The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Gingerly I reached over and lifted one of his eyelids, and found myself staring at his eyeball “What are you doin’?” he inquired languidly.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Do whut?”

  Eventually we sat up and sorted out our clothes. When he handed me my skirt, I discovered a damp stain down one side. “Sperm,” he said with his idiotic smile.

  “Aargh!” I held the skirt away from myself between two fingers. My prior knowledge of sperm was based on an animated Walt Disney film shown in Physical Education class in eighth grade, in which wicked Sammy Sperm had tried to corner luscious Ellie Ovum, the sweet farm girl newly arrived in the Big Womb. I dropped my skirt onto the seat and began beating the spot with my fists. “Kill them!” Joe Bob grinned dementedly, thinking I was trying to be funny. The truth was, I feared sperm almost as much as I feared Communists.

  “You look good in my jacket,” he said thoughtfully. “Will you wear it?” Unexpected delight at this, my reward for performing the unappetizing task of jerking him off, swept over me. The wearing of one’s steady’s letter jacket at Hullsport High was the ultimate in commitment, far more binding than a simple exchange of rings. Naturally, Joe Bob’s jacket was the most remarkable one in the entire school, covered as it was with patches in the shape of basketballs and winged feet and crossed baseball bats and footballs, in addition to several large H’s. It looked like the rear window of a Winnebago, with stickers from every state.

  I threw the floppy jacket arms around his neck and hugged him. Seeing an opening, he charged into it, like the skilled tailback that he was, pinning me under him on the seat and reaching up under the jacket to twist one of my nipples as though tuning a radio.

  “Training,” I whispered in his ear. He sat up quickly and started pulling on clothes.

  The next evening after supper, the Major pulled me aside and said in a voice choked with anger, “Listen to me, Virginia. I will not have my daughter slinking around town like a cur bitch in heat. Do you understand me?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” With a father like the Major, who needed Big Brother? His information networks would have put the CIA to shame.

  “The hell you don’t! I’d think you’d at least have the sense not to go out for your whoring in the only black Mercedes in town.”

  “I wasn’t — whoring.” I wondered if, like doctors, highway patrolmen didn’t have a set of professional ethics to prevent their discussing their clients with the public at large. “Joe Bob and I were — uh — talking.”

  “Like hell you were! Look, you give that idiot back that ridiculous bowling ball of a ring! And that jacket, too!” I had scarcely removed the letter jacket since Joe Bob had given it to me. The sleeves were a foot too long and I’d rolled them up. It hung almost to my knees. “You look like a goddam dwarf in it anyway. And if I ever catch you two together…”

  “You’ll what?”

  “If you’re lucky enough to have inherited your mother’s brains and your father’s survival instinct, you won’t wait around to find out!”

  I whirled around with a contemptuous toss of my ponytail. But, after all, it was the Major who was keeping me in tampons. So the next day I returned the jacket and the ring to Joe Bob in the darkroom. I clung to him, bathing us both in tears.

  The next thing I knew, I was holding his stiff cock in one hand as he lurched back and forth in front of me. I felt as though I were an animal trainer trying to lead a recalcitrant baby elephant by the trunk. But at least Doyle and Joe Bob’s other friends weren’t snickering and calling me a cock tease — or a Do-It Pruitt behind my back. The knife’s edge of respectability made precarious walking.

  “Joe Bob,” I wailed, as he collapsed against the wall gasping, “I can’t give you up. What can we do?”

  And at that point, a romance which would soon have lost momentum, left to its own motive power, gained a dizzying impetus from the interference provided by Coach and the Major. In the gym at lunchtime I sat with my girl friends, who swooned with pity for Joe Bob and me. Joe Bob sat with his male friends on the opposite side of the basketball court, and he and I gazed torridly at each other throughout the remainder of the school year. And of course there were the five-minute grapplings in the darkroom three afternoons a week. I would get a bathroom pass, race to the darkroom, signal my arrival by a secret knock. Joe Bob would turn on the photography club timer to four minutes so that I wouldn’t be late in getting back. Then I’d roll up my sleeves, unzip Joe Bob’s chinos, and, like an efficient housewife, jerk him off in the sink. Then we’d exchange half a dozen muffled endearments until the timer went off, at which time I’d race gasping back to my seat in study hall as Coach eyed me with generalized disaffection.

  With the arrival of summer, the darkroom was no longer accessible. Cruising Hull Street every night, Joe Bob and I would pass each other going in opposite directions, me with my friends and Joe Bob with his. The drivers of our respective cars would slow down reverently while we panted at each other. One night Joe Bob leaned halfway out the window of the car in which he was riding to hand me a crumpled note. He gazed fervently into my eyes and squeezed my hand as he did so.

  It read: “Wait on the corner of Hull and Broad tomorrow night at nine and watch for Doyle’s Dodge.”

  The next night on the appointed street corner I waved as cars full of cruising classmates drifted by. Shortly I saw Doyle’s maroon Dodge — his mobile mattress he called it. Doyle was at the wheel and Doreen, his girl friend, was draped over him like a fox boa. No sign of Joe Bob.

  Doyle pulled over to the curb. Doreen, her fluffy bouffant overpowering her small painted face, waved cheerfully. Doyle hopped out and walked around to the trunk. Leaning on it with one hand, he watched the passing cars.

  “What’s happening, Doyle? Where’s Joe Bob?” He didn’t answer and started whistling casually through his front teeth. A large black DeSoto crept by, and Doyle waved wildly with a big smile. It was Coach, scowling. His car slowed to a crawl as he passed us. Doyle leaned over at the waist so as to look in the window, and he waved again with just his fingers.

  The window rolled down and a voice boomed out, “One hour and forty-eight minutes to summer curfew, Roller!”

  “Right, Coach!”

  When the DeSoto was well out of sight, Doyle glanced around furtively and opened the trunk lid. “Get in,” he ordered out of the side of his mouth.

  “Do what?”

  “Get in!”

  “I’ll suffocate,” I pointed out.

  “No, you won’t. Trust me, Ginny. I’m Joe Bob’s best friend, ain’t I? Get in. Quick.”

  So I climbed in and found myself lying next to Joe Bob as Doyle slammed shut the lid. “Well! What do you think of my plan?” Joe Bob demanded proudly.

  “Not much,” I assured him sourly, as I rearranged my limbs trying to get comfortable. He scooted over, his chest to my back, and wrapped his wrist-weighted arms around me, a hand molding each of my breasts.

  “Is this any better?” He buried his mouth in my neck and nibbled my flesh. I decided to reserve comment.

  The car was moving fast now. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see,” he answered mysteriously. I felt as though I’d been shanghaied into white slavery, which would undoubtedly require that I spend my days jerking off unending lines of horny young men. I could feel Joe Bob’s inevitable hard-on prodding my kidney like a gangster’s revolver.

  “Oh, all right!” I reached behind me, unzipped his chinos, and went to work with a backhand stroke. In the ensuing months, I mastered backhand, forehand, overhand, underhand, according to our positions in the cramped enclosure. Anything to postpone the issue of intercourse, which loomed over me as had dust clouds from the approaching Huns over Rome in its last days.

  After a while, we heard a car door slam. The lid of the trunk opened and Doyle hissed, “Quick, Sparks. Get out.” We scrambled out, and Joe Bob dragged me around to the car door and onto the floor of the
back seat while Doyle glanced around frantically. Inside the car, a speaker was blaring, and I realized that we were at the drive-in. We scooted cautiously up onto the seat, slouching so that our heads were below the windowsills.

  Doreen in the front seat swiveled her bouffant around and offered, “You want me to turn down this seat so’s you can see?’

  “Yeah, great,” Joe Bob said. As she leaned over from the passenger side, I noticed that she was already stripped down to her bra on top. “Hey, thanks for this, Doreen,” Joe Bob added. “I know it’s not so great doublin’ to the drive-in.”

  “Oh Lord, Sparky, we’re just real thrilled to hep you all out. Shoot, you’d do the same for Dole and me.”

  Doyle let himself in the passenger-side door. The movie was The Ten Commandments. Mixed with the dialogue were various sighs and gasps and sucking sounds from the front seat, and blasts from car horns throughout the parking area as, in keeping with Hullsport High tradition, couples signaled that they’d gone all the way.

  At a point in the movie at which a slave woman was about to be crushed on the pyramid construction site by a ten-ton block of stone, the front seat back slammed up abruptly. Joe Bob and I sat up straight so as to be able to see the fate of the unfortunate slave woman. It became apparent that a well-timed miracle would save her; the camera cut to a scene at the foot of a mountain, where the frenzied Israelites were dancing around the golden calf. We glanced down into the front seat and discovered Doyle and Doreen prostrate on it. Doyle’s bare hips were pounding up and down, flashing white in the light from the screen.

  Joe Bob and I looked quickly out the window, pretending not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Simultaneously, we hit the floor like soldiers throwing themselves into trenches during an enemy shelling. By the flickering light from the screen, where the Israelites were still busy with their revelry, we had seen the profile of Coach, a hand bringing popcorn from a cardboard carton to his mouth. He sat in his big black DeSoto two cars away.

  Waiting discreetly until the thrashing in the front seat had ceased, and until Doyle had tooted the horn with his foot to indicate to his teammates that he had scored, Joe Bob whispered urgently through the space between the seat backs, “Dole! Dole! It’s Coach! Two cars down!”

  “Do whut? Oh Christ! He’s everywhere. And it’s eleven o’clock.” Clothes swirled like autumn leaves, front seat and back.

  Doyle, on his knees in front, leaned over and said, “I don’t think you can get back in the trunk with Coach there. You’ll have to lie on the floor and pray.” Doyle spread a blanket over us, tucking it in. It smelled of stale semen, an odor I was by now thoroughly acquainted with.

  This arrangement continued into the next school year. Joe Bob and I would see each other up close three times a week for five minutes in the darkroom, and a couple of hours every other week in the trunk of Doyle’s Dodge. Otherwise, we pined for each other across vast acres of bleachers in the gym at lunchtime, and from neighboring cars at night.

  Sometimes as Teen Team for Jesus officers we were slated to read devotions together over the public address system, the microphone for which was located in a small soundproofed studio. It opened off the principal’s office and was locked from inside when announcements were in progress.

  “‘For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication,’” Joe Bob would read from the devotion sheet mailed out by the Teen Team Headquarters in Birmingham, undressing me with his eyes.

  “‘That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in santification and honor, not in the lust of concupiscence,’” I would respond, watching his cock stirring against his chino leg.

  “‘For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness,” — Joe Bob would continue through the microphone. “‘But I say unto you that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already.’”

  “‘Fornication and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints,’” I would instruct over the airways of Hullsport High as Joe Bob grabbed my breasts with his huge mitt-like hands and buried his face in my neck. “‘For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God…’” I would feel his erection prodding my back as the Bible trembled in my hopelessly sin-stained hands. “‘…because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience,’” I would conclude with a gasp, as his hands fought their way into the secret folds of my soul’s sanctuary.

  And of course Joe Bob and I would catch glimpses of each other at ball games — me in my gray twill shorts and maroon uniform jacket, twirling my flag; and Joe Bob in his various Hullsport Pirate uniforms. I would watch with helpless fury as Coach patted Joe Bob on his ass when sending him into games, as he threw his arm around Joe Bob’s shoulders when he called him out, as he personally took the towel from the water boy and gently dabbed the sweat from Joe Bob’s upper lip and temples.

  My considerable spare time I spent collecting bottle caps from Nehi soft drinks at area vending machines. The local radio station was sponsoring a contest to determine the most popular high school athlete within its listening range. Each bottle cap from a Nehi grape or orange drink counted as one vote. I had collected 41,212 bottle caps for Joe Bob. Doreen had submitted 35,080 for Doyle, when she reminded me of how generous she and Doyle had been to Joe Bob and me over the past months. So I stopped collecting bottle caps and allowed Doyle to steal the title of most popular athlete, with 42,683 votes. Although the entire school knew that it was a lie, that Joe Bob Sparks, not Doyle Roller, was in fact most popular, that back-seat politics alone had swung the election.

  The Major was getting suspicious. “Why don’t you ever go out on dates anymore?”

  “No one asks me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess they don’t want to.”

  “Or maybe they don’t want to horn in on Joe Bob?” he suggested unpleasantly.

  “I gave back his ring and his jacket as I was instructed,” I shot back haughtily. But I knew I had to come up with some dates to throw the Major off the scent. For the time being, he had only his suspicions, but knowing how he operated, he would doubtless turn up some concrete proof before long unless I diverted him. Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive for selecting my former dear friend Clem Cloyd, son of the Major’s tenant farmer, for my escort in deceit: I intended to illustrate to the Major that, out of the male material available to me, Joe Bob wasn’t such a disaster after all. Joe Bob was delighted with the plan because Clem seemed such flimsy competition as not even to merit the titl e. Never did it occur to any of us that I might actually come to prefer Clem Cloyd, crippled hood-about-town, to Joe Bob Sparks.

  4

  Saturday, June 24

  As Ginny sat in the Jeep overlooking the athletic fields of Hullsport High, Joe Bob Sparks trotted toward her from the track. His once-firm belly was somewhat flabby. He waved wildly. She waved back. Her time sense, shaky and unreliable in the best of times, was temporarily stunned. Past had inundated present. She felt she should be dressed in her by now moth-riddled flag swinger outfit She looked down, perplexed, at her patchwork peasant dress and combat boots.

  She was annoyed with her body. Ten years had intervened since she’d last seen Joe Bob, but even so, given license, it would have raced over and flung itself down on the ground in front of him. She realized with dismay that the patterns of activity set up the first time you did anything could recur to plague you for the rest of your life. Like the many times she had found herself saying automatically to Wendy, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” And not because she particularly cared, but because that was what her own mother had told her time and again. The phrase was wired into her circuits. She had held and kissed Clem and Eddie and Ira in substantially the same way that Joe Bob had taught her to hold and kiss him. And many of her subsequent failures at lovemaking were di
rectly traceable to her unfortunate formative experiences with Joe Bob and with Clem.

  ‘Say hey!’ Joe Bob said, his face contorted by his crazy grin, his front teeth munching Juicy Fruit, possibly the same wad from ten years ago. ‘Knew it couldn’t be your mother sittin’ up here watchin’ us for so long.’

  ‘Nope, it’s not,’ Ginny agreed, suddenly as tongue-tied as a schoolgirl.

  ‘How ya doin’?’ He placed both wrist-weighted hands on the roof-frame bar as though he were about to push the Jeep over on its side and looked down at her through his arms. He wore a stopwatch around his neck; it hung spiraling in the air between his furry chest and Ginny’s face.

  ‘Okay.’ She decided not to itemize for the time being the various ways in which she wasn’t okay. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Great. Just great. You know I’m the coach here now?’

  ‘I heard. You’re doing well, I also heard.’

  ‘Yeah, not bad.’

  Their conversation, scant even at the peak of their romance, was about to exhaust itself. Ginny searched her mind for topics. The weather?

  ‘You wanna watch that blond fella,’ Joe Bob said proudly, pointing toward the track at a large handsome boy with long blond hair tamed with a headband.

  ‘He looks good.’

  ‘You’ll be hearin’ his name — Billy Barnes. He’s the finest athlete I’ve coached.’

  Ginny watched Billy Barnes with interest as he jogged along, chest out and arms high.

  ‘Hey!’ Joe Bob said with sudden inspiration. You know you even sound like a Yankee now?’

  ‘Do I?’ Ginny asked with horror. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do whut?’

  ‘Well, it’s not necessarily something I’d have chosen to have happen to me.’ She was looking up at him but kept having to glance away because the dangling stopwatch was exercising a hypnotic effect. Feeling her eyelids growing heavy, she blinked several times.