Kinflicks (11 page)

This arrangement continued into the next school year. Joe Bob and I would see each other up close three times a week for five minutes in the darkroom, and a couple of hours every other week in the trunk of Doyle's Dodge. Otherwise, we pined for each other across vast acres of bleachers in the gym at lunchtime, and from neighboring cars at night.

Sometimes as Teen Team for Jesus officers we were slated to read devotions together over the public address system, the microphone for which was located in a small soundproofed studio. It opened off the principal's office and was locked from inside when announcements were in progress.

“‘For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication,'” Joe Bob would read from the devotion sheet mailed out by the Teen Team Headquarters in Birmingham, undressing me with his eyes.

“‘That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in santification and honor, not in the lust of concupiscence,'” I would respond, watching his cock stirring against his chino leg.

“‘For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness,” — Joe Bob would continue through the microphone. “‘But I say unto you that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already.'”

“‘Fornication and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints,'” I would instruct over the airways of Hullsport High as Joe Bob grabbed my breasts with his huge mitt-like hands and buried his face in my neck. “‘For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God…'” I would feel his erection prodding my back as the Bible trembled in my hopelessly sin-stained hands. “‘…because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience,'” I would conclude with a gasp, as his hands fought their way into the secret folds of my soul's sanctuary.

And of course Joe Bob and I would catch glimpses of each other at ball games — me in my gray twill shorts and maroon uniform jacket, twirling my flag; and Joe Bob in his various Hullsport Pirate uniforms. I would watch with helpless fury as Coach patted Joe Bob on his ass when sending him into games, as he threw his arm around Joe Bob's shoulders when he called him out, as he personally took the towel from the water boy and gently dabbed the sweat from Joe Bob's upper lip and temples.

My considerable spare time I spent collecting bottle caps from Nehi soft drinks at area vending machines. The local radio station was sponsoring a contest to determine the most popular high school athlete within its listening range. Each bottle cap from a Nehi grape or orange drink counted as one vote. I had collected 41,212 bottle caps for Joe Bob. Doreen had submitted 35,080 for Doyle, when she reminded me of how generous she and Doyle had been to Joe Bob and me over the past months. So I stopped collecting bottle caps and allowed Doyle to steal the title of most popular athlete, with 42,683 votes. Although the entire school knew that it was a lie, that Joe Bob Sparks, not Doyle Roller, was in fact most popular, that back-seat politics alone had swung the election.

The Major was getting suspicious. “Why don't you ever go out on dates anymore?”

“No one asks me.”

“Why not?”

“I guess they don't want to.”

“Or maybe they don't want to horn in on Joe Bob?” he suggested unpleasantly.

“I gave back his ring and his jacket as I was instructed,” I shot back haughtily. But I knew I had to come up with some dates to throw the Major off the scent. For the time being, he had only his suspicions, but knowing how he operated, he would doubtless turn up some concrete proof before long unless I diverted him. Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive for selecting my former dear friend Clem Cloyd, son of the Major's tenant farmer, for my escort in deceit: I intended to illustrate to the Major that, out of the male material available to me, Joe Bob wasn't such a disaster after all. Joe Bob was delighted with the plan because Clem seemed such flimsy competition as not even to merit the titl e. Never did it occur to any of us that I might actually come to prefer Clem Cloyd, crippled hood-about-town, to Joe Bob Sparks.

4
Saturday, June 24

As Ginny sat in the Jeep overlooking the athletic fields of Hullsport High, Joe Bob Sparks trotted toward her from the track. His once-firm belly was somewhat flabby. He waved wildly. She waved back. Her time sense, shaky and unreliable in the best of times, was temporarily stunned. Past had inundated present. She felt she should be dressed in her by now moth-riddled flag swinger outfit She looked down, perplexed, at her patchwork peasant dress and combat boots.

She was annoyed with her body. Ten years had intervened since she'd last seen Joe Bob, but even so, given license, it would have raced over and flung itself down on the ground in front of him. She realized with dismay that the patterns of activity set up the first time you did anything could recur to plague you for the rest of your life. Like the many times she had found herself saying automatically to Wendy, “Don't talk with your mouth full.” And not because she particularly cared, but because that was what her own mother had told her time and again. The phrase was wired into her circuits. She had held and kissed Clem and Eddie and Ira in substantially the same way that Joe Bob had taught her to hold and kiss him. And many of her subsequent failures at lovemaking were directly traceable to her unfortunate formative experiences with Joe Bob and with Clem.

‘Say hey!' Joe Bob said, his face contorted by his crazy grin, his front teeth munching Juicy Fruit, possibly the same wad from ten years ago. ‘Knew it couldn't be your mother sittin' up here watchin' us for so long.'

‘Nope, it's not,' Ginny agreed, suddenly as tongue-tied as a schoolgirl.

‘How ya doin'?' He placed both wrist-weighted hands on the roof-frame bar as though he were about to push the Jeep over on its side and looked down at her through his arms. He wore a stopwatch around his neck; it hung spiraling in the air between his furry chest and Ginny's face.

‘Okay.' She decided not to itemize for the time being the various ways in which she wasn't okay. ‘How about you?'

‘Great. Just great. You know I'm the coach here now?'

‘I heard. You're doing well, I also heard.'

‘Yeah, not bad.'

Their conversation, scant even at the peak of their romance, was about to exhaust itself. Ginny searched her mind for topics. The weather?

‘You wanna watch that blond fella,' Joe Bob said proudly, pointing toward the track at a large handsome boy with long blond hair tamed with a headband.

‘He looks good.'

‘You'll be hearin' his name — Billy Barnes. He's the finest athlete I've coached.'

Ginny watched Billy Barnes with interest as he jogged along, chest out and arms high.

‘Hey!' Joe Bob said with sudden inspiration. You know you even
sound
like a Yankee now?'

‘Do I?' Ginny asked with horror. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Do whut?'

‘Well, it's not necessarily something I'd have chosen to have happen to me.' She was looking up at him but kept having to glance away because the dangling stopwatch was exercising a hypnotic effect. Feeling her eyelids growing heavy, she blinked several times.

‘It's not so bad.'

‘Good.'

‘I read in the paper you got married up north a while back. On a pond in the middle of winter or somethin'?'

‘Yeah, my husband sells snow machines. You know what snow machines are? Yeah. So when we decided to get married, he wanted to have the ceremony on a beaver pond in the woods. To promote sales.
You
know.'

Joe Bob was smiling politely. ‘You live up north now?'

Ginny pondered the question. Ira had kicked her out. Her mother was in the hospital and her childhood home was up for sale. Where could she be said to live? ‘Yeah. In Vermont,' she replied, sidestepping.

‘Vermont. Is that on the ocean?'

“No. It's on a big lake, though. There are lots of mountains. It looks like around here, only there's snow half the year. It's nice.'

‘Well, I'm real glad for you.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Did you know I married Doreen?' he inquired gingerly, Doreen being the first girl he'd taken up with after Ginny.

‘Yes, I think I did hear that. That's great.' Ginny was interested to note her nonreaction — no regret, no pleasure at the knowledge that Joe Bob was happily married. Nothing.

‘Are you home for long?'

‘I don't know. A couple of weeks, I guess.'

‘Why don't you stop over sometime? Doreen would just love to see you.'

‘Maybe I will'

‘Good. Do that. We're over at Plantation Estates. Do you know where that's at?'

Ginny nodded, recognizing the name of one of the new developments on the foothills across from the factory, and very near the parking spot Joe Bob and she had discovered early in their days together.

‘Well, got to get back to my boys. Nice to see you.'

‘Nice to see
you.
And see you later maybe.' She watched the muscles rippling down his spine as he jogged off in his white gym shorts. It was a relief to discover that he apparently bore no lifelong scars or grudges from the shoddy way she'd handled the termination of their romance.

Holding his stopwatch with his thumb on the trigger, Joe Bob yelled, ‘All right, you fellas! Haul ass! Let's
move
it!' He snapped the watch with an exaggerated downward movement. Instantaneously, the jouncing boys tensed up and shot off around the track as though pursued by hungry wolves. Billy Barnes, his long blond hair flowing out behind him, streaked along well in the lead like Joe Bob himself in his racing days.

Although you couldn't go home again, you couldn't really get away either. Without hesitation her fingers spun the radio dial to 1490, WHPT. The number was indelibly imprinted on her brain. As the radio blared country music, the Jeep shuddered and bucked up the dirt road that formed a boundary of her family's farm. Below her she could see the land, chopped into neat blocks as though some giant had whacked the valley with a huge butcher's cubing hammer. In an intriguing Mondrian pattern, some of the blocks were blue-green with alfalfa; others were dark brown bottom land newly planted to corn; some were pale green with tobacco seedlings; yet others were gullied red clay planted with dark green kudzu.

After a mile, she came to the Cloyds' tenant house, which was shingled in maroon asphalt tiles and clashed hideously with the orange-red clay of the front yard. Behind and below the house were the dark brown barns and white silos and spotless gray-cinderblock milking parlor. Lined up patiently outside the milking parlor were the Holsteins. She decided not to find Clem and announce her arrival. She'd stop later, when he wouldn't be too busy to chat.

What would Clem be like now that he had to be up at four
A.M.
for milking and could no longer prowl the streets on his Harley until early morning? Ginny had seen him at the Major's funeral — looking intensely uncomfortable in a dark suit and starched shirt. But she had only exchanged greetings with him and received his condolences. The Major had praised Clem's running of the farm. Some sort of metamorphosis must have occurred. The Clem Ginny had known could never have endured such a purposeful life.

On the radio the Piney Flats Gospel Quartet was just completing the jingle for White Rose Petroleum Jelly. Ginny smiled faintly recalling one of Clem's pranks which involved mixing sand into the White Rose in his brother Floyd's glove compartment.

She tooted the horn gently in the old tattoo her family had always used to indicate to the Cloyds that it was Babcocks going past to the cabin, not vandals and thieves. She drove on for another mile down the ever-narrowing dirt track through a woods of oak and sycamore and sassafras, redbud, poplar, and dogwood — a woods so different in composition from that behind Ira's house in Vermont, with its birch and ash and sugar maples, its dozen varieties of evergreen.

Stopping in front of the aluminum gate, she got out and unlocked the chain and drove the Jeep through. She descended the hill into the kudzu-lined bowl that housed the cabin and the pond. The cabin, built of chinked logs and covered by a dull green tin roof, had a patchwork history of occupation. It had been built around 1800 by the original settler of the farm — one of the motley breed of horse thieves and adventurers and deserters who had crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, fleeing the civilized coastal regions of Virginia and North Carolina for the mountainous backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee and southwest Virginia. By the time her grandfather, Mr. Zed, eluded his destiny as a coal miner and bought the farm, the cabin had been deserted for decades. Mr. Zed rebuilt the cabin and lived there with his wife and his small daughter, Ginny's mother, while his pseudo-antebellum mansion was under construction. When Ginny's mother and father were first married, they had lived in the cabin. Ginny herself had been born there. Shortly after Jim's birth, her grandparents had traded her parents the mansion for the cabin. After her grandmother's death, Mr. Zed had spent the rest of his life in virtual seclusion at the cabin, trying to figure out how to undo what he had spent his lifetime doing — founding Hullsport and establishing the factory.

Hence the kudzu. The kudzu vines served a double purpose: First, they held up the red clay sides of the bowl, which were always threatening to collapse into the pond; and secondly, they were an experiment with far-reaching implications in the deranged mind of the aging Mr. Zed. Kudzu was being highly touted at the time by the agricultural extension agents as the wonder vine of the century. Not only did its tenacious roots fix nitrogen in depleted soils; not only did the high-protein foliage make nutritious cattle fodder,
but
the plant spread so voraciously that only a few starter plants were required to take over an entire hillside.