That Motorcycle Boy by John Carver - Chapter 01

Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Suburbia

They protected him so they could use him...

There was something about Gordon. He was spoiled. He was wild. He was too smart for his own good. And he had sex-appeal.

After his last motorcycle escapade with a girl, he required a hiding place. His mother's young suburban friends rallied around. After all, the boy had to have a protector, didn't he? And maybe a little tender, loving care.

Which was all Gordon needed to start operating... Ginnie was a pretty little newly wed just out of her teens. It did not take long for her care to turn into passion. Carmen was a warm-blooded Latin.

The brat in Gordon appealed strongly to her own uninhibited lustiness. Eustice was fighting the odds in her wild marital life. She recognized in Gordon a fellow-loser ... but knew that two losers could make it together.

Here is the stark novel of an amoral boy trapped in the sex web of young-adult suburbia.

Chapter 01

The woman moved to the window like a restless animal.

She stood looking out into the night, her lips parted and her nostrils flared, as though scenting some distant and irretrievable game far away across the flat suburban rooftops.

The season was mid-June. The drapes of the window were open and the steel casements gaped wide. The woman wore only her slip. She was starkly outlined in the light from behind her, full, matronly breasts rising and falling as if on a restless sea.

No one was around to see her. No one was looking.

This was the late evening—after dinner, after television—and all the trim ranchers of the development squatted complacently in place, flanking deserted streets, lawns to the front, lawns to the back, carports snugly occupied, occupants and furniture, appliances and assets hermetically sealed behind brass Yale locks. Each insular little world was smugly sufficient unto itself and satisfied to settle down now and go to bed.

Only the woman looked out, her full-fleshed, well-proportioned body propped forward into the night, her short yellow hair fluffed loosely, like the mane of a young lion, her chin lifted. Her blue eyes were wide, as though she were straining to discover out there in the darkness something that she had lost or that had been taken from her, something that she would perhaps never find again—or that had never really been there at all.

She stood as if at the edge of the world.

A male voice spoke behind her, rumbling firmly. She closed her eyes, turned slowly back into the room.

"I said, I'll see about it," Ralph Conti repeated, removing his black leather slippers and bending forward from the bed to place them side by side in the wardrobe.

"Not this month. Maybe next. I'm hoping to dump two properties. Beach cottages. Maybe then. I'll have to take a look at the books."

"But Mitch says we should charter early if we want the boat for an August cruise," Marion objected. "That's the biggest month."

"If I can sell the cottages or work out something else next month we'll be able to pay our share."

Ralph swung his legs in under the covers and propped his back against the headboard.

"But the others are already in. Peter is boozing again—but Mitch has her own money. Harrison will do just about anything for Ginnie—he agreed just like that.

Carmen called me this afternoon to say that Lyle is sure he can swing it. We're the only ones who are holding things up. It's embarrassing, Ralph."

She was moving about before the two beds now, her nervous hands reaching out to random objects on the dresser. She set them down again. She snatched up a pack of cigarettes, shook out one.

He had put on his glasses and had tentatively lifted a book from the bedside table. Now he put the book back and looked at her over his glasses.

"Embarrassing?"

Hardness edged his deep, carefully controlled voice.

"Yes." She turned to face him, cigarette and lighter in her hand. "Mitch has a little money but Peter is only a salesman—when he can manage to stay off the juice long enough to make a sale or two. You know what Carmen and Lyle have to live on. Harrison and Ginnie don't have to pinch pennies—but he's an older man. He has thirty years with that company. You are doing fine at forty. You have the biggest real-estate turnover in the county. We're better off than all of them, yet you—"

"And yet I continue to be my own kind of man," he supplied wryly, his eyes fixed firmly upon her. "Marion, I've explained a hundred times—I'm not a salaried employee, I own my own business. It's different. You'll just have to take my word for it. I'm not Harrison Simpson. I'm not Lyle Lorenzo. I'm not Peter Mitchell.

I want to take a vacation cruise as much as you do. But I can't let the money go until I'm covered."

She stared at him, at his massive figure dominating the bed—the broad, only slightly stooped shoulders, the neck fleshy, yet a pillar of muscle supporting the roughly hewn head of a Roman senator or some embattled criminal lawyer. The usual grudging admiration, helpless impatience and resentment mingled in her. She snapped a light to her cigarette and turned to clap the lighter back amongst the clutter atop her dresser.

Condemnation burst from her in a hiss of exasperation.

"God, you are tight."

Silence followed. She knew he was looking at her with that determinedly unperturbed, faintly pitying look of his. The moment could be, if she wanted it that way, the calm before the storm.

"You call it tight," he said. "I call it self-discipline.

Another thing you'll never really understand. We have a saying: A woman's sense is always shorter than her hair. You have about medium hair. Leave the money worries to me."

She barely managed to keep from screaming with rage.

Another old Italian proverb. Another quietly superior put-down. And she was left with these nervous bands to pluck the pins from her hair—left with a gnawing ache and the empty night outside. He was watching her from the bed, she knew, and in a moment the careful qualification would come, the oblique apology in the form of solicitous inquiry.

"Come on, Marion—what's the trouble? Is it still the letter?"

Infuriating, too, that he always knew and that he never quailed from forcing whatever troubled her into the open. Still, it was a release to answer him.

"Yes, damn it. I don't care what you say—I just know they're mistreating him there."

She moved to the closet without looking at him and began to undress, knowing that he would be looking at her, his eyes seeming to darken slowly to inky black as they soaked up the sight of her.

"He's trying to be brave about it," she continued.

"He'll do anything to please you. But he doesn't fool me for a minute."

"Now—wait, Marion—"

"No, I can read between the lines and I know what I see there. I know that—no matter what he says—he is suffering."

"Nobody ever said that place was going to be any bed of roses, Marion. Gordon doesn't say it's all that sweet but he does say—"

"Who knows? Maybe they censor the letters, maybe they make sure no complaints get out. It's a prison, isn't it."

"It's a school, Marion, a correctional school."

"All right then, a reformatory," she said and at that moment maternal ache and social shame were all one pain inside her. She closed her eyes. "It's horrible. He's miserable. He tries so hard to cover it up„"

"Marion, at least give the boy credit for knowing his own mind. You read the letter. He said the place isn't heaven but he's beginning to think he might get something out of it. The drafting classes, Marion—think of them. It's the first time Gordon has the slightest interest in anything outside of motorcycles and cool jazz."

"And what about that guard, whatever his name is—Sprang?

He sounds like an absolute brute. All he seems to want to do is humiliate and torment the boy."

"All right, so he made Gordon shave with cold water and a dull razor blade. There isn't a kid with any salt in him who has gone through plain old Army basic training without having to take more than that from his top sergeant. There are always men like Sprang around. And maybe they're even necessary. The school is no kindergarten—but life isn't either. Is it?"

She whirled on him, her slip a knot of nylon folds in one hand.

"Nor is life a reformatory."

He regarded her solemnly, carefully confining his attention to her face.

"I repeat, the place is not a reformatory. It's a school—a correctional school. And for those who make mistakes—it is possible that there just has to be correction. Not punishment. That's not what I'm talking about and that's not what they are trying to do with those boys at the school. And I get a feeling from Gordon's latest letters that in his way he is beginning to understand. He says he can handle it. All right—let's give him a chance. He can even joke about muscle-heads like this Sprang. I say that's a good sign. He's beginning to build a controlled, reasonable pride of his own, Marion. And I tell you—if you don't know by now that pride is exactly what Gordon needs—then you don't know your own son."

I don't know my own ... She could not risk saying the words out loud. The blood careened in her head so violently that she simply had to cancel all reaction to the charge or go mad. She let the slip fall from her hand and turned back to him. Her hands fumbled for the hooks of her brassiere.

Her breasts fell free.

He spoke next with a note of apology. But the firm insistence of his logic reached her from behind the pretense of concern.

"I didn't mean that the way you're obviously taking it, Marion. But it's like the money—you'll just have to try to understand. Gordon has got to learn that there is a price for place in this world, and the price is made up of reason, control, discipline—"

"Discipline!" she screamed. She did not care if her breasts were flopping like those of some crazed harpy as she whirled on him. "That word—that horrible word.

You'd use it as an excuse for anything, wouldn't you?

You'd use it to force the whole world into your mold."

She bent to step out of her briefs. She could see his face darkening, his big hands knotting in the covers—but he was still under control. He still regarded her solemnly, silently.

"Yes," she said, heading for the bathroom. "Anything."

At the bathroom door she turned. His eyes were on all of her now. His gaze hardened, yet seemed to be devouring her. "Even to sending a young boy to jail."

She turned away from him, stepped into the bathroom.

"I signed the papers, yes," his voice said from the bedroom.

"But you signed them, too."

"You made me," she said. The water was sharp and soothing on her hands, her arms, her face. But still her heart was racing and the ache persisted, located somewhere at the back of her neck, under her heart, out in the empty night. "You forced me to sign those filthy papers."

"I did not force you. You knew it was either that or a real reformatory. You agreed, Marion."

Her guilt mingled with the totality of her anguish and she heard herself crying out, "I was wrong!" Then she was weeping, fumbling the washcloth to her face. "Oh, God, I was wrong!"

He rumbled on: "It wasn't easy for me either, Marion.

But it was my duty. And since I am the boy's stepfather and legal guardian—"

She was choking on her tears, stuffing the washcloth into her mouth. Suddenly she was in the bathroom doorway, words hissing from between clenched teeth.

"I am his mother. He is my son. I am his mother. He is my son—"

He waited, upright against the pillows. His face had paled slightly but the broad mouth was still fixed in firm determination. And the aloof, almost pitying sympathy was in his large Latin eyes—oh, yes—while she stood naked and cramped against the door frame, trying to stifle the idiot litany spilling from her lips.

"I am his mother, his mother, his mother—"

He watched her until she could finally quiet her rebellious tongue and tum back into the bathroom to wash her face again.

His voice reached solemnly after her.

"Yes, you are his mother. And he is your son. Nobody can change that, Marion. Nobody wants to."

And that was supposed to make everything all right.

Her tears stopped. She could see herself in the mirror.

The face she saw was not pretty but not bad. It had grown somehow better, rounder and more appealing in the fullness of the years. She saw beautifully modeled shoulders, no looser than they had been all the years of her maturity-pillowed breasts, dark-nippled, still firm—the rounded swell of belly and the sudden soft spread of the hips.

She saw the only weapon with which she knew she could break his strange integrity. She was not sure she wanted to use it. She was not even sure she cared anymore.

Why should she let his arms enfold her and allow her flesh to inspire his and feel that subtle abandonment, that helpless urgency and dependency that every woman knows lies like a vein of gold in every man—and which no man wants fully to acknowledge? What could she want from him now? What could she possibly want?

And yet she found herself preparing in that peculiar psychic-chemical way, felt her mind readying her flesh and perhaps causing her body, her entire self somehow to exude invitation. She paused in the bathroom doorway for a moment, deliberately not looking at him, letting him cope with the haggardness around her eyes, letting him struggle with the reconciliation of that with his rising desire.

His voice was low, gentle. He put a hand beside him on the bed.

"Everything will be all right, Marion. Come here."

Still avoiding his gaze, she shook her head once, wearily. She moved to get her nightgown from the wardrobe.

He traced her progress to the closet and from the closet to the far side of her bed. She allowed herself to savor the building tension, sat down on the bed, her back to him. She bent to cull a magazine from the heap under her night table.

He watched her, wanting her. She had never understood why, really. Did her figure remind him of his Italian mama—while, by the same token, her blond hair and fair complexion represented something non-Italian, forbidden and therefore exciting?

"Marion, come here," he said softly.

That was how the ultimate always began, with a sudden coaxing appeal. She continued to shuffle restlessly through the magazines. Now he would try an even softer approach. Strange, but in many ways he was like some kind of metal-iron that had to be softened in the heat of desire before being tempered to a murdering edge by a plunge into cold water.

She waited while he softened to malleability in the consuming heat of his helpless need.

"Sweetheart, does it always have to be war? Listen, I know I can never be strictly Gordon's father but—"

"That's right," she said softly, flipping pages. "You never can be."

"All right. But that doesn't mean—"

"It means you're not his father."

"You don't understand."

"I'm sorry. You're the one who doesn't understand this time. And you never will. You have different blood in your veins." She gazed with blind fixity down upon the glossy pages of her magazine. "Sometimes I think what you have is not blood at all—but ice water."

She knew differently, of course. There was rich passion in him and she was mining for it as men mine for gold.

There was always a point of reward and she always knew when he and she had arrived at it—and always, no matter how badly she was feeling, she found a perverse, almost painful pleasure in it.

She heard no sound now but the snapping of the pages under her stabbing forefinger. Then, with a low and despairing curse, he heaved out of bed and stood over her.

"I won't have this."

She looked up. "Won't have what?"

He waved a hand over her in an almost comic gesture of futility.

"This—"

And now he was no longer the stem father figure, the dignified, determined and reasonable man, but just another adolescent baffled by the irreconcilable contradiction between what he thinks he should be and what he is unwillingly discovering he actually is.

Men are funny...

The frustration crystallized into frenzy in his eyes.

Poor, confused creatures...

His hand swung helplessly to the fragile lace of her bodice. "You're my wife," he said through clenched teeth.

He could have been some Italian patriarch lording it over his financially harassed, church-bound wife in some poverty-shattered village in Sicily. But this was not Sicily.

"And you—" the devastating words seemed to spring from nowhere, out of some nameless wellspring of inspiration deep within her—"are my second husband."

It was all there in his eyes—the black spouting Vesuvius, the dark flood of fury, the hot blood of vendetta.

"Bitch."

His hand tore at the top of the gown, wrenching her sideways until she nearly toppled off the bed. She twisted, not trying to escape as much as to shrink from the cruel cinching of the nylon. Abruptly he abandoned his effort to tear the garment from her and brought both hands up to her shoulders, forcing her back onto the bed.

He was quite a different man now—a spendthrift of energy, a prodigal of passion, a philanthropist of lust.

He ground his mouth down upon hers and, when this failed to work, he switched to her neck and shoulders, darting his tongue into the soft concavities of flesh and bone, stroking it down to the swelling of her breasts. He lifted trembling hands to pry her breasts free of the top of the gown. He pressed his face hungrily to them.

She herself began to be stirred. She always was when he was the most desperate, as he was now. She felt the weight of him, the hard masculinity, the overwhelming urgency of his desire. Her body responded, heating beneath him, squirming with utterly spontaneous vigor against him. Not that it made that much difference. She wanted something from these moments—but wanted something else afterward.

Yet she could give herself to the instant. She could free her hands to move down the bunched muscles of his back to his knotted loins. She could clamp his bearded jaw in her hands and bring it up to her mouth—letting him have her mouth now, losing herself in the wet, warm visceral enclosure of him inside herself. She felt him grope below to push the gown up out of the way and lifted her hips to help him.

She opened her thighs to receive him. His entry entailed, as always, a perfect contradiction of maddening need and affronted terror, of hope and fear, of the woman in her who would sacrifice all for this—and the woman in her that knew so much better.

And when it was over—when the sweat was cold between their bellies and the burning pain and pleasure of ecstasy had come and gone and he fell, exhausted, half upon and half beside her—she felt the retroactive sense of alarm and warning return as the sad sense of withdrawal and abandonment and the accompanying resentment revived that other thing she wanted from this.

Vendetta. Vengeance.

She turned her head. His massive profile rose against her horizon like the craggy silhouette of some mountain range. His swarthy flesh was beaded with sweat. His eyes stared blindly upward. His lips were parted and he gasped rhythmically for breath.

His ear was scarcely three inches from her lips.

"Now—I ask you," she breathed. "Was that the act of a reasonable man? You really should try exercising a little more control. Discipline, Ralph. Self-discipline.

I'm beginning to think you're some kind of sexual delinquent.

We might have to send you away to the reformatory.

Pardon me—to a correctional school."

Before he could speak, before he could even move, she was on her feet, plucking up her magazine and heading for the bedroom door.

He lurched to his elbows. His protest came as a hoarse croak of surprise.

"Where are you going?"

"To sleep elsewhere," she said as she struggled into her robe.

"But, where? What the hell—"

"There's only one other bedroom in this house."

"Gordon's room." His eyes widened in dawning shock.

"You—that's what you were after all along. You wanted to leave my bed—"

"Maybe I did. Maybe I just did."

She was at the door, clutching the magazine to her stomach, fumbling with the knob. But she could not get it open fast enough to escape his final accusation.

"Marion, do you have any idea what you are doing?

You are going from my bed to—"

"I only know I'm not sleeping with you anymore,"

she told him. "Not until Gordon is out of that horrible place. Now leave me alone. Just leave me alone."

She slammed the door shut on his haggard stare of unbelief and gathering rage. She could not stand to see it. She could not allow its inference to invade her consciousness.

That night she wrote a letter, seated at Gordon's desk, her eyes turning now and then to the dresser and the photograph of Gordon—and then back again to the open window before her and the empty black suburban night.