by Jack Ketchum
The cops were family friends, most of them. My dad knew them from the bar or from the VFW.
Mostly they were just making sure that nobody threw cherry bombs too near the blankets. Standing around waiting for the show like the rest of us.
Donny and I listened to Mr. Henderson, who was talking about the beagles’ new litter and drank iced tea from the Thermos and belched out pot roast fumes at one another, laughing. My mother always made pot roast with a lot of onions in it. It drove my father crazy but it was just the way we liked it. In half an hour we’d be farting.
The public address system blared John Philip Sousa.
A quarter-moon was up over the high school building.
In the dim gray light you could see little kids chasing each other through the crowd. People were lighting sparklers. Behind us a full pack of two-inchers went off like machine-gun fire.
We decided to get some ice cream.
The Good Humor truck was doing a bang-up business, kids wading in four deep. We gradually pushed our way through without getting stepped on. I got a Brown Cow and Donny got a Fudgesicle and we hauled ourselves back out again.
Then we saw Meg by the side of the truck, talking to Mr. Jennings.
And it stopped us dead in our tracks.
Because Mr. Jennings was also Officer Jennings. He was a cop.
And there was something in the way she was acting, gesturing with her hands, leaning forward sort of into him, so that we knew right away what she was saying.
It was scary, shocking.
We stood there rooted to the spot.
Meg was telling. Betraying Ruth. Betraying Donny and everybody.
She was facing away from us.
For a moment we just stared at her and then as if on cue we looked at one another.
Then we went over. Eating our ice creams. Very casual. We stood right beside her off to one side.
Mr. Jennings glanced at us for a second but then looked off in the general direction of Ruth and Willie and the others, and then, nodding, listening carefully, looked attentively back to Meg.
We worked studiously at the ice creams. We looked around.
“Well, that’s her right, I guess,” he said.
“No,” said Meg. “You don’t understand.”
But then we couldn’t hear the rest of it.
Mr. Jennings smiled and shrugged. He put a big freckled hand on her shoulder.
“Listen,” he said. “For all I know maybe your parents would’ve felt exactly the same. Who’s to say? You’ve got to think of Miz Chandler as your mom now, don’t you?”
She shook her head.
And then he became aware of us, I think, really aware of Donny and me and who we were for the first time and what we might mean in terms of the conversation they were having there. You could see his face change. But Meg was still talking, arguing.
He watched us over her shoulder; looked at us long and hard.
Then he took her arm.
“Let’s walk,” he said.
I saw her glance nervously in Ruth’s direction but it was getting hard to see by now, pretty much full dark with only the moon and stars and the occasional sparkler to see by, so there wasn’t much chance that Ruth had noticed them together. From where I stood the crowd was already a shapeless mass like scrub and cactus studding a prairie. I knew where they were sitting but I couldn’t make them out or my parents and the Hendersons either.
But you knew perfectly well why she was scared. I felt scared myself. What she was doing felt exciting and forbidden, exactly like trying to see her through the windows from the birch tree.
Mr. Jennings turned his back to us and gently moved her away.
“Shit” whispered Donny.
I heard a whoosh. The sky exploded. Bright white puffballs popped and showered down.
Oooooooo, went the crowd.
And in the ghostly white light of the aftershock I looked at him. I saw confusion and worry.
He had always been the reluctant one with Meg. He still was now.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“He won’t believe her,” he said. “He won’t do nothin’. Cops talk but they never do anything to you.”
It was like something Ruth had said to us once. Cops talk but they never do.
He repeated it now as we walked back to our blankets like an article of faith. Like it bad to be.
Almost like a prayer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The prowl car pulled in around eight the following evening. I saw Mr. Jennings walk up the steps and knock and Ruth let him in. Then I waited, watching out my living room window. Something turning over and over in my stomach.
My parents were at a birthday party at the Knights of Columbus and my sitter was Linda Cotton, eighteen and freckled and, I thought, cute, though nothing compared to Meg. At seventy-five cents an hour she couldn’t have cared less what I was doing so long as it was quiet and didn’t interfere with her watching The Adventures of Ellery Queen on the TV.
We had an agreement, Linda and I. I wouldn’t tell about her boyfriend Steve coming over or the two of them necking on the sofa all night and I could do pretty much whatever I wanted on condition that I was home in bed before my parents returned. She knew I was getting too old for sitters anyhow.
So I waited until the prowl car pulled away again and then I went next door. It was about quarter to nine.
They were sitting in the living room and dining room. All of them. It was quiet and nobody moved and I got the feeling it had been that way for a long time.
Everybody was staring at Meg. Even Susan was.
I had the strangest feeling.
Later, during the Sixties, I would realize what it was. I would open a letter from the Selective Service System and read the card inside that told me my status had now been changed to 1A.
It was a sense of escalation.
That the stakes were higher now.
I stood in the doorway. It was Ruth who acknowledged me.
“Hello, David,” she said quietly. “Sit down. Join us.” Then she sighed. “Somebody get me a beer, will you?”
Willie got up in the dining room and went into the kitchen, got a beer for her and one for himself, opened them and handed one to her. Then he sat down again.
Ruth lit a cigarette.
I looked at Meg sitting in a folding chair in front of the blank gray eye of the television. She looked scared but determined. I thought of Gary Cooper walking out onto the silent street at the end of High Noon.
“Well now,” said Ruth. “Well now.”
She sipped the beer, smoked the cigarette.
Woofer squirmed on the couch.
I almost turned and went out again.
Then Donny got up in the dining room. He walked over to Meg. He stood there in front of her.
“You brought a cop here after my mom,” he said. “After my mother.”
Meg looked up at him. Her face relaxed a little. It was Donny, after all. Reluctant Donny.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to be sure it wouldn’t…”
His hand shot up and slashed across her face.
“Shut up! Shut up, you!”
His hand was poised in front of her, ready, trembling.
It looked like it was all he could do not to hit her again and a whole lot harder this time.
She stared at him, aghast.
“Sit down,” Ruth said quietly.
It was like he hadn’t heard her.
“Sit down!”
He pulled himself away. His about-face was practically military. He stalked back into the dining room.
Then there was a silence again.
Finally Ruth leaned forward. “What I want to know is this. What did you think, Meggy? What went through your mind?”
Meg didn’t answer.
Ruth started coughing. That deep, hacking cough she had. Then she got control.
“What I mea
n to say is, did you think he was gonna take you away or something? You and Susan? Get you out of here?
“Well I’ll tell you it’s not gonna happen. He’s not gonna take you anywhere, girly. Because he doesn’t care to. If he’d cared to he’d have done it on the spot back at the fireworks and he didn’t, did he?
“So what’s left? What’d you have in mind?
“You think maybe I’d be scared of him?”
Meg just sat there, arms folded, with that determined look in her eyes.
Ruth smiled, sipped her beer.
And she looked determined too in her way.
“Problem is,” she said, “what do we do now? There’s nothing about that man or any other man that scares me, Meggy. If you didn’t know that before, then I sure hope you know it now. But I can’t have you running to the cops every ten, twenty minutes either. So the question is, what now?
“I’d send you someplace if there was someplace to send you. Believe me I would. Damned if I need some stupid little whore out ruinin’ my reputation. And God knows they don’t pay me enough to bother trying to correct you. Hell, with what they pay it’s a wonder I can even feed you!”
She sighed. “I guess I got to think about this,” she said. Then she got to her feet and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator.
“You get to your room. Susie too. And stay there.”
She reached for a beer and then laughed.
“Before Donny gets to thinking he might come over and smack you again.”
She opened the can of Budweiser.
Meg took her sister’s arm and led her into the bedroom.
“You too, David,” said Ruth. “You better get on home. Sorry. But I got some difficult thinking to do.”
“That’s okay.”
“You want a Coke or something for the road?”
I smiled. For the road. I was right next door.
“No, that’s okay.”
“Want me to sneak you a beer?”
She had that old mischievous twinkle in her eye. The tension dissolved. I laughed.
“That’d be cool.”
She tossed me one. I caught it.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” she said and this time all of us laughed, because don’t mention it was a code between us.
It was always what she said to us kids when she was letting us do something our parents wouldn’t want us to do or let us do in our own houses. Don’t mention it.
“I won’t,” I said.
I stuffed the can into my shirt and went outside.
When I got back to my house Linda was curled up in front of the TV set watching Ed Byrnes comb his hair during the opening credits of 77 Sunset Strip. She looked sort of glum. I guessed that Steve wasn’t showing up tonight.
“’Night,” I said and went up to my room.
I drank the beer and thought of Meg. I wondered if I should try to help her somehow. There was a conflict here. I was still attracted to Meg and liked her but Donny and Ruth were much older friends. I wondered if she really even needed helping. Kids got slapped, after all. Kids got punched around. I wondered where this was going.
What do we do now? said Ruth.
I stared at Meg’s watercolor on my wall and began to wonder about that too.
Chapter Twenty-Three
What Ruth decided was that, from then on, Meg was never allowed to leave the house alone. Either she was with her, or Donny or Willie. Mostly she didn’t leave at all. So that I never had a chance to ask Meg what she wanted done, if she wanted something done, never mind deciding whether I’d actually do it or not.
It was out of my hands. Or so I thought.
That was a relief to me.
If I felt that anything was lost—Meg’s confidence, or even just her company—I was never all that aware of it. I knew that things had taken a pretty unusual turn next door and I guess I was looking for some distance from it for a while, to sort things out for myself.
So I saw less than usual of the Chandlers for the next few days and that was a relief too. I hung around with Tony and Kenny and Denise and Cheryl, and even with Eddie now and then when it felt safe.
The street was buzzing with news of what was happening over there. Sooner or later every conversation came back to the Chandlers. What made it so incredible was that Meg had gotten the police involved. That was the revolutionary act, the one we couldn’t get over. Could you imagine turning in an adult—especially an adult who might just as well have been your mother—to the cops? It was practically unthinkable.
Yet it was also fraught with potential. You could see Eddie in particular stewing over the idea. Day-dreaming about his father I guessed. A thoughtful Eddie was not something we were used to either. It added to the strangeness.
But apart from the business with the cops, all anybody really knew—including me—was that people were getting punished a lot over there for seemingly little reason, but that was nothing new except that it was happening at the Chandlers’, which we’d all considered safe haven. That and the fact that Willie and Donny were participating. But even that didn’t strike us as too odd.
We had The Game as precedent.
No, mostly it was the cops. And it was Eddie who, after a while, had the final word on that subject.
“Well, it didn’t get her shit though, did it,” he said. Thoughtful Eddie.
But it was true. And strangely enough, in the course of the week that followed our feelings slowly changed toward Meg as a result of that. From admiration at the sheer all-or-nothing boldness of the act, at the very concept of challenging Ruth’s authority so completely and publicly, we drifted toward a kind of vague contempt for her. How could she be so dumb as to think a cop was going to side with a kid against an adult, anyway? How could she fail to realize it was only going to make things worse? How could she have been so naive, so trusting, so God-and-apple-pie stupid?
The policeman is your friend. Horseshit. None of us would have done it. We knew better.
You could actually almost resent her for it. It was as though in failing with Mr. Jennings she had thrown in all our faces the very fact of just how powerless we were as kids. Being “just a kid” took on a whole new depth of meaning, of ominous threat, that maybe we knew was there all along but we’d never had to think about before. Shit, they could dump us in a river if they wanted to. We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.
It was as though in failing herself Meg had failed us as well.
So we turned that anger outward. Toward Meg.
I did too. Over just that couple of days I flicked a slow mental switch. I stopped worrying. I turned off on her entirely.
Fuck it, I thought. Let it go where it goes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Where it went was to the basement.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The day I finally did go over and knock on the door nobody answered, but standing on the porch I was aware of two things. One was Susan crying in her room loud enough to hear her through the screen. The other was downstairs. A scuffling. Furniture scraping roughly across the floor. Muffled voices. Grunts, groans. A whole rancid danger in the air.
The shit, as they say, was hitting the fan.
It’s amazing to me now how eager I was to get down there.
I took the stairs two at a time and turned the comer. I knew where they were.
At the doorway to the shelter Ruth stood watching. She smiled and moved aside to let me by.
“She tried to run away,” she said. “But Willie stopped her.”
They were stopping her now all right, all of them, Willie and Woofer and Donny all together, going at her like a tackle dummy against the concrete wall, taking turns, smashing into her stomach. She was already long past arguing about it. All you heard was the whoosh of breath as Donny hit her and
drove her tightly folded arms into her belly. Her mouth was set, grim. A hard concentration in her eyes.
And for a moment she was the heroine again. Battling the odds.
But just for a moment. Because suddenly it was clear to me again that all she could do was take it, powerless. And lose.
And I remember thinking at least it’s not me.
If I wanted to I could even join them.
For that moment, thinking that, I had power.
I’ve asked myself since, when did it happen? when was I, yes, corrupted? and I keep coming back to exactly this moment, these thoughts.
That sense of power.
It didn’t occur to me to consider that this was only a power granted to me by Ruth, and perhaps only temporary. At the time it was quite real enough. As I watched, the distance between Meg and me seemed suddenly huge, insurmountable. It was not that my sympathies toward her stopped. But for the first time I saw her as essentially other than me. She was vulnerable. I wasn’t. My position was favored here. Hers was as low as it could be. Was this inevitable, maybe? I remembered her asking me, why do they hate me? and I didn’t believe it then, I didn’t have any answer for her. Had I missed something? Was there maybe some flaw in her I hadn’t seen that predetermined all of this? For the first time I felt that maybe Meg’s separation from us might be justified.
I wanted to feel it was justified.
I say that now in deepest shame.
Because it seems to me now that so much of this was strictly personal, part of the nature of the world as I saw it. I’ve tried to think that it was all the fault of my parents’ warfare, of the cold blank calm I developed in the center of their constant hurricane. But I don’t quite believe that anymore. I doubt I ever did entirely. My parents loved me, in many ways better than I deserved—however they felt about one another. And I knew that. For almost anyone that would have been enough to eliminate any appetite for this whatsoever.
No. The truth is that it was me. That I’d been waiting for this, or something like this, to happen all along. It was as though something starkly elemental were at my back, sweeping through me, releasing and becoming me, some wild black wind of my own making on that beautiful bright sunny day.
