The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Avril is friendly to Marina but thinks her snooty, due to the young lady’s self-crucifying status of being “The First Negress to . . . [Fill in Blank Here].” Yet, Avril also guesses that, given her own Deep South roots, plus the reputation of her state, Marina could presume that her sister nurse-to-be is merely superficially courteous (like too many Canadian Caucasians), and so may wish to avoid any potentially strife-fostering parley.

  Marina has only one asset Avril covets: the chic, black buck who zooms up on his bike, then spirits Marina off to some wind-blown-hair adventure. Avril has never before seen a dark-copper, dapper man, so fastidious in his black leather kit, helming a darling, dazzling cycle. She envies the gazelle-gold of Marina’s legs as they gleam against the flanks of the motorcycle and she presses frankly against the dude’s back; and he dons that black helmet tricked out by rainbow flames.

  Thus, in mid-April 1959, after exams, when most female students had gone to distant homes, or summer jobs, or marriage (at last), Avril had asked Marina—with deliberate vagueness—about her beau. She’d focused her curiosity on the bike, for, truly, she’d not yet ridden on one. She also hadn’t wanted to alarm Marina, who could have had a proprietary interest in a man who, nevertheless, she seemed only willing to kiss. Avril’s gambit carried, and Marina did introduce her to Carl, who was the quintessence of circumspection, while also being avid to give her a test ride. However, Carl pointed out, the jaunt would have to occur in May, once his motorcycle was “born again.” An Easter resurrection jest.

  Now, to Avril, Carl projects ascetic cordiality. Privately, though, he’s very intent on fathoming for himself her sweetest depths, for women like her have been blamed for thousands of Dixie Negroes’ murders.

  (On April 24, 1959, Mack Parker, accused of raping a pregnant white woman, was dragged from his jail cell in the dead of night, in Pearl River County, Mississippi, to be castrated, then hanged. Instead, he was shot to death and his body dumped in the Pearl River.)

  One look at Avril, and Carl recalls again the fierce frissons that the 1950 Italy Cross incident had aroused. He now wants to ascertain, fundamentally, just how deliriously evil a Caucasianess can be—in bed—as the Nation of Islam preaches and the Ku Klux Klan fears.

  Yep, his black Lust be compounded—no, saturated—with Negro Vengeance. By having Avril and having her in ways squealing and squalid, Carl can sound the white woman soulfully. He’ll act dervish-unstoppable. Yep, Carl recognizes that Avril seems gracious, exuding no airs. Nor is she the collegiate belle du jour—a Civil Rights Movement do-gooder. No: she wants to straddle the motorcycle, let the wind ribbon her hair, and feel the throb and pulse of the engine, exhausting itself, hotly, under her ass, and, next, she wants to grip and straddle the black man’s waist, as he drives Pleasure into her coral-pink, coral-white core. Humming.

  To start, though, phone numbers are exchanged—with extreme nonchalance. Neither Carl nor Avril wants to appear to be dating—nor to tip off Marina that her Special Relationship with Carl is about to face a stress test. The two—not couple—are just motorcycle enthusiasts who will put Liz II through her paces, objectively.

  They agree to meet on Tuesday, May 19. (Round this time, Ezra Pound drafts Canto CXIII: “17 Maggio” and “May 19, ’59.” Back in Italy, the Italy of Petrarch’s Laura, Sade’s ancestral cousin.)

  Tuesday, May 19

  Come the day, Carl rolls eagerly from faux-Harlem North End to faux-London downtown and on to faux-Baltimore South End. Speeding south on Creighton, then east—downhill—on Gerrish (aiming for Barrington), Carl brakes too hard and flips the bike over. He shoots skyward: Reverse Icarus.

  At the instant of ejection, Carl is conscious of being airborne, a solid fluid, sensing the flutter and wash of air about his body, the stunning brilliance of sun shadowed by a pressing blackness, plus his actual tumbling, or slo-mo tussling with gravity. Then, instantly, he’s heavy, gaining quick weight, until—like a show-off acrobat—he lands, thud-thud, on his feet, amazingly upright, whole, and conscious. An extra, money-saving miracle: Liz II is undamaged.

  Carl believes Divine Intervention has just occurred—but no fuss. A positive, astrological alignment with his cheery, psychological state? Off he goes, on his way. Whistling.

  Carl and Avril rendezvous at rue Trollope (named for the novelist, not a trollop). She’s plush in her leopard-spot ensemble of capri pants, blouse, and white scarf; and dreamy, such awesome yellow hair, wintry skin, green eyes, red lips. Man and woman kiss lightly, politely. A start. He thinks, Avril Phaedra Beauchamps: A.P.B. (All Points Bulletin on an Alarmingly Pleasing Beauty.)

  Carl’s route will take them off the municipal peninsula and onto the provincial peninsula, then back to Halifax: seventy-five miles!

  The spoils are not in speeding: the spend is in feeling Avril huddling against him, or hearing her squeal as they take a crest, flying, or a tight corner, dipping. He loves that her hair streams back; he loves that her full breasts mash his back.

  Hear the poised thunder of the engine. On the road, Carl sees a Ducati, a Manx, a Harley, a BSA: priceless iron a-gleam.

  The pair edge along the sapphire Atlantic, that lovely, heavy sea, where every drowned fisherman and sailor proves a failed Noah and a failed Christ. The water lazes like a sun-basking lion.

  At Purcell’s Cove, the surf hisses like a bat. At Peggy’s Cove, operatic waves play soprano and bass tones against a beach of boulders and slabs.

  Carl feels Joy ferrying Avril. She is flesh for speed and speed for wind and wind for flesh. Her complexion looks best when she profiles her face against his black leather. And her long hair suits a motorcycle mama. The blond-tressed, Cajun-descent beauty, with her ivory smile, her green-apple eyes, man-oh-man, must bless his bed, eh?

  Returning to Halifax, Carl races spontaneously a 1959 BMW—brand new, manned by a fellow with a scar-blistered face. His rouge machine sounds as healthy as a wasp’s nest, buzzing and humming. Carl produces a brio of noise, a bullet of speed. Slick devilry. But the memory of Mack’s death, in Mactaquac, N.B., April ’58, propels Carl to exercise safe propulsion.

  Sky was as turquoise as Bermuda’s waters. They’d fixed on a race, Carl and Mack, to enjoy a lagniappe—“a little something extra”—as New Orleans folks call added Pleasure. A brisk breeze propelled the brusque—not risky—decision: to have extra speed, a fillip of jet-feel.

  Carl did experience exhilarating acceleration, passing a cream-pink Chevy Bel Air—a car named after his own street. In the rear-view mirror, the car colour began to resemble the “Flesh” tint marketed by Testors model-kit paints.

  Two machines were purring away, this April ’58 Saturday, horsing around in the intoxicating breeze, sweet with apple blossoms, ripe with cow-and-bull-and-horse-and-pig manures, and a mental whiff of the rum to be enjoyed after the racy ride. Stimulating.

  A devil-may-care stunt, really, to occupy both highway lanes, to doubly skim their physical shadows, twinned with the mechanical conveyances, over asphalt, typically New Brunswick–faulty with potholes and pits dug out by the lumber and timber trucks servicing the logging and pulp-and-paper economy by making roads impassable for non-commercial traffic. But Carl and Mack had chosen the best of the rotten roads, hard by Mactaquac.

  Carl zipped past a pink Impala outta Quebec (La Belle Province), and the driver yelled, “Va te faire foutre!” His railway French told Carl that he’d just been told to go fuck himself, and so he dropped his machine in front of the car and slowed down irritatingly, to enjoy, in his rear-view, the sight of the hyperventilating fedora’d driver, a blond woman beside him in an unseasonal summer dress, sunglasses, binoculars about her neck, and the top of her tits jouncing every time the car struck a miniature Grand Canyon. Mack saw what Carl was up to. Grinning, he moved beside the Impala to trap it in its lane, boxing the car in and forcing the driver to move as slowly as Carl might wish. From the driver’s side window, a host of expletives could be heard: “Merde” this and “Calice” that. It changed
nothing: Mack and Carl continued to pace the Impala just above a crawl.

  Soon, however, a speeding green car, with white roof and whitewall tires, approached from behind. Mack and Carl decided to release the Impala and race onward themselves, letting the green and pink autos play horizontal leapfrog with each other.

  The bikers zoomed ahead, still doubling their lanes, approaching a mausoleum hill, perhaps too blithe, too blissful, to proceed with due caution. Speed held them in its deeps.

  So, they shot over the hill, only to see one car bearing down on em in the opposite lane and a farmer and horse-and-buggy plodding head of em in their designated, legal lane. No time to react, to brake, to slow and dip behind the buggy. Worse, the oncoming car was moving like silk on wheels—dynamic, direct—floating right over the omnipresent potholes.

  A mortal chunk of time disintegrated in a glass, steel, wood, horsehide Tragedy. Unfolding sloshes of blood. Carl’s bike went drifting and he was flying and then his ass was plunking softly down under an apple tree.

  The scene erupting about him recalled Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “First Death in Nova Scotia.” Now, Carl saw “First Deaths” in—pitiless—New Brunswick. The black horse, its head out of whack, looked a bit like Bishop’s “stuffed loon,” so torn to pieces was it, as if a machine gun had blizzarded it with bullets, shrinking it down to bird size. The equine cadaver was tactical putty—a big black chocolate “cake coffin.” As for Mack, no measure of medicalese—M.D. Latin or pharmacist Greek—could repair the horror that Carl could see in its unglued guise. Debris impossible to assimilate. “Debris” translated as déchets.

  Mack was mishmash—like a black-ink typewriter page that explodes into red-ink handwriting because a ribbon has petered out. His face was porcelain grammar given a jagged, cursive erasure. Mack’s body implanted an honest nest on the roof of a minister’s car, the preacher’s spouse dead within. Mack’s poundage (e = mc2’d into tonnage) had smacked hard onto the roof, buckling it, so the underlying steel had hammered the Mrs. Minister’s skull, bashing her dead. Beside the torn horse, Mack’s bike looked like a tender mechanism, too easily mutilated.

  Only an engineer could repair the grisly mix of glass, metal, horse, wood, rubber. The waste of animal and wreckage of human beings and the mutual destruction of Jet Age and Stone Age machinery. Only God could survey the scarlet-washed accident and identify the resurrection. Killud—the Estonian word for “collected fragments”—suited the jumble and carnage. Shards of glass, a motorcycle wheel protruding from the horse’s rump, so much furious bleeding, slipshod, the ache of smoke, tears throbbing amid car and motorcycle pieces, the chrome mixed in with the steed’s deep, black breast.

  Then the Quebec car was stopping. The driver and lady could see terrible biffures all about. A man had buried himself in a car roof, and a woman below it would need burial herself. Everyone seemed to be in a deep, morphine sleep. A farmer and un nègre (Carl) were both emitting electroshock hollers. Metal parts, raw junk, goggles of glass for horse eyes, shackles of chrome on the felled biker: only a balm of fog could pacify. Everywhere was detached pissing: tears, blood. The minister, garbed for church, was, instead, attending suddenly his wife’s funeral. Oil and gas and horse urine seemed perfumes as heavy as lead. The air was strident with stink. Unnerving. The animal showed the convoluted guts of a snake.

  Carl felt drastic numbness. He went to Mack. No breath in the bones, no fever in the flesh: just breaks in the bones and wounds on the flesh.

  Slowly, too slowly, a curious, mauve light bled into view: the ambulance. From the broken-roofed car, a matron and attendants withdrew the arthritic vertebrate—the corpse of a wife and mother. The blood from Mack and the woman made the ambulance nurse—Mrs. Bolton, in her Jack Frost–painted uniform—appear to be bleeding too. She had to shoo flies away from herself and from Mack’s posterior, groin, and chest, not to mention the horse’s punctilious wounds.

  The once fully articulated horse was as dead as a royal portrait of George VI. But Mack showed the pallor of a “cold parlour,” a room of unfathomable snow, and his body seemed a stunted lily. He looked the embodiment of disembodiment. Carl wept. For his dead friend. For Joy, too, truly, for he had staved off the cancellation of his own breathing.

  Excited, Avril grips Carl extra hard, thrusts her Dixie Cup breasts ever harder into his back. She thinks, The man is fast; his blood is hot; his muscles are hard. Carl streaks past horizontal rockets of cars—until snarled traffic forces an Armistice upon he and the comrade “Beamer.” They wave goodbye as they veer off in opposing directions.

  At Cornwallis and Gottingen, a grey-haired, potting-soil-coloured elder—Deacon Dex Slaughter—looks Carl and Avril up and down, then winks secretly at Carl. He foresees a black arrowhead sliding into a white pelt.

  Once back to Avril’s sunny—South—side of Halifax (locale of doctored and lawyered Vice), Carl leaves her at the Miramar. Should he care that he’ll see Marina in the morrow?

  Exquisitely, Avril requests another ride. She feels hot, in her very fundament: her blood is leaping, surging, not just pulsing. Avril extends her hand like a Southern belle: “Why dontcha come see me at the Lord Nelson Hotel? I’m a-stayin there when the residence shuts for summer recess.” (For Avril’s plantation-floated purse, the hotel stay is chump change.)

  Carl seconds this plan: “Just say when.” He kisses her cheek—daringly in broad sunlight—while he holds her hand. Then, he jumps up and down, starts the machine, and roars off, his own heart tapping, in Avril’s honour, a fervent tattoo. Echo of Civil War cannon.

  Tomorrow, he’s twenty-four. The New Age is a-lookin up.

  Wednesday, May 20

  Birthday day! Liz II is on the road and Carl is on the prowl. Maybe today—his day—he’ll waylay Mar—lay her down. His way. This time!

  He and Mar haven’t dated, really, since the abortive sofa-seduction of last March. Gossip tells Mar that Carl’s been satisfying his gross needs via assignations with Sluts ’n’ Strumpets (the Haligonian definition of S.S.). But Mar’s always liked Liz II—that queenly but stallion-size motorcycle—and so she asks Carl to take her, on his birthday, for a spin. They’ll have a picnic. She plans a suitable surprise: she’s curious now to observe a live man’s sex, not inspect the dessicated, bent thing latched to a cadaver. She’s nervous, yes, but has practised her planned sucking act and licking art while gobbling suitably dark and spicy pepperoni.

  Carl motors to the Miramar. The day’s succulent with light. Mar appears in saddle shoes, a white pleated skirt, and a yellow blouse. The picnic fits neatly in a saddlebag. She mounts the back of the dual seat, and her arms vise Carl’s waist tightly. Promising.

  Carl decides to ferry em to the Look Off, near Canning. The ride is smooth. The engine gallops up to thirty-five horsepower at 6,800 rpm, thus yielding exceptional glide. (Superfuels maintain Perfection.) Carl is thankful for the noiseless helical gear train for the camshaft, magneto, and oil-pump drive, mechanics that give him a machine quieter than other bikes. Still, Liz II roars; he wants Mar to sense his—ahem—superior equipment. Her nipples feel like snub-nose bullets on his black leather back. Exciting! But no chance for conversation: flies and mosquitoes can rocket to the back of an open mouth.

  Highway 1 (westbound) is glens, gullies, nooks, brooks, picnic tables. The two spy signs that read, “All spring flowers must go!” (Like Youth!)

  At the Look Off, Mar unfurls her picnic: cheese and ham sandwiches, Coca-Cola for her, ginger ale for Carlyle (his full, royal name), and a small, frosted pound cake to serve as the birthday pastry. Carl perches the machine on its stand.

  He plunks at the green park bench, across from Marina, and gawks at goddess eyes that know all there is to know about the human body—if not by touch. He remembers the cold day when she brought him peanut butter cookies and elongated herself sinuously upon his sofa. They’re alone together again. And she’s so prodigiously ripe. In this Eden. Carl imagines her body naked under the wind, under his face, as
his hands slide free her panties. The thought has him sitting stiffly—as upright as an apostle.

  Carl thanks Mar for the repast. She asks him about his art.

  O! That voice! Honey-coated lemon! Goin down sweet in mine ears!

  Flattered, Carl lists the plastic virtues of the model bombers, motorcycles, cars, and the train sets he’s assembled meticulously and oil-painted dexterously so that they mirror—in miniature—the full-size originals. He’s sold several to collectors. Carl shows off—again (for the umpteenth time)—his helmet, a work of applied Art. He tells Mar that he’ll draw her next. She admires (again) the fine flames flicking back from the face. She feels a cool smouldering within. To be a model—supine or prone—but with a moral excuse for her amoral flexibility!

  (Marina’s studied Anatomy as a nurse, but the corpses permitting her dissection or discernment are always white. But Carl, in his living art, is conscious of Negro beauty, Negro physique, Negro physiognomy, Negro elegance.)

  Tender, pale apple blossoms blush as four eyes close and four lips close up. Carl gotta lean cross the maple picnic table to effect the kiss. He stretches. The kissing’s good. Fresh-cut pine scents the air. Stirred, bees tumble from flower to flower. Honey here. No lie.

  Sunlight showers Carl as he lowers Mar now gently, as if he’s got her down in a baptismal pool. Gallantly, his black leather jacket will protect her white cotton skirt from grass stains. His heart is steaming full-throttle; still, he rightly expects her to check him before he can roam his hands over her flesh. Instead, she finds her knees, and perches, looking up at him, and puts up a hand, halting him before he can topple or crumple upon her. But her right hand doesn’t rest on his chest. It slips down, hesitantly, but not accidentally, and she emboldens herself and shocks Carl by unzipping him. Carl fears he might climax at once. Marina’s hands, knees, and (necessarily temporary) smile are shaky, but she proceeds to grant her gift. Carl closes his eyes. His voice falters: “Mar, don’t; you don’t have to.”