The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  ‘Yes!’

  He roared off without a backward glance.

  In the trunk of Doyle’s Dodge the next night, Joe Bob was reciting a list of the couples at school who were screwing. ‘And Ida Tolliver and Stan Strickler, and…’

  ‘No. Not Ida.’

  ‘Yes. Stan swears they do it all the time.’

  ‘Stan says so,’ I said, trying to ignore Joe Bob’s hard-on, which was punching me in the buttocks with each bump we went over. ‘And I bet Stan is telling Ida that you say that you and I are screwing.’ We had come quite away in conversational candor from our first date when Joe Bob had referred to tits as ‘you know.’

  ‘I’ve never said that to anyone.’

  ‘I bet,’ I said, gradually being convinced by Joe Bob’s long list that maybe in fact it was the thing to do. The other persuasive factor was that Joe Bob’s hand was in my panties pummeling something that he referred to as my clitoris. As I had climbed into the trunk, I had noticed by the streetlight that his face was red and swollen. Settling into the curve of his body, I observed that he didn’t wrap himself around me as usual. And he wouldn’t talk. He was clearly sulking.

  Finally, one hand job later, I wheedled it out of him: ‘Why didn’t you tell me about clitorises?’ he demanded sullenly.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You been makin’ a damn fool of me, Ginny. Lettin’ me think I’m getting’ you all worked up.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded with annoyance.

  In reply, he slipped his hand into my panties. Soon the notion of a college education in Boston seemed very distant indeed, and life as the wife of a Hullsport shoe salesman not at all unattractive. In short, as hot waves of desire licked through my body, a decision seemed imminent.

  ‘Ginny,’ he announced, ‘the time has come for you to prove your love for me.’

  I gasped unintelligibly as he speeded up his kneading and resumed his list of our classmates who had fallen by the wayside in the ranks of Brother Buck’s Teen Team for Jesus. ‘Look,’ I panted, ‘it doesn’t matter who’s screwing who. Whom. Even if I were to let you, we don’t have anywhere we could do it.’

  ‘How ‘bout tonight in Doyle’s back seat?’ he suggested eagerly, his fondling now sending icy shivers of craving through my body.

  I considered the possibility, with all the soundness of judgment of a junky in need of a fix. ‘I couldn’t,’ I concluded, in despair. ‘Not with Doyle and Doreen in the front seat. Not our first time.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll get in the trunk for a while,’ Joe Bob speculated, chomping his Juicy Fruit with wild abandon. ‘I’ll ask ‘em.’

  ‘Did you bring a rubber?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Of course?

  Just then the car stopped for Doyle to buy tickets. We waited patiently, having no other choice, Joe Bob’s hand generating shuddering currents of lust up and down my limbs.

  The trunk lid suddenly flew open. Doyle was standing over us looking mortified. Next to him was the irate box office manager. Joe Bob hastily withdrew his hand. The manager shrieked, ‘I’ve had it with you goddamn high school jerk-offs! Sneakin’ in here and robbin’ me of ever penny I make! If I ever catch any of you all here agin, I’ll turn you over to the highway patrol so fast you won’t know what hit you! I don’t kear if you are big football heroes! I’m trying to make my fuckin’ livin’. Now, get the hell out of my drive-in!’

  As Joe Bob and I clambered out of the trunk, the headlights of the car behind us switched to high beam. I felt as though we were refugees being picked up by a searchlight during an attempted border crossing. My skin prickled with fear.

  Out from the car behind us stepped Coach, his 250 pounds of flesh quivering with rage. ‘What the shit are you two tryin’ to pull, Sparks?’ He grabbed Doyle and Joe Bob by the backs of their necks and dragged them off to one side. Swear words kept drifting over to Doreen and me as we stood trembling under the black gaze of the manager. Doreen was weeping and wailing, ‘I ain’t never been in no trouble before. What’ll Daddy say?’

  And from the vicinity of Coach and Joe Bob and Doyle floated: ‘goddam mother-fuckin’ son of a bitch,’ ‘bust your goddam balls,’ etc. Apart from its being close to curfew for both Joe Bob and Doyle, Coach considered it essential that his athletes be moral paragons in the community. They had clearly blown it.

  Doyle and Joe Bob skulked to the car, ashen in the high beams of Coach’s DeSoto. We all climbed into the Dodge in silence, and Doyle turned around and drove me directly home.

  ‘We’re both benched at the next two games,’ Joe Bob mumbled, close to tears. I put my hand over his, intending for us to lock fingers in mutual support. Joe Bob didn’t respond.

  The next morning at breakfast, the Major said, ‘Well, congratulations, Ginny. You’ve done it. You’re wrecking Joe Bob’s coaching career.’

  I glared at him over my poached egg, already consumed with guilt over the fact that I alone would be responsible for Joe Bob’s future as a shoe salesman.

  ‘How did you hear?’ I asked sullenly. I had expected him to hear, but not so quickly.

  He laughed hollowly. ‘Do you really think that anything goes on in this town that I don’t hear about?’ He slashed savagely at his country ham with his knife. ‘For example, do you really think that I don’t know you were at the Bloody Bucket with Clem Cloyd the other night?’

  I looked at him, startled. In fact, I really had expected to get away with that one. I hadn’t figured that the Major’s sources, whoever they might be, would include the clientele of the Bloody Bucket. But I had once again underestimated the efficiency of the Hullsport grapevine.

  He sighed wearily, smoothing his dark graying hair. Tve tried warning you calmly, Ginny. I’ve tried forbidding you to see Joe Bob. Neither approach has worked. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing. Forget college. Forget Boston. Spend the rest of your life in Hullsport as some goon’s slave if you want to. I really don’t care anymore.’

  ‘But I’m dating other people.’

  ‘Oh yes. Clem Cloyd. What superb taste you have, my dear. Joe Bob Sparks and Clem Cloyd. Jesus!’ He stood up abruptly and stalked from the room.

  ‘Who would you suggest?’ I called after him.

  ‘Whom,’ Mother called from her desk, where she was shuffling epitaphs. She added, ‘Dear, I’ve heard that moonshine can blind people. And don’t those men at the Bloody Bucket carry knives?’

  ‘I haven’t seen any,’ I assured her absently as I too stalked from the dining room.

  Pushed by the Major into the muscled arms of Joe Bob, I made my long-awaited decision: We would screw. Oh God, would we screw! I couldn’t wait. Not only would we screw, we would drive across the border into Virginia and get married. And we would live happily ever after in Hullsport with Joe Bob supporting us, when the Major disinherited me, on a shoe salesman’s salary.

  In the darkroom the next day as we rubbed our hips together, side to side in opposite directions, I said softly, ‘Joe Bob, we can’t go on like this.’

  ‘I been thinkin’ the same thing. I guess we got to break up.’

  I stopped shifting my hips. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘I meant that we have to tell them all off — Coach, my father, everyone. Joe Bob, we’re in love. They’re jealous, that’s what. ‘Cause they’re not young and in love. That’s why they’re trying to wreck it for us. But I want you, Joe Bob. I want you to screw me. And then I want us to go to Virginia and get married.’

  I ground my hips into his for emphasis. His cock was getting big and hard.

  ‘Oh God!’ he gasped. ‘But what about my scholarship?’ The timer went off.

  ‘Think about it. We can meet here on Monday to plan it.’ I slipped out the door for my sprint back to study hall.

  Friday night as Clem and I pulled into my driveway after several hours and two cups of moonshine each at the Bloody Bucket, Clem said, ‘
I’ve decided somethin’.’

  ‘What?’ I asked with inebriated interest. It was almost the first time since we’d been dating that he had directed an ostensibly pleasant comment to me of his own accord.

  ‘You can see the spring house again if I can see your bomb shelter.’

  I looked at him with surprise. I couldn’t imagine why he’d be interested.

  ‘You’ve never asked me into your house since that party when we was thirteen.’

  I was touched that he should remember the party where he had kissed me for the first and last time. Could he possibly have a sentimental interest in seeing the chemical toilet enclosure where we had undergone this ordeal?

  ‘Sure. Come on in.’ I hung my helmet on his handlebars, and he hung his goggles next to it. We stumbled inside. I put my finger to my lips and stood still in the downstairs hall, listening to see if the Major was lurking around. But from upstairs came the reassuring roar of his snoring. I opened the cellar door and turned on the lights, and Clem followed me down.

  It wasn’t unattractive, considering its function, though we never used it as a family room anymore. There were comfortable chairs and tables — in addition to the stockpile of canned food and first aid supplies, the plastic containers of water, the bedding and clothing and splints and rifles and boxes of bullets stacked along the walls.

  Clem was inspecting the foot-thick metal door. ‘Does this thing close?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, closing and bolting it to demonstrate.

  ‘Good,’ he said, rubbing his gloved bands. He drew off his black leather driving gloves and unsnapped his hideous red windbreaker. As he removed the windbreaker, I realized that I’d never seen him without it since we’d been dating. His chest under his dark green T-shirt was painfully scrawny, but perhaps only in contrast to Joe Bob’s massive deltoids. On his forearm was a skull and crossbones tattoo, done by gouging out the design with a knife and filling the wound with ink; it looked self-administered, probably during an especially tedious history class. Tossing the windbreaker onto a chair, Clem sauntered over to the stack of weaponry and picked up a .22 with a telescopic sight. He sighted through it at the far corner of the room, and then swept the gun around in a semicircle, as though drawing a bead on a scurrying cockroach. He carefully replaced it.

  Then he unbuckled his wide leather belt with its huge brass buckle and whipped it out of its loops. Folding it in quarters, he slapped it thoughtfully against one palm. I flinched, thinking he was about to beat me. He smiled pleasantly instead and tossed it into the chair. Then he limped over to me and clasped a breast in each hand and pulled me to him. He kissed me, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth like a snake’s.

  ‘That’s more like hit than last time, huh?’ he asked, stepping back from me.

  I smiled uncertainly, feeling woozy from the moonshine.

  He untied the sash of my wraparound skirt. Pulling one end, he gave my shoulder a sharp push, so that I twirled out of my skirt like a tango dancer. Then he methodically unbuttoned my Peter Pan-collared shirt and held it while I slipped out of it. He shook his head with mock disapproval and clucked his tongue as he unhooked my bra and discovered the inch of padding.

  ‘By the way,’ he said as he inspected my bare breasts, whose nipples he had encircled with pokeberry paint eight years earlier, ‘you owe me five bucks.’

  I looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You’re seventeen now, and you’re wearin’ shirts.’

  I remembered our childhood bet and blushed.

  ‘But,’ he assured me magnanimously, taking me by the upper arms and directing me to the wooden sleeping platform, ‘I’ll settle for this instead.’ He removed my panties with one deft movement and settled me on my back.

  The ceiling, as I stared at it, began to spin. I opened and shut my eyes several times and tried focusing on Clem. He was taking a jar of White Rose Petroleum Jelly from his windbreaker pocket. Then he turned out the overhead light, throwing the room into blackness.

  I heard the sound of a zipper being unzipped nearby. Then I heard a tearing sound, followed by a snapping sound. My eyes wide open in the blackness, I saw something coming at me. It was the size and shape of a small salami, lime green and glowing fluorescently. Small green prongs, like on a space satellite, protruded from the rounded end. As I watched with the absorption of St. Theresa viewing the stigmata, this phosphorescent vision descended until it was hovering over my abdomen. Then, as I watched, the object plunged itself between my legs. I felt it enter me with a searing pain. Then I heard Clem saying, ‘Oh Christ! You mean to tell me that you and that Sparks fairy have just been jerkin’ off all this time?’

  I nodded yes in the dark. After all, this was it. This was the experience that people down through the ages had sacrificed life and limb to achieve. Wars had been fought, kingdoms had fallen over the issue of who got to perform this act with whom. I wished Clem would get on with it. We didn’t have much time left before Joe Bob would rip us both limb from limb; we might as well enjoy it to the hilt, so to speak.

  Get on with it Clem did, thrusting himself into me savagely time after time, like a murderer stabbing a still stirring victim. This went on for quite a while. Finally, as I was mentally drumming my fingers on the platform, Clem stopped abruptly. The lime salami reemerged and floated in the air for a few moments, looking as though it were about to ascend into the heavens, whence it had come. Then there was a snapping noise and it vanished.

  I found it hard to believe that this was what Joe Bob and I had spent almost two years building up to. ‘You mean that’s it?’ I asked with dismay. It hadn’t been unpleasant, except for the first pain, but I couldn’t exactly view it as the culmination of my womanhood. Frankly, the rupturing of my maidenhead had been just about as meaningful as the breaking of a paper Saniband on a motel toilet.

  ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ he hissed. By the time he turned on the light, he was fully dressed, as though the incident of the glowing salami had never occurred. I looked at him, through my drunken haze, perplexed.

  ‘Friday night,’ he said, not looking at me, as he heaved open the steel door and left me lying there in a small puddle of blood. Poor Mother, she had failed to capture yet another of my golden firsts with her Kodak M24 Instamatic.

  I didn’t keep my appointment with Joe Bob the following Monday to learn of his choice between marriage with me and his coaching career. I had made the choice for both of us. Or so I thought. Joe Bob and I avoided each other assiduously until he went away to college the following fall. I dropped out of Brother Buck’s Teen Team for Jesus so that I wouldn’t have to read the morning devotions with him. I put away my flag and uniform under the prodding of Clem’s scorn, and I didn’t even appear at the last few baseball games and track meets of the year. Joe Bob’s and my eyes no longer sought each other out across the bleachers in the gym at lunch, or from neighboring cars cruising Hull Street at night. In an insultingly short time, Doreen appeared around school in Joe Bob’s letter jacket, hefting his wax-filled class ring on her left hand. I could tell by the way they stood together — with her cooing and fondling the collars of his plaid Gant shirts, and with Joe Bob’s patting her ass possessively — that they were screwing their heads off. It hurt. I cried unexpectedly over trivial things. My stomach churned when I saw them together. I didn’t want Joe Bob anymore, but I sure as hell didn’t want anyone else to have him. The only solution appeared to be homicide. But it had been my choice. And I was trying to do some compensatory screwing of my own.

  Clem and I, children of the soil, would have done our rolling in the hay, one would have thought. But anyone thinking that has clearly never taken a roll on baled hay. Clem and I had to make do with the sleeping platform in the bomb shelter — and with the damp stone floor in his springhouse, which was where our second attempt at moving the earth occurred. Leaving his Harley by the road, we sneaked through the woods, along the overgrown paths of our childhood, arriving at the springhouse without p
assing his house and alerting his parents. He took out a key ring and unlocked an indicate series of bolts and chains and padlocks.

  It was dark inside. Clem struck a match and lit a kerosene lantern. Then he locked another series of bolts and padlocks from within. Basically, the place looked much as it had when we were younger, though naturally it seemed smaller than my memories of it, since I was bigger now. The spring still bubbled up on one side and gurgled all the way across the stone floor in its channel. But taped around the walls, luridly resplendent in the flickering light of the lantern, were posters featuring every conceivable combination of man, woman, child, and animal, putting every possible body part into every available orifice. I stared.

  Clem stood with his legs planted well apart and his arms folded, his hard-on prodding at his tight jeans. ‘Do much for you, woe-man?’ He had started addressing me, out of the side of his mouth, as ‘woman’ ever since our session in the bomb shelter.

  ‘Well, it isn’t how I remember the place,’ I admitted, wondering what I’d gotten myself into and how to get out of it. I was perhaps in over my head with Clem — his tastes were a little too exotic for me. I no longer had Joe Bob as a bodyguard, but at least the Major still retained power of the purse over Clem’s family.

  ‘We can take ‘em down if they bother you,’ he offered.

  Thrown off guard by his cooperative attitude, I replied with equal amiability, ‘Oh no, let’s leave them up and see how it goes.’ I was trying to sound blase and experienced, for whose benefit I didn’t know since Clem was, by now, well aware of my woeful inexperience.

  Our second attempt wasn’t much more impressive than the first. By the lantern light he donned an orange neon condom whose foil wrapper read ‘Fiesta Brand.’ “Where do you get those?’ I asked nonchalantly. Joe Bob’s Dixie Delite condoms had been a utilitarian tan. Perhaps that was why I had never let him screw me. Could condoms, like Holy Communion, be an outward and visible sign of one’s inward and spiritual grace?

  ‘Floyd gets ‘em somewhere. He says that French tickler like I used last time like to drives Maxine Pruitt wild.’