I wish I had another chance. If I did I would never shove another girl, or at least not till I first married her. I think a married man has less chance of being sentenced to death for killing his wife rather than a girl he recently met, even if he confesses to the charge, which I didn’t since the girl I supposedly raped and murdered was actually the one who seduced and nearly murdered me. I met her in this doughnut place she was countergirling at and it wasn’t a minute after I settled on the stool that she said “That your bike?” meaning my motorcycle in the lot, and I said yes and she said “When do you get off work?” and I told her I’m not working now, only riding, and she said “That was intended as a play on words, young man, as what I meant is when do you want to take me for a ride around this dinky town and maybe even out of it?” and I said I really don’t like putting girls on my back who aren’t at least twenty-one and who also know how to sway with the rider, meaning leaning right when I go right and so on, and she said “I’m twenty-one except I look older from working in this nut house and living in another, and I’ve been on the backs of more riders than we have doughnuts in this shop, and besides I once owned a bike myself and if I still had it I could outride you from here to the Coast by a day and a half.” “Bull,” I said. “Buy me a bike and I’ll prove it,” she said. “Ha,” I said. “Want a free cof and French jelly?” she said. “You’re something,” I said. “And you’re something for saying I’m something, and also for having such a big beautiful bike. Now what time did you say you got off work?” “Seven?” I said. “That’s about the time I lay off also,” and she told me to meet her at the corner across the street, not here in front. “This is a small town with big mouths and I don’t want my folks knowing I’m going with riders again. And here — no one’s looking,” and she slipped me a bag filled with French jellies and two containers of chocolate fizz.
That night I met her at the corner. She ran her hand over the chromium fenders and carb pipes and said “Wow, this is really one striking gorgeous creature you’re keeping,” and was all set to straddle the back when a man walked past. She turned on me winking and said “Excuse me, mister, but I don’t talk to strange customers no matter how big a tip they leave or promise next time — oh, hello, Mr. Denham.” “Hello, Jenny Lou,” the man said, “anything wrong?” “Nothing I can’t handle thanks very much, and give my best regards to Mrs. Denham and Beverly.” “I’ll convey them that,” he said, still eyeing me suspiciously as he walked away. He was a friend of her folks, according to the newspapers, and one of the last persons to see Miss House alive. He later identified me in court as “That’s right, the one with the snarl,” when at that moment of identification I was despondent near to tears, and gave evidence how he heard me annoying Jenny Lou on the street and tried to warn her about me but she said she knew perfectly well how to handle the situation. “Well apparently she didn’t,” Mr. Denham said, “or else this young man was crafty enough to handle the situation a lot more perfectly than she.” The judge told the clerk to strike Mr. Denham’s last remark from the record and for the jury to disregard it when they make a final decision. But I could see from their faces they wouldn’t. They all had me hung from the start.
“Are you going to exchange how-do-you-dos with distrusting townsmen,” I said, “or are you coming riding with me?” “I’m going to do better than that,” Jenny said. “I’m going to ride out with you some quiet place and hump you there till you’re black and blue all over and then I’m going to leave you for dead when all you’ll be is dead tired from my humping and steal your bike and ride it to the Coast and put it on a boat for the Orient and ride it across that continent and maybe even via China if she’ll have me and then across the Mideast and Africa and Europe and back on a boat and then ride it halfway across the country to home again. I expect that whole trip to take me a couple of years, wouldn’t you think?” “You scare me,” I said. “You got these wild nutty ideas which I even think you want to carry out some. I don’t believe you’re not jailbait anymore. Let me see your driver’s license.” “I don’t have one,” she said, “because I once got busted and put away for riding a bike into a crowd when I was seventeen and the police took away both my license and bike. Two people got killed, that’s why.” “Then some form of identification,” I said, but all she’d brought with her was a five-dollar bill, just in case I left her stranded and she had to get a ride home. “What year were you born — quickly now: what year?” and she gave the date for someone born twenty-one years ago. I knew too well about getting girls any younger on my back. Besides the possible trouble with police over curfews and such, these girls had tendencies to scream bloody murder if they suddenly got cross with you and sometimes for no better reason than your not wanting to go a hundred-fifty miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The younger they are beginning with the day after their sweet-sixteen party, the faster they want to ride. And I later learned from my lawyer that Jenny had only two months before I met her turned sixteen. She probably mastered my age test because she had failed the same test with some other rider who had put it to her. If I ever get out of here I would think of a totally new test which for all I knew only I had the answer to. And after I used it on the first girl I didn’t think was twenty-one, I’d think up another new test for the next girl I didn’t think was twenty-one — always a new test so it could never get circulated and known.
“Hop on, Miss Twenty-one,” I said, and she got on behind me, squeezed into me tighter than she had to to hold on. Nipped my ear with her teeth after we took a sharp corner and hugged my chest as we rode till I could hardly take in air. “I saw him force her on his motorcycle,” her boss, Mr. Hill, said at my trial. “He was having rape and murder on his mind even then,” Mrs. Hill told the jury. “Strike that out, clerk,” the judge said. “Jury will disregard witness’s last remark. Witness will be encouraged not to offer opinions of what went on in the defendant’s mind, but to restrict her answers only to what she observed the last time she saw defendant and the deceased.” “But that is what I observed,” Mrs. Hill said. “I remember telling my husband Mr. Hill as I looked at those two from my shop—’Paul,’ I said, ‘that young man has rape and murder on his mind if I ever saw one.’” My lawyer objected. The jury was instructed and the witness reproached. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Hill said, “I wasn’t thinking just now. But I suppose you can’t help me for having bad feelings toward that man, since Jenny Lou was such a nice pretty girl and the most dependable worker we ever had. Murderer,” she yelled, and the judge banged his gravel till I thought it would split. “Rapist. Riffraff. Beggar. Scum.”