Kinflicks (20 page)

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 feeling 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.

‘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?'