“And you were the strong, silent type,” she said.
“The weak, silent type, you mean.”
“Do you believe that, Johnny?”
“No, of course not. I’m not silent and I’m not weak. That’s enough of that. Do you want a beer?”
“No, I don’t think so, Johnny.”
He picked up the carton of beer, opened the car door, ran down to the edge of the pond and threw it into the water. “There,” he said as he came back, “what do you think of that? Wasn’t that a non-John Cotter gesture?”
“It was,” she said wonderingly.
“Some day I’ll probably be diving for it. It’ll keep cool, anyway. Why the hell do you always make me talk about myself? I don’t like to talk about myself, Janie. I really don’t. What have you been doing for the last ten years? Read any good books?”
I have, she thought, been the regular bed partner of an erratic but faithful husband. I read Time and Life and Harper’s and Atlantic; I put my name on the waiting list at the library for the best-sellers; I have done exactly nothing for ten years. I read the Leah Free Press to keep up with what is going on in the world and in Cascom and Cascom Corners.
“I’ve done nothing,” she said.
He was silent for a long time, then he put his arm around her shoulders and gently pulled her toward him. She was grateful that he didn’t ask her if it was all right. His face was dry, like fine sandpaper against hers. She felt her lips become soft. Their teeth touched with a hard little click. Her nipples turned hard; the straps of her bra tightened over her shoulders. As she turned in his arms there was a moment of clear, rather cold wonder—she could never remember such immediate symptoms with Mike. He had not changed her body so much or so quickly. Never. She shut her eyes, and the hot wind ruffled over them, coming into the car with a push that seemed deliberate. She found herself thinking, If it were only real, if I could only know that he is going to stay this time. There was a tremor in his leg, and his toe tapped against the floor of the car.
“See that?” he said. “Hear that? I’m nervous as hell, for some reason. You’d think we hadn’t known each other all our lives, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s because we have,” she said. “You’ve never kissed me before. Now let me say something. I’ve been wondering what that kiss would be like for a long time.”
“How is it?”
“Like I thought it would be.”
“I only know how it is for me,” he said, and tried to stop his leg from trembling. “I feel like a gawky virgin. It’s like going back to the scrape.”
She put her hands under his shirt, against his skin.
“Yes, you did that and nearly killed me on the spot. Yes,” he whispered, his lips against her ear.
“All of a sudden I want to know if you are going away,” she said.
“You feel that way?” he asked eagerly. “Do you, Janie?”
“Yes. I feel like a lawyer, or a miser. Right now I do. I want to know what’s going to happen.”
He moved his hands up her arms to her shoulders and neck, but kept them chastely away from her breasts. “I don’t know what to do. It’s the truth. I’ve never felt this way before. I mean it. It’s brand new. I mean new for real, not for daydreams.”
She had learned that reality had many definitions; that ten years, at least, could be unreal as a dream. To her, reality was progression, not stasis. She was quite sure it must include something she vaguely defined as “improvement.”
John watched her, held her out at arms’ length and watched her without moving. The red moonlight left black hollows beneath his eyebrows, and she could sense the eyes moving in the dark, and only the eyes. She wanted to move toward him, but would wait until he pulled her. Honest? she asked herself. Perhaps it meant too much to be honest; it was too late to be honest; perhaps honesty was not wanted. And yet John Cotter was honest. She could think of no one more honest.
Now his arms were steady; his foot had stopped tapping. The short spasm of his hard muscles had ended completely, and he was again the immobile, watching animal.
“I love you. I only say what I know. You’re not just my girl; you’re the archtype, the essence, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That’s the truth. Every girl I’ve ever had was you incomplete in some way. I don’t like to get out on limbs, but I don’t care what you think about me now. It’s the first thing I’ve been able to say I know for an awfully long time.”
“How do you know what I’m like?” she asked.
“I will know what you’re like,” he said, and pulled her toward him. As they kissed he began, with expert fingers, to undo her clothes. His hands moved surely and busily about her straps and plackets, doing what she wanted him to do—not tearing, not impatient, opening her skin to the hard touch of his hands, which moved down over her back and spine. Suddenly she shivered and there was a great, convulsive blunting of the mind—but then she began to plan again, asking herself how cold she might make herself become. She wanted his hands to press into her flesh itself, to bury themselves in her flesh, and yet she used all her strength to stop him. He knew when to recognize the strength she used against him, and when to really stop.
“I still love you,” he said. “I am committed.”
“I’m sorry. I almost…”
“Yes. Almost,” he said.
“John, I was the first to declare myself, remember? At the scrape.”
“Then what are you sorry about? I don’t lie. No, I don’t mean that. You’re sorry for no reason. You think I’m in pain, or something. That’s a myth, Janie. This isn’t pain.” He put his hand on the bulge in his pants. “If you love me it isn’t pain. Pain is suffering. How can I suffer? For the first time in my life I know what I want, so I can wait. I felt you move toward me.”
“Yes, I did,” she said quickly, then put her mouth to his ear, wanting to be secret, as if to whisper in his ear kept the secret even from him. “I love you. It was the same for me. I didn’t—maybe no one grows up just because glands start and all that. I grew up with you as the man I could receive when I changed and got big enough. I can feel your hand on my back as if I were burned there.”
“Now we won’t do anything,” he said, “and I’ll take you home, temporarily. Here, I’ll help you fix all these things.” He fastened up her dress.
The moon had climbed out of redness; the wind was still hot but did not push. An elation, a clearing of the eyes, a feeling of confidence and carelessness came over her and was strange. “Johnny, I’m so goddam happy,” she said. And then she seemed to hear herself asking, Yes, but for how long this time?
CHAPTER 12
John drove carefully, yet with unusual speed down the gravel road from the Stevens farm. He decided that he would not think about Jane. “What a decision!” he said out loud in the enclosed, rocking privacy of the car. “I will not think about anything!”
He had kept his resolution—or was it Jane’s resolution? And why was the resolution so important? Perhaps this new departure had brought them both back to adolescence, with all of adolescence’s moral strictures. They would wait and take it slow. He remembered something Bob Paquette had said in high school: “If you ain’t had it for two weeks, you’re a virgin again.” For his drunkenness and his fornication and his sin of casualness, he must somehow pay. The greatest sin he had committed was the sin of dissociation, of detachment. No risk: no reward. O.K.
Soon after he turned onto the hard-top road at the bottom of the hill he heard a roar behind him and for a moment thought he had lost his muffler. He turned around to see, and a bank of unsteady headlights came at him, swerved around the car and cut in sharply in front. On the Riders’ black leather jackets white death’s-heads grinned. One rider at the front of the column raised his hand and with military precision the column fanned out to block the road, then slowed down and made John stop. The head rider swung around and came back. It was Bob Paquette.
“Hi, John!” He yelled above his idling engine. “Whe
re you going?”
“Home to bed!”
“Where you been? You’re not going anyplace, then?”
“Home to bed!”
“Follow me!” Bob pointed back along the road, motioned the Riders to go along the way they were pointed, then motioned John to turn around. John reluctantly backed into an old logging road, turned around and followed Bob back toward Cascom, keeping Bob’s elusive taillight barely in sight. In the driveway of the Paquette farm Bob slued around and parked his machine next to the kitchen door, hot cylinders creaking and smoking as they cooled.
“What’s the idea?” John asked.
“Don’t like to see nobody go to bed,” Bob said. “Come on in and have a beer.” He bent over his machine for a moment and patted the saddle. “Don’t she go!”
“She goes, you ass. You’ll kill yourself.”
Bob grinned and nodded his head. He turned around so that John could see the death’s-head on his back, then led him into the big kitchen. Dick looked up from a thick ledger, scowling.
“So you wrecked your bike already? I thought you was going on a wingding or some such. Hi, John. You bring him home?”
“That ain’t a wingding, just going for a ride. A wingding is a kind of a way to flop,” Bob said. He took three cans of beer out of the refrigerator.
“Don’t mind if I do, seeing as it’s your beer,” Dick said. He took the beer and went back to his ledger.
“Dick’s gitting married next week,” Bob said.
“Congratulations,” John said.
“Thank you, John.”
“I offered to let him ride my old bike, but he’s gitting chicken now he’s going to be a family man.”
“Amen,” Dick said.
“Where were you headed when you came up on me?” John asked.
“To Billy Frisch’s, then to Pinckney’s on the flat. Old Slug says he’s got a barrel of cider come out pink and hard. Beautiful! We was going to get a little of that, then take ourselves a little ride to Summersville and back. You take my old bike and come along!”
“Me?”
“Sure. What’s the matter?”
Dick looked up. “It’s been nice knowing you, John.”
“Hell!” Bob said, “You can take her slow till you git the feel of it. You don’t have to go no sixty, seventy miles per hour! Besides, you been on a bike before. I seen you ride that old Harley of Slugger’s once.”
“Around the block. I’m no daredevil, Bob.”
“Aw, lay off that!” Bob said disgustedly. “Ever since you come home you been acting like a heart attack. Like you et something maybe would gag a maggot. What you need is a long ride, boy! Flush your glands out! Put some red in your cheeks!”
“Put some red all over the goddam road,” Dick said.
“You shut up! Just ‘cause you’re gitting chicken and respectable in your old age.”
“Don’t start that again,” John said. “Next thing you’ll be out in the woodshed again.” The brothers looked at each other cautiously and then smiled.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bob said. “You come on out and try my old bike, anyway. Won’t hurt you none to try it. Maybe you’ll git the bug.” He stood up. “Come on, John. Bring your beer along.”
He followed Bob through the sheds, reluctant but unable to do anything about it. He wanted to go home and think (not think) about Jane, to remember the way she moved involuntarily under his hands, to suffer his wait for her. And now this hard monster of a machine came in between with its oily weight. Bob kicked down the starter and the engine hissed, popped and roared in the shed, shook the discarded oil lamps on the walls and brought dust down from the rafters. A thin cloud of blue exhaust smoke rose to the bare bulb over their heads. Bob grinned and turned off the motor.
“Damn’ good bike!”
“It’s alive,” John said.
“You damn’ right! It ain’t no car sitting on four legs like a lousy bathtub. Hell, John, a bike’s right under your ass yelling bloody murder and let’s git going! You got to ride a bike! You don’t sit back like a sack of potatoes and steer with your pinkie! It takes your whole body to ride a bike. You can feel them old pistons humping between your legs. Man, you’re out there in the air where a man ought to be.” He kicked aside a cardboard box and wheeled the machine out onto the gravel. John took it by the handlebars and nearly let it fall. Stationary, it was tremendously heavy and awkward, wanting to jackknife.
“Go ahead. Take her for a spin,” Bob said, standing well back.
“I can’t remember how to start the damn’ thing.”
“Well, now, look. This here’s an Indian, so everything’s just about bass ackwards from a Harley. Here’s your gas on the left, spark on the right. Push your clutch in to connect her up. That’s all. You’ll git the hang of her. O.K., retard your spark, turn switch, disconnect clutch, give a little gas—good, good! Kick her down. You can see how to shift. Three speeds forward. Let her rip!”
It seemed fairly simple, except that the machine wanted to fall over against his right leg, and when it had leaned far enough he had to exert an almost unbearable amount of strength to straighten it back up again. The engine started on his second try. He knew enough to adjust the spark, then sat precariously balanced, tentatively zooming the engine.
“Put her in low and let her go!” Bob yelled.
The little knob moved easily on its short post and the machine began to creep forward with a disconcerting, animal eagerness.
“Clutch!”
He pushed the clutch forward a little too fast. The back wheel spun and the machine surged out from under him. He held on, out of control for a second, but managed to keep his seat and to remember what to do. He rode slowly around the yard in low gear, surprised by the stability of the machine once it was in motion. He waved to Bob on the next cautious circuit of the driveway, shifted into second and shot into the darkness of the main road, clawing desperately for the light switch. He found it just in time, shifted into high, and as the panic drained out of him the chain noises smoothed into a high roar. The road and the trees together dipped and flashed toward him and past. He banked instinctively on the curves and let the world tilt—until he saw the glowing speedometer. The needle pointed to 70. He felt for a moment as if he were falling, but held steady and let the engine slow him down. He made a pretty U-turn in the road and came back, each moment learning easily a new economy of control, a new bit of confidence in his speed. The machine seemed to become more and more a part of his body.
When he stopped in front of Bob he gunned the engine and turned off the switch. In the sudden silence he felt a draining weakness as that source of power died away, and the machine again became heavy and unbalanced.
“O.K., I’ll go with you,” he said.
Bob tilted his head and squinted at him.
“You liked it, huh?”
“I don’t know whether I liked it or not, but I’ll go. I hit seventy!”
“You want to take it easy at first. You got a lot to learn.”
“You asking me to take it easy? Old Cautious John?”
They went back to the kitchen for more beer. Dick had gone to bed. “It’s twelve o’clock,” Bob said. “We better hump.”
“Maybe I better not go, Bob. I’ve got to work in the morning.”
“Who don’t? You’re young yet. You can stand it. Only time to ride is now. No cars on the road. Come on!” They went back to the machines, where Bob showed him how to jam the beer can into a special rack on the handlebars.
He knew what to do this time and they left the dooryard, bounced creakily until they hit the asphalt, then bored down on Leah against the air. Bob’s taillight kept creeping away and disappearing on the corners, and in order to catch up John had to go just a little faster than he wanted to each time. Yet each increase in speed, each greater degree of list on a fast corner, once he had done it successfully, did not frighten him again. Fear became a matter of control and experiment, a twist of his left wrist inc
reasing or barely decreasing it.
He looked up, startled to see the high elms and the darkened storefronts of Leah Town Square, then followed Bob through a power turn, his footrest sparking on the pavement, to shoot past the empty sidewalks toward the river flats and Pinckney’s farm.
In the dooryard the shiny machines were lined up in formation, each leaning just so on its kickstand, each front wheel turned slightly and aligned perfectly with the others, coontails and boon-doggie streamers hanging down. Light shone from the big kitchen which separated the barn and the house, and when he and Bob slued to a stop the door opened and a big man whooped at them, bending his head and trying to make them out.
“Hoo, boy!” It was Junior. “Who is it? Bob? Who else you got?” Then he saw who it was. “I be go to hell!” He turned back to the kitchen. “No wonder he was late,” he said, and went inside. John and Bob followed him in.
The Riders and their women sat straight and neat in their uniforms, each holding a tumbler of hard cider. Slugger Pinckney went to a cupboard and got two more glasses, filled them from a pitcher and gravely handed them to John and Bob. John held his to the light and nodded, feeling quite sloppy in his civilian clothes. He felt that he had entered a highly select and formal club, and had a weird feeling that perhaps he should propose a toast, or at least bow and click his heels. He stood straighter under their scrutiny, took a sip and said, “Beautiful.” It was. It was as good as Billy Muldrow’s. The Riders seemed to approve of his formality. Billy Frisch, tall and rigid as a Prussian officer, nodded and let a tight smile cross his face. Wilma Berry, who was Slugger’s girl, got two chairs from the entryway and without speaking motioned for them to sit down. Even Bob sat straighter. Junior was the only one who lolled back and looked gawky. Even the tight jacket and riding pants of their uniform could not Prussianize him. John had always thought of Junior as a leader of the Riders, and now began to realize that this was not true. They disapproved of Junior. It was evident in the way they ignored his sarcasm, even interrupted him—not to talk, because they rarely talked, but to get up, to pour more cider, to study a new piston and rod that lay on the table.
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