Lancelot and Guinevere, Bonnie and Clyde. It was a long way to Joshua’s motor court, a distance complicated by campers, pickup trucks, and boat trailers, but, breezily negotiating this strung-out slalom, he got them there in less than an hour.
“Wait here,” he told Jackie. “I’ll be right out.”
Big Gene lay sprawled on the living room’s sofa bed watching a television program. He lifted a beer can in salute. Joshua nodded at him, hurried down the skivvy-littered hall, and returned a moment later carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and a quilt.
“What’s that?” the big man asked.
“Flashlight. Quilt.”
“What for?”
“Clambake,” Joshua improvised, pushing open the door and nearly missing the first step. “Don’t wait up.”
“Fuckin’ fool kid,” said Gene amiably.
Joshua made a saddle of the quilt. Jackie, clutching the flashlight, climbed on behind him, and they traveled northeast along a desolate stretch of highway bordering the military reservation.
* * *
Palm trees surrendered to scrub, which in turn surrendered to kudzu, pine trees, and curtains of Spanish moss. In the shoals of summer darkness Alabama loomed up like a barnacled boat bottom. This was territory where, as late as fifteen years ago, backwoods entrepreneurs had erected billboards atop their filling stations and feed stores declaring, “We Want White Peoples Business.” Joshua had never seen such a sign, but Tom Hubbard and Big Gene Curtiss had vouched for their reality. A finger of apprehension drew its nail through the maze of his lower intestines. He wrung the right handlebar to increase their speed and shouted over his shoulder the news that they were almost there. Jackie squeezed his collarbones in acknowledgment.
A line of brick buildings opened out of the countryside like a stage set revolving into view. Joshua backed his hand off the accelerator and let the bike drift into a town with a solitary traffic light. For the past week a crew from Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., had been at work on the little town’s water tower, sandblasting its tank interior down to white metal and applying to every other surface a rugged primer. The belly of the water tank glistened above them like the turret of a Martian war machine.
A fence surrounded the base of the tower, isolating it from the sleeping business district by a good fifty or sixty yards. Every ancient storefront was shuttered, and the traffic light rocked back and forth in a gentle, midnight breeze. Green, amber, red. Green, amber, red. The intersection was empty.
“You think this is better than your trailer?”
“More private.”
She put her chin on his shoulder. “You might as well have taken me to a tennis court or a football field.”
“Not down here. Up there, Jackie. Inside the tank.”
Her expression, softly starlit, did not change. She tilted her head to estimate the height of the tank and the difficulty of the climb. Joshua was pleased that she did not angrily veto his idea, disappointed that she did not seem more surprised. They had come a long way together, both tonight and over the course of the summer. He, she had admitted, was her fourth lover, whereas he had nervously forfeited his virginity to her amid a small range of sand dunes not far from Santa Rosa Beach. Jackie’s readiness to fornicate inside a metal globe one hundred feet above terra firma was probably far less miraculous than her willingness to fornicate at all. A Vietnamese by birth, a dutiful daughter, and “a good Catholic girl,” she ought to have been as chaste as a nun, but Florida had transformed her without really negating these attributes and now she considered herself an enlightened woman of the world. She insisted on embracing diversity.
“Very imaginative, Joshua.”
“Not for me. For me it was an obvious notion.”
They left his Kawasaki capsized in the grass, vaulted the low fence, and climbed the ladder to the catwalk about the tank’s middle. Joshua carried the flashlight in his belt and the quilt over his shoulder like a serape. As insurance against Jackie’s slipping, he brought up the rear, while she protested that because of the crap he was carrying he was the more likely to fall. Neither of them fell, but the climb made even Joshua dizzy, and they rested on the catwalk before proceeding up the hemisphere-hugging ladder to the hatch in the top of the tank. This time Joshua went first.
Perched on the hatch lip, he played the flashlight beam about the inside of the tank. Scale shone dully on the surfaces that had not yet been sandblasted, and the smell of chlorine,