by Lisa Alther
‘Dry up, Floyd.’
He let go of me and laughed. ‘Sure, baby. But when you work up to a real man, kid, you let Floyd know.’
‘Drop dead.’
‘Them French ticklers do much for you? Or in’nt our l’il Clem getting’ it up for you these days?’
‘Go to hell, you miserable creep!’
Floyd laughed and strolled off.
Not only was my nonresponse to French ticklers none of his business, he’d touched on a sore topic — Clem’s and my sex life, which was definitely not a source of bliss for either of us. Clem in recent weeks had tried binding my wrists and ankles with rawhide thongs to the platform in the bomb shelter. One night in the springhouse, he asked me to wear one of my stockings over my face like a burglar’s mask. Another night he drove the Harley to the lonely stretch of dirt road between his house and Grandpa’s cabin. Pantieless, I straddled him as he sat in the leopard-skin saddle and revved the engine with his gloved hand. But nothing seemed to work for him. We had never even approached the topic of what might work for me, what the goal was with regard to my physiology. The basic problem was that Clem was convinced that if he should discharge, he would be dead. This concept of the Ultimate Orgasm fascinated him at the same time that it terrified him. And the models on the posters in his springhouse made it all look so easy.
I watched now as the two men fished their mangled birds out of the pit. Both were still breathing, even though their feathers had been ripped out in clumps and flaps of jagged flesh were dripping blood. I didn’t know or care which had won, but everyone else seemed to.
Floyd looked at his watch and yelled, ‘Okay, folks. It’s time now.’
It was as though a switch had been thrown. Everyone but me raced around doing things. The lid was replaced over the pit. The chairs were returned to the tables. Floyd came over to where I was standing and lifted open another trap door. Two men carrying a wooden keg emptied its contents into the opening. I could hear the moonshine splashing into the river below. Clem lurched over and dropped half a dozen paper cups through the trap door.
Someone knocked on the door into the other room. Shortly Maxine and a black woman I hadn’t seen before came out, followed by two men who were buttoning their trousers. The guitar player sat on the raised platform with his legs crossed, tuning his instrument. Clem brought out a cross-shaped sign with the words ‘Gospel Tabernacle’ printed on it, and leaned it against the platform. Maxine and the black woman mounted the platform, and everyone else closed in around its base. Floyd appeared, hastily draping a fringed black silk ministerial stole around his neck and carrying a large Bible. He joined Maxine and the black woman.
Clem called, ‘Quick! Get over here, Ginny!’
‘Hit it,’ Floyd said calmly. The guitar player started strumming softly. Maxine and the black woman searched around for their notes, and then swung into a rhythmic version in close harmony of ‘Oh Happy Day,’ clapping in time. Everyone else joined in. Floyd cleared his throat.
Red lights flashed through the windows, and sirens whooped, and tires screeched. The door burst open as Floyd declaimed in a sonorous voice, ‘And thus sayeth the Lord…’ In charged several troopers, brandishing pistols. They scurried into the other room, sniffing, like bloodhounds after a bitch in heat.
By this time Floyd was reading loudly and solemnly from the Bible,’ “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God…He who resists the authorities resists God…” — And Maxine and the black woman and their clapping chorus were softly wailing in the background, ‘Oh happy day/Oh happy happy day/When Jesus walked/ Yes, when He walked/When Jesus walked/And showed the way.’
Floyd looked up from his Bible, feigning surprise, and said, ‘Good evening, sheriff. Always delighted to have you and your boys here. You know that.’
‘Damn you, Cloyd,’ the sheriff snarled. ‘You done it again. But we gonna git you one day, buddy.’ He and his men turned around and stomped out, and the cruisers disappeared.
The next evening at supper the Major said, ‘Don’t come to me for bail.’
I scowled at him.
‘I don’t know exactly what you think you’re doing,’ he said pleasantly, ‘but I hope to God that you get it done before you get into bad trouble.’
I didn’t know what I was doing either, but I was damned if I’d admit it to him. In some obscure way, I think I was hoping to be commanded never to see Clem or the Bloody Bucket again.
‘Your mother and I have discussed it,’ he continued amiably. ‘We could of course confine you to the house and install locks on your door and so on. Or we could throw you out altogether and be done with it. Or’ — here he paused significantly, for effect — ‘I could fire Clem’s father, and he’d probably have to leave town to find work.’
I looked at him quickly with hatred as he played his trump card — guilt. Would I sit by and see Clem’s family ruined for the sake of my own personal pleasures, or hang-ups?
‘But of course I won’t do that,’ the Major continued. ‘Cloyd can’t help it if he’s raised an idiot son, any more than I can help having raised an idiot daughter. And so your mother and I are washing our hands of the matter, having offered our more mature perspective in every way that we know how. It would be time now, if you were planning to go to college in the North, to be doing something about it. Since you’re not, I assume that settles the matter.’ He took a bite of steak, thus concluding his dissertation on my character.
I was looking down at my plate, half-obscured as it was by my tits, which protruded in my Do-It Pruitt bra like two upended ice cream cones. At this point, I was the only child left at home and had the great good fortune of being the sole focus for their parental-anxiety syndrome. They had profited by their experience with me: Karl was happily ensconced at West Point, and Jim was sullenly detained at a military academy in Chattanooga. Only I had escaped the rigors of military discipline, and I was really rubbing it in.
I mumbled, ‘I never really wanted to go up north for college. That was your plan. I like it here in Hullsport. If I go to college, I’ll go to State or Tech.’
‘Very well,’ the Major (BA Harvard ‘39) said calmly. I was impressed by his self-control. I knew I was killing him, unaccustomed as he was to being disobeyed.
Mother quickly reviewed the various threats to which I was exposing myself through my continued association with Clem — being splattered all over the highway; being rounded up in a police raid (‘How would a police record look on your college application, dear?’); blinding myself from improperly distilled liquor; being stabbed in a knife fight; being raped and dismembered on a lovers’ lane. Tellingly, she didn’t breathe a word about the most likely afflictions — pregnancy and venereal disease. Apparently the bomb shelter and the springhouse weren’t bugged by the Major after all?
‘But it’s not like that,’ I lied. ‘To hear you two talk, you’d think I was out looking for a way to get hurt, or something.’ The conversation ended with their giving me sorrowful looks, as though I were in a leaking boat and they were pushing me off, expecting the waves to swallow me.
Which is what nearly happened. Because I had been the Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen the previous year, I felt a certain obligation to appear at this year’s festival to crown my successor. Being Tobacco Festival Queen had fit my flag-swinger image, but it definitely didn’t fit my current image as gun moll to Clem Cloyd.
Nevertheless, the morning of the festival I dutifully donned my yellow chiffon gown, and my carbine belt of a ribbon reading ‘Persimmon Plains Queen,’ and my cardboard crown spangled with glitter. The Major drove me to Persimmon Plains because he was on the organizing committee for the festival. He wanted to handle his neighbors’ tobacco and to watch part of the auction to see what the crop from our farm would bring. Mother came along for the ride, toting her Instamatic.
Persimmon Plains was a small town wh
ose only distinction was its central location to the farming regions of east Tennessee. The auction barn was a huge wooden warehouse, its red stain, weathered and fading. The whole building looked as though it might collapse in a strong breeze. The inside was dingy and dark, and the plank floor was covered with shallow baskets of cured tobacco leaves and with throngs of buyers from the large tobacco companies and sellers from area farms. The sharp tingling odor of tobacco filled the cavernous room.
Blessedly for my bouffant hairdo, which was sagging under the weight of my crown, the crowning of the new queen was the first event. I dutifully plunked the cardboard crown on the head of this year’s sucker, a cheerleader from Hullsport High, and kissed her cheek and smiled into the cameras. The Major hopped up on the platform. The Kinflick of that morning shows us in various poses conveying strained affection, alternately growling and smiling as flashbulbs go off on all sides. Then the wife of the farmer whose crop had won first prize climbed up to pose with the new queen and me. She wasn’t much older than I and was dressed in faded bib overalls and flannel shirt. Her hair was dull and frizzy, especially in contrast to the glossy bouffanted manes of the new queen and me. Her wide smile revealed several missing teeth. She seized one handle of a basket containing some of her husband’s prize leaves, and I took the other handle. My free arm I draped across her shoulder for the cameras. Her free arm was amputated at the elbow. She said she’d driven a metal point through her hand while stringing tobacco stalks on wooden stakes for curing. She’d wrapped a greasy rag around the wound and had gone on working. Then she’d forgotten about it. The wound had become badly infected, but she continued to ignore it. Gangrene had set in.
After Mother and the photographers were finished with us, I told her how much I admired her way of life, how real it seemed to me, how I was planning to marry a farmer and live her kind of life, ‘in touch with nature.’ Clem and I had been discussing elopement proceedings the night before, after I had described how impossible it was becoming to live with my neurotically worried parents.
The girl looked at me with disbelief, and for the first time I noticed that her eyes were crossed. ‘Lord God, honey,’ she gasped, ‘don’t you never marry no farmer. Hit’s a darn sight better to be rich and healthy and happy.’
I looked at her with surprise. Then I quickly gathered up my layers of yellow chiffon skirting to go in search of Clem, who was lurching around sniffing and feeling the dried leaves in the various baskets like the connoisseur he in fact was. He looked up at me with a sneer from where he squatted.
‘I had to do it. After all, I was the queen last year.’
‘Shit, woe-man, you love this queen crap.’ He stood up and took my hand, and grazed and nibbled about my bare shoulders and throat with his soulful black eyes. My face flushed, and I could feel the red spreading across my upper chest, which was left uncovered by my strapless gown. ‘Let’s go fuck, queenie,’ Clem suggested. This was intended as a joke, a sad joke, but nevertheless a joke.
‘Please, Clem.’ I glanced around nervously.
The Major was involved with setting up the auctioning procedures and Mother was filming him, so I decided to leave without bothering them.
Outside, Clem gave me his red windbreaker to wear over my gown, since he was wearing a heavy sweater. I put on the green metallic helmet and climbed onto the Harley. Then I gathered my chiffon skirts and tucked them under my thighs in big clumps.
It had rained the night before, and the roads were still damp. But the sun was bright, and the fields and the bare trees sparkled with moisture. The road between Persimmon Plains and Hullsport was narrow and wound up and down, over and around the foothills. In spots there were almost no shoulders, and sharp drops down cliffs just beyond the road’s edge. The road signs read ‘65 mph — Speed Checked by Radar.’ But only Clem went more than forty on that road. It was, in fact, Clem’s very favorite road, and he tore along it that day in his best form, leaning out and speeding up on the curves. His body and the cycle were one, satyr-like. The only problem was me, clinging to him from behind in my yellow chiffon gown. My arms were wrapped around him at hip level, and I could feel his cock stirring as he hit sixty-five on a curve.
He started shouting into the wind, ‘Do hit! Do hit to me, you mother fucker! Go ahead! Kill me if you can!’
I peeked over his shoulder, the wind whipping wildly past my helmet, and watched with fascination as the quivering needle on the speedometer mounted slowly. ‘Sixty-five miles an hour!’ I yelled gleefully in his ear. ‘Seventy!’
‘Kill us, you fuckin’ bastard!’ he howled into the wind, hunching over to decrease his wind resistance. ‘I dare you!’
‘Seventy-five!’ I screamed. It seemed likely that we might hurtle out of the time-distance grid altogether. ‘Eighty!’
Just then my yellow skirts, which the wind had been tugging at, flapped loose. The chiffon material seemed to float on the wind. It swept and swirled playfully, and eventually wrapped itself around Clem’s head.
‘Christ, woe-man! What the fuck are you doin’?’ Clem screamed, starting to lose control on a curve. I let go of Clem’s hips, and with both hands tried to haul in my skirts like sails in a typhoon. As I was doing this, I lost my balance. I grabbed for Clem, but missed.
The next thing I knew, my helmeted head was bouncing down the road like a plastic basketball. My skirts, caught in the rear wheel, tore as my body fell clear of the machine.
An experience that, objectively speaking, took perhaps ten seconds seemed to stretch out into at least two decades as I slid on my side across the asphalt and off the road and down the rocky cliff. I waited for the heat and light that Clem had described from h is tractor incident. After all, this was it — the Ultimate Orgasm. I knew I was as good as dead. I waited to feel pain as I bounced down the rocks. I felt nothing. Except a faint twinge of annoyance, as I floated through the air with my skirts billowing like a parachute, that once again my parents had been right
6
Monday, June 26
Ginny woke up to bright sunlight streaming through the cabin shutters and onto the huge spool bedstead in which she had been born twenty-seven years before. From the musty smell of the mattress, she judged it not to have been aired out since. She lay still, watching motes dance like fools. The housewife in her wondered if the number of motes in any given patch of sunlight was proportional to the cleanliness of the house in which they occurred. If that theory was correct, Ira’s house would have been crammed wall-to-wall with motes by the time she had left it, with Ira’s gun in her back.
Ginny became aware of a screeching noise coming from behind the closed door leading into the living room. The grating screech would last for half a minute or so, then cease abruptly for about the same amount of time, then start up again.
Warily, she climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the door and opened it, expecting a flush of crazed bats to assault her. But all was quiet.
She tiptoed into the living room. In mid-step the screech began again. Startled, Ginny raced to the front door and hurled it open to allow more light into the shadowy room. She could detect nothing unusual — the same old sofa and armchairs covered in gold gingham material, end tables, the wall lined with guns and machetes and fishing poles and hunting knives, the stone fireplace and the old wooden mantel.
She traced the sporadic noise to the fireplace, but by the time she got over to it the noise had stopped. She tried to pinpoint the quality of the noise — it was a cross between the whirring of locusts and the cawing of several hoarse crows and the rattling of a rattlesnake. Apparently, the creature was insect, bird, or reptile. Unless it was mammal or amphibian.
The noise started up again. Ginny grabbed a knife from a sheath on the wall. Then she removed the spark guard from the fireplace. The noise stopped abruptly. Squatting by the fireplace, waiting for the noise to resume, she realized that she was naked. Not that it mattered. Who was around to be appalled by the way her sleek flag swinger’s figure was being obscured by
a layer of matronly flab?
When the noise started up again, Ginny was right there, but she couldn’t actually see any creature to account for it. Gritting her teeth against an attack by a snake curled in the ashes, she patted her hands gingerly over the stone wall inside the fireplace, blackening them with soot in the process.
Finally she felt something furry. Boldly, she pulled it off the wall, halfway expecting to lose a finger in the process. It was a tiny baby bird, egg-sized. She held it up to her face, and she and the bird gazed at each other with fear and curiosity. But as she did so, she realized that, although her bird was quiet, the noise continued.
Going into the kitchen, she tore some rags into strips and put them into a bowl, and then put the baby bird on the rags. It was a tiny gray creature, covered with gray-black fluff, with a yellow beak and serious black eyes. With the help of a flashlight, she pried four more baby birds out of the crevices between the stones. Using a piece of cloth to disguise the odor of her meddling human hands, she placed them in the nest of rags. Shining the flashlight into the ashes, she discovered the remains of their nest, which apparently had fallen loose from the inside of the chimney. Which probably meant they were chimney swifts. Lying beside the torn nest was the corpse of yet another baby bird, coated with a soft powdering of ashes.
The five remaining birds were screeching madly in their bowl. They were frightened. They were hungry. They wanted their parents. They didn’t want Ginny any more than she wanted them. This whole misfortune had nothing to do with her. She had to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
In a burst of inspiration, she climbed the stairs. Opening a bedroom window, she scrambled out onto the dull green tin roof. Carrying the bowl without spilling the birds was possible only because she had the reflexes of the mother of a two-year-old. Balancing herself against the chimney, she placed the bowl on the roof against the chimney. The baby birds started their frantic chorus, craning their heads back and thrusting their quivering pink throats upward.