Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  If I hadn’t noticed the handsome young man on his sexy motorcycle to begin with, we would all still be snug in our beds back home in West Cork. But once I’d met his eyes and swum into their black pools, I couldn’t forget how it made me feel. It was like something I’ve only read about in books. Opium, they say, has something of that magic, but this was stronger. When he looked at me, I felt both terrified and relieved. I guess the reason I can’t describe it any better, even now, should tell you something of his power.

  Because Jim was a force of nature there’s no name for yet, unless that word is ruin, fury, and seduction rolled into one. And he did seduce me; he seduced all of us.

  It all began with a faulty fuel line, you see. Why didn’t I just keep riding past? You be the judge. Pull up a chair and help me figure it out. Because as God is my witness, I still don’t understand all of it.

  It was barely three years ago, at home in Castletownbere. Sometime in May, I think. The sky was swept of clouds when I noticed a figure bent over his broke-down 1950 Vincent Comet dream machine and cursing under his breath. I slowed on my bicycle, not thinking he’d notice. But he turned to face me on the narrow street.

  And with one look, he cracked me open like a safe and stole everything inside.

  THE FIRST THING I ever heard him say to anybody was, “Do you think that car is big enough?”

  He didn’t say it to me, of course, but to the arse of the massive, yacht-sized yellow BMW that nearly clipped him as it roared up the narrow main street near the square. The tourist, whose plates said he and his bejeweled girlfriend came from some country where people drive on the right-hand side, stopped and leaned out the window. The driver had more chins on him than a roomful of butchers. The muscles on his bulging wheel arm might have made reasonable men hesitate. A diver’s watch that would have sunk the Bismarck glinted in the sun.

  “What did you say to me, din skitstövel?”

  The motorcyclist in the ratty leather jacket raised his head, and I saw the weak sunlight catch his irises. There was no fear in them. He was glorious. Before he answered, he took the time to nod at me as I leaned on my bike to see the show. Even today, I can’t tell you what I saw in his eyes. Perhaps it was only aggression. It could have been pure fuck-you-ness, but there was something else hiding there that the motorist didn’t immediately catch as he opened the door and took a half step onto the roadway.

  “I believe I asked you a question.”

  “Kalle, get back in the car. Now!” A blond shape in the passenger seat leaned left and grabbed for the heavyset man’s suede shirt. But he kept at it, placing both feet on the deck, ready to move down the road under his own power.

  Right up until he saw the look in the younger man’s eyes.

  “Before you get too upset,” he asked the Swede, “can I tell you a secret?”

  The motorcyclist kept both arms at his sides and smiled as he walked right up to the driver and put his gorgeous lips to the man’s meaty ear. I noticed that he didn’t just have a great arse, but carried more than muscle inside the tight black jeans and T-shirt. He moved like he had all the time in the world as he bent down to whisper something. The driver was about to protest, and his hands clenched. He could have put one of them around the young fella’s tousled black Keanu Reeves hair and squeezed. And for a second, it looked as if the pompous wanker had a mind to. His condescending smile had been widening for several seconds.

  And then his jaw went slack, along with his shovel hands.

  I couldn’t hear what the handsome fella was mumbling, but it didn’t sound angry from across the street where I was standing. He even put out a hand and playfully pulled at the other man’s earlobe, as if making a point. Then he turned around and, smiling at me, walked back down toward his fire-engine-red motorcycle. The driver just stood there, gobsmacked, letting the wind blow into his open mouth for a bit, while he digested what he’d heard. Whatever it was, it must have come as such a shock that it had robbed him of the power to move, for only the girlfriend tugging hard on his shirttail finally brought him back to the here and now. He got back into his seat faster than my own students after the last bell and gunned the engine so hard he left two fat skid marks on the asphalt. He was past the church steps and gone in seconds, and we never saw them in town since.

  Now, I know what you’re going to say.

  I should have just got back on my bike, continued on my way, and minded my own business, right? Don’t think I didn’t consider it. But wouldn’t you have waited just a few moments more to see if you could find out what had made the driver’s anger evaporate so quickly? Of course you would. So I leaned my bike against the window of the realty office and gathered my courage to walk over and talk to the fella, who was once again kneeling next to his mud-splattered machine, which had more loose wires and plastic tubes hanging out of it than a trauma victim. I thought I heard him humming a lullaby. As if he were singing the dirty street racer to sleep right there, next to the gift shop.

  He knew I was walking across the street even before my own feet did. I know he did; I could tell by the way he stopped for a second before tightening another screw.

  “Howya?” he asked, without turning around, sounding a bit like Dublin, a smidgen of Cork, and a busload of something else not from around here. His voice was as smooth as a cat’s.

  “All right, I suppose,” I answered, feeling stupid for just standing there like an eejit. I was wearing my schoolteacher clothes, regulation skirt length and sensible shoes. Exactly the least sexy outfit to be wearing when talking to any man, and I cursed my rotten luck.

  Then he turned to look at me.

  I can’t say that the ground shifted underneath my feet or any such bullshit. What I will swear to on a stack of Bibles, however, is that looking at him filled me with a kind of hope you only get very early in life and can never quite recapture later. It felt to me as if whatever thoughts I had brewing inside me mattered more at that moment than anything else. Because he didn’t flirt this time, or wink, or smile. He just peered into my eyes, past the retina, the brain and guts, and all the rest of it, and shone a secret flashlight all around my insides before crawling back out, apparently satisfied with what he’d seen. I can only compare the feeling to being in the grip of a large animal you aren’t afraid of; you know it might hurt everyone else, but not you.

  But despite his caressing the tourist’s ear and fashionably unshaven cheek, it wasn’t love that drove that gesture, it was a promise. The promise went something like, “Don’t listen to my words, just heed my willingness to tear your ugly head from your body and drop-kick it down the street.” I knew it as sure as Easter Sunday, and I still didn’t walk away from him.

  What made me stay? It wasn’t just curiosity or the cheap fantasy of a quick ride somewhere in a quiet alley.

  The best I can tell you is that I began to tune in to his voice. Like a lonesome dial waiting to hook on to a good radio station, I stood in my cheap patent-leather Dubarry pumps and let his frequency wash over me.

  “What’s yer name?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s not for sale.”

  He tightened another screw and wiped the fuel line with the bottom part of his shirt, allowing me a full view of a stomach that hadn’t seen many chips or pints of stout in its life. I knew later that he did it on purpose. “And now you want to know what I told the Swedish meatball to make him forget about buying his own little slice of Ireland and to drive off into the sunset instead with Miss Bleach 1983, dontcha?”

  I toughened up my voice a bit, because the fella was too sure of himself, even if he’d read me dead right. “Maybe I do, and maybe I just wanted to see someone not from around here fiddle around with his fancy toy. What kind of bike is that, anyway?”

  He put down the wrench and cocked his head to the side, as if to say, Well, damn, this one’s going to take some effort. “Only the most beautiful motorcycle ever made, and that’s the truth,” he said, stroking the gold leaf lettering on the side of th
e large fuel tank.

  A tattoo-style banner had been carefully inlaid, with the word VINCENT offset in white inside. The fella finally smiled. His teeth were perfect, of course, and he spoke with a reverence I’d only heard before in church.

  “My Vinnie is a genuine racing machine, the only one left in Ireland, maybe even in the world, and rare as a unicorn. A 1950 Vincent Comet, nine hundred and ninety-eight cubic centimeters, with Albion gears and a wet multiple clutch.” He saw my befuddled expression and added, “All that means is she’s fast as piss, a bitch to please, and breaks down all the time. But I love her. Want a ride?”

  “Quite taken with yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Just being friendly.”

  I wanted him to ask me again, but then I looked at my watch. It was nearly nine and, right up the road, twenty-three eleven-year-olds were already piling into their seats for another riveting lesson on the Nile River delta and the construction of the temple at Abu Simbel. He saw me do it and looked a little sad. Before I knew it he had taken my hand and squeezed it, just a tidge, like a gentleman would. He didn’t stroke it or anything.

  Then he said, “I’m Jim.”

  “I’m sure you are.” I took back my hand, walked back across the road, and stopped. He knew I’d do that, too, because he laughed as I turned around. The wind was making his jacket billow on his lean frame like a leather sail. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. What did you tell that Swedish fella? That you’d take his nice car and make him eat it for breakfast?”

  My first real warning came rolling along right there, and I ignored it. I was already past my own good judgment and itching to share a secret.

  Jim shook his head and started the engine. It roared louder than a fleet of tugboats at dawn. This made me come closer to him, of course, and he smiled again, gunning every inch of that thing. Thinking about it now still fills me not with dread but with desire. He stuck his head out toward me and with his free hand beckoned me to bend closer to hear. As my hair whipped around in the wind and merged with his, I could at last make out what he was saying.

  “All I did was tell him a story.”

  “Must have been a pretty scary one, then?” I tried, wanting to know more. The Vincent screamed with all its 998 cubic voices, and now my cheek was next to Jim’s. He smelled of motor oil and several days of hard road. I think I may have closed my eyes for a second.

  “No. Just one that fit what was already inside his head.” Whatever that meant. Then he gently patted my cheek, swung back the kickstand, and gave me another one of those small nods. He tightened his grip on the throttle and took a left up the hill to the town of Eyeries, where kids walking to my own class stood and gawped after him. I remained standing in the street so long after the sound of the engine had died down that I was nearly run over by another fancy car. I moved out of the roadway and stood by my bike, listening to the church bell strike nine. I’d be late for class, but so would at least ten students, because the sight of a red Vincent, driven by a gorgeous fucker who knew what lay dormant inside the heads of others, was not regular fare in the town where I grew up.

  As I pedaled furiously up the hill to work, I tried to recall the look in the Swede’s eyes.

  He hadn’t just been scared by what he’d heard.

  He’d been afraid for his life.

  ALL THAT MORNING, I tried my level best to give two shites about the Great Pyramids, the egomaniac who had them built, and how to spell the words Pharaoh Khufu on the blackboard without looking too much like the first-year teacher I really was. Except it didn’t really play out that way in my sixth classroom. While telling Clarke Riordan three times to put his shagging Game Boy away, I couldn’t help wondering what Jim had whispered into the aggressive driver’s left ear to leave him so paralyzed.

  But most of all, to be honest with you, I just thought about him. I even tuned out the sounds inside the room and listened for distant engine noise that could, perhaps, be emanating from a Vincent Comet.

  “Miss, but you didn’t answer my question,” said Mary Catherine Cremin, and she was bang on target. I hadn’t listened to a thing she said.

  I heard a ripple of nervous laughter around me and snapped out of it. Before me stood the teacher’s pet, uniform starched and pressed and every number-two pencil in her drawer sharpened like a lethal weapon. She clutched the piece of chalk as if, by pressing it harder, she could speed up the lesson. Mary Catherine had been halfway through delivering her homework report on the Valley of the Kings and was pissed that I had crawled up my own arse and disappeared before she got to the good parts.

  “Oh, erm—sorry, Mary Catherine. What was your question again?”

  The future inquisitor crossed both arms and sighed. Her shoelaces were so tight I was surprised the child could even breathe. “David says the sphinx lost its nose because a bunch of French soldiers climbed up and hacked it off, and I say that’s just not true. Is it?”

  “No, I said they fired a cannon at it.” David was a husky boy with a braying voice and eternal bad breath.

  “Shut up, ugly,” hissed Mary Catherine, adjusting a barrette in her hair.

  “Make me.”

  “Quiet, please,” I tried, motioning for Mary Catherine to sit back down, which she did without much speed or enthusiasm. David looked like he had a mind to pelt her with one of the apples from the tree right outside, and I can’t say I blamed him. “Nobody knows, really,” I said, choosing diplomacy. “Many historians believe local vandals destroyed the nose in the fourteenth century, so it probably wasn’t Napoleon’s army. But there’s no definitive answer.”

  Both Mary Catherine and David were unimpressed with that Solomonic judgment and dug in their heels. “But Miss,” started little Miss Please-give-us-more-homework in a piping voice, “I looked it up, and it says it definitely wasn’t the French. It was some loser who—”

  “Did too; they blasted it off with a cannonball,” cried David, thumping his tabletop. “Boom! No more nose.”

  A shouting match erupted across the length of the room, with each side pretending the fight really wasn’t about settling a long-brewing power struggle in the class that I’d been unable to quell: Miss Perfect vs. Mr. Know-it-all. Soon, books went flying right after insults, and raising my voice merely seemed to agitate them even more, the little beasts. I glanced at my watch. It was a long time to second bell.

  Then I heard this dull roar.

  It crept into my ear through the din, growing stronger from somewhere far away, until one by one, the shrieks had been extinguished and the kids were listening, too. I recognized it straightaway. It was the wet sputtering growl of an old motorcycle engine that broke down more than once a day and needed expert tending. I looked out the window but saw only my battered Raleigh next to the even shittier Ford Fiestas in the teachers’ car park by the hedgerow. I couldn’t see the road but still craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of red zipping past.

  Then the sound died down and blended with the drumming of rain on the roof.

  One boy, Liam, whose body weight was so low I could have folded him in two and put him into my backpack, smiled. And this was rare. Liam was the kind of lad the others would shove into the water of the bay so often his gray uniform had turned a kind of mottled brown when it dried out. He rarely spoke up in class, and when he did he always looked at boys like David to see what kind of punishment would be meted out later as a consequence. But today, something had happened. He sparkled like a lighthouse.

  “You saw it too, Miss,” he said, eyes bright and mouth open. “The motorcycle. Didn’t you?”

  Other expectant faces turned in my direction, and I recognized a handful that had likewise observed the crimson rock ’n’ roll machine cutting right through town that morning and wondered where it came from. I considered saying no. Not because I wouldn’t let Liam have his hard-earned victory, but because I was afraid that the way I answered would reveal just how affected I was already by my brief encounter with a man who called him
self Jim and smelled like pure sex, no chaser. I listened for the sound one more time, but there was only normal traffic from outside, produced by mere mortals driving delivery vans and buses.

  I finally looked at Liam and nodded.

  “Yes,” I told him, keeping my voice as neutral as the sphinx’s smile. “Yes, I did.”

  FINBAR, OF COURSE, had most of his tea in punitive silence.

  I loved him, I did. Not because of his spit-shined Mercedes S500L that he always made sure to park somewhere he could keep an eye on it while we ate. And it wasn’t because he was the best-looking piece of arse in old Castletownbere, making more than a million a year flogging “authentic Irish dream homes” to people needing fellas like him to interpret their dreams for them in the first place.

  No, I’d stayed with Finbar upwards of a year at that time because he always listened. It was as simple as that. Even then, I could tell the difference between feigned interest just to get laid and real inquisitiveness. He cared about what I said, never missing nuances or contradictions. At times, it was a bit like dating a lie detector, though, because nothing passed him by. He would nod and wrinkle his handsome brow, and his blue eyes would narrow while he waited for me to finish telling him about my day.

  That’s how he interpreted love, I think: to wait—hold himself back—until it was safe to come out and play. I was happy. Or, perhaps, I wasn’t unhappy. Back then, they amounted to pretty much the same thing. Our sex life, if you must know, was pretty intense for the first two months. There used to be lots of pushing me up against the wall, because he wanted to live up to driving a piece of Nazi steel that big. But those encounters had become rare by the time he and I sat down for our daily ritual of tea before I was to join my sisters for dinner.

  It was precisely because he listened so well that he heard what I didn’t say.

  The sky had got ready for bed and colored the old IRA monument outside the café salmon pink. The shadow of the Celtic stone cross stretched across the street and covered one half of Finbar’s face as he prepared to say something unpleasant. I could tell. I squinted and pretended he was really two people: one was my boyfriend, the other a person who existed to point out my faults. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which of them took up more space that afternoon. He kept opening and closing the flip-lock bracelet on his Rolex, and I wanted to rip it off his arm and toss it into the harbor and have him spit it out.