I asked Jenny if she could take me to the most beautiful spot in the area and she said “There’s a nice site by the river only twelve miles from here, but that’s too close.” “That’s distance enough for me,” I said. “I’ve ridden four hundred miles today and I’m nearly done in.” “Well I want to ride more than that,” she said, “and there’s another site sixty miles up along the same river that’s just as pretty. Let’s drive there,” and “Please?” and “Oh come on, just this once,” so I gave in and we got on the bike again and it was during this ride I really began thinking she was under twenty-one because all she wanted to do was go faster, faster. When I was doing sixty she wanted eighty and when I was doing eighty she said get it up to a hundred and when I reached a hundred she said one-ten, that’s all, just one-ten and she won’t ask for no more, but I pretended not to hear and even slowed down to ninety. I was getting worried she would fall off in all her excitement with the ride, and also of the police. You never knew for sure when they’d be hiding behind a board.
“I only got a chance to see them because they had to slow down for an ell-turn,” Conrad Jenkins, insurance broker, told the court, “and let me tell you I’ve never seen a girl looked so frightened in her life. It seemed she wanted desperately to get off the motorcycle while he at the same time I was seeing them from my picnic table was doing everything that sort knew to keep her on.” The judge cautioned Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Jenkins apologized and said he should have known better. “Having been an adjuster for hundreds of accident cases I know that witnesses are up here not to give their opinions or condemnations, but to confine their answers to the objective facts alone. But that was how I felt. I never saw a girl look so frightened, and in my work experience I’ve seen a lot.”
“What do you think of my site?” Jenny said when we reached the river, and I told her it’s beautiful and it was. No houses to be seen, no bridges, factories or boats. Just a quiet broad river with trees bordering both sides of it and beyond the trees were hills, mountains, clouds and a setting sun lighting up the edges of the clouds like what? Like a painting. Up till then I hadn’t been sure a place like that existed. It was what I started out traveling for, what I had even learned how to ride a bike for. To get off to the more primitive remote places people hardly go to anymore because they either don’t want to or these places are too tough to get to except by bike or Land rover. I took off my boots and walked in a ways and asked Jenny if she’d mind my going in for a dip in only my underpants as I didn’t want to wet my blue jeans, and she said “Take everything off if you want to, I as sure don’t care. In fact, I’m going to take everything off also and then scrub us down with soap if you have any in your bag.” I said I don’t need a washing: the water in the river will make me clean enough. “As a matter of fact the water’s going to make me pure, that’s what it’s going to do, because this is the purest river I’ve ever seen. Oh, I love your place, Jenny Lou,” and I stripped to my underpants and jumped in the river and coming up from around a minute’s swimming underwater I got what was the most beautiful view I ever saw: the setting sun reflecting off the water all around me, making it look like a river of pure golden honey I was in. Jenny came up from the water right beside me, nothing on her, looking great too. I said “Know how man first thought there was something like a Supreme Being around him?” and she said “Oh, you’re one of those.” “One of what?” I said, very cheerful, “it’s just something I discovered now myself for whatever it’s worth — want to hear?” She said, both of us treading water, “Okay — how?” and I said “Very long ago a man drove sixty miles by cart or went six miles by foot but did something to get here but got here and dove underwater and came up after a minute at this exact same time of the day on this exact same day and month of that year to the exact same weather and site we’re seeing right now and said ‘God.’” She said “That’s nice, I like that,” and kissed me on the nose, which I liked her doing. “Now let’s swim around some and then get out before we get chilled,” and I said “Good idea, Jenny, my friend,” and dived down and pulled on her legs till she was underwater with me and kissed her on the forehead. Then we swam around till the sun set and then swam back to land.
“Her body was bruised and scratched and appeared, by my best medical expertise, to have been beaten both before and after she was raped,” the coroner told the judge. “Please speak to the jury, Doctor,” the judge said. “Well as I said just now, she had bruises and lacerations around her pelvic region, thighs, abdomen, buttocks, breasts and neck, her head suffered several severe concussive blows with a blunt instrument such as a jack iron or baseball bat and she seemed, according to my post-mortem examination, to have been savagely beaten both before and after she was sexually attacked — beaten till she was either dead or left for dead but if left for dead then in a condition bordering very close to what we define as clinically dead.” I never told the jurors that Jenny and I didn’t make love. I never said I didn’t have any idea she was a minor. I even told them about that ridiculous age test I gave her and how more and more during the ride to the river I thought she was sixteen instead of twenty-one. I told them everything. I told them I only shoved her in self-defense and she lost her footing and that the whole bad scene of name-calling and branch-wielding and then the accident and death had actually started because Jenny didn’t think I was a good lover. But I still didn’t shove her for that, I swore. I only did it because she was going to come at me with a rock.
“You don’t seem to want to do anything,” Jenny said, both of us snuggled up comfy and warm at the water’s edge under my bedroll. “You’re not even excited.” “You checked?” I said. “I don’t have to check but will if you’re too numb to know it natural yourself.” She pulled the bedroll off us and looked. “Nothing. Is it because you’re impotent or hate girls?” “Maybe I don’t feel like it tonight. Let me for now lie quiet and look at the stars and feel good with everything about life and just hold you for a while. I like it here, Jenny. It’s a very nice place you brought me to and I’ll always be thankful for that. I’ve never seen the sun go down like that ever. Did you see the way it lit up and colored the sky and made the clouds almost seem like cotton balls on fire? It was like a religious scene in a movie where the whole heavens open up and the organ music begins. Or something like such. Words can’t come close to the experiencing of it and I never knew that better than now.” “Don’t you like me?” she said. “Sure I like you, but that doesn’t have to be important to you now, does it?” “You’re damn right it does. And if I’m going to lay with a guy then I want him to like me or I can’t do it.” “Then don’t do it. Let’s be truthful and open about it. If we do it then we do it only because we want to and if we both want to do it then it’ll be fun and beautiful and good. And now I just don’t want to do it.” She said “You know, I’m convinced now there’s something definitely peculiar about you. I think you’re maybe a fruit who gets his kicks by setting up girls for sex so he can put them down when he gets them there, just to make them feel frustrated and like dirty evil females. That’s you all over.” “Have it your own way,” I said. “That isn’t my way — it’s yours. You’re the dirty evil unnatural man, not me the woman. I’m natural. I’m natural because I want to make love.” So mechanically we began to make love. I did all the things I usually do when starting but Jenny did much more than that. She really went into a frenzy, panting and screaming and tearing away with her hands at both our bodies and getting me kind of excited though not that excited but still excited enough to make me want to continue beyond the point where I was planning to say “You see, I was right before: nothing. I just don’t feel like it tonight, though you can’t say I didn’t at least try.” I couldn’t imagine what she’d do if she really loved some man who really loved her. Maybe nothing very much. But she howled and kicked and rolled us all over the ground, which no doubt accounted for the bruises and lacerations she didn’t get in her tree-stump fall, and moved herself like no girl I’d ever been with. She kept yelling “Motorcycle man, oh my Mr. Motorcycle Man, oh I really dig dig dig dig my Mr. Motorcycle Man.” She didn’t taste from alcohol so for all I know she might have been on drugs. The coroner said no when questioned about it by my lawyer, but maybe he hadn’t looked and was only covering up himself to keep his lifetime job. Or maybe she just liked men better than any girl I’d ever known or heard about. She was like out of a dime novel when they sold for a quarter and I used to read them under my covers by flashlight when I was a kid and my folks were asleep. Or like the girls on detective and true romance magazines with the title in first person underneath about them being uncontrollable or incurable nymphomaniacs. Because whatever I did for Jenny or she for herself was never enough, though I didn’t worry about that much. I figured that in the morning, after we rested and I drove her home, I’d start out West on my bike, very early. Jenny wasn’t someone to stay around for because first of all she wouldn’t let me have my thoughts and peaceful moments, and secondly she probably wouldn’t want me to stay around.