Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Sherry Walker was what my mom would have called a “real trip,” if I had told her the way she talked to us at the end of our long days. I knew better. Something in the way Miss Walker’s eyes shined and bored into mine while she talked made it clear the things she said were between us. She always wore the same grubby mechanic’s coveralls splattered with white paint and spotted with grease. She tucked her bleached curls under a battered blue ball cap, the brim cocked back like a proud duck bill, showing her high, damp forehead. As she closed in on the ocean, she rocked us in the hull of her steaming bus, a captive audience of four, and began to talk. She liked to talk to the boys on the bus about guitar players and who was the best and all that, and she saved family stories for me, about her sister who was sick in the hospital all the time, or her husband who crushed his empty beer cans under his boot heel on her kitchen floor while he stared at football on TV. She drove fast but steady the whole time, saying she didn’t get paid near enough for how careful she was with each and every one of us, each and every day.

  It was a blistering Friday in late May, near the end of the school year, all of us restless and ready for summer to start, and Miss Walker was in a weird mood. She was shifting in her seat more than usual and heaving sighs like she wanted someone to ask her a question so she could complain out loud. I was squirming, too. I got the curse for the third time ever during PE, and it was making me miserable. My back and middle ached and I worried all afternoon it would leak and show. Bleeding just generally makes everything worse. I tried to keep track of when it was coming on my school calendar, but it surprised me anyway. I carried a couple of thick maxi pads wrapped in an extra pair of underwear in my backpack all the time. I never told my mom after the first time it came. We didn’t feel close just then and I knew she’d talk about the moon and womanhood and try to hug me. I just slipped pads from her supply under the bathroom sink and hoped she wouldn’t notice for a while.

  Jesse and the other two boys, Kevin and Davy, sat at the very back of the bus, slumped down with their knees propped against the green vinyl seats in front of them, talking too low for me to hear. I suspect they were looking at the nudie magazines I know Jesse stole from his dad, but they were careful not to get caught. What I heard was the stomping, old timey piano opening to “Bennie and the Jets.” It was coming from the little gray radio with the long silver antenna Jesse always carried. It’s one of my favorite songs and Jesse knew it, too. We must have spent a million hours listening to rock radio, playing Name That Tune, like the TV show. When we were little, we thought we invented the game where the first person to recognize a song and name the band gets a point, the most points win. I beat Jesse all the time.

  Jesse Leander was my best friend for most all of my life, before it mattered that he was a boy and I’m a girl. He lived alone with his daddy in a ranch-style house tucked back in the woods about a mile from me. Jesse’s daddy coached football at the Beaches high school and he was hard on Jesse. He yelled that Jesse’s soft and he made him do pushups in their driveway for being mouthy or lazy. Jesse would cut his angry eyes at me and blow air out of his nose like a hot horse if he heard me say it, but it was true: he had a tender heart. When we were young, if we found a turtle that had flipped over in the road and starved that way, Jesse would hide his face so I wouldn’t know he was crying. Just thinking of all the dogs in the world that had to wander the streets alone because people didn’t love them anymore kept him up nights. We’d been in school together since kindergarten, and even when we were babies, our moms were friends, but Jesse’s mom died of cancer and we didn’t talk about that, but one time, late at night when he was still allowed to sleep over, his feet resting on the pillow next to my head, my feet beside his. That night he let me see him cry. Then his dad started making crude jokes about how he’d be a fool to let us share a bed, now that I was a little woman, and Jesse and I drifted apart.

  Jesse stopped sitting with me on the bus this year. We never had to work it out that way, it was just clear from the first day. I sat in the front and he sat in the way back, girls with girls and boys with boys. Last year, he sat in the seat right behind me and even braided my ponytail over the back of the bench seat sometimes, slow and like he wasn’t even thinking about it, his hands just working on their own. He would never do that now. He sat with his two idiot friends and listened to music like we used to. Jesse and I both know more about rock ’n’ roll than Kevin and Davy ever will, but still he chose them over me.

  Just as that ugly thought formed in my mind like a fist, I felt a dry thump on the back of my head and heard the boys laugh. A ball of notebook paper rolled into my lap and onto the seat beside me. I had been beaned in the head, probably by Kevin, the rudest kid I ever met. I shoved the wad into my backpack without opening it up, even though I see black writing on the edges of the paper. I tried to hear if Jesse was really laughing too, but I wouldn’t let myself turn around to be sure.

  Sherry Walker saw it happen in the long rearview mirror mounted over her head. I could tell by the pitying look in her reflected eyes. They’re big and pale blue, smeared all around with black eyeliner and wily, darting between our faces and the road the whole long ride. She just sighed and changed the angle of the window beside her that pivoted smoothly in and out on a hinge, trying to catch a breeze and bring it in. The early summer days were long and over one hundred degrees and that could make a body crazy. That’s how Sherry started.

  “The freaks come out when it gets this hot, I tell you what. It’s a dangerous time, and you best be careful out here,” she said pointing her chin at my reflection. She looked a little like one of my sister’s baby dolls, her round cheeks splotched pink and her bottom lip poked out in a permanent pout.

  “Did y’all hear what happened in Palm Valley, out in the woods? Come up here so I can talk at you and turn that radio off,” she said, raising her voice to the boys in the back.

  They didn’t move right away, but she waved her right hand around like a crossing guard and the boys drug themselves down the center aisle, grumbling.

  “It’s a real terrible story and I probably shouldn’t even tell it to you, but you need to know what’s out here,” she said, jerking her head toward her window. One corner of her mouth turned up in a sly smile, but her eyes were deadly serious.

  “I’m gonna tell you what men are really like.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Jesse, now sitting across the narrow aisle and one row back from me. His arms were crossed on the seat in front of him, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers. He darted his dark brown eyes at me for a second and rolled them, a look that said Yeah, right.

  “It was them bikers, that gang that hangs out at Snoopy’s Bar?” she said in her low, gruff voice. Sherry was a smoker, and you could hear the damage it’s done. “Y’all know about Snoopy’s?”

  “A gang?” Kevin snorted, like it’s a ridiculous idea.

  “Yes, a gang. A motorcycle club. We got all sorts of biker clubs out here. Haven’t you ever seen ’em, riding all together in their leathers?”

  Sherry Walker looked into her high mirror and glared at us, waiting for a response, so we nodded slowly, not sure at all.

  “The bikers set their sights on a real pretty blond girl who they always noticed walking down the side of the road by the bar. She worked with her daddy clearing yards and bagging leaves and was out raking and hauling with him most every day. They were way too poor for her to go to school. Do you know how lucky you are just to have school?”

  Miss Walker gave her question a little air, then started up again when we stayed silent.

  “One of them big mean dudes was drinking at Snoopy’s, and first he sees that pretty girl’s daddy, so blind drunk at the bar, he can’t barely sit up. Then the biker sees the girl walking down the road alone when he goes outside to leave, and he decides to follow her. He keeps his bike back behind her a ways, but she can hear his rumbling engine. She starts walking faster until she gets to the dirt road where her daddy�
�s trailer is parked, then she flat out runs. Just then, with home in sight, that biker goes roaring off, laughing. Well, now he knows her street, and that she’s all on her own, and she don’t even realize it; she thinks he’s long gone. Well, he goes right back to the clubhouse to get his crew.”

  “Clubhouse? Like Mickey Mouse?” Kevin asked, loud and sarcastic and the boys chittered like monkeys in a zoo. I realized I was holding my breath, and I let it out.

  “The gang meets up in an old barn they built out with bunks and a stripper pole. They call it their clubhouse and believe me it ain’t nothing to joke about. So, anyhow, the one rider tells his five buddies he knows this sweet little piece of ass and they should go and get her.”

  I pulled my knees up and stretched my T-shirt over my bare legs, and started double-knotting my tennis-shoe laces while I listened. This story was going nowhere nice, and Miss Walker’s eyes were making me nervous. I realized I could smell the rotten scent of blood gathering in the pad under my shorts and I put my legs back down, horrified. I took my sweatshirt out of my bag and unfolded it over my lap.

  “So off they go. Now, have you ever seen a pack of bikers riding together down the highway? Forget seeing it, did you ever hear it? They’re the loudest bunch of machines you ever heard, like to make you go deaf, and all the hairs on your body just stand up and salute when they go by.”

  Sherry took her right hand off the wheel and gave a quick salute then laughed so hard she started to cough. After her hacking settled down, she stared in silence at the road in front of us for a long minute, knowing we’re hungry for her next sentence. I shifted forward in my seat.

  “The bikers found that little silver trailer parked in a clearing, and started to circle it like a pack of starved dogs hunting. They was so loud, that girl thought a plane was about to land on her roof, so she opened her door right up, not even the sense to be scared. She just stands on the little wooden steps her daddy built, watching those bikes stirring up clouds of dust, their engines gunning full blast. The only thing worse than the sound of them bikes screaming is the terrible sound when they cut them engines off. It went dead quiet.” Miss Walker went quiet too. “That’s the moment that little girl knows she needs to get inside and hide.”

  “Little girl? How old was she?” I asked, surprised how loud my voice sounded in the hollow bus. My hands had gone cold even though it was so hot sweat was rolling out from under my hair and down my back.

  Sherry’s smile showed her yellowed teeth and she squinted her eyes at me.

  “Just about your age, maybe twelve? Old enough to know better,” she said with a bitter laugh.

  “I’m thirteen,” I whispered, too low for her to hear.

  “So, do I need to tell y’all that she couldn’t hide? They stomped right up those little wooden steps, kicked that metal door in, broke the lock and yanked her right out of her room by her long blond hair. She was hiding under her bed! Isn’t that the first place anybody would look?”

  Kevin and Davy both nodded, their eyes glued to Miss Walker’s in the mirror. Jesse’s face showed nothing; a perfect stillness had taken him over.

  “The leader of the pack got the honor of tying that girl up to the back of his bike. He used an extension cord he tore right out of her wall. And off they go, those six bikes cut right through the woods behind her trailer as fast as lightning.”

  I looked out the window and felt like I couldn’t see the strip malls or the tangled green in the empty lots between clearly. My eyes were looking into the woods from the back of a careening motorbike, breaking through low pine branches, engines growling in my ears.

  “Them bikers was smart enough not to drag that girl back to their barn. If her daddy sobered up enough to send the police out looking, they would go right to those outlaws’ crib. So, they go into the pines, deeper and deeper, riding little dirt horse paths until they get to a spot only they know. They have a secret place where they party and do their worst. They’d hauled a bunch of old moldy couches out there and pulled ’em into a circle around a big black pit for fires.”

  I was still thinking about the extension cord, and if the girl was tied upright or hung over the back of the seat on her belly, but this new detail interrupted my thought. I wondered how could anybody carry heavy sofas out between the dense trees, especially in secret, but I didn’t ask.

  “The leader dragged that girl by the cord around her waist and pinned her to a tree. He twisted her skinny little arms behind her back, then hog-tied her wrists to her ankles. She couldn’t move an inch. He took a thick buck knife out of his dirty boot and cut off her little white sundress, then her little white panties, until she was stark naked. She’s crying and moaning, nearly screaming, until he puts his greasy bandana in her mouth to gag her.”

  Jesse put his head down on his crossed arms resting on his seat back like he was staring at the floor.

  I wondered how Sherry knew what the girl was wearing, and every other tiny detail. I shifted low in my seat and let my legs stretch out, thinking of my own white underwear with the thick pad stuck to them and the blood soaked in. I pressed my palms together and sandwiched them between my thighs. They were still ice cold.

  “Then, the bikers just ignored her for a long while, like they had better things to do. They made up a fire and started drinking whiskey and smoking dope. They wanted her to watch and wait, her wrists and ankles bleeding from the bonds. She knows at any time they could turn their sights back to her little naked body tied to that tree like she was nothing but a dog, and waiting is hell.” Sherry Walker’s eyes were wide and fixed in the mirror.

  I wound the scratchy black strap of my backpack tightly around my wrist and pulled it hard. Something strange was happening while I listened to Miss Walker’s hoarse voice; my vision was getting darker and tunneling, my heart was beating fast and making it hard to get a full breath. I was stuck in the dark where her story was and it was getting worse by the moment. I’d never heard anything so raw and crazy, from an adult or anybody, nothing even close. A sour smell like an old battery or cat pee in a closed room was coming from my underarms. I felt Miss Walker’s eyes on me, and I looked up to meet them.

  “She was just starting to develop,” she said, “Just like you.”

  I imagined a Polaroid picture of my naked body developing, my chest coming into focus out of the shiny white chemicals like a lifting fog. Miss Walker was agitated, like she wasn’t getting the response from us she was hoping for, but I couldn’t imagine what that would be.

  Kevin and Davy were on the edges of their seats with their mouths open wide enough to catch flies. Kevin looked excited, but Davy looked scared, even though they mostly looked the same. Jesse’s head was still down, refusing to show anything he’s feeling.

  “First they raped her, one by one. Those guys are huge and hairy and rough. Then they put all kinds of things inside her: bottles, knife handles, the end of a bat, sticks, anything they wanted to. They tore her insides up. One even put out his cigarette on her little tit.”

  The bus was silent and still, the only sound the murmur of the engine and the creaky whine of the springs that held up Miss Walker’s seat. She reached into the breast pocket of her coveralls and pulled out a flattened pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a pink plastic lighter. I thought, There’s no way she will, but she lit up a strictly forbidden cigarette and took a long drag. She released a stinking plume of smoke that blew right back to our seats.

  A hot, sick liquid rose up my throat. I started to cough and Kevin smirked at me.

  “Did she die?” Jesse asked.

  It was the first thing he’d said the whole time, and his voice was barely a croak.

  “No, and that’s the saving grace,” Miss Walker said in a light way, like happily ever after. “She got herself free after they left her and walked all night to the road. A black gentleman who was taking his son to school in the morning stopped for her and took her to the emergency room.”

  She heaved a deep sigh. “So, y’a
ll got to be careful. Especially you girls,” she said right to me, the only girl on the bus.

  “A black guy?” Davy sounded doubtful. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. Don’t be a bigot, it’s ugly,” Miss Walker said.

  I pictured an old black man in a bow tie and little round glasses, maybe because of the word “gentleman.” I imagined a long white car on the little two lane highway that cut through Palm Valley slowing down when he saw the girl. Her white skin would shine in the new morning light and after what they did to her, there would be blood. Too scared and in need of help to hide your own nakedness from strangers in a passing car? I could even imagine that feeling. My mind was bouncing all over, filling in the gaps of the story, and I knew I’d keep doing it for days and days. How old was the man’s son? Was he her age? Did he stare, or did his father have a blanket in his trunk to cover her? Or did one of them give her his jacket? Did the girl have to call her father and explain the whole thing? Miss Walker was done with talking, but there was a tide of details and questions rising up out of her story and I was getting flooded.

  I looked over at Jesse again, and he was squinting out the window into the bright sun. A muscle in his jaw moved back and forth like he was chewing on her words, like he hated Sherry Walker now.

  Maybe she felt it too, because she suddenly asked us if we’d mind a quick detour to Lil’ Champ, the convenience store on the corner before Jesse’s stop. The other two boys cheered and started digging coins out of their backpacks in anticipation, and when she stopped the bus, they rushed down the steps and out the door, Jesse ambling behind them, shaking his head.