The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  As the white bottles are chuffed into place, dark smoke comes up chimney after chimney as the morning fires get going. Up, down the street, mothers or husbands are roustin children outta bed and off to play. And if they’re too slow, there’s a switch waitin for their behinds, right hind the stove.

  Smell of oil or wood catchin fire. Some hand, dark or pale, sticking a tube of dry newspaper, already jetting back flame, into the maw of a stove, to conjure up heat just right for hash and bacon, eggs sunnyside up, toast, a mouth of milk or coffee. (Integration is a kitchen: a Stuart Ltd. May West vanilla-cream pastry consumed right along with a Vachon chocolatey Jos. Louis cake.)

  Carl gives Bud half his mind, but the other half’s concentratin on Avril. Went by her hotel last night, scooped her up like she was water to lap from his palm. She jumped on his bike straight off.

  Carl leans now over his lady’s back, that ski slope white as milk, as if he’s a dark sun descending onto a plain of snow. Avril cries out, “Carlyle,” moaning her impossible delight. Soon, too soon, Carl is pouring possible—accidental—generations into her bucking thighs.

  Carl hears again Buddy clip-clopping his horse over the street that’s more dirt road than pavement. Carl imagines Buddy’s bulk movin right sure as he steps up to a door, then clinks down the two bottles, as white as the two tits Carl now suckles on as he and Avril snuggle into a snooze, what’s left of sleep before he must up and ride to work, relinquishing the Pleasure he has just had.

  Avril and he have taken no precautions—as usual. Carl seldom does; but, so far, no “friend” who’s reported a pregnancy has claimed him as the responsible party.

  Carl prays silently that if Avril ever files a similar report, she’ll finger some other lad. He and Avril—like most Haligonian couples—take their chances.

  What Avril thinks about all this, Carl can only guess. But he’d prefer not to worry.

  So, his eyes wink shut after grazing upon her breasts again: such pink-tinged snow, such ivory blushing carnations. Her arm curls about his waist. Love, Love, his blood sings. Not yet, not yet, his brain broods.

  The milkman’s horse goes on. Buddy’s song goes on and on. He’s the Buddha of the blues. No lies. He’s singin even when he’s only breathin.

  Look! The sun looms in Carl’s windows facin east, but his curtains are clasped gainst its strokes. Avril’s too tired to get up and wash out what she’s absorbed of him. And she likes Carl’s warm auburn colour against her hot white. Why should she move? And he’s already asleep.

  Avril thinks Carl’s tender. But she’s not keen to have a “brown papoose.” A Deep South Catholic, she’d never been raised to want a Coloured chap or a motorcyclist. But, here she lies, a white Dixie student-nurse in a black Canuck railway-worker’s bed. Avril snuggles closer to Carl, for the warmth. She drowses.

  Buddy goes on his way; the sun follows. Halifax stirs; windows catch fire.

  Once the lovers rise, wash, and breakfast, Carl will spirit Avril—surreptitiously—back to the South End, that section of Halifax closest to the South, that is, to swishy bullwhips and twitchy violins. There, Avril reads among ivy, while Carl works at the train station, among Envy.

  Carl appreciates someone like Buddy Sun—Br’er Solar—but Carl’d never blurt out such rudimentary blues. No, no, he’d rather whistle Sibelius.

  Let Buddy shuffle his shadow along under the sun, steppin and fetchin dem milk bottles, an croonin dem historical black, lowdown blues. Carlyle Black will go his own way, individual, liberal, seekin Love—and satisfyin his Lust—as fast and far and wherever that big BMW can take him—whistlin into the wind, unto a woman (or women). Gone. Except that there’s the memory of Mortality—for horses, men, kings (George VI, par exemple), and babes hardly even conceived—and only that fact restrains his temptation to post-coital euphoria.

  He has a date later this day to see L.P. To see how she “works out.” He stores Muriel in the back of his mind, for he has Avril in bed. He can whistle on his ride southward. He should see Miss Publicover (“Public Over” or “Pubic Lover”) later this date. To discover her fistful of letters, her stacked novels, her pale feet, her black blouse and silver pleated skirt, her orchid-bloom smile, her gaudy, turquoise eyes, her extraordinary lips. He imagines they’ll fit well together, eh, like sliced pear and drizzled chocolate.

  On this Saturday, August 1, the Queen hands fresh colours to the Royal Canadian Navy. Crowds applaud H.R.M. and H.R.H. (“Dark Prince”), both nonplussed by their encounter with the mad horse and its royal bodyguard–butcher yesterday.

  The horse’s death is folklore now, thanks to The Globe and Mail of Toronto running a gory, Goya-like photo: It shows the maniacal horse—Black Jack—its hooves in high dudgeon, people leaping from its path, blood lurching from the right of the equine head, and its belly spewing blood too. In the upper right corner, one can see the Duke of Edinburgh being spattered by the mad stallion’s black blood, which had the effect of melting the fog.

  Today, Carl bears dark sunglasses, sports life-like black leather, helms his huge BMW that snorts guttural vivacity. Upon leaving Avril at the Lord Nelson Hotel, he veers south and east to desultory, soul-corrosive Labour at the train station.

  After his suitcase-lugging routine, Sambo mugging for tips, then offloading leprous sleeping-car linen and replacing the lot with bleached sheets (semen, blood, and crud laundered nigh—in patented Black style—to invisibility), Carl strolls into the Hotel Nova Scotian lobby to meet Liz. Not only is she ready, she’s dressed so nicely that Carl can spy her flowery white bra showing delectably through her filmy white blouse (as if she’s taken lessons from Muriel). Swell: she bunches up her long, white skirt to straddle the bike, and her legs glimmer silvery against the clean chrome, purple paint, and spanking black tires.

  Today, this evening, Carl deems fine his life: Last night, he toured a pretty, but volatile, brown gal round Halifax; late night and this morning, he had a creamy, Southern belle in his bed. Now, here’s another white woman, a girl who resembles the Queen, a girl with a Jayne Mansfield figure and a Katherine Mansfield vocabulary.

  Carl sorties along Barrington Street. To their left is a red-brown, glowering lion, striding fixedly above an engraved toponym, identifying the Crimean War battle site, SEBASTOPOL, its head forged toward the harbour. Then, they exit the city. Carl skirts Africville (as usual), then surges down the Bedford Highway to pick up Highway 1—Evangeline’s Trail of Tears—westbound, to reconnoitre Newport Corner, Three Mile Plains, and then Windsor-Falmouth-Hantsport. At St. Croix, the pair admires the 1935-erected water tower and hydropower station. They cross the bridge, where a miniature waterfall pours down with great energy and noise. (The Salmon Hole Dam looks like a water pail filled to the brim, but with a nick in it, and the spill from it thunders down into the cranky abyss that is the St. Croix River.) Wild roses flare and flame. A mint smell near the bridge. Carl remembers having toured Laura “Blue Roses” States through similar geography—and rain—back in May. A million moons ago.

  All the way, Liz hugs tight to Carl’s back. Her gleeful shrieks arouse him as he speeds past slowpoke tractors and horse-and-buggy contraptions (all claptrap, really, compared to the throaty eloquence of Liz II). He soars up and down hills, granting them both a split-second feeling of floating. Only the memory of Muriel’s miscarriage and Mack’s crack-up, the year before, could tamp down Carl’s insurgent Joy.

  The pair passes stretches of wild apple trees, wild pear trees, pines, spruce, maples, as well as farms, gardens, here and there a lake, a river, fields studded with strawberries. In the six p.m. daylight, they see guys felling timber; they hear saws screeching and axes thwacking. They roll past orchards, somehow cut from the woods, plus patches of green wheat, green corn, green beans. They see streams stoop down cliff faces. All is pastels—velvet colours. A Dominion Atlantic Railway locomotive and passenger cars, despite the clanking and the smoke, supplement the pastoral scene.

  He stops at a picnic area in Falmouth,
and Liz and he take seats at a wooden table amid grass studded with clover and strawberries. They chow down on baked beans, biscuits and butter, cornbread and molasses (all good, hearty food), and then have Coke and ginger ale. He knows it’s not quite the same as his birthday date with Mar, that sexual Pleasure that unfolded in a glen a few dozen miles off, but this moment is equally Edenic, and maybe more promising.

  Liz and Carl face each other, in the slowly dwindling daylight, and nine years of guessing and dreaming and remembering and wondering end. The two kiss and clench, non-stop. Away from small-size Halifax, with its—to their minds—small minds, Carl and Liz claim liberties. But this kissing passion is too new, too fresh, to make him throw down his jacket in a clearing, hang her skirt on a branch, and then let them have equal way. The picnic can’t escalate to coitus yet. For the first time, they’re together as man and woman. Conscious of their difference and attracted to that difference. But there is no time to do and try more than they do and try.

  They return to Halifax via the twilight detour over to Walton, along the North Shore of the Minas Basin and Cobequid Bay, and then find Shubenacadie. They jiggle over dirt roads; on the paved routes, they pass trucks, cars, and the Acadian Lines bus.

  Crossing the Macdonald span, they see, far below, waves striking and shattering each other like fragile dominoes. (What Carl and Liz will experience, they muse, shattering the bed.)

  They reach the city in time to join a fresh crush of folks milling the North Commons, now lit up by Nuremberg Rally–quality flames. The royal plane cleaves through fog, cannon boom from Citadel Hill to honour Her Majesty’s passage through Haligonian cloud.

  On the dignitaries’ platform, Lieutenant-Governor “Ox-Cart” Plow, in top hat and tails, orates into a microphone as press cameras flash: “I am honoured to have the privilege to announce, on behalf of Buckingham Palace, that doctors attending Her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth II, have confirmed that the Queen is expecting another child.” Great cheers greet the honour accorded the city, the province, and the nation in being the first territories of the Commonwealth to receive and to relay this momentous news. Another horror-movie-strident rendition of “God Save the Queen.”

  The trim fighter-bomber wings smartly to ferry the pregnant monarch deeper into British North America: her realm. Only later does Carl learn that Her Majesty weeps, all the way to Quebec City, over the horse slain before her very eyes Friday. The Queen proclaims the stallion “spirited” and its destroyer “gallant.”

  Carl and Liz kiss again, to share their honest delight in the Queen’s refreshed maternity. Yet, Carl feels a tinge of melancholy over the Queen’s expectancy; her increase in heirs to the throne of Canada highlights his own solitary state, isolation, and his failure to amount to anything more, so far, than an impending deletion. Thanks to agility, if not God-granted miracles, he’s thus landed on his feet—half the time literally—following his motorcycle spills. Yet, he’s not stable: no settled career, no decided girl, no concrete Faith, no real direction. Perhaps Liz Publicover—L.P.—will prove the Long Playing love-of-his-life: to anchor him as much as he may buttress her.

  Time to frog-march the bike back to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace in the fog that links the royal aeroplane to the loyal-always Haligonians now skedaddling—as if inhaling tear gas. But Carl has his hands on his handlebars and his mind on Liz, while she has her hands on his hips and her mind on the overnight hour(s) ahead.

  At his place, Carl parks Liz II beside a picket fence, tosses a black tarp over the machine (thus blotting out her glimmering chrome), and pulls L.P. into his parlour. Hallelujah! To spy his one-time crush now pushing back on his cushions. Quick! He sets out Ritz crackers topped with Brunswick sardines and Brunswick smoked oysters. Next, he uncorks a bottle of white wine. The petite repast grooves down their gourmet throats while Nat King Cole’s Spanish warbling swirls from the record player.

  Liz is nervous but needing more kisses. She’s had casual dates, curt flirtations. She yielded her virginity, five years before, to a freckled, boyish clerk with horn-rimmed glasses, a chap in a bookkeeping course, whose seduction gambit was to insist that if she didn’t sleep with him, it was due to her backward, provincial prejudice against Catholics, or her Anglo bigotry against “we French.” She deemed this man, Eric Landry, a devolutionary mix of toady and bully, and yet, she—vulnerable in skirt and blouse and loneliness—had let him kiss her, fondle her, shred her panties. Liz still can’t believe, half a decade later, that she’d let herself be laid like a floozy in a storage room of a business college. It’d been a peculiar affair, for she felt no love for Landry, only pity, and she was relieved when he, finding her more stoic than sexy, turned his attentions to an incoming typing student, mousy in style, but capable of biting, rat-style, a-bed.

  Due to her inexperience with “les types, les gars, the guys,” Trepidation trembled Liz as she stepped into this single Negro’s apartment and buttressed herself, legs crossed, on Carl’s sofa, with music in the air and wine fast in her belly. She hasn’t been—still isn’t—sure she’s ready for more than kisses and conversation, and maybe more conversation than kisses. She’d like to get to know Carl—this man of pimento loaf, Tabasco sauce, mariachi trumpet–croon and mescal mystique—better before letting him know her—in the biblical sense. Maybe.

  Yet, to her, Carl is singular—and he was one of the few lads who’d intrigued her at school. Back then, she’d viewed Caucasian as white and Coloured as black. Plus, everyone from her parents to her teachers to her church had inveighed against “Race mingling.” But, in Montreal, in La Belle Province, it was not unusual to see dark chaps with pale “Pepsis,” or sleeping-car porters with striptease dancers, or small-time crooks (all with switchblade-carved faces) escorting fancy, silk-clad call girls. In Montreal, working-class Negroes and working-girl Frenchies constitute everyday couplings.

  So, L.P. is curious about Carl—not as a Coloured, but as a man. She worries about how pleasing a pearl was that Othello to Desdemona’s eye. She prays Carl’s big vocabulary cloaks a big heart.

  She mustn’t chance pregnancy if she will keep her bookkeeping job and her looming, come-September Library Science entrée. Nor does she imagine Marriage. But the wine and her will work their wonders, and she uncrosses her legs and lets her bottom sink back into the sofa and settle plush against the cushions. The moment is underlined, underscored, by silk.

  Carl knows his interest in Liz is mixed with Lust. Ce soir, he’s more Don Juan than John Donne. Plus Liz is entrancing. Hypnotizing are her heady scents of eraser and pencil, ink and leather book covers, a blend of aromas like milk and wine, that is to say, the scents of Trust. Her aroma hints that Liz is bookish, if not a bluestocking, and quite available. Carl imagines her body as a library of silk, such priceless skin, soft volumes of flesh, illuminated.

  Carl kindles four candles, and he and Liz chat while the tapers burn low enough for the wax to gutter. They jest about their time in grade school, the strict teachers with pinched faces and arch tongues, the class jokers and schoolyard toughs, the teeth-grinding irritant of chalk squawking or caterwauling across a blackboard, or the punishment of the strap whacking an upturned palm, sizzling pain into the skin. They remembered their shared triumph as Head Boy and Head Girl: again, their two heads meet in open-mouthed, tongue-filled kisses. Mating.

  Whatever her intentions have been, and however honourable in her own mind, Liz feels herself falling, literally, under Carl, as his hard weight thrusts against her, and then his hand is tugging gently—but insistently—at her blouse. But she retains sobriety to grab his hand and hold it; to tell him, “Not so fast . . . Enjoy the kiss. Imagine the rest.”

  Carl accepts the restraint; his advance relents. They right their frames and straighten their clothes. The candles are out, and Liz whispers, “I like you lots, but I’m not ready for more.”

  Carl laments: he thinks he’s hearing a repetition of Marina’s hesitations, if not outright Prudery.

  Kissing her hand, a
nd again her willing, willing mouth, Carl asks Liz, whisperingly, to wait. He rummages in his bureau until he finds, among his underwear, one single, precious safe. He returns to Liz’s side, but keeps the condom—daunting purchase—in a pocket.

  The wine is translucent, ushering off, with candlelight’s aid, resentful darkness. Light taps molten roots in four eyes, whenever they are open.

  More kisses. Silent elsewise, Liz pants. She won’t wait, now, after all. Carl bends back her head for another kiss. It generates others. Refreshingly.

  All’s Easy Listening as they kiss. Again Carl’s hand explores Liz’s tight, creamy blouse, white lace buttoned to the neck. He puts his hand on her waist in ownership: he feels Liz’s dark hair like a horse’s, her softness, and her white-seeming heat. Then, they wrestle; off come hindrances, fabricated inhibitions; the gospel goes up in smoke. The condom gets put into play.

  Loving is Carl. He’s making love with Liz, no fuckery. Yet, he also luxuriates in the Black Macho realization that he’s just had Avril, in the same bed, this same day. This fact stokes his passion. He’s had—is having—today two white women in succession—as if he’s gone from the young Queen Victoria to the nubile Queen Elizabeth.

  Carl has to keep reminding himself that Liz is Liz and Avril Avril so that he doesn’t commit the heartbreaking crime of confusing the women’s names. But Triumph throbs in his veins; he is rampant—in his own private bedroom, civil rights revolution. Tonight, Hugh Hefner is more his liberator than is Martin Luther King.

  Climax—or climaxes—felt, Carl zooms Liz back to her hotel. They agree to meet again and keep on meeting, whenever possible. Is Liz my best white woman, better than Avril?

  Possibly: Marina is for marriage, Muriel for relief, but Avril allows philandering that’s first-class—from the chandelier in the Lord Nelson lobby to the Yankee whiskey in the lordly hotel room. Because of Mar’s memorable birthday gift of “hand-and-mouth resuscitation,” Carl sees her as less a lady. Despite his late surge of Tenderness for Muriel, Carl knows he’ll never wed her, for she is a maid, and now a Lesbo to boot. As for Avril, she’s a likely Hausfrau, but any marriage between them would be a version of Masters and Johnson. Each would bear, not a halo, but a sex-race mystique. As for “Blue Roses” States, their coupling had been commendable, but she is literally a distant memory. Finally, Miss Publicover remains unproven—save for this evening’s single instance. More—ahem—experimentation is mandatory.