by Lisa Alther
‘Okay.’ I was prepared to accept almost any terms in order to accomplish the deceit.
‘Okay, then. I’ll pick you up some time Friday night. You can wear my helmet so’s you don’t get blown around none or nothin.’
Joe Bob was delighted when I told him of Clem’s cooperation as I jerked him off in the darkroom that afternoon. ‘Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all,’ Joe Bob gasped hopefully as he spurted into the sink.
Friday night when Clem’s cycle came roaring up the driveway, the Major sat scowling behind his newspaper. I had been waiting by the window for Clem for about two hours. Occasionally during my vigil, the Major had interjected a remark about brain damage and amputation and the various other occupational hazards of motorcycle riding.
‘He has a helmet for me.’
‘For your entire body?’ he’d asked.
‘Look! If I didn’t do anything that might hurt me, I’d sit in this house in a rocking chair all day. Maybe not even that — a rocker might break, or the ceiling might fall in.’
‘Yes, but you don’t have to court disaster,’ my mother had said.
I ran out and slammed the door on her as she called, ‘You can’t be too careful!’
Clem sat there revving his motor with one gloved hand, on the wrist of which hung a silver-plated identification bracelet He didn’t greet me or look at me. He merely inclined his head toward the rear seat and handed me the Confederate flag-decaled helmet. I put it on and climbed on behind and experimentally put my hands on his narrow hips. I inhaled deeply of his manure scent, hoping soon to become oblivious to it through proximity.
Over his shoulder, he said, ‘All right. Where to?’
I was speechless. I was accustomed to being taken places by my dates, not to deciding where myself. ‘I don’t care,’ I said meekly. ‘You decide.’
Spraying a shower of white quartz pebbles onto the front porch, he threw the Harley into gear and scratched out. We cruised Hull Street a few times. Once at a stoplight we were next to Doyle’s Dodge. I looked over and saw Joe Bob staring at me wanly, his nose pressed against the window. I smiled bravely over my shoulder as the Harley roared off, leaving the Dodge behind as though it were standing still. The skirt of my madras shirtwaist billowed like a sail.
On another circuit of Hull Street, I glimpsed Coach in his black DeSoto. I waved gaily. He scowled back.
Then we turned in at the Dew Drop, where Clem roared over the asphalt ridges, leaning from side to side as the cycle careened madly under us. I wrapped my arms tightly around his waist and clung in terror. He pulled up in front of a microphone and said over his shoulder, “What’ll ya have?’
‘A cherry Seven-Up, please.’
‘Two cherry Seven-Ups,’ he said scornfully into the speaker.
When the drinks came, he tossed his down in one gulp; I sipped mine demurely, trying not to notice the heads of classmates in nearby cars, all turned to stare in disbelief at Ginny Babcock perched on the back of Clem Cloyd’s Harley. After I had finished my Seven-Up, we drove home slowly. He stopped in front of the porch to let me off. ‘Did everyone who was supposed to see us together see us?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good.’
‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I said brightly. ‘I’d love to do it again if you feel like it sometime.’ This seemed a painless enough fashion in which to sidetrack the opponents of Joe Bob’s and my passion. I turned to walk toward the house.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said sinisterly. He threw down his kickstand and got off the cycle. I froze in my tracks as he limped over to me.
‘What?’ I asked nervously, turning to face him. I wondered if he was now going to require me to reimburse him for the evening with physical favors. I felt queasy at the thought. We stood facing each other, me in the visored helmet and him in his yellow-tinted goggles, like a spaceage Adam and Eve.
‘The helmet. You forgot to give hit back,’ he pointed out with a grin.
‘Oh, how silly of me!’ I gasped with relief, throwing it off and handing it to him.
‘You let me know if you want to play your little game again sometime,’ he suggested over his shoulder, as he limped back to the cycle. He leapt on and started it up with a lunge of his good foot.
In the darkroom the next day, Joe Bob inquired miserably, ‘Well, how did it go?’
‘Awful. He’s such a creep. I hate him really.’
‘You’re a saint to go through all this for us,’ he said, unhooking my Never-Tell. He pulled my shirt up around my neck and pinned me against the wall and devoted himself to chewing on my nipples as though they were wads of Juicy Fruit.
That afternoon as I walked out of the building, I just happened to pass the section of the parking area where all the hoods parked their cycles. Clem was lounging in his saddle, inhaling deeply on a Lucky Strike. I strolled over and said sheepishly, ‘Say hey, Clem.’ He didn’t answer or look at me. I stood shifting my books uneasily from arm to arm. ‘How about this Friday?’ I finally blurted out. Without looking at me, he nodded assent and took another deep drag on his Lucky Strike. Then he snapped his hideous red silk windbreaker and removed his goggles from the handlebars and fitted them so that the elastic band didn’t disturb his unguentary pompadour. I halfway expected him to offer me a ride home and was planning my haughty refusal, but he started up the cycle with a lunge of his foot, revved the motor with his hand, and then roared off without a backward glance.
‘Don’t expect your mother or me to empty your bedpan when you’re a paraplegic,’ the Major called as I ran out the door that Friday night. I had been waiting for Clem two and a half hours.
I put on the green metallic helmet, which I was coming to regard as ‘mine’; and I clambered on behind him, putting my hands firmly around his skinny waist.
‘Last time we done hit your way,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Tonight we do hit mine.’
Titillated, I pondered the topic of what ‘his way’ would involve. We sped out the Crockett River road, the warm night wind whipping my London Fog like a flag in a hurricane, and whistling up under the skirt of my shirtwaist. I realized that there were practical reasons for Clem’s outrageous wardrobe — his tight pegged jeans and windbreaker. I knew that I’d have to acquire some new outfits if our relationship were to continue. Looking down, I studied the tacky dragon embroidered on the back of his windbreaker. It evinced the inscrutable Oriental talent for busywork.
We pulled off the river road onto a dirt road. With alarm, I recognized it as leading to the parking spot along the river where Joe Bob and I had been discovered flagrante delicto by the highway patrolmen. But instead of turning left, we turned right onto two muddy tire tracks.
With almost any other Hullsport hoodlum, I would have been paralyzed with fear by now. But I knew that Clem couldn’t be planning to rape and strangle me because his family’s livelihood depended on the Major’s continuing good will. Power, however obscene, did have its uses. Also, I knew, and knew that Clem knew, that Joe Bob would rip him limb from deformed limb should he in any way whatsoever displease me. It was like having a bodyguard in absentia.
But the main reason I wasn’t petrified to be whipping down a dirt track through a lonely stretch of woods with the most notorious thug in town was that I had a pretty good idea where we were going. Although I’d never been to the Bloody Bucket, it hovered like Gomorrah in my imagination, as in the imaginations of all the respectable townspeople. The Bloody Bucket was a country nightclub run by Clem’s brother, Floyd Cloyd. By day Floyd was the industrious janitor at the state school for the blind and deaf in Knoxville, in the basement of which he reputedly ran the largest still in the eastern part of a still-strewn state. By night he crept around town in a black hearse with a false floor, delivering his bootlegged liquor to all the upstanding citizens of the dry town of Hullsport. The Major, for instance, bought all his Chivas Regal through Floyd. On the nights when he wasn’t making deliveries, Floyd opened up his nightclub, dubbed the Bloody
Bucket ever since a knife fight there in which the loser had had his head jammed into a metal pail. At the Bloody Bucket, Floyd sold his famous home-brew by the drink to those who ventured in.
The nature of the goings-on at the Bloody Bucket had long since assumed epic proportions in the town mythology. According to the popular imagination, the Bloody Bucket was the scene of poker games with stakes of many hundreds of dollars, of knife fights, of lascivious floor shows and wanton prostitution, of racial integration and every other vice known to modern man. The clientele of the Bloody Bucket, in the eyes of the rest of us, inhabited a sort of shadow world, the seedy flip side to Bingo games at the Moose Club and preaching missions at the civic auditorium. Because it was so irresistibly appealing, we, the uninitiated, naturally reacted publicly to its presence on the outskirts of our town with scandalized outrage. Preachers at the church circle on Sundays were forever deploring its existence. And men running for sheriff each term pledged to ‘Shut Down That Sewer of Vice and Corruption.’ But no law enforcement agency had ever been able to surprise Floyd Clo yd with liquor in his possession.
Soon Clem was pulling the Harley up beside half a dozen cars in front of a small sagging building covered with tar paper. Clem climbed down and limped to the door. ‘Comin?’ he asked as he discovered me still sitting hesitantly in the cycle saddle.
‘Am I invited too?’
‘Oh come off hit! Don’t hand me none of that grand lady shit, Ginny. Whaddaya want from me — to spread my jacket on the ground for you to climb down on? Git your ass over here if you’re comin.’
I scrambled off the cycle and glided over to him with injured dignity. ‘Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?’ He opened the sagging door and walked in, in front of me, ignoring me.
The cigarette smoke was so thick that it burned my eyes and veiled the contents of the dim room. Floyd appeared in front of us, elegant in a white shirt and brocade vest. I scarcely recognized him. I was accustomed to seeing him come to visit his parents in the dark green work clothes he wore to the school for the blind and deaf. His long dark hair kept falling into his eyes, and he kept throwing it off his face with sharp indolent tosses of his head.
‘Well, well, if it ain’t the l’il lame prince hissef,’ he said, putting a hand on Clem’s shoulder. ‘And who’s this princess he’s got with him? Why, I do believe it’s none other than the good Major’s lovely daughter.’ He smiled and bowed with exaggerated politeness. Then he dragged Clem away by gouging a thumb under his collarbone. They stood to one side, Clem wincing as Floyd gouged his shoulder, locked in a fierce but quiet argument — over my presence, apparently, because I kept hearing phrases like ‘that Babcock bastard’ and ‘lookin’ for an excuse to shut me down.’
Certain that I was the object of scrutiny for everyone in the room, I finally summoned the courage to glance around boldly. And discovered that no one was remotely interested in me. In the dim orange light of the room, I could see that it was starkly unadorned — bare floor, bare walls, a couple of dozen straight-back chairs and several square wooden tables. To my overwhelming disappointment, it looked just like someone’s tool shed. My vision of plush carpets and flocked wallpaper and red velvet curtains faded. Along the far wall was a row of windows that looked out on the fetid Crockett. In a far corner was a raised platform, on which sat two men, one playing a guitar and the other a banjo. Standing in front of a microphone singing, dressed in a tight black straight skirt and a low-necked rayon jersey and ballet slippers, was Maxine ‘Do-It’ Pruitt, my best friend from the first to the fifth grades. In the sixth grade we had gone our separate ways, me to become a left tackle and then a flag swinger, and Maxine to become ‘Sausage: Everyman’s meat,’ as a moralistic girlhood book had warned us.
Maxine’s hair, which had been a dirty blond in the fifth grade, was now strawberry blond and was teased into cascades of ringlets that made it look as though her neck would inevitably snap under the excess bulk. She had also been transformed from a stringy lanky kid into a warm soft voluptuous young woman with huge breasts that were molded by her bra into bullet-like projectiles. I had to hand it to Maxine: She was a professional, something I would never be if I didn’t settle down and devote myself exclusively to some one trade, rather than flopping back and forth between football and flag swinging, or their equivalents. She was singing a popular country song, ‘Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind.’ She extended her hands, pleading, and threw her magnificent Marie Antoinette headpiece back and wailed in nasal agony, ‘You never take me anywhere/Because you’re always gone./Many a night I’ve laid alone/And cried here all night long….’
Half a dozen rough-looking men in green work clothes, and a couple of excessively made-up and bouffanted women, one of them black, sat around the tables with Dixie cups full of ice and a clear liquid. At one table men were playing cards in tense silence.
Floyd had apparently decided to let me stay, in spite of my father. Clem lurched across the room to the cluster of people. Several looked up and greeted him with familiarity. He turned around and gestured impatiently for me. I walked over, feeling out of place in my London Fog and tasseled Weejuns and madras shirtwaist. I sat down stiffly in one of the straight chairs, carefully choosing one with its back to the wall, as I had done habitually ever since reading as a child of Wild Bill Hickok’s being shot unawares due to his sitting with his back to a doorway. If I were going to be murdered in the Bloody Bucket, at least I wanted to be able to see who was doing it.
I smiled uneasily, although no one was acknowledging my existence. Floyd came over and put cups full of ice and the clear liquid in front of Clem and me. Clem took a gingerly sip. I stared at my cup unhappily. The most I’d ever had to drink had been a can of 3.2 beer at the Family Drive-In with Joe Bob when he had been between basketball and baseball seasons; he had felt he could celebrate by breaking training and trying to get me drunk so that he could lay me.
‘Try it,’ Clem ordered.
Obediently I picked up the sweating cup and raised it to my mouth. I made the mistake of sniffing deeply and was almost anesthetized by the vapors.
‘Drink,’ Clem said menacingly.
So I drank. The liquid burned my mouth, and I could have sworn I felt it corroding my esophagus inch by inch as it descended into my poor unwitting stomach. The vapors ascended into my sinuses and foamed and fizzed like Drano in a drain.
‘Well?’
‘Delicious!’ I gasped, desperately eager to please him for reasons that were unclear to me at the time.
‘Good. She likes it,’ he called to Floyd at the next table. I smiled bravely at Floyd, who grinned back.
A few minutes later, taking a break, Maxine came over to our table. She stood with a hand with grotesquely long orange nails propped on one cocked hip. ‘I’m not believin’ it’s Ginny Babcock!’
‘Say hey, Maxine. I didn’t know you sang. You’re very good.’
‘Thanks,’ she said with indifference. ‘Clem, honey, what you doin’ bringin’ this poor girl here? You oughta be shamed of yoursef.’
‘Hit’s a free country.’
‘That’s what they say,’ she said with a mocking laugh. ‘Don’t you drink too much of that there poison,’ she said maternally to me. ‘Hit’ll rot your gut good.’ And she went over and sat down next to Floyd, who put his hand under her skirt halfway up her thigh.
‘You come here much?’ I asked Clem in order to have something to say.
‘Ever night.’
‘Don’t your parents make you study?’
‘Don’t nobody tell Clem Cloyd what to do.’
If that was true, then his relationship with his father had altered dramatically since our childhood. I remember Mr. Cloyd’s beating hell out of him all the time as his way of ‘telling’ him what to do.
Maxine got up and sang first ‘When My Pain Turns to Shame’ and then ‘How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away.’ I had drunk about a third of my home-brew and was fee
ling giddy. Clem had downed all of his. He stood up abruptly and said, ‘Let’s go.’ I trailed along after him to the cycle, its metallic green glowing like a June bug in the light over the door of the building. I disappeared into the cavernous helmet. I was very conscious, as I tucked the skirt of my shirtwaist under my thighs, of the way my legs spread around Clem’s hips. On the trip home. I was fixated by the way my thighs tightened around him and clung as we whipped around the curves of the river road. I felt genuine disappointment as he pulled into the driveway and waited for me to dismount, revving the motor impatiently with his leather-gloved hand. I sat still, savoring the feel of my knees on his upper thighs, and my hands around his skinny waist.
‘Clem?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘Whatever happened to the springhouse?’
‘Hit’s still there. Why?’ He sounded hostile.
‘I’d love to see it again sometime. We used to have fun there.’
‘No.’
‘No what?’ I asked, hurt at the idea that he hadn’t had fun there.
‘No, you can’t see hit sometime. Hit’s my place.’
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling as though he’d kicked me in the stomach. It used to be our place. After all, hadn’t we pricked index fingers and mingled our blood in a secret lifetime pact? But of course it was true that I hadn’t shown the least interest in it in four years, so perhaps I’d forfeited my rights.
‘Come on, get off, will ya?’
I scrambled down and handed him my helmet. What was wrong with Clem? I was prepared to allow him to kiss me, even to feel me up. I had as much as asked him to take me to the springhouse. But he didn’t appear remotely interested. Was he a queer, maybe, the puny stunted little runt? But then why was he bothering with me at all? To get at Joe Bob, the big handsome hunk? The mere thought of someone’s moving in on Joe Bob and me made me furious!
‘Next Friday?’ Clem inquired with indifference.