of and he even conned me into trying my hand at it, but one stroke on his erection filled me with such shame that he had to finish himself. He offered to suck my cock if I would reciprocate, and he even tried to convince me that the act was necessary for my ascension into puberty, but I wasn’t buying that either. I didn’t care if my cock ever got as big as his.

In the middle of August we drove Tommy to Seattle to catch a non-stop 707 back to Virginia. This time I wasn’t sad to see him go.

The next May I asked Mom and Dad if Tommy was coming out that summer. Mom blushed a little, and left the room. Dad pulled his chair up close to me and asked me if Tommy had ever tried to do anything naughty, as he called it, with me. I knew the wrong answer would incriminate me, so I replied in the negative. Dad went on to explain that Tommy had been accused of doing something improper to another boy, and that until that issue was resolved he would have to stay home. By then I was into puberty and I finally understood where Tommy had been coming from, but I didn’t want to go there myself.

Mom never said anything about it, but later on Dad told me that Tommy had to attend some special classes and counseling sessions and wouldn’t be coming out that summer.

Things seemed to go downhill for him after that. He never visited us again. He got drafted but was booted out of the Army as being undesirable, and that took some doing back in the Viet Nam era. The next time I saw him I was headed to Nam myself. I stopped at my grandparent’s home and Tommy was there. He was out on bail awaiting trial on something or other, nobody would say just what, and he looked like hell. I wished him luck but he wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

Tommy received a five-year sentence for child molestation, and lost his balls while still serving it. Evidently some of the hard core guys in there really detested child molesters and they took out their vitriol on Tommy, or he tried to come on to one of them or something, I don’t know which.

I talked to him six years later at his father’s funeral and he seemed polite, well mannered, and completely inoffensive. He was very open about what had happened, and detailed to me how five guys had cornered him in the laundry, held him down, and castrated him with a home made shiv. I felt kind of sorry for him. He was a little screwed up as an adolescent, but timely intervention most likely would have snapped him out of it. I was also relieved that he had finally been cured.

I also secretly wondered how close to the edge he had pushed me, and if given enough time rather or not I would have joined his plunge into The Abyss.