She felt she could only repeat these verbal impossibilities he was pronouncing. She nearly said, “Do we have to talk about this?” Instead she gathered what was left of her composure. “Joey, you screwed a prostitute in Tacoma and gave me gonorrhea. I’m not happy.”
“It was before I met you,” he said. He added—grudgingly, Beth thought—Tm sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t pay for the antibiotics.” She looked away. “It’s degrading.”
“I’m sorry. All right? What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry.” He pushed forward on the Yamaha’s seat. “Climb on.”
No, she wanted to tell him. It’s not that easy. Not just I’m sorry. Climb on. You can’t get away with that.
But maybe it was that easy, and maybe he could get away with it.
She felt something shift inside herself, the tumbling of a weight in the hollow of her stomach.
“You got the paint?” Joey asked.
She was condemned by the weight of the bag in her hand. She held it up to show him.
“Good.” He stepped on the starter until the motor caught and screamed. He lowered his helmet over his head. There was a second helmet strapped to the bike; Beth put it over her head and tucked her hair underneath.
Climbing onto the bike, she felt a sudden burst of something she realized was joy… the mysterious, dizzying pleasure of doing something she knew was wrong. Making a serious mistake, making it deliberately.
“Hurry up.” Joey’s voice was muffled by his visor and the roar of the bike. “Almost dark.”
She put the motorcycle between her legs and her arms around the bone and sinew of his hips.
He smelled like leather and grease and sweat and wind.
Beth remembered schoolgirl gab sessions, steamy telephone conversations, the inevitable question: But do you love him? The same question rattled in her head now, high-pitched and girlish and embarrassing. But do you love him, do you love him, do you love him?
Her first instinct was that the whole idea was ridiculous, even offensive. Love Joey Commoner? The words didn’t connect. It seemed to Beth that he was an inherently unlovable object, like… oh, a garter snake, for instance, or a bait shop, or a can of motor oil. Something only a grubby little boy could approach with affection.
But that was not the whole answer. If the question had truly been asked, Beth’s truest answer would have been something like: Yes, I do love him… but only sometimes, and I don’t know why.
She had met him last year during her first month at the 7-Eleven up the highway. Beth had divided the clientele into five basic types: little kids, high-schoolers, suburban family types, bikers, and “Pickup Petes”—the guys who drove pickup trucks with strange accouterments, roll bars or banks of what looked like kleig lights, and who wore those duckbill caps day and night. Joey didn’t fit any of these categories, not even “biker.” He didn’t ride a muscle bike and he didn’t travel with the bike crowd. He always came alone. He shopped for snack food: quarts of ice cream and frozen pies, usually, and almost always on a Friday night. She learned to expect him.
One Friday he got into an argument with a Pickup Pete who had parked his rig practically on top of Joey’s Yamaha. No damage had been done to anything but Joey’s sense of dignity and proportion, but Joey called the guy a “cross-eyed asshole” and spat out the words with such acidic clarity that Beth was able to hear him quite clearly through the window glass next to the checkout counter. The pickup guy’s response was inaudible but obviously obscene.
She had watched with startled interest as Joey hurled himself at the man, who must have been twice his age and nearly twice his weight. Suicide, she thought. He’s fucking crazy. But the b oy moved like a whirlwind.
By the time she remembered to ring for the night manager, the fight was over.
Joey, needless to say, had lost.
When she went off-shift at midnight, he was still sitting on the cracked sidewalk outside. His upper lip was split and dripping blood onto the dusty concrete. In the green-and-white glare of the illuminated 7-Eleven sign, the spatters of blood looked both ghastly and unreal—like alien blood.
She could not say why she stopped and spoke to him. It had seemed like a bad idea even at the time.
But, like many bad ideas, it had a powerful momentum of its own. Her feet paused and her mouth opened. “No ice cream tonight, huh?”
He looked up sullenly. “You saw that guy?”
She nodded.
“He was fat,” Joey said with a shudder of distaste. She learned later that this was one of Joey’s pet horrors: he was disgusted by fat people.
“Yeah,” Beth said, “he was.” She remembered the guy as a steady customer—remembered the distinctive way his jeans sagged below the cleavage of his rump. “Gross,” she contributed.
Joey’s look turned to cautious gratitude.
Later, Beth would realize that she had seen both sides of Joey Commoner that night. Joey the authentically dangerous: Joey who had called that impressive wall of flesh “a cross-eyed asshole” and leapt at him like a crazed monkey attacking a rhino. Joey had been all fingernails and spit and bony knees and her first fear had been for the bigger man.
And Joey the vulnerable, Joey the little boy. Joey bleeding on the sidewalk.
She wanted to mother him and she wanted to offer herself to him. The combination of impulses made her feel like the sidewalk was spinning. “How about a ride home,” she said.
“What?”
“Ride me home and I’ll fix up those cuts for you. I have Band-Aids and things. My name is Beth Porter.”
He climbed onto his motorcycle. “I know. I’ve heard of you.” Well, Beth thought, that fucks that up.
Same story all over again. She was inured to it; nevertheless it hurt. But he scooted forward. “Climb on,” he said. She didn’t hesitate and she concealed her surprise. She climbed on and felt the leather seat press up between her legs. “Joey Commoner,” he said.
“Hi, Joey.”
Zoom.
Tonight he took her south along the highway and across the bridge that spanned the Little Duncan River. He turned off the highway and circled back through a raw development of frame houses to the river’s edge. Beth hopped off the bike. Joey cut the motor and wheeled the vehicle down the embankment behind the concrete pilings of the bridge.
The air was quiet here. Beth listened as the crickets resumed their creaking along the riverside.
The Little Duncan followed this stony bed to the sea. South across an open field, beyond the hydroelectric towers, the lights of the houses looked too far to reach—the last margin of civilization. North beyond the river was only weeds and the greasy back lots of businesses fronting on the highway. East: the Duncan River cutting back into the foothills of Mt. Buchanan. West: the cemetery.
Joey knew what most high school graduates in the south end of Buchanan knew, that if you followed the Little Duncan beyond this rockfall and through the duckweed flats, you could sneak into Brookside Cemetery after the main gates were locked.
Joey took the can of cherry-red aerosol spray paint out of the bag. He balled up the bag and threw it into the moonlit flow of the creek. He tucked the can under his belt, to keep his hands free.
Beth followed him along the riverbank. She understood Joey well enough to know that talking was over: there would be no talking now, only motion.
She had the idea that Joey was a reservoir of motions, that he did much of his thinking with his body. She had to work to stay close to him as he scrambled among the weeds and rocks up to the grassy margin of the cemetery. He moved with a feverish agility. If his motions were ideas, Beth thought, they would be strange ones—deft, delirious, and unexpected.
Maybe they would be dreams. The night had begun to seem dreamlike even to Beth. The Artifact had risen in the sky like a big backward moon. It looked faintly yellow tonight, a harvest-moon color. Beth was as frightened of the Artifact as everybody else, but she took from it, too, a curious exaltation. Hanging in the sky above her, casting its light across the trim grass and gravestones, the Artifact was a refutation of all things safe and secure. People lived their stupid lives in their stupid houses, Beth thought, but this new moon had come to remind them that they lived on the edge of an abyss. It restored vertigo to everyday life. That was why people hated it.