Stephen Dixon - All Gone

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.”

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.