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  “A-man,” Brother Buck added as an afterthought. “A-man,” echoed the rest of us.

  “All right, you can drop hands now,” Brother Buck said sotto voce to the group up front. Regretfully, Joe Bob and I peeled apart our sticky palms. “Now what ah hope,” Brother Buck said into the microphone, “is that some of the young people in this group down front here — and any of the rest of you kids in the audience who didn’t bother to come down because you’ve already received the Lord as your Savior — those fine kids, ah hope, will form the nucleus of a Brother Buck Teen Team for Jesus, right here in — ah — Hullsport, Tennessee. There are groups all over the South, and ah think you’ll find that they’re the comin’ thing in our high schools. Soo…that’s all for tonight, friends. And God love you!’ He waved to the audience, who stood up with much rumbling of folding chairs.

  Several dozen of us remained down front — Hullsport’s saving remnant. Most were Joe Bob’s fellow football players and their girl friends. Joe Bob squared his massive shoulders and walked boldly over to Brother Buck, who was squatting on the edge of the stage talking to prospective Teen Team members.

  Joe Bob introduced himself and pointed to me saying, “And this here’s my friend Virginia. I’m — uh — the captain of the Hullsport Pirates.” He looked at the floor with modesty and minced his Juicy Fruit with his front teeth.

  Brother Buck said thoughtfully, “Just a minute now. Joe Bob Sparks, you said? Why, yes, ah do believe ah’ve heard of you, son.” Joe Bob glowed. “You’ve had a good season so far, as I recall.”

  “Six and 0,” Joe Bob confirmed.

  By the time I dragged him away, he had signed us both up for the Teen Team for Jesus, Hullsport branch.

  The next night at the Family Drive-In Joe Bob and I were watching a movie called Girls in Chains, to which no one under eighteen was supposed to have been admitted. It involved a gang of female motorcyclists who roared around cutting the safety chains off the cycles of their male counterparts and then hiding the cycles in clever places, like in the trunk of a police cruiser.

  Joe Bob took his right hand off the steering wheel, which he’d been gripping tightly. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he reached down and groped for my hand, which lay panting, palm up, on the seat next to him. After all, Brother Buck himself had told us to join hands. We knitted our fingers together, both studying the screen intently and trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. His huge hand with its stove-in knuckles enfolded my small skilled flag-twirling hand like a pod around a pea.

  This was my first experience with the concept that I have now, after extensive experimentation, formulated into a postulate:

  It is possible to generate an orgasm at any spot on the human body. Our hands, thus interlocked, took on lives of their own. They trembled and shuddered for the rest of the movie, as Joe Bob and I, though pretending to watch the antics of the girls and their safety chains, made our captive hands the focus of our entire existence.

  The movie over, neither of us knew how to disengage ourselves in a nonrejecting fashion, although by now both palms were slimy with stale sweat. Joe Bob shifted into reverse, using our clasped hands as a unit. On the way home I asked, “Do you ever think about stuff like what Brother Buck was saying last night?”

  “Naw, never do,” Joe Bob replied proudly, mincing his Juicy Fruit daintily. “You know, I liked Brother Buck real good last night, but he’s sure a morbid kind of guy, in’nt he? All that ‘lungs fillin’ with blood’ junk.”

  That evening, of course, opened the floodgates of groping. During the next several months, we groped all over each other — from putting our arms around each other timidly, to prim kisses with tightly closed lips, to wet messy gasping kisses with tongues intertwined and teeth clashing like rival bulls’ horns. I ran my tongue over his chipped front teeth and nibbled the scar tissue of his mangled upper lip and probed the cleat crater that clefted his heart-shaped chin.

  He finally got around to touching my breasts, such as they were, one night after a game against the Davy Crockett Pioneers of Roaring Fork, Kentucky. By now we had hurtled along into basketball season. Joe Bob had scored the tie-breaking basket in the final five seconds of play and was carried from the floor on his teammates’ envious shoulders. I had also enjoyed a triumph of sorts, performing solo in center court at half time a routine that involved winding the flagstaff over and under my legs in an intricate pattern. An error would have left me sprawling deflowered in the center circle. But I had performed the difficult number flawlessly and was rewarded with wild cheering. We had both imbibed enough ego tonic to last us until next week’s game.

  We were at a favorite parking spot high up on one of the red clay hills that ringed Hullsport. Below us, the lights of town were spread out. We were clutching each other in a panting embrace, me running one hand back and forth over his flat top, which could have served as a scrub brush by lopping off the top of his head. My other arm circled his waist, and my fingers clung to the delicious crevices of his spine as though they were toeholds on a mountain wall. Joe Bob with his left hand poked tentatively at my right breast, or rather poked the mound of my maroon uniform jacket, poked the padding of my Never-Tell bra. As I kept up my patting and rubbing on him, which required the concentration and coordination of rubbing my own head while patting my stomach, Joe Bob began prodding and kneading my breast as though he were a gynecologist performing a breast check. His hand trembled from the strain of holding up his wrist weight.

  By the time baseball season arrived, anything above the waist was fair ball, so to speak. The evenings were so abbreviated, what with Joe Bob’s having to be in bed by ten, alone, that we didn’t waste any time. We would drive directly to our parking spot, which by now had been appropriated by the rest of the Hullsport High football, basketball, and baseball teams and was littered with used condoms and empty beer cans. We would take up where we had left off the previous evening, which by this time involved some hasty and perfunctory kissing and squeezing and nibbling. Then Joe Bob would dutifully knead my breasts through my uniform jacket and padded bra, as though he were a housewife poking plums to determine their ripeness. Then he would efficiently unstrap his wrist weights and lay them side by side on his dashboard. Next, he would unbutton and remove my jacket, and, amid much stroking and sighing, manage adroitly to unhook my Never-Tell and remove it.

  There we would sit in Sparkplug, me undressed to my waist, but with my lap covered and my hands folded neatly and my back straight and my knees primly together, like a patient awaiting a pelvic exam. Joe Bob would suck away at my nipples while I tried to decide what to do with my hands to indicate my continuing involvement in the project. Sometimes I would run one hand over his lowered scrub brush head or caress his stove-in neck, while running the other hand up and down the muscular ridges of his back. Other times, I’d grab one of his thighs midway up and squeeze it, to transmit restrained passion without signaling any willingness to yield further favors. After all, we were only dating. It wasn’t as though we were steadies. I had my reputation to think of.

  One particular night during baseball season, Joe Bob had just hit a home run — in the last of the ninth with the bases filled and two men out, naturally — to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I had ascended to new heights in the realm of flag swinging, having successfully executed the nearly impossible feat of tossing the flag high into the air in end-over-end swirls and then catching it, without the flag’s becoming wrapped around its staff. No other Hullsport High flag swinger, to my knowledge, had ever performed this routine for public consumption.

  When we reached our parking spot, Joe Bob turned to me in the dark and said softly, “Ginny, will you wear my class ring?”

  Would I wear his ring? Would Elizabeth Taylor wear the Hope diamond? “Oh yes, Joe Bob, yes!”

  He handed it to me. It was huge — gilded shanks and setting, with a black onyx in the middle. Inside, etched in the shank, were his initials — J.B.S. I pu
t the ring on my thumb, but there was still room for another finger or two. Joe Bob took out his Juicy Fruit and stuck it on the dashboard, and enfolded me in his bulging arms. Hullsport High tradition required that each new material commitment between a couple signal a new array of carnal privileges. We both knew, by the instinct that tells birds when to migrate and where, that the unexplored territories below the waist were now up for grabs. In the dim light of the quarter moon, I could see a tear squeezing out from under one of Joe Bob’s closed eyelids.

  “I’m so happy, Joe Bob,” I whispered.

  “Do whut?”

  “Happy,” I repeated loudly. “I’m happy.”

  “Oh, yeah, me too.”

  That out of the way, he whipped off his button-down-collar Gant shirt. There they were — the furry deltoids of the body beautiful of Hullsport High. And they were mine now, to do with as I willed. He unstrapped his wrist weights and laid them on the dashboard alongside his Juicy Fruit. Then he unbuttoned the twelve gold embossed buttons of my jacket and helped me out of it, unhooked my bra, and tossed them both into the back. We embraced and, for the first time, felt the delicious warmth of our bare chests joined, his bulging pectoral muscles dwarfing my breasts into obscurity without the assistance of my Never-Tell. A feathery arrow of pubic hair ran down his firm stomach to his navel and disappeared tantalizingly behind his belt. We leaned apart so that my stiffening nipples just touched his chest, and then moved sideways in opposite directions, playfully, so that my nipples brushed his chest and got tangled up in his mat of blond hair.

  Then slowly, cautiously, expecting to be stopped, he slid his famous catching hand up under the leg of my gray twill shorts, while his equally fabled pitching hand pulled me tightly to him. His fingers sallied forth into the mysterious folds of the dampening nylon crotch of my panties and dallied there with feigned casualness. Then, in one of the lightening-quick plays he was so renowned for on the athletic fields, one of his fingers skirted the elastic and buried itself in me like Jack Horner’s thumb in a Christmas pudding.

  We both sat immobile, startled by the success of his venture and uncertain of the next way station in our journey together toward the Golgotha of sexual intercourse. We looked at each other, perplexed. With my middle finger, I twirled Joe Bob’s ring, the token of my continued respectability, on my thumb.

  We sat motionless for a couple of minutes, uncertain of how to disentangle ourselves and proceed, just as we had sat with interminably interlocked hands that first night at the Family Drive-In. He couldn’t remove his finger because he didn’t want to yield any yardage gained. On the other hand, he didn’t know exactly what to do with the finger now that it had achieved its much-vaunted destination. He wiggled it tentatively. I smiled fondly at him, as much in the dark as he. He finally leaned his head over and simultaneously sucked a nipple and ground his finger around in me for a while.

  Nor did I know where to position my hands for maximum effect. Displaying a woeful lack of imagination, I tried putting one on his hand in my crotch. With my other hand I caressed his bristly head. Without looking up, he took my hand, the one on his, and placed it on the lump of his fly, which lump I had by now astutely concluded was not a hernia after all, but was rather something infinitely more integral to our undertaking.

  He stopped sucking long enough to gasp, “Rub it!” Delighted to have an apparently meaningful task to perform, I devoted all my heretofore-unchanneled enthusiasm to rubbing the lump, like Aladdin his lamp. By now our various limbs were tangled up like the Laocoon in my Latin II textbook; but rather than being frozen in stone for all eternity, the frieze composed of Joe Bob and me sprawled panting across the front seat of Sparkplug was heaving and trembling and shuddering.

  Suddenly Joe Bob sat bolt upright, his finger popping out of me like a cork out of a champagne bottle; the elastic of my pants leg snapped with nearly enough force to sever my femoral artery. The hard lump under my hand was going all soft and squishy.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked in horror. “Have I done something wrong?’

  “Trainin’!” Joe Bob moaned, looking at his watch. “Coach’ll kill me! It’s almost eleven!”

  I pictured him turning into a medicine ball at the stroke of eleven. “How would Coach know?” I asked, starting to feel faintly resentful.

  “He cruises our houses to see if our cars are in and our bedroom lights off,” he gasped, pulling on his shirt and strapping on his wrist weights.

  “What will he do to you?”

  “He might take me off the startin’ line-up for the next game,” he said grimly, throwing Sparkplug into reverse and scratching out backwards as I scrambled into my Never-Tell.

  “He couldn’t. You’re the star.”

  He shifted into first, and we tore down the dirt road in a cloud of condoms and clattering beer cans, like newlyweds making their honeymoon getaway. “Especially me. To prove that even Joe Bob Sparks can’t get away with violatin’ training.”

  On the drive to my house, he calmed down somewhat; and by the time he let me out in front of the magnolia thicket, he was sniffing his middle finger wistfully and had an agonized look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Blue balls,” he moaned.

  “Do what?”

  He roared off.

  I walked up the driveway, Joe Bob’s ring dangling from my thumb and my cunt tingling from all the unaccustomed attention. Blue balls?

  Having turned out the lights, I went upstairs. On the way up, I glanced into the hall mirror and noted with satisfaction that my uniform jacket was misbuttoned and that my lipstick was smeared around my mouth in a large O like a circus clown, that wisps of hair had freed themselves from my pony tail and hung lasciviously in my eyes and that my eye shadow was smeared raccoon-fashion.

  The Major was sitting on the end of my bed in his gold terry cloth bathrobe. As I skulked in, he studied my disheveled appearance with interest. “You’re late,” he pointed out pleasantly.

  “Yes,” I agreed, thinking fast. “We went to the Dew Drop after the game, but it was so crowded that it took us hours to get Joe Bob his milk.”

  “Uh-huh.” Then, in the bland understatement that was the Major’s specialty, he asked, “Have you been letting Joe Bob kiss you?”

  I blushed and said with noncommittal reproof, “Oh, Father!” Then I held up Joe Bob’s ring as a diversionary tactic and said brightly, “We’re going steady.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, it means, uh, that we like each other a lot. And, uh, that we aren’t dating anyone else.”

  He stood up and stalked toward the door. “Well, if you want to spend your life married to a shoe salesman, that’s your business. After all, maybe the girl’s a foot fetishist,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Who said anything about marriage?”

  “Well, from the looks of you tonight, my dear child, you’d better file marriage away in the back of your mind as a potential necessity.”

  I scowled at him. The idea! Reducing the romance of the decade, between the Hullsport Pirate Little All-American running back and the Hullsport High flag swinger, to the level of mere physical function! “Besides, he isn’t going to be a shoe salesman. He’s going to be a coach. And what’s wrong with being a shoe salesman? It sure beats making bombs, or whatever you do at that filthy place of yours.”

  Aha! A hit!

  “Those ‘bombs,’ as you call them, my dear young lady, happen to be what’s keeping you in your unending supply of Villager blouses. Or out of them, as it appears at the moment.”

  Even then I suspected that more was at stake here than my passion for the ever-muscular Joe Bob Sparks. The Major and I were enacting the ancient sexual drama in which a daughter makes the break with her father, her true love since infancy, by taking a man her own age. The script had been written centuries ago, and we were merely stepping into the parts required of us. Women typically married men very much like their fathers
. So said the Psychology 101 text at Worthley, at any rate. If a woman chose someone unlike her father, it was a rejection of him, consciously or not. Well, there could be no one less like the suave haughty Major than Joe Bob Sparks. Unless it was Clem Cloyd, who entered the picture later as a potential son-in-law for the poor beleaguered Major. No youthful romance was ever as pure and innocent as it seemed. The choice of partners was always a commentary on one or both parents on each side.

  “I didn’t ask to be born!” I informed the Major, in response to his pomposity about paying me my clothing allowance.

  “Oh, go ahead and wreck your life!” He stomped from the room. Reconsidering, he paused at the door and explained wearily, “You’ve got to get away from Hullsport, Ginny. You’re going to college in the North if I have to hogtie you and ship you up there. You’re not one of these people, and you can return only when you’ve learned that.”

  “What am I then?” I shrieked. “You’re not one of them maybe. But I am! This is my home!”

  He shook his head, perplexed, and closed the door behind him. Then he opened it and said, “I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily, Virginia. But you are aware, I trust, that lovers’ lanes attract psychopaths of all kinds.”

  The news that Joe Bob and I were going steady spread around school like the plague. Friends kept coming up the next day to look at the black onyx ring. I’d dripped almost an entire candle behind the stone to make the ring fit. It stuck out an inch and weighted my arm down as I walked, just as Joe Bob’s wrist weights did his. If I had slugged someone with that fist, my unfortunate victim would have had the crest of Hullsport Regional High School embossed on his jaw for life, like the Phantom’s victims in the funny pages.

  At lunchtime as all we students lounged in the fold-out seats in the gym idly watching intramural basketball games, Joe Bob’s and my friends cheered in unison, “Hi, Ginny! Yay, Sparks! Hi yay! Ginny, Sparks!” All the girls cheered shrilly. The boys whistled with their fingers and stomped their feet and hooted knowingly and yelled to Joe Bob, “Gettin’ much, Sparky?” Joe Bob smiled an enigmatic smile and raised our clasped hands high into the air in a victory salute like a prizefighter and the referee. We were now one of the officially established couples at Hullsport High.