A Death On The Wolf, page 8
“Run your finger over it,” she said. I complied and felt the bumps. “That’s the word ‘blue,’” Mary Alice said. “There’s a label inside the waistband of my pants that says ‘pink.’”
“Can I see that one, too?” I said, releasing her shirt collar.
“No, you may not,” she said sternly as she leaned back in the chair.
I laughed. “I’m just kidding. Aunt Charity would have a stroke if she came out here and saw me looking down the back of your pants.”
Blushing, Mary Alice put her hand to her mouth to stifle her laugh. I had succeeded in embarrassing her.
“You want to go for a ride?” I said.
“Where?”
“Nowhere…just a ride.”
“Do you even have a license to drive?”
“I’m talking about on my bike.”
“Oh…okay.” She sounded a little unsure.
“Wait here.” I bounded down the four steps off the porch and headed for the carport.
When I motored into the front yard on the Honda and stopped at the porch steps, I could see the look of confusion on Mary Alice’s face. I shut off the engine, set the stand, and went up on the porch. “Is that a motorbike?” she asked.
“It’s a motorcycle, a Honda Scrambler.”
“I thought you meant a bicycle.”
“I have a bicycle but I don’t think we could both fit on it. We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
Mary Alice stood up and said, “No, I’ll ride with you.” I could still hear some apprehension in her voice.
“Are you sure?” I asked as I took the big book from her hands.
“Yes,” she said.
I set the book down in the chair, took her hand and started for the porch steps. “Oh, wait a minute,” I said as I looked at the bike sitting in the yard, then looked down at Mary Alice’s bare legs.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“The pipes and mufflers have heat shields, but they still get pretty hot. You don’t have any long pants you can wear, do you?” The last thing I wanted was for her to burn herself after reluctantly agreeing to go for a ride with me.
“I don’t have any long pants,” she said. “I mean I didn’t bring any with me from Poplarville.”
“Well…ah…” I was trying to decide if I wanted to risk it, and then I had a thought. “Come with me,” I said as I turned us around and we headed back to the front door of the house.
“Where are we going now?” Mary Alice asked.
“Inside,” I said.
I opened the front door and we stepped into the living room. No one was in there. I could hear Aunt Charity in the kitchen. She was canning tomatoes and fixing lunch. Sachet was in there helping her, so the coast was clear. Normally, Aunt Charity did not want Sachet underfoot when she was working in the kitchen, but my sister had been moping around ever since she got her hair cut yesterday. She had a severe case of buyer’s remorse and our aunt was working her through it by coddling and cajoling her. I led Mary Alice to my bedroom.
“This is your room?” she said as we stepped through the doorway.
“Yeah.” I left her standing by the door and went over to the closet. “How’d you know?”
“The smell,” she said.
“The smell,” I said under my breath. I shook my head and chuckled. I didn’t smell a thing.
“Why are we in your room?”
“I’m looking for something.” I was rummaging through the box of clothes on the closet floor that Aunt Charity had packed up to take over to the home for children the next time she went. Most of this was Sachet’s clothes that she’d outgrown, but there was a few of my things in there, too. I thought there was a couple of pairs of my old jeans from when I was eleven or twelve down at the bottom.
“What are you looking for?”
“Ah…these,” I said as I pulled the jeans from the box. I went over and held them up to Mary Alice. “I think these will fit you almost perfectly.”
She touched my hand, then the denim jeans. “Are these yours?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t they be too big for me?”
“These were mine when I was about twelve. I’ll go out and you can try them on.”
“Wait,” she said, “I don’t know this room. I need to sit down to change.”
I took her hand and led her over to the bed. “You can sit here on my bed,” I said. Mary Alice leaned down and touched the bed spread, turned and sat. She started to unfasten her Bermuda shorts and I said, rather forcefully, “Wait a minute! Let me get out of here.”
Mary Alice laughed. “You don’t have to go out. Just turn around.”
I went over and closed my bedroom door and stood facing it. “Okay,” I said, “I’m turned around.” I knew I could have watched her undress and seen things I’d only dreamed of, but she trusted me to protect her modesty and I wasn’t about to betray that trust. However, that didn’t keep me from listening. When I heard her slip her shorts off, I pictured Mary Alice in my mind’s eye sitting there in her panties—sitting there almost naked where I would be sleeping tonight. It was an excruciatingly erotic mental picture that had a predictable effect on a certain part of my male anatomy. It didn’t occur to me at the time how difficult it would have been to explain this to Aunt Charity if she had walked in on us: me standing there with a huge bulge in my jeans and Mary Alice over on my bed taking her pants off. Somehow I don’t think my aunt would have found the scene amusing.
After what seemed an eternity Mary Alice finally said, “Okay, you can turn around.”
I walked over to my bed and sized her up. “They fit you good,” I said. My old jeans were just a little short in the legs for her, but the length was fine for a girl. “Let’s go,” I said and took her hand.
When we got back out to the front yard I folded down the rear footpegs on the Honda and then helped Mary Alice get situated on the rear part of the seat. I got her feet firmly planted on the pegs and told her to keep them there. I got on the bike and reached back and pulled Mary Alice’s arms around me. I told her to scoot forward. “No matter what, Mary Alice, you hold onto me, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
I turned my head back to her. “Are you scared?”
“A little,” she said.
“Don’t be. You’re going to love this, I promise.” With Mary Alice holding tightly onto me, I reached down and turned the key and then hit the starter button. The engine spun to life and I blipped the throttle a couple of times, pulled in the clutch, and dropped the transmission into first. I toed up the kickstand, and leaned the bike up and balanced it between my legs to get the feel of Mary Alice’s weight. She was definitely lighter than Frankie, the only other passenger I was used to carrying. I turned back to her and said, “Remember what I said. Hold onto me. And when you feel me lean into a turn, you lean with me. Don’t fight it.” Mary Alice said she’d had a bike when she was little and knew what I meant. I eased out the clutch, gave it a little throttle and we were off. I made a wide turn in the front yard, maneuvered in between the pine trees, and then headed down the drive to the road. When we got to the end, I stopped and asked Mary Alice if she was still okay. She didn’t say anything but I felt her nod her head. She was holding me close and her chin was touching my back.
“All right, here we go,” I said. I checked for any cars coming, turned right onto the road, and then twisted the throttle. I quickly shifted up into second and then third and kept the speed at about 25. “You still okay?” I hollered over the wind noise. Again I felt her nod, so I twisted the throttle a little more. I felt Mary Alice’s embrace tighten as I shifted into fourth. I didn’t want to scare her, so I kept the speed to about 35 as I started the lean for the turn that would lead to the straightaway down to the bridge over the Wolf River. I expected Mary Alice to resist the lean, but she didn’t and we negotiated the curve perfectly. I was still in fourth as we exited the curve and I had about a quarter-mile of straight road in front of me leading down to the bridge. I gave it a little more throttle and took us up to 50. Just as I was about to shift into fifth, I caught a glimpse in my left mirror of something coming up behind us. It was the Vincent.
We were still about a hundred yards from the bridge and the Vincent was coming up on us fast. Without thinking I yelled, “Hold on!” and downshifted into third and dumped the throttle. In a blink we were doing 60. The Honda’s 325 CC engine was screaming as I shifted into fourth at 9000 RPM. We were doing 70 when we hit the bridge. I looked in the mirror again and the Vincent was right there, and then in a flash it roared by. I shifted into fifth and glanced down at the speedometer. I could barely see it because my eyes were watering so badly from the wind blast. The needle was approaching 80 MPH. The Vincent had passed us like were standing still.
When I realized just how fast we were going, it scared me. I rolled off the throttle and got into the brakes pretty good. The path down to the river was coming up and I wanted to take Mary Alice down there to show her where we could go swimming.
Mary Alice was still holding me tightly as I turned off the road onto the obscure path that led through the woods and down to the beach on the Wolf. Once I got to the white sand, I eased the bike to a stop and shut it off. The engine, the pipes, and the mufflers were all ticking loudly from the heat of that full-blast run. I told Mary Alice to let me get off the bike first so I could help her get off without burning herself. When she was safely off and we were standing there on the beach facing the water, I saw that she had tears streaming down her face. “Are you okay?” I said. She reached out to me and I took her in my arms and kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
She said something and I didn’t understand her because she had her face buried in my shirt. “What?” I said.
She let go of me and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I wasn’t scared,” she said. “That was the most fun I’ve had since…since I rode a rollercoaster when I was little.”
“Seriously? That didn’t scare you?”
She shook her head and smiled.
“Well…it scared me,” I said. And it did, for two reasons: First, because it was the fastest I’d ever gone on the Honda. And, second, because I knew Daddy would take the bike away from me in a New York minute if he found out I was out here racing with it.
Mary Alice was taking in our surroundings: the wind in the trees, the feel of the sand beneath our shoes, the sound of the river twenty feet away. “Where are we?” she asked.
“This is the beach on the river where Frankie and I go swimming. I was thinking maybe you and I could come down here sometime and swim. You did bring a bathing suit with you from Poplarville, didn’t you?”
“Two bathing suits, actually.”
“And I bet one of ’em is pink.”
Mary Alice laughed. “They both are,” she said.
“We better be getting back. It’s getting close to lunch time and Aunt Charity doesn’t know we’re gone. She’ll start worrying if she misses us.” I took Mary Alice’s hand to help her back onto the bike, but she resisted.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“What is it?”
She reached out to me and her hands came to rest on my chest, then she moved them up until she was touching my face. I let her pull my face down to hers, and there on that white sand beach, the girl I loved kissed me. It was a soft and tender kiss, not clumsy and groping like when I kissed her on Aunt Charity’s porch. It was the sort of kiss that could only be sublimely and uniquely hers. I knew in my heart that while she may have graced other boys with a smile, a laugh, even a held hand, Mary Alice had never bestowed this gift on another. Her first kiss for a boy she had saved for me. As I stood there holding her, it was easy to say a prayer of thanks to God for giving Mary Alice to me.
— — —
Aunt Charity had scolded me when we got back for taking Mary Alice on the motorcycle without telling her first. Lunch was interesting because it was the first time I’d really seen Mary Alice turn her charms on my sister. Despite Aunt Charity’s best efforts, Sachet was nearly despondent over the loss of her hair. My aunt wouldn’t admit it, but I think she was now regretting allowing Sachet’s whim yesterday to become a reality at the beauty parlor. “I want my hair short,” the declaration my sister had made at the breakfast table, resulted in Sachet looking like the kid on a can of Dutch Boy paint. I liked it, but no amount of my feeble compliments could assuage Sachet’s remorse, especially since Daddy’s reaction when he got home from work yesterday was, “Where has my baby girl gone?” Mary Alice, however, was making some headway, and by the time we’d finished eating, she had Sachet laughing and talking, and her mind off her short hair. After lunch, I spent an hour sitting under the big pecan tree in the backyard shucking corn. I had taken a chair out there, and Mary Alice sat with me reading her book.
When I got to the station that afternoon, Dick was working on a motorcycle in one of the service station bays. It was the Vincent. He had it up on the center stand with the front end held off the ground by a cinder block and a couple of two-by-fours under the engine. It looked like he had just finished putting the front wheel back on. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
Dick muttered something and I didn’t catch it. I started looking closely at this magnificent machine. Daddy had said they didn’t make Vincents anymore, but this one looked like new. The engine was shiny black and a V-twin like on a Harley or Indian, but it looked different. Way different. More exotic. The whole bike was black except for the chrome pieces, which included the fenders. There was no tachometer and the speedometer was huge and sat bolt upright between the low-slung handlebars. It read all the way to 150 MPH. The one on my Honda tapped out at 110.
“Did he have a flat?” I asked.
“Almost,” Dick said. “He came in here about an hour ago to get gas and I noticed his front tire was low on air. He asked me to look at it. He’d picked up a thumbtack. He was lucky.”
“Did you get it fixed?”
“I patched it. You know we don’t have any motorcycle tubes. I’m gonna tell him he needs to get that tube replaced. A patch on a bicycle tube is okay, but I wouldn’t trust one on a motorcycle.”
“Where is he?” I asked and looked around.
“How the hell do I know? He wandered off. Maybe he went down to the diner for some coffee. He’s a strange one.”
“I’ve seen him riding down around our house a few times,” I said. “He passed me this morning when I was riding down by the river. I was doing nearly eighty and he went by me like I was standing still.”
Dick looked at me. “What in the hell are you doin’ goin’ eighty miles per hour on that bike of yours? Your daddy know you ride that thing like that?”
“It’s the only time I’ve ever gone that fast and it scared the crap out of me. I won’t ever do it again. And Daddy would kill me if he knew.”
“You damn right he would. You ain’t got no business ridin’ like that. You’ll wind up gettin’ yourself killed.”
I knew for all his bluster, Dick wouldn’t tell my father, so I changed the subject. I pointed to the Vincent and said, “Daddy figures this guy is a pilot from down at Keesler.”
Dick started reattaching the front brake connections. “The guy that rides this thing ain’t no pilot from Keesler.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Look at that,” Dick said, and pointed to the front brake drums. “It’s got two front brakes.” He finished attaching the brake and speedometer cables, then stood up and tested the brakes. “I reckon that’s good enough,” he mumbled. “Pull those boards out when I lift up on the front end.” Dick leaned down and grabbed the front forks and grunted as he lifted the Vincent about an inch off the two-by-fours. I slid them out and held onto the handlebars as Dick let the bike down and I kept it balanced on the center stand. Dick used his foot to push the cinder block from under the bike.
I noticed a black leather duffle bag sitting on the bench over in the corner along with a black denim jacket and helmet. “Is that his stuff over there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Dick said.
“So how do you know he’s not a pilot?”
Dick headed over to the tool box to replace his wrenches in the drawer. “Wait till you see him. He talks like a Limey and he’s got a ponytail down to his ass. He ain’t no pilot, he’s one of them hippies you see down on the beach at Gulfport.”
“What’s a hippie doing in Bells Ferry?” I said.
“Beats the hell outta me,” Dick said. “They’re everywhere nowadays. Between the hippies, the fags, and the niggers, the whole goddamn country’s goin’ to hell.”
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d heard Daddy use swear words over the last month, but I ran out of fingers and toes the first hour I worked for Dick Tillman. From him I got a full dose of profanity every time I came to work, and it was fun sometimes to prod him into getting wound up just to see what he’d come out with. He was always careful not to curse in front of customers, though. I, of course, had a small repertoire of vulgarities that I would use around my friends, especially Frankie, but they remained under lock and key when I was around adults, even Dick. This particular bit of cultural wisdom Dick had just offered up gave me pause. Normally, I would have shrugged it off as being just another “Dickism” to be ignored, but the reference to “fags” in the same sentence deriding niggers and hippies now had me thinking about Frankie. For the first time I began to contemplate just how bad things could get for him around here if people knew he was queer—or a fag, as Dick had put it. This was southern Mississippi, not California or New York or any of the other places where we assumed “alternative lifestyles” were tolerated or even openly accepted. The extent to which homosexuality was even acknowledged among my peers was to use the terms and behaviors associated with it as degrading predicatives while hurling what we perceived to be humorous insults at each other. Branding a friend “fag” or “queer” or “cock sucker” or inviting him to suck your dick was much more effective at putting him in his place than merely calling him an idiot or telling him to kiss your ass.
