by Jack Ketchum
Leave it to Eddie, I thought. Leave it to him.
To state the obvious.
I’d wondered how far it could go, how it could end. Wondered it obscurely, like a mathematical problem.
And here was the unimaginable quietly imagined, two kids discussing it, a Coke and a beer in hand.
I thought of Ruth lying in the bedroom with her sick headache.
I thought of how they were down there all alone with her now—with Eddie with them.
It could happen. Yes it could.
It could happen fast. Almost by accident.
It didn’t occur to me to wonder why I still equated Ruth with supervision. I just did.
She was still an adult, wasn’t she?
Adults couldn’t let that happen, could they?
I looked at Susan. If she’d heard what Eddie’d said she gave no sign. She worked on the puzzle.
Hands trembling, afraid to listen and just as scared not to, I worked with her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Eddie was there every day after that for about a week. On the second day his sister Denise came too. Together they force-fed her crackers, which she couldn’t really eat because the gag had been on overnight again and they’d denied her water. Eddie got mad and smacked her across the mouth with an aluminum curtain rod, bending the rod and leaving a broad red welt across her cheek, cutting her lower lip.
The rest of the day they played tackle dummy again.
Ruth was hardly ever there. Her headaches came more and more frequently now. She complained about her skin itching, particularly her face and hands. It seemed to me she’d lost weight. A fever blister appeared on her lip and stayed for days. Even with the TV on you could always hear her coughing upstairs, deep down into her lungs.
With Ruth not around the prohibition against touching Meg disappeared.
Denise was the one who started it. Denise liked to pinch. She had strong fingers for a girl her age. She would take Meg’s flesh and twist it, commanding her to cry. Most of the time Meg wouldn’t cry. That made Denise try harder. Her favorite targets were Meg’s breasts—you could tell because she saved them for last.
And then, usually, Meg would cry.
Willie liked to drape her over the table, pull down her pants and smack her bottom.
Woofer’s thing was insects. He’d put a spider or a thousand-legger on her belly and watch her cringe.
It was Donny who surprised me. Whenever he thought that no one was looking he’d run his hands across her breasts or squeeze them slightly or feel her between her legs. I saw him plenty of times but I never let on.
He did it gently, like a lover. And once when the gag was off I even saw him kiss her. It was an awkward kiss but sort of tender and strangely chaste when you consider that he had her there to do anything he wanted to her.
Then Eddie came in laughing one day with a dog turd in a plastic cup and they held her down over the table while Woofer pinched her nostrils until she had to open her mouth to breathe and Eddie slipped it in. And that was the last time anybody kissed her.
On Friday that week I had been working in the yard all afternoon until about four o’clock, and when I went over I could hear the radio blaring from the back-door landing, so I went down and saw that the group had expanded again.
Word had gotten around.
Not only were Eddie and Denise there but Harry Gray, Lou and Tony Morino, Glenn Knott and even Kenny Robertson—a dozen people crowded into that tiny shelter counting Meg and me—and Ruth was standing in the doorway watching, smiling as they shouldered and elbowed her back and forth between them like a human pinball caught between a dozen human flippers.
Her hands were tied behind her.
There were beer cans and Cokes on the floor. Cigarette smoke hung over the room in thick gray drifting clouds. At some point the radio played an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune, “Breathless,” and everybody laughed and started singing.
It ended with Meg on the floor, bruised and sobbing. We trooped upstairs for refreshments.
My movie kept rolling.
Kids came and went after that all that following week. Usually they did nothing but watch, but I remember Glen Knott and Harry Gray making her into what they called a “sandwich” one day—when Ruth wasn’t around—rubbing against her from front and back while she hung from the lines suspended from the nails in the beams across the ceiling. I remember Tony Morino bringing Woofer half a dozen garden slugs to put all over her body.
But unless it hurt, Meg was usually quiet now. After the dogshit incident it was hard to humiliate her. And not much could scare her. She seemed resigned. As though maybe all she had to do was wait and maybe we’d all get bored by this eventually and it would pass. She rarely rebelled. If she did we’d just call in Susan. But most of the time it didn’t come to that. She’d climb out of or into her clothes pretty much on command now. Out of only when we knew Ruth wasn’t going to be around or if Ruth herself suggested it, which wasn’t very often.
And much of the time we just sat there around the worktable, playing cards or Clue and drinking Cokes or looking through magazines, talking, and it was like Meg wasn’t even there at all except that we’d say something to mock or shame her now and then. Abuse that was casual and ordinary. Her presence compelled us in much the same passive way a trophy did—she was the centerpiece of our clubhouse. We spent most of our time there. It was the middle of summer but we were all getting pasty from sitting in the cellar. Meg just sat or stood there bound and silent, and mostly we asked nothing of her. Then maybe somebody would get an idea—a new way to use her—and try it out.
But basically it looked like maybe she was right. Maybe we’d just get bored one day and stop coming. Ruth seemed preoccupied with herself and her various physical ailments—preoccupied, strange and distant. And without her to feed the flames our attentions toward Meg got more and more sporadic, less intense.
It occurred to me too that we were well into August now. In September we all started school again. Willie, Donny, and I were leaving for our first term at a brand new junior high, Mount Holly, completed just this summer, and Meg would be starting at the high school. It would have to end by then. It only stood to reason. You could keep a person chained out of sight through summer vacation and no one would notice necessarily. But keeping a kid out of school was something else.
So by September it would be over, one way or another.
So maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe all she needed to do was wait.
Then I’d think about what Eddie’d said. And worry that she was real wrong indeed.
It was Eddie who finished the clubhouse.
He did it by upping the ante again.
There were two incidents. The first one happened on a rainy, ugly day, the kind of day that starts out gray and never gets beyond the color of cream of mushroom soup before fading to black again.
Eddie had stolen two six-packs from his father and brought them along and he and Denise and Tony Morino chugged a few while Willie, Woofer, Donny and I went at ours more slowly. Soon the three of them were drunk and the six-packs gone and Willie went upstairs for more. Which was when Eddie decided he had to piss. Which gave him an idea. He whispered it around.
When Willie came back he and Tony Morino took Meg down onto the floor and laid her on her back and tied her arms tightly to the legs of the table. Denise grabbed hold of her feet. They spread some newspapers under her head.
Then Eddie pissed in her face.
If Meg had not been tied to the table I think she’d have tried to kill him.
But instead people were laughing while she struggled and finally she slumped back down and lay there.
Then Donny got to thinking that Ruth wasn’t going to like it much. They’d better clean things up. So they got Meg to her feet and tied her arms behind her back and held her, and Woofer picked up the papers and brought them outside to the incinerator while Donny ran some water in the big cement sink they had in the cellar for drainin
g out the water from the washer. He dumped in a lot of Tide. Then he came back and he and Tony and Willie marched her out of the shelter into the basement proper over to the sink.
They pushed her head down into the soapy water and held her under, laughing, while Willie scrubbed her hair. In a moment or two she was struggling. When they let her up she had to gasp for air.
But she was clean.
Then Eddie got another idea.
We had to rinse her, he said.
He let out the water, drained it, and ran the rinse water straight-out hot, just as Ruth had done in the shower.
Then, alone, he dunked her under.
When he let her up to the surface again her face was lobster red and she was shrieking, and Eddie’s hand was so red you had to wonder how he’d held it there.
But now she was rinsed.
Cleaned and rinsed. And wouldn’t Ruth be pleased about that?
Ruth was furious.
All the next day she kept cold compresses over Meg’s eyes. There was serious fear for her sight. Her eyes were so puffy she could hardly open them, and they kept oozing liquid a whole lot thicker than anybody’s tears ought to be. Her face looked splotched and horrible, like she’d contracted a mammoth case of poison ivy. But it was the eyes that worried everybody.
We kept her on the air mattress. We fed her.
Wisely, Eddie stayed away.
And the next day she was better. And the next day better still.
And the third day Eddie came back again.
I wasn’t there that day—my father had me over at the Eagle’s Nest—but I heard about it fast enough.
It seemed that Ruth was upstairs lying down and they figured she was asleep, napping through another headache. Woofer, Donny and Willie were playing Crazy Eights when Eddie and Denise walked in.
Eddie wanted to take off her clothes again, just to look he said, and everybody agreed. He was quiet, calm. Drinking a Coke.
They stripped her and gagged her and tied her faceup across the worktable, only this time they tied each of her feet to one of the table legs as well. Eddie’s idea. He wanted to spread her. They left her awhile while the game of cards went on and Eddie finished his Coke.
Then Eddie tried to put the Coke bottle up inside her.
I guess they were all so amazed and involved with what he was doing that they didn’t hear Ruth come down behind them because when she walked through the door there was Eddie with the lip of the green Coke bottle already inside her and everybody crowded around.
Ruth took one look and started screaming how nobody was supposed to touch her, nobody, she was dirty, she had diseases, and Eddie and Denise got the hell out of there, fast, leaving her to rail at Woofer and Willie and Donny.
And the rest of this I got from Donny.
And Donny said he was scared.
Because Ruth went really bonkers.
She raged around the room tearing at things and jabbering crazy stuff about how she never got out anymore, not to a movie or dinner or dancing or parties, all she ever did was sit here minding these goddamn fucking kids, cleaning, ironing, making lunch and breakfast, how she was getting old in there, old, her good years gone, her body gone all to hell on her—all the time slamming at the walls and the wire-mesh screen over the window and the worktable, kicking Eddie’s Coke bottle until it smashed against the wall.
And then she said something like and you! you! to Meg and stared at her furious like it was her fault that Ruth’s body was going and she couldn’t go out anymore and called her a whore and a slut and no-good fucking trash—and then hauled off and kicked her, twice, between her legs.
And now she had bruises there. Terrible bruises.
Luckily, said Donny, Ruth had been wearing slippers.
I could picture it.
I had a dream that night, the night he told me.
I was home watching television and the fights were on, Sugar Ray Robinson against some big ungainly nameless faceless white guy, and my father was asleep next to me snoring in the overstuffed chair while I sat watching from the couch, and aside from the light from the TV set it was dark in the house and I was tired, very tired—and then things switched and I was suddenly actually at the fights, I was ringside, with people cheering around me, and Sugar Ray was wading in at the guy in that way he had, moving like a tank, flat-footed, swinging. It was exciting.
So I was cheering for Sugar Ray and I looked around for my father to see if he was cheering too but he was dead asleep in the seat beside me just as he’d been on the couch, sinking slowly to the floor. “Wake up,” my mother said, nudging him. I guess she’d been there all along but I hadn’t seen her there. “Wake up,” she said.
But he didn’t. And I looked back to the ring and instead of Sugar Ray it was Meg inside the ring, Meg as I’d first seen her standing by the brook that day in shorts and a pale sleeveless blouse, her pony-tail red as flame swinging back and forth behind her as she pounded at the guy, pounded him. And I stood up, cheering, screaming.
“Meg! Meg! Meg!”
I woke up crying. My pillow soaked with tears.
I felt confused. Why should I be crying? I wasn’t feeling anything.
I went to my parents’ room.
They had separate beds now. They’d had them for years. As in the dream, my father was snoring. My mother slept silently beside him.
I walked to my mother’s bed and stood there watching her, a dainty little dark-haired woman who looked younger at that moment, sleeping, than I think I’d ever seen her.
The room smelled thick with their sleep, the musty odor of breathing.
I wanted to wake her. I wanted to tell her. Everything.
She was the only one I could tell.
“Mom?” I said. Yet I said it very quietly, part of me still too scared or too unwilling to risk disturbing her. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. My nose was running. I sniffled. The sniffling sounded louder to me than my voice did calling her.
“Mom?”
She shifted, moaning slightly.
I had only to try one more time, I thought, in order to wake her.
And then I thought of Meg, alone in the long dark night of the shelter, lying there. Hurting.
Then I saw the dream.
I felt something clutch at me.
I couldn’t breathe. I felt a sudden dizzying, rising horror.
The room went black. I felt myself exploding.
And I knew my part in this.
My dull, careless betrayal.
My evil.
I felt the sob come at me huge and involuntary as a scream. It felt like a scream. I covered my mouth and ran stumbling from the room, fell huddled to my knees in the hall outside their door. I sat there shaking, crying. I couldn’t stop crying.
I sat there a very long time.
They didn’t waken.
When I got to my feet it was nearly morning.
I went to my room. Through the window from my bed I watched the night turn deepest black and then a rich dark blue.
My thoughts spun round and round, diving through me like the morning sparrows flying off the eaves.
I sat and knew myself entirely and calmly watched the sunrise.
Chapter Thirty-Six
It helped that for now at least the others were excluded. I needed to talk to her. I had to convince her I’d finally help.
I’d get her to run away with or without Susan. I couldn’t see that Susan was in so much danger anyhow. Nothing had happened to her so far except some spankings, at least nothing I’d seen. It was Meg who was in trouble. By now, I thought, she’s got to have realized that.
It was both easier and harder than I expected.
Harder because I found out I was excluded too.
“My mom doesn’t want anybody around,” said Donny. We were biking over to the Community Pool, our first day there in weeks. It was hot with no breeze and three blocks from our street we were sweating.
“How come? I didn’t do anything. Wh
y me?”
We rode along a downslope. We coasted awhile.
“It’s not that. You hear what Tony Morino did?”
“What.”
“He told his mother.”
“What?”
“Yeah. The little shit. His brother, Louie, let us onto it. I mean, not everything. I guess he couldn’t tell her everything. But enough. Told her we had Meg in the cellar. Told her Ruth called her a whore and a slut and beat up on her.”
“Jesus. What’d she say?”
Donny laughed. “Lucky for us the Morinos are real strict Catholics. His mom said she probably deserved it, she’s probably loose or something. She said parents have a right and Ruth’s her mother now. So you know what we did?”
“What?”
“Me and Willie pretended we didn’t know. We got Tony to come along with us out to Bleeker’s Farm, the woods back there. He doesn’t know the place at all. We got him lost and then we ditched him back in the swamps. Took him two and a half hours to find his way out and get home and by then it was dark. But you know the best part about it? His mom beat the crap out of him for missing dinner and coming home full of swamp muck and shit. His mom!”
We laughed. We pulled into the newly poured driveway by the Recreation building and parked our bikes at the bike stand and walked across the sticky, sweet-smelling tarmac to the pool.
We showed our plastic badges at the gate. The pool was crowded. Little kids kicking and splashing in the shallows like a school of piranha. The baby pool full of moms and dads guiding along their infants, pudgy fingers clutching duckies-and-dragons inner tubes. There were long impatient lines at the diving boards and refreshment stand. Yellowjackets in every trashcan swarming through ice-cream wrappers and soda.
The screaming and splashing and yelling while everybody ran around the fenced-in grass and concrete was deafening. The lifeguard’s whistle seemed to shriek about every thirty seconds. We threw off our towels and went over to the eight-foot section and sat with our legs dangling down in the chlorine-smelling water.
“So what’s that got to do with me?” I asked him.
